There’s a really good conversation going on in the comment section of my previous post on manuscript process, including the question of why 48 pages in the minimum marker of a full length collection.
In my portion of the talk in Willie Perdomo’s VONA class last Friday, I mostly focused on the building of Gravities of Center, how my first DIY chapbook came to be and then opened the way to the first book. I brought up that 48 page minimum requirement, my concern of whether I had enough poetry, quickly mentioned a couple of things about traditional book production and perfect bind as the reasons for the page minimum, and as I said these things, Willie nodded in agreement or acknowledgment.
Apart from myself, Paul S. Flores, Roger Bonair-Agard, Ruth Forman, and briefly Suheir Hammad, also spoke on that manuscript process. None of us questioned full-length minimum requirements, and neither did Willie. We all simply worked to meet this challenge of volume and substantial content, properly ordered, and finely edited by someone whose hardest criticism we trusted.
In terms of organization and/or order, Roger and I discussed compiling our work, and finding its common themes emerging therein. Paul and I used epigraphed sections in order to help with the movement. I told them what I remember Eileen Tabios, who was my editor for Gravities, telling me at the time about the first poem and the last poem really having to be well-placed. And then of course, you have to think of the trajectory from beginning to end. I think of an opening poem as enticing a reader to step inside. I should have also said, though I forgot to, that I think of the opening poem as invocation. As for the last poem, Paul had a good response to the question, “How do you know when it’s done?” He said he likes the idea of open-endedness, as opposed to the too neatly wrapped up and tied with a bow ending.
While Paul has moved away from literary publication in favor or theatre and performative work, Roger, who is a seasoned performer, finds little distinction between writing for performance and writing for the book. Pre-book, he liked the idea of chapbooks as timepieces for his life. I also like this; publication as document.
As well, he stated succinctly that his interest in the book is because of tradition. If you are a writer interested/invested in literary traditions, then you are interested in the book, and in writing books. Indeed, as I brought up Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, my use of Maria Clara as my anti-role model for the Filipina, and her plight which for me brings together imperialism, feminist concerns, and desire, Roger discussed the epicness of Derek Walcott, and whether or not he too could do epic.
Ruth Forman talked about her most recent book, Prayers Like Shoes, and how as a manuscript, its previous incarnations were missing a certain something. With such themes as women, love, and war, which we frequently see in the collections of many women of color, including my own, she felt something still needed to happen to her collection in order to really make it uniquely her take on these themes. Ultimately (and using her time at Hedgebrook), she settled upon an organization in which each of the poems or each section became a prayer.
Suheir discussed how she came to the decision that each poem in Breaking Poems would be a break, how the process of writing these poems and ordering them chronologically reflected a continual or maybe even progressive state of breaking. So here we think of the many, many meanings and implications of break and breaking.
I should also say that Ruth began her talk by telling us that she had always wanted to have a book, and that in the process of envisioning this, she also wrote and produced the DIY chapbook, the step before actually creating a full-length collection. I believe there is no question of a chapbook length project being “complete.” We all appear to have thought of the chapbook as the dress rehearsal for the work of the book.
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I always tell my students that arranging a book of poems is very similar to the way an artist prepares to hang his/her paintings in a gallery.
The artist should know the dimensions of the space where he/she is showing. Of the considerations, the number of walls is one strict consideration. Also, the height of the ceiling. The acoustics. Where the gallery is in terms of other businesses.
With the hanging of the paintings themselves, some paintings will undo the work of the others just by their vibrancy or their will . . .
Oliver, I’m liking this “artist gallery” analogy and will be passing it on to my VONA cohorts.
On my own process, I’m using the “mixtape” analogy more and more. What’s my intro? Are the connections between poems faded in or hard breaks? What themes keep looping back? What’s the background music? Am I mixing enough voices and influences into the work that it becomes its own form and not just a ripoff? Do the sum of the parts become greater than the whole?
At this point, I have more questions than answers but it’s what keeps me moving forward.
I like the music analogy, Oscar. Jim Powell, Berkeley resident and author of one of my favorite first books, ever, It Was Fever That Made the World (University of Chicago Press, 1989 or so), just published his second full-length book, Substrate (2009), which I haven’t bought but which I’m interested in getting for its use of California history. But in the mid-nineties he was self-publishing chapbooks, in editions of 30 and selling them for $25 and selling out. His philosophy was simple: a CD (back then) cost about $25, and he considered his chapbooks his CDs. It helped that he was a MacArthur fellow and had published Sappho translations with F,S &G. But I thought it was cool that a MacArthur Fellow was self-publishing very modest chapbooks with a self-created imprint, Pennyroyal Press.
Barbara, I have a question (and a thought) about Rizal’s intentions in the Noli re: the Maria Clara (MC) character. I’m hoping you’ll give me some feedback. I found your blog post because I googled MC and “anti-role model”. [NOTE: this post has become a bit longer than I intended... I feel strongly, and the words they came.]
I just finished the Soledad Lacson-Locsin (an old Filipina at U. Hawaii) translation which is brilliant, I think. It contains an internal intellectual consistency that I’ve learned to call “the ring of truth”. I can “hear it” as I read. I believe strongly that it is a truely faithful translation which captures much of the subtle complexity of the original (which I infer from the trans). The more recent Penguin trans is a soap opera by comparison.
Anyhow, the Epilogue and MC’s fate left me stunned and cold (literally) for a long time once I understood how all the pieces came together. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read the Noli again. MC’s fate is too horrid. Damaso was horrified by MC’s intention to take vows… because he knew they were often rape-prisons. He may even have known of Salvi’s feverish attractions to MC. Near the beginning of the Epilogue — the beginning of the end for MC — we are told Salvi regularly visits the convent where MC is held prisoner, so to speak. This knowledge is quite probably what causes Damaso’s death — along with his sudden transfer to so far away that he could no longer protect her with his influence. He died because he knew what his daughter was being subjected to, and he knew there was no escape for her.
A truely horrifying, horrid fate for any woman. These words fail me. That the Mother Superior is the willing jail-mistress is beyond inhuman… she a woman, watching women of a shame-culture be destroyed. Even today rape is a “disgrace” in which Filipinas are automatically blamed by both society and family. Filipinas today have the forced “choice” of silence or total rejection: losing every friend and all family. In Filipino culture rape is effectively a black hole from which women cannot escape once they are “stained”. I don’t know how far back this horrid stigma extends, but the Noli sets up a situation which, to me, implies the stigma was as strong then as it is now.
So my question to you is this: do you think Rizal constructed his “heroine” as part of a satire designed to provoke the righteous indignation of Filipinos, and thus rouse the anger needed for revolution? Most of the Lacson-Locsin translation “feels” to me (a native English speaker currently learning Tagalog) as if it is always taking the imposed Spanish ideals to extremes in order to show their shortcomings. I’m not certain “satire” is the correct term for what I’m describing. Perhaps more of a parody, taken to extremes?
With MC I imagine Rizal’s conversation with the Filipino reader (probably mostly male back then) going something like this: “So do you really want to accept the Spanish ideal for your Filipinas? See where it can lead to. Remember the control and corruption wielded by Fathers everywhere without check. Unless you overthrow the current abuses, your daughters too will end up in rape-prisons like MC does. Do you really want that?” Of course they don’t, and Rizal would know that the rape stigma is/was perhaps the most powerful social construct in Filipino culture, which is a shame culture first and a guilt culture by import.
The structure of the Noli is full of surprise revelations and intentional misdirections by the narrator/author. For example we are led to suspect Salvi early on, so the revelation that Damaso is the only rapist of the family (MC’s mother) comes as a complete surprise. But since Salvi has already been painted unpleasant in the extreme, the Epilogue becomes immensely powerful as soon as its dots are connected in the reader’s mind. Salvi is the only character so lurid that stomachs turn at the first thought of his periodic visits to “preach” in the convent-prison.
If this interpretation makes any sense to you, can you please give me some references where I can followup? I’ve had a terrible time trying to research this angle online. People everywhere complain about the social adoption of the MC Ideal / MC Effect, but I’ve seen nothing to support my thesis that Rizal was intentionally taking MC’s personality to it’s extreme logical consequences in order to provoke revolutionary insights in his fellow Filipinos. In the Lacson-Locsin translation, and in my reading of it, this method is consistently appied by Rizal throughout the Noli. I believe Rizal may have constructed MC so as to maximize the shock at the end of the Noli.
Thanks in advance for any feedback!!
-brice