With this poem, we're back to poems written during MFA school. I think this poem may have been workshopped in David Wojahn's class. It's about my introduction into written language, into reading. What we've got in Act One of the poem is family history, about how I learned to read at age two or so. (By the way, there's a blog post from 2009 on this poem that gives more background info.)
| |
My father, in a 1956 gray suit,
had the jungle in his tie,
a macaw on Kelly green.
But today is Saturday, no briefs
to prepare, and he's in a T-shirt.
I sit on his lap with my ABC
Golden Book, and he orders the letters
to dance. The A prancing red
as an apple, the E a lumbering elephant,
the C chased by the D while the sly F
is snickering in his russet fur coat.
My mother says my breakthrough
was the M somersaulting into a W.
Not a mouse transformed into a wallaby
at all, but sounds that we can see.
Later, my father trots me out
to the living room like a trained Z.
Not yet four, I read newspaper headlines
out loud for Tito Juanito and Tita Naty
or for anyone who drops in.
Six years later, I am that boy
in a black Giants cap, intertwining orange
letters S and F, carrying my father's
forgotten lunch to the catacombs
of the UCSF Medical Center,
and I love the hallway cool before the swirling
heat from the Print Shop door.
In his inky apron, my father smiles,
but his eyes are tired. The night before,
I pulled the pillow over my head, while he
|
|
|
|
Page 20
| |
argued with my mother
till 2 A.M. about that old double bind:
a rule to keep American citizens from
practicing law in the Philippines.
His University of Manila
law degree made useless.
But California's just as bad.
"You can't work in your goddamn
profession stateside either!" he shouts.
"Some land of opportunity."
There in the shimmer of the Print Shop, I can't
understand his bitterness. I savor
the stacatto sounds. He leans
into the noise of huge machines, putting
vowels and consonants into neat stacks.
|
|
|
|
Page 21
Here's a bit of what I said about this poem in the earlier blog post mentioned above:
Readers of this poem often say it's about "the making of the artist." Not quite like James Joyce though, I'd say — more like "the making of the artist as a young preschooler." My father did train me for amazing feats, of sorts. He worked with me on the alphabet at age two or three so that I was reading before I was four years old. . . .
I have always thought that this poem is not about me . . . but rather about my father. His strong ambition for himself, later deflected to/through me. His dogged andeavors and planning, culminating with earning his law degree. His disappointment at the Philippines enacting a law to prevent American lawyers from practicing there (since Papa was a naturalized US citizen). His even deeper disappointment that he was also not able to be a lawyer in his beloved America; to pass the bar in California, he would have had to go back to school, but since he was already a lawyer, he felt that such schooling would be below him. His further bitter disappointments as he worked jobs in the US that he felt were similarly beneath him: selling encyclopedias door-to-door, selling dress shirts at a department store, working as an offset printer running enormous printing presses. (Some of this is also described in the autobiography started on this blog.)
Of his many jobs, the one I remember fondly was when he worked in a print shop. Ten years old, I loved the gigantic machines Papa ran, the sharp smell of the ink, the thunderous noise in the shop when the presses were turning. Probably the only way he could have been more heroic to me was if he ran a bulldozer or earth mover on a construction site.
Needless to say, he was keenly disappointed in himself for not being a lawyer, for having to work under supervisors he felt were intellectually inferior to him, etc. Today though, I gotta say, when I go to a print shop for my work as a magazine editor, all that love for Papa comes flooding back when I smell that ink-laden air, hear the thudding whirr of the presses. I don't think Papa ever knew how much I idolized his printing-press work. Though I suppose, even after the fact, that would not have been sufficient consolation for his workaday suffering. .&nbap;.&nbap;.
To round out Papa's story, he eventually did find work that suited him. As I have noted in various posts here, my father was a WWII veteran who had deep concern for veteran's issues. Papa ultimately found an occupation, not just a job, as a Contact Representative for the Veterans Administration; he assisted veterans with all sorts of problems: pensions, health care, service-connected disabilities, etc. Although this was not working with the law, the job was sometimes legalistic, and more importantly Papa felt great satisfaction in being of service to other veterans. So this is a story with a happy ending.
With regard to poetics in the poem, here's what I wrote in the previous blog post.
In terms of craft, nothing much jumps out at me that I haven't already discussed at length vis-à-vis other poems, except for the emphasis here on the letters of the alphabet. Not only in the earlier section when the child speaker is learning the magic of reading, but also the letter-based logo on the ten-year-old child's ball cap, the UCSF of Papa's work (University of California, San Francisco), and the single numeral "2" followed by the letters "A.M." And finally of course, the father's work with letters — vowels and consonants — making Papa a sort of primal man of letters, though he would not have appreciated that complexion in the least.
As I noted with a couple of the earlier poems from the first part of the book, my line breaks in those poems seem now, with the benefit of hindsight, not so confident. In this poem, the lineation seems more sure-footed, with possible exceptions in the last stanza of the first page ("can't") and the last stanza of the second page ("swirling"). Other line breaks in the poem use enjambment and endstop strategically and operationally to enhance meaning.
Finally, do look at that 2009 blog post. An interesting story in there about how Papa groomed me to be a chess Grandmaster at age 6. It's a fascinating story that explains much about the relationship Papa and I had — the ultimate topic of Fighting Kite.
As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment