DRY THE RAIN #05: "F/LIGHT" by Mark Angeles

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This took me a couple of hours to write, though. This is the fifth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I have always regarded meta writing as an easy-access doorway towards the exploration of one of the two or three terminal endpoints of literature, this particular endpoint being where literature will go or what it will grow into once it sheds one of the primary elements that define it in our current mindset: artifice. In other words, meta writing is writing without the pretense of artifice, writing that does not pretend it is anything other than writing, writing that is aware that it is a piece of writing, that it is being written, normally in conjunction with other pieces of writing. It is a terminal endpoint as its logical conclusion is to beget writing about writing for writing - a closed circuit eating nothing but itself. There are some directions where this circle can be taken, ways to make the circuit bigger and wider and longer, moves to make it not only about itself but about things other than itself, but nonetheless it will still inevitably remain a closed circuit.

I see ars poetica as a more mannered, a more artificial - a chummier - form of meta writing. For me, most ars poetica comes across as more cute than cerebral in its self-awareness as it chooses its circle to mainly remain there, in awareness, in bathing in its awareness and not going anywhere else outside of that, and using that as the counterpoint for transcendental revelations, using that as objective-correlative for limning thoughts that are only actually merely about itself. Thus its revelations always come across as too forced, always a little too contrived in its drive to make a point that is basically "I am trying to say something about beauty and being beautiful while also being beautiful and beauty myself." Nowadays, I would verbalise this observation as: ars poetica is critical thinking if critical thinking was only gazing at its own navel. Or rather, ars poetica is poetry's own tool for critical thinking; it is poetry's way of having its beautiful cake and eating it, too.

Mark Angeles's "F/LIGHT" is a poem that strives to have its ars poetica cake and eat it, too: it is a poem about some of the practices of the Contemporary Philippine Poet, primarily the communal celebratory mining of second-hand first world transcendental revelations via the raiding of Booksale bargain bins - from the actual book to the mining of the contents of the book through incessant sometimes unnecessary quoting both critical (= name-dropping) or creative (= style-cribbing) - all in an effort to strive towards a more polished artificial vehicle for now third world transcendental revelations. It does all this in a haphazard manner, in anecdotes and musings stated sometimes vaguely and sometimes lucidly, all in various registers, and somewhere in the middle it even directly/obliquely comments on itself, defining a poem as a "gathering of filthy spree colliding within the vortex of a whirlpool." All heady stuff, albeit all expected in this sort of thing.

What I did not expect were its bookend musings on aesthetics, on its equation of aesthetics as the arrival of "an envelope laced with anthrax," and, more pointedly "not a wrench bequeathed to the apprentice by a master plumber." Thus, aesthetics - defined as the appreciation of beauty, the study of and the sensitivity to beauty, and also (and more importantly) the standardisation of beauty - not as something to work on (= craft), but as an act of domestic terrorism.

The sentiment is not entirely new - poetry's fear of self-analysis is well-documented throughout the history of the form, a fear that is still prevalent today - but the way it was stated in "F/LIGHT," equated to a lethal, disfiguring necrotising disease employed by first world governments as bioweapon against third world soldiers and civilians in recent modern warfare, I thought that that was a very potent and very loaded metaphor, but what exactly does it mean? Is it a proclamation that it is a more self-aware ars poetica and just where this self-awareness may lead? It certainly reads that way. If so, is it a critique on ars poetica as a poetic form and practice? Or on the practice of applying critical thinking to poetry? Or maybe it's a critique on the specific contemporary poetic practice of mining first world criticism for third world creativity? There is a certain common danger in all of these practices, of becoming easy prey to particularly passive and attractive forms of cultural imperialism, passive in their being welcomed in their various purposes and functions, attractive in their promises of wisdom and intelligence.

And they certainly do lead towards a death of a something, a certain mindset, I think, a certain way of seeing/reading/writing literature in general, poetry in particular, something the poem itself anticipates with a - or maybe the? - Mary Elizabeth Frye quote Do not stand at my grave and weep / I am not there, i.e., I - poetry - endure. I am almost tempted to write off "F/LIGHT" as, in its own oblique way, a diatribe against critical thinking, if not for another quote, this one cribbed from Mahmoud Darwish, a quote that saves the poem from being a mere rant, turning it into a rave: "I have learned and dismantled all the words / in order to draw from them a single word:          Home.", i.e., all this poetry and all this thinking poetry and all this thinking about thinking poetry is all about seeking comfort, about not being alone in the world, i.e., is all about poetry.

"Do you think it was necessary to quote?" goes another quote in the poem, attributed to Arkaye Kierulf. For this poem's sake, yes.