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Posted by Haken
Thursday, September 02, 2010 9:58 AM
Poet Ken Chen recently wrote of Wing Tek Lum's reading on the atrocities of war at The Asian Americans' Workshop.
Here is an excerpt:
"I recently hosted the most unpleasant literary reading I’ve ever attended—a poetic listening experience so wondrously uncomfortable that it led me to think about the purpose of poetry readings and the expectations we have of poetry itself. My literary arts space, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, curated a reading titled DO YOU COPY, which featured three poets from different geopolitical milieus documenting the experience of war. The first two—Filipino American poet Luis Francia and Persian poet Kaveh Bassiri—read work about the Philippine American War, the Iran-Iraq War and September 11th. Some members of the audience were moved by these poems and began crying, but the tears they shed did not express discomfort but aesthetic or moral edification. Although these poems possessed war as their subject matter, they remained more beautiful than war. And then the last reader walked onstage and for thirty unrelenting minutes, read a series of poems describing, among other things, a soldier attempting to wrest his blade loose from a body whose head he is sawing off, a man killing a dog gnawing on a detached human arm, and a woman, who has presumably just been raped, with a live grenade forcibly inserted into one of her orifices. Welcome to the work of Wing Tek Lum, an American Book Award-winning Hawaii-based poet who is slowly, without anyone noticing, building one of the most terrifying oeuvres of contemporary poetry."
To read the full article, head on over to The New York Foundation for the Arts.
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Posted by Haken
Friday, August 27, 2010 11:26 AM
Aloha to all of you, and mahalo for your entries in the first Great BR Short-Short Story Contest. Here are the winners for July. Each will receive a $10 Bamboo Bucks award and is listed by category award:
Da Mos In Your Face Wit One Book Award: "By Definiton: Unscrupulous" -- Lavender Lee
Da Mos Life Can Be Tough Award: "Morning Commute" -- Marie Kaufman
Da Mos Green / Recycle Da Earth Award: "A Knife" -- Guy Agena
Da Mos Dating Can Be Tough Award: "A Date at Eight" -- Normie Salvador
Remember, the contest runs through midnight December 31st, and you can enter once each calendar month -- five more times : )
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Posted by HAKEN
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 7:15 PM
Listed are the Hawaii Book and Music Festival Word Bag winners.
First Place Winner
I will liftoff into the sunny literature
--Dionael Distajo
Second Place Winner
I peeked at the magazine my father carried as we sat down for dinner; it was open to a page of poetry.
--Nicole Hori
Third Place Winner
To all savvy people, if can-can…if no can still can!
--Joshua Dawson
Fourth Place Winner
You see vanity skydiving smooth off the tips of people’s tongues taking a plunge into conceitment.
--Serena Simmons
Honorable Mentions
Skip July I belong to August.
--Courtney Barry
I’m afraid the camera will capture my experience.
--Alice Kim
Celebrate the silence between the lines as you step through the Bamboo Ridge.
--Jana Chang
The world is my residence, but it escapes me.
--Peter Li
Your words are done, please stop talking!!
--Mei Ling Luke-Almony
Experiences are in your future.
--Jemma Stollberg
Sometimes, work is a novel.
--Louelle Saya
Life is like ice cream. Enjoy it before it melts away.
--Kalani Manzo
I saw her smile and it was enough solutions to live.
--Jenna Surwilo
Winners will be contacted by a member of the Bamboo Ridge Press staff.
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Posted by HAKEN
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 9:09 AM
Bamboo Ridge Press’ latest issue (#96) is a collection called No Choice but to Follow. The title is a canny play on the book’s concept: a series of linked poems done in a year’s span by seasoned writers Jean Yamasaki Toyama, Juliet S. Kono, Ann Inoshita and Christy Passion. Each of the Japanese linked-verses (renshi) was originally posted online on a weekly basis in celebration of the publishing house’s 30th anniversary.
Labeled by month, the poems begin as an examination of the writing process but gradually move into the territories of domestic strife, romantic longing and other little moments of living local. All four are equally observant and moving, and they each have their moments in stanza to shine. Toyama: “For make my lips red like strawberry / For cool me off and calm down…” Kono: “Tucking the nitro tablet / under the log of your tongue, / I patted your hand / and released you / to your knot of pain.” Inoshita: “At two o’clock / the wind exhaled / as summer cooled / under the mango tree.” Passion: “green cypress reminding me of / Roman coliseums and grander things.” These are just small examples of the delicate moments between the individual lines.
It is to the writers’ credit that the work doesn’t feel or read like a student exercise but a true demonstration of the poetic form.
The book also comes with a CD of the poets reading all 48 of their poems. The entirety is a spellbinding, illuminating work that deserves to be a local classic.
Source: http://honoluluweekly.com/story-continued/2010/05/writing-as-one/
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Posted by HAKEN
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 9:05 AM
At 2008's Hawaii Book and Music Festival, four poets, brought together by an online project by Bamboo Ridge Press to celebrate its 30th anniversary, met to read their writing aloud for the first time.
This was uncharted waters for them. Jean Yamasaki Toyama, Juliet S. Kono, Ann Inoshita and Christy Passion were only four months into a yearlong project based on the Japanese writing process of linked verse, known as renshi. The tricky part was that their ongoing collaboration, regularly posted on the press' website, needed to be done within a week of the updated posting. It was not the kind of deadline creative writers normally face.
Like the resulting collection's title states, the four had "No Choice but to Follow" one another on this dynamic "train" of poetry.
The book — the publication of which will be celebrated with special events starting Wednesday — was a decision by press founder-editors Eric Chock and Darrel Lum, made after that initial reading.
"There was electricity in the air," remembers Kono, who gathered with her fellow poets last Monday in the Na'ea Courtyard on the grounds of the Queen's Medical Center (Passion works there as an intensive care unit nurse). "It was such a powerful delivery of our voices. Before that we didn't even know each other that well in person."
"It was like we had rehearsed beforehand," said Toyama.
"It felt organic," added Inoshita.
Based on a suggestion by press staffer Wing Tek Lum (who himself participated in a renshi back in the early 1990s), Toyama, a poet/scholar/translator/fiction writer and an emerita professor of French at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, was chosen as the first participant.
"It was up to me to find the other three," she said. "I admit I turned the screws on Juliet to help, and Marie (Hara, a press executive officer) and Darrel knew of Ann's and Christy's work, so we finally we had a set.
"I went into this fearless," Toyama said. "I never doubted we could do this."
Even though the poets could write about anything they wanted — provided they used the previous poem's last line as its title and starting point — Toyama kicked things off with "What Does Bamboo Ridge," an obvious choice in her mind to commemorate the independent press' 30 years of existence.
From there, the 48 linked poems made for a clear and unified flow but still expressed the musings and thoughts of four unique voices.
"Each one of us are very different poets," Kono said. "Her's (Toyama) is strong and very to-the-point. Christy's strength is in narrative and imagery. And Ann's a little more serene, and her use of pidgin (in her 'Without Meaning to Be Cruel' poem) is wonderful."
"Taking part in the renshi took me out of my element," said Inoshita, a published writer and professor at Kapiolani Community College. "I felt I was being thrown into the unknown, addressing topics I usually don't write about, so there was a need to be more creative."
Although all concerned are pleased with the resulting book, Passion, an award winner as both a writer and a nurse, said that "if I know something of mine is being published, I would polish it and belabor any choice of words. So had I known beforehand our online poems were going to be published, I probably would've been more manic about the whole process."
"It was odd to see the final result," said Kono said, whose laudable work has been published by Bamboo Ridge over the years. "You realize that this is your writing, but you're more self-conscious of it because it's part of a group effort."
"I was trying to strike my own voice," said Passion. "I admit there were times that I tried to resist the flow of tone and subject the other three had established — like a shopping cart with that one uncooperative wheel. But since I'm more of a novice in comparison to the others, I felt I had to step up my writing and not to emulate, but to find my own voice in this project."
Source: http://www.starbulletin.com/features/20100425_Poets_unite_in_differences.html
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