DDCPoetry

  This past month and a half has been the busiest month -- working through what my next steps are after my position sun downed, figuring out where and what to apply to, but also how poetry fits into my life now.  During this time, I wrote haiku.  It's something that comforts me and helps me focus.  Three images or parts -- one line at a time, and one word at a time.  Sample below: No New Year's Haiku  until the third day; cashing  my final paycheck.   But there were other things going on the end of the year.  My boyfriend went to the ER, and I drove up to San Francisco and took care of him for a bit: cooking, taking him to the hospital, watching What's My Line. Constructing poems  helps calm my mind. I write a  poem a day sort of. Toward the end of this process, poems were written on different digital areas -- for other poets, for gaybrosover30, in a e-writer where I need to type up the poem again.  I got there, but I need to ...

  In my head is the Utada Hikaru song "Traveling."   I only remember the refrain and never really looked at the lyrics in translation.  This part sticks out to me the most: Frolic with the waves, seduce the clouds At last, we meet Blame it on my youth, I give it away too quickly ‘Tis all but dust in the wind  This makes me think of the allure of traveling.  You can act a certain way, but those memories are temporary compared to how a city or a place remembers you.  Well, usually.  The shot above is of Chicago when I went on the architectural boat tour.  Chicago was a revelation to me of younger people appreciating the arts from poetry to plays.  I visited the Poetry Foundation, went to a reading and discussion.  I visited Steppenwolf theater, which the production of Amadeus was really good.  Being back here in San Jose/San Francisco, it's not like people aren't into the arts, but it's me carving out a usual routine in familiar setti...

This one [...] Going from 10 words or less to fourteen lines or longer was a challenge I wanted to give myself.  I thought it's the perfect length because I could surely write two sonnets a day.   Nope. I love a good form poem, especially a sonnet, but it's not my strong suit in two a day challenges.  Instead, I just let the thought extend further to see where it took me.  Two things helped in this challenge. 1.  During this time, the Remarkable Paper Pro Move came out.  It's an e-writing tablet that can fit in my pocket.  I take this everywhere, and I'm able to write in places like restaurants, in my car at the beach, at work.  It's definitely made it possible to jot down whatever thought that crosses my mind. 2. On October 4th, I was invited by Rachelle Escamilla to come down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium at night from 7:00-11:00 to see her read.  I've been to the Aquarium many times in the day.  It was when I was there three years...

  I stopped writing in July and August.  I am grateful for the time with the VONA's Writer Workshop this past end of June, and am honored to be and learn with such great poets.   To write at that high level, I gave it everything I had -- put a lot of thought with each word, mine and theirs.  I was just exhausted afterwards.  I haven't really fully recovered yet.  I have to write an equivalent of two poems a day for two months -- hence the title of month 6 and 8.  I'll be caught up by 10/17.  I have to write two poems today. So the choice for writing two poems a day for a month is the short form. I studied a lot of short form: a love of haiku, cinquains, Li Bai, Issa, Basho, Williams, Bly, Knott, and Armantrout.  It's hard. Yes the shortness of the poem can keep attention spans, but every word and spacing is delicate. Shifts meaning and breath.  The poem has to make you think longer than you read it. Ex. Tell Don’t Show Just tell me...

  A Revised Version About Month 5   During that time period, I got a steam deck.  I use it all the time to unwind and think things through.  I don't commit to long rpg's anymore, and am sticking with rogue-lite/likes or simulation games where I just own a card shop or a farm.   I'm having a hard time with the concept of stories along with video games now these days.  Sometimes, things just happen and happen.   Anyways, here's an example of the poem I wrote this month: Radical Dreamers For tonight, let’s forget about meaning. Give in to hyperbole enough to amplify litotes: the hitched breath upon my hand grazing the side of your body, the way your back tries to slide further into me to feel the most of my chest. Don’t hear my iambs. Please. Let’s just continue to where I’m in control on how I construct my lines. Enjambment feeling out of place; we can’t differentiate space as minutes or hours.

 Credit to user anu-nand from Reddit for the photo.   I've been reading a lot of Kobayashi Issa and Kobayashi Issa insight recently.  I recommend  David G. Lanoue translation and insight of Kobayashi Issa's work as it has great readings, analysis, and examples withing the work.  I keep thinking of his book Write like Issa: A Haiku How-To where Lanoue writes:   Issa's concern for small, weak, alone, and oppressed creatures began with a genuine and sincere effort to imagine the world as experienced by them.  He then affirmed his connection with fellow beings acknowledging a shared reality in which he was not living on a higher plane looking down on them but, instead, was on their level, commiserating with them.   If you look through some of Kobayashi's varied work (I recommend https://haikuguy.com/issa/ ) you'll see the subject matter of Issa's haiku has animals like frogs and flies, mosquitos and crickets.  So I wanted to write about animals...

Barazoku , which translates to "The Rose Tribe" was the first commercially ran gay men's magazine in Japan.  I learned about it from reading Yukio Mishima, and my memory is a bit vague about how involved he was in the magazine, but, for me, he represented this type of bigger, muscular gay Asian male.   Granted, Mishima was and still is not a great role model for gay men.  Seppuku and honor was all in his books, as he himself commited seppuku in a coup attempt. But for me, a kid in his 20's who was ashamed of his sexuality, and sense of masculinity, turned to Barazoku as an ideal self and attraction. Just seeing Asian men being confident in their sexuality and just living their lives gave me hope that there was something better out there, since coming out wasn't a great experience: being laughed at, being told I'm going to Hell, being somewhat disowned and being told I was replaceable definitely changed my world view on what I believed in and the people around...

In grad school, I took a course in Detective Fiction in 2010.  One of the projects we could do at the end of the course was to create our own book proposal for a detective story, and I had one in mind for a long time. Let's go further back, back when I was studying about Asian-American History when I was an undergrad in 2003 I learned about the Watsonville Riots from Strangers from a Different Shore by Ronald Takaki .  From my memory, the title of the chapter about the Watsonville Riots, and the Filipino-American experience in American was called "A Dollar a Day, A Dime a Dance."  This is in reference to Filipino farm workers earning a dollar a day, and spending a dime to dance with someone at a dance hall. But what interested me most about this was this hysteria that Filipino men were dating, loving, and being with white women which was said to be the basis of the riots.  Also the idea that one man, Fermin Tehera, was killed in a farm house -- shot through the hear...

The Stafford Challenge is a commitment to write a poem a day for a year.  I haven't really written poems for a year, and seeing this challenge pop up on my Facebook feed made me wonder why I haven't so before.  I think I'm one of those type of writers who tells himself it's easier to wait for inspiration rather than be more active in the writing process: research, writing, revision as a way to say to myself "I'll write it when it's the best time."  Well, there's no time like now, right? In the past two years, I was able to do poem a day challenges that lasted for a month.  However, the way I wrote them was more improvisational journal entry: writing what I see that day, or what was happening, and since I did this type of writing for two challenges, I wanted to try something different. So a week before the start date, I decided to list a bunch of themes, ideas, undercurrents, to latch onto and guide me as I explored what I thought about them throug...