{"id":103,"date":"2011-10-16T16:32:30","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T20:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sangamithra.wordpress.com\/?p=103"},"modified":"2011-10-16T16:32:30","modified_gmt":"2011-10-16T20:32:30","slug":"poetry-and-performance-process-and-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/?p=103","title":{"rendered":"Poetry and Performance; Process and Product"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We could all use more poetry in our lives. \u00a0I realized that last Friday night while at a book party for Ed Bok Lee<\/a> and Patrick Rosa<\/a>l at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop<\/a>. \u00a0Both Lee and Rosal read a few long narrative poems-“a subversive act” in our 140 character lives, Rosal said about the form.<\/p>\n

“Couldn’t you just listen to these guys all night?,” the executive director of AAWW asked the crowd after the reading.<\/p>\n

Yes. I thought. \u00a0It was these long poems that spoke to me. \u00a0As I listened to Lee read his poems, I watched his body perform them.<\/p>\n

“Every Poem is a Performance,” I once heard a poet announce at a reading. \u00a0 I remember my writing professor, Louise DeSalvo saying, “There’s practice, and there’s performance.” \u00a0 She reminded us that musicians, dancers, athletes practice every day but they don’t perform every day. \u00a0We build up to that. \u00a0As writers, we need to adopt a similar understanding. \u00a0We work toward that final performance.<\/p>\n

Lee’s body knew the words before he spoke them. It was from revision, revisiting, practice \u00a0that this poem, this performance was possible.<\/p>\n

What I love about going to see poetry performed, is listening to the narrative introductions some poets give about their work. \u00a0What inspired this particular poem. \u00a0What triggered it. \u00a0I sometimes crave that sort of introduction in poetry books. \u00a0While the poems themselves do stand alone, I love learning about their incarnation. \u00a0Just as their is practice and performance, there is also process and product.<\/p>\n

Both Lee and Rosal talked about the earth’s dying languages. \u00a0Rosal noted that areas in linguistic decline are also the areas of signficiant ecological loss. \u00a0Languages and lives vulnerable to perhaps the same destructive forces.<\/p>\n

Lee’s poem “Whorled,” addresses this and opens with:<\/p>\n

“Dear speaker in a future age\/when only a handful of tongues remain\/I write this to you as a song\/even as I know it won’t do.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I enjoyed listening to Lee’s poem “Regenesis” and the backstory of \u00a0the “tiny aluminum spoon that could feed crumbs to an ant.”<\/p>\n

It was history behind the poem “If in America,” that stirred my interest. \u00a0How the story of a Hmong man charged with murder and its portrayal in the New York Times resulted in anger by this writer and later in poetry. \u00a0Process is sometimes is equally as fascinating as product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We could all use more poetry in our lives. \u00a0I realized that last Friday night while at a book party for Ed Bok Lee and Patrick Rosal at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. \u00a0Both Lee and Rosal read a few long narrative poems-“a subversive act” in our 140 character lives, Rosal said about the form. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Poetry and Performance; Process and Product”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[23,29,74,93],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-writing","tag-asian-american-writers-worksho","tag-books","tag-poetry","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sangamithraiyer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}