KOPI BREAK ORDER #020 — Czander Tan: “Manila Skyline”
"I wonder if dance could ever be an objective criteria or a family tree and if neither then why not a fireworks show"
I used to sit on the balcony, stone rough where I would scratch my copper soles on the railing before it meets the roof, or sometimes on the roof I would be smothered, unseen, by the dark, my lashes occasionally lit by fireworks sparking the Manila skyline, right above my grandmother’s clothesline, crossing tangled power lines that converged in a bulbous mass of wires up a wooden post, our totem pole of civilization, our electric ecstasy conducting the small hands that set crackers screaming below, their shadows hopping to gunfire-crackles as if they had commissioned the cardboard crickets’ violence at their naked feet: a messy dance, a gunpowder patter, and isn’t it wonderful to watch from the dark roof: sparklers waving like magic wands that glow and burn eye-spots, that twirl and dance with smoke and blood to spell the words “come down” — in a savage cursive the flashes stain my sightlines long after — and I say that one plus one statistically approximates to two only most of the time, my coin always spinning, both sides catching light, but discretely I am stuck in the dark and cannot move: the stomping rituals round and round the crackers cry “come dance” and I wonder if dance could ever be an objective criteria or a family tree and if neither then why not a fireworks show: they pass the skype around the fire each asking “when?” and I reply I am with them in spirit because I have no hands or feet or heads or tails.
I imagine the view from the balcony still, where I hear the roosters crow and the man sell sweet silken tofu and the pesos clink in his hands and the coconut husks scrub the floors to polish them. And me, prowling on the ridged red tin roof that cuts my callused soles, who left to reach forgotten lines, to jump
Hello reader,
As a writer who tiptoes the boundaries of creative nonfiction and poetry like a delicate dance, I’ve often been asked why I label a piece of writing a “poem” or an “essay,” particularly when it lacks the supposed signature building block of a poem—the line break. Without a line break, isn’t the work simply prose?
When a writer labels a work that resembles prose as poetry, they’re suggesting the work be evaluated in the court of poetry rather than that of prose. Pay less attention to plot, narrative and other prosaic devices, and instead the building blocks of poetry: sound, rhythm, and, most importantly, image, the sensory details conjured in our minds.
Today’s poem, Czander Tan’s “Manila Skyline,” ushers in a breathless rush as the speaker yearns for familiarity and home. If a line break truncates a thought into sizeable chunks, using pauses to mediate the reading experience, this poem wants us not to pause, to quickly take in the markers of home—the “grandmother’s clothesline,” the “bulbous mass of wires up a wooden post,” the “sparklers waving like magic wands”—the way memory surfaces in our minds urgently when it strikes. At first, we wonder about the significance of this rush, why the extended metaphors of sparks and fire are so wilfully scattered across the first stanza. Then, as the stanza closes, we realize the vivid description comes not from directly witnessing this “Manila Skyline.” The speaker sees everything—real or imagined—through a Skype call. The rush ends in a melancholic yearning for a celebration the speaker cannot be physically present for. This is a poem about missing something so much, there is no choice but to let it out in a blur.
In a world where displacement is often thrust upon us, Tan’s piece is a reminder to let our origins continue to color us, make us feel whole. The prose poem, I’d argue, is not a trendy, new-fangled method of writing poetry because a writer is lazy to line break. Instead, it is a form that disarms the reader in its prosaic disguise, ready to surprise you with its renewed relationship with language.
All clinks,
Max
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