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WORK TITLE: Brooklyn Antediluvian
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/14/1969
WEBSITE: http://www.patrickrosal.com/
CITY: Philadelphia
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.patrickrosal.com/about/ * https://english.camden.rutgers.edu/2012/06/19/appointment-of-patrick-rosal/ * http://english.camden.rutgers.edu/faculty/ * http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20160428_Rutgers-Camden_poet_professor_Rosal__Getting_past_black_white_binary__building_connections.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 14, 1969.
EDUCATION:Attended Bloomfield College; Sarah Lawrence College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and writing instructor. Rutgers University–Camden, Camden, NJ, assistant professor, 2011–. Has also taught at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, the University of Texas, Austin, Sarah Lawrence College, and Bloomfield College.
AWARDS:Association of Asian American Studies Book Award; Global Filipino Literary Award; Asian American Writers Workshop Members’ Choice Award; Allen Ginsberg Awards; James Hearst Poetry Prize; Arts and Letters Prize; Best of the Net citation; Fulbright Fellowship, 2009.
WRITINGS
Also author of the chapbook Uncommon Denominators. Cofounding editor of Some Call It Ballin’ (sports magazine). Contributor to anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, Poetry, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Grantland, Brevity, and Breakbeat Poets.
SIDELIGHTS
Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive
Patrick Rosal is a poet who is known for exploring race, shared cultural histories, and landscape, and his style is often characterized as verb-heavy. His first collection, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, draws on oral traditions and jazz riffs, and it explores such topics as immigrant- and working-class life in Northern New Jersey. Neighborhood scenes play out in industrial towns, tangentially addressing community and masculinity. As a Publishers Weekly correspondent put it, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive is driven by “old school-obsessed narratives.” Louis McKee lauded the collection in Library Journal, asserting: “Rosal is a gifted poet with a good eye, keen ear, and urgency of voice that creates the energy of his lines.”
As Prairie Schooner contributor Elaine Sexton put it, “if verbs carry the story, Rosal’s hold the mother lode. His syncopated syntax and ripped-from-the-heart riffs complete the job. Rosal creates a migratory geography with his posse of Filipino Bboys, though there are several odes to the literal landscapes from the author’s boyhood in New Jersey. Fistwork and fractures, barrooms and beltways seem unlikely settings for tenderness, but Rosal draws tenderness out of them.” She added that “the surface of his poems offer a nod to traditional lyric poetry (i.e. a regular attention to the lefthand margin), but words bolt from their frames with the engines of sound and image. Equally at home mixing text with white space, Rosal uses columns of words and lines in tiers to wring a fresh sound or wrest silence from the page. As a denizen of spoken word poetry, he takes great liberty with capitalization and punctuation, omitting periods entirely; the words rush their lines as if too urgent to pause to change gears.
Brooklyn Antediluvian
With his fourth collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian, Rosal brings together images of water and flooding with meditations of home and family. Music and dance also feature in the collection, as do mentions of Brooklyn, New Jersey, and the Philippines (all places Rosal or his family have called home). This time around, the author favors rhythm and consonance, describing dance and myth and colonialism, often in the same breath. Through these techniques, Rosal’s considerations of boyhood and manhood blend to bring personal history into conversation with social history. As Rosal explained in an online Lantern Review interview, “growing up in New Jersey, we were always in and around water. And I think we have a special relationship to water as Filipinos in America, having been the descendants of monsoon rains and of people who had to cross miles and miles of water (my grandfather was a sakada, a sugar laborer who sailed from Manila to Hawaii for work). Also, I have real specific memories of water—like my brother almost drowning when he was a toddler or the image of me and my cousins heading out to the Jersey shore mid-week to dive into the waves.” Rosal continued: “And then there were the storms like Katrina and Ondoy and Sandy all in a relatively short period of time, each of which touched me in very personal ways. At some point, probably after I got a sense of the title poem, ‘Brooklyn Antediluvian,’ I realized this book was going to be about waters and floods—which is to say, literal floods from those storms, but also the floods of memory, of roses, of violence, of joy, of names, of gentrification.”
Lauding the collection in Publishers Weekly, a critic noted that “Rosal seamlessly stitches together history, mythology, etymology, and autobiography in a winding narrative.” Daniel Chacón, writing in the El Paso Times Online offered additional praise, declaring: “What’s masterful about this new collection is how the language, endowed with sound, music and image, can go from the streets of Brooklyn, where young men fight over nothing, to mythical lands where the images beg to be read not as literal representations, but as archetype, creating those Rilke ‘things’ that lead us into what makes us human.” Thus, “Images slide into street life as easily as they do into antediluvian archetype.”
Indeed, Rosal stated in his Lantern Review interview: “In Brooklyn Antediluvian I loved having enough space to make things disappear and then suddenly show up again. I loved getting lost as I was writing because the language kept leading me away from any static subject. And just when chaos might take over, some small connection to a previous image—a rose or horse or name or the boy whom the speaker meets in the first line—would come back. It’s a different kind of lostness from [what you might find in] a short lyric. It’s a study in departure.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, July, 2003, Louis McKee, review of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, p. 86.
Prairie Schooner, winter, 2004, Elaine Sexton, review of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, p. 197.
Publishers Weekly, September 1, 2003, review of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, p. 86; November 20, 2006, review of My American Kundiman, p. 40; October 24, 2011, review of Boneshepherds, p. 35; April 18, 2016, review of Brooklyn Antediluvian, p. 93.
ONLINE
El Paso Times Online, http://www.elpasotimes.com/ (March 3, 2017), Daniel Chacón, review of Brooklyn Antediluvian.
Lantern Review, http://www.lanternreview.com/ (March 3, 2017), author interview.
Patrick Rosal Home Page, http://www.patrickrosal.com (March 3, 2017).*
Rutgers-Camden poet/professor Rosal: Getting past black/white binary, building connections
Updated: APRIL 28, 2016 — 9:53 AM EDT
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Camera icon DAVID SWANSON / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Poet Patrick Rosal is a professor at Rutgers-Camden.
by Sofiya Ballin, Staff Writer
Patrick Rosal resides at many cultural intersections. You can find it in his poetry, you see it in his Filipino heritage, and you hear it in his vernacular. And that's how he likes it.
Rosal, a poet and professor at Rutgers-Camden, just finished Brooklyn Antediluvian, his fourth book of poetry, slated for release on May 3.
As the title indicates, his book addresses many kinds of flood: Hurricane Katrina; Tropical Storm Ondoy, which hit the Philippines in 2009; the emotional flood after a breakup; living in Brooklyn amid the flood of gentrification.
"I want people who know poetry to feel they recognize a heightened music and fresh imagery," he says. "For people who might not be as familiar with poetry, I'd love for them maybe to say to themselves, 'I didn't know poetry could be like this or about things that I could relate to.' "
In his poetry, he takes us from Brooklyn to Spain to his Jersey hometown. In "A Scavenger's Ode to the Turntable," he writes:
In a basement of a maple splint
in Edison, NJ, we were learning to turn anything
into anything else . . .
a dance floor could go from winin' to riot
quick if a record skipped when we spun back
the wax to its cue
His hometown was diverse, comprising black, white, Hispanic, and Asian working-class immigrants. The influence is apparent in his work. As a poet, he says, he focuses on the connections among people, places, things, and histories. There are no binaries when it comes to his influences - rap cyphers, DJ and b-boy culture, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Sekou Sundiata, James Baldwin.
As for race, Rosal urges that we break out of the black/white binary: "If the only differences that we are navigating are black and white, then we are oversimplifying the racial dynamics in this country." And he says communities of color need to see one another, as well.
The award-winning poet says growing up, he hated books: "I resented literature because it didn't have anything to do with me."
It wasn't until he attended Bloomfield College, before attending Rutgers-Camden, that he learned art, music, literature, and music stemmed from everywhere, including Africa, Asia, and from indigenous peoples around the world. Before that, much of his education came from hip-hop culture, in which he still finds cultures mixing.
"I'm fascinated by that," Rosal says. "Hundreds of years of university research has not been able to produce structures that allow us to see each other as clearly as the cypher has."
A few days ago, Rosal was reading in a class at the University of Pennsylvania, telling students about the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where Filipinos were "on display" along with U.S. imperialism and colonization. He stressed, especially to the Asian students, that in his class mistakes are OK. In fact, they're welcomed. The flawed space is a growing place.
"Asian folks are held to a standard that white folks are not," Rosal says. "We have to fulfill this idea of the model minority. It's a myth. You can sustain conflict between communities if you perpetuate that narrative.
In "Lone Star Kundiman," Rosal writes of being rendered invisible by the dominant culture:
I keep saying it was the way you took my arm,
the small imperceptible squeeze, that tiny shove,
the way you told me Get to the back of the line,
how you eyed me to my place with your little smirk.
Some keep saying it was the rum. I keep saying
it was history. . . .
In Texas, you can sit in a diner packed with white folks
who dip their sweet potato fries in honey Dijon, while
you practice what it's like to be the last man on earth
or the first one to land in a city where no one sees you.
"Communities of color have always recognized, as a way of survival, various kinds of trouble that you run into," Rosal says. "Now we're in a moment in history where that trouble is made more public."
Bridging gaps within those communities is crucial, Rosal says, for both healing and loving. "We have categories, definitions, and boundaries to help us navigate the world," he says. "When we become over-reliant on those tools, certain sectors of our lives and our imagination become segregated.
"I wonder," Rosal says, "what happens when we take those boxes away to bring them back together."
sballin@phillynews.com
215-854-5054
Patrick Rosal, Associate ProfessorPatrick Rosal
MFA, Sarah Lawrence College
Creative Writing-Poetry, Twentieth Century American Poetry, Poetry in Performance
425 Armitage Hall; 856.225.2807
patrick.rosal@rutgers.edu
Appointment of Patrick Rosal
Posted June 19, 2012, in News.
The Department of English is pleased to announce the appointment of Patrick Rosal as Assistant Professor of English, effective Fall 2011. Professor Rosal earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and he is author of three volumes of poetry: My American Kundiman (2006), Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003), and Uncommon Denominators (2000), among other works. In addition to offering courses for our undergraduates, Professor Rosal will teach in our MFA program and in conjunction with the Childhood Studies program
Photo Credit: Mark Rosal
Photo Credit: Mark Rosal
PATRICK ROSAL is the author of four full-length poetry collections.
His newest book is Brooklyn Antediluvian (2016). Previously, Boneshepherds (2011) was named a small press highlight by the National Book Critics Circle and a notable book by the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of My American Kundiman (2006), and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003).
His collections have been honored with the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, Global Filipino Literary Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award. In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines. He is co-founding editor of Some Call It Ballin’, a literary sports magazine.
He has received teaching appointments at Penn State Altoona, Centre College, and the University of Texas, Austin, Drew University's Low-Residency MFA program and Sarah Lawrence College. He taught creative writing for several years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. In addition to conducting workshops in Alabama prisons through Auburn University, he has taught high school workshops through the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Sarah Lawrence College's Summer Writing Conference for High School Students, Urban Word NYC, and the Volume workshops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is currently on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program.
His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including The New York Times, Tin House, Drunken Boat, Poetry, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Grantland, Brevity, Breakbeat Poets, and The Best American Poetry. His work has been recognized by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net among others. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken.
His poems and voiceovers were included in the Argentine feature-length film Anhua: Amanecer which screened at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. He has also appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show and the BBC Radio's World Today.
His invited readings and performances include several appearances at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Stadler Center for Poetry, WordFest in Asheville, the poetry reading series at Georgia Tech, Poetry @ MIT, the Carr Reading Series at the University of Illinois, the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned his MFA, and hundreds of other venues that span the United States, London, Buenos Aires, South Africa and the Philippines.
July 28, 2016
On Myth, Mystery, and “the Music of the Language”: A Conversation with Patrick Rosal
Patrick Rosal and BROOKLYN ANTEDILUVIAN Cover
Patrick Rosal and the cover of BROOKLYN ANTEDILUVIAN (photo of Rosal by Margarita Corporan)
This month, we were delighted to have had the chance to converse with poet and professor Patrick Rosal about the recent release of his fourth collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian. In our discussion, recorded below, he reflects on the themes and mythologies that shape the book as well as on the publishing process and the influences that music and young people have had on his work. (For yet more on Rosal’s process and inspiration, you can find our previous interview with him here.)
* * *
LANTERN REVIEW: In Brooklyn Antediluvian, water is a central motif. It serves as a force that sweeps the movement of the collection along and is a metaphor for the violent submersion of identity enforced upon the colonial subject under the auspices of imperialism. How did you come to settle upon this motif? Why water, and what was it about the image of destruction by flood that compelled you?
PATRICK ROSAL: First, thanks for reading the book and doing this interview. I feel real lucky to have Lantern Review make space for this new collection.
Growing up in New Jersey, we were always in and around water. And I think we have a special relationship to water as Filipinos in America, having been the descendants of monsoon rains and of people who had to cross miles and miles of water (my grandfather was a sakada, a sugar laborer who sailed from Manila to Hawaii for work). Also, I have real specific memories of water—like my brother almost drowning when he was a toddler or the image of me and my cousins heading out to the Jersey shore mid-week to dive into the waves. And then there were the storms like Katrina and Ondoy and Sandy all in a relatively short period of time, each of which touched me in very personal ways. At some point, probably after I got a sense of the title poem, “Brooklyn Antediluvian,” I realized this book was going to be about waters and floods—which is to say, literal floods from those storms, but also the floods of memory, of roses, of violence, of joy, of names, of gentrification.
LR: The collection draws its name from the final piece in the book, a long poem that commands nearly a third of the text. What appeals to you about the long poem as a form? What was the process of drafting this particular long poem like for you, and what motivated your decision to structure the collection in this way, with the shorter poems up front and the long poem as a finale?
PR: My poems have been getting longer over the course of my four books. In Boneshepherds, I had a poem, “Ars Poetica: After a Dog,” that felt massive, and in a lot of ways it’s a heftier poem than the title poem of Brooklyn Antediluvian, though the more recent poem is a lot longer in terms of pages.
In “Brooklyn Antediluvian” I loved having enough space to make things disappear and then suddenly show up again. I loved getting lost as I was writing because the language kept leading me away from any static subject. And just when chaos might take over, some small connection to a previous image—a rose or horse or name or the boy whom the speaker meets in the first line—would come back. It’s a different kind of lostness from [what you might find in] a short lyric. It’s a study in departure. Also, it gave me a big enough world that many histories and continents—especially in small narrative scales—could exist in the same text. All of this, for me, is a metaphor for seeing and living. I want to see if it’s possible to build a world in language that accommodates epochs and landscapes that seem to have nothing to do with one another. This seems to be the source of a lot of our trouble—parts of our world are so belligerently segregated from one another. What does a Berber pope have to do with a Filipino dietician who died in New Jersey, anyway? A long poem doesn’t just reveal those unusual and often wonderful associations, it finds a music—a pleasing sonic pattern—with which to connect them.
When I first started compiling the poems I wrote after Boneshepherds, I felt a real strong impulse to make a book that could still reach people who don’t consider themselves poetry readers. When I drafted the long title poem, I knew I had something that was going to be challenging even for audiences that consider themselves aficionados of contemporary poetry. I sent the manuscript out to friends, and they made it clear to me that I needed to set up a world of images, places, figures, and rhythms to help prepare the reader for the long poem at the end. Originally, I had the long poem at the front of the manuscript. In the final version of the book, [in which the poem’s at the end], I think readers have a stronger relationship to the ways of looking and singing that the title poem tries to sustain for a longer period of time and on a much bigger scale, with much trickier leaps.
LR: Traditionally, the term “antediluvian” refers to the period before the Great Flood (of Noah’s ark), a time that is partly notable in Biblical accounts because the mythical is said to have coexisted with the everyday—people lived for centuries and humans married “sons of God” who walked the earth. Your modern antediluvian account, too, interweaves realism with a rich mythological world of your own invention: among other tales, there are the creation-flood-survival story of “Fable of a Short Song”; the account of Josefina and Filomena in “Instance of an Island”; and the saga of the old woman in “Brooklyn Antediluvian” who, Methuselah-like, lives long enough to remember the name she had before it was taken from her by colonizing powers. As a poet, how does the interplay between myth and history inform your understanding of narrative possibility and your approach to craft? How did the distinct mythology of this collection come into being in your imagination, and what was the process of fleshing it out on the page like?
PR: I’m so proud of that mythical strain in this collection—and really throughout my work. I don’t think most people would really think of me as someone who deals with myth, but I love the fantastic. Also, growing up Catholic, we were taught through parables, allegories, and the startling and violent imagery of the Passion. I’ve always been fascinated with the challenge of writing a book that incorporates elements from memory or observation with images, fragments, and stories that are invented or highly imagined. I often marvel at the terror and beauty of my dreams. When I wake up, I don’t always remember them clearly, but certain images persist, and more than the imagery, the emotional and psychic impression they make can last the whole day or longer than that. The lyric imagination of a poet can tap into the same experience.
“Antediluvian” is a pejorative term, but it acknowledges that there was a Brooklyn before the rather expensive and fashionable version that we have come to know in the last decade or two. There were many Brooklyns, including the one that my father knew in 1965, when he was a priest in Williamsburg at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul and delivered homilies to the Puerto Rican workers of the Domino sugar factory. I’m not interested in historiography the way a scholar is, but the facts of history are extremely useful to me. In “Brooklyn Antediluvian,” I’m not trying to construct a narrative exactly; I’m trying to write a song. I’m trying to compose a very long orchestral piece made, yes, out of the facts of history, out of the names and words of history, but more importantly, I’m trying to uncover connections by following the music those names and words suggest. One of the things I’ve always loved about poetry is its ability to suggest a coherence that you can’t always define or explain. A sound or image can appear, disappear, recur, and change. Like music, a poem’s transformations and movements—of sound and image—make a meaning that is infinitely more important than the action, plot, or drama that the poem ostensibly represents. I hope that makes sense, but the myth and narrative are just another ordering strategy for the music of the language.
LR: Young people play an integral role in Brooklyn Antediluvian. From the speaker’s niece in “Ten Years After my Mom Dies I Dance” to the middle schooler whose passing remarks become a launching point for the titular poem—the fragile bodies of children, as well as their voices, are crucial agents that move through and heighten the stakes of the collection. At times, you write from within a child’s worldview (as in “Ode to Not Having Enough Kids to Play a Game of Baseball”), while at others, you tap into the perspectives of adults assigned the responsibility of protecting children (as in “Typhoon Poem”). Why was it important to you to interweave the viewpoints of children (and especially of children who are being taught to survive by the adults around them) so closely into the fabric of the collection? As a teacher, have you found that your work with young adults in the classroom, especially in the wake of recent high-profile acts of brutality against children of color (Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and others), has shaped your concerns as a writer? What do you think the teaching poet’s responsibility is in terms of equipping young people, and particularly young people of color, for survival in the face of suffering, violence, and disaster?
PR: It was never my intention to write about children, but in the last five years or so, they’ve been entering [my work]. Maybe it has to do with watching all my nieces and nephews grow. Some are still toddlers. Others are grown adults. In all, I think this book wants to talk to the future. You could build a time machine to do that or you could spend time listening and talking to the ones who are meant to outlive you—which is to say, our youth.
As for the public visibility of the brutality against youth of color, to me, that’s just news headlines. To me, the news is late. If you have lived in and around communities of color, you know that this has been going on a long time. You’ve been angry at the deck stacked against people of color. But if you’re smart, then you’ve also been paying attention—not just since 2011 or whenever folks in the general public decided they needed to get hip to it—to the truly sophisticated ways that young people have sung and danced and written their way into survival. You want to be a good citizen? Learn how to celebrate. Learn how to mourn. You learn that from your family and your friends. But also, you have to learn all the ways that different people praise, how varieties of people grieve. You have to become fluent in as many languages of joy and sadness as you can. And don’t just hear the song, feel it. I want so much to be connected to my sorrow because as a Filipino, as a man indoctrinated into American masculinity, I’ve been cut off from sorrow. And I want that sorrow to contain not just my private injuries; I want this sadness —maybe one day—to hold many, many, many kindred sorrows. I have this bit of faith in me that those sorrows get transformed when we begin to see them in relation to one another. And then we, in turn, are transformed. All kinds of laughter and singing and connection can happen out of that. All kinds of poems.
I’m not an activist or sociologist or psychologist, but I suspect poetry can help more than a few people of color by acknowledging their inner worlds, their vast and rich catalogs of imagery and dreams. I think poetry has a good shot at helping young people learn how one’s inner world is clarified by trying to map its proximity and distance to other inner worlds. I would love this for young people. I would love for us to figure out how to do this in a meaningful way.
LR: As you’ve described, music deeply undergirds your work, and of course, Brooklyn Antediluvian is no exception. In the opening poem of the collection, there’s a lovely few lines where you describe the serendipitous moment when two decks sync of their own accord, independent of the DJ’s intervention. As a former DJ and music producer, how does what you’ve learned from the craft of music-making and -mixing figure into your own process for drafting and revision? How do you know when the sound of a poem has finally “clicked” and come into the right alignment? If you could map a soundtrack to the time period in which you were writing Brooklyn Antediluvian, what would be on it?
PR: Music is really the center of my process. A lot of it is intuitive and some of it is—for lack of a better word—mysterious. I’m following the sound of a word or phrase, and during revision, I have an idea that a particular sound wants to come back. A lot of my process at every stage is substituting different words into a line based on a sound or series of sounds. What enters is often a more precise word or a word with associations I hadn’t expected or planned, a wilder word. Conceptually speaking, music is what connects us because it makes a pattern. But music is also the opportunity for surprise because that pattern can break and vary.
I love this soundtrack question. The first artist who comes to mind is John Coltrane, who would take a phrase and repeat it by turning it upside down, playing it backwards, distributing individual notes from the original phrase into the rest of his solo, etc. I listened to a lot of Coltrane while writing this book. I listened to Bach’s cello suites (I love Pablo Casals) and Goldberg Variations too, for many of the same reasons I listened and continue to listen to Coltrane. But I also just love the music. It moves me.
Who else? Rufus and Chaka Khan, Sly Stone, Donnie Hathaway, Sam Cooke—they’re always on regular rotation anyway. While I was making my last revisions and edits, I listened to a ton of Latin and Afro-Latin music like Los Van Van, Pupy y Los Que Son Son, Fania All Stars of course, Joe Bataan, Conjunto Clave y Guaguanco, Dafnis Prieto, Ray Barretto, so many. I’ve been thinking (and feeling) a lot about swing and 12/8 and all kinds of things around music, so I’m sure all of it touched something in the book at some point.
LR: This is your fourth book and also the fourth you’ve published with Persea Books. How did you and Persea find one another before the publication of your first collection, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, and how would you say that your writing and your relationship to the work that accompanies the publishing and promotion process for a book have changed since then, if at all?
PR: I’ve known Gabe Fried, the poetry editor at Persea, since he published poems of mine in Columbia’s literary journal back in 1999 or so. I was one of the first poets he signed when he started the poetry series at Persea. And it’s kind of crazy and a real honor to be on a press with Nazim Hikmet and Paul Celan and then all my contemporaries too.
I think it’s pretty rare for a writer and a press editor to be together as long as we have. I mean, seventeen years? I still don’t know how Gabe figured it was a good idea to publish my first collection, when so few books on literary presses came out of a hip hop sensibility and none that I knew of, back then, explicitly came out of b-boy culture. I was mixing up all these traditions that hadn’t done a whole lot of hanging out together in contemporary poetry—deep imagism, DJ culture, confessionalism, modernist collage, immigrant narratives, Catholic prayer, the dozens. I got a poem in there that makes reference to quantum physics and Amadou Diallo. I’m sure most of the poetry reading public in 2003—you know, the Paris Review and the New Yorker people—were not nearly in the realm of thinking about those kinds of connections as material for contemporary poetry back then. Gabe, along with my publishers Michael and Karen Braziller, made space for that book. I’m really grateful.
People have called Uprock juvenile—like, to my face pretty much—but when I think back, it was a risk to try and write poems like that for an established literary audience. And it was a risk for Persea to publish the book. Look at what some of the biggest publishers and most popular collections are doing now, more than a decade and a half later—Hip hop references? Race? State violence? Eros? I think that’s what a good editor does—takes chances on poets taking chances.
In terms of promotion, I’ll be honest. I loved my teachers in grad school and learned an immense amount from them, but they weren’t the kinds of mentors who would open professional doors for me. (What doors were really available anyway, except niche presses with a political bent?) My approach has mostly stayed the same. Write and perform the best poems I can. Listen well. Connect to ordinary people in the most meaningful ways possible—both on the page and in person. If I’m to be ambitious, let the ambition be about the level of intimacy and discovery with everyday people. All the other stuff will happen on its own—or it won’t. Of course, great works of art get remembered. But great works of art also evanesce or vanish outright. I’m not interested in making monuments, even as I’m interested in something eternal. The depth and complexity of a human relationship is eternal. I’m trying to invest my energy in that.
LR: What’s next for you? What projects are you working on now?
PR: I’ve got so many things I’m excited about. I’m really enjoying the life of Brooklyn Antediluvian, first of all. I’m enjoying reading from it. Actually, I’m hoping to find the right venue and live audience that will let me perform the title poem all the way through, which takes about a half hour to forty-five minutes; I’ve yet to do that.
I’m probably about two-thirds (maybe more) of the way through an essay collection on poetry, music, sports, race, my family, and other themes; it’s called The Symbol and the Task. This past spring I finished an essay I’m proud of that will be in an anthology on passing edited by Lisa Page and Brando Skyhorse. So there’s a good bit of prose ahead of me, I think.
Also, Gabe and I have talked about doing a New and Selected Love Poems. I’ve got to get the structure down because I don’t think it’s going to be arranged like conventional selecteds, I’ll probably mix up the chronology. And, finished or unfinished, I’m probably going to include this long episodic love poem I’ve been working on for a decade. In addition to that, I’ve been writing new love poems, too.
To me, this isn’t just any old selected and it’s not just love poems. I mean, the way Asian American men are still portrayed in the twenty-first century—no ferocity, no complex inner life, no eros—it’s just ridiculous to me. All these flat portrayals, all these comfortable formulas—they are part of the rampant brutalizing machismo that seems to be making a comeback. We gotta face it. Putting this book together has been really rewarding, in that I’ve been trying as an artist to be part of this discussion for so many years. It feels like the right time. And the book is not far from being finished.
* * *
Patrick Rosal is the author of Brooklyn Antediluvian, his fourth book. His poems and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. He has served on the faculty of Kundiman’s summer retreat for Asian American writers and is an associate professor in the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden.
Brooklyn Antediluvian
Publishers Weekly.
263.16 (Apr. 18, 2016): p93.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Brooklyn Antediluvian
Patrick Rosal. Persea (Norton, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 9780892554744
In his boisterous fourth book, Rosal (Boneshepherds) writes odes to notions of home, family, and the transcendent joy
in music and dance, among other subjects. The Brooklynite'turned Philadelphian opens the collection with a nod to his
former borough, and as the book flows he addresses his childhood in New Jersey as well as his family and ancestors in
the Philippines. Rosal's lines bob and weave with an effortless unpredictability. In an ode to the turntable, he shows off
his extraordinary ear for poetry's sonic qualities, in particular rhythm and consonance: "Our hands cut Bach to
Bambaataa// and made a dance hall jump." Even at their best, the poems leading up to the book's final offering, the title
poem, feel like rehearsals that preface an earthshattering performance; once there, Rosal seamlessly stitches together
history, mythology, etymology, and autobiography in a winding narrative that begins with a teenage boy commenting
on the speaker's sweatshirt and transforms into a treatise on colonialism and all that a name can and cannot hold: "You
might see multitudes/ come, not to watch the field but to reclaim it,// to slash a path all the way back to the tables/ we
first fashioned, to present our gruesome// harvest to our governors whono surprise/refuse to listen." (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Brooklyn Antediluvian." Publishers Weekly, 18 Apr. 2016, p. 93+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450361275&it=r&asid=b7dabebdcc31fad626b7d2116c677b98.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
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Boneshepherds
Publishers Weekly.
258.43 (Oct. 24, 2011): p35.
COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Boneshepherds
Patrick Rosal. Persea (Norton, dist.), $15 trade paper (96p) ISBN 9780892553860
The violence of young men, the tenderness of old guitars, the tribulations and the glories of Filipino and multiracial
American heritage collide and combine in the forceful and passionate elegies, geographies, and love poems that make
up Rosal's third book. "Man Hanging Upside Down" follows "ragtag blackbirds" to an updated Golgotha; "Sundiata
Elegy" remembers the poet Sekou Sundiata by way of encounters in Puerto Plata, where "None of us belongs
anywhere/without love." Compared to My American Kundiman (2006), the laments, odes, and brief, storydriven verse
here may often seem, at first, more conventional, though no less vivid for it. Rosal has a way with opening lines ("We
lived down the block from a stockpile of rockets"), even in poems that fade out, and most do not; they keep on shining,
even as they might also convey information about events that extend beyond Rosal's own life. That life, though, comes
into sharp focus, too. He begins with a street fight, with vividly remembered basketball and a fabulous vision of boxing;
he ends with love and music, "spinets, toys, consoles and uprights," "all the clandestine joys in the wood of one piano,"
bound for the one woman the poet loves. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Boneshepherds." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2011, p. 35. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA271050676&it=r&asid=83ed7e57037ce277ffdc64da98c3702d.
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My American Kundiman
Publishers Weekly.
253.46 (Nov. 20, 2006): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2006 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
My American Kundiman PATRICK ROSAL. Persea (Norton, dist.), $13.95 paper (68p) ISBN 9780892553303
Rosal's fiery sophomore effort begins, "When shall I/ open my mouth/ and let half/ the world/ fall in?" Fastpaced and
selfassured, it reflects a melange of precedentsAllen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, a bevy of hiphop artists, Filipino
and FilipinoAmerican traditions from which Rosal (Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, 2003) takes his unusual
title. A kundiman is either a song of unrequited love or a coded song of political protest, dating from the American
occupation. Rosal's vividly syncretic, even sexy works find the present haunted by the recent past, the personal within
the political: "If like me you don't know well the cruel music of tango, then you don't know how its truths can haunt
you." Another poem invokes, for amorous praise, "Your hype/ Your hips Your spit/ Your sickest wit." Rosal's poetry of
Filipino heritage often centers around New Jersey, where he lives and in whose immigrantrich cities and towns ethnic
tension and crossfertilization are everyday facts. These oddly confident poems, with their extravagant, attentionseeking
titles ("About the White Boys Who Drove By a Second Time to Throw a Bucket of Water on Me") should
attract attention beyond any ethnic, regional or performanceoriented audience. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"My American Kundiman." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2006, p. 40. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA155240676&it=r&asid=7697cba15f05f6b8814aa8edd1e87661.
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Rosal, Patrick. Uprock Headspin Scramble and
Dive
Louis McKee
Library Journal.
128.14 (Sept. 1, 2003): p172.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Persea Bks., dist. by Norton. 2003. 80p. 089255293X. pap. $13.95. POETRY
Rosal is from the new generation of poets schooled on rap and slams and other sharptongued approaches to poetics.
Previously published in literary journals, his first collection offers a fast spin of nouns and slippery verbs denoting a
performer's diction but set on the page with a skill that is seldom found in the new oral tradition. "If every story has its
beginning/ this one starts in the armpit of a godthe plots/of fishbone and vinegar a history of nails/ a war or two a
swan some saints and of course some/ slaves...." His rhythms sparked by jazz riffs tell stories that are rich with the grim
realistic details of the industrial towns of North Jersey, the working class, immigrants, and dreamers. Well versed in the
poets who preceded him, Rosal offers street songs and urban meditations that are influenced by Langston Hughes,
Robert Frost, and others: "To suck until our lips turned blue/ the last drops of cool juice/from the crumbled cup
sopped/with spit the first Italian Ice of summer/ To chase popsicle stick skiffs/along the curb...." Rosal is a gifted poet
with a good eye, keen ear, and urgency of voice that creates the energy of his lines. Recommended for all contemporary
poetry collections.Louis McKee, Painted Bride Art Ctr., Philadelphia
McKee, Louis
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
McKee, Louis. "Rosal, Patrick. Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2003, p. 172. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA107837062&it=r&asid=6ebfcfafc7e395e48b83521f89d88d49.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
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Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive
Publishers Weekly.
250.35 (Sept. 1, 2003): p86.
COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Patrick Rosal's Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive kicks off with old schoolobsessed narratives ("To be To Bboy To
lace shelltoe Adidas/To say Word Kurtis Blow") but takes his investigations of masculinity far into the neighborhood,
elegizing friends and unknowns, contemplating group dynamics ("at this moment There isn't one who doesn't laugh")
and pondering "the catalog of unloved/gestures a woman lets no one read." (Persea [Norton, dist.], $13.95 paper (80p)
ISBN 089255293X)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive." Publishers Weekly, 1 Sept. 2003, p. 86. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA107699957&it=r&asid=f403a28b79b931655e35791106995e97.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
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Rosal, Patrick. Uprock Headspin Scramble and
Dive
Louis McKee
Library Journal.
128.12 (July 2003): p86.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Persea Bks, dist. by Norton. 2003. c.80p. permanent paper. LC 2002156299. ISBN 089255293X. pap. $13.95.
POETRY
"If every story has its beginning/this one starts in the armpit of a godthe plots/of fishbone and vinegar a history of
nails/a war or two a swan some saints and of course some/slaves." As these lines show, Rosal is one of the new
generation of poets schooled on rap and slams and other sharptongued approaches to poetry. His is a fast spin of nouns
and slippery verbs, a performer's diction but set on the page with a skill that is seldom found in the new oral tradition.
His rhythms are sparked by jazz riffs, and his stories are rich with details of the industrial towns of northern New
Jersey, of workingclass women and men, immigrants and dreamers, hard against a grim reality but given to hope. That
said, it is obvious that Rosal is well versed in the poets who proceeded him; the influence of Langston Hughes, Robert
Frost, and others comes through in these street songs and urban meditations: "To suck until our lips turned blue/the last
drops of cool juice/ from the crumbled cup sopped/with spit the first Italian Ice of summer/To chase popsicle stick
skiffs/along the curb." In the end, Rosal is a gifted poet with things to say, and they are important, as much for us as for
himhence the urgency of his voice, the energy of his line. Recommended for all contemporary poetry collections.
Louis McKee, Painted Bride Art Ctr., Philadelphia
McKee, Louis
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
McKee, Louis. "Rosal, Patrick. Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive." Library Journal, July 2003, p. 86. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA105517731&it=r&asid=d859473076a79b6aab78cec8e57cc481.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
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Patrick Rosal, Uprock Headspin Scramble and
Dive
Elaine Sexton
Prairie Schooner.
78.4 (Winter 2004): p197.
COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Nebraska Press
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
Full Text:
Patrick Rosal, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, Persea Books. Diane Lockwood, Eve's Red Dress, Wind
Publications. Paul Guest, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, New Issues. Melissa Hotchkiss,
Storm Damage, Tupelo Press.
A poet's first book, for the reader as well as the writer, is an act of discovery and documentary. These four books are all
debut collections. They represent a cross section of sensibilities and are remarkable for their sharp differences, each
with a highly individuated landscape and vernacular. A sampler of verbs from the first poem of Patrick Rosal's Uprock
Headspin Scramble and Dive includes: "suck," "spit," "chase," "snuck," "bust," "slapped," "cracked," "swiped,"
"buzzed," "danced." If verbs carry the story, Rosal's hold the mother lode. His syncopated syntax and rippedfromtheheart
riffs complete the job. Rosal creates a migratory geography with his posse of Filipino Bboys, though there are
several odes to the literal landscapes from the author's boyhood in New Jersey. Fistwork and fractures, barrooms and
beltways seem unlikely settings for tenderness, but Rosal draws tenderness out of them. The surface of his poems offer
a nod to traditional lyric poetry (i.e. a regular attention to the lefthand margin), but words bolt from their frames with
the engines of sound and image. Equally at home mixing text with white space, Rosal uses columns of words and lines
in tiers to wring a fresh sound or wrest silence from the page. As a denizen of spoken word poetry, he takes great liberty
with capitalization and punctuation, omitting periods entirely; the words rush their lines as if too urgent to pause to
change gears. A capital letter indicates a shift rather than a stop, often in the middle of a line.
There's a heady dose of violence and controlled rage in this collection. In "Nine Thousand Outlines," the setting implies
a gang rape, where the victim, "a contraption of wings," attempts to escape from a story that begins, "in the armpit of a
god."
When I say I was once a boy who became
a wolf who became a crow who turned
to salt I mean I've become a man somehow
without remembering that girl: stork‐awkward
and pale When I say
the boys are my friends I mean
all it takes is one of us startled
into quickness: a twitch
of the hip the others follow
and the girl‐‐a contraption of wings‐‐stumbles
for the nearest door
The body is one of Rosal's staging grounds. He tempers his swagger with a startling and original use of metaphor,
insisting the music in the line hum in the body with the kick of its song. Somewhere between the "bashing" and "acts of
contrition" there's a third more joyful and celebratory voice as found in "Citrus City." Here the speaker devours an
orange en route to see his lover. He examines what it is to be "naked against the city air/(eight million breaths/at any
given moment)":
I look into the eyes of Manhattanites who
look me in the mouth
and I think: perhaps she
tastes the same
tart under her tongue and maybe
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she will head straight for a fruit stand and buy
a navel to eat on the street too
Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive has grit, music, and heart. The street persona casts its author as a Young Turk, but
more than that, this persona unmasks a notable newcomer.
Sassy and suburban, the New Jersey of Diane Lockwood's first collection, Eve's Red Dress, reads as another country
entirely from Patrick Rosal's. Lockwood favors a different bevy of tropes: farm stand; diner; laundry room; therapist's
office. Her language, precise and direct, offers a clear and centered narrative voice. The closing stanzas of the first
poem in her collection, "Eve Argues Against Perfection," sets the pace for what to expect from her garden of Eden:
I ate that apple because I was hungry.
I wanted what lay outside Paradise,
a world without the burden of perfection.
Now you call all sinful women my sisters.
I say, let them claim their own damn sins.
The apple may not be perfect, but it's mine.
The shapes of her poems vary broadly in line and stanza lengths and change to suit the tone. A good storyteller, she
chooses a direct path to the heart of her poems with few discursive diversions. She's fearless and unafraid to let her
characters unmask.
Appetite, eros, seduction, the domestic, the abandonment and cruelty of the father shape the dark heart of this book.
Lockwood's centerpieces, poems about the world of sensual nourishment, include "Eating My Words," "Eve's
Confession," "The Flavor of Sadness." The best of these, "Feeding Habits," draws an older couple in a restaurant
watching a younger couple make love at the bar while they share their meal. "They're kissing again. She nestles/her
head against his chest. He strokes/the skin of her arm. I pop a scallop/into my mouth, savor the succulent flesh, then
fork/a shrimp, pass it to my husband/.... Across the room an ear is nibbled,/ cheeks and neck devoured. I beg my
husband/for dessert. He holds up his hand to say/he's had enough for one night ..."
In Lockwood's hands, the garden best known for earthly delights, temptation and original sin, becomes a setting for
abuse by the father, where the speaker, as a child, must strip naked and blister under the hot sun as a form of
punishment. Just when you've come to see the garden as a benign poetic backdrop, Lockwood yanks the reader to
attention in "My Father's Garden":
I see those hands years ago covered with
dirt from his garden, where flowers sprung up
like torches. I see him digging shallow
ditches for seeds and bulbs. In summer
flowers will stretch for acres. It will look
like Paradise. It will feel like Hell.
Diane Lockwood writes with a confidence born in the richly lived inner life of family, food, and articulated desire. She
seeds her poems with a strident I've got to nothing to lose voice, at once intriguing and disarming.
The body is the fodder and foil in Paul Guest's first collection, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World.
As the title suggests, poetry is an ambitious undertaking. Readers will not be disappointed with Guest's efforts.
Muscular, stark, cool, original and biting, virtually every poem boasts a surprising thrust, a feast of description coupled
with a quirky inverted logic. Open to any page and you'll find lines written with the intelligence and crafted ease of the
young Frank O'Hara:
Walking to get medicine
for a pet, I am tempted
to speak of the flesh
a last time and fall silent
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upon the subject,
as if sleep could claim
my mouth for its own
and close what I'd say
like a wound.
Guest reminds us, again and again, of the pleasures of a wellplaced line break, and as with Rosal's work, music in the
lines accounts for ongoing sonic pleasures. Each syllable offers something fresh to savor and read aloud.
Geography is not a physical region for Guest, but rather the orbit he paints in your head, the one that presumably exists
in his. Bold enough to use "heart" and "stars" in a number of poems, he gets away with it by offering a convincing
conduit between the two, a taut landscape as elastic as a rubber band. A reliable narrator, he gains the reader's trust
early on. Therefore, you trust him on the subject of "the looming cruelty of stars," which are "the topography of false
starts" where "a whole constellation is lousy with desire."
Guest's subjects are both familiar (heaven, hell and the heart that stops, love, pain) and the unusual (comic book
characters, machinery). He packs them densely in discursive lines and stanzas. Because of the structure of his lines,
(they rappel down the page), it's hard to do justice to any of them in brief examples, but here are just four lines from "In
Case of Rapture,":
Something burning will go on
like a sadness and leave a dark soot
like a thumbprint on a throat.
Love's constant graffiti will be effaced.
Autobiography does play a role in Guest's poems, as in Lockwood's and Rosal's. In a few poems he uses his paralysis
from a childhood accident as subject matter. Read as a collection, this information adds a level of poignancy to poems
already thumping with energy and pathos. For example, from the opening lines of "Pinocchio": "Once I was wood and
my heart was a knot./From a block my brain was slowly cut/legs, arms, knees and nose, my all of me/peeked out at
the prompt of father's blade."
Guest's poems have a sharp edge of dark humor. They bristle with the life of the mind, an echo of the role the mind
plays in the work of Wallace Stevens, as he mines that field himself.
The Resurrection of the Body pitches headlong into Guest's signature tone with these lines from the first poem in the
collection, "Melancholia":
Almost I rushed from home to tell you this:
that melancholia, the word, when broken
down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars,
means black hole. How perfect. How yes,
I've been reading the dictionary again.
In a world where "pain grew like love," Guest gives us an unflinching view of the human condition rich with surprising
contradictions. This is a sophisticated, erudite collection, all the more stunning because it is his first.
In "Weekend" from Melissa Hotchkiss' collection, Storm Damage, the poet asks, bluntly: "Do you remember any
moment well?" a question that simmers under the surface of many poems as she presses recollection into focus.
Rosal and Guest may make music and sound key elements in their word choices and lines, but Hotchkiss makes sound
itself a character in her work. Her sensitivity to sound is at its most obvious in a poem in which the setting is a
dramatic, near comic dispute with a neighbor over "his music in my home." She addresses sound directly, not always a
blending of the senses, as in synesthesia, but more often making sound a kind of object in the poem. These three
examples, from separate poems, show various devices she deploys from personification to onomatopoeia: "The tracks
make the sound of rocking as the train comes closer/I think of my lover inside me/That same sort of cold, mechanical
movement" (from "Tracks"); "the ringing of a phone over blue linoleum/Or a draining, straining sink" (from "Return");
and "Newspapers crawl stone steps/Of a housethis fall, cutting wind/Like an accordion." (from "We miss you more
and more ... ").
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In a poem entitled, "Summer," the literal and figurative center of the book, Hotchkiss writes:
I know the sounds which are important:
the buzzing of cluster flies between the screen and storm window
a door slamming shut then opening again
mean rain, dying fire
small collapses only small ones
I will understand these only not the absence of a whole
a whole father
Hotchkiss' speaker is the most emotionally detached of those in these four first books. The settings for her poems are
summer, seashore, domestic circumstances, and the past. Nevertheless she holds them at a remove and offers a
questioning gaze, as though looking back is a questionable enterprise.
Hotchkiss offers her critical lens on the minutiae of a moment to good effect, but in deliberation, she splinters that
impulse. What to look at? What to shut out? The sound? The light? The speaker/narrator occasionally moves in close
only to retreat, setting up a parallel movement in the reader, as in "China Lake." The speaker watches her grandfather as
he carries his own reflection to his face in lake water: "I keep watching him, unable to block/the sounds of waves, or
clawing sun." In a field of memorydriven poetry, Hotchkiss cannot resist the impulse to draw from family and
childhood, as is the case of many first books. By contrast, she continually raises the question of how useful such
memories are, and in one case her lines suggests memory may even be hazardous, as in "Cloth Flowers." A character
wants a picture of herself in love, "It's not about being naked, and finally her face/Looks discolored, her eyes quite far
apart//There is no real difference, only memory/ What that alone destroys."
Storm Damage is a collection of spare, wry poems, finely made. The sparest are as brief as four lines. In the second
section of the book, five of these poems take quotes, fragments of lines by Emily Dickinson, as their titles. These
poems are themselves fragments on the theme of time and memory.
Lockwood, Guest, and Rosal mine the body to give heat to the page. Again, Hotchkiss steps away from the pack. She
directs a cool look at the body from the outset, one of several elements that shape the arc of her book. While Hotchkiss
makes you work a bit more than the others for your pleasures it is well worth the effort.
Sexton, Elaine
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sexton, Elaine. "Patrick Rosal, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive." Prairie Schooner, vol. 78, no. 4, 2004, p. 197+.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A126684550
Book review: ‘Brooklyn Antediluvian’
Daniel Chacón, Special to the Times 8:47 p.m. MT Aug. 13, 2016
Patrick Rosal’s poetry goes from the streets to the infinite
Brooklyn-Cover-1-.JPG
(Photo: Courtesy)
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The familiar lines from Rumi — “There is a field beyond good and evil. I’ll meet you there" — suggest that a field is infinite and contains unlimited possibility, perhaps a mystic view of heaven or innocence and wonder. It makes sense that children and dogs love to run into a field, because they can play all day, equipped only with their imaginations. They can create talking trees and roads into ancient and future cities.
A field is anything. All things.
In his newest book of poems, “Brooklyn Antediluvian” (Persea), Patrick Rosal writes, “a poem is a field. What enters the field enters the poem.”
What has always impressed me about great poetry is how the syntax can pull us in with one idea or sound, and before it ends at the period, we are somewhere entirely new. Language is a wormhole into the multiverse, the infinite landscapes of the imagination — that is, the field. Yes, Rosal is right (even if this isn’t what he meant): In the right hands, a poem is a field of infinite possibility.
What’s masterful about this new collection is how the language, endowed with sound, music and image, can go from the streets of Brooklyn, where young men fight over nothing, to mythical lands where the images beg to be read not as literal representations, but as archetype, creating those Rilke “things” that lead us into what makes us human. They go from a young man punching some punk to a poem in some magical place where girls throw five bricks into the air and they become birds that fly past the ears of God. Images slide into street life as easily as they do into antediluvian archetype.
The poem “Uptown Ode that Ends On an Ode to the Machete,” begins with these lines:
Me and Willie hail the first yellow to fly us from Franklin and Fulton
The language avoids the demands of ordinary grammar, so it’s not “Willie and I,” because these are Brooklyn boys. And what a beautiful way to say catch a cab, to “hail the first yellow.” And the alliteration winks at the reader, “fly us from Franklin and Fulton.”
This poem starts with catching a New York taxi, but it somehow ends up in the Philippines, into another time, into the intimate company of men who make machetes.
They stoked the embers. They chanted low. They dropped their mallets in quick cut time.
The language itself becomes the sound of machetes being made.
It’s not only to the Philippines where Rosal’s language takes us, but into places of the collective consciousness, like in the poem “Instance of an Island,” where we hear the story of an island which both is and isn’t, an island that is a literal place where a couple sit by an infinity pool, as they
Think of infinity. Many many years ago, a great emperor wiggled his finger
Although the emperor of the poem may refer to a real emperor, the poem takes us beyond the “real” into the field of pure poetry, in two lines and with an ambiguous enjambment.
If Rosal’s first two books didn’t show he was one of the great poets of the Americas, one who can bend syntax and create magic, this book definitively displays it.
His sounds are amazing, not just the syntax and rhythms and beat, but those he creates in the minds of the reader, things we hear, like rain being “a zillion spoons whacking the rusty roofs.”
In a poem about boys fighting, he writes,
We ducked under the cop’s bright red hatchets that swung around the corner.
Yes, this is a beautiful way to say they hid from the police and their sirens, but it also deepens the meaning by the enjambment and movement, “bright red,” then “hatchets that swung around the corner.” They make as much metaphorical sense as they do literal.
And then there’s the basketball game in the Philippines, played by “boys of half-court flip-flop runs,” where even the use of hyphens adds to the sound.
We are taken to an urban basketball court, one we can imagine, where we see the boys run and play ball while wearing flip-flops, and we hear the sound, but it is such precise wording that the reader can even imagine what clothes the boys are wearing. We see and hear.
Blending in a bit of Brooklyn, the Philippines, a bar in Austin and other places of the imagination — i.e., the field of possibility — this book shows that Rosal has entered into the realm of the masters, but on his own terms.
In one poem, he writes of city boys who make their own turntable with parts they find in dumpsters, and with their equipment they spin tunes that make people jump, blending everything, even Bach with Bambaataa, the latter a DJ from the South Bronx.
Rosal writes, “We chopped up masters and made the whole block bounce.”
That’s exactly what he does in this fine collection.
Daniel Chacón is the award-winning author of “Hotel Juárez” and other books of fiction. He hosts the literary radio show “Words on a Wire” on KTEP and can be reached at soychacon@gmail.com.
My American Kundiman by Patrick Rosal
In Poetry on June 17, 2011 at 3:26 am
You’ve got to believe in love, and lust, to read these poems. Rosal tells us that the Kundiman is a traditional Filipino song of unrequited love. That’s a whole lot of yearning–a whole lot of attempt. And love wins, sometimes. But these poems remind us–intensely–what it’s like to be with a girl or a boy for the first time. They remind us what it’s like to fall so deeply into that hole, how wonderful the fall can be, and what it’s like to land. That pain. Damn, that pain. And this isn’t entirely about men and women, about bodies and touching. Or, it’s all about these things, but also about cars and countries and culture. It’s about the things we can’t help, the abuse we endure, the sorrow that comes with happiness. We have certain emotions on different levels. What’s the difference, really, between wanting so badly to defend your own honor and wanting so badly to please a lover? We think we are not in love / And no one can hear us // We are moaning for each other’s air. Rosal makes longing necessary and normal: where would any of us be without it?
-Micah Ling
POSTED BY
LUTHER HUGHES
POSTED ON
NOVEMBER 9, 2013
POSTED UNDER
ART, ARTIST, BOOKS, CRITIQUES, CULTURE, ISSUES, POETRY, RACE, REVIEW
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ON: MY AMERICAN KUNDIMAN
kundimanAt first, while reading My American Kundian, I was terribly bored. I was constantly falling asleep while reading and I couldn’t focus on the poem itself. However, Rosal’s collection did improve and I was excited. His outlook on American and his relation to America thereof became very apparent in the later parts of My American Kundiman. I also became quite accustomed to his narrative style of writing. In actuality, it reminded me of Terrance Hayes quite a bit. With his lack of punctuations and heightened use of story, his works relate well to that of Hayes’.
It was in the first part that I felt bored and uninterested. I began thinking, how can anyone put themselves through this. In this part he used lenghty poems and overbearing stories that just drove me insane. I felt lost in these poems and felt overwhelemed. So, I guess one could say this is not my favorite part. However, I did enjoy one poem – When You Haven’t Made Love in a Long Time. I liked this poem because of metaphors. Rosal is talking about sex here, but is using an entirely different way of talking about it. It’s real. You still know what’s going on here. But, he’s not telling you exactly what’s happening. It is like the best way to talk about sex without talking about sex.
I very much enjoyed the second part. I don’t know if it’s because I love when poets name their poems the same thing in different ways or what – but, Rosal has done something here for me. By naming all of the poems in this section Kundiman in some way, it shines a light on his thoughts on different things in relation to himself. I particularly enjoyed Kundiman: The Good Bite. His defintion of this woman who he, assumingly, once loved or will love (“will break your heart in whole”) is lovely. Lines like, “the long noon / a stiff lick of whiskey / on the lips” is stunning. He is describing the smell of alcohol on her lips in such a metaphoric way. It’s appealing to the eye and to the ear. Also, in this section we see the different techniques of formatting Rosal uses. I love the formatting of Kundiman: Tarsus. The breaks and spaces in this poem really gives the reader a feel of what is being talked about. It also leaves the reader at ease, opppose to the previous section where everything was thrown at you at once.
In the third section, we really get a look at Rosal’s narrative powers. His poems become alive so much that I felt as though I was with him in these instances. I also enjoy the quality of poems he produces over the simplest things and events. However, no matter how simple the event or item he talks about, we see the connection between himself and his conflicting thoughts of America. In this section, we really see what “his” America is. My favorite poem in this section is Two Black People and a Filipino Near the Concessions Stand at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. To me, this poem really highlights Rosal’s narrative-poetic skills. He addresses the issue of profiling, racism, classism, and many others in this poem. He gives us a real life event in this poem, and thus invites into his beliefs of what he thinks about America. I especially love the part where he acknowledges the woman’s discriminatory comment, “Thank God I didn’t want / to be killed or anything.” Then I love the response, the laughter the men followed. It’s real life. And the fact that he acknowledged this event as a defintion of his America is pretty great.
I guess you can say I did enjoy My American Kundiman for the most part. Rosal’s insight on what American means to him and what is portrayed as in relation to himself is shown greatly throughout this collection. I believe Rosal does a great job of portraying these thoughts through his narrative poems. And I am sure many poets can learn a great deal from this collection.
Luther Hughes
Boneshepherds by Patrick Rosal
A Review by Jacob Victorine, Book Reviewer
I’ve rarely come to a collection of poetry with more expectations than in the case of Patrick Rosal’s Boneshepherds. I had read his two previous collections, My American Kundiman (2006) and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003), and felt akin to this writer who so gracefully straddles the narrative and the lyrical, the inexplicable and the performative. Rosal is one of the few poets I know of who can address the reader directly (as he does in “Pride Fight”) without drawing him out of the poem. Rosal’s poems ask to be lifted to the mouths of his readers, yet once visited on the page they reveal even greater intricacies. This oral quality does not only present itself in Rosal’s writing style, however, but also in his themes. For as long as I’ve been aware of his poetry, Rosal has been a poet who concerns himself with music and the body. Boneshepherds represents his most ambitious attempt at merging these two motifs.
The collection opens with two epigraphs, one from the great Pablo Neruda. The passage begins, “Show me your blood and your furrow” (1) and concludes with the last line, “I come to speak through your dead mouth” (11). If there are any doubts as to what a Bonesheperd is after this proclamation, Rosal removes them with the collection’s first offering, “Boneshepherds’ Lament.” The poem is a violent landscape of the speaker’s legacy and memory: a murderous piano student who once played for his parents, men who slaughter pigs on the island of their ancestors. At one point, the speaker asks (apparently shouting to the graveyard or sky), “And in return do your ancestors expect you / to simply shutup and bring to the murderer a bottle of rum / and—god help you—a song” (60-62)? These lines demonstrate a witness questioning his own culpability. The Boneshepherds are both the ones who do the slaughtering and the ones who stand by and watch the bones collect. Rosal pushes us to ask if we sing to raise the dead or to drown their voices out.
In the past, Rosal has shown himself as a poet who draws from personal experience, using people from his life to shape his speakers and their settings. In Boneshepherds, however, he moves closer to myth, mixing memory with the strange (and sometimes, the supernatural) to craft narratives that go beyond the individual. It is Rosal’s most expansive collection yet. There are still small stories of love, ancestry and laughter (in “Tamarind,” when the speaker awakes after a night of karaoke with his cousin, Joseph, or in “Shrike Ode” when his friend, Hector pierces his hand on a fence while running from some Newark cops), but as a whole, these poems push toward the universal. They are at once longer (often two to three pages) and wider reaching than Rosal’s past offerings.
It is the way Rosal weaves the personal and the universal together that allows his poems to reverberate through the bones of so many, like the guitar in “Sundiata Elegy,” written for the poet Sekou Sundiata. In the poem, the speaker tells of his time at a resort in Puerto Plata: how he borrows a guitar from a man named Elmond who works there. At one point, Angel, another man who works at the resort, plucks the instrument from the speaker’s hands and begins to play:
After,
he held the instrument at arm’s length gazing into it
as if he himself had cut and planed its wood.
Clearly, it wasn’t so much the guitar he admired
but all the hands through which it had passed. (28-32)
Later, the speaker returns the guitar to Elmond, and watches him use it to seduce a woman who swings her hips to its rhythm. “Sometimes I wonder / if music isn’t just another version of light” (55-56), says the speaker, “slowed down enough for the living to dance with the living” (57).
Music is everywhere in Boneshepherds, often shadowed by death. This is no more apparent than in “The Parable of the Disappeared Man.” A lieutenant fills a mansion with “all the families of seven barrios—the rich, / the poor, the vagrant” (29-30) and forces them to watch from its windows as his men prick a choirmaster for hours “with no more than the points of their bayonets” (39). Rosal writes: “They were not to speak or move. They were not / allowed to cry or else the lieutenant’s boys would shoot them” (33-34). Using the choirmaster as a symbol for music and the lieutenant and his men as a symbol for silence, Rosal creates physical stakes for the perils of censorship. He simultaneously intensifies this danger by making the townspeople complicit in the crime. In effect, we become the townspeople watching the choirmaster suffer through the window of the poem, thereby compacting the poem with the times we have failed to act against silence in our own lives. Silence, Rosal warns us, is the most dangerous enemy of them all.
In “Delenda Undone,” Rosal’s speaker weaves through a family history filled with foreign occupation and forced silence:
This is the truth. I’m not wealthy. I can’t buy
space or time on billboards or websites. The name I inherit
doesn’t part columns in the city’s Daily Journal.
My family comes from a long line of farmers.
My cousins scrub their chopping blocks with salt.
They shush the goats before they kill them. (43-48)
Boneshepherds is a rally cry for the freedom of speech. It not only reminds us of the small instances we have each stayed silent (as the homeless woman sleeps on the subways steps or the man at a nearby table assaults the waiter with epithets), but of the times we have all stayed silent (the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Armenian Genocide). It reminds us that to witness and say nothing makes us accomplices in the crime.
Yet with all of the silence (all of the looming death) in these poems, music is always nearby, acting as its counterpoint. Music intensifies the peril of silence by reminding us of all that we have to lose. In the last poem of the collection, “A Tradition of Pianos,” Rosal writes: “This—/ this is what music can do, can let all the love out of us, / fearlessly, and we can boogie down—or kiss” (31-33). Music is what brings people together to teach us the far reaches of love. It is what lets the body, the breath expand, without everything collapsing.
Boneshepherds by Patrick Rosal
A Review by Jacob Victorine, Book Reviewer
I’ve rarely come to a collection of poetry with more expectations than in the case of Patrick Rosal’s Boneshepherds. I had read his two previous collections, My American Kundiman (2006) and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (2003), and felt akin to this writer who so gracefully straddles the narrative and the lyrical, the inexplicable and the performative. Rosal is one of the few poets I know of who can address the reader directly (as he does in “Pride Fight”) without drawing him out of the poem. Rosal’s poems ask to be lifted to the mouths of his readers, yet once visited on the page they reveal even greater intricacies. This oral quality does not only present itself in Rosal’s writing style, however, but also in his themes. For as long as I’ve been aware of his poetry, Rosal has been a poet who concerns himself with music and the body. Boneshepherds represents his most ambitious attempt at merging these two motifs.
The collection opens with two epigraphs, one from the great Pablo Neruda. The passage begins, “Show me your blood and your furrow” (1) and concludes with the last line, “I come to speak through your dead mouth” (11). If there are any doubts as to what a Bonesheperd is after this proclamation, Rosal removes them with the collection’s first offering, “Boneshepherds’ Lament.” The poem is a violent landscape of the speaker’s legacy and memory: a murderous piano student who once played for his parents, men who slaughter pigs on the island of their ancestors. At one point, the speaker asks (apparently shouting to the graveyard or sky), “And in return do your ancestors expect you / to simply shutup and bring to the murderer a bottle of rum / and—god help you—a song” (60-62)? These lines demonstrate a witness questioning his own culpability. The Boneshepherds are both the ones who do the slaughtering and the ones who stand by and watch the bones collect. Rosal pushes us to ask if we sing to raise the dead or to drown their voices out.
In the past, Rosal has shown himself as a poet who draws from personal experience, using people from his life to shape his speakers and their settings. In Boneshepherds, however, he moves closer to myth, mixing memory with the strange (and sometimes, the supernatural) to craft narratives that go beyond the individual. It is Rosal’s most expansive collection yet. There are still small stories of love, ancestry and laughter (in “Tamarind,” when the speaker awakes after a night of karaoke with his cousin, Joseph, or in “Shrike Ode” when his friend, Hector pierces his hand on a fence while running from some Newark cops), but as a whole, these poems push toward the universal. They are at once longer (often two to three pages) and wider reaching than Rosal’s past offerings.
It is the way Rosal weaves the personal and the universal together that allows his poems to reverberate through the bones of so many, like the guitar in “Sundiata Elegy,” written for the poet Sekou Sundiata. In the poem, the speaker tells of his time at a resort in Puerto Plata: how he borrows a guitar from a man named Elmond who works there. At one point, Angel, another man who works at the resort, plucks the instrument from the speaker’s hands and begins to play:
After,
he held the instrument at arm’s length gazing into it
as if he himself had cut and planed its wood.
Clearly, it wasn’t so much the guitar he admired
but all the hands through which it had passed. (28-32)
Later, the speaker returns the guitar to Elmond, and watches him use it to seduce a woman who swings her hips to its rhythm. “Sometimes I wonder / if music isn’t just another version of light” (55-56), says the speaker, “slowed down enough for the living to dance with the living” (57).
Music is everywhere in Boneshepherds, often shadowed by death. This is no more apparent than in “The Parable of the Disappeared Man.” A lieutenant fills a mansion with “all the families of seven barrios—the rich, / the poor, the vagrant” (29-30) and forces them to watch from its windows as his men prick a choirmaster for hours “with no more than the points of their bayonets” (39). Rosal writes: “They were not to speak or move. They were not / allowed to cry or else the lieutenant’s boys would shoot them” (33-34). Using the choirmaster as a symbol for music and the lieutenant and his men as a symbol for silence, Rosal creates physical stakes for the perils of censorship. He simultaneously intensifies this danger by making the townspeople complicit in the crime. In effect, we become the townspeople watching the choirmaster suffer through the window of the poem, thereby compacting the poem with the times we have failed to act against silence in our own lives. Silence, Rosal warns us, is the most dangerous enemy of them all.
In “Delenda Undone,” Rosal’s speaker weaves through a family history filled with foreign occupation and forced silence:
This is the truth. I’m not wealthy. I can’t buy
space or time on billboards or websites. The name I inherit
doesn’t part columns in the city’s Daily Journal.
My family comes from a long line of farmers.
My cousins scrub their chopping blocks with salt.
They shush the goats before they kill them. (43-48)
Boneshepherds is a rally cry for the freedom of speech. It not only reminds us of the small instances we have each stayed silent (as the homeless woman sleeps on the subways steps or the man at a nearby table assaults the waiter with epithets), but of the times we have all stayed silent (the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Armenian Genocide). It reminds us that to witness and say nothing makes us accomplices in the crime.
Yet with all of the silence (all of the looming death) in these poems, music is always nearby, acting as its counterpoint. Music intensifies the peril of silence by reminding us of all that we have to lose. In the last poem of the collection, “A Tradition of Pianos,” Rosal writes: “This—/ this is what music can do, can let all the love out of us, / fearlessly, and we can boogie down—or kiss” (31-33). Music is what brings people together to teach us the far reaches of love. It is what lets the body, the breath expand, without everything collapsing.