Tag Archives: Nick Carbó

Poetic Industrial Complex: POC and Publishing Anxiety

Continuing on with what is now looking like a series of blog posts on submissions and publishing, I want to reiterate that I’m writing all of this to think out loud about my presentation for the PAWA 07/30/2011 workshop. I am anticipating a relatively specific community of writers, most likely emerging local writers of color who participate in local and grassroots arts orgs, and who have limited publishing experience.

As well, and again, back to author and friend Sunny Vergara’s blog post on self-promotion, as well as thinking back on so much of the writing I do here, as well as thinking about my recent conversations with Anthem Salgado including the Art of Hustle podcast interview, I believe there are cultural and even political reasons for the reticence I see in this community.

A friend of mine, a fellow writer, recently held a women writers submissions party somewhere in the Bay Area. I did not attend, but it was interesting to see the comments thread on Facebook. There really was a lot of articulated and admitted fear. I don’t know anymore what this fear is about; it’s no longer my experience. Maybe it once was. But the very reason why I am offering this workshop is because of those kinds of articulated and admitted fears.

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“Making It Happen”: Getting Your Work into the World

I’ve just come across this announcement for an event taking place at the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) on Wednesday, July 21:

Diane di Prima: Making It Happen

So, you’ve been writing, painting, dancing. You’ve got a band, or a performance piece. How do you reach out to others? Find folks of like mind? Get the work out there? How do you create a community of artists & friends who will support each other?

In this informal reading/talk, Diane di Prima, San Francisco’s Poet Laureate, will talk about making your art and getting it into the world “by any means necessary”—whatever comes to hand—in good times and bad. She will also address the importance of creating a sense of community.

Diane’s presentation will be a rare opportunity to glimpse an important and seldom-acknowledged part of Bay Area cultural history through the eyes of someone who lived it. Dialogue with the audience will be invited and encouraged throughout the presentation.

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Publishing Thoughts for the End of the Year and Decade

I’m inspired, or touched, or feeling warm fuzzies in general about Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor’s and Veronica Montes’s recent blog posts. With Growing Up Filipino II, Bec is now experiencing her first publication in an anthology (as she notes, an actual book), feeling “less a could-be writer and more a in-fact writer.” Inspired by Bec’s post, Veronica, who is reading for the PAWA-sponsored San Francisco book launch, is remembering her own first anthology publication. In both of their cases, Cecilia Brainard was the editor responsible for selecting their work for publication.

I am moved to think back on my own first anthology publication, which was Babaylan (Aunt Lute, 2000), edited by Nick Carbó and Eileen Tabios. Years later, as Eileen came to speak on her work as a poet and editor at SFSU for Justin Chin’s class, I remember her saying that there were some newbie or emerging poets who’d submitted work, and whom she chose to include in the anthology because she believed publication would encourage or propel these poets to continue with their poetic work. Sitting in the lecture hall audience, I thought to myself, “She must mean (poets like) me.”

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New Review at the Hyphen Magazine Blog

My review of Nick Carbó’s new book, Chinese, Japanese, What Are These? is now up at the Hyphen magazine blog. Here is an excerpt:

There is something heartbreaking about Filipino American poet Nick Carbo’s latest collection of poetry, provocatively titled Chinese, Japanese, What Are These? For those of you not in the know, the book’s title references the xenophobic children’s rhyme, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, what are these?” The gestures accompanying said rhyme include using one’s hands to stretch the eyes, hence making the “chinky eye.” The movement corresponding to What are these?” is to show or motion towards the breasts, exaggerating their size.

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Read the entire review here.

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Poem: Nick Carbó, "The Filipino Politician"

The Filipino Politician
by Nick Carbó

When he finds his wife in bed with another man–

The conservative politician feels an ache in his stomach,
remembers the longanisa and the tapa he had for breakfast.
He doesn’t know whether to get the doctor or Cardinal Sin
on the phone. He calls one of his bodyguards, tells him
to shoot the man and then, his wife. He takes his .38 magnum
from his brief case, shoots his bodyguard in the back.

The liberal politician pours himself a glass of Courvoisier,
remembers a passage from an Anais Nin story.
He is suddenly the one they call the Basque. He removes
his Dior tie, his Armani shirt, his Calvin Klein boxer shorts.
He puts on a black beret, whispers, tres jolie, tres jolie,
que bonito, muy grande my petite amore. He joins them
in bed, begins his caresses on the man’s calves,
kisses his way up the man’s thighs.

The communist politician does not call his wife a puta,
nor does he challenge the man to a duel with balisong knives.
He stays calm, takes out a book of poems by Mao Tse Tung.
Inspired, he decides to advance the Revolution.
He takes a taxi to Roxas Boulevard, he begins to curse
and throw rocks at the American Embassy.

* * *

I’ve been thinking about Nick Carbó lately so I thought I’d share this poem, which is the first poem of his I ever read, during a slushpile session when I was editor-in-chief of Maganda magazine at UC Berkeley back in like 1994 or something, before I ever knew El Grupo McDonald’s (Tia Chucha Press, 1995), and before I or any of us Maganda editors even knew who he was.

Anyway, rather than take a trip down memory lane, I should just say that I’ve been thinking about Nick and about those who assume or end up in leadership positions in our Fil Am literary community, and what and how the rest of the community give back, for all the anthologies edited, for all the book blurbs and book reviews and letters of recommendation written, for all the professional hookup’s. I just wonder if the community believes in reciprocity, or if the community believe it’s OK to simply keep taking, benefiting from the work of others.

And that’s all for now. We are actually off to AT&T Park in SF for a Giants game and Filipino Heritage Night. Later.

Filipino Literary Community

Responding to Kristin Naca‘s recent great news, Eileen Tabios asks: So, like, haven’t you all noticed how more and more of these contests are being won by Filipino poets?

Yep, I’ve certainly noticed and experienced this.

Many of these Filipino poets and writers are folks who’ve kept in contact with one another or who have met one another via our FLIPS listserv, which was started by Vince Gotera and Nick Carbó back in 1997. We’ve been featured in many of the same journals and anthologies, we’ve included one another in our various publication projects, we’ve organized literary readings for and including one another in various parts of the country,  we’ve crashed on one another’s couches, shared meals and drinks, we’ve commiserated about writing programs (in fact, I know a few of us consulted the listserv as we were thinking of applying to our respective writing programs) and manuscript woes, we’ve read one another’s manuscripts. We’ve grappled and argued (and we continue to argue) over politics, language, aesthetics, and approaches to publication, we teach one another’s works, review one another’s books, promote one another’s works in various other ways, and we’ve shared our good news with one another. Others’ individual successes have motivated and encouraged (and even emboldened) us to find our own.

Keeping in contact via blogworld is an extension of what began on FLIPS.

For us, this is beyond any simple nationalism or feelgoodism (certainly, it isn’t always pleasant, and it’s never unanimous), and this is what I mean by community. It’s practical and it’s necessary in order to constantly be challenged and to thus work effectively within the poetic industrial complex.

For a list of Filipino American authored books (many of whom are FLIPS listservers), see here.

Blog Post #2 On Gelacio Guillermo and Eugene Gloria

This is a follow-up to my original post on Gelacio Guillermo’s response to Eugene Gloria’s poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

A fellow Filipina writer has brought up some very good points in an email discussion elsewhere, reminding me that the poem in question is an old poem, probably written in the 1990′s or so. And this is something I was just saying yesterday evening: to be fair, the poem was written a long time ago and that after reading Hoodlum Birds, I consider Eugene Gloria a virtuoso. The only reason why I am reading and responding to this older poem now is because Guillermo has just found the poem and has just written and published a response to the poem.

This fellow Filipina writer also reminds me that the poet’s audience and readership must be considered. How do Filipino American writers and other “ethnic” writers portray our cultural and historical artifacts, i.e. “foreign” words and “foreign” objects, to mainstream American literary institutions.

I am also conscious that I have asked some critical questions of a fellow Filipino American poet’s work, and that can be construed as anti-community. I certainly don’t intend this at all. I am trying to understand how we have grown or changed or evolved as a literary community.

Nick Carbó’s anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffeehouse Press, 1995) contains a rather comprehensive introduction on English language Filipino poetry (both Philippines-based and Filipino American), and he discusses nostalgia for the Philippines as a prevalent theme in contemporary Filipino poets’ works. I think the poem in question fits neatly in this category.

Still, even in poems of nostalgia, I think the question of to whom we are writing about ourselves is important. I believe that as readers, figuring out who the poetic speaker is, and who poet and the poetic speaker are addressing is important in understanding the poem. That said, I still question why the speaker in this poem is an unnamed Filipina daughter of a colonel, and why she is addressing Guillermo. I question whether her language and how she treats the historical events she cites are consistent with how a Filipino would address a fellow Filipino, how a Filipino would discuss certain Filipino issues with another Filipino.

Carbó’s introduction also discusses the politicized/activist Bay Area 1960′s-1970′s Flips scene of which, despite my post-1965 immigrant status, I think of myself as a descendant — Liwanag, Kearny Street Workshop, the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (BAPAW). He names Jaime Jacinto, Virginia Cerenio, Serafin Syquia, Jessica Hagedorn, and Al Robles as some of the key figures, who concerned themselves with grassroots, community-based workshops. Carbó states that these folks never reached any levels of national success, “however intensely felt and well-organized this assertion of Filipino writing was in the Bay Area.”

[Interesting that he includes Hagedorn in this part of the discussion, given that no other Filipino American writer's achievements equals hers.]

I bring up Carbó’s discussion of the Bay Area Flips to address the issue of poetic addressee. My longtime experiential knowledge of these Bay Area Flip poets tells me that they/we were/are addressing one another, transcribing what we otherwise always relied upon oral tradition to keep alive — old and ongoing stories of our communities and families. So then these Flips prioritized the vernacular, the local, or the locale, the farms where asparagus and broccoli were harvested, the crab fisheries of Naknek, Alaska, the Pajaro River Valley, the Richmond District, the Fillmore, SoMa.

I am wondering if in “talking to ourselves,” in using insider/familiar language/vernacular, we necessarily sacrifice “national renown” by lessening the numbers of readers who would be able to understand this language and these reference points. I am wondering then, if this is the opposite of what I read in Eugene’s poem, for in writing as the other and addressing the mainstream institution, our familiar artifacts invariably come to be handled as foreign objects, and that there is no place for familiar (never mind “intimate” at this point) language in these poems.

I refer to Carbó’s introduction, which was published in 1995, because I feel like Eugene Gloria’s poem belongs in that context. And both I see as rather outdated.

But I was mentored by Filipino poets of national, international, as well as local renown, and so I grew up in poetry not subscribing to the belief that (inter)national and local, elevated poetic diction and vernacular cannot coexist, or that they must negate one another.