ModPo 2013 # 5 On The Dickinsonian, The Whitmanian, and Being Filipino

Stepping into experience

Note: I am currently taking a course on Coursera.org called Modern and Contemporary American Poetry taught by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania. I will be posting my thoughts on the course discussions here.

Wow! First week done. Three Dickinson poems and one (very long) Whitman poem.

It's been an interesting week. I've been really busy and I would go home tired but still willing to read the assigned poem and watch the ensuing videos. I've never had this opportunity to go deeply into the works of particular poets and I love the experience.

I couldn't possibly conclude this week by pitting Whitman against Dickinson. I enjoyed the false binary between Dickinson and Whitman created in the video discussion but I ended up really appreciating the role of both poets in creating the path for future poets.

I have two things that I'm bringing up in this post. One: the enjoyment of poetry and two: writing poetry in English in the Philippines.

On The  Enjoyment of Poetry

I truly enjoyed Dickinson. I enjoyed her brevity and economy. I was annoyed by all the words that began with capital letters and all the confusing dashes. But I did remember writing a poem, way back, where I employed a capital letter for a noun. My teacher might have been just as annoyed. Was I influenced by Dickinson? I'm not sure. I'm an eclectic reader but I didn't really appreciate reading poetry books until after college.

I was particularly struck by "I dwell in Possibility." I realize that it is the kind of poem that I truly enjoy. And I liked the work of figuring out the puzzle of poetry = possibility and prose = the opposite of possibility. I also loved the powerful ending: For Occupation --this--/ The spreading wide my narrow hands/ To gather Paradise --. It reminds me that poetry is a worthwhile endeavor. It requires work,yes, but the work is rewarded with epiphany.

To my dismay, I realized I deplored Whitman. Maybe because his poem was soooo long. I wanted to sleep already. Yes, there was exuberance, yes, there was ecstasy. But at what cost? It was too tiring. As I wrote in another post somewhere: it was like reading a Facebook wall with random content.

But, there was a reward. The last section was priceless. On its own, it would probably the kind of poem that I would enjoy on a normal day. It starts beautifully, powerfully with that "barbaric yawp" and it ends tenderly, intimately with "I stop somewhere waiting for you." Absolutely beautiful.

All in all, I want the poetry I read to be succinct. Does that sound like I am going to be rooting for the imagists? I can't wait to get there.

Writing Poetry in English in The Philippines

Secondly, I am a Filipino writer who writes almost exclusively in English now taking up a course on American poetry. Well, UPenn can hardly be blamed. It's an American University. But on my end, I try to see how I can stretch the experience of this course into my own territory, into my own life. It's good to get into the history of the poetic form in America, after all, colonization did play a role in my own history. The generation of my grandparents were taught American poetry for sure and that affected the generations after. I am heavily influenced by the Western Canon. Some of my favorite poets are actually American: Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield, Gary Snyder.

I am a conflicted writer because I do long to write in my native language but that opportunity has passed. English is my primary language. I think in English but my experiences are Filipino. Being a writer, I know the power of language. It creates experience and possibility for me just as much as the physical world informs my experience as a human being. Elsewhere, in another poem, I write about appropriating the language to be the medium of my expression as a Filipino. I don't know if I'm only justifying my experience. But it's a reality that I live with.

I once had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine about the importance of being Filipino in my writing. I told him: "That's part of who I am. I cannot claim to come from elsewhere." And he answered that it was more important to be a human being, perhaps to be a citizen of the world. I took solace from that.

So, that's where I'm going to stand. As I go through this course, I understand that the poetry that I am reading is coming from a canon, coming from a pre-selection from an academic institution, coming from a tradition. But I will choose to look at it as a way to inform my being human, wherever I am and whatever my nationality or ethnicity. Poetry encompasses all of that. And I continue the challenge of writing...from wherever I am.

A Meditation on "Each Moment A White Bull Steps Shining Into The World"

EACH MOMENT A WHITE BULL STEPS SHINING INTO THE WORLD
by Jane Hirshfield

If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself
would be treated,
brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant—

Stroke the white throat,
the heavy, trembling dewlaps
you’d come to believe were yours,
and plunge.

Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling,
That you came to love it, that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.

(From her book, The Lives of The Heart)

I credit my friend, Eileen/ Peripeteia (her blog), for prompting this blog post. I truly love the poetry of Jane Hirshfield and when I saw her post, I was delighted with the gift of the poem above.

Recently, I have been through some much chaos and turmoil. But all of these things I have accepted as gifts, as blessings. There was potential loss in each of these events but we were spared. And that brings me to the core of this poem. It is about things I came to believe were mine. It is an illusion. There is nothing, really, that belongs to me. If anything, I belong to the ether, to the earth.

But there is a gift in all of these: that I came to love. Love has nothing to do with possession. It has everything to do with giving up, letting go, thriving in generosity. Everything to give, nothing to lose. I adore the ritual in the words of the poem: "Say the accustomed prayers/ oil the hooves well..." It is in gestures that something becomes precious, not the thing itself. It is the silence that accompanies the moment, it is the drawing of my hands together, the act of saying the words aloud.

The last line makes the poem so moving..."Let the envious gods take back what they can." When has anyone not thought this? Especially when a loved one lies sick in bed, hovering over a line that one cannot bear to behold. "God giveth, God taketh away." It is full of rage and yet it is also full of the love that cannot be taken away.

So, tears came to my eyes today. I have been given not just one gift but several. Let the envious gods take back what they can. There is no diminishing the light of love.

NaPoWriMo#30: Early Demands

NaPoWriMo or National Poetry Writing Month, is an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.

Below is a deconstruction of the poem, Late Prayer by Jane Hirshfield. This is a prompted exercise from NaPoWriMo.net wherein the poet needs to write the opposite of the poem, word for word. The idea is to discover how the poem's rhetorical strategy works. 

I don't know if this even makes sense. Haha! It was a good exercise, though, and made me appreciate Late Prayer even more. Has it really been thirty days already? Yay! A whole month of poems again. Thanks, NaPoWriMo!


Early Demands
(A Deconstruction of Late Prayer by Jane Hirshfield)
By Justine Tajonera

Harshness decides on its singular uselessness.
It does not approach a single thing disparately,
heading straight for all tigers and doves.
Ignore these: outside the soft ether,
countless hammers, countless baubles –
the absence of infernos, of heavens.
There is a silence in the head and the dissolving of multitudinous noises.

---------------------

Here is the poem by Jane Hirshfield:


Late Prayer 
By Jane Hirshfield

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby -
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.