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 is the eighth of the series, but actually the third of a series within the bigger series. It's a growing set of ideas! And I hope to add to this as often as possible.




THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 3 OF 3
(PART 1 IS HERE, PART 2 IS HERE)

Or put in plainer terms, "You always thought things were about you, reason or without reason. [...] This time, it was really about you." But then, you always do think things are about you, reason or without reason! And this is what ought to save poetry from being a simple exercise on/of heightened heady solipsism, this germ of self-doubt not only in the persona, but also in the poet. Not a warm easy comfort, this awareness of irrelevance, but also not the newest idea ever proposed about poetry, but what I think I love about this idea now is that it is now its own Uncertainty Principle, its own Butterfly Effect, this New Sublime: we give meaning to everything, but meaning is merely what we make of it, and we can't/won't/don't know much about everything, thus meaning and how we mean things will never be enough, will merely have to be enough - "the world spins, a butterfly takes flight. // See, the waters quiver with the stone I drop, / only to return to their oneness in seconds / a mirror showing what constantly changes us."

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 is the seventh of the series. This took me a couple of hours, though! Heady ideas. Oh well! At any rate, I hope to add to this as often as possible.




THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 2 OF 3
(PART 1 IS HERE)

The Uncertainty Principle postulates that somehow, against traditional tools and classical interpretation, matter is both a wave and a particle, of a certain measurable velocity and of a certain measurable mass, but we can only perceive and measure one of the two - not both - at any given time; or rather, to measure its velocity means to allow it to move, which means to not measure its mass, and to measure its mass means to stop it from moving, which means to not measure its velocity; or rather, the more precise one aspect is measured, the less precise the other aspects can/will be known; or rather, the observer can never truly know everything as they happen at the same time, can only really know only one aspect of any one thing at any given time, never in its entirety at any given time; or rather, to measure precisely one aspect of any one thing means to risk ignoring everything else about that one thing; or rather, the observer's precision is always limited by the observer's perception; or rather, the act of observation is always subjective.

Which as a foundational critical literary theory - as a way of thinking and writing and reading literature - can mean two things: 1) that interpretation - regarding, writing, reading, reregarding - is always personal, merely all in our heads, which means that all art - all the creation, consumption, and appreciation whether critical or not - is always inevitably by default egocentric, despite all effort to say and do otherwise; which means that every piece of art ever made, every piece of art that will ever be made, and every attempt to analyse art, is inevitably a confessional, a postulation, always inevitably uncertain, always missing the big picture, always just about you; and 2) that a piece of art - the interpretation of, the creation of - is perceived as personal as we currently have no other way of perceiving it as anything else other than personal, even when a piece of art can in fact - against traditional tools and classical interpretation - be one of many things; which means that uncertainty is all a matter of perception; which means that all things can be known absolutely, but we can never absolutely know them.

Thus Melissa Villa-Real Basmayor's "Futura," where the uncertainty of perception is anticipated and accommodated by nothing less than the opening line, "Let the following be postulated:" and its voice playing at objectivity by way of cold scientific observation and/or attempts to purge memory from the self; where the sublime is again not mountains nor rivers but the persona's conjuring of the precision of geometric trajectories of architecture and cartography, i.e., knowable and absolute, played against the persona's imprecise attempts at etymology and memory, i.e., unknowable or ambiguous.

It is postulating that this time, the sublime - the unknowable, the all encompassing, the infinitely deep - is not mountains nor rivers nor even the distance between the Milky Way and Proxima Centauri - given a long enough ruler, all three have precise and knowable measurements - but the self; or rather the acceptance of the self that even if/when all things can be known absolutely, the self can never absolutely know them; or rather, the New Sublime decentralises not just by postulating that everything is the center of something, but also by postulating that the self is indeed the center of everything, only against traditional tools and classical interpretation, the self will never know everything, will never know the center, despite all effort to say or do otherwise.

CONTINUED HERE.

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 is the sixth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




QUANTUM PHYSICS AS THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 1 OF 3

My understanding of the sublime in poetry is that it is a tool for decentralisation, specifically for decentralising the ego of the persona and the reader and the poet via musings on normally natural - things that occur/exist in nature as nature other than yourself or things you yourself have made - events and processes and things that are beyond our normal worldly mortal ken, to remind us that we are all merely mobile mounds of dust in potentia, that often things exist because they just do, not because you made them exist, through poetry or polystyrene or any other creative endeavor and medium.

Only the sublime in poetry is actually mainly used as a tool for merely musing on events and processes and things that are beyond our normal worldly mortal ken as occasions of/for beauty and profundity - beauty and profundity that you made manifest through poetry - which is, in all fairness, true, but this limited line of thinking has placed the ego of the persona, the reader, and the poet squarely in the middle of the work - Ako ang daigdig / We are the world, also an ecologically-irresponsible line of thinking - conflicting with the far more interesting far more open decentralising aspect of the sublime, by effect merely reducing the sublime as tools to turn poetry into exercises on/of heightened heady solipsism.

In recent years, the sublime in poetry has turned to Quantum Physics as its new source of beautiful and profound imagery, this curious aesthetic cropping up in the last thirty years but only really picking up in the last ten or so, of which Mads Bajarias's "Entropy & the Shrike" is one of the latest. This aesthetic is not without precedent as practiced directly by people like Borges (mentioned in Bajarias's poem) and the Oulipo who seemingly drive it, and peripherally by people like Burroughs who are seemingly driven by it. The connection is not difficult to make, also containing its own elegant paradox/irony: quantum physics and the sublime in poetry both drive and are driven by the processing of the poetic possibilities of uncertainty, for limning infinity, all in aid of and by effect making the human ego tiny and insignificant, i.e., musings on the mountains and the sea are replaced by considerations of the Mandelbrot Set; or rather, both are permutations of logic and reason driving the imagination "to sniff out order from randomness"; or rather, both are manifestations of the secular justifying the sacred.

More than a mere update of the sublime, though, the implications of quantum physics on poetry and poetic thinking and thinking about poetry are both deep and wide, even if we only remain on the surface level: much like poetry, quantum physics is a set of ideas that strive to make real the unreal, fueled by the insistent realisation that the unreal in fact drives the real; or rather, in my understanding of quantum physics, there is no concept of "chance," events happen because other events make them happen, only these events may either be too large or too tiny for or too far away from our perceptions they effectively do not exist in reality, thus the illusion of chance - the implicit "order in randomness," the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in New York. The implication of these ideas is that things are - if not everything is - connected on a very fundamental causal falling-dominos level, thus the oracular possibilities of "the Fabric Softeners lane at the corner supermarket" and its causal falling-domino connection to being overcome by the pre-/post-human sublimity of "... the thought of the Milky Way hurling us, / inexorably, into the path of Proxima Centauri", an event that itself is the product of a process that began with an event of atoms colliding in a cascading curve crescendoing into the event of the birth of the universe and all its particulates that make up everything in it, i.e., corner supermarkets and Fabric Softeners and you and I and poetry. Quantum physics has not only potentially reclaimed the sublime as decentralising tool, but has potentially decentralised the ego so far away from the center of everything by insisting that actually, everything is the center of something, i.e., it's not just about you, it's about everything.

This holds up pretty well, up until you consider the Uncertainty Principle as a foundational critical literary theory.

CONTINUED HERE.

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.

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 is the fourth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




How to regard critically Jim Pascual Agustin's "Sea Fireflies of Mindoro," this poem of Kodak moments? I see it as a modern face/phase of the pastorale, where instead of a shepherd waxing poetic bucolic with a lyre on his actual rural life, it is a tourist waning heartfelt earnestness with a camera on an ideal/ised rural life. Loss is the primary melody in this sort of poetry, although the loss of what exactly is not too clear, what is is only the vague notion of something being lost, or rather, of having lost something. Could it be that that something is the ideal/ised rural life partially experienced by the tourist? Only the politics of tourism - the ideal/ised rural life paid for by the tourist in cash and vacation days - dictate that the experience will always remain purely virtual, thus unattainable in any true coherent form. So the loss felt in this poem, in this poetry of Kodak moments is merely the loss of something that the tourist in fact has never bought or owned, can never buy or own, will never be able to in any way that truly matters, thus the photographs shown, thus the memories shared. Is this poetry of Kodak moments yet another symptom of our modern lives lived neck-deep in capitalism? Maybe. What is clear, though, is that this poetry, this poem, works because we all had sunny days and cool nights loitering on the beach watching the world go by, and two days later we all had to go back home, back to the city, back to school, back to work; what is clear is that we were there back then, and we are not there now.

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 two hours, though! This is the third of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.


2100 hours UPDATE: I added in a paragraph in the end, something that I felt I wanted to mentioned earlier but deferred for some reason. I think I need to listen to my gut more often.




I've always seen defacement as a political gesture, be it something as simple as writing "Lito wuz hir" on a mall's bathroom wall or gluing a wooden penis ashtray on the forehead of a Jesus poster or cutting a film to shreds to suit somebody's standards of morality. Defacement is a blatantly rude act, motivated by often unacknowledged political urges, made manifest in the act of and resulting product of the defacement. Applied to poetry, defacement becomes erasure, where the poet takes a prior text - often a book - and turns it into a new text, often by applying wild and drastic violence to it via writing or drawing over it or cutting out the words. In a sense, erasures is the black sheep twin brother of ekphrasis: working off of prior art to create something new. Only as ekphrasis often insists to write about Art with the capital A, erasures often insist to carve out art from various mass-produced cultural detritus; only as ekphrasis insists to complement prior art with compliments via addition of even more art, erasures complement prior art with what can be seen as insults via subtraction.

Aside from the visuality of it all, this is the reason why I love erasures, probably the real reason why I love erasures - their blatant inherent political ill will. Erasures are needlessly defiantly gleefully contrarian in their often manic insistence to interfere with what has already been said and done by someone else, and not merely interfere but specifically to eradicate most of what has already been said and done, that what has already been said and done is actually wrong - not even potentially wrong, but actually wrong.

Thus making erasures an act of censorship, the disapproval of a certain message and the approval of a second one, a message contained within the first. This means the choosing of the first message, the first text from which the second text will be derived, is of great importance, and where erasures display their specific brand of wit and irony: extracting a hard core pornographic text from a more artful erotic story may produce interesting results, but surely it'd be far more interesting (and funny and playful and political) if the source text of the pornography is actually a child's counting book or a young adult novel about a childhood in the prairie.

That is why I kindasorta ambiguously wish Arbeen Acuña picked a different source text for his "eraserase002," something other than a study on Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera," something that is not already a Marxist text. Acuña makes good use of the text's page, though, visually recalling street graffiti, quite possibly the artform closest to erasures visually, treating the page literally and figuratively as a wall upon which are written in a shaky scrawl anti-art sentiments - FUCK ART!!! LET'S KILL!!! - or rather, anti-Art with the capital A defiantly circled, as V from the Alan Moore-David Lloyd V FOR VENDETTA novel spraypaints multiple Vs on the wall with their knives drawn, one V in the air hammering a cannonball back into a cannon with "LITERARY" written on its side, as the resultant erasure first proclaims the inevitability of a "lumpen-proletarian" revolution (the quotation marks are from the erasure, not mine) as Art itself moves towards anti-Art, then proclaims on a second line that literary canon-makers ought to be abolished.

They're not the most subtle nor the newest nor the most original messages one will encounter moving about in the Philippine Literary Scene, but recent history has proven that when applied well, they are still potent and potentially scandalous, these rude political messages relayed in this rude political way, messages often censored or denied a voice in the ongoing conversation, and having these blatant messages exist in a text that blatantly embodies oppression in an anthology that blatantly rudely prides itself in including blatant Art-with-the-capital-A canon-makers, well, that's just blatantly rude and blatantly political, still witty and ironic, and I blatantly love that very much.

Although I do wonder about erasure's shelf life under a literary spotlight like this: I am of the mind that there are some things that are better left outside of some places, permitted only the occasional and pertinent excursion but not quite taking permanent residence. There are still a lot of things that can be done with erasures, the act itself having implications not only in art but also in consumerist culture. But like how ekphrasis is being taught and discussed nowadays here in the Philippines, I can see erasure as something potentially easily misunderstood, easily abused, easily dismissed. Maybe the most appropriate response is really FUCK ART!!!, is really to abolish the "proper people who disclose" erasure into "bourgeois literature?" The ultimate, most perfectly contrarian, self-defacing political gesture. Certainly, far ruder things have been committed to art.

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 is the second of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I believe what frightens most people about militant activism is that it embodies and demands a devotion so utterly blind, a perspective so singularly narrow-minded that it eclipses all reason and logic in favour of what is basically a violent fantasy. This narrow focus - this eclipsing of vision - is necessary to militant activism's survival as any distraction or deviation from it is to weaken the militant activist's resolve, and if and when this happens in the field of battle - be it on the streets or in the jungle - it likely means detainment and/or death.

Directed towards poetry, this blind devotion and eclipsing of reason and logic begets poems that are often resistant to critical input, resistant here more often than not not meaning impervious but instead ignoring, or more accurately, unlistening - most militant activist poetry refuses to listen to criticism, specifically criticism of/on craft, as craft is by and large a middle class artistic concern, unfortunately not a concern of the militant activist poet, the militant activist poet's concern being propagation and endurance of the message, and the message is almost always resist. This does not mean that militant activist poetry is without craft, only that it has its own standards of craft, and these standards don't necessarily align with the burgis vanilla university understanding of craft, that is, of craft in service of art. So what is it exactly that's important in militant activist poetry?

I think I find some of it in Ericson Acosta's "Ika-anim na Sundang: GABUD," what to me comes across as an elegy, a mournful prayer ritually recited by the gravesite of fallen comrades. The image is grim and gritty, a macho fantasy: a group of soldiers re-pledging their allegiance to the cause as they sharpen their war knives in the dark, keeping them sharp for the taut pink necks of the fat and bountiful oppressors. The poem doesn't specifically mention the dead, but they are certainly invoked, reassured that their lives have not been wasted as the persona strives to reassure the living that what they're fighting for is indeed worth fighting for, indeed worth dying for, and that they will die fighting the fight, and it says these things boldly, plainly, with steely conviction, without any uncertain terms.

Which to me is what is ultimately important in militant activist poetry, what it brings to the table of Philippine Literature - militant activist poetry's concerns are more practical: it sees poetry as a tool, a means to an end, and the end is to inspire, provoke, and educate the most number of people possible in the quickest most legible way possible, of craft in service of medium for the message, thus its preoccupation with imagery and statements that lead to easy sentiments of love and hate. In a way, it is where Romanticism lives on without shame, irony, or sarcasm, where earnestness is rewarded not with money or medals or fellowships, but with the assurance that somehow someday there will be peace, but in the time that there isn't, you may die, but take comfort: someone else will pick up your knife, sharpen it, and bring it to battle once again; take comfort: you will not die in vain.

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 is the first of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I believe that to equate and/or counterpoint the discussion of the Body with Geography is one of the easiest and most dependable things to do in poetry. It is easy and dependable as it is something people have been doing since at least the dawn of consciousness of the body and the land, something that people start doing a few months after birth once the realisation that the self exists as an object and it exists within a certain space with other objects existing beside it, i.e., the mountain range looks like a reclining young woman thus we give it a woman's name.

It is a curious and timeless equation for us solipsistic egotistic animals, and elevated towards poetry, I see our interest represented thusly: at the moment of conception, our body rides a steady track towards obsolescence and death, while the mountains and the rivers and the trees all seemingly merely replenish themselves, so, to equate the body with the land is on the surface level to halt entropy of the body, or if not halt then at least delay the onset of entropy, if not in reality then at least in art.

But living in a city in a country in a world where our constant two-billion-year steady consumption of natural and unnatural resources is finally also consuming us, this equation is now horribly inaccurate and potentially dangerously irresponsible in its pollyannaish view of life. I think one response to this reality would be Anina Abola's "In Place of Emotion," in its equation of suffering the survival of a loved one's death with apocalyptic imagery refracted through geography. This is not the first time Abola has applied this particular device in print: her three poems in the anthology CROWNS AND ORANGES (Anvil 2009, edited by Ishikawa and Bautista) all use the body and nature and entropy of the body and nature to talk about romantic long-distance love, a mother's (I assume) cancer, and the persona's body image issues, to varying degrees of success, but she uses it well enough and varying enough - and notice the arc of the four poems, from love to disease of a loved one to reflections of flaws in the self to the death of a loved one, and the echoing theme of absence and the body and nature and entropy - that I feel there is a poetry book somewhere in the gaps of these four poems.

They don't push the imagery and technique too far from the self - "In Place of Emotion," despite the title, is still very much self-centered, especially in its reflection/representation of mood as geologic upheavals a la the Sandra Bullock-Ben Affleck romcom FORCES OF NATURE - but it is already several thoughts away from the largely far more simplistic sublime pastorales of recent decades. In fact, I'll even posit that if we actually bother to ask pastorales to take into account the constant threat of impending global ecological collapse, we will come up with poems like this. Here, the mountain is still omnipresent and gigantic and to climb it is to fall towards the earth head over heels, but it is also craggy and bald in places, and as "years pass, not to heal, / but that they do", the wind and the rain and all the illegal logging will wash this mountain away, turning it into more mud and dust, to be moved only elsewhere.