Process Profile: Andre Yang Discusses “Why I Feel the Way I Do About SB 1070”

Andre Yang | Photo by Mary Yang

Andre Yang is a Hmong American poet from Fresno, California. He is a founding member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC), where he actively conducts and participates in public writing workshops. He completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) MFA program at California State University, Fresno, where he was a Philip Levine Scholar, recipient of the Academy of American Poets-sponsored Ernesto Trejo Prize, and the Graduate Dean’s Medalist of the College of Arts and Humanities.  Andre is a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellow, and has attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and recently completed an artist residency at the Ucross Foundation.  He co-edited How Do I Begin – A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), and his poetry has appeared in Paj Ntaub Voice, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the chapbook anthology ‘Here is a Pen’ (Achiote Press).

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. This year, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem that we’ve published. In this installment, Andre Yang discusses his poem “Why I Feel the Way I Do About SB 1070,” which appeared in Issue 3 of Lantern Review.

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In a way, I have been writing this poem all my life, and considering all the things I discuss in the poem, it really does span my life.  The poem was written to express my feelings about the inception and implementation Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, though I also wanted it to capture my thoughts on the interconnectedness of humanity.

I might not have written “Why I Feel The Way I Do About SB 1070” had I not met Francisco Xavier Alarcón at his Ce Uno One book launch in Sacramento, California.   I overheard Francisco saying he was attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference later that year in Washington D.C. (2011), and since I too was planning to attend the conference, I used that as a conversation starter and approached him.  He mentioned that while in D.C., he would be organizing two off-site Floricanto readings based on his Facebook page, “Poets Responding to SB 1070,” and that well-established poets like Martín Espada would be taking part in the reading.  Five minutes into the conversation, he asked, to my complete surprise, if I wanted to participate in the readings. I said I’d be honored, and told him I’d contact him when I felt I had a poem worthy of the purpose.

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Process Profile: Vikas K. Menon Discusses “Othertongue”

Vikas K. Menon

Vikas K. Menon is a poet and playwright whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as burntdistrict, diode, and The Literary Review, among others.  His poetry manuscript godflesh was a finalist for the 2010 Kinereth Gensler Award and a semifinalist for the Beatrice Hawley award, both from Alice James Books.   His poetry has been featured in Indivisible:  An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry and is forthcoming in The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians.  He is a board member of Kundiman, the first organization of its kind dedicated to supporting Asian-American poetry and is the Resident Playwright of Ruffled Feathers Theater company. 

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. This year, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem that we’ve published. In this installment, Vikas K. Menon discusses his poem “Othertongue,” which appeared in Issue 3 of Lantern Review.

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My writing process is both fitful and fickle:  at the beginning of a writing session, I tend to move quickly among drafts to see which pieces pull me into further play.  This method has allowed me to elude the blocks that used to plague my writing life.  “Other Tongue” started in quick sketches; in this case, with a freewrite about my struggles with my parents’ ancestral tongue, Malayalam.  Malayalam is a Dravidian language that is outside of the Indo-European family of languages, and it is primarily spoken in the South Indian state of Kerala.  While I can comprehend Malayalam when it is spoken colloquially, I am otherwise illiterate in the language.  Since it was the language of intimacy used by my elders during my childhood, I am ashamed by my inability to speak it fluently.  But I can still revel in its aural pleasures and rolling cadences, its stark contrasts with English.  So I began writing into the texture of it, exploring the strangeness of its syllables in my mouth.  At the same time, I was working on a separate poem that explored my mother’s English, which is heavily inflected by Malayalam.  Finally, I realized that the two poems were linked by their exploration of the difficulties of articulation.  Despite that theme, paradoxically, the poem works quite well at readings: there is initial laughter at my mother’s malapropism that quickly turns to silent discomfort.  I like that sudden turn, something the poet and performer Regie Cabico does beautifully.

Friday Prompt: Working With Collage

Manga Scroll by Christian Marclay | Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo | Courtesy of Contemporary Culture Carousel

This week’s writing prompt asks you to think about the mashup, the remix, the “sample”–in short, the possibilities of the literary pastiche, a ground-up, reconstituted form of poetry that artfully (and sometimes not-so-artfully!) arranges found, borrowed and stolen language in innovative ways to make something wholly new.  The idea for this prompt (not a new one, admittedly, as we’ve written many times about poems that use “found language” and their less bashful cousins, the full-0n centos) comes from Daniel Zalewski’s profile piece, entitled “The Hours,” about collage artist Christian Marclay.  The article, which appeared last week in The New Yorker, discusses a broad array of Marclay’s work, the most famous of which is the twenty-four hour film “The Clock.”  By stitching together hours upon hours of raw digital material sampled from all eras, genres and schools of film, Marclay collaged a full twenty-four hours of film matched to the real-time passage of the hours.  In doing so, he

wondered if he could fashion from familiar clips a genuinely unfamiliar film, one with its own logic, rhythm, and aesthetics.  In his view, the best collages combined the “memory aspect”–recognition of the source material–with the pleasurable violence of transformation.

The pleasures and pitfalls of Marclay’s efforts are not unfamiliar to artists in other realms of the creative arts.  In literature, T.S. Eliot famously used pastiche in “The Waste Land” to issue a staggering modernist manifesto.  So did Robert Hayden (whose voice you can hear on the Poetry Foundation Website), who took up similar tools to orchestrate the complicated voicings of “Middle Passage.”  And today, postmodern poets, for whom sampling and “mixing” of high and low language (not to mention literary and non-literary influences) is so commonplace as to be a kind of convention, share this technique with a number of contemporary visual artists, filmmakers and musicians.

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LR News: LANTERN REVIEW at AWP 2012

It’s that time of year again, and now that Issue 4 has successfully launched, we’re on our way to AWP. There are a few different ways you can connect with us at this year’s conference, so read on and we’ll see you in Chicago!

1. AWP Bookfair: LANTERN REVIEW and the “Asian American Literary Collective”
This year we’ll be sharing a table at the bookfair with Kartika Review under the name “The Asian American Literary Collective.” This will be the best way to connect with us–so do drop by and say hello! Our table number is S16 and we’ll have information about an exciting new project (see below!) and as well as a number of other Asian American literary organizations and publications.

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Friday Prompt: Ekphrasis, the Remix

"The Tub" by Edgar Degas (1886 | Musee d'Orsay, Paris)

Today’s prompt is inspired by a series of ekphrastic studies I’ve been writing on images of “women at bath.”  In compiling these sketches, I’ve observed, among others, paintings by Degas, Picasso and the woodblock artist Hashiguchi Goyo, searching for visual elements that might bring a fuller sense of description to my writing.

The traditional mode of ekphrasis—that is, the “making of poetry from art”—involves describing or imaginatively inhabiting a painting, sculpture or photograph; in this way, the poet more or less lends their descriptive craft to that of the visual artist.  What I’ve been investigating, however, is how iconic images (such as Picasso’s “Blue Nude”) can be broken up into elements that recur in various, refracted ways across images, then worked into a poem’s narrative fabric in a way that doesn’t necessarily foreground itself as ekphrasis.

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Friday Prompt: Writing from Film

An image from THE TREE OF LIFE

I’ve seen two fascinating films recently, both of whose images and underlying attitudes have seeped (mysteriously, inexplicably) into my work.  The first is The Tree of Life, whose cosmic interludes (and I mean this literally: one minute you’re observing a family at a dinner table and the next you’re panning across sunspots and galaxies… or maybe a child’s conception?) and drifting trajectories through time make you feel like you’re living inside a Jorie Graham poem.  The second is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a lush, sometimes perplexing film whose primary effect was to draw me back into the sounds and mythologies of my childhood in Southeast Asia.

What I found after watching these films, Uncle Boonmee in particular, was that certain scenes began to haunt me, such that while drafting entirely unrelated poems I would start stitching lines together from the perspective of a character in a movie, or with an emotional pitch keyed to a particularly memorable scene.  Weirdly enough, I found this productive; elements of the poems derived, however indirectly, from these films turned out to be not at all foreign to the impulses of the overall piece. Continue reading “Friday Prompt: Writing from Film” →

Friday Prompt: Holiday Postcards

In the past, we’ve talked about writing postcard poems in our Weekly Prompts, solicited them from readers as part of the LR Postcard Project, even published them in issues of the Lantern Review (see Tamiko Beyer’s “Dear Disappearing” in Issue 1, Rachelle Cruz’s “Postcard Poem #067” in Issue 3).  So it should come as no surprise that  — with the holidays fast approaching — this Friday’s prompt is about writing the holiday postcard.

It’s not what you think… if this is what you’re thinking:

Courtesy of Wikipedia (Postcard c. 1900)

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Friday Prompt: “Field Notes”

Image courtesy of dwellingintheword.wordpress.com

It was about a year ago that I posted this prompt on Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, thanks to former classmate Jessica Tyson; this week’s Friday Prompt is courtesy of another recent UW MFA graduate, Talia Shalev.  She’s derived the exercise from a chapter in the anthology Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes (Longman, 2002), edited by Ryan Van Cleave, and writes:

Spend an hour in an urban setting that’s somewhat foreign to you.  A Laundromat.  A bus terminal.  A French pastry shop.  Record your observations and thoughts.  Spend another hour in a more rural setting, such as a chicken farm, an apple orchard, or a fishing hole.  At the very least, find a garden or park!  Record your observations and thoughts.

Write a poem about the urban setting that uses words, ideas, and images exclusively from your rural setting, and then write a poem about the rural setting that uses words, ideas, and images exclusively from your urban setting.  Does forcing yourself into using unusual vocabulary choices allow you greater freedom?  Does it make intuitive leaps easier?  How might this translate into your other poems?

What I find compelling about this prompt is the way it forces the “translation” or “transmutation” of observational detail from one context to another—a gesture that can be taken in a number of directions.  The same process can be used to navigate not only the in-betweens of rural and urban settings, but also the private and the public, the mainstream and the “minority,” the high and the low.  While I think it’s important that the prompt remain grounded in specific locales (ie. places that can be physically inhabited by the poet), it seems totally possible that a person could make the same linguistic leap from, say, one part of town to another—and in the process, cast light upon new ways of constructing difference, culture and place.

Friday Prompt: STRUCTURE & SURPRISE

Structure and Surprise, ed. Michael Theune (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2007)

This week’s prompt is less of a prompt and more of an invitation to check out this book on poetic structure published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.  Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns is a collection of essays by noteworthy poets like D.A. Powell and Prageeta Sharma, which discusses the use of “the turn” in poetry writing; that is, the energetic leap or shift that occurs as the mind works through form to create dynamic patterns of thought.  In his introduction to the essays, Michael Theune says:

Poetic structure is, simply, the pattern of a poem’s turning.  As such, poetic structure identifies a vital feature of poems: the best poems very often include convincing, surprising turns… [I]n a lecture called “Levels and Opposites: Structure in Poetry,” Randall Jarrell claims that “a successful poem starts from one position and ends at a very different one, often a contradictory or opposite one; yet there has been no break in the unity of the poem.”

One of the structures discussed in Structure & Surprise is the retrospective-prospective structure, a two-part structure that begins with a retrospective discussion of the past and then moves toward a future orientation that shows, as the essay’s author, Mark Yakich, puts it, how “inconstant and dizzying” time really is.  While you’re welcome to browse the list of structures on the book’s extraordinarily helpful website to find one that might work better for whichever writing/revision process you’re currently in, I’d recommend trying this particular approach for starters.

Prompt: write a two-part poem that uses the retrospective-prospective structure to narrate a past event or memory.  Midway through the poem, shift to the present tense to “acknowledge some kind of change” (p. 72) that allows the speaker to either look prospectively into the future, or reconsider the past through a different lens.

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For a list of additional structures and supplemental materials, check out the Structure & Surprise website .

For more writing prompts on structure, take a look at Iris’ Ordering, Reordering, Reversing or last October’s prompt, Complicating Narrative Structure.

Friday Prompt: Writing Ritual

 

Rainbow trout from Silver Lake

Some families hike, some families play board games, some families get together to roll dumplings.  My family goes fishing.  And we always have.  My dad fishes with gear inherited from his dad, whose rod and net have been mended and re-mended so many times I wouldn’t be surprised if they were passed on from his dad’s dad.  Certainly, the rhythm of baiting the hook, casting the line and settling back to wait for a bite is something passed through generations.

My brother and I remarked on our last fishing trip that, when waiting behind a cast line on the side of a lake somewhere, it’s as if we sit waiting not only with each other and our dad, but with his dad as well—who passed on many years ago.  There’s a kind of comfort in this ritual, as if when gathering to bait and lure our lines, we gather to join the family members–both passed on and present—who have practiced these same steps through time.

And so our prompt for this week, taken from Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (Norton, 1997), is:

Use a family anecdote, or a family ritual, as a leaping-off point for saying something about how your family or the world works.

If it helps, think first about the material reality of the ritual you intend to write about.  If it’s fishing you’re thinking of, research the anatomy of the fish.  Find out how its breathing apparatus works, what it is exactly that lines those “frightening gills.”  Learn the jargon of fisherfolk: the brand names of the bait, the particularities of lures and bobbers and lines.  Think of this as an opportunity not only to, as Laux and Addonizio put it, “sa[y] something about how your family or the world works,” but also to say something about how the ritual itself works.

Don’t enter the poem planning to say something earth-shattering (about your family, or anything).  Enter the poem with respect for the ritual in question, those who have conducted it in the past and the materiality of its “steps” as they unfold.  More often than not, it’s by examining the mechanisms of our lives that we reach fresh insight—but let this come to you through the writing.

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Note: Also see Iris’ February prompt about the family rituals we engage in when “turning the year.”  Though we’re still a ways off from New Year’s, many of us still feel the seasonal “turn” of fall (especially with Daylight Savings approaching!), and have our own private rituals built around welcoming this time of year.