In Fighting Form

Or Why the Tiger Stance Rocks in Mads Bajarias’s Pepsi Tastes Funny When it’s Christmas Eve & You’re Alone Eating Canned Tuna (CentralBooks, 2008)

first published in the Philippines Free Press, 14 March 2009

To the aspiring writer with a finished, unpublished manuscript tucked away and toted in the ubiquitous frayed knapsack or cooler-than-cool postman’s bag, ready for whipping out at the merest whiff of an impromptu poetry reading, there are few things more unthinkable than going down the route of self-publishing. If not perceived as pedestrian, that is, sans lofty literary aspirations—an option sought only by sappy sensitive souls with something to express and share with a small circle of intimates—self-publishing, which also goes by its more disparaging pet name, vanity publishing, is seen as smacking of arrogance, subject to no other standards but the writer’s own, lacking the seal of approval by designated literary authorities (possibly even a last resort resulting from their rejection), and therefore not worth serious attention.

Certainly, there are more than enough sloppy, self-indulgent books out there, but if some of them are self-published, a good number of them are not, are even adorned with reliably dazzling markers, say, the stamp of a Palanca Award or the imprint of a university press, and available at your friendly neighborhood National Bookstore (that chain which carries local books at the cost of an arm and a leg and your firstborn, something only commercial publishers can afford). Conversely, once in a while, a self-published book—one with low visibility in the marketplace, often accessible only via small bookstores or prior knowledge of the author or an undergrad class with an unusually adventurous required reading list—makes its way to a reader somehow and surprises with its peculiar synthesis of wit and candor, its unaffected approach to complexity—things I find in Pepsi Tastes Funny When it’s Christmas Eve & You’re Alone Eating Canned Tuna, Mads Bajarias’s first book of poetry, printed on demand by CentralBooks.

In “dreaming the ultimate fight to the finish,” a poem involving a confrontation over siomai in ChowKing ends with the speaker in fighting form: “Coolly, I stepped back/and assumed the tiger stance…” If Bajarias were to strike a pose to approximate the attitude of his first book, a mock-serious tiger stance seems most fitting. Many of his poems are filtered through a sensibility whose defaults oscillate from amused to spaced out to blasé rather than let-me-break-your-heart solemn, the garden-variety stance generated by poetry preoccupied, as is Bajarias’s, with alienation, heartbreak, domesticity, and death in the pop culture-infested, capitalist-consumed, rent-anxious life of the urban dweller. Sure, there is pain and pining, but with a cast of characters including girls in shampoo commercials and anchorsluts, with guest appearances by Sonny Chiba, Rick Moranis, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Jean-Luc Picard, these poems, fortunately, cannot keep a straight face for too long.

There is much tenderness in Pepsi Tastes Funny, a refreshing joyful attention to animals, particularly cats, as complex, communicative creatures (the dogs in the book are mangy, the birds differentiated—maya, frigatebird, Arctic warbler, sandpiper—but the cats, all apartment-based and cared for, reign supreme and are called by name—Scratch, Dutch, Cuervo, Spoon), and a healthily unabashed macho love for women (as in “Her face is the only face/you don’t think of/when you jerk off” in “she’s the one”) but moments most vulnerable are rarely seized upon as opportunities for poignancy and high drama (I think the few poems that go down the road of unadulterated earnestness are the clunkiest of the lot). Instead, Bajarias keeps things lighthearted, be it through downright comedy, playful irreverence, or—what I think is most difficult to do—calculated non-commentary. If, in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rainer Maria Rilke shakes us awake with the sudden appearance of a chasm of silence between most of the poem (a description of a headless sculpture) and its last line (“You must change your life.”), where one’s life is, without warning and with finality, directly and drastically implicated in the object one observes, in the hands of Bajarias, the same strategy—the sudden jolt, the chasm of silence between most of the poem and its end—makes us mindful of our sleepwalking without insisting that we wake up, the effect absurd and hilarious, as in “struggle slacker,” where a meditation over cat vomit and human vomit and rent just about due culminate in the lines “I looked at myself in the mirror./oh, call it a life.”

A master of the incidental-turned-momentarily-central, Bajarias is Richard Brautigan-like in his penchant for snapshots, sudden endings, and single statements most sexual. “Goobye” in entirety: “our pet Cuervo died/last year.//Cuervo was my/good friend.//We both hated karaoke/and car alarms in the morning.” In the poem, “there’s no telling,” a memory of the speaker’s grandmother fishing things out of a hanky juxtaposed with a girl fishing money out a Ziploc bag ends with the most unceremonious of lines: “‘What?’ she said.” And then there’s “O,” in entirety: “All the art men’ll ever need is the look of a woman with cum on her face”. There is no air of profundity here, or if there is, the profundity is tongue-in-cheek. Deadpan humor, yes, and often the sheer nerve of open-endedness, the poem hitting its final note by taking a deep breath and making that incomprehensible sound, mouth hanging open, about to say something more—only it doesn’t. The effect is a distractedness that immediately relinquishes the incident-turned-moment to the elusive yet again. In some of the lengthier poems, the open-endedness is achieved through accumulation and circularity, such as the ghazal-like “sutra in laundrytime” and sutra in shopping-mall time,” as well as the poems “marketing secrets of jesus christ revealed!” and “fateful turning points when the hero must,” where the stanzas can each function independently (I think the stanzas of the “sutras” and “fateful turning points” can even be read hopscotch, not just in sequence) yet also add up to make a whole.

In line with its sensibility (the collection is subtitled “Ramshackle Poems of Tomfoolery, Confusion & Heartbreak”), the language of Pepsi Tastes Funny is appropriately casual—at times too lax for its own good (also a Brautigan problem), resulting in some poems being either uneventful or longer than necessary—yet punctuated with images quite precise and vivid, their presence welcome and startling against the dominantly unscripted flavor of the poems. A line from “natural disasters & the smell of true love”: “In the restaurant, a nebulous waitress took my order.” Another from “some days feel like a train ran over your heart”: “The room is a thicket of belligerent trinkets.” A poem called “creamish,” in entirety: “The mammalian kiss desires whiteness within a gash of twilight tightening”. Bajarias impresses because he doesn’t try to do so; he lets the poems hang loose, allowing his lines to assume various degrees of unfinished-ness, foregoing the polish here and there. While I appreciate this quality in the individual poems, I’m not as much of a fan of the looseness when applied to the book itself. Pepsi Tastes Funny doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in arc, and while some poems, given their placement in the book, seem indicative of progression (as in the lighter poems of urban ennui at the beginning of the book as well as the string of poems on death toward the end), there is no compelling argument for the book to be read from start to end. Given the feel of the collection as a gathering of poems written over a period of time, the reading of it can also be loosely committed, not observant of the order in which the poems are arranged.

Bajarias has said he is already more than happy if friends and family read his work, the impetus to self-publish his first book (a second book of poetry, which he also intends to self-publish this year, is in the works) a consequence of his detachment from literary acclaim or even mere claims of literariness. The capacity of his poetry to yield many pleasures, however, is a clear sign that Pepsi Tastes Funny speaks to the reader interested in words, and what a loss it is if this book remains only in the shelves of a handful, whether due to the lack of machinery to get the book to readers, a problem perennially afflicting typically cash-strapped self-publishers, or to the lack of glitter in the shape of awards and blurbs by literary luminaries—audience-attracting paraphernalia which self-publishers, precisely because of their investment in autonomy, are allergic to, or in the case of Bajarias, simply detached from. But if poets like Bajarias can produce wonderful books through means that are off the beaten track, I don’t see why equally imaginative readers can’t step out of the usual channels to find and read exciting work, no matter what the award-giving bodies and literary authorities don’t say.

Masarap makipagkuwentuhan sa ’yo

Matapos ang mahaba-habang biyahe galing trabaho papunta sa inyo—tatlong dyip, isang tricyle, isang eskinitang tadtad ng tambay, turo-turo, tae ng aso—matapos ang pagtulak ng pinto, pagtanggal ng sapatos, paglapag ng bag at dyaryo sa sofa, isang tanong tungkol sa kulay ng blusa, isang sagot tungkol sa bagong bumbilya sa kwarto—matapos ang paghatak ng t-shirt, bagsak ng pantalon, angat ng palda, ungol, halinghing—masarap humiga sa kamang magkatabi, bagong hugas at punas, bihis, at makipagkuwentuhan sa ’yo—tahimik na kuwentuhan, bulungang nasasapawan ng harurot ng mga tricycle, ng walang-tigil na daloy ng tubig mula sa tangke sa hardin, bagay na lagi ’kong kinakabagabag kahit lagi mong sinasabi mabuti na ’yun, malulusog ang mga halaman at talahib, at ang mga pusang-kalye, dyan umiinom sa namumuong batis, mga bulong ng labi sa labi—kuwentuhang walang plano o patutunguhan, tungkol sa baon kong mansanas, sa kasama ko sa trabahong mali-mali kung bumigkas, kanina lang ginamit niya ang salitang triple at ang bigkas niya sa unang pantig ay try, as in subok, try-ple, tungkol sa mga uniporme ng saleslady sa SM, sa tv mong malapit nang mawalan ng silbi, kailangang tapik-tapikin para gumana, di pa malinaw ang channel 2 kundi hahawakan ang antenna—kuwentuhang napapadpad sa mga baduy na kanta nung ating kabataan, sa sari-saring mantsa sa sapin ng kama, sa mga nakakatawang salita tulad ng laplapan, Dirty Sanchez, duiker, pronking—kwentuhang walang hugis o dahilan, mga bulong ng labi sa labi, bulong na may halong tawa, tawang may halong halik, halik na sinlikot ng mga daliri mong…

…

…

… bukkake ang tawag dyan, hingal mo, may nginig sa boses, sa tuhod, nginig na palilipasin habang nakaupo sa sahig sa tabi ko, habang marahang pinupunasan ng t-shirt ang aking leeg, mukha, ang makulit kong ngiti, dala ng tunog-imbento mong salita.

Untitled

1.

The subject heading says look, and when I do, I click on the folder named Files, and inside it, Undergrad, and inside it, Beowulf to Chaucer, and inside it, Paper 1, and inside it, Notes. I drag the photo there.

2.

Your hair falling over your eyes wide open, your hair can barely hide them. What do you want from me? the look says. Or, more accurately: What do you want from me.

3.

The eye directed not at the face but the mouth, not the mouth but the sound that escapes it, the sound swallowed up by the belting of the guitar, track five, circa speeding down the highway to the beach, eleven years old, uncle yammering about the cost of cement and labor for the new room, still unbuilt, for the baby, still unborn.

4.

Before the temperamental streaks of light on the carpet. Before the ants lined up on the sill. Before the stuttering wires, the poker-faced dog, the crumbs on the pillow, the palm against the lens.

5.

Your face in between the thighs wide open, minus hands, minus breasts, minus note to self, minus moment of weakness, minus mouth in the shape of the sound that escapes it.

I fill in the blank:

I fill in the blank:

I fill in the blank: One of three.

UltraElectroMagneticLit!

Amazing Acrobatics and Aesthetic Apprehensions in Adam David’s The El Bimbo Variations (Youth & Beauty Brigade/CentralBooks, 2008)

first published in the Philippines Free Press, 28 February 2009

Despite the abundance of that commodity called humor writing in the local literary marketplace, there is very little of contemporary writing that is genuinely lighthearted—by this I mean delightful and delighting in ways beyond the perishable haha by way of cuteness and inconsequentiality produced by the majority of creative nonfiction, capped by the requisite tenderness—whether latent, explicit, or sardonic—toward the frailty of one’s inescapably middle-class human condition. In poetry, where the typical stance is meditative, if not brooding, lightheartedness is even harder to come by, its closest incarnations limited to the poignant lyrical moment or the erudite, read-up-to-get-the-joke allusion. It seems that to have any fun, we must keep things mindless (the foundation upon which the highly successful industry of comfort reading is built) and if we are to say anything of consequence, we can’t be cracking up at same time. These are easy equations, of course, and—as with any formula imposed upon writing—lacking in imagination, if not outright untrue.

What Adam David attempts to do in his first book, The El Bimbo Variations, is put these easy equations to rest by blasting them to smithereens and hopefully, beyond resurrection. To the skeptical reader weary of stunts, however, its hyperbolic premise—to rewrite the first two lines of the Eraserheads’ “Ang Huling El Bimbo” ninety-nine times—immediately raises red flags. There is the suspiciously effortless strumming of one’s heartstrings courtesy of the book’s running reference, where attention is not earned but ripped off from everyone’s favorite pop song by everyone’s favorite band, and then there is the potentially exasperating number of rewrites, the threat of a broken record looming, the consequent anxiety of the when-will-this-end variety, similarly endured in the face of a Lav Diaz film or a performance, however short, of John Cagean, chance-driven music. David is himself a skeptic of the most impatient, grim-and-determined sort, as evident in the caustic criticism he practices and publishes in this magazine, which makes the need to walk the talk all the more imperative, and the failure to do so all the more shameful.

Having said that, I must also say that I wrote the introduction to The El Bimbo Variations (of which there are two existing versions, one printed on demand by CentralBooks and out of print, and the other, with minor revisions, available as a downloadable pdf from the author’s blog, wasaaak.blogspot.com), the mere fact already a statement of my high regard for the book. But having written the introduction more than a year ago, I think the book and my thoughts on it are ripe for revisiting, distance being a sufficient impetus, as well as the context of David’s newer work. The El Bimbo Variations, to me, remains genuinely lighthearted, delightful for its hysteria by way of excess and corresponding schizophrenia, the risk of redundancy repeatedly confronted with the obsessive imagining and re-imagining of a couple of lines. The only way to appreciate this is to see it in action. Here is “Déjà vu”: “Kamukha mo si Paraluman/nung tayo ay bata pa/Si Paraluman kamukha mo.” Here is “Forgetful”: “Kamukha mo si…” Here is: “Doubtful”: “Kamukha daw niya dati si Paraluman. Daw.” Here is “Derogatory”: “Yuck./Paraluman.” Here is “Tanaga”: “Babaeng lusog-hita/(Sa El Bimbo’y bihasa)/Sino ang ’yong kamukha?/‘Si Paraluman (nung bata)!” Here is “Acronymic”: “Exuberant loneliness:/bosoms in motion beyond observation.” Here is “Lipogram on ‘A’”: “My thoughts: persistently perturbed by memories of you.” Here is “Univocalism on ‘O’”: “‘Oh, God, no, don’t go!’ Old Boy longs for Joy, now lost to ghosts of old folks; food to frogs, to dog gods, to gross brown worms.” Here is “Tautogram on ‘U’”: “Utilizing utmost urbanity, underdog uberpoet – ultimately unloved – unbosoms unencumbered ursine upwellings; utterances unsaid, unbeknownst.”

Accumulation-over-arc at its most extreme finds a proponent in The El Bimbo Variations, the ninety-nine experiments an overall success because of a working method of constraints in which David clearly thrives, a pool of parameters ranging from descriptive (as in the variations called “Doubtful,” “Derogatory,” “Sarcastic,” “Insistent”), to traditional (as in the local “Diona,” “Tanaga,” and “Dalit,” or the foreign “Limerick” and “American Haiku”), to graphic (as in the Kenneth Koch-inspired “The Art of the Possible,” the Edward Gorey-inspired “Gashlycrumb Tiny,” or the plain and simple “Chordbook”), to genre-based (as in “Erotica,” “SpecFic,” and “True Philippine Ghost Story”), to Western-canonical (as in the variations channeling William Blake, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce), to Oulipian (as in the “Tautogram” and “Lipogram” series, constraints concocted by the French math-and-lit enthusiasts comprising the movement known as Oulipo). The variations escape monotony, hard evidence of the author’s impressively elastic vocal register. Each variation is a unique counterpoint to the Eraserheads’ original lines, and each variation, by virtue of the peculiar alchemy triggered by a change in tone, sensibility, language, available alphabet and vocabulary, syntax, etcetera, is a transformation of one particular idea. Its resistance to closure lies in its nature as a book, its hysteria most evident when read as a whole, whether in sequence or hopscotch. Being rewrites, the book’s plot doesn’t thicken, it only changes its face again and again. The entire collection delights in the multiplicity of experiences residing in the province of language; the discrepancy between the base text and each variation as well as the diversity of variations prove, again and again, that what you say is how you say it, that form and content are inextricable from each other, that every wording of an experience is itself the experience.

This, of course, is my solemn paraphrase of what transpires in The El Bimbo Variations; that the book is funny while my description of it is not only emphasizes the credibility of its theses as well as the ease with which it combines providing pleasure and provoking thought. This book will make you laugh; it is filled with jokes, puns, tricks, and parodies, turning the act of writing into a game, which it in turn plays well. Some of the constraints are ridiculously precocious and playful, demanding that the source text be rewritten using only the letters on the left or right side of the computer keyboard (see “Left-Handed” and “Right-Handed”), or the vocabulary of computer programming (see “ALGOL”), or only words beginning with the same letter (see the “Tautogram” series). They taunt, goad, and dare, challenging even the most lethargic of spectators to recognize the wordplay, maybe even turn into participants delighting in the malleability of language and bent on outwitting the game’s morphing constraints. After applauding adamantly anti-academic, avant-garde author, amateur audience—abandoning apprehensions and activating adventurous attitude—applies appealing absurd activities, attempts anaphora, acronyms, and acrostics, asserting artifice. Amateur author—also ambivalent and androgynous, avidly alleluia-allergic, anal and ambitious—acquires alphabet addiction, accumulates arrhythmic adaptations, amusing aphorisms, auditorily agreeable anthems, and amiable allegories, all-in-all above-average art. Ahaha! Ayun.

A surefire way to kill something funny is to explain it, which perhaps also accounts for the tendency to overlook the complexity of ideas embedded in casual, irreverent texts like The El Bimbo Variations. A reader who is not particularly careful or conscientious may simply pick up the book and laugh at its jokes; the more sophisticated reader, on the other hand, equally entertained, may easily dismiss the collection as an elaborate finger exercise, its author merely goofing off. Anticipating this, David provides an aggressive antidote in the form of extensive notes, ensuring the elevation of the variations—many of them one- to three-liners—into Poetry, Literature, Art. In the tradition of T.S. Eliot’s notorious “Waste Land” notes, David risks infuriating the reader by making his authorial voice present and prominent, diminishing the reader’s autonomy through an annoying habit often associated with control freaks who are also figures of authority: hovering. The corollary risk is, of course, killing the joke with explanation, and very learned explanations at that. While some of the notes are detached definitions of the many terms that certainly need defining, others are not. They are chatty and anecdotal, and at times slightly breezy explanations of literary concepts. Through the notes, David insists that the word games in the book be read in the tradition of the Oulipo, that the amusing verbal acrobatics be seen as outcomes of exacting attention to craft, that the allusions be recognizable and not possibly missed, that the book’s pedestrian-accessibility not be interpreted as a sign of shallowness, that the surface effects be read beyond their surface appeal. In case the reader fails to get it, the notes say that The El Bimbo Variations is not just funny, it’s also literary. The gesture smacks of defensiveness, which runs contradictory to the lightheartedness of the work.

I am sure David is aware of this, and—heavy-handedness and initial irksome effect arising from the didacticism aside—I actually appreciate the notes, and I am happy David made the Eliot gamble. The reader unaware of such things is certainly better off coming out of The El Bimbo Variations with new knowledge of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, of univocalism and spoonerisms or the dalit and cento, of William Burroughs and Byron Gysin, of Finnegans Wake and Tender Buttons. Sure, these may appear as props to validate the literariness of David’s work, subtracting from the devil-may-care attitude that of course, still emanates and remains forceful in this book that undoubtedly proposes an ecstatic alternative to the timidity that infects most of creative nonfiction or the humorlessness in most poetry, but it is a small sacrifice in exchange for the education that this book—in many ways a manual of writing complete with ninety-nine examples—offers.

David has gone on to write a second book called Texticles, a collection of dagli, also downloadable from his blog, and is working on an Oulipian novel called Abecediarya, with chapters comprised of tautograms following the order of the alphabet, excerpts of which appear in the soon-to-be-released anthology, Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 4. (An advocate of self-publishing, David is a firm believer in creating alternative spaces for publication unfettered by the policing of designated literary authorities; he also happens to be a staunch critic of speculative fiction as packaged and practiced here, but these are other long stories.) Texticles and Abecediarya, among other things, are elaborate extensions of some of the experiments in The El Bimbo Variations; a constraint explored in two lines in the first book, for example, balloons into a full-length chapter in the newer work. David is certainly evolving as a writer, one who can be counted on to surprise us again and again. It looks like The El Bimbo Variations, a feat in itself, is bound to soon absorb the identity of prelude to other, more spectacular inventions.

And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth

Introduction to And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth by Carljoe Javier (forthcoming, Milflores Publishing)

Ah, geek love. Indulging yet again in a Mythbusters marathon, where humanity’s long-held myths become subject to investigation through elaborate, stunt-infested, blast-ridden, techno-savvy, ridiculously entertaining scientific experiments, all in the name of putting an end to the sleepless nights that come with life’s burning questions—Did the great escape from Alcatraz end in success or failure? Do cell phones trigger explosions in gas stations? Will the combined intake of a certain amount of pop rocks and soda make your tummy burst? Does toast always fall butter-side down? Is yawning really contagious?—I am gooey-eyed as I watch, smitten, not only with the orchestrated explosions (be it of bathtub, car, or cement truck) and amazing mechanical thingamajigs built from scratch (buttered toast flinger and samurai-approximating sword wielder, anyone?), but also with the show’s two brainy hosts, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman—both bulging-bellied, bearded, and bespectacled, balding, if not bald, one blathering and blundering, the other blunt and beret-ed—a shameless fangirl hanging on to their every word, giggling at every joke of two geeks doing what they do best—geeking out.

The charms of the geek are many, and this, Carljoe Javier clearly knows. In writing And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, Carl takes the geek boy (and geeks, at whatever age, are always boys)—instantly recognizable to any guy with a smart, good-natured buddy whose weirdness lies in the tendency to fixate to the point of absurdity on certain interests, and to any girl who has known the pleasure of having that reliable physics tutor (who teaches her to derive instead of memorize), computer expert (who never fails to iron out the kinks of her quirky laptop), and info junkie (who takes it upon himself to supply her with downloadable material on quasars, if she happens to express a remote interest) in her life—making him the informing intelligence of the scruffy, poorly groomed, balls-scratching, beer-guzzling, guitar-and-video-game-playing, ultimately charming goofball persona that dominates the book. We get to know a guy who, as a kid with poor eyesight and saddled with that ubiquitous geek indicator—eyeglasses—believed he would get optic blasts or go blind, “but then all my other senses would be enhanced to super-human levels. I’d have something like sonar and I’d have super-agility and reflexes.” This is a guy whose childhood constituted of “pretending that you’re Indiana Jones, studying military books to prepare yourself as a future A-Team member, and then being able to name the Original Star Trek, meaning full names, ranks, and designations, as well as assembling plastic models of the Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon and quoting Yoda and Obi-Wan to explain things.” A veritable Adam Savage/Jamie Hyneman-in-the-making.

And Carl certainly does his own mythbusting in And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, but rather than go by way of encyclopedic knowledge and that bewildering capacity for obscure detail retention for which geeks are known, he plays up the social ineptitude and predisposition to clunky situations set off by a series of unfortunate events for which geeks are also known. Looking at the world through Carl’s bespectacled eyes—and occasional beer goggles—as he finds himself peeing on an exposed wire or wincing at the regurgitated adobo in a toilet bowl or surviving a battery of Q&As with a gaggle of bridesmaids or staring at lingerie pinned to a clothesline and fluttering in the wind, myth after myth gets shattered—myths about girls, about the rock star lifestyle, about girls in all girls’ schools, about reality television, about girls featured in men’s magazines, and oh, did I already say about girls? Not that the shattering draws any blood—not when it’s done in a voice funny and likeable, at times lazy and drunken, always companionable, comfortable, and comforting—the same steady voice you can count on to fill you in on any and all things Lost and Battlestar Galactica, remind you when it’s Shark Week on Discovery Channel, and calm you down with a solution to your computer’s latest meltdown. Ah, geeks. What’s not to love?

Closing Remarks

Delivered in response to the tribute to young women writers by the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings, 28 November 2006

On behalf of the young women being honored here today, I would like to thank the ALIWW for the lavish expression of faith in our written work.

It is quite overwhelming to receive this kind of attention when we are still in the early stages of our writing lives. Honestly, the only way I can appreciate my place in this ceremony, what with the body of work I barely have, is to view it as the most generous gesture of belief in possibility. And what a privilege it is to have such interest and encouragement as the context in which we work and write.

Privilege, however, becomes obscene in the face of complacency, and while it would be unjust to say we women writers of this generation—that is, those of us being honored today—have it easy, it would be naïve to say we have it hard. We have history, especially the women writers of earlier generations, to thank for battles fought and won, and for battles begun. Survival, invisibility, submissiveness—these are terms we are able to articulate and engage with without necessarily paying the price of our lives. We are listened to, acknowledged, and valued for the poems and stories we write. The easiest thing to do with privilege is to take it for granted, to succumb to a sense of entitlement that breeds mediocrity, even sheer silliness. To live up to the faith invested in our work as writers is to fulfill the promise, throughout our lives, never to take it easy.

Writing, to me, has always been an exercise of the mind, a way of thinking, a vital sign of will. Ann Lauterbach writes, “When we are moved by an aesthetic object, a poem or a piece of music or a painting, we experience a dual gladness: that the artist has made these choices and, by extension and analogy, that we, too, are capable of making choices.” This gathering of fellow writers, friends, and family, though held in honor of thirteen young women writers, is, more importantly, an affirmation of the creative life as a rich expression of human agency. We are grateful to be the occasion for reiterating the value of this ideal.

Good on Paper: The Poem on the Page

I don’t really think much about my creative process. As someone prone to excessive analysis, which counts among its worst side effects, paranoia, and on relatively good days, humorlessness, I am uncharacteristically disinterested in the paths I take to get to a poem. Not that disinterestedness has always been my default; it took some thinking (yes, analysis again) for me to arrive at this stance, this temporary suspension of self-awareness. When in the thick of writing, I need not to think too hard. By this I don’t mean my writing is driven solely by instinct (though surely, this plays a part), or by feeling (though I admit I emote a lot in my poems). What I do need as I process a poem into existence is to maintain loose contact with my ideas and let them meander their way down the page. I find that when I handle them with a firm grip, they turn into puppets rather than poems—limbs limp, movements mechanical, steps predetermined. Immoderate calculation on my part renders the poem lifeless; things hold together for the most artificial, reductive reasons, and the poem becomes its own prison—unable to reach beyond itself.

And so, if I equate creative process with the very act of writing a poem, my approach is easy lang. Napangungunahan kasi yung tula kapag masyadong nangungulit at namimilit. Certainly, I write because I have something to say, but the more attached I am to my original ideas and intentions—the more I know what I want to say, treating it as a script to be followed—the more the poem assumes the qualities of summary, diminishing in its potential for becoming an experience in itself. In this case, no discovery for myself, and by extension, the reader, awaits, because to begin with, no journey takes place. I need a particular impetus to sit down and write—an image, a vibe, and always, a keeper of a first line—but beyond this, I prefer to keep myself in the dark. As I make my way out, the poem gets written.

This isn’t to say I don’t make plans before I write because I do. Naniniwala ako sa sulat-kutob at tingin ko, may libog na nawawala kapag walang bahid nito ang akda. But I’m also a believer in art as willed, and I’m most productive when I have a couple of clear-cut goals in mind, which, in my experience, are fueled by risk and restlessness, that is, my inescapable need for collision with dilemmas played out in the expanse of a book, my container of choice in which to execute thought. In other words, I like giving myself problems, both craft- and content-wise, separate threads at the onset which ought to merge beyond unraveling. I really don’t see the point in writing what one already knows; nothing is more insufferable than cliché, which, for the writer confined to comfort zones and habits, takes the form of repeating oneself (if not a million others) again and again. I also like taking time and space to work out these problems, which is why, so far, I see myself as writing books of poems, rather than individual poems collected into books. When I wrote elsewhere held and lingered, I had in mind a novel in verse—narrative in arc yet unfolding in lyrical increments, driven by plot yet developed through collage. I wanted the poems to be read in sequence and against each other; I wanted the form of the collection as a book to be necessary.

The idea of writing a book of poems—rather than one poem after another—was for the most part invisible to me when I was starting out as a writer. I used to be interested in perfecting the individual poem. I aspired to write poems that had a finished quality to them—the language tight, the images adding up, the beginning-middle-end discernible. I still believe in such things, but back then, there was something unsettlingly mathematical in my approach; at best, I wrote poems that were crystal clear, but more often than not, they were reducible to formula. When the idea of a book finally presented itself to me—this happened maybe two-thirds into my manuscript of what would eventually be Dark Hours—it had the quality of revelation almost instantly brought down to the level of common sense, similar to the first time it hit me that I didn’t have to be Catholic if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to equate writing with perfecting the individual poem. There was also writing a book of poetry to think about, which opened up to me, for example, the exciting possibilities of poems in relation to rather than in isolation from each other—drawing their energies from each other, employing recurrences, echoes, patterns, and functioning in sequence (thus contesting ideas of individuality and perfection, and entertaining ideas of continuity, and, well, mess). This created a radical shift in my writing process. From the snail’s pace I was used to, tirelessly obsessing over a single poem and imposing upon it the burden of fulfilling a plethora of goals, my writing sped up; I started writing poems simultaneously, allowing the poems to share the weight of my artistic burdens, to refer to each other, depend on each other.

I was already conscious of it then, but I became all the more sensitive to the way the poems functioned on the page when I saw them as material for a book, triggered, perhaps, by a heightened awareness of them as physical things with physical appearances that could be arranged one after the other. The necessity of my work assuming book form extended to the necessity of setting the poem on the page—making it a thing to be looked at and not just read. If poetry is thought shaped on the page, then I needed to understand how the three components—thought, shape, page—worked in relation to each other. To begin with, why write a poem down? We can recite poem, we can sing a poem, why do we have to see a poem on the page? I needed to account for the poem as written down; the convergence of the three components had to be crucial, not mere convention or accident.

In light of these concerns, a craft question I had in writing elsewhere held and lingered involved rediscovering the function of the line in poetry. After working on Dark Hours, where, among other things, I turned to prose, I needed to get to know the line again and to recover its relevance to me. In Dark Hours, where I constructed a world fraught with urban despair and populated by anonymous, isolated characters, I thought it best to abandon the artifice of the line (poetry’s most blatant signal in presenting itself as artful), favoring instead a more unobtrusive, low-key form, and also one which could be read at a greater (however minute the difference is) speed, sans the more pronounced stops and pauses supplied by verse. I wanted the uniform blocks to mirror the undifferentiated quality of the landscape, with its disdain for proper nouns, overall grayness in color and mood, and the unanimous, non-hierarchical presence of despair. Of course the risk of so much flatness was monotone, a difficult battle I had to fight then, especially given my habitual sentence structure, made more predictable by repetitive block text. This risk, in particular, haunted me all the way to my second book, which is why, aside from the return to the line, another project I foisted on myself in writing elsewhere held and lingered had to do with writing more elaborately musical lines.

It can be very difficult to bestow the line with the integrity it deserves, what with the many poems out there which use verse as mere ornament, a crutch to proclaim its poem-ness, a supposedly easy fix to clumsy combos of sound and flow. Knowing that so many poems disregard the potential of the line even as they use it became an occasion for me to make pertinent the technique as used in each poem in the collection. I also pushed the experiment further by doing away with default conventions—the poem shaped as a column, the lines roughly symmetrical in length, and the obedience to the left-hand margin. Instead I went for longer lines, indentions, uneven lengths. In elsewhere held and lingered, the setting and characters are far more contained—involving only a handful of rooms and three main characters—even the subject matter is fiercely focused on infidelity. Expanse, then, I thought, became the province of the form, which in this book, I sought to be more varied, beginning with the tension of syntax and line as carried out on the page. The asymmetrical lines, the far more intricate sentence structures, the prominence of dashes, and the longer poems, a number spilling from one page to the next, were all meant to push the poetry beyond the containment of its small world, to capture the uncertainty, the sudden shifts in thought, the hysteria constantly breaking loose and being fought against by a lead character in search of stability in the face of multiple manifestations of fracture (this is a slight rip-off of Mabi David’s blurb for my book—as I mentioned earlier, I don’t really think that hard in the midst of writing, but her description, in retrospect, seemed pretty convincing to me). Hinayaan kong maging malikot ang mga linya sa pahina, na naisip kong maging paraan ng pagpapalinaw ng gulo ng isip—madalas na kalagayan ng pangunahing tauhan sa koleksyon. I wanted the lines to be musical visually, to leap off the page in their being so erratic, jittery. This drove me to write poems which leapt in sound from phrase to phrase, not written following traditional templates in rhyme and meter, yet musical by virtue of sounds tossed from line to line, allowing them to morph and shift and carry meaning from one set of words to the next. This exercise, which I carried out in a handful of poems—any more would have been exhausting to me—made me especially conscious of the tandem of sound and structure, the poem on the page literally a visual counterpart of the poem as read.

And finally, my awareness of appearance on the page led to continuing and pushing further a preoccupation begun in Dark Hours—that of appropriating non-literary forms into poetry. The idea of employing forms in ways outside their typical functions is extremely seductive to me (a couple of books by Essay Press, Mark Z. Danielewski’s novels, and John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay are bibles to me for this reason), and I thought this could be another way to engage with the fracturing that is a preoccupation of the collection. I already used footnotes to a non-existent text in Dark Hours, but in elsewhere held and lingered, I attempted a wider vocal range in the stand-alone notes, which also happen to be lengthier than in Dark Hours. I also made use of unexpected templates as shapes into which I fit thought on the page—a multiple choice exam, and an index, a prose poem with footnotes attached to it. The appearance of these poems on the page is so necessary that they cannot be divorced from it—I would be hard pressed to read these poems aloud in a poetry reading; it is on the page where they truly reside and come alive.

Already, I feel like I’ve talked about my work too much. I am a firm believer in my work being its own best explanation, despite evidence to the contrary, what with all this chatter. I do hope these notes are helpful to you in thinking about your own work. And I hope the page doesn’t automatically fade into the background—the way it often does—next time you decide to write a poem down.

& (Ampersand), Volume 1

Introduction to & (Ampersand), The Creative Writing Journal of the UP English Department
Volume 1, 2008

We live, think, and write in a place where there are more than enough reasons not to think, not to write. Where we are, there are hardly any publication venues for creative work, and barely any readers for the work that does see print. There are more pressing matters at hand, say, hunger, shelter. Where we are, no less than our generals, officials responsible for our security, can perform the perplexing, amateurish antic of packing billions of euros in their check-in luggage, banking on blockheads like themselves in other shores to miss the obscene display of corruption. This, while those of us who teach in UP obsessively calculate the photocopying costs, at fifty centavos a page, of the readings we require, so oddly apologetic we are, at times, for the volume of required texts, so conscious we are of the price tag that comes with knowledge. Surely, the students can read, but can they afford the (photocopied) readings? Where we are, reproductive health, a right and non-issue in many other places, remains the subject of heated debate. If we still have to ask, why reproductive health, then there is no way discussions in response to the question, why write, can amount to anything encouraging.

And yet, we think, and yet, we write. Despite conditions to the contrary, vibrant conversations continue to take place in the creative writing classes of UP, and exciting work continues to be produced by its students. This, if not the premise, is at the very least the hope of &. In providing a venue for student writing to see print, & celebrates the experiments to come out of the hospitable, illuminating laboratory of ideas that is the classroom—hard evidence of fruitful conversations which ought to continue well beyond the limits of the classroom and the time frame of a semester. The pages you are about to read house an impressive range of student writing, which, in its valiant attempt to rejuvenate and re-imagine what it is to write creatively, ought to reach an audience beyond one professor and a handful of peers.

There is no denying the drudgery that also infects teaching, writing, and studying—tepid lectures, uninspired drafts, one-track minds, and dead air are all too common occurrences that they hardly need documentation. But once in a while—often enough, I’d like to think—the classroom becomes aswarm with possibilities, its residents alert, awake, and engaged. Once in a while, a student, struck by an idea or dilemma tossed in discussion, takes it home, mulls it over, and turns it into a poem, or story, or essay. Once in a while, in workshop, we find ourselves in the presence of a draft that offers a startling thought, or method, or turn of phrase. And we are only too happy to take a break from the blasé attitude that is practically a religion to many of us, and bask in the thrilling encounter with something new.

&, of course, like many things born of good intentions, cannot save the world from itself, but, if one can at the very least be given credit for trajectory, it is a whiff of a hint of a step in that direction. What it can do, after all, is provide a space where the imagination—often the first to go in the face of poverty, corruption, plain mediocrity, and sheer market-driven mentality—can be cultivated, cherished, and championed. It was William Carlos Williams who said, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there,” with which the journal agrees. As I write this I am snickering at my own loftiness—so much drama, todo emote nga naman—but given our context, where spaces for the imagination are few and far between, a little flourish in celebrating them when they do come along cannot be excessive.

I am particularly excited about & precisely because it casts its attention on students of writing, whom I presume to be the most reckless and relentless in their pursuit of the imagination. The idea is to collect the best work of the year written by both undergraduate and graduate students in the courses of the UP Creative Writing Program. The process of gathering material for the journal is fairly straightforward. Each year, a faculty member of the CW Program takes on the role of issue editor. All other CW faculty members are expected to submit copies of the best work in their classes to the issue editor, who selects the material for inclusion in the journal and writes an introduction. Each issue, in effect, becomes a version of the year in writing in UP, and each introduction a document of what CW teachers are thinking of, interested in, or on the lookout for, when they read and write.

In “Period Piece,” among many things that Marc Gaba asserts is that there is nothing passive about anthologizing, and that the unfair hand dealt the notion of the “best” when putting together an anthology occurs when there is hardly anything said to qualify it. And so, as the editor of the maiden issue of &, I have a couple of things to say about the pages you are about to read. It being the first issue, it covers the years 2006 to 2008. For this issue, also, I chose to privilege the youngest of the young and limited myself to the work of undergraduates. Because &, fortunately, is somewhat exempt from the demands of the market, in the tug-of-war between catering to and creating audiences, the journal can tip itself more easily towards the latter, and for this reason, I chose to include many pieces that may have a hard time getting placed in the few existing venues that print creative work.

I am interested in adventurous, hard-to-classify, provocative writing. I am always on the lookout for writing that is unafraid to make claims, meticulous in its pursuit of ideas, imaginative in its treatment of genre, and unwavering in its exuberance. I like work that takes risks and isn’t so keen on maintaining a polished and poised veneer, consequently exhibiting some kind of urgency. I favor work written with an integrity that erases the division between form and content, style and substance; in other words, work that eludes paraphrase. In particular, I gravitate towards process-based, page-oriented work, i.e., work that actively exposes the process of its making and deliberately engages the page in its unfolding. Thus, there are a number of pieces in this issue that are meant to be looked at as much as read. They wrestle with matters of the said and unsaid, space and silence, fragment and fissure, finished and unfinished, version and copy, true and false. They are also about sex and violence, politics and history, humor and decadence, spacing out and ennui. These statements, of course, are crude summaries.

Inspired by the term “potential literature” borrowed from the Oulipo, I am also interested in the appropriation of nonliterary forms and ephemera into literature. In this issue you will find lists, an entire essay made of graffiti found all over UP, an exam, a dictionary entry, a story that is a draft of a story. In employing these forms, the imagination is made to come out and play, something so easy forget when we write and emote and take ourselves oh-so-seriously. There is much delight in experimentation here, much playfulness in the act of trying things out. To animate a word, to capture another lilt in thought, to trigger a shift in perception—these achievements are most surprising when accomplished by unlikely suspects.

That the journal is named after a conjunction—and not the conjunction itself but its symbol—is promise and proof of its commitment to the ongoing, the in-progress, the middle of, where minds are always thinking, always on the move, where the imagination is ever in flux. And now, a couple of thank-yous for making this possible: to Jing Hidalgo and Butch Dalisay, whose Natatanging Guro Awards from the Chancellor have provided the life source, i.e., funding, of the journal; and to friends of the CW program—Kokoy Guevara for suggesting the journal name, Adam David for the generous assistance in preparing the texts—especially those with graphics and other effects—for publication, and to book historian extraordinaire May Jurilla, for patiently working on the cover and layout of the book.

And? Of course, there is always more to say. On with the conversation.