Opening tomorrow of Conspicuous Production at The MAC. I've been feeling a weird and distinct lack of excitement around this exhibition. Dropped off the work on Tuesday night and caught a sneak preview of the catalog. Seeing the layout, If I could go back and do again, I would give the graphic designer just 1 image/text sample, which is apparently what some of my program mates did at the risk of being "difficult".

I've gone from having almost no routine in the past 9 months to now having a very regimented life in the last month - I am a commuter again, riding public transportation to and from my job at the agency while Kort spends the day building his acupuncture practice. Every day I pass the grassy knoll where JFK was gunned down. Yesterday, the train that I was riding went out of service but I missed the announcement on the intercom so I rode around thru several stops in a darkened car until mustering enough pluck to page the conductor and ask to be dropped off, and luckily it coincided with my home station. On the walk from Walnut Hill to my office, I pass a man made reservoir around an apartment complex where I see dads and sons fishing and pass by goose poo and ducks every day. Last week I saw an egret. I recognized it from the U.S. postage stamp and from reading Tom's Volunteer Geraniums. It is said that birds reflect the health of the ecosystem - pigeons, geese, ducks, mallards, crows and egrets cross my path every day. I may not have noticed them until I got out of the car. Driving is a luxury that I'm glad that I won't indulge in. Think Marky Mark in Huckabees - petrol is evil. Happy hour in a few hours here at work. Beer and wine in the lounge. A happy hour like a happy meal, thinking of Mark's cheeseburgers.

Because our marriage officiant is of the Karma Kagyu lineage (Trungpa's lineage), Kort's started going to the local branch - Karma Thegsum Choling. Last night we went over to the meeting house to practice, Thursday night is the chanting of Chenrezig sutra, in Tibetan. We got there late because of my train detour and were totally lost until one of the senior students (who read the sutra in Tibetan vs. English) kindly pointed out where we were. The teacher at KTC is Lama La, aka the Laughing Lama. I like that. I could use a little more laughter in my life. My sutra book was an embarrassing and misfolded yellow fabric mess. I watched as Kort patiently rewrapped the slips of paper into a perfect package. Flashback to Omar and me at the dharma center in Boulder. Tomorrow Kort goes with me to see gura Michelle Andrie at Priya Yoga. Before I started going back to yoga, my thoughts had been that I should practice towards becoming a yoga teacher. If you're going to study, you might as well work towards something. I have to say that this mentality has very quickly melted away. It feels much more sane to cultivate awareness and enjoy this process of growth and awakening, vs. striving for externals - which has gotta be the lesson that I'm destined to master in this lifetime.

Ron has an interesting post on the Real Poetik list serve which I very quickly unsubscribed from after receiving a slew of annoying "unsubscribe me" emails. It was about as obnoxious as people sending to the Buffalo or WOMPO lists unsubscribe me messages. It is true that many people who subscribe to these lists are luddites but you would think that they would figure it out and think twice before compounding a problem. That is what the delete button is for.

yellow
flowers blooming
on her sandals

And now a public service announcement:

Announcing Longevity Acupuncture, a new acupuncture practice devoted to serving the complementary and alternative health care needs of North Texas.

Dallas, TX –– Acupuncturist Markus K. Bergman, MAOM; Dipl. Ac.; Dipl. CH; Lic. Ac. announces the opening of Longevity Acupuncture, a complementary and alternative health care practice devoted to the healthcare needs of adults.

Acupuncture is a safe and effective holistic medicine backed by more than 2,000 years of practice and research. It is practiced worldwide both as a primary and adjunctive treatment for a wide range of conditions. While there are somewhat standard treatment protocols for many conditions, the clinical success of acupuncture is related to the wide range of diagnostic signs and symptoms that are taken into account when looking at an imbalance. For a condition such as arthritis affecting the knees, an acupuncturist may look at your tongue, check your pulse, ask about your diet and lifestyle, etc. This range of diagnostic information allows acupuncture practitioners to develop a treatment strategy that is unique to you and your experience of a particular condition.

CONDITIONS TREATED

According to The World Health Organization, there are over 70 specific diseases or conditions that acupuncture is recognized for based on research from controlled trials. Below is a sampling of generally recognized categories:

- Pain
- Infections
- Neurological disorders
- Respiratory disorders
- Digestive disorders
- Blood disorders
- Urogenital disorders
- Gynecological and obstetric disorders
- Cardiovascular disorders
- Psychiatric disorders and mental disturbances
- Substance addiction
- Pediatric disorders
- Disorders of the sense organs
- Skin diseases/disorders

MARKUS K. BERGMAN, MAOM; Dipl. Ac; Dipl. CH; Lic. Ac.

Markus holds a Master of Oriental Medicine, the terminal degree in the field of Oriental Medicine recognizing the completion of both Chinese and Japanese styles of acupuncture, as well as Chinese herbal medicine tracks, from The New England School of Acupuncture in Watertown, Massachusetts. The MAOM track requires three years of year round study resulting in over 900 clinical hours and over 2,000 didactic hours of study. Established in 1975 by Dr. James Tin Yao So, NESA is the oldest and one of the most prestigious schools of Oriental Medicine in the United States. He is also a certified Diplomate of Acupuncture and Chinese Herbs having passed the required exams administered by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and is currently licensed to practice acupuncture in the state of Texas. A native Texan, Markus attended Richardson Public schools and Stephen F. Austin, before earning his Bachelors degree in Contemplative Psychology from Naropa University.

Please visit www.longevity.gotdns.org for more information, or call 214-485-2232 to make an appointment.

So what are you waiting for? Call and make an appointment today and tell your friends! Congrats Kort on your new practice.

Today I picked up the Observer for the first time in about a month. The news I missed: George Michaels's lover Kenneth Goss opened his gallery in Dallas last month with a show by David LaChappelle. I had to do a doubletake on that one - not Dave Chappelle the comedian, but David LaChappelle, the fashion photographer. George Michaels was apparently spotted at the opening (and mentioned prominently in the gallery's press materials). Wham! was one of the bands that I remember growing up listening to in the 80s - them, Tears For Fears, Simple Minds, Howard Jones, Roxy Music and David Bowie. All the girls had crushes on George Michaels or John or Simon from Duran Duran (mine was on Bowie) and the big hits were "Careless Whispers" and "I'm Your Man." Ah, memories. I seem to be filtering through a lot of them lately...

Top 5 things to do in Costa Rica:
- volcano climbing
- rainforest hiking
- catching some rays
- Pura Vida
- The White Colony

on the road from Marfa:
boxcars on R/R tracks
mirroring Judd's boxes

NEWS RELEASE

Contact: Amy Ouzoonian
tsunamipoet@yahoo.com
(845) 532-0551

A Gathering of the Tribes
Tompkins Square Station
PO Box 20693
New York, NY 10009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, June 14, 2005

Reading and Book Signing for the Release of Poetry Anthology for Tsunami Relief

NEW YORK, NY-- FootHills Publishing and Sherman Asher Press are proud to announce the release of the long awaited anthology In the Arms of Words: Poems for Tsunami Relief. This anthology of poetry includes the work of over 80 poets (many world renowned) from around the world and is edited by Amy Ouzoonian, who is also the editor of A Gathering of the Tribes magazine and author of a collection of poetry Your Pill (FootHills Publishing 2005). Contributors such as Diane di Prima, Nick Carbo, Marge Piercy, Sparrow, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Shin Yu Pai, Bob Holman and Diane Ackerman have made this collection exceptional in both content and cause. Proceeds from sales of “In the Arms of Words: Poems for Tsunami Relief” will be donated to OXFAM and will help in aiding the survivors of the tsunami of December 2004, that destroyed many villages and communities in Asia, killing millions and leaving many more in devastation.

To celebrate the release of this anthology and to raise funds for the survivors, A Gathering of the Tribes and Bowery Poetry Club, on 308 Bowery (between Bleecker St. and Houston), are organizing a book signing and poetry reading at the Bowery Poetry Club on June 30, 2005 from 5-7 p.m. Contributors Thaddeus Rutkowski, Sharon Olinka, Frank Simone, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Donald Lev, Kirpal Gordon, Steve Dalachinsky, James Warner, Jennifer Hill-Kaucher, Irene O’Garden, Nancy Mercado Roberta Gould, Eve Packer, Sparrow, and Ravi Shankar will read their poems from the book.

Copies of In the Arms of Words: Poems for Tsunami Relief are available for sale. For more information on this event or to book a fundraising event and reading for this publication and its authors, please contact Amy Ouzoonian at tsunamipoet@yahoo.com or contact A Gathering of the Tribes: info@tribes.org

Surely, an interesting art project would be taking the U.S. Army First Aid Manual for Soldiers which has been recently declassified and making some sort of illustrated political commentary about the war in Iraq....

With rejection comes acceptance....

1-1 in today's mail. Won't mention the Foundation proposal...but I can say that I will be exhibiting my black and white photographs in a show at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey that will take place in April-May 2006. The exhibition is a group show of writers who are also visual artists and will include work by Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, and yours truly, curated by Jane Haw in conjunction with the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community. Hopefully there will be a catalog...speaking of which our MAC show will be offering a perfect bound catalog of the first 2 years of artists in the Southside program with an introduction by Dr. Richard Bretell. Cover price for the volume has not been set but if you're interested in reserving a copy, back channel me and I'll see what I can do. Catalogs go on sale the day the show opens on June 25.

It's been a ho hum kind of year in terms of poetry so far and a disproportionate amount of activity in the visual realm. Go with the flow I suppose....

Originally uploaded by shinyu32

Artist as Curator: The res program is opening "The Buddy System" a show in the Janette Kennedy Gallery (see photo) over the 4th of July weekend that will be guest curated by the residents of the Southside program. My friend and ex-collaborator from Chicago, Larry Lee has graciously accepted the invitation to present work. Larry and I did a video installation project called Concave is the Opposite of Convex years ago which showed at Gallery 2. Some of my favorite of Larry's works include his minimalist zip paintings referencing Chicago's Chinatown (think BBQed pork and roast duck) and his master's thesis project - the commissioning of portraits of the artist. Check out Lar's website for poems and other brilliant works.

In other residency news - I've finally gotten the Unnecessary Roughness poems framed to hang with Ferenc's images and the love hotels texts are at Fast Signs being made into vinyl wall decals. This will mark the first time I have framed text or applied it to a wall as a finished presentation. It will be interesting to collect feedback... Quin Matthews came by last weekend and interviewed me for about 25 minutes and filmed for 5. I had a headache that morning and didn't feel particularly articulate about the work and felt more guarded than usual when asked about the question of "community." In certain contexts when that terms is thrown around it just feels like a crock of shit and a far cry from asking what you really think. Next up, the UTD gallery show that Greg Metz's students are organizing.

Less blogging recently with too many things to do and a tough week of round the clock meds to clear up a bad infection had me waking up twice a night. I've been able to put closure to most of my projects - wrote the foreword for a friend's book that will be out with Ugly Duckling Presse sometime in the future and withdrew from a couple of things that I just couldn't invest the time or heart in with the wedding coming up. A couple of years ago it would have felt like quitting, now a days it feels like protecting my time, energy and sanity and the right thing to do.

We have found a wedding officiant from the Karma Kagyu lineage who will do a traditional fire ceremony, and we will drive out to meet him in New Mexico over the 4th of July weekend. I bought my wedding shoes, rhinestone bejeweled pumps with a beautiful floral jacquard fabric from Steve Madden - a total princess shoe if I ever saw one. And the bridesmaids have sorted out what they are wearing - a lovely silk shantung sheath in green, blush, and almond - a different color for each. Enlisted my folks in helping with an ultra special wedding gift for Kort that will be handcrafted and one of a kind.

From the Free Press:

The partisan attack on public broadcasting continues. First, they targeted PBS and NPR news programs for signs of "liberal bias." Now they're sharpening their knives for Big Bird.

A congressional subcommittee has voted to slash more than $200 million in funding for public broadcasting, including $23.4 million earmarked for "Ready to Learn" children's educational programming -- the money that keeps shows like "Sesame Street," "Arthur," and "Clifford the Big Red Dog" on the air.

Thousands of phone calls are needed today to save public broadcasting. Call your member of Congress now.

The subcommittee slashed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's budget by $100 million and voted to "zero out" all federal money for CPB within two years. Small television and radio stations that serve rural communities and minority audiences will be devastated by these cuts.

The CPB is already embroiled in controversy over Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson's attempts to withhold funding from PBS programs that don't follow his conservative political line. Apparently dissatisfied with this effort to make public broadcasting more "fair and balanced," the Republican majority is now trying to bankrupt the entire system.

We must stop these cuts from passing in the House of Representatives. Here's what you can do:

1. Call your U.S.representative and ask him or her to restore full funding for public broadcasting. Tell your representative: "Like millions and millions of other Americans, I rely on public broadcasting's superb children's programming and trustworthy news and information. Please protect public broadcasting and restore full federal funding for PBS, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

2. Send a letter to Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), the chairman and vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, letting them know that the American public opposes these cuts and doesn't want partisan interference in public broadcasting.

Congress needs to hear from the tens of millions of Americans who tune in every day -- whether it's for Big Bird or Bill Moyers, "Reading Rainbow" or "Morning Edition." Despite overwhelming popular support for public broadcasting, the Republican leadership and partisan board members at the CPB are attempting to gag and starve public media in America.

Don't let them. Call your representatives right away -- and forward this message to everyone you know.

Onward,
Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
www.freepress.net

Two artists that interest me right now:

Indigo Som
Donna Keiko Ozawa

Costa_Rica

Costa_Rica
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Tamarindo, where we will be staying, is on the Northwest coast of Costa Rica - a country that abolished capital punishment in the 1960s and has no military. Closest thing to paradise..

Guanacaste

Guanacaste
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Where we are honeymooning.

New from Singing Horse Press

)cliff TIDES((
by Mary Rising Higgins
ISBN 0-935162-31-3 $15 paper 120pp.

Open )cliff TIDES(( -- Mary Rising Higgins' new book of poems -- to risk an off-road journey through talk back poetics. Return to travel differently as words offer up alternate terrain. Each time draws closer to where you might imagine, would question, then wake in details to possible terms that approach new breaths recounting.

"These beautifully patterned poems move shaped poetry into a new dimension as unsatiated meaning merges with tides of reanimating stammer. Until mars reopens the sky . . ." :: Charles Bernstein

"The range of formal paths Mary Rising Higgins follows in these carefully wrought and beautifully expansive poems allows a vast repertoire of responses (hers in the variety of poetic possibilities; ours in the many ways we cannot help but read). . . . Written, rooted in the past few years and all they contain, these poems refuse the simple response and inscribe a multiplex awareness of all the good and bad that surrounds us. How can a writer, today, take on the world and still remain true to her art? Take up )cliff TIDES(( and prepare to see." :: Douglas Barbour

Purchase )cliff TIDES(( directly at www.singinghorsepress.com and receive a free CD of Mary Rising Higgins reading from )cliff TIDES(( and earlier work.

Also new from Singing Horse Press: The New Spirit by Hank Lazer; The Ideation by Phillip Foss; The Epochal Body by Andrew Mossin; Playing Well With Others by Paul Naylor, and Near Or Random Acts by Charles Alexander.

You can also order Singing Horse Press books from Small Press Distribution: (800) 869-7553 or on the web at www.spdbooks.org.

Conspicuous Production: The First Two Years of the UTD SouthSide Artist Residency
June 25-July 30, 2005
Opening: Saturday, June 25, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary
With performance by TREEWAVE
Panel Discussion: To be announced

Phyllida Barlow
Kelli Connell
Carola Dreidemie
Brian Fridge
Ryan Fitzer
Christopher Jagers
Saskia Jorda
Misty Keasler
Baseera Khan
Stephen Lapthisophon
Audry Liseron-Monfils
Annie Murdock
Titus O'Brien
Shin Yu Pai
Sai Selvarajan
Ludwig Schwarz
Marjorie Schwarz
David Sequiera
Paul Slocum
Kaneem Smith
Reynaldo Thompson
Kyle Wadsworth
Chen Xinpeng

For anyone who can't get a hold of Hyphen in your area and who is interested, here is the original version of my piece on Asian American lit anthologies. Note: The Hyphen version was severely cut for reasons attributed to space and style, to the extent that some of the details are convoluted and some of the more meaningful critiques, esp. in relationship to Screaming Monkeys were dropped.

Surveying Recent Asian American Literary Anthologies

by Shin Yu Pai

Ask any anthology editor the rationale behind organizing a together a new collection of work and you’ll get a wide and complex range of answers. Market need. The wish to showcase a new generation of voices. Political imperatives. The reshaping of the canon. When Bay area poet Eileen Tabios talks about her history of involvement editing various anthology projects, Tabios explains, “I've involved myself in editing Asian American literary anthologies for generally two reasons. The first is to expand previously narrow categorizations of "Asian American Poetry, helping to expand offerings to include the avant garde or other poetic forms that depart from strict story-telling narratives about overt Asian American experience. The second reason I've involved myself in this area is to address certain ethnicities that previously were not as fully presented in Asian American texts.”

In an era when the new crop of literary anthologies are edited by practicing writers and cultural activists for the communities in which these editors participate, The Norton Anthologies no longer hold poetic authority. This article will take a closer look at three literary anthologies which have recently hit the market and are slowly making their way into classrooms: Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, and Pinoy Poetics. While there is some overlap in authors appearing throughout the collections to be discussed, each of these books makes its own unique contribution to the ongoing discussion of Asian American literature, reflecting specific political and editorial sensibilities.

Taking its cue from anthologies like Jim Daniels and Edward Costanzo’s American Poetry: The Next Generation and David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series, Victoria Chang’s Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2003) gathers together and canonizes the work of 28 poets under the age of 35, including Cathy Park Hong, Mong Lan, Tina Chang, Skrikanth Reddy and Paisley Rekdal, who are framed in the editor’s introduction as representing the “new generation of Asian American poets”. Chang writes of her desire to assemble together a collection of work departing from a “recognizable Asian voice.” While poets such as Reginald Gibbons and David Baker have publicly praised the collection, The Next Generation drew fierce criticism from the Asian American literary community for its closed editorial approach and its assertion of authority which has prevented dialogue around issues of editorial process, the lack of poets outside the academy and the exclusion of radically experimental and innovative writers notably absent from this anthology. To find work for her collection, Chang, a Stanford business school graduate who exists on the fringes of the poetry world and who has yet to release her own first collection of poetry [note: Circle, Chang's first collection, is now available, but had not been released at the time that this article was written or when the anthology was compiled], combed through dozens of literary journals from which she created a master list of poets to solicit work. Chang mailed out approximately 60 queries to ” friends, friends of friends, editors, professors, and anyone that would respond” in order to get recommendations. In total, Chang considered the work of nearly 140 poets for her project, ultimately narrowing her selection to 28 contributors, the vast majority of whom have MFAs or PhDs and have some involvement with academia. The poets are arranged in alphabetical order and placed in context by essays from Marilyn Chin and the project editor.

Winner of the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and Foreward Magazine’s Gold Award for Anthologies Winner, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press, 2003) has quickly caught the spotlight for its ambitiousness, vision, and range. Screaming Monkeys grew out of a call put out to a community of writers, scholars, and artists by Editor M. Evelina Galang to respond to an article that appeared in an issue of Milwaukee Magazine in which a writer reviewing a Filipino restaurant referred to the owner’s child as a “rambunctious little monkey”. The Screaming Monkeys anthology is organized into thematic sections (including a final section on “transcendence” - works that both depart from and transcend a “recognizeable Asian voice”) and compiles together historical documents and timelines, media quotes, and news headlines alongside fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, and commercial images of Asians as represented by mainstream media. The collection is diverse in its range of writing styles and voice, and across generations, pairing elder established writers, such as Marilyn Chin, Walter Lew, Garrett Hongo, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, alongside emerging writers such as Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, S.L. Kim, and Brian Komei Dempster. Loosely inserted throughout the book are artworks by Asian American artists including Barry McGee, James Yang, and Dindo Llana, and “found images” from sources including Apu from popular T.V. show “The Simpsons” to “go geisha” fashion images , which lack a clear editorial context or focus and more often than not distract from the textual works. Assembled by a collaborative team of editors under the leadership of Galang, Eileen Tabios, Sunaina Maira, Jordan Isip, and Anida Youe Esguerra contributed to giving shape to this collection, and scholar Leslie Bow provides a reading companion highlighting areas of inquiry to help make sense of the over 500 page collection. While Screaming Monkeys presents older work that has been previously anthologized or published before such as Li-Young Lee’s famous poem “The Cleaving”, the project of this collection was clearly to cast a wide as net as possible in gathering together a range of voices and to reframe these works in the context of the Asian American experience,

Pinoy Poetics: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino- American Poetics is published by Meritage Press, an independent publishing company founded by cultural activist Eileen Tabios who contributed to editing the Screaming Monkeys anthology, and who has also edited several other projects including Black Lightning (Asian American Writers Workshop, 1998) and Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (Aunt Lute Press, 2000) co-edited with poet Nick Carbo. Conceptualized by Tabios and edited again by Carbo, Pinoy Poetics collects together the work of 40 international Filipino English-language poets. The poets speak for themselves, touching on issues of poetic craft, identity, and practice, approaching the call with a variety of strategies – Vince Gotera conducts a self-interview, Paolo Javier plays with typography and the visual presentation of text in his anti-narrative essay “Marginalia”, Oakland based poet Barbara Jane Reyes discusses the process of writing and revising her long poem “Anthropologic” from her collection Gravities of Center, Jean Vengua talks about the experience of writing poems “in public” for the internet, and others speak of poets influential to the development of their poetic sensibilities, defining a personal poetic and presenting poems which mirror aspects of their practice. Carbo includes a literary timeline marking major events in the history of Phillipine writing and Tim Yu contributes an essay on the work of modernist poet and former “National Artist of the Phillipines” Jose Garcia Villa.

Keep an eye out next year for Carbo’s latest editorial project, Son of the Dragon: Literary Dialogues with Asian America Men, an anthology of writings on Asian American male identity and experiences which Carbo is co-editing with performance poet Marlon Esguerra of I Was Born With Two Tongues fame. The idea for this project grew out of a discussion over Whitney McNally’s Gay or Asian? piece that ran in the April 2004 issue of Details Magazine. The project will examine what it is to be male and Asian in America and both respond to and subvert how Asian American males are portrayed by mainstream media.

Other Asian-American literary anthologies for further exploration:

• Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas
Edited by Marianne Villanueva & Virginia Cerenio

• Black Lightning
Edited by Eileen Tabios

• Babaylan
Edited by Nick Carbo & Eileen Tabios

• Watermark: Vietnamese Prose and Poetry
Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong & Luu Truong Khoi

also see other titles available at the www.aaww.org website

Ever wonder about how your classmates from graduate school are doing? Mine are rocking the literary world - three won Illinois Arts Council grants this year:

Alice George
Judy Valente
Eileen Favorite (Eileen is a 2 x winner - she won previously for prose writing)

Garrett just won a nice piece of recognition from the PCC.

And Dan's first book is out.

Jennifer founded a collective space that curates experimental programs.

I find this tremendously exciting - at the time that I enrolled at the Art Institute only about 2 graduating classes had preceded mine and my entering class was a motley bunch with some very eccentric interests. Gratifying to see writers I shared workshops with getting their just acknowledgements and continuing to make time for writing. I'm particularly excited for Eileen who was always an amazing woman and voice. And she had the coolest partner, Martin Perdoux, who told me a story about being in the French army to ease my homesickness only about 10 minutes after I'd met him.

Ferenc's art work for the group show at the MAC arrived today. The exhibition is called "Conspicuous Production", more info here. To run overlapping with the exhibition planned at UTD with more info here. Got to work this week on getting 2 text pieces frames and 2 wall pieces made at the sign shop for the MAC show. UTD show will just be sketches and notes.

The best part of wedding planning has been by far the cake testing. We went to Delicious Cakes in the town of Addison, whose mayor is a Taiwanese-American. I had Friday off so we booked an appointment for the morning at the bakery and sampled a range of white, liqeur, fruit, and chocolate cakes with buttercream and cream cheese frosting, while watching the kitchen staff prepare tiered cakes. Kort wants to do a chocolate grooms cake which we are thinking of driving in from Dallas - the trick here, only buttercream frosting will work, because cream cheese frosting will melt, and make your cake look all wonky, even if you've got the sucker on ice. I wanted to get a sense of flavors for the main cake - even though we will be hiring a New Mexico vendor to reproduce something. We've decided on a simple almond cake with a fruit preserve filling and butter cream frosting, which is slightly sweeter than cream cheese icing. It will be 3 tiered and serve about 40-50, garnished with ribbon and marzipan or fresh flowers. We are having a mock-up of the grooms cake made which will be ready tomorrow - Kort customized it with choco horns, chocolate shavings, cream cheese frosting, and German chocolate cake. We'll see how it tastes and whether or not it needs fine tuning.

Best friend Jenn flew in from California on Saturday morning and left on Monday morning. We've got bridesmaid dresses out of the way - a simple shantung silk sheath in a greyish blue. It rained like crazy and we spent most of our time in the inside of malls catching up. Jenn bought an "Everything is bigger in Texas" t-shirt to wear on the plane ride back to San Diego. On the way home we spotted a dead armadillo on the roadside. Had dinner with Kort and Chip, K's brother and best man, at Veracruz on Sunday followed with gelato at Gaylord Texan - a strange and wonderful luxury hotel in Grapevine that has reconstructed within its interior various Texas landscapes - the San Antonio riverwalk, Texas hill country, etc. It felt good to laugh and have time for girl talk. Thank God for friends on the path.

Wedding update: So this past weekend, I finally ordered a wedding dress. On Saturday, my best friend from childhood who is also getting married will arrive for a brief stay and to help with some of the planning details. Friday morning, Kort and I go for a cake tasting at one of the local bakeries. Ellen is talking about having a groom's cake made here in town and transporting it herself to Taos Ski Valley. The website is finally all up to date and we have a potential officiant, Lama Karma Chodrak of the Karma Kagyu School. Jack Greene, my classmate from Naropa will be photographing. The rings have been ordered from Simon Day in England, to be inscribed with the mani mantra. I am hoping to bind all of the wedding programs by hand. Working now on lining up a baker, florist and musician for August 6. Oh yeah, and the invitations have slowly gone out over the last 2 weeks and the RSVP cards are trickling in and we are finally registered at Williams & Sonoma (see haiku below) among other places...when will IKEA have a gift registry?! The wedding iPod playlist needs to be cut down by about 1/2 hour of music but includes:

Magnetic Fields
Belle & Sebastian
The Smiths
Death Cab for Cutie
Bob Dylan
Neil Young
Iron & Wine
REM
Rufus Wainwright
Jeff Buckley
Mojave 3
Nick Drake
Aztec Camera
The Shins
David Byrne

monagrammed steak
branding seared slab
of flesh long dead

new love hotel poem - (not as it appears on the printed page)
a bit darker than the others...


tie me up, tie me down

the Western tradition:
a punishment

reserved for
petty thieves
wife beaters
drunkards

& fortune-tellers

unforetold perversions
in the land of the rising sun:

a feudal obsession with sex

stocks and bonds
paired and cropped
crotch shot

a photographer with rope describes it
to the press

since I can’t tie up their hearts, I tie up their bodies

masturbatory
printed matter
shoved into
a tight corner

imagine an adulterer
tethered
to a pole/ buried
up to the neck

one hundred villagers
discharging across
his/her deathlike mask

Just mailed off a batch of invitations at the 24 hour post office where I noticed that this particular branch plays movies on tv monitors to keep the staff entertained. One of the clerks was helping me send some materials to Brazil and I said out loud to Kort, "Which movie is that?" "Oh, some film with Jake Gyllenhaal." We get engrossed in the movie. The clerk says, "The day after tomorrow." "Oh - that piece of mail will arrive that soon, that's great!". "No, the movie."

So here is a partial list of films that we think should play at the 24 hour post office that would provide comic timing:

The day after tomorrow
Midnight cowboy
Delivery day
Ce jour la
The day after
One day in September
Le huiteme jour
Any day now
When the day breaks
El septimo dia
Der Neunte Tag
April Fool's Day
The night of the following day
One fine day
On the 2nd day of Christmas
El dia que me quieras ("the day that you love me")

Big news in Dallas this past week concerning the Phantom Professor.

Though I taught at SMU this Spring, I did not know about this story until a friend who adjuncts locally emailed me about it. Read some of Elaine Liner's descriptions of SMU students and am torn between feeling sympathy for her losing her contract and feeling at least a little bit skeptical of the caricature of the average student presented on her blog. None of my students were Paris Hilton types, though a fair amount of them came from backgrounds of extreme privilege. I had 3 students drop out after erratic attendance patterns - 2 of whom were student athletes. I was amazed and constantly surprised by the students who committed to a semester of poetry - their openness, their fierce opinions against W, criticism of Campus Crusades, and their ability to take and synthesize an assignment to write on the homeless in downtown Dallas into wonderful politically engaged poems. I will say that during the past semester I wondered how out of touch I may be with the life of a student struggling through college - the emotional highs and lows, the pressure of grades, girls, boys, parents, coaches, jobs, bills, and the unique circumstances of non-traditional students returning back to school to get a degree.

Tonight, Dancing Tongue performance at the Undermain and later this week a film crew in my studio interviewing me about my creative process for the Material Support show at UTD that will coincide with the residency program's MAC show in June. I am quite honestly tired of talking about my process with other people. It will probably make most sense to discuss the writing of the love hotel poems, though there is not much to say on that. Last night at the Dancing Tongue performance, I was listening to the sound of my co-performers using highlighters to highlight their vocal parts in the written score. A sound installation of the writing process could be fun - the sound of typing on a keyboard, lines getting scratched out, sounding something out off the page...and of course, cursing. That inevitably seems to be a part of my process...

The last time I was rolfed was in 2000. I was living in Chicago and going to Alan Davidson in West Chicago. He lived and maintained his practice in a space that was at one time a public bathhouse and said so on the facade of the building. It is a healing practice like no other that I know - Alan interviewed me before he would actually agree to work on me, and I committed to a series of 10 sessions spread out over several months. This morning, I had my first rolfing tune-up in 5 years with a local practitioner, Jody Seay, who maintains offices in Portland, Tulsa, and Dallas. It's hard to say why I waited so long to go back to this practice - I know that I become very committed and attached to the healers with who I've worked - Korey, Ethan, my Japanese acupuncturist in Watertown who's name I am blanking on right now, and Lynn. It can be so much work and tearing one's self open to start a new relationship with a practitioner, that everything has to come together at the right time, and hopefully that time doesn't have to coincide with some crisis point. The rolfer I picked here in Dallas is a writer and a healer, lives in Portland - a city that I would happily relocate to, and is, perhaps most importantly at this particular moment in my life, female and intuitive. I described to her the knee pain that I have been experiencing, and it is so simple from a rolfing perspective - quite literally having difficulty standing on my own 2 feet. Got that right.

Crash may well be the best movie that I've seen all year. The film takes place on familiar home turf - So Cal - not sunshiny hipster birthplace fantasy of Coachella/Lollapalooza, but fucked up world of race, politics and segregation in L.A. The film is written and directed by Paul Haggis (writer of "Million Dollar Baby") and stars Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Don Cheadle and an outstanding cast of actors.

Shopping for wedding dresses has had to be one of the more terrible things I have ever subjected myself to. To give some context to my male readers and others who have not yet gone down that path - it is tedious. Sales people at wedding and consignment boutiques work on commission which translates as pushing every service imaginable on you that is out there - alterations, steaming, preservation. And then there are the dresses - big poofy ornate too much fabric color of death gowns that the saleswoman at yesterday's boutique insisted on helping me with - store policy. So I'm standing around in my underwear in a dressing room the size of a narrow bathroom stall being helped by a strange woman who forces dresses on me that I don't have any interest in trying on but "everything looks better off the hanger." The 2nd boutique that we went to was run by a Thai woman and the whole set-up was a million times better. Browse at your own pace, get your own dressing room the size of a small apartment in China, and plenty of privacy. The differences between cultures, clearly. So going back into the world today for another round of gown shopping and hopefully putting some closure to the above. It was a lousy week. We lost our officiant and the housing arrangements got majorly fucked. Rant rant rave rave.

Yesterday, I did a creative writing session for The Splendors of China show at the DMA. It's always an interesting audience for drop-in programs - I had a decent turnout for the 20 minute poetry reading which preceded writing in the galleries, but kept the reading short and limited the reading of works to pieces from EQUIVALENCE - poems written in relationship to works at the DMA and other blockbuster names, the easily recognizable. No Lukowksi, Suto or Keasler. About 6 people stuck around afterwards for the writing in the galleries - all women, 3 of whom are in a regular writing group with a former mentee, 1 woman who wrote her responses in Japanese, and an older woman who was more interested in talking to me about color theory and painting her kitchen red than poetry or the works in the China show.

Favorite proof error of the week: "I wish you clam before the storm."

It's the seven year anniversary of my refuge vows today. And also, as I understand it, National Nurse Appreciation Day. Hmm... I never made that connection between nursing and compassion back when I worked for the nursing center in Boston. Seven years out, compassion means to me something different than it did in my early 20s - mostly now, shunning a former propensity towards "idiot" compassion and putting more discriminating awareness into practice. I can't believe I'm getting married in three months and turning 30 in four months. Many occasions to reflect upon.

Less and less blogging these days and more time spent on planning a wedding. Things I have been procrastinating:

- writing a preface for Volunteer Geraniums
- buying a dress
- working on a contribution to The Warrior's Handbook
- reading Andrew's anthology
- working on libretto
- planning grad workshop

The new hours at the job are taxing but on the plus side the company retains a chef and a masseuse.

Currently working on love hotels installation at the MAC in June as part of group show Conspicuous Production and next week's Dancing Tongue performance at the Undermain.

If I ever learn to sew, I will become a wedding dress designer...

Blogger is having problems. No posting access at The Haiku Year so here is my weekly haiku until I can post it elsewhere:

co-worker nods off during a brainstorming meeting

Currently in Week # 20 of the haiku challenge...

I wonder if the Flux Factory will sponsor a similar residency program for poets...

Public Service Announcement: HYPHEN MAGAZINE

IT'S PARTY TIME!

We know you've been waiting a long time for the latest issue of Hyphen.
It's finally here! Just like J.Lo, Hyphen's had a rebirth. The new Hyphen
features a new logo, more original photography, and is in full color for
the first time! Come celebrate the redesign and the release of Issue 6
with the Hyphen staff at the Alpha Bar in San Francisco this Saturday, May
14th. Come tell us in person what you think about the new Hyphen!

If you can't make it to the party, you can still pick up issue 6 at many
fine retailers across the country. Please check out our website to find a
store near you: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/gethyphen/


WHAT: Hyphen's Issue 6 Release Party

WHEN: Saturday, May 14th, 9:30pm - 2am

WHERE: Alpha Bar, 3848 Geary Blvd. at 2nd Avenue, San Francisco

COVER: $3.00 / free with subscription purchase

Dancing Tongue Performance

dt_poster
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Core members Tim Cloward (poet/founder), Chad Evans (artist/musician), and David Darnell (visual projectionist), along with Fran Carris (performance poet), and Richard Allen (actor/video artist) welcome guests poet Shin Yu Pai, trumpeter Freddie Jones, and sound-scapists Tao Jonesin.

****************************************************

The Undermain Theater* is located in "East Ellum" in legendary Deep Ellum, in the basement of a six-story red brick building. 3200 Main Street, Dallas, TX - between Hall St. and Exposition Ave.

For more info contact 214.747.1424 | mail@undermain.com

Upcoming Rexroth event...

rexposter1
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

This announcement came to me via Ray Craig. Click on photo for details....

Art Talk with Shin Yu Pai
McKinney Avenue Contemporary
May 4, 2005, 7 p.m.

Reading from Equivalence (La Alameda Press, 2003), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005) and Nutritional Feed (Tupelo Press, forthcoming), and discussing my new project with Misty Keasler. Time allowing, I'll show a DVD of "Recipe for Paper" created in collaboration with Hedwig Dances and Gao Ping.

Notes on Love Hotel Series for MAC talk..

I have been working for the last month on a group of poems for a series of images by Misty Keasler, who was here a few weeks ago giving a talk for the MAC as part of the Southside on Lamar program. Press Lorentz, an independent publisher and maker of limited editon artist’s books, approached me to work on a series with the collaborator of my choice. I had been looking at Misty’s photographs for several months and thinking about her work, when the invitation came to me from Chicago. Misty had an interest in seeing the Love Hotel images published and after living with the images for a few weeks, I accepted the challenge.

Japanese Love Hotels, or “rabu hoterus”, are an interesting aspect of Japanese culture - they serve not only middle-aged married couples looking to find some privacy away from paper thin walls and children at home, but also young lovers, world travelers on a budget and those involved with enjo kosai – teenage schoolgirls and their danas, wealthy salarymen. Enjo kosai means “compensated dating”, a phenomenon that has been on the rise in Japan since the 80s. Young schoolgirls wanting extra pocket money to pay for the designer handbags and accessories that will make their lives “normal”, become involved in relationships with salarymen who shower them with money and designer gifts. The girls set up their own meetings through cell phones and image clubs, eliminating any middle man and making their own decisions. Recent research on girls who have participated in enjo kosai has shown that there are complex reasons for which young girls become involved in these sexual activities. Many come from homes where their own fathers are salarymen – girls who have been interviewed report that having experiences with the older men who prey on them gives them insight into their own fathers’ lives, and in this way they are better able to know and understand their fathers, or men who they imagine to be like their fathers.

While Japanese girls are becoming more experienced at younger ages, the opposite may be true for teenage Japanese boys. In a culture where everybody wears the latest Prada and Gucci designs and sophisticated young girls date salarymen, the average Japanese male has little chance of finding someone to date. As a result, young males are increasingly losing their confidence around women, turning instead to manga and otaku comics and “cosplay” to satisfy their desires.

When we look at the theme rooms in the love hotels, we find a strange mixture of adolescent male fantasy – the space room and subway room – and rooms geared towards appealing to young girls with Hello Kitty and cartoon imagery. There is a marked absence of physical bodies in these spaces – although evidence of the activities that take place in these spaces are apparent – soiled sheets, plastic cuffs, karaoke consoles. Lockers populate the lobbies of many of these hotels who in an attempt to cultivate a return clientele install these storage devices to create a sense of a “home” away from home. Vending machines dispense marital aids and fluorescent lit cases display meals available through the hotel’s room service. Though the hotels seem eerily abandoned, at any given time there are a series of individuals who keep things running behind the scenes. Meals show up at doors, and keys, when not dispensed from an automated machine, are handed to customers through a darkened screen, only a pair of liver-spotted hands in sight, evidence of the workers in these businesses – obasans old enough to be grandmothers to the young lovers who patronize these places.

The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry

What arrived in my mailbox today...!

Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Featuring work by:

Will Alexander
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Diane Di Prima
Tyler Doherty
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Norman Fischer
Sam Hamill
Jane Hirshfield
Lawson Fusao Inada
Robert Kelly
Joanne Kyger
Michael McClure
Harryette Mullen
Hoa Nguyen
Mike O'Connor
Shin Yu Pai
Dale Pendell
Pat Reed
Janet Rodney
Miriam Sagan
Leslie Scalapino
Andrew Schelling
Gary Snyder
Arthur Sze
Nathaniel Tarn
Chase Twichell
Cecilia Vicuna
Eliot Weinberger
Philip Whalen

Currently reading a sneak preview of Tom Gilroy's forthcoming haiku project Volunteer Geraniums. If you haven't seen Spring Forward or read The Haiku Year, I highly recommend both.

Thanks to Ivy for giving Unnecessary Roughness some positive press!

How delightful everything is!


         or Things that are sold in vending machines


Hamburgers, hot dogs, and takoyaki.

Beer, sake, whiskey and milk in varying dispensable sizes.

Hooks and fishing bait.

D, C, and AA sized batteries.

Video games, vibrators, disposable cameras, and film.

Soiled schoolgirls’ panties.

Toilet paper.

Omikuji*.

Live beetles. Rhinoceros and stag are especially popular for breeding or as pets.

Fresh vegetables picked this morning.

Breaded chicken, French fries, and fried sea bream.



*omikuji: strips of paper used for fortune telling sold at Shinto shrines

(The first title for this poem comes from Sei Shonagon.)

p r o v i s i o n ( a l )

ice cream that never melts:
whipped potatoes
under chocolate sauce

rice noodles
dressed in ketchup
served with spoon & fork –

(the demise of slurping)
trompe l’oeil

school girls in uniform
& wide-eyed gaijin

hunt through Kappabashi District

plastic manufactured
food
kowtowing

to the West

the American palate
in 3 dimensions:
hamburger, hot dog, BLT

human beings are visual
learners,
things are rarely what they seem

displayed under glass
cool fluorescent hum
filling a simulated silence

Love Train


white-gloved working stiffs

    shove riders into openings

cars at 160% capacity

    on the morning commute

salarymen stand

    accused of groping

office ladies

    flowers of the workplace

schoolgirls young

    as a neighbor’s daughter

hang on nylon straps

    bouncing to

the train’s rhythmic

    method

pulling out

    of the station

the press of bodies

   tamaranai - – an uncontrollable urge

enough cause

    for arrest & conviction

paying off the yakuza

    and other authorities

    for a falsely i.d.’ed
             positive

    keep hands in sight
             at all times

From the good people at Bootstrap Productions in Somerville/Lowell:

We are hosting a Benefit at Evos Arts for our non-profit publishing adventure and would like you to come. 

Where: Evos Arts 98 Middle Street, Lowell, MA 01852   
When: Saturday April 30th 2005

There will be a gallery filled with artwork for your ocular enjoyment, many pieces for sale, a silent auction of fine art and random goodies, a full bar, a raffle, and some mood music.  For those of you that are thinking that this might make a great date— public displays of affection are tolerated, especially slow dancing to soul music and random high fives.

Feature Artists include:  Zippy Corning, Derek Fenner, Ryan Gallagher, and Kerri McGill.

The doors will open at 3:00 p.m.  Silent auction and gallery bar will start at 5:00 p.m.  Silent auction will close at 9:00 p.m.  Winning bids will be announced shortly after.

We are also happy to present:

Lisa Jarnot & Michael Gizzi reading from their work from 7:30 – 8:30 p.m.



 

New poem for Love Hotels

Star Fleet Log

on board the flight
of the challenger

Western theories
do not fly

men are from Mars

and women are from Venus

& Asian male penis
size does matter

as much as
a man’s salary

falling beneath
the national average

abandon all hope
of full sensor scans
mind melds
& glow-
in the dark condoms

in the old reruns (the search for spock)
outfitted in skin-tight uniform
Lt. Sulu is quoted
as saying

“Don’t call me tiny.”

In interesting news - the Kerouac School has a new e-zine.

Wash, cut and dry

by Kristen Van Slycke
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Kristen Van Slycke, another student in Dr. Hudson's class at Schreiner, took the text of my poem "Wash, cut and dry" and collaged the poem on to a photograph which she shot.

It starts here...

by Lyndsey Gatza
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Referencing my poem "The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion", Lyndsey Gatza made a digital print which she layered with hand prints and the closing line/text from the poem when one of the main characters leaves her mark on glass.

Here are two poems written in response to "How to eat sugarcane" and "Things which give pleasure" from Equivalence by students in Dr. Hudson's English class:


Why Old Southern Women Grow Tomatoes

Fresh grown
in your back yard
Tomatoes
Warm on a summer day.
Red, ripe and juicy
When first bitten
The explosion of flavor
On the tongue
Filling the mouth
Sprinkle of salt
Picked straight from the vine.
Grocery stores stocked full
Twenty different varieties
Tainted concubines
Spoiled by society
Genetically altered
Loss of taste ensues
In every bite of the
Home garden tomato
The rebirth of innocence
Is experienced.
- Crystal Beth Brummett


Things which give me pleasure
.
Getting lost on old country roads in the Hill Country.

Girlfriend's smile early in the morning.

Funnel cakes, calamari, sesame chicken.

Fox news.

Thursday nights will all my fraternity friends,
Sharing jokes, telling stories, sharing a brotherhood,
Making lifetme friends.

Bens Folds Five on my cd player before an afternoon nap.

Eating BBQ at an old run down restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

- Bradley Flume

Semi-Gloss

semi-gloss
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

My friend Larry Lee opened a show last night at Mn Gallery in Chicago with the artist Laura Kina. Larry and Laura have been collaborators for years and both make amazing work. If you are in the Chicago area, check out this show ASAP! It will be up thru May 14..

For those of you who are interested, here's an article at Glass Tire about the Southside residency program. The first image posted is my studio apartment when it was occupied by Reynaldo Thompson in 2004. Notice in the text the criticism/observation about my space vs. say about my work. I spent no less than 3 hours answering questions for this piece [grumble]. A good reason to say no to interviews.

I am back from an exhilirating 2 day writer's conference at Schreiner University where I had the chance to visit English classes and read poems for the community. Schreiner is a small liberal arts college in Kerrville, TX, 1 hour outside of San Antonio and/or Austin, in the heart of Texas hill country. Green and lush with the Guadalupe River running thru town. The college enrolls about 842 students - close to the size of Naropa when I was there, and very intimate, allowing for everybody to basically know one another. My sponsor, Kathleen Hudson, has a very interdisciplinary teaching style encouraging her students to write poems, creative visual responses, write letters to authors, and to constantly re-examine perspective and the way in which we look at things. What was especially wonderful about this experience is that Kathleen spent time in the classroom before my arrival, introducing the students to my work and having them respond to my poems - which yielded some very interesting list poems in the vein of "things which give pleasure" (Sei Shonagon's prompt) in addition to some very lovely handmade books and visual responses. When I get a chance to photograph/scan/type these works, I will post them. Thank you to everyone at Schreiner for making me feel so welcome!

Thank god the semester is almost over!

Tomorrow is the birthday of the Buddha which means practice day for this wayward Buddhist. In May, it will be the 7th anniversary of my refuge vows with Gangteng Tulku Rinpoche. Kort and I may reconfigure the tea room for impromptu chanoyu...

from the Love Hotel series:

Dirty

in the aftermath of love-

making the bed, stripping
sweat-soaked sheets

the unmentionable

details of a family
owned operation,

an old woman sanitizes
the spanking horse

while her granddaughter
tidies rooms

behind the scenes
a pair of liver-spotted

hands taking the key

Next week I am headed here. My host at the school tells me that her students have been looking me up on the internet. Cripes! Move along, nothing to see here...

This weekend we hit the local galleries here in Dallas. First stop Holly Johnson's new space in the design district where we saw Janaki Lennie's paintings. Janaki is an artist I met last year at MacDowell who is working with sky and urban landscapes. The new gallery space is gorgeous, spacious and well-lit. My neighbor Otis Jones also had a circular painting in the inaugural group show. We proceeded on to Conduit, also in the design district, to view some textual works and than on to Angstrom Gallery in Fair Park for one last opening. At the Angstrom I saw some work that really really upset me. One would think that I would be more upset by Marc Quinn's blood head viewed earlier that day at the Rachofsky House, but not so. The gallery had on display several canvases by an artist who makes his paintings by photographing every day still life scenarios of assorted junk and sending these photographs to China where he hires workers to render these photographs as painting. There is nothing exceptional about the way that these paintings are painted. The concept is, I suppose, interesting, but also entirely exploitative of people living in a 3rd world country. There are many reasons that learning about this work upset me - this is an artist who is now winning awards for his work as a "painter" and beating out other talented artists who actually do the work. The artist himself was trained as a painter and teaches drawing and technical classes - it's not like this is Donald Judd who is making the leap from painting to fabricating sculptures, an entirely different and new discipline to the artist. Interesting to me would be to know if the painter always works with the same individual in China. Is that person considered an artist? Or merely a laborer? Is the individual in China aware of how these paintings are used/sold? How much is that individual paid to do the work? Does that individual receive a portion of the gallery sale? Does the painter change up who he works with when he perceives himself to be in a rut and wanting to go in a new direction? The work is essentially a statement on the commodification of art and the rejection of painting, and to that I say so the fuck what. The average annual income of someone living in China is something like $500 U.S. dollars.

My sensibilities as a poet are coming up against the commodity oriented art world at the moment. Should framed text on cardboard sell for $3000? Is it the gallery or the artist who sets these prices? Doesn't it all sometimes seem a scam? Do poets work harder not smarter? Should we not all take over the art world? What does it mean to maintain integrity in one's art-making practice? Does a notion of the gift economy exist in the visual arts?

Spent Saturday afternoon touring the Rachofsky House, the private contemporary art collection of Howard and Cindy Rachofsky installed in a home built for them by Richard Meier. The Rachofskys recently pledged to donate their collections to the Dallas Museum of Art which will add significantly to the Museum's current holdings. Highlights of the collection included a Doug Aitken video piece and Mariko Mori photo mural in the kitchen. The bedroom had some bad fengshui (no pairs, unless you count Richard Mapplethorpe's eyes) and interesting works on display - a video of a child lip syncing by Rineke Djikstra, a photographic installation piece by Annette Messager which enlarged and distorted numerous body parts, and paintings by Eva Hesse and Phllip Guston. Got an up close look at a Jenny Holzer piece which incorporated both her signature LED displays (this one running text on the vertical) alongside a carved marble slab incised with more text. Great William Kentridge animation piece in the work-out area. Charles Ray's "Rotating Circle". There were also plenty of gross pieces in the collection - chocolate and soap busts by Antoni, Marc Quinn's "Self II", aka "the blood head" which once melted during a severe power outage, Bruce Nauman's "Shadow Puppet, Spinning" - a plaster cast head in severe need of cleaning. The sculptural works outside the building were some of my favorites - a drumming sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan on the top of the building, giant "Cave Bear Teeth" by Kiki Smith on the lawn, an Anish Kapoor piece, and a Jeff Koons balloon piece in the middle of the pond. The Meier house itself is in many ways a more fascinating work than many of the pieces in the collection. The house is built on a grid which radiates from the building out into the concrete parking lot before disappearing into a lawn which is installed with a Robert Irwin sculpture that reminded me of the interior wall at Donald Judd's Manzana de Chinati. The front of the house is solid with a few cut-outs to allow in light whereas the backside of the house is almost entirely transparent and made of glass, except for the bedroom area. The Rachofskys now live down the street from their collection and so there was an odd feeling for me of going thru this collection in a living space that felt less like living space and more like showroom.

2 new poems from a series with Misty Keasler on love hotels and enjo kosai:

Little Chapel Christmas, Nihonbashi

decked in plastic
trees a tangle

of electric lights
girls with the I.Q.s

of potted plants
mistletoe, ornament

pediment

pedophilic

fetishists

Xmas comes
365 days a year

something special slipped
into a stocking

give her what she wants -
a plaid Burberry scarf

or a designer handbag,
pleasure taken in a pair of

socks and underwear

in this Nativity scene

Jesus the name
of just another john


Trojan Horse

what is it about girls and horses?

sometimes she dreamed of bits
as women dream of jewelry

an oiled line of bridle straps
the weight of a shining bit

what crushed Catherine the Great's
reign, mythic as Greek warriors

emptying quietly into the night

Fred Korematsu, Robert Creeley, and Terry Schialvo all gone in one week.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Fred Korematsu, who unsuccessfully fought Japanese American internment camps during World War II before finally winning in court nearly four decades later, died Wednesday of respiratory illness, his attorney said. He was 86.

Korematsu died at his daughter's home in Larkspur, attorney Dale Minami said.

Korematsu became a symbol of civil rights for challenging the World War II internment orders that sent 120,000 Japanese Americans to government camps. His conviction for opposing the internment was finally overturned in U.S. District Court in 1983.

Korematsu helped win a national apology and reparations for internment camp survivors and their families in 1988.

He was honored by President Clinton in 1998 with the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Korematsu, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in Oakland. He was living there in 1942, a 23-year-old welder, when
military officials ordered all Japanese Americans on the West Coast - including U.S. citizens like Korematsu - to report for transportation to remote camps.

Nearly all complied, including Korematsu's family and friends, who urged him to go along. He refused.

He was arrested, convicted of violating the order and sent to an internment camp in Utah. The Supreme Court upheld Korematsu's conviction in December 1944, agreeing with the government that it was justified by the need to combat sabotage and espionage.

"There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some (Japanese Americans), the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and the time was short," wrote Justice Hugo Black in the 6-3 ruling.

Current legal scholars almost universally regard the ruling as one of the worst in the court's history. But it was not repudiated until the early 1980s, when Asian-American lawyers and civil rights advocates unearthed new evidence that undermined the internment order.

For almost 40 years, Korematsu did not talk about his experiences and even his daughter, Karen, had to learn about it in a college textbook.

In recent years, Korematsu remained active in civil rights issues, speaking out against parts of the Patriot Act that he felt violated the rights of Arab Americans.

The Highland Park Lit Fest kept me occupied this week with teaching and presentations. Missed Michael Chabon's talk due to SMU class but made it to the after event party in HP. Taught all day at HPHS and had some delightful Asian American students in my classes - smart, popular, and so much more confident that I ever was at that age. One girl had been nominated for prom queen and is headed to Yale for college. She took a good amount of teasing/harassment from some of the younger (freshman) kids in class for going to a prestigious school, but handled it quite well, dismissing them like the idiots they were. This young woman and another Asian American student actually asked to sit in on my class at SMU. We're in the final stretch so I had to say no, but invited them to the end of semester reading for poetry students at Paperbacks Plus which will take place on April 27 at 6 p.m.

Tone of the week: sobering.

Upon my parents return to California, Dad had some very shitty news waiting for him. They arrived in Dallas on Thursday evening last week and the next day, the place where my Dad teaches in Running Springs was totally shut down, kids sent home to their parents and the parent organization of the school filed for bankruptcy which means that the 100+ employees who worked for the school will never see their last paycheck for the last 3 weeks worked. Unbelieveable. Dad went back to the school on Tuesday to collect his belongings from his office. All the students gone - not even the opportunity to say goodbye to his students and colleagues. On campus there is a classroom building with a piano which Dad would play in between classes and after school before heading back down the mountain to my mother. He played the piano in the abandoned building one last time before leaving and never looking back.

New interview up with Bryan Thao Worra on Unnecessary Roughness and related matters...

My mother and father visited from California this weekend and we had the big talk. At dinner on Thursday after they arrived Kort asked for Dad's blessing to get married. Dad's response, "Wow. It's about time."

The tentative plan is August in Taos at the Lama Foundation with a reception at the Bavarian to be followed in March 2006 by a traditional Taiwanese wedding banquet/celebration planned by my parents in my father's ancestral village of Ching Shui. There is so much planning ahead that I am feeling more than a little bit overwhelmed, but looking happily forward to the times ahead.

I've been doing research into the objects in the current art exhibition at the DMA - Splendors of China which collects together the private art collection of Emperor Qianlong who ruled China during the Qing dynasty. Qianlong is a fascinating figure for me - a devout Tibetan Buddhist, a poet, a visual artist and a skilled politician. Over his lifetime he authored over 400,000 poems which he sometimes calligraphed or more interestingly composed as responses to specific art objects in his collection which he than had artisans engrave directly on to the art objects, a jade boulder, a stone plate, a small jade carving - works of great beauty that the West accuses him of defacing. I have a very different take on the subject - these were works in the emperor's collection that he owned and collected for his own aesthetic tastes. The poems are responses and conversations with these works of arts and their makers, and in incising them into the surfaces of these art objects, this history and conversation is documented for posterity. The catalog for this exhibit does not translate in full any of the poems incised into the art objects and the fragments which are included in the catalog are atrocious in their verbosity and rigidity and kill any hints at the sense of the poem. Why not commission a literary translator to interpret this work? I'm currently working with my dad and a Chinese docent at the Museum to try and get these texts properly translated but they are written in classical Mandarin and for the average joe who reads simplified Mandarin, this requires a lot of research and reference to the dictionary. It seems to me of profound importance that these poems were inscribed on to these objects - the reflections of collector, artist, poet, and aesthete, it seems a shame that this dimension of meaning has been overlooked. Anyways, hoping that I'll have these texts and being to talk about them more when I lead a writing workshop in the exhibition in May.

Weeks ago I went to the curator's lecture on this show which presented the Emperor as a savvy and supreme politician who did not do anything unless motivated by politics - i.e. his embracing of all religions and his choice to have certain images of himself painted. Well any of us who knows Buddhism or the Dalai Lama knows that Buddhism is a faith which accommodates all other traditions, and the allowing of multiple faiths is far from political strategy. The lecturer also left out Qianlong's contributions to cultivating traditional Chinese medicine. The lecturer dismissed the Emperor for being behind the times and naive in his preparations against the West, overlooking his many many contributions to the golden age of culture in China and his accomplishments as art collector and poet.

text on electronic highway sign:

buckle up texas arrive alive

man surfing porn in the "business"
center finally leaves when I clear
the memory of another jam

the cousins swim
in the cement pond
back behind the house

dead leaves of live oak
blown across concrete
patio in March

Visited my Southside program colleague Titus O’Brien’s Creative Process class for non-art majors at UTD yesterday to deliver a talk on poetry and the visual arts. When I walked into the media lab, I felt a bit apprehensive. The class was full at about 30 students, though apparently at one time, there may have been 40 or so enrolled. I will be teaching at UTD this fall and this was my first face-to-face interaction with UTD students. They were great – receptive, engaged, and many had comments and questions about the work – I revamped the talk that I did for Pitt last fall which I’ll do for the MAC in May, and approached the talk for Titus’ class as a trial run. More than a few of the male students had flattering things to say about the sports poems, and many had sharp observations about this work, one student speaking on “and round and round it goes” the roller derby poem and commented on how the language takes on the role of physical characters in a narrative that have violence enacted upon them. Titus did a nice job of slowing down the talk at appropriate moments to elaborate himself on some of the things going on in poems like “De Stijl” – the presence of images like chrysanthemums, the language of “boogie woogie”, all details lifted straight out of Mondrian’s work and art history. Titus has been busy installing his show down here at Southside. The men in our program open a show this week – featuring the work of Titus, Paul Slocum, Ryan Fitzer and Brian Fridge. A very different show than the one that the women put up last month which were all 2d works. In stark contrast, we’ve got video, interactive, sculpture, neon and installation. Should be an exciting show – reception next Wednesday from 7-9 p.m. for local readers – with a performance by Paul’s band treewave.

Went on from UTD to a panel on “poetry and the city” sponsored by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture near the Routh Street Triangle downtown. This panel/wine-talk was 1 in a series of talks on poetry and the city. I didn’t know what to really expect as no program description was available on the Institute’s website and the details I could extract from others seemed somewhat vague. I’ve heard mostly positive things about the Institute – an older academic set/think tank. Anyways the talk was not about poetry and the city as in Dallas, or “the city” as in New York, but the city as in the Greek polis and the roots of epic poetry and its absence in contemporary poetry. It was a very dry and rhetorical talk where several questionable comments were thrown out there including that poets only write for poets and Walt Whitman’s poetry is hard to access. I believe the film critic on the panel also said that everybody is a poet. And than there was a conversation about “the role of the poet”. Towards the end of the talk, a local poet Barrie Neller raised his hand and spoke up about his failed expectations for the talk and his own confusion about what the topic should mean and talked about the importance of practitioners of the craft being the ones to speak on the work and the issues, vs. scholars and critics. Than another Brit in the back of the room, Jacques, chimed in about the lack of poetry in Dallas. It was an interesting audience for sure, a few women with fur coats, a lovely Katherine Hepburn look-alike who kept trying to push the dialogue further into the present day relevance, Barry, Jacques, and several folks who obviously feel very passionately about what Dallas is lacking and wanting to creatively problem solve to transform the city. However, the think tank may not be the place for such conversations.

I get a little break from presenting work for a few weeks, until March 31 when I’ll read for a program for the Highland Park Literary Festival and teach a few workshops to high schoolers. Michael Chabon, author of the Wonderboys and the Spiderman 2 script, is the keynote speaker. Free event on March 30 at 7 p.m. at HP High School. And Laura Wilson, an esteemed photographer and Luke and Owen’s mom will also teach workshops which I hope to sit in on at the fest.

SUBMIT:

Alimentum: The Literature of Food

New literary journal about food, cooking, tasting, eating. Fiction,
creative non-fiction, art, poetry ñ also, looking for recipe poems.
Submissions under 1500 words accepted by email (when pasted into
message); longer submissions use snail mail (include SASE).

Alimentum
P.O. Box 776
New York, NY 10163
alimentumjournal@yahoo.com

So last night I read at Marquetta Herring's store in Lakewood with Jason Carney and had an amazing time. I am not a huge fan of slam poetry having heard quite a bit of it in Chicago centering around Asian American identity politics, but having just read Beau Sia's delightful work, I approached the reading with a more open mind. Jason's narratives did not disappoint - they were something else entirely, original, unique and heartfelt. According to Jason's bio, "as a young man, he was sent to a juvenile detention center after several violent incidents involving gay bashing and racial intolerance. While in the detention center, Jason was roomed with a young gay male who was HIV positive. A friendship formed from what could have been a volatile situation. The experience changed the way Jason saw people that were different from him. After Jason was released, he tried to look up his new friend only to find that he had lost his battle with the disease. Jason has made it his life work to heal and help eliminate intolerance." Jason recited several narrative pieces - one, an homage/song to the influence his mother has had on his life, another on the loss of the friend he met in detention who tranformed his life, and another piece on the nature of intimacy. A tough act to follow, I read my sports poems, a short sampling from Nutritional Feed, and closed with a few poems from Equivalence written on my experiences at Naropa and read in honor of last night's host, Karen X, yogini and dharma broad, The folks at Wordspace drew out a large audience for this Sunday night event which included students, poets, and artists.

As a very positive aside, La Alameda informs me that of our original 1,000 copy print run for Equivalence, less than 200 copies of the book now remain!

In the office I share with Jack, I discovered a book of vintage Ondaatje, "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid". This is an amazing book that tells the story of historic gunslinger Billy the Kid in photos, poems and prose narratives. Savage in its violence, the poems in this collection amaze - stories that include a tale of a madman eaten by the mad dogs that he has inbred over several generations and a story of one of Billy's victims who as he falls to the ground from a gunshot wound to the chest is accosted by a chicken that sticks its beak down the dying man's throat and pulls out 12 yards of the man's innards. A few other memorable tales include a story about one of Billy's men who gets half of his face blown off when his gun explodes who must than cross the desert to get back to civilization where he can get medical attention for his injuries. When the man takes a drink of water it leaks out of his ear, it is a miracle that he survives. Another personal favorite is a narrative where Billy, hiding in a barn and delirious with fever, is surrounded by drunken rats which feed first on fermented grain and than senselessly upon one another. Terrified, Billy loads his gun and fires round after round into the darkened barn. The overall narrative recounts Billy's relationship with his mistress and friends, his capture by Pat Garrett, escape and death. This is an amazing collection that I have heard talked about primarily as a work of fiction/novel, which is a gross over-simplification of the many strategies employed in this book. Of further interest and exploration is that Ondaatje has also worked on making documentary films.. one of which concerns the Canadian poet bp Nichols.

Broadcast worthy news:

Kort passed the National Herbal Board Examination and is officially on his way to getting certified as a practicing acupuncturing and doctor of Oriental Medicine! Today is a day for celebration!

It's spring break at SMU. Thank goodness.

Taking some time to catch up on reading and applications. A student of mine lent me "Night without Armor II", Beau Sia's spoof on Jewel's book by the same name. I'd heard about this book for a long time and was pleasantly surprised and delighted by the silliness of this collection. Reflections on childhood in Oklahoma, the swim team, fat girls, sex, and ex-lovers, and a few humourous pieces on Goth girls (Sia's sister was apparently one of these). There was also one very tender poem slipped into the series contemplating the life of Sia's parents before he was born. Real or made up, a very different resonance than the other pieces in this collection. Beau's been making his way into film, and has had very small parts in 2 movies that I've seen recently, "Hitch" and "The Manchurian Candidate".

Also received from Mark, the catalog for the Infinity poetry show in Boston. My favorite works in this show are Denise Duhamel's 3D hamster wheel "Working Stiff Cylinder" and the endwar collective's "Reiteration" mobius strip poem. Jeffrey Encke also has a nice piece constructed out of a deck of playing cards, and nice to see Michael Peters' work again who's work I'd seen previously in Michael and Dottie's American Weddings.

Currently reading up on the NZ poetry scene. I am looking for a host...

Next term I will be using a different anthology for my course at the college. The book I have been using has gone out of print which means I'll have to go with a different title... currently contemplating FROM TOTEMS TO HIP-HOP, Ishmael Reed's multi-cultural anthology which has poets ranging from Tupac to Levertov. If anyone has any other suggestions, please backchannel me.

Reading tonite with contemplative slam poet Jason Carney at 7 p.m. at Paperbacks Plus in Lakewood. Free and sponsored by WordSpace.

I just received an email via a SF list serve that Eddy Zheng has been pardoned by Governor Schwarzenegger. Up until Tuesday morning, Eddy was an inmate in a California State Prison, where he was sentenced to 7-years-to-life for a robbery when he was 16 in 1986. He served over 18 years and is now 35 years old. While incarcerated, he learned English, completed his GED, earned a college degree, and worked with at-risk youth. Though he has been pardoned, he now faces deportation because of his status as a non-citizen. Read more about Eddy's story here.

Upsetting: "..poetry as politics, rather than art..."

Dallas was privileged to host the visit of Eileen Tabios and her colleague Sandy McIntosh of Marsh Hawk Press this past week. Both poets traveled into Dallas to see the Southside program and to do studio visits with artists in residence. Then on Sunday, Eileen and Sandy read at Paperbacks Plus, home of the Writer's Garret and an on-going poetry events series curated by Karen X. I'd never been to this space which is located over in the Lakewood area of town where turn of the century mansions are surrounded by more recently built apartment complexes. Paperbacks Plus is run by Marquetta Herring, who was in attendance - a wonderfully supporter of the arts and poetry. The reading space is on the 2nd floor of the space, equipped with podium and a roomful of comfy chairs and sofas to sprawl out and enjoy a good reading, the walls and shelves lined with books and journals. Nice to see Charles (author of the Book of Willie which Eileen writes about eloquently at her blog) and Karen X, who joined us later for an after reading dinner at the Tom Tom Club.

Thanks, Eileen, for making Dallas a part of your stop on your whirlwind tour! Eileen read from the "brick", "I take thee English...", favorite poems read included her Ars Poetica and a Baudelaire collage poem. Sandy read from a long poem in his latest book out from Marsh Hawk, a lengthy piece about a former classmate named "Max" at Columbia University. Nice to see Chris who I hadn't seen in person since my visit to Dallas over a year ago when I still lived in Boston. Thanks for bringing in such dynamic poets to North Texas and for all of your good work in the spirit of community. Check out Texas Heat next season for readings by New Yorkers Shanna Compton and Jennifer Knox! And check out Eileen's blog for her brilliant proposal to implement a line item in city planning/permitting processes that would support the arts...

So glad to see Bino back from his meow-bernation and a total site redesign. Check out the Calzoncillo blog for a brief and interesting history on the Asian American Writers Workshop in NYC.

Congrats to John Dalton, MacDowell alum and author of Heaven Lake for winning the 1st place Discover Fiction Award from Barnes & Noble. John's ambitious first novel is set in the place where Kort and I are heading in early 2006: Taiwan.

Tim Yu signs off of the Buffalo Poetics List. And I can not blame him - in the past years there have been several threads expressive of an anti-Asian sentiment and in all cases, Tim stepped up to bat, challenging several members of the list and calling them on their ignorance. There was one last year about the Taiwanese in particular that was stomach turning... the latest threads debate whether or not using the term "Jap" is socially acceptable.

Paul Westerberg is in town on Monday and in trying to convince Kort that we should go and see Paul at the Gypsy Tea Room, I dug out all my old Replacements tapes and early Westerberg solo albums. Albums I haven't listened to in quite some time - Don't Tell a Soul, All Shook Down, and others, and of course the soundtrack to Singles. Kort made a good point, what's a Minnesotan like Westerberg doing on Cameron Crowe's Seattle project amidst bands like Mudhoney, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains? I have no idea, but the man writes one damn good pop song. The Replacements were a handful of bands/artists that I followed closely for several years, owning almost all of their music - few bands rank this highly on my list - Smiths/Morrissey and Jesus & Mary Chain, Echo & The Bunnymen/Mac, and James/Tim Booth. That's about it. Bands that got a lot of airplay on KROQ, 106.7 back in the days of the Poor Man, Richard Blade and Lewis Largent. Trying to convince Kort of the merits of Westerberg is a little bit of a lost crusade - Kort points at the album cover for 14 love songs or whatever that first solo album was called and points out Westerberg's white crew socks paired with black shoes.

The vispo show at Harvard opened last night. Here's a link to the on-line exhibition for Infinity. I'd be curious to hear reports from Michael or Roger your impressions of the show.

Congratulations to my man, Kort, who is now a card carrying member of the NCAAOM, registered diplomate of acupuncture, which makes him eligible to practice in Colorado, Arizona, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Deleware, Rhode Island, Oregon and just about every state except for New Mexico, Cal, and Texas which all have their idiosyncratic certification processes. Interesting to note, there are no practitioners of acupuncture in either Oklahoma or Alabama which have no standards or state certification agencies, which leads one to conclude that there is no licensed acupuncture happening in these places.