tangents
(revised 5:54 am Jan 21)
Funny how I remember the things I am about to tell you in the middle of (wanting to write) a letter to an old friend, newly found.
Because I have to span the difference between me the last time me & my friend met (5 yrs?) & now how I am, & so the scene:
For quite a few weeks my favorite place in school was right behind the guardhouse: two shabby mushrooms that were next to the gate where I usually took the first of two jeeps home. Sun-leaf-shade afternoons with books, pen and paper, where the school’s perimeter wall offered more shade right before sundown. On one such afternoon I was poring over a fairly thick book about writing poetry and yes I am relishing the thought just now. Away. The mushrooms I guess are what you normally call gazebos.
So one afternoon I was scribbling away as I ploughed through the essays in Getting Real. Reading, scribbling, imagining what those current, up-and-coming poets whose works Prof. Abad was sampling looked like. Turns out I wouldn’t be disappointed, yo.
Reconstructed memory: so, that afternoon I came from another string of majorly miserable business management classes and I took my usual spot so that my favorite part of the day could begin.
Someone was sitting in the mushroom next to mine. Whichever mushroom I sit in, it is mine, or at least half of the circular table is mine, until the occasional stranger or more likely pair of strangers who happen to sit on the other side decide to leave.
A few seconds ago, he who sat in the mushroom next to mine took off a padded jacket, folding and carefully draping it over a motorbike’s handlebars. He then lifted the entire body of the motorbike, as if to put it some distance away, but then he stopped and put it back down; the dust and the patch of ungrassed dirt where he parked it were effectively the only things shifted.
He had a uniform on, like what the campus guards had in casual agency white but different, more elaborate with pockets and pleats, a slightly smarter cut too, maybe. Definitely a stiffer fabric or thoroughly starched. Probably from the other campus, I thought. Dull khaki with shirt pockets. Because he didn’t take it off, the wide diagonal slash of his sling bag’s black strap made him look less severe than what could be expected with his uniform, made him slightly daft, in fact. At any rate it didn’t look like it came with the standard uniform. I can’t remember if he was wearing glasses. He had a bony frame and he looked over fifty.
Fidgety, when he was hunched over his table, when I took a quick look over the top of my book. He was absorbed in something on his table and his left arm was furiously moving, spastic. I couldn’t see so I snuck up to a spot some distance behind. The direct aim was to see. Without being seen or rather the intent of prying into other people’s business.
Writing in lines, which made me look wider, closer. Block letters marched across a sheet of long bond paper in his rapid script. Blue ink. The first line of the page was bigger, bolder, a title. He was copying lines from another piece of paper, which he now held up at an angle with his right hand. He had a whole sheaf of papers with writing in them. Titles and lines. The pages were tucked under the brown manila envelope he was writing on. I only saw that they were written on as he tucked them back into his envelope before he got up and left.
So that afternoon I was starting out my foray into writing poems I dare not say in a language I knew well enough with a book no less and here was someone who was actually doing what I wanted to do. No. He was writing it in a tongue I did not, could not hope to wield, ever.
Here is a poem.
-Karon…
SIN-O ANG LUNOK? SIN-O ANG ANAY?
SAPNAYA ANG PALA NGA NAGAPANGHAYHAY!
Ang mga dahon sang nalaya nga pahu,
Hinali narugon, sa unos nag-ampu.
Kailo nga pala, nagapisngupisngu,
Wala na sing puy-an, nagapangasubo!
Kailo nga pala, sa langit nagtangla,
Kilat, daguob, nabatian, nakita.
Kilat kag daguob, nagapanuknaon,
Sa kalalat-an, sin-o ang balasulon?
Anay nagkadlaw, wala sia makaut-ot,
Nalaya nga pahu, ginbasul ang lunok.
Lunok nagtalangkaw, anay ginyaguta.
Nalaya nga pahu, wala sia magkuga!
-Karon…SIN-O ANG LUNOK? SIN-O ANG ANAY?
SAPNAYA ANG PALA NGA NAGAPANGHAYHAY!
– Herminio aquilisca cajilig/ upv police
Copied verbatim from a upv college of management lit folio from the Year of Our Lord 1995. Probably the only poem in that unfortunate volume. I can try and translate it but the nouns, adjectives, verbs escape me. But,<ala-rizal to his sister josephine (rizal saying things in english?!?)> there is something inside.
If anyone, any institution out there wants to give a grant to this man, sana now na. That afternoon there was nothing more I would have wanted to be but to be flush with wealth and give the man a grant. But, alas.
No strings attached, no troubling his poetics, his tradition or traditions. A grant & a book. That time I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what he was doing. I still don’t, but words from the level of the gut: he is on to something that definitely deserves more readers
I am almost sure the man I saw that one afternoon and the byline of the poem above is the same person, but this is a case where I have to trust my inferences because I never ventured into making his acquaintance. This is to say there were force-fields in my head and it is now that I can acknowledge his presence in the backroom, or that place in which I write myself. There are not that many members of the upv police writing poetry. And I distinctly remember the feeling of seeing lines being written down even as the memory barely registers now, as in strands of blue ink. It was a lucky day to have seen that kind of energy. Yis I am a die-hard Romanticem
um, workshop season na pala. toink.
Be One of the 15 Fellows of the 10th IYAS Creative Writing Workshop. This will be held on April 25-May 01, 2010 at the University of St. La Salle, Bacolod City.
• Applicants should submit original work: either 6 poems, 2 short stories, or 2 one-act plays using a pseudonym, in five (5) computer-encoded copies of entries; font size 12, bound or fastened, in separate folders, and soft copies in a CD (MSWord).
• These are to be accompanied by a sealed size 10 business envelope with the author’s real name and pseudonym, a 2×2 ID photo, and short resume, which must be mailed on or before March 12, 2010.
• Entries in Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Tagalog, or Filipino may be submitted. Fellowships are awarded by genre and by language.
• The grant covers board and lodging and a partial transportation subsidy.
PANELISTS
Prof. John Iremil Teodoro Dr. Genevieve L. Asenjo
Dr. Elsa Coscolluela Dr. Dinah Roma-Sianturi
Dr. D.M.Reyes Dr. Anthony Tan
Submit your Application to:
glofuentes2003@yahoo.com Dr. Gloria Fuentes
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
University of St. La Salle, La Salle Avenue, Bacolod City
***
Masaya ito, promise, lalo na ‘pag importante sa iyo ang creature comforts.
nothing today, just that…
I went back and added new tidbits to my 15 books post, which now runs for 3,900-plus words below. Less clunkers too this time around, I hope. If you just came aboard, whew! goody.
Jan 8th: Waddayaknow, I like editing! Myself, in particular. There’ll be another round coming, I can smell it. Note to self: must FOCUS.
new poem on scribd
Postscripts, Maguindanao Version 1.2
Scribd is Good. Scribd saves us from html nightmares.
Update, Jan 21: Postscripts, Maguindanao Jan 15 (Booklet)
Update, Feb 6: Postscripts, Maguindanao FEb 5 (Booklet)
15 Books To Change My Life
As much as possible I refrained from mentioning poetry books, else I wouldn’t be done with this list for another six months. Sorry, Martin (who tagged me on FB back in July). Happy New Year!
Remembering the books that really did it for me was a harrowing trek through memories and what-could-have-beens, but here we are. Conversely, it was an exercise in tracking down wherever it was I was coming from. If the paragraphs below sound like I’m blabbering to myself, I probably am. Will try to keep the dithering to a minimum.
1. Collier’s Junior Classics – There Is No Frigate Like A Book by Emily Dickinson – recipes for latkes and piroughki, stories of Odin and Loki, the Twilight of the Gods, The Lance of Kanana (Me@12: What a noble boy. Me@20: What a waste. He was such a clever boy and Beardless to boot. Why didn’t the Sheik save him?). Greek and a Toothbrush (which went unread until I was twelve). Tom! No answer. I used to kid myself I was never going to the Hogar House that was the dumping ground of unfortunate numbskull talentless young djinns in Mischief in Fez.
Alice in Wonderland, which I loved dearly for the Turtle Soup Song and Less-ons and the flamingoes and the baby pig. Drink Me. Anna Pavlova and the seven (eight? so says Wikipedia) years at the Imperial Ballet Academy. Sur les pointes!
I suppose this is an ample demonstration of how I didn’t have a childhood (you know, playing with playmates outdoors and all that) save for the aforementioned books. I exaggerate.
A Bumbay Man with a tree-shaded shop near Bukit Timah pressed CJC’s ten volumes (plus a couple of the books mentioned below) onto me Pa (hereafter known as FATHER). This was back when he was still sound of head, so to speak. We were walking around and there they were, 10 in a row. When Bumbay Man caught my eye and started talking to him he didn’t stand a chance.
Thanks, swarthy ever-smiling Sikh (Sikhs wear turbans, right?) bookseller whose starched and pale green shirt’s two topmost buttons were undone and have been imprinted into my memory all this time, for ruining my life. And thanks, FATHER, for the books.
I mourn their by-now sorry condition. During the years I had to subsist on Maggi day in and day out in Grandmother’s House, I would look to the bookshelves and feel a little better (“at least I have that”). For that, I believe CJC’s penchant for chapter excerpts has spoiled any potential for extended narratives I might have had.
Um… Massa, de goole bug! Wait, that was a complete story. It was Edgar Allan Poe’s!?? I think I can still remember their colors:
1 and 6 were blue
2 and 7 red
3 and 8 green
4 and 9, funny, I don’t remember,
light blue I think
and 1 and 6 were purple.
5 and 10 were brown.
# 10 for a long time was my least favorite, because of one episode involving my shy/reticient/self-abashing six-year-old self (like anything has changed. hmmm. i swing my arms freely nowadays when walking, i do) and FATHER who was bent on hearing me read aloud. Tom! No answer.
Collier’s Junior Classics taught me to use the library. I had to, if I was going to get the whole story. Swiss Family Robinson, Wind in the Willows (cue a wistful look and a sigh), the guy with the Man Friday, etc.
Now I remember where it all started (giggles).
2. David’s Secret Book of the Gnomes – I hope to visit the gnomes’ sleeping chambers sometime. Because it looks snug and comfy and hidden into a recess in a wall scented wood how awesome. When you open the book, there’s a see-through picture of David the Gnome’s house, which is my favorite spread/thing in the whole world.
I used to have all 40+ volumes except # 10 because it wasn’t in stock. Every book had a paragraph at the back that eagerly told you about the exciting things to be had in the next volume, so # 9 dug a hole in my personal mind-space-time continuum and there was little I could do but fester in it. Eleven years of wondering ended in a room near Sibalom Town Plaza, Antique, November 2006, when I tagged along with A. to see Dr. Maria Eugenia Maza Laosunthara (who left Thailand for a few weeks) open a kids’ library in her hometown. I hope the children are getting their hands on the shiny books, because the sour-faced town librarian doesn’t look like she wanted her wares touched by grubby kids. Fuck I wanted to put #10 in my bag so badly. It felt like finding a missing piece of my childhood, cliches be damned. But stealing a book in front of Dr. Maria Eugenia Maza Laosunthara didn’t seem quite possible right.
I have forgotten #10’s contents by now. That afternoon has bolstered my belief in the uncanny (co)incidence. God was sending me a sign! If you wish hard enough, it just might come true. So now I’m pulling out all the stops on the 6/49 draw, yo.
3. Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, unadulterated version – the one book I snitched from a library. The world is a dark place, I see. And full of adventure. Thanks, Mister Hans! There was this children’s magazine (Children’s D’light?) that told me how Hans lived a sad life and died heartbroken, and that a mermaid’s statue now stands (er, reclines) in Copenhagen Harbour in his honour, and that he made a lot of kids see the light, so I guess it was all worth it.
4. Norton Reader, 6th edition – maybe if I had this book with me when I was in high school I might have gotten to where I wanted to be sooner. Nope, hasn’t happened yet.
I think my first active use of simile (for Grades, that’s what) was for an essay on charter change (Ramos was keen on hanging on to Malacañang at that time). Changing the 1987 Constitution = amputating a healthy leg (clumsy, simplistic, I know). I have the book to thank for that turn of mind. I wish I kept a copy of that essay. Sir — calls my name, so I stand up and he goes, “Did somebody write this for you?” and I guess I gave my most emphatic 3-second response in class ever and with such blazing eyes, a heavy-set nod (heavy as you can at 45 lbs)! My grade in Social Studies went up by 10 points the next quarter.
I also remember pecking away at an electric typewriter and evil step-aunty (philandering FATHER’s wife number two) glowering at me for the racket I made at night. Ah, high school, afternoons smelled of detergent and dinners endless variations on chopped sayote and animal protein. Because dem evil step-aunty’s homies are from Southern Leyte & it was like all that they knew to eat & cook, & evil step-aunty would task me to get the sayote ready for chopping. You slice through the small tip of the sayote and then rub the chopped-off piece on the wound to draw out the rubbery icky sap. I detest sayote to this day. After two years of no vegetables (except for my Boddhi food trips, & atchara/garnishing is never a vegetable to me) I have reconciled with them. The vegetables, yes. Enough said on the topic of evil step-aunty.
Last year I had this bad dream of looking out the window of the apartment where I lived with evil step-aunty for four score and more years and the immediate neighborhood seemed surreally skewed, like I was suddenly on an imaginary 60th floor and I could see places far, far away. I remembered seeing the other side of the lake (Laguna de Bai)/swamps/marshes and the paltry blinking lights of far-away houses. Also in the dream – a flight of steps that was open to the outdoors & felt like the edge of a cliff & a rusty, broken-down washing machine. For some reason I had to know what I could see from the window, but the window was right beside the broken thing that scared me. And then I was afraid the glass would give way and I couldn’t figure out why there was fog and the lights seemed distant. & then I was walking on nice roads that went up and down, and I didn’t know the neighborhood or which road led home or what my home looked like but I felt better. And then I woke up. Having spilled this, I think it was all about my fear of not getting out of there, and that I was missing something big.
Um, therefore the Norton Reader is my favorite book after CJC. So much concentrated thought in one place (it was my pre-internet era). Onionskin paper. I’m partial to books with onionskin paper. Only that it wasn’t mine, so I left it when I went back to Manila (to live with evil step-aunty and FATHER, O The Damage). How noble. Although on hindsight it wasn’t like anyone else was going to read it. Lesson: when you like a book you take it.
5. A Passionate Patience. Reminds me of the bus terminal in front of Ali Mall where I would take a bus back to the old country after spending a summer in the city of my affections (I make it sound too easy). Books like A Passionate Patience were talismans to me, that summer I was laden with heavy bags and the question was: how am I going to do what I want to do?
6. Soundtrack of Il Postino – yup it’s not a book, and not one I read/heard through. A bootleg copy made from L.’s original CD, & our pub made copies to give out to our press-con delegates from the other UP campuses. For free! Next summer another school press conference in Cebu, & more bootleg copies available from the secretariat, for 120 pesos each. Booooo. This was as far as I went with Papa Pablo.
During my last few months in Iloilo, the picture of St. Therese in my room was replaced with Papa Pablo’s capped visage. For his birthday I posted his poems in three languages (because I found a Filipino translation of La Frutera in the library) to fill up our pub’s arty bulletin board that hardly anyone ever looked at. But I made sure naman to follow up that board with poems by Ka Amado V. Hernandez, so (I was a very earnest boy).
Another soundtrack I’d like to mention is Reaching Destination. N. played his CD, I think it was early August 2007, and I was shivering all day afterwards. I did not shiver with Il Postino. What am I saying?
7. Tintin – When I had to change schools (for the third time) in Grade Four that was the last I saw of Tintin. If I ever get into a bit of money, I would go Imelda any place where they sold Tintin books. Hmm, that sounds a little wrong.
We always had books around the house because Lola and Tita and her college mates who used to come visiting were all teachers. One book was all about Philippine History, with the standard three colonizers and all of that colonizing sadness. It happened that EDSA got a lot of coverage and it was like a huge dose of Happy starring Cardinal Sin and Cory and Radio Veritas and two nuns kneeling in front of tanks, etc., etc. ¡¡¡People Power!!! (Years later I and a bunch of classmates and people from the lesser other sections would be herded to the Colliseum to see Cardinal Sin and a very comprehensive dramatization of his life with Jose Marie Chan playing, er, singing as himself, but never mind). Understand that the other chapters in the book previous to EDSA were like one occupation after another.
I have no real-life memories of EDSA, except maybe one anniversary TV Mass held outdoors with crowds teeming around the platform altar. The officiating priest was holding up white pieces of holy bread shaped like triangles, circles and squares, saying it was some body part or another of someone whose name was Jesus and it terrified me (thank God my maternal grandparents are Protestant, which meant I had options, although I had a Mama Mary phase back in, whoops, I was young and impressionable, never mind but it was also a book’s fault if you care to know).
Around the time that I remembered seeing that televised mass, there was also this Lenten season commercial featuring a bloody, flogged Jesus with a high nose carrying his giant plank of a cross and then a guy sings ala Freddie Aguilar with this violin/synthesizer flourish at the end. This made me run & and cover my ears & crouch in terror under the dining table everytime.
God why do I remember these things. Where did that little boy go? These sentences are not acquainted with each other. Anyhow, nothing like traffic (cattle-car seating on the MRT!) to make you chuck away all of that warm fuzziness about EDSA. I was holding back mightily while watching the telecast of Cory’s funeral, mind.
So one time I was 9 turning 10 in a few days, and in the library I pulled out this very pretty hardbound book with glossy pages and sepia-toned photos of the Marcoses going on a trip to China and doing other important stuff, like riding government helicopters and making aerial inspections of the bucolic Philippine countryside. Sepia undertone saturating the page. Very documentary. Big Ate in a high school uniform caught me leafing through it.
We knew each other because we were classmates in reading class (J-1 going on J-2, I was a notch higher than Big Ate who was in junior year), so I was kind of embarrassed to be seen with the book.
– So let me tell you that I was head of our school’s booklover’s club (for Grades 1- 6) when I was 10, because the original president got suspended or something. Which on hindsight was a fucked up thing, because all I remember of what we did was clean the library for a few hours every week. This went on for a few weeks, me the proud ticker. And that one weekend that all school club officers gathered in a farm/retreat house in Oton. We played games, ate meals and did other shit (like I crossed a bamboo pole bridge and saw live ducks and – bathed?communally? for the first time) and then we were told that the essence of leadership was Love, and we went on our merry way. The midnight highlight of the last evening was a bonfire in the middle of our giant retreat hut (we put down our sleepsacks on the bamboo windowsills), in which we were to write on little bits of paper the things in our life we were willing to let go of (Catholicized De-cording Exercise, Do It For Jesus!), and a boy named Dominador cups his hands to my ear and says “I wrote down God. Don’t tell anyone. Is that okay?”
What was I supposed to say? I was ten and very horny and wracked by guilt and denial the whole time. For the record, I wrote down my father and my mother, and my brothers for good measure. I fed their names to the fire!!! Don’t tell anyone.
– Anyway, Ate said I was a Marcos Lover, and I was horrified. Not that my communication skills went beyond a moment’s head-shaking and what I hoped was a very communicative grimace.
Now the memories are coming in I need a break must de-cord from that sanctimonious, know-it-all, utterly naif boy I was at ten,
twelve,
sixteen? winowinowinowinowinowino.
De-cording is Release!!!!!
I just want Tintin to be proud of me.
8. Hans, or the Silver Skates. Amsterdam, where I want to be. Nowadays Iceland is a close second, because I feel a need for empty landscapes. London too, because that’s where you board flights to Iceland. Don’t tell anyone.
9. Medical Encyclopedia. Another four volumes from the book salesman, where I read about the Heimlich maneuovre (not recommended these days, says Das Internets), w/c helped me save my lola’s life + extend her slow shrivelling suffering for, uh, a year and a half. Long story. My favorite part was: the caloric table? Because so help me God I wanted to gain weight (nothing ever happened ever, unfortunately). The pretty pictures of poison mushrooms? I don’t know. Cover to cover.
10. Asiaweek, business magazines, etc – bear mentioning, because I did spend (wasted) long hours of my life reading drivel. Hmm. Note to FATHER: making your children read business magazines won’t make them entrepreneurial, and isn’t that nurturing in toto. But I took what escapism I could get. Alas, they may have done permanent damage to my prose style. And they are to blame for my utter boredom/despair in college (because FATHER said I should take a course in management). I could have been reading, um, Barthes in high school! Why, Lord, why?
Asiaweek. Since I was a little boy I’ve always been conscious of the market capitalization pie charts at the back of every AW issue, the fact that the little circle that was the Philippines was more than equaled by little S’pore’s and the USA’s was the size of Jupiter. I miss that mag. I used to talk to the-God-in-my-mind why I had to be born here. After going through stuff and hundreds of bus rides I know now it isn’t, was never just that little circle at the back of the magazine. I get flashbacks sometimes. I miss that mag.
11. Homelife – for me, the original poetry magazine. One glaring omission of the old Likhaan series (when they were supposed to look at everything published in that year when they were selecting, um, Period Piece makes me wary of continuing my sentence – whatever dem editors wanted to publish). I won’t say it mangled my poetry. In truth and in fact, I got my first lesson in poetics from HL. Baby Steps!
12. A sampler of Philippine/ English/American Lit – random book found at home, er, lola’s house (such are the piddling concerns of people with no permanent address and immense issues with roots). My bookmarks used to be empty wrappers of Nips and peso packs of sweet corn, w/c I pilfered one at a time from our little sari-sari store. On our short street there were four, and when you turn the corner to an even shorter street there’s two more. I used the book as camouflage for my snack stash on more than one occasion. We had good times, that ratty book.
The book was missing its front cover, which is sad, but I think I saw a relatively pristine copy when I was picking through the books in Miag-ao. My life in college sucked hard because nearly all the good books were a good hour and a half away from my campus. Gaah.
Later, I would learn that UPV’s first chancellor was one of the editors. Dr. Dionisia Rola, whose name I mention in the hopes that I can someday track down the book online and, yup, get a copy.
Bobo the Chinese pig-eater, discoverer of cooking. Oscar de Zuñiga and his weltschmerz-y Hiroshima poem. How your manong brought home a wife, and how come your brother’s rooster laid an egg. A mid-day train ride through Bulacan, drenched in Cusp-of-The-Pacific-War Local Color. Churchill’s three retakes of English class, which were devoted to parsing the intricacies of the English Sentence. Oooh wonderful. What can I say? Here are my roots, Philippine Literature Im Anglische.
13. Gorky Park. Xmas Raffle, Library Club, high school. I thought I was getting something Russian, therefore Deep. Anyway, it was a good read! I haven’t forgotten the image of unspecified furry animals bolting their cages on the last page. I could have been reading Nick Joaquin instead, no? Stoopid high school. Sheba, Sheba, open your eyes! The apes have defiled the ivory temple. Our library had two long shelves of Sweet Valley High next to the door. It’s nice to see how National Book Store’s shelving makes it a face-off between the Tagalog Romance Nobols on one side and products from Anvil, Milflores and the university presses on the other. I think I’m trying to go empirical here but never mind.
14. Likhaan Series – I’m convinced it was a mix-up that they ended up in the city campus library. I mean the wonderful literate literature people, all two dozen of them (I’m guessing at their numbers), were living it up in Miag-ao. So I had a phase in which I blew my allowance on photocopying dem books because I had to Read Them All, and then pub-mates/pips borrowed them and never gave them back. Remembering this makes me mad, sigh. I loved that story of the English teacher who died at Christmas (because of the beeyutipool caroling). And the Santa Claus poem. And Eyoter! Good Husbands and Obedient Wives. Stake-out. Allow me to abort this train of thought before I spew out another 600 words of Nada.
Now that I remember, I’d like to cite Prof. Alice Tan-Gonzales’ handouts in Humanities One. Puff the Magic Dragon, Anabelle Lee, poems by her, Alex de los Santos and Ms. Geremia-Lachica, Ma’am Bevs, A Clean and Well-Lighted Place (Nada), The Secret Miracle (now that I’ve googled it I go – Borges?!? I didn’t know he wrote it, yey!), Hello Darkness My Old Friend, How Do You Keep The Music Playing, and Yevgeny Yetuvschenko’s Colors. In which I felt left out as the rest of the class was translating the poem line by line into Hiligaynon. In which my response was to read all I could of the language and then Kinaray-a because of [-personal reasons-] and a bit of Akeanon for the next four years. Anyway….
I owe a lot to Prof. Alice Tan-Gonzales. Because I skipped class too many times, I had to promise her a ten-page paper on Without Seeing the Dawn or Things Fall Apart to clear up my INC at the end of the second term. She made the offer after I broke down and wheezed and cried (because she was standing in the way of my Flight to Diliman, which never came to pass, ahay). Because I wanted it to be more than just a reaction paper, I read up a storm and ended up doing nothing about the papers. Summer passed and I read State of War, thinking if I wrote about it as well it would make up for the delay.
It’s all good now because I retook the same class and it happened to be under Dr. Leo. Lolo Deriada gives out lollipops on the first day of class and one day I shall build up the courage to mail him a couple of poems. I guess.
15. Let me round this off with my 2009 Top 15: Pinoy Poetics, John Ashbery’s works from 1956-1987 (thanks, P., and yes it’s utterly out there), You Are/ Here. Elsewhere Held and Lingered. Highest Hiding Place, Proxy Eros. Must get to SM Megamall because that’s where I saw a copy of Bino Realuyo’s book, which freaking won the National Book Award. The Long Lost Startle. Vocalese. Sitting Amok 2006. Crowns and Oranges. El Bimbo Variations. Free Press all the way, except for the August issues that I missed and the weeks that didn’t interest me. Online is where I find most of the action these days. In Praise Of Shadows, which I borrowed for a few days from my boss. Crow by Ted Hughes from a Bookay-Bookay sale (I read it because it’s OLD and I’m young and it’s all FRESH to me). And At Home in Unhomeliness, the monograph. It’s quite marvelous. I dwell on the marvelous use of the word marvelous on page 37. I feel so much better now with this list.
Yellow
.
.
the curb, yellow rooftops, t-shirts a dusty shade of yellow, the day
.
of yellow, piston springs of motorcycles, yellow pause,
yellow lights on the road. yellow bells and trellises.
yellow in their sunday best. yellow watching, treading
the edge of flooded ricefields. yellow rising up the escalator,
out of the mrt. yellow afternoon. yellow neon glow.
yellow as a new coin, as the high point of morning. yellow as bread as corn.
.
.
yellow as a banner, yellow the drowned swirl of unthreshed rice.
yellow as a pencil. sunflower yellow, canisters of cooking oil, background of posters.
yellow as sulphurous earth. yellow blazing. yellow like a government backhoe.
.
.
amarillo. yellow as old paper. yellow umbrella. yellow as you are.
yellow as the moon. yellow on the striped curb. if not you, then a yellow beetle.
dec 19 2009. plate number bab 453 on aguinaldo st. yellow as butterflies
of jerky flight lines, the tops of tall grass also a far shade of yellow.
in all acceptable shades of yellow. yellow as you are.
in ribbon after yellow ribbon.
.
.
Full disclosure: I got the catalogue assembly above rolling sometime in November, and then I saw a recent issue of Heights, which features a similar-ish project done by Sir Larry. Altogether it wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but it did stop me cold for a couple of weeks. (Nothing in that statement, just a baring of facts/events. Hee.) The subject is too good to pass up, though, so now I hope I’m doing my own take.
(updated at 9:54 p.m january 2 )
ted berrigan
“But it is only here you can turn around 360 degrees and everything is clear from here at the center to every point along the circular horizon.”
the last part goes:
Bleakly, cultivate compassion. Whitman’s walk unchanged, after its own fashion.
