Cheena Marie Lo Reading

About a month ago I had the pleasure of seeing my dear friend and collaborator Cheena Marie Lo read at a Small Press Traffic Reading in San Francisco. The theme of this year for SPT has been Genders/Bodie/Hybrids, and Cheena and I spoke a lot about what it meant to be billed in that theme on a night with two other Asian-American writers doing experimental work (Paolo Javier, and Cathy Park Hong). Cheena was ready to have a discussion about the problems in billing a night like that (the identification of them with one another, even as their work did not necessarily correspond, the differences between them, and the troubles with representation). The opportunity to have that discussion, however, didn't occur - a switch from last year's SPT readings with always included q and a's. I was spinning with questions and critiques of the organization and the world of experimental poetry and its alignment with supporting the subversive modes of poets of color not just doing expected experimental work.

All that said, I was, as I often am, super impressed by Cheena's work. They took a risk in what they read - new work, very personal, which took as an jump off point the mail that was coming into their home and the moment of looking for work that they find themselves in. In really gentle language that maintained a somewhat distant tone, Cheena bridged the process of beginning to wear a binder, with the foreclosure on their parents home, with a look at race underneath it all. It painted a picture which asked which of the intersecting forces of race, gender, classism, were affecting Cheena's moment of navigation of the economy and how each might intervene differently in each moment. I found it a profound and exciting piece, calling into question a simplicity too abundant in race analysis and poetry worlds. Plus, Cheena is a dear one, and I felt so proud!

performancestuff

Poem: Jennifer Chang - one of the unction poems.
I'll be reading a poem that was broken apart in my thesis, linked to home and bodies.
Bio: Tessa Micaela, takes the long way home.

Khaled Mattawa's poetry is gorgeous and has an internal logic to it that is potent and undeniable. That being said, I can't find a way to enter into what he is doing in his poetry, or how to talk about it. While reading it was very clear to me that, yes, there was a system inside of which Mattawa was writing, and that all things that were said, were also saying something covert and hidden underneath (like lucille's behind the poem is an other...but maybe I've just still got her on the brain). When I reached the notes at the end of the book, I found some sense of understanding the logic of the books' structure, but again, only clues to touching down on the heart of the book, or of this poet's positioning in the landscape of displacement.

The third section (based on the state of the soul) felt, strangely, the most reliable of sections in terms of finding a ground. Perhaps this not having a ground and necessity of hide things within themselves is the poetics of Mattawa. It is nontheless extremely difficult an emotional and literary experience, which is why in the third section I felt some consolation. Echo & Elixer 6, especially, affected me deeply. After we've been taken so many places and through so many images with Mattawa, we land on the "echoes" of sentences gathered, seemingly, from all those distinct locations. The sentences swirl around each other in a prose block that feels like it incarcerates the lines. And then the lines begin to repeat in different configurations, subverting any original impulse towards narrative, while never escaping the prose block. In thinking of this poem in the context of the the state of the soul, there is this simultaneous way of being very specific and swirling, explicit and elusive, grounded and ethereal. And so even here, where on first read I felt most safe in locating myself, there is a refusal to locate.

I came upon this video of Mattawa reading a poem about the anger and drive towards dissidence as a young boy in Libya, and also the internalized fear and self limitations in the context of political repression. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq32NX9lkdQ. The simultaneous pulls of action and restraint seem to be present all across The Zodiac of Echoes - even in this as title and structure. A system of divination based on the stars but resonant in all that has come before and lingers underneath. That said, I'm really excited to hear other people's readings to help illuminate this book for me.

out of body

I remember seeing Lucille Clifton read to a packed audience under a tent in the rain. She moved slowly to the microphone, and when she got there looked out at everyone and smiled the biggest, most genuine smile I'd seen in a long time. She laughed, delighted to be there, delighted to be reading. This was at the time that she knew she was dying, and there was something about watching her that felt so rooted in the present moment, the joy of reading her words to an audience hanging onto every second while at the same time looking out into the darkness beyond. Her body was weak; she sat instead of stood and read only a few poems, but did so with that sing-song voice booming and a pleasure in how these poems were once again "coming to her."

In interviews Clifton has talked about being a good listener and that she lets poems come to her. While this feels true in the clarity of voice, the sense of immediacy, and the forms of each poem, there is also a way that Clifton also approaches the world external to the poem with a fierce rhythm and musicality that complicate the image of "receiver" of poems. In Mercy so many of the poems are meditations on the historical and personal moment (which aren't separate for her) that Clifton finds herself in. Poems grapple, in direct, unmitigated tones, Clifton's mortality and fight with cancer.

I was really struck by out of body. The second poem in the collection introduces us to what appears several times later: the first line of the poem at (mama). For me, this is an exact gesture towards mortality and towards cycles. A poem that is in some ways towards her mama is also a poem that becomes an extended metaphor for death. Being one who deals in words, the anxiety about losing ones's voice is tremendous. the words fade, and all the things that might still be said are suddenly no longer available once death comes. For an artist, this is the great fear of death - of what might happen once one goes. "I am trying to say/ from my mouth/ but baby there is no/ mouth.

How frightening, I think. But Clifton's tone and play pulls away from the sadness and towards does not allow us to wallow. This is an outreach poem - baby - and one that might actually be coming from a mama to a child, careful to say all the things that are no longer within arms length.

Secondarily, the lines you must listen/ with your hands/ with the twist ends/ of your hair. These lines, which in some way identify where the body is leaning. Clifton makes sure to speak from her own experiences in ways and tones that reaches out to everyone, but does not devalue or inflate complexities. It makes me think of this quote:

"You know something?  I was just at a meeting today and there were just two people of color there,myself, and the guy who’s the president of the group…and the others there were not.  And one woman said something to me…and I said, “Why is it that when you say something about yourself, you’re talking about yourself as a human, but when I talk about my life, it’s political?”  And just because you say it, doesn’t mean it’s so.  That’s
the first thing about validity.  A lot of women have borne a lot of things; a lot of people have borne a lot of things.  There’s a certain kind of human that I want to be.  There is not shame in my life.  There is certainly misfortune, but I’m not the only one.  I do know that.  And sometimes, one of the things poetry can do is say to an audience: you are not alone.  It can also speak for those who have not yet found their voice to speak.  That’s part of the human condition.  And if we’re going to talk about humans, why are we just going to talk about the pretty ones."

Looking forward to seeing yall Tues!

blame as subversion

To end on Blame me. Oh my. 

I read Diwata in one sitting because I got trapped inside it feeling claustrophobic, freed, angry, vindicated, seduced, enchanted, soothed and amped up all at the same time. I have to say, I've had Diwata on my shelf for some time now. I've picked it up a few times and read the first poem and decided to put it down because I could feel, from the very start, that this book was a journey through a wildnerness of intricacies that needed, demanded, attention and devotion that at that moment I didn't have. I sensed, almost intuitively, although actually it was the sense cultivated from the remarkably crafted first lines (On the seventh day, my love, I surrendered) that I could not pick up and put this book down as it suited me. It was a mythology as much as a present and internal account, and this book would make me adhere to its own internal logic and follow in its rhythms. And oh my, did it ever.

When I say wilderness of intricacies it is because this book pulls on so many themes - Christianity, mythology, languages and multilingualism, gender, power, sexuality, empowerment, colonization, musicality, internalized oppression - all within a shape and form that does not allow for any of these "themes" to be external. It is as if Reyes places us directly inside a space of many many kinds liminality and guides us through all the multiplicities of experiences/feeling/visions that this liminal space engenders. Liminal spaces, because of their complexities, are usually simplified, watered down for more "accessibility". Words are defined, contexts are given, voices pull away from contradictions. But there is no simplification in Diwata. Things (implications of misogeny in Christianity, the origin stories that aid in survival of Filipino mythology, translation or the impossibility of it, voices otherwise not heard) all come together in poems that are deeply centered, clearly spoken, with a complete lack of confusion amid the complexity.

As I read I kept thinking about syncretism (combining of different (often seemingly contradictory) beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. may involve the merger and analogising of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths). It is a term, despite its definition, is used as a diminutive. Except that often syncretism is a survival skill, a measure to keep traditions alive, and to cultivate belief systems that most represent cultural and personal realities. Diwata feels like a work in syncretism all on its own - one that profoundly weaves religious and mythic tales with anti-colonial and empowered gender visions.

And to end with Aswang, the indigenous women priest who speaks all the thing that were ever said about her to discredit her power, and in doing to unveils that in fact her power hasn't been unrooted. Her power has become transformed. Blame me, she says, and with its utterance she subverts the colonial and patriachal myths about her, returning us to a power of wholeness with the land - I am the caretaker of the ancient trees - Blame me.

the shape of a poet

All semester long, when we talk about the differences between first generation and second generation poets, the idea of intersectionality keeps hanging around me. Intersectionality is, in simple terms, the idea that oppressions like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, classism are not independent of one another and in fact are deeply interrelated and cannot be pealed away from one another. The idea is use most widely in social movements led by women of color who refuse to work on single identity category issues, but instead approach movement building, resistance and cultural sustenance from a systemic and holistic outlook. 

I wouldn't say that all the folks that we have read of the second generation have intersectionality at the forefront of their writing, but many do. I'm thinking Chang, Cardenas, Coleman, Tolliver particularly. And in this week's reading both Dempster and Gonzalez really made me think about that. I'm even curious about what folks think of a 2.5 generation, or what a 3rd generation will carry (and when it begins) - poets of color who refuse to be simplified down to representative of the life of their community and instead to be taken as one of a multiplicity of experiences, lives, intersections.

During the first class we talked about the danger of the segregation of a class called poets of color, as if other classes weren't teaching those voices and as if that is all that the poets we have read are. Clearly neither idea is true (although I wish more classes weren't so dominated by white writers); many of these poets have broken the barriers put up around them while also holding onto themselves and their histories with a ferocity that I deeply admire. And this week we've come upon the direct question: it comes down to one, shaping a poet.

While Kevin Gonzalez's poems have more visible content that is shaped by race and history than Brian Komei Dempster, both poets write from a place of deep particularities and intersecting experiences. Each of their voices feels deeply located in the specificity of a self in a particular moment, and write in such a way that includes all the ways their lives have been shapes by past, present, systemic and domestic experiences.

Cultural Stakes: Or How to Learn English as a Second Language and The Burning feel deeply related to me, while dealing with such different topics. Cultural Stakes is an amazing, forceful look at what moving across boundaries actually feels like for one person - linguistic, cultural and parental dualities are indistinguishable from one another. Learning English is indeed about going to a bar as a young boy with a father who gambles and drink and smokes and learning English is about beginning to keep secrets from the mother. It begins with waiting on a corner, and is always located in a body that "is an office always on the verge/of quiet." The Burning is as much an account of abuse and tenderness and neglect as it is of escape and memory and regeneration in shared secret.  "Our bodies dissolving inside the black room."

I'm really interested in the ways that gender is showing up in these poems for these two men. Shame and secret-keeping is a major theme, as is a sense of observation that is not shared. All the other poets that we have read that have most embodied intersectionality, for me, have been women. And now these men write such layered and complex shapes of themselves on the page, but differently, too, than their women counterparts. I'm curious what folks think about this? Would we have read this poems differently not knowing the first names of these poets?

Looking forward to class on Tuesday,
t

uprooting

It wasn't until after I'd read all the poems by Mahealani Perez-Wendt that I read her bio. And I wished I'd read it before I read the work; I wish I'd read it years ago. Bio blurbs's are usually so strange, right? Placing a poet in a location and a job, with a pithy bit about their present situation and placing them in the context of a literary pubic. Which makes sense, but is none-the-less always a little removed and usually about claiming legitimacy in the publishing/writing world. But Perez-Wendt's bio, while doing some of that expected publication list stuff at the very end, began with where she comes from. It began with her grandparents and migration and labor,  a whole paragraph of acknowledgement of where she comes from and what heritage. Which is such a powerful gesture and commentary on historical position, on the predominance of her ancestry and location and family in who she is and what she does.

Of course, all of us are products of the generations before us and where they moved from and to, what they did and had to do where they were, where that cumulative history placed us in our lived and experiences. But mostly, even in the folks we've read this semester, people don't lead with that. The way that Perez-Wendt did recognizes the primacy of ancestral ties in her life, her person, her writing.

I went back, then, to the shorter poem Uprooting. At first read the poem is about a single I being watching by a group of tourists who take her as a "native spectacle." In and of itself this is gross (like the tour buses that arrived in New Orleans shortly after the storm to see the damage but never step out of the bus and help rebuild) - putting survival and indigeneity on display and stripping the humanity away by act of watching at removal. But of course, this poem is about the ways that this culture has been stripped away and uprooted (graves dug up, bones tossed aside) and made peoples lives and culture and ways of life a novelty to be watched from afar. With holding Perez-Wendt's bio in mind, this poem bursts into all the echoes of a killing off of a culture forward and backward generations.

"I turned my back
so I wouldn't have to see them
Watching me
I stood like that
For quite awhile
when I turned around
they were still there
Watching me"

The creshendo down of lines, the tumbling and solid rhythm repeats this feeling that tourism and the arrival of outsiders who make a removed spectacle of ancestral and living ways of life flows back up the line of generations and threatens those to come. Even turning ones back doesn't make that arrival of the bus disappear, doesn't put the bones back undisturbed.

"This is my home, my roots -
What they doing is uprooting."

Uprooting the single I and all the blood, history, labor that flowed down into making that I exactly who she is. Uprooting all the generations before and after by arriving to watch the simple act of survival. I so appreciate Perez-Wendt's to the point and confident writing, downward rhythms and leading from ancestry.

SPT Reading 10/7

On Sunday I went to the Small Press Traffic to see Jai Arun Ravine, Michelle Naka Pierce and Meg Day. This is part of the SPT season theme of Genders/Bodies/Hybrids. All three of these poets/performers are coming from really interesting places of hybridity and "inbetweenity" (a term I learned at the reading). Jai Arun Ravine is a mixed race thai american trans masculine dancer, performer and text maker. Michelle Naka Pierce was born in Japan to one Japanese and one white parent, and teaches at the Naropa school. Meg Day, a white working class queer graduate of Mills, who is a coda (child of deaf parents) - more of that later.

The room was amazingly empty. Granted, there were a million and a half things going on in SF last weekend. But there were literally ten or 12 people in the audience, four of which had come with one or the other of the readers. And for whatever reason, it made me think immediately of the ways that poets in general, poets of color in particular, and poets who carry a burden of responsibility while choosing experimental styles have very few places/audiences which embrace them. It made me think about access. Because these are good poets. Michelle Naka, is pretty well known, Jai and Meg are local (or once local) and really captivating performers.

But I also thought a lot about the audience that SPT attracts/reaches out to. From what I know, which isn't that much, it is a small bay area experimental poetry world, sometimes with really well known readers, and sometimes with less known gems. And if the readings I've been to say anything, it is certainly a mostly white crowd. All this was buzzing around in my head before anyone even started reading.

So Michelle begins. And she reads from a really beautiful book, which is partially in response to Rothko Seagram's paintings, and mostly a meditation on liminal space. Her book blurb describes it as a book that "reflect[s] unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these "invisible" cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze." Michelle invitied Jai (a dancer by training) to move while she read. Jai (who calls out - I'm also a hybrid!) initially takes a seat in a corner, waiting for Michelle to begin. As the interruptions and juxtaposed images were voiced, as Michelle read lines like "can you reclaim mongrel," "what is the value of invisibility if not invisible on the road," and "the symptom of color," Jai leaned and fell and pulled themself around, sometimes hanging from joists in the ceiling and sometimes leaning against the podium where Michelle read from. 

It was really beautiful, to see the conversation happening, one part spoken out, the other taken in and responding somatically. And I was almost totally captivated. Except Michelle held the book up over her face, and spoke very quietly never looking up. And I couldn't find a reason to most of Jai's movements, even while I appreciated the gesture. And the feeling in the room was peculiar, hard to say what, exactly, until Michelle stopped reading and Jai took the stage.

Jai's interests are in Thailand as a place that white men go to "get lost in." They are interested in investigating their own relationship to Thailand and Thai culture and Thai-trans-masculenity while unpacking the imperialist othering of their homeland. The poems they read were satirical comments - mash-ups of American movies based in Thailand featuring Brad Pitt running along a beach, stopping for a drink at the Brokedown Palace Restaurant where Claire Danes works as a waitress. There were some tender poems, too, of searching for a place for themselves and feeling trampled by the white male desire to get lost in the beautiful wilds of Thailand. Conceptually I was really into it, although not at much into the actual poetry. 

Like I said, Jai is a performer. So they performed the poems, wanting to engage with the audience. Asking us how we were, looking for verbal feedback, laughs, something. But the audience was really really quiet. Like we had been trained that it was not what we were supposed to do - respond back - and Jai was obviously feeling weird about the silence. "Come on, you know what I mean?" they said. There was a group of 4 white men in the front two rows who'd come together, each sitting a seat apart (so as not to appear to intimate) and who barely batted an eyelash the whole performance. Behind them it felt actually like there was a wall that I couldn't get through to make contact with Jai, working hard up there. I thought a lot about it afterwards - the performer looking for recognition from the audience, for some sign of life, and getting crickets, and how very culturally and racially and "poetry aesthetic/school"-ed that is. 

Meg Day blew me away. She read a paper on Implant Poetics and Deaf poetics, talking about deaf communities as a separate cultural group, "sometimes considered an ethnicity although this gets tricky" and the ways that people who go in and out of deaf and hearing culture work in the liminal spaces, how bilingualism in English and ASL affect a writer. She, too, got almost no audience participation though she searched for it. Well, Jai, who sat down in the first row, called out a bunch of times, making me really happy. 

speaking from the mouth

I'm having a really hard time knowing how to write about this weeks selections. Lots of weeks, actually, I find it hard to figure out an entry point. With the question of who in the broader context I think I felt daunted even before beginning to read. And when I thought about it what in the question and what in the poets that we've read so far have me feeling at a loss for words, it is the idea of who. Who as in voice, as in the particular and strong voice/self/I that is found bursting through even the most painful and aching of poems.

The reason the question of who feels so hard for me to talk about is because much of my life has been a struggle with voice. I don't need to get into it, really, except to say that part of what I found of solace in writing was a place where a voice and a self could be fleeting and quieted, in ways that didn't feel possible through speech. It's why I so admire work that tells precisely from a poet's experience, that is booming and confident. It's why I adore performance poetry and feel so intimidated by trying to perform.

Thinking about these questions of who and context and voice, I read these poems - poems with such voices that are layered with self-confident power and rootedness in place, even as they talk about displacement and loss and being unrooted. Poems that, like Jerry Quickley's in particular, speak from an I that is so intimate and large and hurting and powerful. Poems that feel like that are being spoken even as I read them from the page.

And that might be it - that these poems are embodied. The way performance poetry, oral works, are poems that are simultaneously words and meaning as well as somatic expressions and visceral responses. Quickley's refrain: I will find myself. It becomes a different utterance when it is spoken. The very act of passing words through the mouth and the body is an act of finding oneself. A somatic engagement and the formulation of a response that is not external or distant, but intimate and bodily and connecting. You know how at really amazing performances you feel close to the performer, and I mean feel like in your chest and in your eyes opening and feeling like out of your head.

The somatic quality of these poems is the one that draws me to them so deeply, and the one that frightens me about them when I think about how to connect. My experience as a white woman with a family history of broken lineage and inherited abuse/inherited illness explain the difficulty in holding onto a steady and embodied voice and my cultural history of power, ownership, upward mobility and assumed "normality" explain the ability to write from a place of minimizing the I while not really being at risk of losing a self, socially speaking. The who in these poems aren't lost in themselves; they are particular and assertive voices that emerge from bodies that stand ground and walk and love and lose, but speak without a doubt, from bodies that in their existence demand acknowledgement of existence. This has everything to do with which bodies are politically, historically and socially valued.

So, when Quickley says, I am so devoid of human touch/ that a knee in my back/ is a blessing, and when Imani Tolliver says, you know you will be ready for a revolution/ when you are ready to eat rats, I feel a response in my limbs and in my chest, and I feel sensations like anger and grief and readiness, but I don't yet have the words for what else that response is.

characters are representation

Over the past week I've been thinking a lot about how the poets of color that we've been reading differentiate themselves from the generation before them, while also interacting with the burden of representation and the structures which can serve as limitations and confinement. In the grad meeting that we had we talked a lot about the poets of color are choosing to interact with the mainstream, to comment directly on race through their poetry. One thing that has been sticking with me while reading this weeks selection is the idea that regardless of the choice the poet of color makes, this choice makes a comment on the expectations of poetries written by folks of color, and makes space for writing on one's own terms. As Chanel said: what makes me a poet of color is this beautiful brown skin I was born with and not what I write about.

With this preface, I was struck this week with the choice that so many of our poets made to write from and of the perspective of characters. This wasn't the confessional identity poetry of the generation before them, nor was it poetry that relied on used tropes like Hannibal Tabu's, but this was in no uncertain terms poetry that commented on how marginalization feels and how difference is viewed. Noguchi, de la Paz and Carbo all used characters entering into the fabric of America. This device fascinates me. It creates a bit of distance with which to enter the world that the poems create, making the readers feel like there is something fictional or other about the world. However, that "magical" distance works to plunge us into the realities of experience in this world, which is not distanced except by positionality, and smacks us over the head with the closeness of it.

The feel of this poetry is so different than the poetry that hinges on an I, wrapped up in the speakers experience. I love the kind of poetry that lets us into a first person voice, don't get me wrong. But I think there are limitations to that kind of writing, limitations which can become confining expectations of what poets of color are "allowed" to do in their poetry. The character driven work, I feel, speaks to viewership. These poets are resisting the expectation to narrate from a representative first person, and instead flip that expectation. The poets become viewers, claiming agency in how stories are told externally, and holding a mirror up to the world they write towards and inside of.

Noguchi's A Man Made Himself a Marionette, which parades as a fantastical poem, comes to circle into nothing fantastical in a comment on internalized expectations and, perhaps, assimilation. "Eventually he learned to resign himself,/ The man who wished for a little discipline, to live/ The life of a dummy." Boom.  And de la Paz's family portraits, so dense and withholding and also full of magic, but which wind into the heart of experience of loneliness, distance from homeland, the different experiences of each within a family, and the tensions within those differences. "Now she has two wardrobes: 'Public' and 'Private.' Both these wardrobes, of sorts, come into view through these poems.

Returning to intimate I voices, however, I just have to say how in love with Pimone Triplett and Jennifer Chang I am. I'll save my raving for class.

Sorry this is late. I've had a bought of migraines this week, including one last night.

See you all tomorrow.