{"id":1736,"date":"2010-05-19T12:40:43","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T17:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1736"},"modified":"2010-05-28T12:33:14","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T16:33:14","slug":"process-profile-janine-joseph-discusses-postcard-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/19\/process-profile-janine-joseph-discusses-postcard-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Janine Joseph Discusses “Postcard”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Janine Joseph<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Janine Joseph is a Ph.D. student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in <\/em>Third Coast, Spoon River Poetry Review, and<\/em> Calabash, among other journals. A Kundiman fellow, she is a recent recipient of a Brazos Bookstore\/Academy of American Poets prize and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She holds degrees from UC Riverside and the Creative Writing Program at NYU where she taught with the Starworks Foundation and Community~Word Project. She currently teaches with Writers in the Schools and serves as a poetry editor for <\/em>Gulf Coast. Born in the Philippines, she was once a child actress.<\/em><\/p>\n

In our Process Profiles series, young contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication.\u00a0 Here, Janine discusses her poem<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong> <\/strong> \u201cPostcard,\u201d which originally appeared in the Fall\/Winter 2008 themed issue (\u201cMaking Tracks: Escape or Journey\u201d) of <\/em>Nimrod International Journal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

I first started thinking about \u201cPostcard\u201d when an old friend came to visit for a weekend in May of 2006. While waiting for our chicken kabob sandwiches at Mr. Falafel, I told Lucy, who had studied poetry with me in college, that I couldn\u2019t get the image of a \u201csoup kitchen\u2014but not a soup kitchen<\/em>\u201d out of my head. I was fresh out of my first year in the MFA program at NYU and, with a stainless steel cup in my hand, I talked about Tupperware and a childhood memory. Lucy, being Lucy, listened and then told me what I had was a poem. What kind of a poem, I didn\u2019t know. After lunch, we took the subway into the city and walked.<\/p>\n

After an evening of writing in September, I brought \u201cSoup Kitchen\u201d into workshop. On the page, the poem was a perfectly square thing that could be cut, glued, and made to fit on a postcard. It included mysterious and humiliating phrases like \u201cjalousie of life\u201d in the last line. (Also, it used the color mauve.) What on earth did I mean by writing \u201cjalousie of life\u201d? I\u2019m not even going to pretend I knew. What was clear by the end of my fifteen minutes of sitting silently during discussion was that the poem, according to my notes, was one part \u201clovely\u201d and one part \u201cthis could go.\u201d In class, I drew a line dividing one movement from the other.<\/p>\n

When I worked on the poem again in January, I saw that the last five lines of the poem all had a similar impulse. They all signaled departure, but in the wrong directions. One line had the word \u201cwind\u201d in it, and another said \u201cMore:\u201d. One even had the speaker \u201crising into \/ an ocean until morning.\u201d Poor speaker. I started deleting. I took a shower. I typed \u201cYes,\u201d and printed the poem out before heading to work. I folded all of the white space back so only the text was visible and carried it with me on the subway. From Brooklyn to Washington Square, I had nothing written after \u201cYes,\u201d.<\/p>\n

The last section happened like this: I lifted the phrase \u201cjazz hands\u201d from two other failed poems in which \u201cjazz hands\u201d was my only salvageable part. Walking on W 4th St. on my way back to work after my lunch break, the word \u201ctendered\u201d came to me. It was a sunny day. I knew I didn\u2019t want the poem to be sad. I passed by a bagel truck. And my favorite couple grilling chicken kabobs. The title, \u201cPostcard,\u201d came from a poem I wrote a week after my first draft of \u201cSoup Kitchen.\u201d I figured that if I was wild enough to use \u201cjalousie,\u201d I could fit a cow in there somewhere.<\/p>\n

Below is the published version of “Postcard.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Postcard<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before I knocked, Ricky\u2019s mother
\nwould open the front door and continue<\/span>
\nsewing in the family room while I
\nmade it into their kitchen and lowered<\/span>
\nmy empty bucket under the running faucet
\nin one effortless grunt.<\/span>
\nAnd then I\u2019d be out again,<\/span>
\nbalancing the water weight on my ankle-
\nbone as I cut through the shared lawn,<\/span>
\nshaking over the spikelets and spilling nothing.
\nIn our kitchen I\u2019d dip empty Tupperware<\/span>
\ninto the borrowed water and turn the vertical blinds
\nso the stalks of light would fill the brims with a broth<\/span>
\nof similar light. While mom slept off her hunger,
\ndreaming we\u2019d die and be plotted in the tile,<\/span>
\nI sifted the morsels of stucco-ceiling reflected
\nbowl by bowl along the breakfast table.<\/span>
\nYes,<\/span>
\nwe rose one morning, vacated the house, surged<\/span>
\nthrough the lawn and upturned bicycles
\nspinning wind in the driveway\u2014yes.<\/span>
\nIf you ask me now, I\u2019ll tell you
\nthe leaves on our trees were a hundred<\/span>
\njazz hands, the sun a cow, or a moon,
\ndepending on the day, the time, the tendered<\/span>
\nsashay of this earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Janine Joseph is a Ph.D. student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in Third Coast, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Calabash, among other journals. A Kundiman fellow, she is a recent recipient of a Brazos Bookstore\/Academy of American Poets prize and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[318],"tags":[292,321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1951,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions\/1951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}