Willie Perdomo, Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award

Willie is a friend. He’s also a teacher, though we’re right around the same age. He’s from New York. I’m from Jersey. Different. Real different. In a lot of ways. But it means so much to me that a Puerto Rican writing about a conga player has made it as finalist to the NBCC Award. Because of friendship, yes. I want my friends to shine. But his poems made space for mine. Still, for a lot of white (and maybe even for some non-white) critics and publishers and reading series, seeing somebody brown or black lock in a spot at a major award like the NBCC isn’t a big deal. But even though there are more POC writing, there’s still a lot of isolation. There is still a ton of self-doubt. There is the simultaneous work of writing your books AND being an advocate for your books where there is little to no advocacy. And then, if you’re someone like Willie, there’s the work of mentoring peers and students and young writers – something he’s been dedicated to for a long time. Me and Willie are very different – as people and poets. But there persists a shared memory—Puerto Rico and the Philippines—and a shared set of images, vocabulary, linguistic musics, and strategies embedded deep in what we do. And those things correspond. The old drums still talk to one another. They still translate. They can still move a crowd. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-best-in-poetry-national-book-critics-circle-award-finalists/2015/03/10/6b81f06a-c2b9-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html

Hollywood’s (Real) Problem with the Asian Male - →

I’m a sexual being and a sexual body – and have been for a long time. I write poems from this very sexual body. Even poems that aren’t explicitly erotic (though I’ve published many) are written by me as a sexual body.

I’ve posted about this before, but we could ask the same things about fiction and poetry books. I wonder about publishers, editors, reading series curators; I wonder what their expectations of Asian male sexuality is. I’ll name four poets off the bat: Justin Chin, Joseph Legaspi, Li-Young Lee, and me. All different. All REALLY different. There is not one Asian male sexuality. How do Hollywood, the publishing industry, the art world, construct a monolithic (or absent) public expectation of Asian male sexuality? How do Asian male poets contradict those expectations outright? The poets I mention here, we are all carnal – not in the way the word is used in moral judgment – but in terms of its root: i.e. of the flesh. We are of the flesh. And as the body moves in many ways, so does the movie, the story, the poem.

January Lit: "Dangerous Poems" by Patrick Rosal →

We bring you a poem about poems (but also not about poems) by Patrick Rosal for the first lit feature of the new year.

I wrote this poem in the summer of 2012, after two unarmed New Yorkers were shot by the police within 24 hours — Reynaldo Cuevas and Walwyn Jackson. I was thinking of Amadou Diallo. I was trying to make sense of what we think of as public competence.