I first met Jon some eleven years ago, shortly after I joined the faculty at Old Dominion University. The community of Filipino American writers is close knit, and we “knew” each other from the “Flips” electronic listserve started by writers Nick Carbo and Vince Gotera (themselves poets).

Jon Pineda

We met one afternoon at an outdoor coffee shop on Colley Avenue, and it was there that Jon first shared stories about growing up mestizo, growing up Filipino American, and the poems that were eventually published as his first book, Birthmark.

At the time, he was considering titling his manuscript either “Bread and Wrestling” or “Wrestling with my Father.” But even then, there were compressed poems which bore his signature lyricism, and a voice which probed the experiences of kinship, childhood, and origin without losing sight of their complex layers.

For instance, in the poem “Matamis,” a childhood memory of language is caught perfectly in the image of a father breaking an orange into halves and offering the fruit to his son: “…my father/ …breaking the globe in two, offered me half./ Meaning everything.”

Since the publication of Birthmark in 2004, and most recently of The Translator’s Diary in 2008, Jon has been invited to participate in numerous readings at literary festivals and college reading series. He has also begun teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC, and been invited to lead workshops in the Kundiman retreat for Asian American poets. A new poetry manuscript called Little Anodynes is currently being sent out for consideration; and Jon’s memoir, Sleep in Me, is expected from the University of Nebraska Press next year.

Although they do not dwell on exactly the same subjects, both Birthmark and The Translator’s Diary form a kind of bridge in that they focus on what Jon has referred to as “the allure of memory.” It is something that likewise underpins his forthcoming memoir, where he continues to explore the theme of his sister’s accident and the nearly five years after that she was unable to walk or talk; and of how this event inevitably influenced his boyhood and the lives of all of his family members.

Jon took some time out to answer a few interview questions for AltDaily.com.

What are the origins of The Translator’s Diary?

When I was eleven years old, my older sister, who was sixteen at the time, was in a car accident in the Outer Banks, NC. After the accident, she was in a coma, and when she finally woke, we found the head trauma she sustained was so severe that she was unable to walk or talk again. Watching her struggle to communicate left a lasting impression on me. Twenty years later, I would start the poems that would eventually comprise this collection.

Tell me (and readers of this article) how you perceive the relationship of loss to poetry.

Loss has always been a reminder that things are tenuous, and out of such loss is, I believe, the implication of survival.

A line from your title poem reads, “the truth/ …never survives its translation.” And yet you write poetry. How do you explain this simultaneous notion of futility and work –  for instance, to the beginning writer?

I don’t know if I can explain it, except to say that I believe some things are inexplicable. They transcend the limitations of the subjective. My writing “the truth/…never survives its translation” in the context of the title poem is to, at the same time, concede that it does survive. This provides tension, being suspect of a perspective, while the poem continues to unfold in varying fragments.

Do you consider yourself a regional poet? Where do you situate the notion of home in your work?

I don’t consider myself a regional poet, yet I suppose one can quickly point out that many of my poems are set in the Hampton Roads area. Wasn’t it Yeats that said a poet’s words have “to be wedded to the natural figures of his or her native landscape”?  For me, the “notion of home” is a point a reference that serves as a fulcrum upon which the unknown balances.

Would you say something about your recent experiences teaching in the low residency program, and also about your new / forthcoming work?

The students and the faculty in the low residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte are amazing and never cease to inspire me.  A few years ago, I returned from one of the residencies in Charlotte and began writing [my] memoir, which is now forthcoming in fall 2010 from the University of Nebraska Press.

David Poyer will be reading on Thursday @ 2pm @ the University Village Bookstore. For a complete Lit Fest schedule, click here.