Hyde Park Poetry!

series A, a new reading series, is hosting its first reading on Thursday, July 20, at the new Hyde Park Art Center at 6:00 p.m. The featured readers will be Kerri Sonnenberg and Chris Glomski. I invite everyone to come out and celebrate the launch of a new series in Chicago and to celebrate the writing of these wonderful poets.

For more information, please see http://www.moriapoetry.com/seriesa.html.

The Hyde Park Art Center is located at 5020 S. Cornell Avenue. The reading will be held in the conference room.

Bios:

Kerri Sonnenberg lives in Chicago where she directs the Discrete Reading Series at the Elastic Arts Space in Logan Square. Her books include The Mudra (Litmus, 2004) and Practical Art Criticism (Bronze Skull, 2004). Other writings can be found in recent issues of MiPoesias, Factorial, Magazine Cypress and Unpleasant Event Schedule.

Chris Glomski was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1965. Raised in Illinois, he has also made his home in Iowa and Italy. His first collection of poems, TRANSPARENCIES LIFTED FROM NOON, was published last fall by MEB / Spuyten Duyvil Press in New York. His poems and critical writings have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, The Octopus, Pom2, and ACM. Recently, he has been translating poems by the Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale.

Those Glittering Asian Guys (II)

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Those Glittering Asian Guys

Hoo boy. So I was in San Francisco last weekend (more on which soon) and heard some murmuring about a Michael Magee poem that had caused a stir at a recent reading by talking about "Asians." That poem, of course, was "Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay", and after some pointers from Barbara Jane Reyes and Brent Cunningham I found the discussions going on about the poem at Minor American, lime tree, Asian American Poetry, and other places. I'm coming very late to this, and I (like others) debated whether to get involved at all, having developed a certain level of fatigue about calling out examples of Asian stereotypes in contemporary poetry.

But there did seem to be something a bit different about this case, in part because it involved a poem written by someone whose work I generally like and defended by someone else I agree with about 90% of the time. And in part it made me think about precisely how images of the "Asian" get used in contemporary poems, and whether one could usefully distinguish between those kinds of uses. I'm going to try to approach this by (empathetically and idealistically) imagining how the "general reader" might receive such issues, before going into how the position of an Asian American reader might differ.

As I've observed before, the most feared epithet in these kinds of discussion is not "Asian," or "Oriental," or "Chinaman." It's "racist." The arguments of those who critique stereotypes or racial imagery in a poem are often reduced to, "So-and-so says the poem is racist," and the charge of racism is seen as so toxic as to end all further discussion. More to the point: there's no such thing (today, at least) as a good, racist poem. The charge of racism is understood to place something outside of reasonable discourse and of aesthetic appreciation. This is not to say that there aren't poems written and published now that, upon closer reading, can be seen to have racist implications; it's simply that no acceptable poem can explicitly claim a racist position--one that openly seeks to caricature, demonize, and inspire hatred or fear of a particular racial group. One can certainly think of any number of historical examples of this kind of writing--for example, Bret Harte's poem on the "heathen Chinee"--but it's nearly impossible to imagine a "serious" poet today attempting such a thing.

So when we do encounter racial stereotypes in a contemporary poem, we tend to assume that "something else" must be going on. (For example, when I critiqued racial imagery in a poem on the Poetics list, the response came back, "Well, obviously we know no one on this list is a racist, so...") I'll attempt to describe two of those "something elses"--two ways in which racial images or stereotypes seem to get used in contemporary writing--before discussing the third "something else" that Magee's poem may or may not represent.

1. Ambivalent. This can best be described as a simultaneous fascination with and repulsion from racial imagery, an unease with the racial other that can manifest itself as mockery, ethnography, or fetish. The writer's intention and attitude toward the subject matter seem to be unstable. The examples that immediately come to mind are two pieces posted to the Poetics list, one titled "WHY DO THE TIAWANESE" and the other infamously referencing the "Filipino crack whore," that I discussed at some length here and here. In these cases, what the author allegedly intended as "realistic" or even "sympathetic" portrayals of Asians seemingly cannot help but partake of the most degraded stereotypes, not least because the author seems to lack any awareness of the destructive power of such stereotypes.

I think also of a story I read a few years ago in the New Yorker in which the protagonist is a young white woman who works as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, describing the food as dirty and disgusting and the proprietress's communication as consisting of guttural "ngs" and "oks."

It might easily be protested that these writings are straight-up racist--no ambivalence about them. Without a doubt the worst writings in this category lean that way. But their dynamic of repulsion and attraction (the young woman in the New Yorker story describes her attraction to a young Asian man who works in the restaurant) and the apparently unconscious nature of their racism gives them a kind of bare cover that in some cases can allow them to get away with it (at least to some readers).

2. Ironic or parodic. The vast majority of contemporary racial stereotyping in poetry, and perhaps even in popular culture, falls into, or wants to fall into, this category: it's a self-conscious use of racial imagery that holds the stereotype at an ironic distance, ostensibly parodying or satirizing the very stereotype it deploys. (In popular culture, cf. South Park, Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts, and so on.) In other words, using a racial stereotype is okay if you are aware that you are doing it, since then you couldn't possibly take it entirely seriously.

The simplest example of this is when the irony is provided by the position of the speaker, e.g. when Marilyn Chin refers to the "mega-Chinese-food tropes" of her poems or an African American comedian uses the "N-word." Since it's assumed that these speakers are not being racist toward their own racial groups, it follows that their words must be ironic or appropriative. As Pam Lu has pointed out, this strategy is by no means always, or even usually, successful; an Asian American writer who self-consciously portrays Asian Americans in stereotypical fashion can easily end up reinforcing those very stereotypes.

Another technique of ironic distancing is that of the dramatic monologue: you use racist words but put them in the mouth of a speaker clearly marked as a character, distinct from the author. Think, for example, of the opening scene of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, in which white male real estate agents invite each other to dine at "the Chink's" and inveigh against "Patels." The usual interpretation given is that Mamet is not himself a racist, but rather is realistically portraying the racism of his rather unattractive characters. (In the context of Magee's poem, this would be the "redneck reading"--that the poem's references to Asians should be attributed to an ignorant and racist speaker whom Magee intends to satirize.) Of course, a closer reading reveals that there is nothing remotely "realistic" about the racist language Mamet puts in his characters' mouths (one describes Indians as "A supercilious race"), which, depending on your view of Mamet, can lead in one of two directions: toward the idea that Mamet is adding another layering of irony in order to satirize us, who believe that we can comfortably distance ourselves from the racism of others; or back toward ambivalence, in which Mamet is not distancing himself from racism as much as we might initially think. (For a fictional take on this scene, see Bharati Mukherjee's story "A Wife's Story.")

For an instance of this strategy of ironic distancing, take a couple of poems that another Asian American poet recently pointed me to: two pieces called "Chinese Movies" by Bernard Henrie in the latest issue of SHAMPOO. (In order to insulate myself against the suspicion that I am anti-SHAMPOO, I should note that I and many of my, um, best friends publish our work there.) Henrie's title suggests the mass-culture source of Chinese stereotypes, and the poems' serial numbering suggests the mechanical reproducibility of such stereotypes. The poems are stocked with what Anglo-American readers have come to expect as the cliches of chinoiserie: silk garments, snow cherries, plum blossoms, bamboo, persimmons. The frame suggests that we are meant to receive these images with a wink and a nod, that they are cliches being used satirically.

But how ironic is it? There's a distinct speaker, but despite his language of cliches it's not at all clear how distanced we're supposed to be from him. When he describes a female artist, "Chen," the imagery is almost comically piled on:

A Mandarin when she works,
her oversize smock and sleeves
look like petals. I expect rice fans
to appear for shade, gifts from
her village in rural China.

And perhaps the "I expect" registers this as a product of the speaker's stereotypes.

But the poem never leaves this level, never actually gives us a position from which to critique the speaker. In fact, the poem's conclusion seems to do nothing so much as seek to reanimate the stereotypes, to reaestheticize them and restore their erotic charge:

Her painting dry and bamboo
brushes wrapped, she prepares
to bathe, pausing to peel
a fat persimmon, the juice drips
and forms a glistening drop
on her gold thigh:

"Look, another water color."

The final words, I assume, are Chen's own; she's actually shown to be participating in her own orientalized objectification. So this is a poem that seems to begin from an ironic position but fails to maintain it; instead, it slides toward ambivalence by seeing the stereotype as a source of attraction and pleasure.

Irony and parody can, however, be highly successful methods of critiquing and reworking racial stereotypes. The work of John Yau is probably the best example I can think of in the current context. Yau's series "Genghis Chan: Private Eye," like Henrie's poems (which actually seem derivative of Yau series like "Late Night Movies"), signals in its title its sources in mass culture, but the title itself mashes up seemingly incompatible stereotypes: that of the fearsome Asian warrior (Genghis Khan) and of the effeminate and deferential Asian (Charlie Chan); then it places these in a wholly unexpected American context (that of the film noir). The result is parodic but also unstable, not permitting any established stereotype to gain traction, seeking to create a new and hybrid speaking position.

The poems themselves often seem to function as junkyards--or recycling bins--for racially charged language, which is fragmented and reconstructed into something compelling yet monstrous:

shoo war
torn talk

ping towel
pong toy

salted sap
yellow credit

hubba doggo
bubba patootie

wig maw
mustard tongue

The result is less an attractive reanimation of orientalism but a pastiche of it whose primary emotion would seem to be a charged disgust.

So what does any of this have to do with Magee's "Their Guys"? My sense is that while most attempts to read the poem have fallen into one of the two above categories, the poem is tryihng to do some third thing; for what that might be, and how successful it is, stay tuned.

Reviews, Resurrected (II)

Thanks to Ron Silliman for pointing to my review of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation--although it is a bit disturbing to think that this is the best available picture of me.

It's always illuminating to hear someone else summarizing your argument, which often brings out things that you may not have noticed yourself. Silliman's pithy precis defines the three "generations" of Asian American poets quite nicely along the lines of politics. I had also hoped to emphasize that I saw some degree of continuity between the "politicized & populist" poets of the 1970s and younger "post-avant" writers (with the implication that it was the "lyric" turn of the 1980s that could be viewed as anomalous in the history of Asian American poetry). But that's certainly a debatable point.

Thanks also to csperez for pointing (in Silliman's comment box) to the discussion that's been going on here and elsewhere. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to respond more fully to the thoughtful comments by him and by Pam Lu, in part because I've been away the past few days (on which more to come). But I'll try a quick stab at answering now.

Both commenters raise the question of whether perhaps the anthology does represent some sociological "truth" about Asian Americans: as Pam puts it, maybe the anthology's "dehistoricized, deculturalized, uncritically-examined perspectives do actually reflect the perspectives of a (growing) sector of the population."

It's difficult for me to assess this as a sociological claim. It's certainly true that one hears Asian American activists complaining all the time about the problems of politicizing Asian Americans, and perhaps some might see this as a decline from the activist days of the 1970s. But is the Asian American population in general less politically engaged and less historically aware than it was three decades ago? My guess would be no: a generation of students has gone through American colleges with at least the opportunity to study Asian American history, literature, and politics, and Asian American student organizations remain robust (if rarely politically radical).

But I think Pam may be right in another sense, in that there are now a multitude of models for how one might be an "Asian American writer." To claim that label in the 1970s meant a rather particular thing, both politically and aesthetically--which also rather excluded one from "mainstream" acceptance. But the "breakthrough" success in the late '70s and 1980s of writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Cathy Song made it quite possible to be both an Asian American writer and a "mainstream" one--or, better yet, to be a writer who "just happens to be" Asian American.

For me, The Open Boat plays out the political and aesthetic logic of this moment. But what I don't think I'd realized in my past readings of Garrett Hongo's anthology was how pointed Hongo's dissent from the aesthetic/political conjunction of the 1970s was. To take up Silliman's characterization, Hongo's stance is probably not apolitical but purposefully anti-political, a reaction against "ethnic consciousness" dogma. But that resistance, at least, was still a kind of engagement, a conscious departure from a certain norm; an ironic awareness of ethnic politics is still a form of awareness.

But what happens when one places into the category of "Asian American writer" those who do not see their work in those terms at all? What Chang's anthology seems to argue is that it is now possible not to allude to the tradition of Asian American writing in form, content, or intention, and yet still to be called an Asian American writer. In short, that there is now a completely dehistoricized and decontextualized way of being an "Asian American poet," and indeed to be a highly successful one. To make this point even more contentiously: it may be precisely that success itself (measured in terms of fellowships, publications, and teaching positions) is the gold standard of acceptance into the category of Asian American poet. The Asian American poet thus becomes the model minority.

Finally, the question has been raised of what an ideal anthology of Asian American poetry really would look like. It's interesting that Silliman read me to be saying that such an anthology would essentially be Premonitions redux. That's perhaps what I would like to have said, or perhaps should have said were I a more loyal post-avanter. What I actually said was

The new, truly comprehensive anthology of Asian American poetry that is needed now would draw generously from both the 1980s lyric represented in Hongo’s Open Boat and the avant-garde work of the 1970s and 1990s featured in Premonitions, offering notes and introductions that place both aesthetics in historical and literary context. But it would also offer a much longer historical perspective on Asian American poetry...It would place this work alongside poems by younger writers who represent some of the newest Asian American immigrant groups, while using three decades of experience by teachers of Asian American writing to help measure what poems have been most useful in the classroom. Such an anthology--ideally a collaboration between critics and poets--would provide an invaluable introduction to Asian American poetry for general readers, while providing the depth students, scholars, and writers need.

That's the anthology that, to me, would seem the most useful--one I could use in my own classroom, but that I'd also love to read.

Ain't I Yellow?

[New Orleans] Mayor Ray Nagin, whose shoot-from-the-hip style was both praised and scorned after Hurricane Katrina, narrowly won re-election over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu on Saturday...

"It's time for us to stop the bickering. It's time for us to stop measuring things in black and white and yellow and Asian."

Um...

That's Progress!

I've signed up as a blogger for Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, the spinoff of the Asian American organization within the Howard Dean campaign. I'll be making occasional posts (with a couple other bloggers) over there on politics and Asian Americans. This may protect all of you from having to hear so many political rants from me. Unless of course you like that sort of thing, in which case come on over.

A Few Good Fences

The Senate...backed construction of 370 miles of triple-layered fencing along the Mexican border Wednesday...

The vote to build what supporters called a "real fence'' - as distinct from the virtual fence already incorporated in the legislation - was 83-16. The fence would be built in areas "most often used by smugglers and illegal aliens,'' as determined by federal officials. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., estimated the cost at roughly $3.2 million per mile, more than $900 million for 300 miles...

"Good fences make good neighbors," Sessions said.

Perhaps the gentleman from Alabama should read a bit more closely.

"...Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me--
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

"Chinese Restaurant Syndrome"

I was kind of hoping that this was a joke, but apparently it's not.

Chinese restaurant syndrome is a collection of symptoms that some people experience after eating Chinese food.

Following this logic, I propose that obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer be relabeled American food syndrome.

Don't worry, though.

Most people recover from mild cases of Chinese restaurant syndrome on their own. Their prognosis is excellent.

Reviews, Resurrected

The second issue of Galatea Resurrects is up, including a reprint of my review of Victoria Chang's Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. It's a good opportunity for me to try to respond to the interesting discussion around reviewing--particularly of Asian American poets--that's been going on the past couple weeks.

Barbara Jane Reyes has been asking some tough questions (parts 1, 2, and 3) about the function of criticism: in particular, what happens when an Asian American critic reviews an Asian American writer.

...the question came up of whether we ought to be even writing these critical reviews, non-endorsing reviews, stating that a book written by one of our community members does not appear to be well-written, does not appear to accomplish what it has set itself up to accomplish. Then citing the text in order to explain why we think this is the case. Perhaps then proposing alternatives, what do we think would make the work work...So, should we be doing this to books written by "our own"?

I'd venture to say that this is a question not just for Asian American writers but for almost any poet today: the reviewer is likely to be part of the same, relatively small "community" as the author being reviewed. As I argued a while back in saying "death to reviews" (a command I obviously haven't heeded myself), the print-culture model of the critic as objective gatekeeper, sorting the wheat from the chaff, would seem to have little relevance in an era where major book reviews ignore poetry and most critical discussions of poetry take place in relatively specialized zones (little magazines, blogs, academic articles). It's increasingly unlikely that a writer will be asked to review a book of poetry by someone he/she doesn't know and in whose work he/she has absolutely no stake. This might seem like a rather cynical view. But I think it can also be rather liberating. Reviews, in this model, are less a Siskel-and-Ebert-style thumbs-up-or-down and more a way of keeping a certain kind of aesthetic conversation going, an engagement with and response to a book as much as an evaluation of it.

I tend to take the same approach to thinking about reviews of Asian American writing, although the stakes may be somewhat different. This is, after all, as much a political category as it is an aesthetic one, and the promotion of Asian American writing is often seen as part of the broader cultural and political struggles of Asian Americans. The critic Sau-ling Wong puts this point powerfully: just as the category "Asian American" is a political coalition, the category "Asian American literature" is a "textual coalition," whose interests it is the professional task of the Asian American critic to promote. Or as Barbara Jane puts it:

there appears to be so little F/Pilipino American literature "out there," that we ought to be calling people's attention to the work, writing reviews to convince readers to read the work, ultimately, buy the work. The rationale is solid, I think: we F/Pilipino American authors need our books to sell. Otherwise, we are constantly crippled by statistics which show that F/Pil Am authored books do not sell, and that F/Pil Am's do not read.

These certainly seen like reasonable goals. But it's also true that under this logic, the negative review is going to become an increasingly endangered species, and a positive review risks being seen as mere boosterism.

I don't particularly enjoy writing negative reviews. I'm more likely to follow mom's advice on this one: if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. We all know that when it comes to books there's no such thing as bad publicity (cf. runaway sales of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces or the brisk eBay trade in now-illict copies of Opal Mehta). Particularly when it comes to a poetry book--which is not likely to get noticed by a large number of reviewers--the nastiest thing you can do to a book you don't like is to ignore it. For me, this is less a question of intellectual honesty or fearlessness than a question of the best use of my time, and yours: I'd much rather discover what is interesting and productive in a book than spend time bashing it. Nor do I think it's my job as a critic to explain to a writer what they're doing wrong and how to do it better: that's a role better approached as a colleague or a friend.

All that said: so under what circumstances does it become necessary to write a negative review? I use the word "necessary" because that seems to be my own standard: such a review has to be written when the book in question is potentially going to have a significant impact, and when that book--I don't know what other way to put this--puts forward an argument that seems to me wrong or even pernicious. It may seem strange to characterize a book of poetry as having an argument, but I think most do: they argue in favor of a particular aesthetic, a particular politics, a particular way of looking at the world, in a way that goes beyond some simple judgment about whether they are good or bad.

I think this is especially true of books we put into the category of "Asian American poetry." Because to do that to a book is to make some kind of claim about it, about what it is for and what it is doing in the world. I do not say that there is only one kind of way in which to make this claim, or even that I can say with any precision what I would mean by it myself. But it's important to recognize that it is a claim, not just a neutral category. Sometimes this claim may be made quite directly by the author; sometimes it may be made by an editor or publisher; sometimes it may be made by a reader, critic, or teacher. But because it is a claim with some ostensible political substance, I think we have a responsibility to evaluate its relationship to the work at hand.

When we start doing this kind of evaluation, I think we're less in the realm of reviewing than in the realm, more broadly, of criticism: a kind of writing that steps back from a work, views it in its historical, aesthetic, and political contexts, and tries to understand why we might value certain things in it and not others. That's what I tried to do in my review of Asian American Poetry (and why the thing ended up so darn long). Call a book that and you clearly are making a certain claim: that there is such a thing as Asian American poetry and that what's between the covers shares its characteristics. But what troubled me was that the anthology itself seemed to undermine even that claim, suggesting that Asian American poetry had little about it that was distinct at all. I think that was because the anthology didn't cast its net widely enough, either historically or aesthetically. There was no sense that the anthology was entering into a four-decade-long debate about Asian American poetry and politics, and the anthology's position seemed to me to come perilously close to the argument that Asian American poetry is just poetry written by those who "happen to be" Asian American: in which case why have the category at all? That's the point, I think, where the critic needs to get involved.

Geeky Bumper Sticker of the Day

Seen on a pickup truck parked in front of my house, printed on a red background:

If this sticker is blue, you're driving too fast.

Lyn Hejinian, May 10 and 11 @ U of C

POEM PRESENT
Reading and Lecture Series
University of Chicago

Wednesday, May 10
LECTURE by Lyn Hejinian: "The Return of Interruption"
Rosenwald 405, 1101 E. 58th Street
5:00pm
FREE/OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sponsored by POEM PRESENT & THE PROGRAM IN POETRY AND POETICS

Thursday, May 11
READING by Lyn Hejinian
Social Sciences 122, 1126 E. 59th Street
5:30pm
FREE/OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sponsored by POEM PRESENT & THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY

Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author or co-author of fourteen books of poetry, including The Beginner (Spectacular Books, 2000), Happily (Post Apollo Press, 2000), Sight (with Leslie Scalapino, 1999), The Cold of Poetry (1994), The Cell (1992), My Life (1980), Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978), and A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking (1976). Description and Xenia, two volumes of her translations from the work of the contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and Moon Press. In 2000, the University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry, and she was Guest Editor of The Best American Poetry 2004. From 1976 to 1984, Hejinian was editor of Tuumba Press, and since 1981 she has been the co-editor of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. Other collaborative projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996, a composition entitled “” with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian, a mixed media book entitled The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill created with the painter Emilie Clark (Granary Press, 1998), and the experimental film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs, for which Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko wrote the script. Her honors include a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and a Fellowship from The Academy of American Poets. She lives in Berkeley and teaches at the University of California.

"Where Are You From?"

Why can't I go out for lunch in Chicago without getting asked this question? There I am, sitting in a Hyde Park restaurant, minding my own business, when this elderly white man comes shuffling toward me and strikes up a conversation.

Elderly White Man: I guess these are the high-class seats!*

Me: Yeah, I guess so.

EWM: I've never been in here before! I had no idea it was so luxurious!

Me: Yeah, it's pretty nice.

EWM:: You look like a regular customer.

Me: I guess I come in here occasionally.

EWM:: So! Where are you from?** Some other country?***

Me: ...**** [shaking my head]

EWM: This one?

Me: [nodding]

EWM: Oh! I never would have guessed!***** But your ancestors must have come from some faraway place.****** Japan? Korea?

Me: ...******* China.

EWM: [utters something incomprehensible]

Me: Excuse me?

EWM: [repeats previous utterance]

[At this point I realize that the man is actually speaking Chinese. Not the usual "ni hao, ching chong" stuff: I distinctly make out the word "zhongwen" at the end of his sentence.]

Me: [laughing nervously] Well, your Chinese is better than mine.

EWM: It should be! I had a good teacher! The American government! You ever been to China?

Me: A few times.

EWM: Well, that's more than I have! But when I did go I stayed a long time!

Me: [packing up my stuff] Well, enjoy your lunch.

EWM: See ya.

---

Notes

*I was sitting next to the windows. I should note that at this point the man was actually hovering over my table, as if he were going to sit down with me; over the course of the conversation he gradually backed away.

**Notice the weird way in which this question is almost always used as a conversational entree, like asking about the weather. "Say, it's a beautiful day! Hey, did you notice that your skin isn't the same color as mine?"

***This oddly pointed clarification prevented me from using the usual response to "Where are you from?" which is to say something disarming like "Chicago" or "California" and look at the questioner blankly.

****This is the slightly stunned silence that you retrospectively fill with comebacks like "Why? Where are you from?" or "Same as you, jerk." At the time, though, one part of your brain is saying Is this really happening? and the other part is saying Yes, it's happening, again, which makes it a little difficult for your mouth to work.

*****I will admit that I was entirely clad in olive, which perhaps the man mistook for the uniform of the People's Liberation Army.

******This is, of course, a slightly more sophisticated variation on the usual follow-up, "No, where are you really from?"

*******Here I'm weighing the desire to just stop talking to the man against the realization that that would just prolong this further. Anyway, what was I going to do? Lie?

---

I've gotten the hostile version of this question, i.e. "Why don't you go back where you came from," only once that I can remember, on the subway in Boston.

I have never been asked this in California.*

Once, in Toronto, a guy on a park bench called out to me as I was walking to work, "So what about you? Are you from this country?" I just laughed, because the answer, of course, was "No, I'm an American."

*After I told Robin this story, she reminded me that this had, in fact, once happened to me in California, when a guy in a bookstore in San Luis Obispo decided to harass me (and my people) for being short.

ChiPo

New link (well, new to me): Chicago Poetry, a group blog by Ray Bianchi, Kerri Sonnenberg, Jeremy P. Bushnell, and others.

(Not to be confused with ChicagoPoetry.com, "The Center of Chicago's Cyberspace Poetry.")

Vote 4 Me!

What is the origin of the political phrasing: "[Name of politician] for [name of state or country]"? I was thinking about this when looking at the banner at the top of Ron Silliman's blog entry yesterday: not "Pennacchio for U.S. Senate," for instance, but "Pennacchio for Pennsylvania." (I imagine in this case Pennacchio is taking advantage of the fact that "Penn" is part of his name.)

The first time I remember seeing this locution was "Dean for America," and I remember thinking it was really weird at the time. (Actually, living in Hyde Park, I still see those words looking at me from every other bumper.) Was Howard Dean running for the position of "America"? Was there an implied ellipsis: "Howard Dean [is best] for America"? Or was Dean "for" America in the same way that you might be "for" the Cubs or the White Sox?

After that, though, it seemed like everyone was adopting the "for..." Barack Obama's website, if I recall, was obamaforillinois.com. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's campaign site is called, um, "Rod for Illinois."

So is this a new phenomenon? I don't remember "Dukakis for America" or "Arnold for California" or anything of that ilk. And is it a largely Democratic phenomenon? A random troll of political sites doesn't turn up any Republicans using this formula.

A note on the actual content of Ron's post: What Ron calls the ideological incoherence of Democratic tickets this year seems, perversely, to be an effect of a national campaign effort that is more centralized than any time in recent memory, with the national party deciding well in advance of primary season who can win--based almost entirely on biography and name recognition rather than on ideology--and then sinking huge resources into getting that person on the ballot in the general election. The best example around here is "Fighting Dem" Tammy Duckworth, an Asian American officer who lost both legs in Iraq and who (with a lot of national funding) edged out a more established (and possibly more progressive) local candidate who had come with striking distance of victory two years before in a heavily Republican district. National concerns (the desire to reclaim credibility on Iraq and the military) and Duckworth's compelling story clearly trumped the grassroots here.

This isn't to say that Duckworth isn't a great candidate, and she has a good shot at winning a seat formerly held by Rep. Henry Hyde--in another parallel, Hyde has long been the House version of Santorum in the vehemence of his opposition to abortion (most prominently through the infamous Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Medicaid from funding abortions). But it's hard to say what the ultimate result of this centralizing strategy will be: we're watching a large, diverse, decentralized party that loses trying to make itself more like the small, disciplined, centralized party that wins.

Greetings, with Shameless Plug

Hello all. I'm rather amazed to report that the U of T's spring term is over, which might mean--could it be?--occasional reappearances in blogland by me over the next few months.

If you're wondering what I've been up to, you might check out the new issue of Chicago Review, which in addition to much fine work by and on Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, contains my rather lengthy and belated review of Victoria Chang's anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. (Please note that the belatedness is entirely my fault, not CR's.)

And in more belated news, thanks to wood s lot for the notice of "The Badger," widely interpreted as a chronicle of my struggle with Canadian identity, but really an ode (thanks Cassie) to this.

Glencoe's Favorite Son

Why this should stir me out of my shell, I don't know. But so I get this email announcement:

Poetry Foundation Presents
Archibald MacLeish’s JB
A Staged Reading Produced by Bernard Sahlins

CHICAGO —The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce a staged reading of Archibald MacLeish’s JB produced by Bernard Sahlins. This is the fourth production in the Foundation’s Poetry on Stage series and runs from March 4-5.

What: Archibald MacLeish’s JB: A Staged Reading
When: Saturday, March 4, 3:00pm & 7:30pm; Sunday, March 5, 3:00pm
Where: Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 North Halsted Street, Chicago
Tickets: $20.00 adults; $15.00 students & seniors.
For reservations, call Steppenwolf Audience Services. Phone: (312) 335-1650.

JB ambitiously retells the Book of Job, transporting it to a modern circus setting. It renews God’s wager with the Devil, raising the still urgent questions of why a righteous man should suffer and how a God that is good can abide evil.

“We are pleased and excited by the enthusiastic response to the Poetry on Stage series,” said Stephen Young, Program Director of The Poetry Foundation. “These lively productions have helped further the Foundation’s goal to bring the best poetry before an ever-wider audience.”

JB won MacLeish his third Pulitzer Prize when it was staged on Broadway in 1958. MacLeish, a son of Glencoe, Illinois, managed to leverage his versatile talents as a writer into multiple careers: in law, teaching, publishing, diplomacy, and public service as Librarian of Congress. This production stars Poetry on Stage veterans Nicholas Rudall, Greg Vinkler, and Scott Jaeck. Richard Christiansen, former Chief Theater Critic for the Chicago Tribune, will lead audience discussions following the performances.

Well, thank goodness those Poetry Magazine folks are leading the long-overdue MacLeish revival. But a few quibbles about that biography: "a son of Glencoe, Illinois"? Oh dear. If anyone ever leads a biography of me with "a son of Wilmette, Illinois," at least tell them I was born in Evanston, so there's some hope of salvaging my street cred.

And he "managed to leverage his versatile talents..." Ugh. Forget the MFA; I think the poetry degree of the future is the MBA. Leverage those talents! Stage hostile takeovers of Ploughshares!

Hats Off

Wherever We Put Our Hats # 3 docks this week.

Dana Ward
Clayton A. Couch
Heather Brinkman
Rodrigo Toscano
Valzhyna Mort
Matt Turner
Kristin Prevallet
Anne Boyer


4, 5, or trade

Tory Tuesday

Hello there, (sort of) Conservative Canada.

Contemporary Poetry: Write That Syllabus!

Look out world: next year they're letting me teach contemporary poetry. Here's your chance to write my syllabus.

Okay, more precisely: The course is called "Contemporary Poetry in English," which would seem to include writing from any country except Canada--not that Canadians don't speak English, but that there is already a separate full-year course on modern Canadian poetry. It's a one-semester (13-week) course, so figure at most one short collection of poetry per week.

"Contemporary" I would usually interpret to be post-1945, but most of the "modern" courses here run to 1960, so perhaps we should think post-1960; in any case, it seems likely that I'll emphasize much more recent writing. Given my own interests, it also seems likely that I'll focus on American poetry.

I've got plenty of ideas of my own. But I'm interested in hearing suggestions, either just of what you all think would be important or that you've taught before. Also, has anyone ever found a contemporary poetry anthology that would work for a course like this? All the ones I can think of have various drawbacks, but let me know what you think.

From the Reader's Guide

Americans are often criticized for being ignorant and indifferent to cultures that exist beyond their own. To what extent do you believe this is true?

Where does the tension in this story lie? Did you guess the outcome?

Have you ever witnessed or participated in this kind of aggression against a group of people in your community? What was the outcome?

Do you think she has learned from her mistakes, or is she becoming mixed up in her own?

In what ways do the characters in these stories reject Western ideas and culture? In what ways do they buy into the American ideal?