This is one of the retreats that gave me some real strategies to take back home...
For those of you who don't know about Kundiman go to kundiman.org!
This is a revised version of what I submitted to the directors as a testimonial:
Language is my homeland, and even this landscape is always moving and changing. The Kundiman Retreat was like an unexpected homecoming. Unexpected because I never knew I could feel so much connection, despite the initial awkwardness. At first, I felt a little “out of place,” and was self-conscious about the fact that I had only begun to really embrace poetry within the past two years. I never doubted that I was a poet, but I didn’t feel comfortable connecting with other, more experienced poets about the process of creating it.
But on the second day, my workshop faculty member brought about a huge movement in how we related to each other. Myung Mi Kim found what connected the very different poetics in our workshop, while recognizing the very different experiences and inspirations that we each hold sacred: poetry for us, in our workshop at least, was in motion, happened in movement, and moved us.
As Toni Morrison says, there is a difference between being touched and being moved by writing. Kundiman was an experience that drastically moved me and moved my writing. Mixpe, one of my many mentors, said that an amazing education can be acquired by learning one thing from every being that we meet. Although I would love to and could easily write a statement about what I learned from each staff member and from all the Kundiman fellows, I will restrain myself to the faculty.
I really appreciated the absolute and unconditional care with which the staff made every decision, made every ritual into a loving tradition, and above all, I appreciated the love that they brought to every detail of the retreat.
msn
This is the only poem that I wrote during the actual retreat (aside from lunes and other little things). It's still in process:
“Language Sensitivity“
MEMESHII: my mother used to call me this
felt like the impulse to vomit,
like my outsides turning in for false comfort
like absolute contempt.
Memeshii, a word that marches to the same beat
as words like Mediocre, Weak, and Oversensitive.
She sent me to classrooms in northern Virginia
where the light particles and dust hang in the air,
like the arms of swamp willows or retired Southern Belles
like post-bellum battlefields
or shrapnel.
On each mote in the atmospheric
class structure
my teachers hung their own weapons.
They said:
Intolerable, Youbettershapeup, and Standardsofintellectualmerit.
They trained me to speak French, then Latin
until I growled three languages
incomprehensible to my family.
Outside the sharp, restricted light of my
“Humanistic” education, I
Found the shadowy foxtails of the word
That scrambled my intestines as a child:
女々しい
(also written: 女女しい)
radical translation: woman woman ish.
I stand in classrooms many years and
many miles later,
In southern Maryland,
Muraled by the faces of Malcolm X,
Frida Kahlo, and Che.
These are the heroes that the students picked
and painted –
students like the ones in my class,
like Te’Renée or Devon,
who calls out anything
that moves, for being “gay”
or Carl, who polices the darkness of his friends’
darker complexions.
Neither picked by them nor their hero,
I try to reach them by any means necessary.
And I wonder what convinced them that black
might not be radiantly beautiful
and what is so revolting (revolutionary) about loving
one another.
For those of you who don't know about Kundiman go to kundiman.org!
This is a revised version of what I submitted to the directors as a testimonial:
Language is my homeland, and even this landscape is always moving and changing. The Kundiman Retreat was like an unexpected homecoming. Unexpected because I never knew I could feel so much connection, despite the initial awkwardness. At first, I felt a little “out of place,” and was self-conscious about the fact that I had only begun to really embrace poetry within the past two years. I never doubted that I was a poet, but I didn’t feel comfortable connecting with other, more experienced poets about the process of creating it.
But on the second day, my workshop faculty member brought about a huge movement in how we related to each other. Myung Mi Kim found what connected the very different poetics in our workshop, while recognizing the very different experiences and inspirations that we each hold sacred: poetry for us, in our workshop at least, was in motion, happened in movement, and moved us.
As Toni Morrison says, there is a difference between being touched and being moved by writing. Kundiman was an experience that drastically moved me and moved my writing. Mixpe, one of my many mentors, said that an amazing education can be acquired by learning one thing from every being that we meet. Although I would love to and could easily write a statement about what I learned from each staff member and from all the Kundiman fellows, I will restrain myself to the faculty.
- Prageeta Sharma showed me how to explode lines and stanzas from their moorings on the page, move them around.
- Myung Mi Kim asked us to revisit what texts we hold sacred, what processes induce writing in us, what are we currently trying to work out through our poetry.
- Regie Cabico mapped out the landscape of the poems that we wrote and performed: how to dance along the boundaries between inhabiting a poem and reliving the trauma of it, how to revisit the words and their impulse without losing oneself in the performance.
- Patrick Rosal's words throughout the retreat and in the mentorship session connected disparate pieces for me: I learned never to let anyone make me feel ashamed of what I love. I learned that if something is calling me, in whatever language, I have to listen to that call and move towards it.
I really appreciated the absolute and unconditional care with which the staff made every decision, made every ritual into a loving tradition, and above all, I appreciated the love that they brought to every detail of the retreat.
msn
This is the only poem that I wrote during the actual retreat (aside from lunes and other little things). It's still in process:
“Language Sensitivity“
MEMESHII: my mother used to call me this
felt like the impulse to vomit,
like my outsides turning in for false comfort
like absolute contempt.
Memeshii, a word that marches to the same beat
as words like Mediocre, Weak, and Oversensitive.
She sent me to classrooms in northern Virginia
where the light particles and dust hang in the air,
like the arms of swamp willows or retired Southern Belles
like post-bellum battlefields
or shrapnel.
On each mote in the atmospheric
class structure
my teachers hung their own weapons.
They said:
Intolerable, Youbettershapeup, and Standardsofintellectualmerit.
They trained me to speak French, then Latin
until I growled three languages
incomprehensible to my family.
Outside the sharp, restricted light of my
“Humanistic” education, I
Found the shadowy foxtails of the word
That scrambled my intestines as a child:
女々しい
(also written: 女女しい)
radical translation: woman woman ish.
I stand in classrooms many years and
many miles later,
In southern Maryland,
Muraled by the faces of Malcolm X,
Frida Kahlo, and Che.
These are the heroes that the students picked
and painted –
students like the ones in my class,
like Te’Renée or Devon,
who calls out anything
that moves, for being “gay”
or Carl, who polices the darkness of his friends’
darker complexions.
Neither picked by them nor their hero,
I try to reach them by any means necessary.
And I wonder what convinced them that black
might not be radiantly beautiful
and what is so revolting (revolutionary) about loving
one another.
Comments