Kai Huang Returns Home and features at East Meets Words

Kai Huang comes back home, our tenant in the bookstore's attic - we welcome him at the first open mic of the year. Kai is the big man who plans the EMW program East Meets Words. The team has been taking the lead during his travels and we've eagerly booked Kai as this month's feature! It only sounds fair to give former member of the Providence slam team and Brown University slam team a humble feature on home turf.

However, Massachusetts seem a little less inviting compared to the sunny-side-up California.  The week leading to the open mic felt like the temperature was way below zero. Daunting for even New Englanders to troop it outside for any post school/work activities. On the flip side, we can always count on our fam for a full house and a full open mic list. The room elevated with hands, half of the audience were new faces, the other half were regulars like Jelyn Masa.  She has been attending the open mic since the Summer of last year.  She is a student at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.  Jelyn was introduced to EMW and the open mic through the ROOT Collective, a group of self-identified Asian American women, trans, and gender queer individuals seeking community in shared histories of personal experiences.

"In this space, I experience vulnerability and growth. I hear truth so raw I lose my breath for a second and then five minutes later, I'm laughing like crazy.  Thanks for filling a void I didn't even know I had," she shared.

Sharing the stage that evening was Sabrina Ghaus, a long time friend of EMW. Performing at the open mic, she reads a brave piece about language and her internal battle between cultures.  Sabrina tells us that the only reason she feels comfortable is that this space feels safe.  "I feel that family is here. EMW is one of the reasons I moved back [to Boston]".  Sabrina did absolutely amazing and the cool thing is, her first time ever performing poetry was here at East Meets Words!

Sitting right in front of the stage was Ayo E., a writer, comedian and student at NYU.  This was her first time in the space. She planted herself in the first row with several friends.  All of them were close enough to be in "spit range" some might call it.  After the event we got her thoughts, "...coming from New York, the vibe between the two cities could be competitive," but Ayo left with a very different impression.  She felt extremely welcomed at the bookstore.

It was also Amanda and Ricky's first time co-hosting together.  As they introduced Kai Huang, they asked one another how would they describe him in two words.  Amanda answered thoughtfully, "endearingly abrasive." Ricky added, "very attractive," - both of which are true and both are two of the many qualities that make this man an incredible artist and human being.  Kai premieres his set responsibly rocking his accent piece, a red knitted scarf, which he tells us that it is first colored garment he has worn in four years.

"2015 is the year of humility!" Kai repeatedly announces during his feature. "The sheep shall inherit the earth."

Regardless of your astrologically and zodiacal beliefs, we can't deny how amazing last Friday was.  Kai opened up with "Private Institution," a hard-hitting, truthful piece about higher education. He performs a few throwbacks like "Mao" and "Miseducation Revisited," then sneaks in a few new gems, two persona pieces to be exact. One in the voice of Samson speaking to Delilah, the second was in the voice of his revolutionary glasses.

Thanks to all the new faces, regulars, organizers, performers, Kai Huang, ITSYERBOI - we out here! Take a look at all the photos from East Meets Words featuring Kai Huang here.

On the Fearlessness of the Honey Badger

In the epigraph for her poem "Mellivora Capensis," poet Sally Wen Mao reports that the honey badger—at least according to the 2002 Guinness World Records—is the world’s most fearless animal.

Following the poetry open mic, Mao, as part of the Honey Badgers Don’t Give a B**k! tour, performed the poem in a round-robin style poetry reading at EMW Bookstore with fellow poets and Kundiman Fellows Cathy Linh Che and Eugenia Leigh. Mao, in her signature style—crisp and luscious, cerebral as it is down to earth—explained why honey badgers are awesome and don’t give a damn. Honey badgers eat beehives for breakfast; an assortment of venomous snakes for a post-prandial snack; and they swipe prize meals from more formidable predators without batting an eyelid.

Built with an omnivorous appetite and thick skin, a specimen of Mellivora capensis courts danger regularly. Her genes, and perhaps environment, demand resilience. In the poem "Mellivora Capensis" from her collection Mad Honey Symposium (published by Alice James Books), Mao repeats twice, “A broken badger is not a sad thing.”

Why is a broken badger not a sad thing?

Cathy Linh Che read from her book Split (published by Alice James Books) in which she described the inheritance of anguish and the complicated role of family in moving past trauma. Eugenia Leigh, in turn, read poems from her forthcoming collection Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, highlighting pieces on working through heartbreak, fear, and the death of a beloved artist. All three honey badgers read poems that in essence breathed air into stories of brokenness.

Common threads for the evening’s readings were the themes of surviving, containing multitudes, and being a self through and beyond trauma—physical, personal, abstract, institutional, symbolic, and more—and far larger foes. One salient message was that those traumas might mark us, but they do not mar us, do not make us.

Being broken is not a sad thing.

In several moments of the readings by Mao, Che, and Leigh, I found myself wondering how I could be more like the honey badger and wild of heart in what I see to be a fairly tame, domesticated existence. The poems delighted me and resonated deeply with my own struggles with being Asian-American and beyond (I guess, just a self).

In light of tangled identity politics, Mao’s poems written from the perspective of a wry Anna May Wong, an American-born Chinese-American Hollywood actress from the 1930s, particularly stood out to me. The Hollywood industrial machine limited Wong to roles that were, well, limiting—as a dragon lady, a Madame Butterfly, a lotus flower, a prostitute, a daughter of the villain, a great gal and seductress who never gets the leading man—and yet, she still glows on the silver screen, becomes her own star, and holds dignified court in spite of the times. There’s something true to life about living with constraints while also breaking through them, twisting out from under the claws of what holds us down, while fighting back and, perhaps, eating what is trying to eat us. Mao's honey badger in "Mellivora Capensis" declares the sentiment with lethal puissance: "Spit me out, larger beast—find my paws/ on your jaw, on your hipbone, on your feet./ [...]/ Find the waterbuck heaving/ in the swamp. Find gashes. Find heat./ Find skin molting but you won't find me."

Being able to contain multitudes, to be free and unfree at the same time, being able to take on—to devour—what cuts us the most deeply and keeps us awake at night—to take on bigger enemies—that, for me, reveals the true fearlessness of the honey badger and the three poets I saw that night.

After three sets of three poems from each poet, we lingered in the bookstore in awe and conviviality. It was like we were in a bookstore, but instead of books, we had people who contained poems and the tireless courage of the honey badger who is wise enough to know that being broken is not a sad thing.

Don't forget to check out the photo album on the EMW Bookstore Facebook page!

On Bodies and Ghosts: Franny Choi and Jess X. Chen at EMW

     

I first saw Franny Choi at EMW a couple of years ago, when she and a bunch of talented students from Brown U (including one of our current EMW residents, Kai Huang) featured. So it's been a real treat witnessing her rise as a poet, from all the national poetry slams she's dominated to doing a TED talk, from publishing her first book to being profiled by the Poetry Foundation. I suppose I should clarify that I'm not a stalker, but that I follow, teach and write about Asian American literature for a living. ;)

I could get all academicky about what Franny is doing with spoken word poetry as a form and how Jess X. Chen's haunting illustrations serve as interlocutors to Franny's poems in their volume, Floating, Brilliant, Gone, but I'm not going to. In the four years that I've been coming to EMW, I come not as a prof, but as any other person who is constantly processing what it means to navigate this world in my body, who needs community in order to validate/embrace/resist/negotiate all the mechanisms that inform my day-t0-day experience. Which is why for me the most memorable line from Franny's reading last night came from her poem, "Orientalism (Part II)"-- It's about being an Asian woman with a white boyfriend, and having to deal with all the pasts and presents that their bodies signify. The lover tells the speaker: "Please, my love,/ Not every house is haunted."

That got me thinking about what ghosts I'm constantly battling, that we're all constantly battling. I've never been more aware of what it means to walk around the world as an Asian woman until I've had to navigate two things: working as a professor in the lily white world of academia, and dating as a single woman in Boston. Just as Franny writes about being cat called by men who shout, "I like pork fried rice!" I could testify to having fucked up things said to me. It was at work, not on a date, when an older white man asked me if I wanted to sit on his lap. It was on a date, not at work, when a man (not white, which makes this more sad) marveled at my "outspokenness," as if it's some genetic anomaly. It's in the pursuit of both work and love that I constantly have to explain where I am really from. We could wish that these interactions, however frustrating, are ultimately benign, that they're just the faux pas of some stupid and ignorant individuals. We fear, though we know to be true, that they indicate something deeper: that the reason why these and far worse violences happen is because we have built the world in a way that allows them to.

It's easy to walk around angry, jaw clenched so tight that you have a chronic headache, as I have. What's not as easy is containing that anger, channeling it towards something productive, all the while figuring out what moments are residues of some larger forces of oppression that are worth fighting and which moments welcome forgiveness.

That, I suppose, is why poetry is so important. We get to figure that shit out. And take comfort in knowing that we don't have to figure that shit out alone. And, moreover, we get to sigh, cry, and laugh together in that process.

I think that's why one of my favorite poems of Franny's is "Pussy Monster." Through such a simple move, of rearranging the words to a Lil' Wayne song by order of frequency, she incisively highlights the narcissism with which misogyny operates, as the poem culminates in an outpouring of "me me me me me..." and "I I I I I I I I I I..." But by the end the word "pussy," which signifies so much violence done towards women, gets reclaimed as both political commentary and as a word we can chuckle about. Even better, it becomes a collective mantra-- It's telling that Franny's reading last night ended with the entire audience chanting with her, "pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy..."

As Franny would say, that's magic.

FRANNY THIS FRIDAY

You already know, y'all. Franny Choi this Friday, May 9 at 8 pm. Be there. Poster credit: Jess X. Chen (who featured last month with Paul Tran and will also be having a gallery opening this month!!)