Various Poetics and Community Items

It’s time to start collecting blurbs for Diwata. I am sending out email requests to [unnamed literary luminaries] with the hopes that at least a couple of them will have the time and inclination. Crossing fingers….

Yesterday evening, I spoke in Sharon Coleman’s Berkeley City College poetry course, and had some awesome discussion with the students. We covered so many things, I don’t really know where to start. I told them that the creative writing class I took around 1999 at Vista College (which is now Berkeley City College) was the very first creative writing class I ever took, and prior to this, I was writing mostly by emulating what I read, and by trial and error. In my Vista College class, I was opened up to think differently about page and line, that the poems I wrote there I included in my MFA application work sample and in my first book.

I told them that as I did not participate in open mics early in my writing, I see this now as a missed opportunity; how much good editing could have happened as a result of hearing myself speak on the open mic. So this led to discussion on reading poetry aloud in the writing/work in progress stages, to get that music going, to nail the language. This got us talking about hearing language other than my own, keeping the ears sharp for the way others speak rather than constructing my own versions of how I imagine others using language.

We talked about my fear of writing the same poem over and over again, how the recent mimicry of my West Oakland poems was one way of trying to stretch my voice and use of form and line. I told them how the mermaid appeared in one poem in Gravities of Center, and how she’s continued to manifest herself in my work. We see her in Poeta en San Francisco as this original Southeast Asian/elemental woman power kind of figure, then as an exotic creature lost in the city’s sewer system and then as that exotic creature made into a living art exhibit. We hear her various voices in Diwata and see how she has endured foreign invasion, war, dispossession, transformation, and migration over long, long spans of mythical and historical time.

We discussed poetry communities, finding poetry communities, and the importance of these, forming writers’ groups to present and critique one anothers’ work in progress, to do things like find creative writing classes in which to enroll. I talked about how my earliest poetry communities were fellow Filipino American UC Berkeley students with whom I worked on the publication, Maganda, and from there, how this work with Maganda enabled elder writers/activists to find us. I told them that I don’t know now if I was trying to find them, and that rather, perhaps they were looking for us, this “new” generation of writers/activists. I do remember now, being encouraged by them (Jaime, Manong Oscar, Manong Al, Marianne, Eileen, Nick), or at least told that I was doing good work, that I should continue to do so. I remember being invited to and/or brought into literary events in that community of elder writers. I remember what I think of now as elders’ genuine affection for my wide-eyed (read: naive) enthusiasm about poetry and publication.

I talked also about my very first DIY chapbook, and that process of compiling my poems, finding that I had a body of poems worth compiling, doing the Kinko’s thing and selling them out of my backpack, and how the positive community response from others translated into more sales than I’d ever anticipated, and the (also unanticipated) book contract with Arkipelago. I discussed KSW as a part of all of this growth for me, the fact that mentors and elders were writers who looked like me, that if they could write and publish, then so could I.

Finally, one student asked about how I start writing; is it a fully formed idea for a project or what? I told her about starting Poeta en San Francisco with one not so fully formed idea, the encounter between the female speaker and a homeless PTSD’ed Vietnam vet on 16th and Valencia Streets, how from there, meditating and speculating on all the possible factors that have brought each of these parties to that moment in that particular place, and how from there, so many unforeseeable turns as each item led to so many more unforeseeable turns. The key then, is to remain open to all of those possibilities.

So that’s a lot. I am glad for the students’ energetic lines of questioning.

All of what I’ve mentioned above about community is heartening for me, and a wonderful reminder, as this morning some listserv discontented kvetching from previous lurkers has almost worked its way under my skin. The fact that I’ve been continuing to pass along all of the teaching and arts administration work, residency, fellowship, and a wide array of publication opportunities I hear about has got a small number of folks stewing about “elitism,” because they claim they’d never have a shot at any of these.

I can’t address these discontented kvetchers anymore when there are so many emerging writers and colleagues I know or am finding who take initiative and work so hard at their writing practices in various venues (which reminds me: I still have to blog about the SFPL writers’ panel from this past weekend). This is where my energy is best spent.

So I will end here by restating my credo about community: You get what you give.