WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you, Tyler.

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Hello, everyone.

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First, I wanted to express
my gratitude to the Poetry

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Center and the organizers of
the Tucson Humanities Festival

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and the Center for
East Asian Studies

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for hosting this amazing
opportunity to meet and hear

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from Brandon Som.

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Brandon is a Chicano and
Chinese American poet,

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and his collection, Tripas,
was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer

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Prize in poetry and was a
finalist for the National Book

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Award.

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He is also the
author of The Tribute

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Horse, which won the 2015
Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

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He lives in San Diego in
the traditional and unceded

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territory of the
Kumeyaay Nation,

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and teaches literature
and creative writing

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at UC San Diego.

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In her groundbreaking book,
Making The Chinese Mexican,

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historian Grace Peña Delgado
strikes out against the, quote,

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omission of the
Chinese fronterizos

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from Borderlands history.

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For Delgado and other
intersectional historians

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of the Borderlands,
part of this work

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is to rescue history from
the nation, end quote.

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She calls for us to imagine
a Trans-Pacific Borderlands,

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is what she calls it, to
recover transnational histories

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that were and those
that could have been.

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The Trans-Pacific Borderlands
is in the everyday, she says.

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It's in anecdotes
and in places where

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individuals and communities
created identity.

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And as she writes, in the,
quote, intensely in between,

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end quote.

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For me, Brandon Som's poetry
is, to use his coinage,

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and I love this, is to use
and give us hyphen- monology.

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A way to listen, to live,
to read, to grieve, to be

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in that intense in-between.

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In reading his poems, I feel
the very structure of my senses

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changing as he
expands and shrinks

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the time and spaces
of the borderlands

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to encompass the lives and
labors of kin and communities.

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My eyes start
straining at circuitry,

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starts sniffing the air for
chemicals, the very shape of my,

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quote, inner ear
and its network of,

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quote, bony canals essential for
balance becomes narrated back

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to me.

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So your whole kind of body
becomes a new apparatus

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for sensing the world
as you read his poems.

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So that transmissions
might bounce back

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from the tympanum of the
moon, again, a quote.

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So in reading his poems, I
become a cyborg, hardwired

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to a rogue dictionary that dubs
things over, that autocorrects,

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quote, orale, into oracle.

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In his poems, and you'll
hear more about this.

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This is me doing my best
to cite these amazing poems

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as a new reader.

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In his poems, I believe
that while the boundaries

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of our homelands
expand ever wider,

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the, quote, connections
get smaller and smaller.

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As some of you may know,
I am a new professor

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here of applied and
urban humanities.

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Although I keep saying new, I'm
like, this is my fourth year.

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But by way of decades of
teaching English literature

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in South Los Angeles, I studied
and used of all things 19th

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century novels to produce
place-keeping projects with

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South LA teens, a rather
audacious plot by a Filipina

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immigrant public school teacher
to manipulate the welter

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of Dickensian language with
students that hail from Belize,

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Guatemala, Manila, or Alabama.

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Part of that plot for me was
driven by my own alienation

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and intimacy with language
and languages, specifically

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the English language, actually
sort of like born into it

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but also colonized by it in so
many ways, that both located

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and dislocated me.

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And looking back, I was driven
by that always imminent question

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that Som actually uses to
start one of his first poems.

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Como se dice.

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How do you say?

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I wish I had Tripas then as
a way to understand what,

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as Som writes, quote,
what over the years

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accrues within one's words.

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I am so grateful
to have Tripas now.

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In arriving in Tucson
almost four years ago,

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I've worked in community
engaged projects

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through my work in the
public and applied humanities

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department, primarily in
the Southside of Tucson,

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and also in relation
with AAPI communities

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here and beyond our campus.

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A particularly key project
to mention at this point,

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actually, if I may, is the
uncanny resonance, I believe,

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with Som's visit, the
transpiring of the Chinese

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Chorizo Festival.

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So I have a couple
of flyers here,

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and they're also at the desk.

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So I'm going to share a little
bit about the Chinese Chorizo

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Festival, because I do think
it's kind of a nice Tucson

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rejoinder to what's
happening tonight.

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Founded by artist, chef,
and activist Feng-Feng Yeh,

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also an Arizona native and
child of the Chinese diaspora,

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this project, kind of
a Tucson-born project,

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brings to light the story of 100
plus Chinese grocery stores that

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operated in Tucson in the late
1800s to the '70s by reviving

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the lost delicacy of the Chinese
chorizo that these stores sold.

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Multiple restaurants right now
across the month of October

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and even into November,
are joining in the effort

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to revive this
history by featuring

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a dish using this chorizo,
which you can try.

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And hundreds of
pounds of this chorizo

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was actually made by Feng-Feng
and donated to these restaurants

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in order to bring alive this
symbol of community solidarity

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then and now.

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So this festival is ongoing.

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You can find it at
BATA, at Anello,

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at like all of
these cool places.

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It's happening in Phoenix.

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It's going on throughout
this whole month.

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And really, it's a
testament to the ways

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AAPI communities contributed
our own, quote, mixed pieces,

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and I learned that
that's actually

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what chop suey means, is
mixed pieces, from Brandon,

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to the rasquache sensibility
of these borderlands.

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This project and the poems makes
history of the Chinese American

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and Chinese Mexican communities
visceral, a part of our organs,

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in the same way the poetry that
we're going to hear tonight do.

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And I just want to quote some
lines that relate from Tripas.

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Quote, Chinese grocers,
immigrants unassimilable.

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The long hand she learned
in a village schoolhouse

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keeps sound and stores
meaning, writing

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in the margins or corners.

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Those tienditas de la
esquina where paths meet

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or not like cut rope or twists
like those figures of dragons.

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To repeat a point, I am
so grateful to have Tripas

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and to have met you,
Brandon, at this juncture.

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My own journey of becoming an
Asian body within the circuitry

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of the Sonoran Desert.

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I read it over last night,
right after coming home

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from examining TCE plume maps
in Tucson Southside at UCAB,

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a historic community
advisory board

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engaged in remediating
water contamination

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at the Tucson International
Airport Superfund Site.

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I returned home to see
the glow of the neon

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sign of a market store
across from where I live,

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whose name is in fact Empire.

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I opened my copy of
your poems and read

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that, quote, within
parallel circuits,

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currents increase across
increased resistance, end quote.

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And I can't help but feel that
your poems are, as Nana called,

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the electronic circuits she
peered over for their flaws.

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My own quote, tiny
little maps of this city.

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They are wayfinding devices,
like the phones that now fit

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in our pockets, retransmitting
our own disconnections

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and disappearances into
diagrammed instructions

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for finding our way home.

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Without further ado,
welcome, Brandon Som.

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[APPLAUSE]

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