 |
|
An audience member dons poet Eileen Tabios’ original wedding dress as part of a conceptual poetry sculpture. Photo by Jessica Yazbek.
|
Writing on the Edge
‘Interlope’ brings out Filipino American innovation
By Neela Banerjee
AsianWeek
Last Friday night found Locus Arts, San Francisco’s premier Asian Pacific American arts space, filled to the brim with poetry lovers. But this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill, angsty spoken word event or lyrical Asian food poetry reading. Instead, the release party for the eighth volume of Interlope — a literary journal dedicated to innovative APA writing — featured Filipino American poets, an experimental online journal, an ode to stilted office romance and a marriage happening that involved the whole room.
Interlope magazine was founded by San Francisco resident Summi Kaipa when she was finishing her MFA from the renowned creative writing school, University of Iowa.
“The mission is to publish innovative writing by Asian Americans, and for me that means to publish more of the avant garde, [which] I’ve defined very inclusively,” Kaipa said.
Since she began in 1998, Kaipa has published two magazines a year, with a few themed and guest edited issues. For issue No. 8, Kaipa said the idea arose rather organically through a conversation she had with poet Eileen Tabios a few years ago. For Tabios (whose latest book of poetry, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, is reviewed on page 21), the idea of collecting cutting-edge Filipino American writing seemed crucial in the poetry world.
“I was saying that this is an area that has not been explored by literary journals … the idea that innovation would have unique resonance to any Filipino English language writer because of the history of the English language. In the Philippines, it was used as a tool of colonialism years ago,” Tabios said. “In other words, for a Filipino English writer today to write well, that would sort of be the best revenge, given the history.”
Tabios, who switched from a career in international banking to poetry nearly 10 years ago, didn’t make a general call for poetry when she was editing this issue because she knew she was looking for something very specific. “It has to do with poets who [are] more self-consciously self-conscious about the attempt to experiment,” Tabios said.
The issue, which includes over a dozen poets, pushes the structures of poetry with such innovations as Nick Carbo’s “Cube Dice Poems,” an interactive poem that one can cut out to form a cube and roll for different poetic combinations, and Eric Gamalinda’s “Murder In Progress” series, inspired by a visual art series by Gerhard Richter, in which the poet writes a poem, then cancels words and phrases at random, and composes a new poem using the leftover words.
“Innovation is a very high threshold if you follow [Ezra] Pound’s ‘Make it new,’ and I would say, without naming any names, what most poets can do is take an innovative approach, but it isn’t necessarily true that they will end up with an innovative project. Most artists will never do anything innovative,” Tabios said. “I would say that at least two writers achieved the innovative goal. Frankly, that’s damn good and more than I thought I would get.”
Friday’s highlights included Santa Cruz poet Jean N.V. Grier, who Tabios referred to as “one of the best hidden secrets in poetry,” who read from her online hypertext journal The Nightjar, which seemed to blur the lines between the modern blog and pure poetry. Also, San Francisco native Tony Robles’ series of odes to the voicemail lady, and the white man and his colonial mentality found resonance, especially when prolated in Robles’ perfect, dry pitch.
Tabios ended the evening with her “Poem Tree” wedding performance, a nearly two year conceptual poetry project. “In my own attempt to do something new, I was coming up with a new way to write a poem because I was trying to avoid narrative,” Tabios described. “There is that saying: ‘Poetry is not words, it is what is in between words.’ So I decided to write poems by sculpting them. So that got my flaky mind to ask what would a poem look like if it had a body, if it had physicality.”
Tabios explained she sent out a cold call in cyberspace for poets to respond as she was putting together the performance. She received over 100 poems from 13 different countries and 26 U.S. states.
Running with the Filipino and Latino tradition of pinning money to the bride’s wedding dress as a form of blessing, on Friday evening Tabios chose an audience member — a South Asian American man — to don her original wedding dress and handed out the collected poems to everyone in the room. As drums and other instruments resounded in celebration, audience members came up and pinned pieces of their allotted poems to the dress. Each guest also took home a copy of their poem as a wedding favor.
Overall, both Kaipa and Tabios declared the Locus event a success.
“The best thing [about Interlope] is being able to make contact with all these people out there — to really feel like I am being a conduit for voices and really feel like people are meeting each other through this magazine, and that it is a community resource,” Kaipa said. “And it is a huge resource, I’ve met so many people through this magazine. It’s been a springboard for so many ideas.”
All issues of Interlope are available for $5. For more information, visit the Interlope website at www.interlope.org.
Reach Neela Banerjee at nbanerjee@asianweek.com.
|
