#teow lim goh

[catapultbooks]

To take up citizenship in another country is to naturalize: to be made natural, normal. In this framework, to immigrate is to move away from our origins, break with our lineage, and become unnatural and alien, which is aberrant to many who subscribe to the idea of a patrilineal homeland.

Catapult | Catapult | On Borders and Citizens | Teow Lim Goh

[conundrumpress]

Teow Lim Goh's Book About Poetry Left By Chinese Immigrants Garners National Attention

Teow Lim Goh’s Book About Poetry Left By Chinese Immigrants Garners National Attention

“Although it was widely known as the Ellis Island of the West, Angel Island wasn’t meant to herald immigrants to the United States so much as to keep them out. Located just across from Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay, the immigration station started operating in 1910, largely to process the cases of Chinese laborers, who, three decades before, had become the first group of people to be…

[poetryvoice]

Aaron Abeyta is the featured poet, interviewed by Kierstin at Bridger Global. Uche and  Kierstin talk recently deceased Colorado poet Jack Mueller, whose tiny love lyric is the Open Bard poem. Yeats meets Black Sheep on the Not Yet Freestyle, and going deep on Marie Howe. Subscribe on iTunes (+ comment and rate, 5/5 for the pentameter, of course)!

News & Oohs: Demimonde wins a Willa Award for Kierstin. Uche goes Swiss with a poem, “Lausanne à Genève” in Global Geneva magazine ( p 15).

Mentioned or hinted: Teow Lim Goh’s Islanders. David Mason’s Ludlow. Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art.

Credits:

Opening & closing music: (FUNK IS) THE D.N.A. OF HIPHOP, by curious, © 2006. Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.

Intermission music: circus man by Jeris, © copyright 2012. Creative Commons Attribution license.

Not-Yet Freestyle poem: “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” by William Butler Yeats. Backing track: “The Choice is Yours”—Black Sheep.

Ridgway Alley poem: Love by Jack Mueller.

Deep Voice poem: “The Gate” by Marie Howe

Hosts: Kierstin Bridger and Uche Ogbuji.

Production: Uche Ogbuji.

[semperintrepida]

Now I see that beginnings, with their sense of possibility, are intoxicating. We live in a culture that eschews the long haul in favor of the glitter of the new. It is easier to keep starting again, always dabbling, than to commit to a path that leads to places you cannot yet see.

Teow Lim Goh, “Tenacity, the Key to the Writing Life”

[dead-philospophers-society]

“I cannot seem to document my own life— I rarely take photographs or keep momentos, write things down— memory is perfidious. Yet things come back to me in flashes. Sometimes i write them into fictions.”

— Teow Lim Goh

[growingdenver]

The President's 'Kitchen Cabinet', How Writings On Detention Center Walls Inspired...

The President's 'Kitchen Cabinet', How Writings On Detention Center Walls Inspired…

Your perception of George Washington may change when you hear about how he treated the first presidential cook. The story comes out of Denver author Adrian Miller’s new book, “The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of African-Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families.” Then, writing on the walls of an immigrant detention center inspired Denver poet Teow Lim Goh. The poems in the men’s…

[coloradopoetjhwriter]

Eleanor Goodman in Conversation with Teow Lim Goh

Eleanor Goodman in Conversation with Teow Lim Goh

Eleanor Goodman Teow Lim Goh

Here is an excellent interview with poet and translator Eleanor Goodman by the fine young poet Teow Lim Goh. I blogged about Ms. Goodman back in September, when she came to the University of Denver to speak and read from her Chinese translations under the auspices of the Professional Creative Writing Program, and when she read (the following evening) at BookBar.

The…

[catapultbooks]

“Seven years ago, I visited Angel Island for the first time. I rode a ferry across the bay, climbed a steep flight of stairs, and walked along a service road to the immigration station. The sky was clear and I could see for miles around the bay. I remember thinking that unlike those who were held here, I had the freedom to walk where I wished. I also remember thinking that here, the sea is both a border and a vista of possibility. Borders don’t always keep people out, but they can keep those of us inside from looking beyond.” 

A new essay by Teow Lim Goh on borders, immigration, and what it means to be a citizen.

(via Catapult | Catapult | On Borders and Citizens | Teow Lim Goh)

[conundrumpress]

Women Write The Rockies and Beyond Presents “A Celebration of International Women’s Day”

Women Write The Rockies and Beyond Presents “A Celebration of International Women’s Day”

Women Write the Rockies and Arapahoe Community College’s Writers Studio will celebrate International Women’s Day with a poetry and fiction reading focusing on cultural identity and social awareness on Thursday (March 10) at the college’s main campus in Littleton. The event is being organized by Conundrum author Kathryn Winograd, Ph.D., and will also feature Conundrum author, Teow Lim Goh, whose…

[poetryvoice]

Kierstin and Uche are back after an unannounced summer break with a jam-packed episode including separate interviews of featured guest Teow Lim Goh. Then a tête-à-tête at “Weezy’s” to Not Yet Freestyle Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus, bring in a poem from former guest Joe Hutchinson and go deep on Incendiary Art, a firestarter of a poem by Patricia Smith. Subscribe on iTunes (+ comment and rate, 5/5 for the pentameter, of course)!

News & Oohs: Don’t miss Kierstin Bridger as interviewed in Canopy Poetry, a new project of this episode’s guest Teow Lim Goh. Uche has four poems with an attitude one might recognize from the Not-Yet-Freestyles in Okey-Panky. and a couple of poems published for the 2017 total eclipse, including Totality with a video he recorded from the site.

The chatter: The mad realities of parenting in summer—The many layers of the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus—El Cuervo’s Yucatecan tail-Enjoying the unexpected popularity of a book of poems—”What are the intimate consequences of political decisions?”—A root of irony at the wellspring of Stanford University—The beauty of a place of cruel history (labelled “No undue hardship”)—Writing beyond the waxwork of “bad hombre” immigrants—Drawing the narrative out of ideas in Chinese lyric—The predominant Cantonese of the Angel Island detainees and other Chinese dialects—The Rock Springs, Wyoming massacre—The remarkable story of Ah-Yuen AKA China Mary, latterly of Evanston WY—The 2D popular conception of the American West—Using the left brain to make a living and the right brain to inhabit that living—Releasing the received, British-protected poetic tradition from its European prison—The total eclipse as omen—The seven stomachs of summer.

Mentioned or near mentioned: Teow Lim Goh’s Islanders. David Mason’s Ludlow. Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art.

Credits:

Opening & closing music: (FUNK IS) THE D.N.A. OF HIPHOP, by curious, © 2006. Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.

Intermission music: SUNBIRDS BOCrew, by BOCrew © 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.

Not-Yet Freestyle poem: “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. Backing track: “Roun’ the Globe”—Nappy Roots.

Ridgway Alley poem: The Crow/El Cuervo by Joseph Hutchison.

Deep Voice poem: “Incendiary Art” by Patricia Smith

Cover image: Bartholdi and co working on the Statue of Liberty’s left hand—US National Park Service.

Hosts: Kierstin Bridger and Uche Ogbuji.

Production: Uche Ogbuji.

[femmesfollesnebraska]

Writer Teow Lim Goh generously shares with LFF about her “leap of faith” into writing; her inspirations from landscapes to authority of voices; her tenacity, feminism and more…

Whereare you from? How did you get into art?

I was a math major at the University of Michigan and moved to Denver after I graduated. In Denver I began writing, at first to figure out who I was and my place in the world. In the last three or four years, I decided to take my writing seriously. I have studied at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop here in Denver, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as online at LitReactor.

It was a reckless leap of faith to begin writing. But I needed to do it.

Angel Island

Tell me about your inspirations, process.

I work full time in an office and I write in the interstices of the day. Sometimes I wake up early. Sometimes I stay up late. I always have a notebook with me.

At the beginning, I was most interested in the landscapes of the American West. The mountains, deserts, and prairies were larger than anything I had seen, and I wanted to understand what it means to live in such a place. I get inspiration from travel, be it flying out to San Francisco to visit friends or walking in the patch of prairie next to where I live.

I am also interested in what it means to speak, to have authority, whether on a particular subject or our own lives. Whose voices do we listen to? Whose perspectives do we believe? What are the consequences of silence?

I also get ideas from reading. Authors whose work I consider influences include Rebecca Solnit, Joan Didion, Natasha Trethewey, Jake Adam York, David Mason, Lidia Yuknavitch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Kate Zambreno, and Anne Carson.

Tell me about your current project and why it is important to you.

I am circulating a manuscript of poems on the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. This was where, from 1910 to 1940, Chinese immigrants were detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Some of them wrote poems on the walls (above). There are no records of poems the women wrote, because the women’s barracks burned down in a fire. In the manuscript, I imagine what the women might have said.

I want to reclaim marginalized and otherwise unheard voices. In writing about Angel Island, I get to indulge in my obsessions: history, landscape, immigration, witness, the abject female experience. And I get to dream about the sea.

Now I’m researching a second book on the 1885 massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming. I think of it as a book-length poem. I have been visiting the archives in Cheyenne, Laramie, and Green River, as well as spending time in Rock Springs. It is still too early to tell where this is going.

Do you think your city is a good place for women in art? Do you show your work elsewhere/is there a difference in how your work is received?

It is hard for me to say. I have mostly published in journals and magazines with a national reach. But this much I can say about Denver: it is affordable compared to, say, New York or San Francisco, and we have a lively arts scene. Also, we do not quite have an establishment to measure ourselves against, which means that there is more room for experimentation, for voices outside of the mainstream. I am not sure if I would have become a writer and write the way I do had I moved somewhere else at 22.

Artist Wanda Ewing, who curated and titled the original LFF exhibit, said of her work: “I’ve been making provocative art with a political edge in my Midwestern hometown since 1999. And to do that, you have to be tenacious as hell.” Are you tenacious in your work or life? How so?

I had to overcome my upbringing and believe that I have something worth saying. When I decided to take my work seriously, I became anxious, sleepless, and distracted. I crashed my car. I often felt I was hanging on by my fingernails. I still do not know what got me through that time. Tenacity, perhaps. Or a mix of ambition and desperation.

I have not yet received much blowback from my work, but I am steeling myself for the derision that would one day come my way. “It did not happen that way.” “This is not as important as you think it is.” I write shadow histories. People get vicious when you upend their comfortable assumptions about their power and privilege. 

Ewing, who examined perspectives of femininity and race in her work, spoke positively of feminism, saying “yes, it is still relevant” to have exhibits and forums for women in art. Does feminism play a role in your work?

In my book on Angel Island, and most likely in the Rock Springs Massacre too, I imagine the voices of women whose stories have been lost. Too often, women’s perspectives are forgotten or silenced. To bring their experiences to light is a feminist project.

Ewing’s advice to aspiring artists was “you’ve got to develop the skill of when to listen and when not to;” and “Leave. Gain perspective.” What advice do you have for aspiring artists?

Find your tribe. Find a group of peers and mentors who believe in you and your work. Art is hard enough; you need support.

Don’t pigeonhole yourself or your work. Take risks and try new things. Explore the unknown.

http://teowlimgoh.com/

~

Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events (See CALL FOR ART/WRITING on the submissions page); originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Deskins.  LFF Books is a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including Intimates & Fools(Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) and The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015). Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012 and 2013, available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.

[pankmagazine]

PANK Magazine :: 9.12 / December 2014 :: On the Boat by Teow Lim Goh

A fish tank in his room.

No fish, only seaweed and water.

I imagined guppies circling the glass, nowhere to go.

We knew we would part in San Francisco.

I did not love him, but for the first time in my life

I felt held. These things I am not supposed to know.

Some nights I wonder where he is.

[To read more poems by Teow Lim Goh, visit our website Here]

[guernicamag]

All that morning I followed the news reports out of Japan. The reactors had shut down immediately when the quake occurred, but the tsunami crossed a seawall, flooded the backup generators, and left the plant without power to run the cooling systems. The fuel rods began to overheat. The heat evaporated the water in the cooling pools and exposed the rods. The pressure in the reactors built up. The day after the quake, an explosion tore off the roof and outer walls of Unit 1. Two days later, an explosion in Unit 3 damaged its exterior walls. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant operator, initially tried to reassure the public that Unit 2 was stable, but four days after the quake, it suffered a blast that warranted a temporary evacuation of the plant. In an attempt to keep the fuel rods submerged in water, Japan began pumping seawater into the reactors, the nuclear equivalent of a Hail Mary. Half a world away from the disaster I went about my life as usual. I went to work. I visited the art museum. I rode my bike around the prairie near my home. I made dinner. I did not rush out to buy potassium iodide pills, as many Americans did, but I felt a heightened alertness and a sense of vulnerability. The fabric of everyday life had ruptured, the routines of thought disrupted. I had a sense that a wall had crumbled and I had turned permeable. I was immersed in the present, but I also felt another kind of receptivity: I knew that if I were in the path of the fallout, I would be subject to its dangers. My body would absorb the radioactive iodine and potassium in the air. The poisons would lodge in my bones, my thyroid, and over the decades emit elevated levels of radiation and scramble the codes in my cells.

Teow Lim Goh: Split - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

[thecommonmag]

The ocean encircles a lone peak.

Rough terrain surrounds this prison.

There are few birds flying over the cold hills.

The wild goose messenger cannot find its way.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a Chinese immigrant carved this poem on the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. It was unsigned, one of many. ...

Revisit Teow Lim Goh's essay on Angel Island, immigration, bearing witness, and change--among much else.

[theoffingmag]

I cannot seem to document my own life – I rarely take photographs or keep mementos, write things down – memory is perfidious. Yet things come back to me in flashes. Sometimes I write them into fictions.

Teow Lim Goh, “Archives,” published in The Offing

[poetryvoice]

Uche interviews poet, professor and mountain man David J. Rothman at Louisville (Colorado) Public Library, later joining Kierstin in downtown Denver for discussion of many mountainous things. Teow Lim Goh is the Open Bard/Ridgway Alley poet. W. B. Yeats’s famous fourteener (sonnet) on the Not-Yet-Free tip, to “The Infamous Date Rape.” 20th-century Colorado Poet Belle Turnbull for Deep Voice. Subscribe on iTunes (and comment and rate, 5/5 for the pentameter, of course)!

The chatter: Stars the world over. Is there a Singaporean Whiskey? Teow Lim Goh in The New Yorker (“The Lost Poetry of the Angel Island Detention Center”) With whom did Donald Trump’s mother sleep? The Oresteia cycle and the transition from chthonic to classical Greek religion. Crested Butte after a snow-bashing. Susan Sontag vs Leni Riefenstahl/nonsense vs mountains. The refugees from Nazi Germany who founded the great Rocky Mountain ski resorts. Temple Buell and Denver architecture. The miners in Kierstin’s family. Rediscovering Belle Turnbull, a forthcoming book on her from Pleiades Press. Protest and standing the gaff. Julia Archibald Holmes, the badass “bloomer girl” who summited Pikes Peak in 1858. Molly Molybdenum, Molly Brown, but not that other sort of Molly! Camembert. Poetry Voice in The Telluride Watch.

If you enjoyed this episode check out Western State Colorado University’s program Poetry with an Emphasis on Versecraft, and consider coming out among the Fourteeners for Rothman’s Writing the Rockies Annual Conference.

Credits:

Opening & closing music: (FUNK IS) THE D.N.A. OF HIPHOP, by curious, © 2006. Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.

Intermission music: Scratch-a-sax by morgantj © 2012, Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Ridgway Alley poem: “Stars” by Teow Lim Goh.

Not-Yet Freestyle poem: “Leda and the Swan” by W. B. Yeats. Backing track: The Infamous Date Rape –A Tribe Called Quest.

Deep Voice poem: “Time as a Wellspring” by Belle Turnbull.

Bonus poem: Camembert by David J. Rothman.

Cover image: Collegiate Peaks by Kierstin Bridger.

Hosts: Kierstin Bridger and Uche Ogbuji.