It’s a trope of the last Empowerment Century that personal trauma makes for great art. That false understanding has led to the development of effective art therapies, some really bad art, and even more really bad poetry. (Most of all, it has led to the establishment of a new performance discipline — one-woman shows — but that’s another story.)
Yes, when trauma poetry’s bad, it’s horrid. But when it’s good, it’s very very good: a transformation of personal compulsion towards pain into a shared compulsion towards the sublime. That’s been poet and cultural worker Joël Barraquiel Tan’s project throughout his career. His second book, the incandescent Type O Negative, throws away as much of the chat and meter and matter of poetry as the poet can get away with, digging toward the vein of fire that, whatever its source, animates both poetry and memory. Tan finds it more often than not.
The book is divided into two sections. “Thicker,” is about Tan’s Philippine childhood and his family, the title both a reference to the relative density of blood and water, and a carnal take on the figures and obsessions of those tasked with his upbringing. “Bug” is about death, primarily death by that bug, AIDS, but also cancers, toxic shock, even roadkill: the nonviolent, nontraditional deaths of the marginalized American. The lacuna between this before and after — the poet doesn’t say — is that much-storied “immigration experience,” which Tan parodies and disposes of ruthlessly in his introductory “ars poetica filipiniana:”
isn’t enough
to pass mangoes ’round
until they’re bruised
abscessed from over handling
or lament the bread
warm hands of dying
grandparents. isn’t
enough to be defined
by exile or empire
or scorn the
love of whites. Just
isn’t enough to be brown.