Song of a Reformed Headhunter

waiting for the white man full moon

lit by the sun the dogwood flicks its white ash

in the manila folder the color of forsythia a festival program running into a peck of pigeons cloudburst

As a poet, I'd be deeply grateful to any reader who reads my poetry as closely as Dorothy J. Wang does the writings of Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Pamela Lu. The quality of attention in Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry is strongly sympathetic, though never uncritical. Wang shows how the racialized formation of the poets' identity is, not a cause, but a determinant of the form and language of their poetry. To ignore such influence is to read them willfully with one eye closed. Whether the poet treats race thematically, as Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin and John Yau do, or through formal means and experimental strategies, as Wang argues for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Pamela Lu, he or she has to confront the realities of American racial politics. In her readings, Wang uncovers the complex deployment of the individual poet's dominant trope. She shows, for instance, that Li-Young Lee is...

going incognito the forsythia drops its medals

Invited by Charlie Bondhus to the Publishing Triangle Awards Ceremony, I decided to troop along. The evening was held in the auditorium of The New School, where I heard Marie Ponsot read some years ago. The big space was less than half-filled. I thought it a pity, since the event was free and open to the public. Don Weise, with whom I chatted during the reception, suggested that New Yorkers don't value what they can get for nothing. Steven Cordova and Walter Holland, who are in the same writing group as Charlie, came in support too. Sara Farizan made a dramatic entrance just as her win for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction was announced. She had been delayed at San Francisco airport for three hours. She received even greater applause when her novel If You Could be Mine won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction. It was the first time in the awards history that one book won in the two categories. I was very happy for Charlie when his book of poems All the Heat W...

hehe drunk on shots of forsythia

transplants in Central Park forsythia suspensa

this spring the tulips are so late, drag queens

out on the lawn the first sunbathers I shiver in my coat

My poem "We will not pass this way again, my love" appears in The Raintown Review Volume #11 Issue #2, March 2014. Thanks, Anna Evans, for accepting the poem. The issue also includes a roundtable discussion of the legacy of Paul Christian Stevens, the beloved editor of The Shit Creek Review , The Chimaera , and The Flea . Paul was very supportive of my work, publishing several of my poems in his three journals, and a feature on my erotic poetry edited by Rose Kelleher. I miss his postings on Facebook, where he stood out for his humaneness. Today's haiku does not refer to Paul, but to another friend. Its mood is, however, in remembrance of him too. waking up with hair falling out on easter morning

soap bubble bigger than a man blown by man

Watched Ilo Ilo yesterday. It was a well-made film with good acting. A surprise to me that it wasn't better than competent. The plot was rather predictable. The symbolism a little forced. The camera angles, except for some nice close-ups, were familiar. The film could also do with tighter editing. It was a deft summary of the tropes of Singapore's Chinese TV dramas and multilingual stage plays, without the things that make them unique, the madcap comedy and the social criticism. Playing the father in the film, Chen Tianwen, the veteran TV actor, could stand for the same old same old. hungry again what good are my neighbor's plums?

overnight unexpected flowers snow in April

spring rain in New York City italicizes

Departures , directed by Yôjirô Takita, is somewhat sentimental, but I could not help but be moved by the home-coming story. Daigo Kobayashi (played by a lovable Masahiro Motoki) gives up a musical career playing the cello and returns to his hometown. There he stumbles into the job of preparing corpses for burial, a work called nokanshi, or "encoffineer." It soon emerges that he is a man wounded by his father's abandonment at the age of six. By sending off the dead in a tender and professional manner, and thus comforting the mourners, he finally achieves consolation for himself. There is a wonderfully comical scene when Daigo has to model as the corpse for a training video featuring his boss and teacher Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki). The symbolism of the scene becomes clear gradually as Daigo undergoes a form of rebirth. spring wind walking to work no sweat!

spring wind a bike chained to a tree missing a wheel

The second edition of the Second Saturdays reading series was hosted last night by Paul and Al. It was a pleasure to hear Vijay Seshadri read from 3 Sections . Other readers were very good too. Ten readers, but the hour went by quickly. Colin Goh's rendition of the Lord's Prayer into Singlish was hilarious, without being disrespectful. He and Damon Chua each read an extract from their stories in the forthcoming collection Singapore Noir . Marcus Yi read a satirical piece and Teo Kiat Sing read a darker poem by Marcus. Eric Norris read two fine poems, one about Kyoto, and one after Horace. Kenneth Lim read his well-turned poems about love. Christine Chia read a couple of new poems that strongly linked political and romantic disunion. Halfway through, Teo Mei Ann led us in creating a piece of collaborative theater. Contributing one line each, we wrote a discontinuous narrative about coming together as a community. spring wind I can go left or right

Read last night with Charlie Bondhus, Steven Cordova and Walter Holland at the Bureau of General Services--Queer Division . Greg, who works full-time at the Bureau, was lovely to talk to. Al and Paul Rozario-Falcone came, as did Eric Norris. I read "Profiles" and a couple of the ghazals from Seven Studies , "Eve's Fault" from the forthcoming book, and "The old Chinese poets" from The Pillow Book . Eric thought it was the best reading that I had done. I thought so too. I could hear myself relaxed into the music of the lines. mute swan a child's drawing on blue paper

mute swan in the long grass poem in English

mute swan on a blue plate poem in Chinese

mute swans on the Great Lake poems in translation

green shoots spring riding crops

Happening upon Matisse's Jazz cutouts at Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington green shoots the old magician on a sax Happening on Jazz was but one of the many happy incidents in Bloomington. The annual ALSCW conference ended last night with a banquet in the beautiful Tudor Room in Indiana Memorial Union, where the conference took place. The eating was followed by readings from the association's journal Literary Imagination . Jim McGregor paid a lovely tribute to his wife Sallie Spence, the founding editor of the journal, by reading a poem by Mark Strand published in the very first issue. Sallie read a poem by the Meringoff prize winner George Kologeris, a poem about his father blessing the house with a spring of basil. Archie Burnett, the current editor, read a non-fictional piece on the commas in the famous first sentence of Austen's Pride and Prejudice , and the same punctuation mark in Milton's Paradise Lost . John Burt regaled our table with Civil Wa...

green shoots in contempt of frost flowers

green shoots on a cutting board for a winter soup green shoots new testament of old roots

My friend Helen Dano organized a very interesting evening of poetry and discussion at City College--CUNY last night. She invited Rowan Ricardo Philips, Adam Fitzgerald and Bejan Matur not only to read, but to intersperse their reading with responses to questions from the moderator David Groff and City College MFA students. The three poets were very different in their styles and approaches to poetry. Philips was logically rigorous; his poetry showed a feeling for argument and form, and his answers a penchant for accuracy. Fitzgerald wrote much more associative verse, and his answers were more casual and personal. Bejan Matur was the most interesting of the three. The Turkish poet was genuinely and thoroughly mystical in her writing and poetics. There was no irony in her poetry, unless it was the deep irony of being alive in a deadly world. I had not realized that City College-CUNY had such beautiful stone buildings, an actual campus. After the reading, KM and I went to an Italian rest...

green shoots from the rich loam outside the condo

Gandhi (1982), the biopic by Richard Attenborough, was absorbing for all of its 191 minutes. It is to be expected that a film of such magnitude and with such backing would be hagiographic and would ignore all the controversies about the man, but once that reservation has been put aside, the film is an incredible piece of cinema, and well deserves its Oscar and Globe in best direction. Ben Kingsley is a very believable Gandhi, complete with Bapu's Indian-influenced English. Rohini Hattangadi is a very lovely Kasturba Gandhi. Roshan Seth brings some complexity to his portrayal of Pandit Nehru. He is the human working with the superhuman Mahatma. Oh yes, we also watched Chef's Special (2008), an okay gay comedy directed by Nacho G. Velilla, starring Javier Cámara, Lola Dueñas, and Fernando Tejero, who plays a cute ex-footballer.

the rain changes to snow then to rain the bus is here