Hi Elmaz,
Would you please send out the revised assignment--just so we are all on the same page for class. I know we are making a map and curating it. How re we curating it?  I believe that the reading is now only on Tabu and Cabrillo--is that correct?

Thanks,

April

Also what is your correct email post hacking?

Lost in too many memories, words

I'm really at a loss right now. This whole week was a blur, and I apologize this post is late. My grandmother's viewing was on Thursday, the memorial service was on Friday, and the funeral was on Saturday. I spent so much time with family and crying, and too many feelings have past through me. Excuse the brevity of this post, but I hope I can give as much as I could now, considering how lost I am feeling!

I want to focus on one poet in the selection. Vandana Khanna's brevity in her poems struck me, and her first poem, "Train to Agra," shook me. It read like a homage poem, a tribute poem, and the journey was beautifully painted in such a succinct and striking way. I love the first lines, "I want to reach you-- / in that city where the snow / only shimmers silver / for a few hours." That, to me, focused on what "place" meant in a post-colonial perspective. "Place" is as much physical--the train to Agra--as it is emotional and it is structured as much as it is in the world and in the mind. Here, the narrator is reaching out to a place that represents and encompasses everything that a homeland assumes and extrapolates.

Here are other stanzas I love:

"... Asleep

in the hot berth, my parents
sway in a dance, the silence

broken by scrape of tin, hiss
of tea and underneath,

the constant clatter of wheels
beating steel tracks over and over

to the city of white marble,
to the city of goats, tobacco

fields, city of dead hands,
a mantra of my grandmother's--

her teeth eaten away
by betel leaves. The story

of how Shan Jahan had cut off
all workers' hands

after they built the Taj, so they
could never build again."

This brief passage shows me how Khanna takes the history of the person and ties it with the history of a people. It's a lovely, subtle movement and she does it without stress; it's a natural progression. She moves from the moving imagery of her parents dancing, a still movement, and like a film, expands and expands until the whole city of Agra is in view, quickly panning to the history of the Taj Mahal, the cut hands, and back to the history of the person, compressed in her grandmother's mantra.

It was too much to take in during this time. I miss my grandma. She is my muse. Throughout the whole week, I slept in her small room and explored everything, all the drawers, the big closet of clothes, her vanity table, everything. I wrote her obituary and researched her history as much as I could. I found her notes that told me of the time she was captured by the Japanese during WWII in the Philippines, when she was tied by the neck and hung and yet never relented, never said where my grandfather was, a major and guerilla in the US-Philippines combined armed forces. I found old documents detailing her brain tumor surgery in 1991, when I was only three, and I can't believe them--they tell me she was weak and nonsensical--but the only thing I remember is how much of a presence she held in my life, how much of a tyrant, a tiger mom, she was to me, and I couldn't help but cry and miss her.

I hope this is appropriate, but I wanted to share my own tribute poem I wrote for my lola back in April 2012. Khanna's first poem reminded me of my own. I hope this speaks a little about place and how to deal with place and memory too.

My lola knew I would sound like a bastard child
whenever I tried to color my tongue Tagalog. She mourned
the way I stuttered, how I paused over words that looked
like olds myths. She ran her fingers across my cheeks,
saying, “Here you are. Ikaw ay puti, anak. Ikaw ay puti.”
She frowned.

In the morning, I dig in my soul with a spoon full of rice,
looking for yesterday and yesterday, paper parols dancing.
I force my lola’s hands in mine, asking where my sky was.
Was it here, was it there, where do I stand? Am I of the
brown children or the white, I ask, telling her, please take me there.
She frowned a wave of sorrow, saying our sky was where
the gone things go, tucked away, laid in the folds of yesterday,
yesterday. I see the island and I am a thousand years old,
my lola stands with me, her skin bright like warm coconut milk
mixed with calamansi blood. She sings an old, forgotten kundiman
to my lolo in the woods. He wears a green beret and has a rifle
in his hands. When he sees my lola, his eyes become the Pacific.
He is the myth of the masculine toad, anger lives in his arms.
He sees me and spills ash over the land.

I begin to fade in this island without a sky. When only my hands remain,
my lola takes them, placing them on a rock. She tells me all the things
that I am: I am Ilocano, from Ilocos Sur, my lola is from the mountains,
my lolo is from the sea. I come from a rich farm family, and my great-lolo
died when the Japanese burned his land. The redness from the grass has
become my sky. There was no rain to quench the redness. Everything I am
has become yesterday, yesterday, like the sun goodbying at dusk.

Here is, too, my grandmother's obituary (if you are interested in reading it): https://lissawriting.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/my-grandmothers-obituary-the-tiger-from-aringay/

Form & Place!!!

I don't really know where to start. The selection of poems we read this week were so many things to me. Absolutely beautiful, disturbing (at times), hard to decipher (at times), and very heavy. The first thing that jumped out with these readings was the form. Many of these poets make such interesting form choices and use the page in such different ways.

I'll start with Lisa Asagi's first three pieces, April 14, April 15 and April 22. These poems are in block paragraph form, with heavy punctuation.  Then her next poem, Soundtrack For Home Movie No. 3, is in a slightly more traditional form with space in between stanzas. But even her stanzas in this poem vary from single line stanzas to four liners. I wonder what persuaded her to make certain form choices. The block paragraphs give an effect of claustrophobic panic/anxiety. It's a brick wall of words that come at you without any space to withdraw. I just kept going, kept reading, trying to figure out what was going on. Was she writing about losing her house? Was it by force or is she just moving on? I still don't quite know what those first three poems are about but one of the lines really hit me: "And I am wondering if there is really a thing called stop." This is such an intriguing question that I have never thought of. But it's been on my mind ever since reading the poem. What does stop mean? Does it ever happen? What are the indicators that something has truly stopped?

Moving on to Tina Chang, she also does some very interesting things with the forms of her poetry. She uses listing and numbering in "Curriculum" and "Journal of the Diabetic Father". Curriculum reads like a list of instructions or directions towards something. The fourth stanza listed as "contempt" really struck me.

4: Contempt
The heart is something daily slain.
The man is happy who goes off
to war, kills fields full of children,
becomes a hero. He returns, axing
the thin white flowers of his walls.
Then offers himself to his family,
quietly, an earful of bullets.

This feels like such a strong and truthful portrait of what can happen to a soldier, and specifically to a soldier's heart upon returning home from war. The the first and the last two lines of this piece are so painfully beautiful and jarring, emotional even.


This week we are focusing on "what is place". In "The Wind Shifts", Adela Najarro is so masterful in rooting her poems in place and the environmental space around her. Her poem "San Francisco" is so spot on!! I was visualizing the streets and neighborhoods of the city as I read her lines. Poetry is a powerful thing though because two poets can sit and soak up the exact same places, see the same sights, her the same sounds...but can create two entirely different poems, capturing such different memories...yet, both pieces could describe the single place so perfectly. That's the power of words, mixed with the power of individual memory.

This doesn't have anything to do with the topic, I just wanna say that I absolutely LOVE Eduardo C. Corral. I feel his words in the pit of my stomach, at my fingertips and in the base of my spine. Especially his poem on my favorite artist, Frida Kahlo. LOVE! Ok, that's all :)

Spaces and places in between

I(t) sunk.

The polarity
forcing, melting away to fit
never hot enough to break shape.

Hit and hit and hit, with miss:
concave, aching, bending, breaking
to be

whole.

To round out the dents,
smooth the curves,
pave the cracks.

To fill the space,
(your space)
with spaces and places
and names
of
my own.

Of mine, my fingertips reaching
to find the brink of
your tongue,
the well boarded shut,

and sing sweetly
and low
and slow

as soft
as tender
as all
of
you.

Adela Najarro is a G.

Adela Najarro's poems "Throughout New York City" and "San Francisco" struck me in the realest way. Her description of place is grounded in blatant observations, and the "caught" moments -- the ones everyone sees and feels, but no one feels comfortable discussing. Like that old, wraught, indescribable place: the soul.

Having lived in Brooklyn for two years and some change, "Throughout New York City" struck me immediately. She manages to encapsulate all of New York -- the rich, and the impoverished -- in one poem, which ironically is rarely done in a discussion of the city (and its boroughs). Its structure towers and reaches, with two-lined stanzas, broken apart by only one space. It feels cluttered, but she provides in that one space a moment for the reader to breathe. She captures the claustrophobia of the city by swinging us from image to image, weaving in and out of objects, people, and places like a yellow cab. Within this, she also weighs in on the emotional rollercoaster that the city provides its residents:

Emotional instability demands a new pair of shoes

and a leopard-print coat. All the men are beautiful glass

houses. Desire struts down Fifth Avenue, past Gucci and Chanel,

throwing blocks while shaking the rattle. I have been behaving 

badly chasing after a man in a blue wool coat who lisps

in Spanish and smiles with a crooked eye. A late night

phone rings and rings, while in the morning 

dreams morph a black crow's claws onto my left

ankle, a scavenger picking pieces from the not dead yet.

I should leave this city and practice patience...

I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to leave the city while I was there, and how all of these outside elements left me with that feeling constantly. The feeling of being impatient, of deceptively feeling unproductive, never leaves you. She places all of these things (man in blue wool coat, phone, Fifth avenue and all its consumerist glory, even her dreams) in the first five stanzas, neatly packed and processed like the Empire State Building, all while the city races with rage against time. There's never enough time for anything. 

Fortunately, there's room for the Earth's circumference in the poem as well, and "damn near perfect" leaves. This is the only mentioning of nature in the poem, as the rest is conquered by the massive iron horse that is the NYC subway.

Before we realize it, we are walking with her down the steps, whilst her body undergoes "an unnamable interior ooze". I want to pause and mention this ooze has a place too, it's contained within her body. It causes me to imagine the ooze that sits and does not settle in all 8 million inhabitants of the city, and how this ooze is ignored in order to assume the role of being in New York, which means being in many places at once (emotional, physical), and the performance of impatience and assertiveness in order to be "productive". Being around millions of people takes people to many emotional places, all in the course of one day -- from the person who bumped into you on the train, to the stranger who complimented your shirt, etc. Or, it can simply make you feel invisible, or having no place to belong at all. All of these emotional places collide, to the extreme, and on steroids, in New York City.

The subway is a contained place that gets you from one physical place to another, and it has continued to crack me up how there can be so many people in one place who (most often) never interact. I am so thankful to Najarro for describing these accidental interactions, and the grouping of people who feel so painfully individualized:

We find shelter under an aluminum awning over a five-story

parking garage and by running down subway

mid-summer sauna steps to another connection,

another train. All holds still

with permission to touch a knee, hip, shoulder,

a slight seductive brushing

back and forth as we sit on pre-fabricated easy-to-clean

subway seats...

She collectivizes the subway experience, through the use of "We". She makes us feel a little less lonely on the train, and zeroes in on the (un)authorized permission of body parts that can't help but speak to each other on the train (even if the people will never speak from their mouths). What is New York if it's not a city where everyone is experiencing "the ooze"? The fact that she puts this into words speaks volumes.

...Our bodies, 

moist and pliable, wait for the one who seeks

to calm or release or turn-the-table on that same interior

ooze and find refuge, a palm in the dark. In the lilt

of so many bodies swaying with the continual rocking,

there is only more of ourselves. 

Yes, yes, YES! She contains the mess that is happening inside the human psyche and spirit in this poem, and embodies the experience of finding solace in a place that is paced for you to have it all figured out, all the time. The truth is quite the contrary, of course.

To exit the subway is a tremendous feat, as anyone who's been on the trains knows. Pushing, shoving, rushing, efficiency. No one truly wants to be on the subway, but they have to take it, in order to get where they're going. It's almost as if she's formed a twisted metaphor on facing the ooze, which I equate to be the dark, ugly matter in our souls: You have to face what's below the surface in your soul, and plunge deep within it, in order to move past it, and get on with the rest of your life. 

Lastly, she describes the underbelly of the city, the "tiles falling from turn-of-the-century walls", that New York as a place now masks (think Times Square 1970s vs. today's Times Square). Its massively erected buildings, its shows, its fashion, have all been built to boast perfection, and assuming its place as "the best city in the world". Of course, then, there's everything that's not Manhattan (Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island) that is less-than-perfect (although the massive gentrification of these boroughs has a plan to create this facade of a perfect, sellable "product" once more). 

Contrasting this poem with "San Francisco", which, albeit in form is similar, feels a lot more spread out, and is located in its snapshots of people. There are many different ethnicities in this poem (Cuban, Cherokee, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean), as well as cuisine, so it feels much more familiar, and less jam-packed. Street names are also present, and it is through the mercados that we get a true whiff of para los quesos y los chiles:

...One

whiff and the world is not so small.

There is an air in this poem that provides breathing room, both in the space between stanzas, and the indentation of each line in the stanzas. Here, it is through the whiff of food that people are taken to many places -- past, present, and future -- as food is linked to memory through the olfactory sense. This food is the one element of culture that many folks have retained with them from immigrating to the US, and it is through cooking (and/or selling) this food that they can transcend space and time, and cause others to do the same. The world, truly, is not so small then.

This poem is considerably less claustrophobic, and less manic than "Throughout New York City" -- no rushing taking place, no weaving in and out of traffic, just "Tooling". Now, a lot of where a person's physical place is has everything to do with their emotional place, and it appears that San Francisco is leading folks to be a lot more aware of the world around them, with life being found even in the space between the Direct TV satellite and the gay pride flag.

I have much to also discuss about the emotional and spiritual place in the poem "Between Two Languages", but I will save that for class! Long blog short, Adela is uhhhmazing. 

What is place?

AHHHHH this question is so simple yet challenging to define!!! It hits like a brick to the face. It's a word you've been using since you can remember and it's a word you thought you knew, but when faced with the question you fumble for a clear cut definition.  I feel like I can ramble for days about what place actually is, to me at least.

So first step of whenever I'm stuck with trying define lofty concepts or notions or words especially coherently I always start by making lists as a meditation and ultimately to organize my thoughts.

A Place is:

where people fall in love
a concept
home
where people fall out of love
your childhood home
where you keep your secrets
your favorite restaurant
where you find secret
where you bury things
magical
a safe spot
a space
an installation
memory bank
an imaginary space
an island
part of your identity

Have you ever accessed and evaluated how much a region or a place affects an artist and their work. I felt a connection with Khanna's imagery of India and her being a foreigner there as much as her partner(?) she's traveling with in Spell for Lori

"We traveled the city like we didn't belong, a place I should call home but as foreign to me as to you."

I liked how we got to visualize specific place and regions in different regards with all the authors from Winds and AAP.

Comparing what place evokes for different poets is just an example of how broad the definition of "place" is... For example compare Khanna's poems of India with Eduardo C. Corral's words that paint a desert and mountainous Tuscon, Arizona... Tuscon and Agra are geographically distanced and distanced even further with how they're defined by the respective poets.

located isolation - lisa asagi

Among the disparate poets we read this week, I feel particularly compelled by Lisa Asagi. There was something so unsettling in the poems we read, something that made me feel like someone who I was very close to me was telling me what it felt like to be in a particular place and feel deeply uprooted inside it.

April 14th, April 15th and April 22nd are mysterious and wide poems, while they are so rooted in a particular and compressed feeling house. "My sister's house." Particularly, on the bedroom floor on the second floor, in the hallway at night, just outside the house in the cul-de-sac. We might, as readers, imagine this as a suburban house - carpeted, with fixtures and well lit, in a "safe" neighborhood where people know one another's names. What we might extend our assumptions out to be middle class, mostly white enclaves. Off the bat, Asagi tells us that this is not the speaker's home; she is familiar with it, but does not feel a deep sense of belonging in the house. There is such loneliness in these small prose poems. A quite voice, almost as if whispering and certainly narrated with a thundering silence of around her.

We know very little of the context here. We don't know where the speaker is geographically, or where the others in the house are. Perhaps the others are asleep or they are gone for a while. We know that there are children, the nephews or neices of the speaker. We know that this is a short stay from this moment - a little over a week - despite knowing nothing of how long she's been there or why she came.  What we do know is an overwhelming sense of loneliness, of isolation and of depression.

How it seems to have grown into an impossible thing. The motions of living. The way the air is unable to be still even in this room.

She longs for stillness, for sleep, but can't find either in the dark and quiet of the night. She listens to the mundane quotidian motions of time and physical  structure, but with a distance that can I can only describe as having a sense of entrapment in the comfort of it.

I tried to research Lisa Asagi, at once feeling a kinship and a mystery to the sentiment she works with. I found out very little - a few chapbooks publishes and readings here and there. The she was raised on a chicken hatchery in Honolulu. Reading the Soundtrack from Home Movie Num. 3 I found it. She's queer! And that kinship I felt was of a sense of isolation in the midst of family, and the confusion of moving in and out of comfortable but not entirely accepting spaces. That sometimes it feels desperate inside a place of familiarity to stay because part of a self isn't fully embraces, but that leaving home is a tremendously orphaning and strenuously lovely act.


it feels like one by one ropes are being untied and tossed onto a boat I am standing on. It is rocking. It is slowly sinking. And tonight it feels like I am getting ready to swim for a long time.

and then, in Home Movie:

What is true is that secrets do not have to be lies.

I found many connections to the other poets we read in this section. In the tensions between family and home/origin with identities and desires that pull people away from those places. I'm excited to talk more about this kind of hybidity and how it shows up in form and syntax.