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!

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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/

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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!

2011 Kundiman Faculty Jon Pineda, Kimiko Hahn, and Karen An-hwei Lee

From June 15th-19th, two Lantern Review staff members (Editor Iris A. Law and Staff Writer Henry W. Leung) attended the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Retreat at Fordham University in New York City.  What follows are our reflections on our experiences there.

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I. Iris

A few weeks ago, I stepped out of a D train in the Bronx and trundled my suitcase up the hill toward my very first Kundiman Retreat. Fordham Road greeted me with its jumble and racket: taxis honked their way down the street; motorcycles revved; teenagers laughed over the tinkling of a Mr. Softee van; shop owners shouted from behind racks of merchandise that spilled colorfully onto the sidewalk; a child descended uneasily from a bus and promptly vomited on the pavement. It felt strange to enter the gated, manicured space of the Rose Hill campus—ostrich-like; irresponsible, almost. But once swaddled into this beautifully (even eerily) verdant setting, it was also difficult not to feel that this was a space that in some way enacted the purpose of Kundiman: a place in which the creative soul could clear space within itself so that new patches of greenness could be sown and take root—not in isolation from the world, but in juxtaposition with, and in the context of, the world. I was reminded of something that I’d read in an interview Sarah Gambito gave to The Fordham Observer. In order to write in New York, she remarks, she tries “to be as still as [she] can in the city.” Indeed, to be a writer is to live in a position of simultaneous privilege and responsibility. As participants in social communities, we hold a responsibility to live fully in the world, so that we can write into, for, and from those communities. But at the same time, the work of the writer cannot be completed without the ability to occasionally take a step back: to be a still, small, open receptacle to the world, but a simultaneous processor of that world. And the lens with which we process—with which we must enact our craft—requires, from time to time, the ability to allow ourselves space to wrestle with the work itself, and with the world surrounding the work.

Fellows Jane Wong, Tarfia Faizullah, and Cathy Linh Che

I shared during Closing Circle (the final, reflective gathering of the weekend) that—as cliché as it may sound—the retreat felt like a gift to me. I came to New York expecting to take a step back from the world in order to write and to be in the presence of other writers; to expend great swaths of time developing projects; to workshop; and to make some engaging new friendships with other Asian American poets. But my experience of the retreat was, in fact, more like a step deeper into the experience of being a writer in the world—of being a poet in context.

Kundiman felt like a gift to me—as a writer, and as an Asian American-identified poet—not solely because of the writing I was able to do and the people that I met, but because I came away from the weekend feeling deeply nourished. Throughout the weekend, I was constantly being given small treasures—little tokens of wisdom, practical help, assurance, goodwill—by the faculty, by the staff, by the other fellows. Timothy Yu offered his advice and his ear (and gave up the chance to eat his dinner in peace) one evening when he allowed me to grill him about PhD programs in literature; Karen An-hwei Lee listened to me and offered me wisdom about faith and writing; Jon Pineda shared insights about envisioning pause and pacing in a manuscript; Kimiko Hahn opened the weekend with the invitation to “give ourselves permission” and encouraged us to make our writing time precious, even if that time was limited to ten minutes in the parking lot every morning; Sarah Gambito shared earnestly and encouragingly about the struggles she’d gone through while adjuncting; Oliver de la Paz offered advice about setting priorities in teaching and writing, and helped me to shape the jumble of vaguely-related poems that had grown out of my thesis into a new vision for a manuscript. There were practical gifts: a submissions spreadsheet model from Oliver de la Paz; leads on job opportunities from several of the fellows; the suite of prompts that Kimiko Hahn led us in creating and sharing during my last workshop; the insightful, concrete feedback that my home group gave me; the exquisite corpse poem the fellows secretly created as a thank-you for the staff. And there were immaterial gifts, too: the courage of the poems shared during salon; the river song that Misha Chowdhury sang to open the reading; the warmth, generosity and humility present amongst the members of my workshop group as they carefully critiqued each fellow’s work.

Fellows Annie Won, Kristine Uyeda, and Hong-Thao Nguyen

I left the weekend feeling full: with a renewed sense of purpose both for myself as an artist, and for the editorial vision of LR. Over and over again, I was reminded of our self-imposed imperative to curate a publication space in which the crazy, slippery thing that we call “Asian American poetry” can be simultaneously performed and interrogated. As Kimiko Hahn remarked during Timothy Yu’s presentation on the literary history of Asian American poetry, when we try to talk about what Asian American poetry is, we often end up “finding more of a description than a definition.“

Tim Yu, Monica Ong, Matthew Olzmann, Jane Wong, and Oliver de la Paz at the final Salon of the retreat

Indeed, that is exactly what Mia and I constantly wrestle with whenever we vision for LR. How, we ask ourselves, can we provide a space that is descriptive rather than prescriptive, messy rather than precise, illuminative rather than obscurative? A space that, in other words, enables the playing-out of central questions about the relationship between poetry and community.  As Sarah Gambito remarked during Closing Circle, “The poet needs to be able to see and write what our communities can’t say or do. How can a community see if the poets don’t?”

But the call to transformative illumination extends far beyond the work of the individual poet, or even the work of the editor. To quote Sarah once again: “Illuminative living, clear-sighted living, joyful living. That’s what a poem is.”

“Take the light back,” she urged us. And so that’s what I’m doing here.

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II. Henry

Kundiman means “love song.” Joseph Legaspi noted in an assignment to my workshop home group: “They say every poem is a love poem. Is it? Kundiman is a love poem. It is.” Sarah Gambito said at our Lincoln Center reading, “What is the truth? Our story, on our terms.” Jennifer Chang sent us a letter for Opening Circle that included this exhortation and reminder: “Be the poem you want to write. Then write it.” I was reminded of Jacqueline Woodson who wrote some years ago, “Name all the people / You’re always thinking about / People are poems.” And of an old friend arguing with pre-med students that medicine only delays death, but poetry—“Poetry saves lives.”

How far we’ve come from T.S. Eliot’s occlusive “Tradition” and from self-denying High Modernism! Wordsworth, I have read, tried for a while to speak in verse, grafting poetic form onto his conversations throughout the day. It was a failed, pretentious experiment. What if, instead, he had met this year’s Kundiman Fellows and understood that one need only live in verse? That, in the end, poetry’s bottom line is not adroitness but acquaintance?

Fellows Matthew Olzmann, Duy Ba Doan, and Sonia Mukherji

When we gathered in the lounge of O’Hare Hall, the usually softspoken Karen An-hwei Lee shouted that we were “Hot lava!” It’s no wonder the themes arising from this Kundiman Retreat melted a boundary between the poet and the poem—that estrangement we effect when we’re afraid to invest and represent ourselves in language. We spoke endlessly of permissions and fearlessness. The honey badger, which suffers bee stings and snake bites even as it chews its meals, was a kind of mascot. In our poems and conversations, we shared intimacies in a spirit that “confessional” poetry today often lacks in its sensationalism: a spirit of sanctity, of trust in the listener, of trust in the absolution. Graduating Fellow Helene Achanzar told us that she couldn’t sleep at night—she felt so known, so filled with joy, she didn’t want that vitality to end. I felt the same way, and as the Kundiman Retreat capped off a year of many transitions for me, I thought: We frequently change (Miles Davis: “I have to change, it’s like a curse”) but how often do we get to awaken?

It was a privilege to work with instructors Kimiko Hahn, Karen An-hwei Lee, and Jon Pineda. A privilege to workshop with Matthew Olzmann, graduating Fellow and winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, whose humor and wisdom were equally instructive. A surprise and privilege to meet Esther Lee, whose book I’d reviewed before I knew I’d meet her, and to see her process. A privilege to learn from all the adjuncts and professionals who are making it in the “real world,” and from Fulbright scholar-poets Misha Chowdhury, Tarfia Faizullah, and Jane Wong. A blessing to workshop with Carolyn Ho, who read my poems with more acuity than anyone I’ve known.

Henry with Helene Achanzar, Sandra Yee, and Vikas Menon

But illuminated craft was the least of the gifts I received from Kundiman; casting beyond it, Oliver de la Paz completely reframed my perspective on publication. (In fact, I was sketching Keating Hall from a park bench as I waited for our meeting, and when he called me over to his bench, I noted how different the building looked after a walk of just thirty feet). For the longest time I’ve been angry and anxious about the system in place, the way that submitting work to journals and contests can be a sordid rolling of the bones. I was worried about making a living out of my writing; he taught me instead to make a life out of it. He described publication as a part of the writing process, a way to find out if your work is ready—and if so, ready for whom, for what audience? In other words, what homes will you find for your poems and for yourself?

I have never felt so grounded as a writer, so sure of my place. I no longer need to identify as a writer of Asian American background in protest of being misunderstood; I can now identify as such knowing I have been understood, and can again, and because I have a love song to write. Once community has been found, the pressure of the citizen-poet seems to change from filling in negative or margin space to celebrating an open space. Since before Romanticism, our culture has been obsessed with the figure of the individual genius. But, in language, how much can we claim belongs to the individual? I place myself in a larger Asian American neighborhood believing that brilliance is a collaborative, fortunate, even miraculous, lifelong accumulation of words and their joy, of words and their grotesqueness.

Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi, Kundiman Founders

And I hold that poetry is not a duty. Duties are burdens. It’s a commonplace to say that artists and creators are products of their communities. But we are entering an internet eternity of uncertain ownership (in a wireless society, what does it mean to belong or be dispossessed?), and though the universe may be contracting, it is only getting more complex. Today, we get to will our communities into being; we get to nurture our sources of nurture. As Kimiko Hahn said at the reading, “Who says you can’t choose your family?” During the third-year Fellows’ graduation, they were given turtle charms as a symbol, for the turtle carries its home on its back everywhere; and now we, too, have a home to carry forth. I want to end this with love and respect for the Kundiman Fellowship and its community, for Kundiman means “love song,” and fellowship means we are all in this boat together.

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).

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.

Ken Chen speaks at the AAWW's Friday Panel

(A note: this post is a reflection on some of the on-site events that we attended during AWP this year. Mia will write more about our off-site reading in a later post).

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a month since AWP 2011 ended, and here we are—as usual—egregiously late with the update.  Nevertheless, this year’s conference was a colorful and thought-provoking experience for us, and we would be amiss if we did not share at least a taste of what we took away from it with you.  At last year’s AWP, we got our feet wet, so to speak, meeting and connecting with a host of amazing poets, and soaking in every bit of Asian American poetry that we could.  It was an exciting and effervescent time for us—we were just starting to get LR off the ground, and we were looking ahead at how our project might find its space amidst the community that was already out there.

Neil Aitken, Jennifer Chang, and Sarah Gambito, who comprised one half of the Kundiman Panel.

This year, we were struck once again with the generosity and warmth of those in the Asian American poetry community—from Neil Aitken of  Boxcar, who allowed us to use almost half of his bookfair table for our materials; to Kaya Press, who made content recommendations and gave us review copies; to Kundiman and the AAWW, who offered us time to introduce ourselves and a shoutout, respectively, at their panels; to all of the many people who came up to us to introduce themselves, to inquire about what we do, or to give us a kind word of encouragement.  It was both gratifying and amazingly thrilling to get to finally meet some of our contributors at our off-site reading, and on the whole, we were struck once again with how humbling and exciting it is to have the chance to do what we do, within the context of the community into which we’ve been carving our niche.

Jennifer Tseng, Kimiko Hahn, and Marie Lee at the AAWW Reading

This year, though, was also different for us—in that we came to the conference with a little more experience under our belts, and hot on the heels of the questions that we wrestled with in the editors’ note of our second issue.  And this year, it seemed that everywhere we went at the conference, those same questions—about definitions and identitarian politics—continued to follow us, throwing out new challenges to consider and  further questions to contemplate at every step.  From the first event we attended (a panel about Catholic identity at which we heard Luisa A. Igloria reflect on the relationship between Church and Philippine history, and how the tension of that balance manifests itself in her writing), to the last (the AAWW’s anniversary reading, at which we heard and were encouraged by well-established Asian American writers who explored subjects that often ranged far and beyond those that have come to be familiar within the Asian American literary canon), we continued to be confronted and struck by the way that contemporary Asian American literature regularly defies and transgresses its own boundaries, manifesting itself in areas where one might not otherwise think it a relevant, and incorporating work, and writers, who might not otherwise fit the categorically ‘orthodox’ definitions that we, or others, have tended to set for it.

Luisa A. Igloria speaks at Thursday's 'The Rosary Effect' panel.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop was at AWP for the first time this year, and we were particularly struck by something that Ken Chen, its director, said at their Friday “Page Turners” panel.  The AAWW, he said, has occasionally been criticized for getting involved with programming that does not seem to be directly, distinctly, related to Asian American identity (for example, sending people to participate in protests against the recent immigration legislation in Arizona).   But such criticisms, Ken feels, are unfounded;  he sees the mission of the AAWW (to curate literary events and to build coalitions) as one which absolutely necessitates a broad, rather than a narrow, focus.  The act of curating, he said, can be used “like a flashlight on the surface of history,” to contextualize Asian American writers and their work by putting it in conversation, and in context with, broader political issues that apply to people from different eras, and of multiple ethnicities.  An important part of the work that they do at the Workshop thus consists of “curating” people of different ethnicities together around issues of politics and art, in the belief that politics is not something that should be separate from individual identity or expression.  Participating in broader political explorations, he said, allows the AAWW’s work to remain relevant.

Such a position, though, requires that the Workshop envision Asian American identity (and, by association, Asian American literature), as something which is dynamic, rather than fixed.  This view infuses everything that the AAWW does, from the readings and discussions it holds to its newest project—Open City—which sets out to track gentrification throughout New York City, without claiming to limit its focus to Asian American communities exclusively.  [We are, by the way, very intrigued by the work being done on the Open City blog, and hope to write an Editors' Picks post about it at some point, but that is a subject for another occasion].

Patrick Rosal and Ed Lin at Saturday's AAWW Reading

Ken’s words resonated deeply with us.  From an editorial perspective, we often consider how to hold our ‘Asian American’ designation  loosely while still remaining true to our mission of being a space where both poetry by Asian American poets and poetry that engages with questions relevant to the study of the Asian diaspora can be played out.  And we liked Ken’s idea of the literary curator as both a “critic and an anthropologist” of literature.  His comments provided a bit of an ideological lens for us as we continued on through the rest of the conference, and caused us to ask how we might push ourselves further in this respect.

Purvi Shah speaking at the Asian American First (Poetry) Books Panel.

So we return to that nagging question once more: what, then, should an Asian American literary journal publish?  Certainly, we should, and desire to, publish work by poets who identify as Asian American—but we hope to do far more than only that.  None of us write, or exist, in a vacuum.  So why shouldn’t we be a publication that challenges established definitions about whose work, and what kind of poetry, may be considered relevant to this construct that we embrace and call ‘Asian America’?  A space that allows Asian American poets to read their work in a context that, even while celebrating it, refuses to isolate it from the greater conversation?  A magazine that invites both Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans to read, and to find something compelling and relevant, within the work that we’ve curated together under the category of ‘Asian American poetry’?  Why should we not allow ourselves to engage with flux, with disorder, with the complex irreconcilibilities of hybrid identity (‘Asian American’ is, after all, a hybrid designation, as it clumps people of many experiences and ethnic identities together into the same category, and becomes even more complex if we are to define ‘American’ broadly, too, in recognizing that the implications of ‘America’ extend far beyond the 50 US states, and that ‘Asian Americanness’ is, in a way, an inherently transnational condition—such that we already receive, and publish, work by poets who are not based in the US)?

Douglas Kearney blows the audience away with his deliciously bone-rattling performance at the 'New Kind of Hybrid' panel.

Punny as it may sound (given the presence of the light source in our own name) we left the conference thinking hard about how to actively embrace Ken Chen’s metaphor of curation as a flashlight.  How might that look, practically?  We’re not sure yet.  The Postcard Poetry Project (which invites writers of any sort—poet and non-poet, Asian and non-Asian—to read and respond to Asian American poetry), might be one place to start.  And we’d like to continue to push forward the ideal of exploring critical, aesthetic, and political questions, rather than familiar tropes, in our future issues.  Whatever the case, Ken’s thoughts have given us something meaty to chew on for the future.  “We [the Asian American Writers Workshop] are always reinventing Asian American literature,” he said at one point.  It seems to us that in order for LR to remain contemporary and relevant, we need to be able to do the same.

To see the rest of our photos from the AWP Panels we attended this year, visit our Flickr set.

It’s that time of year again.  Our friends at Kundiman and Alice James Books are accepting submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts  for their annual book prize.  This is a unique opportunity for Asian American poets of all stripes (they accept entries from both emerging and established poets), and we highly encourage you to consider submitting your work.  (Not to mention that this year they are accepting electronic submissions in addition to traditional paper sub’s—a plus for both the environment, and for the money saved on postage!)

A few details, from the Kundiman web site:

Kundiman and Alice James Books are accepting submissions of poetry manuscripts for The Kundiman Poetry Prize electronically and by regular mail through February 11, 2011. The Kundiman Poetry Prize welcomes submissions from emerging as well as established Asian American poets. Entrants must reside in the United States.

The winner receives $1000, book publication and a New York City feature reading.

Kudos to Kundiman and Alice James for continuing this tradition of helping Asian American poets to get their work out into the world. More information about the prize and its submission guidelines can be found on Kundiman’s web site.  Or see our Issue 1 Community Voices feature on Kundiman for more about the organization itself.

Image from Kristine Uyeda's postcard poem, "Red Riding Hood" (published in Issue 1 of LR)

This week’s prompt was largely inspired by the beautiful Kundiman postcard poems that we had the privilege of publishing in our first issue. Writing postcard poems can be a lovely exercise in multiple respects. They are, by nature, short, which is a challenge in and of itself.  Furthermore, they are handwritten, and in some cases, hand-illustrated, too.  The detail and attention that drafting them requires can add a dimension of intimacy to the finished product.  Additionally, the fact that they are necessarily one-of-a-kind means that each postcard poem becomes a little one-off publication unto itself, and the card’s fragility and vulnerability to things like fingers and rain as it travels through the mail means that the piece that is received on the other end is always inscribed with a physical history of travel and transfer from hand-to-hand-to-hand.  The exchange of postcard poems , furthermore, can be an excellent way to build community, inviting collaboration, response, and the incorporation of poetry on a micro-scale into the everyday correspondence of those who participate.

Experienced poets may find it satisfying enough to challenge themselves with the tiny spatial confines of a postcard, but I have also included a variation below that I’ve tried in the community/classroom setting with some success.

Prompt:

Create or find a postcard whose subject interests you (non-geographically specific subjects tend to work quite well).  Decide upon a persona, or voice, and an addressee.  From what space, place, or position is that postcard being written?  How might this sense of positionality affect the speaker’s attitude towards the addressee, and thereby, the tone of his or her address? Write an epistolary poem on the back of the postcard, using the small rectangular writing space to shape your poem’s form.

Classroom Variation (“Wish You Were Here”):

Write a poem in the form of a postcard from an unusual location.  When I’ve done this exercise with small groups in the past, I’ve come prepared with a handful of blank notecards on which strange, mundane,  wacky , and/or otherwise non-geographical ‘locations’ have been pre-written (e.g. “The Bridge of George Washington’s Nose,” “The Back of the Refrigerator,” “The Library Dumpster,” “The Bee’s Knees,” “Inside Harry Potter’s Shoe,” “The Kitchen Table,” etc.).  On the back side of each card, I’ll draw or print a “postcard” template (complete with spaces for mailing address and stamp, should the students decide to mail off their completed pieces). After introducing the concept of epistolary poems to the students and giving them a few examples, I allow them to choose a “postcard” featuring a location that interests them.  The students are then given the chance to try writing a postcard poem on the back sides of their chosen cards.  For younger or more artistically-inclined groups, adding an illustration on the blank front side of the card can also be fun.

I’ve you’d like some great examples of postcard poems, check out the Kundiman poems “Red Riding Hood,” “Leaving Cortona,” and “Dear Disappearing,” from Issue 1 of Lantern Review, or read the poems from Kundiman’s 2007 postcard project that appeared in Shampoo 31. As always, if this exercise inspires a poem that you’d like to share, please do send it in!  We are still accepting submissions for Issue 2.

Morning in Denver from our hotel window

Waking up to bright sun and brisk, springy weather every morning was just one of the many small points of brilliance that characterized AWP for Mia and me this year.  Having just come off winter (we both live in places that are not known for their sunshine during the first few months of the year), it was a treat to look outside our hotel room in the morning and see sun, blue skies, and mountains in the distance.  Denver was beautiful.  Even the snow that had been forecast for Wednesday held off for us.  But not even the gorgeous weather or the lure of spring fever proved powerful enough to distract us from the activity going on inside the harshly-lit interior of the Convention Center this weekend.  When I say that it was a wonderful AWP, I really mean it.  After last year’s conference in Chicago (I met Nick Flynn!  I heard Sun Yung Shin read! Lan Samantha Chang complimented my sweater! Poetry played in the elevators all day!) I was prepared for this year to be pretty darn awesome.  But my experience this year totally blew me away.  Part of it was the fantastic panels and readings that I attended.  Part of it was the excitement of walking around the bookfair and getting to talk about LR and hand out our bookmarks and mini-books. Part of it was the great hotel, great food, and Mia’s great company (I’ll admit that we took at least one night off towards the end of the conference just to spend some catching up and discussing each other’s poems over styrofoam cups of Ramen).  But a large part of what made the experience so great was the amazing generosity of the people that we met there, and the passion with which we heard them speak of their work and their involvement with communities of other writers.

Over the course of the four days, Mia and I went to panels and readings galore and spent lots of time in the bookfair.  In this two-part series, we’ll be reflecting on just a few of our favorite events.  For my post, I’ll be focusing on one off-site reading and three panels/readings that I particularly enjoyed.  For more about our experience, look through our Flickr gallery of photos from the weekend, and check back here at the blog for Mia’s followup later this week.

Follow the jump below to read my reflections on the Kundiman/Cave Canem Joint Reading on Wednesday, Thursday’s Kundiman Panel, Friday’s From the Fishouse reading, and Saturday’s Split This Rock’s panel.

Kundiman/Cave Canem Joint Reading

Ching-In Chen emcees at the Mercury Cafe

The Kundiman/Cave Canem off-site reading (on Wednesday night) was a truly rocking way to start off my weekend.  The event was held on the second floor of the Mercury Cafe — an awesomely eclectic venue (think: Vaudevillian with a homey twist) complete with a blue-lit stage, shiny red curtains, strings upon strings of Christmas lights, hand-painted signs, and plastic chairs and tables that had been set up dinner theater-style. The format of the night, moderated by emcees Ching-In Chen of Kundiman and Tara Betts of Cave Canem, began with a wildly diverse lineup of readings by notable Kundiman and Cave Canem fellows and faculty, and concluded with an open mic showcasing the work of other fellows who were in attendance.  The event (as most readings I’ve been to have tended to do) started late, and as my friend Sami and I were jetlagged and exhausted from traveling all day, we left before the open mic began, but the setlist of readings that we were able to catch was fabulous.  Notable moments included Tara Betts giving tribute to all of the Cave Canem fellows who had passed away through the years, Ching-In Chen telling the story of, and reading poetry by, Melissa Rojas (a Kundiman fellow who was kidnapped and tortured while doing community work in the Philippines), Kazim Ali’s sassy/quirky tribute to Lucille Clifton (which eventually went on so long the emcees had to cut him off!), Oliver de la Paz’s reading of a wonderful poem that described his teenage years as a punk, and Cornelius Eady’s fabulous performances of “Emmett Till’s Glass-Topped Casket” and “Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat” (his delivery always resonates just so in the room and gives me the chills).  Several of the readers also made some very thought-provoking statements about the important work that Cave Canem and Kundiman had been doing in terms of creating a space for writers of color within the writing world.  I believe it was Toi Derrecotte who noted, at some point, that the face of AWP had changed dramatically during her career — to have a room full of writers of color listening to other writers of color read would have been unheard of years ago.  So what these two groups have been able to do is incredibly remarkable. And yet, there is still much work to be done (even looking at the demographic of the reading going on downstairs – which Sami and I nearly walked into by mistake at first – one could tell that AWP outside of the panels dealing with race is still in some ways quite homogenous). Indeed, the need for community spaces became a theme that we heard repeated again and again throughout the weekend.  The deep sense of loneliness that can be felt by writers of color who are operating in an environment where they feel that they are the only one: at some point one writer (I cannot remember who, unfortunately) likened it to writing in the dark and thinking they were writing all alone, and then it was as if suddenly Cave Canem switched on a light and they realized that there were others all around them, doing the same thing.

Love Songs and Leaps of Faith [Kundiman Panel]

Vikas Menon introduces the Kundiman panelists

Kundiman’s noontime panel on Thursday was another wonderful testament to the importance of community to the creative life and growth of a vibrant group of writers. Moderator Vikas Menon kicked off the event by describing the mission and history of Kundiman, and then five Kundiman fellows (Janine Joseph, R.A. Villanueva, Matthew Olzmann, Esther Lee, and Rick Barot) read poems and shared their reflections on the impact that Kundiman had had on them.  I was especially moved by Janine Joseph’s description of the moment when she realized that Kundiman was a space that finally felt like family, like home, and by her powerful ghazal describing the dizzying experience of her concussion after a car accident .  Olzmann’s hilarious poem involving large, carnivorous reptiles with magnets taped to their heads (enough said!) and R.A. Villanueva’s deft lyrics dealing with quantum mechanics and frog dissection in Catholic school also stuck with me that afternoon.  The final aspect of this panel that I really appreciated was the way in which one could see community truly being enacted in the ensuing dialogue between the audience and the panelists.  Instead of sitting in uncomfortable silence, audience members (including some very well-known ones, like David Mura) sprang right into the discussion once the Q&A portion of the session was opened, throwing out lots of big questions to which the panelists responded as a collective body, referring to not only their own experiences, but also to one another, and to other people in the audience.  And the conversation did not end with the end of the panel — it continued on in the hallway long after we had to vacate the room.

From the Fishouse: A Reading of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great

Oliver de la Paz reads

I’ll admit that – not being incredibly familiar with most of the poets in the lineup for this reading – I initially went to this event mostly to hear Oliver de la Paz and Major Jackson read. I ended up being very glad that I did, though, because this reading, as a whole, proved to be absolutely fantastic.  I was, of course, duly blown away by de la Paz and Jackson’s performances, but Mia and I also concurred that we loved the vibrancy of Adrian Matejka’s work — the way the room resonated with his voice and the audience was stirred to verbal response.  And when Camille Dungy – who was asked to read her poem “Black Spoon” at the last minute – began to recite it from memory, I was spellbound.  One of the truly lovely aspects of this reading was that each of the poets alternated between reading their own work and reading the work of other poets who were represented in the Fishouse anthology.  I thought this was a great way to represent the contributions of poets who were not included on the panel — and it reminded me of Dana Gioia’s famous protestation in his essay “Can Poetry Matter?” that all readings should include at least some work by other poets.  I don’t always agree with all of Gioia’s views on poetry, but after having sit in on the Fishouse reading, I could see the wisdom of his idea.  It was neat to hear each poem’s work in conversation with the work of other poets whom they admired, and it was also great to get a sense of the rich variety of voices that the anthology contains.  (We definitely recommend checking out this anthology, by the way – it’s set up to be a useful tool for teachers, and is – in an unusual move – organized by poetic device; plus, how can you resist a book that bills itself as “a jamboree of poetry at its acoustic best”?)

Don’t You Hear This Hammer Ring? Socially Engaged Poetry in the Age of Obama [ Split This Rock Panel]

Sarah Browning speaks at the Split This Rock panel

This was the second-to-last panel that I attended during the course of the weekend, and it was a great way to synthesize many of the things I’d heard said about politics and poetry at earlier panels.  It was unfortunate that a fair number of the panelists who were scheduled to present could not make it (I was especially disappointed not to be able to hear Regie Cabico), but moderator Sarah Browning presented a superbly eloquent argument for the necessity of political poetry, and the panelists’ readings illustrated the range of possibilities made available by socially engaged poetics.  It was really compelling to see how deeply invested the organizers of Split This Rock are in the belief that poets cannot responsibly exist in a contemplative little bubble — that they must, in some way, reach out and respond to the injustices in the world around them. Despite the fact that it was an early panel on the last day and everyone was tired, the presenters carried themselves with gravity, grace, and a sense of humor – something that came in handy whenever things (like Melissa Tuckey’s discovery that she was missing half of the poem she’d intended to read) didn’t go exactly as planned!  The poets at this reading also engaged in the reading of other people’s poems (or “OPP”), which was awesome to see.  Their own poetry was great, as well; Mia and I both particularly enjoyed John Murillo’s performance of “Ode to a Crossfader” (“something to wake me up,” he commented by way of introduction),  a wonderfully syncopated piece that perfectly captured the edgy rhythms of scratching, mixing and sampling.

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The panels I attended this weekend formed a powerful illustration of the tapestry of conversations surrounding the work that I — and all of us here at LR – desire to participate in: the work being done by writers of color, work being done with an attention to issues of race, class, and sexuality, the work of communities, and the plain beauty of well-crafted and sonically resonant poetry.  The weekend served as a much-needed reminder of the importance of pushing forward into the things that we as Asian American poets and as lovers of poetry need to survive creatively, of the good work that has been done by older writers in order to pave the way for us, and of the work that we must continue to press into — in making a space for ourselves within the greater conversation of American poetry, but also in engaging with our responsibility to respond to the things that we see going on in our communities.  That we can, and must, be a cluster of voices that speaks earnestly to the luminous qualities of language and to the pain and joy of lived experience, but that we must not forget to remain attuned to the “temperature” of the world around us.

National Poetry Month Prompt Contest (Deadline EXTENDED)

We’ve had a modest response to our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest so far, but we’d like to give more people the chance to enter, so we’re extending the deadline to Thursday, April 8th. The same rules will apply (we’ll announce the third runner-up on Friday the 9th).  Please do take the time to submit a prompt if you haven’t already done so — it only takes five minutes, and if you win, you’ll not only have the opportunity to see your prompt featured on our blog, but will also receive a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz.

Lantern Review at AWP 2010

As we mentioned in last month’s update, the LR editors (Mia and Iris) will both be in Denver for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference next week, April 7-10.  If you’re going to be there, please come look us up around the Kundiman/Alice James Book table, or at one of the Kundiman events, and say hello!  We’ve been working really hard on some nifty promotional materials to distribute, so if you visit Kundiman’s table, you’ll also be able to pick up  bookmark and one of a series of handmade mini-books we’ve produced to featuring selections of our blog content.  Of you follow us on Twitter or are a Facebook fan, you’ve already seen some sneak peeks.  We’ll post photos of the finished products and a list of Asian American poetry events taking place at AWP on the blog early next week. (We’ll also do an event coverage post about AWP after we return from Denver).

April Community Calendar Updated

We’ve updated our Community Calendar page for the month of April.  As always, please continue to let us know about events we haven’t included.  We’ll continue to add to and update the list as the month goes on.

End of Reading Period for Issue 1

Our submissions period for Issue 1 will close on April 15th (tax day!) If you haven’t yet sent in your work, we want to see it!  You can find our submissions guidelines here. (Many thanks to those who have already submitted).

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Happy Passover or Holy Week to those of you who are celebrating!

Best,

Iris & Mia
Lantern Review Editorial Board