We see much of this feature in the work of young poets, who attempt to reflect modern-day anomie, urban zeitgeist, simul stimuli and the randomness of quicksilver lives. Sometimes it works, when it’s subtly conducted, not laid too thick. There is a trick to handling delicacy of irony in non-linear impressions, expressions and narratives. More often than not, however, that sleight-of-hand poker trick proves elusive.
This is why I’ve never liked the work of Gary Snyder, the iconic poet of counter-culture America. He had fine long hair done into a pony tail; that’s all I find admirable in his personal stance. Otherwise the disjointed verse he passes off as cool, esoteric wisdom leaves me cold. Unfortunately, his work bears influence on those who think that they too can get away with poetry of disjunctions and dysfunction.
Maybe I’m relatively conservative as a poetry reader. I still go for the notion, conceit, insight, or theme around which a poem grows in solid layers, the alliances among the lines as clear-cut as betrothal. Plus technique, man, technique. Otherwise, as in much of Snyder’s poetry, and some of the quieter, para-Zen ones of Allen Ginsberg, the reader is left with too much guesswork, the toil of having to patch up the gaps and silences, leap across the great gulfs meant to suggest presumption and compliance.
In a couple of debut collections published early this year in the US, I note a carousel of such disjointedness: outer parts going around in circles, inner strengths pumping up and down the scales of critical acceptance. When it works, it can be valid as a tack. When it doesn’t, when the disjunctions are overstretched, it can only point to the preferable alternative of massaging a poem into an ideational and metaphorical conjunction.
It is not enough to be inspired to write poetry, to feel poetic, or to believe that going the way of poetry is living a life inspired. Thankfully, both Paolo Javier and Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes convince us that they can also instinctively recoil from an overdose of "concrete," disjointed poetry. I would have wished however for a more balanced offering of their talents in their first books.
I met the young poet Paolo Javier at the Filipino-run restaurant Cendrillon in Manhattan, November of 1999 if I’m not mistaken. A literary date with top-class fiction writer Lara Stapleton led to intros across other tables. The personable young man had an aunt who happened to be a blast from the past. I joined their table for a while. We have corresponded since, Paolo and I.
I am happy that he finally has his first poetry book, The Time at the End of This Writing (Ahadada Books, Tokyo/Toronto).
His long poem "Mi Ultimo Adios, ayon kay Original Brown Boy" gives us snatches of autobiographical lowdown. "To begin with, my parents – judging/ by their first names, Prim & Rose – are less of a match made/ than, I’d say, cultivated/ in Heaven.// It’s 8:25 pm &/ the name as it appears on my death certificate/ Paolo Rafael Santos Javier.// That’s PJ to you if you’re K.O., Pao to my kamag-anak in Toronto, Lu Pao if you’re Papa,/ Paowie if you’re Tita Eva, &/ always Kuya, of course/ to Eric & Patricia./ Rene – pare, if you can hear me, talaga/ pogi pricks my ears up. But if it’s you, Cacay, hollering, then/ by all means, please holla/ pangit, MB, or, even better, OBB –/ yours alone & short for the Original Brown Boy.//…"
It goes on, chatty and casual – arbitrary itals and non-itals –unveiling the authorial persona in bits and pieces of visits to foreign lands, flashbacks to the home country, inclusive of an actual address in Las Piñas. Deftly does it avoid turning into a rant, even as it’s addressed nearly tenderly to a presumed desired one, for or before whom the F word is brandished in all jauntiness. The poem slips into a passage on teeth and toothpaste: "For they used to be thoroughly cleaned after meals/ at Mr. Sushi, Cendrillon, Krystal’s & Ihawan/ That I consider Lemongrass Grill the city’s/ finest fast food restaurant ought to tell you that/ I f***ing hate carpet./…"
On the next page the lines go serpentine and splayed out, turning into a concrete display of verse. I don’t know if the poem ends here, with the staggered couplet "& if I cry into a raging sea/ let me do it from your balcony." Or whether it ends overleaf, where another couplet hangs in the middle: "Now that I have read this you will refuse to hear it/ The time now being at the end of this writing 9:30 pm" A single asterisk lies three line-spaces below. Is this the end of the poem? I can’t tell, "cuz" the facing page has three lines in a different font, boxed. And it has no title. So is that still a continuation of Mi Ultimo…?
I refer to Contents. The next page’s boxed couplet must still be part of that poem, as the next title is "Pimples of Love Swastikatin Through Inattention (after Manuel Ocampo)." And this poem carries on for 11 pages, until one reaches Part Two with its single entry: "I sculpt poems…" For 40 pages the reader goes through typographic assortments of mostly aphorisms, snatches of phrases et al. Here is where I feel the gulfs are too wide, so that the trees the paper came from may have been wantonly violated.
In fact Part Three starts this way too, until Javier shows that he can write standard stuff, not old standards like sonnets or villanelles, but modern mainstream stuff, like "The Lid to the Great Jar" – "my father believed in work/ my father caught the baby mice/ in the sun and in the rain…" Now this is a sample of the real poem, unlike the ersatz poems that resemble trendy graffiti fluttering in random fonts and sizes across otherwise empty pages.
But even there we catch some lively phrasing – "a phrase smeared by my operas" – which makes it all the more incumbent I think for this young poet to exercise that sort of strength, rather than give in easily to the demands of an attitude demonstrable only with the aid of graphic cuteness.
Gravities of Center by Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes (Arkipelago Books Publishing, San Francisco) bears a similar tendency towards pre-eminent graphic design considerations, such that the leaf-pages even have gray-scale motifs as background for the poems.
Barbara Jane I finally met earlier this year, on a Chicago street outside the hotel where a big literary conference had induced our presence. But it seemed we had known each other for so long already, through membership in an e-group, and assemblies between covers. Her poems have joined others by Fil-Am poets in at least two anthologies I’ve co-edited.
Some of her poems like "Brown Man’s Burden" and "Images of Loss" take off from impressions of other artists’ works, as Santi Bose’s and Luis Francia’s, or pay tribute to other writers, artists, filmmakers. "…Fragrance always drifts in through the open skylights. Manong, I feel you have been here before the dirt in my parents’ backyard was always so fertile.…" (from "Placemarkers – for Al Robles, and for the elders whose stories he told")
Prose poems make up the bulk of the collection. Now, this genre still stands at the crossroads of appreciation. I prefer the first poem, "Found," which is in standard verse form:
"Patron saint of santeros, of borderland curanderas/ You name me, invoking gifts of seeing past the surface.//… I have found your lifebood,/ This chamber of uncontainable beauty,/ This reservoir of smoke in a glass, garnet crystalline fire.// Slow, and certain./ Burning, to light the way back home."
But immediately Reyes goes on to tribute poems that sport epigraphs (which I often find suspect, as they only seem to suggest that the poet has read something memorable enough to quote on one’s own page) and various aphorisms, recitations, the sundry works.
The question is whether to make of a poem, in a poem, a more creative kind of junction: conjunction and not disjunction.
Much more do I appreciate such "standards" as "Typhoon": "As corrugated metal buckles under/ The pressure of so much gale wind// She pulls the children deeper into the jungle/ Beyond swaying fields of cogon grass// Deeper into thickets of papaya and bamboo/ Into the hovels of wild boar and snake/ Beneath a canopy of balete leaves/ She witnesses ancient trees uprooted// And savors raindrops large as guavas/ Which cleanse her fragile body"
"Etymology on a Mexican Holiday" reads like dictionary entries on foreign terms. "101 Words That Don’t Quite Describe Me" delivers straight-up, as a prose poem, a litanization of English and Filipino words that may apply to woman. Similarly, "Notes from a Forum on the Pilipino American Historical Context of Urban Development" simply lists jargon picked up from such a confab, the first line running thus: "gravities of center, encroachment, adaption" followed by "communities of absence, collections, edges" and so forth.
Sure, certain terminologies seduce. Which may be the be-all and end-all of even such poems as "Recipe," another prose poem, and "First Dates with Artists," a menu-like listing of imagined ingredients and situations. Oh, I like the brief prose poem "Insomnia (After Eileen Tabios’s ‘Insomnia’s Lullaby’)": "I too recall the moonlight glinting off the flautist’s nimble hands, my fixation on his delicate fingers/ I recall the taste of my own fingers stained with juice of ripe berries, the beauty I carried upon my shoulders, embraced by red velvet…." Here the lyrical snippets are offered with a controlled elusiveness, as in "Offering" and "Sirena (The Mermaid) Sings."
Then there s the primal erotic chant of a "Sonnet for My Punk Rock Boyfriend": "You, craziness and mayhem…./ You, dreaming mobsters, swinging fists, contrite./ You, tough as nails. You, tattooed devil boy.//… You, evil muse. You, reeling drunk. You, mine." Now this is strength since of appropriate "graphic" quality, melodic in its flow yet serving up a powerful junction: imagery cum metaphor.
Elsewise, there may be a tendency, in the aphoristic and concrete kind of versifying, for a perilously cutesy approach, as witness alone the kilometric titles of some poems. There is the danger of prolixity as well. But as I’ve noted earlier, these young poets can grow into more solid citizens, perchance after tiring of the appeal of liquid flashes.