Friends & Neighbors: Holiday Events Roundup (Dec. 23, 2009 – Jan. 11, 2010)

Things in the literary scene are winding down for the year, and the LR staff is going to be taking some time off from the blog for the holidays starting tomorrow (December 23), and ending on January 8th.  It’s been a great last few months, and we’ve been bowled over again and again by your support and enthusiasm as this community has begun to take root.  Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be taking time to rest, spend time with friends and family, attend to personal matters, and prepare for LR’s next steps in 2010. In light of the fact that we’ll be taking such a long span of time off, we’ve decided that four our events roundup this week, we will cover a longer time period than usual.  The Holiday Roundup below covers events happening from December 23rd until January 11th, and, since there are several contests and festivals with deadlines coming up in the next month or so, we’ve also included a list of calls for entries.   As always, please let us know of any corrections that need to be made, or if you have an event that you’d like to add.  Happy Holidays!

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Friends & Neighbors: The Asian American Literary Review

The Asian American Literary Review Logo

We recently received word about The Asian American Literary Review, a new and exciting journal that will soon be available by subscription.

Says Editor Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis:

“The Asian American Literary Review is a space for writers who consider the designation ‘Asian American’ a fruitful starting point for artistic vision and community. In showcasing the work of established and emerging writers, the journal aims to incubate dialogues and, just as importantly, open those dialogues to regional, national, and international audiences of all constituencies. We select work that is, as Marianne Moore once put it, ‘an expression of our needs…[and] feeling, modified by the writer’s moral and technical insights.’ AALR features fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, comic art, interviews, and book reviews.

Our first issue, debuting in April 2010, features forum responses by Alexander Chee, David Mura, and Ru Freeman; poetry by Cathy Song, Oliver de la Paz, Paisley Rekdal, April Naoko Heck, Mong-Lan, Eugene Gloria, Nick Carbo, and David Woo; Karen Tei Yamashita interviewed by Kandice Chuh; prose by Ed Lin, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Sonya Chung, Hasanthika Sirisena, David Mura, Gary Pak, and Brian Ascalon Roley; and book reviews by Paul Lai, Timothy Yu, and Jennifer Ann Ho.”

Lawrence speculates that submissions will likely open sometime in late spring or early summer of 2010.  In the meantime, please head on over and check out their temporary web site, or leave them some love on Facebook by joining their group. 

Weekly Prompt: Private Vocabularies

Everyone has a private vocabulary (or vocabularies) to which only they and those that they know are privvy.  Some of these “private” terms are particular to an individual person’s worldview or imagination (I have a friend who refers to internet survey memes as “salsa”), while others develop in the context of relationships with a particular group of people (whenever our 12th grade calculus teacher told us to “put away the Martian,” my classmates and I knew that he meant for us to stop doing other classes’ homework while his back was turned).  A private vocabulary can be deeply personal, and can link us to the awkward idiosyncracies of our families (as Paul Muldoon has reflected in his poem “Quoof”), or it can serve as a fruitful site from which creative production can bloom into entire alternate worlds (as in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth,” or Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky”).  Private vocabularies can be nonsense-based, or they can be based in mistranslations, in grammatical inconsistencies, or in innovation born of the need to fill linguistic gaps.  This, I think, can be especially poignant for those of us from immigrant families in which a language other than English, a mixture of English and other language(s), or a non-standard version of English, was commonly spoken in the home.

Exercise:
Write a poem that draws on a word or set of words particular to a private vocabulary of your own.

Here’s an excerpt from my attempt, which draws upon the first time that my younger brother (who grew up calling me Jaibo, his variant of the Chinese word for older sister), addressed me by my “real” (legal) name.

Losing the Nickname

My real name
fell from your mouth
so stiffly I thought
perhaps you’d coughed.
“Ah-ris,” the sound
of it seemed to stick
in your gullet, balled up
behind your gums. 
The word clattered
from your tongue,
scratchy, a stale clump
of bread bumping along
through uncombed carpet . . .

As always – if you attempt this – we’d be flattered if you shared an excerpt of your results in the comments.  Happy writing!

Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Dec. 17-21, 2009)

This week, in addition to readings, open mic’s & performances, we’ve also included a couple of local book sale events.  And be sure to check out your local independent bookseller or a university or small press’s online shop this week if you’re looking for holiday gifts; help support the dedicated small businesses that make the publication and promotion of contemporary poetry possible!

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Staff Picks: Holiday Reading Recommendations

Whether you’ll be traveling or relaxing at home during the upcoming holidays, it’s a great time to polish off an old reading list or to start in on something new.  As our gift to you this season, and to help you get started on your own holiday reading list, we’ve asked members of the LR Staff to recommend some of their recent favorites.  Here are our suggestions.

QuanBarryAsylum

Asylum | Quan Barry | University of Pittsburgh Press (2001)

Recommended by Mia: “My holiday reading pick . . . it’s her first collection.  Her engagement with the voices and subjects of the Vietnam War is beautifully executed, and though the scope of her work is much broader, I was most riveted by her ‘war’ poems.”

* * *

BehindMyEyesLiYoungLee
Behind My Eyes | Li-Young Lee | W.W. Norton & Company (2008)

Recommended by Iris: “This is Lee’s most recent collection — and it is stunning, as always.  Figurations of the Virgin Mary intertwine with moving landscapes, conversations between the poet and his wife, the transitory spaces of travel, a chance vision of the poet’s father; all hang in a delicate, almost sacred, lumen, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth.  Each poem breathes with an expansiveness and a grave tenderness that only Lee knows how to render. Behind My Eyes is sold with a CD of the poet reading some the poems in the book, and I highly recommend listening to this, as well.  I had the privilege of hearing Lee read from his drafts for this book a few years before it came out, and loved the way that the intonation of his voice seamed through the lines of each poem, threading them together in a low, sonorous hum.  It’s a beautiful listening experience, and adds a new and lovely textural dimension to his already melodious poetics.”

* * *

CallMeIshmaelTonightAghaShahidAli
Call Me Ishmael Tonight | Agha Shahid Ali | W.W. Norton & Company (2003)

Recommended by Supriya: “This collection of ghazals shows the versatile ways in which a poetic form can go beyond its history and language while staying true to its essence. Agha Shahid Ali demonstrates the intentionality with which he overcomes expectations and boundaries by using a traditional form that often evokes feelings of longing and melancholia but writing in a contemporary English that feels timeless. Although written entirely in form, the range and depth of this collection allows for a vast expanse of emotions and possibilities and is the perfect collection with which to curl up whatever your mood.”

* * *

AGestureLifeChangRaeLee
A Gesture Life | Chang-rae Lee | Penguin USA (2000)

Recommended by Ada: “Told from the point of view of Dr. Hata, a Japanese WWII veteran, this fictional memoir weaves between his experiences in a crumbling outpost of a Japanese imperial outpost in the last days of the war and his later life in gated, suburban America. The protagonist in Lee’s second novel is so reasonable it’s eerie, and though I think that we are meant to feel sorry for Dr. Hata and the stiffly respectable, appropriately understated life he has bound himself into, the distance that separates him from all the other characters in this book translates into distance from the reader. Not that the whole book left me cold: the scenes describing Dr. Hata’s encounters with Korean comfort women during the war are eye-opening, gripping, and an interesting perspective on the terrors of war.”

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Friends & Neighbors: Sesshu Foster and Giveaway at Molossus

Sesshu Foster's World Ball Notebook
Sesshu Foster's World Ball Notebook

We mentioned Sesshu Foster’s award-winning collection World Ball Notebook  back in November, when we did a post about the winners of the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards.

Well, it’s recently come to our attention that the magazine/blog Molossus, which bills itself as “an online broadside of world literature,” has posted a lovely conversation with Sesshu and is offering its readers a chance to win a free copy of World Ball Notebook in partnership with City Lights (winner to be announced this Wednesday, Dec. 16th). 

We loved what Sesshu had to say about using elements of indigenous heritage as “political and social iconography and ideology” rather than as “ethnography.”  Here’s an excerpt:

Our identity as Americans, as citizens of whatever it may be, is collectively bound up in on-going discourse and dialogue about our relations, our culture and history. Times change, and we can’t recycle categorical definitions of ethnic character that are forty years old any more than we can recycle racist assumptions about the self from the 19th century. People do, of course, but writers are supposed to be hipper than that, more up to date.

To read more of the interview or to enter the giveaway, head on over to Molossus and check out their full post: “Atomik Aztek: A Conversation with Sesshu Foster + Book Giveaway!” [on Molossus]

Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Dec. 11-16, 2009)

A short-ish list this time around.  Events happening this weekend – and into next weekend – for your perusal.  As usual, please feel free to suggest updates and additions. 

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Editors’ Picks: Downtown Chicago Poetry Tour Review

ChicagoPoetryTour1

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I went into Chicago with a few friends, and decided to use the opportunity to try out the downtown portion of the Poetry Foundation’s Chicago Poetry Tour.  My companions very graciously agreed to take the tour with me—no small feat, considering that it’s a 45-minute walking tour, and a few of them were dragging rolling luggage with them the whole time!  Much to our delight, it ended up being a very pleasant experience for all of us.  In particular, one of our number had never been to Chicago before, so it was a perfect way to show him pieces of the Loop.  But even for those of us who were more familiar with the city, it was wonderful to see the neighborhood around Millennium Park from a different perspective.   The downtown portion of the tour (which is the main tour listed on the web site) takes you almost straight down Michigan Avenue (perfect for us, since our train into the city disembarked at Randolph Station), and then turns west and ends a bit more inland.  It works like this: before going to Chicago, you download the audio file containing the guide, and a map (not necessary, but interesting/helpful if you’re one of those directionally challenged people like me who needs to know exactly where you are in reference to the rest of the neighborhood at every minute) from the Poetry Foundation’s website.  The audio is a single track, and is available in either mp3 or mp4.  You then put the audio file on your portable music device, and turn it on whenever you reach the tour’s start point (The Chicago Cultural Center, at 78 E. Washington).  From there, you follow the audio as it guides you through six different stops of interest (pausing whenever you want to explore a shop, get food, or look at something else along the way— the audio even recommends doing this at several points in the narration), and end up at the Harold Washington Library (400 S. State St), which is conveniently located next to a CTA stop.

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Weekly Prompt: Superheroes

A favorite childhood superhero (via Muppet Wiki)
A favorite childhood superhero (via Muppet Wiki)

It’s been a superhero kind of week.  Inspired simultaneously by this song, this NPR story, and by an article (I think from Teachers & Writers’ Collaborative magazine)  in which a writing teacher asked her tentative students to write about their secret superpowers, I developed a prompt about superheroes to use with a group of adult residents at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, where my M.F.A. classmates and I lead a workshop on Wednesday nights.

After opening with an icebreaker about flight vs. invisibility, I shared two poems (“The Flash Reverses Time” by A. Van Jordan, and “Superhero Pregnant Woman” by Jessy Randall) written from the perspectives of different kinds of superheroes with the group, and asked them to choose between three options: 1) to write about an unusual superpower of their own, 2) to write about what their life might be like (how it might be the same or different) as an undercover superhero or villain, and 3) to write from the perspective of a “real” superhero (fictional or living).  The intent was to draw out the class’s imaginations, away from the everyday perspectives of self, and to have them enter into the fantastic realm of the alternative desire – the “what if,” so to speak.  The class responded with a wide range of interpretations – two people wrote about the ability to stop pain, several people inhabited their favorite comic book and movie characters, one young man who says that he normally writes “on the dark side” wrote a very sweet poem about his ‘superhero’ of a mother, and a young woman who was at first hesitant to share her work wrote a hilarious piece about a superhero who could, among other abilities, toast pieces of bread with her built-in laser beams.

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Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Dec. 3-7, 2009)

We took a break last week for the Thanksgiving holiday, but now we’re back — and there’s lots more going on this weekend!  As usual, please feel free to suggest updates and additions to this list.

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