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 inevitably 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

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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.

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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.

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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).

Esther Lee

Esther Lee has written Spit, a poetry collection selected for the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011) and her chapbook, The Blank Missives (Trafficker Press, 2007). Her poems and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Lantern Review, Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Salt Hill, Good Foot, Swink, Hyphen, Born Magazine, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University where she served as Editor-in-Chief for Indiana Review. She has been awarded the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and Utah Writer’s Contest Award for Poetry selected by Brenda Shaughnessy, as well as having been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and AWP Intro Journals Project. Currently, she pursues a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah and lives with her fiancé, Michael, and their dog and three cats in Salt Lake. Starting this fall, she will begin teaching as an assistant professor at Agnes Scott College.

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, Esther Lee reflects upon the excerpt of her project Daughters of Celluloid that appeared in Issue 5.

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(if his plate would not record the clouds, he could point his camera down and eliminate the sky)

—John Szarkowski

If there is a hegemonic familial gaze, imposing rigid familial ideologies, then mothers are most cruelly subjected to its scrutiny.

—Marianne Hirsch

Excerpts of this Process Profile are pulled from a craft talk titled, “Double Exposures: Photographic Fictions and Traumatic Memories” given at Virginia Tech. All photographic images are ones I’ve taken or borrowed from family albums.

My hope is to invite you into a constellation of influences—and mostly questions—I’m working with and exploring in this work-in-progress, tentatively titled Daughters of Celluloid. This constellation includes the works of writers and artists who meditate on, thematize, and/or employ photography, as well as those whose works investigate the complexities of trauma and representations, in particular, of trauma not directly experienced first-hand. So a kind of assemblage, if you will, one that is part wax, part string, part etched glass.

In Daughters of Celluloid, the narrator finds that her mother’s enigmatic past is pocked with speech, presented as fragmented anecdotes, suggesting recessed narratives of trauma and dislocation. To borrow a phrase from the French novelist and Holocaust writer, Henri Raczymow, memory is “shot through with holes” and underscored by potential absences of family photographs wherein large swaths of time and space have seemingly vanished, losing any semblance of continuity. As a result, the narrator finds herself attempting to photograph the mother, grappling with how the camera can both fix and unfix them. In doing so, they disrupt their unspoken ways of looking, complicating the myths of familial memory and, ultimately, searching for what Alison Bechdel describes in her graphic novel, Are You My Mother?, as a “mutual cathexis” between mother and daughter, wherein they can recognize each other’s invisible wounds.

*  *  *

WAX.

What I know about this photograph:

This is my mother. Or an image of her. Though she is questionably small. Though her face is a blurred coin without face or denomination. I tell myself that this is my mother. That I belong to her.

If you squint, my mother appears to be an extension of the tree. Or the tree an extension of her. Either of which: an aberration of the other. I’m unsure how far the shadow extends.

My own vision is terrible, especially my left eye. As a child I was encouraged by a well-meaning optometrist to read with a cutout piece of newspaper taped over the left side of my eyeglasses. All in the hopes of correcting my vision. Eventually, I ripped it off.

*  *  *

STRING.

Barthes’s Camera Lucida is perhaps (next to my fiancé) the love of my life—the book, that is, not Barthes himself, although I should re-examine this possibility too.

In the aftermath of his mother’s death, Barthes searches though photographs of her, photographs that would, as he puts it, “speak” and allow him the hope of “finding” his mother again.

He writes:

I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. . . . Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful  labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false (65-66).

“Images partially true . . .”

A few pages later, Barthes describes a photograph of his mother as a child. She is standing with her brother at the end of the little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory. This “Winter Garden photograph,” as he refers to it, is the photograph which allows him to feel that he has “at last rediscovered [his] mother” (69).

Unlike Barthes, however, I’m unsure of what a photograph of my own mother as child would look like since there are none in our family albums. Instead, photographs of my mother begin mid-sentence, mid-narrative, in her thirties, as if her infancy and adolescence had somehow never occurred.

*  *  *

GLASS.

There are too many photographers from whom I draw inspiration to name here, but I’d like to highlight a few below.

Nikki S. Lee

Like a social anthropologist or a driven method actor, Lee observes particular American subcultures and ethnic groups—such as punks, yuppies, skateboarders and swing dancers—and adopts their customs and costumes through gesture and posture. In her “Projects” series, she immerses herself in the respective lifestyles of these groups, a process that sometimes takes weeks or even months, which involve performing and posing in snapshot photographs, doing basically whatever it takes to “fit in.”

Her ability to “perform” cultural identities in these photos suggests that identity is not a static set of traits belonging to an individual, but, rather, something constantly changing and re-defined through relationships with other people. She’s been described, not surprisingly, as a chameleon. Her work often unnerves viewers because of its ability to provoke questions of authenticity and sincerity, sometimes revealing our own assumptions and stereotypes about cultural identities.

Lee’s work informs my own attempt to consider the ways our identities can be reconstituted, how identity can be an arena of free play, where appearance may serve only as an alterable mask. In my own work, markers of ethnicity and race are destabilized. For instance, the mother character purposefully thickens her Korean accent to avoid receiving a speeding ticket. Moments when ethnic markers are acknowledged—and are in danger of aesthetically commodifying Asian American cultural differences—attempt to give way to other moments that obscure and discomfort those conventional boundaries and subjectivities.

*  *  *

WAX.

Bertien van Manen

Bertien van Manen is a Dutch photographer who has traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and Asia, often learning the native languages and developing bonds with people she has photographed. In one series, she took photos of people’s photographs instead of photographing the people themselves. In a video about her work, she mentions that when she’d visit people’s houses, they’d ask her, “Where do you want me?” and she would respond with, “I don’t want you. I want your pictures.” At times van Manen would arrange the photos in the person’s home, juxtaposing the photo with a particular object belonging to the person who lived there. Her photos often suggest the impact of larger cultural memories—at times those memories have alluded to traumatic events such as the Holocaust or other upheavals—on personal, private lives.

Her photographs speak to my own interest in photographs as cultural objects loaded with meaning and ideologies. I’m interested in portraiture via photographing of spaces (both with or without photographs in them) and what these spaces could illuminate about a person, perhaps as much—if not more so—than a conventional portrait of their face.

This photograph here is of my parents’ bathroom. If you look closely, you’ll see a metal basket attached to the wall and inside—a bible and a wooden back scratcher.

*  *  *

STRING.

Nan Goldin

The American photographer, Nan Goldin, says that, when she was a kid, people would tell her that “You didn’t see that, that didn’t happen,” so they’d tell her what she’d experienced for her (instead of believing her perception of reality). As a result, she became skeptical of other people’s versions of reality and started taking photos. She says, “It was all about keeping myself alive . . . about being able to trust my own experience . . . I still use the camera as a tool of anti-revisionism.”

We can see just how urgent such a statement is when it comes to one of Goldin’s most memorable photographs’ title, Nan one month after being battered (1984). In using the camera as a tool of anti-revisionism, Goldin suggests that this photograph of her bruised face following a beating from a former lover possesses a documentary authority that she can’t (and doesn’t want to) deny, evidence that prevents her (as she suggests) from ultimately returning to an abusive relationship.

Her compelling statement, however, provokes one of the major questions I’m exploring in Daughters of Celluloid, which is whether photography may offer a way to actively revise the past, potentially bringing to light how we are constituted in the space of social configurations like family. For instance, how do we look at, see, scrutinize, survey, and monitor within the institutions of family? What happens to the family’s visual interactions when the coded nature of family photos are manipulated, purposefully distorted, or re-enacted?

*  *  *

GLASS.

Sally Mann

Sally Mann’s controversial photographs of her children (exhibited in 1992 and later published as a book titled, Immediate Family, in 1995) explore familial bonds, as well as maternal love and child response. The photographs of Mann’s children seem to meditate on the concept of childhood and “growing up” using a variety of the sensual, the everyday, and the fantastic; all through a maternal eye.

It’s important to note that plenty of critics have argued that this body of work evokes cultural anxieties. Mann emphasizes, however, that she herself didn’t intentionally seek to provoke those anxieties. She states that these photographs are simply “of my children living their lives here too. Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things that every mother has seen.”

With regard to Mann’s work, I’m most interested in how her photographs ride the line between the particular and universal, between fiction and authentic experience, while not shying away from the nostalgic or the taboo. Her work also incorporates a sense of performance in that she at times stages elaborate portraits that still lie within the realm of possibility, at times re-creating actual events.

For instance, in the case of her photograph, “Jessie Bites,” Mann explains in the documentary, What Remains, that her daughter Jessie had bitten her, but by the time the photograph was ready to be taken, the bite mark had all but disappeared. As a result, Mann recreated the scenario by creating the bite mark on her arm herself.

*  *  *

WAX.

Here is a close-up of the word “salang” in Korean, which means “love.” This is lifted from a letter written by my mother.

And here, an even closer view of the syllable, “lang.” To consider my mother’s handwriting and ironic notions about the ways we look at and scrutinize each other, I created a letterpress broadside, which centers around this second syllable, “lang.”

*  *  *

STRING.

The window—heightening my awareness of her torso—threatens to weigh down her shoulders, to startle her. On the other hand, the window (it could be a helpful window!) might serve as her thought bubble. Though what is visible is the bubble and not her thoughts.

What is disconcerting is how the tree in the background horizontally distends, that perhaps I inadvertently (and digitally) stretched its branches—and the framed world—apart. I feel guilty but don’t correct it.

I don’t understand why everything is so magenta. Perhaps I am to blame for this too.

The house behind her is not ours.

The boy’s face I cropped out may belong to one of the children my mother took care of. This may be their house. The trees suggest an affiliation between them.

*  *  *

GLASS.

Lyrics from Bill Callahan’s song, “Night”:

We do not know how things work

We do not know where you go

In the night

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We do not know

The door that holds you

Silent as glue

We stand under it

But we don’t understand it

We stand under it

But we don’t understand it

The door that holds you

Silent as glue

These lyrics evoke my own sense as a child of a palpable silence within my family. At times these silences seemingly culminated in overt physical violence and in other ways, symbolic and subtle. Henri Raczymow writes, “The unsaid, the untransmitted, the silence about the past, were themselves eloquent,” and yet “fragments have been transmitted . . . a trace remains.” My parents were children during the Korean War. What they had experienced during that time has been offered in slivers, alluded to or mentioned as fragments during conversation.

My parents’ testimony, if you will, arrives, sparse, out of context—like slips of paper, creased against the grain, waterlogged, and baring cryptic scrawl. A curse? A folded love note? As Jeanette Winterson said during a recent reading, “The words are the parts of silence that can be spoken.” Familial legacy: itself both gift and debt. We stand under it, but we don’t understand it. Silent as glue.

 *  *  *

WAX.

In Immigrant Acts, scholar Lisa Lowe votes for what she calls a “horizontal generational model of culture” in which cultural identity is constantly in flux, never complete, and considered in relation to history and power, rather than the vertical anthropological model wherein cultural identity is fixed and related to some essentialized past. For Lowe, interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation essentializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among those of Asian descent.

In Daughters of Celluloid, however, rather than to opt solely for this horizontal model as Lowe recommends, I attempt to revisit and possibly rearticulate this vertical model of first/second-generation struggles, wondering how/if the portrayal of these generational conflicts and filial relations can avoid the former representational pitfalls of reducing social differences into a solely privatized familial opposition. How might this text celebrate a paradigm based more on heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, revealing how the making of Asian American culture includes practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented? In other words: part wax, part string, part etched glass. And, more broadly, how can writers of color potentially avoid re-inscribing the very demarcations they admonish and find reductive, yet celebrate and foster the sense of alliance and empowerment that collective identity constructs can spark?

*  *  *

STRING.

Understandably, there are conflicting theories about the notion of an “intergenerational transmission of trauma”—from whether or not trauma can actually be “transmitted” (and to what extent), to questions of how to even refer to the children or their parents who have survived trauma.

While my aim in Daughters of Celluloid is to not necessarily align with a particular viewpoint (at least not wholesale), instead I wish to explore the complications of varying viewpoints (at least in sections of this work and in oblique ways) and put them in dialogue with one another in this manuscript.

Take for instance, Kaethe Weingarten’s investigations about how the trauma of political violence experienced in one generation may “pass” to another generation that did not directly experience it. This “intergenerational transmission of trauma,” according to Weingarten, may result in what she calls “secondary” or “vicarious traumatization.”

Ernst van Alphen, on the other hand, in his article, “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory,” questions the alleged continuity of trauma between generations, which is implied by such terms as “second generation.” He writes, “it makes little sense to speak of the transmission of trauma. Children of survivors can be traumatized, but their trauma does not consist of the Holocaust experience, not even in indirect or mitigated form. Their trauma is caused by being raised by a traumatized Holocaust survivor.”

In her book Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch describes what she refers to as “post-memory,” which “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”

Along with the ways in which trauma is potentially suppressed or “transmitted” through verbal and non-verbal, symbolic means, I’m interested in exploring those seemingly invisible networks of looking, concentrating on a single family and the role of their family photos as a form of imagetext that mediates individual and familial memory.

Bertien van Manen’s work also relates to what Marianne Hirsch refers to as the “unconscious optics” of familial memory by provoking us to question the ways in which we are constituted in the space of family through looking, how power is deployed or contested. Through narratives mediated by the daughter in Daughters of Celluloid, an unreliable transcriptionist/archivist of both her personal and familial histories, how might concealed optical relations resurface and become acknowledgeable? How are traumatic events potentially negotiated, framed, and reframed?

*  *  *

GLASS.

To explore the tension between the use of the camera as an anti-revisionist tool (as seen in Goldin’s work), as well as the possibilities of photography as a revisionist tool (as suggested by works by Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee), or more broadly, the tension between what is potentially decidable and undecideable with regard to individual and collective memory, a kind of ‘double exposure’ is evoked. In a sense, a superimposition of both familial inheritance and political trauma, of both gift and debt, of remembering and forgetting, of the dual impulse to both fictionalize and to document. In a later section of Daughters of Celluloid, the daughter and mother characters broach new territory in their visual interactions. Through the re-enactment of former events, they intervene by “performing” photos, thereby “unfixing” their former meanings, which may allow for new ways of seeing each other.

*  *  *

WAX.

Often, photographs, for me, suggest silences. Visual reminders of the very factors that help create an archive of elisions. Even the backsides of certain photographs (as this one below from a family album) are also emblematic and resemble that which shapes our own sense of belonging: maps, eruptions, frames, chromosomes, fingerprints, signatures—presences both inscrutable yet familiar. How to make sense of what Nadine Fresco calls a “diaspora of ashes”? Perhaps this is why I search for and collect old photographs from antiques malls, thrift stores, yard sales. And at the risk of committing what Susan Sontag would consider a dangerous collecting of the world, I love to stare at these familiar and anonymous faces in photographs, whether they belong to my own family or someone else’s.

Much of what fascinates me most about these artists I’ve mentioned (and others like Philip Lorca di Corcia, Sophie Calle, Duane Michals, etc.) is how their work at times problematizes two (arguably) divergent modes of photography—as a possible realm of fiction and duplicity, as well as a medium devoted to authenticity of someone’s perceptions and experiences.

A different photo, which I cannot find, is that of my mother rowing a small boat on what appears to be a small pond. I think I remember the edges of the pond in the frame, which, along with her human scale for reference, detracts slightly (but only slightly) from the possibility of reading a narrative akin to an epic. But if you were to crop in, though (or take away the pond altogether), you might see her as I do, that in spite of herself, she is rowing away and toward something else. I once created a sculptural version of this photograph, my mother and the boat larger than life size, but the photograph and the sculpture are both gone. Don’t remember where.

Kazim Ali

Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator.

His books include several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008), and the cross-genre text Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). He has also published a translation of Water’s Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri (Omnidawn Press, 2011). His novels include Quinn’s Passage (blazeVox books), named one of “The Best Books of 2005″ by Chronogram magazine and The Disappearance of Seth (Etruscan Press, 2009), and his books of essays include Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence (University of Michigan Press, 2010), and Fasting for Ramadan (Tupelo Press, 2011).

In addition to co-editing Jean Valentine: This-World Company (University of Michigan Press, 2012), he is a contributing editor for AWP Writers Chronicle and associate editor of the literary magazine FIELD and founding editor of the small press Nightboat Books.

He is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College.

* * *

LR: As a writer, you have the unusual ability to move seamlessly between genres—poetry, fiction, and essays. Can you describe what it’s like to make those transitions? Does your creative process change between genres and if so, how?

KA: I always liked a musical, lyrical, rhythmic kind of prose. Anais Nin’s book The House of Incest was one of my favorite books growing up. I found myself attracted to brief prose forms, ones that could be taken in at a single setting, that acted nearly as music. I like transporting the shape of a lyric poem into prose, whether an essay or fiction.

The form of the “prose poem” per se has never been very interesting to me. First of all because I love the sentence more than the paragraph. And secondly because what prose—the novel or the essay—really offered was time. So I am not interested in brief prose forms, flash fiction or whatever.

There are times when the question of genre doesn’t matter. My book Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities, for example—does it matter if it is prose-poetry or lyric memoir or whatever? I’ve often thought it should be taught in Urban Studies classes. It is about “cities” after all!

Does the category matter? Only if you are trying to sell the book, not for the reader or for the writer. It was written as a “book;” that’s pretty much what I have to say about it. Of course it’s prefigured by texts like “Event,” “Train Ride,” “The Journey,” and “Travel,” all published as poems in my first collection The Far Mosque.

I am not sure I think about genre as I am writing, but many times as I work on poems (I have been working on one about Varanasi for a long time) I will think: this needs to be in prose because I need more time.

Poems happen in a moment, like music, while prose creates an architecture of experience, like dance? Is that it?

LR: Your prose is often infused with poetry, and you sometimes work with prose poetry. What inspires you about crossing genres?

SKY WARD

KA: Well, language is itself, queer, revelatory and unsettling. So it’s the “poetry” or the non-normative, the performative and oral, that I privilege always. Bringing the resources of poetry in the novel or the essay is my path. I barely write traditional narrative poetry, though some comes in here and there (for example, in my recent book Sky Ward there are many narrative poems, including “Fairy Tale,” but this is a new development! Who knows how long it will last).

LR: How has your background in music and dance informed your poetry?

KA: Sound and silence have always been critical to me in constructing a poem, often times coming before sense or leading me to some kind of sense. (Though I am still suspicious of nonsense, I confess). Dance (and yoga) helped me to learned the physical capabilities of the body and the length of a breath. Choreographing on a stage gives you lots to think about in terms of the shape of a poem and the shape of the page.

Do you know that reading series “Page Meets Stage”? I have never (yet) been invited to participate but I think I am both Page and Stage. In fact the page is a stage, isn’t it? I feel a lot of kinship with writers who work in both senses.

LR: You have mentioned that voice, the act of speaking words aloud, has been an important consideration in your work. How do you view the relationship between your poems as they appear on the page and as they might be spoken or performed?

KA: I always speak them as I write or [while] in the process of writing. I never simply write without speaking aloud, except in Bright Felon and in my other prose books. Furthermore, all of my prose books except Bright Felon and the first half of Fasting for Ramadan were written longhand first and typed up later. Bright Felon I had to type, because it was too hard emotionally, and I wanted to write it quickly and even switch off my conscious brain and type while I was doing something else, like reading a magazine or watching a TV or sitting at a café near the County Building and Courthouse (in Carlisle, PA, where I wrote most of it) while the workers came in the morning to get their sandwiches and coffee or on their lunch breaks.

Recitation is really important to me—the music of the line, the sound of the vowels.

LR: Couplets feature heavily in the poems of both The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day. What were some of your motivations for working with the couplet form?

KA: January through March of 2003, I was taking a workshop with Jean Valentine at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Another poet, Kythe Heller, used to get on the 6 train with me and ride downtown and into Brooklyn. At Atlantic/Pacific Street, I would get off and switch to the N/R. Kythe and I would talk about all kinds of things on the way down and she would say some really remarkable stuff. One thing she told me about was a seminar that Olga Broumas gave at Sarah Lawrence—I wrote about it in a poem called “Rhyme.”

Another time, Kythe told me about the Delphic oracles and how she would speak in disjunctive couplets, the second line reflecting the first in some way, speaking back to it. So I got really interested in that qualities of the couplet. It became a little bit of an obsession. It’s still the tidiest form in the world and the one I often find myself going back to. It holds a thing and its opposite, which is a kind of poetry.

LR: Another theme that recurs in many of your poems, such as “Double Reed,” is ambivalence—wanting, and then not wanting once the object of desire is obtained. Could you tell us about how the formal strategies for conveying ambivalence evolved in that poem?

KA: “Double Reed” is a classic example of the couplet whose second line refutes or refracts the first line. It was also the story of a relationship—two people trying to live together and make a unified life though they were each very different. Students at my old high school, Williamsville East, wrote a piece called “Double Reed” after the poem, a piece for oboe and bassoon.

Many years later, Robert Walters, the principle oboist and English horn player of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, gifted me with a double reed that he had used in playing Franck’s Symphony in D, one of my favorite pieces ever, which also figures in one of my favorite novels by Nin, Children of the Albatross.

LR: Your poem “Autobiography” begins with the line, “we didn’t really speak,” and ends with the question, “is there a self.” How do you envision the significance of silence and the self as it relates to questions of culture and identity?

KA: I wrote a lot about this in my essay “Faith and Silence,” which appears at the end of my book Orange Alert. You can’t write an “autobiography” unless you know who the “I” is? Is it “you?” Who do you mean when you say “Kazim?” There’s a lot to sort out. People want answers about why you make the decisions you make in your life, why you have become the person you have become. And I don’t find the explanations to be very easy.

LR: What has your experience been with Kundiman, having previously served as faculty and as an advisory board member for the past several years? How have you seen the organization change over time?

KA: I came to one of the first retreats. (Maybe it was the second one?) That was in the summer of 2007. It was a wonderful and very emotional space. I’d hurt my wrist and couldn’t practice yoga at the time. It was very hot in Charleston, but Jon Pineda (my faculty colleague) and I always found respite in the air conditioned coffee shops. I mostly wanted to know if Sarah Gambito had been in the secret society when she was an undergrad at UVA, but she just laughed and changed the subject. Jon and I had a bromance and wrote poems for each other. Mine turned into “The Escape,” which is in Sky Ward. I don’t know what he did with his. Sarah gave us a chakra writing exercise that was amazing. I taught so many amazing writers that summer and many of them have gone on to publish books, including Ching-In Chen, Tamiko Beyer, Soham Patel, Cindy Arrieu-King and Janine Oshiro. I’m sure there were others, in fact.

Something else significant happened. Between the Kundiman retreat, a family wedding, and a trip to Maine, I somehow lost a folder of about 40 pages of poetry I had been working on all the previous year. The last place I remember having it was at Kundiman. I showed [the poems] to Arthur Sze. He’s the last person who saw them. I’ve never found the folder but I kept writing through it. Years and years after that, at a different conference, I showed Alex Dimitrov a folder of poems that I also hadn’t saved anywhere. When I was on the plane home from that conference I thought how if I disappeared in the sky no one would ever know about those new poems (most of them are in Sky Ward now) but I comforted myself by thinking “At least Alex saw them once.”

At the beginning of the retreat, Kundiman gives out folders, and each folder has a totem-poet inside. That summer mine was Adrienne Su, who was also my neighbor in Carlisle at the time. So it was kind of funny. It was an amazing summer, though I haven’t been invited back yet!

Later, a poet named Andre Yang wrote me an email and said I was his totem-poet in his folder. And I told him, “you’re my totem poet.” And he still his. Whenever I hear about him publishing something, I go and look. I secretly wait to see when his book will come out and what he will do next.

LR: What projects are you working on now?

KA: I have a whole set of new poems in [a] manuscript that I am working on. I am also working on a cross-genre poetry-prose manuscript that is kind of a sequel to Bright Felon. And [at] the moment, its working title is Autobiography and Cities Volume 2. I’ve been translating a lot recently—two translations are out this year, L’Amour, a novel by Marguerite Duras and Oasis of Now, selected poems by Sohrab Sepehri. I’ve been working on translating a book by Ananda Devi and may do another Duras at some point.

Happy April! It’s national poetry month, and as usual, we’re celebrating both this month and next (APIA heritage month) on the LR blog with lots of Asian American poetry goodness. This year, for April, we’ll be running an installment of our annual Process Profiles series, and we’ve also teamed up with our friends at the Asian American Literary Review and Kaya Press to offer a giveaway that includes some truly awesome prizes.

First, though, we want to hear from you: what Asian American poets are on your reading list for this April, or what’s one poet whom you’d recommend to people who want to read more Asian American poetry this month? Leave a comment on this post by April 22nd with the name of at least one Asian American poet whose work you love, and you’ll be entered in a random drawing to win a 1-year subscription to AALR, a copy of Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut’s Magnetic Refrain (reviewed on our blog here), and a copy of our very own Henry W. Leung’s chapbook, Paradise Hunger.

But the APIA poetry love doesn’t stop there! Those of you who follow us on Facebook might remember seeing pictures of the “Poetry Starter Packs” from our AWP display this year—little envelopes containing prompts and ekphrastic/found inspiration that we handed out to passers-by in the bookfair. Well, if you weren’t able to make AWP (or even if you picked up a starter pack there, but want more to share), here is your chance: we’ll be giving away bundles of 5 poetry starter packs—some to keep, and some to share—to each of the first ten (10) people to enter!

To help get you thinking, we thought we’d ask some of our Issue 5 contributors what Asian American poets they’ve been reading or whose work they’d recommend to others this month. Here’s what a couple of them said.

From Ching-In Chen:

 I adore Larissa Lai’s Eggs in the Basement because she generated/mutated the whole body of language/the story from the actual language that she is playing with: “I generated a body of source text in a ten-minute automatic exercise, separated it as neatly as possible into subjects and predicates and wrote the poem by repeating first all the subjects and and cycling through the predicates in the first half, and then reversing the procedure for the second. Strangely, the result is loosely the story of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which two murders are committed by a collective: an initial one, which traumatizes the collective, and a second, which covers over the first and consolidates an violent and violated melancholy from which the group cannot escape.”  Next on my reading list is Paolo Javier’s The Feeling is Actual.  I witnessed Paolo’s live film narration of “Monty and Turtle,” on the Feminism Meets Neo-Benshi: Movietelling Talks Back panel at AWP recently, which explores the story of an Asian American artist couple, and loved what I saw!  After some discussion about the question about appropriation within neo/benshi practice, Paolo said that he dealt with this question by creating his own film clips to narrate to.  Though the film clips aren’t part of the book, his script is published in this book.

From Desmond Kon:

For a lecture I’m giving, I’m rereading Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, edited by Timothy Liu and published by Talisman House in 2000. In my research, I discovered Liu’s lovely essay titled, “Making the Case for Asian-American Poetry”, on Poets.org. I also just received Iris A. Law’s chapbook of wildly intelligent poems: Periodicity. These are lyric gems, some persona poems, that thread the imagined voices of great women scientists like Marie Curie, Rachel Carson and Anna Atkins. Finally, to throw in some fiction, I’m reading Tash Aw’s newest novel, Five Star Billionaire. The book intertwines the lives of migrant Malaysian workers, trying to eke out a living in Shanghai – this “Paris of the East” is at once bright lights and dog-eat-dog. In fact, Tash Aw is doing a reading at this awesome and intimate bookstore BooksActually, and I’m really looking forward to hearing him talk about the writing of his novel.

Our National Poetry Month giveaway will end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, April 22nd. Winners will be announced the following week. Many thanks to our partners, Kaya Press and AALR, for their generous sponsorship, as well as to LR staff writer Henry Leung for donating a copy of his chapbook. We look forward to hearing from you, and hope that the comments that others leave in this thread will inspire you to read more Asian American poetry this April!

Best,

Iris & Mia