American Poets in the 21st Century
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While other poems allude to Spanish and US colonialisms in the Philippines, Japanese occupation during World War II, and Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law, Diwata as a whole “does not primarily aim to critique colonialism” or authoritarianism, as Reyes notes, but rather “foregrounds women who have resisted, survived, endured colonial invasion and dislocation. They have done so by being creative, by (metaphorically) shape-shifting, by passing down wisdom through the generations (through story, song, dance, tattooing, weaving, etc.), and by arming themselves and fighting.”45 We see such shape-shifting take place when the main female figures—diwata, duyong/mermaids, Eve, unnamed hunter women—transmute into one another (for example, “Dragonflies,” “Estuary,” “Duyong 2,” “The Villagers Sing of the Woman Who Becomes a Wave Who Becomes the Water Who Becomes the Wind”), and we hear such cross-generational knowledge transmitted in the poems of collective assembly and incantation. “The Fire, Around Which We All Gather” exemplifies these practices: the ritualistic offering of tobacco and spirits to diwata, the arrival of the deity embodied in a female elder, and the recognition of her as poet, “conjurer of words” (Diwata 42), and as “lover and beloved” (Diwata 43). This ceremonial tribute to the unvanquished female guardians of wisdom, memory, oral tradition, and desire returns in the poem “In the City, a New Congregation Finds Her,” where “her” attributes are invoked through couplets and epithets: “She keeps safe our memory when nothing’s committed to stone. / Sibilant selvedge woman, thread and knots talkstory woman” (Diwata 64).
Although Diwata ends with the poem “Aswang,” a term used by the Spanish colonizers to demonize priestesses and medicine women, and thereby embraces those women who have continued “fighting” against patriarchal (neo)colonialism,46 I close here by turning to the book’s beginning. Reyes’s reimagining of two origin stories offers a way of considering her feminist poetics as a world-making practice. The Philippine tale of Malakas and Maganda (“strong” and “beautiful”), who emerged from a bamboo reed that a bird pecked open, and the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in which God fashions a woman out of the man’s rib, appear as epigraphs to the book. These stories are rewritten as the “The Bamboo’s Insomnia” and “A Genesis of We, Cleaved,” respectively. The latter uses the seven-day story of creation as a template for narrating the female speaker’s birth within, and separation from, her male beloved. Leaving aside themes of female betrayal, divine punishment, and ejection from paradise, “A Genesis” instead dramatizes erotic attachment by alluding to Aristophanes’s explanation of love in Plato’s Symposium as the consequence of primordial division. In this case, conventional gender roles are reversed, and the woman awakens within the “strange vessel” of the man’s “darkness” (Diwata 11). Contravening Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh”), this poem’s couple is “torn” apart by an “unseen hand from above,” “exacting penance for our joy” (Diwata 11). Ripped from her beloved, the speaker plunges into a river, sings a “dirge” of lament, dreams “that from loss” there might be a chance “of being whole” (Diwata 11), returns to “you” and is implanted with “your seed,” but then is “cleaved” yet again by the “unseen hand” and admits ambiguously: “On the seventh day, I surrendered” (Diwata 12).
This thematic clustering of creation, division, and erotic longing reverberates across a number of poems in Diwata (for example, “Again, She Tells the First Story,” “Eve’s Aubade,” “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores”) and is central to perhaps the most emblematic poetic statement in the book—the brief, enigmatic, subsequent poem “The Bamboo’s Insomnia.” Its entirety reads: “I can’t sleep. There is a poet stuck between the love lines of my palms. And I would tell her to get out if I could, but there is a poet stuck inside the cradle of my bones and tendons” (Diwata 13). The notes to Diwata state that this poem is written after Eduardo Galeano’s “The Night/I”: “I can’t sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat.”47 In Reyes’s version, the bamboo’s inability to address and expel the poet is due to an obstacle not in its throat but in its body. In this way, the bamboo’s personification rewrites the myth of Malakas and Maganda by mixing it with the remixed Adam and Eve story “A Genesis of We, Cleaved.” That is, by having the bamboo take on human shape with palms, bones, and tendons, enclosing a woman, Reyes correlates the reed with the Adam-like man of “bone, and viscera, and flesh” of the previous poem, and aligns the poet with the Eve-like woman who forms within him: “Do you remember me fluttering inside your chest, tickled by the cool air newly filling your lungs? Do you remember exhaling song on this first day?” (Diwata 11). In this merging of myths, both the Maganda- and Eve-like figures are associated with poetry, song, and breath—echoing the line in Poeta en San Francisco: “in my native tongue, breath is word is spirit” (20).
Why does the poet cradled in the bamboo’s bones and tendons block the release of the poet caught in the love lines of its palms? What sort of allegory of poetic expression does this tale present? Whereas the “prayer stuck in [the] throat” of Poeta’s epistolary speaker is lit aflame in a blazing act of self-sacrifice, “The Bamboo’s Insomnia” resonates with other poems that render birth as a cleaving from an originary oneness, implying that the bamboo’s desire to separate its palms, open itself up, and allow the emergence of the female poet (analogous to Maganda and Malakas stepping out from the split bamboo reed) conflicts with the poet’s desire to remain within—one with—the bamboo’s internal body. For the bamboo’s “love lines” to be not only read, as it were, but written, spoken, sung as lines of love poetry requires that the poet be cleaved from her primordial home. In other words, love, desire, and expression are born of loss, division, and obstruction.
But what “The Bamboo’s Insomnia,” as a reworking of Genesis and Malakas and Maganda, also suggests is that poetry is not merely the intimate revelation of eros; it is a social act of world making. Rather than elevate the traditionally gendered heterosexual couple to the status of foundational progenitors, Reyes proffers the “poet” as the originator of the (human) world, drawing on the poet’s etymological derivation as “creator” or “maker” (poiesis as the act of making), and as the mediator or “bridge” between human, spirit, and natural worlds.48 Such a practice is an aesthetic (Maganda the beautiful) as well as a political act: “Yes, I believe diwata have a very crucial place in our times; my diwata are indeed muses. Creativity, generative and imaginative acts, acts of creation are always necessary, especially during troubled times.”49 Reyes’s poetic world making in times of trouble eschews clichéd tropes of healing and harmony without relinquishing the possibility of renewal and community, of “forming silent / alliances with outcasts and expatriates, street corner / denizens,” as she writes in Poeta (19). As speculative and imaginative acts of creation, Reyes’s poetry confronts the past and present social frictions and abrasions that produce “our lacerated and fractured selves” and rewrites the imperial modernist mandate into a scene of postcolonial, diasporic hope: “in our collisions, we learn to make new” (Poeta 20).
NOTES
1. “experiment, n.,” O.E.D.
2. Melissa R. Sipin, “Poeta in San Francisco,” TAYO 3 (2011–2012), issue3. tayoliterarymag.com. See also RC Ruiz, “Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes,” Chie and Weng Read Books July 18, 2014, chieandweng.wordpress.com. Reyes was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.
3. See Rigoberto González, “Small Press Spotlight: Barbara Jane Reyes,” Critical Mass 12 September 12, 2010, available online at bookcritics.org. See also Ruiz, “Interview.” For a list of influential books, see her blog post, “Meme: 20 Poetry Books,” February 22, 2009, available online at www.barbarajanereyes.com. A number of Reyes’s poems are “written after” another poet’s work; see, in particular, For the City That Nearly Broke Me (San Antonio: Aztlan Libre Press, 2012).
4. Meta DuEwa Jones and Keith D. Leonard, “Reveling in Fluidity, Resisting Dichotomies: An Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes and Matthew Shenoda,” MELUS 35.2 (2010): 129.
5. See, among other posts on Reyes’s blog poeta y diwata, www.barbarajanereyes.com, “Towards a Pinay ‘We’ Poetics” (February 15, 2011); “Lyricism, Political Poetry, Social Realism and Responsibility” (September 29, 2011); “On Filipino Experimental Poetics” (October 25, 2011); “Creating or Destroying Readers in Filipino American Literature” (December 11, 2012); “Notes: Asking, Community, and Poetic Work” (April 9, 2014); and “Answering Some Questions About Being Fil Am, About Writing” (May 16, 2015). On issues of audience, reception, and community, see also her essays, “Some [Disjunctive] Notes on the Avant-garde, Narrative Convention, Feminism, Desire, and Ambivalence,” Achiote Seeds (Spring 2007); “On Feminism, Women of Color, Poetics, and Reticence,” XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics 20 (2008); and “Resisting the Narrowing of Community,” Best American Poetry (blog), May 25, 2012, available online at blog.bestamericanpoetry.com.
6. Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 15. For an early example of how identity and language are mutually constitutive, see Barbara Jane Reyes, “101 Words That Don’t Quite Describe Me,” in Gravities of Center 33; and her essay “101 Words That Don’t Quite Describe Me,” in Not Home, But Here: Writing from the Filipino Diaspora, ed. Luisa Igloria (Pasig City: Anvil, 2003), 31–38.
7. Barbara Jane Reyes’s full-length collections are Gravities of Center (San Francisco: Arkipelago Books, 2003); Poeta en San Francisco (Kāne‘ohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2005); Diwata (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2010); To Love as Aswang: Songs, Fragments, and Found Objects (San Francisco: Philippine American Writers and Artists, 2015); and Invocation to Daughters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017). Her chapbooks are Easter Sunday (San Francisco: Ypolita Press, 2008); Cherry (Brooklyn: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008); and For the City That Nearly Broke Me (San Antonio: Aztlan Libre Press, 2012).
8. Poeta en San Francisco won the James Laughlin Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2005. Diwata was named the Global Filipino Literary Awards recipient for poetry published in 2010, and was a finalist for the 80th Annual California Book Awards. Critical considerations of Poeta en San Francisco include Cathy Park Hong, “Decorated Wall,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 30.1-2 (2006); Martin Joseph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (New York: New York University Press, 2012); and Timothy Yu, “Asian American Poetry in the First Decade of the 2000s,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (2011).
9. Kella Svetich, Review of Gravities of Center, MELUS 29.1 (2004): 312.
10. Reyes, Gravities of Center, 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as GC.
11. See, for instance, Oscar V. Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2.2 (1995); E. San Juan Jr., The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippines-U.S. Literary Relations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); and the two special issues of Amerasia 24.2 and 24.3 (1998), “Essays into American Empire in the Philippines,” edited by Enrique dela Cruz.
12. On Filipino invisibility and forgottenness, see Oscar V. Campomanes, “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); and Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
13. Barbara Jane Reyes, “The Building of ‘Anthropologic,’” in Pinoy Poetics: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino American Poetics, ed. Nick Carbó (San Francisco: Meritage Press, 2004), 253.
14. Ibid.
15. Eileen Tabios, introduction to Reyes, Gravities of Center, n. p.
16. Reyes, “Building of ‘Anthropologic,’” 250.
17. Eileen Tabios, “Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes and Paolo Javier,” E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, September 20, 2005. Available online at willto exchange.blogspot.com.
18. Contrast, for instance, the highly elusive Poeta with Reyes’s essay “History is Written on the Walls: A Walking Tour of SoMa,” in Bay Poetics, ed. Stephanie Young (Cambridge, MA: Faux Press, 2006).
19. Tabios, “Interview.”
20. Reyes, Poeta en San Francisco, 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Poeta.
21. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 177.
22. See Tabios, “Interview”: “I began writing this after reading Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, in which he portrayed a surreal, spiritual, tender, and realistically violent American urban center.”
23. Craig Santos Perez, review of Poeta en San Francisco, Rain Taxi (Winter 2006–2007). Available online at www.raintaxi.com.
24. Tabios, “Interview.”
25. Jones and Leonard, “Reveling in Fluidity,” 144.
26. Reyes also alludes to Heart of Darkness in “[panambitan]” (dirge) (Poeta 89).
27. See Tabios, “Interview.”
28. Yu, “Asian American Poetry,” 833.
29. Albert Abonado, “Cooked Just Right: An Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes,” BOA Editions Blog, October 1, 2010. Available online at www.boaeditions.org.
30. Abonado, “Cooked Just Right.”
31. See Craig Santos Perez, “Talking with Barbara Jane Reyes,” Jacket 2, May 10, 2011. Available online at jacket2.org.
32. See Bryan Thao Worra, “Barbara Jane Reyes,” Asian American Press, September 26, 2011, available online at aapress.com. See also González, “Small Press.”
33. Abonado, “Cooked Just Right.”
34. Reyes, Diwata, 51, 52. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
35. González, “Small Press.” Literary anthologies in this vein include Nick Carbó and Eileen Tabios, eds., Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2000); and Marianne Villanueva and Virginia Cerenio, eds., Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas (Corvallis, OR: Calyx Books, 2003). Reyes’s work appears in both collections.
36. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 236.
37. Worra, “Barbara Jane Reyes.”
38. Brian Spears, “The Rumpus Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes,” Rumpus, January 19, 2012. Available online at therumpus.net.
39. Abonado, “Cooked Just Right.”
40. González, “Small Press.”
41. Ibid.
42. Jones and Leonard, “Reveling in Fluidity,” 128–29.
43. See Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 56–58.
44. Perez, “Talking with Barbara Jane Reyes.”
45. González, “Small Press.”
46. Reyes takes up this figure in To Love as Aswang: Songs, Fragments, and Found Objects (2015).
47. Eduardo Galeano, “The Night/1,” in The Book of Embraces, trans. Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer (New York: Norton, 1991), 92.
48. On the poet as bridge, see Perez, “Talking with Barbara Jane Reyes.”
49. González, “Small Press.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Barbara Jane Reyes
BOOKS
Gravities of Center. San Francisco: Arkipelago Books, 2003.
Poeta en San Francisco. Kāne‘ohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2005.
Diwata. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2010.
To Love as Aswang: Songs, Fragments, and Found Objects. San Francisco: Philippine American Writers and
Artists, 2015.
Invocation to Daughters. San Francisco: City Lights, 2017.
CHAPBOOKS
Easter Sunday. San Francisco: Ypolita Press, 2008.
Cherry. Brooklyn: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008.
For the City That Nearly Broke Me. San Antonio: Aztlan Libre Press, 2012.
ROBERTO TEJADA
POEMS
FROM Exposition Park
Debris in Pink and Black
[after Thomas Glassford]
Objects that hover there above the surface of a subject, kindly as upgrades in urgent care, rescue to make us suspect or safe in the need for shelter, heightened on behalf of a petrifying world, my stomach swelling as it capitulates to onslaught and then I saw it, thought of you my little shame, short of light long in alternating current.