Asian American Poetry Unbound
Happy Friday, everyone!
A reminder that our reading period for Issue 5 will be closing this Sunday, July 15th, at 11:59 PM EST. This will be the last chance to submit for The Hybridity Issue, so please don’t forget!
Click here to access the special submissions guidelines for this issue (the link to our online submissions form can be found at the bottom of the page).
Many thanks and good luck; we look forward to reading your work.
Cheers,
Iris & Mia
A poem by Lantern Review contributor Vikas K. Menon is up on Pocket Broadsides today. Click here to read it on Tumblr!
To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Welcome to the 2012 edition of our Summer Reads blog series, in which past Lantern Review contributors give us a peek at what’s on their reading lists for the current summer season. This year, we decided to change things up a bit: instead of posting longer lists as we have in the past, we’ve asked our contributors to select the top three titles that they’re excited about this season and to write in about them. Throughout July and August, we’ll be sharing the Top Three lists that they’ve sent us on the blog.
This week’s Top Three comes from Issue 2 contributor Kimberly Alidio, who wrote us the following note on her birthday (July 9th):
July 9, 2012
Hello LR!
Thank you again for the invitation to share my summer reading list.
I just finished Scott Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), which demonstrates that neither scholarly questions nor queer decolonizing politics have to be “special interest” matters but instead good tools for anyone who seeks justice. Generous, thoughtful writing makes all the difference. Reading this helped me finish a research essay just last Friday.
Yesterday, I went to the Lucian Freud retrospective at the Fort Worth Modern and meditated quite a while with the textures of each face and figure. Maybe some ekphrastic poems will arise alongside Sarah Howgate, Lucian Freud Portraits (National Portrait Gallery, 2012). The huge exhibition catalog was a really necessary splurge since no photography was allowed in the huge exhibit, and I’m an obedient museum-goer. Less Instagram posts, more books!
Today is my birthday and my brother got me what I asked for: Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami (Chainlinks, 2011), a book of daily poetry and object-making in response to military dictatorship first published in 1973 Chile. A good practice for us today.
Til next year — wishing you joy and ease —
Kimberly
Many happy returns, Kimberly! Thanks for sharing your list with us.
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For more, read Kimberly’s poem “translation” in Lantern Review, Issue 2.
What have you been reading this summer? Leave us a comment or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter to let us know.
Today’s prompt is more of a loose, outline sketch than a focused discussion. We’re still continuing our exploration of different modes of “hybridity,” but in thinking of examples of pieces that mix media and “collage” voices from outside sources together, I found that it was difficult to choose just one or two poems that felt truly representative. There is so much being done in terms of mixed media today, and so many, many different ways that people have found to do it.
Hence, the following list of resources loosely illustrates a few examples of the two particular modes of hybridity I’m focusing on today: 1) hybrid means of presenting poetry to the viewer (in which the artist employs media outside the realm of the traditional printed page, or combines two or more different media as the means by which to enact their finished piece), and 2) the use of multiple sources (texts, images, video clips, sounds, etc.) to create a hybrid, “collaged” effect (in which the artist may “borrow” text from multiple different sources and mix it with his/her own speaker’s voice). In many cases, the examples I’ve listed do both.
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1. Monica Ong’s visual poem from LR issue 3, “Corona Mestiza,” which overlays text upon the found images of a map and a brain scan in order to convey a family narrative of physical and geographical loss. (See Monica’s web site for more examples of her work, which often combines archival and original images with text, physical objects, sound, and reader/audience interaction).
2. Visual Poems by Gregory and Trisha Orr (from Rattle #29): the poet and his wife, a painter, collaborated on these pieces, combining text with color and visually-textured hand-lettering to form striking works of visual art. The rest of the issue is also full of interesting visual poems that can be used for inspiration.
3. Margaret Rhee’s “Materials” from LR Issue 4, which makes use of scrolling, vertical columns and strategic typography, and combines text and voices from multiple sources.
4. Charles Hobson’s beautifully composed and choreographed video accounting of the making of his artist’s book for Eavan Boland’s poem “Quarantine” (from Drunken Boat 15). The video is as much part of the mode of his art as the book and the borrowed text itself. As with the Rattle issue mentioned above, the rest of the “Handmade/Homemade” folio that features Hobson’s film is worth exploring, too. A tip for submitting to LR: if you are planning on sending in work that uses the full text of another person’s poem, please be sure to obtain their explicit permission before doing so (otherwise, we cannot publish your piece, even if it is accepted).
5. Mouseover translations on Action Yes: admittedly, this is more of a brilliant editorial intervention than anything else, but it so perfectly illustrates the possibilities for mixed media made available by the web that I couldn’t not include it. Here’s one great example: “from strips, attempts, games,” by Rémi Froger, translated by François Luong (mouse over the English to reveal the original French).
6. The work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, best known for her book Dictee, whose written and performed art sought to problematized the acts of speaking and writing in English (the loss of a heart language, the simultaneous stifling of a history by mainstream narratives) through explorations that made use of anatomical diagrams, archival photographs, poem-text (both self-generated and “borrowed” from sources like French dictation exercises), textiles, musical instruments, video footage, the performances of physical acts of creation and erasure, and more. Extensive digital documentation of her work is no longer readily available online, but this New York Times tribute describes several of her important pieces quite well.
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Why mixed media? Why collage? Because the results of both can be absolutely startling. The dimensions of unfamiliarity and innovation that can emerge from the overlaying of the poem with non-print media, digital platforms, unique performative experiences, or text that comes from outside the characteristic syntax or lived experiences of the poet him or herself, can cause the reader to look again, to examine the text from a different perspective, and to encounter the poem in new and refreshingly counter intuitive ways.
Prompt: Create a poem or poetic work that presents itself to the reader through a mixture of two or more different types of media, and/or which collages together materials gathered from multiple different sources (texts, images, poems, sound clips, found objects, etc.).
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The submissions period for Issue 5, “The Hybridity Issue,” will close on July 15th. Has this prompt inspired you to experiment with mixed media poetics, or do you have other previously unpublished work that explores the concept of “hybridity”? Click here to submit.
Now that the reading period for our first themed issue is open, we thought that our return to regular Friday Prompts would be a great opportunity to provide you with some inspiration. To that end, we’ll be setting aside this month’s prompts to illustrate just a few of the many approaches with which we believe the theme of “hybridity” could be interpreted.
This week, our focus is on form. Although there are many ways in which the formal structure of a poem could cause it to be classified as “hybrid,” for today’s prompt, we’ve chosen to highlight two poems that make use of hybrid forms very differently: Kimiko Hahn’s villanelle “The Fever” (from The New Yorker), which mixes elements of free-verse with the constraints of a traditional formal structure, and Ching-In Chen’s poem “Fob” (from Tea Party), which blurs distinctions between “forms” from different genres by shaping itself around the structure and syntax of a dictionary definition.
In re-envisioning the villanelle, Hahn holds rhyme and meter loosely. Her use of slant rhymes (e.g. “color” / “fever”) and strategically varied refrains, and her light adherence to iambic meter allow her to engage the “rules” loosely enough that her language flits conversationally from line to line (clusters of Latinate words—themselves borrowed from the science section of the New York Times—as in, “damages the membrane of symbiotic algae,” help to make the stresses sufficiently “bumpy” so as to feel uncontrived), but she still holds onto enough of the form that as the poem rolls along, it stays—like a marble rattling through a chute—recognizably within the scaffold of a villanelle. The lyrical lilt that the form lends to the poem allows it to take on a twinge of ironic whimsy (given the gravitas of its overarching metaphor), while still retaining the appealingly confessional tone that is more frequently associated with free verse. As a result, the voice of the speaker comes across as sympathetically quirky, bemused, worldly—and we wholly buy the “leap” the poem takes when, by its end, we find that the speaker’s musings on coral reefs are merely a conceit by which to critique her own practices of self-ornamentation (“the ocean’s escalating fever” becomes “my ocean’s escalating fever”).
Ching-In Chen’s “Fob,” meanwhile, engages in a different kind of formal experimentation: it “borrows” the structure of a type of writing that falls entirely outside the genre of poetry. In appropriating the definition as a poetic form, Chen makes strategic use of the didactic—even alienating—editorial qualities that we associate with the dictionary’s language in order to frame and enact her ensuing critique of the relationship between structural and linguistic hegemonies. Her “example sentences,” which extend the reader’s gaze beyond the bars of the “definition” text to offer startlingly intimate glimpses into an alternate, more evocatively “definitional” narrative, subvert the bland, instructional tone of the dictionary’s text, thus “fobbing” our expectations of the poem’s own conceit. Through her lyric interventions, Chen allows us to witnesses the complicity of teacher and dictionary—by their silence on the pejorative meaning of “fob”—in the racial bullying that the speaker experiences, and gives us access to her subsequent, delicious revenge, in which she tricks one of the bullies into thinking that, among other things, the Chinese word for “ugly” is actually the word for “pretty,” and that the term “ku-li” (coolie) is a flattering and desirable nickname. In re-appropriating the dictionary’s syntactical patterns as a “form,” then, Chen successfully manages to turn the cultural and linguistic authority it represents against itself.
To read both poems in their entirety, click below:
“The Fever” by Kimiko Hahn
“Fob” by Ching-In Chen
Prompt: write a poem that makes use of hybrid form, either by blending a traditional form with new and unusual elements from other verse traditions, or by appropriating the “formal” conventions of another style of writing or genre.
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The submissions period for Issue 5, “The Hybridity Issue,” will close on July 15th. Has this prompt inspired you to experiment with hybrid forms in your writing, or do you have previously unpublished work that explores the concept of “hybridity”? Click here to submit.
At AWP, writer and comic artist Amy Kurzweil did a beautiful little drawing on her business card for us in exchange for a Pocket Broadside. Her piece went up on Tumblr this morning (click here to see it larger).
To see all of the Pocket Broadsides that have been posted on Tumblr thus far, visit the project’s main page at pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com. To read each new piece as soon as it is posted, follow us on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Purvi Shah’s Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), which explores migration as potential and loss, won the Many Voices Project prize and was nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. Her work fighting violence against women earned her the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008. In 2011, she served as Artistic Director for Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight the voices of Asian Americans during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change. Check out more of her work at http://purvipoets.net or @PurviPoets on Twitter.
For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a poem (or group of poems) from inception to publication. As in the past, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem of theirs that we’ve published. In this installment, Purvi Shah discusses her poems, “’Some didn’t make it. Some did.’” and “’This is MY NY.’”, which appeared in Issue 4.
Some say this is woman’s territory: to know what is unspoken in the midst of what is spoken.
It is also territory of the poet, who in lyric enacts what is said, what we fear to say, and yet what we must make known without it ever being said.
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Conversation 6: Split This Rock
We were asked, when dialoguing after sharing excerpts of Together We Are New York—a community-based project with Kundiman poets honoring the voices of Asian Americans as part of the 10th anniversary of 9/11—whether it was difficult to write poems in response to conversations with community members. After all, to capture an individual’s story or fullness of experience is a mighty task. Even many biographers fail. So how does a poet approach someone’s horizon?
Zohra Saed, who had interviewed her charming father for the project, astutely responded how she realized in the process of this writing that her poems had always been in conversation—previously, she had just been talking to herself. As the audience chuckled, I marveled at the truth of Zohra’s humor-filled revelation and thought about the layers of conversation embedded in my poems, including these I had written for Together We Are New York.
We often think about the buzz poems create but not the buzz that creates poems. Then again, flight—or fall—is rarely one way.
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This May, in celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we have asked several respected teachers and writers of Asian American poetry to share writing exercises with us in lieu of our regular Friday Prompts. This week’s installment was contributed by Timothy Yu.
travesty, n. A literary composition which aims at exciting laughter by burlesque and ludicrous treatment of a serious work; literary composition of this kind; hence, a grotesque or debased imitation or likeness; a caricature. (OED)
I’m currently writing a sequence of poems called 100 Chinese Silences. The series was inspired, so to speak, by a poem by Billy Collins called “Grave,” which describes the “one hundred kinds of silence” that the Chinese believe in—only to admit that this idea is something the poet “just made up.” This made me mad—those darn quiet Asians!—so I decided to get even. Rather than replying to Collins’s poem, I rewrote it line by line and phrase by phrase.
I’ve decided to call this a travesty, a “ludicrous treatment of a serious work.” It takes a poem that plays on stereotypes and rewrites it from the inside out. It tries to critique without falling into easy anger or mockery.
So here’s your assignment:
Find a poem that really bugs you for some reason. Maybe, like Collins’s, it contains an annoying stereotype about Asians. Maybe it’s sexist or simply smug. Then rewrite it, line by line, preserving when possible the form of the original—the same number of lines, the same kinds of phrases, even the rhyme scheme if there is one—while filling it with content that reflects on, critiques, or undermines the original. The result should be a poem that could have been written by the original author but is “off” in some way. Don’t be afraid to be silly, but do strive to echo the tone of the original. Hopefully you’ll end up with something that can speak back to the original in its own voice.
Timothy Yu is the author of two chapbooks: 15 Chinese Silences, from Tinfish Press, and Journey to the West, winner of the Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize from Kundiman. He is also the author of a scholarly book, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press). He is an associate professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We’re happy to announce that the next issue of LR is going to be a particularly special one. For the first time, we’ve decided to put together a themed issue! The theme that we’ve settled on for Issue 5 is “Hybridity” (to be interpreted critically, aesthetically, or otherwise), and in order to help provide you with some context around which to shape your submissions, we’ve come up with the following call for submissions:
For its fifth issue, Lantern Review seeks poems, visual art, multimedia, and mixed genre poetic works that engage with the critical notion of “hybridity,” whether in language, form, aesthetic or subject matter. How can the act of poetic “collage” mimic, transform, and otherwise help us to negotiate the boundaries of ethnic and cultural distinctions? In what ways can experimenting with the mixing (and re-mixing) of narratives, forms, source material, and genres be used to enact the condition of hybridity (geographically, generationally, biologically, and otherwise)?
Some potentially generative terms might include: collage; assemblage; montage; inter-; trans-; multi-; blending; mixology; mash-up; mixtape; recombination; border-crossing; crossing; heteroglossia; hypertext; blending; hyphenation; interlingual; intertext; collecting; curation; multivocality; meiosis; overlay; juxtaposition; patchwork; cut-and-paste
On the heels of the guest posts we’ve seen this May—particularly Luisa Igloria’s collage-inspired prompt (in which she encourages us to try using textual and historical fragments as a critical “speculum” by which to re-imagine narratives from the legacies of diaspora), Tarfia Faizullah’s process profile (which, in its own terminology, “braids” together the memories of two narratives that happened years apart) —we feel that the topic of “hybridity” is particularly prescient. Other potentially helpful sources of online inspiration might include Craig Santos Perez’s AWP paper in which he observes the dearth of poets of color in Norton’s American Hybrid anthology, Kenji C. Liu’s recent post on geography, diaspora, and being of “mixed” poetic lineage on The Best American Poetry Blog (which serves as his introduction to the APIA Month guest series that he is curating there this week), and also Margaret Rhee’s Artist’s Statement from her mixed-media, multi-vocal poem “Materials,” which we published in Issue 4.
The reading period for LR 5: The Hybridity Issue will close on July 15, 2012. To submit your work, please visit the revised guidelines that we’ve posted on our Submissions Page.
We look forward to seeing how you will respond!
Many thanks as always,
Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Board
Tarfia Faizullah’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the associate editor of Blackbird. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship, a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellowship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the Asian American Literary Review and Trans-Portal.
For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. As in the past, we’ve asked several Lantern Review contributors to discuss their process for composing a poem of theirs that we’ve published. In this installment, Tarfia Faizullah reflects upon her poem “At Zahra’s Salon for Ladies,” which appeared in Issue 4.
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