Day 14 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2022

Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: “Today’s challenge is a fun one: write a poem that takes the form of the opening scene of the movie of your life. Does it open with a car chase? A musical number? A long scene panning across a verdant plain?” Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt: “[W]rite a scary poem. Your poem could invoke monsters, release spiders, or tremble at the mystery of the night. It could contemplate taxes or the prospect of public speaking. And don't forget the dread of the blank page.” Today I'm merging the prompts by cheating on the movie scene: I'm cinematizing not my own life but someone else's: Dante Alighieri. On the off chance someone might not know what I'm referring to in today's poem, the opening lines of Dante's Divine Comedy are "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost" (The Inferno, Canto I), as translated by Longfellow in 1867. Also, I'm using a form Robert Lee Brewer recently invented as a poetic game, the Wordy 30, which plays on the online word game Wordle that's currently an international viral craze. Opening Scene in a Dante Biopic ALONE WOODS CRAZY BURNT TREES SCARY —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Here's what this poem might look like in a Wordle-type matrix. I'm grateful today to my friend Bruce Niedt who wrote a Wordy poem yesterday for NaPoWriMo, introducing me to this fun new form. Thanks, Bruce. To end, an interesting coincidence: at the start of The Divine Comedy, the main character (Dante himself, fictionalized) gets lost in the woods on Maundy Thursday (Holy Thursday to Catholics). What's interesting? Today is Maundy Thursday! Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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On Dante and Doré and Childhood

A couple of days ago, my daughter Melina, who's a senior in high school, asked me to go with her to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up a Penguin edition of The Divine Comedy by Dante. As you may know from other blog posts, I have what seems to me an almost lifelong history with Dante, and especially Gustave Doré's Divine Comedy illustrations. Well, not only did we find Melina her Penguin, we also found me a remaindered Divine Comedy (hardcover and only $17!), which is, I'm pretty sure, the same text and illustrations (Doré's, hurray!) that I used to sneak peeks at in my Lolo's sala. Actually, I didn't only "sneak peeks" . . . I used to pore and pore over that book. I was obsessed with it, at probably age 4 or 5. Those hidden childhood hours with Dante made quite an impression on me. More particularly, the Doré illustrations are deeply imprinted in my memory. Looking through my new find, I quite vividly remembered many of the images &mdash specific ones! — first seen over fifty years ago. Inferno, Canto 10       Inferno, Canto 19       Inferno, Canto 18 Filipinos have a pretty lively cultural connection with the occult and with death, so I was already well primed for these images. I quite clearly remember the image on the left above, of a grave sundered open and a corpse tottering up to speak. Perhaps my long apprenticeship with such imagery explains my interest in cinematic and literary vampires, zombies, Frankenstein, the aswang. (Remember you can click on an image to see a larger version.) I also recall quite strongly the image in the center, where the punished are embedded upside down in holes in solid rock, burning. I recall my horror at this specific penance, imagining these people's nostrils filled with whatever noxious fluids feed the flames and smoke writhing around their legs and feet. Worst of all, they are constantly drowning. (Drowning just happens to be one of my greatest fears.) Dante and Doré may have provided my earliest introduction to the nude female body. There are many examples in the book, but I do remember this image on the right, probably because of the woman's buxom form but also because she is smeared with shit. At that age I could already read quite well and probably easily decoded Dante's language: "filth . . . out of human privies," "so foul with ordure" (in Longfellow's translation). Inferno, Canto 13       Inferno, Canto 15 Most of the time, it was the particularity of the punishment that got to me. Above left, sinners have been turned into mangled and distorted trees. The talking trees in The Wizard of Oz movie didn't scare me: they were originally trees . . . talking, yes, but still in their own natural forms. These are people who have been changed into trees, obviously not of their own choosing. This specific punishment seemed to me, as a child, quite brutal: trees cannot get up and run away. On the right, a rain of fire. Yes, I knew about the tongues of fire that descended upon Jesus's disciples after his death. But I imagined those as friendly flames, like soft birds almost. Instead, we've got rain . . . really, rain couldn't give a care about you as it pelts your skin indiscriminately, but here it's made of fire. I distinctly recall imagining what those hundreds of firedrop burns might feel like on your naked skin. Inferno, Canto 22       Inferno, Canto 24 In the image on the left, I remember surmising that the demon had chased down a misfortunate and thrown him into boiling water or even oil. I knew what jumping bubbles of oil looked like from watching my mom fry up dinner. That had to be boiling oil or worse! What really scared me, though, was the obvious virtuoso flying the demon is doing. That convinced me to avoid going to Hell. There'd be no way to escape from these flyers, with their serrated bat wings, pitchforks, and snakey tails. Speaking of snakes, in the image on the right . . . what else is there to say? They sic snakes on you! Snakes. Snakes! Inferno, Canto 28       Inferno, Canto 28       Inferno, Canto 31 The image on the right was (and is) especially troubling to me. Demons slitting your chest . . . so you could pull it open, exposing lungs and innards, the heart, to the sulphurous air of Hell. This particular image has stuck with me over the years. I only recently realized that the central figure here is Mohammed, and I am reminded, alas, of the misguided animosity some Americans currently have towards Islam. In the center, a man holding up his own severed head and talking. The original talking head, ha ha. I've had a long fascination with this sort of image, later centered upon The Green Knight, Sir Gawain's nemesis. Clearly I had forgotten that that fascination is rooted in this particular image from childhood. An image that was not so much horrific as it was interesting, especially with the perfectly round, collar-like neck of the man. On the right, a more benevolent context. We see Dante and Virgil being transported by a giant (Antaeus, it turns out, who had fought Hercules and lost). As a child, I was very interested in giants from fairy tales and mythology, Greek and Norse. In this image, I recall being amused by the hero holding on to the giant's beard, afraid of being dropped. Dante, so unheroic, so much like an ordinary Joe. Inferno, Canto 34       Inferno, Canto 12 I quite clearly remember gazing at the image on the left for long periods: Satan (or perhaps, more correctly, fallen Lucifer), frozen into ice. I was quite surprised to learn that in the deepest pit of Hell Satan would not be on fire but rather on ice. And he really seemed to me quite bored. Supremely so. I mean, he's got four wings and all. And nowhere to go. No way to go. Humpf. You have to understand: at that age, I thought I was really seeing Hell. That this was what it was like. Not metaphor. Not imagined. But journalism. You sinned, you go to Hell, you're tormented by guys with sharp implements and leathery bat wings. And in the middle of it all, Satan imprisoned in a lake of ice. But it wasn't all horror. I was also glad to see the creatures of mythology were real, and they lived down there. Look here on the right at the centaurs. Aren't they having a good old time? These horsy bro's horsing around with their spears and bows and arrows. As a kid of 5 or 6, I nursed a great interest in archery. The American Indians' versatile short bow. The great longbow of the English. And so on. Fun! Purgatorio, Canto 12       Paradiso, Canto 12       Paradiso, Canto 31 At that age, I didn't find Purgatorio and Paradiso nearly as interesting as Inferno. (Actually, I still don't.) Purgatorio, even though it still featured punishments, did have a lot of pastoral fields and such. Looking through the book now, the only image I recalled from back then was the one on the left. And it's quite similar to the infernal images. A bunch of guys carting boulders up a mountainside. Like Jesus burdened with the cross, actually. At least it looks like they are having a modicum of success, not the futility one saw again and again in Hell. Just as I thought Hell was exactly as Doré portrayed it, I thought Heaven was just like he shows in the center and right images above: a lot of synchronized flying by angels making circular shapes and patterns. As a kid, I was very interested in Paradiso as a destination more than as an actual location. And I really wanted to believe that the saved souls would be happy there. I think I must have remembered the center image because the angels in the upper circle — a "garland" of "sempiternal roses," Dante and Longfellow called it — seemed just like a flying saucer ringed by bright landing lights. At that age, I was crazy about flying saucers. Remember that was the '50s and flying saucers were all over the news, absolutely de rigueur. And on the right, well, that's some fancy flying, ain't it? Actually, I felt much more religious about it back then. I'm being pretty glib here. Pretty flippant. I remember imagining what a glorious sight that would be if you could be right there on that cloud with Dante. Millions of angels and saints forming a "snow-white rose" of concentric Seraphim and Cherubim and Archangels, with God ensconced in the center. Wow. I mentioned zombies above, and I'm remembering how I saw the movie Night of the Living Dead as a teenager. Have you seen it? It's a black and white flick. Well, many years later, I was talking to someone and insisting that the movie was in color. Of course, I was wrong, but the important point is that I had "colorized" the movie in my head. I could still see scenes from the movie (as I can now today) but I saw them in color. (Though now that I know better, I remember them in black and white again . . . the imagination is funny that way.) Well, I've had something similar happen with Doré's Dante illustrations. Here's something I wrote in a blog post three years ago: "I remember vividly the [Doré illustration from Dante] that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future." I looked for that illustration in my new book, and it ain't there. It seems I manufactured that memory, made up a "new" Doré illustration. Amazing. Anyway, that's all for today. If you've gained an interest in Doré from this blog post, go buy that Divine Comedy that's "bargain priced" at the Barnes and Noble. Or buy it from Amazon (price about the same). Or look at Bruce Johnson's online tribute to Doré. In any event, you won't be disappointed. That Gustave Doré is one hip artist. He had quite a sublime effect on my childhood. He's one cool cat. All the images above are borrowed from Bruce Johnson's beautiful webpage on Gustave Doré. Mr. Johnson's website on artists and art is an excellent tool to learn about art history. A retired teacher of Latin, he has also created an interesting online guide to historical personages. Check them out.

Dante and Angels and Saints ... Oh, My!

I've posted a couple of poems in the blog so far that refer to Dante's Divine Comedy: "Crosses" and "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside." Well, here's a third Dante-influenced poem. I don't think I had realized consciously until doing the blog what an impact Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (and particularly Gustave Doré's illustrations of The Divine Comedy) had had on me as a child, as an artist/poet-to-be, on my imagination and on my sensibilities.

With your indulgence, I'll set up first by telling you Lolo means "grandfather" and Tita means "aunt," although probably those Filipino words are reasonably clear in the poem's context. Okay, here we go.

Wings I really thought it depicted heaven: a picture of the sky entirely filled with a single gigantic rose shaped by the wings of countless angels in Lolo's book. I was five and didn't know this was Dante's Paradiso. All I know is I saw wings everywhere. One evening, a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. But such visions didn't happen only after I saw the Doré engraving of Dante. Three years before, when I was two, Gerardo, my brother born premature, died after a week in an incubator. Mama swore she and Papa heard wings beating near my crib. I pointed, laughing, "Ahdo, Ahdo," my finger tracing an invisible arc as the sound of flapping slipped out the window. What does my daughter, three months old, really see, when her eyes sweep across the room? Ah ... but then I laugh at myself. I'm a computer programmer. I make pixels fandango onscreen. Surely I never really saw angels. I want to believe my cousin and I simply divined our aunt was dying and were wishing just as hard as we could, "Let her go to heaven." Yet I also recall my college roommate Bill heard rustling outside our window. "A trapped bird," I told him, listened for cooing, some sort of cry for help. We looked. Nothing. The next day, a telegram — at the precise moment we heard wings, my Lolo had died.     —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in the Mississippi Valley Review (1989) in a slightly different version.

Click on the images to see them larger. Gustave Doré William Blake Giovanni Britto (?) Commissioned by Alessandro Vellutello Giovanni di Paolo Illuminated manuscript

It is literally true that the Doré illustration (top) of Beatrice and Dante marveling at the heavenly host forming a "white rose" in the Empyrean was, in my child's mind, really heaven. At the age of five (or whatever my actual age was), it didn't occur to me to wonder how Dante or Doré could have known. Since the image was between covers, in a lordly-looking tome, that was enough proof for little me that heaven really looked like that. This is one of my earliest and most powerful, most charged memories.

Click on the first image at the top above to see the Doré image (dated 1867) in all its glory . . . and I do mean "glory." The other images are different artists' renditions of heaven's "white rose" in the Paradiso. (Cantos 30 and 31 if you want to read Dante's descriptions.)

The second image, below Doré, is by poet and printmaker William Blake (c. 1826): a study or sketch showing the white rose as actually looking like a flower, sepals and all, with each petal reserved for a given person or character; Blake died before he could finish the project, so there is no finished art of this subject.

The third image is attributed to the engraver Giovanni Britto, who worked for Francesco Marcolini, the publisher of Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 commentary on the Divine Comedy; Britto — or whoever created this engraving (click on it to see better detail) — renders the rose with a whole multitude of petals that look like thrones with saints and angels and whomever in each one.

The fourth is an illuminated manuscript by Giovanni di Paolo, a Sienese painter (1400s); his rose is smaller in scope than those of the others, but the figures are strikingly rendered. As a child, I only knew the Doré, and it's illuminating (sorry, bad pun) to see these other takes on the white rose image.

The three vignettes involving wings come right out of Gotera family stories, though I've fiddled with them a bit. The middle one, concerning my brother Gerardo, is narrated here just as people in the family tell it. Although I was small enough to sleep in a crib, I evidently knew about Gerardo and pronounced his name as "Ahdo." Narratives of supernatural visits and so on are very common in Philippine contexts; all families have stories like these, passed on from one generation to the next.

In keeping with this kind of family tradition, and the continuation of such traditions, I have tried to keep the language in the poem simple and down-to-earth. Getting the poem ready to post in the blog, in fact, I changed a word in the first stanza. The phrase "countless angels" was originally "innumerable angels," but I thought innumerable now was not in keeping with family scenes of young and old recounting these stories.

As I've posted the 30 or so poems that are on the blog at this moment, I hadn't revised any until now. I wanted the older poems to reflect my style of those other moments, but with "Wings" I felt strongly that the poem really needed revision. And that doing this would give me the opportunity to talk in the blog about revision as a concern of craft.

With that end in mind, here are three stanzas from "Crosses": those on the left, in red, come from the poem as it was published in the Mississippi Valley Review twenty years ago, while those on the right, in blue, are from the version posted above, as revised over the last couple of days.

Old Version (1989) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in my grandfather's house. The gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining angel told us, "Someone important will pass here this evening." While we were sweeping, my Aunt Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .] New Version (2009) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .]

As you compare the two versions, see how more jagged the older version looks: long lines followed by conspicuously shorter ones then vice versa. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with such variation. But somehow it just didn't seem as polished to me now.

I think this may come from my practice since maybe 1990 of starting a poem by writing in iambic pentameter while at the same time trying to sense the form that the poem seems to want for itself. The result of this practice evidently is that I began to appreciate lines that are more similar to each other in length. Whereas twenty years ago, apparently, I liked lines to be more leggy, more varied. Perhaps something here of the garden vs. the wilderness?

It may also be that I have gotten better at sensing the possible junctures, the potential breaks, in lines . . . that I am more open to different sorts of line breaks, and thus more able to regularize line length. For example, in the third line above, "the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony," I didn't (or couldn't?) hear the potential break after the word "me" that might set up an intriguing nuance while at the same time keeping line lengths similar.

The more likely possibility, though, is that I was just not as good at lineation in 1989 as I am today. So I tended back then to go for more flash ... in other words, enjambment. For instance, in the second line above, I break like this: "to brush / the ceiling." Hmm. What possible advantage was there in calling attention to the word "brush"? Doesn't that line break distract? Make the reader wonder why the line ended there? Is it over-dramatic? Even sentimental? It's certainly sensationalistic.

In his excellent book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that good fiction creates "a vivid and continuous dream" in the mind of the reader, and that the good fiction writer will do whatever it takes not to interrupt that dream. What I'm suggesting in the previous paragraph is that lineating at "brush" breaks up the reader's dream's continuity. Granted there can be good times and reasons to do that, to unbalance and destabilize the reader — Garnder notwithstanding — but it's not necessary in the progress of the narrative at this point in the poem.

I think I was probably similarly preoccupied with enjambment in other line breaks in the earlier version — "the gecko / on the wall" (lines 5-6) or "'Sweep / the steps'" (7-8) or "'will pass / here'" (9-10) — perhaps unnecessarily preoccupied with enjambment, to the disservice of the poem overall. And of the reader. Who doesn't need to have to wonder why "gecko" is out at the end of that long line, gone out on a limb, so to speak.

In the more recent version at the right, I smoothed out the earlier over-the-top enjambments. I set up new, more subtle enjambments that are to my older ear more serviceable. More appropriately dramatic . . . that is, less so. The break at line three of "to me / and my cousin Tony" sets up the "me" as seeing himself in a more elevated position, metaphorically, vis-à-vis the angel; that makes a lot more sense to me narratively (especially with regard to characterization) than the previous emphasis on the action of wings brushing a ceiling. Or, at the end of line eight, the stanza enjambment that highlights "Someone" as opposed to the earlier privileging of "pass[ing]." In other words, in both cases, more focus on character than action.

I've also slightly changed some wording; I think these edits are similarly character-related. For example, I've replaced "grandfather" with "Lolo" and "Aunt" with "Tita"; such usage is more appropriate to these child characters, more personal, as well as more probable in the imagined scene of family storytelling, the imagined language that would be used as these stories are told to nieces and nephews, to grandchildren.

I replaced "While we were sweeping" (line 10) with "As we busied ourselves with brooms" not only to avoid repeating the word "sweep" but also to make a clearer picture (and squeeze in another alliteration, this time on /b/). This alteration also sets up a slant rhyme between "brooms" and "from"; while the poem is essentially unrhymed, there are occasional rhymes created by the new lineation: "feathers" and "shoulders" (lines 1-2) or the distant rhyme of "once" with "Someone" (lines 6 and 8).

There are other small changes, but I think I'll leave off there. Wings are everywhere, people. Angels surround us — if not heavenly, then earthly ones. So many small (and large) kindnesses from all our sisters and brothers.

Note: the Doré illustration above comes from Wikimedia Commons. The Blake image comes from the University of Texas's Danteworlds website. The third image, commissioned by Vellutello, comes from the University of Virginia's The World of Dante website. The di Paolo image comes from a different page on that same website. These last two sources in particular provide a wealth of information and visual imagery connected to Dante and The Divine Comedy.

Dragonfly (pages 8-9)

The next Dragonfly poem shares a theme with the poem I posted on 15 February, specifically the Good Friday crucifixion thing. When I wrote that poem for Arturo Islas in Texas, where I was visiting, I had read in the San Antonio newspaper that a re-enaction of Christ's crucifixion was to take place on that day, Good Friday — an event that also occurs in various locations in the Philippines, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church, which disapproves of these voluntary crucifixions.

Crosses In the ambulance, streets unrolled through rear windows pulsing to the siren. Plastic tubes sprouting from both arms, I drifted with that thurifer, memory, recalled Stations of the Cross one Friday when I was six, and Mama whispering in Our Lady of Antipolo church in Manila, "See that old woman over there — near St. Jude? That's Aleng Tosang. Last year, she walked on her knees from Jerusalem to Calvary." I mixed up calvary with cavalry then: bearded men with muskets ride horses round wooden crosses on a hill. I had already discovered in Tatay's sala a large and dusty book with drawings of men in some dark wood, their chests slit, loose entrails like gutted fish. Every year, when the saints would hide their faces under purple cloth, penitentes in black hoods walked the streets on parade, scourging themselves with whips of knotted Manila hemp. And Sister Mary Helena told us in the fourth grade about an American chaplain who said Mass daily in a North Korean POW camp. For wine a raisin soaked in water, then squeezed into a thimble. Page 8

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She called our bodies her temples of the Holy Ghost. We saw snapshots of Christians in China, nailed on huge wooden ideographs, and I remember I prayed, "Me too, God. Me too." The ambulance is slowing now, then nurses wheel me, flat on my back. White hosts in fluorescent ciboriums glow in benediction. But I'm remembering last week, I entered some church on a whim. In the dark there I'm kneeling to say thanks, and I can think only of that cloud of incense which isn't floating now in the nave. Of Pasig where Papa was raised, where friends still nail penitentes to crosses and raise them up for fifteen minutes. Of Aleng Tosang trudging on her knees to Paradise. Page 9

I hardly know what to say about this poem. I wrote it while I was in the Master of Fine Arts poetry program at Indiana University, probably for a poetry workshop, though it's possible that I wrote it specifically for my MFA thesis. Over two decades ago, then. I was having a lot of trouble with asthma at that time, and the ambulance scene that starts off this poem took place several times. I don't recall specifically if memories wafted through my brain like drifts of incense, though they certainly could have. Those ambulance and hospital trips were often kind of psychedelic, you know?

The word thurifer is a technical term that goes very well with memory trips, at least with my memory. In the Catholic tradition, the thurifer is the altar server — "altar boy" back in my day — or at high mass or other elite ceremonies a priest who tends the thurible — the metal incense burner, or censer, suspended from chains and held in the hand. Whenever, as an altar boy, I was assigned to be a thurifer, I often flashed back to an incident when I was probably four or five and fainted at a church service from smelling burning incense; that half-remembered incident was certainly psychedelic, with fanciful, Alice-in-Wonderland visions I can no longer conjure today. Being a thurifer was quite a privilege, as I remember, and you had to master the techniques of working the thurible, which could be unwieldy because you held on to the chains and not the censer itself; also you had to be a little careful not to let sparks burn moth-holes in your cassock, the black robe. Or on your surplice, for that matter, the white over-thingy.

In terms of craft and technique, I can't really remember any more why I used the word thurifer in this particular context, except that there is something really trippy about IVs and ambulances and EMTs; you just let go and let your brain fly, because people who know what they're doing take over your body and you can relax, let your guard down. The drugs they give you ain't bad, either . . . you can take off into the ether, sail up into clouds, drift into deep high blue. Oh and of course thurifers and thuribles are so Catholic.

The trigger for this poem is Philippine Catholicism's sometime convergence of religion and violence, particularly a kind of self-sacrificial masochism in the service of faith. Blind faith, some might say. For example, the custom of of penitents who volunteer to be crucified on Good Friday — with real nails! Or the other penitentes, self-flagellants who whip their backs into a bloody froth before these crucifixions. All done to make up for one's sins. You probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Catholic Church in the Philippines distances itself from these activities, saying that Christ's sacrifice is a one-time act that cannot be replicated. It may also not surprise you to hear that province governments practically sponsor these events in order to draw tourists into their areas, advertising the crucifixions and flagellations as brutal yet strangely attractive spectacles.

Although as a child I was not aware expressly of these sorts of religious tortures, I had already had a personal intro, of sorts. In my grandparents' formal living room in Manila, I had stumbled, early on, upon my Lolo's edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, with the exquisite Gustave Doré engravings. I remember being utterly fascinated and enthralled by these illustrations, and feeling at the same time that they were somehow forbidden because as far as I knew I was the only one who ever looked at them, and I only did so when there was no one around. I was particularly intrigued by images of the Inferno and both shuddered and thrilled at the horrific punishments — eternal ones! for pity's sake — especially the one described (and shown) above: where a demon with a humongous sword would slice open the damned, who would then further rip themselves open, tender innards pulled out and exposed to the noxious air of Hell. That one really stuck with me. The lacy, graceful, June Taylor Dancers, Busby Berkeley mandalas of angels in the sky of Paradiso were no match whatsoever, I tell ya.

I had heard, however, of people walking on their knees in penitence. Or, more accurately, had seen them. Not uncommon in Philippine churches to see women walking on their knees from church door to communion rail. So the idea that someone would knee-walk the cobblestones of the entire Via Dolorosa (Latin for "the way of suffering") — starting at the Lion's Gate, the edge of old Jerusalem, and ending up on Calvary or Golgotha, now inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — that idea would not be strange at all. (Probably more the stuff of legend than actual possibility, although pilgrims have walked and still walk the route barefoot, as Jesus did.)

In any case, through chismis or gossip, a person like Aleng Tosang in my poem could be rumored to have walked the Via Dolorosa on her knees, even if she had simply walked it upright, like the pilgrims in the picture above, carrying a wooden cross as symbol of their imitation of Christ's passion.

Without a doubt, there's an element here of heroism, of hero worship. Aleng Tosang would be considered a hero. And think of Ruben Enaje, pictured above being raised on a cross and featured in this Reuters video; he has been crucified for 22 consecutive Good Fridays. Twenty-two! That's a superhero record, don't you think? Not just in the Philippines, but anywhere — even in the USA.

My fourth-grade teacher in the US, Sister Mary Helena, did tell us the story of the unnamed US Army Chaplain in a POW camp who hoarded raisins (maybe from the Red Cross) to make thimblefuls of altar wine so he could perform his duty to celebrate mass; Sister called him a hero of the first order. Catholic tradition has many heroes: saints, angels, and especially martyrs. Kids in Catholic grade schools — in whatever schools! — they all want to be heroes too. I'm not the only person raised Catholic who, as a kid, wished to be a martyr.

Now perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but I gotta admit I wonder if the Good Friday penitentes in the Philippines are pursuing that same desire to be a hero, pushed to obsessive lengths. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying the penitentes are inauthentic. I'm sure all of them believe fully in what they are doing. No one could do what they do without such amazingly strong belief, don't you think?

The little Catholic school kid inside me yearns for a taste of their power, their heart. The speaker in the poem — well, really me, on several levels — we both wish for the ability to have that certitude of faith, that strength of resolution, that keen courage in one's belief. All I can say is amen to that, sisters and brothers. Amen to that.

DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

This poem also appeared as part of a mini-collection titled “A Poetry Reading: In Homage to Carlos Bulosan” in Bearing Dreams, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives, edited by Linda A. Revilla, Gail M. Nomura, Shawn Wong, and Shirley Lune (1993).

The illustrations above are (1) Frederic Remington's painting "The Cavalry Charge" (1907), from the Metropolitan Museum of New York; (2) Gustave Doré's illustration of Canto 28 of Dante's Inferno, picturing schismatics, notably Mohammed in the center (Wikimedia); (3) a BBC news photograph of self-flagellants on Good Friday in the Philippines, 2007; (4) a BBC news photograph of Ruben Enaje being cruficied for his 21st time in as many years, Good Friday, 2007, in the Philippines; (5) a BBC news photograph of voluntary crucifixion in the Philippines on Good Friday, 2000; (6) contemporary Christian pilgrims carrying a cross on the Via Dolorosa — image courtesy of www.HolyLandPhotos.org; and (7) a thurifer carrying a thurible (Wikimedia).

The video embedded above can be viewed in the context of the original Reuters video story, "Christ's Crucifixion Re-enacted" (March 21, 2008).

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 — 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 — electrodes, colored wires — 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 — 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 — 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?