ANNOUNCING: “OF COLOR : POETS’ WAYS OF MAKING :: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics”
Forthcoming from the Operating System in 2019
“I’m going to study poetry,” I said….
“What do you mean poetry?” my mother asked. In searching my thoughts for a Hmong equivalent, I realized we may not have had a definitive history of writing, but we do have a rich oral tradition that includes folk art forms such as sung-poetry. “It’s like the kwv txhiajs we sing,” I explained, “but mine will be written down.”
And in this simple conversation, this sudden invitation, this surprising arrival and wild recognition that there must be something larger and more profound ahead, the long-term aspirations I had, to write, to publish, to harness language as a way of pushing against the erasure of our individual and collective stories, to make visible the histories of and traumas suffered by communities like my own, began to spill out of my mouth and into the unexpected space of this moment…”
~ Mai Der Vang, from the Foreword
“To meet me (a them) is to learn a different
syntax, to re-wire your tongue.
Do you know my name?”~ Ching-in Chen
“I would no longer ask for permission. …I have learned, over time, that resistance generates change; or at the very least, a way out of the self-policing and instead to self-materialization.”
~ Addie Tsai
“What indefensible monstrosities do we come from, live in? What new bodies do we need in order to survive and live? What texts can we conjure from the wreck, whose ferocious griffin hospitality can we inhabit? Can we awaken the dead?”
~ Kenji Liu
As Managing Editor and Creative Director of The Operating System I am thrilled and honored to announce an addition to the 2019 catalog (and to the field of contemporary publishing and pedagogy):
OF COLOR : POETS’ WAYS OF MAKING :: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics, edited by Amanda Galvan Huynh & Luisa A. Igloria, forthcoming from the OS in time for programming at and around AWP Portland (and available for discounted pre-order now!)
This incredibly valuable text for poet and human and classroom alike includes contributions from Mai Der Vang (Foreword), Ching-In Chen, Addie Tsai, Tony Robles, Wendy Gaudin, Ernesto L. Abeytia, Abigail Licad, Tim Seibles, Melissa Coss Aquino, Sasha Pimentel, Jose Angel Araguz, Khadijah Queen, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, and Kenji Liu.
This collection asks:
How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice? How do they learn from and teach others? For poets of color, what does the relationship of “what one knows” have, with conditions extending but not limited to publishing, mentorship and pedagogy, comradeship and collegiality, friendship, love, and possibility? Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA? For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic, and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they have learned to others?
The editors write:
“These and other questions come up so consistently in our daily experience as poets of color. And we hear them from poets of color at various stages of their careers. Out of the desire not only to hear from each other but also to share what we’ve learned — each from our unique as well as bonded experiences of writing as poets of color in this milieu — this anthology project was born.
In this collection, we make no claims of presenting any definitive theoretical or other stance. Neither do we offer these essays as prescriptive of certain ways of thinking of craft or of doing things, although in them is expressed a collective wish — that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility without replicating the systems that play the game of divide and conquer and turn us against each other for narrow or self-serving profit. Instead, let there be a steady effort to compile lore and take inventory of strategies, intersections, bridges; to map our histories, to sight possibilities for the future.”
Please considering pre-ordering this collection to support its publication and/or planning on course adoption! PDF’s can be made available as per OS standard practice and/or we can support discounted copies for educators, students, independent teaching or community organizations, or others seeking to use this book as a tool for positive change.
More excerpts, to whet your anticipation:
“The trinity that my father so deftly introduced me to was the bucket, the mop, and the wringer. …[M]y father was an artist. That is not to say a formally trained artist, but art and expression moved in his blood. Let me communicate to you that he was an artist from the moment he rose from bed to the moment he showered to the moment he put on his shoes. His mundane movements, his moving from point A to B was a dance, a flow, an exhibition of a story imparted to him that lived in his bones and moved across his skin like the songs that kept us alive, filling our empty pots with something that would sustain us when we could barely look into the mirror to confront who we were.”
~ Tony Robles
“While I prefer to use the essay to excavate and decorate the lives of the women who came before me, to delve into their spiritual lives, to resuscitate the ways of love and worship and protection that they inherited from the women who came before them, poetry gives me the space to direct my thoughts to those who are seen as perpetrators and to expose them. In history, men like my great-grandfather are culprits, lit by the spotlight of racial, socioeconomic, and gender privilege — and, indeed, they are. In poetry, they are listeners — a captive audience — receiving criticism, receiving forgiveness, receiving a focused, dynamic attention from those they never acknowledged. In poetry, I can say, Whether you saw her or not, she was there. Whether you hear me or not, I will speak”
~ Wendy Gaudin
“For me, Spanish is a key to unlocking myself, a way of connecting to my history. Reading Julia Alvarez’s poetry collection, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, I recognize that Spanish is political, a way of defining self and the surrounding world. … Sometimes what I have to say doesn’t fit the standard narrative or needs words as I know them, not as they’re often prescribed. In much of my poetry, I blend Spanish and English because it’s what’s needed for the poem to work effectively. …[E]ven the names and words used daily around us are more than they seem. I can’t go into the Ventana Room at Arizona State University’s Memorial Union without wondering at the lack of ventanas (windows) or think about the southeast corner’s Rincon Room without laughing at the name rincon (corner). There is a world of words with clear, discernible meanings.”
~ Ernesto L. Abeytia
“I suspect that being self-identified as a disabled woman of color has been key to my inability to arrive at resolution in my writing. I find that I must continue to unpack, parse out, and explore, or else I become complicit in the social and cultural structures that place me at a greater risk for poor mental health to begin with. Always in my poems my meditations circle through the triple axes of race, class, and gender, and loop in further notions of otherness, diaspora, history, and the postcolonial.”
~ Abigail Licad
“There is no neutral living. Either our actions significantly reflect our felt sense of things or we perform our lives in spite of what we feel. We live against the grain of our authenticity — which is, at its core, a formula for chronic frustration, depression, perhaps violence and complete madness.”
~ Tim Seibles
“I stare at the bull’s eye of my own vision, work against the compelling, sometimes irresistible, desire to look over my shoulder and wonder who is watching and what they might think, and keep trying to hit the truth. One arrow at a time. Each bull’s eye a moving target. Esa habla por un tubo y siete llaves as my grandmother likes to say when insulting the wordy ones who like to tell truths out loud, who talk too much and about a lot of nothing. It is supposed to be an insult, but it means talking from one true source even if it is coming out from various spigots and faucets all at the same time. Talking too much and all at once. Talking and talking until you finally say what you mean. Talking until someone finally listens. Replace talking with writing. Replace too much with never enough. Some will label it: wasteful, annoying, and repetitive. You must anoint it: required. If you are looking to find the thing you are actually trying to say, you better open all those faucets until you hit the one spilling clean water and clearest truth.”
~ Melissa Coss Aquino
“The unspeakable breaches of body, pain, somehow compassion, all of it together: words and paper bobbing just above grief. And how such grief is so large, ensnared in a human shame more incomprehensible than just a girl’s and her family’s, you cannot look away. …[A]s a writer I still need new stories, or new ways to tell the same story. I need the scene, the narrative. Perhaps I still need to change the shapes of the words which were formed for the hollow of my mouth to find words which feel more true.”
~ Sasha Pimentel
“…In my near twenty years of a writing life, it is this questioning energy that remains a constant. Whether bristling against something new or being swept away by it, the weather of being a poet raised in the United States informed by literary traditions in both English and Spanish has been one filled with movement. Over time, I have learned to accept this state of being unsettled, to read the weather project by project. I offer no apologies…. My story is not one of denying culture, only to return to it later; rather, it is a story of being another thorny manifestation of it.”
~ Jose Angel Araguz
“A radical poetics of love defines love as a self-love, both the specific and broadly applicable self to be sure, but also a love of future-making, of possibility, even if or because it is or seems futile. Far from a fetish for the foolish, it rejects the recklessness of cynicism in favor of a future that, if we can imagine, we can ultimately create as a new reality if we pay attention to how we feel when we read and write, radically and rigorously. Rigor, in the context of a poetics of love, means inquiry — thorough, diligent, exhaustive — avoiding the negative connotations (i.e. rigidity, severity or discomfort) of the word in favor of a relentless investigative questioning. Rigor mortis, for example, describes the stiffness of a dead body — but a poetics of love assumes and operates from life, and aims to function as part of a whole self.”
~ Khadijah Queen
“I sing in this shadow, in every desire, I hope to be: a body intercepting light.”
~ Remica Bingham-Risher
“I never wanted to build a “body of work,” but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.”
~ Ocean Vuong
“The imagination is an ocean of possibilities. I imagine the blank page as an excerpt of the ocean. The ocean is storied and heavy with history, myth, rumor, genealogy, loss, war, money, the dead, life, and even plastic. The ocean is not “aqua nullius.” The page, then, is never truly blank. The page consists of submerged volcanoes of story and unfathomable depths of meaning.
Each word is an island. The visible part of the word is its textual body; the invisible part of the word is the submerged mountain of meaning. Words emerging from the silence are islands forming. No word is just an island, every word is part of a sentence, an archipelago. The space between is defined by referential waves and currents.
Oceanic stories are vessels for cultural beliefs, values, customs, histories, genealogies, politics, and memories. Stories weave generations and geographies. Stories protest and mourn the ravages of colonialism, articulate and promote cultural revitalization, and imagine and express decolonization.”
~ Craig Santos Perez
Editor’s note: The Operating System announced its 2019 catalog some time ago, and yet as in these past few years you may find that we make, periodically, occasional additions to those accepted titles — but only ones that follow a certain pattern: these projects have become flotsam in an increasingly precarious, exhausting climate.
The truth is, we see fellow independent publishers, organizations, and the humans that run them losing steam and deciding to step away from their work all the time, and we empathize with the realities that make this necessary. There have also been presses that have shuttered in the wake of accusations around staff, or authors who pull their projects from associations that no longer make them feel comfortable ethically or personally for a variety of reasons.
And so, for the last few years, the OS has kept a sort of secret SOS kit of intention, holding space for orphaned projects either before or after their original planned publication date. If a book is still forthcoming, we may try to keep these projects close to their original timelines if possible, or get a book back up in circulation if a press has closed. We may not necessarily tell the story of where the title was previously, as that isn’t ours to share. But know that our decision making processes are always in the interest of equity and fairness to all our community members as well as for those in the greater community to whom we recognize we can provide crucial support in difficult times.
As always, we seek to be a fully transparent organization, and so too to shine light behind the scenes of a difficult industry to survive in: none of us benefit from the illusion that everyone’s ok: we’re all struggling to keep going and to keep each other going. So please welcome and support these new titles as we announce them!
