Edgy, quirky, elegant Fil-Am poetry

One of the many US-based Filipino poets represented in the upcoming UP Press anthology 100 Love Poems: Philippine Love Poetry Since 1905, edited by Gémino H. Abad and this columnist, is Patrick Rosal, whom neither co-editor has met, but whose quality work we have recognized from e-group postings.

One poem in particular, titled "Uncommon Denominators," served as the title poem for a Rosal chapbook released a couple of years ago. It was also the poem he submitted in response to our call for the anthology. A full year’s delay hounded our project, however, so that by the time we finalized our selection, the poem had already appeared in Rosal’s first regular poetry book, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, published last year by Persea Books/ New York.

Thankfully, his publisher granted permission for its inclusion in our anthology. The poem isn’t brief, but I must quote it in full to share the now-edgy, now-elegant power of this young man’s poetry:

"I add up the times I’ve fantasized about/ women I’ve seen but never spoken to/ and divide that by the hours/ I drive past cemeteries and add again/ the weight of breath in your mouth/ measured in the ancient Tagalog word for yes/ – but the number always comes out the same.//

"So I subtract the moon/ and the smell of incense on Good Friday/ trying to connect Planck’s Constant/ to the quantum moment between/ a candlelit flick and the back of your neck/ setting aside my 7 dreams of having sex once/ with Tyra Banks who tells me God/ you Filipino guys know/ how to make love to a woman/ and even if I tally the 10,069/ channels launched by satellites/ which have an asymptotic relationship/ to the count of stones cast/ from a sinner’s fist raised/ to the power of eight million punch-clock/ stiffs heading home late/ still the number comes out the same/ and when a beggar pirouettes/ along an expressway’s center lane/ swearing this won’t be his last/ cigarette (smoke rising from/ the rust in his moustache) I suddenly know/ the acceleration of a falling body/ has little to do with slipping/ a mother into the ground or/ a whole greater than the sum of its parts//

"And if you ask what I’m doing/ with 7 loaves and 4 fish multiplied/ by the root of a dried tamarind tree/ or the coefficient of friction/ of a bullet on the brink of a rib/ or the number of clips emptied/ into an unarmed Guinean man/ on a dark Bronx stoop I’ll tell you/ I’m looking for the exact/ coordinates of falling in love plus or minus/ the width of a single finger/ lost along the axis of your lips." ("Uncommon Denominators")

Now, that’s nothing if not superb poetry. I will maintain so, and stress the same before future classes at the Ateneo de Manila University, and/or among workshop fellows this summer or next. And I will point out the features that make this poem strong, fresh, compleat, and memorable.

A successful correlation is made between the mock-casual exercise of love and the numerical precision of science. This correlation is not your usual equation made admissible with solid, tangible proof. In poetry, the metaphysical conceit is what rises well above the humdrum correspondences or associations we are subjected to in the real world.

I say the correlatives attempted in this poem turn successful because Patrick Rosal transports us into a cerebral, and yet still subtly emotive, reckoning of marvels occupying two planes that are not entirely dissimilar. In fact the verisimilitude (oops, big word; sorry, ye non-academics) of wish and longing and fantasy is shown to be applicable to an exact cognizance of measurements and mathematical processes. And the irony is that even this apparent exactitude is suspect for all its vaporous reliance on, or rather estimable hope for, finding the absolute answer.

Rosal couches the tentativeness, vis-à-vis confidence in the scientific process, in fine gambits of imagery, the graphic recall of which is enhanced by the fresh, nearly furtive turn of phrase. The conversational tone and lines are balanced by good doses of pure ether in such startling poetic applications as "subtract the moon and the smell of incense" with its mythopoeic surrealism, and other highly imagistic yet refreshing phrases as "stones cast from a sinner’s fist…," "when a beggar pirouettes…," "7 loaves and 4 fish multiplied by the root of a dried tamarind tree" —- which like the reference to Tagalog and the Pinoy as lover casts back to an exoticized provenance, "a bullet on the brink of a rib" which compresses both imagery and diction into appropriately tight, punchy delivery, and finally, that winsome, wistful closure of measured yet transcendent tenderness: "plus or minus the width of a single finger lost along the axis of your lips."

This is a compleat, fully realized poem, a model for young practitioners who should realize that originality of articulation, offbeat stabs at insight, and quirky variance of tone and emotional stance are what have become premium in contemporary poetry. Enough of the well-trodden paths that spell extended clichés not only of lines but ideas and situational poses.

In Patrick Rosal’s poetry of Now, there is tough talk but at no prejudice to the tendresse of uncertain assumptions. He serves jive in most other poems in the collection, but always there is that grounding that defines a sensitif’s rock-hard foundation.

The book’s title is sourced to the poem "Freddie" which narrates, as do most of the poems in the first of two sections, street experience equals boyhood and the rites of "becoming a man" —- a theme favored by the poet.

"Freddie claimed lineage from the tough/ Boogie-down Boricuas/ who taught him how to break-/ dance on beat: up/ rock headspin scramble and dive// We called it a suicide:/ the front-flip B-Boy move that laded you/ back flat on the blacktop. That/ was Freddie’s specialty —- the way he’d jump/ into a fetal curl mid-air then thwap/ against the sidewalk —- his body/ laid out like the crucified/ Jesus he knocked down/ one afternoon in his mom’s bedroom/ looking for her extra purse/ so both of us could shoot/ asteroids and space invaders/ until dusk…" ("Freddie")

Why, this is poetry a la Allen Iverson, all dash and spurt then acrobatic extension, inclusive of fancy crossover, contortion and hangtime… Thence the swish, nothing but net on the penetration. Into our systems of boyhood and homelife recall, of nodding recognition and appreciation.

Rosal’s imagery is nearly precious in its contrapuntal dazzle, as in the first stanza and a third of "Nine Thousand Outlines":

"If every story has its beginning/ this one starts in the armpit of a god —- the plots/ of fishbone and vinegar a history of nails/ a war or two a swan some saints of course some/ slaves Eventually boys one day/ toss bricks at a burst of starlings/ then plash through the sky gathered/ in potholes and oil-slick rainpuddles And/ there is —- that afternoon —- a girl/ awkward and pale crossing the lot/ among scattered genuflections of sedans/ and wagons The cooked rubber/ fumes the projects when/ those boys’ necks erect and everything/ sunstruck for a moment/ become still//

"When I say I was once a boy who became/ a wolf who became a crow who turned/ to salt I mean I’ve become a man somehow/ without remembering that girl: stork-/ awkward and pale…"

And in closing: "…It’s a place where a girl can cower her whole life/ where things have flung themselves/ so far into the future time already reels backward/ where twilight etches —- in patinas/ older than bone —- 9,000 outlines/ of a girl whose endings I’ve traveled this far to forget/ with all the lies a boy will work a lifetime to believe/ until he’s caught looking back."

Marvelous. I can’t say enough of this fellow’s poetry. And I urge poetry lovers to get a sense and a drift of what the genre or medium is evolving into, and which Rosal has grasped and is doing his best to extend, beyond, beyond (perchance Beyonce’s own butt) …

Form and technique, line-breaking, prosody, cadence, the rhythms of language as these curtsey to function —- he is evidently aware of all of these, so that he propels his poetry past leitmotif or theme (toughening up, gangmanship, new-millenium odes to one’s father —- for which I salute this young man further…), into cycles of a whole that promises to be very major, indeed capital.

I marvel at the poems "You Clubhouse Boys," "The Next Hundred-Odd Half-Dreamed Miles," "Ritual From the Book of Mistakes," "A Prayer at the Edge of a Map," "Notes for the Unwritten Biography of My Father, An Ex-Priest," "Asbury Park, 1977," "The Overnight Ferry," "The Ancient Baguio Dead," "A Song for Women (after Audrey Lorde)," "The Basque Nose," and "Pick-up Line Ending With a Prayer" —- the collection’s final poem, with these closing lines: ""Let there be mar-y-sol Let there be land/ and one day let it contain a dance floor/ There let me recognize human grace when I see it:/ every mis-step and slip/ every foible and fuck-up/ Let me know them/ like the first errors of the sea"

The back-cover info on the author reads thus, among the glowing blurbs: "Patrick Rosal grew up in northern New Jersey, the son of Filipino immigrants. He received an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and has published poems in Folio, North American Review, The NuyorAsian Anthology, and elsewhere. The 2001 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State-Altoona, he teaches writing and literature at Bloomfield College and lives in Edison, New Jersey."

For a copy of this wonderful first book of poetry, try amazon.com, or write Persea Books at 853 Broadway, New York, NY 10003, or e-mail info@perseabooks.com. The publisher’s url is www.perseabooks.com

Thanks for the book, Patrick. And Bravo! As I’ve always said when up against the wall: Give me poetry – this kind of poetry —- or give me death.