[patrickrosal]

On 'diversity' and 'quality' in higher ed

"... a commitment to hiring is often lacking, such that minority faculty remain underrepresented in the most secure, highest-paying and most influential tenured and upper-administrative positions -- those that have the potential for changing institutional norms and cultures."

Let me write that last part again: "those that have the potential for CHANGING institutional norms and cultures." viz. "conditional hospitality" (fr. Sara Ahmed), i.e. not just changing the face or diversity count, but the norms, values, and culture of an institution. That means broadening and complicating the standards of quality, i.e. not just the same old emblems of excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service, but innovative, bold, sometimes even disruptive forms—forms that are illegible to traditional academic benchmarks and rubrics. One small example: I can't tell you how many times I've heard scholars say that a Fulbright to Europe is more impressive than the same fellowship to Asia because the European ones are "harder to get". At every level, faculty of color risk opening their mouths if there is even a hint of dissent. Meanwhile, they continue to produce high quality publications, while ALSO having to acquire vocabulary and skills that translate to the existing, long-standing culture why their work is equal to (though often more valuable than) the work deemed excellent by traditional standards. Check out this essay by Adia Harvey Wingfield in The Chronicle https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/09/09/more-faculty-color-can-and-should-be-top-ranks-universities-essay

[patrickrosal]

Prince's Style

Like a lot of folks, I've been playing a lot of Prince, thinking about his music and his art. A few months ago, I got asked to write an essay about class for a forthcoming anthology, which also ended up being a meditation on style. I don't think I'm giving too much away if I leave some of it here. I went back to the essay after Prince died. It made me think how his style made a way for so many.

"The word style is cousin to stylus. It comes from the Latin to etch. Or to engrave. And so, style is a way to inscribe oneself upon the world, but also a way to dig, to delve into, to investigate. Style is, then, an inquiry. Style, furthermore, because it is a way to engrave, is also a way to carve a place into some landscape, a hole. That is, style is a way to prepare the earth for the body."

[patrickrosal]

Publishers Weekly Review!

 "Even at their best, the poems leading up to the book’s final offering, the title poem, feel like rehearsals that preface an earth-shattering performance; once there, Rosal seamlessly stitches together history, mythology, etymology, and autobiography in a winding narrative that begins with a teenage boy commenting on the speaker’s sweatshirt and transforms into a treatise on colonialism and all that a name can and cannot hold."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-89255-474-4

[patrickrosal]

Woodson, father of Black History Month, in the Philippines

Carter G. Woodson went to the Philippines in 1903 to help establish a new school system there  (The first group to do this traveled aboard the U.S.S. Thomas and were therefore known as Thomasites.) Woodson, a Black educator, saw how the books and subjects that Filipino kids were being taught were completely outside of their own circumstances, their own story. The Filipinos' lives and landscapes were excluded from the books and curriculum written and designed by white Americans. 

During this profound experience, he was crafting his ideas about the education of Black folks in the continental United States, which he would dedicate his life to in the following years, holding posts like the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Howard. 

Similar to the "education" of colonized Filipinos, African-Americans were receiving instruction that had little-to-nothing to do with their own story. As part of a larger philosophy of inclusive and meaningful education, Woodson initiated a celebration of Negro History Week in February, coinciding with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. This Week eventually became Black History Month. 

Chances are, you didn't learn this in school. There is plenty of work to do for all of us. Support real, innovative, and radical teaching and teachers. Know the facts of history. Better yet: know its dream... and its feeling. 

[patrickrosal]

On Love: The Difference Between Power and Strength

To state the obvious: love is what matters. Where there is love, there is strength. Strength is not power. Power is often handed down or passed surreptitiously under a table from one hand to another. One acquires power from somewhere outside the self. But strength--one reveals strength through a deep, difficult inner looking. You can be powerful and loveless. if you are strong, though,you are loving and loved; your love sees itself in relation to beloveds and therefore resonates/resounds. Your strength, then, becomes legible. Your love becomes eloquent.

[stunningpicture]

[mexandthecity]

M&TC:

Americans and Mexicans playing volleyball over the border 

[patrickrosal]

Back to Cesaire

"...[T]he decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies. “  And later:  “...[I]t is an excellent thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds, that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies...”

from —Discourse on Colonialism

[patrickrosal]

Just got a draft done of my Asian Am Lit syllabus for the fall semester. My first time teaching it. And I have to say, it's been a very moving experience...

On teaching Asian American Lit for the first time

[patrickrosal]

Johann G Herder on Kant

“The history of mankind, of nations and of nature, natural science, mathematics and his own experience were the wellsprings which animated his lectures and his everyday life. He was never indifferent to anything worth knowing. No intrigue, no sectional interests, no advantage, no desire for fame ever possessed the slightest power to counteract his extension and illumination of truth. He encouraged and gently compelled people to think for themselves: despotism was alien to his nature.” 

[patrickrosal]

Artists in National Parks

I want the National Parks Service to run a major grant program that fully funds travel and support for writers and artists--especially from communities who are less likely to utilize the Park System— to visit, camp, hike our national parks and produce writing, artwork, film, dance, music inspired by our landscapes. Let's go Ford, Carnegie, Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, AWP. Let's go, Oprah. Let's go, rich Apple guy and the other guy who does the other computers. Figure it out. ‪#‎artistsinnationalparks‬

[patrickrosal]

Field exercise

Think of a field — imagined or from memory. You can describe the field, but I’ll suggest another challenge: Write down all the rules of that field. Every field has its rules. A meadow or clearing abides by the rules of its ecology (ecologies). A magnetic field or a field of energy has its rules. Think of graveyards and gardens, which are curated fields. Or mine- and battlefields. One of the horrors of war is that its violence exposes the interior of buildings and homes to the outside--an abrupt return to some version of their original state— field. (Most human structures seem to want to arrest the field, which isn’t just a space but a process; the field in nature is always changing.)  I wrote down some questions:  How does the field of your imagination/memory change when one or more of its rules are broken?  What’s the difference between a field over which only seven sparrows can fly at a time and a field in which a piano must always be burning? What happens when they become the same field?  What happens when you place yourself inside this field?  What becomes possible only when you leave the field?  Is what’s under the field part of the field? How far down? How about above it? How far?  In ten years, when you give your field and its stewardship away, what condition will it have to be in when you let it go? Will you be able to choose who or what takes possession of it?  If someone offers to buy your field what will it cost the buyer? What will it cost you?  Look at your field again in a week or a year. What has entered the field since you last looked at it? What disruptions do you notice after leaving it for a while? Can you describe them? Have the disruptions become part of the field? 

[patrickrosal]

(via https://soundcloud.com/unclepatrick/brooklyn-to-philly-a-lil-summer-spoken-word-jam?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=tumblr)

[patrickrosal]

In-depth writing, music, photography, and art

People often ask how long it takes me to write a poem. I've been working on the same 11 pages for almost six years. I'm grateful to Jonathan Farmerfor publishing "Brooklyn Antediluvian" in At Length Magazine. The poem is about floods of the imagination, gentrification, violence, memory, joy, names, but also a bit about real floods, Katrina, Ondoy, Sandy. I should say too, that Galeano's gone, but I'm hoping somehow some of his spirit is in this poem. Also, I hope you enjoy it:  ... When my mother married my father, as goes the Western tradition, she changed her name

from Gelacio, which is Spanish, derived from Gelasius, the Latin name of an African

pope, a Berber, they say. Look how far a name can travel, borne by a brown body

whose old name vanished when he crossed the sea as one condition for him to rule

the Christian world, which he did, according to some, with wicked orthodoxy.

[patrickrosal]

32 Essential Asian-American Writers You Need To Be Reading

You're going to need a bigger bookshelf.

[patrickrosal]

I’m headed back to Sarah Lawrence College on Saturday for their MFA Alumni Festival. 11am, Ross Gay and I are giving a craft talk titled BFF XOXO BFF XOXO with Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal Each writer interviews the other about poems from their collections. They'll talk about process, shared and divergent artistic influences, how they didn't once take a class together at Sarah Lawrence College but turned their XOXO into almost two decades of collaboration in teaching, editing, writing, and a whole lot of other jackassery.

[poetsandshoes]

Patrick Rosal (Philadelphia Correction) is reading Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong. Right foot: Tiger Onitsuka (red w white and gray stripe); Left foot Chima Ferguson Pro Vans (Gray Leaf design).

[patrickrosal]

Dandaniw Ilokano: mga tulang Ilokano, 1621-2014

Ilokano is the second language in my ear, but really the third or fourth on my tongue. English is first. At home, our parents didn't speak to us in Tagalog or their native Ilokano. I picked up a few phrases from them and more from my cousins when they arrived from Hawaii and Laoag. And my Ilokano is still stunted, but even the failures--all the busted up grammar and wrong vocabulary--are expressions (I hope) of love. I can say just enough in Ilokano to get around Ilokos or one of the smaller barrios on the outskirts of the region's cities. I can tell secrets to the women who were among the first to show me to dance freely (Emy and Rose). I can listen a bit.

So I'm proud to have published a poem in my parents' language in this incredible historical anthology, Dandaniw Ilokano: mga tulang Ilokano, 1621-2014, edited by Frank Cimatu. This is for my mom and dad, my brothers (who learned the language of art in the space where they would have learned Ilokano), and all my cousins in Jersey, Chicago, Cali, Hawaii, Vigan, Laoag.