The Before Columbus Foundation announces
Winners of the Twenty-Eighth Annual

AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS

Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press)

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday)

Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black, and Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka/Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804 (University of Washington Press)

Maria Mazziotti Gillian, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions Inc.)

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (HarperCollins)

C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive Press)

Angela Jackson, Where I Must Go: A Novel (TriQuarterly)

L. Luis Lopez, Each Month I Sing (Farolito Press)

Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fae Myenne Ng, Steer Toward Rock (Hyperion)

Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press)

Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press)

It's good to be a Bay Arean. (Wait. That doesn't sound right.) It's good to live in the Bay Area, partly because of all the great readings. I don't think anyone covers a reading better than Oscar Bermeo. Oscar's personal and intelligent reports are the best thing other than actually being at the reading. He's always had the best flickr, and now he's also capturing readings on video. The video(s), a playlist, above is of the most recent Achiote Press reading, organized in collaboration with the UCB Ethnic Studies library, which turns 40 this year. The featured poets are Naomi Quiñonez, Lee Herrick, and Hugo Garcia Manriquez. I highly recommend you check out Oscar's videos, get your hands on the new Achiote Press chapbooks, and donate a/your book to the Ethnic Studies library.

Now, far be it from "Poetry & Popular Culture" to take particular umbrage at the Poetry Foundation's use of the term "good bad poetry"–despite the fact that Huerta doesn't cite the essay "Writing Good Bad Poetry" that appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and that was excerpted on this blog back in October. No, there is no umbrage taken, in part because the term "good bad poetry" is an adaptation of George Orwell's term "good bad fiction." While the Poets & Writers essay did acknowledge the Orwellian origin of "good bad poetry," it's perhaps no surprise that the folks at the Poetry Foundation want to make it seem like the term originated there—in the million-dollar Chicago offices of the nation's oldest and most prestigious little magazine. After all, it's Poetry's own standard-bearer T.S. Eliot who famously quipped that while good writers borrow, great ones steal—a quip Eliot himself cribbed from Oscar Wilde.

I apologize to Mike Chasar for troubling him over my use of the phrase “good bad poetry.” (And thanks to Jeff Charis-Carlson for pointing out Chasar’s blog post.) Chasar faults me for not citing his essay “Writing Good Bad Poetry,” which appears in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. I have not read Chasar’s essay, but now that I know about it I definitely plan to read it. Perhaps had I known about it sooner I would have added his essay to my 3rd field/”Aesthetics of Bad Poetry” list for my PhD qualifying exams. The list, which I’ve been working on for a year and a half now, includes a section of primary works called “Good Bad Poetry.” I didn't feel that I needed to cite a source for my use of "good bad poetry" in the McGonagall post because the phrase is commonly used in the literature I've been reading for my field. A difference: Chasar sees his supposed coining of the term "good bad poetry" as a discovery, as a revelation; I see the term "good bad poetry" as the given, as a starting point. Had Chasar had access to my reading list he might have been more familiar with the history of the phrase in question.

El Deportado, by Anonymous
No tengo papeles, by Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado
Running to America, by Luis J. Rodriguez
Human Resources, by Monica Teresa Ortiz
Imperfect Utterances, by Monica de la Torre
Mariachi indocumentado, by Lucha Corpi
187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border, by Juan Felipe Herrera
Elena, by Pat Mora
Mexicans Begin Jogging, by Gary Soto
Añoranza a mi patria, by Leticia Samaniego
When the Paw Brought us Down, by Marcos McPeek Villatoro
My Father, by Estella Gonzalez
Freefalling toward a borderless future, by Guillermo Gomez Peña
El Mojado y La Migra, by Juan Felipe Herrera
Statue of, by Carmen Tafolla
X antecanto: the xicano sign, by Alfred Arteaga
Canto Primero. Arrival, by Alfred Arteaga
My Freedom Song: Wire Skin, by Melissa Lozano
Dead Taco, by Violeta Ramirez
Heart of Hunger, by Martin Espada
Storm and Crisis: Immigrants, by Gabriel Gomez
While Late Capitalism, by Paul Martinez Pompa
Fence on the Border, by Sheryl Luna
Into America, by Blas Manuel De Luna
To a Mojado who Died Crossing the Desert, by Eduardo C. Corral
Journeys, by Benjamin Alire Saenz
Southwest Border Trucos, by Tato Laviera
Quicksand, by Urayoan Noel
The Border, by Emmy Perez
Noches Fronterizas/Sleepless Border Nights, by Gabriela Erandi Rico
may 12, 2008: postville, iowa, by Lauro Vazquez
Immigrant Voices, by Mario Escobar
The Fifth Dream: Bullets and Deserts and Borders, by Benjamin Alire Saenz
Canto Hondo, by Francisco X. Alarcon
The Border-Crosser’s Pillow Book, by Rigoberto Gonzalez
Numbers, by Agustin Palacios
sobre piedras con lagartijos, by Gloria Anzaldua

I offer you two charades:

1.

My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal.

2.

My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!

But, ah! united, what reverse we have!
Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown;
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.

Thy ready wit the word will soon supply,
May its approval beam in that soft eye!

(I'll give your ready wits an opportunity to solve the charades. "My first" and "my second" refer to syllables. "My whole" is the word you're trying to guess. For the answers click on "Continue Reading.")

Javier Huerta: More and more I am convinced that what we need now is a revival of bad poetry. So I’m working on a book of bad poems.

Friend Unnamed: You mean another one.

JH: Ah, well . . .

FU: Listen, why do you speak of “revival’? Don’t you think bad poetry has been alive and well all these years. In the biggest journals. In the smallest zines. In slams. In MFAs.

JH: I’m not interested in passing judgments. Those poems you consider bad poetry, I’m sure, have their defenders. When I say “bad poetry,” I mean a value neutral category of writing that involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate.

FU: Neutral, you say.

JH: Well yes, you can have good bad poetry or bad bad poetry. I read somewhere that the International Society for Humor Studies discontinued its annual Julia Moore Good Bad Poetry Competition because the entries failed to ascend (I was going to say descend) to truly memorable badness. Writing good bad poetry is an art. When I say I’m working on a book of bad poems, all I mean to say is I want to engage this art form. Now, if you consider my first book to be bad poetry, I can only say that that badness was not intentional.

Oakland, the city in which I live, is home to two national book awards—the American Book Award and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award—that challenge the hegemonic judgment of the literary establishment. The force behind these awards is multiculturalism, a belief that “sweetness and light” is multiple and diverse. I tend to trust the Oakland awards more (though I suppose I still hold a mistrust for all awards, for that Lehman Tendency to rank the best of the best of the best) than the Big Three because they seem to be more accurately representative of what’s being published in the United States today.

Here is an announcement of the 2008 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Awards:

PEN Oakland & The Oakland Public Library Announce the Winners of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles 18th Annual National Literary Awards & 12th Annual PEN Oakland Censorship Award Saturday, December 6th, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM in Oakland Free To The Public

On Saturday, December 6th, come celebrate well-known and emerging Bay Area and international authors who will be honored for excellence in multicultural literature at the 18th Annual PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Awards.

PEN Oakland, A Bay Area Chapter of the International Organization of Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, was founded in 1989 to address multicultural issues, and educate the public as to the nature of multicultural work. These award-winning authors address the diversity and uniqueness of American culture, and represent the new voices of American literature. The late Josephine Miles, in whose honor the awards are presented, was a highly regarded poet, critic, and professor of English at the University of California in Berkeley.

Here is Alfred, proud and excited, enjoying the honor of having his poem "Corrido Blanco" included in the Berkeley Poetry Walk. I have borrowed the photograph from Lorna Dee Cervantes's blog. Lorna was there sharing in Alfred's excitement. Last month as a way to memorialize him, three of Alfred's students--Robert Reyes, Harold Terezón, and Yo--got together to brighten up his plaque. Here are some photographs from our sidewalk cleaning/reading in memory of Alfred Arteaga.

It must be quite an honor to have one of your poems selected for a poetry plaque on the Berkeley Poetry Walk. Ron Silliman said somewhere that it (his inclusion on the walk) is one of the most memorable and satisfying honors he has received. One problem that arises, however, is keeping these tributes clean and unobstructed. Since I am a Berkeley graduate student with little money, I would like to offer my cleaning services for a small fee to be discussed at a later date. If you are either a poet on this Poetry Walk or the follower of such a poet (For a list of all the poets, please consult the Addison St. Anthology), you may be interested in the following services.

Poets give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching, to consist with right practice. We must avoid their specious tropes and figures and the vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world. I saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods. For they deserved to be chased out of the lists and beaten with rods. No one can interrogate poets about what they say. The dialectic cannot engage them. Most often when they are introduced into the discussion some say that the poet’s meaning is one thing and some another, for the topic is one on which nobody can produce a conclusive argument. The wit of the fables and religions of the ancient world is well nigh consumed: they have already served the poets long enough; and it is now high time to dismiss them; especially seeing they have this peculiar imperfection, that they were only fictions at first. Poets are liars. Their creation is far removed from the truth, and this, it seems, is the reason why it can produce everything, because it touches or lays hold on only a small part of the object and that a phantom. The very fact that they are poets makes them think that they have a perfect understanding of all other subjects of which they are totally ignorant.

1.

Tonight I am a parade of love and anger.

For those of us who are gay, a sad, palpable irony accompanies, even ruins, the celebratory mood, the prayers of thanks and joy. On November 4, 2008, we accomplish a fulfillment of the civil rights movement, and yet on the same night we find that our relationships are marginalized, our desire to manifest our lives, our loves, and our families in the public realm has been very cleanly snuffed.

Tonight 18,000 gay couples are marching for their lives. Tonight, hundreds of years are walking arm in arm together parading the rim of some comic black abyss. Men and women who love one another with their bodies and with their intelligence, like you. Tonight they are marching. Together they are daring the absence to abolish them. They are crowding the darkness with the light of their private embraces. Tonight they are together, facing the public, their faces lit by starlight and police light and news camera, flashing their pleas and anger. They are facing the hypocrisy of our culture and government, refusing silence, determined, defiant, undefeated.

We carry our signs: we carry the singular river of our song, our voices lifted into a shout that echoes other revolutionary movements: Separate Is NOT Equal! Ban H8! Yes We Can! Sí Se Puede! Yes We Can!

Tonight I am marching with them.

I am taking you with me.

Y cuanto muchacho habrá que anda con el tomito de Everyman en su bolsillo, para leer a John en la calle, al aire libre, bajo los parasoles verdes de las plazas. Keats es para el bolsillo, donde se llevan las cosas que cuentan, las manos, el dinero, el pañuelo; los estantes se los deja a Coleridge y a T. S. Elliot, poetas- lámpara. Un bolsillo es la casa esencial y portátil del hombre; hay que elegir lo imprescindible, y solamente un poeta cabe allí.

And how many a young man must be walking around with the little Everyman volume in his pocket, to read John in the street, in the open air, under the green parasols of the plazas. Keats is for the pocket, where we carry the things that matter, hands, money, handkerchiefs; the bookshelves he leaves for Coleridge and T.S. Eliot, lamp-poets. A pocket is the essential and portable home of man; we must select the indispensable, and only one poet fits in there.

I am haunted by the ghost in the footnote to the first sonnet. Footnotes in Charlotte Smith do much more than cite sources, and this first footnote interacts with the rhyme of the final couplet to emphasize the word ghost.

Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,
If those paint sorrow best—who feel it most!*

* “The well-sung woes shall soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint them who shall feel them most.” Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard,” 366th line.

The end words cost/most produce an off-rhyme, but the asterisk sends the reader to the footnote in order to encounter the true rhyme. Since the sonnet’s couplet keeps the same rhyme sound as the Pope couplet, ghost is both present and absent from the sonnet. A ghost, not unlike an echo, can be a present absence or an absent presence. In Pope’s poem, Eloisa and Abelard are not the ones singing “the well-sung woes”; they are calling on a future bard to sing the woes for them. In addition to having to witness “every pang” and “every sigh” of the living, the speaker of the Elegiac Sonnets is haunted by the ghosts of Eloisa and Abelard. Elegies confront loss, but, more accurately, they must confront the trace of what was lost. In Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann claims that the “peculiar force” of Smith’s sonnets “comes from the fact that they are not elegies for some particular person or persons” (157). These elegiac sonnets depict a dreary vision because the presence of those who are supposed to be absent haunts the poet/speaker out of all possible resort.

(with apologies to Forrest Gander)

A brown poet does not automatically know the work of other brown poets. It is an education, one that usually does not happen in the classroom. Anthologies, the generous ones, include a brown poet or two, probably Gary Soto, probably Martin Espada. Both are great poets, but come on. It is an education that happens in the main stacks of the UH Anderson Library where instead of studying for classes I was enrolled in I read all the Chicano poets I could get my dirty paws on. My education of brown poets from New York didn't begin in earnest until earlier this year when I went to NYC for a couple of ACENTOS readings (Big Ups to Rich Villar and his crew) and a Con Tinta reunion (Saludos a El Pasoan Rich Yañez, who more than anyone else has convinced me that ours has to be a retrospective age). The following is a list of 6 Poetas I was fortunate enough to see perform during my stay.

I.

I never refuse seconds. You can tell this by looking at me. Since I don’t make a habit of stepping on the scale, I really can’t say in precise numbers how overweight I am, but I can say that the label gordo would not be inappropriate. I often joke that my favorite mispronunciation of my name is heavier because it describes me so well. Other ways of joking around about my weight: “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones” (Whitman), “The girls, the girls, they love me because I’m the overweight lover Ja-a-vi” (Heavy D), and “Un kilo de papada no es papada!” (Paco Stanley). Do I have a weight problem? No, because Maria, my partner, the woman I love, does not seem to mind. She actually likes that she has difficulty wrapping her arms all the way around me. She even likes to pull up my shirt and bite on my belly. I don’t get it either. But if it works for her, it works for me. All of this is just to say that I would make an awful hunger artist.

I recently submitted a course description for a class I will be teaching next semester (si Dios quiere).

Javier Huerta English R1B Literature of the Undocumented

Book List: Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, Ramón Tianguis Pérez; The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia; The Elements of Style, Strunk and White.

A Course Reader will have additional readings.

Films: Bajo la misma luna/Under the Same Moon; (short film) AB 540 The Movie.

Course Description:

It is a curious thing how many documents attempt to document the undocumented. The texts we will read this semester ask us to engage our critical reading and writing skills on the topical question of undocumented immigration. We will turn our critical attention to articles from both sides of current debates on immigration in order to analyze and evaluate the efficacy of those arguments. In the literary works—a novel, a nonfiction diary, and poems—we will focus on those characters that are either defined by documents or by the lack of documents. We will also look at the significance of documents in our lives: birth certificates, driver's licenses, school identification cards, passports, death certificates, etc.

The primary goal of this class is to develop students' practical fluency in argumentative writing and research skills. Taking these texts as occasions to produce further writing on documents and the undocumented, students will write a couple of short writing assignments and a couple of long argumentative essays (each 8-10 pages long).

This class is one I believe I am uniquely qualified to teach and one I wish to continue to adapt and develop for different courses and different levels throughout my teaching career (si Dios quiere).

Because self-nominations are not accepted.

Because I'm dirty, mean and mighty unclean. I'm a wanted man, Public enemy number one. Understand. So lock up your daughter n' lock up your wife. Lock up your back door and run for your life. The man is back in town. So don't you mess me 'round. 'Cause I'm T.N.T. I'm dynamite. T.N.T. And I'll win that fight. T.N.T. I'm a power load. T.N.T. Watch me explode.

Because I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, called “Saab Cape Cod.” It and I went out of business 33 years ago. The Saab then as now was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: “Swedes have short dicks but long memories.” I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize.

Because my amazon.com sales rank, #315, 882, is too high.

When he first introduced the current group of Harriet bloggers, Nick T. mentioned that I was in Berkeley. This is only partly correct. I study (or whatever it is that PhD students do) in/at Berkeley, but I live and write in Oakland.

(from Oaklandish)

Craig Santos Perez celebrated his book release at University Press Books in Berkeley two nights ago. I attended the reading but failed to ask any questions during the Q & A section. I tend to be reticent in those situations. (I did manage to say this dumb comment, “Hey Craig, you know what poets call royalty checks? Reality checks.) So I hope you don’t mind if I list my questions here.

In our daily language there is a group of words that are prohibited, secret, without clear meanings. We confide the impressions of our most brutal or subtle emotions and reactions to their magical ambiguities. They are evil words, and we utter them in a loud voice only when we are not in control of ourselves. In a confused way they reflect our intimacy: the explosions of our vitality light them up and the depressions of our spirit darken them. They constitute a sacred language like those of children, poetry, and sects. Each letter and syllable has a double life, at once luminous and obscure, that reveals and hides us. They are words that say nothing and say everything. Adolescents, when they want to appear like men, speak them in a hoarse voice. [. . . ] But these words are definitive and categorical, despite their ambiguities and the ease with which their meanings change. They are the bad words, the only living language in a world of anemic vocables. They are poetry within the reach of everyone. Octavio Paz (trans. Lysander Kemp)

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi. William Faulkner

So both candidates have now confirmed they will be at tonight’s debate, which means that all eyes will be on Oxford, Mississippi. I am hoping that each of the candidates will take photographs of themselves sitting on the bench next to William Faulkner. I also think that the candidates could bring the house down if they write and present their opening remarks in Faulknerian style. Or at the very least they can acknowledge his importance to Ole Miss and pay tribute to his birthday, which was yesterday Sep. 25, by quoting Faulkner in one of their answers.

I had the privilege of speaking to “underprivileged” high school students in El Paso’s lower valley last Friday. My Arte Publico Press contact—when I asked what I was supposed to talk about—said that I should just read my poems and share my “personal story,” The librarians and counselors who invited me to speak hoped students would connect with my “personal story” and be able to envision themselves succeeding academically despite their economic and language barriers. I wanted to say, please let’s not talk academic success until I pass my qualifying exams; I wanted to say, I really didn’t have it all that bad. What goes unnoticed, or at least unremarked, is how my personal story of underprivilege has afforded me certain privileges.

“Privilege” is used too often as an accusation. For example, when someone disagrees with us on an issue like politics and poetry, we tend to say something about how the other person’s privileged situation blinds him or her to the political nature of language. This type of charge is meant not to further debate but to end it. It should be added to the official list of logical fallacies. Call it ad privilegium. Those accused of “privilege” tend to take offense and deny the charge by citing some distant ancestor who may have had it rough at one point or another. Neither the accuser nor the accused admit their privileged status. “Privilege” is a dirty word, and no one wants to claim it.

Let there be no more talk of major and minor. We have had enough of the Great in the Great Odes. Ours is a Naughty Keats. How many more articles must we read on the importance and significance of Great Keats? The whole of the critical tradition on Beautiful Keats can be reduced to this brilliant insight, “He is with Shakespeare.” Very well, we understand. Now we ask that not one sentence of criticism be written on the Odes or the Hyperions or “this living hand” for at least half a century. We must forget Tragic Keats long enough to get to know Keats, the Scribbler. Ours is a Playful Keats. As critics, let us learn from the poet and read his work in the spirit of Outlawry. Our research question—how two or three dove’s eggs can hatch into sonnets.

1.

The deadline for former students to submit poems in memory of Chicano poet and UC Berkeley professor Alfred Arteaga was yesterday at 3pm. (He passed away earlier this summer; he was born on Cinco de Mayo and died on the 4th of July; he would have appreciated these coincidences immensely.) The poems are to be collected in a booklet by the Department of Ethnic Studies. I, one of his former students, did not submit anything and have yet to write a poem in memory of Alfred. Perhaps Neruda’s words are appropriate here. In Confieso que he vivido, Neruda remembers being solicited for some verses on the death of Che Guevara and explains why even years later he has not yet written them.

Pienso que tal elegía debe contener, no solo la inmediata protesta, sino también el eco profundo de la dolorosa historia. Meditaré ese poema hasta que madure en mi cabeza y en mi sangre.

I think such an elegy should contain not only the immediate protest but also the profound echo of dolorous history. I shall meditate that poem until it matures in my head and in my blood.

(It is highly improbable that a reader would encounter an “Advertisement” in the opening pages of a contemporary book of poetry. Preface, Foreword, Prologue, Introduction—Yes to all of these. But the “Advertisement” is a past genre that didn’t make the evolutionary cut. It differs from those other types of prefatory remarks in that it explicitly references the contentious relationship between the author and his reader. In a way, the “advertisement” anticipates questions and criticisms that may be raised about a particular volume, and the author, thinly veiled in the third person, makes a preemptive strike against his detractors. It serves, if you will, as a warning.