Narcissus : poems /
Cayanan, Mark Anthony.
Narcissus : poems / by Mark Anthony Cayanan. - Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila University Press, c2011. - x, 96 p. 26 cm.
Text in English.
and yet another addresses an other with oblique self-evanescence : "You are now no longerare. I can extend / upon myself the same luxury." The 'placelessness,' the emptiness of the I, alright, but one fit and apt for Cayanan's brilliant notion of a 'hovering self'! OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES. rapt poetry whose aim is dear. Bravissima! J. Neil C. Garcia. In this volume, Mark Anthony Cayanan's avatar of the queer is a versatile actress-ardent in figural maquillage, resolute through epistemic pantomimes, equipoised for tropic pirouettes. At the same time, most of Narcissus wishes to figure out a subject prior to melismatic fervor. The poet speaks to be free from the ornaments of longing. Queer desire is placed, and vocally so, in a zone where the lyrical affair between the voice and its converse, the gaze, is always already intimate. A certitude comes thereafter : the frailty of the gaze. What remains radiant is that sonority, free from remonstrance, voice becomes a body vertebrate. Hail, this "heart and its erratic echo," that strange sultry tone, this lovely poet! J. PILAPIL JACOBO. Emil Beneveniste once characterized the first-person pronoun an "empty sign' in Language. As such sign, it enables any & every speaker to populate it with his/her person/ e upon usage. This lingual I is thus quintessentially paradoxical : its generality as a sign creates an endless series of 'subject-positions' for speakers to inhabit, but its ensuing forms of particularity always secure for us the 'subject-effect' that we so need to believe in our self-presence with each and every speech act. Cayanan's unusual poems instantiate some of the purest and most playful expressions of this lingual I, away from the typically lyric I of the Confessional (his chosen mode which, in the hands of a less gifted poet given over to the blandishments of vainglory, can degenerate into tedious rehearsals of solipsistic self-love and the most egregious excesses of autobiography). Cayanan avoids these dangers by skillfully bookending Confession with its Others of Concealment across the poems, by consistently twinning revelation with restraint. He achieves this expressive lyricism : "I slide into my mouth, the fit an indication of fate," says one speaker with self-certitude NARCISSUS Poems by Mark Anthony Cayanan The infinitives that spur the utterances in Cayanan's Narcissus are the infinitives that shore up the body of the enduring myth : to see, to crave, to speak. And yet, the lyric speaker, both subject and object of these poems' abiding gaze, is not only iteratively performed by such powerful insistences into fabulous existence-he is simply, thoroughly, and impossibly adored. This, as we know, is the way with imagination, whose claim on our attention must be both beauty and truth, and whose portraitures do not so much reflect as textualize the considering face, fashioning it as multiplicies of relations in which the self, at once loving and loved, can be lost and thereby irreparably found...A bright and staggering accomplishment, ruthless in its confident entitlement, and lovely in its solipsism. Poetry that seethes and flounces, again and again
9789715506342
Philippine poetry (English).
PS 9993.C39 / .N165 2011
Narcissus : poems / by Mark Anthony Cayanan. - Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila University Press, c2011. - x, 96 p. 26 cm.
Text in English.
and yet another addresses an other with oblique self-evanescence : "You are now no longerare. I can extend / upon myself the same luxury." The 'placelessness,' the emptiness of the I, alright, but one fit and apt for Cayanan's brilliant notion of a 'hovering self'! OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES. rapt poetry whose aim is dear. Bravissima! J. Neil C. Garcia. In this volume, Mark Anthony Cayanan's avatar of the queer is a versatile actress-ardent in figural maquillage, resolute through epistemic pantomimes, equipoised for tropic pirouettes. At the same time, most of Narcissus wishes to figure out a subject prior to melismatic fervor. The poet speaks to be free from the ornaments of longing. Queer desire is placed, and vocally so, in a zone where the lyrical affair between the voice and its converse, the gaze, is always already intimate. A certitude comes thereafter : the frailty of the gaze. What remains radiant is that sonority, free from remonstrance, voice becomes a body vertebrate. Hail, this "heart and its erratic echo," that strange sultry tone, this lovely poet! J. PILAPIL JACOBO. Emil Beneveniste once characterized the first-person pronoun an "empty sign' in Language. As such sign, it enables any & every speaker to populate it with his/her person/ e upon usage. This lingual I is thus quintessentially paradoxical : its generality as a sign creates an endless series of 'subject-positions' for speakers to inhabit, but its ensuing forms of particularity always secure for us the 'subject-effect' that we so need to believe in our self-presence with each and every speech act. Cayanan's unusual poems instantiate some of the purest and most playful expressions of this lingual I, away from the typically lyric I of the Confessional (his chosen mode which, in the hands of a less gifted poet given over to the blandishments of vainglory, can degenerate into tedious rehearsals of solipsistic self-love and the most egregious excesses of autobiography). Cayanan avoids these dangers by skillfully bookending Confession with its Others of Concealment across the poems, by consistently twinning revelation with restraint. He achieves this expressive lyricism : "I slide into my mouth, the fit an indication of fate," says one speaker with self-certitude NARCISSUS Poems by Mark Anthony Cayanan The infinitives that spur the utterances in Cayanan's Narcissus are the infinitives that shore up the body of the enduring myth : to see, to crave, to speak. And yet, the lyric speaker, both subject and object of these poems' abiding gaze, is not only iteratively performed by such powerful insistences into fabulous existence-he is simply, thoroughly, and impossibly adored. This, as we know, is the way with imagination, whose claim on our attention must be both beauty and truth, and whose portraitures do not so much reflect as textualize the considering face, fashioning it as multiplicies of relations in which the self, at once loving and loved, can be lost and thereby irreparably found...A bright and staggering accomplishment, ruthless in its confident entitlement, and lovely in its solipsism. Poetry that seethes and flounces, again and again
9789715506342
Philippine poetry (English).
PS 9993.C39 / .N165 2011
