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

LR News: Extension of Summer Hiatus

Dear LR Fans and Readers,

Due to unforeseen personal circumstances that have recently arisen for one of our editors, we have decided to tentatively extend our summer blog hiatus by two weeks.  We apologize for the delay, but look forward to returning full-force as soon as possible, and hope that we’ll be able to resume posting and introduce you to our wonderful new team members as early as the 20th of September.

In the meantime, however, please do take some time to peruse our brand-new blog theme and leave us some feedback about how it’s working for you.  We are excited about our new, clean look, and would love to hear your thoughts about how we might continue to improve our blog’s navigability.

Thank you so much for your patience.  We remain, as always, incredibly grateful for your continued support and encouragement.

Warmly,

The LR Editorial Staff.

Friends & Neighbors: Calls for Submission (AALR, Cha, Kartika Review, and others)

As we prepare to head into our late summer blog hiatus, we’re aware of the fact that several of our friends have recently put out new calls for submission.  We thought we would put together a little list of interesting opportunities for submission that have recently come to our attention:

The Asian American Literary Review is calling for electronic submissions for its third issue, to be published in Spring 2011.  Deadline is September 1st.  See their online guidelines for more details.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is calling both for regular submissions to be included in its 13th Issue, and for submissions to its special themed 14th issue, which will focus on China.  Submissions are accepted electronically only. Deadline is December 15th for Issue 13, April 14th for the China Issue.  Complete guidelines for Issue 13 here; details about the China Issue here.

Kweli Journal, a publication that focuses on promoting the work of writers of color, is calling for submissions to its Fall/Winter 2010 issue.  Submissions are to be sent by postal mail.  Deadline is September 16th.  Guidelines here.

Kartika Review is calling for submissions in anticipation of future issues.  Kartika, which has a rolling policy for screening work, is now accepting submissions both via email and through its online submissions manager.  See their guidelines here.

BOXCAR Poetry Review and Cerise Press, which are edited by Asian American poets Neil Aitken and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, respectively, also have rolling submissions policies: look for BOXCAR‘s guidelines here, and Cerise‘s here.

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Finally, be on the lookout for the reopening of our own submissions period (in anticipation of our second issue), when we return in September.

Good luck, and see you on the other side of August!

Summer Reads: Issue 1 Contributor Subhashini Kaligotla

For our Summer Reads series, we’ve asked contributors from Issue 1 to share what they’ve been reading or plan to read this summer.  In this, our last installment, Subhashini Kaligotla shares about her summer reading plans.

Subhashini tells us,

“Since I am very interested in long poems but have succeeded in writing them only by putting together sections or fragments, I thought it would be useful to read Paisley Rekdal, who is a master of the long poem that marries lyric and narrative quite skillfully.  So I am looking forward to reading her Six Girls Without Pants and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope.

The other part of my summer list includes an old favourite—Nick Flynn’s Some Ether—and a few other books that also handle family narratives and loss in a collection of lyric poems: Marie Howe’s What the Living Do; Donald Hall’s The Painted Bed; Gregory Orr’s Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved; and Kevin Young’s Dear Darkness.”

Subhashini’s poem “Sydney Notebook” can be found in Issue 1 of Lantern Review. Many thanks to her, and to all of the Issue 1 contributors who have shared their reading lists with us this summer.  We hope that this series has inspired you to explore new titles and poets in your own summer reading queues.  Now it’s your turn: what is the best book that you’ve read this summer, and why?  We’d love to hear; tell us about it in the comments below.

Friends & Neighbors: Issue 1 of THE ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW

THE ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW, Issue 1

It’s always exciting to receive a fat jiffy envelope with a book-like bulge in it when the mail comes. So when my copy of The Asian American Literary Review‘s inaugural issue arrived last month, I was especially ecstatic to rip into the envelope. Since the editors of AALR announced their presence online earlier this year, I had been eagerly anticipating their first issue.  Their pre-release publicity had advertised an impressive lineup of literary luminaries, and I must say that in every respect, the issue has managed to live up to the editors’ promises.

I’m going to focus on some of the poetry in the issue in a bit (since this is, after all, a poetry blog), but before I delve into that train of thought, I should note that I immensely enjoyed the prose in the issue, too.  I especially liked that the editors chose to began the issue with a “forum” (i.e. a series of position statements and replies) in which three Asian American writers (Alexander Chee, David Mura, Ru Freeman) responded to questions regarding the necessity and purpose of an Asian American literary magazine.  I enjoyed following the convergence and divergence of the participant’s different points of view, and in particular,  thought that their discussion about whether an Asian American writer must necessarily write ‘about’ his or her ethnicity brought up some very important questions, such as: do MFA programs disservice students of color by teaching them to write toward a “norm” set by mostly middle-class, white models?  Or, conversely, do they force students of color to conform their work to an particular “trope” or mode in which  “ethnic writing”  is expected to operate?  I also enjoyed the dialogue sparked by David Mura’s observations about the lack of longevity that has hitherto plagued many Asian American literary ventures.  Mura noted two problems that have contributed to this trend: 1) a lack of financial and administrative know-how, and 2) the divided nature of the Asian American community with regards to whether or not to claim a pan-Asian American identity.  I thought that Mura’s observations were spot-on. Young as LR is, my work on it thus far has already given me a taste of some of the challenges that he identifies.  I was especially struck by his point about lack of administrative manpower.  Administratively, LR is a two-woman operation and our solution thus far to keeping the administrative side of things manageable has been to keep the magazine relatively small.  But what of the future?  What will happen if LR expands beyond our administrative capacities?  Mura’s observations (and the ensuing responses by Chee and Freeman) touched on a very real concern for us, and served as a good reminder that in order to avoid burnout, we will need to be humble enough to seek out help when it’s necessary while remaining practical enough to stay grounded in whatever way we can.

Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Issue 1 of THE ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY REVIEW” →

Weekly Prompt: Borrowed Headlines

A man-moth? (Image from a 2007 hoax).

This week’s prompt is inspired by the story behind Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem “The Man-moth,” whose concept (and title) were derived from a newspaper’s misspelling of the word “mammoth.”  While reflecting on the poem in a 1962 piece, Bishop mused,

“I’ve forgotten what it was that was supposed to be “mammoth.” But the misprint seemed meant for me. An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for a moment.”

In “The Man-moth,” Bishop allows the content of the newspaper’s article to be subsumed by the wonderful strangeness of the misprint’s language.  She excavates the question of what a man-moth might be, and builds an alternative universe around the idea.  We are given a portrait of a subway-dwelling creature that is all eyes and all secrets, to whom the bustle of the surface world is threatening, but who finds comfort in the racing and lurching of the subway trains:

“Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.”

I am interested in the idea of what might be done with borrowed and revivified language of this sort.  The newspaper-based exercise that I’ve delineated below is only one place to start, but I imagine that one could also get equally interesting results with another type of source: copy from internet advertisements, perhaps?  the names of dishes on menus?  informational text from a museum, zoo, or aquarium exhibit?  The possibilities are pretty well endless.

Prompt: write a poem that takes, as its title, a headline or article title that has been borrowed from a newspaper.  What fresh or alternative meanings might be excavated or derived from the headline’s syntax?  Feel free to tweak (splice, loop, embellish) or even completely ignore the article’s actual contents.

If you’re looking for a place to start out, here are some titles of New York Times articles that I recently came across, which I thought might make for interesting titles of poems:

Eight Million Bodies in the Naked City
Two New Paths to the Dream: Regeneration
Illinois: Invader Carp May Have Been At Home
What the River Dragged In
The Senate’s Important Lunch Date
Broadway and the Mosque

Summer Reads: Issue 1 Contributor Jai Arun Ravine

For our Summer Reads series, we’ve asked contributors from Issue 1 to share what they’ve been reading or plan to read this summer.  This installment features reads from Jai Arun Ravine.

In an email, Jai enumerated the following books:

“Found” – Souvankham Thammavongsa
“Small Arguments” – Souvankham Thammavongsa
“from unincorporated territory [saina]” – Craig Santos Perez
“Lake M” – Brandon Shimoda
“Chimney Swift” – Jason Daniel Schwartz

Thank you Jai, for sharing this list with us.  Jai’s poems “dern, 1” and ‘dern, 2” can be found in Issue 1 of Lantern Review.