Poems Eligible for a Rhysling (Part 2)

Continuing from yesterday's post about Rhysling Award–eligible poetry . . . here's one of my speculative poems this year that appeared only in print, in the excellent poetry magazine Dreams & Nightmares, edited by David Kopaska-Merkel. Aswang Christening: A Family Photo Radiant parents and bouncy baby, all silken and crinoline, taffeta and three-piece wool, are posed in this portrait next to the baptismal font at St. George’s. The baby smells of milk and, slightly, of turned earth. They name him Malcolm. The mother, Clara, whispers to herself, she’ll swear off womb water, that sweet fetal liquor, now that she’s bearing children. Santiago, the father, thanks the parish priest but thinks to himself how plump the man is. Imagines Father Simon running for his Life, pale skin glimmering in dim forest. Behind them, in stained glass, a trick of the light turns the Holy Ghost — a dove — black, not white. —  Vince Gotera, Dreams & Nightmares (Issue 104, September 2016)                     I just remembered that when I started this blog almost ten years ago, I used to comment a little bit on the poetics of the poems of my own I would post on the blog. I originally envisioned the blog as an extension of my teaching so that both my creative-writing and my literature students could come to the blog to learn. Let me go back to that practice now. This is a hybrid sonnet (part English, part Italian, or part Shakespearean, part Petrarchan). It uses the Petrarchan envelope quatrain (abba) but is structured with a Shakespearean architecture: three quatrains and an ending couplet. I'm particularly happy with the rhyming in the third stanza: it's abba (or, in the context of the whole poem, effe) with "priest" rhyming with "forest" in lines 1 and 4, as well as "is" rhyming with "his" in lines 2 and 3. But that's not all. There's consonance in "priest" and "forest": p-r-s-t echoed by f-r-s-t (where the /p/ and the /f/ are related consonants. Besides that, the last two lines of that stanza are a couplet with two-syllable rhymes: "for his" and "forest." Ain't rhymin' fun? I should also point out this poem is part of my in-progress novella-in-poems about two Philippine monsters — mythical aswang — who fall in love, marry, and move to the US to try and live a normal (i.e., human) family life. Do check out Dreams & Nightmares. It's one of the premier speculative poetry venues in the US. And subscribe! Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ  If you got here from my list of Rhysling-eligible poems, please click here to go back to the list.

I'm back ... and born from bamboo!

Well, friends, today is the one-year anniversary of the last time I posted in the blog. Since last March 19, like any slacker, I often thought of themes and subjects I could blog about but just couldn't free up the time . . . and then worried incessantly about the whole situation. But now, here I am, here we are, and let's just get right back into it, shall we? Thanks for your patience with my slackerly ways. I'm back, I'm reformed, and I'm ready to blog. Hasta blogeesta, baby. During my slackerozo non-bloggo year, I had the good fortune of publishing my poem "Born from Bamboo" in an anthology titled Reeds and Rushes: Pitch, Buzz, and Hum, thanks to the good graces of editor Kathleen Burgess as well as Pudding House Publications. Here's the poem: Born from Bamboo In remembrance of my paternal grandmother, whom we called Nanay (Tagalog for mother) "Gray-haired man with three summer-blue eyes," said Nanay. Fructuosa Gotera, her name: fruitful, fertile. "That was Bathala, god of the skies." My father, just four, looked up at his mother's smile. Slim as bamboo, she went on: "Aman Sinaya, goddess of the sea, had green eyes, like emerald. Both gods tried to outdo each other every day. Thunder and lightning. Tidal waves and typhoons. Aman Sinaya's monsoons raked the sky. Bathala hurled boulders —" "No, whole mountains!" said my father, eyes glimmering. "Yes, Martin . . . mountains! into the sea, creating our islands, all seven thousand. Meanwhile, caught between the two realms of heaven and ocean, the northeast wind Amihan had had enough. She took on the shape of a bird, with indigo feathers and feet. She shuttled back and forth, with dainty alimasag crabs, tiger prawns in tamarind, starfish, anemone flowers, from the wavelets up to Bathala, then down with shooting stars, planets' rings, moons for Aman Sinaya to braid in her jade-tinged hair. With gifts and sweets, letters bathed in perfume, the bird enticed Aman Sinaya and Bathala to be friends —" "No," said Martin, "wife and husband!" "Maybe, my son," Nanay laughed. "In his joy, Bathala flew over the sea and cast not rocks but his seed into the Mindanao Deep. From Aman Sinaya's seabed sprang a gigantic bamboo reed, swaying between sky and water." Nanay's hand, upheld in front of my father, danced a sweet fandango in the air. "One day, Amihan, now a huge hawk, soared in circles round the sky-high bamboo, spiraling down until she stopped, hovered. Did she hear calls from within the reed? Help us, Princess of the Air! Small kulintang gongs. Voices in madrigal. Amihan pecked the bamboo, laying bare a tiny space, a womb in the reed. Inside, the first humans: brown eyes and skin, black hair. Amihan named the woman Maganda — beautiful. The man she called Malakas — strong. Inviting them onto her back, the bird ferried the two humans through glorious clouds to the northernmost island created by Bathala, our lovely Luzon, just north of the River Pasig." My father whispered, "You mean . . . our own river?" "Yes, and their children and grandchildren became we Filipinos. You and I, my son, are descended from that divine, royal line: Aman Sinaya, Bathala, Malakas, Maganda, the bamboo reed split open by Amihan." As Nanay finished the tale, Martin, my Papa, kissed her then went to play. My grandmother, before she once again became Fructuosa the Fish-Seller off to work at the market, reveled in the thought that she herself was the bamboo reed, the mother of mothers. Such dreaming helped her through birth upon birth, the death of her oldest daughter, a world war, husband and son in the Bataan death march. Fructuosa . . . shower of golden mangoes, windfall. Rich brown called kayumanggi, she passed on to us. Wife, mother, grandmother: life source, the well. — Vince Gotera, in Reeds and Rushes: Pitch, Buzz, and Hum, edited by Kathleen Burgess, Pudding House Press, 2010. The writing of this poem was an interesting case because it was composed specifically for this book. The bamboo is after all, a reed, and it's used to make musical instruments . . . the application of reeds in music is one of the themes of the anthology. Go buy Reeds and Rushes; it's a marvelous anthology. This poem also afforded me the opportunity to explore how myth and family can interweave; in the poem's frame scene, my lola tells my father, still a child, one of the central Philippine creation stories: how people came to be. For years, I have toyed with the idea of a collection of poems based on myth, and this is a good start for this project, though there are other earlier poems which will probably be included, such as the poem "Aswang." In terms of craft, this poem uses terza rima — interwoven triple rhyme (aba bcb cdc etc.); as you may know from other poems of mine, I more often use distant slant rhyme rather than straight rhyme. For example, northeast / feet / starfish . . . where the long e and the t in the first word rhyme pretty straightforwardly with the second word while the f in feet and the s in northeast rhyme with the f and sh (sorta) in starfish. I suspect that some readers will not agree that my rhymes work . . . and that's just fine with me. As with other poems already discussed in the blog, I am using here a "roughed-up" pentameter (see my discussion of the poem "Guard Duty," for example). Once again, some readers will probably disagree that the meter works (certainly someone like Spenser or Percy Shelley would probably find my poems terribly sloppy) . . . and again, that's just fine too. If people read this poem as some sort of tight free verse, more power to them. Above I coined the sentence "Hasta blogeesta, baby" as some sort of tribute to the second (good) Terminator — not to Schwarzenegger the Governator but to the character — however I think I used it wrong. It probably ought to go at the end of the blog post, as a kind of send-off. So, friends . . . HASTA BLOGEESTA, BABY! P.S. Do get yourself a copy of Reeds and Rushes; you'll love it!

A Pause for the Cause (5.0) ... Suite101

Suite101.com has published an interview with me, thanks to Linda Sue Grimes, Suite101's poetry guru, who graciously invited me and then guided our conversation. Interestingly, she conducted the interview completely within Facebook. Many thanks, Linda Sue!

Also, do browse through the good stuff at Suite101, a leading online magazine and anthology of articles on the arts, literature, writing, and a plethora of wide-ranging topics: food, music, business, education, health, science, sports, technology, travel, and on and on.

You poetry enthusiasts out there may find it interesting that Linda Sue Grimes's Suite101 articles use the spelling "rime" rather than "rhyme" — she has a fascinating article explaining her reasons for this preference. I would be interested to hear what all y'all think about the question of "rime" vs. "rhyme." Please read Linda Sue's article on the topic and then weigh in with a comment below.

Oh, and of course, if you have remarks about the interview, do share those in a comment as well. Thanks, everyone!

Weddings and Knife Clouds

Last week, I visited Rochester, Minnesota, for a day, with my daughters Amelia and Melina, and we happened to pick up an issue of Rochester Magazine. In it was a clever full-page ad, picturing a young woman extending her left hand toward the viewer, giving "the finger" with her third finger. Only her hand is in sharp focus; face and torso are blurred, calling attention to the ring finger sans ring. The caption reads, "Is your girlfriend trying to tell you something?" The sales pitch continues by claiming Lasker Jewelers has "the largest selection of diamonds in Rochester" then advising a young man in need of an engagement ring to get down to the store, "Because trust us, it's better we tell you where to go before she does."

Click on the ad if you want to see a larger version.

I find this ad fascinating on a couple of levels. First, switching from the second finger to the third finger is brilliant — the hand still looks like it's giving "the finger" even though the finger doing the semiotics has changed. Second, it suggests that the woman is in charge of the relationship, the timing and particulars of the engagement and also the wedding, though the ad is hardly a feminist document. And of course the ad upholds the societal privileging of heterosexual life. As well as the privileging of the male, who has the agency of procuring the ring, the symbol of union. Or is it of fealty?

Obviously, the ad got me to thinking about weddings and marriages: who is in charge? Especially with regard to national culture and customs. The Philippines, before contact with European culture, was inhabited by many tribes and peoples, all of whom shared the folkway that women and men are equal; this is reflected in Philippine languages and dialects, which have no segregating "she" and "he" pronouns, but rather a single generic nonsexist one. In our time, though, just about a half a millennium after Magellan claimed to have discovered the Philippines, unleashing hundreds of years of Westernizing by Spain and the US, this vaunted gender equality has become quite rare throughout the society.

And so it was in my parents' marriage. Here is a poem that explores these issues.

Wedlock


Papa said, "You know I would have to kill you,"
to Mama, who sat quietly, head bowed.
I was just a kid — five or six — and cried
deep gut-wrenching sobs. The moon, like a new
coin in the window, sliced in half by blue
knives of cloud. "You're too young to understand,
Vin," he smiled. "It would be my duty as a man."
A tear on her cheek, Mama whispered, "That's true."

To this day, I don't know if there was another man
or if they were only talking possibility,
in case, for example, Mama felt her face
begin to flush downstairs with a repairman.
Her only safety net then — Papa's motto,
A place for everything, everything in its place.

—	Vince Gotera, from Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (2000). Also appeared in Fighting Kite (2007).

I hope this poem speaks for itself, because I don't think I can say it any clearer than this.

Something I can tell you is that the incident recounted in the first stanza did happen. I remember my parents talking in these words or something very like them. I was indeed five or six, and you can draw whatever inference you want from parents talking about such matters in the presence of a kid in kindergarten or first grade. The event certainly stuck with me. I think this was probably, from my father's point of view, part of my indoctrination into maleness, into machismo. Part and parcel, I think, of US Army training as he saw it, from the dual perspectives of trainer and trainee . . . father and son, in the way his father (my Lolo) taught him to be a man, through hard knocks and a thick belt.

For those of you who read the blog to hear about poetic craft, the basic element here is form: we've got a sonnet here. I am using this form because of the tradition of sonnets as love poetry. In this case, though, the sonnet is being used as a vessel for "anti-love," for control and oppression in the name, allegedly, of "love."

To be more specific, this is a Petrarchan sonnet with an octave (or eight-line stanza) rhymed abba acca, a small departure from the norm, an octave made up of two envelope quatrains (abba abba). The second stanza is a more standard Petrarchan sestet (or six-line stanza) rhymed cde cde. There is also the usual turn (or volta) at line 9 . . . in this case, a change in time: the opening octave set in the speaker's childhood and the closing sestet set in the present.

All of these mechanics and specifics are not probably quite as important as the effect of the form, specifically the Petrarchan form, on the unfolding of the initial narrative in the octave and the sestet's meditation on that narrative. Both parts are contained and molded by the Petrarchan architecture, like liquid being poured into a bottle of a particular shape. I can't be more specific than that because I don't really know more than that. More often than not, an art object is more opaque to the artist than to the viewer.

I have also borrowed an image from Un chien andalou, the surreal silent-film short by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. This image occurs at the film's opening, when a full moon is sliced in half by a thin, knife-like cloud. This image occurs in tandem with another, more horrific, cutting that I won't reveal now in case you want to experience Un chien andalou yourself. My borrowing (stealing?) of this image is serendipitous; I don't know really what it means in the context of the child's narrative, but it works for me at some deep, unknowable level of emotion. How this happens occurs, for me, subconsciously or unconsciously so that I find myself at a loss as to how to explain the effect. I would appreciate any insight you can contribute here . . . please write a comment below. Thanks.

Beyond all that, I guess I would caution the young woman in the ad — well, really anyone considering marriage — to be very, very careful. And watch out when you see knife clouds bisecting the moon, too. Just watch out.

NOTE: The ad above comes from the March 2009 issue of Rochester Magazine. No copyright infringement is intended, and the appearance of the ad in this blog is free advertising for Lasker Jewelers. At least, I hope they see it that way. Oh, also, in case you're still wondering what the Petrarch an envelope quatrain is, the rhyming of the quatrain's inner two lines is enveloped by the rhyming of the outer two lines . . . abba, the b-rhyme lines enclosed by the a-rhyme lines.

Have a Heart!

Happy Valentine's Day, O my readers!

Today, a poem I wrote for Mary Ann some Valentines back to celebrate the holiday and my love for her in a much different fashion from tradition's red roses and frilly paper hearts.

Valentine Day's Poem As we watched a laparoscopic gall-bladder surgery on TLC last night, I was amazed how the body seemed so much like a landscape. The gall bladder resembling Half-Dome Rock in Yosemite, abutting the burnt-sienna mountain range of the liver, and the rich apricot-yellow forests of fatty tissue. The heart was distant and strange, the horizon pulsing, the sky of skin in chorus with crimson land. Is this heart our symbol of love? Like red-lace hearts and heart-shaped boxes of candy? No, this is the real thing. That's how I love you, Mary Ann, as much as any landscape of flesh can love you: blood, muscle, my hands washing your hair, bones like trees in a wind. —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in the Asian Pacific American Journal (Spring/Summer 1996).

I trust the poem speaks for itself about love and Valentine hearts.

Since some of you, O gentle readers, follow the blog to focus on poetic technique, let me tell you this is a Shakespearean (or English) sonnet, as perhaps you've surmised from the poem's structure and shape: three quatrains and a couplet. In typical Shakespearean-sonnet fashion, the quatrains alternate their rhyme — abab.

Now I sense some scratching of heads at how "body" and "Yosemite" could possibly rhyme. As well as "candy" and "landscape." The key words: slant rhyme. For those who may not know, Yosemite is pronounced yoe-SEH-mitt-ee; the rhyme then is between the two syllables of body and the final two syllables of Yosemite. With the rhyme pair candy and landscape, the rhyme happens with the first syllable of both words; also the consonance repetition of the /k/ sound at the beginning of candy and in the center of landscape contributes to the soundplay. In addition, the first rhyme word in the couplet, "hands," rhymes similarly with "candy and "landscape." And, again, a slant rhyme with "wind."

Okay, enough enough enough. Go out and enjoy Valentine's Day. And do the "red-roses and frilly hearts" thing; it's often practical and judicious not to follow, in everyday life, what poems tell us. Again, Happy Valentine's Day!

Note from 17 Feb 2009: I've just gotten permission from Jessica Wheat to use her wonderful medical illustration of the heart. Hurray! As you can see above, Jessica's heart image is now next to the poem. Click on it to see a larger version. The previous graphic I used is now to the right of this note; it came from www.medical-look.com.

Vanessa Ruiz, creator of Street Anatomy, a website that explores human anatomy in medicine, art, and design, said this about Jessica Wheat's work: "Jessica has a very nice loose painterly style present in all of her work. It makes the anatomy seem more organic and fluid. It’s a nice change from some of the highly stylized and ridged anatomical illustrations we see at times." I couldn't agree more. Her color images are simply lovely, with a gentle application of color and shading that rivals the best fine art. To see more, check out Wheat's online porfolio; look particularly for her "Leather Sea Star" and "Moon Jelly."     — VG

Love Poem for a New Year

And now, as another year approaches, I offer a sonnet I wrote for my lovely wife Mary Ann Blue Gotera.

First Mango Remember that June before our wedding we spent in San Francisco? That first morning you woke to my brother in silver sequins singing like Diana Ross? What must have gone through your mind? What kind of people were you marrying into? My father who laughed a lot but was schizophrenic. My stepmom who'd tried, they say, to stab him in the back with scissors. Love may be blind, but not stone blind. Then, one Sunday we bought at the corner market one perfectly ripened red-gold mango. How carefully I slit the skin with my penknife . . . rivers of yellow juice, the furry seed . . . then sliced the golden half-moons into quadrangles, open petals. Your first bite of our sweet life. for Mary Ann — Vince Gotera, from Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1995).

Some of the family history behind this poem has been covered already in the blog. My half-brother Pepito's story: the whole Diana Ross and sequins thing really happened. My father's mental illness is touched on here and there in the blog, particularly in the write-up on the poem "Newly Released, Papa Tells What It's Like Inside." The story that Carolina, Papa's first wife, had tried to kill him was, it turned out, a fabrication he made up for his second wife, Candida . . . Mama. To justify in her eyes why he had left Carolina. I found that out when Papa remarried Carolina some years after Mama died. I said, "Why are you remarrying her? She tried to kill you!" And he said, "I made that up for your mom." When the events in this poem took place, during the summer of 1984, Papa and Carolina were married again.

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, rhymed abbaabba cdecde. Of course, in my customary manner, I mix half rhyme and full rhyme. For example, the a rhyme revolves around the consonant combination /n/+/t/ or the related /n/+/d/: spent, mind, into, blind. My favorite rhyme pair in the poem is mango / quadrangles, which illustrates what a polyglot language English is. The word "mango" comes from Malayam through Portuguese, and "quadrangles" from Latin through French. So on a superficial level, both words could be considered Latinate because they both come into English from a Romance language, but at a deeper level of analysis, they are as distantly unrelated as two etymologies can be.

With regard to meter, these lines are roughly pentameter with many varieties of poetic feet mixed in. Without scanning (we don't always have to scan) we can find "effective" spondees, i.e., pairs of syllables that behave like spondees (stress stress) even though scansion might reveal them to be actually stresses belonging to different feet. Well, maybe a little scanning will be helpful; look at the second half of line 2, after the caesura/question mark:

. . . that FIRST | MORN- ing | you WOKE

The phrase "first morn-" effectively forms a spondee even if it's not structurally so. I suppose there is also an effective pyrrhic foot (unstress unstress) in the adjacent syllables "-ing you" to match and offset the preceding effective spondee.

There are also "performative" spondees: maybe someone reading the poem out loud might choose to make a pair of syllables into a spondee. For example, "half-moons" is naturally a trochee but could be spoken as a spondee; the phrase "first bite" in everyday speech is probably an iamb but could be performed as a spondee for dramatic or rhetorical effect. And with the phrase "RED-GOLD MAN- go" we have potentially a performative molossus (stress stress stress), though I gotta tell ya: the molossus is a pretty rare creature in English poetics. Besides, I can't think of the molossus with a straight face; I start flashing to some clumsy dinosaur lumbering through a swamp with mangrove trees. Hmm, "mangrove" . . . "mango"? No, don't go there.

To end, I just want to point out there is a real spondee here of which I am proud: the closing phrase "sweet life." This sonnet is, after all, a love poem, a tribute to my wife Mary Ann and to our beautiful life together. Amen. (Say it like a spondee.) AMEN.

Shh, Shh, Shh

Went to a reading last night: a book-launch event for J. D. Schraffenberger's new (and first) book Saint Joe's Passion (Etruscan Press, 2008). The reading was part of the University of Northern Iowa's "Writers Talk" Reading Series . . . and a welcome to Jeremy, who is a new faculty member at UNI.

Jeremy made a sweet gesture at the reading: along with his own poems, he read a poem by James Hearst as well as one by me. That poem was "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside," from my third poetry collection, Fighting Kite (2007). (By reading poems besides his own, Jeremy was also furthering the cause of making poetry relevant to our everyday lives, a là Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" — a now-iconic essay from 1991.)

Jeremy's reading was simply marvelous, a hint at the scintillating career that lies ahead of my new young colleague. Congratulations on the new book, Jeremy. And thanks again for performing my poem. For those in the audience who might like to see that poem after hearing it last night:

Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside Vin, that psych ward is Dante's Inferno — circles within circles, you climb and climb. The sons of bitches in white, they're monsters and devils. You see, son, you're paying for your sins while you're there. Each circle a privilege you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion, the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed's made up with wet sheets and you become Satan on ice &mdash the teeth chattering inside your head, stones rattling round and round in a can. Then once a week, they take you down for shock, the mouse killed again with an elephant gun. First time was '46: the bed just like an electric chair &mdash electrodes, colored wires &mdash That's all I can remember. Except for that shock, vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes. And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies. Closest to outside is the circle called grounds privileges, they let you walk all the way out to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers, the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas, saying you're different from real people. But how do you get there? Between is a tortured drama: wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass &mdash mixing with real lunatics, the gamut running from rapists to certified pigstickers, manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it's always the walk I'll remember. The Thorazine shuffle. We're all diviners doomed to Dante's Eighth Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal. We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish it would end . . . we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle in line . . . our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh. — Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Kenyon Review (1991). Also published in the collection Fighting Kite (2007).

My father was a schizophrenic. This doesn't mean he had multiple personalities — the layperson's usual (mis)understanding of schizophrenia. It meant, among other things, that my father sometimes heard voices, saw visions. In the Philippines, this meant Martin Avila Gotera was considered a visionary man. In the US, it just meant he was crazy.

During my childhood, my father was often in and out of psych wards. In "Newly Released . . ." I imagine Papa telling me what life is like inside the psych ward at the VA hospital. Some of the material in the poem comes from things my father did tell me, for example, about his being given shock therapy at Letterman Army Hospital, though the details about that in the poem are wholly imagined. The wet-sheet treatment is also something Papa endured.

I suppose some readers of the poem may think of the Dante connection as arising out of my literary background. Well, first, my father was himself a fiction writer who studied literature avidly and so quite likely could connect with Dante. In fact, he was quite an aficionado of The Divine Comedy. Second, my grandfather, Papa's father, Tatay, had in his sala (the formal living room), a copy of The Divine Comedy, an edition with the Doré engravings; as a small child, I used to sneak into the sala (I think now that maybe that room was off limits to the grandkids, because I remember sneaking) and pore over that huge volume. Not for the text so much — I didn't really read Dante until I was in college &mdash but for those illustrations. I remember vividly the one that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future. There was also another showing sinners rending their chests open . . . for what infraction I have no clue.

This poem is also the result of a one-sided competition with my former teacher David Wojahn at Indiana University, where I earned my MFA in poetry. "One-sided" because I don't think David knows about "our" competition. I remember one day in an MFA workshop, 20+ years ago, David had us read and discuss Craig Raine's poem "In the Kalahari Desert" which ends with this striking line: "Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh . . ." At a poetry reading some months later, David read a poem that also featured the word "Shhh" in the last line, and he may have even mentioned his own competition-of-sorts with Raine. Not to be outdone, I eventually produced my own poem with "Shhh" as an ending, however petty and unpoetic that might sound.

In terms of craft, the poem is written in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, etc. Of course, as I suggested was my frequent mode in the previous post, I use slant rhyme, very slant rhyme. For example, "sons" / "sins" / "seclusion" or "kiss-ass" / "——stickers" / "Vin, it's." Quite distant rhyme in some places, then . . . in the case of those last three words given in that example, the two similar vowels, the trochee stress pattern, and the ending /s/. With regard to meter, perhaps predictably, a "roughed-up" pentameter (again, see the last post).

When I was in the Army, my MOS ("military occupational specialty" or job) was Military Pay Clerk. For a time, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center, where I helped mentally ill patients (all military service members) with their pay problems. This was where I learned about the system of privileges (that we see also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the poem, I have my father use as a metaphor for that system the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno. (Ironically, my father was also a mental patient at Letterman Army Hospital three decades before I worked there.) It was also at this job that I witnessed what everyone called "the Thorazine shuffle," the way the drug Thorazine made patients essentially catatonic.

As far as larger thematics are concerned . . . that's your call. I didn't have any axe to grind, I don't think, when I wrote the poem. At some level, I guess, I hope you are getting some idea about how the mentally ill have been treated, historically, by American medicine. Though I'm not on a crusade or whatever. I do wish my father had had available, during his lifetime, medicines like Prozac and other contemporary anti-depressants. They would have made his life easier. Nevertheless, he held down a job; he toughed it out, as men in his generation were supposed to do; and he held on to his dignity. What more could one ask for?

Craft and Technique (1.0)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted my poem "Guard Duty" here, but the politics-oriented context of that post didn't really allow for discussion of poetics. Now and again, I get inquiries from students who are writing a paper on some poem of mine, and generally their papers end up covering meaning more than craft. In the interest of informing such seekers about my technique, I'd like now to unpack "Guard Duty" some. Here's the poem again.

Guard Duty A young soldier squints into thick black night hoping no hostile sapper is cutting through barbed wire, a bayonet and grenades tied to his waist . . . invisible. This mute scenario lies at the heart of three generations' bedtime stories: my Lolo and my Papa in the US Army, Philippine Scouts, death march in Bataan, my brother Pepito in the 'Nam, nightmares of Agent Orange. That young soldier could have been any one of them . . . or me, on guard mount at Fort Ord during Vietnam. Almost dreaming machine gun recoil in our hands. Screaming, an oncoming horde. Never again . . . young women and men should dream of breezes in trees, soft rain, sunshine. Never again. — Vince Gotera, from Poets Against the War (2003). Also appeared in my 2003 collection Ghost Wars.

To begin, I should say I subscribe to Seamus Heaney's distinction between craft and technique; craft has to do with building-block approaches, like alliteration or rhyme; technique is the cooperation of craft and personality, one's individual, idiosyncratic use of craft elements. Craft is mechanics; technique is stylistic. Below, I'll be talking about craft; my technique is ultimately for you to decide (it's invisible to me, of course).

SOUND and MUSIC. I am a huge fan of Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his over-the-top sound play. Of course, today you can't use sonic devices like Hopkins did . . . contemporary ears find such sound play fascinating but really just too much. Nonetheless, you can emulate Hopkins to a limited degree. For example, alliteration in stanza one: /th/ in "thick" and "through," "/b/ in "black," "barbed," and "bayonet"; assonance: the short /i/ in "squints," "into," "thick," "hoping," "cutting," "his" . . . and the three instances in the single word "invisible"; consonance: the beginning /s/ and ending /r/ in "soldier," "sapper," and scenario." And all this just in the first stanza.

One of my favorite sonic devices is rhyme. As a faithful student of Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen, I tend more towards slant rhyme than full rhyme, thus I rhyme "been" with "gun," "dream" with "again." A là Owen, I even have an instance in this poem of consonant rhyme — what critics call "pararhyme" and Owen called "jump-rhyme" (probably the most famous examples are in his poem "Strange Meeting," where in the first four lines he rhymes "escaped" and "scooped," "groaned" and "groined"). Here in this poem, I rhyme "bedtime" with "Bataan" . . . I'm particularly happy that I was able to involve three consonants: /b/, /t/, and /n/ or /m/, in that order.

An important way to think about rhyme, other than in terms of sound, is to look at what words are rhymed. As a poet, one can hint quite a bit about theme through judicious use of rhyme pairs. For example, I'm quite proud of the pairing of "US" and "nightmares," as a bit of social commentary. Also, not using periods in the abbreviation — like "U.S." — allows the additional meaning of "us" . . . i.e., the plural first person pronoun, as in "you and I," thus extending the social commentary even more.

RHYTHM and METER. In a couple of earlier . . . wait, before we get deep into this topic, let me warn you that it might get a little technical. Don't worry. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the Wikipedia articles on poetic meter and prosodic feet. Okay, let's get to it.

In a couple of earlier posts, I referred to favoring "roughed-up" meter. In this poem, I use pentameter that is — you guessed it — "roughed up." What I mean by this is frequent substitution of feet; if my primary meter is iambic, I pepper the poem with trochees, anapests, dactyls, even some spondees and pyrrhics.

In fact, I'm not even sure if my primary meter in the poem is iambic. Look at a scansion of the first line:

×a

/young

|

/sol-

×dier

|

/squints

×in-

|

×to

/thick

|

×black

/night

So . . . iamb trochee trochee iamb iamb. I suppose because the first foot is iambic and three out of five feet here are iambic, you could say we've got iambic pentameter. Well, maybe. I suppose that's as good an argument as any. But I gotta tell ya, I'm not sure myself, really. When I count feet while composing, I pay attention mainly — no, only — to how many stresses are in the line; I let the unstressed syllables sort themselves out. So when I wrote this poem, I bet I never once thought iambic or trochaic or whatever. I did know I wanted pentameter, but that's as much as I thought ahead, probably.

Let's look at another scansion, this time of line 3:

×barbed

/wire

||

×a

/bay-

|

×o-

/net

|

×and

×gre-

|

/nades

/tied

This is probably as close to true iambic pentameter as you'll find in this poem . . . and it isn't exactly that, either. We've got iamb iamb iamb pyrrhic spondee. And those last two feet are what's called a "double iamb," which count (say the experts) as two iambs . . . I like to think of this construct as a "super iamb" because there are two unstressed syllables followed by two stressed syllables, so you've got a fully unstressed foot heightened then by a fully stressed foot, to get the rising rhythm required by the iamb. In any case, although this line may seem to be straight-out iambic pentameter, it's still not your run-of-the-mill example, particularly because of the caesura (or break in the line, marked here by a comma) immediately after the first foot. And that first foot may not really be an iamb, it turns out; it could be scanned as a spondee: BARBED WIRE || a BAY- | o- NET . . . and so on.

And here's line 7, another interesting example. First off, note the two caesuras (caesurae?):

/ar-

×my

||

/phil-

×ip-

|

×pine-

/scouts

||

/death

×march

×in

|

×ba-

×ta-

/an

A noteworthy trick I use here is bringing together the unstressed syllables of two different feet, as in the second and third feet here. Perhaps more striking in tandem are the fourth and fifth feet, where we get four unstressed syllables together. A cool side effect is that you also get, in effect, a spondee where the third and fourth feet meet: SCOUTS, DEATH. It's very easy to do; you simply take two iambs and flip the second iamb into a trochee, or in the case of two dactyls, the second dactyl into an anapest. Though I'll admit that I don't do it that way, thinking about the feet per se; I simply try to get interesting texture into the rhythm by finding natural ways to bring a number of unstressed syllables together. Or, similarly, a number of stressed syllables next to each other.

And finally the ending line of the poem, which features three caesuras:

×of

/bree-

|

×es

×in

/trees

||

×soft

/rain

||

/sun

×shine

||

/nev-

×er

|

×a-

/ gain

Same device here as in line 7, bringing unstressed syllables together, as in NEV- er | a- GAIN. And then there is also the spondee effect with the stressed syllables RAIN, SUN. In fact, the foot "soft rain" could be read as a spondee as well, which would bring four stressed syllables together: TREES, || SOFT RAIN, || SUN- shine. One could get a similar effect in line 1 with THICK, | BLACK NIGHT if "black night" were scanned as a spondee. Oh, and the last line, by the way, is hexameter . . . an alexandrine, used here to evoke "the sense of an ending."

Anyway, that's how I "rough up" the meter, by (1) frequent substitution of feet, in order to really mix up rising and falling stress patterns, and (2) bringing together stretches of unstressed syllables or, similarly, stretches of stressed syllables. All meant to destabilize the singsong flavor of regular meter.

LINEATION. Just as I lean towards slant rhyme, I tend to favor enjambed lines over end-stopped ones. In this poem, there are only three end-stops: lines 3, 12, and 14. That means that there are 11 enjambed lines. This makes a hurried poem, always teetering forward at the line break . . . consequently there is a lot of tension in the poem, unresolved energy. And I trust this goes along with the thematic tension of constant fear in war . . . being continually on guard.

FORM. Of course, this is a sonnet, a Shakespearean one. Syntactically, though, the quatrains don't match the sentence structure, unlike Shakespeare's frequent matching of individual sentences to quatrains. The first chunk of language, from "A young soldier" to "invisible" doesn't reach the end of the first quatrain. The second chunk, from "This mute scenario" (line 4) to "of Agent Orange" (line 9) is too much for the second quatrain, leaking out of both ends. The third chunk, comprised of three sentences, from "That young soldier" to "oncoming horde," is too small again but neatly finishes out the third quatrain. Thus leaving the final couplet to deliver quite conventionally and deliberately, with the customary volta, or turn, at the beginning of line 13. So the effect I wanted is of language and feeling that breaks through the sonnet form, or perhaps more accurately, out of it, but is then resolved by the closing couplet, the double occurrence of "never again," highlighting effectively (I hope) the overall antiwar theme of the poem.

CODA. Well, that's it. That's all I know about this poem. Of course, there's more, much more, that I can't see. I hope you will share with me your insights about the poem and its poetics by writing a comment in response. Just click on the word "comments" immediately below this post. Then we can have a dialogue (or a multilogue) about poems and the writing of them.

One parting shot. While I was writing this poem, I knew none of what I'm sharing with you above (or, at least, precious little of it). I simply wrote the thing, trusting to my own inner "poetry machine" to produce the literary flair that might give this poem the apt tone and feeling to mark it as poetic language. I can't quite remember how much revision this poem went through . . . it feels to me now so much of a piece, so unified. But it seems to me that it didn't go through much revision; I think it pretty much wrote itself. Partly because of the occasion of writing it for the "Poets Against (the) War" movement, partly because it speaks so clearly to (and for) my family history, my sense of self, the overall feeling of being a Gotera, of being my father's son.