"My job as a poet is to keep showing up
and writing it down."           
                        
Tina Demirdjian

Tina Demirdjian's first book Imprint was published in 2003.  A selection of Demirdjian's works have also appeared in Aspora, Ararat International Journal, the Los Angeles Times, High Performance, Midwest Poetry Review, the Texas Observer, and in Birthmark: a bi-lingual anthology of Armenian-American poetry, published in 1999.  She is the recipient of three honorable mentions from the Arroyo Arts Collective's Poetry in the Windows contests. 

Demirdjian is also the recipient of a 2006/07 Artist in Resident grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.  Shehas taught poetry in schools, libraries, and community centers throughout Los Angeles since 1991.  In addition, she is the co-creator and co-producer of the workshop series, Poetic Generations,  in conjunction with the historic Alex Theatre.

As Director of the Armenian Dress & Textile Project, Tina Demirdjian uses her sensibilities as a poet and her skills as an arts administrator to research and exhibit her grandmother's and great-grandmother's clothing and dowry items which originated in Turkey.  Along with other collected pieces, the Project's mission is to unlock the lives and mysteries of all our grandmothers bridging the past with the present.

A Review of Imprint by Arpi Sarafian

The poems in Imprint do indeed leave an indelible imprint of ancestral chants, of women in long dark clothing and dark silent eyes, of stuffed mussels, "salty, oily and full of flavor/ready to fill your mouth." Tina's images, so exact and so stunningly fresh, reach deep into the experience and give expression to her feelings with such delicacy and sensitivity that the world she represents becomes our own. 

Although as various as "The Silence of Blue" "that wraps around our tongues/like a blue ribbon tied in a bow," or "Aunt Sylvia in the Waiting Room,"  "round and white like the moon waning/in the blue and silver-metal chair," when read together, the poems have a coherence that goes beyond the play of language and the easy cadences, to convey moral value.  The mothers, the grandmothers and the great grandmothers, to whom the book is dedicated, may be silent-- "as if there were a prize for keeping silent"--but the poems "speak out loud."  Tina"s celebration of this "lost community," to borrow the words of renowned poet Octavio Paz, helps us recover our "collective memory" and goes a long way towards preserving our cultural identity.

Indeed, Tina's Armenian heritage inevitably comes through in her poetry.  The references to the 1915 Genocide are sometimes direct.  More often, however, a whole history of exile and silencing is subtly woven into ordinary everyday experiences, like attending a wedding, looking at family photographs, or delivering a letter to the mailbox.

Even when piercingly dark "The angry Birch "swooped to the ground/ in the winter"s ice/ like a hand praying to hell/ she knelt below the bitter cold sky/ and I/ knelt down by her side""the honesty of these poems and the rich insight they yield lifts and delights us.  There is certainly no despair here. Quite the contrary.  Memories may be all we have left of things past, but like the old woman in "A Day at an Armenian Wedding," who miraculously finds herself seated next to the daughter of her long lost brother, we can boldly, even if tearfully, say, "I am 80 years old and I've/never given up hope." We also know that the soil "At the Holy Site in Gyumri" "will bear fruit again/in me." The bones, now, are "unearthed and full of flesh."  Indeed, Tina"s poems provide

A healing place
a wound
scabbing:
a protective layer . . .
A scab
heals a wound
for life.
   --from "Scab"

Through Tina's poetry we get to know the fearful child, but also the grown up woman, unafraid of what hurts.  More importantly, we encounter a beautiful human being and can hardly wait to go back to the elegant little volume for more of her sweet delights.

Arpi Sarafian, PhD., is a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the English Department at California State University, Los Angeles, and her articles have been published in Ararat, The Armenian Observer, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and the Los Angeles Times.