Becoming Realer: A Conversation with the Surreal

Becoming Realer: Identity, Craft and the MFA is a column that explores issues of poetry, theory and writing craft in relation to the personal experiences of Saint Mary’s College of California Creative Writing MFA candidate and LR staff writer, Kelsay Myers.

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" cover shot by Helen McFadyen

Earlier this month, Beijing-born storyteller and essayist Yiyun Li came to Saint Mary’s for a craft talk and reading. One of the things she said is that we write to be in dialogue with writers whom we admire. Li’s words reminded me of something similar I heard in high school from a screenwriter, who said writers write because they love actors. I couldn’t agree more.

Before our summer hiatus, I wrote about feeling like I was finally a part of the Asian American movement in San Francisco after meeting Flo and Nellie Wong at an art exhibition last spring. After such a grandiose rush of historical connection, my thoughts have turned inward once again, mainly to ideas about persona and “the dialogical self.”

One of the first books of poetry recommended to me was Open House by Beth Ann Fennelly. In her long poem, “From L’hotel Terminus Notebooks,” her speaker has an internal argument with a man who represents the critic’s voice. The voice is antagonistic and imaginary, yet also a part of herself. Psychologist Hubert Hermans considers this, the relationship between all the disparate voices in our minds, to be “the dialogical self.” The self in dialogue.

Continue reading “Becoming Realer: A Conversation with the Surreal” →

Review: AALR SPECIAL ISSUE: COMMEMORATING THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPT. 11

Special Issue: Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of Sept. 11, guest edited by Rajini Srikanth and Parag Khandhar | The Asian American Literary Review, Volume 2, Issue 1.5: Fall 2011 | $12.00

AALR SPECIAL ISSUE: COMMEMORATING THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPT. 11

In the selective memory of America’s pop tart psyche, 9/11 is a day—a montage of proud flag-waving, “God Bless!” and baseball. In this sense, 9/11 is a memorial that never meant anything to me. But a decade ago, before I had formulated my political consciousness as a queer person of color, I knew what it meant to live in fear, to be a “Transsexual Militant,” as Amir Rabiyah writes, in the anxiety-inducing nightmare of airport security, to move through public spaces as suspect. The exclusive “land of the free” 9/11 did not remember people like me.

AALR’s Special Issue attempts to rupture the dominant narrative of 9/11 by examining, as Rajini Srikanth states in the introduction, the not-so-innocent act of remembering. The voices and visual art in this book and the companion DVD—from youth, students, teachers, social workers, lawyers, DJs, community organizers, neuroscientists and poets in the South Asian, Asian, Arab and Muslim American communities—fight America’s obsession with 9/11 as a fixed tragedy, as a single event after which everything changed.

Their remembrances counteract the ways we are being told to frame 9/11 by contextualizing it as a continuation of historical patterns systemic of broader structures of US imperialism. In these crucial and courageous testimonies, essays, interviews and discussions, 9/11 is framed as a non-event, as a decade of war, [1] as an “American Century,” [2] as “homeland security” since 1492. Sunaina Maira writes, “9/11 was not a moment of exception but an ongoing state of emergency.”

Continue reading “Review: AALR SPECIAL ISSUE: COMMEMORATING THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPT. 11” →

Friday Prompt: Ars Poetica

Self-Portrait in Afternoon Shadow
Self-Portrait in Afternoon Shadow

Last week, while reconnecting over pizza with someone with whom I’d gone to high school, I found myself suddenly enmeshed in a debate about the utility of teaching poetry in the classroom.  We had been talking about what we hope to do with our careers in the future, and my friend, who was blissfully unaware of what he was getting himself into at the time—began to ask me about my writing.  Why had I decided that I like it so much?  What made me so sure that I want to center my life around it?  Why do I want to teach poetry someday?

I began to explain to him how much the idea of building opportunities for people to encounter poetry on an everyday basis—in the bus terminal, on the subway, in a store window, on the radio, in their Facebook newsfeed, tucked away between the salt and pepper shakers on a cafeteria table, or of course, in the classroom (whether Composition or Creative Writing)—excites me.  Ideas about ways to get people to “bump into” and experience more poetry literally keep me up at night.  They make me fidget in meetings and cause me to take too long in the shower.  They make me zone out during sermons in church and distract me while I’m grading.  I shake when I talk about them.

“It troubles me,” I explained, rattling the ice around in my glass, “that we don’t see more poetry in the real world, or even in the English classroom, where most people encounter literature for the first time.  Teachers are often a little afraid of it, and so students become very afraid of it.”

My lunch companion was nonplussed.  “But prose is a more practical model for student writing,” he objected, “so why should there be more poetry in the classroom?”

Well, in that case, why should we teach Mark Twain (parts of which are written in dialect)?  Or Shakespeare (with its slippery Elizabethan speech)?  Or even Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams (both of whom wrote for the stage), for that matter?  If the place of the English classroom is only to provide “practical” models for student writing, then the idea of teaching literature at all becomes questionable.  And yet, most people would agree that including literature in the high school classroom is important.  Literature provides a compass for us, a “window” (as one of my own high school English teachers used to say) by which we can practice empathy and imagination. It is a beacon, a stepping stone, a map, a boat, an interview, a mask, a portrait, a question, a shovel, a vision, a road, a challenge to ourselves as human beings.  Young people need literature—because literature gives us words and paradigms by which to conceive of ourselves and of others; because literature helps us to grow.

So why teach poetry?  Because poetry is literature—and poetry is necessary.

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A Conversation with Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh
Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh is the author of three books of poems, including the recently published Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press) and Best Gay Poetry (A Midsummer’s Night Press), and in journals such as Cimarron Review and PN Review. Born and raised in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.

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LR: Seven Studies for a Self Portrait is divided into seven chapters, with seven poems in each chapter, and forty-nine in the last. What is the significance of the number seven?

SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT
SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT

JLK: Seven days in a week. The practice of writing a poem a day is important to me. The days when I don’t write feel empty to me, incoherent, lost. A day, like a poem, is invaluable for itself and also for being a part of something larger, like a week or a life. I wrote my first book Payday Loans, a series of 30 sonnets, in the month before I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with my MFA.

One of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, asks in a poem, “What are days for?” He answers himself, as poets have the habit of doing, “Days are where we live.” A day is an on-going project. At the moment I am reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She speaks of Nietzsche’s will to power as a project of self-transcendence. When Larkin considers transcendence, he says in his typically sardonic manner that the question brings the priest and the doctor running. Because I have lost my faith in organized religion and have yet to place my life in the hands of medical science, I am working out my daily transcendence in writing poetry.

I wrote Seven Studies for a Self Portrait in two years. As I wrote, the number seven acquired and transformed its Christian meanings—the days of Creation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Eshuneutics, who reviewed my book, puts it well, “This silent structuring … evokes a tradition running from the mediaeval period and sets a context for the spiritual enquiries within the book.” Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from which my book got its epigraph, was an inspiration for the post-Christian enquiry.

As vital as the spiritual quest was for me, so was the musical composition that the number enabled. A sequence of seven poems has not only a beginning and an end, but also a well-defined middle. It also breaks up into two unequal parts—four and three—half of the sonnet’s proportions. The first six sequences in fact culminate in two sonnet sequences, one English, the other Italian. Breaking through and re-working that framework is the final set of 49 ghazals, each made up of seven couplets about love. The ghazals raise, in my imagination, a 7 x 7 x 7 cube. In planning this structure, I was thinking very much of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in particular, the last game that the Magister Ludi builds from the floor plan of a Japanese house.

Continue reading “A Conversation with Jee Leong Koh” →

LR News: Introducing Our 2011-2012 Staff Writers!

Today, the LR Blog is pleased to officially welcome our new team of Staff Writers for the 2011-2012 school year:

  • Interviewer Wendy Chin-Tanner, who is new to our team this year, will be chronicling her conversations with different Asian American poets from month to month.
  • Returning Staff Writer Henry W. Leung will be transitioning out of his previous role as a reviewer, and into a new position as a Columnist.  His new column, “Panax Ginseng,” will explore themes of transnationalism, multi-lingual blending, and hybridity in texts of both poetry and prose.
  • Returning Staff Writer and Columnist Kelsay Myers will continue to reflect on her experiences in the M.F.A. program at Saint Mary’s College of California through her column “Becoming Realer,” and will also occasionally contribute other content (such as interviews).
  • Reviewer Jai Arun Ravine, who is also new to our team this year, will be writing about different, recently-published books, chapbooks, and/or issues of literary journals each month.

We feel privileged to be able to welcome (or, in the case of our returning writers, welcome back) such a strong, cohesive team. We have an exciting lineup of posts planned for this fall, and are confident that you will enjoy the content that Wendy, Henry, Kelsay, and Jai will be contributing to the blog. To read more about each individual Staff Writer, please see their bios on the updated Blog Masthead. You’ll see the first of our staff-written posts for the year (an interview conducted by Wendy Chin-Tanner) appear later this week.

Cheers to the new year, and a warm welcome (once again) to our new team.

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

Friday Prompt: Writing Ritual

 

Rainbow trout from Silver Lake

Some families hike, some families play board games, some families get together to roll dumplings.  My family goes fishing.  And we always have.  My dad fishes with gear inherited from his dad, whose rod and net have been mended and re-mended so many times I wouldn’t be surprised if they were passed on from his dad’s dad.  Certainly, the rhythm of baiting the hook, casting the line and settling back to wait for a bite is something passed through generations.

My brother and I remarked on our last fishing trip that, when waiting behind a cast line on the side of a lake somewhere, it’s as if we sit waiting not only with each other and our dad, but with his dad as well—who passed on many years ago.  There’s a kind of comfort in this ritual, as if when gathering to bait and lure our lines, we gather to join the family members–both passed on and present—who have practiced these same steps through time.

And so our prompt for this week, taken from Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (Norton, 1997), is:

Use a family anecdote, or a family ritual, as a leaping-off point for saying something about how your family or the world works.

If it helps, think first about the material reality of the ritual you intend to write about.  If it’s fishing you’re thinking of, research the anatomy of the fish.  Find out how its breathing apparatus works, what it is exactly that lines those “frightening gills.”  Learn the jargon of fisherfolk: the brand names of the bait, the particularities of lures and bobbers and lines.  Think of this as an opportunity not only to, as Laux and Addonizio put it, “sa[y] something about how your family or the world works,” but also to say something about how the ritual itself works.

Don’t enter the poem planning to say something earth-shattering (about your family, or anything).  Enter the poem with respect for the ritual in question, those who have conducted it in the past and the materiality of its “steps” as they unfold.  More often than not, it’s by examining the mechanisms of our lives that we reach fresh insight—but let this come to you through the writing.

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Note: Also see Iris’ February prompt about the family rituals we engage in when “turning the year.”  Though we’re still a ways off from New Year’s, many of us still feel the seasonal “turn” of fall (especially with Daylight Savings approaching!), and have our own private rituals built around welcoming this time of year.

LR News: Best of the Net 2011 Nominees

The Lantern Review editorial board is pleased to announce that we have selected two poems to nominate for Sundress Publications’ 2011 Best of the Net Anthology. They are, in order of appearance in our magazine:

“Northwest Poem” by W. Todd Kaneko

“Vestige” by Michelle Peñaloza

Both poems originally appeared in Lantern Review Issue 2 (Winter 2011).

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About the Nominated Poets

W. Todd Kaneko
W. Todd Kaneko

W. Todd Kaneko is not cool enough to be a rock star, not tall enough to be a professional wrestler, and not virtuous enough to be a super-hero.* His stories and poems can be seen in Puerto Del Sol, Crab Creek Review, Fairy Tale Review, Portland Review, Southeast Review, Blackbird, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. He teaches in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with the writer Caitlin Horrocks.

*Editorial Disclaimer: Todd’s appraisal of himself; not ours.  We think he’s a lot cooler than he admits.

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Michelle Peñazola
Michelle Peñaloza (Photo: Janna Ireland)

Michelle Peñaloza grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nashville Review, Lantern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review and Bellingham Review, among others. She received the 2011 Women Writers’ Literary Fellowship, awarded by Oregon Literary Arts, and currently serves as director of the Kidd Tutorials at the University of Oregon.

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Congratulations to Todd and Michelle.  We are honored to be represented by such fine work, and wish each of you the best of luck in the judging process!

Friday Prompt: Answering Questions

Burning through the fog
"Writing is the act of burning through the fog in your mind." - Natalie Goldberg

In one chapter of her beloved book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg urges young writers to  “Make Statements and Answer Questions.”  I’ve taught her chapter on the importance of being specific before, but I decided to add this chapter to my syllabus for the first time this Fall, and as the semester has progressed, I’ve been finding myself returning to the raw courage of its advice again and again—both in my teaching, and in my own writing.  In “Make Statements and Answer Questions,” Goldberg observes that many young writers (and indeed, experienced writers, too) feel timid about putting their ideas out into the world, and so, in their hesitancy, they often fill their writing with questions and indefinite statements (“Isn’t that terrible?” “Maybe she’s right”).  There is indeed something quite vulnerable about the act of writing for an audience—of making a claim and expecting others to listen to it.  To do so requires boldness, a kind of brash willingness to allow one’s own ideas to stand alone, at the risk that one’s audience might not agree.  Goldberg encourages us to cut the apron strings, so to speak, by challenging ourselves to confidently answer each question we find ourselves asking: “Making statements,” she writes, “is practice in trusting your own mind, in learning to stand up with your thoughts” (93-4)  And later:

“Don’t be afraid to answer the questions. You will find endless resources inside yourself. Writing is the act of burning through the fog in your mind. Don’t carry the fog out on paper. Even if you are not sure of something, express it as though you know yourself. With this practice, you eventually will” (94).

Call it the partner to the questions prompt that Mia posted in 2009, if you will: today’s prompt was inspired by Goldberg’s call to write with confidence.

Prompt: Write a poem consisting entirely of answers to questions. Try to mix answers to small, concrete questions (such as “May I have a second slice of cake?”) with answers to bigger, nearly unanswerable questions (like “What do trees do when they feel cold in winter?”).

Review: Two Works by Ronaldo V. Wilson

Ronaldo V. Wilson
Two Works by Ronaldo V. Wilson

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University

Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Manby Ronaldo V. Wilson | U of Pittsburgh Press 2008 | $14

Poems of the Black Objectby Ronaldo V. Wilson | FuturePoem Books 2009 | $15

Stephen Hong Sohn
Stephen Hong Sohn

In this review, I discuss Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press 2008) and Poems of the Black Object (FuturePoem Books 2009). Wilson’s first full-length poetry collection might be more specifically described as prose poetry, as implied by its title. There are really no formal line breaks throughout the collection, so one is forced to consider what makes such a work poetry as opposed to prose. This genre-defying work’s title also clearly derives inspiration from two canonical African American literary texts: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. In Wilson’s title, there isn’t any mention of the word “slave,” but the impulse to explore the conditions of subjection and domination are still very much there. Wilson’s work thus seems to enact a neo-slave “poetic” as derived through the queer racial minority’s subjectivity. The reference to the “brown boy” and the “white man” in the title also helps situate what actually occurs in the prose poetry blocks throughout the collection. “Brown boy” suggests that the lyric “I” is a mixed-race subject and likely an adult, but clearly one who does not have much access to economic resources. He is engaged in a homosexual relationship with “White Man,” someone likely older and with clearly far more money than the “Brown Boy.” Racial difference, class difference, and age difference, among other such distinctions, generate the rubrics of power and domination that mark the tension between “white man” and the “brown boy.”   Wilson’s work is raw, dense, and does not shy away from difficult topics, as demonstrated by the following excerpt, which is fairly indicative of the stylistic impulses of the collection:

“Go Shower. This command reveals [the brown boy’s] relationship to the white man. He follows his lover’s orders like a slave without anything but the promise of being fed and shown a movie” (64).

Continue reading “Review: Two Works by Ronaldo V. Wilson” →

LR News: We’re Back! (New Developments for Fall 2011)

Welcome back to a new academic year at Lantern Review!  Along with the return of the blog, this Fall brings with it a number of exciting developments—some of which we will reveal incrementally as the season progresses, but a few of which we are delighted to be able to share with you today.  Read on for a couple of important announcements, as well as a teaser of what is yet to come.

Issue 4 Reading Period

Our reading period for Issue 4 is now open. We urge you to consider sending some work our way, and to help spread the word however you can!  As always, we’re interested in original, well-crafted poetry that takes a fresh, unusual approach to the notion of “Asian American poetry”—but please don’t forget that we are also interested in visual art, new translations, collaborative pieces, and (critically relevant) essays on poetics!   For those of you who have submitted before, please note that there has been a slight change to our previous set of guidelines: whereas previously, we asked that bio’s be 2-3 sentences in length, we are now requesting that they be no more than 1-2 sentences long.

Friday Prompts

This year on the LR Blog, the posts that were formerly known as “Weekly Prompts” will now be categorized as “Friday Prompts,” in order to allow for greater variety and flexibility in our weekly schedule.  If you take a look at the categories in the sidebar, you’ll notice that we’ve changed the “Weekly Prompts” slug to “Friday Prompts” accordingly.  Not to worry, though, if you’ve previously linked to one of our prompts—the permalinks for all past Weekly Prompt posts will remain the same, so there’s no need to update your links.

Teaser: Best of the Net Nominations, New Staff Writers, and more

As October deepens into mid-Fall, we’ll be rolling out many more new developments.  Next week, we’ll be announcing our 2011 Best of the Net Nominees, and the following week, we will introduce our team of staff writers for the 2011-2012 academic year.  We also have plenty of exciting new reviews and interviews and a brand new column planned for the fall, so please continue to keep your eyes peeled in the weeks to come!