Adding to the February Poetry Schedule, and additional thoughts on Nathaniel Mackey

Wow. Here’s a couple of intense events I will be participating in this month:

• February 20: Literary Death Match! Thanks to Parthenon West Review editor Chad Sweeney, who’s somehow convinced me to represent them there. Details here. Please come out for this, to offer lots and lots of encouragement and moral support (and/or to buy me whiskey).
• February 23: Zapatismo! Thanks to Rupert Estanislao, who I believe will also be participating in this series of events, which are in celebration of the release of The Fire and the Word, A History of the Zapatista Movement, by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, to be published by City Lights Books. We’ll be reading in Oakland, somewhere on International Blvd. Details are forthcoming. But for now, I’ll say that I’m so interested in this organization’s inclusion of Filipino poets.

Doveglion

Have a look see here: Doveglion is forthcoming this summer from Penguin Classics.

And on the name, “Doveglion,” from Eileen Tabios’ remarks accepting the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary National Award for The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa (June 17, 2000):

The poet wrote metaphysically. From the dregs of the failed revolution, from the household ruled by a man living in the past, Villa came to claim that he was born in a country called “Doveglion” — a name he melded from “dove, eagle and lion” and something he described as a “strange country with no boundaries. Only “Earth Angels” can live in this country. Villa would explain, “Land itself is not a real country: it is commerce, agriculture, politics, a husk country.” Doveglion, however is a real country because it is a country “that moves to follow fire.” Thus, Villa seemed to confirm charges that he wrote as if he wasn’t birthed from that troubled country called the Philippines. And yet I would agree with [Nick] Joaquin who posits that Villa was writing, indeed, as a Filipino. Because his poetry that seems to spring from nowhere is indeed rooted in Filipino history — it is the needful post-Revolution duty of killing the father. The Philippines had to move on; it had to move on into the period of its American colonization.

[...]

It’s also hypothesized that Villa’s attempts to create his own history through the imaginary homeland called “Doveglion” placed him outside of the subsequent ethnopoetics that are supposed to include the excluded. And finally, Villa’s emphasis on craft rather than content (content here including cultural references) caused him to be excluded by certain Asian American critics.

Complete text here.

And finally, the poem, “DOVEGLION,” by e.e. cummings:

he isn’t looking at anything

he isn’t looking for something
he isn’t looking
he is seeing

what

not something outside himself
not anything inside himself
but himself

himself how

not as some anyone
not as any someone

only as a noone(who is everyone)

Good things a-brewin’ on the horizon, folks.