Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn was born in 1949 in Manila, Philippines. Since moving to the States in 1963, she is often referred to in scholarship as an American playwright, writer, and poet. My take: by commanding language and blurring the boundaries of national and artistic categorizations in her work, Hagedorn weaves together investigations of life and culture through exploratory multimedia performance art. From novel pages and theater stages to the fine art press, Hagedorn’s words have received vast literary honors including The Rome Prize for Literature, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a Philippine National Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Jessica Hagedorn photographed by Caleb Lee Adams for the Alta California Book Club, Published March 22, 2024
In the spirit of last year’s AAPI Heritage Month post, I challenged myself once again to let my identity drive the discovery for this essay topic. What I decided was to not only represent a multiethnic Filipino-American like me, but also connect AAPI identity to my ongoing curatorial projects in poetry and counterculture. Within the Carter Burden collection at the Morgan Library & Museum are two instances of Jessica Hagedorn’s work: a signed, limited edition broadside print featuring her poem “The Leopard” and a rhythmically compelling collection of poems from 1975 titled Dangerous Music. This essay draws on my lived experience and my discussion with the author, boldly proclaiming the presence of AAPI identity within the Morgan’s collection and American literary culture at large.
On a serendipitous phone call with a decisiveness fueled by mutual interest, Hagedorn and I set a date for her to visit the Morgan, an institution with which she is not unfamiliar. (Like the rest of us, she is still raving about the Walton Ford show from last year.) I had the privilege of speaking with the Pinay poet on a sunny, bustling spring day at the museum. We sat at a high top table at the fringes of the cafe, well-positioned to speak privately while maintaining awareness of the aliveness of the atrium. We spoke organically and broadly about Asian American identity and multiracial experience, about her approach to writing and her career in the poetry scene. We shared stories of family history, artistic connections, inspiration, dreams. When our meal ended, we ordered coffee and continued conversing. The cafe slowed to a close around us. I was reluctant to say goodbye.
“Canto Negro” by Jessica Hagedorn, in Dangerous Music (PML 178982)
dancing
the spirit shaking everyone
your faces are flowers of darkness
eyes closed
in dancing ecstacy
the spirit shaking everyone
shake
shake
children of the jungle
calling me to sing
forget my nightmares
mangoes staining my lips
what is the spirit
that moves us
when we sing
in a thousand backrooms
funky with dopesmells
and pretty men and women
the spirit shaking everyone
we feel so beautiful
a whirlpool of silver eyes
and silver sweat
the spirit moving us
like holiness
in the sway of our bodies
the joy in our voices
humming the dance
the trance
of one night’s voodoo
celebration
Jessica Hagedorn and the West Coast Gangster Choir, “Dancing”, October 30, 1975, at Studio 1, San Francisco State University. This is the premier public appearance by Hagedorn and the Gangster Choir, featuring music composed by Julian Priester and accompanying vocal chorus led by Linda Tillery. Hagedorn led the band from 1975 to 1985.
In the premier public appearance leading the West Coast Gangster Choir, the same year Dangerous Music was published, Hagedorn sports a graphic tee with the titular phrase. The band performs jazz-funk riffs and background vocals as she reads the poem “Dancing”. I questioned if poetry was her aspiration or just where she began. She responded instantly: “I always loved poetry, and I read a lot of poetry, but I always wanted to write everything. I feel like the poetry was my foundation because it's close to song.” To Hagedorn, music is a force. Music and poetry cannot be divorced. Even in her novels the words flow with subtle syncopations, rejecting traditional narrative and literary forms. “Poet fiction” is how she referred to her work.
Command language, embrace the power of music, remain open to experimentation, never relinquish authenticity, “Shake / shake / children of the jungle”: important advice seeps through the cracks of the conversation. Everything is a story.
Hagedorn’s writing career began on the West Coast, a place increasingly populated by artists, migrant workers, and young immigrant families in the 60s and 70s. Though born later than many of the Beat poets (“it’s so far out…I’m young! Allen Ginsberg’s dead, all those people are dead.”), Hagedorn mingled with outspoken beatniks and explored the various undergrounds of the San Francisco scene. According to her, her timing was great.
Portraits of William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jessica Hagedorn, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti by photographer, poet, and activist, Joey Tranchina. © Transparent Press LLC
According to history, her empathic readings and steadfast critiques of colonialism and consumerism situate her firmly within the camps of coastal counterculture. She speaks reverently of photographer and poet Joey Tranchina, whose candid photos and portraits (like those above) of the Beat scene document her position within these groups. But counterculture is just as complex and layered as identity. Despite being looped in with the Beat Generation in the history books, Hagedorn considered herself to be more at home within the tribes of multicultural artists. She found kinship in the Asian American communities in the Bay Area and forged a family with fellow multiethnic writers. All Beat poets were openly critical of capitalism and the American government. However, it was within the clan of Asian American artists where Hagedorn remembers getting a crash course on what she refers to as “the other America”—the America of the Asian American experience. Suddenly, she was made aware of Japanese internment camps, state anti-miscegenation laws, and widespread organized labor strikes. Despite the presence of the Philippines in American news cycles due to martial law under Ferdinand Marcos in the 70s, many remained unaware of Filipinos in America. We’re familiar with the name Cesar Chavez, but why don’t we know Larry Itliong?
The 2020 United States census reported approximately 19.9 million Americans identified as Asian alone. Along with the 4.1 million who identified as Asian in combination with another group, the Asian American population comprised 7.2% of the total population (census.gov). The Philippines consists of over 7,000 islands occupied by 182 ethnolinguistic groups and the Filipino diaspora is one of the largest in the world. The diversity of Filipinos (and Asian Americans in general) shouldn’t come as a surprise. But to the many who are unfamiliar, it does. Hagedorn: sitting on a panel with other Filipino-American writers; the audience: unable to understand why none of them look the same. “Oh, you could be Portuguese!” they say, the kind of comment received by ethnically ambiguous women over the centuries: Belle da Costa Greene, Jessica Hagedorn, Sam Mohite.
Hagedorn credits her biological family for her artistic inclination but her chosen family for the ways she was able to grow and maneuver within her career. The scenes were complicated, she says. The people were complicated. Publication was complicated – before her debut novel Dogeaters was published and received recognition, eleven different publishers first turned it down. Complexities are infused into Asian American identity. But, across the conglomerate of underground communities in the literary world, an uncomplicated thoroughline unites AAPI experience: appreciation for art and kinship in shared struggle, forged “in a thousand backrooms / funky with dopesmells / and pretty men and women” letting the spirit entrance them all.
The spirit continually awakens, shakes, moves, hypnotizes: poetry becomes a pathway to expression and exploration of self. Words embody spirit, making sense of, creating meaning from, and finding beauty in the confusion of diasporic experience.
On her decisions to write autobiographically, using settings and stories of the Philippines and the diaspora, Hagedorn says with a sly smile: “Our country is just as fabulous and full of rich, complicated cuckoo history and witches and shamans, and they’ve been colonized and f***ed over by everybody and we’re psycho. And you know what? We are far out people. We're such a beautiful people, you know? So I always wanted to write about it all. It's not boring.”
Sam Mohite (she/her)
Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellow
The Morgan Library & Museum