Dragonfly (pages 26-27)

Continuing the serialization of my first poetry book Dragonfly. The next poem is another music poem, but this time jazz, not rock, on renowned guitarist Django Reinhardt. I'm tempted not to say 'nuff said . . . but 'nuff said. Hot Club de France Reprise on MTV —Django Reinhardt, 1910-1953 A rock video, and there you were. Only two good fingers on your left hand hammering note after rapid note from an old guitar, unheard beneath a rush of heavy metal. Was it Whitesnake? Def Leppard? The rock group's lead guitarist couldn't believe it. He stepped from his Ferrari into a fast-food sushi bar, opened chrome doors and found himself 50 years back in time: a Paris cafe, smoke, and you jammed against the beat. Winking at him, in your wide-brimmed, black floppy hat, you slipped out the side door and he followed. A will-of-the-wisp chase through cobbled streets, the lure of a velvet cloak. He finally caught up with you, passed out in some alley. And I wanted to shout, "No, that's not how it was." I wanted my son watching videos 2000 miles away to know the real Django. I wanted MTV to send a time machine to Saturday, February 23, 1935, the night Coleman Hawkins detonates Django and the Hot Club Quintet upon Paris. The joint jumping as the Hawk trades riffs on sax with Stephane Grappelli on violin. The videocam would focus on your hands, welding a solo from jive licks and magic octaves, swirling the air with chords in harmonic spirals. Dancers jitterbug while hepsters pat their feet. Page 26 I could call my son long-distance, tell him to watch for you on the tube: your fingers lit up by your crimson tie, like some artificial flower, like a blossom of flame blooming from a gypsy caravan. Page 27 The genesis of this poem has to do with my MFA mentor at Indiana University, Yusef Komunyakaa, who is renowned as a jazz poet, among other literary accomplishments. He was editing an anthology of jazz poems with my classmate Sascha Feinstein, and I wrote this poem in Yusef's poetry workshop class for possible inclusion in that book. The anthology eventually got published, with my poem included . . . here's a link to the book. Many thanks to Yusef and Sascha. The subject of the poem, Django Reinhardt, is one of the most well-known and most accomplished jazz guitarists ever — actually, one of the best guitarists, period, who ever lived. When Django was 18, he burned his hand in a fire and badly burned the ring and little fingers on his fretting hand (along with other bodily injuries). When he recovered, he developed a guitar style using primarily his index and middle fingers for melody and solos, with the damaged fingers used only for chords. Django became world renowned for this remarkable finger style. Here's a video of Django performing with his band the Hot Club de France Quintet. Regarding the narrative at the start of the poem, I had seen a video on MTV that featured a character clearly based on Django, very much as I described, though I fictionalized some of the details. I have looked for that video over and over but have never been able to find it again. If someone knows about that video, please leave me a comment below. The video was not of Whitesnake or Def Leppard, as the poem surmises. I wonder sometimes if I merely dreamed that video! As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Dragonfly (page 22)

The next poem in Dragonfly is also a transition poem. Yes, I said that the previous poem was a transition into poems dealing with childhood, esp. in San Francisco. And this one does. But this poem also leads us into another favorite subject of mine: rock 'n' roll. And it also touches on a favorite — well, maybe "favorite" is not quite the right word — an often-visited subject in my work: war. A "family subject" of sorts. I made a small change from the original text in Dragonfly. The poem's title in the book had a semicolon after the word "gig" . . . that punctuation just feels wrong to me now, and so I've changed it here to a colon, the more conventional choice between title and subtitle. Also, there are other poems in the book that already use that title-colon-subtitle format. After the Gig: Saint Agnes Teen Club Dance Crisp air mainlines in the brain, and I love the guitar case's heft in my hand, the strings of my SG muted now by velvet. "No groupies?" says Ron, as he did every Saturday night, and we smile. The joke fitting like old hi-tops. I feel again the sweet exhaustion, fingertips sore and ridged by taut steel, a hoarse voice till Sunday night. In the cold air, as always, I first notice the amps ringing deep in my head, whirlpooling down where the band is always playing "Soul Sacrifice." Ron's wicked grin as he shuttles the conga beat across the skitter of Terry's sticks. Steve's hands, freckled, walking a Vox bass. And above their safety net, Jay and I trapeze: his wheeling solos on the Hammond B-3, me on my SG Custom. The hall always filled with a fog of sound, rock and roll mixed with the sweat of dancers, the pale ennui of wallflowers loving the edges. In the night air, too keyed up for sleep, we pull into a Doggie Diner for a quick cup of coffee. No one says a word. There's graduation and the draft, the world like a Leslie speaker's double horns whirling, whirling. Page 22 I was Yusef Komunyakaa's MFA student when I wrote this poem, and the phrasing in opening line shows some of that influence, I think. Here I'm using a stanza mode I still employ: groups with the same number of lines throughout (here, five) without deference to meaning, as in verse paragraphs. This method can cause strong stanza enjambment as in, for example, the break between stanzas two and three above. The names of the band members in the poem are actual . . . though I've fiddled with the gear: I played an SG Junior, not a Custom, and Jay had a Farfisa organ or maybe a Fender. (For some reason, a brand name starting with F sticks in my memory with Jay.) Steve, however, actually had a Vox bass, the short-scale Bassmaster; I remember Steve always had a tough time finding strings because long-scale strings were too thick at the short-scale length to feed through the tuner posts. In the photo below, you can see Steve on the right with his Vox bass (this is, however, of a different band we were in together, three years earlier); click on it to see a larger version. The Leslie speaker mentioned above is often associated with Hammond organs; it used two spinning speaker horns for a unique doppler effect. Things specific to San Francisco in the poem are teen clubs (youth groups in Catholic parishes) and the Doggie Diner restaurant. This was a San Francisco-only fast-food franchise, now gone. A nostalgic memory for many native San Franciscans. The picture above is of the Doggie Diner at Mission and 18th. The one our band always went to was at Geary and Arguello. The poem's setting in time coincides with the Vietnam war, and male high school seniors at that time were all very worried about being drafted into the Army. And of course the poem concerns itself more largely with oncoming adulthood. Interesting in this context is that our band in the poem was named Change of Heart. Hmm. Okay, that's all for today. I'd love to hear what you think of this poem or anything else; please comment below. Thanks. Ingat. The first image above is a family photo taken by my dad. More info on it is available in the blog post dated 3 September 2011, which also talks about the Doggie Diner. The second image above is borrowed from the website Doggie Diner.com, and the photographer is Chandler White. ¡Viva el Doggie Diner! DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Wound, Burn, Glacier: A Poetry Exercise

This past semester — Spring 2011 — I taught a Beginning Poetry Writing course at the University of Northern Iowa. A few minutes before class was to start one day, I realized I had neglected to prepare an in-class poetry exercise, something to get students in the zone, as they say. Looking around my office for last-minute inspiration, my eyes lit upon the most recent issue of the North American Review, which brought to mind the fine short story "VIVA!" by Erin McReynolds. I leafed quickly through Erin's story, looking for a paragraph that had fascinating words in it. I found one that contained the words blue light, wound, burn, glacier, Sssh, crushes. Bingo! Here's that paragraph as it appears on the page, with the exact lineation: My boyfriend sleeps beside me, and his face is peaceful in the blue light of my laptop. His lashes are long and I bend down to kiss them. Because I'm used to telling him every- thing, I whisper aloud the things I find on the Internet. Things like, "A wound to the carotid artery results in a loss of consciousness in under a minute," and, "They burn the organs they remove during autopsy, unless the family wants them put back in, for religious reasons." When he startles, his glacier eyes wild with panic, I stroke his head. "Sssh," I whisper, "it’s me," as if that should comfort him. He blinks at me and then grabs me around the ribs and crushes his face to my chest. I keep stroking his hair, whispering, "The human body contains about five liters of blood." I quickly xeroxed the half of the page bearing the paragraph (making sure Erin's entire name was visible) and then wrote instructions on the remaining white space: Write a 12-line poem using one word from each line in the paragraph shown. The chosen word from each line needs to appear in the same line in the poem. E.g., if you use the word "Internet" it should appear in line 4 of your poem. If you use "chest" it must appear in line 11. Okay? Ready, set, go. I left the 13th line of the paragraph out because it was short and thus had relatively few words. In class, I also told the students they could slightly alter the words, for example, changing "sleeps" to "sleeping." Here's an image of that actual sheet (click on it to see a larger version); the handwriting shows how truly impromptu the exercise was. Impromptu or not, the exercise was incredibly successful. The 12-line exercise poems the students wrote in the course of about ten minutes were quite good, probably due in great part to the haunting strangeness of Erin's paragraph. After the semester, I looked back at the course and saw this exercise as one of the high points in the class. Via e-mail I asked the students if they would be willing to share in this blog entry what they wrote in response to this exercise. Two volunteered: David Hosack and Mandy Paris. My thanks to both of you. Here is Dave's exercise; the words borrowed from Erin's paragraph are in gray at the right. my face is not like yours it does not light up when the phone rings it has never been kissed it sees things as they really are it leaks the results to loved ones before organ transplants go through my face removes smiles from children and disrobes religious men and says "sssh" after the first chords of "happy birthday" my face only blinks when it matters my face is not like yours my face is not like anybody's —Exercise by David Hosack     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face light kiss things results organ remove religious sssh blinks face · · · · David has written a fascinating poem here. I like how he drew from Erin's paragraph an obsessive focus on the face, that idiosyncratic image we advance into the world each day. Notice how Dave finds unusual and striking attributes for the face; my favorite is how the face can say "'sssh' after the first chords of 'happy birthday'" — how we can short-circuit each other's happiness with just a look. Also, Dave makes a savvy rhetorical choice here to abandon the "rules" in the last line: by not using one of Erin's words in his twelfth line, he ends the poem with a convincing and meaningful closing. Bravo, Dave. Mandy, she told me, is usually meticulous in holding on to completed course materials but couldn't locate what she wrote that day. I remember that her exercise was as strong as Dave's. Instead Mandy offered to write something new in response to the exercise. Here is that poem, written at home with more practice, with more than ten minutes grace: I push my face into that crook and I feel you bending against me, limbs locking automatically. You're telling me awful things, about your mother, about your sister. You whisper because this is an open wound. Our hearts beat together. . . . The tip of your tongue burns as it reaches the scalding thoughts at your temple. They remove themselves, but linger, wanting a way back in. Our eyes catch. I have nothing for you — yet you search me. I can't comfort you, I can only blink — and my ribs tighten like ropes around the beating organ that contains every humane wish I had for you. —Exercise by Mandy Paris     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face bend telling whisper wound burn remove back in eyes comfort ribs human

Mandy's poem is a heart-rending portrayal of a vulnerable and touching moment shared by two people. Her closing image of the heart both as literal, physical organ and as the metaphorical, metaphysical "font of love," is breathtaking. Brava, Mandy.

The day of the exercise, I wrote along with the students, as I usually do. I was amazed that in three or four minutes, this surfaced:

P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication. Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!

I'm an aficionado of crime fiction, especially when it centers on forensics. For example, just today I finished a Patricia Cornwell novel featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In any case, I guess I'm well-primed to write about this topic. But what really surprised me was how much of a "real" poem this exercise was. I plan to work on this poem more: I need to work out who the speaker is and why he's where he is. Line 10 is an allusion to (perhaps a re-working of) a line in Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "Facing It"; I need to figure out if that echo helps or hurts the poem. Etc.

Since I had a few more minutes — the students were still writing — I tempted and challenged the muses by trying again. Perhaps lightning might ... well, you know. Here's what came of that second attempt:

Mary Wonders Why Her boyfriend was just too sweet, leaving on the screen of her laptop pictures of dancing hearts and kissing birds. All drawn lovingly from the Internet. He never thought of any losses between them, not in a minute. He removed all possibility of anger and defeat from them. Had his reasons. His childhood was wild and panicked: alcoholic father, angry mother, comfort a rarity. He couldn't face it again now. His jagged and scarred past always whispering. —Exercise by Vince Gotera     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks]

boyfriend laptop kiss Internet loss minute remove reasons wild panic comfort face whispering

Not as good, quite a bit clunkier. Too much abstraction. (Probably my students who are reading this now are laughing, knowing how I rail so much against abstraction.) I don't seem to know what the poem's really about until close to the end. But for a five-minute writing, not bad. The fascinating thing here, I think, is that I've got the seed of a short story here: a man who, perhaps obsessively, tries to control his relationship with his girlfriend because of a traumatic childhood. Obviously nothing earthshaking there . . . I need still to find out what's really at stake for the character.

Well, that's all for today. I just wanted to tell you about an exciting learning moment in my class. Please don't copy or quote anything from the exercise poems above. They are only drafts. Thank you for your cooperation with that.

Oh, about the exercise itself. This word-from-line-from-found-text approach is not my invention. I first learned it in a Teaching Creative Writing class taught by Sena Jeter Naslund over two decades ago at Indiana University. Thanks, Sena! In any case, you can find many (probably better) versions of this exercise in books and online. Do try it yourself, though. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you end up writing. There may even be a "real" poem waiting for you to do this exercise. If you do use this exact exercise, I'd like to hear how it turns out.

Please write a comment below. I'd love to hear what you think. Hope you're having a great weekend!



Added 31 December 2011: There's a "reboot" of this in-class poetry-exercise topic in the post titled "Wound, Burn, Glacier ... Revisited" . . . new poetic responses/exercises by the poet Catherine Pritchard Childress. Check it out!

Dragonfly (page 3)

The second poem in the book is also dedicated to Marty. As I said in an earlier post, "I thought of Dragonfly," when I was putting it together, "as a kind of long letter to Marty about things I wanted him to know as he entered his adult years."

Gallery of the Mind — for Marty You'd stare at Richie Rich, your Playskool pull toys, the hamster's Habitrail, anything brightly colored, for long minutes then gaze intently at a blank wall. You were just five. Could you have known those ghosts (Richie Rich dressed in teal) were only after-images, topsy-turvy colors? Or were you looking for a place you knew just had to be? Where cabins sailed in tornadoes, and a marionette some whale swallowed could become real. If only you didn't have to blink your eyes or breathe, you could funnel the world into shapes on the wall, a photo gallery of the mind. Your hamster Goggles before he died. Your mom and I dancing a tarentella to divorce. Your grandmother, sheets drawn up to her chin, the night we smuggled you into the cancer ward — you were Batman, it was Halloween. If only the moments would freeze on the wall, you could soar above it, like Peter Pan swooping over London's lights. Glitter sprinkled on black cloth.

Page 3

Marty, around age 6 or 7 in the poem, was a quiet child. His mom and I noticed during this time that he would stare, for long periods, at images full of color (for example, Richie Rich, dressed in red in some comic book). Then he would transfer his gaze to a blank wall. We eventually asked Marty what he was up to, and it turns out he had, all by himself, figured out how to impress, so to speak, an image onto his retinas so that he could subsequently see it as an afterimage on the wall, in colors complementary to the original.

When I began writing this poem, probably almost a decade later, in 1986 or 1987 when I started working on my MFA, it occurred to me, in hindsight, that perhaps Marty was symbolically (or perhaps actually) playing this afterimage game to escape his life, which was quite difficult at that time, with deaths (of a beloved pet and then his grandmother) and impending disaster (the rocky marriage of his parents teetering on the edge of collapse). That's the seed of the poem.

On craft: the poem shows the writerly influence of my teacher Yusef Komunyakaa as well as one of my favorite poets at the time: Sharon Olds. For example, the phrase "a photo gallery / of the mind" sounds a bit like Komunyakaa; when I was writing this, I probably didn't know I was imitating, but there it is. A pale imitation of Yusef's manner, though, I should add. The breathless, hurried enjambments are probably influenced by reading Sharon Olds: "at a blank / wall"; "topsy-turvy / colors"; "could become / real"; "London's / lights." Quite definitely my attempt at a bravura image as an ending is derived from Olds's style.

In poet circles, you often find people saying they no longer like the poems in their early books; in my case, that's not so true, generally, but this poem is definitely stale for me. My technique has moved quite a ways away: I am much more aware, more deliberate about line breaks, and I have developed phrasing and language that are more acutely my own. In other words, as poets say, I found my voice (probably two decades ago, in 1989 or so).

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NOTE: about the afterimage thing, try it yourself: have a piece of white paper handy, then stare intently at the green, leaf-like form in the middle of the image at left. Do this for at least one minute, maybe even two. Quickly turn your gaze to the white paper. Now relax. The afterimage should coalesce, but only if you don't push it hard.

You can also research this cool optical effect on YouTube, where there are quite a few videos that demonstrate it, such as "Jesus Illusion" (black and white) and "Cool color illusion" (obviously not black and white!).

So what did you see in the afterimage? What did the green "leaf" turn out to be? Tell me — and everyone — in a comment below. Hint: Anglo-Saxon for "language."

I do hope your new year is unfolding happily. Be well.

Dragonfly (page ix) Introduction

Introduction           This short book dovetails the new with the old, the imagined with lived experiences, cementing this mosaic of possibilities. Some terrifying moments are encased in chrysalises of beatific clarity and certainty. Wisdom and bewilderment stare back at us from these pages. Janus-headed: historical and futuristic.           These poems lead us readers to search for answers in ourselves. I am not talking about profundity (though there are numerous profound moments here); in essence I am speaking about how those simple, overlooked glimpses at our common lives tend to rise to the troubled surface of this poetry. The voices here seem to be saying that if we "dream on the edge of history" we won't escape by feigning ignorance or innocence. Gotera paints the score in brilliant, bold, and brave strokes across an encompassing canvas. Like those x-ray paintings by Australian Aboriginals, his journeys are inward. And we can see inside the "hollow bones of hummingbirds" alongside the desires within us. There are not easy or unearned directives here; however, there is prophecy — not mere imagistic probes among psychological landmines. Everyday motifs align with the fantastic and bizarre. Gotera dares to glance at "Pharaoh's scimitar" through a plexiglass facade, showing us our own bewildered faces in this imagistic mix. Through this poetry we can almost see what we are becoming.           What is most striking about Dragonfly, considering the fact it is a tapestry of lived and imagined extrusions, is how the poems seem to defy any rote definition. They are flighty, majestic, simple, confident, and risk-taking.           The voices here are having fun. They can be heavy as war, Elvis, blood, racism, and Tutankhamun's tomb; but also light and airy as mosquitoes, dragonflies, and notes from Carlos Santana's guitar on a sunny day in Berkeley. A tension through juxtaposition is what Vince Gotera's Dragonfly achieves in a miraculous light that sobers the mind. Characters ease into each other's dreams, taking us along with them, and we are better and more complete because we have humbled ourselves long enough to peer through the eyes of these sojourners. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Page ix

I am ever grateful to Yusef Komunyakaa, then a professor of creative writing at Indiana University, for his mentorship during my MFA days there and also for his continuing mentorship throughout my career. Some of this story is told in my article "Mentor and Friend: Yusef Komunyakaa as Teacher," published in a special issue of the literary journal Callaloo devoted to Yusef (28.3, Summer 2005).

Words can never express the extent and magnitude of my gratitude for your teaching, Yusef, for your taking me on as an apprentice. Salamat, as we say in Filipino, maraming salamat! Thanks, Yusef . . . many, many thanks.

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Dragonfly (pages vii-viii) Contents

And now Dragonfly's Table of Contents. The page numbers given are the same as those in the book; click on the page number for the blog post that features the poem on that page in the book.

Since the book, at this point, is still being posted in the blog little by little, not all the page-number links will be live right away. I'll fill in links as stuff gets posted.

Contents           ix       Introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa 1       First Hand-Plant: Skating the Petaluma Ramp 3     Gallery of the Mind 4     Tutankhamun, September 1979 6       Miraculous Dragonfly 7       Mosquito / Manila Haiku 8       Crosses 10       Pacific Crossing 12       Shiites, 1985 14       Ferdinand Marcos, Shadow Boxing at His Mirror, on the Occasion of His Wife Imelda's Arraignment in New York City, November 1988, Where She Wore a Ballroom Gown 15       Imelda Marcos discusses with Ferdinand the Gala Party She Gave on September 11, 1990, to Celebrate His 73rd Birthday Posthumously 16       Gambling 18       Uncle Ray Shoots Craps with Elvis 20       Jive Talk 22       After the Gig: Saint Agnes Teen Club Dance 23     Carlos Santana in Concert: Berkeley, 1983 24       "Are You Experienced?"

Page vii

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25       Janis, 1987 26       Hot Club de France Reprise on MTV 28       Gawain's Rap 29       At the Poetry Reading in Science B 135, A Snowstorm 30       Hunter: A Sculpture in Glass 32       Morgan Kali Murray 33       An Aviation Engineer's Tribute to Leonardo 35       Halloween 1963 37       Tunnel Rat 38       Veterans Day 1987 40       Vietnam Era Vet 42       Heirloom 44       A Note About the Author

Page viii

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It's been an interesting experience posting Dragonfly so far, even though I'm still pretty much at the beginning of the project. Looking at the table of contents brings back memories about what was going on in my life as I was writing and workshopping these poems. I'll share those in due time as more pages are posted in the blog.

Incidentally, some of these poems are still very much "alive" out in the world; for example, the two Marcos poems above are due to be published soon in the Philippines in a literary anthology about the Marcoses, and I have written a third poem to accompany these two. The new poem deals with Ferdinand and Imelda's son Bongbong (actually Ferdinand Marcos Jr., but with a childhood nickname that has unfortunately followed him into adulthood and into public life). This kind of naming, inexplicable as it may be, is fairly common in the Philippines.

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UPDATE   7 March 2025 . . . As I finished the serialization, I realized that there is one blog post that is not covered by this contents page: the front matter of the book before the Introduction (which is the first item in the contents). Here's a link to that blog post: FRONT MATTER.

Dragonfly

My first poetry collection, titled Dragonfly (1994), came about because I was a member of a creative writing listserv called CREWRT-L during the late 1980s and early 1990s. I made many friends in that close-knit writing community, some of whom I'm still in touch with today, mostly through the social network Facebook.

One of those stalwart friends was (and is) Dr. H. Palmer Hall, founder and editor of Pecan Grove Press (PGP), a publisher of fine literature (mainly poetry), based at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas. In late 1993, after we had gotten to know each other quite well online, Palmer asked me if I would be interested in publishing a poetry collection with PGP. I was indeed interested, and this publication would end up to be a boon for both of us because my book would be the first national publication by PGP. Since then, Pecan Grove Press has become one of the nation's premier poetry publishers.

At that time, I was quite aggressively sending a manuscript titled Pacific Crossing to various presses (mainly through prize competitions) and had a book in progress titled Heirloom. I thought of the PGP book as a kind of teaser, a longish trailer, for these two collections and so mined poems out of both of them. The PGP collection, Dragonfly, I planned then as a large chapbook that would be just a couple pages shy of the minimum book-length total page count of the time: 48 pages. As it turns out, Pacific Crossing has yet to find a publisher although it has been a finalist at various competitions over the years. Ditto with Heirloom. Any publishers out there seeking poetry books? Or do you, O gentle reader, know any publishers? (You just never know!)

Once I had assembled the manuscript of Dragonfly and Palmer and I had agreed on its final form, sequence, etc., I asked him if my wife Mary Ann could design the cover, and Palmer agreed. This was quite generous on his part because most publishers don't allow the writer to have any say about either design or art. So thanks for that, Palmer!

Mary Ann spent an entire summer studying dragonflies; fortunately, we lived in northern California on the coast near Oregon (Redwood country), and dragonflies were in great abundance. At one point, she needed to see one up close and I caught one for her in exactly the way I describe in the book's title poem "Miraculous Dragonfly" (she had always thought that the method of dragonfly-catching I described was imaginary!). Nonetheless, she had done sketch after sketch and none of them pleased her.

Because the pen-and-inks and pencil renderings were not working out, Mary Ann decided one day to tear a dragonfly out of white construction paper. The finished cut-out didn't feel right, so she laid it down on another piece of paper and painted it black. When Mary Ann picked up the dragonfly, she discovered that the black paint had seeped underneath and the black outline you see in the completed cover above was on the paper below. To finish the cover art, she simply added the turquoise highlights. The rest of the cover design followed in short order, resulting in just a marvelous cover, I think. Though it's possible I may be just a little biased!

While Mary Ann was working on the cover, I secured an introduction from Yusef Komunyakaa, who had been my poetry writing professor at Indiana University, as well as blurbs from two fine poets (and friends): Jessica Hagedorn and Walt MacDonald. Here are those two blurbs since they are impossible to read in the reproduction above of the back cover.

Dragonfly is a welcome collection of poems by Vince Gotera. In a simple, straightforward style, Gotera begins by writing about a father's tender love for his son. Poem by poem, and ever mindful of the big picture, Gotera goes on to explore the painful contradictions of cultural identity with dark humor, wisdom, and compassion.

— Jessica Hagedorn

Vince Gotera’s Dragonfly has exciting images, like fine photography packed into a chapbook. These are spirited poems about legends exposed, or missed and forgiven — and about ordinary people accepted and honored for what they are. Gotera is amazed not so much by the gold of their bodies or fortunes but of their hearts. As if he wields a camera, Gotera captures the breathless moment, writes of the flesh made flesh, but often holy: the old woman who walked on her knees from Jerusalem to Calvary; the Chaplain who said Mass daily in a POW camp, who had for wine only "a raisin soaked in water, / then squeezed into a thimble." In a signature poem, a herald of more good books to come, Gotera catches the daring of his son skating a ramp — "A flawless slide down plywood," then "free, free" at the top of the ramp for a second, stealing a glance "over right shoulder, scouting new country."

— Walt McDonald

The photograph on the back cover is of me and my infant daughter Melina (now 15 years old). I intended that particular shot to be a tribute of sorts to Jessica Hagedorn, whose photo in an anthology where we both appeared, Garrett Hongo's The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, portrays her and one of her daughters. Thanks for all your help over the years, Jessica. And many thanks to you as well, Walt, for your help and for your fine body of poetic work that I was honored to study and interpret in my book of literary criticism Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans (1994).

Dragonfly is now out of print after going through three printings, though it is still occasionally available from rare and vintage book dealers. In fact, not long ago, a signed copy of Dragonfly was being sold in either Oregon or Washington State for something like $150.00; isn't that simply incredible? Who'd a-thunk it?

In any case, now that Dragonfly has become quite difficult to find, I am pleased to be able to present it here in the blog in serial form. I hope you enjoy it, O my faithful readers. Stay tuned to this poetry channel!

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P.S. I should have said above that, while Pacific Crossing and Heirloom have not yet been published, two other poetry collections have come out since Dragonfly: Ghost Wars (2003) and Fighting Kite (2007). Ghost Wars won the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry.       — VG 12 Jan 2009