Tarfia Faizullah (Photo by Amanda Abel)

Tarfia Faizullah’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the associate editor of Blackbird. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship, a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellowship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the Asian American Literary Review and Trans-Portal.

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. As in the past, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem of theirs that we’ve published. In this installment, Tarfia Faizullah reflects upon her poem “At Zahra’s Salon for Ladies,” which appeared in Issue 4.

* * *

1. It actually did begin at Zahra’s Salon, with my head tilted back.
2. Auntie Neelam and I never spoke, though she has always been gentle with me and I have never gone to another stylist.
3. That day at the salon, Ghulam Ali’s song Chupke, Chupke began to play.
4. It had been many, many summers since I had last heard that song.
5. My younger self rose up.
6. I went home and began to try to affix the atmosphere of the salon, the deft, elegant movements of Auntie Neelam’s fingers.
7. I listened to Chupke, Chupke over and over again.
8. I called my mother, cradled the phone against my shoulder to take notes while she translated Chupke, Chupke for me.
9. I began to remember that other, younger summer.
10. The summer I had started growing out of my swimsuit.
11. How bewildered I was, how frightened by all that dark hair shadowing across me.
12.  “I can feel that other day running underneath this one,” Anne Carson wrote, and similarly, I strongly felt the summer of my youth below that present one.
13.  As adults, we take for granted the agency we have to strip our bodies of their darkness.
14. The poem has always been in second person. It had to be so that I could clearly see both my younger and adult selves as I was addressing them.
15. “At Zahra’s Salon” took me two years to write.
16. I am interested in the possibilities of collage, of braiding together multiple elements.
17. I love David Shields’s assertion of collage as “a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge on it.”
18. It took two years to try to weave together the salon, the song, and those other summers while ensuring each element remained singular and intact.
19. One day, I asked Auntie Neelam about her life.
20. She was born and raised in India, and is married and has a child.
21. I think she was as startled as I was.
22. She started telling me about her wedding day.
23. I remembered my own wedding, the way my body was purified, decorated, posed.
24. She gave me a mishti.
25. I left the salon, my face smarting.
26. One of the red brick walls was covered in clematis vine.
27. The sky was so blue.
28. I wanted to write a poem that could dwell in nostalgia, that could dwell in those first feelings of hunger without fully leaving the present.
29. I wanted to write a poem that acknowledged the beauty and terror of solitude.
30. Don’t we all long for a lifetime of sweetness?

Pocket Broadside #6 - Michelle Penaloza

A poem by dual Kartika Review and Lantern Review contributor Michelle Peñaloza is up on Pocket Broadsides today!  Click here to read “This Idea of Sin” on Tumblr.

To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Luisa A. Igloria

This May, in celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have asked several respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share writing exercises with us in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts. This week’s installment was contributed by Luisa A. Igloria.

Writing poetry is always a little archaeological—we dig and sift not only through our fund of experiences and memories, but also through a variety of textual fragments. As a writer in the diaspora, I am always reminded that the past, history, is a hallucinatory presence right here with us; that our life in the contemporary moment is marked by the displacements that time is eternally enacting.

In the news, we encounter stories about all sorts of anniversaries and commemorations: recently, so many articles on Bin Laden’s capture and killing last year; but also, I read the reminder that my high school friend and classmate, James Balao (whose 51st birthday was April 19), has been missing for nearly four years now since his political abduction by state forces on September 17, 2008. And then, I learn that a former student and friend, and one of my daughter’s grade school teachers who has made a life in Japan these last ten years, walked out of her home and marriage a month ago, with three very small children in tow—and has not been seen or heard of since. How is it possible? I am disturbed. I am disturbed by these unexplained rifts in time, by the unforgivable absences of explanations. And because facts alone, even when they are available, cannot assuage the terrible depths of these displacements, I turn to poetry for some kind of response, if not relief.

Because we are all involved in the drift of time, displacement is a function of contemporary experience—it is not something reserved only for us in the diaspora or for those of us who live with the legacies of colonization. History is a field at once very large and very intimate. But I like to think of the past as not completely done, of history’s archives as not static; we can enter the archive, we can reconstruct and re-imagine events, we can insert ourselves as figures or characters into its landscapes.

In my last book, Juan Luna’s Revolver, I used a perspective that let me travel into and out of specific Filipino histories (the world of Filipino intellectuals and artists abroad in 19th century Europe, the world of the 1904 World’s Fair and Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri); this perspective allowed me to establish a kind of specular relationship with history’s contexts and contents—I use the meaning of specular here as it relates to the medical instrument which allows entry into a body cavity, allowing for the possibility of more direct vision.

I used a similar method of composition in writing the poem below, which has been archived as part of my poem-a-day project (I’ve written at least a poem a day since November 20, 2010) at Via Negativa. I also loosely borrow the numbered structure of recorded “dreams” that Roberto Bolaño uses in his prose poem “A Stroll Through Literature” (from the book Tres).

In the poem, I am able to engage a variety of “facts” from Philippine colonial history and figures from colonial texts, including, but not limited to: the babaylanes (poet-priestesses and keepers of oral epic traditions) who were driven out of town when institutionalized religion was introduced; characters from Balagtas’ allegorical long poem “Florante at Laura” and from Jose Rizal’s incendiary novel, Noli Me Tangere; the earliest recorded indigenous Filipina poet, Leona Florentino.

Much like, I suppose, someone working with (but not limited to) collage, dream, hallucination, or a choose-your-own-adventure book, I can juxtapose fragments of different narratives, rearrange their timelines, push them toward different sets of questions, ask What if?, and arrive at any of a number of complex possibilities. None of them may be completely true, or completely false; but who is to say?

Hallucinatorio
Luisa A. Igloria
Posted at Via Negativa on March 25, 2012
(after Roberto Bolaño’s “A Stroll Through Literature”)

1. I dream of blood that wells from a cut, uncoils its wavelengths of sequestered light, turns more solid than the furniture in my house.

2. In my dream it is Lent, just like it is right now. Guardia civil are herding babaylanes into yellow Humvees. Their bandannas, knotted under the chin, catch the glow of sunset. The vehicles rev up and head toward the hills. When the dust settles, the townsfolk find they cannot erase the ancient writing that has formed beneath tire tracks. It becomes their new epic poem. They will read it every year. Movie producers will come to film it.

3. In my dream it is still Lent. Which can mean any of a number of things: penitents stripped to the waist, their heads wrapped in sack-cloth, their brows circled with crude vines or barbed wire. Their backs: red labyrinths, ladders gorged with flame.

4. In another dream all the lilies have open vestments. The children come to gather pollen in their cups. Every eyelid will be streaked with gold, every finger outlined with knowing.

5. I dream that in the ruined chapel, above carpets of moss, a cherub ziplines toward me from the belfry. When was the last time you washed your face? I ask my soul. It likes to play in the mud, where it is cool. It hangs its head to one side; it doesn’t like to brush its hair.

6. Donde? Aqui, aqui.

7. In this dream, I knock on the door of room after room until I come to the one where Prinsipe Florante is lashed to a tree, bemoaning his fate. If I turn the right combination of locks hidden in the leaves, we will understand each other perfectly, in monorhyming quatrains filled with lyric and metaphor. And the lion will slink back into the darkness from which it came.

8. In this dream I gently cover the woman’s mouth with my hand, lead her into a room which has temporarily been stripped of all reminders of her sons; I bathe her fevered brow with water. If you lived her story, you too would be crazed. Later in the night, the oil lamp that should have ignited the revolution the first time, will burn down the governor’s house.

9. In this dream it is many years since you have touched me. By this I mean the premises have fallen silent. Sometimes it is not a dream.

10. The poet leaves: she is outcast from her hometown. Does she drink? Chew betel nut leaf? Swear like a cargador at the pier? Gamble away her children’s inheritance? Smoke cigars with the lit end in her mouth? Take lovers, including her maid? Wear only pants? Burn her bra? You have no imagination if you think this is all it takes to be a poet.

* * *

Prompt: Reflect on a subject of historical relevance to you and write a poem in which you take several pieces of available or archival knowledge—in any textual form (documents, art work, photographs, songs, overheard language)—and re-imagine/re-cast their language, their outcome, their time and setting, their narrative trajectory. Involve yourself in the poem in some way: have a conversation, or an argument; become a participant in these reconstructed landscapes.

Luisa A. Igloria is a Professor of Creative Writing and English, and Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. She is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (winner of the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and 8 other books. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Rattle, and TriQuarterly, and her various literary awards include the 2007 49th Parallel Poetry Prize (selected by Carolyne Wright for the Bellingham Review), the 2007 James Hearst Poetry Prize (selected by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for the North American Review); the 2006 National Writers Union Poetry Prize (selected by Adrienne Rich); and the 2006 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize (Crab Orchard Review). Luisa is also an eleven-time recipient of the Philippines’ highest literary prize—the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature—in three genres, and its Hall of Fame distinction.

Pocket Broadside #5 - Wendy Chin-Tanner

A micro-poem by Issue 3 contributor and current LR staff writer Wendy Chin-Tanner has been posted to the Pocket Broadsides Tumblr page.

Wendy is the driving force behind the host of  thoughtful, colorful interviews that we’ve had the opportunity to publish on the blog this year, and we are excited to have been able to include some of her own poetry in the Pocket Broadsides series.  Please help us to spread the word by tweeting, re-blogging, and sharing her micro-poem wherever you can.

To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Karen An-hwei Lee

This May, in celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have asked several respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share writing exercises with us in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts. This week’s installment was contributed by Karen An-hwei Lee.

In Santa Ana, where I live, a curious wind rises only in autumn and winter. It is a hot, dry wind. Hair static. Restless dogs lie in the shade; quiet dogs are restless. In the “Los Angeles Notebook,” Joan Didion writes of the Santa Ana wind: “The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called ‘earthquake weather.’”

The wind is not named for any geographic origins here. Miles away, it starts with a downsweep of cool air that is slowly heated while crossing the high Mojave Desert into our valleys and coastal regions. Unsettling our routines, it sweeps across my city of gardeners and mission arches. Angelenos who spent their childhoods south of the Great Basin, who recall urban fires and great earthquakes, call it the “Santana.”

When the Santa Ana comes, the sun looms closer to the earth despite the winter solstice. Noon hangs, a sharp, angular hour, in the sky. Eucalyptuses toss dry leaves onto the asphalt, and no one sweeps them: no use. No one picks up broken pottery shards. Let the wind sweep everything clean, “for the wind blows wherever it pleases,” says Jesus to Nicodemus. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). After prayer, I close the shades, stay in the coolest room away from the lanai.

What is the tone of this wind?

I think of lines from “To the Tune of Wuling Spring” by the Song Dynasty woman poet Li Qingzhao. She was highly attuned to her surroundings, whether in days of plenty or of war and exile: “When flowers vanish / and wind ceases late in the day, / I am too tired to brush my hair.” Or these lines from her poem, “To the Tune of Sands of a Silk-Washing Stream”: “A far-off mountain range thins the falling dusk; / . . . as ineluctable pear blossoms, withering, wilt to fade.”

It is a desert wind, not a hurricane gale or a blizzard. As a girl, spending my childhood on an archipelago and two New England coasts, I experienced both of the latter. With the Santa Ana wind, tar paper tumbles in the road. I set out dishes to dry; a teaspoon of water vanishes. Night yields little relief as sea waves swell to the west. To the east, helicopters fly over spot fires in the hills and canyons where rough chaparral brush—yucca, black sage, manzanita—has weathered pre-blackened zones of controlled burning.

After moving to California, I learned two things.

With an earthquake, temblor-raised dust seeds the clouds, sending rain. After the Santa Ana calms, a fog always rolls in. I still do not know whether this is a sea fog or a land fog. On the coast, we have a phenomenon called a marine layer, so perhaps that is what this is. The temperature drops from the nineties to the seventies and even to the forties after sundown. I walk in the fog with my hair unbound and a fresh skirt, carrying mailed books in the welcome cool. Following a week of fire and smoke, I am grateful for the fog as a divine provision.

Prompt: Consider the rhythm of a wind you know well and write in this rhythm.

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Process Profiles Series

Just as we’ve done in past Mays, we’ve asked several of our contributors to write short guest posts for us in which they reflect upon their processes for writing a poem of theirs that we’ve published.  This has always been one of our favorite series to run, and we hope that you’ll enjoy this year’s installments equally as much as those from years past.  A new Process Profile will be posted each week (usually on a Wednesday), every week, for the duration of May.

Curated Prompts

We had a lot of fun getting to work with our guest prompt-writers last May, so we’re thrilled to be able to continue our Curated Prompts series—in which we post writing exercises contributed by respected writers and teachers of Asian American poetry in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts—during this year’s APIA Heritage Month.  This year’s lineup begins with Karen An-hwei Lee, whose exuberant, weather-inspired exercise will appear on the blog this Friday, the 4th.

Issue 5 Reading Period to Open Mid-Month

We’ve been waiting to re-open our reading period, because we have a very special announcement to make about our next issue. All will be revealed in mid-May, when we will officially open our doors to submissions for Issue 5.

The Poetry Celebration Continues

We’re particularly lucky, in a sense, that Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month are back to back, because it means that we have the opportunity to celebrate Asian American poetry for two months straight!  In addition to our May series, we will also be keeping April’s Digital Broadsides up on the blog, and will continue to post Pocket Broadsides on Tumblr. We hope that you’ll continue to share these projects far and wide as our celebration of Asian American poetry continues.

Many thanks, and a very happy May to you.

Iris & Mia

"Narrative" (Click to visit the download page)

This week’s Digital Broadside, which features Janine Joseph’s “Narrative” from LR Issue 4, was designed by Bethany Hana Fong, an SF-Bay-Area-based artist and designer whose black and white portraits of her grandfather appeared in Issue 2. We love the way that the quirky, collage-like nature of Bethany’s design echoes the fractured whimsy of the narrative tellings in Janine’s poem. We also like the effect that designing each version (printable and wallpaper) in a different orientation had on the possibilities for reading the poem itself.  While the print version preserves the original (vertical) arrangement of stanzas, the wallpaper version floats them side-by-side into a matrix-like grid, so that the stanzas can be read in juxtaposition, as well as linearly. Both versions of Bethany’s beautiful design can be downloaded over at our “Digital Broadsides” page.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our Digital Broadside series this April. And as National Poetry Month draws to a close, we hope you’ll consider telling us about what you did with the broadsides that you downloaded. Did you hang a copy somewhere unusual? Did your new wallpaper or cubicle decoration lead to any interesting conversations?  Did having a poem on your desktop or physical wall inspire you in your own writing life in some way? We’d love to hear your stories— leave us a comment, post a note on our Facebook Wall, or Tweet us to share!

No. 2 (Margaret Emma Brandl) - Exchanged for a Pocket Broadside at AWP 2012

The second of the pieces that was given to us in exchange for Pocket Broadsides at AWP—a short poem by Margaret Emma Brandl—is now posted on Tumblr! Click here to read “February Sweet.”

To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

"translation" (Click to visit the download page)

This week’s digital broadside download is actually two designs in one. Designer Kenji C. Liu has created two separate visions for Kimberly Alidio’s poem “translation” (from LR issue 2): not only has he designed a beautiful desktop wallpaper, featuring an image of a boat, but he’s also conceived of the printable version in such a way that it can be cut and folded into a miniature chapbook. Kenji (who’s a poet and past LR contributor himself, in addition to being a crackerjack graphic designer) had this to say about his decision to create a printable that requires an element of DIY:

The reason I decided to make an “interactive” broadside is I’m interested in making bookmaking as accessible as possible. The broadside is a great tradition that makes writing easier to distribute. I just wanted to take it one step further and demystify the book. This mini-chapbook is more in the DIY “zine” tradition but is also inspired by pocket poetry and “poems for all“. It is extremely easy to make, reproduce, and distribute. I hope others will use this format for their own poems, and leave them everywhere.

In the spirit of making it even easier to spread the poetry love, we’ve created a video tutorial demonstrating how to turn it into a book:

Both of Kenji’s beautiful designs can be downloaded at our “Digital Broadsides” page. Where will you leave a copy of your “translation” mini-chapbook?  As always, we would love to see a photo or hear a story.  Tag us on Facebook or on Twitter, leave a video response on YouTube, or send us an email at editors [at] lanternreview (dot) com.

Pocket Broadside #4 - Ocean Vuong

Issue 1 contributor Ocean Vuong‘s Pocket Broadside, a miniature poem called “Mother Tongue,” is now on Tumblr!

To read all of the Pocket Broadsides that have gone up so far, please visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com.

As always, we’d be grateful if you helped us spread the word by following, reblogging, tweeting, or Faceb00k-sharing.