แล้ว and then entwine is a skin that once peeled from Ravine’s body took the form of language. Inscribed on pieces of rice paper, Thai lesson workbooks and notebook pages, this text hung on the walls of our apartment in Boulder, CO. แล้ว and then entwine is born out of Ravine’s divine and dangerous rite of passage from a half-Thai ballerina dancing in the hollers of West Virginia to a trans-shaman-prince-warrior in the form of Ram who dares to probe beyond the silence and speak hir mother (‘s) tongue. These words are not extended poem or anti-novel, but incantation. Ravine carried Ram to term and I helped coax the boi-child as midwife with the harmony of a shruti box and a congress of ravens. Pieces were conjured over a pot of simmering curry, stringy meats and steaming jasmine tea and in empty rooms where we danced to the sound of Thai vowels and embodied rock, rope and sea.

-Marissa L. Perel

1.

Waitlisted (again), I went to the first class of Bhanu Kapil’s fall 2006 semester course at Naropa University with the hope that one of the three White boys ahead of me in line would drop out. (One of them did. That wasn’t enough, though.) I remember the trance-like state through which she led us in a writing exercise, and although I can’t remember it exactly, in my memory she told us to imagine the space between, to imagine a journey through that space, to draw the texture of that journey, to keep its notebook.

I drew this:

…which for me was both a rope and a river.

It became a seed.

1.1

I feel like I gave birth to this book. Strange, considering that I hate babies (…okay, except for cute Asian ones…) and, while Thomas Beatie wasn’t the only trans guy in the world to do it, I’ve never had any desire to be pregnant. I feel like I gave birth to this book because there are strands of the text I don’t remember writing so much as I remember how they came out of me, and the textural process of revision–knotting, un-knotting, cutting and tying to–once they were out.

2.

In the Boulder blur between summer and autumn, 2006, I was wandering some residential side streets, sort of lost. From where I stood, it was one year after an Amtrak ride from West Virginia (when I carried two suitcases and some cigarillos and didn’t turn around to wave) and one year before the Penske Craigslist rideshare to San Francisco (when I drove at 3:00 AM past the lights over Laramie, spooked by the ghost of Matthew Shepherd). I turned around to see my future friend–the writer, performance artist and healer Marissa Perel (a.k.a. MVP)–standing in the middle of the street, smiling.

Several months later, in a cafe/bookstore on Pearl Street, MVP and I sat at a table near the front with a small curtained window. (There might even have been a glass vase with a flower in it.) Looking up from our journals, we said, Let’s live together!

Both of us had moved from the east coast. Neither of us owned real furniture. Our living room was bare for the longest time. We turned it into a dance studio for authentic movement. We turned it into an airport. We put altars on either side of the fireplace. We put up our writing on the walls. We drew goddess cards and drank red wine and ate curry out of acorn squash. We danced to Kate Bush. We put up a picture of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha on the window facing the parking lot and watched it fill with snow. It was where, every Friday morning in the spring, MVP gave me the critical mojo I needed before I going to teach class.

I miss that apartment. It was our raven haven. It was our school of embodied poetics. It was where แล้ว and then entwine was born.

3.

On the third floor of the now non-existent Allegheny Books in Charleston, West Virginia, I spent junior high summers sitting on the floor in front of a section probably labeled “HISTORY – ASIA.” I looked for Thailand and found it was written by White people, illustrated in black and white photographs and printed in the 60s and 70s. Eventually I learned one to ten. I guess I didn’t need to count any higher.

When I decided to study abroad in Thailand in 2004, I decided I needed something to hold on to. I decided that this was basically my only chance to connect to a history, language and culture I thought was mine–I figured I had a right to it. But the other non-Thai, mostly White, American students in my program had other reasons–new experiences, fresh perspectives, to be exposed to different cultures, to go to Cambodia and see Angkor Wat–and often I felt they were fitting in more than I did. They were on their way to becoming advertisements for study abroad catalogs, promotional materials for tourism and instruments for US-Thailand public relations.

I traced Thai script in kindergarten workbooks. I read the signs I passed in red song taew taxis. I asked for sticky rice and meat on a stick and pineapple. But I discovered that this language failed me and fell short when I attempted to express myself to the aunt and queer cousin I had just met. Learning Thai was tied to a sunken past only partially legible in my face. As a queer, gender non-conforming, mixed race and diasporic subject, I wanted to stake claim to something concrete that could bind me to Thai-ness, that said I could belong. If biological family and bloodlines were insufficient…

…What claims can be made to silence?

The project that became แล้ว and then entwine developed from my need to imagine a historical relationship to Thailand, to invent a past and create a mythology, in order to figure out what that relationship meant to me in the present. I wanted a clear line from A to B to C–from Thailand to the United States to me–so I drew it. I wanted to put that line into my hands.

4.

I started writing this text in the fall of 2006 during my MFA at Naropa. Just that August I’d read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Myung Mi Kim’s Commons–two works and two authors that may have single-handedly helped me develop my poetical politics/political poetics. From them I learned what it means to “come into speech,” the effects of silence on the body, and what arises in the discourse between two languages/two nations.

I also finally discovered Padcha Tuntha-obas’ composite.diplomacy and trespasses. Up until then I didn’t know any other Thai poets, much less Thai poets who worked with Thai and English on the same page and were complicating notions of translation. For the first time I felt I was not alone and that my own work could be possible.

That fall I took a “Food as Metaphor” fiction course with Indira Ganesan. This was where all the meaty connections between hunger and language, learning and eating–the mouth, the mother, the river–began to take shape. Working with lines of dis/connection in family trees and genealogy diagrams, I wanted to show that the inheritance of silence was palpable and suffocating.

Everything I wrote that fall I fed into this project: the creation of a notebook that dreamed–re-imagined–my mother’s immigration. I wanted desperately to hold on to something, even if I had to make it up. That’s how much I needed it to make sense. That’s how much I literally wanted to make complete sentences. I was tired of fragments and the endless fragmentation of being; I was tired of line breaks and arbitrary spacing–I wanted paragraphs. I wanted a narrative. I needed to make a map.

5.

In an interview with Lantern Review, Craig Santos Perez talks about the page as ocean in relation to his multi-book project, “from unincorporated territory“: “I imagine the blank page as an excerpted ocean filled with vast currents, islands of voices, and profound depths. I imagine the poem forming as a map of this excerpted ocean, tracing the topographies of story, memory, genealogy, and culture.”

Perez talks about words rising up from this ocean/page like archipelagos, with all that is still submerged. I think about this kind of weaving in relation to my interaction with the apartment wall on which my book emerged. Because I was thinking of my project as a journey, as a long poem, as a map, I needed a surface large enough to allow me to see all the points at once–to see the source and conclusion simultaneously. Using the wall helped me visualize the text in relation to its parts, to get a sense of the whole.

The way I walked to and from this wall makes me think of Perez’s ocean. I stuck printouts to the wall with sticky tack and walked back. I walked up to the wall to re-write and revise and then walked back. I cut up parts of the text, added a note, diagram, picture or drawing, and then walked away. I walked up to move parts around and rearrange sections and then walked back. One day Nora Cox gave me a Chiquita pineapple tag that explained how to cut a pineapple in four steps. I added it to my wall:

This back and forth, discursive action also applies to the ways I used translation. I looked up traditional Thai poetic forms and modeled my own writing after them–translating from English to Thai to English forewords and backwards several times. Utilizing my dictionaries and worksheets from 2004, I used the direct translation as an anchor and then swam out, back and out again, drifting with the current. I also experimented with making the English text foreign and strange by translating it in and out of itself in the same way.

Because of this discursive motion, I have a very tactile relationship to this text and to its mythology. Like drawing the image of the rope/river, I needed to make this journey as visual, as three-dimensional, as possible. MVP and I made a song to “sweet bones” and sang it during a graduation reading. I made collages on rice wrapper. I wrote the text from the LOY and DTERN sections on rice wrappers.

In a performance I did at Naropa with MVP in 2007, I read the text from the wrappers, then cracked them or placed them gently into a bowl of water. I made a trail of rice kernels. I put soaked wrappers on my forearm and read the text off my skin. MVP accompanied on wrapper handling and shruti box. During an evening in which everyone else stood behind a podium and coughed, I got in trouble for bringing bowls of water on stage, in precarious proximity to electricity.

6.

Toward the end of writing this manuscript in the spring of 2007, I was starting to question a transgender identity. One of the reasons it took me a while to revisit the work was because being Thai was entwined with a kind of femininity I was beginning to disidentify with. While I had surrounded myself with literature written by first and second generation Asian American women and other women of color (like Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior), I was starting to recognize a familiar and depressing pattern concerning immigration, fracture and mothers. I was beginning to disidentify with the immigrant mother and daughter dynamic I had mythologized in my text.

Being gender non-conforming in the San Francisco bay area presented its own challenges that seemed to function outside my relationship to being mixed race and Asian American in the bay. My preoccupation with gender pushed my preoccupation with Thai-ness away for a while. I stowed the manuscript away and even packed away my Thai things. I didn’t want to look at them.

During the 2007 Summer Writing Program at Naropa, in the final week of my study there, I took Myung Mi Kim’s workshop and signed up for a one-on-one session with her. I gave her parts of the manuscript to read. She said, “I think you’re holding on too tightly to the text.” She said to give it some room to breathe, to make some gaps. I knew where she was coming from, but at the same time I didn’t want to. I was told that when I was born the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck in such a way that for a few seconds I wasn’t breathing. For me this text was about holding on too tightly, was about making complete sentences with periods, was about writing a narrative strung together in one line, on one rope, was about choking.

7.

I went to Thailand for the second time this past March and April, and through a residency at ComPeung made my short experimental film on Thai trans-masculinities, Tom/Trans/Thai. I was prepared to pass as farang (white/tourist); I was prepared to say “khrap” (the male participle required for polite speech). Every so often a Thai person would ask me, in Thai, “Where do you come from?” and depending on how I felt that day I would say either “Phrathet America” or “I’m half Thai, my mother’s Thai.” Sometimes they would then ask, “How come your mother didn’t teach you Thai?” and I would say “She didn’t” (or, actually, “never taught”) and they would say “Good luck” and I would say “Thank you” and walk away with my banana smoothie, my DVD, my t-shirt.

I know now that I can never belong to Thai-ness completely, no matter how much I write that connection into being. There are parts I take and parts I leave. This time around I found myself in Thailand in small ways, like having a fabulously gay dinner with the Thai Transgender Alliance, getting a beer at the 7Eleven and having the best conversation of my life with another half Thai trans guy, and watching boys in tight jeans and high tops dance in front of the MBK.

Knowing the rope is there, I let it go. Writing แล้ว and then entwine taught me how to let go. And then, and now, and so, I do.

—
Jai Arun Ravine is a mixed race Thai American writer, dancer, video and performance artist. They received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. Ze is the author of แล้ว and then entwine (Tinfish Press, 2011), the chapbook Is This January (Corollary Press, 2010) and The Spiderboi Files. A Kundiman fellow, hir short experimental film Tom/Trans/Thai recently exhibited at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand. Find Jai online at jaiarunravine.wordpress.com.

The way a snail crawls out of her shell,

cross boundaries almost as soon as I drew them.

               a strong believer in the Chinese saying “a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step,” I spilled out into the world. Could not tell the difference between me and the painting I saw that day,

     what was me, what was the painting. These days, I begin

with a sound.

               a thanking of the four directions, water, earth, air and fire.

                                             The world is whim; the sun rises every day to date.

               swallows a door each time, deeper.

                              If the whether is settled, the how is accidental. Some mornings, I begin
with email.

Is your life good? What do you do with it, and how do you feel about that?
      — Sesshu Foster

I tamper with it until it blows up in my face and I realize

            I could have sat with it and listened. Sometimes

                  sole provider for my adult daughter and her daughter              I want

to only be responsible for myself. Last night,

      the sounds of an animal, likely a coyote, scratching

against the window, knocking on the wall. This morning the smell

            of medicinal herbs, bark and root being cooked by my mother, I stay

      umbilical corded to my families.

working three jobs for a basement studio apartment that frequently flooded and barely affording to feed myself, I’ve learned from my mother how

      to laugh at my job, to laugh at the holes in my shoes and then duct tape them shut,

                        I am angry that life is unnecessarily hard and I am lonely.

I write, often in my bed/ livingroom. Dance when I turn on the radio or commune beneath black strobe-ing lights without liquor. And when he says that his accomplishment is as much his as it is ours, I think of how I like all my doors ajar.

            My life borrowed. Woke up

and ate dim sum and eggs and broiled cabbage (which my mom assured me was good for my digestive system), then I washed it down with orange juice. I rise into the sky, fly across county lines. This makes me feel like a slow learner, the kind that would exasperate an average teacher.

      I have to return it in the same condition it was given to me, clean, innocent and pure.

… in the company of language that has been met with potential erasure; what happens in that kind of collaboration between the impossibility of utterance and finding the means by which to utter?
      — Myung Mi Kim

I am having a very hard time understanding this sentence. So, let me try

      to translate. Each time surprises.

            a reclaiming of first sound and new sound

So much hope at one time; now, he can’t pin-
point one place his life could’ve turned to right

                  Creativity and civil disobedience.

the hopes that, in remaining unchanged, changed
him for the airier, the air about him
heavy,

Lots of days I prepare for the possibilities of uttering. just in case. I walk thinking
there is always “a case” holding the wall around the corner, trying to sell me
something I don’t need or take from me              the Psalms full of wishes

      for comfort, protection, revenge: good
      returns for faithful waiters like him.

                  knife needing a handle and a wood block.

                        how deeep the wound.
                        the abuse of our mother. Alcoholism. Ancestral memory
isn’t always an easy collaboration what Louise Glück says
               in her poem, “The Red Poppy”– I speak / because I am shattered.

How many generations does it take to heal? Two, three, twenty? By writing through a rupture, can one hope to get across it?
      — Pam Lu

The ink a triple bypass, but I intend to cause ruptures

      Each generation              The black lungs of the sulfur mine and the heads lodged with shrapnel

            one generation to seek a crevice.
            re -lives the pain of the one before.

At the same time, I like ruptures. Blood never forgets. (How)
                        are we befriending this body of rupture?

How do we navigate these buried maps? How do we locate our own native meridians? How do we measure our own time and space?
      — Craig Santos Perez

      Lately thinking
about time in more of the African religious way, where time is present

                        at the back of your head and I am walking backward into

our internal compass, discerning the landscape of our world below the surface of what we’ve been told,

      I do not trust maps. My intention to deconstruct my white privilege        No map can lead you to your meridian.

            delivered by those bent on controlling where I travel. My aim to become lost.
the body unable, immediately, to divert itself from the usual, historical repetitions. Humans spent 3000 years measuring things, and every measurement we have ever made has been inaccurate.

                  Conversation over food. easier to navigate together. Late night baking. Every measurement taken with the heart. Backyard gardening. Directing most/all of my anger at men.

      My uncle had his uncle draw a map of the old estate. Marking where his grandfather buried bags of silver.

                              Each vein is an edit.

            Here, under this tree. There, by the stone.

      by the gray hair, by the books collected, by who has been born and who has died.
My uncle tried twice to recover them, once in the eighties, once in the nineties. But the land had changed. The mountains witnessed his digging back into time.

      In my fury—I am more woman, more a part of things, more articulate and unafraid.

In the nineties, after the second failed attempt, he started a business. We measure our story by the number of other stories we run into, collaborate with, collide with.

                  we cannot locate ourself by ourself.

Last I heard, his business was successful, and he was wealthy, so he climbed Mt. Everest.

What if lineage is a line of lit fuel?
      — Michelle Naka Pierce

                                    I love my herbs textbook.

the general description of each herb, its functions, dosage, its action in combination with other herbs, its properties compared to other herbs. My dad died from cancer three years ago. Then the historical commentary. Who wrote what about this herb in which century.

How they disagreed, and argued about how to use this herb. At night, the ripples of wind.
                                          Lines being blurred, being bent.

                        Even knowing that each wave erases what came before

                  Hopefully, some lucky seekers will arrive there:

Before he passed, my uncle held ceremony in our living room. In that circle my dad said, among other things, “I am the first born child of a first born child.”

Standing in sand with water carving every grain around and under your feet. The textbook makes no judgment, only presents the arguments over the centuries.

                  be a segment, extending it, helping to light it.

The readers get to decide what they think, who they side with. Well I am the first born child of a first born child of a first born child. That is a line of lit fuel.

But then the work breaks down again: how do you recombine these “parts” — these fragments — that were disseminated under brutal conditions?
      — Bhanu Kapil

      If you trust the person you whisper to,
learn codes, new patterns, new techniques, learn to shape shift, learn the ways of trickster

                  because that person is outside
            the gate, and can relay your cosmos to the book maker,

quilt making made from scraps of cloth or stew made from left over meat and vegetables or what happens in the act of revision – fragments can make a whole.

Inseminations recombine fragments, and as such. This feels like a contraction. 40,000 acres somewhere in the Brazilian forest that have been given to corporations this year.

                                    you still must
                        sit still on the rough bench and wonder

about the editors. Stanley Kunitz said that the heart breaks
            and breaks, and it breaks

                  by living.

How long can I sit and be attentive when the world is blowing up?
      — Myung Mi Kim

The image of the tree that remains intact while simultaneously being on fire. What is a self-portrait, other than an attempt to breathe between shifting your bones?

                                    28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds
            both potently attentive and in constant chaos.

The opposite of destruction
      can’t be construction but rest, runners
who, relaxing, run faster. I live
                        in a world of blowing up.

to be on the street and mobile, and here in the garden, with this breath, on the page?

What is the recombinant energy created between languages (geopolitical economics, cultural representations, concepts of community.)?
      — Myung Mi Kim

When she speaks with Auntie in between-language, she pretends
      I don't understand. I see these as items that in close proximity can magnetize each other -
                              The imagined space that exists
                  between the pockets of the way we name
                        objects and what they do

like cutting up a speech, slipping parts
variously into a wall of slots, and wondering

            which ones will land
                        with which people. I wish

      I could live in an island of between-language

                  energy compels or propels them towards and away from each other, I would
live inside the breath of a hollowed out pit, of pith and hunger. Forced mutations
                  (which I am trying to embrace).
            emboldened and burdened by the continued proximity of difference.

The grapefruit we are both eating, the dirt we both washed off of our hands first.

      I get it, I say, I get it. There is fire, new registers of aliveness.

i have no earthly idea... I understand my name in any language.

Are your feelings somebody else’s ideas?
      — Sesshu Foster

      Plenty, yes. I hope
as I pass them from my body, nothing gets stuck…that it all translates
                  to you, the writer,

      just as thunder is not mine. My life is never my own.

Down the burning lineage, I feel the fishermen, Marcos-protesters, abandoned children, the “tomboys,” porridge makers, adoptees, judges, cancer survivors, writers, striking a match, the clack of lined-up dominoes on the sidewalk of my blood.

                  No small wonder that I feel damaged at times.

What word could mark the change in me? What word could help me get to the other side?
      — Tina Bartolome

It took us about ten notes to slide into a harmony. What word keep me, what word cling?

      Why? Beloved. Why? Focus. Why? Listen. Why? accountability

      Many of the questions I still have no answers to In the discordance, some held and some gave. What word free and now need prune?

            I do not want to do things alone anymore.

What are the consequences of silence?
      — Bhanu Kapil

Everything that has happened,
      having an opinion, and wanting
to say it,

            for as long as we could imagine.

      I love the peace, concentration, and light that silence affords me.

not the same as waiting for the fire.

      Silence out of anger

potentially preserve relationships if only used as a holding ground

      Forever on the verge but never honoring enough forward momentum.
Better to jump into a volcano. Auntie says, you don’t need to know their names. Mother says, you don’t need to know their names. I can hear your heart beating in my throat.

                  How such a decision does not have to equal silence.
can be a holding of the thought, the knowing for a time when it can be used by others. Fewer burns.

                              The sunlight is so bright up there.

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). She is a Kundiman and Lambda Fellow and part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. She has worked in the San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston Asian American communities. Ching-In currently lives in Milwaukee and is involved in union organizing and direct action.

Collaborators/Participants: Todd Wellman, Constance Lee, Aimee Lee, Lily Wong, Vincent Toro, Carina Farrero, Kyla Searle, Monica A. Hand, Susu Pianchupattana, Serena W. Lin, James Autio, Vanessa Huang, Shiaw-Tian Liaw, Porschia L. Baker, Nan Ma, Noel Pabillo Mariano, Stacia M. Fleegal, Joy Mariama Smith, Rona Luo, Evangeline Ganaden, Jie Tian, Dalila Paola Mendez, Kimberly Zarate, Anne Coyle, Rachelle Cruz, Stephanie Hammer. Translation assistance: Monika Maria Schultes, Cheng-Hsing Chen.

You are receiving this invitation because the fabulously and variously talented Barbara Jane Reyes and Oscar Bermeo have asked me to submit a poetics manifesto for Doveglion Press.

(For more on what a manifesto entails, go to: http://www.doveglion.com/2010/07/manifesto or check out the amazing manifestos of my writing peers)

As I’ve been thinking about what makes up my poetry and creative work, I have always been surrounded by strong community and collaboration, pulling from what’s around me, the work of my peers and also the lineage of artists who have come before.I wanted to write this poetics manifesto using, altering, collaging, sampling remixing the words and fragments of you who are in my life.  If you got this e-mail, perhaps you have collaborated with me in the past, or you belong to one of my communities, or are in the constellation of my life, or I am curious about you.  Whatever it was, your energy surfaced for me in this moment.In pulling from the lineage of artists who have come before, I am following in the footsteps of:

Doug Kearney — http://www.douglaskearney.com/
Myung Mi Kim — http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kim/
Orlando White — http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/orlando_white/index.shtml
Claudia Rankine — http://www.claudiarankine.com/
Cathy Park Hong — http://cathyparkhong.com/
Gloria Anzaldua — http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/anzaldua.php
Larissa Lai & Rita Wong — http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780978498139/sybil-unrest.aspx
Noah Purifoy — http://www.noahpurifoy.com/
Catalina Cariaga — http://www.durationpress.com/subpress/cultural.htm
Layli LongSoldier — http://www.amerinda.org/newsletter/13-2/longsoldier.html#1
Betye Saar — http://www.betyesaar.net/
Juan Felipe Herrera — http://www.juanfelipe.org/
Akilah Oliver — http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Oliver.php
Kimiko Hahn — http://bombsite.com/issues/96/articles/2834
Sharon Bridgforth — http://sharonbridgforth.com/content/
Lily Hoang — http://lilysvirtualpad.blogspot.com/
* Check them out if you haven’t before:-)

I am also thinking of Bhanu Kapil’s brilliant book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Over many years, she asked a series of South Asian women she met randomly (on the street, in the airport, in the subway) a series of 12 questions, recorded them in notebooks and then wrote a beautiful hybrid book which “contains words, lines, sentences, fragments, stories, phonemes and images taken from those notebooks.”  This audio clip features Bhanu Kapil talking about the origins of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and reading from the project:

http://www.kelseyst.com/listen/2006/11/15/bhanu_vertical_audio/

So what does this mean for you?  If you would like to participate, please respond with a YES.  I will then send you 12 open-ended questions.  You can answer in whichever way you are moved to — off-the-cuff, improvisationally, in deep meditation, whichever feels right to you.

xo,
Ching-In

*
How will you begin? — Bhanu Kapil

I have been thinking about stairs, leaving
one place moving
with fingers on the home row, or by removing
an article of clothing.  In order to get close to flying,
slowly.  With my thumb
on the record player, listening very closely to the whispers.

*
Is your life good? What do you do with it, and how do you feel about that?  — Sesshu Foster

The ice rink today had good
ice.  The mirror in the Target changing
room told me to keep
doing important things.  In the past
I have lived in very toxic
places.  If you don’t know much

about orchids, all conditions
correct, most important they need to be left

alone.   Here:

I am always searching for the perfect
green mango of my childhood, and I come close
in Asian stores, even the jarred, pickled ones
imported from my country, and then I go home

and know that I can never find it anywhere else. …………………I memorize formulas, I weigh herbs, I interpret over the phone, I do intakes, I feel you where it hurts, and where it does not hurt.  I feel myself where it hurts.  Colonized for 500 years, I now own a master key to the collective shackle. I help children remember the name

they had before they were given a name.  Given the space to chisel words onto the surface of sky,

I am occasionally afforded a disco break.  I watch the cars go by this Midwestern suburb.  I tap needles down your back.  It’s getting easier these days.  I feel surprised, how much I do not miss

what I left behind.  I talk

to the same person everyday.  We sleep and wake up, and I like the way

it smells, our sleeping and waking.

*
… in the company of language that has been met with potential erasure; what happens in that kind of collaboration between the impossibility of utterance and finding the means by which to utter?   — Myung Mi Kim

We each a self induced Mandala
intersection of six languages – five
broken, one which “pass”
as fluent – but none fully
home.  Travel
start with grief and despair, glimmers of meaning
seeded in you from the very beginning.  Practice, revelation,
groping towards fluency, amnesia that comes with loss.

A circular narrative unstrung

What we say builds us
To live is an act of erasure

I don’t know.

Sit down by a fire.

Breath brew, air whisper

to dust oil lamps
he bought at antique stores. He wipes them clean.

There is a word for this. I think. Anomia. A severe problem with recalling words or names. Or dysnomia.

Only ten minutes pass. He sees his carving
someone must love someone just enough to dig without shovels.

*
How many generations does it take to heal? Two, three, twenty? By writing through a rupture, can one hope to get across it?  — Pam Lu

unannounced, sometimes by invitation, sometimes as a gift

If you are expecting me to surrender my wounds, I won’t.  Fever
leads to immunity.

part of the fabric, I am not an artist who loves solitude.
And yes, one can row a boat across a canal putting pen to page, I’ve crossed

time with my hands bound, only to realize that time itself is a fog of circumstance. I wandered. I once saw myself making rope, shaping bullwhisps.

His mother asks him if he’s with anyone. But he has all sorts of projects that doesn’t involve making babies; babysitting, for example.

to write something that will heal
all fourteen generations of my father’s traceable genealogy, I don’t know

if I can meet that ambition.

None.

You the only hope that will make it happen.

*
How do we navigate these buried maps? How do we locate our own native meridians? How do we measure our own time and space? — Craig Santos Perez

With a wounded, bleeding finger, sheet metal, ramen noodles, wool socks, sheet music, old books and letters, fragments of half-knit

things. Sometimes

like walking in a room full

of empty chairs and knowing which chair
will be the right one, not because
you can see where
sitting still will take you, but because you can imagine who
will speak how, where the best place to see a piano player’s hands is, how

far forward the rest of the listeners will sit. Knowing something is out there, deeper than your feet, deeper than potatoes, maybe deeper than the frost line. We locate

them after living for a while, missing things, piecing things together, asking questions, feeling sick in different parts of the body, losing things and people, going to strange places, being a stranger and a shadow.  I am furious.

Not sure how to navigate that all the time.
The ways that “manners and politeness” have paralyzed me.

closing our eyes, picturing our spine.  Despite using a level and copious amounts of tape measure, I could not make everything seem completely right.  Take a parabola (or mountain or a bowl of rice or breast or wave). Let Pleasure be the point, this apex, where the curve changes direction. Call this point Equilibrium. All other points is Pain: bees on the ground, car-alarm mockingbirds.
Somehow the ground of the building is crooked, and the painted line up top is skewed.  My body is cluttered with doors I spit out and open one after another

to you after another.

*
What if lineage is a line of lit fuel? — Michelle Naka Pierce

Then many of us are on fire.

Gasoline.   I am a trough of gunpowder.  I am carbohydrate.

Pour flames. (This is me acting before i think.) Pour more flames and let that which doesn’t elevate be burned and its ashes conceive new trees; new beings. (Now I’m thinking.) If the lineage consumes too much, then walk away, build a safe space, study the heart of the fire that’s too consuming, but more importantly study your own, decode it, take what you need to continue and contribute to the lineage. She should only approach, while hearing her own waving flame.

My paternal grandmother will someday come to me from her dead place and invite me to butter the turkey with her, our small hands inserting pats of gold under tight skin. She will cry instead of making small talk.

If you are fuel, you cannot also be water, as much as you might want to be already ashes.

*
But then the work breaks down again: how do you recombine these “parts” — these fragments — that were disseminated under brutal conditions? — Bhanu Kapil

A. Steal two turntables and a p.a. system from your uncle’s garage.  Slowly, with my thumb on the record.  (see first question)
B. Rig a lamp post to get yourself some juice.
C. Put up flyers at the bodega, the rec center, and the 6 train.  Paste and light them up.
D. Wait for the crowd to gather.
E. Pump the music and bump until the cops break up the party.
(See: Kool Herc, KRS-One, and Afrika Bambaataa)

But we had such ordinary love between us: coffee, walking the dog, cocktails, making meals, having friends over. I understood love to mean wanting our tessellated days to continue.

Some brutalities are unspeakable, and we shouldn’t force ourselves to speak of them.

So if we were each in our silent, cordial, distrust of each other, we were stubbornly ordinary in our love. On a trip to San Diego, we made several U-turns, but we arrived in the end. When on the 5 freeway I said look, ocean, she handed me her hand lotion; we were each of us at least two people in our preoccupations.

no division between wave and ocean.

We laughed our way back into one bodies.
We grow together and whole again after the breakage.

*
How long can I sit and be attentive when the world is blowing up? –-Myung Mi Kim

This depends on how well you are trained.
my kali instructor Gura Bautista spoke about life as concentric circles.
And if you survive, that’s not fair — if you ask a Buddhist this question, you may get a real answer.

*
What is the recombinant energy created between languages (geopolitical economics, cultural representations, concepts of community)? — Myung Mi Kim

His mother lives in Hong Kong with his brother.

behind a bright red velvet curtain with broadway tunes, Chinese opera, jazz, voices yelling at a rally, fists raised, and girls with glasses using electronic devices to Wikipedia questions about their origin.
The most he does is to call his mother twice a week and his brother about once a month.

Das unheimliche ist verborgen.

visits maybe once a year ……….saves money for her retirement.

I heard today that a saxophonist died.  He thinks he can do more, and more; isn’t it weakness to be unwilling

*
Are your feelings somebody else’s ideas? — Sesshu Foster

These feelings
…..demons, skeletons, baggage and other decaying dead weight that find their way and anchor themselves in
I borrowed them from the library and will return them with all late fees paid once my name is transferred from energy to artifact.

If I go to Taiwan now, I’d be arrested to fulfill two years of mandatory military service, being told what to do, push-ups maybe, in a language I don’t understand.

I believe in recycling.  I have no feelings besides those programmed into my robot matrices.

If I go back to Japan, I would hate how street signs aren’t as large and red as I remember them, the road from our San no Maru Danchi apartment flat to Najima primary school not as long.

I can’t live without you, lover.  Or I would hate wanting Fukuoka to be something else. What of feeling after break?

If I go live in Hong Kong, I’d be neither resident nor visitant, port and floating. If I stay here, I shall be provincial in all its glorious dialectic toward universal by pressing against the individual.  I’m crowded with ideas.

How to touch a native feeling?  But who really knows? Right now I’m stuck to Gloria Anzaldua poster on my wall.  Tomorrow, perhaps an earthquake, or ICE knocking at my door. Tomorrow perhaps an illness or lottery. Tomorrow a remembered pain or new limb.

*
What word could mark the change in me? What word could help me get to the other side? — Tina Bartolome

Give me words, please.

Makadaymushkikiwaboo.
Belisa Crespusculario of Isabelle Allende’s Eva Luna stories.  I always wanted to be that super hero.  Ani minikway dah makadaymushkikiwaboo.  Since I don’t know which side you are trying to get to, it is a difficult question to answer.

Dance!
And then kinnickinnick, of course.  

*
What are the consequences of silence? — Bhanu Kapil

An unmade bed,
the firing squad,
an island annihilated by a pipeline,

Somebody else will ask all the questions which will be written with indelible ink on scrolls stained with tea, to make them look ancient.

Then again so can danger.
Your stomach rumbles.

a razed jungle,
Satori,

Somebody else will present your answers and frame them in non-reflective glass.

exploding tea kettles,
the extinction of ritual,
a rave review in the New York Times,
a question festering into a cancer,
a water supply privatized,
a magnificent mural adorning the Westside,
The Patriot Act,
an apology,
and lovers remembering together that
they are the center of the universe.

When you raise your hand, somebody will call on you, and your answers will be broadcast, but not in your name.  You will wish that instead of raising your hand in the air, you had simply held hands with the black-haired girl, wearing glasses, sitting next to you.  She is listening:  http://www.vimeo.com/25331226

—

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). She is a Kundiman and Lambda Fellow and part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. She has worked in the San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston Asian American communities. Ching-In currently lives in Milwaukee and is involved in union organizing and direct action.

Collaborators/Participants: Todd Wellman, Constance Lee, Aimee Lee, Lily Wong, Vincent Toro, Carina Farrero, Kyla Searle, Monica A. Hand, Susu Pianchupattana, Serena W. Lin, James Autio, Vanessa Huang, Shiaw-Tian Liaw, Porschia L.  Baker, Nan Ma, Noel Pabillo Mariano, Stacia M. Fleegal, Joy Mariama Smith, Rona Luo, Evangeline Ganaden, Jie Tian, Dalila Paola Mendez, Kimberly Zarate.  Translation assistance: Monika Maria Schultes, Cheng-Hsing Chen.

[Photo credit: Sarah Grant]

We are experiencing technical difficulties, and apologize for the delay in posting here! We were on a roll too, with our weekly essays from our excellent authors. But fear not, we’ll be back on track very soon, with essays from Ching-In Chen (a two parter), Jai Arun Ravine, book reviews by Craig Santos Perez, reprinted work by Julie Thi Underhill, Serafin Malay Syquia, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, and more.

Furthermore, a collaborative print publication is in the works, and we’re totally psyched about this!

Gracias y Salamat for your patience, understanding, and support.

[Baybayin font source: http://www.baybayin.com]

The authors include, for example, Sixto Lopez and Clemencia Lopez, whose passionate speeches moved the Anti-Imperialist League and New England Women’s Suffrage Association; editors and contributors to the Filipino Students Magazine, who railed against the exhibition of Filipinos at the St. Louis World’s Fair; and the publishers, editors, and writers for the myriad Filipino newspapers and magazines published on the West Coast in the 1930s, whose incisive and often angry editorial prose on labor and civil rights spurred strikes in the agricultural fields. There were many more writers than those I mention here, and their work in periodicals was published not only on the West Coast, but also in the Mid-west, in New York and Washington D.C., and likely any area to which Filipinos migrated, and stayed for any lengthy period.

Our literature has evolved from letters, editorials, essays, short stories, and poems published in periodicals, and even from testimonios, in the case of Filipinos whose personal experiences of vigilante attacks on the labor camp near Salinas were written and published in the Philippines Mail.¹

The early writings of Filipinos published in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century were in turn part of the stream of journalism and literature published in the Philippines within U.S. colonial communications and publishing infrastructures. Their work was created in an atmosphere of provisional “freedom” and constraint through surveillance which, I believe, affected the early published efforts and writing of Filipinos published in the U.S., in some cases with devastating effect. This relationship needs to be further explored.

Without the support of U.S. Filipino² publishers and editors in the pre-WWII era who used their newspapers as venues for budding, as well as more experienced writers, Bulosan—and many other Filipino writers from that period—may never have gotten published at all. The editors were, in a sense, our first curators.

Why does it matter that many of these editors and publishers were also writers? How will our view of Filipino American literature and arts change, if we read the passionate political editorials of D.L. Marcuelo, Luis Agudo, Juan Dionisio, M.G. Alviar, Aurelio Bulosan, and youthful Filipina writers such as Helen Rillera and “L.A. Pinay”? Why do they matter, and what are the implications of this journalistic-literary genealogy? All these and other questions can only be answered if we continue stewardship and curation of the early periodicals (newspapers and magazines) published by U.S. Filipinos.

I’m referring to curation not only in its functions of preserving and archiving, but also in terms of what Lorcan Dempsey summarizes as “selection, organization, and presentation.”³ This involves the effort to find and develop audiences for texts, making sense of them in ways that will be valuable for readers, libraries, and booksellers. This can include criticism that taps into the larger literary history of Filipino writing in the U.S. and elsewhere. Unless we are involved in a continuing process of archival research and curation, we will be participating in the erasure of our early literary history in this country.

Some Filipino American researcher/curators—Alex Fabros, Dawn Mabalon, Jess Tabasa, Reme Grefalda, Lala Lacuna, among others—began years ago to collect photographs, interviews, books, and newspapers of historical significance for Filipinos in the U.S. Others, like E. San Juan, Jr., have drawn on Filipino newspapers found in university archives and individual collections in order to understand and articulate contextually certain aspects of Filipino writing in the U.S. since the 1920s, especially in relation to the work of familiar writers such as Carlos Bulosan and Jose Garcia Villa.

Still, there hasn’t been enough inquiry and excavation done to bring to light the work as writing in the early periodicals. I fear this is because there is an underlying assumption that there isn’t much there, and, if there is something, it’s “only” newspaper articles and journalism. The periodicals are seen as important historical and sociological documents, but—as “literature,” nothing of worth.

There are certainly enough U.S. Filipino newspapers and magazines catalogued in university archives and county historical societies to present a significant amount of material to be gone through. Furthermore, references to periodicals that aren’t catalogued suggest that there may be more out there hidden in personal collections and in public library newspaper archives, if they still exist at all.

Deeper research and study of these works will likely change our perspectives of Bulosan, Villa, Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez and others, and allow us to see our contemporary writing and spoken word in a larger, richer, and more complex historical context. How many Filipino writers are aware, for example, that one of the more important critiques of Bulosan’s work before the mid-century, was written by a Filipina, Nelly X. Burgos?⁴

The early writers need to be taken out of the mist; their names should be spoken in classrooms, their work read, and their significance and relation to current Filipino American writing argued and discussed.

Though our contemporary writers and artists are increasingly finding ways to use the media to make their presence heard, this is not the case for early U.S. Filipino writing. Is this any surprise, given our history of invisibility in the U.S.? Part of the problem may be the “unsexiness” of “literature,” in comparison to spoken word, hip-hop, dance, or the visual arts. We may not always appreciate some of the biased opinions voiced by Filipino writers in the 1930s. And yet, how fascinating it is to read—within its historical context—of a play about Jose Rizal’s martyrdom, written and staged by a Filipino women’s club, with participation of many members of the Filipino community; how moving to read—during a period when striking laborers were harassed by vigilantes and police with impunity—that some 2000 attended and were moved to tears by the play’s symbolism of courage and sacrifice.⁵

“Curation” has recently become a buzzword, and its use is already being capitalized as knowledge organization for pay. In an era overwhelmed by information on the internet—much of which consists of increasingly superficial content—it’s important to approach this work with a more fundamental curatorial value: to “curate” is to manage, oversee, and even to guard and protect that which we deem valuable.

With funds disappearing and academic publishers litigating to charge fees for access to books, journals, and interlibrary loan, our ability to locate the material may become more difficult. As time goes by, more of the fragile print materials will be lost before becoming microfilmed or digitized. Printed on cheap paper stock made during the economic downturn of the 1930s, the Filipino periodicals are literally falling to pieces while archivists search for funds to purchase acid-free containers and other preservation materials—hoping, in the meantime, that each turn of the page will not cause complete disintegration.

Locating primary documents now is important, and preservation is just as important as digitization. I have seen original copies of the Philippines Mail newspaper;⁶ viewing the pages in full size, with ads and articles juxtaposed as the editors originally placed them is crucial to our understanding and interpretation of the early writings. While microfilm “preserves” documents, they also frame them in ways that hinder full viewing and interpretation. In a way, they even contribute to the “invisibility” of the documents.

University collections had been making inroads in collecting Filipino periodicals prior to the Bush administration (U.C. Berkeley and U. Washington are stellar examples). But as the government became more involved in the wars in the Middle East, and as the economy began its inevitable crash, funds for archiving, libraries, ethnic studies departments, teachers, and staff have been withdrawn.

Thus, while it’s important to make change happen within existing institutions, it’s also time for us to be the curators and disseminators of our own histories, literature, and arts. There is enough material out there to allow for many scholars to find their own curatorial niches. Are there more Filipino newspapers and magazines in New Orleans? Chicago? New York? Alaska? Kansas? Mexico City? Was your uncle, aunt, or grandfather an editor who boxed up old newspapers and hid them under the bed?

County historical societies, public and private collections, as well as university libraries are good places to start. Filipino curators, researchers, and writers need to meet and discuss strategies. We can’t wait for universities and other institutions to catch up with us. We are low in their list of priorities now; they have other fish to fry.

–

[1] I use the word in Spanish consciously, as a nod to the important scholarship that has been done on testimonios in the Americas.

[2] U.S. Filipinos: A term used several times in newspaper headlines by Filipino writers during the pre-WWII era to describe themselves.

[3] Lorcan Dempsey, “On the discrimination of curators and curations…” Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/002119.html. Dempsey is Vice President, OCLC Research and Chief Strategist.

[4] Nelly X. Burgos, Philippine Commonwealth Times, Sept. 25, 1941.

[5] “2000 Are Inspired By New Feature Of Salinas Rizal Fete,” Philippines Mail, Jan. 8, 1934.

[6] Accessed at the Monterey County Historical Society in Salinas, CA.

–

Jean Vengua has a Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley. Her Ph.D. dissertation can be accessed online at ProQuest/UMI. Jean has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Gavilan College. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Prau, and a chapbook, The Aching Vicinities. With Mark Young, she co-edited the First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. In the mid 1990s, Elizabeth H. Pisares and Jean Vengua formed Tulitos Press and published and edited The Debut: the Making of a Filipino American Film by Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, and The Flipside, by Rod Pulido. Her poetry and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies. She currently lives and works in Elkhorn, CA, near Salinas.

Find her online at http://commonwealthcafe.info, http://commonwealthcafe.wordpress.com, and http://biblioshock.wordpress.com

I borrow from hip-hop all the time, if not content than approach. I write a rhyme sometimes won’t finish for days,¹ as the line goes, which is to say I revise. I rework, re-see, re-think. And right now I’m reconsidering how I think about poetry and hip-hop. For a long time the musicality in hip-hop has been, primarily, considered a function of the track. MCs have the benefit of possibility: you can be a lyricist or you can be hot garbage over a dope beat. I’ve said it myself. I’ve long thought poets had no such luxury, but I was wrong. It all starts with denial – if I say that there is no poetry in hip-hop, then I don’t need to look for how the words in hip-hop make music, and therefore I am never threatened by the skill of an MC. But more than that, I don’t look at the ways poetry can mirror mainstream hip-hop’s tendency towards nihilism and apathy. It all boils down to how the art pushes the artist to say something, and how the art offers the artists masks to hide from self and society.

My ink so hot it burn through the journal.² There is poetry in hip-hop, a very obvious manipulation of the sounds in words to help convey meaning. The dopest MCs have a fluency with rhyme, rhetoric, and figurative language. Used to speak the king’s engalish, but caught a rash on my fingertips, now I speak just like this.³ You can hear it, the reliance on rhyme that would be called conservative if a contemporary poet showed such favor. But the MC knows what the poet has forgotten, the musical landscape of the words is a product of how the words are arranged – and rhyme, metaphor, simile, anaphora, etc., etc., etc. are not stylistic ticks. The dope MC creates the musical landscape and lets it function as the wave the meaning rides on. So I steal, because the youngins don’t bob their heads and memorize the words just because they are in love with the death and violence and materialism that many of the songs on the radio advocate. They nod their heads because the poetry of hip hop offers them something that contrasts with the prose of their lives: the lectures, the movies, the conversations amongst each other. The music is a break, and opens up a space for something different to happen in their heads. So I steal. Bucka bucka bucka bucka bucka bucka. Onomatopoeia, alliteration. I want to manipulate schemes and tropes – those mountain sized categories of rhetoric.

They trying to censor the influencer just makes me sicker, influenza; I abide by their censorship, soon as they ride I get back on my nigga shit.⁴ Ask Lupe Fiasco if MCs care about audience, if they are concerned with making a discernible sense. Ask the members of NWA that you can catch up with; ask Luke. Even at its worst, rarely do you listen to a hip-hop album and walk away at a loss for what the artist was saying. Or maybe more to the point, maybe you never walk away from the dopest, most skilled rappers albums wondering what was going on. I want a poem like that, a book like that – something that is infused with what I think about the world. When we talk about classic albums, their status as masterpieces cannot be divorced from the material content of the songs. It is never solely about rhyme, solely about the beat – it is all about the way rhyme, beat, and lyrics form some kind of landscape of commentary and art. I have a running list in my head of the times that poets have told me that the poet must please self, that they must write with the perfect reader in mind. I’ve always wondered about that. I have never been a perfect reader. I skip pages, skim – I come to the page without the history of American literature always at hand. I come to the page to argue, to learn, to be seduced. What exactly is a perfect reader? Imagine being an MC, walking into an arena with even a meager two thousand people in attendance. You hear them screaming, you hear them chanting. There is a woman with fifteen ear piercings standing next to a young cat with a suit on. There is no way to predict what each of these folks want, no way to predict a perfect listener. So what does he do – he spits like one person is listening and has to get it – and that one person fits the legal standard for liability, a person that would react in the same manner as someone else with reasonable intelligence in the same situation.

Eight million stories to tell.⁵ I just want to tell a few, and tell them well. As a lover of music, I’ve learned that narrative is king. It’s what drives us, explanations, excuses, professing of love – they all start with a story. I used to know this girl named Mary Jane. What up kid, I know shit is rough doing your bid. Dear sister got me twisted up in prison I miss ya. It’s all narrative, it’s all hunger to say something and say it well. It’s no surprise to me that MCs rely so much on those two broad categories: scheme and trope, to get their points across. Maybe MCs aren’t aware that schemes are figures of speech, rhetorical strategies that change the standard word order or pattern; maybe they do not know that tropes are rhetorical strategies that change the general meanings of words – but they used them. I think of myself as a kid playing the dozens. I had no idea that “you look like a monkey’s uncle” was simile. The point, in the end, is that you can listen to the best of MCs and see their strategies, and understand what their saying.

I’m like Che Guevara with wings on I’m complex.⁶ That’s what I’m chasing. Complexity as a poet. Maybe when I said the poet was reaching for prophecy I was wrong. Think about it – if nothing else, the MC embraces failure, embraces their mistakes. I understand that the speaking is proof that they made it through these hard knock tales – but at its best, this speaking is something more. It is a way to narrate the hero’s story, and maybe hip hop’s most arrogant in the trope of rapper as hero. I never said I had wings on nigga I get my by any means on⁷ – which is to say this hip-hop thing is a professing of one’s history, filled with jewel and indictment. I go to hip-hop because of the nakedness in the livest MC. And the refreshing honesty. Think about Tupac on “Life Goes On.” Think about Jay- Z on “Song Cry.” And of course there is no need to be sentimental. There is a fierce nihilism in hip-hop, there is a ridiculous amount of materialism. Still, I go back to the well, because as a poet I learn from the audacity and from the amount of exquisite execution needed to pull off some of this work, especially when the MC, the artist, is more caught up in the compromises of fame than any poet will ever be. And the MC knows it. I ain’t invent the game, but there ain’t no reason why I be buying expensive chains.⁸

Ask Joan Aleshire. Borrowing from Stephen Yenser, she speaks of “gossip (fact, data, raw material),” and “gospel (parable, pattern, truth).” In discussing Lowell’s “Dolphin,” Yenser argues that where there is more gossip than gospel, the pattern, the meat of experience is hidden. Specifically, she’s talking about the lyric poem, and Yenser is talking about Lowell, but what is an MC if not the epitome of a confessional and lyric poet. And gospel is different from prophecy. The prophet lives in his time and carries no mirror. He talks of your flaws, not his – but he who spits the gospel is reflective. And the gospel lasts longer. Prophecy dies when that moment is done, and prophecy only becomes lesson if it gets woven into gospel. I’m stealing a line from the nicest MC, often. Cause I get it – the poet has to move toward gospel, away from inanity, bells and whistles.

Then again, I steal from MCs because they, at their best, are conscious of their words and conscious of the meaning making of their songs. Right now Lupe Fiasco is getting run in the media for calling President Obama the biggest terrorist. Okay, not the most precise political critique – but what you find, what I admire, is that there is a forming of a critique. There is a nakedness that acknowledges that the role of MC is both entertainer and prophet – and to see who loses, we must see who speaks. On this one, Lupe loses points. Not because he can’t criticize the president, but because his one liner lacked the punch of his illest verses, verses that use trope and scheme to pack much more thought and insight than one would expect in such a short space. They don’t want to censor the influencer because he might say the President is a terrorist – any idiot can say that. They want to censor all us influencers because the best of will recognize “a penny from heaven is the same as a semi from the second,”⁹ and work to convey that in a thousand different ways, until a thousand different things in our society change for the better. Hip-hop, correctly, takes flack in the community – but it is flack that comes because of the artist role as entertainer and prophet, as seer. I want a poetry that embraces that role.

–

1. Mos Def, “Hip-Hop,” Black on Both Sides.
2. Mos Def, “Mathematics,” Black on Both Sides.
3. Mos Def, “Hip-Hop,” Black on Both Sides.
4. Lupe Fiasco, “Jedi Mind Tricks.”
5. Mos Def, “Mathematics,” Black on Both Sides.
6. Jay-Z, “Public Service Announcement,” Black Album.
7. Jay–Z, ibid.
8. Jay-Z, ibid.
9. Lupe Fiasco, “Failure.”

–
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father. The author of the memoir, A Question of Freedom, and the poetry collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, Betts is a 2010 Soros Justice Fellow and a 2011 Radcliffe Fellow. www.rdwaynebetts.com.

Grandfather takes me on his motorcycle through town—bumpy road, night sky, a warm breeze. Scent of cigarettes. One of my initial vivid experiences of conventional masculinity.

My father’s childhood village in Taiwan was small when I first visited as a child. It had two dirt roads. During the bai se kong bu—White Terror—hundreds of thousands were disappeared or executed. Now it’s a city, and those dirt roads are main thoroughfares in a democracy. The house is surrounded by buildings instead of fields, instead of spies.

I wasn’t born there, but my birth certificate is of two minds about it—Birthplace: Kyoto, Japan [* mother's country]—Nationality: Republic of China [* father's country].

Map 2

Recently I learned there were cross burnings in the 1920s down the street from my childhood home in New Jersey. They were lit across the border in the neighboring town, Metuchen. It was the “negro” section, right next to the tile factory, pub, and railroad tracks.

We drive down the street, and on the corner there is an older black man in his usual spot, leaning with his leg raised on a cement stoop. I meet his eyes, and he nods.

As a child, things I didn’t know filtered in through feeling. That part of the street always seemed older, more worn out. Somewhere in the back of my young brain I wondered why black people lived over there and not in Edison. Today I can discuss class difference, a history of the area’s racialized development. But back then, the map was unspoken. A feelings cartography. Maps under the maps.

Map 3

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin

The wreckage of now. Myriad human struggles have created the cartography of “here.” What I know or want to know about a place is often not on any map, and I understand maps influence perception, understanding, decisions, laws. As a poet I let myself be haunted by what has happened in a place. Being an immigrant of color, an Asian American man, a Taiwanese-Japanese emigrant from a New Jersey suburb, the present is littered with wreckage:

Map 4

“I” as a set of dispositions based on history, experience. Influences. Reactions. Learning. Preferences. “I” as a temporary formation at the intersection. Race. Gender. Class. Sexuality. Nationality. Learning to be a raced self, a gendered self, what is acceptable and not. Normality. Governability. Economic plug and play. Productivity.

“I” as living sculpture, performance of selves. Self-reflection. Unlearning. Helpful and unhelpful habits of mind. Alignment with alternatives, subcultures, political movements. Valuing difference. Queering. Alliance with margins. Legacies. Counter-stories.

Map 5

O Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, formations, consciousness. … Therefore in emptiness, no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no formations, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind… — Heart Sutra

Self, a collection of ever-changing phenomena. A collaboration of multiple elements, influences. Not insubstantial or  transcendental, but contextual. In a network of meaning, of meaning-giving. Self as a nexus, shifting over time, in and through society. A large, warm pool of humanity.

No matter how tenuous this convention of having a solid self, I am inevitably a Chink and Jap to someone. These eyes, these ears, this nose, this tongue, this body, this mind. One of the male bodies that for much of US history, needed to be legislated, regulated, inscribed.

Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.

An elderly white man answers my knock on his door. I finger the candy I’m selling for middle school. You know, he says slowly, during the war I fought against the Japanese. A Jap boy is a Jap boy.

There are so many Asians at these events—the nice white lady says—the attendance is slanted. No offense.

The legacy of response has often been militant, meeting solids with solids. Assertion of masculinity. You say this identity is negative? I say it is positive, vibrant and unbreakable. It requires allegiance, conformity, and a spoken word manifesto.

Solid and changing, both are true. They challenge each other. For me, these are the bones of poetry.

Map Key

Settled about 1700, named for Indian chief, Metuching. Colonial trade center at Oak Tree Store. Skirmish fought here in June, 1777. — Metuchen Historic Marker

My old Edison neighborhood used to be a forested country road, farmland. A village of the colonies, built on the outskirts of a town barricaded against Indians. Before that, so many other things. The Turnpike follows the route of a former Indian highway. How many skirmishes don’t have plaques?

In 2005 Edison elected its first Asian American mayor. In 2010 Time published a “humor” column article lamenting the town’s excessive South Asian presence. Too many Indians.

I no longer live there. But wherever I am, the more looking happens, the more unfolding happens. Most of the time, there aren’t any markers for these maps. Some legacies need to be tagged. Somewhere in here, poetry lives.

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Kenji Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey. His poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes (Finishing Line Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in several journals, including Kartika Review, Lantern Review, and Kweli Journal. He has received a Pushcart nomination and is working on a multi-genre full-length collection of poetry, prose and visual art. Kenji is currently the poetry editor at Kartika Review. More info at http://liusan.wordpress.com.

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Jerrold Shiroma was born and raised in San Diego, CA. Since, 1999, he has been the editor / publisher of duration press and durationpress.com.

He currently lives in Kailua, Hawai‘i.

Notes on Good (“New & Improved!”) Poetry.

1. Several people asked whether their poems were “good.”
2. Is your life good? What do you do with it, and how do you feel about that?
3. Is your breathing good, is it working for you? When you do it, it fulfills its functions, doesn’t it? I’d suggest that poems serve you, too. Like breathing, even if you forget about paying attention to its regulation and effects.
4. The question of “good” should perhaps always be answered in the negative, for this reason. What I hear in that question is this other question: am I done?
5. No, your job is not “done.” You must also live as a poet, see as a poet, serve as a poet. If your poems are to serve, serve your poems. Is a cook, a person whose vocation is cooking, or a musician whose vocation is music, done if they do one dish well, play one song well? Is a one-hit-wonder “good”? Getting “good” does not end.
6. That is, a poem is not merely an end product. It’s part of the process of living your poetics, serving your own poetics, seeing and enacting them in the world.
7. Have you defined your poetics so explicitly?
8. The short answer seems to me, is that if you can’t say how the poem serves your poetics, and whether the poem serves you, then you’re not feeling it. If you’re not feeling it, isn’t that your answer? Or a part of it?

Suggestions

1. You must write poems that serve you.
2. You must write poems that don’t. Then you can tell the difference.
3. I’d suggest that, therefore, you must always be writing bad poems. Some must be “bad,” for some to turn out “good.”
4. Some poets would call this “taking risks” with your writing. But what the hell is the risk? What’s going to happen if you write a terrible poem? Is your house going to fall into the hands of a banker? Are you going to get struck by lightning? Are people going to laugh at you on the street outside of bars? They only put people in jail for writing good poems, and mostly in other countries. Bad poets are as safe as the reproductions of paintings in motel rooms.
5. Feelings are real. The clichés of 18th & 19th century Romantics left over hundreds of years later in pop music are not, not on the same level. They have been copyrighted. Are your feelings copyrighted in advance? Are your feelings somebody else’s ideas? Don’t equate one with the other. Even if you believe in the emotional fundamentalism of Romanticism (who doesn’t now and then?) or as Sarah Campbell put it in her review* of Poems for the 
Millennium: Romantic 
and Postromantic Poetry, (2008) edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, “The Romantics are more contemporary than we are. The Postromantics are more alive than we now living,” you still have a different poetics than Kenneth Goldsmith.
6. Read to find what is useful to you about that tradition, and what is not.
7. Define your poetics (and poems) in that way: is the poem useful to you? Is it working for you? Why or why not? Define your poetics by writing poems.
8. You already figure that some techniques, whether personification or appositives, synecdoche or metonymy, allusion or juxtaposition, are perhaps the right tool for the right job at the right time. You would intuitively just do it. (Maybe after a lot of previous work and thought.) You wouldn’t say “catachresis is always better than parataxis.” Instead, you would be engaged and, in a sense, in motion. In which direction?
9. You get to have fun with that. You have to have fun with it. Intellectual or somatic or aesthetic or social or sonic joy is simply required.
10. I repeat, fun is required. Whether you are writing about being in pain, or living in a fucked up world, or, like Paul Guest, surviving as a paraplegic. If you are not having fun with joy and grief, take a break. Start over.

* Sarah Campbell’s review of the Rothenberg, Robinson vol. 3 of Poems for the Millennium is here: http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh12content/18.html

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Sesshu Foster has taught in East L.A. for 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, http://www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook.

That said, I wanted to say a couple of things about format, and let you know what you all can expect to see here in the coming weeks.

As Doveglion is currently an e-publication, we figured we would free ourselves from the confines of traditional print publication issues or volumes. It’s beneficial, I think, to the writer, and to the readers. If you are like me, then you can be overwhelmed with the glut of work contained in a single issue, and never get to all of the awesome work created by some promising or amazing artists.

The blog format works for us, then. It gives us all space to breathe, read, meditate on the work. You don’t even have to keep checking back here. Just add us to your RSS feed reader, which will let you know when to visit us as a new essay, poem, manifesto, interview, or review is posted.

Speaking of which, here’s who you can expect to see in the coming weeks: you will see Sesshu Foster again, as well as Jerrold Shiroma, Ching-In Chen, Kenji C. Liu, Jean Vengua, Reginald Dwayne Betts, J. Michael Martinez, Jai Arun Ravine, and much more in the works.

Thanks again, and if you haven’t already, please do read Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo, Fly the East L.A. Dirigible Transport Lines!

[Baybayin source: http://www.baybayin.com]