Burning down the house

This week we interview Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, who is in our opinion one of the finest poets in the country, her relative youth notwithstanding. (Don’t take our word for it; authorities such as Marge Evasco, Gémino Abad, and Krip Yuson have praised her poems for their revelations and imaginative leaps and “precise reconnaissance of emotions.”) Mookie came out with her first book, The Proxy Eros, in 2008, and she’s won numerous writing awards, and published her poetry in various journals here and abroad. Recently she launched her second collection of poetry, Burning Houses, and it is even better than the widely-praised first—more ambitious, suffused with honestly-earned eloquence, its offerings written with a surer hand.

We talked to Mookie about music, poetry, and karaoke.

YOUNG STAR: What is your earliest music-related memory?

MOOKIE KATIGBAK-LACUESTA: Making home music videos of Money Changes Everything by Cyndi Lauper, complete with a guy-meets-girl, guy-and girl-fall-in-love, girl-leaves-guy-for-moneyed-dude narrative. I’m not sure but there seems to have been a lot of Aquanet and someone was blowing powder out of a straw from behind a blanket for a kind of dry ice effect.

What is the best live musical experience you’ve ever had?

Watching Bono in leather pants in New York City, 2001. He was still more rockstar than activist then and was so much more of an electric presence onstage. (In my next life, I would love to be an anthemic U2 song—so much, well, love, going on in a stadium of thousands singing the same song about how we gotta carry each other).

What is your go-to karaoke song?

Total Eclipse of the Heart! How can you not love “Once upon a time I was falling in love/ Now I’m only falling apart./ There’s nothing I can do/ The total eclipse of the heart?” I also totally embarrassed [host] Wanggo Gallaga when my sisters and I did Rockeoke during my bachelorette party and we were so wasted, we forgot the words onstage and basically just knew the refrain. The audience had to sing with us and guide us through it. They deserved a humanitarian award that night. Of course I don’t remember any of this but I hear it’s on YouTube.

What role, if any, does music play in your writing?

I listen to a lot of music while writing and I listen to music to get into a writing mood. Mostly things by Air to kind of capture that urban vacuum vibe I like while writing (how pretentious did that just sound?). When I’m writing something sad, I listen to I’m so Glad by Cream.

Burning Houses is your second book of poetry. What do you feel has changed between your first book and this new book?

I think Burning Houses is a lot more honest, has a lot more variety, and wants to be more relevant. I’d like to think that poetry isn’t dead and that the lion’s just sleeping.

I also think it’s better than my first book craft-wise. Sorry, younger self. I know you worked so hard on that first book and got your heart broken just so you could write a good poem.

What inspires and drives your work?

Honestly? Growth and getting better as an artist. When I’m not working on a creative project, I just sit around and stare at my hands. I get terribly impatient for the next project. I don’t think I can keep still. “Onto the next,” as Jay Z says.

Which poet’s work did you first love?

The first poet I loved was Pablo Neruda—we all start out loving Pablo Neruda.

What makes a great poem?

A great poem is something that does things to you—resonates, gives you goosebumps, makes you more human if only for a minute. One of my favorite writers says that we should return to a time when we didn’t ask what art meant because we knew what it did. Great poetry and art should do things to you.

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Burning Houses is published by UST Publishing House, and is in bookstores now.