Monthly archive February, 2010
Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
| Wednesday, May 5, 2010 | ||
| 8:00 pm |
Wednesday
Newly published by the University of Arkansas Press, Indivisible brings together forty-nine American poets who trace their roots to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The poems gathered here take us from basketball courts to Bollywood, from the Grand Canyon to sugar plantations, and from Hindu-Muslim riots in India to anti-immigrant attacks on the streets of post–9/11 America. The reading will feature contributors Monica Ferrell, Subhashini Kaligotla, Vikas Menon, Purvi Shah, and Sejal Shah plus the editors Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam.
Monica Ferrell’s first poetry collection, Beasts for the Chase (Sarabande, 2008), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel The Answer Is Always Yes (The Dial Press/Random House, 2008), which was a Borders Original Voices Selection and named among Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008.
Born in India, Subhashini Kaligotla was raised in the Middle East and the United States. Her poems have appeared in Catamaran, the Crab Orchard Review, the Literary Review, the New England Review, and the Western Humanities Review and have been anthologized in 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India, 2008) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). She is a former poetry editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and the current poetry editor of Catamaran: South Asian American Writing.
Vikas Menon’s poems have appeared in Bitter Oleander, Catamaran, the Literary Review, the New Delta Review, MIPOESIAS, the Toronto Review, and TriQuarterly. Menon was a finalist in the Writers at Work competition, and his first play, Lead with Your Left, was produced at the South Asian Theatre Arts Guild Experiment’s (STAGE) One Act Festival in Washington, D.C. He is a board member of Kundiman, an organization dedicated to cultivating Asian American poetry, and the literary manager of the Ruffled Feathers theater company. He recently completed work on his first collection of poetry, godflesh.
Purvi Shah’s poetry has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, the Brooklyn Review, Many Mountains Moving, the Massachusetts Review, Meridians,and the anthology Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996). Her first book of poems, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), won the Many Voices Project prize. Shah is a former poetry editor of the Asian Pacific American Journal. Born in Ahmedabad, India, Shah lives in New York City, where she recently served for more than seven years as the executive director at Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based anti–domestic violence organization.
Sejal Shah’s writing has appeared in the Asian Pacific Ameri can Journal, Catamaran, the Indiana Review, the Massachusetts Review, Meridians, Pleiades, Prairie Fire, and the anthologies Under Her Skin (Seal Press, 2004) and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996). Her poem “Independence, Iowa” was performed in an evening-length dance piece, “Ball’s Out: Play to Win,” presented by the Black Earth Collaborative Arts Company (Iowa).
EDITOR BIOS
Neelanjana Banerjee’s work has appeared in The Literary Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Nimrod, and the anthology Desilicious. She has taught creative writing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for organizations like WritersCorps and Kearny Street Workshop. Banerjee has worked in mainstream, ethnic, and independent media for the past ten years. For over five years she helped young people tell their own stories at YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia. She is an editor and blogger with the Asian American magazine Hyphen, where she now oversees the semiannual short story contest.
Summi Kaipa is the author of three chapbooks. Kaipa was the founder and editor of Interlope, a magazine featuring innovative writing by Asian Americans (1998–2003) and served as a board member and literary curator for several San Francisco nonprofits, including the Alliance of Emerging Creative Artists (AECA), an organization promoting emerging Asian American artists, and New Langton Arts. In addition to being a writer Kaipa is a clinical psychologist. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband.
Pireeni Sundaralingam’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, The Progressive, and World Literature Today, as well as anthologies such as Masala (Macmillan, 2005) and Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). Educated at Oxford University, she has served on award juries for several literary organizations and festivals, including PEN Oakland and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Together with coproducer Colm Ó Riain, she commissioned and curated twenty-one poets and musicians to tell the forgotten immigration stories of America; the resulting recorded album, Bridge Across the Blue, was awarded the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize.
This event is co-presented by Poetry Society of America. Admission for PSA members is $5.
We Saw the Light: Conversations Between New American Cinema and Poetry – Talk & Screening
| Friday, April 30, 2010 | ||
| 6:30 pm |
Friday
In We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2009), Daniel Kane draws on correspondence and interviews with key figures in innovative cinema and writing of the 1960s to provide a fresh look at film’s influence on poetry. Please join us for a discussion amongst filmmakers and poets, and stay for a special screening of mainly 16mm prints.
Talk (6:30-7:30 PM) Ed Bowes, Jacob Burckhardt, Abigail Child, Cole Heinowitz, Jonas Mekas, Jennifer Reeves, and others TBA. Moderated by Daniel Kane.
Film Program (8 PM) A selection of short films by Ed Bowes, Stan Brakhage, Jacob Burckhardt, Rudy Burckhardt, Abigail Child, Christopher Maclaine, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, and Jennifer Reeves.
Stan Brakhage: Two: Creeley/McClure (1965) 16mm, color, silent, 5 min
Christopher Maclaine: The Man Who Invented Gold (1957) 16mm, color, sound, 14 min
Jonas Mekas: Hare Krishna (1966) 16mm, color, sound, 4 min
Abigail Child: Surface Noise (2000) 16mm, 18 min
Jennifer Reeves: excerpt from The Time We Killed (2004), 16mm
Rudy Burckhardt: The Automative Story (1954), 16mm, b&w, 15 min
Jacob Burckhardt: Black and White (2001) 16mm, b&w, 10 min
Marie Menken: Lita’s Party (1964?), 16mm, 4 min
Ed Bowes: excerpt from Entanglement (2009)
Program subject to change.
Thanks to the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, Jacob Burckhardt & Andrew Lampert at Anthology Film Archives.
Admission is $10.
Final Post from Guest Blogger Rachel Levitsky
Confinement as Commons
Probably all comparison is specious. At least wrong. There was feudalism and then there was capitalism. There were horse drawn carriages and then there were cars. For a while there were both and it was natural to compare them as ways of getting somewhere. Or the telephone as a way of communication soon to be replaced by ‘texting’ message. (The mayor of Las Cruces, surprised by the sudden wave of opposition to the development of a privately built ICE Detention Center, proposed to my friend Dana that they ‘text’ on the matter.) I suspect that the invention and proliferation of instant text exchange has altered the face to face encounter – speech upon being in physical proximity is no longer self-evident. As far as manners and etiquettes of compassion in our new textual spaces, I suppose we just need to figure them out. When I think like this I think maybe it isn’t true that there is nothing new under the sun. Maybe that is all there is. Negation, replacement.
There are three books on my mind this week. They are kari edwards, Bharat jiva (Belladonna/Litmus, 2009), Spring Ulmer, Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay, 2009) and Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence, 2009). Each of these books, written during the oughts and published on the eve of their demise can be placed under the category defined by Wagner’s serial title “Everyone In The Room Is A Representative Of The World At Large”—although perhaps the more accurate phrase would be “Every body in the room represents and receives the world at large.” These books, two of which are poetry books and one, Ulmer’s, is a book of poetically informed essays. Ulmer’s essays study the self as part and parcel of our moment of genocidal current and aftermath. Note: here the collective first person ‘our’ that I am utilizing is informed in part by the premise of Ulmer’s work: in times of virtual representation, we are not only overwhelmed by information and reality, we become it. Aware of the world and its injustices since her birth, being born and growing up in rural Vermont in a kerosene lamp-powered house her radically-left parents built, Ulmer writes of brokenness as hers and also not her own. “An Atlas of the Itinerant Nature of Perspective,” which touches upon her study and time in post-genocide Rwanda (I keep stumbling over writing that, thinking the concept impossible, there is no post-genocide), ends with the line “I will then concede that Abraham’s broken heart is much more broken than mine. There is, of course, no comparison (45).” Since this quote is out of the context, I will explain that what I think is being said is that while there is no comparison, neither is there a clear line of demarcation.
edward’s book, Bharat jiva is in some way a poetic-political-existential-spiritual accounting of her year in an intentional spiritual community in Tamil Nadu, India. The book, like our list of 1970’s movies, ends bleak, perhaps even bleaker than its beginning: her final attempt to find hope in community has failed edwards, it’s the same as every other flawed attempt to get beyond consumption, and the spirit-murderous branding required by consumption (for more on this see Rob Halpern’s excellent essay “Reading the Interval, Reading Remains” in Bharat jiva’s companion volume, NO GENDER, published simultaneously by Belladonna/Litmus—in this Halpern publishes edwards’ emails critiquing ‘community’). The flip side of the abandon and rage and frustration implicit in Bharat jiva is an accounting that the poet brings onto her self-same body alongside every other body (once again, ‘our’ as radical ego collectivity). A passage from the preface reads:
“…when we mention the people, we do not mean the confessional body of the people, we mean the particularly itinerant bodies in mechanic flux, preaching freedom beyond flesh pamphlets of authority, concealed in blind devotion.” (3)
Through the duration of the book, this preaching, edwards’ critique, her attempt to render a different story through witness and poetic action is (now, from the aftermath), “replaced by a generous claw/with nothing to say (115).”
Wagner also makes a statement of poetic negation: “If a poem is active/Its action aborts in you/A colored light flies into black.” (36) Overall, My New Job asserts a practice of poetry as a shared fact, if not reduced than joined by the grunts and sighs that are the facts and banality of contemporary work and getting by. Not without pleasure, penises, vaginas and good fights with lovers, the poem is brought into the world physical body with sound gestures, and nursery rhyme, and commercial jingle
STILL not finished review
but productive day and feeling
GÜT
like a fine mama
SHÜT
putting down some
RÜTS
like the lost queen
TOOT
TOOT
TÜT TÜT TÜT
These poetries, which all put the subjective body forward as a shared space suggest to me that yes, the fantasy of ‘wandering on alone” is forever gone and that ‘our’ bodies, behind screens that watch us back and no longer able to be removed to some colonial outpost, are in fact themselves the site of our new public, our new commons.
Epilogue
Though I’m fairly sure I didn’t get very far in the great project of considering confinement in our times I did learn something about blogging in our times which may after all be critical to the thinking about confinement in our times. Every time I mentioned the blog to someone, their response was inevitably, “Oh you blog???” The way they might inquire if I were a skier, or a practitioner of S/M…”So, you’re into S/M?” And this appeals to me as an analogy because like skiing and S/M, blogging is in fact, not something I ‘do’ but rather now something I have tried, done, dipped into like I have dipped into so many things that one can ‘do’ with no intention of sustaining them as a practice in the way that I practice things like swimming or getting tipsy or sitting on the couch and watching tv or reading New York Magazine talking to Dana now often on the telephone since she has moved so far away. Like skiing and S/M, I find blogging does have its fun but is too much machinery, too ritualistic, its accountrement of too many steps, so much always themselves in the same way for me, i.e. the ski lift and its line, the leather and its fittings, the constant presence of the format. Perhaps holding onto a fantasy of escape, I prefer my watery little dream world where I get to just jump in.
[Note: you can listen to Catherine Wagner read “Coming and I did not run away” in our Audio section.]
Introductions for Joanna Fuhrman & John Koethe
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of three collections published by Hanging Loose Press, most recently Moraine. Her new book, Pageant, has just been released by Alice James Books. From 2001-2003, she was the Monday Night Reading Series coordinator here at the Poetry Project. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and in public schools and libraries. Her essay on teaching Jayne Cortez’s work to high school students is in the current issue of Teachers & Writers magazine.
In an interview I recently came across, Joanna Fuhrman quoted Wittgenstein’s “There is no private language”, a rich statement for people, poets, often engaged in conveying our private worlds. Fuhrman, too, recognizes that language is formed in the public sphere for the purpose of communicating in the public sphere. Poems are a public language, though the number of those who choose to participate may be, as she points out, less than the number of Americans who are interested in genital piercing or dressing up as Anime characters for toy robot conventions. Her new book is aptly titled Pageant, a public entertainment consisting of a procession of people. The poems appreciate elaborate display while exposing artifice, for instance in clone school no one looks the same but everyone is. Elaine Equi calls Joanna “a witty visionary for our virtual age” and calls the work “exotic and mundane, retro and futuristic at the same time. Pulsating with surround-sound and a panoply of ‘neon fluid special effects…”. Please welcome Joanna to the Poetry Project.
John Koethe’s most recent book is Ninety-Fifth Street (HarperCollins). From 1973-2009 he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. North Point North: New And Selected Poems was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2005 he was a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and in 2008 he was the Elliston Poet in Residence at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
John Koethe’s new book, Ninety-fifth Street, features a painting by Rackstraw Downes, an ideal artist to have in mind as we begin our encounter with poems that are deeply concerned with compositional rigor, the architectural space of imagination and human engagement with environment. It is tempting to say that these poems are about confronting mortality but I think, taking a cue, from Koethe himself, they are poems about poetry, or time, or better yet poetry as “a way to live through time.” Places once inhabited by the poet – San Diego, Milwaukee, Berlin and the very idea of selfhood as a place to be inhabited or vacated– are activated by memory, the only way we have to understand history. While making distinctions in place, at the same time Koethe suggests that place can be reduced “To a bare concept, an abstraction that extends ‘from sea to shining sea’. As in his past books, there are moments of disarming first-person acknowledgments such as, “My life is fine, though not the life I’d wanted or imagined,…” that give the reader (this is from Edward Hirsch) “the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and help aloft”. Please welcome John Koethe to the Poetry Project.
Kaia Sand reads from “Uptick” – 12/9/09
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Jules Boykoff reads from “Das Greenspan, Volume I – III” – 12/9/09
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Allison Cobb reads from GREEN-WOOD – 11/30/09
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Ana Božičević reads “A Summer’s Breeze” – 11/30/09
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