Just some thoughts.

First, “experimental” should be in quotes, just like that. It’s a blanket term or that miscellaneous box that you throw stuff in when you can’t immediately, clearly understand or access it. And even using the term in the first place already changes the reader’s expectations for the work.

So why do/did I use the term? Well, because I wanted my students to be prepared to read and discuss texts that do not appear to give us a conventional narrative.

Some quickie history: I’ve heard all kinds of disdainful stuff said about the “experimental” poet within a Filipino American context, at least on this here side of the country. I think there may be an element of distrust involved; is the writer “tricking” us or hiding something from us. Why can’t she just give it to us straight?

So, given how Poetry can tend to already get skimmed over or lost altogether in discussions of Filipino American narrative, “experimental” texts can be more so dismissed, as irrelevant to the ethnic American experience.

Really?

I am bring this up now, as I just did a substantial lecture and discussion of a few “experimental” Filipino and Fil Am authored poems, and someone on FB asked that I post my lecture notes. Honestly, my lecture notes are sparse, a few bits of notation about what “jologs” and “konyo” mean, or some lines of questioning about narratives unfolding in footnotes rather than main text (Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer,” or Conchitina Cruz’s “Geography Lesson,” in which someone has been relegated to the margins), or what the purpose of the quotations in Catalina Cariaga’s “Excerpts from Bahala Na!” or the commas in her “Ten Twenty Six” poem are meant to convey.

So yes, my lecture notes were a compilation of questions for my students. If we know, for example (back to Cariaga) the story of Flor Contemplacion, then how do we read these snippets of commercials and product placement that her narrative is drowning in? How do we read the symbolism of the cockfight? As per the Alan Dundes epigraph to the poem, why is the cockfight highly symbolic? And symbolic of what?

In “Ten Twenty Six,” what information do we already have? The title already gives us a lot to go on, as does the footnote. Ten twenty six = not guilty by reason of insanity. Everything else, the body of the poem, is what fleshes out the skeleton. I read this poem aloud, abide by every comma, line and stanza break. A student responds, this makes me think of the second hand on a clock. We discover that “time” is central to this piece, as the word appears in every couplet, and in a poem about being incarcerated in a psych ward, “time” is indeed significant.

Does the apparent fracture of the text indicate something of the heavily medicated father’s state of mind? Is this poem in his voice or from his point of view?

I am sure there was resistance among my students, and this is fine.

I reassured them that any “difficulty” of the text is purposeful, not arbitrary, or not simply to confuse us, but to encourage us to dig a little deeper.

If we can identify a narrative (however a narrative is presented to us), and if we can identify a speaker, speakers, or absence of a speaker, then we can access the poem and start to understand why it is being presented to us the way it is.

We discuss Cariaga’s “Excerpts from Bahala Na!” and the frustration of getting to the story of Flor Contemplacion, as we sort through the sound bytes and noise, and how is that significant, trying to cut to the meat of the matter with all of this crappy news reporting, other media distraction and fluff and commercial interruption. And doesn’t commercialism indicate a larger system of global capitalism, and doesn’t that maintain the system of the OFW.

Why not write, “I am frustrated trying to find the ‘truth’ about Flor Contemplacion, with all of this biased, corporate-sponsored media news reporting,” et al. Why not just write that? Well, is it more effective to be made to experience frustration at having to sort through noise? Also, if the poem tells us about that frustration, then the focus is taken away from the story of Flor Contemplacion, and becomes more about us than about her. Already, we see how mass media is taking her story away from us, and so must the poet also participate in that dehumanization process? Does/Can this poem in its form help cultivate compassion for the human being lost in the media BS?

We agree these texts ask, require, even demand a lot from the reader.

We agree that must look closely at their use of the page, and the poet’s use of punctuation and language more acutely.

I tell them that as readers, we are asked or invited to participate in the making of meaning.

Now, speaking of language, back to “jologs,” and “konyo.” How have Filipinos Filipinized English into its various permutations, some beyond recognition (and recognition by whom)? And what does that mean for Filipinos and our relationship with this colonially imposed tongue? Paolo Manalo drops this Wittgenstein quote on us: “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”

Manalo also drops a quote from Caroline S. Hau, regarding Jose Rizal’s Noli Mi Tangere; if this novel was meant to be read by all Filipinos (because the novel is about our historical plight against Spanish tyranny), then let’s ask how many Filipinos at the time of Rizal would have really been able to read it, given that he wrote it in Spanish. And should a novel about the people be written in the language of the people?

Does the original language of the Rizal novel render invisible the Filipino masses?

So, then back to the Wittgenstein quote; can we also apply to Gizelle Gajelonia’s poems in “pidgin” or HCE. There’s a form of life there, a human being, an entire community of human beings whose histories and narratives you will never know, because you ignore them when you see them on the bus. Or, as in Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer,” whose narratives you will never know unless you take the time to look and read thoughtfully.

Can “imagining a form of life” be an insistence to look, to acknowledge, and to hear the multitudes that high English or high Spanish have rendered invisible?

Anyway, so these are some of the things about “Filipino Experimental Poetics.” I am no expert on the matter, but having been called an “experimental” Filipino American poet, I respect texts that consider our active participation as readers, rather than being spoon fed a canned narrative, that do not insult our intelligence.

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