Weekly Prompt: Dramatic Monologues (remembering Ai)

Ai in 1972

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.

LR News: April Updates

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).

* * *

Happy Passover or Holy Week to those of you who are celebrating!

Best,

Iris & Mia
Lantern Review Editorial Board

LR News: Submissions Form Fixed!

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).

Submissions will continue to be open until April 15th (Visit our submissions guidelines here).

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.

What’s Going On: What We Talk About When We Talk About China

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.

LR-News: Image Submission Errors

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:

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2-3 Sentence Artist Bio(s):

Titles of pieces included:

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Submission Categories [Poetry(Individual Artist) / Poetry (Collaborative) / Translation / Essay / Book Review / Visual Art / Community Voices]:

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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:

  1. 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
  2. (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.

Best,

The LR Editorial Board

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Weekly Prompt: Poem-Objects

Untitled and "Mot Cache" by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

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.

To see more works by Cha, visit the BAM/PFA online archive.

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!)

Review: Sasha Pimental Chacón’s INSIDES SHE SWALLOWED

INSIDES SHE SWALLOWED

Insides She Swallowed by Sasha Pimental Chacón | West End Press 2010 | $13.95

Sasha Pimental Chacón’s debut collection, Insides She Swallowed, brims with ripe, unusual images that linger long after each poem.  She explains that the collection is based “on what we consume in order not be consumed ourselves”, and powerfully portrays these ideas with vivid, tangible examples of both physical and metaphorical consumption – recurrent images of life, of seeds and ripe fruit and blooming plants, of animals and the natural world, of the human body as both intimate and gross, in a constant celebration of beauty and biology.

Chacón frequently uses present-tense verbs to evoke a sense of action, creating a quick pace that makes her pieces perfect to read aloud.  Her sharp and precise language propels her poems forward. The first poem, “Learning to Eat”, opens with “A pomegranate / is opened like this: / gutted like a fish, / its entrails glow.” She doesn’t gloss over her images. The reader is presented with both the picturesque and the grotesque exactly as they are. The images may not always be beautiful, but they are always apt.

What stands out is her ability to capture these images just at the moment at which they burst from their own confines and blossom into something beyond themselves. Her poems call to the senses: they feel like they can be touched, smelled, tasted. She uses a lot of color, especially brown skin that reminds the reader whose stories she tells and grounds the pieces in the reality of the Filipino American experience. The history and connection to working the land can be seen by frequent references to slaughtering animals at home, and in the third section of “Childhood Parts” she writes, “Seeing the brownness of our joints, did she / think of a wet chicken’s leg, how to pull / the limb from the socket, how easily.” Chacón carefully and intentionally selects images that are rooted in the very identities they portray.

Many of the pieces in Insides She Swallowed meditate on the roles of family/community and of shared memories, taking advantage of the child’s perspective and childlike wonder to make observations that might otherwise remain unsaid. In “Bamboo” the speaker is able to share her mother’s grief over her dying grandfather and the way it brings them together to “ignore the twenty-one years we have held our emotions / like women, like bamboo cupping rainwater in a storm.” She captures the ways in which women often deny and suppress their own feelings as well as the ways in which those feelings may eventually spill over. But most of the poem is spent imagining what her mother might be thinking without talking about it, with lines such as “She counts the memories / she will never have because she moved West” and “My mother thinks of her father’s changing body, / how it breaks like a chicken’s wishbone / in the dampened handkerchief of his bed.” In this way, she shows the ways emotions are hidden and revealed within families.

Chacón possesses a keen insight for the observed but unstated, unafraid to tackle any issue from the personal to the political. “Blood, Sister” is one of her boldest pieces, a social commentary on the state of impoverished women in Manila. In the first section, the speaker observes women on the streets and  addresses them as “Blood Sister” even as she observes how they differ: “often, you are outside of them, and they are inside the car, / bus, or pedicab: they / are going somewhere / –you are not, and they refuse your drink  because / you are not clean.” As the sections progress, the speaker seeks commonality with these women and acknowledges the slim luck that separates her from them with, “Had you my father with his passports […] would you be / very different from me?” Throughout this piece, the speaker confronts the status and privilege that now separate her from the women of her motherland. In the end, she loses as much as she gains. Her ending lines resonate:

and I am eating you

because you take my place

in the streets.

You fill my mouth

because I am empty

of memory, birthright,

the bruise of begging,

empty

and this is hunger, this is hunger.

Chacón has a powerful ability to convey meaning with little explication. Her poems are often personal, exploring the relationships within one’s family and community as well as how the Filipino American identity may be at odds with the traditional Filipino or American ones.  She fearlessly paints the truth in its raw form,  inundating the senses with a rapidity, grittiness and sensuality that, ultimately, leaves the reader satiated.

Announcing Our 2010 National Poetry Month Prompt Contest

Special Prize: A Signed Copy of Monica Youn's IGNATZ.

National Poetry Month is coming up in April, and in order to mark it, the LR blog is going to be hosting our first ever Prompt Contest, made possible by the generous sponsorship of Four Way Books.  Do you think our Weekly Prompts could use some spicing up?  Do you have a favorite writing exercise that you’d like to share?  Here’s your chance to have your ideas featured in our weekly content, or even — if you turn out to be the one lucky person whose prompt we like best — to win a signed copy of Monica Youn’s new collection Ignatz!

Here’s how it will work:

1) Leave a comment on this post that includes the text of your prompt.  Entries must be posted by 11:59PM EST on Thursday, April 1st April 8th. Comments on this post will close after that time. Please leave some form of basic contact information in your comment (even if it’s just a link to the contact page on your web site), so that we can get in touch with you if you win.

2) During the first full week of April, we’ll be choosing the four prompts that we like best.  The winner and all three runners up will have their entries featured as Weekly Prompts on the LR Blog during the four Fridays from April 9th – 30th.  In addition, the winner will also receive a special prize that has been graciously offered  by Four Way Books: a signed copy of Monica Youn’s Ignatz. We will announce the runners up and winner week by week starting with the third runner-up and culminating with the winner, so keep on checking back in April to see if your entry has been featured.

3) A few ground rules: You may only enter once. Please submit only poetry prompts.  Keep all prompts appropriate: anything of a bigoted, demeaning, or nasty nature will not be considered; we’d also appreciate it if you could please try to keep your prompts somewhat PG in nature, as when choosing prompts we always try to look for flexible exercises which can be adapted for classroom use with either adults or kids.

That’s it!  Go forth and prompt-ify; we look forward to reading your entries!  And while you’re at it, please do check out Ignatz on Four Way’s site.  Many thanks to Editor Martha Rhodes, to Monica Youn, and to Four Way for their generosity.  Be on the lookout for our review of the collection next month.

Weekly Prompt: Poems that Play with Shape

During the past week or so, we’ve been looking at poems and aspects of presenting poems on the page which take into account (2-D) visual space and make room for illustration and elements of painting, drawing, collage, etc.  This Friday, our prompt asks you to reexamine a form which many of us may remember being introduced to in grade school: the concrete poem.

Examples of Calligrams by Guillaume Apollinaire
Examples of Calligrams by Guillaume Apollinaire

“Concrete poetry,” according the Poetry Foundation’s glossary, is “Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic.”  Far from being limited to poems whose words take on the outline of the object they are describing, concrete poetry can encompass everything from a playing with the sizes and spacing of text on the page to certain kinds of full-on “visual poetry,” which are more akin to collage or painting in their methods of arrangement words. The challenge, of course, is how to integrate the visual into a poem in a way that is satisfyingly beautiful (or jarring, depending on the desired effect) and yet feels organic and further enhances the complexity of the reader’s interaction with it.

Prompt: Write a  poem takes into account shape and visual space on the flat plane of the page.

Some suggestions:

1) Compose a calligram, or poem in which the shape of the words enacts or take on the visual form of some object as a kind of complex illustration.  (See examples of Guillaume Apollinare’s famous calligrams at the top of this post).

2) Create a poem that experiments with unusual typographical arrangements to emphasize its meaning.   The Poetry Foundation also has a couple of neat visual poems that play with the shapes of letters: here, and here.

3) Write a poem on a piece of paper (or other flat surface) that is not a standard vertical letter-sized or notebook-sized sheet, using the shape of the surface to guide your form.  For example, a long piece of ribbon, or the back of a circular coaster.  I’ve found that this exercise (which I’ve borrowed from a former teacher of mine, Bruce Snider) becomes especially interesting if one uses a writing surface that already has words on it and allows those words to seamlessly flow into the resulting poem.  (Examples of poets who’ve used a similar technique include A.R. Ammons, who wrote “Sphere” on ticker tape, and D.A. Powell, who wrote one of his books with his notebook turned sideways).

4) Write a poem that engages with the use of negative space in an existing piece of text or image (for example, a poem written in the margins of a newspaper, between the lines of a letter, or in the background spaces of a photograph or advertisement).

We realize that this week’s prompt is a little different, in that your response may or may not be easy to share in comment form.  In light of this, we’ve created a Flickr pool where you can upload photos of your responses to our prompts if you’d like to share them [if you don’t feel comfortable uploading photos of whole poems, feel free to crop creatively or blur out portions of the text].  Here’s how to do it:

1) Follow this link to get to our pool.

2) Click “Join this Group.” (Sign into Yahoo/Flickr if you need to do so, or create an account).

3) Confirm that you want to “Join this Group.”

4) Upload the image or video you want to your stream.  In the description, mention the prompt you’re responding to (if you like you can include the text, too, but that’s not necessary). We suggest that you tag your poem for ease of navigation as the pool grows (for example, I’ve tagged the concrete poem I uploaded with “concrete poem”), but that’s also optional.

5) Choose “Groups >> Your Groups”

6) Select the group “Lantern Review — Weekly Prompt Responses”

7) Click “Add something.”  Follow the instructions to add your photo to the pool.  That’s it!

We hope that you’ll share some of what you’ve written with us; we’d love to see how your experiments turn out.  If we get enough responses, we may even feature some of them on the blog in upcoming weeks.

Editors’ Picks: A Roundup of Asian American Poetry Broadsides

The presenting of poetry in beautifully laid-out flat prints — often accompanied with artwork or produced using the letterpress process — is a time-honored tradition.  The broadside emphasizes the way that a poem navigates visual space and draws out the reader’s sensual experience of a poem beyond the metaphorical or imagined and into the realm of physical touch, color, line, and shape.  The production of broadsides also provides opportunities for collaborative conversation between poets and the people who deal intimately with the physical production and setting of their work: book artists/printers, painters and illustrators.  In recent years (especially with the advent of internet technology), the broadside also has taken on new importance as a means by which to make poetry more familiar, more affordable, and more culturally accessible to the public.  The Poetry Foundation’s free downloadable “refrigerator” broadsides and the Broadsided project — which publishes printable electronic broadsides and encourages their free distribution in public places — are two examples of projects that seek to expand the scope of  the dialogues taking place around poetry while still maintaining a value for stunning visual presentation.  I’m particularly drawn to the idea of both kinds of broadsides — those which, by their small-scale production (often by hand), ensure that the poems printed on them will continue to be treasured as objects of quality and great cultural importance, and those which, by their widespread availability, ensure that poetry can continue to grow outside of itself, to evoke new conversations in unusual places so that the consumption of beautiful art need not be reserved for those with money.

Here is a short roundup of some broadsides I found that feature Asian American poetry:

Naomi Shihab Nye – “Boy and Egg”
[One of a series of free printables from the Poetry Foundation’s web site]

Li-Young Lee – “Every Circle Wider”
[Available from the Poetry Center of Chicago]

Jeffrey Yang – “Wolf Shadow”
[Available from the Center for Book Arts in NYC]

Agha Shahid Ali – “Ghazal”
[Available from the Center for Book Arts in NYC]

Oliver de la Paz – “If Given” and “Fury”
[Available on his web site]

Barbara Jane Reyes – “Polyglot Incantation”
[Available from Zoland Poetry]

Has your poetry ever been made into a broadside?  Do you create broadsides?  We’d love to hear from you!  Please leave a comment to tell us about your experiences.