For this week’s feature article, we interviewed Iris A. Law of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.
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Sapling: What inspired you to found Lantern Review?
Iris A. Law: Several factors contributed to the seed of the idea that became LR. The first was a lingering sense of loneliness—of the sort that you'll hear many writers of color describe. I was finishing up the first year of my MFA program at Notre Dame, and having come there straight from college, I found myself missing the Asian American writing community I'd been a part of as an undergrad. Taking Asian American literature courses and participating in a student workshop group called Oceanic Tongues during my senior year at Stanford had provided me with both community and a sense of context for how my writing might operate within a larger literary tradition or movement, and while I loved the MFA program at Notre Dame and enjoyed the ways that I was being challenged to grow there, I missed the sense of context that my involvement with AAS and OT had given me. I wanted to find a way to reach out and build community with other Asian American writers again. The internet, with its wealth of social networking tools, seemed like a wonderful way to facilitate that.
At the same time, I was beginning to submit my work to literary magazines, and noticed that—despite the fact that there was a lively blogging scene amongst Asian American poets—there seemed to be few publication venues (digital or print) that focused specifically on their work. There were some multi-genre magazines that focused on Asian American writing and a couple that focused on work from or about Asia, but as far as I could see, there were no magazines that were specifically dedicated to publishing Asian American poetry. In a way, then, LR partly came out of a desire to see a space on the net where the work being produced and discussed by Asian American poets could be featured and contextualized.
The last element that contributed to the idea for the magazine’s inception was my desire to experiment with digital publication formats. I wanted to see whether one could successfully design an interactive journal that emphasized the visual aspect of poetry as much as the verbal. Poetry on the printed page makes its first impact through the way that it is laid out—how its words and stanzas fit into their allotted white space and direct the visual trajectory of our experience with them. And yet, many online journals do not allow readers the ability to take in a poem’s overall visual presentation at a glance. Scrolling through a poem works well for some pieces, but for others—especially those which involve unusual spatial manipulations—it is not particularly ideal. With tools like CSS positioning, we have the ability to determine exactly how a poem will take up the space of a browser window, down to the pixel. Furthermore, publishing on the web opens up myriads of possibilities in terms of interactivity. At the time that the idea for LR was beginning to take shape, I was taking a class with Joyelle McSweeney, and was inspired by some of the ways that her digital journal, Action Yes, had taken advantage of simple things like mouseovers to create a new kind of reading experience. I have been fiddling with designing and coding basic sites since high school, and was excited to experiment with new ways of digitally illuminating poetic texts. LR intentionally addresses both of these concerns. We lay out our pages in two-page “spreads” that fit in an average-sized browser window, so that the reader “flips,” rather than scrolls through, the issue (thus emulating, to some degree, the “feel” of a paginated print volume). We also make use of CSS positioning to fix the visual layout of each poem on its page, and string each issue together via a network of hyperlinks that allow the reader to access printable/scalable versions of poems, as well as contributor information and a dynamic table of contents while reading any given poem in the issue. We also link certain sections of the issue to outside sites of interest (and sometimes, to posts from our blog), and in Issue 2, we embedded an audio recording of a performance poem so that the reader could listen to the poets reading their piece as he or she paged through the text. Having so much control over the look and feel of each “page” also means that we can comfortably accommodate many different kinds of poems, particularly those that are wide, rather than long in shape, and those that may have a lot of unusual indents.
S: The current issue of the magazine is, in fact, your second issue. Tell us a bit about the process of getting Lantern Review off the ground. Also, what are your plans for the future of the journal?
IAL: The first thing I did when I started thinking about making the magazine a reality was to pitch it to my most trusted writing friend from college, Mia Malhotra (then Sakai). I asked her to come on board in an editorial capacity, and we talked about it over email and hashed out some ideas over dinner one night while I was visiting the Bay Area. Mia’s creative and administrative contributions have been an integral part of making LR what it is; I’ve been very blessed to have her support and partnership throughout all of this.
After we’d decided to give the plan a go, the first steps we took were to devise a name and to begin developing the magazine’s identity. We were very concerned that we project our vision—of openness, experimentation, exploration, and illumination—clearly, so we took our time with this. Over the course of a summer, Mia and I created a logo and a mission statement and recruited our first staff bloggers. In September 2009, we bought web space and a domain name, put up a placeholder page that explained our project, and began getting the word out about ourselves through Facebook and Twitter. Then, in November, we launched the blog and our main web site. The first issue took longer to come to fruition—we needed several months to get our feet wet and to lay the necessary groundwork. We spent those months carving out a space and voice for the blog, and developing a submissions interface (my friend Brandon Chez, who’s a talented developer, custom-built our system for us). In April, we went to AWP in Denver and brought along little handmade books with excerpts from the blog to promote our content and to invite people to submit. By late spring, we’d chosen our first round of submissions, and by mid-June we’d released Issue 1. Putting together that first issue was a big learning experience for us. It took us a while to decide what poems we wanted to include, and how to arrange them, and physically laying out and coding the issue took even longer. (I didn’t sleep very much during the weeks leading up to the release!) In the end, though, I think it was well worth it—the issue was well-received, and when we put together Issue 2 (which came out in January), we were able to revise and tweak our process in order to avoid some of the mistakes we’d made the last time. At this past February’s AWP, we were able to put together a little off-site reading with Boxcar Poetry Review, and it was fabulous to be able to meet some of our contributors from both issues and to hear them read their work together.
In terms of what’s next—in the short term, we’re accepting submissions for Issue 3 through June 1st, and we’re planning a series of special posts for the month of May (which is APIA Heritage Month). At some point further down the road, I would like to continue honing and streamlining the look and functionality of the blog and web site, and Mia and I are actively thinking about ways to make LR more administratively and financially sustainable. We’ve both also talked about wanting to try for a themed issue in the future, and we’d love to keep introducing more elements to the blog and magazine—personally, I would love to try doing something in one of our issues involving video; or to perhaps work on a broadside series. We’d also like to try hosting more readings, collaborating more with other artists or arts organizations, and coordinating more projects (like the Postcard Project we initiated at this year’s AWP) that invite the average internet browser to interact with, and respond to, Asian American poetry.
S: How do you think Lantern Review adds to or informs the ongoing conversation about Asian American literature?
IAL: As we said in the editorial note to Issue 2, we’re constantly reframing and redefining our relationship to that which we call “Asian American poetry.” But it’s that very struggle, I think, that defines what we strive to be. Asian American literature is a complex and slippery entity: it grows and contracts, twists and turns, according to what creative work is being produced and which writers are being featured in publications. We realize that, even though we’re a tiny digital magazine, we hold a heavy responsibility, because we’re invested in the act of curation. What we choose to draw attention to on our blog, or in our magazine, is what other people will read, and consequently, what they will converse about. But we hope never to be an entity that attempts to put fences around what “Asian American poetry” is or is not (to do so would be foolish). Rather, we’d like to try to be fluid in our approach to that conversation, and to be as widely representative as we can while still continuing to maintain a high standard of quality with the content that we publish. That’s one of the reasons that we have the blog. The journal is a place to curate small collections of fresh work, and we envision the blog as a place to discuss and to contextualize some of that work. We are also interested in helping to curate a sense of online community amongst writers & readers of Asian American poetry, and to highlight (through both our Community Voices feature and the blog) ways that different arts organizations and working collectives of artists are already doing some of that community-building work locally. We would like to promote a view of Asian American literature that is, at its heart, dynamic, fluid, inclusive, and collaborative. To answer your question more directly, we hope to contribute to the existing conversation by showcasing Asian American voices, by pushing existing definitions of what “Asian American poetry” is, or can be, and by providing spaces in which we can invite critical discussion and creative response. As we say in the “About” statement in our web site, we hope to “shed light on the multifaceted, ever-evolving creature that is ‘Asian American poetry,’ as well as to be a stage on which the question, ‘What is contemporary Asian American poetry and where is it headed?’ can be played out.”
S: Other than Lantern Review, what are some of your favorite literary journals?
IAL: In terms of digital journals (in no particular order): Drunken Boat, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Kartika Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Doveglion Press, Cerise Press. Print-wise, The Asian American Literary Review is one to check out, as are Notre Dame’s celebrated Notre Dame Review and its MFA student/alumni journal, The Bend. My preference for other print journals tends to vary depending on the issue. But I’ve admired, at different points, journals such as West Branch, Ecotone, Jubilat . . . and I’m fascinated by the beautiful visual design of publications like Bateau.
S: What is the first thing that you look for in a submission?
IAL: Solid craft, most of all. We like poems that surprise us, that sing or groove, that pop off the page, that resonate, that trick us, that haunt us. We like poems that feel finished (as opposed to “polished”—we realize that while some finished poems feel beautifully polished, others are not meant to feel polished at all). We also consider whether the poet has addressed their subject in a way that feels new, relevant, and appropriately complex (we’ve turned away poems that have felt too essentializing—or worse, orientalizing). We do like to feature a wide variety of aesthetics and perspectives under the umbrella of “Asian American poetry.” We do not consider a poet’s ethnic heritage or geographical location as one of our selection criteria (we are more interested in whether their work is engaging with relevant critical questions in a thoughtful, intelligent, and aesthetically brave, complex and powerful way). We like it when poets surprise us with their take on “Asian American poetry.”
S: What advice would you offer to poets and artists who are interested in submitting their work to Lantern Review?
IAL: Submit your best, most interesting work. Submit more than one poem in your manuscript, but don’t submit more than the guidelines recommend. If your poems have unusual formatting that you wish us to retain, submit in .pdf format, rather than as an MS Word document. Consider submitting collaborative pieces or translations (we are very interested in these, too, but haven’t yet seen many of them in our submissions pools for the last two issues). For visual artists, consider submitting pieces that you think might work well if the text of a poem were overlaid on it (we often like to pair images with text). Also, please do read our submissions guidelines carefully and follow them. It makes things easier for all parties involved.
S: Who are your favorite living poets and writers?
IAL: To be honest, it varies, depending on what I am working on at the time, and what I have been reading recently. However, Louise Glück is one definite perennial favorite. (I hope it’s not too vain to say that I love The Wild Iris for Glück’s approach to persona!) I’ve also always really enjoyed the work of Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Kimiko Hahn. And I enjoy the work of people who’ve mentored me, as well, because I’ve been able to learn not only from their insights, but also from their examples—Andy Grace, Bruce Snider, Sara Michas-Martin, Orlando Menes, to name a few. I had the chance to take a workshop with Cornelius Eady at Notre Dame, and I’m intrigued by the way that his poems groove, riff, sing, and take flight (he himself says that he sees the act of performing his poems as akin to improvising on a jazz score). I love Jill McDonough’s book Habeas Corpus for its rigorous ethics and its deft approach to form. I love A. Van Jordan’s poems, with the way they play with light, sound, texture. And I’m fascinated by some of Nick Flynn’s work with physics, waves, and elemental/material substrates in Some Ether. (In case you can’t tell, I write a lot about science in my own work). More recently, I’ve also been really obsessed with Oliver de la Paz’s and Sarah Gambito’s work, and I’m starting to get into Kazim Ali’s, as well. Joyelle McSweeney is also one of my favorite poets to listen to—she is such an absolutely wonderfully wacky, sassy, beat-savvy, brave, and downright fun performer. And don’t get me started on how much I love some of my MFA classmates’ work. I could go on all day.
Prose-wise, my list is a bit more succinct. Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie are all up there. I went through a period of obsession (in college) with Susan Zimmerman’s dramatic adaptation of the Metamorphoses. I like Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I am obsessed with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and its wisdom about the writing process (I make all my comp students read parts of it). I also love a lot of long-dead novelists (Kate Chopin, Charlotte Brönte, John Steinbeck, for example), but that’s another list, entirely.
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To learn more about Lantern Review, visit http://www.lanternreview.com/
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Iris A. Law is the editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry. Her own poetry was selected for the 2009 Best of the Net Anthology and has appeared in journals such as Lumina, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Kartika Review, Barely South Review, and The Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies. She is a newly-minted Kundiman Fellow and a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame. |
