Kundiman Lineages

We All Belong to a Love Song Called Kundiman - Part 2

Here are our Origins (aka Part 1)

Here are our Lineages (aka Part 2):

I Always See Her With A Typewriter In The Sun ~ For Gloria Anzaldúa | Bushra Rehman

Taken Names: The Poetic Lineage of Jai Arun Ravine | Jai Arun Ravine

Our Subversive Anatomies: The Embodied Feminist Poetics of Jai Arun Ravine | Margaret Rhee

A Moving Vehicle: The Poetry of Margaret Rhee | Jai Arun Ravine

feminist sentences take time and space / look new like this: | Soham Patel

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Curated by Ching-In Chen

A Moving Vehicle: The Poetry of Margaret Rhee | Jai Arun Ravine

Accidentally, I met Margaret Rhee. An accident can mean either a mishap or a crash.

Crashing on the couch of a friend of a friend, not more than a week fresh in San Francisco, my host took me to a bar in the outer Mission, and ran into a friend who, after meeting me for about two minutes, contacted me a few days later. “There’s someone you should meet.”

When I first met Margaret, she had blue gaffer tape all up and down her arm. I was late (accidentally). She was shooting for her QWOCMAP (Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project) film All Of Me, which would document the formation of an Asian and Pacific Islander (A&PI) drag king troupe, later known as The Rice Kings, of which I would become a part.

Is this chance? Calamity? Collision?

I think of Margaret when I think about my lineage of Asian American poetry, since she ushered me into the queer A&PI community in the bay area and introduced me to Kundiman. I think about all the things that had to be set in motion in order to manifest this accidental meeting.

An accident can mean a nonessential attribute or characteristic, but there is nothing nonessential about Margaret’s poetry. In engaging three of her poems—“the elegy of the trellis” (published in Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets, Achiote Press, 2009), “Education in Numbers and Letters” and “My Brutal Algebra”—the strokes are indeed brutal, necessary with an ache, sore and gasping.

“My Brutal Algebra” was one of the first poems I heard Margaret read aloud, at an Achiote Press reading in Oakland. Her poem rose in relief from the other readings—I told her how much I was struck by it. She smiled and said, “Because it’s about the body.”

The experience of body as land/scape. As land/scrape. As land/scope. In Margaret’s algebriacs I am flipping through diagrammed amputations and cross sections of live tissue in the process of mutation. The body of the one desired is a living textbook, opening, and we are taking notations—we must take them. “Since scientists never consider those breaths that never leave you. / That is essential to the body,” writes Margaret.

An accident often results in injury or death. In “the elegy of the trellis” Margaret weaves stems and vines into an emotional portrait of her father’s death. At first glance the fragmented lines and spacing give the impression of an airy lightness, yet as I read each word drops like a stone, the spaces gasp and the rhythm surprises. “before blood stroke bed sore and eyes i pleaded open”

In a bio Margaret cites the warm, humid summers of Virginia during Kundiman retreats as the place where she fell in love with poetry. I think about how humidity can usher in emotions either swift or slow but always thick and heavy. The weight of “the elegy of the trellis” masquerades in the tension between its thick, overwhelming fragrance and its bitten phrasing. It disguises itself as small and contained, but actually each space, each breath, is exploding.

An accident is often without apparent cause, involves a moving vehicle or an unplanned event or conception. “Education in Numbers and Letters” was written and read for an April 1, 2010 Solidarity Reading on UC Berkeley campus regarding budget cuts to education in the UC system. Margaret makes connections between the prison industrial complex and the academic industrial complex and talks about teaching research methods to a woman in prison:

She tells me,

Her father “lives under the 80

His address A sign for food”

She poses “why do so many incarcerated women come from poverty”

Then admits, “I love research,”

Three words of longing

Of terror and exuberant possibility

With longing and terror this poem makes me think about the increasing inaccessibility of college education, about the ways school systems lock up students behind gates, urging them to manufacture and mass-produce only certain ideas, reducing them to common denominators in economic transactions.

I think about the severe divide between cultural production and organizing within and outside of academia, a divide that continues to widen until there is almost no cross-communication. I think about how people live inside universities, inside prisons, fed by institutional jargon, becoming more and more isolated.

Margaret demonstrates poetry’s ability to be a moving vehicle. To move the blood in your cells, to move you to action. In her poems the causes are apparent, what is conceived has been articulately planned, each letter and space involves a birth, a change.

(Text may be altered from the original due to formatting.)

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Jai Arun Ravine is a trans-identified, multi-disciplinary writer, dancer, visual and performing artist of mixed Thai and white American heritage. Jai received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Hollins University. As a Kundiman Fellow Jai has studied with Myung Mi Kim and Staceyann Chin. Jai’s first chapbook, IS THIS JANUARY, is forthcoming from Corollary Press. For more information, visit http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/

Photo by Christine Pan & Mia Nakano Photography.

Our Subversive Anatomies: The Embodied Feminist Poetics of Jai Arun Ravine | Margaret Rhee

“Yet the child began to grow a phantom tongue. At first it was a test, to see if such faculties of speech were possible. Then it became a practice. The child began to dream the sweetness of kanom, the scent of roots muddied in the riverbank. Began to climb backwards in search of the other end of her mother’s lost tongue.” – Jai Arun Ravine from “Llao: how to peel in seven lessons”

"May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more
resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve." –Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." – Emily Dickinson

Feminist and gender non-conforming experimental poet Jai Arun Ravine’s innovative and evocative poetry and upholds Emily Dickenson’s definition: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry.” Reading Ravine’s work, I am startled, provoked, and inspired, hir’s poetics runs deep.
through my body, my veins, and flows into my feminist raised fist: our hearts.

Hir’s poetics simultaneously pulls, cuts, and bridges apparent boundaries, providing a trans-national-genre-language-gender poetics. Ravine’s language serves as a healing wound: puncturing through the page, with words, spaces, and narrative—until unrecognizably beautiful.

This is the work of a feminist Kundiman poet: whose consciousness, body, and poetics transcends constructed boundaries, and these limiting borders of the self. In doing so, Ravine transforms our notion of a poem, poet, and feminist through subverting the page.

This Is What A Feminist Poet Looks Like

I could describe Jai’s handsome face, and stylish clothes, or the fact that se does not only write poetry, but is also an amazing performance artist, drag king, and activist extraordinaire. Yeah, se is pretty much is more than amazing. And se is a dear friend to me. But here, I’m going to attempt to answer, this age-new question: What does a Kundiman feminist poet look like?

Short answer:

Pretty damn hot.


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Long Answer:

I write as a friend of Ravine’s but also all at once, a fan, an admirer and reader of hir’s work. I’m an advocate for poets like Ravine, whose poetics transgress the very rigid boundaries that limit our subjectivity.

Meaning: hir’s feminist poetry, has saved me.

At this particular moment, post-1965-stonewall-civil rights-LA riots, we live in a disillusioned, neoliberal, & post-racial world…yet, mixed race, Thai, and queer poet, Ravine’s work is important not only because it survives the page, but for the survival of our selves. Our hearts. Because to add to Emily Dickenson’s definition of poetry, I want to add truth. It’s poetry, when the intimate poetics is shared, from one poet, to a reader and for a community. And we are all blessed to have a truth teller in our midst.

In hir’s manuscript, “Llao: how to peel in seven lessons,” published in Tinfish 18: The Long Poem Issue, Ravine re-imagines hir/she’s mothers immigration from Thailand to the U.S. Through an interweaving of images from a Thai language worksheet, Ravine walks us through the seven lessons, of how to peel. The body and the knife is evoked prominently here and in much of Ravine’s work. Like our lineage of feminist poet subversives, the body is configured within the poem, and on the page, but is cut through and reworked into an utterly new poetics.

I feel these excerpts need no critical explanation: as if scholarly engagement can really help one read a poem. So I ask you here to work through this question with me… although virtually. But let’s provoke an embodied experience.

So this lesson, is to read & listen.

What does a feminist poet sound like?

“Execution: Gaw achieved such precision with her knife. There is no question that huddling around the fruit, intercepting its skin latitudinally, is the best method available. There is no distance when the tail is broken. One long line eventually curves. Persistence rewarded with a diversion, a deviation.”

“The birth of Ram was her anchor, but now, so tied, she could not differentiate between the shape of

1) noose, or the severity of
2) salvage

She had survived, had pulled herself across water to pull this child upon this land. What should this child know?”

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In a more recent poem, written in 2009,“We Fear the Body’s Buried Dreams,” (with italicized text from Hermaphordite, Mon Amour by Richard Collins) Ravine again engages and questions the body, a theme persistent in hir’s work:

“Before I had a name for it,
I had a nightmare.
They threw away my wok—
And my knife, you know my knife?”

“A boxing coach owned my breasts
which I couldn’t conceal

I remember looking at nude female torsos
In books, drawn to the shape of white breasts
And stomachs, the divots of shade

Wanting, knowing I wasn’t.”

“I want to change my sex as I change my shirt

I’m stabbed in the chest,
And the hand that wields my blackened knife has a face”

In Ravine’s poetics, the body and the knife figure evocatively, as a metaphor which resonates how language works as a knife dissecting the constructed hegemonic notions of the body and the nation-state Through a feminist move of diaspora, Ravine also provides interventions made through the experimentation of narrative and form.

Moreover, as quoted above in the beginning of this experimental essay/hybrid text & evocation, poet Teresa Hak Kyung Cha imagined what Sappho might say, (a point that the quote was imagined, was discovered by amazing Asian American feminist literary scholar, Shelly Sunn Wong). Like Ravine, Cha’s act of writing is linked with the body from “flesh,” “bone,” “sinew,” and “nerve.” Cha’s inclusion of anatomy resonates with Ravine’s usage of the body as an analytic and metaphorical space to subvert hegemonic ideologies.

As literary scholar (also, fabulous Asian American feminist scholar) Lisa Lowe writes: “Throughout (Cha’s) Dictee, it is often the physical body, which bears the traces of colonial...mutilation and the literal and figural site from which different, often fragmented, speech is uttered in resistance to the imposed competency in the colonizer’s language.”

Like Cha, and our lineage of feminist poets, Jai Arun Ravine interweaves and subverts notions of the body, metaphorically within the poems and physically. The poems breaks, cuts, and re-creates the page with language. Hir’s language. A strategy that marginalized subjects utilized when unable to speak. Moreover, Ravine’s intimate, hopeful, and politically charged poetics, grapples not only with the very notion of a poem, but radically engages with the narrative of the Asian immigrant mother, pulling silenced voices, center, and in the process, finding ourselves. From reimagining hir’s mothers immigration from Thailand, Ravine writes: “She awaited permission to borrow a new tongue.” And with no temporal borders asserted here, Cha continues Ravine, as Ravine continues Cha, so we can be “who you really are.”
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Margaret Rhee is a poet, media artist and interdisciplinary scholar. She has published poems in Back Room Live, the Berkeley Poetry Review, and co-edited the chapbook Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (published by Achiote Press) with amazing Kundiman feministas Ching-In Chen and Debbie Yee. Currently, she is a doctoral student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She attended the inaugural Kundiman poetry retreat, and studied with Kundiman feminist mentors such as Joseph O. Legaspi, Marilyn Chin, Patrick Rosal, Myung Mi Kim, Prageeta Sharma, Oliver de la Paz, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. At Kundiman, she fell in love with poetry & there there.

We All Belong to a Love Song Called Kundiman

We All Belong to a Love Song Called Kundiman

Welcome to this Kundiman edition of This Is What Feminist [Poet] Looks Like. Back in February, when I was thinking about my own sense of feminist poetics for my Delirious Hem contribution, I came back again and again to the communities I belong to and how they have shaped my writing.

One of those organizations is Kundiman, an organization dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry. Each summer, a group of emerging Asian American poets gathers to write and talk poetry in community together.

I longed to hear their voices in the conversation so I asked fellow Kundiman poets the following questions and waited for their responses --

Where do you draw your poetic lineages from the poetries of Asian American female or gender-non-conforming poets? How do you (do you) intersect with feminist poetics? Other communities of women? Transgendered/gender-variant communities? Racialized communities? Tactics and tricks, fragments and fears, languages and loves? How does Kundiman contain these desires or break out of them? What is your Kundiman (love song)? What is your horror? What is your broken record? How do you participate? Resist? Do you feel conflicted about your relationship to these? As the previous This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like suggests, feel free to take liberties with these questions! Answer them at will, alter them, transgress them, make someone else you admire answer them! Images, maps, whisperings, inkings, handmade/bound tales welcome! Tell me something crucial and bloody and wrestled, something that matters to your existence as a Kundiman poet!

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I hope you enjoy and join in the conversation!

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Openings (aka Part 1):

Myung Mi Kim :: Into the Whole Space :: Mark At The Margin | Tamiko Beyer

To Love, To a Justice of the Heart: Ruminations on A Feminist Poetics of My Own | Purvi Shah

The Gold Soldier | Yael Villafranca

Untitled | Cynthia Arrieu-King

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Lineages (aka Part 2):

I Always See Her With A Typewriter In The Sun ~ For Gloria Anzaldúa | Bushra Rehman

Taken Names: The Poetic Lineage of Jai Arun Ravine | Jai Arun Ravine

Our Subversive Anatomies: The Embodied Feminist Poetics of Jai Arun Ravine | Margaret Rhee

A Moving Vehicle: The Poetry of Margaret Rhee | Jai Arun Ravine

feminist sentences take time and space / look new like this: | Soham Patel

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Kundiman: Our Love Song is Our Commitment (aka Part 3):


The Mountains Are Just Ahead of Us | Alison Roh Park

At the time I read Sarah Gambito’s "Paloma’s Church in America" | Addie Tsai

One has to rely on memory so much when one is always leaving: A conversation with Janine Joseph | R. A. Villanueva

and earth still rising: Melissa Roxas’ chorus of prayer | Vanessa Huang

Poems as Evidence | Melissa Roxas

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Curated by Ching-In Chen