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Tinfish Press
$13.00 / 109 pp / paper
/ isbn 0-9759376-4-2
http://www.tinfishpress.com/
Review by Joyelle McSweeney
“I have said “A Poet in New York” when
I ought to have said “New York in a Poet,” Lorca
said of his 1932 volume, and this inside-out, vertiginous
intimacy characterizes his vaticism. With Poeta en San
Francisco, Barbara Jane Reyes trains a bolt of implacable
political anger through Lorca’s doublesightedness.
The San Francisco in this poet swells beyond its geographic
and temporal borders to an apocalyptic scale without losing
contact with its realtime emergencies.
Reyes’s bold, disturbing unity of vision is on display
from the volume’s prologue, in which she announces
the “crescendos of text” to come and figures
the fractalling, prophetic sightline of her speaker:
[...]For
instance, if I dream the wetness of your mouth an oyster
my tongue
searches for the taste of ocean,
if I crave the secret corners of your city on
another
continent, in another time, in series of circular coils extending
outward,
then it is only because I continue
to harbor the swirls of galaxies in the
musculature
and viscera of my body.
In this “instance,” the lyric datum (“the
wetness of your mouth”) gives passage to a whole ocean,
the ocean to cities and continents, time is rendered “a
series of circular coils extending outward;” epochs
are redrawn inside the intimate space of the body. The “instance” itself
contains more than an instant in the temporal sense, and
slips beyond a single ‘instance’ in the rhetorical
sense. Instead, the speaker herself is the site of continguity;
she “continue[s],” it is her ongoingness, as
well as the sentences,’ that allows for the vision.
If the speaker’s body is also the site of her vision,
the explicitly female gender of this body is also central
to the book’s politics and to its system-making. As
the poems move among memory, history and Hollywood history;
Tagalog, English and Spanish; Vietnam, America and the Philippines;
Catholicism, mysticism and cynicism, gender provides both
a thread through and a model for all with its double figure
of intimacy and opposition. These qualities are both present
in [Kumintang], named for a traditional Filipino courtship
song form with roots, it is conjectured, in Andalusian music:
That
blank space on your map, that’s where I was born.
The
more blank your map, the more darkness for exploration.
Gold
stars pinned to your chest for every military and civilian
slaughter, for every child defiled, for every rice field
set ablaze,
for
every leveled village, for every racial slur coined
in
these blank spaces on your map, for every new howling
wilderness,
for every incineration of flesh, for every gasoline
victory
smell in the morning. […]
The first couplet of this poem links (Western)
ignorance with (male) prurience, a habitual charge of the
book; the reader snared by the seductiveness of the first
line finds herself rewarded not with a fleshed-out map
or further intimate revelation but her own image, “fleshed” out as
a male conqueror, one part soldier and one part Hollywood
specter. The male body here is erased by his uniform of statistics;
dehumanization, it would seem, is a two-way street. By the
end of this poem the effacement of the female speaker at
the beginning is distributed to the lover/conqueror: “Think
of how soft now, your rot of a body. Your fucking filth.”
The male figure here excoriated is not (only) an actual
soldier or veteran of the Vietnam war but also the Hollywood
version of the same, as suggested by allusion to lines from Apocalypse
Now. Coppola’s movie is referenced and cross-referenced
in this book, folded into a quotation from the Clash’s “Charlie
Don’t Surf,” attacked more directly in [zoetrope],
which derides “his wishful fantasy, his streets, his
guilt-laden academy/loves vietnam headtrips and phantasms
singing. his invaders’ blues/narratives spinning.” In
Reyes’ hands, the title of this iconic film is ironized;
she points out that Americans manage to derive aesthetic
pleasure from their decadent mock-up of the Vietnam catastrophe,
without bothering to feel actual empathy for the war’s
impact on Asians. Instead, our “ apocalypse” is
one that can be viewed and reviewed, popcorn in hand, the
product of an auteur, a diversion.
If militarism, racism, and imperialism
engender bitter binaries for Reyes, Roman Catholicism poses
a more complex problem. On the one hand, Catholicism is
both fruit and method of Spanish imperialism in the Philippines
and Americas; on the other, Catholicism seems to exist
on a continuum with native myth; allows for a model of
apocalypse, justice and redemption; and even provides this
book’s characteristic modes
and tropes, its litanies, prayers for intercession, and atavistic
thinking (since, in Catholicism, all Our Ladies are the same
Lady):
[…]our lady of the neon strip joints
our
lady of blowjobs in kerouac alley
our lady of tricked out
street kids, pray for us
blessed mother of cholo tattoos
you are the tightest homegirl
our lady of filas and lipliner
our lady of viernes santo procession
our lady of garbage-sifting
toothless men
our lady of urban renewal’s blight
pray for us sinners ipanalangin
n’yo kaming makasalanan
now and at the hour ngayon
at kung
of our death kami
ay mamamatay
amen
The squalor and mundanity of the first
three stanzas are less surprising here than the reversion
to the actual text of the prayer and its translation into
Tagalog at the end. While Reyes’s prayers are laced
with irony, they are also laced with a persistence by turns
rueful and hopeful.
In fact, for all the justified and righteous
anger of this book, its ultimate wish seems to be not for
apocalyptic destruction but for the persistence of languages,
and language. The bleakest moments in the book are those
that lack even invective, in which words pile up like heaps
of consumerist goods: “the
people small ethnic gender illusion catwalk because few speak.” Against
this, the passage of the Tagalog “Ave Maria” above
is a didactic text; just as the missionary’s first
proselytizing tool is to translate Christian texts into native
languages, so Reyes gives most Anglophone readers their first
Tagalog lesson in the last stanza of this poem. That may
be more an ironic gesture than anything else, however; the
book features long swathes of untranslated Tagalog in Western
and non-Western orthographies, poems which sweep English
stanzas off the page. The book’s final words are in
Tagalog. This seems a gesture of resistance—not just
to American culture with its many varietals of dehumanization
and oppression, but to the cult of sameness, to the erasure
of difference and identity and its replacement with projection,
fantasy, and mass-market myth. The multiple fluencies of Poeta
en San Francisco, then, might lead one to imagine an
apocalypse in which the veil of hegemony and monoglossia
are rent to reveal not the next world but the one that’s
already here.
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