this is where i will be on monday & tuesday

i am presenting a paper at a conference at UC Davis monday and reading on tuesday.

check out the program, very exciting

here's a description of the conference. wish me luck ;)

The conference “Discursive Practices: The Formation of a Transnational Indigenous Poetics” brings together scholars and writers from México, U.S., Canada, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, that engage and/or produce indigenous literary creations. By making indigenous literature central to indigenous peoples concerns, the organizers hope to dispel the conventional idea that the indigenous experience needs mediation. The conference will provide a fertile continuation of dialogue for future scholarship in this area as well as a space for indigenous writers and intellectuals to know each other’s works. To a great degree, indigenous literary projects connect to social movements centered on cultural (re)vindication and human and cultural rights. And yet, the notion of “Writing Indians” continues to be perceived as an anomaly. The conference wants to facilitate the opportunity of dialogue between the indigenous writers of the Americas and re-establish their legitimate leadership as aesthetic creators of their own destiny.

this is where i will be on friday!

The Xicana/o Culture Working Group at U.C. Berkeley proudly presents:

The 1st Annual Encuentro Xican@

Friday, May 9th, 2008
9:30 A.M. – 5:00 P.M.
Tilden Room, MLK Student Union

A community gathering of activists, scholars, poets, public intellectuals,
and dreamers.

Featuring:

A Keynote address by Chicano activist and scholar Dr. Carlos Munoz, Jr.

Panels on Immigrant Rights and Youth Violence Prevention

An Artist Plenary with spoken word artist Paul Flores, writer Carla
Trujillo, visual artists Taller Tupac Amaru (Melanie Cervantes & Jesus
Barraza), and Professor Laura E. Perez

FOLLOWED BY

**************** The 2nd Annual Noche de Florycanto ****************

5:00-6:30 Dinner/ Reception 330 Wheeler
6:30-9:30PM Florycanto 315 Wheeler Hall, Maude Fife Room


Featuring:

Nahuatl opening/blessing by Xicana songstress Eutimia Montoya

A rare public appearance & reading by the legendary Chicano poet

******************** JOSE MONTOYA *****************************

The Winners of the 2nd Annual Florycanto Chicana/o Poetry Prize

Naomi Quinonez

Achiote Press poets: Javier Huerta and Gabriela Erandi Rico

Alejandro Perez

And a special performance by: The Brown Buffalo Project


This event is wheelchair-accessible, Free & Open to the Public


For more information, please contact Marcelle Maese-Cohen
(mmaesecohen@berkeley.edu) or Gaby Erandi Rico (erandi_rico@berkeley.edu)

defusion

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thanks to everyone who commented below...i will respond soon and i hope others will too. debbie's comment made me spit my hot tea all over my laptop from sudden laughter. thanks debbie!

anyhoo, did anyone notice the Guam flag that Clayton Banes posted on his blog? i'm so used to the invisibility that enshrouds my homeland that it sure did surprise me. but as you politically-minded folk prob know, guam has been getting some 'attention' from the primaries since the vote is so close. well, the vote on guam was close also: obama won by 7 votes! that's only like 1/15 of all my cousins (only on my dad's side).

there have been many articles and news clips about guam recently--some of which are completely offensive--others just blatantly ignorant. the most interesting one to me so far is this one, from PBS newshour. altho the clip employs a very typical and nauseating narrative of Guam, this narrative gets undercut in interesting ways by the two live interviews, which disrupt for a moment until they are subsumed again within the narrative.

despite the problems i have with the video, it gives some sense as to why i don't consider myself 'american' (why i resist the narrative of inevitable 'fusion' as 'american') even tho i've been an immigrant in the states for nearly 13 years.

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the asian-american author is dead

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i could listen to javier huerta talk about his poems all day. amazing.

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however, i could live a happy life if i never hear another word from raymond bianchi. in a post about a new anthology called LANGUAGE FOR A NEW CENTURY: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond , Bianchi writes:

The work is so broad that it seems that every poet who has anything to do with Asia is included. [...] There are some really great poets in this book. Nikmet Hazmet, Sarah Gambito, Prageeta Sharma, Ha Jin and Bei Dao among them. The fact is however that the weight of the size of Asia makes this book seem unsatisfying in its scope having said that how does one encapsulate Asia in 695 pages? The book is in reality a triumph and gives many Asian voices a chance in the American market [...]

so bianchi is a little overwhelmed by the sheer size of asia and a little underwhelmed by the sheer size of the anthology. he goes on to write:

One of the problems with After-Postmodern Racial politics is that there are no boundaries. When does someone stop being "asian" and become just American or British? It is hard to argue that some of these poets are really "asian" in fact 102 of the over 240 poets are in fact immigrants or natives of the USA, Australia and the UK and if their goal was to create an anthology of all poets with any Asian blood- where are the Latin American Asian poets?

Poetic identity politics is a really dangerous road. This might have been the result of the fact that all three editors are Anglo-American academics the inclusion of a poet editor from the Middle East or East Asia might have mitigated this problem. There are poets in this book who it is hard to argue they are Asian- Yehuda Amichai comes to mind is he really a Middle Eastern Poet? Is Ashkenazi Israeli culture Asian? You see why this is problematic.



yes, i do see why this is problematic! racial politics are just way too flexible these days, with asian-americans, filipino-americans, korean-americans, chinese-americans, japanese-americans--who can keep track of all of these borderless bodies! they are not REALLY asian! it gets worse:

Would Peter Gizzi or Jennifer Scappettone be included in a contemporary Italian anthology? Of course not- but people whose connections to Asia are just as distant are included here and I think that it is a weakness of this book. I think that the anthologists should have limited themselves to poets living in Asia or ones whose primary formation was in Asian culture not Immigrant Culture. Many of the poets included who are of Asian origin are really part of their immigrant cultures- not Asian culture directly and this is the only weakness of this book.


thus, the asian-american poet is dead. apparently, if you descend from asian immigrants then you are no longer part of asian culture in any 'direct' way, but you are now part of the grand melting pot known as 'immigrant culture'. well, it's good that bianchi came along and clarified the boundaries and saved not only those confused asian-americans but all our cultureless immigrant souls from the dangerous road of 'poetic identity politics'. forgive us for having complex cultural and racial subjectivities and for rejecting the assimilation myth of immigration. we're sorry to confuse you.

and my favorite bit of bianchi's idiocy:

In the end however contemporary poetic identity politics gets in the way of a book that might have been seminal instead it is only important.

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on Friday's reading

the reading at the Human Rights Summit at San Francisco State University on friday went very well. i read 3 poems: "Juan Malo & the Tip of America's Spear" "Juan Malo & Where America's Day Begins" and "from achiote". 11 minutes on the dot. crowd was maybe 30-40 people...it was hard to tell because the room was very big. got to hear some great poets (all somehow related to SFSU...professors/students/friends). unfortunately, my pics of all 8 readers did not come out, so below you will see:

camille dungy, chad sweeney, maxine chernoff, and michael warr. it was my first time meeting michael warr and i didn't know that he was co-publisher of Tia Chucha press and apparently he was roommates with luis rodriguez. luckily, he gave me his card so i hope we can stay in touch.

the video is of a band i saw (roger clyne and the peacemakers) friday night at slim's in san francisco (yes, it was an all day city day).

three comments

here are three comments left on this blog on different blogposts that i wanted to put into dialogue and perhaps spark further dialogue.

barbara:

OK, I really like this statement you've excerpted here, as it is asserting the existence of the opposite of noble savage. I think the expectation placed on the ethnic writer to represent that pure indigenous experience, language, and culture stems from a denial on the part of the dominant culture that the dominant culture has displaced the "indigenous" via mission work/Christian conversion, boarding schools, destruction of the places where the "indigenous" have made their homes and a subsequent movement into city streets, etc.

mark:

Williams was a *doctor* for God's sake..and consequently ,possessed more money than me, you, Silliam, Knott...probably combined. I don't quite get the connection between Williams and under-represented minorities in the least. For all intents and purposes, certainly from the perspective of his time, he was a white guy like anyone else--perhaps descended from the first wave of immigrants to hit U.S. shores in the 19th century, but in no way part of any immigrant population since that time.

Ergo, any talk of the legacy of Williams vis-a-vis non-whiteness is kind of hollow. Which is not to say that because of that that the award ought to a priori go to a white guy at all. However, I'd say that Craig is correct in pointing out that from an "ethnic" perspective that Saroyan fits the Bill moreso than Williams does. Perhaps they are both (Williams and Saroytan) united in having wads of cash that most of us, white or less white or not white do not. Being immersed in penury myself, I don't however, object to the choice of Saroyan on that basis. (In fact, I don't object to the choice of Saroyan at all, but that is not my point here.)

My point here being that I'd say the issue of race here is irrelevant. Certainly nobody would call Saroyan canonical--his exception from said cannon having nothing to do whatsoever with race, but rather the character of the work he does. Which I'd say one would be hard pressed not to recognize its influence, however, remotely upon what has followed in poetry. Nobody had collected it in the way that UDP did previously, so thus, as an editorial effort, it is "contemporary" insofar as it hasn't been done before. 40 years is not a huge amount of time in the scheme of things, so perhaps Saroyan wasn't recognized 40 years, well, then why not now?--The award isn't about specifically lauding the work of "new" or "young" poets, but rather the best book of the year by a small publisher, the criteria of which, I would say that the Saroyan book fulfills admirably.

francisco:

Your post today reminds me of the Introduction that Garrett Hongo wrote for his edited volume of Asian American poetry nearly twenty years ago called _The Open Boat_. My recollection of that Introduction is that he got a lot of flack for the volume's aesthetic diversity, for including, for example, the work of John Yau.

But I tend to be a tad optmistic on this question, based on my observations of the activities of such people like Roberto Tejada, who co-edits Mandorla (which he founded while living in Mexico City); Gabe Gomez and J Michael Martinez and their project Breach Press. And what J. Michael Rivera is doing in CO. And the fact that John Chavez is making experimental Latino poetry and this question in general the subject of his doctoral studies at Nebraska is great. Roberto Harrison in Milwaukee is also doing interesting work as an editor/publisher, in addition to his own work.

I'm also very encouraged by the fact that Carmen Jimenez Smith is on the verge of taking over the editorship of PUERTO DEL SOL at New Mexico State. This bit of news is perhaps most ground-breaking of all: how many literary journals of this scope are headed by a Latino/a? The only other one I can think of is ROGER, edited by Renee Soto, but it's still very recent and not as nationallly recognized as PDS.

AND YET: One thing Roberto Tejada mentioned when I had the chance to speak with him at length in mid March is that it's only been recently (if I heard him correctly) that he and others (like Rodrigo Toscano) has noticed what little visibility avant Latinos have gotten from the avant establishment. The most recent case in point was the Arizona Poetry Center's festival/conference on innovative poetry that didn't include any Latino/as event though it's now clear that there are Latino/as writing from these innovative strands.

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'extra-literary expectations'

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i know i know NaBlogWriMo is over. but hey, while i'm here i might as well say that i just finished my first review of the month! it's of jaime luis huenun's PUERTO TRAKL (PORT TRAKL) which you can dig at ACTION BOOKS.

the translator's introduction, writ by daniel borzutzky, includes a passage (in translation) from an article. huenun said:

"the emergence of an ethnic poetry has generated a series of extra-literary expectations, one of which seems to suggest that a writer of indigenous origins can only sing about the natural world, his ancestors, his gods and mythologies. And it's all the better if he does this in his native language. I try, simply, not to deceive; that is, I try to maintain a certain coherence between my origins, my upbringing and my literary interests and obsessions. In this sense, I think that a poet of indigenous origins raised in an urban Chilean school, as is my case, does not need to...defend his ethnic condition by writing bad ethnic poetry."

(el mercurio, 2/22/02) (trans by borzutzky)

altho i did not address this passage in my review (which is already at 1500 words), i wanted to see what you folks thought about this statement.

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blogging against the wind

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i did it! i've survived NaBlogWriMo! to all those who said i couldnt do it, kiss my blog! and to all those who gave me support and encouragement and food for thought, this blog's for you. NaBlogWriMo was by far the hardest month in my life, and i couldnt have made it without you.

i've changed the settings on this blog so that all 30 posts from NaBlogWriMo can be seen. what i want to know from you dear reader is which post was your favorite and why?

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The Liberal White Man's Burden

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are you in the mood for some fun and free books? then go to the OMNIDAWN blog and play our new contest! you can win OMNIDAWN books--plus, only one person has played so far so you have a good chance of winning ;)

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and yes, if you are wondering why i havent continued the train of thought from a few posts down, it's because i've been busy-busy with school...hopefully some reprieve soon. today was fun tho, as i got to meet with one my poetry heroines juliana spahr at her lovely home in berkeley. i 'interviewed' her for a project i'm working on which i will talk more about later.

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what i do want to blog about today is a blogpost i just read by BILL KNOTT. a rambling post in which he bashes ron silliman's choice of aram saroyan's complete minimal poems as the winner of the william carlos williams award.

i've only been in the poetry world for a short time, but it's quite obvious to me that everyone--from poets to editors, judges to critics, translators to reviewers--has their preferences. and yes, there's a fine line between preferences and prejudices. to me, ron's choice reflected his preferences and a particular reading of williams. so what.

i commented on what i found interesting about his choice here: "a writer whose work hardly gets talked about in terms of 'ethnic' poetry gets chosen for an award named after a writer whose work hardly gets talked about in terms of 'ethnic' poetry."

what's very strange about knott's post is that he accuses ron of "picking a Rich White Male from a wealthy background." he goes on to say, parenthetically: "(Parenthetically, in his desire to honor the heritage of WCW, might he not well have considered the ethnic roots of William Carlos Williams, and with that lineage in mind looked to chose one of the meritous poets of Hispanic background currently publishing their work—)."

isnt it funny how Knott italices the "carlos" as if to say hello! look at his middle name and recognize his 'ethnic roots! hello mr knott, look at 'aram saroyan'. oh wait, let me italicize it for you 'aram saroyan'. that look like a 'white' name to you? of course, ethnicity's much more complicated than one's names: saroyan is jewish / armenian. dig his pic. williams' mother, Raquel Helene Rose Hoheb, was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico (her mother was from Matinique and her father was from Puerto Rico of Dutch ancestry ). Williams' father, William George Williams, was an English businessman. if knott wants the winner of the prize to match up with the prize name, saroyan is not a bad choice.

another annoying thing about knott's post is his white paternalism. apparently, he was also a judge of the williams prize at some point:

"I can hardly criticize Silliman for choosing a White Male when I myself back there in what year was it, '77, '78, did the same—

and nothing (it seems) has changed in the 30 years since then, has it—

I could have opted for an African-American Woman/Latina/Asian, but I voted my private devotion to [John] Logan"

yes mr. knott you had the power and oh why didnt you bestow your lamplight onto the tired, the poor, the huddled masses and wretched refuse that yearn to win poetry prizes awarded by white men. oh great father, why did you forsake us!

knott goes on, still reeling from the guilt of not having fulfilled The Liberal White Man's Burden (i feel a Kipling spoof coming on):

"Thirty years ago I could have voted for a minority poet, a woman poet, but I didn't, and last week Silliman could have also, but he didn't."

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i cant help it (first stanza):

Take up the Liberal White Man's burden--
Reject the work of ye breed--
Go find the poets of color
To serve your editors' need;
To read in every corner,
Of common folk and exotic--
Your new-caught, ethnic flavor,
Half-devil and half-poet.

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Poetry & Human Rights

if you are in the bay area, i will be reading this friday (between 1:00-2:30) at the FIFTH ANNUAL HUMAN RIGHTS SUMMIT at San Francisco State University. The theme for the summit is "Privileged Destruction: Examining Environmental Justice." you can read a complete schedule here (scroll all the way down for poet bios)

my first and last name will be reading with

1.)Ann Galjour
2.)Camille Dungy
3.)Craig Perez
4.)Chad Sweeney
5.)Kristi Lynn Moos
6.)Laura Moore
7.)Maxine Chernoff
8.)Michael Warr

some kind of cruel joke / great honor to have me read between camille dungy and chad sweeney! eek &

listen:

ACHIOTE PRESS SPRING 2008 CHAPBOOKS NOW ON SALE!

(photo courtesy of oscar bermeo. check out his flickr of the event here).

the rumors are true! achiote press spring 2008 chapbooks are now available for purchase at our website.

for those new to achiote press, we publish 2 chapbooks every season and sell them as a pair. one chap is always single authored and the other is our famous chap-journal ACHIOTE SEEDS.

this season, the achiote seeds issue features four writers: CRISTINA GARCIA, BRENDA CARDENAS, EMMY PEREZ, and GABRIELA ERANDI RICO. with all the talk about Latin@ poetry, this issue is a must have.

our single author chapbook is a first for us: a chapter from a novel-in-progress titled SARAME by MARIA TUTTLE. Tuttle's historical (archival) novel is about the life of an aspiring Opera singer in El Paso, Texas during the early 20th century. another cool thing about the chap is that it features an actual photo of Sarame on the cover, as well as newspaper clippings relating to her life (we were given permission to publish the photo and clippings from the special collections departments of the u of texas at el paso library).

$12 gets you the set of 2 chapbooks, which you can paypal here. if you want to pay by check, please email me: csperez06 [at] gmail [dot] com

i should also tell you that we only make a 100 of each, and the issues tend to sell out fairly quickly (plus we sold a bunch last night)--so act now ;)

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Here are the bios of the contributors:


Cristina Garcia was born in Havana and grew up in New York
City. She attended Barnard College and the John Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies. Garcia has
worked as a correspondent for Time magazine in San Francisco,
Miami, and Los Angeles. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was
nominated for a National Book Award and has been widely
translated. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow
at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers’
Award.

Brenda Cardenas' chapbook of poetry From the Tongues of Brick
and Stone was published by Momotombo Press (Institute for
Latino/a Studies, University of Notre Dame) in 2005, and her
full-length book Boomerang is forthcoming from Bilingual Review
Press. She also co-edited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina
Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). Cardenas’
work has appeared in a range of publications, including The City
Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, The Wind Shifts: The New
Latino Poetry, Poetic Voices Without Borders, U.S. Latino Literature
Today, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Prairie Schooner,
RATTLE, and the Poetry Daily web site, among others. With
Sondio Ink(quieto), a spoken word and music ensemble, she co-
produced and released the CD Chicano, Illinoize: The Blue Island
Sessions in 2001. Cardenas is currently an Assistant Professor in
the Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee.

Gabriela Erandi Rico (P'urhepecha & Matlatzinca). A Mexican
indigenous writer, poet, and emerging scholar, Gabriela Erandi
was born in Michoacan, Mexico and grew up following the
migrant farm-worker trail along the American West Coast. After
graduating from Stanford, she participated in INCITE's Sisterfire!
Cultural Arts Tour for Radical Women of Color. As an Ethnic Studies
doctoral student at U.C. Berkeley, she's interested in exploring
the performance and commodification of indigenous identity and
spirituality in Mexico as well as the displacement of Mexican
indigenous people through urbanization and international
migration. Her poetry has been published in various magazines
and anthologies including We Got Issues! A Young Woman’s Guide
to Living a Bold, Courageous and Empowered Life (2005), Antologia
Anual de Mujeres Poetas en el Pais de las Nubes (2005, 2006, & 2007),
Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry (2006), Mujeres de Maiz (2007),
and Seventh Native American Generation (2004 & 2008). She is the
2007 recipient of the Xochiquetzalli Award for Xicana /
Indigenous Women's Poetry and will also appear in Rosa Linda
Fregoso's forthcoming anthology on feminicide in the Americas.

Emmy Perez is the author of Solstice (Swan Scythe Press 2003).
She has received poetry fellowships from the New York
Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work in
Provincetown, and for her prose writing, the James D. Phelan
Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has
appeared in North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Prairie
Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, LUNA, The Wind Shifts: New Latino
Poetry, and other publications. Audio recordings of some of her
poems are forthcoming online at From the Fishouse
(www.fishousepoems.org). Originally from Santa Ana,
California, she currently lives in the U.S./Mexico borderlands,
where she is an Assistant Professor in the M.F.A. program at the
University of Texas-Pan American. She also teaches poetry in
local detention centers.

Maria Tuttle was born on the 2nd of May 1974 in Bogotá, Colombia. Her
mother, Elvia Gladys, immigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, leaving Maria in
Colombia for a period of time. Maria immigrated to Cincinnati as a young
child, eventually becoming a naturalized citizen. She attended Anderson
High School, graduating in 1992. She entered the Art Academy of
Cincinnati that same year, earning a BFA in painting and art history in
1997. Maria entered the writing program at the University of Cincinnati
where she earned an MA in comparative literature in 2002. She has worked
as a fine art book editor for a midsize publishing company, but knew that
she wanted to further her writing education. Within a year of earning her
MA, Maria applied to and was accepted by the Bilingual Creative Writing
Program at the University of Texas at El Paso where she earned an MFA in
creative writing and border studies in 2005. She left El Paso and now
resides in Oakland, CA and is currently working at Los Medanos College in
Pittsburg, California as an English professor. She is also the director of the
Puente Program, a program designed to assist under-represented students
to transfer to 4-year colleges and universities.

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Achiote Press Spring Release Party

some pics from tonight's events.

1) the crowd
2) oscar bermeo working the crowd (about 40 folks)
3) gabriela erandi rico
4) maria tuttle
5) javier huerta
6) barbara jane reyes
7) truong tran

thanks to all those who came and to our wonderful readers!








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'by a minority'

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so what are the dangers of the narrative sketched out in my previous post?

most directly related to selinger's essay is how this narrative obscures the craft of the earlier generation of ethnic poets. as javier reminds us, "most scholars who study Corky's work, or alurista's, or any work of someone in that generation, tend to study it with a cultural studies lens or Marxist lens." disrupting this tendency, javier's aims to "critically engage their work to learn exactly what's going on at the level of craft."

simon, in javier's original post, is even more blinded than selinger by the myth of the ethnic poet: "I detect in the lines a poet whose talent may be better suited for the Nuyorican-esque slam scene, where exaggerated gestures (such as, indeed, that "or", or the ALL CAPS THIS IS SERIOUS) and steady, transparent "identity" definition work far better, and a, yes, slack and rhythmically dull line on the page can be revitalized by an idiosyncratic delivery. I've seen this quite a bit, actually, especially in work being pitched as explicitly "by a minority": eager to transfer the slam to the more "professional" page, editors overlook quite a bit."

simon claims to have "seen this quite a bit", but the only thing he's able to see is limited by the narrative that accompanies the pitch: "by a minority". like any grand narrative, it dangerously limits the imagination; simon's comments are symptomatic of this limit. (at least selinger is able to expand his imagination and see the striking prosodic structure of 'i am joaquin')

the danger of occluding craft coincides with another: the expectations that accrue from ethnic poetry being situated merely in 'identity poetics'. ethnic writers are often expected--by the mainstream or by the minority community--to write in the mode(l) of the earlier generation (to choose the first path) and are punished if they dont.

Jose Garcia Villa is a good example. In “Asian/American Modernisms: José Garcia Villa’s Transnational Poetics,” [18] scholar Tim Yu writes:

It is Villa’s very allegiance to the universalizing aesthetic dicta of high modernism and the Anglo-American literary canon that has prevented him, up to now, from being considered under the rubric of American ethnic writing. Indeed, Villa’s admission into the Asian American literary canon may do less to stabilize Villa’s position and more to destabilize the category of Asian American literature itself; for one reason Villa has frequently been unfavorably been compared to his contemporary, Bulosan, is because Bulosan’s social engagement and activism, both inside his work and outside it, have been seen as more amenable to the political goals of Asian American studies than Villa’s detached aestheticism. To accept Villa, in short, is to alter our very notion of the ‘Asian American.’

again, the critical imaginary of Asian American studies was limited by the narrative of 'identity poetics' and Villa existed precariously outside their vision because he did not fit into the political goals and bounden aesthetic duties of 'Asian American literature.'

In an interview with Harryette Mullen, conducted by Michael Magee and Farah Griffin in an issue of COMBO, Mullen talks about her struggles when she began writing experimental poems:

Well, I mean, one reason I wrote Muse and Drudge is because having written Tree Tall Woman, you know, and when I went around reading from that book there were a lot of black people in my audience. There would be white people and brown people and other people of color as well. Suddenly, when I went around to do readings of Trimmings and “Spermkit,” I would be the one black person in the room, reading my poetry […] it was interesting. But that’s not necessarily what I wanted, you know, and I thought, “How am I going to get all these folks to sit down together in the same room?” Muse and Drudge was my attempt to create that audience. […] and I didn’t think I was any less black in those two books or any more black in Tree Tall Woman but I think that the way that these things get defined in the public domain is that, yeah, people saw “Spermkit” as being not a black book but an innovative book. And this idea that you can be black or innovative, you know, is what I was really trying to struggle against. And Muse and Drudge really was my attempt to show that I can do both at the same time.

or, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s essay "Goodbye, Columbus? Notes on the Culture of Criticism," he writes: "If black authors are primarily entrusted with producing the proverbial 'text of blackness', they become vulnerable to the charge of betrayal if they shirk their duty."

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there are two more things i want to cite in relation to the dangers of this narrative (and i will also get to the values of this narrative), but i am out of time so it will have to wait :)

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if you live in the bay area, come to achiote press' spring issues release party in berkeley!!!!

What: Achiote Spring Issues Release Party
When: Friday, April 25th: 6pm--8pm
Where: Ethnic Studies Library, Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley Campus


We'll have food, drinks and music. The event is free, open to the
public and we welcome families and children

*Achiote Press will celebrate the release of our Spring issues with a party and reading on Friday, April 25th at the Ethnic
Studies Library on the UC Berkeley campus.*

The event will feature special readings by former Achiote contributors

*Barbara Jane Reyes* (Poeta en San Francisco) *Truong Tran* (Within The Margin), and *Oscar Bermeo* (Anywhere Avenue).

*Maria Tuttle* will read from her new Achiote chapbook, Saramé. * This chapbook contains an excerpt from Tuttle's historical (archival) novel about the life of an aspiring Opera singer in El Paso, Texas during the early 20th century.*

*Gabriela Erandi Rico* will read from her contributions to the new Achiote Seeds chapjournal.

*Javier Huerta, author of Some Clarifications y otras poemas, will read selections from other contributors to the journal: Emmy Pérez, Christina García, and Brenda Cárdenas.)

* Poet Oscar Bermeo will emcee the night.


Sponsored by the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, Asian American Studies Program, and Chicano Studies Program.

the codes of oppressed people

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so where we left off:

"In poetry, there continues to be a radical break between those networks and scenes which are organized by and around the codes of oppressed people, and those other 'purely aesthetic' schools."

we might describe the 'codes of oppressed people' as voice emerging from suppression, as identity emerging from dissolution, as narrative emerging from silence. we might describe the 'codes of oppressed people' as the struggle to be heard and live in the memories of those who don't see us. we might read sheryl's 'I AM' as a song of visibility at the edge of invisibility. yes, this is a 'radical break' from the 'purely aesthetic' because more is at stake than to simply 'make it new'.

however, the 'codes of oppressed people' are always historically coded, always subject to change. furthermore, the phrase 'oppressed people' creates a homogenous entity unable to shed the adjectival prison of 'oppressed'. it's more accurate to say 'peoples', more accurate to say 'the changing codes of peoples who suffer from and struggle against oppression'.

emerging from these changing codes, the contemporary 'ethnic-avant' questions this 'radical break' by racializing modernist and postmodernist aesthetic techniques to articulate personal and collective suffering and to protest against individual and systemic oppression. the 'radical break' that silliman describes has been radicalized by the 'ethnic-avant'.

the truncated narrative i've just told sketches the contours of the grand recit of ethnic poetry in america. more specifically, the narrative is usually situated in the 60s and 70s with the Black Arts Movement and the Multicultural Poetry Movement representing the full blossoming of the Harlem Renaissance. as the story goes, these poetries depended on the voice and performance of Identity (hence the term 'Identity Poetry'). The poetic 'codes of oppressed people' depended on--in fact, needed for their continued existence--a stable, essential(ized) subjectivity. The aesthetic form was entirely secondary if it mattered at all.

the grand narrative forks with the postmodern dissolution of the subject and the poststructuralist deconstruction of representation. the successive generations of ethnic poets had to choose between:

remaining a craftless Identity poet (as an Oprah poetry book) or to give up on the page entirely and become a slam / spoken word poet.

OR

by embracing the postmodern aesthetic (and, of course, you'd be expected to get an MFA or PhD) and to carve the wood broken by the preceding generation (as javier described so eloquently).

In selinger's letter to the editor, he highlights the craft of 'i am joaquin' to show that even tho he is more than able to read the music and design of the poem, he didnt. "why did i not even look?" he asks. he gives us numerous reasons: 1) he's afraid of abstractions; 2) he identifies with the object of the poet's scorn (white society); 3) he has a class bias (which made him assume the poem would be 'art-less' and 'working-class'); 4) he's not sure if he asks poetry to change lives or to make things happen.

I want to add to the list that the grand narrative of ethnic poetry in america also contributed to his blindness, even if only as a 'narrative unconscious'.

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curses, time's up...sorry for the bad grammar/meandering organization but am racing the clock here. will write more on this tomorrow but only if people prove that THEY AM and comment.

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my dactyllic dimeter is bigger than your trochaic trimeter

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in javier's initial response to selinger, he brilliantly draws out the 'craft' of 'i am joaquin' show its music and design (that the poem isn't simply 'slack free verse', as selinger dismisses in his essay).

javier mines the lines:

A strong iambic rhythm drives the music in this opening stanza. Actually all the lines in the first stanza scan as iambic, beginning with a dimeter in the first line, continuing with tetrameter lines, and finally concluding with the iambic pentameter of the heroic couplet. The last four lines of the first stanza can be scanned as two iambic pentameter lines that are dropped after the first foot.

finds the rhymes:

The heroic couplet is completed with the rhyme battle/survival. Notice also the internal rhymes of struggle and cultural. This rhyming is established earlier in the stanza. In the second line, the poem's I is “lost in a world of confusion,” and in the third line the poem's I is “caught up in a whirl.” Notice the echo and the condensing of the noun phrase “world of confusion” into the single word “whirl.”

and functions the conjunctions

In addition to emphasizing “or” by placing it on its own line, Gonzales rhymes “or” with “hunger” in order to reveal the uncertainty in hunger. The “or” is further emphasized by the “r” sounds in the following words: paradox, victory, spirit, hunger, American, neurosis, and sterilization. The focus of the first stanza is “and”; the focus of the second is “or.” The joining of and/or is at the center of the paradoxes of the poem...

in selinger's letter to the editor response, he also scans the lines:

The first line I, too, read as iambic dimeter. The next is trimeter—dactyl, dactyl, trochee—while the third and fourth are, to the ear, a single tetrameter line, with “caught” a “headless” iamb leading into three more dactyls.

and he goes on to admit that yes, 'i am joaquin' is a well crafted poem. but before I, too, go on, let's recall what pound once warned: "go in fear of the headless iamb."

okok, since i only have 30 minutes here, i will be more serious.

in javier's 22nd comment, he writes:

In the end, I think that our focus on the social, cultural and political concerns of our elders keeps us from recognizing and acknowledging the intriguing and innovative ways they engaged formal (aesthetic) questions.

selinger, trying to account for why he missed the 'craft' in 'i am joaquin, writes:

...by slapping the label of “working class poet” on Gonzales himself, and of “working class aesthetics” on the poem, I substituted knee-jerk categorizing for actually reading [...] Having assumed that the poem would be more-or-less artless, and having heard its diction as that of a speech, rather than of a poem, I never looked beyond those first impressions. Had I approached the poem more expectantly, or simply without class bias, I would have seen more, as indeed I did after Huerta’s letter.

javier re-articulates this sentiment in a comment to his 22nd post:

Most scholars who study Corky's work, or alurista's, or any work of someone in that generation, tend to study it with a cultural studies lens or Marxist lens. Arteaga's Chicano Poetics is really the only work I know (if someone knows of others, please let me know) that tackles the issue of language in Chicano Poetry. He uses Bahktin and Deleuze to discuss all the intriguing stuff going on in their poetics.) I guess my point is that the tendency is not to focus on aesthetic or language issues when discussing a work like Joaquin.

in the next few days (and i hope you will comment), i want to question why the work from this 'generation' of poets (and i want to extend the discussion to include ethnic poetry in general) read with such a limited lens? how did this narrative of "working class poet" and "working class aesthetic" form? why is it so pervasive that not only selinger (aka Dr. Dactyl) but even some contemporary ethnic poets (as javier alludes to) are blinded by this narrative?

i will leave you with this passage from Ron Silliman's essay "The Political Economy of Poetry" in his brilliant book The New Sentence (1977):

"In poetry, there continues to be a radical break between those networks and scenes which are organized by and around the codes of oppressed people, and those other 'purely aesthetic' schools."

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so tomorrow i will write more on this. please comment because NaBlogWriMo is such a dactyl, dactyl, trochee grind. i need your encouraging iambic pentameters to keep me alive: i blog therefore i am(b)!

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the san diego zoo & other enclosures

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long travel day (tho not a very long distance). forgot to mention that i went to the san diego zoo yesterday. i dont like zoos, too implicated in the imperial project and yet almost a necessary evil to save what is endangered. tho it was a sunny day, i had a difficult time because the very first animal i saw was the Guam Rail , what we call the ko'ko'. it was a very strange lacanian moment to see my country's bird in a little cage in san diego. it broke my heart. ugh, anyways, here are some pics of other animals (including the very rare upside down flamingoes!):



























































































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wait a minute, you might say, that's not a wild animal, that's the irish-american poet javier o'huerta!

in case you havent noticed, javier has written a follow up to the discussion of 'i am joaquin' with a post called "the 22nd comment"
(which to me sounds like the title of a sci-fi noir film about a poet blogger who after the 22nd comment begins to find and read blogs written by dead poets).

selinger comments on that blog post. spanking of selinger, he also writ a post on the topic at his blog here. AND he posted his letter to the editor response at the LPR site. and speaking of maria melendez, she blogradiotalks about the discussion here (i highly recommend you listen to the whole thing as she also reads some of her own AMAZING poems, along with a poem by valerie martinez (i got to see both of them speak on a panel at AWP).

i have much to say about all this, but alas my time is up for tonight. hopefully you will stop by tomorrow as NaBlogWriMo rolls on.

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if it aint beyond baroque, dont fix it

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beyond baroque is a magical place and i am happy their lease issues were settled. i got to talk with their executive director, fred dewey, and he is a really awesome man. he showed me their chapbook selection (the best i've ever seen) and encouraged me and achiote press to send our chapbooks to their chapbook archive., which has books dating back to the sixties. the next time i am in town, i would love to just dig thru all the old chaps.

i finally met steve dolph, the co-editor of Calque, and he has wonderful energy. also, the newest issue of Calque was available for the reading and it's quite a treat. i'm most excited about jen hofer's translations of laura solarzano's LOST MOUTH. i reviewed jen's translations of laura's LIP WOLF (ACTION BOOKS). my review is in the current issue of the DENVER QUARTERLY.

beyond baroque has a cool little theatre space...and the best thing was that i got to read last (as i joked at the reading, i'm tired of being typecast as the young, good looking opening act for older, more famous poets)! i sat patiently listening to jen hofer, suzanne jill levine, and stephen kessler read from their translations (all from the spanish) and some of their original work. i was in awe to be in such amazing company.

i read:

1) excerpts from ALL WITH OCEAN VIEWS
2) excerpts from THE LEGENDS OF JUAN MALO
3) excerpts from PRETERRAIN
4) from achiote

after the reading, i was very honored that Antje Ravic Strubel bought all my chapbooks and told me about this group in germany that is working with the chapbook form. i gave her my email and she is supposed to send me some samples. she's apparently in LA for a few more weeks. so cool.

also, i met Tisa Bryant. she is so amazing and funny! she even gave me a copy of her new book, Unexplained Presence, from LEON WORKS.
You seriously must buy this book. i just started it, but it is blowing my mind. i love LEON WORKS. maybe tisa will submit to achiote press--how cool would that be?

i also had the great honor of talking with Sesshu Foster, whose work i keep hearing about, but havent yet read, particularly CITY TERRACE FIELD MANUAL and ATOMIK AZTEX. the funny thing is that after the reading he said he was surprised that achiote grows on guam too--i felt a certain kinship with sesshu and i look forward to corresponding with him.

finally, it was really great to meet sharyn blumenthal, who teaches in the film department at cal state long beach. she had the funniest stories to tell about her students and steven speilberg (who apparently got his BA in film from csulb (strange, i know). anyways, she said she wants to make a poetry film with my poems. something noirish she said. but then i found her bio online and read this: "Ms. Blumenthal has just completed her indie feature TAKET WO, a dark comedy about bad choices, worse choices, power politics, and personal redemption." then, i thought, hey, that sounds like all my poems!

after the reading, we all went out to dinner at a cuban restaurant on venice blvd. lots of fun to chat with everyone--one of the most fun readings / after dinner readings i've ever been to. thanks to steve and fred for organizing this event!

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some pics from my reading in LA. descriptions to come.

Poetry

brave old world

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i took a nap today. havent taken a nap since the clinton administration. i need more naps in my life.

check out oscar's great poem here.

in case you havent heard, ron silliman chose aram saroyan's 'complete minimal poem' (ugly duckling presse) as the winner of the william carlos williams prize.
the craziest thing to me is that a writer whose work hardly gets talked about in terms of 'ethnic' poetry gets chosen for an award named after a writer whose work hardly gets talked about in terms of 'ethnic' poetry. i have an older essay (that needs revision) thinking about these two writers in just those terms and what they might mean for the current 'ethnic-avant'--maybe the summer (my new mantra).

you can of course buy saroyan's book from the UDP website, or you can read his works online at UBU
here.

but you must read this article about saroyan and how one word he wrote caught the eyeyes of congress.

also, a nice pice by curtis faville here

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'california rescue me'

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am headed for L.A. tomorrow for a reading on Saturday at BEYOND BAROQUE. if you are in Socal, come see me why dont ya:

19 April, Saturday — 7:30 PM
CALQUE & Friends: Literature in Translation


Calque is a new, triannual journal of literature in translation, edited by Steve Dolph and Brandon Holmquest. Tonight’s participants: SUZANNE JILL LEVINE has translated numerous Latin American writers; her books include, The Subversive Scribe: Translatinghttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Latin American Fiction, and a literary biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions. STEPHEN KESSLER’s new book of poetry is Burning Daylight (Littoral Press). His translation of Luis Cernuda's prose poems, Written in Water (City Lights), received a Lambda Literary Award. He is author of more than a dozen volumes of translations from Spanish. CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ is co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two chapbooks: constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox), and all with ocean views (Overhere). JEN HOFER is a translator, interpreter, educator, urban cyclist, and member of the puppet theater collective The Little Fakers. New poems, translations and collaborations can be found through Action Books, Atelos, Counterpath, Dusie Books, Kenning Editions, and Palm Press.

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if you dont know CALQUE, you should check out their kickass blog. besides CIRCUMFERENCE
Calque is a must read if interested in translation...i have work in issue #2, and issue #4 is supposed to come out on saturday i believe. they also have a wonderful mailing list, so you should subscribe. if you translate, you should definitely submit.

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anyways, besides the reading i plan to go to the beach and do some wine tasting. oh well, and i guess i have to bring some homework with me ;) of the 13 years i've lived in america, i've only lived in california (5 years in Socal & 8 in Norcal). even tho this isnt my homeland, i love it very much.

here's a little travelin music



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speaking of translations, achiote press has just accepted a chapbook in translation (spanish to english) and we are VERY excited about this work. more details to come ;)

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i will be bloggifyin' while gone, so stay tuned and please keep those comments coming. for a question: what journals of translation do you recommend? what presses of translation do you recommend?

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p.s. today is the last day to win the omnidawn blog trivia contest (FUNNY answers will get prizes also).

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the critical character

(i wish it was sunday morning!)

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i must admit, eric selinger is a kind and thoughtful gentlemen (much unlike me, so i much appreciate it). in the post below, he writes:

As for ending the piece with Sarah Cortez, you're absolutely right to see that as a return to the opening "conquistador" gesture, and I see exactly what you're saying about the move. Read skeptically, as you do, it's exactly what you describe: an eroticizing of the Other, in which xenophilia mixes uncomfortably with exploitation. I knew that at the time. My hope was that the particulars of that poem, "Late Night Torta," balanced out the power relationship somewhat, even reversing them. (In the text, the prospective lover is told what to do in order to "lift" the speaker, by the close, to a position of pleasure and power--an elevation that the poem equates with the triumph of the Virgen's "dark Indian eyes" over the Spanish Bishop, or so I saw it at the time.) Like much in the piece, that could have been improved--but we do what we can in the time that we have, and go from there.

Also, to be perfectly honest, I wanted to end with Cortez because I liked her work so much. She's not in Francisco's anthology, as Maria Melendez is, so I thought my readers might not head out in search of her work without that extra emphasis. A risky, even self-indicting gesture, but I figured that the potential costs to my own reputation (Selinger, the aesthetic sex tourist, who likes poems for all the wrong reasons!) were worth the potential benefits to hers.



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altho i agree that cortez' work does express an empowering sexuality, i'm not sure how much of that comes thru when placed within selinger's frame. are the selections from cortez enough to subvert the conquistador trope (or the history that the trope bears with it), as selinger claims? or does it simply become subsumed in its use to fulfill the trope? of course, i dont really think selinger is an 'aesthetic sex tourist' (!), i just question how effective this touristic / imperialistic frame is in presenting latino poetry (or any kind of ethnic poetry).

yes he's right to call me out for my skeptical reading. the 's' in cs, stands for 'skeptical' (it used to stand for 'sentence' but people kept mistaking me for 'francine prose's' nephew.)

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selinger adds:

By "my readers," above, I meant "my readers in Parnassus: Poetry in Review," where the piece first appeared. I don't know the actual demographics, but I suspect that most are white and middle-aged, evenly divided (more or less) between male and female. If I'd written the piece for LPR, the tone and the whole "character" that I create for myself in it would have been different. (How the substance would have changed, I'm really not sure. Probably would have requested to do it as a dialogic piece, an exchange with some other, more knowledgeable reader, rather than flying solo.)


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how interesting. i like the idea of a 'dialogic piece'. a much less problematic critical 'character'.

anyhoo, thanks for your engaging comments & perhaps others will comment too?

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Cortez in Kevlar returns!

(post soundtrack--i heard this on the radio today)

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because of all my talk-shit on this blog, i have nightmares that eric selinger (author of the essay at latino poetry review) will appear and say "some of my best friends in college were latinos and we used to get drunk and talk-poetry all night." or that aaron baker (author of mission work) will emerge from the heart of darkness and say "as a missionary son, i've saved 12 indigenous souls and therefore have to right to portray these people in any way i see fit." today, my nightmare came true.

eric selinger wrote two comments on my blog (and he also commented at javier's blog).

here's what he said:

Just came across your post, C-- I had no idea the piece was up live yet.

Anyway, for what it's worth, "The Unbearable Whiteness of Reading" would have been a damned good title--I'm sorry I didn't think of it myself. And you can bust my matzo balls all you want; seriously, I started this piece bone ignorant, and if I ended up skin-and-bone ignorant, making a fool of myself in the process, it wouldn't be the first time.

So--about the piece. Oy. I gather the humor fell flat. (Does it sound to you like someone joking about finding the final solution to the problem of Jewish American poetry might to me? I hadn't thought it would, but I'm beginning to think I may be a world class idiot.) In any case, the "pick your native nation" thing was a jab at the false "inclusiveness" of anthologies that throw some Native poems in without any sense of the diversity of nations and traditions they come from, and the Kevlar--well, that was Sarah Cortez, who has an Ode to Body armor featuring the stuff.

Damn. I hate not being funny. Getting old, folks. Getting old.

Anyway, I could probably say as much about the problematic nature of the ending as anyone, but I'll save that excoriation for my own blog, or my response at the LPR. Feel free to call me on anything you like, though, as Javier did. I actually appreciate being read & taken seriously. It doesn't happen often.

Until then!

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his second comment:

P.S. I don't know who sent you the angry emails about the whole Jewish thing, but it doesn't (and didn't) bug me at all. "Holy Hannukah"? Not offensive. Not a problem.

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what nice and thoughtful comments! if i could find magee's initial comments to people's repsonses to "their guys, their asian gliterring guys, are gay", it might make an interesting comparison.

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yeah, his humor fell flat for me, tho i thank him for explaining the motives behind his attempts (perhaps i was being too humorless to appreciate the jokes).

besides the intro, the two other issues i had with the essay was the seemingly randomness of selinger's choices of text. altho he does move from decima to corrido quite interestingly, he never provides a strong sense of historical trends of latino poetry--especially odd considering the beginning of the essay sets up a historical perspective. instead, his essay develops into a structural 'island-hopping' (his phrase), moving from marti to espada to v. cruz to lorna dee to urrea and others without ryhme or reason. granted, this type of nodal approach can be engaging, but i question his choices. which is to ask, why did you choose those books? did you order a barnes and noble box set of latino poetry (just kidding as the joke falls flat)? why is the selection so limited?

my final concern is the way selinger ends his essay with the sara cortez poem. i'm not saying that cortez doesnt hold her a place in a discussion of latino poetry, but ending in such a way, coupled with the conquistador motif that intros the essay, it feels as if "cortez in kevlar" climaxes in the most violent of tropes of the conquest narrative: sex with the natives. as he describes the poem, it "addresses the [gringo] reader as a prospective lover". this reads too much like aesthetic sex tourism.

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thanks for commenting mr selinger (i want you to go to the omnidawn blog because there's a game that rewards a twisted sense of humor--you can win free books!). i hope others will also comment. NaBlogWrMo more than half way over!

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does posting pictures count as NaBlogWrMo?

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a fun trivia contest at the omnidawn blog. we are even giving prizes for the funniest answer so give it a shot!


lots of great things in blogland: nicholas' incredible prose piece ("So call my parsing diction, my wild syntactics foreign: only know, that in your naming, you are only situating these things deeper inside of myself, where they have their true home, and where the weight of their loving lies.") and his take on contests / paid submissions.

and javier's great post on american tomatoes and the newest in his "undocumented poem series.

an amazing poem by barbara.

an awesome recap of the fresno reading by oscar.

an interesting post by linh dinh at the harriet blog.

and check out this old issue of VQR. all essays on whitman. i am particularly interested in the pieces by writers 'of color' (esp: natasha trethewey, rafael campo, and meena alexander).

you should go to this reading of pacific islanders this friday, at the de young in san francisco.

Friday, April 18, 7:15 p.m., NZ born Samoan artist Rosanna Raymond, Samoan poet/painter/filmmaker Dan Taulapapa McMullin, and Cook Islander Jon Tunui will present performance poetry, “Spoken words in E-motion.” unfortunately, i will be in los angeles all weekend ;(

and finally, a few posts down, gary left a wonderful comment about collage, specifically describing Barbara Henning's My Autobiography, which i havent read yet but it sounds really great. i just wanted to pull this passage from his comment as i am still thinking about collage:

"That's another value of collage: one can use it to foreground aspects of some pre-existing text (or speech) in a way often more potent than via parady."

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p.s. i finally found where my email was online and have successfully removed it. now that no one i dont know can email me to bitch about my talk-shit, i will happily commence this age old pan-indigenous tradition (similar to talk-story, just shittier). what you don't believe that talk-shit is an indigenous tradition? clearly you havent read aaron baker's mission work. (click on the link!)

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will it ever end?

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that's right, another poetry reading tonight. this time, at pegasus, featuring rusty morrison (photo 1), barbara claire freeman (photo 2), and elizabeth robinson (photo 3). this was a very special to me because rusty was my teacher during the mfa at the u of san francisco, and now as you know i work with her for omnidawn publishing (have you been to the omnidawn blog yet? there is a really fun game / contest where you can win omnidawn books). not only that, but she is an AMAZING POET. her newest book, the true keeps calm biding its story, which won the sawtooth poetry prize, blows my mind. i cant recommend this book enough. check it out here.

i was also very excited to hear elizabeth robinson read. she used to teach at usf, but now she teaches at naropa. i've heard so many wonderful things about her work and her person...so it was a real treat to hear her read and to talk with her after.

the funny thing about this reading is that many of the people who were at the Moe's reading on friday were at this reading. it was a mini-reunion. in attendance (of people that i recognized / talked to) were paul hoover, maxine chernoff, carol snow, alice jones, jaime robles, susanne dyckman, brian teare, todd melicker, stephen hemenway, chad vogler, brenda hillman, clayton banes (who was the host of course), val witte, ken & cassie (the omnidawn crew), and giovanni singleton. it was the first time i had met giovanni and she rules! only got to talk to her for a few minutes, but she is super nice.

anyhoo, here are the pics:

OMNIDAWN CONTEST! FUN & FREE BOOKS

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gentle reader, immediately go over to the OMNIDAWN BLOG and play the contest to win free Omnidawn books.

GO before it's too late for you. Ron Silliman linked to the contest so there isnt much time!!! GO and comment to win!

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