I am aware that much of my poetry works with recurrent themes involving place (I am always writing about my hometown— Baguio, it seems), the complicated dynamics of family, the often tangled relationships between history, time, and memory. […]
At the same time, I am aware of the desire to make a clear and accessible connection to readers, whoever they might be, while remaining true to my heart’s first subjects and passions. The notion of a “universal audience” has about the same significance and importance to me as the arguably comparable notion of a “global citizen.” (That is to say, the construct of universality which posits that underneath all the indices of identity, history, gender, etc. which mark us, we are essentially all the same, might be useful in certain contexts, but also undeniably dangerous for its potential to conflate the details of our histories, which are singular.) But also, I cannot believe that what I write would have relevance only for an audience “just like me,” or that such an audience really and truly exists.
Mom at 36
While she talks on the phone,
her blue pen seems to have
a life of its own,
makes abstract flowers
& filigree
& Gordian knots
all around the list of birds seen
on her morning walk.
I watch fascinated
as I eat my allotted three
fresh peanut-butter cookies,
each bearing the print of a fork’s
uncomplicated foot.
What’s mental illness got to do with it?
There’s just one particular form of mental illness that’s been found to be shared by a significant number of spree killers. It’s depression. At least a tenth of people in the U.S. have it, or have had it, myself among them. And there’s no conclusive causal link between the depression and spree killing.
You are not normal.
There is no normal. You may well be happy and well adjusted. I hope you are. I often am as well. But every single person is neurologically distinct. Normal is semantic, an arbitrary boundary on the bell curve between peak and long tail. Mentally ill, if it means anything at all, just means landing on the wrong side of that arbitrary line.
Poems vs. bullets
Today I happened to remember I’d written a poem in the voice of a hero from a previous school shooting. Romanian holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, blocked the doorway to keep the gunman from entering while his students got out through the windows, “into the garden.”
Let’s get real, you say. What good can poetry possibly do, faced with these kinds of horrific acts? I’d reply that anything that helps to deemphasize and demythologize the role of the killer can’t hurt. I tend to think that the mass media’s focus on the killers not only ensures that they will be remembered, but also encourages other violent, antisocial types to emulate them knowing they’ll get the same kind of notoriety. And notoriety might sometimes be just what such troubled young men are after. I love old-time murder ballads as much as anyone, but I think it’s time to put those behind us and stop feeding a gun culture that romanticizes lone killers and vigilantes.
I don’t believe that news reports should be censored, so how to combat the sensationalism? By elevating and memorializing those like Librescu who resisted, and who led truly exemplary lives besides. I hope it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing songs and poems about Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung and the other heroes of the massacre.
More than poems of mourning — which are also necessary, and which we poets are always Johnny-on-the-spot with after every major cataclysm — we need poems of celebration and defiance. We can’t allow the killers to dominate our memories of these events, just as we can’t allow the gun fetishists to continue to hijack public discussion of the role of violence in our culture and how to change it. If we do, to coin a phrase: the terrorists will have won.
Wake
It doesn’t seem right,
looking at “the old moon
in the arms of the new,”
the dark part glowing
a bleary orange
with earthshine,
that we can still emit
so much radiance.
In response to Vigil.
Nocturne
For I am every dead thing.
John Donne, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”
December night. Meteors streak
through the bare crowns of oaks.
I watch the sky as if it were the sleeping face of a dreamer.
All that blazing action without a sound!
And the longer I look, the more unfamiliar it becomes,
wholly itself & yet possessed. Wild. Vulnerable.
I want to be present the way an oak is present
& stretch empty arms into the void.
I’m kind of a big deal on the web
Poets take note! There’s another critter out there even more adept than we are at hiding behind an enormous effigy of itself made entirely of garbage:
New Species of ‘Decoy’ Spider Likely Discovered At Tambopata Research Center
From afar, it appears to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the center of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon. As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.
Step in even closer and things start to get weird— that spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects. The confusion sets in. How can something be constructed to look like a spider, how is it moving, and what kind of creature made this!?
It turns out the master designer behind this somewhat creepy form is in fact a tiny spider, only about 5mm in body length, that is hiding behind or above that false, bigger spider made up of debris.
Sacrifiction
Somewhere between gratitude & reciprocity, things started to go wrong.
Because we were given time, we invented drumming.
Because we were given trees, we invented floor-length dresses.
And because we were given crops, we invented sacrifice.
When God sent a messenger to the sacred table & said Stop burning my meat — give it to the needy instead, we invented elaborate rules for hospitality that involved frequent bathing & fine clothes.
But because the needy were still exceedingly numerous, we went over God’s head & invented games of chance.
This invention was the mother of Necessity, otherwise known as That’s Just The Way Things Are.
And we took our chances and groveled in the dirt.
Words on the Street
The Legend of the Cosmic Hen
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Before there was a cosmic egg, there was a cosmic hen. Even in the absence of gravity, she couldn’t stay airborne.
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She was alone. When her feet got frost-bitten & began to bleed, she had to cannibalize herself.
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It was her need to bathe that gave rise to the galaxies. Bright dust spun out from hen-shaped holes.
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Laying left her slightly crazed. To this day, hens stand over their newly laid eggs & declare their readiness to buck, buck — buck all! Only then do they settle, croon & brood.
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Free range has its limits. For billions of years she waited in the middle of nowhere, listening for a car, for a cart — for anything on wheels to come along so she could race in front of it, wings outspread, making the first cross.