Storytelling Lesson of the Week: I spent some hours with a novelist the other night among a group of people she was just getting to know. It wasn’t a surprise to see that she was a good listener and attentive and had good questions for these strangers. But something became apparent to me as the conversations evolved, fragmented, redirected and evolved again: it was this genuine wonder I saw swell up in her as they spoke. Her eyes would get big or she would lean in or she would laugh with them or open her mouth in astonishment. There wasn’t a sense she was standing above or away as she listened. There wasn’t even nearly a sense that she was mining the moment for material. I’m talking about a multi-book, multi-honored, widely read and beloved writer. And she was absolutely present in awe and in laughter. It indicated to me a true love for human stories and a real affection for the human being in front of her. She was nowhere near a pen, paper or keyboard. But I think she was writing already in the sense that she has honed this keen and loving habit of attention to the world around her and the particulars of the people in it.
Jack Gilbert Introduction of Linda Gregg (c. 1999)
I wrestle a little bit with some of what Jack Gilbert asserts in this introduction he made of Linda Gregg at a reading at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, but some of it resonates beautifully and it’s all very Gilbertesque, isn’t it? More importantly, it reminds me of my utter devotion to poetry. I sat in the audience of a couple hundred and transcribed this word for word. I don’t know shorthand but Gilbert must have been speaking just slowly enough for me to keep up. I was obsessed with listening and recording. This might have been 1999 or so… Indeed, some of my students don’t recognize the tyranny they impose on their own poems:
“I started out a tyrant. I had to know the first line and the last line of the poem. I was such a tyrant that I would not write a line until it was perfect then I would go to the next line. She taught me to listen to the poem. It was a total surprise to me. I felt that if you didn’t watch the poem carefully it would be like riding a horse if you didn’t hold reigns tightly. It would just eat all day long and you’d always get home a little time after they finished dinner. She taught me pretty much by example to listen to the horse but not give into it. If you would give into it, the horse would eat all day. You have to balance the two. You have to listen and you have to have control. She also helped me to learn to trust material that I did not understand yet. It was strange being around her. I still have not met another poet like it. She wasn’t what I would call “ordinary.” Her way of writing was unaccountable. I think particularly it was because she grew up in the country. She lived with her family in a kind of paradise. Her father owned a mountain and they had all these horses and she and her twin sister Louise would spend all their time looking for … She didn’t grow up like the city. There was a sense of magic—magic of a kind that was not showy and, at the same time, Linda herself was unaccountable. I finally decided what was so strange about Linda, in terms of writing, was that she had the wrong side of her—well let’s say—her mind. She used the side of her brain that was supposed to do mathematics with the creative side of her brain and it still produces a unique kind of surprise. So many things were wrong. She wrote love poems. And everybody knows you didn’t write love poems. That’s for beginners, people who don’t make it. She wrote magnificent poems about passion, about the heart. I think it was because she lived in this green world for so long. It ended up like those periods in history when they didn’t have language—like the Japanese didn’t have a written language until the year 600. Japanese poetry is the pre-literary ability and they feel that poetry is that pure Japanese. It’s part of what I admire about Linda Gregg. But I have enormous respect for her insistence on magnitude…They’re not sentimental. They’re not small in communicating something you won’t find elsewhere.”
To a bookseller re: Filipino-American Writing -- NEWS →
I went to Word books in Jersey City for the first time yesterday and was thrilled to see a cafe/bookstore in a neighborhood and city that I know really well. I didn’t see any Filipino-American writers on the shelves and I thought I would send a note. Here’s what I said:
Dear Folks at Word,
I wanted to convey my delight and gratitude at seeing an independent bookstore on Newark Ave. I’m Jersey born and bred, though I’ve lived in Brooklyn for the last seven years and am on my way to moving to Philly. A family friend opened up LITM – what is it – more than a decade ago now? (I even lived on Mercer for a short stretch.) So I’ve been in and around the neighborhood for nearly a lifetime. I can almost crane my head out your door and see where the FIlipino basketball league was held for years at the Boys and Girls Club (is it still?). And Manila Ave., where the Santa Cruzan festival runs in May, is right around the corner. In short, I have many, many memories there. What a stroke of genius to have Word take up residence in that neighborhood.
Thank you for the very challenging work of making a space for books, a home for language and learning and community. As a reader of Filipino-American writing, I wonder if you would consider extending that support to the Filipinos of Jersey City who number, by gross estimation, at about 15000–probably many more (not to mention Filipinos in the rest of Hudson and surrounding counties). I’m sure you’ve seen the many Filipino stores and perhaps even recognize conversations in Tagalog or one of our other 80-plus languages from the archipelago. In my visit to Word yesterday Filipinos were as ubiquitous as I remember. At least half a dozen Filipino faces walked into your store in the short time I was there. And of course they do, since Filipinos are in Jersey City’s government, hospitals, restaurants and shops.
It would be terrific if Filipinos could enter a bookstore and see names and faces that remind them of their own histories. I scanned your shelves for Filipino authors – Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa or recent releases by Lysley Tenorio, Jessica Hagedorn, Matthew Olzmann, Jon Pineda, Evelina Galang,and Gina Apostol, to name a few. Perhaps I missed them, but I didn’t see any Filipino writing represented in your books. Do you usually carry Filipino and Filipino-American authors? I also took a look at your upcoming events and didn’t see any Filipino writers featured there.
As one who coordinates a reading series, I know it’s difficult to keep up with the publishing world. I can say with great confidence, however, that Filipinos and Filipino-Americans have been publishing beautiful novels and poetry collections for some time – with major houses and significant small and mid-list trade presses as well as academic publishers. Filipino-American writers are winning awards and getting reviewed in the New York Times. At Greenlight in Brooklyn and St. Mark’s in Manhattan and Myopic in Chicago and Eastwind in Berkeley and Powells in Portland and Bookpeople in Austin, Filipino writers and readers are there.
Perhaps one of the young Pinoys who walked into Word yesterday is an aspiring writer; perhaps one doesn’t yet know she has the gift – and very importantly the literary heritage – of writing and literature. Highlighting the lives and cultural production of Filipinos (selling Fil-Am books, incorporating Fil-Am writing into your regularly scheduled literary readings and events) would go a long way to make that happen. I’d be thrilled for Word to be partners in supporting Filipino-American readers, which is to say, supporting American readers. If it’s helpful, I’d be happy to send along book titles and authors’ names. Please let me know.
Forgive the belated welcome, but let it not diminish the excitement I feel about having Word in Jersey City, NJ.
Warm regards,
Patrick Rosal
___
Chilltown is close to my heart. I became a writer, as a Filipino from NJ, not knowing that Filipinos wrote novels and poetry, not knowing that Filipinos have been deeply embedded in the making of this country, its industry, its imagination for centuries.
During the eighties, I knew HUNDREDS, maybe literally thousands, of Filipinos from Cherry Hill to Rockland; How many of us became writers? How many artists? We were told otherwise.
I became a writer! A poet! Ha! Those are crazy odds! My parents’ first language was not English. I was often told (and am still told) how fucked up my English is. And yet – I write. I publish books. Certainly the young Filipino fellaz and ladies of Jersey City deserve the opportunity to read books by other Filipinos. THere’s a kickass Filipino novelist or poet or playwright right now in Jersey City. There are likely many. But it will be very difficult for them to be encouraged and nurtured without books by other Filipinos. Trust me, I done it.
That said, feel free to write Word Bookstore, but I would URGE you to visit the store first. They seem like really good people. I love that you can buy books about dinosaurs and supply/demand economics. I think there’s tremendous potential for making space for Fil-Am literature.
In our office suite on campus, there’s a bunch of tapes in a cabinet that is going to be thrown out. Chair told us to take whatever we wanted. Found this little joint. Also Lorraine Hansberry plays and James Earl Jones reading “Poems From Black Africa” #digging
Steve Scafidi's new book →
I’ve been chewing on one of two new books by Steve Scafidi, The Cabinetmaker’s Window (LSU).
And every day since, it is the same.
Our mothers wake up and up
they rise and out they go laboring
all day until the world is made.
Our fathers somewhere
sing our secret names, our secret
names, our fathers sing our hidden
names until the world is made.
Until everyone who is now — is.
Thank you history. Thank you luck —
Half way through the book and it’s another beautiful collection of wildly felt and meticulously crafted poems. Steve’s other book also released this year is To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas), which, I believe, has some of the Lincoln poems I’d seen early drafts of. Lots of good poems to look forward to. Thank you history. Thank you luck.
Ocean County College Nat'l Poetry Month
Invention of the self...
This secret making of the self consists of the ability to observe, to gather all sensual and sensory data, to assess menace, and at the same time consult the true thrill of one’s own body – which is to say, such invention consists of naming one’s fear and facing it. It is a practice honed for survival and it is hard won.
—from “Pacquiao vs. Rios: Contemplating the Filipino in Macau” (Some Call It Ballin’, Issue 1)
Mac Walton has a great early entry on Some Call It Ballin' →
A sports journal run by poets?  Slightly silly name aside, this is a development I’ve been dreaming of for years.  Sure, there are upscale sports blogs - Grantland, Deadspin (arguable, and admittedly gross, but essentially upscale or at least upscalely skepto-liberal) - but none that I know of that define themselves by poetry.  Poets, and poetic writers, reveal to us the beauty that we would otherwise miss. At all levels, sports are an expression of beauty and grace.  But while a tacit acknowledgment of this beauty may undergird the existence of the Luxe Sports Blog, too often the content of the Luxe Sports Blog is caught up in analyzing the business and media of sports, not the play itself.  It’s much easier to write an eloquent, evocative, significant analysis to Richard Sherman’s postgame interview, and what it says about race and sports media, than it is to write something meaningful about the game itself.  It’s just easier to write about text than about action.  (You could say that the same tension exists in writing about pop music - that it’s too easy to just write about the lyrics, and take the music for granted.) But from the first issue, it seems that Some Call It Ballin' might actually keep its eyes primarily on the game, and look at the other issues in sports only when they are directly involved in our reading of the game.  (For instance, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s piece is about the impossibility of watching the Sochi Olympics without thinking of the political and social injustices right outside the stadium; a piece about football and CTE would be successful along the same lines, whereas a piece that merely analyzes the NFL’s legal and financial response to CTE revelations would be somewhat beside the point.)  Of course, it’s important to talk about the institutions, and the financial and legal and social and moral problems that plague athletics at all levels (and, let’s not forget, always have tainted sports).  But it’s important to remember why we love sports, why we love watching them and playing them; and who better than a bunch of poets to remind us?