2: Poet's Sampler & Place

A theme from last week was thinking about what makes a poet political, what makes political poetry, and how poetry is a form of protest. I'm trying to use this as a jumping off point into thinking about place/space. What is the difference of place and space? What makes either mean something? I decided to close read "San Martincito" to expand my questions, but I'm keeping this quote from Noah Eli Gordon's introduction in my back pocket: "The tangled complexities of our political lives deserve a poetry equally complex". 

Matuk layers space in "San Martincito" by setting up the scene of many little worlds layered upon each other: Greenpoint is a small part of Brooklyn, part of NYC, etc. Within Greenpoint, the sheets surround the narrator and create a "line around"  (or a shape) the narrator. There are bugs in their swamp. 

If there aren't scenes all down our street
            at a simple throb in someone's
            car music

This was a beautiful stanza to me while I was thinking about spaces and how they mean something to people - like, people driving in their car, which is a confined part of their own world where they play music loud and maybe forget for a while that the people outside of the car can hear the music. My best interpretation of the first line is that they're driving in their car, contained with the music, and maybe don't see the people in their "scenes" as they go down the street. So, it feels like another instance of space layering. 

What stood out about this poem is that it does live up to that complexity because there's sweetness in both the places that Matuk mentions, San Martin & Greenpoint. As a reader, I'm left with the feeling that, for the narrator, these two places aren't being held at odds with each other. But the two places are actually separated by this stanza:

              I'll give you the republic
a story of land treaties
and the shapes they made

So Matuk's fondness for both places is different than the cold republic making lines on a map and borders. This is much more political and feeling especially important this week. The imagery in our poems this week reveals deep roots in places and the complexities of relationships to space (space that is stolen, occupied, limited/expansive, conditional/home). 
             

A Story of a Place

For a lot of these poems, I feel as though a place becomes personified as a person or identification for a people and their set of values (this seems to be the case with  Saadi Youssef in "America, America" where he address America as though it were an entity in and of itself) or it becomes symbolic of a feeling. Of the four we read the one that stuck out to me the most was, "The Story of My Country," and I believe this is because it doesn't exist within the binary of criticism/adoration. If anything this would exist right outside of it, where there is a love for where one comes from but also a recognition of it's faults that is not a criticism so much as a footnote. Being American, I read the poem with the mindset that these words were or could be about my country, but I don't think that this lens in anyway alters the poet's feelings or intent. 

What helps this particular poem (Asadullah Habib, "The Story of My Country," pg 400) is the background of the story - which here is used to mean the documentation (or fabrication) of the evolution of a place or past - and I say this because it frames the (for lack of a better term) information to come as something that is an account, it's constantly changing, an allowance for me as a reader to understand what is said as a narrative. To elaborate, the implication of a story being told adds a certain layer of accessibility that helps the text become relatable. Another way of thinking about it is reading an Alexander Hamilton biography versus going to see the musical. Both contain generally the same amount of facts but one is a narrative and uses elements of storytelling in order to get a point across, the other is just...words. So in approaching this poem I didn't read it as someone telling me facts about their country but rather inviting me for a story about it. 

The relevance of the story is that I believe this is how this poem creates a part of it's own meaning, within the framework of the story (which begins with the title) we go into the poem as it's story is being written.

"The story of my country is written on it's jungles and deserts -" 

So we travel with the poet through the making of meaning of his country and are allowed to see that story unfold. We learn that his country is it's own book (of disasters) or perhaps a (beautiful) poem without end (the juxaposition in these two sentences helps eliminate the binary I previously mentioned) it's a hymn, we learn what flowers grow, and go back to reflect on it's fractures; and we end with our poet's frustrations over this binary. He asks, who will be there to tell the story of my country, the good and the bad? And more importantly as it is a story, who will be there to care or listen? 

The place in this poem stands for it's own remembrance which means unlike a personification, a feeling, or a symbol, the poet treats this place as a story that needs to be told. It is very much itself, which I can only hope to mean that his country  - wherever it may be - is not a placeholder for meaning, there are no metaphors, the place is just supposed to exist and go on from and by the people who have lived through it's trials. 

Yolandi E Cruz Guerrero 

Jan 31, 2017

In this collection, the sense of place has shifted or taken on life in the eyes of the poet. Talk about the place, the meaning of it to the speaker, the way the images make it specific.

new poetic slang for us 

gave me floor: 

to ground by breaking through the concrete of a persons emotions. in order words, to be delivered, or to be centered, or asked the hard question you know you should of have been answering all along. can be used in these ways, 

“gurlll, that poem gave me floor”

“you floor me”

“your piece gave me floor, now i feel like i am not alone in this!”

"no one leaves home until 

home is a sweaty voice 

in your ear

saying-

leave,” 

— Warsan Shire 

This weeks collection of poems and essays engage the idea of home within the context of different political moments in different nations across the globe. And in talking about a home a poet can come to find themselves moving in ward onto themselves while they survive the shifting times. There is a clear opposition, a nation who has claimed power and has a created a system to dehumanize bodies, of course by their chosen specificity. The benefit of using exploring home with poetry is that it makes one have to make it specific. Home is defined by their life and vice versa. What I feel like talking about home allows for is to not just mark the difference that started a war but what came first genocide or war? What I am trying to say is: the pieces we read for this week implicates us in this question, will we recognized genocide in the context of war or war in row context of genocide. In other word, this distinction matters because what it is really asking is, which made you loose home first?

Reading these poems, along the reality of our todays made my mind spin. From “god save america” to “a stranger becomes afraid” (Youssef)  these poems gave me floor because they remind me that“the other is that that is not me”(Mullen).

  The invocation of place becomes a site to render context, to tell the other side of the story, to say that maybe it was not the sword of the colonizer that came first but that of the indigenous. In order for that reclaiming to occur, in order to invoke place as a mechanism to actually into time. Rosal wrote: “One way to erase an island is to invent /a second island absolved of all the sounds /the first one ever made” (Rosal). Rosal, along with other poets from this selections, do the work that time inevitably requires us to do: to reimagining the past by slowing down the present. In a way, it becomes clear to me that the work of a poet is to invent sound. In another note, Rosal makes a salient point, that the work of finding shouldn't be the work the work of erasing, but that even labeling it as finding is an act of erasure. It sets a crucial distinction between an indigenous body/immigrant away from settlers/colonizers. These pieces are records of the consequences of the desire to find (&steal/hoard resources) . I once had a teacher come in to class quietly and write on the board: “We are here because they were there”. This phrase has always stuck with me. I am a transnational body, I am an immigrant. I make this connection here because it is apart of the consequences of these piece of people that had war, the they’s come into their life and that always has set of motions that follow. 

There is a kind of dignity that is expressed in these piece where the characters in the poems do not reported on they’re witnessing in testimony(poetry) but that that exact condition, whether that be it living through war or have war be a constant attack on your body, is what brings you into a state of grace. Brings to say perhaps: “no fear of the wolves of the wild /no fear, for the land is my land” (Youssef). Suffering offers a kind of grace that black bodies can articulate in a very particular way because of the history they embody. Youssef wrote: “I am not your foe/I do not need your day of doom” Youssef, 197. Youssef makes one thing clear, regardless of what came first, genocide and war are choices that were made. The disunity that is woven through this collection lies in a deep understating of grace. That grace is never about the other person, grace is about us deserving it. About that liberation, that ultimate sovereignty. Grace is love in its ultimate form. 

A Place Called...

January 31, 2017

Poets of Color/Professor Elmaz Abinader

Mimi (Rose) Gonzalez-Barillas

Response to:

An Instance of an Island, by Patrick Rosal

Carols, Long Before and Shortly After, San Martincito, Of Mule and Deer, Anamorphosis, by Farid Matuk

Language for a New Century poets:

·      Saadi Youssef

·      Phåm Tiên Duât (a,e,a incorrect accents)

·      Mahmoud Darwish

·      Asadullah Habib

This week’s reading points us in the direction of “home;” more accurately, place – that great continuum against which time exercises its never-ending story.  Taken as a whole, these poems and poets offer readers a sense of how the land in which we are reared, becomes the soil of our skin wherever we travel on our own personal journey.  From the start of our lives as children and as our parent’s wards into the claiming of our identity as we learn to stand by and for ourselves, never far from the arms that held us, nor separate from the eyes made of the soil and parental terra from which we are made.

There is an inherent loyalty to the land upon which we learned life.  Conversely, there is also a migratory urge, a wanderlust inhabiting our animal selves that drives us to discover “what’s out there.”  We learned to forage for food that follows seasons; to seek the sun’s light and follow the sky.  We’re born to look, to seek out.  No matter how far we go, home and motherland accompanies us.  Even when we have to run from our motherland and seek refuge in a new land because our brothers are paid to attack us or because the savior sent to relieve us from a tyrant who’s stolen our land and identity then becomes our abuser.

Saadi Youssef’s poem, “America, America”[1] indicates a different kind of place, when an invading army infiltrates home.  This Iraqi poet’s love for his home is illustrated through all of the examples he gives of its simple landmarks: the date palm, the mulberry tree, water buffalos and feasts.  He also reveals an insightful level of familiarity with the dominant American culture by noting jeans, jazz, Mark Twain.  What’s astonishing is his deep awareness of what the American culture needs as he’s addressing the country:

“Let’s exchange gifts…

“Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries

and give us village homes.”[2]

This passage and two other couplets from this section found me exclaiming out loud, alone in my apartment, “Wow.”  What America has sought to inflict on his country, he demands they retract.  In the same breath, he elucidates in such fine succinct prose, what America is doing to its own populace: building prisons instead of homes.  The passage continues,

“Take the stripes of your flag

and give us the stars.

Take the Afghani mujahideen’s beard

and give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.”[3]

Here is an Iraqi, so familiar with what is important in America, not his home, addressing Americans on the territory of our homeland through references significant and specific to America.  How many American’s could muster what’s in Whitman’s beard?  And Youssef is willing to trade this American poet’s beard for that of his regional neighbor.

All of the poets in this week’s selection speak to where they began and where they currently are.  Some have never left and don’t have wanderlust.  Some can’t leave because of economic or travel restrictions; especially reinforced through this week’s racist travel ban on Muslims - legal, vetted residents.

There was an echo forward from Youssef who stood out for me.  In the cited poem, he dismisses our massive cities and edifices for his home.  “I need the village, not New York.”[4]  The same anthology and assignment included Phåm Tiên Duât who too mentioned the village saying “These days every village must be a great city.”[5]  This poet travels so far within the poem “In the Labor Market at Giang Vo.”  He cites stacks of food and comments on the rich using up any laborer from anywhere to build their many homes.  Progress has come in the form of construction.  But it’s still the village.  A village that survived the Vietnam war and is now a suburb of Hanoi.  It still wears its history in the scar on the worker’s face and that returns the poet to what this village was in the midst of what it’s becoming.

---

[1] Youssef, Saadi. “America, America.” Language for a New Century. ED. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, Ravi Shankar. New York:  W.W. Norton, 2008. 197.

[2] Ibid. 199.

[3] Ibid. 199.

[4] Ibid. 198.

[5] Phåm Tiên Duât. Ibid. 212.

Blog #2: Space

Western imposed divisions, wars, and occupations are described by their effects on the land and on the speakers' psyches in all of the poems read for this week. From the flights of imagination and of location in Darwish's poem of diaspora, to Saadi's speaker's direct address to America, each poet mourns and forms the inarticulable loss of their connection to place.

In Duật's poem, the people in Giang Vo's Labor Market are literally of the land, "You are the dark earth." They carry scars from the American war and the French occupation. But, unlike the earth, they are conscious of the war's devastation on their geography, their health, and history. With the pressure of industrialization comes "new kinds of clouds," I think of smokestacks rising up from factories, polluting the air and offering a "new line of workers" who struggle daily with hunger and poverty in order to survive this post-war environment. Trauma is passed on to this "new life," quiet and omnipresent, humming behind the "look of quiet resolve."  

Saadi also investigates the relationships between warfare and language, how the two work with and against one another. In the first stanza we have a few examples of this reciprocal mode: The French general calls the notorious prison of Nugrat al-Salman a "fort," "Liberation was better versed in topography," and the neutron bomb "distinguishes between / an 'I' and an 'Identity' (197)". The speaker echoes the blues form and brings it into his own form. 

Saadi, in his readings, actually sings the blues sections. His blues are operating on a couple different levels in this work. On one level they are used to sing the depths of sorrow citizens of Iraq hold as a result of Saddam Hussein's regime and the U.S. war in Iraq. They also work as a way to break/experiment with convention. Saadi fuses the American blues colloquial lyric structure with Iraqi free verse to portray American influences on Iraqi culture. Saadi is both deeply critical of this influence and also views it as a complicated gift. In a similar move he asks: "Take the books of your missionaries / and give us paper for poems to defame you" (199). In his blues he alludes to Gilgamesh: "We are not hostages, America... / We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of drowned gods, / the gods of bulls / the gods of fires, / the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song". It is in this song--the fusion of African diaspora folk tradition and Iraqi folksong--Saadi can hold the mythic, the present, and the liminal. 

Specific place names, the names and allusions to myth, the incorporation of different traditions into a single work--these devices are what help each of the poets we read for this week to write about their specific experience of history and space. In all the works there is a deep melancholy, death overwhelms with its closeness. 

Blog Post #2 1/31

1/31

In this collection, the sense of place has shifted or taken onlife in the eyes of the poet. Talk about the place, the meaning of it to the speaker, the way the images make it specific…

-

When asked about the meaning of place, I was immediately reminded of a women/gender/sexuality class I took at Mills last semester. At the very beginning of the semester, we defined the meaning of “place”, and how it was different from “space”. What we learned was that place was essentially space that was given meaning, a bit like a house becoming a home.

Saadi Youssef repeats the word “home” over and over again in the phrase: “God save America, My home sweet home!” (Youssef, 197-202) throughout his poem “America, America”. He also later defines his home in the following verse: “How long must I walk to Sacramento?/How long must I walk to Sacramento?/How long will I walk to reach my home?/How long will I walk to reach my girl?/How long must I walk to Sacramento?” (Youssef, 197-198) This definition is more specific than simply “America”, and is attached to not only a location, but to someone he loves and cares about.

In Patrick Rosal’s “An Instance of an Island”, place also seems connecetd to a person’s loved one instead of a location. The two women described in the poem are first compared to one another in a way that makes it seem like they complete in another in a way: “Two women, Filomena and Josefa, arrived within days of one another. By then, each had lost most their toes, though they had ten full fingers between them, each woman with one hand still intact.” (Rosal, 1) 

The two women, made to leave their home or “place”, and forced onto the island or new “space”, make the space into place with each other’s company and the makeshift instrument: “One way to erase an island is to invent the waters that surround it. You can name the waters that will turn all the sounds the island makes into salt. It will teach you to listen to everything you love  disappear    ...    or you can invent a song so big  it will hold the entire ocean./ Josefa and Filomena/rocked in the dark, hip to hip, joined by that third body of wood, which made sure there was nothing left in the unbroken world to possibly make them whole.” (Rosal, 1) This one part of the poem made me feel so much. It felt familiar. 

My girlfriend and I have similar disabilities – we are both on the autism spectrum and both have the same emotional dysregulation disorder. The world is largely not built for how our brains works, and it feels very isolating at times. The way these women were on this island together, but found home in each other, felt so much like how my girlfriend and I found place as well. 

I don’t believe place always has to be a location. In fact, I don’t think it can JUST simply be location. It takes so much more than that to make space into place.

Place, Beauty, Destruction

A common theme throughout the several poems that we read was the significance of homeland, the burdens of exploitation of that homeland due to U.S. (or Spanish or Israeli) wars and what I am going to call colonialism for lack of a better word, and the eventual realization that the speakers of the poem would have to immigrate to the very land whose capitalism and war-machines destroyed the speaker’s homeland.  This, of course, was not the arc for every single poem, but the significance of home seemed to be entrenched in another culture’s destruction of the speaker’s homeland.  

Duat’s “In the Labor Market at Giang Vo” seems not to deal explicitly with the concept of the idea of homeland in the context of colonialism in oppression until the final stanza.  Using an observant speaker who addresses evil in the second person, Duat identifies the monstrous presence haunting a Vietnamese village as “dark earth” and the “jagged rock wretched from the mountain” (211).  The audience understands this presence to be overshadowing and haunting the city but the speaker fails to identify the presence until the last stanza.  As the crowd of the city disperses, the presence or “you” is identified as “...  the scar, the last broken shard of war” (212).  Unfortunately, in the United States, discourse regarding the Vietnam war rarely considers the damage that was done to the actual country where the war was physically fought- Vietnam.  This overarching “scar” that is an unrelenting reminder of brutality, poverty, colonialism, and fear did not leave Vietnam when the war ended.  

Similarly, Asadullah Habib’s “The Story of my Country” contrasts beautiful images of the speaker’s experiences of the beautiful naturalistic and religious beauty of Afghanistan with images of the horror and destruction it has endured through war, exploitation and colonization.  Habib takes the audience on a beautiful and catastrophic journey, citing “the smell of wet grass”, “the sacred light of Zarathustra” and finally, “a continuous fire, a burning garden” (400).  In a meta moment, he questions the significance of even bothering to tell the story that no one might be listening to in the first place during the last stanza.  Habib gifts the audience with the speaker’s most precious memories and most significant depressing thoughts about his homeland and finally questions whether it all matters.  In essence, the speaker and their memories of Afghanistan meld into each other and characterize each other.  So, the question, “where is one listener” embukes the reader to understand everything about Afghanistan and the Afghani people have been exploited, livelihoods destroyed and then their concerns and stories are ignored.  The speaker’s sense of self is directly embedded in place and locale and cannot be separated.  

I could not help but think of the refugees and immigrants trapped and dejected because of Donald Trump’s immigration ban from seven Muslim countries when reading these poems.  I think these poems really point out that the U.S. and other exploitative countries do not take responsibility for the mess that they leave (i.e. not wanting to take refugees or building military bases in countries and banning immigrants from those countries).  I think these poems really get at the crux of the issue, making me upset that they are not required reading for our schoolchildren, college students, and politicians. 

Reflection #2: Sense of Place

Webster’s dictionary defines place in a variety of ways: physical location, position in a social scale, an appropriate moment in time etc. Mills College is a physical place, but feeling like campus is a safe place to express yourself is can bounce between social acceptance and appropriate moments to be expressive. With this week’s readings I found the poets interchanging what place meant to them in the bodies of the work, and the different ways that place is defined for each of them.

“One way to erase an island is to invent a second island absolved of all the sounds the first one ever made.”

When I first read this line, my mind went to the social state of Oakland and how much of the original culture has been lost due to gentrification. Oakland used to be known as “ghetto,” and listed as one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. but is now regarded as one of the best places for foodies, or to travel for leisure time because of the new culture that has developed due to transplants and start-ups. This “new” culture has been allowed to erase Oakland guilt-free in exchange for “improving urban communities.”  

This comparison and continued reading of the poem made me realize that place is as much about physical location as it is the memories that we associate with it. My definition of Oakland is based off of experiences here growing up and other poets have defined place in their work based off of their experiences with a location and not the location itself. Rosal doesn’t specify street corners, monuments, or landmarks but he talks about place as a sense of being and feeling connected. We learn more about this island through Filomena and Josepha than we do in descriptions of sandy beaches and clear blue oceans.

The Story of My Country is another example of place described as experiences. Habib doesn’t state which country is his but we learn about it through the hymns of Zarathustra and summer nights on the rooftop. He also reinforces this idea in the line “where are the old storytellers to tell the story of my country, where is one listener.” To me this implies that the validity of this country, this place, can only be told from the mouths of elders. Simply naming a mountain top or river isn’t enough.

Does place even exist? Who gets to decide what is place, who is in place, out of place, has ownership of it etc. if “place” is both a physical point and a state of mind? I ask this question in reference to myself and the poets this week, but specifically thinking about Farid Matuk’s Carols where he states “I only care that you love, she says to her American, hammocks, hillocks, porcelain ducks floating down the river,” and in Long Before and Shortly After, he states “I am among my whites whom I love very much.” This make me think of patriotism and how being “American” is generally defined by celebrating certain customs and having a white face. No one else is allowed to take ownership of this place if you have experiences that don’t fit this norm. Although Matuk is an immigrant, he can easily pass for a white American (as he says among his whites) and his works feels like you can have pride in this place if you’re part of the dominant class. That may not be his intentions but it’s hard to tell his position, which is explained in the intro by Noah Eli Gordon.  

On the flipside, in America, America by Saadi Youssef, he lists cultural customs that he likes “I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats,” but specifies that he is not American. The poem alludes to saving “my home sweet home,” but I wonder if Youssef truly feels at place here with his need to state that. Although he is an immigrant like Matuk, it doesn’t seem that he feels at love among whites.

I’d have to do some more digging to see if those comparisons have any truth to them, but my biggest take-away is that place is what you make it. Have fun with it.