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.

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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.

Tags: American Literature Association