Poetry Matters

Si Marie, ako, si Alvin at si Ian, nung Writer's Night last week. Wala lang. Galing kay Kit.

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Ni-launch nga pala last Tuesday, after a 3-year delay, yung NCCA Ubod New Authors Series. Kasama ang chapbook ko, Reluctant Firewalker, sa mga ni-launch. Kung interesado kayong bumili ng kopya (kahit mga 3-6 years old na ang mga tulang nasa loob), paki-email ako sa nayav@yahoo.com. P80 lang pala per copy.

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Ito yung link sa poetry podcast ng Heights, kung saan nagbasa kami nina Egay at Arkaye ng mga tula. Good luck na lang sa pakikinig dahil hanggang ngayon hindi ko pa rin mapatugtog sa kahit anong computer dito sa Internet C@fe.

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May bago akong gustong makata, si Carol Muske-Dukes. 4 pa lang ang nababasa kong tula nya, kaya hindi ko pa masasabing bago ko siyang Paborito. Pero naaalala ko sina Carolyn Forche at Susan Mitchell sa kanya. Ito yung gusto kong tula nya:

To the Muse
(New Year's Eve, 1990)

She danced topless, the light-eyed drunken girl
who got up on the bow of our pleasure boat
last summer in the pretty French Mediterranean.

Above us rose the great grey starboard flank
of an aircraft carrier. Sailors clustered
on the deck above, cheering, and the caps rained down,

a storm of insignia: S.S. Eisenhower.
I keep seeing the girl when I tell you
the Eisenhower's now in the Gulf, as if

the two are linked: the bare-breasted dancer
and a war about to be fought. Caps fell
on the bow and she plucked one up, set it rakishly

on her red hair. In the introspective manner
of the very drunk, she tipped her face dreamily up,
wet her lips, an odalisque, her arms crossed akimbo

on the cap. Someone, a family member, threw a shirt
over her and she shrugged it off, laughing, palms
fluttering about her nipples. I tell you I barely knew

those people, but you, you liked the girl, you
liked the ship. You like to fuck, you told me.
The sex of politics is its intimate divisive plural,

we, us, ours, Who's over there? you ask -- not us.
Your pal is there, a flier stationed on a carrier.
He drops the jet shrieking on the deck. Pitch dark:

he lowers the nose toward a floating strip of
lit ditto marks and descends. Like writing haiku --
the narrator is a landscape. A way of staying subjective

but humbling the perceiver: a pilot's view.
When you write to your friend I guess that
there are no margins, you want him to see

everything you see and so transparent is
your kind bravado: he sees that too. Maybe
he second-guesses your own desire to soar over

the sand ruins, sit yourself in the masked pit
and rise fifteen hundred screaming feet a minute
into an accessible shape: falcon, hawk, Issa's

blown petals? Reinvent war, then the woman's faithless
enslaved dance. Reinvent sailors bawling at the rail
and the hail of cliches: flash of legs on the slave deck.

Break the spell, reverse it: caps on the waves as they
toss away their uniforms, medals, stars. Then the girl
will wake up, face west, a lengthening powerful figurehead

swept gold with fire. The waves keep coming: the you, the me,
the wars. Here is the worst of it, stripped, humiliated--
or dancing on the high deck, bully-faced, insatiable.

Here is the lie that loves us as history personified,
here's the personification: muse, odalisque, soldier,
nightfall -- swear to us, this time, you will make it right.