on sensing and honoring the waters

The first issue of vitriol includes a poem where I call in and celebrate the waters...





...and awesome illustrations of contributors by Cal Tabuena-Frolli!

Conundrum for a Community

As we come to know ourselves and each other as a community, how can also allow ourselves and each other to be unknown, so there is space to be new, to renew? So waters of love and possibility and renewal and connection and forgiveness can flow and continue flowing?

And if we think we know each other, will that thinking stop us from really knowing each other in this moment? Will that stop us from extending love to each other?

If love is openness and willingness to know - holding the other not to an image but to the emerging (of spirit, of healing, of love) that is budding in them - how may we love each other?

How may we see each other?

If forgiveness is a remitting of debts - what will allow the debts we collect (or impose) in community to be remitted?

And what of the ego's desire to be right, to defend its stand, to know, to be certain (before or so that it can trust)?

Is there a way to stay tender towards each other's becoming as we continue to come together and take a stand together and build and create together? - as village, as community?

And what of our beloved relationships in other spheres of our lives? What of our other communities? How can we cultivate a beginner's mind to relationship even as our deep wounds get triggered that seek safety and certainty, that permit us to offer only so much openness or conditional trust? 

Sometimes I notice my own tightening - and ask for healing - and ask to meet that deep well of love that I may know you in your spaciousness - and allow myself to be known in mine - continually.

Quick notes: Nico Peck's The Pyrrhiad

The taste of bloodgriefrage still with me—selkies still singing—by way of this sly, multi-voiced elegy where, amidst the violence in our cities, thoughts, language, we are injected with possibility—of play—in word & world—that is both guile & guilelessness.

And the living are taught we may speak to the dead, milk between us.

(Nico Peck's The Pyrrhiad has been published by Dirty Swan Projects, 2014)

Tonight with Hearts Desire & Dirty Swan Projects at The Omni Commons

Nico Peck and Sara Larsen launch their first full-length collections tonight, and I will be joining them at this exciting reading/event:

Nico's THE PYRRHIAD (Dirty Swan Projects)
Sara's ALL REVOLUTIONS WILL BE FABULOUS (Printing Press)

7-9pm, @ Omni Oakland Commons, 4799 Shattuck Ave, Oakland, CA

More info:

https://omnicommons.org/calendar/events/hearts-desire-and-dirty-swan-projects-presents-nico-peck-sara-larsen-and-monica-mody/

https://www.facebook.com/events/543223275812387/

AAWW's TO DO list for you this Friday

1) Travel to the colony of world travelers. 2) Code-switch. 3) Get vulnerable and fluctuate. 4) Come to our wild reading with some of our favorite emerging poets: Jenny Zhang, Wendy Xu, Monica Mody, and Monica McClure. Rookie contributor Jenny Zhang--possibly the poet most mentioned when we get internship and job applications--is “a 21st century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological" (Elizabeth Robinson). Ruth Lilly Fellow Wendy Xu--whose You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2013) was one of Poets & Writers's picks for top poetry debuts--"plunder through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn’t have known before she turned us toward them" (Dara Wier). Take a dive in the black waters of Monica Mody’s shamanic-futuristic Kala Pani (1913 press 2013), the best bonkers, ritualistic-bureaucratic, anti-imperial, terraforming poetry book ever written about lentils. Latina gurlesque poet Monica McClure’s new book Tender Data (Birds LLC 2014) offers a hash-tagged, slippery, code-switching take on gender-making, class warfare, and vexed relationships--that’s 100% chiflada.

Asian American Writers' Workshop 
112 W 27th Street, 6FL, New York, NY 10001
Friday, November 7, 2014, 7:00pm

Monica McClure’s debut poetry collection Tender Data (Birds LLC) comes out in the spring. The curator of the Atlas Reading Series, she also wrote the chapbooks Mood Swing (Snacks Press 2013) and Mala (Poor Claudia) and co-edited with Brenda Shaughnessy the anthology Both and Neither: Biracial American Writers. Read an interview with her here.

Monica Mody’s first book, KALA PANI, just came out from 1913 Press. Bhanu Kapil calls her “a poet of sacrifice” who writes “to us from the space behind the sun.” Monica has worked with Breakthrough, the global human rights organization, on their program areas, as well as with the Centre for Feminist Legal Research as a film festival coordinator. Her engagement with social justice and feminist/queer issues draws on her citizen/alien selves as much as on her evolving ideas of spiritual participation. Through 2007-08, Monica curated Open Baithak, a multilingual poetry in performance series in Delhi. Check out her conversation with Cathy Linh Che here.

Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2013), which was profiled by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the year’s best debut books. A Ruth Lilly Fellow, she is the co-editor and publisher of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry / iO Books, and former curator of the jubilat / Jones reading series. Here she is at the poetry foundation.

Jenny Zhang could be the poet most mentioned as their favorite when we get internship applications. Her poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012) has become a sort of classic. Hear her talk about how she became a ghoul here! She’s a regular contributor to Rookie, curates Stain of Poetry, a monthly reading series in Bushwick.

Save a seat here!

Capable of miracles

Even a short stay in the kingdom of Monsea puts you at the risk of being in the range of King Leck’s lies—and you don’t have to hear his voice for the lies to take hold in your mind. Contact with someone exposed to him, or even someone exposed to someone else who had contact with him, could affect your sanity—your ability to discern, question, and resist. The lies spread insidiously and virally, and soon, we are all in a state of trance, unable to see things for what they are. We ignore the small animals mysteriously injured and unable to heal. We ignore the indigenous communities, farmers, fishermen, workers, and homeless displaced, forced to migrate, impoverished, criminalized in the name of development. We ignore the deaths and beatings, the abuse and the institutional disrespect. We ignore communities living in fear and mistrust. We ignore the polluted waters and the disappearing species. We ignore the floods and the landslides. We ignore the signs, and we stop hearing and seeing everything that does not fit into the narrative that Leck wants us to hold.

It is easy to want to believe in the goodness and rightness of Leck’s story. For who really wants to hurt others? Who really wants their lives to be built on a foundation of lies?

We want to believe in love and goodness and honesty and fairness and equality—that there is compassion and soft landings and courage and joy and vitality and tenderness in the world. For this is who we are. Deep down inside, this is what matters to us. 

Perhaps this is why, in spite of the trance, it could be that we have slipped back into remembrance, across the always fuzzy borders of stories and consciousness—perhaps someone we love (the earth, ancestors, goddess) has been hurt or is in danger and that has jolted us back to wakefulness—to being able to see beyond Leck’s stories, and the pain in our heart is tremendous. How could we have allowed ourselves to be duped—to be taken over by the lies, illusion, trance—so utterly? What happened to everything that we have held dear about ourselves: our values of love, justice, truth, fairness, mutual respect, empathy, and grace? What happened to who we believe ourselves to be deep down inside—good people, good citizens, courageous humans? 

And what can we do now? What can we do to make sure that we are not pulled back and made instruments of a socio-economic-imaginal-moral order so completely unmitigated and vicious that it sees humans (and, indeed, all of nature) merely as chess pieces to be moved around and—in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’—kicked off the board? What can we do to ensure that those we love and care about (all of humanity, all of the earth, all of the cosmos) stay safe, cherished, thriving?

It is clear that those of us who can must continue to remember and speak the new story, birth it into existence, foster its interconnections. We must keep singing the sacred songs and trust that other voices will join us, that someone will hear us across the mountain and be moved or comforted, or lit up or ripped ablaze.

This conviction must be held in the face of all odds. 

It must be held in the face of all doubt, all uncertainty, all fear, because possibilities open up when we are able to stare the impossible in its face. As Marianne Williamson says, “miracles are summoned by conviction. Conviction can be seen as an attitudinal muscle that gives us strength to see beyond appearances and invoke the possibilities that lie there.”

Let us invoke the possibilities.

And one day, the newold story of love—as too the wings of our collective conviction—will become so sturdy, so strong, that together we will be able to lift the hunter’s trap-net with our courage, our love, and fly.    

Reading tonight at Lit Crawl San Francisco

I am absolutely looking forward to the reading tonight -- Seas & Islands: Five First-Book Authors from SPD. 8:30pm at Adobe Books, with Meg Day, MG Roberts, Alana Siegel, and Zoe Tuck. Hope to see you there if you can make it! 

On Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream

I wrote this short piece for a feature on Kim Hyesoon being brought out by Action Books/Asian American Writers' Workshop - The Margins:

Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream is a companion for grief. It startles the wounds out of your own soul and you find yourself rubbing your collarbone in a spot a white bird has appeared. And rain.

The poet/translator/text/reader takes into her own body the wounds of the world or shoves her feet into the wound, small ribs break off, yet she continues to walk. The small pieces of cloth that make up the garbage quilt of this poem are never quite enough to cover us, and they are. "Are you vacant? I'm vacant." These "dirty writings" hold the urgency of shadow, cold sweep of desolation, broken glass. How many are brave enough to stay in this room of loss outside modernity's schedule, getting licked all night long? How many are brave enough to let these things enter them?

Hyesoon brought to us via Don Mee Choi is willing to take the ice, the media of seeing into her mouth, and this lending of herself is what makes rain, water, sea, salt, so necessary to cry, this barking water that holds both our past and our future.

While you were typing
I couldn't stop the rain

As Sobonfu Some puts it, grieving is a matter of life and death. Open to grieving and read Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream.

From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant Garde

The symposium, hosted by the MFA program at CIIS, begins today!

I perform tonight and present on Sunday.

Also in attendance:

Bhanu Kapil
Cheena Marie Lo
Ching-In Chen
D'Loco Kid
Geneva Chao
Jai Arun Ravine
Jason Magabo Perez
MG Roberts
Margaret Rhee
Ronaldo Wilson
Pireeni Sundaralingam
Sean Labrador y Manzano
Soham Patel
Truong Tran

& YOU?

The full schedule is here!

Growing up in the Sea of Stories, that is India

When Craig Chalquist asked me to write a few words about myth and story in India to share with his students at CIIS taking the Archetypal Mythology course, I wrote this in January, not knowing that in just over two weeks, Penguin will withdraw Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History, and we will once again find ourselves at the perplexity of a present bullied by cultural vigilantism or the threat of it in the name of purity of the past.   

“The sweetness of my childhood was contained in tales told, retold, unraveled, re-dressed in books. In lieu of grandparents, I had storybooks, and magazines—Nandan, Champak, Parag, Chandamama, Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle, and Bal Hans, to name only a few. Through them, I encountered myths, folktales, fables, legends, and history—with them, I lived in a continuum of realities and temporal structures. Imagine a world where the moment that is cohabits with the moment that has always been, or never was. Imagine when a moment, swallowed, reappears in another story, even as that story spits out other, stranger moments. 

In the imaginal world of my childhood, differences, though not equal, were possible: a polymorphism bid by the range of linguistic, regional, religious, caste-based, gender-based traditions of mythology that had, over time, evolved in India. Further, tales from other parts of the world (especially, at the time, from Britain and Russia) were never far from the emotional, intellectual, and fantastical matrix of this postcolonial, ever-swirling navel of the world. 

It was jarring, then, to find myself growing up in a modern India where fundamentalist forces demanded a single unified Hinduism tethered to a monolithic mythology. Myth, I learnt, can be the terrain of cultural wars. To stake your claim over culture, your cultural practice, you have to tell your stories. Ultimately, mythology is about place and belonging. 

Those living at the brink of the mainstream Indian imagination, those interested in bringing social/narrative justice into mainstream Indian imagination, are today trying to give voice to indigenous, dalit, women’s, non-brahminical, nontextual, local storytelling traditions though publications, performances, film, and other media. Storytelling in India also always raises the question, “In which language?” With cultural globalization, the diversity of worlds and worldviews signified/created in each language has shrunk, but the intricate streams of mythologies that flow into and are the “sea of stories” that is India may be both too old, and ever-renewing, to disappear.”

On NPM Daily: Living with Language

Let’s say nature is sentient & alive, & that everything in nature is also sentient & alive. 

Stone River Genome Abrasion
Flight path L&fill Stigmata OS
Laughter Erhu Dreams Fibula
Sun Lozenge Radiation Terror 

Animists would also say: 

Let’s say all parts of the natural world are interrelated—that we are kindred. 

Language, then? 

Is language alive & sentient?
Is language kin to us?

Read the rest here on NPM Daily. 

Review of Kala Pani on Rain Taxi

The gracious Elizabeth Robinson wrote a wonderful review of Kala Pani on Rain Taxi!

Every moment of this book is a testament to resourcefulness and insubordination. The detours and proliferations of Kala Pani, along with its embrace of absurdity, become a means of survival that jumps over the limitations of the rational. There’s a sense of suspension, of process—“cursor in internal disorder”—that beguiles the intrepid reader to follow chaos into constellations that make order as we know it irrelevant.

Thank you, ER!