Asian American Poetry Unbound
This week, in addition to readings, open mic’s & performances, we’ve also included a couple of local book sale events. And be sure to check out your local independent bookseller or a university or small press’s online shop this week if you’re looking for holiday gifts; help support the dedicated small businesses that make the publication and promotion of contemporary poetry possible!
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Dec. 17-21, 2009)”
Whether you’ll be traveling or relaxing at home during the upcoming holidays, it’s a great time to polish off an old reading list or to start in on something new. As our gift to you this season, and to help you get started on your own holiday reading list, we’ve asked members of the LR Staff to recommend some of their recent favorites. Here are our suggestions.
Asylum | Quan Barry | University of Pittsburgh Press (2001)
Recommended by Mia: “My holiday reading pick . . . it’s her first collection. Her engagement with the voices and subjects of the Vietnam War is beautifully executed, and though the scope of her work is much broader, I was most riveted by her ‘war’ poems.”
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Behind My Eyes | Li-Young Lee | W.W. Norton & Company (2008)
Recommended by Iris: “This is Lee’s most recent collection — and it is stunning, as always. Figurations of the Virgin Mary intertwine with moving landscapes, conversations between the poet and his wife, the transitory spaces of travel, a chance vision of the poet’s father; all hang in a delicate, almost sacred, lumen, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth. Each poem breathes with an expansiveness and a grave tenderness that only Lee knows how to render. Behind My Eyes is sold with a CD of the poet reading some the poems in the book, and I highly recommend listening to this, as well. I had the privilege of hearing Lee read from his drafts for this book a few years before it came out, and loved the way that the intonation of his voice seamed through the lines of each poem, threading them together in a low, sonorous hum. It’s a beautiful listening experience, and adds a new and lovely textural dimension to his already melodious poetics.”
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Call Me Ishmael Tonight | Agha Shahid Ali | W.W. Norton & Company (2003)
Recommended by Supriya: “This collection of ghazals shows the versatile ways in which a poetic form can go beyond its history and language while staying true to its essence. Agha Shahid Ali demonstrates the intentionality with which he overcomes expectations and boundaries by using a traditional form that often evokes feelings of longing and melancholia but writing in a contemporary English that feels timeless. Although written entirely in form, the range and depth of this collection allows for a vast expanse of emotions and possibilities and is the perfect collection with which to curl up whatever your mood.”
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A Gesture Life | Chang-rae Lee | Penguin USA (2000)
Recommended by Ada: “Told from the point of view of Dr. Hata, a Japanese WWII veteran, this fictional memoir weaves between his experiences in a crumbling outpost of a Japanese imperial outpost in the last days of the war and his later life in gated, suburban America. The protagonist in Lee’s second novel is so reasonable it’s eerie, and though I think that we are meant to feel sorry for Dr. Hata and the stiffly respectable, appropriately understated life he has bound himself into, the distance that separates him from all the other characters in this book translates into distance from the reader. Not that the whole book left me cold: the scenes describing Dr. Hata’s encounters with Korean comfort women during the war are eye-opening, gripping, and an interesting perspective on the terrors of war.”
Continue reading “Staff Picks: Holiday Reading Recommendations”
We mentioned Sesshu Foster’s award-winning collection World Ball Notebook back in November, when we did a post about the winners of the 2009 Asian American Literary Awards.
Well, it’s recently come to our attention that the magazine/blog Molossus, which bills itself as “an online broadside of world literature,” has posted a lovely conversation with Sesshu and is offering its readers a chance to win a free copy of World Ball Notebook in partnership with City Lights (winner to be announced this Wednesday, Dec. 16th).
We loved what Sesshu had to say about using elements of indigenous heritage as “political and social iconography and ideology” rather than as “ethnography.” Here’s an excerpt:
Our identity as Americans, as citizens of whatever it may be, is collectively bound up in on-going discourse and dialogue about our relations, our culture and history. Times change, and we can’t recycle categorical definitions of ethnic character that are forty years old any more than we can recycle racist assumptions about the self from the 19th century. People do, of course, but writers are supposed to be hipper than that, more up to date.
To read more of the interview or to enter the giveaway, head on over to Molossus and check out their full post: “Atomik Aztek: A Conversation with Sesshu Foster + Book Giveaway!” [on Molossus]
This week’s prompt is adapted from a writing exercise in Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community (T&W Collaborative, 2005), a writing handbook now on sale on the Teachers & Writers Collaborative website.
What happens when we die? Where do noises go? How far is far? These types of questions without answers are the focus of today’s writing prompt. According to Collum and Noethe, an unanswerable question is one that causes the mind to “kee[p] on seeking.” Don’t lose sight of this objective! Allow each question to lead to the next without bothering to consider an answer. Resist the impulse to know it all.
As it may take a while to get your mind into “seeking” mode, begin with a few practice questions. Let your thoughts wander. Stare out the window… Where do birds sleep at night? How do they recognize their family members? Do baby birds ever find their fathers? Would they want to? How tall do pine trees grow? How long would it take for one to grow into outer space? Unfetter your mind: no question is too whimsical for this exercise.
Continue reading “Weekly Prompt: “Questions Without Answers””
The Teachers & Writers Collaborative is having a book sale! If you teach English, writing composition, creative writing, anything… these handbooks are a tremendous resource.
The T&W titles on my shelf are: Poetry Everywhere and The List Poem, though I can vouch for numerous others (Listener in the Snow, Handbook of Poetic Forms, etc. ) as well. I’ve found these books to be useful not only in leading poetry workshops, but in teaching middle school writing composition, and even elementary school grammar! The prompts are wonderfully versatile, and can be adapted for writers of any age.
Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: Teachers & Writers Collaborative Book Sale!”
A short-ish list this time around. Events happening this weekend – and into next weekend – for your perusal. As usual, please feel free to suggest updates and additions.
Continue reading “Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Dec. 11-16, 2009)”
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I went into Chicago with a few friends, and decided to use the opportunity to try out the downtown portion of the Poetry Foundation’s Chicago Poetry Tour. My companions very graciously agreed to take the tour with me—no small feat, considering that it’s a 45-minute walking tour, and a few of them were dragging rolling luggage with them the whole time! Much to our delight, it ended up being a very pleasant experience for all of us. In particular, one of our number had never been to Chicago before, so it was a perfect way to show him pieces of the Loop. But even for those of us who were more familiar with the city, it was wonderful to see the neighborhood around Millennium Park from a different perspective. The downtown portion of the tour (which is the main tour listed on the web site) takes you almost straight down Michigan Avenue (perfect for us, since our train into the city disembarked at Randolph Station), and then turns west and ends a bit more inland. It works like this: before going to Chicago, you download the audio file containing the guide, and a map (not necessary, but interesting/helpful if you’re one of those directionally challenged people like me who needs to know exactly where you are in reference to the rest of the neighborhood at every minute) from the Poetry Foundation’s website. The audio is a single track, and is available in either mp3 or mp4. You then put the audio file on your portable music device, and turn it on whenever you reach the tour’s start point (The Chicago Cultural Center, at 78 E. Washington). From there, you follow the audio as it guides you through six different stops of interest (pausing whenever you want to explore a shop, get food, or look at something else along the way— the audio even recommends doing this at several points in the narration), and end up at the Harold Washington Library (400 S. State St), which is conveniently located next to a CTA stop.
Continue reading “Editors’ Picks: Downtown Chicago Poetry Tour Review”
A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University
In thinking about the so-called state of contemporary Asian American poetry, I am most struck by the issue of the proliferation of small presses that have remained afloat through print-on-demand publication policies and through the strategic limited print-run system. American poets of Asian descent have certainly been a beneficiary of this shift as evidenced by hundreds of poetry books that have been published within the last decade. In 2008 alone, there were approximately 20 books of poetry written by Asian Americans, the majority of which were published by independent and university presses. Of course, on the academic end, the vast majority of Asian American cultural critiques, especially book-length studies, have focused on narrative forms, but the last five years has seen a concerted emergence in monographs devoted (in part) to Asian American poetry, including but not limited to Xiaojing Zhou’s The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry (2006), Interventions into Modernist Cultures (2007) by Amie Elizabeth Parry, Race and the Avant-Garde by Timothy Yu (2008), and Apparations of of Asia by Josephine Nock-Hee Park (2008). As a way to gesture toward and perhaps push more to consider the vast array of Asian American poetic offerings in light of this critical shift, I will be highlighting some relevant independent presses in some guest blog posts. I have typically worked to include small press and university press offerings in my courses, having taught, for example, a range of works that include Sun Yun Shin’s Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press), Eric Gamalinda’s Amigo Warfare (WordTech Communications), Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (University of California Press), Timothy Liu’s For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press).
In this post, though, I will briefly list and consider the poetry collections by American writers of Asian descent that have been put out by Four Way Books (New York City), headed by founding editor and director, Martha Rhodes—and will spend a little bit more time discussing Tina Chang’s Half-Lit Houses (2004) and Sandy Tseng’s Sediment (2009). Currently, Four Way Books’ list is comprised of:
Tina Chang’s Half-Lit Houses (2004)
Pimone Triplett’s The Price of Light (2005)
C. Dale Young’s Second Person: Poems (2007)
Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s Shadow Mountain (2008)
Sandy Tseng’s Sediment (2009).
Were I to constellate the commonalities between these five collections, it would be clear that the editors at Four Way Books are very committed to the lyric approach to poetry, in which the connection between the “writer” and the lyric speaker seems more unified. I have taught Pimone Triplett’s The Price of Light in the past, specifically for my introduction to Asian American literature course. What I find most productive about this collection is its very focused attention on “lyrical issues” of the mixed-race subject. In The Price of Light, one necessarily observes how distance from an ethnic identity obscures any simple claim to authenticity and nativity. In The Price of Light, a lyric speaker returns to one vexing question: what does it mean to be Thai? To answer this question, the reader is led through a unique odyssey, where issues of poetic form, tourism, and travel all coalesce into a rich lyric tapestry.
Continue reading “On The Small Press and Asian American Poetry: A Focus on Four Way Books”
This Wednesday, I was lucky to attend Rebecca Brown’s haibun class at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood Haibun is an ancient Japanese poetic form that juxtaposes prose narrative and short haiku. Brown’s interest in the form stems from what she calls “the wonderfully uncategorizeable texts” of contemporary American poets who have taken this ancient form and adapted it to their own literary moment.
The event was packed, and I shared a tiny table in the corner with three other women, one of whom is an alumni of the University of Washington’s M.F.A. program. Years ago, she helped found the program’s literary journal, The Seattle Review, and studied with the faculty member who initiated The Castalia Reading Series, which is also hosted at Hugo House. Also in attendance was the editor of a local haiku journal, and one of Seattle’s resident specialists in Beat literature, who volunteered himself to read an example of a haibun from Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, a novel written in 1956 while Kerouac was living in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Brown’s samples of haibun ranged from pieces like Desoluation Angels to works by John Ashbery and Basho himself, the poet credited as the originator of the haibun form.
It’s been a superhero kind of week. Inspired simultaneously by this song, this NPR story, and by an article (I think from Teachers & Writers’ Collaborative magazine) in which a writing teacher asked her tentative students to write about their secret superpowers, I developed a prompt about superheroes to use with a group of adult residents at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, where my M.F.A. classmates and I lead a workshop on Wednesday nights.
After opening with an icebreaker about flight vs. invisibility, I shared two poems (“The Flash Reverses Time” by A. Van Jordan, and “Superhero Pregnant Woman” by Jessy Randall) written from the perspectives of different kinds of superheroes with the group, and asked them to choose between three options: 1) to write about an unusual superpower of their own, 2) to write about what their life might be like (how it might be the same or different) as an undercover superhero or villain, and 3) to write from the perspective of a “real” superhero (fictional or living). The intent was to draw out the class’s imaginations, away from the everyday perspectives of self, and to have them enter into the fantastic realm of the alternative desire – the “what if,” so to speak. The class responded with a wide range of interpretations – two people wrote about the ability to stop pain, several people inhabited their favorite comic book and movie characters, one young man who says that he normally writes “on the dark side” wrote a very sweet poem about his ‘superhero’ of a mother, and a young woman who was at first hesitant to share her work wrote a hilarious piece about a superhero who could, among other abilities, toast pieces of bread with her built-in laser beams.