White Pine Press is having a book sale of Dennis Maloney's personal library to raise proceeds for the press. Acquire signed books and small press treasures, while simultaneously supporting the press here.

becoming black

in Pretoria
the High Court rules
that Chinese

South Africans
are to be reclassed
as blacks, having suffered

under years of apartheid
rule that identified
Asians as mixed-race;

aligned with the most
poor they can now
qualify for affirmative

action under Black
Economic Empowerment
codes, citizens erect their own

businesses, own shares
in other outfits & receive
empowerment transactions

under BEE conventions
the Chinese are one
step nearer to being

made less

invisible; a new
precedent set
their civic identity

a legal loop hole
handed down through
tribunal decree

Crater of Diamonds

Kort tells me a story
of arriving at unending fields
of overturned earth,

after hours of driving
an outing organized
by his grandparents

to pan for diamonds
we choose a day
after rain when the topsoil

has washed away, imagine
stones will sit out
winking on the surface

ours for the taking
“finders keepers”

signs mark the day
the crust was last plowed,
number of diamonds found

this month: seven
excavated yesterday: just one
when we empty

the contents of our dig
onto the ranger’s carrel
she points out quartz

then singles out
the citrine; crystalline
structures altered

by compression &
high temps, I finger chert –
rock flaked off to form the flint

you used to build blazes
in your boyhood accounts
touching the warmth

of metamorphic
matter hollowed out
of the body’s beryllium

we come back to mine

obstruction

the night monks
from Drepung Loseling
perform the closing

Dug-Sher-Seng Sum ceremony
to remove external obstacles,
a lecture takes place

on the other side of campus:
Tristan Taormino, feminist
pornographer draws a record

crowd of students in a talk
on polyamory, swinging
& sex-positive culture

Lama Gala is more
humorous then sexy
when he forgets the word

for “genitals” while describing
the root chakra “down there”
though it’s the throat center

from which tonal chanting
emanates, forming the color
of each seed syllable

through the control and inner
tone of the larynx -

I muse upon my ear-nose-throat
doctor who slid a scope
down her throat to tape

a video of herself speaking
“The Blue Guitar” – round
picture, the cropped tondo

displayed raw flesh
beating open & closed
how there was something

pretty obscene about
the whole act –
wondering

how the tenor
might have changed if
the recitative text

had been the body
of the Heart Sutra

red-shirt rally

six years before –
over Narathiwat,
Thailand, peaceful

protest marked by
folded paper cranes
cast from airplanes

since the coup,
matrons gather
used sanitary pads

from menstruating
women, to install
around a monument of

the nation’s protector

to harness the power
of human blood
arhats show their support

for the ousted prime minister
by donating plasma from
their vital humors

to make a monk
bleed, is one of the most
cardinal sins

displaying transfused
syringes collected
for the dump

a calculated push
to organize one million
units, so much blood could

“save many lives”

spilled before Parliament
spumous red fluid froths
& clots across concrete

Sara Parkel, a talented and wonderful letterpress artist I have been working with since Haiku Not Bombs is exhibiting in a few upcoming shows that features my writing:

Hybrid Land (artist book) & Bamiyan (broadside)
March 17-April 9, 2011
'Impressed'
Cecil R. Hunt Gallery
Webster University
St. Louis, MO

Bamiyan & Hybrid Land
June 1-30, 2011
ULUS Printmaking Triennial
Cvijeta Zuzoric, Art Pavilion
Serbia

MFA exhibition/solo show, Hybrid Land
April 2011
Ferguson Gallery
University of Alabama Campus
Tuscaloosa, AL

passing through Hot Springs
wondering if a sign for "Woo Pig Sooie"
refers to Chinese BBQ

Was shocked to learn of the death of art historian and curator Robert Seydel. While at AWP this past week, I saw promotional materials for his forthcoming book from Siglio Press and thought to look him up again after many years. I worked with Robert at the Photographic Resource Center at BU during my undergraduate years - he was down to earth, kind, and genuinely interested in the lives of students - strikingly more so compared to other staff during my generation of the PRC. His first book will be published in April. He died in January of a massive heart attack at the age of 50.

Tienanmen Square Souvenir, May 2009

Chinese teens beg
a snapshot w/ my travel
companion who is British-

born, ten years after
the uprising, Yan
whispers to abstain from

using
the word
massacre

images that circulate
beyond the borders,
the northern Gate

of Heavenly Peace
Chairman Mao’s picture

wheatpasted & replaced
after every incident of
destruction, depletion

of a backroom stuffed full
w/ stock replicas

Beginnings - spring nijuin renga (19 more verses to come)

bears emerge from
winter sleep, rousing from lairs
dug out from under trees

let's plan Zen poetry
oh when the Grass Sprout Moon turns blue

some see the face of
man, others report seeing
rabbit shadow

that's how the old ones tell it-
don't think I made it up

AWP Redux

I was in DC this past week for the Associated Writing Programs Conference. AWP is a weird animal and a full debrief with my husband was helpful in moving towards some sort of clarity around specific kinds of interactions that pervade my experiences at this annual industry event.

The Bookfair, while being a great opportunity to check out new books and authors is also a place of hunger and economic transaction, and a place of presumed connections, power relationships, and deep assumptions that makes it difficult to bring authentic interactions. People read nametags and treat one another accordingly to name/face recognition. Going from a week at the Naropa Authentic Leadership program to AWP was a mindfuck. Opposite ends of the human spectrum.

While standing at a friend's table, several writers came up to aggressively market their manuscripts and make editorial sales pitches.

Do you take bilingual work? No, I don't mean translation work, I mean work that incorporates both Spanish and English. You're not the publisher? When are they coming back?

At more than one table, the initial greeting went like this:

Are you a writer? Well we have a contest, let me tell you about it...

And still worse - at one small journal's table that devotes each issue to a different geographic region and/or country, the pitch went like this:

We sell subscriptions. Let me show you our Asia issue...

At one small press journal the interaction went like this:

Oh, we published your work in our first issue.

That was 2 years ago and I didn't even submit that poem - my collaborator did and the issue showed up in my mailbox which is how I learned about your xeroxed zine. Context, yo!

And at another table, where I got hustled into buying at full price on Day 1(and regret it b/c I like the performative interaction of the haggle and give-and-take) - the interaction was:

Oh yeah, I read a manuscript from you.

That was 7 years ago and a lot has happened since. Ultimately the only item I paid full price from at the fair was from this particular vendor. Not because they read my manuscript 7 years ago, but because we shared friends in common and I wanted to offer my economic support of their project by not being a hardass about retail price, and the editor of the book I purchased is a colleague from Seattle with an incredibly bright mind and innovative sensibility. But writers know the real cost of printing a book and what constitutes mark-up and profit. That's why everyone waits until the last day of the Fair to purchase or collect freebies. One partner in the pair who was not making the sales pitch said "Oh, poetry, that's discounted." To which the other partner said, "NO. It's an anthology. No discount."

The best moments at AWP for me were hearing and seeing John Wesley Harding and Josh Ritter read from their new novels and perform folk songs. Kay Ryan is a laugh riot - skillful and cutting with her humor, as in cutting through. I loved her and her work and more poet laureates should be like Kay Ryan. I also deeply enjoyed the multimedia doc poetics program with Kwame Dawes and Natasha Trethewey who are, as always, doing incredible work. Their cohorts on the panel, I was less interested in for their limited stakes in the communities that they are studying and working with.

I also went on a tour of the Library of Congress and saw where the Poet Laureate offices.



The building itself was incredibly rich with literary thought and intention.


And DC in general is an interesting literary town. The conference, and my hotel room were based at the Marriott Wardman Park - the same place that Langston Hughes once worked as a busboy and was discovered by Vachel Lindsay. Elsewhere around town, the monumental presence of Walt Whitman in Dupont Circle.



And what was Naropa like, you ask? Like going home.

Mush / Cull

One hundred
dogs put down
during the slow season

a mass grave of huskies
malamute & utanogan
stiffen under feet of snow

thirty-five exotic animals
freeze in Juarez at
the Serengeti Zoo

Berto Hernan cites
fourteen parrots
thirteen serpents
five iguanas
two crocs &
one capuchin monkey
dead during power
failure in Aldama

twenty-one lechuga ponies
collapse before a match
their bodies shot through

w/ vitamin injections

a dead rabbit arrives
in the Chinese mail,
an eel is inserted into

the asshole of an unconscious chef
disemboweled alive; both man
& moray die

at new year,
men buy up birds
determined to do

good deeds

catch & release
the catch w/out release
the catch

the release

Adamantine reviewed by Cati Porter at Inlandia Journal here. Plus, three poems here.

Adamantine reviewed by Liesl Jobson here.

I am delighted to announce that Longhouse has published a new chaplet of haiku poems, nearly invisible, that spans 2003-2010 and poems written in Boston, Seattle, Peterborough, Port Townsend and Taiwan.

Forthcoming reviews of Adamantine are slated for publication in Denver Quarterly and Zen Monster.

Thank you to Kimberly Becker for interviewing me for Eclectica.

Graceland

We went to Graceland.



To see how Elvis lived.



It was very yellow.


With lots of texture:


Including shag:

I am very pleased to announce that I am now represented by The Lecture Bureau: http://www.thelecturebureau.com/speakers/shin_yu_pai.html

Adamantine reviewed in the New Pages.