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.
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."
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!
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!
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.
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, SmithsonianAnnual 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!
Just a quick reminder to all you SF Bay Area based readers:
The deadline for Kearny Street Workshop’s Intergenerational Writers’ Lab is coming up this Friday, February 19th. Applications must be received in the office by 5 pm that day. Do take a chance on sending in an application if you have the time; it would be a shame to miss out on the chance to participate!
A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University
Stephen H. Sohn
In an earlier post, I had the chance to discuss the exciting growth in Asian American cultural production via the small press, especially as it has impacted poetic projects and publications. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on Tupelo Press, another small press that has developed an outstanding catalog which includes both Asian and Asian American poets. Among the offerings in Tupelo’s current catalog are:
In this post, I will concentrate most specifically on Barbara Tran’s In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words, Karen An-hwei Lee’s Ardor and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit.
Tran’s chapbook is one that I have chosen to teach for my Introduction to Asian American Literature course. What I find so breathtaking about Tran’s work is her clarity of image, which always imparts a precise sense of a given moment or time through its use of lyric. The chapbook also has a clear sense of lyrical trajectory. The earlier poems seem to be invested in rooting out heritage and ethnic origin, especially as rendered through a growing romantic relationship. The latter poems dig more deeply into the diasporic trajectory. It is here where the chapbook becomes more autobiographically inflected.
This year’s Year of the Tiger begins on Sunday, Feb. 14th (according to the Gregorian calendar).
Orchids for the turning of the year.
For most people, the approach of the New Year (whether according to the Gregorian or Lunar calendar) signals a time to reflect upon our habits and to make lifestyle changes in order to have a “fresh start” in the coming year. The traditions surrounding New Year’s celebrations are filled with rituals celebrating transition and fresh hope, and also with traditions that remind us of our roots — our connections to family and beloved friends. Whether toasting to Auld Lang Syne or visiting our elders to exchange New Year’s greetings and receive gifts, our traditions engage us in a rhythm of return and renewal — each year, we come home or look back at what’s familiar and beloved in order to move forward again. Lunar New Year rituals, in particular, are rich with symbolic resonance. Cleaning out the house, donning new clothes, consuming foods which are meant to stand in for one’s hopes for the year, celebrating with firecrackers and tree blossoms — these are actions which can remind us of the fleeting nature of what’s past, but which also evoke a sense of hope for the new experiences we anticipate in the coming season. It’s with these things in mind that we give you this week’s prompt
Prompt: Write a poem about a personal or familial ritual for the turning of the year.
If you need help getting started, here are a couple of links to some beautiful New Year’s poems from the Poetry Foundation’s archive:
