Charles Bernstein | Courtesy of The Poetry Foundation
This week’s prompt is taken from leading Language poetry practitioner and theorist Charles Bernstein‘s “Experiments” (handily compiled by the University of Pennsylvania’s Electronic Poetry Center). It asks you to venture into uncertain linguistic territory where meaning ceases to guide your composition (or in this case, translation) process and, instead, turns the reins over to sound.
We all know what homophones are, words that mean differently despite their (usually identical) sonic qualities (see/sea, their/there), and this exercise is one that relies almost exclusively on the odd transmutations of meaning that can happen when two words sound the same but signify different things… in different languages.
Though you will be working to translate a piece of poetry from another language into English, because the translation method is based on homophones and sound patterns rather than denotative/connotative meanings, your process will undoubtedly yield some wacky — but wonderful! — results.
Welcome to our Summer Reads 2011 blog series! Throughout the summer, we will be featuring recommended reading lists submitted by Lantern Review contributors who want to share titles they plan to read and want to suggest to the wider LR community. This week features a set of reads from LR Issue 1 contributor Rachelle Cruz.
She writes:
I am so lucky to host a poetics radio program (The Blood-Jet Writing Hour) because it allows me to invite poets I am curious about and/or admire. Although I feature poets of many different backgrounds, I seek to support and promote poetries of the Pacific Islands, Asia and their diasporas. Summer is also the time for me to catch up on some fantastic Young Adult (YA) literature, poetry blogs/websites, and anthologies (hello, Norton!).
Below is just a small selection from my very long Summer 2011 Reading List.
Books:
*FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [SAINA]
by Craig Santos Perez
(Omnidawn, 2010)
Innovative, intertextual poetry that disrupts, navigates and de-navigates the histories of Guam (Guahan). I’ve just finished FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [HACHA] and I am excited to start Perez’s second book.
*BOUGH BREAKS
by Tamiko Beyer
(Meritage Press, 2011)
A fellow Kundiman poet who was also featured in LANTERN REVIEW! Her book seeks to interrogate queer motherhood, gender and the politics of adoption. Tamiko will be on the show with another Kundi, Hossannah Asuncion…
Welcome to our Summer Reads 2011 blog series! Throughout the months of July and August, we will be featuring recommended reading lists submitted by Lantern Review contributors who want to share books they plan to read this summer and titles they want to suggest to the wider LR community. This week features a two sets of reads from LR Issue 2 contributors W. Todd Kaneko and JoAnn Balingit.
From Todd:
This is the first summer in a while that I will not be attempting to finish Infinite Jest. I always try but then give up (at about page 200) when the huge time commitment gets in the way of my work. So instead, I just finished How They Were Found by Matt Bell and have started Once the Shore by Paul Yoon. On deck after that are Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Queen of the Ring by Jeff Leen, and Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting. Also, my partner Caitlin Horrocks has a brand new book out, This is Is Not Your City—I’ve read the stories, but it’s exciting to re-experience them in the book.
My poetry reading list is too long and cluttered to convey in full, but I recently read and was transfixed by Ignatz by Monica Youn and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey. At the moment, I’m kind of mesmerized with Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee. Up next are What the Right Hand Knows by Tom Healy, A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood by Allen Braden, Archicembalo by G.C. Waldrep, The Haunted House by Marisa Crawford, Delivered by Sarah Gambito, Spit by Esther Lee, and Before I Came Home Naked by Christina Olson.
I am also planning to play Fallout: New Vegas wherever I can fit it in.
Welcome to our Summer Reads 2011 blog series! Throughout the months of July and August, we will be featuring recommended reading lists submitted by Lantern Review contributors who want to share books they plan to read this summer and titles they want to suggest to the wider LR community. This post is a triple feature and includes reads from Issue 2 contributors Michelle Peñaloza, Kenji C. Liu and Gowri Koneswaran.
Michelle writes:
Here’s what I’m hoping to get to this summer:
Atlantis by Mark Doty The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Natural History: A Selection by Pliny the Elder Just Kids by Patti Smith Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Welcome to our Summer Reads 2011 blog series! Throughout the months of July and August, we will be featuring recommended reading lists submitted by Lantern Review contributors who want to share either books they plan to read themselves this summer, or titles they want to suggest to the wider LR community. This week features a set of reads from Issue 2 contributor Kimberly Alidio.
She writes:
I’m halfway through the Naropa Summer Writing Program — hello from Boulder to the Lantern Review family! My reading list relates to the conversations of the past two weeks. As I was compiling this, I was often tempted to add the line: “and, eventually, all her other books.”
Anselm Berrigan, Notes from Irrelevance (Wave, 2011)
Welcome to our Summer Reads 2011 blog series! Throughout the months of July and August, we will be featuring recommended reading lists submitted by Lantern Review contributors who want to share either books they plan to read themselves this summer, or titles they want to suggest to the wider LR community. This week features a set of reads from Issue 1 contributor and 2010-2011 staff writer Henry W. Leung.
He writes:
Criticism: Foreign Accents by Steven G. Yao. This just came out and was a helpful if limited summation of the three broad phases of Chinese American verse (racial protest, lyric testimony, & ethnic abstraction).
Chinese Writers on Writing edited by Arthur Sze. Also just came out. All translated from Chinese, some for the first time. I recommend the whole series: it’s a hugely important intro to current international writers–on their own terms.
After Confession edited by Kate Sontag & David Graham. Ten years old but a grand discovery for me. American poets on where the “I” belongs in poems today.
Poetry: The History of Anonymity by Jennifer Chang, my patron poet from Kundiman!
Graphic: Duncan the Wonder Dog by Adam Hines. I’ve just started this and it’s gorgeous, multitextual, and resonates with some of what DeLillo did in White Noise.
Thanks for this reading list, Henry, and happy summer!
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Henry’s poem “Question for a Painter” can be found in Lantern Review, Issue 1. His many editorials, interviews, and book reviews can also be found on the LR blog – just search for his name on the blog’s homepage.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Paris 1923 | Courtesy of VerySmallKitchen
Speaking of summer reading, my summer reads (and flicks too, apparently!) have demonstrated the uncanny trend of featuring the work and life of a single character: Gertrude Stein. Without knowing anything about the book except that it was recommended to me by multiple people, I started reading Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt. I’m about four chapters into the novel, and have just begun to realize that the mysterious “Mesdames” referenced obliquely throughout the introductory chapter are none other than Alice B. Toklas and, as she is called in the book, “GertrudeStein.”
I had also planned to read Juliana Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy: Collective Reading and Collective Identity(University of Alabama Press, 2001) later this month, and when I flipped through it a few days ago — lo and behold, the title of chapter one? “There Is No Way of Speaking English: The Polylingual Grammars of Gertrude Stein.” Spahr goes on to consider such figures as Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, but, as far as I can tell, grounds most of her inquiry in the groundwork Stein laid for future generations of poets in Tender Buttons and other influential writings.
But last night’s movie is what really convinced me that something the universe has been orchestrating a grand conspiracy to get Stein on my mind. Friends had warned us to walk into Midnight in Paris without any expectations or previous knowledge about the film, so we had no clue what the movie was about — or into whose home the main character would stumble after wandering into 1920s Paris. I won’t spoil the (admittedly very thin) plot, but suffice it to say, I got the message.
Welcome to our Summer Reads 2011 blog series! We have asked Lantern Review contributors from Issues 1 and 2 to share with us what they are reading this summer, and will be featuring their responses weekly throughout the months of July and August. This first installment features a set of reads from Issue 1 contributor Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé.
He writes:
I just finished a talk at The Asian Festival of Children’s Content, where I spoke on how literary greats like Rudyard Kipling and Robert Graves actually wrote poems specifically for children, while honing their own craft. Really relished reading poems like Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”, Eliot’s “Song of the Jellicles”, Leonard Clark’s “Mushrooms”, Seamus Heaney’s “Trout”, and Tolkien’s “The Mewlips”, among others. It was wonderful researching on the subject matter. All of a sudden, I felt my own poetry distilling itself, paring down its language to become more accessible, a strange distancing from my love for compression and heavy metaphorical constructs. Helps me remain in a more contemplative space, which I welcomed. So, I’ve found myself loving some books that afford this beautiful transparent quality, mixed in with my favorite experimental fare. I also have a commissioned article coming up – a reflective piece on the interdisciplinary art I do – for The British Council’s Writing the City Project, in which I serve on their writing panel as a contest judge. So, I’m already working through some heavy critical, theoretical material, like the books by Hagberg, Brown, and Genette. And to make happy my love for all things graphic and visual, I’ve got a whole list of great chapbooks from Dan Waber. I’ll be taking some of these with me on the plane, on the coach when I travel, which will make all that waiting time disappear. These will definitely take me past the summer into the new year, and I’ll lap up every moment of it!
This week’s prompt is inspired by two things — which happen to be closely related. First, the group of beginning poetry students I had the pleasure of teaching this spring. Second, the end of the school year, which, for those of us tied to the academic calendar, signals a shift in many things: schedule, work pace, travel & place, life rhythm…
Midway through spring quarter, a group of my students developed a writing prompt, or “pitch,” in which they asked their classmates to write a poem that paid particular attention to sound. In class, we’d been discussing Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), in which she introduces the concept of “sound families”: vowel and consonant sounds divided further into mutes, liquids, etc. I’d asked the class to develop their own families of sound, based not only on Oliver’s taxonomy of vowels and consonants, but on their intuitive sense of language as well — what sounded “spiky,” what sounded “smooth;” what sounded “purple” versus “yellow,” and so forth.
What emerged from this class session was the following prompt: write a poem whose use of sound dramatizes a change, or shift, in mood and circumstance. I found this to be a brilliant way of getting the class to explore the use of dynamic structures in their work, as well as to think about the possibilities of sound in enacting meaning.
After all, why not use sound to signal change? When frightened, it’s our ears that prick up first — sounds acquire sharper, more jagged edges; loud noises reverberate in a clanging, dizzying cacophony. The change of a season, the death of a loved one — these are dramatic moments that shift the ways in which we understand our surroundings and, thus, alter our sense perception of the world.
* * *
Prompt:
Write a poem that dramatizes a shift or change, not simply in its narrative or rhetorical structure, but in its sonic textures as well. Think about the relationship between sound, speaker, and tone; ask yourself how your piece’s aural qualities can become a dynamic force that alters the mood or circumstance of your poem.
Last May, the LR Blog featured the Angel Island poems in our APIA Heritage Month “Poetry in History” series. In the post, Iris explains:
Often called the “Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island served as the site for processing as many as 175,000 Chinese immigrants from 1910-1940.
Detainees were separated by gender [and ethnicity!] and locked up in crowded barracks while they awaited questioning, for weeks or months — sometimes, for years — at a time. To pass the time, many immigrants wrote or carved poems into the soft wood of the barrack walls.
The poems vary in theme, form, and in level of polish, and serve as a testimony to the experience of detention, chronicling everything from hope to anger to loneliness, to a sense of adventure.
At the time, I had never visited Angel Island or read any of the poems inscribed on the walls of the immigration station, but last week I made the pilgrimage: flew to San Francisco, drove to Tiburon, took the ferry, made the hike, etc. It was an odd experience—I arrived at the dock at the same time as two groups of fifth grade history students, meaning that I toured the immigration station with them and heard all sorts of hilarious comments: “Who fought who during the Civil War? China and America?” as well as some not-so hilarious ones: “Chinese, Japanese, itchy knees, money please…” a sing-song chant I remember hearing about from the mid-twentieth century, around the time the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Amazing, really, what little impact four decades of activism have had on prevailing attitudes about who is/n’t included in “America” and why.
