Janine Oshiro

Janine Oshiro holds degrees from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University), Portland State University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon’s Literary Arts. Her first book Pier was the winner of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize and was recently published by Alice James Books. She lives in Hawaii and teaches at Windward Community College.

LR: In Pier, which is so richly evocative of the complex emotions surrounding the illness and loss of a loved one, you strike a fine balance between confession and creative license, authentic experience and fantasy. How did you find this balance? And how did you avoid sentimentality?

PIER

JO: I’ll first respond to the “S-word.” I didn’t think consciously about avoiding sentimentality; while I don’t want to be sentimental, I do think that sometimes the fear of sentimentality can inhibit the exploration of emotions. Sometimes the truth of a person’s experience can come off as sentimental in a poem. There is no way around that. I would much rather read a poem that strikes me as authentic and a little sentimental than a poem that is just hip and ironic or detached and intellectual. I think about a poet like James Galvin, who in his latest book has a poem called “Two Angels,” featuring a boy with a mental disability and a dog. It walks the fine line. I truly admire that he doesn’t shy away from what might be construed as sentimental. In a way I think the fearlessness to even approach the sentimental is what makes some of his poems so powerful for me. I know that I have written some sentimental poems and poems I would never want anyone to read, and those poems have been important in my development as a writer and as a person.

I don’t really know that I can answer the question about balance. Did I have a strategy for finding a balance? No. I had all these questions about losing my mom, seeing my dad’s health decline, experiencing invisible presences, having a distinctly marked body, and feeling an “other” to myself. Writing the poems was my way of trying to answer these questions—even though I wasn’t really aware of that as my “project” at the beginning. Of course, I could have chosen to answer these questions through journaling and therapy, which I did to a certain extent. But then there is this—making a word-object with sound constellations, reimagining experience, creating a new and authentic experience in the word-world. What really happened? I didn’t really see a school of spoons swimming in the ocean though I write about it in the poem “Setting,” but I really did experience something crawling out of a zippered compartment in the wall and running down my body as I describe in “Next, Dust.” In the world of the poem what really happened doesn’t matter. It is all really happening in the world of the poem.

LR: How did you discover the language of this book, which, as in poems like “Three Capes”, “Eleven Dancers”, and “Next, Dust”, makes ready use of off-rhyme, sentence fragments, interjections, disruptions, and onomatopoeia?

JO: I love fooling around with words. I love just writing words on the page and giving those words sound siblings to see what happens. I love found language and jotting down words and phrases that are striking. I remember reading something once in a National Geographic about bodies oxidizing, and that ended up as “our bodies rust” in the poem “Relic.” I have found language from medical texts, of course, and books about grammar, book arts, gardening, critical theory, psychology, etc. I even find the explanatory language of the dictionary compelling. It is often the case for me that found language triggers an idea or emotion that starts a poem. Sometimes the found language finds its way out of the poem at the end, and sometimes it stays.

LR: Your voice is restrained, ethereal, sometimes clinical, and other times, it captures the whimsy of childhood. Did you have particular strategies of craft in mind while you were shaping this voice?

JO: The word “strategy” has been tainted for me by my college’s accreditation activities, which results in so much chatter about “strategic plans” and “strategic outcomes,” so I’m having a bit of trouble connecting strategy with poetry. Right now I want them as far away from each other as possible. I guess I think there is a danger in too closely identifying a strategy. Okay, so something happened, and I like it, but it isn’t the case that I necessarily want the same thing to happen again. I don’t want an “exportable strategy” in poetry. In the writing process I stumble upon a voice, and I want to see how far that voice will go. Maybe it keeps going, or maybe it dissolves. Maybe I stumble upon another voice, and I want to see how the two voices will work together. The poet Mary Szybist visited a class I took at Portland State University, and I’ll paraphrase here something she said: I’m not interested in finding my voice, but in making many voices. This was liberating for me to hear at the time, and I still think about it today. How many voices can I make?

LR: How did you come upon the tripartite structure of the book?

JO: Going from a manuscript to the published book was a fascinating experience. Sarah Gambito actually helped me to find the structure. It was originally just ordered without sections, and then I put it into five sections. I remember she asked, “Why five sections?” I really had no answer. I started thinking more about what I wanted the reader to experience as a whole. It took time for me to be able to see the poems without attachment to the order in which I wrote them and surface content, but eventually I eliminated some poems and came to this sequence. The simplest way for me to explain it is that in section one, there is a problem. In section two, I’m trying to act out various solutions to the problem. Section three attempts to resolve the problem. It creates an arc, though hardly original, that makes sense for the individual poems. It seems simplistic as I’ve explained it, but it took quite a process to figure it out.

LR: Can you describe the journey that this book took in its writing and path to publication?

JO: I certainly couldn’t conceive of a book when I first started writing poems. These poems were written and revised during my three years in graduate school at Portland State University and my two years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I am so grateful for the poets I worked with in Portland and Iowa, both fellow workshoppers and teachers. Many of these poems are in conversation with poems I read in my workshops. I continued to make minor revisions for a couple of years after graduate school, but the poems were mainly formed during those five years. After I won the Kundiman Prize, I did more revising and the final shaping of the manuscript. Sarah Gambito was my “editing buddy” during that time, and it was such a pleasure to work with her. Everyone from Alice James Books was incredible; I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Of course the manuscript was rejected countless times before this. When Sarah Gambito called to tell me, I cried. It was happiness, but something else, too. It was maybe fear, maybe a sense of emptiness. This one thing that I wanted more than anything had happened. Now what?

LR: Do you have any advice for poets who are putting together their first books now?

JO: I loved my time in workshop, but I think the time when I most needed feedback was when I was looking at the manuscript as a whole. Getting feedback on the whole manuscript or even a small collection seems more useful to me now than feedback on individual poems. Mark Levine was my thesis advisor at Iowa, and he suggested an ordering for the manuscript that was radical for me because I was attached to the order in which I wrote the poems; he suggested ending the manuscript with the poem “February,” which I never would have considered on my own. The idea of ending the manuscript with the line “It was not spring” was so devastating to me that it actually made me write the poem “Chorus,” which now ends the book. I didn’t know that thinking about the poems as one manuscript could generate new poems.

I think it’s important for poets to feel good about their own process—no matter what anyone else is doing. When I was in graduate school, I was shocked by how prolific some poets were—and they were writing amazing poems, so it wasn’t just quantity! I work slowly, and now that I teach, it’s going even more slowly. It used to make me a little anxious, but now it’s okay. I’m writing my poems in my own way and in my own time.

LR: What is your writing process like? What do you draw on for inspiration? Do you have favorite exercises or rituals that you like to use? If so, can you share a few of them?

JO: I accumulate notes and journal entries and scraps of language, and then I play around with them to make something meaningful for myself. I think play—exploring and enjoying language— is essential, no matter what the content. I like to write, go for a walk, and then write a little more. I usually have some formal concern that I am also working through—maybe couplets, or the relationship of prose chunks to lines, or iambic pentameter, or just writing a nine-line poem. What can happen in nine lines?

LR: How do you keep yourself accountable? Do you have writing partners, people to whom you send your work, or a writing group to which you belong?

JO: Sometimes writing is a priority. Sometimes teaching is a priority. Waking up and meditating is always a priority. Moving toward spiritual growth is always a priority, and writing is definitely part of that growth. I haven’t been writing very much lately, and that is fine. I’m not a fanatic about writing every day. I don’t have a writing group right now, and I’m much more interested in starting a reading group at the moment.

LR: Pier won the first Kundiman Book Prize. How has your involvement with Kundiman influenced you as a writer?

JO: Because I grew up in Hawaii, I really didn’t identify with the term Asian American. It wasn’t until I moved to the mainland that it even made sense to me. I really didn’t know that I was missing anything until I went to the Kundiman Retreat in 2006. I had been in many amazing and supportive workshops prior to that, but there was something present at the retreat that I had not ever experienced. I was so much more conscious of belonging and being an integral part of a group. With that sense of belonging came a different kind of confidence in myself. It was a confidence that was also a call to action because I learned that belonging was not automatic; it required that leap to be part of and to embrace community. I’ve had a few experiences that have given me more confidence in myself as a writer—and being part of Kundiman is one of them.

LR: Aside from Kundiman, what other resources would you recommend to emerging Asian American poets who might be either outside of, or freshly graduated from, the M.F.A.?

JO: Definitely look to Kundiman, but I would also say that everyone is a potential resource and friend, and don’t underestimate your own ability to create community wherever you are and with whoever happens to be around you.

LR: Do you have any new projects in the pipeline? If so, can you talk a little about them?

JO: I’m working on individual poems that aren’t intentionally part of a project. I remember a friend once telling me that my poems were noticeably absent of people. These newer poems have more people, more men in particular. I don’t quite know what to make of them yet, but I’ll find out.

Brenda Hillman | photo by Brett Hall Jones

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar(1997), Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982); Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995); and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). In 2010 she co-translated Jeongrye Choi’s book of poems, Instances, released by Parlor Press. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

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INSTANCES cover

LR: What attracted you to rendering translations of Jeongrye Choi’s poetry?

BH: I met her at Iowa at the International Writers Workshop, and it proved to be interesting and fruitful to work on her poetry with the other students who had some knowledge of Korean. When I found out she was working in Berkeley the following year, we were able to continue working on her poetry, but I needed help from several other people to complete the project. Wayne de Fremery, a Harvard PhD candidate in Korean Studies who lives in Seoul, had met Jeongrye before and agreed to do the transliterating for me and LTI Korea backed us financially. Poet Gillian Hamel served as an advisor and helped produce the manuscript and Byungwook Ryu designed it. Jon Thompson at Free Verse Editions and Dave Blakesley at Parlor Press were also instrumental to this work.

LR: You’ve done some translations before this book. Was there anything that interested you about Choi’s work in terms of the craft of her poetry specifically?

BH: I was interested mostly in her aesthetic and her commitment to the strangeness of the everyday. She has a perception of reality that’s not just run-of-the-mill surrealism. I know she’s doing a lot of language play in Korean, but because I don’t know the original language, I had to rely on what Wayne would tell me was going on. As far as I can tell, one of the things she does is use a lot of—not exactly punning—but she keeps the possibilities of language open so that things can be read as punning on different situations, and that really interested me. I tried to get that sense when we were rendering it into English. I think the quality of imagination is rendered really well, so the images do carry a lot of linguistic content. And the things that do translate well are the repetition and intimate forms of address that are open to the reader and can also be taken as an address to self. At times, you can’t tell whether she’s addressing herself or the reader, and I found that really appealing as well.

LR: Did you notice any particular differences in the cultural transformation of bringing a contemporary Korean poet to an American audience?

BH: There’s a bringing forth of a feminist, politically motivated and more populist poetry that speaks to everyday experience and that’s also considered more linguistically radical. I think she fits into that too. There’s an effort that might be in keeping with some of what has gone on in American avant-garde poetry, a continuance of the engagements with modernist fragmentary forms, and also with the psychological and with women’s issues.

She’s a very precise writer. I found it really interesting because I had two different experiences with translating in a span of two years. The first was with Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Asher Etwebi, a collection of work from a Libyan poet that I co-translated with Diallah Haidar. My experience with Jeongrye had to do more with discussions of how literal to be with the Korean because it’s really hard to be literal when the grammatical structures are so different, even in the way the sentence is maintained.

LR: In the introduction, you wrote that in Choi’s poetry “meaning is restless: it goes back and forth,” and Choi herself says that her work deals with “fragments of memories.” As I was reading, I also thought that a lot of her poems pull the reader in and out of time. In one poem she writes “time floats on the muddy water,” which seems to describe the experience for me reading her work. Did time and fragmentation affect your rendering of her poems?

BH: Wayne and I tried to work on the sentence structure, so it’s not as fragmented as someone like Barbara Guest. It is very disjunctive, where you’ll set up one thought paratactially next to a very different one. A better description of what Jeongrye does is that she puts fragmented thought into grammatical context. That’s how it was described to me from the transliterations. They were usually in disjunctive, fragmentary sentences. Jumpy is a good word.

LR: Going back to what you said about Choi having a sort of feminist or politically motivated bent to her work. Also, in the book’s introduction, you wrote that you find her work to be feminist “in an instructive way.” As a poet who also tackles issues of feminism in your own writing, and as an activist, how do you find her work to be instructive?

BH: She’s of a younger generation, and I feel in some way that American feminism has informed a lot of international poetry too. I feel instructed by her—maybe instructed is the wrong word—but a solidarity and sisterly-ness with her sense of quirkish freedom that reminds me of slightly previous feminism from the 1970s. Even though it fits into a sort of grouping, her mind is very playful. She’s wild. She has freedom of emotion, and she expresses a community with other women, like in her poem “Lebanese Emotion,” which is one of my favorites. She says:

Veiled women pass by
against a background of buildings pocketed by bombs exploding.
Hollowed eyes flashing; they come and go like gulls;
Maybe it was me.

She’s really getting at a condition of identification for all people in that poem, and identification with a difficult condition of the world through a more emotional approach—through the image that women are allowed to express more freely in all cultures. That draws me to her feminism.

LR: I know in your own work that you have a spiritual or mystical connection to the natural elements and that a current interest for you is eco-poetics. Does Jeongrye Choi’s work interest you on that spiritual or mystical level too?

BH: Again, that draws me to it because she has a playful connection to the nonhuman. For instance, she writes about crabs with one leg inside the hole. She writes poems to geese, and tigers, and frogs, and watermelons, even the moon gets a lot of attention and shadows. In my own eco-poetics, I’m more interested in naming things. Hers comes from more symbolic representations of trees, and plants, and animals, but they’re all animated in a way that involves an interaction with human imagination. She interacts with shadows that she mistakes for something else, and that makes it special.

Very often, those things are figures for either emotions or relationships. For her, I think relationships are problematic, and so the natural world, or the nonhuman world, is a way of entering into these human relationships with a different kind of symbolic figuration. There’s a poem called “A Forest of Donkey Ears” that I really love, in which the poet thinks she sees donkey ears, but it’s really leaves, and then it turns into memory and becomes a figure for the mistakes we make.

Like understanding the cry of the redpoll
only as the red of berries,
like something heard before
with a knitted brow—
Who was it? What was it?

If you can understand the animal or the nonhuman, then you can somehow get clearer on what’s often difficult for this poet.

LR: Do you think her work has universal appeal?

BH: Like all good poets, she works with local situations that get bigger as they become symbolic as a whole. Again, I think she’s speaking to women’s experiences that become representative of here’s how it is: to have children, to have different love affairs, to have hope in a dangerous situation. She’s on the border of dangerousness a lot, so there’s a sense of the universal. She writes of departure and love affairs that haven’t worked—it’s never quite clear why. I think she gets “universal” mileage of never saying the why but just saying the what.

With the where, I think of a poet like René Char who writes symbolically about living in the French countryside, but the places he talks about could be anywhere as opposed to someone who’s writing very specifically about one place. Then there are writers like Gary Snyder who write about their own locale, and you can extrapolate a lot from that. Jeongrye seems to me an urban, or suburban, poet because she writes about being in cities and seeing the things that are there in the city, or in the house. The editors constructed a statement on the back that says she “creates environments at once familiar but dreamlike,” and I think it’s a very good description actually.

I also like her statements at the end, and I sort of take her saying, “Now that I am alive and have a memory and can feel things deeply, I have to answer the questions of who I am, and where I am. So I write,” back to the question of women’s experience and poetic experience in the world. I like to have themes emerge in the brain. There’s a powerful nature of living in a symbolic world that teaches you more and gives you more material. It enriches reality to live very deeply and strangely and imagistically in the world. I wouldn’t say it’s only particular to her work, but poetry in general. The delicacy and intricacy of her poetics, like many poets who write conversationally offers a deeper, more vital way to live.

Kimiko Hahn, by Nancy Bareis

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight books of poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006) a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; and Toxic Flora, poems inspired by science (W.W. Norton, 2010). As part of her service to the CUNY community, she helped initiate a Chapbook Festival that has become an annual event; since then she has published the chapbooks, Ragged Evidence and A Field Guide to the Intractable. Hahn has also written text for film, such as the 1995 MTV special, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She-Thing; also, the text for Everywhere at Once, a film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and of course, in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York where she is a distinguished professor; also for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem and Kundiman. Among her current projects: a collaborative translation of Japanese zuihitsu and new sequences triggered primarily by neuroscience.

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TOXIC FLORA

LR: In the latest issue of The American Poetry Review featuring 13 of your new poems triggered by articles on science, you speak of the power of lists and the poetic momentum that can be generated by them in the context of individual poems. In Toxic Flora as a whole, how did you maintain a sense of urgency and intensity while using the same kind of source material (NYT science articles) for each piece?

KH: These poems are from a new manuscript that I began late summer of 2009 [i.e. not Toxic Flora]. I was preparing the Toxic Flora manuscript for publication and thinking that I was finished with science—but suddenly realized that science, at least the exotic language and realm, was not finished with me. I returned to several articles in the Science section of The New York Times and gave myself the assignments as described in APR.

Over ten years ago I wrote a sequence based on various articles (i.e., from [the] Science section of The New York Times). I soon had so many poems that I realized it could become a whole collection. So I kept writing—maybe over a hundred—and at a certain point began seriously revising. Then while compiling a manuscript, [I] began seriously cutting poems that were too weak. I have described the particular process in a W.W. Norton online column: “A Poet and Her Editor”.

LR: You are widely known as an exemplar of a poet who teaches. What relationship is there between your teaching and your writing?

KH: I take my students very seriously. I believe that is the greatest gift an artist can give a student. Obviously, if I hold a high standard for their work, say in the closure of a poem, I had better hold the same. I also find that I read a greater variety of poetry because I need to go beyond my own taste.

LR: What has been your experience teaching at Kundiman? From your perspective, why is it important to intentionally foster spaces of community for Asian American poets?

KH: There are cultural issues such as “saving face”/shame, rage/reticence, and so on that can censor a writer. These are in some respects stereotypes and do not apply to every Asian culture or every Asian American family. But I found similarities among those at the Kundiman retreat and I was grateful to be in the mix: to see how I fit in there and to be able to identify some of these aspects as cultural. Then to break open into rich discussions. Some were very painful. And equally necessary.

LR: How do you envision the roles of cultural and gender identity in your work?

KH: When I began writing seriously, the country was in the throes of the Civil Rights and Feminism Movements. Unlike some earlier writers of color, I didn’t feel that I had to write “like a white person”—like, say, T.S. Eliot. On the other hand, if I wanted to imitate Eliot, I also didn’t feel that I was betraying my growing sense of being an Asian American female. Maybe part of this comes from being mixed, i.e., Eurasian. In any case, I feel that whatever I write is going to have a cultural and gender imprint, directly or subtly. I can’t understand why this is an issue in 2011—to not want to be an Asian American writer—because it is not limiting. I feel extremely grateful that Toxic Flora was awarded an Asian American Literary Award from AAWW. The book isn’t obviously written by an Asian American writer—at least not typically so.

LR: How has motherhood affected your writing?

KH: I have an essay coming out called, “Still Writing the Body,” (Rankine, Claudia and Lisa Sewell, North American Women Poets in the 21st Century, Volume 2. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, Forthcoming, 2012). It is triggered by my abiding interest in French feminists’ “écriture féminine.” The mother’s body—which is to say my mother’s body and my own body as it is the mother—is an essential part of who I am. Why would I want my writing to be separate from my body? That would be to deny cadence and the texture of language! Not to mention genuine emotion.

On a practical level, and perhaps this is more your question, I had to compartmentalize my life very strictly to get any writing done. I hope in my driving ambition that I didn’t subject my children to my own madness. Hard to know where being a model ends and being a terrible-mother begins…. We are all three very loving towards one another so I think I hope! I was what is known as “the good enough mother.”

LR: Tell us about how you got your start in poetry. How was the poetry world different then? Would you have done anything differently?

KH: I’ve always loved the sound of words—even words that made no sense to me. In fact words that make little or no sense possess the kind of magic we expect in poetry. So, I’d say that I always loved poetry but truly fell in love with Edgar Allen Poe in third grade. My family was at an outdoor book fair and I found an old gilt-edged copy of Poe that my parents bought for me. My father kind of explained meter. On into high school, rock ‘n’ roll lyrics as well as Gertrude Stein, Eliot, and so on. Even in high school I knew that I wanted to become a writer and when I found that the University of Iowa had undergrad workshops off I went. I studied with Louise Glück, Marvin Bell, Charles Wright, as well as then-grad students Michael Burkard and Rita Dove. On graduation I returned to New York City and lived with my radical boyfriend who introduced me to social movements. I was introduced to a number of non-academic poets such as Sekou Sundiata and Jessica Hagedorn. You could work part time and find a run-down cheap apartment in Manhattan in the ’70s. It was a heady mix of studying Japanese at Columbia, radical politics, and clubbing. Overall: writing was at the center of my life. … What would I do differently? Hard to say. I wish I had stretched myself a bit and taken fiction workshops as an undergrad. I am sorry my Japanese is so rusty but I am collaborating on some translations now so I make [d0].

LR: You’ve written eight books so far. How do you move from one book to the next? How do you know when a book is finished?

KH: The collection is finished when I find myself doing other stuff. Then it’s time to arrange and rearrange; to show writer friends what I have; to revise even more. It’s been different for each book. Although I am not interested in “an idea book,” that is, a book that is made specifically with a project in mind, the fact is that I often work with a theme or focus or preoccupation in mind.

LR: How have your writing and your writing process evolved since you started writing?

KH: I noticed early on that the writers I really loved to read—such as Charles Wright—were working out their own styles. They have been teachers and models. My own writing initially evolved just from writing a lot; then, in The Artist’s Daughter and Toxic Flora I began to hammer out particular aesthetic concerns (as described in that APR). I am finding formal elements that have a lot of give.

LR: What advice would you offer to emerging poets?

KH: When asked this question, I always reply: toss out the map.

LR: Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?

KH: I have several writing projects: a collection of “fake journals” inspired by the Japanese poetic diaries (nikki); a translation collaboration; and a collection of new poems triggered by science articles (APR poems are an example). There are a few other projects, but these are the ones that I’ve prioritized. Thank you for asking!

Jenna Le

Jenna Le was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the youngest child of two Vietnam War refugees. She obtained her B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and her M.D. from Columbia University. Her first book of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York Quarterly Books in August 2011. Her poems and translations of French poetry have been published by Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, The Nervous Breakdown, Post Road, The Raintown Review, Salamander, Sycamore Review, and other journals.

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LR: Many of the poems in Six Rivers riff on classical characters and themes while preserving a conversational use of language. Likewise, you often work in form while eschewing formal language. What do such dualities aim to achieve?

SIX RIVERS

JL: Many of the characters in Greek mythology seem quite real to me, especially the sorceresses like Circe and Medea, who in my mind embody the tragicomic situation of the 21st-century woman who is brimming with intellectual resourcefulness but who is still anguished by her dating troubles. Like, I see Circe as a sort of precursor to Napoleon Dynamite: although she had plenty of “great skills….like nunchuck skills, bow-hunting skills, and computer-hacking skills,” she was still totally hapless when it came to romantic relationships. This is such a thoroughly modern theme that it only makes sense for me to talk about it in colloquial contemporary English.

I use traditional verse forms for much the same reason: because I feel they have a lot of relevance to our modern-day plight. The tanka, for example, is a verse form that was historically used by aristocratic Japanese poets to treat such subject matter as clandestine assignations with illicit lovers. Well, I always thought it would be interesting to repurpose this verse form and use it to address contemporary sexual practices that really don’t differ all that much from ancient ones (“hooking up,” etc.).

LR: There is a strong geographical trope in your book with literal journeys along rivers that are both real and fictional. How do these journeys serve your narrative?

JL: Well, immigration and displacement played big roles in my family history. All the journeys in my book recapitulate that, in a way. And, in a way, it’s this small-scale recapitulation of a large-scale narrative of escape, of striking out on one’s own in an unfamiliar and sometimes hypo-oxygenated territory, that drives the narrative of Six Rivers.

LR: Your poems often view myth, history and geography through the prism of the personal, that is, the speaker’s point of view as a Vietnamese American female physician. Tell us how you balance all those perspectives and what the melange confers to the politics of your storytelling.

JL: The “politics” of my storytelling are rooted in the personal, yes. My intent is not to make political statements per se, but to spin yarns and to massage language until it moans. I ask: is a poem in which a fictional couple contemplates having an abortion “political”? Or is it just another kind of love poem? (Or is it both?)

LR: There seems to be a tension between the natural and the unnatural, health and disease in your book. On the surface, this preoccupation appears to relate to your “day job”, but on a deeper level, what story does it tell?

JL: I’ve always had a somewhat morbid fascination with the unnatural, I guess. It’s something instinctual, universal, like how I involuntarily shudder when I see a peanut shell that contains more than two seeds. It’s a kind of rubbernecking, but a rubbernecking that looks inward as well as outward.

LR: What have your experiences been as a poet who identifies as both Asian American and female? Have you found that this has placed you into a “niche” in publishing, and if so, have you found this to be reductive or empowering?

JL: Yes, I occasionally find myself being labeled by other people as an “Asian-American poet” or “Asian-American female poet” (although perhaps not as often as I feel pressured to wear the label of “physician-poet”). These labels, obviously, don’t spring out of nowhere, and I’m somewhat complicit in their use: after all, it’s true that I write primarily from a female perspective and that my writing is inevitably inflected by my Asian heritage and my Asian-American upbringing, just as it is unavoidably influenced by my past job experiences and sundry other autobiographical factors. Still, when you get down to it, the stuff I try to write is poetry, not Asian-American female poetry.

I’m conflicted. On the one hand, like any female writer who’s ever used a male or neuter pseudonym (I’m thinking of Charlotte Bronte who published her first novel under the pseudonym “Currer Bell” in 1847, as well as of Joanne Rowling who published her first novel under the moniker “J.K. Rowling” 150 years later), I want my writing to be taken seriously for what it is, and I aspire for my writing to reach a large mixed audience.

On the other hand, I am cognizant of the fact that some of the people who have responded most warmly to the publication of my book have been Asians and Asian-Americans, and I am enormously grateful for their support and their exuberant expressions of fellow-feeling. Moreover, I remember how hard it was to grow up as a Vietnamese-American girl in the 1980s with relatively few Asian-American female poets to turn to as role models. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there are no Asian-American women represented in the Norton Anthology of Poetry to this very day.) If, by accepting the label of “Asian-American female poet,” I can help bolster the confidence of other aspiring young Asian-American female poets, I am happy to do it.

LR: With a BA in mathematics followed by an MD, your entry into the poetry world was unorthodox. How did you come to poetry and how did you navigate its murky waters?

JL: Literature was my first love. I began seriously reading and writing poetry as a preteen, in an effort to break free from the shackles of the sterile perfectionism that was threatening to ruin my life. In the years that followed, I continued reading poetry, writing poetry, taking poetry classes, and asking other poets for feedback on my writing. By exercising what meager time-management skills I possess, I was able to continue doing this in parallel with my other major life pursuits.

LR: Did you consider doing an MFA? Why did you choose not to, and how has that choice impacted your poetry career?

JL: I toyed with the idea of doing an MFA. In the end, it just didn’t jive with my other plans, temporally or financially or family-wise. Not doing an MFA has doubtless handicapped me, in terms of making connections, freeing up time for writing, etc. On the other hand, not “going the MFA route” has given me interesting life experiences, an increased amount of economic security, and an outsider’s perspective on po-biz, and I console myself with the delusion that these are worthwhile things to have.

LR: What advice would you give to poets who are trying to break into po-biz from the outside, both for journal and book publishing?

JL: When your work is truly ready to be published, betake yourself to the internet, which houses such helpful resources as duotrope and Jeffery Bahr’s online guide to print journals. These websites will give you a sense of which journals are a good fit for your work, as well as which journals have high visibility and will give you the best exposure. Keep tabs on other poets who are at a slightly more advanced stage in their career than you, but who have similar backgrounds or similar writing styles to you; make note of which journals they’ve been published in, and then submit your poems to those very same journals.

Based on my personal experiences which led up to the publication of Six Rivers, I believe that the importance of “making connections” can’t be underestimated. Don’t just schmooze with industry insiders at barbecues and book fairs, but actually give them time to get to know you, e.g., by volunteering as an editorial assistant for a literary magazine that you respect. Giving poetry readings is another good way to make yourself visible to well-placed people in the book-publishing field.

LR: What is your writing process?

JL: To me, the most important thing is making a commitment to sit down and work on my writing on a regular basis. I find it useful to set quantitative goals for myself: e.g., “I’m going to write at least 10 lines of poetry this evening.” Sometimes, when I find myself lacking “inspiration,” I ask current MFA students what writing assignments their workshop teachers have given them lately, and then I give them to myself as “homework.” I enjoy giving myself assignments that force me to step outside my comfort zone, be it in terms of subject matter or formal qualities.

Other times, I’ll aimlessly page through encyclopedias (Wikipedia is fair game!) and quietly take heed of which weird factoids grab my attention in spite of myself. Then I’ll try to use those loose strands to build the nest for a yet-to-be-hatched poem.

LR: In addition to original poems, you also do translations. Do you see them as different art forms? How do translating and multilingualism in general affect your own work?

JL: I view poems and translations as different art forms, albeit closely related ones: after all, isn’t it common practice nowadays for poets to do “homolinguistic translations” as a means of generating new original poems?

Doing translations has made me a more attentive reader of other people’s poetry, and it’s heightened my awareness of the subtle literary techniques that other writers use. It’s also brought me closer, emotionally, to such great writers as Nerval, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.

Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh is the author of three books of poems, including the recently published Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press) and Best Gay Poetry (A Midsummer’s Night Press), and in journals such as Cimarron Review and PN Review. Born and raised in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.

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LR: Seven Studies for a Self Portrait is divided into seven chapters, with seven poems in each chapter, and forty-nine in the last. What is the significance of the number seven?

SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT

JLK: Seven days in a week. The practice of writing a poem a day is important to me. The days when I don’t write feel empty to me, incoherent, lost. A day, like a poem, is invaluable for itself and also for being a part of something larger, like a week or a life. I wrote my first book Payday Loans, a series of 30 sonnets, in the month before I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with my MFA.

One of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, asks in a poem, “What are days for?” He answers himself, as poets have the habit of doing, “Days are where we live.” A day is an on-going project. At the moment I am reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She speaks of Nietzsche’s will to power as a project of self-transcendence. When Larkin considers transcendence, he says in his typically sardonic manner that the question brings the priest and the doctor running. Because I have lost my faith in organized religion and have yet to place my life in the hands of medical science, I am working out my daily transcendence in writing poetry.

I wrote Seven Studies for a Self Portrait in two years. As I wrote, the number seven acquired and transformed its Christian meanings—the days of Creation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Eshuneutics, who reviewed my book, puts it well, “This silent structuring … evokes a tradition running from the mediaeval period and sets a context for the spiritual enquiries within the book.” Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from which my book got its epigraph, was an inspiration for the post-Christian enquiry.

As vital as the spiritual quest was for me, so was the musical composition that the number enabled. A sequence of seven poems has not only a beginning and an end, but also a well-defined middle. It also breaks up into two unequal parts—four and three—half of the sonnet’s proportions. The first six sequences in fact culminate in two sonnet sequences, one English, the other Italian. Breaking through and re-working that framework is the final set of 49 ghazals, each made up of seven couplets about love. The ghazals raise, in my imagination, a 7 x 7 x 7 cube. In planning this structure, I was thinking very much of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in particular, the last game that the Magister Ludi builds from the floor plan of a Japanese house.

LR: The poems in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait are chiefly concerned with different ways of viewing the multiple facets of the self, simulacratically, if you will. What was the motivation behind this preoccupation? Were you affected by the new social media?

JLK: To speak biographically, my life is broken up in various ways. I moved from Singapore to New York in 2003, at the age of 33. I left behind family, friends and career in order to build a new life for myself. This new life does not only include the poetic vocation, but also a new identity as a gay man. I wrote about the experience of coming out as gay and expatriate in my second book Equal to the Earth. But Singapore will not go away. I need distance from it to write about it, but writing does not close the distance between me and the bookish child I was, the Bible-thumping adolescent, or the ruler-wielding teacher. Living in the States has deepened my perceptions about race, ethnicity, gender and class. These perceptions have sharpened my understanding of society, but turned inwards, they cut up the self into multiple fragments. Again and again I hear the same debates about whether one should identify as a gay poet, a woman poet, an Asian American poet or what have you. I find it near impossible to give an answer in prose. I prefer to let my poetry speak. I find in writing what Frost calls “a momentary stay against confusion.” I would add, however, that being gay is vital to my poetry, in ways that being Chinese and Singaporean are not. It is my motive force. It orders my creative agenda.

EQUAL TO THE EARTH

I consider myself a lyric poet living in an anti-lyric age. The illusions of the lyric “I” have been well catalogued: the simulation of psychic wholeness, the privileging of atemporality, the masking of social injustice, the marginalization of the Other. The new social media reinforce the fragmentation of the self. And yet I think the lyric answers to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice. By looking at the self in various ways, I try in Seven Studies to rework the lyric for our highly self-conscious times.

I look at the self through various lenses in the book. The title sequence is written after master self-portraits—Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Schiele, Kahlo, Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura. In contrast, the second sequence “Profiles” sketches the self sideways. “I Am My Names” is a series of riddles. “What We Call Vegetables” describes the organic basis of identity. I “translate” an unknown Mexican poet in one sequence, and speak as Ted Haggard, the Evangelical pastor accused of paying for gay sex, in another. The fragmentation of the self follows the example of Roland Barthes in the final ghazals, where I beg to be reconstituted by a lover-reader.

LR: Born in Singapore, educated in England, and living in America, some might call you a “gay transnational Asian poet.” That’s a lot of labels!  Have you found such multiplicity freeing or constricting? How has your transnationalism affected your poetic career? Has it opened doors, allowing you to maintain inroads in England and Singapore as well as America?

JLK: If “transnational” means beyond the nation-state, I am all for it. On a lecture tour of the United States, Rabindranath Tagore told his American audience, “The idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented.” The writer of Gitanjali, beloved in his own country, was critical of the blinkers of nationalism. I like to think that nothing human is alien to me. That I could potentially inherit everything human.

Certainly, moving to New York City has given me access to writing groups, editors and curators whom I could not possibly reach, or even know, from Singapore. Besides New York, I have read in Boston, Salem and New Orleans, and taken up writing residencies at Marilyn Nelson’s Soul Mountain Retreat and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. I have also attended and benefited from the Kundiman writing retreat. The infrastructure for supporting writers here is incredibly extensive and well established compared to that in Singapore, and probably many other countries. American writers are very lucky.

I try to keep up with the Singapore literary scene, which is small but active. I return home regularly to participate in the Pride month reading.  Last summer a local bookstore organized a book launch for Seven Studies. The quality of poetry coming out of Singapore now is under-recognized in the States. Cyril Wong, Alvin Pang, Aaron Lee,  Hsien Min Toh, Alfian Sa’at, Li Sui Gwee, and Yi-sheng Ng all deserve to be better known. At the most recent conference of the Association of Asian American Studies, there was no academic paper on Singapore literature, though there was one on Singapore film. Singapore literature can be usefully studied as part of the “transnational” approach.

I am certainly not the only Singaporean writer living in New York City. Hwee Hwee Tan, who published her first work of fiction Foreign Bodies at the age of 22, lives here too. Wena Poon, whose first book Lions in Winter was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize (Ireland) and whose poetry was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (UK), divides her time between New York City and Austin. So residency in the States is no barrier to recognition in the UK and Ireland, such is the fluidity of transatlantic networks.

Other Singaporean writers have taken other routes. Poet Kim Cheng Boey migrated to Australia and now teaches at the University of Newcastle. Yew Leong Lee, who edits the exciting new international journal Asymptote, has just moved to Taiwan. The last example is perhaps indicative of a growing trend, that of journals and writers developing an international focus. We want to hear not just news but voices from all over a world growing rapidly smaller and more connected. Boey’s journal Mascara started out with a focus on Asian, Australian and Indigenous writers, but has since added an international section.

LR: You have now self-published three books and mastered the art of promotion. How has that process changed from book to book? How did you carve out an audience for yourself as a self-publisher? How did you stake your claim to critical legitimacy?

JLK: My first book Payday Loans was actually published by a small press in Hoboken, New Jersey. Working with Roxanne Hoffman the publisher gave me some idea of the workings of an independent press. I decided to self-publish my next book Equal to the Earth, and so set up my own imprint, Bench Press, for that purpose. I published Equal with Lulu print-on-demand but changed to Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand for Seven Studies in order to sell my book on Amazon Marketplace. I really enjoy having total control over the publication of my books, working with a professional book designer to decide on the cover, layout and font. I threw an on-line book party for Equal at which I read aloud from the book and answered questions “live” on the book blog. Seven Studies was launched early this year at two house parties and a reading at Cornelia Street Café in NYC.

To build an audience for my books, I keep an active literary blog called Song of a Reformed Headhunter and a steady presence on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter. I also read and sell my books at the annual Rainbow Book Fair and, this year, at the Brooklyn Book Festival. I am a regular at the Son of a Pony reading at Cornelia Street Café, and people hear me or hear of me that way. My sales target is very modest: I aim to recover my publishing cost so that I can self-publish my next book. It took me some time to wear the hats of poet and publisher comfortably, but the satisfactions of working for oneself are rewarding.

In the brave new world of on-line publishing, the sources of critical legitimacy are more widely dispersed. On-line journals and groups are multiplying, and they gather around them a community of contributors and readers. I send my books to editors who have accepted my poems for publication. The relationship is reciprocal: they support my work and my work, in turn, supports theirs. I now have three reviewers who follow my work from book to book.

I also submit my books to the Lambda Literary Awards. Though Equal did not win last year, I was asked to join the judging panel for this year’s gay male poetry prize. It is a pity, I think, that the Asian American Literary Awards do not consider self-published entries. As my judging experience with Lambda can attest, it takes next to no time to separate a vanity press product from a serious literary production. I hope the Asian American Writers’ Workshop will review this rule, so as to keep in step with the changing times. I predict more and more serious writers will turn to self-publishing.

LR: What individuals (or entities) most influenced your poetic career and what were their best pieces of advice?

JLK: I did not think a Singaporean poet could both write well and write on matters close to my heart until I chanced upon Kim Cheng Boey’s Days of No Name in a bookshop. The book travels from [the] Iowa International Writing Program to San Francisco to Germany, while rejoicing in the painful pleasures of friendship, love and art. The other Singaporean poet whose work I love and measure myself against is Cyril Wong. His poetry is one of deep interiority. Unlike many of us, he has chosen to stay at home, in Singapore, and is producing an extraordinary body of work.

Stephen Dobyns at Sarah Lawrence College was very generous with his time and attention. I have internalized his call for clarity in intention and communication. His Best Words, Best Order is still one of the best primers around on writing poetry. John Stahle, who passed away last year, encouraged me to take the leap into self-publication. He designed Equal to the Earth and the Bench Press logo. Andrew Howdle, who lives in Leeds, England, has proven the worth of a virtual friendship many times over. I rely on his critical acumen.

Michael Schmidt has been publishing my work regularly in the British journal PN Review. He has also included me in the forthcoming Carcanet anthology, New Poetries V. A less obvious way in which he has influenced my career is his editorship of Eleven British Poets, the school text that introduced me to Philip Larkin.

Best advice? That must come from Poetry Free-for-all, an on-line poetry workshop to which I have belonged for nine years. I have learned so much from the international community there. One of the workshop moderators has condensed her wisdom into what she calls Scavella’s Mantra. It goes, “I am not as good as I think I am.” If that is not Asian, I don’t know what is.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three books of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and Requiem for the Orchard. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry with Stacey Lynn Brown, and co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. A recipient of grants from NYFA and the Artists’ Trust, his recent work has appeared in the New England Review, Sentence, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and literature at Western Washington University.

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LR: Who were your earliest influences as a young poet? Was there a momentous decision to pursue this career?

OP: I’ve got a lot of early influences so I’ll name a number of firsts. My very first poetry book was The Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. When my parents first arrived in the U.S. they became subscribers to Readers’ Digest and part of the subscription deal was to receive three gift books with their subscription. One of the gift books was Robert Penn Warren’s book. So apart from my mother’s medical texts, I was pouring over Robert Penn Warren’s poems, not really understanding what was happening in them, but having a profound curiosity over the work.

The first poetry books that I ever purchased for myself were for a poetry class in college. I bought Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares and Adrienne Rich’s Atlas of a Difficult World. The poetry collection that really opened my eyes to the sonic qualities a poem could have was Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. I still have the first two tercets memorized: “The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat./ The fat/ Sacrifices its opacity . . . ”

The first poetic influence that affirmed I could be a poet was Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose. I was deciding between continuing a career in the sciences, or pursuing poetry. At the time, I was a care provider in a supported living home for the developmentally disabled and an EMT. I had a lot of time to read because the main client I worked with slept a lot due to the meds. So I read long into my shift. I imagine that was when I decided to pursue the life of letters. I wasn’t really excited about the lab work or the medical work I was doing, and I was feeling quite invigorated by all the poetry I was reading.

LR: “Drama is danger / plus desire, a teacher said.” What are your dangers and desires?

OP: My real life dangers—chainsaws and cancer. I’m not kidding about the chainsaws. I bought a Stihl chainsaw with a 25” bar, and I’m absolutely terrified of the thing. There are a lot of trees that are downed around my property that I haven’t properly disposed. One of the sure-fire things that occurs in this part of the Pacific Northwest is the seasonal wind gusts every Fall. Couple the windy weather with soaked ground from all the rain and you get a lot of downed pine trees. Anyway, all the locals had filled my head with horror stories of how a chain slipped off a bar and whipped across someone’s face or how a chainsaw tooth got lodged into someone’s hand and jerked back into their midsection. Understand that this is why I am afraid of my chainsaw.

I’m afraid of cancer, too. I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer in 2007, which is a fairly common and highly treatable form of cancer. What was scary and particularly dangerous about my cancer was the size of the tumor. It was found on the left side of my neck and was roughly the size of a golf ball. I hadn’t noticed it, surprisingly. My mother spotted it while my wife and I were visiting her in Oregon. My mother reached across the table and pressed down on the knot as soon as she saw it. As I mentioned, papillary cancer is a fairly common and treatable form of cancer, but because of this tumor’s size, there was a possibility that it had spread. I went through a mild chemo treatment for a year after my thyroid was removed. The messy part wasn’t the surgery, it was the loss of the thyroid. It’s amazing what the thyroid does for the body. I went through a bout of weakness and insomnia as the doctors were trying to adjust my replacement hormone levels. I realize I’m probably over-sharing, but you asked the question.

As far as my desires are concerned, my current desires are that my children grow up wise, healthy, and happy. Of course, before I had children, I had different desires—namely to find a way to sustain myself as a writer. My desire to sustain myself through writing has shifted these days. I’m less concerned about sustaining myself as a writer and more concerned about assisting in sustaining writers’ communities. In particular, my hope is that Kundiman can become a self-sustaining organization. Under the wisdom and guidance of Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi along with Vikas Menon, Jennifer Chang, and Purvi Shah, I think it’s in good hands. Additionally, I hope that the students I teach in my creative writing classes continue to write long after they’ve finished their undergraduate and graduate college careers.

LR: As your books progress they seem to develop toward frank self-exposure. Names Above Houses has a fabulic narrative distance; in Furious Lullaby, you start to orbit spiritual questions; and by the time we get to Requiem for the Orchard we see the self-portraits and childhood memories. Was this a conscious aesthetic move, or did it simply happen?

OP: Each book came about as a way to escape the process of its predecessor. In other words, I had to relearn how to write a poem for each project. It was absolutely a conscious effort. I knew, after writing Names Above Houses, I could keep writing the same type of fabulist prose poem and it would be very easy to remain in the voice and the tone of that work, but I was bored of the process. It was getting to the point where there wasn’t much active imagination happening during the writing of some of the later poems, and the fact that it was becoming too easy became the impetus for me to stop writing prose poems for a while.

I then attempted writing short lyrics, which you see in the middle section of Furious Lullaby. I had been reading a lot of Paul Celan to get back into the mode of the short lyric. It was the tail end of my time as a graduate student at Arizona State University, and I was working with Norman Dubie, who has the most incredible imagination. He was “seeding” the second book for me by offering me various assignments that ultimately show up in some of the aubades that fill the book. Also during this time, I was re-learning how to put together a manuscript. It was relatively easy to construct Names Above Houses because it’s a linear manuscript which is character driven. Furious Lullaby took awhile to assemble and went through numerous drafts. I had started the manuscript in 1999 and didn’t have it published until 2007. It did the rounds at all the various contests, and I learned a heck of a lot about how to structure a manuscript. While Furious Lullaby was circulating, I wasn’t writing. I probably should’ve put pen to paper, but a number of things were happening in my life. I had gotten married, I got a new job, I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I didn’t have time to espouse a new obsession.

Unlike the other two books, in Requiem for the Orchard I wanted to explore a voice that was much more self-reflexive. The sum total of returning to the West, becoming a parent, and having more time to write triggered a creative surge that hasn’t seemed to abate. Requiem for the Orchard was written during a relatively short period—between 2007 and 2009. The poems were written relatively close together, so the tonal level, the themes, all of it was fairly uniform. I needed to get a handle on my cancer recovery and my new fatherhood, so the poems took shape as I was trying to avoid pathos. In order to trick myself away from writing the overly sentimental poem, I gave myself assignments. All those “Self Portrait” poems are the result of many assignments, and the titles are giveaways for the specific prompt I had given. The titles ultimately became a guide for the structuring of the book.

LR: In an old interview (from 2006), you said that after Names Above Houses you became more deliberate in your writing, connecting poems by sequence or theme. How does inspiration figure into this process?

OP: Inspiration is always a factor during this process, but I don’t believe inspiration comes out of the aether. I firmly believe that all art is dialogic, that it’s in conversation with something that is occurring in the culture or in the artist’s life at the time. So in the case of my writing, I apply the same idea to a poem that I may be writing. After it has been written, I explore whether it is conversant with other works that I have written. If it isn’t, then I imagine the possibilities of a poem that could have a conversation with it and set about crafting that poem.

I’ve heard that such a process may foster the composition of flat poems that can’t survive on their own without its cohort, but that’s where revision comes in.

Additionally, my writing process is compact and fairly economical. I don’t write during nine months out of the year. During the three months that I am writing, I write in short, intense bursts. What happens during those little bursts is that my mind won’t have time to shift from one idea or subject to the next, so I continue writing on that subject. I mentioned in your previous question that I give myself assignments. The assignments I give myself are also thematic guidelines. I tend to imagine a sequence of poetry as paintings that are to be hung in a gallery for an exhibition. There is a narrative that occurs when you go to a gallery to view paintings on a wall. Certain paintings cannot be placed adjacent to each other. Certain paintings demand their own wall. Architecture. Form. These concepts all demand that there be some form of inspiration at work. What’s particular to the architect or even the gallery curator is the idea of utility—there is a functionality that must exist within the design. The building must be designed so that the plumbing can reach the top of the tower. The gallery display must be arranged so that the patrons of the gallery enter the gallery and proceed through the exhibit in a particular manner.

LR: You make beautiful use of flight—sometimes deformed or aberrant—as theme and image. Requiem for the Orchard ends with this self-portrait: “Now, where once resided // acrimony for youth’s black seed—nothing except a single wing / opening and closing and opening again to catch the wind.” It reminds me of Fidelito when he’s broken his wrist, and his mother “feels his unsteady pulse and shields her one-winged son.” Can you say something about the single wing?

OP: I’ll try. This is a difficult question because it’s something that I’m still muddling through. The image of the single wing renders the violence of the speaker’s upbringing in concrete and uncompromising terms. An animal is mutilated at the hands of children who are trying to become men by driving a tractor they have no business driving. And yet, what closes the poem is the image of a child raising his arms, wanting to be picked up by his father who had been one of the children driving the tractor. So, in this case and in the case of many of my poems, the idea of flight for me is the idea that despite the past, there remains a possibility of grace.

I also have to mention, as an immigrant and son of immigrants, “flight” symbolism is almost always charged with the idea of fleeing from something. In the case of my family, we left the Philippines during the 70’s “brain drain” of that country, when President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. My father always tells me that we left the Philippines in order to have more opportunities. He holds on to this narrative still to this day. The idea of the single wing, in this sense, could suggest all the ways in which we hold on to an idea and how that idea tries to raise itself into the air.

LR: As a “poet-citizen,” what do you see as the relationship between aesthetic and social pragmatism?

OP: I see that they are concurrent and congruent. Art is a societal need, though some will always argue that art is impractical. One thing that I have always believed—art engages its audience in an active and dialogical way.

I believe in the power of dialogue. Whether that dialogue take the form of a painting or a poem is not my central concern. I myself draw much inspiration from the visual arts as well as literature. Many of my poems were inspired by the visual arts.

There is always a danger in categorizing things according to their usefulness. That happens so much and we’re seeing it now with this economic crisis—various legislatures are determining what should be cut based on use and usefulness. Art has the ability to foster creative and critical thinking. So when legislatures determine to cut the budgets of art programs or community programs, they are essentially diminishing the possibility for their constituents’ long-term civic involvement.

LR: You mentioned the Hoagland-Rankine issue on your blog. Rather than pressure you for a stance: can you say a bit about Asian American poetry and literature in general, and community/readership?

OP: It’s okay to pressure me. I was quite cheesed off by Hoagland’s poem and his response to Claudia’s poetic response, but for the longest time, I couldn’t articulate my displeasure. I was in the audience at AWP when Claudia Rankine had Nick Flynn read Hoagland’s piece. She then read her piece and the ensuing responses. There was a palpable tension in the air and I felt like I had been punched in the neck. After Claudia had finished, a number of poets gave her a standing ovation.

I’ve always been one to step back before responding to anything that coaxes such a visceral response. I’m still grappling with the “conversation.” So here’s where I’m at today, and my feelings can change depending on what sets me off. Art, for me, is governed by choices. There are decisions and micro decisions that go into the composition of a poem, and what irked me about Hoagland’s response to Claudia is that it seemed like he decided to disengage and ultimately divorced himself from holding any responsibility for his poem, fortifying himself with the argument that the role of the artist is simply to make art and that we are not to confuse the speaker with the artist. Sure, but as I mentioned, I believe art is governed by choice as is how we interact with said art. Claudia knew where he was coming from. She understood his rhetorical stance and countered it eloquently. Tony, it seemed, didn’t understand where Claudia was coming from, unfortunately, and I don’t feel his response was as rhetorically accommodating. High jinx ensued. So we’ve had responses and counter responses. Ultimately, the writing community is taking Claudia Rankine’s challenge on and proposing discussions, talks, the opportunity for dialogue.

With respect to Asian American poetry, literature, and the community, I have always felt a responsibility to that community. When I was starting as a writer I sought community. One of the first poets I contacted was Fatima Lim Wilson. She persuaded me to contact Nick Carbo. Nick mentored me for many years, putting me in touch with many of the writing friends I have now. Community is self-generative provided that the constituents of said community wish to sustain that community. I had mentioned one of my desires is that Kundiman become a self-sustaining community, and in many ways it has become just that. Many of the fellows who leave the retreat maintain their community by corresponding and collaborating with each other over the years. And let me also say that there is a need for communities like Kundiman, Kearny Street Workshop, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Macondo, Canto Mundo, and Cave Canem. First off, the life of a writer is a lonely one. The life of a minority writer is extremely lonely. As I was in the process of searching for community, I couldn’t go to my family because they were new immigrants and their view of a successful career path for me certainly didn’t involve the arts. So it’s important for the new generation of minority artists to see that they have predecessors, even models. Li-Young Lee was my first model. He led me to Garrett Hongo’s anthology, The Open Boat. Garrett’s anthology led me to contact Fatima Lim Wilson who led me to contact Nick Carbo. All the while, I was unsure about the writing life as a life.

What’s clear now is there are a number of really fantastic young Asian American writers out there—Esther Lee, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Melody Gee, Neil Aitken, Purvi Shah just to name a few Asian American poets with new books . . . and the difference between when I was coming into my own as a writer and what they are experiencing is that they know each other through various community experiences but particularly Kundiman.

LR: Advice for a young poet?

OP: Read as much poetry as you can, no matter the style or the school. It’s important not to lock onto one particular writing style at this point because it’s important to experiment with the possibilities of your aesthetic. It’s also important to seek a poetic community that will challenge and sustain you, whether that community is a writing group, a couple of friends who share your passion for writing, or a writing organization. You never know when you’ll encounter a moment when the solitary writing life calls you away from the desk and out into the open air.

Above: A Taiyo Na scrapbook. Shown here are Regie Cabico, Taiyo Na, Taiyo Na’s youngest fan, Ishle Yi Park, Beau Sia and Taiyo Na fighting a giant yellow _____ .

As the Sulu Series came to an end on September 19, 2010 to a packed house at The Bowery Poetry Club in New York, I sat down with Sulu’s artistic director, Taiyo Na, to try to understand what five years of Asian and Pacific Islander performing arts meant to him and to our community. Below is a recap of our conversation, which I hope will inspire other cities (like The Sulu Series in New York, Sulu DC and Family Style in Philadelphia, among others) to gather and find platforms for our unique voices.

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How did The Sulu Series begin in New York?

Two things really contributed to the formation of Sulu: Hurricane Katrina and the Boston APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit in 2005. After the Boston Summit there was a lot of good energy after a really great Summit. Regie [Cabico] felt like there needed to be a hub in New York City for Asian American artists. It was also because the Asian American Writers Workshop at the time felt like a less community-friendly space. Before that, the Asian American Writers Workshop was kind of that hub, so there was that factor. But then when Hurricane Katrina hit, it was like “Wow!” you know? It was a pivotal moment in the country of course, but also for a lot of us here because when they were covering Katrina we knew that there were a lot of Asian Americans down there in Louisiana and Mississippi and their stories weren’t being told and their needs weren’t being attended to. Sure, everybody was affected in that region. Everybody deserves the attention. But we wanted to do something in particular with the Asian American community to say, “You know, there’s a lot of Vietnamese folks there and they need help.” So we put together this benefit for those folks and the money went to the this group in Biloxi, Mississippi. That benefit kind of brought a lot of Asian American artists and organizations together and since then, we carried on Sulu. Regie was living in Williamsburg at the time and had a connection at Galapagos Arts Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And they were like, “Hey, we have these Tuesday nights open, do you want to take it once a month?” and I’m like, “Okay.”

Was it just you and Regie [Cabico] then?

No, no, no, it was a bunch of us. [DJ] Boo was there. There were other artists, too. Terry Park and Chaz Koba, Hanalei . . . and a bunch of others. Even at the Katrina benefit, I became one of the main sort of cultural connectors—people who have the contacts with the artists and brought the artists together. It just kind of became this natural thing for me to do the monthly Sulu curating too after that. We did, I think, the thing at Galapagos for maybe a year or so and then, things weren’t really workin’ out there. The location was Williamsburg and not Manhattan and it was hard for folks to get to and you know, the vibe was different. So when the Bowery Poetry Club . . . I forgot what happened. But, we did an event here. We did like a special Sulu at the Bowery Poetry Club. It had to do with triple A.S. (Asian American Studies Conference). It was happening one year in New York and it went really well, so we were like, “Oh, well let’s just have it here.” Beau Sia has a good relationship with Bob Holman and it just all organically came about. Bowery Poetry Club became the new home and it’s been our gracious home ever since (for the last three years or so).

What do you see as the state of affairs for AAPI poetry, specifically in New York but in the rest of the country, also?

The APA poetry community here . . . I mean, I’m not per se an expert, but I think with Kundiman, it’s great. What they do here is just phenomenal. What Joseph Legaspi, Sarah Gambito and Ron Villanueva and Pat Rosal and all those folks have done to build that organization up to a retreat that can have like 20-some poets every year to help nurture their talents, to have a monthly reading series, is great. I think they’re a little bit more of an older crowd, more of like an academic crowd, but that’s fine, there’s that. But I think spoken word per se if we were to kind of split poetry up into those two camps—more academic poetry and then spoken word poetry—spoken word poetry is real healthy. It’s more mainstream, so there’s less of kind of the underground stuff, you know? It’s bigger and more popular than ever.

So, you feel positive about AAPI poetry?

I feel positive mostly. The Asian American Writers Workshop is the place. It’s turned around. They have a new director there, Ken Chen, who, in the last couple years, has really revitalized the space and he’s been very supportive for all kinds of younger and new artists.

Top three AAPI poets for you, in your heart, whose careers you follow. The ones you feel are the most innovative and most important to watch. Who should we be watching?

See, now that’s a couple questions there! Now, are you talking about like my favorite poets who I constantly learn from?

Let’s say the three AAPI poets who have crossed this stage who inspire you most?

Ok, so my personal top three, as in people who are friends and also mentors, people I love and admire and learned so much from constantly are Beau Sia, Ishle Yi Park and Regie Cabico.

What makes them different?

I could speak volumes about their greatness, but in their own unique way, they each have a really special gift. They really sincerely care about the truth and humanity of what their artwork is there to serve. I could go on and on, but that’s part of it.

Who are the rookies?

My favorite rookies, umm, that’s a good question . . . Simone! [Laughing] I don’t even feel like I’m really qualified to answer that question because there are just like, so many up-and-coming, great poets. People that have come through Sulu as of recent that have really touched me?  There are a few, like Elijah Kuan Wong, Tiana Nobile, Rachelle Cruz, Vinh Hua . . . they’ve all performed at Sulu and they are all in their mid- to late 20’s. They’re great.

How do you identify? Would you identify first as a community organizer? Artist? Curator?

As an artist and someone who does artsy things. Even what I do at Sulu is an extension of me as an artist. You know, the title of Artistic Director was all just put on by Regie, Hanalei or whomever. What community organizers do, and I don’t consider myself a community organizer because I have friends who are and I really admire the work they do. And what they do is organize the community to make laws pass and to have protests and you know, all these things that create small systematic changes. Me, as an artist, I’m culturally organizing. I could call myself a cultural organizer.

That’s beautiful! I’ve never heard anybody say that. I like that title.

But you know, that’s what we as artists do. We organize people not to pass laws and protests—and we could!—we could play a role in those struggles, but what we mainly do is organize shows, we organize albums and projects and event productions. That’s what we do. And we organize media and art.

But, that’s important, too, if not equally so . . .

Sure! It all plays a part in the play of life. Absolutely.

What do you think people will remember about The Sulu Series?

I’m sure there are academics and scholars who could break this sh-t down all day . . .

We don’t need them to tell our stories!

[Laughs] But, um, me . . . Sulu is just a place that we needed at the time in New York City. We needed—young, Asian Americans needed—a hub, needed a base, a place where once a month you can depend on people from, you know, way-faring souls from all over the country to maybe be there, you know what I mean? And to have young artists here, to be here, to connect and to feel like they’re not alone. You know like, many Asian American artists feel like they’re like the only one around. But, you know, Sulu is like that little hub where you don’t have to explain yourself and you can just be yourself and you can just be, and try out new work and have an awesome, rock star show that’s so quality and it’s not pretending to be anything for anybody. I think this little place is like no pretense. Pretense isn’t allowed here. It’s different from some talent shows that are trying to impress people. And they have an important job to impress people and you know, get money and sponsorship. But, that’s not really like our goal here. Our goal here is just to make sure the artists that exist and that they have a space where they can call home, meet, have fun and drink. You know, some of the memorable nights are nights where people don’t remember them!

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Barbara Jane Reyes

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, entitled Diwata, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2010.

Her chapbooks, Easter Sunday (2008), Cherry (2008), and West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM and other Oakland poems (2008) are published by Ypolita Press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, and Deep Oakland Editions, respectively. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Latino Poetry Review, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, among others.

She has taught Creative Writing at Mills College, and Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

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LR: I wanted to start by talking about history, which is something that figures strongly in your poetry—for example in Poeta en San Francisco we see historical references mixed in with local references to San Francisco (SF) and the Beat Movement. Can you start by talking about how both history and geography are incorporated into your work?

BJR: I grew up on the periphery of SF, meaning that I lived in the East Bay for most of my life in this country. The more I came to see other parts of the country, I realized that there’s something interesting about SF and its history of people coming from so many different places and colliding with one another. I know this happens in every major American city, but for me SF has this unique place on the cusp of the Pacific Rim […] When the westward movement got to the Pacific Ocean, it just kept going into the Pacific. Just think about major American wars in Asia in the 20^th century, and SF being a very important strategic point, and then Honolulu, and then Manila. What that means for all those people that get cast aside and spit out of that system is that they all end up with this baggage that they’re aiming at one another. That’s SF for me.

LR: And in your own personal history when did this dawn come?

BJR: It really did happen in college, as an undergrad at UC Berkeley. I remember reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Frontier Thesis,” where he talks about the American identity—and here he really means the masculine identity created as these men are forging West and dealing with the landscape—that makes the American man different from the English colonial subject. What my professor argued was that the wars in the Pacific, starting with the Spanish American War and the Filipino American War, were an extension of that creation of the masculine American, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go but the ocean. The Philippines were seen in the Filipino American War as the starting point for America to get into China and start its own empire.

When I was hearing these things lectured to me and as I was reading about them, what I was seeing in SF started to really make sense—what I was witnessing and experiencing as a Filipino girl growing up in the Bay Area, not being able to find any evidence of long time Filipino settlement there, even though now I know that there is a much longer history. I always kind of felt like that there had to be some reason why so many of us just kind of got plopped in the city. And a lot of it had really to do with that movement into the Pacific once the frontier ended. 

LR: When you write this poetry, how do you think about how people who are not as deeply entrenched in this history are going to read it and understand it?

BJR: I think that there are enough concrete colors there. I think about this, for example, when I’m in the Mission District walking around the mission. I spent a lot of time there because I had done a presentation for one of my Native American Studies courses on sacred spaces, the idea of the mission and the mission system. We all see these symbols and these landmarks, so there are always these points of geography to grasp onto, whether or not we know the specific history behind them. I think that when folks come to the Bay Area, they may or may not know something, for example, about Angel Island. But it’s a big rock out there in the bay that they can find out about. They may or may not know something about the I-Hotel, but they can go visit it.

I always kind of hope that poetry will make or compel people to research farther or think about these things farther. I hope that maybe deep in their consciousness, it will alter something that they have previously taken for granted or haven’t thought about. I feel like as long as I am not making up any of these historical references and that they are actually there and verifiable, that it will hopefully encourage a reader to stop and think next time he or she is walking up to North Beach to hit one of these nice touristy traps–the I-Hotel is right there! Just stop and look at it.

LR: And so these physical reminders of history are actually very important to you.

BJR: Absolutely. I think a lot of it has to do with monuments and my own search. Like a lot of Filipino Americans I knew growing up in the Bay Area, we were always searching for monuments, and feeling like we weren’t finding them. Monuments to our communities. We didn’t know where to look. And you know, the monuments really are there–we haven’t been completely wiped out. There is evidence of our having been here since the turn of the 19^th-20^th century. I hope part of what my poetry is doing to is to point them out.

LR: I want now to jump to some of the concerns you’ve written about on your blog. Recently you addressed translation, and asked yourself how one can or should critique translated poetry when you don’t know the language yourself. Some have responded by asking how your books, which incorporate Tagalog, should be read by non-speakers. What are your thoughts on that now?

BJR: I think that in my mind there is a difference from, let’s say, the poetry of Lorca or Neruda that was written entirely in native tongue. I guess we can say that Poeta is written in my native tongue, if my native tongue is code switching. My family and I have a very pragmatic system of communication that is mostly in English, or not–it just depends on what is the most efficient way of being understood. So it isn’t quite English and isn’t Tagalong–but what is it? I speak in this code switch language.

Of course I think that the primary text of Poeta is in English, and the Tagalog adds another layer to how we think of English. What is English? You go to any part of United States and a different kind of English is being spoken there, and we shouldn’t be invalidating anybody’s English.  The English of the Bayou and the English of Chinatown and the English of East Oakland are different things altogether, but we find ways of understanding one another because the goal is communication. I think that if the goal is communication and poetry for me is just a form of communication, then we will try to be understood and understand one another but also be true to and honor that language that defines us, or that language that we truly speak.

Ultimately this is about whether as a reader we can trust that the poet is really trying to communicate something to us. I think that there’s a lot of suspicion surrounding hearing a language we do not understand. Can we not step back from that and say that there’s a system of communication happening here that delineates a community, and [if] so how do I expand my community such that someone who has hardly ever experienced Tagalog can possibly find a way in, despite some sections of a 109-page book that may be in a language they’ve never seen before? There’s all this English and all these concrete cultural references that you can anchor yourself to as a reader.

LR: While on the subject of different Englishes, I read this from your recent blog post: “As Filipinos, we have a loaded relationship with the English language, which I believe is why we pun ‘bad’ English, deliberately mispronounce and redefine English words. These are some ways of claiming ownership over the language, and isn’t it great, how we empower ourselves with the ‘master’s’ language.” So bilingualism or pidgins seem more than just by-products of the need to communicate, but can be acts of rebellion or activism. How accidental or deliberate do you really think this is?

BJR: I think initially, a simple acknowledgment of multiple Englishes, hybrids or pidgin can be considered some kind of rebellion or even activism in that it decenters standard or proper, English or institutional English. Lee Tonouchi’s work, Living Pidgin (Tinfish Press, 2002), is a pretty comprehensive volume on the matter of pidgin and activism. I do think we should consider that activism is involved in fulfilling the need to communicate by creating a new or hybrid language and system of code switching. It isn’t just a by-product. As well, I think recognizing the need to communicate and understand one another across multiple communities is pretty important. This is how we begin building coalitions.

LR: And that brings us to activism and building community, in the more literal sense. Is activism different for us as minority writers? Is it more important? And what about those who want to be seen as writers in their own right, apart from their ethnicity?

BJR: I feel like we just have to do the double work. There might not be any way around it. I really do feel like if community and forwarding our work as a community of artists is important to us, then the concrete work that we do as folks who head community arts organizations–as editors, publishers, and mentors–that work is indeed activist work. And I’ve chosen to do that on top of the fact that I want to continue writing books. I love the idea having a professor contact me out of the blue and say I have X number of students reading your work, can you come in and talk? I want to walk into a classroom where they’ve never read Filipino lit before and have them ask me a million quesitons about my book.

LR: Speaking of that, you recently mentioned in your blog you’ll be teaching yourself in class. Have you thought about already what you’re going to say about yourself?

BJR: I think it will probably be okay … I guess it was different when I walked into Ronald Takaki’s Asian American history class and we read his Strangers from a Different Shore or another classic, like when we read A Different Mirror. It was fine, because he was one of the authorities on Asian American history. So I guess I’ll just have to have that confidence in myself as one of the authorities on Filipino American poetry, and be academic about it.

LR: How does it feel to be considered such an authority?

BJR: I’ve always been in this leadership position just because my name has been out there as an author for a while. But it was even prior to that, really starting with my years with maganda magazine, which was so important for the local community here. It was so important that elder Filipino American poets, really folks I look up to very much, found me and my colleagues. They were so thrilled to see this younger generation.  I started on the local spoken word scene, so I was always visible to some community of Asian American or young poets of color and I was called upon a lot to shout poetry on megaphones at political rallies and that kind of stuff.

LR: Is your role as an authority or a leader in this community different from that of your predecessors?

BJR: I believe in concrete support, as in how can I be concretely supportive of young Filipino poets or young poets in general who are looking at what I’ve done in my career as some sort of blueprint for theirs. What am I going to do as a mentor, somebody who edits publication, somebody who curates a reading series, or somebody who can write letters of recommendation for an MFA program? So I think that’s a lot of it right there.  Two of my poetry mentors, Jaime Jacinto and Eileen Tabios, were hands on. Whereas I consider the monumental community figure like Al Robles to have been inspirational (because of his poems, the subject matter of his poems, and his community work; his poetic and political practice were the same thing), Jaime and Eileen gave me a lot of one-on-one concrete literary advice about where to submit my work, which poets to read; they asked me hard questions about what I wanted my poetry to do, and advised me accordingly. Both have also read my manuscripts in progress and given me feedback on these. These two also brought me into literary reading venues and as editors, into publication.

So, following the lead of these two, as an editor for various poetic projects, I’ve tried my best to open up the publication space to younger API and Pinoy/Pinay poets; in the past I’ve included the poetry of Ching-In Chen, Debbie Yee, and Sasha Pimentel Chacon in OCHO. Yee’s poem, “Cinderella’s Last Will and Testament,” ended up in Best American Poetry 2009. Two of my forthcoming guest editor projects, In the Grove and Blue Fifth Review, will include poems by Niki Escobar, Rachelle Cruz, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Gizelle Gajelonia, Yael Villafranca, and Allison Moreno.

I have a couple more editing projects up my sleeve, in which I plan to continue opening up that publication space to emerging writers or color.

LR: Can you talk about your invovlement with Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) and Arkipelago, and highlight for us some of the upcoming events?

BJR: My current involvement with PAWA has been as a board member, curating our reading and workshop series with Edwin Lozada. In this capacity, I’ve been trying to provide literary reading space to writers in the community, both established and emerging. I’ve always valued the live reading as a crucible, a place to try out new work in progress, a way to refine the work.

On June 5, we are teaming up with Eth-Noh-Tec for an evening multidisciplinary performance and storytelling. Featured artists are filmmaker Nara Denning, theater performer Sean San Jose of Campo Santo, poet Aileen Ibardaloza, musician Ron Quesada whose Kulintronica is blend of Southern Philippine kulintang and electronica, and theater performer/stand up comedian Allan Manalo of Bindlestiff Studio.

LR: You mention bayanihan in your blog. What does that mean?

BJR: Bayanihan is a Tagalog word that means something to the effect of ‘the spirit of community’. Bayan refers to a nation or community. So bayanihan means the spirit of community to achieve something, like some kind of goal.

LR: And so when you think of bayanihan for the Fil Am or AA poetry community, what might those goals actually be?

BJR: As an author, major goals are publication and book sales, not just for myself individually. I want to see more APIA and Filipino American authors’ books in print, a diversity of voices. I encourage more writers to polish and submit their manuscripts to publishers, and to do so in a focused manner. I’m a strong supporter of independent publishers, because there are many with admirable mission statements about ethnic, political, and aesthetic diversity.

Nick Carbo told me years ago that one of the best way to bolster book sales was through course adoption. Experientially, I agree with him. That said, I want to see our literature taught widely. Outside of academic settings, I haven’t figured out yet how to make our books appealing to the greater APIA community, i.e. those outside of activist, artist, academic communities, or how to effectively bridge that gap. This is a work in progress for me.

LR: Lastly, can you tell us a bit more about your upcoming book, Diwata? Like your other books, it will be incorporating history and themes of historical dislocation. But in what ways do you think it will depart from your first two books? Perhaps start by telling us about the mythological, creationist (or re-creationist and rebirth, as it were) aspects of the book?

BJR: The way I’ve come to think of Diwata is like this: in my work, there are themes I’ve previously tried to address, for example, as you mention, the recurring theme of dislocation. It’s taken on some mythic qualities in my first two books, but I think only in glimmers, this mythical or mythological tellings and retellings of dislocation. Diwata became the space for me to blow it up.

While wary and critical of contemporary reclaiming of pure indigeneity as appropriation, I am still interested in possible ways indigeneity morphs and endures in our urban, American everyday given Western conquest, diaspora, transnationalism. Does such a thing exist without going native, without forwarding a new noble savage? If so, how? What changes, how does it change?

Mong-Lan and two of her book covers.

Mong-Lan is a Vietnamese-born American poet, writer, painter, photographer, and Argentine tango dancer and teacher.  Mong-Lan’s first book of poems, Song of the Cicadas, won the 2000 Juniper Prize from UMASS Press and the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards for Poetry.  Her other books of poetry include Why is the Edge Always Windy?; Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, the bilingual Spanish / English edition, Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos and Love Poem to Tofu and Other Poems (chapbook). A Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry for two years at Stanford University and a Fulbright Fellow in Vietnam, Mong-Lan received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona.  Her poetry has been frequently anthologized, having been included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; Asian American Poetry —The Next Generation, and has appeared in leading American literary journals. Her paintings and photographs have been exhibited at the Capitol House in Washington D.C.,  for six months at the Dallas Museum of Art, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, in galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in public exhibitions in Tokyo, Bali, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Seoul. Based in Buenos Aires, Mong-Lan travels frequently.  Visit: www.monglan.com

LR: You are both a visual artist and a poet, and both of these art forms have a strong presence in your books.  How have your sensibilities as a visual artist have influenced your poetry’s aesthetic?  Did you come to one through the other?  At what point did the two interests begin to intersect?

ML: My sensibilities as a visual artist have influenced greatly my poetry’s aesthetic.  The open field of the page is important to me, just as the blank canvas or white sheet of paper is to the visual artist.  When writing poetry, I think in spatial terms, not just linearly.  So, in this way, I concern myself with the placement of words on the page, using the way words bounce off each other, the connotation of words next to each other, above, below, to the right and left, and diagonal. In Tango, Tangoing, my latest book, you can read certain poems not only left to right, but down one column, then down another column.

I didn’t come to one art through the other.  A visual artist since childhood, I showed my artworks in Houston and then in San Francisco, where I flowered and came to mature as a visual artist in the very liberal atmosphere there.  At the same time, I was writing since high school, scribbling in journals my feelings, emotions, narratives, stories and things that I couldn’t depict visually in paintings.

Both poetry and the visual arts are twin sisters, and it’s easy for me to shift from one to the other.  I find that these arts complement each other.  And, so, there in San Francisco in the 90’s, I found myself as a poet as well as a visual artist, giving readings with other Vietnamese-American writers/poets.

LR: When you are putting together a collection of poems that will include visual artwork — how do you view the art in relationship to the text?  Do you see the art as illustrations of your poems? As a kind of visual poetry in and of itself?

ML: In my first two books, Song of the Cicadas and Why is the Edge Always Windy?, the text is primary, and the visuals secondary.  The artwork in both books were used more as appetizers and section dividers.  In Song of the Cicadas, I included pen and ink drawings that I drew when I was in Vietnam, the same time I was writing the book itself.  It just happened, naturally and synchronistically like that.

Because many people commented on my artwork in both books, I decided to include more of them in my next books.  In the chapbook, Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems, and in Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, the artworks are very integral to the books, indeed [they] complement the text a great deal, although the texts can stand by themselves.  There are many more drawings/paintings in these latter two books—they’re more like entrees and not just appetizers.

The artworks in my books can stand by themselves; thus, they are not mere illustrations. Yet, they do illuminate the text and add another dimension to it.  Yes, I would consider my artworks a kind of visual poetry in and of itself.

LR: Tango, Tangoing and Love Poem to Tofu and Other Poems both engage with the use of strong, fluid brushstrokes reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy.  The conversation between Western-style poetry and the visual aspects borrowed from a traditional Asian form of poetic expression is truly fascinating.  How would you describe your aims in juxtaposing the two?

ML: Well, I was living in Tokyo for five years, from 2002 until 2007, and the brush calligraphy that I saw on a daily basis on the streets was beautifully overwhelming.  It invaded my senses!  I also took a few classes in brush calligraphy, painting/writing kanji (Japanese for Chinese characters).  While the importance of the brush stroke is not new to me, being a painter since childhood, it took on new dimensions of its own as an aesthetic in its own right.  I basically use brushstrokes with these same calligraphic techniques and apply them to my art.  While one could consider it a “traditional Asian form,” it’s also being practiced left and right in Japan and China and other parts of Asia today.  Yes, in my books, you find a juxtaposition of the East and the West, just as in my being and psyche, there’s a juxtaposition of East and West.

LR: The artwork included in your poetry collections employs a variety of different media: whereas Tango, Tangoing and Love Poem to Tofu engage with a more painterly style, Song of the Cicadas features line drawings between its sections and one of your photographs on its cover.  Can you talk a little bit about your process in deciding what sorts of visual media will best lend themselves to a text?  How has the arc of your visual/textual projects evolved from book to book?

ML: My first two books were written from 1995 – 2000, although they were published later — Song of Cicadas in 2001, and Why is Edge Always Windy? in 2005.   My mentor at the time when I was putting Song of the Cicadas together, Jane Miller, suggested that photography catches people’s eyes more.  At that time, I was working on these montage photographs of Vietnam, and I decided to use [one] for the cover.  Luckily, the publisher liked it.

As mentioned earlier, I lived in Tokyo from 2002-2007, and during this time, I was working on the later two books, Love Poem to Tofu and Tango, Tangoing.  It was a function of my environmental influences, more than anything.  The art I was creating was influenced greatly by where I was living and the environment I was immersed in.  And I simply used this art for my books.

LR: Last month on the LR Blog, we did a number of posts about ekphrastic poetry.  How do you engage with ekphrastic processes in your work?  What visual artists have most inspired you?  Do your poems ever emerge from pieces of your own artwork?

ML: No, I don’t think poems ever emerge from pieces of my own artwork, although, it’s an interesting idea.  I’ve never written about a painting I’ve done, because it seems to me that once I’ve painted it, I can move to a different theme or idea and not repeat it in writing.

But, I have, for example, used the tango as an inspiration, and have written poetry stemming from the experience of tango.  And, in the same book, included drawings of tango dancers, what I saw in the tango dance halls, or milongas.  So, in this instance, my artistic activities stemmed from the same source.

I have taught classes in which I gave my students that as an assignment, ekphrastic poetry, and it has been helpful in exploring a visual artist’s psyche, ideas and intentions.

With regard to artists that have inspired me, I have loved Kandinsky’s paintings for his use of color and that of Paul Klee for his whimsicality and playfulness.

LR: In many ways, you are an artist whose work expands across (even defies) linguistic and national boundaries.  You were born in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese language occasionally makes little cameo appearances in your poetry.  Tango, Tangoing has also been released in a bilingual Spanish-English edition.  How would you position yourself in relation to these multiple linguistic modes — and how does your engagement with them inform your work?

ML: I grew up speaking Vietnamese within the family, and went back to Vietnam several times, first on my own for half a year, then later on a Fulbright Fellowship to write and do research.  In those instances I was able to deepen my knowledge of Vietnamese.  I’m also fluent in Spanish, and indeed, I love the Spanish language.  I am now based in Buenos Aires, and have been based here over a year now.  I’ve been coming to Buenos Aires since 2001 for periods of several weeks to a month, for the tango.  When I go out onto the streets of Buenos Aires, I feel a sense of elation merely listening to Spanish.

With regard to other languages, I also speak French fluently, and am working on my fluency in Italian.  Living in Tokyo for five years, I learned Japanese, but have since forgotten quite a bit.  I also lived in Bangkok for six months and took lessons in Thai every day, but it is a difficult language to remember if you aren’t immersed in it everyday.

Knowing these languages has helped me broaden my mind culturally and syntactically, and I think this has deepened my involvement with the English language as well.  The English language is a rich language that generously takes in other languages.  In my writing, I’ve written about the various places I’ve lived, such as Bangkok and Tokyo, and of course Vietnam and Argentina, and knowing the language of the country is essential to understanding its culture.

LR: You are also a dancer.  In what ways have the forms and physical knowledge of the human body helped to shape both your poetic craft and visual aesthetic?

ML: Dancing tango gave rise to Tango, Tangoing.  Indeed, dancing is an affirmation of the body, the body as a means to express the joy of life, the earth and the universe.  I’ve known writers and poets who negate their bodies, and identify only with their minds.

Dancing has taught me to flow in my life as well as in my art.  Not only did I begin to write poetry that was a direct result of my tango dance experience, I started to do drawings and also paintings on canvas of tango dancers, showing the movement and flow of the dance.  More than the form and physical knowledge of the human body, dance has taught me to flow in other areas of my life.

LR: What projects are you working on at the moment?
ML: I’m working on a novel, another book of poems, paintings on canvas and paper, photography, and tango choreography.  I’m also working on a catalog of my paintings and artwork.  It’s a handful!

LR: What advice would you give to younger poets who might be considering how to integrate their engagement with visual or performing arts with their writing?

ML: Experiment with everything you know.  See how your interests fit together synergistically.  Learn from tradition, but don’t be afraid to break it.  And, enjoy your work!

Examples of Achiote Press Cover Art

Achiote Press, a Berkeley-based press edited by Craig Santos Perez and Jennifer Reimer, publishes poetry and art in a range of print formats, including chapbooks, perfect-bound books, anthologies, and art books.  Each season, they put out limited-run editions of two single-author chapbooks and an issue of their unique publication, Achiote Seeds, which their blog describes as a “multi-author chap-journal.” Browsing through the beautiful covers on Achiote’s web site, one gets a sense of just how thoughtfully the design of each book has been selected in order to complement the work contained within. That Achiote has a dedicated Art Director, Jason Buchholz, is even more indicative of just how important the idea of a book as a physical art object is to the press.

We  asked Jason to talk to us about Achiote’s aesthetic vision and his role as the decisionmaker behind Achiote’s “look”.  Here’s what he had to say about his process:

“I allow our overall aesthetic to emerge from the works themselves. I read each manuscript carefully, in search of two things: recurring visual imagery, and a distilled sense of the overall emotionality of the work. In other words, I try to experience a manuscript as if it were a visual work, translating movement, change, and the other temporal qualities of writing into a single impression. I then look for an image that will match that impression, as well as the title.  The role of the title here can’t be understated – it’s the interplay of image and title that not only gives the book its initial impact,
but also creates an inescapable psychological context for reading the words inside. My primary goal with each cover is to ensure that this context remains true to the writer’s intentions. If I’m working on an anthology, I’ll try to match the unifying theme, rather than specific images or feelings. In those rare cases that we publish collections without strong themes, I simply use the opportunity to showcase a great piece of work I want the world (or at least our readership) to
see. Our overall aesthetic, then, is the sum total of all these book covers, plus my personal contributions of a simple logo and a dash of orange.

In the future I hope to produce more works that place art and writing on equal footing.  Just this week we released Her Many Feathered Bones, which sees an artist and a poet on equal footing, in a slow and deliberate dialogue in which neither art form is given precedence. To me this represents the beginning of a new aesthetic that emerges almost entirely from our artists and their work. In such cases, I will have very few decisions to make. My role will be that of front-row observer, part-time quality assurer, and occasional matchmaker.”

Thanks very much to Jason for taking the time to offer his thoughts to us, and to Craig Perez for passing our questions on to him. Please do take the time to visit Achiote’s web site and browse through the covers from their current list and archives — they are truly gorgeous, and are testament to the love, taste, and meticulous attention that goes into each of Jason’s design choices.

Jason Buchholz is an artist, writer, and editor living in El Cerrito, CA. Someday his work will be available at jasonbuchholz.com.