Our poet gone global, if X-rated

Felix Fojas now lives in Chico in Northern California, where he says he has many chicas. He’s been the latest addition to the continuing diaspora of distinguished Filipino poets who have sought greener pastoral odes and turned Fil-Am, or at least settled for once-and-future expatriation.

He joins his fellow PLACmate (Philippine Literary Arts Council) Eric Gamalinda who left for temporary good in the early ’90s, Luis Francia who chose to be a New Yorker a decade earlier, along with Jessica Hagedorn, Luis Cabalquinto and the much younger Bino Realuyo and Paolo Javier, Fernando Afable who’s become a vice-abbot in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Catskills, Rene Navarro in Pennsylvania, Oscar Peñaranda and Eileen Tabios in San Francisco, Nick Carbo in Miami, Vince Gotera and Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas in Iowa, Fatima Lim-Wilson in Seattle, Luisa Igloria, Reme Antonia-Grefalda and Jon Pineda in Virginia, Antonio Jocson in Houston, Eugene Gloria in Boston, and Mike Maniquiz in Kentucky.

Should they join up for a sterling anthology, its collective strength can rival a contemporary volume of the works of local poets (read: Philippine-based). Toss in other Fil-Ams we have yet to meet, like the BayArea’s old-timers Al Robles, Jeff Tagami, Jaime Jacinto and Virginia Cerenio, and the so-called 1.5 Generation (X‚)ers like Cyn. Zarco, Michelle Macaraeg Bautista, Joel Tan Barraquiel, R. Zamora Linmark, Loreta Medina, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Barbara Pulmano Reyes, Patrick Rosal, Regie Cabico and Oliver de la Paz (whose 2001 title Names Above Houses is an excellent poetry collection) – and a substantial part of the future of poetry in America may be said to rest on the brows and shoulders of our far-flung brothers.

This week a number of them will gather for three straight days of a lovefest poetry reading slash multimedia performance billed as Clit-Chat at Bindlestiff Theater in San Francisco. Tabios, Bautista, Reyes and perhaps Tan-Barraquiel lead the readers from the anthology Eros Pinoy, where they’re represented. We know that our guru-friend Oscar Peñaranda will be there.

Felix Fojas would do well to show up, too, and announce his presence as a one-man Cavalry out to – no, not exactly rescue Fil-Am poetry – but pitch in with his own distinctive, often rambunctious, ever rhapsodic, and alternately guttural and gentle erotic voice.

In the ’80s Fojas had travelled through the States on a sort of brown-man’s pilgrimage through the land of milk-and-honey-blondes, and came away with a testosteronic version of Whitmanesque verse in a sheaf of poems called Conde de Cojones in America.

Now he’s at it again, but doing it from the inside out. Days and nights he maneuvers in a metaphorical leather jacket through the skyways and alleyways of a global landscape, punching at a computer, submitting poems to e-zines and websites, contests and literary journals from as far away as India.

Over the holidays, he messaged us by e-mail: "Just the other day I won a modest honorable mention award in the Anthology Magazine 2001 Poetry & Prose Contest, Mesa, Arizona. And soon the Cyberwit.net Press of Govindpur Colony, Allahabad, India, will publish my book, Poems Selected & New by Felix Fojas. This has just been confirmed by its managing editor, Radha Agrawal. They’re also putting out a literary journal in which I’ll serve as associate editor."

Last we saw Felix, it was at a poetry reading at the now defunct Republic of Malate. That was sometime in August of 2000. The event honored the visiting Fil-Am novelist Bino Realuyo, author of the highly successful first novel, The Umbrella Country. Or so I may erroneously recall. It might have been at a follow-up reading, but Bino was certainly around, together with fellow Bicolano Marne Kilates, another PLAC stalwart.

Felix strode up to the mic and startled the audience with his booming voice, Caviteño accent, and come-hither manly stance. He read poems on sex: "Futuristic Sex," "Narcissistic Sex," "Psycho Sex," etc. A table of rotund men who all looked like they had just dropped in from a very bureaucratic office, given their officious-looking attire and decorum, clapped and cheered heartily.

Felix eventually introduced his pala crowd as his buddies at the Assets Privatization Trust. He thrust a fresh business card onto our palm, and we learned that Felix the seer, the poet, the rough-and-tumble Lothario, had incarnated himself once again as a nine-to-fiver with Malacañang Palace as his office address.

We weren’t surprised at the makeover. We had always admired Felix for his chameleon-like ability to blend with the woodwork, not to mention the green jokes, every time he resurfaced as something or other.

The young Felix Fojas was in the Dumaguete workshop with the ageless Jolicco Cuadra sometime in the late 70s. Legend still has it that the macho duo was almost ran out of town after they went on a binge and punched, kicked and karate-chopped their way through a private field of crunchy banana stalks. Years later, Felix recounted how he and buddy Jolicco had another mano-a-mano over a lady workshopper, but that he gallantly deferred to the more handsome poet out of regard for seniority.

Eventually Felix wound up doing ad-man work for the special San Mig group at McCann led by another legendary UP poet, Erwin Castillo. Felix was happy to have cast his lot with another wild bunch of bird and chick hunters, as well as barroom brawl stalkers, which included Cris Michelena and Sonny Yñiguez.

On the side, Fojas wound up as the sixth man at PLAC, literally and proverbially. He invited the five-man orig group, which still included the jolly Freddie Salanga, to a weekend at his uncle’s beach resort in Naic. There we posed for photo-ops in the gentle surf and before an aesthetically challenged cement grotto filled with Santo Niño icons. Freddie and Ricky de Ungria raised V-signs with their fingers behind Felix’s thick mop of hair, while Jimmy Abad and Cirilo Bautista smiled beatifically in appreciation of the demands of poetic initiation.

There was Felix at Penguin Cafe Gallery one night in the late 80s, plucking a three-iron from his car boot and threatening to take a swing at a young-poet-come-lately whose bad accent and apparent pretensions had annoyed him. Ricky distracted him from his homicidal intentions by pointing out a puchingkay inside the cafe whose sundry moles called for a reading.

Felix did make a living assaying women’s moles, palms, handwriting and whatnot, and when his Third Eye turned limpid, relied on Tarot cards to complete the seduction.

But we would lose him on weekends that stretched to months and years. In the mid-90s I bumped into him in Jakarta, where he had taken an expat’s job at an ad agency. He took me around one night, along with his native lady love, an Indonesian Hindu with a striking, Arabic look. Eventually he’d take her to Manila and try Makati advert work again. Then he’d ring up and say he’d nearly had it here, he was considering Jakarta once more, or perhaps Europe.

Through the seasons, Felix never compromised on his poetry – tough, rough, engaging in its torrent of eroticism, and topical in its alternative concerns. He wrote political poetry, protest poetry, love and lust poetry, but never of disaffection.

He won national awards: the Palanca for his collections Port of Entry and Confabulations, which came out as full volumes in 1985 and 1990, respectively. For his professional work, he garnered a CLIO Award for Advertising Excellence Worldwide, in New York in 1977.

Armed with B.A. and M.A. degrees in English & Comparative Literature and Linguistics & Literature, Fojas was also awarded creative writing fellowships at Cambridge University in the UK and at the 18th Midwest Writers‚ Annual Conference at Kent State University in Ohio, USA. He had been widely anthologized in Philippine and international poetry collections well before he left for the States some 16 months ago, mayhaps for good.

As early as the ’70s, Felix was indefatigable in managing to toss his poems overseas to win distinctions, such as the 1978 Golden Poet Award from World of Poetry, based in Sacramento, California. Trying his hand at short fiction, he bagged a Graphic Magazine award in 1991.

In California, Felix appears to have redoubled his efforts at correspondence poetry. His updated list of distinctions now include the following: honorable mention, December 2000 Writers‚ Journal Poetry Contest, Perham, Minnesota; award of merit and editor’s choice award in the 2001 International Open Poetry Competition, The International Library of Poets, Owing Mills, Maryland; award of merit and fourth place award, 2001 Iliad Awards Program, Sterling Heights, Missouri; award of merit, Sky Blue Waters Poetry League, Faribault, Minnesota, 2001; and honorable mention, 2001 Anthology Magazine Poetry Contest, Mesa, Arizona.

And no, he hasn’t turned into a gnome handcuffed to a CPU, a monitor, keyboard and mouse. He has ventured out in the sunshiney state to lecture at The University of California at Davis, the Sacramento State University, and Sacramento City College. He was the featured poet at a reading at Has Beans Cafe in Chico last April. At a reggae concert last October at the Senator Theater, also in Chico, Felix (in a leather jacket, a silver chain dangling at his hip, knuckles adorned by large-jewelled rings), he took the stage anew as a featured poet. He was a guest poet at the Eco Fair, Earthday 2001, at Chico State University.

Felix Fojas must be in demand in Northern California for his politically topical poems as much as his erotica. A recent work titled "Collateral Damage" gives evidence of Fojas’ appeal to American audiences. We share an excerpt:

"When a smart bomb dropped/ From heaven like an/ Overweight fallen angel,/ Whistled and gave a wolf/ Call before missing its/ Military target and detonated/ Instead in the lap of a teeming/ Village, the official spokesman/ For the allied forces, a tall,/ Handsome five-star general,// Called it ‘collateral damage’/ Shrugged his shoulders and/ Smiled sheepishly as if/ The casualty was negligible,/ Mere cold facts of statistics,/ And as if politely admitting/ To the mass murder without/ Apologizing and losing/ His clean-shaven face and/ Martial pride, a conduct// Befitting an officer/ And a gentleman..."

Now sample his equally graphic mode when it comes to erotica. Here’s a recent poem, "The Concupiscent Eye of Memory," which we share in full:

"The conscupiscent eye/ Of his memory/ Panned, zoomed in/ To the now blurred faces/ Of his innumerable past/ Lovers – their supple curves,/ And their exposed hairy/ Crevices are wide-open clams/ In grainy black-and-white/ Like the saucy footage/ Of a poorly lighted/ Low budget skin flick./ And as the antique film/ Rolls on, his hand slides/ Down, fondles his shaft/ Of flesh slippery with/ Vaseline, and shakes it/ Up and down faster and/ Faster until his eyeball explodes/ Into a viscous vision/ Of kingdom come./ The autodidact shudders/ And groans in ecstacy,/ Straining his voyeurism/ To the limit–a vicarious/ Orgy of wriggling, naked bodies/ In his secret play of solitaire/ As he shuffles the deck of his lust/ Until the projector in the primitive/ Carnal lobe of his brain/ Overheats, rattles, and conks out,/ And the white-hot tungsten lamp/ Drills a huge lascivious hole/ Gaping like a sizzling pudenda,/ Deflowering the fragile/ Screen of his mind’s eye."

Last year Fojas published a chapbook, The ABC of Lies: A Poetry Primer for Adults.

We miss him, for it’s Valentine’s Week. And Felix Fojas of the derring-do manner is unarguably our prime exponent of poetry on adult relations, meaning R-18 and X-rated stuff. Wish he were back here to continue to titillate us with his unabashed amorousness. Ave amor! Hail Felix the ever-purring Cyber Cat!