Melissa: carries the sea with memories

• Poem from our studies: Khaled Mattawa's "Echo and Elixir 2"
• Poem from my personal work: A poem, "The Afternoon Elephant in the Lunch Break Room." (posted below for the zine.)
• Artist Bio: carries the sea with memories
• Potluck item at Elmaz's: Maybe my pulled chicken adobo again? (;

The Afternoon Elephant in the Lunch Break Room



The Ravenel Bridge in Charleston
is a white, looming structure
over the south peninsula

where I climb over the fence
and think: not of dying
but meeting the black medical student

who jumped into the teal,
shimmering bay
just a few days earlier

at work, we heard the news



over the radio, interspersed
between minute-to-minute broadcast updates
about a white man who stopped traffic

drove into the bridge's concrete wall
wrote with black, bolded letters on
the side of his truck: I want to die

he didn't succeed in killing himself
but his life story was on the tip
of everybody's tongues

unlike the black medical student



whose story was spat out by the townsfolk
forgotten and thrown to the sea like her body
dismantled by the coldness

my coworker said: "Poor guy;
he gone and try to kill 'imself.
I gave my peace. Sent my prayers to heaven.

but that bridge's fence needs to be higher.
other folks can't be trusted."
"others like whom?" I asked her

but she dodged my looks



with her pretty, sea-blue eyes
so here I am, standing
at the edge of the bridge

at the tip of the concrete wall
and over the fence
cars past by me and honk

I'm not thinking of dying
I just came here to ask her:
how does it feel

to be remembered?

When the stories, words, enter your body

---
"I sing 'Happiness uncontainable'
and 'fields greening in March'
until I'm sad and tired of truth,
and as usual I'm never believed."
---

Khaled Mattawa's Zodiac of Echoes struck me in a visceral and mentally shifting place. His poems play around with form, empty space, and geography, commenting on a transnational relationship between place, labor, identity, and memory. I loved his poems, and though some weren't as accessible to me as others, it reiterated many thoughts I've been thinking about lately, like a poem's insularity of multiple meanings, its many shades, and the impressions that we--as a reader--imprint unto the poems.

Mattawa's poems talk a lot about the sea. And that was my gateway into his poems--his sense of displacement and self that was dependent on a vastness that ultimately connects via the body of water. His first poem of the collection opened his moving, stunning voice to me:

"Next time, we promised, it'll be the Atlantic, next time
some salty immensity, some honest to goodness breeze,
the smell of the earth turning around itself,
a clear run to the horizon, a clean shot to Africa,
to something we could beckon and understand,
something the waves would release us from
now that we were stuck here on the Biloxi road
chained, and chain smoking, aware of the sea
we left behind, and that had left us,
the Mediterranean, that other swamp, too far
to touch us again, too far to ever matter."

I brought so many of my own emotive responses to these lines. And I think that's the beauty of poetry in comparison to fiction. There's a direct brevity with poetry that's able to strike the "belly song" much faster, and poetry can use narrative and language as tools in a succinct motion which fiction or prose takes time to create. With poetry, you can picture a world with one phrase, "a clean shot to Africa," and the imagery saturates in your mind, creating a mental space that is vividly distinct and tangible, filled with mood, tone, possibilities, longing. And I think this beauty of poetry has given me so much this past semester, and how Khaled writes from a place of remembering has allowed me to see what I want to do with my own writing, with my own emotions, thoughts, shouts, and whispers on paper.

Khaled's poem series, "Echo & Elixer," was a liminal journey for me. In the second poem, he takes me through the body of languages through cab drivers in Cairo, and I feel the world at the edge of my tongue in this piece. To do such vast movements in my mind--through a narrative, through such brevity--really broke me down to a space of clear adoration. I have to admit it's my favorite poem in the book, or at least one of them.

“Vicinity (A Sequence)" was a constant moving portrait, a poem of accessibility and inaccessibility to me. I say the latter, too, because of its moves in empty space and breath, its differing forms, and how it embodies--to me--a lingering puzzle, a labyrinth of emotive language.

'subway cars plunge into the sea "to form a reef
                           off the Delaware shore." What do you mean to me now
that I have become your substance?
You a moment                           and I am your duration,
a web of instincts             refined
             toward a pure savagery,
                                                    paradisal, pubescent.

To me, this part of the poem becomes an actualization of the metaphysical and self-reference to the poem. When I read a poem, it becomes a part of me, as if the stories, the words, enter my body. I am transfixed by the signifiers, by the objects and forms that the words allude to. In a way, the words do become "a web of instincts      refined / toward a pure savagery, / paradisal, pubescent."

"... the only mercy is memory"

There's a cadence and singsong quality to Lucille Clifton's voice, so much that when she ruminates about death, race, mercy, America, 9/11, the phantom, the wizard of Oz, nature, family, mother, sister, brother, father, logos, Powell, the race riots, etc. etc., she sung me to sleep with her nuanced and alluring language. I had to put her book down throughout the weekend because of the power behind the brevity of her words. She is a powerful voice. I had to read her slowly and give her honor.

How Lucille organized her poetry collection first interested me, compelled me. Her poems in last words informed the way I looked at the rest of poems, and how she used lowercase formatted the sound in the poems as whispers of longing and memory, shifting the way I look at perceptions and mercy. Her poems feel so intimate, like I'm slipping into a conversation between two people who know each other deeply. One of my favorite poems from this section is dying:

i saw a small moon rise
from the breast of a woman
lying in a hospital hall
and I saw that the moon was me
and I saw that the punctured bag
of a woman body was me
and i saw you sad there in the lobby
waiting to visit and I wanted
to sing to you
go home
i am waiting for you there

The visceral experience from this poem was overwhelming, and the way she paints the scene with minimality introduces an outer-body experience, as if the exchanges between the small "i" and the big "I" represented watching one's own body in the feverish experience before death, like it's a dream. I thought of my grandmother in her hospital bed before she died. I thought of the moment I tearfully clung to her and apologized for the many things I had failed at. And Lucille's ability to capture that moment before death in a nuanced cadence was beauty to me. There's an unspeakable emotive language that occurs before death, and Lucille is able to thread that language out of the bones of her words. It's magical and dreamlike and alluring and painful, like a purging, like mercy.

My mother's name is Mercy. Her full name is Mercidita. I never say her name aloud, and I rarely speak about my biological, estranged mother besides to point out that she has transferred parts of her sadness to my body, like my grandmother did. Lucille forced me to confront these emotions, within the pangs of memory.

Her next section stories contained my favorite poems. the river between us, in the mirror, a story for edgar, mercy, here rests, after oz, the Phantom, Powell, hands, and stop. It's the way she writes about her subjects with veracity and verisimilitude, usurping the centre of knowledge by removing what's expected. In a story, her last stanza stayed with me:

later
our mothers went mad and
our brothers killed themselves
and we began this storytelling life
wondering whose father that was
wondering how did we survive
to live not happily but

ever after

How do you transcend the personal purging and healing in poems and make art out of your pain, your life? Lucille writes from a deep, deep place, and achieves a mastery over her experiences, owns them like her severed fingers in hands--she was born with polydactyly, two extra fingers on each hand:

look    hold these regulated hands
against the sky
see how they were born to more
than bone     see how their shadow
steadies what i remain     whole
alive      twelvefingered

I have been struggling with that question throughout the semester. The well in which I was born in, the circumstances of my life, has cast out my body into the familial fray of brokenness and stories, and I believe that all of us are born with many stories, stories that haunt us from memory and obsession. "... the only mercy is memory" is how Lucille begins this beautiful poetry collection, and I think this gives way to the veil of her message, pulls apart the wall of threads that protect the narrator-persona of her poems. She constantly changes the centre of the poem, the big and little "I's", like in Powell, where she speaks from the point of view of one of the officers who beat Rodney King.

In her next two sections september song: a poem in 7 days and the message from the Ones, she continues to shift the centre, whether through process and rumination or through the logos, through the beginning Word (alluding to creation and Genesis). I am enthralled by her mastery, her whispered singsong that strikes me at a deeper place. Her work centers itself into a voice grounded in its time and place and cultural geography, but is able to transcend into a lyrical testament of the soul enumerated by mercy and memory.

I want to end with her poem on a plaque outside the NYC Public Library. It just speaks to the thoughts I'm having right now:

The Belly Song in My Sea

And this poem
This poem
This poem / I give / to you.
This poem is a song / I sing / I sing / to you
from the bottom
        of the sea
             in my belly


Reading Etheridge Knight was a heart-wrenching and visceral experience for me. His life was a belly song, a sea. His three marriages, his longing, his 8 years in prison, in the Korean War, in Mississippi, in poverty, in pool halls, on the streets, his toasting, his poetry--everything about him paints a complexed and haunted man, and I could not help but cry as I read his poetry. I felt as if I was getting to know a man so intimately, and his poems broke me. Yet, they also healed me, too.

I don't want to give too much of my thoughts away because of our group presentation on Tuesday (which I'm SO excited for), and for the sake of keeping some parts of my belly song of Etheridge, I want to speak specifically about that poem, Belly Song.

Poetry comes from our belly. They come from a deeper place. The cadence of this poem spoke to me in ways that struck a submerged cavity past the ribs and directly to the heart. What Etheridge has created through his poetry are vignettes of healing, and his anguish is wrung out in his words, placed between the breaths and pauses, and we heal through his belly songs, we know his belly songs, we are one with belly songs. The repetition in his poem reminds me of how he threads his love and anger of life throughout the collection. He sings his laughter, sings his sadness.

His process of catharsis was a unique and utterly defining reading for me. It's because of his refining process. Catharsis literally means to purge. Etheridge lays out everything in his words--his madness to his joy--he hides nothing and at times uses his silences, his breaths and pauses, to convey the purgation of his poetry. As I read Etheridge, I had to put the book down in moments and fight tears because I felt the culmination of his being coming through his stanzas and couplets, I felt the reign of his emotions and longing and the disparity between his wants and needs, and I felt as if I, too, were purging my emotions along with his as I continued along. His words branded themselves on my soul. Left a mark. Left me wanting.

This made me think of the power of witnessing, testifying. Etheridge's first entryway into poetry was through toasts--long, oral narratives that are steeped in Black origins. He made these toasts in pool halls, bars, dives, etc. as a young black cat, and though his toasts built the foundation of his healing, the environs of where the toasts were made structured his drug addition. That was the start of his demons. As a way to challenge his addiction, he wrote poetry to heal himself, to purge himself. There's a power to witnessing, even if it's to himself. But it makes me wonder how this power is shifted, how the voice is rendered powerless when the poems still can't change a man's path through the valley of death.

Alas, I fell in love with Etheridge's voice, with his soul.

Come forward, and speak.

Here I am, stuck in my husband’s apartment in Norfolk, Virginia, where the wind is howling and the rain falls and falls and falls and falls, never-ending like the view of the ocean on the horizon. I can’t help but be angry and happy and confused—because at least, after 2 months, my husband is snoring peacefully besides me—but after the Navy’s incessant volatility on Friday and two canceled flights due to Hurricane Sandy, I can’t help but think: why can’t life give me a break? Just this once. And these feelings pour into my writing, how I handle the stress, and how I read. I think it’s a wonderful irony that the two books I read for this week are Barbara Jane Reyes’s Diwata and Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, as Hurricane Sandy dominates this city so foreign to me, and I’m stuck here. The instant-now of this moment overfills me like the incessant rain, and I feel overwhelmed yet pleased that the parallel narratives of my life—writing and my marriage—intersect without volition, intention, and I’m stuck to figure out this dilemma with my thoughts and a pen.

In this very transparant status of mind, Barbara’s Diwata spoke to me as if it were a process of reexamining and rearticulating myths, as a way to dismantle, deconstruct them. The words, the narratives, the language spoke to me like the rain did, clear and dominating and incessant. I felt blessed.

Each poem was a conversation on myth, on constructs, whether they were socially accepted (Eve, the Genesis story, diwata, duyong, etc.) or made up (the fictionalized myth in “Why Girls Do Not Speak.”)

The first poem, “A Genesis of We, Cleaved,” opens up the collection in a breathtaking manner, placing the Genesis/creation myth into the mouth of Eve, rearranging the old myth, retelling it, and making it wholly anew and familiar. It also, however, became a conversation on the process of writing, as well as the process of storytelling. In the dark belly of a man, there is a woman who learns how to weave song, and she “torn from the haven of your blood, the cradle of your flesh and tendons.” This poem is juxtaposed by “The Bamboo’s Insomnia,” which is a brief, beautiful poem on the creation of a poet: “I can’t sleep. There is a poet stuck between the love lines of my palms. / And I would tell her to get out if I could, but there is a poet stuck inside / the cradle of my bones and tendons.”

This brings me to Barbara’s poems, “Eve Speaks” and “The Bamboo’s Insomnia 2,” both of which are structured in a similar fashion as the first two poems: one, where Eve speaks and two, a persona stuck within the body. The somatic nature of these four poems bring to my mind our class discussion on immigrant poetics reclaiming the body, as the first step in colonization is telling a single story of the marginalized, and the single story first conquers the marginalized bodies—as a way to dehumanize and ‘other’ the oppressed. Here, Barbara is directly retelling, reclaiming, retaking the woman’s body in “A Genesis of We, Cleaved” and “Eve Speaks”—she is giving the first woman a voice. She dispels old myths by telling the alternative story:

“Lover, do not come near, for I see story in your broken parts. Lover / do not promise, for when you do, I come to loathe words. Lover, do not / speak, for what you say is vapor. / … Lover, did you not / know I wrote my own creation story? Did you not know we all do.”

“The Bamboo’s Insomnia 2” is another creation myth—the act of childbirth—but it usurps the first “The Bamboo’s Insomnia” by changing the person within into a male babe. The mother dies after the birth. It’s violent. “There is no known portrait of her face, he now laments. Only my mosaic / of many scattered stones.” Here, the poem brings out the “I” in the last line. Is this the voice of the mother’s? It may be that it is her and that her stories are “many scattered stones.”

I also want to talk about two more poems, “A Little Bit About Lola Ilang” and “Why Girls Do Not Speak.”

What I love about “A Little Bit About Lola Ilang” is how Barbara captures the ‘voice’ (literally, the syntax and the repetition of “you know”) of the elders via the ‘voice’ of the poem’s narrator. I also love how the narrative moves haphazardly, as if it is a brief moment around the campfire when a manong talks ‘story’—how one moves like a snake telling a tale and starts with a single image of old women: “They flipped their cigarettes with / their tongues so fast.” This poem moves like a film. But it’s also a retelling. It takes an old talkstory and sheds light on how World War II affected a family, but it also goes beyond the retelling and opens up on the lost Japanese soldiers, commenting on the erasure and devastation of war, both on the enemy and the conquered.

“Why Girls Do Not Speak” is a fantastic made-up myth Barbara infused into a poem that directly challenges limiting gender constructs via talkstory and recreation. But it also alludes to another great myth, Plato’s Cave metaphor, where a man travels out of the cave and becomes enlightened by the sun, but when he returns to free his fellow, oppressed, and chained men, they tell him he is insane—they continued to choose to be oppressed by the dark shadows of reality. Here, the woman hunter is the enlightened man. Her tribe’s women are sold off to colonizers who entrap and enslave them, but they become accustomed to their oppression: the whalebone cages and narrow, pinching shoes. When she returns to save them, they claim “they did not recognized her” and “so she returned to Bundok alone.” This poem struck me in a deeper place, and I could not help but relate it to Elmaz’s speech last class, the backlash of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism that enslaves the American public, the oncoming election and my fear of Romney, and how, just when my husband and I were trying to have our first sushi date in months, a woman besides us goes on a rant on why Obama supporters are stupid and Romney is just about making state/local government priority and the “racism is dead now” talk. It made me think of literature being dumbed down and social politics not taught in schools, how our poems and our stories can only do so much to a culture that’s already forsaken books, and how my writing only makes me feel even more isolated and alone when I talk to those outside academia.

It makes me think of the cave. It makes me think of Lispector’s words: “May whoever knows the truth come forward. And speak. We shall listen contritely.”

But the power of our words is innumerable, as is the power of old myths, of dismantling myths, of making new ones. There is a power to our words, which is why are continually silenced. And I cannot help but be thankful for books such as Diwata, and to come across it during the early stage of my writing life, as it shows to me the power we do have as poets of color.

Barbara ends the collection with “Aswang,” which is, as many already mentioned, a female demon in Philippine folklore who preys on fetuses and sucks them from mothers’ wombs. Barbara mentioned at a TAYO reading that I planned way back in 2010 (and at the end of the book) that the ‘aswang’ comes from the colonizing Spaniards who wished to dehumanize the tribal priestesses, as many were in power. It was a way to retell their story, oppress them, strip them of their power, and it worked. Here, Barbara is reclaiming the female body of the aswang. And many Filipino/FilAm writers today are reclaiming her, taking back her distorted body, making her whole again.

Fittingly, Barbara ends the collection with: “Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.”

It is a dare from a witch, from the aswang, from the stealer of life, of babies. Do so, and see what happens.

"An image that is never filmed"

Tonight, I want to focus on the poetry of Cathy Tagnak Rexford and her ability to capture an photography in a poem. "Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film," "Kinetoscope," and "The Negative," all portray the making of an image into structured words. It's beautiful.

It's the way Rexford deals with an image and memory and perception that entralls me. In "Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film," she uses repetition, as "Loop the sound," and "Wait. Wait. Wait." and breaks between words on the same line to evoke the way the mind obsesses over a moment or a person or an object. "Her hairline marks her shift         from caribou to woman." That's so much weight in this one line, a line that follows "Loop the sound of tundra grass sprouting." There's a natural movement here, and the poem moves like a camera, focusing on an object, like a woman, to the blurred people behind her, the people that make her who she is: "When you blink, the camera captures / the frame of her kin, walking upside down." Also, I obsess over the line where she says, "The shutter will remember / their white crested etchings. / They resurface in the lyric of your documentary." There's so much here, and she captures how the camera cannot fully capture everything in the moment. The camera can only focus on one object and all the rest of images/objects in the picture blur out of focus. This is exactly what happens in our memory, our perception. Memory is associative like this poem, and it works in haphazard, pattern-like obsession. The structure, the body of the poem on the page works like and veers off like memory, the breaths and the pauses evoke the lapses in our brain and the work it does to continue each thought. 

"Kinetoscope" is another poem I fell in love with. I feel like Rexford is saying something very acute about her writing, "I will write the movement of wings, and I will / write a blood sky so he may trace the line of the horizon." It's a beautiful poem, and she's evoking something that's vivid in this photograph poem--she's drawing out the image, threading out the soul of the man and his action of handling an "extinct / bird" and juxtaposes his imagery and positionality with the faultiness of human memory, emphasized and alluded to the man's failed migration and failure to capture this moment on film.

There is something to be said about how memory works, how it fails, and what it obsesses. "The Negative" brings up these conjectures and thoughts, as she says, "I watch as a negative transform" and even in that word--negative--we can comprehend this idea of a negative photograph and negative space--empty space--and how such spatial concepts provide "distilling meaning from underexposure."

It makes me think about how we imprint our perceptions onto photographs and other holders, repositories for our emotive compulsions. These objects are structures of impressions. They are meaningful only because we infuse meaning into them. What does this say about our memories, our perceptions? It's that philosophical/ontological question of the camera and the photograph--who are we peering at, looking at, when we see an old photograph of ourselves? Are we seeing 'us' or a body that used to hold us? What does the mechanics of a camera do, how does it render a human body, what is the byproduct of its rendering? Do we literally see ourselves in that old photograph, or a partial body, a single, somatic unit of ourselves? It's an compelling question that intersects with the question of identity, and Rexford does a stunning job at composing and deconstructing this construct of self-identity, meshed up with impressed constructions of the body via perceptions, language, and embodying the poem, and memory, on the page.

Digging Out Our Prayers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7w4TUoJcNg

Hearing Ruth Forman’s slippery voice changes this poem’s positionality for me. Here is a poem that breathes into me its own life, its own rhythmic voice, its own entity. I am swept away by its longing and its change of pace, by its black, Christian motherly voice, by its sweetness and its heartbreak. When I read Forman’s interview by Buchanan in The Writer’s Chronicle, I was locked in by Forman’s words:

“Writing in vernacular represents the voice on the page. You may force a reader to read the poem out loud and that’s not a bad thing. How does it challenge me as a writer? It’s so important to me to let that voice be heard as best as possible…”

This made me think immediately of the other poets in today’s reading section, but mostly I gravitated to Mahealani Perez-Wendt.

“Bury Our Hearts at Walmart, etc.” haunted me. Her repetition created a cascading voice, spatially alluring our tongue to dance and sing, and yet the language, the images, the bones, the moans—they haunt you. I read the poem aloud to myself, to hear the poem’s voice come out, and there’s so much that this voice is telling me, telling us. I think immediately to one of my favorite quotations from James Baldwin, during a brief documentary film “Baldwin’s Nigger”:

"I’m compelled, I’m speaking of myself as a black man, to doubt my history, to examine it; I’m compelled to try to create it. I’m trying to excavate my history from all the rubble that has been buried for so many hundreds of years. And that means I have to question everything." — James Baldwin

What Perez-Wendt is doing in “Bury Our Hearts at Walmart, etc.” is what Baldwin is speaking of—excavating. Via the poem’s voice, she is exploring this meticulous (which is represented by the poem’s beat) excavation, the removing from the earth one’s family history—“The sands of my birth”—and the totality of this method, this movement is a loss of culture (in I.) but also the regaining of it through individualistic means: “I exhume myself, / Dug up my bones, / Threw salt, / Blessed the resurrection. / I anointed myself.” Here, Perez-Wendt is enacting what Baldwin did as well—we are compelled, as children of loss, to re-examine our own histories, to excavate the bones of our past (the histories we carry in our bodies and that have been transmuted to us through “the sands of our birth”). We question everything, we anoint everything, we reclaim it.

It makes me think back to Ruth Forman’s poem, “Prayer Like Shoes,” and her thoughts on her book of the same title. When she reorganized it and made the title poem the book’s honor poem, the book shifted and changed to a book of healing. Each poem and each section became a prayer. Like Perez-Wendt’s poetry, Forman’s became voices that encircled such great loss, yes, but also usurped that loss and made it anew, made it ours, excavated it from the rubble that has been buried for so many years.

I think of Perez-Wendt’s last lines in Double Decker, “We are all agreed / Father would turn over / In his grave / If he could.” That is what our poems do. Though history, through systematic and institutionalized racism, classism, poverty, and every other –ism that seeks to oppress and destroy, our stories, our poems, our narratives—seemingly dead—turn over in our graves and are alive. When we dig them out, exhume our skeletons from the earth, we regain them, heal from them, are one with them.

Two Readings: Living Room Series + Rewriting America: Race & Re-Imagings Post 9/11 [LitCrawl]

It was an intense weekend. On Friday night, I headed to the city with my roommates to Professor Truong Tran's Living Room Reading series, which is hosted by mostly SF State MFA students and populated by 'them' (yes, the 'other' MFA programs in the city.) Firstly, the environs of Truong's city apartment lured me to the romantic lifestyle of the poet. His apartment is right at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, and when I walked inside, down his longwinding hallway decorated with neon colors against taupe wallpaper, artwork mixed with pop culture and words encapsulated in jars on shelves, I was taken into, literally, a world foreign and strange to me, and I felt myself tripping over every word I had said, to the point that Truong tried to make me feel at ease by laughing at my big, golden glittery low-cut boots I bought from Forever 21 for an exact occasion such as this. I felt out of my skin. I felt differientated, though my roommates were with me (also MFA students, and one was a fictioneer like me). Eventually, a second-year MFA Mills student came as well, and though we made a little discussion enclave between us Mills-ites, Truong dispersed us and commanded that we tried to make friends. But the living room and kitchen were filled with people at diversified positions in the MFA/writing world--some were graduated, some were in-school, some were in the process of applying, others were professors and MFA students at the same time, and others were just straight out professors. Though seeing a good 'ol friend, Paul Ocampo (who happens to live with Truong), was a comfort in such unknown terrain, I still felt uneased and uncertain and out-of-joint. I'm always stuck in my mind at these events. People tell me I have it together, and I know I have nothing together besides the masks I wear for these events. I'm so unsure of myself, of my writing. And then, the reading commenced.

That's when everything shifted, as cliché as it sounds, but this was the moment why I came.

There were two poets, one fictioneer, and one memoirist/multi-genre writer. Gerardo Pacheco, a graduate of SF State and winner of the distinguished Joseph Henry Jackson Award by the San Francisco Foundation, read first. His poetry was filled with rapid beats, his voice strained and his eyes flickered, and his feet tapped and tapped, and I felt at home with his bilingual verses that trailed into Spanish and left you at English. Jaydn DeWald, a graduate from Pacific University's MFA program, read next, and his words drown my soul. One of his poems was in honor of his sister, a military/army wife, and he acutely captured the disarrayed emotions wives of my stature carry--the distance, the endless questioning of whether we'll know our husbands after they've come back--and his last image/stanza stayed with me, haunted me: the wife, holding her husband from the back in a corn field, becomes silent as her husband slowly turns toward her, his face shifting and shifting until the eyes become familiar and distant and filled with the objects of the past now gone.

We had a break. I sipped more wine and talked more endlessly, and I grew restless. I wanted to write. I wanted to cry. I wanted to talk to my husband. I wanted everything in my life to fit in a nice little package like their poems, as if my fractured self could become self-contained and whole like the words that possess me.

Carolyn, the host and a graduate of State, called us back, and I sat on a pillow behind Truong's monstrous display of repeated baby heads and bright, colorful dots until my phone rang with an Unknown number. There was a break. I loved Sara Marinelli's beautiful prose about a grandmother and the narrator's mother journey to an Italian cathedral, where they said 580 Hail Mary's and Lord prayers to make a miracle come true. After Sara's last breathe and the sound of the applause, I rushed outside because I knew the voice behind the call was my husband's. I finally cried outside Truong's apartment, alone with just my lover's voice, and I couldn't had been any more happy and pleased and thankful. Unfortunately, I only caught the end of Chanan Tigay's piece on an Irsaeli army unit, but his language was fierce and his lines were staccato like mimes trickled across a desert expanse.

That was Friday night. After the reading, I lingered about in Truong's apartment with my fellow Mills MFA-ers and ate a very spicy hotdog the host had cooked with pleasure. It was good. I drove home, crossed the bridge into Berkeley, drank another glass of wine at Jupiter's, and called it a night. The next morning, I rushed to get ready and meet up a VONA friend I had met back in 2011 in a workshop with ZZ Packer, and though I was a few minutes late, we caught up like no time has lapsed. Her new novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, has just come out and I beg you all to read it. It's only 200 or so pages, and it's about the Sri Lankan civil war that lasted from 1980s–2009.

We rushed to the city via BART, walked and walked until we finally found that gray old building of California Institute of Integral Arts, and listened to Elmaz and three other wonderful, wonderful poets read. We luckily got there just in time before the panel began.

What's funny about this reading is how different, how incredibly more formal and yet more comfortable and 'safe' this panel felt compared to Friday night's. I had met three of the poets (Elmaz included) prior to the reading, and had met Pireeni Sundaralingam and Francisco Alarcón at early writing stages of my life. I met Pireeni at USC back in 2010, when her South Asian anthology had just been published and she recalled to us the difficulty of publishing in a hegemonic industry. Different presses had asked Pireeni to separate the poets' works into two themes: "Curry and Karma Sutra." I re-realized that racism is only playing dead. I had met Francisco at AWP in early 2011 at Washington, D.C., when I went to his reading (funnily, with Paul Ocampo) which focused on poets writing against SB 7010. The Francisco I met then and the Francisco I met on Saturday were one and the same, and I couldn't help but feel more and more inspired by these fierce and strong and lion-like poets who filled the panel with their voices and pains and struggles and successes. Ronaldo V. Wilson was someone who I hadn't met before, but I knew of him from Barbara Jane Reyes and our work with PAWA, the Philippine American Writers & Artists, Inc. What's funny is that there was something off about Ronaldo to me--not his poetry, I loved, loved his experimental poetics where he juxtaposed his own voice, improvisation, and the unfolding of the present, of 'now,' in his reading, but what was off is how he acted. It wasn't until dinner when I mentioned to him--"Do you know Barbara?" and he said, "Why, yes! She wants to plan a reading for me." [This I knew, because I'm helping with the PR.] And then he continued, "I was thinking I should wear a barong or a Japanese kimono to the reading--I have a beautiful one, you know."

And that was it! It finally clicked in my mind and I asked him if he were half-Filipino and he said, "Duh." That was what was off--I saw a kababayan that I didn't notice, and my mind was incredibly off because he acted, sounded, and breathed so Filipino--him even thinking about what to wear to the reading (and it's in January! Four months away, and of course he's thinking about his appearance and dress-that's how we are). When I mentioned that a barong would be a great idea (it's a tradition Filipino formal garment or dress shirt made of pineapple or banana fabric) but a Japanese kimono might bring bad omens (we're very superstitions) he said, "Well, hell yes, that's exactly what I want to do!" [Side note: bad omens because we were colonized by the Japanese, and well, by everyone--America and Spain.]

That night, I felt like I was slowly and finally becoming my own skin in the midst of fearless, incredibly talented writers. We ate and talked and breathed writing over Ethiopian food, sharing spirit and food with our hands.

And even before that, at the panel, the words they imparted to me stayed and haunted me in a challenging, enlightening way.

"Sorrow can only be felt by the living." -- Elmaz

"Langauge gets corroded." -- Pireeni (speaking about the diaspora)

"Poems fill the pages; tattoos punctuate the flesh." -- Francisco (speaking about his short vignette poems that he called 'tattoos', which his Stanford professor called rubbish and 'not poems')

"I was SO bored with the shit out there, so I made something new, something utterly mine." -- Ronaldo

Even their discussion on the pitfalls of literary journals focused on writings of color (like my TAYO Literary Magazine) blew my mind. Pireeni had a point--that the hegemonic publishing world could see our enclaves, our literary journals, as our "safe spaces" and thus do not need to include us in the mainstream. That may be a pitfall. But like Francisco said, you fight and let the words stand on their own. He sold over 10,000 copies (or more, I didn't get to jot down the exact number) of his poetry collections. It's the way we fight, the way we use our words, the way we cultivate our craft, and the way we solidify the languages that oppress and free us.

I needed to be at both readings. I needed to hear everyone's words. I needed to feel like a vagrant and at home.

shameless plug: come watch me read for litcrawl!

Please come to my Lit Crawl reading this Saturday! We can go together to other Lit Crawl readings (Phase 2 and Phase 3). It'll be a blast, I promise. Hope to see you there.

Maybe we can all meet at a BART station on Sat? At 4pm? (I have to be there 20 minutes earlier!)

LIT CRAWL – BARRIO FIESTA (WAVE 1)
IRMA’S – 2901 16TH STREET
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13 | 6 PM

There will be free lumpia!

More info here:

http://litcrawl.org/sf/events/barrio-fiesta/

https://www.facebook.com/events/416982075016389/

a culture slide under a microscope

Quickley, Pardon, and Tolliver select poems in Voices in Leimert Park share cascading movements in voice and crescendos, which overpower you and pull you into a complex portrait of many Los Angelenos, and the subjects in their poems paint that complexity, reveal that contradictory Los Angeleno in ambivalent ways, and make the waterfall-like movements in these poems unnerving and wonderful and immensely addicting.

They've taught me so much about line breaks and beat. Here are a few stanzas I loved:

From Calcium Rings by Quickley

"They shipped his remains home to the family
in a box
the size of a small suitcase
too small to possibly
hold his memory
or the landslides he left behind
or the pints of whiskey
his father began to swallow
to keep from breaking"

From Smoke and Mirrors

"it's a culture slide under a microscope
24 hours no commercials
except when you have to breathe
it's a science lab with cable television
it's a vender machine and
mostly you don't have any change
Los Angeles
Pico Aliso
Pico Union
Sunset Blvd.
Alta Vista
Sierra Vista
La Cienega
Vista Del mar
it's a Rubik's cube
in the hands of a blind man"

From Spanglish and Spikanese

"I am the one-breasted
Amazon Archer:
the rite of passage
the rain forest surgeon
the jive-talking Jamaican cousin
draped in gold arrogance
& history"

From Mudcloth by Imani Tolliver

"i had been calling you
you had been calling me
feeling call, spirit call
the way old lovers communicate
when phones are complicated, forbidden"

These staccato, 'jive-talking' lines vividly paint the speaker in these poems, and when I read them, I couldn't help but picture in my mind the different people who walk the streets in Union Station or down Vermont Street, or those who gather at Pershing Square. These poems are concern themselves with the body, too. The remains of a cousin, and the search of finding oneself. Los Angeles becomes a Rubix's cube "in the hands of a blind man." Padron paints the life of Los Angeles in quick, self-contained images and stanzas "I am collard greens / Chinese laundries & / steamy summer subways" and Tolliver breathes into her poem a love song, mixing it with dirt and a bodily, lusty affirmation and calling.

How is difference made distinct here? In this portrait of Los Angeles? I think it's grounded in the voice of these poems, and it's how they connect via the body and the city they live and breathe in.

How do we connect these writings to the revolution, to the Lost Poets? I think they share the same referentiality--"their eyes are grenades," and "death is their prize."

When we look at Quickley's poem, we see that framework. That indirect rending of a cop's assumptions, of society's assumptions, of those who work the infrastructure and control the race constructs, "it must have been a drug deal gone bad." How do these poems fit in "the revolution?" How is poetry a revolution? To read poetry, to read literature, is against the highest directive: "writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seems, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them," Edwidge Danticat. You carry ideas in these poems, you carry characters, portraits of people, whose existence is in an acute war with the single-story constructs that govern mainstream culture. That's why I loved the crescendos in these poems. They pull you in, build you up, and take you face-to-face to the Angeleno you'd call a gangster, a crip, a "drug deal gone wrong," a Spanglish-Spikanese biracial product of the hood, a brown dike whose lover wears elaborate African fabric to carry her babe. They strip away the single-story constructs--whose "eyes are grenades" and "death is their prize." It's hard to configure these images without placing them against the consequential effects of poverty and classism, but literally, these poems carry those whose bodies carry the weight of the past--slavery, aboriginal massacre/manifest destiny, and how the community deals with the deaths in-between--and transmute them into congregated voices.

de la Paz and Noguchi--secrets and minimality

Oliver de la Paz and Noguchi are magical storytellers with precise, succinct techniques. What they say about and how they portray "family" is swift and momentous, and it forces me to ask: how do we use the personal, the history of a person/familia, to connect with universality, the construct of "family," and how do we intellectually and emotionally move the reader through a poem? de la Paz and Noguchi have different answers. And I love them both.

de la Paz uses distinct and complex imagery. His selected poems in AAP tell a story of a connected and disjointed familia, and the poems are brief fractures and moments, portraits if you will, of the Recto familia. It starts with Manong Jose, which means elder Jose, who's an airport worker and not a part of the Recto familia--but he's also a part of them because they share a similar, forced experience in the Philippine diaspora. He is "pleased though wary" when he sees the family step off the plane. I love the beautiful moon imagery de la Paz uses here to describe the boy. It connotes hope and a love for something that represents the anak, the children, something Manong longs for in his country because everything here is morphed. That's what my grandma always told me--"You're too American." There was always this battle of assimilation in Filipinos. And the history of that--the country being colonized by three super powers, Spain, America, and Japan--says a lot about the diaspora and it trickles in via colonial inferiority complexes.

I love the armpit section of Nine Secrets. My husband's mom has that same armpit mole, which hangs from her armpit discreetly, and she always wears long-sleeved dresses to hide it. How de la Paz organizes this poem is meticulously orgasmic for me. The nine secrets are brief portraits into the moments of this family's life. It travels through the every-day livelihood of this Filipino family, and I can't get over this section:

Overhead Long-Distance Phone Conversation

'You mean you can't distinguish between a lychee and a longan? Cost:
six dollars.

I'll go over de la Paz's poems more meticulously on Tuesday.

Noguchi's minimalistic poetics and line breaks enthralled me as much as de la Paz's descriptive fractures and humor.

The language used here is so compelling because it, in its simpleness, connotes to me the briefness and borderline strictness of Japanese culture. But it carries so much emotion and weight, just like de la Paz's poetry. But de la Paz's poetry carries the weight through a storytelling that's very reflective of Filipino culture--we are outwardly loving and yet hide everything despite the affection and suffocation of words--it takes forever to say good-bye at a Filipino party. Here, Noguchi's language is sparse, but the sparseness provides a tone that's longing and formal, but also heavier, in a way, than de la Paz's because of this formality.

I loved the lines:

Kenji has broken
Her favorite ironing table--
A wedding gift from the Yamaguchis.
The legs, split beyond
Their crotch.

His mother on her knees
Tries to iron on the ruined table
Anyway. His father needs
A shirt to impress
The same co-workers
He sees daily.

The line breaks: "His mother on her knees / tries to iron on the ruined table / Anyway" broke my heart. It spoke to me the harsh passion and duty Kenji's mother had to the father. To do that through such minimalistic language provides me referential points to the power of imagery and form and line break. The structure of the poem and the way the lines move, because you must break your breathe as you read each line, provides such movement and heart to a poem that's so sparse and bare.