Poetry Reading: Fabulous Folks at UC Merced

Wow! Abundant thanks to Jared Stanley for inviting me to read at the Kolligan Library at the brand-spankin-new (to me) UC Merced campus. The library is ultra-modern, vast and airy, and the lounge where I read was comfortable and casual with these awesome couches, a lot of windows, some great light and acoustics. Already, this kind of couch-y setting set up the vibe for the reading and the kind of rapport I felt I could establish with the students and professors there. Jared tells me that the audience was quite large, and I think it was; there were probably about 40-50 people there, and the space was so large that even those lounging in its farthest corners appeared to be listening in.

I realized I’d spent two hours in the car with Oscar driving, and I hadn’t thought about what I planned to read. This ended up being a good thing, as pre-set set lists I do not think are based upon what we think the audience would be interested in hearing, but rather, what we think the audience should be interested in hearing, before we’ve even encountered them. One quick look around at folks told me the audience was diverse in so many respects, and so young! This, of course, is relative, as I am pushin’ 40. But I have started to think more about performing a healthy cross section of work beginning at Gravities of Center, all the way to the West Oakland poems, providing historical, geographical, literary context for the work in between poems, and hopefully a sense of evolution or growth over time, as the work progresses.

[Set list after the jump...]

To demonstrate “healthy cross section,” at the risk of being slightly tedious, here is my impromptu set list:

• “Found,” from Gravities of Center, and invocation to my tocaya, Saint Barbara.
• “Images of Loss,” from Gravities of Center.
• “consider this procession,” from Poeta en San Francisco (p.19)
• “why choose pilipinas?” from Poeta en San Francisco.
• “why choose pilipinas, remix,” from Poeta en San Francisco.
• Various pieces from Poeta en San Francisco’s middle “[dis•orient]” section, travel guide and prayer poems, including “galleon prayer,” “prayer of the banished,” “exaltation of the lowly,” and “Ave Maria.”
• “agimat kinabukasan,” from Poeta en San Francisco.
• “Worry.”
• “West Oakland Litany.”
• “West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM.”
• “(t)here.”
• “Killer of Ferdinand Magellan,” from Diwata.
• “In Her Memory, the Tattooed Angel,” from Diwata.

I may be missing some poems here, but this is the general idea. This was a very chunky reading, which I think lasted about well over twenty minutes to half an hour, and I didn’t even read from Cherry or Easter Sunday, though I did bring these too. After this we had a very substantial and enthusiastic Q&A, in which we discussed many things including storytellers; language, multilingualism, code switching, and translation; colonized and indigenous selves; poetic form; the Filipino USAFFE WWII veterans; many things about city, making home and finding community in city.

After the official Q&A, there was still more enthusiastic discussion with students, young women of color, some Pinay, just gushing with things to say in response to the poems, visceral responses, all kinds of critical thoughts about poetic dialogue/intertextuality, history, mythology, oral tradition, mapmaking, space, and city (both San Francisco and Oakland). These were really very bright and inspired students. Like a dummy, I totally forgot to bring business cards (just website info) and books to sell (a couple of students did ask where they could buy books). Still I am not trippin because the whole event was so gratifying. Oscar’s photos and video are forthcoming, so I will link to those once they are available.

Tags: Diwata, Gravities of Center, Jared Stanley, Poeta en San Francisco, UC Merced