Fighting Kite (pages 1-5)

Here is the front matter of Fighting Kite. These are facsimile pages that resemble the layout but may not be exactly the same. For example, the text font in the book is Bauer Bodoni, but I am using Blogger's default serif font instead. I do love the display font designer Sally Kueker used for titles — HansHand — and so I am reproducing that font in this serialization. Page 1 Also by Vince Gotera:     Poetry     Dragonfly     Ghost Wars     Criticism     Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans Page 2 Poems by Vince Gotera Pecan Grove Press San Antonio, Texas Page 3 Copyright © 2007 by Vince Gotera All rights reserved Printed in the United States Cover photograph: Mary Ann Blue Gotera Cover design: Sally Ann Kueker Interior design and copysetting: Sally Ann Kueker ISBN: 978-1-931247-23-8 Pecan Grove Press Box AL 1 Camino Santa Maria San Antonio, Texas 78228-8602 Page 4 For my father — — Martin Avila Gotera 1921–1989 Page 5 Such handsome interior design by Sally Ann Kueker! Thank you very much again, Sally. Just a little background on her: when I was Editor of the North American Review, Sally worked there doing layout while she was a student. She already had substantial experience at that point with graphic design. As you can see, I'm sure, with her design work on the cover and the interior pages. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Day 11 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2024

Day 11 . . . here's the intro from Day 11 eleven years ago: Day Double-One. Eleven pipers piping, yo! At present, the Doctor is number 11 — that's in Doctor Who, for you non-Gallifreyans. A website called "Fun Facts About the Number Eleven" says theologian Ernest L. Martin "claims the date of birth of Christ to be September 11, 3 B.C." Interesting date, hey? Note: unfortunately, that fun facts website no longer exists. Sorry! But that September 11 factoid is still found online! Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo suggestion: “[O]ur optional prompt for the day honors the ‘ones’ in the number 11. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write either a monostich, which is a one-line poem, or a poem made up of one-liner style jokes/sentiments. Need inspiration? Take a look at Joe Brainard’s poem ‘30 One-Liners’ or Frank O’Hara’s ‘Lines for the Fortune Cookies.’” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a memory poem. The poem could conjure up an actual memory that you have from your childhood, or last week, or earlier this morning. Or the memory could be made up.” Okay, merging both prompts: a memory poem that's only one line. The title . . . well, that's not limited in length! On Meeting my Father in the Hallway The Morning After I Came Home Drunk in High School When I Had a Hangover to Beat the Most Dreadful Hangover Ever Dad said, "You've been punished enough," and walked away. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] My dad, Martin Gotera, holding my first son Marty, around 1973, 4 years after the incident in the poem. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

NaPoWriMo / PAD 2024 • Pick a day: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Happy Birthmonth, Dr. Seuss! ... Of Books and Such, 6 March 2004

Earlier this month, March 2012, I started preparing the blog post you're reading now to celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday, but then current events, shall we say, heated up at my school, the University of Northern Iowa — ssst, more on that later — and I got preoccupied and didn't finish it. So now I'm posting this within Dr. Seuss's birth month rather than day. Close enough. Theodor Seuss Geisel, most famously known as Dr. Seuss — with whom many of us spent our happiest hours as small children, I'm certain — was born on 2 March 1904. For the sake of this errant and tardy blog post as well as the allure of being on time (at least in a fictional sense, sorta), why don't we call this March Dr. Seuss Month? Especially since the cartoon starring Danny DeVito as Dr. Seuss's mustachioed, cranky yet loveable, environmentalist, tree-hugging (in a good way) Lorax is still in theaters. Somewhere. Surely. I'm going to take this Dr. Seuss Month opportunity to reprise — resurrect? — my "Of Books and Such" book-review column from the Cedar Falls Times in 2004. After all, books don't go stale, do they? Whenever you and I read a book, no matter when it first saw the light of day, it's new for us, it's born in our minds. Even if we've read it before, we renew it, right? So . . . here is my Dr. Seuss Month offering of a "Of Books and Such" column from Dr. Seuss's centennial year. Cue gnarly, serpentine Seuss-ish trumpets: tah–tah–DAAH! OF BOOKS AND SUCH by Vince Gotera, Cedar Falls Times, 6 March 2004. Oh, The Places He Went! The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel by Charles D. Cohen, Random House, 2004, 390 pages, cloth $35.00. I bet, for most of you reading this column, Dr. Seuss has been more present in our lives than Dr. Spock — the baby doctor, not the pointy-eared Vulcan. We grew up "living" on Mulberry Street and wishing we had 500 hats. We were babysat by Yertle the Turtle, the amiable elephant Horton (who heard a Who), the Grinch (who tried to steal Christmas), and of course The Cat in the Hat — in print as well as on TV. We read The Lorax to our kids, teaching them about caring for the environment, and we gave Oh, The Places You'll Go! as graduation gifts. The name Dr. Seuss, for us, brings up weird, gangly animals with long legs and feathers in unlikely places; scraggly trees with tufts of odd-colored foliage; and impossible yet charming architecture and machines. This week (March 2, to be exact) marks the celebration of Dr. Seuss's 100th birthday: "The Seussentenial"! Check out <www.seussentennial.com> for more info. [No longer an active web address.] So, who was Dr. Seuss? You may know he was born Theodor Seuss Geisel, but beyond that, what? Besides the myths he put on paper, Dr. Seuss often made myth out of his own life; "He was an unusual man, particularly with respect to his memory and vision," Charles Cohen writes, "and his penchant for storytelling and practical jokes often led people astray from the facts." It turns out that Dr. Seuss, or more properly, Ted Geisel, is as interesting a person as many of his creations. Did you know, for example, that Geisel — let's call him Ted — was a well-known political cartoonist for years before his first children's book? That he used what we would now recognize as "Seussian" characters in nationally known ad campaigns for Flit insecticide and Standard Oil, again before what he at first called "brat-books"? That Ted published a book for adults called The Seven Lady Godivas featuring drawings of seven undressed sisters? (Though, as Carolyn See noted in Esquire, "In 1939 America was feeling too blue to be cheered up by pictures of silly ladies with no nipples and funny knees"). Did you know that during WWII, Ted served as Captain (and later Major) Theodor Geisel, working for Frank Capra (the famous director of It's a Wonderful Life) in a filmmaking unit in the Army, where he invented the cartoon character Private SNAFU, known to many vets from that war? Did you know that 1953, when I was not yet one year old, saw the release of Ted's big-budget Hollywood movie, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T? This is the stuff (and more!) of which Cohen's enlightening and entertaining book is made. The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss is lavishly illustrated with thousands of illustrations from Seuss's work (magazine covers, political cartoons, sculptures, marionettes, and of course art from his books), photos from Geisel's personal life, action figures of Seussian characters, representative work from artists that influenced Dr. Seuss, and so on — the majority from Cohen's large collection of Seuss materials. Cohen's research is meticulous and carefully documented; more importantly, he discusses Geisel's life and times, the development of Dr. Seuss's images and ideas as well as his social conscience, in a readable and enjoyable style. Readers of all ages will enjoy this book. My son Gabe, who is just on the verge of becoming a reader, savored the fun pictures. History buffs will appreciate how social and cultural events and trends affected Dr. Seuss's work. This book is indeed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth on Dr. Seuss. P.S. There is also a fine biography of Dr. Seuss for younger readers (kindergarten through fourth grade): Dr. Seuss by Mae Woods. Those interested in Dr. Seuss's writing as literature (and Geisel is a fine poet, especially in his use of meter and innovative rhyme) should look at Dr. Seuss: American Icon by Philip Nel. Vince Gotera, when not at his day job teaching at the University of Northern Iowa, has read Dr. Seuss books to all of his five daughters and sons. Contact him at OfBooksAndSuch@yahoo.com. [No longer an active email address.] A bit of history about the book-review column title: When I was a youth, my father Martin Avila Gotera had a journalistic commentary and miscellany column called "Of This and Such" in The Philippine News, a newspaper based in San Francisco and published by Alex Esclamado. As a tribute to my dad and his literary aspirations, I titled my own column with similar phrasing. Okay, watch for future reprises of my "Of Books and Such" column in the blog. As I said above, books don't get stale, and if you go out and buy the books I reviewed back in 2004, you'll enjoy them just as much now as you would have when they were new. Please, also, won't you comment below? I'd really love to know what you think. Thanks. So . . . happy Dr. Seuss Month! Go put a stripey hat on your cat. Take good care, friends. Ingat.

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

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!

In his Inky Apron, My Father Smiles

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been posting and commenting on my poems reprinted by editor Shawn Wong in the 1996 textbook Asian American Literature. The immediate occasion for these blog posts, as I have mentioned previously, is that I was contacted through Facebook by members of an Asian American Lit class at the University of Georgia, and we have been discussing these poems online. At about the same time, interestingly, my own Asian American Lit class at the University of Northern Iowa reached these poems in our ongoing course schedule. Here, then, is the last of the five poems from Shawn Wong's textbook:

Dance of the Letters 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 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.

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in Ploughshares (1989). Reprinted in Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996). Appeared also in Fighting Kite (2007).

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. When I was about six, he decided he would make me into a chess Grandmaster. So every day, we would drill on the chessboard, sometimes for hours. The King's Gambit. The Sicilian Defense. The Ruy Lopez Opening. (I only now learned, via Google, that there's an interesting irony here because the Philippines was named after King Philip not by Magellan, it turns out, but by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos. Fancy that. Ruy Lopez. I wonder if my father knew that.)

We would replay famous chess games, such as the 1956 so-called "Game of the Century" in which chess master Donald Byrne lost to 13-year-old Bobby Fischer; as we duplicated the moves in these replayed games, Papa would have me analyze what made each move weak or strong. I suppose Papa was probably glad he taught me to read early, because he had me begin reading chess strategy manuals at this time. We spent a lot of time with endgame puzzles and checkmate tactics. (The only result of this training is that I ultimately lost my love for chess and now play only seldom.)

Back to the poem . . . I have always thought that this poem is not about me (as those who call it a "making of the artist" may assert) 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.

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.

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.

And I bet my father did know about that Ruy Lopez who named the Philippines. Papa was a heck of a smart guy.

NOTE: the graphic above is the cover image from the Wikijunior Animal Alphabet.

Oh, also, there was one small change between the Ploughshares and textbook version and the one above (same as in Fighting Kite): the earlier "two a.m." was changed to "2 A.M." to coincide with customary usage (numeral with A.M. or P.M. in small caps) as well as to include yet one more single-character entity to match the alphabet letters throughout the poem.

Added 7 April 2009: a slide show of this poem. Enjoy!

Weddings and Knife Clouds

Last week, I visited Rochester, Minnesota, for a day, with my daughters Amelia and Melina, and we happened to pick up an issue of Rochester Magazine. In it was a clever full-page ad, picturing a young woman extending her left hand toward the viewer, giving "the finger" with her third finger. Only her hand is in sharp focus; face and torso are blurred, calling attention to the ring finger sans ring. The caption reads, "Is your girlfriend trying to tell you something?" The sales pitch continues by claiming Lasker Jewelers has "the largest selection of diamonds in Rochester" then advising a young man in need of an engagement ring to get down to the store, "Because trust us, it's better we tell you where to go before she does."

Click on the ad if you want to see a larger version.

I find this ad fascinating on a couple of levels. First, switching from the second finger to the third finger is brilliant — the hand still looks like it's giving "the finger" even though the finger doing the semiotics has changed. Second, it suggests that the woman is in charge of the relationship, the timing and particulars of the engagement and also the wedding, though the ad is hardly a feminist document. And of course the ad upholds the societal privileging of heterosexual life. As well as the privileging of the male, who has the agency of procuring the ring, the symbol of union. Or is it of fealty?

Obviously, the ad got me to thinking about weddings and marriages: who is in charge? Especially with regard to national culture and customs. The Philippines, before contact with European culture, was inhabited by many tribes and peoples, all of whom shared the folkway that women and men are equal; this is reflected in Philippine languages and dialects, which have no segregating "she" and "he" pronouns, but rather a single generic nonsexist one. In our time, though, just about a half a millennium after Magellan claimed to have discovered the Philippines, unleashing hundreds of years of Westernizing by Spain and the US, this vaunted gender equality has become quite rare throughout the society.

And so it was in my parents' marriage. Here is a poem that explores these issues.

Wedlock


Papa said, "You know I would have to kill you,"
to Mama, who sat quietly, head bowed.
I was just a kid — five or six — and cried
deep gut-wrenching sobs. The moon, like a new
coin in the window, sliced in half by blue
knives of cloud. "You're too young to understand,
Vin," he smiled. "It would be my duty as a man."
A tear on her cheek, Mama whispered, "That's true."

To this day, I don't know if there was another man
or if they were only talking possibility,
in case, for example, Mama felt her face
begin to flush downstairs with a repairman.
Her only safety net then — Papa's motto,
A place for everything, everything in its place.

—	Vince Gotera, from Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (2000). Also appeared in Fighting Kite (2007).

I hope this poem speaks for itself, because I don't think I can say it any clearer than this.

Something I can tell you is that the incident recounted in the first stanza did happen. I remember my parents talking in these words or something very like them. I was indeed five or six, and you can draw whatever inference you want from parents talking about such matters in the presence of a kid in kindergarten or first grade. The event certainly stuck with me. I think this was probably, from my father's point of view, part of my indoctrination into maleness, into machismo. Part and parcel, I think, of US Army training as he saw it, from the dual perspectives of trainer and trainee . . . father and son, in the way his father (my Lolo) taught him to be a man, through hard knocks and a thick belt.

For those of you who read the blog to hear about poetic craft, the basic element here is form: we've got a sonnet here. I am using this form because of the tradition of sonnets as love poetry. In this case, though, the sonnet is being used as a vessel for "anti-love," for control and oppression in the name, allegedly, of "love."

To be more specific, this is a Petrarchan sonnet with an octave (or eight-line stanza) rhymed abba acca, a small departure from the norm, an octave made up of two envelope quatrains (abba abba). The second stanza is a more standard Petrarchan sestet (or six-line stanza) rhymed cde cde. There is also the usual turn (or volta) at line 9 . . . in this case, a change in time: the opening octave set in the speaker's childhood and the closing sestet set in the present.

All of these mechanics and specifics are not probably quite as important as the effect of the form, specifically the Petrarchan form, on the unfolding of the initial narrative in the octave and the sestet's meditation on that narrative. Both parts are contained and molded by the Petrarchan architecture, like liquid being poured into a bottle of a particular shape. I can't be more specific than that because I don't really know more than that. More often than not, an art object is more opaque to the artist than to the viewer.

I have also borrowed an image from Un chien andalou, the surreal silent-film short by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. This image occurs at the film's opening, when a full moon is sliced in half by a thin, knife-like cloud. This image occurs in tandem with another, more horrific, cutting that I won't reveal now in case you want to experience Un chien andalou yourself. My borrowing (stealing?) of this image is serendipitous; I don't know really what it means in the context of the child's narrative, but it works for me at some deep, unknowable level of emotion. How this happens occurs, for me, subconsciously or unconsciously so that I find myself at a loss as to how to explain the effect. I would appreciate any insight you can contribute here . . . please write a comment below. Thanks.

Beyond all that, I guess I would caution the young woman in the ad — well, really anyone considering marriage — to be very, very careful. And watch out when you see knife clouds bisecting the moon, too. Just watch out.

NOTE: The ad above comes from the March 2009 issue of Rochester Magazine. No copyright infringement is intended, and the appearance of the ad in this blog is free advertising for Lasker Jewelers. At least, I hope they see it that way. Oh, also, in case you're still wondering what the Petrarch an envelope quatrain is, the rhyming of the quatrain's inner two lines is enveloped by the rhyming of the outer two lines . . . abba, the b-rhyme lines enclosed by the a-rhyme lines.

Not St. Paddy's Day but Ash Wednesday

Last night was a truly wonderful evening. I had the good fortune to be asked to give a poetry reading at Wartburg College in nearby Waverly, Iowa. This was part of a "Writing Symposium" put on by Wartburg's English department and The Castle, the student literary magazine. My two fellow guests were Gary Eller, fiction writer and author of Thin Ice and Other Risks, and Tim Bascom, a memoirist whose recent book is Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia. I enjoyed their readings; it was great to see Gary again and very nice to meet Tim for the first time.

My thanks for this kind invitation go to Claudio D'Amato and Emily Van Oosbree (editors of this year's Castle) as well as to Dr. Paul Hedeen, professor of creative writing at Wartburg College. I really enjoyed the symposium; the students in my poetry workshop were lovely people. We'll be keeping in touch to discuss their poetry, and I'm looking forward to those contacts.

The poem below is one I read last night from my poetry collection Fighting Kite. Enjoy. (Though maybe "enjoy" is not quite the right word; I'll wish you the little thrill, the frisson — hair standing up on the back of your neck — that I inevitably feel whenever I perform this poem.)

A Visitor on Ash Wednesday Papa faced the devil again on the stairs to the living room. Seven years old, I couldn't sleep. Papa shouting: "Make it now, damn you, end it here." I saw clenched in his hand a buntot pagi, the long tail severed from a sting ray, the Filipino's traditional weapon against spirits. Papa kept his on the living room wall, and when neighbors would visit and talk of his monthly standoffs with the devil, he would take the buntot pagi down, let them touch it. When I was over at my friends' houses, I would hear people talk about Papa: "So brave, that Mang Martin," they would say, "Did you hear last night he took on the devil again?" When my great-uncle Tay Birco died, we prayed for nine days, a novena of dinners and dancing. Late into the night, the grown-ups told stories of encounters with demons. Eyes glistening, my grandfather Tatay described how when he was a boy, church bells woke him one night. Peeping out his window, he saw on the plaza facing San Antonio Church a man in flames, dancing in red-hot chains on the flagstone steps. Next day, all the neighbors asked each other, "Did you see that burning man?" then rapidly crossed themselves. Tatay's mother, my great-grandmother, once met a man in a hooded robe on the stairs in her house as she left for morning mass. "Who are you?" she asked. "Can I help you?" When he threw back the hood, his face was like molten copper. She shrugged, walked on. But that Ash Wednesday when I was seven, I recall I stood rooted to the shadowy floor of Papa's bedroom. Half-heard voices downstairs, a glimmer of light wafted up. I could see the tusks, its eyes like glowing coals, as it climbed the steps. I could hear Papa praying below: "oh jesus save us from the fires of hell lead all souls to heaven help . . ." I can still see its red eyes. I'm sure if I had reached out, I could have touched spiny hackles — it was that close. Gliding by, the pig entered my dim bedroom.

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in Caliban 7 (1989). Also appeared in Fighting Kite (2007).

I'm gonna guess that I probably know precious little about what's really going on in this poem. So much of it is stuff bubbling up from my subconscious. At least I think so. I really don't know 'cause all of that is invisible to me. But here's what I do know . . .

If you read the autobiography I started in the blog back in November, I was born in the US but lived in the Philippines as a small child for some time. While there, I eventually realized that my father would periodically have visions of the Devil. And that in these encounters he would take the Devil on as his nemesis. It was also clear to me as a child (the poem says I'm seven) that people did not write Papa off as a lunatic. Instead they believed in these visitations and saw my father as a visionary man, tormented as well as honored by the Devil.

In the US, of course, Papa was not seen this way; he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and spent a great deal of time, off and on, in psych wards. My poem "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside" describes that other side of Papa's life experience. In fact, at the reading last night, I read these two poems together to highlight these sharp differences between Philippine culture and American culture.

If I could switch over to talking about craft for a minute, I want to point out that I use a framing device. The Ash Wednesday event, in which Papa is visited by the devil and where the speaker sees a devil-like pig moving through the half-darkened house, frames a narrative of vignettes told by relatives at a funeral. My intent is to have the middle section contextualize and legitimize the magic-realist Ash Wednesday event. Filipinos customarily believe in such occult happenings and in fact treat them as everyday occurrences. The speaker's great-grandmother is not at all surprised at meeting the Devil in her house. She is, after all, the wife (so to speak) of a Catholic priest, and the devilish presence may just be par for the course, an attempt to tempt her, to terrorize her as a kind of extension of her husband the priest.

Whoa, whoa. I don't think I've mentioned my great-grandfather the priest in the blog before, have I? Hmmm. Okay, let's hold off on that. I'll tell you more about that another time. Now you'll have to come back to get that story!

So, back to the poem. And back to what I know (or think I know). Seeing the devil pig . . . that's an actual memory. I remember that distinctly. My father was downstairs with the Devil, shouting at him. And then I saw the pig. It was dark. It lumbered right by me, very close, ignoring me. And then it went into the darkened door of my bedroom. Where it disappeared into blackness. I swear to God. This memory is one of the strongest, most vivid remembrances of my life. No surprise there.

I found out later, as a teenager maybe, or as an adult, that Papa had been seeing the Devil for many years, ever since he was a teenager. In fact, probably not long before the poem's Ash Wednesday event, my mother and father both saw the Devil, as a face glowing like fire on the wall. Both Mama and Papa, mind you, not just Papa.

My father always said that the Devil, when he would see him, looked like a goat, so I searched for goat-like images of Satan to use as illustrations here. I included the Doré engraving above because that very image was what, as a child, I thought Satan looked like; in my poem "Wings" I talk about my vision of angels and heaven, based on a Doré illustration of Dante's Paradiso. Dante provided me, when I was a child, with entire cosmologies of belief.

Well, let's leave off there. I worry sometimes about over-explaining and over-analyzing here. This poem is best served with a little frisson, as I said above.

Yes, today is St. Patrick's Day but I never have anything Kelly green to wear. It is Lent right now, though, so Ash Wednesday is also strangely apropos. Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. And not to the Devil, one hopes! Take care.

NOTE: The top image on the left, above, is from the Codex Gigas, the largest extant medieval manuscript, often called the "Devil's Bible" because of this illustration of the Devil. The center picture is Baphomet, from Eliphas Lévi's book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie ("Dogmas and Rituals of High Magic," 1854); while the image refers to a pagan idol, it is also connected to the central icon of the Church of Satan, founded by Anton Lavey, where this goat image is merged with an upside-down, or inverted, pentacle. The top image on the right is the Devil card from the Tarot. The image at the bottom is Gustave Doré's illustration of Satan from Dante's Infeno.

Dragonfly (pages 10-11)

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

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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?

DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

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.

Thanks, Best American Poetry!

I would very much like to thank Emma Trelles for mentioning Fighting Kite, my 2007 poetry collection, in The Best American Poetry blog in her post "Big Love, Little Books" (13 February 2009). I truly appreciate the good word, Emma — such a nice plug.

For those who are not familiar with Fighting Kite, here is the title poem, an elegy for my father, Martin Avila Gotera.

Fighting Kite — 1930 — Just outside Manila, it was my father's ninth birthday, but all he could think about was his duel with fighting kite that afternoon. For weeks, he'd been grinding glass between rocks: green for luck. The kite string soaked in glue then dipped in powdered glass. In the sun, the string would gleam — filament of emerald. His kite emblazoned with a vermilion hawk, talons of shiny hooks and razors hammered from tin-can lids. At 3 P.M. sharp, his hawk dancing a red tinikling in the sun, my father stood by the Pasig River, his twelve-year-old opponent on the other bank, the wind blowing downstream. In the sky, the other kite was a silver mantis with bat wings. The hawk and mantis swiveled and faked like mongoose and cobra. My father gauged the wind like a cat's paw on his cheek, waiting for the breeze to hold its breath, then the whiplash crack of his wrist. Hawk whirled around mantis, razors flashing — kite strings twining, sliced. The bat wings ripped away in tatters. He'd won, my father had won. — 1989 — Swimming in that white hospital bed — IVs like kite strings in reverse piercing his arms — Papa must have longed to soar, to leave behind his sick and scarred heart, his breath trapped in emphysemic lungs . . . O to fly like some red-feathered bird, to dance free in lucid air above the sparkling Pasig. How far, then, you could see: the jungle green rock of Corregidor leaping from Manila Bay, the Pacific stretched flat out, an aquamarine mirror, endless and new. The razors of Papa's soul slashed at his lines — invisible strings tethered deep in the ground — then Papa launched into gold and purple sky like the sun's first flash breaking from the east, his fingers uncurling slowly from a clenched fist.

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in Hawai'i Pacific Review (1992); reprinted in the textbook Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology, edited by Shawn Wong (1996).

As far back as I can recall, my father told me tales about flying fighting kites, a sport he engaged in throughout his youth. Kite fighting is done in many countries across the world; the sport is a major motif in Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner, which was made into a feature film in 2007. But for me, the fighting kite was (and still is) a thing of romance, a source of adventure and fable in bedtime stories I heard from my father.

I wrote several versions of the first half of this poem over a number of years, versions that simply didn't do justice to my dreams and fantasies about kite fighting. But it was not until Papa's death in 1989 that the poem came together, as I realized that the fighting kite was, for me, a symbol of his difficult and fascinating life. The book's description on the back cover reads, in part, "Fighting Kite narrates, in verse, the life of Martin Avila Gotera — son, trickster, soldier, schizophrenic, visionary, lawyer, workingman, father &mdash a life that glimmers like a node, a shimmery knot, a glowing nexus . . ." And that's what the fighting kite is: a "nexus," a connection, a symbolic gathering of the threads, strands, strings of his life. In fact, I learned recently that the proper term is "fighter kite," but I am sticking with "fighting kite" because I think of my father as continually acting, constantly striving to make a better life for himself and his family, ultimately his people, despite illnesses and obstacles.

As you know if you are a frequent reader of the blog, it's my practice to say a bit about craft and technique in each poem. But I think I'll just let this one speak for itself. Martin Avila Gotera was quite a fascinating person — a man of passions and problems; the back-cover description ends by calling him "brilliant and troubled, tormented and wise." I hope my poems, and the book, do justice to his memory.

Once again, many thanks to Emma Trelles and to The Best American Poetry blog. Keep the faith, people!