I’ve just received an email from a UC Merced student regarding poetry, and specifically how I go about starting to write a poem. Where do I start, where do I place myself in order to make this happen. How do I stick it through to its completion. Finally, is the process any different for poems which incorporate other languages. This student wanted to know about Spanish, though I believe this also applies to my poems incorporating or including Tagalog. Recently I tried a Tagalog Malay mash-up and was relatively pleased with the results.
You may remember I was invited by Jared Stanley to read at UC Merced early last month. I was so pleased to see how diverse the student body present was, and I was also pleased that their lines of questioning were so thoughtful and engaged. There were a couple of questions about language and translation, what I do with code switching, knowing that readers can potentially be thwarted by words they do not understand.
But let me start from the beginning here. This blog post is my response to this UC Merced student’s questions. Those of you who are familiar with my work, or have followed my blog for a while may know that when I was writing Poeta en San Francisco, I was actually walking through or sitting in public places in San Francisco, watching people rushing from one place to another, interacting with one another. I listened to the city’s sounds, thinking about the city’s movements and bustle. Sometimes people weren’t rushing around, sometimes they meandered. Some actually appeared to achieve stillness. Maybe some people had nowhere to go. Sometimes the people smashed into these bustling spaces didn’t interact with one another. Sometimes they stepped over one another, avoided one another, disregarded those who were markedly different than they were. This is novels of material right here. Add to these human interactions the architecture, the city planning, i.e. how the city is arranged. How these arrangements determine human movement.
Add to the above the historical phenomena that made possible the mix of human beings, flung into this space; add to this the cultural movements, cultural productions which accompany the historical accounts. This is where research came in, actually reading books, articles, poems, stories, prayers, mythologies, viewing films, viewing photography and visual art, listening to songs. Here I mean in print and online, on Youtube (was Youtube around then? Anyway…), on DVD’s, on iTunes. I spent a lot of time in Mission Dolores, the church, the graveyard, the gallery full of Native American artifacts, old Spanish drawings of the people, maps. For two or three years I participated in the Good Friday Spanish language mass and procession. Here, litany, poetic cadence informed by the movement of the procession, many human beings speaking and moving as one body. Found poems come from this (these).
Yesterday in Penelope Flores’s SFSU class, one student teacher of social science and history asked us about found poem. I told him this reminded me of the writings of the Angel Island detainees, these writings which were scrawled, etched, carved into the barracks’ walls. Perhaps they never intended for these carved words to be poems, but this is now how we consider them. This is not different from statements made in graffiti. We find poems in ironically, particularly worded articles, headlines, essays, firsthand accounts and/or testimonies. So I suppose I am telling you to be on the lookout for language that is interesting to you, language that is confounding you, affirming you, riling you up, pissing you off, moving you to tears. We also find language in the visual representations, images that are jarring, offensive, beautiful. When on the lookout for language, do not limit yourself to English.
The writing process for Diwata was not too different. I read Philippine mythology or folk stories, again meditated on city, thought about ways of mashing up these two things. I kayaked the Oakland Estuary, hiked the Marin Headlands, hiked to the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite, and these produced their own sets of myths, images, and poetic meter. Think about the regularity of your footfalls and breath, or of your oar dipping into the water. Think about the details of the natural world around you, what is rushing into the underbrush as you pass. What are the names of the trees and flowers. Who are the raptor birds circling overhead. Who are the spirits in these spaces? Don’t forget to acknowledge them, ask permission to pass. The Glacier Point hike was like 3.5 hours uphill and another 2.5 to 3 hours back downhill; you get to this point where you are almost in a trance, and every critter stirring, every peculiar rock formation, every ancient tree around you is a deity of some kind. Urban kayaking is really interesting; Coast Guard Island and its gunboats, old industrial structures and corroding old piers, spendy waterfront restaurants, the Port of Oakland cranes towering like AT-AT Walkers. But sitting in the kayak, the water is so clear, and you don’t hear the city’s bustle.
I suppose this is all just to say that if you pay attention, really make an effort to listen and to see and smell, telescope in and out like you are viewing through a zoom lens, you will find poems. Keep this language in your head, remember those rhythms (I tend to go into a trance). That’s your poetic meter.
Now as for languages other than English, I can only say that so many of us exist between languages. Let’s not perpetuate the erroneous assumption that monolingual English speakers should be privileged over the rest of us. Let me add to this the fact that “proper” English is only one sliver of the Englishes we speak and hear every day. Think about what folks speak in East Oakland, or the Fruitvale, or in the Mission District, or in Chinatown, or on Powell Street, or in any major American city, cosmopolitan spaces, inner cities, suburban and rural communities. People are not speaking in proper academic English but in really interesting figurative language.
One positive result of my English Tagalog Spanish mash-ups is that subtracted bilinguals like me relate to it; take away the negative connotation that this is “broken” language, and it reaffirms our wholeness. We were never broken to begin with, and it’s unfortunate we were ever led to believe this in the first place.
7 May 2009 at 6:55 pm |
A great post, BJR. I never know when a poem is going to hit me these days. It can be something in a film, a momentary mood swing while I’m driving, a memory from decades ago suddenly resurfacing. But there is a spark…it’s like a little ignition in my brain that automatically tells me “this should be a poem.” I was at a reading a couple of months ago, and this young woman came in late and she looked like she’d just stepped out of an Ingmar Bergman film. You know that look — windswept, pale. All of these jocks who were at the reading for class credit were eyeballing her, summing her up, and she ignored them like they weren’t there. Never gave them the satisfaction. I came home and wrote about her.
8 May 2009 at 9:02 am |
Thanks for this comment Collin. I like that, the little spark or voice in your brain that tells you “this should be a poem.” Maybe the hardest thing to “teach” is how to “obey” that voice.
10 May 2009 at 11:37 am |
What a wonderful explanation and description of process, Barbara! And you’re timing couldn’t be more perfect. The weather right now is too inviting for hiking, kayaking and all other sun-worshipping, nature-loving activities. I’m constantly trying to train myself to grow and keep my writerly antennae active at all times, whether during my work commute or on a bike ride to the grocery store. Its difficult to stop and obey the call of the muse when rushing to a meeting, and I’d like to think I could easily pull over to the side of the road and jot something down when lightning strikes. But for all intents and purposes, practicality tugs me to stay within the lines. Another frustration tethered to being open to art at all times is what do you do when you collect these fragments of possibility? How does one take notes and what does one do with these notes to keep them in some semblance of order, ready to use when they’re ideally most needed? I wonder if you find yourself approaching your found “sparks” differently when you’re actively seeking them as opposed to scribbling something down while you rush to pick up the dry cleaning. The random notes I take tend to get lost in the ether of busyness. Is there a marked difference in your pieces between what you actively hunt for when you’re out and about in the city versus what arbitrarily strikes you? Or can you happily meld them together in some organized system? Me, I’m drowning in a sea of notes archived both online and on paper.
10 May 2009 at 12:14 pm |
[...] Barbara Jane Reyes, beckons us to come play outside with her recent post, “Making a Poem, Work, Prompt, Spark”. She guides and inspires writers on how to constantly fuse writing and living. We’re [...]
12 May 2009 at 9:11 am |
hi rashaan, thanks for this comment and for linking to this post! i know what you mean about all of these notes all archived and in so many places. i was talking to another pinay artist (visual artist) who told me she has all kinds of folders on her hard drive, filled with whatever she happens to be obsessing over, in the hopes that some kind of project may coalesce from them.
as a poet, maybe it’s a little easier for me (as opposed to writing fiction) because all the disparate notes (in my google reader, in my moleskine, in my hard drive) can become individual poems that have nothing to do with one another. i like that – the discreet poem, which i’d grown unaccustomed to writing while i’d been focusing on book.
when i am not in a position to write things down because i am on the move, i have to just commit something of whatever is grabbing me to memory. when i return to it later, i might just remember a tone, or a smell, or something that becomes the jump off point into a new piece – as opposed to the deliberate setting myself down somewhere to actively watch, witness, take notes on everything. hoping this makes sense…..