Rich Villar is asking, "where do you write," and "where is your place." For me, it's pretty much anywhere and everywhere something hits me and has to be written down.
These days, for better or for worse, it's in my cubicle at my day job in Oakland Chinatown, where I am surrounded by so much language and cultural translation, women's health and public health issues being hashed out in very concrete terms, where terms such as domestic violence, sexual abuse, and PTSD are still things that happen to other people, and that these other people are right here, where we see so many aspects of their lives unraveling before our eyes as my/our responsibilities are to ensure their access to affordable medical services and to refer and direct them to support services.
Not like this is specific to Oakland Chinatown, but these are my work's daily specifics. On these fringes or edges is typically where I find myself, participating and affected but still safe; here is where my poetic speakers stand to witness and record. Because I live in general safety, she speaks from a position of general safety, thinking on the concrete mechanisms which compromise this safety, knowing that safety is conditional and hence tenuous. Definitely, as a woman, I understand bodily safety threatened as a real possibility; you know, random posses of boys on the streets threatening to gang rape you for not smiling at them when they holla. Guys might tell you that kind of talk is benign, but do not underestimate how scary it is to hear someone say those words to you. And as a relatively petite Filipina, I understand there's another level of that bodily safety being potentially compromised and threatened.
One of the grad students I met with at University of Alabama told me he was wary of his position, writing as an "armchair activist," given his lack of direct exposure to war and the world's injustices about which he felt compelled to write. I told him there is value to taking ownership of this position. It's honest. This position does not make us unaffected, unknowledgeable, ineffectual, irrelevant as writers of poetry that can be considered "political."
Conversely, I've seen too many self-proclaimed political poets who have tried to pass themselves off as being of "the hood," of "the street," when they actually grew up socioeconomically sound, in relatively safe suburbs and (even) relatively safe urban areas. I am always asking how it is that being of "the hood," or of "the street," is synonymous with being "authentic" as a political poet.
So there's that.
