Some Quick Thoughts On Teaching, and Writing About Teaching

It’s been nice being quiet over here.

It’s been an interesting time in my in box lately.

Paul Hoover has left a couple of comments in response to my blog post on the recent Black Dog Black Night Vietnamese poetry anthology reading at the de Young Museum, and I am glad he did. So this has got me thinking about the active effort that some American poets make to place themselves outside of their own cultural, literary, linguistic, political contexts, to attempt to participate in others’ “subaltern” contexts. This active effort contrasts theorizing about the possibility of placing the self outside of one’s own context. The challenge then, would be to disrupt the existing conventional power dynamic (First World versus Third World, privilege versus deficiency, standard versus deviance), and to understand other poets’ contexts without yielding Orientalist, fetishizing, or distanced-from-above ethnographic results in one’s own work and work ethic, and to reconsider seriously that one’s own context is not the center or standard by which all others must gauge themselves, and that these other contexts are not peripheral to one’s own.

The term, “subaltern” then, is kind of problematic for positing inferiority and other-ness.

Anyway, this isn’t even the point of my blog post.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson also writes to invite me to submit an essay on teaching and poetry to an anthology he is editing. I tell him I don’t teach full time, I am not affiliated with any academic institutions, nor am I officially affiliated with any community arts organizations, and this is OK with him. Given my non-affiliated, non-official status, and given my visiting scholar, visiting professor, visiting artist status, I think on whether my teaching values really carry weight in institutional spaces.

Anyway, my essay will center around reading poetry, discussing poetry, writing poetry with Filipino American students within Ethnic Studies spaces, within ethnic-specific writing workshops and discussion spaces. What are the specific needs and are they met here rather than in conventional and institutional spaces in which Filipino Americans find themselves to be a cultural, linguistic, political, social minority. I am interested in privileging, centralizing Filipino American spaces, literatures, and concerns in writing and discussion. I think again on the high caliber discussion of R. Zamora Linmark’s “They Like You Because You Eat Dog” at UCSB in a small group consisting of primary Filipino American students. Did they benefit from this discussion, the ethnic make-up and progressive and transnationalist political leanings of all the folks in the room, the fact that I was able to engage them on poetics, poetic line, poetic form, grammar, and other literary tools (irony, anaphora, etc.), and how these mutually inform the poem’s addressing of issues of colonial mentality and self-hatred, immigration and economic downgrading, ultimately, Filipino American immigrant communities’ concrete survivalist strategies and pragmatism.

I haven’t even begun to process everything discussed in Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s class (this massive lecture hall with over 200 students in it), but for sure, one thing I really enjoyed about visiting UCSB and talking to Celine again, after many years, was the ability to engage in detailed critical and nuanced talk about artistic process and craft, pressing political issues of ethnicity, gender, economics, war, and Filipina speakers and subjectivities. Most “ethnic” academics I know can be pretty clinical and un-nuanced in discussing artistic and creative process and how political concerns are executed in creative work.

Finally, part of me is wondering how long I will be able to do this kind of work unaffiliated. The other part of me is happy to have the freedom to do this kind of work with unaffiliated status. I think seeing Celine again has enabled me to think about institutional spaces and what I can accomplish in these spaces a little more seriously.

Still, not quitting my day job here.

Some quick thoughts on my UCSB visit: poetry workshop

The UCSB Filipino American student organization, Kapatirang Pilipino (KP), were such awesome young folks who took such good care of me. And I actually worried I wouldn’t be able to offer them anything valuable for all their time and effort. There really is only so much you can do in one hour of poetry workshop. I tend to want to give so much background that it really does take ~15 weeks to unravel everything I mean to say.

I’ve been told by some that in poetry workshops taught by poets of some level of renown, you wish for more engagement with texts rather than abundant time to free write. Anyway, I do try to have space for both. That said, I was able to discuss to some extent the music of the poetic line, and the orality of a good musical line, and how poetic form is a container for this music and a way to organize “expression” in order to commit to memory, and in order to drive the narrative forward.

And since the term, “spoken word” was coming up everywhere I was speaking at UCSB, I got to the point that I was saying to students:

That line between spoken word and poetry - erase it. It’s the same thing.

Poetry has always existed in human cultures, and its many musics are culturally and geographically specific, and based upon orality and performance. I know folks also make the distinction between orature and literature, but I am not going to make that distinction because some measure of value invariably gets attached to either term.

We discussed Nellie Wong’s pantoum, “Grandmother’s Song,” for what the progression and repetition of lines accomplishes within this metrically consistent poem. We discussed the shift from the golden pomelo days to peeling shrimp for pennies a day, working in the mud and the erosion of tradition, etc. That shift just kind of sneaks up on us, and so as readers, what do we do with this? As poets, especially poets wanting to write politically relevant work, how can we make these devices useful to us?

What I asked the students to write was based off Huu Thinh’s “Asking,” and Oscar Bermeo’s “I’m Jus Askin”; questions that they want answered, questions whose answers they haven’t been satisfied with hearing, rearticulations of these questions aimed at/indicting different parties, each question its own line. And then to go about either answering those questions, or to write lines that are reasons why they are asking those questions. Given that each of the sample poems are written from culturally, historically, geographically specific spaces, what are our specifics? I told them to throw conventional grammar to the curb and just write lines. What came out of this free write was defiant, pointed, philosophical/lofty as well as concrete and practical.

We ended with a pretty hefty conversation regarding R. Zamora Linmark’s “They Like You Because You Eat Dog,” which, even when fully aware of the poet’s use of irony, is still a tough read: worshipers of blue passports, machine gunning your own kind, unable to fill out an application form. It elicits all kinds of questions of colonial mentality, self-hatred, economic necessity, and perceived cultural and moral deficiency, given the power relationship between the “they,” those of the dominant American culture, and the “you,” the allegedly colonized Filipino. Even the sentences’ grammar places the “they” in the power position (the viewer and doer) and the “you” in the viewed, receiving position. “They like you because,” “They like you because,” over and over again is relentless, until the final line when the refrain ends and the, “when the time comes [that you are more and more like them], will they like you more?”

I asked the students what their poetic responses would be to this poem. Some possibilities they brought up: Changing the sentences’ grammar so that the “you” is no longer in the viewed, receiving position. Responding to each indictment without irony but with a pointed message of we do these things to survive and you don’t have to like me/us. In this way too, I see how “they” become “you,” and the Filipino becomes the “we/us,” taking front and center.

OK. That’s what I got for now, and I do hope that the students have gotten the message that thoughtfully composed poetry with structural integrity can be a very pointed weapon.

Internet Community Activism Pragmatism Poetics: Many Thoughts on 05/31/2008

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.

UCSB Poetry Workshop Next Week: Thinking on Poetic Line Again

I am still trying to get my mind into poetry workshop space for next week at UCSB. I have been poring over poetry books and anthologies for works to discuss and to create poems using those as models.

I have 15 students and one hour. I am thinking most of these students will be either Asian American Studies students or Filipino American student group students. I don’t know their previous exposure to American poetry. As well, it’d been mentioned early on that diversity and social relevance is an issue. It’s hard to know where to start.

So I am starting with the poetic line.

I am pretty sure I get free verse. Almost every bit of contemporary American poetry belongs under the large category of free verse, which does not mean a disregard for poetic line, but rather a reexamination of poetic line.

Rather than looking at contemporary American poetry that is a revisiting of formalism, I am looking for/at contemporary poetry with deep regard for line, for breath, time, music, and any sense of meter, by semantic units, by interesting enjambments, and working with or against conventional grammar and sentence structure. As well, I am open to considering lines and line breaks as units of space and not just units of time (though I don’t see these factors operating independently from each other).

I have come across a good chunk of poetry that I don’t know whether the poet is considering the functions of poetic line. That is, I am not reading even a break with or subversion of traditional functions of poetic line.

I am trying to remember now, how we learn to construct poetic lines, and how we learn how to make line breaks. Is this something your eyes and ears just have to know, some kind of instinct.

Finally, another consideration is the function of the poetic line in poetry that is call and response, in spaces and narratives not only involving a single poet and his/her reader, but a poet and his/her listening and participating congregation.

Anyway, some folks I am currently reading/revisiting:

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art.
• Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems. Towards the end of this collection, those truncated, sparse, short lines are so awkward, disorienting to read. I actually thought to myself when reading “An Asphodel,” “Wait a minute; is this Ginsberg or Williams I’m reading here?”
• Kamau Daáood, The Language of Saxophones. It makes sense to me that poetry written in the language of saxophones would contain substantial and clear poetic lines, even when working with dissonance and collage.
• Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. Somewhat similar to reading Daáood when considering jazz’s dissonances and collages, and just trying to figure this guy out.
• Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia, specifically Muse and Drudge, and as I’ve discussed with students in the past, its lack of conventional “sense” whose contained form enables us to access “sense” and “meaning.”
• Anne Waldman, Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays.
• Juan Felipe Herrera, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.
• R. Zamora Linmark’s “The Like You Because You Eat Dog,” and “Bino and Rowena Make A Litany To Our Lady Of The Mount,” in Rolling The R’s. This book is the bomb, a series of vignettes in prose and verse and whose collective arc is the novel’s arc. Nice.

Yes, the Beats are well represented here (as is City Lights Books). I suppose that’s an interesting conversation to be had.

Some Quick Thoughts from this Weekend’s American Literature Association Conference

There sure is a lot to say about my participation in Saturday’s panel and reading, and I am still decompressing.

It’s interesting that the Circle for Asian American Studies, in considering poets for the Marketing Asian American Literature panel chose me and Timothy Yu, given that both of us came into poetry via DIY and “avant garde” or “innovative” poetry communities. Our panel presentations had a lot of good overlap, in discussing our ambivalence towards participating in what I call the Poetic Industrial Complex, what he calls (as per Charles Bernstein) Official Verse Culture, and that we are concerned as API poets about where we fit in those worlds.

What became a point of discussion to which folks kept returning was a criticism of reliance or over-reliance as educators upon anthologies rather than on full length books including poetry collections authored by API writers. Academics were saying that there is something complacent, even lazy, about relying upon an Official Verse Culture anthology to tell us what Asian American Literature is. Anthology seems to rely upon the tropes that we are constantly criticizing, and that are constantly being reproduced by API writers. I had implied this in my presentation; if we API poets are navigating MFA programs and slush piles, what do we do in our work to make it accessible to a wider American readership? And isn’t reproducing tropes some of the strategies we’ve all seen?

Some Quick Thoughts on Considering the Poetic Line

Since I am gearing up for my UCSB talk, and particularly the poetry workshops I will be conducting, I have revisited Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art. Why this book? Well, you gotta give it to Ferlinghetti. He doesn’t hold back on his strong opinion on what poetry is, and what poetry does. Even as he claims this book not to be poetry, I actually am starting to believe it is, for his deployment of poetic line, active use of the figurative, and for evidence of duende at work here.

Here is something I have been suspecting, but unsure of how to articulate: why is it there seems to be so much poetry that really is prose broken up into lines? I can’t even call these lines here poetic lines. I read this poetry, this so-called conventional “narrative poetry,” and I am constantly asking myself, “Is this really poetry?” And “Why is this considered poetry?” Simply because it’s broken into lines? And why are they broken how/where they are? And what are the functions of these lines within this body? So this is how revisiting Ferlinghetti is helping me with this.

I have started trying to read Louise Erdrich’s Jacklight, which I came to because I’d recently read Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines. I am not sure what I was looking for in Erdrich; I’d just thought it’d be good to read more Native American women poets, particularly to see how oral tradition may figure into the work. Also, I know she is much more well-known as a novelist. Thing about Jacklight is I keep putting it back down. I keep not thinking these are poems, though they contain some poetic moments, some incantatory music. I keep thinking of these writings as notes or blueprints which have become what we find in the conventional prose that is her novels.

So this is where I am today with poetic line versus line, poem versus writing containing poetic moments.

Southeast Asian, Take 3

This morning I thought of Sarith Peou’s chapbook, Corpse Watching. I remembered what made this publication possible was first Ed Bok Lee’s poet-outreach work into the Minnesota prison system, where Peou, a survivor of Khmer Rouge genocide, has been serving time, and then Tinfish’s openness to consider such stark, graphic, relevant work. Like Linh Dinh, Sarith Peou’s work is not nostalgic and it is not beautiful. Something like Linh Dinh, there is something like a “Poetics of Disgust,” at work here, with unrestrained descriptions of corpses in the river, diseases and bodily maggot infestations in the labor camps, which I think counters popular American expectation of any Southeast Asian experience to be voiced as sentimental, and grateful to the American savior. Too many misguided American war movies, it’s also disaster porn, watching all those poor refugees bombed and razed, loaded into boats.

This morning I also thought of Bryan Thao Worra’s On the Other Side of the Eye, in which he voices critically the expectation and desire of his writing workshop colleagues to really deliver that pain of war and exile from the motherland. This too is disaster porn. All this, when post-relocating, and very matter-of-factly, Bryan, a Laotian adoptee transplanted into the Midwest, simply wants to tell us that the USA changes people.

So this is anti-nostalgia then, as I am also thinking of Katie Vang, who is a Hmong performance artist, who performed at Bryan’s book release party at The Loft back in August. The piece she did then, was spoken in a mother’s bilingual voice, and it was an angry voice, telling us a story of her family’s day in the life, dad and the kids scavenging through alleyway dumpsters for useful things which Americans have thrown out.

These are the things I am thinking are relevant to being here, and growing up here.

Blog Post #2 On Gelacio Guillermo and Eugene Gloria

This is a follow-up to my original post on Gelacio Guillermo’s response to Eugene Gloria’s poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

A fellow Filipina writer has brought up some very good points in an email discussion elsewhere, reminding me that the poem in question is an old poem, probably written in the 1990’s or so. And this is something I was just saying yesterday evening: to be fair, the poem was written a long time ago and that after reading Hoodlum Birds, I consider Eugene Gloria a virtuoso. The only reason why I am reading and responding to this older poem now is because Guillermo has just found the poem and has just written and published a response to the poem.

This fellow Filipina writer also reminds me that the poet’s audience and readership must be considered. How do Filipino American writers and other “ethnic” writers portray our cultural and historical artifacts, i.e. “foreign” words and “foreign” objects, to mainstream American literary institutions.

I am also conscious that I have asked some critical questions of a fellow Filipino American poet’s work, and that can be construed as anti-community. I certainly don’t intend this at all. I am trying to understand how we have grown or changed or evolved as a literary community.

Nick Carbó’s anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffeehouse Press, 1995) contains a rather comprehensive introduction on English language Filipino poetry (both Philippines-based and Filipino American), and he discusses nostalgia for the Philippines as a prevalent theme in contemporary Filipino poets’ works. I think the poem in question fits neatly in this category.

Still, even in poems of nostalgia, I think the question of to whom we are writing about ourselves is important. I believe that as readers, figuring out who the poetic speaker is, and who poet and the poetic speaker are addressing is important in understanding the poem. That said, I still question why the speaker in this poem is an unnamed Filipina daughter of a colonel, and why she is addressing Guillermo. I question whether her language and how she treats the historical events she cites are consistent with how a Filipino would address a fellow Filipino, how a Filipino would discuss certain Filipino issues with another Filipino.

Carbó’s introduction also discusses the politicized/activist Bay Area 1960’s-1970’s Flips scene of which, despite my post-1965 immigrant status, I think of myself as a descendant — Liwanag, Kearny Street Workshop, the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (BAPAW). He names Jaime Jacinto, Virginia Cerenio, Serafin Syquia, Jessica Hagedorn, and Al Robles as some of the key figures, who concerned themselves with grassroots, community-based workshops. Carbó states that these folks never reached any levels of national success, “however intensely felt and well-organized this assertion of Filipino writing was in the Bay Area.”

[Interesting that he includes Hagedorn in this part of the discussion, given that no other Filipino American writer's achievements equals hers.]

I bring up Carbó’s discussion of the Bay Area Flips to address the issue of poetic addressee. My longtime experiential knowledge of these Bay Area Flip poets tells me that they/we were/are addressing one another, transcribing what we otherwise always relied upon oral tradition to keep alive — old and ongoing stories of our communities and families. So then these Flips prioritized the vernacular, the local, or the locale, the farms where asparagus and broccoli were harvested, the crab fisheries of Naknek, Alaska, the Pajaro River Valley, the Richmond District, the Fillmore, SoMa.

I am wondering if in “talking to ourselves,” in using insider/familiar language/vernacular, we necessarily sacrifice “national renown” by lessening the numbers of readers who would be able to understand this language and these reference points. I am wondering then, if this is the opposite of what I read in Eugene’s poem, for in writing as the other and addressing the mainstream institution, our familiar artifacts invariably come to be handled as foreign objects, and that there is no place for familiar (never mind “intimate” at this point) language in these poems.

I refer to Carbó’s introduction, which was published in 1995, because I feel like Eugene Gloria’s poem belongs in that context. And both I see as rather outdated.

But I was mentored by Filipino poets of national, international, as well as local renown, and so I grew up in poetry not subscribing to the belief that (inter)national and local, elevated poetic diction and vernacular cannot coexist, or that they must negate one another.

Poet Laureates Again, and “Official Verse Culture”

This is the first time I am conscious of my use of the term, “Official Verse Culture,” and I am not sure I really know what it means. That said, François Luong has left this comment:

I find the Poet Laureateship very problematic in how it posits poetry. It’s also a very Anglo-Saxon thing to do (I believe early Renaissance poet John Skelton was one of the first poets to use it). So here we have a function inherited from a feudal society. The question becomes, of course, for what purpose? Because a function sponsored by a state power may be problematic, especially when said state is engaged in military activities. If anything, the laureateship might be the prime example of what Marx means when he writes of intellectuals being the producers of ideology.

The flipside of this is the figure of the poéte engagé who claims to be speaking for the masses. In doing so, I am not sure that s/he is really going against the situation. It is still a very romantic(ized) position to take, this positioning of poetry outside of a capitalistic system of exploitation. I am somewhat dubious of a self-righteous politico-moral position in regards to poetry in that it does not realize that the writing of poetry is still a form of production and therefore, maybe, still reaffirms the values of the current economic system.

To which I have responded:

François, I think you bring up very good and relevant points, in terms of manufacturers and/or producers of state sanctioned ideology. As well, I agree with you that poetry doesn’t necessarily exist outside of a/the capitalist system, that our current system of poetry reaffirms the dominant culture, even the poet who appears to represent the “masses.” Still, being poets, I think we do subscribe to the romanticism of the poet’s and artist’s symbolic importance in our society.

This is where I leave behind rational discussion and consider the artist as the “soul” of a culture. Or perhaps this is rational, and I can’t remember who said this, that the way the dominant culture regards art and artists is an indicator of the “well being” and integrity of the culture’s soul.

Ultimately I would just like some politicized multilingual visibility on a level larger than our small artist circles.

I would like to clarify my position on poets participating in the production and propagation of state sanctioned ideology, and poets existing and participating in a/the/our capitalist system: We do.

The romanticism I describe above, of poets and artists as the “soul” of a society does not preclude our participation in mainstream culture and economy, if only as consumers in our everyday lives, payers of mortgages and taxes. Our participation in this economy does not/should not negate our ability to be thinking people, critical of this economy, nor to live mindfully and to enact sustainability within it.

More pointedly, so many of us poets are invested in publication, in manuscript submissions to contests and awards (i.e. mediation and approval of/by editorial bodies). Many of us participate in the machine called the MFA, with no guarantees on our investment’s return. Many of us poets participate in this English and Western-centric system, knowledgeable and reminded constantly that we and our both radical and nuanced differences are unwelcome here. Even when we are directing our work towards independent publishers and DIY projects, we are acknowledging literary institution by positioning ourselves in relation to it. It is this totality I think of when I think of “Official Verse Culture.”

While I agree with François, I also believe that if I were to operate wholly on theory, then futility at any attempts to eschew “Official Verse Culture,” would set in, and I would do nothing. It is not even that I would take it “underground” to my “peeps”; I just wouldn’t seek publication, and more so, I wouldn’t write. And then I would have nothing to share with a community. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be a poet. I’d go live in the suburbs, drive a massive gasoline uber-consuming vehicle, and do something societally and gender respectable, like have no opinion.

So, does our nomination of Juan Felipe Herrera for California Poet Laureate mean anything within “Official Verse Culture”? I believe that it does. Similarly, [unnamed important literary person] has just told me s/he has nominated Al Robles for San Francisco Poet Laureate, and it’s clear to me this unnamed person also believes the visibility of this poet activist advocate is meaningful. It is not because we demand these figures to speak for us, but because they have enacted and continue to enact their poetics and politics. In doing so, they have provided us with very concrete blueprints for our own actions and activisms as poets with political consciousness. If we keep relying on poet activists like Herrera and Robles to be our “voice,” then we have missed the point entirely.

I am reminded of Nikki Giovanni’s recent Oakland Museum event. She read poetry and spoke much about her mother and sister, Sarah Vaughn, Rosa Parks, and what these women meant to her, to her community, to American history. During the Q&A, a young man asked her if she had any advice on how a young brother could address women’s issues and feminism not just in his poetic work, but in his life. Ms. Giovanni responded firmly: haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been talking about for the past couple of hours?

05.01.2008: New Langton Arts, SF Presences, Panel Discussion: Oral Histories of Women

Here is info on the first of two events I will be participating in this evening at New Langton Arts:

Panel Discussion
Artists Amanda Eicher, Jennifer Wofford, and Barbara Jane Reyes in conversation with project participants.
Thursday 01 May 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008, 7-9 pm Free

Presences is a community project and a collaboration between artist Amanda Eicher and New Langton Arts. With the goal of opening the gallery to include the community around it, a series of oral history workshops and a panel discussion will draw attention to women’s presences in the diverse South of Market community.

Tied to Langton’s recent feminist art exhibition Small Things End, Great Things Endure, and Book It! (a one-day alternative publishing fair), the project seeks to extend the feminist inquiry of the gallery into the streets, asking women to share their stories of home, self, migration, and survival in conversation with one another, in workshops, and during street interviews. Participants learn oral history interview techniques by interviewing each other and neighborhood residents to unearth women’s presences and experiences that shape the community around New Langton Arts. The resulting interviews and materials will be collected into a chapbook, to be released Thursday, May 1, as a part of the panel discussion.

Presences takes its shape from the participation of artists, community members, and most of all women in the South of Market neighborhood; it is also supported by the engagement and effort of Bayanihan Cultural Center, Manilatown I-Hotel, The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, Bindlestiff Studio, Jennifer Wofford, Barbara Jane Reyes, Ana Hortillosa, Chelsea Heikes, and students at USF and SFSU.

Philippines-based and Filipino American Poetry: A Brain Dump

I was recently contacted by a Filipino American UC Berkeley undergraduate who was looking for information on Philippines-based Filipino poetry, and he came to me as he perceived me as some kind of authority on the subject.

I’d originally agreed to meet with him and brain dump on him. But then something in his email made me think again. He asked me for some recommendations on Philippine poetic traditions, and mentioned that in this area, he was reading the anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue, edited by Nick Carbó. I thought, curious, this anthology as the student’s primary resource on Philippine poetry traditions.

Quickie Reading Updates: Linda Hogan, Yoko Ono

Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines is another one of those books that I am surprised I have only just read. I actually finished reading it last week so right now I have no specific details to offer here, but that during my reading of it, I kept contrasting Hogan’s poetics and/or craft to Joy Harjo’s. I suppose as they are both Native American women authors, the comparison is bound to happen? Anyway, what I love about Hogan is that her wording feels upon first read very plain spoken (almost like a coaxing to not be afraid of this language, a reassurance that you reader can access this), but that I see that she really does employ a figurative poetic register, or mythical (mythological) register and litany like repetition. Much like a lot of old story from the mouths of elders, there are all these unexpected turns in the narrative and language. So she never gets to overstating the importance of the story, which is something that has disappointed if not annoyed me about Harjo’s writing in two of the three books of hers I have read, namely She Had Some Horses and A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales.

Blog Poetics: Revisiting Old Drafts and Process Talk

The thing about moving blog-city blog posts to blogger is that there is no 1:1 blog dump, as between blogger and wordpress. My blog-city backup comes in the form of an html file per month, and if I want to move these over to blogger, then I have to copy and paste each individual post. It’s tedious, and I’d thought of just leaving the old posts in some dark corner of my hard drive, but I am finding a lot of what I think is interesting stuff in my blog-city archives.

In February 2004, I was writing Poeta en San Francisco, doing all that cutting up and remixing of the travel guide, a book (compendium) of angels, The Book of Revelations, Apocalypse Now. I thought a lot about archangels. Every day brought a number of new experiments, drafts, revisions, textual and musical additions to the recipe, another layer or language of city and its citizens.

In February 2004, I was also taking a grad seminar on feminist literature, rereading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” which got me thinking again of a woman’s circumscribed place, and the social and political consequences of transgressing these spaces.

In February 2004, Lenten e-discussions of Mel Gibson’s highly flawed The Passion of Christ got me thinking again on literal and figurative readings of the New Testament, and such phenomena as Philippine Good Friday crucifixions, the issues of faith and political protest involved in these international spectacles.

None of the above is meant to be revelatory or fetishizing of the experience of writing the book, as much as it is a revisiting of the work of writing the book. This is important to me right now, or maybe this is always important to me, because sometimes I wonder how many more books I am capable of writing. This is all very terribly self-conscious of me, and maybe I get to thinking this way when I am in between projects and not in super crazy speed freak prolific writing mode. Finally, I’d been wondering whether blogging is currently useful to me for writing poetry in the way that it used to be.

Poetics, Horticulture, and Being Environmentalists in West Oakland

Here’s a cliché for you: Think global, act local.

I am wondering who concretely does this, or at least makes effort to do this.

I have been thinking about the cliché, in light of the recent discussions on the civilizing missions elsewhere in the world not our backyards attitudes in American poetry, and its love and fetishizing of the exotic, quaint customs of the primitive third world brown people elsewhere never here. I believe this love for the exotic, quaint customs of the primitive third world brown people elsewhere never here stems from the dominant culture’s boredom and discontentment of its own cultural capital, and from a refusal to look at what happens in American cities, which isn’t all affluence, comfort, progress, and enlightenment, as much as it is corporate dependence, environmental non-sustainability, wastefulness, poverty, acts of directed violence, and terrifying homicide rates.

You know what else? I am tired of other people. I am tired of other people’s baggage. I am tired of talking about other people, and writing criticism about other people’s problematic work. Lord knows they don’t give a shit about me and what I think.

Poem: Jaime Jacinto, World’s Fair, St. Louis, 1904

Ernesto Priego has left a good comment to my “I white center versus black brown other existing marginally and only in relation to that I white center” poetry post here. Craig Santos Perez and Paolo Javier have very thoughtful blog posts as well.

In the meantime, responding to Ernesto’s comment, “I think that a tangential approach that advocates a different understanding of poetics is really important,” I would like to call your attention to Jaime Jacinto’s poem, which I have included in OCHO #16.

“…sondern bloß zu zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist…”

“…nicht das Amt die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, sondern bloß zu zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.” — Leopold von Ranke.

“…not the duty to judge the past, nor to instruct one’s contemporaries with an eye to the future, but rather merely to show how it actually was.”

That said, have a read of this perfect Shakespearean sonnet (then again, maybe not so “perfect,” since my scansion of it tells me it isn’t completely iambic, but y’all get the point I hope):

Agamemnon Before Troy
by John Frederick Nims

Er will bloss zeigen, wie es
eigentlich gewesen ist*—Ranke

A-traipsin’ from a shindig, I unsaddles—
Three floozies an’ a blatherin’ buckaroo
Wangled the whole caboodle, and skedaddles.
You in cahoots with thet shebang, skidoo!—
Seein’ if yer the critters I suspecion,
You varmints ain’t a-goin’ to hotfoot far.
Sartin galoots is sp’ilin’ for conniptions—
Wal, they’s a posse hustlin’ here an’ thar

Fixin’ to put to the kibosh on the shenanigans
By landin’ scalawags in the calaboose.
Hornswoggled! sich palaver with bamboozlin’
Coyotes gits my dander up! Vamoose
Totin’ spondulicks an’ the cutie too!
They’re itchin’ fer a whangdang howdy-do!

*He merely wants to point out how it actually happened.

white man’s burden: what is troubling in american poetry, and do i dare disturb the universe

This book was recently brought to my attention by a colleague, who was at a loss as to how to respond to it. And now that my colleague has brought this book to my attention, I am now at a loss as to how to respond to it, and its larger implications. These larger implications include the position of Americans and American poets in relation to the “other,” or what has been historically delineated as “other,” who are of elsewhere, never here, and who are aberrant of the norm, never the norm itself.

My disclaimer is that I have not read this book, and while I would be interested in reviewing it, I also do not want my money to support it, and the exoticizing lens through which the poet/speaker views the third world primitives which serve the purpose as backdrop, as scenery for the I and the “elevation” of this missionary work in which the speaker has come of age.

This narrative is a part of the family of the imperialist writings of Theodore Roosevelt, and Frederick Jackson Turner, and the formation of the American Man through the taming and civilizing of the Wild and Dark (pigmented skin, unenlightened), childlike superstitious Other.

What is obviously troubling to me is this I white center versus black brown other existing marginally and only in relation to that I white center pervasive cosmology’s refusal to die out and become irrelevant, or pointedly criticized by American literary institutions.

The above poetics is and has been for many years now my anti-poetics, and we see how it is being constantly affirmed and reaffirmed, via the prestigious award bestowed upon it, and via its publication by a major publishing house.

I am also hyper aware that my position here, the above as my anti-poetics, is unpopular. I tend to believe that too many of us in practice subscribe and abide by and give power in so many ways to the above institution and accept our place on the margins. Few of us want to disturb the way things are. I feel like my being vocal of systemic, historical, and institutional practices meant to maintain our marginalization makes other writers and academics distance themselves from me instead.

I am also pretty certain that the more attention I pay this type of missionary work, the more power I am giving it. I would like to know what are effective strategies to ensure, to hasten its disappearance. Do we just ignore it and hope it eventually dies of neglect?

In the meantime, let me end with a poem here, Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.”

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden,
And reap his old reward–
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden!
Have done with childish days–
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

Good Poetry Discussions Yesterday at Los Medanos College

Whew! Many thanks to Professor Maria Tuttle for inviting me to read and speak, and for some wonderful curating and discussion; a lot of hefty, enthusiastic, and critical exchange went down yesterday afternoon at Los Medanos College with two rounds of students, in addition to some very good interview questions with a student writing for the campus newspaper.

I wish I could remember everyone’s names, but honestly, I am a little bit ablur. After reading sections of Poeta en San Francisco, Maria conducted a Q&A interview with me, in which we were able to discuss so many good things about poetic form and page (and here I was able to talk about reading Catalina Cariaga’s Cultural Evidence, and what what she conveys in her poems not just in her use of words, but definitely in placement of words on the page), language and the writing/composition of multilingual poetry, translation, the specifics of particular excerpts of Poeta: the “dear love” letters, the dictionary definition of “new,” my use of baybayin (speaking of cultural evidence).

We talked about Diwata as my post-Poeta project, in which I am concerned with story and storytellers, where story comes from, who and what are our muses. I told them that one of the most devastating things about my elders (my Papa and my Tita Alice) passing away relatively recently was that everything they knew is now gone. But then is it gone if they’ve passed it on to us. I told them that my Papa always did take my being a writer very seriously; he gave me so many stories, showed me so many old pictures. He knew how much his memory contained, and he knew it was very important to pass it on.

Where I’m at Today with Poetry.

I did mean to say more about Luis J. Rodriguez’s reading and talk, didn’t I. So here’s this: I’d just been thinking about folks’ various discontentments at being a part of the poetry industrial complex. We express our discontentments in various levels of nebulousness, which I don’t think is so constructive, because then how are we really to know what it is that’s bringing about the discontentment. I bring this up now because I remember again, after being in Rodriguez’s presence why it is I actually believe in poetry, literature, and the community/ies it makes possible.

I say these things oftentimes confounded and frustrated by the state of poetry communities around me, but then as Rodriguez discussed this past week, there is his conflict with community, in deciding what things must be told, what stories are too sacred to tell, what stories, if told would have palpable negative consequences. He resides in this place of conflict, and this is where his poems and stories are birthed, in the creative tellings of what is sacred, sensitive, secret, blasphemous, transgressive. Poetry, he reminds us, which is meant to be read and heard many times, is a special intense language, a very important way of using language. I wonder why it is we need to be reminded of this, though I know we do.

So that W.H. Auden poem I’ve been seeing a lot lately, excerpted as thus: “For poetry makes nothing happen…” I find this interpretation of the excerpt(ed line) satisfying: “The closing section agrees that poetry has no power to enforce, but claims it has far greater powers to heal, soothe, teach, liberate, and triumph.” I think this is what I meant when I wrote that we came out of Rodriguez’s talk enriched, and better people. This is what he gives his readers and audience, tools to teach, to liberate. He himself finds liberation in the word, its writing and its dissemination, his ability to connect with so many people.

I think of what potentially demoralizing things happen within the poetry industrial complex: rejection letters, rejection letters, rejection letters. Certainly having a file of rejection letters indicates that we are actually sending our stuff out there, risk-taking, believing in the quality of our work. This is the most centrally important thing, and so regarding all the haters and whatever: Fuck ‘em. And they fall away.

Despite what is potentially demoralizing is the fact that I have gained a platform, a podium, the microphone, a couple of books, additional publication in various venues, an audience, a readership, a voice that is heard, words that are read and discussed and argued over and about. Many of us have some of these things, or some of us have many of these things. And we are fortunate for this.

Good day. Zero Hate.

Belated reading post: On Javier O. Huerta, on translation, on the task of the translator

Oscar has said much good stuff about Javier O. Huerta’s recent reading at UC Berkeley. What I am thinking about is bilingual poetry, and that bilingualism does not come with an on-off switch, nor is translation a neat 1:1.

Some back story first: I find I am generally surrounded by so many “translators” of poetry into English from languages that the translators themselves don’t speak. I have always been perplexed about this; simply put, I wonder how it is done, translating when you don’t even know, live, function within the language you are translating. Even after I have studied translation of poetry as rigorous craft, that “translation” can be defined and interpreted in ways that do not entail any kind of faithfulness to the original text, I still wonder how it’s done. And why it’s done. And isn’t there someone more well-equipped to do so. It seems that what seems to take precedence is the translator himself, the filter function he takes upon himself, the bringer of the Word to his constituents.