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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March's featured poet and poem is Fernando "Pido" Ayala and his poem "dust motes dancing." A resident of Davao City, Philippines, he is a member of a respected family of poets, painters, musicians, philosophers and comedians. Pido's poem was the first poem submitted to the "Six Directions" project which received works from poets around the world (see Six Directions press release below). "dust motes dancing" is also a recent prize awardee from Poetry.com.

dust motes dancing

recollections of who we were
floating against the wall
of nostalgia

dust motes dancing
in the late afternoon
golden orange rays
of reminiscence

throwing this room
into darkness and
memories of
half-remembered pains

seemingly emptying our souls
to bare crags of cynicism

littered with
the flotsam and jetsam
of disillusionment

-- march 8, 1996

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POETIC ALCHEMY: AN EXHIBITION

"POEMS FORM/FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS"
Visual Poetry by Eileen Tabios
March 4-29, 2002
Sonoma Student Union Intercultural Center Gallery

In celebration of Asian American Heritage Month, the Sonoma Student Union presents an exhibit of poems, drawings and sculptures by Eileen Tabios. The exhibition also features guest artists who either collaborated with Ms. Tabios or created works with a similar sensibility to Ms. Tabios' poetics: painters Max Gimblett, Venancio "V.C." Igarta and Patricia Wood; quilt-maker Alice Brody; poet Paolo Javier; and photographer Cal Strobel. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Filipino American Association of Sonoma State University and the Asian Pacific Islander Organization

Eileen Tabios will present an artist's talk and host a performance wedding ritual to symbolize her commitment to Poetry on Tuesday, March 12, 2002, from 5-7 p.m. at the Gallery. The wedding "happening" will introduce the installation work "Poem Tree" and feature Sonoma State University student Natalie Concepcion who will wear Ms. Tabios' original wedding dress. Ms. Concepcion was the InterCultural Center 2000 and 2001 Poetry Slam Winner, currently serves as SSU's Associated Student Arts and Humanities Representative, initiated and taught a course on Filipino-American history, and received the "Erin Fisher Scholarship" for being an outstanding woman student leader. Local poets also will join Ms. Concepcion in sharing their poems during the ritual.

"Poems Form/From The Six Directions" culminates a four-year alchemic process by Ms. Tabios 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?" Ms. Tabios responded with small sculptures and drawings.

The project's title relates to the Native American concept of six directions: north, south, east, west, up and down. The title offers another concept explored by the project: Ms. Tabios' desire to make her Poet's persona seamless with the universe. Thus, the exhibition offers the presence of other artists from a variety of disciplines to symbolize the presence of the (external) world within the (internal world of the) poet's imagination. The choice for another person (Ms. Concepcion) to wear Ms. Tabios' original wedding dress during the performance ritual also symbolizes the integration of the (external) world as well as Ms. Tabios' view that a poem often transcends the poet's autobiographical intent.

The core of "Six Directions" are a dozen poems which were created as a result of Ms. Tabios' sculptures. Her use of sculpting to "write" poems reflects Ms. Tabios' postcolonial poetics that include her desire to avoid relying on narrative. This impulse stems from her consciousness that English was used as a communications (or narrative) tool by the United States to colonize her birthland, the Philippines.

A key work is "Poem Tree" which references the Filipino wedding tradition of guests pinning money on the bride and groom's clothes during the wedding celebration to offer financial aid for the new couple's life together. "Poem Tree" will be pinned with print-outs of poems instead of money to symbolize how Poetry, too, feeds the world. To further integrate the (external) world into the (internal) world of Ms. Tabios' Poetry, all of the poems pinned to her dress were written and sent by other poets from around the world.

The Sonoma Student Union Intercultural Center Gallery is located on the Sonoma State University campus, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, CA. For more information, please contact Darius Spearman at Spearman@Sonoma.edu.

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REVIEW: NELSON'S RUN BY PETER BACHO

Meritage Press is grateful to Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel for writing the following book review on Peter's latest book, Nelson's Run. Leny is the author of Coming Full Circle:The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans. She is one of the moderators of an online discussion group about the process of decolonization. Those interested in subscribing should send a blank email to: pagbabalikloob-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. You can also review the archives of postings by going to yahoogroups.com and search 'pagbabalikloob'.

Nelson's Run
Published by Willowgate Press (http://www.willowgatepress.com)

I read this new novel by Peter Bacho in one sitting. It is a fast read. But after putting it down, it wouldn't leave me alone. In fact, I didn't sleep well at all that night. I had nightmares.

This is a scary, wicked novel. Scary because you know that behind the comedy, the lurid sex, the seductions, and the restless shallow life of one white American male, Nelson, is the projection of a national collective shadow. But whose?

The book begins with a prologue where a visiting University of the Philippines professor is delivering a lecture at UC Berkeley about the famous legend of a white Dona in the island of Samar. The year is 2020. The second prologue introduces Nelson, product of a loveless marriage, then divorce. Nelson the boy spends his summers in San Francisco with his promiscuous father whose mistresses Nelson is mandated to call "Mom." One summer, Dad brings home a Filipina in need of sanctuary. She seduces Nelson and he loses his virginity and so begins his obsession with sex.

His obsession takes him to, where else, but Manila where he easily slides into acceptance among the wealthy and white-loving locals. He poses as a journalist and ends up on an assignment on the island of Samar. Events of intrigue, political maneuverings, revenge killings, encounters between 'communists' and the military, and the jealousy between two women from opposing camps trying to keep Nelson from running - all these thicken the plot with both comic and tragic twists.

Between the chapters, Bacho has inserted "Hidden History Lesson 1, 2, and 3" referencing key events in US intervention in the Philippines: "War, It's What White Guys Do" and the Balangiga massacre of 1901. The third history lesson talks of the strength and power of pre-colonial Filipino woman.

It is these history lessons that provide the hidden context for Nelson's Run. On the one hand, it shows Philippine politics and culture at its worst. How can it be otherwise when the country's politicians and citizens learned their lessons well from their American tutors? The two women who duel over Nelson's body indicts both the 'bad' and 'good' Filipina who, when it comes to white love, would end up killing each other for it. And when they are both dead, the military still had to stage a drama for a politician's campaign with a woman at the center of it all. Who else but Nelson becomes the cross-dressing matriarch who bestows her blessings on this great comedy?

And on the other hand, it shows Nelson as an archetypal figure of a white guy whose inner war is translated into a war on the 'other' (war, it's what white guys do!) except here sex becomes the terrain of that war. What kind of salvation is Nelson looking for when he runs to Manila? Is he looking for salvation from his own demons? What created these demons? Nelson's shallowness almost evokes a sympathetic reading of his character, after all, it is probably his parents' fault that he turned out the way he did. But you see, it is not so easy to absolve him.

What Bacho has created in this novel is a satire, yes. Wicked and scary, yes. Unsettling and unrelenting in the way it indicts all the parties involved. In between the tight, muscular prose of his writing, history shines a light on the lingering effects of war -- in the individual psyche and in the collective culture of an entire devoured, debauched country. It is painful to read. It is haunting precisely because even as satire, much of it sounds true.

Bacho didn't let me off easy this time. This is a good read. But be ready for many sleepless nights.

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EROS PINOY

Meritage Press is delighted to laud an anthology marrying poetry and the visual arts: EROS PINOY: An Anthology of Contemporary Erotica in Philippine Art and Poetry (Editors Virgilio "Pandy" Aviado, Ben Cabrera and Alfred A. Yuson, Anvil Publishing, Inc. 2001). This long overdue book (beautifully designed by Ramon Sunico), whose idea was first raised by Pandy in the 1980s, was recently launched in the United States at Bindlestiff Studio: An Epicenter for Filipino American Performing Arts (www.bindlestiffstudio.org).

Featured below are four poets whose works hint at the variety of how EROS PINOY's writers and artists define "erotic." Information about the four poets are featured before their poems:

Rene Navarro is is a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist and a senior instructor of the Healing Tao Center. He teaches chi-kung, Tai chi chuan, Shaolin, meditation, Chinese nutrition/dietetics, Tantric sexology, massage, feng-shui, internal alchemy and arnis de mano. He lives in Lake Harmony in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

Peque Gallaga is a multi-awarded film and television director. He currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at De La Salle University.

Luisa Igloria is a poet, fictionist and essayist who published five books under the name Maria Luisa A. Carino. Her sixth and most recent book is Songs for the Beginning of the Millenium, published by De La Salle University Press. She is the recipient of a 2001 Fiction Fellowship from the Virginia Commision for the Arts.

Vicente L. Rafael teaches at the Department of Communication, University of California at San Diego. He was born and raised in Manila and has published books and articles on Philippine history and cultural politics. If you are curious to know more about him, please click on the following site: http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_rafael.html

THIS IS THE HAND
By Rene J. Navarro

that awakened your
hand, touched the light
in your palm,
pulled and threaded
the strands
of your meridians
in circles
and knots from your third eye
down to the cross
between your breasts. I can still
see my fingers
floating over
your body, the mounds and
crevices, seeking the spring
where the light
like white mist rises
and swirls. Nobody
will believe this, you said,
and I knew
from my hand
what you meant.

~~~~~

PSYCHO SEX
By Peque Gallaga

I'm sorry if you were Janet Leigh
In the bathroom stall
And I was Anthony Perkins in his wig
And mother's dress.
I didn't mean to hurt you.
I was only trying to get through
The goddamned plastic shower curtain
To you.

ANAL SEX
By Peque Gallaga

Rooting deep into your E. Coli
I release your soft flatulence
And discover arcana
That you have taken pains to keep discreet.

(C'mon, let's keep this on a higher plane ---
take the higher road; something, but not this!)

What matters the orifice
As long as it is accompanied
By the appropriate sound effects?

(Upliftment, Gallaga, go for upliftment.)

This must always come to pass:
The prostration
The bondage
And the total surrender of the self.
More extensive, more prodigious
And a lot more kicks
Than social relevance.

~~~~~

JUNGLE BOOK
by Luisa Igloria

"Celebes" by Rafael Ferrer, Puerto Rican, 1933;
Installation of painted wood, fabric, paper,
animal skin, felt, plastic, neon;
--Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

The General sends his regards
from Macondo, where the bank will honor
no currency except the generous grin
of the stuffed boa constrictor
suspended from the ceiling. I think
of how it must be to begin and end
my days in a room such as this: to comb
my hair, coiled and matted from a night
of shark-finned dreams, before the mirror-
incandescent pink, like the shoes that washed
up, somehow, on the shore. I'll put them on
and go for a stroll on the lemon-colored beach,
returning when the skin masks on my reed walls
light up their eyes like lanterns, and the hot
salt wind licks the undersides of my nipples
so they begin to thrum like jungle
drums, like bars of purple neon
glancing off the wavy shingles
of an iron roof.

~~~~~

COULD THE EROTIC BE SOMETHING LIKE THE IDIOMATIC?
By Vicente L. Rafael

"Question: What do you mean by `idiomatic'?

"J.D.: A property that one cannot appropriate; it signs
you without belonging to you; it only appears to the
other and it never comes back to you except in flashes
of madness that brings together life and death....You
dream, it's unavoidable, about the invention of a language
or of a song that would be yours, not the attributes of a
`self,' rather... the musical signature of your most
unreadable history... the `old new language,' the most
archaic and the most novel, therefore unheard-of,
unreadable at present."
-Jacques Derrida, Points... Interviews 1974-1994.

1. Could the erotic be something like the idiomatic? Something that howls in a voice past hearing; that bubbles forth and hisses just below and just above the threshold of taste and smell? It returns from a history without an origin and so calls on you like the unexpected guest whose demands you cannot possibly fulfill. Is this the erotic? And "Pinoy?" Pee-noy. Penoy. Balut. At the bus stop on Crame and Santolan. Masarap. Laman na napakalambot. At yung amoy. Taste and smell past remembering, spiked with rock salt rolling on your tongue. In the heat of the day. Dust. Bare legs. Sipping that juice through a crack on a smooth surface.

2. The erotic like the idiomatic calls out to the other, the other that is also you. It gets through the busy signals, cuts through the day's appointments, cracks you in the head and takes up the space of your work table. It obligates you to respond in its language. It is, in other words, the infinite demand for translation, of translation. The transferring and entrusting of words, the specter of betrayal, the inevitability of misunderstanding, the hallucination of correspondence, the faith in meaning, the hope of getting across. In Tagalog, for example. To and from English. Astride between the legs of two languages, you slip and slide, sucking syllables, forming phrases, whispering words. Okey lang? Sige pa? Wait. Relax lang. You tell me na lang when, ha? Saan? Dito? How? `Di ba? Oh, I see. I see you. O, ayan na. Oh. Oo.

3. "...except in flashes of madness... the most archaic and the most novel...," the erotic is singular and elusive. It is idiomatic like death: wholly yours at the very moment when you are utterly freed from ownership of all sorts. Like death, it escapes social life even as it forms one of its foundations. It is life at the very moment it exceeds life. It has no conscience and therefore makes such conscience possible. It gives, not just life in the certainty of death; it gives giving itself and so surpasses any return. Thus the madness. Exceeding the sentimental, overflowing the emotional, the danger and lure to the movement of history, the erotic escapes the syntax of every narrative. Faced with the other's death, you are seized by a strange stillness, an uncanny thing that turns your body into an element of its speech. You are swept away by a grief whose grammar precedes you. Death's idiom, the dream language of the erotic.

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THE EROTIC SEASON

Meritage Press would like to share a poem by Eileen Tabios inspired by the poems in EROS PINOY. Eileen wrote the poem "Season of Durian" partly by collaging lines from the poets featured in the book. EROS PINOY's poets may recognize traces of their words within this poem, although the collaged lines are often edited to reflect the demand of this new poem. (This is a similar poetic technique described in Eileen's Editor's Essay in BABAYLAN that discusses how she wrote the poem "Corolla.") Because the 54 poets and 47 artists defied cultural conservatism by participating in EROS PINOY, Eileen dedicates this poem to them for recognizing that artistry demands the exercise of freedom.

SEASON OF DURIAN

"Durian defies categories"
--Jose Ayala, 2001

"Question: What do you mean by `idiomatic'?"
"J.D.: A property that one cannot appropriate; it signs
you without belonging to you; ....about the invention of
a language or of a song... the musical signature of your
most unreadable history... the `old new language,' the
most archaic and the most novel, therefore unheard-of,
unreadable at present."
--Jacques Derrida, Points... Interviews 1974-1994.

I.
Somewhere, a crop
teases a wet opening
to soften bones

Nipples nail a man
into a silence
so loud the stars,
for once, are audible

To be human is to know
the body as "Hell"---
"Sweetness on the verge
of rot"

Inevitably (and sweetly)
limbs must panic
until you speak again with
the sampaguita's vocabulary
ignoring insomniac neighbors
and former lovers trying
to escape from shadows

Erase that line
between wanting and doing

When I say your name
inaugurate
the endless season of durian
with our inability to stop
burying our teeth into spicy crevices ---
"nothing poetic about it"

All this, and I have yet to blossom

Would I go so far as to eat your body
(like Juana the Mad)
dicing your penis and testicles
while quaffing sweet jerez
as mating butterflies swarm
about our roaring heads?

Once, a man clenched a thorn
to steal a rose---
the price for smelling again
the ocean's spoor on her nape
as her skirt falls on a "bedroom floor
in the afternoon"

"Bite me again"

"Again"

And "as we undo more and more"
"will it have happened/ at all"
in that room whose windows
remain blocked by shades
to protect the world?

Fit in dominatus servitus
In mastery there is bondage
In servitude dominatus
In bondage there is mastery

I don't recall who among us
strapped on the harness

I do recall Mojacar La Vieja radiating
as a mountain glows
"when the moon is just right"

No fine frost shall desolate this darkness
where oral sex is never simulated
lest one suffers from writer's block
(for the poem must be authentic)

I feel nipples begin to thrum
listening to cicadas begin their gossip
(such as J. L.'s orgasm: is it truly,
at best, "middle class"?)

Another fodder for rumor-mongerers:
I volunteer to walk (barefoot)
a path strewn with glass slivers
for the remnants of your footsteps

I still sense the warm gaze
of your third eye

I have memorized the map
of moles
unfolding against your inner right thigh

II.
"The sun was setting" yet again
when you finally released me

Somewhere, a small dog was barking
at women disrobing by a river

Now I am singing paeans to new lives
quivering beneath dew
even if sweetness must mean
pain begins once more
for the mango tree waters its own shadow

Above all, a nude descends a staircase
to leave the painting
and earn its flesh
as "mercy comes handing you back to me"

You understand: despite my reputation
I am simply no good at one night stands
that turn body parts into a blurred chorus

I don't wish to lose the love
legends from my childhood
as when the lamp illuminated
a frenzy wetting sheets
while a hungry lizard peered
through a cloud of dusk
Or "the way / each digit of light" drops
in "an act
more utter than a deathbed confession"
(with "more kicks / than social relevance")
before concluding gloriously
like an opera through swollen lips

Forgetting unfolds
with stars falling like tin
fragments
floating in the fountains of the Alhambra

Another page turns in the book of whispers
unsuspecting
of a cathedral hidden
in the same space that might accept your seed

Tenderness, too, bucks loose
as if mercy is tangible --- something we can grasp,
not like sunlight swamping a room
or a breast or cock floating across a mirror
(and their preceding and subsequent shadows)

I am trying to remember a poem
written on damp blue paper
and how, afterwards, raindrops
became blades
in that deep country I visited without masks

III.
So many things remain unsaid
despite the voluble speeches of tumbled hair

IV.
"The ant ascends the house with honey"

Sainthood requires the precedent of wickedness

It can be easy imitating a "master's manner" ---
imagine a bird whose beak can pierce
bark to set a wilderness ablaze

Si tatyaw kung pumupog
When the rooster plunders
Mga inahi'y sumasabog
The hens simply scatter

There is a scar
otherwise known as "renewal"

While the taste of tears
is "chemical"
not like beads of crystal cascading
into the mound where wars are buried
whose durian scent means "all is well"

Like this long poem so unlike a virginal climax

Have I mentioned yet
the "flock of winged elephants"
moving in my belly at your touch?

Yes, the erotic can be "idiomatic"---
what howls
a dream language
roaring outside the frame

What howls
What roars

What howls

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SECOND PLACE

Meritage Press is amused to share a poem by Tony Robles about his second place win in Meritage Press' 2001 Holiday Poetry Contest (see February 2002 entry for results). Here at Meritage Press, we believe that anyone discerning enough to be interested in (reading and/or writing) poems is already a winner. But here's Tony's take:

"Upon getting 2nd place in a Poetry Contest"

I was notified by email
that my poem
got 2nd place in
the contest

The editor stressed
that i missed
first place
by a hair's breadth

It was a
toss up

Printed the announcement
and emailed it
to everyone i knew

Friends,
ex-friends,
ex-bosses,
ex-girlfriends,

ex cons

The poem was about
a sandwich shop
downtown

and to the
hands that
build sandwiches

and how bread
is stacked
and built by the
sandwich makers

stronger and more
sturdy than any
building

I printed the 2nd
place poem
and took it to
the deli of the sandwich makers

Approached the manager
and told him how
i'd been "inspired"

Gave him
the poem

(not for any future discounts
on salami sandwiches but
to show my appreciation
to his shop)

He took it, smiled
and nodded

I walked back
to my
concrete building

Went back to
the deli a few
days later

The manager rung
me up:

one salami sandwich on
a sweet french roll
and a bag of chips

He took my
money but
said nothing

I guess he
didn't remember
me

And why should
he?

He's far too busy
making sandwiches

to think
about

making
poetry