Fighting Kite

My third poetry collection, titled Fighting Kite, is a poetic biography of my father, Martin Avila Gotera. I had been writing poems about him for over 20 years by that point. This project was interesting to Palmer Hall, publisher and editor-in-chief at Pecan Grove Press, which published my first book Dragonfly, probably because of the substantial portions having to do with my father's military experiences, since Palmer was himself a vet. Palmer and I were connected in at least a couple of ways online: through a creative writing listserv called CREWRT-L and a Vietnam-war studies listserv, VWAR-L. Fighting Kite was published in 2007, with a cover photograph by Mary Ann Blue Gotera, my wife at that time. The cover design was done by Sally Ann Kueker, a former student and an editorial assistant working on layout at the North American Review, where I was editor then. Sally also did the interior design and the typesetting of the book. The cover photo shows me flying a dragon kite with my son Gabe in the meadow behind our house. You can see a larger view of the cover photo by clicking on the front cover image below. Here is the text on the back cover: a book description and two blurbs by renowned poets Nick Carbó and Annie Finch. Fighting Kite narrates, in verse, the life of Martin Avila Gotera — son, trickster, soldier, schizophrenic, visionary, lawyer, workingman, father — a life that glimmers like a node, a shimmery knot, a glowing nexus, of the shared histories of the Philippines and the United States. Fighting Kite also unveils how parents' lives shape, shade, and sharpen their children's days and nights: a son remembering a father, brilliant and troubled, tormented and wise. "Fighting Kite is a tour-de-force in American poetry. The book is a psychological landscape of risk and loss in the complicated relationship between a father who survived the Bataan Death March in WWII and a son coming to terms with this historical legacy. These poems terrify and comfort and will resonate for a long time." — Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man       "The skillfully interwoven lines in Vince Gotera’s Fighting Kite — tightly gripping couplets, wryly sprawling sestinas, eerie terza rima — stay ever alert to the echoes and shadows of language. Subtle in music and vivid in imagery, these poems spin honest tales that spell out hard and important truths of the pain and pride between father and son." — Annie Finch, author of Calendars           Funny story about the cover photograph: I had given Gabe the kite reel while I was holding up the dragon kite because an action shot for the cover would have been perfect. There we were, and I was saying, "Run! Run!" and Gabe just stood there as you can see in the photo. Reminded me a little of my father teaching me and my little 5-year-old son Marty how to fly a kite 45+ years ago. Not much luck there either, though my dad was an expert kite flyer from childhood. Both of these events were quite a long while ago; Marty is now 52 and Gabe is 26. Time flies! But not kites, evidently. シ Fighting Kite is now out of print, but it is still occasionally available from rare and vintage book dealers. In any case, since Fighting Kite has become rather difficult to find, I am pleased to be able to present it here in the blog in serial form. I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned to this poetry channel for more pages from the book as they come up! Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ   FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

The Stafford Challenge, Day 33

Today, I offer an elegy for my old friend, the poet Nick Carbó, who passed away in October 2024. Nick was a Filipino American poet who was proficient in English, Spanish, and Filipino. I included all three languages in my poem; I also chose the ovillejo form because it is Spanish. The poem pays tribute to Nick's quirky sense of humor. Here's an explanation of the ovillejo form in the blog Write Better Poetry by Robert Lee Brewer. Basically, it's 3 couplets and a quatrain, rhymed aa bb cc dccd, with the last line combining lines 2, 4, and 6 (the short lines earlier). There's a challenging syllable count: 8/3/8/3/8/3/888X — X being the sum of the repeated 3 lines) — also, lines 2, 4, and 6 can have 4 syllables instead of 3. Whew! Toast to Nick Carbó: An Ovillejo Ang tunay na lalaki . . . yo, Nick Carbó! Nos haces felices. ¡Salud! You rock, dude. In our hearts, your best endeavors live forever. Your sharp poems and prose will never die, Secret Asian Man. You’re home. Excuse this loko-loko poem. Nick Carbó, you rock! Dude, live forever! • “Ang tunay na lalaki” . . . The real man (Filipino) . . . also the main     character of Nick Carbo's poetry book Secret Asian Man (2000). • “Nos haces felices. ¡Salud!” . . . You make us happy. Cheers! (Spanish) • ”loko-loko” . . . silly (Filipino), cf. “loco” . . . nutty, crazy (Spanish) —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] The photo above is from Nick Carbó's author page on facebook. I'm grateful to RJ Clarken for writing an ovillejo in The Stafford Challenge facebook group a few days ago, my introduction to this intricate poetic form. Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

America, Lady Liberty, the Stars

Well, how about that? Two days in a row here at the old blogista keys! Keep on keepin' on, as we used to say back in the day. (I think I'm probably showing my age here!) Yesterday, I gave you a link to my daughter Amanda's poem "Mitosis" on Rattle poetry magazine's online blog from last October. That particular poem was originally published in Rattle 24, the Winter 2005 issue that featured a tribute to Filipino Poets. Although Amanda has been published several times before, including a nation-wide anthology she edited, this was the first time I believe she was published expressly as a Filipino (American) writer. At right is the cover of that Rattle issue, still available for purchase. (Many thanks to Rattle for publishing that tribute to Filipino poets.) I was fortunate also to have a poem in that issue. Here is the beginning stanza of that poem: Chewing Gum Upskirt On the Avenue of the Americas, at noon two weeks ago Tuesday, a nun paced the grimy concrete, robed in black, a starched, white veil framing her stunning face, one-in-a-million supermodel cheekbones. Read more . . . Would you mind clicking on "Read more" directly above and reading the poem on the Rattle website? This opening stanza doesn't really foreshadow the several directions this poem takes: Catholic school in San Francisco, my son under our deck in Iowa, my father in grade school in the Philippines, and throughout the poem the muses women teachers can be to boys. As Nick Carbó wrote in a comment responding to this poem in the Rattle blog: "Female teachers do face a different set of challenges than males, I think ... although they seem to have an advantage in activating their students' imaginations." In the poem, such "activation" leads to political ... whoa, you'll discover that when you read the poem, how chewing gum can represent the lofty themes that title this blog post. Something else Nick said in his comment really moved me: "My late grandfather could have been the soldier packing the spearmint — an unwitting accomplice. I'm sure he'd have shared it anyway though. I'm happy to have thought of him. Thanks, Vince. From the stories my grandpa told, I felt he left a chunk of his heart in the Philippines." One just never knows how what we write, what we say, will touch someone in unexpected ways. Keep on keepin' on, people.

Scream On, Monkey, Scream On!

Okay, more poetry about my dad and his military service during and immediately after WWII. The following poem was written expressly for an anthology titled Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang, et al.

There's a very interesting story behind this anthology. In April 1998, Milwaukee Magazine published a restaurant review that called the restaurant owner's young child a "rambunctious little monkey." This opens raw wounds in Filipino American historical memory because of American naming early in the 20th century: the "affirmative" racist naming for Filipinos was little brown brother and the negative one was monkey. Both names obviously galling and destructive.

Evelina Galang, who eventually edited Screaming Monkeys, brought the restaurant review to the attention of the members of the FLIPS listserv (an e-group that Nick Carbó and I founded for writers of Filipino ancestry and heritage). It's a long story that probably doesn't need to be told here — suffice it to say that lots of online pressure was brought to bear, etc. (Read Screaming Monkeys to get all the details.)

In any case, the literary result of this incident was this trailblazing anthology. The blurb on Amazon.com explains:

When a restaurant review referred to a Filipino child as a "rambunctious little monkey," Filipino Americans were outraged. Sparked by this racist incident, Screaming Monkeys sets fire to Asian American stereotypes as it illuminates the diverse and often neglected history and culture within the Asian American diaspora. Poems, essays, paintings, and stories break down and challenge "found" articles, photographs, and headlines to create this powerful anthology with all the immediacy of social protest. By closely critiquing a wealth of material, including the judge's statement of apology in the Wen Ho Lee case, the media treatment of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, and the image of Asian Americans in major U.S. marketing campaigns, Screaming Monkeys will inspire all its readers.

The poem itself relates a family story. When my father was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco immediately after the war, a soldier on the street refused to salute my father (who had been recently promoted into the officer ranks of the US Army). It was quite clear to Papa that the refusal was racist — the soldier, a white man, was not about to salute an officer who wasn't white. So my father took off his uniform jacket and draped it on a nearby hedge, then ordered the soldier to salute the jacket, affixed with lieutenant bars, again and again. Which the soldier did. My father always told this story as a parable about "thinking out of the box," as we say these days.

Honor, 1946 In birdsong my father strolled the Presidio of San Francisco, a Filipino in the U.S. Army, sharp in parade dress, lieutenant's bars riding his shoulders like sun cresting clouds. A corporal in dingy fatigues walked past my father, snickered, kept his right hand by his hip. "Hold it right there, soldier!" my father barked. "Where's that goddamn salute?" The corporal smirked, looked him in the eye and said nothing, but my father could read it in his face — I'll be damned before I salute a little brown monkey who ought to be climbing a fucking tree. My father growled an order. The soldier jerked to attention. My father slipped off his jacket, draped it on a hedge. The rainbow of ribbons reminded him not of crossfire and the soldier he saved on patrol, not of the forced retreat to Corregidor, not of the weeks evading Japanese capture, not even of the Bataan death march, nor of the concentration camp. Instead he recalled the American jeep that tried to run him down in a rainstorm. Get out of the road, monkey! My father said, "You might not want to salute me, young man, but you will salute this jacket, these bars. Do it!" Birds sang. "Again." Sun shone. "Again." The corporal's arm swept the air, a wiper blade trying to swipe brown mud from a windshield. — Vince Gotera, from Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, (2003).

In terms of poetics, this poem (like "Looking for Double Victory," which appeared in yesterday's blog) employs pentameter that has been intentionally "roughed up" to avoid the singsonginess that led Ezra Pound to rail against traditional meter by sneeringly calling it "too rum-tum at a punch."

I've also used alternating couplets and tercets (all unrhymed). I have forgotten why I shaped the poem this way, but the pattern does allow me to produce some useful verse paragraphs, for example, stanzas 5, 9, 10, and 11. At the same time, I also get some nice stanza enjambments: "a Filipino in the US / Army," for example, in lines 2-3, highlighting the problems Filipinos encountered during that time, both in the US Army and in US society overall. I suppose a literary reader could suggest that there seems to be an opposition set up between the couplets and the tercets, which may represent Filipino Americans and the mainstream culture, respectively. But you know, making such an observation is the reader's and critic's job, not mine. I just write 'em — you read 'em and tell me (and whomever) what's going on in the poem(s).

Whatever, whatever. I am simply glad and honored to have had the opportunity to help with such an important project as the Screaming Monkeys anthology, an important step in deconstructing and, one hopes, deleting destructive stereotyping, not simply against Filipino Americans in particular and Asian Americans in general, but all stereotypes that oppress. Words can hurt and destroy, as we know, but more important, they can save and uplift. And that should be one of the most crucial aims of writing today.

Can War Be Just?

Okay, back to poetry. And back to my "Filipinos at War" theme from a couple of days ago.

In early 2003, while I was putting together my poetry collection Ghost Wars, originally intended as an anti-war protest specifically against the Iraq war that was about to launched, I thought long and hard about the question of whether or not war can ever be just . . . you know, St. Augustine and all that.

As an answer to that question, I wrote the following poem about the killing of Ferdinand Magellan by Lapu-Lapu, first hero of the Philippines, who struck the first blow against colonialism. Granted, the poem is quite romanticized (like pretty much all the lore about Lapu-Lapu), but it does make, I think, a credible case for the justness of war through dramatic means.

Just War


Pale blonde sand glaring white into his eyes,
Lapu-Lapu stood on the beach with his tribesmen.

His wooden shield — a vertical rectangle rounded
at top and bottom, scalloped inward on the sides —

rested on a sinewy left arm, his lean legs slightly
spread, brown muscled chest rising, falling, softly.

Clenched in his right hand, his sharp kampilan,
a hefty metal sword with ornately carved hilt.

Tramping up the sand from rowboats beached
on a reef, los conquistadores labored in helmets

and breastplates, cutlasses drawn. In the lead,
Ferdinand Magellan, a dandy’s pointed beard,

sweat stinging his eyes in harsh tropical sun.
With a crash of wood and metal, like trees

falling under the typhoon’s wind and thunder,
the two met, swords arcing like lightning bolts.

Thrusts, parries . . . then Ferdinand’s eyes
opened wide a moment as Lapu-Lapu’s blade

swooped over his, an eagle diving from the sun.
The Spaniards turned, fled as Lapu-Lapu thrust

the severed head into the blue dome of sky.
Magellan’s vaunted circumnavigation: a lie.

Lapu-Lapu, brave brown defender, circumcised
that vainglorious invader’s ultimate round trip.

— Vince Gotera, first appeared in Pinoy Poetics (2004).

Similarly romanticized is this statue commemorating Lapu-Lapu, located near the actual site where he and Magellan crossed swords . . . in the Battle of Mactan on the island of Cebu. Note particularly the oversized sword the sculpted Lapu-Lapu is holding, his kampilan . . . quite the phallic symbol there.

This poem happened when I was copyediting Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's fiction anthology Growing Up Filipino. The title pages for the sections of that book featured photographs accompanied by excerpts from poems. One of these photos was a chiaroscuro image of this Lapu-Lapu statue.

That silhouette of a Filipino warrior, sword and shield limned starkly against sky, was so incredibly moving for me that I went straight to the computer and wrote "Just War" in one sitting. The question I was posing with regard to the oncoming American war in Iraq was this: Who would be Magellan, and who would be Lapu-Lapu? I trust it would be clear to anyone, of whatever political stripe, that we would definitely not be Lapu-Lapu. To bring it closer to home, we would be the Redcoats this time.

On a side note, take another look at the statue Lapu-Lapu's sword. (Click on the picture to see a larger version.) The sword is shaped like a mix between a Bowie knife and a 1900s military bolo rather than a kampilan: a curved blade with a one-handed hilt (like a saber) vs. a straight blade with a two-handed hilt (like a single-edged broadsword). If you compare earlier plans for the statue with the finished product, you'll see that a different sword was originally planned, a straight-bladed one.

To the right is a painting of Lapu-Lapu's fight with Magellan (from a website about "Pre-Spanish Tacloban"). Note Lapu-Lapu's weapon in the painting: a two-handed sword with a straight blade and two points. In other words, the stock kampilan.

It may be that the statue's designers were trying to be true to Spanish written accounts of the Battle of Mactan, in which Lapu-Lapu's sword is described as a "cutlass" and a "scimitar." It may also be that the kampilan of 500 years ago was shaped differently from the kampilan of more recent times.

What I do hope is that, whatever reasons there may have been for altering Lapu-Lapu's sword, the change did not arise from some misguided motive to make the weapon appear more familiar to Western eyes. More like a harem guard's exaggerated sword in a Hollywood movie. That would be truly unfortunate. Lapu-Lapu's sword would make him look like Captain Hook in loincloth. Ay naku.

In any case, Lapu-Lapu's war was indeed just. And Ferdinand Magellan, whom many people think circumnavigated the globe, did not complete the trip. Lapu-Lapu saw to that. The End.

NOTE: The poem "Just War" ended up not being a part of Ghost Wars because that collection evolved into a a more specialized focus only on American wars. I am now considering writing a book of poems on Filipino myth, legend, and folklore; that would be a good home for this poem.

Also, there is more background info on "Just War" (the poem) and just wars (as an intellectual question) in my essay "Love and War, Contrapuntal: A Self-Interview" from Pinoy Poetics: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American Poetics, edited by Nick Carbó (Meritage Press, 2004).

Finally, here's a 2006 YouTube video featuring Filipino martial artist Yuli Romo demonstrating the use of a kampilan.