LR News: August 2010 Updates

Happy August!  Here is our little news flash for the month:

Late Summer Blog Hiatus & LR Staff Changes

Our staff will be taking a blog hiatus from August 11th until September 6th.  During our hiatus, we’ll be updating the web site, fine-tuning our submissions policies in preparation for the next reading period, making final decisions about our staff search, and welcoming our new staff onto our team.   When we return in September, we’ll introduce our new team members and open submissions for Issue 2.

August Community Calendar Posted

In light of our upcoming blog hiatus, we’ve extended the range of our August Calendar to include events up through September 6th.  If you know of something going on or would like to note a correction to an existing listing, please email or message us to let us know (we will still be responding to email during the hiatus, even though we won’t be on Facebook or Twitter as regularly as usual).

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We’ll still be posting regularly up through August 10th, so in the meantime, keep on coming back for more poetry goodness.  Many thanks to you, as always, for all of your support — having such a dedicated and enthusiastic community of readers has made our first year an incredible joy.

Best,

Iris & Mia
LR Editorial Staff.

Weekly Prompt: Writing the Family

If you’ve been following the Lantern Review Blog for a while, you’re already familiar with the ekphrastic poem, that is, a poem written in response to a work of art.  This prompt is a variation on the idea of ekphrasis and, like this prompt from two weeks ago, gives you an opportunity to play with perspective (except with higher stakes).

Pick a photograph of a meaningful occasion in your family’s history. A wedding, for example, or a baby shower.  Maybe even a funeral; just choose an image that tells a story and features more than one member of your family.  Look carefully at the people in the photo and think about their personalities, voices, idiosyncrasies.  What family folklore comes to mind when you look at each individual?  Now think about who’s not in the photo.  Someone who passed away recently, or who has been deceased for decades.  Someone who missed the occasion because they had something else to attend to, or forgot to show up.

Now write from the point of view of the absent party. Proceed in whatever way feels most natural to the voice of the person whose absence you’ve identified — this may mean you’re working mostly with direct address, description, narrative, or a combination of modes.  You may find yourself experimenting with the voice of the dead, the voice of a divorced parent, or that of an uncle who cut himself off from the family.  The idea is to forge a new perspective from which to consider your family’s history, one that would otherwise go unaddressed by more normative modes of “telling” family lore.

Summer Reads: Issue 1 Contributor Eileen R. Tabios

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 a list of titles that were recommended to us by Eileen Tabios.

Writes Eileen,

“For another venue, I came up with a Summer reading list in poetry here . . .

From above list and for LR — I can recommend the following Asian American titles:
Juvenilia by Ken Chen (Yale University Press)
Far far above the typical poet’s first book. Admirably — and effectively — ambitious. Sophisticated. Will make you fall in love
Bending The Mind Around The Dream’s Blown Fuse by Timothy Liu (Talisman House)
Simply: Magnificent!
Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu (Letter Machine Editions)
Intelligent luminosities!”
Many thanks to Eileen for sharing these titles with us!  Her poem “DISASTER RELIEF (#2)” can be found in Issue 1 of Lantern Review.  She can also be found online at her blog, “THE BLIND CHATELAINE’S KEYS.”

Friends & Neighbors: Doveglion Press Launched

We just received word last week that Issue 1 Contributor Barbara Jane Reyes and her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, have launched Doveglion Press.

Screenshot of Doveglion Press's Site

From Doveglion’s first blog entry:

“Doveglion Press is an independent publisher of political literature and orature. We are committed to publishing aesthetically diverse and challenging works of strong artistic merit.

Doveglion, the pen name which Jose Garcia Villa crafted from the dove, eagle, and lion, is a fantastic and hybrid creature, signifying the writer’s ability to embody multitudes, and from splintered selves, to reinvent, and to reconstruct him/herself anew.

Future projects include a semi-annual print journal, interactive blog with rotating guest writers, and an audio/video gallery.”

Please do head on over to check out the rest of their blog entries.  Personally, I’m loving their beautiful, spare site design, the force of Barbara & Oscar’s vision, and the operation’s small, focused feel (delightfully indie, immensely professional).

Congratulations, Barbara and Oscar!  We can’t wait to read Issue One, and look forward to following Doveglion as it grows.

Barbara Jane Reyes’ pieces “13. Black Jesus” and “10. For Al Robles” can be found in Issue One of Lantern Review.

Weekly Prompt: Architectural Poem

Part of an architectural plan for a library (via Wikipedia)

This week’s prompt has a shorter explanation than usual.  I was simply very intrigued by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s use of a particular building’s architecture to shape her poem “Permanent Home.”  As Berssenbrugge engages with structural forms and technical language, the walls and beams of the house she’s describing become transparent, windows through which we can peek in at the speaker’s interior life while she peeks at us.

“The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate.

I look through it to an extinct volcano.

The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by.

A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea.

Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger.

Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance.”
I love that last line, in particular. Berssenbrugge evokes such space and light with it.  A home (even an imagined one) becomes a whole world, a place of origin and a vantage point from which one develops one’s perspective.  And the lack of an actual physical structure to which to tie the speaker’s longing transforms the poem itself into a kind of home in which imagination dwells.  A process that, I think, has particular resonance for me, not just as a child of diaspora, but as one such subject who writes.

Prompt: Write a poem that uses the architectural structure of a building as a frame or form by which to shape its content and imagery.

Review: INDIVISIBLE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY, Part 2

INDIVISIBLE

This is Part 2 of a two-part series about Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. You can find Part 1 here.

As the editors of Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry emphasize, there is no way to completely define or capture the South Asian American experience. Yet the politics of identity and language cannot be ignored. As Summi Kaipa, one of the editors, said, “Being South Asian and putting our voice out there is a very political act. What does it mean to do this anthology post-9/11 to get this chorus of voices out there to represent ourselves to defy the stereotypes that may be placed upon ourselves?” In the Introduction, the editors describe the ways in which language can be dangerous or misleading — the power of what is stated but also what is omitted.This suggests that what the contributers’ choose to write (or not write) has weight simply in their decision to do so. The politicalizations are not always intentional or obvious, but subtle insights about the evolving South Asian American identity can be found throughout the anthology.

All three of Sasha Kamini Parmasad’s pieces (“Burning”, “Sugarcane Farmer”, “The Old Man”) reflect this understated social commentary via observation. She uses striking visual imagery to paint the scene, allowing the reader to see what she sees and to draw their own conclusions. In “Burning”, the heat is almost tangible; Parmasad’s repeated images beat down like the sun, as demonstrated by the opening lines, “The twelve o’clock sun sizzles / like onions and garlic the grandmother pitches / into a black iron pot rubbed with butter. / Trees are stingy with their shade. / Moth-winged morning flowers wither on stems.” But we also see the people under that sun  — a young girl, her father, her grandmother — three generations all living in that heat. We see the grandmother cooking despite the heat, the father slaughtering a pig in the heat (“Drags it writhing / back to the slaughtery.— / Pig’s blood staining the macadam road forever), and the young girl witnessing it all. Parmasad is able to humanize the difficult and unchanging living conditions of the working class by showing how daily experiences continue despite the unbearable heat.

Continue reading “Review: INDIVISIBLE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY, Part 2” →

Summer Reads: Issue 1 Contributor Tamiko Beyer

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 a list sent to us by Tamiko Beyer.

Says Tamiko,

“Here’s what’s on my reading stack right now:

Cascadia, by Brenda Hillman
Incendiary Circumstances, by Amitav Gosh
Ida, by Gertrude Stein
the ecolanguage reader, edited by Brenda Ijima
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami (finally!)
Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
And chapbooks by Jason Bayani and Bushra Rehman, which I got from the authors at the most recent Kundiman retreat!”

Many thanks to Tamiko for sharing these titles with us.  Check out her postcard poem in Issue 1’s special feature on Kundiman, or follow her online at her personal web site, www.wonderinghome.com, and at the Kenyon Review blog.

Editors’ Picks: Pop-Up Poets in NYC

The following YouTube clip of a group of NYC poets surprising subway riders with guerrilla-style readings came to our attention via Issue 1 contributor Tamiko Beyer yesterday.  I thought it was so absolutely freaking cool that I had to share it here:

These poets are part of a project called PUP, “Poets in Unexpected Places” or “Pop-Up Poets.” They do exactly what their name implies: pop up in unexpected public locations (like the subway, the Botanic Gardens, a supermarket) to read poetry.  You can read about some of their experiences on their blog, in which they detail stories of people’s reactions to their performances.  My favorite, I think, is their most recent post about a Q-train ride in which one of the riders got up and started dancing, while the rest of the car clapped and cheered!  Such unexpected joy in the middle of a city that is known for its public mask of anonymity (the summer that I worked in Manhattan, we were distinctly advised by our HR trainers to put on a confident, stand-offish “subway face” while riding public transit in order to avoid sticking out).  I love the idea of bringing poetry to public spaces at unexpected times, of incorporating it into the everyday rhythms of life in playful and soul-filled ways.  PUP thrives on the idea that poetry is (and may at any time) be all around us, and that its wild spontaneity and beauty is something to be celebrated, all day, every day.

I love the idea of bringing PUP-style projects to other parts of the nation, too.  Watching the video got me all revved up imagining what it would be like to have a PUP style group in quiet little South Bend, IN, or in my parents’ tiny hometown in NJ—wouldn’t it be cool if  poets popped up in the middle of  a bank lobby, or on the South Shore line or Riverline, or in front of the public library, or in the middle of a mall or a cafe or bar?  Or even in the grocery lines at Costco or Meijer?  Or in the different departments?  You could have poets in all the aisles!  Have you ever participated in a guerilla-style poetry project?  If so, please do share your experience with us; we’d love to hear your stories!

LR News: Issue 1 Featured on DAILY s-PRESS

Issue One has been featured on the indie publishing site DAILY s-PRESS !

Screenshot of LR's Feature on DAILY s-PRESS

DAILY s-PRESS is a web site that “explores + celebrates the landscape of small+indie presses with daily book features.”  It is run by Dorothee Lang, the editor of BluePrintReview. Many thanks to Dorothee for this opportunity.  Click here to read the rest of the feature.

Weekly Prompt: Playing With Perspective

So you’re drafting a poem and nothing seems to be working.  Fifth draft, sixth draft…  the language drags, the images remain hackneyed.  But here’s a thought: have you considered experimenting with point of view?

Though this is something you probably had to do in middle school, I’ve actually found that shifting the narrative center of a poem (unless, of course, you’re not working with a narrative center, in which case you’ll just have to keep on drafting) can bring new energy to a drafting process gone slack.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this too early in the process – I’ve come to think of this “trick” as something of a last resort, like when I’ve done all I can to work through a poem and still don’t feel it’s arrived.  For example, earlier this week I was working on a fairly straightforward poem about a family in a hospital watching their dying father take communion: the wife waited, the child sat.  The chaplain poured the grape juice.  The chaplain blessed the grape juice.  The chaplain passed the grape juice.

Things were getting a little boring.  So I switched it up and forced the narrative into a second person point of view.  All at once, it wasn’t “the man dying,” but you.  And you were dying.  Working through the poem with this fresh perspective forced much of the material (about half the lines, I’d say) from the narrative, but also demanded that certain details be added.  What do “you” hear when you’re at death’s door?  How do “you” perceive your family?

Whether or not you stick with the perspective switch after you’re done with the exercise, hopefully you’ll find that this has forced you to write toward a different set of expectations and demands.  Work to make the individual versions as distinctive as possible, and have fun!