Recalling "The Spine" by Michael Spence

This evening, my Poetry Workshop at the University of Northern Iowa had the pleasure of Skyping with the poet Michael Spence, whose 2014 collection The Bus Driver’s Threnody we are reading for class. In the course of that insightful and invaluable conversation, I brought up Mike’s poem “The Spine,” from his first poetry collection The Spine. When I looked for this poem online to show it to the students, I discovered it’s not available in cyberspace. So, with Mike’s permission, I proudly present that poem to the blogosphere. The Spine “The fossilised vertebrae of a large dolphin-like   reptile dating from 150 million years ago were   recently discovered in this mining town.”                                     —Australian travel brochure The icthyosaur, Like ancient water It flashed through, Dried to dust. A few Pieces of spine Dug from a mine At Coober Pedy Are the only Remains. They glint Iridescent Blue, purple; Bits of gold fill Every crack. The Jurassic Faded: the reptile Changed to opals. Thirty-three Vertebrae Like those here— One for each year I’ve lived—link What I think To how I move. The chord in their groove Sends what lightning I have forking Through my hands Into the land. If my traces reach The distant beach Of the future, The bones I stare At hold my wish: To start as flesh And end as jewel. The line of fossils Burns—each gem A star in the stem Of the Southern Cross. We gain by loss. — Michael Spence, from The Spine (1987). I have a personal relationship with this particular poem because it was, for me, life-changing with regard to my writing of verse. I was an MFA student at Indiana University in 1987 when I found The Spine on a new-book rack in the IU library. I distinctly recall how this poem stunned me, with its bravura off-rhymes—icthyosaur/water, reptile/opals—and its off-kilter dimeter. This poem opened up a new vista for me. I had a moment akin to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” the library stacks spinning a bit as I stood, leaning on a shelf, reading “The Spine.” This was during the “poetry wars” of the ’80s, when the New Formalists were bucking the Free Verse establishment and being called Reaganites. I was personally beleaguered, as an emerging neoformalist myself, in a workshop with classmates who reviled work in rhyme and meter. And it was Mike, on paper, who taught me how to write a poem that was tightly formalist but read like free verse to those who expected free verse. I learned from Mike's poems how to be a tightrope walker—and he’s a master, a damn good one. He can slant rhyme and craft meter like a tenor-sax jazz artist, syncopating silence and staccato sequences. I hope you’ll check out Michael Spence’s work. The Spine, published by Purdue University Press almost 30 years ago, is still in print. His new collection,  The Bus Driver’s Threnody, is a tour-de-force collection of poems about driving a city bus in Seattle. Other books include Crush Depth, a father-son book that includes poems on life in the US Navy, and Adam Chooses, about which Mark Jarman wrote, these “poems, often cunning experiments in traditional form, dramatize the way experience leads to knowledge.” Michael Spence is the real deal, friends. You’ll enjoy his poetry, I guarantee. Won’t you comment, please? To comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don’t see that, look for a red line that starts Posted by Vince, then click once on the word comments in that line. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

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 Memoriam Al Robles ... Manong Chito Speaks Again

For the last few days, thoughts of Al Robles keep rising into my consciousness, like bangus — milkfish — surfacing out of dark water. So here's another manong poem, dedicated once more to Manong Al's memory. The speaker of this poem is again Manong Chito, who spoke the poem "Madarika" from the last blog post. I offer this second poem in celebration of Al's pioneering oral-history work to preserve the life stories and talk-stories of our manongs and manangs. Manong Chito Tells Manong Ben About his Dream over Breakfast at the Manilatown Cafe Ah, good morning, 'Pare. Care to join me? Have you eaten yet? Hoy, Johnny! Bring my friend Ben some coffee, OK? Putang ina! The service in here gets worse every day, ha? Ayan, here he comes. You know, Ben, when you walked in the door, this dream I had last night just jump — like that — into my head. I was back home, a kid again, maybe fifteen or sixteen, two years before I come here. I was with this girl — I didn't see her for forty-five years until last night. I ever tell you about her? 'Pare, we was supposed to get married but then I come stateside and that — goddamn — was the end of it. I don't know . . . the letters stopped and I just got too busy with blondies. You know how it was, Ben. Those blondies. Anyway, Maria Clara — yeah, that was her name, no kidding — Maria Clara and I were down by the river. Saturday morning, I think, she wasn't the kind to play hooky, you know? What's that? Chaperone? I remember wondering about that, too, in my dream. Her papa used to send her little brother Pabling all over with us — what a pain in the ass that little kid was. But, no, not this time. Just Maria Clara and me. Now listen, Ben, what I'm gonna tell you now happen only in my dream, OK? It's not a real memory, nothing like that. Maria Clara was teasing me, asking if I could swim, and I say, sure I could. And she say, well prove it, there's the water. And so I take off my shirt and then my pants . . . I hesitate a second, look around, and pull off my underwear too. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I turn to look at her. Our eyes meet — susmariosep, Ben, she got beautiful eyes, real dark, like when you look into a well at night and see stars down there. You know that painting by Juan Luna, the really famous one in Malacañang Palace, La Bulaqueña? Maria Clara was beautiful like that. Anyway, she looks in my eyes, she never looks down, and then she reaches over and holds my titi. I was getting hard by then, anyway. It was like it really happened, 'Pare. I can still feel her hand, her fingers were cold, I feel each one as she closes her hand. Then I turn back to the water and I dive in. That wakes me up. I'm sitting there, sweating and cold. Jesus, I left the window open, you know, so I get up, close the window, walk down the hall to the bathroom, and piss it all away. It all just goes away. I forget all about that dream until I see you walk in here. Jesus Christ, that's the problem with you and me, Ben. That's the problem with all of us Pinoys. We piss it all away. We come here thinking America — yeah, gold grows on the trees like mangoes — and it breaks our hearts, 'Pare. Yeah, that's it — we piss it all away. Here, have another cup, Ben. Hoy, Johnny! Bring us more coffee, OK? Putang ina, the service here is terrible. —  Vince Gotera, from Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry (1995). ________ Vince Gotera performing the poem. <bgsound src="http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/podcasts/Manong-Chito-Tells-Manong-Ben.mp3" loop="1"> Juan Luna, La Bulaqueña (1895, oil on canvas) Malacañang Palace A manong with his trusty guitar (from Al Robles's own photo collection) Manongs at a restaurant (from Al Robles's own photo collection) Al Robles (at right) with a manong In terms of craft, this poem is written in pentameter, as was "Madarika," the poem in the last blog post, spoken as well by Manong Chito. In the previous poem, Manong Chito is speaking in the 1970s to young Filipino Americans about the lives of the manongs and manangs, young people probably of Al's own generation. In this poem, he is speaking to one of his own peers, someone of his own generation. In both poems, I envision (or channel) Manong Chito as a kind of seer, a person who observes deeply and far. I based Manong Chito's voice on manongs I have known: primarily my Uncle Primo Arellano, but also my father's friends as well as my father himself — he was a younger manong who in fact had lived at the I-Hotel for a brief time. (The International Hotel, as described in the first epigraph of "Madarika," was a residential hotel where many manongs lived in San Francisco until the late 1970s.) Because I feel that the actual spoken voice, with the requisite Filipino accent, is important to the poem, I have included above a spoken-word performance of it. Please listen to that recording, along with reading the poem. The reference to the Maria Clara mythos is important. In the Juan Luna painting La Bulaqueña, the woman portrayed is wearing a Maria Clara outfit, called the "national costume" for Philippine women. The original Maria Clara was a character in Jose Rizal's revolutionary novel Noli Me Tangere; Filipinos were inspired by Maria Clara and she became a national symbol for the traditional virtues and nobility of the Filipina woman. That Manong Chito's dream woman and former fiancee is named Maria Clara indicates she is not only an actual person in his life but also a symbolic figure, in the largest national, international, and literary senses. I guess that's all I've got to say about this poem . . . I want Manong Chito to reclaim center stage. And you too, Manong Al, rest in peace. NOTE: The picture above of Al Robles with a manong is an eloquent emblem of Al's work as an advocate for seniors and the poor, seen most strongly in his founding of the Manilatown Senior Center in the 1980s. This photo is the cover image for the website "Manongs of Manilatown: The Inspiration of Al Robles" where you can find out more about the work and legacy of Manong Al Robles.

Dante and Angels and Saints ... Oh, My!

I've posted a couple of poems in the blog so far that refer to Dante's Divine Comedy: "Crosses" and "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside." Well, here's a third Dante-influenced poem. I don't think I had realized consciously until doing the blog what an impact Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (and particularly Gustave Doré's illustrations of The Divine Comedy) had had on me as a child, as an artist/poet-to-be, on my imagination and on my sensibilities.

With your indulgence, I'll set up first by telling you Lolo means "grandfather" and Tita means "aunt," although probably those Filipino words are reasonably clear in the poem's context. Okay, here we go.

Wings I really thought it depicted heaven: a picture of the sky entirely filled with a single gigantic rose shaped by the wings of countless angels in Lolo's book. I was five and didn't know this was Dante's Paradiso. All I know is I saw wings everywhere. One evening, a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. But such visions didn't happen only after I saw the Doré engraving of Dante. Three years before, when I was two, Gerardo, my brother born premature, died after a week in an incubator. Mama swore she and Papa heard wings beating near my crib. I pointed, laughing, "Ahdo, Ahdo," my finger tracing an invisible arc as the sound of flapping slipped out the window. What does my daughter, three months old, really see, when her eyes sweep across the room? Ah ... but then I laugh at myself. I'm a computer programmer. I make pixels fandango onscreen. Surely I never really saw angels. I want to believe my cousin and I simply divined our aunt was dying and were wishing just as hard as we could, "Let her go to heaven." Yet I also recall my college roommate Bill heard rustling outside our window. "A trapped bird," I told him, listened for cooing, some sort of cry for help. We looked. Nothing. The next day, a telegram — at the precise moment we heard wings, my Lolo had died.     —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in the Mississippi Valley Review (1989) in a slightly different version.

Click on the images to see them larger. Gustave Doré William Blake Giovanni Britto (?) Commissioned by Alessandro Vellutello Giovanni di Paolo Illuminated manuscript

It is literally true that the Doré illustration (top) of Beatrice and Dante marveling at the heavenly host forming a "white rose" in the Empyrean was, in my child's mind, really heaven. At the age of five (or whatever my actual age was), it didn't occur to me to wonder how Dante or Doré could have known. Since the image was between covers, in a lordly-looking tome, that was enough proof for little me that heaven really looked like that. This is one of my earliest and most powerful, most charged memories.

Click on the first image at the top above to see the Doré image (dated 1867) in all its glory . . . and I do mean "glory." The other images are different artists' renditions of heaven's "white rose" in the Paradiso. (Cantos 30 and 31 if you want to read Dante's descriptions.)

The second image, below Doré, is by poet and printmaker William Blake (c. 1826): a study or sketch showing the white rose as actually looking like a flower, sepals and all, with each petal reserved for a given person or character; Blake died before he could finish the project, so there is no finished art of this subject.

The third image is attributed to the engraver Giovanni Britto, who worked for Francesco Marcolini, the publisher of Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 commentary on the Divine Comedy; Britto — or whoever created this engraving (click on it to see better detail) — renders the rose with a whole multitude of petals that look like thrones with saints and angels and whomever in each one.

The fourth is an illuminated manuscript by Giovanni di Paolo, a Sienese painter (1400s); his rose is smaller in scope than those of the others, but the figures are strikingly rendered. As a child, I only knew the Doré, and it's illuminating (sorry, bad pun) to see these other takes on the white rose image.

The three vignettes involving wings come right out of Gotera family stories, though I've fiddled with them a bit. The middle one, concerning my brother Gerardo, is narrated here just as people in the family tell it. Although I was small enough to sleep in a crib, I evidently knew about Gerardo and pronounced his name as "Ahdo." Narratives of supernatural visits and so on are very common in Philippine contexts; all families have stories like these, passed on from one generation to the next.

In keeping with this kind of family tradition, and the continuation of such traditions, I have tried to keep the language in the poem simple and down-to-earth. Getting the poem ready to post in the blog, in fact, I changed a word in the first stanza. The phrase "countless angels" was originally "innumerable angels," but I thought innumerable now was not in keeping with family scenes of young and old recounting these stories.

As I've posted the 30 or so poems that are on the blog at this moment, I hadn't revised any until now. I wanted the older poems to reflect my style of those other moments, but with "Wings" I felt strongly that the poem really needed revision. And that doing this would give me the opportunity to talk in the blog about revision as a concern of craft.

With that end in mind, here are three stanzas from "Crosses": those on the left, in red, come from the poem as it was published in the Mississippi Valley Review twenty years ago, while those on the right, in blue, are from the version posted above, as revised over the last couple of days.

Old Version (1989) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in my grandfather's house. The gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining angel told us, "Someone important will pass here this evening." While we were sweeping, my Aunt Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .] New Version (2009) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .]

As you compare the two versions, see how more jagged the older version looks: long lines followed by conspicuously shorter ones then vice versa. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with such variation. But somehow it just didn't seem as polished to me now.

I think this may come from my practice since maybe 1990 of starting a poem by writing in iambic pentameter while at the same time trying to sense the form that the poem seems to want for itself. The result of this practice evidently is that I began to appreciate lines that are more similar to each other in length. Whereas twenty years ago, apparently, I liked lines to be more leggy, more varied. Perhaps something here of the garden vs. the wilderness?

It may also be that I have gotten better at sensing the possible junctures, the potential breaks, in lines . . . that I am more open to different sorts of line breaks, and thus more able to regularize line length. For example, in the third line above, "the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony," I didn't (or couldn't?) hear the potential break after the word "me" that might set up an intriguing nuance while at the same time keeping line lengths similar.

The more likely possibility, though, is that I was just not as good at lineation in 1989 as I am today. So I tended back then to go for more flash ... in other words, enjambment. For instance, in the second line above, I break like this: "to brush / the ceiling." Hmm. What possible advantage was there in calling attention to the word "brush"? Doesn't that line break distract? Make the reader wonder why the line ended there? Is it over-dramatic? Even sentimental? It's certainly sensationalistic.

In his excellent book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that good fiction creates "a vivid and continuous dream" in the mind of the reader, and that the good fiction writer will do whatever it takes not to interrupt that dream. What I'm suggesting in the previous paragraph is that lineating at "brush" breaks up the reader's dream's continuity. Granted there can be good times and reasons to do that, to unbalance and destabilize the reader — Garnder notwithstanding — but it's not necessary in the progress of the narrative at this point in the poem.

I think I was probably similarly preoccupied with enjambment in other line breaks in the earlier version — "the gecko / on the wall" (lines 5-6) or "'Sweep / the steps'" (7-8) or "'will pass / here'" (9-10) — perhaps unnecessarily preoccupied with enjambment, to the disservice of the poem overall. And of the reader. Who doesn't need to have to wonder why "gecko" is out at the end of that long line, gone out on a limb, so to speak.

In the more recent version at the right, I smoothed out the earlier over-the-top enjambments. I set up new, more subtle enjambments that are to my older ear more serviceable. More appropriately dramatic . . . that is, less so. The break at line three of "to me / and my cousin Tony" sets up the "me" as seeing himself in a more elevated position, metaphorically, vis-à-vis the angel; that makes a lot more sense to me narratively (especially with regard to characterization) than the previous emphasis on the action of wings brushing a ceiling. Or, at the end of line eight, the stanza enjambment that highlights "Someone" as opposed to the earlier privileging of "pass[ing]." In other words, in both cases, more focus on character than action.

I've also slightly changed some wording; I think these edits are similarly character-related. For example, I've replaced "grandfather" with "Lolo" and "Aunt" with "Tita"; such usage is more appropriate to these child characters, more personal, as well as more probable in the imagined scene of family storytelling, the imagined language that would be used as these stories are told to nieces and nephews, to grandchildren.

I replaced "While we were sweeping" (line 10) with "As we busied ourselves with brooms" not only to avoid repeating the word "sweep" but also to make a clearer picture (and squeeze in another alliteration, this time on /b/). This alteration also sets up a slant rhyme between "brooms" and "from"; while the poem is essentially unrhymed, there are occasional rhymes created by the new lineation: "feathers" and "shoulders" (lines 1-2) or the distant rhyme of "once" with "Someone" (lines 6 and 8).

There are other small changes, but I think I'll leave off there. Wings are everywhere, people. Angels surround us — if not heavenly, then earthly ones. So many small (and large) kindnesses from all our sisters and brothers.

Note: the Doré illustration above comes from Wikimedia Commons. The Blake image comes from the University of Texas's Danteworlds website. The third image, commissioned by Vellutello, comes from the University of Virginia's The World of Dante website. The di Paolo image comes from a different page on that same website. These last two sources in particular provide a wealth of information and visual imagery connected to Dante and The Divine Comedy.

Love Poem for a New Year

And now, as another year approaches, I offer a sonnet I wrote for my lovely wife Mary Ann Blue Gotera.

First Mango Remember that June before our wedding we spent in San Francisco? That first morning you woke to my brother in silver sequins singing like Diana Ross? What must have gone through your mind? What kind of people were you marrying into? My father who laughed a lot but was schizophrenic. My stepmom who'd tried, they say, to stab him in the back with scissors. Love may be blind, but not stone blind. Then, one Sunday we bought at the corner market one perfectly ripened red-gold mango. How carefully I slit the skin with my penknife . . . rivers of yellow juice, the furry seed . . . then sliced the golden half-moons into quadrangles, open petals. Your first bite of our sweet life. for Mary Ann — Vince Gotera, from Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1995).

Some of the family history behind this poem has been covered already in the blog. My half-brother Pepito's story: the whole Diana Ross and sequins thing really happened. My father's mental illness is touched on here and there in the blog, particularly in the write-up on the poem "Newly Released, Papa Tells What It's Like Inside." The story that Carolina, Papa's first wife, had tried to kill him was, it turned out, a fabrication he made up for his second wife, Candida . . . Mama. To justify in her eyes why he had left Carolina. I found that out when Papa remarried Carolina some years after Mama died. I said, "Why are you remarrying her? She tried to kill you!" And he said, "I made that up for your mom." When the events in this poem took place, during the summer of 1984, Papa and Carolina were married again.

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, rhymed abbaabba cdecde. Of course, in my customary manner, I mix half rhyme and full rhyme. For example, the a rhyme revolves around the consonant combination /n/+/t/ or the related /n/+/d/: spent, mind, into, blind. My favorite rhyme pair in the poem is mango / quadrangles, which illustrates what a polyglot language English is. The word "mango" comes from Malayam through Portuguese, and "quadrangles" from Latin through French. So on a superficial level, both words could be considered Latinate because they both come into English from a Romance language, but at a deeper level of analysis, they are as distantly unrelated as two etymologies can be.

With regard to meter, these lines are roughly pentameter with many varieties of poetic feet mixed in. Without scanning (we don't always have to scan) we can find "effective" spondees, i.e., pairs of syllables that behave like spondees (stress stress) even though scansion might reveal them to be actually stresses belonging to different feet. Well, maybe a little scanning will be helpful; look at the second half of line 2, after the caesura/question mark:

. . . that FIRST | MORN- ing | you WOKE

The phrase "first morn-" effectively forms a spondee even if it's not structurally so. I suppose there is also an effective pyrrhic foot (unstress unstress) in the adjacent syllables "-ing you" to match and offset the preceding effective spondee.

There are also "performative" spondees: maybe someone reading the poem out loud might choose to make a pair of syllables into a spondee. For example, "half-moons" is naturally a trochee but could be spoken as a spondee; the phrase "first bite" in everyday speech is probably an iamb but could be performed as a spondee for dramatic or rhetorical effect. And with the phrase "RED-GOLD MAN- go" we have potentially a performative molossus (stress stress stress), though I gotta tell ya: the molossus is a pretty rare creature in English poetics. Besides, I can't think of the molossus with a straight face; I start flashing to some clumsy dinosaur lumbering through a swamp with mangrove trees. Hmm, "mangrove" . . . "mango"? No, don't go there.

To end, I just want to point out there is a real spondee here of which I am proud: the closing phrase "sweet life." This sonnet is, after all, a love poem, a tribute to my wife Mary Ann and to our beautiful life together. Amen. (Say it like a spondee.) AMEN.

Shh, Shh, Shh

Went to a reading last night: a book-launch event for J. D. Schraffenberger's new (and first) book Saint Joe's Passion (Etruscan Press, 2008). The reading was part of the University of Northern Iowa's "Writers Talk" Reading Series . . . and a welcome to Jeremy, who is a new faculty member at UNI.

Jeremy made a sweet gesture at the reading: along with his own poems, he read a poem by James Hearst as well as one by me. That poem was "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside," from my third poetry collection, Fighting Kite (2007). (By reading poems besides his own, Jeremy was also furthering the cause of making poetry relevant to our everyday lives, a là Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" — a now-iconic essay from 1991.)

Jeremy's reading was simply marvelous, a hint at the scintillating career that lies ahead of my new young colleague. Congratulations on the new book, Jeremy. And thanks again for performing my poem. For those in the audience who might like to see that poem after hearing it last night:

Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside Vin, that psych ward is Dante's Inferno — circles within circles, you climb and climb. The sons of bitches in white, they're monsters and devils. You see, son, you're paying for your sins while you're there. Each circle a privilege you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion, the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed's made up with wet sheets and you become Satan on ice — the teeth chattering inside your head, stones rattling round and round in a can. Then once a week, they take you down for shock, the mouse killed again with an elephant gun. First time was '46: the bed just like an electric chair — electrodes, colored wires — That's all I can remember. Except for that shock, vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes. And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies. Closest to outside is the circle called grounds privileges, they let you walk all the way out to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers, the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas, saying you're different from real people. But how do you get there? Between is a tortured drama: wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass — mixing with real lunatics, the gamut running from rapists to certified pigstickers, manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it's always the walk I'll remember. The Thorazine shuffle. We're all diviners doomed to Dante's Eighth Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal. We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish it would end . . . we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle in line . . . our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh. — Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Kenyon Review (1991). Also published in the collection Fighting Kite (2007).

My father was a schizophrenic. This doesn't mean he had multiple personalities — the layperson's usual (mis)understanding of schizophrenia. It meant, among other things, that my father sometimes heard voices, saw visions. In the Philippines, this meant Martin Avila Gotera was considered a visionary man. In the US, it just meant he was crazy.

During my childhood, my father was often in and out of psych wards. In "Newly Released . . ." I imagine Papa telling me what life is like inside the psych ward at the VA hospital. Some of the material in the poem comes from things my father did tell me, for example, about his being given shock therapy at Letterman Army Hospital, though the details about that in the poem are wholly imagined. The wet-sheet treatment is also something Papa endured.

I suppose some readers of the poem may think of the Dante connection as arising out of my literary background. Well, first, my father was himself a fiction writer who studied literature avidly and so quite likely could connect with Dante. In fact, he was quite an aficionado of The Divine Comedy. Second, my grandfather, Papa's father, Tatay, had in his sala (the formal living room), a copy of The Divine Comedy, an edition with the Doré engravings; as a small child, I used to sneak into the sala (I think now that maybe that room was off limits to the grandkids, because I remember sneaking) and pore over that huge volume. Not for the text so much — I didn't really read Dante until I was in college — but for those illustrations. I remember vividly the one that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future. There was also another showing sinners rending their chests open . . . for what infraction I have no clue.

This poem is also the result of a one-sided competition with my former teacher David Wojahn at Indiana University, where I earned my MFA in poetry. "One-sided" because I don't think David knows about "our" competition. I remember one day in an MFA workshop, 20+ years ago, David had us read and discuss Craig Raine's poem "In the Kalahari Desert" which ends with this striking line: "Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh . . ." At a poetry reading some months later, David read a poem that also featured the word "Shhh" in the last line, and he may have even mentioned his own competition-of-sorts with Raine. Not to be outdone, I eventually produced my own poem with "Shhh" as an ending, however petty and unpoetic that might sound.

In terms of craft, the poem is written in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, etc. Of course, as I suggested was my frequent mode in the previous post, I use slant rhyme, very slant rhyme. For example, "sons" / "sins" / "seclusion" or "kiss-ass" / "——stickers" / "Vin, it's." Quite distant rhyme in some places, then . . . in the case of those last three words given in that example, the two similar vowels, the trochee stress pattern, and the ending /s/. With regard to meter, perhaps predictably, a "roughed-up" pentameter (again, see the last post).

When I was in the Army, my MOS ("military occupational specialty" or job) was Military Pay Clerk. For a time, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center, where I helped mentally ill patients (all military service members) with their pay problems. This was where I learned about the system of privileges (that we see also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the poem, I have my father use as a metaphor for that system the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno. (Ironically, my father was also a mental patient at Letterman Army Hospital three decades before I worked there.) It was also at this job that I witnessed what everyone called "the Thorazine shuffle," the way the drug Thorazine made patients essentially catatonic.

As far as larger thematics are concerned . . . that's your call. I didn't have any axe to grind, I don't think, when I wrote the poem. At some level, I guess, I hope you are getting some idea about how the mentally ill have been treated, historically, by American medicine. Though I'm not on a crusade or whatever. I do wish my father had had available, during his lifetime, medicines like Prozac and other contemporary anti-depressants. They would have made his life easier. Nevertheless, he held down a job; he toughed it out, as men in his generation were supposed to do; and he held on to his dignity. What more could one ask for?

Craft and Technique (1.0)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted my poem "Guard Duty" here, but the politics-oriented context of that post didn't really allow for discussion of poetics. Now and again, I get inquiries from students who are writing a paper on some poem of mine, and generally their papers end up covering meaning more than craft. In the interest of informing such seekers about my technique, I'd like now to unpack "Guard Duty" some. Here's the poem again.

Guard Duty A young soldier squints into thick black night hoping no hostile sapper is cutting through barbed wire, a bayonet and grenades tied to his waist . . . invisible. This mute scenario lies at the heart of three generations' bedtime stories: my Lolo and my Papa in the US Army, Philippine Scouts, death march in Bataan, my brother Pepito in the 'Nam, nightmares of Agent Orange. That young soldier could have been any one of them . . . or me, on guard mount at Fort Ord during Vietnam. Almost dreaming machine gun recoil in our hands. Screaming, an oncoming horde. Never again . . . young women and men should dream of breezes in trees, soft rain, sunshine. Never again. — Vince Gotera, from Poets Against the War (2003). Also appeared in my 2003 collection Ghost Wars.

To begin, I should say I subscribe to Seamus Heaney's distinction between craft and technique; craft has to do with building-block approaches, like alliteration or rhyme; technique is the cooperation of craft and personality, one's individual, idiosyncratic use of craft elements. Craft is mechanics; technique is stylistic. Below, I'll be talking about craft; my technique is ultimately for you to decide (it's invisible to me, of course).

SOUND and MUSIC. I am a huge fan of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his over-the-top sound play. Of course, today you can't use sonic devices like Hopkins did . . . contemporary ears find such sound play fascinating but really just too much. Nonetheless, you can emulate Hopkins to a limited degree. For example, alliteration in stanza one: /th/ in "thick" and "through," "/b/ in "black," "barbed," and "bayonet"; assonance: the short /i/ in "squints," "into," "thick," "hoping," "cutting," "his" . . . and the three instances in the single word "invisible"; consonance: the beginning /s/ and ending /r/ in "soldier," "sapper," and scenario." And all this just in the first stanza.

One of my favorite sonic devices is rhyme. As a faithful student of Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen, I tend more towards slant rhyme than full rhyme, thus I rhyme "been" with "gun," "dream" with "again." A là Owen, I even have an instance in this poem of consonant rhyme — what critics call "pararhyme" and Owen called "jump-rhyme" (probably the most famous examples are in his poem "Strange Meeting," where in the first four lines he rhymes "escaped" and "scooped," "groaned" and "groined"). Here in this poem, I rhyme "bedtime" with "Bataan" . . . I'm particularly happy that I was able to involve three consonants: /b/, /t/, and /n/ or /m/, in that order.

An important way to think about rhyme, other than in terms of sound, is to look at what words are rhymed. As a poet, one can hint quite a bit about theme through judicious use of rhyme pairs. For example, I'm quite proud of the pairing of "US" and "nightmares," as a bit of social commentary. Also, not using periods in the abbreviation — like "U.S." — allows the additional meaning of "us" . . . i.e., the plural first person pronoun, as in "you and I," thus extending the social commentary even more.

RHYTHM and METER. In a couple of earlier . . . wait, before we get deep into this topic, let me warn you that it might get a little technical. Don't worry. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the Wikipedia articles on poetic meter and prosodic feet. Okay, let's get to it.

In a couple of earlier posts, I referred to favoring "roughed-up" meter. In this poem, I use pentameter that is — you guessed it — "roughed up." What I mean by this is frequent substitution of feet; if my primary meter is iambic, I pepper the poem with trochees, anapests, dactyls, even some spondees and pyrrhics.

In fact, I'm not even sure if my primary meter in the poem is iambic. Look at a scansion of the first line:

×a

/young

|

/sol-

×dier

|

/squints

×in-

|

×to

/thick

|

×black

/night

So . . . iamb trochee trochee iamb iamb. I suppose because the first foot is iambic and three out of five feet here are iambic, you could say we've got iambic pentameter. Well, maybe. I suppose that's as good an argument as any. But I gotta tell ya, I'm not sure myself, really. When I count feet while composing, I pay attention mainly — no, only — to how many stresses are in the line; I let the unstressed syllables sort themselves out. So when I wrote this poem, I bet I never once thought iambic or trochaic or whatever. I did know I wanted pentameter, but that's as much as I thought ahead, probably.

Let's look at another scansion, this time of line 3:

×barbed

/wire

||

×a

/bay-

|

×o-

/net

|

×and

×gre-

|

/nades

/tied

This is probably as close to true iambic pentameter as you'll find in this poem . . . and it isn't exactly that, either. We've got iamb iamb iamb pyrrhic spondee. And those last two feet are what's called a "double iamb," which count (say the experts) as two iambs . . . I like to think of this construct as a "super iamb" because there are two unstressed syllables followed by two stressed syllables, so you've got a fully unstressed foot heightened then by a fully stressed foot, to get the rising rhythm required by the iamb. In any case, although this line may seem to be straight-out iambic pentameter, it's still not your run-of-the-mill example, particularly because of the caesura (or break in the line, marked here by a comma) immediately after the first foot. And that first foot may not really be an iamb, it turns out; it could be scanned as a spondee: BARBED WIRE || a BAY- | o- NET . . . and so on.

And here's line 7, another interesting example. First off, note the two caesuras (caesurae?):

/ar-

×my

||

/phil-

×ip-

|

×pine-

/scouts

||

/death

×march

×in

|

×ba-

×ta-

/an

A noteworthy trick I use here is bringing together the unstressed syllables of two different feet, as in the second and third feet here. Perhaps more striking in tandem are the fourth and fifth feet, where we get four unstressed syllables together. A cool side effect is that you also get, in effect, a spondee where the third and fourth feet meet: SCOUTS, DEATH. It's very easy to do; you simply take two iambs and flip the second iamb into a trochee, or in the case of two dactyls, the second dactyl into an anapest. Though I'll admit that I don't do it that way, thinking about the feet per se; I simply try to get interesting texture into the rhythm by finding natural ways to bring a number of unstressed syllables together. Or, similarly, a number of stressed syllables next to each other.

And finally the ending line of the poem, which features three caesuras:

×of

/bree-

|

×es

×in

/trees

||

×soft

/rain

||

/sun

×shine

||

/nev-

×er

|

×a-

/ gain

Same device here as in line 7, bringing unstressed syllables together, as in NEV- er | a- GAIN. And then there is also the spondee effect with the stressed syllables RAIN, SUN. In fact, the foot "soft rain" could be read as a spondee as well, which would bring four stressed syllables together: TREES, || SOFT RAIN, || SUN- shine. One could get a similar effect in line 1 with THICK, | BLACK NIGHT if "black night" were scanned as a spondee. Oh, and the last line, by the way, is hexameter . . . an alexandrine, used here to evoke "the sense of an ending."

Anyway, that's how I "rough up" the meter, by (1) frequent substitution of feet, in order to really mix up rising and falling stress patterns, and (2) bringing together stretches of unstressed syllables or, similarly, stretches of stressed syllables. All meant to destabilize the singsong flavor of regular meter.

LINEATION. Just as I lean towards slant rhyme, I tend to favor enjambed lines over end-stopped ones. In this poem, there are only three end-stops: lines 3, 12, and 14. That means that there are 11 enjambed lines. This makes a hurried poem, always teetering forward at the line break . . . consequently there is a lot of tension in the poem, unresolved energy. And I trust this goes along with the thematic tension of constant fear in war . . . being continually on guard.

FORM. Of course, this is a sonnet, a Shakespearean one. Syntactically, though, the quatrains don't match the sentence structure, unlike Shakespeare's frequent matching of individual sentences to quatrains. The first chunk of language, from "A young soldier" to "invisible" doesn't reach the end of the first quatrain. The second chunk, from "This mute scenario" (line 4) to "of Agent Orange" (line 9) is too much for the second quatrain, leaking out of both ends. The third chunk, comprised of three sentences, from "That young soldier" to "oncoming horde," is too small again but neatly finishes out the third quatrain. Thus leaving the final couplet to deliver quite conventionally and deliberately, with the customary volta, or turn, at the beginning of line 13. So the effect I wanted is of language and feeling that breaks through the sonnet form, or perhaps more accurately, out of it, but is then resolved by the closing couplet, the double occurrence of "never again," highlighting effectively (I hope) the overall antiwar theme of the poem.

CODA. Well, that's it. That's all I know about this poem. Of course, there's more, much more, that I can't see. I hope you will share with me your insights about the poem and its poetics by writing a comment in response. Just click on the word "comments" immediately below this post. Then we can have a dialogue (or a multilogue) about poems and the writing of them.

One parting shot. While I was writing this poem, I knew none of what I'm sharing with you above (or, at least, precious little of it). I simply wrote the thing, trusting to my own inner "poetry machine" to produce the literary flair that might give this poem the apt tone and feeling to mark it as poetic language. I can't quite remember how much revision this poem went through . . . it feels to me now so much of a piece, so unified. But it seems to me that it didn't go through much revision; I think it pretty much wrote itself. Partly because of the occasion of writing it for the "Poets Against (the) War" movement, partly because it speaks so clearly to (and for) my family history, my sense of self, the overall feeling of being a Gotera, of being my father's son.