Poems for Monday Mornings: Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade with a Book and a Rattle from a String of Pearls” at From the Fishouse

Surprise!  Here’s a brand new blog series to start off your Monday morning.  In celebration of National Poetry Month and APIA Heritage Month this year, we (the editors) hope to be able to lead you to an audio recording of a different poem that has moved, challenged, or stuck with us each Monday morning, for the duration of April and May.  A little something to listen to while you’re brushing your teeth, eating breakfast, or checking your email.  A poem to start off the week.  We hope to simultaneously expose you to the wealth of multimedia performances of poems that are available on the web, and to share with you the delight of hearing poems that you might, hitherto, have only experienced on the page.

Today’s Monday Morning Poem is a recording taken from the wonderful archives at From the Fishhouse:

Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade with a Book and a Rattle from a String of Pearls.”

This is an elegy, an achingly beautiful one that has haunted me (Iris) since I first heard the poet read it in Chicago at AWP 2010.  The tenderness with which de la Paz handles his subject is deeply moving to me (particularly as I continue to reflect on the loved ones whom I have lost this past year), and, in combination with the resonance of his sonics and the spareness of his tone and syntax, paints a rich portrait of a woman that is at once ferocious and yet gentle, quiet and yet somehow audaciously brave.

To listen to the recording, click through and then hit “play” on the grey bar next to the ear icon at the top of the page.

Henry Leung’s interview with Mr. de la Paz will appear on the blog later this week.

Happy Monday!

LR News: April 2011 Happenings (National Poetry Month Edition!)

It’s National Poetry Month! T.S. Eliot may have famously proclaimed April to be “the cruelest month,” but here at LR, plenty of exciting things are happening (yes, even despite the giant, fat snowflakes that I woke up to this morning here on the East Coast):

National Poetry Month Contest Prompts (sponsored by Kaya Press)

In celebration of the urge to translate idea and image into line and stanza, we will be posting a prompt submitted by one winner of our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest on each successive Friday of a full week in April, beginning with the 3rd runner-up on the 8th, and leading up to the Grand Prize winner on the 29th.  Our big winner will receive a copy of Lisa Chen’s Mouth, thanks to the kind generosity of Kaya Press.  Many thanks to all those who submitted a prompt!  Please check back every Friday to see whether your submission has been chosen!

Reading Period for Issue 3

Looking for something to do with your responses to the contest-winners’ prompts?  You’re in luck, because we will be reopening our reading period to submissions for Issue 3, starting next week.  Time to dust off the poetry hat and get your revising on!

Continued Postcard Project Posts (Postmark Deadline: April 15th)

If you took home a postcard from AWP or received one in the mail, now is the time to send it in! Please don’t forget, our postmark deadline is April 15th.  We will continue to post cards as we receive them.  (A reminder that we also plan to choose a couple of postcards to feature in Issue 3, and participating in the Postcard Project does not preclude your submitting through our regular reading period, so if you’re hoping for an extra chance of your work being noticed this time around, sending in your postcard poem in addition to submitting through our electronic system is one way to go!)

Interviews with Oliver de la Paz and Sarah Gambito

We are very excited to have the honor of being able to publish interviews with two Asian American literary luminaries, Oliver de la Paz and Sarah Gambito, on our blog later this April. Be on the lookout for our staff writers’ interviews with these two distinguished poets.

. . . and More.

As always, we’ve got our regular columns (Sulu DC, Becoming Realer), but we’ve also got a few surprises up our sleeves, so keep your eyes peeled!

Happy Poetry Month,

Iris & Mia.

Announcing Our 2011 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest

In anticipation of National Poetry Month this April, the LR Blog is once again going to be holding a prompt contest.  This year, we are pleased to partner with the generous folks at Kaya Press, a unique small press that focuses on cutting-edge work by Asian diasporic writers.  Just as with last year’s contest, the top four prompts that we select (three runners-up and one first-place winner) will be featured on the LR Blog on the Fridays of each full week in April, beginning on the 8th.  The winners will be announced in reverse order, beginning with the third runner-up and ending with the first-place winner.  This year’s grand prize (courtesy of Kaya’s sponsorship) is a copy of Lisa Chen‘s Mouth, which our staff blogger Henry will be reviewing later this spring.

Here’s how it will work:

1) Leave a comment on this post that includes the text of your prompt.  Entries must be posted by 11:59PM EST on Thursday, March 31st. Comments on this post will close after that time. Please leave some form of basic contact information in your comment (preferably an email address), so that we can get in touch with you if you win.

2) During the first full week of April, we’ll be choosing the four prompts that we like best.  The winner and all three runners up will have their entries featured as Weekly Prompts on the LR Blog during the four Fridays from April 8th – 29th.  In addition, the winner will also receive a special grand prize that has been graciously offered  by Kaya Press: a copy of Lisa Chen’s Mouth. We will announce the runners up and winner week by week, starting with the third runner-up and culminating with the winner, so keep on checking back in April to see if your entry has been featured.

3) A few ground rules: You may only enter once. Please submit only poetry prompts.  Keep all prompts appropriate: anything of a bigoted, demeaning, or nasty nature will not be considered; we’d also appreciate it if you could please try to keep your prompts somewhat PG in nature, as when choosing prompts we always try to look for flexible exercises that can be adapted for use with either adults or kids.

That’s it!  We look forward to reading your entries.  And while you’re at it, please do take a moment to check out Mouth or of the other titles on Kaya’s web site.  Many thanks to Publisher Sunyoung Lee, Lisa Chen, and Kaya Press for their generosity.

Weekly Prompt: Directional Force

Crow in Flight (Image via Wikipedia)

I’ve been thinking a lot about force lately (in the Newtonian sense) as I’ve been working on revising a poem that had become too static for its own good.  How, I’ve been asking myself, might one use a directional force (a push or a pull) as a central device by which to drive a poem’s internal motion (imagistically, rhythmically, and otherwise)?  It’s an interesting challenge, to allow the arc of one’s language (which is, ultimately, abstract) to be driven by the idea of a physical (concrete) force.  Cornelius Eady’s poem “Crows in a Strong Wind” provides some insight into how this may be done:

Off go the crows from the roof.
The crows can’t hold on.
They might as well
Be perched on an oil slick.

Such an awkward dance,
These gentlemen
In their spottled-black coats.
Such a tipsy dance,

The thrust of his lyric takes off (or is blown off) its perch as suddenly as the crows are blown from the roof, only to return again as both the speaker’s thoughts and the crows themselves attempt to recreate the scene that served as the poem’s genesis.  This pattern—of being blown off course, and then returning, only to be blown off, and to return again—creates a sense of disorientation that makes the poem feel dizzily, and wonderfully, surprising.  The force of the wind drives the poem forward and back, forward and back, just as it  disturbs the crows from their perch, resulting in a kind of sampling that causes the original image to be made new again and again.

Prompt: write a poem whose arc, and imagery, is driven by a single, physical motion (a push, a pull, a twist, a parabolic descent).

Friends & Neighbors: Monica Mody’s TRAVEL & RISK

Our very own Monica Mody (who writes reviews for us) is having a splendid writing year, and we are very excited for her. We recently received word that her chapbook Travel & Risk (Wheelchair Party, 2010) is now available in free e-book form on the publisher’s web site. (It’s also available for purchase in a limited print run for $3, or with all three other Wheelchair Party Press titles for $9—an option which we highly recommend as well, since each Wheelchair Party chapbook is painstakingly hand-bound into a hand-screen-printed cover created by its publisher, CJ Waterman).

Travel & Risk is rubbly on the tongue and lovely in the ear; a long poem that is almost surgically aligned into neat single columns on the page, and yet whose imagery—at times playfully, and at times ominously—shimmers wickedly in the corner of the mind’s eye, slides languidly out of the field of one’s vision, returns winking to adopt its most serious instructive guise, when all the while you know that it is running joyously, inexorably amuck behind the scenes.  A read that we highly recommend.

Monica’s work also recently appeared in the Boston Review, and her manuscript Kala Pani was just accepted for publication by 1913 Press, to be released next year.

Congrats, Monica!

The LR Postcard Project 2011: #032

#032 Front
#032 Back

* * *

Postcard #032
Received: March 11, 2011
Poet: Kathleen Hellen

Empty Hand

They walked to the outskirts.
Everything they had in jellied gasoline
in folds of singed kimonos
In the gray garden
of Tokyo’s napalmed streets
a small hand reaching as if planted
in the ashes. She was 17
“Fire everywhere,”
Etsuko says. “They
were closing on.”
Osaka/Kobe/Imabari
* * *
To participate in the LR Postcard Project, please return your response via snail mail by April 15, 2011 (Postmarked).

Friends & Neighbors: Help Fund AALR’s 8+1 Symposium

Our friends at the Asian American Literary Review have recently let us know about their Kickstarter fundraising campaign in support of their 2011 8+1 Symposium.  8+1, which is the sequel to last year’s 8: A Symposium, will take place at the LA Lit Festival on May 7th, and will once again feature another exciting panel of respected Asian American writers.  This year’s lineup features:

Joy Kogawa
R. Zamora Linmark
Rishi Reddi
Kip Fulbeck
Reese Okyong Kwon
Hiromi Itō and translator Jeffrey Angles
Ray Hsu
Viet Nguyen
Brian Ascalon Roley

AALR is trying to raise $4000 by April 19th in order to help cover the cost of offering this unique literary experience.  As with all Kickstarter projects, the organizers need to be able to raise the full amount in pledges in order to be funded, so we encourage you to consider contributing to 8+1 sooner rather than later. (Not to mention that, if the satisfaction of being a literary patron is not enough, there are some great thank-you rewards being offered to backers at various levels of sponsorship, ranging from event posters to autographed book copies, to AALR subscriptions, professional SAT tutoring, original artwork, documentary film copies, personal editorial consultations—even the chance to attend a private dinner with the Symposium participants).

As we know from putting together even our little off-site AWP reading this winter, literary events (especially those of this scale) are not easily organized, let alone funded. AALR has been doing excellent curative work in its first year or so of existence, and we would love to see them have the opportunity to continue that work through events like 8+1.  If you have even a dollar or two to spare, please do consider donating to this very worthwhile cause.