An Evening with Gerald Maa

Date: 19 July 2015

Time: 7:00pm

Presented by Ragged Claws

Gerald Maa, poet, scholar, and co-editor of the Asian American Literary Review, will join us Sunday evening for a discussion about how political matters can delimit poetic expression, and what a poet can accomplish within those constraints. About his talk, Gerald says, "Recently, one of the basic problems of the United States of America, the black man’s body, has dominated the news of and discussions within the American populace. Poet Raymond Patterson's neglected masterpiece "Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Blackman" has a lot to say about American poetry, and, more generally, poetry of, by, and against the constitutively disenfranchised. In this talk, we will search for Patterson's conclusions about how one who is so disparaged politically can carve out a space hospitable for him and his imagination." Gerald Maa lives in Los Angeles, California. His poetry and translation have earned fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Library Congress Asian Reading Room, and the Vermont Studio Center. His art has been performed and exhibited in Los Angeles and Sweden, and his essays appear in places such as A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race, Studies in Romanticism, and The Little Magazine in America. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Asian American Literary Review and editorial board member for Kaya Press.

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