Poetics: Manuscript Process Talk

Many thanks to Willie Perdomo, who has invited me to VONA to speak on manuscript process. Roger Bonair-Agard and Ruth Forman will also be coming in to speak. I understand Willie’s manuscript workshop group will be joined by Suheir Hammad’s poetry group for this Friday morning talk. It’s great to be invited to be a part of this group of poets and authors of color, and I’m excited to finally meet Suheir, whose work I’ve admired in a big way. I am very flattered to hear she is also an admirer of my work.

I think about all the contemporary American poetry naysayers, frothy and hysterical about the decline and irrelevance of poetry, that American poetry is doomed, that print is dead. Funny, now that I come to think of it; it isn’t folks of color bullying us into believing that American poetry is drawing its last breath. On the contrary, think of all of our mentors, who’ve pushed and pulled us “emerging” poets of color to cross over into varying levels of critically acclaimed and academy approved authordom since the latter part of the last century, and think of how this trend is only growing into booming in this new century.

Perhaps this is what white American naysayers are lamenting (Collins, for example, and also I’ve noticed a trend over at Silliman’s blog of highlighting “poetry is doomed” articles); it’s not their poetry or their narrow band brand of poetry growing in popularity, but rather, assisted in part by more accessible technology and much more so by our mentors and the places they have secured in American poetry, these authors of color who write and publish with very pressing political concerns, these continuing waves of writers who are no longer looking to a white American mainstream for permission to speak or move, who are instead driving into the American poetry scene and continuing to change American poetry.

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This manuscript talk is timely, given my recent and current concentrated effort to clean and hone Diwata. As I’ve written here, over time I’ve come to more clearly articulate what Diwata is, what is its world and what are its driving ideas. This has helped me with my editing. Or perhaps the editing is what’s helping me articulate.

For purposes of this talk, addressing students whom I think are just beginning to think about manuscript, I want to take a few steps back. Last night at dinner, I found out that Roger has a forthcoming, contracted second collection of poems. I asked him what was different between the first and second manuscripts, how did the process change. His response was very similar to my experience between Gravities of Center and Poeta en San Francisco.

For my first collection, it was a matter of whether I had enough poems, did I have a volume of work that could add up to a full length collection, not even thinking yet of themes or subject matter. Still, as we know, we each have our own poetic tendencies, or political, cultural, historical concerns that recur in our poems. I was able to find a few common threads which translated into sections: Filipino history and Western contact, being viewed through Western lenses, which therefore included Filipino American history and experience. There was another component here, about Filipinos interacting with one another, and how tradition survives or changes with Westernization. Then of course, the sections of love and desire, more personal poetics I guess. My rationale for including all of these in one volume was that even love and desire could be viewed through a Pinay lens, or filtered through a Pinay experience.

Poetic form and poetic experimentation comes into play here, though I’m not quite sure how to articulate its importance in the first collection. I suppose if I must identify a single thread woven throughout Gravities of Center, I’d say it’s the experimentation with technique and form, the rigor of “Anthropologic,” polyvocalism, math equation, film script, ekphrasis, the attempts at haiku and sonnet, the recipe, the prose poem. And how do I describe “101 Words That Don’t Quite Describe Me,” which I think may be the defining poem in/of the book, though others would say different. Jon Pineda once told me it was “Typhoon,” a quiet and small poem in measured couplets:

Typhoon

As corrugated metal buckles under
The pressure of so much gale wind

She pulls the children deeper into the jungle
Beyond swaying fields of cogon grass

Deeper into thickets of papaya and bamboo
Into the hovels of wild boar and snake

Beneath a canopy of balete leaves
She witnesses ancient trees uprooted

And savors raindrops large as guavas
Which cleanse her fragile body

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This poem is a little more wordy than I would like, but anyway, that was the first book. That’s a lot right there, though again, how does the manuscript process change from the first book to the second, from the second to the third, and so on. I’ve written and spoken a great deal on the process of writing Poeta en San Francisco, which you can read about at Tom Beckett’s e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s. And as for Diwata, I’ve been blogging about that since the old blog and on this here blog (link 1 | link 2).

More practical information might be on writing the themed manuscript, deciding that you have a theme (perhaps an aspect of the previous manuscript that needs more fleshing out), then deciding on source materials and setting parameters. Also important information is how we work with our editors. I am not sure if the students want to hear about manuscript submissions and book contracts, though these steps precede working with editors (assuming our editors work for or are our publishers, which most of the time, they are) but I can if they want.

I am looking forward to this talk, and am so glad to have an opportunity to give this caliber of talk to a group of emerging poets of color.