MISSING: Best Poetry of 2008 Lists

Happy New Year! We hope that 2009 will be filled with perfect line breaks, abundant and truthful metaphors and rollicking onomatopoeia.

But before we forget about 2008 entirely: I recently spent a full day going over 'Best Books of 2008' lists from major publications and websites (the NY Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, NPR, Amazon, etc) to uncover the Best Asian American Books for 2008 for Hyphen magazine, where I am Books Editor and blogger. 

I discovered that South Asians did quite well, especially when it came to fiction -- where Jhumpa Lahiri reigned supreme with her second short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. In terms of Asian American poetry, I found most of the books I listed from the Kundiman site, though Asian American poets also did well in the American Book Awards. Our own Ravi Shankar was one of the co-editors of a poetry anthology, Language for a New Century, that had a more international focus, but also featured Asian and South Asian American poets. But I did have a hard time finding mention of any South Asian poets on the lists, but maybe it wasn't because of the lack of South Asian poets. 

But what I realized more than anything else, was that POETRY itself was missing from this strange year-end calculation. Sure there were a few (try two) mentions of poetry in the SF Gate's 50 Best Fiction, Poetry Books of 2008, a handful of interesting anthologies in this Guardian story, and here's a random-ish list on the Library Journal site, but I think it is safe to say that poetry published in 2008 safely slipped under the radar of the year-end, gift-guide media frenzy -- as poetry is known to do.  

Is it because of the subjective nature of poetry that makes it hard to review or recommend? Either way, I think it speaks to the way poetry is marginalized in America, or at least seen as un-sellable in a time of year when it's all about the money. But it did inspire me to pay more attention to the way poetry is talked about in the media, for which this blog is a wonderful outlet. 

So, I'll end this post with a little bit of mainstream poet coverage. By this time, I'm sure you've all heard about poet Elizabeth Alexander scoring the biggest poet gig of all time: Barack Obama's Jan. 20th inauguration. Going back to my previous point, this Chicago Tribune article mentions how difficult it is to find Alexander's 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist collection American Sublime in Chicago bookstores. Either way, it is exciting to see poetry being published in major mainstream American dailies, like the Washington Post, and for indie Graywolf Press to get major attention. 

What poetry books of 2008 do you think were the best? And what were the best poems published by South Asian Americans in 2008? And does it really matter?

Featured Poet: DILRUBA AHMED

BIO:
Dilruba Ahmed’s poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Blackbird, Born Magazine, Catamaran: South Asian American Writing, Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, Drunken Boat, and New Orleans Review. Her work received first place for The Florida Review’s 2006 Editors’ Award. She holds B.Phil and M.A.T. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently enrolled in Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. program.



Q1: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written.

I just finished reading Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali, an intense and beautiful collection of poems. Here are a few lines from one of my favorite poems, “By the Waters of the Sind”: “Sharpened against/ rocks, the stream, rapid-cutting the night,/ find its steel a little stained/ with the beginning light,// and the moon must rise now from behind// that one pine-topped mountain to find/ us without you.” For me, Ali’s book has been particularly instructive as a model for weaving personal events with public and historical events.

Q: Describe the place/physical location
where you write most regularly .

A: My husband and I found the desk at a garage sale shortly after finishing college and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. The former owner sold us the first pieces of furniture that would furnish our new, empty apartment: two large leather chairs, a green folding card table, and a slim dark brown desk—all for $20!

While the other purchases have disappeared from our current home, the desk remains. It’s mainly a temporary storage space for materials related to my current projects: stacks of poetry books, books on the craft of writing and, of course, piles of paper. I love the desk itself but usually I take over the dining table for writing purposes. From the dining room, I face a view of the brightly lit living room and trees framed by windows. I spread my writing materials across the table surface into a river of books, papers, pens, highlighters, and notepads. I’m a big fan of sticky notes, so narrow strips of yellow or blue paper poke out from all of these materials.

I shelve books on craft behind me, and collections of poetry to my left. Poetry collections are the only books I alphabetize. Typically the wall to my left bears a few sticky notes with favorite lines of poetry or quotes on writing. Currently, I’ve posted a fortune from a fortune cookie declaring, You are a lover of words, someday you should write a book.

For years, I only wrote first drafts in spiral notebooks with pens. Periodically, I would review my scribblings, sometimes attempting to index them with more sticky notes—this time bearing enigmatic titles such as “dwelling-helped-harmed” or “serious children.” Eventually some of this raw material would appear in later, typed drafts. I now type many of my first drafts directly into my laptop.


Q3: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

I’m often obsessed with themes of cultural hybridity and forging new cultural identities. When I first began writing in earnest in college, the few South Asian titles on bookshelves at that time tended to focus on false dichotomies: West versus East, freedom versus limitation, good versus bad. So my early writing efforts attempted to respond to and defy such overly-simplified categories. Thankfully, times have changed! Now dozens of South Asian and South Asian American writers have brought new voices and more complex representations of cultural experiences into literary conversations.

NEWS: Upcoming Poetry Workshop

SHIFTING FOCUS: Changing Your Brain, Changing Your Poetic Practice –

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Kearney Street Workshop, (the nation’s oldest Asian American arts organization) is organizing a poetry workshop to tie in with its current visual arts exhibition “Shifting Focus”.

Taught by poet/scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam, this workshop is split over 2 consecutive Saturday mornings (11a.m. – 1p.m.) and is dedicated to helping you develop a sustainable and effective practice as a poet. Incorporating ideas from neuroscience (including research on enhancing perception and attentional mechanisms), the workshops aim to challenge the way that we, as writers, engage with the world around us. In particular, the 2 day workshop will explore how innovative metaphors can be used to shift our focus, both as readers and writers of poetry.

If you’re interested in registering for the course, please contact : info@kearnystreet.org
giving details of your full name and contact info.

INSTRUCTOR BIO: A former PEN USA Rosenthal Fellow, Pireeni's poetry has appeared in literary and political journals such as Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Progressive, and The Guardian newspaper (UK), university texts such as Three Genres (Prentice-Hall, 8th Edition, 2006; 9th edition, 2009), and anthologies such as Masala (Macmillan, 2005), and Language for a New Century (Norton, 2008). Her poetry has aired on national radio in Ireland, Sweden, and the US, and been featured at the United Nations headquarters, and the International Museum of Women. She is co-editor of Writing the Lines of Our Hands: the first anthology of South Asian American poetry (forthcoming). Pireeni was educated at Oxford University, and has held cognitive science research posts at MIT and UCLA. Dedicated to examining the confluence of art and science, in the past year alone, she has given lectures on “Poetry and The Brain” at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (SF), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin). Pireeni was born in Sri Lanka and currently lives in San Francisco. http://www.wordandviolin.com

DATE: Saturday 6 December & Saturday 13 December, 2008

TIME: 11a.m. – 1p.m

LOCATION: “Space180”
180 Capp Street (at 17th Street), San Francisco, California, 94110.

REGISTRATION:
Contact Kearny Street Workshop : Tel: 415.503.0520 Email: info@kearnystreet.org
To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, 180 Capp Street #5, San Francisco, CA 94110. Please include your full name and contact info.

NOVEMBER NEWS

We're delighted to hear that "Memory of Sugarcane-Worker Off Duty", Sasha Parmasad's poem from our anthology, is the winner of Poetry International's 2008 competition. The poem will be published in the next issue of the Poetry International journal.

6th Annual Third I Film Festival

Roll out the red carpet, yaar! It's that time of year when Third I showcases films from the South Asian diaspora. As usual, the lineup includes everything from engaging documentaries to the as-campy-as-they-come Bollywood numbers. I've got my (third) eye on the 1929 Bollywood classic, A Throw of Dice; Lakshmi and Me (a documentary of "gender, class, and the ethics of representation"); Maqbool (a recasting of Macbeth featuring Irffan Khan); and Slumdog Millionaire (the rise of an Indian slumdweller to a TV game show millionaire).

The Festival runs from Thursday, November 13, 2008 through Sunday, November 16, 2008. Venues include the Brava Theater and the Castro Theater.

For details on this year's lineup of films, check out:
http://www.thirdi.org/festival/

Also, here's an article I wrote about Third I in 2004. Obviously, the films are different, but it gives you a sense of how the film festival has emerged.
http://niralimagazine.com/2004/11/all-eyes-on-film/

Featured Poet: MAYA KHOSLA

Right: At work, looking for salamanders.










Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing. Her first full-length poetry manuscript Keel Bone won the 2004 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. While working for the National Park Service, she completed Web of Water, a creative nonfiction manuscript which was accepted for publication by the Golden Gate National Park Association Press in 1997. Poetry remains her favorite genre. She has been published in Americas Review, Poetry Flash and Seneca Review and was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1998.


Q: Name one collection of poetry that you wish you had written and why?

A: If it’s already been done, I’d rather be working on something different. I’m certainly influenced by what I’ve recently read and re-read (S. Bagchee, J. Harjo, T. Doshi, P. Levine, P. Rogers, R. Stone, J. Thayil). I’m just hoping my voice sounds more mine than anyone else’s.


Q: Describe the place/physical location where you write most regularly

A: My studio isn’t much of a red oak desk in a small room with bamboo
blinds, but it seems to be exactly what I need—now. Luckily, a walnut
tree and a loose assemblage of birds are associated with this setting,
which I’ve been working in for the last couple of years. There’s a
highly territorial Anna’s hummingbird, the regular, and a scattering of
visitors including white-crowned sparrows, mockingbirds, northern
flickers and a rare Cooper’s hawk. That’s the south-facing backdrop to
my rolltop desk.

Most writers say that it’s consistency that brings at least some amount of magic to the writing practice—consistent times, even consistent hours
of the day. I’m throwing geography in with that mix. It’s good to know that my studio’s location is so predictable that I can walk to it half
asleep, should the need arise. Or maybe what works is consistency in the degree of disorder. I have been reasonably productive within my own
mess. This may also have something to do with knowing my environs, the fact that thesaurus and dictionary are within reach, that a lot of the nonfiction, poetry and maps I need is on the floor or three steps to my right and that the fiction is downstairs.

I could also take the easy way out and blame my parents for a lot of these habits. My father begins writing at approximately the same timeeach morning and for the same number of hours each day, surrounded by the stacks and volumes that look so much like his favorite habitat that
when he’s outside it, he seems a little lost. Add messy clay and stained glaze notebooks to the picture and about the same was true of my mother,when she was alive. Good, I’m not the only one.


Q: What South Asian themes are you interested in exploring in your work?

A: Following naturalists around the Western Ghats and around the Indian Himalaya. Writing down everything they say. I’m including scientific experts, villagers, photographers—anyone who might be inclined to spend an evening with a just-emerged purple frog, a flame-backed woodpecker or a forest leopard—at a safe distance.

My Month at Hedgebrook

I had to miss out on the exciting Writing the Lines Litquake event on October 11th because I was tucked away in my cabin at Hedgebrook, a writing residency for women on Whidbey Island in Washington's Puget Sound.

Founded by Nancy Nordoff in 1988 on 48 acres of land, the whole idea behind Hedgebrook is inspired by Virginia Woolf's "belief that giving a writer a room of her own is the greatest gift of confidence in her voice."

I spent my four weeks there walking in the woods, reading endlessly (Salman Rushdie, Annie Dillard, Italo Calvino, Andre Dubus, Joan Didion, Carolyn Forche, Ruth Forman, Suheir Hammad -- who was in residence at Hedgebrook in the week before mine), eating delicious homegrown meals, conversing with the other writers and rejuvenating.

I went to Hedgebrook to revise a collection of short stories that was my MFA thesis from San Francisco State University and found that the long afternoons were exactly what I needed to have the courage to really, really revise my work properly. I thought of it as dropping my work off of a cliff and then slowly walking down to the valley below and discovering what I was really trying to say. But like other writers, I found myself engaged in all kinds of creative work besides the "goal" of my residency. I scribbled poetry in my journal about the shadows the fir trees drew across the writing desk, took obsessive pictures of the green banana slugs that slimed their way across the cedar wood chip paths, I edited video footage from my last trip to Kolkata, I prepared for my Bollywood Benshi performance, and made raging fires in my little woodstove.

I read David Lynch's treatise on transcendental meditation, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, every night. In his chapter called "The Art Life," he quotes an artist he knew as a child who said: "If you want to get one good hour of painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time." Word.

But beyond the time and space, the community I found at Hedgebrook was one of my favorite parts of the month. I met bad-ass poets and memoirists and journalists and novelists and prodigies and comedians and performers and ... the list goes on and on.

Even the women I didn't meet kept me company. In each of the cabins were twenty years of journal entries by former residents. In my cabin, I was drawn to a journal entry by a woman named Bishakha Datta who wrote about coming to Hedgebrook from India. Later, I found a documentary film in the Hedgebrook library called In the Flesh by Datta, which profiles three different people who work in the sex industry in Kolkata. It was an amazing film - done with so much love and humanity. It was a truly inspiring moment in my time there.

Writing the Lines contributors Minal Hajratwala and Maya Khosla were also former residents of Hedgebrook, and I would often pick up Khosla's award-winning book Keel Bone in the farmhouse library while waiting dinner. (It was exciting to think how Writing the Lines of Our Hands will one day be in the illustrious library as well.)

All in all, it was an amazing experience. I was even attacked by a territorial barred owl one night! The deadline for application is every September. But I got some tips about other residencies and these were highly recommended: MaDowell, Sacatar, Jentel and the Headlands Center for the Arts (where Writing the Lines contributor Bushra Rehman is currently in residence).

But being back at home (and work), my goal is to find that uninterrupted four hours at least once a week, if not more. Here's to all of you doing the same!