May
15
2008
You may take any true-blooded Cebuano out of the ground beneath his feet, but there's no taking away the homebound rhythm of his heartbeat. Wherever he may be, regardless how distant his corner under the sky may be and no matter if his mouth reeks and turns sloppy with the staleness of nostalgia in this age of diaspora, his tongue will always be tattooed with the taste of earth.
Recenly, I created an online hub--a sort of homecoming spot, a melting pot--for creative writers in Cebuano who've been riding the ripples toward the four winds in search of the so-called greener pastures. In strange lands, the ear keens for familiar voices that may be all we will ever need to hear our inner selves in the face of the goblin called globalization, to reclaim and remind ourselves who we were, to begin with, and who we will always be. To go far in the world, all we really need is to stay rooted, no matter the uncertain loam of elsewhere we've chosen to raise our stakes into.
Thus Kabisdak (Kalihokan sa Bisdak nga Katitikan) is born, out loud with something like a battlecry against the cold-blooded spawn of alienation spelled triple in scarlet letters: KKK (kalaay, kalimot, kamingaw). In the face of distance and displacement, may Kabisdak be a way as well for us to touch base with the magsusulat who choose to anchor the flight of imagination in the native shore. Our common ground. Our mainland of memory in the globe-embracing ocean of our saying and singing.
Na hala, dapiton ko kamo ngadto sa balayan sa Kabisdak. Ablihi lang ang ganghaan pinaagi sa pagtuktok-tuplok ning maong luna: www.balaybalakasoy.blogspot.com
Apr
26
2008
Reality bites for those rabid about reading. The news, particulary. The stuff of headlines, the wounds we have to lick, the bloodhound smell of fear and loathing--all the stomach-churning facts never go prosaic.
How to deal with a deeper hunger? The French poet Charles Baudelaire replies, tongue in cheek: "Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry."
For those in dire need of words as soul food, so to speak, watch and listen to this video inspired by the poem titled "Eating Poetry" by Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand:
Feb
06
2008
the joy of having a gift is not really on the gift itself, but on the fact that the giver thought about what to give you, made an effort on thinking of what you want.
a flower given to a girl is of no purpose if the giver just gave it because she asked for it.
Nov
19
2007
MUSINGS OF A SOLITARY PERSON SEARCHING FOR KINDRED SPIRIT
It’s been quite sometime that I’ve found that this mortal coil I’m tied to
has become rather burdensome.
It’s not that suddenly the load has become unbearable;
nor because its multiplying cares have conspired to overwhelm.
It’s not even because of the countless frustrations it has spawned daily.
Why then the wanton indifference,
the lackadaisical and dreary outlook to the unfolding reality that slowly rolls in each day ?
Culled from a veritable storehouse of life experiences, the answer is readily unraveled.
The uncanny realization that earthly life is bereft of meaning,
so fleeting and so vaporous in its content.
Finding that nothing of life induces inspiration to pursue it with at least decent fervor.
No wonder then its trite challenges are met with tepidity and nonchalance.
Finding that the trifling values and pursuits that present-day man has clothed life with,
I look down with derision and disdain.
Harboring no ill will toward man himself
but only at the blatantly hedonistic pursuits that preoccupy his day.
A gnawing yearning for something more meaningful and profound is felt spiritually.
Things that satisfactorily fulfill my very discriminating criteria for goals worthy of pursuit.
Things that relate to the higher and noble nature of man.
Ultimate causes that address what comes after this so inscrutable existence.
And the pangs of impatience obstinately tear at my consciousness,
Making it very difficult to exhibit even feigned interest
and enthusiasm at the very mundane concerns of everyday living.
Despite the gloomy picture painted above,
the quest for meaning is doggedly pursued if only to justify continued existence.
The ultimate purposes are easily articulated with nary an iota of doubt.
To mortify and bring the material body to complete and total subjugation
by the spirit through the strict practice of A S C E T I C I S M.
This determination gives me impetus to continue with life.
It proffers the clarity of vision to see through the hazy veil
that shrouds the real purpose of man here on this earth.
That he is here only as an itinerant traveler,
preordained to begin his real life in the spirit
devoid of the constrictive trappings of the flesh.
Still, while the mind and spirit share a clear and unstinting grasp of my real goals in life,
Keeping in this frame of mind is most of the time difficult
and calamitous lapses are not uncommon,
Making it necessary to incessantly remind myself of the guiding principles
that should rule my daily living.
But life ought to be more than just an excruciating tolerance
and nonchalance of the events that shape it.
It ought to be more than just trying to survive the trip so the goal can be attained.
It is still within one’s capabilities to make life a more positive experience.
One should be able to look forward to each day with child-like anticipation,
in tandem with a driving passion to be an active and catalytic participant in it.
And not just a passive onlooker being bandied about,
satisfied with just trying to salvage the most out of a situation.
If such a possibility should exist,
I ought to dig deep into myself and my innermost resources to find out.
To enable me to look at life in a positive perspective
so that I can approach each day with promise and excitement.
The search might be made more meaningful
if I can find a kindred spirit to share my sentiments and philosophy.
Is it possible to find such a person in this lifetime,
or am I so alienated from the rest ?
In my own peculiar and quaint ways
I pursue the search for kindred soul for I still have to find one.
While everyday, I struggle and grope around trying to maintain the precarious equilibrium
that makes life bearable and livable.
At every turn and every tick of the clock,
confrontational situations stare at me,
Demanding undivided attention
and unyielding to anything less than total commitment.
Most of the time, the battles seem to weigh against me
resulting in a troubling and agonizing sense of frustration.
And as if these were not sufficient for the day’s share of troubles,
the vagaries of my sensual emotions float around the mind seeking fulfillment.
Sensuous desires, definedly moral taboos, buffet the will;
Are the learned moral values of our youth still relevant or what ?
The many familial concerns also add their share of bitter medicine
to an already water-logged soul.
Indeed, life seems not to be getting any better in terms of achieving a yeoman’s share
of those fleeting moments of seeming peace and tranquility
so that my mind can relax and savor the beautiful vistas it surveys
as it glides through the times of my life.
Death seems such a sweet and tempting alternative to extricate oneself from all this living.
but in an inexplicable, almost sadistic, way one can’t help believing
that these trials are cathartic and may indeed make for a more saintly life.
For do not all these bring out in each one of us
the same godly dignity that permeated Christ's earthly life?
(Republished)
Jan
14
2007
when i was a little girl (i'm still little but not a girl anymore), i have always dreamed of that knight in shining armour. someone who would sweep me off my feet and take all my worries. now that i'm a bit mature, i've realized that it's hard to hope for that romance. it's disappointing and frustrating.
however, maybe things come when you least expect them. i am in manila, broke and hopeless. but 3 people helped me and encouraged me to still stand up and fight. let's call them Pocholo, Singkit and Doc.
Pochollo picked me up last night from taft avenue corner buendia. i was supposed to go to malate and meet him up. my plan was to go to taft ave corner edsa and ride a jeep there going to malate. but wow, there was a swarm of people (i think they were people going home to the province since it was a saturday night and people who watched the pyro-lympics in sm mall of asia). vehicles could not move because of the traffic jam and i could not take a taxi nor a jeep. so i walked until i reached buendia. still, there were a lot of people and no chance of getting a taxi. it was already 1 a.m. i wanted to cry and just go home (of course, by walking). then he told me to wait and he will pick me up. and in no time, there he was, in his walking shorts, white t-shirt, sneakers and comforting smile. Pochollo was a gentleman the whole time, staying at the danger side, opening doors for me, and asking if i'm okay.
Singkit is a normal guy trying to be very good guy. he tried to protect me from himself. hahaha! i don't know if that makes sense.
now, Doc, even if he's very busy, tries so much to spend time with me. he offered options and his help even if he has a lot of problems, himself.
i've never met a knight in shining armour before. the cynical me would have said that there's no such thing or person. i had been so sure before that no guy could ever be like that. but i am so glad that i'm wrong.
Nov
30
2006
HEFTY AND FEATHERY at the same time, here's an airtight evidence of poetry's power to encapsulate anything of epic scope. One of my favorite poems from the anthology 180 More: Extraordinary Poems For Every Day (edited by Billy Collins), the following piece written by R.S Gwynn is simply nifty in summing up some of Shakespeare's masterpieces, whittling down the formidable canon to the level of a playful puzzle: a deconstructionist's romp through the ramparts of the Elizabethan verse structure that often looms like an enchanted jungle to many an English Lit major. Who says one can't graze through the wilderness of a poem, chew the cud of its subtleties, and lick one's lips with a flourish of a grin after reading? Consider this: Shakespearean Sonnet
A father is haunted by his father’s ghost.
A boy and girl love while their families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who blocks his way.
A ruler’s rival plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.
Aug
08
2006
Nine weeks have passed since i saw you
and i can't deny it, i have been missing you
but thoughts of you keeps me from feeling blue
oh! how excited i am to see you
i can't wait for tomorrow
i hope you feel the same way too
i don't know if this is just an infatuation
all i know is you are my inspiration
and you definitely got my admiration!
Aug
08
2006
Ako ay hindi makata...
subalit nang ika'y makilala...
ako'y natutong gumawa ng tula...
ako ay nabigla at nagtaka...
ano kaya ang meron ka?...
at ako'y nabighani't nahalina...
Jun
04
2006
we were in the same room but talking to different people…
we were sitting beside each other but we’re both doing something else…
I was looking at you but you were too busy to notice…
we managed to have a conversation but it was strictly business…
you did compliment me but you were about to leave in a few minutes…
that day…we were so near yet so far…
May
29
2006
Every couple has their own love story to tell…
…others are breathtaking while others are bittersweet…
…some last forever while some are short lived…
…some are full of excitement while others are not…
Every love story has its own beginning...
…their first eye contact, first hello and first kiss…
…Other beginnings are magical…they call it love at first sight…
…while some started as friends…and become more than that…
Every love story has its own happiness and thrills…
…the exchange of sweet nothings, laughter and the hugs & kisses…
…the out of town adventures or the cuddling on the sofa on lazy afternoons …
…the star gazing moments and the times spent day dreaming of the future…
Every love story has its own twists and turns…
…the petty quarrels, big fights and the unfulfilled expectations…
…the misunderstandings, disappointments and frustrations…
…the heartaches, bitter tears and broken promises…
Every love story has its own endings…
…some are ended because it’s not really meant to be…
…some ends when couples breathe their last…
…while some were ended even before it started…
All love stories are appealing…
…it may be hurting and heart breaking…
…or it may be inspiring and pleasing…
…but it never fail to touch the heart
Mar
06
2006
COMING TO TERMS with the cold, with its dark undertones, has been constant in my poetry. Here are variations on the theme, with a bit of revision since it first saw print on the pages of Philippine Graphic (8 April 1996) and the anthology Likhaan: Best of Philippine Poetry and Fiction 1997 (UP Press).ALL THE UNSUNG 
They come wind-
willed, without a creak
from the rusty gate.
Those who went
are here again, shouting
for their shadows.
My breath clouds over
everything when I
call back. No more
the barking dogs. I
swing the windows wide
and wonder why
the sky lately looks
starved of stars. I
gather myself,
cold. I hear nothing
but birdbone stuck in
the wind's throat.SPECKS OF SEAI I remember, and the breathing of the drowned draws the ripples.
The waves drowse no more,
wobbling the boat while the wind
blows out the weathered hats
of fishers. I stand wordless at
the breakwater's edge and hear
the burst of spume. Storms recur
in my head. Now returns all
the shipwrecked. All the dead. 
II
Flitting by are swarms of fishes.
In the coral within my skull skulks
the coelacanth and I, diving
deeper, peer at it, prying it loose.
As it surges off, unhooked,
my depth-deafened ears hear
the scabrous clarity of scales. I blink,
resurfacing in the eye of the surfs.
Only the remora remains, mossy
in the rustling waters of memory.
ADDRESSED TO A NAMELESS MARINER This is just to say how I envy the sea 
gulls. Theirs is the blue of both sky and water
in one fell swoop while all I can see
are but the odds and ends of leavings: fishbones,
a litter of shells, stranded sargasso... Your bottled
letter found me among these ebbtide
souvenirs. On this usual shore. I stumbled,
tripping over it. Now I know the wind's a guide,
goading the waves on until even my feet
wavered, as when I hurled this missive, this
reply folded like a wing. May air ripple through it
like a sigh. This is just to say goodbye.
Feb
18
2006
DON'T WORRY, WRITE POETRY. And be happy. That, in a nutshell, is the eyebrow-raiser out of the Independent Online Edition written by Christina Patterson. Read on:
Poetry is good for your health. That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock'n'roll, but the new Prozac.
This was not instantly evident at the ceremony for the TS Eliot poetry prize last week. Perhaps it was the strip-lighting, but the assembled throng of pasty faces and panda-shadowed eyes did little to foster a sense of radiant health. As feel-good events go, it ranked just above a tussle with your online tax return, but probably below a Thai takeaway in front of Celebrity Big Brother. It was, of course, not fair of Cyril Connolly to describe poets as "jackals fighting over an empty well", but it is true that £10,000 prizes do not, on the whole, boost the health and happiness of those who don't win. 
The prize, in any case, went to a paean to psychosis. Carol Ann Duffy's collection of love poems, Rapture, is a moving and, at times, skin-crawlingly accurate portrayal of a process that psychologists have recently identified as a form of madness. We have all been there: tending the mobile "like an injured bird", repeating the name "like a charm, like a spell". For most of us, falling in love is a season in what Duffy calls "glamorous hell", and not a sojourn. We might suffer a few sleepless nights, or even eat a bit less than usual, but we can't sustain life at this pitch. And, luckily for us, our minds comply.
Many poets - a higher proportion, apparently, than of the average population - are not so lucky. John Clare, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and, most famously, Sylvia Plath, all knew the torments of a mind that would, on occasion, burst out of the crucible of what Freud called "normal human misery" into the nameless horrors of mania. The mad poet may be a cliché, but it is not a myth. Poets continue to write of their experiences of mental illness. If poetry is some kind of wonder-drug, it sure ain't working for them.So who is making these headline-hitting assertions, and why? The answer, of course, is arts administrators, and they're doing it for money. And kindness, and the philanthropic impulse, and passion and a desire to help the lost and the lonely and the miserable and the mad. But, to do all this, you need money, and to get money you need to go to funders, and to go to funders you need studies, evidence, and results.
A current project is a good example. Poems in the Waiting Room was set up by an enthusiastic 
social worker eight years ago. Run, like most of these things, on a shoestring, it has had little pots of funds from trusts and foundations as well as the Arts Council, the Poetry Society and the Foreign Office. It aims are, you'd have thought, worthy and modest: to cheer up miserable places (hospital waiting rooms) at an anxious time with a little injection of art.Their online "evaluation," however, tells a different story. Amongst a dizzying range of aims and objectives listed in its executive summary are "to gauge the external consequences of displaying poems in waiting rooms", to see "what new behaviour follows" and "what new activities". An extensive discussion of the "methodology" follows, with tables of facts and figures. The one thing, in fact, that the project doesn't allow for is for someone to read a poem and keep quiet about it. This is poetry as life-coaching. You must read and act and reach your goal. And you must do this in an act of self-improvement in which most poets, critics and readers have failed.
In a brave moment of honesty and bathos, the project's organisers assert that "the precise impact of the poems displayed... was always going to be hard to measure". The final report consists, as these things always do, of pages of anecdote masquerading as science, and ends with the hope that further funding be found. My heart went out to the organisers. Like most of us, they're simply doing their best in a league-table culture where everything is judged by results.
There is, in the right hands, a fine role for poetry as social work, but let's not pretend that it's the same as poetry as art. Poetry, like all art, is not a panacea. Perhaps it's more like homeopathy. A great placebo - some people swear by it - but the studies are inconclusive.
Feb
14
2006
MY WIFE ARLAINE, teasing as ever, asked me yesterday if I have anything romantically surprising for her today. Lemme see, I winked. Last year, we spent our Valentine's Day trying to steer clear from the stampede of lovers out for a candle-lit dinner. So we deemed it more spectacular to hie off at the sidewalk near the Fuente Osmeña park. There, she could only chuckle as she watched me wolfing down a burpful of balut, my lips sluicing vinegar and salt. Less costly, less cliche.
Today, I risk getting a frown from her as I resort to going back to the basic, setting out to bring her a bouquet of orange and purple mums and a box of heart-shaped chocolates in motley colors. Trite, the mother of my two sons will tell me. But, as I'll retort with yet another wink, I know she'd hum along when I'll breeze through bits of a hackneyed song: The fundamental 
things apply as time goes by...
And I will tell her, too, the words still hold true out of this first poem I wrote for her six years ago:
MUSING MY ONE TRUE POEM
Unless you come into me,
I have only the heart
of a blank page. The 
beat
of metaphors tapping limp as the feet
of rain in the desert. The wreath
of smoke out of mirrors. The breath
of me disfigured of speech, spitting
shards or forking the words like a snake
from the pit of my tongue.
Until my touch becomes your second skin,
nothing can break you open or spurt
the seed of my silence into fruiting
the phrases only bees
and worms embrace. In the absence of words.
In the scent of flowers. In the flesh
of dreams where the dead can
teach me: To read with all ears the dance
of the shovel in a patch of paper
where a gardener burns the weeds
and a gravedigger whistles until
I can fill all that's hollow
and come into you.
Feb
14
2006
WHAT'S LOVE IF it's not something to die or kill for?
On a day like this, when the air is suffused with sweetness and light while the call of commercialism whittles down the wilderness of the heart to a cozy cage of sentiments, passion is often given a short shrift. As if it were devoid of violence out of a wrenching away from the self-centered zone of comfort. As if its beauty and tenderness weren't always threatened by danger or pain and fear of losing.
Methinks nothing's worth loving unless it spawns inside us a ruthlessness to be reckless in pursuit of our private Eden. Yes, not until it smolders enough to ignite in us a purging compulsion to endure burning. Ah, that feeling of being killed softly. Something that most love songs gloss over, sad to say.
Against the overchewed and junk-food notions of romance, here's my poem slightly revised since its publication at the Sunday Inquirer Magazine (August 27, 2000) :
PRANDIAL PIECES
I'm at your banquet because wolves
are invited, hoping your heart
is on the plate.
A toast startles you. As if stars,
falling, shattered the wine glass
you're holding.
I'll wash with the wine your bloodied
hand until your eyes suffice
to drown me.
You say the dishes are almost cold.
I reply with a burp. Suddenly,
the knife drops.
A rodent slurps on my vomit. All I care
of etiquette is when hunger devours
the heartbeat.
Jan
20
2006
SOME SQUIRM at the sight of spiders. Creepy, they say. Never mind if those crawlies are nowhere near the tarantula's level.
Then again, I'd stick my neck out to vouch for one of the world's most overlooked natural wonders, a perfect model for order and harmony, wrought out of such silken concentration worthy of a Zen master, with such craftmanship packed at once with lethal potency and fagility enough to give monks a run for their meditation, an ode to solitude: the spider's web.
No wonder, a character in Bergman's film Through a Glass Darkly had visions of God as a giant spider.
Caught in his own fantasy, my eldest son Golli (short for Gabriel Ollivan) thinks he is Spider-Man. God bless the power of imagination. Stuck myself in the web of my own flights of fancy, I hope he'd grow up to understand and empathize in due time his father's own thread of longing for fortitude and grace. Here's my first published poem (which I have recently revised since it was printed in the Philippines Free Press, 4 June 1994 issue) shortly after my creative writing fellowship at the 1994 National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete:
SPIDER SENSE
He thinks of how a spider makes its web, how the web is torn/ by people with brooms, insects, rapacious birds; how the spider/ rebuilds and rebuilds, until the wind takes the web and breaks it and flicks it into heaven's blue and innocent immensity.. - Stephen Dobyns
Windowing
the whiteness
of the wind,
the blind's incandescence
straight from the storm's eye as I
see a web, unspidered. 
Fled from the dead, I hear
the mourners in the living room chanting my name.
My shadow looms in a corner,
reaching for cobwebs while
a whorl of gossamer
whirls in my head, darkly,
lest they'd see me, skull-shaven
or with hairs graying in
the wee hours
of awareness.
Jan
17
2006
VERY BASIC. Or so Dr. Resil Mojares echoes, at the 2005 Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop in Cebu, the smart-alecky point of a fellow writer who simplifies the complex world of a difference between prose and poetry. "Prose is planned parenthood," he grins, "while poetry is accidental pregnancy."
About that distinctive fissure or face-off in literature, Mark Halliday explains more in this reprint from The Georgia Review:"SOMETIMES Sometimes fatigue or a journal stuffed with bad poems throws us into poetry-dismay, even poetry-disgust, but poetry soon wins us back. A good poem comes along that is damned appealing; it has charisma, it has a peculiar panache, it cuts a new path through experience, it expresses - or it is - a new truth, or new edge of truth. Life is suddenly undreary. And this poem is so strangely sure of itself! Where did it get such nerve? It has a quality I will call arrogance.
A poem, just by being a poem, says ‘I am more significant than all your chatter, all your information, all your reports and articles, more significant even than all your stories, more important than any page of Crime and Punishment or Women in Love or Middlemarch - even, in a mysterious way, more important than each of these novels as a whole. You must gaze down into the well of me. You may never see to the bottom.’
The essential sign of poetry's arrogance is white space. Poetry takes unto itself the luxurious, ostentatiously high-class option of not reaching the right hand margin. Prose must pack itself into the common area, the second-class accommodations, filling the page all the way to the margin regardless of whether it's referring to the principles of Baroque architecture or the Meaning of Meaning or what some Hollywood star wore to a premiere. The unfilled part of a poem's page is the ornamental garden surrounding the castle of superior meaning. A poem says, ‘I can drape myself in white space like a mink coat. I stand apart from the mundane tide of utilitarian utterance. I create and require a respectful silence around me.’
The arrogance of poetry is titanically oppressive in the silence immediately after a poem’s last line. That silence stares at you. It says, ‘Do you or do you not get it.’ It says, ‘Do you love me? You should. If you don't, you've missed something. The problem is yours - some blindness, some crudeness, some insensitivity to nuance.’
If a person said that to you, or if a person’s way of falling silent implied that, you would respond energetically - you would walk out of the room, or laugh in the person's arrogant face, or ask intense questions, or express remorse. Like such a person, a poem refuses to be taken casually. If you do take a poem casually, you feel slothful, shallow, flippant - a feeling that is very different from thinking hard about a poem and deciding it is itself slothful, shallow, flippant. Fortunately, persons don’t often have the gall to say, ‘If you don't love me, the problem is yours.’ Poems say this every time.
Poems keep stroking their own hair. A poem is like the person at the table who won’t speak unless everyone else hushes to listen. A poem is like the person whose tone announces: Enough of your jabber. Now I shall speak words worth remembering. You should want to chisel these words in marble.
Poetry’s demand for special attention is one aspect of its essential arrogance. Another is its pride in implication. A poem always knows - or carries - something it doesn't spell out. A poem is like someone who conveys crucial meanings with subtle changes of gaze and gesture, with eyebrows rather than words; a poem suddenly stares at you to see if you can meet its challenge. This gaze is charismatic - when it is not absurdly portentous. We are beguiled and enthralled by the poem’s sublime implicitness - when we are not irritated and repulsed.
Confronting a poem, we often have to work hard to decide whether its oddity or difficulty comes from a wonderfully forgivable, or from a repulsive arrogance. The arrogance of all poetry is tiring - like both good sex and bad sex.
Poems are mostly read by people already hooked on poetry. How does a novelist feel, reading a book of poems? The novelist may feel a puzzled respect for someone who doggedly writes a kind of literature unlikely to bring wealth or fame. At the same time, the novelist may feel annoyed when the poet offers such small things - coy, anemic perceptions and teasing metaphorical connections - as if each one were terrifically unusual - a day' s work! - enshrined by costly whiteness on all sides, commanding a hushed and riveted attention. The novelist has produced countless equally sharp images and insightful connections and richly evoked moments - hundreds in each novel! And the novelist has given these gifts to the reader without poetry's preening insistence that each morsel is a sublime Godiva truffle. The novelist may think the poetry is ‘good’ but that her own work by comparison is admirably unpompous and generous.
But Thomas Hardy, one of the few writers great as both poet and novelist, felt that greatness in poetry mattered more than greatness in prose. Isn't this an unreasonable bias?
To be calmly sensitive and thoughtful each time a poem is in front of your eyes, but to turn away for rest and refreshment before either exhaustion or cynicism sets in. This nearly angelic response is humanly possible, but it is amazingly hard to sustain.
Poems crowd toward you like the shades of the underworld when Odysseus visits; they crave the hot blood of attention.
Or they crowd toward you like refugees mobbing a United Nations worker who dispenses far too few bags of grain from the back of a truck.
Notice the inconsistency of that simile with the analogy of a poem's being like a proud high-chinned person requiring a respectful hush around his or her augustness. On the level of self-presentation, each poem is that dignitary; meanwhile, on the practical level, seen from outside, each poem is more like a famine victim in danger of being trampled beneath the feet of its fellow poems, all famished for the reader's ration of attention.
The poem seems not to have noticed its actual social situation. Picture a crowded, deafening cocktail party; in the middle of the room stands the poem, addressing itself to anyone and everyone, not even shouting, regardless of whether anyone listens. In real life this is a kind of madness. In art, it is the arrogance of art...
