Paula Gunn Allen: 1939 - 2008

Found this at Joy Harjo’s blog:

Born Oct. 24, 1939, Albuquerque, N.M.,
Died last night in Fort Bragg, CA at 10:40 PM after a struggle with lung cancer.

Fly free.

Linda Hogan at Stanford: Indigenous Identity in Diaspora

Oscar has a write-up on Linda Hogan’s reading and talk yesterday evening at Stanford in the Feminist Studies Program’s Indigenous Identity in Diaspora. He brings up a very good point about Ms. Hogan’s use of “human,” and I should add that it seems qualifying “human” for her poetic speakers and voices indicates that her speakers know the entire world is alive, every rock, every grouping or family of aspen trees such that if you cut down one tree, the rest will die. The actors and active agents in her work are not only humans, but the earth itself, the healing clay, and deities that are animal spirits, such that to use “human” is necessary for clarification.

True, we don’t qualify ourselves as humans enough in our poetry; this means we take our humanity as a given, and I think this is a marker of privilege, not to think our humanity can be contested. Certainly, as a Filipino I don’t have to reach back too far into American history to cite specific examples of our humanity contested, erased. So then I wonder now whether I ought to be writing humanity with more urgency and certainty. Or maybe I already have been.

Ms. Hogan spoke of a returning of a diasporic community, many of her Chickasaw community’s and her own personal return to their land and traditions, from elsewhere throughout the country. She is now back in Oklahoma, back in a place where the earth smells like it does no where else. Seven Sisters is the street named after her grandmother and sisters; she is meeting cousins she’s only just now discovered. Here again is this belonging to the land, replanting one’s roots in the recultivated land. So there she is, back in Tishomingo, participating with the tribal body in building a school and affordable housing. I think we can also think of her poetic use of “human” through her community work.

Further in terms of writing process, and given that she is a multi-genre writer, Cherrie Moraga asked her how and when she decides in which genre to write, and is it based upon subject matter or otherwise. Ms. Hogan responded that genre chooses you. Poetry is weaving, and in poetry, use of language is so condensed or concentrated, and you can communicate so much in such a small amount of space. Her poetry is contained by a sense of incantation of word, an echo of so many world mythologies in which the world was spoken or dreamed into existence. Alternately, the novel, she says, is linear, and you can provide a larger space for a narrative to gradually unravel. She didn’t differentiate between novel and non-fiction, but did say a few things about her memoir, in which she decided to pan out from the strictly individual/personal and instead, compose a frame of her community’s natural and historical world. Regarding being “human,” I don’t think she means it in an individual sense.

I could’ve listened to her talk all night. She had so much story, which she rolled through, weaving tangents into tangents into a large cohesive cloth. At one point, she apologized for getting carried away with some backstory on her research on environmental contamination in Florida, the poisoned alligators, birds, panthers in the Everglades. She had begun by telling us a story of a native man who killed a Florida panther, thinking perhaps by its eyeshine at night, that it was a deer. He then barbecued it and ate it (why waste a perfectly good animal, I think), and then was arrested for poaching an endangered species. This is where talk of contamination came in, as to why the panthers were no longer reproducing.

Well, I could go on, but will end with this: having major publishers in New York, Ms. Hogan tells us, can be challenging. She’s told her publishers that she wanted cover art by Native American artists, to which publishers have responded: there are no Native American artists. In her place, I’d probably throw a chair, so I admire that she works so steadily and prolifically through American publishing industry bullshit, prioritizing her Chickasaw community’s needs, talking to students, and opening herself up to young writers like us. I will be sending her a copy of Poeta, and I am overjoyed that she’s interested in reading my work.

Addendum: I just remembered now, another poem Ms. Hogan read was about a move back to the use of canoes or kayaks made with animal skins stretched around skeletons of the willow tree. The boat or craft itself is alive; it breathes. These animal skin boats are more easily navigable than the modern fiberglass counterparts, and so the boatmakers are relearning this old craft that they’d previously set aside (for various reasons). This is also a part of the returning to the indigenous in the modern world.

UCSB Poetry Workshop Next Week: Thinking on Poetic Line Again

I am still trying to get my mind into poetry workshop space for next week at UCSB. I have been poring over poetry books and anthologies for works to discuss and to create poems using those as models.

I have 15 students and one hour. I am thinking most of these students will be either Asian American Studies students or Filipino American student group students. I don’t know their previous exposure to American poetry. As well, it’d been mentioned early on that diversity and social relevance is an issue. It’s hard to know where to start.

So I am starting with the poetic line.

I am pretty sure I get free verse. Almost every bit of contemporary American poetry belongs under the large category of free verse, which does not mean a disregard for poetic line, but rather a reexamination of poetic line.

Rather than looking at contemporary American poetry that is a revisiting of formalism, I am looking for/at contemporary poetry with deep regard for line, for breath, time, music, and any sense of meter, by semantic units, by interesting enjambments, and working with or against conventional grammar and sentence structure. As well, I am open to considering lines and line breaks as units of space and not just units of time (though I don’t see these factors operating independently from each other).

I have come across a good chunk of poetry that I don’t know whether the poet is considering the functions of poetic line. That is, I am not reading even a break with or subversion of traditional functions of poetic line.

I am trying to remember now, how we learn to construct poetic lines, and how we learn how to make line breaks. Is this something your eyes and ears just have to know, some kind of instinct.

Finally, another consideration is the function of the poetic line in poetry that is call and response, in spaces and narratives not only involving a single poet and his/her reader, but a poet and his/her listening and participating congregation.

Anyway, some folks I am currently reading/revisiting:

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art.
• Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems. Towards the end of this collection, those truncated, sparse, short lines are so awkward, disorienting to read. I actually thought to myself when reading “An Asphodel,” “Wait a minute; is this Ginsberg or Williams I’m reading here?”
• Kamau Daáood, The Language of Saxophones. It makes sense to me that poetry written in the language of saxophones would contain substantial and clear poetic lines, even when working with dissonance and collage.
• Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. Somewhat similar to reading Daáood when considering jazz’s dissonances and collages, and just trying to figure this guy out.
• Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia, specifically Muse and Drudge, and as I’ve discussed with students in the past, its lack of conventional “sense” whose contained form enables us to access “sense” and “meaning.”
• Anne Waldman, Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays.
• Juan Felipe Herrera, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.
• R. Zamora Linmark’s “The Like You Because You Eat Dog,” and “Bino and Rowena Make A Litany To Our Lady Of The Mount,” in Rolling The R’s. This book is the bomb, a series of vignettes in prose and verse and whose collective arc is the novel’s arc. Nice.

Yes, the Beats are well represented here (as is City Lights Books). I suppose that’s an interesting conversation to be had.

Some Quick Thoughts from this Weekend’s American Literature Association Conference

There sure is a lot to say about my participation in Saturday’s panel and reading, and I am still decompressing.

It’s interesting that the Circle for Asian American Studies, in considering poets for the Marketing Asian American Literature panel chose me and Timothy Yu, given that both of us came into poetry via DIY and “avant garde” or “innovative” poetry communities. Our panel presentations had a lot of good overlap, in discussing our ambivalence towards participating in what I call the Poetic Industrial Complex, what he calls (as per Charles Bernstein) Official Verse Culture, and that we are concerned as API poets about where we fit in those worlds.

What became a point of discussion to which folks kept returning was a criticism of reliance or over-reliance as educators upon anthologies rather than on full length books including poetry collections authored by API writers. Academics were saying that there is something complacent, even lazy, about relying upon an Official Verse Culture anthology to tell us what Asian American Literature is. Anthology seems to rely upon the tropes that we are constantly criticizing, and that are constantly being reproduced by API writers. I had implied this in my presentation; if we API poets are navigating MFA programs and slush piles, what do we do in our work to make it accessible to a wider American readership? And isn’t reproducing tropes some of the strategies we’ve all seen?

This Weekend in SF : American Literature Association Conference : More on the Poetic Industrial Complex

The conference takes place at the Hyatt Regency at the Embarcadero from May 22 to 25. The Marketing Asian American Literature panel is this Saturday, May 24 from 9:30 to 10:50 am.

Session 16-A Roundtable on Marketing Asian American Literature (Pacific B/C)
Organized by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies

Co-chairs: Jennifer Ho, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Michelle Rhee, Stanford University

1. Timothy Yu, University of Toronto
2. Barbara Jane Reyes, Bay Area poet
3. Janet Francendese, Temple University Press
4. Meghan Kozar, Michigan State University
5. Walter S. H. Lim, National University of Singapore
6. Jeffrey Partridge, Capital Community College

Now I have no idea what the other panelists are going to talk about. I may be wrong but I believe Timothy and I are the only ones on this panel concerned with poetry. I believe he may be discussing marketing via teaching Asian American Literature.

I’ve blogged previously about the poetic industrial complex and this is basically what I will be discussing, strategies of API poets navigating the poetic industrial complex. Given that very very few API poets are on the same mass appeal major league playing field of Mary Oliver (six titles in the top ten on the bestseller list), Robert Hass, Billy Collins (one title in the top ten, and one title is number eleven), it’s rare or it’s never that we see our books on the Contemporary American Poetry Best Seller list. Unless your name is Li-Young Lee, then you are not a even a minor contender.

Or, we can have a look at all the diverse including API titles on the Small Press Distribution Best Seller list. Shit, if I am forever among the SPD Best Sellers, then I consider myself very fortunate. Given that most American poetry is published by independent presses and university presses, who are our major distributors? How do our books even get on Amazon in the first place?

And given the relative absence of “ethnic specific” presses among the independent and university presses, do we really market ourselves primarily or solely by ethnicity? What do we do to stand out in slush pile with thousands of other American poets, that is, if we choose to participate in slush pile? How do we position our poetic speakers in relation to majority/mainstream readers, given that readers of poetry are not really a majority of Americans. And why do we position ourselves how/where we do?

I want to go back to my discussion (Part 1 | Part 2) on Eugene Gloria’s poetic speaker in “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City,” and my point that the speaker appears to be speaking as a Filipino “other,” about Filipino “others,” to an American majority, rather than as a Filipino to another Filipino. I believe we API poets are every day in danger of doing that, for what we may believe is the benefit of a wider readership. The flip side to this, as Nick Carbó wrote of the Bay Area Flips in his introduction to Returning a Borrowed Tongue, is to address the local, the relevant to a specific community, thus cutting ourselves off from the possibility of national acclaim. Still, while it feels my poetic and political practices seem to be yielding results counter to this assertion, I believe this local versus perceived universal (I hate that term) subject position and subject matter, use of various accessible and inaccessible languages and registers and poetic forms are a major point of discussion when discussing marketing ourselves.

Finally, there is course adoption, from which Poeta en San Francisco has benefited greatly. I’d like to better understand how and why educators in different academic fields decide what entire books are teachable and/or worthy of being taught; whereas I have been told by some Filipino American educators that Poeta is “hard to teach,” I also am experiencing so many other educators (Filipino Americans included) so eager and enthusiastic to teach it. Still, I do not know that we go about trying to write teachable books.

* * *

Oh, and my next event at the American Literature Conference on Saturday is at 5:00 pm:

Session 21-G Reading by Asian American Writers (Pacific F)

1. Barbara Jane Reyes
2. Shawn Wong
3. Helen Zia

A poet, a fictionist, and a non-fictionist. Ought to be interesting.

Some Quick Thoughts on Considering the Poetic Line

Since I am gearing up for my UCSB talk, and particularly the poetry workshops I will be conducting, I have revisited Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art. Why this book? Well, you gotta give it to Ferlinghetti. He doesn’t hold back on his strong opinion on what poetry is, and what poetry does. Even as he claims this book not to be poetry, I actually am starting to believe it is, for his deployment of poetic line, active use of the figurative, and for evidence of duende at work here.

Here is something I have been suspecting, but unsure of how to articulate: why is it there seems to be so much poetry that really is prose broken up into lines? I can’t even call these lines here poetic lines. I read this poetry, this so-called conventional “narrative poetry,” and I am constantly asking myself, “Is this really poetry?” And “Why is this considered poetry?” Simply because it’s broken into lines? And why are they broken how/where they are? And what are the functions of these lines within this body? So this is how revisiting Ferlinghetti is helping me with this.

I have started trying to read Louise Erdrich’s Jacklight, which I came to because I’d recently read Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines. I am not sure what I was looking for in Erdrich; I’d just thought it’d be good to read more Native American women poets, particularly to see how oral tradition may figure into the work. Also, I know she is much more well-known as a novelist. Thing about Jacklight is I keep putting it back down. I keep not thinking these are poems, though they contain some poetic moments, some incantatory music. I keep thinking of these writings as notes or blueprints which have become what we find in the conventional prose that is her novels.

So this is where I am today with poetic line versus line, poem versus writing containing poetic moments.

Poetry Work Updates

OK. I am gearing up for the next flurry of events, as the last has gone embarrassingly well.

Last Thursday I submitted our nomination for Juan Felipe Herrera for California Poet Laureate, and was very happy to be able to exchange a couple of emails with him. I am really very confident in his qualifications, and I believe the wording in our application/nomination is strong.

Last Friday’s South and Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement was nerve wracking, starting with participating un-robed, un-hooded, un-regalia’ed (I never do these things with regalia; I’m not enough of an academic for that!) in the faculty procession, continuing with Professor Jeff Hadler’s amazingly flattering introduction and discussion on my work (he’s apparently read everything I have published, and that is enough to be nerve wracked). I am sure I was insecure about my speech until the very end. But what I didn’t realize is that there appears to be a great love for story, myth, and poetry in that department; the undergraduate speaker (I am sorry I do not immediately remember her name) was a lovely young woman who also framed her speech within a traditional South Asian story, and in that way, my starting with poetry performance and discussing narratives throughout my speech was right on. I had a brief exchange with her after she was all done with her family’s picture taking and all, and we were both very happy that our speeches contained these common threads.

I am also happy to report that the improvised performance with the Gamelan Sekar Jaya musicians really worked. I’d originally thought of performing the rolling, looser prose of Diwata, since I was so concerned with conveying accessible narrative, but then I decided instead on the pieces with tighter metered lines, couplets set up as call and response, one “We” poem, and a pantoum. The accompaniment was right on, they were with me the whole time. Actually, it felt more like we took turns leading and following. I had asked the musicians if I should at least show them my poetry beforehand, and they said to surprise them instead.

All day, I kept having the most wonderful conversations with Professor Sylvia Tiwon, with whom I took one lower division Southeast Asian Studies course probably back in 1991 or so. She keyed in on so many of the popular and traditional cultural and mythological references, whose sprawl also made me insecure in the company of (disciplined) academics. But old stories are open like that, as I’ve learned from all the Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies courses I have ever taken. Why are there earthdiver myths and great turtles upon which the earth is created, and great ovens from which we, the clay creations of the deities, are born, in North America and in Southeast Asia — this has always been so interesting to me. And perhaps I do know that these belief systems and stories are determined by the natural worlds (climate, terrain, fauna, etc) which the people inhabit; here, I’d actually use the Tagalog term/phrase, “sa mundong kinagisnan,” or “sa daigdig na kinagisnan,” the world into which (we) have awakened. The fact that I leap between continents has always nagged at me, for its apparent lack of discipline, even when that is one of the major points of Diwata, and even when I know my poetic discipline is tight.

At the post ceremony reception, I ended up having all these conversations about poetry, the value of MFA programs for poets really wanting to expand their knowledge bases and build their poetics, versus the poetic industrial complex, interesting poetic experimentation that yields uninteresting poetry, the work to which our readers have to commit in order to access the poetry when faced with the absence of translation, and the absence of conventional Western narrative. And really, everyone I spoke to was so exuberant about poetry, about hearing poetry, and having it be included in this commencement ceremony. That this was very appropriate. And really, everyone’s exuberance to me was like an embarrassment of riches, to be surrounded by so many women who’ve been so moved by my work, when I have grown accustomed to the kind of women who socially dislike me for my work. Oh, the men were very warm and responsive too; it’s just that the responses of the women were able to break out of the appropriate professional and intellectual response and into the less articulable, less academic province of “poets feed the soul of a people,” and/or more (stereo)typically gendered female talkstory at kitchen tables.

Anyway, there was so much good discussion with the SSEAS faculty, as it happens when you actually get to sit and share a meal with folks. I have been invited back, sometime soon, once again to perform more poetry with musical accompaniment for the department.

OK. Next up:

(1) I will be speaking on a panel on marketing Asian American Literature for the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, and I will be reading with Shawn Wong and Helen Zia. These two events take place Memorial Day Weekend.

(2) I will be reading at Eastwind Books of Berkeley on May 31st, for the Field of Mirrors anthology. Complete list of readers is here.

(3) I will be at UC Santa Barbara on June 2nd-3rd, teaching poetry workshop, speaking to Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s Asian American Studies class, doing a reading/performance, and it also looks like I will be holding a number of one on one student conferences.

(4) I will be reading with Meg Withers, Truong Tran, Craig Santos Perez, and others sometime in June (I don’t know the exact date) at Modern Times Bookstore is SF for Meg’s Communion of Saints book launch.

Done!

Submitted the California Poet Laureate application for Juan Felipe Herrera! Oscar and Ching-In helped a LOT. As did Matthew, Lee, Craig and Achiote Press, Javier and the UC Berkeley Xican@ Culture Working Group.

Southeast Asian Studies Commencement Address writing completed! Just need to decide which poems to perform with the gamelan ensemble.

Tonight, I am chill.

That is all for now.

Southeast Asian, Take 4

Whew! And I believe, my friends, that we have a speech!

I am now exchanging emails with a professor from the Southeast Asian Studies Department, and musicians from Oakland based Balinese Gamelan Sekar Jaya. As part of my speech will include a reading from Diwata, the gamelan ensemble musicians will be accompanying me on this, totally improvised. As one of the musicians tells me, this particular section or instruments within the ensemble traditionally play accompaniment to a singer who sings poetry in a way that I think fits Diwata, rolling loose storytelling.

This is going to be so exciting!

I’ve done improvised performance with Joachim Luis accompanying me on kulintang. This can be lively. An ensemble of similar instruments is going to be even livelier.

At any rate, in an effort to procrastinate on my speech writing, and work off some nervous energy, I took the veggies from this weekend’s trip to the Jack London Square farmers market, and some organic tofu, and I made vegetarian lumpia. Ingredients: sugar peas, baby carrots, white onion, green onion, garlic, and tofu sautéed in soy sauce and a little oyster sauce, freshly ground black pepper, and sesame oil. After letting this cool, I wrapped these up into some fat lumpias, and shallow fried them for a couple of minutes on both sides (fried to the color of my forearm).

To accompany: garlic fried rice made with leftover chicken adobo in coconut milk, and a salad made with organic mixed greens also from farmers market, tomatoes, and a peanut vinaigrette.

(Robert Karimi: “Remember folks, just because you eat lumpia, doesn’t automatically make you Filipino!”)

I should also say I was inspired by Robert Karimi’s and John Castro’s lumpia campesina (fried to the color of Castro’s forearm) at The Cooking Show Con Karimi y Castro. Because the revolution begins in the kitchen. Word.

Southeast Asian, Take 3

This morning I thought of Sarith Peou’s chapbook, Corpse Watching. I remembered what made this publication possible was first Ed Bok Lee’s poet-outreach work into the Minnesota prison system, where Peou, a survivor of Khmer Rouge genocide, has been serving time, and then Tinfish’s openness to consider such stark, graphic, relevant work. Like Linh Dinh, Sarith Peou’s work is not nostalgic and it is not beautiful. Something like Linh Dinh, there is something like a “Poetics of Disgust,” at work here, with unrestrained descriptions of corpses in the river, diseases and bodily maggot infestations in the labor camps, which I think counters popular American expectation of any Southeast Asian experience to be voiced as sentimental, and grateful to the American savior. Too many misguided American war movies, it’s also disaster porn, watching all those poor refugees bombed and razed, loaded into boats.

This morning I also thought of Bryan Thao Worra’s On the Other Side of the Eye, in which he voices critically the expectation and desire of his writing workshop colleagues to really deliver that pain of war and exile from the motherland. This too is disaster porn. All this, when post-relocating, and very matter-of-factly, Bryan, a Laotian adoptee transplanted into the Midwest, simply wants to tell us that the USA changes people.

So this is anti-nostalgia then, as I am also thinking of Katie Vang, who is a Hmong performance artist, who performed at Bryan’s book release party at The Loft back in August. The piece she did then, was spoken in a mother’s bilingual voice, and it was an angry voice, telling us a story of her family’s day in the life, dad and the kids scavenging through alleyway dumpsters for useful things which Americans have thrown out.

These are the things I am thinking are relevant to being here, and growing up here.

Southeast Asian, Take 2

Really now. As you all know, I live in Oakland, where I have learned at my job about some of the Southeast Asians’ particular community concerns, and via the work of some of my old college friends. In particular, I am thinking about Oakland Chinatown based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and their organizing around the Laotian community in Contra Costa County, living in an industrial zone which includes the Chevron Refinery, and the Mien populations in East Oakland, organizing to ensure that folks can transition into American urban living and retain their cultural and religious practices.

In the meantime, many groups of Southeast Asian youth have recently experienced harassment including wrongful arrests and racial profiling (as gang members, etc.) by the Alameda police as a result of one group of youths’ violence and the very unfortunate death of one young lady.

I am thinking the above, the plight of communities in American urban areas, do not make it into area studies departments, but really now, this is my way into “Southeast Asian” in Oakland.

I have just been thinking about pragmatic statements that I think students would prefer to hear over all the lofty and political yadda yadda. I also think parents of graduates perhaps like to hear that there are practical applications for their children’s non-straight forward sounding, not practical nor applicable in “real life” sounding majors.

Just trying to keep it real.

The Laguna Copperplate Inscription

This is something that’s come to mind, thinking on Philippine connections to other Southeast Asian communities/civilizations. It’s interesting thinking on artifacts and other cultural markers. Not like I will be mentioning this particular artifact in my speech; it’s just come to mind. It apparently predates the use of baybayin. You can read about it here.

Poet as Orator: A Pinay Poet in the Southeast Asian Studies Commencement Ceremony

Alternate title: How I am struggling through writing this Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement Speech.

Commencement Ceremony is this Friday.

Holy God (Dewata?) (Diwata!) (Jayadewa!) (Batara?) (Bathala!) This is hard!

Anyway, I am trying to cement some intuitions that I have regarding the connections between Philippine and other Southeast Asian languages and mythological stories.

I am still questioning what value anything I say as a Pinay poet has to a group of Southeast Asian Studies graduates.

I am trying to remember my way into the Southeast Asian Studies Department, where I actually did take a couple of classes sometime in the early 1990’s.

I am remembering a then-graduate student there, named Jacqueline Siapno, who submitted some poetry to Maganda Magazine. There was one poem in which she placed two versions of it side by side, and I don’t know which version she wrote first and which language(s) she translated: the first was the English version, and the second she wrote in what I understood to be a hybrid of Philippine and Malaysian languages. To me, what was most remarkable about the Philippine/Malaysian version was that I understood most of it.

That was part of my way in, as Asian American was not something with which I felt a strong connection, culturally and linguistically, though I did politically.

Learning various insular Southeast Asian mythologies was more exercise in cultural familiarity.

(Speaking of mythologies, some excerpts of Diwata might come in handy in this speech; I always include my or others’ poetry in my speeches. I am a poet after all.)

At any rate, as I am cranking this speech out, I am thinking that this is my third commencement address to write and deliver in three years, and I am thinking about Debbie’s comment to Oscar’s blog post on Nikki Giovanni, and how it is I have been consistently called upon to orate, i.e. going beyond reading, reciting, performing poetry to audiences. Debbie says that there are some poets who clearly are not orators. I agree with her, having witnessed some poets speaking and having these instances be painful to witness. So I want to say that not all poets should be called upon to orate. Still, we poets work with crafting clever, precise, witty, ironic combinations of words in anticipation of effect upon readers. Some/many poets engage in theatrical or dramatic performance of their work. Orating should be a sixth sense. Ay, I just want to understand; maybe writing this speech would get easier if I understood.

But after this minor catharsis, I think I will be OK. To the gentleman who recommended me to the department, and to the professor who invited me: you guys owe me a single malt scotch.

SPDBooks: March/April Poetry Bestsellers

Beat out by Aram Saroyan!

1. Complete Minimal Poems Aram Saroyan (Ugly Duckling Presse)
2. Poeta en San Francisco Barbara Jane Reyes (Tinfish Press)
3. All That’s Left Jack Hirschman (City Lights Publishers)
4. You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am Tao Lin (Action)
5. The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta Press)
6. Lobster With Ol’ Dirty Bastard Michael Cirelli (Hanging Loose Press)
7. The Evolution of a Sigh R. Zamora Linmark (Hanging Loose Press)
8. Lyric Postmodernisms Reginald Shepherd, Ed. (Counterpath Press)
9. Incubation: A Space for Monsters Bhanu Kapil (Leon Works)
10. Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath Benjamin S. Grossman (Ashland Poetry Press)
11. Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems Amiri Baraka (House of Nehesi)
12. The Transformation Juliana Spahr (Atelos)
13. Momentary Songs George Albon (Krupskaya)
14. Murder Ballads Jake Adam York (Elixir)
15. Winter Journey Tony Towle (Hanging Loose Press)
16. Daode Jing Laozi (Flood Editions)
17. Sleeping and Waking Michael O’Brien (Flood Editions)
18. Houses Fly Away Leigh Anne Couch (Zone 3 Press)
19. Be That Empty: An Apologia for Air Alice Fogel (Harbor Mountain Press)
20. Dust and Conscience Truong Tran (Apogee Press)

Complete list here.

Blog Post #2 On Gelacio Guillermo and Eugene Gloria

This is a follow-up to my original post on Gelacio Guillermo’s response to Eugene Gloria’s poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

A fellow Filipina writer has brought up some very good points in an email discussion elsewhere, reminding me that the poem in question is an old poem, probably written in the 1990’s or so. And this is something I was just saying yesterday evening: to be fair, the poem was written a long time ago and that after reading Hoodlum Birds, I consider Eugene Gloria a virtuoso. The only reason why I am reading and responding to this older poem now is because Guillermo has just found the poem and has just written and published a response to the poem.

This fellow Filipina writer also reminds me that the poet’s audience and readership must be considered. How do Filipino American writers and other “ethnic” writers portray our cultural and historical artifacts, i.e. “foreign” words and “foreign” objects, to mainstream American literary institutions.

I am also conscious that I have asked some critical questions of a fellow Filipino American poet’s work, and that can be construed as anti-community. I certainly don’t intend this at all. I am trying to understand how we have grown or changed or evolved as a literary community.

Nick Carbó’s anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffeehouse Press, 1995) contains a rather comprehensive introduction on English language Filipino poetry (both Philippines-based and Filipino American), and he discusses nostalgia for the Philippines as a prevalent theme in contemporary Filipino poets’ works. I think the poem in question fits neatly in this category.

Still, even in poems of nostalgia, I think the question of to whom we are writing about ourselves is important. I believe that as readers, figuring out who the poetic speaker is, and who poet and the poetic speaker are addressing is important in understanding the poem. That said, I still question why the speaker in this poem is an unnamed Filipina daughter of a colonel, and why she is addressing Guillermo. I question whether her language and how she treats the historical events she cites are consistent with how a Filipino would address a fellow Filipino, how a Filipino would discuss certain Filipino issues with another Filipino.

Carbó’s introduction also discusses the politicized/activist Bay Area 1960’s-1970’s Flips scene of which, despite my post-1965 immigrant status, I think of myself as a descendant — Liwanag, Kearny Street Workshop, the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (BAPAW). He names Jaime Jacinto, Virginia Cerenio, Serafin Syquia, Jessica Hagedorn, and Al Robles as some of the key figures, who concerned themselves with grassroots, community-based workshops. Carbó states that these folks never reached any levels of national success, “however intensely felt and well-organized this assertion of Filipino writing was in the Bay Area.”

[Interesting that he includes Hagedorn in this part of the discussion, given that no other Filipino American writer's achievements equals hers.]

I bring up Carbó’s discussion of the Bay Area Flips to address the issue of poetic addressee. My longtime experiential knowledge of these Bay Area Flip poets tells me that they/we were/are addressing one another, transcribing what we otherwise always relied upon oral tradition to keep alive — old and ongoing stories of our communities and families. So then these Flips prioritized the vernacular, the local, or the locale, the farms where asparagus and broccoli were harvested, the crab fisheries of Naknek, Alaska, the Pajaro River Valley, the Richmond District, the Fillmore, SoMa.

I am wondering if in “talking to ourselves,” in using insider/familiar language/vernacular, we necessarily sacrifice “national renown” by lessening the numbers of readers who would be able to understand this language and these reference points. I am wondering then, if this is the opposite of what I read in Eugene’s poem, for in writing as the other and addressing the mainstream institution, our familiar artifacts invariably come to be handled as foreign objects, and that there is no place for familiar (never mind “intimate” at this point) language in these poems.

I refer to Carbó’s introduction, which was published in 1995, because I feel like Eugene Gloria’s poem belongs in that context. And both I see as rather outdated.

But I was mentored by Filipino poets of national, international, as well as local renown, and so I grew up in poetry not subscribing to the belief that (inter)national and local, elevated poetic diction and vernacular cannot coexist, or that they must negate one another.

Random News

Two things in the news, disturbing me for different reasons and in different ways, or two different news items that I just don’t know how to write about.

1) Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his own daughter in his cellar for 24 years, and fathered her seven children.

2) Michelle Duggar, the woman in Arkansas who is happily pregnant with her 18th child.

***

Addendum:

I tagged this blog post “Feminism,” when I think I should have tagged it “Family Values.”

I realize the two individuals I name above don’t have anything to do with each other. I think at least Duggar is happy and healthy (physically and mentally).

I am just thinking about what women’s bodies are for, what are the limits on this, and who decides these things.

I am thinking also of family, and the role of women and the role of women’s bodies in family. Must we be reproduction machines?

Or maybe I should have tagged this entry, “Shit that Confuses Me.”

Gelacio Guillermo responds to Eugene Gloria’s Poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

This is so interesting. This essay/letter was forwarded to me by two separate people, wanting to know what I thought of it. The truth is, I am having a little bit of a hard time piecing this story together. I do know for sure that Eugene Gloria did, indeed, write a poem entitled, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” This poem was published in The Literary Review in March 2000 (link here).

Gelacio Guillermo (note the correct spelling of the name) is a real person. He came across this poem in 2008, and now responds with very valid points:

Despite the mis-spelling proceeding from mispronunciation of foreign names so typical among North Americans, I thought I was being referred to in the poem and would like to take issue with you on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as subject for creative work.

The poem’s speaker is presumably a woman whom I believe Eugene Gloria “invented.” Gloria fabricates a background or position for her. She is Filipina in/from the Philippines, and part of this narrative takes place during Martial Law. She is the daughter of a colonel in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which speaks to some level of privilege. In the poem, she brings up her own breaks with the church, and her rebellions, which I read as the reasons why she is compelled to express kinship with “Gellacio,” whom she imagines has gone to “the mountains,” implying he is a political insurgent. She is addressing her fabricated, imagined, romanticized, and sexualized version of “Gellacio Guillermo”: “Your brindled skin is sweating in Iowa sun, // your hair in a tight chingon, / you, barefoot and G-stringed like a Manobo / prince in St. Louis…”

I am wondering why she imagines him G-stringed, tribal, regal. In his letter response to the poem, Guillermo points to the term, “brindled,” and its etymology:

The “brindled skin” has a far earlier provenance: the black slaves during those centuries of slave trading were assessed, like livestock in the market, according to their animal strength and the gloss of their hide. “Brindled” originates from the late ME [Middle English] “brended,” a variety of “branded.” Vestiges of racist arrogance of the West die hard.

I am wondering if she is the one objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as this “barefoot and G-stringed … Manobo prince,” or if it is Eugene Gloria objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as he imagines a Filipino national/Filipino from the Philippines, or if it is either or both she and Eugene Gloria anticipating “Gellacio Guillermo’s” objectification by white middle Americans in Iowa.

The real Guillermo was indeed in Iowa; in his letter, he reveals that he spent six months (October 1970 to April 1971) on a writing fellowship at Iowa University’s International Writing Program. Guillermo then, was a writer; he was a Filipino writer in middle America. “Gellacio, / I am reading you in English,” the unnamed Filipina persona says. I am wondering why this is so remarkable; Filipinos in the Philippines have been writing in English and reading in English since the late 19th century/early 20th century.

I am wondering if Guillermo’s six months in Iowa University on a writing fellowship is comparable to the Philippine Reservation of the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, to which the speaker has made reference.

I am wondering why “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” whom she believes has previously gone into the mountains has become her symbol of rebellion, and why she has come to need “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” as this representative of the “salvaged.” I am wondering why she needs a representative of the salvaged at all. And here, do note that the “salvaged” in a Philippine (specifically Martial Law?) context are not the saved, but the dissidents drowned in the Pasig River and other bodies of water for their dissidence.

Mostly, I am wondering why Eugene Gloria created this unnamed Filipina persona to address this imagined “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” Guillermo points out: “I am named; why isn’t she?”

I want to go back to Guillermo’s original point in his letter: “on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as a subject for creative work.” Is Eugene Gloria’s poem “irresponsible”? Do we get away with not taking responsibility all the time, never expecting our poetic subjects to gain access to our work and have the opportunity to respond?

Maybe I understand the poem, but I suppose I don’t understand why the poem. And I don’t think I have answered any of my own questions about responsibility here.

“Official Verse Culture” and the Poetry Contest phenomenon

“Official Verse Culture.” Sure gets easier to say each time.

Blogging about “Official Verse Culture,” the power we give it, and how we willingly participate in it has reminded me of Chris Tonelli’s (relatively) recent blog post, “Contest Culture and Poetic Community,” on the Ploughshares blog. An excerpt:

Who, exactly, wittles the slush pile into a manageable finalist pool? I’ve done it as a student intern, just barely into a graduate program. It’s this odd model of allowing, theoretically, the least qualified of those involved (the intern) choose the work that gets to the, theoretically, most qualified of those involved (the judge). The chances I, as a student intern 10 years ago, passed along the 10 best manuscripts, if given the chance to go back and review my choices, are slim to none. My guess is that a lot of sophistication and subtlety is lost on many a preliminary judge, as it was on me. This leads me to believe that much of what gets through is either gimmicky and loud or numbingly quiet–those that are undeniably under the umbrella of Poetry.

I really appreciate this blog post for its criticism of an ongoing system within “Official Verse Culture,” which has badly needed reexamination and restructuring. Still, I doubt our criticisms change much, if we all continue to participate in this part of “Official Verse Culture.”

Howard Junker has just posted this on the Zyzzyva blog: “The major way nonsuperstar poets get their books published is by entering them in contests…” I keep wondering, why is this the major way? Why must this be the major way? There are so many publishers of poetry out there, and most exist in spite of poetry not being a revenue generating genre. Additionally, there are so many new small publishers of poetry being born. There are bodies such as SPDBooks (Small Press Distribution) who are so effective in making all of this poetry available and accessible.

This year, I have not been keeping track of how much I have spent on poetry contests. Really, it’s only been a small number of contests, and a small amount of money, compared to what I hear other poets are shelling out every manuscript submission season. I hear of folks shelling out hundreds of dollars per manuscript submission season and that is staggering.

I will not be submitting to poetry contests anymore. Given the above model described by Tonelli, with the “least qualified” being bestowed the role as poetry institution gatekeeper, Diwata simply isn’t ever going to make it past a contest slushpile. Its title is an unrecognizable term in an unrecognizable language (unhispanized Tagalog). This unrecognizable language is consistently used throughout the manuscript and not translated, though this time around, there is no baybayin script to be found in my manuscript. The unrecognizable term is the manuscript’s premise.

Diwata’s literary references are not those of canonical or popularly consumed American literature, unless you consider Eduardo Galeano, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tu Fu, and the Tagalog Creation Story of Malakas and Maganda among the canonical or popularly consumed American literary works, which they are not.

Among Diwata’s historical and social references and inferences are Lapu Lapu, the headhunting of the northern tribes, the Philippine American War and resistance figures such as Macario Sakay, USAFFE Filipino WWII veterans, the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines and the Bataan Death March, the Comfort Women, non-hipster SoMa and Mission District San Francisco, Manny Pacquiao. Familial references include a dedication to Tita Alice and Papa (Papa’s name is also quite a mouthful), a densely populated family tree, and then Lola Ilang. And then there is my use of Philippine and invented feminist mythologies. Perhaps the only reference readily familiar to intern slushpilers is the biblical Eve, and she’s not doing conventionally Eve things.

I say all these things not to rant, really. In rejecting the contest route, I am not rejecting editorial approval/affirmation. I believe in editorial process. I would simply prefer discerning and experienced editors (and I gauge these things based upon which poets and titles they have previously published) to read Diwata, which is currently in or will very soon be in some [unnamed editors'] good hands, safely outside of the contest route, and where the odds are maybe not guaranteed to be in my favor, but are markedly better than being the “ethnic” “political” “experimental” poet in a slushpile of thousands (thousands?) of conventional American English narrative poets.

And so regarding these unnamed editors with these unnamed independent publishers, let’s just say that my “shameless hussy-ing” is making this possible, though I don’t know how well it’s “working” until I receive the final word. I want to say that I feel like it’s close.

Poet Laureates Again, and “Official Verse Culture”

This is the first time I am conscious of my use of the term, “Official Verse Culture,” and I am not sure I really know what it means. That said, François Luong has left this comment:

I find the Poet Laureateship very problematic in how it posits poetry. It’s also a very Anglo-Saxon thing to do (I believe early Renaissance poet John Skelton was one of the first poets to use it). So here we have a function inherited from a feudal society. The question becomes, of course, for what purpose? Because a function sponsored by a state power may be problematic, especially when said state is engaged in military activities. If anything, the laureateship might be the prime example of what Marx means when he writes of intellectuals being the producers of ideology.

The flipside of this is the figure of the poéte engagé who claims to be speaking for the masses. In doing so, I am not sure that s/he is really going against the situation. It is still a very romantic(ized) position to take, this positioning of poetry outside of a capitalistic system of exploitation. I am somewhat dubious of a self-righteous politico-moral position in regards to poetry in that it does not realize that the writing of poetry is still a form of production and therefore, maybe, still reaffirms the values of the current economic system.

To which I have responded:

François, I think you bring up very good and relevant points, in terms of manufacturers and/or producers of state sanctioned ideology. As well, I agree with you that poetry doesn’t necessarily exist outside of a/the capitalist system, that our current system of poetry reaffirms the dominant culture, even the poet who appears to represent the “masses.” Still, being poets, I think we do subscribe to the romanticism of the poet’s and artist’s symbolic importance in our society.

This is where I leave behind rational discussion and consider the artist as the “soul” of a culture. Or perhaps this is rational, and I can’t remember who said this, that the way the dominant culture regards art and artists is an indicator of the “well being” and integrity of the culture’s soul.

Ultimately I would just like some politicized multilingual visibility on a level larger than our small artist circles.

I would like to clarify my position on poets participating in the production and propagation of state sanctioned ideology, and poets existing and participating in a/the/our capitalist system: We do.

The romanticism I describe above, of poets and artists as the “soul” of a society does not preclude our participation in mainstream culture and economy, if only as consumers in our everyday lives, payers of mortgages and taxes. Our participation in this economy does not/should not negate our ability to be thinking people, critical of this economy, nor to live mindfully and to enact sustainability within it.

More pointedly, so many of us poets are invested in publication, in manuscript submissions to contests and awards (i.e. mediation and approval of/by editorial bodies). Many of us participate in the machine called the MFA, with no guarantees on our investment’s return. Many of us poets participate in this English and Western-centric system, knowledgeable and reminded constantly that we and our both radical and nuanced differences are unwelcome here. Even when we are directing our work towards independent publishers and DIY projects, we are acknowledging literary institution by positioning ourselves in relation to it. It is this totality I think of when I think of “Official Verse Culture.”

While I agree with François, I also believe that if I were to operate wholly on theory, then futility at any attempts to eschew “Official Verse Culture,” would set in, and I would do nothing. It is not even that I would take it “underground” to my “peeps”; I just wouldn’t seek publication, and more so, I wouldn’t write. And then I would have nothing to share with a community. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be a poet. I’d go live in the suburbs, drive a massive gasoline uber-consuming vehicle, and do something societally and gender respectable, like have no opinion.

So, does our nomination of Juan Felipe Herrera for California Poet Laureate mean anything within “Official Verse Culture”? I believe that it does. Similarly, [unnamed important literary person] has just told me s/he has nominated Al Robles for San Francisco Poet Laureate, and it’s clear to me this unnamed person also believes the visibility of this poet activist advocate is meaningful. It is not because we demand these figures to speak for us, but because they have enacted and continue to enact their poetics and politics. In doing so, they have provided us with very concrete blueprints for our own actions and activisms as poets with political consciousness. If we keep relying on poet activists like Herrera and Robles to be our “voice,” then we have missed the point entirely.

I am reminded of Nikki Giovanni’s recent Oakland Museum event. She read poetry and spoke much about her mother and sister, Sarah Vaughn, Rosa Parks, and what these women meant to her, to her community, to American history. During the Q&A, a young man asked her if she had any advice on how a young brother could address women’s issues and feminism not just in his poetic work, but in his life. Ms. Giovanni responded firmly: haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been talking about for the past couple of hours?

Poet Laureates and All

Some news and thoughts in and about Poet Laureate Land.

(1) Tony Brown is the new Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. W00t! I don’t know Tony Brown personally; I know Oscar does. But why do I think this is so fabulous?

(2) Charles Simic does not want to reprise his role as U.S. Poet Laureate. After one year, he’s had it. He’d rather be writing poetry. And here I was last year all excited about change. I think about this now and I wonder why I thought Simic (his presence really more than any programs he’d dream up and execute) would bring change to American poetry.

(3) Nominations are open for the position of Poet Laureate of California. Now this position I actually take seriously, because I have been recently thinking about and talking with folks about who determines what is California poetry. I don’t know of any California specific publishers of poetry, though the excellent Heyday Press is a California/West Coast specific publisher of diverse literature. Is it who the University of California Press publishes? I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the people of this culturally, socioeconomically, linguistically, aesthetically diverse state.

In fact, having recently seen Mr. Jack Hirschman reading, like, everywhere, and after he lost his voice doing reading after reading at cultural centers and political rallies, and still there he was, reading his anti-war, community mobilizing and community building poetry, I believe the San Francisco Poet Laureates are much more in line with what I envision to be a better measure of what California poetry is: written by a poet whose works address the people of California, a poet whose work actively engages the political movements of the people, the workers, the immigrants. We recently picked up Hirschman’s translations of Roque Dalton’s Poemas Clandestinos, and I have been thinking that I think we take for granted that Mr. Hirschman is a man of letters, and so this is reaffirming my preference and love for poets who are unabashedly political, and poets who transgress conventional borders.

Speaking of poets who are unabashedly political and poets who transgress conventional borders, here is my nomination:

JUAN FELIPE HERRERA for California Poet Laureate.

Who’s with me?

Information on how to nominate is here.