Poetry for the holidays

A couple of fine poems appealed to me of late. Plus a scintillating essay on the craft of poetry. All were received by e-mail.

The first poem was sent by a good old buddy, film director Butch Perez, with whom I sometimes engage in cross-texting through certain cantos of thrilling NBA games we both happen to be watching on TV. The only other fellow I do that with is Dumaguete’s Sawi Aquino, whose new book threatens to join bookstore shelves in time for Christmas.

Anyway, here’s that first poem, titled "Old Men Playing Basketball" by B.H. Fairchild, from The Art of the Lathe: Poems (Alice James Books), as lifted from www.nortonpoets.

"The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language/ of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot/ slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love/ again with the pure geometry of curves,// rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away./ On the boards their hands and fingertips/ tremble in tense little prayers of reach/ and balance. Then, the grind of bone// and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,/ the grunt of the body laboring to give/ birth to itself. In their toiling and grand/ sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love// to their wives, kissing the undersides/ of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe/ of desire? And on the long walk home/ from the VFW, do they still sing// to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock/ moving, the one in army fatigues/ and house shoes says to himself, pick and roll,/ and the phrase sounds musical as ever,// radio crooning songs of love after the game,/ the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat/ as her raven hair flames in the shuddering/ light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,// gliding toward the net. A glass wand/ of autumn light breaks over the backboard./ Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout/ at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air."

Wonderful. I just love sports poetry. Except that the only poem I recall from bygone days is "Casey at the Bat," which was a humdinger of a recitation poem early in high school.

I’ve tried my hand at it myself. I have four poems thus far on sports: "Mismatch" (which briefly recounts how the Harlem Globetrotters used to make mincemeat of our Philippine team way back in the ’50s; "Ali in ’72, ’75, ’76" (on the classic exploits of Muhammad Ali); "Larry Bird Smells the Flowers" (on Dream Team ’92 taking the gold-medal winners’ stand in Barcelona); and "No More Jordan" (on MJ’s second retirement). The last was temporarily given the lie by His Airness when he tried to turn into a Wizard. For a while there I considered writing a follow-up poem on that nth return, but thought better of it.

As you can see, I’m partial to the dash-and-dribble game, so that three of the four sports poems I’ve written dwell on it. That’s why Direk Perez was sure I’d pick up positively on "Old Men Playing Basketball."

But I’ll tell you what else is good and appealing about Mr. Fairchild’s poem.

One: he’s not afraid to render a poem in quatrains. Two: It’s also rife with images: concrete, graphic appropriate. Three: Contour-wise, he feints, then drives, then glides, and winds up elliptically exultant through the rhetorical posers: "… do they still make love… do they still sing…"

And after the flashback to young romance scene-set with that retro "radio crooning songs of love after the game" —- we have the superb last stanza, jumping back to the present, with the final two lines providing tentative, poignant closure: "Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout/ at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air."

Ah, lovely. If only all our days and weeks spelled a holiday season, how welcome it would be just to lie back and read up on all the poetry we’ve missed, from books, hardcopy sheets, Word files in our laptops… Nothing like the holidays to brush up on and re-ignite the old flame/s.

The second poem I received from poet-painter Lise Weidner, who just got back from abroad. Writing in appreciation of last month’s "Bellagio Suite" columns, Lise mentions how "Your description of the ‘Direction and Distance: Defining the Historical Dimensions’ work made me think of a poem by James Tate from his collection Lost River, which I came across in New York…" Here’s the poem, titled "Being Present at More than One Place at a Time."

"I took a step and looked around. No one/ was looking, so I took another step. I glanced/ at the ground, looked up at the sky. Everything/ seemed to be in order, so I took another step,/ this one almost a hop. A woman walks up to me/ and says, ‘That was cute.’ ‘Thanks,’ I say,/ ‘watch this,’ and I leap high into the air./ ‘That’s overdoing things,’ she says. I hang/ my head, ashamed of myself. I stand there for/ half-an-hour, not moving, barely breathing./ A cop comes up and says, ‘You are loitering.’/ ‘I’m not loitering,’ I say, ‘I’m repositioning/ myself. I’m adjusting to the currents.’ ‘My mistake,’ he says. ‘You had the appearance/ of a loiterer.’ ‘It’s the fog,’ I said./ When he was gone, I took a step and looked/ around. I could see a vast, golden city on/ the horizon. No, it’s only the fog, I thought,/ and jumped backward, surprising myself."

The poetry of motion, one might say. It’s an excellent poem. So succinctly does Mr. Tate take us through the gamesmanship and adventure of self, as the "I" persona conducts motion studies in a metaphorical parallelism with mundane activity and dialogue. We follow the imagery, the subtle action, and we too are surprised over yet another quotidian revelation.

The feat of bilocation is only in the mind. Or spirit. And that recognition, too, lends itself perfectly for poetry.

Last Monday, at a fun dinner and sing-along at writer/editor/painter Erlinda Panlilio’s residence on the eve of the launch of her new Comfort Food anthology from Anvil, house guest Edith L. Tiempo, National Artist for Literature and "Mom" to everyone, spoke about her current writing project. From what I gathered, it’s a series of critical essays on "rendering the symbol."

She intimated how she had chosen eight short stories, including one by her late husband Edilberto and one of mine ("Voice in the Hills"), to elucidate on the conscious or inadvertent "rendering" of varieties of symbolism she has identified.

I look forward to the collection, which UP Press Director Jing Hidalgo managed to get a lock on. It’ll be completed early next year. We should all keen in anticipation for any manifestation of Mom Edith’s equal-time expertise on prose and poetry.

In her cogent remarks at the launch the next day, she recounted how, upon being introduced decades ago by Nick Joaquin to Jose Garcia Villa, the latter had characteristically offered this "backhanded compliment": "Ah, Edith. You know, the trouble with your poetry is that you know exactly what you’re doing."

Doveglion had a point, as all of us manage to put across whenever we indulge in poetics. Then too, there’s something to be said about knowing "exactly" where a poem we write should take us, given veteran smarts on all sorts of poems vintage and contemporary.

Other bounty came last week as modest parallel universes of communication, via snail-mail and e-mail. San Francisco-based poet Angela Narciso Torres forwarded a card from the splendid American poet Jane Hirshfield, whose works I’ve been taking up in class. It was in appreciation for a book of mine I had sent her through Angela. No, I won’t share what Ms. Hirshfield wrote in the card. Certain prized sentiments we ought to keep private; something about selfish gratification triples its choice intensity, yeah.

What I can share are excerpts from a recent essay by Ms. Hirshfield, this time forwarded by Angela through e-mail. The long, entirely excellent essay, titled "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander Toward Writing," appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and was reproduced by Poetry Daily in the Amazon.com website. That’s where you can acquire the full essay.

Here are sampler parts for the meandering start of the holiday season, something you can mull over while making your way to the first edition of the nine-day series of Misa de Gallo starting at dawn tomorrow.

"Language wakes up in the morning. It has not yet washed its face, brushed its teeth, combed its hair. It does not remember whether or not, in the night, any dreams came. The light is the plain light of day, indirect – the window faces north – but strong enough to see by nonetheless.

"Language goes to the tall mirror on one wall and stands before it, wearing no makeup, no slippers, no clothes. In the same circumstances, we might see first our two eyes looking back at their own inquiry, or else, perhaps, glance down to the two legs on which vision stands. What language sees is also two-fold, what it sees is this – the two foundation powers: image and statement. The first the wordless outer world and all its intricate treasure moving inward, into the self’s interior realm, and the second something humanly made and moving outward: the answering mind and its multiform workings, traveling back into the world. All that is sayable begins with these two modes of attention, and their prolific offspring. Begins, that is, with the received givens of bodily existence and the created, creative responses we offer the world in return.

"Image: the word comes from the Latin imago, a picture or likeness. An image is not the primary world, though it comes to us from that source. It is the name we call the world by once it has made the journey into the mind. From there, it may remain in the interior storehouse of imagination, or it may travel back into the outer by taking the form of paint or stone or word. Some images enter the mind by touch, others are heard or seen; some are simple, others complex.

"Here is a simple image: a small fish hovers in a creek, its body exactly the color and variegation of the algae-draped rocks below it. For an instant, the onlooker rests in only that. But it is not the mind’s nature to stop with what it first sees. The mind goes on to notice that in its streaked camouflage mottling, the fish – it is a young trout – appears to be itself a rock, but a rock drifting somehow, and a little transparent. It appears to be what a rock would be if a rock could dream itself alive. Then perhaps comes the memory of having seen this before.

"…As a horse crops grass or a pear tree makes pears, we make statements. They come in different forms – some are propositions, some are suppositions, some are narratives; some are similes, recipes, questions. All are ways we cross more fully into being, plunge the containment of the inner life into engagement with the scouring, altering outer. Looked at from its own verbal history, a statement is how we declare our place in the world. The Indo-European root leads back to "stand" – to holding oneself upright on the ear.

"…Time’s resistance, transformation, and remembrance form a large part of the deep pleasure a good poem contains. And there is, always, pleasure, sometimes delicate and subterranean, sometimes a large-ribbed exulting…"

Hirshfield takes up a poem each by Swedish poet-novelist Lars Gustafsson and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, and quotes lines from Keats, Robert Herrick, Louise Gluck, Kafka, D.H. Lawerence, Rilke and Yeats. She cites other poets and writers, as in:

"If we are, however, to taste the full range of what is given art to carry, we will revel also in the works of partisan, partial genius: in Larkin’s acerbic eye, Plath’s rage, James Wright’s or Neruda’s harangues as well as their more broad-hearted lyrics – all the flavors and scents of the human, emanating from within as well as observed from without."

Then: "… In poetry’s rages and griefs, as in its most limerick laughter, art sinks its roots in the aquifer of pleasure. Kay Ryan has spoken of it as a kind of hilarity that lives within even the most serious of poems – it is her term I use here, remembering the ‘giggling aquifer’ she describes as running through all good poems. The rustling fabric of Herrick’s consonants and vowels, the muscular wit not only of Gluck’s mind but of her music, can be recognized as fine hair roots, the means by which a pure language-joy is taken in. This steady undercurrent of joy is the elixir by which good art revives us, watering the dry regions of more straightforward thought, more straightforward seeing and hearing."

And here is how Jane Hirshfield, author of the poetry books Given Sugar, Given Salt; The Lives of the Heart; and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, ends her fine essay:

"To participate in the creative renewal of the world is as close as we may come to touching the cloth of existence’s original daybreak – in that moment, the artist is neither human nor god, neither perishable nor lasting, neither good nor bad. In that moment, when language has fully awakened and taken its seat in the full light of morning and begun the tentative exploration or sure-tongued outpour, the artist is not even himself, not even herself. The artist and language and the page are given over to one thing alone – or rather, into no separable thing at all: they have surrendered the condition of noun to become purely verb. They are working.

"And this working, the creative act of a whole and undivided heart, is the one true appetite of the writer’s tongue and mind and heart, with us as long as the trout swims in the streambed while above it, slightly shadowing the surface, floats the faintest, curious glimmer of the watching human face."

Earlier I mentioned a literary guru’s forthcoming book. Well, there’s late word that Chessmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader, is due out on December 21, the day of the winter solstice, from Midland Press in Davao City. The cover looks good, too, as you should see on this page. For direct orders, try contacting Ian Casocot, who designed the book, at sands_coral@hotmail.com

It compiles Aquino’s fiction, poetry and essays. As a poet he’s delicate, loony and goofy, in that order, and for which these exquisite blurbs from the Magi hardly miss the mark:

"César Ruiz Aquino’s almost uncanny feel and handling of language has produced exciting pieces, from his luminous poetry to his sonorous writerly prose." —- Ophelia Dimalanta

"By turns rueful lover, gentle cynic, overgrown and sorrowful Werther, and fatalist, Aquino is no trailing string from the Romantic school but very much a poet of our time." – Edith L. Tiempo

"…The reason his poems are not as better known as his prose could be that they are written undroopingly in the raw, with a fierce directness of lyrical eye and ear. There is some verbal baiting, but the meaning always lies in clear proximity to the trawl and thaw of words. His breakthrough poem ‘Eyoter’ is a comic Valentine with a twist, literally head over heels." – Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez

Lastly, here’s helping our buddy Eileen Tabios of Meritage Press in San Francisco with an important holiday announcement for Filipino/a poets. You are all invited to submit to a fun poetry contest, the Third Holiday Poetry Contest, sponsored by Meritage Press and the NPA (New Poets Army).

E-mail no more than two poems to MeritagePress@aol.com. Please include your full name along with your e-mail address. However, the poems will be sent without your names to judge Patrick Rosal, thereby allowing the poems to be read on their own merit.

"There are no limitations to poetry styles or content. All types of poems are welcome. We are now taking submissions up to the deadline of Dec. 31. Only previously unpublished poems are eligible. You may, however, submit poems that you have featured on your own web sites or blogs, or that have been published in limited edition chapbooks of no more than 250 copies.

"Meritage Press has asked Patrick Rosal to choose one winner. However, Patrick may choose other finalist-winners, depending on the quality of the submissions. The winner(s) will have their poems published in the February 2004 edition of "Babaylan Speaks" at http://meritagepress.com/babaylan.htm. (They will also receive various book prizes.)

"Patrick Rosal is the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books) and the chapbook Uncommon Denominators, winner of the Palanquin Poetry Series Award. He was the 2001 Emerging Writer in Residence at Penn State and is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bloomfield College."

And, may I add, a terrific young poet.