Featured Poet: DILRUBA AHMED

BIO:
Dilruba Ahmed’s poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Blackbird, Born Magazine, Catamaran: South Asian American Writing, Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Drunken Boat, and New Orleans Review. Her work received first place for The Florida Review’s 2006 Editors’ Award. She holds B.Phil and M.A.T. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently enrolled in Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. program.



Q1: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written.

I just finished reading Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali, an intense and beautiful collection of poems. Here are a few lines from one of my favorite poems, “By the Waters of the Sind”: “Sharpened against/ rocks, the stream, rapid-cutting the night,/ find its steel a little stained/ with the beginning light,// and the moon must rise now from behind// that one pine-topped mountain to find/ us without you.” For me, Ali’s book has been particularly instructive as a model for weaving personal events with public and historical events.

Q: Describe the place/physical location
where you write most regularly .

A: My husband and I found the desk at a garage sale shortly after finishing college and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. The former owner sold us the first pieces of furniture that would furnish our new, empty apartment: two large leather chairs, a green folding card table, and a slim dark brown desk—all for $20!

While the other purchases have disappeared from our current home, the desk remains. It’s mainly a temporary storage space for materials related to my current projects: stacks of poetry books, books on the craft of writing and, of course, piles of paper. I love the desk itself but usually I take over the dining table for writing purposes. From the dining room, I face a view of the brightly lit living room and trees framed by windows. I spread my writing materials across the table surface into a river of books, papers, pens, highlighters, and notepads. I’m a big fan of sticky notes, so narrow strips of yellow or blue paper poke out from all of these materials.

I shelve books on craft behind me, and collections of poetry to my left. Poetry collections are the only books I alphabetize. Typically the wall to my left bears a few sticky notes with favorite lines of poetry or quotes on writing. Currently, I’ve posted a fortune from a fortune cookie declaring, You are a lover of words, someday you should write a book.

For years, I only wrote first drafts in spiral notebooks with pens. Periodically, I would review my scribblings, sometimes attempting to index them with more sticky notes—this time bearing enigmatic titles such as “dwelling-helped-harmed” or “serious children.” Eventually some of this raw material would appear in later, typed drafts. I now type many of my first drafts directly into my laptop.


Q3: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

I’m often obsessed with themes of cultural hybridity and forging new cultural identities. When I first began writing in earnest in college, the few South Asian titles on bookshelves at that time tended to focus on false dichotomies: West versus East, freedom versus limitation, good versus bad. So my early writing efforts attempted to respond to and defy such overly-simplified categories. Thankfully, times have changed! Now dozens of South Asian and South Asian American writers have brought new voices and more complex representations of cultural experiences into literary conversations.

NEWS: Upcoming Poetry Workshop

SHIFTING FOCUS: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice –

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Kearney Street Workshop, (the nation’s oldest Asian American arts organization) is organizing a poetry workshop to tie in with its current visual arts exhibition “Shifting Focus”.

Taught by poet/scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam, this workshop is split over 2 consecutive Saturday mornings (11a.m. – 1p.m.) and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience (including research on enhancing perception and attentional mechanisms), the workshops aim to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the 2 day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus, both as readers and writers of poetry.

If you’re interested in registering for the course, please contact : info@kearnystreet.org
giving details of your full name and contact info.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: A former PEN USA Rosenthal Fellow, Pireeni's poetry has appeared in literary and political journals such as Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Progressive, and The Guardian newspaper (UK), university texts such as Three Genres (Prentice-Hall, 8th Edition, 2006; 9th edition, 2009), and anthologies such as Masala (Macmillan, 2005), and Language for a New Century (Norton, 2008). Her poetry has aired on national radio in Ireland, Sweden, and the US, and been featured at the United Nations headquarters, and the International Museum of Women. She is co-editor of Writing the Lines of Our Hands: the first anthology of South Asian American poetry (forthcoming). Pireeni was educated at Oxford University, and has held cognitive science research posts at MIT and UCLA. Dedicated to examining the confluence of art and science, in the past year alone, she has given lectures on “Poetry and The Brain” at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (SF), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). Pireeni was born in Sri Lanka and currently lives in San Francisco. http://www.wordandviolin.com

DATE: Saturday 6 December & Saturday 13 December, 2008

TIME: 11a.m. – 1p.m

LOCATION: “Space180”
180 Capp Street (at 17th Street), San Francisco, California, 94110.

REGISTRATION:
Contact Kearny Street Workshop : Tel: 415.503.0520 Email: info@kearnystreet.org
To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, 180 Capp Street #5, San Francisco, CA 94110. Please include your full name and contact info.

NOVEMBER NEWS

We're delighted to hear that "Memory of Sugarcane-Worker Off Duty", Sasha Parmasad's poem from our anthology, is the winner of Poetry International's 2008 competition. The poem will be published in the next issue of the Poetry International journal.

6th Annual Third I Film Festival

Roll out the red carpet, yaar! It's that time of year when Third I showcases films from the South Asian diaspora. As usual, the lineup includes everything from engaging documentaries to the as-campy-as-they-come Bollywood numbers. I've got my (third) eye on the 1929 Bollywood classic, A Throw of Dice; Lakshmi and Me (a documentary of "gender, class, and the ethics of representation"); Maqbool (a recasting of Macbeth featuring Irffan Khan); and Slumdog Millionaire (the rise of an Indian slumdweller to a TV game show millionaire).

The Festival runs from Thursday, November 13, 2008 through Sunday, November 16, 2008. Venues include the Brava Theater and the Castro Theater.

For details on this year's lineup of films, check out:
http://www.thirdi.org/festival/

Also, here's an article I wrote about Third I in 2004. Obviously, the films are different, but it gives you a sense of how the film festival has emerged.
http://niralimagazine.com/2004/11/all-eyes-on-film/

Featured Poet: MAYA KHOSLA

Right: At work, looking for salamanders.










Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing. Her first full-length poetry manuscript Keel Bone won the 2004 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. While working for the National Park Service, she completed Web of Water, a creative nonfiction manuscript which was accepted for publication by the Golden Gate National Park Association Press in 1997. Poetry remains her favorite genre. She has been published in Americas Review, Poetry Flash and Seneca Review and was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1998.


Q: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written and why?

A: If it’s already been done, I’d rather be working on something different. I’m certainly influenced by what I’ve recently read and re-read (S. Bagchee, J. Harjo, T. Doshi, P. Levine, P. Rogers, R. Stone, J. Thayil). I’m just hoping my voice sounds more mine than anyone else’s.


Q: Describe the place/physical location where you write most regularly

A: My studio isn’t much of a red oak desk in a small room with bamboo
blinds, but it seems to be exactly what I need—now. Luckily, a walnut
tree and a loose assemblage of birds are associated with this setting,
which I’ve been working in for the last couple of years. There’s a
highly territorial Anna’s hummingbird, the regular, and a scattering of
visitors including white-crowned sparrows, mockingbirds, northern
flickers and a rare Cooper’s hawk. That’s the south-facing backdrop to
my rolltop desk.

Most writers say that it’s consistency that brings at least some amount of magic to the writing practice—consistent times, even consistent hours
of the day. I’m throwing geography in with that mix. It’s good to know that my studio’s location is so predictable that I can walk to it half
asleep, should the need arise. Or maybe what works is consistency in the degree of disorder. I have been reasonably productive within my own
mess. This may also have something to do with knowing my environs, the fact that thesaurus and dictionary are within reach, that a lot of the nonfiction, poetry and maps I need is on the floor or three steps to my right and that the fiction is downstairs.

I could also take the easy way out and blame my parents for a lot of these habits. My father begins writing at approximately the same timeeach morning and for the same number of hours each day, surrounded by the stacks and volumes that look so much like his favorite habitat that
when he’s outside it, he seems a little lost. Add messy clay and stained glaze notebooks to the picture and about the same was true of my mother,when she was alive. Good, I’m not the only one.


Q: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

A: Following naturalists around the Western Ghats and around the Indian Himalaya. Writing down everything they say. I’m including scientific experts, villagers, photographers—anyone who might be inclined to spend an evening with a just-emerged purple frog, a flame-backed woodpecker or a forest leopard—at a safe distance.

My Month at Hedgebrook

I had to miss out on the exciting Writing the Lines Litquake event on October 11th because I was tucked away in my cabin at Hedgebrook, a writing residency for women on Whidbey Island in Washington's Puget Sound. 

Founded by Nancy Nordoff in 1988 on 48 acres of land, the whole idea behind Hedgebrook is inspired by Virginia Woolf's "belief that giving a writer a room of her own is the greatest gift of confidence in her voice." 

I spent my four weeks there walking in the woods, reading endlessly (Salman Rushdie, Annie Dillard, Italo Calvino, Andre Dubus, Joan Didion, Carolyn Forche, Ruth Forman, Suheir Hammad -- who was in residence at Hedgebrook in the week before mine), eating delicious homegrown meals, conversing with the other writers and rejuvenating.

I went to Hedgebrook to revise a collection of short stories that was my MFA thesis from San Francisco State University and found that the long afternoons were exactly what I needed to have the courage to really, really revise my work properly. I thought of it as dropping my work off of a cliff and then slowly walking down to the valley below and discovering what I was really trying to say. But like other writers, I found myself engaged in all kinds of creative work besides the "goal" of my residency. I scribbled poetry in my journal about the shadows the fir trees drew across the writing desk, took obsessive pictures of the green banana slugs that slimed their way across the cedar wood chip paths, I edited video footage from my last trip to Kolkata, I prepared for my Bollywood Benshi performance, and made raging fires in my little woodstove.  

I read David Lynch's treatise on transcendental meditation, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, every night. In his chapter called "The Art Life," he quotes an artist he knew as a child who said: "If you want to get one good hour of painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time." Word. 

But beyond the time and space, the community I found at Hedgebrook was one of my favorite parts of the month. I met bad-ass poets and memoirists and journalists and novelists and prodigies and comedians and performers and ... the list goes on and on. 

Even the women I didn't meet kept me company. In each of the cabins were twenty years of journal entries by former residents. In my cabin, I was drawn to a journal entry by a woman named Bishakha Datta who wrote about coming to Hedgebrook from India. Later, I found a documentary film in the Hedgebrook library called In the Flesh by Datta, which profiles three different people who work in the sex industry in Kolkata. It was an amazing film - done with so much love and humanity. It was a truly inspiring moment in my time there.  

Writing the Lines contributors Minal Hajratwala and Maya Khosla were also former residents of Hedgebrook, and I would often pick up Khosla's award-winning book Keel Bone in the farmhouse library while waiting dinner. (It was exciting to think how Writing the Lines of Our Hands will one day be in the illustrious library as well.) 

All in all, it was an amazing experience. I was even attacked by a territorial barred owl one night! The deadline for application is every September. But I got some tips about other residencies and these were highly recommended: MaDowell, Sacatar, Jentel and the Headlands Center for the Arts (where Writing the Lines contributor Bushra Rehman is currently in residence). 

But being back at home (and work), my goal is to find that uninterrupted four hours at least once a week, if not more. Here's to all of you doing the same!

 

Saturday, November 1--The New Talkies: Bollywood Night

Just want to put the word out that the first-ever Bollywood Benshi night, curated by Konrad Steiner and me, is happening this Saturday, November 1st. For those of you unfamiliar with the "benshi" form, picture writers doing a live performance of an original reinterpretation of a carefully selected film clip (in this case, from Bollywood or India-themed movies) . The result is a terrifically entertaining and poetic event!

The New Talkies: Bollywood Night
Saturday, November 1 at 6:30pm (note the early time)
Bollyhood Cafe
3372 19th Street (near Mission)
San Francisco, CA

Starring:
EMILY ABENDROTH (Philadelphia) - Gunga Din / Lives of a Bengal Lancer
NEELANJANA BANERJEE - Silsila
NADA GORDON (New York) - Navrang
SUMMI KAIPA - Hare Rama Hare Krishna
RODNEY KOENEKE (Portland, OR) - Pyaasa
ANUJ VAIDYA - Purab Aur Paschim

For those of you worried about missing out on Halloween fun, the benshi happens early--and in the later part of the evening, you can choose to get your groove on at Bollyhood Cafe.

http://www.kino21.org/
http://www.bollyhoodcafe.com/

Featured Poet: Ravi Shankar

RAVI SHANKAR






Ravi Shankar is founding editor of the online journal of the arts Drunken Boat, and poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University. He has published or has work forthcoming in such journals as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, AWP Writer's Chronicle, Indiana Review, Catamaran, Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, and The Massachusetts Review. He has also been on panels for the Poets House and the Electronic Literature Organization, has held fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, MacDowell, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and has read at such venues as the National Arts Club, The Ear Inn, and Columbia University. He is currently reviewing poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and has just edited the anthology "Language for a New Century: Poetry from Asia, the Middle East and Beyond" (Norton, 2008).


Q: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written and why.

Though I don’t know – but can imagine - how corrosive abiding in Huffy Henry and Mister Bones for any extended period of time might be, I would love to have written John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. With it’s syntactic leaps and conflation of diction, its bawdy comedy and its body mordancy, the book shimmers with irrepressible song. To be able to write this “unshedding bulky bole-proud blue-green moist thing made by savage & thoughtful surviving Henry,” and “to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting tree” would be revelatory if I only one could keep the pole charged towards exultation and not terrific gloom.


Q: Describe the place/physical location where you write.

The attic of our house, built in the 1920’s on farmland along the banks of the Connecticut River, was later known as Pine Lane when it was lived in with Richard Sachs, the expert bicycle maker and the room still retains sloping roofs, baseboard heat and has a window that looks out on the small barn we use for our storage now fringed with smatterings of leaves. When I’m really purring along at top speed, I’m “double geeking,” writing, even working on multiple pieces, while researching and querying folk and sending documents back and forth from the Mac laptop where I do most of my writing to the PC to the printer or scanner. When the surfeit of task proves too distracting, I can push back the chair, with music from ITunes to syncopate the view.

On the desk there’s only space enough to fit a modicum of books. The loose volumes accumulated around the desk, which often change, include (clockwise) Issues 7-26 of the Paris Review, Edmond Jabés The Book of Margins, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Jacques Lacan’s Ècrits, The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz and Emily Dickinson, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Lyric Postmodernisms edited by Reginald Shepherd, Henry Ferrini & Ken Riaf’s DVD Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, an issue of Bomb Magazine and Catamaran, Ellen Susman’s literary encyclopedia of sex, Dirty Words, in which I am “quickie.” The bookshelves behind me are filled with poetry collections and adjacent me with reference volumes, science books, philosophy, collected letters and nonfiction. The remaining books reside downstairs.

Next to the printer, filled with the backsides of bureaucratic papers ready to be repatriated, is a recent photograph of my daughter, Samara, and above her, a glitter painting, an icon really, of (hope! pray! but most of all, get out the vote!) the next president of the United States Barack Obama painted by Aaron Snifit as part of a campaign to raise money for the candidate. I have some other art in the room, a fragile lily pad of an abstraction painted by Rodney Harder, a surreal bust painted by my sister Rajni Shankar-Brown, and a Christ-like figure hanging on a field of spray paint that I bought from a delirious leering savant along the Charles Bridge in the malá strana neighborhood of Prague during my junior year abroad over a decade ago. In case inspiration flags, there’s a bed in the room next door and I generally bring meals up with me when I’m working, staying ensconced in this cozy space until something worth keeping has transpired.


Q: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

A pronged answer since I have a few immediate and few longer term projects in mind. I recently reviewed Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield’s translation of Mirabai (due out in the Contemporary Poetry Review in the winter) and I’m currently working with poet Priya Sarukkai-Chabria on a new translation of Andal which has begun me on the journey towards learning the Pallava script. Tamil is my mother tongue, a language I can access aurally but not textually and another of my projects is the transliterating of certain idiomatic phrases into a contemporary English vernacular. Finally, my subconscious teems with the mythological world brought to life by Amar Chitra Katha comics and in spry, leaping Hanuman and in the illustrated fables from the Panchatantra I’m convinced there’s something in them that entrances me the way fried food might call to someone at a county fair. Eventually, inshallah, those seeds will germinate into lush or spare shapes I can’t yet envision.

Anthology takes Litquake by storm

Tanuja Mehrotra (top left)

Ravi Chandra (middle)

(Bottom) Minal Hajratwala and journalist/radio
show producer Sandip Roy

The first indication that the festival reading was going to be a runaway success was, I suppose, when I arrived early to the sound-check only to find a long line of people already filling the sidewalk outside...

By the time the event got going later that evening, there were people sitting on chairs, tables, other people, while a solid bank of poetry devotees stood patiently in an adjoining room, listening to the reading being piped in from the main stage next door. (The venue staff later estimated that there had been between 100-150 people attending the reading at any one time.)

And the night went from strength to strength. The audience even started applauding during the introductory remarks as we explained our mission behind curating and editing this ground-breaking collection. It's moments like these that make those grueling hours at the editorial desk seem worthwhile...

Our featured poets held the audience in trance as they freewheeled through a host of styles, from Tanuja Mehrotra with her "threaded ghazals", a form she has created blending together two lyric traditions, to Ravi Chandra's juggling of formal verse and syncopations from his days on the slam poetry scene, and Minal Hajratwala's languid explorations of language and sensuality. Highpoints include Tanuja breaking into song at the podium, Minal's tiara, and Ravi's request, at the start of his reading, that audience members join him, fist upraised, in a traditional South Asian chant — "Jai Obama!"

Days later, we're still receiving positive feedback from the event, here in San Francisco. We're delighted to report that two faculty members who were in the audience that night have asked us to present an anthology reading to their respective universities, while also offering to review the collection when it comes out, in their newly established journal of Asian American literature. We've also been inundated with people asking to find out more about the anthology and join our mailing list, while the venue organizers have given us an open invitation to return at any time.

Here's to future readings being as successful as this one!

FESTIVAL FEATURE

We're coming to the close of the Litquake festival, here in San Francisco, and it's been a hectic week of panels, readings and workshops. Litquake is the West Coast's largest independent literary festival, with over 450 authors taking part this year so we're honored that the anthology has been chosen as one of the features of the final night celebrations (last year's final night was attended by over 1,000 people).

Four of the poets from the anthology (Ravi Chandra, Minal Hajratwala, Tanuja Mehrotra, and myself) will be reading at the Bollyhood Cafe, San Francisco's premier new desi hot spot. We've also invited along some local South Asian American non-poets to join us for the occasion, including the short story writer Moazzam Sheikh, novelist Balaji Venkateswaran, Falu Bakrani, who'll be reading from her book on the cultural politics of the Bhangra/ “Asian Underground” music scenes in Britain, and Minal (again!) reading from her forthcoming non-fiction book about her family: "Leaving India: My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

Congratulations to Minal on her new book! (checkout Minal's website for news on the book and her blog: http://www.minalhajratwala.com/)

Here are more details of the anthology reading at Litquake:

WRITING THE LINES OF OUR HANDS: An Evening with South Asian American authors
Saturday 11 October: 7:15 pm
Bollyhood Cafe (3372 19th St)
between Capp St & Mission St)
San Francisco, CA 94110

If you're in the area, do join us!
LITQUAKE Festival site: http://www.litquake.org/the-festival/lit-crawl-2008/

- Pireeni