Michelle Penaloza, Pt. 1

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION]

Monica Ong asks, Time is limited, yet nowadays there is a limitless amount of great literature and art one can take in. What is your criteria for choosing what or whom to read, in terms of growing as a poet?

Michelle Penaloza answers, I am a bit promiscuous; I don’t know that I have any criteria other than “whatever holds my interest.” On my nightstand: Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, the Magic Shows issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Lucky Fish. I often discover what and whom I read through friends, writerly or not. I have a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which adds lots of books to my constantly growing list. Sometimes random things on the internet lead me to new poets and new books; I have a bookmarks tab that’s just labeled READ THESE for my running list of stuff I want to read. Basically, I say yes to almost everything; my criteria becomes discriminating once I’ve gotten started with something. The library is my dear friend. Also, [the visual below] might illustrate my answer this question. 

[POEM]

LESSONS IN COMMUNICATION

If you enter a house through the window
instead of the door, a ghost will follow you.
If two dogs bark at night, you know the ghost
wants to watch Doctor Zhivago, cry, and steal
all of your wheat toast, your Earl Gray, and your butter.
Should you suddenly feel a weight upon your chest,
the ghost would like to speak with you about its concerns
regarding your late night habits—you eat dinner too late
in the evenings, you smack your gums while watching television,
you are a terrible judge of character (really, the men you
bring home), you smoke too much, and you haven’t been to mass
in years. Also, you no longer make an effort to speak to the dead.
This, the ghost will say, is very disappointing.
To hush a ghost, you must spin counter clockwise three times.
Hold your palms upward and whistle Mancini’s “Moon River.”
You can never really make a ghost hush, but if you stand within
a circle of salt, knock three times upon a mirror and light a single
white candle, you can manage a ghost’s moaning, order it
to stay in the starlight, to stay on the other side of the windows’ glass.
When you get lonely, you can press your ear upon the darkness and listen:
cricketsbittermelongoldleafbullsbreathfoxglovewhatsightreefallrainclouddustdustdust

First published in The Weekly Rumpus.

[BIO]

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Michelle lives in Seattle, hard at work on her current project, landscape / heartbreak; also, this brings her great joy. 

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday. [QUESTION] Brynn Saito asks, Do you believe …

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION]

Brynn Saito asks, Do you believe in ghosts?

Monica Ong answers, I do. My family’s ghosts haunt me, bind me to intricate histories, and challenge me to ask difficult questions about where we’re going and when we’ll finally be home. I don’t go looking for them, but they often find me, leaving their fragments and traces in small objects, smells, and strange empty spaces. When I write I rely on them often, sometimes to feel less alien, sometimes to expand, other times to ask for a good recipe. Despite being prone to exaggeration, they do tell great stories, and inspire narrative elements in my work. I just wish they weren’t so camera shy.

[POEM]

Click on the image below to see Monica’s work on Seneca Review.

[BIO]

Monica Ong is a literary hybrid who explores medical narratives through the overlap of poetry, art, and technology. 

Brynn Saito, Pt. 1: Go to the ends of the earth / girl / go like a leopard

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION]

Cathy Linh Che asks, In writing, what are you most afraid of?

Brynn Saito responds, 

I fear that the poem knows something that I do not yet know. This is also my greatest hope. I get afraid that, through poetry, I’ll uncover something about myself that will completely alter the story I’ve constructed about my life. In the same breath, I’m afraid my own writing will, one day, cease to surprise me, cease to reveal an unknown. I’m reading Mary Ruefle’s cutting and beautiful book of lectures,Madness, Rack and Honey. In it, she talks about craft: a craft is a thing, she reminds us—a boat, or a ship, or a raft. “Great skill is involved in building a craft, for it is far from easy to make things that float of fly.” Every time I sit down to it, I fear both the failure of flight and the possibility of some wild orbit through the exhilarating dark. But I believe in my fear: fear is useful; fear is tied to wonder—that feeling of trembling before the terrifying angel (Rilke!), that rush of living on the edge of what is known. 

[POEM]

W.W. ON HOW TO BE FREE

Go to the ends of the earth / girl / go like a leopard

chasing her longing / go like the grasses grown

and cut and blowing over the valley by autumn

fire-winds / Go away from the valley / girl / go

to the city / go like a fighter / with gold ore

precision / with penny-like pain / with plenty

of power / Please ignore / what you can girl /

the growls in your absence / the men with their ice-blocks 

melting in arms / the men with their mine-field hearts /

The women like me / wishing you well / whistling

wisdom into your spine / learn to lie to survive / girl /

learn to outlast the flame / learn the art of surprise

[BIO]

Brynn Saito is a poet and writer living in the SF Bay Area. She wrote a book called The Palace of Contemplating Departure.

Cathy Linh Che, Pt. 1 In the Underworld, / I starve a season / while the world wilts

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION]

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Debbie Yee asks, Cathy, Are there real or virtual spaces you go to for research? What or where are they? What do they inform you?

Cathy Linh Che answers, 

Thanks, Debbie, for the question! My answer is roundabout, but I do get around to it. Here it goes: 

Like Paul Tran, and so many others, I was sexually molested as a child—and have felt the ripple effects into adulthood.

I write about my experiences because I’m uneasy with the silence. I’m uneasy with the abject and unfathomable horror surrounding the topic—as if sexual molestation is not something that happens to one in three girls and one in seven boys. At a table with ten folks, several people have been sexually violated at some point in their lives (whether we identify as victims, survivors, or something else), or are perpetrators. So, it’s not ‘unimaginable’—it’s lived experiences that we all share.

 When I have a concept or an image I want to explore, I look up definitions and etymologies on the internet. I do Google images searches. I turn to different mythologies and origin stories. I buy books and read up on psychology and psychoanalysis. I go home and inhabit spaces where these incidences have taken place. I look at personal experiences again and again—after all “research” is about looking closely and looking repeatedly.

Type in the word rape into the Online Etymology Dictionary and you get:

rape (v.)

late 14c., “seize prey; abduct, take by force,” from rape (n.) and from Anglo-French raper (Old French rapir)

When I learned that rape originally meant to abduct, or to carry off by force, I thought of the myth of Persephone in a new way.

I saw her abduction, then being carried off into Hades, as a kind of childhood rape story—and from there, I wrote.

Editor’s Note: If you are interested in information about support services as a sexual assault survivor, please visit RAINN.

[POEM]

Pomegranate

I open my chest and birds flock out.
In my mother’s garden, the roses flare
toward the sun, but I am an arrow

pointing back.
I am Persephone,
a virgin abducted.

In the Underworld,
I starve a season
while the world wilts

into the ghost
of a summer backyard.
My hunger open and raw.

I lay next to a man
who did not love me—
my body a performance,

his body a single eye—
a director watching an actress
commanding her

to scintillate.

I was the clumsy acrobat.
When he came, I split open
like a pomegranate

and ate six of my own ruddy seeds.

I was the whipping boy.
Thorny, barbed wire
wound around a muscular heart.

Originally published in Split (Alice James Books, 2014)

[BIO]

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Cathy Linh Che would like to start a conversation with you. Email her.

Debbie Yee, Pt. 2 #writetoday

Use the following words in a sonnet as “rhymed-ends” in the bouts-rimés tradition, which is described as, “lists of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list.

  • Snore
  • Pragmatic
  • Atomic
  • Labor
  • Pliers
  • Conspires
  • Article
  • Swallow
  • Fallow
  • Cuticle
  • Margarine
  • Mold
  • Told
  • Tamarind

Thanks to Seattle poet, L.J. Morin for an introduction into the practice of bouts-rimés.

Debbie Yee, Pt. 1, There was a drift of sugar desire in a once-small town.

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

Debbie Yee’s Green Tea Cupcakes with Red Bean Paste Buttercream

[QUESTION]

Paul Tran asks, I recently watched Natasha Trethewey’s “Why I Write: Poetry, History & Social Justice” on YouTube. the 52-minute lecture led me to George Orwell’s essay by the same title. Both got me thinking about the importance of “messages” in Asian American poetry. I define “message” as an argument or observation of the world that compels new understandings or visions of human existence, its operations and struggles. What kind of messages do you articulate or reimagine in your work? Why these in particular? And if none, what might their absence say? Why the choice to “not say”?

Debbie Yee answers, I hadn’t, until recently, considered my writing as having a message other than addressing my version of an existential crisis that resonates with few to twelve imagined people. But Orwell is perhaps correct in having identified political purpose as a driver. Whether intentionally or not, I’ve been re-telling “women’s work” from a 21st century feminist perspective through poems couched in observation or fantasy. They tend to concern maternal desire and absence, employing images of domesticity and home life quite a lot, usually set around the kitchen, garden, and the body. Except for a poem or two vaguely in the context of the law, my profession as a lawyer is extremely absent. I’ve often hoped I could turn on the law-poem spigot, but haven’t so far gotten any traction. That area of my life may largely be resolved and non-controversial in an internal sense, so I then roam into different terrain.

[POEM]

There was a drift of sugar desire in a once-small town. Sun-sweetened trees bore a load of pear-shaped children. The single-story buildings mottling the topography were gummy and edible, nestled along highways and footbridges paved in fruit leathers. The people gardened. They were simple and diabetic. They dreamt the way giants do. Their hearts wrestled with vast plots of untilled acreage. Their arms were fit to host suppers, could carry two seasons of bounty. Those who did laid the groundwork for a nest of kittens and bucks to fawn over. Those trees dipped and swayed in melodious day and continued this way well into the night, capturing in rhythm the town’s inhalations, exhalations, sighs and whistles. Underneath constellations, in a lunar rabbit year, the children snapped off from their birth branches arched over moonlit yards, slung rope and plank over their ancestors, fashioning swings for play, motion, inertia. The town was mid-breath in its history, conjectured a future by hand shadow puppetry as its talent at the county fair, its pies and cakes near-baked, its fruity, flavorful offspring at the ready.

[BIO]

Debbie Yee is an attorney, poet, mother, baker and crafts enthusiast living in San Francisco.

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

Editor’s Note: For today’s post, Kundiman Fellow Paul Tran discusses details of his experience with child abuse and sexual assault. A video of his performance above also includes a a poetic address of those issues.

[QUESTION]

Janine Joseph asks, I’ve been thinking recently about some of the first poems that shook and prompted me to respond. In the spirit of Nazim Hikmet, I want to ask you: What are things you didn’t know you loved?

Paul Tran answers, My father started molesting me when I was four.

I remember it all: a hand opening the shower door; my stomach pressed into a car seat; Terminator 2 playing over my screams in an apartment by Montezuma Road. It’s a nightmare that returns to me even now.

When he disappeared in 1999, my mother cut his face from our family photographs. She gave them to me in a grocery bag and said bo thung rac. Throw it away. Nho lam gi? Why remember? Nho chi co lam con them kho thoi. Remembering will only make you suffer. 

I still know what his body looks like—how his mouth curled right before coming. How even his cum smelled like Heineken. But I didn’t know I could forgive him. I didn’t know that years later, after I’d grown up and been raped by other men, after the memory and nightmare became indistinguishable, saying the violence’s name aloud—Rape. Incest. Almost murder.—was, in fact, my gesture of forgiveness.

And what do we forgive but a thing we didn’t know we could love?

[POEM]

The video above is of Paul performing “Ice Cream Man” during the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.

[BIO]

Paul Tran is an Asian American historian, activist & spoken word poet from Providence, Rhode Island. 

Janine Joseph, Pt. 1: Can you smell the burning mustard plants, the foxtail and foxglove weeds on my skin?

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION]

Eddie Kim asks, From speaking with friends and my own personal struggles, it seems that those of us who have gone the MA/MFA/PhD route experience difficulty transitioning into life after school. There seems to be an existential ennui or existential panic that accompanies graduation. What were your experiences like post MFA? Post PhD? What helped you through that transition? If you feel you haven’t transitioned out of it yet, with what aspects do you specifically struggle?

Janine Joseph answers, Here’s the truth: when working on my MFA and, later, my PhD, I kept one foot out the door. It was a preparedness I had developed when putting myself through college. I wrote the poems that got me into NYU after closing. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a job or had a job in place. What I struggled most with was prioritizing school—prioritizing poetry—over the very experiences that fed my writing life. The “real world” was where I felt indebted, where I never needed to be reintegrated. Even when I was working on my MFA I’d sit at the computer and, while messing around with the lines on the screen, be preoccupied with the progress of the DREAM Act.

I suspect now that it was the self-sentence of five years that helped me fully transition into a life, not just of school, but also of poetry. Committing to the PhD helped me to acknowledge the world around me—its possibilities and uncertainties—and then refocus. It’s not so much that I had to compartmentalize all of the distractions and obligations, but that I looked, too, and with greater intensity, at what needed the most of my attention. At the field where I could best do meaningful work.

[POEM]

Leaving the Non-Profit Immigration Lawyer’s Office

             2001

When the car drifted from the Santa Ana winds, I switched off the radio
                                    and pointed at the street poles swaying over the two-way stretch like palms.

                                                                       All night the wind brushed dry the hills with fire, and I kept driving,
                                   his hands steady out the window, taking snapshots of the red, whipping rings.

I power-rolled the windows down and let the smoked-grass scent seep
                                   into the upholstery, circulate coyote and birdsong through the air vents.

                                                Can you smell the burning mustard plants, the foxtail and foxglove weeds on my skin?
                                                                       I asked, hands open, the wheel orbiting under my palms.

Watch when I let go, I demonstrated, finger knuckles loosening around the leather,
                                   the car coasting left with pollen and butterfly debris.

                                                                                                 We’d be pitched into the brushglare, I warned, if I let go
                                                                  completely. We’d grate the chain link fence and itch the ashen shrubs

                                   Eye shuttered slow at tumbleweeds storming the under-
                                                                            carriages storming the road, B. said: Right, like you’d let go.

Previously published on Kenyon Review online.

[BIO]

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Janine Joseph has new work forthcoming in The Journal, Hyphen Magazine, Eleven Eleven, and The California Journal of Poetics.

Eddie Kim, Pt. 1: "Food is essentially how my family communicates."

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

Jason Bayani asks, The poems I’ve read from you seem to bring up food a lot.If your collection of poems was represented by a buffet style spread at a family party, what could we expect to be feasting upon?

Eddie Kim answers, Food is essentially how my family communicates. It’s how we show affection towards one another and say what we’re often incapable of saying – or maybe unwilling to say. Which is why food is featured so heavily in my collection. The foods and poems revolve around family, place, nostalgia, past hurts and losses and an inability to express/discuss them. The poems have openness, but a sense of distance as well; they’re guarded. As such, Spam fried rice might be the perfect dish to represent my collection (what’s in Spam is also unspeakable/unknowable). For me, it’s comfort food, familiar; it holds history and a sense of conversation with family and the past. It represents the combining of two cultures – Spam having been introduced to Koreans by US soldiers during the Korean War. It encapsulates the cultural and generational mélange represented by my family and in my poems. Also, there would be kimchi.

[POEM]

The Whale

There was only one road out of town,
and it led to the dump. We went
shooting there, scaring off bears, birds
and barrels. A shore on one side
of the road, open tundra full of ptarmigan

on the other. Once, a whale lay beached
on perfect skipping stones. I watched as gulls pock-
marked its grey-blue skin turning it flesh.
Crowds of people stood watching.

Cemetery Hill wrapped just around the corner.
We went sledding there, just off
Dead-man’s Curve, landing in bush
and snow. The tundra offered blueberries,
cranberries. I can still remember the taste

of dirt speckled sweet. Back then,
I set booby-traps in the bush to protect
myself from bullies, and my brother and I
shot arrows at each other. In summer,
we avoided lost lures as we swam in the bay.

[BIO]

All for freedom and for pleasure, nothing ever lasts forever… everybody wants to rule the world. 

Jason Bayani, Pt. 2, #writetoday

(Inspired by Warsan Shire’s poem, Backwards)

What are some of the most significant moments in your life. Good, bad, and all things in between. What are the moments you feel define you? What stands out? What images, symbols, and landmarks do you associate with yourself? Now make a list of what you would change and what you would keep the same, then rewrite the story of your life. 

Jason Bayani, Pt. 1

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

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[QUESTION]

Roberto Ascalon asks, "What’ve you got in your hands?"

Jason Bayani responds, Well that is the question is it not? What truly is in our hands? Or we think about the question and somehow when you ask this, what is in our hands suggests the future, what will be, that’s what our hands can hold. Or what is in our hands is something that is in process, it is current. We speak current or future, but what is in our hands can be what has always been in our hands or what has been, so where are my hands engaging time? I think that’s the question. What is in my hands? An infinite set of possibilities, all of space/time. I have, not only a universe, but all of the universes. 

Actually, it’s just my phone. I’m using it currently to send you beefcake photos of myself, Robert. Some of me doing some crossfit training, kettle bell curls, stuff like that.

[POEM]

Story  

As I can recall, every bit of telling 

memory is a certain fiction. The truth 

as best as I can build it. The Philippines is hot; this is true. 

Everyone looks at me and sees my father; this is also true. 

When I leave the farm of the woman who helped raise him (when 

the money was not enough), she: my grandfather’s sister 

chases after me as I trod down the muddy pathway back 

to our car. She cries and asks me not to leave her again. I feel

that this too is telling memory. The mist pulls into wide;

when the body reminds itself; learning her hands

outstretched to God; sun stumbling across 

the palm canopy. Her hands, they say

the story. All of her tears

folding into the rain.

[BIO]

Jason Bayani is the author of Amulet, published by Write Bloody Press. He’s a graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program and lives in the Bay Area. You can find him at www.jasonbayani.com

#writetoday

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(h/t)

Today you’re stealing from screenwriters. 

Before you write the poem use the three-act structure to create the outline.

If you want to add another step, think of the characters that will be in your poem-screenplay and write brief back stories for each of them.

To create the outline, use only 1-3 sentences for each item.

Act One (Set Up)

Inciting Incident:

Turning Point (PLOT TWIST!!):

Act Two (Confrontation/Development)

Midpoint:

Turning Point:

Act Three (Resolution)

Resolution:

Climax:

Roberto Ascalon, Pt. 1: to crunch bone like candy

For each day of National Poetry Month one of our fellows will explore the breadth of poetry in three ways: through a question from another fellow, through a poem and through a writing prompt, #writetoday.

[QUESTION] [POEM]

Mg Roberts asks, What can the honey badger teach you?

Roberto Ascalon responds,

What Can the Honey Badger Teach Us?

to believe in neither gods nor poisons

to lumber pretty, sashay and bite

to crunch bone like candy

to believe dirt is water

to thicken our skins

to roll the fat night

in our mouths,

ever in our

mouths

[BIO]

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NYC born Roberto Ascalon is an award-wining poet who has teaches across Seattle.  He is a Jack Straw and Kundiman Fellow, a two-time Seattle Slam Team member and the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize.   He lives in an old school building with a beautiful girl, a blackboard and a cat.