A Small Press Review “Pick” for 2008.
"James Penha is able to mold exotic topics into poignant universal truths. Should I be called upon to speak at a funeral, I would choose to quote the first four lines of the evocative title poem, 'No Bones to Carry.'"
--Virginia Howard, Editor, THEMA
"James Penha's imagination will whet your own. This book is a feast."
--Louie Crew
"The poems in No Bones to Carry are nuanced and expansive, defining the individual’s place in the larger world. Here, Penha reminds us of the limitations of our perception and the poet’s struggle to see beyond them."
-- Blas Falconer
NO BONES TO CARRY & NO DEEPER MEANING!
Notes on the new collection and on poetry
by James Penha
My students have been trained—mistrained, I’d say, by too many teachers—to believe that every work of literature is reducible to a theme. They call it, to my dismay, “the deeper meaning,” as if the treasure (and pleasure) of poetry resides not in the poem, but somewhere in its basements and dungeons. I do not read or teach poetry that way. I certainly don’t write it that way . . . as a dog buries its bone.
I have obsessions; I have fears; I have dreams. Mostly, I have questions. Rarely have I deeper meanings or themes or answers.
And when I do, I don’t bury them. Whatever satisfaction and fulfillment readers find in my poems emanates, I hope, from the experience etched in them—in the words, the music, the wondering, and wonder.
I often feel more like a jazz singer than a poet. The words denote and imply only insofar as the vocalist improvises a melody, a mood, and a rhythm. Sinatra’s phrasing; Billie’s mimesis.
I often feel more like an actor than a poet. I need to think and feel like the speakers of the poems: so many of them lost and helpless, foolish and mean. I need to understand them to play them . . . to give them voice and a chance to redeem themselves.
from "EVAPOETRY"
To paint poetry
on the walk
of the summer palace
is an exercise
of body and soul.
I often feel more like a painter than a poet. I see what’s horribly and beautifully in front of my eyes—only peripherally visible to passersby—and try to frame those images with colors sometimes bolder than real (sometimes black and white), with a composition that leads an audience in time through a narrative, and with discernible brushstrokes proving that some one, at least, has noticed.
After twenty years in Asia, fifteen in Indonesia, I remain an outsider, but a loving one—working hard in my personal and professional life never to be or even seem imperial, but well aware that I will always have feet the size of Gulliver’s. Such tensions and paradoxes are part of Indonesia in particular, and one of the reasons it fascinates me so. This is a deeply religious nation, but its roots are in the soil of an animistic archipelago.
For a Muslim back from Mecca to consult a dukun, a shaman, is no surprise; for a village’s most respected Christian convert to describe how his father turned into a snake to attack his enemies presents no contradiction; for a Jakarta street singer to wear an Osama bin Laden tee shirt and a New York Yankees cap distresses no one.
Indonesia has no monopoly on paradox of course, but it has helped me live at ease with the beautiful contradictions elsewhere in Asia: A Beijing retiree demonstrates the immortality of classical poetry by writing it in water on a sidewalk; a Chinese painter explains how freedom in art and perhaps in politics derives from rigor and discipline.
The ultimate paradox, the cohabitation of life and death, is solved no where on earth, but in this ring of fire, it burns so dramatically and so frequently, that a poet can be forgiven for believing that he has come to accept the fragility of his own life on a planet so powerfully spirited amidst a universe so wonderfully incomprehensible. What is dead? What is alive? Maybe the questions, though unanswerable, are irrelevant. Maybe poetry defies the questions. Here, in this volume, Rimbaud lives and disappears, as he does in his own oeuvre. Park rangers with whom I supped on the coast of Java one night are swept in and out to sea by a tsunami the following week. A colleague opens a beer at a Bali bar I have haunted for years and is blown to smithereens by a terrorist’s bomb. Earthquakes. Mudslides. Volcanoes. Imagination must give way to inspiration.
Writing a poem is a strangely selfless act, I think. Although the motivation for starting a poem is often a deeply personal feeling of loss or pain or confusion or joy that must be expressed, the poem will make its own demands on the poet. The poem wants clarity; the poem wants beauty; the poem wants to become a medium through which one individual experience can be communicated over miles and years to be felt by unknown “generations.” And so the poet must come to care more about the poem than about the intimate emotion that gave it inspiration. In this way, poetry heals--not by disremembering, but rather by revising memory into a palpable presence. One that can be shared. Poetry immortalizes.
