Welcome to our new Summer Reads blog series! We recently asked our contributors from Issue 1 to share with us what they are reading / what’s on their reading lists this summer, and we’ll be featuring their responses here throughout the months of June and July. This first installment features reads from Jon Pineda & Barbara Jane Reyes.
Few of us ever sit down to write and think, “Wow, I feel like writing a double abecedarian today!” or “I’m not sure why, but this feels like a sestina type of morning.” If you’re anything like me, you have a somewhat removed relationship to form: you know it’s out there, and have grown up loving sonnets and sestinas, but you’re steeped in contemporary free verse and it’s not often that you turn naturally toward the formal constraints of meter, rhyme schemes, and patterns of repetition. What I’ve discovered however, is that using form (or multiple forms, even) as part of a drafting process can be tremendously helpful.
Take this process, for instance. I begin with a page and a half of rough, ill-formulated free verse (part of my stream-of-consciousness generating process), cut everything that seems extraneous, then apply a ten-syllables-per line rule that reads roughly like iambic pentameter. Some lines feel forced, others buckle with newfound muscle and verve. In certain places, the syntax torques into interesting patterns and the language tightens with sharpened verbs and image. I extract all the lines that are working well and weave them into a pantoum. The language overlaps, recontextualizes, and surprising new meanings are forged and unforged.
My pantoum reveals the weaknesses of specific lines, so I cut them, keeping only the lines strong enough to stand alone. Strong enough to pass, if you will, the “test” of the pantoum. What’s left is a hodge-podge of lines and my poem looks like a newspaper with the headlines cut out, but one or two stanzas remain untouched. I smash them into a rough fourteener form, then work and rework the language until what emerges—hammered, refined, and carefully tuned, is a new poem. I am pleased.
Your process (or experiment) doesn’t have to be as involved as the one I’ve just described. Writing through form (where form is not the final destination, but rather, the means by which one reaches the poems one really wants to write) can be as simple as: free verse to blank verse, or free verse to haiku to heroic couplets. Be creative. Mix and match, invent unexpected combinations of form (ie. “What do you get when you cross iambic tetrameter with an elegy?”). Some pairings may prove disastrous, but no worries. Since you’re writing through form as part of a drafting process, even the most awful results can be redirected in the next draft.
Feel free to either post a sample poem or share a few process notes from your attempts to write through form. Good luck, and have fun!
I HOTEL by Karen Tei Yamashita | Coffeehouse Press 2010 | $19.95
Karen Tei Yamashita—writer, professor, and globetrotter—possesses an oeuvre that is anything but conventional. From her debut eco-fantasy novel Through the Arc of the Rainforestto her latest novel, the incredibly ambitious I Hotel, Yamashita has time and again demonstrated a preoccupation with offbeat human experiences.
At the center of I Hotelis the history of the titular inn, the International Hotel, a low-income housing complex located in San Francisco that became the source of much controversy and conflict when its residents, mostly elderly Filipino and Chinese bachelors, were threatened with eviction in the 70’s. Working with this historic centerpiece, Yamashita crafts a highly experimental novel comprised of prose, screenplay, quotes, analects, and even comics. And in an effort to give it a more comprehensible structure, the novel is divided into ten “novellas,” each corresponding to a year between 1968-1977. For research, Yamashita interviewed residents from the community, and their stories serve as seeds for the novel. Despite her efforts to shape the novel around fictionalized versions of these culled stories, the “fiction” elements end up coming across as secondary to the overwhelming amount of synopsized history and culture that fills the novel in the form of primary source-like documents. Thus, we have a “novel” in which the most compelling sections are the ones that feel least like a novel.
In each novella, we’re afforded glimpses into the lives of various protagonists. In an interview with Kandice Chuh for Discover Nikkei, Yamashita said she roughly structured the book so that each “novella” followed three central characters, with one typically serving the role of a mentor. Characters include the son of activists, a saxophonist, and a dancer, among others. But despite being modeled on actual people these colorful figures feel hastily formed, like participants in a dress rehearsal. The scenes they exist in feel ethereal and unanchored. There’s no sense of settling into moments and scenes and exploring characters and their connection to their settings. Instead, there is mostly dialogue, and not even very effective dialogue. The dialogue often is too heavy-handed or too inconsequential. Despite efforts to spotlight characters and how they negotiate trying circumstances, what takes precedence is an overriding narrative voice that attempts to bridge them all together.
More often than not, what hamstrings the conventional narrative threads is the intrusion of an overriding polemical voice that waxes and wanes about humanistic subjects such as philosophy, history, politics, film, art, and literature. The personal stories are undermined in part because when the novel does digress into the polemical mode, the most compelling writing actually arises. In several of these sections, the language is mesmerizing. There are passages that are so stylistically crisp and stirring that I initially reread them to deconstruct the source of their power:
“Do you command great armies and oversee great territories, or are you the fodder of stinking bodies sacrificed at the front? Do you rule by the will of God or the Mandate of Heaven, or do you grovel in the dirt for your subsistence and share your food with animals? Do you stand at the pinnacle of power, however precariously protecting, with the great umbrella of your powerful arms and silken sleeves, a hierarchy of hapless fools and ungrateful subjects, or are you a struggling peon of unfortunate birth? …The rise and fall of civilizations held in dusty monuments for thousands of years may suddenly be compressed in no doubt brilliant minds to explain the present moment.”
Yamashita is fluent in the language of so many disciplines and subcultures that no matter the subject being explored—whether it’s French poets, Marxist theory, or Imelda Marcos—the writing feels commanding.
The fluency and command Yamashita demonstrates, however, cannot mask the novel’s lack of narrative cohesion nor can it salvage characters that seem never to set themselves apart from the farrago of activity all around them.
But I suspect this lack of cohesion is due less to oversight and more to the progressive aspirations of the text. The novel (if it can even be called a novel) is so brimming with experimentation and historical substance that it ignores more traditional narrative preoccupations, like continuity, character development, and standard conflict resolution structure. But this doesn’t make it an inferior work; it just makes it different, in my opinion. That’s not to say the novel isn’t without it’s shortcomings, but with a certain mindset the shortcomings can be seen as consequences of a different kind of preoccupation, one geared less to achieving the typical objectives of a novel and more towards rendering a kind of spoken word historical epic that captures the zeitgeist of one of the most transformative periods in American history.
While reading I Hotel, I couldn’t help but call to mind Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Specifically, I thought of a statement Diaz made in an interview, in which he said he initally planned for Oscar Wao to be a multimedia extravaganza filled with comics, web site tie-ins, and other postmodern pyrotechnics. In the end, though, Diaz reigned in his ambitions in favor of a more formally conventional family saga that was distinguished by its unconventional voice. In I Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita seemingly aims to realize the mega-project Diaz abandoned by creating a novel that combines various formats and syncretizes diverse voices in order to capture the complexities of a community caught up in the turbulent currents of history’s unfolding.
Whether she has created something compelling and worthwhile depends on your expectations going into the book; if you’re expecting clearly rendered stories that will resonate and stick with you, then I Hotelmay not be for you, but if you’re looking for a head rush from reading about a host of interesting subjects in a variety of unconventional formats, then you’re probably in the right place.
At long last, the inaugural issue of Lantern Review is now live on our web site!
We’re thrilled to be able to present a volume of more than 30 extraordinary pieces, in a wide range of styles, and by poets of multiple generations. Contributors to this issue include Eileen Tabios, Jon Pineda, Barbara Jane Reyes, Luisa Igloria, Angela Veronica Wong, Changming Yuan, Melissa Roxas, Sankar Roy, Subhashini Kaligotla, Vanni Taing, Rachelle Cruz, Jai Arun Ravine, Craig Santos Perez, as well as many others. The issue also includes a special feature devoted to work created in the context of Kundiman’s vibrant community, in the form of our Community Voices section. Before entering the issue, you might want to take a moment to check out our recommendations for optimum viewing, located here. If you want to proceed to the issue right away, click here or on the cover image at the top left of this post.
We are still very much learners when it comes to producing and supporting a web-hosted magazine, so we’d appreciate any feedback or questions you might have about readability and navigation issues. (Feel free to drop us a line via email).
Thank you so much to all of you for your continued support, enthusiasm, and patience as we’ve wrestled with the process of making our dream become a reality. We are honored to have the opportunity to present such a stellar body of work in our very first issue, and hope that you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.
I’m spending a some time at my parents’ place at the moment, and one of the things that always characterizes home for me is the overabundance of fruit that my family likes to keep in the house — on top of the microwave, in the fridge, on the butcher block, on the floor next to the butcher block, in cardboard boxes in the garage. We really love our fruit — we eat lots of it after every meal, and lots of different kinds. This week alone, the five of us here have demolished a number of mangoes, a large pineapple, half a giant watermelon, a honeydew melon, and much of a large box of strawberries (we’ve yet to break into the large papaya next to the counter but I suspect that it’s slated to appear at tonight’s evening meal). Fruit may seem like an odd topic for a poetry blog — but I assure you that it’s much less far-off than it may sound. It occurred to me recently just how many famous poems have been written about fruit — Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons,” Gary Soto’s “Oranges,” William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say,” and Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” are just a few that come to mind (Poets.org has a list of many more). And then there is the Biblical association of the fruit that stems from original sin, the folk associations in many traditions between fruit and fertility. Fruit, it seems, is a subject that has the potential to draw out longing, desire, sensual pleasure — both epicurean and sexual — for the writer. And writing about encounters with different kinds of fruit and with different ways of preparing them (as in Lee’s “Persimmons”) may be a way of engaging with cultural difference, alienation, or homesickness, as well. I never thought much of eating papaya, pomelo, longan as a child — but it was fruit like these that I would find myself missing the most deeply years later when I grew up and moved away.
Prompt: Write a poem about a fruit whose associations figure significantly in your memories of a particular person, time, or place.
Hello, all! If you’ve noticed that the LR blog has been unusually quiet in the past couple of weeks, please accept our apologies. We have been hard at work putting together Issue One and most of our energy as of late has been consumed with carefully laying out and coding each page. We’re currently finishing up with inputting a few last poems and ironing out some bugs in the code, but should still — if everything goes smoothly from here on out — be on track to release on time on Monday. In the meantime, please enjoy this exclusive sneak peek at our cover design:
Other features to look forward to include poetry by Luisa Igloria, Barbara Jane Reyes, Eileen Tabios, Jai Arun Ravine (as well as many, many more), a special feature highlighting collaborative work from Kundiman, and a book review by Craig Santos Perez.
This week’s prompt is based on a surrealist exercise. I tried leading a version of it this past spring at the Center for the Homeless, where I was participating in a writing group, and it was fascinating to hear the kind of responses that the topic of superstition evoked. Everyone had a story to tell: of Irish grandmothers who threw salt over their shoulders, fathers who insisted that if their son did not wear a particular “lucky” jersey, their favorite team would lose, fears of opening umbrellas indoors and ruminations on the subject of black cats (What happens to people who own black cats? They must cross their pets’ paths all the time). Whether or not one would identify oneself as superstitious, there is something attractive about the imaginative possibilities evoked by unusual relationships of cause and effect. If I sleep with my notes under my pillow the night before a test, will the information really seep into my brain? There’s something intriguing about the idea of translating physical symbols — marks on the page — into knowledge which might be acquired through touch, mediated by the permeable state(s) of sleep and dreaming. Superstitions celebrate the strange and fantastic, the unusual and the inexplicable and the ways that we ground our narratives of encounter with them within the contexts of ritual and belief. Where do superstitions come from? What happens when we develop new ones? (For example, “If you sneeze when the wind is blowing South, you’ll generate a tornado somewhere” or, “Don’t eat pretzels on a Sunday; you might come down with the measles”). The following exercise asks you to engage with the question of where and how we come to associate actions with otherwise mysterious consequences.
Prompt: Come up with a new superstition and elaborate upon it in a poem; or, develop a series of new superstitions — and use them to write a list poem.
As an interesting example of a poem based on a made-up superstition, we’ll leave you with this excerpt from Marin Sorescu’s poem, “Superstition“:
Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) andPoeta en San Francisco(Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, entitled Diwata, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2010.
Her chapbooks, Easter Sunday (2008), Cherry (2008), and West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM and other Oakland poems (2008) are published by Ypolita Press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, and Deep Oakland Editions, respectively. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Latino Poetry Review, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, among others.
She has taught Creative Writing at Mills College, and Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.
***
LR: I wanted to start by talking about history, which is something that figures strongly in your poetry—for example in Poeta en San Francisco we see historical references mixed in with local references to San Francisco (SF) and the Beat Movement. Can you start by talking about how both history and geography are incorporated into your work?
BJR: I grew up on the periphery of SF, meaning that I lived in the East Bay for most of my life in this country. The more I came to see other parts of the country, I realized that there’s something interesting about SF and its history of people coming from so many different places and colliding with one another. I know this happens in every major American city, but for me SF has this unique place on the cusp of the Pacific Rim […] When the westward movement got to the Pacific Ocean, it just kept going into the Pacific. Just think about major American wars in Asia in the 20th century, and SF being a very important strategic point, and then Honolulu, and then Manila. What that means for all those people that get cast aside and spit out of that system is that they all end up with this baggage that they’re aiming at one another. That’s SF for me.
LR: And in your own personal history when did this dawn come?
BJR: It really did happen in college, as an undergrad at UC Berkeley. I remember reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Frontier Thesis,” where he talks about the American identity—and here he really means the masculine identity created as these men are forging West and dealing with the landscape—that makes the American man different from the English colonial subject. What my professor argued was that the wars in the Pacific, starting with the Spanish American War and the Filipino American War, were an extension of that creation of the masculine American, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go but the ocean. The Philippines were seen in the Filipino American War as the starting point for America to get into China and start its own empire.
When I was hearing these things lectured to me and as I was reading about them, what I was seeing in SF started to really make sense—what I was witnessing and experiencing as a Filipino girl growing up in the Bay Area, not being able to find any evidence of long time Filipino settlement there, even though now I know that there is a much longer history. I always kind of felt like that there had to be some reason why so many of us just kind of got plopped in the city. And a lot of it had really to do with that movement into the Pacific once the frontier ended. Continue reading “A Conversation with Barbara Jane Reyes”→
It’s June, and we at LR are rounding off our seventh month of blogging. Here are some new things that you can expect to see from us this month:
Issue 1 Is Coming!
We are very pleased to announce that Issue 1 of our magazine will be released — if all goes as planned — on Monday, June 14th. We have been working very hard on curating and laying out the more than 30 poems and visual art pieces that we’ve selected, and can’t wait to show you the final product. Check back on the blog for sneak peeks and other updates in the next week or so.
June 2010 Community Calendar is Live
We’ve updated the Community Calendar for the month of June, and as usual, we welcome any corrections and additions that you may have for us. This month, we’re pleased to be able to feature some cool Asian American literary events happening in Minneapolis, in addition to the cities we regularly cover: June 7th is the registration deadline for the amazing-sounding Lao American Writers’ Conference that will be held at the LOFT Literary Center this August; the LOFT will also be holding an event featuring graphic novelist Gene Yang on June 18th. We look forward to continuing to cover events at the LOFT in future months.
June LR Blog Features: Barbara Jane Reyes, Indivisible, and More
During the past three months, we’ve mostly focused on themed posts, but this summer we’ll be returning to our regular blog content. Some things to anticipate: our staff writer Ada Yee recently had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Barbara Jane Reyes — look out for her remarks about poetry, history, and community on the blog tomorrow; we also had the pleasure of meeting some of the editors of Indivisible(the first-ever anthology of South Asian American poetry) back in April, and are excited to announce that during the next couple of months, our staff writer Supriya Misra will be running a couple of feature posts on their work. We’ll also be continuing with weekly prompts and with our editorial columns Friends & Neighbors and Editors’ Picks.
Thank you so much, once again, for all you’ve done in responding to our posts and spreading the word about us. We are so thrilled to finally be rounding the home stretch into Issue 1 — and are ever grateful for your support.
Neil Tangaroa Aitken is the author of The Lost Country of Sight which won the 2007 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2008. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, Poetry Southeast, Sou’wester, and elsewhere.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Neil grew up in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the western parts of the United States and Canada. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California – Riverside, and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.
In our Process Profiles series, young contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. Here, Neil discusses “I Dream My Father on the Shore,” the final poem in his collection The Lost Country of Sight.
* * *
It was the summer of 2006 and I was attending my second Kundiman retreat at the University of Virginia. We’d been challenged to write a ghazal and when I sat down to work on the poem, I found myself linking the form’s tradition of exploring the ties between beauty and loss with my own memories of my father’s loss of his father. Although I’d written about that experience many years before, I felt that a different poem might reside in the space created by time and distance, and the way that dreams and memories alter our understanding of the past. I set out to craft something that would carry a certain dreamlike lushness, while reflecting the constant turn and return of the form.
The poem went through several drafts and gradually I realized that perhaps the ghazal was not the actual form it needed to take. I ended up trimming out most of the repetition, but tried to keep a sense of the original form present through sound and rhythm – like a ghost or an afterimage of the ghazal. Switching to free-verse opened up more possibilities, allowing the line-breaks to do more work and permitting me to extend images, phrases, and conceits over larger spaces in the poem.
As I worked on the poem, I found myself reflecting on my own relationship with my father and how he had once told me that he would not live a long life; that he would likely die young from one of the many health conditions he endured. His sense of mortality and the way he had offered the news to me before I first left for college all those years ago seemed in some way to echo a line from Wendell Berry’s “The Country of Marriage” and so I eventually included that line as the poem’s epigraph. By the time the poem was published by Sou’wester in late 2007, my father had passed away from an aggressive form of ALS and the closing lines of the poem suddenly became much more than dream or metaphor. When I assembled the version of the manuscript that became The Lost Country of Sight, I knew that this would be the poem to complete the book, and that those last images would be the ones I wanted to linger on when the final page was turned.
Below is the final version of “I Dream My Father on the Shore,” as it appears in Neil’s collection:
I Dream My Father on the Shore
What I am learning to give you is my death.
~ Wendell Berry
Outside, beneath the light of late October’s candled sky
the weave of ash and maple burns. We stand silent on the graveled shore.
My father lifts his father’s ashes from its urn, a strangely heavy thing,
he seems to say, his arms swaying, then casting out into the long dark
as if to throw a line, while we wait for some sound, a wave,
whatever marks the distance between a father and a son.
And when night comes, it comes without a tread, without a word.
The stars flickering in their endless retreat, more distant and sure
than before, do nothing while the shadows continue to fill the trees
with their cast-off clothes. The harvest is long past, the apples
have fallen to the orchard floors. Even my father turning to go
is almost lost to the reeds already in his path, his figure no more
than a pattern of light – a memory of a road that winds
through the darkness to our waiting ride home.
