Category: reading

by this lecture given by the ever-brilliant Conchitina Cruz. She says, My enchantment with genre bending has to do with the possibilities it yields through an unyielding stance toward the question: What is it?

From “To Essay a Poem: Notes on Genre Bending” :

Our creative writing program here in UP, like many others, is organized by genre and divided into three basic tracks: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. On occasions that call for quick descriptions of these strains, it is convenient to go tongue-in-cheek: poets pay attention to sound and image, fiction writers to plot, and nonfiction writers to “what really happened.” Or: poets play with line cuts and language, fiction writers with narrative and time, and nonfiction writers talk about themselves. Easy to tell which genre demands, as far as reputation goes, the most amount of chika and the least amount of skill. Which also explains the order of elimination CW majors typically go through (“Well, it looks like I can’t do fiction, and I know I can’t do poetry, so I guess that leaves…).

…

There is nothing more tiring than hearing yourself say the same things in the same ways again and again, nothing more exasperating than hearing others say what you are also saying in the same ways again and again, homogeneity being another cause of claustrophobia. If writing is a means of ushering thought into ordered existence, and what you say is how you say it, then the cross-pollinations of the genres can only guard against monotone and redundancy in making possible varieties of articulation and therefore varieties of thought, diverse shapes of imagination.

Read the whole thing; it’s an absolute treat. :D

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Ms Cruz also provides a link to Cesar Ruiz Aquino’s “The Distance to Parnassus: A Palanca Commentary”. In this article, Aquino critiques “three poetry collections-The Gospel According to the Blind Man by Marie La Viña, Sl(e)ights by Ana Maria Katigbak, and Morphic Variations by Francis C. Macansantos-which won in the Poetry in English category of the 2008 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. This critical commentary highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each collection in terms of imagery, use of language, manipulation of form and structure, theme, and prosody.”

Interesting! The last time I checked the Palanca website, I was only able to read Marie La Viña’s Gospel, which bagged the 3rd place for Poetry last year (I adore this poem).

I’ll go download and read what Mr. Aquino has to say.

I love this: No matter how you would describe the voice that a poem carries, what the poem wants is a readership through time attuned to its voice—not a prize, if they are not the same and they are not.

This from Marc Gaba‘s review of the English poetry sections of UP’s Likhaan Book of Fiction and Poetry series. I own two volumes: 1998, poetry edited by J. Neil Garcia; and the 2001 volume, poetry edited by Gemino Abad.

Sadly, I’ll have to agree with Mr. Gaba here:

To many poets whose works appear frequently in the series, poetry seems be a matter of sounding ‘poetic’: inflated, sort-of-heightened language that sounds understandable, but if read closely (or if simply read) either makes no sense, or obscures the small idea that is meant. Often, in effect, sentences descriptive in gesture do not describe anything, images are not achieved, verbs don’t do their jobs, diction is just wrong…—it is as though language in poetry is meant to be a kind of noise that ‘sounds beautiful.’ Metaphors proliferate with no consciousness tracking them, mainly because they derive from unintentional errors in diction. The writers of these poems seem unaware of how their language mangles material in the name of a misguided sense of what is poetic.

He gives several examples, and closes with:

…the intention—the wish—is that the poems we write be read not as extensions of people with names big or small, nor as cultural ornaments that one need not consider seriously, but as a written thing that is best read without—in fact may be read only without—fear, without that weird readiness to be intimidated, a readiness which tends to submit too easily to inherited, ‘expert’ judgement and interpretation at the expense of a self vivified by its honest response.

Amen. :)

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I adore that phrase – inherited judgment. Which makes me think of the word canon. Which makes me think of those instances in CW classes when you want to raise a contrary criticism about a piece, but you can’t because GUSH THEY’RE PILLARS OF POETRY AND FICTION GUSH.

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There’s a certain “pillar of poetry” whose poems I just don’t enjoy. I try to, but I can’t. I once shared this with a friend who finished CW (I majored in Journ and just took electives), waiting for the backlash. It didn’t come. She looked at me and said: “Yeah, I don’t like him/her either.” Then we laughed. It was a nervous, exhilarated laughter, as though we had just shoplifted and had gotten away scot-free.

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Just a thought, though: I think Mr. Gaba should have mentioned that a poem of his was included in the 1998 Likhaan.

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I got the link to his review from Conchitina Cruz’s blog. Cruz’s first poetry collection, Dark Hours, was a defining moment for me as an avid reader and occasional writer of poetry. Here are poems that mean something to me, I thought. Here are poems that move me. Her second book, elsewhere held and lingered, is also excellent.

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Marc Gaba was my instructor in my first and only poetry class, Imagery. I thought he was great, his class another defining moment. As for his poems, I’ve read only a handful, but this is my favorite:

Study of Linearity

He tasted his tear, tiny orchestra, it fled
itself down his face to the tongue which could not
hold that rapid taste, the lives that quote each other
streamed below his placard, all day and later
the sun pulled out like an ending, it pointed
away from its answers, at us whom it missed,
word by word, the holes in the net we make.