Barbara Jane Reyes : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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Barbara Jane Reyes

Filipino American Poetas en San Francisco

Hello all. So I’ve neglected to mention that I co-curate (with poet and editor Edwin Lozada) and host a monthly reading series in San Francisco, for a lovely non-profit organization called the Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. (I am not too thrilled with the “Inc.” part of the name, but the organization itself is very good). For those of you not in the know, the Filipino American artist community in the SF Bay Area majorly overlaps with our activist community. Many of our organizations are homegrown, and have formed completely outside of academic and institutional settings. Poetry for us happens in community centers’ storytelling circles, and the best publicity is word of mouth.

These community centers are multi-disciplinary and multi-purpose spaces. Musical and theater performances, art exhibits, and literary readings take place in the same spaces as meetings to organize political demonstrations for Filipino WWII Veterans’ benefits, and for the tenant rights of this gentrified city’s low income Asian elderly. A couple of our activist and artist hot spots are South of Market (SoMa) and the new I-Hotel rebuilt in our former Manilatown, wedged between the Financial District, Chinatown, and North Beach.

And always, as with most Filipino gatherings, there’s food, and lots of enthusiastic picture taking. The vibe in the place becomes nothing like monotone automaton reading from behind a podium, eyes glaze over literary event; it’s more like a Philippine palengke, or bustling marketplace.

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09.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Catalina Cariaga, ‘Cultural Evidence’ (Subpress Collective, 1999)

Of course
they didn’t eat dogs.
They didn’t have dogs.
If they had dogs
they would have eaten them.

–Catalina Cariaga

This poem, “Dogmeat,” is one of the opening poems to Catalina Cariaga’s Cultural Evidence (Subpress Collective). I really can’t think of a better way to start off a collection of poetry concerned with weighing the given anthropological, journalistic, statistical evidence of Filipinos in the world, versus evidence provided via experiential knowledge and memory. Right away, Cariaga is telling folks, don’t readily believe everything you’ve been told about us.

cultural

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09.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Frances Chung, ‘Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple’ (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

we who know that those who are
brave cross Mott Street on a
diagonal.

—Frances Chung, Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple

crazy-melon-and-chinese-apple

Frances Chung’s manuscript of poems, “Crazy Melon,” which was published posthumously as the first half of the book Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple, edited by Walter K. Lew, is a collection of poems written in various forms, including forms which obscure the boundaries between conventional “poetry” and “prose.” This obscuring of form is a “cross on the diagonal,” a defiance of the rules of order, and of conduct, as established by traffic lights, institutions which set up traffic lights, and the laws governing the flow of traffic, across streets, and across ghettoes and ethnic communities. Courage is required to defy these rules, and defying these rules requires a questioning of the soundness of these rules. As a young Chinese American woman wedged in between the worlds of New York City and Chinatown, Chung’s speaker not only engages in this questioning while moving outward from Chinatown into the rest of the world, but she also compels her reader to question what definitions they assume as given along the way. In an effort to understand the multiple exterior and interior worlds she and her speaker inhabit, Chung obscures the boundaries between literary forms, communities, and languages, examining then proactively rearticulating the relationships between names/words, and their corresponding objects/images.

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09.11.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Raúl R. Salinas, ‘Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey Through Indian Country’ (Wings Press, 2006)

I was not introduced to the work of Raúl R. Salinas until very shortly after his death last year. I’d received an email invitation from San Francisco author Alejandro Murguía, to the Galería de la Raza in the Mission to celebrate Salinas’s life.

raulrsalinas_portrait

At that Galería de la Raza event, I learned that Salinas ran the Austin, TX multicultural and political Resistencia Bookstore which was also a community gathering space, as well as Red Salmon Arts, the literary venue and the small press. I witnessed a group of intergenerational Latino writers share their grief after telling us what an influential and monumental figure he was in their political and poetic lives. This reverence reminded me of Al Robles (who was still alive at the time); I wondered if I’d be able to withstand the inevitable outpouring of grief that would happen when Robles’s time came.

Further cementing Salinas’s monument status, I witnessed Lorna Dee Cervantes have the honor of performing Salinas’s signature work, “Un Trip Through the Mind Jail,” which Murguía described as the Xicano “Howl.”

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09.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Paul Martínez Pompa, ‘My Kill Adore Him’ (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009)

Chicago poet Paul Martínez Pompa kind of frightens me. I just tore through his first collection of poetry, My Kill Adore Him, which was selected by Martín Espada for the 2008 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. This prize is administered by Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at University of Notre Dame. The two previous recipients of the Montoya Prize are Sheryl Luna and Gabriel Gomez.

my-kill-adore-him

I’ve seen Martínez Pompa read before; last year, he was one of a handful of feature poets for The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry anthology reading, hosted by the anthology editor Francisco Aragón at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley (you can read Aragón’s Poetry Foundation article here). I remember one of the poems Martínez Pompa read at the time, “Amputee Etcetera,” which I found hilarious and troubling.

Nothing cuter
than a war amputee.

At this point I’m cracking up, knowing it’s a terrible thing, my need to laugh this hard.

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08.28.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (13)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘Night is a Sharkskin Drum’ (University of Hawaii Press, 2002)

haunani-kay-trask

Haunani-Kay Trask’s Night is a Sharkskin Drum (University of Hawaii Press) is a book I picked up along with Lee A. Tonouchi’s Da Word (Bamboo Ridge Press) and the first edition of his Living Pidgin (Tinfish Press) in a Borders Bookstore, of all places, in Lihue, Kauai.

Having found these books, I was trippin’ for two reasons. First, these Hawaii based publishers are some of my favorites for their specializing in Pacific literatures, especially those with a political edge. Second, I never shop at Borders Bookstores because the ones around here (the closest being in Emeryville) just aren’t gangsta enough to carry any interesting indie published titles.

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08.26.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (26)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Russell Leong, ‘The Country of Dreams and Dust’ (West End Press, 1993)

Russell Leong’s The Country of Dreams and Dust is one of those books of poetry I wonder why I read so many years (15, to be exact) after its original publication, and then in many ways I am glad I came to it when I did. I’d recently picked it up used at Half Price Books in Downtown Berkeley for $4.98, and really, I was drawn to it because of the publisher, West End Press, who’s published Arlene Biala, Paula Gunn Allen, Nellie Wong, Naomi Quiñones, among other writers I admire.

Photo credit: I. Perello (2003)

This is what I expect to find in a collection of Asian American poetry — conventional immigration and immigrant narratives which give us a clean delineation between “there” (homeland) and “here” (host country), translating into a neatly packaged conflict. In this conventional Asian American “identity politics” poetry, the poet’s ethnic identity is the thing driving forth the narrative, the reason for the conflict, and the primary if not sole lens through which the poet views his “there” and “here” world.

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08.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Jeff Tagami, ‘October Light’ (Kearny Street Workshop Press, 1987)

I’ve previously reviewed Central Valley poet Jeff Tagami’s October Light, for the International Examiner’s Pacific Reader at the time of the book’s third printing. October Light, Tagami’s first and thus far only collection of poetry, was originally published in 1987 by San Francisco-based, Manilatown-founded Kearny Street Workshop.

tagami

Tagami appeared in the PBS television series, United States of Poetry (1995), which featured his poem, “Song of Pajaro”:

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08.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Evie Shockley, ‘a half-red sea’ (Carolina Wren Press, 2006)

[Hello all, I realize this book review is about three years too late, but better now than never!]

evie-shockley-book

Evie Shockley’s got a brave and firm grip on history; her first full-length collection of poems, a half-red sea, Harryette Mullen describes as “navigating against prevailing currents.” Indeed, Shockley skillfully navigates, pointedly assesses, and calls our acute attention to the prevailing current of the Middle Passage and of rivers, their historical and contemporary effects in shaping American world views on race and gender.

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08.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (13)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Suheir Hammad, ‘breaking poems’ (Cypher Books, 2008)

Cypher Books has just announced that Suheir Hammad’s breaking poems, which was the recipient of the 2009 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, has just been nominated for an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

It’s wonderful to see a poet most well-known for her sharp and effective performance — she was an original cast member and co-writer for the TONY Award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway (2003) — being recognized for her literary work.

I have been a huge admirer of Hammad’s work since I first read her poem, “Of Woman Torn,” in the anthology The Poetry of Arab Women, edited by Nathalie Handal. Hammad’s “Of Woman Torn” addresses the so-called “honor killing” of an eloped young woman by her father in Cairo in 1997:

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08.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Author Archive

Barbara Jane Reyes

Filipino American Poetas en San Francisco

Barbara Jane Reyes

Catalina Cariaga, ‘Cultural Evidence’ (Subpress Collective, 1999)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Frances Chung, ‘Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple’ (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Raúl R. Salinas, ‘Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey Through Indian Country’ (Wings Press, 2006)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Paul Martínez Pompa, ‘My Kill Adore Him’ (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘Night is a Sharkskin Drum’ (University of Hawaii Press, 2002)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Russell Leong, ‘The Country of Dreams and Dust’ (West End Press, 1993)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Jeff Tagami, ‘October Light’ (Kearny Street Workshop Press, 1987)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Evie Shockley, ‘a half-red sea’ (Carolina Wren Press, 2006)

Barbara Jane Reyes

Suheir Hammad, ‘breaking poems’ (Cypher Books, 2008)

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