I got a new chapbook manuscript

…anyone wanna publish it?

Seriously, I dig chapbook. I love that the unit is very manageable and undaunting for me, in terms of thinking up a project, and writing it through to some end without the same exhaustion that I’ve experienced writing full length book projects. As well, I love that production timelines on chapbooks bring almost immediate results. It’s also easing me back nicely into the prospect of writing a book. I’m happy to say I see 4th book manuscript solidifying, as we wait to hear back on 3rd book manuscript. This waiting, of course, is interminable, so it’s good to fill my waiting time up with some satisfying amounts of productivity.

That said, the poems in this chapbook manuscript, entitled We, Spoken Here, are as follows:

• Upland Dance
• We, Spoken Here
• Worry
• Pakikisama
• We, Spoken Here
• No, I am Not Yours
• We, Spoken Here
• West Oakland Invocation
• West Oakland Litany
• West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM
• My California
• West Oakland Serenade
• (t)here
• 14th & Broadway Lullaby, Oakland

So there’s that.

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.

This Weekend in SF : American Literature Association Conference : More on the Poetic Industrial Complex

The conference takes place at the Hyatt Regency at the Embarcadero from May 22 to 25. The Marketing Asian American Literature panel is this Saturday, May 24 from 9:30 to 10:50 am.

Session 16-A Roundtable on Marketing Asian American Literature (Pacific B/C)
Organized by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies

Co-chairs: Jennifer Ho, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Michelle Rhee, Stanford University

1. Timothy Yu, University of Toronto
2. Barbara Jane Reyes, Bay Area poet
3. Janet Francendese, Temple University Press
4. Meghan Kozar, Michigan State University
5. Walter S. H. Lim, National University of Singapore
6. Jeffrey Partridge, Capital Community College

Now I have no idea what the other panelists are going to talk about. I may be wrong but I believe Timothy and I are the only ones on this panel concerned with poetry. I believe he may be discussing marketing via teaching Asian American Literature.

I’ve blogged previously about the poetic industrial complex and this is basically what I will be discussing, strategies of API poets navigating the poetic industrial complex. Given that very very few API poets are on the same mass appeal major league playing field of Mary Oliver (six titles in the top ten on the bestseller list), Robert Hass, Billy Collins (one title in the top ten, and one title is number eleven), it’s rare or it’s never that we see our books on the Contemporary American Poetry Best Seller list. Unless your name is Li-Young Lee, then you are not a even a minor contender.

Or, we can have a look at all the diverse including API titles on the Small Press Distribution Best Seller list. Shit, if I am forever among the SPD Best Sellers, then I consider myself very fortunate. Given that most American poetry is published by independent presses and university presses, who are our major distributors? How do our books even get on Amazon in the first place?

And given the relative absence of “ethnic specific” presses among the independent and university presses, do we really market ourselves primarily or solely by ethnicity? What do we do to stand out in slush pile with thousands of other American poets, that is, if we choose to participate in slush pile? How do we position our poetic speakers in relation to majority/mainstream readers, given that readers of poetry are not really a majority of Americans. And why do we position ourselves how/where we do?

I want to go back to my discussion (Part 1 | Part 2) on Eugene Gloria’s poetic speaker in “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City,” and my point that the speaker appears to be speaking as a Filipino “other,” about Filipino “others,” to an American majority, rather than as a Filipino to another Filipino. I believe we API poets are every day in danger of doing that, for what we may believe is the benefit of a wider readership. The flip side to this, as Nick Carbó wrote of the Bay Area Flips in his introduction to Returning a Borrowed Tongue, is to address the local, the relevant to a specific community, thus cutting ourselves off from the possibility of national acclaim. Still, while it feels my poetic and political practices seem to be yielding results counter to this assertion, I believe this local versus perceived universal (I hate that term) subject position and subject matter, use of various accessible and inaccessible languages and registers and poetic forms are a major point of discussion when discussing marketing ourselves.

Finally, there is course adoption, from which Poeta en San Francisco has benefited greatly. I’d like to better understand how and why educators in different academic fields decide what entire books are teachable and/or worthy of being taught; whereas I have been told by some Filipino American educators that Poeta is “hard to teach,” I also am experiencing so many other educators (Filipino Americans included) so eager and enthusiastic to teach it. Still, I do not know that we go about trying to write teachable books.

* * *

Oh, and my next event at the American Literature Conference on Saturday is at 5:00 pm:

Session 21-G Reading by Asian American Writers (Pacific F)

1. Barbara Jane Reyes
2. Shawn Wong
3. Helen Zia

A poet, a fictionist, and a non-fictionist. Ought to be interesting.

Poetry Work Updates

OK. I am gearing up for the next flurry of events, as the last has gone embarrassingly well.

Last Thursday I submitted our nomination for Juan Felipe Herrera for California Poet Laureate, and was very happy to be able to exchange a couple of emails with him. I am really very confident in his qualifications, and I believe the wording in our application/nomination is strong.

Last Friday’s South and Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement was nerve wracking, starting with participating un-robed, un-hooded, un-regalia’ed (I never do these things with regalia; I’m not enough of an academic for that!) in the faculty procession, continuing with Professor Jeff Hadler’s amazingly flattering introduction and discussion on my work (he’s apparently read everything I have published, and that is enough to be nerve wracked). I am sure I was insecure about my speech until the very end. But what I didn’t realize is that there appears to be a great love for story, myth, and poetry in that department; the undergraduate speaker (I am sorry I do not immediately remember her name) was a lovely young woman who also framed her speech within a traditional South Asian story, and in that way, my starting with poetry performance and discussing narratives throughout my speech was right on. I had a brief exchange with her after she was all done with her family’s picture taking and all, and we were both very happy that our speeches contained these common threads.

I am also happy to report that the improvised performance with the Gamelan Sekar Jaya musicians really worked. I’d originally thought of performing the rolling, looser prose of Diwata, since I was so concerned with conveying accessible narrative, but then I decided instead on the pieces with tighter metered lines, couplets set up as call and response, one “We” poem, and a pantoum. The accompaniment was right on, they were with me the whole time. Actually, it felt more like we took turns leading and following. I had asked the musicians if I should at least show them my poetry beforehand, and they said to surprise them instead.

All day, I kept having the most wonderful conversations with Professor Sylvia Tiwon, with whom I took one lower division Southeast Asian Studies course probably back in 1991 or so. She keyed in on so many of the popular and traditional cultural and mythological references, whose sprawl also made me insecure in the company of (disciplined) academics. But old stories are open like that, as I’ve learned from all the Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies courses I have ever taken. Why are there earthdiver myths and great turtles upon which the earth is created, and great ovens from which we, the clay creations of the deities, are born, in North America and in Southeast Asia — this has always been so interesting to me. And perhaps I do know that these belief systems and stories are determined by the natural worlds (climate, terrain, fauna, etc) which the people inhabit; here, I’d actually use the Tagalog term/phrase, “sa mundong kinagisnan,” or “sa daigdig na kinagisnan,” the world into which (we) have awakened. The fact that I leap between continents has always nagged at me, for its apparent lack of discipline, even when that is one of the major points of Diwata, and even when I know my poetic discipline is tight.

At the post ceremony reception, I ended up having all these conversations about poetry, the value of MFA programs for poets really wanting to expand their knowledge bases and build their poetics, versus the poetic industrial complex, interesting poetic experimentation that yields uninteresting poetry, the work to which our readers have to commit in order to access the poetry when faced with the absence of translation, and the absence of conventional Western narrative. And really, everyone I spoke to was so exuberant about poetry, about hearing poetry, and having it be included in this commencement ceremony. That this was very appropriate. And really, everyone’s exuberance to me was like an embarrassment of riches, to be surrounded by so many women who’ve been so moved by my work, when I have grown accustomed to the kind of women who socially dislike me for my work. Oh, the men were very warm and responsive too; it’s just that the responses of the women were able to break out of the appropriate professional and intellectual response and into the less articulable, less academic province of “poets feed the soul of a people,” and/or more (stereo)typically gendered female talkstory at kitchen tables.

Anyway, there was so much good discussion with the SSEAS faculty, as it happens when you actually get to sit and share a meal with folks. I have been invited back, sometime soon, once again to perform more poetry with musical accompaniment for the department.

OK. Next up:

(1) I will be speaking on a panel on marketing Asian American Literature for the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, and I will be reading with Shawn Wong and Helen Zia. These two events take place Memorial Day Weekend.

(2) I will be reading at Eastwind Books of Berkeley on May 31st, for the Field of Mirrors anthology. Complete list of readers is here.

(3) I will be at UC Santa Barbara on June 2nd-3rd, teaching poetry workshop, speaking to Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s Asian American Studies class, doing a reading/performance, and it also looks like I will be holding a number of one on one student conferences.

(4) I will be reading with Meg Withers, Truong Tran, Craig Santos Perez, and others sometime in June (I don’t know the exact date) at Modern Times Bookstore is SF for Meg’s Communion of Saints book launch.

Done!

Submitted the California Poet Laureate application for Juan Felipe Herrera! Oscar and Ching-In helped a LOT. As did Matthew, Lee, Craig and Achiote Press, Javier and the UC Berkeley Xican@ Culture Working Group.

Southeast Asian Studies Commencement Address writing completed! Just need to decide which poems to perform with the gamelan ensemble.

Tonight, I am chill.

That is all for now.

Southeast Asian, Take 2

Really now. As you all know, I live in Oakland, where I have learned at my job about some of the Southeast Asians’ particular community concerns, and via the work of some of my old college friends. In particular, I am thinking about Oakland Chinatown based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and their organizing around the Laotian community in Contra Costa County, living in an industrial zone which includes the Chevron Refinery, and the Mien populations in East Oakland, organizing to ensure that folks can transition into American urban living and retain their cultural and religious practices.

In the meantime, many groups of Southeast Asian youth have recently experienced harassment including wrongful arrests and racial profiling (as gang members, etc.) by the Alameda police as a result of one group of youths’ violence and the very unfortunate death of one young lady.

I am thinking the above, the plight of communities in American urban areas, do not make it into area studies departments, but really now, this is my way into “Southeast Asian” in Oakland.

I have just been thinking about pragmatic statements that I think students would prefer to hear over all the lofty and political yadda yadda. I also think parents of graduates perhaps like to hear that there are practical applications for their children’s non-straight forward sounding, not practical nor applicable in “real life” sounding majors.

Just trying to keep it real.

Poet as Orator: A Pinay Poet in the Southeast Asian Studies Commencement Ceremony

Alternate title: How I am struggling through writing this Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement Speech.

Commencement Ceremony is this Friday.

Holy God (Dewata?) (Diwata!) (Jayadewa!) (Batara?) (Bathala!) This is hard!

Anyway, I am trying to cement some intuitions that I have regarding the connections between Philippine and other Southeast Asian languages and mythological stories.

I am still questioning what value anything I say as a Pinay poet has to a group of Southeast Asian Studies graduates.

I am trying to remember my way into the Southeast Asian Studies Department, where I actually did take a couple of classes sometime in the early 1990’s.

I am remembering a then-graduate student there, named Jacqueline Siapno, who submitted some poetry to Maganda Magazine. There was one poem in which she placed two versions of it side by side, and I don’t know which version she wrote first and which language(s) she translated: the first was the English version, and the second she wrote in what I understood to be a hybrid of Philippine and Malaysian languages. To me, what was most remarkable about the Philippine/Malaysian version was that I understood most of it.

That was part of my way in, as Asian American was not something with which I felt a strong connection, culturally and linguistically, though I did politically.

Learning various insular Southeast Asian mythologies was more exercise in cultural familiarity.

(Speaking of mythologies, some excerpts of Diwata might come in handy in this speech; I always include my or others’ poetry in my speeches. I am a poet after all.)

At any rate, as I am cranking this speech out, I am thinking that this is my third commencement address to write and deliver in three years, and I am thinking about Debbie’s comment to Oscar’s blog post on Nikki Giovanni, and how it is I have been consistently called upon to orate, i.e. going beyond reading, reciting, performing poetry to audiences. Debbie says that there are some poets who clearly are not orators. I agree with her, having witnessed some poets speaking and having these instances be painful to witness. So I want to say that not all poets should be called upon to orate. Still, we poets work with crafting clever, precise, witty, ironic combinations of words in anticipation of effect upon readers. Some/many poets engage in theatrical or dramatic performance of their work. Orating should be a sixth sense. Ay, I just want to understand; maybe writing this speech would get easier if I understood.

But after this minor catharsis, I think I will be OK. To the gentleman who recommended me to the department, and to the professor who invited me: you guys owe me a single malt scotch.

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?

Clarification on “shameless hussy” poetics of self-promotion

The etymology of “hussy” is “housewife.”

On “shameless”:

I think I am fortunate. I learned early on from my most generous, aggressive, and lively mentors that if I do not promote myself and my work aggressively, then I shouldn’t wait around for people to simply discover me and take on spreading the word about me. These mythical discoverers of me wouldn’t do it adequately, if at all, and not in the ways that I want to be aggressively promoted and publicly regarded.

“Early” means back when “my literary career” meant hawking my DIY (with the help of Downtown Oakland Kinko’s and a paycheck from my not related to literature day job) chapbooks out of my backpack at every single local community arts space/event I could humanly attend, and still being indecisive about whether to apply to MFA school or not. Actually, “early” is much earlier than all that, and includes editing and promoting the Filipino American publication Maganda, and performing “spoken word” at local arts spaces and political rallies, back when I was published nowhere.

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.

indie lit peeps: something to be learned from nine inch nails and radiohead?

As a recent purchaser of the entire Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I - IV, via Amazon.com MP3 downloads, and for a mere $5, this is something I am constantly thinking about: that there are benefits to bypassing or overturning the traditional existing systems by which product gets to our audience (or constituents, or consumers). I am trying to keep up with industry news on NIN and Radiohead, and there are a whole slew of articles I haven’t gotten to read yet. Here’s an article in Wired, a dialogue between David Byrne and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, “on the real value of music.”

If I may link these music industry developments to the literary industry, can we realistically model ourselves after them, and are we willing to take the risks of taking production into our own hands? Trent Reznor recently expressed his disappointment about downloaders of the Saul Williams album The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of NiggyTardust! which Reznor produced:

Reznor had masterminded the Radiohead-esque plan of letting listeners choose between getting Williams’ album for free or contributing $5 for a higher-quality download. The overwhelming majority of the 150,000 downloaders had chosen the former option, which caused Reznor to glumly remark to CNET News in January that the idea “was wrong in my head, and for once I’ve given people too much credit.” [Full SF Weekly article here.]

Local Filipino American Arts: Work, Working.

[Addendum: Lifted from Christine Wong Yap's blog:

A derisory tone prevails in most media treatment of contemporary art, whether controversial or not, a tone not appropriately skeptical or critically alert but smugly dismissive - and, I suspect, defensive.

This tone reflects little or no effort to imagine the risks of creative work in the postmodern context - the risk of self-deception, of squandering precious time and energy, of embarrassment through self-exposure. Instead, it echoes the tone of anti-intellectualism sounded in every statement in support or denunciation of public policy by every politician who dreads the stigma of “elitism” — and that seems to mean every politician, period.

–Kenneth Baker, “Saving the Soul of Art,” March 2, 2008, SFGate.com]

Quick Thoughts on Work, and Women’s Art at Manilatown

Yesterday’s Manilatown event was pretty standard fare, good stuff. I think the strongest part of yesterday’s program was the impromptu talk of the artists as Evelie Posch, the feature musician, ended up not being able to make it to the event. The artists were able to talk, albeit briefly, about process and politics. I was happy to see work by Jennifer Wofford both as an individual artist and as a member of the performative art group/collective, the Mail Order Brides (MOB).

Jennifer discussed her individual pieces depicting the Filipina nurse, and in particular, her own mother as a RN specializing in wound care. So her pieces are illustrated on this kind of sterile hospital-looking green paper, and she depicts the white pastel colored Filipina nurse up against these gigantic blobs of wound and flesh. As well, the Mail Order Brides’ Always a Bridesmaid Never a Bride ™ project is loaded, ironic, and pretty fuckin hilarious, and I highly recommend witnessing the spectacle of it for yourself!

Sticky Words: Poetry Community

Certainly, “Poetry Community” is different from who I invite into my home, who I invite to sit at my table, and/or share a meal with; over lunch with Maria and another professor Michael (can’t remember his last name) after the Los Medanos reading/event, I mentioned how good it feels to actually sit and have a meal with folks that I encounter professionally. Sometimes there are intersections between “Poetry Community” and who I invite into my home/share a meal with, and then I am totally cool with when there aren’t intersections.

I refer back to my previous blog post in which I reference Luis Francia’s July 2004 Philippine Inquirer article, in which he brings up my generation of Filipino American poets, and the apparent absence of “intramural sniping and oneupmanship” which he depicts as more prevalent among his and previous generations.

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.

New Langton Arts: Filipinos in SoMa, SF

Yay and thanks to community artist Amanda Eicher of New Langton Arts. Amanda has contacted me to have work included in Presences, a publication project on SoMa (South of Market), and engaging the neighborhood and its denizens. She is interested in having artists do a walk around the neighborhood, talk to folks, and have projects come from these experiences. It goes without saying that there’s a sizeable and visible longtime Filipino American population present in SoMa, and my contribution to Presences will be all about that Filipino American longtime presence.

I’d done a series of walks around and about SoMa, and a bunch of this writing can be found in the Asia Society’s Asia in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in my Poeta en San Francisco, and Bay Poetics, the anthology Stephanie Young edited. And as a general rule, a lot of my writings on Filipinos in San Francisco are centered in SoMa, which is where Arkipelago Books is located. I’m happy to do another series of walks and additional/further writings on Filipino Americans in SoMa, though in the interest of time, I will be excerpting my Asia Society write-up for New Langton Arts, as I believe this write-up is fairly comprehensive.

On Poet Blogging: In Response to Tim Yu

I recently received an email from Tim Yu asking for ideas on blogging, so here is a somewhat on the fly response.

I am sometimes ambivalent about “community” formation which is said to occur in blog world. I know for sure that many of my relationships with other poets have begun here, given geographical distance. And interfacing/interacting with local poets occurs both here, and in person; I realized recently while talking to Al Robles at the Bayanihan Center that I really wouldn’t know how to get a hold of him in e-world, but that should not distress me when he tells me I can usually find him at Manilatown. When I’ve worked my nerve up and ask him for something huge, and he agrees to it/gives me his word, shakes hands with me, and we are confident that he will honor that agreement made over the hand shake, this type of “honor” and “word” makes me nostalgic for something pre-blog, pre-e-world, that maybe centrally exists mostly among older generations.

Poet : Work : Updates

I’ve just finished proofing the pdf’s of chapbook #1, Easter Sunday. Carrie Hunter of Ypolita Press and I have gone over some really awesome cover art, so just you wait.

I’ve just updated my acknowledgments page for chapbook #2, Cherry, and submitted this to Brenda Iijima of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, so just you wait (again).

I have three poems — “Accessories,” “Corpse Eater,” and “Worry” — forthcoming in Eleven Eleven.

I am reading/speaking at two different places next week: Los Medanos College on Wednesday afternoon, and Manilatown on Saturday.

Ack! Gig.

Ack! In honor of my “Gigs and Invitations: How to get me to say yes,” post, I’ve just been invited to give the commencement address at UC Berkeley’s Southeast Asian Studies Department Commencement Ceremonies.

In a moment of panic, I thought, “I couldn’t possibly pull this one off,” but after a real grounding conversation with one of the department’s professors (who reads my blog), I’ve accepted the invitation. Thankfully, the moment of panic has passed.