We're here to talk about a poem by Patrick Rosal, and it's called Uptown Ode that Ends on an Ode to the Machete. It's from a book of poems that's published in 2016 called Brooklyn Antediluvian. It's actually all in ModPo, at least the time of this recording, the most contemporary poem that we're talking about. In Brooklyn Antediluvian, we encountered this poem, which is divided distinctly into two parts. So we'll talk about those two parts. But the first part is written in a frenetic, and I think I would say not happy but ecstatic, excited, energetic, present tense. Can anyone, maybe Connie, just say in the most basic way, what you think is literally going on? What is the scene? Probably towards the night there's traveling going on. The author or the narrator and Willie are just going across the city, across the bridge to a bar, dancing. There's that frenetic energy. Is it just the speaker and Willie? It seems like people are joining them. I think Orlando has joined them. Kamara, do we know where they are? East Side Franklin and Fulton, I know Tito Puente was from Spanish Harlem. El Barrio. El Barrio, yeah. So that's AKA Spanish Harlem, or East Harlem? Yeah. So they're going uptown, it looks like. Lily, we've got an energetic present tense, men going dancing. This must remind you of another poetics in early poetics. Yes, it sounds like Frank O'Hara's The Old Place. At the Old Place. In particular, but what more generally about O'Hara do you see here? We're not going any particular place. We're just weaving in and out as though we were at a party behind one person's shoulder. Anna, it's not even five past midnight in El Barrio, and I'm nodding to evil spinning one ill cut after another. It's another O'Hara poem that we encounter in ModPo that this reminds you, don't you think? It's got that classic O'Hara New York School I do this, I do that style. It reminds me of the beginning of The Day Lady Died. Or even the end. Or the end. [inaudible]. I mean, actually, the whole poem. It's these motions through the city. I know O'Hara is anti-narrative, but Rosal updates that anti-narrative with the simultaneity. These things are all happening at once, where he says, "Don't take three minutes for me and Will to jump on the dance floor or post up at the bar sipping on Barrilito, or to tap on my glass." The or instead of the and that O'Hara would use makes all of these things happen with this charged simultaneous energy. Carlos, I'm going to ask an obvious question, but I feel it's really important. How else is Patrick Rosal being different? This is a New York poem, it's in New York, but it's a different New York from Frank O'Hara's New York, no? Yeah. Well, it's very textured by immigrant culture. I mean, Frank O'Hara can be very musical, but I think that this poem has such a sonic quality to it. It's such a condensed, heated rhythm. That almost matches the different kinds of music that he's referring to. When we listen to it, it's very [inaudible]. It sounds almost like it's a drum, actually. His voice sounds like a drum. I was just underlining while he was saying some of the words that stuck out to me, the verbs specifically. The fly us from Franklin, the zip up the East Side, the knocking to Esther Williams. Not only it was the performance varied. Percussion-y? Percussive? Percussive, but the language itself, especially the verbs. So there's very little in the way of I am's. The I am's goes [inaudible]. This is up the East Side, over the bridge, up East Side. So we get much more of a series of unstressed syllables and then we lead to some beats. So it's almost scored by Tito Puente in a way. So we have a general sense of the importance of Spanish culture, and Filipino's relationship to Spanish is complicated. Anything else to add? I mean, Connie said diaspora. Is that apparent in the first section? Well, I think, because in maybe the New York School poetics, the demotic language and the reference to the objects is really important here, even more so, maybe they seem like artifacts or a way to connect to something that's lost. There's, I think, a sense of going back or a sense of the importance of these objects [inaudible]. Lily and Kamara, can we add one more factor before we go to the next section, which is there. So there's O'Hara like homosociality here. These are guys who are dancing with each other, just as in O'Hara is at the old place. Anything to say of significance about that, Lily [inaudible]. [inaudible] get at the very end of this section, he goes from calling, I'm assuming it's the same person calling his friend or maybe it's actually his brother Willie to dear brother Will all capitalists. So you could interpret that a few different ways like all capitalizations makes it seem like this as a title that he holds. Possibly, it could mean he calls him by a name that he translated to English as dear brother Will, all caps or maybe you'd like a term of endearment that wouldn't translate something like that, but like very clearly underscoring that this statement that dear brother Will is about to make isn't to be taken lightly. It is dear just like the relationship that they have with each other. So let's just assume that Lily is right about Will, was it maybe a special relationship because the others may be, in fact, they may be from all parts of what makes up the El Barrio and makes up Spanish Harlem, and Latin American, Central American, Filipino. But brother Will seems to have a special thing he wants to say as a result of this great experience that the monopoly flock is having. Anna, how would you paraphrase that? We are all trying to get home. Good luck. I would say it's the push and pull of that immigrant experience of the places where you can maintain your contact to your culture and tradition, and yet also participate in being part of the motley flock. So maybe like him saying this and especially if you listen to the reading, like this is the moment, this is the gravitas moment really which stands in such a wonderful contrast to the energy that we were talking about at the beginning of this discussion, that makes you pause and think about actually what that struggle or what that sometimes it's a struggle, maybe sometimes it can be tremendously empower existing with one foot in each. Yes. I'm going to jump ahead briefly. When he uses the word Duan De, it's really appropriate to this poem. Can you explain? So Duan De, I think has a couple of different meanings depending on how you learn about it. But it's either like the spirituality of a place, a landscape, which comes from, I think primarily Latin culture or the spirituality or sense of aura in a piece of art, the poetic landscape or artistic landscape. There is so many layers in this poem because there's the poetic landscape of the poem and then Duan de that we're reading. Then there is this kind that these people are trying to create in this dense heated moment of music and connecting. But far away from some origin. Far away from their origins, which is another landscape. They're trying to travel to. Reproduce it in the motley flock. Yeah. Right. But then that inevitably makes Will think, wait a minute, what we're really doing here is we're all trying to get homes. One of the advantages of using the present tense, which is the style, is that when you get to, we are all trying to get home. You continue the present tense. In fact, in doing all this present tense uptown, downtown movement, and dancing, and integration of cultures and creation of a motley flock, you are in that trying to get home. It's not as if now we will say that in a general present, we are all trying to get home. So it has a greater power. So the second half of the poem seems to be the second Ode. The first Ode is the Uptown Ode, and now it ends. In fact, more than 50 percent of it becomes an Ode to the Machete. So it begins with that powerful line that I think Connie referred to, allow me to translate. [inaudible] I think he's very clearly signaling who he expects his audience to be, meaning someone to whom this experience from the first section would not be familiar at all. Right. So brother Will has sent this to me and now I turn to you in the second Ode and say, "I think I want to explain what this means." But I actually think it's complicated and I don't know that super cleared from reading the second section at first. Whether he's translating all of only what Will said, "We are all trying to get home," or if he's translating the entire first paragraph like which part of the first stanza are we supposed to be able to graph on to this second? So that is a key ambiguity. Am I translating what will just told me, or am I translating this entire scene? To do so, I need to go somewhere else. One of the first things to notice is that it differs so much from the first section in tempo and also in the syntax. Allow me to translate, there's some sort of implicit didacticism, but then also you have images that come. In that next line there are neighborhoods in America. It sounds like a mini-lecture. Something about the machete, that is a tool, that is not only violent. Yes? Yeah. Because you can use it for so many different things, it becomes a very complex image that both references many different uses and then many different cultures in the poem. What made me think that the second section is actually a translation of the entire first section is the way that these if- Which is, by the way, let me pause it, a really interesting idea. Thank you. I mean, can you say a little more about that? What is the second ode? Is it a mirror? What made me think it two things, one was, he mentions the law of moving bodies, which I thought was like Newton's laws. Yes. It's a pawn on physics and diaspora. I thought the law is for every action, there's an equal but opposite reaction. So I thought maybe he was intending to say, even though he's describing dancing, I thought it was an idea of, here's this section and maybe presented in this environment, it's got an equal but opposite translation. But there's a real shift to me in the groundedness of the first section. It has the objects that we talked about, the artifacts. It has people, it got names, it has directions, it has movement that we can anchor, like they went from here to here. But the second section has an almost magical realistic or quality to it. We know he's going back to a real place, he's making a pilgrimage. He's looking at the process by where some of these things are made, but there is almost a dreamier quality to it. It is an origin story to the exact place where. Then you have fire and embers and making things. The machete, not as a symbol, but as an actual tool, this is where it's forged. I wanted to talk about religion and rights and traditions in this passage. The biggest content change for me is that after this first section of fun and dancing and the city life of New York City, we get back to this origin story that is rooted in diablos, and rights, and weeping, and black saints, and disgruntled angels which for me says something about like, if this part is a translation of this, then there must be something also holy or devilish in this as well. So I think that's really powerful and beautiful. I'm feeling excited about discovering yet again, from Patrick Rosal, what we know about American music. Let's say from New Orleans, for instance, to take a different mode, which is American music is essentially created from the diaspora, from horrific, forced diasporic bodies moving. Now, let's turn to the last section, which I will read and I'll invite each of you to say something about. If now we are so, we're not in Frank O'Hara's New York anymore. Total. We are not in that style, we are not in that present tense, and now he's becoming a little more formalistic and creating a triad of what hard is. When I was young, I thought hard was the mad dog you could send across the crowded bar. I thought hard was how deep you roll or how nasty the steel you bring. In some neighborhoods of America, hard is turning down the fire just enough, so you could kiss the knife and make it ring. In a way, this re-translating of hard forgives the youth or forgives the youthful definition of what hard is. What is the youthful definition of hard? Just macho, bearing a weapon, or doing something. Yeah. Cutting and knifing in military. Lily, I'm just going to throw you a little curveball and ask you to try to give us some meanings of hard. It can mean hardened against the world, like you are self-contained and strong. That's one. Another one? It can mean unbreakable. Like, it's hard as opposed to soft. Another one? Stiff. Not malleable. Yes, and that refers back to the forging. It's all about making the metal not hard during the forging so that you can create something that is very hard. Yeah. Okay, there's one more. Difficult, like hard to parse. They take this poem ultimately as about a complicated history of machismo, complicating it, tempering it, turning down the fire, so that when we see these guys dancing in Spanish Harlem, we think maybe something that is more complicated going on among this male ritualizing. It's a shift from an enacting into a making. Instead of using the tool to enact violence or to royal your way across the room like a mad dog, it's a shift towards focusing on the making of that tool. It's the using of all these different fire and steel and earth and the human coming together to make these things and the connectivity of that making rather than the use. Terrific. I think based on the concept of translating, and when we talked about before about how it seems to signal that he expects his audience to be one that's not familiar with this particular experience, I took that to mean he's asking us, if we see this scene in our own lives, to read this complicated journey of masculinity and complicated diasporic identity in the people that we see, and not to just assume that's just some guys having a night out, like what Kamara was saying. There's a right and a ritual and something really important to what these guys that you might cast aside or walk by and not think about what they're doing. Carlos, final thought, final word. Sure. I'd just like to say that he has such an incredible command of pace, moving from the first long stanza with very few periods and punctuation and just runs through densely together, and then it's "tempered" again in the second one, shortening itself down into these more declarative sentences that echo off each other, especially the last three, into a ringing for me, that I just thought he did really well. I would say that I am absolutely all for a poetry that seeks to complicate any of these notions of masculinity, diaspora, machetes. Any or all of the above, that's what I'm looking for, especially when I'm the audience that needs these things translated for me because this hasn't been my experience. The next time I see someone named Jibo spinning one ill cut, notice the cut there because this is about a machete, the cutlass, one ill cut after another, I'm not going to think simply, that's someone I should be afraid of, that's someone who is inherently violent. I'm going to say, there's probably a complicated cultural story about this ill-cut dance. I was going to say that, going back to the title, an Uptown Ode that Ends on an Ode to the Machete, if you looked at that title without reading the rest of the poem, you'd think this poem would be about violence. You would see some relation between New York and someplace else, but you would think violent. But learning about origins and learning about diasporic histories, things like that, you can find some type of peace in that. The only real violence in the poem that we encounter is the physics of the diaspora. The first and last law of moving bodies. That's what's happening here. That's what's happened. That's how America is, the word America, not United States, that's how America is constituted, the law of moving bodies. That the best sanctuary for such moving bodies, bodies that had been moved is the dance floor. That's what he says. That the dance floor is a sanctuary. That makes me deeply moved by the experience of the first section, in retrospect, when I reread it. So the book is by Patrick Rosal, R-O-S-A-L, and it's called Brooklyn Antediluvian. I think everyone at this table is going to buy it, it's available. Thank you very much, all of you.
