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asianamlitfans2008-04-24 09:00 pm
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Joseph O. Legaspi’s Imago
Joseph O. Legaspi’s Imago
It was a treat to meet Joseph O. Legaspi in person recently and I never wrote up a review of Imago, so I re-read it a couple of days ago and am immediately reminded of poetic elegies. Evoking a sentiment of loss structured through the metaphor of coming-of-age (specifically a masculine coming-of-age), Imago is the epitome of transnational poetics. Like Jaime Jacinto’s Heaven is Just Another Country, Imago shuttles us from the Philippines to the United States, while grounding us in a lyric experience in which relationships between family members loom large. Legaspi generously gives us a lyric “I” that grounds us throughout the collection and places this “I” directly in relation to the definitions he provides just before the poetry collection opens. For those who follow psychoanalytic theory, the imago is an idealized image structured in childhood of an important figure in that child’s life, usually a parental figure. The imago necessarily functions all throughout psychoanalysis through theories of infantile sexuality (Freud) and object relations (Klein). At the same time, the imago references the period after an insect’s metamorphosis in which the organism has reached sexual maturity. In this sense, the poetry collection deals both the attachments that the lyric “I” has made with both parents (but also of other individuals), but also accesses the period of adulthood when one reflects back on these attachments and how they necessarily come to color one’s life. One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Sleeping Together.”
SLEEPING TOGETHER
Inside mosquito netting, my father and I sleep
on the same mat, the soft, crucifix weave
of buri leaves, laid out on the floor
between two beds. My sisters, tangled
in floral sheet, occupy the bed on the right,
Jeniffer, all wispy brown hair and cream
colored skin, Jayne, square-jawed
with hair like deep archipelago nights.
My mother—the mare-beauty of her—sleeps
on the other bed with her new born daughter
suckling at her breast, beside her, my brother,
abysmal in the process of his weaning.
I am seven, occupying that privileged space
beside my father, life and life-giver. Light
burn all the while. Moths' wings collect
onto the net. The room swirls
with breathing, a world unfolding.
This poem perfectly twines together the dualistic definition of “imago.” On the one level, the lyric “I” moves backward into time, but yet the very intensity of the vision behind the speaker suspiciously reveals, “I am seven,” leading us to believe that the speaker is both seven and not. The speaker both lives within that time and without it, experiencing a blissful moment of familial union. A poetic word that Legaspi employs throughout the collection is “archipelago,” which is so rife with multiple meanings; a group of islands separate yet connected (the Philippines always being obliquely referenced), something that is very much at play in this poem. The bodies are joined together in some cases quite physically, and yet still apart. The speaker makes reference to this paradoxical situation by considering the prospect of his younger brother, now undergoing the painful process of weaning. The poem is texturized by images related to connection, ranging from the “crucifix weave” to the “netting” to the “sisters, tangled.”
Simultaneously, Legaspi invokes the trope of the insect as the family appears beneath mosquito netting and the “moths’ wings” that have drifted onto the net. The insect imagery brings to mind the transitory nature of this moment, as the “room swirls/with breathing” suggesting a living progression, forward and dynamic and ultimately inexorable. Rather than a melancholic memory, this moment seems rather to evoke a pleasant interrationality that will structure how the reader comes to experience the Philippines and the speaker’s relationship with his family that appears all throughout Imago.
It was a treat to meet Joseph O. Legaspi in person recently and I never wrote up a review of Imago, so I re-read it a couple of days ago and am immediately reminded of poetic elegies. Evoking a sentiment of loss structured through the metaphor of coming-of-age (specifically a masculine coming-of-age), Imago is the epitome of transnational poetics. Like Jaime Jacinto’s Heaven is Just Another Country, Imago shuttles us from the Philippines to the United States, while grounding us in a lyric experience in which relationships between family members loom large. Legaspi generously gives us a lyric “I” that grounds us throughout the collection and places this “I” directly in relation to the definitions he provides just before the poetry collection opens. For those who follow psychoanalytic theory, the imago is an idealized image structured in childhood of an important figure in that child’s life, usually a parental figure. The imago necessarily functions all throughout psychoanalysis through theories of infantile sexuality (Freud) and object relations (Klein). At the same time, the imago references the period after an insect’s metamorphosis in which the organism has reached sexual maturity. In this sense, the poetry collection deals both the attachments that the lyric “I” has made with both parents (but also of other individuals), but also accesses the period of adulthood when one reflects back on these attachments and how they necessarily come to color one’s life. One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Sleeping Together.”
SLEEPING TOGETHER
Inside mosquito netting, my father and I sleep
on the same mat, the soft, crucifix weave
of buri leaves, laid out on the floor
between two beds. My sisters, tangled
in floral sheet, occupy the bed on the right,
Jeniffer, all wispy brown hair and cream
colored skin, Jayne, square-jawed
with hair like deep archipelago nights.
My mother—the mare-beauty of her—sleeps
on the other bed with her new born daughter
suckling at her breast, beside her, my brother,
abysmal in the process of his weaning.
I am seven, occupying that privileged space
beside my father, life and life-giver. Light
burn all the while. Moths' wings collect
onto the net. The room swirls
with breathing, a world unfolding.
This poem perfectly twines together the dualistic definition of “imago.” On the one level, the lyric “I” moves backward into time, but yet the very intensity of the vision behind the speaker suspiciously reveals, “I am seven,” leading us to believe that the speaker is both seven and not. The speaker both lives within that time and without it, experiencing a blissful moment of familial union. A poetic word that Legaspi employs throughout the collection is “archipelago,” which is so rife with multiple meanings; a group of islands separate yet connected (the Philippines always being obliquely referenced), something that is very much at play in this poem. The bodies are joined together in some cases quite physically, and yet still apart. The speaker makes reference to this paradoxical situation by considering the prospect of his younger brother, now undergoing the painful process of weaning. The poem is texturized by images related to connection, ranging from the “crucifix weave” to the “netting” to the “sisters, tangled.”
Simultaneously, Legaspi invokes the trope of the insect as the family appears beneath mosquito netting and the “moths’ wings” that have drifted onto the net. The insect imagery brings to mind the transitory nature of this moment, as the “room swirls/with breathing” suggesting a living progression, forward and dynamic and ultimately inexorable. Rather than a melancholic memory, this moment seems rather to evoke a pleasant interrationality that will structure how the reader comes to experience the Philippines and the speaker’s relationship with his family that appears all throughout Imago.