Much to say about this very quick in and out of New York, where Bhanu Kapil and I had a fantastic and well-attended reading full of such interested and interesting, articulate and attentive folks, and during which I learned what a Nor'easter is.
Poet groupie moment first: upon leaving the Bowery, and while we were all still milling about outside, a woman who attended the reading approached me, and thanked me rather emphatically for my work, telling me how much she really enjoyed my reading. She'd wanted to buy my book but all my copies had sold out. She then took off a leopard skin velvet glove, shook my hand, and introduced herself to me as Anne Waldman, who I then very calmly introduced to Oscar, and to Sarah Gambito, while I stopped myself from fainting. I was gushy and dumb, but managed to thank her for coming, for enjoying my reading, for being interested in my book. I managed to tell her also that I'd recently taught her work, and, oh I don't know what else I told her.
* * *
Bhanu Kapil's reading was grounded, rocksteady, and quite strongly sustained. She read a section towards the end of Incubation: A Space for Monsters, which I think is a book-length prose poem, and in which her protagonist and speaker, Laloo, a young South Asian woman hitchhiker, is so exposed to bodily danger, if not spiritual danger, out there, in the middle of America. I am stuck on the image of Laloo's jeans, bunched around her ankles, or this gun slipping up her skirt. I think of what drives a young woman to place herself in this kind of danger, and whether it's simply normal, the danger we experience, the possibilities of bodily and spiritual harm that are so a part of our everyday lives, such that it's so normalized. As well, she read from Humanimal, forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press. It's an interesting and somehow logical movement from the monster/cyborg to the humanimal, these young women, these bodies, who are and aren't human beings. I am now looking at the epigraph to Incubation: A Space for Monsters. An excerpt:
"... Always radically historically specific, always lively, bodies have a different kind of specificity and effectivity; and so they invite a different kind of engagement and intervention." — Donna Haraway, The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.
Brenda Iijima and Evelyn Reilly were such gracious and generous hosts, and Brenda gave me one of the best introductions ever, a close, critical reading of Poeta en San Francisco, beginning with Toni Morrison on breaking silence, as epigraphed by Edward Said in the first chapter of Culture and Imperialism.
So much amazing conversation with so many women writers in such a small amount of time, and I am so grateful for this. Of course it's always good to catch up with Sarah Gambito, and Cathy Park Hong, for (to me) the very important reason of affirming that we are working, that we are doing good work, that we are tracking our progress for there is progress to be tracked, that we are doing a lot of good work.
I realize I've grown a little unaccustomed to actually having (non-student) women want to talk to me about the work, what they are thinking about the work, what or where are their ways into the work. Regarding my "Filipina crack whore," Bhanu talked about giving space, or outlining space around this girl, who would be otherwise forgotten or invisible. With Cecilia Wu and Melissa Buzzeo, we talked also about decentering this perceived singular cultural political literary Center, and whether it's possible to write our own centers without displaying or portraying ourselves as peripheral to that Center, somehow not giving that Center more power than it already has. Bhanu likened this to looking through a microscope, and magnifying something else that is interesting we've found on our slide. Giving that thing proper attention, or again, marking space.
We talked about the multilingual in my work, and how during the course of my reading, I sometimes forget which language I am speaking; it's at this point, Cecilia says, that she finds herself a way in, where something like a surrender has occurred. We talked about surrender, at the point or place when or where all other recourses are exhausted for the poetic speaker, and what effect the speaker's surrender has on the reader. Back to the "Filipina crack whore": "just gave up is all."
Brenda then asked me about the appearance of the Ouroboros in one of my Diwata poems, the tattoo on the body of the military fatigued, balisong wielding, urban archangel, placed where the ribcage opens. I told her that image came to mind as I also have a hunter who is tattooed with a similar looking Ifugao fertility symbol in that same place, the opening of the ribcage. There's a connection there in meaning, cyclical structures, regeneration or renewal.
Also that evening, I met Julie Patton, Tisa Bryant, and Sara Wintz, a recent Mills College graduate, who is a lovely young lady, and whom I last saw read in San Francisco, at Muddy Waters Cafe in the Mission, with Truong Tran, Linh Dinh, and Wanda Coleman. I have her chapbook, and will be reading it very soon.
Later on that evening, Oscar and I met up with Rich Villar and Tara Betts, and it was great to have some chill with friends time, dessert and tea time, as well as more deep, unbarred feminism and poetry talk, on how women publicly interact with one another, how professional interplays with something perhaps gender specific. Ultimately, how and when women do and do not support one another professionally, pay lip service to feminism, not practice feminism. Good times. Definitely kept me warm in 30-something degree weather.
