Fine, ludic, sublime poetry
October 11, 2004 | 12:00am
Three of the finest books I’ve read intently this year are poetry books, and I’m so pleased to say that the authors are Filipinos who also happen to be my friends. They have something else in common. Jon Pineda teaches in Norfolk, Virginia; Nick Carbo in Miami, Florida; and Luis H. Francia in New York City, where he’s been based since… well, since he was still a bachelor heckling me over my conjugal capacity, and that was a very long time ago.
I regret that it’s taken me this long to have gone through their respective poetry collections – which are individually distinctive and distinguished – and that now I have to lump together, in an omnibus review, my appreciation of their work. But enough of pasintabi; I’m sure they’ll understand.
As early as last April, the droolingest month, did I receive by mail Jon Pineda’s Birthmark, which won the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry competition last year. That distinction leads to publication as part of the annual Series, a joint publishing venture of Southern Illinois University Press and Crab Orchard Review, one of the most highly respected literary journals in the US.
Even without having seen the rest of the competition entries, I believe it’s very safe to say that Pineda fully deserved the nod of single judge Ralph Burns. His poetry can be luminous, a word that may have gained fashionable currency in tagging a work of art or a face like Zhang Ziyi’s, but which still best describes the quiet, self-assured radiance of the 27 poems in this first collection.
The title poem alone bids fair to hallowed posterity. It is a prose poem of the first water.
"After they make love, he slides down so his face rests near her waist. The light by the bed casts its nets that turn into shadows. They both fall asleep. When he wakes, he finds a small patch of birthmarks on her thigh, runs his fingers over each island, a speck of light brown bundled with others to form an archipelago on her skin. For him, whose father is from the Philippines, it is the place he has never been, filled with hillsides of rice & fish, different dialects, a family he wants to touch, though something about it all is untouchable, like love, balanced between desire & longing, the way he reaches for her now, his hand pressed near this place that seems so foreign, so much a part of him that for a moment, he cannot help it, he feels whole."
Wholeness, in ironic part or in subtle entirety, thematically informs and infuses much of Pineda’s poetry of grace and innate, intuitive wisdom. And he is true to his words: "…something about it all is untouchable, like love…" Yes, like the tender qualifications that must render all offerings in parenthetical fashion.
"Matamis" is another signature entry: "One summer in Pensacola,/ I held an orange this way,/ flesh hiding beneath/ the texture of the rind,/ then slipped my thumbs/ into its core & folded it/ open, like a book.// When I held out the halves,/ the juice seemed to trace/ the veins in my arms/ as it dripped down to my elbows/ & darkened spots of sand./ We were sitting on the beach then,/ the sun, spheres of light within each piece./ I remember thinking, in Tagalog, the word matamis is sweet in English,/ though I did not say it for fear/ of mispronouncing the language.// Instead, I finished the fruit & offered/ nothing except my silence, & my father,/ who pried apart another piece, breaking/ the globe in two, offered me half./ Meaning everything."
These are such fine poems, so delicately crafted, as befits reliance on and translation of memory. Only 27 poems, but not a few are serial, dutifully undertaking, probing, and fathoming a gathering multitude of silences and blessings. Oh and I’m such a sucker for verses dwelling on father-son relations, or relating to bodies of water, to fish, travel in Italy, wrestling, lifeguarding, loving, starting a family… But besides this affinity glows, too, an admiration for other causes and sources: his being mestizo, his episodes of contretemps with language, languages…
Birthmark is such a fine book of poetry; it takes its rightful place in our largesse of a birthright.
Nick Carbo’s Andalusian Dawn (Cherry Grove Collections, 2004), assembles poems written on serial residency grants, but mostly those that were liltingly perfected at Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain.
Señor Carbo of El Grupo McDonald’s first-collection fame was destined to meet up with Madre España, and it turns into a classically joyous happenstance of filial spirits rousting and jousting together. Imagine the "secret Asian man" of La Mancha, himself his own Sancho Panza, cut-and-thrusting at the windmills of our imperial/colonial minds. Nick has this gift that is virtually that of a magus, too, or of all Three Magi. There is gold in his treasury of light touch and whimsy, frankincense in his sensual bliss, and myrrh in his mirthful discoveries. And he takes as well as he gives.
Hear him announce himself: "I must admit to this outright theft./ Before the crickets could impede me,// I reached outside my window/ to grab as much of Andalusia as// I could in the palm of my hand./ I took the evening’s silver// from the olive trees, the yellow slumber/ from the lemons, the recipe for gazpacho.// I made a small incision in my heart/ and slipped in as much as my left// and right ventricle could hold./ I reached for a pen and a piece of paper// to ease-out the land into this poem./ I closed the small incision in my heart// and closed the wooden shutters/ of my window." ("Robo")
Carbo has mastered the apt line, couplet, stanzaic arrangement. He beefs up sentiment with his unerring feel for form. And when the judicious observation calls for casual treatment, none but the brave of ludic heart can touch his skills. We can only applaud this virtuoso of the soft yet instructive poetic voice, as evident in "Translating Lorca in Andalusia":
"Take the word salitre and look/ under blue rocks for its true meaning./ To find la luz de la cañavera/ go to the dry riverbed towards/ nightfall and lay still for an hour./ …To see the mariposas negras, locate/ the moonless nights in a grove/ of olive trees and clap your hands."
His imagery strikes and reverberates: "I wait for the potato of tears;" "your all-night hips;" "a pomegranate tree with flowers/ dancing flamencos in red dresses…;" "…not enough shade for metonymy;" "un plato / cracked on the rim of midnight…"
Heed this ending stanza of the haunting, melodious "Mal Agueros": "If you come to Mojacar/ and a cock crows ten times at three/ in the morning, lock your door and all/ the wooden windows because nightmares in silver/ dresses will arrive to slip into your bed."
The poems are grouped into four sections: "The Evening’s Silver in Andalusia"; "Songs of Ancient Arab Andalusia"; "Tormenta Electromagnetico"; and "Directions to My Imaginary Childhood," where he turns most poignant, reeking with fictive thus fevered nostalgia, for a homeland not so lost as it is rediscovered time and again, from ethereal distance.
Again he instructs, guiding you to "the Frederick Funston fish sauce factory" and "Calle de Recuerdos" where you should ask "if Mr. Florante and Miss Laura/ are home…" There eventually "…you reach// the part that’s lined with tungsten-red/ Juan Tamad trees, on the right will be/ a house with an acknowledgments page/ and an index, open the door and enter/ this page and look me in the eye."
That eye winks, ever in the Nick of time, and timelessness..
Luis H. Francia’s Museum of Absences (co-published by Meritage Press of San Francisco, USA and UP Press) is admirably titled. For indeed it is a collection of poems about the veritable surfeit of voids felt and appraised with the keen eye and heart of an exile, one who doesn’t exactly languish in that storehouse of ironies, but surveys it with both dispassionate discernment and a passionate reckoning.
"The Manong Chronicles" fittingly starts the book, as a five-section long poem that serves up the first barrage cum catalogue of Pinoy experience abroad.
"Experience, that clever leveler, with/ Its greedy mouth, ate the walls/ One by one behind which I had hid." (from "A Manong Meditates"). The voice of the xenagogue can be halfway bitter, languid on occasion, rhetorically ingenuous in mock poses. "Where in a white world can/ This grain of unhusked rice spin?"
He identifies himself through these warranted postures. "Only pigeons coo over me/ Rats whisper in my ear.// Telling me to sing even more/ I, a St. Francis manqué/ My miracle/ Is this, that I can/ Turn blue in the face/ While remaining brown."
The poem titles are a roadmap to alienation while, still, contrapuntally fitting in, ever so prodigiously, as if to the manor of diaspora born: "Catholics Anonymous" ("…passing by this cathedral on Fifth,/ spires ready to slice the/ belly of heaven like a blue piñata and/ let all those good boys and girls/ with wings come fluttering down…"); "dogless in manhattan" ("…when we go out into/ the day’s waning to play I/ sense a lift higher as he forays in/ air like an angel after a stick thrown/ at improbable angle"); "A Request to My Landlord After a Suspicious Fire" ("…I take refuge in/ The kitchen, islanded on a black/ Ocean of burnt tile/ My meat almost cooked/ In the cooking room, finding/ Faith in a lump of dead flesh/ A knife my slender priest")…
These are tough lines, tough voices, yet they melt in compassionate observance of what the rest of the world has to offer. Thus they speak too in anguish of identification and betrayal, as in "A Man in Sarajevo Speaks Before Dying" ("Let them see how this face/ Fades as will their own/ Let the light out// Quickly/ Quickly…" or in "September 11, 2001" ("Stone and steel burst, and so did the heart.").
But perhaps the strongest summation is conducted inwards, when the expatriate Pinoy soul treads in the planet of sheer water: "In different parts of the ocean above/ You float in different parts –/ There is your left hand not knowing/ Where or what your right hand is doing/ … There is the archipelago of your torso,/ Islands of blood and sinew, red against the blue,/ Declaring their Independence of You/ You have no thoughts// Your thoughts have you/ You are not out of your body/ Your body is out of you/ Seceding into smaller republics//…" (from "A Dictionary of the Vanishing").
Not since Rimbaud assigned sovereignties to colors has a poet as effectively dwelled on such a palette of fated assignations. Francia is a fastidious marvel at collecting disparate and networked instances of emptiness, cipher-hood, vacuumed histories. He curates this museum of invisibility where we behold only the sublime poetry of truths. And oh such verities they are – of the gallery variety – lived, abandoned, relived anew, with the fresh, vigorous intensity of a pandemic patriotism.
Viva Pineda! Bravo Carbo! Animo & Fabilioh Francia!
I regret that it’s taken me this long to have gone through their respective poetry collections – which are individually distinctive and distinguished – and that now I have to lump together, in an omnibus review, my appreciation of their work. But enough of pasintabi; I’m sure they’ll understand.
As early as last April, the droolingest month, did I receive by mail Jon Pineda’s Birthmark, which won the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry competition last year. That distinction leads to publication as part of the annual Series, a joint publishing venture of Southern Illinois University Press and Crab Orchard Review, one of the most highly respected literary journals in the US.
Even without having seen the rest of the competition entries, I believe it’s very safe to say that Pineda fully deserved the nod of single judge Ralph Burns. His poetry can be luminous, a word that may have gained fashionable currency in tagging a work of art or a face like Zhang Ziyi’s, but which still best describes the quiet, self-assured radiance of the 27 poems in this first collection.
The title poem alone bids fair to hallowed posterity. It is a prose poem of the first water.
"After they make love, he slides down so his face rests near her waist. The light by the bed casts its nets that turn into shadows. They both fall asleep. When he wakes, he finds a small patch of birthmarks on her thigh, runs his fingers over each island, a speck of light brown bundled with others to form an archipelago on her skin. For him, whose father is from the Philippines, it is the place he has never been, filled with hillsides of rice & fish, different dialects, a family he wants to touch, though something about it all is untouchable, like love, balanced between desire & longing, the way he reaches for her now, his hand pressed near this place that seems so foreign, so much a part of him that for a moment, he cannot help it, he feels whole."
Wholeness, in ironic part or in subtle entirety, thematically informs and infuses much of Pineda’s poetry of grace and innate, intuitive wisdom. And he is true to his words: "…something about it all is untouchable, like love…" Yes, like the tender qualifications that must render all offerings in parenthetical fashion.
"Matamis" is another signature entry: "One summer in Pensacola,/ I held an orange this way,/ flesh hiding beneath/ the texture of the rind,/ then slipped my thumbs/ into its core & folded it/ open, like a book.// When I held out the halves,/ the juice seemed to trace/ the veins in my arms/ as it dripped down to my elbows/ & darkened spots of sand./ We were sitting on the beach then,/ the sun, spheres of light within each piece./ I remember thinking, in Tagalog, the word matamis is sweet in English,/ though I did not say it for fear/ of mispronouncing the language.// Instead, I finished the fruit & offered/ nothing except my silence, & my father,/ who pried apart another piece, breaking/ the globe in two, offered me half./ Meaning everything."
These are such fine poems, so delicately crafted, as befits reliance on and translation of memory. Only 27 poems, but not a few are serial, dutifully undertaking, probing, and fathoming a gathering multitude of silences and blessings. Oh and I’m such a sucker for verses dwelling on father-son relations, or relating to bodies of water, to fish, travel in Italy, wrestling, lifeguarding, loving, starting a family… But besides this affinity glows, too, an admiration for other causes and sources: his being mestizo, his episodes of contretemps with language, languages…
Birthmark is such a fine book of poetry; it takes its rightful place in our largesse of a birthright.
Nick Carbo’s Andalusian Dawn (Cherry Grove Collections, 2004), assembles poems written on serial residency grants, but mostly those that were liltingly perfected at Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain.
Señor Carbo of El Grupo McDonald’s first-collection fame was destined to meet up with Madre España, and it turns into a classically joyous happenstance of filial spirits rousting and jousting together. Imagine the "secret Asian man" of La Mancha, himself his own Sancho Panza, cut-and-thrusting at the windmills of our imperial/colonial minds. Nick has this gift that is virtually that of a magus, too, or of all Three Magi. There is gold in his treasury of light touch and whimsy, frankincense in his sensual bliss, and myrrh in his mirthful discoveries. And he takes as well as he gives.
Hear him announce himself: "I must admit to this outright theft./ Before the crickets could impede me,// I reached outside my window/ to grab as much of Andalusia as// I could in the palm of my hand./ I took the evening’s silver// from the olive trees, the yellow slumber/ from the lemons, the recipe for gazpacho.// I made a small incision in my heart/ and slipped in as much as my left// and right ventricle could hold./ I reached for a pen and a piece of paper// to ease-out the land into this poem./ I closed the small incision in my heart// and closed the wooden shutters/ of my window." ("Robo")
Carbo has mastered the apt line, couplet, stanzaic arrangement. He beefs up sentiment with his unerring feel for form. And when the judicious observation calls for casual treatment, none but the brave of ludic heart can touch his skills. We can only applaud this virtuoso of the soft yet instructive poetic voice, as evident in "Translating Lorca in Andalusia":
"Take the word salitre and look/ under blue rocks for its true meaning./ To find la luz de la cañavera/ go to the dry riverbed towards/ nightfall and lay still for an hour./ …To see the mariposas negras, locate/ the moonless nights in a grove/ of olive trees and clap your hands."
His imagery strikes and reverberates: "I wait for the potato of tears;" "your all-night hips;" "a pomegranate tree with flowers/ dancing flamencos in red dresses…;" "…not enough shade for metonymy;" "un plato / cracked on the rim of midnight…"
Heed this ending stanza of the haunting, melodious "Mal Agueros": "If you come to Mojacar/ and a cock crows ten times at three/ in the morning, lock your door and all/ the wooden windows because nightmares in silver/ dresses will arrive to slip into your bed."
The poems are grouped into four sections: "The Evening’s Silver in Andalusia"; "Songs of Ancient Arab Andalusia"; "Tormenta Electromagnetico"; and "Directions to My Imaginary Childhood," where he turns most poignant, reeking with fictive thus fevered nostalgia, for a homeland not so lost as it is rediscovered time and again, from ethereal distance.
Again he instructs, guiding you to "the Frederick Funston fish sauce factory" and "Calle de Recuerdos" where you should ask "if Mr. Florante and Miss Laura/ are home…" There eventually "…you reach// the part that’s lined with tungsten-red/ Juan Tamad trees, on the right will be/ a house with an acknowledgments page/ and an index, open the door and enter/ this page and look me in the eye."
That eye winks, ever in the Nick of time, and timelessness..
Luis H. Francia’s Museum of Absences (co-published by Meritage Press of San Francisco, USA and UP Press) is admirably titled. For indeed it is a collection of poems about the veritable surfeit of voids felt and appraised with the keen eye and heart of an exile, one who doesn’t exactly languish in that storehouse of ironies, but surveys it with both dispassionate discernment and a passionate reckoning.
"The Manong Chronicles" fittingly starts the book, as a five-section long poem that serves up the first barrage cum catalogue of Pinoy experience abroad.
"Experience, that clever leveler, with/ Its greedy mouth, ate the walls/ One by one behind which I had hid." (from "A Manong Meditates"). The voice of the xenagogue can be halfway bitter, languid on occasion, rhetorically ingenuous in mock poses. "Where in a white world can/ This grain of unhusked rice spin?"
He identifies himself through these warranted postures. "Only pigeons coo over me/ Rats whisper in my ear.// Telling me to sing even more/ I, a St. Francis manqué/ My miracle/ Is this, that I can/ Turn blue in the face/ While remaining brown."
The poem titles are a roadmap to alienation while, still, contrapuntally fitting in, ever so prodigiously, as if to the manor of diaspora born: "Catholics Anonymous" ("…passing by this cathedral on Fifth,/ spires ready to slice the/ belly of heaven like a blue piñata and/ let all those good boys and girls/ with wings come fluttering down…"); "dogless in manhattan" ("…when we go out into/ the day’s waning to play I/ sense a lift higher as he forays in/ air like an angel after a stick thrown/ at improbable angle"); "A Request to My Landlord After a Suspicious Fire" ("…I take refuge in/ The kitchen, islanded on a black/ Ocean of burnt tile/ My meat almost cooked/ In the cooking room, finding/ Faith in a lump of dead flesh/ A knife my slender priest")…
These are tough lines, tough voices, yet they melt in compassionate observance of what the rest of the world has to offer. Thus they speak too in anguish of identification and betrayal, as in "A Man in Sarajevo Speaks Before Dying" ("Let them see how this face/ Fades as will their own/ Let the light out// Quickly/ Quickly…" or in "September 11, 2001" ("Stone and steel burst, and so did the heart.").
But perhaps the strongest summation is conducted inwards, when the expatriate Pinoy soul treads in the planet of sheer water: "In different parts of the ocean above/ You float in different parts –/ There is your left hand not knowing/ Where or what your right hand is doing/ … There is the archipelago of your torso,/ Islands of blood and sinew, red against the blue,/ Declaring their Independence of You/ You have no thoughts// Your thoughts have you/ You are not out of your body/ Your body is out of you/ Seceding into smaller republics//…" (from "A Dictionary of the Vanishing").
Not since Rimbaud assigned sovereignties to colors has a poet as effectively dwelled on such a palette of fated assignations. Francia is a fastidious marvel at collecting disparate and networked instances of emptiness, cipher-hood, vacuumed histories. He curates this museum of invisibility where we behold only the sublime poetry of truths. And oh such verities they are – of the gallery variety – lived, abandoned, relived anew, with the fresh, vigorous intensity of a pandemic patriotism.
Viva Pineda! Bravo Carbo! Animo & Fabilioh Francia!
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