Panax Ginseng is a bi-monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those with hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the English language’s congenital borrowings and derives from the Greek panax, meaning “all-heal,” together with the Cantonese jansam, meaning “man-root.” This perhaps troubling image of one’s roots as panacea informs the column’s readings.

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It is by speaking of the “assumption of the myths of a race not [her] own, a race nearly annihilated by [her] kind” that Susanna Moore begins her quasi-memoir, I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i (National Geographic 2003). She describes her “self-delighting pride at being a liminal participant in an authentic culture that continues, despite attempts to the contrary, to fear the ghostly night marchers . . .” This prefatory remark appears to apologize for her presumptions as a white woman writing about an island where she grew up with considerable privilege. Yet, notice the qualifiers—“self-delighting,” “liminal,” “authentic”—as they progress from the private to the public along a claim toward ownership. Identity politics frustrate me to no end, but as poetry and nonfiction on the subject of Hawaii have been coming across my desk recently, I have started to see that perhaps nobody can uncontestably write or rewrite Hawaii, not even those with genealogical ties to the native Hawaiians: for to call them natives today is to codify culture into a prelapsarian nostalgia, to selectively deny cultural change. I also wonder about recent mainland literatures about Hawaii and to what degree their conservatism and transgressions are intrinsic. I intend to look briefly here at three writers who claim a conflicted connection to Hawaii through the tension of poetic language: Susanna Moore, who lived on Oahu from early adolescence until she was a teenager; Juliana Spahr, who taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for half a decade; and Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, who has been “going home” to the Big Island from the Midwest since her parents retired there. Each of their works brushes against the usual tropes that brand a Hawaiian text when written in English, such as provincial or pastoral expectations, a stylized pidgin lexicon, and a mystified engagement with history. Yet, our three writers clearly feel their outsiderness, and, in order to make meaning and make meaning communicable as required by their poetics, they find nuanced rhetorical forms to grant themselves permission.

Though Susanna Moore is primarily a novelist, I engage with her two quasi-memoirs here because they don’t function as histories in the formal sense, nor do they paint the personal history that we would expect from a narrative memoir. Rather, her approach to Hawaii on the page utilizes a technique of accumulation and parataxis more common to poetry than to prose. Each of the chapters in I Myself Have Seen It is titled with a definite article (“The Night Marchers,” “The Returning God,” “The Islands,” etc.) and recaps a moment in Hawaii’s history by culling together anecdotal documents, often sparking or rhyming with associations to corollaries like those of Greek mythology. Moore’s personal experiences emerge more frequently toward the end, so that, taken in sum, the book appears to move along a linear history. Taken in parts, however, the material is fragmentary rather than episodic. It offers discrete moments of intense attention or, more often, intense spectacle. The narratives are sparks of observation, just as watching and witness are thematically key to the process.

This method is even more pronounced in Moore’s later, also quasi-, memoir entitled Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawaii (Grove Press 2008), whose title brings to mind the myth-memoir style of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. In Light Years, every chapter is again light on personal memoir and composed largely of excerpts on common island themes. These are drawn from Moore’s childhood library, which means they are nearly all Western authors, from Herodotus and Hesiod to Dickinson and Woolf, and they also include excerpts from her own fiction. For a writer who has spent considerable time on the islands and engaged extensively with the space in her first three novels, both Light Years and I Myself are remarkably evasive and reticent. This evasion on the macro/formal level perhaps bespeaks Moore’s anxieties on the micro/sentence level. By calling on other writers to speak for Hawaii (or to speak around Hawaii, as in Light Years, which is composed more thematically than geographically), Moore relinquishes the pressure to give her own nonfictional account of it. Citing passages from her own fiction is also a part of this evasion. What I understand less are the passages in which she plagiarizes herself—verbatim, for as much as two pages at a time—without citing herself as a source. This includes a sustained observation about Japanese girls on the beach cut from I Myself and pasted into Light Years. I can’t tell if this is laziness or a codification of voice, as though her own history were untouchable myth, impossible to revise or rephrase. She writes in Light Years: “I did not want to make the mistake of imagining that myth was something available to everyone. I understood that myth was a luxury.” Regardless, the result is a polyphonic collage, and I read the poetic process as a cadavre exquis.

Juliana Spahr’s writing is much more direct in its tensions, taking on a form of anaphoric self-contradiction. In her “barely truthful” novel/memoir/prose-poem The Transformation (Atelos 2007), Spahr engages directly with her anxieties about the expansionist and colonial language she cannot but use. The book begins: “Flora and fauna grow next to and around each other without names. Humans add the annotation.” Rather than annotate, Spahr refuses to name Hawaii explicitly—or any person or place—except in the afterword. She names only by allusion, by mapping outlines or negative space to suggest a recognizable form without claiming ownership over it. When she is naming or nominalizing, she makes a point of reconfiguring her nouns until they become unfamiliar and questionable: “the boths,” “the accusative they,” and the persistent unease in which “they could not allow themselves to be an us.” Of her complicity as a mainland writer coming to Hawaii, she notes: “There was no way that the expansionist language could carry all the local knowledge because the expansionist language was only able to be expansionist because it claimed to be universal, neutral, objective, because it did not name the winds so specifically.” Her unfolding repetitions are carried over from her earlier book of poems, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan 2001), the title of which is an example of placeholder words being transfigured. A significant motif in those poems is “da kine,” a Hawaiian pidgin catch-all that can refer to nearly anything and cannot be reduced to a single part of speech.

The primary conflict of The Transformation is expression itself, which is tantamount to the capacity to belong. However, though the quest in the book and in the poems are ostensibly a single, singular transformation, this proves to be not only implausible but likened to the process of conversion or conquest, to the illusion that a tourist can fly to Hawaii, write “747 poems” so named after the commercial jet plane, and simply fly away. Formally, Spahr achieves her transformation by a stop-start process of pivots, disruptions, and uncertainties. She writes, “they continued to circle around and around in their thinking and the sun shone down and their skin sometimes tanned and their skin sometimes burned.” Unable to speak for or with Hawaii except in a language problematic for its colonial past, she works at a keenly microscopic level, which calls for a new method of topography, “a new sort of conceptualization that allowed for more going astray than any map they had ever seen.”

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang’s chapbook, Where the Lava Meets the Sea (self-published at Blacklava 2013), is the most sentimental and plainly self-disclosing of the texts discussed here. Wang’s approach attempts inclusion in spite of otherness, and the subtitle of her chapbook—Asian Pacific American Postcards from Hawai‘i—is telling, significant for a lyric speaker whose home base is the Midwest and who finds community in Hawaii’s immigrant, rather than indigenous, population. Wang’s prose poems are postcards not only in their pretty snapshot form, but also in that they inevitably tokenize something of the other as a souvenir. They frequently feature surprise at cultural norms, delineating the “Culture of a Kiss” or “Culture on a Volcano,” sometimes enumerating a menu of exotic items (“tempura, teriyaki chicken, mochi, andago, anpan, Spam musubi”), and atother times featuring projected rites of initiation (“What kind of Hawaiian are you?”), but above all else, just as in the other texts, they express a desire to be considered by the subject community as more than an intruder. Wang romanticizes the hybridity of Hawaii and finds respite there by blending into its Asian American community in a way that she cannot in the Midwest: “I am tired of singing and dancing and always being the one to teach others about our culture(s) and justify how we are not weird. Sometimes I wish I could just live my life without having to think about culture . . .”

Contrary to this professed sentiment that culture is anything but neutral, what is ultimately remarkable about Wang’s poetry postcards is their consistent tone of wonder. In the tense space of the unfamiliar, Wang does not evade it like Moore or become agitated like Spahr, but through her roseate gloss, she is able to delight in its otherness. The last line of the chapbook illustrates this when the speaker sees “a school of flying fish take flight out of the water into our world.” Wang watches in melancholy delight as her son tries to fit in with other children, when she watches herself as both observer and performer in a place where her identity is amplified by scrutiny, when she ventriloquizes a local voice through such lines as: “But hooo! Braddah! That’s the stuff love songs are made of.” She seems to show no qualms about whether she is capitalizing on the pidgin she has picked up; she simply incorporates it into her own speech pattern as song.

I am tempted to use some spectrum of truth or authenticity to rank these approaches to writing Hawaii as an outsider. Instead, I’ll return to the passage I opened with from Moore’s I Myself Have Seen It, about the assumption of others’ myths. When I read the phrase, “an authentic culture that continues, despite attempts to the contrary, to fear,” I can almost see authenticity being equated with fear. The night marchers stand in for elemental forces which cannot be fully named nor reckoned, and fear cannot be tempered by logic or criticism. I hypothesize that authenticity may be nothing more than adrenaline: out of our control, stimulated by a fraught circumstance, and, of necessity, charged for motion or transformation because the naming always happens and then re-happens. Is this not poetry in its many forms? In its renewal? A poetics on the subject of Hawaii naturally comes with old tropes of the wonders of the other, but I argue that it is also a matter of the other wondering at. I began with the concept of permission and ownership, but perhaps as writers, we neither make nor issue permissions. Discomfort and otherness are the beginnings of art. Spahr writes of “a time of troubled and pressured pronouns,” but she also writes of “a story of finding an ease in discomfort. And a catalogue of discomfort.” Perhaps it is exactly trouble that is sought when writing of the exotic; we write best of resorts by re-sorting, even though we come short always by resorting to.

Kundiman co-founders Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi

To round off our APIA Heritage Month celebration, we sat down with Joseph O. Legaspi and Sarah Gambito, the co-founders of Kundiman—a nonprofit that serves young and emerging Asian American poets through its retreats, reading series, and community resources—to ask about their thoughts as the organization approaches its tenth year.

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LR: Kundiman is coming up on its tenth anniversary this year. How are you feeling about its turning a decade old? What have been some of your favorite moments from your involvement with it over the last ten years?

JL:  Kundiman going on 10 years is astounding to me. Wow! My feelings are overwhelmingly mixed, all strong emotions: for the most part I feel elation and pride, partially with dread and anxiety because there is still so much to do. The question is where do we go from here? We have a decade worth of accomplishments—most prominently, nearly 60 books and chapbooks published by Kundiman fellows—but how do we get to the next level where we are more stable and branch out and empower more Asian American writers. Oh, it is a celebration, of course, but now we’re working on how to sustain Kundiman for the next 10 years, and the next . . . As for my favorite moments, there are just too many. Lawson Inada at the Chinese buffet. Marilyn Chin dancing. The fellows’ sandwich-making contest. All closing circles. The singing, the camaraderie, the poems. The poems. The whole roller coaster [of] experience[s] as some of the most joyous in my life.

SG:  I agree. It overwhelms me that it has been 10 years. We’ve now seen an arc of fellows coming into their own—literally growing up before our eyes. We’ve read their poems, their books, attended their weddings, celebrated the births of children. It has been such a privilege to be able to witness fellows mentor each other, to become each other’s best and most trusted readers. What I love is that we’ve become a family in ways that are mysterious and then not mysterious. (This past winter, I hosted around 15 fellows at my apartment and cooked huge pots of ma po tofu and fried rice.) As for favorite moments, there are so many. I loved the Kundiman reading where Bei Dao and a fellow who had never read in public before and was just finishing college, Yael Villafranca, read together. I was thunderstruck because I realized that I was witnessing something that was so hard-worn, rare and precious: the knitting of generations of Asian and Asian American poets. I love the fellow toasts at graduation where we get to see how fellows have been so aware of each other and are praising each other.  I loved Kimiko Hahn saying “I give myself permission to be a writer. I’ve worked too hard to not do this” and then watching the fellows invoke this throughout the retreat in their own ways, both literary and personal. I loved having Tan Lin at Kundiman and watching him blow workshops out of the water and seeing fellows reorient their relationship to what words can do.

LR: In a previous interview on the LR blog, Joseph told us the story of Kundiman’s origins, and how the idea came into being at a family barbecue of Sarah’s where you discussed your shared longing for a literary community that felt like family. I think it’s safe to say that your dream has since been wonderfully achieved—and in no small part thanks to the culture of warmth and hospitality that you’ve cultivated through the unity of your vision and the strength of the partnership that you have with one another. What do you like most about working together on Kundiman? How would describe your working relationship? What would you say each of you contributes to the partnership?

JL: Kundiman wouldn’t even exist without the vision and passion and sheer tenacity of Sarah Gambito. I’m frequently astonished by her drive, instincts, and eloquence. How her mind works, with such speed and intelligence.  I believe we work well together because we give each other space, then we get together; and it’s a true collaboration. We’re open to each other’s ideas. She elevates me, I pull her down to earth. I reel her in, she releases me. And along the way, amidst all the hard work, there’s mutual respect, sibling love, and a whole lotta laughter.

SG:  There would be no Kundiman without Joseph’s strength of heart, utter vision, power of charm, and resourcefulness. I so deeply admire him and learn so much from him. I’m gleeful that I get to work with him.  I trust him to see what we are doing in every most expansive way. We’ve always had the same attitude of service toward Kundiman. From hauling bags of ice to filling out endless forms and reading applications, we both were not afraid to work harder than we have ever worked to make Kundiman’s mission a reality. And yes—laughter. Laughter is the the crucible of Kundiman and Joseph has brought so much of that to my life.

LR: Kundiman is notable not only for its support of the people within its network, but also for its engagement with the larger literary community and its collaborations with other communities of color. For example, on the tenth anniversary of 9-11, Kundiman organized a program called “Kavad” that was meant to give New Yorkers a chance to hear and engage with Asian American voices in the midst of all of the nationalistic (and often racist) furor surrounding much of the mainstream discourse about the tragedy. Other examples of inter-community collaborations have included your close relationship with Cave Canem and the reading series that you host in tandem with the NYC bar Verlaine. What, if any, do you think has been the impact of these collaborations: both on Kundiman itself, and on the larger literary community?  Why do you think it is important for Kundiman to continually reach outside of itself in this way? What sorts of other collaborations would you like to see happen in the future, and are there any in the works now?

JL: Community-building has always been at the heart and mission of Kundiman. Beyond the building of an Asian American literary community. We are a tiny organization and we could only do so much; partnering with other organizations is key: the retreat with Fordham University, the Kundiman Book Prize with Alice James Books, and the NYC reading series with Verlaine. Now only are these partnerships enabling is to serve our direct constituents, but they broaden our reach.  Moreover, we learn from these partnerships, trying to accomplish common goals.

In the future, I’d like to see more direct collaborations by way of a weekend conference or forum with Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and other literary groups, and the creation of a similar organization for Native American writers.

SG:  Yes, Kundiman is enriched and enlivened by these critical partnerships. They allow us to move beyond our scope of ability and engage in a multi-platform dialogue. There is so much work to be done and there is no possible way that we can do this on our own. These partnerships give us sustenance, perspective, and grounding.  It is important that Kundiman continues to reach out beyond itself, as we are comprised of individuals, and we need others to see for us what we might miss. We’d like to work more with Cave Canem and CantoMundo as well as with The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kearny Street Workshop, and Asian Arts Initiative. Additionally, we are working on exploring partnerships with Asian American student groups at Fordham University.

LR: How has your involvement with Kundiman influenced each of you—both personally, and as writers and teachers/administrators?

JL: It’s funny, because at times I’ve had difficulty thinking of the days before Kundiman. How memory works: in my mind, it’s always been a part of my life.  In a way, my being a co-founder of Kundiman has become an identity. I adamantly brushed it off, or even railed against it at a certain juncture in my life; I felt my poet-self had been forgotten, but that’s not so much the case now. I’m multi-faceted, I realized! And I reiterate: Kundiman is one of my most precious accomplishments. At every retreat, at Kundiman readings, every time I’m around the fellows, I’m floored at how talented and luminous they all are!  And I’m proud that in the tiniest way I contributed to that, in their development. Because of Kundiman I’ve become more evolved as a writer and as a person.

SG:  When I was 21 and had just moved to New York City, I remember just feeling overwhelmed and at a loss. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I was so hungry for fellowship and belonging and I didn’t know where to look for it. I remember going to readings and standing beside the cookies and not knowing what should happen next. I needed Kundiman before Kundiman. And, I realized that sometimes you have to become what it is you wish you had. Kundiman has sheltered me and continues to provide me with the grist, the tools to believe in myself as a poet. As a teacher and administrator, I’ve learned how to fight for what I want. Nothing is given. The fight is harder and easier and more pleasure than I had thought possible.

LR: Over the course of the last ten years, you’ve worked with many different “micro-generations” of emerging poets through the successive cohorts of fellows who have come through the retreat. In what ways have you seen the face of Asian American poetry change, as reflected in the young poets you’ve met over the years? Where do you see (or hope to see) the future of Asian American poetry heading, and how do you envision Kundiman’s role in that?

JL: Sarah once observed that there’s a generation of Asian-Am[erican] poets who’ve never known Kundiman NOT to exist! They’ve always had it available to them. It’s mind-boggling because Sarah and I created Kundiman because of the absence of an organization like it.  And now Kundiman is here to serve and foster Asian American poetry!

As far as the “face” of Asian American poetry, [I'm] not sure I could answer that, but I could offer what I’ve witnessed in the Kundiman microcosm. I see young poets who are fearless and with a broader sense of the world. They are adept and willing to experiment with poetics and poetic forms. They tackle myriad subject matters; they have different preoccupations and obsessions. They are world-weary, cosmopolitan, nature-lovers, gender benders, fierce activists, academics, tech-savvy, virtual and personal, steel and wounds, and most of all, open-minded, open-hearted.

SG:  I feel like I’ve seen more young people become empowered and emboldened to claim an identity as an Asian American poet. I’ve seen a healthy embracing of all forms and aesthetics of poetry. Young people are realizing that one does not have to be an academic to be a poet.  They can come to poetry on their own terms. I’d like to see Asian American poets lead the charge with digital creative writing and new forms of new media publishing in tandem with artisanal modes of print-making. At Kundiman, I’d like for us to host some kind of skill-share where we identify ways to devise a toolkit for how our poets are contending with the idea of being/becoming a 21st century creative writer.

LR: How can people learn more about Kundiman, and what should they do if they’d like to help support for its work?

JL: Well, we have a newly redesigned website: www.kundiman.org, your one-stop shop for Kundiman information. Once you’ve learned what Kundiman is all about, engage and take advantage of our programs. Reach out to us. We’re very friendly. And if you believe [in] sustaining a vital organization that nourishes Asian American voices and promotes social change through literature, please support us by making a donation. Now is the best time because our dear Kundiman fellows have launched an Indiegogo campaign to assist in building Kundiman, in taking the organization to the next level. You’re one click away.

SG: Yes, check out the Kundiman website. Kundiman is a collective of writers and readers. Join us in our telling of the Asian American story. We need you:  your words, experience, and belief beyond measure that Asian American writers deserve to be nurtured. Consider contributing to the Indiegogo and coming to a Kundiman event/program. We are looking forward to seeing you.

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Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press) and the forthcoming chapbook Subways (Thrush Press). He lives in Queens, NY, and works at Columbia University.  He co-founded Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American poetry.

Sarah Gambito is the author of the poetry collections Delivered (Persea Books) and Matadora (Alice James Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Field, Quarterly West, Fence, and other journals. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the Creative Writing Program at Brown University. Her honors include the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers and grants and fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Urban Artists Initiative, and the MacDowell Colony. She is assistant professor of English and director of creative writing at Fordham University. Together with Joseph O. Legaspi, she co-founded Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.

To support Kundiman’s work in a tangible way, please consider donating to their Indiegogo  fundraising campaign, which closes this coming Sunday, June 2nd. Every little bit counts!

Barbara Jane Reyes

In celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we’re continuing our annual tradition of asking respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share favorite writing exercises with us on successive Fridays during May. This week’s installment was contributed by Barbara Jane Reyes.

First, get that “I am APIA” identity poem, that “Yellow Power,” “Brown Power,” “Brown and Proud” poem out of your system. I wholeheartedly believe that we all need to write one (or two, or a few) of these at some point in our development as writers, especially in this American context, where we are described as “minority,” or “alien,” or worse things. Such mis-labelings are assaults upon our humanness. Now, oftentimes, as an initial phase of our political education, to defend ourselves against what we can rightfully view as attack—i.e. “what are you,” “you’re not from here,” “you don’t belong here”—we assume a defensive posture. We respond in defiance; we unleash the righteous anger.

Do not let go of that anger. Do not let anyone tell you that anger is not valid, not useful, not civilized, that it has no place in Poetry.

Salman Rushdie once said, “We are described into corners and then we must describe ourselves out of corners,” this little snippet of a quote that’s stayed with me for a long time.

Being described into corners is surely reason to be angry. And so how can we describe our way out of corners?

Minding the “Ethnic” “Artifact” in Our Work

“Artifact,” may not be the best word, because it implies stasis, but let’s go with this for now.

I am interested in the ways we describe ourselves into our own corners.

Something I recently blogged:

It’s not about the presence of the ethnic artifact in our work. It’s never been about the presence of the ethnic artifact in our work. It’s always been about what we are doing with the ethnic artifact, why and how we are doing what we are doing with the ethnic artifact.

What is the ethnic artifact in our work—not just objects (the Balul, the barrel man, and hanging on the wall of your parents’ home, above the Santo Niño on the altar, the gigantic narra wood spoon and fork, the gigantic narra wood tinikling dancers), but also language, food, customs, rituals.

Are you writing a grandmother/Lola poem because you feel like you have to? Why do you feel like you have to? What are you writing about your grandmother? How? Why? And are you handling her voice and narratives properly? Are you doing her voice and narratives justice? Are you exploring the complex layers of her voice and narratives, are you moving towards some insights you hadn’t previously considered, about her as a woman, a mother, a wife, her attitudes, her awareness, her agency? Her ambivalences? Her faith, her sadness, her will? Her humanity? Her testimony?

Is she telling the “truth”? Is she “lying”? Is she “omitting”? What and why?

And as you are engaged in this hard work, are you minding the borders of sentimentality? How close are you? Or are you rehashing everyone else’s Lola story, not digging deep enough, or are you going full maudlin, effectively turning her into a stereotype? Or are you sticking to the expected abstracts, Lolas as martyr, Lola as survivor (Of what? How? What are some ethical and moral questions we can employ here, as we discuss her agency?), Lola as symbol of strength, Lola as embodiment of tradition, Lola as symbol of generosity, love for Lola as expression of cultural pride?

You are not doing your Lola justice by resorting to the sentimental, generic, the hackneyed, overused trope. Your writing is objectifying your Lola.

So then, it has to do with the kind of hard work we are willing and able to do as writers, crafting narratives that flesh out the humanity of a character or persona in all its awesome contradiction and intricacy, versus churning out a fast, cheap, and easy McStory or McPoem … as a way of placating our constituents. The hard work is in the language—precision, specificity, and it is in how deep you dig into your own imagination (yes, imagine that, using our imagination), how much you can challenge and push your own imagination, as you listen to her tell her own story, or challenge and push your own memory. What other hard questions are we asking ourselves to push these narratives further, into something well considered, carefully crafted, original, interesting, specific?

What is at stake? What are the larger implications of the narrative?

So then, this is not a strict “prompt,” but rather, some lines of questioning I hope are helpful in unraveling the “ethnic” space we occupy, in many cases, with ambivalence. By all means, write about your families. Write your family histories. Write your family recipes. But be mindful of your lenses. Home in, scale back, position yourself at different angles. How are you looking?

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Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry and a finalist for the California Book Award. She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of the chapbooks Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2008) Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press, 2012).

An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, she received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program, where she teaches Filipino/a Literature in Diaspora, and Filipina Lives and Voices in Literature. She has also taught Filipino American Literature at San Francisco State University, and graduate poetry workshop at Mills College, and currently serves on the board of Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA). She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, where she is co-editor of Doveglion Press.

Matthew Olzmann

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines (Alice James Books), selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Currently, he teaches at Warren Wilson College and is the poetry editor of The Collagist.

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MEZZANINES

LR: Some of the most pervasive themes that Mezzanines deals with are place, identity, and faith, all in the context of mortality. Can you talk about the relationship between mortality and some of the specific places, identities, and beliefs you grapple with in the book?

MO: I’ve heard it said that most of literature, in some way, grapples with only one question: what does it mean to be alive? I’m probably not capable of answering that question, but if the idea of mortality hangs over a lot of these poems, it’s because I often get stuck thinking in binary terms; I get at things by considering their opposites. What does it mean to be alive? Not a clue. What does it mean to not be alive? Now I’m sufficiently terrified. What I’m saying is I tend to be the type of writer who understands the dark only by flicking the lights on and off a couple dozen times. I understand the deep end of the pool by splashing through the shallow side. I know Eden is paradise only when I’m banging against the gate from the wrong side.

LR: Mezzanines is full of unlikely juxtapositions and contradictions; for example, the interplay between high literature and the intensely personal and emotional in “The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth” or the pairing of sci-fi pop culture with a meditation on racial identity in “Spock as a Metaphor for the Construction of Race During My Childhood.” What are your thoughts on contradiction and juxtaposition as poetic strategies? As the aforementioned poems appear side by side in the book, can you explain how they relate to one another?

MO: I’m interested in making connections between various points, in metaphor as a device that makes something abstract more tangible. As such, I’m constantly looking at things that might not overtly belong together, and I’m trying to find correspondences among those dissimilarities.

In trying to organize the book, I initially arranged the poems a little bit more thematically: here are the love poems, the poems about identity, the poems about weird stories from the news, etc. However, those thematic clusters quickly began to feel artificial and predetermined. So I deliberately broke them up and tried to spread them out over the book, hoping those threads that were related in terms of “content” would echo and speak to each other across the length of the book rather that exist back-to-back as next-door neighbors. I began thinking of the order “tonally,” and those two poems—while apparently dissimilar in terms of subject matter—felt similar in terms of tone and perspective, both in their movement from humor to emotional crisis, and from an outward gaze to internal reflection.

LR: How would you describe the roles of humor and self-parody in your poems?

MO: There is no form of humor that doesn’t come with some kind of “target.” In this way, for me, humor can be a type of critique. I also think types of humor and absurdity—with their tendencies to disrupt the reader’s ability to anticipate—can be an interesting entrance to a more lyrical moment.

LR: Which poem in Mezzanines was the most challenging for you to write? Can you walk us through the process of its creation?

MO: While I’m not sure if it was the most challenging, “Spock” went through an unusual revision process. It’s actually the combination of three different poems. So the process of its creation was probably the most elaborate. First, I had to write three failed poems. That wasn’t necessarily “challenging,” but understanding that those poems didn’t work (and why they didn’t); realizing that those poems (all written at different times without the others in mind) were related and approaching similar concerns; imagining a way that they could be used together; and finally stitching fragments of them into a single poem took a lot of time.

LR: Along with a fair number of the poets we’ve interviewed at Lantern Review, you have spoken about the importance of risk and the tolerance of failure in their writing. Can you tell us a bit more about why you think the freedom to fail as a poet is important? How does that freedom impact your writing, and what are some of the practical measures you take in order to find and harness the freedom to fail?

MO: I think it’s a matter of having the right amount of pressure on you and your work. Obviously, I don’t want to “fail.” I don’t set out to purposely write poems that don’t live up to my expectations. But a certain amount of that is inevitable and part of the process. A baseball player in a batting cage might take hundreds of swings in one day. Obviously, he’s trying to hit each ball as effectively as possible. That won’t always happen, but each swing is part of the process of getting better.

LR: As a founding member, participant, and proponent of The Grind, what do you think writing every day gives to writers that writing less frequently doesn’t?

MO: This is closely related to the previous question, and, for me, writing every day is a way of managing the pressure I put on myself, balancing the desire to write a “good” poem against the inevitability of failure. For example, if I haven’t written something in three months, there’s a lot of pressure when I actually return to the writing desk. In those moments, I feel whatever I write has to be good, because this is my only chance, it’s the only thing I’ve written in ages. To extend the baseball analogy from above, you’ve only got one swing, then you have to make contact. Because of that specific type of pressure, if I haven’t written for a long time, I become less likely to write at all. I’ll start trying to create the ideal situation for writing: I have to have three hours of uninterrupted time, a clean desk, a cup of coffee, all my other work must be done first, inspiration, and appointment with the muse, etc. I have to make it count because it’s the only thing I’ve written. However, when I’m writing every day—even a little bit—it clears some of that away for me. If what I write is garbage, then I’ll be back at it tomorrow and the next day and the next. You write as hard and as well as you can, punch out at the end of the day, eat dinner, go to sleep, and come back to work tomorrow.

LR: What has being an editor at The Collagist contributed to your understanding of the publishing process as a poet?

MO: It’s introduced me to the work of hundreds of writers I was previously unfamiliar with. In some ways, it’s given me a sense of how large the poetry world is; I’m awestruck by the sheer volume of poets writing good poems. We can only publish a small fraction of those, and I’m constantly humbled by the energy, grace, and imaginative force of the poems out there that are trying to find a home.

LR: You’re currently teaching for a year at Warren Wilson College, a low residency MFA program from which you yourself graduated. How do you feel that Warren Wilson’ s program differs from traditional ones, and what would you suggest that writers interested in a low residency program consider?

MO: I’m teaching in the undergraduate writing program, which is separate from the MFA Program for Writers. The MFA has its residencies on campus only when the college is not in session: during winter break or over the summer. From my experience as a student in the MFA program, and based on what I know of more “traditional” residential programs, Warren Wilson offers more direct feedback on a student’s work. My first semester, I had an instructor respond (in the form of notes, line editing, and personal letters) to over 30 poems and fifteen essays I had written. Those letters were substantial. By the end of the semester, he had written over 70 pages of (typed) prose about my writing. That type of instructor feedback is rarely possible if you’re in a workshop with twelve other people and having one of your poems looked at every other week. I can’t speak about other low-residency programs, but I think one the strengths of Warren Wilson is its methodology and attention to developing the writer as a reader. A lot of people say that it’s important to “learn how to read as a writer,” but few can actually say how that skill is acquired. The program at Warren Wilson is really designed to do just that. It teaches a writer to be better reader—to look at a piece of writing, see how its particular effects are achieved, and understand how those specific strategies can be applied to one’s own writing.

LR: As the winner of the 2011 Kundiman Book Prize, can you tell us how has being a Kundiman fellow influenced you as a writer? Was it different from your MFA experience, and if so, how?

MO: Kundiman has both nurtured and supported my writing in a number of ways: retreats, residencies, and practical advice about moving through the writing world. But what I value most are the friendships and the deep sense of community that it has allowed me to experience.

While there are some similarities between what I experienced in an MFA Program and at Kundiman (lasting friendships, a sense of camaraderie with other writers), in general, it’s impractical to compare the two experiences. You apply to these different things for different reasons, and should approach each with separate expectations. Initially, I applied to Kundiman at a point when I was wrestling with issues of mixed-race Asian American identity, both in my personal life and in my writing. I went to the retreat to listen to and participate in a very specific type of conversation related to identity, community, and the arts. No one goes to an MFA program for those reasons. You go to an MFA program to be a student of poetry, to apprentice yourself to your art, to learn particular skills that—you hope—you’ll be able to use in a concrete way.

LR: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

MO: I’m writing new poems and some very short stories. I’ve got a group of poems that I think could be the core of a new poetry manuscript, and I’m trying to understand how these poems are related.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we’re continuing our annual tradition of asking respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share favorite writing exercises with us on successive Fridays during May. This week’s installment was contributed by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Stationery
by Agha Shahid Ali

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.

The Context

The hand-lettered envelope. The canceled stamp. The tooth of the paper that nibbles the ink. The epistle is a type of poem that underscores the best intimacies that can arise from a letter: the measured and focused address to a specific recipient. In a world that values the addictive glow of a screen, the speedy text message, the quick hello and check-in—much can be gained and admired in a poem that follows the ancient and simple form of a letter.

The word epistle comes from the Latin word (espistula) for letter. In the Middle Ages, the art of letter writing was often taught as a necessity for building community and encouraging discourse. In fact, the writing of epistles was actually amplified as old road structures began to decay and crumble. Travel became increasingly difficult—people soon relied on letter writing to conduct and negotiate business in place of making a claim in person. Another variation of the epistle is one that Ovid himself employed—epistles as a way to explore persona. In his Heroides, he imagines letters written by neglected or abandoned heroines of Greek mythology: writing as Penelope to Odysseus, writing as Helen to Paris, as Medea to Jason.

When is the last time you opened your mailbox and found a bona fide hand-written letter? So much of mail these days is ‘sad mail’—coupon flyers, missing children notices, bills, sweepstakes packets. But oh the joy and delight when you find your name written by a friend or loved one’s hand! Or the surprise and mysterious architecture of a handwriting you’ve never seen before! When was the last time you wrote a letter?

The Exercise

Feel free to mimic the relationship uncovered within most epistles—the letter poem is addressed to someone ‘you’ can’t talk to for whatever reason—the person is far away or deceased or famous, or even someone you know well, but you can’t say what needs to be said in real life. It should be clear to the reader who is being addressed within the title or the first few lines. There are no meter or rhyme rules for this form. This type of poem is more of a vehicle to explore persona and voice.

Still stuck? Write an epistle to any of the following: 1) an animal or plant, 2) yourself, ten years ago, 3) yourself, twenty years ago 4) your beloved, twenty years ago, 5) a future version of you, even if the future you imagine is simply ‘tomorrow’ 6) a company or corporation 7) one of the seven deadly sins or virtues (ie. Dear Lust,… or Dear Patience,…) 8) your zodiac or birthstone 9) your favorite “guilty pleasure” food or 10) the city you call ‘home’ in all its complicated and wondrous glory.

The Why

I’ve found that writing a poem TO someone (or some-thing!) makes the edges of imagery focus crisper into view. And in that focused state, the epistle begins to tighten up the rest of the poem’s language so that a distinct persona emerges and establishes a clear and immediate tone and mood in ways that other poems might not. And yet, writing a letter to a stranger takes the innate intimacy of an epistle a step further: it requires the invention of an imagined other (even if the person exists, he/she is still being imagined), and it fashions a sort of detailed handiwork about why we might find ourselves wishing to talk to them. And isn’t that such a good and necessary occupation, a welcome slowing down and stepping away from a handheld device or screen? I like to think of writing epistles as a writing towards—and attempting to love, or at least recognize—the strangers that live inside each of us.

For More Inspiration:

“Frame, an Epistle,” by Claudia Emerson

“note, passed to superman,” by Lucille Clifton

“Letter to Simic from Boulder,” by Richard Hugo

“As Children Together,” by Carolyn Forché

* * *

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is professor of English at State University of New York–Fredonia, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature. She is the author of three poetry collections: Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the gold medal in poetry from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award. Poems and essays are widely published in venues such as Tin House, Ploughshares, Orion, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and noted in Best American Essays. Other honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Western New York in the middle of berry country with her husband and young sons.

Oliver de la Paz

In celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we’re continuing our annual tradition of asking respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share favorite writing exercises with us on successive Fridays during May. This week’s installment was contributed by Oliver de la Paz.

When you’re a parent of three children under the age of 6, you have to be very deliberate in finding time for yourself to commit to the page. My family lives in the country, and it’s a 40-minute commute from my house to the doorstep of my workplace. In addition, all my children are in daycare. You’d think that having the kids in daycare would afford me some time, but it doesn’t. When they’re in daycare, I’m either teaching, thinking about teaching, preparing to teach, or administrating on some committee that has to do with teaching. Needless to say, my writing time comes in pockets. Slivers. Little flares. My relationship with the page is no longer routinized. I used to have ample time to dedicate to writing, but that was before children. Now my writing time is broken down into excursions. Mini-trips. Little rendezvous. I understand that this is my life and rather than succumb to long silences, I challenge myself everyday, to think about a poem. In order to cope with my hectic schedule, I developed a process that fosters obsession.

An obsession is not a terrible thing to have when you’re a writer. It can be a motivator—generative beacon. I try to dedicate increments of five to ten minutes throughout the day to the composition of a line. I also attempt to write a line every hour for fourteen hours, so by the end of the day I have a sonnet-length collection of lines. My poem “Requiem for the Orchard” was composed under these particular conditions. During the hectic weeks of Christmas vacation (who’d have thought Christmas vacation would be hectic?) I had a sense that I needed to craft a “spinal” poem for a collection of poems I had nearly completed.

During the Kundiman Retreat in 2007, I assigned the Kundiman Fellow cohort the following assignment. I give it to you now:

1) Write a single line every hour. Write no more than a line. Even if you feel you wish to write a second line, restrain yourself from doing so.

2) Set an alarm to go off every hour.

3) At the top of every hour, write a new line, adding to the collection of lines you have written throughout the day.

4) Do this for fourteen hours.

Here’s what happens, at least to me, when you set up these particular circumstances—you wind up thinking about the poem all day. Sure, you’ve spaced out the time you get to the page, but in the interstices of an hour, a poem begins to take shape from its first line to its next line to the line that follows. Of course, you’re going to want to be sure that you are in a safe locale for this. One Kundiman fellow was driving when the fellow’s writing alarm went off and she nearly sideswiped a car. Don’t do that.

* * *

Oliver de la Paz is the author of four books of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, and Post Subject: A Fable, forthcoming from the University of Akron Press in 2014. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems and the co-chair of Kundiman’s advisory board. He teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Western Washington University.

Our crowd-sourced map at AWP 2013.

“What is the Landscape of APIA Literature?” reads the poster board map of the United States that I’ve stuck up on my bedroom wall. Red, green, and blue dots cluster over the black sharpie outlines of its borders, clotting layer upon layer in some locations (e.g. NYC, LA, SF, New England), and scattering more sparsely across others (there’s two lonely blue dots huddled together in the southeastern-most corner of South Dakota; while several states—such as Alaska, Idaho, Oklahoma, and New Mexico—remain blank). A key in the right hand corner provides some interpretation: green dots stand for people who identify as writers and readers (and/or publishers) of Asian/Pacific Islander American (APIA) literature, red for those who identify as readers (but not writers) of APIA lit, and blue for those who identify as neither a reader nor a writer of APIA lit, but are curious to learn more.

The information on this map was “crowd-sourced” a few months ago at our the AWP bookfair table, where we and three other APIA lit mags (Kartika Review, TAYO Magazine, and Hyphen) invited passers-by to add dots representing themselves to the map according to the place of origin with which they most identified and their relationship to APIA literature. One of the things that struck us immediately was how very open people were to our invitation to “map” themselves. The act of adding oneself to a map carries its own particular appeal. To place yourself on a map is to make a statement about one’s identity; to declare one’s origins; to make one’s mark on a place; to speak for and represent oneself amidst a larger community. In the context of a conference as bewilderingly large and far-flung as AWP, especially, that seemed particularly important.

The map also opened up some truly interesting conversations about the relationship between geography and identity. Almost everybody who put a dot on the map openly pondered where to place themselves: “What if I’m ‘from’ more than one place—as in, I grew up in one state but live in another now?” we were asked more than once. Not only did this open up intriguing questions regarding the complexities of place-based identity, but it enabled us to engage in deeper exchanges about the shared, slippery natures of our own relationships with place and “home.” It allowed us to go beyond the question, “where are you from?” and to have more personal interactions about migration, regional identities, and even family histories.

More than once, I found that my sharing about why I’d placed myself in Kentucky (even though I was born and raised in New Jersey, I wanted to claim my current state of residence because it seemed so underrepresented on the map!) opened a door to further conversations. One man spoke about having grown up in Tennessee (one state over), and we talked about Appalachia and about writing from home-places marginalized by regional stereotypes. Another woman, not seeing Long Island on the map, asked if she could add it in (“Of course!” was our reply); our ensuing conversation led us to speak at length about NYC and her work as a literary agent with a special interest in supporting the work of APIA novelists and memoirists. One person who’d grown up in Puerto Rico was surprised and delighted to find that we’d included it on the map. Still others who were from places that we hadn’t managed to fit on the map (Wales, England, Canada) wrote themselves in (in a box labeled “other” on the left), and each time that happened, it brought to mind echoes of critical discourse about the politics of cartography: when one makes a map, one necessarily designates places as “central” vs. “marginal”, “significant” vs. “not as significant” by their placement and inclusion or exclusion from the projection.  In generating our map, we decided to include only the fifty states, Guam, and Puerto Rico for reasons of visibility (to “zoom out” any more would have meant that there wouldn’t have been room on some of the smaller states to stick dots). But who, indeed, has the right to determine whose homes are featured or marginalized, included and excluded? We, too, were guilty of some forms of marginalization.

How people chose to identify in terms of their relationship to APIA lit also proved interesting to observe. While some chose their dot color without a moment’s hesitation, others deliberated painstakingly over the choice. “What does ‘APIA’ mean?” many people asked (so many, in fact, that I eventually added an asterisked note explaining the acronym). Still others seemed unsure of what “counted” as Asian American literature, or couldn’t immediately call to mind the names of Asian American writers whose work they’d read. I had to convince a few people trying to decide between red and blue dots that they could still choose to identify as “readers” of APIA lit if they’d only read The Joy Luck Club (they may not have been regular readers, but they certainly counted as people who had read some APIA literature). I was encouraged to see many people identify as blue (“curious to learn more”), as it opened the door to many conversations in which we were able to recommend ways for them to encounter APIA lit for the first time. But I was also equally interested to see who self-identified as “green” (as a “reader and writer of APIA lit”). Most of the people who mapped themselves using green dots were visibly of APIA heritage, but there were also others who added themselves under that category, such as Vievee Francis, who, having published APIA writers in Callaloo, suggested that we add the alternative description “/publisher of” to the green dot category so as to encompass people like her, who felt deeply invested in the reading, writing, and promulgation of APIA lit despite not identifying as an APIA writer herself. Our conversations with Vievee and others reminded us of the shifting, slippery nature of the boundaries that society uses to delineate literary and racial categories alike—the very instability that we like to embrace and tease out and question here at LR, and which lies at the heart of our mission.

The map also directly provoked at least one rather uncomfortable encounter for us. On the second evening, while we were getting ready to clean up for the day, an older, white gentleman wandered by. When we invited him to put a sticker on the map to represent himself, he proclaimed that something was “wrong” with it because it didn’t include Asia—which, he said, gesturing at the group of us who were packing up, was where all of us were “from.” He then insisted that it did not make sense for us to use a map of the the US, since (he implied) none of us were “from here.”

“What is your state of origin?” he asked me several times, attempting to prove his point.

“New Jersey,” I replied (truthfully) each time (though he was clearly fishing for a different answer).

Our interaction with this man was an unpleasant reminder of the complications of being a person of color—and more specifically, a person of APIA heritage—in America. But it also caused me to think more broadly about the limited ability of a single physical or political map to communicate identity. True, we could’ve included Asia on our map had space permitted (in fact, we would have loved to include more countries, as many of our readers and several of our contributors are based in Asia, and we pride ourselves on interpreting “Asian American” quite broadly—both in terms of ethnicity and geographic locale). But even the most detailed, comprehensive map in the world would not have convinced this man of the “authenticity” of our having claimed the US as our homeplace; he had his own, fixed map in his head, onto which he’d placed us according to his preexisting notions about relationships between physical appearance and place. To be transnational or diasporic; to be from several or many, or even part, of a place or places, did not fit the logic of his internal notions of geography. (He did, at one point, inquire what we meant by “Asian American,” as, in his words, “Asia’s a big place,” but although he seemed to understand the inherently unwieldy pan-ethnic implications of the term, he could not seem to grasp the notion that American national identity could also fully inform the personal identities claimed by people of Asian descent).

And so his own map had failed him. But in a way, so had ours, as all maps must do at a certain point. Maps can be beautiful and evocative and highly informative, but they are, at heart, only schematic representations, notational distillations of much more complex configurations and patterns of landscape and human behavior. I like that word, landscape, because it brings the notion of the “map” into the realm of the experiential, the real and 3-D, the shifting and unpredictable. People’s locations can be plotted on a map. But people themselves (and their stories) inhabit landscapes. A map is a tool that can facilitate the creation of a landscape, as the bare geographical details before us take flesh and rise up into larger, more robust, and infinitely more intimate narratives that color our worlds and help to contextualize our identities.

May is APIA heritage month, and as we head into the thick of celebrating it here on the blog, I’ve been thinking again about the “landscape” of APIA literature (more specifically, APIA poetry) and how what we do here at LR is an attempt at a “mapping” of sorts. In striving to highlight the expanse and breadth of Asian American poetry, to push at and challenge its borders, and to help put Asian American poetry and poets on the literary “map,” we ride a fine line. How can we be both “of here” and “not of here,” a center for literary community-building, and yet global in both import and impact? We cannot be, or represent, all of what it means to be readers or writers of Asian American poetry, and yet, we must start somewhere, if we are to pave the way for greater exposure and deeper, more universal discourse about APIA literature. And so, we begin slowly, in the only way that we can: by adding more dots to our map—more people to the conversation—one at a time.

Thank you so much to all of you who entered our 2013 National Poetry Month giveaway!  This weekend, we put the total number of entries (comments) received through a random number generator, and let it choose the number of the winning comment for us:

And the winner is  . . .

Noel Mariano (comment #13), who writes that he is currently in the midst of reading Barbara Jane Reyes’s Diwata and re-reading Bino Realuyo’s The Gods We Worship Live Next Door.

Here’s a screenshot of his comment:

Noel will receive a 1-year subscription to the Asian American Literary Review (courtesy of AALR), a copy of Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut’s Magnetic Refrain (courtesy of Kaya Press), and a copy of Henry W. Leung’s Paradise Hunger (courtesy of the author). Congratulations, Noel!  We hope you’ll enjoy your prize!

Also as promised, each of the first ten commentors to have entered the contest will receive a bundle of five of our poetry starter packs. These lucky ten people are, in the order in which their comments were received:

1. Rumit Pancholi, who’s reading Li-Young Lee and Garrett Hongo.
2. Cathy Linh Che, who adores Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors.
3. R., who has Myung Mi Kim and Barbara Jane Reyes on the top of their list.
4. Roberto Ascalon, who’s reading Jon Pineda and looking forward to Jason Bayani’s Amulet.
5. Michelle Penaloza, who recommends both Eugene Gloria and Luisa Igloria.
6. Luisa Igloria, who wrote of her love for Paisley Rekdal’s work.
7. Michelle Lin, who’s enjoying Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior at the moment.
8. Rachelle, who’s reading Brynn Saito and Jason Bayani, and is waiting for Manila Noir (ed. Jessica Hagedorn)
9. Jane Wong, who recently finished (and loved) Lynn Xu’s Debts and Lessons and also recommends the work of Cathy Park Hong (having recently read Engine Empire) and Myung Mi Kim.
10. Kristen Eliason, who says she visits and revisits For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang, and Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil.

We were thrilled to see everyone’s responses. There was a wide range of names mentioned in the thirty-four comments that were left on the original post; Ching-In Chen, Kimiko Hahn, and Li-Young Lee topped the list at 4, 3, and 3 mentions each, while a number of other poets (Jason Bayani, Tarfia Faizullah, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Karen Llagas, Barbara Jane Reyes, Ocean Vuong, Lynn Xu, and Andre Yang) were mentioned twice. Other writers who showed up on people’s lists included: Arthur Sze, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Dilruba Ahmed, Angie Chuang, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kenji Liu, David Maduli, Pos L. Moua, Soul Choj Vang, Ka Vang, Sesshu Foster, Angela Torres, Matthew Olzmann, Koon Woon, Allen Qing Yuan, Beau Sia, Amy Uyematsu, Russell Leong, Mitsuye Yamada, Joel Tan, Tsering Wangmo, Lee Herrick, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, David S. Cho, Bao Phi, Ed Bok Lee, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Sasha Pimental Chacon, Burlee Vang, Ishle Yi Park, Sally Wen Mao, Lo Kwa Mei-En, and Hoa Nguyen. (To read about these recommendations  in more detail, click here to see the original post). Many commentors also took the time to leave detailed remarks about the work of the poets they’d mentioned. Their recommendations have definitely nudged us to add several names and  titles to our reading lists, and we hope they’ve inspired you, too!

Congratulations to all our winners, and thank you so much again to everyone who entered, as well as to our generous sponsors, AALR, Kaya, and Henry Leung. A very happy tail end of National Poetry Month to you all!  We’ll see you on the flip side, in May, when we’ll continue our celebration of Asian American poetry with more special content for APIA Heritage Month.

Christopher Santiago

Chris Santiago is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and teacher. His writing has appeared in FIELD, Pleiades, The Asian American Literary Review, Canteen, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and elsewhere. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and has been a finalist for both the Stony Brook Short Fiction Contest and the Kundiman Poetry Prize (for his manuscript Tula). Chris is completing his Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where he is a Provost’s Ph.D. Fellow and ACE-Nikaido Fellow, and teaches literature & writing in the Thematic Option Program.

This April, we are returning to our Process Profiles series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their writing process for an individual poem or poetic sequence of theirs. As in the past, we’ve asked Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a piece of theirs that we’ve published. In this installment, Christopher Santiago writes about his poem “Tam,” which appeared in Issue 5.

*  *  *

I wrote the first draft of “Tam,” I think, out of anger. It’s an older poem, and I was in my early twenties and mad about a lot of things, but one of the things that really got under my skin was pop culture, and portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans in particular. Miss Saigon, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boubil’s Vietnam War redux of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, was the kind of cultural object that really drove me up the wall. The tale of Kim, a Vietnamese bargirl who commits suicide so that her son, Tam, can grow up in the States with his American ex-GI father, didn’t bother me when I first saw it as a teenager. But over the years, the memory festered—I won’t waste time explaining why—and only after I began to try to write seriously did it occur to me that this anger might be something I could use.

I was just starting out, and writing a lot of persona poems, partly because I felt that trying to get in someone else’s head allowed me to get outside of myself, and partly because I was (and still am) deeply interested in voice. My anger toward Miss Saigon—and texts that were like it—gave me energy, but it also made me inarticulate. As the poem unfolded, then, I felt the impulse to deflect, to approach the subject obliquely—from the point of view of Tam, who I imagined growing up haunted by the memory of his mother’s voice. That way, I reasoned, I could really poke holes in the musical’s phony premise, its false catharsis. I could build further into its world in a way that would, I hoped, reveal its glib and hollow heart.

After I wrote a few drafts, the poem sat on the back burner for years, until I started working a couple of years ago on a manuscript I’m tentatively calling Tula. I was happy to find “Tam” on an old hard drive, and happier still to find that one of my current obsessions had begun to take shape in “Tam” years before: my obsession with the way that unlearned languages haunt us. I never learned to speak Tagalog, or Ilonggo, or Bicolano—my mother tongues, or heritage languages—and I’m fascinated by the bits and pieces that I do know, the bodily traces of certain rhythms and intonations in the ears of 1.5 and 2nd generation folks like me. I’ve been reading these fascinating fMRI studies on the subject: the science, as far as I can tell, supports the intuition that Kim—her singular way of speaking—remains a part of Tam even after he can no longer recall (at least consciously) a single phrase of Vietnamese.

As for the poem, I still liked its bones, but thought perhaps it over-explained itself. I decided to strip it back, to let the silences bleed more, and to break the suite of episodes into shorter and more irregular fragments. I also hoped that reordering them might quiet some of the melodrama. I’d given Tam my anger, and think he deserved to feel it; some of it, I think, still bubbles up under the lid. But instead of belting his anger out under the spotlights, Tam mutters it under his breath. I hope that gives the poem at least a bit more bite and plaintiveness.

WATER CHASING WATER

In Koon Woon’s Water Chasing Water, a river appears in one poem and flows into the next, appearing there as rain, turning up in one place as an ocean and in yet another as a damp and soggy sadness. I was immediately reminded of lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and there on thúy’s first page: “Ba and I were connected to the four uncles, not by blood but by water” (3).

Woon’s text gestures toward the meanings of water—as life-giving force, as connective tissue, as that which carries us. lê thi diem thúy explains that “In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nu’ó’c.” In Thai, the word for river (แม่น้ำ) is made up of the word for mother (แม่) and the word for water (น้ำ). For the diasporic fish/ghost/dish-washer in Woon’s poems, water connects places to other places, traveling from person to person and washing up memories and other debris.

As if glazed in the afternoon heat,
the blackberry brambles are still and
quiet, the steel rail expanding,
and once the roar of a rumbling freight
passes and dies, the slough,
quiet again with its currents,
becomes water moving on
in my unregulated childhood.

[. . .]

In the waters between us are
the gurgling sounds of childhood empires
and paper boats, and in the parcels of land
that sustain us, the memories of stickers
and hand-staining berries;
in nights of sleep,
a child’s reworking of paradise. (“As If,” 5)

In the poem “Coastal Highway 101, 1960,” Woon remembers U.S. 101, the highway that runs down the western edge of California, Oregon and Washington, as a river. A rhythm develops with the repetition of the lines “It was in effect a river of sorts—”, “It was in effect a town of sorts—”, It was in effect a time of sorts—” and “It was in effect a life of sorts—” (7) as the highway moves through historical references and geographical landmarks, evoking lines of commerce and economies of travel.

The highway, like a river, expands to fill the distance, like water poured into a container, just as “Chinese cooks diced string beans a mile long / their work expanding to fill idle hours, the Pacific tides contracting / and expanding across the pretense of commerce . . .” (7). Woon’s use of ellipses and em dashes in nearly every stanza mimic these contracting and expanding motions, as oceanic currents between the U.S. and China are remembered in the bodies and lives of diasporic cooks,  homeowners and misers.

“[A]mong the many rivers between us / and the many waters,” (6) the rocking is sometimes comforting, at other times disorienting. In the poem “Flight,” Woon discusses the dislocation of place: “Oak Street never had oaks: this much we knew / of the street we lived on. Aberdeen / in the encyclopedia refers you to Scotland” (10). In reference to the Satsop River, he continues: “Channel cats (catfish) either dig holes / in the muddy bottom, lodging themselves in and vacuuming / the food that drifts their way, or they / swim downstream forever” (10). The tension between embedding oneself in a place, despite a pull to return elsewhere, and floating away becomes the tidal force that ebbs and flows in this book.

In the poem “A Season in Hell,” Woon discusses the labor of working in a (probably Chinese) restaurant in San Francisco in relationship to tourism and economies of food. It opens with the following image:

‘When you come in to work each morning,
remove your bodily organs and limbs
one by one. Hang them up on the hooks
provided in the walk-in box, then put a white apron
onto your disembodied self, pick up a knife,
and go to the meat block,’ said Alex, the manager.

I was also drained of blood and other vital bodily fluids. (“A Season in Hell,” 30)

Later in the poem, the gutted, ghosted and emptied speaker is at Fisherman’s Wharf, where “[t]ourists paid me to dance / on the waves; I carefully tread water and remembered to breathe” (30). Evicted, the speaker climbs down to the water beneath Golden Gate Bridge. There, ”I waited until one sunny day when the water was warm and calm, / then swam all the way to Asia and got replacements for my disembodied self. / I did not forget that I was a ghost” (30). This sense of being filled up and drained, of being replaced, surprised me in this piece. I thought about the speaker being replaced when tourists pay him to dance on the waves; I thought about replacement in a line Woon writes later in another poem, “I go for egg tarts to feel Chinese” (86). The shifting and porous self of these poems butts up against the insides of their frames and containers, sometimes permeating the borders between places.

In Water Chasing Water, Woon organizes memory in terms of bodies of water. “[T]he best story is always told by a river” (17), he says, “[a]nd water, when running in one room, can be heard in the other” (21). As a connective force, tributaries and capillaries become one and the same, as water becomes blood becomes home: “[A]nd the lines on my open palms / and all the veins and arteries on my naked body / are like a road map of China” (31). Each body of water—each crush, drip and misting—remembers a town of sorts, a time of sorts, a life of sorts, that chases and slips into another. Woon writes, “if the moon and the water get together, / you can bet there will be tides. / And even a sea anemone will feel a surge of something” (39). These poems surge. He asks the reader to ”take this swelling / and make it an ocean” (43).