His winning poems, which appeared in Boston Review’s November/December issue, we’ve managed to peruse. Indeed, they’re far removed from the usual verbiage that weighs down otherwise creditable poetic efforts. The sole judge C.D. Wright is himself moved to write verse in praise of Gaba’s winning entry of five brief poems amounting to less than 40 lines:
"... Yet here is one affinity for story, for stories,/ present as much in their missing parts as in their suggested dramas./ One thinks of the horizon, and of music in single notes/ moving toward it. The score is improvised; so the destination/ is just beyond the horizon./ That’s why I selected these poems by Marc Gaba."
Marc’s entry included a poem titled "Three Lines," with the title itself as the first line, followed by a couplet. Then there are three different short poems, highly ideational, with the same title: "Study of Linearity." Strange boy. Strange brilliant boy.
And here we present in full the longest of his five poems, "Water Understood," which should give everyone an idea of how cerebral and emotional ellipses are achieved – in the very gaps of unique verse that seems reticent even when beholden to a rhetorical, imagined narrative.
"Can I use the word we to mean those waters we have seen// fall round in parts that keep to themselves falling/ as in rain we can// slow down, you know, in our minds each like parts of it perhaps/ you or I have watched fall, maybe, once or never, crossing:// a sea, small enough, deep enough to cross, sending and sending/ its white eyelids nowhere along with a small boat,/its one mouth traveling filled/ with letters accepting rain, the word We for them// as We have stood here for long We have not/ known joy we are dumb and can be envied our coldness we can freeze// whitely over eyes and melt without music/ till we see without music: the boat ashore with our letters/ ruined, and he// whose work was to bring them, is dead there and rotting// while we say as water that water understood, we are not words,// we are not water."
Brilliant. Why? Just take my word for it. Heh-heh. Okay, a few notes: Tone is casual, diction fresh, poem rife with seemingly unintended mystery. Ambiguity just so. Lines are shorn of neat ribbons of closure, rather rely on the reader’s own peripheral imagination to fill the blanks that are not even suggested.
Leaps of verbal faith. Yes, that is what good poetry should be. Heightened language. Yes, even when it doesn’t sound as much, while avoiding the trite and very true. Language that cues, but won’t read like cue cards.
Gaba’s poetry scores on the checklist, and then some. Moreover, his voice is silent on the starting blocks and every unseen, but strangely sensed, demarcation line. That is the strength of these poems.
Turns out that Marc Gaba’s triumph, close on the heels of Joel Toledo’s major, second-place finish worth a thousand pounds sterling in the UK’s prestigious Bridport Prize, heralded other peak moments for contemporary Philippine poetry in English.
We got wind of a quick string of three successive milestones all within the week just past. Toledo scored a curious hat trick by copping first and third prizes in the 2006 Meritage Press Holiday Poetry contest – holiday because it’s announced, by poet/anthologist/publisher Eileen Tabios from San Francisco, USA, soon after the Christmas holidays.
Joel’s winning poems are "Atonement" and "Contact" – both of which we recall he read recently at Mag:net Katips. Joel has been on a winning streak; he’s in the zone. Last year he also bagged the NCCA Writers Prize for Poetry, and gained an honorable mention in the 2005 Meritage Press Poetry Prize.
This time his fine work gained the nod of sole judge Michelle Bautista, Fil-Am poet, who selected the winning poems all the way to fourth place, with "Atonement" gaining first prize.
The winning poems will be published in Meritage Press’ online magazine next month.
Here’s an excerpt from "Atonement":
"Where they are exactly, no one knows./ It is enough that they lie somewhere,/ slicing the darkness with their sharp sounds.// Far off, in the cities, people are making do/ with light and music and wakefulness./ Here, it is not so different. Only here,// the fireflies are satisfied with their nature,/ their flickering envy of stars.... //... This is the call of both the wild/ and the human: our constant search for sources,/ answers. Then again, there is the question// of God, our natural need to be heard, forgiven,/ as these crickets – noisy but perhaps/full of prayer, perhaps already redeemed."
Then we got a send-up from the young poet Paulo Javier in NY: "Congrats are in order for Patrick Rosal, whose poem ‘The Blue Room’ was recently selected as one of the ‘Best of the Net 2006’! Check it out here: www.sundress.net/bestof/.
Patrick has authored a couple of poetry collections, both published by Persea Books: Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive which won the 2003 Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award, and My American Kundiman, a recent release he sent us a copy of, and which we should be reviewing in this space soon.
He came over for a visit late last year, chilled out in Baguio for a month in the company of fellow poet Frank Cimatu and gang, maybe did some break-dancing on Session Road. Then on his Manila stopover we arranged for him to read (more like perform) at Mag:net. He was terrific, and "The Blue Room" was one of the poems he delivered with great rapper’s energy and astute vocal handling of lines and phrases – plus nuggets of revelation! – as excellent on the auditory plane as they are on paper.
Here’s an excerpt from the long poem:
"That was the year I first smelled a girl/ on my fingers – a consensus of sweat and blood/ and bloom – the same year a skinny Polish kid and me/ turned a recess tussle into a year-long fight/ not long after I learned ‘Hotel California’ on the guitar/ and squeaked a desperate chorus to every/ freckled schoolyard chick who’d listen/ That was the first year I believed the white boys/ who bragged about all the sex they’d had It seemed/ everything by then was a race so there I was still/ crouched at puberty’s starting blocks anxious/ to sprint toward that orangutan manhood of my own...//"Sometimes I wonder what’s become of that/ strong-thighed half-French/half-Irish gymnast who let me/ for one year in the Blue Room of the public library/ slowjam and slopkiss her from neck to hip – two of us/ dodging the few beams of afternoon that lit/ the slant columns of dust our bodies unsettled until/ we emerged into the full light back/ downstairs to the other kids: her friends in one corner/ and the white boys in another waiting – hungrily – to sniff the what-was-it-like musk of my hands/ and inhale from my fingers the perfume of a future/ they swore they already knew."
Wow! Now isn’t it? Bravo, Patrick. This poem appeared in the online Boxcar Poetry Review, and was selected among the winners of the 2006 Best of the Net Anthology of Sundress Publications by Paul Guest as sole judge for poetry.
Then, hot off the Terrific News machine comes this capper: North American Review just informed Luisa A. Igloria of Norfolk, Virginia, that she’s won first place in the 2007 James Hearst Poetry Prize. It’s worth a thousand dollars, with her winning poem "Venom" to be published along with the finalists in the NAR’s "National Poetry Month" March-April issue. The sole judge was poet-essayist Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.
Now, we’ve always known that our kumadre Luisa of Baguio City has never, ever, been an also-ran in any contest she set her boozed-up sights on, heh-heh. We can’t share the full poem, but this excerpt should do:
"In every bottle of Caballeros/ triple-distilled mezcal, a scorpion// swims in a silo of liquid the color/ of caramel, of clarified dulce de leche,// the hot milk of it pressed from a mulch/ of chopped blue agave hearts, maguey azul.//... All because she’s fallen/ for the one she can’t have, she tosses// her head back and drains the little cups/ like they were poison, remembering// the sting of lime on his tongue, the bite of salt in the crevice between his finger and thumb."
Hoo-hah!
So there. Four recent Pinoy winners versus American rivals in the conduct of verses in what’s-that-language-again?
I tell you. Don’t ever doubt it.
Poetry? We rock!
We have to call on our powers of bilocation tomorrow, since another buddy, Charlson Ong the great Filipino novelist, treats to beers and single malt whisky at Conspiracy Bar, starting at 6 p.m., on the occasion of the launch of his Anvil book, Banyaga: A Song of War. Kempei!