Oops! Where Is the Dog? ... An Interview with Leslie A. Kebschull

Last month, I interviewed Annie E. Existence, a Louisiana artist. This month, I'd like to introduce you to a local artist: Leslie A. Kebschull. (By "local" I mean Cedar Falls, Iowa.) Leslie has a painting show at the downtown Cup of Joe coffeehouse through February 19, next Sunday. I know Leslie through church. I play bass in the praise band at St. John Lutheran here in town and she is married to the pastor, Dave Kebschull. Leslie has received awards for her art, for example, first and second prize as an amateur in the Denver, Iowa, art show; this past year, at that same art show she won third prize in the professional category for a painting titled "Victory"— that painting is in the show at the Cup, the last of the images below. Besides creating beautiful paintings, Leslie is also a dedicated haiku poet, a fine singer, and a wonderful photographer. About this she said, "I do enjoy photography also, but am just a "point and shoot" kind of gal. I don't have a lot of formal training, just a decent eye." I think Leslie's got one heck of a photographer's eye; check out her work at the online JPG photography magazine.     Leslie at the Cup of Joe art show. Her paintings are on the wall at left.   Remember, click on any of the images to see a larger, more detailed version. Now to the interview . . . Vince:  Could you share some personal background? Where you were born and raised, that kind of thing? Leslie:  I grew up in Iowa: born in Charles City and raised in Cedar Rapids. My husband Dave and I have three daughters: Lauren, Whittney, and Micah. We've lived in Missouri, West Virginia, several towns in Wisconsin, and Green Valley, Arizona. In Iowa, we've lived in Tama/Toledo, Dubuque, and now Cedar Falls. Because of all those moves I have worked in a variety of jobs, from cake decorator, to making fine, quality glasses in about an hour as a lab tech at LensCrafters, to managing memberships at a YMCA. Vince:  What are some of your earliest memories about art? Do you remember starting to make art? Leslie:  My earliest memories are pretty sketchy. I remember my mom painting scenery or still life and I would use her paints. I drew a lot, mostly women, and my paintings, as a kid, were more realistic. I had never really seen abstract art while I was growing up. My brother and I also had this drawing game we would play where one of us would just do a scribble and then the other would try to draw something from the scribble, which made us really have to use our imaginations.     blue plus blue plus blue  equals a glorious day          sky mathematics   Vince:  Do you have any formal training in art? Is your work always abstract, like the paintings in this show? Leslie:  I went back to school in 2006 to get a degree in Art Therapy and after almost 20 years of not creating any art I just didn’t think I could draw to save my life, but I found out I could. What inspired me to try painting abstract was a young man, named Adam, whose easel was near mine. I loved his work and so I decide to try my hand at it. As a teen I had always done more realistic pieces, so this was very new to me, and I loved it. Then Art History classes exposed me to other artists, such as: Robert Rauschenberg, Theodoros Stamos, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hoffmann, Franz Marc, and many others. Vince:  Are those artists your influences in painting? Leslie:  Most of the paintings in the show were inspired by Frankenthaler’s style, but at the same time, totally me. That is the one thing I have discovered with Abstract Art, it truly comes from the artist. Just like I would have loved to do the type of work Adam was creating next to me in school, I couldn’t, because it was his own spirit and experience coming through in his work. I find the inspiration from others, but my work is a reflection of me. I would not say it’s my emotions coming out so much as my inner spirit being revealed in my paintings. It is also fun to hear how others react to the paintings, what they see, feel, etc.        smell the flowers aromatic sensation      a heavenly scent   Vince:  In this exhibit, instead of giving each painting a title, you’ve given haiku. Tell us about that. Leslie:  I decided to use haikus rather than titles for my pieces, because they are also an expression of me. In the last two years I wrote a haiku almost daily. Usually I was observing something around me, such as a coffee house songstress, or the chimes blowing in the wind, or a spiritual revelation, or just a thought, and I wanted to share them with people. I have so many haikus and no one really sees them except the occasional Facebook reader. Also using haikus instead of titles gets the observer a little closer to the painting to really take it in. All the haikus posted under the paintings were written before I created the paintings. I just tried to find a haiku that would somehow fit the painting. Vince:  In the book that accompanies the exhibit, you say that yes, you do think in haiku. Which of the haiku you've listed there do you like best? Leslie:  Here are a couple of my favorites because they are two of the funnier ones. piles of laundry grow and clutters accumulate oops! where is the dog? cognitive comma, senior moment, brain blockage simply put: brain fart Vince:  Both of those are hilarious! I like how they're about everyday life. Leslie:  I love playing with words and think haikus are a fun way to express myself. I think my favorite haikus are the ones that express that playfulness. For a while there was an online group I was in where I had created a thread called “Haiku” and we would all respond to each other in that form. It was a fun way to communicate to each other.                       the gray misty year is a faded photograph                           of lost memories   Vince:  How did you choose the paintings that are included in this show? Is there a story connected with this exhibit? Leslie:  About three weeks before this show at I really did not have a body of work that went together and I was beginning to think I would have to use paintings that didn’t really show a body of work and had no congruity to it. Then something happened: one of my inspirations, Helen Frankenthaler, passed away and I began to look at her work again. On the day she passed away I painted four paintings and four more the day after she passed. In those two days I had ideas, colors, and composition coming at me and I couldn’t stop painting. It was only when I ran out of canvas and decided I had plenty of paintings for the show that I stopped. Besides I only have so much room in my basement to store all these paintings. Vince:  It's wonderful when that kind of creativity happens to us, isn't it? Okay, how about a final word? Leslie:  All in all I just love to create whether through words or paint. It's an extra perk if someone else enjoys my work, but ultimately I just like having fun being creative. ;-)                     I see around me god in the oddest places                                             unexpected joy   Everyone, please leave a comment below . . . I would love to hear what you think and so would Leslie. She'll be checking for comments here and also responding. If you came to this blog post because you saw an announcement of it on facebook, would you please leave a comment here instead of in facebook? Or maybe in both places if you'd like, but certainly here, please. If you live near Cedar Falls, go see Leslie's show — up through Sunday, February 19. The paintings are marvelous to see "live." And they're for sale, so if you like something a bunch, Leslie would love for you to own it and give it a nice home. Her own home is already where they live, but she'd like them to travel and see the world! Also, if you happen to see Leslie hanging around her paintings at the Cup, say hello . . . I'm sure she would love to talk about them with you. I hope you enjoyed the interview. Take care, friends. Ingat. Added later on 9 Feb 2012: I've made a change in the painting images. Changed the last one, I should say. These images of the paintings are from Leslie's facebook art portfolio. The bottom image above, when you see it in person, is very different from the facebook image. The painting on the wall appears more yellow while the computer photo is more like peach or salmon. So I tweaked it more toward lemon in Photoshop and then asked Leslie what she thought. She prefers the original photo because in the photoshopped version, while its color might be more true, "the brush strokes are no longer there and the picture looks more graphic rather than hand-painted," as Leslie wrote to me. So I've changed it back to the image from Leslie's facebook. Truth be told, I liked that image better than the photoshopped one, anyway.

Art with No Regrets: An Interview with Annie E. Existence

Three years and as many months ago, I started this blog, imagining it as a blue guitar: an "aquamarine ark, spaceship, brave vessel of verse and bliss[, a] glorious palimpsest." I just love the notion of a blue guitar . . . I have a bright blue 5-string electric bass as well as a 4-string midnight blue bass (inset image, top left, next to the blog title), and a Kashmir blue classical guitar. My blog title Man with the Blue Guitar I nicked from Wallace Stevens's well-known poem with the same title: within the poem, a guitarist is interrogated by others curious why his music does not "'play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'" That's how Stevens dramatized imagination, as a device or conduit or construction that changes the world, that (re)renders the world in its own fashion, separate and different from — here do air quotes — reality, creating and displaying its own inner transcendence. Stevens himself nicked the title (or at least the image) from Pablo Picasso's 1903 Blue Period painting "The Old Guitarist" (at right), Stevens's inspiration or trigger for the poem. Picasso pioneered Expressionism with this image, dramatizing on canvas his grieving for a close friend dead from suicide, emblematizing through paint his sorrow — so say art historians and critics — visually evoking the feeling one might find in music in a momentary twinge like the "blue note" of the Blues. Recently, in the online artists' community deviantArt.com, I found a splendid and gorgeous digital painting that's based on the "The Old Guitarist" but transforms Picasso's image by playing and replaying it on Stevens's blue guitar of the imagination, so to speak, transmuting its sorrowful feeling into a more joyful yet equally blue (an altered and luminous blue) beauty. Here it is at left: "The Blue Guitarist" by Annie E. Existence. In my bio for the blog (look all the way left, top), I say, "my favorite color is blue, in all its dynamic shades and flavors: cobalt, electric, royal, robin's-egg, navy, cerulean, teal, indigo, sky." This painting rocks several of those flavors of blue, especially (to my eye, or on my screen) teal and sky. Her painting expresses for me the intimate and sometimes heartbreaking, throat-catching loveliness of playing music on the guitar (the real, material guitar, that is). Annie renders the instrument in muted browns like Picasso's and then uplifts the woman playing it, transfigured and made luminescent by the music she's performing: her skin and hair are illuminated by — no, are — a kind of cool fire, a lambent flame like malleable metal that's nonetheless fleshy and soft. Annie E. Existence is the pseudonym of a fine artist in Lafayette, Lousiana, now specializing in tattoo art after completing her studio art BA at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. I had the great pleasure recently of interviewing Annie — completely via facebook — and now I'm honored and glad to present that interview. Remember: click on any image to see a larger version. Vince:  Annie, would you tell me about your background in art? Did you maybe melt crayons as a kid and smear multi-color soup on walls? Annie:  I was always creative as a kid . . . kinda weird though . . . I used to shave the heads of my Barbie dolls, wrap them in torn-up towels like mummies, and make death masks out of construction paper for them. I was always into Egyptian history. It always fascinated me. But I've been drawing and writing for as long as I can remember. Vince:  Wow . . . Barbie-mummies. That's way better than melting crayons! What about after you grew up? Annie:  In May [2011], I graduated from UL [University of Louisiana at Lafayette] for printmaking. I also did a lot of casting and other metalworking while I was there and I enjoyed that more than anything. There is something very personal about sculpting something out of wax and casting them. I always ended up with these intimate size sculptures that people wanted to hold and move around in their hands, which was the point. I want to get people reconnected with art instead of the look, don't touch culture we're living in now. I recently completed my tattoo certifications and sent off to the state to get my commercial body art license . . . when I get that, I'll be able to tattoo full time at Bizarre Ink where I've been apprenticing. I suppose that's one obvious way to connect people to art in the literal sense. The shop is on downtown Jefferson Street where all the bars are [in Lafayette, Louisiana]. I've struggled a lot getting the customers to care about the art on their bodies instead of just wanting some cursive font with the name of their boyfriend. Vince:  Tell me more about your tattoo art. How did you get into that? Annie:  I was always interested in tattoos and since I've always been a weird kid and an artist, I fell naturally into the underbelly of culture. Just like I'm intrigued by Egyptian history, I find the culture and history of body art to be intriguing as well. But this underbelly is not the most attractive thing in the world. I have to spread my influence from the dregs up. When someone wants to enter the tattoo business, they have to swim through a sea of junkies, thieves, liars and coattail riders. It's so sad but so true. But that's where you separate the real artists from the "I love Miami Ink" wannabes. How much are you willing to put up with to be the best artist you can be? Luckily I'm apprenticing under two artists who have paired up to see me succeed: James Aaron Puckett and Andy Boudoin. It's been a terrifying experience. Simply because normally I can pick up a new art form, manipulate it, and make something beautiful whether I have a lot of experience with that medium or not. It's not like that with skin. I've never picked up an art form and sucked at it . . . until recently. But I'm learning fast and have great mentors. They want to see what I'm capable of. Once I'm given the basics and the right guinea pigs I think I'll be capable of a lot more than what I've been doing. Vince:  I'm guessing you also have tattoos, then? Annie:  I have several, some of which I will be covering up and redoing. The first I ever got is still my favorite . . . I got f-holes like from a violin on my back to resemble Man Ray's old, famous photomanipulation "Le Violon d'Ingres." I really can't say what it is about this artist that I love so much. Maybe it's the fact that he was a definite beginning to the art that we see modern artists of my age doing today. We just use photoshop now instead of paints. At left is Man Ray's "Le Violon d'Ingres" (1924), in which he added two f-holes (violin style) to a photograph of his model. Next to it is a photograph of Annie E. Existence with f-holes tattooed on her back in homage to Man Ray and his work. Vince:  Do you have a personal philosophy or whatever about your art? Or as an artist? Annie:  I work back and forth between making art for the fun of it and trying to say something with it. I'm really interested in personal relationships and how people treat one another, and how the way someone treats me and vice versa directly affects how I respond to life and myself. One of my tattoos is on my left hip. It says "Scapegoat" and has goat horns around it. A lot of my art is based on the scapegoat concept. Traditionally the scapegoat was a literal goat that Christian villagers would symbolically place their sins on. They would then take it into the woods and slaughter it almost like a sacrifice. Very pagan in ritual, to be honest. I have always been the one to work too hard and sacrifice my own well-being so someone else didn't have to feel so bad about their wrongdoing. I hate to go too far into my personal life, but most of my senior thesis in school was based around this man I had fallen in love with. There was something charming and charismatic about him. But he was addicted to pain killers and used my feelings for him as a way to get away with hurting me and the people around me both financially and emotionally. The soft-hearted compassionate artist in me wanted to believe he could change. I guess that's my fault for hoping I could manipulate his disaster of a life like watercolors on a canvas and make something beautiful out of it. I almost slaughtered myself doing this and have tried valiantly since then to not be that person . . . but alas, I guess it's the artist/mother instinct. Vince:  Glad you were able to escape that situation. Okay, so how do these ideas interact with "The Blue Guitarist"? Annie:  Well, "The Blue Guitarist" falls more into the category of "just for fun." And it's also a tribute piece to Picasso, a thanks for what he has contributed to the art world. I do portraits of my friends for the same reason. I'm about to start another one. I do a lot of portraits of my artist friends as an appreciation for what they contribute to our local art community. The next piece will be of my friend Cootie Von Ghoul. Obviously that's her artist name and not her real name, but I always call her Cootie. She's a beautiful woman and I won't mind staring at her face while I do it.   ;-) Vince:  One thing I find so moving about "The Blue Guitarist" is the shade of blue you used. It's so different from the blue Picasso used in his "Old Guitarist" painting. Can you say more about that color? And how does color affect you as an artist, maybe especially as a tattoo artist? Annie:  Well, I think Picasso's version is a little more dreary, and mine, however very blue, is slightly more hopeful. Maybe hopeful isn't a good word for it, but I don't think it invokes the same sad feeling as Picasso's choice of blue. I do enjoy a certain amount of vibrancy in color when I choose to use it. I'm primarily a black and white kind of girl but my color drawings and paintings tend to use really bright colors. As far as tattoo-wise, colors tend to be brighter there and maybe that's why I'm attracted to that. When you're working on flesh, if you're not using just black and grey, you use the most vibrant colors possible. Also, colors don't react the same way over flesh tones as they would over white so you have to choose a more exaggerated color palette. I'm just very prone to using exaggerated color. Vince:  In some facebook interchange we had recently, you mentioned being involved in a community of artists where you are. How does that affect your work? Annie:  It greatly affects my work, especially since people have their own taste. It's this community of artists that encourages me to pursue my own work and they appreciate it for what it is. My quirky style of art is not offputting to them since they too are rather eccentric with their work. But the art that sells here, that upper middle-class white housewives want, is fleur-de-lis and swamp scenes and tiger-themed stuff. You know, Cajun culture, the Saints and the French history, and LSU football. Now, I love Cajun culture, but the symbology has become so cliché that I can't bring myself to make it even though I know it would make me money and feed me. The other artists here just get it and when I'm amongst them I know I can just make art the way I want to make it. Recently I started making Voodoo dolls which has been a more enjoyable way to tap into the old New Orleans culture that is still prevalent today. Vince:  Where did your pseudonym "Annie E. Existence" come from? Annie:  "Annie" is just the last part of my first name . . . and there is a small part in a song by TOOL which mentions the name "Atrophy Annie," so I took that. Normally, when a name is written out, formally, the middle name is represented with an initial. The "E" stands for "Enigma," which holds the meaning of mystery, and not knowing what the middle "E" stands for immediately is part of that . . . and I will always be a mystery even to myself because as an artist there a lot of things I am constantly discovering about myself. I've figured out how far my tolerance for abuse from others goes. And by abuse, I mean people taking advantage of my kindness, backstabbing me, or using me as a stepping stone to get something else they want. I've found out I have a high tolerance for these things, but my tolerance for seeing someone else get abused is very low. Also, I've struggled most of my life with depression and anxiety and I didn't discover until recently what these things really meant for me. I was constantly terrified that I would create some sort of social blunder, so I would isolate myself. Once I got old enough to understand these emotions I was able to see an episode (panic attacks or sudden drop in mood) coming. I can't prevent these things for sure but I've been able manage my breathing, calm down my racing heart, and remind myself that it will pass. It's more of a biological problem and I'm not just crazy. This has been the most important revelation for me over the last couple of years. But I'm still learning ways to deal with it. And "Existence" . . . well, that holds a lot of meaning for me. When I was struggling the hardest, battling constant depression and anxiety, it was hard to find reasons to live. I told myself, "Just exist. That's all I have to do right now." So when it comes down to it — even when my life is hard and I'm not particularly living for anything — I just have to exist and my purpose will present itself later. Vince:  What aspirations do you have for your art? Where do you think it will go in the future? These are clichéd questions, I know, but we all have wants and desires for our work. Annie:  I'm focused on being a good tattoo artist right now. Here is my favorite tattoo I've done so far. I did this on my boyfriend and he was willing to be the guinea pig — bless his heart! I was very pleased with what I was able to do when given the chance. That was the first tattoo of its kind that I was able to do. It was more than just font or small band logos. I'm happy for any work I get but even more so when I get to do something fun and more creative. Also I want to travel and hit the convention circuits and rub elbows with other artists. That is my chance to make a name for myself and immerse myself in the culture where I can learn from artists from all over the world. It's the greatest opportunity coming my way. Vince:  Any last word you want to leave my readers with? Annie:  All I can say at this point, is that my future is unknown like everyone else's. All I can do is learn about the people around me and seize opportunities as they come to me. That's what life is all about: overcoming hardships, loving people, learning as much as possible, and jumping at every opportunity with no regrets.

You can see more of Annie E. Existence's artwork on facebook and deviantArt. I'll leave you with one more digital painting by Annie E. Existence, titled "Emily" (2011).

Would you please leave a comment below? I'd love to hear what you think, and so would Annie. Thanks. Ingat.



Sources: (1) Pablo Picasso, "The Old Guitarist," from PabloPicasso.org. (2) Annie E. Existence, "The Blue Guitarist," from deviantArt.org. (3) Annie E. Existence, May 2011 facebook profile picture, used by permission. (4) Man Ray, "Le Violon d'Ingres," from the J. Paul Getty Museum. (5) Annie E. Existence, from facebook art page, Dissident Arte. (6) Annie E. Existence, June 2011 facebook profile picture, used by permission. (7) Annie E. Existence, October 2010 facebook profile picture, used by permission. (8) Annie E. Existence, tattoo, from facebook art page, Dissident Arte. (9) Annie E. Existence, "Emily," from deviantArt.org.

 

Skulkers of the Philippine Night

Over the last five or six days, students in an Asian American Literature class at the University of Georgia have been friending me on Facebook. Their professor, Will Abney, offered them extra credit for contacting and friending authors they are studying.

At first, I was divided about the situation, but it has developed into an interesting learning opportunity for them as well as me: we now have a Facebook group in which we can discuss my poems in their textbook, Shawn Wong's Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. There is only a small window during which we (along with their professor, who has now joined the group) can address my work online; they start discussing the poems in class this week and will probably be done with them in fairly short order.

In the meantime, though, the students have started asking questions and I am answering . . . though I'm not simply giving the answers away. I find myself responding in such a way that I hope will entice the students to meet the poems halfway, so to speak, engage them to read the poems critically and actively.

Here is one of those poems that are in their textbook, on aswang (ah-SWAHNG), the bogey man (or woman) of the Philippines.

Aswang


Shooting marbles, Carding from across the street
and I knelt on gritty concrete in front
of his house. His mother and a couple of friends sat
on the steps, laughing and gossiping about aswang,
those routine skulkers of the Philippine night. Carding's
mother had a pretty cousin who could
pierce your jugular with her hollow tongue
like sharpened bamboo, then delicately sip your blood,
her eyes darting crimson. One of the friends
had an uncle with fingernails hard as stone,
his breath reeking of damp earth, of human
flesh three days dead. They said Mang Enteng,
who sells baskets at market, changes into cat,
dog or boar at full moon and prowls bundok roads.

That night, I was strolling by Carding's house,
and I saw his mother, a pretty mestiza widow,
her face hidden by hair hanging down
as she bent far forward from the waist.
A manananggal, the worst kind of aswang:
women who can detach themselves at the hips,
shucking their legs at night like a wrinkled slip.
They fly, just face and breasts, to prey on infants.
For a moment, a shadow like a giant bat
darkened the moon, then I ran to my friend's room.
He cried as we sneaked into his mother's bedroom
and sprinkled crushed garlic and holy water
on the legs propped up in the southeast corner. "She'll be free,"
I told his trembling shoulders. "She'll finally be free."

The next day, friends and neighbors gathered
at their house. The priest wouldn't let anyone
in the bedroom, they said. Then six men carried a pine
box into the light. I couldn't forget how his mother
flew in the window at dawn. Her face was white, her
lips full and red. She screamed when
she couldn't touch her legs. He rushed in,
began to brush away the garlic. His mother
like a trapped moth fluttering against the wall.
I leaped and wrapped my arms around Carding.
She swooped, we struggled until the first sunbeam
touched her. My friend sobbed as I wiped blood from
a cut on my arm. The funeral was a week ago, and all
I've dreamed the last six nights is neighbors standing

in a line — I'm running — they whisper, "Aswang. Aswang."

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in Zone 3 (1990). Reprinted in Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996).

Vince Gotera, "Aswang: Manananggal"   (click to view full-size)

The opening stanza is a kind of primer about aswang, the Filipino all-purpose monster: vampire, ghoul, shapeshifter. These different types of aswang have European cognates, but not the manananggal (mah-nah-nahng-GAHL) . . . there is no monster in European or American culture that does what she can do: split her body at the waist, entrails hanging like broken cables, unfurl leathery, pterodactyl-like wings, and sail through the night in search of prey.

Now of course all monsters have to have some weakness; otherwise, we humans would be long-extinct. A vampire can be killed with a wooden stake, the werewolf with a silver bullet, the zombie by a death-dealing blow to the head. With the manananggal — typically a woman — the vulnerability is that she must leave the bottom half of her body alone while she hunts. Spread a little salt or a little garlic on her nether regions and she cannot reconnect, reintegrate her body; when sunrise comes, she dies at sunlight's touch.

In the second and third stanzas, the poem moves from primer to narrative. Carding, the speaker's playmate, is the protector of his mother's bottom half. The speaker, off stage, convinces Carding to be brave, to set his mom free from the curse of being an aswang. After all, Carding is short for Ricardo, a Germanic name meaning "hard ruler," a là King Richard the Lion-Hearted of medieval fame.

But Carding is no Lionheart; he wants his mother to live. Her only release from aswang-ness is through death. It turns out not Carding but the speaker is the "hard ruler" and he must battle in epic struggle against both Carding and his monster mother. In the fight, the speaker is injured slightly. Later he fears (no, perhaps is more than certain) that he has damned himself, that he has in his heroism been turned into an aswang.

I suppose I really didn't need to tell you all that; we are all such good interpreters of horror-film conventions. But I wanted to retell the story, rehearse the thrills again.

You see, I really just wanted to write a good old-fashioned horror story, and the clincher was I wanted to do it in a sonnet. Well, fourteen lines was not a large enough space to contain this topic, so it ended up being three sonnets. With a tail, a small caudate: an ending monostich or single-line stanza where the punchline is, full circle from the characters in the beginning of the poem "laughing and gossiping about aswang."

You may not have recognized that the poem is made up of three sonnet-shaped stanzas because, at times, I use quite distant slant rhyme. Here are the rhyme schemes of the three stanzas, broken into rhyme groups:

a b a b c d c d e f e f g g

street front sat aswang Carding's could tongue blood friends stone human Enteng cat roads

a b b a c d d c e f f e g g

house widow down waist aswang hips slip infants bat room bedroom water free free

a b b a a b b a c d e e c d

gathered anyone pine mother white, her when in, mother wall Carding sunbeam from all standing   //   Aswang

As you can see, the first stanza is a Shakespearean sonnet, the second a modified Petrarchan (cddc instead of abba in the second quatrain), and the third a pretty standard Petrarchan . . . with the caudate line rhyming with the closing line of the last sonnet stanza.

Some of the rhymes are so slant they may hardly be rhymes — and some of my poet friends probably would say they don't rhyme at all. For example, in the first sonnet stanza, "front" and "aswang" (the b rhyme). Or "stone" and "Enteng" (the f rhyme), though that pair has a more subversive rhyme: the rich consonance of /t/ + /n/ with /t/ + /ng/. Which also rhymes, consonantally, with the earlier c rhyme: "Carding" and "tongue" (/d/ + /ng/ with /t/ + /ng/). Which in turn rhymes in a more standard fashion with the second b rhyme above, "aswang." So, while the rhymes can be quite distant, there is a great deal of subtlety in the rhyming that gives the poem a confident musicality and poetic texture. (I'm particularly proud of the rhyme of "white, her" with "mother.")

Unless you counted the lines in each stanza, you might not have thought these were sonnets at all. You might have thought this was free verse, in fact. While I was pursuing my MFA at Indiana University, my classmates in that program were mainly unfriendly to rhymed and metered verse, so I developed a formalist style that used slant rhymes and roughed-up meter as disguises. A reader expecting free verse could see my poems as such, while a reader looking for formal conventions could also find them there.

Okay, enough craft talk. A few final notes. In the original version of the poem, published in Zone 3 and reprinted in Asian American Literature, I misspelled manananggal. I left out a na syllable. This spelling is corrected above.

In the textbook, a footnote says the manananggal is a "witch who is half-human and flies around in a caldron [sic]." I have never encountered the cauldron element in literature I've consulted on aswang legends, so I wonder if this footnote is in error, though the cauldron may be part of a local version of the myth somewhere.

Here is a YouTube video showing a female aswang transforming into her manananggal form, from the Philippine film Shake, Rattle & Roll (1984). Production values quite low, but interesting nevertheless.

It was difficult to find an aswang image I liked out in the internet. So I made my own; see above. It's more of a cartoon than a representational rendering, though my wife and kids assure me it's nonetheless a scary image. You decide.

And comment below, please. Thanks!

Dante and Angels and Saints ... Oh, My!

I've posted a couple of poems in the blog so far that refer to Dante's Divine Comedy: "Crosses" and "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside." Well, here's a third Dante-influenced poem. I don't think I had realized consciously until doing the blog what an impact Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (and particularly Gustave Doré's illustrations of The Divine Comedy) had had on me as a child, as an artist/poet-to-be, on my imagination and on my sensibilities.

With your indulgence, I'll set up first by telling you Lolo means "grandfather" and Tita means "aunt," although probably those Filipino words are reasonably clear in the poem's context. Okay, here we go.

Wings I really thought it depicted heaven: a picture of the sky entirely filled with a single gigantic rose shaped by the wings of countless angels in Lolo's book. I was five and didn't know this was Dante's Paradiso. All I know is I saw wings everywhere. One evening, a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. But such visions didn't happen only after I saw the Doré engraving of Dante. Three years before, when I was two, Gerardo, my brother born premature, died after a week in an incubator. Mama swore she and Papa heard wings beating near my crib. I pointed, laughing, "Ahdo, Ahdo," my finger tracing an invisible arc as the sound of flapping slipped out the window. What does my daughter, three months old, really see, when her eyes sweep across the room? Ah ... but then I laugh at myself. I'm a computer programmer. I make pixels fandango onscreen. Surely I never really saw angels. I want to believe my cousin and I simply divined our aunt was dying and were wishing just as hard as we could, "Let her go to heaven." Yet I also recall my college roommate Bill heard rustling outside our window. "A trapped bird," I told him, listened for cooing, some sort of cry for help. We looked. Nothing. The next day, a telegram — at the precise moment we heard wings, my Lolo had died.     —  Vince Gotera, first appeared in the Mississippi Valley Review (1989) in a slightly different version.

Click on the images to see them larger. Gustave Doré William Blake Giovanni Britto (?) Commissioned by Alessandro Vellutello Giovanni di Paolo Illuminated manuscript

It is literally true that the Doré illustration (top) of Beatrice and Dante marveling at the heavenly host forming a "white rose" in the Empyrean was, in my child's mind, really heaven. At the age of five (or whatever my actual age was), it didn't occur to me to wonder how Dante or Doré could have known. Since the image was between covers, in a lordly-looking tome, that was enough proof for little me that heaven really looked like that. This is one of my earliest and most powerful, most charged memories.

Click on the first image at the top above to see the Doré image (dated 1867) in all its glory . . . and I do mean "glory." The other images are different artists' renditions of heaven's "white rose" in the Paradiso. (Cantos 30 and 31 if you want to read Dante's descriptions.)

The second image, below Doré, is by poet and printmaker William Blake (c. 1826): a study or sketch showing the white rose as actually looking like a flower, sepals and all, with each petal reserved for a given person or character; Blake died before he could finish the project, so there is no finished art of this subject.

The third image is attributed to the engraver Giovanni Britto, who worked for Francesco Marcolini, the publisher of Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 commentary on the Divine Comedy; Britto — or whoever created this engraving (click on it to see better detail) — renders the rose with a whole multitude of petals that look like thrones with saints and angels and whomever in each one.

The fourth is an illuminated manuscript by Giovanni di Paolo, a Sienese painter (1400s); his rose is smaller in scope than those of the others, but the figures are strikingly rendered. As a child, I only knew the Doré, and it's illuminating (sorry, bad pun) to see these other takes on the white rose image.

The three vignettes involving wings come right out of Gotera family stories, though I've fiddled with them a bit. The middle one, concerning my brother Gerardo, is narrated here just as people in the family tell it. Although I was small enough to sleep in a crib, I evidently knew about Gerardo and pronounced his name as "Ahdo." Narratives of supernatural visits and so on are very common in Philippine contexts; all families have stories like these, passed on from one generation to the next.

In keeping with this kind of family tradition, and the continuation of such traditions, I have tried to keep the language in the poem simple and down-to-earth. Getting the poem ready to post in the blog, in fact, I changed a word in the first stanza. The phrase "countless angels" was originally "innumerable angels," but I thought innumerable now was not in keeping with family scenes of young and old recounting these stories.

As I've posted the 30 or so poems that are on the blog at this moment, I hadn't revised any until now. I wanted the older poems to reflect my style of those other moments, but with "Wings" I felt strongly that the poem really needed revision. And that doing this would give me the opportunity to talk in the blog about revision as a concern of craft.

With that end in mind, here are three stanzas from "Crosses": those on the left, in red, come from the poem as it was published in the Mississippi Valley Review twenty years ago, while those on the right, in blue, are from the version posted above, as revised over the last couple of days.

Old Version (1989) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in my grandfather's house. The gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining angel told us, "Someone important will pass here this evening." While we were sweeping, my Aunt Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .] New Version (2009) [. . .] a man with bright feathers sprouting from his shoulders to brush the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony at the bottom of the stairs in Lolo's house. A gecko on the wall looked once, then scurried off. "Sweep the steps," the shining man said. "Someone important will pass here tonight." As we busied ourselves with brooms, our Tita Nena quietly died from the tuberculosis she'd had for years. [. . .]

As you compare the two versions, see how more jagged the older version looks: long lines followed by conspicuously shorter ones then vice versa. Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with such variation. But somehow it just didn't seem as polished to me now.

I think this may come from my practice since maybe 1990 of starting a poem by writing in iambic pentameter while at the same time trying to sense the form that the poem seems to want for itself. The result of this practice evidently is that I began to appreciate lines that are more similar to each other in length. Whereas twenty years ago, apparently, I liked lines to be more leggy, more varied. Perhaps something here of the garden vs. the wilderness?

It may also be that I have gotten better at sensing the possible junctures, the potential breaks, in lines . . . that I am more open to different sorts of line breaks, and thus more able to regularize line length. For example, in the third line above, "the ceiling spoke to me and my cousin Tony," I didn't (or couldn't?) hear the potential break after the word "me" that might set up an intriguing nuance while at the same time keeping line lengths similar.

The more likely possibility, though, is that I was just not as good at lineation in 1989 as I am today. So I tended back then to go for more flash ... in other words, enjambment. For instance, in the second line above, I break like this: "to brush / the ceiling." Hmm. What possible advantage was there in calling attention to the word "brush"? Doesn't that line break distract? Make the reader wonder why the line ended there? Is it over-dramatic? Even sentimental? It's certainly sensationalistic.

In his excellent book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that good fiction creates "a vivid and continuous dream" in the mind of the reader, and that the good fiction writer will do whatever it takes not to interrupt that dream. What I'm suggesting in the previous paragraph is that lineating at "brush" breaks up the reader's dream's continuity. Granted there can be good times and reasons to do that, to unbalance and destabilize the reader — Garnder notwithstanding — but it's not necessary in the progress of the narrative at this point in the poem.

I think I was probably similarly preoccupied with enjambment in other line breaks in the earlier version — "the gecko / on the wall" (lines 5-6) or "'Sweep / the steps'" (7-8) or "'will pass / here'" (9-10) — perhaps unnecessarily preoccupied with enjambment, to the disservice of the poem overall. And of the reader. Who doesn't need to have to wonder why "gecko" is out at the end of that long line, gone out on a limb, so to speak.

In the more recent version at the right, I smoothed out the earlier over-the-top enjambments. I set up new, more subtle enjambments that are to my older ear more serviceable. More appropriately dramatic . . . that is, less so. The break at line three of "to me / and my cousin Tony" sets up the "me" as seeing himself in a more elevated position, metaphorically, vis-à-vis the angel; that makes a lot more sense to me narratively (especially with regard to characterization) than the previous emphasis on the action of wings brushing a ceiling. Or, at the end of line eight, the stanza enjambment that highlights "Someone" as opposed to the earlier privileging of "pass[ing]." In other words, in both cases, more focus on character than action.

I've also slightly changed some wording; I think these edits are similarly character-related. For example, I've replaced "grandfather" with "Lolo" and "Aunt" with "Tita"; such usage is more appropriate to these child characters, more personal, as well as more probable in the imagined scene of family storytelling, the imagined language that would be used as these stories are told to nieces and nephews, to grandchildren.

I replaced "While we were sweeping" (line 10) with "As we busied ourselves with brooms" not only to avoid repeating the word "sweep" but also to make a clearer picture (and squeeze in another alliteration, this time on /b/). This alteration also sets up a slant rhyme between "brooms" and "from"; while the poem is essentially unrhymed, there are occasional rhymes created by the new lineation: "feathers" and "shoulders" (lines 1-2) or the distant rhyme of "once" with "Someone" (lines 6 and 8).

There are other small changes, but I think I'll leave off there. Wings are everywhere, people. Angels surround us — if not heavenly, then earthly ones. So many small (and large) kindnesses from all our sisters and brothers.

Note: the Doré illustration above comes from Wikimedia Commons. The Blake image comes from the University of Texas's Danteworlds website. The third image, commissioned by Vellutello, comes from the University of Virginia's The World of Dante website. The di Paolo image comes from a different page on that same website. These last two sources in particular provide a wealth of information and visual imagery connected to Dante and The Divine Comedy.

A Pause for the Cause (3.0) ... Anti- Art

I just found out that my photograph "Ergodyne" has appeared as cover art in the poetry magazine Anti-.

Many thanks to the staff of Anti-, especially editor Steven D. Schroeder, for selecting "Ergodyne" to appear as cover art. This is my first time contributing cover art to a magazine. Very exciting. Congrats also to the featured poet, John Gallaher.

To get to "my" Anti- cover (and, of course, John Gallaher's poems): <http://www.anti-poetry.com/feature21>.

Dragonfly (page 6)

Okay, back to the serializing of Dragonfly. And, to continue the insect connection, as in my recent beetle-on-a-string theme, this time we focus on the dragonfly. This poem is in fact the title piece of the collection.

Miraculous Dragonfly Tutubi Milagrosa — a Tagalog phrase emblazoned across this sack of jasmine rice, also in Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Laotian, English, and Thai: a concert of tongues, scripts, pictographs. But the crudely drawn dragonfly cruising the names seems hardly a friendly miracle: metallic globes for eyes, skeletal legs from a giant mosquito, hairy carapace like some gene-fused nightmare from a low-budget movie. Abdomen shaped like a missile — a penile sting. Not gossamer wings but helicopter blades: Cobra chopper streaking over silky jungle mist hovers, cybernetic killer machine poised on a stream of fire, molten metal. No. Dragonfly out of my childhood is delicate, a four-year-old's handspan from wingtip to wingtip. Almost sunset near the Rizal monument in Manila's Luneta Park — cicadas in full choir, singing a canticle. A little boy in khaki shorts, a scrape on one knee, stands still then takes a step like a tightrope walker in line with the slender tail of a jade and ultramarine dragonfly. The boy's gaze, his whole being, funneled into fingertip and thumb. For a moment, a small universe of utter beauty and grace in his hand, my hand — intricate shimmer of wings, the eyes iridescent jewels. Page 6 NOTE: Image sources at right, from top to bottom: (1) my wife Mary Ann Blue Gotera's artwork for the cover of the original publication of Dragonfly; (2) a Cobra helicopter firing a missile, from Wikipedia; (3) a photograph by Pablo Yáñez, from his wonderful website www.modernstills.com; (4) a photograph by Judy of the Woods (browse her interesting website on how to carry on a sustainable life at www.judyofthewoods.net); (5) a photograph by Darrin O'Brien (check out his photostream on flickr). Many thanks to these lovely people for giving me permission to use their images in the blog. Do click on the images to see them enlarged; the details of the dragonflies in particular are quite exquisite and not quite as enjoyable in these smaller versions I've posted.

This poem happened because I didn't know something. What I didn't know was what "milagrosa rice" is.

There is indeed a brand of rice called "Dragonfly." I tried really hard to find an image online of the bag it comes in but came up empty-handed; you'll have to take my word for it that the bag is indeed marked with the word dragonfly in several Asian languages. On the bag also is a primitive-looking rendering of said dragonfly, and the whole shebang is labeled "Tutubi Milagrosa." I saw a bag of rice just like this in an Asian food store, and that started up this poem.

Now, tutubi (too-too-BEE) is the word for "dragonfly" in Filipino (or Tagalog, as the poem says), and milagrosa is Spanish for "miraculous" — a word imported wholesale into Filipino. Putting two and two together, then, I thought the rice bag said, "miraculous dragonfly." In fact, the word milagrosa, it turns out, refers to a type of rice, so the bag is quite pedestrian in declaring its contents as tutubi-brand milagrosa rice. Nonetheless, the misunderstanding — the resonant phrase "miraculous dragonfly" — fueled in me a mindstorm of meditation and memory, and this poem is the happy result.

First, a couple of facts. If you read the first installment of my ongoing bio in the blog, you know that I was born in the US but also lived some years as a small child (fact one). This poem is set during that time, just like the poem "Beetle on a String," posted on 1-30-2009.

Fact two. You can catch a dragonfly in your hands. This poem is my most-anthologized poem, and it has appeared in several language-arts textbooks for middle school and grade school; I have also performed this poem for students at various middle schools and grade schools, and this is what kids (and adults, I'm guessing) always want to know: can you catch a dragonfly? And how do you do it?

Look at the pictures of dragonflies above; you'll see that their thorax, the part of their body behind the head is quite bulky, containing the musculature for the wings. Although dragonflies have these gynormous compound eyes and probably have much better peripheral vision than we do, I don't think they can see behind themselves. That bulgy thorax gets in the way, like a bulky backpack. Now, I haven't checked with an entomologist on this, but I'm pretty sure I'm dead on here.

So, find a dragonfly that's landed; line yourself up with the tail, so you're directly behind the insect; then sidle up and grip the dragonfly by its tail between thumb and forefinger, ever so gently of course. Now this makes dragonflies really mad, but just hold on. I learned recently that the safest way to hold a dragonfly, so you don't harm it and it doesn't harm itself thrashing, is to bring the wings together above the insect and use them as a kind of handle. The bottom picture above demonstrates how to do that.

Try this out the next time you're near dragonflies; you'll be amazed at how easy it is. But of course, do let the dragonflies go. Don't keep them in a jar and try to feed them plant stuff. They are carnivores and must catch their prey, other insects, on the wing. Even if you put insects in the jar with them, they won't be able to catch them because they have to do it while flying. So don't keep them very long. In fact, it's best to let them go right away.

Fact three. (And this is a confession.) When Mary Ann needed a dragonfly for a model when she was working on the book cover, I went out and caught one. (She didn't actually think it could be done; who says you can't learn practical facts from poems?) We kept it in a jar and tried to feed it. But no go. It died, alas. So I know whereof I speak from actual experience. And my penance is to tell people not to keep dragonflies. Besides, here's a little fact that might intrigue you. The dragonfly forms a cage with its legs and uses it to scoop and trap other flying insects. That's why it can't catch another insect inside a jar, not enough room to get up some speed.

By the way, there's a cool story (fact four) behind Mary Ann's dragonfly illustration for the cover (top image above). She spent a summer drawing dragonfly after dragonfly and although they were wonderful renderings, I thought, Mary Ann was never satisfied. One day, she ripped a dragonfly shape out of white construction paper. She liked it okay, but the color seemed wrong. So Mary Ann pasted it down on another sheet of paper and painted the dragonfly black. After she let the black dry, she lifted up the dragonfly and the black part of the image above was what was underneath, on the throwaway sheet. Mary Ann simply added the turquoise accents, and there it was.

Okay, enough with the facts. "Just the facts, ma'am." Oh, wait, I wanted to add about Mary Ann's art experience that I just love how accident and serendipity can be such important aspects of art; another way to say it is that art can often be a gift to the artist. From the universe, from God, from whatever greater benevolent force you may believe in. And we, the artists, are just a conduit for that grace.

Changing gears. I'm teaching a course in Beginning Poetry Writing right now, and we're at that inevitable point in class when (some of) the students assert that a writer can be universal, can reach the widest audience, by being vague and ambiguous. The argument goes like this: readers won't identify with one's specific detail because it will contradict their own detail, their own memories, so one ought to write generally in order that readers can inject their own feelings into the poem. Nothing could be further from the truth. The poet must provide her own concreteness, and write those details out of her own life so that they glisten and scintillate with her own experience and vision; readers find joy in those specifics, feel that they are in capable hands, and trust the poet to "bring it." Ironically, it is at moments like this that readers bring in their own details, noting how they resonate with the specifics the poet has laid out.

I hope you can see this dynamic at work in this poem. Note in the second stanza the details of "metallic globes for eyes, / skeletal legs from a giant mosquito, hairy carapace / like some gene-fused nightmare from a low-budget movie"; as a child, I was enthralled by those old black and white 1950s movies filled with monsters inevitably produced by atomic radiation, for example, the movie The Fly starring David Hedison (later remade with Jeff Goldblum as the mad, but loveable, scientist). Comic books too were full of that stuff: the Hulk erupting periodically from scientist David Banner who had been exposed to radiation from the gamma bomb he had designed. (These 50s and 60s "morality plays" are, for my money, related to guilt about atomic holocaust, but that's a story for another blog entry.) My point here is that these insect/robot/cyborg details are specific to my own pop-culture interests, but they surely intersect with similar C-movie details gleaned by everyone from Saturday matinees and late-night TV.

Ditto with the war vs. nature stuff in stanza three: "silky jungle mist" vis-à-vis "cybernetic / killer machine." For people of my generation, this screams Vietnam. But, since the twentieth century and evidently the twenty-first too are times of wars and wars, this material should reverberate for most readers: the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, the current war in Iraq, etc. (And those are just the American ones.)

In the second half of the poem, there are details that are more closely related to the specifics of my own life: "a four-year-old's handspan from wingtip to wingtip"; "the Rizal monument" (José Rizal is the national hero of the Philippines, so there are both personal and national references in this passage); "cicadas." And much more specific and personal: "khaki shorts, a scrape on one knee." These details are designed specifically to ground the poem (and the reader, of course) in verisimilitude, in an apparent reality, to help them feel as if they are "there." Although perhaps someone may not have worn khaki shorts, everyone will have had abrasions and bruises. So a common humanity is invoked by these small details.

In the final stanza, I start to include general ideas, notions that aren't concrete: "his whole being," "a small universe," and "utter beauty and grace." But notice that this is one stanza out of six, and the earlier five act as contextualizing ballast: all the Asian languages mentioned in the opening stanza, for instance. This transition from the specific to the general allows the speaker then to reveal: "his hand, my hand." And the last line returns us to specific detail: "intricate shimmer of wings, the eyes iridescent jewels."

As we used to say in poetry workshops of the 70s and 80s, the poem earns the right to use large, universal concepts by anchoring the poem first in concrete detail and then re-anchoring the poem at the end with concrete detail.

Once again, though, let me remind you that the writer is never the best source about his or her own writing. So I would love to hear what you think about all this; leave me a comment below. Or if you have questions, ask away. Thanks. I hope you are having a truly marvelous day today.

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Starting Up This Poetry (etc.) Blog!

Friends:

Welcome to The Man with the Blue Guitar . . . my new blog with a name shamelessly pilfered from Wallace Stevens.

I'm not exactly sure what's going to transpire in this blog, but I do know it will focus on poetry, among many other themes.

I do want to post, piece by piece, Dragonfly, my first poetry collection from 1994, currently out of print. Along with each poem: a bit of background about the making of that piece, the slice of life it shadows and illuminates.

I plan to experiment also in this blog with poetry films and animations, slide shows, podcasts, and the like. And of course post poems. And poems. And poems.

Discuss contemporary poets, poetry, poetics. The other genres. Perhaps from time to time post a short short. Or even a full-length short story. Or a piece of creative nonfiction. Now and then a piece of what critics call "autotheoretical" writing. Post the occasional book review. Talk about publishing trends and tips. Editing and magazines. Post art . . . photographs, collages, pen-and-inks, paintings. Et cetera.

Won't you join me in this endeavor, this journey? Let's find out where the blue guitar will take us. This aquamarine ark, spaceship, brave vessel of verse and bliss. This glorious palimpsest . . . Pablo Picasso's 1903 painting The Old Guitarist (shown above), which inspired Stevens's poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," is said to have a ghostly image painted underneath. Thus also with poetry . . . layers upon layers upon layers. Sediment of beauty and bone, sense and song.

It will be fabulous to have you with me in these travels. And now, be well . . . ingat (as we say in Filipino).

— Vince

NOTE: To pronounce "ingat," first say "Klingon," then drop off the /k/ and the /l/. Replace the ending /n/ sound with a /t/. Now change the short /i/ vowel to a long /e/ . . . EENG-aht. This Filipino word means "take care" and you can use it as a parting greeting. Be careful today . . . ingat, okay?