Boston

BU Creative Writing Faculty Reading (feat. Ha Jin, Louise Glück, Robert Pinsky, and others)
February 9th | 7:30 pm
BU School of Management Auditorum
Boston University

Chicago

Poetry Cafe at the Chicago Public Library
February 8th | 6:30-7:45 pm
Blackstone
4904 S. Lake Park Avenue
Call (312) 747-0511 to register in advance.

Dallas

Avante! (feat. Shin Yu Pai and Jerry Kelley)
2010 WordSpace Spring Reading Series
February 6th | 8 pm
Paperbacks Plus
6115 La Vista

Los Angeles

Beware of Cupid: A Valentine’s Day Show (dir. Julia Cho & Benjamin Kim)
Opening Feb. 5 (till Feb. 21) | Fridays & Saturdays @ 8 pm, Sundays @ 3 pm
The Actor’s Playpen
1514 N Gardner Street
Tickets: $14-$20

New York City

Artwall Performance (feat. Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai and Greg Tate)
Feburary 6th | 2 pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (btwn. Houston and Bleeker)

Jazz, the Japanese Connection at Nuyorican Poets Cafe
(Followed by Jazz Jam & Open Mic)
February 6th | 9 pm
Nuyorican Poets Cafe
236 E. 3rd St (btwn B & C Aves)
$15 cover ($10 for jazz jam musicians)
Reservation Recommended; Purchase advance tickets here

Kundiman & Verlaine Reading Series (feat. Vijay Seshadri, Brian Carey Chung, & Alison Roh Park)
February 7th | 5 pm (open bar from 4-5)
Verlaine
110 Rivington St.
(Ludlow & Essex Sts.)
$5 donation

Vincent Who? Documentary Screening (Hosted by the AAWW)
February 10th | 7 to 9 pm
Asian American Writers Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A
Light refreshments served
$5 Suggested Donation (benefits the NY chapter of APA for Progress).

Sacramento

Yuyutsu RD Sharma Reads at the Sacramento Poetry Center
February 8th | 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th St.

San Francisco Bay Area

Opening Reception: “The Lost and Found” Solo Exhibit (the visual art of poet Truong Tran)
Presented by Kearny Street Workshop & Mina Dresden Gallery
February 5th | 7 to 9 pm
Mina Dresden Gallery
312 Valencia Street
San Francisco

GO!STYLE 2010
(feat. poets Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu and Loa Niumeitolu, alongside other top artists)
February 5th | 8 pm
Palace of Fine Arts Theater
3301 Lyon St., San Francisco
Preordered tickets: $40 General, $36 Family & Friends Discount, $15 Student
$10 Preorder Discounts available with code (Tickets $40 at the door)

American Chinatown Book Reading
February 9th | 6 pm
CHSA Museum & Learning Center
965 Clay St
San Francisco

Seattle

W.S. Merwin & Friends – A Benefit for Copper Canyon Press
February 4 | 7 to 9 pm
Town Hall
1119 Eighth Ave.
Tickets start at $10

Washington, DC

“Call + Response” (16 visual artists & 16 writers – incl. poet Gerald Maa) at the Hamiltonian Gallery
Until February 13
Hamiltonian Gallery
1353 U St, NW, Suite 101

Chicago

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai at Northwestern (Spoken Word Performance + Q&A)
January 14 @ 8 pm and January 15 @ 3:30 pm
Northwestern University, Norris Center, McCormick Auditorium
1999 Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL
FREE

Concord, NH

Janice Y.K. Lee at Gibson’s Bookstore
January 18 | 7 pm
Gibson’s Bookstore
27 South Main Street

New York City

TyperwriterGirls Poetry Cabaret (feat. readings by Patrick Rosal and Huang Xiang)
January 17 | 6 pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (Between Houston & Bleeker)
$7 admission

World of Poetry & PAF Shab-e She’r Present: Dalia Sofer
Open Mic to follow reading
January 20 | 6 pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (Between Houston and Bleecker)
or, watch this event live on the web

Medea and Its Double (Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts)
through January 24; Thurs – Sat @ 8 pm
LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club
74A East 4th St.
Tickets $18

Seattle

Words Expressed—Oliver de la Paz, Rick Barot, Donna Miscolta, Toni Bajado
Filipino Poets & Writers Reading, presented by the United Filipino Club of Seattle University
January 14 | 7 pm
Seattle University, Le Roux Room (Student Center 160)
12th and Cherry St.’s
FREE and open to the public

Pimone Triplett at Open Books
January 14 | 7:30 PM
Open Books: A Poem Emporium
2414 N. 45th Street
Seattle

Allen Say at the Wing Luke Asian Museum
January 16 | 4 pm
Wing Luke Asian Museum
719 S. King Street
Seattle

Skagit River Poetry Festival Showcase (feat. Oliver de la Paz and others)
January 16 | 7 pm
Village Books
1200 Eleventh Street
Bellingham, WA

San Francisco Bay Area

Growing Up Filipino II Book Launch
Hosted by PAWA Arkipelago
January 16 | 2-5 pm
Bayanihan Community Center
1010 Mission St., San Francisco

Washington, D.C.

14th Annual Poetry Extravaganza In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
presented by Collective Voices
January 16 | noon-5 pm
Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, Auditorium A-5
901 G St., NW
First-come, first-serve seating (groups of 10+ encouraged to register in advance)
202-727-1281 for more information
FREE

SULU D.C. Jan 16 Show
feat. Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, Simone Jacobson, Elahe, Taiyi Sun, Marco Mercado, DJ Mars Noble
January 16 @ 7 pm – January 17 @ 2 am
Doors open at 6:30, Show at 7, Dance party at 10
Almaz Restaurant and Lounge
1212 U Street NW
$10 general admission | $8 students
All ages; attendees under 21 will need supervision after the show

“Sunday Kind of Love” — Celebrating Four Years With Young DC Poets
Open Mic + Set Readings (feat. Abdul Ali, Danielle Evennou, and Adam Pellegrini)
January 17 | 4 pm
Busboys & Poets (Langston Room)
14th and V Streets NW
FREE and open to all.

Larissa Min, reading from an account of her family's journey from Korea to Brazil and the United States. Photo courtesy of Maya Li.

I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to check out an event on December 4th called Breaking English, hosted by Korean-Brazilian writer Larissa Min.  Larissa moved to Seattle in 2000, where she got her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Washington.  Since then, she has taught at local community colleges and begun work on a family history project mapping her parents’ journey from Korea to Brazil, and several decades later, to New York City.  Her research, sponsored by the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, has taken her back to Brazil, down the streets of her hometown, and into the archives of her childhood library.  

I arrived at the event a little late, but found a great seat as Larissa assured the audience that she was running on “Latino time” and would be ready in a few minutes.  I felt immediately gratified to be in the company of what seemed to me a different crowd than the one that usually frequents Seattle literary events (where I am often the only person of color present!)  The unusual venue, a darkened second-floor dance studio in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district (known for its arts community), was a lovely event space: floor-length mirrors, wood pillars, votive candles flickering on the hardwood, white paper bags glowing luminously along the back wall of the studio…  

Larissa established a wonderful rapport with her audience, at times reading from her manuscript-in progress, at times moving into a more conversational mode and talking through a presentation of images and newspaper clips.  I appreciated the fluidity with which she transitioned from one performance genre to the next; one moment she was crouched on the floor with a Korean drum, and the next she was laughing at a childhood photo of herself making faces at the camera.  All throughout the evening, her wonderful and quirky humor (a photo of a prancing unicorn popped on the screen when she described her surprise at finding a fellow Korean during her travels to the southernmost tip of Brazil), moved her audience to laughter and, at more serious moments, tinged some of her family’s most painful experiences with a poignance I found tremendously beautiful.

The selections Larissa shared from her manuscript-in-progress were excerpted from three different periods of her family’s life: first, her parents’ courtship and preparation for their move to Brazil, which they undertook with fifty other Korean families after negotiating an agreement with the Brazilian government.   Next, her family’s settlement in Brazil, and the strangeness of encountering a wholly new terrain and culture that, over time, became home.  In her final selection, she narrated an episode from her family’s first few years in New York, allowing the quality of the reading to take on a more personal tone as she wove story from the conflicted relationships of a family in transition.  I thoroughly appreciated Larissa’s narrative adeptness, evident not only in her written texts, but in the variety of voices, modes, and media she evoked over the course of the evening.  What a fantastic event!

Boston

East Meets Words Open Mic Series feat. Kevin Nadal
December 11 | 8 pm
East Meets West Bookstore
934 Mass. Ave.
Cambridge, MA
$3 Suggestion Donation

Los Angeles Area

Grace Kim and the Spiders from Mars – catch it before Lodestone closes!
Dec. 12 a| 8 p.m. (playing Saturdays through Dec. 20th)
Lodestone Theater Company
GTC Burbank
Burbank, CA
$12 general admission

Cold Tofu and Room to Improv together
December 12 | 7 to 9 pm
Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center Auditorium
222 S. Hewitt Street, Los Angeles 90012
(Located east of Alameda, between 2nd & 3rd streets)
FREE parking available on the property and on Hewitt Street.
Admission $10 (a portion of the proceeds goes to Philippines National Red Cross to help typhoon victims)

New York City

RANGOON staged reading + Q&A
with the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre
December 11 | 7 pm
520 Eighth Avenue – between 36th and 37th Street
3rd Floor – Bruce Mitchell Room
RSVP: info[at]panasianrep.org
$10 suggested donation collection at the door

Rosa Loses Her Face (Queens Theatre in the Park)
December 12 at 2 pm and 8 pm; December 13 at 3 pm
Claire Shulman Playhouse / Main Stage
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Flushing, NY
Regular Tickets: $32-$38

San Francisco

Hyphen Holiday Happy Hour
December 11 | 5-10 pm
Lot 46 Lounge
46 Geary Street, San Francisco
21+ |  $5-$10 sliding scale donation
First 50 get a free magazine

Seattle

An Evening of Poetry in Translation with Robert McNamara & Carolyne Wright (feat. Bengali poetry)
December 11 | 7 p.m.
Village Books
1200 Eleventh Street
Bellingham, Washington 98225

Washington, D.C.

K. Silem Mohammed, Lacey Hunter, Ken Jacobs at Bridge Street Books
December 14 | 7:30 pm
Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave., NW 20007

Konrad Ng at the Smithsonian – Brown Bag Lunch Lecture
New Media and New Asian American Cultural and Political Engagement
December 16 | 12 pm to 1:30 pm
Presidential Suite, National Museum of American History
14th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
Limited Space.  Call to reserve a spot: 202.633.2692.

This Wednesday, I was lucky to attend Rebecca Brown’s haibun class at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood  Haibun is an ancient Japanese poetic form that juxtaposes prose narrative and short haiku. Brown’s interest in the form stems from what she calls “the wonderfully uncategorizeable texts” of contemporary American poets who have taken this ancient form and adapted it to their own literary moment.

The event was packed, and I shared a tiny table in the corner with three other women, one of whom is an alumni of the University of Washington’s M.F.A. program.  Years ago, she helped found the program’s literary journal, The Seattle Review, and studied with the faculty member who initiated The Castalia Reading Series, which is also hosted at Hugo House.  Also in attendance was the editor of a local haiku journal, and one of Seattle’s resident specialists in Beat literature, who volunteered himself to read an example of a haibun from Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, a novel written in 1956 while Kerouac was living in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State.  Brown’s samples of haibun ranged from pieces like Desoluation Angels to works by John Ashbery and Basho himself, the poet credited as the originator of the haibun form.

Rebecca gave us three different writing prompts, each of which was modeled after a different example of Japanese or American haibun, then asked us to read our pieces out loud.  I enjoyed the generosity of the class’s response to each new piece, and was struck by the beauty of the form’s sudden turns from one literary mode to the next.  “Mmm, mmm, now that’s good,” Rebecca often remarked after an individual had shared, amidst a warm flood of sympathetic “mmm”s and “wow”s.  Below is an excerpt of one of my in-class pieces:

HOW I GOT HERE | Three haibūn

In the fall we moved to Seattle, so into our boxes went the table salt, the winter coats, the towels, and the wedding dishes.  Packing was painful, as packing always is, and the last glimpse of the apartment, newly emptied, wiped down, swept, was cut short by the neighbor’s niece: “You keeping that bath mat?”

Boxes piled in the bed of a red pickup

Miles of freeway winding through the hills

This city too will forget the nights

We spent wandering on University Avenue

*

The idea of haibun is that it combines prose and poetry to tell the tale of a personal journey, one that is both physical and interior, and marked with moments of insight (haiku) or po

etic interlude.  The haiku interspersed throughout the narrative do not necessarily further the journey, but act as imagistic (re)conceptions of moments that have occurred or are occurring in the narrative.  In the exercise above, we were instructed to craft a four-line haiku modeled after the one that first appears in Nobuyuki Yuasa’s translation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Penguin Classics, 2005), in which Basho describes a personal object, captures an image from nature, alludes to a force much larger than himself, and finally, ends with a specific reference to a proper noun.  I found myself thoroughly enjoying the form, and appreciated learning about a tradition that has its roots in ancient Japanese literature, as well as a rich legacy in Western literature.

WHAT’S NEXT…

Later this week I will be attending Larissa Min’s spoken word event, Breaking English.  On the event website, Min says, “Breaking English is a creative nonfictional account of my family’s migration from Korea to Brazil and then the US, as a lens through which to examine the experiences of immigration, displacement and remembering.”

More on that later, but for now, enjoy your weekend, and stay tuned for more Editors’ Picks next week!

A poet’s utopia, Open Books: A Poem Emporium, is a poetry-only bookstore located in Wallingford, Seattle.  Owned and run by husband and wife duo John Marshall and Christine Deavel, Open Books is the only bookstore of its kind on the West Coast (the other is in Cambridge, MA).  The store’s collection caters to a wide range of poetic sensibilities and carries not only recently published works, but a variety of rare and first editions as well.

Described by many as “a poet’s haven,” Open Books acts as one of the main hubs of the Seattle poetry scene, and frequently hosts readings by both local and visiting poets.  In June of this year, California poet Victoria Chang, author of Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), and editor of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004) gave a reading at Open Books, one which was well attended by a number of notable Asian American poets teaching and writing in the Pacific Northwest: Rick Barot, Pimone Triplett, Oliver de la Paz.

Tonight, the store is hosting a reading by San Francisco Bay Area poet Brian Teare, whose most recent book, Sight Map, was published by the University of California Press.  He will be followed next week by another Bay Area poet, Brenda Hillman, who teaches currently at St. Mary’s College of California.

Poets, literature lovers, and supporters of independent bookstores in the Seattle area can drop by Open Books (2414 N. 45th St. Seattle, WA 98103) from 11am-6pm on Tuesday-Saturday, and noon-4pm on the first Sunday of the month.  Those living in other parts of the country can join the store’s mailing list, or place online orders for rare or unusual collections of poetry.  John and Christine are always more than happy to help, and take very seriously their work of supporting the literary arts.