We All Belong to a Love Song Called Kundiman

We All Belong to a Love Song Called Kundiman

Welcome to this Kundiman edition of This Is What Feminist [Poet] Looks Like. Back in February, when I was thinking about my own sense of feminist poetics for my Delirious Hem contribution, I came back again and again to the communities I belong to and how they have shaped my writing.

One of those organizations is Kundiman, an organization dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry. Each summer, a group of emerging Asian American poets gathers to write and talk poetry in community together.

I longed to hear their voices in the conversation so I asked fellow Kundiman poets the following questions and waited for their responses --

Where do you draw your poetic lineages from the poetries of Asian American female or gender-non-conforming poets? How do you (do you) intersect with feminist poetics? Other communities of women? Transgendered/gender-variant communities? Racialized communities? Tactics and tricks, fragments and fears, languages and loves? How does Kundiman contain these desires or break out of them? What is your Kundiman (love song)? What is your horror? What is your broken record? How do you participate? Resist? Do you feel conflicted about your relationship to these? As the previous This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like suggests, feel free to take liberties with these questions! Answer them at will, alter them, transgress them, make someone else you admire answer them! Images, maps, whisperings, inkings, handmade/bound tales welcome! Tell me something crucial and bloody and wrestled, something that matters to your existence as a Kundiman poet!

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I hope you enjoy and join in the conversation!

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Openings (aka Part 1):

Myung Mi Kim :: Into the Whole Space :: Mark At The Margin | Tamiko Beyer

To Love, To a Justice of the Heart: Ruminations on A Feminist Poetics of My Own | Purvi Shah

The Gold Soldier | Yael Villafranca

Untitled | Cynthia Arrieu-King

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Lineages (aka Part 2):

I Always See Her With A Typewriter In The Sun ~ For Gloria Anzaldúa | Bushra Rehman

Taken Names: The Poetic Lineage of Jai Arun Ravine | Jai Arun Ravine

Our Subversive Anatomies: The Embodied Feminist Poetics of Jai Arun Ravine | Margaret Rhee

A Moving Vehicle: The Poetry of Margaret Rhee | Jai Arun Ravine

feminist sentences take time and space / look new like this: | Soham Patel

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Kundiman: Our Love Song is Our Commitment (aka Part 3):


The Mountains Are Just Ahead of Us | Alison Roh Park

At the time I read Sarah Gambito’s "Paloma’s Church in America" | Addie Tsai

One has to rely on memory so much when one is always leaving: A conversation with Janine Joseph | R. A. Villanueva

and earth still rising: Melissa Roxas’ chorus of prayer | Vanessa Huang

Poems as Evidence | Melissa Roxas

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Curated by Ching-In Chen