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


*****************************************************

May

May's featured poet and poem is Luis H. Francia and his "Password for a Hybrid Century." Luis has published two collections of poetry, HER BEAUTY LIKES ME WELL (with David Friedman) and THE ARCTIC ARCHIPELAGO AND OTHER POEMS. He edited BROWN RIVER, WHITE OCEAN: AN ANTHOLOGY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILIPPINE LITERATURE, and with Eric Gamalinda, FLIPPIN': FILIPINOS IN AMERICA. Meritage Press is delighted to feature Luis' poem which also relates to the topics addressed by his recently-released U.S. book of non-fiction, EYE OF THE FISH: A PERSONAL ARCHIPELAGO (see the press release from publisher Kaya after Luis' poem):


PASSWORD FOR A HYBRID CENTURY

The world is full of speech unheralded
Each creature, each thing, fashions
Words not said, nor heard

Mankind, beast, flower, fish, atom cell

On the avenue, in the city's
Fields of streets
A language of secrets unscrolls
Rich in the grammar of love

Pure as an infant's theology

I sense it in this room when
Your beauty navigates this space
By osmosis
When your seaweed hair announces
Itself as a sacrament

I sense it on the days of
Longing, when this trill and utterance
And weave, this eloquence beyond the
Exultations of art, beyond the scribbles
And bankrupt narratives, blesses and

Bathes me, drowning the pornographic
Stutter of a center that devours its young.

Speak me as I speak you,
And not only you, my beloved,
But all of you who are my beloved
This speech without speaking, this

Covenant and testament
As the measure, the love of

All the invisible and real
Sometimes am I blessed

By such tongue, to move through the
Interstices of being and put

My head on the twin laps of
Pain and pleasure in
Whose hymns I

Taste death, that passage
Out of life into life
Where in a vast hall

New music plays, and each one of
Us, from particle of dust to deity,
Is a scale of ancient lore

Read me read you

Speak me then as I speak you
As notes for a song
Between speech and nonspeech

Between a living that is a dying
And a dying that is a living

Make me a part of your speech
An act looking for silence and utterance

An O lodged in the mouth of a mute god




---------------------------

NEW BOOK EXPLORES FILIPINO AMERICAN'S PERSONAL ARCHIPELAGO
EYE OF THE FISH, BY LUIS H. FRANCIA

The first of Luis H. Francia's books of non-fiction to be published in the United States, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (Kaya, 2001) is a deft, luminously intelligent examination of the Philippines through a glass darkly. Cross-cutting between Francia's recollections of the Philippines of his youth and accounts of his travels through the archipelago over the past two decades, Eye of the Fish paints a vivid and detailed portrait of the terror, beauty, and insistent humanity of the Philippines today.

The Philippines that Francia explores is a country indelibly marked by both Spanish and American colonialism, a collection of over 7,000 islands where cultural alliances and political ideology have pushed aside identity politics and where traditional beliefs both mimic and subvert conventional Christian piety. Francia's odyssey takes him the length of the nation, from Batanes in the north to the Muslim Jolo and Marawi regions of the south, and from the rugged mountain hideaways of revolutionary freedom fighters to the well-appointed salons of the political and cultural elite. Painters and priests, island shamans and small-town politicians, cultists, feminists, and infamous first ladies all make an appearance in this imaginative and idiosyncratic exploration of "home."

Through their stories, and through his own memories of estrangement and acceptance in the Philippines and in the U.S., Francia reflects on the hybridity that is simultaneously the burden and the benediction of the Philippines -- and of his own mestizo self.

Here are some advance words on EYE OF THE FISH:

As engaged as he is intrepid, Luis H. Francia proves a sure-footed guide as he leads us through insurgencies and art exhibitions, cockfights and cabarets. Eye of the Fish is at once a hugely readable travelogue and an indispensable guide to a fascinating and richly varied archipelago.
--Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

Gifted with a sharp eye for the incongruous, a keen taste for the ironic, and a deft feel for the tragic, Luis H. Francia writes about the Philippines like a man possessed by ghosts he can neither tame nor fully recognize. Haunted by childhood memories of a post-war Manila, Francia in turn has been haunting the land of his birth. He has visited the centers and peripheries of everyday lives, recounting encounters with victims and victimizers, retelling the rumors and truths that surround and inflect the most tumultuous events in the nation's recent history.
--Vicente L. Rafael, University of California at San Diego and Author, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History

This book is the perfect antidote to the "parachute journalism" that's being written about the Philippines. A poet and journalist himself, Francia not only takes the reader through a panoramic journey of the archipelago, from stormy Batanes to war-torn Jolo, but also through dazzling layers of personal memory and history, revealing the beauty and violence of the country as only a native son can, with both compassion and a critical eye.
--Eric Gamalinda, My Sad Republic, winner of the Philippine Centennial Prize

-------------------

Rick Barot's poetry manuscript THE DARKER FALL has received the Morton Prize (judged by Stanley Plumly) and will be published by Sarabande Books in fall 2002. Rick is Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford and recent recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, and The Paris Review. Here is one of Rick's poems (which first appeared in the New England Review).


AT POINT REYES

I was old. I could see this in the will
of the ocean moving in, the lavish force.

Among the seaweed were finger bones
of driftwood, some feathers, flame-blue

and teeth-white. The water was the same
as I had known it: light green within

the thinning wall of its arc, the horizon
behind it. I felt separate but unhurt,

the smallest trapeze swinging on inside
my chest. From the pieces eroded

to chalk by the sand, I had to remember
what it meant to have ruined something,

bottle after bottle cracking against rocks.
Dead things, souring in the salt air:

this was my exhaustion. The iceplants
glistened plastic pink, the poppies furled

into bullets. I started to get cold, cold
as a leaf on someone's palm. A line of

breath followed everything that I said
to myself. Somewhere in the cordgrass

I found a pair of glasses, an insect-leg
tangle of rusted wires. The sunset began

to answer the things I had my heart on:
the snowglobe city, its durable lights;

the view from a window down to wet cars,
each roof a nail painted in black polish.


----------------------------

THE ANCHORED ANGEL: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa (Kaya, 1999) received the 2000 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. The book was edited by Eileen Tabios and the notes for her acceptance speech of the award has been published in README (Issue #4), a wonderful online poetics journal edited by Gary Sullivan. Eileen's speech, which incorporates several poems by Villa, is available at http://www.jps.net/nada/issuefour.htm

Teachers should note that her PEN/Oakland speech is also a useful text for Fil-Am, Asian American, poetry, multi-cultural and modernist courses.