Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Volume VI | Issue 3
Luis H. Francia and I met at the Sun Yet-sen University International Writers’ Residency in China last Fall. We were a small band of writers who, for a month, travelled, wrote, joked and had an enviably fabulous time. Luis H. Francia had the life of a bard written over him: a ready raconteur, literary swordsman of thrust and parry, poet who performs the varied personas of his poetic register, presence jocular and warm. Moreover, he’s a deeply concerned critic of contemporary creativity; identity and history are his broad themes. People, moments and relationships are the grain of his writing; the sacred hisses out as shadow and tenderness from the surface of his poems as in this stunner, ‘… The world is full of speech, unheralded/ Each creature, each thing, fashions/ Words not said, not heard // Mankind, beast, flower, fish, atom cell.’ Read his poems here. Luis H. Francia is also a much awarded memoirist, essayist, celebrated teacher and film critic. You’ll discover his poems brim with street savvy pizzazz and intellectual elegance, delight in double entendres and wordplay, elate with their resonance and use of the refrain; the energy of a pervasive syncretism pulses through his work. For Luis H. Francia straddles many worlds.
As we said our goodbyes at the airport Luis H. Francia agreed to edit an issue of Poetry at Sangam. We are honoured and enchanted. Read on…
— Priya Sarukkai Chabria
Luis H. Francia
This is not a reader’s manual. Just some notes on how I view the poems included here, in as succinct a manner as I can manage. You may want to take these in, or disregard completely.
Fidelito Cortes, Jennifer Hayashida, Kristine Ong Muslim, Ramon Sunico, Mags Webster, Nicholas Wong: These six poets are a diverse group. I don’t just mean geographically, for they are as far away (or near) as Australia, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, as near (or far) as Long Island in New York and Manila and Mindanao and even Sweden, but more significantly in the way each approaches their craft and sullen art, as Dylan Thomas, that incandescent Welsh bard, once put it.
Not surprisingly, the thematic ground they cover is continent-and-oceans vast, from ruminations on Rumi and printer’s ink to the perverse politics of disenfranchising immigrants, from meditations on poetics, poetic forms, and history, to the lacerations of love and the complexities of landscapes, both internal and external (what Gerard Manley Hopkins would have termed “inscapes”), from linguistic and sexual border crossings to the lingering hangover of colonialism.
There are surprises in these works, some hiding in plain sight, some to be uncovered through careful reading. The arc of language spans East and West, with Cantonese and English and Filipino sidling up to one another, in a comradeship and camaraderie, even rivalry, that words—differently hued and textured—engage in when we respect them enough to let them be. And respect language these poets certainly do, and often in a playful manner.
Contrary to the shopworn image of poets as often fey, delicate, and disengaged creatures, you’ll find quite a bit of the world and the otherworldly, as well as humor (sly, droll) and irony, in their lines. In the spirit of Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes—as well as beatitudes.
Each voice is distinct, with a quiet confidence that what is said and written will be taken in and considered by the attentive reader. Their presences exude a grace at once self-contained and effusive.
As to what they might mean?
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca once wrote that “poetry is like faith—it isn’t meant to be understood but to be received in a state of grace. No one should say ‘This is clear,’ because poetry is obscure. And no one should say ‘This is obscure,’ because poetry is clear.”
And now, dear reader, please lose yourselves in these poems.
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