The Man with the Blue Guitar

Art with No Regrets: An Interview with Annie E. Existence

2012-01-16T21:18:00.003-06:00

Three years and as many months ago, I started this blog, imagining it as a blue guitar: an "aquamarine ark, spaceship, brave vessel of verse and bliss[, a] glorious palimpsest." I just love the notion of a blue guitar . . . I have a bright blue 5-string electric bass as well as a 4-string midnight blue bass (inset image, top left, next to the blog title), and a Kashmir blue classical guitar.

My blog title Man with the Blue Guitar I nicked from Wallace Stevens's well-known poem with the same title: within the poem, a guitarist is interrogated by others curious why his music does not "'play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'" That's how Stevens dramatized imagination, as a device or conduit or construction that changes the world, that (re)renders the world in its own fashion, separate and different from — here do air quotes — reality, creating and displaying its own inner transcendence.

Stevens himself nicked the title (or at least the image) from Pablo Picasso's 1903 Blue Period painting "The Old Guitarist" (at right), Stevens's inspiration or trigger for the poem. Picasso pioneered Expressionism with this image, dramatizing on canvas his grieving for a close friend dead from suicide, emblematizing through paint his sorrow — so say art historians and critics — visually evoking the feeling one might find in music in a momentary twinge like the "blue note" of the Blues.

Recently, in the online artists' community deviantArt.com, I found a splendid and gorgeous digital painting that's based on the "The Old Guitarist" but transforms Picasso's image by playing and replaying it on Stevens's blue guitar of the imagination, so to speak, transmuting its sorrowful feeling into a more joyful yet equally blue (an altered and luminous blue) beauty. Here it is at left: "The Blue Guitarist" by Annie E. Existence.

In my bio for the blog (look all the way left, top), I say, "my favorite color is blue, in all its dynamic shades and flavors: cobalt, electric, royal, robin's-egg, navy, cerulean, teal, indigo, sky." This painting rocks several of those flavors of blue, especially (to my eye, or on my screen) teal and sky. Her painting expresses for me the intimate and sometimes heartbreaking, throat-catching loveliness of playing music on the guitar (the real, material guitar, that is). Annie renders the instrument in muted browns like Picasso's and then uplifts the woman playing it, transfigured and made luminescent by the music she's performing: her skin and hair are illuminated by — no, are — a kind of cool fire, a lambent flame like malleable metal that's nonetheless fleshy and soft.

Annie E. Existence is the pseudonym of a fine artist in Lafayette, Lousiana, now specializing in tattoo art after completing her studio art BA at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. I had the great pleasure recently of interviewing Annie — completely via facebook — and now I'm honored and glad to present that interview.

Remember: click on any image to see a larger version.

Vince: Annie, would you tell me about your background in art? Did you maybe melt crayons as a kid and smear multi-color soup on walls?

Annie: I was always creative as a kid . . . kinda weird though . . . I used to shave the heads of my Barbie dolls, wrap them in torn-up towels like mummies, and make death masks out of construction paper for them. I was always into Egyptian history. It always fascinated me. But I've been drawing and writing for as long as I can remember.

Vince: Wow . . . Barbie-mummies. That's way better than melting crayons! What about after you grew up?

Annie: In May [2011], I graduated from UL [University of Louisiana at Lafayette] for printmaking. I also did a lot of casting and other metalworking while I was there and I enjoyed that more than anything. There is something very personal about sculpting something out of wax and casting them. I always ended up with these intimate size sculptures that people wanted to hold and move around in their hands, which was the point. I want to get people reconnected with art instead of the look, don't touch culture we're living in now.

I recently completed my tattoo certifications and sent off to the state to get my commercial body art license . . . when I get that, I'll be able to tattoo full time at Bizarre Ink where I've been apprenticing. I suppose that's one obvious way to connect people to art in the literal sense. The shop is on downtown Jefferson Street where all the bars are [in Lafayette, Louisiana]. I've struggled a lot getting the customers to care about the art on their bodies instead of just wanting some cursive font with the name of their boyfriend.

Vince: Tell me more about your tattoo art. How did you get into that?

Annie: I was always interested in tattoos and since I've always been a weird kid and an artist, I fell naturally into the underbelly of culture. Just like I'm intrigued by Egyptian history, I find the culture and history of body art to be intriguing as well. But this underbelly is not the most attractive thing in the world. I have to spread my influence from the dregs up. When someone wants to enter the tattoo business, they have to swim through a sea of junkies, thieves, liars and coattail riders. It's so sad but so true. But that's where you separate the real artists from the "I love Miami Ink" wannabes. How much are you willing to put up with to be the best artist you can be? Luckily I'm apprenticing under two artists who have paired up to see me succeed: James Aaron Puckett and Andy Boudoin. It's been a terrifying experience. Simply because normally I can pick up a new art form, manipulate it, and make something beautiful whether I have a lot of experience with that medium or not. It's not like that with skin. I've never picked up an art form and sucked at it . . . until recently. But I'm learning fast and have great mentors. They want to see what I'm capable of. Once I'm given the basics and the right guinea pigs I think I'll be capable of a lot more than what I've been doing.

Vince: I'm guessing you also have tattoos, then?

Annie: I have several, some of which I will be covering up and redoing. The first I ever got is still my favorite . . . I got f-holes like from a violin on my back to resemble Man Ray's old, famous photomanipulation "Le Violon d'Ingres." I really can't say what it is about this artist that I love so much. Maybe it's the fact that he was a definite beginning to the art that we see modern artists of my age doing today. We just use photoshop now instead of paints.

At left is Man Ray's "Le Violon d'Ingres" (1924), in which he added two f-holes (violin style) to a photograph of his model.

Next to it is a photograph of Annie E. Existence with f-holes tattooed on her back in homage to Man Ray and his work.

Vince: Do you have a personal philosophy or whatever about your art? Or as an artist?

Annie: I work back and forth between making art for the fun of it and trying to say something with it. I'm really interested in personal relationships and how people treat one another, and how the way someone treats me and vice versa directly affects how I respond to life and myself.

One of my tattoos is on my left hip. It says "Scapegoat" and has goat horns around it. A lot of my art is based on the scapegoat concept. Traditionally the scapegoat was a literal goat that Christian villagers would symbolically place their sins on. They would then take it into the woods and slaughter it almost like a sacrifice. Very pagan in ritual, to be honest.

I have always been the one to work too hard and sacrifice my own well-being so someone else didn't have to feel so bad about their wrongdoing. I hate to go too far into my personal life, but most of my senior thesis in school was based around this man I had fallen in love with. There was something charming and charismatic about him. But he was addicted to pain killers and used my feelings for him as a way to get away with hurting me and the people around me both financially and emotionally. The soft-hearted compassionate artist in me wanted to believe he could change. I guess that's my fault for hoping I could manipulate his disaster of a life like watercolors on a canvas and make something beautiful out of it. I almost slaughtered myself doing this and have tried valiantly since then to not be that person . . . but alas, I guess it's the artist/mother instinct.

Vince: Glad you were able to escape that situation. Okay, so how do these ideas interact with "The Blue Guitarist"?

Annie: Well, "The Blue Guitarist" falls more into the category of "just for fun." And it's also a tribute piece to Picasso, a thanks for what he has contributed to the art world.

I do portraits of my friends for the same reason. I'm about to start another one. I do a lot of portraits of my artist friends as an appreciation for what they contribute to our local art community. The next piece will be of my friend Cootie Von Ghoul. Obviously that's her artist name and not her real name, but I always call her Cootie. She's a beautiful woman and I won't mind staring at her face while I do it. ;-)

Vince: One thing I find so moving about "The Blue Guitarist" is the shade of blue you used. It's so different from the blue Picasso used in his "Old Guitarist" painting. Can you say more about that color? And how does color affect you as an artist, maybe especially as a tattoo artist?

Annie: Well, I think Picasso's version is a little more dreary, and mine, however very blue, is slightly more hopeful. Maybe hopeful isn't a good word for it, but I don't think it invokes the same sad feeling as Picasso's choice of blue. I do enjoy a certain amount of vibrancy in color when I choose to use it. I'm primarily a black and white kind of girl but my color drawings and paintings tend to use really bright colors. As far as tattoo-wise, colors tend to be brighter there and maybe that's why I'm attracted to that. When you're working on flesh, if you're not using just black and grey, you use the most vibrant colors possible. Also, colors don't react the same way over flesh tones as they would over white so you have to choose a more exaggerated color palette. I'm just very prone to using exaggerated color.

Vince: In some facebook interchange we had recently, you mentioned being involved in a community of artists where you are. How does that affect your work?

Annie: It greatly affects my work, especially since people have their own taste. It's this community of artists that encourages me to pursue my own work and they appreciate it for what it is. My quirky style of art is not offputting to them since they too are rather eccentric with their work.

But the art that sells here, that upper middle-class white housewives want, is fleur-de-lis and swamp scenes and tiger-themed stuff. You know, Cajun culture, the Saints and the French history, and LSU football. Now, I love Cajun culture, but the symbology has become so cliché that I can't bring myself to make it even though I know it would make me money and feed me.

The other artists here just get it and when I'm amongst them I know I can just make art the way I want to make it. Recently I started making Voodoo dolls which has been a more enjoyable way to tap into the old New Orleans culture that is still prevalent today.

Vince: Where did your pseudonym "Annie E. Existence" come from?

Annie: "Annie" is just the last part of my first name . . . and there is a small part in a song by TOOL which mentions the name "Atrophy Annie," so I took that.

Normally, when a name is written out, formally, the middle name is represented with an initial. The "E" stands for "Enigma," which holds the meaning of mystery, and not knowing what the middle "E" stands for immediately is part of that . . . and I will always be a mystery even to myself because as an artist there a lot of things I am constantly discovering about myself. I've figured out how far my tolerance for abuse from others goes. And by abuse, I mean people taking advantage of my kindness, backstabbing me, or using me as a stepping stone to get something else they want. I've found out I have a high tolerance for these things, but my tolerance for seeing someone else get abused is very low. Also, I've struggled most of my life with depression and anxiety and I didn't discover until recently what these things really meant for me. I was constantly terrified that I would create some sort of social blunder, so I would isolate myself. Once I got old enough to understand these emotions I was able to see an episode (panic attacks or sudden drop in mood) coming. I can't prevent these things for sure but I've been able manage my breathing, calm down my racing heart, and remind myself that it will pass. It's more of a biological problem and I'm not just crazy. This has been the most important revelation for me over the last couple of years. But I'm still learning ways to deal with it.

And "Existence" . . . well, that holds a lot of meaning for me. When I was struggling the hardest, battling constant depression and anxiety, it was hard to find reasons to live. I told myself, "Just exist. That's all I have to do right now."

So when it comes down to it — even when my life is hard and I'm not particularly living for anything — I just have to exist and my purpose will present itself later.

Vince: What aspirations do you have for your art? Where do you think it will go in the future? These are clichéd questions, I know, but we all have wants and desires for our work.

Annie: I'm focused on being a good tattoo artist right now. Here is my favorite tattoo I've done so far.

I did this on my boyfriend and he was willing to be the guinea pig — bless his heart! I was very pleased with what I was able to do when given the chance. That was the first tattoo of its kind that I was able to do. It was more than just font or small band logos. I'm happy for any work I get but even more so when I get to do something fun and more creative.

Also I want to travel and hit the convention circuits and rub elbows with other artists. That is my chance to make a name for myself and immerse myself in the culture where I can learn from artists from all over the world. It's the greatest opportunity coming my way.

Vince: Any last word you want to leave my readers with?

Annie: All I can say at this point, is that my future is unknown like everyone else's. All I can do is learn about the people around me and seize opportunities as they come to me. That's what life is all about: overcoming hardships, loving people, learning as much as possible, and jumping at every opportunity with no regrets.

You can see more of Annie E. Existence's artwork on facebook and deviantArt. I'll leave you with one more digital painting by Annie E. Existence, titled "Emily" (2011).

Would you please leave a comment below? I'd love to hear what you think, and so would Annie. Thanks. Ingat.

Sources: (1) Pablo Picasso, "The Old Guitarist," from PabloPicasso.org. (2) Annie E. Existence, "The Blue Guitarist," from deviantArt.org. (3) Annie E. Existence, May 2011 facebook profile picture, used by permission. (4) Man Ray, "Le Violon d'Ingres," from the J. Paul Getty Museum. (5) Annie E. Existence, from facebook art page, Dissident Arte. (6) Annie E. Existence, June 2011 facebook profile picture, used by permission. (7) Annie E. Existence, October 2010 facebook profile picture, used by permission. (8) Annie E. Existence, tattoo, from facebook art page, Dissident Arte. (9) Annie E. Existence, "Emily," from deviantArt.org.

In the Cool of the Evening ...

2012-01-08T16:30:00.023-06:00

. . . when everything is gettin' kinda spooky.

I was barely 16 when the rock song "Spooky" by the Classics IV came out. An ardent devotee of rock guitar, I immediately started to work out how to play it — no Internet or Google then, you had to work out the chords by ear, meticulously plunking out notes while listening to records over and over. The first chord of "Spooky" was easy: an E minor 7th chord with a cool double note on the two highest strings: D and G. Like this: 020033.

A quick detour here for non-guitarists. The numbers in the symbol above refer to frets used with each string. Left to right, lowest string to highest string: the notes E A D G B E. The "0" means an "open" string, i.e., unfingered. The fingering shown in the symbol above, then: (1) the second lowest string (A) at the second fret (thus, a B note), (2) the second highest string (B) at the third fret (a D note), and (3) the highest string (E) at the third fret (a G note). So the symbol 020033 above stands for the notes E B D G D G . . . hence, Em7. Hope that helps.

The second chord was tougher to identify. I knew it was an A major chord of some kind, but it was hipper than that. I then noticed the presence of an F# note on the high E string. And so, throw that note on top of the A chord: x02222 . . . that is, A (add 13). Beautiful. (Not quite a full-fledged, card-carryin' A13 because the 7th and the 9th are missing. You know, I always loved how those jazz guys pushed us three-chord rockers.)

The "spooky" feeling comes partly from chordal interplay on the highest 2 strings. The Em7's D note on the B string slides down a half step to a C# in the A(add13). And the Em7's G note on the high E string similarly slides down to an F# for the 13 added to the stock A chord. Back and forth, slyly and subtly, back and forth. Brilliant.

But the really brilliant part comes near the end of the pattern when the song goes jangly and dissonant with the third chord, Bb diminished 7th. You can hear this strangely cool chord behind the words "all right" in the opening verse. The Bbdim7 isn't merely a passing or transitional chord, as diminished chords often are. It's used as a main chord in the song. Now that's spooky.

Often a songwriter will quickly resolve the unstable feeling of a diminished chord by following immediately with a chord a half step higher. So one would generally expect the next chord in this song to be some sort of B, major or minor. But that doesn't happen. The song makes you wait three more measures before resolving the whole pattern (not just the diminished weirdness) with the fourth chord, a B minor. Lots of spookiness throughout the song.

Before we go any further, I need to 'fess up. I lied above. Well, a fib, a white lie. I simplified things to make the story (and the chord symbols) smoother. Guitarists love songs in E (major or minor) because the instrument's highest and lowest open strings are tuned to E, predicating the guitar's tonality. Just letting you know, 'cause surely someone among you is saying "Wait, the Classics IV didn't play the song in E minor." Yes, I know it was F minor. Just taking some poetic license. And slingin' a capo on the first fret.

All right, back to the story. The Classics IV version (October 1967) is actually a cover (that is, not the original version). Many people think Dusty Springfield's 1970 version is the original, but it's a cover too. And the lively (and well-known) version by the Atlanta Rhythm Section in 1979 is also a cover. The original "Spooky" was an instrumental by saxophonist Mike Sharpe (nee Shapiro) and Harry Middlebrooks, Jr., released in 1967. Here's a video of Mike Sharpe's cut.

Mike Sharpe, "Spooky" (1967)

http://youtu.be/rf3jGU4PUws

Note: if you click on the arrow, the video will play here. The web address below the image will play the video on YouTube, where the screen is larger and high-definition is accessible.

Beautiful, ain't it? Wasn't really that popular, though. Then the Classics IV threw in some appropriately spooky lyrics and that's where the saga begins, for me at least. Listen to this cut below, especially the sax interlude after the second verse . . . pretty sure it's Mike Sharpe playing basically the same improv line as in the version above. The Classics IV version, with words, struck a chord with the public (forgive the pun); the song reached #3 in the US. And did pretty well in the UK too, a counter-salvo of sorts "against" the so-called British Invasion.

Classics IV, "Spooky" (1967)

http://youtu.be/S8tSSTnHM7o

Fast forward to now . . . "Spooky" has become a cover standard, with versions by many artists of all sorts.

Here's where you come in, O Gentle Reader. I'd really love to know which cover version you like best. The "classic" Classics IV version above? Or one of the covers below? Why? Write me a comment below, please. Deal?

Even someone as mainstream in the '60s as Andy Williams — think Christmas specials and "discoverer" of the Osmonds — got into the act. Check out his version, recorded quite soon after the Classics IV release.

Andy Williams, "Spooky" (1968)

http://youtu.be/ybvkV8vsuDY

And the folkies too. How much more folk royalty can you get than The Lettermen? This ain't a bad version, either, by the way.

The Lettermen, "Spooky" (1968)

http://youtu.be/1w2F1b6Gflg

"Spooky" was covered internationally too. The Golden Cups, a "proto-punk," "proto-garage" band from Japan, threw their hats (cups?) into the ring.

The Golden Cups, "Spooky" (1968)

http://youtu.be/LW3n8w8ThBY

"Spooky" in the vein of the Classics IV was definitely a straight guy's song: "Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you." The cover artists above followed the Classics IV's masculine lead. That changed with Dusty Springfield's version a couple of years later. Listen how she revises the lyrics below . . . women of that time didn't propose marriage. As a consequence the reference to Halloween was written out and, as my daughter Amanda Gotera has pointed out to me, the projected relationship between the singer-narrator and the spooky lover becomes much more indeterminate and strange.

Dusty Springfield, "Spooky" (1970)

http://youtu.be/-iq9xyc5hjw

In 1971 some members of the Classics IV formed the Atlanta Rhythm Section and "Spooky" crossed over into Southern rock. Note in ARS's version below how much more guitar-driven and Allman Brothers-ish the song becomes. I love this version. It definitely ROCKS. And there's a Wes Montgomery-style guitar break at 4:08. Hm-hmm.

Atlanta Rhythm Section, "Spooky" (1979)

http://youtu.be/cMAo0m4E4Lc

"Spooky," with the Santana-esque possibilities of its Em / A vamp, lends itself well to bravura soloing, as we saw above with ARS and we'll see below with The Jazz Butcher. (The Santana band never covered "Spooky" as far as I know, though they did an excellent version of the Classics IV song "Stormy.") Okay, now here's The Jazz Butcher.

The Jazz Butcher, "Spooky" (1988)

http://youtu.be/wFielGAVxUk

A decade later, R.E.M. incorporated "Spooky" into their live show. In the video below, Michael Stipe tried to retrieve his lyrics "cheat sheet" from German fans who had snatched it off his music stand. "I don't know the words," Stipe said, having difficulty with the language barrier. (If you want to skip that part, the song starts at 1:23.)

R.E.M., "Spooky" (1998)

http://youtu.be/ffeSU33qX9U

Probably the most interesting revision of the words into a female situation is Joan Osborne's. Note her graceful rewriting of the third stanza. Also more than a hint of a lesbian relationship. A smoldering, smokey "Spooky," def.

Joan Osborne, "Spooky" (1999)

http://youtu.be/XhZAG7uVjmE

Over the years, "Spooky" has been redone, re-envisioned, redecorated, "revisioned" into a variety of musical styles. Here are some samples.

Lydia Lunch . . . No Wave? Experimental? Avant-garde? You got me. Off-key on purpose. A parody of the Classics IV, actually the whole lot of the "Spooky" cover artists.

Lydia Lunch, "Spooky" (1979)

http://youtu.be/pvecyq5dB4Q

Daniel Ash . . . techno, synth-pop.

Daniel Ash, "Spooky" (2002)

http://youtu.be/5NYQ34Zf7Lo

Imogen Heap . . . torch, indie.

(Incidentally, this version was used in the TV show Eastwick, sung by the character Kat, reclining on a piano á là Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys.)

Imogen Heap, "Spooky" (2005)

http://youtu.be/TA8tlbIINgo

The Puppini Sisters . . . retro-swing like The Andrews Sisters. A fun, campy version.

The Puppini Sisters, "Spooky" (2007)

http://youtu.be/c2v3Ej7z46E

Pixie Lott . . . dance-pop.

Pixie Lott, "Spooky" (2010)

http://youtu.be/KvKe6pU2RKE

Phish . . psychedelic jam, Grateful Dead-like.

Phish, "Spooky" (2010)

http://youtu.be/L9XT1VnAZLI

Amateur YouTube renditions have also surfaced. Witness this sultry "Spooky" by the Italian singer Sayaka Alessandra. Note how she pares down the chords to let her voice take center stage.

Sayaka Allesandra, "Spooky" (2010)

http://youtu.be/SsQc6Zu-RWk

I'd like to give the Classics IV the last word here — well, actually, the Atlanta Rhythm Section, descendant of the Classics IV. Here's ARS playing "Spooky" live in concert last year.

Atlanta Rhythm Section, "Spooky" (Live in 2011)

http://youtu.be/vl7shA6Yv3o

Well, that's it. According to "Wikipedia "Spooky" has also been covered by Martha and the Vandellas, Velvet Monkeys, GoldieLocks, David Sanborn, and others; featured on both big screen and little (the movies Fandango and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People as well as the TV show American Horror Story); and sampled by such artists as The Bloodhound Gang. A great track record for a "spooky little" song.

So . . . which one of the covers above did you like best? A tough choice for me. I'll always have a soft spot for the Classics IV version, but I also love Atlanta Rhythm Section's take. Gotta love Joan Osborne's rendition as well as Imogen Heap's. What's your preference? Please leave me a comment below. Which one? Let's talk about it.

I get confused 'cause I don't know where I stand.
And then you smile . . . and hold my hand.

Hope you've had a great weekend, everyone. And that this post has triggered some fun memories. Good music, at any rate. Even if you don't have a take on which "Spooky" cover rocks your world the most, leave me a comment anyway. See ya below. Take care. Ingat.

Wound, Burn, Glacier ... Revisited

2011-12-31T06:34:00.004-06:00

One of the things I love most about blogging is meeting excellent writers I didn't know before. Earlier this year, I met Catherine Pritchard Childress, who took on a teaching exercise I described in a blog post in May 2011.

Wait, let me back up a little. It might help if you read about this in-class exercise in that post — especially the ad hoc, impromptu, improvisational way it came about — but basically the exercise asked my students to write a 12-line poem based on the following paragraph from the story "VIVA!" by Erin McReynolds.

My boyfriend sleeps beside me, and his face is peaceful in
the blue light of my laptop. His lashes are long and I bend
down to kiss them. Because I'm used to telling him every-
thing, I whisper aloud the things I find on the Internet.
Things like, "A wound to the carotid artery results in a loss of
consciousness in under a minute," and, "They burn the organs
they remove during autopsy, unless the family wants them put
back in, for religious reasons." When he startles, his glacier
eyes wild with panic, I stroke his head. "Sssh," I whisper, "it’s
me," as if that should comfort him. He blinks at me and then
grabs me around the ribs and crushes his face to my chest. I
keep stroking his hair, whispering, "The human body contains
about five liters of blood."
— North American Review (Winter 2011)

The tricky part was that you had to pick one word from each line of the paragraph and use it in the matching line in your poem. A word from McReynolds' first line would go in your first line, then a word from line 2 would appear in your line 2, and so on. Small changes in the words (remove to removing, say) allowed. I left line 13 from the paragraph out of the game because it had too few words in it, and I didn't want the word blood to unduly influence what the students might write. And me too, because I did the exercise along with them.

Well, I was impressed — flabbergasted, even — by the exercise poems my students dashed off in about ten minutes ... and the two poems I wrote weren't bad either. That experience was the inspiration for that blog post in which I shared the exercise, its backstory, and a couple of the students' exercise poems, as well as my own.

So, back to Catherine ... after reading about the exercise, she was inspired to try it and then shared what she'd written in a comment to the post. Here it is, with the "borrowed" words from the McReynolds paragraph in gray at the right.

Ragdoll

Peace eludes her hard-earned sleep,
she lashes out incoherent words, flailing
limbs tell long-buried secrets of a past
he tries to whisper away with hush nows,
there theres, croon clear the blighted artery
of memory that burns clean to the surface —
a childhood. Family forgotten by light, encircles
her with startling clarity in the void of night
wild as the twisted vines heavy with grapes,
where she blinked tears drawn by mama's hand,
clinging to crushed remnants of whiskey-free days,
stroking the pale straw hair of a faceless doll.

—Exercise by Catherine Pritchard Childress [do not copy or quote ... thanks]

peaceful / sleeps
lashes
telling
whisper
artery
burn
family
startles
wild
blinked
crushes
stroking

This is quite an amazing poem, actually. Catherine wrote this in ten or fifteen minutes. And notice how she uses two words in her first line. (Catherine, I hope you won't mind too much that I edited this a little, adding a hyphen in lines 1 and 3 to match your hyphen in "whiskey-free.")

Even more amazing, Catherine then shared, a month later, another exercise poem that, as she put it, "resulted from working with this exercise and a little more time."

Oeuvre

A real boyfriend would've cared I was only twelve,
that it would be a long time before I wasn't jailbait,
never had a slow, wet kiss full of wrestling tongues,
been able to find my G-spot or even know I had one,
that what he had planned for the backseat would wound
more than the pink crescent between baby-fat legs. Minutes
of his pleasure would remove the thin layer of dignity
I cleaved to with the zeal of backwoods religion,
sacrificed for a few quick, dry strokes of his manhood.
Would have offered a rag for the blood and comfort
in his arms, instead of flopping his chest on top of me
again and again pounding out his body of work.

—Exercise by Catherine Pritchard Childress [do not copy or quote ... thanks]

boyfriend
long
kiss
find / I
wound
minute
remove
religious
stroke
comfort
chest
body

My response to Catherine, in our conversation through blog comments, was this: "I really appreciate the seriousness of the poems, how they deal with such personal topics with dignity and elegance." Absolutely ... dignity and elegance.

Since she had written such fine exercise poems, I challenged Catherine to take even more time and try it again. Here's what she sent me two months later.

Hush

I parked beside a winding mountain road to gather my thoughts
before rounding the next bend, a sharp left onto my father’s farm
where I'd hide in the hayloft with Jason Martin so we could
take turns reading aloud, poems we were ridiculed for reading
in view of the real men. Those lost afternoons buried a secret
deeper in me than the paperbacks hidden under tawny bales,
the one I'd come to tell Dad now. He wants me to marry a nice girl
from a religious family, raise a couple kids, work at the mill,
Sssh crying babies while the woman gets supper on the table.
Wishing for his sake I wanted that too will provide little comfort
when I see his face in my rearview mirror, broken
after I've laid my future that began whispering in his barn.

—Exercise by Catherine Pritchard Childress [do not copy or quote ... thanks]

beside
bend
I'm
aloud
loss
under
wants
religious
sssh
comfort
face
whispering

Just a tremendous poem. The phrase "dignity and elegance" is again apropos, and perhaps even pales. In this persona poem, Catherine affords her character such dignity, such pathos, as he faces up to coming out as gay to his father who will, he knows, be broken by it. Hmm.

There's plenty more I could say about any of these lovely poems but I've been holding back. I'd really like to hear what you have to say. Please write me a comment below. And Catherine will be "listening" as well and I'm sure she would be happy to reply. As will I.

Incidentally, Catherine recently wrote me on facebook that "My poem 'Oeuvre,' which was inspired by your online writing exercise, was accepted in its revised form, along with another of my poems, for publication in a journal based in Hawaii, Kaimana. Thanks for the inspiration." Congratulations, Catherine! I'm glad and proud that my little exercise had such a grand result.

Again, friends, do leave a comment below, please. Thanks.

Happy New Year, everyone! Manigong bagong taon!

Added later on 2 Jan 2012: After I posted this, it occurred to me another lit mag editor might see the poem "Hush" and snap it up. All because of my hosting it online. Well, I had been thinking about publishing "Hush," so I contacted Catherine and asked if the NAR could have it. And this was on the three-day weekend, no less. (I very rarely do this kind of thing; the great majority of my selections are from work already submitted to the NAR.) Anyway, happy ending. I've made a couple of suggestions and Catherine is considering some revisions. Watch for "Hush" or whatever its eventual title will be in the NAR! Stay warm, everyone!

Announcing ... The First NAR Literary Roundtable Podcast

2011-12-14T18:22:00.004-06:00

Friends, my good friend and colleague Jeremy Schraffenberger (associate editor at the North American Review) just loaded onto our website the first "NAR Literary Roundtable Podcast." Hurray!

Listen to this conversation in which the editors of the magazine discuss the uses and abuses of the thesaurus, as prompted by poet Mark Doty; the essay "Village of Adams" by J. P. Vallieres from our recent Fall 2011 issue (cover pictured at left); and what we've all been reading lately.

Before you click on that link above to listen to the podcast, do check out the cool cover by NAR art editor Gary Kelley. If you click on the cover image at left, you'll see the cover "life-size." I think you'll enjoy Gary's comment on contemporary society here.

After you listen to the podcast or view the cover, please go to Facebook or follow us on Twitter and let us know what you think of either.

And, of course, do subscribe to the magazine at www.northamericanreview.org. And also please leave me a comment below, won't you? Ingat.

Sea of Mending ... a film by Amanda Gotera

2011-11-30T02:55:00.001-06:00

I'm very proud to present today a brand-new, short film made by my oldest daughter, Amanda Blue Gotera. Below are a couple of screencaps from it. The film was inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's poem "A Jar of Buttons," from his poetry collection Delights and Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Click image to see it larger.
Click here to view the film.

The young woman who appears in the film sewing a button onto her sweater is my next oldest daughter, Amelia Blue Gotera. As you might imagine, my buttons (forgive the pun) are fit to burst.

If you've got five minutes, please watch and enjoy "Sea of Mending." Then, won't you come back here and write a comment below? Both Amanda and I would love to know your thoughts about the film.

Thanks so much. Ingat . . . take good care.

Don't Judge ...

2011-11-20T23:54:00.021-06:00

. . . a book by its cover. That's what we say, isn't it? Well, in reality most of us — if not all &mdash do that kind of judging all the time, not just with books but also with people, what they wear, what they carry, their cars (if they drive one), the cars they don't drive (if that's the case, right?), how they talk, what they tweet or even if they tweet, what their facebook or myspace or Google+ profile is like, yadda yadda whatever. You know how it goes.

In this virtual planet we call the blogosphere, as you know, that kind of judging is also operative; a blog title (or its subtitle or tag line) as well as the titles of individual posts can mean everything, can decide whether a reader's gonna dip into a blog and into a post or not. I like to think I'm good at this Madison Avenue–branding blah blah blah and that you're actually reading these words because the word judge and also the word don't in my title above snagged you. Or that images, like the picture to the right of the next paragraph, are performing like a "good hook" . . . especially in something like a tumblr(esque) blog.

Well, yesterday, at my local city library, I got snagged. Near the checkout robot whatchamacallits, there was one of those rollaway bookshelf/cart thingies that advertised withdrawn library books for sale. Fifty cents! And for hardbacks too. Since I also like to think I'm a savvy deal-finder I was immediately sucked in.

As a quote-unquote deal-finder, I often annoy my wife Mary Ann by consistently telling friends what a great low price I paid on eBay for some recent purchase or other, like for example these Beatle (or Beatle-ish) boots I'm wearing at this moment: Giorgio Brutini demi-boots with Cuban heels . . . $21. I'm guessing they would typically be priced at no less than $80, though I suspect they might be vintage, probably no longer available available new (?), and may cost even more. Such a deal, hey?

Anyway, the title of one particular nonfiction book on that sale rack yesterday snagged me: Science Friction by Michael Shermer. In case your brain's messing with your eyes &mdash and of course our brains are always (re)editing what we see, etc. — there's an R in that second word. What a clever title, I thought. Especially given the subtitle of Shermer's book: Where the Known Meets the Unknown. The vertical image of a recently snuffed, smoky match highlights the idea of friction, of the scientific known rubbing up against, irritating, the unknown, igniting them, one might suppose, into an intriguing intellectual flame. If you hold a match upside down, like it's shown here, you're gonna scorch your fingers, even more intriguing.

The book's cover art further embedded that 50-cent hook. As you can see, we've got a black cover against which the main title SCIENCE FRICTION floats in white. There's a subtle 3D effect in play. The subtitle in a shade of mustard, because of its warm color, feels slightly closer to the viewer than the cool white of the title and Shermer's by-line. The identical warmness of the match's color moves toward us as well while the smoke emanating from the match tip dips even further behind the white title. Fascinating visual effect (and marketing ploy). I hope the jacket designer, Lisa Fyfe, won't mind too much that I've tainted her cover a little by leaving that white 50-cent sticker stuck on ... that low price is crucial to my self-image as a dealer-wheeler, etc. etc.

Trying to locate a suitable image of the book cover online (before I finally decided to scan it myself because there weren't any good ones), I learned through googola woogola that the phrase "science friction" has been used quite a lot. Google it yourself, focusing especially on images . . . you'll find quite a fascinating array of images/uses. Here are a few of the more intriguing ones.

A comic book cover–style flyer for a Naked Girls Reading event in Boston. Click on the picture at right to expand this full-color image, trés cool. This Naked Girls Reading phenomenon &mdash something new to me — seems to be an performance-art movement that started in Chicago: nude women reading literature in public performance. The main NGR website features international "franchises" in cities across the US and the world. Check out the NGR blog as well. In this context, the word "friction" in Boston's "science friction" event is entertainingly bawdy and . . . well, you come up with your own adjective.

I wonder if Naked Girls Reading is related (if only in spirit) to a couple other onine "literary nudity" projects: novelist Tracy Williams, known as The Naked Blonde Writer, who has read her work naked online, and fiction writer Carol Muskoron who, according to Google, has (had?) a website called Naked Novelist. I couldn't get this site to load today, but here's an interview of Muskoron by Andrea Semple. (Semple's cool literary website also has other interviews of authors that are worth checking out. Also, as far as I can tell nakednovelist.com exists but seems to be at present just a blank page. Evidently, from articles written ten years ago, Muskoron was a webcam lifecaster who could be watched writing in the nude.)

At any rate, back to Naked Girls Reading, it seems fairly easy to open your own franchise if there isn't already one in your area . . . browse the NGR website. Obviously some people will find this art movement derogatory to women while others will see it as positive feminist activism. Whatever its artistic assets or liabilities, I appreciate the way it surely (re)enlivens literature for a variety of audiences, especially young 20-somethings. You be the judge.

Back to the phrase "science friction" . . .

There's an illustrated novella by that title written by furry fandom writer Kyell Gold . . . sold by publisher FurPlanet as "a work of anthropomorphic fiction for adult readers only."

Science Friction is also the name of a scoring, composition, and sound design company — duo George Martindell and Frank Sonsini — see scifrimusic.com.

British folk/rock singer/songwriter Roy Harper founded his own record label named Science Friction to distribute all his music from a recording career of 40+ years, via cd or download.

Photo by wikipedia user Trharp, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

There is also a clothing line named Science Friction, based in California. About this company, owner and designer Fortino Cortez says, "Science Friction was formed with the intention of sharing my love for the vast universe, its contents, sci-fi of all types and the unknown." Go to www.sciencefrictionclothing.com to see Cortez's designs and clothing.

Well, that's probably enough, though there's more, plenty more: TV shows, cartoons — an episode of Huckleberry Hound, a Ben 10 intersection — bawdy storytelling, a Dr. Who tribute in the form of a Cyber(wo)man cosplay by fashion, costume, and footwear designer (and tumblr blogger) Rachael Gray (photo at left, Kinky Salon London party titled Science Friction). Pretty tenuous connection, really, but I'm an avid Dr. Who fan. And also a fan of Ms. Gray's artistry. Check out her blog and portfolio at rachaelgray.tumblr.com and fauxred.com — she's definitely a cordwainer par excellence.

Well, I'm really not too sure any more how we got here, but clearly the phrase "science friction" is resonant and evocative indeed. And as a title it rocks!

I'll get back to you about the Shermer book Science Friction. I've started reading and it's definitely fascinating. Perhaps we can judge a book by its cover. At least, sometimes. Let's leave it there, shall we?

Please post a comment below. I'd love to know what you're thinking. Ingat . . . take good care. Happy Thanksgiving!

Riding Bicycles in the Italian Countryside

2011-10-30T13:41:00.003-05:00

Hello, everyone! The North American Review is about to launch our new podcast — watch for an announcement here.

Anyway, we needed some theme music, so I wrote a song I'm calling "Italian Bicycle" for flute, guitar, bass, and drums. We'll be recording this song soon with NAR editors Kim Groninga, Vince Gotera, Jeremy Schraffenberger, and Grant Tracey playing the instruments named above, respectively.

In the meantime, here's a sneak peek ... click on the image below and then, after the sheet music loads, click on the orange triangle at the bottom left.

I'll let you know when the podcast is available online. Then you can hear the song played by real musicians — or human ones, that is — not the teensy electronic ghosts living inside your machine, playing their little ghost flutes and whatnot.

Please leave me a comment below. I'd really like to know what you think. Thanks! And happy halloween tomorrow.

Serial Killers, Profilers, and Poetry Imitation

2011-10-12T17:50:00.011-05:00

At the University of Northern Iowa I teach a course titled "Craft of Poetry" and from time to time I employ poetry imitation as an instructional approach in that class. Students read several books of poems by well-known poets; analyze each poet's subject, sensibility, and style; then write poems in imitation of specific pieces they have chosen from each poet. (I "inherited" this course model from Maura Stanton, from whom I took the exact same class at Indiana University when I was a grad student.

In my poetry-writing courses, I sometimes "do" the assignments along with the students, and in "Craft of Poetry" in Fall 2002 I wrote this imitation of Louise Glück’s poem "Siren."

Sniper, 2002
after Louise Glück’s "Siren"

I become a god when I squeeze it off.
I was . . . before that, I was . . .

I don’t know what it was
I was. I wanted to marry.
I wanted to ride in a long black hearse.
I wanted my fifteen minutes . . . forever.

I wanted to be a child again, to squash lines of ants.
I am a 30-caliber flyswatter.
I am the clean-up hitter.

Does a good person think like
I do? I do. I don’t care what you think.
I am. I am. I am.

I have been a god before. In the Gulf War,
I was Superman with an M-16 and a sniperscope.
I could see miles and miles like a desert raptor.
I wore black smoke from oil fires like a cape.

I will tell you my dream. Last night
I dreamt I was in a jail cell. In the dream,
I am white light. Iron bars melt. Walls crumble.
I stand among ruins wearing a crown of spines. Though

I walk in the valley of shadows,
I shall fear no evil, for I am the Golden Calf.
I am gathering my twelve apostles. Join me.

I see you. I see you.

I squeeze off another round.

— Vince Gotera, from Ghost Wars (2003).

Louise Glück opens her poem "Siren" with this line: "I became a criminal when I fell in love." Well, the most notorious criminal of 2002 was the Beltway Sniper, aka the Washington, DC, Sniper. I'm not quite sure exactly when I started writing "Sniper, 2002" but there had probably been several deaths already; in the sniper's killing spree, carried out "during three weeks in October 2002 . . . [eventually] ten people were killed and three others critically injured" (Wikipedia). I'm pretty sure it was Glück's word "criminal" that bridged me to the "sniper" topic.

I have had a healthy interest in crime-solving, especially forensics and profiling, for a long time. I originally started the poem in the voice of a profiler — in fact an early title was "Profiler" — trying to get into the head of the Beltway sniper who had not yet been caught, take on his persona, so to speak. If the FBI could psych out his "moves," he could be apprehended by knowing ahead of time where he would be and what he would do.

Imitating poetry in the way we were doing it in class, we also spoke about "moves": what moves might Glück conceivably make in writing a poem on a sniper, based on the moves she had already made in "Siren," a poem spoken by "the other woman" in a love triangle. That speaker says, "I wanted to marry you, I wanted / Your wife to suffer." And "I sat in the dark on your front porch" — a deliciously stalkerish moment. Etc.

I imagined that, mirroring Glück's "other woman," my sniper would be similarly self-obsessed; he would speak in ultra-bold and aggressive, even outrageous, first-person declarations, always starting with the word "I." Before I got too far along with the poem, the authorities arrested a man named John Allen Muhammad, who turned out to be a US Army Iraq-war veteran. That bit of info led me to abandon my FBI approach: profiler as speaker morphed into sniper as speaker, and the poem pretty much wrote itself.

If you compare "Sniper, 2002" to "Siren," you'll see there's not much of Glück's influence left. The poem quickly became my own poem — or rather a poem in its own right — rather than simply an imitation of her poem. In an epigraph, however, I do give props to Glück because she and her marvelously rendered and imagined speaker got me going and showed me the way.

Leave me a comment below, okay? Let's talk. Ingat, friends . . . take good care.

One small footnote: if you're a regular reader of the blog, you know that I usually include photo or art images. In this case, I decided to use none. I just didn't know how to illustrate this post without potentially causing pain to someone or other. The victims, their families, the Muhammad and Malvo families have suffered enough (Muhammad had an underage apprentice, Lee Boyd Malvo).

Vince Gotera @ The Gypsy Art Show

2011-09-30T23:56:00.001-05:00

I had the good fortune and distinct honor yesterday to be interviewed by poet and artist Belinda Subraman for her renowned radio program The Gypsy Art Show.

Rather than go on at length here, let me just say, "Thank you, Belinda!" Please listen to the podcast by clicking on the image above. Hope you enjoy our conversation! Do check out Belinda's other podcasts.

And please leave me a comment below. I'd love to hear what you thought of the interview. As always, thanks for reading the blog. Ingat. Take good care.

9/11 Tribute in Light ... Not a War Memorial

2011-09-11T21:23:00.005-05:00

In today's memorials of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I worry some Americans may again lean toward thinking of all Muslims as radical, would-be terrorists. Although well-intentioned Americans know this is a false image of Islam, the tarring of Muslims with a single brush could intensify again as a result of the tenth anniversary remembrances. With this in mind, I'd like to post this poem — a haiku — as a hopeful, more positive memorial.

Not a War Memorial

Like beacons or search
lights — ghostly towers glimmer
in star-riddled skies.

Inspired by the Tribute in Light memorial in which two beams of
light shone upward from near Ground Zero for a month after
3/11/02, the six-month anniversary of the tragic attack.

Dedicated to Saade Mustafa and other Arab Americans who worked
at Ground Zero. His picture is featured in the Life photography
book Faces of Ground Zero by Joe McNally. Mustafa said, "I ran
cable and set up movie lights for the search. My parents are
Palestinian. Islam is not terrorism. I was in the U.S. Navy in the
Gulf War." It seems fitting to dedicate a poem about light to this
lightbearer, a genuine American hero.

Photo credit below.
— Vince Gotera, from Ghost Wars (2003).

A little background. After 9/11, photographer Joe McNally documented the "faces of Ground Zero" with incredible lifesize photographs, shooting almost 300 full-figure images. These were collected in an exhibit and coffee-table-size book. Some of these images can also be seen in Joe McNally's online portfolios; a new website recaps some of the 2001 images and updates them with new tenth-anniversary 2011 portraits.

The Faces of Ground Zero image that struck me the most was of TV electrician Saade Mustafa, a Palestinian American. In the photo, he is hefting one of the huge studio lights he set up at Ground Zero to help with the search for survivors and then bodies. Part of what Mustafa says in McNally's book, "Islam is not terrorism. I was in the U.S. Navy in the Gulf War," shows his realization and fear that American Muslims will be discriminated against in the aftermath of 9/11, perhaps even hurt or killed. And so his image and statement are both meant to help forestall as well as mend such ruptures.

I found (and still find) Mustafa tremendously heroic and inspiring. His job, to be a bringer of light, coalesced in my mind with the magnificent Tribute in Light displays, building twin towers of bright light at Ground Zero. The footnote that accompanied my poem in Ghost Wars (see above) referred only to the first Tribute in Light event. In fact, Tribute in Light has shone for the subsequent anniversaries, and shines at this very moment for the tenth time as I write this on the evening of 9/11/2011.

As light can bring us hope in darkness, both literally and metaphorically, let us keep in mind that all people are sources of the light. All people — Muslim, Jew, Christian, whatever. Notice how the double "towers" of the 9/11 Tribute in Light point us toward heaven. Whether you believe in heaven or not, I hope we can all agree to see the best in each other, each other's light, each other as light. Amen . . . a ritual word used by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Amen.

Below, pictures of the Tribute in Light over the last ten years. I hope you find these as inspiring as I do.
Could you leave me a comment below? I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks.

2004

Photo by Derek Jensen, Wikimedia user Tysto, released into public domain.

2004

Photo by Mike Hvozda, U.S. Coast Guard official photo, in public domain.

2006

Photo by Jackie, Flickr member "Sister72," licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

2006

Photo by Denise Gould, U.S. Air Force official photo, in public domain.

2006

Photo by Denise Gould, U.S. Air Force official photo, in public domain.
A smaller version of this photo appears above next to the poem.

2008

Photo by Flickr member Scott Hudson, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

2008

Photo by Kenn Mann, U.S. Air Force official photo, in public domain.

2009

Photo by Flickr member Francisco Diez, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

2009

Photo by Flickr member Dan Nguyen, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

2010

Photo by Randall A. Clinton, U.S. Marines official photo, in public domain.

2010

Photo by Flickr member Bob Jagendorf, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

2010

Photo by D L, Flickr member "dennoit," licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

2010

Photo by Flickr member Bob Jagendorf, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Kids in "the City" ... Don't Call It "Frisco"!

2011-09-03T21:48:00.032-05:00

On facebook recently there has been a lot of excitement and discussion in a group called "You know you grew up in San Francisco when ..." The group members — 11,629 at this precise moment — talk about shared experiences and memories, such as visiting Playland at the Beach, San Francisco's long-gone amusement park that has been extinct exactly 39 years this weekend, Labor Day weekend, but is still fondly remembered by many of the facebook reminiscers. Interestingly, quite a few recall being scared by the six-foot-tall, mechanical Laffing Sal that beckoned kids — of all ages, as they say — into Playland's Fun House. Like other native San Franciscans in the group, I too distinctly remember being petrified of Laffing Sal and her maniacal cackle that could be heard all across Playland. Jeez. Shiver.

Other San Francisco memories: Surfing homemade coasters — planks with cannibalized roller-skate wheels — down steep concrete hills. The one and only Mitchell's Ice Cream shop with its trademark Filipino flavors: ube, macapuno, langka, halo-halo. The San Francisco restaurant chain Doggie Diner with the huge sign: a 3D dog's head wearing a chef's hat and a bowtie. The Mission District's Tik Tok drive-in, where Carlos Santana as a teenager washed dishes for his after-school job. Golden Gate Park's Music Concourse where the rock band I was in played the summer after the Summer of Love; two of us went to high school at SI &mdash St. Ignatius &mdash another to Riordan High School, the fourth to the gifted-and-talented magnet Lowell High School. Oh yeah, then there were those two guys who sang and played guitar on the sidewalk below Ghirardelli Square with a handwritten sign, "Help us get to Europe" . . . they used that sign for several summers and probably never went to see the Eiffel Tower or the Tower of London. Illegal bonfires at Ocean Beach to go with Boone's Farm wine and Colt 45 beer. Parking with your honey along the "lovers' lane" on top of Twin Peaks.

My short story "Manny's Climb" draws from such specifically San Francisco memories, focusing especially on boyhood in "the City," as all San Franciscans call their home. Need I say it? Don't call it "Frisco." There was even once a tourist-trap restaurant called that: Don't Call it Frisco. We mean it. Really.

"Manny's Climb" was first published in Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Cheng Lok Chua and published by New Rivers Press in 2000. This book was a landmark publication, the first literary anthology by Southeast Asian Americans . . . in other words, not just plain old Asian American (which, to many, may have meant only Chinese American or Japanese American).

Later, I had the good fortune to have the story reprinted in Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults, edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and published in 2003 by PALH (Philippine American Literary House). Since this anthology explores the topic of Filipino childhood across the globe, editor Cecilia Brainard asked the contributors for short introductions to our story, which appeared as headnotes in front of each piece. Here's my brief intro.

Growing Up in America in the 1960s [a preface to the story]

"Manny's Climb" mines its emotional power from the experience of young Filipino Americans in the 1960s, a time when the racial sensitivities of the U.S. were attuned to only two colors: black and white. It was difficult then to be teenage and brown, yellow, or red. I recall distinctly how I and my Filipino American friends and peers slipped on whiteness (Derby jackets and Ben Davis baggy pants) as well as blackness (pimp socks, dashikis, knit shirt-jackets) but not so much "flip-ness" — Barong Tagalog, the terno — even though we would wear these to the many "Fil-Am" social events our parents would drag us to. I was probably nineteen or older before I began to really accept being Filipino, and older yet when I could see those experiences more lucidly, as I hope they are depicted in this story.

Before we get to "Manny's Climb," let me clarify a couple of things.

First, the transmitter tower on top of Mt. Sutro in the story is NOT the gigantic three-pronged transmitter that now looms above Clarendon Heights, even though that's called the Sutro Tower. An inaccurate name, I've always thought, because it's not on Mt. Sutro itself but rather between Sutro proper and Twin Peaks. Before that humongous tower was built, there was a much smaller transmitter atop Mt. Sutro that is no longer there now. That smaller older tower is where my story takes place.

Second, to my grade school classmates at St. Agnes ("grammar school," as we called it) . . . I've based the kids at St. Alfred's in the story on us. You'll recognize some first names though not family names. Please rest assured these kids in the story are NOT meant to represent us. I've mixed and merged and altered. As the author, I am not talking about any of us in particular, so please don't try to read into the characters that way. The narrator of the story, although Filipino, is not me. None of the events in this story really happened. Okay? Here we go.

Manny's Climb
— a story by Vince Gotera

"He looks just like a damn spider in a web!" It must have been Piggy Figone who said that. "A Flip spider!" We had all laughed — me, the Three Rons, Crazy Greg, and a couple other kids — as we watched Manny climb the transmitter tower. Hanging by the tips of his fingers. Even now, more than twenty-five years later, I can still imagine what he must have felt like; just the week before Manny's climb, the Three Rons had made me scale that tower. I can still remember how it felt: the wind parting your hair like a cold hand, the tower creaking as it swayed, like the rivets were gonna pop off one by one as if you were Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon, and the sky all around you a deep blue fishbowl. Manny just kept inching, shinnying up. Filipino spider, indeed.

I'll never forget the day Manny — Emmanuel was his full given name — transferred to St. Alfred's in the sixth grade. Third week of school, a bright Indian-summer morning with just a hint of crispness in the air. A new kid was in the schoolyard, where we were all waiting for Sister Mary Michael, the principal, to come out and ring that huge handbell of hers, telling us to line up. "My name is Manny Mendoza," he was saying to one kid after another, "D'ya want me to eat this paper?" He would then hold up a piece of paper, shredded on one end, where it had been torn from one of those pocket-size spiral-bound notebooks. Of course, each one of us, when asked that question, said "Yeah!" What else could a self-respecting, red-blooded, American eleven-year-old say? Boy, did he gather a crowd of kids as he chewed up and swallowed paper after paper. Kids were beginning to cheer, to egg him on, "Manny! Manny! Manny!" In fact, just as Sister Michael came out on the school steps with her bell, Manny's pad ran out, and he tore a chunk out of his brown lunch bag with his teeth.

Well, I didn't know what to think about this new kid. For five years, I had been the only Filipino kid in the class, and now Manny made two. But, jeez, what a clown! Did I want to be associated with this guy? One thing about Manny, though, he knew how to dress. His St. Alfred School uniform — white shirt, brown "salt-and-pepper" corduroy pants, brown cardigan — was always impeccably cut. The rest of us always seemed rumpled and baggy in our uniforms next to Manny. His pants had been altered, form-fitted to a sixteenth of an inch outside what the nuns might deem too tight. And his pants — I tell you, this is hard to do with cords — his pants were always starch-ironed with folds like razor blades. His sweaters always had a blousy look, kind of like "poet shirts" in lingerie catalogs, billowing out slightly in the sleeves before the gather of the cuff, a whisper of fullness at the waist before the cummerbund-like tightness hugging the hips. His white short-sleeve shirts, too, were always professionally starched. By 3:30 in the afternoon, we would be limp as wilted cabbage, but Manny's collars would still be crisp as cardboard. And he wore imported Italian half-boots! The rest of us wore Kinney's wingtips, but his boots were what we could call, in a year or so, "Beatle boots" — coming to a chic, sleek, and trendy point at the toe. Man, that Manny was sharp!

Don't get me wrong, now, Manny was no sissy. He may have dressed like a dandy, but he was no slouch on the basketball court. Every day at lunch, the Three Rons would rule. That was Ron Johnson, a tall black kid who played center on our fourth-grade team; Ron Morse, a freckled and carrot-topped Irish boy with a short-man complex, who would fight anybody that looked at him the wrong way; and Geronimo Lee Wong, a sullen half-Chinese, half-Apache kid who had beaten up white Ron the second week of school in second grade to earn his slot. It occurs to me now that the Three Rons were like some kind of demographic slice of early 1960s San Francisco. Anyway, the Three Rons were the apex of the boys' social pyramid, and some of the girls rather liked the Rons' dashing ways, at least until Manny showed up with his Italian half-boots. So Manny had to prove himself that first day. Well, no, it couldn't have been the first day, because Manny was sent home right after lunch with a stomach-ache. In fact, he had thrown his lunch away (what there was left of the paper bag), 'cause he just couldn't bring himself to eat anything. But anyway, Manny showed himself over the next few days to be a pretty decent point guard. He could dribble real fancy — between scissoring legs, pizzicato behind the back — and he could sink two out of three jump shots from the top of the key. Until now, though, I can't figure out how he kept those Italian half-boots shined throughout the day, but he always did.

Back at the tower, all I could see of Manny's boots were his soles, and they were just as worn as the bottoms of anybody else's shoes. In fact, it seemed like there was the beginning of a hole in the left sole, but he must have been thirty feet above us, so who knows? In any case, the pointed toes were coming in real handy as Manny slipped them into one acutely angled foothold after another, as diagonal braces criss-crossed in front of and around him. As I looked at him against the backdrop of drifting clouds, the tower seemed to ripple and shimmer, sway slightly like the tower of Pisa must, I imagined. Jeez, that was one climb I would never want to do again.

When white Ron, in the sixth grade, noticed that the rest of us were growing taller around him, and that he was fading back in the growth curve, becoming a runt, one might say though still no one dared to say it to his face, he and black Ron devised a series of tests by which the rest of us boys could prove our manhood. One was to jump off the top of Chinese Ron's stoop to the sidewalk. Now this wasn't a straight-down drop, some ten feet or so. That wouldn't have been sporting enough. No, you had to sail at a forty-five degree angle across the gravitational pull of the earth, about fifteen feet over the steps. And there wasn't much room at the top of the steps for a running start. You just had to stand there and take off, hoping your knees could take the shock when — and if — you hit the sidewalk and not the last step. I guess it was fortunate no one got more than a skinned knee or torn pants. There were twenty-one steps, I remember distinctly, and that split second while you were in the air seemed like forever. Then you would hit rock bottom. Piggy was the best at that free fall. Piggy wasn't fat; he just had a little upturned nose and with a name like Figone, well, his nickname was a natural. Manny survived that test too, though he did scuff his right boot.

Another stunt black Ron devised was walking around and over the N Judah tunnel entrance. The N Judah was a streetcar line that went underground for a mile and a half, or thereabouts, and then surfaced to continue its way downtown. For a while, we had been jumping on the back of the streetcars, riding on the outside and making funny faces at the backs of passengers' heads. One time, Chinese Ron and Crazy Greg even rode the N Judah — again, on the outside, hanging on to the back window ledge — all the way through the tunnel. After they rode back, Crazy Greg — his full name was Gregory Romanoff, a good Russian boy — Greg was jumping around like Daffy Duck, he was so jazzed. Now that tunnel ride's something I just could not do. Black Ron couldn't do it either, so he proposed the tunnel walk.

The tunnel entrance was flanked by two sidewalks which climbed the hill above the tunnel; at the top, the sidewalks met and continued up. Next to the sidewalks was a four-foot-high concrete bannister, maybe a foot or so wide with a fairly gentle incline, while at the top, where the sidewalks converged, a level segment, about forty feet across, formed the upper rim of the concrete wall that edged the tunnel archway. Black Ron's idea was to walk on the banister, an uphill climb of maybe a hundred feet, then across the straight edge above — a real tightrope act, since you'd look down past your feet at the rails glinting below, with an occasional rumbling streetcar to shake you up, literally as well as figuratively — and finally downhill on the other side. White Ron and I, both small and fleet of foot, were the best at this stunt. Manny passed this test too; in fact, he stood on one leg in the middle of the level crossing, and mimicked a statue of Mercury perched on one winged foot. "Look at me, you guys! No hands!"

Manny was getting close to the top of the tower, now. He had been climbing for a solid seven minutes. With a couple of shaky transitions, I must say. I particularly remember that loose strut he encountered some ten feet earlier. Well, not exactly loose, since the rivets on either end were still holding. The strut would nevertheless quiver and rattle if you touched it, and you sure didn't dare put your weight on it. When I had climbed the tower the week before, I had looked down as I passed that strut, wanting to make sure I didn't put a foot on it. The view was magnificent. The Three Rons and the other kids were distant as ants. Crazy Greg's mouth gaped open. With sheer bravado born of adrenaline, I had leaned out over the abyss and yelled, "Hey, Crazy! You catching flies?" Boy, what a rush! The sun shining, reflections glinting off the occasional shiny surfaces on the tower. Down below, on the other side of the tower from the kids, was Sutro Lake, also flashing reflections like you wouldn't believe. Well, not exactly a lake, more like a pond, really. It was beautiful.

Piggy and I went over to Manny's house one afternoon, after school. He had invited us to have cookies or something. His parents weren't home, but that was pretty common among us kids, all latchkey types. Manny lived in a typical San Francisco flat, a little dingy and dark, with most of the shades pulled down. All sorts of Filipino bric-a-brac all around: on the dining room wall hung a giant wooden fork and spoon, carved fancifully on the handles; also a black shield like an interstate sign, with miniature Moro swords and knives arrayed on it like inlaid stripes; in the corner of the living room, a hanging lamp festooned with a mobile of circular capiz-shell slices; and other touristy knick-knacks.

"Jesus H. Christ," Piggy laughed, "we're in the Philippines now."

"I can't help what family I was born into," Manny muttered, his eyes glowering as he turned on the tube. So anyway, Piggy and Manny and I were sitting in the living room munching down on ginger snaps and watching Rocky and Bullwinkle, when Piggy's hand darted up into the air in front of his face. He had caught a fly. Not much to brag about, 'cause that fly had clearly been in the house for a couple of days, and it was starting to slow down. Not yet at that stage where the fly becomes delirious and begins bumping into your face, but certainly not at the peak of condition either. After Piggy let the fly go, I reached out and grabbed it too.

"Hey, watch this," I said, leading the way into the kitchen. Still holding the fly buzzing around inside my right fist, I asked Manny for a glass of water. He set it down on the counter, and I lowered my right hand into the water and let the fly go. "What do you think? Will he drown?"

"Sure," Piggy snorted, "he's a Flip, that fly!"

Manny's lips were pressed into a firm straight line. The fly lay at the bottom of the glass, motionless, for quite a long time, maybe a minute, as we watched intently. And then I poured the water slowly into the sink.

"Now watch," I whispered. In the empty glass, the fly lay there for a moment and then seemed to shrug feebly. After a few seconds, he was on his feet, though a little shaky. In another half-minute, he had recovered enough to sail into the air, buzzing as well as ever before.

"That's nothing," Manny said. He then snagged the fly in his palm, got it between finger and thumb. I remember how mad it was, buzzing and wriggling its legs. Then Manny popped it into his mouth and swallowed noisily. "There you go, Piggy," he said. "So much for your Filipino fly. I hate everything about the goddamn Philippines." It was only at that moment that I realized how much Manny and I were in competition.

Manny was almost at the top of the tower now. He just had to reach his left arm upward and he would touch the base of the transmitter itself. That's as far as any one of us had ever gone. Just a momentary touch, to say you too had been there, had planted your flag in the North Pole, then back down to terra firma. Of course Manny went further. Pretty soon he was standing on the transmitter base, swinging from the antenna itself like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building. "I'll be damned," black Ron said. "I thought that antenna would give you one hell of a shock." We all stood there with our mouths hanging open, like lightning was going to strike Manny any moment.

And then Manny turned to face the lake. He was just a silhouette up there, a figure cut sharply from the blue background of sky. Manny dove, kicking his legs to clear the chain-link fence around the bottom of the tower. In the air, Manny spread his arms like bird's wings. "Holy Mary," white Ron whispered, "Mother of God." In my head going on thirty years, in all our heads, I'm sure, though we never talked about it, Manny was dazzling as an eagle flashing in the heavens. None of us could tell at that moment if he was going to make it into the lake. I turned away, the image of Manny spread out against the sky indelibly burning in my brain.

— Vince Gotera, from Tilting the Continent (2000).
Reprinted in Growing Up Filipino (2003).

Usually when I post one of my own poems in the blog, I say something about its craft or its history. I think all I will say here is that all of the stunts from the story are drawn from real life. Kids did ride the outside of streetcars through tunnels. We did walk in tightrope fashion the wall around the N Judah tunnel entrance. There's now a fence on that wall to keep daredevils off. Sometimes I marvel that any of us survived. Bob Boynton, the drummer in my band that played in the Music Concourse, was the person who showed me how a fly could survive long immersion; neither of us ate the fly, though. And so on.

I hadn't thought about this before, but I'm teaching a Beginning Fiction Writing class at the University of Northern Iowa this semester, and perhaps my students who might happen to read this could take away a lesson about how to use "real" facts: when to be journalistic (of a sort), when to fictionalize. As I said above, when you base your characters on people you actually know, "mix and merge and alter."

Okay, 'nuff said. Check out these pictures (click to see them larger).

Laffing Sal, the 6-foot-tall clown that laughed maniacally above the Fun House door in Playland. She frightened many little kids, including me.

One of the huge trademark signs that stood above Doggie Diner restaurants, in several locations around San Francisco. I think this one was from the Doggie Diner on Sloat Boulevard, near the zoo.

The Sutro Tower. NOT the transmitter in the story. This much larger tower dates from 1972, a decade after the story's time period.

Ghirardelli Square, home of the famous Ghirardelli chocolates. At the bottom of the zigzag stair near the lower center of this photo is where, as I described above, two college-age guys played guitars and sang for tourist tips with a sign "Help us get to Europe." They plied their "art" for several summers, using the same sign, and I bet those buskers never actually travelled overseas.

The east end of the N Judah tunnel. This is where the kids in the story would balance on the wall, walking up one side, then cross at the top (still on the wall, directly above the tunnel entrance), and finally back down the other side. Kids did this in real life — me too. As seen in the picture, a chain-link fence now prevents such potentially deadly stunts.

Our band PEACE OF MIND playing a show in the Golden Gate Park bandshell in the Music Concourse, summer 1968. Left to right: Pat Martin (rhythm guitar, lead vocals), Vince Gotera (lead guitar, vocals), Bob Boynton (drums), Steve Hazlewood (bass). We were high school sophomores.

Pat Martin is now principal of a middle school. Bob Boynton I've lost touch with ... are you looking at this, Bob? Leave me a message below! Steve Hazlewood is the only one of us who became a professional musician. He has played bass with various rock bands and toured the world several times. I play in church bands here in Cedar Falls, Iowa — bass, lead, a bit of drums. Also playing lead axe in a start-up classic-rock band.

Please write me a comment below. I'd love to hear what you think. Especially if you were raised in San Francisco.

Hope you're having a great weekend. Take care. Ingat. Don't go tightrope-walking on any tunnel-portal curtain walls.

PHOTO CREDITS: (1) The Laffing Sal photo above was taken by Wikipedia user Schmiteye, who has released it into public domain. (2) The Doggie Diner photo was taken by Wikipedia user Atlant; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. (3) The Sutro Tower photo was taken by Justin Beck; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. (4) The Ghirardelli Square photo was taken by Wikipedia user Infratec, who has released it into public domain. (5) The tunnel-entrance photo was taken by Wikipedia user Senor_k [Kneiphof], who has released it into public domain. (6) The band photo was taken by my late father Martin Gotera; I own the rights.

Dragonfly (pages 16-17)

2011-08-31T23:02:00.009-05:00

I can't believe it's been over two years since I posted a Dragonfly page. Two years! Okay, I'll have to confess.

All this time, I've had a kind of writer's block . . . blogger's block, I guess. From my perspective now as a poet and artist, this poem is the weakest one in the book. It was indeed a strong poem, an important poem, for me when I wrote it during my grad-school days, working on my MFA, but now . . . meh. So I've been stuck, frozen, paralyzed, unsure how to move the blogging of Dragonfly beyond this point, this poem.

Today, though, I decided I should be loyal to the book as it was published then. Or, better yet, to the emerging poet I was during those times, the late '80s. Besides, whenever someone picks up a copy of Dragonfly today, they'll still be able to read this poem, right? So why not post it here. At least this way, I'll be able to comment on the poem in a way that may guide others' reading of it. And I do have a responsibility to my loyal readers — to you — to finish the serialization of the book in this blog. Okay, so here goes.

Gambling

In the 50s, we drove each month to my uncle's house.
Springing from the car, Papa would joke with him,
"The American Dream, ha, Kumpadre? No sleep
till Monday." Then they'd play mah jong non-stop
and we cousins, sleeping under whispering
gauze, dreamed of Arabian nights, Sinbad,

genies with palaces nestled in their palms.
Those Saturday and Sunday mornings, the kids would build
castles with mah-jong tiles piled up in walls
of many colors, which my cousin Levy
would demolish with a sweep of his hand.
We were mystified by cries of "Kang!

Mah jong! Pong!" We didn't yet have dreams
of horses named Flip Side or Pearl of the Orient.
Jai-alai and cockfights—just games.
Not yet insomniac rounds of Keno, dollar
slots or poker. We hadn't yet entered
that airy mansion Long Shot built from clouds.

How could we have predicted the chill of adrenalin
from snake-eyes? Up against the wall, crapped out.
Papa's weekend trips to Reno were
a calculus of chance. Any day now,
Lady Luck would wave her Ninang's wand
in our direction. You never know. What's that?

Romantic, you say? I want to tell you mah jong
is real. Hard and cruel as the Napa asylum
where my childhood friend stares into
oblivion. My kumpadre, Jose Manalo.
He can't escape it, lives it over and over.
How he had scrimped on lunches to join the "Empress

Page 16

of China Tour" bound for Reno. From the bus,
he and his partners flipped off the old-timers
hanging out on Kearny. Yeah, they were going
big time, no more tonk for 10 and 20.
Jose saw Chinese ideographs in Harrah's
Oriental Room and copied them off the walls

onto Keno cards. In his mind, they said
long life, wealth, or dreams come true.
On his last try, 10 minutes before
the bus was scheduled to leave, he matched 9
spots—50 grand. Manalo: a winner.
He knew he had to claim the prize before

the next game, 5 minutes at most. But balato,
the Filipino custom of spreading your luck,
meant at least a hundred bucks in each
of his buddies' pockets. So he strolled
with his friends to the bus, then said
he'd forgotten his coat. As the bus revved up,

he sprinted back into Harrah's
where the Keno boss waved him away.
"I'm sorry, buddy, you know you've got to collect
before a new game begins," and he pointed
to the Keno screen on the wall, newly blank.
Now, Jose spends his days building mah-jong castles.

Page 17

I'm going to backpedal a bit here and say that, nevertheless, there are still elements I like in this poem.

For example, lines 5-6, "sleeping under whispering / gauze" — an evocation of mosquito nets — exhibits a sussurus-ish atmosphere (perhaps from the use of s and z) that still suggests magical dreamscapes for me. Also, lines 13 through line 24, from "We didn't yet have dreams" to "Ninang's wand / in our direction" . . . those lines still rock. They dramatize well the common Filipino interest in (for some, obsession with) gambling. My parents routinely traveled to Reno and Lake Tahoe . . . for them this was a way to banish and vanish our family's financial woes, and they were very methodical, even technical, about their gambling so they wouldn't bankrupt the household. The influence of Keno, its numbered ping-pong balls and marked-up tickets (as pictured at left), was indeed large in my family's lifestyle and livelihood. While the game's odds are astronomical against the player, the payoff was much larger than with other casino games and so my parents played Keno quite a lot and often. "You just never know," they would say. "You could win any time."

The poem also retells an apocryphal story you would often hear when I was a kid in San Francisco in the '60s: some poor schmuck wins a big jackpot in Keno, but through his own selfishness in trying to sidestep the Filipino practice of sharing gambling winnings with friends and relatives, doesn't collect in time. And so he goes insane, the legend goes. Hence the mention of "the Napa asylum," the California state mental institution where the indigent would be committed.

I crank up the legend by naming our hero "Jose Manalo" . . . "manalo" is the Tagalog verb "to win." I just now googled "Jose" and found it means "he will enlarge" or "the Lord will increase." When I was writing this poem some 25 years ago, I had a keen interest in names and what they denote so I'm sure that, although the first name was probably originally inspired by a childhood friend's given name, I surely did know about the "enlarge/increase" connotation. And of course the name turns out to be ironic because Jose Manalo does win but eventually loses it all.

It's also important that the speaker calls Jose Manalo his kumpadre. This word calls into play one of the strongest relationship systems in Filipino culture. A kumpadre is the godfather of one's child, or one may be the godfather of the kumpadre's child . . . ditto with kumadre, a connection through godmotherhood. Such a godparent relationship is one of the most crucial social affiliations and alliances in Filipino society, equal to family bonds, in some cases even surpassing them. The reference to a "Ninang" in the poem is closely related, also; a ninang is a godmother, and evoking the word is how a child interacts with the kumadre/kumpadre social system.

Okay, given all these factors why do I say then that this poem "is the weakest one in the book"? My largest misgivings lie in the poem's strange (and uneven) lineation. Look at line 8 . . . why is it so long? A somewhat more graceful line break might be after the word "would," to bring "build" and "castles" closer together. In other places, there are lines that are overly enjambed: why break "dollar" from "slots" in stanza 3; or "Empress" away from "of China" at the end of stanza 5; or, worst yet, "9" separated from "spots" in stanza 7. At times, the line breaks seem almost capricious.

At some locations, lines are so enjambed they become melodramatic, using structure to up the ante rather than character action or significant detail. For example, the aforementioned "sleeping under whispering / gauze" in the opening stanza: notice how "whispering" unmoored from "gauze" may suggest that something maleficent nears the sleeper . . . and then we are told "gauze." Anticlimax. Stanza 5: "into / [line break] oblivion" . . . really? And again, at the end of stanza 7: Jose must "claim the prize before // the next game," the stanza enjambment in this case suggesting some dramatic turn or revelation only to be deflated by something routine. Ditto in stanza 9 when "the Keno boss" says, "'you've got to collect / before a new game begins,' and he pointed /" — here, because of the line break we think there will be a momentous climax, but he is pointing only "to the Keno screen on the wall."

Having been a magazine editor now for over a decade, it's immediately (and painfully) obvious to me how many small errors there are in the poem. For example, "the 50s" in the first line should have an apostrophe before the 5: "the '50s." The word "nonstop" doesn't have a hyphen in it; I was tempted to change that above but finally left it alone. Or "mah jong" (no hyphen) as a noun, and then "mah-jong" (hyphenated) as an adjective . . . hypercorrect, don't you think? In stanza 3, the sport name "Jai alai" has no hyphen, at least in this universe. Maybe just one more: "adrenaline" is spelled wrong; the closing e is MIA. Sans closing e, the word is a Parke-Davis trademarked medication, Adrenalin, a compounded epinephrine.

That's probably enough. I've flayed the poor young poet too relentlessly. Oh, wait, one more thing: entirely too much italicization of non-English words; just italicize the first occurrence. Okay, now enough flaying.

Listen, perhaps this isn't that bad a poem, after all. I don't know. You be the judge. Write me a comment below . . . I've got a thick skin, so tell all. Peace out. Ingat.

NOTE: The photo at the top is by Immanuel Giel, Wikimedia commons, used
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

DRAGONFLY

FIRST

CONTENTS

LAST

It's Mondo Marcos, Yo!

2011-07-26T23:58:00.030-05:00

Do you remember the literary anthologies titled Mondo Elvis and Mondo Barbie (stories and poems)? Snarky, arch, but also a bit nostalgic.

Well, now we've got a Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos equivalent: Mondo Marcos: Writings on Martial Law and the Marcos Babies (in English) and Mondo Marcos: Mga Panulat sa Batas Militar at ng Marcos Babies (in Filipino), both published in late 2010. These books are essentially a two-volume anthology because their contents are different — not merely translations of each other, that is — adding up to almost 400 pages! Like Mondo Barbie and Mondo Elvis, the Mondo Marcos books' takes on the subject(s) are multidimensional and complex in their emotional and intellectual approaches.

A couple of days ago — huzzah, huzzah! — my contributor's copy of the volume in English finally arrived via snailmail. Evidently administrative mishaps had held up my copy. I have three poems in the Mondo Marcos anthology, focusing on Ferdinand Marcos, Imelda Marcos, and their son "Bongbong" Marcos (as announced in this blog on 26 June two years ago). Immediately below this announcement in that post, read my description of my own family's strange, opposed connections to the Marcos mondo bizarro.

Here's what the book looks like; the volume in Filipino has a contrasting red cover. It's fascinating how the book designer's choice of bright blue next to bright red for both volumes causes visual vibrations that mirror the frenzied lives and reps of the Marcos family. (It just occurred to me that some readers may not know much or, in fact, may know nothing about the Marcos saga . . . for some background, read my three blog posts on Ferdinand, Imelda, and Bongbong in full. At the very least, you'll enjoy the pictures.)

From the back cover . . .

For the first time ever, some of the best Filipino writers
recall, cry, decry, metamorphosize, giant robotize, love
and Skylab, imagine, re-imagine, televise, sport dance,
odify, audify, analyze, saint patronize, assassinate,
colorize (orange), underwear commercialize, monsterize,
pornify, necrophilize, shadowbox and guava jam with
themselves, their friends, their generation and THE
LIFE under President Ferdinand Marcos. Mondo Marcos
features the fiction, essays, and poems of:

Paula Angeles
Alma S. Anonas-Carpio
Cesar Ruiz Aquino
Genevieve Mae Aquino
Oscar Atadero
Robert J.A. Basilio Jr.
Shubert L. Ciencia
Frank Cimatu
Johanns Fernandez
Vince Gotera
David Peter Jose J. Hontiveros
Luisa A. Igloria
Cyan Abad-Jugo
R. Zamora Linmark
Martin Masadao
Apol Lejano-Massebieau
Gabe Mercado
Wilfredo O. Pascual Jr.
BJ Patiño
Padmapani L. Perez
Pete Rajon
Ige Ramos
Sandra Nicole Roldan
Grace Celeste T. Subido
Eileen Tabios

A couple of names were left off because they were not writers: Rolando B. Tolentino (co-editor) and Andy Zapata (photographer). A writer, however, who was left off the back-cover listing is a poet "named" Anonymous . . . I'm not sure why this writer is published as anonymous; perhaps this poem was originally published sans name during the martial law period. Marcos summarily jailed writers and artists, most notably the poet Mila Aguilar, among many others.

The introduction to Mondo Marcos is cagey about whether or not the poem had been originally submitted to the editors without a name; the editors had some computer-virus problems during their collection of manuscripts and this poem's by-line could have been lost that way. In any case, this anonymous appearance is fitting because of the way Marcos hog-tied free speech during his rule, causing many to protest against him in secret. The Marcos regime is said to have kept a notorious "black list" of opponents and dissenters &mdash quite probably this was more than rumor.

Here is the poem published nameless in Mondo Marcos:

Requiem
—Anonymous
Memory is a mosaic of tongues licking dirt, of lies embroidered to protect the King of Martial Law.

He was born. He is risen. He will kill again. And his Kingdom will have no end.

Memory is a 1972 machine gun fired on Sunday morning. Four bodies on the edge of a dirt road. An act of suspended drowning.

This is a cup of his blood, the new and everlasting covenant.

Memory is a woman who howls past curfew. Late night dinner parties and spilled champagne.

She drinks it so that their sins may be forgiven.

Memory is a spinning bottle, a top with no base, a mad pack of white dogs eating brown tails, brown dogs, eating spotted tails.

She breaks the bread, gives it to their disciples, and says, Eat this in memory of us.

Memory is an archipelago of closed-view coffins, eaten calmly like sugared fingers of bread.

Such a marvelous poem that gets to the heart of the Marcos dynamic. Mondo Marcos editor Frank Cimatu had tried to locate and identify its author via the blogosphere some time back, without success. I hope the poet will come forward and announce her or his identity . . . are you out there reading this? Perhaps you could reveal yourself in a comment below?

I'm very glad to have my three Marcos poems appear finally in Mondo Marcos. One concern: the poems were edited into 14-line blocks rather than my intended three quatrains and a couplet. Nonetheless, I recommend Mondo Marcos highly. These books and the works they contain are crucial historical and personal comments to the ongoing Marcos story and legacy, from writers who were born during martial law or grew up during that time.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about and responses to the larger Mondo Marcos project overall or the specific poem Requiem. Would you please comment below? It's Mondo Marcos, yo! Let's talk.

Photo from Daily Mail online article "Back from the dead: Imelda Marcos plants ghoulish kiss on glass coffin of embalmed husband as she resurrects political career" (29 March 2010).

A Memorial to Maria Fleuette DeGuzman

2011-06-12T22:08:00.002-05:00

While reading the Sunday paper this morning, I was shocked to discover that Maria Fleuette DeGuzman had passed away last week, from "complications of a heart attack," according to the obituary. Here's that article (if you can't read it, click on the image to see it enlarged):

I really like how Maria is described here as "a vibrant, compassionate woman whose infectious (though sometimes excessive) enthusiasm was thoroughly enjoyed by those privileged to know her. An avid artist and writer, her unique creativity spilled into all aspects of her life." I didn't know Maria very well, but as much as I remember, that's her to a T.

I first met Maria at a poetry reading I gave in Cedar Falls . . . it's a bit fuzzy now, but I'm guessing it would have been in the mid- to late '90s. She had come to hear me read partly because I am Filipino American, and Maria had been married to a Filipino. In any case, we would often run into each other at literary and arts events. We always had lively conversations — that's the way it always was with Maria: everything was always lively and exciting around her — conversations about poetry and art and sometimes Filipino matters. After her family moved to New Jersey in 2004, we lost touch for some time, but then Maria found me on facebook, and we resumed those lively conversations electronically.

I'm writing about Maria today because I'd like to introduce you to her art and writing. She kept three blogs and they are a wonderful way to get to know her. Check them out. In them you'll enjoy her impassioned personality: fun, effervescent, volcanic, devoted to literature, the arts, and social justice.

First, "The Big Life" at http://lavidagorda.blogspot.com . . .

Second, "theBIGlife Calendars" at http://biglifecalendars.blogspot.com . . .

Third, "DAMN THE MAN!" at http://madasshell.blogspot.com . . .

I'm tempted to say her art and writing resemble the work of Lynda Barry — a Filipino American artist, incidentally, part Filipino — but while there are resemblances, Maria had an interestingly refreshing perspective as a writer and artist that was very much her own.

I won't say any more about Maria's work here. I'd love to hear what you think. Please leave me a comment below. You can also visit Maria's facebook at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1509368934, which has now become a tribute page. (You might have to log in to facebook to see this.)

RIP, Maria Fleuette DeGuzman. You'll be very sorely missed, indeed, Maria.

Google Doodle 4 Les Paul

2011-06-09T04:25:00.018-05:00

Friends, today is Les Paul's birthday. He was born 9 June 1915 so he would have been 96 today.

For those of you who may not know Les Paul, he was a truly influential visionary in the guitar world. Wikipedia calls him "an American jazz and country guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which 'made the sound of rock and roll possible.'" Amen to that and more.

You may know of the legendary Gibson electric guitar named after Les Paul; in the picture to the right, the man himself is playing one of those guitars. So what you're seeing is Les Paul playing a Les Paul at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City in 2008.

In celebration of Les Paul's birthday, Google has created an interactive logo for today that can be played like a guitar, using your mouse to strum! Push the black button below the logo, and try playing the keys on your keyboard, especially the number keys.

If you're in the US, pushing that black button will also allow you to record 30 seconds of what you plink and plunk, then play it back! After you finish recording, you'll see a web address show up below the logo. You can copy that and send it to people to play in their own browsers. AMAZING! Google, you rock.

Here's the skinny on today's interactive Google logo (or "doodle") . . . http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/doodle-for-instrumental-inventor.html. The designer of the logo is Alexander Chen. If you go to that blog post, make sure to play the tune Chen wrote to be played on the logo. Wow.

On a less musically impressive note (sorry, bad pun there), try playing this on your number keys (the ones above the letters, not the keypad):
5 3 1 3 5 8 0 9 8 3 4 5 5 5 0 9 8 7 6 7 8 8 5 3 1
Yup, 4 is off (should be "4-sharp" — a half-step between 4 and 5, that is) but hey, it's still pretty tremendous. And patriotic.

Okay, all for now. Have fun playing the Les Paul Google Doodle.

The photo of Les Paul was taken by Thomas Faivre-Duboz, and is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Added 11 June 2011: The Les Paul Google Doodle has now moved from the main Google page to the Doodle archive. Click on the link next to the date above the doodle.

I've fixed the links in the text above to work properly (i.e., to jump to the archived doodle).

Oh, also, Alexander Chen's lovely demo tune in the Googleblog page linked above will play properly as well, so go listen to it again.

In any case, we can all keep playing and recording on the Les Paul doodle. Thanks, Google!

Melina's Graduation

2011-05-31T23:12:00.006-05:00

Two days ago, on 29 May 2011, the day before Memorial Day, our youngest daughter Melina Blue Gotera graduated from Cedar Falls High School. There's Melina on the right, with her eyes squinched tight in joy, hugging her BFF Sarah . . . don't the two of them look just ecstatic and glorious?

It was a wonderful graduation commencement. An English teacher was up there at the podium and represented the tribe in excellent fashion, with a funny and uplifting address . . . Ms. Marguerite DeMoss, one of Melina's favorite teachers. Just yesterday Melina showed me the fabulous Hemingway parody she wrote in Ms. DeMoss's "great books" class, where incidentally they read Dante. Faithful readers of the blog know of my longstanding obsession with The Divine Comedy. Gotta love it!

It's been an interesting four years for all of us in the Blue Gotera family &mdash rewarding, challenging, full of joys. Now Melina goes on to pursue her many interests: teaching, psychology, art, literature, music, and her great love, writing. These will be lifelong pursuits, I'm sure. Melina has numerous talents, but most of all she wants to be of service. She wants ultimately to help people and the world as much as she can. I know I'm her dad and all that, but I am certain Melina will lead a life that will be fulfilling not only for her but also for everyone around her.

And now, of course, you gotta look at pictures. There are also a couple of videos, but I won't put you through that. Many thanks to Melina's older sister Amelia, who was a most excellent photographer and videographer for the event.

Okay, here goes.

That's the happy-graduate-holding-her-diploma shot. Ain't she just beautiful?
(Remember, just click on any image to see it larger.)

This is Melina's other BFF, Jordyn. She's been a real rock for Melina, just a wellspring of support.
(I know, mixed metaphor . . . proud Dad syndrome.)

The kids: Amanda, Gabe, Melina, and Amelia. Yup, Melina's wearing really high heels.

My older son Marty and our lovely daughter-in-law Grace live in Germany and couldn't be here. We love and miss you guys!

Mary Ann and I . . . happy, proud parents with our baby all grown up.

And finally the picture from the top of the post, this time without all that Photoshop schmotoshop.

Congratulations, dear Melina. Her name comes from the Greek for "honey" and that's what she's been all her life. Sweet.

Melina, your Mom and I couldn't be prouder. We wish you all the best, ALL THE BEST, in life and love . . . laugh, laugh, laugh, that's the secret. We all love you!

Dear readers, I hope you will comment below. Let's talk. And thanks.

Wound, Burn, Glacier: A Poetry Exercise

2011-05-28T23:51:00.015-05:00

This past semester — Spring 2011 — I taught a Beginning Poetry Writing course at the University of Northern Iowa. A few minutes before class was to start one day, I realized I had neglected to prepare an in-class poetry exercise, something to get students in the zone, as they say. Looking around my office for last-minute inspiration, my eyes lit upon the most recent issue of the North American Review, which brought to mind the fine short story "VIVA!" by Erin McReynolds.

I leafed quickly through Erin's story, looking for a paragraph that had fascinating words in it. I found one that contained the words blue light, wound, burn, glacier, Sssh, crushes. Bingo! Here's that paragraph as it appears on the page, with the exact lineation:
My boyfriend sleeps beside me, and his face is peaceful in
the blue light of my laptop. His lashes are long and I bend
down to kiss them. Because I'm used to telling him every-
thing, I whisper aloud the things I find on the Internet.
Things like, "A wound to the carotid artery results in a loss of
consciousness in under a minute," and, "They burn the organs
they remove during autopsy, unless the family wants them put
back in, for religious reasons." When he startles, his glacier
eyes wild with panic, I stroke his head. "Sssh," I whisper, "it’s
me," as if that should comfort him. He blinks at me and then
grabs me around the ribs and crushes his face to my chest. I
keep stroking his hair, whispering, "The human body contains
about five liters of blood."
I quickly xeroxed the half of the page bearing the paragraph (making sure Erin's entire name was visible) and then wrote instructions on the remaining white space: Write a 12-line poem using one word from each line in the paragraph shown. The chosen word from each line needs to appear in the same line in the poem. E.g., if you use the word "Internet" it should appear in line 4 of your poem. If you use "chest" it must appear in line 11. Okay? Ready, set, go. I left the 13th line of the paragraph out because it was short and thus had relatively few words. In class, I also told the students they could slightly alter the words, for example, changing "sleeps" to "sleeping."

Here's an image of that actual sheet (click on it to see a larger version); the handwriting shows how truly impromptu the exercise was.

Impromptu or not, the exercise was incredibly successful. The 12-line exercise poems the students wrote in the course of about ten minutes were quite good, probably due in great part to the haunting strangeness of Erin's paragraph. After the semester, I looked back at the course and saw this exercise as one of the high points in the class. Via e-mail I asked the students if they would be willing to share in this blog entry what they wrote in response to this exercise. Two volunteered: David Hosack and Mandy Paris. My thanks to both of you.

Here is Dave's exercise; the words borrowed from Erin's paragraph are in gray at the right.
my face is not like yours
it does not light up when the phone rings
it has never been kissed
it sees things as they really are
it leaks the results to loved ones
before organ transplants go through
my face removes smiles from children and
disrobes religious men and
says "sssh" after the first chords of "happy birthday"
my face only blinks when it matters
my face is not like yours
my face is not like anybody's

—Exercise by David Hosack [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face
light
kiss
things
results
organ
remove
religious
sssh
blinks
face
· · · ·
David has written a fascinating poem here. I like how he drew from Erin's paragraph an obsessive focus on the face, that idiosyncratic image we advance into the world each day. Notice how Dave finds unusual and striking attributes for the face; my favorite is how the face can say "'sssh' after the first chords of 'happy birthday'" — how we can short-circuit each other's happiness with just a look. Also, Dave makes a savvy rhetorical choice here to abandon the "rules" in the last line: by not using one of Erin's words in his twelfth line, he ends the poem with a convincing and meaningful closing. Bravo, Dave.

Mandy, she told me, is usually meticulous in holding on to completed course materials but couldn't locate what she wrote that day. I remember that her exercise was as strong as Dave's. Instead Mandy offered to write something new in response to the exercise. Here is that poem, written at home with more practice, with more than ten minutes grace:
I push my face into that crook and I feel you
bending against me, limbs locking automatically.
You're telling me awful things, about your mother,
about your sister. You whisper because this
is an open wound. Our hearts beat together. . . .
The tip of your tongue burns as it reaches the
scalding thoughts at your temple. They remove
themselves, but linger, wanting a way back in.
Our eyes catch. I have nothing for you — yet
you search me. I can't comfort you, I can only blink —
and my ribs tighten like ropes around the beating organ
that contains every humane wish I had for you.

—Exercise by Mandy Paris [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face
bend
telling
whisper
wound
burn
remove
back in
eyes
comfort
ribs
human
Mandy's poem is a heart-rending portrayal of a vulnerable and touching moment shared by two people. Her closing image of the heart both as literal, physical organ and as the metaphorical, metaphysical "font of love," is breathtaking. Brava, Mandy.

The day of the exercise, I wrote along with the students, as I usually do. I was amazed that in three or four minutes, this surfaced:
Observing the Medical Examiner at his Job

She sleeps on a brushed steel bed,
Her lashes frozen in the big sleep.
Harsh fluorescent lights caress and kiss
the Y cut between her breasts; the Internet
is the only place I've seen this. Her arteries,
sliced, pump nothing, not even ooze. Organs
— lungs, heart, miles of stomach — autopsied
and removed and put in a plastic bag. Glacier,
that's what I make my mind, my head.
I'm ice. I'm stone. I don't dare blink.
Can't imagine my ribs like hers splayed open.
The human body is an envelope, a sack, a hole.

—Exercise by Vince Gotera [please do not copy or quote ... thanks]

sleeps
lashes
kiss
Internet
artery
organs
autopsy
glacier
head
blinks
ribs
human body
I'm an aficionado of crime fiction, especially when it centers on forensics. For example, just today I finished a Patricia Cornwell novel featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In any case, I guess I'm well-primed to write about this topic. But what really surprised me was how much of a "real" poem this exercise was. I plan to work on this poem more: I need to work out who the speaker is and why he's where he is. Line 10 is an allusion to (perhaps a re-working of) a line in Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "Facing It"; I need to figure out if that echo helps or hurts the poem. Etc.

Since I had a few more minutes &mdash the students were still writing &mdash I tempted and challenged the muses by trying again. Perhaps lightning might ... well, you know. Here's what came of that second attempt:
Mary Wonders Why

Her boyfriend was just too sweet,
leaving on the screen of her laptop
pictures of dancing hearts and kissing
birds. All drawn lovingly from the Internet.
He never thought of any losses
between them, not in a minute.
He removed all possibility of anger
and defeat from them. Had his reasons.
His childhood was wild and panicked:
alcoholic father, angry mother, comfort
a rarity. He couldn't face it again
now. His jagged and scarred past always whispering.

—Exercise by Vince Gotera [please do not copy or quote ... thanks]

boyfriend
laptop
kiss
Internet
loss
minute
remove
reasons
wild panic
comfort
face
whispering
Not as good, quite a bit clunkier. Too much abstraction. (Probably my students who are reading this now are laughing, knowing how I rail so much against abstraction.) I don't seem to know what the poem's really about until close to the end. But for a five-minute writing, not bad. The fascinating thing here, I think, is that I've got the seed of a short story here: a man who, perhaps obsessively, tries to control his relationship with his girlfriend because of a traumatic childhood. Obviously nothing earthshaking there . . . I need still to find out what's really at stake for the character.

Well, that's all for today. I just wanted to tell you about an exciting learning moment in my class. Please don't copy or quote anything from the exercise poems above. They are only drafts. Thank you for your cooperation with that.

Oh, about the exercise itself. This word-from-line-from-found-text approach is not my invention. I first learned it in a Teaching Creative Writing class taught by Sena Jeter Naslund over two decades ago at Indiana University. Thanks, Sena! In any case, you can find many (probably better) versions of this exercise in books and online. Do try it yourself, though. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you end up writing. There may even be a "real" poem waiting for you to do this exercise. If you do use this exact exercise, I'd like to hear how it turns out.

Please write a comment below. I'd love to hear what you think. Hope you're having a great weekend!

Added 31 December 2011: There's a "reboot" of this in-class poetry-exercise topic in the post titled "Wound, Burn, Glacier ... Revisited" . . . new poetic responses/exercises by the poet Catherine Pritchard Childress. Check it out!

On Dante and Doré and Childhood

2011-05-15T19:25:00.004-05:00

A couple of days ago, my daughter Melina, who's a senior in high school, asked me to go with her to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up a Penguin edition of The Divine Comedy by Dante. As you may know from other blog posts, I have what seems to me an almost lifelong history with Dante, and especially Gustave Doré's Divine Comedy illustrations.

Well, not only did we find Melina her Penguin, we also found me a remaindered Divine Comedy (hardcover and only $17!), which is, I'm pretty sure, the same text and illustrations (Doré's, hurray!) that I used to sneak peeks at in my Lolo's sala. Actually, I didn't only "sneak peeks" . . . I used to pore and pore over that book. I was obsessed with it, at probably age 4 or 5.

Those hidden childhood hours with Dante made quite an impression on me. More particularly, the Doré illustrations are deeply imprinted in my memory. Looking through my new find, I quite vividly remembered many of the images &mdash specific ones! — first seen over fifty years ago.

Inferno, Canto 10
Inferno, Canto 19
Inferno, Canto 18

Filipinos have a pretty lively cultural connection with the occult and with death, so I was already well primed for these images. I quite clearly remember the image on the left above, of a grave sundered open and a corpse tottering up to speak. Perhaps my long apprenticeship with such imagery explains my interest in cinematic and literary vampires, zombies, Frankenstein, the aswang. (Remember you can click on an image to see a larger version.)

I also recall quite strongly the image in the center, where the punished are embedded upside down in holes in solid rock, burning. I recall my horror at this specific penance, imagining these people's nostrils filled with whatever noxious fluids feed the flames and smoke writhing around their legs and feet. Worst of all, they are constantly drowning. (Drowning just happens to be one of my greatest fears.)

Dante and Doré may have provided my earliest introduction to the nude female body. There are many examples in the book, but I do remember this image on the right, probably because of the woman's buxom form but also because she is smeared with shit. At that age I could already read quite well and probably easily decoded Dante's language: "filth . . . out of human privies," "so foul with ordure" (in Longfellow's translation).

Inferno, Canto 13
Inferno, Canto 15

Most of the time, it was the particularity of the punishment that got to me. Above left, sinners have been turned into mangled and distorted trees. The talking trees in The Wizard of Oz movie didn't scare me: they were originally trees . . . talking, yes, but still in their own natural forms. These are people who have been changed into trees, obviously not of their own choosing. This specific punishment seemed to me, as a child, quite brutal: trees cannot get up and run away.

On the right, a rain of fire. Yes, I knew about the tongues of fire that descended upon Jesus's disciples after his death. But I imagined those as friendly flames, like soft birds almost. Instead, we've got rain . . . really, rain couldn't give a care about you as it pelts your skin indiscriminately, but here it's made of fire. I distinctly recall imagining what those hundreds of firedrop burns might feel like on your naked skin.

Inferno, Canto 22
Inferno, Canto 24

In the image on the left, I remember surmising that the demon had chased down a misfortunate and thrown him into boiling water or even oil. I knew what jumping bubbles of oil looked like from watching my mom fry up dinner. That had to be boiling oil or worse! What really scared me, though, was the obvious virtuoso flying the demon is doing. That convinced me to avoid going to Hell. There'd be no way to escape from these flyers, with their serrated bat wings, pitchforks, and snakey tails.

Speaking of snakes, in the image on the right . . . what else is there to say? They sic snakes on you! Snakes. Snakes!

Inferno, Canto 28
Inferno, Canto 28
Inferno, Canto 31

The image on the right was (and is) especially troubling to me. Demons slitting your chest . . . so you could pull it open, exposing lungs and innards, the heart, to the sulphurous air of Hell. This particular image has stuck with me over the years. I only recently realized that the central figure here is Mohammed, and I am reminded, alas, of the misguided animosity some Americans currently have towards Islam.

In the center, a man holding up his own severed head and talking. The original talking head, ha ha. I've had a long fascination with this sort of image, later centered upon The Green Knight, Sir Gawain's nemesis. Clearly I had forgotten that that fascination is rooted in this particular image from childhood. An image that was not so much horrific as it was interesting, especially with the perfectly round, collar-like neck of the man.

On the right, a more benevolent context. We see Dante and Virgil being transported by a giant (Antaeus, it turns out, who had fought Hercules and lost). As a child, I was very interested in giants from fairy tales and mythology, Greek and Norse. In this image, I recall being amused by the hero holding on to the giant's beard, afraid of being dropped. Dante, so unheroic, so much like an ordinary Joe.

Inferno, Canto 34
Inferno, Canto 12

I quite clearly remember gazing at the image on the left for long periods: Satan (or perhaps, more correctly, fallen Lucifer), frozen into ice. I was quite surprised to learn that in the deepest pit of Hell Satan would not be on fire but rather on ice. And he really seemed to me quite bored. Supremely so. I mean, he's got four wings and all. And nowhere to go. No way to go. Humpf.

You have to understand: at that age, I thought I was really seeing Hell. That this was what it was like. Not metaphor. Not imagined. But journalism. You sinned, you go to Hell, you're tormented by guys with sharp implements and leathery bat wings. And in the middle of it all, Satan imprisoned in a lake of ice.

But it wasn't all horror. I was also glad to see the creatures of mythology were real, and they lived down there. Look here on the right at the centaurs. Aren't they having a good old time? These horsy bro's horsing around with their spears and bows and arrows. As a kid of 5 or 6, I nursed a great interest in archery. The American Indians' versatile short bow. The great longbow of the English. And so on. Fun!

Purgatorio, Canto 12
Paradiso, Canto 12
Paradiso, Canto 31

At that age, I didn't find Purgatorio and Paradiso nearly as interesting as Inferno. (Actually, I still don't.) Purgatorio, even though it still featured punishments, did have a lot of pastoral fields and such. Looking through the book now, the only image I recalled from back then was the one on the left. And it's quite similar to the infernal images. A bunch of guys carting boulders up a mountainside. Like Jesus burdened with the cross, actually. At least it looks like they are having a modicum of success, not the futility one saw again and again in Hell.

Just as I thought Hell was exactly as Doré portrayed it, I thought Heaven was just like he shows in the center and right images above: a lot of synchronized flying by angels making circular shapes and patterns. As a kid, I was very interested in Paradiso as a destination more than as an actual location. And I really wanted to believe that the saved souls would be happy there.

I think I must have remembered the center image because the angels in the upper circle — a "garland" of "sempiternal roses," Dante and Longfellow called it — seemed just like a flying saucer ringed by bright landing lights. At that age, I was crazy about flying saucers. Remember that was the '50s and flying saucers were all over the news, absolutely de rigueur.

And on the right, well, that's some fancy flying, ain't it? Actually, I felt much more religious about it back then. I'm being pretty glib here. Pretty flippant. I remember imagining what a glorious sight that would be if you could be right there on that cloud with Dante. Millions of angels and saints forming a "snow-white rose" of concentric Seraphim and Cherubim and Archangels, with God ensconced in the center. Wow.

I mentioned zombies above, and I'm remembering how I saw the movie Night of the Living Dead as a teenager. Have you seen it? It's a black and white flick. Well, many years later, I was talking to someone and insisting that the movie was in color. Of course, I was wrong, but the important point is that I had "colorized" the movie in my head. I could still see scenes from the movie (as I can now today) but I saw them in color. (Though now that I know better, I remember them in black and white again . . . the imagination is funny that way.)

Well, I've had something similar happen with Doré's Dante illustrations. Here's something I wrote in a blog post three years ago: "I remember vividly the [Doré illustration from Dante] that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future." I looked for that illustration in my new book, and it ain't there. It seems I manufactured that memory, made up a "new" Doré illustration. Amazing.

Anyway, that's all for today. If you've gained an interest in Doré from this blog post, go buy that Divine Comedy that's "bargain priced" at the Barnes and Noble. Or buy it from Amazon (price about the same). Or look at Bruce Johnson's online tribute to Doré. In any event, you won't be disappointed. That Gustave Doré is one hip artist. He had quite a sublime effect on my childhood. He's one cool cat.

All the images above are borrowed from Bruce Johnson's beautiful webpage on Gustave Doré. Mr. Johnson's website on artists and art is an excellent tool to learn about art history. A retired teacher of Latin, he has also created an interesting online guide to historical personages. Check them out.

Carrieola @ Women, Women, Women

2011-05-07T01:34:00.006-05:00

Do you remember the poet/artist Carrie Arizona (aka carrieola on deviantART), whose work I featured on the blog a month ago?

Carrie's mixed-media "Cosmic Cradle on Canvas" will be exhibited in "Women, Women, Women" — the 7th annual international women's art show at Raices Taller 222 Art Gallery in Tucson. Click on the image above to read the found poem Carrie has excavated in a torn page from a book and embedded into her collage. (Once you get to the deviantART version, click on the image again for more magnification.)

This photograph of Frida Kahlo painting in bed, from Raices Taller's blog announcement of the exhibit, exemplifies the show's focus on "women artists that are daring both inwardly and outwardly and who continue to make art with the knowledge that art made by women has been largely ignored throughout much of cultural history."

The opening reception is at 7:00 P.M. tonight. The gallery is located at 218 E. 6th Street in Tucson (520.881.5335). Go check out the scene and say hi to Carrie for me. Tell her the man with the blue guitar sent you. Represent, Carrie. Peace out, everyone.

VidPo (2.0) - Ecopoetry, Beetles, and String

2011-05-06T16:36:00.014-05:00

I had the honor a couple of days ago to have my poem "Beetle on a String" featured as a video on "Why Poetry Matters," a new YouTube channel.

This channel, an excellent video-poetry resource, was founded by Marty McGoey to bring attention to Ecopoetry. If you don't know what that is, Marty has an excellent video intro. He begins, "Ecopoetry is a type of poetry that has an emphasis on ecology and often has an ecological message."

I'm not really much of a nature poet, having been raised in the big city. Well, San Francisco's a pretty small city (only 50 square miles), but you know what I mean. Nature to me, when I was a kid, was confined to Golden Gate Park; the hills I knew were mostly covered in concrete and asphalt. But then Marty goes on to say that ecopoetry "is not just poetry about nature, but pushes through tradition showing nature as a neutral force, forever non-human."

Is "Beetle on a String" an ecopoem? I wondered. I've always thought of this poem as an apology to the insect world for my sins, in a way for all our transgressions as a species, against our six-legged counterparts who, after all, outnumber us humans. Marty says, ecopoetry "states that humans are accountable for the non-human world"; I might revise that to read that we "are accountable TO the non-human world." At least that's what was on my mind when I was writing that poem.

So I asked Marty, via facebook, along with some of his ecopoetry colleagues if "Beetle on a String" is indeed an ecopoem. They assure me it was, and that's how the poem ended up on Marty's channel. Thanks for the honor, Marty!

The notion of ecopoetry is still something fairly new to me. I'm working out how it might connect to my work. I'm thinking specifically of two other poems . . . my regular blog readers will remember I've been slowly putting my first book Dragonfly onto the blog and those two poems, "Miraculous Dragonfly" and "Mosquito/Manila Haiku," appear here as pages 6 and 7. Are these ecopoems? Marty does go on to say, in his introductory video, that "Ecopoetry connects us with the natural world and our animal counterparts." Fascinating.

Marty later asserts that ecopoetry "uses totems to make connections [and] encourages people to find their own totems and symbols in the natural world. In many ways, the dragonfly has been a kind of totem for me, as the poem "Miraculous Dragonfly" suggests. I think.

I'd love to hear from you, faithful blog readers, if you think those other two poems are ecopoems. And maybe also "Hunting Sponge," a poem that strangely or not-so-strangely has nothing to do with insects. Would you please write a comment below whether or not you think these poems are ecopoems?

Also, please visit Marty McGoey's YouTube channel. He's an excellent reader of poems, with a strong podcast voice. And the poems Marty's chosen to feature are all wonderful entrees into ecopoetry.

Okay. Comment below, please (on anything, really, not just ecopoetry). Watch some of Marty's videos. And have a great weekend. I'm looking forward to our graduation ceremony tomorrow at the University of Northern Iowa, where our speaker will be Michelle Obama. Yes.

Note added later on 6 May 2011: Live video of tomorrow's commencement speech by Michelle Obama will be streamed online at http://live.uni.edu/2011/05/07/spring-2011-commencement-special-guest-commencement-speaker-first-lady-michelle-obama, starting at 11:00 A.M. (CDT).

Half Guitars and Angel Wings

2011-04-27T23:54:00.009-05:00

Thought I'd post "Aswang: Guitar," the second installment in my visual "Aswang" digital-art series. You may remember the first image from my 29 March 2009 post featuring my poem "Aswang."

I've always been fascinated by the manananggal monster, to me the most intriguing and horrifying of the various Filipino aswang types. The manananggal is a female vampire who can split off the top half of her body from the bottom half, grow wings, and feed on children, pregnant women — especially their favorite snack, the unborn fetus — through their vampiric tongues like straws: long, hollow, almost prehensile tubes that suck blood and what-all parts of you and me can be siphoned and suctioned away into the maw of the manananggal clinging like a fly to the ceiling rafters.

Fun, huh? Click on this image to be taken to a full-size version of the art in my deviantART site. To see the first in the series, click here.

About this second, new image . . . what can I say? I love Gibson SG guitars. I love the color blue. I love to laugh. I love a good shudder, a satisfying frisson.

Take care, now. Don't let anything fly in the window and perch on your ceiling. Especially if it seems to have a long tongue. Sleep well.

Let's Celebrate National Poetry Month!

2011-04-25T02:32:00.004-05:00

Friends, I've completely forgotten. So rude of me. Forgotten to invite you to my National Poetry Month event at the Cedar Falls Public Library tomorrow evening. (Actually, tonight since it's past 2:00 A.M. the same day as the event.)

I'm giving a reading of some of my own poems and then leading a discussion on poetry at the Cedar Falls Public Library on Monday night (25 April 2011) at 7:00 P.M. (The Facebook event page says the event runs till 10:00 but it won't go on that long.)

(Click on this image to see a larger version you can read.)

See you there? Hope so. If you can't make it, please leave a comment below. Actually, leave a comment below anyway. Take care!

Unknown Muse in a Coffeehouse: An Interview with Andrew Oldham

2011-04-18T23:38:00.004-05:00

It's my honor and pleasure today to interview Andrew Oldham, one of the brightest and most memorable British poetic voices of today. Lapwing Publications, a renowned poetry press in Belfast, Ireland, published his collection Ghosts of a Low Moon in 2010. I was delighted to publish Andrew's poem "Costa Coffee Girl" in the North American Review two years ago, in 2009; that poem appears in the book and I am even more delighted now to have the opportunity to discuss it with him.

I'm also glad today to draw your attention to the important blog How a Poem Happens. In each "episode" of this blog award-winning poet Brian Brodeur selects a poem by a contemporary writer and interviews that writer about her or his process in writing that poem. Brian has borrowed his method from the late Alberta Turner, who pioneered this interview procedure in two books she edited: 50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (1977), and 45 Contemporary Poems: The Creative Process (1985).

Brian’s interview questions differ from Alberta's but he has kept the spirit of her project: to entice poets to reveal their particular modes and processes in writing poetry. One of Brian's questions is particularly provocative: "What is American about this poem?" Since Andrew is British, I was very interested to see how he would field this question, especially given that Ghosts of a Low Moon contains a long poetic sequence titled "American Vignettes."

For the most part in my interview with Andrew I kept Brian's questions verbatim and in order, except that I inserted a new final question, "What is British about this poem?" in place of Brian's usual ending question, "Was this poem finished or abandoned?" Many thanks to Brian for allowing me to borrow his format. Below you'll know which questions come from How a Poem Happens — they'll be underlined.

All right, as the Tenth Doctor was fond of saying, allons-y! Here’s the poem Andrew and I will be discussing:

Costa Coffee Girl
(Deansgate, Manchester)
by Andrew Oldham
She wipes down the tables, stifles yawns and tears,
a damp cloth skims away the coffee cup rings,
the tense fingerprints, the ghost whorls of
business meetings, lovers tentative touches and
breakups, ladies who lunch, lone men
who pretend to read books but watch her
move, licking their lips, the bitter
acrid taste of mocha latte, cappuccino and frescato,
over the gums and down the gullet, the grain
of their teeth beneath their tongue, they flash
a stained smile and without a pause she wipes it away.

From Ghosts of a Low Moon (Belfast: Lapwing, 2010)

VG: Andrew, as I mentioned earlier to you, I'm borrowing from the blog How a Poem Happens by drawing my questions from Brian Brodeur's interview format. Here we go. When was this poem composed? How did it start?

AO: This is actually one of the earliest poems in Ghosts of a Low Moon, it was originally composed in 2006 and I started writing it in Costa Coffee in Manchester, England. I remember it had just opened in a popular bookshop chain that I won't mention as I do not approve of large chains of anything. I put that down to old age or the realisation that every high street looks the same no matter what country you're in now. I am a grouch or maybe I miss the smell of really good second hand bookshops that you can just dip into.

I stopped off to grab a seat not a coffee, rebellious in a way that only the English seem to do well. A passive aggression bookmarked with, 'Oh, I didn’t realise you had to buy something to sit here, I am so sorry', and cemented with a feeling of smugness and superiority as you depart in grandeur your shopping bags smacking every chair as you leave. It is a trait I deplore in myself but I was tired and there were seats. The seat I selected was by the window, tucked in an alcove, so I wouldn't need to have that uncomfortable conversation about buying something to sit there. There I sat, there I wrote in my notebook and there I saw her; she wasn't even serving, she cleared the tables, scrubbed the floors, re-arranged the chairs, the girl.

VG: How many revisions did this poem undergo? How much time elapsed between the first and final drafts?

AO: This is the only poem that came fully formed. I watched these events happen, wrote them down, the girl wiping down the tables, the middle aged men that flirted with her, the wives that just barely tolerated her. The girl herself bored of it all.

The coffee listed in the poem was on offer that week and the signs were everywhere. The only lie in the poem is that I don’t drink coffee, don’t know what it tastes like.

There is a distinct rhythm to places that people are served in. I discovered that when I was bartender in a hotel. There is ritual, movement and musicality.

I had never had a poem come fully formed before and it quite scared me. I sat on it for months. I even tinkered with it but when I did it lost that lyrical movement, that raw and bitter edge; it lost the movement of the girl in the poem and became more about me.

This is her poem, whoever she was, whatever she became. I never saw her again. I don’t want to. I don’t need to know the rest of her story. I just want this moment. Just this tiny act of rebellion.

This is a poem for anyone who has ever served anyone and heard the same joke, the same flirtations, the same complaints, day after day, month after month.

VG: That's quite a striking thing you said just now. I'll have to share it with my daughter Amelia, who's a cocktail waitress. I'll report back to you what she says. Indeed, "the same joke, the same flirtations." I've never been a waitperson and never thought of it quite this way, though I probably should have. I'm afraid I'm probably that guy who makes waitpeople roll their eyes up, but only their mind's eyes because of the tip.

AO: You are not alone.

VG: Okay, back to the How a Poem Happens structure: Do you believe in inspiration? How much of this poem was "received" and how much was the result of sweat and tears?

AO: Well, with 'Costa Coffee Girl' it was inspired by just watching. I received the poem because of the events that unfolded before me and the location I was in. It may not have worked at a market or even in another bookshop or coffee franchise. That was just dumb luck.

Many of my poems come through redrafting early ideas, taking them in new directions. In Ghosts of a Low Moon there is a sequence of poems called 'American Vignettes,' though the initial idea for that came easily, write what you see, write what you hear, it would have been a jumbled mess if I hadn't taken time out to re-edit, pull out poems, ditch others, look for a common thread to explore. It is still a poem that I could tinker with.

I could keep on tinkering with all my poems but that's the nature of being a writer, looking for perfection. I don't think this exists, I think readers sometimes say it does but writers never do. If writers achieve perfection it is a lot to live up to.

So I sweat, so I cry, and when I am sick of the poem, when I can no longer look it in the face, it goes in a drawer, it sits there for a week, a month or a year depending on how much I have come to loathe it. If I look at it again and think I can see what I once liked in it, I can see that it works as a poem, it goes out into the world and then it belongs to readers and not me.

VG: How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?

AO: As I said earlier, this poem came fully formed. I did consider the act of rhythm in this poem rather than thinking of it as a sonnet or a pantoum.

VG: I'm remembering now that I asked you in the proof stage of publishing this poem if you could be persuaded to add a possessive apostrophe to the word "lovers" . . . and I recall that you were quite adamant about not doing that. Could you remind me of your reasons again? I can see now, as a reader of the poem rather than an editor, that without that apostrophe, a reading is made possible that the girl is "skim[ming] away" not only the "tentative touches and / breakups" but also the "lovers" themselves, metaphorically.

AO: That's absolutely right. I wanted to make it clear that the girl was at the centre of this world and everything could be wiped away by her boredom.

VG: How long after you finished this poem did it first appear in print?

AO: It sat in a drawer for quite a while and first got published in the North American Review in the Spring of 2009.

VG: I'd like to go on record here how proud I am to have unveiled this poem to the world, if you will. I recall still how vividly this poem spoke to me when I first read it, probably because I am a coffee drinker and spend a fair amount of time in coffeehouses (clichéd as that may be for poets). I was also struck quite strongly by how much dignity and poise you afford to the girl. As you know, so often these days, writers "beat up" on their characters. So, bravo!

AO: Thank you, those are kind words. I try to avoid beating my characters up, I think we have enough of that in real life. It is up to the reader to do the beating not the writer. I'm not a preacher or a politician. I am not going to tell a reader what they should think of me or my writing. Once the poem is written, once the text is out there, it is unbound and belongs to the reader not the writer.

VG: How long do you let a poem "sit" before you send it off into the world? Do you have any rules about this or does your practice vary with every poem?

AO: On average my poems spend around six months in a drawer. I edit them from one week to one month, and in one case, two years (I gave up on that one and it never made it into any drawer but made a more successful shopping list). The practice varies from poem to poem, each poem has its needs, each poem is different and that means I can spend different times on each.

Unlike my fiction writing, I can only edit one poem at a time, hence the need to edit, put in a drawer and move to the next one. This means I can often find a glut of them after six months hanging around my office. I send them out to clear out the drawers for some more.

VG: Could you talk about fact and fiction and how this poem negotiates the two?

AO: This poem is a factual event. As the writer I step in to condense the time I sat there. I sat in the coffee shop for around one hour. My wife was shopping, preparing big plans for our wedding that took place later that year. I needed to step in when writing the piece to bring all these images, and those moments played out over that one hour into an easy-to-read, fit-in-your-pocket type of poem. It needed to be that because that's how we see people who serve us, those faces behind the counters, those voices in the drive thrus, those name badges we never read, they are all fit-in-your-pocket people, we use them, we move on. I know that sounds harsh but I have been on that side of the fence and no one ever remembered my name or my face. They took their change and put it in their pocket and moved on. I wanted to twist it around, so that the girl is the centre of this universe rather than the customer.

VG: Is this a narrative poem?

AO: Yes. I suspect it is.

VG: Do you remember who you were reading when you wrote this poem? Any influences you'd care to disclose?

AO: I was reading Ruthven Todd and Basil Bunting.

VG: Do you have any particular audience in mind when you write, an ideal reader?

AO: No. My readers come in all shapes and sizes. I just want to tell them a good story.

VG: Did you let anyone see drafts of this poem before you finished it? Is there an individual or a group of individuals with whom you regularly share work?

AO: Yes, my wife used to read all my poems when I first started writing. Not so much anymore. Not because I don't trust her opinion but because I like the surprise on her face when she reads the published piece. That is worth more than just giving her a crumpled piece of paper with a few scribblings on. I still talk to her about ideas and she always tells me whether they're interesting. The other day she was clearing out some of her things and came across some letters I wrote to her when I lived in Wales, she started asking me whether I'd written that story and those poems I mentioned in those letters. They were eight years old! The wonderful thing was that I'd never noted those ideas in any of my notebooks and that those ideas must have been in that moment, as I wrote those letters, and they were good ideas. Just shows that you never know.

The only other person who sees my work is the poet Ian Parks, he has to some extent influenced my lyrical style and pushed me to select images that are more universal, that address the reader directly.

VG: How does this poem differ from other poems of yours?

AO: I suppose in style it is extremely concise. It is an anti-love poem or a leave-me-alone-and-let-me-do-my-job-without-hitting-on-me kind of poem.

VG: What is American about this poem?

AO: The 'ladies who lunch' is a direct reference to Stephen Sondheim's musical Company. I think that this influences the poem, the same level of bitterness stalks through the lines. There is a tinge of Elaine Stritch’s voice to it.

VG: Fascinating to me how factually you answer here, Andrew. I thought you would say something about Walt Whitman, if not in this poem, in the rest of Ghosts of a Low Moon, where quite a few of your poems use a sort of loping, devil-may-care long sentence as well as long line like Whitman. In fact, in "American Vignettes," you include an imitation of Allen Ginsberg, unarguably the inheritor of the Whitmanesque style and sensibility. I wonder if the Whitman connection I can envision so clearly is one of those things that other people see in our poems but are invisible to us while we’re writing.

AO: I've never thought of that before. Certainly, Whitman has influenced my work along with the likes of Wallace Stevens. I appreciate American poetry as it tries to set its own rules and break away from an European literary canon or adapt that canon. I like the long line as I think it lends itself to a narrative poem, builds images and voice. It also appeals to me to break some poetry rules and push the line as long as I can without it becoming short fiction.

I appreciate it when readers see something I don't see. Writers read and those influences sink into our subconscious and often we are not aware of them. I am often not aware of the influences that rise to the surface in my poetry but I am glad in this case that it was Whitman!

VG: What is British about this poem?

AO: Everything, even though the coffee franchise is probably American, the coffee is probably South American, the furniture is from Sweden, the people in the poem are purely English and I mean that by defining a certain stereotype within the British community. It sums up the awkward nature of that first flirt and only the English would think a good flirt technique is just to smile whilst hiding behind a book.

VG: Thanks for the lovely interview, Andrew. I hope you sell truckloads of books . . . lorryfuls of books.

AO: Thanks, Vince. I appreciate you taking out time to talk with me.

VG: And thanks again to Brian Brodeur for his useful set of questions. Do check out his cool blog.

You can purchase Andrew Oldham's Ghosts of a Low Moon as a hardcopy collection (£10 / $16.27) or as an e-book (£5 / $8.14) at Lapwing Publications' online store or via the shop at Andrew's website at http://www.andrewoldham.co.uk, where signed copies are available.

Nathan D and the Sestina Family

2011-04-16T22:30:00.002-05:00

A couple of years ago, you may remember, I blogged about the sestina, an intricate medieval poetic form, in a post on my poem "Vietnam Era Vet." Well, it probably won't surprise you that I assign my poetry-writing students at the University of Northern Iowa to write sestinas. And for the most part (at least so I always thought) the students are okay with the form. This semester, in my Beginning Poetry Writing course, it didn't work out quite that way. Several people had quite a tough battle with the sestina. Here's a poem by my student Nathan that deals with that issue in simply hilarious ways.

My Love of the Sestina

by Nathan Dahlhauser

Over-structuring is the heart of the sestina.
I suppose to say that I hate sestinas
may be a tad harsh, but the thing with a sestina
is that, for one, they are so damned repetitive. Sestinas
may be seen as "classical," to some, but let's be honest. A sestina
is just a sestina. I say, "Fuck the sestina!"

You may ask of me, "Sir, why are you so angry? Sestinas
are just another form of poetry. What did the sestina
ever do to you?" First off, sestinas
use the same words over and over again. I'm using the word "sestina"
to illustrate how annoying this can be. Here comes another. SESTINA.
Would you like me to use a different word? Nope, I'm now bound to use "sestina."

Second, there is very little room to convey emotion or meaning in a sestina
because it is the same words being used. Even in the times where sestinas
do get a message across, the word choices feel so forced. Sestina.
See, I had to end that line with the word "sestina"
because I set myself up for it in the first stanza. All the sestina
does is constrict a poem's motion, much like a tiny room sestina

that resembles a sub-stair broom closet. Sure, I'm being childish and sestina
poking fun at the fat kid in second grade, but I'm not the only one, sestina
NO ONE LIKES HIM! He’s a big FAT fart face! That is the sestina
for you, in a nutshell. Are you as tired of this sestina
as I am? Jesus! Buddha! Allah! By the beard of Zeus! Sestinas
make me curse their maker and their maker's maker by sestina

association. Thank my lucky stars I'm nearly finished with this damned poem!
Shit, did I just slip there and use "damned poem" rather than "sestina"?
Fuck it, it works regardless. "Damned poem," "stupid form of poetry,"
they are both synonyms for that single word. Sestina.
I'm just about done. This here is the last stanza of the ONLY sestina
I will write in my lifetime. What? One MORE stanza!? Fucking poem!

That'll work as well, I suppose. Forgive me if I make this sestina
even more cynical. I've had about enough of the aforementioned word.
Much like Jan speaking of Marcia, I just want to scream to anyone saying sestina,
"Sestina,
Sestina,
Sestina!"

I hate Sestina’s family. I hate its sister, Sestina. I hate its brother, also named Sestina.
I hate its parents. Who names three children ALL Sestina?
Fuck you, Sestina! I hope you go to hell and burn with Satan’s sister, Sestina.

Brilliant, don't you think? And you might quite easily feel the same as Nathan if you had looked up sestina in Wikipedia, say, and learned what the word-cycling pattern is called: retrogradatio cruciata. Doesn't that remind you of the Cruciatus Curse in Harry Potter, which "inflicts unbearable pain on the recipient of the curse" (Wikipedia)? Unbearable pain, indeed!

Nathan's genius touch here is in his repetons (the technical name of the repeated words . . . sorry). Instead of choosing six words, he uses only one. Wow. And how he uses them, that's brilliant too. I was asking all the wrong questions: Was he punning on the word "stanza" (Italian for room) at the end of the third stanza? In the second line of the fourth stanza, was "sestina" standing in for the word "because"? Nope, Nathan said. Just throwing in the word "sestina." 'Cause he had to. Comic genius.

Okay, that's it for today. Hope you learned some schtuff about poetic craft. Like the rich consonance at the end of Nathan's poem: the instances of s, t, and n sounds in "Satan's sister, Sestina." Meh. I hope, even better, you had a good laugh. Word.

No. Sestina.

Abducted, Boosted, Carjacked, Duped, Embezzled ... !

2011-04-14T10:22:00.008-05:00

Today, I googled my own name, just for fun — you do it, too, don't ya? — and I found an interview of me that had never happened! To tell the truth, I was pretty jazzed, like the time I found out an online term-paper mill was selling a research paper on one of my poems. But I digress . . . let's go back a couple of years to get the whole story on the mystery interview.

On 12 April 2009, Linda Sue Grimes interviewed me on the website Suite 101, under the title "Interview with Vince Gotera / Poet, Editor, Professor, Blogger." Below is a reduced screencap of that particular webpage, followed by a printout of Linda's very generous introduction and then her opening question. (Click on the image to see the webpage screencap at full size.)

The important American poet, Vince Gotera, edits the oldest literary review
in the United States; Thomas Jefferson was a subscriber!

In addition to his editorial duties at the North American Review, which was
founded in 1815, Vince Gotera also serves as professor in the Department
of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Iowa.

Vince’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. He has published
three books of poetry, Fighting Kite, Ghost Wars, Dragonfly, and a book
of criticism, Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans. He blogs at The Man
with the Blue Guitar.

LSG: How and when did you get started with poetry?

Now, on to what I found through Google today. Below you'll see what appeared in a website called My Custom Writer Blog, using the exact same interview title, on 25 September 2010, a year and a half later.

The portentous American poet, Vince Gotera, edits the oldest literary review
in the United States; Thomas Jefferson was a subscriber!

In extra to his editorial duties at the North American Review, which was
founded in 1815, Vince Gotera also serves as schoolteacher in the Department
of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Iowa.

Vince’s poems have appeared in frequent literary journals. He has published
three books of poetry, Fighting Kite, Ghost Wars, Dragonfly, and a book
of criticism, Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans. He blogs at The Man
with the Blue Guitar.

LSG: How and when did you get started with poetry?

No hyperlinks, no italics, no boldface. Some words have been changed (shown in red above), to inhibit being found out, I suppose. The alterations are simply hilarious, ROTFL to the max. I'm "portentous"? Look that up . . . it means I'm bad news, a disaster waiting to befall someone. I always try to be good news, to be a long drink of cool water. Yes, I teach, but "schoolteacher"? Not quite. The other two are funny too, don't you think? For clumsiness alone, if not for other reasons you can psych out.

Okay, so then I wondered: why rip off my interview? How could my talking about poetry, of all things, cause greenbacks to flitter from some schlub's wallet into the blogger's? Well, what I figured out was not all that flattering, I gotta say. Nothing to do with my writerly reputation or literary accomplishments blah blah.

In the bogus interview, Linda's question "How and when did you get started with poetry?" doesn't get answered. Instead what follows is this name: "vince del monte"; when you click on the name, you're whisked off to a website advertising a "fast" muscle-building program pioneered by, you guessed it, Vince Del Monte. I don't know if Mr. Del Monte knows how potential customers are being routed to his website, but the reason my interview was stolen is that Mr. Del Monte and I share the same first name. And maybe poets are notorious for needing their muscles built. And built fast. Who knows?

You poets out there, though, and anybody else reading this, you decide for yourself if you want Mr. Del Monte building your muscles. Fast. You can probably guess on which side of the proverbial fence I'm gonna end up here. I'm just sayin' . . .

Seriously, though, the problem of online content theft is huge and thorny. Just google "online content theft" or some similar phrase, maybe "stolen blog content," and you'll see that a whole lot of virtual ink has been spilled here. And maybe some virtual blood too. All I can say is this: if you get the heebie-jeebies when you're reading a blog or website, if the hackles on your neck raise up because there seems to be weirdness in/with the text, go spend your money somewhere else. Some writer(s) are getting ripped off.

Though it does seem perversely cool that someone bothered to nick a poet's words. It's strangely refreshing that someone cared enough. Though of course they cared for all the wrong reasons. Not for love of literature but rather lust for lucre, illicit and immoral moolah. (Ain't alliteration fun?)

On Deviancy in 3 Dimensions

2011-04-13T01:22:00.007-05:00

I AM A DEVIANT. I must confess. Yes, I am. And I have been for a whole month now. It's true.

What I'm talking about is that I am a new — or fairly new — member of deviantART, an international social network for artists . . . would-be, new, emerging, established, whatever. My little node, my deviant identity, in this network is vincegotera. Yep, that's me.

You can do a lot of über-cool things on deviantART: for one, you can upload your own art, called "deviations." I now have 10 deviations (don't know if they're art, really, but there they are). Actually 9 plus a photograph of me I'm using as my "deviantID" . . . it's from a time a coupla years back when I shaved off my mustache. I hated the way it — no, I — looked and you'll see how I kinda solved that problem at that time — at least for the picture, which I used as my facebook photo then. It's also a tribute of sorts to one of my favorite artists.

Something I've learned about recently while strolling the avenues of deviants and boulevards of deviations is 3D images (or stereograms) . . . called "free-view" because you can see them in 3D without special glasses. Remember those Magic Eye puzzles that were all the rage a few years ago? Where you gaze at an apparently abstract image and then out of it resolves a "secret" picture that not everyone can see? If you ever learned how to make those hidden images appear, you already know you do it by crossing your eyes. (These stereograms I'm learning about are also called "cross-view" or "crosseye-view" images.)

As part of my new "deviancy," I've started making such "crosseye-view" stereograms. Here's my first one, "Exhaling Dissolution 3D." (Click on the image to go to its deviantART page, where I have instructions on how to view it in 3D.)

My subject here is the huge wood-and-metal sculpture by Sarah Deppe, a BFA student at the University of Northern Iowa. It's quite a tribute to Sarah that her sculpture — titled "Exhaling Dissolution" — is permanently featured in a courtyard on campus. For those of you who can't simply walk over to see this twelve-foot-tall behemoth head, I hope my stereogram can give you a feeling for its glorious humongousness, its driftwoody enormity. Click on one of the heads above; you'll be amazed.

Thanks for letting me "3D" your baby, Sarah. Friends, watch for Sarah Deppe's art in the future . . . you'll hear of her again, I guarantee.

Here's another stereogram project of mine on deviantART, a "WIP" or work-in-progress. What you see below are two versions — one with background, one with. Knowing the name of my blog, you'll appreciate my interest in this project.

Please click on the guitars directly above and you'll be able to access the two versions. I'd really love to hear which one version works for you (both 3D-wise and otherwise) and why. Please leave your comments on the 3D blue guitar pages in deviantART rather than here. Thanks for your help!

Back to the über-cool things you can do on deviantART: they let you compile a collection of other people's artwork (sorry, other "deviants' deviations") and "curate" an exhibition of these objets d'art in your profile. For example, I have a slowly growing little anthology of images that center on the color blue, which I call "Blues." Perhaps not the cleverest of titles, but I'm rather deviantly proud of how it's a musical pun. I am also collecting art pieces on the Filipino monster, the aswang (you might know my poem on that subject). Also images of guitars, of dragons, of steampunk artifacts. Lots more, LOTS more.

I hope you'll come and visit my deviantART profile. You'll have a blast. And leave me comments all over the place there. Oh, while we're on the subject, do leave me a comment below as well, please. You'll make me one very happy deviant.

Carrie Arizona's Altered-Page Found Poems

2011-04-07T01:18:00.015-05:00

Do you know about "altered books"?

Around the late 1970s and 1980s, a "grassroots" art movement began in which people would save books that might otherwise have been thrown away and would turn them into works of art. Glue, glitter, collage, paint, pencil, pastel, sculpture even . . . these are the materials these artists would use to change these books from mass-produced, disposable things to one-off, highly personalized objets d'art. I mention sculpture because an altered-book artist might, for example, cut out a cubic enclosure inside the book, out of many pages perhaps, and maybe suspend something like a small nail-polish-red papier-mache heart within that space.

Sometimes people would do this with only one page, perhaps torn out of such a book, and this would become a free-standing artifact . . . in other words, a poem, a found poem. As the Altered Books website puts it: "Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration." Find the words that will make up your poem in the page at hand, maybe in order down the page or left to right, circle them (let's say), and "obliterate" the rest of the text on that page: cross out lines of text, draw an image over areas of the page, whatever. Look at the Altered Books website (link a couple of sentences back) for some examples. I gotta tell ya the altered pages you'll see there seem quite slapdash, clumsy, not really artful at all. The website's endorsement of the word "obliterate" in this context suggests violence to the text, to the page . . . a confrontation between the purpose of the original writer of these words and the artistic intent of the mixed-media altered-books artist. One would think some delicacy would be called for, a commitment to beauty, to some sort of unified vision.

Well, look at the example to the right. That's an altered page from the artist Carrie Arizona (deviantART.com) . . . notice how her black "cross-outs" start at the top left of the page and meander down to the bottom right, clearly an echo of the way we read in Western culture, left to right, up to down. The page has been converted into a pleasant cascade of organic shapes, bubbles in which are revealed Carrie's found poem. The wonderful thing about this poem is that it's a great poem, a — to use technical poetics lingo — a kick-ass poem. The page has not just yielded up, via Carrie's hand, a beautiful visual pattern; the poetic text she's culled from the page is profound, intelligent, and pleasingly defamiliarizing (that is, it helps us see our everyday lives and reality in new, surprising, potentially delightful, ways). Like all excellent poetry, it can both unsettle you and make you think, feel . . . have an experience that is both visual and textual.

Here is the page magnified so you can read the poem. Notice how Carrie even finds us punctuation in the page, as needed. The poem can also (should also) be experienced in its "natural habitat" (so to speak) on deviantART.com — an international social network for artists of all skills and backgrounds and cultures. Along with the image of the book page, Carrie also provides for us the text of the found poem:

Beautiful Leech

Whoever you may be,
be as blood flowing
to a bleeding answer.

I am a wound
who lives on blood
like a beautiful leech.

And then below that Carrie adds, quite delightfully, "Nietzsche, of course." As far as I'm concerned, there's no US poet working with found poems and altered pages/books who can come close to the rich elegance and exquisiteness of Carrie's work. She rules, no question about it, friends.

I hope you can take some time to explore Carrie's deviantART gallery: paintings, collages, photographs, digital art, "regular" poems, and of course more found poems on altered pages. I always enjoy how beautiful these poems are, visually. Marvelous marvelous work.

Here is an intriguing self-portrait by Carrie; she can be an enigmatic, mysterious figure . . . the few self-portraits you'll find in Carrie's deviantART gallery don't give much away. Her pseudonyms, carrieola and Carrie Arizona, don't reveal much either, except that she lives in the state of Arizona. How about this . . . let it suffice to say that Carrie Arizona is a wonderful, talented artist. Let's leave it there, shall we?

P.S. If you'd like to find out more about altered books and found poetry, google the words altered, pages, books, found, and poetry in various combinations.

That the "altered books" art movement had been quite a strong force can be seen by the existence of a website titled Altered Books &mdash The International Society of Altered Book Artists (ISABA). This organization evidently dismantled itself only recently: December 2010. But you can still sneak into their gallery of altered books. Here's the back door that I found ajar.

And try to "write" one of these poems yourself, for National Poetry Month! Have fun.

Note added 7 May 2011: Carrie's work is featured today in an art exhibit.

Tornado and Candy House in a Matchbook

2011-04-03T19:40:00.006-05:00

I was fortunate recently to publish a poem in a magazine called Matchbook. This magazine's title is truth in advertising to the max. Each copy of each issue of Matchbook literally appears as — is bound in — a vintage matchbook. My two contributor's copies of the issue with my poem have for their covers two matchbooks, one telling us to visit Lyman's Country Shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the other advertising the "proved safety, earnings, and availability of savings" at the Des Moines Savings and Loan. Old-timey matchbooks that look like they're from the 1960s, maybe even the 1950s or older. S&Ls started up during the Depression, didn't they? Early 1930s, I believe.

Matchbook magazine is the brainchild of poet Friedrich Kerksieck, founder of Small Fires Press. This small press (see Friedrich's clever pun in the press name?) publishes, along with Matchbook, poetry chapbooks and broadsides printed on a letterpress, an almighty Vandercook Press and Photopolymer Plate Maker. Not only is Friedrich the CEO, editor,and publisher, he is also the designer, proofreader, copyeditor, fact-checker, pressman, binder, salesperson, webmaster, troubleshooter, and sweeper-upper.

When I think about Friedrich driving that letterpress, I imagine him as a helmsman manhandling a frigate through a monsoon on the high seas . . . all the while also having to be the Captain, First Mate, Quartermaster, ship's doctor, cabin boy, cook, all sailors before the mast, and also any and all mutineers! Oops. Sorry about that romanticized, even sentimental moment. I loved pirate novels as a child (and maybe still!).

Anyway, about once a year or so (sometimes less often), Friedrich entertains submissions to Matchbook. Because of the actual size of matchbooks, length requirements are pretty stringent. Small Fire Press's submission guidelines specify that poems must be no longer than 24 lines that are no longer than 22 characters (including spaces). Prose can be as many as 48 lines. Artwork must be reproducible in black and white in a square space that's 1.25" X 1.25" . . . whew. The current issue — volume 3, published in 2011 — contains both poems and illustrations. Quite a feat of editing and publishing. Watch for Friedrich's next call for submissions, probably in 2012 . . . before the Mayan end of the world, let's hope.

At the right is a photo of one of my poem's pages in Matchbook and also the title page in another matchbook (kind of a blurry shot . . . sorry). I really should invest in a good macro lens.

Below is the poem itself, which focuses on a traumatic event that happened in nearby Parkersburg, Iowa: an F5 tornado in May 2008 that battered the town and the surrounding area, damaging over 400 homes and buildings. I dedicate this appearance of the poem to the many people who were injured. And also to the eight who died that day . . . may they rest in peace.

Confetti
Parkersburg,
Iowa, 2008

The twister tears off
the Andressens' first
floor, the basement

ceiling. Just below,
a toddler screaming.
Skinny legs pointed

up at the dull flank
of the tornado. Dad’s
hands clamped, vise

grips on her wrists,
his legs gnarled
around a newel post.

Then the wind whirls
somewhere else, tiny
Jennie forgotten.

Her skirt flops like
a lofted tablecloth.
Wisps of paper

and plastic drift
from acetylene sky
onto a concrete floor.

— Vince Gotera, first appeared in Matchbook III, 2011.
I'd like to show you another poem from Matchbook III, "The House Is Made of Candy" by Jasmine Dreame Wagner — poet, fiction writer, artist (photography, drawing, collage, books), musician (singer-songwriter, drums, guitar, piano, you-name-it) and ______ — fill in the blank . . . I bet she does it!

I first met Jasmine when she submitted "Paradelle for a Girl in a Coma" to the North American Review. I was delighted and honored to publish it. The paradelle is a notoriously difficult poetic form, invented in 1997 by former poet laureate Billy Collins as a joke: a form that would be close to impossible (so damn hard no one would ever try). A comment on and a parody of the enterprise of writing poetry in closed forms. Well, joke or no joke, since then quite a few poets have written successful paradelles, undaunted by the form's recalcitrance and complexity, and one of the most accomplished of these adventuresome souls is Ms. Wagner.

Okay, here is Jasmine's Matchbook poem. Enjoy!

The House Is Made of Candy

The house
is made of candy,
and it might be raining.

The ceiling
leak, its caramel
intricacies.

I am gliding
through its corridors.
Goodbye,

goodbye.
I am through
with smiling

at you as though
you'd just gotten off
an airplane.

— Jasmine Dreame Wagner, from Matchbook III, 2011.
To find out more about Jasmine and her many endeavors and escapades, check out her websites: her personal one, titled songs about ghosts; her music project, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities; her psychedelic garage rock band, Son Cats; her entrepeneurial "mini-empire" (as she jokingly puts it), For Arbors / For Satellites. Google jasmine dreame wagner . . . there are many more sites to explore. Quite an adventure just finding out about Jasmine!

As you know, I frequently talk about poetic craft in the blog as well. Maybe something really small here: in "Confetti" I worked hard at using sharp and quickly registered images, for example, the closing "Wisps of paper // and plastic drift / from acetylene sky / onto a concrete floor" (mad props there to Hart Crane). Notice too, in Jasmine's poem, her delicious image "caramel / intricacies," focusing on both taste and color (too often imagery in contemporary writing refers only to sight). Okay, lesson over, 'nuff said.

Go write a poem. It's National Poetry Month! Need a nudge to begin? Check out Robert Lee Brewer's blog Poetic Asides: each day during National Poetry Month, he provides a prompt, an "assignment" sorta . . . 30 days, 30 poems. Today, April 3, Robert says, "write a poem in which you imagine the world without you." Ready, set, go!
HASTA BLOGEESTA, BABY!

P.S. If you feel like trying to write a paradelle, start by looking at the first one by Billy Collins. Ron Kowit has put online a small anthology of successful paradelles. Another notable example is "A Paradelle for Donald Rumsfeld" by Ronald Wallace; this poem shows how the paradelle can lend itself to quite serious subjects. Good luck!

I'm back ... and born from bamboo!

2011-03-19T17:16:00.002-05:00

Well, friends, today is the one-year anniversary of the last time I posted in the blog. Since last March 19, like any slacker, I often thought of themes and subjects I could blog about but just couldn't free up the time . . . and then worried incessantly about the whole situation. But now, here I am, here we are, and let's just get right back into it, shall we? Thanks for your patience with my slackerly ways. I'm back, I'm reformed, and I'm ready to blog. Hasta blogeesta, baby.

During my slackerozo non-bloggo year, I had the good fortune of publishing my poem "Born from Bamboo" in an anthology titled Reeds and Rushes: Pitch, Buzz, and Hum, thanks to the good graces of editor Kathleen Burgess as well as Pudding House Publications. Here's the poem:

Born from Bamboo
In remembrance of my paternal grandmother,
whom we called Nanay (Tagalog for mother)

"Gray-haired man with three summer-blue eyes,"
said Nanay. Fructuosa Gotera, her name: fruitful,
fertile. "That was Bathala, god of the skies."

My father, just four, looked up at his mother's smile.
Slim as bamboo, she went on: "Aman Sinaya,
goddess of the sea, had green eyes, like emerald.

Both gods tried to outdo each other every day.
Thunder and lightning. Tidal waves and typhoons.
Aman Sinaya's monsoons raked the sky.

Bathala hurled boulders —" "No, whole mountains!"
said my father, eyes glimmering. "Yes, Martin . . .
mountains! into the sea, creating our islands,

all seven thousand. Meanwhile, caught between
the two realms of heaven and ocean, the northeast
wind Amihan had had enough. She took on

the shape of a bird, with indigo feathers and feet.
She shuttled back and forth, with dainty alimasag
crabs, tiger prawns in tamarind, starfish,

anemone flowers, from the wavelets up to Bathala,
then down with shooting stars, planets' rings, moons
for Aman Sinaya to braid in her jade-tinged hair.

With gifts and sweets, letters bathed in perfume,
the bird enticed Aman Sinaya and Bathala
to be friends —" "No," said Martin, "wife and husband!"

"Maybe, my son," Nanay laughed. "In his joy, Bathala
flew over the sea and cast not rocks but his seed
into the Mindanao Deep. From Aman Sinaya's

seabed sprang a gigantic bamboo reed,
swaying between sky and water." Nanay's hand,
upheld in front of my father, danced a sweet

fandango in the air. "One day, Amihan,
now a huge hawk, soared in circles
round the sky-high bamboo, spiraling down

until she stopped, hovered. Did she hear calls
from within the reed? Help us, Princess of the Air!
Small kulintang gongs. Voices in madrigal.

Amihan pecked the bamboo, laying bare
a tiny space, a womb in the reed. Inside,
the first humans: brown eyes and skin, black hair.

Amihan named the woman Maganda —
beautiful. The man she called Malakas —
strong. Inviting them onto her back, the bird

ferried the two humans through glorious clouds
to the northernmost island created by Bathala,
our lovely Luzon, just north of the River Pasig."

My father whispered, "You mean . . . our own river?"
"Yes, and their children and grandchildren became
we Filipinos. You and I, my son, are

descended from that divine, royal line:
Aman Sinaya, Bathala, Malakas, Maganda,
the bamboo reed split open by Amihan."

As Nanay finished the tale, Martin, my Papa,
kissed her then went to play. My grandmother,
before she once again became Fructuosa

the Fish-Seller off to work at the market,
reveled in the thought that she herself
was the bamboo reed, the mother of mothers.

Such dreaming helped her through birth upon birth,
the death of her oldest daughter, a world war,
husband and son in the Bataan death march.

Fructuosa . . . shower of golden mangoes, windfall.
Rich brown called kayumanggi, she passed on to us.
Wife, mother, grandmother: life source, the well.

— Vince Gotera, in Reeds and Rushes: Pitch, Buzz, and Hum,
edited by Kathleen Burgess, Pudding House Press, 2010.

The writing of this poem was an interesting case because it was composed specifically for this book. The bamboo is after all, a reed, and it's used to make musical instruments . . . the application of reeds in music is one of the themes of the anthology. Go buy Reeds and Rushes; it's a marvelous anthology.

This poem also afforded me the opportunity to explore how myth and family can interweave; in the poem's frame scene, my lola tells my father, still a child, one of the central Philippine creation stories: how people came to be. For years, I have toyed with the idea of a collection of poems based on myth, and this is a good start for this project, though there are other earlier poems which will probably be included, such as the poem "Aswang."

In terms of craft, this poem uses terza rima — interwoven triple rhyme (aba bcb cdc etc.); as you may know from other poems of mine, I more often use distant slant rhyme rather than straight rhyme. For example, northeast / feet / starfish . . . where the long e and the t in the first word rhyme pretty straightforwardly with the second word while the f in feet and the s in northeast rhyme with the f and sh (sorta) in starfish. I suspect that some readers will not agree that my rhymes work . . . and that's just fine with me.

As with other poems already discussed in the blog, I am using here a "roughed-up" pentameter (see my discussion of the poem "Guard Duty," for example). Once again, some readers will probably disagree that the meter works (certainly someone like Spenser or Percy Shelley would probably find my poems terribly sloppy) . . . and again, that's just fine too. If people read this poem as some sort of tight free verse, more power to them.

Above I coined the sentence "Hasta blogeesta, baby" as some sort of tribute to the second (good) Terminator — not to Schwarzenegger the Governator but to the character — however I think I used it wrong. It probably ought to go at the end of the blog post, as a kind of send-off. So, friends . . .
HASTA BLOGEESTA, BABY!

P.S. Do get yourself a copy of Reeds and Rushes; you'll love it!

Shout Out ... Gypsy Art Show

2010-03-19T23:55:00.009-05:00

Belinda Subraman has featured my book Fighting Kite on her blog Belinda Subraman Presents / Gypsy Art Show. In this generous book notice, Belinda also reprinted my poems "Greased Pole" and "Wedlock." Thanks, Belinda!

Please check out my page on Belinda Subraman Presents / Gypsy Art Show and leave a comment there.

Belinda Subraman's untiring efforts to highlight poetry and the arts deserve your support. This blog's subtitle is Audio and Video Interviews with Poets, Writers, Musicians and other great Creators as well as Book Info, Excerpts and Occasional Reviews. Lots of promise there to keep you coming back to her many projects and blogs (you'll find links to these in Belinda Subraman Presents). And comment, comment. Maraming salamat — many thanks!

Note: You can find out more about the poem "Wedlock" here on this blog.

Interview: How a Poem Happens

2010-02-16T19:22:00.004-06:00

I had the honor recently of being interviewed on How a Poem Happens, a blog run by the poet Brian Brodeur.

I'm joining excellent company: Stephen Dunn, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Maxine Kumin, Dorianne Laux, Richard Wilbur, and many other renowned poets. As well as several equally renowned Filipino American poets: Rick Barot, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Oliver de la Paz.

The interview centers on my poem "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside," which was also featured in this blog. Please check out my "How a Poem Happens" interview and leave a comment there. Brian and I would love to hear what you think. Take care. Ingat.

Poetry Reading at Indiana University

2010-02-03T01:51:00.006-06:00

Friends, I'd like to invite you to my poetry reading at Indiana University tomorrow evening (Thursday, 4 February). This event is cosponsored by IU's Creative Writing Program, Asian American Studies, the Asian Cultural Center, and the Filipino Student Organization.

The trouble begins at 8:00 P.M. at Collins Living Learning Center, in the Edmondson Formal Lounge. See you there?

Before the reading, there will be a poetry workshop for residents of the Collins dorm. That trouble begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Ed basement classroom. (Interested students should sign up in the Collins duty office.)

For more info, visit the Facebook event page or the Collins Living Learning Center's Facebook page. Many thanks to Sarah Eaton, Assistant Director at Collins LLC, for your tireless work on this event.

My Poetry Reading at the Library of Congress: A Video

2010-02-02T23:46:00.018-06:00

The Library of Congress has put up videos of Unsung Heroes: Asian Pacific American Heroism in WWII, the 26 October 2009 symposium in which I gave a poetry reading.

Click on this web address: http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4808. You'll go to a webpage at the Library of Congress with a small video screen. Click on Launch in a new window below the screen. You can then enlarge the Real Player window that will open. Also, you'll need to close the webpage with the small screen, because the video will start in both windows.

I certainly recommend you watch the entire program, but it's quite long (over two hours). To see only my section, go to the 36:26 mark for the gracious introduction by Ms. Reme Grefalda, Reference Librarian in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress and a fine poet herself. My actual reading runs from 38:08 to 54:38 (16 minutes and change). Enjoy!

And please leave a comment below. I would love to hear what you think. Thanks.

America, Lady Liberty, the Stars

2010-01-31T23:39:00.014-06:00

Well, how about that? Two days in a row here at the old blogista keys! Keep on keepin' on, as we used to say back in the day. (I think I'm probably showing my age here!)

Yesterday, I gave you a link to my daughter Amanda's poem "Mitosis" on Rattle poetry magazine's online blog from last October. That particular poem was originally published in Rattle 24, the Winter 2005 issue that featured a tribute to Filipino Poets. Although Amanda has been published several times before, including a nation-wide anthology she edited, this was the first time I believe she was published expressly as a Filipino (American) writer. At right is the cover of that Rattle issue, still available for purchase. (Many thanks to Rattle for publishing that tribute to Filipino poets.)

I was fortunate also to have a poem in that issue. Here is the beginning stanza of that poem:

Chewing Gum Upskirt

On the Avenue of the Americas,
at noon two weeks ago Tuesday, a nun
paced the grimy concrete, robed in black,
a starched, white veil framing her stunning face,
one-in-a-million supermodel cheekbones.

Read more . . .

Would you mind clicking on "Read more" directly above and reading the poem on the Rattle website? This opening stanza doesn't really foreshadow the several directions this poem takes: Catholic school in San Francisco, my son under our deck in Iowa, my father in grade school in the Philippines, and throughout the poem the muses women teachers can be to boys. As Nick Carbó wrote in a comment responding to this poem in the Rattle blog: "Female teachers do face a different set of challenges than males, I think ... although they seem to have an advantage in activating their students' imaginations." In the poem, such "activation" leads to political ... whoa, you'll discover that when you read the poem, how chewing gum can represent the lofty themes that title this blog post.

Something else Nick said in his comment really moved me: "My late grandfather could have been the soldier packing the spearmint — an unwitting accomplice. I'm sure he'd have shared it anyway though. I'm happy to have thought of him. Thanks, Vince. From the stories my grandpa told, I felt he left a chunk of his heart in the Philippines." One just never knows how what we write, what we say, will touch someone in unexpected ways. Keep on keepin' on, people.

Adventures in Library Land

2010-01-30T23:56:00.008-06:00

My daughter Amanda, a recent graduate of Grinnell College, now works in our town's library, the Cedar Falls Public Library. This gig as a Children's Librarian has been something of a dream job for Amanda. Below are a couple of pictures of her reading a book to some gathered tykes and parents. Note also the puppet theatre behind Amanda's storytelling throne . . . that she would be giving puppet shows was the deciding factor between this job and another that would have paid more. Puppet shows are a very important — no, crucial — part of life, as we all know. Or at least as we all learned when we were kids, though perhaps many of us may have forgotten that by now. Not so, Amanda.
Another part of Amanda's job is creating book displays to entice children (and those other taller children: parents, grandparents, sundry adults) to read. To rediscover the joy and magic of reading. Below are some views of Amanda's first book display. Books on time travel, with the centerpiece nothing less than a time machine: that steampunk-y TARDIS-looking affair. (Google TARDIS if you're a little lost.) Notice the clock and gears embedded in the side of said time machine. And the sassy gold Jetson antenna on the roof contrasting with the Victorian frou-frou detailing. And the lazy wave-like frieze of moon phases. Lovely, isn't it?

I spent a couple of dreamy hours browsing through the time travel books, then settling on a graphic-novel rendition of Wells's Time Machine, which I read from cover to cover. I traveled in time back to childhood when I had read Wells's story as a comic book in the Classics Illustrated series. Thanks, Amanda.
Shortly after she started as a children's librarian, the print and online magazine Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century put up one of Amanda's poems:
Mitosis

When things have bloomed, my mother
teaches me to hunt out the dead

Read more . . .

A little reminder: you can click on the pics above to see larger versions. Well worth it to inspect Amanda's time machine up close. Oh, also, if you didn't get around to googling TARDIS, it's an acronym that stands for "Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space": the moniker of The Doctor's time/space ship that looks like a London police box (in the British science fiction show Dr. Who).

On a meta-front, sorry again that I have been neglecting the blog. I'll try to be better about it. Keeping up the blog, I've just decided, is a new New Year's resolution. Added just now. So . . . see you tomorrow?

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T16:59:00.003-06:00

Hello, friends. Maligayang Pasko at Manigong Bagong Taon! (That's "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" in Filipino.) I hope you and yours are having a wonderful holiday season.

Here are a couple of pictures of the Filipino parol or Christmas star lantern. These were traditionally made of bamboo strips and colored paper lit from within by candles; today they are made of many materials (such as capiz shell in the picture on the right) and are often ornately decorated. Again, Maligayang Pasko!

Note: the picture on the left is from the Hawaii Tribune Herald; the one on the right is by Eugene Alvin Villar (wikimedia).

Veterans Day ... Papa, Tatay, and the Library of Congress

2009-11-11T23:53:00.013-06:00

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, two weeks ago I had the pleasure and honor of reading my poems at the Library of Congress in a symposium honoring "Unsung Heroes: Asian Pacific American Heroism in WWII." This kind of recognition in Washington, DC, has been long needed and comes at an opportune historical moment, with Congress's recent passage of reparation one-time payments to the Filipino soldiers of WWII who were stripped, immediately after the war, of the veterans' benefits FDR promised them.

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At that event, I had the honor of meeting retired General Antonio Taguba as well as the Honorable Tammy Duckworth (Assistant Secretary at the VA [Veterans Affairs], a decorated Army veteran from our war in Iraq — where she lost both legs and the partial use of an arm — and still a Major in the Illinois National Guard). I also had the genuine pleasure of meeting Dr. Valentin Ildefonso, US Army Philippine Scout in WWII, and a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, where he served as a medical doctor. Dr. Ildefonso also volunteered later as a doctor during the Vietnam war. (By the way, Dr. Ildefonso was featured in an online news article today for Veterans Day.)

Dr. Valentin Ildefonso and Vince Gotera

As you may already know from other posts in this blog, my father Martin Gotera and my grandfather Felix Gotera also served in the Philippine Scouts in WWII, where they both were in the Bataan Death March. So it was particularly touching and moving for me to meet these three Army vets, whose courage and service are so allied to the esprit de corps that was the spine of the Gotera family's contributions to the US Army, not just my father and grandfather, but also my brother Pepito's US Army service and mine during the Vietnam war.

As part of my poetry reading at the symposium, I read the following poem, which describes my father's relationship with my grandfather, my Lolo whom all of us grandchildren and great-grandchildren called simply Tatay, the Filipino word for "father," because he was so much the patriarch for us all. He was a gentle, soft-spoken old man when I knew him, so unlike the chilling stories Papa told me of Tatay's brutal discipline towards him as a child. The poem, one of three I read at the Library of Congress, describes two sides of that relationship: first, how Tatay whipped my father cruelly and routinely, and second, how Papa found Tatay in the Japanese concentration camp and cared for him as he would have his own child.

Tatay

My grandfather in a faded photograph is
a centurion blowing a Christmas party horn,
on his head my foil Roman legionnaire helmet.

I remember him smiling like a boddhisatva
as he pulled on scuffed brogans to bail out
my uncle in the drunk tank — Tito Augusto

had been brawling again. But in 1933,
Tatay seemed another man. My father
at twelve was circumcised with a couple

of buddies. The ring of boys.
The penknife. Blood dwindling.
When Tatay heard, he bent my father

over the Army trunk again. Set up
the pitcher and glass. He made his
two-inch-wide leather belt lick the boy's

naked back. Resting, he sipped water, then
got up, belt in hand. My father glanced over
at the pitcher to see how much was left.

There were other stories. How after
the Bataan death march, they met, father
and son, in the concentration camp near Capas.

Tatay shivered at noon, muttering of
bodies mantled with wings, ashimmer.
My father could see two compounds away,

they were burning wood — bark the Igorots
use to cure malaria. My father crept
under the wire. A butterfly's

lazy tango in the glare. That itch
between his shoulderblades. A bead
of sweat. The imperial guard's boots

a yard to the left. The Philippine Army
regulars who were burning the wood smirked
when they caught him, gathering branches

in his arms. With fists and bare feet
pounding his head and back, did he recall
those rituals of trunk and pitcher?

Cradling a bundle of sticks, my father
crawled back. I can see the bark dancing
now in water, next to the cot where

Tatay moans in his sleep. I hear my father
singing softly. I can almost make it out, but
I can't quite place the tune, a Tagalog lullaby.

— Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Madison Review (1989).

In the poem, I highlight an ironic and iconic difference between Filipinos: the Philippine Army soldiers beat my father because he was a Philippine Scout, that is, a member of the US Army. In this context, because the US Army can no longer protect my father, they see him as too good for his britches because he is a Filipino in the US Army — uppity, someone whom they would see as having previously lorded over them. The irony is that Papa is beaten in order to save the life of the man who used to beat him.

The other two poems I read at the symposium have been featured in the blog already: "Honor, 1946" and "Refusal to Write an Elegy." In the first, we see another side of my father being caught between different racial forces: instead of being attacked by Filipinos, he is attacked by white Americans. In the second, we see the war demons he faces, not from external attack but rather from within.

Besides my own small part in the symposium, I was truly moved at the scope and span of the subjects covered, the articulate speakers who gave presentations not only about Filipino Americans in the war but also about the original Flying Tigers, Chinese American fighter pilots who volunteered to fly for the Chinese Air Force against the Japanese even before 1941; the Japanese American soldiers of the most highly decorated American military unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team; the Asian American women who served in various military capacities during the war; and so on. I learned quite a lot, and the symposium was indeed a joyous occasion celebrating the tremendous contributions Asian Pacific Americans made to the American war effort.

As General Taguba said in his keynote address, "The Asian Pacific American families who join us today have marked a lasting legacy in our history not to be forgotten. . . . Our unsung heroes have many untold stories yet to be shared. It is their time. It will always be their time." Amen to that, kapatid, kababayan.

Today is Veterans Day. Today is also my father's birthday. If he were living today, Papa would be 88 years young. In the '60s, he was a pioneer in the fight to restore the veterans' rights of the Filipino WWII veterans. In San Francisco, he founded an organization, the Filipino American Veterans and Dependents Association, which worked on this problem, setting out what was probably the first class action suit in the struggle. About the recent legislation of one-time payments ($15,000 to Filipino American veterans in the US, $9,000 to Filipino veterans in the Philippines), I'm certain my father would say, if he were here, "Although this payment is, in many eyes, too little too late, it is a significant gesture nonetheless; we in the Filipino American community, however, should still push for the full restoration of these veterans' benefits."

You rock, Papa. Happy birthday! Veterans Day will always be your signature holiday.

P.S. Many thanks to Reme Grefalda, librarian extraordinaire at the Library of Congress's Asian Division, for inviting me to be a participant in this historic symposium. Maraming salamat, thanks so much, for your hospitality, Reme. I hope I can return the favor sometime if you ever visit Iowa.

Now, just a couple more pictures (click on any of the pictures above or below to see larger versions). The Library of Congress is made up of incredibly beautiful buildings. If you are ever in Washington, DC, you should definitely check out the Library. Many visitors go to the Capitol, the Smithsonian, the various memorials. Go also to the Library; it is the living monument to our country's intellectual aspirations and achievements.

Kluge Room, where the symposium was held

Hallway in the Jefferson Building

Lobby of the Jefferson Building
Friends, please write a comment below. I'd really love to hear your responses. If you have visited the Library of Congress, tell us all about it. Thanks for visiting the blog! Come back often.

My Poetry Reading at the Library of Congress, Monday, 10/26/09

2009-10-25T14:59:00.005-05:00

Hi, everyone.

Many MANY apologies for having neglected my blog for so long. It's like I fell off a bicycle, walked it home, and then for some reason couldn't ride it again. The more time passed, the harder it became to pick up again. I promise to get back on the blog bycicle here after I get back from Washington, DC, in three days or so.

I am typing this blog post in a hotel business center before I take the train into the city and do the tourist thing. Nothing like a new location to liven up the blog-making. Which I am finding that I'm having to relearn as I go here.
I'm in DC because I'm giving a poetry reading tomorrow, Monday, 10/26, as part of the conference "Unsung Heroes: Asian Pacific American Heroism during World War II." This is open to the public so come and check it out. The event runs from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and my reading is, I believe, at 9:00. I will be reading poems regarding WWII from my collections Ghost Wars and Fighting Kite.
If you do make the reading, come up and say hi to me. Also, there will be copies of Fighting Kite for sale. I'll sign one for you.

See you tomorrow?

A quick update: I just talked by phone to Reme Grefalda, the organizer of tomorrow's conference, and found out my reading will be around 10:00. Before my presentation is the keynote address by retired Army general Antonio Taguba. Do come at 9:00 anyway to catch his address ... it will be well worth it.

Taguba, you may recall, is the general who investigated the Abu Ghraib atrocities and wrote the official US Army report on the incident, a report in which he was extremely critical. He even testified that he was convinced Rumsfeld had lied to Congress about Abu Ghraib. Later, after his retirement from the military, Taguba publicly accused the Bush administration of war crimes. I am certainly looking forward to his keynote address and to meeting him. His father and my father both fought in the Philippine Scouts (a US Army unit) and both survived the Bataan Death March.

Incidentally, it seems just unbelievable to me that I could be just a couple of years younger than a General — a retired one, at that! Somewhere inside, I'm still that young Army soldier who saw all Generals as old men. But it was about 35 years ago when I was that guy. Does that make me an old man now? Hmm. Nahhhh.

Sunflowers and the Four-Legged Tree

2009-07-31T16:05:00.004-05:00

In our backyard, a riotous orgy of growth: the wild forest of sunflowers that springs up annually, a thick three-dimensional scrim taking up loads of ground-space, reaching as much as six or seven feet into blue sky. Our yearly summer panorama, re-inscribing myriad stems on last year's palimpsest of sunflowers.

Acolytes of Amun-Ra . . . devotees of the day's eye . . . morning's minions, the A.M. . . . amanuenses of am.

Sunflowers: girasol, helianto, las flores del sol (SPANISH) . . . mirasol, mga bulaklak ng araw (FILIPINO).

Seers of the sun, soothsayers of light, la luz, ilaw, liwanag. Illumination, insight, epiphany, nirvana.

A spray of words, dustmotes, canary and mahogany, dilaw at kayumanggi, yellow and dark brown.

Isn't that last photo above simply amazing? I think this particular plant was broken by that windstorm described in my last post. Look how devastated and dilapidated the stem is that arises out of the grass. But the top quarter of the plant has raised itself from the ground and the flower is ready to track the sun in the sky. Incredible. Living things abide.

Speaking of living things that abide: some news about the four-legged tree featured last time. The tree experts who were consulted have decided that the tree is just too dangerous because half of the canopy is gone. In another windstorm, the rest of the branches could break off and either damage the house or fall on cars in the street. So all the branches of the tree have been lopped off, and the hope is that the tree will survive and start to push out offshoots that could eventually become a full canopy.

There is already new hope. Look at this close-up: a couple of offshoots have sprouted. The tree is still living and abides.

As do we all. I hope you are well. Abide and be strong.

Small Acts of God — Cedar Falls, Iowa

2009-07-16T23:33:00.009-05:00

At about 3:30 a.m. Friday morning, July 10, Cedar Falls was hit by a severe thunderstorm that generated straight-line winds of around 100 mph in some locations. Estimates range from 60 mph to 160 mph; one theory for the high winds is that the storm produced a powerful microburst. The effect on the town was a LOT of tree damage: huge branches littering the streets; large trees broken off at the trunk, even uprooted. A garage was demolished, and there were widespread outages of electric power, ranging from minutes to hours to days.

Here are some photos of the aftermath of the storm. The first was taken by my friend David Grant. Note the tree which has fallen across a street and onto a car; in the right foreground, a power pole has fallen — you can see a transformer on the pole as it leans away.

The next picture, taken by my friend Tiffany Bullen, shows a large tree uprooted completely out of the ground. For a sense of scale, note the two houses shown in the background.

Tiffany's next shot also shows a tree that has been uprooted; note at the right of the picture the grass that was formerly at the base of the upright tree. The ground torn up with the tree still carries the grass as if nothing has happened. At the left, you can glimpse a guy in blue who is chainsawing branches; seeing how small he looks will give you a sense of how large this tree is. (In order to pick out Blue Guy, you may have to click on the picture to see a larger version.)

Carole Fishback, my friend who is a professional photographer, took this next shot. Her dramatic composition shows what a tremendous force snapped this huge tree like a slim twig. As Carole told me, the damage is like "random acts of violence — some giant couldn't find the tree he wanted so he grabbed this one and that one and left them all lying every which way."

Here is a photo I took on the University of Northern Iowa campus. This tree was inexplicably torn in three directions. The large break sent a sizable branch towards the left; a break higher on the trunk sent a larger branch toward the right; and underneath the branch on the left is another branch that is going in yet another direction, toward the low concrete wall. I'm pretty sure all the branches came from this tree because there was not another tree nearby, but how they ended up pointing in these three directions is beyond me. The concrete wall in the background is about three or four feet tall, so the highest part of the trunk is about seven feet up. Pretty amazing.

This next photo shows the top portion of a power pole. When I first saw this, the morning after the storm, it was hanging in the air from power lines, with the bottom of the portion about six feet above this sidewalk. Where the rest of the pole was I don't know. I stuck my head out the car window to take a picture, but Mary Ann said, "Oh no, this is too dangerous!" and took off. So I didn't get what would have been one heck of a photo, but she was probably right. If the thing had taken that moment to plummet to the ground, we would have been in the middle of a mess of flailing power lines.

The next three photos show what happened to our city's landmark tree. It has a huge canopy arising out of four joined trunks; the four trunks form an archway that leads toward the front door of a corner house. I wonder how many engaged couples and also brides and grooms have taken a picture under this tree. It's quite a wonderful thing . . . probably made it into "Ripley's Believe It or Not."

This close-up diagrams the four tree trunks, in case you couldn't make them out above.

And this third shot shows how much of the original canopy was lost in the storm. The last I heard, on the local TV newscast, the jury was still out on whether the experts thought the tree would survive such massive damage. I sure hope it does. Many years of tree husbandry went into this beautiful thing.

Well, that's it for now. I'll keep adding photos to the blog if I find other dramatic images. Fortunately, no casualties other than trees. Ironic since Cedar Falls holds the title of "Tree City USA." Thanks again, David, Tiffany, and Carole, for letting me post your pictures here. Stay well, everyone.

Oh, and please write a comment below! If you are in Cedar Falls, tell everyone your storm story here. If you are somewhere else, I'd love to hear your reaction. Thanks!

Gypsy Punk on Nat Geo

2009-07-03T17:42:00.014-05:00

Hello, everyone. How about we take a little break from poetry today, and instead have some music. Thanks to Pris Campbell and her blog "Songs to a Midnight Sky," I found out recently that the National Geographic website hosts music videos. And quite a charming and eclectic collection of world music it is.

Here's a small sample from Nat Geo, featuring the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello (the inventors of said genre). Gogol Bordello is fronted by wild man Eugene Hütz . . . you may remember Hütz from the 2005 movie Everything Is Illuminated, where he played Alex, an irrepressible Ukrainian guide who spoke a unique and charming brand of distorted English: "Many girls want to be carnal with me . . . because I'm such a premium dancer!"

Gogol Bordello, "Start Wearing Purple"

Gogol Bordello, "Wonderlust King"

Gogol Bordello Sessions, Part One

Gogol Bordello Sessions, Part Two

I hope you enjoyed Gogol Bordello's videos and their spectacularly frenetic approach to gypsy music. Did you notice that Eugene Hütz was wearing blue suede shoes in the two "Sessions" videos? Shades of Elvis! Presley, that is.

For more on Gogol Bordello, visit their website. And do check out the cool video collection on the National Geographic website. Thanks again, Pris!

From Mondo Marcos ... Bongbong's Sonnetina

2009-06-26T02:31:00.036-05:00

In both the last two posts — featuring my Ferdinand Marcos poem and my Imelda Marcos poem — I've referred to a third sonnetina that completes my "Marcos trilogy." This third starring none other than Bongbong Marcos . . . or, more properly, Ferdinand Emmanuel "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr., the only son of Imelda and Ferdinand. His two given names, Ferdinand Emmanuel, the same as his father's, thus the Jr.; the nickname "Bongbong," originally meant to be used, I'm sure, only within the family but now the most notorious element of his public persona; and Romualdez, his mother's maiden family name. Thus Bongbong's full name is indeed a true hybrid of his parents' names, in the same way his face (see below) is quite a striking mix of both his parents' faces, so that he seems (at least to my eye) to resemble them both equally.

Once, in the late '80s, when I performed the first two Marcos sonnetinas at a poetry reading to a mainly Asian American audience, someone yelled out, "Cheap humor!" Well, I gotta admit, those two poems are cheap humor; the Marcoses are such easy, obvious, unavoidable targets. This third poem, spoken by Bongbong and written several years later, features even more heightened slapstick than the earlier two. I really cranked up the cheap humor: my Bongbong poem is downright cheesy and campy and over the top. Enjoy . . . (oh, wait . . . first read the Ferdinand poem and then the Imelda poem before this one.)

Bongbong Marcos Goes to Confession
with Jaime Cardinal Sin After Visiting
His Father, Ferdinand Marcos,
Lying in a Glass Coffin, in the Family
Mausoleum, Open for Tourists
— a sonnetina
Bless me, Cardinal, for I have grievously sinned.
My last confession . . . do you really need to know
all that? Damn it all, I'm Governor Bongbong
Marcos, son of the late President Marcos

and the one and only Imelda — Madame Marcos.
Actually, Cardinal, I lied. I haven't sinned
at all. I need an exorcism. Do you know
how to do one? Each night I hear: "Bongbong,

save me." Then the clock tolls Bong Bong.
The voice continues, "I'm cold under glass; Marcos
doesn't deserve to be gawked at by sense-
less yokels. Hell would be better, though heaven knows

I'm innocent, Bongbong!" Cardinal, I just don't know
what to do. Would you send away my Daddy Marcos?

I hope the cheap humor comes across: I couldn't resist, for example, the well-known and well-remarked juxtaposition of "Cardinal" and "Sin" (the actual name of the Philippines' actual cardinal back in that day); or Bongbong saying "I lied; I haven't sinned" (here an unremarked irony). Look for stuff like that; the poem is full of such slapstick silliness. But hey, how can you avoid that, when your speaker is named "Bongbong"!

Oh, incidentally — just an aside, not really something germane to the poem as such — isn't it interesting that both father and son have Emmanuel as part of their given names? Emmanuel, "God with us," a name for the Christ. Wow. Might there be some messianic, self-exceptionalist projection at play there? (Not to mention that their first name is Ferdinand . . . the first name of Magellan, so-called discoverer of the Philippines.)

The picture on the left shows Imelda kissing the glass coffin of Ferdinand. I couldn't pin down a source for this picture, which appears in many webpages across the internet. Nevertheless, an interesting reversal of Snow White asleep in her glass coffin, about to be awakened by Prince Charming's kiss. Well, here it's the man inside the glass, and the kisser is the woman. Though some people have wondered, because Ferdinand looks so darn good (and young) under glass, that what we're looking at is a wax figure and the actual corpse is elsewhere or perhaps directly underneath. Who knows? It's that trademark Marcos weirdness.

The picture on the right is of Bongbong Marcos arriving at Honolulu Airport in 1996, three years after the family returned to the Philippines, to testify in a court case where a group representing a deceased Filipino treasure hunter was seeking $1 trillion in damages from an incident where allegedly Marcos's soldiers stole a 1-ton solid gold Buddha from said treasure hunter. Do read the Honolulu Star-Bulletin article which the photo illustrates; it will give you a glimpse of the strange events that continually surround the Marcos family as well as an impression of Bongbong's fascinating personality, often overshadowed by the larger-than-life reputations of his parents.

The Bongbong sonnetina is forthcoming quite soon in Mondo Marcos: Martial Law Babies Write About Marcos and His Martial Law, edited by Frank Cimatu and Rolando B. Tolentino. Today's blog appearance of the Bongbong sonnetina is meant as a kind of advance advertisement for Mondo Marcos, which will elaborate more of the weird world of the Marcoses.

Oh! I should share with you my own family's involvement in the weird world of the Marcoses. During the late '60s and early '70s, my father Martin Gotera, a very vocal critic of the Marcos regime, wrote a column in the US-based Philippine News, a loud anti-Marcos voice in print. As such, he was (supposedly) on Ferdinand's infamous blacklist. As a child, I never quite knew what being on the blacklist meant; perhaps that was why we never traveled to the Philippines during those days? Was my father afraid of being arrested? Or, worse yet, salvaged or disappeared.

On the other side of the coin was my stepmother, Carolina Matsumura Gotera. She was most definitely a Marcos supporter — a very avid one. In fact, she was one of Imelda's Blue Ladies. These women were her informal ladies-in-waiting, a kind of clique or close social circle.

No one could be farther from or more reviled among the Marcos faithful than someone on the blacklist, and no one could be more "in" the Marcos inner circle than a member of the Blue Ladies. And in my family, we had one of each! When Papa (re)married Carolina, I was grown and didn't live at home any longer, so I never witnessed up close how my father and his wife reconciled this gap. My stepmother quite often talked about her high-society adventures with the Blue Ladies, and my father would just smile. It was that Marcos weirdness right in my own family.

On another front, the sonnetina front: I'm currently in touch with the poet Michael Heffernan, inventor of the sonnetina. I'll report back with details on our discussions about the sonnetina and how it developed. Stay tuned. Also, I'll let you know when Mondo Marcos is out. Take care.

Added on 27 July 2009: it occurred to me today that some readers may not know about the sonnetina form. Look at my June 18 post with the Ferdinand Marcos poem; there is a brief explanation of the sonnetina there.

Added on 27 July 2011: Yo yo yo, Mondo Marcos has landed!

Dragonfly (page 15) ... Imelda Marcos

2009-06-19T19:07:00.009-05:00

Since the previous poem from Dragonfly features Ferdinand Marcos as persona, it would probably be no surprise to you that the next poem — also a sonnetina — is spoken by Imelda Marcos. After composing these two sonnetinas I thought of them as an intertwined pair. A Bongbong Marcos poem came along later, completing what has become a trilogy of Marcos poems. ("Bongbong" is the family nickname of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. . . . probably a cute moniker when he was a toddler; unfortunately it has followed him into public life.)

Background stuff you should probably know: after Ferdinand died in late 1989, Imelda requested permission from Philippine President Cory Aquino to have his body interred in the Philippines with full military honors. Aquino refused to allow Ferdinand's body on Philippine soil, citing potential problems of national security. Imelda then kept Ferdinand "on ice" (that is, refrigerated) until the day when she might be able to bury his body in the Philippines.

The immediate trigger for this poem was a Newsweek article that showcased the weird activities at the Marcos enclave in Hawaii, focusing on a birthday party Imelda threw for Ferdinand and family and friends . . . after his death. I noticed that a sentence in the article fell neatly into pentameter-size lengths, each chunk ending with words that were cool repeton possibilities: "birthday," "Ferdinand," and "frozen." So I quoted that sentence at the beginning of the poem, as if Imelda were reading it out loud, and then continued the monologue in her voice, addressing Ferdinand. Probably she is sitting beside his coffin, perhaps with the lid up. Here is the poem. (Note: please read the Ferdinand poem before this one.)

Imelda Marcos Discusses with Ferdinand
the Gala Party She Gave on September 11, 1990
to Celebrate his 73rd Birthday Posthumously
— A sonnetina starting with a quotation
from Newsweek (October 1, 1990)
"The Imelda threw such a can't-miss birthday
bash for her very dead husband, Ferdinand,
that . . . he attended, natty as ever, in a frozen
casket." Can you believe that made the news,

Daddy? And yet, they didn't mention the new
space-age polymer coffin I bought for your birthday!
Please tell me what to do, my darling Ferdinand.
We can't afford to keep you like this: frozen

till she lets us both go home. You've defrosted
once already. That witch! If she only knew . . .
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday
to you, happy birthday, fair Andy,

happy birthday to you . . . soon, my beloved Ferdinand,
you'll rise like the phoenix, a new Christ, from the deep freeze.

Page 15

I made up some things here, such as the "space-age polymer coffin" and Ferdinand defrosting, though these elements might not be all that fanciful. Imelda spent a lot of money on technology and utilities keeping Ferdinand frozen; at one point in the sordid saga, Imelda had run up a $214,500 electric bill. Imelda refused to pay the bill, thus threatening a Ferdinand thaw, but it was eventually paid by a family friend.

One thing I did not make up is Ferdinand's nickname in the poem (line 12). Often in the press and in blogs, Ferdinand is called "Ferdie" (and in fact the first published version of the poem contained the phrase "dear Ferdie"), but it turns out that Ferdinand, in his desire to be as American as possible, preferred to be called "Andy." In the poem, the words "fair Andy" both preserve a sonic link with "Ferdinand" and make possible a multi-layered pun about perceived blondeness as well as imagined impartiality in his political career. Obviously neither of these could be further from the truth.

Did you think you were going to get out of here without hearing (again) about Imelda's (in)famously expensive shoe collection? Above are a couple of images that allude to the whole shoe thing. The wonderful caricature on the left, by Risko, is from a 2007 Vanity Fair interview with Imelda by George Wayne. This interview, on the occasion of the release of The Imelda Collection, a fashion company founded by Imelda's grandson, is quite revealing about what makes Imelda tick. Check it out . . . lots of fun.

The photo on the right is from a 2006 BBC article titled "Inequality on show in Filipino resort." Although she is not even mentioned in the article, Imelda is immediately recognizable as a poster child for the inequalities between rich and poor in the Philippines. The reason I've included this photo, however, is that the shoe Imelda is holding in the photo does not seem to be a shoe at all. I think it's a phone. Shades of Maxwell Smart! The parallel between "The Imelda Show" and Get Smart is simply too delicious not to point out.

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Dragonfly (page 14) ... Ferdinand Marcos

2009-06-18T15:44:00.023-05:00

Another installment of Dragonfly. This time, a sonnetina in the voice of Ferdinand Marcos. More on the sonnetina form below, but first some background on Marcos . . . his fame in the US, the fodder of front-page headlines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has greatly deteriorated of late.

Ferdinand Marcos, a self-proclaimed guerrilla war hero from WWII, was elected first a Congressman and then a Senator and eventually President of the Philippines in 1965. He is most well-known for his martial-law declaration in 1972 that eventually led to his being nominally a president but effectively a dictator, with the support of the US government, until 1986. The People Power Revolution of that year resulted in the end of the Marcos regime, with the ousted president and his wife Imelda Marcos going into exile in Hawaii. By the time they left the Philippines, the Marcos family had amassed a fortune said to be in the hundreds of billions. In 1988, Mrs. Marcos was indicted and arraigned by the US, accused of embezzlement.

Two real-life incidents are referred to in the poem: first, the news release of a video in which the gravely ill Marcos showed himself shadowboxing in front of a full-length mirror (to prove his continued manliness despite his kidney disease), and second, Mrs. Marcos showing up for her US arraignment wearing ballroom attire. Marcos died less than a year after that video appeared in the news, and Mrs. Marcos was acquitted of the embezzlement charges in 1990, eventually returning to the Philippines in 1991. More on that in the next post. When the poem's Marcos character refers to "that lemon housewife" he is speaking of President Cory Aquino, Marcos's successor, who ran for office wearing yellow as her signature color (as did her campaigners and supporters). "Malacañang" is the White House equivalent of the Philippines, where the president resides; when the Marcoses left the Philippines in 1986, Mrs. Marcos left some 3,000 pairs of shoes in Malacañang Palace. The shoe thing — for which Imelda is primarily well-known, I think — is also referred to in the poem.

Ferdinand Marcos at His Mirror, on the Occasion
of His Wife Imelda's Arraignment in New York City,
November 1988, Where She Wore a Ballroom Gown
— A sonnetina, after Michael Heffernan
Here I am again, the Great Brown Hope:
Jab, jab, fake, roundhouse from the right,
Knockout. I can take anything that lemon housewife
Sends me from Malacañang. I'm Ferdinand Marcos,

After all. And now they're after the Marcos
Millions. The goddamn U.S.A. is hoping
For billions, but Imelda's got more brains in her right
Shoe than any federal judge — let the wife

Show them. "Wear the blue terno, my darling wife,"
I told her. "Give them the famous Meldy Marcos
Style." Knockout. We'll be King next time, I hope.
Head fake, left jab, shuffle, then shoot them the right.

They better all hope they don’t come up against this right.
Because I've got a gorgeous wife — and I am Marcos.

Page 14

I couldn't find Marcos's shadowboxing video on the internet; I thought for sure it would be on YouTube. However, here's something else that will dramatize Marcos's cult of personality. During his presidency, Marcos commissioned a Mt. Rushmore-style statue of himself. On the left below I've included a wide shot of this 99-foot tall concrete sculpture on a mountainside to give you a sense of the magnitude of the thing. The statue was bombed in 2002 and the picture on the right shows how it looks today, compared to its appearance during Marcos's regime in the center picture.

This situation reminds me of Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous sonnet "Ozymandias," which focuses on the decline of the fame of great leaders who thought their reputations immortal during their own lives. Certainly Marcos felt that way, and I hope the poem demonstrates how Marcos felt about himself, his fame, and particularly his manhood.

On the sonnetina form: in the early 1980s the poet Michael Heffernan invented a sonnet variation that melded the sestina and the sonnet. I am almost certain he called his new form a "sonnetina" but I can't seem to confirm that on the internet at present. Nonetheless, when my poem was originally published in the journal Asian America, I used the epigraph shown above claiming the poem to be a Heffernan-style sonnetina. The most commonly cited example of this form is Heffernan's poem "A Colloquy of Silences" from his collection To the Wreakers of Havoc (mistakenly cited by Amazon.com as "Wreckers").

In his hybrid of the sonnet and the sestina, Heffernan used a sestina-style recycling of repetons or repeated words: bottom, top, next to the bottom, next to the top, etc. (For a review of the sestina, see my blog post on it.) This pattern of repetition results in the third repeton always ending up in the third slot; to correct this problem, I've used a different pattern: instead of the last repeton in a quatrain becoming the first repeton in the following quatrain, then the first repeton in the earlier quatrain becoming the second repeton in the following quatrain — that is, 4-1-3-2 — my pattern is 4-1-2-3. (The sestina's equivalent pattern is 6-1-5-2-4-3.) This might be clearer with this visual matrix, the repetons color-coded.

Quatrain 1........

Hope
right
housewife
Marcos Quatrain 2........

Marcos
hope
right
wife Quatrain 3........

wife
Marcos
hope
right Envoi

hope right
wife Marcos

One difference between the sestina and the sonnetina is that the sestina has six repetons and six sestets, whereas the sonnetina has four repetons but only three quatrains . . . Heffernan left out the fourth quatrain to constrain the form overall to the sonnet's 14 lines.

I think my explanation of the sonnetina here may be the first time that the "rules" of the Heffernan sonnetina have been explained on the internet. I hope this is useful to poets overall. And that my correction of Heffernan's pattern will also see wide use.

This Ferdinand Marcos sonnetina is part of a three-sonnetina sequence: the second one features Imelda Marcos (the next poem in Dragonfly) and the third one (a more recent poem) stars Bongbong Marcos, Ferdinand and Imelda's son. This third sonnetina is forthcoming in an anthology currently in press in the Philippines; that should be done quite soon, I understand. I'll let you know when that poem and book appear.
NOTE: The pictures shown above came from the Artificial Owl website, which showcases abandoned human-made structures around the world. Many thanks!

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Dragonfly (pages 12-13) ... Shiites

2009-06-10T20:56:00.012-05:00

Well, we've had three graduations these past several weeks. First, Amanda, then Amelia, and this past weekend, my niece Madi's graduation open house two states away. We just got back last night from our road trip to Indiana and back. And I see today that eight days have gone by since my last blog entry.

So let's go on to the next couple of pages in Dragonfly. Hard to believe almost three months have elapsed since the last Dragonfly post. Here goes.

Shiites, 1985

The terrorist leaned out the pilot's window
dwarfed on TV by the sloping shoulder of the jet.
Already one American sailor dead.

On every channel, fifteen-year-old Iranian
boys waving captured Uzis on a bus
to the Iraqi front. Fervor. Jihad.

But in my mind, I'm seeing another scene,
a National Geographic photo: a jungle clearing
in Mindanao, the Muslim island

of the Philippines. Twelve men have unrolled
mats of woven palm. They bow to Mecca.
I can almost hear the muezzin.

Perhaps a tree branch was his minaret
and as he perched there chanting, he disturbed
a python, who slid into leafy gloom.

The men wear green headbands, chant "Mabuhay
Husayn. Mabuhay Khomeini. Karbala now."
Their hands reach out to the boys on that bus, on the jet.

And I recall my great-great-uncle Cesar,
a fighter in General Aguinaldo's barefoot
army in the Philippine-American War.

Seized by the ritual rage of amok,
he stormed the Kansas line in Caloocan,
a U.S. Army infantry barricade.

Later he couldn't remember bayonets
or bullets. Only heart's flame foaming
through fist into the haft and blade of a bolo.

Page 12

Amok, Cesar danced through rifle fire
without a gun, his knife a snake's tongue.
No bayonet pierced the red haze

of his eyes. Like magic he slipped untouched
through the gauntlet of men, killed thirty
American soldiers, then melded into jungle.

For three weeks, a platoon of trackers searched.
He'd vanished like a fish in a mountain stream.
"Bahala na," he had said before his charge,

come what may. The dove he had glimpsed
against blue sky made no difference.
Just the keen edge and the blood of sunset.

But the twelve in Mindanao, after prayers,
slide oiled cloth through the barrels of M-16s.
Jihad, amok: all of that can wait. Today

these men will work, haul fish from boats.

Page 13

Here is the National Geographic photograph that inspired this poem (click on it to see a larger version). This image is from the July 1986 issue, a picture taken by Steve McCurry to accompany Arthur Zich's article "Hope and Danger in the Philippines," on the problems faced by newly elected President Corazon Aquino, after the People Power Revolution that drove out Ferdinand Marcos. The photo's caption reads "Muslims of the Moro National Liberation Front pause for prayer while on patrol in Mindanao."

Steve McCurry
National Geographic
July 1986

What strikes me today is that the setting for the poem is exactly 25 years ago, a quarter century, and yet the problems that then plagued the Middle East, and by extension the world, continue. Some of the players have changed but much is the same. The opening scene in the poem is a jetplane hijacking by Muslim extremists; that particular tactic culminated in the 9/11 hijackings . . . and other hijackings may yet occur. In the poem, youths are off to fight in the Iran-Iraq war; today, youths — American ones — still fight in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

What struck me then, while I was beginning this poem, is that the Muslims of Mindanao — the Moros — are Shiites who share the same religious culture as the majority of Muslims in Iran and Iraq. They would then share the same important story of the Prophet Muhammad's nephew Husayn being martyred at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, so that for the Moros, Husayn would represent the ultimate figure of rebellion against oppression. I then surmised that because of this, the Moros might also revere Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini as the main opponent of the exiled Shah. For the Moros, the Ayatollah's rhetoric of jihad and fatwa might have resonated favorably, as a resource for their own struggle against the Philippine government, against whomever was in charge.

The other large theme of this poem is the particularly Malay battle-rage or frenzy called amok. Filipinos "running amok" was a unique military problem for the American forces occupying the Philippines during the Philippine-American War: Filipinos would single-handedly attack entrenched American troops, usually with just a blade, perhaps a machete, and succeed in injuring or killing many. The fight would be at such close quarters that American soldiers found it difficult to fire their rifles effectively without killing Americans or use the bayonets mounted on those rifles. The US Army's solution was the Colt .45 pistol. I recall learning this fact while I was in the US Army and marveling that the army I was in had developed a special weapon specifically to kill my people. Incredible.

It's interesting to look at different versions of this poem. In its first appearance in the 1989 Wooster Review, the poem used the words "Moslem" and "Philippine Insurrection." In 1994, the poem as it appeared in Dragonfly still had "Moslem" but the latter phrase had been changed to "Philippine-American War." By 2003, when it was reprinted in the collection Ghost Wars and in the online magazine Our Own Voice, the poem had the more contemporary "Muslim" and "Philippine-American War." Unfortunately, the reprint in Our Own Voice has mistakes; the italicizations and the quotation marks have disappeared. Those should be as given above. (Note: since some people find the word "Moslem" offensive, I have silently emended it to "Muslim" above; Dragonfly used the older usage.)

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Mushroom Hunting: The Almighty Morel

2009-06-02T20:53:00.005-05:00

Well, friends, mushroom season is over. I hope those of you in the Midwest got out there into the woods and looked for those Morels. Mushroom hunting is an annual springtime ritual for the Blues and Yeakleys, Indiana families I married into. This poem — written probably 20+ years ago — talks about learning mushroom hunting from my Blue family.

Hunting Sponge
— for Jerry Lee Blue
The light settles on the forest floor wafting
like leaves into pools of ochre and new green.
Mary Ann and I, my father-in-law Jerry —
we’re hunting for mushrooms. The Indiana Morel.

In these woods behind his hog farm, Jerry hunts
each spring gray sponge, snakehead, yellow
sponge, elephant ears. At each find, he sees them
frying deep in butter. Look under sycamores,

Jerry tells me, especially dead ones. He walks to
a fallen tree, his shadow thickened by a lifetime
of dawn feedings, and pokes his walking stick, twisted
like a shillelagh, in the brush. See? Gray sponge.

Just the week before, Mary Ann and I
had gone looking for Indian arrowheads
in the newly plowed field behind the house.
In the living room, Jerry has a large jar,

eighteen inches tall, filled with stone points.
He sees them, bright as pebbles in a creek,
from the seat of his combine as he disks —
the metal blades turning black earth.

Mary Ann and I had spent an hour or two
without finding a single piece, when Jerry came out.
Only minutes, and he’s pointing. There’s one.
It’s broke, but here’s the other part that’s chipped off.

And that’s how he is today on our mushroom hunt:
Here’s a bunch. And there, right behind you.
I am concentrating hard, searching
for that Morel outline like a minaret,

a fleshy stalk topped by a pointed bulb
ridged like a brain. Three years hunting mushrooms,
and I still haven’t found one on my own.
But now, in a patch of dark green grass,

just a few feet from where Jerry has passed,
I see a small yellow tower. I call out,
Got one! A clump of yellow sponge.
Jerry turns back, looks at me, and says,

Ain’t that something? There they are, just shining.

— Vince Gotera, first appeared in the 1989
Literary Supplement of Arts Indiana.

Recently, Jerry and Mary Louise (my in-laws) were visiting for Amanda's and Amelia's graduations. They treated us to "store-bought" morels! We've been so busy we didn't get out to hunt the wild kind, but we still got to partake of the bounty of God's forests.

The treasure laid out

Ready to fry!

Morel done to a T!
Last Week's Shrooms!

Buttered and floured

Magic in the pan

MRE ... Mushrooms, Ready to Eat

It was a lovely little feast. Thanks, Mom and Dad! We'll find you some wild ones next year.