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...

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