The Philippine Online Chronicles

To the Beatles I owe a childhood animated by a psychedelic vocabulary and schooled in the sonorous seductions of gibberish—pataphysical and polythene and toejam football and walrus gumboot jabberwocking with obladi-oblada and jai guru deva om and soe-leh-moe-kee-von-tre-byan-awn-sawm; a childhood adrift in a shape-shifting playground at times featuring macabre slapstick, murderous silver hammers clang-clanging and falling on heads, or coded trips assisted by plasticine porters and fixated on the euphemistic Lucy in the sky, or surreal travels at sea, in a yellow submarine, if not an octopus’s garden in the shade, or hyperbolic critiques of taxmen taxing everything and your feet; a childhood of excessive repetition and casual encounters and vivid visuals and non-sequiturs—from so much twisting and shouting to so many hellos and goodbyes, from Lovely Rita to Sexy Sadie to Doctor Robert to Father McKenzie, from words like endless rain into a paper cup to two of us riding nowhere spending someone’s hard-earned pay, from I read the news today, oh boy to I’d love to turn you on; all this effortlessly acquired on slow summer days spent lounging on an itchy red couch or playing dead on the marble floor or obsessively watching the record on the turntable spin, spin, spin, in the company of an ever-changing cast of stray cats and two sisters prancing about, practicing their latest dance moves.

The Beatles were, for the most part, background music, the soundtrack to a quiet and relatively unremarkable childhood, but there was something in those songs that, despite physical evidence to the contrary, kept me awake and listening, and what was meant to accompany the day became the point of the day’s unfolding. Which is to say that the Beatles taught me not just a love for music but a love for words, and the love for words was not unconditionally given and granted but elicited and earned by the acts of language they made available to me and to which they made me pay attention, since what they offered was an elastic and diverse repertoire. Which is to say that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were my early teachers in poetry.

One of the Beatles songs I knew most as a kid was “Blackbird”—I listened to it often, played it on the piano, memorized the words, and then one dreary summer day when I was seized by the realization that I would have to go to school forever, that the foreseeable future was all about extended periods of monitored boredom, the song became pertinent to my life. The blackbird, its color notwithstanding, was not a bad omen; it was misunderstood and prejudged; it was vulnerable and sympathetic. The blackbird was not just a literal bird; it was also something else. Without teaching me the actual terms, the song taught metaphor and paradox and symbol and pathos. The blackbird was me at ten years old, hating school, and then at fifteen, wanting to move out of the house, and then at eighteen, doing equal amounts of worthless and worthwhile things, and then at twenty-five, moving into my first apartment on the other side of the world. And by this I mean to dwell less on the self-centeredness of a reader/listener who relates to a text because it confirms or conforms to personal experience and more on the capacity of a poem to abstract experience so that it simultaneously speaks to you and permits you to be the voice of its speech. I have on my playlist “Blackbird” by the Beatles, Elliott Smith, Sarah McLachlan, and Sarah Vaughn; they are the same song and at the same time four different songs because they are voiced differently, the way “Blackbird” is the same song I’ve known since childhood but also different with every attentive encounter because I am different at every such point, and what I draw from it when I listen to it or what I invest in it when I sing it is not redundant.

I believe that every poem presents its own theory of poetry, and thus, there are as many theories of poetry as there are poems themselves. What I hope to do in this series of short essays is exercise attentiveness to various acts of language, where poetry is as much an attitude and lens as it is a genre. The essays are not about why poetry matters, since that is already given, but how it does, and every poem this series invites you to become attentive to is meant to serve as an illustration.

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Paul McCartney at rehearsal: Blackbird (Ari721)