Editors’ Picks: Teachers & Writers Collaborative Book Sale!


Teachers & Writers Collaborative book sale!
Teachers & Writers Collaborative book sale!

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.

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Friends & Neighbors: Weekend Roundup (Dec. 11-16, 2009)

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. 

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Editors’ Picks: Downtown Chicago Poetry Tour Review

ChicagoPoetryTour1

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.

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On The Small Press and Asian American Poetry: A Focus on Four Way Books

Some Offerings from Four Way Books' List
Some Offerings from Four Way Books' List

A Guest Post by Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University

Stephen H. Sohn
Stephen H. Sohn

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.

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Editors’ Picks: Haibun at Hugo House

Rebecca BrownHugo House

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.

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Weekly Prompt: Superheroes

A favorite childhood superhero (via Muppet Wiki)
A favorite childhood superhero (via Muppet Wiki)

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.

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Event Coverage: Lily Hoang’s Farewell ND Reading

Lily Hoang reads from her forthcoming collection UNFINISHED
Lily Hoang reads from her forthcoming collection UNFINISHED

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a farewell reading for South Bend, IN based novelist, Lily Hoang.  Lily received her M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2006, and has since been living in the area, teaching at St. Mary’s College, and furiously turning out new work.  In 2007, her first book, Parabola, which won the Chiasmus Undoing the Novel Contest, was published, and in 2008, her novel Changing came out from Fairy Tale Review Press.  She also has a chapbook (Mockery of a Cat) out with Mud Luscious and has three forthcoming full-length books in the pipeline: The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press, 2009/2010), Invisible Women (StepSister Press, 2010), and Unfinished (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012).  Lily’s books are incisive, imaginative and form-bending.  She plays with convention and elasticizes the boundaries of narrative and the space of the page in all sorts of ways.  She’s also well-loved among the members of the Notre Dame Creative Writing community, and has served as a kind of de-facto mentor to many of the current M.F.A. students, so when she recently announced that she is moving to Canada at the end of the year, a couple of my cohorts pooled their resources to throw her a lovely goodbye reading.

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Editors’ Picks: Voices From Southeast Asia

Voices from Southeast Asia

While browsing the library for new voices in Asian American poetry, I came across the book Voices From Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States (Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1991).  Though the book is not new, it provides historic context for the experiences that have shaped and seeded much of contemporary Southeast Asian American poetry.  The 247-page volume is comprised of a series of oral histories, each of which features the life experience of a Lao, Hmong, Vietnamese, or Cambodian refugee to the United States.  Though most of the book is written in prose, there are a few narratives in verse form.  The poem below, for example, was written by a Cambodian woman after her relocation to the Bronx.

URBAN LIFE

They take us and put us in boxes to live.

Each family lives in the same kind of box […]

Our boxes are not all in the same building […]

So we talk on the telephone and imagine

what this person does and

how he lives in his box

and I tell him about life in my box.

This poem, probably one of the earliest instances of Southeast Asian American poetry, captures in simple, unsentimental, and uncomplicated terms the experience of resettlement in the United States by a faceless “they,” a “they” responsible not only for “tak[ing] us” from Cambodia, but “put[ting] us in boxes to live.”  In the speaker’s sense of disconnection, her need to construct an imagined community life, and attempts to communicate across fractured lines, one begins to identify the beginnings of Southeast Asian American poetry.

The accounts in the book are, as US Senator Edward Kennedy puts it, “full of the agony of exile, the disruption of the refugee camps, [and] the challenge of starting over.”  Since 1975, over a million Southeast Asians have settled in the United States, established communities across the country, and begun to shape the voice of contemporary Asian American poetry.  The question for Asian American poets writing today, both those of Southeast Asian descent and other ethnicities, is how to engage the concerns of their history and to move forward.

If, in your own writing, you have struggled to engage historical material (family myth, oral narrative, historical text) in verse, please share your experiences here.  What forms and methods have worked for you?  What dilemmas and/or points of resistance have you encountered?  We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Weekly Prompt: The Art of Rhetoric

Note: This prompt was first introduced to me by poet and UW professor Andrew Feld, author of  Citizen (Harper Collins, 2004).  Because I found it so helpful to my own writing, I have decided to share it with Lantern Review.

Shakespeare Resources Center

The art of rhetoric, one of the ancient arts of discourse, is the art of persuasion and using language effectively.  Rhetorical devices and figures can prove tremendously useful to the contemporary poet, in the sense that they offer one a variety of syntactical structures that force tighter form and syntax, quicker turns in language, and—at times—more rigorous thought.

In my experience, experimenting with “rhetorical poetry” can allow a poet’s language to move in unexpected ways, thus enabling them to explore territory they wouldn’t normally breach.  Think of rhetoric as a tool than can be applied to language; the use of chiasmus, for example, will structure your thought in such a way that you begin with a word of idea, move to another, and then circle back to the initial one.  Consider the rhetorical effect of this particular construction: the sense of venturing out, circling, and returning is created not by description or narrative, but by the language itself.

The following excerpt from one of my “rhetoric” poems is an example of how using a rhetorical device in your writing can lead to some productive experimentation with voice, tone, and syntactical structure:

Sometime in the nineties, midway through

Her Southeast Asian exile, she directed the Frenchman at the salon

To Do Anything.  Thus began the cropped years.

She came home and cried.  We all cried.

Here the use of epistrophe is demonstrated in the repeated use of the word “cried” at the end of the two sentences in the final line.  Ending both sentences on the beat “cried” affects not only the rhythm of the language, but the manner in which the stanza shapes meaning and tone as well.

To write your own rhetoric poem, refer to this article, entitled “Shakespeare’s Grammar: Rhetorical Devices,” which is a quick glossary of some of the most common rhetorical devices.  Select a few (two or three, to begin) devices from the list and incorporate them into your writing by either (1) revising a previously written poem, or (2) tackling some new material.  It may be easier to begin with a poem you have already written, although starting on a completely new project may afford you a greater degree of freedom.

In short, consider the ways in which rhetoric can take pressure off you as a poet.  Let syntax do the work of poetry—you may be pleased with the results!  We would love to see any experimentation that results from your work with rhetoric, so please consider posting your responses on our blog.

What’s Going On: A Humanist’s War

Is counterinsurgency a humanist’s war? A few weeks ago, I was watching Obama’s War, Frontline’s most recent documentary on the American war effort in Afghanistan; one of the program’s most salient points was one that most interested observers are probably already well aware of, which is that the war in Afghanistan is not a conventional war with conventional strategies. And by conventional war, I mean a war where you enter with a lot of troops, take out key enemy positions, and then declare victory. Instead, the war effort is rooted in a counterinsurgency strategy in which victory is determined by the extent to which Americans can corral native support for the established government. So, how is the counterinsurgency effort going? Well, a lot of Frontline’s footage showed soldiers shooting at empty fields. Instead of being a straight get-the-bad-guy-in-your-scope-operation, a lot of the key work takes place during moments of relative calm as soldiers hold informal sit-downs with villagers in strategic areas. And herein lies another point made by the documentary: in wars of counterinsurgency, there are a lot of counter-intuitive realities. For example, more force does not necessarily translate into better results. If anything, more force makes natives apprehensive and provides insurgents with political ammunition to garner more support. Furthermore, very often the appropriate response to an attack is no response at all because when American soldiers strike back they often strike back with excessive force, which once again, as a symbolic act, has the potential to play into the hands of insurgents. While watching Obama’s War, I couldn’t help but see counterinsurgency, with respect to conventional warfare, as more of a humanist’s war in that, with counterinsurgency, soldiers are tasked with employing a campaign of goodwill in which they garner support among natives through reciprocal communication, temperance, and cultural understanding. An instrumental figure in this humanist’s counterinsurgency war is the military interpreter who is tasked with bridging the communication divide between American soldiers and Afghan natives. Very often, Obama’s War implied that the effectiveness of interpreters is the limiting factor to America’s counterinsurgency effort.

What is it like to be a military interpreter? I wondered. Well, I did a quick Google search and came across the book, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and came across a section on interpreters that illuminated for me what it must be like for these individuals. For example, interpreters are expected “not to interject their personality, ideas, or questions” and always “[mirror] the speaker’s tone and personality.” And American military operatives are instructed to “position [the] interpreter by their side (or a step back). This keeps the subject or target audience from shifting their attention or fixating on the interpreter rather than on the leader.” Of course, this is all reasonable and for the sake of effectiveness, but at the same time, it seems lamentable that a figure with field experience among natives and among American troops would assume such a secondary position. Which brings up questions about why native interpreters choose to work with Americans in the first place. I suspect economics are involved, but perhaps there’s more. Undoubtedly, most interpreters must, at some point, deal with questions of loyalty, identity, and legitimacy. While the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual instructs American military personnel to take care of their interpreters, there’s also a warning to be cautious around interpreters, in case their loyalties lie elsewhere. Moreover, in terms of identity, interpreters are tasked with an interesting set of objectives, in that they are expected to understand the nuances of not one, but two languages, and be cognizant of culturally specific mannerisms. And this is all in addition to being able to adopt many of the qualities and characteristics of the speakers they are interpreting. With these kinds of responsibilities, interpreters operate in a provocative nexus point between native Afghans and American forces.

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