Carlomar Arcangel Daoana: On Clairvoyance, Creative Process and Poetry’s Clarifying Light

Poet Carlomar Arcangel Daoana shares his insights on the making of his third poetry collection, Clairvoyance, published this year by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.

1. When did you begin writing Clairvoyance?

I began writing the poems between 2008 and 2010. You see, in my last two books, I worked with a bit of backlog (some of the poems that constitute The Fashionista’s Book of Enlightenment, published in 2009, were written as far back as 2003). I didn’t have that much elbow room with Clairvoyance. Luckily, most of the poems that emerged within those two years felt like disparate sounds that aimed towards the same orchestral feel. This is the reason why I didn’t feel compelled to separate my poems into chapters, since I felt that they were all somehow interlinked in the basis of temperament and temporality.

2. Why “clairvoyance”? What was the impetus for it? What was your vision for this third book of yours?

More than its metaphysical and occult implications (although they count too, being rich in conceptual associations), the word “clairvoyance” attracted me for the way it sounds, its polysyllabic beauty. Its etymological French meaning (clair=clear; voyance=vision, seeing) seems to me the oblique pursuit of every poem, a transparent thing where the mysterious, the spiritual if you may, could shine through.

Unlike my other poems rooted in and nourished by the personal—bits of autobiography—most of the pieces in this collection are fashioned from imaginary strands and interior states (dream sequence, word associations, mental snapshots) that had little or nothing to do with what we refer to as outside experience. The distilling point, the self, suspended disbelief and went along to give way to this soul-voice that seemed to have plenty of things to reveal. My “task” was to midwife these poems, retaining, as much as possible, their visionary seizures, their brooding complexity, their discomfiting emanations.

3.   How different is Clairvoyance compared to your second book, The Fashionista’s Book of Enlightenment and the first, Marginal Bliss? Will we get to hear a new voice, perspective or themes in Clairvoyance?

Clairvoyance is different in that it plays with and displays strategies and decisions—form, line-cutting, agency, framing device—to approximate deeply felt demands of the text and to ferry across the page the distinct, and somehow numinous, utterance of every poem. Poems in The Fashionista and Marginal Bliss are more reflective and formal in terms of their techniques and reflections. They gun for an insight. In Clairvoyance, words resist containment; they ramify and point to different directions. I’d like to think that each of my poems is some kind of revelation: the point is not so much understanding as wide-awake observation. Despite the seeming rootlessness of the poems, I would, however, stop short in calling them experimental as I did not venture to create something that was, or had to be, totally new.

4.   What are your favorite poems in the collection?

I’d say the title poem because it encapsulates the spirit of both the theme and the voice of the entire collection. Its urgency startled me; it came out already in tercets (three lines per stanza). Another one is “Architectina,” my reflection on modernism (particularly in design and architecture which are the subjects of my weekly column in Manila Bulletin) through the form of sestina. “Parcels of Time” was fun to write as it afforded me access into certain words (in the poem’s case, those that we use to artificially delineate time) and how the mind—admixture of experience, cognition, and ideas—approached them to make sense, and more important create situations, out of them.

5.   How do you work on a piece? How many revisions do you do?

I’m not a big fan of revisions. I’m one of those who believe that every poem is a moment of its own, atomic and indestructible. Revise it and you not merely lose the originating idea, the inspiration but also destroy the privileged path that has led you to it. Save for check-ups on diction, grammar and the way the poem sounds, I don’t perform that much revision. The deliberate judgment, however, comes into play during the selection and sequencing of poems that will enter a collection. Even if the poem has already been published in a journal or magazine, that is no guarantee that it’s automatically in. It’s important to me that all the poems accrue to something. The entire book, in that sense, is the collection’s last poem.

6.   What is important for you as a poet in terms of writing and readership?

What is important for me as writer is the actual work: sitting on the chair, typing away, producing something. You can attend workshops, readings and all those things but the ultimately work should still be the writing—and the reading, of course, which is crucial to the creative process.

I have given up on trying to reach for an audience. People who love, or at least have a temperament for, poetry will find ways to gravitate towards it, as other people would to ikebana or homeopathy. It’s this audience that I primarily seek, but only after the fact of the book as already published.

If ever people should encounter poetry, it should be in classrooms that feature, one hopes, the climate of information-gathering, learning and knowledge appreciation. I don’t think that anyone is born allergic to the art form. It is important, however, that we have teachers who are equipped to teach poetry to students and not destroy their potential enthusiasm for it. To be honest, I’ve seen people who live decent, respectable lives without poetry. But why stop at decent if, by reading a poem, you can spiritualize your life in a way that no religion could.

7.   Can you tell us about your book cover and its artist? What made you choose this particular artwork? How did you go about securing permission to use it?

The artist is Lao Lianben who is known for his stark, minimalist work which goes against the prevailing trend in Philippine visual arts, i.e., photo-realistic figures and sense of horror vacui. The first time I saw it (at the Avellana Art Gallery), I told myself that it would be the cover of my next book (and this was before The Fashionista’s Book of Enlightenment came out). As soon as the book was already approved for publication, I got in touch with owner and curator Albert Avellana and through him, I was able to secure permission from the gallery, the artist (whom I had already met) and the collector.

8.   Which writers do you count as your influences?

My first big, real influence was Wallace Stevens who showed me how reality and imagination, the literal and the figurative, can have a wholesome marriage in a poem. Household gods include Rilke and Neruda. I’m a big follower of Jorie Graham, Anne Carson and Louise Glück. Linda Gregerson, Susan Mitchell and Mary Jo Bang are my must-reads. I get a heady mix of dread, dumbness and discovery whenever I read John Ashbery. I learned the value of craft, the possibility of line and the gift of the authenticating experience from my beloved mentor Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta. Through her poems, I was mentored by Luisa Igloria. The opus of J. Neil Garcia is just startling, magnificent and profound. Among my contemporaries, I have deep admiration for Joel Toledo, Lourd Ernest de Veyra, Allan Pastrana, Mookie Katigbak, Carlos Piocos III, Jerry Gracio.

9.   Any plans for your next book?

Yes! The fourth one is a clear departure from my first three books which I consider a trilogy of some sort. At this point in my writing career, I think in terms of books, not individual poems but God knows what I’ll give to write a poem of utmost resonance such as Carlos Angeles’ “Gabu,” OAD’s “Montage,” Alfred Yuson’s “Dream of Knives,” Edith Tiempo’s “Bonsai.” The goal is to come out with a poetry collection every three or four years—unless of course, life interrupts and brings me someplace else.

10.  What’s your advice for beginning poets?

Poetry offers no shortcuts and no immediate, visible rewards. You write it for its own sake. It requires a certain temperament: if you’re short-fused, result-oriented and career-driven, I don’t think that you’ll find writing poetry as a vocation attractive in the first place. If you have the gift (you’ll know in your innermost if you do), if you think you can devote your life in the service of imagination and have the stamina for endless hours of testing craft and sifting through feedback, then by all means, throw yourself into the process. One also needs, if I may add, a high tolerance for solitude. I’m not saying this to romanticize the image of the poet: you will really just have to spend a lot of time writing a lot of poems (most of them bad at the start), time spent away from family, friends, partying. If you’re in a rut, go out there, read indiscriminately, hop trains, travel, visit your parents, pay your taxes, bathe your dog, watch movies, attend fashion shows, do something fun and shallow, drop by galleries, take care of the disfigured and the infirmed, live life and go back to your desk and write.