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EXPERIENCING THE ELSEWHERE:

Reading the Transgressions in the Poetry of Conchitina Cruz

Patricia Angela “Petra” F. Magno

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TABLE OF CONTENTIONS

Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 3

Thesis Statement ................................................................................................................... 4

Chiaroscuro: An Intertwining of Traditions ..................................................................... 6

The Proxy Eros: Sfumato and Rock Music ....................................................................... 9

Readership for Contemporary Local Poets ...................................................................... 13

................... 16

Sequential and Serial Poetry: On The Levels of Book and Page .................................. 19

Synecdoche: The Unsaid ...................................................................................................... 28

White Space: Room for Response ...................................................................................... 33

The Paraphernalia of a Page: Crossing Out a Line or Two ............................................ 37

Relevant Last Lines .............................................................................................................. 38

Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 39

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In re/citations of Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new,” emphasis has invariably

fallen on the word “new”... even as it has worn itself through with our recyclings, a kind of

déjà new, which has exhausted our attention and made us all victims of fashion...We have

ignored the other two words, “make” and “it” as if they were of no significance. But it is

precisely in the ordeal of the making, and in the powerful ambiguity of the “it,” that we need

to refocus our attention.

- The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Lauterbach 44)

What, then, to make of Conchitina Cruz’s third book of poems, elsewhere held and lingered?

Among its pages are poems composed entirely of footnotes to blank pages, scattered lines, words

that have been struck out or pushed to the margins of the page. Appropriated as well are the forms

of the multiple choice questionnaire and numbered sequences. Titles are repeated for different

poems in different sections, and forms extend from simple quatrains to three-page poems that

sprawl across the page. The book ends with an index of last lines, that when used as a reference, do

not correspond to any of the poems found in the book. How to respond? The symbiotic

relationship of poetry and criticism aligns one to the other, and conventional poetry can beget

conventional criticism. When a text displays few of the conventions found in Philippine poetry, the

criticism the text merits should equal the text’s intention to trangress.

In the evaluation of elsewhere held and lingered’s postmodern techniques by wielding a

heightened concern for form and an eye for the transgressive act, this study will propose a reading

that hopes to equal the level of craft in the “rigorously imagined” (David) book that Cruz has

contributed to Philippine literature.

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Evaluating the transgressive act of

elsewhere held and lingered will be done by

shifting the critical question from

“Is this new?”1 to the inextricably linked

and much more valuable notions of

What and How, in order to refocus the

critical gaze on the it of the it – the

innovations in form that subvert the

standard notion of image, page, and

synecdoche – and the obviously

rigorous ordeal of creation.

                                                        1 Not because it is a given but because it is always asked, and the answer can always be Yes.  

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OF POETICS MORE THAN ORIGINS: SYNCHRONY OVER DIACHRONY

Instead of reiterating Pound’s call for newness as criterion for evaluation, consider instead

the faculties of invention and discovery as that which makes a poem: invention on the part of the

poet, and discovery on the part of the reader. This “heuristic gift,” which enables readers to deduce

meaning for themselves, can be recognized as the trademark of great and authentic poetry (Bloom

1). This “hands-on” approach points to a possible honing of aesthetics; when the questions of How

was this made and How do I read this are introduced into criticism, the method of creation is celebrated

and the resulting readings are acknowledged. The inclination to wrestle with tropes is present, of

course, but other than this, inventiveness is what allows a poem to assert its value.

This evaluation of inventiveness within elsewhere held and lingered will presuppose a survey of

the contemporary scene in local poetry and not a recap of the tradition of poetry in English in the

Philippines.

Whittling the focus of this paper to examine products and not sources is an emphasis on

synchrony – “language as a system existing at a given moment” – rather than diachrony, which is the

concept of “language as an entity constantly changing over time” (Attridge, Bennington and Young

183). Because synchronic context emphasizes the process of creation and the rigor of craft, the

innovation brought to the page is better discovered in form rather than grammar. In the case of

elsewhere held and lingered, this proposed formalist reading is appropriate to the text’s own scrutiny of

form. This privileging of synchrony is an appropriate limit to this study that aims to propose a

method of readership as rigorous as the text produced, so that the gaze is focused on the formal

workings and potentials of page and book.

This critical orientation toward formal qualities does not fully disqualify the value of tradition.

Tradition must be acknowledged if its products are to be named at all. Roman Jakobson declares

that synchronic poetics “[are] not to be confused with statics,” and should also encompass “that part

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of the literary tradition which for [the stage in poetic development] has remained vital or has been

revived” (64). A synchronic evaluation of elsewhere held and lingered, despite its centeredness, cannot

float in a void. Naming and examining the devices employed to bring about the faculty of discovery

requires an awareness of the traditions these devices stem from or are morphs of. Historical context

therefore is not to be denied, but instead examined with the goal to return always to the main text

and ultimately to the concern for form rather than tradition.

If current poetics more than origins are to be considered, it would do well to examine Cruz’s

peers in mainstream publishing before establishing her own achievements and possibilities. At a

racetrack, prime example of momentum with telos, one keeps an eye on the horses abreast of each

other, and not on the starting line. Local poets, while not to be pitted against each other and then

bet upon, are to be considered nodes in the progress of traditions, and their poetics as systems

working within the local scene at this particular point in time.

Context for Cruz’s work will be illustrated by examining the work of two local poets in

mainstream publishing, specifically those who released books of poetry in the same year Cruz

published elsewhere held and lingered: 2008. These poets are Joel Toledo and Mookie Katigbak, with

their collections respectively entitled Chiaroscuro and The Proxy Eros.

CHIAROSCURO: AN INTERTWINING OF TRADITIONS

Joel Toledo holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing (Poetry) and undergraduate degrees

in English and Journalism from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, and he currently

teaches Literature at Miriam College in Quezon City. He is recognized and celebrated by the local

writing scene, having received two Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in recent years. The

award-winning poems are published in Chiaroscuro, with the second section “What Little I know of

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Luminosity” having been awarded first place in 2005, and the third section “Literature and Other

Poems” winning second place in 2004.2

The entire collection Chiaroscuro interweaves Romantic and New Critical traditions – both of

these identified by Gemino Abad in his critical essay “This scene so fair” as two of the three

dominant strains in Philippine poetry over the last century (Abad 290) which is possibly why

Toledo’s poetry is held in high esteem by the previous generation of writers, with praise from the

likes of Marne Kilates and Alfred Yuson adorning the published book.

Marjorie Evasco’s lovingly-written foreword celebrates the poetic renderings of “heartlight

and shadow” (xiii) by pointing to Toledo’s skillful side-by-side depictions of natural and emotional

landscapes. Consistent is the creation of these internal landscapes mirroring the natural world, as

well as the rich pool of literary images and vocabulary that Toledo draws from, employing sorrow

and seawater, fragile objects, the tangle of night, the weight of beauty. These poetic images are

punctuated by declarative statements that either illumine the link between the real and the poetic

truth, telling the addressee that “You are everything about the sea/that pulls things down” (Toledo

22) or else confidently declaring their own reality, that “[a]ll this/happened before the dark ages”

(10).

In terms of concerns, i.e. what the persona chooses to talk about and how he does so, the

persona’s assumed voice as that of the “magus... proffering advice... perhaps [unsolicited] by the

uninitiated imagination” (Evasco ix) approximates the notion of the poet as an oracle or a visionary,

the poems being true to the Romantic ideal of being “formally meaningful or persuasive in [their]

‘sense’ of reality” (Garcia).

Toledo’s work embodies the “consistent projection of a personal voice whose treatment of

experience and insight is couched in either hard-edged or tender understatement” that is identified

                                                        2 taken from the bionotes of Joel Toledo, Chiaroscuro (Manila: UST Publishing House, 2008). 

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as favored contemporary devices in lyric poetry today (Yuson 31). This is accomplished by the skills

of mystic observation and the agility of movement from dramatic situation to insight in the service

of organic unity, exemplified by the graceful use of abstractions embedded in what one could call

“thesis statements.” For example, “Pointillism” begins self-reflexively: “We begin with an empty

something,” and continues with an elaboration of graffiti, ending with “making perfect sense, the

perfect finishing touch.” Toledo’s poetry – elaborately articulated packages of wisdom and insight –

shines as a fulfillment of the New Critical tradition of “nuances of language, a sharpness of imagery

and verve of metaphor, and a poignant tension and irony of thought and feeling” (Abad 294) as he

artfully sets together the light and the dark of the human condition, true to chiaroscuro.

To consider form and the appearance on the page, here are three pages scanned at random

from Chiaroscuro:

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THE PROXY EROS: SFUMATO AND ROCK MUSIC

In terms of painting techniques as metaphors for poetics, Mookie Katigbak’s sterling debut

The Proxy Eros has been compared not to chiaroscuro but to sfumato (Evasco, The Real Is

Marvelous vii-xv), the Italian technique of shading tones and colors into each other to produce

softened forms. The judges’ citations for the 2009 Madrigal-Gonzalez Awards – in which her book

was a finalist – confirm this by noting that in Katigbak’s utterances, the poetic is synonymous with

all that is “tangential, [ambivalent, and imprecise.]” Katigbak’s own poem entitled “Sfumato”

counsels the master Leonardo as he “[sets] out deeper / into the fog of not knowing” (23) and in the

end reminds him that no one knows as he does what it takes to make. Katigbak herself dares to make

what she will out of the collection’s theme: the human hungers for love and loss,3 already blurred

and softened forms by themselves. Always the addressee is “actual” somewhere else, somewhere

unnamed – from “As Far as Cho-Fu-Sa” to “Brace Me Somewhere,” calling to mind the blurring

that distance evokes.

What then, holds a reader, if the premise of this book is loss itself? There is the triumphant

“astonishment of language” (The Madrigal-Gonzalez Awards) which is Katigbak’s method of

holding onto the addressee, who always seems to elude the reader’s grasp. A closer look at The Proxy

Eros uncovers an arresting persona with a consistent voice, a masterful articulation of a personal

reality, and what is arguably the sharpest ear for sound in contemporary poetry today. Katigbak is

the contemporary babaylan – the singer-songwriter.4

                                                        3 acknowledging quite gracefully that love and loss are intertwined, and in seeking one, the other is eventually discovered. 4 as opposed to, say, a lead singer – whose voice can possibly be drowned out by the band. Singer‐songwriters are masters of their own sound, and must therefore work to keep their voice and utterances as distinct as possible. This in turn requires a careful attention to sound, a direct and visceral connection with an audience, and “insisistently percussive lyric”* ‐‐ all characteristics of Katigbak’s work.   *The Madrigal‐Gonzalez Awards, Judges' Citations for the 2009 Madrigal‐Gonzalez Awards, December 2009, 15 December 2009 <http://panitikan.com.ph/newsarchive/monthly/citationsmadrigal2009.html>. 

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[No] way to tell birdsong from my heart, except one never sings the same song twice.

- The Inciendiary Perceptible (Katigbak 26)

The persona’s voice is stable and unmistakable, adhering to the first-person monologue and

consistently using devices such as inner rhyme and an astute vocabulary. As consistent as the I is the

you, as the persona assimilates the lover into the reality that she fashions as commentary on love.

This is most obvious in “Ghost Pain” (56), where the you runs a spectrum of objective correlatives: a

“frisky pan burned on the underside,” an “angel on the lam,” a “phantom limb.” This you, however,

remains consistent in the nature of address with the rest of the poems in the collection, hinting that

the I of Katigbak speaks to only one other you, as she recalls the image of the pan in another poem

“Sonnet:” “I cook emotion in the deep fry, / Sizzling out the fat. Ain’t no one sees me cry.”

Katigbak’s diction is remarkable for its confidence in its accessibility, wielding epigraphs

from Shakespeare to Clapton, running the gamut from Anglo-Saxon to Latinate to endearment:

“You swale from the low, darling. You do” (34). The images employed are drawn from nature and

mythology, recalling Toledo’s fondness for the resonant literary image, and Katigbak appropriates it

with her pitch-perfect sound. For example:

The sea the man keeps plunging into turns different things up: Salve/love, storm/bruise. He can’t decide what inside him gets to choose. - As If (21)

The poems’ subject and object remains slippery, but Katigbak offers the persona –

recognizable by her tone – as what remains constant and unerringly precise, further giving her voice

power when she wields the first-person point of view. For example, an excerpt from “Brace Me

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Somewhere” displays both the predilection for images drawn from mythology and the strength of

the persona’s voice:5

I’m thinking of the part in the story where Apollo moves to touch the nymph, and her mind, crossing crisis, canters through the woods, plots the escape route – but I’m getting ahead of myself. (38)

Similarly, she takes the voice of the persona giving chase to the nymph darting through the

woods in “Quiver,” asserting in the end that “wherever you go, I am to follow.” When Jean Cocteau

sketches Orpheus and Eurydice – in the poem of that name – the poet-as-persona announces

herself at the end of the poem, making the reader aware of the poeisis, that it is Katigbak who

ultimately guides Cocteau’s hands in the writing of the poem, her “ink [final] on the page.”

Katigbak as the contemporary babaylan takes the torch from the likes of Marjorie Evasco,

one of the long-standing icons of the woman’s place within Philippine poetry as the strong, unique

voice. This Romantic sensibility of the empowered individual consciousness or traditional lyric

speaker is echoed in the solo role of any singer-songwriter,6 and Katigbak fully actualizes this

Romantic effect through her use of tropes favored by New Criticism. The proxy eros therefore are

the carefully created images of love and the beloved, which had to be appropriated through tropes in

order to be grasped in the absence of the actual. In less words, Evasco herself says this in her

introduction to The Proxy Eros, affirming that in Katigbak’s work, “the poem divines the real”

(Evasco, The Real Is Marvelous xv).

                                                        5 The move to draw the link between the flight of the nymph in the image to the flight of the persona’s own thoughts serves as a sort of poetic amplifier, in which the persona’s voice is backed up by the devices of image and metaphor within the poem.  6 Think Billie Holiday, think Esperanza Spalding. Think Cynthia Alexander – distinctive voices with full names taking center stage. 

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Again to demonstrate form and the appearance of Katigbak’s poetry on the page, here are

three pages scanned at random from The Proxy Eros:

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READERSHIP FOR CONTEMPORARY LOCAL POETS:

Undoubtedly, the strains of recognized and esteemed literature in the Philippines’

contemporary scene are those with the Romantic sensibility articulated through New Critical

devices. Abad in his evaluation of the development of Philippine poetry waffles slightly on the third

strain: naming it an open field, “marked by a heightened consciousness of language” (289) but also

acknowledging the desire to be free from New Criticism’s obsession with rhetoric but ultimately

adhering to the level of craft that New Criticism demands. The implications for contemporary

readership, however, involve enforcing the rules of the two aforementioned traditions, focusing on

whether the work conforms to New Critical ideals such as organic unity and solid diction – hence

the presence of thesis statements and the reliable persona. Another example of this intertwining of

traditions is the Romantic notion of the image as objective correlative, so the reader when faced

with a poem is pressed to find descriptions of the human condition in New Critical devices of

similes, metaphors, sound and rhythm, tropes of light and dark –

What you are is the questing where and far

- The Proxy Eros (Katigbak 34)

– and is then alienated from other possibilities of the image, is then closed to the notion of

the page as a playground, or of the word itself as image. By lumping aforementioned devices (e.g.

description, sense impressions) under the general term of imagery, “Romantic writers [assimilate]

mental, verbal, and even pictorial imagery into the mysterious process of imagination, which is

typically defined in contrast to the ‘mere’ recall of mental pictures, the ‘mere’ description of external

scenes” (Mitchell 24) and poetic meaning is thought to be found solely in these devices, therefore

limiting the possibilities of imagery actualized elsewhere, possibly in form.

“But the distinctive modernist emphasis is on the image as a

sort of crystalline structure, a dynamic pattern of the intellectual and

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emotional energy bodied forth by a poem. Formalist criticism is

both a poetics and a hermeneutics for this kind of verbal image,

showing us how poems contain their energies in matrices of

architectonic tension, and demonstrating the congruence of these

matrices with the propositional content of the poem” (Mitchell 25).

Mitchell’s definition of poetic imagery encompasses both the aforementioned Romantic and

New Critical notions of imagery – i.e. the inner harmony of tropes working to propose a thesis

statement – and the proposed possibility of imagery as something grammatical, where the patterns

and tensions remain within the poet’s language. The conventions of Philippine poetry produce

criticism that approaches the poem as something to be read and dissected according to what it says,

and that diction is fully ascribed to the traditional lyric speaker, who is “firmly established and is

thought to preside over the business of the poem” (Conte 44), usually throughout entire collections.

The following can therefore be proposed as a sort of summary:

[P(1NC + 2NC + 3NC...)R ]L = x

where R = Romantic sensibility; nNC = a device derived from New Critical conventions; P = stable and singular persona; L = lyric form,

and conversely: [R√NC/1 +NC/2 + NC/3...)/P]L = y

where x is a poem, and y the criticism it begets.

 In “After Free Verse” Marjorie Perloff quotes Steve McCaffery in reminding us that for the

longest time running, the page has had “no optical significance... prose structures tend to be

temporal rather than visual” (159). McCaffery contrasts this continuity of information with poetry,

where “the left-hand margin is always a starting point, the right-hand margin a terminal, neither of

which is determined by the randomness of page size but rather by the inner necessity of the

compositional process.” This is seen in the consistency of Toledo and Katigbak’s poetry in terms of

the lyric form, each poet appropriating the form for their own concerns – Toledo by literary trope,

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Katigbak by rhythm and sound. To be noted is how these techniques are still well within New

Critical design, being of the Modern tradition, and how their individual concerns – Toledo’s of

wisdom, Katigbak’s of feeling – are rooted in the Romantic by their alignment to the natural world

of seas and skies and love.

Perloff in another essay points to the age of free verse as the reason for lineation – “the

creation of discourse that does not run all the way to the right margin” – being that which allows us

to hold onto the survival of poetry as a method of discourse.

The implication for form is that lineation is the first step to considering a text a poem, and not necessarily at the level of being a good poem.

- Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms (Perloff 117)

However, in the face of the postmodern, poetics are marked by a collapsing of boundaries,

and the left-hand and right-hand margins become restrictions themselves. Lineation is not

destroyed, but extended. By designing pages to be looked at as well as to be read, the “inner necessity”

of composition remains intact, and is in fact, heightened by an awareness of form breaking out of

the usual.

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    elsewhere held and lingered crosses boundaries set by both page and propriety by speaking (or

not speaking) of a love affair, dealing with the experience of what must be marginalized for the sake

of propriety. elsewhere... plays brave host to fields of white space and is studded with the oft-ignored

paraphernalia of the page, focusing on that which is usually pushed to the periphery. This

transgression of page politics will be further discussed later on in light of specific techniques used:

that of synecdoche, white space, and the use of footnotes, etc.

________________________ 1 where it is not supposed to be? 2 In this case, with a mirror.

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elsewhere held and lingered has the Modern sensibility of renovation of structure, but the

collection undertakes this renovation by using postmodern techniques, mainly those of

transgression. If evaluated according to Ihab Hassan’s proposal that

Modernism – excepting Dada and Surrealism – created its own forms

of artistic Authority precisely because the center no longer held [while]

Postmodernism has tended toward artistic Anarchy in deeper complicity of

things falling apart... (400)

and that “Modernism does not suddenly cease so that Postmodernism may begin: they now

coexist” (390) – the tradition present in elsewhere held and lingered can be first evaluated as the revision

of Modernism – i.e. Postmodernism – and then the return to Modernism, as it settles for the

renovation of structure rather than embracing randomness and chaos as the anarchy of

Postmodernism is wont to do. Can it be that the postmodern transgression of structure that is

mostly found in the “affair poems”7 echoes the complicity of the persona with her lover in the illicit

affair they undertake? Does the return to more conventional form near the end of the book imply

the persona’s return to her rightful place beside the husband?

On the following page are four pages scanned at random from elsewhere held and lingered:

                                                        7 The “affair poems” being the ones concerned with the events of the actual affair, e.g. “Inventory of a year,” “This hand,” (which both utilize footnotes) and “Marginalia” (which uses, well, marginalia.) Noteworthy is the fact that these poems are found in the fourth section of the book, sequentially the center of the book, the book being composed of six sections all in all. 

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SEQUENTIAL AND SERIAL POETRY: ON THE LEVELS OF BOOK AND PAGE

There exists an implied narrative8 threading through the book as the affair begins,

progresses, culminates and ends. The narrative is never explicitly stated, but it remains that elsewhere

held and lingered is a sequence collection – where the poems are capable of telling a story by virtue of

their arrangement within the book. The poems do stand on their own – and this is a formalist virtue

– but the very narrative is lost on a reader if all they receive is one poem excised from the collection,

contiguity in this case being a presupposition of the narrative.9 The full effect of the narrative – and

consequently, the full gravity of the affair – is made known to the reader only if he begins at the

beginning and ends at the end.

The sequential nature of the collection can be traced to the book’s creation as a unit unto

itself. In her essay expounding Steve McCaffery’s book experiments and the extent to which they

materialize the structures of language, Marjorie Perloff cites McCaffery’s own”fanciful Cratylian

study” regarding the etymology of the word book

connected with the name of the beech tree

(Old English bok, boce, Old Norse bok)

in relation to the etymology of the word page

from the Latin pagina, whose stem pag- is also that of pangere

to fasten, fix in, fix together

making the point that a book as a beech tree is an organic object, a whole unit by itself, and

the page as a “kind of trellis,” where words and letters are fastened.

                                                        8 A “narrative thread” being proposed with evidence: the first poem being entitled “The Marriage,” and the last line of the last poem being “You crawl your way back to the center of the page,” evoking the poet‐persona’s return to the territory to which she conventionally belongs. 9 An affair being the phenomenon that encompasses the entire collection, containing poems for its beginning, middle, and end. No poem describes the entirety of the affair, and the nature of affairs – when discovered or broadcasted – requires that the “whole story” be told in the service of either truth or intrigue. 

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This notion of the poem as no longer just a single unit is present in Ihab Hassan’s rubric of

modernism known as experimentalism, that when extended into postmodernism becomes

improvisational or aleatory structure (394).

In coexistence with its sequential structure, elsewhere held and lingered has managed to

encompass the aleatory or open notion of structure as well: on the level of the single poem. This

form is notable for the way in which its elements are linked, and there are infinite relations; hence

the term, “open” form. The open form is equated to the serial form, and several of the poems in

elsewhere... are serial forms, i.e. “a paratactic structure (meaning ‘arranged side by side’) whose

elements, although related by the fact of their contiguity, are nevertheless autonomous” (Conte 22).

Examples of the serial form and its possibilities:

“Marginalia” (Cruz 56) and “Domestic Life” (68).

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A serial poem is an open form in the sense that the reader is invited to begin anywhere and

end anywhere, favoring the possibilities of multiple combinations over organic sequence. Conte

praises this complexity of meanings as “a level of artistic maturity comparable to particle physics”

(22). The final poem in elsewhere... is written in the form of an index of last lines,10 which brings in an

awareness of lines in poetry being taken out of context, and the possible shifts in meaning, especially

when none of the lines correspond to the rest of the poems in the book. Unlike the sequential

nature of the collection, the elements in the serial poems are not hierarchical,11 and “there is no

initiation, climax, or terminus precisely because there can be no development” (23).

12

                                                        10 As opposed to first lines, the poem’s nature having to deal – of course – with endings. 11 Much like the contiguity of husband to lover: the married woman cannot privilege the one over the other, or else the other will cease being husband or cease being lover. In this sense, neither is better; they are only different.  12 Cover art of elsewhere held and lingered, based on Stefanie Posavec’s “Rhythm Textures” experiment,* which explores methods of visually representing sentences, sometimes even extending to visual depictions of entire chapters of novels. elsewhere’s cover art is a modified rhythm texture: a diagram of word construction. Again the aim to unname.    *See her work at http://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk/ or http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie_posave.php 

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elsewhere held and lingered displays the coexistence of postmodern techniques striving to fulfill a

modern aim, and when held up as an example, McCaffery’s aforementioned book-as-a-unit, page-as-

a-trellis possibilities synchronize with Conte’s theory of sequential and serial forms. elsewhere...

articulates these theories in a two-fold manner, which in turn unfolds into actual devices within the

collection and its individual poems:

1.) Sequential structure occurs at the level of the book-as-a-unit, creating an organic whole

and employing semiotic techniques that allow the poems within the collection to respond to one

another. 1a.) For example, four poems share the title “A sensible life,” and they are alike in form –

short and succint, left-aligned on the page – and alike in content, as they all center around the figure

of a cat being observed by a persona as the cat goes about its daily activities. 1b.) Also worth

mentioning here are the two poems “A red dress” and “There are worse things,” both quatrains with

similar dramatic situations – the persona speaking in first-person to another her in the mirror, who

responds. In the first poem, the color of a dress is discussed, and the dress by virtue of the search

for the right word, turns into “the word” by the close of the poem. In the second, infidelity is the

topic of discourse, the persona revealing her true bitterness to the self in the mirror – the words

“fucking slut” jarring the reader’s consciousness – before the persona finally “puts her gloss on.”

In the book’s blurb, Mabi David asks: “What happens to the self when it permits the

trangressive act?” The two poems correspond with each other in terms of discourse between

fragments of the persona,13 who – despite the shifts in point-of-view throughout the collection –

coalesces into the one persona who is having the affair, especially in “A red dress” and “There are

worse things,” where she confronts herself in the mirror.

                                                        13 Worth noting – or footnoting – here is that the device of the fragmented persona is a Modern device. Interestingly enough, the difference between this Modern persona and the highly reliable, easily recognizable persona that is present in poetry such as Katigbak’s is a difference that lies in geography as much as it does in theory, the fragmented persona being as Western as it is Modern. 

Magno  26 

2. The serial structure, on the other hand, occurs at the level of individual poems,

simultaneously realizing the page function McCaffery described: Cruz experiments with form by

“fastening” text to parts of the page where text rarely occurs.

By poeticizing the experience of a married woman having “the luck or misfortune of

peripheral vision” (Cruz 81), elsewhere held and lingered is a discourse of what then remains within that

woman’s grasp: all that which she claims for herself outside of the marriage. In the creation of

poetry that seeks to articulate this transgression, Cruz lays her own claim on the paraphernalia14 of

the page, that property rarely used, often considered irrelevant.15 elsewhere held and lingered is about this

overstepping of boundaries, and ultimately, the simultaneous preservation and transgression of

things held dear – be it marriage, be it poetic form.

                                                        14 Origin: mid 17th cent. (denoting property owned by a married woman): from medieval Latin, based on Greek parapherna ‘property apart from a dowry,’ from para ‘distinct from’ + pherna (from phernē ‘dowry’) 15 What follows appropriately: the etymology of paraphernalia as a married woman’s property aside from her dowry. 

Magno  27 

16

                                                        16 “Marginalia” made a page. 

Magno  28 

Close readings reveal postmodern techniques existing within the modernist goal – and these

postmodern qualities are extensions of certain modern rubrics that Ihab Hassan identifies: 2a.) a

privileging of synecdoche as an extension of the unsaid, 2b.) evidence of white space as the choice to

remain silent in a space where one is expected to speak, and 2c.) an overarching transgression of

page politics with the use of the aforementioned paraphernalia of the page – footnotes, marginalia,

and appropriated forms such as multiple-choice.

SYNECDOCHE: THE UNSAID

Jonathan Safran Foer, contemporary author and precious literary figure, said this about his

growing collection of blank pieces of paper: “I wanted to see if the accumulation of emptiness

would be greater than the sum of its parts.” Though the idea of such a collection seems pretentious

at first, it is given gravitas by the fact that these blank pages were contributed by Foer’s favorite

writers – the pages being the pages from the top of their personal stacks of writing paper, i.e. the

next piece of paper they would have written on. For Foer, that invisible literature exists first by its

proximity to what was actually written, and second by virtue of its absence on the page (Foer).

This fascination with the dual existence of potential and emptiness is the fascination of

synecdoche – which when pushed beyond the realist method of simply giving a part for a whole

becomes an extension of the poetic notion of the unsaid. More on this potentiality later, but one

would like to echo Ann Lauterbach – sideways-as-opposed-to-forward-thinking champion of the

postmodern – in her fear of the unbridgeable gaps between fragments and the corresponding

celebration instead of the fragment as the whole fragment (Lauterbach 3).

On the topic of gaps between theory and text, Harold Bloom mentions two literary

techniques in The Breaking of Form:

In lyric poetry, there is a crucial gap between reduction or metonymy

and the part-for-whole representation of synecdoche...

Magno  29 

A metonymy names, but a synecdoche begins a process

that leads to an un-naming (11).

The distinction of synecdoche from metonymy is that synecdoche is concerned with

absences and metonymy concerned with presences, specifically those of names. elsewhere held and

lingered, for example, functions without proper nouns, recalling a footnote in “Inventory of a year”

wielding a certain irony in its declaration: “It goes without saying a secret thrives in the absence of a

record” (48) when the book itself remains the truest record of the secret affair, even as in places it

chooses instead not to speak, e.g. in the main body of the page, the conventional territory of a poet.

In contrast, metonymy, like metaphor, extends the signified by making it more present in the

reader’s consciousness. This is done by equating signifiers to what surrounds it or what is contiguous

to it, therefore creating a context in which the signified can fulfill a specific function attributed to it.

Metaphors and similes work in a similar manner by extending the signified to what else exists like it.

This is the goal of lyric or organic poetry: to equate “disparate materials, to draw them toward a

central axis that expresses some unity of the whole” (Conte 23). Proximity therefore is key to the

metaphoric discourse, and proximity presupposes presence.

Metonymy, metaphor, and simile therefore intensify the signifier by connoting the presence

of more signifieds; the tropes differ only in their method of doing so, whether by implying

contiguity or similarity. These presences become more powerful in a reader’s consciousness the

more popular a particular trope becomes. The image of a red, red rose, for example, will always

point to the notion of love.17

Metaphor and simile are rare in the collection; Cruz adheres to plain and concrete language,

rarely straying into abstractions. Metonymy in elsewhere... is more present, but subtle. For example,

                                                        17 “A rose is a rose is a rose, she sings.” (Cruz 48) As metaphor as metaphor can get. 

Magno  30 

the series18 of poems entitled “A sensible life,” in which the cat is always present, culminate with the

final poem where the cat is asserting an absence by implying the uncertainty of its presence:

The cat is nowhere to be found. The cat is in the house, somewhere. - A sensible life (Cruz 65) The cat as extension of the female persona works as metonym rather than symbol19 because

the cat makes appearances throughout the collection in poems other than “A sensible life:” in

“Errand,” the persona imagines the cat looking out the window of the apartment she is surveying; in

“Where were you all this time?” near the end of the collection, the cat is “still asleep where it wants

to” – much like the cat in the first poem “The Marriage” sunning itself in the room where the

persona confronts her husband. The cat, therefore, in accordance to metonymy’s use of contiguity,

is obviously a pet, present in the persona’s life, and while it is not an exact reflection of her

character, it hints of her activities by simply being present or absent.20

In terms of etymology, metonymy, via Latin from Greek, comes from metōnumia, literally

“change of name.” See the poem “A red dress,” reproduced here in full:

Not rust, she says to me in the mirror. Not cinnamon, or god forbid, fulvous. Not quite ruby or cherry, maybe carmine, maybe crimson. Vermilion, I say, and I put the word on. (34)

                                                        18 The word “series” here being employed not as the Comte device* but simply to denote paratactic structure. 19 Easy to equate the bored and straying cat to the straying female persona, but by the end of the book, in the poem “Where were you all this time?” the cat is “still asleep where it wants to,” while the persona has slipped herself into place beside her husband, having ended the affair. 20 The question “Where were you all this time?**” presupposing the notion that what matters is not what you do, but whether you were there or not.  *i.e. with a contrasting example of sequential structure. **possibly the question that the husband poses to the persona of the wife, whether silently or out loud.  

Magno  31 

Note the metonymy – the paradigmatic play – where the discourse of color culminates in the

dress itself being replaced by the word, the “word.” The word “red” is mentioned but once, and in

the process of the poem becomes redder than the actual word “red” can evoke in the mind’s eye.

The poem achieves this intensification by grasping for specificity – the proffered words being

contiguous to the actual word but not exactly like the real word; the thesaurus, therefore, is the book

of metonymic play.

However and remarkably, the poem can also be read with an eye for synecdoche, by virtue

of the omission of the word “scarlet.” “Scarlet” as a synonym for “red” is also present in the

consciousness of the reader, though it is unmentioned, because “scarlet” is closer to the notion of

red than say “fulvous” or “carmine,” and ultimately, because of the subject matter of the entire book.

Synecdoche spurs the awareness of absence by giving the reader only part of a whole,

emphasizing that something somehow had to be left out, i.e. the word “scarlet” and its implications

of infidelity and promiscuity, hinting that this is not how the persona sees herself – literally, in the

poem – in the mirror. Here, poetic intention crosses over into persona’s discretion.

The unsaid is usually attributed to the associative properties of words in a poem, to the

potential tension between signifier and signified. Cruz utilizes this grammatical method knowingly,

even self-reflexively. A few lines from “Swivel” exemplify her use of parts for a whole

The mouth in secluded places. The tongue and its conclusions.

Say, your body like no other. Say, your body removed from simile.

...

Say, the body in this bed not its absence in another.

...

Each moment, the compulsive incisions: the wished-for hand, the wishing it away (28).

Magno  32 

– as if the body were to be made more present somehow by removing it from simile, from

that which is like it to that which is only part of it, intensifying absence by making present only the

parts of the body one can hold.

For an example in terms of form beyond grammar, two strophes from Cruz’s Multiple choice:

11. a. with a breakdown of bone: scapula, clavicle, sternum b. with the mechanism that lets me dream you alive c. with my aversion to hints of faith in horoscopes 12. a. she walked naked across the room without asking b. she walked naked and without the slightest clue c. she walked naked into the other woman’s closet (21) By presenting answers, and solely answers, laid out in the form of multiple choice, what is

made present in the reader’s consciousness is the absence of questions. Bloom calls this quality of

authentic poetry the “dearth of meaning achieved by strategies of exclusion, or what can be called

litanies of evasion” (15), going on to quote Roger Poole’s amendment of the question “What does

this poem mean?” to “What has got left out of this poem to make of it the particularly expensive

torso that it is?” When faced with synecdoche, one is therefore pressed to look at what’s missing.21

WHITE SPACE: ROOM FOR RESPONSE

As for the notion of white space,22

                                                        21 The irony of this statement is not to be lost on the reader, or in the discourse of this paper. 22 The irony of this statement is not to be lost on the reader, or in the discourse of this paper. 

Magno  33 

Magno  34 

The question of why text stops at a certain point points to the same function that allows the

question of why “scarlet” is omitted from the thesauric discourse of “red” in “A red dress,” i.e. 1.)

the function of white space as potential because something is unsaid. 2.) Furthermore, white space

understood at the level of intention allows the reader to problematize this particular choice of the

writer to literally blank out in at a particular point in the text, pointing to the authorial decision to

keep silent. 3.) Finally, the turnover of possible discourse from the author to the reader points to the

function of white space as an openness to the reader’s response, much like Hassan’s enigmatic

blanks positioned after his postulated rubrics (Hassan 392) or his quote borrowed from Erich Heller

concerning postmodernism’s device of wilful incompletion: “the employment of the material in the

service of its own negation” (390).

These three functions are not separate from each other but are linked in a general

transgression of language – the choice to remain silent in a space where one is expected to speak.

(Of course there cannot be a full boycott of language, because then the book would cease to exist.

Spaces and language exist by virtue of each other, and white space is merely the privileging of the

former over the latter, especially in an area of the book where the latter should prevail, e.g. the body

of the page in the poem “Inventory of a year.”)

By virtue of its visuality, white space is more than an extension of the notion of

synecdoche’s unsaid. Synecdoche’s unsaid presumes the existence of a specific something that was,

much like a phantom limb is specific to the part of the body from which it is missing. White space,

on the other hand, boycotts language itself, therefore moving beyond un-naming to not-naming, a

silence either chosen or imposed.23

                                                        23 Highly appropriate to the nature of an affair, where silence becomes room for response, and response becomes gossip. Such is the discourse between reader and text, when the text so deftly wields the aforementioned “heuristic gift” – not just by virtue of what it says, but by virtue of where it decides to remain silent. 

Magno  35 

What then does this imply for a reader, pressed to respond? This response must be evaluated

in terms of what has been given. One such example of white space as the boycotting of language can

be examined beside another example of transgression – this time not of language but of page

politics: Cruz’s “Inventory of a year,” a poem entirely composed of footnotes to blank pages: the

white space allowing the reader to speculate on what must exist in the void,

and why it had to be left out.

Magno  36 

THE PARAPHERNALIA OF A PAGE: CROSSING OUT A LINE OR TWO

What follows is an excerpted footnote from “Inventory of a year,” specifically the sixteenth

footnote on page 48 of elsewhere held and lingered.

Magno  37 

“16From the marginalia of platitudes, i.e., wishful thinking:24 It goes without saying

that in the hierarchy25 of a page, the margins are in the periphery.26 It goes without

saying that a digression is a glitch on the sheet, easily reparable with one stroke of

correction fluid.27 It goes without saying that a secret thrives in the absence of

record. A rose is a rose is a rose, she sings.”

                                                        24 Taking this clause as a device of synecdoche* illuminates the footnote as the area of possibility,** where the subjunctive reigns over the indicative, hence the wishful thinking.*** 25 A hierarchy denotes ranking denotes politics denotes power distributed unequally.  26 The bulk of the power, therefore, would be in the body of the text. If the affair is detailed in the footnotes, one then assumes***** the body of the text is the territory of the husband, the rightful partner. 27 Digressions better being relegated to footnotes rather than to the main body of the sheet, where “one stroke of correction fluid” will still leave a telltale absence between innocent texts. Footnotes, on the other hand, belong to the space of the page where a reader does not expect text to exist in the first place. The irony here lies in the use of footnotes to blank pages, which forces the reader to focus on the footnote itself. Something had to be read, and therefore, nothing is concealed.  * ...composed entirely of footnotes to blank pages, the footnotes containing the intimate details of an affair. **as opposed to platitudes both moral and mundane. *** the affair in the poem being the narrator’s desires**** actualized ****the most fun they’d each had in years” Conchitina Cruz, elsewhere held and lingered (Quezon City: High Chair, 2008). 48 *****here, one only assumes, i.e. steps into the subjunctive, because the body of the text is left blank, the white space telling us (by not telling us) that the husband is – quite literally – out of the picture.****** ******”It goes without saying that a secret thrives in the absence of record.” 

Magno  38 

RELEVANT LAST LINES:

a supermimesis achieved by an art that will not abandon the self to language (Bloom 37)

And then there is this. I am talking about / something really heartbreaking. (Toledo 60)

Begin, I say, again. (Cruz 73)

constantly rediscover their language and constantly see anew their world (Abad 292)

Holding our breaths for the next big arrival (Katigbak 72)

I will be more watchful of beauty (Toledo 56)

never mind what happened since (Cruz 16)

One can see better from the periphery than from the center (Lauterbach 3)

the moment there is nothing to see (Cruz 13)

What is weak will be forgotten (Bloom 5)

you are no longer asking a question (Cruz 12)

You crawl your way back to the center of the page. 180 (Cruz 81)

Magno  39 

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