In our backyard, a riotous orgy of growth: the wild forest of sunflowers that springs up annually, a thick three-dimensional scrim taking up loads of ground-space, reaching as much as six or seven feet into blue sky. Our yearly summer panorama, re-inscribing myriad stems on last year's palimpsest of sunflowers.
Acolytes of Amun-Ra Sunflowers: girasol, helianto, las flores del sol (SPANISH) Seers of the sun, soothsayers of light, la luz, ilaw, liwanag. Illumination, insight, epiphany, nirvana. A spray of words, dustmotes, canary and mahogany, dilaw at kayumanggi, yellow and dark brown. Isn't that last photo above simply amazing? I think this particular plant was broken by that windstorm described in my last post. Look how devastated and dilapidated the stem is that arises out of the grass. But the top quarter of the plant has raised itself from the ground and the flower is ready to track the sun in the sky. Incredible. Living things abide. Speaking of living things that abide: some news about the four-legged tree featured last time. The tree experts who were consulted have decided that the tree is just too dangerous because half of the canopy is gone. In another windstorm, the rest of the branches could break off and either damage the house or fall on cars in the street. So all the branches of the tree have been lopped off, and the hope is that the tree will survive and start to push out offshoots that could eventually become a full canopy. There is already new hope. Look at this close-up: a couple of offshoots have sprouted. The tree is still living and abides. As do we all. I hope you are well. Abide and be strong. |
Friday, July 31, 2009
Sunflowers and the Four-Legged Tree
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Small Acts of God — Cedar Falls, Iowa
| At about 3:30 a.m. Friday morning, July 10, Cedar Falls was hit by a severe thunderstorm that generated straight-line winds of around 100 mph in some locations. Estimates range from 60 mph to 160 mph; one theory for the high winds is that the storm produced a powerful microburst. The effect on the town was a LOT of tree damage: huge branches littering the streets; large trees broken off at the trunk, even uprooted. A garage was demolished, and there were widespread outages of electric power, ranging from minutes to hours to days. Here are some photos of the aftermath of the storm. The first was taken by my friend David Grant. Note the tree which has fallen across a street and onto a car; in the right foreground, a power pole has fallen — you can see a transformer on the pole as it leans away. The next picture, taken by my friend Tiffany Bullen, shows a large tree uprooted completely out of the ground. For a sense of scale, note the two houses shown in the background. Tiffany's next shot also shows a tree that has been uprooted; note at the right of the picture the grass that was formerly at the base of the upright tree. The ground torn up with the tree still carries the grass as if nothing has happened. At the left, you can glimpse a guy in blue who is chainsawing branches; seeing how small he looks will give you a sense of how large this tree is. (In order to pick out Blue Guy, you may have to click on the picture to see a larger version.) Carole Fishback, my friend who is a professional photographer, took this next shot. Her dramatic composition shows what a tremendous force snapped this huge tree like a slim twig. As Carole told me, the damage is like "random acts of violence — some giant couldn't find the tree he wanted so he grabbed this one and that one and left them all lying every which way." Here is a photo I took on the University of Northern Iowa campus. This tree was inexplicably torn in three directions. The large break sent a sizable branch towards the left; a break higher on the trunk sent a larger branch toward the right; and underneath the branch on the left is another branch that is going in yet another direction, toward the low concrete wall. I'm pretty sure all the branches came from this tree because there was not another tree nearby, but how they ended up pointing in these three directions is beyond me. The concrete wall in the background is about three or four feet tall, so the highest part of the trunk is about seven feet up. Pretty amazing. This next photo shows the top portion of a power pole. When I first saw this, the morning after the storm, it was hanging in the air from power lines, with what you see here about six feet above this sidewalk and no pole below. Where the rest of the pole was I don't know. I stuck my head out the car window to take a picture, but Mary Ann said, "Oh no, this is too dangerous!" and took off. So I didn't get what would have been one heck of a photo, but she was probably right. If the thing had taken that moment to plummet to the ground, we would have been in the middle of a mess of flailing power lines. The next three photos show what happened to our city's landmark tree. It has a huge canopy arising out of four joined trunks; the four trunks form an archway that leads toward the front door of a corner house. I wonder how many engaged couples and also brides and grooms have taken a picture under this tree. It's quite a wonderful thing This close-up diagrams the four tree trunks, in case you couldn't make them out above. And this third shot shows how much of the original canopy was lost in the storm. The last I heard, on the local TV newscast, the jury was still out on whether the experts thought the tree would survive such massive damage. I sure hope it does. Many years of tree husbandry went into this beautiful thing. Well, that's it for now. I'll keep adding photos to the blog if I find other dramatic images. Fortunately, no casualties other than trees. Ironic since Cedar Falls holds the title of "Tree City USA." Thanks again, David, Tiffany, and Carole, for letting me post your pictures here. Stay well, everyone. Oh, and please write a comment below! If you are in Cedar Falls, tell everyone your storm story here. If you are somewhere else, I'd love to hear your reaction. Thanks! |
Friday, July 3, 2009
Gypsy Punk on Nat Geo
| Hello, everyone. How about we take a little break from poetry today, and instead have some music. Thanks to Pris Campbell and her blog "Songs to a Midnight Sky," I found out recently that the National Geographic website hosts music videos. And quite a charming and eclectic collection of world music it is. Here's a small sample from Nat Geo, featuring the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello (the inventors of said genre). Gogol Bordello is fronted by wild man Eugene Hütz Gogol Bordello, "Start Wearing Purple" Gogol Bordello, "Wonderlust King" Gogol Bordello Sessions, Part One Gogol Bordello Sessions, Part Two I hope you enjoyed Gogol Bordello's videos and their spectacularly frenetic approach to gypsy music. Did you notice that Eugene Hütz was wearing blue suede shoes in the two "Sessions" videos? Shades of Elvis! Presley, that is. For more on Gogol Bordello, visit their website. And do check out the cool video collection on the National Geographic website. Thanks again, Pris! |
Friday, June 26, 2009
From Mondo Marcos ... Bongbong's Sonnetina
| In both the last two posts — featuring my Ferdinand Marcos poem and my Imelda Marcos poem — I've referred to a third sonnetina that completes my "Marcos trilogy." This third starring none other than Bongbong Marcos Once, in the late '80s, when I performed the first two Marcos sonnetinas at a poetry reading to a mainly Asian American audience, someone yelled out, "Cheap humor!" Well, I gotta admit, those two poems are cheap humor; the Marcoses are such easy, obvious, unavoidable targets. This third poem, spoken by Bongbong and written several years later, features even more heightened slapstick than the earlier two. I really cranked up the cheap humor: my Bongbong poem is downright cheesy and campy and over the top.
I hope the cheap humor comes across: I couldn't resist, for example, the well-known and well-remarked juxtaposition of "Cardinal" and "Sin" (the actual name of the Philippines' actual cardinal back in that day); or Bongbong saying "I lied; I haven't sinned" (here an unremarked irony). Look for stuff like that; the poem is full of such slapstick silliness. But hey, how can you avoid that, when your speaker is named "Bongbong"! Oh, incidentally — just an aside, not really something germane to the poem as such — isn't it interesting that both father and son have Emmanuel as part of their given names? Emmanuel, "God with us," a name for the Christ. Wow. Might there be some messianic, self-exceptionalist projection at play there? (Not to mention that their first name is Ferdinand The picture on the left shows Imelda kissing the glass coffin of Ferdinand. I couldn't pin down a source for this picture, which appears in many webpages across the internet. Nevertheless, an interesting reversal of Snow White asleep in her glass coffin, about to be awakened by Prince Charming's kiss. Well, here it's the man inside the glass, and the kisser is the woman. Though some people have wondered, because Ferdinand looks so darn good (and young) under glass, that what we're looking at is a wax figure and the actual corpse is elsewhere or perhaps directly underneath. Who knows? It's that trademark Marcos weirdness. The picture on the right is of Bongbong Marcos arriving at Honolulu Airport in 1996, three years after the family returned to the Philippines, to testify in a court case where a group representing a deceased Filipino treasure hunter was seeking $1 trillion in damages from an incident where allegedly Marcos's soldiers stole a 1-ton solid gold Buddha from said treasure hunter. Do read the Honolulu Star-Bulletin article which the photo illustrates; it will give you a glimpse of the strange events that continually surround the Marcos family as well as an impression of Bongbong's fascinating personality, often overshadowed by the larger-than-life reputations of his parents. The Bongbong sonnetina is forthcoming quite soon in Mondo Marcos: Martial Law Babies Write About Marcos and His Martial Law, edited by Frank Cimatu and Rolando B. Tolentino. Today's blog appearance of the Bongbong sonnetina is meant as a kind of advance advertisement for Mondo Marcos, which will elaborate more of the weird world of the Marcoses. Oh! I should share with you my own family's involvement in the weird world of the Marcoses. During the late '60s and early '70s, my father Martin Gotera, a very vocal critic of the Marcos regime, wrote a column in the US-based Philippine News, a loud anti-Marcos voice in print. As such, he was (supposedly) on Ferdinand's infamous blacklist. As a child, I never quite knew what being on the blacklist meant; perhaps that was why we never traveled to the Philippines during those days? Was my father afraid of being arrested? Or, worse yet, salvaged or disappeared. On the other side of the coin was my stepmother, Carolina Matsumura Gotera. She was most definitely a Marcos supporter — a very avid one. In fact, she was one of Imelda's Blue Ladies. These women were her informal ladies-in-waiting, a kind of clique or close social circle. No one could be farther from or more reviled among the Marcos faithful than someone on the blacklist, and no one could be more "in" the Marcos inner circle than a member of the Blue Ladies. And in my family, we had one of each! When Papa (re)married Carolina, I was grown and didn't live at home any longer, so I never witnessed up close how my father and his wife reconciled this gap. My stepmother quite often talked about her high-society adventures with the Blue Ladies, and my father would just smile. It was that Marcos weirdness right in my own family. On another front, the sonnetina front: I'm currently in touch with the poet Michael Heffernan, inventor of the sonnetina. I'll report back with details on our discussions about the sonnetina and how it developed. Stay tuned. Also, I'll let you know when Mondo Marcos is out. Take care. Added on 27 July 2009: it occurred to me today that some readers may not know about the sonnetina form. Look at my June 18 post with the Ferdinand Marcos poem; there is a brief explanation of the sonnetina there. Added on 27 July 2011: Yo yo yo, Mondo Marcos has landed! |
Friday, June 19, 2009
Dragonfly (page 15) ... Imelda Marcos
| Since the previous poem from Dragonfly features Ferdinand Marcos as persona, it would probably be no surprise to you that the next poem — also a sonnetina — is spoken by Imelda Marcos. After composing these two sonnetinas I thought of them as an intertwined pair. A Bongbong Marcos poem came along later, completing what has become a trilogy of Marcos poems. ("Bongbong" is the family nickname of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Background stuff you should probably know: after Ferdinand died in late 1989, Imelda requested permission from Philippine President Cory Aquino to have his body interred in the Philippines with full military honors. Aquino refused to allow Ferdinand's body on Philippine soil, citing potential problems of national security. Imelda then kept Ferdinand "on ice" (that is, refrigerated) until the day when she might be able to bury his body in the Philippines. The immediate trigger for this poem was a Newsweek article that showcased the weird activities at the Marcos enclave in Hawaii, focusing on a birthday party Imelda threw for Ferdinand and family and friends Page 15 I made up some things here, such as the "space-age polymer coffin" and Ferdinand defrosting, though these elements might not be all that fanciful. Imelda spent a lot of money on technology and utilities keeping Ferdinand frozen; at one point in the sordid saga, Imelda had run up a $214,500 electric bill. Imelda refused to pay the bill, thus threatening a Ferdinand thaw, but it was eventually paid by a family friend. One thing I did not make up is Ferdinand's nickname in the poem (line 12). Often in the press and in blogs, Ferdinand is called "Ferdie" (and in fact the first published version of the poem contained the phrase "dear Ferdie"), but it turns out that Ferdinand, in his desire to be as American as possible, preferred to be called "Andy." In the poem, the words "fair Andy" both preserve a sonic link with "Ferdinand" and make possible a multi-layered pun about perceived blondeness as well as imagined impartiality in his political career. Obviously neither of these could be further from the truth. Did you think you were going to get out of here without hearing (again) about Imelda's (in)famously expensive shoe collection? Above are a couple of images that allude to the whole shoe thing. The wonderful caricature on the left, by Risko, is from a 2007 Vanity Fair interview with Imelda by George Wayne. This interview, on the occasion of the release of The Imelda Collection, a fashion company founded by Imelda's grandson, is quite revealing about what makes Imelda tick. Check it out The photo on the right is from a 2006 BBC article titled "Inequality on show in Filipino resort." Although she is not even mentioned in the article, Imelda is immediately recognizable as a poster child for the inequalities between rich and poor in the Philippines. The reason I've included this photo, however, is that the shoe Imelda is holding in the photo does not seem to be a shoe at all. I think it's a phone. Shades of Maxwell Smart! The parallel between "The Imelda Show" and Get Smart is simply too delicious not to point out.
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