{"id":5736,"date":"2012-05-23T07:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5736"},"modified":"2012-05-23T01:59:30","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T05:59:30","slug":"process-profile-margaret-rhee-discusses-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/23\/process-profile-margaret-rhee-discusses-materials\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Margaret Rhee Discusses “Materials”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Martha Kenney, Amy Shen, Margaret Rhee, Jennifer Beth and Tania P\u00e9rez-Bustos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Margaret Rhee<\/a> is the author of the chapbooks <\/span><\/em>Yellow<\/span> (Tinfish Press, 2011) and <\/span><\/em>University Dreams<\/span> (Forthcoming 2012). She is the managing editor of <\/span><\/em>Mixed Blood,<\/span> a literary journal centered on race and innovative poetics edited by C.S. Giscombe.<\/span>\u00a0In April,\u00a0she curated the literary reading, “Body Maps: A Digital\/Real Asian American Feminist Poetics” for the Asian American Women Artists Association.\u00a0As a new media artist, she works on feminist participatory digital storytelling<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>supporting issues of HIV\/AIDS awareness for women incarcerated in the San Francisco Jail. <\/em>Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies and New Media Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a Kundiman fellow.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. As in the past, we\u2019ve asked several\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Lantern Review\u00a0<\/strong>contributors to discuss\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>their process for composing a poem of theirs that we\u2019ve published. In this installment, Margaret Rhee reflects upon her new media piece \u201cMaterials<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Issue 4<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/div>\n
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* \u00a0* \u00a0*<\/span><\/div>\n
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It begins with a drive.\u00a0 The road up to Santa Cruz from Berkeley is a winding one.\u00a0Largely known as one of the most dangerous highways in the state, Highway 17 wraps around the Santa Cruz Mountains with sharp pretzel turns and dense traffic on weekday afternoons. \u00a0It\u2019s my first trip to Santa Cruz.\u00a0 And I am driving a big, used silver Volvo station wagon, one bought just a few weeks before. My dear friend and colleague Kate Darling is in the passenger seat helping with Mapquest directions.\u00a0 We finally arrive safely at our destination, the first ever Science Studies creative writing workshop, organized by Martha Kenney and held at the University of Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

Soon after arriving at the workshop space, we found ourselves having lunch with much admired feminist scholar Donna Harraway.\u00a0 It was beyond lovely.\u00a0 Kate and I shared about our drive up.\u00a0 Donna joked that people in Santa Cruz often say that the road keeps those they don\u2019t want out of Santa Cruz!\u00a0 In between bites of salad I laughed, not only because this was funny, but because it was probably true.\u00a0\u00a0I laughed out of relief as well, not believing we actually made it up that long winding road.<\/p>\n

Our assignment prior to the workshop was to write a creative piece inspired by our scholarship. I was thrilled by the possibility of combining, intersecting, and interweaving theoretical questions I had with poetry\/poetic form. \u00a0At lunch I wondered what the feedback process would be like for the cross-genre works written for the prompt.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies and New Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and my interests includes the intersections of science, technology, and race. \u00a0But I\u2019m also a poet and new media artist with similar concerns.\u00a0 I like intersections, interventions, and mutations.<\/p>\n

At the time, I was reading Aram Saroyan’s collection of minimalist poetry from Ugly Ducking Press.\u00a0\u00a0 Simultaneously, I was working through Hsuan Hsu and Martha Lincoln\u2019s co-authored article on the exhibit Body Worlds, while engaging with an online HASTAC Scholars forum (an amazing virtual new media collective) on Bodies + Body Worlds.\u00a0 I was concerned about the ethics of the exhibition, as well as the elision of issues of race and transnationalism in discussing Bodies + Body Worlds.\u00a0 When the opportunity to participate in the Science Studies creative writing workshop arrived, I signed up and wrote an early draft of \u201cMaterials\u201d as an experiment.\u00a0 I hoped to delve into the questions (personal, political, intellectual) I had around the topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaterials\u201d is a special poem\/new media\/theoretical piece for me because it is my first attempt to merge the three \u201clanguages\u201d in which I am actively engaged.\u00a0 How do they look together? How do they trouble ideas of poetry and theory? How is one supposed to read \u201cMaterials?\u201d I have no idea and I like it that way.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaterials\u201d travels.<\/p>\n

When preparing for the workshop at UCSC, I worked on an early draft of \u201cMaterials\u201d during a long Bubble Tea Date with poet Jai Arun Ravine.\u00a0 I remember showing Jai the poem.\u00a0 Ze liked it, the center column the most. I continued writing the piece.<\/p>\n

Then \u201cMaterials\u201d was workshopped at UCSC with Martine Lappe, Karen De Vries, and Donna Harraway in an incredibly generative dialogue. \u00a0Revisions were made. \u00a0Their insights were honored and held within the poem.<\/p>\n

A few months later, the poem was performed at Revolution Books in Hawai\u2019i.\u00a0 I read with dear friends and much admired poets Craig Santos Perez, Brandy McDougall, and Janine Oshiro.\u00a0 I was in Hawai\u2019i for the UC Humanities Research Institute Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT), and serendipitously arrived just in time for the publication of my first chapbook, Yellow<\/em>, by the University of Hawai\u2019i-based Tinfish Press. \u00a0Psychic convergence? \u00a0Or poetic convergence? \u00a0Perhaps both.<\/p>\n

At the reading, my piece was a group performance.\u00a0 I asked a few feminist techno-science scholars to mutate into feminist techno-science poets and read \u201cMaterials\u201d with me: Amy Shen, Jennifer Beth, Martha Kenney, and Tania P\u00e9rez-Bustos<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Margaret Rhee, Jennifer Beth, Martha Kenney and Tania P\u00e9rez-Bustos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though the act of writing a poem is often done in solitude, we do not write alone.\u00a0 Influences, settings, mentors, colleagues, books, news articles, emotions, and memories all flow into your bloodstream through the soft parts of your fingers.\u00a0 And some poems are not meant to be read alone but together.<\/p>\n

+<\/p>\n

In 2009, I presented with fellow Kundiman poetas at \u201cAdvancing Feminist Poetics and Activism: A Gathering\u201d convened by Belladonna.\u00a0 During one of the sessions, I naively asked poet Ann Lauterbach, \u201cWhat is the difference between poetry and theory?\u201d She answered, \u201cIt\u2019s not as different as they try to make you believe\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

That answer stayed with me and, I believe, enabled the writing of \u201cMaterials\u201d two years later.<\/p>\n

In April 2012, at the second iteration of the Science Studies creative workshop (now called Mutated Text), poet Cecil Giscombe spoke on poetry.\u00a0 After judging several poetry contests this year, Cecil shared that many of the judges\u2019 debates included the accusation \u201cthat\u2019s not poetry.\u201d\u00a0 Cecil said, \u201cWhen they say it\u2019s not poetry, you know<\/em> it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suppose the process of writing \u201cMaterials\u201d was an attempt to push the boundaries of poetry. Something my favorite poets, such as Cecil, Craig, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, all do so admirably and politically in their work. \u00a0Let\u2019s take one of Craig’s maps for example,\u00a0\u201cfrom<\/em>\u00a0lisiensan ga\u2019lago\u201d in\u00a0from unincorporated territory [hacha]:<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n
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The imagination is an Oceania of possibilities. The blank page is an excerpt of the Pacific, a blank map haunted by story. Each word is an island. The visible part of the word\u2014its textual body\u2014is where we live. The invisible part of the word is the submerged mountain of meaning. Words emerging from the silence are islands forming\u2014phrases are archipelagos. The space between is defined by waves and currents.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
(Craig Santos Perez, The Poetics of Mapping Diaspora, Navigating Culture, and Being From (Part 5)<\/a>)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On our drive up to Santa Cruz, I had no idea my old car was dying.\u00a0 In a few weeks that car would break down\u2014a typical occurrence for a poor graduate student and poet, I suppose.\u00a0 But I come back to that Santa Cruz Road because I want to think about roads and writing poems.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the road to a poem is a straight shot. Or it\u2019s a long stretch of highway whose horizon never seems to end.\u00a0 Or it\u2019s a dangerous road that winds around and around, the kind of road on which you just need to continue on and on. Like my first trip to Santa Cruz: even though you\u2019re not sure if you\u2019ll get there, you just trust that your used car is going to last and take you where you\u2019re supposed to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margaret Rhee is the author of the chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and University Dreams (Forthcoming 2012). She is the managing editor of Mixed Blood, a literary journal centered on race and innovative poetics edited by C.S. Giscombe.\u00a0In April,\u00a0she curated the literary reading, “Body Maps: A Digital\/Real Asian American Feminist Poetics” for the Asian American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"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":[314,353,690,724,1051],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5736"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5736"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5777,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5736\/revisions\/5777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}