Babaylan Speaks

This Publisher's Column shall feature developments related to Filipino literature. Each monthly update also shall include a featured poet and poem. For comments and suggestions, please e-mail Meritage Press Associate Editor Jade Afable at Jade@meritagepress.com

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July's featured poet and poem is Eric Gamalinda and his new poem "Murder in Progress, after Gerhard Richter." Eric published a book of poems, Zero Gravity (Alice James Books) which won the Asian American Literary Award in 2000. His novel, My Sad Republic, won the Philippine Centennial Prize in 1998. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University and the University of Hawai'i in Manoa, and currently teaches at the Asia / Pacific / American Studies Program at NYU. His poem "Murder in Progress" is one of a select group of poems selected by Guest Editor Eileen Tabios for a forthcoming INTERLOPE #8: SPECIAL ISSUE ON INNOVATIVE FILIPINO/A POETRY (more information is available below).

As regards his poem, Eric says: "'Murder in Progress,' a work that's going to be in progress for a while, was inspired by a technique used by Gerhard Richter in a series of paintings in which he created photo-realistic portraits, then scratched out the portrait, leaving only an abstract composition of lines, scratches, and colors. I applied this technique to text by initially writing a poem (using images from Richter's paintings, in this case his portrait series of murder victims, among them two Filipina nurses killed in Chicago in 1968), then canceling words and phrases at random, and writing a new poem using the leftover words. I intend to repeat this process with the newly created poems indefinitely, and with no ultimate goal except to discover where this process will take me."

MURDER IN PROGRESS, AFTER GERHARD RICHTER

The lacquer on your hair reflects the floodlights.
Are you still thinking of death, lovely cunt,
is your miniskirt making you cold?
There's a boy with a knife waiting for you,
to cut you like a cake. Happy birthday.

Eight bodies in a room in Chicago, circa 1966.
Phlebotomy is a word that surprises me,
how it fills the mouth. Love
does not, it is small and oval, blood candy,
and is quick to dissolve.

You travel twelve hours to the other side of the world
only to spend the last minutes of your life
under a bed, hearing the rain,
how it stalks the night, longing
for something to land on.

Who will set back the clocks? The express trains
are running backwards. Five centuries ago
time zones didn't even exist.
Now the minutes drip into your coffee,
sweet, intravenous, and fattening.

Eight bodies in a room in Chicago, circa 1966.
Phlebotomy is a word that surprises me,
how it fills the mouth. Love
does not, it is small and oval, blood candy,
and is quick to dissolve.

You travel twelve hours to the other side of the world
only to spend the last minutes of your life
under a bed, hearing the rain,
how it stalks the night, longing
for something to land on.

Who will set back the clocks? The express trains
are running backwards. Five centuries ago
time zones didn't even exist.
Now the minutes drip into your coffee,
sweet, intravenous, and fattening.

Not even all your lacquer, Helga Matura, reflects the hour
this photo was taken, not even all the money
that bought these floodlights,
the lovely boy sitting beside you, one hand
on your knee, eight years your junior,
who never thinks to cut you in
mid-sentence, no, not even to miss a word
you misspell, and this evening, while birthday bodies
start to stink in a room in Chicago (they had thought
it was a guest, or the take-out guy), circa is a word
that does not belong to this poem, it fills the mouth
with time, a condiment not useful presently. Love is quick
to give us all the schedules. But now let's travel,
the other side of your life
stalks the desolate maps still longing
for discovery, and to settle there, in towns where the trains
of all that's verboten never stop, wouldn't that be
everything we want? Five time zones away
where reporters are still digging into
your last itinerary, where the widowed squaws
are ululating?

Leave all your longing to weather. An hour later
someone picks it up. What's not taken
is garbage not even the trucks will stop for.
Money is the most beautiful object in the world.
A boy can ponder the sound of one hand
clapping, but after years contemplating the silence
don't you imagine the brahmin thinks he's found
nothing but a life sentence? This evening,
we are no more than our bodies, in a room
where love is a guest that does not belong,
and is not useful, unless the schedules say so.
Necessity maps where the heart will settle. Tell me
to stop, and everything will, for want of closure;
love, beauty, fuck, will be the last words I'll say.

I'm bi-polar, so leave me alone. I'm depressed and poor,
and this weather hurts me. This is the hour
when someone must come and save us
from ourselves. Gap stop, aspirin, panacea.
I object to no religion,
no law, as long as they all cyclone
around me. Does God hear anyone at all,
does he break the news through silence?
Imagine coming to terms with everything
you've turned away from.
Would you have found peace at last?
Or does the evening trickle slowly in muted
gentians, just to deceive you? No more second
guessing. Open your mouth, and breathe.
Love is a lie, and I, neither lover nor liar, say so.
Tell me you want to be hurt. I know people
who can help you. Beauty,
fuck, that's a lie too. But it's too late
not to believe.

The polar caps are melting.
Set the clocks back an hour.
Nobody will come and save us now.
Stop listening.
Nobody will come and give you religion.
How long before the water runs out?
If I play loud music, will I still hear the voices?
Silence is made of small, sharp crystals.
In no uncertain terms, state your name.
Put all your guns away.
Have they found all the children?
First, open the gates of the cities.
Second, blacken the windows.
The river has many legs and one mouth.
I want you green.
Green wind swaggered like someone in the know.
If I tell you a lie,
will you swear not to believe?

back half a mile where nobody was listening

give food and water

music, but he feared money more

the first to surrender was the sharpshooter

if you had a vote, what should be the fifty-first state?

then one day they no longer heard the guns

philosophy or cities

all summer he dreamt of an apartment with windows

afternoon, I was rollerblading on Riverside Park, when

you still got to know someone

I have nothing to fear

back half a mile where nobody was listening

give food and water

music, but he feared money more

the first to surrender was the sharpshooter

if you had a vote, what should be the fifty-first state?

then one day they no longer heard the guns

philosophy or cities

all summer he dreamt of an apartment with windows

afternoon, I was rollerblading on Riverside Park, when

you still got to know someone

I have nothing to fear

"Half the people in the world hate the other half."
"The refugees rejected food from relief crews."
"I will do anything for money, if I have
to." "Martyrs don't surrender." "What do you accuse

me of?" "They're killing all the Maoists." "I will vote
for anyone who can save me." "Have a nice day,
or don't." "I no longer think of you." "Left a note,
then slashed his wrists in the bath tub." "Philosophy

is the opium of the privileged." "Suppose pi
is not the constant." "Summer dreamt of you, at five
you were its solstice." "Sky rockets in flight, after-

noon delight." "Eat my load." "Wake me when it's over."
"God is so still, sometimes he is barely alive."
"I alone and you remain, you alone and I."

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Meritage Press highly recommends the following exhibition by Alfonso Ossorio, A Filipino-Chinese-American artist whose contributions have yet to be fully recognized within the art world:

"Horror Vacui" by Alfonso Ossorio: "Filling the Void -- A Fifty Year Survey"
May 9- August 2, 2002
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
24 West 57th Street
NYC 10019
P: 212 247-0082

Ossorio may be considered the visual art equivalent of Jose Garcia Villa. Like Villa, Ossorio was engaged with and a major player of his times; yet the written history of post-WWII American art almost ignores his presence partly due to ethnicity/sexuality/class factors. Someone should do a "recovery" project on him (in the same way The Anchored Angel was created to "recover" Villa). Here's more information about Ossorio.

Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) was born in Manila and educated in Catholic boarding schools in England before coming to the U.S. in 1930 to continue his studies at Portsmouth Priory in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1933, he became an American citizen and a year later, matriculated at Harvard University, where he was exposed to primitive art at the Peabody Museum and met Jared French, George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus and engraver eric Gill; three consecutive summers were spent at the latter's workshop, St. Dominic's Guild, in Sussex, England.

Actively working by the early 1940s in the tradition of Surrealism, Ossorio had his first solo exhibition in 1941 at Betty Parson's legendary Wakefield Gallery in New York City. In 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a medical illustrator. After his discharge from the army in 1946, he moved to New York City just as the Abstract Expressionist movement was beginning to emerge. In the late 1940s, as Ossorio began to explore abstraction, he formed vital relationships with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet and he began to collect their work.

In 1950, Ossorio returned to The Philippines for the first time since his childhood to execute a mural for the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker. After spending much of 1951 in Paris with Dubuffet, Ossorio purchased the East Hampton estate known as "The Creeks," which he renovated to showcase his modern art collection and later cultivated into "the Eighth Wonder of the Horticultural World." He remained in the Hamptons until his death in 1990, where he was a critical member of that avant-garde community, which included Willem DeKooning, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. From 1951 to 1962, The Creeks housed Dubuffet's extraurdinary Art Brut collection and it is no coincidence that in the early 1960s, Ossorio began to create his own visionary assemblages which he labeled "congregations."

In his congregations, Ossorio combined disparate found objects -- glass eyes, shells, animal bones, shards, pearls, driftwood -- in an attempt to synthesize beauty with decay, refinement with crudeness. Internationally recognized fo rhis complex and challenging visual language, Ossorio has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications. His work is represented in museum collections throughout the world including Albertina Museum (Austria), Centre Georges Pompidou (France), L'Art Brut Museum (Switzerland), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Museo National Centre de Arte Reina Sofia (spain), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), and the Whitney Museum. In 1995, the Ossorio Foundation was established in Southhampton, NY to interpret and preserve the legacy of Alfonso Ossorio.

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YOU ARE INVITED TO TWO EVENTS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

"POEMS FORM/FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS"
Eileen Tabios Presents A Visual poetry Exhibition
August 10-September 14, 2002
Pusod Gallery
1808 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA

The Pusod Center is pleased to present an exhibit of poems, drawings and sculptures by Eileen Tabios. The exhibition will open with various festivities at Pusod on Saturday, August 10, 2002. At 2 p.m., Eileen will present an artist's talk. Starting at 4 p.m., there will be a party to celebrate her (or any poet's) metaphorical (and real) marriage to "Mr/s Poetry" through a wedding performance happening involving other poets, artists and musicians.

The wedding Happening will feature local poets and a performance wedding ritual to symbolize her commitment to Poetry on Saturday, August 10, 2002, at 2 p.m. at the Gallery. The wedding "happening" will introduce the installation work "Poem Tree" and feature poets Barbara Jane Reyes and Michelle Bautista in the original wedding dresses of Eileen and Malou Babilonia. Poet Catalina Cariaga is expected to play some of the ukeleles in her collection, while other poets will read from their works.

The exhibition also features guest artists who either collaborated with Ms. Tabios or created works with a similar sensibility to Eileen's poems. Guest artists include painters Max Gimblett, Venancio "V.C." Igarta, Patricia Wood and Thomas Fink; quilt-maker Alice Brody; poets Paolo Javier and Jukka Pekka-Kervinen; and photographer Cal Strobel. In addition, in conjunction with the exhibit, Eileen is expected to present a four-week, once-a-week poetry workshop at Pusod.

"Poems Form/From The Six Directions" culminates a four-year alchemic process by Eileen who sought to cast poems as physical bodies and/or multidimensional spaces. Her project resulted from her investigation of the notion of Poetry transcending words. She created the works comprising Six Directions in an attempt to answer a question that she dreamt: "If Poetry exists between words --- "between the lines" --- thus implying intangibility, what would poems look like if they had bodies?" Eileen responded with small sculptures and drawings, as well as multidisciplinary collaborations.

INTERLOPE
Forthcoming in August 2002 is INTERLOPE #8: SPECIAL ISSUE ON INNOVATIVE FILIPINO/A POETRY, guest-edited by Eileen Tabios. This issue promises to become a collector's item as it features a select number of Filipino/a poets who fit INTERLOPE 's vision as "a journal of poetics which seeks to publish innovative Asian American poetry work which challenges the tradition of American and/or Asian American poetry. "Even Jose Garcia Villa shall de/ascend to lend his ab/prescence to this issue! There shall be a limited run (akin to a special edition) and so it is recommended you reserve a copy by sending $5 right away (say it's for Interlope #8 Filipino Issue) to:

Summi Kaipa
Publisher
PO Box 423058
San Francisco, CA 94110

Checks should be made out to Summi Kaipa; $5 is a token for the value of this special edition, which benefits from the support of the 2002 Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize.

INTERLOPE #8 also will be launched in San Francisco on August 23, 2002 at Locus 1640 Post, located at 1640 Post Street (cross street Laguna) in San Francisco. The event is open to the public. Featured presenters from INTERLOPE #8 shall include Catalina Cariaga, Tony Robles, Annabelle Udo, Jean Gier and Barbara Reyes. The event will include another wedding "happening" from Eileen Tabios' Six Directions Poetry Project: because Poetry transcends gender and ethnicity, it is expected that a non-Filipino/a male poet shall wear Eileen's original wedding dress to symbolize commitment/marriage to Mr/s Poetry.