Category Archives: Books

Frances Chung: A Chinese American Woman’s Plight. By: Susan Yung

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the winter wind sits in the living room
so we huddle in the kitchenin our winter coats looking silly
and too cold to do anything
but light a candle eat melon seeds
as I wonder
what do we wear when we go outside?
— poem by Frances Chung, p. 25, 1970
from “Crazy Melon & Green Apples”

On November 8, 2009, I picked up the Village Voice because of its headline “The Great Walls of Chinatown Living in Cubicles @ 81 Bowery” by Elizabeth Dwoskin . It reminded me when while traveling through India, a rich X-boyfriend exclaimed, “How can they live like this?” (see photo-”A Delhi Untouchable”) I smiled & knew how & why because I grew up in Chinatown, NYC. Since then, after making me homeless, the X lives comfortably in Provincetown.

Meanwhile, reading the article, I find the writer makes landlord-tenant relations a Catch-22 even with the intervention of Dept. of Buildings’ evictions and judicial system’s re-installment of tenants. It’s a no win unprofitable game for the Chinese in America. Where are the low-income housings? Ms Dwoskin only describes the Bowery as its traditional vicinity for “losers”….never describing the evictions as a racist act benefiting the landlord. Obviously, it is a continuum battle for low-income families. Now, there is every reason for gentrifying the nabe.
delhi-untouchable.jpeg
An Untouchable in New Delhi, India © photo by Susan L. Yung

“Plenty” in her short life is what she wrote, knowledgably. She was emerging as a public figure to become a spokesperson for life in Chinatown, which is the Chinese immigrant story as reflected like the Jews of Lower East. In 1977, inside a “slum” ghettoized neighborhood, Frances prepared her first manuscript that she had “written a secret book entitled “Crazy Melon”. She submitted to various funding sources for publications and routinely, had been rejected. It would be a social class problem where at that time, (is the norm) … to be reckoned as amateurish writings by elite writers like Kimiko Hahn, graduate of Columbia University, or Kenneth Roth. Nevertheless, by 1980, Frances began to receive a poetry grant from New York State Council on the Arts-Creative Artists Public Service (NYSCCA CAPS) in 1980-81; A New York Times Co Foundation scholarship (1986); and a NYSCA Writer-in-Residence fellowship (1987-1988). This gave her confidence to submit her second manuscript, “Green Apple” for “conventional poetry competitions” such as the publication Walt Whitman Award sponsored by the Academy American Poets in NYC. Her brief poems, short vignettes and prose reflect her precise selection of words. Her sparse lines describes a single Asian woman’s (maybe feminist) subtle thoughts during the Ethnic (Black, Hispanic and Asian) Civil Rights movement of the 60s-80s. Her work is “not prophetic, but the creation of deeper silences in which to safeguard personal or community thought, feeling and relationships from the onslaught of real estate speculation, … exploitation by the garment industry, and the ideology of a nation at war against yet another Asian populace, the Vietnamese.” She never joined a union, a NGO organization or participated in Chinatown worker’s issues. Her sole participation had been in women’s writers groups of LES or whenever they had blossomed in the late 70s. Eventually, such women’s intellectual groups diminished in late 80s. Maybe, she lacked political motivations or to participate in any activities such as attending marches, rallies; demonstrations and other radical/revolutionary changes would stunt her career as educator.

In Frances Chung’s 40 years, she poetically, with a touch of sardonic humor, described the boundaries of NYC’s Chinatown from Canal St to the diverse culture of Lower East Side during the years of 1966-1990. She died in 1990. However, there is only one posthumously book that has been published by Wesleyan College and edited by Walter K. Lew, a poet and Korean-American scholar. He had total access of her two manuscripts to print this singular book entitled “Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple-the Poems of Frances Chung”. The book came out in 2000; 10 years after her tragic death and it took me twenty years later to find the book to peruse. By now, any trace of this poet’s qualitative experiences are forgotten and there are more writers of Asian American descent in NYC capable of writing about the same perpetual struggles as experienced in the 60s & 70s.

The paperback book has 144 pages of Frances’ poems, vignettes and prose writings with 30 pages of Walter K. Lew’s titles of “Commentary”, “About the Text” and “Appendix.” His intensive research and faithful chronology of her writings portrays the writer’s development from adolescent to a matured woman with speculative lovers as perceived by Walter K. Lew. He even directed her cover design that trivializes her manuscript into a small illustration. Frances’ intent is to utilize a Chinese wrapper’s design where she had scotch taped for her front manuscript, “Crazy Melon”. The wrapper enclosed dried sweet plums where Westerners are unfamiliar with its tart sweet taste and flavor. (Hard to explain.) I would prefer if the artwork had been blown-up full size to appreciate the candy wrapper’s artistry since it reflects the art of Asia. The cover’s design is important for marketing of the book’s contents especially if it is a foreign culture to an ignorant mainstream American culture.

Luckily, I had survived NYC’s various stereotypical labels and can enumerate or reflect the similar experiences as well as go beyond the melding compatibilities or incongruence of Eastern (mainland China) and Western cultures due to my various travels to third world nations. I seem to complete the cycle of growing up in a Chinatown and returning to the same ghetto/barrio problems that are also inherent throughout the world.

Frances and I were classmates in Junior High School and High School. I had moved into the Chinatown neighborhood at the age of 12 from 2 years in the Bronx and 10 years in Portland, Oregon, my birth state. NYC’s cultural shock had affected me grandly since my family in Portland, Oregon were the only Chinese living within a mile from another Chinese family. The NYC culture of finding Asian families of 7-10 people living in close vicinities crammed in three room apartments can be disorientating and especially in a classroom of 30 Chinese students who were highly smart with competitive grades. In addition, most of my classmates went to Chinese schools to learn reading and writing calligraphy as well as speak Cantonese from 3:30-5:30 at the Consolidated Benevolent Association on Mott St. Thus their capacities to be studious, smart, intellectually observant, lacking leisure time to enjoy competitive sports, artistic activities, attending social functions and events such as rock concerts, dating, dance mixers, and other social activities to mold and meld into mainstream culture. Instead, they became the model minority for other ethnic groups in NYC. These were high achievers whose parents were employed in the laundries, restaurant businesses and garment factories. There were some students whose parent’s were from Chinatown’s small businesses that lined the streets of Chinatown retaining the village traditions of Mainland China. Rarely, were their parents in the professional professions such as MDs, PhDs, lawyers, professors, architects, engineers, corporations, etc. Thus, the environment and experiences that Frances Chung grew up motivated her to be a role model for her classmates. Being a straight “A” student enabled her to escape a future of poverty. She expresses her hopes, childhood traumas, “observations” of the local, residential eccentrics and/or “eccentric.” happenings She traveled as a tourist or “was it a jet-setter lifestyle”? Upon her return to Chinatown as her home base, Frances makes comparisons of her world wind travels and her life in provincial Chinatown, as cited in the following lines:

The echoes of the night trucks
bouncing off the cobblestones
on Canal Street play on the
silences in my bones. Playing
games with the red and green
light on the corner of Mott and
Canal, we find an excuse to run—
we who know that those who are
brave cross Mott Street on a
diagonal. (page 4)

Her quick terse observations become humorously timeless. She purposely focused on her subjects depending on quick descriptions that embodies the brief moment, lingering the experience with unforgettable words different from her mother tongue. Her sensitive observations can, to a Westerner, be considered neurotic. She could be bipolar, a schizoid silently suffering the contradictions while developing a voice contrary to the Chinese traditions, as well as develop a vocabulary to emote feelings and subtly suggest a precocious mind.

…the young man stopping her in the street to say “Arigato” and then looking hurt when she explained she was not Japanese. And then the man whispered as she walked past on Mott Street “do you ever play with yourself? You and me … I could really sock it to you.”

Friends wrote from Europe wishing her a Happy Valentine’s Day. (p. 41)

…..blue mannequin eye. Some brides stood proudly without
heads, one-armed, even one naked bride with no nipples. (p. 34)

He will jump out of his hospital window. Before
you leave, he will ask you to bring toothpicks the next
time you come. (p.70)

the Mexican night
fresh smell of el campo
luciérnagas (p.118)

Her sharp wit encompasses the years of living in a confined, stifling community describing bitter hardships and taboo traditions that need broken as in:

There is a group of Chinese-American men who think of
themselves as Chinese warriors. They are beautiful
anachronisms. They study the martial arts, practice
calligraphy, consult the I Ching and go to sword flicks to
blow their minds. (p.61)

The reader can decipher double innuendos subtly expressed with select words as in

“…see her taking care of teacups in the
association. She seems imported.” (p.67)

These lines suggest the dormant domesticity of an immigrant woman. Frances abhors the servitude by highlighting the activity and ending in a simple statement. The word “association”, for a Chinese person, automatically indicates the family’s village name of colloquial China and their patriarchal history of migrating to America. It is the alternative social services provided in an insular community behind the gift shops, restaurants, & grocers familiar to tourists. However, due to the Exclusion Act of 1864 the sojourner men had to organize a methodology to legitimize a system of protection for their assimilations and survival in White dominating America. These family associations provided loans for small businesses, shelters for family arrivals, filed paper works for citizenships, provide translators, keep records of village members with same name sakes, locate separated family members, etc.

Often, Frances references the exotic teas, foods: Hispanic and Chinese as only some readers can experience due to their individual family upbringings. She reminisces her childhood of identifying peculiar actions as normal such as “banging on the kitchen table” and observing roaches scattering in seven directions which she states “I must reread “Metamorphosis”. She describes stealing a snail from a grocer’s stall and once in the apartment, “spraying drops of water from our fingers to see if it was home.” (p.28). These childhood memories are unusual little moments of joy for a ghetto child to ruminate.

Frances’ quick observant words express feelings that many Asian artists and writers lack. Most major AA writers only write about their ID crises whereby they are constantly dependent and too busy finding a role model to emulate. For example: for men it would be “Bruce Lee” and for women “Suzie Wong”. There are other occupations to be pre-occupying as filmmakers, photographers, writers, or musicians, poets etc. So in American history Asians will be portrayed or considered as some form of enemy as oppose to being just American. Maybe it is a rites of passage to call a Chink “Chink”, Japanese “Jap” and so on “whatever….” Thus we’ll be stuck as templates Bruce Lees and Suzy Wongs, the fundamental stereotypes for Americans to fall back on and thus stalemating the cultural definitions of Asian Americans. In the following poem, Frances indicates her rebellious attitude, minimizing the words:

We use newspaper for a
tablecloth. And when I
want to make my mother
sad I tell her that I’m
going to cook American
food when I get older. (p.52)

In the afterward section, Walter Lew did an intensive research of Frances short-lived life where many of her poems express the static turmoil of living/growing up in a ghetto and her desires to go beyond the boundaries of Chinatown as well as travel before settling into a sedate profession.

Frances had prepared two manuscripts for publications, “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple”. The latter has “a richer conception of the scope and achievement of Chung’s writing” as described by Lew. He footnoted and charted France’s chronological progress of writing each poem, prose etc. This can be quite obsessive and stringently limiting for further interpretations since we will never witness Frances’ full maturity through her writings. Her early form of expression and early writings of an Asian American woman is obliterated by other living women writers. Frances Chung’s sensitive works precedes the west coast notables Maxine Kingston Hong and Amy Tan. These two women write about the first generation Chinese coping with an unfamiliar culture in a new country while Frances reflects the struggles of living in a ghettoized neighborhood. Her subtle words slowly stings with angry. Unfortunately, she never expressed it through participatory demonstrations, joined any grassroots organizations, be a political activist or bona fide artist. She just became a teacher in the Lower East Side and slowly submitted her ms to various funding sources. It took awhile for recognition but by then it became too late. To know the source of her brain tumor … was it from too much overuse in being a straight A student or the adult stresses of being Asian in a Hispanic community or never understanding a loved one?

In her poems, Frances’ last lines as experienced in the ghetto, constantly stings the mind with ironies that reaches a certain level of timeless miseries. Often it can be stifling and her escape route would be

“…every cockroach that runs across
my mind
whispers that I haven’t seen Peking.” (p. 44)

Here are a few other extracted last lines:

“everything in life being guesswork
cooking without teaspoons
eternal windowshoppers
we women were sometimes like children (p.60)

Chinese New Year …….Banners
across Chinatown. So many dragons to
follow. Oranges to cut. Shrimp chips
flowering. (p. 24)

When I went to JHS 65 on Forsyth St, many of my friends were fascinated with Frances’ straight A grades and her competitiveness to outshine their intelligences. I seemed to only surpass her with my math and history grades. However, I felt her quiet complacent solitude disturbing as an introvert incapable to speak out or make complaints as I became rebellious to NYC’s education system and often spoke my mind to various teachers. Even when we were in Washington HS, an all girl’s school, Frances kept to herself and achieved all the straight A’s. After graduation, she managed to go to an elite school, Smith College with scholarships while I attended Hunter College. After college, I participated in a non-profit cultural organization, Basement Workshop to become an expressive artist. Via this organization, with other peer groups of identical begrudges, we were able to culminate in a Confucius Plaza demonstration as our civil rights movement.

However, Frances shied from such demonstrative activities and would submit her manuscripts to the Basement Workshop in the hopes of publication. The organization was too busy dealing with internal logistics of mobilizing volunteers into a collective consciousness and administering an arts space to prevent street gangs rather than finance a publication. At that time, she had finished her 2 years foray in the Peace Corps situated in Central and South America. In addition, she taught in LES as a trilingual teacher, Spanish, Chinese, & English. Poetry became her outlet of expression and she taught poetry at St. Mark’s Project and Henry St. Settlement. She was able to receive 3 poetry awards: NYSCA CAPS (1980-81), NY Times Co. Foundation scholarship (1986) and a NYSCA Writer-in Residence fellowship (1987-88). Besides South America, she traveled extensively to Europe, Asia and Africa. Frances was slowly becoming acknowledged until she was overtaken by her brain tumor. Thus after her death does her poems become a significant testimony to a life style that is slowly disappearing due to encroaching gentrification of Chinatown after LES’s final gentrification.

I find myself falling into Frances’ affinities and identify closely with her struggles that it often becomes painful to reflect how our lives are parallel of self-destruction and resurrections. However, in the late 80s, Frances fell a victim of an institution’s negligence. Once diagnosed, she underwent surgery. While in a coma, Frances was injected with antibodies that the doctors had unknowingly been unaware of her allergies. During her unconsciousness, she died with the poison burning through her veins. I also had the same allergy reaction when recuperating from surgery and luckily; I was conscience to complain the burning sensation coursing through my veins. The doctors were able to counter the poisonous drug with the correct antibody.

As Frances relies on selected words to describe a lifestyle in Chinatown, I tend to record with a camera, stills and videos. Thus, I been able to also travel, record and compare similarities of foreignness and isolated observations on the hopes that social changes would be evitable, especially in the socio-economic improvements. However, little has evolved through such expressions in the arts to expedite these social changes. As Asians, we are still imbued with stereotypical labels due to mainstream resistances. Recently in the past year of 2008, there had been a rash of fires and evictions occurring in Chinatown. For example, in 2008, on a very cold winter night, prompted by a landlord’s complaints, the Department of Buildings evicted 50 Chinese men from their SRO rooms and relocated them up in the Bronx. These men were unable to read or speak English and were alienated in a Hispanic community. With the assistances of the young determined community activists of Chinese Americans Against Anti-Violence (CAAAV) and the rallying efforts of Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU), it took a year for the men to return to their familiar environment-Chinatown.

There are more Chinese bums
In the neighborhood now. No
one knows where they come from
but they appear with crazy
smiles and unshaven faces.
One of them looks like a poet. (p.19)

Did ALL these poems caused her brain to develop a tumor? Was it the wait and frustration of submitting her ms to publishing houses and the constant rejections? Or the wait until other Asian friends could print them in “another Asian” collective anthology every 10 years. She had been a member of Ordinary Women, Basement Workshop, St Marks Poetry Project, and Henry St Settlement. Like Iris Chang’s tragic suicide in 2004 (a well known published writer of Chinese American History who died at the age of 38. See my written article entitled: Iris Chang: A Deceased Role Model Minority). Both died in the same age range which can be suspiciously speculative. Frances’ goals were the same … to explain 20th century modern hardships in order to become an artistic entity as a writer & poet. In the 21st century, Chinatown is being gentrified where many prime properties are converted to skyscrapers leaving nothing to be preserved or become historic landmarks, to retrace and hide the miseries of the still inherent oppressions of an ethnic immigrant slum life.

Frances Chung subliminal speculative poems & prose writings describe the barrios/ghettoes like Jacob Riis’ photos of LES. She praises or glorifies no mentors, persons, or spiritual beings. The reader is introduced to a lifestyle that Luc Sante, writer of “Low Life”, might write if he was Asian. Frances might be described as the sweet, romantic Asian American “muckrakers” who unlike the anarchist, Emma Goldman, wrote about her present situation in the hopes of being published as a contemporary writer.

Like an American pioneer, Frances Chung’s writings are before her time. Her narrative voice preludes the writings of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Frances’ enduring words have historic significance as her voice transcends and echoes the 20th Century innocence of life in a slum/ghettoe/barrio during an era of restitution and reconstruction of an American eye sore called “oppression and racism” which leads us to our present situation of Age of Terrorism and Anarchism. As gentrification encroaches and eradicates areas of ol’ Chinatown starting from Park Row’s middle class neighborhood to Mott St’s small businesses, Frances words will haunt my generation while the next generation welds with the New Recession with unemployments, scapegoatings, glass ceilings, inflationary rent increases, lack of labor skills, lack of artists reflecting a minorities’ subculture.

RIP, Frances Chung

Review of “A Porcelain Doll with Violet Eyes, Staring into Space and Imagining She is Alive”

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Here is a review in Spanish of bilingual chapbook by Lourdes Vazquez called A Porcelain Doll with Violet Eyes, Staring into Space and Imagining She is Alive.

It was published by Wheelhouse at: http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/chapbook.html

Una muñeca de cerámica con ojos violetas que mira fijo hacia el
centro imaginándose que está viva=A Porcelain Doll with Violet Eyes, Staring into Space and Imagining She Is Alive: el libreto de Lourdes Vázquez
Publicado por Wheelhouse Press, 2009 [edición electrónica]
Edición bilingüe: traductora
Bethany Korp-Edwards

Más allá de las palabras destructivas, que también están, la expresión verbal de Lourdes Vázquez se centra en el ardid, lo que aparece a la vista desde un parecer, esa es la copa de la que Lourdes Vázquez gusta beber, y la que nunca agota.
Una muñeca de cerámica que se cree viva, tiene la seguridad que le da su construcción, una construcción narrativa que se apoya en caminos no convencionales: la confrontación de lenguas, su intervención simultánea en un mismo espacio, la contaminación, el préstamo, el género y su imprecisión, el placer o la pena de un modo, de una manera de hacer escritura.
Esta no es una muñeca de cerámica que se cree viva. Foucault escribe acerca de la pintura de Magritte “…hay que admitir entre la figura y el texto toda una serie de entrecruzamientos, de ataques lanzados de una a otra…este dibujo que usted ve “no es”
(no está sustancialmente ligado a … no cubre la misma materia que…) “una pipa”. Entre la muñeca de cerámica del texto y una muñeca de cerámica, entre ellas y Mecha o Mechi, se establecen otros enlaces, se lanzan otros dardos, se disponen otras líneas: la concretización de la muñeca en la escritura y lo que esta manifiesta de verdad, lo que se crea como verdad del texto.
En el escenario de Meche, Asafarfa, las mujeres mandarinas que dirimen roles, y otra vez: la muñeca de cerámica con ojos violetas que mira hacia el centro imaginándose que está viva, el resto de los muñecos, el chisporroteo de los fuegos artificiales, hay un deambular escenográfico; por la escena pasan todos, es en el escenario donde se presta atención para ver qué papeles están en juego, donde se desenvuelve el desequilibrio de fuerzas, las luchas, las hilachas de las luchas, los caídos, la ceremonia pomposa de la dinastía que arrancó hace tanto tiempo y sigue entronizada, y también Mechita con apenas un mechón en la cabeza. Pero apagadas las luces sólo se percibe el polvo, quieto como el de un cementerio, adherido a las tablas. El final de esta historia puede estar metido silenciosamente muy lejos de la palabra Fin, es cuando Meche o la muñeca de cerámica que se cree viva o alguien hecho de esa misma materia, huye por la escalera de emergencia y corre y corre, y no para hasta llegar al océano.
Una narración que alienta, que da aliento, que da un color verdadero a la fuerza que desarrolla y que es definidamente contraria a la palidez general.

2009
Por: Gloria Lenardón narradora argentina. novelas publicadas: La Reina mora (premio Emecé, 1987) A Corta distancia (Sudamericana, 1994), Eva maravillosa (Alción 2006).

Palabras de la autora/Lourdes Vázquez

No perdí los estribos escribiendo una historia realista; mas bien me acerqué a lo más detestable y lo menos palpable. Areas viscerales que crean divisiones y en consecuencia condicionan a la audiencia. Para comprender este libreto habría que pensar en Breton cuando escribió que el ser humano tiene dificultad en inventariar los objetos que lo han formado. Con este pensamiento en mente elaboro el micromundo de una mujer junto a sus más cercanos: es decir aquellos que se topó en la calle de la vida. En este caso una mujer que no tan solo carece de conciencia de los elementos y eventos a su alrededor, sino de lo abstracto de ciertas experiencias.

La historia parcial y censurada, la historia traidora y secreta, aquella que nos crea delirio es el eje central de esta toma. Por ende sería una falsedad hacer lectura de este libreto como se lee un poema, porque estaríamos leyendo un monólogo dramático. Aunque exista un personaje nuclear cuya vivencia y signos no concuerden con el status-quo, lo cierto es que en este mundo temporal existen otros personajes que también tienen poco claro su autorrevelación y la imagen que reflejan en los objetos inmediatos. En esta gran pesadilla abunda el caos y la desmesura, mas los personajes escojen con sumo cuidado su lenguaje, que junto a su fuerza expresiva nos proponen la estrategia de la huída. Esta estrategia es uno de los significantes que caraterizan la sociedad del siglo veintiuno. Tal vez este dato sea lo más concreto de la historia. Bienvenidos al desierto de lo posible, al nuevo orden del confesionario.

Review of Lucky Girls

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Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger

Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

Nell Freudenberger’s first story ever to be published, the title story of this collection, was chosen as one of four by “debut writers” for the New Yorker 2001 Summer Fiction Issue. Her first book, a collection of  skillfully wrought short stories, is impressive in its insight, honesty, and observation.

Four of the stories take place in Asia, the main characters being young women, in their early 20′s, enjoying the privileges of their native country and tender age. The only exception is the 17-year-old first person narrator of the last story, “Letter from the Last Bastion.” She is the unacknowledged daughter of a famous writer teaching at an American university and, despite her relatively “under” privileged status, raised by a single working mother, is on her way to optometry school. When Freudenberger writes from the point of view of characters, closer in age and experience, she has a sturdy  grip of her characters. She portrays the parents of her characters with a sharp knife, exposing a little more than expertly carved stereotypes.

For example, when drawing the character of the 17-year-old girl who writes the letter forming the last story we are told that her single-working mother chose to become impregnated by the college professor so that her baby would have his genes, has worked hard all of her daughter’s life in order to save for her college tuition. All of the following sections of the letter concerning the mother take place in the past, when she was young and tender and impressed by older intellectual professors. This reader couldn’t help but wonder about the unfolding of her life, the adult this mother became.

“The Orphan”  is told through the mother, Alice’s, point of view. She has gone to her daughter Mandy’s rescue after an hysterical phone call from Bankok,  where she volunteers in an orphanage, claiming her boyfriend has beaten and raped her. Some moments evoke recognizable familial dynamics in a certain class in pre-, modern-, post- and contemporary-modern America. In this, Freudenberger displays a Cheever-esque intimacy with the failings of privilege and comfort. The existentially challenged dealing with too much of a good thing. Alice fantasizes about reconciling with her amicably estranged husband, who has taken up with a much younger woman. Maybe they could adopt one of the orphans and start allover again. On a visit to the orphanage, she is invited by Mandy to hold an unhealthy looking baby, who spits up. She recalls the Bankok mall where they’d shared a family lunch, where she could ride the elevator and be in clean, familiar surroundings. We come back to her at the end in a tense moment in a Bankok hotel in the ambivalent conjugal bed. For Alice, the combined estrangement and familiarity is deep and painful, the thread connecting them fragile. These scenes seem to arise from a daughter’s eyes having observed the mysterious relationship between the two who raised her, interpreting it through her own experience of a broken heart, though most of the people in these stories get their hearts broken and one gets the sense that they will all get their hearts broken eventually.

There is nothing inherently bad about being born rich, no guarantees one way or  the other whether privilege will lead to fame, fortune and bad behavior instead of enlightened, socially responsibility; anymore than being poor ensures progeny who are insensitive, undereducated oafs. We know this is possible on both sides of the tax cuts. If we refuse to prejudge people, based on something they were born to, we have to do it all the way.

Anyone looking for the exotic, hedonistic or philosophical exploits of the Spiritually Driven, drug induced or otherwise, will be disappointed. The razor’s edge is blunted, here, for internal use. These stories of infidelity, rebellion, albeit in the form of working in an orphanage in Thailand, not hash smuggling. A teenager loses her virginity with her tutor, not the leader of a Shiva cult. Each character is struggling with being the “other,” whether through the initial shock of arrival or being a long term ex-patriot. None of these characters go native. In fact, even when decrying in adolescent exasperation that her parents just don’t get it, telling her mother that when her boyfriend hit, then raped her, maybe, well just maybe, it turned her on, this is still a naive coed from Connecticut after all. Many have arrived at this sexual awakening on college campuses all over the U.S of A. There’s something patriotic in these ostensible ex-pats living in some American version of the Raj.

Fly By Night Publication “Spic Chic” Goes Into Second Print Run

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Thank you to Tribes supporters who have made direct buys of the New Edge/Fly by Night Press publication Spic Chic. We are in the process of ordering a second print run of the book to utilize on the upcoming twenty five city book tour plus overseas presentations of material from: Spic Chic “The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican.”  

Spic Chic Written by: Luis Chaluisan aka El Extreme. Published by: Fly By Night Press – A subsidiary of A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC. ISBN 1930083173 (100 pages with color photos). For filmed performances of material from the book please visit  www.newedgecabaret.com

“I think Spic Chic is strong stuff, right in the Nuyorican tradition. Poems and then stories back into poems that are often emotionally moving. A self exploration in a non-chronological history consistent in language and point of view, it is clearly a highly personalized work that is successful in the Nuyorican free-style genre and successful in the broader sense as well.” David Henderson, author, ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child

In late 2008, Fly by Night Press (a subsidiary of A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC) opted to publish a compendium of  poetry, photos, artwork, comedic essays and short stories dating back to 1975 under the title of Spic Chic (The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican), written by Luis Chaluisan (aka El Extreme). The term “Spic Chic” caused controversy in 1974 when it was used on the Bill Boggs mid-day talk show – then aired on Metromedia Channel 5 in NYC (now Fox Television). The offhand remark was offered by Latin NY magazine editors to describe the infusion of vivid colors by Latino clothes designers then making their mark on NY’s fashion world. The latter part of the promotional title (The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican) is based on a humorous quip in 2005 from Nuyorican poet Papoleto Melendez that “El Extreme represents the torn page” from the canon of previously published Nuyorican writers who flourished in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Meanwhile, writer David Henderson (‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child) is a bit more serious stating, “I think Spic Chic is strong stuff, right in the Nuyorican tradition. Poems and then stories back into poems that are often emotionally moving. A self exploration in a non-chronological history consistent in language and point of view, it is clearly a highly personalized work that is successful in the Nuyorican free-style genre and successful in the broader sense as well.” Both observations are welcomed by Bronx bred author Chaluisan – now residing in Brownsville, Brooklyn – who states, “I could have chased a traditional path in developing my work but I was having too much manic fun being off-beat and, besides, God had other plans for my creative life.” With the publication of “Narrative of a Hybrid” in the “Polemic” Anthology (1976, Straight Ahead Press – Amherst, Massachusetts) Luis Chaluisan joined the ranks of period Nuyorican writers that included Pedro Pietri (“Puerto Rican Obituary” 1973), Miguel Pinero (Short Eyes 1973) and Lefty Barretto (Nobody’s Hero 1976). Mentored by Black Panther cultural minister Ed Bullins and later by Young Lord Eddie Figueroa (founder of the “New Rican Village” on the Lower East Side of New York) Chaluisan was invited to join the NY Public Theater’s emerging playwright unit headed by Crispin Larengeira in the summer 0f 1977. A chance meeting with magazine editor-in-chief Soledad Santiago paved the way for Chaluisan to land a job at Latin NY magazine – the nation’s first successful long term English language monthly publication focusing on Latino (primarily Puerto Rican vis-a-vis Nuyorican) arts and culture. The nineteen year old Chaluisan rose up the ranks from reporter to music editor between 1977-79 under the tutelage of Latin NY publisher Izzy Sanabria which led to his being hired by WCBS network affiliate WFSB (Channel 3) in Hartford, Connecticut in June of 1979. For the next seventeen years he  worked as a TV investigative reporter, producer, writer and marketing executive for PBS (Bowling Green, Ohio), Telemundo (Tucson, Arizona/Yakima, Washington), WCBS Channel 2 (New York), and News 12 Long Island, along with stints at radio station WGB in Albany among other mainstream media outlets in the US. Upon leaving the news business in 1997 and resettling in Hartford, CT, Chaluisan (once again performing full time as “El Extreme”) began to disseminate work he had developed as a musical composer and poet/essayist with his own indie rock groups dating back to 1982 (Little Otis and The Upsetters, The Blankets of Doom, La Gran Orquesta El Extreme, Gang Bang Bang, and El Extreme’s Electric Cabaret.). The effort led to his inclusion in the National Slam Poetry movement as a State Slam Champion for CT. (1998/1999 in Austin, Texas and Chicago, Illinois.) His semi-final performance was captured on film by CBS’ Sixty Minutes and featured in the news magazine’s report on the tenth anniversary of the Slam movement. In 2000 he returned to NYC and set to work on organizing his written work and professional notes describing his media/educational experience which resulted in the off-Broadway play Spic Chic: S.panish P.eople I.n C.ontrol (initially a 2001 workshop at the Nuyorican Café in Manhattan with later runs at the Chelsea Playhouse and Spanish Repertory Theater). The performance at El Repertorio Espanol garnered the attention of producers for the 2004 Biennale Festival in Bonn, Germany where Spic Chic had its European premiere at the Bonn Opera House Theater. In the meantime, Chaluisan was approached by film director Henry Chalfant (“Style Wars”)  to contribute both content and interview source material to the award winning documentary “From Mambo to Hip Hop” which aired on PBS in 2006. In 2007, Chaluisan moved to Puerto Rico after the death of his father Federico Chaluisan to spend a year in mourning and soaking in the poetry/writer’s scene at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, PR. With the help of University students and Professor Linda Rodriguez, El Extreme re-emerged writing in both English and Spanish. The rest is, as the pundits say, “underground history.”

The Geoglyph

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The Geoglyph

by Patrick Kosiewicz

$10 (Trade Paperback)

Fly by Night Press

77 pp

ISBN-13: 9781930083165

Published 30 Dec 2008

Available at St. Marks Bookshop
Advanced Praise

“In this age of confessional poems or political poetics, the poet of The Geoglyph has given us a long poem about the nature of nature, the trees that are in our memory, the eternal sunrise, the tribal sense of

ceremony, the mysteries of deepest waters. It is not a scientific diatribe, but a song, indeed it feels like incantation as he makes us imagine the shamens, the cycles celestial, something geological coming from the heart of New York.  I cannot help of thinking of some of the movements of Michael McClure, of his use of logos.  Mr. Kosiewicz makes his own language of disparate influences. I felt many poetic intuitions

turning these pages, a wise bird flies out of its words.”

-Victor Hernandez Cruz, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets

 

“Patrick Kosiewicz is an emerging poet of substantial power and versatility. The Geoglyph is an innovative work that breaks language open to bring us face to face with the microscopic and macroscopic elements of existence.  While the poet takes many risks, they invariably lead to extraordinary rewards.”

-Pablo Medina, author, The Cigar Roller; translator, Poet in New York
Synopsis

Combining the visions of scientist, sage, and poet, The Geoglyph explores the powers of the elements, the astounding immensity of our planet’s physicality, bio-diversity, and humankind’s presence as caretaker of and apprentice to the only place in the known universe to harbor life.

In this epic poem, Life and Earth’s parallel movement through the ages is observed with millennial eyes that peer into the molecular, organic, planetary, and cosmic.
Here, the primitive is the civilized.  The primordial is the most advanced. Here, humanity is the technician of Earth, and Earth, technician of humanity’s soul.

Chavisa Woods’ Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind -Reviewd byPhilip Gounis

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          There’s a girl in New York City

          She calls herself the human trampoline

          And sometimes when I am falling, flying

          Tumbling in turmoil I say

          Oh, so this is what she means

                  -Graceland (Paul Simon

           It seemed eerily significant that in the same week that I first met Chavisa Woods, scenes of youthful violence and victimization filled the media outlets. YouTube videos of teenage girls in Florida bloodying one of their own was broadcast ad nauseum; over four hundred children of a polygamous sect in Texas were taken into protective custody; and Virginia Tech noted one year since its on campus massacre. A societal landscape of pervasive brutality and ubiquitous perdition. This also is the milieu of Woods’ short story collection, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind. Her stories are at once a true-life chronicle of growing up absurdly in rural America and a surrealistic survival book on how to transcend the same.

              Readers may have trekked some of this toxic terrain before with writers like Dorothy Allison, but Chavisa Woods leads us through these narratives with a Doris Lessing-like metaphysical clarity.

It is the author’s understated, wise beyond her years psychological perceptions that are the binding emulsion of this collection. In response to an interviewer’s comment on this, Ms. Woods response was,” Don’t they say it’s the mileage not the years that matter?” Indeed.

    It is a mark of the writer’s syntactical brilliance that she opens this book with a textbook precise description of the honeysuckle plant only to then adroitly immerse the reader in the paradoxical childhood realm of vulnerability and acute awareness. “Where I was growing up, violence was as common as a sneeze”, Ms. Woods stated to me matter- of- factly. Characteristically the children in “The Smell of Honey” have become acclimated to an atmosphere of violence to the point where this acclimation has become their device for survival. This is a reoccurring thread throughout the book.

    The vivid characters and scenarios are depicted with such sagacious nuance, that the reader is drawn into a childlike vision of rich metaphor that belies the knife sharp actuality. It is both a trenchant literary memoir and a searing indictment of a pitiless society. “Sundown in the Land of Lincoln” tells of a novice African-American grade school student who realizes that “People were processing the information of him and trying to fit him into the category of human being, without compromising the integrity of their own status…” Later, his dilemma is only finally resolved with a magical jolt of cultural and chemical shamanism.  

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               By the time the reader reaches only the third story, “Kicking”; they find themselves vicariously enveloped in the complex vortex of adolescent sexuality. In just four pages, the writer vibrantly brings alive all the fear, anticipation and wonder of youthful physical discovery. All of this in what is ostensibly a short description of everyday playground shenanigans. This alternating sensibility of empowerment and vulnerability is the vehicle that transports and thereby transforms those who partake in all of Chavisa Woods’ art. It is an artistic statement that brings to mind the observations of French philosopher Jacques Lacan and his extensive explorations of his concept of “the Other.” In other stories, the female protagonists respond to their exploitation with a violent, brutal act. Mutilation or dismemberment is not disallowed. At the same time there is always a transcendent panoramic truth, both ontological and emotional that fills the page. 

       “Never Enough” is a narrative from her book that has a section that Ms. Woods often delivers as a performance piece. In it, the narrator, a female proto-punk dyke Holden Caulfield type declares: “ Or maybe I don’t believe in GOD anymore, ’cause my God was always talking about how he died for me and I had to die and be reborn for him all the time, or else spend all my afterlife dying, and I only have the energy to die for one thing at a time right now, and right now I’m dying for love. Maybe I’ll die for love right now, and later I’ll die for God. Or maybe I already died a little for God. Anyway. Fuck it.”

     It is in fact, the philosophical undercurrent of these stories that drive them and distinguish them from the genre of transgressive literature. And it is not as if these stories necessarily unfold in an orthodox linear manner. It is more accurate to say that the brilliantly descriptive prose barrels the reader through a Hieronymus Bosch like tunnel of images and deep perceptions. One rich in societal and psychological revelations. These seemingly shuffled chapters of one novel suggest progression and development simultaneously with freeze frame cinematic scenes that stop time for both the characters and reader. Beyond the constraints of linearity, the author is free to impart to the reader incidents in scenarios that are unbounded by cause and effect. What then surfaces and are truly experienced by the reader are the most profound of emotional and at the same time political truths.

            Chavisia Woods’ prose explodes the connection between patriarchal tyranny and fascism. It is within that spectacle of explosion that the contemporary American Zeitgeist becomes illuminated. . Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind is as much an indictment of the ignorant and sadistic among us as it is of the collective atmosphere of indifference that nurtures the same. What level of indifference must exist in a society that celebrates ignorance and pain? Is this indifference the only natural human response to an unfeeling, modern super- sized technological environment? And to what degree are these factors the result of a system of Darwinian economics? 

 

     Only the best narrative writing can provoke as this collection does. This is an extraordinary book. Woods’ impeccable use of language involves the reader in a high level of intense vicarious physicality, while it provokes an equally intense emotional and intellectual response. This is well crafted art in the form of effective, dynamic literature.

                                                                                               – Philip Gounis

To purchase this book visit:

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Does-Make-Gentle-Kind/dp/1930083122

Lester Aflick ‘I Dream About You Baby’

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Publication party and reading for “I Dream About You Baby”, poems by Lester Afflick, at SOLAS, 232 E. Ninth Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Wednesday, June 11, 7-9 pm, free.

Book release Party July 19th 2008 4-5:30 pm @ The Bowery Poetry Club- Readers TBA

Fly By Night Press is proud to announce the publication of I Dream About You Baby, poems by Lester Afflick.

Born in Jamaica, Afflick was a vital force and fixture on the New York poetry scene from the early 1980s until his untimely death in January 2000. This posthumous collection of his finest poems has been compiled by Afflick’s dearest friends and most discerning readers.


Said the poet Hal Sirowitz: “He reminds me of the British painter Turner. Turner painted the turbulence of war and the ocean. Lester used words to paint the turbulence of life. The power of his metaphors combined with a deep voice, like Paul Robeson’s, made you marvel at the narrative.”

Another poet and friend John Farris explained: “Afflick’s death at 43 cut short a literary voice that was just beginning to find its maturity, a force that had just begun to hurricane density, that spoke to desert and crag, the heat of an unforgiving sun and maudlin existence, rendering the maudlin with a tool both dry and sharp. The poems in this collection represent Afflick’s vision: Island culture and alienation in an urbane and witty top hat.”

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In conjunction with the book’s publication, A Gathering of the Tribes, in conjunction with Redtape Productions and Solas, will present a reading of poems in the collection by an array of Afflick’s friends and admirers, (including at press-time: Steve Cannon, Michael Carter, Steve Dalachinsky, John Farris, Marci Goodman, Ruth Siekevits, Carl Watson and others TBA) at Solas, 232 E. Ninth St. (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Wednesday, June 11,

7-9 pm.

For more information about the event or about “I Dream About You Baby”, poems by Lester Afflick, contact A Gathering of the Tribes, Inc. at 212-674-3778, info@tribes.org, or visit www.tribes.org.

 

New York and African Tapestries

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“Juanita Torrence-Thompson’s delightful collection is more than a tapestry, it is a collection of tapestries. Juanita has stitched together the times and the places of her life with people who share them with her. The result is an heirloom of insight and image; a source of wisdom, identity and especially of comfort. By her gratitude we all become grateful.”

— Daniel Thomas Moran, 2nd Poet Laureate, Suffolk County New York

 

“Juanita Torrence-Thompson carefully considers and perfectly shapes her lines of verse. As a result, her poems are lucid and immediate. You get a feeling of ‘Yes, I’ve been there; I’ve felt those things.’”

— Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Tetched and Roughhouse

 

“From New York to Uganda, England to Chin, Sydney to Africa, Juanita Torrence-Thompson’s poems lead us on a mother-daughter journey, each separately finding her own way in the world of women, searching for the human sparks that unite us all. Issues tackled from September 11 in New York to Peace Corps work with disadvantaged youth, to the simple act of dancing with her husband.”

— Rochelle Ratner, author of Balancing Acts

 

“In Juanita Torrence-Thompson’s book, New York and African Tapestries, the 9/11 poems reveal her nobility of character. I found the ”Mother You Knew How to Live“ poems to be tenderhearted and revealing of a mother who had very special qualities for her daughter and for the world at large. The mixture of enthusiasm for life, insight into human foibles and strengths and awareness of tragic conditions that exist for some while others dance in a more utopian realm are her own unique medley”

— Poet Barbara Hantman.

Selections

About Juanita Torrence-Thompson

Juanita Torrence-Thompson has read extensively at U.S. universities, schools, libraries and on radio and TV. She has also read in Switzerland, Singapore and at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Juanita Torrence-Thompson’s poetry is published in Europe, Canada and widely in U.S. journals and in her newspaper poetry columns (The Culvert Chronicles in New York and in Point of View in Massachusetts). In 2006, she became editor of the 25-year old international Möbius, The Poetry Magazine.

Juanita Torrence-Thompson is a poet and the editor of Möbius, The Poetry Magazine.