Lingering Notes of Colonialism, Homesickness in Poetry Center Display

GOLDEN GATE XPRESS -- The event was a collaboration between the Poetry Center and Asian American studies lecturer Barbara Jane Reyes, and ran alongside several events over the weekend, culminating with a big group performance Saturday. Steve Dickison, director of the Poetry Center at SF State, said he first heard about the Kuwentuhan genre through Reyes. “It is what people do together,” Dickison said. “They sit around a table – eat, drink, laugh and tell stories. And we thought of a way to bring this activity into the contemporary poetry world, partly because so much of the kinds of contact people have is so fleeting and virtual and has to do with social media, or e-mails, or passing one another in a strange city. So we wanted for people to have the time to actually sit down together, face to face, and talk with one another, and see what would arise from that experiment.”