Hello, friends. In anticipation of National Poetry Month, I've created a video of my poem "Gawain's Rap."
I trust you know the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the medieval romance on which this rap poem is based. Though the poem, in its own way, tells the story well enough.
This poem "Gawain's Rap" was originally published in the Winter 1989 issue of The Wooster Review, published once upon a time by the College of Wooster in Ohio. It later appeared in my first poetry collection, Dragonfly (1994).
Thanks for watching the video. Hope you enjoyed it. Would you please leave a comment below? I'd love to hear what you think. Look for a blue link below that says "Post a comment"; if you don't see that, look in the red line below that starts "Posted by" and click on the word "comments."
See you back here in a couple of days for National Poetry Month? Let's all write a poem every day in April. Ingat — take care, everyone.
The next poem in Dragonfly is a transition poem. The two previous poems focus on family in conjunction with pop culture. Starting with this poem we get a series of poems that deal with childhood. This poem focuses specifically on Asian American childhood in San Francisco in the '60s.
I've written about this in the blog before: last year, I posted a short story on this very topic titled "Manny's Climb"; when that story had been published in the book Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults, it had appeared with a preface that explains what happened: during the '60s and '70s, teenagers who were neither white nor black had to choose one or the other of those identities in order to survive on the streets. That's the way it was in San Francisco, certainly, and I would hazard a guess that that happened in many locales.
What I saw happening with Asian American kids in particular — both girls and boys — is that they would oftentimes teeter-totter back and forth between passing as white and passing as black.
Jive Talk
Growing up, I thought
I was black.
For 2 or 3 years, anyway. Playing
the dozens, jive talk,
Smokey Robinson
and the Miracles.
Dancing the 4 corners,
A & I, Sophisticated
Cissy, Mother Popcorn.
Afternoons with Joe, Ronnie,
and Resting-His-Eyes Jackson
harmonizing with the Tempts:
"The Girl's All Right with Me,"
"Get Ready," "My Girl,"
"Ain't Too Proud to Beg."
At Grattan Playground, our gods
were the Big O
and Wilt the Stilt.
Soft steal like
Walt "Clyde" Frazier,
a Meadow Lark hook from half court.
Knit shirt-jackets like rainbows,
creased jeans, black and red
pimpsocks, gold dashikis.
Talking trash. Doing
Muhammad Ali and The James Brown.
Testifying, funkifying:
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Get down with the get down! Get down, brown.
Joker, wild card sure is you own.
Get by with the get by! Get by, Sly.
Getting on, keeping on for real. But don't mean nothing.
Flaming funk be jiving junk
if you the signifying skunk.
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Here are a couple of images that will illustrate a bit of the fashion spirit of that time. On the left we see typical African American fashions from around 1970. This is how an Asian American teenager putting on blackness would have dressed. As did I during the time described in the poem.
On the right is an image of African musicians wearing the dashiki. Not gold as in my poem above but other bright colors . . . the man in the center sports a mainly red one while around him are white dashikis, orange, yellow, etc. From about 1968 on, people in the African American civil rights movement wore dashikis as an Afrocentric statement; this fashion filtered down to common folk, and Asian American youth who were, again, "putting on blackness" followed suit. Bad pun, sorry.
Because of the realities of my growing up during that time, I was fluent in Black English (again as a survival practice). A linguistic fluency that also came in very handy during my US Army service from 1972 to 1975. When I use this poem at readings, in fact, I perform the latter part of the poem, the italicized portion, in Black English.
There's also an interesting story connected to the closing part of this poem. I wrote this text as a freestanding poem in a beginning poetry writing class with the poet Belle Randall at Stanford University in 1971 or 1972. Then, in probably 1986 or thereabouts, when I was working on my MFA in poetry with Yusef Komunyakaa, I resurrected it, as something that really spoke to my childhood experience, and inserted it into this poem, so that the opening section (the romanized portion) serves as contextualization for the ending section. I sprinkled the latter around the page in order to differentiate it from the part in standard English and to give a sense of its performative quality.
Okay, that's all for today. I'd love to hear what you think of this poem or whatever; please comment below. Thanks. Ingat.
The image on the left is borrowed from the website PastReunited.com. No attribution of photographer there. I'll be glad to give credit or remove this image if the creator contacts me. If you click on the photo, you'll be taken to PastReunited.com; this specific image is about 14 screenloads down that page.
Okay, so there was a two-year gap between the previous Dragonfly post and the one before that. And then from that last post to now, a nine-month gap. Has any project ever hung fire so much?
It's been so long, in fact, there may be readers who have never seen a Dragonfly post. To those friends, let me explain: I'm blogging my first poetry collection page by page, or rather, poem by poem with commentary on craft or the circumstances surrounding the composition of the poem, etc. At the bottom of each post, you'll see a little box at bottom right that will help you navigate to the initial Dragonfly post (from late 2008), the table of contents, and so on.
This next poem in the book is thematically related to the previous poem since both deal with gambling.
Uncle Ray Shoots Craps with Elvis
It was Christmas 1963, and my mother's youngest brother, Ray,
was hitting all the tables at Harrah's: blackjack, roulette, craps
and baccarat — the exotic Monte Carlo import into Vegas.
In a trés chic hotel room, stories above the glitter of games,
another man was suiting up in silver lamé and rhinestones — Elvis
Presley, ready for whatever — rock-n-roll's unruly King.
And so they met, two sovereigns, my uncle whose name means king
and the honey-throated emperor of the silver screen. Uncle Ray,
in a white shirt and gray sport coat, sat down across from Elvis
under the dusty yellow light wafting down on the green and red craps
table. The shooter, a platinum blonde who was new to the game,
giggled as she fondled the dice, peeking at Elvis the Pelvis through Vegas
showgirl lashes. Neither the blonde nor Elvis paid the vaguest
attention to my uncle. Elvis ordered glass after glass, first "The King
of Beers," then later Johnnie Walker, Southern Comfort. The game
went on: Platinum giggled and threw, giggled and threw. Uncle Ray
bet with the table, and Elvis bet against. In front of my uncle, a crop
of red and blue chips blossomed and grew. Again and again, Elvis
called for a new stack of chips. The table wavered in front of Elvis's
eyes: was he ready to wager his diamond ring, his sequined vest, his Vegas
Caddy, the keys to the city of Memphis, his entire tobacco and cotton crop
in Tennessee? Who was this little man who dared challenge the King?
Did Elvis squint into the smoky glare, trying to focus on Uncle Ray?
Maybe he looked just like a favorite servant, the grounds- and game-
keeper at the Tennessee farm: Juanito from Cuba, who raised game
cocks and racing greyhounds for the betting pleasure of Elvis
and his retinue. On the other side of the table, Uncle Ray
peered through his own lowered eyelashes at the King of Vegas
and saw a brash young man, cruelly handsome but no King. Drunk as a skunk, he would later tell us kids. At that craps
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table, Elvis was just another foul-mouth holligan. "Crap"
was the gentlest cuss word he said that night. As the game
went on, I noticed a bulge under his coat. It was the king
of handguns, a Colt .45 — the more he lost, the more Elvis
stroked its pearl handle. Then he bet all his chips and the "Vegas
Equalizer," as he called the gun. I thought to myself, This is it, Ray,
do or die. The dice flew. Elvis got up real shaky: he'd crapped
out: "Life's a game," he said. "Now you're King." "Just call me Ray,"
I told him. Then he and the blonde staggered out into the streets of Vegas.
Page 19
This is based on a true story. Though I've made up everything. My cousin Monica (Uncle Ray's daughter) once told me at a family gathering, "Hey, did I ever tell you how my dad shot craps with Elvis?" I said something like, "Nicky, don't tell me another thing. I want to write about it without knowing the details."
This poem may also be connected to my MFA professor David Wojahn's assignment to write a poem in which a family member meets a celebrity. I didn't write this until several years after I was David's student, but there it is. Some of you may know of that famous Wojahn assignment, which has been published here and there.
What else can I say? It's a sestina. Google that word or click on the word "sestina" in the labels below. I wrote a decent blog post on the sestina in March 2009.
Let's see . . . that picture of Elvis above is from a Sun Records promotional photo when he was 19. I tried to find an image of Presley that's not well known. I borrowed it from Wikipedia; click on it for more info. The picture's in the public domain.
There's a small anecdote connected to this poem for me. I was a visiting writer at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, at UMass Boston during the '90s, and I performed this poem, among others, at a reading. During the Q&A, a well-known scholar and historian of the Vietnam war called me out for sexism, citing the portrayal of the character of the showgirl as evidence. I felt bad about that for quite a long while, but really, if one were to write from the point of view of a mass murderer, does that make one a mass murderer? The showgirl is, admittedly, a static, undeveloped character who is shown only as silly arm candy for Elvis. But her purpose in the poem, as an image, as a device, is to characterize Elvis's womanizing and to oppose his character to that of Uncle Ray. I'd love to hear some thoughts about this question, if you wouldn't mind posting a comment about it below.
Oh, one other thing, the phrase "cruelly handsome" above was originally "brutally handsome" in the book. I think, though, that I unconsciously lifted that from the Eagles. Hence the alteration.
Okay, that's all for now. Comment below, won't you? About anything, please. Thanks. Ingat.
Added 5/8/2012: Yesterday, I mentioned that the Wojahn assignment had been published. Here's the scoop: "The Night Aunt Dottie Caught Elvis's Handerchief When He Tossed It from the Stage of the Sands in Vegas," a poetry-writing exercise by David Wojahn, from The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. Lots of great exercises in this book . . . worth picking up.
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
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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.
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.
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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 Fairinterview 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.
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.
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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!
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.)
I need to apologize here for letting the blog slide below my day-to-day horizon. It's been a crazy couple of weeks, work-wise and whatever else, and I see it's been a week and a half since my last post. Yikes.
Let's look at another couple of pages from Dragonfly.
Pacific Crossing
The pier, a great concrete semicircle, stretched into San Francisco Bay like a father's arm around a daughter. On Sundays, we would venture on that pier,
Mama in her broad straw hat, a country woman in some rice paddy on Luzon. In his lucky lime-green short-sleeved shirt, checked by orange pinstripes, Papa would heft the net.
I would lean over the rail, watch the two steel hoops — the smaller within the larger, criss-crossed by heavy twine in diamond shapes — loft out over the dark water and sink
in a green froth. A small wire cage nestled in the center of the hoops, containing chunks of raw meat. Papa would say, "Best bait is porterhouse. Crabs really go for that."
Sometimes he would let me pull the net up. The rope slimy and tight in my small hands and then the skitter and scuttle of claws on the wooden deck of the pier. Later
at home, I would play the radio loud, hide that same skitter on the sides of the large enamel-white Dutch oven, concentrate instead on the sweetness I knew would come.
One of those Sunday evenings, I dropped in at my friend Peter van Rijn's house. Dinner had just been served, and the family rule was: all the neighborhood kids had to leave.
Page 10
But I didn't. There was Pete's father, like some patriarch from a Norman Rockwell painting, poising his carving knife above the shell — huge and bountiful — of a red King crab.
I said, "Wait." Their heads swiveled toward me in shock, as if I'd screamed a curse word out. Old Peter, the daughter Wilhelmina, his sons — Paul, Bruno, Guido, my friend Pete —
the Mom whose given name I never knew: a good immigrant family. The heirs of European culture, I always thought, these direct descendants of Rembrandt.
I said, "Wait." And then I shared the secret passwords to being a Filipino. Here is where you dig your fingernails in to pry the top shell off. You suck this green
and orange jelly — the fat of the crab. This flap on the underside tells if it's male or female: pointed and skinny or round like a teardrop. Here's how you twist off
legs, pincers. Crack and suck the littlest ones. Grip it here and here, then break the body in half. These gray fingers are gills — chew but don't swallow. Break the crab into quarters.
Here you find the sweetest, the whitest meat.
Page 11
The first half of this poem describes one of my fondest childhood memories: crabbing with the family. I've never been one for fishing, I gotta say, but crabbing, now there you've got something! My dad really did use steak for bait — porterhouse, no less — rather than something like chicken (which many people use); that gesture is part of his devil-may-care, aristocratic attitude.
This is a guy who (thought he) looked like the movie and TV actor Dick Powell . . . a not uncommon sentiment among Filipinos of his generation, that they resembled white celebrities. The famed Filipino writer Bienvenido Santos, in fact, wrote a novel titled The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor.
Below is my father's passport photo from the late 1940s, next to a picture of Dick Powell, a crooner in 1930s movies and later a film-noir tough guy in the 1940s (he played the detective Philip Marlowe in the 1944 movie Murder, My Sweet.) You decide if there's a resemblance. I guess the point here is that Papa thought of himself, of Martin Avila Gotera, in romantic terms, and that carried through into everything he did, even crabbing.
Back to the poem: the details and feelings I connect here to crabbing are pretty much an unadorned recounting of how I felt. I really enjoyed those lovely family moments even though when I was a child it disturbed me that we would cook the crabs alive. For those of you not used to seafood, this boiling crabs alive is how it's done by everyone, not just Filipinos, something to do with eating crab safely. The crabs you can order for shipment to you are also cooked alive and then frozen.
Okay, by now, you're probably wondering who the third guy is in the pictures above, the one to the right of Dick Powell. That's the greatest Dutch painter, Rembrandt van Rijn, a self-portrait painted in 1630 when he was in his mid-20s.
As the poem says, my oldest childhood friend, Peter van Rijn, is a direct descendant of Rembrandt, and I was always awed by that ancestry. But then there are other kinds of knowledge, and in the poem the speaker shares expertise the van Rijns didn't know, the "secret / passwords to being Filipino." Believe me: you don't want to cut a crab open with a knife; you'll have sharp, pointy shell bits mixed up with the meat.
For what it's worth, this dinner and crab event really happened. Though I did take one small liberty: the poem says the van Rijns were eating a "red King crab" — probably a red Alaska King crab. In all likelihood, they would have served a Dungeness crab, the most common crab typically eaten in California. You can probably recognize this in the pictures below of an Alaska King crab on the left and a Dungeness crab on the right; the King crab looks like some kind of space alien from a B-movie. Here's why I chose to use "King crab" in the poem: it's a very expensive crab, and I liked the word "King," emphasizing the "heirs / of European culture" connection I wanted to highlight.
That admission of a poetic liberty taken with the story is pretty much all I'll say about craft in the poem. Obviously it's in free verse, though we've got quatrains or four-line stanzas rather than the more usual verse paragraphs to emphasize meaning. 'Nuff said.
Okay, wanna know what you should do next? Go eat some crab. Maybe King crab legs. Expensive, yes, but well worth it. Better yet, get a whole crab, rather than crab meat that's been extracted by stainless steel gadgets. There's something magical and fun about getting your hands dirty while eating crab. Whatever you do, steer clear of faux crab, imitation crab meat.
If you've never eaten crab by hand before, check out these instructions from Instructables.com; but also follow my tips in the poem, which will become easier to apply if you look at the Instructable pictures. Remember, no knives. Also, the online instructions say, "Remove and discard the spongy, inedible gills"; as I say in the poem, "chew but / don't swallow" — try it. The Instructables write-up says, "Rinse the greenish-brown goo out of the body"; don't do it: "suck this green // and orange jelly — the fat of the crab," says the poem. You won't be sorry.
One little aside. Look again at the pictures above of my dad, Dick Powell, and Rembrandt: don't you think the bottom half of Papa's face resembles Rembrandt's? Hmmm. Nah, just kidding, just kidding! Thanks for reading the blog.
Oh, wait. Another little aside. Check out the picture below of a coconut crab doing a little dumpster diving. Well, not a dumpster exactly, but a common household garbage can. Scary, don't you think? You probably don't have a pot big enough to cook this bad boy.
And this crab definitely is a bad boy. I'd hate to meet this guy in a dark alley. I'd hate to meet him anywhere. But with all the coconut he must eat to get this big, I bet he would taste pretty damn good!
Just so we can all feel safe taking out the trash later, let's leave off with a picture where human beings are firmly in charge of the crabs.
That's a scene from San Francisco's world-famous Fisherman's Wharf: a sidewalk vendor's crab stand, where you can walk up and get as much crab as you can stand. Hmmm-hm. See you down at the wharf, then?
Photo credits: The picture of San Francisco's Municipal Pier at the top is from yelp.com, taken by Ed "Mr. Peabody" U. The next picture, of a full crab net, is from the Beachstumps website. The third picture is from the Instructables.com instructions on "How to Cook and Clean a Fresh Dungeness Crab." The next picture, of a person holding a live crab, is a San Francisco Chronicle file photo from SFGate.com. The fifth picture, of a whole cooked crab on a plate, is courtesy of PDPhoto.org. The sixth picture, of a quarter crab plus legs served up on a plate, is again from Instructables.com. The photo of Dick Powell is a detail from an image on fanpix.net. The self-portrait by Rembrandt (1630) is from Wikimedia commons. Also from Wikimedia Commons are the pictures of the Alaska King Crab and the Dungeness Crab. The picture of the coconut crab on the garbage can be found all over the internet; just google "coconut crab." I found it in the blog Loko's Domain. The last picture, of a Fisherman's Wharf crab stand, is also from Wikimedia Commons.
The next Dragonfly poem shares a theme with the poem I posted on 15 February, specifically the Good Friday crucifixion thing. When I wrote that poem for Arturo Islas in Texas, where I was visiting, I had read in the San Antonio newspaper that a re-enaction of Christ's crucifixion was to take place on that day, Good Friday — an event that also occurs in various locations in the Philippines, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church, which disapproves of these voluntary crucifixions.
Crosses
In the ambulance, streets unrolled through rear windows pulsing to the siren. Plastic tubes sprouting from both arms, I drifted with that thurifer, memory,
recalled Stations of the Cross one Friday when I was six, and Mama whispering in Our Lady of Antipolo church in Manila, "See that old woman over there — near St. Jude? That's
Aleng Tosang. Last year, she walked on her knees from Jerusalem to Calvary." I mixed up calvary with cavalry then: bearded men with muskets ride horses round wooden crosses on a hill.
I had already discovered in Tatay's sala a large and dusty book with drawings of men in some dark wood, their chests slit, loose entrails like gutted fish. Every year, when the saints would hide
their faces under purple cloth, penitentes in black hoods walked the streets on parade, scourging themselves with whips of knotted Manila hemp. And Sister Mary Helena
told us in the fourth grade about an American chaplain who said Mass daily in a North Korean POW camp. For wine a raisin soaked in water, then squeezed into a thimble.
Page 8
She called our bodies her temples of the Holy Ghost. We saw snapshots of Christians in China, nailed on huge wooden ideographs, and I remember I prayed, "Me too, God. Me too."
The ambulance is slowing now, then nurses wheel me, flat on my back. White hosts in fluorescent ciboriums glow in benediction. But I'm remembering last week, I entered
some church on a whim. In the dark there I'm kneeling to say thanks, and I can think only of that cloud of incense which isn't floating now in the nave.
Of Pasig where Papa was raised, where friends still nail penitentes to crosses and raise them up for fifteen minutes. Of Aleng Tosang trudging on her knees to Paradise.
Page 9
I hardly know what to say about this poem. I wrote it while I was in the Master of Fine Arts poetry program at Indiana University, probably for a poetry workshop, though it's possible that I wrote it specifically for my MFA thesis. Over two decades ago, then. I was having a lot of trouble with asthma at that time, and the ambulance scene that starts off this poem took place several times. I don't recall specifically if memories wafted through my brain like drifts of incense, though they certainly could have. Those ambulance and hospital trips were often kind of psychedelic, you know?
The word thurifer is a technical term that goes very well with memory trips, at least with my memory. In the Catholic tradition, the thurifer is the altar server — "altar boy" back in my day — or at high mass or other elite ceremonies a priest who tends the thurible — the metal incense burner, or censer, suspended from chains and held in the hand. Whenever, as an altar boy, I was assigned to be a thurifer, I often flashed back to an incident when I was probably four or five and fainted at a church service from smelling burning incense; that half-remembered incident was certainly psychedelic, with fanciful, Alice-in-Wonderland visions I can no longer conjure today. Being a thurifer was quite a privilege, as I remember, and you had to master the techniques of working the thurible, which could be unwieldy because you held on to the chains and not the censer itself; also you had to be a little careful not to let sparks burn moth-holes in your cassock, the black robe. Or on your surplice, for that matter, the white over-thingy.
In terms of craft and technique, I can't really remember any more why I used the word thurifer in this particular context, except that there is something really trippy about IVs and ambulances and EMTs; you just let go and let your brain fly, because people who know what they're doing take over your body and you can relax, let your guard down. The drugs they give you ain't bad, either . . . you can take off into the ether, sail up into clouds, drift into deep high blue. Oh and of course thurifers and thuribles are so Catholic.
The trigger for this poem is Philippine Catholicism's sometime convergence of religion and violence, particularly a kind of self-sacrificial masochism in the service of faith. Blind faith, some might say. For example, the custom of of penitents who volunteer to be crucified on Good Friday — with real nails! Or the other penitentes, self-flagellants who whip their backs into a bloody froth before these crucifixions. All done to make up for one's sins. You probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Catholic Church in the Philippines distances itself from these activities, saying that Christ's sacrifice is a one-time act that cannot be replicated. It may also not surprise you to hear that province governments practically sponsor these events in order to draw tourists into their areas, advertising the crucifixions and flagellations as brutal yet strangely attractive spectacles.
Although as a child I was not aware expressly of these sorts of religious tortures, I had already had a personal intro, of sorts. In my grandparents' formal living room in Manila, I had stumbled, early on, upon my Lolo's edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, with the exquisite Gustave Doré engravings. I remember being utterly fascinated and enthralled by these illustrations, and feeling at the same time that they were somehow forbidden because as far as I knew I was the only one who ever looked at them, and I only did so when there was no one around. I was particularly intrigued by images of the Inferno and both shuddered and thrilled at the horrific punishments — eternal ones! for pity's sake — especially the one described (and shown) above: where a demon with a humongous sword would slice open the damned, who would then further rip themselves open, tender innards pulled out and exposed to the noxious air of Hell. That one really stuck with me. The lacy, graceful, June Taylor Dancers, Busby Berkeley mandalas of angels in the sky of Paradiso were no match whatsoever, I tell ya.
I had heard, however, of people walking on their knees in penitence. Or, more accurately, had seen them. Not uncommon in Philippine churches to see women walking on their knees from church door to communion rail. So the idea that someone would knee-walk the cobblestones of the entire Via Dolorosa (Latin for "the way of suffering") — starting at the Lion's Gate, the edge of old Jerusalem, and ending up on Calvary or Golgotha, now inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — that idea would not be strange at all. (Probably more the stuff of legend than actual possibility, although pilgrims have walked and still walk the route barefoot, as Jesus did.)
In any case, through chismis or gossip, a person like Aleng Tosang in my poem could be rumored to have walked the Via Dolorosa on her knees, even if she had simply walked it upright, like the pilgrims in the picture above, carrying a wooden cross as symbol of their imitation of Christ's passion.
Without a doubt, there's an element here of heroism, of hero worship. Aleng Tosang would be considered a hero. And think of Ruben Enaje, pictured above being raised on a cross and featured in this Reuters video; he has been crucified for 22 consecutive Good Fridays. Twenty-two! That's a superhero record, don't you think? Not just in the Philippines, but anywhere — even in the USA.
My fourth-grade teacher in the US, Sister Mary Helena, did tell us the story of the unnamed US Army Chaplain in a POW camp who hoarded raisins (maybe from the Red Cross) to make thimblefuls of altar wine so he could perform his duty to celebrate mass; Sister called him a hero of the first order. Catholic tradition has many heroes: saints, angels, and especially martyrs. Kids in Catholic grade schools — in whatever schools! — they all want to be heroes too. I'm not the only person raised Catholic who, as a kid, wished to be a martyr.
Now perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but I gotta admit I wonder if the Good Friday penitentes in the Philippines are pursuing that same desire to be a hero, pushed to obsessive lengths. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying the penitentes are inauthentic. I'm sure all of them believe fully in what they are doing. No one could do what they do without such amazingly strong belief, don't you think?
The little Catholic school kid inside me yearns for a taste of their power, their heart. The speaker in the poem — well, really me, on several levels — we both wish for the ability to have that certitude of faith, that strength of resolution, that keen courage in one's belief. All I can say is amen to that, sisters and brothers. Amen to that.
The illustrations above are (1) Frederic Remington's painting "The Cavalry Charge" (1907), from the Metropolitan Museum of New York; (2) Gustave Doré's illustration of Canto 28 of Dante's Inferno, picturing schismatics, notably Mohammed in the center (Wikimedia); (3) a BBC news photograph of self-flagellants on Good Friday in the Philippines, 2007; (4) a BBC news photograph of Ruben Enaje being cruficied for his 21st time in as many years, Good Friday, 2007, in the Philippines; (5) a BBC news photograph of voluntary crucifixion in the Philippines on Good Friday, 2000; (6) contemporary Christian pilgrims carrying a cross on the Via Dolorosa — image courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org; and (7) a thurifer carrying a thurible (Wikimedia).
The video embedded above can be viewed in the context of the original Reuters video story, "Christ's Crucifixion Re-enacted" (March 21, 2008).
Dragons & Rayguns (poems, 2024) • Order The Coolest Month (poems, 2019) • Order Fighting Kite (poems, 2007) • Out of Print • Read Ghost Wars (poems, 2003) • Out of Print • Read Dragonfly (poems, 1994) • Out of Print • Read Radical Visions (literary criticism, 1994) • Order
Liner Notes
A blog on poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, the world of writing and art . . . life, the universe, everything . . . something, nothing, anything . . .eep opp ork ah-ah.
Please start with the welcome post from 1-November-2008. Then click here to find the most recent posts. Make yourself at home!
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I write poems and stories. Also the occasional creative nonfiction. And I edit the North American Review, the longest-lived literary magazine in the US. I am a Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where I teach creative writing and literature.
I play bass guitar and lead guitar; I also love to bang on the drums! And if you couldn't already tell from the color scheme around here, my favorite color is blue, in all its dynamic shades and flavors: cobalt, electric, royal, robin's-egg, navy, cerulean, teal, indigo, sky.
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