10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 24 :: JUSTIN ROVILLOS MONSON on PATRICK ROSAL
Week four of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Caits Meissner, who writes: “all of the writers featured in our final week are either in, or have served time in, jail and/or prison. But I didn’t choose them with the intention to illuminate the experience of incarceration — though many of the essays do, of course — or to advocate for anything other than the poets who spark up their blood. Quite simply, I invited this roster of writers because what I do with my days is think about, commune with and work with writers who share the condition of incarceration. It is part of my commitment to create space for these voices in the wider literary community.” Read the rest of her curatorial statement here. –EM
A poetics, when created correctly — or, really, with heart — is a field full of misfits and martyrs, hustlers and prophets, trying to find a home. A poetics becomes a place for gods, both small and giant, a field where we toil and attempt, almost always resulting in some form of temporary failure, to name what feels unnameable.
It is rare for a poet to conjure up such a poetics in a single collection, let alone a single poem, but somehow, Patrick Rosal gives us the gift of a vast, verdant field in “Brooklyn Antediluvian,” from his love song of a collection bearing the same title:
I’m the one // who believes we have ancient names / like dawnlight flashing into the dreams // of murderers and sunken into the hillsides / of countries whose shanties and projects // are named for moguls and saints …
The first time I read Rosal, the first time I read this poem — this riot of names and beauty — the world felt wider, things that once appeared trivial revealed themselves as brimming with importance. My own history — the names that I carry, the blood passed on to me, the vandal stories I lived through with my ragtag squad — became more than liner notes to a prison movie. My history became part of a larger epic.
For those who ask what poetry can do, Rosal might provide an answer. We look into our lives, we get lost in moments, we hear the songs we dedicated to our first loves, we dance in our kitchens after a funeral, we find the houses our ancestors were raised in replaced by convenience stores, and we think “there should be a name for that” — the vibrating beauty in the center of violence or ache or want — and sometimes we stumble upon a word that fits. Perhaps we later realize that the name was not enough. Perhaps we make new names. Perhaps this is why we turn to poetry, that raucous field, in the first place.
Listen: / our names // were taken. And in their place the bastards / shoved some other word like ‘laughter’ // crafted with a Spanish hatchet or carved / like a joke into a Roman stone. Every name // is a word that embedded with a wish …
Rosal refuses to hold his punches. Yet, the blows land like kisses hard-earned and waited for. He gives us names and histories to feel out so that we might carry our own with just a bit more hope, or, at least, he reminds us that there is, somewhere, a field for us to call home.
Metropolis, / do you hear me? Young man? I don’t want // anything. I want this. I want to say / the names we’ve been given aloud. The ones // they took away…
Justin Rovillos Monson is a first generation Filipino-American poet and writer, PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow, and winner of the inaugural 2017 Kundiman/Asian American Literary Review/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Mentorship in poetry. Justin’s work has been published, or is forthcoming, in The Nation, The Asian American Literary Review, Pacifica Literary Review, The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is working on his first collection of poems, and is currently serving a sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, from which he hopes to be released in 2027.
