de la Paz and Noguchi--secrets and minimality

Oliver de la Paz and Noguchi are magical storytellers with precise, succinct techniques. What they say about and how they portray "family" is swift and momentous, and it forces me to ask: how do we use the personal, the history of a person/familia, to connect with universality, the construct of "family," and how do we intellectually and emotionally move the reader through a poem? de la Paz and Noguchi have different answers. And I love them both.

de la Paz uses distinct and complex imagery. His selected poems in AAP tell a story of a connected and disjointed familia, and the poems are brief fractures and moments, portraits if you will, of the Recto familia. It starts with Manong Jose, which means elder Jose, who's an airport worker and not a part of the Recto familia--but he's also a part of them because they share a similar, forced experience in the Philippine diaspora. He is "pleased though wary" when he sees the family step off the plane. I love the beautiful moon imagery de la Paz uses here to describe the boy. It connotes hope and a love for something that represents the anak, the children, something Manong longs for in his country because everything here is morphed. That's what my grandma always told me--"You're too American." There was always this battle of assimilation in Filipinos. And the history of that--the country being colonized by three super powers, Spain, America, and Japan--says a lot about the diaspora and it trickles in via colonial inferiority complexes.

I love the armpit section of Nine Secrets. My husband's mom has that same armpit mole, which hangs from her armpit discreetly, and she always wears long-sleeved dresses to hide it. How de la Paz organizes this poem is meticulously orgasmic for me. The nine secrets are brief portraits into the moments of this family's life. It travels through the every-day livelihood of this Filipino family, and I can't get over this section:

Overhead Long-Distance Phone Conversation

'You mean you can't distinguish between a lychee and a longan? Cost:
six dollars.

I'll go over de la Paz's poems more meticulously on Tuesday.

Noguchi's minimalistic poetics and line breaks enthralled me as much as de la Paz's descriptive fractures and humor.

The language used here is so compelling because it, in its simpleness, connotes to me the briefness and borderline strictness of Japanese culture. But it carries so much emotion and weight, just like de la Paz's poetry. But de la Paz's poetry carries the weight through a storytelling that's very reflective of Filipino culture--we are outwardly loving and yet hide everything despite the affection and suffocation of words--it takes forever to say good-bye at a Filipino party. Here, Noguchi's language is sparse, but the sparseness provides a tone that's longing and formal, but also heavier, in a way, than de la Paz's because of this formality.

I loved the lines:

Kenji has broken
Her favorite ironing table--
A wedding gift from the Yamaguchis.
The legs, split beyond
Their crotch.

His mother on her knees
Tries to iron on the ruined table
Anyway. His father needs
A shirt to impress
The same co-workers
He sees daily.

The line breaks: "His mother on her knees / tries to iron on the ruined table / Anyway" broke my heart. It spoke to me the harsh passion and duty Kenji's mother had to the father. To do that through such minimalistic language provides me referential points to the power of imagery and form and line break. The structure of the poem and the way the lines move, because you must break your breathe as you read each line, provides such movement and heart to a poem that's so sparse and bare.