Yesterday, I got to sit in on Oscar‘s last Oakland Word class which he taught on urban poetics, and which was a five-week free workshop for local writers. Oakland Word, spearheaded by Kenji C. Liu who is also the poetry editor for Kartika Journal, offers free writing classes that are held at various Oakland Public Library branches. Really, Oakland Word is some wonderful act of generosity. Last week, at the library’s main branch, I attended the release party for In Your Ear, a beautifully produced (a multi-talented Kenji also designed it), free anthology of Oakland Word writing. It was a nice mix of diverse emerging writers in poetry, fiction, and memoir, and some very earnest and lovely pieces about memory and family were shared. It always floors me to enter into a community arts space that’s brimming with so much unbridled upbeat energy and warmth. I will also say, so that the point is not missed, that what I’ve experienced so far of Oakland Word is predominantly writers of color, negotiating spaces between MFA programs, VONA writing workshops, and actively assuring that they can continue to write, generate new work, revise work in progress, beyond their writing programs. So this I believe is community making.

In Oscar’s urban poetics class, they discussed Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “kitchenette building,” and as different, even divergent thoughts on the poem were discussed, a few students agreed on this: poetry is meant to be read aloud, shared, and discussed with others. It’s the consideration of others’ readings of poems which come to inform our own readings, and here, a community is formed. How do poems which speak to specific experiences generate empathy in readers with very different life experiences? As poets, how do we do this; as poets writing our cities, the cities in which we live, and our ideals and idea of cities, how can we generate and cultivate that empathy?

Oscar then asked me to talk about poetic line, and also to discuss my ideas on urban poetics, given that I write or have written about San Francisco, Manila, and Oakland. Good challenge, discussing these things together, or as they go together. I have decided that I think of poetic lines as conveying the rhythms, noise, musics of a particular place; so it’s not centrally and solely about the writer as much as it is about the place she inhabits with so many others, and how she makes sense of it.

If in San Francisco, I am concerned with historical and human collisions and discord, then how do my lines reflect this? How can my lines convey my speaker’s walking and witnessing, falling into the fray, stepping back, back against the wall and trying to meditate on what sees and experiences? If in Manila, I think of the river cutting through the city, if I think of my sentimental, historical attachment to this river, then I think of a tender and riverine flow for my lines. But if this river is dead, toxic, filled with the bodies of political dissidents, its banks overpopulated by squatters and shanties, then what will my lines do? If I pull back into the gated properties of the elites, then what kind of isolated coldness can I communicate? If I can’t decide how to claim Oakland as my home, to state confidently that I am of the city of Oakland, then what kinds of acts of ventriloquy will I commit as I attempt to find at least one voice to help me work through my indecision?

Oscar reminds me of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself 42: “This is the city, and I am one of the citizens; / Whatever interests the rest interests me….” So there’s that empathy, the self which is not the small, individual self, but the self-identification with city.

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