The Page Transformed: Luisa Igloria on Ekphrasis in JUAN LUNA’S REVOLVER

Juan Luna's "Spolarium"
Juan Luna's "Spoliarium"

As part of our exploration of ekphrastic poetry, poet Luisa Igloria (who was featured in our November 2009 interview) very graciously agreed to answer some questions about the role that ekphrasis plays in her most recent book, the Ernest Sandeen Prizewinning Juan Luna’s Revolver [UND Press 2009].

JUAN LUNA'S REVOLVER
JUAN LUNA'S REVOLVER

LR: In what ways did visual art inform your process in developing Juan Luna as a project?

LI: Visual art provided both a means to stimulate individual poems, as well as provide points of thematic unity between the different parts of the book.  I looked at photographs, old lithographic representations, postcards, and more.  Juan Luna’s Revolver could not have evolved without calling to poems that make some reference to art — after all, Juan Luna was a painter, one of several Filipino artists and intellectuals who left the Philippine colony for Spain and other European destinations in the mid to late 1800s to study and to travel. Juan Luna was perhaps most famous for his mural “Spoliarium” which depicted two defeated gladiators being dragged into a chamber where they would be stripped of their armor and prepared for burning. The painting won one of two gold medals at a Barcelona exposition and took the art world there by surprise.  In truth, however, I came to the Juan Luna poems in the book more gradually — the book perhaps really began with my long-standing fascination with stories about the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and how 1100+ indigenous Filipinos were transported to serve as live exhibits there (many of them were taken from the northern Cordillera region in the Philippines, which is where I grew up). I’d done considerable research on this and looked at archival material, and it became clearer to me as the poems came that one of the central themes in this project was colonial spectatorship. Fair-goers at St. Louis in 1904 came to see the Philippine reservation and its half-clothed savages, and protested that they had paid to see “the authentic native” when well-meaning persons out of concern for their health, wondered if they should be given warm clothing to wear. While traveling in Europe, Juan Luna and his contemporaries were similarly gawked at. But through the powerful art and literature they produced (Juan Luna’s compatriot Jose Rizal wrote the two novels that further inflamed a grassroots-led revolution which finally overthrew the Spanish colonial regime) they had found a way to return the gaze of the Other.

LR: What influenced your decisions in terms of where and how to place ekphrastic poems like “Letras y Figuras,” “Dolorosa,” and “Mrs. Wilkin Teaches an Igorot the Cakewalk” within the text of Juan Luna?  How do you envision their particular contributions to the arc and the rhythm of the text?

LI: When I’m beginning to work on the structure of a book, I also like being led by the tonal and emotional congruencies between parts. I try to see what kinds of “music” might be made by the decision to set one poem next to another, one section next to another. I don’t necessarily think a chronological approach is always the best one. And, I much prefer trying to set up relationships across poems so that it might be possible for an image or motif to jettison the reader back or toward another moment, in another poem…   For example, even if the 1904 / World’s Fair poems form the last section, I hope it eventually becomes clear to readers that I’ve been trying to talk about the implications of looking at something or someone, or being held in close scrutiny, really from the very outset (such as in a very early poem in the book like “Intimacy deserves a closer look” ).

LR: In the poem “Ekphrasis,” you write of the viewing of sculpture as a process of critical reading: “the bridle that is history’s wants it to stay / its previous course — At least that’s how // it might be read” (55).  In what ways can the exercise of “seeing” and subsequently interpreting a physical object of beauty prove useful to poets in our own crafting of imagery and perspective on the page?

LI: Poets frequently “see” and “interpret” — that is, find ways to move from a physically sensuous validation of the world (“seeing” is part of that) to finding in language the means, the shape, the form in which to express it. “Seeing” has never  equated to a “neutral” activity to me. Even when I’m people-watching, I quickly realize I’m making up stories, wondering about the hidden narratives: who’s that old couple in the parking lot? where are they going, what are they thinking, who will they meet? what did they have for breakfast? When the imagination exerts an influence on what’s given, we make art. That’s one of the things that still continually amazes and humbles me – that on the one hand historical reports might say of events in the past, “these things are over, they’re done” — but that on the other hand, poetry can say, let’s look at it again; and what if?  So yes there is critical reading, but there is also a sense that meaning can be remade or that a closed door is not necessarily what we think it is.  We might think we know everything there is to know about something. But poetry always reminds us of the mystery that remains.

To read more about Luisa Igloria and her work, please visit her web site and blog.  Juan Luna’s Revolver is available for purchase from the University of Notre Dame Press.

The Page Transformed: Introduction & Part I – Ekphrasis

Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus"

During the month of March, we’ll be exploring the theme “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & The Visual Arts” in our posts.  We’re interested in ways in which poetry and the visual arts speak to one another, inform each other’s practices, and blend with one another on the page.  We’ll begin with an examination of ekphrastic poetry, and will eventually move on to explore other areas of intersection – the book as a physical object of beauty, for example, and broadsides and typography (poetry as visual art).  We also hope to feature conversations poets who engage in both the visual arts and poetry, as well as a couple of posts about visionary experimental figures like Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, who pushed the boundaries of text as object.  Our prompts this month will also work in with our theme, and (we hope) will provide exercises that ask you to creatively engage with and perhaps try out some of the topics we’ll cover in our Editors’ Picks and Interview posts.

For this week and the beginning of next, we’ll be focusing on ekphrasis and ekphrastic poetry.  The Academy of American Poets’ website gives what I think is a helpful definition of ekphrasis: “poetry confronting art.” The  idea of the image which confronts and subsequently moves the poet to speak is clearly reflected in what is perhaps one of the best loved examples of American ekphrastic poetry: William Carlos William’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” based on Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.”  In his poem, Williams interprets the actions of the figures in the painting, highlighting the isolation of Icarus’s action in the larger context of the scene — while country people go about their daily lives, herding sheep and plowing fields, Icarus is visible only as a tiny pair of legs attached to an unseen body already engulfed in water.  Only one man looks up to the sky, but has already missed the action.  Williams plays powerfully on the desolate futility that he reads into Breughel’s interpretation of the myth:

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Williams’ poem is certainly a famous one.  But perhaps my favorite meditation on the commonalities between the work of the poet and painter in creating imagery that will resonate in the mind of the viewer or reader is Robert Lowell’s Vermeer-inspired poem “Epilogue,” which I will leave you with:

Epilogue
by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

[Text of “Epilogue” courtesy of poetryoutloud.org.  To read more about ekphrasis, visit this article on the Academy of American Poets’ website.]

Editors’ Picks: Fiona Sze-Lorrain Interviewed by Retort

Melbourne-Based Retort Magazine

We were recently given a heads’ up about this fascinating interview in Retort Magazine that Singaporean poet Desmond Kon conducted with Fiona Sze-Lorrain (whose book, Water the Moon, we reviewed earlier this year).  [Thanks, D.K., for the link!]

Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Here’s an excerpt (Sze-Lorrain on place and geography in her work):

Places permeate my writing since you may say that I am someone of travels — in exile and displacement, so-called. I’ve traveled, yes, and at times, without a choice, but I am never a tourist. Pierre Nora sees places as sites of memories; I see places as moments and years. I thought that writing about places as memories risks falling into the trap of flat sentimentalism, or a re-invention of the past. Unlike most artists in exile who eschew geographical precision, I look towards the porosity of borders — both physical and temporal — for inspiration. Otherwise, places are no different from identities, and any kind of identity will never fail to imprison souls.

To read the rest of the interview, click here.   Also worth checking out is the latest issue of Cerise Press, a magazine that Sze-Lorrain creates and edits with Karen Rigby and Sally Molini. It’s an intriguing space that beautifully mixes translation, art, and lyric — and is well worth the read.

LR News: March Blog Changes

Dear Faithful Readers,

It’s been a wonderful four months since we first started blogging. We’ve featured interviews with poets and literary magazine editors, a guest post series on the small press and Asian American poetry, reviews of two recent collections, and countless Editors’ Picks, Weekly Prompts, and Events Roundups. The focus and scope of the LR blog (as well as our audience) have started to grow in really exciting ways, and in light of this, we’ve decided to announce a few changes, to be implemented beginning in the month of March.

Community Calendar

You might have noticed that there is a now new orange tab located in the top right hand corner of the blog’s layout.  This is our new Community Calendar, which will serve as the successor to the weekly events roundups we’ve posted in the past.  Instead of posting roundups once a week, we will now be making use of the new Community Calendar page as a space on which to post a consolidated list of events once a month. We’ll do mini-updates to each month’s calendar roughly every week and a half, adding new events that we learn about during the course of the month, and removing events that have already happened.  We decided to implement this change not only to streamline the culling process for us (on the editorial end), but also to centralize the information so that it’s easier for you to find.  This way, not only will we able to keep all information about events in one location, but you won’t have to scroll through reams of past posts in order to find the roundup for the week you’re looking for. If you have the chance, please do take the time to check it out!  You’ll notice that for most of the cities listed (except for NYC) we’re a little sparse on details at the moment.  If you know of interesting APA arts events going on in one of these cities (or one we haven’t listed), please do consider suggesting them in the comments.

Speaking of suggestions, we’re also adding a new Twitter events reporting method: to suggest a new event or a correction to an existing event’s information, you can now either leave a comment on the calendar page, or mention us in a Tweet (@LanternReview), using the hashtag #APAPoetryEvent.

March 2010 Theme: “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & the Visual Arts”

During the next few months, you’ll find that many our posts will be themed around a particular subject or issue.  For the month of March, we’ve chosen the theme: “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & Visual Art.”  Throughout the month, we’ll be posting Editors’ Picks, prompts, and hopefully a few interviews as well in which we’ll be looking at poets who engage the visual arts in their work, the visual aspects of poetry, and the poem (or book) as an object.  Look out for a fuller explanation of our March theme later this week.

Upcoming this spring: Prompt Contest, AWP Coverage, Submissions

The AWP’s annual conference and National Poetry Month are both scheduled for April (next month), so be on the lookout for posts later in March relating to our plans to cover these events on the blog.  We’ll be hosting a prompt contest towards the middle of March (with the winner and three runners up to have their prompts featured during National Poetry Month), so keep your eyes peeled for an announcement to that effect.

Secondly, the Lantern Review editorial staff plan to be at AWP, and it’s possible that we might be able to organize a meetup of some sort.  If you’re planning to be at AWP, know something about venues in Denver, and would be interested in helping to coordinate an informal LR meetup, please do shoot us a quick email at editors [at] lanternreview (dot)com.

Finally, we’re still accepting submissions!  (Don’t forget that we are also looking for visual art, in addition to poetry).  Please do consider sending us your work; we would love to see it!

Thanks, and best,

Iris & Mia
Lantern Review Editorial Staff

Weekly Prompt: Winter Weather

Sun rising over snow in New Jersey

The deep of winter can be a particularly difficult time, especially for those who (like me) are affected by short, dark days and perpetual gray skies.  El Nino has wrought some particularly freakish incidences of heavy snow this year on the East Coast and some has dumped some uncharacteristically heavy bouts of rain on parts of the West Coast, but even here in the Midwest, where the storms have been much milder than usual (last year at this point, we were in the middle of a deep freeze in which the moisture in my nostrils would turn to ice each time I stepped outside), the weather’s inability to make up its mind in favor of clear skies has made my artificial sunlamp my new best friend.

Winter weather (and in particular, the alien quality of harsh winter storms) has always been a popular subject of poetry, it seems.  Robert Frost fixed winter in the national imagination forever with his “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  William Carlos Williams captured the human viciousness we often project onto driving snow and ice in his poem “Blizzard.”  And Cathy Song’s “Leaving” deftly embodies the feeling of being under siege that can result when one is housebound by winter rainstorms:

The mildew grew in rings
around the sink
where centipedes came
swimming up the pipes
on multiple feet
and the mold grew
around our small fingers
making everything slippery
to touch.
We were squeamish and pale.

This week’s exercise asks you to follow in this tradition of writing the winter blues.

Prompt: Write about an experience of extreme winter weather.

Here’s an excerpt from my own attempt:

February Brown

The ground liver-spotted
with half-receded ice scales
takes up fresh powder

with swift muddy gulps.  Snow
mageddon is what the weathermen
back home are calling it,

and yet here, we are stuck
between ice storm and thaw.
Let there be less of this

frozen monochrome, more
of the acid sun slanting off

the glazed drifts . . .

As usual, we’d be thrilled if you shared a portion of your own attempt with us in the comments below.  Happy writing — and for those of you who are snow or rain bound, hang in there!  May spring come very, very soon.

Editors’ Picks: “My Issei Parents… Now I Hear Them”

I was browsing the American Literary History Journal the other day and came across Corinne E. Blackmer’s “Writing Poetry like a ‘Woman’.”   In it, I found this observation on the subject of writing by incarcerated Japanese American women during World War II:

The experience of these [internment] camps radically affected the writing of issei and nisei women poets.  Before the war, issei values of feminine propriety confined women to the household and prohibited public discourse; the experience of the camps, however, blurred men and women into a shared common world. (134)

Though Blackmer makes an interesting claim about the impact of changed spatial and social relations on “the writing of issei and nisei women poets,” I was most intrigued by the mere existence of the term “issei and nisei women poets.”  I was struck for two reasons.  First, I realized that I know virtually nothing of “issei and nisei women poets,”  nor of the writing they did before or after the war.  Second, to see the phrase “the writing of issei and nisei women poets” in print, in an academic literary journal, was shocking.  I had never thought of “the issei poet,” or “the nisei poet” as real figures in the history of American literature though I had certainly wondered what they might say.  It goes without saying that this realization has prompted me to search out some of these key figures.

Mitsuye Yamada, who wrote the book Camp Notes and Other Poems (Shameless Hussy Press, 1976),* during and shortly after the internment, is one of the poets mentioned in Blackmer’s article, whose voice comes to the reader with great force and a radical vision.  In the poem “Neutralize” she writes:

white floors walls ceiling white
white chairs tables sink white
only when I close my eyes do I see
beyond the white windowless walls

The poem, which opens with an epigraph stating “poetry… / has been my spiritual guide / throughout my incarceration,” details the speaker’s resistance to an outside “They’s” attempt to “kill / the sentient being in me,” that is, the seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and hearing self.  Her strong and forceful diction, repetition of the word “white,” and conflation of objects, surfaces, and imagined/actual realities makes for a compelling first encounter with a group of writers with whom I am only just becoming acquainted.

One of Yamada’s earlier poems from Camp Notes, which I also found compelling, constructs an issei voice through the use of fragmented, non-standard English free verse.  I found this gratifying because this mode validates some of my own experiments with Japanese American “dialect” or “accented” writing.  An excerpt from “Marriage Was a Foreign Country”:

When we land the boat full
of new brides
lean over railing
with wrinkled glossy pictures
they hold inside hand
like this
so excited
down there a dock full of men
they do same thing
hold pictures
look up and down
like this
they find faces to
match pictures.

In this poem, the speaker’s gaze is turned forward toward a future in America, a country as foreign to the new bride as that of marriage (as indicated by the title).  The speaker, freshly delivered to an alien shore and tinged by her departure from Japan, brings with her the language of a person newly acquiring a foreign tongue.  Returning to this voice, or listening to the traces of it embdedded still in the Japanese American community, is a curious reversal of history and generational assimilation, and therefore one I find tremendously interesting.

I appreciate Yamada’s poem because it does for me something that I am unable to do for myself: imagine what a voice shrouded by time and, to a certain extent, cultural taboo (as many Japanese Americans have, through the generations after WWII, worked to shed their accents and mother tongue), might sound like.  Because much of Japanese America’s history has been an effort to make the assertion that “I am an American” (as seen in the Dorothea Lange photograph below), to evoke a “non-American,” or non-standard English voice is a risky move.  As always, more to come…

Photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of The Bancroft Library. "Following evacuation orders, this store, at 13th and Franklin Streets, was closed. The owner... placed the I AM AN AMERICAN sign on the store front on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor."

____________________________________________________

* Now available as Camp Notes and Other Writings (Rutgers University Press, 1998)

Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Feb. 24-28, 2010)

Of note this weekend: Sandra Lim in Chicago, Jason Koo in Cleveland, Marilyn Chin in San Jose, Fay Chiang in NYC.  Also: Hyphen #19 release party in SF.  Please note that this weekend’s roundup only covers through February 28th — as we’ll be transitioning into a new format for our events listings starting on March 1st.  Look out for an announcement at the beginning of next week!

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Friends & Neighbors: “8: A Symposium”

Our friends at The Asian American Literary Review have just passed on some information about an exciting event of theirs that is coming up in April.

8: A Symposium (sponsored by The Asian American Literary Review)

8: A Symposium: Voices from The Asian American Literary Review will feature free public readings, Q&A sessions, and book signings by eight highly accomplished Asian American writers: Karen Tei Yamashita, Sonya Chung, Kyoko Mori, April Naoko Heck, Ed Lin, Srikanth Reddy, Peter Bacho and Ru Freeman.   The symposium will be an all-day affair, and will take place on April 24th, 2010, from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at Ulrich Recital Hall as part of the University of Maryland, College Park’s, Maryland Day celebration.

For more information, please contact the organizers by email: asianamericanliteraryreview[at]gmail[dot]com.

If you live in the vicinity of Maryland or will be in the area around the time of April 24th, we highly encourage you to check out this event!

Weekly Prompt: The Poem of Invocation

This week we’ll be experimenting with poems of invocation; that is, poems that employ direct address to construct and position a “You.”  When thinking of the “addressee” of a poem, we are often tempted to think simply of audience.  In the poem of invocation, however, “You” is a much more active presence in the poem; it is actually called into being, by the poem.  For example, by saying, “You come and stand before me,” one literally creates a “you” who materializes through the mechanism of the direct address, comes before the speaker, and stands—at least, in the world of the poem.

To view poetry in this light transforms the art of versifying into a kind of conjurer’s art, which is what happens every time we write: we conjure people, places, events, and affective states, some of which are “real,” and some of which are purely imagined.  It also grants the poet the power of creation.

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Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Feb 19-24, 2010)

We’re posting slightly later than usual this week, but still in time to let you know about some really interesting events!  Of especial note: two AAWW events (Purvi Shah Workshop and Jason Koo Book Party) and the SULU series in NYC, Flamenco-Inspired Poetry Reading by PAWA Arkipelago in SF, Marilyn Chin in San Jose, Smithsonian Annual Day of Remembrance for Japanese Internment (marking the anniversary of Executive Order 9066) in DC.  Also: don’t forget about the open mic series going on (Family Style in Philly and *SPARKLE* Queer-Friendly Open Mic in DC), and that in many cities, Lunar New Year festivities are not yet over. Check out your city’s newspaper or Chinatown web site to find out if festivities are still going on!

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