Carmina Figurata 2024

My speculative poetry book Dragons & Rayguns contains two concrete poems that are carmina figurata (singular: carmen figuratum), which form a visual image on the page from poetic lines read straight across, jumping over white spaces. These are "Space Opera" and "The Raygun's Plea for Understanding." (Below, you can click on each poem to read it more clearly in a magnified image if you would like.) If you are having trouble reading the poem (this image is kind of small), you can click on it to see it larger and crisper. Also, here is the text of the poem, taken out of shape. A blunt lipstick-shaped tube of dull gray points up to gunmetal sky covered by drab clouds of acid ice scoring the ground with hard pellets of sulfur hail like fiery bullets of burning brimstone dredged from hell’s deep abyss. Flash Gordon taking off to Ming the Merciless’s planet to rescue Dale Arden from that fate worse than death. Night’s shroud is falling. The red-orange blast of his engines glows like morning, a little harbinger of hope in stormy darkness. The small ship soars, a desperate arrow. The second poem I wrote when I was putting together Dragons & Rayguns. It occurred to me that I didn't have enough "raygun" poems in the book, so . . . voila! Again, if you're having trouble reading, click on it for a magnified image, or else here's the poem text, outside of the raygun shape. PEW PEW PEW That’s how most folks think we rayguns sound. Or maybe blam kablooey rrip. Well, everyone, often there’s no sound ‘cause we are battling out in space. No air. No vibrations. Simple flashes of light, piercing flashes, pardon the pun. Energy beams even, rays, if you will. No flash at all, sometimes. I’m tired of the stereotype. We rayguns are sensitive. We don’t indiscriminately kill. We are careful, selective, canny. Some of us have not ever fired one shot. So relax! I learned how to write carmina figurata from the poet Jan D. Hodge, who is the absolute best concrete poet in the US, maybe in the world. He would type a page full of x's and then erase whatever was needed to draw the desired shape. Then he would substitute words for the x's, sometimes not from top to bottom, but inserting text that coincided with parts of the image. Brilliant. Here's one of Jan's carmina figurata, "Carousel II": Jan D. Hodge, "Carousel II" (2012) You can read a entire book full of Jan's carmina figurata in his collection, Taking Shape (2015). In this book, you'll find a poem that I was fortunate to publish in the North American Review, in the amazing shape of a harpsichord superimposed over a guillotine. Speaking of buying books, at the start of this post, I linked my book Dragons & Rayguns to Amazon. If you want to buy a book and would like me to sign your copy, buy it direct from Final Thursday Press here. And then also email the press that you want an inscription. Since we're looking at visual imagery, here's the cover of Dragons & Rayguns, designed by my son Marty Gotera, who is a graphic designer in Germany. When I asked him to do it, I specified that I would like it to have a comic-book vibe and feature a dragon as well as a raygun. I think he did an incredible job. What do you think? Cover of Dragons & Rayguns by Marty Gotera (2024) As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

Dragonfly (pages 40-41)

The next poem in Dragonfly is the last Vietnam-war-focused one. It's a sestina with a lot of alterations in the cycling end-words. This poem has its own separate blog post here where the specifics of the sestina-making are discussed. By the way, this poem needs a trigger warning: a derogatory word for Asian appears in it, a word that is here because this is soldier talk from the '70s. I have not changed this word because it is true to the voice of this character (and it is a character, not myself). More on that below. Vietnam Era Vet A fragrance remembered is Vietnam— the acrid odor of gunpowder and tracer fire, smudgy cooking fires in every hooch, the pungent scent of nước mắm and water buffalo shit, a father's acid sweat as he searches for his lost son in some ville, smoking from an H&I strike—all this was my wish. I'd look at my class A's in their plastic bag in the closet and wish sometimes I too had been to the 'Nam. I remembered basic training at Fort Ord, double timing in the sun to the range. "Ready on the left! Ready on the right! Fire at will!" Late nights in the latrine, I wrote my father long letters about being afraid I'd be sent over there. Everyone in the platoon was afraid of being sent, but not one of us admitted it. "Sure wish they'd ship me over to that motherfucker," we said to each other in the noonday light, "Vietnam— can't wait. Shoot me a fucking gook or two, fire mortars all goddamn night." Papa'd write back, "Son, let God's will be done. Just be a good son. Just do your job. If they send you, then they send you. That's all." And I'd lie on my dark bunk and smoke—the fiery tip of the cigarette curling like a tracer ricochet—wishing I loved it all. C-rations, the firing range, the memorized Vietnamese phrases, my leaky shelter half on bivouac. All for Papa. That was as close as I would get to my father's war. I'm sure my grandfather called him a good son, both in the U.S. Army, the Philippine Scouts. Their Vietnam had been Bataan. When the sergeant would send my father out on point, did he wish even for a moment that he hadn't joined up? Did artillery fire Page 40 make him cringe in his foxhole? That time he was caught in crossfire, did he try to will himself into a tree, a rock, a bird? Papa, I knew only the mortar's crump and whoosh, the parabolic path reaching up to California sun. I never knew the shrapnel's white-hot whistle at arc's end. Two nights ago, I dreamt I was in Vietnam: a farmer runs for the tree line—I fire a crisp M-60 burst—Vietcong, for sure, for sure. The LT sends me up to verify. In shimmering sun, Charlie's face is the one I wash in my helmet. No. It's your face, Papa. Page 41 Going back to my previous blog post on this poem in 2009, I wrote this: Many readers misinterpret this poem as being spoken by a grunt in Vietnam, a combat veteran. The central conflict of the poem orbits around the speaker not having gone to Vietnam. In fact the title of the poem is US governmentalese for someone who served in the US armed forces during the war but was not sent to Vietnam. Although this poem uses many autobiographical details from my own life, this speaker is a persona, not me at all. I personally don't feel this way about not having been sent to Vietnam; in real life, my father, even though he was quite the proponent for Army and veteran service, did not want me to fight in that war because he felt the war in Vietnam was wrong. So why did I write the poem? I had read and was wowed by a story titled "The Persistence of Memory" by Walter Howerton, Jr. (from an anthology called The Perimeter of Light). Howerton's excellent story focused on a Vietnam-vet wannabe driven by a deep need to connect with his WWII-vet father, now dead, who had condemned him for being an anti-war activist during the Vietnam war. After reading this bravura story, I wondered if I could write something similar using elements from my own life. So essentially "Vietnam Era Vet" is an imitation that ultimately transcends imitation. At least I hope so. Okay, despite the poem not being fully autobiographical, I am indeed a Vietnam era veteran, and here's a picture from my US Army service in the 1970s, when I was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco. Receiving the Soldier of the Month award, Presidio of San Francisco, 1974 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 (pages 38-39)

At this juncture in Dragonfly, a poem about how war and military service were seen in 1980s America, as evidenced by a news story from 1987. Veterans Day 1987 It snowed this morning in Washington, and I saw, on the early news, a black gash carved from a white hillside. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a waiting-room TV in the VA hospital. The gray-haired veteran next to me telling about wearing his army uniform into a tavern in 1945—they bought him round after round. The boys finally home for Christmas. Even after we left Vietnam, in 1975, my haircut was brand enough. I wouldn’t have worn my class A’s into a civilian bar. I tried it once in a honky-tonk in Chowchilla, and was chased out. They wouldn’t believe I had never been to Nam. Today, I watched those real Vietnam vets in jeans and field jackets, beards and berets reflected in stone. Only 0900, but already a small legion was mustering. The TV cut away to the Wall Street Drill Team in a Philadelphia parade, a platoon of men and women in blue pinstripe suits with matched briefcases. They opened ranks and placed the cases in rosettes on the asphalt. Then countercolumns and other exotic marching maneuvers. The crowd on the street cheered, but there wasn’t a single chuckle or even a smile in the waiting room. In my mind, those vets at the Vietnam Memorial are wearing colors: a black and yellow eagle screaming on a shield, a sable horse against a field of gold, a sword notched in slotted stone. No, these patches aren’t coats of arms. They’re telegrams from a jungle, monkey howls, Page 38 a litany to match words cut into a wall. But you and I know it ‘s been almost fifteen years, and there’s the Ayatollah and Afghanistan. The Contras. American journalists sending their love on videos shot in some terrorist’s basement. And somewhere the Wall Street Drill Team is marching on. Page 39 The Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team from Hometown Life (2021). This poem was occasioned by my seeing on TV news a drill team of men wearing business suits and carrying briefcases on Veterans Day in 1987. I can't recall now if I made up the name "Wall Street Drill Team" or if I maybe had actually seen the Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team pictured above. Either way, drill was seen in that 1987 news show as comedic rather than ceremonial. 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 37)

The next poem in Dragonfly was originally inspired by The Tunnels of Cu Chi, a book by Tom Mangold and John Penycate (1985). When I taught at Humboldt State University, starting in 1989, I met David Shaw, a Native American veterans' counselor at the university, and he told me about his US Army service in Vietnam where he was a tunnel rat. Thanks to David for some of the details in this poem. Tunnel Rat —for David Shaw Scorpions, salamanders, spiders, earthworms tracing dim tattoos in the target beam of my flashlight. Here, I am my own man. Up there, buddies stuck in the crotch of the Green Mother. The Corps. Vietnam: one hundred degree heat and leeches—shriek of jets and choppers—chicom grenades and pungi stakes. Just now, a scritch ahead to my left. A snake . . . or Charlie crawling to his post? I heft my .45 and flick my light off. I hold my breath. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Empty—just a hole in the earth—and then a face, the moon. My weapon’s on autogetem— Rock and Roll—Mad Minute—till I’m bleeding from both ears. Thunder jazzing the tunnel like Jimi’s guitar, like breaking glass. I’m out of there, back in the sun. Fire in the hole. Our frags boom in the ground, deep and hollow. Then another tunnel. Another tunnel. Always another tunnel. But you know I’ll always go down. The dark hush, the cool air on the back of my neck. I love the tunnel, the solid weight in my clenched hand of pure steel. There it is: the solace of pure fucking steel. Page 32 Photo from "The Tunnel Rat Experience in the Vietnam War" (The Armory Life). David Shaw is an Apache and joined the US Army during the Vietnam war in order to fulfill his tribe's cultural traditions of being a warrior. During that war, there were many Native Americans who joined the service for that very reason. Tom Holm's book Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War, discusses that phenomenon as well as how Native American soldiers often had an easier readjustment back to civilian life from their tribal ceremonies to heal warriors after war. Check out the two books I mention in this post about fighting in Vietnam. 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 (pages 35-36)

At this point in my book Dragonfly, I turn toward several poems focused on war, specifically the Vietnam war. Halloween 1963 Ricky Chang swept Edgewood Lane with his Johnny Seven assault rifle—single shot, rapid fire, grenade launcher, bazooka, breakaway pistol, and who can remember what else? In khakis and bush hat, little Frank Asahi was a desert rat, brandishing his M-1 carbine with its plastic wood-grain stock. I had on old fatigues, lovingly daubed with brown, black, yellow green. An olive-drab submachine gun, just like Vic Morrow’s on Combat. We patrolled San Francisco streets: Victorians perched on steep hills. Our rucksacks bulged with Tootsie Rolls, Chunkies, black and orange kernels of candy corn, pippin apples. At Edgewood Lane’s dead end, a house with windows shuttered like dark eyes. We chorused, “Trick or treat!” The young woman at the door said, “I’m from France, I’m sorry, I don?t have any candy,” until her hand fluttered like a white wing to her mouth. She whispered—not to us— “Dien Bien Phu.” We must have thought she was speaking French, maybe even giggled as she lurched like a spastic marionette back through the open door and froze in front of the living-room window, a statue. “That’s OK, lady,” we yelled, and tumbled down her steps in a clatter of bandoliers and plastic straps, whooping like movie Indians. Page 35 At that very moment, a Green Beret advisor was pinned down in a firefight at the edge of a montagnard village, his tribesmen firing scalpel bursts into green jungle. At that moment, President Diem’s generals were braiding an iron lariat around his palace: a noose of tanks and machine guns for Saigon’s mandarin. The morning sun like a blind eye. But my mind keeps circling back to that woman. I later heard her name: Jacqueline DuBois. Nine years before, a French paratrooper— her father—had thrown himself on a Viet Minh grenade, saving his squad just three hours before the French surrender. I see her now: poised at the window, her face and white dress barred by the half-open blinds. She sees the white flash. Asian faces—just boys, really—surging over the redoubt. A monsoon of hot metal. The sickly sweet stench of burning flesh. A mist of blood on the breeze. Her window faces east, and as she stands there, she cannot see the amber fields rolling away into the night, where America’s sleeping children dream on the edge of history. Page 36 Image by Kodini from Pixabay On Halloween 1963, I would have been eleven years old, and this poem draws from actual memories of my friends and me trick-or-treating. We were probably not very much aware of the American war in Vietnam heating up at that point, though ironically we would have been playing at being soldiers at war, as we did in real life. The fictional French woman I imagined for this poem would have been about our age when her father died in the French war in Vietnam nine years before. And of course for these boys, the Vietnam war would soon be very present in their lives, in American life in general, as the closing image of the poem suggests. 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