*

The "Fish House" in Berkeley (via SFGate.com)

*

“The China Issue” of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal presents itself with an ambiguous title. It is the journal’s literary issue on China, but it might just as well be ‘the issue of China,’ i.e. the problem of it, a claim to authority and singularity; or simply ‘the issue of representing China,’ the question of it, the difficulty. ‘China’ as a thematic boundary is naturally complex for a journal based in Hong Kong—but virtually, over the internet—and presented in English. Most of this issue’s poems are translations from the Chinese, with the originals preserved; of these, few refer explicitly to or narrow themselves by locality—except where those locations become outside points of reference (i.e. Zang Di’s “History of Daffodils” referencing Fukushima, or Zhai Yongming’s “Climbing the Heights on the Double Ninth,” which is self-conscious about the literary tradition of hiking on a traditional occasion). Some of the poems written in English, however, announce their ‘Chineseness’ with archetypal localities, such as romanticized pastorals of farmland China, or romance recalled as manufacture in Sumana Roy’s “Love: Made in China,” or the two poems with Beijing in their titles.

Place is fascinating and troubling to define. Is place a city by name, by reference, or by index? Or a collocation of buildings and objects seen as an outsider might see them, or as an insider might? Within the spaces shaped by buildings are cultures and languages—both mainstream and marginal—and the subjectivity of people and their relationships to history and memory.

Appropriately, a few of the poems in this issue deal with houses and architecture. From the English selections, Arthur Leung’s “Earthen Houses” is a poem finely wrought to formally mimic the tulou buildings of which he writes. W.F. Lantry offers a close reading of the poem’s rhythmic structure here, discussing the way earthen houses are constructed and making the general argument that poems are spaces of empathy allowing us to dwell in the poet’s mind. I wish to push his argument further and add that all architecture, real and linguistic, serves a rhetorical function. When Hisham Matar gave his recent Hopwood Roundtable Craft Talk in Michigan, he talked about his previous career in and passion for architecture; he said that architecture is not about geometry or numerical efficiency, but about people. The way a building is designed—round table or long table, restaurant booth or bar counter, high ceilings or low, windows and exposure to light, door handles—all of that affects the way people feel about themselves and the way they interact with others. Place is psychosomatic (in the old sense of the word, though the medical sense applies as well). He commented, therefore, that writing is not a ‘thing’ we do but a space we construct and enter. After all, what are buildings but walls—boundaries carving the abstraction of empty space, narratives framing chaos?

Arthur Leung’s poem, in addition to the imitative form Lantry lauds, transforms the communal nature of earthen houses into voice and persona. It begins, “Perhaps you wonder how mud fortifies,” addressing the reader as a stranger to the buildings but not as a tourist, not as a consumer. It is campfire-conversational. The next line gestures at the physical in close proximity—“rammed earth walls like these”—and the third line has a first-person plural that merges the speaker with the houses: “as though our wood frame tulou treads against / the weight of mountains.” This fourth line continues into the fifth to speak directly of coalescence: “We blend with stones, branches, / bamboo chips and let gravity push together . . .” That fifth line has no punctuation to separate one sequence of verbs and objects from another. These are intimate pronouns. The poem has no single “I.” Even the blending of languages can be seen in the italics: first “tulou” is italicized to distinguish it as a Chinese romanization, then “eat rice” is italicized to give a transliterated Chinese idiom, chifan, to commence a meal in welcome and good faith. Italicizing foreign words often serves to alienate them from the rest of the text, making them non-diegetic. But the italics here are a blend that makes the strange familiar just as much as it renders the familiar strange. We might even read it as the transformation of languages into objects—as an analogue for immersion in a good poem, in which we experience information as material.

W.F. Lantry’s poem “Forever Lasting Love,” similarly has a tri-stanzaic structure imitative of Zhang Xiaogang’s triptych panel, “Yongyuan Chijiu de Ai.” He “reads” the painting from left to right, describing the scene in a present tense into which we are flung with a spondee: “Now early April . . .” Unlike paintings, poems are inevitably sequential. We have to see the images as they are concatenated in words; thus the speaker of the poem explains as much as describes, for instance prioritizing “breasts and leafless trees” as the first painted image and establishing “this triptych’s wings” as a thematic frame which narrows into the birds and absence of birdsong this poet imbues into the piece. Thematic representation is the mode by which Lantry accomplishes an impression of visual synchronicity: echoes and the expanding ripples of naked figures and bare breasts, curled or bent forms, voicelessness, crocuses, birds. The stanza breaks indicate the panel folds, but by enjambing verbs along those spaces the poet keeps us suspended in two kinds of movement: linear travel (“while foreign birds // move from the center”) and motionless vitality (“those trees, dark stems uprooted, still survive / since in the final panel blossoms thrive”). This poem, like “Earthen Houses,” sets its boundaries and then navigates between them. The process of the poem is an instruction in its own logic, and a constant movement between sound and sight, synchronicity and linearity, the thing heard and the thing witnessed.

* * *

Exile is a prominent theme among the poems translated from Chinese. Zhai Yongming’s “Abandoned House” looks at a house as an object for empathy, a double for the speaker’s own sorrow and isolation; house and person become reflections of each other, both in gesture and perception:

I often pass by there
In a variety of nervous postures
I’ve always been feeble come dusk
And that abandoned house shuts its eyes tight
As I stand and stare

Duo Duo’s “Night” begins in what seems to be a traditional meditation on the moon and its metaphors, then ends with a sudden self-revelation: “Ah moonlight, hinting at the clearly seen exile…”

And Wang Jiaxin’s long poem, “Commemoration,” deals heavily with solitude and alienation. In the second section, the poet writes: “ ‘In dream, you don’t know you’re a guest,’ you try / Repeating it in a different language.” In the fifth section there is the question of being “sarcastic in an alien land,” and in the eighth, the poet now asks, “What kind of fear needs to be quelled, so that alone / One can become?”

But these are loose interpretations of exile, in Albert Camus’ sense when he argued again and again that we are existentially exiled from ourselves, from the nations in our bodies. Here is Camus in The Rebel, explaining our impulse toward literature and so-called escapism: “Far from always wanting to [escape the world, men] suffer, on the contrary, from not being able to posses it completely enough, estranged citizens of the world, exiled from their own country.”

It is this universality of exile that leads me to read some of the other translated poems as engagements with the alien self. Xiao Kaiyu’s “A Telegram” confronts the slippery facts of memory, beginning with a date, “November 6, 1986,” then moving into a retrospective issuedfrom the future, then returning with uncertainty to 1985. The location and destination fluctuates from Harbin to Xining to Qaidam, none of them certain until a grave and life-altering telegraph arrives from home in Sichuan. The speaker of the poem is both subject and object, a fixed point of view that is yet rotating in the attempt to encounter the self.

Zang Di’s “History of Daffodils” sets off gargantuan, eschatological vibrations with the line, “The aftershocks continue in Fukushima” and references (to) maelstroms and extinction. Then our attention is diverted to the small, the local: daffodils. They are mirrors or refractions: “They are prepared / for us to see the different us.” And in “Rise Up Like a Snow Mountain,” we read:

On the window is a piece of paper
that tells fortune, but it will say the same thing whether you poke it
or not. On the paper is a small hole of poetry.

The ending note of poetry in this stanza points us toward fortune not as chance but—as is often the case in literature—as character, as inevitability. The unalterable fate, the unchangeable self: the poem as the process and attempt of transgression, perhaps as a way to see a different us.

Lastly, Zhai Yongming’s “Climbing the Heights on the Double Ninth” takes up the long, solitary tradition of poets ascending peaks and writing about the smallness of man in a hulking, beautiful world. “Today I raise a cup alone,” she writes. “Who will answer my echo? / Wine poured down the throat” flows into the body. Here is where she does something different: “Problems of desire and mortality / [of] separation and health / Also change inside the throat” and these problems “become nimble yet meticulous.” Transformation occurs in the passage of the throat, downward with the wine and its troubles and simultaneously upward with the voice of the poet.

The body as a site of passage. The poem as a site of entry, where understanding changes into vision. I’m reminded of the ancient Greek sophists and their technique for memorizing speeches: by associating each section of the argument with a different room of their houses, such that their recited language was an enacted walkthrough of the home—every outward expression also an inner journey. And I think again of the fifth section of Wang Jiaxin’s “Commemoration,” where he asks:

(But should Homer revise that flimsy ending
To the epic?)  You put down The Times
And your mother tongue comes out in tears. . . .

And earlier, in the fifth section: “Buy a copy of The Times, not to read / But to bury one’s face into.” He points us to the timelessness of language as emotion, of authorities and canons as things we reconfigure and engage with personally. History is a site to inhabit, too. When we narrate our dreams and say, “I open the blinds and now I’m in my parents’ house,” what we really mean is, “Now I think or recognize that I’m in my parents’ house, that I’ve been in it all along, and yet I haven’t been in it at all because that’s not all it is.” We overlap everywhere with poems, with languages, with memories, with spaces of imagination and solitude across continents and times.

* * *

Kuwento for Lost Things [ed. Rachelle Cruz and Melissa Sipin]
is accepting submissions

KUWENTO FOR LOST THINGS Anthology

LR Contributors Melissa Sipin (whose work is forthcoming in Issue 3) and Rachelle Cruz (whose work appeared in Issue 1 and who has a postcard poem forthcoming in Issue 3), are co-editing an anthology of phillipine mythology called Kuwento for Lost Things, and are accepting submissions of poetry, prose, and visual art through January 15, 2012.  Submissions guidelines are available here. Please help their project get off the ground by liking or following them on Facebook or Twitter, respectively, and by sending some work their way! Visit their web site here: http://kuwentoforlostthings.wordpress.com/

* * *

Angela Veronica Wong wins a Poetry Society of America NY Chapbook Fellowship

Many congratulations to Issue 1 contributor Angela Veronica Wong, whose chapbook Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter, was selected by Bob Hicok for a 2011 PSA New York Chapbook Fellowship! A short writeup about Veronica and the other Kundiman fellow who won this year (Alison Roh Park) that appeared on Poets & Writers ‘ contest blog  last week featured a short video clip of Veronica reading at LR‘s joint AWP reading with Boxcar Poetry Review this past February. (Read the article here).

* * *

Craig Santos Perez’s poetry CD, Undercurrent, now available on iTunes

UNDERCURRENT (Craig Santos Perez & Brandy Nalani McDougall)

Issue 1 contributor Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nalani McDougall have released a poetry CD called Undercurrent that features audio recordings of both artists reading their own poems.  Craig’s contributions are taken from his two collections, from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008) and [saina] (2010).  Undercurrent is available for download on iTunes, or for purchase through Amazon.  An electronic version of the liner notes can be found on Craig’s blog.

* * *

Jai Arun Ravine’s first book available for order

Jai Arun Ravine's แล้ว AND THEN ENTWINE (Tinfish 2011)

Congratulations to Issue 1 contributor Jai Arun Ravine, whose first poetry collection, แล้ว and then entwine has been published by Tinfish! Doveglion has printed Jai’s reflections on the process of writing the book and its guest editor, Craig Santos Perez, has written about editing it on his own blog.  More information about ordering แ ล้ ว and then entwine can be found on Tinfish’s web site.

* * *

Cha releases “The China Issue”

Cover Art Detail from CHA's China Issue

Our friends at Cha have released their long-awaited China Issue, which features poetry, creative and nonfiction prose, translations, reviews, an interview, art, and art criticism that explore questions about China in the contemporary era.  The editors and contributors share a strong concern for both aesthetic and social issues (such as freedom of expression and human rights violations)—but the purpose of the issue is not so much to engage in protest as it is to delve into curative exploration: a grappling with the complexities of China’s national condition through a collection of voices from both inside and outside its borders. Writes Tammy Ho-Lai Ming in her editorial introduction:

“I still have hope for a freer, more democratic, more just China, one that if it does not quite embody the totality of the ‘could be,’ at least manages to be better than it currently is. And I hope it gets there soon. I want to see it, breathe it, live it, be proud of it. In the meantime, China is what it is or perhaps more accurately it is a near infinity of realities and possibilities. This issue of Cha is devoted to capturing a sense of this complexity, to provide a view of what a few people, both Chinese and non-Chinese, think of this remarkable country at this fascinating juncture in history. In these works, you will see a handful of microscope slides, cross-sections of the contemporary Middle Kingdom, which when read together will hopefully provide a glimpse of the whole.”

The issue is populated with the voices of contemporary Chinese who are living in China,  Chinese expatriots who are studying or teaching abroad, members of the Chinese diaspora in the West, and a sprinkling of Westerners.  Names of particular interest to LR readers include internationally-known artist and dissident Ai Wei Wei and respected Asian American poet and literary scholar Russell C. Leong.  Read the issue here.

* * *

AALR gears up for release of a special issue about 9-11.

AALR's 9-11 Issue

The editors of the Asian American Literary Review have announced that they will be releasing a special issue in response to the 10th anniversary of 9-11. Write the editors:

“On the ten-year anniversary of September 11th, experts of every camp and affiliation will compete to dictate its legacies for our collective memory. The danger isn’t simply that the loudest voices will dominate—it’s that only a limited range of voices will make it into the conversation at all. So many of our communities have borne witness to so much over the past 10 years; it behooves us to critically consider the moment and its aftermath—the various political, legal, and civil rights repercussions, particularly for the communities most directly affected, South Asian, Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim American. But how can we do so, when so many of the voices of affected communities remain unheard? How do we remember and reflect on this moment as Asian Americans when the public conversation is so circumscribed?

In the interest of broadening that conversation, The Asian American Literary Review (AALR) is publishing a special commemorative issue.”

The issue will feature prose, poetry, dialogue, photography, and video by and about South Asian American activists, students, scholars, and community members, and is now available for pre-order on the AALR web site.

AALR is also currently accepting submissions for its regular magazine through September 1st.  (Guidelines here).

* * *

Kundiman introduces “Together We Are New York” in remembrance of 9-11

Also in response to the anniversary of 9-11, Kundiman is preparing “Together We Are New York: Asian Americans Remember and Re-envision 9-11,” a remembrance arts project that seeks to bring “the poet’s ear and vision” to the conversation surrounding the event, in order to “ensure that this historic anniversary includes public remembrances and the vital voices of a key marginalized community fundamentally transformed by the tragedy.”  The opening performance and dialogue of this series will be held on September 13, 2011 from 7-9 PM in Fordham University Lincoln Center, and will feature poets Hossannah Asuncion, Tamiko Beyer, Marlon Esguerra, April Heck, Eugenia Leigh, Bushra Rehman, Zohra Saed, Purvi Shah, and R.A. Villanueva.  More information about “Together We Are New York” is available on Kundiman’s web site.

* * *

Drunken Boat accepting submissions for its Open the City folio
(in collaboration with the AAWW)

Drunken Boat is now accepting submissions for a special folio in collaboration with the AAWW “that respond[s] to the question of Asian and Middle Eastern-American populations in urban spaces.”  The theme is flexible and can be interpreted in many different ways. Write the editors, “These can take a particular city as point of departure, can verge to cities around the world, engaging with the notion of how the forces of displacement and accretion intersect to create identity in a particular environment. We envision Chinatown, Little India, mosques in metropolitan areas, ethnic groceries, foreign film theaters, etc. all as possible sites for investigation.”  Submit via the Drunken Boat submissions manager by October 1st.

* * *

That’s all for now, but please be on the lookout for our own Issue 3, which is set to launch bright and early tomorrow!

Perhaps it sounds obvious, but engagement with APIA art and writing shouldn’t be limited to the Month of May:  APIA writers and artists are, of course, producing and performing and publishing new and challenging works all year round.  Here are a few recommendations to get you started for the summer (in no particular order):

1. Takeo Rivera’s GOLIATH (dir. Alex Mallory). This powerful one-act choreopoem about the implications of the Iraq War, which began life as an original student play at Stanford, is making its New York City debut tomorrow, thanks to the brilliant creative talents of its playwright (Takeo Rivera) and its director (Alex Mallory).  Takeo is one of those rising-star-types whose work is impossible to miss once it’s entered your periphery: his aesthetic roots lie in the brave activism and the rhythmically-compelling sonic and dramatic gestures of spoken word, and his critical approach to his subject matter is thoughtful, complex, and blade-sharp (he has a Masters Degree in Modern Thought & Literature and is about to enter a PhD in performance studies this fall).  Alex (GOLIATH’s director), is also a forced to be reckoned with: she’s been directing productions and workshops in New York for a couple of years now, and before that, in college, she honed her chops by directing a number of major student productions and by founding The Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project.  Alex was also the major force behind bringing GOLIATH to the Big Apple.  GOLIATH has been newly revised for the New York stage and will be playing at the Robert Moss Theater for the next two weeks. If you’re living in New York City or will be in its vicinity during the next few weeks, I urge you to see this play. I t’s not something you want to miss!  [See the teaser trailer above].

2. “We Axe You to Speak”: Kartika Review’s first poetry reading.   Yes, folks.  Kartika Review’s inaugural reading event is tonight (6 to 8 pm at the SF Public Library, 100 Larkin St), and I highly recommend it (though I’m sad that I’ll have to miss it because I’m not on the West Coast).  Barbara Jane Reyes, Eddy Zheng, Margaret Rhee, Shelley Wong, and Kenji C. Liu.  Great lineup.  Landmark event.  To those of you in the Bay Area: GO.  You do not want to miss this if you can help it.

3. “I Got My”  Music Video ft. Jin [Magnetic North and Taiyo Na].  Bao Phi posted on Facebook that this “is not a music video – more like an Asian American family reunion, or maybe a map. Whatever it is, it’s a gift.”  One can’t help but agree: so many landmark APIA faces!  The video was created for APIA month, but its awesomeness, of course, extends far beyond the month of May alone.  Here’s the video:

4. The 2011 Kundiman Retreat Reading. We always recommend Kundiman events here at LR, of course, but I’m afraid that this particular recommendation also comes mixed with a bit of shameless self-promotion: Henry Leung and I are going to have the privilege of participating in this year’s retreat as first-time fellows, and we’re incredibly excited to be able to write and perform alongside both the other new fellows and the corps of returning fellows.  This year’s headlining faculty members are Kimiko Hahn, Jon Pineda, and Karen An-hwei Lee.  We’ll giving a reading at Fordham Lincoln Center on June 17th at 7 pm (I’ll try to follow up with more details later).  Come hear us on Friday, stay overnight, and catch GOLIATH’s closing performance on Saturday for an awesome NYC weekend full of APIA literary and performing arts!

5. The HYPHEN Magazine Blog. Hyphen is a hub for all things related to Asian America—and it covers everything from pop culture to food to books to politics in an incredibly sharp, politically-astute way.  I am just a little obsessed with their  feed (which I follow via Facebook). If you don’t already follow this magazine, you need to.  Stat. End of story.

6. The Open City Blog.  This is the Asian American Writer’s Workshop’s most recent online project.  In their own words:

AAWW’s OPEN CITY: Blogging Urban Change is an interdisciplinary neighborhood blog and community project coordinated by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW).  Five commissioned writers, called Organizing Fellows, are working with community organizations and neighborhood folks in Manhattan’s Chinatown/Lower East Side (LES), Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn to collect oral histories and interviews, offer commentary about gentrification, neighborhood change, and produce new creative work around these themes.

Later on in their “About” statement, they conceptualize their project as an “urban tryptich,” and the sites of their written observations and engagement as a “constellation” of portraits that—while never complete—is ever-evolving.  I love the way that this describes both the historical and creative work of documentation, and the way in which their chosen medium (a collaborative blog) reflects these dual impulses towards collectivity and fluidity. (I also, incidentally, love their choice of url—”Open the City”—which comprises a call to action, rather than a titular placeholder). 

7. Kaya Press’s forthcoming releases: Kaya Press has recently put up two forthcoming titles for pre-order: Water Chasing Water by Koon Woon and Lament in the Night by Shosôn Nagahara.  I’m not sure exactly when these two books will actually become available to ship (the web site doesn’t say; if anyone knows this information, please do let us know and I’ll update this post to reflect it), but I’m particularly intrigued by Water Chasing Water.  The cover art is extraordinary, and the description (which includes a quote by Bob Holman in which he calls the poet “Li Po in drag, the voice of New America” and which then goes on to characterize this new collection as a continuation of “his exploration of loneliness and memory with poems and essays that seek out “‘his light / Without which existence is not detectable’”) sounds absolutely tantalizing.

7. APIA-relevant Lit Mags: I’d be amiss not to include this on my list.  Doveglion has recently put out a few new essays (in installments), and AALR‘s lovely, thick second issue came out this spring (it’s sitting at the top of my book queue, awaiting a read).  I’ve no doubt that our friends at Kartika and Cha are busily working on new issues, too.

And of course, keep your eyes open for Lantern Review Issue 3!  (Don’t forget: our current submissions period closes tomorrow at midnight EST).

Let’s dive straight in, examining three of the issue’s first poems and their wrestle with words and meanings.

Phill Provance’s interlace poem “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches,” is perhaps the most abstruse, though its diction remains commonplace. The poem’s charm lies not in its form but in its unself-conscious vernacular. Its colloquial voice, inconsistent in a way typical to modern speech, uses contractions here but not there, and lumbers along monosyllabic platforms (many its, thats, and ises). The loftiest word is “ellipticizing,” but this neologism, rather than conjugating the Latinate directly (“ellipsing”), invokes the urban by conjugating gym ellipticals as root. All this results in the naturalization of the poem’s anfractuous form, such that it flows with incidental ease. This is hard to achieve. Provance himself comments that the poem is designed to be accessible despite its layered meanings, which makes it an appropriate gateway poem to the journal. Yet: why is a poem about St. Petersburg, or his second poem remembering lost love, placed as the opening of an “Asian Literary Journal”? The third stanza of “St. Petersburg” describes a vaguely Zen mode of seeing, but the other poem has nothing culturally comparable. We’ll return to this.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s “A Talk With Mao Tze-tung,” though also colloquial, achieves a much steadier voice. This poem addresses the quondam Chairman’s mortal absence, because “you are nowhere / until a Swedish journalist recites your poetry / and wonders . . .” Living, and dead, and revived, Mao’s core vitality resides in his words and ideas, which become corporeal by revolutions. Thoughts march, words poison, books are buried. And along the way, vituperation must question itself: “why am I talking to you, dead man?” It seems language persists even when we don’t desire it, and since “history has no last word,” this poem ends in questions, and the talk with Mao must pause until an answer comes alive again.

Kim-An Lieberman’s two poems are among my favorites for their adroitness. “After Ten Years,” a loose-octameter poem, turns list into narrative. The “Because” reiteration chants and expiates, swelling to crescendo; the final line hits the kind of poetic denouement that evokes quiet “hm”s from audiences at readings. In “Harvest,” we begin in miniatures (“single beads, stray buttons, broken twigs”) and end in nature’s enormity. The sound of children’s jubilance masks the tone and the suffocating fish onshore, until the ending when the ominous “sudden true hand” comes forth unveiled. Lieberman distinguishes herself in poetic brevity with truncated phrases like “This is not to sing / a strange-eyed child, some oracular pure . . .” and doesn’t sacrifice clarity for linguistic decoration, or vice versa.

* * *

Thematic Curiosities

Most of the poems in this issue fit the “Asian” label easily enough, apprehending in some way the international context of culture. An obvious example features the tourist/outsider as observer. Helle Annette Slutz’s “Another City Which You Leave” triptych takes us through a foreigner’ travels through China: Turfan (mistakenly naming the Mogao caves instead of the Bezeklik caves?), Beijing, and Shanghai. In the first, she vivifies statues as only an outsider’s imagination can: “I watch them unbutton, untie, de-robe / and fold emerald silks and saffron cottons into stone.” This is used to great poetic effect, though the same turn of vision comes cheaply when she concludes self-consciously as a poet writing this poem. Peters Bruveris’s “Notes from Travels in China, I” and Xu Zhimo’s “Farewell River Cam” are two more evidently outsider poems, to which I’ll return when discussing translations.

Other “Asian” poems take Chinese places as their subject. W.F. Lantry’s “Rainbow Bridge” is a kind of translation, deriving from a Song Dynasty scroll painting that, in this case, is evidence of a woven bridge having existed in antiquity. Lantry wonderfully demonstrates the limitations of visual art without language; his poem verb-alizes the painting, not only exalting in the details but animating them and, in the process, expounding instructions to build such a bridge. The attention to detail would be prolix if not for the enjambment and inconsistent rhymes. Another poem, Steven Schroeder’s “You Can Smell Roads,” situates itself in Shenzhen (according to Reid Mitchell’s review), and execrates the urban displacing the rural. Formally it’s pleasant, the first sentence flowing across three stanzas, and the title line melodizing: “you can smell roads / where rivers ran.” But the conclusion is a blunt judgment, and neglects the mixed cultural connotations in “a young city growing old”—as if to age were simply to lose moral innocence.

The poems that don’t immediately fit any distinct cultural categories include Provance’s two poems, Annie Zaidi’s “Diaphragm,” and Marco Yan’s “Remembrance.” Not that an Asian journal has to meet presuppositions about content—but Cha’s self-applied category invites scrutiny. Provance’s “What I Said To Her Was Not A Lie” is an anonymized lost-love poem with no distinguishing context in race, culture, locality, or language. Zaidi’s “Diaphragm” is a heuristic exploration of closeness between lovers. Yan’s “Remembrance” meditates on the lingering destination of breaths belonging to someone deceased or gone away. What pattern emerges from these three apparently inapposite poems? The body. “Diaphragm” touches on this from the start: “If a lover wants to be / close, closer / than skin . . .” Poetry’s bottom line is always a discourse of human language; even if we regard it only linguistically or dialectically, situated between the formally written and the colloquially spoken, we cannot forget the role the body plays. Especially in a sometimes bilingual journal, the body communicates as universally as narrative.

* * *

Translation

I laud Cha for being international and diglossic, because the presence—or shadow—of other languages encourages us to confront our own more objectively. One poem in this issue is bilingual, and three are translations (I include “Rainbow Bridge,” tentatively). This is atypical of most literary journals, and for that reason, reading Cha is a great privilege.

Eddie Tay’s “Cities” features an alternating refrain in Traditional Chinese. The footnotes have the translations reversed, a typographical curiosity that turns the Chinese into interjections rather than responses to preceding lines. Read properly, they function as an embedded inner monologue, as though the English were the ego’s narration and the Chinese the superego’s mantra. It isn’t common to see two languages interchanged effectively in poems; one usually commands the other, or the first remedies the second’s insufficiency. In Tay’s poem, disparate languages enter equally from different facets of a single mind. Were the syntax of the lines not interlaced and the first not repeated, the Chinese would be a distraction from the poem. Instead, it holds the poem’s sentiment—disappointed change and resolve—together.

Bruveris’s “Notes from Travels in China, I” is translated by Inara Cedrins. The linguistic transitions are impressive: its short, trailing lines and unconnected stanzas are a fine attempt at a haiku spirit written into (vaguely Chinese) couplets, written in Latvian and translated into English. But the title foretells the poem’s major flaw: garrulous and sprawling in statement, it reads like fragments from a sentimentalist’s journal more than a unified poem. It fails to achieve the ecstatic vision of short image-lines; the narration, self-consciousness, and hodgepodge of articles and prepositions are all supererogatory. For example, “in evening twilight” starts with an unneeded preposition, then iterates the same time of day twice; just “twilight” suffices for the line. But the couplets in the third-from-last section are the strongest, pared down to vivacity:

full moon
above Jasper Gate

and

a fish in the canal
red fins

both, with minimal words, leave lasting images and the surprise of movement.

Xu Zhimo’s famous poem, a stanza of which has been memorialized on a monument in the back walk of King’s College, is translated by Clara Hsu in this issue. She takes minor liberties with it, titling the poem “Farewell River Cam” though the original bids farewell to “Cambridge.” But otherwise she adheres closely to the Chinese, quatrain by quatrain. Her major contributions to translations of this poem are tightened language and strong, active verbs. The broken reflection of the rainbow concludes with a wonderful susurrus: “immersed in illusory dreams.” And Hsu’s coinage, “Silence is the wind of parting,” remains faithful to the sense in Chinese while also refreshing our English idiom. All that lacks now for translations of this poem is preservation of rhyme—imperative, I’d argue, since Xu’s purpose was to import Romantic mannerisms to 20th-century Chinese poetry—but until then Hsu’s free-verse modernization suffices brilliantly.

* * *

Editorial Proclivities

It’s been a pleasure to read and review this issue of Cha, which has the virtue not only of being an accessible journal representing diverse talents but of being international and thus representing diverse geographical perspectives. If you followed the links to these poems, you’ll know that many are paired with commentary or reviews in the correlating blog, A Cup of Fine Tea, emphasizing the dialogue that small-press literary journals are intended to be.

The blog also regularly promotes the journal’s contributors, and on it you’ll find recent nominations for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best of the Web prizes. While confessing that I only read the poems nominated from this issue, I’ll say that the editors do seem to favor poems that employ periphrastic repetition as a means to circle around answers. I won’t agree or disagree with their selections, but I do hold that the power of poetry to move derives from either its narrative force, or its accurate reproduction of the poet’s process toward vision and clarity.

I don’t know how many of us read hard copies of literary journals from start to finish. Online, it’s even easier to skip from page to page. Yet an editorial decision of organization must be made. In this issue of Cha, we begin in St. Petersburg, Russia, ellipticizing. We end in Cambridge, in translated Chinese, waving farewell. Have we been visitors to Europe and England all along? Outsiders to the English language? If so, where do we travel next?

As we prepare to head into our late summer blog hiatus, we’re aware of the fact that several of our friends have recently put out new calls for submission.  We thought we would put together a little list of interesting opportunities for submission that have recently come to our attention:

The Asian American Literary Review is calling for electronic submissions for its third issue, to be published in Spring 2011.  Deadline is September 1st.  See their online guidelines for more details.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is calling both for regular submissions to be included in its 13th Issue, and for submissions to its special themed 14th issue, which will focus on China.  Submissions are accepted electronically only. Deadline is December 15th for Issue 13, April 14th for the China Issue.  Complete guidelines for Issue 13 here; details about the China Issue here.

Kweli Journal, a publication that focuses on promoting the work of writers of color, is calling for submissions to its Fall/Winter 2010 issue.  Submissions are to be sent by postal mail.  Deadline is September 16th.  Guidelines here.

Kartika Review is calling for submissions in anticipation of future issues.  Kartika, which has a rolling policy for screening work, is now accepting submissions both via email and through its online submissions manager.  See their guidelines here.

BOXCAR Poetry Review and Cerise Press, which are edited by Asian American poets Neil Aitken and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, respectively, also have rolling submissions policies: look for BOXCAR‘s guidelines here, and Cerise‘s here.

* * *

Finally, be on the lookout for the reopening of our own submissions period (in anticipation of our second issue), when we return in September.

Good luck, and see you on the other side of August!

I know it’s a little late in coming, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a brief rundown of the poetry goodness inside both Kartika Issue 7 (which features a special section devoted to Asian American writers’ reflections on the theme of “home,” and the work of a new poetry editor, Kenji Liu), and Cha‘s February 2010 Issue (which features not just great poetry, but some of the most beautiful cover art I’ve seen from them yet). I’d encourage you to read both of these issues in their entirety, of course, but here are a few thoughts about what I particularly enjoyed in each:

KARTIKA REVIEW Issue 7

Kartika Review #7 is, in my opinion, the magazine’s best issue yet.  I’ve really enjoyed the past two issues – but this issue really impressed with me by how quickly the publication has been getting bigger and better.  The work contained in this issue’s poetry section is, in my opinion, of a more even quality than in some of the earlier issues, and new poetry editor Kenji Liu’s four choices work well as a set: each successive poem speaks to the previous one, taking up its thread in some manner or contrasting it in a thought-provoking way.  The first three poems have to do with fathers and mothers and questions of inheritance, and the last – Aimee Suzara’s “We, too, made America” – expands this question to a broader “we,” claiming not just individual family histories, but a space in the  broader American narrative (harkening back to Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America”).  I enjoyed the compelling portrait of a man presented in Vuong Quoc Vu’s “My Father Sleeps” and the tension created between the interrogator and the respondent in Barbara Jane Reyes’ “One Question, Several Answers,” but Eugenia Leigh’s “Between Heaven and the Bedroom” was really a standout with its use of some truly knockout imagery to juxtapose the airily mythological with the small and domestic.  Its opening strikes me speechless: “Somewhere in the city with her slip-proof / shoes and apron, our mom locates an angel /tall as miles.”

I also really enjoyed the special “Meditations on Home” section at the end of this issue, and appreciate that the editors thought to package it as a .PDF packet for use by educators.  Oral histories like the ones contained in this issue are extremely valuable and important to preserve, and I like the idea of a classroom text that has been freshly generated and is available online at no cost to students.  Several of the respondents chose to tell their stories in poems rather than in prose, and it’s definitely worth checking these responses out — especially the striking contributions by David Mura and Kelly Zen Yie Tsai.

CHA Issue 10

As I mentioned earlier, the cover art on the current issue of Cha is absolutely gorgeous – I love the deep purple blooms around the woman’s face and how they seem to melt into the text of the issue itself.  As usual, though, I made a beeline straight for the poetry section.  One of the things I appreciate about Cha is that despite being a multi-genre journal it publishes an extensive amount of poetry in each issue.  This, I’m sure, has a lot to do with co-editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s being a poet herself, and it shows: the work they showcase is usually of a very consistent quality, and because there’s a relatively decent amount of room for poetry in the journal, they’re able to create a broader sense of continuity between work by both very established poets and people who are just emerging.  Some of my favorites moments from this issue included the frank, unflinching language of Papa Osmubal’s “A Bum’s Demise,” and the satisfyingly mouth-thick, incantational sonics of the two poems that were contributed by Angela Eun Ji Koh: “Our Malady” and “The Harvest Shaman.” I also thought it interesting that both the current issues of Kartika and Cha featured poems involving angels (Rocco di Giacomo’s “Angels” appears in Cha, Eugenia Leigh’s “Between Heaven and Earth” appears in Kartika).  Having gone back to reread Cha just before I read this issue of Kartika, it was fascinating to think of these two poems in conversation.

Many congratulations to the editors at both Kartika Review and Cha for their successful spring issues – and for the well-deserved amount of attention they’ve received for them.  Please do click over to check out their respective sites.  And while you’re at it – don’t forget that we at LR are building towards our own first issue; our submissions deadline is this Thursday, April 29th, and we’d love to see your work!

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and CHA Logo

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer. She edited Hong Kong U Writing: An Anthology (2006) and co-edited Love & Lust (2008). She is also a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the first Hong Kong-based online English literary publication. She is currently studying in London, UK. More about Tammy can be found at her web site.

***

LR: First question to ask any writer—how did you start, or what are your memories of first starting to write creatively?

TH: Until university, I wrote almost exclusively in Chinese, mostly just scribbling and half-thought out ideas. I think it took English to really get me started. When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong, I spent a great deal of time in the library. One day, I picked up a copy of Ambit off a shelf I was sitting near and started reading. I was especially drawn to the poetry and shortly afterwards I began trying to write creatively in English. I showed my first poems to one of my professors and received positive feedback, which encouraged me to continue writing. I have been writing ever since.

LR: As a Hong Kong native and member of the HK Writer’s Circle, you’ve remarked that the size of the HK writing community has been underestimated, even by yourself. As a young writer, who did (or do) you look to as models and as peers?

TH: This question is interesting as recently I was thinking about the smallness of the Hong Kong poetry writing scene. I think that my opinion of the scene probably waxes and wanes, sometimes it seems full of great writers, other times it feels a little bit constrained. The truth is that there are some strong writers in the city but as English is not the first language of most residents, the number of English writers is always going to be limited.

My models, I think, vary through time. I often find inspiration in the works I am reading at the moment and in recent personal experience. I don’t think that there is someone I return to over and over again as a source of inspiration or as a guide for my creative writing. That said, the following Asian writers have inspired me at different points of my writing career: Shirley Lim, Louise Ho and Leung Ping Kwan. As for peers, I would have to say first and foremost Reid Mitchell, my writing partner and sometime friendly editor. Also, I would like to mention the Singaporean poet Eddie Tay and Hong Kong poet Arthur Leung.

LR: What would you say is special about being a writer in HK?

TH: I guess the mixture of Chinese and English influences is probably the most obvious characteristic of writing in Hong Kong.

LR: Interesting–could you elaborate? What is it like to be composing in a language that may not be your native one? How does actually writing in a different language feel different from, say, translation (if it even does)?

TH: Personally, when I write in English, I think first in that language. But I do wish to have more Chinese/Asian elements in my creative works. I don’t want to ever lose touch with my linguistic and cultural roots.

LR: Cha’s “about” statement remarks that Cha was founded a decade after the handover—does this figure into HK writing?

TH: Of course, some writers address the handover. However, as far as I know, the English creative writing output from Hong Kong is generally not very political. An exception I can think of is Louise Ho, a Hong Kong poet whose writings have some political elements. We mentioned ‘a decade after the handover’ in Cha‘s “About” statement as much as a time marker as any kind of political statement.

LR: What about being a writer in the Asian diaspora?

TH: I am not sure that I am an Asian diaspora writer. I am from Asia and although I currently live in the UK, I will return home at some point. I am more in the Asian-expat writing community.

LR: You are also a scholar of Victorian literature. How, if ever, do your more academic pursuits intersect with your creative ones?

TH: In some ways, they are very different pursuits. However, sometimes my academic reading (either in the form of novels or scholarly works) will inspire me to write something. I am sure that my poetry is full of unconscious or conscious reactions to my academic work.

LR: Two of your poems that I really enjoyed: “Minute” (“You are so spoiled. I had not time to philosophise”—something I think many of us have heard from our parents!) and “Ring Fingers” (just the fantastic nature of it). Care to comment on either?

TH: “Minute” is a very autobiographical poem. The scene portrayed there isn’t far off of an experience I had visiting my parents’ house. It was actually written on the bus home after spending a night with my family. My father told me about his fear of the clock and we looked at its hands together. It is a moment I will never forget, not only because it is now captured in the poem.

“Ring Fingers” is also autobiographical. It is about the time I lost my ring fingers and the cat ate one of them.

LR: Why and how did you start Cha?

TH: We started Cha in the summer of 2007 because we realized that Hong Kong did not have an online literary journal, at least in English. Such journals are common in the West but are less so in Asia. From our observation, we also knew that there is a lot of great writing in English in Asia but that it often goes unnoticed. We therefore decided to found Cha, as a means of trying to support new writing from and about Asia. Since Jeff (my co-editor) is a professional editor and I had also edited several literary collections, we felt we were in a reasonably good position to start the journal.

LR: Why the name, “Cha”?

TH: When we founded the journal, we wanted to publish work from across Asia, not just from Hong Kong. Cha, which means tea in many Asian languages, struck us as a name which could encapsulate many different eastern societies at once. Obviously, the drink is an important, nearly ubiquitous, element in many Asian cultures. But beyond this, the word cha, and its variants, is almost as common in the region. For example, a word which can be Romanized as cha means tea in Korean, Japanese and Chinese. Likewise closely related words also mean tea in other languages. Think for example of chai in Hindi. Drinking tea is associated with a kind of contemplation, a sense of savoring something that is both simple and complex, which is equally true of good literature. So because of its linguistic and cultural ubiquity in the continent, and its more philosophical associations, we thought that Cha provided an apt name for a journal devoted to Asian literature.

LR: An issue for any literary magazine that is “ethnically” themed is choosing what content fits this theme—does a journal themed around the Asian diaspora experience need only showcase work by Asian authors, and what is an “Asian” theme to begin with? Cha has previously published work by diverse authors on diverse subject matter, yet manages to maintain its central theme. What is Cha’s philosophy, and how do you find yourself choosing what to publish?

TH: Again, I am not sure the term ‘diaspora’ is entirely appropriate to describe Cha. Of course, we have published a number of writers who could be considered part of the Asian disapora, people of Asian descent living in another country. But many of our writers are also Asians living in Asia. We also publish a number of writers who could be jokingly called part of the ‘Caucasian disapora’, that is, expats living in the region. One thing we have realized editing the journal is that the definition of ‘Asian writing’ is quite fluid and dynamic. I think what my co-editor, Jeff Zroback, wrote in his second anniversary editorial summarises our philosophy on ‘Asian writing’:

I also had no sense of the diversity of the Asian writing community. When we began, I assumed that Asian writers were those found on the continent, locals, maybe a handful of expats. I have come to realise that this definition was far too narrow—that in a globalised world the idea of Asian writing must be more inclusive and fluid, must encompass the perspectives of writers from the diasporas, travellers to the region, even people with an interest in the continent. Asia it turns out is everywhere. All you have to do is open your doors. How else can one run a Hong-Kong based journal from a house in London?

LR: An interesting feature of the magazine is “A Cup of Fine Tea,” in which you revisit and analyze works published earlier in the magazine. What was the impetus for this feature, and what are your future plans for it?

TH: “A Cup of Fine Tea” is our critique column for works previously published in the journal. The philosophy behind it is that if something is good enough to be published in Cha, then it is good enough to receive critical attention. We also hope to encourage discussion of the texts through our interpretations. We have also found that just providing a different way to look at the works draws readers to the journal website; some people are more drawn to the academic side while others prefer to read the original texts for themselves. I am not sure that we have definitive future plans for the column, although we would like to attract some outside writers to contribute. We have also had reactions from some of the writers featured in the column. For example, one poet would like to include our piece in her upcoming collection.

LR: Interesting about their reaction–are they ever surprised by what people find?

TH: When we analyse works previously published in Cha, we simply add a link to the relevant pieces (instead of reprinting them on the critique column). The writers usually leave us comments regarding the pieces and they can be found on the Fine Tea web site.

LR: In the latest issue of Cha, your co-editor Jeff Zroback commented that “the written word and the Internet are perhaps the two best ways to travel, to experience new things without ever leaving the comfort of your house”. He also remarks that editing an online journal from home “slips into the quotidian”. Could you comment on what it has been like to publish and online journal? What are the advantages or disadvantages of being online instead of on paper? Is it any more important for a writing community like the Asian diaspora?

TH: Jeff said it was ‘quotidian’ because we live together so of course the running of the journal slips into our day-to-day routine to a certain extent. That having been said, there is an element of travelling and having the world come into our computers associated with the journal.

As far as I see it, there are two main advantages to publishing online. The first is obviously cost. We simply couldn’t afford to publish a physical journal without more financial means. The second advantage is the accessibility and exposure the internet offers. If we were publishing a physical journal, we would have a very small and limited circulation. Being online, on the other hand, allows us to reach a wide audience throughout the world and find Asian writers wherever they may be. We don’t think we are losing that much by not having a physical copy. We may, however, consider publishing an anthology in the future, if we can secure funding.

LR: How have you found guest editors, and how have you found working with different guest editors helped or shaped Cha?

TH: One special feature of Cha is that we have at least one guest editor for each issue. The guest editors read the submissions with us and help us select works; they are among people who have appeared in the journal. We think that this process brings freshness and a new set of eyes to our submissions and thus gives each issue a slightly different feel. We both appreciate the new perspective the guest editors bring to the editorial process. The guest editors we have had so far include Eddie Tay, Arthur Leung, Nicholas Wong, Reid Mitchell, Bob Bradshaw, Royston Tester, Jonathan Mendelsohn and Gillian Sze.

We are particularly grateful that Eddie approached us to be our first guest editor. He eventually became our Reviews Editor. Reid has served as guest editor several times and now he is our Consulting Editor. Bob is not only a regular contributor (his poetry has been published in Cha two times), he also acts as a Tea Taster for our critique column, “A Cup of Fine Tea.” Arthur and Royston will return as guest editors in future issues, perhaps indicating that their experience of working with us was a pleasant one. Other guest editors such as Jonathan and Gillian have had creative works published in more than one issue of the journal. Gillian is our first female guest editor and therefore she will always have an important position in the journal.

LR: Any other future plans for Cha?

TH: We don’t have specific long term plans at the moment except for continuing to put out the journal and hopefully keep growing our readership.

LR: Last but not least, advice for writers and other members of the writing community?

TH: Keep writing. Keep reading.