• poem #1: rick barot's "reading plato"
• poem # 2: a poem from my current project called "milwaukee aubade"
• bio: if dionysus were a feminist...

constellations, interconnectedness, the global

i'm having a hard time figuring out how to talk about this collection, mainly where to begin and where to key in from. i can't think about them without thinking about how poets and writers in libya were imprisoned for writing, how this policing and criminalization affected content, and then what it means for mattawa's poems to exist as they do and take on what they do in the 2000s. and then i also can't not think of the libyan uprisings two years ago. i am thinking about all this, but again, not necessarily sure about how to connect the past (1970s/1980s) the present that this book takes up based on when it was published(2003) and then the future (2011, which is now the past, but WAS the future when thinking about when this book was published).

mattawa talks about how he cannot write from the moment itself, but has to write from a point of reflection and processing. i think this tactic of contemplation before responding to events instead of a direct reaction contribute to how this collection weaves together so many different experiences, voices, places, influences, etc. in his poems, you get a sense of cause and effect. how immediate decisions and structures contribute to building tensions, oppressions, and problems over time. how you cannot look at large governmental decisions and institutional actions as disconnected from racism, classism, issues of access, worker safety/health, and the proliferation of certain serious illnesses, birth issues, etc. in certain areas as affecting certain communities. and then all of this continues to echo through time and history, calls back to the origins, even predicts problems/reactions/consequences in the future.

i think this zodiac form that he uses to organize the collection and sequence the book makes a lot of sense in relation to what i can glean of his personal politics. he calls us to understand how national actions have global consequences, how globalization puts us all in a constellation of connectedness where policy, regimes of power, populations of people, capitalism/competition, grassroots efforts, etc all hold influence and create various consequences for how we either negatively or positively experience our world. he reminds us to recognize that worlds we refuse to think about or understand we are directly responsible for or influencing even if we are unaware (cairo with its daewoo stereos , jews rescued by ottoman boats) as a result of our globalized world.

i think this happens continually throughout the collection. and the fact that poems interrupt other poems and then pick up after other poems have finished speaks to the way time is non-linear and that consequences continue to echo and influence long after their initial occurrence.

ramblings

i'm really sorry for the lateness of this post. the short story is that mercury is in retrograde and that's the gremlin in everyone's life right now and the long story is a lot's going on in my own.

this weekend i went to the national women's studies association conference here in oakland. i went to a panel called "toward a reparative future: feminisms and visual/literary cultures of women of color" in which one of the panelists presented her research on documentary narratives, activism, and artwork produced in response to widespread femicides in juarez. she talked about mierle laderman ukele's manifesto for maintenance art that she wrote in 1969 and that inspired her to create an installation that brought to light the invisible labor of museums--labor of "maintenance" that goes unnoticed and unappreciated. she invites folks to look at the tools of maintenance as art items and also points to how sites of culture and art do not challenge institutionalization, but continue to reinforce and devalue raced, gendered, sexualized, and classed labor. the panelist expanded on ukele to talk about how women, folks of color, lgbtq folks, low-income folks continue to think about their work and their political activism as acts of necessity and survival and not only don't receive recognition for their personal output, but also aren't moved to think of their work as legitimate. she went on to talk about not only are these things invisibilized, but we're also not really moved to claim them.
i have a lot of feelings about what this suggests about de-legitimized experiences of work and art and who feels compelled to claim identities like poet, artist, and activist and who don't (but who definitely create and fight on a day-to-day basis).
so how i relate this back to lucille clifton is that in talking about her craft and her life, she talks about how she feels a strong responsibility to her "art, sex, family, and race" as well as to "humanness." given the panelist's conversation about how the day-to-day experience of domestic work (unpaid and paid) are invisibilized, i think about how day-to-day experiences of womanness and blackness are also. clifton also talks about how, like, uhh duh i would write about menstruation when that was a part of my life for 35 years. and duhh i'm going to write about and feel responsible to write about black women's bodies and having children and etc etc because a) i am in my body and also because we all have relationships to these experiences that we need to acknowledge and speak to. i was thinking about how all these experiences should be but are not always included in what we think of as humanness and that has a lot to do with why these work, body, life experiences that are very much raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, etc fail to be legitimized in the same way as other work, body, and life experiences.

anyway, there's all that i'm thinking about and didn't really synthesize, and then there's the fact that
mercy is just everything. the poems in there are such deeply felt, beautiful, expressive of suffering, deep love, regeneration, transformation. i felt a deep sense of hope toward the end of the book in the last section of poems that speak to how worlds are capable of great change and that they will change, that they can't hold and can't always keep that power, especially without facing the reality of the damage done.

love/empathy/poetry

split my skin

with the rock

of love old

as the rock

of Moses

my poems

love you

i thought it was great that "genesis" opens up the collection. this preface poem that introduces the rest of the book is both rough and inviting and calls attention to how grueling the process of poetry is. it is an unveiling, a molting, a shedding, a splitting open of memory, your body, your timeline. poetry isn't easy. writing it means excavating and breaking yourself open, reaching into recesses to make something precious, valuable, healing out of experiences--positive, negative, personal, historical. he points to this in this poem, with describing his skin splitting from the rock of love. it is a process of love even when the subject matter is full of violence or entrapment. he sets up the collection as a space for love, letting readers know that his poems care for their readers. they may be "green... and sometimes / wrinkled or worn," aka not beautiful, they may be painful, violent, and act as a challenge (as many of his poems do challenge), making "the heel / of Adam & Eve / to bleed," but they are out of love--self-love, familial love, community love. his poems take different shapes and occupy many spaces. some are dense blocks, some skeletal with short-lines with a lot of space to breathe. 

 as important and warm as love can be, it is also violent, subject to change, sometimes ugly, sometimes impossible. he points to these multiplicities in this poem by his language and word choices "wrinkled," "split," "bleed," "rock." this isn't a cutesy poem and his poems aren't warm and fuzzy even if they do love us. they are an engagement with the reader. they get up close to readers to make them feel and see. the subjects of his poems vary and often deal with really rough subjects--a contemplation on his sister's sex work, being in prison, suicide, violence and death, losing love, etc. they aren't all tender poems, sometimes they are very tough, but they do all come out of a tenderness and sensitivity to these realities, and many of these poems are rooted in deep empathy.

confluence of land, nature, body in diwata

in Diwata, there is a continued interconnectedness between the natural, the physical/corporeal, and what makes up landscape. the lines between bodies, nature, and place are often blurred, and each often stand for or are somehow connected to the other (the ocean as womb, tree bark as skin, the flesh of fruit, etc). elements of the natural and of landscape are often personified. both creation myths introduced in the collection point to this blurring also. in the poem "Again, She Tells the First Story,"  the wind dances with the sea and roars and the woman is described as being "born of the rocks" while the man is "born of sea spume." in the first poem pointing to genesis, the bones of the first man ossify from dust and fire, the wind gives him breath. the first woman lives within the landscape of the first man's body and is birthed from his rib. the woman being birthed from the cracking of the bamboo is similar. body parts and plant parts have the animal qualities of birthing, creating.

bodies and landscapes often become each other in these poems, or exist inside each other. in "Duyong 5," the speaker's mother's "womb becomes the sea." in "Dragonflies," the river comes into the bodies of those who fall into it, to be heard in the beating of her heart. in these two examples, our concepts of vastness and space are altered. we don't think of the vastness of a body of water as able to be contained or present in a body. and we don't think of a person's womb ballooning out to contain an ocean. 

it's so important to recognize the ocean as landscape, not only because it does CONTAIN (ecosystems, land masses, wildlife, etc) and because it sustains us (food-wise, etc), but also because it can be colonized, mapped, encroached upon. and also because it is traversed and a mode of transport. these poems continuously remind us of how the sea is a bridge colonizers (Spain, the USA) cross in order to colonize, re-vamp, change land, push out and introduce violence to landscapes and the people who inhabit them. in the poem "Duyong 4" the man "takes the ocean as his consort." he is "carried in the womb" of the ocean, he "enters" the ocean, in the same way men "enter" female bodies throughout the text. the confluence between lands, bodies, and nature is especially important in the context of colonization and war because "other" bodies and "other" landscapes become susceptible to violence and transformation at the hands of colonizers. colonizers claim ownership and overtake bodies as well as landscapes. just as the land is built upon--fire escapes come into the picture, light pollution overtakes the night sky blocking out natural light, homes are displaced, etc, bodies are overtaken and changed-- via rape, acts of violence, murder, improper burial, introduction of clothes and customs (the whalebone corsets breaking ribs, shoes on bare feet, etc).
as an undercurrent in this collection is the acknowledgement that place holds meaning and evidence of identity, culture, community, history and memory. what happens to all of these things when landscapes are forcibly altered, how can these landscapes continue to hold these identities, histories, and memories when they are razed and built upon and the bodies of the people who've experienced those histories or have internalized them (via memory) are also destroyed and dismembered? i think, in the face of colonization and imposed violence to spaces, cultures, and people, is why it's such an important, political strategy to blow open and reclaim the creation myth--to emphasize all the possibilities for the reclamation of creation and growth and the fact that we constantly create ourselves and can constantly recover that power of creation. it's especially important in connection to the creation narrative, remembering how Catholicism was imposed upon (of course, not only) the Philippines.

sound/shape/silence

don't ask why and don't tell anyone shapes the poet and the narrative in dempster's "the burning." the narrative and story exist around those two commands, everything that happens is held in those orders. the narrator cannot speak what happened or ask why, so the poem is largely a chronicle of all the sounds elements existing around those experiences. the characters can't speak, but the events do.

the characters are being told to be silent in many areas-- not just in keeping the secret of what happened to them. the children are punished for making noise, the crash of a dish. the tabasco punishment does not equate to the "crime" of having an accident--breaking a dish, talking too loud over the tv. children are typically boisterous, but they are forced to be silent and go inward. they aren't allowed to talk about what happened to anyone, let alone each other, and the commands of don't ask why and don't tell anyone resonate, not only as repetitions in their head, but they are spoken through the experience. the burn of the tabasco reminds them don't ask why, the brother "burning through" them keeps them silent.

in the second section, the memory of the burn coming back after having salsa brings back their story, and is so overwhelming it can't be spoken. there is a complicated, blurred relationship between the past and present, old memories and ones being newly created. the "story" is present even through this sexual encounter occurring in a different place and a different time, and even when directions like come closer and here are welcoming, intimate, and not dangerous.

voice is lacking in the poem--characters are quiet and hushed, but the surrounding sounds ring out-- the zipper clicking, the garage door opening, the squealing bicycle, the chain of the brother's door. objects and surroundings make up for all the silence. it seems like everything is responding to what's happening because the children cannot. in the "black room" while their "bodies dissolve," the goldfish gurgles.

.....

brenda cårdenas's poems, "empty spaces" in particular, had me thinking a lot about the power and journeys of language. "empty spaces," i think, points to how the ways "we" (who makes these decisions? who has power over language?) value and impose hierarchies on language and fail to recognize and value multiple literacies, multiple modes of expression, and importantly, how this causes harm and fragmentation. i see the empty spaces as the things the speaker loses or fears of losing in the journey of learning and embodying english. there is a desire to hold onto words, letters, sounds, functions. though english is made up of most of the same symbols, it's structured completely different, the sounds are different, the emphases are different.
 the way that language is institutionalized and systematized is inherently imperialist, racist, classist, etc. in the attempt to "universalize" language, whose language gets considered the norm, the reference point for all others to accomodate? how is speech, sound, words commodified and homogenized? what happens to self-identity when one is forced to adopt that language in order to be understood, to gain legitimacy?

what do folks have to empty themselves of in order to communicate themselves and in order to be heard, understood, seem viable? how do you get back your lost sounds, your empty spaces? i like how she makes connections between speech, language, identity, history, the body. describing the speaker's hollow of pelvis as "georgia o'keeffe"-- whoa. the way we universalize culture and language has specific consequences for the otherized body.

there's all of this, and then i think about how fast and loose we are with language, and completely unconscious of consequence. not just blindly unconscious, but decidedly unconscious. tonight i was at a reading where a white male read a number of problematic pieces that, i (and others) felt, reeked of entitlement and privilege, and were downright offensive. he read a story about working in whole foods, managing other workers-- his "slaves." he threw this word around i don't know how many times and suggested "it's okay that i call them that, they think it's funny and they kinda like their work anyway." i think the fact that there was a veiled self-consciousness there-- "it's okay, they think it's funny" was the most disturbing because there was some sort of nod to using that language as fucked up and a blatant display of power, but ultimately, it didn't matter and it was okay. then there was the quip about homeless people coming into whole foods asking for the free dog biscuits they give out to customers, HOW FUNNY!, and the fact that whole foods only allows service animals in the store but there are so many dogs in there and it's doubtful all those folks are disabled but you can't really ask if they are because that's, you know, messed up and awkward to ask, etc etc. i'm not sure what the worst part about hearing all this was-- whether it was the fact that it was all meant to be funny, the fact that he decontextualized the very real and present legacy of slavery, exploitation, oppression, the fact that people were laughing, the fact that he'll probably read those stories again outloud and instantaneously make the space unsafe, the fact that he felt comfortable reading out something like that (which speaks to the fact that there isn't widespread challenge to this kind of behavior, otherwise there would be consequences for doing it, etc)... the fact that after a friend did call him out, he listened but it was unclear if it really sunk in as a critique of his privilege rather than feedback on his writing, or if it meant anything to him to hear that...

i guess i am bothered because we hear voices like his all the time and there's so much air space for it and a lot of praise goes there, but we rarely hear voices like brenda cårdenas's, and voices like hers aren't valued or distributed as they should be, otherwise maybe it would be less acceptable and feel less encouraged for folks like this guy to take power over spaces and over language in the way that he did.

i know i am probably oversimplifying in my processing of this, especially in connection to cårdenas's work, but i am just angry that not only are marginalized folks at all times needing to acquire, reshape, delete, de-politicize, etc their languages in order to be heard, which often leads to a loss of language (whether it's a dialect or a whole language in itself), but other folks are rarely moved to even think about how their words contribute to erasure, violence, inequality, etc.

just gonna call it ex-factor

it probably has a lot to do with where i'm at right now--processing old friendships, relationships, sifting through experiences now that i'm in this transitional phase after having uprooted many things to move to california, but imani tolliver's "mudcloth" really got to me today. when i first began, the first half of the opening stanza turned me off and i made a judgment about the poem i was getting into. i thought it was going to be cutesy and sentimental and cliche. but then it wasn't, for me. nostalgic, yes, but not sentimental.

to be honest, i decided to move away from reading straightforward poems and have been looking a lot at poets that are doing weirdo things with craft, voice, grammar, form, as a way to challenge and push my own writing into new directions. last year, i had been frustrated with the poems i'd been producing, wanting to move away from the narrative, lyric poems i'd been writing, so i've been wrapped up in other stuff. and it was nice to read this today and i value it.

but i really love poems that make me sad, or are relatably sad. and, even more, i guess a guilty pleasure of mine is the sad-lost-love poem. like i've been reading and re-reading sandra cisneros's collections loose woman and my wicked, wicked ways for half a year. and also i frequently listen to "ex-factor" on repeat. what i think really affected me about "mudcloth" was its intimacy, vulnerability, and emotion. i really saw this in the specificity in the poem, like "when our bracelets chimed our footsteps" and "as we blessed each other / anointed our locks with frankincense / making pungent crosses on our foreheads."

i could relate to the feeling of loss, yearning for someone you've parted from, and that impossible feeling of wanting to reach out, but knowing it's inappropriate, but still feeling that inward pull to the person, that "feeling call, spirit call." and also, however long it may have been since you've seen them last, that instant palpable rush of every feeling, all of the love coming back and feeling present between you both when you run into each other again--it's a lot. i love how she captures all the complex feelings you have in these situations: the appreciation of the love, the yearning for it, the re-emergence of feelings, the confusion around all of it (what to do? i wanna call, i can't call), the questioning (whyyyyyy?), the knowing that this is how it needs to be, etc.

i also love how rooted in place the poem is and how it speaks to places being memory landmarks, how when we think back to love lost, we remember the places we've been and the feelings and senses that surrounded that particular place and time. the african marketplace will never be the same. and we hold these stories of love and loss not only in locations, but in our bodies and they continue to resonate well after the relationship/experience ended. "notice the soil finger painting / of how we found each other / how we loved / how we forever stained a story / we are still telling" it was really nice to see these feelings come out in a poem because i've been there. and i admire it, too, because trudging up feelings and memories like these is hard to do.

there were also little things that made it different to me than other lost love poems--like the line "life is harder without the lusty affirmation of my body / there was a time you loved my pliant and full brown more than i." i think of how hard it is for women and female-bodied people in general to feel comfortable in their bodies, to love and cherish them, to feel sexual and to own our sexualities in the face of all we have to measure ourselves up against. and honestly sometimes we only begin to see ourselves through other people. and even when we do listen to or believe in our lovers' appreciation of our bodies, we often continue to experience that inward struggle and have a hard time finding ourselves worthwhile and beautiful.

i admire this poem because it isn't just any sad break-up poem, it feels more important than that. because it means something that the love is between two brown women and there is a moving affirmation throughout the poem of the specificity of that love, the strength and beauty of it. romantic relationships can often feel very charged and political, because expressions of brown love, lgbtq love, love for and between marginalized folks is undermined, undervalued, seen as threatening. negative realities pound at them and there are often obstacles to survive through (or ones that have been survived through already), which make these connections feel even more meaningful, so when they turn out to not be indestructible, it's extra difficult. but it's still important to tell the story of them.

if there is no memory, it did not happen

what is so intense to me about "if there is no memory, it did not happen," is, at first, the definitiveness of that title. with the IF this, THEN this formula, i kinda expect a poem to start out with a vague recollection, a difficult memory pieced together and exemplified via roundabout language (which does occur, in a sense, later). but instead, chang starts out with a proclamation: "mother took us / and locked us in the basement." there are no bones about it. that happened. and then everything unfolds, the distinct details and the not-so-distinct. this is a location that has a specificity to it, the functions are known. dank, hollow, where onions and yams cool. but there are also blurs. and that's where the question of "are you sure?" "you don't know what you're saying," comes in. you read something strange in those blurs, / you read a story / and not the truth. there is an outside questioning here, one that continues to diminish the felt experiences and exacerbates the meaning of the blurred pieces of the puzzle, what's not-remembered, what's confused, accusing the subject of self-pity. i think what's so moving, to me, about this poem, is the interrelationship between very concrete details (like the line that opens the poem, and others throughout) and more conjecture-type/abstract ones. ("she was... small enough to close in a cupboard"). it speaks to the experience of piecing together concrete details and inferences in complex memory recollection. the thing about this poem is, there IS memory, but there's still the thought that IT did not happen. because there's a question of authenticity, existence of the memory/actuality of the memory/corroboration of the memory in the first place.



i know that there's this whole motif of nearsightedness that is both literal and figurative, but i'm just really drawn to this idea of memory, selective consciousness/belief/recognition of experience, et al.

i really appreciate the deliberateness of language and the crafted, intentional vagueness of jennifer chang's poems. as much as i know that it can be frustrating when writing isn't clearly explicit, i think there's a braveness to a sort of removed voice that is at a distance from a subject, particularly when it comes to writing that attempts to piece together fragmented memories, especially familial ones, and ones that are difficult. there is a definite time and place for implicit voices. sometimes, it isn't possible to say outright: "this. this. that. this." and we exist in these liminal spaces, what i think chang cultivates as unction. she cutlivates this dissociation and removedness through her syntax and language choices. she says parts of a song i once knew. it's indirect, removed, not present.

 i think when we're mentally working through these experiences the issue of authenticity often arises, and i appreciate how that is weaved within these poems, that the outside questions and assertions (that are also questions/ideas we internalize and ask/accuse of ourselves) come into these poems--you're making it up... whose arms disappear? you were simply born that way. i think these external and internal questions and assumptions are part of what makes it so hard to definitively write about difficult, familial, childhood, etc experiences. when we're constantly asking ourselves if our experiences are authentic and real, it becomes difficult to externalize them.

i think i'm more drawn to the abstract, internal questioning in these poems than to the discrete details. i think both ground the other: the succinct "these are the facts" and then the in-between kinda blurriness of other details/inferences really just make sense to me.

i'm just overwhelmed with appreciation and want to go into every line of these poems, but instead, i will just highlight some things, lines in particular, that resonate with me:

-THE PAIN OF SPACE-- yes. perfect. i feel like i know exactly what this is.
-i am branched / and branchless in / this ecstasy of absence--i swallow air / until my hunger is     an insatiable question.
-i avoid / to avoid. don't i?
-also the whole poem "what is the landscape works for what i have left"
-i have been missing twenty years.
-if i write a list, / i will lose the thing,    the deisre/ for retrieval 
-also I am tired of the past. / I am so tired.
but it never goes away, even if you find a way to write it.