Patrick Rosal
I’ve been in a bunch of fistfights. I fought many years into my adult life. After brawling, me and dudes in my crew would slip from the scene, hit a diner, order burgers or late-night breakfasts, then tell stories of what just went down. We recalled the damage. We reconstructed the fragments of how the fight started and who was where and what happened in what order. We talked about what startled us and even what amazed us or made us laugh. Mostly, fear, sorrow, and regret went unsaid. Then, we all went home.
The inner life for people of color contains whole landscapes. If those landscapes sometimes contain anger and violence, it’s often because we’ve absorbed the ridicule, negligence, and bitterness directed toward us by a dominant culture. These vast and sophisticated compositions of survival, especially for young people, have a terrible time finding their way into language. I like to think poetry can make a difference in that regard by offering models of expression, observation, and reflection. Given the scale of institutional, domestic, and linguistic violence in our time, I like to think poetry can clarify (and also complicate) our inner lives or at least teach people how to deal with the apparent impenetrability of those landscapes’ mysteries. In my practice as a poet, I start small. I often turn toward memory and I often start with myself.
In my mid-twenties, I started reading contemporary poetry. I didn’t exactly understand everything the poems were saying, but I recognized their power. I noticed those poets were each telling a story of what happened to them, too. Like us, they were trying to make sense of what went down.
At the age of 23, these were essentially my two worlds. It didn’t take a whole lot to see how similar they were. In both, I was learning how good talkers could push language into danger, discovery, strangeness, feeling. At the same time, each world couldn’t necessarily see or say things that the other could. They were two worlds that often had serious misconceptions about each other. To be clear in all of this, I don’t mean to suggest that my friends were brutes without language. It is important to note, however, that American poetry has often operated as if it were a language without brutality.
Young men like us mostly didn’t exist in history books, news, movies—or poems. And if we—Filipino, Black, Latino—did exist there, we had no control over how we’d be seen. The figures up on the screen and on the page occasionally looked like us, yet the powers that conjured and crafted those images erased where we really came from and what we most desperately wanted to become. This crew was made of young men who struggled with and cared for lovers and strangers alike; they had poetic gifts, wit, metaphor, music. Both the fight and the talk-story of the fight were undoubtedly brutal. But more than masculine bullshit sessions, they were opportunities, albeit flawed, for us to tell each other that we were, in fact, real. In the diner our riot of stories was a way to touch and be touched.
There were things at those tables, post-scuffle, that we wished we could say aloud but couldn’t—for shame, for fear, for lack of time. But there were many more things in the beautiful books I was reading that those poets and poems could not possibly have seen (refused to see?) in the barrooms, streets, and basements of New Jersey and New York. From those simultaneous silences, there’s a tremendous literature to be made. It is a space where I acknowledge and study American violence not just as a witness, but as its object and enthusiastic agent too. Those ciphers in the diner were masterful iterations of a very old oral tradition. If you knew our histories, you’d know that all that trash-slinging and self-singing was just another version of our families’ dinner-table ruckus, our parents’ bickering, our cousins’ braggadocio, and our aunties shit-talking to our uncles. My friends’ stories and the deep past they emerged from were expanding the subject and formal possibilities of American poetry, though few people had noticed. Few had bothered to record it.
As a Filipino-American, I’m a descendant of brutality on both sides of the gun. If you know the history of American imperialism, you understand what I’m saying. We have a million-some stories that have yet to be fully confronted and written. So, a whole history of feeling goes untold.
To say that I’m a poet is just to say I’m more or less the same man who has struck another man on the corner of George Street and Livingston Avenue, and who kissed his lover in the bed before he left for work, and who once wept for a grandfather he barely knew. As a poet concerned with social justice, I have to believe in love—I have to believe that love is a constant in a way that money and power are not. That’s what James Baldwin urges us to do. And like Baldwin, I believe there is an inner horror that mirrors the horrors of history. As young men, we turned that horror and history into a regular bedlam with our particular fists. Certainly, that wasn’t enough to extricate the rage. We also needed to tell the story. In my poetry, I’m always trying to get back to that need to tell the story and examine the rage. I’m trying to get through the horror. I’m trying to get back to love.
