11/10/09 Panel at the Urban Center (SF)

I need to prepare a presentation for tomorrow evening’s Young Urbanists [Literature] panel. Some guiding questions, as per our moderator, Matthew Zapruder:

• In the introduction to his anthology Writing Los Angeles, editor David Ulin writes “The story of Los Angeles has always been, on the most basic level, the story of the interaction between civilization and nature … an idiosyncratic hybrid of the urban and the elemental.” He then goes on to discuss how the “literature of Los Angeles” reflects that story. Do you think there is a literature of San Francisco? If so, how would you characterize it, and its relationship to both the natural landscape and the built environment?

• In what ways does being a resident of San Francisco in particular (as opposed to some other place) affect your creative work, as well as your life as a writer?

I am looking at an old presentation I did a few years ago in Stephen Hong Sohn’s California Regional Literatures course at Stanford; I think of “a literature of San Francisco” within the context of relationships, even legacies. Here is an excerpt of this presentation:

One typically does not think of Filipinos when discussing San Francisco poets, and certainly, among others, the poet Ron Silliman, often cited as an authority on the so-called San Francisco Renaissance, doesn’t bring up Filipino poets when discussing San Francisco poetry, but here we’ve been for decades, not figuratively in the shadow of the North Beach Beat Poet greats, with Manilatown on the border of Chinatown and the Financial District, decades-long haunted and “invisible,” and now reemerging. Again, we are reemerging. We have been here a long time, not unknown to the city’s literary fixtures. They have invited and welcomed us into their spaces. As a young poet hanging out at City Lights Bookstore, Jessica Hagedorn was a poet child of Kenneth Rexroth, as much as she was a poet child of Filipino American poet Al Robles, who has, for decades, his entire life, been a San Francisco citizen, walking the streets of Chinatown, SoMa, the Fillmore, organizing and advocating for the city’s many old carabao and their ghosts, Filipino agricultural and industrial laborers who built San Francisco and California to greatness.

In his book, Rappin with Ten Thousand Carabaos in the Dark, Manong Al makes poetry about, for, and in the voices of the city’s many old carabao and their ghosts. I say these things not intending any dramatic effect. Housed in the low rent International Hotel on Kearny and Jackson Streets until its demolition, these dispossessed Filipino laborers of the 1920’s and 30’s are a fact of San Francisco and California history. With the city’s brutal eviction of these elderly tenants in 1977 and the building’s subsequent demolition, young Asian American and Filipino American poets’ newly formed arts organization and small press, Kearny Street Workshop, housed in the International Hotel, was also displaced.

[...]

Manong Al’s poet children reflect him, and he reflects them back. We see this is Jessica Hagedorn’s cosmic Carabao Kid in Gangster of Love, in Jaime Jacinto’s world of the Richmond District in Heaven is Just Another Country, in Jeff Tagami’s Pajaro River agricultural community in October Light, in Oscar Peñaranda’s culminating, digressing stories of his brawling young West Coast Pinoy cats in Seasons by the Bay, in Shirley Ancheta’s poems filled with streetwise and gentle old carabao, in Catalina Cariaga’s psychologically and physically exhausted laborer father (presumably one of Manong Al’s carabao) in Cultural Evidence, in Tony Robles’ children’s book character Lakas, and in his characters populating the world of San Francisco SRO hotels and section eight housing. And in my poems, my Poeta en San Francisco, who listens, witnesses, and absorbs the Mission District, Chinatown, and SoMa streets’ collisions and brutalities.

This is already stuff that readers of my blog, and students of Filipino American literature should already know. While that above excerpt speaks to the built landscape’s effect on literature communities, I am not so sure about the city’s natural landscape’s effects on the SF literature I mean to discuss. I can speak on its geography, in relation to the Pacific, to Asia, in relation to wars in Asia. I can speak on its demographics as a result of its geography and war. A large part of my presentation then will be rearticulating why I wrote Poeta en San Francisco, where all of the book’s threads come from, weave, and tangle.

You know how it is to have spoken on a subject so extensively, that you just don’t know anymore, how to start in on it again, how to organize it?