Recording the Havoc Bit By Bit

Boneshepherds, my last book, was basically done in 2009. As a matter of fact, I sent the Boneshepherds manuscript to my editor in 2007 and both of us were ready to go into pre-production almost immediately. But as I went back to it, as I sent it out to folks I trust, it just didn’t feel right. So I went in and made some major revisions and it finally came out in October 2011. I’ve told myself of this story the last few years to remind myself how long it’s been since I’ve really dug down and written. Five years is a long time not to be getting to the page. 

When you’re not just busy, but crazed, it can multiply the frustration if you’re not bearing down and writing. My life has been turned upside down with personal setbacks and having to move several times in very short periods and a bunch of traveling, which is a gift but also taxing in its own way. It’s just been a rough stretch. 

I sat down this summer hoping to begin writing the next book in earnest. It was a different process for me. Most of my life, I made time to write almost every day and at some point in the process I would get that feeling that I was close to finishing a book, that I had accumulated enough material to at least see where I was at. I’d gather all my notebooks and stray napkins and scrawled-on receipts and book marginalia and see what poems I had and how they might coalesce, if at all, into a collection. That’s pretty much how it happened for three books–a decade of writing like that. 

Starting from scratch, though, felt strange and intimidating. Like having to walk out into a very big lake in my drawers, a rubber duckie in one hand and three stones in the other. How could I even start? 

Well, I moved to a new city the first week of May. I had boxes in storage. And for the first time in my life everything I owned was under one roof. I put the plates away, the books, all the little bullshit accrued from travel and two-dollar whims.

But I also unpacked boxes of notes. So many. In the years since Boneshepherds, moving from one address to the next, once in the wake of the worst NYC hurricanes in recent history, barely staying spiritually afloat after a breakup, reassessing old friendships, managing a two-hour-commute-one-way-Brooklyn-to-Camden, I realized, I actually had been writing all along. How could this be? I think, in fact, the habit was so deeply ingrained, that I scribbled on the Bolt Bus while dozing off or jotted things in between faculty meeting notes and doodles, scrawled lines on the inside covers of books I was teaching. Or maybe, I just needed to. Maybe something in the room or the rhythm of a conversation or the cadence of a sentence I read drove me to write it down–anything. 

Fragment by fragment I was recording all my departures, my grief and heartbreak, my dancing, my deep studies of history. I wasn’t writing poems, but I was collecting impressions–of Brooklyn, the Philippines, floods and storms and violence and names and a ton of music. Moving to an apartment I think I’ll be at for a while and settling in quickly helped me get some invaluable silence and solitude. It allowed me to see the raw material without judgment. I could see the crevices to pry open for a little light. I’ve been revising now. And I think I have some poems. Maybe even a whole book of them. I think that would be good if I do. 

Live, from my house!, Broadcast of Willie Perdomo and Malik Abduh Poetry Reading →

When I moved to Philly, I was happy to have a space that lends itself to sharing. So I thought I’d hold occasional gatherings of writers, musicians, and artists. 

Ayat, simply, means love in Ilocano, the language of my parents – though I’m told that in Arabic it can refer to the verses of the Qur'an or it can mean a sign of love or gratitude. I’m hoping to make a space where people can share what they love. Ayat events are mostly informal and completely irregularly scheduled. 

As a way of making a first blessing, Willie Perdomo and Malik Abduh will be reading poems. Friday, June 13, approximately 6:45pm EDT. 

Malik Abduh received his MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden in 2011. He was the recipient of the 2008 Rutgers University Alumni Association award for Creative Writing. He lived abroad for many years in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other countries. He is fluent in classical Arabic and works as a translator/interpreter. His interests are the Bedouin verse of early Arab poets and the Imagist movement of the early 20th century.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Poets, 2014), Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W.W. Norton, 1996), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Mandorla, and African Voices. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a former recipient of the Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia University, and a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books, a VONA/Voices faculty member, and is currently an Instructor in English at Phillips Exeter Academy.



These Dancers are indeed human →

Dear Huffington Post:

I hadn’t seen that video of The Company’s routine at Vibe IX in Irvine California. But I’m thrilled by it. I’m a former b-boy (c. 1981, Majestic Force Crew, NJ). Old head like me, I’m not really a fan of choreographed hip hop, but I can appreciate it. What I have a question about is your description of the dancers: they “might be robots”; “looks like they are sharing a collective consciousness”; and your Facebook headline reads, “There’s No Way These Dancers Are Human”.  (At the bottom of the article, you have a slideshow titled “Robots, Cyborgs, and Droids from TV and Film.”) I don’t find it offensive exactly, but these are really the only observations that Sarah Barness makes about The Company’s routine. And her language has a whiff of that really tired (and persistent) stereotype of mindless, robotic Asian-Americans. You know, we don’t have a mind of our own; we are obedient and unfeeling.

I’m not making an academic argument here. If you’ve ever danced for three minutes – I mean danced hard – choreographed or not, if you’ve ever caught a groove on a dance floor or subway platform or dollar-store aisle, let me tell you, there’s few things more human than that. You can’t just move to be a good dancer. You have to feel.

 There are so many other ways to comment on this video. Yes, “incredible”. Yes, “amazing”. But “robot”? A “collective consciousness”? How about the fact that so many of the bodies wouldn’t nearly make the cut in a European dance tradition like ballet? How about not just the synchronization, but the synchronization of varied body types? Slender and thick. Tall and short. Isn’t there a metaphor somewhere in there? Isn’t there some democratic wish embedded in that performance? And how can a big crew like that dance without feeling?

 ***

Years back, an aunt I loved very much died. We were eating at her house in between viewings at the funeral home. My cousin (daughter of the aunt who had just passed) and I were sitting next to each other with our Styrofoam plates on our laps. The room was grim, silent, but she suddenly stood up, put her plate on her seat, turned around to face the half dozen of us sitting against the wall and started to dance. No music – at least no music the rest of us could hear. She just danced – with her whole body, hands, hips, and hair. She kept going until she was almost out of breath.

A year or two later I asked her about it and she said, “Sometimes you just don’t got words. So you dance.” We trace our family to the Philippines. My cousin was born there. In the video of The Company’s performance, I count faces I could easily see in my mom’s barrio or in the provincial capitol. They are Southeast Asian and East Asian. I’m going to bet there are a bunch of Filipino dancers in the crew. I bet they come from some really similar traditions as my family, which is to say, we were taught, if you got sadness or grief or exuberance or confusion, you work it out through the body. Sometimes that leads to fights. Sometimes it leads to song — and dance. I’m telling you, the dance is human.

***

Instead of relegating the work and love of these young dancers to a robotic mind and body, it would be terrific if you profiled the dancers themselves. I would like to know what love drives them – and what troubles too.

I get that Ms. Barness was trying to be ironic. But the irony comes a little too quick and too easily. If I understand it properly,  true irony must contain its opposite, which is ardor. In Ms. Barness’ piece there is little to no ardor, and so her irony fails. But the dancers, it’s clear to me, they themselves are fire. 

Madagascar-Philippines connection

Lara Stapleton posted to Facebook a trailer for a movie about Madagascar playing at BAM this weekend and it reminded me that years ago, before the internet was as sophisticated as it is, I stumbled across words in Malagasy, the (a?) principle language of Madgascar. Some of the words had a remarkable resemblance to my parents’ language, Ilokano, the numbers in particular. They’re both Austronesian languages, so linguists, I guess, have identified some relationship, but I certainly haven’t been taught the specific histories (trade routes, etc.) that connect Madagascar and the Philippines.

Here are the languages (and English) counting to ten:

one (english), ray (malagasy, maysa (ilokano)
two, roa, dua
three, telo, tallo 
four, efatra, uppat
five, dimy, lima
six, enina, innem
seven, fito, pito 
eight, valo, walo
nine, sivy, siam
ten, folo, sangapulo

The Retirement of a Great and Largely Unacknowledged Poet and Teacher: Paul Genega

To be an artist is to be one who is willing to see what you didn’t see before, in fact, to be one who stubbornly seeks that out. And to be a teacher is to model that by seeing beyond the acknowledged skills and talent of each and every student. 

The delight of teaching is not in judging or identifying greatness. Nor is it in the making of stars. The true joy of teaching is helping students witness their own shine.

Thanks again to Paul Genega, poet, teacher, mentor, and dear friend.