Issue 1 Is Coming!

We are very pleased to announce that Issue 1 of our magazine will be released — if all goes as planned — on Monday, June 14th.  We have been working very hard on curating and laying out the more than 30 poems and visual art pieces that we’ve selected, and can’t wait to show you the final product.  Check back on the blog for sneak peeks and other updates in the next week or so.

June 2010 Community Calendar is Live

We’ve updated the Community Calendar for the month of June, and as usual, we welcome any corrections and additions that you may have for us.  This month, we’re pleased to be able to feature some cool Asian American literary events happening in Minneapolis, in addition to the cities we regularly cover:  June 7th is the registration deadline for the amazing-sounding Lao American Writers’ Conference that will be held at the LOFT Literary Center this August; the LOFT will also be holding an event featuring graphic novelist Gene Yang on June 18th. We look forward to continuing to cover events at the LOFT in future months.

June LR Blog Features: Barbara Jane Reyes, Indivisible, and More

During the past three months, we’ve mostly focused on themed posts, but this summer we’ll be returning to our regular blog content.  Some things to anticipate: our staff writer Ada Yee recently had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Barbara Jane Reyes — look out for her remarks about poetry, history, and community on the blog tomorrow; we also had the pleasure of meeting some of the editors of Indivisible (the first-ever anthology of South Asian American poetry) back in April, and are excited to announce that during the next couple of months, our staff writer Supriya Misra will be running a couple of feature posts on their work.  We’ll also be continuing with weekly prompts and with our editorial columns Friends & Neighbors and Editors’ Picks.

Thank you so much, once again, for all you’ve done in responding to our posts and spreading the word about us.  We are so thrilled to finally be rounding the home stretch into Issue 1 — and are ever grateful for your support.

Sincerely,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

Modern forms of the cento include writing a poem that borrows a single line from another poetic work and echoes that line throughout, stitching together lines, images, or phrases from other poems and using only original prepositions and conjuctions, and (or simultaneously) juxtaposing voices and images from a variety of poetic sources, thus creating a wholly new artistic work.  The contemporary cento is generally associated with a certain witty, humorous, or ironic tone, but of course these conventions are subject to (re)invention.  For even more explanation and classic and contemporary examples of the cento ranging from Virgil to John Ashbery, see the Academy of American Poets’ entry on the subject.

In my own writing, I have used the cento as a way to rhetorically frame and arrange found language from a variety of sources: interviews, artists’ statements, oral narrative, and lyrically composed prose.  Because my writing often clusters around a specific constellation of issues (transculturation, cross-cultural/cross-national encounters, “ethnic” narratives, etc.), these sources generally feature Asian/Asian American subjects or speakers, or those (like Vietnam war veterans or turn-of-the-century “globe-trotters”) whose lives have somehow crossed or complicated a sphere of Asian life.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down | Anne Fadiman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1998)

In the excerpt below, I adapt prose from Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) into a lyrical engagement with the beliefs and taboos of shamanistic Hmong practices, which, as Fadiman explores in her book, can result in tremendous misunderstanding—and tragedy, even—when challenged by the conventions of Western medicine.

BLOOD IS FINITE
from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Surgery is taboo.  To release a fever,
Scrape the skin with a coin, a spoon, a silver
Necklaces or bamboo.  Light the chest
With a sheaf of grass, a wad of cotton wool,
Or a heated cup.  Chopped, crushed,
Or mixed with ashes, herbs can be used
To treat burns, fever, poor vision, broken bones,
Arthritis, anemia, rabies, scabies, gonorrhea,
And impotence.  Leave them in a cup–
Not for the patient, but the dab.[1]

As I found with this poem, working with found language can be exhilarating to a writer whose personal language world(s) and vocabulary(ies) have begun to feel stagnated or overly recycled.  Accessing new systems of thought, image families, and tonal registers through secondary texts can be extremely helpful—and what’s more, contributes to the many ongoing textual conversations that surround us, whether or not we are aware of them.

*    *    *

Prompt: Write a poem derived from found language.  Consider a variety of sources, not just poetry!  Newspaper articles, novels (Orientalist novels, even!  See my Editors’ Pick on “(Re)Fashioning Japonisme” for some specific perspectives on this unusual genre), medical reports, road signs—the world is rife with strange and subversive texts, and taking them up in poetry can be fascinating.  Interact with your texts in a variety of ways; that is, don’t feel pressured to reproduce lines or phrases, exactly, but employ strategies of arrangement and rhetorical framing that will allow you to design a voice (or system of voices) that is unique to your cento, semi-cento, or found poem.

A word on plagiarism.  ”Borrowing” other poets’ language, when done well and cited correctly, is generally seen as an honorific practice, and can contribute nuance and freshness to previously published work.  Do be mindful, however, of attributing credit where credit is due, either through the use of an epigraph (as in my sample poem, “Blood Is Finite”) or a footnote.

As always, please share any experiments/attempts/polished products with the Lantern Review community by posting a response here!

“Writing these poems enabled children who knew Spanish to enjoy their knowledge of it and gave those who didn’t a feeling for another language . . . Too often, the non-English language a child knows is regarded in school as something that has to be overcome rather than as an additional source of knowledge and pleasure.” (297).

I love the idea of allowing a language whose rhythms feel natural to one’s ears (whether it is a first or second language) to color and inflect the poetic voice, and so to give it a place in one’s own [English language] writing. A year ago, when I traveled back to my undergraduate institution to co-present a writing workshop at an Asian American activism conference, my collaborators and I tried out Koch’s prompt with the group in attendance, but instead of using Spanish, we challenged ourselves to substitute words from our own families’ native languages. While preparing for this activity, I found myself struggling mightily with the question of authenticity, since my knowledge of Chinese (in either Mandarin or Cantonese) is limited to the names of a few foods and assorted pleasantries like “hello,” “thank you,” “good morning,” “did you sleep well?” “see you tomorrow.”  What right did I have to claim (and was I crazy to even attempt) a language that for all practical purposes, is really not mine?  But as I began to think about it more, I realized that I do feel a type of rootedness in the Chinese language, and specifically in the Cantonese dialect — but this sense is grounded in sound rather than in meaning.  I grew up in a house in which Cantonese was spoken among the adults of the family, but because I never understood what my parents and grandparents were saying to one another, the musicality of the dialect’s tonal cadences and phrasal inflections are what have stayed with me.  I associate Cantonese with home, with the smells and tastes of food, with dinner table conversation, with family rituals like going to Philadelphia Chinatown on Saturdays to buy our groceries and eat dim sum.  With words that held meaning and shape for me only in childhood [there was a time at which I knew only the Chinese names for certain actions, body parts, foods, but those resonances have since slipped away as medical terms and American slang have come to fill their places].  And so I tried to engage with the prompt by using what words remain with me to form a kind of sound portrait of a place. I ended up being quite surprised by how easily the words seemed to come once I’d started.  It was as if my brain had already clustered those words in with the part of it that stored my early memories.  And I began to feel a little homesick.  I still do, a little, each time I encounter Cantonese.  Whether in a half-empty restaurant in South Bend, IN; a TV switched on in the back of a corner store; someone talking on their cell phone in the subway of an unfamiliar city, a part of my aural knowledge flashes on for a brief instant, and pulls me into a place of deep longing.  I still feel a bit awkward and self-conscious whenever I read the poem I wrote from Kenneth Koch’s prompt (knowing that my pronunciation is awful and that I barely understand the words that I’m repeating, myself), but the simple act of working on the poem enabled me to lay claim to a kind of heart knowledge which I’d always felt too timid to access before.

Prompt: Write a poem that incorporates non-English words.

Here’s a draft of my own non-English-words poem:

Philadelphia

I know you – not for your big Ben Franklin bells

or your liberty towers at screaming heights –

but for the gum-choked pavements of 10th

and Market, the smoke-thick corridors of Arch

and Race.  I know you for your Chung May’s

and your Joy Tsin Lau’s, for your bakeries

studded with fruit-glazed sweets, your blue

tilapia tanks, your gleaming racks of char siu

hanging in clouded windows.  I know you for

the smell of oranges on the street, the wail

of engines emerging from the firehouse, the clatter

of pushcarts and plates, the tables we sat at

on Saturday mornings, the din of the dim sum

crowd, tongue against tongue in a language

whose seams still elude me:  Ha gow, siu mai!

(Child, your hands are like ice).  Dan tat!  Ma lai gow!

(Put your gloves on, a draft blows under the door),

Ha cherng!  Lau bok gow!  (Place your palms in mine,

my warmth will feed yours).  Pei dan siau yook jook

ngo jap!   (Let me button your jacket closer to your heart).

As usual, we’d be thrilled, should you care to share an excerpt of any work that this prompt might help generate.  Happy weekend!

Berkeley

PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Awards
Sunday, December 6 | 3-6 p.m.
Anna’s Jazz Island
2120 Allston Way

Chicago

First Friday Chicago Poetry Love-In
+ Book Release for Cram 7: Poetry of Celebration
Friday, December 4 | 7 p.m.
Cafe Ballou
939 N. Western Ave.
Arrive early; bring a folding chair if possible

A Night of Bedlam Balladry
(Open Mic at Bon Bon Vietnamese Sandwiches)
Monday, December 7 | 8 to 10 p.m. (sign-ups begin at 7)
2333 W. North Ave, Bucktown

New York City

The Life and Death of Joshua Zweig [by Lauren Yee, dir. Marie Darden]
December 3-6
2009 Winter Forum Festival
The Looking Glass Theatre
422 W. 57th St.
General Admission: $18

TerraNOVA presents: Subterranean
(feat. Patrick Rosal, Martin Dockery, and LPFunk)
Thursday, December 3 | 10 p.m.
D-Lounge 101 East 15th Street
beneath the Daryl Roth Theatre
$10 Entry + 1 Drink Minimum

Best New Poets 2009 Reading Series
Saturday, December 5 | 7 p.m.
KGB Lit Bar
85 E. 4th St

Yoshiko Chuma’s Hold the Clock (A Reading)
dir. Yoshiko Chuma; performed by Yoshiko Chuma, Ursula Eagly, Jun Kim & Mina Nishimura
Saturday, December 5, 2009 | 7 p.m.
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
123 4th Ave, 2nd FL
Tickets by donation at the door.

Poetiks and Politiks: Writers of Color Read
Sunday, December 6 | 5 p.m.
FREE! – at the Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowerey (btwn. Houston and Bleeker)

“Out of the Archive: Progress and Community” Panel
(part of the Dialogues in Visual Arts Series)
sponsored by the Asian American Arts Centre
Wednesday, December 9 | 7-9 p.m.
BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center
19 Chambers St. | $5 Admission (includes refreshments)

Philadelphia

IlluminAsian Film Series: The Betrayal
Friday, December 4 | 7 p.m.
The Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine St.
FREE (donations gladly accepted)

San Francisco

Pinay Stories: Connection, Memory, Roots
presented by Babae SF and Gabriela USA
Saturday, December 5 | 8 p.m.
Off Market Theater
965 Mission St. #250
Tickets: $12

Community & Academic Writing Programs: A Panel for Emerging Writers
Presented by PAWA & Achiote Press
Sunday, December 6 | 2 p.m.
San Francisco Public Library, Latino Room B (lower level)
100 Larkin at Grove
FREE and open to the public; refreshments provided

Santa Monica, CA

Jude Narita in “From the Heart”
December 3-5 at 8 p.m. | December 6 at 3 p.m.
Miles Memorial Playhouse
1130 Lincoln Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90403
Tickets: $12-$15

Washington, D.C.

Poetics of Labor: Poetry Inspired by Stories of Labor and Migrants
feat. Naomi Ayala and John Olivares Espinoza
December 5 at 11 am and 2 pm | December 6 at noon and 3 pm
National Museum of American History (in the “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program” Gallery)
14th & Constitution Ave., NW
FREE