Work Post: Talking about Writing and Literary Community

[Some edits below.]

If you have a look at my Events page, you may notice I am scheduled to speak in a few places on writing, being a writer, and being a member of writing communities. So this means, more gigs about the writing life and work rather than gigs in which I get to actually share my poetry. I don’t know who it was who recently said that s/he was spending more time writing about writing, rather than writing poetry. Indeed, I am doing a good deal of that as well, with pedagogy, poetics, and political poetry essays forthcoming in a few places, and of course, with my current teaching position, and my two current blogging gigs, in which I talk about other people’s art and poetry.

It’s interesting how we get to this place, or how we find ourselves in this place; what do you call it? And when did I come to be seen as an authority on the subjects of political poetry, or poetry in the American margins, or on anything which sometimes I think an Ethnic Studies or English/Comparative Lit PhD would do better to speak on, or that I am constantly being called upon to speak on matters I think I am still trying to figure out. Actually, the truth is I am more accustomed to being dismissed by academics/scholarly types, and overlooked by more mainstream literary bodies, so this being sought after is all quite strange.

I suppose this is what it means to be a working artist; I think of myself as fully invested in the details of creative process and am getting quite good at discussing it concretely and critically. I was also thinking about this new-found authority of mine in terms of Filipino American representation at the college level, community demand for Filipino American professors, but then I think of this simultaneous and sometimes toxic anti-intellectualism that many do not see as an impossible contradiction.

But let me end on a positive note here. I have just learned that my Filipino American Arts course will be cross listed in Asian Studies, which makes it interesting, having to tease out the boundaries between Filipino American and Filipino Art, which for now I am thinking of as USA-based artists drawing from our histories and experiences with/of transnationalism. Many good things here, and what I want to do in my work is to keep things from falling into abstract and esoteric discussion in which more attention is paid to the theory than the art and the artist. I prefer to remain rooted in the art and digging my hands into the art, what is there on the page, on the canvas, in the frame (and even what bleeds out of the frame), in the beats and lyrics, in the body language of the performer.