Some good comments coming in to this here blog, and so I thought I’d call your attention to them.
In response to my recent post, “In the Meantime, the Poetic Industrial Complex and Filipino American Authors,”here is my exchange with Gladys:
Gladys: … i love your term “colonial mentality hiya.” there’s hiya, and then there’s the “colonial mentality” version. based on what comes to mind when i think of these two terms, they are indeed different, if related, structures of feeling.
me: … Yes on differentiating between hiya and “colonial mentality hiya.” In the past I conflated the two, but am learning why it [the former] is valuable. I think maybe the things I’ve written about we poetics (versus I poetics) may fall into the category of hiya.
Gladys: yes, i would agree that the we poetics as you’ve described it in this space is hiya, and not part of a colonial mentality. it’s an interesting claim, though, b/c i think that some would say that attempting to produce work that withstands mainstream editorial standards is an act conditioned by a colonial/colonized mentality, the wanting to be white. (sorry for the simplistic rendering of this argument.) but i agree with you that there is something wrong when people go the other direction because it looks like “self-effacement” and “retreat.” i like your idea of a strong, well-respected network of fil am presses/publishers. meritage, for example, shouldn’t have to do it alone.
me: I agree that in the most extreme terms, abiding by editorial standards can also be read as some kind of colonial mentality. You know how I wrote — someone else’s expectations of [how] a well-behaved ethnic is supposed to write and sound. I have experienced how it becomes this totally polarized argument about academic/colonized versus anti-intellectual/revolutionary. Getting stuck in between where I believe most of us are, I am interested in how we enlarge this in between space by bringing our values to the center, and producing well-written work, and supporting, finding or creating presses that also support this.
In response to my older post, “Deciding (How) To Publish,” here is my exchange with Jill:
Jill: Thanks for publishing this Barbara. I like your thoughts. I found a small non-profit press to publish my book, but mainly because the editor was an friend who happened to like my work. I think itʻs very hard to be published esp. if you are from Hawaiʻi, but I agree itʻs better to publish books from through presses. Chapbooks, I think are fine to self-publish. Itʻs a good lesson and a good way to get your work out there….
me: Hi Jill, thank you for your comment. For me, two of the most important items in finding a publisher are (1) establishing a respectful and professional relationship or rapport with a publisher and editor, and (2) making sure of distribution networks. As I’ve said, there are writers who can move their own product to their desired audience/readership, so I will add that as an author, while it is important for me to connect with that desired audience/readership, it’s been great being able to have my books connect with a larger and unforeseen audience/readership, and how this outward movement I think is largely due to the publisher’s and distributor’s established networks.
I’ve been following your stuff for a while, and just wanted to say this is good stuff. I’m especially fascinated by this:
“I have experienced how it becomes this totally polarized argument about academic/colonized versus anti-intellectual/revolutionary. Getting stuck in between where I believe most of us are, I am interested in how we enlarge this in between space by bringing our values to the center, and producing well-written work, and supporting, finding or creating presses that also support this.” – I think the transitory, the in-between, the liminal, the hybrid grotesque, can be a valuable source of political/social impetus (i was going to say capital, but that doesn’t seem to work…). How this fits with conceptions of the “well written” – I’m not sure. maybe “the point is to change it”.
Ross, belated thanks for your comment. The point is to change “it,” indeed, if by “it,” you mean that polarization, and if I may add, that one aesthetic and ideological center to a peripheral everything else. And certainly, “well written” means or can mean many things; I think there’s a point to expanding our criteria beyond what central/mainstream bodies deem as “good poetry.”
Yeah, I totally agree. It seems there are a lot of people working on similar projects, to different but interrelated ends (Johannes Goransson being another). Its similar to my issues with Timothy Yu’s book on Asian American poetics, as expressed on Susan M Schultz’s blog a couple of months ago – If I remember rightly he created a dicotomy between AA poetry and “experimental” work – essentially negating the ethnicity of writers such as Myung Mi Kim. Obviously I’d find that distasteful….
One of the things I love about NZ (though it aslo has it’s problems) is that there isn’t a particularly developed ‘experimental’ (for lack of a better term) literary ‘scene’, so there aren’t fully encoded methods of ‘proper’ practice. I love the work of Tony Green – it’s remeniscent of Clark Coolige, though more overt – simply piling word on word on word in a kind of hysterical anti-poetic, calously ignoring any encoded practice as encoded by Marjorie Perloff or Ron Siliman.
It’s kind of like what I tend to aim for, my major idol being Ronald Johnson, who created an amazing practice in a lot of was totally at odds with comtemporary codified “experimental practice” – especially in his employment of rhyme, without seeming overtly atavistic. Truely nomadic (a la Pierre Joris’ manifesto). The trick, I think, is to do something like this without losing political efficacy. I have it easy, to a degree, in that any non-normative practice over here is political in itself – and I write often overtly pretty, “girly” poems, therefor (kind of) “queering” my identity as a hetro-normative Pakeha (white) male.
Wow, that was a bit of a rant – I hope you don’t mind!
R