This room

She decided on the multi-colored bed linens with their machine-stitched designs. She thought that they would add some uncomplicated cheer to the room, which she had chosen because of its two large attractive windows that now flooded it with indiscriminate light. Everything was in plain sight, and daylight seemed to her like the determined but unexamined optimism of someone she did not understand. One might as well have some cheerful objects around. Her old curtains were useless against the light, but they were pretty. White leaves on white tendrils were stenciled on the fabric and felt starched against the soft cotton, which was unexpected. Their lengths differed slightly, and the width of the hem of one was uneven. But the stenciled leaves showed where the painter had perhaps lingered or hesitated with his paint roller. Suddenly it felt as if another person’s absorption was in the room. She decided that something must be done about that as well.

Filed under: Uncategorized , notes on a landscape

Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English on Conchitina Cruz, Jose Perez Beduya, and Marc Gaba

From Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, Rajeev S. Patke and Philip Holden eds. 2009: 175–177

“Among the younger poets practising from the Philippines, Conchitina Cruz is of particular interest. She is the author of Dark Hours (2005) and elsewhere held and lingered (2008). Her poems are distinguished by their introspective absorption, combining economy of articulation with a disembodied self-reflexivity which separates the self that writes from the self whose experiences, thoughts and feelings are written about….Cruz herself shows to be the poet of an analytically feminine selfhood intent on linking personal memories and experiences to an inescapable sense of living in a city. Her poems are imbued with a sense of dreams as well as dilapidation, a desire for relationship as well as solitariness, of a history both personal and communal that the contemporary poem can neither quite wholly comprehend nor affirm without qualification. The [poems of elsewhere held and lingered] exemplify a degree of quiet sophistication…”

“Also of note is Jose Perez Beduya, whose Seem (2007) is characterized by a faintly surreal minimalism, as in “An insomniac taking his cloud / of thoughts indoors to arrange them // on a page’ (2007: 8). Another poem, ‘Switch’, meditates on the paradox of ‘the dark / returning the act // of reading to the realm of the physical’, and puns neatly on the possibilities latent to the notions of sight and vision (2007: 3–4). A more complex conceit is unveiled in the second part of the poem ‘No Place In Nature’, where it is said that the blank veil of faith needs to be held up, ‘Because one must / be rendered // to be surrendered, / suffered by another // body’ (2007: 7). The word ‘render’ thus becomes laden with a double meaning, as does the idea of being suffered by another body. The minimalism works by placing ordinary words at pressure points in the system of articulation used to make meaning out of faith even as faith is made up of working new meanings into place in the poem.”

“Likewise, Marc Gaba’s How Sound Becomes A Name (2007) represents a bold step forward in terms of formal experiments in how syntax and typography can be broken down and re-assembled in new configurations which become an integral part of a reconfigured mode of poetic signification. ‘Study of Copernicus, 1514’, for example, gives a new role to syntactic dislocations in poetic cohesion. A different but equally fascinating experiment is conducted in the poem ‘Logic Diptych’, in which two facing pages of the printed text are placed in a visually antithetical relation across the split introduced by the inside-spine of the book. The first set of lines separates and pairs these two lines: ‘the second glorious mystery of the lord Thus printed’ | ‘a fourth glorious mystery the assumption of the blessed’ (2007: 4–5), and the rest of the diptych proceeds along similar lines of disjunction-cohesion. The combined roles of antithesis, apposition and conventional punctuation marks are re-worked around the pause represented by the diacritical mark for a caesura in several poems, such as ‘Swift’:

     then off | with you

     Idea | meaning: no afterlife | then nothing

     […]

                                                        (2007: 9)

“Such poems show a willingness to take language for a walk past the familiar markers that grammar and convention subsist on, in order to see how meanings can be crystallized around an unusual process of fragmentation and collage. The lessons of the more experimental forms of contemporary poetic idioms are thus assimilated into writing that opens up new possibilities for expression and communication in Southeast Asia.”

***

(These High Chair books are available at Filipinas Heritage Library and the U.P. Press Bookstore.)

Filed under: Poetry , Conchitina Cruz, Jose Perez Beduya, Marc Gaba

to be elsewhere is to be nowhere

The thing about being on the fringes is that when one is pointedly put in one’s place and is made to feel peripheral by the center’s blatant exercise of power for which one has little regard in the first place, then the exercise becomes no more than mere gloating and is pointlessly redundant.

But, then again, if there is anything that history has taught us it is that, sadly, repetition is always effective. Which may be the problem with Conchitina Cruz’s elsewhere held and lingered: its poems attempt to depart from those that one has long been accustomed to reading here—and they succeed. The list of the finalists for the National Book Awards just came out and Cruz’s elsewhere held and lingered wasn’t even nominated in the Poetry category, with members of the venerable Philippine Literary Arts Council serving as judges.

Now this just beggars belief. Cruz is one of most exciting poets in the Philippines today, and her works have been generating critical discussions both in and out of the classroom. To encounter a well-wrought work of art that shows the elasticity of preconceived boundaries of the genre and in that same work encounter a clarity of thought and an eloquence that help to genuinely and intelligently illuminate on the human experience is no mean feat. And this Cruz achieves in elsewhere held and lingered. The book has been called by some a novel in verse not only because of the compelling narrative arc and how deftly it utilizes to its advantage the pleasure arising from the reader’s willing absorption into a “story,” but also because, by its very act of “genre bending,” it accommodates the formal use of such elements as marginalia to a missing text, footnoted subtext, an index of first lines to imaginary poems, etc. And enabled out of these “formal means [are]…fresh and varied insights into experiences and ideas that remain personal, but with applications that are more general in scope.” (Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, Rajeev S. Patke and Philip Holden eds. 2009: 175-176) I offer further praise from Routledge:

“Among the younger poets practising from the Philippines, Conchitina Cruz is of particular interest. She is the author of Dark Hours (2005) and elsewhere held and lingered (2008). Her poems are distinguished by their introspective absorption, combining economy of articulation with a disembodied self-reflexivity which separates the self that writes from the self whose experiences, thoughts and feelings are written about….Cruz herself shows to be the poet of an analytically feminine selfhood intent on linking personal memories and experiences to an inescapable sense of living in a city. Her poems are imbued with a sense of dreams as well as dilapidation, a desire for relationship as well as solitariness, of a history both personal and communal that the contemporary poem can neither quite wholly comprehend nor affirm without qualification. The [poems of elsewhere held and lingered] exemplify a degree of quiet sophistication…”

One cannot help but wonder, and in this case out loud in the hopes of being heard and getting a response: why wasn’t elsewhere held and lingered nominated? And we ask not because of any prize or any recognition or Cruz having a chance at either or both—it is never about these things. If there is a lesson that the history of art awards has taught us it is that they are inadequate, even illusory, measures of one’s merit and provide one only doubtful, limited comforts.

But I insist on asking “Why wasn’t elsewhere held and lingered nominated?” because all too often those addressed refuse to respond, and this brush-off has broader implications given that this institution positions the awards, via its general and genre guidelines, as being interested in “new” and “original contributions” that “[develop] the poetic form into new or relatively unexplored frontiers.” What can attend this unexplained omission is a persistent and bewildering refusal to acknowledge the presence of poems that are different from the dominant strain but equally important and may even enrich contemporary Philippine poetry by the very criticism and experimentation they generate among readers and writers. What is alarming is that, instead, an acknowledgement of their presence—in the case of elsewhere held and lingered via its nomination—and the critical thought and the conversations that may arise out of the departures and the diversity may be seen as either lethal to or contemptuous of the mainstream poetic practice, and the hearty disagreements immediately condemned as partisan poetics. Better therefore to pretend that they do not exist. This is an old and tired refrain. We know that in art the impulse to modify, to challenge, to push the boundaries or break them down, to test one’s mettle and beliefs against the rock even if they might perish must be built in.

Filed under: Booklove, Poetry