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Marc Vincenz’s The Propaganda Factory (Argotist EBooks 2011)

Marc Vincenz's THE PROPAGANDA FACTORY

Contributor Marc Vincenz’s new e-book The Propaganda Factory was released by Argotist EBooks this past August.  In this short collection (which includes “Taishan Mountain,” a poem that first appeared in LR issue 2), Marc weaves together layers of history and geography through an ever-shifting range of lenses that take us from the level of the microscopic to the realm of the galactic at a moment’s notice.  It is available for download here.

Kim Koga’s ligature strain (TinFish Press 2011)

Kim Koga's LIGATURE STRAIN

Issue 3 contributor Kim Koga now has a chapbook (ligature strain) out with TinFish.  In this linked sequence, which was published as #6 in TinFish’s current retro chap series, Kim floods the page and the mind’s eye with feverish, liquidly intense imagery that involves birth, echolocation, pink and white flesh, and lots of fetal beavers (yes, the actual animal).  Be on the lookout for more about ligature strain later this month.

Official Launch of How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology

HOW DO I BEGIN?

The Hmong American Writers’ Circle, whom we featured in Issue 3, officially launched its anthology, How Do I Begin? (Heyday Books 2011), in late October. The book is now available for purchase via Heyday’s web site.  We’re absolutely thrilled that this landmark anthology is finally in print, and are incredibly excited to see the HWAC’s hard work on it come to fruition. 

Kartika Review Issue 10

KARTIKA REVIEW - Issue 10

Kartika Review‘s beautiful tenth issue has just hit the web (and Lulu, too—as it is now also available in either black-and-white or full-color hard copy!), and we were especially elated to see the poetry section, which is edited by Kenji C. Liu (of LR issue 2) and includes work by two of our other past contributors: Kathleen Hellen (Issue 2) and Melissa R. Sipin (Issue 3)!  The issue also includes one of Timothy Yu’s fantastically irreverent “Chinese Silence” poems (a series that began as a response to Orientalist tropes in Billy Collins’ work), and poems and an interview with Ed Bok Lee.

TAYO Literary Magazine Issue 3

TAYO - Issue 3

TAYO, the extraordinarily-designed Filipino literary magazine for whom Melissa Sipin (of LR Issue 3) serves as Creative Director, has just put out its gorgeous third issue. The issue, which includes poetry by LR Issue 2 contributor Aimee Suzara and an interview with LR  Issue 1 contributor Barbara Jane Reyes, is available both in print and in a special, new online edition.

Cura: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action

CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action

Kundiman founder Sarah Gambito recently announced the release of the first issue of CURA, a literary project that is produced out of the Creative Writing program at Fordham University.  Edited by Sarah and designed by LR Issue 3 contributor Monica Ong, each issue is curated according to a prompt that draws its inspiration from a central theme (this year, the theme is “home”).  Issue 1 features work by Bushra Rehman (LR Issue 1) and our very own staff writer (and Issue 1 contributor) Henry W. Leung alongside poems by the likes of  Robert Bly and Evie Shockley.  CURA is accepting submissions through Thursday for its second issue, whose prompt is “the body as home”—so please consider sending something their way!

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Many congratulations to Oliver, Marc, Kim, HWAC, Kenji, Kathleen, Melissa, Aimee, Barbara, Bushra, Henry, Monica, and to the editors of Kartika, Tayo, and CURA.  To read their contributions to LR, please visit any of our past issues (you can navigate to any of their work through the issues’ respective Tables of Contents:  [Issue 1], [Issue 2], and [Issue 3]). Happy Monday!

Sea Stones: Ordered, Reordered, Reversed

As I’ve been working on coding, laying out, and putting together Issue 3 (which in many ways has proven to be a much more technically challenging endeavor than our previous two issues), the question of order/ordering has continually been at the forefront of my mind. How important decisions about order are when presenting a group of poems, or images! Juxtaposition means everything: placing even one small poem strategically can entirely change and elevate the overall energy of an issue, an anthology, a collection. And (to apply this thought to the level of craft) how much more so with regards to the arrangement of lines, images, stanzas, within each poem itself! At this year’s Kundiman retreat, Oliver de la Paz showed me how the placement of a single poem within a manuscript would affect the impact with which certain images in it would be perceived by a reader—and that revising with attention to order, both on a inter-poem and intra-poem level, was therefore very necessary. And during workshop, Kimiko Hahn suggested that one of the Fellows try reversing the order of the lines in her poem, a simple change that which—when applied, completely reshaped its arc, and brought the whole piece alive in a new and fascinating way.

Of course, reversing the order of a poem’s lines does not work the same magic in every case—it worked on the poem that we were discussing because it allowed the strange linguistic impulses of the final lines to speak better and thus made the arc of the new version much less tidy and more texturally interesting. But the results of this simple revision exercise got me thinking about how to apply it to my own writing. How many times have I shuffled and reordered stanzas in a poem that feels stuck, only to find that the arc of the poem was still either falling flat? Oftentimes, my last thoughts as I draft a poem may be some of the most complex, the most evocative, and so reversing a poem, image by image, or even line by line, could be a very useful way to at least read the images in the draft from a different angle, and thus to reenter the revision process on a fresh foot.

Today’s prompt is an example of more shameless, deliberate “stealing” from the advice of teachers whom I admire.

Prompt: Take a poem whose arc or movement feels “stuck” and reverse the order of the images or lines as way to re-envision the “map” of the poem.  Alternately, if you are working on a manuscript, try reversing or changing the order of poems, or experimenting with reversing lines within the opening and closing poems to see whether the impact of this reordering reveals anything new and luminous.

On the subject of "stealing" poems from the observed world: a "steal-worthy" orthographical variation? (Bag reads "Roos Beep").

Today’s exercise is less of a prompt and more of a practice, but having just returned from the 2011 Kundiman retreat—at which Oliver de la Paz announced on the first day that he fully intended to “steal” from each of us, and where Kimiko Hahn shared a lovely collaborative variation of a “stealing” exercise during my final workshop of the weekend—I wanted to continue the chain and extend the same thought to you.

Perhaps the term “stealing” is a bit harsh-sounding—”recycling,” “quoting,” or “riffing” might be more a more genteel way to put it, since what it involves is not outright plagiarism, so much as a process of exploring new avenues through “sampling” and strategic mimicry—but somehow it still feels apropos, as the delightful discovery and surprise that occurs when one takes something that one admires and puts it into a different context, tinkers with it, uses it as a launching pad or a frame, embeds it, or layers it with one’s own work, does in part come from the feeling that one is doing something utterly subversive.  Socially and culturally, we tend to envision the artist as a lonely figure who operates entirely self-sufficiently—the work, and its every element, must come out of her head and her head alone.  But in fact, in our daily lives as artists, we are engaged in a perpetual process of “stealing”: we observe things in the world around us—the quality of light on a bedspread, the deep crease in a parent’s forehead, the conversation between a pair of girls at a nearby table, the color of a house, what the host is saying on TV, the sound a cash register makes when it opens, the texture of a wall at the train station, the funny taste of food when one is sick, a joke that fell flat at a party—we process them, we file them away, and these things which we file away filter themselves, eventually, into our creative work.

Painting students routinely practice their technique by studying and copying the work of the masters.  DJ’s “sample”  lyrics and melodies from other people’s songs, and composers regularly embed bars containing musical “quotes” from famous themes into new pieces.  So why not be intentional about the act of “stealing” in writing poetry?  While in one sense,  “stealing” can be an homage to the work of someone we admire, it is also a necessity of creative life and the hallmark of an open, actively collaborating community.  If we had nothing to learn from one another, then community would not be necessary.  But there is always more to learn, always new and different ways to stretch oneself creatively—things that are best accomplished when one is actively reading, communicating with, interacting with, and responding to the work of others—and thus, the writer, as a matter of deep necessity, must situate him or herself within some sort of literary tradition or community (whether real, virtual, or residing amongst the shelves of a well-read library).

Today’s prompt (which is itself “stolen” from Kimiko Hahn’s workshop!) has two parts—the first, to be completed as an individual exercise, and the second, to be shared in the context of a group of writers. Many thanks to Oliver and Kimiko, respectively, for sharing the wisdom of “stealing” with us, and for allowing me, in turn, to “steal”  their ideas so that I can share them with you here.

Exercise:

1.  Read someone else’s poem and hone in on a specific line, image, or aspect of its craft that you admire. Create a writing prompt for yourself that challenges you to write a new poem that makes use of that line or stylistic technique.  For example, if you admire the way that the poet uses enjambment, challenge yourself to write a poem that makes similar use of enjambment.

2. Variation for a workshop or group of writers: have everybody in the group read the same poem and create an exercise for themselves as in part (1).  Afterwards, the workshop members should share their newly-devised prompts with one another to create a suite of connected exercises, or “gifts” to one another (to use Kimiko Hahn’s wording).

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.

Today’s Monday Morning Poem is a recording taken from the wonderful archives at From the Fishhouse:

Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade with a Book and a Rattle from a String of Pearls.”

This is an elegy, an achingly beautiful one that has haunted me (Iris) since I first heard the poet read it in Chicago at AWP 2010.  The tenderness with which de la Paz handles his subject is deeply moving to me (particularly as I continue to reflect on the loved ones whom I have lost this past year), and, in combination with the resonance of his sonics and the spareness of his tone and syntax, paints a rich portrait of a woman that is at once ferocious and yet gentle, quiet and yet somehow audaciously brave.

To listen to the recording, click through and then hit “play” on the grey bar next to the ear icon at the top of the page.

Henry Leung’s interview with Mr. de la Paz will appear on the blog later this week.

Happy Monday!

National Poetry Month Contest Prompts (sponsored by Kaya Press)

In celebration of the urge to translate idea and image into line and stanza, we will be posting a prompt submitted by one winner of our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest on each successive Friday of a full week in April, beginning with the 3rd runner-up on the 8th, and leading up to the Grand Prize winner on the 29th.  Our big winner will receive a copy of Lisa Chen’s Mouth, thanks to the kind generosity of Kaya Press.  Many thanks to all those who submitted a prompt!  Please check back every Friday to see whether your submission has been chosen!

Reading Period for Issue 3

Looking for something to do with your responses to the contest-winners’ prompts?  You’re in luck, because we will be reopening our reading period to submissions for Issue 3, starting next week.  Time to dust off the poetry hat and get your revising on!

Continued Postcard Project Posts (Postmark Deadline: April 15th)

If you took home a postcard from AWP or received one in the mail, now is the time to send it in! Please don’t forget, our postmark deadline is April 15th.  We will continue to post cards as we receive them.  (A reminder that we also plan to choose a couple of postcards to feature in Issue 3, and participating in the Postcard Project does not preclude your submitting through our regular reading period, so if you’re hoping for an extra chance of your work being noticed this time around, sending in your postcard poem in addition to submitting through our electronic system is one way to go!)

Interviews with Oliver de la Paz and Sarah Gambito

We are very excited to have the honor of being able to publish interviews with two Asian American literary luminaries, Oliver de la Paz and Sarah Gambito, on our blog later this April. Be on the lookout for our staff writers’ interviews with these two distinguished poets.

. . . and More.

As always, we’ve got our regular columns (Sulu DC, Becoming Realer), but we’ve also got a few surprises up our sleeves, so keep your eyes peeled!

Happy Poetry Month,

Iris & Mia.

Portrait of Old Friends.

Valentine’s Day, with its often-saccharine greeting card verses and glossy commercial sentiments (not to mention its frequent misquotations of everyone from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson), is at hand once again, and what better time of year than to give that tricky (and oft-abused) specimen—the love poem—a subversive spin?  I’m not talking about writing penny dreadfuls or anguished emo laments (we are not Death Cab for Cutie here).  I’m talking about defying expectation completely with regards to what a “love poem” is and/or should be.  In a sense, the love poem (as it is known in contemporary popular culture) is very much akin to the ode, in that the tone and subject matter of its address tends to elevate the “you” with the use of high language and often ornate imagery.    The purpose of the exercises that follow are to invite you to write against this sense of elevation while still retaining, in some way, at least a loose engagement with the intimacy, tenderness, or intensity of the close gaze in which the speaker of a love poem might hold the object of his or her affection.  To, in short, write against and across cliché and into something that is bold, surprising, and new.

Prompt: Write an “unromantic” love poem.  Some ideas:

1. Write a love poem that specifically avoids the use of any words or gestures which might traditionally be associated with the genre  (For example,  a sonnet that avoids words like “love,” “lips,” “kiss,” “flowers,” “soul,” “heart,” “tongue,” “forever,” “time,” “youth,” “beauty,” “heat”, “soft,” “blood,” “sun,” “flame,” “darkness,” “arms”).  If you’re stuck, try writing an inversion of a famous love poem to start you out.

2. Write a love poem that focuses the speaker’s gaze on a mundane, miniscule, technical, inanimate, messy, awkward, or even grotesque task, process, or object, rather than on a subject of conventional beauty. (Think: the very famous WCW poem,  “This Is Just to Say,” which focuses on plums; or even the spirit of John Donne’s “The Flea,” which uses a parasite as its primary metaphor)

3. Write a love poem that engages with an aesthetic of sparseness, remoteness, or sterility (both sonically and imagistically), rather than with one of superfluousness.

4. Write a love poem that takes the aesthetic of elevated excess to its extreme, such that it becomes wildly surrealistic, or grotesquely decadent, or even campy (à la gurlesque).

5. Write a love poem that limits its exploration of its subject to only one, non-visual sense (i.e. smell, touch, taste, or sound).

6. Write a love poem that  does not take the form of a direct address (e.g. “I” to “you”).  Or try eliminating the first and second person completely.

7. Write a love poem addressed to an object of ambiguously romantic or non-romantic love (for example, a stranger, a child, a public figure who is known for something other than their beauty or glamour) and which engages with that subject in terms of the everyday or mundane. (Think Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade  with a Book and the Rattle from a String of Pearls” or Marc Vincenz’s “Taishan Mountain“  from LR, Issue 2).

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Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 | Timothy Yu | Stanford University Press (2009)

Recommended by Mia: “This is one of the key critical texts on my reading list for the holidays.  I’ve only skimmed the first few chapters, but thus far have found Yu’s argument compelling, his analysis rigorous, and his wide-ranging knowledge of Asian American and Language poetry in the United States to be informative to my own work—not to mention useful in historicizing these two movements/moments in contemporary poetry!

From the Tinfish Editors’ Blog: ‘Using a definition of the avant-garde that has less to do with aesthetics than with social groups composed of like-minded artists, Yu argues that Asian American poetry and Language writing formed parallel movements in the 1970s. [...] Both presented themselves in opposition to the mainstream; both were marked by questions of form and racial identity. Both meant to create art out of social groups, and reconstitute the social through the reception of their art.’”

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Radiant Silhouette: New & Selected Work 1974-1988 | John Yau | Black Sparrow Press (1989)

Recommended by Mia: “Yau is one of the two major poets that Timothy Yu addresses in Race and the Avant-Garde (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is the other), so I’ve been reading through his New & Selected Work for an introduction to the thematic and aesthetic scope of his early career.  He’s a fascinating figure in Asian American poetry and, as Yu points out, ‘might best be read as a restoration of the links between politics, form, and race that characterize the avant-garde Asian American poetry of the 1970s [... providing] the first opportunity for most readers to recognize [...] the presence of that avant-garde back into the very origins of Asian American writing.’”

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Man on Extremely Small Island | Jason Koo | C&R Press (2009)

Recommended by Iris: “Jason Koo’s style is very different from my own, but this book (his first collection) managed to completely charm me with its quirkiness.  The voice of the book’s primary speaker manifests a world-weary exhaustion that is, on the surface, darkly melancholic and painfully self-deprecating.  He obsesses over his dirty apartment while eating a tuna sandwich, dreams about floundering clumsily through an encounter with Lucy Liu, envisions himself stranded on an island in the middle of an ocean, worrying about the size of his nose.  But beneath the speaker’s (at times endearingly hyperbolic) self-consciousness lies a striking vulnerability and a luminous ability to evoke the fantastic within the mundane: BBQ chip crumbs echo the ‘fine grains / of my slovenliness,’ becoming ‘barbecue pollen,’ and later, ‘orange microbes’ (9); Lucy Liu becomes a motherly goddess figure who guides him through a secret mission, ‘pulling you after her diving into the stage,’ which becomes the arena for an undersea showdown complete with battleships, lingerie models, and harpoons (22) , the island transforms into the kneecap of a giant woman who ‘has no nose. Just a space where mine / can fit’ (77). Part Frank O’Hara, part tragic hero of his own sardonic comic-book series, the speaker’s sense of humor, whimsy, and wonder, as transmitted by Koo’s craft, paint a picture of a world that reinvisions the now-archetypal image behind John Donne’s famous ‘No man is an island’ with simultaneous irreverence and tenderness. ”

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Beasts for the Chase | Monica Ferrell | Sarabande Books (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “Possibly one of the most beautiful collections that I have read this year.  Along with the beautifully strange and grotesque figurations of the body that occur in Kimiko Hahn’s The Artist’s Daughter, Ferrell’s gorgeously ornate (but never stiff) renderings of mythological and literary figures have caused me to look more closely at my own craft, to think more minutely and intensely about the intricacies of shape, texture, and fluid—the body as shapeshifting tableau, rendered intricately and forcefully (even animalistically, at times) on the page.”

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The Elephant’s Journey | José Saramago (Trans. Margaret Jull Costa) | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2010)

Recommended by Monica: “This is the first Saramago book I’ve read and I hope you, like me, find and read everything you can by him. The Elephant’s Journey is apparently a work of historical fiction but it also lives in the interstices of other genres such as fable, socio-political commentary, philosophy, and gentle comedy. An Indian elephant, gifted to the king of Portugal by Goa, is re-gifted to the archduke of Austria. How he makes his journey across 16th c. Europe with his mahout is basically the plot, and there’s not much to it. It is Saramago’s narrative strategies, such as the artifice of orality, defocalization, polyvocality, and digressions, that give the book its force.”

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The Road to Wanting | Wendy Law-Yone | Chatto & Windus (2010)

Recommended by Simone: “It begins with a suicide and a comedy of errors, wrought with the dark humor leftover in ordinary people’s minds in a former British colony. Although the town of Wanting and the Wild Lu tribe which feed this novel’s plot are the author’s inventions, Burma (her birthplace) and its complex human dramas are very real. The principle character, Na Ga, illuminates the stark reality of what Nobel Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi once referred to as a ‘Fascist Disneyland.’ Na Ga’s story gives voice to the country’s ethnic minorities and reveals a more intricate portrait of Burma through her own longing, displacement and growth. Throughout her tumultuous journey, Na Ga seeks to discover what–and where–’home’ truly is.”

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Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire | Carole Maso | Counterpoint (2000)

Recommended by Kelsay: “I find Maso’s short collection of essays to be incredibly inspiring for the lyric artist in any genre. In this book, she elevates the act of writing about writing to poetry because she’s not afraid to interrogate the task of a lyricist, especially a lyrical writer of prose, while making love to language itself in each essay.”

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Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation | Jeff Chang | Picador (2005)

Recommended by Kelsay: “When asked what basic idea he wanted readers to walk away with this past November in a lecture on Can’t Stop Won’t Stop at Saint Mary’s College of California, Jeff Chang said: ‘That hip-hop is a worldview.’ Even more than a history of the music that made his generation, his book is a story of generations, political ideologies, history, culture and the worldview of the people participating in the grassroots movement over the past thirty years.  ”

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And don’t forget the following books—all of which we’ve reviewed and/or featured in the last year—either:

Poetry

• Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Insides She Swallowed by Sasha Pimental Chacón (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• from unincorporated territory [hacha] and from unincorporated territory [saina] by Craig Santos Perez (as featured in this interview with him)
• Why is the Edge Always Windy? by M0ng-Lan (as featured in this guest post by Stephen H. Sohn and this interview with her)
• In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words by Barbara Tran (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (as featured in this guest post about Tupelo, by Stephen H. Sohn)
• Ignatz by Monica Youn (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz (reviewed in this post by Supriya Misra)
• Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (featured over the course of two months: part 1 and part 2)
• Each Crumbling House by Melody Gee (reviewed in this post by Henry W. Leung)
• The Half-Inch Himalayas by Agha Shahid Ali (as featured in this post by Mrigaa Sethi)
• 100 Poems by S S Prasad (reviewed in this post by Monica Mody)
• Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai (reviewed in this guest post by Stephen H. Sohn)
• The Mental Life of Cities by Eddie Tay (reviewed in this post by Henry W. Leung)
• Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes (reviewed in this post by Monica Mody)
• Burnings by Ocean Vuong (reviewed in this post by Kevin Minh Allen)

Prose

• I Love You’s Are For White People by Lac Su (reviewed in this post by Ly Chheng)
• I-Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (reviewed in this post by Ly Chheng

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Please help support the work of small presses and Asian American writers this season.  What’s on your holiday reading or gift list this year? Leave us a note in the comments to share your favorite titles from 2010.

A bicyclist pauses at an intersection in New York City while a sea of yellow taxicabs moves around him.

I’ve always found that one of the occasions on which I am best able to write is when I’m traveling.  I don’t drive, and so whenever I need to go somewhere that is too far away to be reached by bike, I ride all sorts of buses, trains, planes, shuttles, trams, taxis, and other forms of mass transit in order to reach my destination.  There is something uniquely meditative about these trips: despite the fact that I am usually surrounded by—even crushed in against—other passengers, the motion and sound of the vehicle and the relative anonymity of being amidst a crowd of strangers provide me with excellent opportunities to listen, observe, and record.

In Oliver de la Paz’s poem “Aubade with a Thistle Bush Holding Six Songs,” the speaker engages with the sensory aspects of his experience on a train in order to contextualize a portrait of a fellow passenger:

A man told me that he had wasted his life. I did not know him.
We were on a train moving from one trespass to the next,
the fields in the windows shifting utterly into daybreak.

As the poem progresses, we find that the train itself and the experience of traveling on it have become the primary device by which this portrait is rendered:

The rails below us were making comparisons
as if they were saying look at the thorn tree gone wild,
look at the gravel kicked on the ties.

I wondered about the hollow of the guitar and of the voice of the man.
It’s always like this on trains‹the burn of your ear
when a stranger speaks over the sun cutting through windows.

The speaker, who knows nothing about this man besides what he has heard and seen of him within the context of the train ride, finds that the sound of the train and the slant of the light through its windows merge into his vision of this stranger, until, by the end of the poem, the man is absorbed into the greater network of train trips and other journeys that form the speaker’s experience: he is, the speaker states, just one of many strangers “who’s asked me for an ear.”  Like so many piece of luggage, some of those people’s stories have been remembered by the speaker, while others’ have been “left at the station.”  Most, we imagine, have suffered the latter fate.  But the speaker remembers this particular man’s story because of the way that his memory of it is mediated by his own experience of the train ride.  What he recalls most vividly is not the content of the story itself, but the scene outside the window of the train as it was being told: the three birds that “blur by,” and the way that their flight fixed this particular stranger into the speaker’s memory, as if sticking his name “to a thistle.”

Prompt: Write a poem that uses the sensory experience of riding a particular form of transportation as a device by which to relate the story of a journey or trip that you’ve taken.

THE ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW, Issue 1

It’s always exciting to receive a fat jiffy envelope with a book-like bulge in it when the mail comes. So when my copy of The Asian American Literary Review‘s inaugural issue arrived last month, I was especially ecstatic to rip into the envelope. Since the editors of AALR announced their presence online earlier this year, I had been eagerly anticipating their first issue.  Their pre-release publicity had advertised an impressive lineup of literary luminaries, and I must say that in every respect, the issue has managed to live up to the editors’ promises.

I’m going to focus on some of the poetry in the issue in a bit (since this is, after all, a poetry blog), but before I delve into that train of thought, I should note that I immensely enjoyed the prose in the issue, too.  I especially liked that the editors chose to began the issue with a “forum” (i.e. a series of position statements and replies) in which three Asian American writers (Alexander Chee, David Mura, Ru Freeman) responded to questions regarding the necessity and purpose of an Asian American literary magazine.  I enjoyed following the convergence and divergence of the participant’s different points of view, and in particular,  thought that their discussion about whether an Asian American writer must necessarily write ‘about’ his or her ethnicity brought up some very important questions, such as: do MFA programs disservice students of color by teaching them to write toward a “norm” set by mostly middle-class, white models?  Or, conversely, do they force students of color to conform their work to an particular “trope” or mode in which  “ethnic writing”  is expected to operate?  I also enjoyed the dialogue sparked by David Mura’s observations about the lack of longevity that has hitherto plagued many Asian American literary ventures.  Mura noted two problems that have contributed to this trend: 1) a lack of financial and administrative know-how, and 2) the divided nature of the Asian American community with regards to whether or not to claim a pan-Asian American identity.  I thought that Mura’s observations were spot-on. Young as LR is, my work on it thus far has already given me a taste of some of the challenges that he identifies.  I was especially struck by his point about lack of administrative manpower.  Administratively, LR is a two-woman operation and our solution thus far to keeping the administrative side of things manageable has been to keep the magazine relatively small.  But what of the future?  What will happen if LR expands beyond our administrative capacities?  Mura’s observations (and the ensuing responses by Chee and Freeman) touched on a very real concern for us, and served as a good reminder that in order to avoid burnout, we will need to be humble enough to seek out help when it’s necessary while remaining practical enough to stay grounded in whatever way we can.

The editors’ choice to open with insights from Mura, Freeman, and Chee did well for the magazine’s ethos; it established a precedent of  inviting real conversation between members of the community that AALR proposes to represent. The boldness and diversity of the three forum participants’ views speaks not only to the wide range of perspectives amongst Asian American writers, but also transparently acknowledges the messy complexities of any project that sets out to “embody” or “represent” Asian American writing.   I am curious as to whether the editors plan to retain this feature as a regular part of the magazine; I would love to see more forums, on different topics, in future issues.

But to move on to the poetry: I appreciated that the editors chose to give about half of the issue’s pages over to the genre, and that they placed the poetry section first, right after the opening forum.  Sometimes, I think, poetry can get  skimmed over when it’s scattered throughout the pages of mixed-genre magazines (a very small poem can easily get lost when slipped in between lengthy prose contributions; in some publications, the inclusion of poems here and there almost feels like an afterthought).  Not so with AALR.  There was no way that you could have missed the powerhouse lineup of poems in this issue!  Nor would you have wanted to, with the likes of Cathy Song, Nick Carbo, and other such notables gracing its pages.

While I enjoyed the poetry section as a whole, two sets in particular really gave me chills.  The first was a series of epistolary poems from Oliver de la Paz.  The ferocity of de la Paz’s language, combined with the rhythmic crescendo effected by his downbeat-like repetition of “Dear Empire, / These are your ____” at the beginning of every new section, blew me away.  Like an archaeologist, de la Paz builds up his portrait of Empire in shale-like layers, brushing away white space to reveal line after line of intensely electric imagery.  The force of his speaker’s voice seems to vibrate through some brittle, conductive medium—glass, perhaps, or wire—rattling in and around each new line.   “If you took a photo negative of me right now, you would see the heat outlines / of ghosts,” he writes in the third segment, “The upright caskets are violent with their exhaust.  This is me placing / flowers on a stone. This is me besides the wisteria, twisted around the gate’s / trellis. These are your solar flares”  (33). The sheer range of the imagery being employed here is amazing to me:  in the course of a single stanza, de la Paz juxtoposes thermodynamics with supernatural beings, cemeteries with suburban gardens, and then zooms out wide to land us in the realm of astrophysics.  The speaker’s relationship to the you (or “Empire”) is also deftly rendered.  We get a sense of tired intimacy underlaid by a history of conflict and pain—like that of an estranged lover reflecting back on his or her abusive ex-partner.   The speaker displays an intimate knowledge of the textures and idiosyncratic propensities of Empire: how in its evenings, “The dark has the texture of fur,”  (34) how when asking questions or being questioned, “You fold your hands over a knee,” how the calloused hands of workers by the road seem to exist in a world entirely separate from that inhabited by speaker and addressee: “they bear no resemblance to us. To your beautiful hands” (36).

And yet there is little tenderness to the tone of the speaker’s address.  Rather, there exists an ominous closed-ness that is at times almost clinical. In the case of the hands: “The above must be expressed flatly as to deny one’s office. Your hands are beautiful. To deny would simply provoke a question” (36).  Other times, the understatedness of the speaker’s tone takes on the color, though never the outright manner, of protest.  In the fifth section, the speaker’s disgust and resentment at being left to “starve in the jungle while your generals smoke tobacco we had dried all month” is projected onto an image of captive monkeys.  It’s the image of the manacled monkeys that the speaker terms “most audacious,” though we readers are equally as horrified by the image of humans being kept captive and naked in the jungle.  Protest, within this series of poems, is kept beneath the surface and tightly guarded, but it is all the more powerful as a result: rather than exploding bombs above ground, de la Paz allows us to experience subversion via subterranean tremors.  We are shaken not because we know exactly what is wrong, but because although we are given a sense that something is wrong, we are never given enough information to fully explain it.

The second set of poems in this issue that stood out to me was the group contributed by April Naoko Heck, especially the cluster of three—”Conversation with My Mother,” “Translation,” and “Spark”—which deal with the transmission of family narratives about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  Heck uses small details—such as the pattern of fabric burned onto skin, emergency procedures for burn treatment, and lists of words which she translates from Japanese—to demonstrate the way in which her speaker, who is a generation removed from the bombing, experiences the event through remembered fragments that are transmitted to her by her elders.  The incompleteness of the narratives with which Heck wrestles contribute to their horrific quality:

Was it plain? Was it the fabric’s texture, not pattern, that showed on her skin?
No, the fabric was patterned, and the pattern burned into her skin.
Maybe flowers?
Maybe flowers.
Maybe leaves?
Maybe leaves (58).

The uncertainty of the details in the speaker’s mother’s narrative makes the scene being described feel more like an inescapable nightmare than a concrete event, and renders a complete grappling with the source of this trauma (and thus, healing) impossible.  Heck’s speaker is left with what might be thought of as an inherited melancholia.  As pieces of the original traumatic event recede further into memory from one generation to the next, they acquire the elusive properties of a flashback dream.  ‘Maybe, maybe’ becomes a refrain that accompanies the account as it is passed down, and the narrative gaps that the “maybe”s cover become a source of further wounding with each retelling.

Craft-wise, Heck probes the suffering caused by the a-bomb with a quiet, but deeply distressing intensity.  Her poems, with their juxtaposition of mechanical language and images of human anguish, accomplish a terrible serenity, in which the delicate choreography of moments like “Hard to remember the spark in first person, the tipping, / if the arms flew up or down” (“Spark,” 60) is belied by our knowledge of the reason for the action being described (a body being thrown during the detonation).  Later in the same stanza, lush pastoral imagery oozes from the victims’ wounds: “A spot on her cheek /continued to weep. You wanted to see the colors / of fall leaves, to pick apples in the hills.”  The effect of the contrast between the known reality of the emergency being described and the polished smoothness of the language Heck employs is—like some eyewitnesses’ descriptions of the bomb’s flash itself—at once rivetingly surreal and absolutely terrifying.

With such a strong start, AALR seems to have established a good footing for itself. I look forward to watching its development in future issues. Issue 2 (due out in September) is also set to contain only solicited pieces, but the editorial board is currently taking open submissions for Issue 3.  I will be curious to see how the editors bridge this transition.  If the quality of the content and editorial work in Issue 1 is any indication of what is to come, however, I am confident that readers will have nothing to worry about.  AALR seems to be a smoothly managed, sophisticated, and most of all—smart—operation, and I think it can look forward to having a long, successful life ahead of it. I, for one, am already on the edge of my seat in anticipation of the next issue.  September cannot come fast enough.