Current : Various : Updates : Relevance
(1) Grant application due at the end of the week, and I need to get going on this.
(2) Pedagogy essay for Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s anthology is due very soon, and I need to get going on this. Linh Dinh has posted his essay on the Poetry Foundation blog, so this helps me selvedge what scraps I currently have. I want to focus on teaching poetry to Filipino American students, and this does not mean focusing on Filipino American texts, though I have found it always helps to teach ethnically and culturally diverse poetry to ethnically and culturally diverse students.
(3) Poetics and Politics dialogue with Matthew Shenoda for the forthcoming MELUS Journal is due soon, and we need to get going on this. I proposed this a while back, a dialogue with a panel of writers/authors of color on poetics and politics. They’d responded to our query, telling us that they’d be interested in hearing me and Matthew in dialogue; lucky for me they provided us some questions/guidelines, which helps me focus my otherwise blown wide openness on the topic, which I think is vast. I had hoped for a larger panel of writers, though I think he and I will have a very substantial dialogue, and I think our editors at BOA would be pleased to see this.
(4) Thank you to Catherine Ceniza Choy, who has indeed adopted Poeta en San Francisco for her course, Contemporary Narratives on the Philippines and the United States in Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley. She has also adopted Sunny’s (do I use his official author name?) or Benito M. Vergara’s forthcoming book, Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City. I know some graduate student instructors who have taught Poeta at UC Berkeley; Cathy, who is also Filipino American, is the first professor there to do so. She is one of few Fil Am professors who actually teach Poeta, so this means a great deal to me.
(5) Because this is a total trip, I will end with this: Harold Bloom versus Barbara Jane Reyes. A certain Gina Sully (thank you!) of UNLV has written and presented a paper entitled,“The Haunting: Harold Bloom, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Ghosts in the Contact Zone”:
In his now-notorious introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988-1997, Harold Bloom rejects identity poetry as both the product of the “School of Resentment” and the first step down a slippery slope that leads to abandonment of aesthetic considerations. I place Bloom’s rejection of identity poetry into tension with Filipina American poet Barbara Jane Reyes’ insistence on it as both impossible to escape and essential to the poetic expression of a hybrid subjectivity that is always already multiple. In her book-length sequence Poeta en San Francisco, Reyes uses Baybayin script, Spanish, English, and Tagalog to replicate hegemony’s concurrent exclusion and construction of the colonial subject. Reyes moves beyond replication to invert imperial relationships by reconstructing multiple contact zones out of which emerge Otherness, exclusion, and the double consciousness of those who simultaneously do and do not belong. Disagreeing with Bloom’s condemnation, I maintain Reyes’ text demonstrates that identity poetry need not reject aesthetic considerations and that, because it makes visible both histories that ought to be resented and the multiplicity of hybrid subjectivity, identity poetry is culturally invaluable.
