We started yesterday morning attending the SPTraffic Aggression Internet Panel, which featured Erica Statie, Jasper Bernes, and Craig Santos Perez, at CCA in Oakland. And really, what I came away with was a grave sense of disconnect, not necessarily with the poetry community present in the room — Jenn Reimer, jen Hofer, Stephanie Young, Juliana Spahr, Chris Chen, David Buuck, Cynthia Saliers, Laura Moriarty, Robin Tremblay McGaw, Tyrone Williams, Bhanu Kapil, Joshua Clover, Lisa Robertson, et al — but a sense of disconnect with the central arguments of Erica Statie and Jasper Bernes. First, on Statie, I don’t think she really had much of an argument or position, rather than that of an archivist of two relatively recent inflammatory poetry e-world fracases.
The first fracas was the Michael Magee, “Their Glittering Asian Guys Are Gay,” thing which started with Magee reading this poem at a poetry reading at David Buuck’s house in Oakland. I’d first heard about it via my colleague Kate Pringle, and her Minor Americans blog with Maggie Zurawski. I wasn’t particularly interested in Magee or his poem. I am still not particularly interested in Magee or his poem. My original reasoning for my lack of interest was that if the manufacturing of an Asian image is the point of discussion here (and that’s what I was understanding from folks’ blog comments), then I am more apt to turn my attention to Asians and Asian Americans constructing and manufacturing those images. When Asian masculinity as constructed by non-Asians arose in discussion, I turned instead to what I’d been currently watching, Akira Kurosawa’s cultural productions, and to martial arts films made by Asians and starring Asians, Kurosawa’s Stray Dog starring Toshirô Mifune and Takashi Shimura, and then later on, Ronny Yu’s Fearless starring Jet Li, respectively. That is, Asian men constructing images of Asian men. Straight forward. My old blog posts are here and here.
The second fracas Statie archived was numerous blog posts and comments in response to Juliana Spahr’s and Stephanie Young’s article, “Numbers Trouble,” in the Chicago Review. I ended up leaving a women’s poetry list serve after folks started discussing this article on the listserve and marginalized and/or compartmentalized race/ethnicity in the process. And that told me I was not needed there. I wrote my own response to the alleged reticence of women of color in poetry, and I moved on.
Anyway, I suppose have little issue with Statie’s presentation except that if she was trying to make an argument or state a thesis, I didn’t hear one. She framed this whole presentation as a bifurcated “Race and Gender” discussion, in which women of color get to fall into the cracks or not exist. She also called for bloggers to find better, more positive ways of blogging, though she offered no concrete solutions or possibilities. As well, she openly claimed not to be a blogger herself, so I wonder what is up with that prescriptive tone, from an inexperienced if not disconnected “authority.” In all, too vague to be effective.
Craig’s presentation was a revisiting of his much maligned essay on Michael Magee’s poem. Much of the criticism towards his essay involved his allegedly supporting or condoning Magee’s flarfy poetic process. But the more I think about Craig’s essay, the more I can’t understand why people can’t see it’s so critical to the point of open and incisive mockery of Magee. Craig uses Magee’s own tools to dismantle Magee.
Jasper Bernes’ presentation was really the major point of disconnect for me. His argument was that the internet has become a substitute for actual human community work, that this work has been rendered ineffectual, and that “we” need to be invested in the actual physical world instead because “we” currently aren’t. And really, as the majority of discussion time was devoted to Bernes’ presentation and argument, this made me think on all of the community work in which I have participated over the last decade, in which the internet had facilitated communication with so many other bodies and enabled all these bodies to come together in physical (i.e. non virtual) spaces. And from there, how many gatherings, events, and publications have been made possible via this mode of communication.
Shit, how many editors and educators have accessed our work via Google searches to our websites and blogs, how many readings and talks we have given as API authors and artists, as Filipino American authors and artists, as Filipina authors and artists, as authors and artists of color, in so many different kinds of venues — libraries, classrooms, community centers, theaters, cafés, art galleries, independent bookstores, SFPL, the Philippine Consulate, Eastwind Books, Arkipelago Books, Bindlestiff, KSW, Pusod, City Lights, Manilatown, SoMaArts, New Langton Arts, and I could go on and on — nationally and transnationally, how many API, Filipino, and other “minority” authored books reviewed, how many writing workshops and visits to how many classrooms full of all kinds of students, were made possible because our communities have been able to talk to one another and find out about one another’s existence via our listserves and blogs. Prior to this, opportunities to speak, perform, and publish were not so abundant to us.
I didn’t really want to participate in this discussion because it wasn’t about my communities, how we operate, how we interact as individual members of a collective. There was a general sense at this discussion that internet anonymity was a convenient way of erasing one’s identity and therefore could be a liberation of sorts. You know what though, not in my communities. We fight against erasure all the fucking time. As well, If I were to write completely erased of any ethnic or gender signifiers, then (1) I wouldn’t be writing about things that were important to me, and that would be a waste of my energy and time, and (2) the default would be white and male, and I am not down with that on any level. Lisa Robertson, one of the panel attendees, rejected that identity-lessness, saying that those identifiers were still operative in the ways in which folks interact with others, assert power over others, or feel threatened by others.
If I had said anything, I would have said that if a community has been complacent and passive pre-internet, then the internet isn’t going to miraculously change this. And that really, blaming the internet for your own community’s complacency and passivity is also a sign of complacency and passivity. Moving on here.
OK. On to part 2 of my day. I read at Eastwind Books of Berkeley yesterday afternoon for the Field of Mirrors anthology. This anthology was edited by Edwin A. Lozada, who brought in such a diverse group of so many Filipino American writers. The reading itself was so varied in terms of content and experience. This event was so much like an extended family reunion; I love it that Flips coming together is like a family party.
Always a pleasure to hear Anthem Salgado read. He’s focused on what I think is a longterm project, this series of short stories centered around his suburban upstate NY childhood and adolescence. So he’s focused on the interactions between place and the players, and what his “I” is learning in the process. I feel like his work really has some good momentum. He’s going from KSW’s IWL into VONA and I think these are some fantastic opportunities he’s taking.
Always a pleasure to hear Al Robles read. He brought up Phil Chavez to accompany him on the ukelele. Manong Al’s first piece looked like he was reading from the pages of an essay he’d published in Amerasia Journal, on who we Flip poets are, what we Flip poets do and why. “We are not solitary figures,” says Manong Al. “We cry out for social change,” he continues. The opposite of what I’d witnessed earlier that day at CCA. Manong Al invokes the names of Bill Sorro, Presco Tabios, and Norman Jayo, Flip community activists and/or poets. Poets, Manong Al says, give strength and resistance to our people, transgress traditionally imposed boundaries, and call for the enlarging of our communities to include those working for the same things we poets who are members of actual human communities work for. He invokes Wounded Knee, Agbayani Village, Manzanar, Tule Lake, and other Japanese internment camps, the I-Hotel, Manilatown as places and events that have brought us together. Bill Sorro, he describes as a whale belly of stories. Our stories and poems are for and about us “forgotten brown people,” and here I remember again what’s so important about my own poetry, why the community values it, why the community gathers together to hear it.
Always a pleasure to hear Vangie Buell read. She’s such a wonderful lady, author of Twenty-Five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride: Growing Up in a Filipino Immigrant Family. Born and raised in Oakland, the granddaughter of a Buffalo Soldier in the Philippine American War, president of FANHS East Bay Chapter, in I think her mid-late 70’s now, her life story is part of this American history of “forgotten brown people.” She talks about her childhood West Oakland home as the central place where so many Pinoy migrant workers would stay as they traveled through this place. Filipino American children and entire intact families were rare at the time, around WWII, and so she and her sister became everyone’s children.
Always a pleasure to hear Edwin Lozada read. He read one poem entitled “Cancion,” which he originally wrote in Ilocano, translated into Spanish, and then into English. He read all three versions (English last). After hearing the Ilocano and Spanish, I got the gist of the poem, tripping all the while on hearing Ilocano in a non-kitchen, non-Pulmano, literary verse context. Apart from this, Edwin told me afterwards that he sees anthology as a call to gather community.
I got to catch up with Korina Jocson, a fellow UC Berkeley Pinay from back in the day, who I see maybe twice a year. I also got to catch up briefly with Janet Stickmon, who I also see very rarely. Finally, Liz Megino was in attendance! She was the longtime advisor in the Ethnic Studies Department, who kept track of my former college drop-out ass (even before I declared my major) in an effort to eventually see me set straight. In fact, when I finally went back to school years after she retired, and when I met with Dewey (the current adviser), it was her unofficial files pulled out of storage that made it easier for him to actually help me finish college in a timely manner. Liz asked me about a few of her Ethnic Studies Pinay advisees: Allyson Tintangco-Cubales, Rhacel Parreñas, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and in many ways I feel like we were part of her something like a brood and pride. Not that she made us, but she definitely saw us grow up from undergrad wildness and militancy to where we’re at now.
Liz Megino, by the way, is also a longtime member of FANHS East Bay Chapter, who have been actively archiving all kinds of Filipino American print and audiovisual material for a very long time now in an effort against erasure, to prove our presence on the American landscape, in American history, in American letters. In fact, the Filipinos in the East Bay book, which is due out this month from Arcadia Press, and in which I am happy to be included, is a FANHS East Bay effort.
Will post pictures of the reading later.
Filipinos in the East Bay by Evangeline Canonizado Buell, Evelyn Luluquisen, Eleanor Hipol Luis
