It’s happening! The Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Center is hosting its first ever Asian American Literature Festival next week in DC. I’ll be participating, as weill an incredible roster of artists, writers, publishers, and scholars. This is a historic event, and not to be missed. My participation is three-fold. I’ll be reading poetry as part of the Poetry Journal’s Asian American themed issue launch on Thursday night. On Friday, I’ll be making a Literary Address. The title of my remarks is “Awarding Abjection.” It’s likely to be a somewhat provocative conversation, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m also hosting a salon on Experimentalism and Community Building. It should be a busy but amazing time! I’m so grateful to the organizers, most especially Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis for his selfless organizing efforts and immensely generous imagination for community. Click the image above to visit their program site.
Mark your Calendars: Subterranean Technologies at the AAWW Friday April 27
Subterranean Technologies: The Ambient Poetics of Tan Lin, Pamela Lu, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Dorothy Wang, and Lucy Ives
Friday, April 27, 2012, 7PM
Join us for a night of ambient poetics with three experimental writers who probe the relationship between art- making and found technologies from parking garage reverberations to the neon glow of TV broadcasts. Treat your ears to Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt, Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Underground National. Williams College professor Dorothy Wang will moderate and Triple-Canopy Editor, Lucy Ives, will live-tweet the event.
The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation Writing Grant, Lin is the author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies, lauded by Warren Liu as “an utterly, compellingly boring film–I’ve already forgotten it in the best way unimaginable.” In Tan Lin’s latest work, Insomnia and the Aunt, a young man’s memories of visiting his Chinese aunt at her motel, recalled almost as if written by their TV set. The aunt’s memory ghosts her nephew’s television screen, their shared past-time. The aunt “resembles the biography of a dead person where the dead person has somehow forgotten to die. She speaks casually, like the speech of a language without a speaker.” Lin’s experimental novella is indexed by photographs, postcards, and the indicia to an imaginary novel, mimicking the seamless repetition and reproducibility of images on the television. In Lin’s beautiful and wonderfully odd elegy, technology acts as an emotive transmitter engaging the two relatives in erotic simulacra.
Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot profiles a noise music band’s search for the ultimate ambient sound and is the follow-up toPamela: A Novel, an experimental poetry classic and one of SPD’s bestselling books of the 90’s. They sample revving engines, the parking habits of the rich and famous, and commercial parking spaces. Reading Ambient Parking Lot is comparable to “watching an indie webisode spin-off of ‘Behind the Music,’ as Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops,” says Jai Arun Ravine ofLantern Review Blog.
The author of That Gorgeous Feeling and Underground National,Sueyeun Juliette Lee could be the only poet to write about U.S. intervention in Korea and the dating patterns of K-pop stars. Sueyeun is a transnational collagist who perverts found documents and replaces fixed histories of square footage, geographic boundaries, and global affairs editorials with erasure. In her second book of poetry, Underground National, Lee remixes celebrity suicides, tourism trends, and web splices to put forth a subterranean account of Korean culture.
This event is co-sponsored by St. Marks Poetry Project
@ Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation
Mark Your Calendars in Austin and Philadelphia
APRIL. We tilt a bit closer to the sun, and what blossoms from the earth…I’m excited about several opportunities to read over the next few weeks. Maybe I’ll get to see you at some of them?
Firstly, the NEW issue of Critiphoria is out! Definitely one of the smartest collections I’ve ever had the privilege of appearing in. Please go “click” and take a peek.
I’ll be in Austin, Texas for the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference from April 8-11th. The conference is being held at the Omni Austin Hotel downtown. If you want to hear me nerd out, I’ll be presenting a paper on Mei Mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry on Thursday at 4:30pm. Timothy Yu, who wrote the excellent Race and the Avant Garde, will be presenting on John Yau’s Berlin poems, and Catherine Fung (who was just hired to teach up in Massachusetts) will discuss Gran Turino. Stephen Hong Sohn from Stanford will be chairing.
I’ll be reading poems for the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) Reading on Friday, April 9th at 7pm.
On Saturday, April 10th, I’ll be reading with Ken Chen, the executive director of the AAWW at Hoa Nguyen’s home in Austin. I’ll have further details on that soon.
If you’re in Philadelphia, there’s a HUGE Heretical Texts event on Saturday, April 10th in Center City Philadelphia. All five poets will be (re)present(ed), and it is probably the only time this will happen for this particular volume of the Heretical Texts Series. Though I can’t physically be present because I’ll be in Austin, Carolina Maugeri will read a few of my poems on my behalf, and I will be there in spirit. Below is the announcement for the Philadelphia Heretical Texts reading.
On MONDAY April 12th, I’ll be giving a presentation discussing the use of film and theory in my poetry at the University of the Arts. The talk is from 1-2:30 in the CBS Auditorium, located in Hamilton Hall (corner of Broad and Pine Street). This talk is intended for an undergradate audience. You’ll need a picture ID if you plan on attending. I hope you do!
On FRIDAY April 16th, I’ll be reading in Philadelphia for the Moles Not Molar reading series. The event starts at 7:30 at the Wooden Shoe Bookstore (704 South Street (at South and 7th St). I’ll be reading with Matvei Yankelevich of Ugly Duckling Presse (they produce the most stunning books), with music by Tristan Dahn & Tim Leonido.
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HERETICAL TEXT Philly event, DON’T MISS IT! (If you miss it don’t come crying to me!)
April 10th
at 8pm
TERRA HALL
http://www.uarts.edu/about/2176.html
Corner of Walnut and Broad
in the Connelly Auditorium, 7th floor
(ENTER on Broad Street through the door between Rite Aide and the Italian restaurant, you will need to show I.D. at the desk to enter, EVENT IS FREE)
Kate Schapira (author of TOWN), Allison Cobb (author of Green-Wood), Sueyeun Juliette Lee (author of Underground National), Simone White (author of House Envy of All the World), and CAConrad & Frank Sherlock (co-authors of The City Real & Imagined)
HERETICAL TEXT Books are published by Factory School, and this Philly event is the only event in the continental US and the entire world where all the authors will be reading together! DON’T MISS IT!
see: http://www.factoryschool.org/ht/index.html for details on books.
Kate Schapira’s book: http://www.factoryschool.com/pubs/heretical/vol5/schapira/index.html
Allison Cobb’s book: http://www.factoryschool.com/pubs/heretical/vol5/cobb/index.html
Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s book: http://www.factoryschool.com/pubs/heretical/vol5/lee/index.html
Simone White’s book: http://www.factoryschool.com/pubs/heretical/vol5/white/index.html
CAConrad & Frank Sherlock’s book: http://cityrealandimagined.blogspot.com
silentbroadcast 