Items: Poetry and things that make me happy about it
Forrest Gander on the Poetry Foundation blog, on Anne Waldman:
It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat and despair,” Anne Waldman comments in the introduction to the anthology Civil Disobedience: Poetics & Politics in Action (Coffee House Press, 2004). Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.
So I appreciate Gander’s post and Waldman’s quote very much, and what I appreciate about these is the acknowledgment of joy’s importance, and even of ferocity’s importance in poetry. I am a big fan of poetry which contains the bling, fangs, fuck you’s, blues beats funk and soul, the tactile and the lush, and other things that indicate to me that the poet actually loves what s/he is doing, what s/he is writing, and that s/he is invested in it and believes it belongs in the world. I am a big fan of this kind of poetry when it is well crafted, well presented, not mumbled monotone off a piece of paper into the ether, not presented in such a dull fashion that we can’t even tell if the poet cares about his/her own work, not bled ’til it’s depleted of its vitality. I am a fan of the kind of poet who pulls off dynamic well-crafted performance of dynamic well-crafted work and considers the reader and audience to whom s/he is presenting his/her poetry.
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That said, it’s been mentor-ly over in our world, as we’ve been spending some quality time with some younger Pinoy poets and writers. They’ve been coming over to the sexy loft to spread out for an evening and really talk, as running into one another at events just isn’t conducive to extended and deep conversations (though seeing Adrien the other day at Pegasus and getting to talk to him for a minute was great). And they’ve been bringing offerings. Yup, that’s the proper thing to do when you visit your elders. Yup, you bring ‘em offerings.
One poet/writer has been thinking that it’s time to consider MFA programs and wanted to talk about what can potentially be gained there, what he hopes to find there, how it differs from our local community arts scene, and so some of the discussion entailed my talking about my own movement between the local community arts scene and the world which being in my MFA program opened up for me. We talked much about just opening up to reading so many different writers, and learning how to talk about them and their work. As well, we also talked about the absence of unconditional community love and the absence of cultural and political understanding that necessarily happens with one’s colleagues and professors in grad school, how this is actually a good thing, for various reasons of perspective and balance.
Another younger Pinoy poet came over yesterday evening with his chapbook manuscript, which we went through poem by poem, as well as discussing it as its own cohesive poetic body or poetic project. We talked about what his intentions were for the project, and how this overarching idea or concept had many different fine points, aspects, and areas to excavate. He talked to us about whose work was informing this first attempt at a chapbook project, versus a bunch of different poems brought together. Certainly, writing a bunch of different poems and bringing these together into a chapbook is not a bad thing or less sophisticated thing for a poet to do. It’s just that sustaining himself through an extended project was something newer to him and he was thrilled to try it. He told us he’d recently read Bino Realuyo’s The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, and Justin Chin’s Gutted. He’s also read Oscar’s chapbook, Anywhere Avenue. I think, yeah, these are good choices for what he is trying to do with his project.
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So this is where I am at this morning, quite happy that I am able to have this kind of time and exchange. I am also noting the significant fact that it’s for the most part young Pinoy men who are able to reach out and ask me for something they need and I have. I have an informal policy of giving what I am able to give, and not depleting myself and not letting myself get pushed around to give more than I can (for example, if I have hardly met a person and have never read his/her work then I am not in the position to write a letter to recommendation). So I can’t deal with pushy, and I also can’t deal with flaky. As well, I’m not the person to go to if what you are looking for is unconditional Pin@y love, a hug, a cookie.
And rather than think that these younger Pinoys have ulterior motives, I think of this along socially constructed gender lines, again reticence versus professional assertiveness. Then again, we do have Karen Llagas, a younger Pinay poet, who’s single-handedly organized our Filipino-centric Litquake reading, and I am very happy she’s done so. It’s a step outside of our oftentimes insular* feelgoodism comfort zone for Filipino American community gatherings. Still all Filipino American readers for a Filipino anthology, integrated into a larger San Francisco literary scene outside of our usual community venues.
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*I literally mean insular. We are an island people after all. And while I am on the subject of “we,” I just really love that the “We” of Major General Antonio Taguba is an American “We.” And that from a position of American leadership, he claims this American “We.” He claims it hard.
