Poetry&Stuffby
MARNE KILATES
MARNE
S
KRIPTS
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
(Introduction to Children of the Snarl & Other Poems)
"A Folk Gothic Sense"
Reviews & Interviews
A younger Freddie on the cover of the CCP invitation to launching of his posthumous Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather, Poems 1980-1988
folk gothic sense pervades Marne's poetry. It is an overpowering sense, such as I have not come across in a long time and which I have not found in many of the poets of his generation who continue to write in English. I say overpowering and not simply powerful. That distinction is crucial in Marne's case because his poems do not, as powerful poems do, hit you in the proverbial gut. His poems hit you in that region reserved for the mystic third eye, slightly above the bridge of one's nose, set directly in front of one's cerebrum. As it should, for this is where the poems ultimately grip the reader as they challenge the intellect.
That folk gothic sense is embedded in the images that he conjures. They are wild and lush and sometimes complex though not filigreed. Neither are they merely vegetative, and here's another crucial distinction. Imagery that is merely vegetative grows without the reader, straddles the borders of one's senses. Marne's images vegetate in the mind, live on in the imagination, latch on to one's consciousness and ultimately adopt a life of their own. Thus overpowering. They are absorbed through the senses, certainly, they provoke the underbellies of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. These are images that are concrete, palpable, alive.
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Finally, they are folk gothic in the sense that they stir up what is latent in all of us--the dark, primeval, sensual pre-colonial beings that lurk behind our westernized colonial facades. Being folk gothic in that sense, they disturb us because they open us up to ourselves, make us see what we are deep down inside, the core that we suppress in the name of borrowed good and borrowed honor. Thus subversive. These poems subvert our ordered view of life, the harmony we lull ourselves by.
How Marne has managed this we will never really know. Like the unassuming poet who labored long at Lloyd's of London, he will probably remain as enigmatic. A quiet person whose poems explode. A powerful poet because his poems overpower us. A dangerous poet because his poems subvert our mannered visions of ourselves as quiet fellow travelers on this earth.
Alfrredo Navarro Salanga
1 April 1986
Feast of the Seven Sorrows of
the Blessed Virgin Mary
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