First of all, welcome to those of you who are just joining us post-AWP! [For those of you who have been following us for a while, check out our updated links page to meet some of our new friends].
Thanks to the overwhelming amount of support and interest that people expressed last weekend in Denver, we’ve decided to extend our submissions deadline by a couple of weeks. The new submissions deadline for Issue 1 is now Thursday, April 29th. The process (via our online form) will remain the same as before, and we will still respond to those of you who submit before April 15th within 6 weeks of your submission. So if you are just joining us now or are (like me) someone who tends to pull things together at the last possible instant — here’s your chance! (Click on the banner below to go to our submissions page).
Many, many thanks to those have already submitted, and good luck to all! We can’t wait to read your work!
A big thank you to all of you who submitted prompts to our National Poetry Month contest! We’ve chosen three runners-up and one winner, and will be announcing them week by week as we post the ideas that they submitted.
This week, we’re featuring, as our third runner-up, a prompt that comes from an idea submitted by LR reader Joy.
Prompt: Write a poem having to do with place characterized in some way by a border or boundary.
Congratulations to Joy, and thanks again to all of you who submitted entries.
Check back again next Friday to see the prompt from our second runner-up!
LR Goodies for AWP 2010: Bookmarks & Handmade Mini-Books
As we mentioned last week, the LR editors are gearing up for the 2010 AWP Conference with great excitement. For those of you who will also be going, we thought we’d put together a list of panels and readings that we thought might be of special interest to readers and writers of Asian American poetry. Come look for us, in particular, at Kundiman’s Thursday panel and Wednesday off-site reading (co-sponsored with Cave Canem). If you check out the bookfair, you’ll also be able to find us (and our materials) at the Kundiman/Alice James Books table.
The Lantern Review Guide to AWP 2010
Recommended events of potential interest to LR readers
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Wednesday
Off-Site Events:
7:00PM-10:00PMAHSAHTA / OMNIDAWN READING Location: The Magnolia Hotel Ballroom, 17th & Stout (Only 3 blocks from the Colorado Convention Center.) Cost: No charge for the event.
Please join Ahsahta Press and Omnidawn Publishing for a reading. The readers will be: Christopher Arigo, Susan Briante, Dan Beachy-Quick, Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover, Gillian Conoley, Ben Doller, Lisa Fishman, Noah Eli Gordon, Richard Greenfield, Janet Holmes, Hank Lazer, Laura Moriarty, Rusty Morrison, G.E. Patterson, Craig Santos Perez, Bin Ramke, Don Revell, Elizabeth Robinson, Heather Sellers, Heidi Lynn Staples, Michelle Taransky.
8:00PM-11:00PMCave Canem/Kundiman Reading & Salon Location:Mercury Cafe, 2199 California Street, Denver, CO 80205; (303) 294-9281 Cost: $3 suggested donation — to benefit Cave Canem & Kundiman (no one turned away for lack of funds) Website:http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=474228325544&ref=ss
Join the Cave Canem & Kundiman Families for a Reading Featuring Toi Derricotte, Sarah Gambito, Cornelius Eady, Oliver de la Paz, Dawn Lundy Martin & Kazim Ali + a salon featuring Cave Canem and Kundiman fellows & family (bring a poem to share!) Emceed by Ching-In Chen & Tara Betts.
Thursday
9 AM to 10:15 AM
R117. Decolonial Poetics: Womanist, Indigenous, and Queer Poets of Color on the Art of Decolonization. (Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui, Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, Susan Deer Cloud, Ching-In Chen, Lisa Suhair Majaj)
R121. The Online MFA: An Innovative Alternative to the Resident and Low-Resident MFA. (Lex Williford, Daniel Chacón, Sasha Pimentel Chacón, José de Piérola)
10:30 AM to 11:45 AM
R124. Bollywood, Bullets, and Beyond: The Poetry of South Asian America. (Summi Kaipa, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Ravi Shankar, Bhanu Kapil, Subhashini Kaligotla, Monica Ferrell)
Noon to 1:15 PM
R148. Kundiman: Love Songs and Leaps of Faith. (Vikas Menon, Jennifer Chang, Matthew Olzmann, Sarah Gambito, Rick Barot, R.A. Villanueva)
Mong-Lan is a Vietnamese-born American poet, writer, painter, photographer, and Argentine tango dancer and teacher. Mong-Lan’s first book of poems, Song of the Cicadas, won the 2000 Juniper Prize from UMASS Press and the 2002 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards for Poetry. Her other books of poetry include Why is the Edge Always Windy?; Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, the bilingual Spanish / English edition, Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos and Love Poem to Tofu and Other Poems (chapbook). A Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry for two years at Stanford University and a Fulbright Fellow in Vietnam, Mong-Lan received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Her poetry has been frequently anthologized, having been included in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; Asian American Poetry —The Next Generation, and has appeared in leading American literary journals. Her paintings and photographs have been exhibited at the Capitol House in Washington D.C., for six months at the Dallas Museum of Art, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, in galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in public exhibitions in Tokyo, Bali, Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Seoul. Based in Buenos Aires, Mong-Lan travels frequently. Visit: www.monglan.com
LR: You are both a visual artist and a poet, and both of these art forms have a strong presence in your books. How have your sensibilities as a visual artist have influenced your poetry’s aesthetic? Did you come to one through the other? At what point did the two interests begin to intersect?
ML: My sensibilities as a visual artist have influenced greatly my poetry’s aesthetic. The open field of the page is important to me, just as the blank canvas or white sheet of paper is to the visual artist. When writing poetry, I think in spatial terms, not just linearly. So, in this way, I concern myself with the placement of words on the page, using the way words bounce off each other, the connotation of words next to each other, above, below, to the right and left, and diagonal. In Tango, Tangoing, my latest book, you can read certain poems not only left to right, but down one column, then down another column.
I didn’t come to one art through the other. A visual artist since childhood, I showed my artworks in Houston and then in San Francisco, where I flowered and came to mature as a visual artist in the very liberal atmosphere there. At the same time, I was writing since high school, scribbling in journals my feelings, emotions, narratives, stories and things that I couldn’t depict visually in paintings.
Both poetry and the visual arts are twin sisters, and it’s easy for me to shift from one to the other. I find that these arts complement each other. And, so, there in San Francisco in the 90’s, I found myself as a poet as well as a visual artist, giving readings with other Vietnamese-American writers/poets.
LR: When you are putting together a collection of poems that will include visual artwork — how do you view the art in relationship to the text? Do you see the art as illustrations of your poems? As a kind of visual poetry in and of itself?
ML: In my first two books, Song of the Cicadas and Why is the Edge Always Windy?, the text is primary, and the visuals secondary. The artwork in both books were used more as appetizers and section dividers. In Song of the Cicadas, I included pen and ink drawings that I drew when I was in Vietnam, the same time I was writing the book itself. It just happened, naturally and synchronistically like that.
Because many people commented on my artwork in both books, I decided to include more of them in my next books. In the chapbook, Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems, and in Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art, the artworks are very integral to the books, indeed [they] complement the text a great deal, although the texts can stand by themselves. There are many more drawings/paintings in these latter two books—they’re more like entrees and not just appetizers.
The artworks in my books can stand by themselves; thus, they are not mere illustrations. Yet, they do illuminate the text and add another dimension to it. Yes, I would consider my artworks a kind of visual poetry in and of itself.
In honor of the poet Ai, who recently passed away, this week’s prompt focuses on the dramatic monologue — a technique for which she was famous.
Born Florence Anthony, she adopted the name “Ai” after discovering that she had been conceived through an affair between her mother and a Japanese man that she (Ai) had never met. The Poetry Foundation’s bio on her describes her particular sensibilities well:
Ai is a poet noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues which give voice to marginalized, often poor and abused speakers . . . She has said that her given name reflects a “scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop” and has no wish to be identified “for all eternity” with a man she never knew. Ai’s awareness of her own mixed race heritage—she self-identifies as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche—as well as her strong feminist bent shape her poetry, which is often brutal and direct in its subject matter.
Ai’s poetry practically vibrates with the force of its imagery. Her lyrics leap from the page and inhabit the personas she takes on without apology. One of the things for which she was noted was her ability to enter the voices of those at the margins of society and infuse them with dignity and magnetic strength.
To illustrate, here is the opening to her poem Salomé:
I scissor the stem of the red carnation
and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would,
if I cut it off.
But what if I tore you apart
for those afternoons
when I was fifteen
and so like a bird of paradise
slaughtered for its feathers.
Even my name suggested wings,
wicker cages, flight.
Come, sit on my lap, you said.
I felt as if I had flown there;
I was weightless.
You were forty and married.
That she was my mother never mattered.
She was a door that opened onto me.
The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence
and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness.
That dried plum and licorice taste
always back of my tongue
and your tongue against my teeth,
then touching mine. How many times?—
I counted, but could never remember.
What stands out for me in these opening lines is the unforgettable boldness and clarity of its images: the scissored red carnation becomes a severed head, her description of dried plum and licorice give a sickening viscerality to the complexity of the speaker’s relationship to the “you” — he is at once abuser and lover, taker of innocence, and seductor, the wielder of an invisible tyranny in which the mother is also implicated: at the end of the poem, when a ghostly sword slices through the speaker’s throat, the mother’s dress is like that “of a grenadier,” and we are made to see how her kiss becomes an act of terrible violence disguised as tenderness.
In honor of Ai’s life, work, and legacy, here’s this week’s prompt.
Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a dramatic monologue in the voice of a single speaker who is not yourself. Optionally, if you do not wish to write a traditional persona poem, you may imagine the speaker’s voice as a loose projection of your own.
The cruelest month? We hope not — at least, not this year! Lots of exciting things are going on this April for LR. Here’s a quick rundown of our news for the month:
National Poetry Month Prompt Contest (Deadline EXTENDED)
We’ve had a modest response to our National Poetry Month Prompt Contest so far, but we’d like to give more people the chance to enter, so we’re extending the deadline to Thursday, April 8th. The same rules will apply (we’ll announce the third runner-up on Friday the 9th). Please do take the time to submit a prompt if you haven’t already done so — it only takes five minutes, and if you win, you’ll not only have the opportunity to see your prompt featured on our blog, but will also receive a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz.
Lantern Review at AWP 2010
As we mentioned in last month’s update, the LR editors (Mia and Iris) will both be in Denver for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference next week, April 7-10. If you’re going to be there, please come look us up around the Kundiman/Alice James Book table, or at one of the Kundiman events, and say hello! We’ve been working really hard on some nifty promotional materials to distribute, so if you visit Kundiman’s table, you’ll also be able to pick up bookmark and one of a series of handmade mini-books we’ve produced to featuring selections of our blog content. Of you follow us on Twitter or are a Facebook fan, you’ve already seen some sneak peeks. We’ll post photos of the finished products and a list of Asian American poetry events taking place at AWP on the blog early next week. (We’ll also do an event coverage post about AWP after we return from Denver).
April Community Calendar Updated
We’ve updated our Community Calendar page for the month of April. As always, please continue to let us know about events we haven’t included. We’ll continue to add to and update the list as the month goes on.
End of Reading Period for Issue 1
Our submissions period for Issue 1 will close on April 15th (tax day!) If you haven’t yet sent in your work, we want to see it! You can find our submissions guidelines here. (Many thanks to those who have already submitted).
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Happy Passover or Holy Week to those of you who are celebrating!
Just a quick update to let you know that our amazing Tech Consultant, Brandon, has fixed the issue with our submission form. You should now be able to submit visual art as usual. (We’d appreciate it if you could please use the form to submit rather than emailing us, as it allows us to keep better track of your submission and to respond to you sooner).
Thank you so much to those of you who helped by pointing out the problem! Please do let us know immediately should you ever run into further technical issues with our site or form in the future.
While browsing Amazon recently, I stumbled upon Martin Jacques’ book When China Rules the World, which appears to be the latest in a long line of books devoted to explaining why China will, within a few years, control every man, woman, and child on the planet. When I did a quick search for the book in my local library’s online catalog (I never buy books if I can help it), I found that it had twenty-seven holds. Of course, I could just settle for another of its kind, since they are legion:
But for whatever reason, I have my heart set on the Jacques. When I mentioned the twenty-seven holds to a friend of mine, we got into a discussion about to what extent all of this China anxiety is actually warranted. My friend dismissed most of the hype, saying instead that he has his money on another burgeoning Asian powerhouse—India. While there are also books devoted to enumerating the reasons India will ascend to the position of global badass supreme, in my experience India simply isn’t invoked as often as China when someone wants to trumpet the economic decline of America and the concomitant ascendency of an exotic foreign power.
It’s all about China, for some reason. Why?
Perhaps it was the Olympics. Since that opening ceremony of jaw-dropping proportions, China has been front and center when it comes to speculations about the future of the global economy. The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing showcased China’s sheer manpower and cultural richness, with hundreds of Chinese citizens participating in elaborate choreographed dances and demonstrations.
But is the hype about China warranted? Is China really positioned to become the next global superpower, poised to surpass the United States in just a few years? Well, the question looks to be more debatable than most have suggested. From what I’ve read, I’ve found that James Fallows at The Atlantic has a pretty balanced understanding of China’s position. Recently, he cited three “sensible” articles on China:
According to the Pettis piece, a recent op-ed by Paul Krugman of the New York Times, and a recent editorial by the New York Times,China has been artificially deflating the value of their currency, the renminbi. Doing so keeps China strong economically (or, at least, maintains the appearance of strength) because it stimulates exports. Weaker renminbi means cheaper manufactured goods, which means more exports, which means more income from exports for Chinese companies.
Whereas the Qiu and Pettis articles focus on very specific socioeconomic threads, the Mufson/Pomfret piece provides a broader analysis of the general attitudes towards the PRC. Here are just a few of the more interesting snippets from the Mufson/Pomfret:
“But the notion that China poses an imminent threat to all aspects of American life reveals more about us than it does about China and its capabilities. The enthusiasm with which our politicians and pundits manufacture Chinese straw men points more to unease at home than to success inside the Great Wall.” (Quote from Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations)
“This is not to say that China isn’t doing many things right or that we couldn’t learn a thing or two from our Chinese friends. But in large part, politicians, activists and commentators push the new Red Scare to advance particular agendas in Washington. If you want to promote clean energy and get the government to invest in this sector, what better way to frame the issue than as a contest against the Chinese and call it the “new Sputnik”? Want to resuscitate the F-22 fighter jet? No better country than China to invoke as the menace of the future.”
If we take what Mufson’s saying to be true, then clearly there’s a lot of manipulative hype floating around about China. And if we consider Krugman, Pettis, and Mufson/Pomfret’s perspectives together, we see a China who may be inviting some of this false hype.
What does this fear mongering and misrepresentation mean for Asian American literature? Well, it brings up questions of perception, expectation and obligation. Most Asian American writers can probably attest to the fact that, very often, Western audiences find it difficult to process works by Asian Americans independently from their country of origin. With China and its recent events, there is the growing danger that Western audiences will misstep when processing works by Chinese Americans because Westerners’ perceptions of Chinese Americans will largely be extensions of their perhaps misguided perceptions of China the country.
The Chinese American experience in America is ripe with material, of course, and it’s not necessary to flock to and circle around China’s economic issue, even though it is so front-and-center in the media. But then the question becomes: how do you maintain a conversation separate from a subject that’s become so prominent? Are you dooming yourself to irrelevance by ignoring the elephant in the room? Perhaps not. Perhaps by deliberately sidestepping the issue, you’re doing what needs to be done: avoiding the obvious topic in favor of advancing a deeper kind of conversation about the Asian American experience–one that pushes beyond the headline makers.
I would suggest that when we—Americans—talk about China, we’re not just talking about a rising economic superpower, we’re also talking about a whole slew of cultural and ideological assumptions and juxtapositions that may be founded upon false or distorted premises. And the fallout may now be influencing experiences outside of China. In the end, it’s not just a conversation about the renimbi or the future economic landscape but also a conversation about perceptions of otherness, both cultural and ideological, getting appropriated to advance the agendas of a group.
Still, the conversation is an ongoing one, and it’s open for debate.
It’s recently come to our attention that our online form has been giving people errors when they’ve tried to submit visual art. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience as we continue to investigate the issue.
If you’ve also received an error that has prevented you from submitting work to us, please do drop us a line in the comments to let us know!
In the meantime, if you would like to submit visual art (and only if you are submitting visual art – poets and writers of essays & reviews must still go through the online form; we will not be able to read your submission otherwise), you may bypass the form by emailing your images to editors [at] gmail (dot) com. Please include the following information in the body of your email:
Prefix (Ms/Mr/Mrs/Dr):
First Name:
Last Name:
Contact telephone:
Mailing Address:
Artist Name(s) [if different from the contact name; translators should include the name of the original poet here; this is where authors of collaborative works should indicate co-authors]:
2-3 Sentence Artist Bio(s):
Titles of pieces included:
Is this a simultaneous submission? (Yes/No):
Submission Categories [Poetry(Individual Artist) / Poetry (Collaborative) / Translation / Essay / Book Review / Visual Art / Community Voices]:
Additional Info:
Statement of Originality (type your full name beneath the statement to indicate your agreement):
“I certify that the work being submitted has not been previously published in any format (neither print nor electronic), and that it is either:
My own original creation (defined as a poem, prose piece, visual artwork, or new translation created solely by the artist or artists indicated above), OR
(If submitting to the community profiles category) An original creation of the group that I represent.”
Thank you so much for your patience. Our apologies once again for your trouble.
I certify that the work being submitted has not been previously published in any format (neither print nor electronic), and that it is either:
My own original creation (defined as a poem, prose piece, visual artwork, or new translation created solely by the artist or artists indicated above), OR
(If submitting to the community profiles category) An original creation of the group that I represent.
This week’s prompt is inspired by some of the visual poetry work done by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 — 1982), a Korean American artist and poet who experimented with film, mixed media, intertext, and live performance to push her audience’s experience of the written word in radical directions. Cha lived an incredibly productive, but tragically brief life: at the age of 31, she was murdered by a stranger in New York City. Her much-studied book of hybrid poetry, prose, and image, Dictee, was published a week before her death.
One of the things that interests me most about Cha’s body of work is her experimentation with the book as object. On many occasions (as in the two pieces pictured above), she made use of objects other than the standard book format in order to demonstrate a kind of poetic. The forms and physical textures of the (often handmade) media with which she presented words in these pieces creates a process-oriented experience for the observer, in which we see and can feel the labor required to produce each piece of text. The text itself, too, has a physical quality to it. In the “untitled” piece above, it dangles almost precariously on wire, trapped halfway in a glass jar (the words read “water,” “fire,” “earth” . . . and something which I can’t quite make out . . . in French). We sense the microcosmic nature of language — it becomes a flimsy, yet beautiful item that constitutes our world.
Prompt: Create a poem designed to be presented as a 3-d object.
"Self-Portrait"
The piece I’m sharing with you here is actually a project I created for a contemporary poetry class last year: we were supposed to create an archaism, and I decided to use the technique of embroidery, along with nineteenth century / early twentieth century botanical diagrams and mottos from the language of flowers, to reflect on the idea of a curated representation of self (the work, obviously, is a pun on my name; the antique language of flowers handbook that I used indicated that the Iris used to convey the message “I Burn [for you]”). This, when combined with the sexuality of the plant’s anatomical structures (a flower is a plant’s reproductive organ), and the traditionally gender-bound craft of decorative embroidery, I hope — forms a reflection on gender, artifice, craft, and time.
As always, please do feel free to share your experiments on our Flickr pool. Happy Weekend! (Don’t forget to think about an entry for our prompt contest!)
