Category Archives: Bay Area

Learning More from Eduardo Galeano in SF: On Listening and Being Present

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This is about process, I think. First, behold my fancy Instagram pictures from yesterday’s Eduardo Galeano event at City Lights Books. This was a rare thing, to have such an intimate event with such an immense human being. Big treat. And I am clearly ecstatic still. Galeano is one of my major literary idols, even though “idol” may not be the best word, and even though maybe it’s not the best thing, to have “idols.”

But he is BIG in my literary pantheon; without knowing it, he’s been a tremendous informer and influence on my work for years now. Whether it is about sustaining the form and hence sustaining the meditation; sustaining acute attention on the smallest moment; focusing the gaze even finer than I thought possible and then panning out macro within the same body; finding the most specific, most direct, and most clean ways of saying, telling; forging the connection, however tenuous, however unapparent and unlikely; learning how to empathize and/or write with compassion. He calls it feel-thinking, or think-feeling.

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Where Do I Begin Again: Work in Filipina and Pinay Lit

pinay poets oakland library 12.08.2012

Well, it’s the end of the year and the end of the semester. I’m washed out. It’s been a flurry of events, moderating panels, editing, teaching, preparing syllabi, and reading. I still have to submit grades. I haven’t been writing enough. I want to produce new work, but I’ve prioritized so many other things. I’m behind in responding to folks. A lot of people have asked me for a lot of stuff. This is OK. I am not complaining. I really do appreciate folks asking. I give what I can when I can.

So, here’s one thing. We had a Pinay poets/poetics reading and panel at the Oakland Public Library Temescal Branch this past weekend. I was contacted by librarian and poet Steve Lavoie via my website, and it was great to be sought out as an Oakland poet. Because he left the format of this event up to me, I invited Rachelle Cruz, Melissa Sipin, and Yael Villafranca to share their work as well. He asked me if these Pinay writers were my protégés, and this made me think. Do I have protégés? I don’t think I do. Anyway.

I’d just had these three, and Niki Escobar, close out my Pinay Lit class at USF. I’d told my students that having worked through an entire century of Filipina/Pinay works in English this semester, what we are dealing with here is a tradition of Filipina Literature. Surely, the tradition is larger than English, but given what original works (i.e. not translated works) we could access in an American classroom, and given the all-encompassing nature of American colonization and imperialism, given Americanism/Americanization, there is already so much here to study, read, discuss — so very much more than one semester’s worth of material.

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07/22/2012: Chapbook Celebration at Eastwind Books of Berkeley

Sunday, July 22, 2012
3:00pm until 5:00pm

Come celebrate chapbooks with readings by Rachelle Cruz, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Margaret Rhee at Eastwind Books of Berkeley (2066 University Ave Berkeley, CA 94074) on Sunday, July 22nd at 3pm!

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and the host of The Blood-Jet Writing Hour, a podcast on poetics. An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Southern California.

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books), Poeta en San Francisco (‘finfish Press), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, andDiwata (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which was a finalist for the California Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press), Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press). She is an adjunct professor in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco, where she teaches Filipino/a Literature in Diaspora, and Pinay Lives and Voices in Literature. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

Margaret Rhee is the author of the chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and University Dreams (Forthcoming 2012). She is the managing editor of Mixed Blood, a literary journal centered on race and innovative poetics edited by C.S. Giscombe. In April, she curated the literary reading, “Body Maps: A Digital/Real Asian American Feminist Poetics” for the Asian American Women Artists Association. As a new media artist, she works on feminist participatory digital storytelling supporting issues of HIV/AIDS awareness for women incarcerated in the San Francisco Jail. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies and New Media Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a Kundiman fellow.

Eastwind Books of Berkeley
2066 University Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704 (510) 548-2350
http://asiabookcenter.com/

Tribe, Poetry, Politics, Praxis

“Say Flip, you is so funky…” — Vince Reyes, “For My Stylin’ Brothers.”

[Photo credit: Tony Remington, Liwanag (1975)]

Some things I am thinking about today: I am thrilled to have found some poetics essays by Al Robles (1930-2009), and Serafin Malay Syquia (1943-1973)*. I am also thrilled to have found an article by Ninotchka Rosca on Asian American artists and the Asian American audience (I will talk about this Rosca article another time). These things I’ve found while on my usual scour of academic e-archives, and my bookshelves, for my USF Filipino Literature syllabus.

Al Robles wrote “Hanging on to the Carabao’s Tail,” a creative essay published in Amerasia in 1989. It’s very critical of the Asian American poet, or of the poet in general, of the work we are to do, and of the alliances we are to form. He references Russell Leong’s essay on Asian American poets 1968-1978, also in Amerasia, Leong’s discussions of Third World reorientation, and the enacting of Tribe: “We read as we wrote — not in isolation — but in the company of our neighbors in Manilatown pool halls, barrio parks, Chinatown basements.”

I understand why this mode of poetic creation and creativity is the preferred mode; in order to write about community and tribe, we must practice and embody community and tribe.

I therefore also understand why those who engage in the solitary act of writing and reading are viewed with suspicion, even contempt, by the tribe.

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Lit, Poetry, Events, Syllabus Updates, and Becoming a Dona Gangsta

Whew! Lots has just happened, and Oscar and I have found ourselves in many lit spaces over the last few days, while also managing a couple of birthday feasts.

I need three more students to enroll in my Philippine/Filipino American Literature course, and it’s a go. Good news is that incoming freshmen have not yet enrolled, and I’ve also just spread the word to fellow USF faculty in Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, folks with whom I’ve recently reconnected at the 04/26 USF Growing Up Filipino American author panel, featuring Peter Jamero, Pati Navalta Poblete, and Janet Mendoza Stickmon. As I’d previously mentioned, I’d never met or heard Jamero and Poblete, so I wanted to say a few words about them, as I came away impressed with their presentations.
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10/04/2010: Reading with Randall Mann

HI all, Just came back from the Asian Art Museum event; I had a really good time reading with Dan Gonzalez, who is a professor in Asian American Studies at SFSU, and whose Filipinos in San Francisco book is due for release in February 2010. Yesterday, I read at the Berkeley Watershed Poetry Festival, both during the Strawberry Creek Walk and then on the main stage. That said, on to the next event:

09/30/2010: The Kaleidoscope Reading Series with Naomi Quiñonez and Barbara Jane Reyes

Hi all, do come out if you can. I am thrilled to be reading with the always lovely Naomi Quiñonez, and two of my Mills grad students –

Come out for September’s star-studded Kaleidoscope Reading!

Featuring Barbara Jane Reyes and Naomi Quiñonez, with Raphael Cohen, Maya Chinchilla and Alex Fernandez. It is not a night to be missed.

Thursday, September 30th at The Kaleidoscope Free Speech Zone, 3109 24th Street at Folsom. Doors at 7:30, show at 8. Admission free.

Naomi Helena Quiñonez is the author of Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de Colibri, The Smoking Mirror and The Exiled Moon and co-edited Invocation L.A: Urban Multicultural Poetry an anthology which won the American Book Award

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata, Gravities of Center and Poeta en San Francisco and is co-editor of Doveglion Press.

Raphael Cohen, author of  Scrutinizing Lines, is the founder of  Play In The Margins Press, an independent publishing and event production initiative.

Maya Chinchilla is a founding member of Las Manas Tres, director of MADE IN BRAZIL: Dreams at Work and Reading Between the Rhymes and is currently working on a book of poetic non-fiction.

Alex Fernandez is sassy. Alex writes to put feelings back into calloused hands and hearts.  Alex is VONA alumnus. Alex is second generation Pinoy/American from San Leandro (it hugs Oakland!) by way of Guam.

I’m Reading Tonite @ SFPL

Hi all, so Roseli Ilano called me in to pinch hit for Joi Barrios for this evening’s event. I’m thrilled; I’ve got copies of Diwata in my bag and ready to go:

Dispatches From The Diaspora: A Night of Critical Philippine Prose and Poetry
Thursday, September 9
6-7:30 PM
San Francisco Main Public Library, Latino Hispanic Reading Room

Featuring a reading by acclaimed Philippine and Philippine-American writers at the forefront of the discourse surrounding transnational/diaspora literature. Followed by a moderated discussion on the use of literature as a space for dialogue around issues of identity, immigration, and agency. Part of the Singgalot Exhibit http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000278501

Featuring: Aimee Suzara, Barbara Jane Reyes, Luis H. Francia. Moderated by Roseli Ilano.

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