Voices from the fringes: I,began,to,Grow

Today’s poet for National Poetry Month was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1908. José García Villa’s early literary works got him in trouble with the Philippine government (which is to say: the American colonial government) for being to racy. In 1929 he was both convicted and fined for obscenity by the Manila Court of First Instance, as well as winning a 1000 peseta prize, which he used to emigrate to the United States, where he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico and did graduate work at Columbia.

One of his signature styles was the insertion of commas as an integral part of a poem’s meaning. This is evident in “Divine Poems (134)”, today’s entry.

“Divine Poems (134)”

When,I,was,no,bigger,than,a,huge,
Star,in,my,self,I,began,to,write,
                    My,
               Theology,
             Of,rose,and,

Tiger: till,I,burned,with,their
Pure,and,Rage. Then,was,I,Wrath—
                    Ful,
               And,most,
            Gentle: most,

Dark,and,yet,most,Lit: in,me,an,
Eye,there,grew: springing,Vision,
                    Its,
               Gold,and,
           Its,wars. Then,

I,knew,the,Lord,was,not,my,Creator!
—Not,He,the,Unbegotten—but,I,saw,
                   The,
                Creator,
             Was,I—and,

I,began,to,Die,and,I,began,to,Grow.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Traffic lights and railroad tracks

Most people outside the Hawaiian Islands probably only know Israel Kaanaoi Kamakawiwo’ole from his mashup of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World”. But in his short life, he was celebrated in the islands for his artistry on the ukulele and for keeping alive Hawaiian traditional music.

The piece I’m giving you for National Poetry Month today is “Hawai’i ‘78”, a cut from his first solo album, Facing Future, released in 1993. That, in turn, was four years before his death at age . The song was written by a friend of Iz, Mickey Ionane; it speaks to the ties of native Hawaiians to their natural surroundings and the clash with Western modernization. This is a theme well known to native peoples subsumed by white European hegemony.

Here are the lyrics:

Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i
Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i

If just for a day our king and queen
Would visit all these islands and saw everything
How would they feel about the changes of our land

Could you just imagine if they were around
And saw highways on their sacred grounds
How would they feel about this modern city life

Tears would come from each other’s eyes
As they would stop to realize
That our people are in great, great danger now

How, would they feel
Could their smiles be content, then cry
Cry for the gods, cry for the people
Cry for the land that was taken away
And then yet you'll find, Hawai'i

Could you just imagine they came back
And saw traffic lights and railroad tracks
How would they feel about this modern city life

Tears would come from each other’s eyes
As they would stop' to realize
That our land is in great, great danger now

All the fighting that the king had done
To conquer all these islands now these condominiums
How would he feel if he saw Hawai'i nei

How, would he feel
Would his smile be content, then cry
Cry for the gods, cry for the people
Cry for the land that was taken away
And then yet you'll find, Hawai'i

Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i
Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i
Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i
Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i

 

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Nothing but dying

Victoria Chang’s poetry is somewhat more challenging for me than previous entries for this year’s National Poetry Month. She uses language fluidly, with repetitions I don’t quite grasp. Especially the series about Barbie Chang, who seems to be eternally hovering at the periphery of the cool kids’ table.

For that reason I was going to give you “Mr. Darcy”. And then I came across “How Alone Barbie Chang’s Mother”, and carried me to being a senior in college when my mom died. So here we are.

“How Alone Barbie Chang’s Mother” 

How alone Barbie Chang’s mother
     must have felt doing

nothing but dying her mother actually
     stopped dying her hair

in January stopped being an actuary
     for her money she

must have known her time was limited
     did the diseased birch

tree know they were going to cut it down
     how quickly the air

around it filled in the space it does no
     good to know a mother’s

face who would have known that a 
     mother’s face could

be erased too at some point we are all
     eliminated from this

earth at some point most of us give birth
     at some point we lose

a mother at some point we are all
     disappointments who

can’t possibly care for others when
     our mothers die we

are all lost and there are no words for
     it some want to

name us as grieving others wrongly
     name us heroes

 

Voices from the fringes: Language lesson

John Olivares Espinoza writes a lot of poetry about his family, particularly his father, who as an undocumented immigrant supported his wife and sons by doing gardening work in Riverside County, Calif. Today’s National Poetry Month entry is about family, but also about language—what we might call Spanglish. The kids I went to elementary school with back in the last century used some of these terms, as you do when you’re essentially living in two universes.

I suppose that technically this is not a poem. I don’t care.

“Spanish as Experienced by a Native Speaker”

A George Washington quarter was a cuarta. Two cuartas bought us una soda from a vending machine. We asked abuelito for a cuarta to play the video game console. No, he said, una peseta. No, una cuarta. Una peseta para la máquina. He called the console a machine. Like the machine (máchina) that dropped a cuarta for every six cans Mother put in. La máchina is what Father had us puchar across yardas on the weekends. At work we ate lonche. At school we ate lunch. At home we ate both. Queki was served on birthdays. It was bien gaucho to have your birthday skipped again. Skipiar was done to the unsolvable math problem, which was never attempted again. Half our time was spent on homework, the other half was spent wacheando TV. Wacha signaled you were about to do something impressive, but foolish, like a bike stunt. !Wáchale! is what your friends tell you when you nearly plow into them with your bike. A bike is a baika. Uncle Jesse peddled a baika to the grocery story to buy leche y cornflais. Leche, not tortillas, were heated in the microgüey. Un güey is a dude. Uncle Beto called more than two people “una bola de güeyes.” I secretly listened to the Beastie Boys in Uncle Beto’s troka because I could turn it up full blast.  Uncle Jesse peddles back from Queimar with two new plaid shirts. Dad’s returning from his trip to the dompe, where he left last week’s garbage. Mother’s fixing Spam sángüiches. Abuelito pulls from his pocket a peseta, but hands me a cuarta.

 

 

Voices from the Fringes: I may be at risk

The day after we hear that a veteran police officer in a Minneapolis suburb fatally shot an unarmed Black man at a traffic stop because she allegedly mistook her service weapon for a taser gun, and after news broke that a uniformed Black National Guard officer—who was pepper sprayed, handcuffed and threatened during a December traffic stop in a hick Virginia town—has filed a federal lawsuit against the two cops at the scene and the town of Windsor…well, it seems appropriate to have “Bullet Points”, by Jericho Brown as our National Poetry Month entry.

Brown won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection The Tradition. If it matters, in addition to being Black, he’s gay and HIV-positive.

“Bullet Points”

I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do, 
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do, 
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze 
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took 
Me from us and left my body, which is, 
No matter what we've been taught, 
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.

 

Voices from the fringes: Something else like that

You know when you’re in your teens—maybe starting in your tweens—when you’re trying to figure out who you really are, and your body’s doing all kinds of crazy things, and you’re stretching and shrinking, and nothing feels like you can just be? I rather think that trans-gender and non-binary people are that in spades. They must look at the binary-dominant world and wonder WTF all the time.

And then we have Republicans and evangelicals who take time out from their ordinary race and misogyny grievances to become the toilet Taliban. Gawd.

Today’s National Poetry Month entry comes from Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, born in Riverside, Calif., in 1987. Actually, I’m giving you a tweet—which I find both profound and amusing—and “Things Haunt”, which describes that sense of wanting to exist in a world that really can’t deal with those who don’t fit the perceived norm.

“Things Haunt”

California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.
I’m full of ugly feelings, awful thoughts, bad dreams
of doom, and so much love left unspoken.

Is mercury in retrograde? someone asks.
Someone answers, No, it’s something else
like that though. Something else like that.
That should be my name.

When you ask me am I really a woman, a human being,
a coherent identity, I’ll say No, I’m something else
like that though.

A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes
and says what they are before the mirror.
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—

Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
Hear me. Bear the weight of my voice and don’t forget—
things haunt. Things exist long after they are killed.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Child's play

I heard a lovely story about Prince Philip, who died Friday at age 99. You can say what you like about the pros and cons of hereditary monarchy as an institution, and there are plenty of instances of Philip on tape without his verbal filter in place. But the guy was married to Elizabeth II for more than 70 years, gave up his naval career early on, and showed up on time and hit his marks for royal appearances right up until he crashed his Range Rover a few years ago.

Anyway, here’s the story: in November, 1963, Philip flew to Washington, D.C., to attend the funeral of President John F. Kennedy. On he day before the funeral, Jackie was looking for John-John, who at not-quite-three, had been bewildered and frightened by all the goings-on. She opened the door to his playroom and found Philip down on the floor, playing with the little boy, and laughing. The Duke of Edinburgh would have been about 42 at the time.

Two years later, when a memorial to JFK was dedicated at Runnymede, England, John-John walked between Jackie and the Duke, holding their hands.

The notion of a 40-something prince-consort taking time to play with a bereft child, and making him laugh, really lightens my heart, especially after the week we’ve had, newswise. And I’m grateful for that image of the man and boy being happy together in a deeply sorrowful time.

My friend MLD tolled the tenor 99 times (really the Ellacombe Chimes because COVID and a hand-flapping vicar) for the Duke at noon on Saturday at Holy Trinity Church in Maidenhead, which is just down the road from Windsor. Here’s a clip of that. 

 

Voices from the fringes: Things I think are nice

No one—but no one—could turn a phrase like Dorothy Parker. That woman could pack more venom into a single couplet than anyone who’s ever picked up a pen. Born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893, Parker was part of the creative explosion in New York after World War I. Poet, critic, playwright, screenwriter; she was one of the linchpins of the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel. She could drink most of the men under that table and never lose a battle of wits.

Parker was also a human rights activist: against fascism and racism, for civil rights and decency. At her death in 1967, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Much of Parker’s poetry is self-deprecating, particularly with respect to her disappointments in love. (If you’ve been diagnosed with depression, you really want to stay away from her short stories. They’re beautifully written, but they’ll gut you like a fish knife.) Here’s one that’s a little more defiant; if I had to choose a personal anthem, this would be it.

“Neither Bloody nor Bowed”

They say of me, and so they should,
It's doubtful if I come to good.
I see acquaintances and friends
Accumulating dividends,
And making enviable names
In science, art, and parlor games.
But I, despite expert advice,
Keep doing things I think are nice,
And though to good I never come-
Inseparable my nose and thumb!