Paolo Javier presents the Foreword to
dust of a contact that is everywhere by Raymond De Borja
(Fonograf Editions, 2026)
I write this introduction with deep alarm at how Philippine-U.S. imperialist history continues to bear down on the U.S. American present, and I write in grief over my father’s passing this July in Canada, where my mother, my brother and his fiancée, my sister, and her family still live. I grew up under Martial Law in Manila, when censors monitored speech and Ferdinand Marcos Sr’s regime silenced journalists, artists, writers, and activists through imprisonment, torture, and killing. My family sheltered dissidents in our home before joining the EDSA revolution of 1986 that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship. My childhood taught me to see poetry as fragile yet defiant—reminding me that language can wound as easily as it can shelter, that it can serve tyranny and repression but also sustain survival.
This lesson—that poetry could live in tension—followed me into adulthood. But in the world of letters it resurfaced in another form early in my journey as an author: rejection. Twenty years ago, when my first book of poems, the time at the end of this writing, appeared in the U.S. and Canada, a Manila newspaper columnist dismissed it. This prominent poet with connections to the Flip writing community in New York mocked my debut’s experimentalism while praising the more conventional collection of an older FilAm poet born and raised in the U.S. Dismayed by this conservative gatekeeping, I withdrew from conversations with Philippines-based writers, convinced there was little space for the poetry I most valued.
If Manila’s gatekeeping once convinced me there was no room for such work, Raymond de Borja’s new book arrives as its counterpoint—a sign that another path has always been possible. This is why the dust of a contact that is everywhere feels reparative. Where my poetics were forged in confrontation, de Borja offers another mode: slower, quieter, but no less political in its careful regard. His radicalism lies in close reading akin to devotion, treating the fragment, the collage, and the gesture as ways of building solidarity with writers and artists across time and place. Encountering this work in 2025, and being invited by Fonograf Editions to write alongside it, eases the sting of my earlier rejection and renews my optimism for experimental literature in the Motherland—evidence that it flourishes despite institutional conservatism.
De Borja does not frame his project as conventional criticism but as an ars poetica of kinship. He explains: “Two independent clauses that echo recurring aspects in my work – 1.) A preference for correspondences of things over connections of things, which I practice in collage work, and 2.) Correspondence, as in the correspondence between or among people engaged in various conversations.” For him, the fragment is not unfinished but a gesture of relation, a way of keeping company with texts and lives. Lisa Robertson’s reminder clarifies this: “Reading shares this necessarily unsanctioned intimacy… I have the strong sense that reading chooses me, as have my friendships.” De Borja’s writing embodies this same intimacy—less about closure than about keeping voices alive in dialogue.
His influences stretch across continents and disciplines, assembling unexpected correspondences. Philosophers Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Karl Marx, and Benedict Anderson appear beside poets such as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, Kurt Schwitters, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Lisa Robertson. He engages conceptual artists Simon Hantaï and On Kawara, composer Toru Takemitsu, and Filipino contemporaries Marc Gaba and Allan Balisi, while translating Allan Popa’s Tagalog poems. Reading such a who’s who of 20th century avant garde figures, I can’t help but think of José Garcia Villa, whose daring formal inventions made him central to U.S. American modernism, and David Medalla, whose Signalsgallery and magazine connected experimental artists across London in the 1960s. Perhaps their absence from de Borja’s book underscores his aim: not to establish a canon but to assemble a personal archive of resonances. Unlike Villa, whose brilliance carried a prescriptive edge, de Borja cultivates openness, allowing a poetics to emerge through relation rather than decree.
At his most focused, de Borja turns to poets and artists as partners in dialogue, voices that illuminate new pathways. Celan’s Meridian is one touchstone: “The poem is lonely. It is lonely and underway… The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks out, speaks toward it.” In his meditation on Allan Popa’s Kasaysayan, translation becomes encounter, one that steps into history through close attention and utterance: “‘Kasaysayan,’ which directly translates to history, has in it the word ‘saysay’ which can mean any of ‘value,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘statement’… For today, I choose to translate it as utterance.”
This attention extends to his reflections on Marc Gaba’s Mondrian-inspired paintings, where abstraction resists rigidity and breathes as dialogue with the viewer. Like de Borja, Gaba is both poet and artist; de Borja writes about his friend not from critical distance but in adjacency, where looking, writing, and pakikisama converge.
De Borja’s prose also absorbs the strategies of writers he esteems, reshaping them into his own style of inquiry. From Lyn Hejinian—my mentor, friend, publisher and north star—he carries forward the new sentence, where thought unfolds by digression and return. In Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, he finds a syntax that slows perception into meditation. With Lisa Robertson, abstraction sharpens into sudden intimacy, clarity edged with eros. De Borja transforms these approaches into an idiom wherein collage, journaling, and translation become a means of companionship across time and place.
This book arrives at a charged political moment. Published in the U.S. by Fonograf Editions—de Borja’s first American release—it signals a growing recognition of avant-garde literature from the Philippines, especially following Glossolalia, Marlon Hacla’s acclaimed 2023 book of surrealist prose from Ugly Duckling Presse. Meanwhile progressive dissent in the United States remains under attack, fueled by MAGA and Project 2025. Reproductive rights and gender-affirming care are curtailed, books vanish from classrooms, universities dismantle programs, artists face censorship for naming the state’s violences, and migrants endure scapegoating. Legal immigrants and U.S. citizens of color face intensifying hostility. The Democratic Party fractures as it accepts money from organizations complicit in genocide while performing hollow rebukes against fascism. Such duplicity leaves progressive artists and cultural workers stranded between repression from the right and betrayal from the supposed left. The poetry world clings to prizes and the MFA circuit, while its non-profits fire organizers and remain silent about anti-AAPI hate and the genocide of West Asians in Gaza. Against this backdrop, de Borja’s book matters to me all the more: it offers a model of relation and of pause, a way to resist not only the demand for legibility and certainty but also the relentless drive for productivity under late capitalism. In this pause, I seek strength—an interval for rest and reflection that restores my attention to deep reading, and steadies me to respond to our collapsing empire with greater clarity of purpose as a poet.
De Borja also belongs to a broader current of resistance in Pilipino experimental practice. Emmanuel Lacaba carried Rimbaud’s dictum that the poet must be “absolutely modern” into the struggle against Martial Law, wielding art as a weapon against tyranny before Marcos’s military captured and killed him in 1976. José Garcia Villa recalibrated poetry in English with comma poems and reversed consonance, even as his severe pronouncements closed down dialogue. David Medalla staged participatory avant-garde interventions that turned anti-Marcos propaganda into art. Pacita Abad transformed exile into bold textile canvases confronting dictatorship and displacement. With But for the Lovers, Wilfredo Nolledo rebuked Hollywood’s WWII Pacific island fantasies, instead inventing a distinctly Pilipino surrealism to depict Manila under the waning shadow of Japanese imperialism. De Borja’s poetics belong to this lineage, though it moves differently—anchored in duration: meditative, sustained through dialogue, and marked by vigilance that refuses disappearance.
My father’s clarity in the face of authoritarianism sharpens how I read de Borja’s work: modest yet unyielding, and a reminder that steady attention itself can be a form of defiance. The son of parents from Ilocos Sur—Marcos Sr’s own province—Prim Javier, Jr stood resolute against dictatorship. As treasurer of a U.S. company, Papa refused bribes again and again, including those from Marcos Sr’s cronies—choices that placed him at real personal and professional risk. As the husband of a University of the Philippines graduate, he supported my mother’s activism and joined her when our family entered the People Power revolution. Papa remained anti-Trump and anti-MAGA. He teaches me that refusal itself can be resistance, a lesson that returns in de Borja’s book, where gestures of care endure against empire’s demands and the market’s lures alike.
With de Borja and Hacla’s work now reaching U.S. readers, experimental literature from the Philippines enters a wider conversation, speaking alongside contemporary diasporic Pilipino (North) American avant-garde poets—Jessica Hagedorn, Catalina Cariaga, R. Zamora Linmark, Veronica Corpus, Barbara Jane Reyes, Eileen Tabios, Mg Roberts, Fonograf Edition’s own Kimberly Alidio and Charles Valle, Jason Magabo Perez, Sean Labrador, Dennis Somera, Feliz Molina, Celine Shimizu, Shaheen Qureshi, and myself—and visual artists—Josh Kline, Stephanie Syjuco, Mikko Revereza, Christopher Baliwas, Jaret Vadera, Emmy Catedral, and Stephanie Comilang—together sustaining a dialogue that unsettles and dismantles the master’s tongue. As my kababayan in Manila gather this week at EDSA for the Trillion Peso March against the corruption of Bong Bong Marcos Jr’s government and the excesses of oligarchs, the link between Papa’s generation and the present moment sharpens. Drawing strength from de Borja’s example, I see in his poetics a commitment to resurgence: that in our diffusion, in our cross-border correspondences, in our stubborn departures from the expected, Pilipino experimental literature and art gather force like dust—luminous in spread, eluding enclosure, and persisting to imagine futures empire cannot contain.
—PAOLO JAVIER, September 2025, New York City
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Paolo Javier (from Poetry Foundation bio) was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, New York; Cairo, Egypt; and Vancouver, British Columbia. He earned his BFA from the University of British Columbia, working as a freelance journalist and running an experimental theater company before returning to New York City, where he still lives with his family. He earned an MFA and MAT from Bard College. Javier’s collections of poetry include The Feeling Is Actual (2011); 60 lv bo(e)mbs (2005); the time at the end of this writing (2004), recipient of a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award; and Court of the Dragon (2015), which Publisher’s Weekly called “a linguistic time machine.”
Javier has most recently collaborated with Listening Center (David Mason); their work appeared as a limited edition book/cassette Ur'lyeh/Aklopolis (Texte and Töne, 2017).
He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Queens Council on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more than ten years, he edited and published the experimental art and poetry journal 2nd Avenue Poetry. From 2010 to 2014, Javier was poet laureate of Queens, New York.
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