Artist-In-Residence

C. Community and Audience. I’ve always been interested in the question of audience. During my MFA, I was mentored by the generous poet Brian Teare—who very quickly challenged me to notice my dilemma with audience: who is on the inside and outside of this story and its reception and consumption? Often, Brian Teare would tell me that in his own poems, he'd keep things to himself and for his community. Much later, during my PhD, I'd learn this and shape these gestures as acts of refusal. I would learn, too, much from reading and teaching over and over again Barbara Christian's “The Race for Theory.” My students often gravitate toward the moment in which she asks about intention: “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?” Here I think we can exchange literary criticism with poetry, fiction, essay, and other forms cultural production. The question I like to ask, too, is: “To whom do we write this? Who is addressed?” In the past couple of months, I've been writing and thinking in community—an emergent, intergenerational community of Filipinx diasporic writers. We're building something worth building: The Digital Sala. These conversations, these workshops, these longer and sometimes brief virtual encounters, have helped us develop various forms of kinship and solidarity. There is promise. I've always been writing for The Digital Sala.

D. Proximities of Form. During this current uprising and struggle for Black lives, I've been returning to the question of form. I still don't have most of my books with me but one that I happen to have in my apartment is Fred Moten's B Jenkins. I continue to return to the interview at the end. Given my current capacities, I'm going to simply and humbly leave this excerpt here: “I want to write poems that recognizably inhabit, but in some kind of underground or fugitive way, the space between the laws of music and the laws of meaning. I want to challenge the law that language lays down while taking advantage of the opportunity that language affords.”

E. What is Savage Lovebird as a project even? I've been working for the past couple of months to make sure this project reminds itself to work against a redemptive moment. While I am tempted to turn some of these rehearsals and processes into a book manuscript, I am also inspired to let things sit. I have always been an impatiently patient writer. I have always struggled to produce in the finished object sense. I stay present with the current conjuncture. Craft is now and has always been about the struggle for humble, sincere, genuine solidarity.

F. Rest in Peace to Auntie Ellie, who we lost to COVID-19 recently.

G. MAKIBAKA! HUWAG MATAKOT!

H. BLACK LIVES MATTER. BLACK LIVES MATTER. BLACK LIVES MATTER.

A. Rough Draft Mess. In an earlier post, and throughout this residency, I’ve been rethinking my commitment, rather, my fascination, rather, my obsession, with the notion and materiality of the rough draft. I don’t want this to be confused with a carelessness with thought and language. I don’t want this to be confused with an antagonism toward revision. I definitely don’t wish to convince myself to move away from a practice of deep revision. Clearly, I’ve been working both implicitly and explicitly with the narrative lessons, tensions, sentences, paragraphs, and desires of my MFA thesis since that 2004-06 moment when I started to articulate my prose writings as fiction, as short stories. I’m interested in what rough drafts tell us about our inclinations, our habits, our disciplining, and our limitations. I’m interested in what rough drafts make available and make possible. At the very least, rough drafts offer an entry point into a conversation, into a thinking process. Rough drafts can reveal, make transparent, and de-fetishize literary production. This is why I think being able to see the early version of the opening to Z.Z. Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” in Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers is so generative. In the early draft of that story opening, Packer explores a “secondary” character and her relationship to the narrator as a way into the backstory and interiority of the narrator. That “secondary” character and her relationship to the narrator never make it into the story. You could say that that “secondary” character haunts (in good ways) the story—and for sure for sure, haunts (in good ways) the narrator. I love having this discussion with my students. I’m also committed to the notion of mess. Poet Doug Kearny explores the poetics of mess through the rigorously experimental impulses of Black cultural production and literary genealogies in Mess And Mess And. Along different lines, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us ever so gently that “History is messy for the people who must live it.” Rough drafts know they are messy. Rough drafts own their messiness. Can we, as the rough drafters, as the drafters of the rough, reclaim the rough draft as archive, as history, as worthy of critical, vital, and generative discussion? What would that take in a literary world that prizes the finished product? How do we meet the rough draft at its own time, space, and pace without desiring its revision or perfection? And, no, I’m not interested in perpetuating the first draft, best draft mythos or excuse.

B. Cultural Production and Cultural Practice. Throughout this residency, I kept asking myself the same question: How do I work against the logic of production even as these rough drafts and experimental revisions I’m engaging are in of themselves sorts of productions? This is not only what keeps me up at night—it is actually the very question that keeps me from sustaining a consistent writing practice and “healthy” relationship with writing. So much of what I’ve absorbed through my writing education is about the horizon of not publishability, but the horizon of intelligibility, the horizon of others knowing what the hell I’m talking about. So much has been about the objective of yielding a product that can be understood as literature, or what might be worse, literary art. At this point, after a few months of experimenting and sitting patiently with this question of production, I’m starting to disarticulate production from product, production from property, production from profit. I’m starting to reinvigorate a practice, or quite simply an understanding, that I write to learn, I learn through the act and process of writing. I’m not quite there, but that I’m feeling confident in producing these reflections tells me I’m moving in that direction. The practice. The process—not the Joel Embiid kind. Or maybe.

April 29, 2020

Dear Amanda and Angela and Anthony and Grace and Jen,

So, here I am: at kitchen table. Here I am: at poetics. Here I am: at politics. Here I am: at form. Here I am: at against form. Here I am: against I. Here we am, we are, for we, for us, for this. Here we are: possibility. Here we are: multitudes. Here we are: at an expanse. Here I am humbly humbly fanboy wondering how to frame this reading and conversation that perhaps has arrived and assembled too late, perhaps has arrived and assembled too soon, certainly has arrived simply out of critical and intimate necessity. Too often, in my own search for a friendly and generous form to hold my and my family’s and my community’s words, fragments, sentences, lyrics, narratives, anti-narratives, post-narratives, dichos, silences, erasures, re-memories, and archives, I’ve become trapped in the tangles of those who ride or die in the name of either creative nonfiction, or, in the name of the essay, or, in the name of memoir, or, in the name of autobiography. Too often I urge myself to ensure that I’m reading the latest Wayne Koestenbaum essay, the latest Maggie Nelson play with form. To be clear, I am a fan of both of these contemporary writers as well. Perhaps too often, too, I’m looking too far for the form of the essay when the essay, the experiment, the learning, the holding, has always already been formed right in front of me. Still, too often in search of the illusive horizon of legibility, of intelligibility, of benevolent conscription into that which we might call “the literary,” I find myself formless, out of body, out of mind, out of tune with how my many literatures need a holding. Tonight, I’m interested in exploring together the various modalities of witness found in your writing. I’m interested in how you navigate temporalities of past, present, and future. I’m interested in the interplay, the antagonisms, the contradictions, the fluidities between form and genre, genre and embodiment, embodiment and silence, silence and memory, memory and erasure, lyric and narrative, evidence and uncertainty, the documentable, the undocumentable, the speakable, the unspeakable, the sayable, the unsayable. I’m interested in implicitly and explicitly tracing collective genealogies to Gloria Anzaldúa’s autohistoria, Audre Lorde’s biomythography, and countless formal inventions, interventions, interrogations, ruptures, and generous, imaginative wisdoms of women, queer, trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary writers of color. When, Amanda, you write that “there comes a point when text becomes stagnant and needs to break open,” I’d like to explore how we rekindle our love for language amidst wreckage. When, Angela, you say that “spirits of the dead and myth are fluid and malleable,” and you suggest that queer is future and future is queer, I’d like to hear how ancestral frequencies emerge in gaps and silences of form. When, Anthony, as you write of the meeting of immigrant dreams and queer realities, I wonder of a form that makes possible that meeting, that encounter, those intersections. And when, Grace, you navigate anything and everything you have written, and decide on what is published, public, and what is private, what is archive, what is body, I wonder about how calculated absences and refusals still call into being bodies and worlds. And, Jen, when you seek possibility and a third space for “multiple ways of being and seeing,” when in the intersectionalities of being you “bend the rules of telling,” what happens to the shape of desire, the shape of political? My Dear Friends: here we am, here we are, here we go, where we now.

Peace,

Jason

To be honest, I no longer fear his laughter.
To be honest, I risk it against my suspicions.
To be honest, there’s something fishier than the air.
To be honest, I am intrigued by how low your hair drapes down.
To be honest, people are dressed for church.
To be honest, Marcos is a good man when dead.
To be honest, I’ve already canceled reservations.
To be honest, I’ve been waiting for this my entire existence.

a. I’ve been thinking a lot about parallel structures, repetitions, and refrains, especially after some deep craft conversations with fellow poet Hari Alluri. The refrain is incredibly generative. I think the visuality of the refrain in this piece (“So, she says, you praise the dead”) is aesthetically pleasing. But I also think the sound of the refrain in the performance is simply fun to perform.

b. First, I chose two random pages from the longer MFA manuscript and worked with those pages only. I’m a little upset that I don’t have access to my external hard drive, which happens to be in my campus office—and the campus is still closed! With access to the digital manuscript files, I think I’d be able to play with larger bulks of text. Right now, I’m feeling a little lazy to work with so much text. Perhaps the reality is that I don’t have the current attention span or emotional bandwidth to take on more text. I thought working with a printed manuscript would help me, but now I’m a little over it. With the two pages I chose, I looked for a refrain that would be interesting. The refrain turned out to be: “So, you praise the dead.” This first existed as a piece of dialogue in a scene in which an emerging eulogist meets the potential love of his life at a cemetery. Once I got the refrain, I let my eyes scan both pages (from two different stories) and whatever image or fragment I picked up on, I typed out. Then, I let the refrain do its own work within the fiction.

c. There’s an emergent narrative within this piece. I think the piece acts as this sort of minimalist flash work that has a few built-in narrative directions/gestures: an interior monologue and a murder.

d. In an early reflective post, I mentioned how I thought my fiction writing was often funny, at least to me. I guess the actual tone of what I was writing in my mid-20s was dark as fuck. I’m so learning things right now.

So, she says, you praise the dead.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and shrugs.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and becomes self-conscious.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and takes cigarette back.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and ashes.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and admires scars.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and believes.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and shuts it down.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and drops knife.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and stands before self.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and steals cop’s gun.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and returns.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and man dies.
So, she says, you praise the dead, and never says words again.