Questions for the new year

Happy new year to any of you who still find this place--

I'm preparing to teach a graduate workshop in Poetry as Prose/Prose as Poetry, as well as a single author course for upper level undergrads on Gertrude Stein. So I'm writing lists of questions for myself and others.

First, the poetry workshop. Here's a description of it: http://english.hawaii.edu/course/grad-writing-workshop-poetry-2/

and here are the questions, so far. I'm not a fan of workshops, because they are so difficult to move past the point of pressure points, sensitivities, and opinions. So here I'm emphasizing reading that is done without judgment.

 

Poetry as Prose/Prose as Poetry

Spring, 2016

QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR OWN WORK AND OTHERS'

What do we write (about)?

For whom do we write?

Describe what you or another has written.

Describe it as carefully and precisely as you can, avoiding judgment.

Again, without judgment, analyze the piece you have just described.

What are the pieces and parts of the mechanism, and how do they work?

Thinking as a writing mechanic, which of these pieces works best?

Which piece might require some re-visioning?

Where are the issues? In the chassis, the axle, the engine, or the wheels?

What tools will the writer need to do his or her work?

What is the effect of the piece on you? (Again, without judgment.)

What part of your body does the piece touch, or fail to touch?

How does the writer get to that part of your body/mind?

Find the precise words and syntax that makes it happen.

If you remain untouched, suggest some replacement parts from your toolkit.

What forms do you see within the relative formlessness of the prose poem?

Consider that a mode of seeing can be expressed in a sentence, as well as in a genre.

(Write a sentence that's a nature poem, a love poem, a documentary poem.)

What work are these forms doing?

Take a couple sentences and translate them into other forms (love into car mechanics, documentary into lyrical, haiku into letter and so forth). Consider the effects. Change them back.

Take something out.

Add something in.

Consider the writer's use of pronouns. Switch some. Switch them back.

Consider the writer's use of verbs. Change modes. Active to passive, passive to past tense, past tense to subjunctive (what's left of it).

Consider the writer's meaning. If you are disturbed, consider why you feel disturbed (without judgment).

If you are moved, consider why (without judgment).

Say something critical, without judgment.

Say something positive, without judgment.

The Gertrude Stein course is full, over-full. I doubt many of the students know what they're in for. But, as she's an excellent partner in drawing out our assumptions (and reactions), my questions about her work so far center on them. The description of the course can be found here: http://english.hawaii.edu/course/single-author/

QUESTIONS INSPIRED BY THE WORK OF GERTRUDE STEIN

What do we write (about) and how do we write (about it)?

How do we tell stories?

What is a story?

How do we write poems?

What are poems (for)?

How do we use words apart from their meanings?

How do we find meaning in that?

What connections exist between writing and painting, music?

What is the function of repetition in language?

What is punctuation and why does it exist?

What happens if small words (the, it) assume a larger role in our writing?

How do we read?

When do we stop reading, and why?

What is the relationship between life and art?

What is the relationship between a writer's biography and her work?

Seattle Status (Lines)

2/25: Going to the big writers' conference, seated next to a guy with black-framed hipster glasses, two digital devices, a kindle & a laptop, who was trying to get his young son to write a 12 page story about boogie-boarding (to be written in a booklet the size of a blue book, with lines and a big square for drawings). They argued about the story, the son slammed his fist against the tray table, and there was no peace in our row until the boy got to use his iPad again.
 

2/26: Going to the big writers' conference, three hour lay-over on Maui (what we do to get good fares). No paper in the women's room, or soap. "At least we're going back to the real world," one woman says. "I live in Hawai`i," I say. 


2/26: "You know, like straight guys who really love cats . . . had no idea they existed, until I met Ryan." 


2/27: The lovely hand written signs in the vegetable markets in Seattle remind me of the work of the Australian painter, Robert McPherson who paints grocery store script on canvas. The hand written sign by the young white man who sits near the Convention Center: "Money, food, bus ticket: anything helps." He was working on the lettering this morning. Last time I walked by, he had his head down, sign propped up. 


2/28: Homeless man in alley crushing crackers under his heel so the birds can eat; writers at AWP bookfair--no, the metonymy's too easy.


2/28: One of the hotel housekeepers was telling me her throat hurt. She thought she was getting a cold. On a hunch, I asked if she was Cambodian. Yes, she said, usually people asked if she was from Thailand. I showed her pictures of my son. She was from Battambang, in the west. Our friend Hongly's father died there of starvation during the Khmer Rouge time. She said my son looked like a movie star. We laughed and said good-bye.


3/1: We talked about the weather, the couple next to me on the airplane and I. Then we talked trauma: her mother had tried to kill her as a baby, spent years in hospitals, left her to be abused by a grandfather; she hadn't known what it meant to feel. [Her husband explained "conversion disorder" to me: she'd been paralyzed, except for her eyes, for two weeks. When asked by a therapist what she remembered, she'd said, "nothing before age 8."] Her husband said he just wanted to be her best friend. Their one grandson was found abandoned, covered in HIV sores, in Ethiopia. [He's autistic, but they live too far away from treatment to qualify.]


3/2: In the "it never ends" department:

[I have no idea what happened to make the photograph appear in this way, but it's appropriate]: 

[To see what this actually is, go here]

 

The nearly completed syllabi in Documentary Writing & Small Press Publishing

On the graduate level, I'll be teaching a course in Small Press Publishing; much of what follows is contingent, but the flux is more sea-worthy than it was:

https://sites.google.com/site/smallpresspublishinguhm/syllabus-spring-2014

On the sophomore honors level, I'm teaching a course in Documentary Writing:

https://sites.google.com/site/documentarywritingspring2014/syllabus

Both syllabi will ramify, especially at the beginning of the course. In any case, I'm really looking forward to both these classes.

Bob Holman & R. Zamora Linmark rock the classrooms of UHM

[Bob Holman, top; Zack Linmark & Amalia Bueno, bottom]


The heavens aligned yesterday in a marvelous twofer of guests in my classes, English 353 (History of Poetic Form) and English 273 (Documentary Writing).  The early class--it's an 8:30 class in a city with too much traffic in an engineering building classroom with no windows, dingy white paint, and aged plastic coated desks--found themselves confronted by Bob Holman, slam poet, poetry enthusiast, defender of endangered languages. I'd suggested he was welcome simply to talk story, and that my students lit up most when we did a unit on signifyin, rap and performance poetry. And perform he did. The opening act was Holman as Benjamin Bratt (6' 2" white guy) as Mikey Pinero (5' 2" Puerto Rican guy). Holman played both roles, Pinero as himself, Bratt as Pinero. Then he played himself--older hipster, slam poet, charismatic teacher--to a group of students wearied by a long semester and still smarting from a recent unit on the elegy.  (I just got off Facebook where Kathy Lou Schultz was lamenting that her students may never come back to her class after reading elegies.) 

Holman recounted his ur-moment as an oral poet, when he found himself dancing to a poem by Kurtis Blow, "These are the breaks." One student in class helped him chant the poem. He then riffed into the following topics: the sound of Lower East Side in Nuyorican English (Loeesida); how he started memorizing poems after his first attempt to read a poem beneath lights that flashed too much for him to see his own text; how what you do if you are a poet is what a poet is; his work with PBS's United States of Poetry, which included videotaping Lois-Ann Yamanaka's "Boss of the Food"; his experiences with a blues poet; signifyin' two levels of a single story, one X-rated, one not; orality not as poetic form but as consciousness; Homer; how he was left out of the second edition of the Ron Padgett book of forms we're using in the class; the question of how many languages there are, and the fact that we're losing one language every two weeks, and are slated to lose 1/2 of all languages in the next 60 years; corporate global capitalism; his study with a griot; how poets are paid in West Africa; the difference between an epic that is "long long long" (oral) and "very long" (written); how a poem shifts from day to day because each day is different, according to his griot mentor; Hawaiian orality and literacy; digital consciousness; how literature comes through the body; multi-linguality as a natural tradition; kids as sponges; the sadness of being the last speaker of a language; talk story vs. talk stink; how he was left out of edition #2 of Padgett; rainforests and cancer treatments, both of them being life forms out of control; Welsh; definitions of poet; verb tenses in the Amazon; ecology of consciousness; his courses on "exploding texts" (Columbia) and "poetry census" (NYU)

and then he was gone.

Zack (aka R. Zamora) Linmark came to my early afternoon class, where we've been reading his new novel, LECHE.  The course is on documentary writing, so the mix of history, postcards, tourist tips, and other documents, real and imagined, made the book fit the syllabus nicely.  Many of the students are local Filipino, and most of them are from Hawai`i, so the book is close to home for them. (Its central character, Vince, comes to Hawai`i from the Philippines as a child, and is now returning for a visit, only to realize no one in the Philippines considers him anything other than American.)

After my students had finished taunting me over my Cardinals' pummeling at the hands of the Giants, Zack began talking about homecoming narratives, starting with those by Homer; about how the motherland often rejects the traveler; how he detests linear narratives; how digressions and plot are related; how it took him 12 fucking years to write the book, which he started as a UH student; how it only took him one year to write Rolling the Rs (a book he says he detests); how LECHE is a prequel and a sequel to that book; how this novel relates to Gulliver's Travels, which the students have not read; how Vince is Gulliver; how he also uses elements of Dante's Inferno; how he used Swift's model in the long long scene of Vince trying to take a shit but finding no toilet paper; about how Vince's story is developed through nightmares, tourist tips, and postcards sent home; how he uses 3rd person, 2nd person, 1st person and dialogues in the book (this fit in well with the fiction-writing tips Donovan Colleps had offered the class period before); how difficult it was to divorce himself from the main character; how much research he did on history, popular culture, the US military, superstitions; how he has no audience when he writes, but means for more than Filipinos to enjoy the book; how place is not setting but character; Kalihi, Manila; how he had to become a sociologist/anthropologist to write the book; the signage he saw in Manila ("Elizabeth Tailoring"); on how his next novel will be set in Tokyo, a city he only lived in for six months; how you need eight pairs of eyes in Manila; how the energy of his prose is intended to echo the frenzy of Manila; how to develop character through dreams; a dream he had about shitting in his pants while naked; the reading his friend, Justin Chin, gave of this dream; procrastination; satire; how to spell "da kine" or "da kind"; how people don't speak in italics; how texting is unfixed, like language

and then he was gone.

Field notes from the teaching life

The students of English 273: Introduction to Literature and Creative Writing: Documentary Writing, were terrified. My course apprentice, doctoral student No`u Revilla, had asked them to break into pairs and push their desks up against each other, so that each student could look at another student face to face. Nervous laughter. Some blushing. Lots of chatter. They were to spend five minutes taking notes on the other student's face, in preparation for writing a portrait of the other student. (We've been reading Eleni Sikelianos's The Book of Jon, which is an extended portrait of the poet's usually absent, heroin-addicted, father.) The five minutes of observation reminded me of the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of John Cage I imposed on a composition class once. The anxiety became palpable in that class when one football player began drumming on his desk and another leaped to his feet to perform a dance for the others. In this class, the silence was only part of the unease; the rest brought together a fear that often blocks us writers from writing with clarity.

The equation goes like this: observation = judgment. We live in a culture where a famous person can proffer judgment even on an empty chair. We go to college and learn to think critically, which too often gets interpreted as "with moral judgment." Our churches leave out the "lest ye be judged" part of the proverb. Perhaps it would have been easier for each student to write a description of an object: rock, paper or scissors, say. I've had classes do that exercise before, and it works well for generating metaphors. What the portrait exercise achieves is the crisis of associating observation with judgment, when the student realizes that he or she is also being observed. What will my partner (who doesn't even know me!) write about me? Has anyone ever looked this closely at me, or I at them? No`u eased their minds retroactively, when she described these portraits as "gifts" from each student to his or her partner. That's a beautiful way to put what I would describe as a lesson in realizing that the world not only calls out for observation, but that such close observation can be done most lovingly--or merely effectively--if we put aside our fears of being judged.  (I know, that's especially difficult when you're 20 years old!)

Our early discussions of Sikelianos's book were fraught with questions of judgment. One student wondered why Sikelianos sometimes portrayed her father in a loving way, and sometimes called him a bastard. Why not one or the other? Perhaps we can bring this conversation around, pointing to the way in which human relationships are inevitably complicated. But even more instructive is the way in which Sikelianos's book is most effective (to my mind) when she is trying to paint a picture of her father apart from her interest in him. Who was he as himself? How utterly impossible is it to create such a portrait, when you are the neglected daughter? And yet, how beautiful the task of trying to give him back his life.

Ed. note: the morning after I wrote this post, I found something about Maria Abramovic's MOMA exhibition/performance (where she sat and invited people to come look at her for as long as they wanted to) on Andrew Sullivan's blog, with a link to an earlier post about people who began to cry as they looked at her. Find that link here. 

__________

In more personal poetry news, the new issue of NAP, an on-line journal, includes my mash-up of The Little Prince and King Lear, which originally appeared on this blog. The last book her social worker read to her was the pop-up version of Saint-Exupery's book. I bought my own copy to "read along" with them. The new issue (#100!) of Bamboo Ridge includes three of my memory cards from the recent Singing Horse Press book. I will be participating in the September 30 BR reading at the UHM Art Auditorium at 3 p.m. There are two other BR readings, as well, at Native Books and at Kumu Kahua Theater.

Syllabi, Fall 2012

This coming semester, I'll be teaching two courses, an introductory level course on documentary writing and an upper level course on the history of poetic forms.  The first course is a mixed critical and creative course (the kind I teach anyway) and the second is more of a reading course, though students will have to engage with forms as ways to see the world, if not forms as rules to follow in their own poems. 
  

353: History of Poetic Forms:



273: Documentary Poetry

"In God's name don't think of it as Art": On first (belatedly) reading _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_, by James Agee

To give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and interest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. James Agee

__________

When I put James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on the reading list for Spring, 2012's Documentary Poetry course, I had not yet read the book. I am only two-thirds of the way through as I write this. More precise than almost any book I've read--the lists of animals, of clothing, of furniture, are astonishing--Agee's style cycles between Whitman and Faulkner and a rural Ginsberg, between Objectivism and raw subjectivity. He ushers in C.D. Wright's South decades before she began to write her prescient books. Reading it feels at times like being a hamster in a wheel; all the pressure is to move forward quickly, traveling back again and again to a starting point that disappears as quickly as it reasserts itself.

I expected the documentation; what I did not expect were the extended, sometimes self-corroding, sometimes transparently self-justifying, episodes of poetics. It's a self-defending artifact, doing and then reasoning about the doing. I want to think more about this reasoning because it opens a space from which to teach documentary poetry and prose. More than that, Agee brings together the actual, the ordinary, the factual and the spiritual, the intangible, the sacred, in ways few other documentary poets do. Using a word introduced to me by Leonard Schwartz, I will say that Agee is a "sobjectivist," finding subjectivity in the objects of the southern tenant world, and a need for precise, objectivist description in the persons of that world. If he loses the political force of using the few to represent the many, and so to press for change, he gains the moral force of thickly describing particular places and the people who fight to live there. While acknowledging that the ambition of his project takes him outside the provenance of language, he writes: "yet in withholdings of specification I could but betray you still worse" (89).

Nowhere does the perceived gap between material fact and spiritual presence seem as great as in situations like the those Agee describes, inventories, catalogues, details, worries over. He is writing about people who are dirt poor, whose houses offer only partial shelter against the elements, who do not own the land they work or most of the proceeds from it. To find beauty here can seem condescending, demeaning, naive. How to make it otherwise is one of Agee's central projects. Here he describes himself as a "cold-laboring spy," who

shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishing on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: (117)

Beauty to a tenant farmer is either impossible or it's a decoration taken from advertising and applied to the walls near the fireplace. Agee devotes a page and a half to the "pretty things" the Ricketts put on their walls. Ad copy tries to sell you expensive things, but it's cheap art. Agee is not, as he tells us over and again, interested in art; he wants some notion of the real to come through in his writing. And that real is beautiful, more beautiful than art. And so the houses are beautiful:

It is my belief that such houses as these, approximate, or at times by chance achieve, an extraordinary 'beauty.' In part because this is ordinarily neglected or even misrepresented in favor of their shortcomings as shelters; and in part because their esthetic success seems to me even more important than their functional failure; and finally out of the uncontrollable effort to be faithful to my personal predilections, I have neglected function in favor of esthetics. (177)

The moral problem becomes clear later, when Agee asserts that the house's beauty is set against its "economic and human abomination," but "that one is qualified to insist on this only in proportion as one faces the brunt of his own 'sin' in so doing and the brunt of the meanings, against human beings, of the abomination itself" (178). There's no purity here, no Wallace Stevens's-like elevation of poverty into abstraction. It's as if, in Agee's terms, poverty descends rather than ascends into beauty. And that's a problem. Agee's hatred for "reformers" is perhaps due to a sense that they, like Stevens, abstract their focus rather than materialize it. He refers to this as the movement to "Improv[e] the Sharecropper" (189). On the other hand, it's hard to sympathize with Agee's attacks on rural electrification (he loves lamps!) and on the toilet, for the American obsession with "sterility" to which it testifies.

The extent to which we need to elevate "abominations" into livable conditions, while acknowledging the beauty of these abominations is an unsolvable problem. The tent city on the sidewalk beside Old Stadium Park in Honolulu poses the same question. The tent city across from K-Mart off Nimitz is another. The line of tents up the Waianae coast is another. And another and another.

Yet Agee insists not simply on beauty in poverty, but the "lucky situation of joy" that occurs when the perceiver is put in a position to notice the actual world. Somewhere between the actual (even the non-toilet, the non-art, the car's exhaust) and the writer's perception of it there's a spark. "[I]n any rare situation which breaks down or lowers our habitual impatience, superficial vitality, overeagerness to clinch conclusion, and laziness," offers the writer that joy. Beauty in poverty is greater than beauty in art because actual conditions are real, and art is not. Agee throws imagination out with the (infrequent) bath water and offers as clear a poetics of documentary writing as I've seen anywhere:

I will be trying here to write [this is on page 213!] of nothing whatever which did not in physical actuality or in the mind happen or appear; and my most serious effort will be, not to use these 'materials' for art, far less for journalism, but to give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and interest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. . . I am in this piece of work illimitably more interested in life than in art (213-214).

"I hate art" becomes "I love actuality."

Actuality can bite back. There are big problems with Agee's project, problems Jonathan Morse gets at on his blog, The Art Part:

In 1980, Howell Raines of the New York Times revisited the three poor Alabama families of whose lives James Agee and Walker Evans made immortal art forty years earlier in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Those forty years, it turned out, had reduced Agee's gusty prose to sentimental fiction. The pathetic little girl whose imminent death Agee movingly predicted, for example, was still alive in 1980 -- and a high school graduate, and six feet tall, and full of hatred for the artists who had once, long ago, picked up her tiny body, made it into a specimen, and then dropped it back into the dirt of Hale County, Alabama, and driven away.

Agee's multi-genre work did include "sentimental fiction," at least in retrospect. That is not its strength. What is strong, it seems to me as I read it now, is the density of detail--as if Agee were as much a shopkeeper as a writer, or maybe just a belated Melville--and in his self-examinations in the face of the task. He finds "the dignity of actuality" in tenant farmers and their few possessions, and posits beauty and sacredness in that actuality. The ad copy provides tenant farmers with small spots of beauty over their fireplace; in Agee's book it is not those pictures but the list of them that is beautiful. The fact of their being there is what makes them beautiful, and the desire for beauty behind them. As Elizabeth Bishop noted of the filling station, itself a beautiful, troubling poem, there is a (feminine) presence behind the doily in the oily shop. She's as interested in that presence as in the doily.

It's where invisibility meets the visible, the hidden hand meets the open eye, that Bishop (and Agee) find the spirit. It's precarious and troubling, but the unsettled (con)fusions are what finally join inventory to art. Book and photographs have shifted from the category of documentation to that of art (the Frank photographs sold at steep prices, according to Jonathan Morse, and netted nothing for their subjects). Or maybe it's in their wavering between art and actuality that the real force of our projects needs to reside. As Agee argues, description is not enough and yet what else is there? The what else is something we bring to the language, some notion of the sacredness of the actual, even if--especially--it is poor in substance or mercantile value.

__________

The other day, the New York Times put up a video clip from a forthcoming Errol Morris film. We see and hear a man (aptly monikered Tink) who has been obsessed with the JFK assassination for many decades, but who is not a conspiracy theorist. He tells us the story of "the umbrella man" who stood next to Kennedy's motorcade at the moment he was shot. He tells us about the conspiracy theories that emerged from his being there, the only man in Dallas who carried an umbrella on that sunny day. And then he tells us that the man was found, years later, and testified before Congress. His umbrella had not had to do with weather, or even with the sun, but with his anger at JFK's father for supporting Neville Chamberlain, who carried an umbrella and who made nice with Adolph Hitler. Nothing is so wacky as ordinary fact, this man tells us on the film clip. Any event, if you look at it closely enough, becomes strange, opens up to our quests for meaning, our tortured intelligences. The man named Tink told this story with something like joy inscribed on his face. Ordinary explanations are way more strange than extraordinary ones, he told us.

Here's a book list for this Spring. Insufficient, I know! And here's a blog post I wrote on teaching documentary poetry.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee & Walker, Mariner Books

Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, University of California Press
Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine, Graywolf Press
Coal Mountain Elementary, Mark Nowak, Coffee House Press
I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning, Kristin Prevallet, Essay Press
from unincorporated territory [saina], Craig Santos Perez, Omnidawn
Things Come On: an amneoir, Joseph Harrington, Wesleyan
Green-Wood, Allison Cobb, Factory School
We will also read Murial Ruykeyser's Book of the Dead (1938) in pdf or xerox form. I will also recommend a slew of other texts for anyone who is interested.
After asking for suggestions toward a list of readings in documentary prose on facebook, I got the following recommendations:

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs or The Soccer War & Studs Terkel

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn & Gary Young, No Other Life
Grand Avenue (a novel in stories), by Greg Sarris, Life Lived Like a Story (Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders), by Julie Cruickshank, and Immigrants in Our Own Land, Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, two books of poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Books by Juan Goytisolo
I welcome more suggestions. In the meantime, thanks to Ragnar, Molly, Sergio, and Pam for these possibilities.
Sergio Pereira sent the following list of documentary poetry and prose. What a treasure trove!

Dear Susan,

Here is a 'river-list' of books that I read over the years and perhaps some/most of them

can fit into the category of documentary poetry & documentary prose that you are working

with great talent and dedication.

Best regards,

Sergio

-------------------<>--------------------

Documentary poetry:

Clark Coolidge, The Act of Providence, Combo Books

Roy K. Kiyooka, Pacific Windows - Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, Talonbooks

Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes and Other Writings, Rutgers University Press

Jessica Hagedorn, Danger and Beauty, City Lights Books

Daphne Marlatt, The Given, McClelland & Stewart // Ghost Works (prose & poetry), NeWest

Carter Revard, Winning the Dust Bowl (prose & poetry), The University of Arizona Press

Gu Cheng, Sea of Dreams - The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng, New Directions Books

Breyten Breytenbach, Judas Eye, Faber and Faber

Harry Robinson, Living by Stories - A Journey of Landscape and Memory, Talonbooks

Harry Robinson, Native Power - In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller, Douglas & McIntyre

Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives, Green Integer

Miyazawa Kenji, Selections, University of California Press

Miguel Algarín, Love is Hard Work - Memorias de Loisaida, Simon & Schuster

Juan Felipe Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (prose & poems), The University of Arizona Press

Louise Bernice Halfe, Bear Bones & Feathers, Coteau Books // Blue Marrow, Coteau Books // The Crooked Good, Coteau Books

Joseph Bruchac, Ndakinna (Our Land) - New and Selected Poems, West End Press

Baisao, The Old Tea Seller - Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Kyoto

Kimberly Blaeser, Apprenticed to Justice, Salt Publishing

Duane Niatum, The Crooked Beak of Love, West End Press

Ricardo Sánchez, Canto y Grito Mi Liberación - The Liberation of a Chicano Mind Soul, Washington State University Press

Eric Gansworth, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function - poems and paintings, Syracuse University Press

Wendy Rose, Itch Like Crazy, The University of Arizona Press

Gregory Scofield, Native Canadiana - songs from the urban rez, Polestar Book Publishers // Singing Home the Bones,

Polestar Publishers

Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Life Woven with Song, The University of Arizona Press

James Thomas Stevens, Combing Snakes from His Hair, Michigan State University Press

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera - The New Mestiza (prose & poems), Aunt Lute Book Company

Luci Tapahonso, Sáanii Dahataal - The Women Are Singing (poems & stories), The University of Arizona Press

Luci Tapahonso, Blue Horses Rush In - Poems and Stories, The University of Arizona Press

T'ao Ch'ien, The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien, Copper Canyon Press

Su Tung-p'o, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o, Copper Canyon Press

Wei Ying-wu, In Such Hard Times - The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, Copper Canyon Press

Cherríe L. Moraga, Loving In The War Years (prose & poetry), South End Press // The Last Generation - Prose & Poetry,

South End Press

Kamau Brathwaite, DS (2) - dreamstories // Elegguas, Wesleyan University Press

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Dark and Perfect Angels, Cinco Puntos Press

Maurice Kenny, On Second Thought - A Compilation (prose & poetry), University of Oklahoma Press

Matsuo Basho, Basho's Haiku - The Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho, State University of New York Press

Kobayashi Issa, The Spring of My Life and Selected Poems (prose & haiku), Shambhala Publications

Santoka Taneda, Mountain Tasting - Haiku and Journals of Taneda Santoka, White Pine Press

Ana Castillo, My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, W. W. Norton

Simon J. Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning, The University of Arizona Press // Out There Somewhere, The Univ. of Arizona Press

Documentary prose (memoirs, essays, autobiography)

Leslie Scalapino, R-hu, Atelos // Zyther & Autobiography, Wesleyan University Press

Ted Greenwald, Clearview/LIE, United Artists Books

David Antin, i never knew what time it was, University of California Press

Ron Silliman, Under Albany, Salt Publishing,

Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness - Writings, 2000-2010, Duke University Press

Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun - Notes on a Vocation, Graywolf Press

Lyn Hejinian, My Life, Green Integer

Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger Journals, Station Hill Press

Michael Gottlieb, Memoir and Essay, Faux Press

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge - A Memoir, Viking Penguin

Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, City Lights Books

Aaron Shurin, King Of Shadows, City Lights Books

Kamau Brathwaite, The Zea Mexican Diary, The University of Wisconsin Press

Jalal Toufic, Over-Sensitivity, Sun & Moon Press

Keith Waldrop, Light While There is Light - An American History, Sun & Moon Books

Fred Wah, Diamond Grill, NeWest

J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Oxford University Press

Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Ono Ono Girl's Hula, The University of Wisconsin Press

bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown - engaged cultural criticism, South End Press

bell hooks, Remembered Rapture - The Writer at Work, The Women's Press

Breyten Breytenbach, Mouroir, Archipelago Books // Intimate Stranger - A Writing Book, Archipelago Books // Dog Heart - A Memoir, Faber and Faber

Breyten Breytenbach, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, Return to Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Faber and Faber

Gerald Vizenor, Interior Landscapes - Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, University of Minnesota Press

Louis Owens, I hear the Train - Reflections, Inventions, Refractions, University of Oklahoma Press

Bill Reid, Solitary Raven - Selected Writings of Bill Reid

N. Scott Momaday, The Names - A Memoir, The University of Arizona Press // The Way To Rainy Mountain, University of New Mexico Press

N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words - Essays, Stories, Passages, St. Martin's Griffin

Diane Glancy, Claiming Breath, University of Nebraska Press // The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, University of Nebraska Press

Diane Glancy, The West Pole, University of Minnesota Press // In-Between Places, The University of Arizona Press

Alurista, as our barrio turns...who the yoke b on?, Calaca Press

Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter - Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America, Temple University Press

Alfred Arteaga, House with the Blue Bed, Mercury House

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, Vintage Books

Kenneth Lincoln, The Good Red Road - Passages Into Native America, University of Nebraska Press

W. S. Penn, All My Sins Are Relatives, University of Nebraska Press // This is the World, Michigan State University Press

Ray A. Young Bear, Black Eagle Child - The Facepaint Narratives, University of Iowa Press

Ray A. Young Bear, Remnants Of The First Earth, Grove Press

Carter Revard, Family Matters,Tribal Affairs, The University of Arizona Press

Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over The World - A Native Memoir, W. W. Norton

Joseph Bruchac, Bowman's Store - A Journey To Myself, Lee & Low Books

Anita Endrezze, Throwing Fire at the Sun,Water at the Moon (prose & poetry), The University of Arizona Press

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer - A Story of Survival, University of Nebraska Press

Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail - The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, The University of Arizona Press

Darryl Babe Wilson, The Morning The Sun Went Down, Heyday Books

Mavis McCovey and John F. Salter, Medicine Trails - A Life in Many Worlds, Heyday Books

Eva Tulene Watt and Keith H. Basso, Don't let the Sun Step Over You - A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860-1975, The University of Arizona Press

Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller - A Chief and Her People, St. Martin's Griffin

Jeannette Armstrong, Slash, Theytus Books

Refugio Savala, Autobiography of a Yaqui Poet, The University of Arizona Press

Matsuo Basho, Basho's Journey- The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho (prose & haibun), State University of New York Press

Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand, Grove Press

Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving The Dream, University of California Press

From Washington, DC, Dave Taylor sends another list of possibles:


Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
Telling True Stories, eds. Kramer & Call
The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje with Walter Murch
which leads into film:
Buddha’s Lost Children, Mark Verkerk
In the Realms of the Unreal, Jessica Yu
Mysterious Object at Noon, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The Source, Chuck Workman

Back to prose and graphic novel memoirs with:
Away from the Light of Day, Amadou and Mariam
Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation, Harvey Pekar
Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel