[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Tyler.
Hello, everyone.
First, I wanted to express my gratitude to the Poetry
Center and the organizers of the Tucson Humanities Festival
and the Center for East Asian Studies
for hosting this amazing opportunity to meet and hear
from Brandon Som.
Brandon is a Chicano and Chinese American poet,
and his collection, Tripas, was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer
Prize in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book
Award.
He is also the author of The Tribute
Horse, which won the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
He lives in San Diego in the traditional and unceded
territory of the Kumeyaay Nation,
and teaches literature and creative writing
at UC San Diego.
In her groundbreaking book, Making The Chinese Mexican,
historian Grace Peña Delgado strikes out against the, quote,
omission of the Chinese fronterizos
from Borderlands history.
For Delgado and other intersectional historians
of the Borderlands, part of this work
is to rescue history from the nation, end quote.
She calls for us to imagine a Trans-Pacific Borderlands,
is what she calls it, to recover transnational histories
that were and those that could have been.
The Trans-Pacific Borderlands is in the everyday, she says.
It's in anecdotes and in places where
individuals and communities created identity.
And as she writes, in the, quote, intensely in between,
end quote.
For me, Brandon Som's poetry is, to use his coinage,
and I love this, is to use and give us hyphen- monology.
A way to listen, to live, to read, to grieve, to be
in that intense in-between.
In reading his poems, I feel the very structure of my senses
changing as he expands and shrinks
the time and spaces of the borderlands
to encompass the lives and labors of kin and communities.
My eyes start straining at circuitry,
starts sniffing the air for chemicals, the very shape of my,
quote, inner ear and its network of,
quote, bony canals essential for balance becomes narrated back
to me.
So your whole kind of body becomes a new apparatus
for sensing the world as you read his poems.
So that transmissions might bounce back
from the tympanum of the moon, again, a quote.
So in reading his poems, I become a cyborg, hardwired
to a rogue dictionary that dubs things over, that autocorrects,
quote, orale, into oracle.
In his poems, and you'll hear more about this.
This is me doing my best to cite these amazing poems
as a new reader.
In his poems, I believe that while the boundaries
of our homelands expand ever wider,
the, quote, connections get smaller and smaller.
As some of you may know, I am a new professor
here of applied and urban humanities.
Although I keep saying new, I'm like, this is my fourth year.
But by way of decades of teaching English literature
in South Los Angeles, I studied and used of all things 19th
century novels to produce place-keeping projects with
South LA teens, a rather audacious plot by a Filipina
immigrant public school teacher to manipulate the welter
of Dickensian language with students that hail from Belize,
Guatemala, Manila, or Alabama.
Part of that plot for me was driven by my own alienation
and intimacy with language and languages, specifically
the English language, actually sort of like born into it
but also colonized by it in so many ways, that both located
and dislocated me.
And looking back, I was driven by that always imminent question
that Som actually uses to start one of his first poems.
Como se dice.
How do you say?
I wish I had Tripas then as a way to understand what,
as Som writes, quote, what over the years
accrues within one's words.
I am so grateful to have Tripas now.
In arriving in Tucson almost four years ago,
I've worked in community engaged projects
through my work in the public and applied humanities
department, primarily in the Southside of Tucson,
and also in relation with AAPI communities
here and beyond our campus.
A particularly key project to mention at this point,
actually, if I may, is the uncanny resonance, I believe,
with Som's visit, the transpiring of the Chinese
Chorizo Festival.
So I have a couple of flyers here,
and they're also at the desk.
So I'm going to share a little bit about the Chinese Chorizo
Festival, because I do think it's kind of a nice Tucson
rejoinder to what's happening tonight.
Founded by artist, chef, and activist Feng-Feng Yeh,
also an Arizona native and child of the Chinese diaspora,
this project, kind of a Tucson-born project,
brings to light the story of 100 plus Chinese grocery stores that
operated in Tucson in the late 1800s to the '70s by reviving
the lost delicacy of the Chinese chorizo that these stores sold.
Multiple restaurants right now across the month of October
and even into November, are joining in the effort
to revive this history by featuring
a dish using this chorizo, which you can try.
And hundreds of pounds of this chorizo
was actually made by Feng-Feng and donated to these restaurants
in order to bring alive this symbol of community solidarity
then and now.
So this festival is ongoing.
You can find it at BATA, at Anello,
at like all of these cool places.
It's happening in Phoenix.
It's going on throughout this whole month.
And really, it's a testament to the ways
AAPI communities contributed our own, quote, mixed pieces,
and I learned that that's actually
what chop suey means, is mixed pieces, from Brandon,
to the rasquache sensibility of these borderlands.
This project and the poems makes history of the Chinese American
and Chinese Mexican communities visceral, a part of our organs,
in the same way the poetry that we're going to hear tonight do.
And I just want to quote some lines that relate from Tripas.
Quote, Chinese grocers, immigrants unassimilable.
The long hand she learned in a village schoolhouse
keeps sound and stores meaning, writing
in the margins or corners.
Those tienditas de la esquina where paths meet
or not like cut rope or twists like those figures of dragons.
To repeat a point, I am so grateful to have Tripas
and to have met you, Brandon, at this juncture.
My own journey of becoming an Asian body within the circuitry
of the Sonoran Desert.
I read it over last night, right after coming home
from examining TCE plume maps in Tucson Southside at UCAB,
a historic community advisory board
engaged in remediating water contamination
at the Tucson International Airport Superfund Site.
I returned home to see the glow of the neon
sign of a market store across from where I live,
whose name is in fact Empire.
I opened my copy of your poems and read
that, quote, within parallel circuits,
currents increase across increased resistance, end quote.
And I can't help but feel that your poems are, as Nana called,
the electronic circuits she peered over for their flaws.
My own quote, tiny little maps of this city.
They are wayfinding devices, like the phones that now fit
in our pockets, retransmitting our own disconnections
and disappearances into diagrammed instructions
for finding our way home.
Without further ado, welcome, Brandon Som.
[APPLAUSE]