Moving and Shaking!

Hi Everyone,
We're moving blog addresses. You can now find us here:

www.indivisibleanthology.blogspot.com

See you there!

San Francisco International Poetry Festival

San Francisco International Poetry Festival

Guest Blogger/ anthology poet: Ravi Chandra

Worlds and words collided at the Second International Poetry Festival this weekend. I attended two events - one of the two mainstage productions at the Palace of Fine Arts, and a more intimate reading at the Richmond Public Library. Hosted by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, the Festival ambitiously brought together leading poets from dozens of countries, largely reading in their native languages. On Friday night, the

English translations were projected on a screen behind the poets.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened with some poetry he'd apparently just written - he turned 90 this year! He looked and sounded great. He read on

e sarcastic poem about America in a Lady Liberty mask, and another similarly wry poem about the excesses of our materialistic lives which end with a "smiling mortician." The poets that got the biggest audience reaction were real performers - Roy "Chicky" Arad from Israel who used a portable keyboard, and Paul Flores of YouthSpeaks, who came clearly from the "Slam" tradition.

It was wonderful to hear so many languages. I loved the vowely lull of Spanish and Italian, while the Vietnamese (of poet Lam Thi My Da as read by my friend Nguyen Qui Duc) rang like bells. The Welsh poet Menna Elfyn read in Welsh, a banned language until this generation. Who knew that fake breasts financed by a life of crime

could sound so poetic in Welsh ("His fingerprints were all over them")? And where else would I hear Shona, a language of Zimbabwe? Every day, languages die; we need events like this to preserve and honor them.

However, I have to say that three hours of poetry in various languages was a bit long for me, as much as I love and enjoy poetry. An ambitious concept - but then, it's striking that a *free*, international scale event like this could only fill half of the Palace auditorium, that too with a largely older audience. Perhaps some events geared more to youth (an evening of slam/spoken word?), or with more English language poets, could bring more people in. There are a lot of ways to represent diversity.

Saturday, I went to hear Nguyen Qui Duc read his own poetry. He was also the host of the now -defunct Pacific Time on public radio, and now lives in Vietnam where he built a house in the mountains which serves as an artists' retreat , runs a bar (Tadioto), writes an occasional blog and

is an all around good guy. Afterwards, we chatted over coffee and chai with Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, who runs the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. They are now at work on their own anthology. Perhaps we'll have a chance to collaborate some time? Or at least spend some times in the mountains north of Hanoi?

Featured Poet: PURVI SHAH

Purvi Shah serves as the Executive Director at Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based anti-domestic violence organization. Her debut book of poetry, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press 2006), won a Many Voices Project prize. Among other places, her poetry has been published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Brooklyn Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Massachusetts Review, Meridians, Natural Bridge, NuyorAsian, and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (which won an American Book Award in 1997.) She served as a poetry editor for The Asian Pacific American Journal, has been a Kundiman fellow, and received the Virginia Voss Poetry Award at the University of Michigan. Her research for her M.A. in American Literature from Rutgers University delved into 19^th and 20^th century women’s and Asian American anthologies. 

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

Who am I not to covet brilliance? I would have been bliss-filled had I written many a collection of poems including Agha Shahid Ali’s Half-Inch Himalayas, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Li-Young Lee’s Rose, Paul Monette’s Love Alone, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf – or even the oeuvre of Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Emily Dickinson. And, yes, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost too – and not just so that every school kid would be forced to ingest my work but for the love of rhythm, place, and the urgency of living.

For all these reasons and more, though, if I had to settle on one poet – a mandate I don’t subscribe to (my essay in the recent Poet’s Bookshelf attests to that) – I’d elect John Donne’s works. The Holy Sonnets are to be relished – I return to “Death be not proud” and “Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You” each time with amazement anew. I love that Donne’s poems are arguments – that he delves into the paradoxes of life, and, yes, that he puns unceasingly. The mix of faith, human foibles & concerns, and passion in a language of rumination open imagination – and leave me learning, questioning, contemplating, and feeling more through each reading. If my poems were to reach such level of craft and felt knowledge, I would be done.  

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

My job is demanding. It leaves very little room for rest, much less room for writing poetry at leisurely stretches. So I write when & where I can – which is usually on the New York 

City subway in my travels through the day. My poems often plumb aspects of migration – it’s fitting that I write on the move. I keep a small journal with me to brainstorm and to craft starts & shells of poems. On another trip, I’ll revise on the subway in this same journal. When the piece feels close to fruition – or when I’ve hit a wall – I’ll write up the work on the computer in my bedroom or kitchen. I’ll ponder ideas, sequences, & word choices, make edits and slash, and then print out the piece so that I can take it on the subway the next day to see if the poem feels ready or right. Mornings being with promise – that expectation of travel and the desire to see what arises in this room of journey. 

The subway has become my writing sanctuary and taskmaster. Given time is tight, I focus and deploy short bursts of generating material and revising. Being in the world as I write brings me images, concepts, and words I would not necessarily have settled on had I been writing in the serenity of my home. Since my mind works through association and stitching information, the subway offers a vital space where I can gather and reflect. While I often seek a stretch of day where I could write and write and write, I know that my subway scribbling has a power of its own – and has brought me many an unexpected moment of excitement and joy in language, line, and poetic production.

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

The poems in Terrain Tracks explore migration as potential and loss. They are keenly aware of the context of immigration – as highlighted by the “Immigrant Song” sequence. You can go to Sandhya Nankani’s Literary Safari blog to get one take on the final piece in this lyric sequence. As with other immigrant and/or postcolonial subjects, I’m interested in exploring movement, women’s shifting positions, and American culture.

I also love trains from my early memories of India riding the rails within the hubbub of milkwalas and fellow sojourners and the landscape shifting from dust to fields to dust. In America too, the journey by train carries you through landscape otherwise unseen and brings me a calm and unique topos of rumination. Those elements – as well as a love of nature, science, human exchange, and the urban geography – coalesce in my poems. For example, “Signs there is a hole in Manhattan,” reflects on 9/11 from the vantage of reportage, highlighting the confusion of subway travel – with the frame of a South Asian American New Yorker who lost a friend in that tragedy.

This is to say, as we all know, that identity is complex and experiences (& insights) cannot be predicated on labels. And yet, identity cannot also be javelined. My new work – in conversation with visual artist Nandini Chirimar – examines faith and objects of Hindu worship. At day’s end (and start), what motivates my poetry is a quest for knowledge, a desire to map feeling, and a love of the sensual imagination. What I crave to hear most, though, is what as readers strikes you about my work. Poetry is an amazing avenue of exchange and dialogue – I feel most satisfied when I hear what my poems evoke. That is the subway reaching, after many twists & turns, its destination.

Notes on the Anthology reading

Thanks to Oakland Asian Cultural Center (and directors Mona Shah and April Kim) for ensuring a huge turn-out for our reading. It was standing room only last Friday as we took to the mic. Delighted to see what a warm response the anthology received. Good, too, to find how seamlessly the poems from the anthology dovetailed with readings from our other Asian American writers. Based on the feedback we've since received, the interconnections and resonances seemed to work well in highlighting the anthology's strength as a literary bridge between communities.

Favorite moments?

NEELA: Hearing poems from the anthology read aloud. Especially, hearing Minal Hajratwala read and discuss her poem "Angerfish," which is a poem I have read over and over for the duration of our editing process and loved. It was so enlightening and beautiful to hear Minal read it and discuss its origins. I also loved the two fiction readers -- Mimi Lok and Diana Ip -- and how the theme of Chinese seniors connected the two stories beautifully. I love synchronisity like that in reading.

PIREENI: Good to hear the range of different voices, both among our fiction guests and among our own contributing poets. Hearing the poems read out, in these particular permutations, let me discover new threads of thought between what _had_ seemed like familiar pieces. Good, too, to see how excited the audience were about the anthology: and it's not even out yet...

SUMMI: I was blown away by the resonances between the stories and poems presented by Mimi Loc, Diana Ip, and Aimee Suzara and the poems from our own anthology, by Tanuja Mehrotra, Subashini Kaligotla, and Meena Alexander (read by the editors).  The intersections between styles and stories were proof of the benefits of existing in a multi-cultural Asian American space where we can learn from both similarities and differences.  It was also great to hear Minal Hajratwala read both her poetry and her fiction.  Her live performance made tangible the intent of Writing the Lines of Our Hands, exciting us (the editors) and the audience about the forthcoming anthology.

And here's a blog report from one of our audiences members (poet Barbara Jane Reyes):
http://bjanepr.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/literary-evening-in-oakland-chinatown/

Anthology featured at OACC literary event: May 29

Our very own "Writing the Lines of Our Hands" will be showcased as part of a literary celebration at Oakland Asian Cultural Center (OACC) later this month. The literary night features Asian American women writers from a broad range of backgrounds, including Diana Ip, Aimee Suzara, and Mimi Lok, as well as women poets from our anthology including Minal Hajratwala while anthology editors Summi, Neela and Pireeni will be discussing their experience of editing the anthology over the last few years.

LITERARY NIGHT

Friday 29 May
7:30 - 9: 30
Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 9th Street, Suite 290
Oakland. CA 94607
Tel: 510.637.0455
Fax: 510.637.0459

www.oacc.cc
$20 - $5 (sliding scale)

Knives in the Night

I'm in Oxford, gearing up to vote in the elections for the Professor of Poetry, tomorrow. There have been last minute nominations, withdrawals, backstabbing and smear campaigns for weeks now, and suggestions that outraged senior poets will be burning their ballot papers in tomorrow's election at the Examination Schools.


See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/15/oxford-poetry-professor-walcott-padel
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6256746.ece
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/

Until a few days ago, the race for this prestigious 300-year post was between the Indian poet Arvind Mehrotra, Derek Walcott and British poet Ruth Padel. Following a vicious smear campaign in which he was accused of sexual harassment 26 years ago, Walcott withdrew his candidacy. However, last night, the Evening Standard in London (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/) published a report suggesting that the smear campaign of anonymous letters had actually been sent by Padel's campaign manager and former boyfriend, John Walsh.

Derek Walcott was formerly being supported by such well-known writers as Alan Hollinghurst, Marina Warner, John Carey, Jon Stallworthy, Jenny Joseph, Bernard O'Donoghue, UA Fanthorpe, Alan Brownjohn, Anthony Thwaite and historian Margaret MacMillan, while Ruth Padel is supported by numerous contemporary British poets, including Carol Ann Duffy (the new British Poet Laureate).

Indian candidate Arvind Mehrotra was supported by such noteworthies as Amit Chaudhuri, Toby Litt, and Tariq Ali. (For more information about Mehotra's work, see Amit Chaudhuri's report in the UK Guardian's column "A Week in Books").

Senior Oxford poets are now calling on the University to cancel the elections for this year.

April News

PUBLICATIONS

Vikas Menon's poem "“Prayer for the Rending” appears in New Delta Review this month.

Several of Dilruba Ahmed's new poems appear online at Diode
while a multimedia version of my poem, "Dhaka Dust," is online in Born Magazine

An interview with Pireeni Sundaralingam appears in the April issue of World Literature Today

W.W.Norton's collected works of Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite (published Feb 2009) has been continuing to garner critical acclaim. See Book Forum's review.

Shilpa Agarwal's first novel "Haunting Bombay" just came out with Soho Press. Shilpa is currently on book tour on the West Coast.

EVENTS

Ro Gunetilleke will be reading as part of the annual Los Angeles, ALOUD event for poets in the LA area, at the Mark Taper Auditorium at the L.A. Central Library, 524 S Flower Street,
7:00pm, Wednesday April 29, 2009
www.aloudla.org

Pireeni Sundaralingam will be reading with Jane Hirshfield and Phillip Schultz at Cuirt: The Galway International Festival of Literature.
Galway Theatre, Thursday 23 April, 8.30pm.

Representing the U.C.Berkeley English Department, Swati Rana will be presenting her paper "“Ameen Rihani's New World Nativity" as part of the
Transnational American Studies Working Group at , April 17, 2009
5-7:00 pm at 306 Wheeler Auditorium, U.C.Berkeley, BERKELEY, CA

Minal Hajratwala reads from Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

One of our very own Writing the Lines of Our Hands' authors, Minal Hajratwala, is on a book tour for her first memoir, Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents. The editors will be in attendance at her home base (San Francisco) reading and launch party at the Booksmith in the Haight on Thursday, March 26. Hope to see you there!

For further events and news, check out her website www.minalhajratwala.com.

Featured Poet: SASHA PARMASAD

Sasha Kamini Parmasad was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, began writing poetry as a child, and was actively involved in the performing arts on a national scale from the age of six. She lived with her family in New Delhi, India, between 1988-1992. She received her B.A. in English Literature and Studio Art at Williams College, Massachusetts, in 2002, and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York, in 2008. Her first novel, Ink and Sugar, which is a work in progress, won third place in the long fiction category in the First Words Literary Contest for South Asian Writers in Washington D. C. in 2003. In April 2008 her paintings were exhibited at the second annual Indo-Caribbean Women’s Empowerment Summit in Queens, New York, co-sponsored by Sakhi for South Asian Women and Jahajee Sisters: Empowering Indo-Caribbean Women. One of her poems was the winner of the 2008 Poetry International competition, and will be published in the next issue of Poetry International. At present she lives in New York City where she teaches a Creative Writing Workshop to undergraduates at Columbia University. (Photo credit: Priyanka Das Gupta )


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

Somewhere in Caroni, Central Trinidad: an overgrown hunk of land on which, at one time, stood a wooden shed that concealed a crude underground room. Secreted in this room, the story goes, a manual printing press used to publish clandestine papers distributed among workers and farmers engaged in struggle throughout Trinidad. The world as text, and action as writing, this is the book I would have liked to have written.
But the boundaries of this plot of land are no longer clear; the underground room has, perhaps, long filled with water and caved in.

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

A room in our apartment. My husband, Mandip, moved in when I was in Trinidad, set up my desk here because I like to write in spaces that crow with direct morning light. Paradoxically, I keep the curtains and shades mostly drawn so that grey days don’t dampen, or bright days blot out the world at my fingertips. I face my desk away from the windows for the same reason. But I like to know, especially in winter, that there is light at my back; to watch it brush my computer screen, smear the wall in front me.

On that wall, a picture of my parents, sister, myself taken in 1988, as we prepared to leave Trinidad for India—my father was on his way to study cultural history at Jawaharlal Nehru University and we would live on that campus for four years. It was a staggering journey—back to the land from which our ancestors had been taken one hundred and forty-three years before, which generations before us had never seen. Beside this picture, a copy of The 23rd Psalm gifted me by my maternal grandmother, Soobratan, who in part raised me; observing her I learnt, to my especial delight as a child, Spanish, patois and Bhojpuri swear words, how to kill and clean a chicken, eat rice and dal with my fingers. Descending from a long Muslim line, she declares herself a Khan, is a member of the choir of the Presbyterian Church she has belonged to for more than three decades, and prays to Shiva alongside her Hindu grandchildren. Beside this, the fragment of an Indian-Trinidadian Bhojpuri song written and performed by my paternal grandfather, Ramsaran, in the 1930s, in honor of Uriah Butler, a labour leader of that time: Uriah Butler garibo ke khaatir, apne praan ko khelgayaa.

Beneath these images, binders that contain, like the file cabinets lining the adjacent wall, material relevant to my teaching and ongoing writing projects: my notes on literary texts; writing exercises; historical material accessed through archives, libraries, museums, cultural organizations; clippings from Trinidadian and American newspapers; academic essays; information relating to the Indian diaspora, particularly the old plantation diaspora; interviews with elders in the village of sugarcane workers and farmers in which I grew up; drafts of pieces of writing; video footage from a rapidly changing Trinidad that I hope, at some point, to edit, compose – in the vein of my earlier video-work – into sequences of visual poems.

I have not yet been able to unlearn the idiosyncratic method of typing I developed at college (I didn’t know how to type when I left Trinidad), so we’ve had a wooden stand constructed for my laptop which has saved me from many a neck crick. Tucked beneath this, books I’ve been jumping between: Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920, Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, Michael Ondaatje, Grace Paley, Nikolai Leskov, Charles Simic, an anthology of Caribbean short stories. More books and material of current interest on either side of the stand, piled atop the file cabinets, beside a corner shelf reserved for Caribbean literature, texts about Trinidad and Tobago.

On the desk, apart from books: cups of pens, a lamp—unspecial, but familiar. Up into the cubby-holes: journals I jot ideas in, literary magazines, junky things I resist discarding. The post-it notes stuck to the edge of the desk guide my writing like that broken line down the centre of the road. Higher up, a printer, speakers for music, folders, books: a collection of postwar Polish poetry edited by Milosz, poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, Jeremy Cronin, Dennis Brutus, Lorna Goodison, Martin Carter, Mahadai Das, Wislawa Szymborska, my father—Kenneth Parmasad, fiction by Tagore, Harold Sonny Ladoo; a dictionary, thesaurus, a brass murti of Saraswati I acquired on what I remember to be my first visit to an Indian-Caribbean temple in Queens, old bangles, photographs. It’s been over a year since I assessed the items on these upper shelves; they are footprints in dried mud.

I didn’t develop the practice of writing at a desk, in a closed room, facing a wall, until I left Trinidad to attend college. When I visit Trinidad I still like to write outside, by hand, or drag my small desk, if it’s not raining, into the upstairs porch with its view of the Northern mountain range, this Tanty watering her plants, that one sweeping the gap in front ofher house, the boys playing cricket in the road. I am not sensitive to shifts in light there.

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

Cities of the Dead, according to its author, Joseph Roach, “shows how the memories of some particular times and places have become embodied in the through performances.” Roach further states: “…the voices of the dead may speak freely now only through the bodies of the living.”

In the Caribbean, Indian indentureship ended decades ago.

Sugarcane plantations are no more.

The government of Trinidad and Tobago announced last January that 2007 would mark the end of the sugarcane industry in the island—a watershed period in Trinidad’s history and, particularly, the history of the Indian community in Trinidad for, since 1845, when Indian indentured labourers were brought to the island to toil in conditions of bondage on plantations, the lives of masses of Indians, sugarcane workers and farmers, have been intimately tied to and dependent on the fortunes of sugar.

So much has changed, and yet, so much remains the same.

Though Indian-Trinidadians constitute half the population of Trinidad and have shaped and given their lives to that place for almost two hundred years, they are still called “East Indian” in that context—the same term used to describe them in colonial documents; it appears beside that other acceptable colonial designation, “coolie” (a derogatory term comparable to “nigger”). Many Indian-Trinidadians have also come to refer to themselves as “East Indian”. In Trinidad, I might be called an East Indian, West Indian. Here, in the United States, filling out official forms in different contexts, I have often had to choose between the categories: South Asian, Black/Caribbean. When, in one instance, I chose Black/Caribbean, the officer behind the desk took one look at me and said that I had to identify myself as South Asian. When I told her that I was both Indian and Caribbean – that my ancestors had lived in Trinidad for almost two hundred years – she shrugged. “You’re not black,” she said. Interestingly, the Black/Caribbean or Black/West Indian equation is also present in much American social scientific writing.

When I write, I think of these things—of the indelible marks left on us by history—how the voices of the dead continue to speak through the bodies of the living. I think of the contestation that exists between humankind and history: how we strive to be makers of history as history simultaneously makes us. I think of a Trinidadian sugarcane farmer – I will call her, Radha – who, in the political struggle waged by small sugarcane farmers in the 1970s to repeal an oppressive piece of Trinidadian legislation, pushed a policeman’s gun out of her face and asked: “Why you pointing a gun at me for? This is a peaceful struggle we having here.” I think of the Guyanese sugarcane worker and political organizer, Kowsilla (aka Alice), who became a martyr in 1964 when an estate scab drove a tractor through her, severing her body in two. I think of an Indian-Jamaican friend of mine, the descendant of indentured laborers, who walks into a room at a Massachusetts college where her friends (whose parents hark from South Asia) are sharing “Indian-Indian” food, hears the word, “aloo”, and bursts into an excited torrent of questions. What does the word mean, she asks urgently, what does it mean; for her grandmother in Jamaica used to use it, but the old woman is now dead and that word, dead with her, so what does it mean? Her friends, laughing incredulously, tell her: potato. She, clutching the word, fills with tears. Around the word, aloo, lit on a stage, I picture a space so dark with eroded sound, image, that the absence seems to shriek.

Iranian Literary Festival

Under a rock? Looking for 2nd Generation Desi Fiction

A non-Desi co-worker raved about two South Asian themed books she had recently read. The next week, I find in my mailbox a copy of Anjali Banerjee’s Imaginary Men. It’s obvious from the cover that the book is light romance reading—the stuff of airport bookstores—and not in line for any major literary prizes. I am reminded of the hundred plus Sweet Valley High books I had read as a pre-teen, which both lured and repelled me. I enjoyed the endless daydreams of relationships I might once have (but didn’t) in high school and, when older, would have happily reincarnated into an avid consumer of Harlequin romance novels.

But the writing bug bit me, and I look back with embarrassment on the SVH era (the Ayn Rand, too). My bedside table is now a mess of avant-garde poetry, two Junot Diaz books, and past issues of The New Yorker, Gastronomica, and Fence. My writing group just finished Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and we’re reading The Sound and the Fury next. Though the feeling of trudging backward into an awkward history of teenage romance novels intimidates me, I convince myself that it’s something to blog about and dig in.

I read Imaginary Men in a day on my commute (the 38 Geary Limited) to and from work. No doubt my instincts about the book are true; it’s not literary fiction. But two things surprise me. I am relieved not to follow a protagonist who is “blonde” and a “perfect size 6” like the Wakefield twins. It would’ve done wonders for my self-esteem to have been reading about Indian women like me who fall in love with their dream guys. The other thing that strikes me is that with Jhumpa Lahiri being one of the only literary fiction voices in the United States, it might just be that books like Imaginary Men (and I’m told that The Hindi Bindi Club is great fun by this same co-worker) fill in the holes of the second generation Desi experience, albeit in a simplified way. And while I’m not rearranging my reading list or my bedside table books anytime soon, this foray was a good reminder that I, as an Indian American writer, need to know what others are consuming about my culture, as well as what’s missing from the big picture.

January News

NEW BOOKS:
Pramila Venkateswaran's new collection of poetry "Behind Dark Waters" (Plain View Press) comes out this month. The enclosed poems explore women's lives and issues from around the globe. Reviews of the book include those by poet Karen Swenson, who calls the poems "fierce" and "daring," and poet Saleem Peeradina who describes the book as a "a thoughtful, witty, dramatic, and provocative collection." Available from Amazon and Plain View Press.

READINGS:
A Unique Evening with Four South Asian Writers
Thursday 29 January: 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Redwood City Public Library will be hosting a reading including short-story writer and translator Moazzam Sheikh and three of our anthology's poets (Tanuja Mehrotra, Neela Banerjee and Pireeni Sundaralingam).
Redwood City Public Library
1044 Middlefield Rd.
Redwood City, CA 94063
(650) 780-7058

Delhi International Literary Festival
Many congratulations to our poet Sudeep Sen for masterminding the first festival of its kind in Delhi a few weeks ago. International luminaries included: Tomaz Salamun, Arthur Sze, Mimi Khalvati, Jane Draycott and Fred D'Aguiar.

TOURS:
Poet and editor Ravi Shankar is on tour with the poetry anthology "Language for a New Century: poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond" (Norton, 2008) which includes several of our poets, including Meena Alexandar, Khazim Ali, Sudeep Sen, Vijay Seshadri and Pireeni Sundaralingam. Readings for the book include a book launch and party, sponsored by PEN, at Theosophy Hall in Bombay, as well as readings in Chennai (14 January), Singapore (16 January) and in the Philippines at the University of Manila (19 January).

WORKSHOPS:
P3: The Postcard Poetry Project with Debbie Yee and Bushra Rehman
Working with writers and artists in San Francisco and New York City, our very own Bushra Rehman will be teaching students to create original works of postcard art and poetry with a view to exchanging them with fellow artists on the opposite coast. The workshop will culminate in a public reading on both coasts and a publication consisting of the poet-artists' portfolio of work. The workshop is co-sponsored by two Asian American artists organizations: Kearny Street Workshop (SF) and Asian American Writers' Workshop (NYC).
Meetings: Mondays, Feb 2 through Mar 23, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Website: http://www.kearnystreet.org/programs/calendar/2009_1.html

MISSING: Best Poetry of 2008 Lists

Happy New Year! We hope that 2009 will be filled with perfect line breaks, abundant and truthful metaphors and rollicking onomatopoeia.

But before we forget about 2008 entirely: I recently spent a full day going over 'Best Books of 2008' lists from major publications and websites (the NY Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, NPR, Amazon, etc) to uncover the Best Asian American Books for 2008 for Hyphen magazine, where I am Books Editor and blogger. 

I discovered that South Asians did quite well, especially when it came to fiction -- where Jhumpa Lahiri reigned supreme with her second short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. In terms of Asian American poetry, I found most of the books I listed from the Kundiman site, though Asian American poets also did well in the American Book Awards. Our own Ravi Shankar was one of the co-editors of a poetry anthology, Language for a New Century, that had a more international focus, but also featured Asian and South Asian American poets. But I did have a hard time finding mention of any South Asian poets on the lists, but maybe it wasn't because of the lack of South Asian poets. 

But what I realized more than anything else, was that POETRY itself was missing from this strange year-end calculation. Sure there were a few (try two) mentions of poetry in the SF Gate's 50 Best Fiction, Poetry Books of 2008, a handful of interesting anthologies in this Guardian story, and here's a random-ish list on the Library Journal site, but I think it is safe to say that poetry published in 2008 safely slipped under the radar of the year-end, gift-guide media frenzy -- as poetry is known to do.  

Is it because of the subjective nature of poetry that makes it hard to review or recommend? Either way, I think it speaks to the way poetry is marginalized in America, or at least seen as un-sellable in a time of year when it's all about the money. But it did inspire me to pay more attention to the way poetry is talked about in the media, for which this blog is a wonderful outlet. 

So, I'll end this post with a little bit of mainstream poet coverage. By this time, I'm sure you've all heard about poet Elizabeth Alexander scoring the biggest poet gig of all time: Barack Obama's Jan. 20th inauguration. Going back to my previous point, this Chicago Tribune article mentions how difficult it is to find Alexander's 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist collection American Sublime in Chicago bookstores. Either way, it is exciting to see poetry being published in major mainstream American dailies, like the Washington Post, and for indie Graywolf Press to get major attention. 

What poetry books of 2008 do you think were the best? And what were the best poems published by South Asian Americans in 2008? And does it really matter?

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!