Happy APIA Heritage Month! Here is our first of the month news update:
May Community Calendar is Now Live
We’ve updated our community calendar page for May. As always, we’d love to have your input in making our event coverage more accurate and thorough: leave a comment to suggest any additions and/or corrections.
APIA History Month on the LR Blog
During May, we’ll be running two blog series to celebrate National APIA Heritage Month. The first, “Poetry in History,” will appear each Friday in lieu of our regular Editors’ Picks / Weekly Prompt posts, and will feature poems written during and/or about a particular period in Asian American History and an accompanying (linked) prompt. Our “Process Portraits” series will begin during the second week of May, and will spotlight the work being done – and the history being made right now – by six young contemporary Asian American poets. Finally, we’ll also be running interviews, book reviews, and occasional editorial posts during May that have to do with questions of historicity and historical engagement in Asian American poetry.
Issue 1 Submissions Period Closed
Thank you so much to those of you who submitted work during our very first reading period! The Editors are currently making final decisions about what will go into the magazine, and if you haven’t heard back from us already, you should within the next few weeks. If all goes as planned, Issue 1 will launch in early June. Look out for an announcement about the exact launch date later this month.
Thanks once again for all of your continued support in reading and helping to promote the content we put on the LR Blog. We could not run this gig without you!
Congratulations to Kenji, the winner of our 2010 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest!
Here’s a slightly paraphrased version of his winning prompt.
Writes Kenji: “This one is not mine originally, but it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever tried. It comes by way of poet Suheir Hammad.”
Prompt:
Close your eyes and think about a time in your life that was extremely difficult. Imagine the scene in as much detail as possible. Now, holding that moment of difficulty in your mind, search the scene and find one aspect of the situation or your environment that was beautiful. It could be environment and sensory – a sound, color, texture, lighting – or it could be an insight, perspective or emotion that existed at the same time as the difficulty.
Write about that beautiful aspect of this scene of difficulty for 15 minutes.
* * *
We liked the creative possibilities of the paradoxical tension that this prompt asks the writer to explore: not beauty in spite of difficulty, nor a romanticized celebration of difficulty, but the strangeness by which a moment of difficulty can take on aspects of the beautiful. Exploring this sort of tension in a poem may have the potential to open up an image or brief narrative moment to strange, surprising, and ever more complex associations.
Kenji will be receiving a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz. Congratulations to him, and many thanks to all who participated!
Ignatz by Monica Youn | Four Way Books 2010 | $15.95
Monica Youn’s second book of poems, Ignatz (the prize for our 2010 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest), is based on Ignatz Mouse from George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat. I read the collection without prior knowledge of the comic strip, other then the basic synopsis that the cat loves the mouse, the mouse hates the cat, and the cat mistakes the mouse’s hate for love. Thus, the collection is presented as a series of unrequited love poems. The pieces often present an ambiguous and painful love, where the object of the love is never identified and never responds.
Youn’s language is lyrical and majestic, with images that evoke the highest ideals of love and quickly make the reader forget that the poems are rooted in comic strip characters. She does not hesitate to use romantic or archaic language, and modern references such as Amtrak and CEO come as a surprise when they appear. In “I-40 Ignatz”, the speaker describes the interstate with tanker trucks, stoplights, gas stations, and yet still embeds them in loftier images such as, “A cop car drowses / in the scrub / cottonwoods. Utmost.” What stands out the most throughout the collection is her use of distinctive imagery.
Images of the landscape, the body, and the strange ways in which they intersect recur throughout the collection. In “Landscape with Ignatz”, Youn describes a canyon and the sky as bodies, and the place where the canyon and the sky touch as the meeting of two bodies. Each of the six lines is vivid and unusual, including the opening one: “The rawhide thighs of the canyon straddling the knobbled blue spine of the sky.” Another piece, “Ignatz Oasis”, opens with: “When you have left me / the sky drains of color / like the skin / of a tightening fist.” These moments are not conventionally beautiful, but instead reflect the tension lying immediately under the surface. The poems are like postcards, capturing simple messages across the changing landscape without revealing the depth of emotion behind them.
Youn demonstrates great versatility in her writing, playing with different styles and formats. Most of the poems are written in the first person, invoking or addressing an unknown “you” (ostensibly, the object of the unrequited love). The titles of the poems often reveal their intent; for example, the opening poem is entitled “Ignatz Invoked”. Other pieces include “Ignatz Aubade”, “Letter to Ignatz”, “A Theory of Ignatz”, and “Ignatz: Pop Quiz”. She also experiments with line arrangements, from prose poems to a collection of fifteens words presented in three columns of five words each (“Ignatz Incarcerated”).
In general, the speaker appears to present a certain sense of simultaneous self-awareness and obliviousness. The love expressed is nuanced and complex but with no sense of reciprocity. “Ersatz Ignatz” almost suggests the object of the affection becomes irrelevant to the performance of the affection itself. The poem ends with, “He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite / pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.”
The book is divided into four sections, each opening with a poem called, “Untitled (Krazy’s Song)” and ending with a poem called, “The Death of Ignatz”. These poems frame the sections, with each “Untitled (Krazy’s Song)” expressing a tangible but unattainable love and each “The Death of Ignatz” evoking a poignant sense of loss. The two modes provide a clear juxtaposition. The four poems entitled “Untitled (Krazy Song)” have an intentional saccharine quality while the four poems entitled “Death of Ignatz” are distilled precision, as the very last piece shows:
The architect leapt
from the bright
bell tower
and the sea
slunk back
to her cage
Throughout the collection, the pieces feel like they are building toward a greater realization that never arrives, reflecting the same sense of cyclicity and stagnation that is one of the central themes. Yet Youn manages to create a sense of complicity — the reader’s frustrations parallel that of the speaker — leading to a sense of pity for the speaker’s desperation. This sense of the dramatic, like the extreme caricatures portrayed in comic strips, heightens the carefully crafted sense of excess and futility that Youn presents in Ignatz.
Here’s some news from the literary sphere: congratulations to our friends at Kartika Review, who put up their 7th issue earlier this month, and to the editors at Cha, whose work was recently featured in this beautifully laid-out article in the South China Morning Post (that’s the prominent English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, for those who aren’t familiar with it).
I know it’s a little late in coming, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a brief rundown of the poetry goodness inside both Kartika Issue 7 (which features a special section devoted to Asian American writers’ reflections on the theme of “home,” and the work of a new poetry editor, Kenji Liu), and Cha‘s February 2010 Issue (which features not just great poetry, but some of the most beautiful cover art I’ve seen from them yet). I’d encourage you to read both of these issues in their entirety, of course, but here are a few thoughts about what I particularly enjoyed in each:
KARTIKA REVIEW Issue 7
Kartika Review #7 is, in my opinion, the magazine’s best issue yet. I’ve really enjoyed the past two issues – but this issue really impressed with me by how quickly the publication has been getting bigger and better. The work contained in this issue’s poetry section is, in my opinion, of a more even quality than in some of the earlier issues, and new poetry editor Kenji Liu’s four choices work well as a set: each successive poem speaks to the previous one, taking up its thread in some manner or contrasting it in a thought-provoking way. The first three poems have to do with fathers and mothers and questions of inheritance, and the last – Aimee Suzara’s “We, too, made America” – expands this question to a broader “we,” claiming not just individual family histories, but a space in the broader American narrative (harkening back to Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America”). I enjoyed the compelling portrait of a man presented in Vuong Quoc Vu’s “My Father Sleeps” and the tension created between the interrogator and the respondent in Barbara Jane Reyes’ “One Question, Several Answers,” but Eugenia Leigh’s “Between Heaven and the Bedroom” was really a standout with its use of some truly knockout imagery to juxtapose the airily mythological with the small and domestic. Its opening strikes me speechless: “Somewhere in the city with her slip-proof / shoes and apron, our mom locates an angel /tall as miles.”
I also really enjoyed the special “Meditations on Home” section at the end of this issue, and appreciate that the editors thought to package it as a .PDF packet for use by educators. Oral histories like the ones contained in this issue are extremely valuable and important to preserve, and I like the idea of a classroom text that has been freshly generated and is available online at no cost to students. Several of the respondents chose to tell their stories in poems rather than in prose, and it’s definitely worth checking these responses out — especially the striking contributions by David Mura and Kelly Zen Yie Tsai.
CHA Issue 10
As I mentioned earlier, the cover art on the current issue of Cha is absolutely gorgeous – I love the deep purple blooms around the woman’s face and how they seem to melt into the text of the issue itself. As usual, though, I made a beeline straight for the poetry section. One of the things I appreciate about Cha is that despite being a multi-genre journal it publishes an extensive amount of poetry in each issue. This, I’m sure, has a lot to do with co-editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s being a poet herself, and it shows: the work they showcase is usually of a very consistent quality, and because there’s a relatively decent amount of room for poetry in the journal, they’re able to create a broader sense of continuity between work by both very established poets and people who are just emerging. Some of my favorites moments from this issue included the frank, unflinching language of Papa Osmubal’s “A Bum’s Demise,” and the satisfyingly mouth-thick, incantational sonics of the two poems that were contributed by Angela Eun Ji Koh: “Our Malady” and “The Harvest Shaman.” I also thought it interesting that both the current issues of Kartika and Cha featured poems involving angels (Rocco di Giacomo’s “Angels” appears in Cha, Eugenia Leigh’s “Between Heaven and Earth” appears in Kartika). Having gone back to reread Cha just before I read this issue of Kartika, it was fascinating to think of these two poems in conversation.
Many congratulations to the editors at both Kartika Reviewand Chafor their successful spring issues – and for the well-deserved amount of attention they’ve received for them. Please do click over to check out their respective sites. And while you’re at it – don’t forget that we at LR are building towards our own first issue; our submissions deadline is this Thursday, April 29th, and we’d love to see your work!
This week prompt is from Steph, the reader whose prompt we’ve chosen as the 1st runner-up in our National Poetry Month Contest:
Prompt: Find a childhood toy and write about the first memory that comes to mind. Also consider the toy’s colors, textures, heft, etc.
We thought this was an interesting take on the exercise of writing about an object as a memorial trigger (I’ve done this before with vegetables and with household items like hangers and lightbulbs, but never with toys, which have a peculiar relationship to memory as both mute witness to and the subject/object of memory). There are so many ways that you could spin it: a textural list poem, a persona poem, an ode, a poem in the form of an advertisement, an epistolary poem, etc.
Many congratulations to Steph! Please check back next Friday when we reveal our first place winner and the recipient of a signed copy of Ignatz.
If you’ve been following us on Twitter or Facebook, you’ve seen that we’ve had some great news recently: Lantern Review has been featured not once, but twice, on Harriet (the Poetry Foundation’s blog) this week!
Then, on Monday, Craig Santos Perez posted an Editor Spotlight Q&A, in which he gave me [Iris] the opportunity to share a little more in depth about the genesis and mission of LR.
Needless to say, we are both thrilled by, and very grateful for, this honor. A gigantic thanks to Barbara and to Craig for helping us to get the word out about LR in such a big way, and many thanks to you – our readers – for your continued support as we build toward Issue 1. (P.S. Don’t forget that we are still taking submissions until April 29th – last chance to get your work in before we start wrapping up our editorial decision process!)
To add to Iris’ reflections on our recent trip to Denver and this year’s AWP conference, here are a few additional thoughts, as well as some slightly more “reportorial” reflections on several of the panels that I most enjoyed. As this was my first time at AWP, I anticipated feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of panels, readings, and discussions going on at all hours of the day, ranging from the future of M.F.A. programs in the United States to the apparent (or perhaps not-so-apparent) war between “hybrid” and traditional aesthetics in contemporary poetry. What I found, however, was that in the midst of these many conversations, a few distinctive threads began to emerge. Central to each of these threads was the question of community: how communities form around shared cultural, national, or transnational consciousnesses; how communities develop through shared aesthetics and/or poetic sensibilities; how communities emerge out of a drive to engage similar ethical and/or political concerns. My sense of poetry—or perhaps more accurately, my sense of those of us in the United States (and elsewhere!) who “do” poetry—as forming one large and vibrant community that extends across forms, aesthetics, cultural affiliations, and even national boundaries was deepened by all that I saw and heard while in Denver. Thanks so much to all those who welcomed us into their community at AWP.
Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America
[Readings from Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry]
Several of the editors and poets of INDIVISIBLE celebrate its (very!) recent publication.
We were extremely lucky to attend this panel, which featured a stellar lineup of poets published in the brand new anthology of Asian American poetry Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry(University of Arkansas Press, 2010). We were thrilled to learn that the anthology, the first of its kind, had literally just been published and, hot off the press, was ready for purchase at the AWP bookfair. It was probably because of this that “Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond” felt a little like a release party: poets gathering to celebrate the publication of this groundbreaking new collection, some of the editors and authors meeting for the very first time, voices coming to life from freshly minted pages . The presentation of this anthology featured readings by poets like Ravi Shankar and Monica Ferrell, to name just a few. As mentioned in reviews of the collection, Indivisible showcases “emerging and established poets who can trace their ethnic heritages to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka,” and represents a truly impressive range of voices and aesthetic styles. Keep an eye out for upcoming reviews!
Transnational Identities: Asian American Writers & Asia
Transnational Identities Panel Participants
Though not all the original panelists were able to make it, at this panel we heard writers David Mura, Wang Ping, and Ed Bok Lee offer their reflections on what it means to engage transnational Asian and Asian American prose/poetry as subjects with complex relationships to both Asia (ie. China, Japan, Korea) and the United States. Each writer shared not only from their personal experience of navigating the terms of transnational selves, or American ethnic selves, but from their writing as well, which pointed to many of the same questions addressed in their presentations. Toward the end of the session, we were especially grateful for the intimate feel of the panel as moderator Bao Phi encouraged audience members to actively participate in constructing a conversation around the questions of what it means to be Asian and/or Asian American, and how to explore the linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural complexities of this transnational identity… not to mention this transnational literary identity.
Before, After, Under, Over, Inside, and Beyond the Anti-War Poem
Easily one of my favorite panels at AWP this year, this discussion of the “Anti-War Poem” was moderated by Fred Marchant and featured poets Brenda Hillman, Nick Flynn, and Shanee Stepakoff, each of whom chose a different preposition (“inside,” “under,” “before,” or “after”), which they used to focus their reflections on the anti-war poem. Their high level of engagement—artistically, personally, and professionally—in examining issues of violence, torture, and the wide-ranging effects of the American war on terror led me to reconsider the role of the contemporary poet in what I now understand to be an America-at-war. Nick Flynn in particular drove home the point that because we are now writing in a nation at war, we are all writing war poems, whether we are aware of it or not, and are all affected by our country’s involvement in international warfare. What I most appreciated was the breadth of the conversation that took place at this panel; in addition to discussing the larger trends and exigencies of anti-war poetry today, the panelists also took time to reflect on salient features of their craft: techniques of redaction, the use of repetition and ordering in the amplification of found texts (ie. courtroom transcripts and the narratives of torture victims), the ethics of using testimonials and court transcripts as the raw material for poetry.
This week’s prompt comes from LR reader “YW,” whose submission to our National Poetry Month Contest we’ve chosen as our second runner-up.
Prompt: Rewrite a fairy tale in verse from a different character’s perspective (e.g. the witch in Hansel and Gretel).
We were intrigued by this persona poem exercise, and thought that it might be interesting to consider in conversation with Louise Glück’s haunting take on Hansel and Gretel, “Gretel in Darkness.” Here’s an excerpt of the poem to get you thinking (the rest can be found on the Poetry Foundation’s web site):
“Gretel in Darkness
by Louise Glück
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .
Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.”
Congratulations to YW, and happy Friday to all! Look out for the prompt from our first runner-up next week.
Waking up to bright sun and brisk, springy weather every morning was just one of the many small points of brilliance that characterized AWP for Mia and me this year. Having just come off winter (we both live in places that are not known for their sunshine during the first few months of the year), it was a treat to look outside our hotel room in the morning and see sun, blue skies, and mountains in the distance. Denver was beautiful. Even the snow that had been forecast for Wednesday held off for us. But not even the gorgeous weather or the lure of spring fever proved powerful enough to distract us from the activity going on inside the harshly-lit interior of the Convention Center this weekend. When I say that it was a wonderful AWP, I really mean it. After last year’s conference in Chicago (I met Nick Flynn! I heard Sun Yung Shin read! Lan Samantha Chang complimented my sweater! Poetry played in the elevators all day!) I was prepared for this year to be pretty darn awesome. But my experience this year totally blew me away. Part of it was the fantastic panels and readings that I attended. Part of it was the excitement of walking around the bookfair and getting to talk about LR and hand out our bookmarks and mini-books. Part of it was the great hotel, great food, and Mia’s great company (I’ll admit that we took at least one night off towards the end of the conference just to spend some catching up and discussing each other’s poems over styrofoam cups of Ramen). But a large part of what made the experience so great was the amazing generosity of the people that we met there, and the passion with which we heard them speak of their work and their involvement with communities of other writers.
Over the course of the four days, Mia and I went to panels and readings galore and spent lots of time in the bookfair. In this two-part series, we’ll be reflecting on just a few of our favorite events. For my post, I’ll be focusing on one off-site reading and three panels/readings that I particularly enjoyed. For more about our experience, look through our Flickr gallery of photos from the weekend, and check back here at the blog for Mia’s followup later this week.
Follow the jump below to read my reflections on the Kundiman/Cave Canem Joint Reading on Wednesday, Thursday’s Kundiman Panel, Friday’s From the Fishouse reading, and Saturday’s Split This Rock’s panel.
Congratulations to our friends at The Asian American Literary Review, who have just announced the release of their inaugural issue featuring poetry and prose by Oliver de la Paz, Mong-Lan, Cathy Song, Nick Carbo, Ed Lin, David Mura, and many other Asian American literary luminaries.
Issue 1 of The Asian American Literary Review is out!
The issue is available by snail mail for $12 plus shipping and handling, and may be obtained using the subscription form on their web site. Copies can also be procured in person at their upcoming symposium or their panel at the Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival in two weeks.
