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)
By Way of an int
By Way of An Introduction
(Or: Is it even useful to ask?)
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THE COVER ART
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The cover art for Marneskripts is refreshed every fortnight more or less, featuring the works of Filipino artists, painters, photographers who are my friends or who are willing to show their work on my website, as accompaniment to my poems. Full credits are provided, or send some to me with a short bio note. Those interested may write me, with a sample of their work, at marnek2@gmail.com.
Just poetry. Perhaps with the least intrusion... But with the most memory. That's what I hope you find in this site. Yes, mainly my own poetry. But also with some notes and other prose as well, plus translations. And Art! With which I hope should satisfy at least your curiosity. (That's why the first question is always "Why.")
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HY THIS? What goes? There could be any number of variations to this interrogative. Even the obvious, seldom asked, so-called ultimate ones. Why do I write? Why do others like me bother with this thing—task, pastime, passion, puzzle—of poetry, of writing, or art? We really don’t know why or what it is about. Is it even “useful” to ask?
Maybe the other side of the question (as the Roman deity Janus guarding gates and doorways has two faces) is why are you here, Reader? Because you read about this somewhere? I invited you, enticed you with signs and contrivance to come here? And you opened this door? Or clicked this (virtual) portal (trap) open? And you stepped in. Thanks, in advance. Glad you're here, Reader. Welcome to Marneskripts! (Say marn' scripts.)
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So why are we here? That’s the oldest philosopher’s question. Why is there a poet and a reader? What do they do for each other? What do they need from each other? Maybe you and I know and don’t know, that’s why we’re here.
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” is the oft-quoted phrase from Auden, although we might discover in the process, that poetry—the words themselves—is the happening, as when Seamus Heaney hears his father shoveling: “…A clean rasping sound/ When the spade sinks into gravelly ground…” The pen between his thumb and forefinger, has done, before our mind’s ears and eyes, the digging.
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W
There are other nice words about this thing. Beautiful, noble, lofty, sensitive, inspiring, profound. Or even funny, tickling and ticklish that make us
snicker or pause. Or sometimes clueless, “down to earth” words from poets and non-poets alike, wondering where it came from, how it came to be. I have some favorites. Or at least those I can remember.
poetry defies the space which separates...
Carl Sandburg liked to pretend and said, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” “I, too, detest it,” begins Marianne Moore. “Not… the party line,” denies Allen Ginsberg. Or, "Not everybody wants to look at at these bits of squirelled away language..." says Simon Armitage. This “craft or sullen art,” complained Dylan Thomas of the lonely practice in the still of night. Or John Ashbery looking out his balcony and seeing the city as the “…gibbous/ Mirrored eye of an insect.”
And yet, as we have seen with Heaney, poetry itself is the event: The poet might be devoid of the farmer’s sinewy arms to capably handle dirt, but the rasp of the shovel happens as he writes, or the writing makes him as brawny and earthy as his farmer father, whom he laments he can never be like. Or, looking out to the world, the poet can break the concrete caves of the city into a thousand fragments from the mirrored eye of a dragonfly.
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All art is the search for the inner sense of things that the artist often feels compelled to know and understand and convey or recreate that understanding to us. And it is always take it or leave it. His or her task is not to convince us but to simply pass on the experience with all his creative/re-creative powers.
The moment or act of recreating and the way the viewer takes it in are two faces of the Janus event that is as remarkable. What happens between reader and poem, viewer and painting or theater or music is like wandering and wondering about life itself: again as the poet limns it with only the carving or shaping tool he has, words.
“We name one thing and then another,” says Charles Simic. “That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word… and there's a lot of space inside words.” Like the groundhog that disappeared between summers, eaten by the earth, “St. Theresa and her wild lament,” Roethke wrote.
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GEORGE TAPAN
...these bits of squirreled away
language
John Berger, recently deceased, and described by many as one whose writing changed their way of looking the most, makes it even less complex, “That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means we are less alone… Poetry defies the space which separates…” Again the Janus moment between the present and the past, between not knowing and knowing: the momentary fragment of eternity.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” “And the ground where we find we stand is holy,” sighs W.S. Merwin on the crags where he finds the deft but clumsy-looking ibexes. And like the Old Master of modernism, after so many winding stairs and vacant lots we find “The end of all our exploring…” and so forth.
We are, in the end, at a loss for words, as when Eco makes his speech-challenged hero, Baudolino, pause and carefully enunciate, “Time is an eternity of stammers.” Again, glad you're here.
Marne Kilates
17 January 2017
OUR CURRENT COVER
PHOTO: Ben Razon, Mabini on a Rainy Night (Posted 15 February 2022)