Notes on Jean Vengua’s Prau

(Today I received my copy of this fine book and I resolved to make first impression notes of each poem as my reading moved along. This is the 1st installment.)


Prau is a book of 4 sections: Momentum, Displacements/In Place, Ghost Vessels, Rowing/Breathing.

The title of the first poem of the first part of Jean Vengua’s Prau is called“This isn’t Kansas.” That is, like they say, a sign. This is going to be a book of voyages and recognitions, but sans the cutesy. The munchkins have left the building and there’s “a lot of/ nakedness around here lately.” At the same time, we are adrift—“there/ is no tether, no reality.”

The next piece is called “Voyeur/Voyager.” It is almost a list poem, but it is more than that, it’s a kind of equation/invocation in which the electrical grid and a body’s map of veins merge:

• We build upon the bodhi highway. Tentacles bundled
• Under the skin, surge of tears, blood, oil, cum.
• City life, nation, posts and rings; tattoos are code, tag.

The third text reiterates the title of Prau’s 1st section, “Momentum.” It is in prose—and it is, I want to say, a pile of transparencies in which one time travels back and forth through a portal opening in 1911. 1911: the year Gustav Mahler died,;the year “that Moses Browning developed the M-1911 Colt .45, to kill intransigent Filipino ‘Moros’ in Mindanao” ;the year the author’s mother’s father joined the Philippine Constabulary,” when he really only wanted to “play the clarinet and fall in love.” Also in 1911: Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize for isolating the radium which would later kill her; Chilean Surrealist, Roberto Matta was born; and “the first Filipino workers appeared in Alaska to work in the fisheries and on the fishing boats.” Personal and political histories are braided through “Momentum” with grace and clarity. The text’s flashes of brilliance are magnified in its skin prickling denouement in which Vengua’s father witnesses , from the rail of a ship, a nuclear explosion on a coral atoll.

Next up, “The Bird,” a short poem which conflates the death of a robin and the death-in-life of some hard scrabble trainyard workers. “The Bird” is followed by “The Poetics of Geodetic Control.” It’s as if the losses incurred through the creation of transportation infrastructure (infarct structure?) have to be glossed metaphysically:

Beauteous adventure. The tale slips, vanishes. Not a thing
one can grasp although there are tracks. In the body there are
dreams, and in the palms of the hands and elsewhere on the wrists
there are spaces between cells and molecules that allow coming
and going, as if some footfall. Captured with lenses and granules
of sand, still embedded. Film, a fragment drifting across the cornea.
Giant volcanoes piercing the sky. Through a plate glass window in
an unknown mall, the consumer sees, thinks maybe something—
yellowish cast to the sky, a cloud or a mist just hovering. Find a place
to shelter between or under pillars, a crawl space will do. Breathe easy
with so much knowledge. Not to make your reaction obvious or
operatic.

The next bead on the proverbial thread is “Migration Busting” which coincidentally I just read while listening to Stephen Stills singing a stripped down version of “Wooden Ships.” No human attempt at change is uncontested is, I guess, the message. It’s as much a matter of what’s outside as inside one.

“Commuter” brings it down to queasy everyday contemporary urban experience: one is hailed “from a distance” for purposes of gathering information, signatures; relationships are shaky; “lies/have been repeated without attention/to detail.” These are the routines of our daily travels.

“Tik-Tok.” The clock beats relentlessly in the body. Which in “The Shifting” becomes a straining narrative of trying and trying not to make.

“The Aching Vicinities” is for me one of the most beautiful of all contemporary poems of jouissance:

dream is a set aside thing, a girl with obstinate
melting curls, followed by aching vicinities body
functions, spasms of the colon, birdsong, calculus
&
&
Ache translates to both hunger and habits of escape
numb comforts batteries
are just batteries no
charge. No
apology
&
frankly
the body jerks
to life feeding on
particles of apprehension
oh
rosso scuro I’d wander among the inks
leuchtendes grun a la pagoda lightfast

In “My Own River” “a lover is the greatest circus ever” with “pungent sweet styx flowing under.”

“This is Not to Explain” is a question which answers itself about what it means to have traveled where we travel and why we remember what we do. Funny word “remember” with its connotation of reassembling a body.

“Mnemosyne’s Hymn” is also a hem, selvedge—“territory a tattoo an avatar.”

“Night Stammers”—the desire to write being written.

“To the Photographers”—the momentum of tumbling over into time.

NB: I’m not an essayist. I’m a poet/interviewer who tends to intimidate himself out of writing essays. These notes are offered as the most fragmentary of first impressions . I hope to continue with the other three sections of the book as time allows and then perhaps to cast the notes into something else.