POETRY IS: JOSE GARCIA VILLA’S PHILOSOPHY OF POETRY

MONICA MANOLACHI Reviews

Poetry Is: José Garcia Villa’s Philosophy of Poetry (2015), edited by Robert L. King

(Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015)

BOOK LINK 

In the autumn of 2015, poet Eileen R. Tabios sent me a parcel of books. One of them is the wonderful Poetry is: José Garcia Villa’s Philosophy of Poetry (2015), edited by Robert L. King and published by Ateneo de Manila University Press. José Garcia Villa (1908-1997) was a Filipino American poet, literary critic, short story writer and painter, who emigrated to the USA in the 1930s and had a notable literary influence in the Philippines throughout the twentieth century.

In Poetry Is, his former student and friend, Robert L. King, gathered and structured Villa’s numerous lectures on various aspects related to poetry: Poetry Workshop I (1952-1960) at New York City College and Poetry Workshop II (1964-1973) at The New School for Social Research. While the first fourteen chapters are aimed at teaching what poetry is and what poetry is not, the next eleven chapters provide a step-by-step analysis of the specific problems encountered in the composition of a poem. Essentially, Villa’s advice is: “After reading a poem, the question to ask is: ‘How did the poet do it?’ – not: ‘What did he say?’” Although aware that “the lyric spirit cannot be taught,” he approaches poetry as someone who cares about an artistic tradition that has been with us since the era when the first songs were heard on the planet. His work is not simply didactic. It rather works like an unconventional guide, an intersection of poetry, philosophy and the history of poetic thought. It is also engaging, full of insights, with schemes, drawings and cartoons, now serious and demanding, now humorous and epiphanic.

The chapters corresponding to the first workshop include a theory of poetry, a taxonomy of poetry, a work in progress with clarifications on a series of differences: between poetry and self-expression; between poetry and prose; between lyric poetry, verse, free verse, prose poetry and poetic prose; between narrative and dramatic poetry; between poetry as spirit and poetry as art; between pure poetry, great poetry, general poetry and abstract poetry; or between truth and poetic truth. For example: “The best definition of poetry – when it is pure – is magical song. However, since poetry is seldom pure and almost always impure, the best definition of poetry that is impure is memorable speech (Auden’s definition). If that definition is shifted slightly in emphasis to noble speech, then we have moved into the realm of great poetry.”

Drawing on what great poets, novelists and thinkers of the past said about poets and the art of poetry, Villa also presents the specifics of poetry (internal and external characteristics, and popular misconceptions), cogently states that meaning is always secondary to language, music and form (“in poetry, what you don’t know can hurt you”), and highlights the utility of poetry (it is a “distillation of life”, which serves solving problems of unfamiliar causes, such as mental disturbances or socio-political troubles). In these ideas, the experienced reader might recognize previous conceptualizations, which Villa quotes and comments at length: T. S. Eliot – “no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”; Paul Valéry – “the subject of a poem is as foreign to it and as important, as his name is to a man”; Wallace Stevens – “poetry is not a literary activity – it is vital activity – a part of life itself”; or Stéphane Mallarmé – “poetry is the language of a state of crisis.”

Convinced that “good poets make words better than they are in the dictionary,” Villa’s focus of the subsequent chapters is predominantly on craft and on the theory of the poem: poetic language (how the spirit of play is used to convey meaning); technique (which can be low, medium or high, according to the intensity and number of aesthetic events created through language play); the first lines of a poem (what makes them strong) and the problem of inspiration; the musical, verbal and semantic aspects of poetic force; the craft of versification; poetic tension; poetic abstraction; or the role of the last line of a poem. Villa also offers a long useful list of “don’ts of the art of poetry” – some of them may be debatable in some circles, which makes his theory even more thought-provoking.

My mother once told me: you have a mystery. Later I thought: yes, I have. We all have a mystery, in a sense, we are all mysteries. Man is a mystery of the universe. If we knew everything from the beginning, would life be the same? In this book addressed to anyone interested in the essence of poetry, José Garcia Villa suggests poetry is… always mysterious, conveying apparently distant or veiled realities, ungraspable, yet powerful when they become recognizable. We are primarily drawn to poetry because of its harmonious choice of words and structure, but Villa warns that the art of poetry is not easy. On the contrary, it involves years of study, practice, faith, discipline, and commitment to produce what he calls “self-defending poems, poems that defend themselves against time by virtue of their craft.”

Bucharest

January 2017

*****

Monica Manolachi is a lecturer at the University of Bucharest, where she teaches English in the Department of Modern Languages and where she completed her doctoral thesis, Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry, in 2011. Her research interests are American, British and Caribbean literature and culture, postcolonial studies and contemporary Romanian and Eastern European literature in translation. As a poet, she has published two collections in Romanian and was awarded a prize for poetic eloquence by the American Cultural Center in April 2005. She is also a translator and editor, contributing to the multilingual literary magazine Contemporary Literary Horizon.

A SERIES OF UN/NATURAL/DISASTERS by CHEENA MARIE LO

KIMBERLY ALIDIO Reviews

A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters by Cheena Marie Lo

(Commune Editions, Oakland, CA, 2016)

BOOK LINK

This morning, the Center for Art and Thought’s Facebook page shared a Time Magazine photo of supine shirtless men lying on a floor, as they say, packed like sardines. Or trafficked people on a slave ship. “This Photograph Makes Life Inside a Philippines Jail Look Like Dante’s ‘Inferno’” is the title. Where to look, the article opens? Are these corpses? The article then provides the metadata for the photograph: 3800 people are imprisoned in the Quezon City Jail, an institution designed to hold 800. The photojournalist, Noel Celis, intends to get his audience to push for prison reform. Two last important points of context: the sight of prisoners sleeping on stairs shocked Celis the most, and the photographs have gone viral.  The narrative of policy reform and collective sensationalism organizes our experience of the photograph. After we get the message, we no longer have to look.

Cheena Marie Lo offers another way to look at the photojournalism of crisis. Three poems in their collection, A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (Commune Editions 2015), reconstruct photographs of houses in New Orleans left behind by evacuees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Lo does not engage with the ambiguity of these images. They start with an almost painterly image of an object and methodically catalog descriptive information relating to it: color, number, what is adjacent.

lines of parallel panels painted gray and peeling.

eight lines of parallel panels in the frame painted gray and peeling.

orange X spraypainted on eight lines of parallel panels in the frame, so bright against paint gray and peeling.

With each line a variant of the last, “Direct Sunlight Looking Over 4725 Dauphine Street” uses anaphora to return us to images of light, shadow and architecture.  In “Successive Water Lines on Door in Lakeview,” repetition builds the poem with the starting seed words “successive” and “second”  — a kind of in-joke about anaphora. The slowing down and building up of a list poem is put to good use here. We can see the physical, built environment of post-Katrina New Orleans with a degree of contemplation. The house bears traces left by its inhabitants, the tropical storm, by subsequent evacuation, and then by the state.

Perhaps the poem keeps us looking for Lo’s interpretation of the photograph. This photographed house could be made into evidence for any number of policy or intellectual debates on climate change, climate refugees, disaster capitalism, race and poverty, and cultural memory. Lo refuses any framing narrative. The poems’ lack of interpretative framing — what’s the central lesson of the photograph, for example — frees us from the almost automatic responses we have to crisis, suffering and disaster.  Here is a series of events: a house was hit by Hurricane Katrina and then visited by a FEMA’s search and rescue mission and subsequently marked with an X as “dangerous.” So which part do we accept as the “natural” disaster?  The storm surge brought on by greenhouse gases and global warming? Or the devaluing of Black lives by state agencies? When did either of these disasters really begin? How are they understood as inevitable and accidental all at once?

Governance and structures amount to another fraught language to learn and then overturn. A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters is related to Lo’s other project exploring their use of the pronoun “they” and their engagement with gender. In an interview with Weird Sister, Lo states, “since English is her second language, [my mom]’s kind of bad with pronouns, but in a subversive way that I am obsessed with.” Lo enacts a queer immigrant rematerialization of the failure of the government to rescue and protect mostly Black and poor people in New Orleans. “Connect Policy to Built Environment” is a kind of ars poetica advising how the control of people and place are looped to data, reports and law. “‘It Keeps Getting Better’“ is a prose block of phrases enclosed in quotation marks, creating a hypnotic rhythm reminiscent of Alice Notley’s epic The Descent of Alette. The quotation marks here, however, emphasize the otherness of policy confidence. The mosaic of proposed solutions is a play of tension between “immense part played by mutual aid” and “individual jails.” In addition to stripping context clues, Lo arranges found language around a keyword: “poor planning and communication,” “poor judgment in not evacuating” and “poor or too frail to leave.” The rationalizations about vulnerability in the wake of the storm are both infinitely variable and mind-numbingly the same.

The most mysterious and powerful poems are arrangements of numbers without any explanation of what is measured. The poem “o” is a center-justified list of six zeros followed by sixty-five numbers ordered from smallest (in thousands) to the largest (in millions). The visual effect is striking and sparse. Each number represents a value related to the built environment or to people but more importantly it is somehow key to the government management and control. Although most reviewers confess frustration with the absence of explanation and interpretation, tables of numbers are familiar to anyone who’s done some kind of administrative work. This is necessary poetry: Lo releases the data from serving policy, whether aid administration or mass surveillance. They perform subversive incantation to redeploy statistics’ magical force.

Lo’s methods of research, erasure, and formal arrangement (the collection is organized as an abecedarian) make visible how the disaster is governance interrupting our relationships and our dreams of a truly transformative collectivity. In “How There Was so Much Water,” they write: “how struggle is replaced by cooperation. how to be human./ how there is a difference between refugee and evacuee. how one is marked as an other. how to be human.”

*****

Kimberly Alidio wrote After projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). She held residencies at the Center for Art and Thought, Kundiman and VONA, and received fellowships from the University of Illinois’s Asian American Studies Program and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. She is a high-school history teacher and tenure-track dropout born in West Baltimore, raised in Baltimore County and living in East Austin.

WRITER IN EXILE / WRITER IN REVOLT: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CARLOS BULOSAN

PAULINO LIM, JR. Reviews

Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan, edited by Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

(University Press of America, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

BOOK LINK 

Decentering Carlos Bulosan

This remarkable anthology introduces Carlos Bulosan to 21^st readers, and bares the need to remember the history of one’s country as a way to know who you are as a person.  Thanks to Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao, associate professor at Bryant University, for editing this volume that serves both as a primer of the work done by and about Bulosan within a span of nearly fifty years, and a prospectus for projects that an interested student, critic, and cultural historian undertakes. It gathers essays, poems, facsimiles of art works, letters and photos from artists and literary critics in the United States and the Philippines at different historical moments of tension and change – the beginning of the Cold War period of the 1950s, the Asian American Movement and mass movement for Philippine national sovereignty in the 1960s and 1970s, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in the 1980s, the rise of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s, and the antiwar and environmental justice movements of the 21^st century. The anthology is a repository of the collective memory of Bulosan, whose struggles mirror the plight of the Filipino people fighting tyranny and enduring the hardships of a capitalist system that enslaves them. 

The editor Jeffrey Cabusao assigns a chapter to each item of the collection, and groups them under its four parts. For example, Part I includes three chapters: an elegiac poem “Bulosan Now,” by Alvaro Cardona-Hine; a brief biography Dolores Stephens Feria, and an essay by E. San Juan, “The Achievement of Carlos  Bulosan.” Like the book’s two-part title, Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt, the heading of sections also has two parts: a nominal title indicating the subject covered, and a participial subtitle as its theme, both fulfilling the primer and prospectus design of the book. 

Part I. “Bulosan’s Voice: Listening to the Manong Generation,” the participle listening invites the reader to recreate in the imagination the poet’s “voice” that comes through in the poems that Feria analyzes in her affectionate brief biography of the poet. A glance at the remaining subtitles gives the reader an idea of the scope of the anthology:  Part II. “Creating an Alter/native Filipino Literary Practice”; Part III. “Broadening the Bulosan Canon”; and Part IV. “Becoming Filipino—Becoming Free.” The participles, listening, creating, broadening and becoming —expand the possibilities of the biographical, critical and literary projects that the collected items establish or illustrate, hence the subtitle “Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan.”  

The section and chapter headings, as well as the detailed listing of the topics of each chapter, facilitate the search for any topic. Detailed notes at the bottom of each entry, and a selective bibliography at the end of writings by and about Carlos Bulosan are also helpful in supporting various projects: archival, biographic, and investigative. “Commentaries on his works abound,” San Juan writes, “but a definitive biography is still wanting” (284). He names Dolores Feria as the real “angel” of Bulosan’s works. It’s a gracious tribute from San Juan who, more than any other critic or historian, has defined “the position, meaning, and significance of Bulosan’s writing” (285). Full-length critical essays of San Juan, dated 1969, 1979, and 2008 anchor three of the four parts of the anthology. 

Jeffrey Cabusao, who credits San Juan as the central figure in Bulosan criticism, follows the latter’s pointers for guiding future studies: historicizing, decentering, and renewing the emancipatory goal of the writer.  San Juan centers Bulosan (his novels, poems, short stories, essays, letters) with the historical materialist approach of Marxist philosophy. Applied to the relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines, Marxism can account for the role of the elite that profits the most from the capitalistic economy, in the ascent of dictators like Ferdinand Marcos and a fascist president like Duterte. 

On May 20, 2016, six months before the U.S. Presidential election, the Philippine edition of The Guardian ran this opinion by Tom Smith: “Don’t compare Trump and Duterte—the Philippines leader is far worse.” Does Trump’s victory signal the collapse of a broken capitalist system? It seems to be a revolt of the working class against the established system, but does it merely expose and further unleash the vicious racism beneath the myth of American Exceptionalism? How it plays out remains to be seen. 

 San Juan has successfully decentered Bulosan from platonic, sentimentalized romantic, and formalist readings. He has choice epithets (e.g. inept and blind) for those who misread Bulosan and align his work with the prevailing assimilative tradition of immigrant writing. Cabusao includes many decentering studies of Bulosan, some tilting back to San Juan’s Marxist centering. An example is Michael Viola’s essay: “Filipino American Hip Hop and Class Consciousness: Renewing the Spirit of Carlos Bulosan” (283). The archival research of Marilyn Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi has disclosed the existence of an FBI dossier aimed at gathering evidence of Bulosan being a communist enough to deport him. The textual analysis of two letters (facsimile and transcription in the anthology) by Oscar Campomanes and Todd Gernes makes a case for intertextual reading, showing the epistolary element in the writer’s narrative strategy. The selective bibliography lists other decentered essays. One entry stands out: Melinda de Jesus’s “Rereading History/Rewriting Desire Reclaiming Queerness in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido Santos’s Scent of Apples.” 

As a literature and criticism teacher, I applaud Cabusao for bookending his anthology with two poems, because it opens up for me the possibility of a phenomenological reading. The poems are Cardona-Hine’s elegy and Melba Abela, moving tribute and pledge to continue poet’s quest for realizing the fulfilling dreams dormant in America is in the Heart.  Phenomenology brackets the subject from the knowledge that surrounds it, and investigates as a construct of words, for example, Bulosan’s description of his autobiographical America Is in the Heart as a “mosaic of our lives.” As a Filipino, he must have known that mosaic is a plant virus that infects abaca, the source of hemp fiber. This reading intensifies the resonance of mosaic as a pattern and mosaic as blight. Bracketing the poetry and investigating its construct could yield knowledge about its “essence,” a suspect term I know, and enshrine Bulosan in the pantheon where, in the words of the platonist Shelley, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”   

*****

Paulino Lim Jr. is a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of a quartet of novels set against the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos, and three short story anthologies. His Alma Mater, the University of Santo Tomas has recently conferred upon him a Lifetime Achievement Award for "significant contributions in Philippine Literature. Lim is also the recipient of the 2016 Presidential Award for overseas Filipinos who have distinguished themselves in their profession.