Asian-American Poetry and Other Artistic Meanderings

Page Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival

2009-11-12T00:05:00.000-08:00

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop presents
PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival
Friday & Saturday, Nov. 13-14, 2009

Join the Workshop for PAGE TURNER, a two-day literary palooza that’ll bring together more than thirty writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, David Henry Hwang, Hari Kunzru, Ed Park, and Porochista Khakpour. This quirky but curated festival will also feature a former Chinese rocket factory worker, poets making video art, ukulele-strumming comedian Jen Kwok, Indian crime fiction, panels on internment and immigration, and a cocktail reception and awards ceremony. For schedule and tickets, please visit pageturnerfest.org.

EVENTS DETAILS

Friday, Nov. 13, 2009, 7-10pm
PAGE TURNER: GALA KICK-OFF DINNER
At Vermilion, 480 Lexington Avenue, NY, NY
$50 cocktail reception (7-8pm); $500 gala dinner (8-10pm)
A special cocktail reception and dinner honoring Sonny Mehta, who will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from Michael “English Patient” Ondaatje. For tickets, visit aaww.org/dinner or call (212) 494-0061.

Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009, 11am-7pm
PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival
powerhouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY
$5 per reading; $20 Day Pass; $10 Literary Awards & Reception Only; $25 All-Day Pass+Awards

A hip all-day reading series that’ll feature more than some of the most prominent Asian American writers in the country, as well as stand-up comedians, academics, and the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Awards. The line-up includes: Jhumpa Lahiri, David Henry Hwang, Ed Park, Mort Baharloo, Monique Truong, Hari Kunzru, Meera Nair, Mohan Sikka, Hirsh Sawhney, Mae Ngai, Mitra Kalita, Alexander Chee, Ron Hogan, Rakesh Satyal, Jen Kwok, Porochista Khakpour, Ed Lin, Jennifer Hayashida, Jeff Yang, Sree Sreenivasan, Ravi Shankar, Hua Hsu, Dennis Lim, Julie Otsuka, Rea Tajiri, Sunaina Maria, Tania James, Hasanthika Sirisena, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Amitava Kumar, Lijia Zhang, Alexandra Chang, Walter Lew, and Ye Mimi. For a complete schedule and tickets see http://www.pageturnerfest.org/.

Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry

2009-11-11T23:52:00.000-08:00

The Lantern Review website and blog have gone live. Check it out! Yours truly will be doing a guest post on the Lantern Review blog soon. Stay tuned.

A Review of Squash: Fascinations Upon an Understated Gourd

2009-07-01T00:44:00.000-07:00

"Quite seldom in life does fruit matter anymore." These words mark the epicenter of Squash: Fascinations Upon an Understated Gourd, the latest cookbook travelogue by horticulturist Samuel Wong Remalcoole and the third and final work in his "melon" trilogy (following Watermelon: A New Dawn Rises Over Sunset (1998, Amorphous Chicken Press, 285 pages) and Acorn: The Fast and Recognized Frontier (2002, Two Hundred Grand Piano Books, 293 pages)).

Whereas Remalcoole’s Watermelon found an eloquence in seedless descriptions of Oregonian-Taiwanese gardens in the 1950s and 1960s, and Acorn tended towards self-indulgence with its two hundred fifty-eight snapshots of an oak tree leaf, Squash captures that perfect balance of summer and winter.

From the opening chapters of Squash, as the aptly named Ann and Dave meander through the vegetable section of the second largest flea market in Tucson, we are compelled to wonder whether their marriage will outlast dinner.

Dave, 41, chooses each squash with such care and Ann, 39, speaks so endearingly of November, that we can almost picture them as psychology graduate students at the New London Graduate School of Artifacts and Gourds. Remalcoole has a knack for capturing the passion that Ann and Dave share for squash, their mutual disdain for broccoli and celery sticks, and their fierce lobbying for ordinances to put a squash on every dish in town. (In fact, rumor has it that the first title of the book was The Carrot Lobby.)

This passion jump starts the unlikeliest of festivals -- a three day feast in Tintleabre Square, attended by the most discrete gardeners and chefs of all thirty-one political parties. Many edicts were signed and comprehended. But it is only through Remacoole's description of honeydew that we know love is possible. Seven stars.

Kundiman - Letter from Executive Director Sarah Gambito

2009-03-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

As you (may) know, Kundiman is playing an important role in the literary world of the U.S. By initiating a summer retreat for Asian American poets five years ago, it has opened doors of opportunity that were previously closed to young poets of the Asian diaspora. Through intensive workshopswith renowned poets and the enthusiastic support from staff and peers, the amount and excellence of their output is phenomenal.

Kundiman Fellows have published poems in The Virginia Quarterly Review,The Colorado Review, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review and Crab Orchard Review. They are attending MFA and doctoral programs at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, New York University, Stanford University, The University of Houston, and The University of California, Berkeley. Three Kundiman fellows have gone on to publish full-length collections of poetry.

What you may not know is how important this program has been in the development of lives of the poets themselves. I'd like to share quotes from just two of the Fellows and I invite you to read the testimonies of others on our website http://www.kundiman.org/. Also, please see Janine Oshiro's essay on her experience at the Kundiman retreat here: http://www.oregonhum.org/i-spy.php

Months after this year's Kundiman retreat, I am still left wondering whether the most intensely beautiful experience, short of falling in love, was an accidental happenstance of a meeting of more than 20 poet-minds atvarious stages of our writing development; or the intricate design of the driven and artful, purposeful and generous, tactical and loving staff, guest faculty and board of Kundiman. The camaraderie, peer review, professional insight and instruction, mutual support, lack of sleep and utter kindness and friendship fired up the most remote synapses of mybrain and my deepest heartstrings. But why qualify the impact of Kundiman? I did fall in love with my fellow poets, their exquisite analyses of my work and each of their unique poetic voices. I'm both humbled and proud to be a small part of this growing family of writers whoeven today, are shaping the poetry of tomorrow.--Debbie Yee

As soon as I arrived, I was greeted so warmly as if I was among old friends! I felt at home among complete strangers. Here was a group of dynamic people who shared both my struggles being a writer of color inAmerica and my passions: a deep devotion to the art of poetry. I've always heard, read, and spoken about the importance of community in anyartistic endeavor. The poet's road can be a lonely one; the drifting heart needs its anchors. But I never realized how empowering a community of artists could be until I spent four days at UVA with the Kundimanstaff, teachers, and fellows. I found there what I failed to in any other poetry workshop I've taken: a deep respect and honor among poets; a desire to talk about race, identity, and history, in conjunction with one's composition process; and a willingness to be brave. --Brynn Saito

We are turning to you to ask for your help in insuring that the 6th Kundiman Summer Retreat can take place, to replace funds that we received in the past but that are not available this year because of budget cuts. The $4,000 we need will go toward direct costs of the retreat's faculty and staff travel and faculty honoraria. Again this year, Kundiman staff members will donate their time to coordinate and administer all the stages required to carry out the five day session.

What we ask, we ask for the program itself and for the brave and gifted poets it serves.Poet by poet, Kundiman is helping to change the face of American literature and what it means to document an important part of the American story. We need the certain light of poetry all the more in these uncertain times. With your help, we will continue to light the way for the next generation of Asian American writers.

Please click here to donate: http://www.kundiman.org/%5BCLB%5D_Brightside/1.Source/donate.html Please, also, do forward this widely.

Sincerely,
Sarah Gambito

On Bamboo Ridge Press

2009-03-20T23:02:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has run a small to mid-sized publishing press will tell you, it is not the easiest endeavor. The successful ones are real labors of love. One of the most successful publishing presses in the field of Asian-American poetry is Bamboo Ridge Press, which was founded in 1978 and focuses on literature by and about the people of Hawaii.

I particularly like Bamboo Ridge Press's website. Like the most ambitious websites, this one is multifaceted, containing useful features such as an online bookstore, upcoming literary events in Hawaii, blogs by Bambook Ridge Press staff and site members, podcasts, videos, a photo gallery and news about the press itself. In my humble opinion, it is definitely worth checking out!

Review of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond

2008-04-26T22:55:00.000-07:00

Over the past year, I have eagerly anticipated the publication of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar, W.W. Norton, 2008, 734 pp.). Sometimes when you eagerly anticipate the delivery of a new book on the virtual doorstep of your local transnational online bookseller, the work itself does not meet your lofty expectations, but I am happy to say that I am delighted with Language for a New Century, which is a triumph on so many levels.

I think that the anthology greatly benefits from Carolyn Forche's foreword, Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar's preface, and each of Tina Chang's, Nathalie Handal's, and Ravi Shankar's short personal essays before each section, which are elegantly written and effectively contextualize the geographical, linguistic, national, and thematic terrain of the poetry. The preface thoroughly outlines the selection criteria for poems in the anthology: 1) a broad definition of "the East", 2) representation of a broad selection of countries and nationalities, 3) the definition of "contemporary poetry" as post-1946, 4) a broad representation of various schools/styles of poetry, 5) a balance of emerging and established poets from different generations, 6) the selection of many different aesthetic sensibilities, 7) the publication of at least one book, with limited exceptions, and 8) the inclusion of translations. In the preface, the editors also explain the organization of the poems into nine major thematic sections -- characterized by Forche in her excellent foreword as "childhood, selfhood, experimentation, oppression, mystery, war, homeland and exile, spiritual life, love and sexuality, from Afghanistan to Yemen" (p. xxxi). Elegant touches like the inclusion of a country index and language list, along with more traditional features like author, translator, and editor biographies, permissions acknowledgments, and a general index (along with an explanation of the rationale behind the inclusion of a country index) further exemplify the wonderful editing. In short, I think that the editors have organized the anthology clearly, intelligently, and thougtfully.

Yet while clear, intelligent, and thoughtful, the anthology is also bold, ambitious, and makes major claims about the natures and meanings of Asian and Asian-American poetry. A reader should not simply dismiss the book as a coffee-table anthology. Each of the eight criteria for inclusion noted above, though I tend to agree with all of them, raises such difficult questions as, 1) why does the "East" not include more of Europe or Africa?, 2) what about Caucasian or African-American poets who were raised in Asia or have lived in Asia for a long time, who write about Asia extensively in their poetry, or who have written poems in such forms as haiku, ghazals, or pantoums?, 3) does the inclusion of poets from so many different nationalities necessarily exclude certain poets from "overrepresented" nationalities (like Indian and Chinese poets) from having a poem appear in the anthology? I think that the editors correctly do not raise such questions in the preface, as it would have probably lengthened and disrupted the flow of the preface, but I think that such questions are worth considering in a careful reading of the anthology.

Perhaps all of these questions point to, in my opinion, one of the most interesting and provocative elements of the anthology, which is the "effort to include as many crucial voices as possible" and to do so by "cho[osing] one poem per poet" (xxxvii). I think that the editors do successfully accomplish the important goal of including as many poets as possible, though at times, that causes the anthology to have the effect of feeling like The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics in the sense that the inclusion of just one poem -- as opposed to several poems per poet, as was done in The Open Boat (ed. Garrett Hongo) and Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation (ed. Victoria Chang) anthologies -- may limit our understanding and appreciation of the work of any particular poet. But I feel for the editors here, as the inclusion of more than one poem from a given poet would probably have led either to a volume of an unmanageable size or to the exclusion of certain poets from the anthology. I think that the editors made a justfiable decision in limiting the number of poems per poet, but it must not have been easy. One almost wants this anthology, as in the tradition of the first Star Wars trilogy, to have a volume II and volume III. At any rate, just as The New Princeton Encyclopedia remains a comprehensive and necessary work for any poet or student of poetry, at least partly by virtue of its thoroughness, so does Language for a New Century.

As far as the poems themselves go, I would make the highly subjective and throughly unjustifiable claim that they generally are quite terrific. This claim is "highly subjective and thoroughly unjustifiable," because there are just so many poets and poems! There are over 400 poems in the anthology, and I think that any generalization of the poems as a whole would be an overgeneralization. But I have already greatly enjoyed reading many of the poems and will probably be discussing at least a few of them on this blog. I would add that I think that the fact that there were three different editors with different tastes really strengthens this anthology by allowing for an even more diverse array of poetic styles and sensibilities. Language for a New Century possesses the beauty of a freshly assembled five-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.

So, in short, I highly recommend Language for a New Century, which I think is an essential work for anyone, and not just anyone interested in Asian-American poetry, to have on their bookshelves.

Brief Thoughts on Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry

2008-04-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

On his blog, Glenn Ingersoll recently made a few nice posts on various poems in Premonitions: the Kaya anthology of new Asian North American poetry (1995), edited by Walter Lew. Premonitions is one of the most ambitious Asian-American poetry anthologies out there and a landmark collection in Asian and Asian-American poetry.

The Price of Language for a New Century

2008-04-20T00:52:00.000-07:00

I have to give props to W.W. Norton & Company for pricing the 734-page anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, at the very reasonable price of $27.95. In fact, Amazon is currently selling the book for $18.95. I feel that Norton made a smart decision in publishing the anthology as a paperback, and I think that the relatively inexpensive price of the anthology will encourage more people to buy it.

Even though I imagine (just as I imagine that the grass is green) that not every publisher has the financial resources of a W.W. Norton, it always irks me a little when a publisher does something like price a fifty-page chapbook for $39.95 or a hardcover anthology for $79.95. There is a legitimate argument that the "free market" can dictate the pricing of books, but I think that it's better not to price out potential readers (e.g., college students with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans) by overpricing a book of poems in the first place.

It Is a Real Gift to Love

2008-04-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

After close to a twelve month hiatus from my blog, I am back! In my absence, here is a lesson that I have learned: it is a real gift to love. To love Asian-American poetry, any kind of poetry, or any kind of art is a blessing. It is to feel that indefinable joy that most of us crave but can experience only fleetingly. Some of us try to grasp at this je-ne-sais-quoi by resorting to the deification of consumer goods, theme park vacations, or cliches like cigarettes or alcohol. But, at least in my humble estimation, these temporal stopgaps can never quite compete with that ethereal love of art.

It is a real gift to be able to share my thoughts on Asian-American poetry through this blog. I feel lucky to be living in a time of blogs. When I started this weblog way back in December 2004, I was greatly inspired to blog by the then-recent publication of Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation (edited by Victoria Chang, 2004). Similarly, my return has been greatly motivated by the recent publication of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar, 2008), which I plan to comment upon extensively in the days and weeks ahead. Also, hark, methinks that Li-Young Lee has a new collection of poems out as well, his first in seven years and his fouth overall, and I plan on getting around to blogging about it as well.

On Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station"

2007-04-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

Whenever I want to experience the life force that poetry can provide, I often turn to the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. While a poem like Bishop's "The Moose" may be grander in scope, and a poem like Bishop's "One Art" may be more technically ambitious, I find a poem like Bishop's "Filling Station" more emotionally rich and satisfying. In a way, it is kind of like the As Good As It Gets of Bishop's poetry.

In "Filling Station," Bishop details the everyday particularities of "a family filling station" with Norman Rockwellian precision in six stanzas with six or seven lines each and an ending couplet. Aside from the second stanza, which alludes to a father and his "several quick and saucy/ and greasy sons," the poem is focused on setting and, more specifically, the objects in that setting, including "a cement porch/ behind the pumps," "a big dim doily/ draping a taboret," and, of course, as only Bishop would phrase it, "a big hirsute begonia."

I like the "Filling Station," in particular, because it embodies many different, overlapping yet conflicting, ideas and emotions. It demonstrates the richness of humanity, optimistically suggesting that people can enact their love through quotidian rituals and, as the final line goes, that "Somebody loves us all."

First -- and I want to highlight this point first, because I think that critics typically have not noted it -- the poem is not only serious but humorous as well. Some might not think of Bishop as a humorist, but I think that the poem shows that she clearly has a sense of humor. There are the lines with the overtly witty double meanings to demonstrate the cleverness of the speaker herself -- "quick and saucy/ and greasy sons," comic books that "provide the only note of color --/ of certain color," "somebody waters the plant/, or oils it, maybe." Then there is Bishop the poet herself with her use of vivid, over-the-top adjective-noun combinations like "oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing over-all black translucency," "high-strung automobiles," and of course, our lovely "hirsute begonia."

Then there is Bishop making that certain kind of smart, poet inside-joke with her characterization of "the doily" -- "Embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerities, I think, and heavy with grey crochet" -- as if proclaiming, "I am an Elizabeth the Poet," with the talent and ability to write circles around other poets. Indeed, I would characterize this description of "the doily," which is as "extraneous" as the "extraneous plant" (i.e. the begonia) and as "extraneous" as the depiction of the begonia itself, as the equivalent of a Michael Jordan wagging his tongue while leaping from the foul line for a slam dunk. No real need for it, but you've got to give your props -- if only we could all write like Bishop.

Second, and related, Bishop consciously infuses the speaker of the poem with a voice that is at once haughty and humble, which is as difficult a combination to pull off as serious and humorous. Bishop is clearly aware of issues of class and gender here. Her speaker self-consciously partakes in an upper/upper-middle class, stylized, self-consciously feminine way of talking, using phrases and words like "all quite thoroughly dirty," "crushed and grease-impregnated wickerwork," "a taboret," "embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerites," "embroidered the doily," and, of course, let us not forget our "hirsute begonia." These fancy objects -- e.g., taboret, begonia, and doily -- seem almost out of place in an oil-soaked family filling station.

But the key word is almost. The speaker never states that they are out of place, instead posing the questions of "Why the extraneous plant?," "Why the taboret?," "Why, oh why, the doily?" and answering that "somebody" put them there and that "Somebody loves us all." Essentially, Bishop is saying that they do have their place in the filling place, and their presence exemplifies the presence of love. Love is exemplified through the simple particularities of everyday life -- a wicker sofa, a dirty dog, comic books, a taboret, and yes, even a hirsute begonia.

It is like what John Ashbery says in "Some Trees" -- "That their merely being there/ Means something," except that Bishop uses the anaphora, "somebody," in suggesting the importance of the things having been "embroidered," "water[ed]" or "arrange[d]" there by someone -- perhaps the mother or grandmother of the household. The poem thus suggests that the presumption that there are "male" settings that may exist without women, or the presumption that classes of upper class and working class people may be discretely separated, is wrong. "Somebody," a presumably upper class woman, has helped fashion the space of the filling station and at least coexists with the working class men there. Furthermore, this "Somebody," in her own particular way, brings a different kind of generative love that enlivens the filling station, just as the father and his sons enliven it in their own way, and thus "the rows of cans/ [may] softly say: ESSO--SO--SO--SO."

At any rate, what does this poem have to do with Asian-American poetry? (Why, just about everything!) But in all seriousness, transitioning from the previous couple paragraphs and making my third and last point here, I think that "Filling Station" deals profoundly with questions of identity and belonging. Practically every noun in the poem is trying to find its place in the filling station, and by extension, I would say that Bishop is suggesting that we are all trying to find our own niche in a flawed but beautiful world. Our beauty, and the beauty of the world around us, comes from funny, silly, quirky, charming, vivid specificities that make us diverse and unique. We are often both out of place and in place at the same time, as "the dirty dog" and the "greasy sons" exist in the same space with a "doily/ draping a taboret" and the "Somebody" who "embroidered" it. While the taboret, begonia, and doily may seem out of place at first glance, they actually have their own place and are essential to the existence of the filling station.

Be it the speaker with the haughty vocabulary, the parent in a dirty monkey suit, Bishop herself, anyone of any race, and the reader of the poem, "Somebody loves us all." Sometimes, I think that this ending is too simple and pat, but at other times, I feel that this poem earns this ending by showing us the love in the previous six stanzas and one line. There is a kind of reconciliation of the diverse elements of the poem, and I enjoy the generosity of this line and the poem as a whole.

Asian American Writers' Workshop and Cave Canem Workshop

2007-02-24T08:17:00.000-08:00

Thursday, March 8th, 7pm

A Celebration of Poetry with Cave Canem and Asian American Writers' Workshop

The Asian American and African American communities gather for a night of brilliant poetry and music. Readings by Elizabeth Alexander, Justin Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Linda Susan Jackson, Gregory Pardlo, Vijay Seshadri and the musical stylings of Patrick Rosal in collaboration with Aracelis. Curated by Tina Chang and Tracy K. Smith

Elizabeth Alexander's collections of poetry include Antebellum Dream Book (Graywolf Press, 2001), Body of Life (1996), and The Venus Hottentot (1990). Her poems, short stories, and critical writing have been widely published in such journals and periodicals as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and The Washington Post, and her work is anthologized in over twenty collections. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago, and the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Justin Chin is the author of Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard, and three collections of essays, Burden of Ashes, Attack of the Man-eating Lotus Blossoms, and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks. His newest collection is Gutted (Manic D Press).

Kimiko Hahn's seven books of poems include The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award, and most recently, The Narrow Road to the Interior. In this new volume, she collects work inspired by the Japanese forms, tanka and zuihitsu; the title, itself, comes from Basho's famous poetic journal, Okunohosomichi. She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA program at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Linda Susan Jackson's first collection of poems, What Yellow Sounds Like, was a finalist in the 2006 National Poetry Series Competition and will be published by Tia Chucha Press in Spring 2007. She has published two chapbooks, Vitelline Blues and A History of Beauty. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Brilliant Corners, Asheville Poetry Review, Gathering Ground, Heliotrope, Los Angeles Review, Rivendell, Warpland, and Brooklyn Review 21 among other journals and has been featured on From the Fishouse audio archive. She is an Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair of the English Department at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.

Gregory Pardlo is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Calalloo, Lyric, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Volt, Black Issues Book Review and on National Public Radio. He teaches creative writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant with his wife and daughter. His manuscript, Totem, was chosen by Brenda Hillman for the American Poetry Review/ Honickman First Book Prize and will be published Sept. 2007.

Patrick Rosal is the author of two full length-collections of poetry, My American Kundiman and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. The closest he got to conservatory was secretly struggling with first species counterpoint during the graveyard shift of his second job at 19. He once jammed with Max Roach -- and was terrible.

Vijay Seshadri's collections of poems include James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street,
10th Floor (btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
$5 suggested donation

Reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library

2007-01-27T23:53:00.000-08:00

Tina Chang (Half-Lit Houses), Srikanth Reddy (Facts for Visitors), Victoria Chang (Circle, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation) will be reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC on January 29th. The event will be introduced and moderated by Joseph Legaspi of Kundiman. Please see http://www.folger.edu/woSummary.cfm?woid=329 for details.

2007 Asian American Kundiman Poetry Retreat at the University of Virginia

2007-01-24T01:05:00.000-08:00

KUNDIMAN ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY RETREAT
The University of Virginia, Charlottesville
June 20 – 24, 2007

In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman is sponsoring an annual Poetry Retreat at The University of Virginia. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets will conduct workshops and provide one-on-one mentorship sessions with participants. Readings and informal social gatherings will also be scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 5-day Retreat will take place from Wednesday to Sunday. Workshops will be conducted fromThursday to Saturday. Workshops will not exceed six students.

Faculty

Myung Mi Kim’s books of poems include Commons (University of California Press), DURA (Sun & Moon), The Bounty (Chax Press), and Under Flag, winner of the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award (Kelsey St. Press). Anthology appearances in Asian-American Literature: An Anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and other collections. Honors include a residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and awards from The Fund for Poetry. She is Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won top prizes in the 1993, 1994 and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken WordRevolution and Slam. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, PBS’ “In The Life” and MTV’s “Free Your Mind” Spoken Word Tour. Regie is the recipient of the 10th annual Writers for Writers Award sponsored by Poets & Writers and has received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multi-Disciplinary Performance.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (subpress books, 2000) and The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004). Her work has also appeared in Agni, Art Asia Pacific, Boston Review, Combo, Fence, Indiana Review, Women’s Review of Books and other periodicals. She received her MFA in poetry from Brown University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School.

Fees

To keep the cost of the retreat low for all participants, fees are not charged for workshops or programming. Thus, all accepted applicants are given an automatic tuition scholarship. Room and Board for the entire retreat is $300.

Application Process

Send five to seven (5-7) paginated, stapled pages of poetry, with your name included on each page. Include a cover letter with your name, address, phone number, e-mail address and a brief paragraph describing what you would like to accomplish at the Kundiman Asian American Poets’ Retreat. Include a SAS postcard if you want an application receipt.

Manuscripts will not be returned. No electronic submissions, please.

Mail application to: Kundiman 245 Eighth Avenue #151 New York, NY 10011.

Submissions must be postmarked by March 1, 2007.

For more info, please visit: http://www.kundiman.org/index.php?id=4

Two Poems by Jake Ricafrente

2007-01-17T20:49:00.000-08:00

Before the most recent issue of MiPOesias, I don't think I quite appreciated the concept of "discovering" "undiscovered" talent in poetry, which many poetry editors have expressed as one of the most enjoyable aspects of choosing poems for publication. It wasn't that I thought that these editors were paying lip-service to the idea. I imagine that such "discoveries" must happen. All poets have to start somewhere, and there are many different kinds of beginnings, from a first publication in a literary journal to a first award/prize received to a first collection of poems.

But pretty much all the poets whose poems I have come across in literary journals, anthologies, or books were poets who had already had numerous publication credits before, if not one or a few collections of poems published. It is seldom that I read the poetry of a fairly new poet and come away feeling very confident that this poet will someday be published in many literary magazines, have an excellent first collection of poetry with a major publisher, and receive many accolades from various organizations and publications.

I had exactly such a feeling, however, upon reading the two poems of Jake Ricafrente published in the Asian-American issue of MiPOesias. While I'm familiar with the poetry of most of the poets in this issue, the Asian-American poetry world not being unimaginably large, I had never come across any of Ricafrente's work before. Now I think that there are many great poems in this issue, but I feel that Ricafrente's two poems achieve an unmistakable quality of transcendence, like the best poems of Adrienne Su -- and I chose to mention Su here, because Ricafrente's "White Plastics" reminds me of Su's "Savannah Crabs."

Reading the first poem, "Concerning Glass," I perceive it as the more ambitious of the two poems, even though the latter is more technically accomplished. Consisting of four stanzas, the poem successfully takes on the difficult task of drawing out the different facets of a single word (glass, in this case) through an entire poem, while at the same time it is also an "Asian/Asian-American poem" in the sense that it makes oblique references to the Asian race/ethnicity/nationality of the speaker in various stanzas.

More specifically, I think that the second stanza is the poem's strongest, because it so deftly transitions from a broken glass to the speaker's "father's dog" to the "crass vet" to the speaker's "last good teacher" to a detailed description of the teacher's eye and the speaker's reaction to it. These shifts, akin to shifts in memory, are done through original turns of phrase and sharply detailed descriptions. Throughout the poem, there are many brilliant lines. I would say, however, that I think the first stanza should have started with the third line, as "Light's the thing that," instead of with references to bending light. Perhaps the sight of light bending through glass inspired the first draft of the poem, but the opening two lines distracted me a bit by self-consciously pointing to the notion that many other poems contain references to "bending light" and drawing attention to it as a cliche. My favorite lines in the poem are the final eight lines or so in the last stanza, which flow naturally from the rest of the poem, are well-earned, and make me think of the best work of Davis McCombs and Marilyn Chin.

I really like the second poem, "White Plastics," as well. It does two separate things together perhaps as well as I've come across in any poem -- it shows great skill in the use of classical forms, while at the same time, it is also a fascinating meditation on racial identity. First, I found the poem very techncially accomplished. It is written in blank verse, composed of rhyming couplets, and appears to be a kind of variation on the sonnet, though it contains eighteen lines. Second, the speaker of the poem seems to be someone of mixed race, and the poem basically deals with the experiences of the speaker upon encountering himself as "the other" by some members of his family.

Here is my reading of the narrative of the poem. Everything is superficially idyllic, but the speaker is aware of this superficiality. The speaker suddenly becomes aware of himself as a "half-breed, some percent/ of full." There is a festive dinner in Poughkeepsie, perhaps Thanksgiving dinner, with the "white" side of his family. The food is great and the speaker is enjoying himself, but the "white" members of his family "gather round to scout" him and his brown skin as if he were a foreigner. The speaker feels "other-ed" by this experience and presents the profound question of whether it is better to assimilate or to take pride in one's racial/ethnic heritage in a multicultural American society. To a certain extent, the speaker cannot fully answer this question on his own -- and by extension, none of us can fully answer this question on our own -- because our experiences as individuals are formed and mediated by our histories and communities. The "Pilgrims" are an essential part of the speaker's language of history, just as the aunts who may perceive him at least partly on the basis of his skin color are a part of his family. There are hugs, and there is some measure of acceptance, even though this acceptance is one that must be negotiated.

At any rate, that was my reading of "White Plastics." I thought that both of Jake Ricafrente's poems were quite successful, filled with heart and wit and effectively balancing narrative and lyricism, and I look forward to reading more of his poetry in the future.

MiPOesias Magazine 2007 - Asian-American Issue

2007-01-13T15:24:00.000-08:00

The Asian-American issue of MiPOesias Magazine has just come out, officially commencing what I think will be an exciting year in Asian-American poetry. Edited by Nick Carbo, it marks the first collection of Asian-American poets since the publication of Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004, ed. Victoria Chang) and, by the end of the year, we should see the publication of Contemporary Voices from the East: An Anthology of Poems (W.W. Norton, 2007, eds. Tina Chang, Ravi Shankar, and Nathalie Handal) as well.

This issue also represents the continuing efforts of MiPOesias, run by publisher Didi Menendez, to feature the work of a racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse range of poets with aesthetically diverse styles of writing. In my admittedly biased opinion, MiPOesias represents the best of independent poetry publishing. Through the dedication of Didi Menendez, Amy King, Jenni Russell, and many guest editors, poets, and readers, it has remained open to an incredibly broad range of contemporary poets and become increasingly successful over the past seven years. I'm highlighting this point, because it is never easy to run a great poetry publication, and I think that the people "behind the scenes," so to speak, seldom get sufficient recognition and credit, which they deserve, because they play such an important role in shaping the present and future of poetry.

Examples of Poems by Cathy Song

2006-12-20T00:11:00.000-08:00

The Poetry Foundation has a nice sampling of poems by Cathy Song. I think that poems like "Ikebana," "Leaving," and "The White Porch" are especially good examples of Song's ability to render precise and original images.

The Poetry of Cathy Song

2006-12-15T17:21:00.000-08:00

In comments on a previous post, Glenn Ingersoll mentions the Asian-American poet Cathy Song, perhaps most well-known for winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award with Picture Bride (Yale University Press, 1983). At the time, no Asian-American poet had received such a prestigious honor, and the selection of her book by poet Richard Hugo represents a kind of landmark in Asian-American poetry. But I think that Song's place in Asian-American poetry, and contemporary American poetry, has remained at least somewhat puzzling, and in this post, I would like to discuss it.

In many respects, Song has had a remarkably successful career in poetry. She has continued to publish steadily since the publication of Picture Bride. She has come out with three books of poetry after Picture Bride -- Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (W.W. Norton, 1989), School Figures (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), and The Land of Bliss (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001) -- with major publishers. (At the current rate, I would not be too surprised if her fifth book of poetry comes out within the next couple years or so.) She has received such accolades as the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, the Hawaii Award for Literature, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. She has played a key role in the success of Bamboo Ridge Press, which was founded "to publish literature by and about Hawaii's people."

But even as the publications and accolades have piled up, Song has received comparably less recognition in Asian-American poetry and contemporary poetry. I want to look historically here for a possible explanation. Cathy Song's Picture Bride (1983), Li-Young Lee's Rose (1986), and Garrett Hongo's River of Heaven (1982) were perhaps the three most prominent Asian-American books of poetry published in the 1980s. I think that there were many similarities between these three books. The poems in each of these volumes drew heavily on a narrative style, used concrete images, tended not to be surreal, discussed immigrant experiences in America, seemed at least somewhat concerned with identity politics, and sought to develop an "Asian-American" poetics by evoking the race/ethnicity of the poet/narrator/protagonist.

I think that most people would agree that, for better or worse, Asian-American poetry did not adhere to this relatively unified schemata but instead has fragmented into many different poetries among many different schools of poetry over the past couple decades. In other words, Song's vision of "Asian-American poetry," at least as expressed through her poetry, has not become the dominant one but one of many visions. In my opinion, Asian-American poetry, as it currently stands, is fairly kaliedoscopic.

However, I think that the general move away from narrative poetry does not completely explain Song's lack of popular and critical recognition. I now want to compare and contrast Cathy Song and Li-Young Lee. They are about the same age. They were both educated at universities in parts of the United States with relatively small Asian-American populations -- Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport, while Song received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. Their first books came out at about the same time. Most importantly, at least in my opinion, the best poems in Picture Bride (1983) are as powerful as the best poems in Rose (1986), with an exuberance, originality, and attention to detail that has not been surpassed in Asian-American narrative poetry since that epoch of belief and incredulity known as the 1980s.

So why has Li-Young Lee received more popular and critical attention than Song? I can think of at least three reasons. First, Lee has publicized his poetry more to Americans on the mainland. While Song returned to her native state of Hawaii after receiving her M.A. in creative writing and has remained there, Lee has toured many parts of the United States, teaching at different universities and taking part in various speaking engagements. Second, Song has never quite been able to "escape" the labels of "female," "Asian-American," and "Hawaiian" poet, which can often piegonhole a woman poet of color. I put "escape" in quotes there, because I think that Song has not attempted to avoid but actually, to her credit, embraced her diverse identitites -- for example, read her remarks in this Honolulu Star-Bulletin article, http://starbulletin.com/2001/02/05/features/story1.html.

Third and related, Song's poetry and Lee's poetry have taken different directions since the publication of their first volumes. While Lee's poems have shifted away from the identity-oriented concerns of his earlier works, Song's poems have consistently remained in the realm of identity politics. One might say that Song remains comfortable with the ideas and themes of her previous poems and, perhaps unlike Lee, has basically continued to write the same types of poems as in that well-known first volume.

While I think that Song's poetry may not quite be in vogue among some contemporary Asian-American poets, I respect Song's adherence to a consistent vision and style of poetry, believe that her poetry still has a lot of relevance, and feel that her poetry should receive greater popular and critical attention. I also think that that there are some Asian-American poets who have been, and will continue be, influenced by her various poems -- especially since her poems have been oft-anthologized and have an important place in American poetry.

A Review of The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry

2006-11-08T01:10:00.000-08:00

If you keep a blog on "Asian-American poetry," then I think that the chances are fairly decent that you would read Xiaojing Zhou's The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2006) -- the first published book-length critical study of Asian-American poetry. When I started this blog, I pointed out that no full-length study of Asian-American poetry had ever been published, and much to my approval and delight, that fact has now changed.

Also to my delight is the fact that Zhou's The Ethics and Poetics is a real tour de force. In characterizing the book as a "tour de force," I mean that Zhou illustrates her central thesis -- "in developing a poetics of alterity that insists on confronting social injustice against the other and exploring the ethics and aesthetics of otherness, Asian American poets demonstrate that their transformation and displacement of the lyric I engage with broader issues than merely the poetic" (pp. 275-76) -- with real persuasiveness and intelligence. It's a difficult thesis. I read Zhou as claiming that Asian-American poets have transformed "the traditional lyric I, the lyric voice, and the lyric form" (p. 20) into a poetics that is more conscious of the "we" and the "you" aspects of human relations, that is more engaged with philosophical questions concerning otherness and the self.

Zhou demonstrates this thesis through an exploration of the work of seven Asian-American poets -- Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, David Mura, Kimiko Hahn, Timothy Liu, John Yau, and Myung Mi Kim -- "moving from autobiographical and confessional poems where the lyric speaker is central, to surrealist and Language poems where the poet-I as the lyric I is replaced by multiple voices of other, and the lyric voice gives way to impersonal, hybrid, and other-sounding patterns" (pp. 20-21). She divides the book into seven chapters, exploring the work of one poet in each chapter, and adds an introduction and conclusion. I found the book very well-organized, and it covers a diverse range of poetic traditions.

Perhaps the greatest quality of the book is Zhou's perceptive readings of the poems themselves. Over and over again, she uses the pattern of describing a particular poem, quoting excerpts from the poem itself, and then analyzing the excerpts. She usually analyzes the poem in light of her aforementioned central thesis, but she does not push it to the degree of rendering her assertions incongrous with the text. The points do not become forced or repetitive, but instead, they provide us with greater insight into the poetry itself. The book contains quite a few wonderful readings of various poems.

While I enjoyed the book, I will point to several issues that I had with it as well, many of which may be addressed in a future edition of the book. First, I found my asking the question, "Why these poets?" While I understand the necessity of limiting the number of poets, if only for reasons of space, I think that Zhou should have explained the reasons that she believes that these particular poets' works exemplify "Asian American poetry," given that there are dozens of other Asian-American poets whose works she potentially could have selected for this volume. Second and related, I would say that the book would have been stronger with poets from a wider range of ethnicities -- there are four Chinese American poets, two Japanese American poets, and one Korean American poets. As is, perhaps a more appropriate term than "Asian American poetry" would have been "Asian Pacific American poetry." Third, I would have preferred that the book contain more information on Asian American history, the history of Asian American poetry, and contemporary Asian American society, but this point may be a minor one, because I know that you can only do so much in a limited amount of space, and I found the book's length to be quite appropriate at 312 pages. Fourth, I think that Zhou could have better explained her rationale for choosing the poems that she does select in light of the poet's larger body of work -- for example, she quotes heavily from John Yau's "Genghis Chan" poems, but many of Yau's poems do not engage in questions of Asian American identity, and it would have been interesting if there had been some compare and contrast between poems that are relatively more engaged with such issues of "otherness" and poems that are not as engaged with these issues. Fifth, especially since this book is the first published full-length study of Asian-American poetry, I think that it would have been better with more of a discussion on the reasons for having such a published volume of analysis on Asian American poetry at this point in time.

Let me pause for a moment here. The previous paragraph was relatively long. I want to say again that I think that this book is not only fascinating and well-written but groundbreaking. It's not easy to do "groundbreaking" work, because you face a lack of texts written before yours. Furthermore, there are not a lot of scholars of Asian-American poetry, which means that a professor like Zhou (or a PhD student) must deal with the issue of having relatively few people who would have read her text with much interest or expertise before its publication. As someone who has read and written on Asian-American poetry for years, I can sympathize. I think that the book stands as a pretty amazing accomplishment.

That said, I'll describe arguably my most important issue with the book here. It's not really a critique, and it has to do with the thesis. Basically, I wonder about the extent to which these Asian American poets' transformation of the lyric I to make it more engaged with philosophical questions of otherness is distinctive to Asian-American poetry. I am guessing that Zhou would assert that such an engagement is not distinctive to Asian-American poetry, because she notes the importance of the poetry of Asian-American poets to larger questions of feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and critical studies in race, gender, and culture in both her introduction and conclusion.

But the book is a study of Asian-American poetry, and I find myself asking, "To what extent do the poetics and poems of various contemporary non-Asian American poets engage in such innovations with the lyric I?" In other words, to what extent should this "Asian-American poetics of alterity" (p. 19) be adjudged as "Asian-American"? The very writing of this book strongly suggests that Zhou does think that Asian-American poetry is different from, for example, feminist poetry or African-American poetry or rural American poetry. Again, a more in-depth discussion of Asian-American history, the history of Asian-American poetry, and/or contemporary Asian-American society would probably have helped. I think that Zhou might even have provided her own working definition of "Asian-American poetry," even if it would have been subject to critique, or perhaps outlined multiple definitions of "Asian-American poetry," so readers could better understand her perspective in this respect.

As you may conclude from this rather involved discussion of The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry, I think that the book is a must-have for anyone who reads and enjoys Asian-American poetry. It's a very useful volume that belongs on the bookshelves of libraries, scholars of contemporary poetry, and readers of Asian-American poetry alike.

On the Goodness of Asian-American Poets

2006-11-06T00:52:00.000-08:00

In a recent column entitled, "Yes, We Have Role Models," Sports Illustrated writer Jon Wertheim writes that "the overwhelming majority" of people in the sport of tennis are "good people," pointing to the prevalence of such individuals as James Blake, Carlos Moya, Monica Seles. (I'm not sure whether Asian-American poetry aficionados would recognize all these names, but rest assured, they are well-known in the world of tennis.)

While Asian-American poets do not make millions, or even thousands or hundreds, in endorsement deals, I think that the same compliment may be directed towards them. I would say that the overwhelming majority of Asian-American poets are good people. By "good," I mean something akin to Wertheim's observation that world number one tennis player Roger Federer "will return from his matches to write a thoughtful, entertaining blog for this tour's website" -- that is, most Asian-American poets are kind and generous with their time and are not opposed to engaging in some dialogue with readers of their poetry.

Partly that has to do with the present state of Asian-American poetry. The other day, I was telling a friend that, in Asian-American poetry, unlike in fiction and non-fiction and perhaps poetry in general, no author is really so "big" as to be completely inaccessible to a scholar's or reader's letters or feedback on their writing. At the time, I was probably thinking of the "fame and money" factor, suggesting that no Asian-American poet has become so rich and famous through poetry as to, either through choice or neccessity, basically ignore the responses they get from readers of their work. The top poetry books generally just do not sell as well as the top fiction and non-fiction works.

But I have thought it over some more, and I think that the relative lack of fame and money cannot totally account for the "goodness" of Asian-American poets. For one thing, the leading Asian-American poets have achieved an analogous level of fame, such that one might presume that they could feel entitled to ignore scholars' requests to explain their poetry, for example. Yet, in Xiaojing Zhou's The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry, which I'll be reviewing and discussing on this blog, Zhou thanks all of the poets whose work she discusses in her book -- Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, David Mura, Kimiko Hahn, Timothy Liu, John Yau, and Myung Mi Kim "for taking the time to discuss their writings with [her] and to respond to [her] readings of their poems" (p. x). I found it kind of touching that these leading Asian-American poets would be open to discussions and scholarly analyses of their poetry.

My hypothesis here to account for the generosity of Asian-American poets with their time, especially with regards to such scholarly endeavors, is that the vast majority of Asian-American poets are interested in fostering the idea of "an Asian-American community." They are aware of their existence in American society as Asian-Americans and do care about other Asian-Americans. Participation in organizations like the Asian American Writers' Workshop and Kundminan count as another example of the willingness of many Asian-American poets to reach out to the community as a whole.

Collaborative Poetry

2006-10-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

In this post, I'd like to think more about collaborative poetry as it relates to Asian-American poetry. If one defines "collaborative poetry" as a poem or sequences of poems authored by two or more poets, I think that there is simply not much collaborative work in Asian-American poetry. I know that I've never come across a sequence of poems, or even a single poem, authored by two or more Asian-American poets, and I'm not sure if there are any such poems out there.

In general, one could say that there is and there isn't much collaboration in American poetry today. As I've defined collaborative poetry, there isn't too much of such work going on, especially on the level of book publishing, which makes Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar's Wanton Textiles, as well as the postcard poems of Tim Yu and Cassie Lewis, relatively unique works of art. But I would say that there is a lot of collaboration among poets in other forms -- for example, writing workshops and conferences, feedback from poetry editors, suggestions and critiques from other poets and friends. You could even expand this list and point out that poets live in societies and are greatly influenced by the time and place in which they live. I would thus assert that the notion that poems typically exist in some kind of "pure" form, uninfluenced by the opinions of other individuals, is somewhat overly romanticized and outdated. In this sense, I think that most poems are the products of a certain degree of collaboration among poets.

But in the less abstract sense of "collaborative poetry," I find it interesting that there is almost none of that happening in Asian-American poetry today. I think that it points to the importance of the individual in the generating of poetry, especially poems that are more personal in nature. But I also wonder whether such a lack of collaboration is essentially a byproduct itself of a particular tradition in contemporary American poetry that presumes a poem to have only one author and thus approaches collaborative poems with some measure of bewilderment. In other words, if you read enough poems in literary magazines that have only one author, pretty soon you presume that is the way that poetry works.

From both history and modernity, however, we know that there are different ways in which the art of poetry could and does work. In some Asian cultures, oral history is the primary means through which poetry is generated, shared, and passed down from generation to generation. The renga is a form of collaborative poetry that originated in Japan, and poets throughout the world continue to work in the form today. Then there is the whole concept of "postcard poetry" in which, in its simplest form, poets exchange poems on postcards, which may or may not touch upon specific geographic locales depending on the poets' definition of such poetry.

While I think that most poets who engage in collaborative poetry find it amusing and a nice change of pace, I also think that such work can and should be taken more seriously as well. There are many potential upsides to collaborative poetry -- it could point to similarities and contrasts in writing styles between two poets, work as a means to highlight different perspectives on particular issues, like matters involving race or ethnicity or gender, and help poets grow as authors and thinkers by showing them a different way of approaching a topic or theme.

On Wanton Textiles and Collaborative Chapbooks

2006-10-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006), a collaborative poetry chapbook by leading emerging American poets Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar, and it's an entertaining read. I imagine that if Regis and Kelly were ever to emcee at a Dadaist poetry festival, this is what they would say to the crowd of spools and yarn.

In this slim volume, the distinctive voices of Livingston and Shankar emerge unscathed as their personas exchange prose poems with each other. While both poets continue in the "avant-garde" tradition of poetry writing and seem at ease with surrealist techniques, I think that we essentially have a successful study in contrast. Even though one poet (Shankar) is Asian-American, while the other poet (Livingston) is not, I would say that gender is a more obvious proxy than race for the representation of "difference" here.

Livingston's passages are generally marked by her use of the second person "you," her relatively more personal voice, her plain speech, her directness, her observation of concrete, everyday objects, and her evocation of "feminine" reference points (e.g. "hosiery" (p. 9), "silk worms" (p. 9), "mermaid" (p. 11), "beautiful pinching stilettos" (p. 15), "grapefruit-scented" conditioner (p. 24)).

Shankar's passages are generally marked by his comfort with the third person, his preference for the abstract, his scattering of relatively obscure names and places, his use of long and/or difficult words (e.g. "multitudinous" (p. 14), "clairolfaction" (p. 14), "vestigial" (p. 19), "slabyard of recurrent camisoles" (p. 21), "entropy" (p. 23)), and a certain gender-neutrality that nevertheless still possesses qualities of a "masculine" voice.

I should note that I'm more familiar with Shankar's poetry than Livingston's. I haven't talked about my thoughts on Shankar's poetry on this blog before, so I'll do it quickly here. In my opinion, the greatest strength and weakness of Shankar's poetry is its intelligence. The poetry is often brilliant and eloquent. It's often "erudite," so to speak. The voice, vocabulary, and tone are somewhat like Vijay Seshadri's or John Yau's. There's an implied skepticism towards the personal and/or confessional and not too much of an everyman feel to the poetry. There's usually no obvious invocation of the poet's race. In short, this isn't the work of Adrienne Su or Li-Young Lee here.

I was particularly fascinated by the fact that Shankar largely kept his usual voice, as described previously, but also expanded it in response to Livingston's passages in certain lines. To note just a few of Shankar's lines that break from the prevalent rhythms of abstractness: "Let's stretch together, sky, breasts/ silhouettes, our own recognizable heads/ unnumbered and damp upon the grass" (p. 26), "Nothing doing./ Not a single train has left the station/ grown over with snarling vetch, sandwich wrappers," (p. 23). At times, there's a shifting of gears here towards relatively simple, plain, everyday talk, and what an admirer of Adrienne Su or Li-Young Lee's poetry might characterize as charming.

I'm bringing up this point, because it suggests one of the great potentials of collaborative poetry chapbooks. Collaboration can lead to shifts in a poet's style and add to a poet's repetoire. The back-and-forth between two poets makes each think about his or her work in relation to the other poet's work. I think that I may blog more about collaboration in poetry as it relates to Asian-American poetry in a future post. But for now, I'll just say that Wanton Textiles represents a nice example of, and model for, a collaborative chapbook of poetry.

The Catalina Cariaga-Cultural Evidence Conundrum

2006-10-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days, I have been thinking about Catalina Cariaga's Cultural Evidence (1999). I first came across Cultural Evidence as a college student, and I must admit that I really did not understand it back then. More precisely, I didn't understand why something "like this" was even published and in our library. At around the same time, I had similar reactions to the poems of Myung-Mi Kim and John Yau, which generally bear a certain similiarity to Cariaga's in the sense that they are rather "avant-garde," may arguably classified as "language" poems, and often push the limits of form in poetry. At the time, these poems made relatively little sense to me.

Now I think that it is natural for people to gravitate towards certain "schools of poetry" and enjoy certain kinds of poetry more than others. But here is the thing -- I also think that we should challenge this natural inclination to, essentially, stick with the types of poems we like. It builds our capacity to relate to each other as readers of poetry, challenges our preconceptions regarding different schools of poetry, sharpens our minds and expands our perspectives on the possibilities of poetry, and may lead us to eventually discover that we like certain styles of poetry that we may not have in the past. On a related note, I also think that people should read within and outside of Asian-American poetry as well as both contemporary and non-contemporary poetry.

I wonder sometimes, though. I wonder whether my views on the importance of reading many different types of poetry might change in the future. The existence of the very phrase, "schools of poetry," suggests that it might. My experiences in general suggest that my sense of the importance in reading poetry broadly and historically may be in the minority here. It appears that the vast majority of poets and readers of poetry tend to "stick with what they like," so to speak.

And practically speaking, it makes a lot of sense. There are lots of poems to read. There are only so many hours in the day. There are only so many days in the year. We can only check a limited number of poetry books out of the library. We can't afford to buy every book of poetry out there. We have lives outside of poetry. It makes sense, on a practical level, to focus on the kinds of poetry that we intuitively feel we like and quickly move past the ones we don't. Also, by focusing on the poems that we have a certain affinity towards, we can read them in greater depth. We can arguably develop a greater understanding of that particular body of work.

In terms of relating this phenomenon to my own experience of reading poetry, one might call it the Catalina Cariaga-Cultural Evidence Conundrum. That is, to appreciate a text that I found challenging, like Cariaga's Cultural Evidence, I needed to put in more time and effort into it than I probably would have when reading a more accessible work of poetry. By putting more time and effort into it, I was perhaps spending less time on poems that I found easier and more enjoyable while not spending as much time developing a particular expertise in the poetry that I more naturally enjoyed.

But the conundrum presents itself in another form -- I would never have appreciated Cariaga's Cultural Evidence, if I had not been open-minded enough to return to the book. I would have missed out on a great piece of literature, and I would not have sharpened my skills as a reader. In fact, I'm glad that I stepped out of what had been my comfort zone as a poetry reader and took a more in-depth look at a genre of poetry whose importance I had not fully comprehended before.

In addition, by focusing on a particular "school of poetry" without making an effort to look outside this particular field, one risks not gaining sufficient insight into the very field itself. I find overspecialization somewhat worrisome, because it could breed complacency and lack of understanding of the more general context within which a school of poetry, or specialty, is situated. The ability to make cross-field comparisons can add to the quality of the reading and writing of "one's own school of poetry." A greater understanding of the diverse schools of poetry may lead to more innovation in both the scholarship on poetry and the writing of poems.

At this point in time, as a reader, I think that one of my goals is to read a wide range of poems to get a greater sense of the possibilities that are out there. At least in the forseeable future, I would like to remain open to the diversity in poetry and gain a better understanding of Asian-American poetry and beyond.

Asian-American Poets Not Named Li-Young Lee

2006-10-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

How many Asian-American poets do you know? You might be able to name Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Justin Chin, Garrett Hongo, Eileen Tabios, and Nellie Wong off the top of your head. You might think that you know most, if not practically all, of the Asian-American poets out there. But do you really?

On her blog, Barbara Jane Reyes recently made an insightful commentary on the general preoccupation with Li-Young Lee, and it made me think. It made me think that, for a greater understanding of Asian-American poetry, we should read a wider range of poets. It made me consider the possibility that all of us -- even Asian-American poets, even people who study Asian-American poetry closely -- may not know as much as we think we know, as far as appreciating the scope of Asian-American poetry goes.

There are at least several dilemmas with this lack of knowledge. First, it renders any of our assertions of "what Asian-American poetry is" less accurate, given that we have only a limited, partial view of this body of literature. Second, it prevents us from making comparisons between the poetry of, say, a "Justin Chin" and the poetry of a perhaps lesser known Asian-American poet. Third and related to the previous points, it makes progress in defining and comprehending "Asian-American poetry" (and perhaps in the writing of such poetry itself) more difficult. There may be a constant reinvention of the wheel, a swinging of the pendulum between "language" and "political/identity" poetry camps in both the poems themselves and the scholarship on the poems, fostering "schools of thought" that are not terribly original and cannot fully negotiate all the nuances of "Asian-American poetry."

Where am I going here? In the remainder of post, I want to introduce three Asian-American poets that we should know. I say, "introduce," because I have never come across a discussion of any of these poets, or any of their poems or books of poetry, on any poetry blog. In fact, I have very seldom encountered their names or poems anywhere and thus do not know much about their poetry. But I say, "we should know," because all three of these poets have something in common -- in the past seven or eight years, important publishers have published their first poetry collections.

It is somewhat of a puzzle to me that certain poets are more generally well-known than others. Does the popularity of the poet correlate with the perceived quality of the poetry? I really cannot say. I cannot say, because these poets have something else in common -- relatively few of their poems are online, which makes it difficult for me to form a judgment. Now I could buy their books, but the catch-22 here is that I actually do not know enough about their poetry to make an intelligent decision as to whether I should purchase them. Perhaps these poets and/or their publishers had not done quite enough in terms of publicity. Or perhaps it is those of us in the blogosphere who are behind the curve. I don't know. At any rate, I'd like to give their books of poetry another look with this post:

Arlene Biala: In 1999, West End Press published her first poetry collection, Continental Drift. Here is her biography: "Arlene Biala was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. Her poetry explores stories of the generations who have left their native lands to live in America, particularly Philipino/a people. A performance artist with an MFA from the New College of California in San Francisco, she has studied under poets Genny Lim, Juan Felipe Herrera, Margarita Luna Robles, David Meltzer, and Lyn Hejinian. She performs with her brothers, Jimmy Biala on percussion and Billy Biala on saxophone, throughout California. Her stark, tender, sensual and political poetry goes beyond chronological storytelling into the dance of simultaneous experiences called forth by tragedy, family, and love" (http://www.unmpress.com/Book.php?id=2160).

David Chin: In 2000, Mellen Poetry Press published his poetry collection, The China Cupboard and the Coal Furnace. Here is his biography: "David Chin grew up in Jersey City. He received his PhD in English from Binghamton University. His poetry appears in various journals, anthologies, and in a chapbook, Chalked in Orange (Mbira Press). He has been the recipient of a Clara Woo award" (http://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?aid=314&pc=10).

Richard Hamasaki: In 2001, the University of Hawaii Press published his poetry collection, From the Spider Bone Diaries: Poems and Songs. Here is his biography: "Richard Hamasaki's home is in Kane'ohe, on the island of O'ahu. He has published two poetry chapbooks, 7 Poems/8 Photographs (with brother Mark Hamasaki), and virtual fleality. Hamasaki co-produces a series of publications, including spoken word and music recordings, and he writes articles, reviews, and essays, as well as poetry" (http://www.amazon.com/Spider-Bone-Diaries-Poems-Songs/dp/0824825411/sr=1-2/qid=1160628428/ref=sr_1_2/104-5455499-2839160?ie=UTF8&s=books).

A Lack of Asian-American Lit Mags at Colleges and Universities, Part II

2006-10-01T01:02:00.000-07:00

A short while ago, I made a post commenting on the lack of Asian-American literary magazines at colleges and universities. And someone who came across the post recently asked me the following question: "I wonder if there is a way that an organization could be set up into helping campuses start their own Asian American lit mags?"

I thought it was an excellent but difficult question. I attempted an answer, and I am basing this post on the answer that I gave:

At this point, my best answer, which is not directly answering the question, is that I think that undergraduate and MFA students alike may start an Asian-American literary magazine without the existence of such a centralized organization -- by making the publication an online one. While it would be nice to have a print publication -- and personally, I like to read fiction and poetry on paper myself -- I think that an online publication would not only be more financially feasible but would most likely reach a wider audience than a print publication as well. Actually, I think that online lit mags are the wave of the future, even though print lit mags will never become completely obsolete.

It would definitely be nice if the college or university gives financial and/or infrastructural support to an Asian-American literary magazine, and I think that students should at least try to seek support from various sources at their respective colleges and universities. Possible sources of assistance include student organizations, faculty members, student governments, and the Dean's Office. In general, I would say that the broader the institutional support that an Asian-American literary magazine possesses, the more successful it will be and the longer it will last. It takes time and effort to start a lit mag, and if there are fiction and/or poetry student groups on campus, an undergrad or grad student who desires to start such a publication may want to contact members of these groups to find others willing to help out as editors and staff members. The Asian Student Associations at various colleges and universities are another potential source of funding and assistance.

Given the lack of Asian-American literary magazines out there, I would add that anyone who started such a publication at a university or college would be filling an important niche. Particularly if the Asian-American student population is not that large, I think that it may be a good idea to seek submissions on a national basis, and I would speculate that there would be a respectable number of responses. Such a publication could be limited to undergraduate and/or graduate students, depending on the preferences of the editor(s). Also, it may be useful to visit existing online literary publications to consult the formats of their websites and their guidelines...Anyhow, I think that it is possible for undergraduate and graduate students to set up Asian-American literary magazines, and that's my personal though definitely far-from-perfect take on things here.

A Few More Thoughts on Asian-American Poetry (What Else is New?)

2006-09-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

Poets Bryan Thao Worra and Barbara Jane Reyes have made great posts on Asian-American poetry, and I would encourage you to check them out. I just have a few quick, general thoughts to add:

1. Asian-American poetry, of course, has a past. But it also has a terrific present and future, which look brighter than ever.

2. I second Pam and Bryan's remarks that Li-Young Lee has an indefinable "presence" that makes him a figure of interest for most people who have come across him in person. I would also add that Li-Young Lee deserves a lot of credit for that. It's primarily what he says and how he interacts with people that makes him so interesting and compelling, along with the fact that he is very generous with his time and energy.

3. I share Barbara Jane's concern over the equation, "Li-Young Lee = Asian-American Poetry." I think that Li-Young Lee himself would not want that to happen. I also concur that other Asian-American poets should have a greater share of the "Asian-American poetry" spotlight, so to speak.

4. There is a need for more Asian-American literary publications. Ironically, at at time when more Asian-American poets than ever are writing and getting published, there may be fewer Asian-American literary publications out there than at any point in the past decade.

5. Both Eileen Tabios and Bryan have mentioned this book, and I want to highlight it here: David Mura's Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry series, 2002). Like Breaking the Alabaster Jar, it contains interviews and perspectives on poetry by the poet (the poet being David Mura here).

Li-Young Lee on Asian-American Poets and Poetry

2006-09-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

"That's another thing. A lot of art by Asian Americans is about being Asian American. That's a very dangerous thing because that's supposing that there's something unusual about us. There may be certain things about us that are unique, but ultimately, like you were saying, our experiences are all universal. We have to transcend, especially in art, we have to transcend those - what I call trivial aspects of our existence - and we have to move on to greater issues, that's really what art is about. It's not about this momentary thing, like about AIDS. It's like, 'I'm going to write all these poems or paint all these paintings about AIDS'. AIDS is a real thing. It's very frightening. It's very important in our time. But at the same time, is it art?" -- Li-Young Lee, "Art is Who We Are," Breaking the Alabaster Jar (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), p. 62.

In an interview with Patty Cooper and Alex Yu, originally published in the terrific but now seemingly defunct Chicago-based Asian-American literary/artistic magazine Riksha, poet Li-Young Lee offers a series of fascinating assertions on Asian-American art and poetry. From this interview, the above paragraph includes perhaps the most fascinating and provocative of these remarks, as Lee dismisses much of the work of Asian-American poets as lacking transcendence. I think that it also exemplifies Lee's true feelings on Asian-American art and poetry, as Lee makes such remarks in many of his interviews (though almost certainly in terms that are less stark than in analogizing Asian-American identity to living with AIDS and then suggesting both are "momentary".)

I have been giving these comments a lot of careful thought, as I believe they are important to the way that we conceptualize art and poetry. And I want to help Lee here by answering his ultimate question, "Is it art?"

In this paragraph, Lee suggests that art and poetry should seek to "transcend trivial aspects of our existence" and be about "greater issues," by which he means, "love and death" (p. 63). But what I think that Lee does not acknowledge is that one of the most important ways to address greater issues like love and address is through the "trivial aspects of our existence." In contrast to Lee, who claims that "our experiences are all universal," I would say that our experiences can be both universal and particular at the same time.

Let me elaborate. Lee praises Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (p. 62) -- two of my favorite poets as well. But whereas Lee appears to believe that the greatest quality of Whitman and Dickinson's poetry is the ability to directly address the universals of love and death, I would say that it is the capacity to illuminate the universals of love and death through the use of vivid, specific images, words, and forms as well as through the evocation of contemporary social concerns with gender, class, and race.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I think that Lee posits a future without races by implicitly comparing poems about being Asian-American to poems about AIDS. Essentially, he offers a future in which AIDS (and race) are no longer real, salient issues. It is what I would call a "utopian waiting game theory" of art and poetry. That is, if we "wait" long enough (perhaps decades or centuries), social categories such as those of gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, etc. will one-by-one no longer have relevance, and we will be left with a "pure" form of art and poetry that focuses on the essentials of love and death.

I think that there are a couple problems with the "utopian waiting game theory". First, I highly doubt that a "pure" form of art and poetry exists. (If one chooses to believe that language and grammar are products of society, then it definitely does not exist.) Second, assuming for the moment that such a "pure" form of art and poetry is possible, I question whether we should aim for it. For complete devotees of Lee's philosophy here, I think that a key problem is, so to speak, "a poetics of boredom" -- an adherence to such a philosophy could very well result in poems that are devoid of originality in language or ideas, e.g., poems that just keep on repeating the words "love," "light," "water," etc. Another issue may be the overproduction of poetry that is unengaged with the world in which we live.

I would suggest that art that "lacks transcendence" is still art. To return to Lee's question, I would answer that poems about being Asian-American or poems about AIDS are works of art, even if one believes that, for example, race will no longer be salient in American society or there will be a cure for AIDS in the future. Specific moments in time and space -- and detailed evocations of specific moments in time and space -- can be interesting, funny, warm, touching, noble, and/or beautiful. Beautiful art does not have to be transcendent to achieve beauty. Perhaps "transcendent art" is art that remains relevant for the society that experiences it. It can exist powerfully for the time being.

Introduction by Earl G. Ingersoll

2006-09-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

As noted in the previous post, I have more to say about Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Specifically, I want to highlight Ingersoll's introduction to the series of interviews, which I identified as "one of the most perceptive introductions on an Asian-American poet that I have ever come across" in the previous post.

As devoted readers of Asian-American poetry know all-too-well, there has been a long history of non-Asian-American poets giving awful introductions to/readings of the poetry of Asian-American poets. What do I mean by "awful"? I think that I would define "awful" here as "profound misreadings of poems that veer dangerously close, or plunge vigorously into, crude stereotypes." What are the features of such a maladroit introduction? First, it typically includes overuse of such words as "quiet," "tradition," "humility," etc. Second, none of those words accurately describe the poems themselves (and probably not the respective poets-as-people either). Third, there is an indefinable hovering over the "exotic," "oriental," and/or "foreign" features of the poetry, more profoundly present if the Asian-American poet happens to be female.

I have to add quickly here, however, that I think that the intent of the non-Asian-American poet who reads/introduces the work of an Asian-American poet is not necessarily bad. In other words, I think that the origin of such stereotypical misreadings typically comes not from ill-will towards Asian-American poets or his or her poetry but from some deeper inability to approach the text with less static, so to speak. I don't know if it is possible to read poetry without having some thoughts on the race, ethnicity, and nationality of the poet -- especially if explicitly referenced in the poetry -- but I would say that an introduction to a book of poems should not primarily be about "the extent to which the poet her or himself is 'Asian' or 'Asian-American'"but should help focus the readers' attention to the qualities of the poems themselves with reference to larger issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, etc., should the narrative call for it.

Earl G. Ingersoll's introduction is, of course, not an introduction to a book of poems by an Asian-American poet. It is an introduction to an Asian-American poet himself. I can't say whether that it is easier or harder to write such an introduction, but I think that the dangers of inaccurate stereotyping still exist, and Ingersoll not only skillfully avoids them but paints a remarkably clear and interesting portrait of Li-Young Lee.

Ingersoll's introduction opens with a wonderful paragraph that manages to provide a glimpse into Li-Young Lee's personality, a history of the Lee family, and a brief discussion of Lee's poetry and memoir, Winged Seed, while maintaining the flow of the narrative. All three have been done before elsewhere but to do it all in one paragraph is no easy task.

As editor, Ingersoll then undertakes the risky (but adroitly executed and thus very readable) enterprise of speaking through Li-Young Lee, ventriloquizing Lee through a general reading of his interviews. There are multiple examples here, all emphases mine. "Lee is well-aware that excessive emphasis on his life and especially on his ethnicity can direct attention away from the poems themselves" (p. 9). "Lee knows how indebted he is to American poets" (p. 10). "He might well identify himself as an Asian-American to the census-taker at the door; however, it is as an American poet that he would see himself as first and foremost" (p. 10). "Paradoxically, Lee as a poet has reservations about language" (p. 11). "Once again, Lee is a poet who takes his vocation very seriously" (p. 11). The list goes on and on.

I think that this technique works really well here -- and it is very difficult to tell that it works really well until you have gone through most of the interviews -- because Ingersoll has closely read and digested all the interviews, as well as having interviewed Lee himself, which allows for an intimate yet global reading of Lee as poet, artist, reader, father, and man. In other words, the success comes not by accident but as a result of hard editorial work.

Perhaps more importantly, this technique helps Ingersoll sidestep the perils involved with projecting his personal opinions on the "Asian" or "Asian-American" features of Li-Young Lee's poetry. For example, we don't have Ingersoll saying whether it is a good or bad thing that Li-Young Lee "is not likely to think to himself, Here I am, an Asian American setting out to compose an Asian-American poem"(p. 10). We have Lee's perspective from the interviews, and that seems sufficient here.

Ingersoll then answers the question that I think that all editors of collections of interviews, poems, short stories, etc. should answer: Why this volume? Why should anyone undertake the task of collecting interviews by Li-Young Lee? Why should any potential reader of this collection care? In my previous post, I suggested that the two main answers to these questions are that 1) Lee is a prominent poet who has sold many books and that 2) Lee gives really good and interesting interviews. That is implied in the very undertaking of this enterprise, but Ingersoll adds another important reason: 3) Lee is not an academic and thus "is just not likely to write essays, explaining his notions of his craft as a poet" (p. 12). In other words, these interviews are basically all we've got, aside from speaking personally with Lee himself, in terms of learning Lee's thoughts and views on art, poetry, and life. As Ingersoll puts it, "These conversations offer access to Lee's sense of himself as a working poet and his concept of what it means to be a poet" (p. 13).

Ingersoll does a few other technical things well in the introduction. First, he appears to prefer to call these interviews "conversations," as opposed to "interviews" (even though he does use the term "interviews," probably for the sake of clarity), which seems more appropriate, given the free-flowing feel of most of the exchanges in the volume. Second, he integrates about the right amount of quotes from Lee in the right number of places. Third, towards the end of the introduction, he remembers to clearly reference the original publications in which the interviews first appeared as well as list all of Lee's honors -- again, Ingersoll moves quickly and devotes just about the right amount of space here (two paragraphs). Fourth, Ingersoll does not use the words "foreign," "exotic," or "oriental," which is consonant with the fact that Lee refrains from using these terms as well, but at the same time, Ingersoll does discuss Lee's Chinese heritage and Lee's views on race and ethnicity, which is consonant with the fact that Lee does, in fact, discuss these topics in his conversations. In short, Ingersoll pays close attention to the substance of Lee's interviews.

A larger question went through my mind as I reflected upon Ingersoll's introduction. Would it have been possible for anyone to write such an introduction twenty years ago? I don't know. One could argue that Ingersoll, and perhaps future authors of introductions to the works of Asian-American poets, have the benefit of decades of response and critique from Asian-American scholars. One could also make the "demographic" argument that the increase in the Asian-American population over the past two decades has led to a degree of mainstreaming of the Asian-American population that has made more possible a reading of an Asian-American poet's work without a complete preoccupation with the race of the poet her or himself. Regardless, I think that Ingersoll successfully paints an accurate and informative portrait of Li-Young Lee that will last through at least the first half of the twenty-first century.

A Review of Conversations with Li-Young Lee: Breaking the Alabaster Jar

2006-09-12T23:12:00.000-07:00

The newly published, Conversations with Li-Young Lee: Breaking the Alabaster Jar (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), represents a landmark in Asian-American poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Conversations with Li-Young Lee is the first edited and published collection of interviews given by an Asian-American poet. While the fact that a book happens to be "a landmark" (in the sense that it attempts to undertake an original endeavor) does not necessarily make it good, I think that this volume of Li-Young Lee's thoughts on poetry, aesthetics, and life is superlative -- both in concept and execution.

I think that the first correct decision was in concept -- to make the collection about Li-Young Lee, as opposed to another Asian-American poet. Why was this initial editorial move a "correct decision"? Two reasons. First, Li-Young Lee has an almost twenty-year history of giving interviews on poetry. In fact, I imagine that it would be very difficult to do such a collection on other Asian-American poets, given their relative newness to poetry and/or their lack of published interviews. Second, Li-Young Lee's comments may be some of the most quotable and fascinating of any poet of his generation. In other words, he is very good at giving interviews. He is very good at sharing his thoughts on poetry and life in a compelling way, which all-too-often does not happen with poets talking about poetry. Even at the basic level of the sentence, Lee's ordering of words in plain speech has a certain poetry. I agree with Ingersoll's claim that Lee's interviews here "provide readers of Lee's poetry a sample of his provocative, witty, and engaging comments on his writing," and I think that Lee's skill at communicating with and relating to different people surely has helped contribute to his fame in the poetry world.

Next, I give a lot of credit to the editor, Earl G. Ingersoll, for his skillful editing of this collection. Most importantly, from interview to interview, the questions and answers do not become repetitious. We are not faced with the Sisphyusian phenomenon of Li-Young Lee answering the question, "So what is it like to be an Asian-American poet?," a million times. I could sense that Ingersoll put great care into the selection of the interviews. Ingersoll also makes the great editorial move of ordering the interviews in chronological order, which adds a certain logic to Lee's thoughts, as we can somewhat trace their development over time. I do have a slight quibble here -- I think that the Table of Contents should have included the dates of the original interviews, instead of having the reader figure out the reasoning behind the ordering for her or himself. In addition, Ingersoll adds the nice touch of opening with an introduction -- which is one of the most perceptive introductions on an Asian-American poet that I have ever come across (more in a subsequent post)-- and closing with his own interview of Lee. This bookending is done quite well.

But most important to me here, especially for the purposes of this blog, is that Li-Young Lee says A LOT about Asian-American poetry, writing, and identity. Now I don't agree with everything that he has to say, which I think is a good thing. I like the fact that Lee's remarks often challenged my own thoughts and views, further shaping them into what hopefully would be something better. In future posts, I plan to specifically address some of Lee's more interesting remarks, engaging in a kind of dialogue with the text.

In the meantime, I would definitely recommend this collection of interviews to fans of Li-Young Lee's poetry and to fans of poetry in general.

The Asian American Curriculum Project

2006-09-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, I came across the Asian American Curriculum Project, which focuses on marketing and selling Asian-American books. Here is a description of the organization from its website:

"Our mission is to educate the public about the great diversity of the Asian American experience, through the books that we distribute; fostering cultural awareness and to educate Asian Americans about their own heritage, instilling a sense of pride. AACP believes that the knowledge which comes from the use of appropriate materials can accomplish these goals...

The Asian American Curriculum Project, Inc. has been an award winning non-profit voluntary educational organization since 1969. Our original name was Japanese American Curriculum Project JACP, Inc. Since our beginning in 1969, we have grown to offer the most complete collection of Asian American books.

The books and other materials offered are for all age groups, all levels of education and all Asian ethnic groups; including and not limited to Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Samoan, Tongan, Thai, & Vietnamese Americans and Hawaiians.

Materials include literature, folk tales, posters, magazine, tapes on language and music, games, activities, teachers guides, dictionaries, bilingual materials and reference books on history, social issues and education."

I find the idea of a bookstore that specializes in "Asian-American books" quite fascinating. A thought occurred to me -- there are lots of grocery stores that sell Asian food and cater primarily to Asian and Asian-American grocery shoppers, but I had not come across any place that specializes in the sale of Asian/Asian-American books until the AACP, Inc. Evidently, it's a lot harder to go without bok choy or litchee than the latest offering in Asian-American poetry. Fair enough. But here is a bookstore/organization that makes a nice effort to cater to readers of Asian/Asian-American literature.

The Trouble with Quotes

2006-08-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

I came across a short book review today that made me laugh. It has "made my day," so to speak, which is either a sign of my dedication to the art of poetry or a lamentable commentary on my social life. Maybe both.

Anyhow, as proudly posted on amazon.com, Publishers Weekly has come out with a blurb on the soon-to-be-released The Best American Poetry 2006:

"From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. In the 19th installment of this annual series, former poet laureate Collins (The Trouble with Poetry, 2005), one of America's most popular poets ever, has culled the typical handful of big names and some surprising new voices from more than 50 American literary publications. Collins's predilections for accessibility, humor and tidy forms are evident, but there are also surprises. Usual suspects—former Best American editors Ashbery (who surprises with a poem in neatly rhymed couplets), Hass, Simic, Tate and Muldoon, as well as Mary Oliver—meet rising masters like Kay Ryan ("A bird's/ worth of weight/ or one bird-weight/ of Wordsworth"), Vijay Seshadri and Franz Wright. Most interesting, however, is the chance each volume offers to see which up-and-comers make the cut. This year's roster includes edgy poems by Joy Katz, Danielle Pafunda ("my hair cramped with sexy"), Terrance Hayes, and Christian Hawkey ("O my/ beloved shovel-nosed mole"), among others. Collins's surprising and opinionated introduction—in which he admits that, unlike some of series editor David Lehman's previous guest editors, "the designation 'best' doesn't bother me," and offers his definition of a good poem (often one that "starts in the factual" and displays "a tone of playful irreverence")—may cause some controversy. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition."

This anonymous review tickles my funny bone in at least several respects.

First, the reviewer characterizes Billy Collins as "one of America's most popular poets ever," like a kid describes the latest Harry Potter flick or a promoter publicizes the latest heavyweight fight. Putting aside the possibility that poets like Poe and Frost may have had a few admirers of their own, I just find this proclamation a tad amusing.

Second, the reviewer obviously believes potential purchasers of the book will just go ga-ga for "surprises." In this volume, there are "some surprising new voices" (first sentence), "also surprises" (second sentence), and "Ashbery (who surprises with a poem in neatly rhymed couplets)". Now, look, I have some favorite words of my own as well. That's ok. But not only does the review overuse the word "surprises," it doesn't really discuss them much or give us much of a hint. (Ashbery has always had a thing for rhyme; I don't consider his "rhymed couplets" the equivalent of Brad and Jen announcing their breakup.) It makes me wonder whether there are real "surprises" in the anthology. Perhaps there are, which leads to my third and primary point.

The Trouble with Quotes: Third, the reviewer points out that "this year's roster includes edgy poems" and then lists several poets and quotes lines from a couple of these poets' poems. Apparently, Danielle Pafunda has a poem with the line "my hair cramped with sexy," and Christian Hawkey has a poem with the line "O-my/ beloved shovel-nosed mole."

Now my first thought here was that it must be tough when one's hair is "cramped with sexy." Maybe that's the right time to switch to another brand of shampoo. I'm not sure I quite get this line, but it must be like when Justin Timberlake sings "I'm bringing 'sexy' back," and sure, he's not bringing any nouns back, but he's got a cool adjective to accompany him.

And if you think a poem about cramped hair is "edgy," keep your striped socks on for that "beloved shovel-nosed mole." A few thoughts crossed my mind here. First, when one's mole is shovel-nosed, it's best to get that checked. Second, it can't be easy to be a "shovel-nosed mole," especially if all the other moles have sexyback snouts cramped with sexy. Hmmm...perhaps this review is asking us to read the lines from these two different poems together, as in, "O-my/ beloved shovel-nosed mole/ its hair cramped with sexy". Third, deep down, I'm glad that the mole is "beloved" in spite (or because) of being shovel-nosed, what with the national media forcing us to conform to its ideal of beauty these days. Fourth, my apologies, but I haven't encountered enough moles to vividly imagine any mole, let alone one that is shovel-nosed. Finally, am I making a mountain out of a mole with this post?

Anyways...I'm sure that Joy Katz and Terrance Hayes were quite mournful that the review didn't grab isolated, "edgy" lines out of their respective poems. I actually feel a tad sorry for Pafunda, because I have indeed read and enjoyed her poetry. So this blurb makes me think of the dilemmas involved with quoting individual lines from poems in book reviews. Taking lines out-of-context can inhibit the reader's comprehension of the poem and/or unfairly cast an unfavorable light on it. In fact, I think it's possible that I 'd enjoy the poems from which these random, quoted lines have journeyed.

Fourth, the reviewer's listing of four poets, "Hass, Simic, Tate, and Muldoon, as well as Mary Oliver," made me think of the four Beatles and Yoko. Maybe it's because the female poet is randomly singled out for some reason.

Oops, I missed another "surprise" -- the last sentence of the review states that Collins offers a "surprising and opinionated introduction." Apparently, Collins dares to boldly offer the startling proclamation that "the designation 'best' doesn't bother me" as well as his definition of a good poem. Utterly stunning! I just can't believe that Mideast conflicts are still making the front pages of the NY Times as opposed to this amazing piece of news...(I'm just kidding, of course.) Same as every year, I'll still go out and buy this book and promise to act surprised.

Asian Americans and Hurricane Katrina

2006-08-29T23:03:00.000-07:00

Although not well-publicized in the media, thousands of Asian Americans, most of them Vietnamese, were adversely affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Asian American Justice Center has accumulated a great list of reports and links to resources on Hurricane Katrina: http://www.advancingequality.org/?id=233.

Here is an excerpt from the Asian American Justice Center's "An Informal Report: Current Challenges Faced by Asian Americans and Hurricane Katrina: Highlights on Language Services and Physical and Mental Concerns," presented by Juliet Choi (http://65.36.162.215/files/AAJC%20_Katrina.pdf):

"Background: Demographics and Community

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana was home to over 50,000 Asian Americans, of which more than half were Vietnamese. New Orleans, steeped in a rich and multicultural heritage, was home to the oldest Filipino community in the nation. Southern Mississippi was home to about 7,000 Vietnamese and other Asian residents. Many lived in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina and in places such as Bayou La Batre, Alabama, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Gulfport, Mississippi. To date, an estimated 10,000 Vietnamese evacuees relocated to Houston. Katrina also affected Chinese, Filipino, Bangladeshi and Korean Americans.

Many of the Asian Americans in the Gulf coast region hit by Katrina are, or were, shrimpers and fishermen, people who have made significant contributions to the local economy and fishing industry for years. Moreover, many of these Asian Americans are refugees and immigrants, people who have settled along the Gulf Coast after surviving war and political turmoil in their native countries. As stated in a recent Chicago Tribune article, 4 many of the Asian American hurricane victims are now refugees once again, having lost everything, facing language and cultural obstacles, leaving them isolated and unable to access or even understand the wide array of federal assistance programs widely available.

More specifically, a large part of this Asian American community is unaccustomed to the American way of accessing public assistance and navigating the intricacies and bureaucracies of public agencies. An added cultural dynamic to the refugee community not readily recognized is the fact that many of these individuals left a society where government and public agencies were almost never trusted and always feared. As a result, in times of need and crisis, Asian Americans, like in so many communities, typically turn first to their internal community groups where there is a sense of familiarity, where the same language is spoken and where similar cultural values and traditions are shared, and thus, some trust."

On Mastery

2006-08-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

One of the most prestigious awards in American poetry is the Wallace Stevens Award, which is given by the Academy of American Poets. Currently carrying a stipend of $100,000 for the recipient, the award "is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry" (http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/107). Basically, it is a lifetime achievement award for poets.

But rather than honoring poets for "lifetime achievement", the award recognizes poets for "outstanding and proven mastery." I have several issues with this formula for "mastery".

First, a minor one. What does it mean for "mastery" to be "outstanding and proven"? To me, saying "outstanding and proven mastery" is kind of like saying "terrific and wonderful greatness" or "benevolent and humanitarian charity." In other words, the adjectives seem superfluous. But let's take the adjectives seriously for a moment. "Outstanding" works for me -- it signifies that the judges believe that the poet's work is unique, innovative, special. But "proven" strikes me as a tad conclusory, and I'm not sure you can "prove" "mastery" in poetry. It's not like a math problem. There are no theorems and equations. It's not like any Carlos Bulosan may write a poem that is somehow the objective magical formula of poetic superiority.

It leads to my second (and primary) issue, which is the award's recognition for "mastery in the art of poetry". I have problems with the term "mastery". Now mastery can mean "natural or acquired facility in a specific activity," but it can also mean "the act of exercising controlling power or the condition of being so controlled." To my mind at least, since I often find it difficult to separate words from their social context, the word "mastery" carries some baggage. It reminds me of the long history of the "master-slave" relationship. "Mastery" conjures up images of power, control, force, coercion, domination, etc. I don't know if you would want to give an award for it, even if "mastery" in the art of poetry is possible.

I say, "even if 'mastery' in the art of poetry is possible," because I highly doubt that it is. I think that what distinguishes the work of many of the winners of the Wallace Stevens Award -- e.g. Adrienne Rich, Jackson Mac Low, Ruth Stone, etc. -- is not "mastery" but a constant innovation of form and susbtance. The poets, through a lifetime of work, have exemplified a certain restlessness, a desire for greater understanding of the multiple facets of poetry, an originality that builds upon the past. I can't say for sure, but I am skeptical whether any of the honored poets, or the poet-judges who honored them, would claim that they have achieved "mastery in the art of poetry," because mastery suggests an endpoint whereas the award honors work that is capable of much interpretation, vital, and enduring.

Third, as a quick note, I think that one might observe that no racial minorities and only two female poets have won in the twelve year history of the award. Though quite a few female and African-American poets hve been judges, John Yau is the only Asian-American to have been a judge. Similar observations may be made of the Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Award in poetry. This is not a critique but merely a caution to remain conscious of "who" we designate as our "masters" in the art of poetry, race and gender being two elements of who we are. Mastery is singular, whereas poetry is for all.

A Lack of Asian-American Student Lit Mags at Colleges and Universities

2006-08-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a question: Why are there virtually no Asian/Asian-American student literary magazines at colleges and universities? Even as the Asian-American student population at colleges and universities continues to grow, and even as a respectful number of Asian-American students choose to major or minor in English, the Asian or Asian-American student literary magazine remains a rare species at colleges and universities.

In fact, I can only think of two Asian-American student literary magazines -- John Hopkins' Anagram and the University of Pennsylvania's Propaganda Silk (formerly known as Mosaic -- and I do approve of the creative name change from the previous, accurate-though-pedestrian title). I find this number surprisingly low, especially if you account for the many west-coast colleges and universities, like UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and USC, with relatively large Asian-American student populations.

I have two separate hypotheses that may or may not be right. First, I think that the relative lack of Asian-American faculty in English departments, especially tenured faculty, may be responsible for the lack of Asian-American student literary magazines. While such publications may be student-initiated, students do come and go (regardless of whether they talk of Michelangelo). In other words, most students are only at a college or university for four years, and usually, it takes a year or two simply to become acclimated to dorm life and midnight marathons of reading poems. The faculty remain, and often a student-run publication needs a dedicated faculty advisor to ensure its year-to-year endurance.

Second, I think that some Asian-American students either do not want or take an interest in an Asian/Asian-American literary publication. They may feel that there is no need for a distinct, ethnically/racially-based literary magazine and even perceive such a publication as self-segregating. Now, I think that the holding of a negative perception of Asian/Asian-American literary magazines is a minority view, but I think that there are some Asian-American students who hold it.

It is an interesting question (interesting to me, at least) whether colleges and universities need Asian/Asian-American student literary publications. Perhaps Asian-American students have sufficient creative outlets elsewhere, but on the other hand, such publications may draw attention to particular issues and themes of particular salience to Asian-Americans.

For Roger Ebert

2006-08-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

As you may have heard by now, film critic Roger Ebert (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage) has been unwell and is currently recuperating from surgery. His wife has been providing updates on his progress on his website. Last week, Jay Leno subbed for Ebert on his show Ebert and Roeper. Leno was solid, but it was not the same, of course.

What does Roger Ebert have to do with this blog? Well, in short, no Roger Ebert, no Asian-American Poetry blog. Much of the "voice" of this blog has been shaped by Ebert's print and television reviews. I started reading Ebert's print reviews and watching Siskel and Ebert when I was about twelve or thirteen, and it has had a profound influence on my writing style as well as way of conceiving and viewing the world. His critical voice is impossible to emulate. Lots of film reviews are good, but he takes it to that difficult-to-define next level of brilliance. His film reviews always manage to hit such a wide range of notes -- informative, funny, tender, sarcastic, sophisticated, personal, charming, serious, and entertaining. Understandably, I have looked up to him. As someone whose writing style is constantly evolving, I think that I have chosen a good role model. Get well soon, Roger! You are definitely missed.

Three Nice Listings of Links

2006-08-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

For fans of Asian-American poetry, here are three sites that offer good listings of Asian-American poetry-related websites and blogs: Mor X. Chang's http://www.asianamericanpoetry.com/links.php, Lee Herrick's http://apapoetry.blogspot.com/, and Bryan Thao Worra's http://thaoworra.blogspot.com/.

Revisiting Michael Magee's "Glittering" Work

2006-08-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, friends, I am a few months late to the paper-knights-of-the-round-table discussion on Michael Magee's "The Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay." Judging by the 103 comments on Tim Yu's second post on this poem, http://tympan.blogspot.com/2006/06/those-glittering-asian-guys-ii.html#comments, I gather this "glittering" jewel became an object of importance for a couple dozen or so folk who are not working a 70-hr workweek or raising small kids (and if you are, while still managing to find time to blog and/or post comments on blogs, kudos to you).

Forgive me if I am mistaken, but I have the general impression that pretty much everything has been said on Magee's poem already. In this post, I am doing something different. Essentially, I am workshopping the first two stanzas of the poem here. It is an example of a larger project that I have been contemplating for a much longer time. It is my belief that any poem, no matter how "good" it is, can be revised/rewritten to take on different meanings. Notice I did not say "revised and made better". Perhaps such revision may make a poem "better," but "better" always seems quite subjective and that endeavor would be relatively uninteresting to me, or at least, not as interesting as an exploration into the different possibilities of language without such an ambitious (or arrogant?) agenda.

Here, below, with "Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay," (http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com/2006/05/their-guys-their-asian-glittering-guys.html), I am trying to concretize the ideas, concepts, and emotions that Magee has expressed through his poem. As is, I think that Magee's poem is a fascinating piece with a lot of interesting content that should be streamlined. Some poems need greater abstraction, but I sense that this poem is struggling towards greater directness, perhaps even a social statement of some kind.

At this point, Michael Magee's poem seems almost trapped between flarf and the work of Sharon Olds. (Do I get bonus points for using "Michael Magee" and "Sharon Olds" in the same sentence?) Magee uses fragments and pidgin in parts, but I would edit out most of these devices. I am not sure that they work that well in this particular poem, and at any rate, the speaker does not appear to be Asian-American (as exemplified by the line, "I don't want to sound stereo-/typical, but most Asian people I HAVE MET are pretty short," in the second stanza). The speaker is probably Caucasian. I also prefer Tim Yu's title for the poem, "Those Glittering Gay Guys," for the sake of its relative simplicity -- Magee's more experimental, more grammaticallly flamboyant title would probably work better for me in a poem that I perceived as aiming for greater abstraction. Another way of revising the poem, I think, would be to move further in the direction of flarf, but that would require heavier lifting.

"Those Glittering Asian Guys" - first and second stanza rewritten

Ten years and another Asian city shall arise.
Let the Empire swallow countries for their own benefit.
Brutus and Ajo, pity the look in the eyes of their country. A thin Asian
chick wears a burgundy car coat, Hong Kong chic.
Old guys in Chinatown like pick-up trucks,
insinuate that guys with trucks deconstruct the meaning of Asian norms.
Six guys. On some occasions, they grunt at a pick-up
as they make their way. An Asian Santa can be seven feet tall.
The "green" is spotted with snow. The flag is up. The ball is on the green.
You always hear about sleazy guys, their drivers ready,
their spectacular gazes upon Kimmy, a 21-year-old Asian cutie.
Kimmy dials a number on her cell phone. I understand.

Model minority Asian stereotypes slurp cereal from a carton.
Soon will be the baptism of their sons. I do not want
to stereotype, but most Asian people I HAVE MET are pretty short.
In a country full of plots, I search for character. But it always
ends in a soapy mess, and I cannot tell Asian from Hispanic anymore.
It depends on the wetness of skin tone.
He was Malaysian in the last century, Asian in this one,
tumbling through fantasies of beautiful bad men deceiving us with
their easy-going nature. My eyes are switching from their normal green.
The problem is that we were once special --
with our white-striped manes, watching biker-bankers tear off
their Hell's Angels jackets, partying away through the grubby paws
of horniness. What made you call her a Dragon Lady?
Anything could titillate straight guys back then. Now we are anyone.

On Michiko Kakutani, Part II

2006-08-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

(Note: You should probably read Part I before proceeding to Part II. I think that it might make my writing seem more logical and orderly and possibly even halfway decent and amusing. Who knows? It won't take long. You can even eat a doughnut while you're reading.)

Second, Ben Yagoda points out that Kakutani's reviews are "harsh an awful lot of the time, and publishing folk commonly complain that Kakutani is too hard to please." (http://www.slate.com/id/2139452/) Poor publishing folk! I feel sorry for them now. Really, I had no idea that book reviewers were supposed to compromise their honesty and integrity for the sake of book sales. But putting aside my ignorance of that matter, I question whether "bad" book reviews do cause books to sell less well and that "good" book reviews cause books to sell better. (If that were the case, sales of poetry books should have gone through the roof by now.) Actually, it would be interesting to read a study that mapped out some kind of statistical correlation between book reviews and book sales. As for myself, sadly, I have a mind of my own and can process my own thoughts. An intriguing "bad" book review ironically, or not ironically, can make me more interested in the book itself.

Third, and maybe most importantly, I feel that Yagoda overlooks Kakutani's conscious development of a "diva persona" -- in other words, Yagoda does not recognize that many of Kakutani's book reviews are overtly performative. It is like wagging a finger at a drag queen for wearing too much eyeshadow.

Yagoda takes issue with Kakutani's use of "lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing." Well, as utterly amazing as Yagoda probably felt for making wonderfully intruiging critiques of Kakutani to please those who dislike her, it may just be a tad embarassing that he apparently was not sufficiently savvy enough to acknowledge the performative aspects of Kakutani's prose. Yes, Kakutani uses too many adjectives at times. Yes, it is over-the-top at times. That's the point. It is also one of the main pleasures of reading one of her book reviews. Her book reviews can be Christina Aguilera-esque fun. With many of those types of book reviews, it is almost her signature. She aims for a grandiose form of humor sometimes, and the key to happiness and equanimity is to not take her reviews too somberly.

Unfortunately, it seems that some critics and authors have chosen to take her reviews somberly and personally. That's fair enough. As Yagoda notes, Susan Sontag, one of my favorite intellectuals, fairly asserts that "[Kakutani's] criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Sontag is playing according to the rules of the diva game here -- diva vs. diva, criticism vs. criticism. On the other hand, Norman Mailer infamously referred to Kakutani as a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority, choosing to attack the person instead of the prose, thus violating the rules of the diva game while simultaneously committing the sin of being unfunny with remarks that lack arc, performance, or irony.

Fourth, just quickly, Yagoda asserts, "The qualities most glaringly missing in Kakutani's work are humor and wit." I disagree. I do not think that humor and wit are missing. I think that Kakutani is being funny and implictly encouraging us not to take her critiques -- the thoughts of just one person -- too seriously. Perhaps Yagoda should have taken the advice that he gives Kakutani at the end of his piece and remarked that "I think that the qualities most glaringly missing..." I agree with Yagoda's advice on the use of the pronoun "I," but interestingly, at various points in his piece, Yagoda sinks into the kind of faux-objectivity for which he lambasts Kakutani, making debatable claims sans use of the pronoun "I". Kakutani often omits the pronoun "I", but with her prose, so much of her presence already looms over the bold assertions, that this omission does not strike me as that glaring.

Finally, what's up with the illustration that accompanies that article?! As much as many publishers and book reviewers would like to ship Kakutani to Easter Island, perhaps Kakutani's head could have been a wee-bit more well-proportioned. (Yes, I realize that the illustration is a purposeful exaggeration -- how original!) Perhaps we should just be thankful that the artist did not make Kakutani's eyes even beadier. You know, the illustration could have shown Kakutani with a better hairdo and a trendier outfit. But I suppose that would undermine a major point of this article and many other critiques levied against Kakutani -- the smart and the honest are also the angry and the wrinkled.

On Michiko Kakutani, Part I

2006-08-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years, Michiko Kakutani has taken a steady drubbing from authors and fellow critics alike, and I feel it only fair to offer a rebuttal of sorts to the rarified, haute-culture, bitch-slapping of the so-called brilliant upon the so-called brilliant -- a defense of Michiko Kakutani. My rebuttal will be the type of response that only out-of-it, literary-loving nerds like myself could possibly care about, but since you are what you eat, and I eat celery sticks without peanut butter and lima beans, I shall plow forward.

Here I am going to use Ben Yagoda's fascinating Slate article, http://www.slate.com/id/2139452/, as my take-off point. Yagoda does a solid job of summarizing the critiques and epithets that have been hurled at Kakutani and adds the tidbit that he went to Yale with Kakutani -- for which I am supremely jealous, since Kakutani is like the mother I never wanted but with whom I would have liked to chit-chat with over tea, bagels, and maraschino cherries during our summer picnics upon the Mayweather Fields of Shangri-la.

Sure, Yagoda tosses a few bones in the general direction of Kakutani, asserting that she has an "estimable intelligence" (side note: dolphins and most barnyard animals also have an "estimatable intelligence"), but he uses this concession merely to tee himself up for the rest of the article. The vast majority of the piece basically treats Kakutani's book-reviewing skills like an overstuffed Chinese lantern pinata, shellacking Kakutani the book reviewer for being "a profoundly uninteresting critic" in a variety of ways.

Yagoda scores some candy out of his endeavor, but unfortunately, it's mostly the moldy coconut kind. I think that his analysis is useful, however, in that he misreads Kakutani in a way that is similar to the way that many authors and critics have misread her -- or rather, her unique twist upon the art of the book review. These critics have consequently failed to understand why she strikes many of her devotees as *gasp* even better than a crossword puzzle or a Thomas Friedman op-ed desperately trying to center itself in the middle of the ever-shifting Left.

First, Yagoda declares that Kakutani's "main weakness is evaluation fixation." It's funny, isn't it -- criticizing a critic for being critical? Ho, ho, ho. Yagoda recognizes the irony here and quickly adds that the problem for Kakutani, as opposed to the flawless Pauline Kael, is that "for her, the verdict is the only thing." At this point, since Yagoda does not cite to much evidence to prove this point, I could shout, "Wrongo!" and my imagined Yagoda and I might engage in an "is-so, am-not" debate. (I don't fault Yagoda here for not rambling through a list of examples -- after all, it is a Slate article and not some graduate thesis that will never be read or published.) But I will not do so. I have graduated from kindergarten.

Instead, having read a large number of Kakutani's book reviews, I will cite to my own evidence that contradicts Yagoda's assertion of Kakutani's "evaluation fixation". Google "Michiko Kakutani" and you will come across a large archive of her book reviews. If you read enough of these reviews, you will notice a general pattern. Kakutani usually opens with a viciously verdict-ish (can I use the word "verdict-ish"?, oh wait, this is my blog, of course, I can. I don't even have to obey conventional rules of grammar or keep my focus, but I usually do -- except for this run-on parenthetical -- because I'm basically a stick-in-the-mud panda) paragraph or two, as Yagoda notes. But Kakutani also spends about 50 to 90 percent of her book reviews, depending on the particular review, summarizing and describing the book in precise detail, before closing with a verdict-ish final paragraph. You do have substance there, I'm afraid. Critics of Kakutani neglect this substance, I think, because the opening and closing paragraphs of her pieces are often unusually blunt.

But you should note that I say "general pattern," "50 to 90 percent," "usually," and "often," because there is no "Michiko Kakutani" book review. Critics tend to ignore the fact that Kakutani displays an amazing range of style and tone in her book reviews -- from serious to funny, from irreverent to critical, from substantive to silly (silly, as in the case of the parody reviews that she writes from time to time, which Yagoda acknowledges towards the end of his piece. Like Yagoda, I am not the most avid fan of those reviews.) Yagoda cites to Kakutani's review of Nick Hornby's latest novel as "a case study," but you could point to plenty of other Kakutani book reviews completely unlike that one. In fact, with a few of her book reviews, you can barely discern Kakutani's personal opinion of the book itself, because she is so preoccupied with describing it. Typically, Kakutani reserves this serious side of her persona for works of non-fiction. Note her interest in books on politics and international affairs. Also, not to be overlooked is the fact that Kakutani delves into a wide variety of genres -- non-fiction, fiction, short story, biography, etc. -- but sadly, she has not entered the enchanted forests of recipe books, dictionaries, or (egads!) poetry.

Kundiman's Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize

2006-06-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

The Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize
Deadline: June 30, 2006
Judge: John Yau
Prize: $500, Barrow Street publication, & Full Scholarship to Kundiman Retreat 2007
Fee: $15
Guidelines: www.kundiman.org
Eligbility: Asian American poets who have not published more than one book of forty-eight pages or more.

***************************************************************

On June 19, 1982, in Detroit, Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a man and his stepson. The two laid-off autoworkers mistook Chin for Japanese — an Asian group they blamed for the ailing U.S.auto industry. The assailants never served jail time, and later federalcivil-rights courts acquitted them entirely of the crime.

For many today, this is a rarely remembered footnote in American history.However, the tragedy of Vincent Chin marked an important change in how Asian Americans viewed themselves. It was the first time, according to APAadvocates and academics, that people who traced their ancestry todifferent countries in Asia and the Pacific Islands crossed ethnic andsocioeconomic lines to fight [politically] as a united group of AsianPacific Americans. They were Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino; theywere waiters, lawyers, and grandmothers who were moved to action by whathappened to Vincent Chin.

For the first time, Asian Americans banded together against the discrimination and racism directed toward the APA community. Decades later, the need for Asian Americans to unite as a population and to project a voice into the cultural mainstream is as urgent as ever.

In honor of Vincent Chin and this watershed moment in Asian American history, Kundiman and Barrow Street are sponsoring The Vincent ChinMemorial Chapbook Prize. This annual prize is an opportunity for bothKundiman and Barrow Street to support and spotlight the talent of anemerging Asian American poet, a new voice in the landscape of AsianAmerican _expression and power.

Winner will receive:
• $500 cash prize
• Chapbook publication in Barrow Street:http://www.barrowstreet.org/journal.html
• Full scholarship to the 2007 Kundiman Summer Retreat

Applicant Eligibility
Asian American poets who have not published more than one book of forty-eight pages or more.

Entry Fee
Check for $15.00 payable to The New York Foundation for the Arts

Judge
John Yau will judge this year’s contest.For guidelines and more information on The Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize, please go to: http://www.kundiman.org

APIA Blog Network

2006-05-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

Along with asianamericanpoetry.com, another website that has emerged as a useful and important resource on various issues involving Asian-Americans is the "Asian Pacific American Islander Blog Network" (www.apiablogs.net), which engages in "the exploration of Asian-American identity through blogging." More specifically, it is a blog network that syndicates posts from various Asian American-related blogs. The APIA Network "bring[s] together bloggers of the Asian American community and help cultivate greater debate and discussion on our identiy, community, collective experience and heritage" (http://www.apiablogs.net/about.php). And just in general, I have to say that I think that it is quite a creative and fascinating idea to link to/bring together different blogs on one website.

Good People

2006-05-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

On this Memorial Day weekend, I thought that I'd spread a little positive energy on this site and thank my readers. You know, when I started this blog, I expected that I would engage with a diverse array of people on issues that relate to Asian American poetry, that it would be an informative, educational, and fun experience for myself and for anyone who happened to come across this blog. It has surely been such an experience, and I thank the people who have read and commented on this blog.

But keeping this blog has also been a nice experience in another way -- one that I had not anticipated. I have come across many good people, some of whom are Asian American poets, some of whom are either Asian American or poets, some of whom are neither. And I have to say that, at least from this blogging experience, I think that pretty much all Asian American poets are basically good, decent people, and I have been lucky to have gotten to know their thoughts and their humanity through this blog. So you, dear reader, I thank you for coming along with me on this journey through Asian American poetry. Thank you.

On Walt Whitman's "A child said, What is the grass?"

2006-05-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

Growing up, I never loved Walt Whitman. Back then, I never loved Whitman, because I formed my perception of Whitman solely upon his oft-anthologized "O Captain, My Captain!" (a decent poem but really quite one-dimensional -- it's cool that the war was won, but it's sad that the captain died). I thus made the abysmal error of conflating a single poem with the poet's work as a whole. It ain't all broccoli, folks. Just because you don't like celery, doesn't mean you won't enjoy tomatoes.

Whitman's "A child said, What is the grass?" (http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15816) is a prized tomato in my book. I view it as one of the first American poems to successfully explore issues of race and multiculturalism in an emotionally compelling way.

I'd like to draw your attention to the stanza that proceeds, "And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow/ zones,/ Growing among black folks as among white,/ Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the/ same, I receive them the same." Rather than bogging himself down in the sameness versus difference dichtomy that sometimes confounds multiculturalism and feminism, Whitman moves fluidly between sameness (sprouting alike), difference (in broad zones and narrow zones), sameness (growing among black homes as among white), difference (Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congresman, Cuff,), and sameness again (I give them the same, I receive them the same). This particular stanza explicitly focuses on race,

but then Whitman makes an abrupt transition to the next stanza, comprised solely of the elegant line, "And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves." It is a distinct quality of this poem that -- while it celebrates diversity in age, gender, and race -- it alternates this celebration with an honoring of what is universal about life at the same time. And this alternation is a vibrant one -- like bubbles blown in the air by children, not like a pendulum.

In "A child said, What is the grass?," Whitman also refuses to suppress or make stereotypical uses of color, which may stand for race. For example, in this stanza -- "This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,/ Darker than the colorless beards of old men,/ Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths" -- darkness is not a representation of evil but merely exists as is, as a part of life. Sameness and difference both juxtapose and stack upon each other here with "The grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers" and "Darker than the color beards old men" taken as representations of sameness among each of the respective groups ("old mothers" and "old men") but representations of difference when read alongside each other.

In the following stanza, Whitman also proclaims, "O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!/ And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing," which one may interpret as a celebration for the fact that many dialects and languages are spoken in the United States of America.

The last couple stanzas move surprisingly from relatively more questioning and unsure stanzas (e.g., "What do you think has become of the young and old men?/ What do you think has become of the women and children?") to crescendo in a daringly self-assured proclamation of hope -- "They are alive and well somewhere;/ The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,/ And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait/ at the end to arrest it,/ And ceased the moment life appeared.// All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,/ And to die is different from what any one supposed, and/ luckier."

The Asian American Writers' Workshop

2006-05-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

I have already explored Kundiman, http://www.asianamericanpoetry.com, and Interlope on this blog, so I think that it is only appropriate that I discuss the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW) -- http://www.aaww.org/ .

I've always looked at the Asian American Writers' Workshop as a stereotypical Asian-American child might look at her or his stereotypical immigrant parent -- filled with a vague sense of duty, fear, and admiration. Although I have always respected the AAWW, it has never been that entirely accessible to me in an emotional sense. Perhaps it is because I first learned of the organization when I was a teenager. Perhaps it is because the organization is quite New York-centric, and I am not a New Yorker, even though I think that I have a New York personality, even though my New York friends say I'm too nice to have a New York personality, whatever that means. Perhaps it is because its agenda and programs (described below) have such a grand and ambitious scope. Perhaps it is because some of the biggest names in Asian American literature populate its board and advisors. At any rate, it seems sometimes to me more like a venerable institution, important and older and more established, more than anything else.

The description on the About page of the AAWW, http://www.aaww.org/aaww_aboutus.html, probably encourages one to view the organization with awe:

"Established in 1991, The Asian American Writers' Workshop, Inc., is a nonprofit literary arts organization founded in support of writers, literature and community.

Operating out of our 6,000 square-foot loft, we sponsor readings, book parties and panel discussions, and offer creative writing workshops. Each winter we present The Annual Asian American Literary Awards Ceremony to recognize outstanding literary works by Americans of Asian descent. Throughout the year, we offer various youth arts programs. In our space we operate a reading room of Asian American literature through the decades.

The only organization of its kind, the Workshop has become one of the most active community arts organizations in the United States. Based in New York City, we have a fast-growing membership, a list of award-winning books and have become an educational resource for Asian American literature and awareness across the nation. "

But, as the History page suggests, http://www.aaww.org/aboutus_history.html, the AAWW started out humbly and meekly, just as pretty much all Asian-American arts organizations commence, before it blossomed into a well-respected institution:

"The Asian American Writers’ Workshop began in 1991 when six writers began meeting at a Greek diner in the East Village. A core group of ten formed, gathering at a space donated by the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence and the Asian American Arts Alliance. By January 1992, the group held its first standing-room-only reading in Chinatown, and the event was rebroadcast on WBAI. In 1992, the Workshop became a non-for-profit organization and published the first issue of The Asian Pacific American Journal.

Within a year, the Workshop began a newsletter and the national Poetry Caravan Series. Additional funding from the New York Community Trust permitted the Workshop to launch the Van Lier Fellowship, which annually supported the work of three writers under the age of thirty. The Workshop also moved into its first offices at 296 Elizabeth Street. The 500-square-foot office was shared with A Magazine.

In 1995, the Workshop moved to its own space at 37 St. Mark's Place, adding a conference room, a bookstore and performance space; it also launched in-house youth summer writing institute, CreateNow. The following year, the Workshop began its Small Press Division, which eventually published ten anthologies and a collection of poetry.

Throughout the late 1990s, the Workshop expanded its scope and vision. The first Annual Literary Awards were presented in 1998 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. The move to the Workshop’s current home, a 6,000-foot loft space at 16 West 32nd Street, permitted the Workshop to enlarge its lending library and accommodate growing audiences at events. Currently, we have 800 members and an annual audience total of 11,000. "

Asian American Poetry - Book Review - An Example

2006-05-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here is a delightful review of Marilyn Chin's The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed, 1994) -- http://www.rambles.net/chin_gone.html -- that both contextualizes the reading of the book and acknowledges Badurina's authorship over the review. I think that it could benefit from Badurina further elaborating upon her personal thoughts on specific poems in the book itself and a more detailed discussion of the content of the poems, but the review's strength resides in the reviewer's comfort with her voice, in not having to assume a false omniscience and dictatorial control over the reading of the poetry. Thus, we get a nice reading that particularizes the presence of the reviewer.

On Having Taken the "I" Out of Book Reviews

2006-05-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

You know what I don't really understand? I don't really understand why reviewers of books of poetry have taken the "I" completely out of their blurbs and reviews. This problem has reached epidemic proportions. Almost all reviews are framed as questions of "What is this book of poems about?" and "Why do poems in this book work or not work?," rather than "What do I think this book of poems is about?" and "Why do I think poems in this book work or not work?"

It seems to me that there is something snobbish, insincere, and overwrought about taking the I completely out of book reviews. No book review exists outside the frame of reference of the individual reviewer, and to speak of "readers' perceptions of the author's work" is merely to say that "I, the reviewer, feel this way about this book." It strikes me as especially strange when a reviewer speaks of "what the poet is doing in particular poems," as if she or he could not only inhabit the mind of the person but somehow utterly transpose his or her entire personage into that of the poet. An individual book reviewer should not behave as if his or her opinion was representative of that of every single past, present, and future reader of the book, because no human being can achieve that level of ubiquity -- sadly, not even the most pompous of us are that amazing.

I am not saying that I am immune to this problem myself. I am not even saying that the third person has no place in a particular book review. But I am speaking of the problem as a matter of degree -- it becomes problematic when the pronouns "I" and/or "you" are totally or mostly absent from a book review.

If we only had a problem with poetry book blurbs/reviews, then that would not be extremely problematic. Who reads book reviews of poetry at any rate? I'm sure that the audience for book review of poetry even magnifies the audience for poetry by comparison. (As a side note, I imagine that if reviewers worked harder to make at least some of their reviews more entertaining, warm-hearted, amusing, personal, vital, or evocative -- see, e.g., how some movie reviewers have succeeded in these aspects with their movie reviews -- then the audience for poetry reviews would be larger than a pre-2005 Los Angeles Clippers home game, this coming from a Clippers fan who stuck it out all through the 1990s and not some fairweather playoff harpie.)

But unfortunately, the problem has reached our readings of individual poems as well. At least sometimes. Just colloquially, we say things like "this poem is great," "this poem uses language well," or "this poem stands as a metaphor for two Japanese penguins on a flotilla of ice," as opposed to "I really like this poem," "I like this poem's use of language," or "I think that this poem stands as a metaphor for two Japanese penguins on a flotilla of ice, but I could be wrong, because I'm just random dude in San Jose who majored in cultural antropology and what do I know about penguin metaphors?"

In short, I encourage moving towards a greater recognition of the notion that to say "what a poem/book of poems is" is merely to say what the person who makes this particular claim thinks it is.

Interlope: a journal of asian american poetics and issues

2006-05-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you feel like you want to make the coolest post in the world on an important topic, and then you wait and wait and wait for the "ideal" post to come, and it never materializes. Well, I have waited for seven or eight months now, and I realize that the "moment of the ideal" may never arrive, so I might as well say what I have to say here and now, imperfections and all.

I'm referring to blogging about Summi Kaipi's Interlope: a journal of asian american poetics and issues, which has been arguably the most significant journal on the Asian American poetry scene over the past decade. It has featured some of today's better known Asian American poets as they just started out and/or have been on the rise -- like Linh Dinh, Tina Celona, Hoa Nguyen, and dare I say, poetry bloggers Lee Herrick, Pamela Lu, and Tim Yu (yes, friends, the Asian-American poetry universe is not that large) -- as well as Asian American poets who seem to have completely fallen off the map.

The look and feel of the print version of Interlope echoes the characteristics of classic underground comics, where the poets and poems are feeling their way through into being and have a vibrant, slippery, alive quality about them. Interlope was also one of the first Asian-American poetry journals to use the Internet as a means of publicizing poetry and to have its own website. Here is a brief description of the journal from the website, www.interlope.org:

"Interlope's mission is to publish innovative writing by Asian Americans. The first issue of the magazine, developed out of Summi Kaipa's interest in Asian American literature and the contemporary avant-garde in poetry, was released in May 1998. Particularly helpful as a starting point was the Premonitions anthology (published by Kaya, edited by Walter K. Lew, also an Interlope contributor), which had already begun - in a much less detailed way - to address the Asian American avant-garde. With writers like Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha as muse and evidence of a developing tradition, Kaipa fully married Asian American identity issues with avant-garde literature, bringing poetry and fiction by writers of Asian American descent together in Interlope to provoke questions of the impact of ethnicity on literature: What is Asian American writing and what is unique about it? What is experimental in emerging Asian American writers and why? What is the scope and the purpose of the Asian American avant-garde?

Interlope continues to be one of the few Asian American literary magazines currently being published. It is an invaluable resource for contemporary writing by up-and-coming Asian American writers and is currently available at many academic libraries, including Brown University, Stanford University, Yale University, and UC Berkeley. In February 2001, Interlope celebrated its 6th issue, a "criticism issue" guest edited by Alvin Lu (The Hell Screens), with a multi-arts event featuring readings by Lu, Chris Chen, and Amar Ravva, as well as a performance by experimental musicians Yasuhiro Otani and Tatsu Aoki. Additionally, for the past two years, Interlope has participated in APAture, a festival of young Bay Area Asian American artists. Some of Interlope's past contributors have included Brian Kim Stefans (Free Space Comix), Sianne Ngai (Criteria), Pamela Lu (Pamela: A Novel), and local musician and artist Miya Masaoka.

As writer, filmmaker, and Interlope contributor Kirthi Nath has said, “We [Asian American writers] have all thought, for a long time, that there needs to be a place for dialogue about the Asian American avant-garde. The significance of what Interlope is doing is indubitable.”

Notice that I have used the terms "has been" and "was" here -- this online description is slightly outdated, and the website and the publication itself have been on hold since 2003. One of the primary issues is that editor Summi Kaipa (www.loveinthetimeofcoriander.blogspot.com), like all of us, is human, and being human, we (gasp!) have lives of our own outside poetry and sometimes wonder whether our projects/passions have run their course. After all, five years is a long time to run a poetry publication, and having gone through most of the issues myself, I think that it is evident that Summi put a lot of time, energy, and heart into editing and producing it.

At any rate, seven or eight months ago, I was corresponding with Summi about the future of Interlope, and I'm going to quote myself here, because it is late at night and I'm hungry and ready to grab a bite to eat but want to make this post before I go grab myself a slice of leftover pizza, and more importantly, much to my dismay, I don't think that I can come up with anything better than what I had written Summi before:

"To be honest, I actually think that you should continue editing Interlope or start a different Asian-American poetry publication under another name. There is definitely a void in Asian-American poetry and poetics magazines nowadays. I think there has been a retrogression since the 1990s. I'm pretty sure that the only "Asian-American" poetry publication out there now is the one published by the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York, which comes out only sporadically. And Victoria Chang's Asian-American poetry anthology is the first of its kind to come out in about ten years.

I imagine that funding may be a major issue, and if it is, I'd suggest considering publishing online. There are deep, often unspoken prejudices against online poetry publications in the poetry world, but I think that they are the wave of the future. I think that the prejudices are more of a generational thing where poets over forty -- and virtually all poets with power, influence, and prestige are over forty -- tend to have anxieties about the use of the Internet as a medium for poetry and perhaps the Internet in general. That said, it's an open question whether their anxieties will influence a newer generation of poets and poetry editors/publishers."

Summi was just asking for my thoughts on what the 10th (and final) issue of Interlope should be like, and I was perhaps offering more than the question asked, implying that she should revive the publication if she feels like it. But the larger issue here, I think, is the complete lack of Asian American poetry publications -- whether online or print. It remains an open question whether there will be a regular Asian American poetry magazine or journal in the future.

Tinfish 16 / trout 13

2006-04-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

Newly released: a collaborative issue of Tinfish with trout, an on-line journal out of Honolulu and New Zealand, edited by Robert Sullivan, Anne Kennedy, Tony Murrow, and Brian Flaherty (www.trout.auckland.ac.nz). Both journals specialize in Pacific poetries; some of the authors have appeared in both publications, but most are new to one or the other.

This issue features work by Hinemoana Baker, Cherie Barford, Linh Dinh, Murray Edmond, Kari Edwards, David Eggleton, Glenn Mott, Eileen Myles, Kit Robinson, Hazel Smith, Juliana Spahr, Richard von Sturmer, and Mark Wallace, as well a review of John Kinsella by John Rieder. And much more! Wonderful translations from the Chinese of Huang CanRan, Shang Qin and others. Each cover of the Tinfish paper version is unique, a slipcover map. Centerfold by Thomas Wasson, designer of the roofing paper cover issue.

On asianamericanpoetry.com

2006-04-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

"Founded in the United States of America in June of 2005, asianamericanpoetry.com is a non-profit Internet-based site created to share poems by Asian poets from the U.S. as well as from all around the world. Our mission is to encourage and strengthen Asian poets to share their poetic works or art and have their brilliant gifts discovered." - www.asianamericanpoetry.com

"One does not need to be the greatest of poets andwriters to be in the "spotlight." Anyone who strives to be the best they can be as a writer and poet will be recognized and acknowledged." -Mor X. Chang, www.asianamericanpoetry.com

There are many things to like about asianamericanpoetry.com. First, it accepts submissions not only from Asians and Asian-Americans but from individuals of all races and ethnicities. Second and related, its policy of open submissions maximizes inclusivity by not imposing a fixed idea of what "Asian-American poetry" is, thus leaving this important question open. Third, it has attracted a diverse array of poets from different ethnicities, particularly southeast and south Asian-American poets. Fourth, it does not arrange poets or poems into any kind of artificial hierarchy.

But perhaps most importantly, asianamericanpoetry.com provides a great online repository for poems being written today by various Asian-American and non Asian-American poets. I think of it as "primary source material," as I learned the term in elementary school, in the sense that it contains useful documents from the original sources, i.e., the poets, unfiltered by a secondary source.

For me, there is a certain innocence to the site, because it recaptures the egalitarian ideal -- imagined though perhaps never really existing -- that there is a place for everyone's poems (an egalitarian ideal that remains strong in poetry but is captured maliciously by "vanity" publishers that make people pay exorbitant prices for their anthologies). In essence, asianamericanpoetry.com works at least partly by filling a void left by the commodification of poetry, which has its own set of positive uses but does largely exclude poets who do not want to go through the traditional submission/publication process. The brilliance of asianamericanpoetry.com resides in its fostering of an inclusive community.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part IX

2006-04-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

Dark strawberries tasted moist to Kudos. He lingered upon each syllable of strawberry, but who could forget a satellite dish? It served as an oval hammock.

Kudos was elbows of cool, and I recalled the only trampoline that ever knew me well. Its looseness prevented me from reaching too high. That was me with the essential glasses, front row, near the center of the photograph with the other short kids.

Meditative playground, come back to me as if you wanted everyone upon you. Kudos pretended not to notice a tangerine butterfly. In the form of a sandwich, a family member can talk your voice back into your mouth. Fear can make the voice of another your own. Kudos, soon enough, you will leave the security of pancakes again.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part VIII

2006-04-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

In the kitchen, Aunt Wei-Wei poured several tablespoons of water into the pot to make the sweet rice creamier. "So you found him," she asked and answered.

"Sometimes you are the seventy-eight year old great aunt of a young man who discovers a starving poet on the roof of a bed-and-breakfast, and that is the way life works. Even before your pre-breakfast manicure, the day has already begun."

My great-aunt and I had been talking about professional tennis rankings last night, and I wanted to change the subject to the immigration debates in Congress instead of Kudos, but she crossed the conversation-change finish line first. Still, I thought, if one imagined our chat thus far as the first leg of a triathalon...

"We are a nation of immigrants," I replied, "I don't understand the anti-immigrant rhetoric. It's always about interest groups."

"Kudos is not an immigrant. He is a poet. He is always at home. Don't you know that poets are always at home," Wei-Wei asked and answered, while layering a piece of toast with lemon caramel margarine.

"At any rate, I think that it's doubtful that either the Democrats or the Republicans have enough votes to get any bill out of the Senate this term," I replied.

"Kudos has been living on the roof for the past nine months. But the neighbors haven't noticed. Maybe if he wrote fiction. Nobody notices poets," Wei-Wei asked and answered.

"Still, I wonder if any senator would fillibuster if a proposal looked like it would pass," I replied.

"Many of the poems that Kudos has written are almost publishable. None of that racial/ethnic identity stuff about food. That won't get you a third look these days with hardly any editors. But I like flarf. I think that he should start a blog," Wei-Wei asked and answered.

Aunt Wei-Wei handed me a porcelain plate with two pieces of half-burnt toast, an ice cream scoopful of rice, and two slices of Canadian bacon.

"I'll take it up to Kudos," I sighed. "Is there anything you want me to tell Kudos?"

"Yes," she replied. "Tell him amnesty is unlikely. Politics can be tough in an election year."

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part VII

2006-04-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

Kudos used to play the guitar. He loved to play the guitar, because it made him feel good. He became good at playing the guitar, and he dreamt of writing songs. He wrote songs, some of which were good, some of which made his guitar sing beautifully. He felt moon upon moon of beauty whenever his guitar would sing at night. He was an incarnate guitar that inhabited the musicality of life.

"But that was when I was a boy," Kudos sighed. After leaving his family, Kudos spiraled downward. He sold his guitar for a week's worth of coffee, scrambled eggs, and cinnamon rolls. He lived in a homeless shelter, while he worked at a supermarket. He worked double-shifts as a bag boy at first, then gradually moved up the supermarket hierarchy. He became manager of the local branch after five years. He could not take it anymore after six years.

Yes, Kudos, I am listening to your ballad. I am realizing that guitars are not of this community. Endangered species, the whole band of musical instruments. Fewer and fewer guitars live in the wild. The turbulence of shopping malls frightens them, and I can only spot the stragglers through the use of powerful binoculars. Surviving guitars seldom know melodies nowadays, because we are losing the best of tradition.

"As a child, I was afraid of many things. As a child, I thought that you would no longer become afraid once you reached adulthood. I thought adults had no fears," Kudos the Adult slowly recollected. "As an adult, I know that I was mistaken. Adults have the weight of childhood and adulthood to bear. Adults have seasons upon seasons of scars that have sealed emotions into solemn cubicles of silence. Adults are conscious of loneliness but often lack the imagination of children to escape it. There are fears upon fears, and you do not want to go it alone, but sometimes...sometimes, it happens that you end up in a supermarket at midnight with no one to love you back."

Yes, Kudos, I am afraid as well. Play the guitar for me again, please.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part VI

2006-04-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

Kudos had the sense of a humor of a pie chart. With no raisins, with no orange slices, he could fashion a dotted grin on either snowman or potato. He could do prison guard imitations with waffle fries. In a fable without dragons, he could slap triangles on a salamander. He was masculine.

I would have wanted Kudos to perform in my elementary school theatrical on the perils of bad dental hygiene. My teacher only let the tallest boy play the part of the toothbrush, but let us not get that far into the voting rights debate. If Kudos could have done slapstick as dentures, I would have been mouthwash. No one can defeat bad breath without a palindrome.

Seven o’clock. Kudos told me that he no longer understood the concept of chewing gum, but it mattered little to him. Funny Kudos, alone on the roof. Poor, funny Kudos.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part V

2006-04-04T23:46:00.000-07:00

"I wanted to live in a town where everyone would misspell my name," Kudos sighed. "When you are a teenager, you believe in your indestructibility. Only much later do you learn that you are right. The confirmation comes via airmail, transposing an equinox with drums."

Kudos meant his poetry. "Did you think that anyone could destroy my poetry by firewood, scalding each stanza into ash? Did you think that it hurt me to leave my family? No, it cleansed me. My facelessness cleansed me, and I was so much the stronger for the anonymity. I was so much –"

Kudos broke off and wept, but he failed to realize that I could not deal with adults crying. (That weakness of mine existed "back then" but so recently that I can still taste everyone I had lost – and was losing.) Why was he crying? I used to crave blueberry pancakes whenever anyone wept. I asked Kudos for maple syrup but settled for a hard boiled egg and salad dressing.

"Commerce is humorous," Kudos gasped. "Just when you have purchased a glass dodecahedron, you realize that you no longer need the purity of refracted sunbeams. Then you take it home with you, and you realize that you do need it. Have you ever met the man who invented the windowsill? When you live outdoors, you tend to forget the language of windows."

It had been seven years since Kudos lived indoors. "No one can make a living off poetry," he declared. I smiled while imagining that it must have been the quality of the poetry. It would have been utterly fantastic to envision a society in which poets could not survive off their poems. A low tolerance for myth makes the globe spin faster.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part IV

2006-04-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

When Kudos hoisted me upon his shoulders, I became the fireworks I never forgave. Picnic music swarmed a malted radio. Balloons played plantains with flags. A mattress saleswoman closed shop. With each gaze that the stars cared to throw, a teardrop slipped across the face of a man, arc upon arc, his face upon the grass.

"Comprehend," Kudos proposed, "that everyone you have ever loved could be tender back to you. That you could share with them everything. Everything." Kudos set me back down on the roof and looked away. "No one is like that, you see."

On the state fairgrounds, you can be seven years old, and no one will blame you for it. You can have hot dogs and popcorn. You can have baseball. You can have parents. No one will blame you for it.

In three hours, the first rooster of a week that can begin on any day will crow. Five dozen average fortune cookies will burst open in fury, and their slips will scatter over the welcome mat of Wei-Wei’s bed-and-breakfast. A ticker-tape parade. Kudos wanted to know why I left the carnival that night and whether I would leave the rooftop.

"Yes," I replied. "I have learned to leave. Everyone I have ever loved, I have learned to leave." With that assertion, I opened a jar of fortune cookies to release two robins. Darling and confused, they reached the cherry tree unharmed. They fell in love with each other, and it was entirely believable.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part III

2006-04-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

Reckless Kudos was no heavyweight. "You do not have to know the beginning of my life," he warned, "to feel for the middle. Sentimental buckaroo, rejoice!"

If objects could be people, I think wool jackets are like Kudos. He meant to call me kid, though he barely understood that cauliflower and confetti no longer made me young. I meant topiaries. It would have been his pity that made me pitiful.

At the age of eighteen, Kudos escaped his home for Wyoming and a mug of coffee. Like every American, he travelled eastward in complete sentences. He vanquished fried bacon with civility. The lassos came without accolades. He traveled very publicly with a gothic marching band on a bus to Jefferson City.

When Kudos told the lead goth-saxophonist that he wrote poems, she looked at him like he was eighteen. "Only children write poems," she intoned. "After poetry, we become who we are meant to be."

Dear Kudos. As if anyone could escape from family. You are born into who you are meant to be, and you have divulged a life after poetry. Now you say you have changed. Now you want to go back. Dear Kudos, I can empathize.

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part II

2006-03-31T00:49:00.000-08:00

I've never been one of those anglers who have read much of poetry. That's not how my mind works. I've read a few poets like Shakespeare and Degas, but I've never really had the heart to decipher. People have told me that I should write poetry, but I always take it as an insult. I refuse to take it like an unkempt man.

"Anyone can be charming nowadays," Kudos the Poet expounded. "That's the problem with this world. You take a barrel of maple leaves. Even if you decided that you really wanted to chortle at the company picnic, you would not. With issues such as sandals, it is a matter of volition."

Kudos and I sat on top of the tatami roof of my great aunt Wei-Wei's bed-and-breakfast. Neither of us wanted to play the fashionable video games that had come out in the past three years, so conversation seemed to be the only option. I was glad. It started to drizzle. What made the rain wax the impatient heart into solitude?

Kudos had grown up in Monterey Park, California. Everyone in his family wanted him to be a astrophysicist. His mom surrounded his bed with silver candelabras till he turned 15. His dad made him dress up as a sheep-herding chemist for Halloween every year till he turned 18. His older brother performed as a juggler from the age of six in the second-largest Asian-American owned-and-operated circus in North America, and the family followed him around the country for several years till the circus industry slowed down. His little sister collected enough sharpened pencils to place third at the Hallibrook Festival of Uninvited Oddities. All in all, he had a childhood with a sufficient quantity of happiness.

On his eighteenth birthday, his mother discovered what must be one of the ultimate nightmares of any concerted family member: Kudos was thinking of becoming a rhyming poet. Not just any poet. But a poet who refused to write in free-verse, who only operated in the bewildered fixedness of monstrosities like ottava rima.

It happened that Kudos accidentally left his membership card for the Society of the Secret Pantoum People (SSPP) -- a rebel offshoot of the mainstream organization People for Pantoums -- on his dresser drawer. The SSPP was dedicated to returning the traditional rhyme scheme back to the writing of the pantoum and had been charged by many a poetry editor with "rhyming at all costs". A group of shiftless, undocumented bums. (At least the free verse poets were documented. You have to give them credit for that.) His mother was about to give Kudos a book of dim sum recipes for his birthday when she spotted the card before Kudos had the chance to hide it under his glass figurine of Nikola Tesla. His mother screamed, and his whole family ran to his room.

A search of the room began. Dozens of poems, hundreds of poems, thousands of poems. Hidden in the covers of textbooks, in his trigonometry notes, in yellow sticky notes underneath a bowling pin lamp. Rhyme, rhyme, rhyme! The habit had spiraled into addiction. While Kudos's mother and brother restrained Kudos, Kudos's father and sister seized all the evidence. Kudos's mother dialed the poetry emergency hotline and told everyone than the authorities would be there in less than half an hour.

Suddenly, Kudos managed to shake himself free and started to run. The chase had begun...

The Adventures of Kudos the Poet - Part I

2006-03-30T09:08:00.000-08:00

Recently, I had the privilege of venturing to Poplar-Nakagaki Square -- right near Shady Lake off Rutabaga Road -- where my great aunt Wei-Wei operates a five-room bed-and-breakfast. I had just finished off a bowl of her notorious leek dumpling soup, climbed up the oval staircase, and was heading to my room when I heard the sound of someone typing on a laptop. It came from up above.

Now you have to understand that I'd been here in Poplar-Nakagaki Square for many a moon festival, and I knew that the house only had two levels. I was no amateur. I wore floral pajamas with feet. Someone must have been typing on the roof, which made me curious, if only because I'd always been a boring person with an amazing sense of appreciation for the trivial.

I found the ladder for the roof, and up I went, rung by rung, till I popped open the ceiling. No one was there. I looked around, so you should trust me. But oh, the moon! You should have seen the moon. It was a Mrs. Moon from all the public libraries of our youths. If I was one of those kimono-making pygmies that you always hear about in the media these days, I would have stitched a giant kimono for Mrs. Moon. The laughter of a pygmy is often the size of a poncho. Then again, I thought, I have always been one of those people jealous of round objects, and there comes a time in every guy's life when he has to find his inner cubicle, master the art of triangles, and go work for the Trapezoid.

You don't know how lonely it gets sometimes in America. Everyday you order chicken fingers with curly fries. Some morality within you objects to combining curly fries with ketchup. You learn to watch cars, because isn't that what your parents always wanted? You tell yourself to grow up, and exactly three days and twenty-two hours after you have decided that you wanted to be a "grown-up," you find yourself piecing together a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a Minneapolis car salesman's interpretation of Hong Kong circa 1983 with your parents, because your sister decided to come home from San Jose State six hours later than usual, and who can rest comfortably before your sister has arrived back home? Self-acceptance can be brutal.

I was just about to head back down when I heard a voice behind me whisper, "Rhombuses are squares with scoliosis." I gasped and turned around. The voice said, "Hi, my name is Kudos. And just who are you supposed to be at this hour?"

On David Mura's Angels for the Burning

2006-03-28T00:52:00.000-08:00

Here is a book of dogged poems, totally intentional in its racial and ethnic politics. Evocations of "my/glass of RC with Pepperidge Farm," ("Astronomy"), "the Buddha/step[ping] forth, like those ballplayers/ in the Field of Dreams" ("The Last Days"), and "Bon-o-dori celebrations" ("Internment Epistles") consciously dwell upon the temporal and explore a particular time and place with a studied social realism. Many poems in this volume focus on Japanese-American experiences, in particular, experiences during the internment years.

It is also a very "American" book of poems in the way that it moves beyond the politics of the poet's own ethnicity and meditates upon worlds of different ethnicities and races. Examples of such poems include "Guests from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore" ("No Epic Song"), "the firehouse and Little Saigon Auto" ("First Generation Angels"), Chinatown and the world of early Chinese immigrants ("Father Blues for Jon Jang"), and Bosnia, Somalia, Puerto Rico, and a whole host of other races and nations ("Minnesota Public"). There is a daring attempt to render these "others" a cognizable part of a heterogeneous though unified polity.

Both substantively and stylistically, David Mura's Angels for the Burning (Boa Editions, 2004) is a throwback, echoing many of the poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Wing Tek Lum, James Mitsui, Janice Mirakatani, and Nellie Wong, whose work constructed a poetics around matters of "race" and "ethnicity." Substantively, the poems are direct with their primary subject matter -- race and ethnicity -- and primary agenda -- to meditate upon the discrimination and racism that racial minorities and Asian Americans in general, and Japanese Americans in particular, have experienced in America. Another important theme is multiculturalism and the recognition of the idea that America is a complex, multicultural society. Stylistically, the poems, with a few exceptions like "Internment Camp Psychology" and "Dahmer and the Boy," are fairly formal with well-controlled, left-justified stanzas of the roughly the same number of lines and lines of roughly the same length. While there is variety in word choice, language in and of itself is not the most important feature of the poetry.

I do not think that this book of David Mura's represents the future of Asian-American poetry, and I do not know if that is a good or bad thing. For example, "Father Blues for Jon Jang" is a critique of Charlie Chan, Flower Drum Song, and Stepin Fetchit. These figures clearly were concerns in many Asian-American poems of the 1980s but not so much in the poems of "political" Asian-American poets today. I can't think of a poet under the age of 40 who has written on Flower Drum Song, for example, because such references are just less likely to resonate with a contemporary audience. This is the age of Better Luck Tomorrow. Furthermore, the "Japanese-American" poems like "Relocations," "Hyde Park, 1950," and "Internment Epistles" evoke a historical memory that does not appear to have a prominent place in the works of many of the Asian-American spoken word poets and is not a central project of the Asian-American poetic avant-garde.

In this sense, one might say that the poems are dated. But look, you have to remember that to say poems are "dated" is not to say that poems are "bad." In fact, I think that part of the power of Mura's Angels for the Burning resides precisely in its uncompromising "datedness," its adherence to anti-discrimination precepts that grew out of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

It may be that this book of poems represents one of the last great gasps of an era of poetry that consciously delves into historical memory to find political meaning rather than a past that should be thrown aside for the sake of "progress" in poetry. There is a passion and narrative here often absent in many of the poems written today, for all the talk that we live in times of great urgency. All in all, I accepted and liked the book for what it is and believe that it well exemplifies its liberal project and carries out its mission of encouraging greater tolerance and understanding.

Loneliness and Connection in a Vast World

2006-03-25T02:30:00.000-08:00

While listing the "characteristics" of Asian-American poetry, I think that we should not overlook one of the most important qualities of Asian-American poetry -- its power to counter loneliness in an often vast and sometimes unforgiving world. That is, the very existence of "Asian-American poetry" is a form of connection that may unite people who share this area of interest. (Of course, there is the danger of exclusivity -- a danger that all "united" identities face in terms of walling themselves off against "others". But I think that if one shifts the focus from persons/poets to poems, then we may diminish this danger.)

But back to the point of this post: I think that it is a great gift to really enjoy something as I enjoy Asian-American poetry and discover quality folk who share this enjoyment. A real quality of human beings, perhaps not sufficiently emphasized, is the fact that we have the capacity to connect and empathize with one another. Art and poetry take the form of sharing, and I somehow take comfort in the fact that "Asian-American poetry" may be a conduit into our mutual minds and hearts. Even in a society that often alienates, we can still find each other.

Five Weird Habits of Asian American Poetry

2006-03-11T14:17:00.000-08:00

Following up on Pam Lu's request, http://openreader.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_openreader_archive.html, I've come up with five weird habits of Asian American poetry (or something like it).

1. Food: Because John Donne never grabbed Chinese takeout, it apparently has become the obligation of every Asian American poet to interject food into some poem or another. It's not tough to account for this phenomenon. Names of ethnic food may score points for original word choice (even "rice," which -- though I haven't done any studies here yet -- must appear in fewer contemporary poems than either "bread" or "water"), food can evoke multiple senses, and food can also serve as effective proxies for "cultural meaning". The type of food is important. Take Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons" -- I doubt that that the poem would be as effective if he called it "Watermelons" and used watermelons as the driving metaphor.

2. Asia: Often in Asian-American poems, there is some reference to various locales in Asia. Again, original word choice and the evocation of "cultural meaning" are plausible reasons for such usage. More bonus points. Whether Asian American poets use names of cities and places in Asia to exotify locales for an English-speaking audience is open to debate, though the evocation of geography itself in poetry is often a means of exotification, especially with American geography and the perception of regionalism that constitutes the nation, so perhaps the point is moot.

3. In a Language Other Than English: Asian-American poets sometimes like to throw in "foreign" words and phrases into their English-language poems -- whether Tagalog or Korean or Chinese. I'm not sure why. My guess is that it instinctively looks and/or sounds cool. A drawback is that a reader who is not bilingual in those particular two languages may find it hard to understand the poem. It makes more sense when there's some purpose behind the use of more than one language, when it is intended to play up some comparison between the English and the "other" language itself or to make a statement about cultural/ethnic difference. More unusual is the poem by an Asian American poet completely written in a language other than English -- these kinds of poems are more unusual than a satelite dish on top of a fast food restaurant in Taipei.

4. Cultural Memory: In many poems by Asian-American poets, there is a hearkening back to a "cultural memory," not entirely invented but not entirely extant in an objective sense either. If you are bothered by representations of the individual poet's conception of "culture" as indicative of "group culture," try not to think that way. Seriously. This is poetry folks, and it's important to remember that individual poets are projecting their individual perceptions on to culture, shaping it but not necessarily representing it (save the few cases in which the poet explicitly asserts that she or he is speaking for the group as a whole).

5. Experimentalism/Avant Garde: Over the past decade or so, Asian-Americans have increasingly engaged in avant-garde/experimental forms of poetry. There are many reasons, of course, but one particular not oft-stated reason, I think, is that generally Asian-American poets were never as beholden to some schools of poetry as, say, many non-Asian-American poets have tended to be. In the nineteenth century, for example, there was never an Asian-American poet equivalent to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Robert Browning or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Similarly, much of the twentieth century witnessed the overshadowing of Asian-American poets and poetry. It appears that the relatively recent rise of Asian-American poetry is related to such poets' predilection for newer ways of conceptualizing poetry and the desire to be on the cutting edge, or what is perceived to be the cutting edge, of poetry and thinking in poetry.

Tinfish Press and Poeta en San Francisco

2006-02-20T20:55:00.000-08:00

Tinfish Press is proud to announce publication of Barbara Jane Reyes’s POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO, winner of the James Laughlin award from the Academy of American Poets. The book was designed by Colin Wilkinson and Karen White and is quite beautiful. $13 from Tinfish (no shipping), or from spdbooks.org.

Please see more information about the book and how to order it at http://tinfishpress.com/ (click on “books” first). Then have a look around the rest of our website, which features descriptions of our publications, as well as “free stuff.” Among our recent publications are Kim Hyesoon’s When the Plug Gets Unplugged, translated by Don Mee Choi, and Yunte Huang’s Cribs. Tinfish 14 (bank report covers) and 15 (the chum pencil issue) are still available, as well.

Folk Say - An African-American Equivalent to Asian-American Poetry

2006-01-28T04:44:00.000-08:00

Wow, so blogging about issues does make a difference! In a comment below, Kevin Andrew Elliott says that my post on the lack of an African-American equivalent to this blog has inspired him to establish just such a blog on African-American poetry -- "Folk Say" http://blackpoetry.blogspot.com/.

This is exciting! Kevin's first post is terrific and sounds the message of inclusiveness and curiosity that I find important to both our blogs.

You know, I feel like All in the Family, and the Jeffersons have now moved up on to the East Side to their own groundbreaking series. I want to say that I'm not being "racial" here, and this comparison would work just as well with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, but both our blogs concern "race" anyway, so I might as well work the race angle for any humor that may exist. After all, there is no Asian-American equivalent to All in the Family (unless you want to Margaret Cho's All-American Girl, though it's questionable whether she would even want to count that herself), so I'll run with this comparison.

The Cruelest Month

2006-01-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Started by masterminds at Harper Collins, a new website (www.cruelestmonth.com) is linking to poetry journals, poetry resources, and (gasp) poetry blogs...Sorry David Lehman, I guess there are people who appreciate blogs. Go figure. But don't feel too bad -- as Randy Jackson might say, "you did your thing dawg." At least you had the decency to mention bloggers alongside J-Lo in the same introduction.

As long-term, or maybe even short-term, readers of this blog can probably guess, I approve of this website. I really think that poetry publishers, editors, and poets should work hard to market themselves. It's a tough world out there, folks. Most people watch television and go to movies. Too few people read poetry. Joe Six-Pack Srichipan would much rather buy one of those "novels" than a book of fine poetry. If you publish poetry, you've got to flaunt it at least a little.

And there are books of fine poetry offered by Harper Collins. I'm going to point in alphabetical order, and possibly revealing my biases more than I would like, to Ashbery, Brooks, Bukowski, Dickinson, Doty...ok, I think I'll stop here. The list goes on, and it's a great list.

So instead of saying "shucks, I'm just [name of poet/poetry editor] and don't believe in commercialism and don't care about readers and would be happy if my book sold in the triple digits, and novelists are just so much sexier because they can't shut up about all their 'ideas,'" the poet/poetry editor might say, "You should buy my books of poems and read my poetry, because poetry is so awesome, and so much easier to read on the subway than a cookbook or dietbook or Republican Lovers Weekly."

So, shout out to cruelestmonth.com. Long live blogs!

A Color Barrier? - African-American Poetry

2006-01-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

Do African-Americans write poetry? Why are there no blogs out there by African-American poets? Why is there no "African-American Poetry" equivalent to this blog? (And by "African-Americans," I mean "black," of course. Just using the term "African-American" because it sounds and looks similar to "Asian-American.")

Obviously, I'm mistaken that there are no blogs by African-American poets. At least I think that I am. Prove that I am mistaken. As the very sane Tom Cruise might say, "Show me the blog!"

I hesitate to make a socioloeconomic, historical, and/or cultural arguments that there are fewer African-Americans, on average, that have easy access to computers and e-mail and blogs, and therefore, that accounts for the lack of African-American bloggers. After all, there are plenty of African-Americans with easy access to computers and blogs.....But that still leaves us with a puzzle.

Paper or Plastic: A New Frontier?

2006-01-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

Unga-bunga! From the dawn of civilization, people have been writing poems. It all started when Ug the Cave Man and Uga the Cave Woman used their prehensile fingers to share tanka pictographs with each other by carving poems in the dirt. Since then, we've gone through many stages in terms of writing utensils for poetry -- paint made of berries for cave walls, the use of papyrus, quill pen and paper by romantic candlelight, etc.

Now we have computers. Computers scare a lot of poets. You have to understand that knowledge of poetry and knowledge of computers do not go hand in hand. I can sympathize. Computers scare me as well. Things happen so fast. E-mails and blog posts seldom allow for enough contemplation. You're on a first date and then, boom, before you know it, you're married with three kids, a two door garage, and a mortgage the size of Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. But, like it or not, I'm here to say that the computer is here to stay, just as the Internet and blogs are more likely than not here to stay.

That leads to one initial question: In the future, will poets generally write poems on paper/in notebooks or type them out on computers? My guess is that we are heading towards the latter. That is, I can envision a future, maybe twenty and thirty years down the line, in which only a distinct minority of poets will use paper to write initial or subsequent drafts of poems, and all writing and revising of poems will occur on computers.

You might be scoffing. You might be one of those poets who writes everything initially by hand and shuns the idea of typing out poems on the computer. Well, scoff, if you must. I can't stop you. We (still) live in a country with no federal prohibitions on scoffing.

But I think that those of us over the age of 21 should wake up and take a look around. Over the past decade, I've witnessed the world of computers and the Internet infililtrate the world of young people. I didn't use a computer much when I was a kid. Kids are using computers regularly now. When I was a teaching assistant for a summer school class of first graders a few years back, they were already typing away on the computer. I didn't use e-mail on a regular basis till I was in my junior or senior year of high school. For many teenagers nowadays, e-mail, IM, and blogs are a regular part of their lives and have been their whole lives. That is, they have never known any differently. To draw a parallel here, it is like trying to imagine a world without television sets, which is very difficult to do.

I'm not sure whether this phenomenon is good or bad. At least a few of my friends have lamented at the costs of the new technological age -- less face-to-face contact with people, fewer phone conversations, greater alienation, etc. At the same time, there are benefits as well -- easy communication via e-mail, the nonintrusiveness of such communication, it is a plus for people who like to write, etc. More relevant to the point of this post, a lot of younger people actually don't know how to write substantively or stylistically well on paper, especially in cursive in terms of style. It may come as a surprise to you, but it shouldn't. With more time spent on computer instruction and regular use of computers, writing on paper naturally seems more unnatural. At the same time, the computer skills of younger people are well-developed, and in general, will be more well-developed than those of a previous generation.

My guess is that most poets under the age of 21 have already given up pen and paper for keyboard and computer monitor. Go to xanga.com -- where there are many Asian-American poets under the age of 21 -- to check out the phenomenon for yourself. This is the year 2006. We are at the cusp of the computer/Internet age, and I think that more poets should more seriously consider the different ways in which this change may drastically affect "how" we write poems.

Asian-American Men and Looks

2006-01-01T05:10:00.000-08:00

Sooner or later every Asian-American male blogger makes a post about race and gender and the American mass media. (This post defines "Asian-American" as Americans from East Asia, of course, because Asian-Americans from South Asia have a similar though separate set of concerns and issues.) Obviously, I've touched upon it over and over in a series of posts, but I don't know if I've ever dealt with it directly, perhaps because I've been focusing on poetry as opposed to television or film.

I've been thinking. I'm going to use American Idol's William Hung as an example for this post, since I've talked about him before, and there's a better than average chance that readers of this blog will know who he is. Most Asian-Americans don't like William Hung. But why? What's bad about William Hung?

One response may relate to the fact that he's basically one of the few Asian-American male figures in popular entertainment out there. He serves as a symbol for all Asian-American men in the United States, because there are so few represented in mass media. I like this answer. Under-representation is bad, and Asian-American men are underrepresented in all forms of media -- be it television, film, magazines, or even poetry, though the poetry world has been changing rapidly in poetry over the past two decades. As discussed before, I predict the continued rise of Asian-American poetry.

More questionable, to me, is the answer that William Hung embodies negative stereotypes. I mean, what does that mean? My concern is that Asian-Americans are bashing the "William Hungs" of the world at least partly for being physically ugly. That is, "ugly" by the superficial standards of mass media. But lots of Asian-Americans look like William Hung. Many of us are not all that good-looking by the standards that many corporations have defined beauty. On average, Asian-Americans tend to have rounder faces, smaller eyes, less facial hair than Americans of other races. Asian-Americans also tend to be shorter and have a different complexion than Americans of other races.

Equally questionable, to me, is the answer that the William Hungs of the world are bad because of the way they "act" -- as if the way someone acts can ever be completely separated from the way someone looks. On American Idol and afterwards, Hung acted polite, naive, straightforward, reserved, and calm. His attire was acceptable but could be improved upon. His English was ok but not perfect. In short, he acted the way that a lot of Asian-Americans, and a lot of people, act in general. Very common and not decked out with bling.

My fear is that Asian-Americans' critique of William Hung also reflects a self-hating desire to look and act more like Gap, Abercombie and Fitch, Old Navy models, etc. That's not going to happen. William Hung will never look that way, no matter how many stylists or voice coaches the entertainment world gives him before they abandon him to oblivion once the fad wears off, if it hasn't already. Nor should it happen, one could argue. We should be happy with the way we look and accept ourselves for who we are. Asian-Americans should not try to simply imitate the look, attire, and behavior of any other race -- some imitation can be good, but it should be an adaptation into what may become ours, not a refutation of what is there.

Lots of Asian-Americans are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. For some Asian-American men, I think that the William Hung issue may reflect an anxiety to separate ourselves from the identities of our parents and grandparents. If an Asian-American man happens to be an immigrant himself, he may want to break away from the whole identity of the Asian past as well. There's a tension there, which the mass media (especially television and film) worsens by not presenting enough possibilities as to what and who an "Asian-American man" can be.

One Year Anniversary

2005-12-29T07:35:00.000-08:00

This blog on Asian-American poetry is a year old now. To celebrate its birthday, it is time for the author to do some soul-searching...Ok, just found it beneath a pile of pantoums! Seriously, though, I think that I may be more amazed than anyone that this blog has lasted a year. There are marriages that don't last a year. The blog has kept on trucking through the posts that I've liked and the (hopefully fewer) posts that have made me want to stick my head in the sand.

At this point, I have mixed feelings about this blog. Obviously, I derive some joy, or at least satisfaction, out of maintaining it. I'm not a masochist. I like thinking and talking about Asian-American poetry, and I certainly wasn't getting enough of it at the same time last year. The blog has given me an outlet to share my thoughts on Asian-American poetry with anyone who happens to come across it. That's been cool. And I'm grateful for all the people who have stopped by, read my thoughts, and/or commented on them. Thanks. It's nice to know that there are people out there interested in Asian-American poetry, that you're not some freak with an interest that no one shares.

On the other hand, this blog is clearly, how do you say?...different. This blog is not about me. To a certain extent, all blogs are not completely representative of the people behind them, but this one has been even more of an act of ventriloquism than your average blog. Unlike most other bloggers, I don't talk about my life, which makes it difficult to get to know me through this blog. There are no pictures of myself, my pets, or my house plants. There are no links to other blogs. There isn't really much of a developed personal identity here. Plus, I've experimented with different authorial voices, which doesn't help with trying to establish a more personal connection. That's not necessarily bad. The focus has primarily been on Asian-American poets and poetry. The main goal of this blog has been to draw attention to matters of interest involving Asian-American poetry, and I feel that I've been fairly successful in this respect.

But sometimes I've wanted an understanding that I know would be virtually impossible to get out of this blog. A personal understanding. It's virtually impossible with this blog, because I would have to reach out first, and it would be against the nature of this blog. I'd have to talk about myself and my life, which may or may not be interesting, but would definitely detract from the discussion on Asian-American poetry. I'd probably have to be less blunt, provocative, and critical. The critic, in particular, needs a certain level of detachment. I'm not exactly sure why I've kind of painted myself into this corner, because I do enjoy blogs that are about people and their personal thoughts and emotions, probably more than single-issue blogs on average. If I ever start another blog, it most likely won't be single-issue. I'd show my true personality, which is not reflected on this blog.

In certain respects, Roger Pao the blogger is so different from me that it's almost funny. It's almost 180 degrees from who I am, and I'm in on a joke that only the very few readers who know me in real life can possibly get. For starters, I hardly ever say anything bad about anyone. I'm nice to people. Also, I'm quiet and shy. In a crowded room, I don't attract attention. I don't share my opinions with strangers. I'm sensitive to other people's feelings, and I'm into patience and compromise. My sense of humor is usually one of the later things that people learn about me. I care about people and my friends, and my friendships usually last a long time, etc.

In a way, the blogger is kind of like the Wizard of Oz. Roger Pao the blogger definitely aspires to be the Oz of Asian-American poetry. The blogger wants his towering emerald green presence to cast a shadow over Dorothy, the Tin Man, and all the pauvre munchkins. I'm kind of jealous of the blogger, of the confidence, bravado, and swagger that I lack. The blogger is bolder, more out-there, less insecure.

But in some respects, I am also the blogger. The two are not irreconcilable. The voices on this blog are my own. And that's sort of scary! I mean, I think that the blogger is bold, but I wouldn't even know if I'd want to be classmates or co-workers with this blogger, let alone actually be him. Still, I have a certain personality, and even though I may deny its existence on this blog, its presence, I imagine, marks pretty much every post.

As many bloggers have considered with their respective blogs, I've considered putting the brakes on this blog and ending it altogether. After all, the blog does take up some time and energy that could be put to other uses. So I have thought about bringing it to a close...Well, I hate to break it to you people, but that's not going to happen any time soon! The Asian-American poetry blog shall continue. I've still got at least one major project up my sleeve, and I've still got more opinions to share about Asian-American poetry. So happy holidays to all, and I hope you'll come back for more in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Stickwitu

2005-12-27T21:56:00.000-08:00

I've been finding myself enjoying the Pussycat Dolls' "Stickwitu". For those not in the know, "Stickwitu" features such innovative rhymes as "day, away, and say," "better, forever," "me, baby," and the ever popular "stickwitu, stickwitu." Clearly inspired by Nellie Wong's Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, the song marks another step forward for cultural feminism with such trailblazing lyrics as "I must stick wit u" and "I'm a stick wit u." Of course, the earlier Dolls' hit, "Don't Cha" featured the anaphora "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was [hot, a freak, raw, fun] like me." I guess "free of venereal diseases" didn't make the short list.

At any rate, I'm just kidding. Kudos for marketing yourself well, Dolls. Maybe poets Garrett Hongo and John Yau can imitate and form a Britney and Madonna-like duet and go touring the nation.

I don't know if there are any Asian-Americans in the Pussycat Dolls (a.k.a. the United Nations of Prettiness). If there were, I'm not sure about the extent to which it would mark an advancement for our people. Maybe it would. I mean, who needs an Asian-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court?...Oh, I get it now! "Stickwitu" stands for "Stick with you." They're just too fast for me, or rather, toofast4me...I should be making a post on football players who write sestinas in the near future.

David Lehman Takes a Swipe at Bloggers

2005-12-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

Let me preface this entry by saying that I have a certain fondness for poet/editor David Lehman. I think of good ol' Dave as one of the greatest American poetry pimps that America has witnessed in the past two decades. The guy knows how to market poetry, and for that, he deserves a woot, woot! In many respects, my views on the commercial aspects of poetry resemble his. Like Dave, I don't have a problem with Rosie and J-Lo writing poetry -- the more, the merrier. I think Dave's a cool guy with a cool anthology series.

But, if only for the sake of my fellow poetry bloggers, I have to defend our kind, and poetry criticism, from this assertion of Dave's in The Best American Poetry 2005, edited by Paul Muldoon:

"But it is also worrisome that that the back of [Poetry] -- the part devoted to criticism -- has grown steadily. More voices, more pages, do not equal clarification. It is sometimes said with heavy tones of lamentation that in this day and age everyone's a poet. The criticism in Poetry implies that on the contrary everyone's a critic. And criticism is too often the sound of a gripe and the taste of sour grapes expressed with all the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of a midnight blogger" (pp. 4-5).

First, hey Dave, bloggers have feelings, too, you know! I know you must think that your analogy of poets/ poetry critics who suffer from sour grapes to midnight bloggers is cool and all, but you're not scoring points with this "midnight blogger." My "sensitivity and thoughtfulness" says that this one-sentence swipe at bloggers deserves to kiss my proverbial yellow and slightly-less-hairless-than-the-average-American's behind.

Second, yes, everyone is a critic. For example, this particular paragraph of yours needs editing. The sentences in this paragraph deserve commas. I've helped you a bit already. I changed "lamentation than" to "lamentation that." That was a typo. I also only excerpted the second part of your paragraph, because obviously, this is a new paragraph -- you had been praising Poetry as "a little livelier, more compelling magazine than it had been" to set yourself up for axing it. Very clever. Now all you need is a paragraph break, and you're ready for the prom.

Third, I do not know anyone who has ever said "with heavy tones of lamentation" that everyone is a poet. I know you're just articulating the other side's position here, but really, I don't know anyone who would "lament heavily" -- like a virgin shrouded in the purest shade of white, who has just discovered that her fiance has run off with the village prostitute -- over too many people being poets.

Fourth, and now on to the more serious stuff, I agree that "more voices, more criticism, do not equal clarification." But I disagree with your implification that this phenomenon is bad. I don't believe in a hierarchy of poetry. Now, your anthology represents a hierarchy, and it works well for the masses, and I think you should run with it. But I don't think that you should take yourself too seriously here. Don't let your critics push you into vehemently defending the "clarification" of your model of organization. It's clear who is in charge with dictatorships. Clarification does not necessarily mean good. Actually, this claim contradicts your other suggestions to open up poetry itself to a greater cacophony of voices. If the "poets' club" should have more voices, why not the "poetry critics' club"?

Fifth, yes, I realize that poets can be petty and childish, and that can be bad. It can be bad when "people...go public with their peeves" (p. 5). I don't think of personal "peeves" as poetry criticism, and I know it can be hard to draw the line. I'd draw the line at personal attacks on the poet, but that's an ambigious standard as well. But isn't it better this way? Now we can separate the "real intellectuals" from the vindictive posers. That's an advantage of having a liberal democracy -- perhaps with more than any other form of government, you can tell the difference between people who sincerely care about poetry and those who merely want to air their personal grievances. At least I can, and I'd like to think that most people can as well.

It strikes at something more fundamental and more American as well. Americans are blunt and bold and sexy and weird and lovely and diverse in more ways than one could possibly conceptualize. And returning to the origins of this post, this diversity is reflected in the wide array of blogs out there. So Dave, as a friend, I would say that you should visit more blogs, or start one of your own, to find out what all the fuss is about.

The Most Intriguing (and Sensual) Male Poets of 2006

2005-12-17T00:40:00.000-08:00

(Edit: This post is a persona post intended to be humorous and ironic. Sorry if there was any confusion. Read it as if the blogger were an uptight, old-fashioned, McCarthyesque conservative, and then go buy the calendar, for goodness sake!)

Someone must be the voice of morality around here. And as everyone knows, I have always been the voice of wholesome purity -- the kind that made the 1950s the best decade in American history. There may have been minor "issues" with regards to race back then, but, you know, as the KKK always say, que sera, que sera.

With all the polymorphous perversity oozing around the blogosphere, I was not surprised to come across this filthy calendar --http://www.poeticinspire.com/calendarletter.html -- in the guise of poetry and charity. It even features an Asian American poet-blogger, Mr. Lee Herrick, who promotes the calendar on his depraved blog: http://www.apapoetry.blogspot.com/

It's not about CFIDS, I'm afraid. It's about hot poet sex, ready to deflower us all, just like Shakespeare deflowered the sonnet. If I was a mother of three teenage daughters, I would buy three of these calendars and force my daughters to sit in front of them until they got it out of their system. Same thing, if I was a father with three teenage sons. I'd expose the calendar to them till they learned what was decent and right.

Sure, there are some "cool" people who will buy this calendar. Some "chicks" and (don't even let me think about this one) "dudes" may have purchased it already. These "chicks" and "dudes" may say "hey, man" to each other in their "happening" alleys and present themselves as "the in-crowd" and go shooting pool on Sunday afternoons like a pack of "hippie" Buddhists from Indonesia.

But there are consequences as well. For example, and names have been concealed to protect the innocent here: Mrs. Jane Doe-Sugiyama, 32, was an average suburban housewife and mother of two 3 year old twins, who liked backgammon, knitting stockings, and baking oatmeal raisin cookies. One day, while making sure her computer was safe from pornography as any upstanding American would, she came across a link to this calendar on Mr. Herrick's weblog. Like any good mother, she wanted to protect her toddlers from online images that would not be conducive to their upbringing. She had to check out the site for the sake of her toddlers. But when she clicked on the link, when she saw the primordial pics of poet after poet, her right hand started shaking. Against all the morals that constituted her purity and membership card of the right wing of conservative fortitude, she clicked "yes" and ordered it!

For days afterwards, she worried that her husband would find out, and when it arrived while her husband was still at work, she found herself ripping the package apart with her teeth. Animal! She tore off her corset, fell to the carpet, and licked all the poems like a Victorian with too much caffeine in her system. Animal, animal! She glossed poem after poem, poet after poet, page after page, with her lustful tongue. Animal, animal, animal! She wept and screamed, "O what a foul, poet-lusting beast have I become!" Fortunately, she confessed her grievous straying to her husband, who quickly enrolled her in a 14-step program for housewives addicted to beefcake calendars.

At any rate, if you like sex, if you think that poems can be sex toys, if you think that poetry is about the flesh -- about Mr. Randall Mann's pecs, Mr. William Allegreeza in his underwear, and Mr. Herrick's bare feet -- I cannot stop you from indulging yourself and buying this calendar. I can only warn you of the heart of darkness that is The Most Intriguing (and Sensual) Male Poets 2006.

On TinFish Press

2005-12-15T17:54:00.000-08:00

I think that this blog has been a tad too nice recently. What can I say? Blogging has at least slightly muted the angry persona that is the host of this blog. It's good to be nice in real life, but nice doesn't necessarily translate well to the blogosphere sometimes, especially when you've promised that your blog will offer "strange and outlandish takes" on the subject at hand. Unfortunately, for you lovers of mockery and power and self-loathing, this post will also be nice, but I'll have more oddness to dish out in my following post. Stay tuned...

This post must be nice, because I have to be honest here and give props to TinFish Press, run by Susan Schultz -- a hard-working and visionary editor who puts out arguably the most cutting-edge work in Asian American poetry today. Here is a description from the TinFish website (http://www.tinfishpress.com/):

A non-profit organization founded in 1995 by Susan M. Schultz, Tinfish Press publishes a journal of experimental poetry from the Pacific, including Hawai`i, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, California, and western Canada. The press also produces books and chapbooks of poetry and experimental prose, some of it written in Hawai`i Creole English (Pidgin). Each publication is designed by artists living in Hawai`i, under the direction of cover-girl, Gaye Chan. Tinfish uses recycled materials, including tarpaper, weather maps, proof sheets, and hamburger sleeves to cover its always un-recycled poetry and prose.

As you can tell from the description, Schultz clearly has a specific and unique vision for TinFish Press, which I imagine has contributed to its relative longevity. It is peculiarly an interpretation of Hawaii, while at the same time, it acknowledges Hawaii's physical place in the larger, geographical landscape of the Pacific Ocean. It also negotiates all the territories around Hawaii. In a sense, I think that TinFish represents the Opposite of Europe. Reversing the more traditional narrative of space and time, Hawaii is central, while Europe is falling-off-the-edge-of-the-world.

Here are excerpts from an e-mail that Schultz recently sent out to publicize works that have been, or will be, published by the press:

I'm pleased to announce publication of _When the Plug Gets Unplugged_, by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi. Kim Hyesoon is one of the most prominent poets in South Korea, and Don Mee Choi lives in Seattle where she translates the work of Korean women poets. Chapbook design by Mike Cueva.

These are poems about rats, spoken by rats...

Now at the printer is Barbara Jane Reyes's much anticipated volume, _Poeta en San Francisco_, so stay posted.

aloha, Susan, Tinfish Editor

PS Remember that rat books make fine holiday gifts.

This announcement sums up TinFish Press quite well. Really, come on now -- "These are poems about rats, spoken by rats..." Who else but Susan Schultz would publish poems about rats written by a Korean woman poet and translated by a Korean-American?! Under TinFish, the avant-garde becomes a ratty delinquency, exuded by the ugly visceralness of feminine hygeine. It's wild stuff, and in its own way, it's kinky in an increasingly kink-free world.

Asian and American, Entranced by Words

2005-12-09T01:14:00.000-08:00

Poet Victoria Chang alerted me to this nice article in the San Francisco Chronicle -- http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/04/RVGMHFU0V41.DTL&type=books -- about three Asian-American poets who have come out with new books of poetry this past year. More ideas for Christmas presents, or Hannukah presents, or Kwanzaa presents, or Hey-Why-Don't-Asian-Americans-Get-a-Holiday-of-Their-Own-in-December presents. (I don't think Hallmark makes cards for that last one.)

It is nice -- and highly unusual -- given the lack of space of typically devoted to poetry, let alone Asian-American poetry, in mainstream publications like the Chronicle.

On Eileen Tabios

2005-12-04T00:59:00.000-08:00

Several months ago, poet Eileen Tabios sent me a couple poems to post and comment for this blog. Unfortunately, she failed to take into account my technological ineptitude -- one of the poems had crossouts, and I tried a couple times, but I was unable to get the formatting quite right, so I put it off. And now the boat seems to have passed in terms of my phase of commenting on individual poems, as I had done a few months ago.

Fortunately, I have read enough of Tabios' poetry in general to be able to comment generally on it. (I should have thought of this mode of commenting earlier, but I didn't. What can I say? I'm like Wile E. Coyote in one of those Looney Tunes cartoons where he doesn't realize that he's rushed over the cliff till he's already gone half way over the Grand Canyon.)

For me, Tabios' poetry has always been at the forefront of the Asian-American poetic avant-garde. Her poems have been continuously innovative and ground-breaking, in terms of style and content, and they have paved the way for the work of other Asian-American, especially Filipina/o-American, poets whose poems reflect her intelligent experimentation with language and identity.

Her poetry embodies the negotiation between form and content in a way that is important to Asian-American poets and others -- especially important for critics who do not believe that experimentation with language and lyricism and narrative/history/identity may be reconciled. In Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole and other poems, she dares to attempt both at the same time, which is no easy task.

Though Tabios is not often mentioned as a central figure in "Asian-American poetry" -- in the sense of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, and Nellie Wong -- I think that she should be discussed in these terms. All these poets write different types of poems, and her own poetry is different from the work of these poets, charting out a new direction that Asian-American poets have consciously, or subconsciously, attempted to emulate. In addition, she was the editor of one of the most innovative anthologies in Asian-American poetry -- Black Lightning -- which showcases various Asian American poets' describing their own individual poems in progress. Her own poetry should definitely be sought out.

Guest Blogger: Melvin Wong the Cantaloupe

2005-11-24T17:53:00.000-08:00

(Editor's Note: Melvin e-mailed me from his Blackberry yesterday and asked if he could respond to my two most recent posts on Ghettoization. I have given him permission to respond here. - Roger)

I would like to thank Roger Pao for giving me the chance to make this post on his blog. While Pao and I did indeed have such a conversation last week at Kroger's, his posts contain a number of glaring mischaracterizations, omissions, and flat-out incorrect assertions, which I would like to correct here.

First, as a minor matter, Although, Although ($14.95, Hirsute Begonias Press) came out in February 1996, not 1995, as Pao indicated in one of his previous posts. Also, my daughter was in the fifth grade, not the third grade, when she played the role of Lavinia in Mr. O'Neill's play.

Second, for the purposes of this post, I will be assuming a priori that I am a cantaloupe, even though I believe that such distinctions are meaningless.

Third, I was indeed penning a sestina -- I was finishing the fifth stanza -- when Pao tapped my rind with his knuckles. Forced to stop my work in the middle of the poem, just as I had finished the brilliant line, "Mastadon masters emasculated the massuesse on Christmas morning," I came out to tell Pao to stop thumping me. Theoretically, I can comprehend the act of thumping vis-a-vis watermelons, but I do not understand why so many customers operate under the illusion that they would learn anything by thumping cantaloupes. We are not united by our differences. All of us are orange inside.

Fourth, I want to discuss the problem of reverse discrimination, which I believe has infiltrated the poetry establishment as well as Pao's last two posts. These posts portrays me as weepy, angry, and emotionally unstable. If I was a member of a "protected" minority group -- a homosexual, African-American, or the like -- I believe that no one would have dared to paint such a blantly officious portrait. Because I am an "Asian-American" and a "cantaloupe," these posts take liberties that might not otherwise have been taken.

Fifth, Pao dunked me in baking soda, not flour. Just to set the record straight: I am neither Taiwanese nor homosexual.

Finally, I may be wrong here, but I think that Emily Dickinson once wrote in one of her letters to Carlos Bulosan, "The category of cantaloupe is an affront to human dignity. When shall we be free of the chains that bind?" Though now appropriated by Adrienne Rich and others in the radical, faux-deconstructionist left, Dickinson was obviously saying that affirmative action hurts the cantaloupes that it tries to help. For example, people ask me all the time -- how do you procreate when you are a sphere and nothing else? Well, if you abolished affirmative action, I would not have to face these ridiculous questions. Indeed, we need to use our imaginations in order to achieve true equality.

-- mwc

Ghettoization - Part I

2005-11-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

I was in the supermarket yesterday and came across a talking cantaloupe. The cantaloupe told me his name was Melvin Wong. I usually don't like to converse with supermarket fruit, especially melons I have just met, but I was amused by the sestina that he was etching on his rind. He was the first cantaloupe that I had ever encountered who was working with fixed forms.

Melvin the Cantaloupe shared the story of his life as a poet with me. He immigrated from Hong Kong with his parents at the age of five in the early 1960s to San Francisco. He grew up in a suburb adjacent to the city and was raised in a conservative, heterosexual household, where people of all races lived happily in the '70s. He attended UCLA, majoring in computer science and minoring in English, but he was still miffed that the quota system had kept him out of UC Berkeley (he started college three years before the Supreme Court issued the Bakke decision).

At UCLA, Melvin the Cantaloupe took up poetry and enrolled in poetry classes. His first poetry professor was a feminist, and he studied Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Nellie Wong during his freshman year. But his second poetry professor, who soon became his mentor, hated feminism and identity politics for "depurifying" the art of poetry ("depurifying" was a word that this particular professor coined in his most famous book, The Clarity of Mystification (1969), which was largely regarded as a rebuke of the politics of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school of poetry for having obliquely encouraged the rise of the feminists and multiculturalists during the civil rights movement.) This poetry professor introduced him to Hart Crane, John Berryman, and John Ashbery, and he loved these poets with almost the passion of the 3,288 cantaloupes who congregated on an ice rink coated with margarine to protest the annexation of San Diego shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Melvin the Cantaloupe enrolled in the MFA program at UC Davis straight out of college, much to the dismay of his parents. Melvin was not too happy there, because he felt that too many of his professors there wanted to "indoctrinate" him by forcing him to write poems about his Asian heritage and Asian-American identity. In short, he felt that they wanted to "ghettoize" him, and he did not want to be confined to their petty categories...

Here I interrupted Melvin the Cantaloupe to tell him that I kept a blog on Asian-American poetry. At first, Melvin did not know how to react and even seemed a little embarassed at having criticized identity politics in general, thinking that I supported the agenda that disgusted him. So I quickly added, "No, no, no, this isn't your run-in-the-mill blog on Asian American poetry. I provide my own 'strange and outlandish takes' on the subject, and I challenge practically every presupposition in the field of Asian-American poetry."

Melvin still appeared a little suspicious, and nobody likes a suspicious cantaloupe, so I continued, "My blog is mainly about me trying to think things through. I don't have any particular fixed view that I'm defending here. The main purpose of this blog is for me to learn."

Melvin paused for a second, stuck a straw into a nearby coconut and took a long suck, and told me the following: "I object to the existence of your blog. I think that your blog ghettoizes Asian-American poets, which I find confining and demeaning. My whole life, I have had to fight people like you, people who want to place artificial limitations on the art of poetry. I think that you should take your blog down."

Ghettoization - Part II

2005-11-22T14:06:00.000-08:00

Melvin the Cantaloupe said that everything started when he came out with his first book of poetry, No Raisin in the Sun (1988). It received the S.Q. Chalmers Award for the best first book of poems by a poet under 35, judged by the eminent Kenneth Koch, as well as rave reviews in American Poetry Triquarterly, Contemporary Poetics, and Stunned Gasping. Such now oft-anthologized poems as "Single Bird," "Harpischord Who Shook the Cherry Branches," and "Clouds of the Enemy Dolphin" appeared in this book.

But the Asian-American critics hated it. They dubbed Melvin the Cantaloupe the "Hello Kitty" of American poetry. Melvin was allergic to cats. When he went up to NYC, the other Asian-American poets did not invite him to their annual Asian-American literary gala, which he interpreted as a rebuke to his work. The cultural feminists hated it as well, arguing, in particular, that "Clouds of the Enemy Dolphin" demeaned women and trivialized housewives with such lines as "womanly minnow/ who swam among the thousand whores" and "the territory of the absent vagina is a woman with no womb." In 1990, he locked himself in the bathroom for three days straight, sustaining himself only with Cheese Balls and drinking water, upon learning that his longtime friend and fellow poet, Emma A. Cho, had ripped him apart in Asian-American Poetry Review without letting him know beforehand.

I had no idea that cantaloupes could be such drama queens. By now, I was ready to move on to the grapes, since I knew that grapes are the type of fruit most likely to study in the library on a Saturday night. But not being the type of person who could leave a cantaloupe in despondency, I gave him a couple Kleenexes and tried to console him.

"I am not a cantaloupe," he suddenly exclaimed. "Why does everyone treat me like a cantaloupe! I have never claimed to be a cantaloupe, and it is my prerogrative to choose whether to be one. People think that I am just a self-hating cantaloupe, but I am not! I am not a circus animal. I just want to be more than another melon, another fruit. Is that too much to ask?"

I picked Melvin the Cantaloupe up, dunked him in flour, and called him a donut hole. He soon calmed down again. During the past fifteen years, Melvin had been quite prolific. He had come out with five different books of poems -- The Clown Who Ate Paris with One Fist (1990), After Pistachios (1993), Although, Although (1995), Landing Upon the Gates of a Solar Eclipse (2001), and Every Salad Without an Ostrich (2003). After Although, Although, Melvin went through a dry spell, writing only two poems from 1996 to 1998, until one day, attending his third grade daughter's school production of Mourning Becomes Electra, it suddenly occurred to him that he could rhyme "bologna" with "phony," which made everything in the world make sense again. Since then, he had been experimenting with rhyme and fixed forms, penning a 28-page opus in terza rima, entitled "Sweetheart," which made up about a third of his most recent book.

The critics still bother Melvin the Cantaloupe from time to time, but nowadays, they leave him alone for the most part. He has few Asian-American poet friends and even fewer cantaloupe poet friends but no real regrets. Glancing at his sestina, I spot the six end words: "pizza whimsy orifice jacket mooch farmer." I ask him for his autograph.

A Dilemma of Originality

2005-11-18T14:38:00.000-08:00

Here is a problem that I am having. I am wrestling with the dilemma of whether poetry can be original and whether we want it to be original. By "original" poetry, I mean that poetry which is innovative and unique in both substance and form. (The subjectivity of originality is something that I would like to address in a separate post, but I will just work with this basic definition for now.)

One of the problems with poetry is that it cannot be entirely original. In terms of substance/content, the same basic themes emerge over and over again: love, life, death, religion, politics, etc. In terms of form, the same basic structures emerge -- rhyme, fixed forms, free verse, dream transcription, visual poetry, etc. Poetry uses language and is a form of communication. Poetry follows a certain set of rules, though the set itself varies from poet to poet, from reader to reader.

Within these fundamental confines, elements of originality are present. I am not saying here that all poems are alike. A Catalina Cariaga poem is unlike a Lee Herrick poem, a Garrett Hongo poem is unlike a Tan Lin poem. You could make the more radical argument that no two poems are alike, meaning that every poem, in a sense, is original, or you could even assert that every stanza or line is original.

But the more interesting question to me is whether we want poetry to be original. Should poets aim for originality? Most poets would answer yes, but maybe most poets have not given enough thought to the question. Original does not always mean good. For example, in Cambodia, in the late 1970s, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge sought to return the nation to a state of originality, making their nation different and apart from all other nations, and it led to the destruction of all major cities and the auto-genocide of millions of innocent civilians.

Originality can paradoxically mean regression. If we seek to write an original poem, we run the risk of writing a regressive poem. A poem can be a pale imitation of another poem without having intended to be, just as Pol Pot probably never intended the anarchy and chaos in which his search for the original and the regenerative ended. Examples of regressive poems abound in the volumes of the International Library of Poetry -- they strive for originality but end in unintended imitation.

Because originality is not necessarily good, we need role models as poets and models of good poems. In Asian-American poetry, we need and want a Carlos Bulosan or Li-Young Lee or Marilyn Chin to guide us. We need to read their poems and take them seriously. Tradition is important. History is important. We need a past. We need a coherent narrative from the past to the present to guide us into the future...Or do we? Maybe this paragraph is entirely untrue. As readers, we should always be aware of that what is asserted boldly, as this paragraph does, may not necessarily be right.

After all, one can make a good case for originality as well. One can argue that tradition is dangerous. History is dangerous. The past is dangerous. Even a coherent narrative is dangerous, because it implies linkages that might not otherwise exist, and whether triumphalist or apologetic, ratifies what it says through the telling. We do not need or want a Carlos Bulosan or Li-Young Lee or Marilyn Chin to guide us. First, they have already done it, and we have their poetry already, so why bother to imitate. Second, it could turn out that their poetry is awful; their poetry is not inherently good -- it is up to us to decide. For example, I think that slavery is awful, but tons of people thought it was good and right for centuries, and it turned out they were being stupid. We should not seek to think and write like our predecessors. We should seek to think and write like ourselves, independently and critically. We need originality.

At any rate, I am saying here that originality is a double-edged sword. Boring people will tell you that you can dabble in both tradition and originality, building upon the traditional to formulate the original. I suppose, although I don't understand why that isn't just another way of trumpeting tradition as the main course and throwing in a little originality as cole slaw. There are gradations of tradition/originality, but there are choices as well. Important choices -- in what we read and what we write.

On the Process of Writing a Poem - Language and an "Asian-American" Identity?

2005-11-12T20:55:00.000-08:00

When you are writing the first draft of a poem, do you pay attention to your use of language or to an "identity" of yours (racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, gender, etc.)? If you have been following this blog, you may think that I have blogged extensively about this subject before, but I have not. Here I am speaking of the actual process of making a poem.

Essentially, I am personalizing the identity-language debate, making it a debate concerning one's own work. There is no right or wrong answer, because I am asking what "you" actually do in the composition of a poem, and no government is not big enough yet to stop you from your own individual act of artistic creation.

Here is my own opinion: First, if you do not care whether you are writing a good or bad poem, if you are not writing for the sake of the art of poetry, if you do not want to publish, then this question should not matter to you. You should feel free to write random goobledygook about daisies in Lichtenstein or rant all about cruising down the mean streets of Monterey Park in the Honda that your parents bought for you. This is not a poetry-fascist state: we have so many stresses in our daily lives that it would be unfair of me to argue for denying the right of people to compose poems just for the pure fun of it without being burdened by the pressures and pleasures of craft.

Second, if you do care, I think that both a veering towards language and a veering towards identity present opportunities and perils. If you choose the former, focusing on words and sounds and the structure of language, then you may come up with a highly original poem in terms of style and language, but you risk losing the emotional center of your poem -- the deep-down feeling that drove you to write it in the first place and presumably will drive your readers to enjoy reading it. If you choose the latter, for example, focusing on your Korean-American identity, then you may get your point across forcefully, but you risk losing the ability to turn well-crafted, original phrases that can startle, entertain, and illuminate the complex intricacies of language and life.

Third, at this point in my life, I would have to say that I am focusing more on the language and craft of the poem, while I am writing a poem myself. Of course, I think that it always depends on the particular poem. But I am not purposefully channeling everything into any one identity in general, which I am enjoying and think is good, because it helps liberate me from being too obvious or preachy, even though this does not mean that my poems are not still haunted by multiple questions of identity.

But do not take anything here as the final word. With each poem, as a reader and writer, I try to bring to the table an open-mindedness, hoping that my own perspective on poetry will change for the better, whatever that "goodness" or "betterness" may entail, and these days, as always, it is nice to have hope for the good.

You Know

2005-11-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

You know what I hate? I hate bloggers who blog only once a month, and then, their first post back, talk all about blogging only once a month in a half-apologetic, half-arrogant tone. I mean, what's up with that?! First, you're assuming that we care. We don't. We have lives of our own. Get over yourself. Second, we know that you haven't been blogging, because we aren't important enough for you. You ramble on about being busy with caring for your next-door neighbor's eight Siamese kittens, carving Jack O'Lanterns with the gang from the boondocks to scare the old folks up in Mr. Pepperidge's Square, or (gasp) writing poetry of your own. We get it, OK, the blog has moved down your magical list of priorities. Congrats on finding a social life or writing that masterful novel! Third, we have more important things to do with our own lives than sit around and read posts that have nothing to do with why we came here. You may not think so, but we've got other things that we could be reading right now -- like David Woo's Eclipses, the latest gossip about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Michiko Kautani's reviews in the NY Times, etc.

But here's what is the absolute worst: bloggers who sneak in a self-promotion with their first post back. So, for example, you've been gone for a month, and you want to show at least part of what you've been doing with your time, so (tee hee!) you link to a modest little publication -- www.hlrecord.org -- that has nothing to do with the focus of your blog. "Golly, I'm so embarassed. Have I been editor-in-chief?! I didn't want anyone to find out." Really, I think that kind of behavior is uncalled for.

No Money in Poetry and Poetry Education

2005-10-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

Why is there no money in poetry? I still don't get it. It makes absolutely no sense that books of fiction, books of non-fiction, autobiographies, cookbooks, comic books, etc. all outsell books of poetry. Or maybe I do get it.

As I've discussed here before, at a very early age, we are taught that poetry is stupid, non-essential, and frivolous. Short stories are ok. Novels are substantive. Well, guess what, I've read The Brothers Karamazov and don't remember anything about it, except that it went on and on and on, and my English teacher told us that we'd all enjoy it more as we grew older, which is the same thing that one of my aunts once told me about durian and boiled spinach.

It's strange, in a way, that poetry doesn't sell. The world's moving faster. Individual poems don't need as much time as novels, in this sense being like ice cream or a bag of Skittles or a chocolate chip cookie, and as the "new" Cookie Monster has learned, "A cookie is a sometimes food." I understand that childhood obesity is a problem, but really, I'm not sure whether a naked blue monster with no table manners has too many body image issues.

In addition, I think that some teachers also teach us to hate poetry. To take an example, if I was teaching poetry to K-12 students, I would NEVER make them memorize and recite poems. I had to do it myself, and I don't remember any of those poems. The primary purpose that it served was to make most students hate poetry by making students associate it with a laborious chore. A subsidiary purpose was to publicly humiliate them -- that's what we call a "marginal benefit." I think that I usually recited the poem correctly, but I remember being intensely nervous about it, and I remember many students who couldn't and felt really bad and ashamed about it. (Of course, my critique does not apply to teachers who have memorized The Brothers Karamazov word-for-word and have publicly recited it in front of their students.)

Seriously, though, the practice of making students memorize poems may serve the anti-poetry goal of rote memory retention. I know I've picking on Hitler lately, but really, I think that he would approve of this practice to turn society into mindless drones who know the actual words of texts but nothing else about language, art, or humanity. Hmmm...maybe I should start picking on Kim Jong-Il. I'd pay to watch him recite John Ashbery's "Daffy Duck in Hollywood." But the way, do poetry lovers and poets need to have good memories? Umm...remind me again what this post was about.

As far as my affirmative agenda goes, I think that K-12 students should be encouraged to discuss poems in an open-ended format. Teachers can assign and grade essays as long as they spare students the imposition of their own views, that is, as long as they don't grade according to the conclusions that they themselves have drawn with the expectation that students reach the same conclusions. More time should be given to poetry, of course. By the way, you know, William Shakespeare and William Blake wrote poetry -- but remarkably they weren't the only people who've written poetry in the past one thousand years. Imagine that!

Also, teachers could have students write poems of their own, though they should check with the bylaws of their own school districts. In many jurisdictions, it's not yet a misdemeanor to allow students to use their imaginations, and not a felony to have students write poetry.

Srikanth Reddy and Dara Weir Reading

2005-09-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the Srikanth "Chicu" Reddy and Dara Weir reading at Adams House at Harvard tonight. It took place in a nightmarishly artsy red room that bears a certain resemblance to the netherworld to which art-loving Nazis must go when they die. The tomb-heavy door matched the room's crypt-like ambience, and the lights were appropriately dim to make the audience feel like they were somewhere wealthy and important. (For goodness sake, Harvard, go buy a bucket of 100 watt light bulbs!) Essentially, the room scared me.

Even though the poets arrived on time, the reading started twenty minutes late. Why do poetry readings start late? My theory is that the purpose is to punish people, like myself, who actually know how to tell time and can't fake ignorance. For people who arrive late to these things, I'd like to introduce you to a marvelous invention called the "watch." It typically has hands, numbers, and a face and is most often worn on people's wrists. If that's too tough for you, I've heard there are digital "watches" nowadays that just give you the numbers. Seriously, though, I envy the late arrivals. They're the smart ones, economically speaking, because they've made efficient use of their time, while I've been walking around the room and pondering over the reason that there's a plastic hanger in a porcelain bowl by the side window. They're rational actors. I'm the guy staring at a hanger in a bowl.

Fortunately, the poets were nothing like the room. Reddy appeared quite friendly and likable, and Weir seemed open and down-to-earth. Reddy talked about baseball, which made me like him immediately, even though I'm pretty sure he's not an Angels fan. Both the poets have the feel of real people, which I find to be an important quality. I like to impose my judgments of people when I first meet them, because it makes me feel sexy, and I had favorable judgments of each. Both are great readers. Reddy's pieces were perfectly modulated and in keeping with the general tenor of the poems themselves. And they kept their readings the perfect length -- twenty or twenty-five minutes. Obviously, they're really experienced.

Which reminds me -- as usual, there was a lot of mutual whoring going around. First, poets are like whores in the way that they give reading after reading to different audiences, often for a price, and typically never seeing most of the audience members again. It's like prostitution without the sex. Second, audience members, like myself, are whores in the way that we (sometimes) buy the poet's book and have him or her sign it. We don't personally know the poet, but we do it anyway, at least sometimes. I'm not sure why. One of my English teachers once said that she liked to get authors' signatures, because they could be worth a fortune when they die. She was the one who introduced me to Keats.

While Reddy and Weir were reading, I couldn't help but notice poet Peter Richards' olive green sweater, which I'd mistook earlier for a scarf and was stupid enough to tell him. Richards was sitting in the audience, in a comfortable-looking lounge chair, right in front of me. I hate it when I say something stupid, and I said something like "nice scarf," and he said it was a sweater. (When you want someone to like you, you should always mistake their articles of clothing for other articles of clothing. I mean, there's just no way around it.) And, no, I had no idea what kind of conversation I may have been trying to start, but that happens to me a lot, and he was really gracious about it. I also noticed that Richards was pulling his sleeves over his hands during the reading, which I take as a sign of a good person. I've read that Hitler just let his sweater sleeves hang there like they belonged to a mannequin. No one in the KKK ever wears sweaters.

At any rate, I will say that I was impressed by Reddy's signing of the books. If he is a whore, then he is a sexy French one in the watercolor tradition of can can dancers, not a slovenly hag east of Reno for whom you can pay in coins. He actually engaged whorish individuals like myself, congregating around him like hyenas around Bambi, and then wrote something in the book based on the conversation. That takes some measure of intelligence and talent.

So, it was an enjoyable night. Some people like to watch birds, but I like to watch poets. I like to watch poets, even when they are doing nothing. I think we should give our poets scientific names -- like Chicus Reddius or Daraius Weirus -- and we should talk about our sightings and have them verified by some accrediting body of experts.

Juvenilia

2005-09-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

Instead of blogging as often as a good blogger should, I have been wading through some of my earlier posts --my juvenilia. It's amazing that one can be so embarassingly stupid -- and still live to blog about it. Not that I seriously think I've ever been embarassingly stupid here (are we counting this post?), but I just think that it is interesting that my views have changed, thanks in large part to many of you.

I am always a bit saddened when I come across people whose views don't change. I do not think that there is a correlation to age here. Younger people can be obstinate, and older people can be open-minded. At any rate, to always have the same view of "what Asian-American poetry is..." strikes me as sad.

I think that my favorite thinkers and poets are in a perpetual state of juvenilia. They never grow old to me, because they have never grown old to themselves. They are able to adapt and improve themselves and their poems, which I admire.

It must be because deep down inside they feel that they have not attained the ideal of having written great poetry. There must be an insatisfaction, a hunger, that drives them into originality in both the thinking about the art of poetry and the act of writing the poem itself.

And I think that we who try to claim the mantle of "intellectualism," as I once did in an earlier post, should try not to adhere to "a" single view our whole lives. Because the foundation of intellectualism is not dogmaticism. The foundation is a quest towards greater understanding, and understanding is an infinity loop.

Asian-American Poetry and Class - Revisited

2005-09-16T00:42:00.000-07:00

I once had a stimulating discussion with someone who claimed only rich, or at least upper-middle class, people write and read poetry, so poetry is only for the rich or upper-middle class. Now I don't think that's true, but admittedly, neither of us had the statistics to back up our claims but could only rely on anecdotes.

Related to Asian-American poetry, I do wonder about the socioeconomic-educational background of Asian-American poets. The recent Next Generation anthology provides some information on this matter with its relatively extensive biographies on the poets -- all the poets are at least college graduates, and it's very possible that all the poets have at least some graduate degree with the majority having MFAs. That doesn't exactly lead to anything conclusive about their socioeconomic status, though socioeconomic status is highly correlated with education.

Demographically, Asian-Americans are the "wealthiest" race in terms of family income. But the category of "Asian-American" conceals variations between ethnicities as well as among a particular ethnicity ("among" as in the case of recent Chinese immigrants who labor in factories versus Chinese immigrants who have come to the US to get their PhDs.) There are Asian-Americans living in poverty out there.

I think that it could become problematic for all Asian-American poets to be college graduates and have MFAs, if one wants poetry to truly be representative. You know, we talk all the time about having the proper race, gender, sexuality balance, but I find it fascinating that "socioeconomic class" tends to be a taboo. No "Asian-American" poems about living in poverty or growing up poor come to mind.

I feel that, as readers, we should remain critically aware of our biases, and I'm aware that I may be biased against poems whose experiences that are more difficult for me to comprehend -- growing up in poverty, being one of a whole laundry list of experiences that fall under this category. But I'm not satisfied to merely read poems that seem to more directly relate to my own socioeconomic class or ethnicity, for example. I'm also hoping for a more diverse poetry canon that expresses a broader range of human experiences.

[Note the strong assumption that I've made here: I've assumed that a poet's socioeconomic class directly influences his or her poetry. This discussion of class is yet another critique against the idea of having a single "poetry" as capturing "the" universal.]

A Fundraiser: Proceeds for Katrina Disaster Relief Fund and More

2005-09-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

TAKES 3 TO TANGO: A Dance Party Extravaganza

Sponsored by: Bloom, Cave Canem, and Kundiman

Ever want to dance true tango style? Rose in your teeth? Love in the air?Well, cariño, your time has arrived. Takes 3 to Tango features tangolessons, free flowing wine, glittering poetry and dancing to your favoritehip hop and funk beats! Come on out and shake your groove-thing for afabulous cause. All proceeds will benefit programs for LGBT, AfricanAmerican, and Asian American writers. A portion of the proceeds will alsobe donated to The Red Cross Katrina Disaster Relief Fund.
• Free Tango Lessons from 8:30 – 9pm
• Open Wine Bar from 9 – 10pm
• Free Gold Roses given out (for dancin’ and romancin’ of course!)

Your Illustrious Host Committee:Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mark Doty, Regie Cabico, Father Francis Gargani,Bishop Alfred Johnson, Walter Mosley, Vijay Seshadri, Patricia Smith & John Yau

The 411:
Saturday, September 24, 2005
The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues)
8:00 p.m – Midnite

$20 Advance Tickets & $15 Student. Advance Tickets are available onhttp://www.kundiman.org/ OR http://www.bloommagazine.org/ Tickets are $25 at the Door. For more information on this event, please email info@kundiman.org

Performer Bios

Counted by A. Magazine as among the hottest up and coming Asian Americanstand-up comics, Regie Cabico has competed in four National Poetry Slams,and winning the title as a member of Team Mouth Almighty from NYC. Thewinner of MTV’s ‘Free Your Mind’ competition, he was also featured on thePBS series ‘In the Life’. Regie appears on HBO’s Russell Simmons PresentsDef Poetry. In 1997, Regie received the New York Foundation for the ArtsPoetry Fellowship. His work appears in over 30 anthologies. As a foundingmember of the Asian Arts Collective, Cabico has developed and led numerousspoken word and writing workshops.

Patricia Smith, a poet, performance artist, and journalist, was born in1955. Her volumes of poetry include Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1993);Big Towns, Big Talk (1992), which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award;and Life According to Motown (1991). Her latest work of nonfiction,Africans in America, is a companion volume to the PBS Series. Her poemshave been anthologized in Unsettling America: An Anthology of ContemporaryMulticultural Poetry (1994) and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican PoetsCafe (1995). A four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam,Smith has performed her work around the world. She has also written andperformed two one-woman plays, one of which was produced by DerekWalcott’s Trinidad Theater Workshop in the spring of 1994. Anaudiocassette of Smith performing before a live audience, Always in theHead, includes selections from her first three books. A short film ofSmith performing the poem “Undertaker” won awards at the Sundance and SanFrancisco film festivals. A former Metro columnist for the Boston Globe,Smith teaches writing periodically and is now a columnist for Ms. Magazineand the online magazine Afazi.

SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS

Bloom was founded to support the work of lesbian, gay, bisexual, andtransgendered writers and artists and to foster the appreciation of queerliterature and creation. http://www.bloommagazine.org

Cave Canem is committed to the discovery and cultivation of new voices inAfrican American poetry. Our program has expanded from a summer retreat toinclude regional workshops, a first book prize, annual anthologies, andreadings and events in major cities around the United States. We are anational community of emerging and established poets, a family of blackwriters who create, publish, perform, teach, and study poetry, and supporteach others’ work. http://www.cavecanempoets.org

Kundiman is a not-for-profit organization serving emerging Asian-Americanpoets. Through instruction and collaborative programs with establishedAsian-American poets as well as through publications and readings open tothe public, Kundiman hopes to advance the work of Asian-American writing.Through poetry, we aim to celebrate and promote a strong and positiveAsian-American culture and identity. http://www.kundiman.org/

Leaving Children Behind

2005-09-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

I've made a similar post before, but I want to emphasize again that I think that it is totally wrong to reduce or eliminate the teaching of poetry in K-12 education.

Partly, I blame the fetishizing of multiple choice testing. I think that it's a mistake to salivate over high stakes, multiple choice tests and artificially constructed "increases or decreases" in scores. Even though all the people in this world who are good at multiple choice tests are also good, upstanding citizens with highly developed social and emotional skills, I haven't flown to the moon on my vaccuum cleaner lately.

High stakes, multiple choice testing is especially bad for poetry. I mean, I suppose you could have the question: Regie Cabico is a) the square root of five, b) a type of kumquat, c) a poet, d) the capital of Brazil, e) none of the above. (Believe it or not, that would actually be an improvement to certain curricula, because at least you would be learning the name of a living poet.) For some reason, it seems very difficult for certain officials who design curricula and tests to comprehend sometimes, but believe it or not, there are poets who are still alive and writing! Yes, there are still poets writing poetry out there today! Go figure.

I also think that poetry is too-often marginalized -- economically, politically, and socially -- which should not be a surprise if you've been reading this blog regularly. This marginalization affects the education of poetry. We teach elementary school, middle school, and high school students that poetry means nothing when we don't teach poetry. We teach students that poetry means less when we teach less of it. We teach students that no one writes poetry today, or at least no one we should take seriously, when we complete the education of poetry by winding up the unit with the "modern" work of T.S. Eliot. I guess Elizabeth Bishop (who actually is one of my favorite poets, if I was forced to choose) is too much of a wild child.

Of course, in almost every classroom, we teach students that Asian-American poetry means nothing everyday. Now that school years are beginning across the nation, I suppose that will remain one staple of the English curriculum, no matter how many brilliant new exams that one manufactures.

Meaning vs. Being in Poetry

2005-08-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15222) is so oft-anthologized, because I think it is one of the outlandishly poorest works in his oeuvre, if one actually reads a poem for its content and logic. The poem is readable and has an easy rhythm to it, but it is quite confused in its position on the art of poetry.

In the first of three sections, the poet proclaims that a poem should be "mute," "dumb," "silent," and "wordless." In the second section, just in case we live on Neptune and haven't been clobbered with enough adjectives yet, the poem twice adds that "a poem should be motionless in time." The third section, providing what is (sadly) the phrase most often quoted from MacLeish's poetry, closes with the claim -- a claim that is wrong on multiple levels, as I will discuss below -- that "A poem should not mean/But be."

One of the primary problems with MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" is that the poem itself is not even consistent with its own proclamation that "A Poem should not mean/But be." For example, the poem opens with the couplet, "A poem should be palpable and mute/As a globed fruit," which is a claim that already necessitates interpretation and "meaning" -- it asks the reader to accept the conclusion that a globed fruit is, indeed, palpable and mute, not even getting to the question of what "globed," "palpable," and "mute" mean to different people. Very well, this problem is not a major one. We're still in the second inning, and the Dodgers haven't lost the ballgame yet with this one.

But in the third stanza, MacLeish comes up with the incredible couplet, "For all the history of grief/ An empty doorway and a maple leaf." Though the poem does not acknowledge it, that couplet is essentially an amazingly bold conclusory remark on "the history of grief" that requires a great stretch of the imagination both for comprehension and acceptance. Superficially, it is a rather lovely couplet. But, like the rest of the poem, it is a Venus fly-trap of sorts. Essentially, the poem is equating all the past and present personal and societal destructions and violences to "an empty doorway and a maple leaf"!?! Would you go up to a Chinese dissident writing a poem about massacres during the Cultural Revolution and say, "tsk, tsk, 'an empty doorway and a maple leaf'/ for your history of grief"? Maybe you could. If you could, then golly, it's easy to solve problems! Pretty soon, we'll have no grief at all in this world -- woo hoo!

I haven't even gotten to the issue presented by the previous couplet, which proclaims "A poem should equal to:/ Not true," then turns around and equates the history of grief to an empty doorway and a maple leaf and equates love with "the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea." The issue here again is that the poem itself is "equaling to"; the poem itself makes comparisons and analogies. But the poem denies that it is undertaking these acts that require interpretation and meaning.

Now I am at the point where I am disputing the primary argument that "A poem should not mean/ But be." I am disputing it in two ways: 1) A poem that is must "mean," and 2) a poem should "mean."

1) First, I do not think that a poem exists independently of everyone and everything. Poems always have readers, even if it is just the author him or herself. Maybe if you randomly scribble letters on a chalkboard in the dark, say the letters form "a poem," throw the chalkboard in a silver safe, and throw the safe in the ocean, you might have an argument that that is a poem that "is" but doesn't "mean." But that's just getting a bit theoretical there, folks. A poem that describes something typically has some emotional, linguisitic, philosopical, spiritual, and/or political meaning behind it. A poem that is "means."

2. Second, a poem should "mean." Part of the power of poetry is that it does mean something. Every poem means in many different ways -- to the poet, to the friends and family of the poet, to the reader(s), socially, culturally, emotionally, linguistically, philosophically, spiritually, and politically. It may be possible for us to find most of these different elements embedded in every single poem.

I am not a fan of people saying that poetry doesn't mean anything. Of course, most of those people are just saying that poetry is less important than pogo sticks or football or collecting pogs or whatever. But it's related -- if a poem "should not mean," why should anyone care about it? I mean, you might as well go and marvel at all the amazing pogs in your pog colllection. At least the cardboard "means" something to you.

MacLeish was an amazing person and poet (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/47) who led an amazing life. Nowadays, he is underappreciated, because, as evidenced by the sometimes unthinking popularization of "Ars Poetica," not a lot of people care to read his work thoughtfully. A poet like MacLeish deserves more than that.

On Brian Kim Stefans' "The Applicant"

2005-08-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

Although Brian Kim Stefans has penned longer and more complex works, I've chosen a rather simple, modest poem for this blog. The poem is modest and fun and suitable for children, which is not a commonplace combination. The poem is a vivid display of the poet's capacity to play nicely in a skillful way. It defies the equating of un-innocence with stupidity that is often not so much of a product of avant-garde sophistication than of laziness and apathy.

The poem has the feel of what I think is the best of transcribed, sput-of-the-moment poetry. It feels fresh and unpolluted. There is rhyme, but the rhyme feels unforced. The length of each line is short, often consisting of only one word, which pulls the reader through the poem. If one wants to make the case for "less is more" (which I actually think is an overused cliche), then this poem would be a sound example.

If I must find meaning in the poem, it appears to be about an applicant at a job interview, though it is capable of many different interpretations, and the primary feature of the poem is the language.

The language is the diva of the poem. The poem opens with the wonderful line, "Your promise is a lazy dog." There are several original turns of phrasing, such as "jury duty effects," "dirigible skill," "It's nothing the matter person," "free in bluster," and "all block-wide jeeps will issue." I realize that I'm quoting a fair percentage of the poem here, but many of the lines are entirely fascinating inventions. The final stanza ends on the same strong, refreshing note as the opening stanza.

What I also like very much about the poem is that Stefans does not appear to be writing solely for a particular school of poetry here. There has been talk about particular schools of poetry around the blogosphere. I don't mind them, of course -- Asian-American poetry can surely be interpreted as a "school of poetry." I think that they can make for good communities as well as be helpful to the development of poets and even the writing of poems.

But I also think that "schools of poetry" can become stultifying to the individual poets within the school if they aren't flexible and capable of change. And they can become annoying to everyone else outside the school, if they become instruments of exclusion, like a fraternity where everyone gets certain bawdy in-jokes that are meaningless and dull, if not offensive, to everyone outside it. So, I would argue that those within a school of poetry should remain open to an expansion of the form and the changing of boundaries over time as well as sensitive enough to allow others not inside the school to more fully participate in the conversation. And, of course, even though I read a lot of "Asian-American poetry," that is certainly not the only type of poetry that I read. But I'm drifting here...

I think that "The Applicant" is a good read that will entertain all poetry lovers of different stripes.

Brian Kim Stefans' "The Applicant"

2005-08-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

To read Brian Kim Stefans' "The Applicant," go to http://www.theeastvillage.com/t5/stefans/p1.htm

*****

For a biography of Brian Kim Stefans, go to http://www.mipoesias.com/Volume19Issue3Gudding/stefans.html

*****

Other Brian Kim Stefans sites of interest include: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/ stefans/index.html

and http://www.arras.net/fscII/archives/2005/05/ what_does_it_ma.html

The i and the &

2005-08-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

There are two tropes of many modern poems that often thoroughly confuse me, though I have tried both myself. They confuse me, because I'm not getting what they're all about. I don't have a particular bias for or against any style, but I feel like there should at least be some point involved, some reason for the poet doing something and/or something that the poet wants to show. I'm not sure what the point is behind the i and the &:

1. the uncapitalized "i": The first one is the uncapitalized "i." Yeah, I get it -- the world is grand, you're insignificant vis-a-vis the world, you're way too modest, etc. But why do poets that use the uncapitalized "i" usually use it over and over again in the same poem? Doesn't that defeat the purpose? I mean, you're already talking about yourself and what you're thinking and feeling, so you might as well just capitalize the "i." I think that the "i" would only serve a purpose if it was in a poem that meant it -- that wanted to distinguish the "i" from the "I" in some meaningful way, for example.

2. and for "&": If the previous technique is used more often by poems that are more "personal" and "political," then the "&" is used more often in "language" poems. The "&" perplexes me even more. This one must be some inside joke that I'm not getting here. Using a symbol for a three-letter word seems rather pointless to me, which might merely mean that I'm ignorant if there really is a point that I've missed. I'd like to be invited to the party (the party where we bob for candy-appled "&'s," play pin the tail on the "&," swing at the giant "&" pinata, etc.) but I haven't yet.

I'm willing to venture that at least the first couple poets who used the i and the & actually had some important reasons behind this decision. There must have been some original justification that meant something.

A Love Affair with Michiko Kakutani

2005-08-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, but I can no longer keep my crush hidden from the world: I am in love with Michiko Kakutani. Well, not Michiko Kakutani the person. I don't know her. I don't even have her poster over my bed. I'm talking about Michiko Kakutani the NY Times book reviewer, more specifically, the book reviews themselves, which are some of the most entertaining literary works being written today.

There is no equivalent to Michiko Kakutani in poetry criticism today. (If you think there is, let me know. Prove me wrong.) No one in poetry criticism writes that clearly and honestly. Too many poetry critics use big words and complicated sentences meaninglessly and off-handedly allude to obscure poets as if the reader would care that the critic is so smart. Most importantly, of course, too many poetry critics write reviews that are BORING. I don't care how many color photocopies you make of your shiny Ph.D. diploma from Fancy Feast University -- boring does not equal interesting!

In addition to being a marvelous writer, Kakutani also gives the reader different looks in terms of style and content. You never go into a Kakautani review quite knowing what she will say and how she will say it. That's a good thing, because if you could fully anticipate what you're going to read, you'd probably not read it in the first place. For example, Kakutani's most recent review is written entirely in the first person and makes self-referential remarks on the critic's own personal life -- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/books/23kaku.html. It's a strange review, almost like a Tim Wakefield knuckleball, but it's nice to witness a critic innovate and attempt to challenge the conventions of the review form.

The Hitler Question Revisited - Poets vs. Poetry

2005-08-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

(Note: I have edited and added to a post on "The Hitler Question" that I made earlier, which I find interesting and worth revisiting.)

The Hitler Question: If a historical researcher discovered that Hitler was a poet and had written a book of fantastic poems, would you judge solely on the basis of the poetry or judge the poet along with poetry?

The descriptive answer, meaning the "is" answer, for me is that I honestly couldn't divorce the poetry from the poet. I don't think that I could go around proclaiming that Adolf Hitler is a great poet. If I knew Hitler wrote a volume of zesty sestinas, I don't think that I could go around praising his original use of end-words knowing he caused the death of six million Jews. The normative answer, meaning the answer to the question "am I wrong here? should I be divorcing the poetry from the poet?," is relatively more open to debate.

I think that this question potentially has widespread implications. I chose Hitler on purpose, precisely because he is a reviled figure. Lots of people sincerely think that they can separate the poetry from the poet. But the question is whether they can pass the Hitler test. And if they pass, should they be passing, that is, should they be openly praising Hitler's poetry and encouraging people to read Hitler's poetry despite the man himself? The normative question is, of course, also an ethical one.

You might argue, come on, no poet is as bad a person as Hitler. And that would be exactly my point. You would be looking at the poet; you would have to be looking at the person of the poet to make such a conclusory remark. It does matter to us who the poet is.

And if it matters to us who the poet is, we must ask ourselves, is it ethical for a poet who is not a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing to represent him or herself as such, as happened in the case of the Yasusada hoax? I do not find the idea of a non-Japanese or Japanese-American poet representing her or himself as such as troubling or interesting as the idea of any poet, in general, trying to pretend that his or her work of art is not his or her own creation and thus both disavowing any responsibility for it and decontextualizing it from its individual and societal source.

Of course, there have been many works of literature throughout history that are anyonmous or pseudononymous, but my radical claim is that our knowledge of these works is necessarily incomplete. In other words, I am saying that an anonymously penned or falsely accredited poem may reveal only a limited piece of the full picture of a poem. A poem has the capacity to show us who the poet is and what type of society, in history or in the present, helped shape the poet as an individual and artist, and this knowledge is lost through anonymity, pseudonyms, or misrepresentation. Perhaps that is what makes scholars so passionate in debates over the "true" identity of the authors of literary works. The identity of the poet can give us fuller insight into the grandeur and significance of the poem.

On Srikanth Reddy's "Burial Practice"

2005-08-18T00:57:00.000-07:00

There are some poems that one wants to avoid. Srikanth Reddy e-mailed me a copy of "Burial Practice," from Facts for Visitors (2004), about a couple months ago, and I must confess that I have been avoiding it. The poem invites avoidance, because it is a highly intellectual, poised, somber piece that meditates on death in an unsentimental way, meaning that it bears a much closer resemblance to an Ingmar Bergman film than "Garfield: The Movie." But maybe if you squint your eyes and pretend that "gravely wounded" Prince Theodore is really Nermal the World's Cutest Kitty Cat...

As the title and first stanza of "Burial Practice" suggest, the piece concerns death, and the rest of the poem takes place after what is at least an initial death. It is not the death of your pet goldfish but an impersonal death. There are no characters with whom we should empathize. There is purposefully no "I" or "you" in the poem, which is a relatively commonplace technique in avant-garde poetry that by itself does not make a poem effective.

I think that the effectiveness of the poem primarily lies in its intriguing phrases, as in the lines, "Then sadness without reason," "Then the removal of the ceiling by hand," "Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean," "Then the page with the curious helmet," and "Interpretation, then harvest," and "Then & only then the violet agenda." The unique use of language, coupled with the poet's strong use of anaphora, is what keeps you reading, and if you don't read a poem for its language, you likely will be turned off by the end of the second stanza. But if you do, then reading this poem can become a hypnotic, almost mystical passage through an odd, inspired, strikingly surreal yet familiar world.

The poem is also wildly ambitious, attempting to cover philosophical, literary, historical, and futuristic terrain with one grand swoop of the pen (or keyboard). To take one example, there are no particular wars mentioned, only "the same war by a different name."An American reader of today would probably, at least subsconsciously, be thinking of the war in Iraq, but that is not what the poet appears to be getting at here. The war in Iraq is too particular, intimate, and human, and the poet is instead aiming to say something profound about the general human condition.

In the sense of not having personal specificity, the poem ironically resembles the "I love you-you love me" poems that some junior high poets scribble in their diaries (and which they should be encouraged to keep on doing despite warnings that that kind of habit won't lead to steady paychecks), except that this poem is what one would call "high art." The abstractness is not an accident but a motif. How can I put this delicately? -- the poet did not write this poem for lemon-flavored dum-dums. You can deduce this fact by observing the references to Prince Theodore and Masha, the line, "Then the page scribbled in dactyls," and most importantly, the overall tone of the poem. This poem is intended for a coterie of relatively educated readers, many of whom might not get it but probably won't publicly admit to not getting it. This poem is not intended for well-oiled hunks and hotties who like to party on a Jamaican beach with Tara Reid. Sorry. I'm not sure who comes out ahead, but I'd rather not be keeping score.

And since this blog is entitled "Asian-American Poetry," I should note that this poem, as has been the case of at least the previous few poems on this blog, is not one that inherently lends itself to identification of the poet as Asian-American. Breaking away from race, ethnicity, and identity (along with breaking away from the "I" and the "you") is part of what makes this poem ambitious. And the poem's ambition manifests itself in a certain level of elegance, style, and grace.

Srikanth Reddy's "Burial Practice"

2005-08-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

To read Srikanth Reddy's "Burial Practice," go to http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16760

*****

Biography: Srikanth Reddy's first collection of poetry, "Facts for Visitors," was published by the University of California Press in Spring 2004. His work has appeared in various journals, including APR, Fence, Grand Street, jubilat, Ploughshares, and Verse. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Reddy currently teaches poetry and literature at the University of Chicago.

On Ghose's Essay - Part III

2005-08-14T02:03:00.000-07:00

Zulfikar Ghose: The very thing that works against us-- national origin-- is sometimes the reason for our success. I encountered this dilemma almost as soon as I began to publish poems in London, in 1959. Writers from the former British colonies were a new phenomenon. Dom Moraes and I from the Subcontinent, Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, and a few others were among the first poets from the recently independent countries to be published in England. Suddenly a new category was born: Commonwealth literature. Next thing, publishers began to produce anthologies of Commonwealth poetry with their own little nationalistic pigeon-holes and I found myself in demand for the simple reason that I was identified as having been born in Pakistan. It had nothing to do with the quality of one's work. Poetry readings, literary festivals, etc., followed: one was in demand because one could be labelled.

Being included under this label gave us more opportunities (sometimes the only opportunity) to be published but at the same time, by confining us within a category, guaranteed our status as untouchables. But here's the dilemma: those of us who have acquired a reputation by being included in anthologies of Commonwealth literature and university courses in ethnic studies have been given opportunities to be published and to be studied which, being a consequence not of the quality of our work but of our being identified with a group, are denied to writers from the 'mainstream': in other words, the very thing that creates opportunities for us, and places us in a privileged situation, is the thing we accuse of branding us as untouchable. But to the mainstream folks our complaint of being thrown into a ghetto must sound like having one's cake and whining, while one's mouth is still full eating a big chunk of it, that it tastes bitter.

This post constitutes my third and final commentary on Ghose's recent essay on hyphenated English-language literature. It'll probably make more sense if you scroll back and start with Part I. Trust me. :)

I find the arguments in this excerpt more convincing than the two previously quoted excerpts. In contrast to the other excerpts, Ghose uses the word "I" effectively here. We get a much better of where he is coming from. The glimpse into Ghose's inner self allows us to better sympathize with his primary contention that identifying one as a "Commonwealth poet," or as an "Asian-American poet," constitutes an undesirable pigeonholing. His narrative allows us to experience the author as an individual with past personal experiences from which he has derived his present views.

Ironically, the success of this passage lies at least partly in the fact that we, the reader, can view him as a very specific human being, of which ethnicity/race/nationality constitues a key part, along with geography and publishing history. And Ghose makes an interesting, if not entirely original, point that "identity politics" can be used to benefit a racial/ethnic minority author in publishing -- the strength of this excerpt here, however, is that Ghose personalizes this argument across decades of experience.

I do have a quibble, though, with Ghose's assumption here and elsewhere that publishers, editors, and others who have promoted "Commonwealth literature" simply did so on the basis of group identification. I don't think that Ghose is saying that he and his fellow Commonwealth poets were published solely on the basis of their names, because that would just be wrong and, at least in relation to most publishers and editors, sounds like a somewhat unfair caricature of the truth. More likely, Ghose means that publishers and editors have not taken the work of his fellow Commonwealth poets seriously enough, have not been reading the works critically and honestly, and have not been evaluating it on the basis of its literary quality.

But whether literary merit and the ethnic/racial content of the poem or poet may be separable is an open question. In another version of the Hitler question, one may ask, is it possible to write a racist poem, like a poem that favors slavery, that is of high literary quality? I don't think it is possible. So, I think that literary merit is at least partly contingent upon ethnic/racial content, and the race/ethnicity of both the reader and the poet are at play in the reading of many poems.

I guess I also don't have as bleak a worldview of "the ghetto" of Commonwealth literature, or Asian-American poetry, as Ghose and some others do. Even if one assumes that it is a ghetto, I don't think that it's necessarily a bad place to be, or as Ghose puts it, "a bitter cake." I mean, we all have individual scholarly interests in poetry. I wonder how Ghose would feel if it wasn't the "ghetto of Commonwealth poetry" but "the ghetto of the Beat poets" or "the ghetto of gay/lesbian poets" or "the ghetto of southern poets." Or how about "the ghetto of Shakespeare," if a scholar is only, or primarily, interested in Shakespeare?

On Ghose's Essay - Part II

2005-08-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

Zulfikar Ghose: Instead, in western countries, one would be lucky to find the names [of G.V. Desani and Raja Rao] in university courses other than the ones devoted to that hideous bureaucratic invention, Third World literature, courses that are usually taken by a handful of students from racial minorities or by foreign students pathetically looking for something with which they can identify. Such courses, which purport to provide a balanced view, only perpetuate the essential distortion: they confirm the generally accepted notion that English literature consists of regional blocks that have no connection with one another and are to be seen only as pictures of those regions. Without such nationalistic identification, even this little recognition would be denied Desani and Rao.

But isn't it sad that with such world-class writers as Desani and Rao one has to place them in a nationalistic category in order to win them some attention? It is a procedure by which one's neglect can almost be guaranteed. It is like a work of art which the museum curator, finding no niche for it in the permanent galleries, places in the storage room and brings it up on some rare occasion for a temporary exhibition in which it is included not for its beauty but to make some sociopolitical point.

Wow, Ghose has really got it going on with that first sentence, which is a doozy that manages to take a shot at university bureaucracies, faculty members, multiculturalists, racial minority students, and foreign students at the same time. Indeed, Ghose displays the amazing ability to totally comprehend the reasons behind many students' course selection habits with the line that "students from racial minorities and foreign students" take classes like "Third World Literature" (and by implication, Asian-American literature?) because they are "pathetically looking for something with which they can identify." Ouch! Hey, maybe they're just choosing classes, because they're not into morning classes or only want classes on Thursday and Friday. Is that any less "pathetic"?

I think that the primary problem with this claim is that it unfairly singles out "Third World Literature" or "Asian-American Poetry" or "African-American Novels" for harsh criticism by decontextualizing them from the rest of the classes offered in English. Look, we all know the types of courses offered in college. Beyond intro courses, courses often are quite specific. For example, some English classes that will be offered at Duke University in Fall 2005 include "Seamus Heaney," "Medieval Literature to 1500," "Sexualities Film/Video," "Renaissance Enviornmentalisms," "American Literature: 1915 to 1960," etc. Even a class that has a more general-sounding title like "Contemporary American Writers" must necessarily be relegated to a limited set of works due to the time constraints of the semester. So, I'm not quite understanding why "Third World Literature" must be isolated for particular criticism. And I'm not sure why taking a class with which you can identify is so pathetic. I alawys thought that it was cool to explore one's own interests and identity, but then again, I think that Aqua's "Barbie Girl" is a cool video, so maybe I have a warped sense of coolness.

To borrow Ghose's museum analogy, most college classes feature works of art that are singled out. They are all unique and specific. It's not such a bad thing to have diverse course offerings, just as it's not such a bad thing that there is a diverse array of exhibits at museums. I don't deny that the professor who offers "Asian-American Poetry" wants "to win [the poets] some attention," though I'd dispute that would be the only or main goal. Usually, it's about exploring a subject that is also a scholarly interest with students. Also, winning attention for the author(s) and their works would be the same objective for the professor offering the class on "Seamus Heaney" or "Medieval Literature to 1500" as the professor teaching "Asian-American Poetry." Furthermore, such classes like Asian-American Poetry" may concededly not be "permanent" offerings, but they can be, provided that there are professors or grad students willing to teach them.

More importantly, Ghose seems to desire a English lit curriculum that is unified and features a limited set of writers, while at the same time, he wants it to focus on Indian writers like Desani and Rao. Paradoxically, it's almost an "Indian-power" argument that wants Indian writers to be featured but does not want them to be singled out as"Indian" in the inclusion or the teaching. Indeed, Ghose acknowledges that courses like Third World Literature may be the only way that these authors get any recognition at all, and he clearly wants these authors to get recognition.

But Ghose does not deal with the problem of exclusion, which I've touched upon before in previous posts -- for an expansion of a unified curriculum in American poetry, for example, there must eventually be an exclusion of poets, since there is only a limited number of poets that may be read in a semester or year. I think that taking out some of the "lesser" English-language writers for "greater" English-language Indian writers is what Ghose wants, but he does not want the Indian writers to be acknowledged as "Indian" but simply "great," which is ironic, considering that Ghose himself points out that they are Indian. And, actually, a changing of the curriculum has already happened to a limited extent in many relatively generalist classes that offer an ethnically/racially diverse array of authors, though less so in poetry than in other fields in English literature.

Ghose does touch upon the valid point that classes like "Third World Literature" are often not as popular with students as a class like "Shakespeare," for example. Well, one important reason is that "Shakespeare" is often a requirement for the English major. Another reason is that high school graduates have generally all had much more exposure to Shakespeare's works (as opposed to probably zero exposure to any Asian-American poets), and so there's a better chance that they'd be interested in a class called "Shakespeare." And, in general, there are fewer tenured professors willing to devote the energy and attention to teach a class in "Third World Literature" or "Asian-American Poetry," which is important, since tenured professors generally get to decide the classes that they want to teach. But perhaps most importantly, students are often taught at a relatively early age, maybe junior high or high school, that novels are more important than poems, that Ernest Hemingway is more important than Garrett Hongo, and that Asian-American poetry is not a worthwhile scholarly field of study, if it is a field of study at all. It's a tough lesson to shake, because it's one that is gradually communicated through years and years of education.

On Ghose's Essay - Part I

2005-08-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

In one of his recent essays, www.callreview.net/issueone.html, long excerpts of which I found via Pam's blog, http://openreader.blogspot.com/, Zulfikar Ghose implicitly challenges the very existence of this blog! It's a splendid piece, because Ghose doesn't mince words, so I won't feel bad for openly challenging and disputing his arguments here. (Plus agreeing with them when I think he's right, of course.)

And I'll be doing something I've never done before with this post and the following couple posts, which is create a paragraph by paragraph dialogue with an excerpt from the piece (or at least the parts on Pam's blog -- I don't have access to the whole piece, but Pam has helpfully quoted much of it on her blog). I've generally found this technique needless and distracting, often requiring the reader to read more than necessary and obscuring the blogger's own points, but I just had a nice supper and figure I should try it out at least once while I'm feeling like it. Also, as Pam insightfully points out, it might help if you substitute "identity" for "nationalism" while reading, because Ghose is clearly talking about what most American scholars popularly term "identity politics" except that he discusses it mainly from an "English" perspective. And when Ghose refers to "national identity," it's equally clear that he's thinking of "ethnicity."

Ghose: Of all the categories into which literature is divided, the worst is the nationalistic one, especially among writers in the English language. An implied hierarchy has become established among English-language writers: it is assumed that those from the United Kingdom and Ireland and from the U.S.A. are the primary English-language writers, the mainstream, followed by those from the former British colonies, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, whose population until recently was largely of white Britsh or European origin.

Whoa, slow down, big fella! First, let's take some responsibility for our points here: you think the worst way to divide literature is the nationalistic one, you think that there is an implied hierarchy, you think that (unnamed) others have separated an "UK-Ireland-U.S.A" triumverate from "the former British colonies." The "assumptions," though framed as assumptions, are actually assertions here.

Second, I doubt that the worst way to divide literature is the nationalistic one. There are many worse ways, in my opinion. For starters, there's the bastardization of poetry into a mere three or four bookshelves in bookstores while magazines, cookbooks, and computer self-help books get much more space and glory. Then, within the poetry section itself, we let in only "good" poets like Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, and Frost, while we relegate contemporary poets to a fraction of this already small space. Finally, have you tried to find even a single Asian-American poetry book in a bookstores these days? You should try it out, just as a fun experiment. Oooh, for all you teachers out there, this is a smashing idea for an inexpensive field trip! If you're lucky, you'll find a book or two by Marilyn Chin or Li-Young Lee, but that's probably about it. There, I've just come up with three worse ways to divide literature. Three strikes, baby. And I haven't even gotten to how even the lower-middle class gets excluded these days with the shutting down of public libraries, decreasing funding for academic publishers so fewer works of poetry and poetry criticism get published, etc.

Third, and not a major point, I've never comes across the grouping of the U.K., Ireland, and U.S.A. as "primary English-language writers" apart from the "British colonies," such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Really, I guess I need to get out more. I've always thought of all six of those nations as having plenty of English-language writers. But I know that Ghose is implictly referring to the general degree of critical esteem that these writers have received, and I don't have much of a problem with this assertion, except for the oversight that the U.S.A. was once a British colony as well and that Ireland and the U.K. haven't exactly had the most amicable relationship either. Also, Ghose evidently has India in mind as a "British colony," and he should just come out and say it here instead of avoiding it to downplay the question of race.

Fourth, the contention that the population of British colonies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand "until recently was of British or European origin" is ahistorical. Indigenous peoples have long populated all these nations, before British and European immigrants migrated over the past several centuries. In addition, during the past several centuries, there has been plenty of migration from Asia and Africa as well.

Fifth and finally, I applaud Ghose for opening with a forceful and fascinating topic sentence and following it up with an interesting contention. Ghose clearly has something interesting to say here, and he's straightforward and upfront about it.

From Pamela Lu's "Ambient Parking Lot" - A Commentary

2005-08-09T02:33:00.000-07:00

This prose poem is one of the few "postmodern," "language" poems that merits the language it employs. By that, I mean that its spare, mechinical, technocratic, unwieldy, and surreal universe matches the tone and word choice, which have an equally distancing effect. But this distancing effect is mitigated by a certain human solitude, because Pamela Lu comprehends that solitude can ironically bring us closer when we can identify with it.

I think that the use of the second person is key here. Completely original lines like "Ours was the first generation to realize the sentimentality of artificial repose," "Art shadowed us with all the fidelity of a non-negotiable accompaniment," and "We succumbed to moisture; we reorganized our sympathies around the civic drain," help us empathize with a world that seems so close to describing our own galaxies of picture frames and gumball machines and gas stations and other artificies that possess all the mechanics of appropriateness without quite embodying human essence. It's a very 21st century world.

This piece is very much about the evocation of mood. But I don't think it would have worked that well if it was only about mood. Mood and language can only carry you so far in a relatively long work. I don't enjoy boring but original combinations of words that go on for sentence after sentence, and I don't think I'm alone here. You may think you're chic and the latest craze in your black top hat with the live robin's nest glued to its shiny black surface, but by the fifth sentence, you've already lost your audience, who will be forced to give you generic praise like "Wow, this poem is so smart and sophisticated," meaning, of course, "I'm going to say something blandly nice, so you won't interrogate me on what this monstrosity really means." But I'm going off-topic here...

There is narrative and setting and character and meaning and politics here, and that elevates the poem. There is a sense of drive and adventure, as "we wept with a bitterness that enfolded the greater plots and vistas of our childhood," "we are humbled by literature," and "shunned by our peers, we lapsed into a general delinquency..." We are taken through many locales. "We" feel. Feeling humans confront a strange world of "titanium and clover," city planners, and "diesel sonatas," from which they are alienated. In this sense, the piece is not too far off from strong science-fiction.

This excerpt does have one glaring weakness throughout, and I'd be disappointed if Pam doesn't work on it in a future draft. What am I talking about here? It's the use of adjectives. There are way, way too many adjectives. The setting, language, characters, mood, and tone of the poem all aspire to a lean, efficient minimalism, and the adjectives are sometimes as out of place as chopsticks at a pizza restaurant.

Revision will admittedly be a little tricky, though. Some combos like "artificial repose," "diesel sonatas," and "civic drain" work, primarily because they are original. But others, like "bold and indolent tomorrow," "cold passion," "parched tongue," "blistered feet," and "desert drone of midnight traffic" are either not original enough or overdoing it, at least to me. And, more generally, I think it does become problematic that almost every single sentence has a bunch of adjectives, even if the combos are somewhat neat. I wonder whether "And yet out of this gridlocked tundra, there emerged a solitary figure, silent and unloved, who stood at the center of each of our lives, who canvassed the non-pedestrian terrain and found hospitality in the desert drone of midnight traffic," would work better as "And yet out of this tundra, there emerged a figure, who stood at the center of each of our lives, who canvassed the terrain and found hospitality in the drone of traffic." Or something like that, something to make a unique phrase like "commercial pity" stand out a little more from the crowd.

Overall, this excerpt makes me want to read more. I'd be interested whether Pam can sustain the linguistic/narrative energy and drive of the poem for a longer distance, because it works so far. It works, because we care where we, and the poem, are going.

from Pamela Lu's "Ambient Parking Lot"

2005-08-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

from "Ambient Parking Lot"

We were born in the back of a moving vehicle, gliding softly past the fields of titanium and clover that marked the settlements of a bold and indolent tomorrow. The pleasure of this moment was transitory, yet persisted long enough to color the squawks and intonations of our first words. We surfaced from slumber, gurgling impressions of truck horns and carburetors, ham signals and telegraph buzz. Ours was the first generation to realize the sentimentality of artificial repose. When our favorite projection machine was declared obsolete, we wept with a bitterness that enfolded the greater plots and vistas of our childhood. Art shadowed us with all the fidelity of a non-negotiable accompaniment. We were humbled by literature, by the narrative eclipse of city planners who named boulevards after engineers, cul de sacs after planets. Sidewalks made a lake of silver to park our seismic unrest against. Could we possibly survive the vacancy and cold passion of a landscape novel that contained no people? Pylons became our chorus, the overpass our hero. The conflict between eucalyptus and smog would never be rightly resolved. And yet out of this gridlocked tundra, there emerged a solitary figure, silent and unloved, who stood at the center of each of our lives, who canvassed the non-pedestrian terrain and found hospitality in thedesert drone of midnight traffic. This was the soul of our early compositions, which wore the unsocialized absorption of parched tongue, blistered feet, shuffling gait--everything, in short, that stigmatized the walker as an enemy of progress. The official note was resignation, the official tune estrangement, as we distorted and mixed chromosomal harmonics to coax our avatar out of exile and back into the hum of human events.Mentored by his wrath and guided by his sorrow, we became bad subjects, perfectly ill-suited for day camp, standardized tests, or weekend play-dates. Shunned by our peers, we lapsed into a general delinquency characterized by consumption of Goethe studies and other controlled substances. In the end, preliminary foundations prevailed. El Nino reintroduced us to the warmth of concrete. What new emotion was this, and would we recognize ourselves in it? We succumbed to moisture; we reorganized our sympathies around the civic drain. By springtime, nature had raised a sound structure whose stroke and responsiveness far transcended that of our diesel sonatas. The walker had arrived. He entered a city steeped in gray and troubled tones, with nary a trace of commercial pity. Blazing a trail to the mezzanine garage that housed our sampling stations, he paused to clear his ears. He faltered. He fell against the upturned cone to listen.

*****

Author's Note: "Over the past year, I've been working on and off on a mid-length prose piece called _Ambient Parking Lot_. I've just transitioned from the chiefly narrative part of it to a more lyrical interlude, composed of prose blocks which could function on some level as rambling prose poems. At least, this is what occurred to me when I took a few of these blocks out of context and readthem individually. So I am sending you one of the blocks to digest as you will."

*****

Biography: Pamela Lu is a prose writer who grew up in Southern California and nowresides in Northern California. She is the author of _Pamela: A Novel_, whichcan be ordered through Amazon.com(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1891190040/qid=1120856459/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/102-0638788-8535345?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). When not compulsively surfing and commenting on blogs, she tends domestic animals andwrites computer manuals for a living. Her blog is http://openreader.blogspot.com/.

On Nick Carbo's "HER AHS AND OHS"

2005-08-04T20:23:00.000-07:00

I feel like I've been getting too serious and drifting away from the topic of "Asian-American poetry" in my most recent posts, so I want to rectify that here. I mean, look at the subtitle to this blog, "My strange and outlandish takes..." That's what you're here for, isn't it?

And this poem is a good place to start. Nick Carbo's "HER AHS AND OHS" is like chocolate cheesecake. It's no good for you, but you eat it up anyway. You're not going to learn anything broccoli-ish by reading this poem. It's not the poem that your freshman rhetoric instructor (not a professor, but a PhD candidate) will tell you is "serious" or "profound" or "transcendent," while sweating away in his awkward little red-and-white striped bow tie, hoping that you won't question him "why?" because the answer is not in the lesson plans that he scribbled at 2am last night in pencil on an oversized yellow post-it while preparing an 8-page outline for chapter 3 of his book on Emily Dickinson's imaginary sister's Orphelian farmhouses, only three years away from getting his PhD and three and a half years from moving back into the old upstairs room in his parents' house while becoming a "freelance" writer for some software start-up in Silicon Valley as he searches for a publisher for his novella on a female Manhattanite who has to deal with the quirks and oddities of her Nebraskan fiance's family in the middle of farm-country in Lincoln during the late 1980s after being laid-off from her job as assistant to the bigwig of some Wall Street firm that went bust. Oh, no. That's not this poem.

This poem is appropriately titled, because it's about an orgasm. And orgasms are dirty! Let's say that the woman having the orgasm, and the man giving it to her, are Asian American. Do Asian Americans have orgasms? Asian Americans are a very clean people, so we have to wonder. It's probably more kosher in American pop culture for Asian American women to be portrayed as having orgasms than it is for Asian American men to be portrayed as such. So, in that sense, if we want to picture both the man and the woman as Asian American, the poem isn't all that radical. Of course, the story would change if one party was Asian American but the other was not.

If we want to carry my earlier "Hitler question" to its logical conclusion and say that it's impossible to separate the poet from the poem, we might ask, is the poet doing the pleasuring here? The poet is male. He obviously possesses carnal knowledge, which, if you can't tell from this poem, is pretty obvious from his other poems. But the perspective seems to mutually empathize with both the woman and the man, because the pleasuring is mutual -- both lovers are acting here. There are two people, both doing the pleasuring and being pleasured, in the poem.

And people, does it matter whether these "ahs and ohs" have happened in real life before? One might say that it's the question of the Yasusada hoax (discussed earlier on this blog -- where apparently a Caucasian American poet pretended to be Asian-American and got a bunch of poems published in "prestigious" magazines) all over again. But one wouldn't ordinarily question the authenticity here. Because this is not a "serious" poem in the sense that it doesn't deal with a "serious" issue like the bombing of Hiroshima. But why would one think that way? I mean, if authenticity matters in poetry, shouldn't it matter for any poem? If that's not the case, where are we drawing the line between a "serious" poem where authenticity matters and a "non-serious" poem where it doesn't?

Anyhow, getting to the language of the poem itself, I think that the poem completely overturns the steroetype that Asian Americans don't know how to pronounce consonants. Look at all those "s's" and "p's" and "t's" My goodness, Nick Carbo has done us proud! Seriously, though, I've never understood the racial stereotype of Asian Americans mixing up "l's" and "r's" That must be the most stupid stereotype on the face of the earth, because it's so factually wrong. I mean, I myself have witnessed a plethora of Asian Americans mix up so many English words in so many different ways but never those particular consonants before. Looks like the xenophobes didn't do their research. It's kind of like saying that there are too many Asian Americans in the NBA. You only get to count Yao Ming once, folks. Stop saying Asian Americans "have made it" simply by pointing up at Yao. It's rude to point.

So, I liked this poem. I feel like I can refer to the poet as "Nick" as opposed to "Carbo," because, really, how many people (excluding masochists) would refer to orgasm-givers by their last names? I tell you that Nick has come up with a poem that will last the length that it should last as long as you want it to last, which is the ultimate fantasy.

Nick Carbo's "HER AHS AND OHS"

2005-08-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

HER AHS AND OHS

The shifting pings of her eyes send his synapses on a shopping spree for pink puckering skin. Start with the top turquoise button, she says as she turns the spigot. He craves the opal spin of her minuscule ahs. Will the intaglio of his tongue bring out the fine lines of her vermilion mood? Can he predict the aureole's arrival? Her sibilant hues oscillate under the joules of his kisses. Her fingers increase the intensity. Beyond the lifting belly, her ohs come in staccato bursts and she squeezes his hand. Her red round cowl retreats exposing the tiny bell, which will be tintinabulating until dawn.

*****

For Nick Carbo's biography, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1667164 and http://www.cherry-grove.com/carbo.html.