Reading Update: U Sam Oeur’s Sacred Vows

Sacred Vows by U Sam Oeur

This is a pretty hard read so far, given its subject matter of surviving the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. My basis for comparison is Sarith Peou’s Corpse Watching (Tinfish Press), and his unabashed depictions of horror from beginning to end with little to no reprieve. In U Sam Oeur, this horror just kind of sneaks up on you and then you are fully in it.

I have just finished the poem about the birth of the poetic speaker’s twins, the violation of his wife while while giving birth, the murder of his newborn twins. He begins it relatively gently; there is his helplessness as the poetic speaker, the father, is resigned to the fact that there is no one around to aid in the birth so that he must do it. Then, when the “two midwives” appear out of nowhere, we breathe a sigh of relief for him. Then we realize they are not midwives, and the acts they are committing upon the wife to hasten the birth are a violation, that is, one of the “midwives” reaches up and into her womb and rips the babies out. So this is where I currently am. Hard read.

This text is distinct from Peou as Oeur’s original poems are written in Khmer, and then translated as a collaborative effort between himself and his Iowa colleague Ken McCullough. As well (in terms of how this differs from Peou), bear in mind Oeur is a formally trained poet, i.e. MFA’ed in Iowa, which may likely account for his nuance. In the intro, McCullough discusses translating both rigorously faithful to the text, and then translating to capture the spirit of the poem/its meaning and message. He also discusses that Oeur writes in (or is inspired by) traditional Khmer poetic form, which is apparent in the original. So these two modes of translation I think yield maybe uneven results. I definitely get the sense with the opening poems, which seem to be steeped in Cambodian mythology, that something seems to be lacking in the English.

I am halfway through this and I hope to finish this very soon.

PS: I picked up this book after reading Mark Nowak’s post, “I Hear America Singing,” at the Poetry Foundation blog. I haven’t yet gotten to Oeur’s America poems, but am so interested in another thing McCullough writes in the intro, about Oeur translating Whitman into Khmer, opening that access of American poetry to another population of readers, and actively staking a claim on American poetry, as an Asian American refugee, immigrant, and worker. As I’ve commented on Nowak’s post, I wish more Asian American poets were interested in the activism of staking claims on American poetry, really asserting here-ness, rather than ignoring it is an issue, our claims to here. And I do believe this staking a claim to here through writing is a form of activism.

Diwata Wordle

wordle - diwata, originally uploaded by bjanepr.

As per Wordle, my most commonly used words in Diwata: woman, know, words, eyes, body, hands, tell, say…

Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera!

Hey all, I’ve just received this press release from Juan Felipe Herrera:

Contact: Holly Schaffer, Publicity Manager
520-621-3920, hollys@uapress.arizona.edu

For Immediate Release

The University of Arizona Press, founded in 1959, is a nonprofit publisher of about fifty books each year, with over 800 books in print. Publications include scholarly and trade titles in Native American and Latina/o studies, anthropology, archaeology, nature writing and environmental studies, regional history, Latin American studies, and space sciences. The Press publishes two critically acclaimed series in fiction and poetry, Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series, and Camino del Sol: A Latina and Latino Literary Series.

“The rich, chromatic imagery, the lyrical tone, and the flowing rhythm make the reading of this collection a profound experience, an experience not easily forgotten.” —Luis Leal, author of A Luis Leal Reader

Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA
Publication Date: July 17, 2008
Camino del Sol: A Latina and Latino Literary Series
288 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-8165-2703-8, $24.95 paper + CD

For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Through a variety of stages and transformations, Herrera has evolved more than almost any other Chicano poet, always re-inventing himself into a more mature and seasoned voice.

Now, in this unprecedented collection, we encounter the trajectory of this highly innovative and original writer, bringing the full scope of his singular vision into view. Beginning with early material from A Certain Man and moving through thirteen of his collections into new, previously unpublished work, this assemblage also includes an audio CD of the author reading twenty-four selected poems aloud. Serious scholars and readers alike will now have available to them a representative set of glimpses into his production as well as his origins and personal development. The ultimate value of bringing together such a collection, however, is that it will allow us to better understand and appreciate the complexity of what this major American poet is all about.

Juan Felipe Herrera holds the Tomás Rivera Endowed chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. For the last thirty-five years, Juan Felipe has been writing, publishing, reading, performing, leading workshops, and organizing literary broadsides, journals, and publications in home communities and universities in California and throughout the nation. He is the author of 24 books, and he has more than one-hundred articles, poems, reviews, and essays in print.

The University of Arizona Press
355 S. Euclid Avenue, Suite 103 Tucson, AZ 85719
www.uapress.arizona.edu

Philippine Independence Day

Today is Philippine Independence Day, as depicted above on the Philippine five peso bill. That’s Emilio Aguinaldo positioned in the center declaring independence, and waving the Philippine flag, which actually was adopted as the national flag on June 12, 1898.

“Independence” from whom? “Independence” for whom? I like to ask.

*

The flag’s symbolism is interesting. I have heard that the flag of Cuba, a nation who had also declared independence from Spain, was an influence on the Philippine flag’s design. The actual Declaration of Philippine Independence states the following:

Moreover, we confer upon our famous Dictator Don Emilio Aguinaldo all the powers necessary to enable him to discharge the duties of Government, including the prerogatives of granting pardon and amnesty,

And lastly, it was results unanimously that this Nation, already free and independent as of this day, must used the same flag which up to now is being used, whose designed and colored are found described in the attached drawing, the white triangle signifying the distinctive emblem of the famous Society of the “Katipunan” which by means of its blood compact inspired the masses to rise in revolution; the tree stars, signifying the three principal Islands of these Archipelago - Luzon, Mindanao, and Panay where the revolutionary movement started; the sun representing the gigantic step made by the son of the country along the path of Progress and Civilization; the eight rays, signifying the eight provinces - Manila, Cavite, Bulacan, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Bataan, Laguna, and Batangas - which declares themselves in a state of war as soon as the first revolt was initiated; and the colors of Blue, Red, and White, commemorating the flag of the United States of America, as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards this Great Nation for its disinterested protection which it lent us and continues lending us. [Emphases are mine.]

*

As the above Declaration of “Independence” leaves a sour taste in my mouth, let me also share one of my favorite poems ever, “Open Letters to Filipino Artists,” written by “Bohemian” turned activist poet Emmanuel Lacaba (1948-1976), which speaks to the pragmatic role of the poet in the world, and the active choice the poet makes in being relevant to the “masses”:

A poet must also learn
how to lead an attack
- Ho Chi Minh

I

Invisible the mountain routes to strangers:
For rushing toes an inch-wide strip on boulders
And for the hand that’s free a twig to grasp,
Or else we headlong fall below to rocks
And waterfalls of death so instant that
Too soon they’re red with skulls of carabaos.

But patient guides and teachers are the masses:
Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers;
Of plowing, planting, weeding, and the harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf
This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois origins.

South Cotabato
May 1, 1975

II

You want to know, companions of my youth
How much has changed the wild but shy young poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he’s dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside.

Like husks of coconut he tears away
The billion layers of his selfishness.
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and song within his chest
Now of consequence is his anemia
From lack of sleep: no longer for Bohemia,
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, yes.

He mixes metaphors but values more
A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains: not because they are there
But because the masses are there where
Routes are jigsaw puzzles he must piece together.
Though he has been called a brown Rimbaud,
He is no bandit but a people’s warrior.

South Cotabato and Davao del Norte
November 1975

III

We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all homes are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
To the fascists we are the faceless enemy
Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:
The ever moving, shining, secret eye of the storm.

The road less traveled by we’ve taken-
And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time. Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here among workers and peasants our lost
Generation has found its true, its only home.

Davao del Norte
January 1976

Emmanuel Lacaba was executed by the Philippine Constabulary and the Civilian Home Defense Front (thats’s like, what, Department of Homeland Security?) in March 1976. He was 27.

Segue at the Bowery Poetry Club: Now at Penn Sound

Yay! Audio is now available of my Segue reading with Bhanu Kapil on December 15, 2007, hosted by Evelyn Reilly and Brenda Iijima.

Click here for Penn Sound’s Segue at the Bowery Poetry Club page.

Click here for my and Bhanu’s reading.

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.

Paula Gunn Allen: 1939 - 2008

Found this at Joy Harjo’s blog:

Born Oct. 24, 1939, Albuquerque, N.M.,
Died last night in Fort Bragg, CA at 10:40 PM after a struggle with lung cancer.

Fly free.

Gelacio Guillermo responds to Eugene Gloria’s Poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

This is so interesting. This essay/letter was forwarded to me by two separate people, wanting to know what I thought of it. The truth is, I am having a little bit of a hard time piecing this story together. I do know for sure that Eugene Gloria did, indeed, write a poem entitled, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” This poem was published in The Literary Review in March 2000 (link here).

Gelacio Guillermo (note the correct spelling of the name) is a real person. He came across this poem in 2008, and now responds with very valid points:

Despite the mis-spelling proceeding from mispronunciation of foreign names so typical among North Americans, I thought I was being referred to in the poem and would like to take issue with you on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as subject for creative work.

The poem’s speaker is presumably a woman whom I believe Eugene Gloria “invented.” Gloria fabricates a background or position for her. She is Filipina in/from the Philippines, and part of this narrative takes place during Martial Law. She is the daughter of a colonel in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which speaks to some level of privilege. In the poem, she brings up her own breaks with the church, and her rebellions, which I read as the reasons why she is compelled to express kinship with “Gellacio,” whom she imagines has gone to “the mountains,” implying he is a political insurgent. She is addressing her fabricated, imagined, romanticized, and sexualized version of “Gellacio Guillermo”: “Your brindled skin is sweating in Iowa sun, // your hair in a tight chingon, / you, barefoot and G-stringed like a Manobo / prince in St. Louis…”

I am wondering why she imagines him G-stringed, tribal, regal. In his letter response to the poem, Guillermo points to the term, “brindled,” and its etymology:

The “brindled skin” has a far earlier provenance: the black slaves during those centuries of slave trading were assessed, like livestock in the market, according to their animal strength and the gloss of their hide. “Brindled” originates from the late ME [Middle English] “brended,” a variety of “branded.” Vestiges of racist arrogance of the West die hard.

I am wondering if she is the one objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as this “barefoot and G-stringed … Manobo prince,” or if it is Eugene Gloria objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as he imagines a Filipino national/Filipino from the Philippines, or if it is either or both she and Eugene Gloria anticipating “Gellacio Guillermo’s” objectification by white middle Americans in Iowa.

The real Guillermo was indeed in Iowa; in his letter, he reveals that he spent six months (October 1970 to April 1971) on a writing fellowship at Iowa University’s International Writing Program. Guillermo then, was a writer; he was a Filipino writer in middle America. “Gellacio, / I am reading you in English,” the unnamed Filipina persona says. I am wondering why this is so remarkable; Filipinos in the Philippines have been writing in English and reading in English since the late 19th century/early 20th century.

I am wondering if Guillermo’s six months in Iowa University on a writing fellowship is comparable to the Philippine Reservation of the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, to which the speaker has made reference.

I am wondering why “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” whom she believes has previously gone into the mountains has become her symbol of rebellion, and why she has come to need “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” as this representative of the “salvaged.” I am wondering why she needs a representative of the salvaged at all. And here, do note that the “salvaged” in a Philippine (specifically Martial Law?) context are not the saved, but the dissidents drowned in the Pasig River and other bodies of water for their dissidence.

Mostly, I am wondering why Eugene Gloria created this unnamed Filipina persona to address this imagined “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” Guillermo points out: “I am named; why isn’t she?”

I want to go back to Guillermo’s original point in his letter: “on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as a subject for creative work.” Is Eugene Gloria’s poem “irresponsible”? Do we get away with not taking responsibility all the time, never expecting our poetic subjects to gain access to our work and have the opportunity to respond?

Maybe I understand the poem, but I suppose I don’t understand why the poem. And I don’t think I have answered any of my own questions about responsibility here.

Poet Laureates and All

Some news and thoughts in and about Poet Laureate Land.

(1) Tony Brown is the new Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. W00t! I don’t know Tony Brown personally; I know Oscar does. But why do I think this is so fabulous?

(2) Charles Simic does not want to reprise his role as U.S. Poet Laureate. After one year, he’s had it. He’d rather be writing poetry. And here I was last year all excited about change. I think about this now and I wonder why I thought Simic (his presence really more than any programs he’d dream up and execute) would bring change to American poetry.

(3) Nominations are open for the position of Poet Laureate of California. Now this position I actually take seriously, because I have been recently thinking about and talking with folks about who determines what is California poetry. I don’t know of any California specific publishers of poetry, though the excellent Heyday Press is a California/West Coast specific publisher of diverse literature. Is it who the University of California Press publishes? I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the people of this culturally, socioeconomically, linguistically, aesthetically diverse state.

In fact, having recently seen Mr. Jack Hirschman reading, like, everywhere, and after he lost his voice doing reading after reading at cultural centers and political rallies, and still there he was, reading his anti-war, community mobilizing and community building poetry, I believe the San Francisco Poet Laureates are much more in line with what I envision to be a better measure of what California poetry is: written by a poet whose works address the people of California, a poet whose work actively engages the political movements of the people, the workers, the immigrants. We recently picked up Hirschman’s translations of Roque Dalton’s Poemas Clandestinos, and I have been thinking that I think we take for granted that Mr. Hirschman is a man of letters, and so this is reaffirming my preference and love for poets who are unabashedly political, and poets who transgress conventional borders.

Speaking of poets who are unabashedly political and poets who transgress conventional borders, here is my nomination:

JUAN FELIPE HERRERA for California Poet Laureate.

Who’s with me?

Information on how to nominate is here.

Quickie Reading Updates: Jen Bervin’s Nets and Juan Felipe Herrera’s Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream

Jen Bervin’s Nets is a deceptively quick read, I think. I didn’t read the actual Shakespearean sonnet from which each of her poems is derived, and I am not sure that I should or need to. That said, I think Nets can also be thought of as either a deceptively simple project/experiment, in which much much more is going on in each netting than we apparently get upon first read. Or the opposite: there really isn’t too much to it, that there is no requirement for the resulting netted poem to have anything to do with its sonnet original, and that the netting is random or arbitrary. But even then, this arbitrariness is interesting. I suppose what’s most interesting to me about this project or experiment is the idea of the palimpsest, or the act of creating one or participating in the creation of one; is there an act of erasure here or the opposite. Or is this one (of many) ways in which we bring Shakespeare into our time/place/space, or find new meanings to the texts, or find ourselves in the texts.

Poetry in Epiphanic Mode: Carlos Bulosan, “If You Want to Know What We Are.”

I am still unclear on what is meant by “poetry in epiphanic mode,” as we are discussing over at Craig’s blog, but I believe the following Carlos Bulosan poem may be that. I found it at Bulalat.com.

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

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.

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.”

New and Just Released: Parnassus Poetry, Essay on Asian American Poetry, and Literary Death Match Audio

(1) Many thanks to Cathy Park Hong, whose long review essay on Asian American poetry is included in this 700-page Parnassus 30th Anniversary issue. Cathy reviews three Asian American poets’ books: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s I Love Artists, Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco and Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City.

Find out how to get your copy at the Parnassus website.

By the way, I love that on Amazon, you can see that people who have bought my book have bought Joseph O. Legaspi’s Imago, and Patrick Rosal’s My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive.

(2) Literary Death Match audio available here! In particular, here is my 16 minute and 12 second reading from Poeta en San Francisco. Haven’t listened to it yet, but do tell me what you think.

(3) Also regarding Poeta en San Francisco, can you say, “second printing”? Yeah, I knew you could. And this is totally dope, considering that the first printing was — thanks to the Academy — 7000 books. Good morning!

(4) Addendum: And we are #2 on the SPDBooks February 2008 Poetry Bestsellers list. Good morning again.

For the students who asked: excerpts of Poeta en San Francisco published online

Given that buying books can be cost prohibitive for students, here is where students can read excerpts of Poeta en San Francisco online:

Philippine American Writers and Artists Inc.

HOW2.

MiPOesias.

Blue Fifth Review.

As well, there is always the library.

Quick Thoughts on Russell Leong: Country of Dreams and Dust

Russell Leong’s The Country of Dreams and Dust is one of those books of poetry I wonder why I am only reading now, and then in many ways I am glad I am only reading it now. I’d recently picked it up used at Half Price Books in Downtown Berkeley for $4.98, and really was drawn to it because of the publisher, West End Press, who’s published Arlene Biala, Paula Gunn Allen, Nellie Wong, among other writers I admire much.

I think I have many (perhaps justified) preconceived notions of what I expect to find in a collection of Asian American poetry, what so-called conventional immigration and immigrant narratives, what clean delineation between “there” (homeland) and “here” (host country), and how this translates into a neatly packaged conflict the speaker experiences and articulates. Perhaps this is my derisive way of saying I was thinking I’d be reading conventional “identity politics” poetry, and I mean “identity politics” in the simplest, most commonly understood way, that the poet’s (ethnic) identity is the thing driving forth the narrative, the reason for the conflict, and the primary if not sole lens through which he views his “there” and “here” world.

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.

Some Ongoing Thoughts on Poetry and Literary Community

Zero Hate. A colleague of mine from one of my earliest poetry grad seminars had written a ditty of a poem entitled, “Zero Hate Poem,” which basically listed all these things the author liked. He told us that he titled the poem, “Zero Hate Poem,” simply because there was no hatred or hate present in it.

* * *

I wanted to refer back to Luis Francia’s article, “Different Rhymes, Different Times,” which was originally published in the Philippine Inquirer in July 2004, though the original link has since been unlinked. I’d reprinted it in its entirety on my former blog, and I am glad I did. Link here. What struck me in 2004 about his write-up on my generation of Filipino American poets still strikes me today:

Reflecting on [José Garcia] Villa made me think of the younger Filipino-American poets, who are a very different breed, less into intramural sniping and one-upmanship than into what appears to be a genuine spirit of encouragement and mutual respect.

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.