I hate it when profile pieces begin with a description of the interviewee’s outfit or cocktail or decorative couch pillows, as if some globalizing statement about a person’s character can be deduced from which T-shirt she pulled over her head that morning.

Poet Luisa Igloria

Nevertheless, I felt oddly comforted to arrive in poet Luisa Igloria’s ODU office as she was munching on a McDonald’s hash brown. Igloria, it seems, is human too. I note this because, as the winner of countless national and international literary prizes, the author of nine books, a constant contributor to literary journals and anthologies, as well as a professor and the director of ODU’s graduate program in creative writing (and, she would add, full time mom, short order cook, and chauffeur), she has been the subject of her fair share of mythmaking in my little corner of the world.

Igloria’s newest collection of poetry, Juan Luna’s Revolver, did nothing but steel my perception. Winner of the 2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, this book follows the Filipino diaspora that emerged after contact with Spanish and American colonial powers. Against the backdrop of this often haunting history, Igloria creates poems dripping in description, poems that are both grounded to this sensuous materiality and attached to mystery, to the hidden lives of things. It is from this book she will read on Friday, as a part of ODU’s 32^nd Annual Literary Festival.

Igloria had been working on this collection of poems since 2005, and some of the poems had an even earlier gestation: 2003, when she attended the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“There was something very familiar in the experience of displacement and adriftness that hit me in a very physical way in Russia,” she said. “It was then that I started the section of Juan Luna’s Revolver about the 1,100 indigenous Filipinos that were brought to the states as exhibits in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.”

Her sense of displacement didn’t exist just in Russia, and it wasn’t necessarily initiated by her emigration from the Philippines eleven years ago.

“Displacement is a function of contemporary experience for those of us in the diaspora, or anyone affected by the experience of colonization,” she said. “I felt displacement before coming to America. Place names you see in the book, like Hill Station (which was created for the American government) or Session Road or Cabinet Hill or Burnham Park sat side-by-side indigenous place names in my home city (Baguio). I didn’t find these names strange growing up, but I came to an awareness of the colonial legacy they betokened as I grew older.”

Though the “I” in her poems experiences histories before her time, hers is not a narrator that is inclusive.

“I am hesitant to speak for others,” Igloria says. “Who am I? Like everyone else, I’m involved in the drift of time. I just dropped into a conversation that has already been there.”

She established, instead, a narrator that “traveled into and out of specific Filipino histories, exploring that collective trauma which sometimes goes by the name of war. History is an immense field,” Igloria said, “at once very large and very intimate. There is a great danger of romanticizing these atrocities because they are done. But history is not done. That’s what allows me to come back to these stories; I can loosen the soil and see what’s there. The poems in Juan Luna’s Revolver address both a history and an attempt to transcend that history through their exploration of the complexity of the diaspora.”

At the risk of provoking Igloria’s ire, I told her about a to-remain-nameless writer friend of mine who thinks that poetry is a dying genre, a genre produced by and for the academy.  She was instantly resentful of the idea, calling it an “accusation, wherein poetry is said to be an academic sport that a few, who are mainly talking to themselves, are indulging in. They accuse all poetry coming out of MFA programs of looking and sounding exactly the same.  Which is an accusation I refuse to believe.”

Igloria’s got the chops to back that assertion up. In the spring ’09 semester, she taught a graduate poetry-nonfiction hybrid workshop, of which I happened to be a student. She taught essays that were structured like poems, poems that were structured like prose, inspired words that lept off the page and onto life-size mannequins and tiny paper dolls.

“Poetry cannot be contained by an academic experience alone,” she said. “It must have a connection to real life in order to exist.”

To aspiring poets, she offers this: “Feed whatever it is that inspires you, that will make you do that excited dance inside, that will quicken the pulse. Don’t let anything steal your love to create, your love for the craft. Because, the moment you get cynical, you’re done.”

But what about the other things that “steal” from the ability to create – the responsibilities, like parenting or cooking or chauffeuring or simply paying the bills? How, specifically, is she able to remain so prolific a writer in the face of her multiple responsibilities?

“I don’t sleep,” she says. “Finding time is a function of wanting to do this thing that I love. I ferret out moments to write and I go to work every day. I have a very managerial side that sets goals for myself; for instance, I try to submit five to six works each month. I continuously submit. I know this all seems antithetical to the idea of inspiration, but once I’m working, I can make inspiration possible.”

Let the mythmaking continue.

Luisa Igloria will be reading from Juan Luna’s Revolver on Friday, October 9th, at 2 P.M in the University Village Bookstore.