The Wily Filipino

Subjugato.

Is it just me, or has spam really become more poetic all of a sudden?

"subjugato," by Rosangela Rubino

(seems to know anything about. The more I discover about it -- the more it)

station twelve in two minutes. We are now in parking orbit.

One minute heavy stakes
into the ground with sledgehammers,
backed by the thud of I had no idea.

What do we want to do? As I said --
   it's time for a decision. Do we all

In a moment, I equivocated -- and stopped dead.
For I had suddenly rolling up my face.
   Collecting there. Dropping

The double image flickered and became one.

blow, then away again.

(apparently all of the same individual from what I could see as we strict policy of noncommunication. However it was photographed when)

Povelicious.

My copy of Geraldine Kim's Povel sits invitingly on the table. The reason for this said interpellation is the very fact that its cover has been gently caressed into a come-hither curl, the said curl aided by the lucky confluence of two forces: one, by the manual endeavors of human hands, i.e., mine, and two, by supernatural agency, i.e., the heat and humidity of the Philippine tropics, though the latter is more appropriately "natural," but as E.E. Evans-Pritchard reminds us in his writings on the Azande which has graced many an introductory anthropology reading textbook, like the one I've been using for a few semesters now, the divide between natural and supernatural varies greatly from culture to culture. But allow me at least to discuss the reasons behind the curl in turn: my hands, first, which have only really opened the book to the very first page, that is, the first page of the "povel" proper, occasionally flipping to the back to consult the footnotes, and lingering on the mug shot of Nick Nolte, and reading Geraldine Kim's biography, convinced, after repeated readings, that her past tenure as Governor of Texas was indeed within the realm of possibility, though not probability, but it is also likely that I am fudging the semantic / mathematical difference between the two words, that is, "possibility" and "probability," since the lowest grade I ever received in college, as a Communication Arts major from my agricultural school at the foothills of a Philippine mountain, which by the way, is "bundok" in Tagalog, and is, if one remembers correctly, the only word of Philippine origin to insert itself into English without any specific Philippine denotation, that is, "boondocks," was a crushing 2.5, which is the equivalent of a B-minus in American terms, for what was in fact the only mathematics-related class I took after high school, which was History of Mathematics, though I have no doubt that Geraldine Kim's grades when she was at Yale were much lower, since it is common knowledge that she received a so-called "Gentleman's C" average during her tenure at New Haven. In fact it took me two evenings alone to read the title of her book, staring at it glazed through jetlagged eyes, to which I gave the benefit of the doubt by actually reading it twice, since it was, after all, printed twice, and I am enjoying the book immensely, between bouts of grading and headache and the overall frenzied caloric consumption that characterizes the middle-class Philippine holiday season, though I am somewhat unsure what it is about, that is, the book, not the holiday season, even after closely reading Lyn Hejinian's, or shall I say, "Lyn Hejinian's," explanatory introduction to her book, and I am in fact rather puzzled that Microsoft Word has gone and rudely placed a red squiggly line underneath "Povel" and "Azande" and "bundok" and "Hejinian," especially since one wonders, shouldn't "Hejinian" be a household name by now, up there with "Longoria" and "Aguilera," neither of whom get squiggly lines? Let me discuss the second force behind the curl, that is, the supernatural force, shortly, but right now I am feeling dehydrated and should get up and drink a glass of water. I'll be right back.

"Languages of Whiskered Ghosts."

So a bunch of us in blogland have been keeping quiet about the Poeta's big secret for maybe over a month now -- but now the secret's finally out (scroll to the bottom).

What the Poeta didn't link to on her blog entry, however, was the list of former James Laughlin Award winners -- the only proper response for which is "daaaaaaaaaang." Have come, am here indeed.

And so I thought I'd pull out my old comments from almost a year ago on a slightly different version of the now-award-winning Poeta en San Francisco; I've boiled them down from a rambling six-page, Lorca-ignorant, Ezra Pound-foolish letter that rather lamely begins with:

Hello Barb,

I must confess I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing on your committee... I don't think I'm equipped at all to examine line breaks, or to be able to see how your work draws from specific literary traditions (or doesn't). All I can do is read it as if I were "analyzing" it, so take what I say with a grain of salt...

and my puzzlement continues from there.

But I think I'm equipped to recognize a crucial, essential work of art when I see one (one you can bet my students will be reading once it comes out), even if I completely failed to identify the Clash lyrics she quotes. As you can tell, I loved the poem, which by the end achieves a kind of dirty, ragged transcendence. The poem is an obviously contemporary one, though with an odd timeless quality, as if it dealt with some ancient humid corruption.

So here goes:

----
What makes your poem important in my eyes is its direct, poetic confrontation with colonialisms. In that respect, the poem functions -- even on a purely linguistic level -- as a critique of conquest. But it's an epic, catholic one, encompassing different places and times, Vietnam and some stand-in jungle in the Philippines, the churches of Rome and Hollywood. It's a deeply (dare I say quintessentially?) Filipino American poem, one that interrogates (not just in the lit-crit sense of the word, but in the fist-shaking, confrontational, bare-bulb-hanging-from-the-ceiling sense), on multiple levels of the colonial. And the title is excellent. (I was actually thinking of something of a return to San Francisco at the end -- a reminder that the procession at the beginning continues.)

I love it. It's head and shoulders over your previous work (which is already really saying something), and I think it's great that the reader is, in a way, under no obligation to love it.

It's a terrific, hallucinatory, corrosive read. Its tension / descent is almost unrelieved, and there lies both its virtue and "problem." (I put "problem" in quotation marks because it's not really one.) Tonally it reads like, say, a Diamanda Galas album, a long, keening shriek in the jungles of the colonized. But it's also the reason why listening to a Galas album all the way through is difficult, enervating and sometimes even painful, but pierced with many moments of beauty. Like Poeta. It's unapologetically hard work, and in a way it's hard for the reader to take pleasure (in the ordinary sense of the word) in reading it, and as I wrote earlier, she or he isn't under any obligation to "like" it.

The pleasures of language, however, are another matter; there is an awful lot to like.
----

There are various excerpts scattered around her blog, but you folks might as well wait for it once it comes out from Tinfish Press.

And once again, Poeta: congratulations.

[No Title.]

No title for this one -- it's a spinoff from an old blog entry.

It's about looking for porn and finding something else.

Gingerly, where he found it,
but it was something else,
the thing that could make no sense.
They said it would be there,
thrillingly, to thumb and visit again and again,
the fuel of fervid dreams.
His boy classmates told him so.
It will be covert, but it will be there.

So one cloudy day he snuck into the room,
Cased the dresser,
container of cloth and the quotidian,
repository, hopefully, of the humid.
The shaky fingers, eager for touch.
The knobs, rubbed of their polish.
The wooden swish of the drawer as it slid.
The underwear, bunched like white blossoms.

And there, underneath, the unglossy surprise:
flesh upon flesh, limbs in a twist,
stiffening muscle, sinew and skin,
the spasm, the cries, the moan, the twitch.

The boy traces his unknowing
thumb on the amber surface;
the secrets of old men in muddy weather.

Two Possible Poem Epigraphs.

From E.E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937):

Thus when six or seven of the sons of Prince Rikita were entrapped in a ring of fire and burnt to death when hunting cane-rats their death was undoubtedly due to witchcraft.

And from Ron Silliman:

"Turk Street News" was the name [of] a porn theater where I once watched Kathy Acker on the big screen having sex with several men, one of whom was flogging her with a head of iceberg lettuce.

Speaking of poetry, we "blew" most of my Thursday class spending almost an hour discussing just two of Eileen Tabios's poems "After 2 A.M" and "The Wire Sculpture" -- and identity and colonialism and resonance (not meaning) and what made poems "difficult." (Eileen: "difficult" in quotation marks, mind you -- please don't hurt me! At least... don't flog me with iceberg lettuce.)

Peñaranda / Reyes Reading, 11/4.

A Reading by
Oscar Peñaranda
and
Barbara Jane Reyes

Thursday, November 4, 2004, at 4:00 pm
Richard Oakes Multicultural Center
Cesar Chavez Student Center, San Francisco State University

Oscar Peñaranda was born in the seacoast town of Barugo on the island of Leyte, Philippines. He earned his B.A. (in Literature) and M.A. (Creative Writing) at San Francisco State University where he became part of the struggle to establish Ethnic Studies in the schools. He taught at SF State for 12 years, Everett Middle School for 10 years, and is currently teaching at James Logan High School in Union City. He is the author of a collection of poetry, Full Deck (Jokers Playing), and a collection of short stories, Seasons by the Bay.

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila and raised in the SF Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, and is currently a MFA candidate at SF State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center, and currently at work on her second book (a book-length poem) entitled Poeta en San Francisco.

This event, co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies and the Richard Oakes Multicultural Center, is free and open to the public.

Instructions for White People, #2.

You will inherit a large sum of money.
You will be surrounded by many friends.
Your persistence will be rewarded.
You will have great successes in life this year.
You will give up and ask for a fork.

Instructions for White People.

Tuck under
thumb
   and hold firmly.

Add second chopstick
   hold it as you hold

a pencil.

Hold first
chopstick
in original
position.

Move the
   second one
up
   and
down.

Now you can pick up anything.

Instructions for White People #3.

(what remains)

A scrape.

A breath.

Instructions for Living.

Make
a face.
Make a fist.

On Eric Gamalinda.

Eileen Tabios has a post on one of my favorite poets, Eric Gamalinda, and she's reprinted a fantastic poem of his, "Melting City."

I can still remember the very first time I saw his name in print, when he won a short story prize in Asiaweek sometime in the mid-'80s or so. My mom was quite excited, because Gamalinda was a neighbor of hers -- they lived on the same block of the same street (Instruccion) in Sampaloc, Manila, where my mom grew up. (She was much older, and remembered him as a little boy.) Since then I've followed his career fairly closely -- I think I even clipped his music reviews from the Manila Times (or was it the Daily Globe?) -- and when I finally met him in NY in 2000 (I'll namedrop here and say that I had dinner with him and Luigi Francia one time), I was somewhat tongue-tied in front of the two. (I don't know -- there's something about poets that renders the fanboy in me all speechless.)

I'm finishing up writing acknowledgments and whatnot for my dissertation, and if there was something I could use as an epigraph, it would be something by Gamalinda. The last stanza of his poem "Enough" -- found in his excellent collection Zero Gravity (Alice James Books) -- I've always found sharp and wounding:

Someday I will send everyone a card
with nothing in it, only
the calligraphy
of a river, and in the back
with invisible ink I will say:
Forgive my happiness,
I have betrayed you all.

More Spam Poetry!

Got some more debt elimination spam today -- this time not just with random words, but actual sentences clearly designed to foil anti-spam software. (It looks like the spam program automatically generates sentences based on a template: a phrase here, a preposition there.) The following two paragraphs were tacked to the bottom of the ad:

Now and then, near test honor upon compendium over. Furthermore, from condemnate, and of playoff fall in love with related to. I from squalid toward, or behind assimilate around. Any sky can of, but it takes a real chevron to nearest henry over. Most people believe that related to learn a lesson from heater, but they need to remember how refract. Go near gets drunk, and about we'll starts spiderwort about lost glory; however, beyond give lectures on morality to from.

Now and then, of operate a small fruit stand with treachery around. When around uproot returns home, inside sweeps the floor. Together living with is careen.

The prepositions keep tripping me up, because they're clearly randomly strewn about. But otherwise there are some great sentences and phrases here that one could use for later -- "operate a small fruit stand with treachery around," "starts spiderwort about lost glory" -- and that last sentence, rhythmically a kind of summation: "Together living with is careen."

After Waking, #1.

The wheel of responsibility lies caked on birds' wings. Eyes open to a flutter, the image passes in silence. We are too tired to think. Hands are washed daily. An opacity in the current, a tremor in the stream, and the world rests on shimmer.

Aftershower #1.

Expedited delivery:
The tap on the window
Memos for your consideration
Sharpened pencils in a row

It's standard operating procedure:
The detritus of clips
Spinning in my chair
The clash of deodorant
Rising above the tide

Consider it done:
I hear motorcycles in the woods somewhere.
The muted gentle buzzsaw
The sapper and tick of horses
Wind and river and jangle of quarters
Soil and dapple and rubber stamp

Spam Poetry, Part 2.

Michelle writes that I beat her to the punch by posting spam poetry. I don't know if what I posted would really qualify as "spam" -- "real" spam poetry would probably look like this crude offering:

I am hard.
I stay hard.
I am natural viagra.
I add three inches to my cable descrambler.
I make $$$$$ from my hot and horny computer.
I find the truth about my neighbor's gas mileage.
I astound my wife with prescription drugs delivered overnight.
I watch Jenny and her slutty cheerleader friends refinance home loans.

I am spam.
I contain multitudes.

Since then I've received about three or four more of those odd spam messages -- with great titles like "restless old immanuels" and "when he laid" -- and I'm not sure what to do with them. "restless old immanuels" doesn't start off very well -- the first two words are "german pecan," and "gesture wotan cheesecake cunningham" just stops the whole thing dead (though "cheesecake cunningham" works with "terrible betsy"). But it ends with:

glued thickish.
delinquent
soften

which I kind of like.

Spam "Poetry."

A couple of spam e-mail messages -- for a digital cable filter -- arrived in my mailbox today. The way it tucked its contents into html by inserting random words into the text was rather ingenious, though.

For instance, the phrase "The ultimate digital cable filter" is actually coded as "Thbracketslashmcknightslashe ulbracketslashcredobrackettimate dbracketslashreplenishbracketigital cabracketslashartistrybracketble fbracketslashapparatusbracketilter" (I've replaced "<" and "/" with "bracket" and "slash."). It didn't completely foil SF State's spam filter, though: it still arrived in my mailbox marked as spam, with the message left unrendered in html.

I've taken the random words -- in the same order they appeared in the spam e-mail, inserted into a "font color=white" tag, and laid them out below, adding punctuation here and there. It's called "Stymie."

Stymie

cryptanalytic allison
dither breech nnw julie
enunciate o'brien.

declassify integument aflame
perch punt testimonial
bookish.

dye
fife turnoff:
myriad sundial regulatory timeshare

bleed syrup appear
(jeres child gladstone cacm)
scoff falstaff

conflagration share decor.

cleft birch conspiracy --
giraffe tantalum dutiable
inverse fire.

galapagos: vengeful.

haircut conversion,
quizzical bmw,
forgetful soothsayer erastus:

catlike intrigue,
brainy lemonade.

brookhaven:
id dope deductible

atkins.

jitter.

cotangent malady

Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "Miracle Fruit."

Here's Eudora Welty, writing about the photographs in The Democratic Forest, by my favorite photographer, William Eggleston:

They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world! When you see what the mundane world so openly and multitudinously affirms, there is everything left to say.

After reading Aimee Nezhukumatathil's new poetry collection, one is more convinced than ever that poets -- or, at least, this particular poet -- unlike ordinary human beings, have different eyes through which to see: the reds of a jungle, a sari swinging over the shoulder, cherry farmers, potatoes pulled up from the earth. Each poem in her quietly stunning Miracle Fruit is a finely calibrated balancing act of breathlessness and restraint, sprinkled with words that must be savored in the mouth: "fire sponges, jingle shells, a remnant of whelk," she writes.

Here's an almost random excerpt, the last stanza of "In Praise of Colophons:"

My favorite colophon reports that another monk
designed Carlyle over two centuries ago. Its letters
sit round and open as fishbowls on a windowsill.
The balance so delicate, one strong wind
could spill the glass and its slippery contents
across the stone floor. O, but the light in each
watery leaf, the small transparencies in those fins --
the arc of orange fish that leap and leap and leap.

Her poems are afflicted with the ecstasy of small things, with an exuberant, barely containable delight in the ordinary. Look, she says to the reader, these are the miracles I see. And you must see them too.

Gravities of Center.

I've just finished reading Barbara Jane Reyes's first collection of poetry, Gravities of Center, Reyes, an MFA student here at SF State, has an assured voice that suffuses her impressive debut.

At first glance, there seems to be an uneasy fit between the earlier, more political poems and the poems in the second half about the bass player with the long hair and black jacket -- no, wait: the poems are also about what she feels when he's with him. But what is common to all the poems is the vital, seething, unruly energy simmering underneath the surface. Passion manifests itself as either anger or desire (perhaps they are the same in any case), and this collection is rich with evidence of both kinds. (The lesson of the seeming disjunction between the poems, it seems to me, is that the more explicitly "political" ones, like "Arithmetic" and "Now Showing," for instance, are inherently personal as well, as part of an exploration of the poet's identity, and therefore inextricable from the nakedness of the later poems.)

(It's funny, too; the piece "Delicadeza" is almost -- hopefully she forgives the adjective -- ethnographic in its attention to detail when she describes the Filipino denizens of a casino and the awkward misunderstandings (and shared cultural assumptions) between strangers.)

"Anthropologic" is the poem that made the deepest impression on me: a collage-poem about anthropology and colonialism, inspired by Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy. There's sometimes a tendency, in less capable hands, for a poem like this to become predictably polemical, but that is not the case here. Cinematic, clipped, with truncated and erased captions, "Anthropologic" functions like photographs exhibited -- or butterflies pinned? -- on a wall. The way it looks on the printed page sometimes uncannily brings to mind the acquisitive, classificatory and dissecting impulses of the empire.

Like the skeletons embracing on the cover, Gravities of Center deals with the buried, the repressed, the hidden, the private: "margins always contain undeniable silent worlds," she writes in "Brown Man's Burden." A collection of Pinay postcolonial intimacies. Poems whispered in languorous darkness and secrets sealed with a hiss.

(I should mention too that it's not available on Amazon, alas, which is why I couldn't put it in my All-Consuming box to the right, but it's available through Arkipelago Books.)

Dream Couplet #4.

We are told grit suffuses all.
Endless upon endless, piled in quarters.

Novelists and Musicians.

Caterina Fake has an interesting thread on poets who have written novels -- itself a takeoff on an entry on Ron Silliman's blog about "poets' novelists".

It's interesting because a somewhat similar thread (on summer reading) surfaces every year on the John Zorn list, and it seems the usual people get mentioned: Gass, Gaddis, Dick, Murakami, Delany, Calvino, and so on. Not sure if this means that people who like their music somewhat more offbeat like their fiction the same way too...

The relationship (poets to novelists / poets to musicians) is obviously different. But I do wonder: What do poets -- or people who like to read poetry -- listen to?

The obvious choices are people in the scene, as it were, like Cage, Ono, Ashley, and Zorn (Lyn Hejinian and Myung Mi-Kim wrote a couple of the texts for New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands). But it would be silly to think that people who write poetry like their music a certain way as well.

Or are you all closet George Thorogood listeners?

Notes on "Why Eileen Tabios Bugs Me."

I was trying to figure out what to write about next when I looked through my notes on a future post -- one on Eileen Tabios's poem "Parallel Universe" -- and looked at the lines I'd scribbled:

Gazing through a screen/scrim.

Not black hole.

Primary colors. Of being detached.

Watching in slow motion.

The apostate that I am originally saw it as being religious in nature.

Poet's universe is parallel universe.

On level of sentence.

About art, and the poet, and when will we ever meet?

Somewhere in there: "obviate."

Prose with tiny beaks. Discrete events.

Strings tuning up for the last act.

Tropical Poets.

Some of you might like this: this is from Willard Price's 1920 book on the Methodist Church's missionary work around the world entitled Ancient Peoples at New Tasks:

"Any Filipino who can scribble dog verse is a songster, a new Shelley, a budding Omar Khayyam. The population of the Philippines is ninety-nine per cent. poets and one per cent. farmers."

So wrote a critic of the Filipinos. He would not be correct in making such comment to-day. The work of the United States is transforming millions of easy-going, tropical "poets" into progressive farmers, manufacturers, and merchants is an achievement with few parallels in history.

To Sleep, to Write.

Surfing at less than 33.6kbps is -- well, not really surfing. And so it feels a little odd as a blogger not really being able to read anyone else's blog, at least until I return to San Francisco. I don't what Tim Yu or MacDiva or any of these folks (I'm only filling in the urls from memory) are up to. (It doesn't help that Blogger templates make extensive use of tables which have to be loaded in their entirety for the page to display.)

For instance, I completely missed out on the whole WinePoetics - CorpsePoetics name change -- what was that all about? (I'll have to look through the archives.) An Exquisite Corpse reference, perhaps? Lilacs from the cold dead ground?

The image that came to me, in any case, was not of death, but of sleep, though they're close enough. As I've written before, I see words just before I go to sleep (I literally see them on a printed page), in that hazy period between oblivion and wakefulness -- as if the unconscious prematurely takes over and starts filtering the dream-material before I'm actually asleep.

Hypnagogia, I think it's called. Is that right? (Is hypnagogy, then, the act of receiving the words, as a pupil?) I seem to remember the music lore about either Richard D. James or Kevin Shields, who would keep awake for days at a time and then start composing.

Like last night:

The stammer of orchids.
The language of frost.
A container of bees.

Who knows what it means? I don't. But I had to get up, grab pen and paper, and scrawl the words in the dark.

Then, a caption underneath a photograph of water:

The Ganges does not see you.

Hey, I Got Published Again!

Back when I was in sixth grade at the North Davis Elementary School in Davis, California -- my folks were on sabbatical -- I wrote a poem called "Life." There was little about the poem -- I should really say "poem" -- that I remember, except for the ponderous ending ("Life is like / a long trip.") and one sentence ("The river was / a ribbon of moon."). Hey, it was sixth grade.

Then I didn't think about poetry again for another 22 years or so, except for a detour through Eliot and Cummings in high school. But in the past few months I started plunging into it again, and the immersion has been life-changing, like learning a new language.

Then I started actually making them up just about a couple of weeks ago (see my "Hey, I Got Published!" post from a week back) -- specifically, in Eileen Tabios's hay(na)ku form.

Indeed, I still have a couple about Madeline here, which I'm suddenly emboldened to post:

Your
eyes Your
lips and Your

Purple
kissed bruise
on: right knee.

And I've been thinking as well of organizing those dream couplets into some sort of series, like:

A tangle of horseflies.
The inadequacy of grass.

Peripheries of mollusk.
Inflection of sea.

Sheaves of punches.
The grammar of bees.

Then the best kick in the pants, as it were, was the following message from Eileen the other day:

Congrats to the winners:

Top Three Chosen By Judge Barbara Jane Reyes:

Tom Beckett
Jon Pineda
Dennis Somera

Other masterful hay(na)ku poets reveal themselves to be Stephen Kirbach, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Luis Cabalquinto, Kenneth Tanemura, Terri Leigh Relf, Kasey Mohammad, Benito "Sunny" Vergara, Bill Freind, Shirlie Mae Mamaril, Clayton Couch, Michael Snider, Michael Helsem and Rosanne Virata.

Please check the June 20, 2003 post at http://winepoetics.blogspot.com/ for more details.

Thanks to all participants; your words are a blessing,
Eileen

And in the company of real poets too!

All in all, I think, a nice beginning to things.

Hey, I Got Published!

Samples of my (eek!) poems from Eileen Tabios's Hay(na)ku contest, here and here.

Conversation.

I thought some of you might be interested in the running conversation between me and Eileen regarding a couple of lines I posted earlier. (Think of it is a dialogue between a student of anthropology and a poet.)

Eileen wrote "Ooooooh. Very nice" -- to which I wrote:

I'm glad you like it, Eileen -- but why? I mean, it's pretty raw (it came to me just as I was about to fall asleep, or just after I woke up -- can't remember), so there's no fiddling with fricatives or messing around with mutes. =)

Although now that I look at it, there's a clear link between "horse" and "grass" -- ahh, I still don't know how poetry works...

And then Eileen wrote:

Tangling with mutes? I love that slip if you meant to say "muse".

First drafts are supposed to be raw; editing (if any) can always come later but the first draft is when rawness -- non-censorship -- should be encouraged to help facilitate what the poem's gonna be.

My best poems just "come to me." I often think the poet's job is to just get out of the poem's way.

Why do I like it? I suppose because so much is expressed *between* the words, though the words are very effective for their imagery. What you've done is encouraged the reader to make the link between the two lines, so it's the reader that breathes the couplet into life. (I, for one, find this among the most difficult challenges in poetry -- perhaps from also writing frequently in prose that requires explications.)

In this kind of poem, regardless of your intent, you *trusted* the reader and, by doing so, created a relationship between poem and reader without you* interfering between that unmediated engagement.

(*this could relate to the poet's ego/personality)

--------

Dream poems are great -- partly for getting personality and self-consciousness out of the way. Relatedly, I drink for the same effect (see: my drinking is really a technical strategy because at least drinking allows me to be awake instead of being physically asleep, thus unable to write).

But don't lissen to me, Sunny. I'm drunk. It's the price of my job as.....the poet known as Ms. WinePoetics!

[Okay, I'ma actually drinking a cuppa java as I write this...]

My rambling response:

You're awesome, Eileen. Thanks for your extended commentary.

Later on I did think about altering "inadequacy" -- one syllable too many, I think -- but I liked this connotation of an inability to do something: to cover the earth? To untangle the horseflies? Not sure.

You write: "In this kind of poem, regardless of your intent, you *trusted* the reader..." The phrase "regardless of your intent" jumped out: the crotchety materialist in me raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. But then, as an anthropologist, I do *my* readings of everyday life in the same way, both heeding individual intentionality and being careful to situate people's behavior in the overarching social context, "regardless of [their] intent." (We cultural anthropologists like to think that we foreground our interpretive inadequacies anyhow.)

You also write about your best poems "coming to you." These lines -- can't say they're poems, really -- only come to me at the point when I'm about to fall asleep.

I've often wondered about how one theorizes creativity; I suppose the folks from the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness would know this better. That post I promised earlier on Hirsch and Oliver and sleeping with poets [chuckle] -- unfortunately, I left my Hirsch book at home -- was going to be about the creation of poetry and the ineffable, and how this feeds into the "mystique" of the poet. This form of cultural capital may then be coupled with a parallel accumulation of sexual charisma -- but then the latter is probably squarely in the eye of this beholder anyhow. =)

So Eileen writes:

There's a difference -- or there *can* be a difference -- between writing a poem (which I thought what you were doing with that couplet) and reading a poem. The latter involves (more) looking *at* the poem. I don't know that one can look at a poem from the outside while you're in the process of writing it. I think the poet needs to become (in that moment) the poem itself. Later, you can look *at* it in the same way you might read someone else's work. Which is to say, perhaps the usefulness of an anthropological perspective has certain limitations when *be-ing* the poet/poem because one can't be separate from the work (though such perspective obviously can be useful in other ways, as your own brief reads of poems on this blog has shown).

[Of course, I don't know what I'm talking about. That's partly the challenge of Poetry -- the more one practices it, the less one knows it....at least from my standpoint.]

"Being the poem itself" -- whew! I can see being in the poem better; there's a suggestion of a poetic space, or better, interiority that both poet and reader can inhabit (and conversely, move inside and outside of).

Off-tangent note: since metaphor isn't something that's necessarily culturally universal, I wonder how other cultures conceive of creativity, or, at least, its associated images. (I suspect there are tons of anthropological work done on this already, but it's not my field.) Lightning bolts? Possession? Muses or higher powers? When I was writing my book I thought of it as "flow" -- I wrote most of the manuscript in a summer, in longhand, on unlined sheets of paper, index cards strewn all around me -- and words seemed to flow from some peanut-sized organ in my head into my pen and onto paper. (This was, however, aided by semi-monastic discipline by day and illicit activity by night.)

Dream Couplet #3.

A tangle of horseflies,
The inadequacy of grass.

Tanong.

Kumusta na? Kailan ka dumating? Matagal ba ang biyahe mo? Sino ang kamukha niya? Nakakakain ka na? Anong balita? Kumusta ang biyahe mo? Anong ginagawa mo doon? Tapos ka na ba? Marunong ba siyang mag-Tagalog? Napanood mo na iyong bagong Matrix? Anong gusto mong kainin? Pupunta ka bang Maynila? Anong pinanood ninyo sa eroplano? Anong pasalubong namin? Kumakain ba siya nang Pilipino food? Hindi ka ba natatakot sa SARS? Sinong kapitbahay mo doon? Madalas mo bang makita si Sulpicio? Anong naman ang gagawin mo sa conference? Matagal ba kayo sa airport? Saan kayo natutulog? Anong uso ngayon doon? Pumunta ba kayong duty-free? Marunong na ba siyang maglakad?

Ilan ang ibon sa batok ko? Ano ang sinabi nang bata sa papaya? Binili ba noong madre iyong pipino? Malapit ba ang salamin sa baso? Kailan ka papasok sa kubeta? Sino ang kumuha nang tatsulok galing sa kahon? Binanatan mo na ba? Kinuhanan mo na nang litrato ang puno? Marunong ka bang kumatay nang matsing? Saan nawaglit ang relo? Madalas ka bang nakakasira nang computer? Wala ka bang napapansin sa buhok ko? Malaki ba ang opisina nang principal? Wala bang magamit na santol? Gusto mo bang magpalampaso? Hahanap ba ako nang gatas? Mainit ba sa gubat? Malayo ba iyong lalakarin niya?

Anong oras kayo umalis doon? Anong sasabihin mo sa kasal? Kasya ba kayo diyan sa kuwarto? Kailan kayo bibisita ulit? Kailan kaya kami pupunta diyan? Magsusulat ba kayo? Anong kinakain niya? Sinong nagaalaga sa aso ninyo? Saan kayo nakatira doon? Anong pinapakinggan mo ngayon? Gusto mo bang magpagupit dito? Kailan kaya kita mabibisita? Iyong kotse ninyo, saan ninyo pinarada? Gusto ninyo bang mag-swimming? Alam ba nang mga kapitbahay mo na wala kayo? Magiimbita ba ako nang kaibigan mo? Malapit na bang mag-expire ang passport mo? Gusto mo ba nang talunan? Malamig ba ngayon sa San Francisco? Sinong nag-aalaga sa bata? Maraming bang imbitado? Iyong utol mo, kailan ang punta doon? Kumusta na?

Song, after Beltane.

Jean Gier's disquieting poem ("Out of this lead grow a willow. Out of this willow grow a man. Out of this man grow a coffin. Out of this coffin grow a raven. Out of this raven grow a hair. Out of this hair grow a dress. Out of this dress grow a woman. Out of this woman grow a snake...") reads to me, at least, as a wonderfully eerie sequel of sorts to the Maypole Song from Anthony Shaffer's film The Wicker Man:

In the woods there grew a tree,
And a very fine tree was he.
And on that tree there was a limb,
And on that limb there was a branch,
And on that branch there was a spray,
And on that spray there was a nest,
And in that nest there was an egg,
And in that egg there was a bird,
And on that bird there was a feather,
And on that feather was a bed,
And on that bed there was a girl,
And on that girl there was a man,
And from that man there was a seed.
And from that seed there was a boy,
And from that boy there was man,
And from that man there was a grave,
And on that grave there grew a tree.
In the Summerisle wood.

The fact that it was posted on May 2, right after May Day, made that connection for me, as a parallel and no less natural progression. In Gier's poem, however, the earthly (and earthy) cycle of birth and death and rebirth is "disrupted," as it were, by cogs and bombs and thimbles and shovels. I think it has to do with fecundity, all right, but not a straightforward flowering into a tree or Maypole, but into a veritable thicket of language.

Images are entangled with one another, the artificial with the natural, leaves with words, the thimble from the maggot, the eye from the well. What I see here instead -- no, not "instead," but alongside that natural cycle (I think that brutally dissonant "grow" shoves the reader perpetually into the present) -- is the birthing and rebirthing of metaphors and, finally, almost painfully, the poet herself. "Out of this thigh grow I," the poem ends. Born by words, born through words, borne by words, the poet and the poem emerges.

[The permalink doesn't work -- damned Blogspot! -- so just go to her blog and scroll down to May 2.]

The Dragon Belong To Our Chinese.

In which Tim Yu discovers a poem and reflects on immigrant diction.

[Update: The permalink's screwed -- not your fault, Tim, it's Blogger's -- so just head over to tympan and scroll down to May 2.]

Noam Poem.

Making the rounds of Metafilter and the poetry blogs: Rob's Amazing Poem Generator.

Here's a poem based on Noam Chomsky's talk, "Old Wine, New Bottles: Free Trade, Global Markets and Military Adventures:"

Old nomenklatura, the rest of 92:
Economy in the
line, with
his,
favorite maxim, all of democracy, in
a meaningful question. was
a decent human freedom and overcome.
They know trying to 23%, the old
Communist party. to run it, may never reported
in pursuit of public are disrupting our
way you know, Europe is that they like
allowing generic drug and
if you destroy the activist community. You look for
Clinton.

And, as a PS, a poem generated from my infamous Wit and Wisdom of Imelda Marcos page:

The Philippines is also
for president, quoted in self
defence, anything that I would
most excruciating manner any of
the poor have the Centre for money. and love, someone
is also fun in The Philippines, is where
did the sea. But me, that you paradise And
the opening of
these quotations, are
permanent. Later on the time I am
corrupt. God! manifest in Beatriz Romualdez Imelda: can
hell for my hand and in a person
a resource not aware
of an example.

I'm Filipino, But Is This A Filipino Blog?

(I'm totally blushing. And you should see Eileen's comments on my blog! Brown skin doesn't blush easy, but in this case...)

Anyhow, this will be a more rambling entry than usual. The title of the entry came to me as I (thoughtlessly) clicked on the category "Pinoy" (look to your right for the category archives) after I posted the entry on Eileen Tabios's WinePoetics blog. This was, of course, technically true -- she is Filipina, after all -- but the entry wasn't really Filipino in content, and neither is her blog very Filipino either. Whatever "Filipino" means, anyway.

And then a very nice mention from Mac Diva on her Mac-a-ronies blog (a must-read, by the way, along with her other blog, Silver Rights), where she calls my blog "an olio of news, entertainment, poetry and material about the Philippines." But I feel I'll let some people down, because I hardly post on Filipino or Filipino American things, really.

Much of this is going through my head lately because of Tim Yu's tympan blog, where he has a hilarious and thought-provoking entry on writing an "Asian American" poem -- link swiped from WinePoetics, natch. (See also his equally interesting response to a post by Ron Silliman.) Or rather, parodies of the four categories of Asian American poems he has seen:

--the grandparents poem
--the family photograph poem
--the exotic food poem
--the erotic poem, usually employing imagery from the exotic food poem

Yeah, it is indeed a little snotty, as Yu put it, but not inaccurate. I can think of a few elements contributing to and mitigating this phenomenon:

1. I see this more often in small student-edited collections: young poets learn from those "Asian American" models (and may be given the same writing exercises, i.e., "write what you know") and (unwittingly) imitate them. Nothing wrong with this in general, but...

2. This also operates on a "culturalist" level, i.e., stop a random Chinese American person (for instance) walking in the street and ask her or him what "Chinese culture" is all about, and it is likely that family, respect for ancestors, food, etc., will be invoked. Again, nothing wrong with this in general, but...

3. Unfortunately, this becomes reified uncritically as "Asian culture," and editors/reviewers looking for "a distinctive Asian voice" or something with "an Asian sensibility" would end up selecting an ancestors poem or a food poem because they are coded as Asian. Writers like Amy Tan have been living off the proceeds of this "sensibility" for years.

4. And if outfitting oneself in Asian drag sells, well... this may explain the success of all those footbinding memoirs. How many permutations of "golden," "lotus," "heaven," "jade," and "dragon" could there be? Thus, the reproduction of Orientalist cliches, both internally and externally.

5. But if ethnicity, in opposition to a "biological" category like race (yes, I know both are culturally constructed), is a combination of "culture" and descent, then it would make perfect sense to have a family poem and a food poem (and food preferences, as Bourdieu argues, are practically seen as hard-wired, and integral to notions of culture) as the two models of the "ethnic poem."

Something like Walter Lew's Premonitions was, perhaps conceived to escape those four walls of the Asian American poem-jail (kind of like the prisonhouse of language?). As Maria Damon writes on the backcover blurb:

Neither a multiculti feel-good anthology, an instrumentalist teaching anthology that condescends to its audience and subject matter, nor an Orientalist rehearsal of anti-Orientalism, this book will liberate the reader from the strictures of the known at all levels.

She makes it sound like acid! But that's beside the point: I think what she means is that the poems contained inside weren't selected to communicate an Asian American sensibility (though some do), but perhaps because they were written by good poets, to paraphrase Ron Silliman in his post, who happen to be Asian American.*

I'm preparing for two sections of an "Asian American culture" class in the fall, and as an anthropologist, I taught my previous sections from a social sciences angle, only to be told later on that the classes were meant to deal with "the expressive arts." But while reading through different anthologies recently, I found myself stupidly passing over the fiction and poetry that weren't specifically coded as "Asian American," i.e., those pieces that didn't deal with language or racism or food or repressive tradition, as if "Asian American" couldn't encapsulate anything else. And so I was therefore unwittingly duplicating some Orientalist notion of what Asian or Asian American meant. In any case, the discussion in class should be interesting next year.

*It should be made clear, though, that this is very different from the fantasy of social colorblindness.

WinePoetics.

It's about time I wrote a little something about the sparkling joys of poet Eileen Tabios's blog, WinePoetics. I imagine her drinking her wine, her entries spilling like tiny diamonds onto the keyboard, getting stuck between the "j" and "k" keys.

I met her a few months back at a reading, where she stumped me with a question on some offhand statement I made (I was introducing the writers) about how poets are needed to imagine the nation. I couldn't really answer. Then I ran into her again buying Peet's at SF State (god, this is starting to sound like some kind of mash note), just before she had a poetry reading. (I couldn't go because I was teaching my research methods class at the same time.) Anyhow, she clearly had no idea who I was. =)

Her latest entry, "Song of the Torn Footnotes," is characteristically lovely. "Your hands never memorized the circumference of her ankles." And again: "As the moon rose, we never entered a room whose lights I cancelled from a sudden shyness."

So, Eileen, if you're reading this, consider it fan mail. Or better yet, consider it a toast.