LR News: LR Guest Post featuring Aryanil Mukherjee and Kimberly Alidio on The Best American Poetry Blog

Our guest post for Kenji Liu’s APIA Heritage Month Series  is now live on the Best American Poetry Blog!

Iris's guest post at the Best American Poets Blog

Click below to read Iris’s thoughts on the interdisciplinary inflections in LR contributors Aryanil Mukherjee’s and Kimberly Alidio’s work:

“across and thru”+”this mean time”: Aryanil Mukherjee, Kimberly Alidio, and the Interdisciplinary Lens [Iris A. Law for Lantern Review at the Best American Poetry Blog]

Thank you so much once again to Kenji for this opportunity.  Please continue to check back at The Best American Poetry Blog throughout the week for more posts by Gerald Maa, Barbara Jane Reyes, and by Kenji himself. We also highly recommend Patricia Ikeda’s installment in the series, which went live yesterday.

Friends & Neighbors: A Week of APIA Poetry at The Best American Poetry Blog

Kenji C. Liu hosts an APIA Month Series at The Best American Poetry Blog.

We usually don’t post on the weekend, but I’m posting today because we wanted to let you know about an awesome series that LR Contributor and Kartika Review poetry editor Kenji C. Liu is curating this week at The Best American Poetry Blog, in honor of APIA Heritage Month.  Kenji has invited me (Iris), along with 3 other editors and self-identified writers of Asian American poetry—Patricia Ikeda, Gerald Maa of AALR, and Barbara Jane Reyes—to contribute posts to the series, and it’s been both an honor and a pleasure to be able to work with him.

Kenji kicked off the series today with this awesome introductory post, in which he discusses both the difficulty and the utility of curating poetry through the lens of the “Asian American” label, and describes his thoughts about the importance of the conversation that will take place throughout the week. (He plans to spotlight the work of several Asian American poets who have come to their vocations through alternative/non-standard/non-MFA routes).

He is clear to note that the purpose of these posts is not to engage in a debate about the worth of the MFA (indeed, he acknowledges that the MFA is a valuable resource), but to “bring . . .  greater attention” to APIA poets who have not gone that route, in “recogniz[ing] that a formal graduate education in creative writing often provides resources and networking opportunities that may not be as easily accessible for others.”

I’ll post to the LR blog again when my contribution, which will focus on dual-discipline LR contributors Aryanil Mukherjee (who’s an engineering mathematician) and Kimberly Alidio (whose graduate training is in History) goes live, but in the meantime, we invite you to continue checking back with the Best American Poetry Blog throughout the week to watch our discussion unfold.

Congratulations to Kenji, and many thanks to him for allowing us to be a part of this important conversation.

To follow the series, “A Week of Asian Pacific Islander American Poetry,” please visit The Best American Poetry Blog.

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Kenji C. Liu’s poem “A Son Writes Back” appeared in Issue 2 of Lantern Review.

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Weekly Prompt: Tamiko’s Prompt (National Poetry Month Contest 1st Place Winner!)

This week, we’re featuring the prompt submitted by the grand prize winner of our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest (sponsored by Kaya Press) . . .

(::drumroll::)

Tamiko Beyer!

We loved the freshness of Tamiko’s exercise, and the way that it challenges the writer to combine the particular vocabulary of one activity with the extremely close, almost manic, focus, of an “obsession.”  As poets, we all have obsessions to which we find ourselves returning again and again, and Tamiko’s prompt provides a great way to step out of the boxes we draw for ourselves in order to approach a familiar topic from a new angle.

Prompt: Obsession

  • First, make a list of your obsessions – the topics you find yourself writing or thinking about again and again.
  • Now, think of a specific thing that you know how to do well – knitting, rock climbing, photoshop, fixing cars, etc. Make a list of as many words specific to that activity – the specialized vocabulary of it – that you can think of.
  • Finally, choose one of your obsessions (not related to the activity you chose) and write a poem about it, incorporating as many words from the second list as you can.

Tamiko will receive a copy of Lisa Chen’s Mouth, courtesy of the folks at Kaya Press. Congratulations, Tamiko, and thanks once again to all who submitted!

Signing off for this National Poetry Month,

Iris & Mia

LR News: Mia’s Post Featured at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation Site

Mia's Post on the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation Site

We are pleased to announce that the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation has graciously reprinted one of LR Associate Editor Mia Malhotra’s Weekly Prompt posts in their newsletter (and on their web site)!  Click here to read the reprinted post, or here to read the original.  Many thanks to the kind folks at the Foundation for their generosity.  Mia, we are proud of you!

LR News: We’re Looking for a Summer Intern!

Are you a college junior or senior, graduate student, or recent college grad who loves and/or writes Asian American poetry and is interested in small press magazine publishing? Do you possesses superb organizational skills, appreciate beautiful design, and have a knack for working with social media, blogs, and other web applications? Lantern Review is searching for a part-time intern to assist us with administrative and editorial tasks this summer, and you might be just the right person.

This is a part-time, unpaid, work-from-home position.  For further details and instructions on how to apply, please visit the full listing under the Blog’s new Opportunities tab:

Summer Editorial Internship: Requirements & Application Instructions

Weekly Prompt: Aaron’s Prompt (National Poetry Month Prompt Contest Runner-Up)

This week, we’re featuring the prompt submitted by LR reader Aaron Geiger, whom we’ve chosen as the first runner-up in our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest (sponsored by Kaya Press).  We really enjoyed the genre-bending nature of this exercise and thought it was a fun and unusual approach to the challenge of writing narrative poetry.

Prompt:

Find one of your favorite short stories or essays; perhaps even one you might have written. Make sure it is a story that you know, or that you are going to read thoroughly. Deconstruct the elements of the story into a form suitable for a poem that is no longer than 20 lines.

Rules: you must maintain one of the plot devices, and you can only use words that appear in the story. The purpose here is to show how dense and vibrant poems are, and how much they can  convey with a few carefully chosen words. Can you recontruct the “essence” of a short story or essay in a poem?

Thanks once again to all who submitted, and congratulations, Aaron!

Happy Good Friday, and (early) Easter, to those who are celebrating this weekend.  We’ll see you on the other side of Monday morning.

LR News: LR Contributors Selected as Winner, and Finalists, for BEST OF THE NET 2010

Asterio Enrico Gutierrez

We are delighted to announce that LR Contributor Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez’s poem, “Death poem exercise 64,” which originally appeared in Issue 1, has been selected for the 2010 Best of the Net Anthology.  Asterio’s poem was one of only twelve selected by guest judge Erin Belieu for this year’s Anthology (it appears alongside contributions from such luminaries as B.H. Fairchild and Claudia Emerson), and we are absolutely ecstatic to see his work honored in this way.

(To read Asterio’s poem in Best of the Net 2010, click here).

(To read Asterio’s poem as it originally appeared in Issue 1 of Lantern Review, click here).

Luisa A. Igloria
Subhashini Kaligotla

Congratulations are also in store for LR contributors Luisa A. Igloria and  Subhashini Kaligotla, whose respective poems  “Contingency” and “Sydney Notebook” (which were also originally published in LR Issue 1), were selected as finalists.

Many, many congratulations to Asterio, Luisa, and Subhashini, and as many thanks to the Best of the Net editors for this wonderful honor!

Be sure to check out all of the poems that appear in this year’s Best of the Net Anthology here.

 

 

Weekly Prompt: Chris’s Prompt (National Poetry Month Prompt Contest Runner-Up)

This week’s prompt features the idea submitted by LR reader Chris, whom we’ve chosen as the second runner-up in our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest (sponsored by Kaya Press).

Chris’s prompt was short, but we felt that it aroused a number of interesting possibilities.  It made me, in particular, think of the “beautiful witch” archetype that’s present in so many myths, legends, fairytales, and folklore (from the Greek sirens to Snow White’s stepmother)  and which is often sinisterly underwritten by the deep-seated fears of people in power (men, whites, imperialists, US ‘nativists’, etc.) about those who are ‘under’ them (women, racial or political minorities, colonized and indigenous peoples, immigrants, etc.).  In some cases, especially under colonial rule (and here I am thinking particularly of the line of questioning that Barbara Jane Reyes explores in her books Poeta en San Francisco and Diwata), culturally powerful local figures have been forcibly re-coded as demons, monsters, exiles by imperial powers. How the faces of those obscured behind such imposed masks of monstrosity might be reclaimed, even amidst the violence cast upon them by history, is something with which many writers of color, women writers of color, immigrants and descendents of immigrants, colonized peoples and descendents of colonized peoples, must wrestle on a daily basis.  Chris’s prompt thus resonates with me in the sense that it asks us to explore the possibility of celebration,  even from within (and, in fact, despite) a position in which individual identity has been marginalized by culturally- or socially-imposed images of monstrosity.

Prompt:

Take something that (or someone who) is frightening and write a poem about why it (or he or she) is beautiful.

If you’d like to investigate the approach I’ve described above a little further, here are a few books that deal with rehabilitating the voices of figures who carry the weight of  “monstrosity” in some way :

Poeta en San Francisco (Barbara Jane Reyes, Tinfish 2006)
Diwata (Barbara Jane Reyes, BOA 2010)
Habeas Corpus (Jill McDonough, Salt 2008)
Brutal Imagination (Cornelius Eady, Putnam 2001)

(Know of more collections that we should add to this list?  We’d love to hear your recommendations; please let us know about them in the comments!)

Congratulations to Chris, and thank you once again to all who submitted!  Stop by next week to see who we’ve chosen as our first runner up.

LR News: Don’t forget to send in your postcards!

Participate in the LR Postcard Project!

Just a quick reminder: today is the postmark deadline for sending in your responses to our Postcard Project.  If you have a free minute or two today, please consider writing a few lines on your card, slapping on a stamp, and sticking it in the post box.  We’ve really enjoyed the few postcards that have been sent in so far, and look forward to publishing more of them on the blog!

Weekly Prompt: Janet’s Prompt (National Poetry Month Prompt Contest Runner-Up)

Thank you to all those who submitted prompts to our National Poetry Month contest!  We’ve chosen three runners-up and one winner, and will be announcing them week by week as we post the ideas that they submitted.

This week, we’re featuring, as one of our runners-up, a prompt derived from an idea that was submitted by LR reader Janet.  We were intrigued by Janet’s entry, an exercise which involved plugging elements of one’s memory of a childhood meal into the form of a recipe, and have elaborated upon and expanded that idea slightly to produce this week’s prompt.  (The text of Janet’s original exercise can be found here).

Prompt:

Write a poem that recalls the recipe for a meal from childhood or which uses such a recipe to frame your memory of that meal. Be sure to include, besides the actual ingredients that went into that recipe, descriptions of more intangible elements, such as the people, the place and emotions that were present when you ate that meal.

Congratulations to Janet, and thanks again to everyone who entered our contest.

Please check back again next Friday to see a prompt from our next runner-up!