Claire Light kills me. The woman straight up kills me.
Claire has been live blogging from various APAture events, and I commend her for having the stamina and intestinal fortitude to do so.
[Edits below.]
As this is the first year I haven’t attended any APAture events, I’ve been keeping up via Claire’s live blogging, and have very much been enjoying her literary and political commentary, criticism, wit, and snark. I have come to realize that my own criticism of community events and community literature hurts many feelings. Actually, I’ve known this for a while; literary criticism, community criticism, pointing out omissions and rough spots, areas that could use improvement and attention, asking questions, ruins friendships.
I have blogged about previous years’ APAture events: 2007 | 2006. The fact that I have been publicly critical of emerging API artists’ liberal use of tropes or the need to specialize/hone craft and presentation, the fact that I have been critical at all (as I have been historically within the Filipino American literary community) has made my social interactions with community members awkward, to say the least. I’ve subsequently become more socially removed. I bring this up because I see on Claire’s blog that she’s received some angry response to her blunt criticism.
I believe it’s the role of the more established artists to be critical of our own communities (addendum: it’s actually the role of all the artists in the community, but perhaps mentors and teachers more so?), to write or to set the criteria for the criticism which mainstream literary bodies are ill-equipped to do (in the vernacular: to flip the script) (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). I’ve previously referred to Martín Espada, to Victor Hernández Cruz, on political/politically conscious poetry written by emerging Latino poets (here); I read their constructive, critical write-up’s as necessary tough love, and I agree with it. How do you convince young poets to continue to challenge themselves, to keep on moving after exhausting themselves on one major accomplishment; how do you tell them to rest for a sec, then pick it up and start working on the next big thing.
Back to Claire’s APAture live blogging and the responses to her, this really is about historical perspective, generations, the specific needs of each generation, and the particular places which artists in question or in dialogue currently inhabit. To summarize and expand upon one of my comment responses: to an emerging artist, to someone newer in the scene than I, the “tropes” — the rice cooker poems, the dark skin color pride, the flailing at imperialism, the deployment of key political and academic terms, particular performance styles — are new and yet untried. My poems and performance once were populated by these things, back in the very early 1990’s, back when I was published nowhere, back before I declared my undergraduate Ethnic Studies major. Back when I first read Jessica Hagedorn and Maxine Hong Kingston. Back when I first bought Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls….
And so on.
All this to say that while I am becoming less and less patient with the unoriginal deployment of tropes, due to the widening distance created by time and experience, a much younger emerging poet is discovering them for the first time, and discovering that they are empowering. So this young poet has to work with those things, expand outward from them, and only good things I hope can come from the work; grandparent poems, food poems, for example, don’t all have to be written one stereotypical way.
My only hope then, is that these emerging poets, writers, and artists strive for that next level in their art and political education. If, for example, I see that eight years later, the same writer is deploying the same tropes, still performing the very same poems in the very same performance style, then I will be mighty disappointed. In fact, I have seen this, and I have been very disappointed. What would it take, I wonder, to coax, even push these artists out of their safety, to try something new, different, if only by minor degrees.
I want to say that if you cannot grow your art, if you do not or will not, if you refuse to grow your art, then that’s the death of your art.
Because emerging poets ask me for stuff all the time, here are some things I tell them: try different poetic forms, try different manners of code switching, reexamine your line breaks, replace your abstracts with concretes, flesh them out, reexamine your use of figurative language, reexamine your poetic “I,” try departing from the “I” that is your autobiographical I. Try on others’ voices; write poems based upon/riffing off of others’ poems. Read a poet you’ve never read before. Read as much of this as you can. Think about taking poetry workshops if you haven’t already done so. Take a single poem you’ve written and expand it into a series of poems. Grow your series of poems into a chapbook. There’s always so much more.
I also realize that there will be emerging artists in the community who don’t care what I have to say, and that’s fine too. There are plenty of mentors and teachers to be had.
Finally, I also have to respect that some emerging artists may be trying out art; some may decide it isn’t their vocation but rather, a hobby, and that will determine their level of commitment to it. Some may decide it isn’t for them. They’ll leave it when it’s no longer useful to them. There’s little point in pushing and hoping on my part, and that’s just the way that is.
Tags: APAture, Claire Light
