 So my name is Noah Warren. I'm directing Lunge Poems this year. And I want to open today by just extending a genuine and deep thanks to the Arts Research Center and their sponsors, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, who have sponsored this event with Claire Holm today as a part of the campus's ongoing Angel Island project. That's co-sponsored by the Future Histories Lab, and I think there's more details about other events in that series on the Bolton Board when you come in. Arts Research Center is a really amazing resource on campus. As you can see, the Spring Event Series is centered around reclamation and indigeneity more broadly. And so I want to thank Lori and Beth for really making this event possible. Thank you to the library, to Amber and our student workers, and thank you to Callie from Pegasus Books. Claire's book Up End is really a marvelous document, and you can pick it up afterwards. And finally, before we start, I want to acknowledge this is unceded Bologna land. There's a strong limit to what, if anything, to what land acknowledgments can do, but I think to dwell a minute with the fact of that exclusion and that theft would be a fitting way to begin. Since we're in a library, I thought I'd start today by thinking about archives, how selectively they sort the past, how their filters and their structures reflect deep social consensus about which objects and whose stories are worthy of preservation. The attempt to read against these exclusions, specifically those around Angel Island, structures Claire Hong's poignant Up End. It's a book studded with blurry documents, a testing to state violence, family loss, and the distortions of racist and colonizing language. In it, we encounter a newspaper article about a great grandfather who, quote, died, murdered in parentheses. In San Francisco's Chinatown, we encounter the Angel Island interview, transcript of Hong's teenage grandfather, and Sherwin Williams paint chips from a difficult father's painting business, whose names testify to the ways language hides, sheens, and self-indicts. Classical gold, gold coast, folksy gold, empire gold, gold vessel. Such artifacts are both the problem and the richness of Up End, and Hong works with them, behind them, to tease out the histories and the people they occlude. Hong pushes the sense of history even to the very recent past. One poem, for instance, borrows its headline from SF Gate, Stunning Angel Island Fire Seen for Miles, and offers a plain-spoken parable about the ways violence and occlusion echo through time. We learn that after Angel Island's immigration station was retired, the military planted 24 acres of eucalyptus that expanded to 86 acres and invaded native plants, and since eucalyptus are highly flammable, these trees seeded the devastating 1991 Oakland fire across the bay, where the speaker grew up. Hong traces how racist policies produce, unpredictably, chains of further human and environmental catastrophe, and she allows us to feel with the poem's fast cuts and white spaces, just how insufficient our language for talking about such intertwined tragedies is. And what of the title Up End? It hovers between imperative, memo, and infinitive verb, a resistance waiting to be conjugated to be set in time. What is to be upended is revealed progressively, cutting toward freedom of the book unsettles repressive histories, systems, and discourses. Here, for instance, how the poem Restrained Gold 6129, yet another color poem, replaces one absence with another, and wields bureaucracy against itself. A bureaucratic speaker asks, how many fingers did your mother have, which is responded to by removal proceedings? The freedom Up End points us toward is unstable in part because it is literally typographically marked by the traces of the structures it breaks. Here are the paint ships, and here we find a newspaper article elsewhere. Blurry archival text. The book knows that for all languages awful power, poetry itself has limits. The book's center, and perhaps its most poignant illustration of entailed freedom, is the Long Collage poem. In it, Hong returns to her grandfather's Angel Island immigration transcript, recutting the interrogator's questioning, and the many I don't know of her grandfather, of her young grandfather, into a slowly mutating constellation of Q, white space, A, white space, and variations of the refrain. Do you remember anything? It's a haunting statement about what we can't know, and what we perhaps don't need to know. And the poem, preserving that photostatic quality, makes it seem as if Hong has reached back and by opening the seams repaired the historical record, put the questioning state itself on trial, and lifted the pressure on her scared, detained teenage ancestor. It's one of those rare books whose way of seeing lingers like a second mind long after its completion. In one poem, Hong, a forester by trade, stares in contemporary Yosemite at the color green long enough to get coquineal on the page. In other words, to make visible the blood of the Awanachi genocide that cleared the valley. It's a fitting figure for how we, as readers, return from the beauties of upend, of which many, sensitized to the legacies of violence so recent yet so insistently erased that structure contemporary California and the evasive language of American settler colonialism more broadly. Hong is, besides being the author of Upend, a former Stegner Fellow, the recipient of an artist grant just announced from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She holds degrees from the University of Arizona and the Pratt Institute. She was born in San Francisco and lives currently in Tucson, where she works to distribute air and adapted seeds. It's my privilege to welcome Claire Hong to Berkeley. Hello. Thanks so much, Noah, and to lunch poems and all the staff and students who've invited me today. It's so nice. I spend a lot of time watching the recordings of lunch poems. It feels kind of like tiny desk concert for, so I feel starstruck. Yeah, I'm a little bit, yeah, scared to be here, but thank you. And it's also really nice to see familiar faces out in the crowd and, yeah, to be among some of my heroes, so thanks. Noah, you introduced me so nicely with all the context, and I love that because then I don't have to kind of explain, I spend a lot of time explaining about my grandfather's immigration trial and I think I might just sort of go into it fluidly. I'm going to start with some new poems. I've been writing more in this kind of clunky, gnarled prose, kind of moving away from lyrical poetry, not really by choice. It's just how a language has been coming out for me recently. I'm going to get out of the way just because I don't really like reading prose. So we'll get through that, and then I'll go into up-end. Thank you. Okay. This one's called Grand Scheme, and I wrote it when I was working at a mixed Asian vegetable farm up in Sebastopol. My boss at the No Till Heritage Farm sends a text with exclamation marks, how I should wear my hair to avoid leaving strands in the produce boxes. I turn up the radio when my eyelids falter over the bridge in dark mornings. I understand the appeal of voices introducing others politely and naming the uncertainty of the cause of traffic while I wonder why there is traffic. An open seven days sign hangs on the closed thrift store named Thrift Store. I peel slug damaged leaves off the Tokyo Bikana, backdropped by amaranth, zinnias, and marigolds. I halfway fantasize the blooms as costumed characters performing the wildfires for the cosmos. Orange sky, pink sun, ash of homes and bodies floating onto foliage. A voice on the radio says a star is getting dimmer, that it once was so bright it cast shadows. The same toy truck from yesterday overturned on the highway shoulder. The same dead goal from August becomes more and more shapeless. The calloused bruises form symmetrically on the outsides of my ankles from sitting on them in the rows when squatting becomes too difficult. Tire marks reach for the exit ramp. I find a kaleidoscope on the sidewalk of the boys' choir where I used to hear them rehearse. I stare at the concentric color all evening like a chore. Tell myself something big is around the corner. A defamiliarized word. An adult might tell a child to write in chalk. Equality, compassion, love. This one is the most recent poem I wrote. I move back to Tucson. I kind of just go back and forth between the bay in Tucson and can't figure out where I want to be. But I had recently quit a farm job at a nonprofit that was under staffed, which is kind of a familiar story. And I injured my hip and I was sort of in pain a lot and unemployed and trying to figure out my life. Okay. Living quarters. The actor cast as an actor rehearses a private smile souring at the corners. In the vanity, her image triples in front of the film crew, in front of the film crew. I like to think I can truly see her, not despite but exaggerated by her makeup in the clash of her vertically patterned dress against the French floral wallpaper. So unlike flowers, all ornate. The roses in the bouquet rest on the counter of the vanity in a porcelain vase. Some might call china, conflating material with place. I cut a line down the white stem of the cabbage. And when I pull the stem apart, the inner yellow leaves unlatch willingly. Though their intricate complimentary folds and the reverberations at my fingertips question this willingness. The protagonist then takes the flower vase and antagonistically holds it above her head. The prop becomes the plot. The flowers a threat. I cut the cabbage halves and half and pull them into quarters certain this time. The quarters don't become copies of each other and they don't become opposites either. My dream was dull. I was stuck in a life at a made up greenhouse along the foothills. I was known and obligated to say hello to the regulars. I put on the previous tenant's lipstick from the uncancelled cosmetic subscription that arrives monthly in the mail. The shade is clay after sunset, dark with water the roots don't take. On the phone, the Department of Economic Security pop quizzes me on my identity, which I fail and am told to call back and try again. One day I will understand how to spend the scarcity of time. I reread the immigration inspector's scripted command that someone point to my great-grandparent's graves as evidence of my grandfather's life. A response that the graves even then over 100 years ago were faintly numbered. The cemetery is all fog, lichen rings over etched characters in a view of the mall, scent of an ancient fir trees and fast food oil. The hillside swallows the graves, the headstones face down. I'm illiterate in this language of what time wears. And so that one was published and then I was thinking of it as a poem but then they told me it was fiction so I yeah I think yeah I'm in this kind of awkward in between where I'm writing these full sentences and I'm not sure where they're going but it's a part of my my next project I suppose. I'm gonna read from up and now and I'm just gonna bounce around kind of going in and out of different places and not really doing it in a a linear time frame um yeah and this was um probably the first poem that I wrote that went ended up being the project of Upend and it was after I was working for the Forest Service in New Mexico. Atrocious horizon what made yellow what made antler shed flower flower out a cactus in February a doe sheet handle season without handles is out of bed before plans to have had sun a lifetime left in pastime is a cowboy man tugs his buckle out a chinese buffet at dusk tangled hue call the dig sites ours on file letters with no tribal replies drill sites asleep to gas station lights sunflowers in the jar co-workers get get along fine well enough called yellow though habit kept a live thing dead really they're brown in the jar the way out is far gone a buck and son releases testosterone I'm bleeding in snow a co-worker boss's nephew wants me apologizes his jacket smells like his trophy dear leftover tracks a slow pregnant with fear I know where you live saw over the weekend a red motel renovated after the oil boom a former boss visits talks about his jump-started heart ketchup mustard annual havealina hunt cases of beer stermaster when I speak the federal room laughs over my mother's labor how I came late my supervisor head of minerals always says we're shooting ourselves in the foot here I wear my heart the soul of my foot and mouth hang dry bouquet of wild thoughts thinking this could have been anything had I not made it this this could have been anything had I not I'm gonna read some of or all of a poem called China Mary when I was writing it I got really excited and thought I was gonna write a whole book of these poems and just ended up writing I think like six small little poems but I was trying to create this big kind of amalgamated myth of this figure like the slippery China Mary figure as I'm sure some of you know in the 19th century a lot of the Chinese immigrants who are coming through were given names like China Mary or China Joe and some of these figures ended up being recorded in history because they were economically prosperous in some way in some of the bigger cities but many of them fell through the cracks so I think I was thinking more of the ones who fell through the cracks magenta glow of deforested timber red stitches on the inlet women math with hands to be marked unknown glass display box well dusted silver mixture is an eye trick two opposites on the wheel cancel out into muddy gray gentle how the crow lands next to another crow eucalyptus branch to palm frond invasive invasive out the corner of an eye you clear cut the upturned creosote roots a good place to birth quiet snake among dry sage leaves rattling their absent water they named anyone China Mary so she was China Mary so late she's early to the cultural reawakening rose from the Pacific a beached whale vertebrae some celestial body celestial is a privileged word for outside propped on a dashboard nonetheless is three dumb words that cancel China Mary doesn't wear a halo she adorns herself in watermark dust moat her own hairline shapely around her skull how unorthodox what the devout did photos that don't exist make a mirror of rock China Mary doesn't like how she got here but she's here nonetheless in sitka Portland San Francisco tombstone with brown eyes green or red depending on you black eyes and photos she wants to look at something up close for a lifetime mail ordered escapee she sleeps on a mattress of spruce bows and caved and canyon wall makes jook by the cauldron cast iron her peasant skin an unbelievable flat affect how they feared her gold projection the men cut her heels so she couldn't run away showed her her worth was to stop creation of her whole kind the wet opacity of seal eyes ambiguous lip curl black hair turned technicolor and sun how many squirrels make up her garment countless she's so large or small we can't see her i want you to close your eyes and imagine that that's the story you won't tell the children you'll never have they tried to see through her the way she used animal oil inflamed to see through dark i will skip ahead to this one they wheeled out the monitors and rainbows like candy for our dirtline child hands we learn names for shapes colors numbers the man who walks to and from the bus perpetually holding up his pants the man who bends and stares wide eyed into the traffic the macy aided abraham lincoln look alike dust swirls around pigeon toad siblings and pairs a flood to say about their dog who farts their fathers who will return when the world broke the world didn't say it's not you it's me and that's how i knew it was me ending you woke me in your sleep to say every day every day every day i wanted to smell like a pine forced but i smell like gerbil bedding six eight on cd rom reflections on the wall outside see china mary transcending the transcendentalists a photo shoot a massacre of images and their copies a prolonged handshake with the president her opacity is blinding the men with her non halo fast food cups protect cacti from frost and will stay in the earth longer than us i want us to stay like that a while watch the compost slide off her bones so gently she's not rising or sinking and that's why they're afraid i haven't been dreaming so much lately but when i was writing upend i think because i was looking at so many archival texts um and just like different sorts of media entering my life in poems um most of my dreams were in the third person so um sort of watching like i was a character um so a lot of the poems and upend the speakers um the dreamer so not necessarily me but i guess kind of me two figures travel by foot during the 19th century birds eye view of tiny settlements along a river i become the woman my husband has his arm around my waist sweeping me almost across the ground we're white and fleeing from some mistake he begins painting my nails bright red i'm annoyed at how they look clumped and on my fingerskin i fear someone will notice i'm not her this is me living or not living the idiom blood on our hands 19th century colonial women suffered nationally a leg paralysis western science called it psychosis what about immobilizing guilt organized resistance the land not wanting you lesson i learned english on top of an estimated 50 buried languages i can dig just inches down and find obsidian and shells original daily life a plum tree produced overseas thus underdeveloped plums through language i learned to disembodied my own body my head hurts as if severed i learned to relate surroundings to the self my older sister my twin brother my best friend my plum tree my sister ran away his hands around her neck see this without eyes i can possess i can make a claim sister twin friend tree let's let what surrounds surround clearing i don't believe in luck though i find myself saying that's lucky as a filler for silence or merely that's that twice now the coffee cup bottom has filtered a semi evergreen forest in all its ground sludge to say get out of the desert or don't read about the flammable flammability of buffalo poop read a sign about the massacre of buffalo during indian removal act not the massacre of indians during buffalo removal comet mods feed on poison ivy whereas morpho butterflies leave banners of blue after images on dark foliage when i take off my clothes i think now might be the time to start anti-gravity poses once mastering handstands i can repopulate myself then proceed myself figurative as literal someone can replace someone with a like or as someone can replace someone without a like or as replacement can mean literally relocated or figuratively placed in a hole like side by side without the the like is still side by side birds made homes out of trees and then we did associated or dissociated a figure is real a number is literate products like people come with a number and a name i would hope that reading this in reverse would image like a mirror like history as a way to remember doesn't image i think for the occasional read more explicitly angel island poem it's prose again though so and like no one mentioned this poem's title stunning angel island fire scene for miles and it was a headline in 1991 during a fire that my my aunt's home actually caught fire and i think she was struggling to save her cats and i was in utero with my twin and i think my older sister was at a 49ers game so um yeah i don't know some context the military planted 24 acres of eucalyptus that expanded to 86 and invaded native plants chinese characters carved into a prison wall in the immigration station once you see the open net why throw yourself in it is only because of empty pockets i can do nothing else before historical before conservationists before the military before quarantine before the immigration station what systems did the me walk use for their livelihood livelihood not survival in 1915 the military introduced mule deer for recreational hunting surviving is everything after eucalyptus trees are highly flammable flaming debris from the island to cause the oakland fire in 1991 when i was a one-year-old i guess i was i don't oh yeah i was born i thought i have another oh i think there was an earthquake interesting i was born in 1990 i think i'm mixing like the natural catastrophes so during the 89 earthquake i was in utero sorry about that um my family told stories about where they were that day like the 1989 earthquake my my wrote this book a while ago yeah my mother pregnant with my brother and me rolling a cart canned food falling a semicolon is clipped as a means to continue the 1906 earthquake caused fires for days uh immigration files were destroyed in 2008 residents described the flames as red as orange as yellow conclusion the island was a fort and later an immigration station is now reachable a popular picnicking and camping spot in 2012 i danced in the bar with the old man who sang on the g-train platform dry mouth-on-mouth kiss i gave him the eucalyptus pod from my coat pocket held for for when i missed california as invasive as it was in 1993 california state parks discovered a market in japan for eucalyptus mulch which reduced the cost of eucalyptus removal prisoners from san quentin labored over the burn slash piles garland for herbicide was applied to cut cut stumps a federal plaque is the after image of a headstone in 1775 Juan de Ayala named the island he and his naval crew were the first europeans to access it in third grade we learned about christopher columbus and while the teacher talked i could see the sliced achilles heels infected copper tokens around the necks for those who found gold a ferry ticket cost $15 round trip put coins and the cemented down binoculars see everything except the place itself how are we doing on time i know it's lunchtime so i don't want to cut too much into it okay i think i might i think i'll read um my sherwin williams paint paint chip home that noah was quoting um yeah and it's called census uh and a lot of up end is um um fixated on naming um and like who gets named and who gets lost um in the archive and and um a lot of that is because my great-grandmother was alaska native and a lot of my life's work is trying to find her and to simply find her name and where she was born restrained gold mossy gold harvest gold ancestral gold monarch gold old world gold golden rod marigold golden gate golden plumeria quilt gold folksy gold edgy gold vintage gold escapade gold independent gold humble gold different gold relic bronze shivalry copper artifact reliable white original white intimate white moderate white welcome white white nice white reserved white everyday white high reflective white paper white modest white divine white free spirit polite white spatial white white indian white chinese red red scent red and earth agreeable gray suitable brown well-bred brown rugged brown nearly brown less brown resort tan colonial revival tan colonial yellow new colonial yellow chopsticks diverse beige neutral ground adaptive shade i think i might end there thank you all