Romance and Capitalism at the Movies, and: The Canal Bed (review)

reviews 153 Astride the flock of sails tangled with festival banners sit the pigeons; on the electric wire, tinder eyes stalk the boughs of distant stars riding the sea surge, outstretched hands that shores dragged down ___ Anonymous enough, the pigeons as if to redeem in sleep those unforgiving presences evoked by mastheads, grounded. Or this from "Entelechy on the Libidinal Frnge": Your omphalos tacked up primly for sale Amid gobbledygook, guzzle of wits Attenuated by Capital; arctic opulence Proves plastic, protoplasmic In an equipóse of hazards— Yet like his contemporaries writing in Tagalog and other Philippine languages, San Juan makes a conscious effort to avoid the lugubrious sentimentaUty which characterized much traditional writing. If we were to seek an analogue to such an aesthetic in the western hemisphere, it might be the modernismo identified with the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario earlier in this century. One issue that San Juan forces us to confront is the function of vulgarity in modern poetry. It is evident that the flap over his own poems at the University of the PhiUppines during his undergraduate years still rankles him. The poem in question, "Man is a Political Animal," is reprinted together with the accusations and counter-accusations, the support and recrimination, which it aroused at the time. Though there was much in the poem which too delicate sensibilities considered vulgar, what outraged officials of the university at the time was the poem's last line, uttered as a commentary on the assassination of a politician who fed on the gullibility of the populace: "Now, 1 must celebrate this cathartic progress an fuck a tenpeso whore." Today these documents constitute a drama apart from their historical value. But they also serve to reinforce San Juan's view that the ultimate obscenity is the wealth of the rich in the face of the starvation of the poor. Ultimately, the poems in this collection must be seen as highly individuaUstk. Though several deal with communist revolution and American imperialism, as weU as with Philippine nationalism, love poems dominate the book. There is an exultation in the physical quality of sexual intercourse, and even Wittgenstein is made more human in making love: "You proved the navel equidistant to the igloos and Galapagos Islands." Many of the poems are occasional pieces and not susceptible to any sort of complex interpretation, but the sequence of love poems titled "Highway 54" provides so Uttle information that these pieces will remain distant even from readers who have traveUed Manila's Highway 54. This reviewer is frustrated by a consciousness of some purpose in much of San Juan's poetry which still remains too deep to be easily discovered. Indeed San Juan admonishes us as critics with this epigram: Be ruthless, if you please, in your young recklessness— But less and less you reckon well your own decrepitude. ROGER J. BRESNAHAN Romance and Capitalism at the Movies by Joan Joffe Hall. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Alice James Books, 1985. 63 pages. $6.95 (paper); $12.95 (cloth). The Canal Bed by Helena Minton. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Alice James Books, 1985. 71 pages. $6.95 (paper); $12.95 (cloth). 154 the minnesota review Alice James Books has performed a valuable service over the past several years in fulfilling its stated "emphasis on publishing work by women." A small independent press, it has provided exposure for younger poets (including a number of men), or for those whose writing careers have been slowed or not even begun until well into adulthood because of the pressures of jobs, marriage or family. As a poetry cooperative, Alice James depends largely on the efforts and resources of its own members; and until quite recently, given the requirement that its authors participate in book production, its membership has been drawn principally from the New England states. Despite these seeming limitations, the press issues several titles a year, which (unlike most books from publishers of comparable size) appear in both paper and cloth, and which seem to receive well-organized and fairly widespread distribution to reviewers and sales outlets. Alice James thus provides support for work that might otherwise remain unknown. The Canal Bed, one of the press's titles for 1985, is organized...