I’m thankful for the feedback I’m receiving in various places from folks. I hope this means the manuscript is headed in the right direction. I have been thinking about how to incorporate “less poetic” narratives in with the more easily identifiable poetic diction, because of what I’d previously written about similar stories being told in different languages. This manuscript has been, for the most part, enjoyable. Writing poems again! Lots! Being crafty! Letting it be both intense and fun.
I also really like having the space, so many pages (and volumes) to tell these stories; I know my tendency when I was much younger was to try to be as sweeping and inclusive, to rush and cram everything — Everything! Centuries of colonialism and resistance into a single poem. And for me, that made some clunky, muddled, and didactic work. I guess at the time, I just never knew if I would be able to write another poem worth mention and performance. I also felt everything had to hit you in the face. These days, I prefer the creeping uneasiness, the lingering disturbed feeling, the images and words that won’t leave your mind, long after you’re heard or read the poem(s).
The layering or pairing of voices in this manuscript happened by accident or experiment, the “what if I do this,” while moving stuff around the page, un-breaking and re-breaking lines, figuring out who was speaking where and when and to whom. Then it clicked, made sense to continue layering throughout, whether in dialogue or harmony, or in contradiction. Or really, because so many are speaking at once, and no matter how disparate we think their stories are, they are really not. They’re just saying similar things in different ways, using different language.
As well, since I’d started with a Q&A format, it made sense to me that there was dialogue and multiple speakers already there. This is generally like talking to a room full of people, doing my best to transcribe the spirited, light, grave, frank, profound conversations all happening at once.
I’m energized by some of the lightness, specificity, and peculiarity of some of the Pinay responses. Not necessarily awkwardness or quirk, but a nice self-assuredness, of not having to take the self so seriously all the time.
More on the Chorus manuscript.
First, I am told that Saul Williams has a forthcoming anthology entitled, Chorus. Should this encourage me to find an alternate title to my tentatively titled manuscript?
Now, in the comments section to my previous post, some interesting things –continuing on with my concern of piecing, stitching, “quilting,” disparate narratives and voices into one body, it’s back to basics.
Form, meter, line.
White space. Breathing room.
Another strategy for working with many voices – polyvocal pieces, overlapping, simultaneously spoken narrative, sung lyric.
From Nara Denning's Neurotique.
Chorus: A Poetry Manuscript in Progress
These words and stories do not belong to me. So much of my poetry to date has been an assumption of a Filipina American or Pinay voice, an academic assumption of Pinay concerns. The demand for me to be some kind of Pinay spokesperson has come to fill me with ambivalence, and so I needed to ask, to pass the mic, to step aside and let other Pinays speak, to listen to what they have to say, how they speak, write, and make art about what is important to them. What stands out in their responses is a struggle against invisibilities and silences, a hunger to be heard, and to be acknowledged. Here are their words and narratives, from which I have built poems. Here, I am only one of a chorus of Pinay voices.
Some (mostly Pinay) informing texts and works of art include Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik’s “1492,” Nara Denning’s Neurotique [and other films], M. Evelina Galang’s “Deflowering the Sampaguita,” Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s “One Question, Several Answers,” Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Melissa Roxas’s “Poems as Evidence,” and Jenifer K. Wofford’s “MacArthur Nurses.”
A debt of gratitude to my collaborators: Kimberly Alidio, Olivia Ayes, Terry Bautista, Richie Biluan, Caroline Calderon, Rachelle Cruz, Niki Escobar, Diana Q. Halog, Aileen Ibardaloza, Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor, Rashaan Alexis Meneses, Veronica Montes, Camille Ikalina Robles, Leny Mendoza Strobel, for lending me their words and stories. Maraming salamat, at Diyos ti agngina.