Asian American Poetry Unbound
Of note this weekend: Sandra Lim in Chicago, Jason Koo in Cleveland, Marilyn Chin in San Jose, Fay Chiang in NYC. Also: Hyphen #19 release party in SF. Please note that this weekend’s roundup only covers through February 28th — as we’ll be transitioning into a new format for our events listings starting on March 1st. Look out for an announcement at the beginning of next week!
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Feb. 24-28, 2010)”
Our friends at The Asian American Literary Review have just passed on some information about an exciting event of theirs that is coming up in April.
8: A Symposium: Voices from The Asian American Literary Review will feature free public readings, Q&A sessions, and book signings by eight highly accomplished Asian American writers: Karen Tei Yamashita, Sonya Chung, Kyoko Mori, April Naoko Heck, Ed Lin, Srikanth Reddy, Peter Bacho and Ru Freeman. The symposium will be an all-day affair, and will take place on April 24th, 2010, from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at Ulrich Recital Hall as part of the University of Maryland, College Park’s, Maryland Day celebration.
For more information, please contact the organizers by email: asianamericanliteraryreview[at]gmail[dot]com.
If you live in the vicinity of Maryland or will be in the area around the time of April 24th, we highly encourage you to check out this event!
We’re posting slightly later than usual this week, but still in time to let you know about some really interesting events! Of especial note: two AAWW events (Purvi Shah Workshop and Jason Koo Book Party) and the SULU series in NYC, Flamenco-Inspired Poetry Reading by PAWA Arkipelago in SF, Marilyn Chin in San Jose, Smithsonian Annual Day of Remembrance for Japanese Internment (marking the anniversary of Executive Order 9066) in DC. Also: don’t forget about the open mic series going on (Family Style in Philly and *SPARKLE* Queer-Friendly Open Mic in DC), and that in many cities, Lunar New Year festivities are not yet over. Check out your city’s newspaper or Chinatown web site to find out if festivities are still going on!
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Feb 19-24, 2010)”
Just a quick reminder to all you SF Bay Area based readers:
The deadline for Kearny Street Workshop’s Intergenerational Writers’ Lab is coming up this Friday, February 19th. Applications must be received in the office by 5 pm that day. Do take a chance on sending in an application if you have the time; it would be a shame to miss out on the chance to participate!
Just a friendly reminder about the approach of two submission deadlines for Kundiman‘s programs:
1. Kundiman Poetry Prize submissions must be postmarked by tomorrow, February 16th.
2. Applications for the 2010 Kundiman summer retreat are now being accepted. Deadline is March 1st.
These are two opportunities you won’t want to miss!
This year’s Year of the Tiger begins on Sunday, Feb. 14th (according to the Gregorian calendar).
For most people, the approach of the New Year (whether according to the Gregorian or Lunar calendar) signals a time to reflect upon our habits and to make lifestyle changes in order to have a “fresh start” in the coming year. The traditions surrounding New Year’s celebrations are filled with rituals celebrating transition and fresh hope, and also with traditions that remind us of our roots — our connections to family and beloved friends. Whether toasting to Auld Lang Syne or visiting our elders to exchange New Year’s greetings and receive gifts, our traditions engage us in a rhythm of return and renewal — each year, we come home or look back at what’s familiar and beloved in order to move forward again. Lunar New Year rituals, in particular, are rich with symbolic resonance. Cleaning out the house, donning new clothes, consuming foods which are meant to stand in for one’s hopes for the year, celebrating with firecrackers and tree blossoms — these are actions which can remind us of the fleeting nature of what’s past, but which also evoke a sense of hope for the new experiences we anticipate in the coming season. It’s with these things in mind that we give you this week’s prompt
Prompt: Write a poem about a personal or familial ritual for the turning of the year.
If you need help getting started, here are a couple of links to some beautiful New Year’s poems from the Poetry Foundation’s archive:
“Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“New Year” by Bei Dao (trans. David Hinton and Yanbing Chen).
* * *
Happy Lunar New Year!
– The Editors
LOTS of holidays being marked this weekend: Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and, as our Twitter followers have reminded us, the start of Carnival festivities (Mardi Gras for those of us in the States). Of particular significance to the Asian American community: check out MOCA’s lists of Lunar New Year events in NYC, and in Boston, DC, LA, San Francisco, and Honolulu. Philadelphia readers can read this helpful article for more info; Seattle residents can look here; Chicago peeps can look here. Know of Lunar New Year Festivities in a city that we’re missing? Comment below to tell us about it.
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Feb. 11-17, 2010)”
Dear LR Fans,
We know you’ve been anticipating this for a long, long time, and have endured many push-backs of the date, but we’re happy to announce that our very first reading period is finally, and officially, open! You can link over to our submissions guidelines here, or by clicking on the image at the beginning of this post.
A gigantic thank you to our brilliant Technology Consultant, Brandon, for the many hours he spent programming, creating the nuts-and-bolts behind the whole operation. The database that he’s built for us will allow us to gather, filter, and screen your submissions entirely online without the need for cumbersome reams of email attachments.
Here’s how our system will work:
That’s it! You’ll receive a confirmation email to let you know that your submission has been logged into our database. In up to 4-6 weeks, we will reply with a decision (please don’t query about your submission’s status before then; but if we take too long, feel free to send us a gentle reminder). In the meantime, feel free to email us at editors [at] gmail(dot) com with any questions or updates you may have. Our reading period will close on April 15th.
Please do consider sending some of your work our way. We’d also appreciate it if you could help us spread the word (the banner at the top of this post is free for “grabs” if you’d like to use it to link to us on your own blog or web site; we also have a smaller, button version, available here). Finally, as we are still figuring things out for the first time, any feedback you might have about how to make this process more user-friendly in future reading periods would be much appreciated, so please feel free to drop us a line to that effect. Thank you for all of your patience with us while waiting for this long-overdue phase of our magazine’s development to come to fruition. We look forward to reading your submissions!
Best,
Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff
Lots going on this week. Especially interesting this week: Kundiman & Verlaine Reading Series in NYC, Vincent Who? Documentary Screening at the AAWW, poet Truong Tran’s “Lost & Found” exhibit opening. Don’t forget to also check out the beginnings of Lunar New Year festivities, which are starting in some cities this week (The New Year itself is on Feb. 14th). The Museum of Chinese in America has a great list of New Year’s events going on in NYC and in Boston, DC, San Francisco, and Honolulu.
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Feb 4-10, 2010)”
A favorite prompt of mine from Kenneth Koch’s classic book Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry is an exercise in which he asks his students to compose poems using words from a list of Spanish vocabulary. Writes Koch in his commentary:
“Writing these poems enabled children who knew Spanish to enjoy their knowledge of it and gave those who didn’t a feeling for another language . . . Too often, the non-English language a child knows is regarded in school as something that has to be overcome rather than as an additional source of knowledge and pleasure.” (297).
I love the idea of allowing a language whose rhythms feel natural to one’s ears (whether it is a first or second language) to color and inflect the poetic voice, and so to give it a place in one’s own [English language] writing. A year ago, when I traveled back to my undergraduate institution to co-present a writing workshop at an Asian American activism conference, my collaborators and I tried out Koch’s prompt with the group in attendance, but instead of using Spanish, we challenged ourselves to substitute words from our own families’ native languages. Continue reading “Weekly Prompt: Poems Using Non-English Words”