Back from New York and a Partial Inventory of Food

After enduring a canceled flight, an entire JFK airport ground stop, and our longest flight delay ever (seven hours in an airport terminal), we are home and I don’t know how Oscar managed to get himself to work. Last I checked, we got home at six o’clock this morning.

Not here to dwell though.

We flew into NY on Friday morning, checked our bags at our posh little place on W56th and 7th Ave. (down the block from Carnegie Hall; we can thank my parents for the hook up here), and headed to the Brooklyn Museum for the © MURAKAMI exhibit. There’s Oscar saying hello to a gargantuan Tongari-Kun, aka Mr. Pointy:

So this exhibit is dense and totally crazy, and it was helpful to have first walked through the Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900 exhibit so we could get some perspective on Murakami’s influences and concerns with composition and theme, which we see in the Superflat of his pop art, and because Hokusai is not a part of the School of Utagawa, think instead of Hiroshige’s waves resonating in Murakami’s fields of flowers with faces, his spirals of flowering vines, his Milk (pink canvas accompanying Hiropon), Cream (blue canvas accompanying My Lonesome Cowboy). Think of their compositions and studies of perspective when thinking of Superflat, and also think of their explicit erotic art. Ultimately what it appears Murakami aims to do, while drawing upon those classical influences, is to not merely blur but eradicate the line between high art, pop art, pornographic art, and also commercial art to the point of hardcore commercialism.

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.

Linda Hogan at Stanford: Indigenous Identity in Diaspora

Oscar has a write-up on Linda Hogan’s reading and talk yesterday evening at Stanford in the Feminist Studies Program’s Indigenous Identity in Diaspora. He brings up a very good point about Ms. Hogan’s use of “human,” and I should add that it seems qualifying “human” for her poetic speakers and voices indicates that her speakers know the entire world is alive, every rock, every grouping or family of aspen trees such that if you cut down one tree, the rest will die. The actors and active agents in her work are not only humans, but the earth itself, the healing clay, and deities that are animal spirits, such that to use “human” is necessary for clarification.

True, we don’t qualify ourselves as humans enough in our poetry; this means we take our humanity as a given, and I think this is a marker of privilege, not to think our humanity can be contested. Certainly, as a Filipino I don’t have to reach back too far into American history to cite specific examples of our humanity contested, erased. So then I wonder now whether I ought to be writing humanity with more urgency and certainty. Or maybe I already have been.

Ms. Hogan spoke of a returning of a diasporic community, many of her Chickasaw community’s and her own personal return to their land and traditions, from elsewhere throughout the country. She is now back in Oklahoma, back in a place where the earth smells like it does no where else. Seven Sisters is the street named after her grandmother and sisters; she is meeting cousins she’s only just now discovered. Here again is this belonging to the land, replanting one’s roots in the recultivated land. So there she is, back in Tishomingo, participating with the tribal body in building a school and affordable housing. I think we can also think of her poetic use of “human” through her community work.

Further in terms of writing process, and given that she is a multi-genre writer, Cherrie Moraga asked her how and when she decides in which genre to write, and is it based upon subject matter or otherwise. Ms. Hogan responded that genre chooses you. Poetry is weaving, and in poetry, use of language is so condensed or concentrated, and you can communicate so much in such a small amount of space. Her poetry is contained by a sense of incantation of word, an echo of so many world mythologies in which the world was spoken or dreamed into existence. Alternately, the novel, she says, is linear, and you can provide a larger space for a narrative to gradually unravel. She didn’t differentiate between novel and non-fiction, but did say a few things about her memoir, in which she decided to pan out from the strictly individual/personal and instead, compose a frame of her community’s natural and historical world. Regarding being “human,” I don’t think she means it in an individual sense.

I could’ve listened to her talk all night. She had so much story, which she rolled through, weaving tangents into tangents into a large cohesive cloth. At one point, she apologized for getting carried away with some backstory on her research on environmental contamination in Florida, the poisoned alligators, birds, panthers in the Everglades. She had begun by telling us a story of a native man who killed a Florida panther, thinking perhaps by its eyeshine at night, that it was a deer. He then barbecued it and ate it (why waste a perfectly good animal, I think), and then was arrested for poaching an endangered species. This is where talk of contamination came in, as to why the panthers were no longer reproducing.

Well, I could go on, but will end with this: having major publishers in New York, Ms. Hogan tells us, can be challenging. She’s told her publishers that she wanted cover art by Native American artists, to which publishers have responded: there are no Native American artists. In her place, I’d probably throw a chair, so I admire that she works so steadily and prolifically through American publishing industry bullshit, prioritizing her Chickasaw community’s needs, talking to students, and opening herself up to young writers like us. I will be sending her a copy of Poeta, and I am overjoyed that she’s interested in reading my work.

Addendum: I just remembered now, another poem Ms. Hogan read was about a move back to the use of canoes or kayaks made with animal skins stretched around skeletons of the willow tree. The boat or craft itself is alive; it breathes. These animal skin boats are more easily navigable than the modern fiberglass counterparts, and so the boatmakers are relearning this old craft that they’d previously set aside (for various reasons). This is also a part of the returning to the indigenous in the modern world.

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.

A May Day Event: STRIKE: Igniting the Fuse of Possibility

First, here’s the link to info on the first of two events I will be reading at tomorrow evening.

I am just finishing up writing my piece for tomorrow’s second event in which I will be reading:

A City Lights May Day event @ First Unitarian Universalist Church 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, San Francisco, CA

Doors open 7 pm; performance begins 7:30 pm
Admission: $12.00 @ door (no one turned away due to lack of funds)

Join City Lights and friends for an evening of narratives that cut through the core of the neo-liberal agenda

30 local poets, performers, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians deliver 3 minute pieces offering imaginative responses to the hunger of global capital and its effects upon community.

STRIKE addresses strategies of resistance. We pose the question: what serves as meaningful resistance in an age of disaster capitalism? We shall explore the liberation of the commons- through poetry, performance, music, and magic.

Participants:
Charlie Anders
Maxine Chernoff
Justin Chin
Diane di Prima
Camille Dungy
Ananda Esteva
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Lisa Gray-Garcia
Jack Hirschman
Paul Hoover
Kevin Killian
Joseph Lease
Jon Longhi
Michael McClure
Cameron McHenry
Annalee Newitz
Barbara Jane Reyes
Al Robles
Leslie Scalapino
Matthew Shenoda
Bucky Sinister
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Amber Tamblyn
James Tracy
Roberto Vargas
Youth Speaks
more to come.

Oakland Museum of California 04.24.08: Nikki Giovanni

Current State: Tired, but not Poetically

Yeah I am hella tired, so this is why I haven’t been able to write up a proper UCSC reading blog post. There are indeed many good things worth saying about this event so I will do this soon.

Here is where it gets crazy.

4.25.08 Friday is the Achiote Press reading and release party at UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Library (info here).

05.01.08 Thursday I think I will be doing two readings, both in the evening, both in San Francisco. There is, of course, Strike: Igniting the Fuse of Possibility, organized by Peter Maravelis. Then, there is New Langton Arts’ Presences, organized by Amanda Teicher. I don’t know yet how to do this, how to do these both, but I think it can be done.

05.16.08 Friday is UC Berkeley’s Southeast Asian Studies Commencement and I have a keynote speech to write.

05.22.08 Thursday to 05.25.08 Sunday is the American Literature Association Conference in SF, where I will be speaking on a Circle for Asian American Literary Studies panel with Stephen Sohn, Michelle Rhee and others on marketing Asian American Literature, and participating in a reading with Helen Zia and Shawn Wong.

05.31.08 Saturday is the Field of Mirrors anthology reading at Eastwind Books of Berkeley. It’s always a pleasure to read in this space.

So after doing all of these things, I would like to chill all summer, hike, cook, read, kayak (thinking of buying an inflatable two-seater kayak; it’s actually relatively affordable). Oh, and yeah, write poems. I think I can do this. Right now, I’m tired, and a little overwhelmed.

Cherry: Chapbook Coming Soon

Many thanks to Brenda Iijima of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, for Cherry is coming soon! Here is info on an upcoming book party (from the Cuneiform Press blog here):

United Artists, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs,
Granary, Roof, Cuneiform, Bootstrap, The Figures & Ugly Duckling
INVITE YOU TO A SMALL PRESS PARTY
May 15, 2008
Max Protetch Gallery
511 W. 22nd, NYC
6-8 PM

Come celebrate the publication of the following books:

Phyllis Wat, The Influence of Paintings Hung in Bedrooms
Barbara Henning, My Autobiography
Gloria Frym, Solution Simulacra
Reed Bye, Join the Planets
Barbara Jane Reyes, Cherry
Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Mental Commitment Robots
Julie Patton, Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake

Jennifer Firestone, Waves
Geoffrey Young, The Riot Act & Pockets of Wheat
Catullus, The Complete Poems (trans. Ryan Gallagher)
John Wieners, A Book of Prophecies
Tom Morgan, On Going
Jen Bervin, The Desert
Lewis Warsh, Inseparable : Poems 1995-2005

Francesco Clemente & Vincent Katz, Alcuni Telefonini
Clark Coolidge, Space & The Book of During
Bill Berkson, Sudden Address
Ted Greenwald, Two Wrongs
Dan Featherston, The Clock Maker’s Memoir
Mimeo Mimeo, edited by Jed Birmingham & Kyle Schlesinger
Nada Gordon, Folly

The Consequence of Innovation: 21st. C. Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin
Marc Nasdor, Sonnetailia
Gary Sullivan, PPL in a Depot
Christine Hume, Lullaby
Sam Truitt, Vertical Elegies
Jack Micheline, One of a Kind
Aleksandr Skidan, Red Shifting

Poetry Readings: Update, Hittin the UC’s

I will be reading with Shirley Ancheta and Jeff Tagami this evening at UC Santa Cruz (event info here), and despite my being currently flu-ish and medicated, I can’t wait.

In the meantime, here is info for next week’s Achiote Press reading at the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library:

Achiote Press will celebrate the release of our Spring issues with a party on Friday, April 25th at the Ethnic Studies Library on the UC Berkeley campus. The event will feature special readings by former Achiote contributors Barbara Jane Reyes (Poeta en San Francisco) Truong Tran (Within The Margin), and Oscar Bermeo (Anywhere Avenue). Maria Tuttle will read from her new Achiote chapbook, Saramé. This chapbook contains an excerpt from Tuttle’s historical novel about the life of a woman in El Paso, Texas during the early 20th century. Gabriela Erandi Rico will read from her contributions to the new Achiote Seeds chapjournal. Javier Huerta, author of Some Clarifications y otras poemas, will perform selections from the other contributors to the journal: Cristina García, Emmy Pérez and Brenda Cárdenas. Poet Oscar Bermeo will emcee the night.

We’ll have food, drinks and music. The event is free, open to the public and we welcome families and children.

When: Friday, April 25th: 6pm–8pm
Where: Ethnic Studies Library, Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley Campus
(see a campus map here: http://www.berkeley.edu/map/)

Sponsored by the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, Asian American Studies Program, and Chicano Studies Program.

Manuscript Progress Report and some quick words on the In the Grove Fresno reading

Just plugging away over here at the manuscript submissions/querying publishers thing. Here’s what I received in the mail the other day from [unnamed publisher]:

Dear Barbara,

Thank you for sending us a sample of your manuscript, Diwata. We enjoyed reading it. “A Genesis of We, Cleaved,” and The Bamboo’s Insomnia,” particularly stood out to us.

While we can’t promise anything, if the manuscript is still available we would be interested in taking a look at it.

We look forward to hearing from you.

So there is that.

* * *

In the meantime, allow me to call your attention to some blog posts of the recent In the Grove Andrés Montoya issue release party in Fresno (what up Fresno!): Craig Santos Perez, Oscar Bermeo, Lee Herrick. As well, I will add that I was quite moved by the family and extended family spirit in the room, all in honor of Montoya, his work, his character, his legacy. I love it when poetry is like this. I love it when poets and poetry means so much, cultivating communities, sprouting, shooting, branching, blossoming, bearing fruit.

Indeed, it was a pleasure to catch up with Lee — and much props to him for such a successful event and great publication, to road trip with Craig, Oscar, and Javier (the mens!!) while discussing poetics and chisme, to meet Daniel and Sasha Pimentel Chacón, to hear so much lovely poetry and storytelling. Off the top of my head, I am thinking of the words of Corrinne Clegg Hales, David Dominguez, Manuel Paul Lopez, Philip Levine, Kenneth Chacón, Maceo Montoya, Malaquias Montoya, again, in honor of Andrés and because of him, and how this is a welcome reminder of what matters in poetry/why poetry matters.

While in the end it is the words on the page composed and crafted into the poem, it is the life of the poet, and why the poet writes, what about the world makes the poet write as s/he has no choice but to write, what makes a poet seethe and jump out of his/her skin if s/he doesn’t commit the words to the page.

Let me also leave you with this picture of the mens:

The Mens: Javier O. Huerta, Craig Santos Perez, Daniel Chacón, Oscar Bermeo, and Lee Herrick.

Poetry Reading: Black Dog Black Night Anthology of Vietnamese Poetry at the de Young Museum

As Craig has already mentioned, he, Oscar, and I went to the de Young Museum this past Friday for the poetry reading for the anthology Black Dog, Black Night, edited by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover. Nguyen Do read, as did Truong Tran and Hoa Nguyen, and then Hoover spoke at some length regarding state suppression of poetry in modern day Vietnam.

I wanted to say a couple of things about Hoa Nguyen’s work and reading, and what I enjoyed about both the work and her reading of it. I see her speaker in a home that is open space, and she is centrally positioned partway between the kitchen, the television set, and the garden. Her two little boys are moving the way children move through this open space, discovering something in the garden and articulating to each other and to her these new discoveries. She is also thinking about the garden, what will come to bloom and when. CNN is telling her something about war, something about “disaster capitalism,” what chemicals are found in our water supply. She is meditating on groceries, the hemp hat she has just worn to the market, what she has purchased at the market, and what she will prepare for dinner. She is remembering some image from a dream, and what this image means is not fully formed, but it is visually memorable enough to make her revisit it in the middle of her day. As she shifts her attention, or as her attention is shifted by all of the above, television sound bites, children’s voices, the language of her poems changes, and it does so numerous times. As Hoa Nguyen reads, we hear her shifts in register, bits of abrupt stop and go, disrupted syntax oftentimes disrupted mid-thought. Throughout the poem’s constant shifting, her pace and her tone are steady. She is calm, and her poetic demeanor is calm; this disruption simply is.

So that is what I wanted to say about Hoa Nguyen.

Regarding Paul Hoover’s few words about the state of Vietnamese (not Vietnamese American) poetry, he told us that we would be surprised to know that not all Vietnamese poetry is sentimental and the stuff of folksong. He told us that even the Vietnamese engage in post-modernist inquiry and interrogations of language. I have been wondering why we would be surprised by this, poets interrogating their traditions, conventions, and languages. I realize now after reading the blurb in an email announcement on the Buffalo Poetics list serve, this is because of the Vietnamese government’s efforts to render the poetry benign, politically non-threatening, by relegating it to the sentimental and the folksong. Hoover told us also that we would be surprised to know that in Vietnam, the people respect, revere their poets; in America we do not. In Vietnam, he told us, there are poets who are cultural heroes, and in America, not so much.

But I believe: not in my community. Many of us look to our poets for voice and representation, for visibility; we are interested in the soul feeding they provide us. We pride ourselves on the achievements of our poets. We have made “rock stars,” “cultural heroes,” and institutions of our poets, as evidenced here, here, here, and here. And while nonreciprocal exchange typically happens between community and poets, much of this heroizing I see is a result of how we see their work benefiting and affirming community.

STRIKE: Igniting the Fuse of Possibility

Thanks to City Lights Books’ tireless Peter Maravelis, for inviting me to be a part of this May 1st event, called STRIKE: Igniting the Fuse of Possibility. The blurb from the website reads:

Join City Lights and friends for an evening of narratives that cut through the core of the neo-liberal agenda

30 local poets, performers, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians deliver 3 minute pieces offering imaginative responses to the hunger of global capital and its effects upon community

STRIKE addresses strategies of resistance. We pose the question: what serves as meaningful resistance in an age of disaster capitalism? We shall explore the liberation of the commons- through poetry, performance, music, and magic.

Peter and I spoke about this yesterday evening, and since then I have been thinking about what “meaningful resistance” means. I am thinking about this within the context of being a resident and homeowner in West Oakland. I am thinking about this within the context of sustainability; things we do in our everyday lives, in our homes, in our families, in our neighborhoods and communities. I am looking forward to this piece of mine which I haven’t written yet. Funny thing is I don’t think I will be writing poetry for this event.

UC Santa Cruz Poetry Series: Filipino American Poets!!

UC Santa Cruz

POETRY SERIES
Humanities Lecture Hall
7:30 PM

April 9

Al Robles
Tony Robles
Jaime Jacinto

April 16

Shirley Ancheta
Jeff Tagami
Barbara Jane Reyes

Poetry Weekend: Bits on Linh Dinh at the Holloway Poetry Series, UC Berkeley 03/21/2008

This is by no means comprehensive. Here are some quick thoughts.

Last weekend was indeed another poetry weekend for us, with Linh Dinh in town for a quick visit. I am happy to have heard him read from Blood and Soap, which I have blogged about before. Blood and Soap is marketed as a collection of short fiction, though I still think of it as a volume of prose poems. Actually, I think about this collection being discussed as “fables,” though “the moral of the story” kind of easy pay off doesn’t happen so easily, and I think this is due to what I believe I have previously called Linh’s strategic omissions. Some of my older thoughts on Linh Dinh can be found here.

As a reader, Linh I believe is effective in really getting his audience to want more, and I believe this has to do with his strategic omissions, as well as his unabashed disregard of internal social decorum; here is another previous blog post on Linh and Borderless Bodies. We are left to fill in the blanks in his troubling scenarios, and so we have to decide whether we abide by the same perversities he’s set up for us. Also regarding this “getting his audience to want more,” is the fact that his work is really very funny when he is performing or presenting it to an audience. I am not sure if this is due to his almost deadpan, deliberately flat delivery style while saying very perverse or strange things, or if it’s that the work itself is really very batty independent of his delivery.

On translation, as he was reading from Jam Alerts, in one of his poems he discussed aspiring to say the thing in squirrel, underscoring what is problematic about some translators of literature/poetry — what do translators misunderstand, disregard, dismiss, due to their lack of direct life experience in the culture and language in question. What do they not admit they do not get? What happens when they don’t get it, and they don’t admit it? As well, this saying the thing in squirrel makes me think of my ongoing suspicion of translators who translate literature in so many different languages into English, and the languages of others as objects and commodities that can be acquired.

Oscar and I have this joke that [unnamed translator] can recite the poem in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Mesomerican clicks and whistles, and of course, the original Martian. And isn’t Poetry in a better, a higher place because of this.

“Excuse me sir, but I speak Jive.”

KQED Arts and Culture Blog: Review of Literary Death Match

In case you are wondering how the Literary Death Match ever turned out, you can read a review over at KQED arts and culture blog, posted by Toby Warner here, and in which you may also read my six-word memoir (Debbie! You’d tagged me and I suck at meme!):

Some people say I eat dog.

People say you eat dog? Consider yourself tagged.

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.

Portrait #2: Luis J. Rodriguez, Poet Activist Role Model

Blog post is forthcoming, but here is a picture for now, and a quick few words: it’s rare that I come out of a literary reading feeling enriched, but this is what went down yesterday evening at Luis J. Rodriguez’s reading and talk at the SF Mission Branch Public Library, in a room full of young folk, teachers, parents and children, community activists, and presumably other writers as well. We were enriched. We came out of there, better people for it. And this is the power of Word in the hands of one who believes it matters.

Quick thoughts on Work and Visibility : This Past Weekend’s raúlrsalinas Memorial Poetry Event

So many wonderful stories shared yesterday evening about raúlrsalinas at Galería de la Raza. I could say much about the memorial event, but for now, let me just say how not only was I struck by how much of a life and artistic influence he was to so many Chicano poets and artists, but I got to thinking again about the concrete work of asserting and maintaining community visibility.

I am thinking of the artist/muralist who spoke and whose name I don’t remember; she wanted to make sure folks all remembered that the work of ensuring visibility which raúlrsalinas did included his indie bookstore Resistencia, and his indie publisher/small press Red Salmon Arts. As well, in the 70’s-80’s, he was a part of the Editorial Pocho Ché Collective; a group of Chicano poets who published their constituents’ books. I believe he has provided a clear blueprint for his “poet children” of how to continue working.

In terms of the work of being an elder, what values and corresponding practices an elder imparts upon his “poet children,” and “poet family,” I am thinking of Nina Serrano, who read raúlrsalinas‘ poem, “El Tecato Side 2,” and shared with us that she learned compassion from Salinas’ non-judgment of folk whom we’ve learned to look down upon, as in this poem, which she told us she used to dislike for that openness, the drug addict who understands his addiction, his need for a fix, as the same as his children’s need for food and nourishment. That others didn’t understand was something of a mystery to him.

This is just a smidgen of what went down yesterday evening, which also included Ms. Lorna Dee Cervantes performing the hell out of raúlrsalinas’ seminal “Un Trip through the Mind Jail,” included in the book of the same name, which Alejandro Murguía likened to Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I imagine that performing this poem must be a great honor.

More Poetry Thoughts for the Day

Patrick Rosal has a wonderful post on joy and poetry, specifically the joy which poets bring to audiences at readings and/or performances, and the joy which poets feel to connect with audiences, that this connection is most apparent in an audience’s visceral responses to a poet’s words or combination of words, to interesting, unexpected lines or images.

I tend to think it’s a very fortunate thing I did not come up in the poetry world in an institution whose constituents are bled of their joy as they are trained to exhibit a “cool” pretentious intellectual distance as a poet from an audience, or as an audience member from the poet sharing her words with a room full of interested or even just curious audience members.

Gigs and Invitations: How to get me to say yes.

Here’s the thing. I’ve recently been invited to speak at a couple of different places; I’ve accepted one invitation and I’ve turned down the other. On the positive tip, the invitation I’ve accepted is to speak at UCSB in an Asian American Studies class, in which 200+ students are anticipated to enroll for Spring Quarter. They will be required to read my book. 200+ guaranteed booksales in one pop is always a strong determining factor for my accepting an invitation.

The professor has invited me to either guest lecture or participate in an interview or dialogue with her during lecture. She has also invited me to participate in more informal discussions with professors and students in smaller settings. She’s also made sure to tell me they would be covering my travel and accommodations, as well as offering me an honorarium. These are also strong determining factors. Time off work and travel are expensive. And all this guest lecturing in academic institutions is Work.