{"id":1799,"date":"2010-05-26T10:52:51","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T15:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1799"},"modified":"2010-05-27T13:12:39","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T17:12:39","slug":"process-profile-tamiko-beyer-discusses-in-this-metropolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/26\/process-profile-tamiko-beyer-discusses-in-this-metropolis\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Tamiko Beyer Discusses “In this metropolis”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Tamiko Beyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tamiko Beyer<\/a>\u2019s poetry has appeared <\/em>in<\/em> The Collagist, Sonora Review, OCHO, and elsewhere. She serves as the poetry editor of<\/em> Drunken Boat and has led writing workshops for homeless LGBT youth with the New York Writers Coalition. She is a founding member of Agent 409: a queer, multi-racial writing collective, and is a Kundiman Fellow. She is pursing her M.F.A at Washington University in St. Louis. Find her online at wonderinghome.com<\/a> and blogging<\/a> at kenyonreview.org<\/a>.<\/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, Tamiko discusses her poem “In this metropolis,” which first appeared in <\/strong><\/em>The Progressive in February 2008.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

* * *
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it was April. I was writing a poem a day and running out of ideas. I turned to Charles Bernstein\u2019s Experiments<\/a> and chose the first one: a “homolinguistic translation,” a translation from English to English. I chose to “translate” Ilya Kaminsky\u2019s poem “A Toast” because I was obsessed with his book Dancing in Odessa<\/a><\/em> and wanted to live in one of his poems for a while.<\/p>\n

The result: a whole new realm of diction. And a tone of contemplative urgency from Kaminsky\u2019s poem that infused itself into my own, even when I eventually let go of the constraint.<\/p>\n

Themes of home and community (ones I return to again and again) also echo from the source poem. Early on, it became clear to me that I was writing about gentrification. Living in a dynamically shifting part of Brooklyn<\/a>, I am hyper-aware that what I do and how I spend my money isn\u2019t just about me. There are ramifications across the neighborhood. I would have never set out to write a poem quite like this in tone and voice, but the exercise brought out a persona that gave me a strange kind of permission to push hard into this reality.<\/p>\n

The finished poem was published in The Progressive<\/em><\/a>, which meant that people who didn\u2019t even know I am a poet read it. To me, this is not a particularly \u201ceasy\u201d poem, so it was meaningful to hear how it resonated with folks. One acquaintance emailed me to say that she opened the magazine and, \u201cthere in poetry is the story of my neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u2013 poetry that works at the unexpected intersections of language and <\/span>the stuff of our daily lives\/struggles \u2013 this is the kind of poetry that is most important to me. I felt lucky that it happened in this poem.<\/p>\n

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

In this metropolis <\/strong><\/p>\n

The street elongates
\na tenebrous tongue, spectacle
\nits declared unit: this pre-war
\none bed\u2013 <\/em><\/p>\n

A teenager shoots
\nhoops in the schoolyard,
\ndouble-crossed by MTV
\nand having missed<\/p>\n

the getaway car, thunderous
\nsouped-up engine revving
\nthrough the up
\nand coming neighborhood<\/em>. Ring<\/p>\n

tone of the hour:
\nthe last easy
\nbreaths of a sleeping child
\nin a flame-licked building.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In this metropolis, rain transforms
\nthin trees into bistros festooned
\nwith tea lights whose flames
\nscintillate across papers<\/p>\n

with headlines that call the deluge.
\nChampagne flutes raised
\n\u2013 A toast! A toast!<\/em> \u2013
\nthe real-estate agents loosen<\/p>\n

their ties, slip off
\nblack pumps and stretch toes bound
\nup in flesh stockings.
\nThe b-boys and b-girls crank it:<\/p>\n

out for one last tagging, the looped
\nword, all the bursting smells \u2013
\nthe gentry are coming
\non steeds and silks aflutter \u2013<\/p>\n

wrap up your blistered hand, Ma,
\nthe yellow and red coffee can, afternoons
\nof long, slow stories \u2013 these floorboards
\nwill tell their weight in gold\u2026<\/p>\n

here we go here we go here we go \u2013<\/p>\n

come spectacle come floods.<\/p>\n

[Originally published in The Progressive, <\/em>Volume 72, Number 2, February 2008].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tamiko Beyer\u2019s poetry has appeared in The Collagist, Sonora Review, OCHO, and elsewhere. She serves as the poetry editor of Drunken Boat and has led writing workshops for homeless LGBT youth with the New York Writers Coalition. She is a founding member of Agent 409: a queer, multi-racial writing collective, and is a Kundiman Fellow. […]<\/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},"categories":[318],"tags":[321,332],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799"}],"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=1799"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1942,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1799\/revisions\/1942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}