Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Read at Poets House for the launch of Tribes 13 yesterday. It was a day of record heat, but cool in the Battery Park home for poetry. The circular exhibition room showed some interesting first editions and letters, by Robert Duncan, Pound, Ginsberg, H.D., among others. No Asian American poets there. No Asian American poets too up on the wall in the quiet reading room. The narrative of American poetry, even in a liberal and progressive space, does not include them. For the first time I felt the enormity of the challenge of becoming a part of American poetry. Okka said hi in the exhibition room. She had heard of me from a Singaporean poet friend, and was visiting Poets House when she read my name on a flyer advertising the Tribes reading. An Indonesian, she has been writing since young, and will be taking up a writing residency at the Vermont Art Studio next month. We sat together for the reading. The turnout was very good. There must have been close to 100 people there. I read "T...

Steven Cordova kicked off his new reading series called "Working Authors" by featuring six poets from Best Gay Poetry 2008 , edited by Lawrence Schimel. I read last night, together with Chip Livingston, Timothy Liu, Jason Schneiderman, Emmanuel Xavier and the curator himself. The room in the LGBT center was nicely filled up. I read "Glass Orgasm" from the anthology, and "Florida" and "Montauk." The last two worked well together. Despite stumbling twice, my reading I judge was compelling. TH and EN were there, as was SS who swopped her new book The Future Is Happy for mine. The Friday before last I read at Cornelia Street Cafe, curated by Kat Georges. I did my best ever reading then. Hit every musical phrase with precision and made every structure sensible. The poems were mostly about my father, from the first section of my book. EN was there.