Intro to Minh

To this day, I still remember reading Seattle poet Koon Woon’s first official book of poetry, The Truth In Rented Rooms (Kaya Press, 1998) back in Rochester, NY. As I read more of his writing it was like watching the smudgy white walls of my studio apartment turn into a kaleidoscope of possibilities. I could tell Woon’s writing came from a place of strength and hurt, truthfulness and sorrow. These were human qualities I had taken for granted all my life before I started writing poetry myself.

Woon’s writing had the wonderful ability of convincing me to peer deeper into the well of mystery and to search for my own meaning in life.  He writes in the poem “In Water Buffalo Time,”

When my little friends mocked me for my seriousness,
Our teacher, under the shade of the yung tree bursting with berries,
Told us Meng-Tse had dreamed he was a butterfly
Dreaming it was a man.
Without even knowing what a “yung tree” or who “Meng-Tse” was, I intuitively knew that as a poet of Asian descent I was on the threshold of a long literary tradition in this country I called home. I knew I had already missed much, but I soon realized that the curling waves of Asian American literature(s) populate a very large and deep body of experience, innovation and experimentation that only keeps on getting stronger.

The editors of the Lantern Review blog have asked me to review books of poetry, and I intend to employ my trusty reading skills and quirky powers of interpretation to the task of properly introducing poetic works by Asian American authors to You, the general reading audience. The kind of poetry that reels me in and makes me want to take another bite is one where the author simplifies the complex only to open me back up and engage my mind with the never-ending complexity of human experience and imagination.

Continue reading “Intro to Minh” →

Weekly Prompt: Complicating Narrative Structure

Draft a traditional narrative poem that describes an event or experience from real life.  This doesn’t need to be derived from your own life—something from the news, or a book you’ve read is fine.  Focus on using detail and description to tell a story, accurately and with as much emotional clarity as possible.  Feel free to experiment with sound, image, and/or metaphor if it helps you better access the “truth” of the experience.

Return to your draft, taking into consideration how you might structure your narrative in a way that adds layers of meaning.  You may need to experiment with several options, but some ideas to consider are:

  • locate a companion text (or write another piece) that you can weave into the narrative of your draft in such a way that generates and complicates meaning
  • develop a second poem that describe a corollary event to the first, then weave the two together
  • break the poem into sections, each narrated from a different point of view
  • extract a few lyrical details from your draft and develop a refrain, to be repeated throughout the poem as a force of both unity and change

Spend some time working and reworking your poem, but give it the freedom to become an entirely different piece.  Also keep in mind that the objective of complicating structure is to deepen/layer meaning, and that these new meanings may not emerge until midway through the (re)structuring process.

Review: S S Prasad’s 100 POEMS

100 Poems by S S Prasad | STD Pathasala 2008 | $10 or INR 100

Art interested in and interacting with technology, and the technology of its production, can pose some pretty intriguing questions. Bangalore-based poet S S Prasad, in his nanopoems, attempts to engage with new technologies of writing and with code as language. Collected in print in the book 100 Poems, these nanopoems were first written for the microchip as surface for inscription: Prasad, apart from being a poet, happens to be an engineer working for a prominent Silicon Valley company. Not all the poems ended up being nanoed (“nano” denotes one billionth of a meter), but even in print, even to the naked eye, they as a group assert their micro-aesthetic. What’s interesting is that their micro-ness is a response to Raul Zurita’s sky poems, which the back cover blurb tells us is an intertext whose scalar proportions Prasad inverted.

The poems, most of them in the binary language of zeroes and ones, are primarily concerned with  marking time on, or across, the page space. The binary digits operate as image, as sign, as object. They explore a visual poetics which functions sometimes in the concrete, and other times in the conceptual, mode.
Continue reading “Review: S S Prasad’s 100 POEMS” →

Weekly Prompt: Departures

Autumn in South Bend

The recent passing of a loved one and the swiftness with which summer weather has taken leave of South Bend has had my mind turning over the idea of departures recently.

When we are the ones who depart from a place, we simultaneously take part in entering into someplace, or something, else.  But when we are the ones from whom someone or something departs, we mourn by collecting fragments: wisps of things which we try to stitch together to preserve some approximation of that which we have lost.

Today’s prompt is short, and simple.

Prompt: Write a poem about a departure.  OR, alternately, write a poem about the experience of being left behind by someone or something else who has departed from you.

LR News: Best of the Net 2010 Nominations

We are pleased to announce our nominations for Sundress Publications’ 2010 Best of the Net Anthology.  They are, in order of their appearance in our magazine:

“The Newlyweds,” translated by Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee

“Sydney Notebook” by Subhashini Kaligotla

“Death poem exercise 64” by Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez

“Contingency” by Luisa A. Igloria

All four poems were first published in Issue One of Lantern Review.

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About the Nominated Poets

Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee

Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.

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Subhashini Kaligotla

Subhashini Kaligotla’s poems have appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, New England Review, and Western Humanities Review, and in poetry collections in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in poetry and the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to India for literary translation.  Kaligotla lives in New York City, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of art.

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Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez

Asterio Enrico N. Gutierrez‘s fiction and poetry have appeared in Lantern Review, Asia Writes, TAYO, Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic, and the Sunday Times Magazine, among others. He lives in Manila, Philippines.

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Luisa A. Igloria

Originally from Baguio City, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), which received the Ernest Sandeen Prize; Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005), and eight other books. She currently directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at  Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, hand-binds books, and keeps her radar tuned for cool lizard sightings. www.luisaigloria.com.

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Congratulations to all four nominees.  We are proud to be represented by such a fine selection of work and wish each of you the best of luck during the judging process!

Review: Melody S. Gee’s EACH CRUMBLING HOUSE


Each Crumbling House (from melodygee.com)
Each Crumbling House (from melodygee.com)

Each Crumbling House by Melody S. Gee | Perugia Press 2010 | $16

Melody S. Gee’s first book of poems has been advertised for its first-generation Asian American experience, a perhaps unfair label that evokes an older generation’s assimilation-preoccupied narratives. Gee’s poems subsume that historical genre and renew it through her family’s multiple generations. Though the poems do aggregate around immigration, they also address the return to motherland and a Pacific-straddling awareness that’s neither here nor there. Most of these poems are trenchant with cultural identity’s complexities, with both China and America composing the poet’s (or at least the poet’s family’s) world-center.

The primary, migratory narrative buttresses each of the book’s two sections, including the “Paper Son” strain, the W poems (“What They Saw,” “Where We Are Gathered,” etc.), and the dated/located poems. The opening poem, “Migration,” uses monarch butterflies to explore estranged inheritance. The monarch is common to an American childhood but foreign to a Chinese one; between two generations emerges a rift of (de-)naturalization, so that the speaker inherits, variously: sacrifice, beauty, foreignness, destination. These lines from the poem elucidate the space this book inhabits:

how much more time have you been given
to learn a language and forget a language, to break
your body over an ocean [. . .]

Continue reading “Review: Melody S. Gee’s EACH CRUMBLING HOUSE” →

LR News: Call for Submissions: Issue 2

Just a reminder that as of September 20th, we are now accepting submissions for our second issue. We have revised our guidelines slightly, so please make sure that you review the information on our guidelines page before submitting. Submissions will be accepted through November 29, 2010. 

If you would like to help spread the word (and we would indeed be very grateful if you did), feel free to grab the button above, or the smaller one in the sidebar for use on your own site or blog.

Thanks, and keep ’em coming!  We very much look forward to reading your work.

Best,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff

Weekly Prompt: Engaging the Image

Using Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” as a model, write at least 20 lines of detailed, concrete observation that describes a single object.  Move past the obvious and think instead how you can describe the thing as if seeing it for the first time.  Using tools like sensory detail, metaphor, and simile, defamiliarize the object to the extent that it becomes an object of wonder—terror, even.  Hone your powers of observation by delving into the fantastical, allowing your subconscious to reveal what’s most strange or troubling about your subject of scrutiny.

Work with all of the senses (including the imagination) to allow your reader to really see the object—and then to see it again, even more closely.  Avoid abstractions and “I” statements, communicating instead a sense of the “I” through the types of concrete detail included in the poem.

After finishing your initial draft, return to the piece and think how you can invest specific details with greater emotional resonance (ie. in describing the worn laces of a man’s boot, how can you actually address the nature of his relationship with his father?) through word choice, tone, and pacing.  Expand on one (or two) of your most promising details and develop an original, full-fledged image (for example, the severed ears in Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel,” or the lantern-heads in Victoria Chang’s “Lantern Festival”), one that functions as objective correlative to the subject matter of the poem.

Alaskan Rainbow Trout

 

Becoming Realer: A Writer’s Life

“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.

A Writer's Life
Picture by Monica Reyes (via Kohlage)

My MFA program began with a validation. We gathered in Galileo Hall for Orientation and the program director, Marilyn Abildskov, welcomed us to Saint Mary’s College of California’s Creative Writing program right off the bat by saying, “The MFA is the public declaration of the writer’s life.” It was the first opportunity many of us had to see each other. I nodded, inspired. Looking around a room full of similarly inspired faces, faces imbued with similar curiosity and similar possibilities for living the writer’s life I wondered, “What does it mean to live a writer’s life anyway? Who are these fellow students, fellow writers, who I’ll be spending the next two years with? Who are they, and who am I?”

Questions of belonging and self-identity aren’t new. It was those questions that led me to apply to MFA programs to begin with. My personal statement ended with a quote from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her memoir, A Dialogue on Love (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), she writes: “If I can fit the pieces of this self back together at all, I don’t want them to be the way they were. Not because I thought I could be better defended either: what I wanted was to be realer.” I also want to be realer, I stated.

As an undergraduate student at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan I started out knowing that I would study philosophy, literature and poetry writing—not Asian studies. That wasn’t my place. I was a Korean adoptee raised in a small Midwestern town where I could count the number of racial minorities on both hands. Cultural ties were shaky at best; resentful or embarrassing at worst, but my Korean face stood out on my college campus. It became the marker by which others defined me, and then, how I came to define myself. I went to Japan because I couldn’t get to Korea. I found revolutionary Asian American Studies. I devoured Asian American poetry. I learned what it meant to be Asian in Middle America. I realized that philosophy was not my place either, but I craved the self-knowledge involved in much of metaphysical and continental philosophy. By the time I left K, I wanted to know where my place was. Asian American studies? Literary theory? Creative writing? Some interdisciplinary approach to all three?

By returning to that existential question—who am I?—I knew the answer. I am an Asian American woman writer, but beneath the politics of racial identity, beneath the yearning for self-expression and self-creation, is simply a desire to be seen and known. Is that living the writer’s life? Of course, fundamentally, living a writer’s life is writing. I see this column as a step in the right direction. It’s a place for questions about literary writing forms, craft and how all of it interacts with my experiences at St. Mary’s. Personally, I still hope both this column and my MFA program will help make me realer. Maybe that is living a writer’s life. 

LR News: We’re Back! September 2010 Updates.

Dear LR Friends and Fans,

At long last, we are back from hiatus!  Here are some lovely new changes that we have implemented during the course of our absence:

Reading Period for Issue 2 is Now Open

That’s right; we’re now accepting submissions for our second issue, to appear sometime during the winter.  Please take some time to review our updated guidelines first, as we have changed a number of policies since our last reading period.  Here’s the link.  Our new submissions deadline is November 29th.

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New Staff Bloggers

LR welcomes five brand new staff bloggers to its team this fall:

Reviewer Henry W. Leung will be giving us the scoop on new books and issues of literary journals.

Columnist Simone Jacobson will cover the monthly Sulu DC series and will keep us up to date on the spoken word circuit in her column, Sulu Spotlight.

Graduate Student Correspondent Kelsay Myers will be chronicling her experiences in the M.F.A. program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Staff Writers Kevin Minh Allen and Monica Mody will be treating us to a variety of different kinds of content, including reviews, interviews, posts about recent chapbooks, coverage of events in the Seattle area, and investigations of avant-garde and experimental work.

LR Blog veteran Mrigaa Sethi also returns to revive her column, Writing Home.

Please see the updated Blog Masthead for their bios.

Though we will miss the members of our team who have decided to move on to other things, we are extremely excited about to welcome Henry, Simone, Kelsay, Kevin, and Monica on board this fall.  We have an exciting lineup of posts planned for the next few months.  Look for them starting later this week.

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A New Look for the Blog

We mentioned it earlier, but we’ve given the LR Blog a bit of a facelift, in order to make it cleaner and easier to navigate.  What do you think?  Leave us a comment to let us know.

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Main Site Under Construction, Where’s the Community Calendar?, and Thanks.

You might have noticed that, among other wonky inconsistencies, some of the information on the Main Site is a little out of date and the Community Calendar is currently offline.  Not to worry; we are in the midst of updating the site, and the Calendar will return soon (as early as October, hopefully).  Our editorial team is still working under a few temporary role readjustments in the wake of some unexpected changes to our personal lives.  Though we are running a little farther behind schedule than we had originally anticipated, please rest assured that we are doing our best to get everything back in working order as soon as possible.  Thank you for the grace you showed us during the extension of our hiatus; we are commensurately grateful for your continued patience with us during this time.

Always,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff