So I'm sharing it here:
15 FALSE OPENINGS FOR RAMIL DIGAL GULLE’S NEWEST POETRY COLLECTION
1. Only Ramil Gulle can deploy dirty words like “kupal” and “Jessica Simpson” in a serious poem.
2. Then again this is poetry that wants to ride a lonely bus to strange destinations. Carrying a bagful of colored pills, it wants to sit on the last seat in the back, where the light is faintest. For some reason it wants to open its zipper. It stares out the window as it reflects on the idea of the world as a one continuing blur.
3. Ramil’s new works are not afraid to take on disturbing decibels of loquacity. This, after all, is the Maximalist age. This is the era of Big Data, of psychotic oversharing. Others post snapshots of their pesto burgers on Instagram. Ramil lays down his creepy little dreams and poignant recollections in defiantly sprawling stanzas.
4. The more I read this newest collection the more I am convinced that Ramil has ditched his psychiatrist in favor of that one loyal yet traitorous shrink called Poetry. Here is a verbal quiltwork of the man’s most vibrantly lurid desires, snapshots from the strange landscapes in his head, stark meditations on memory and desire, on love and loss, on death and daemons both dreamlike and domestic, on suicide bombers and rock vaginas.
5. There is an alarmingly bizarre transcript of imaginary mental-hospital talk shows. Ramil, what fucking medications are you on?
6. Alternatingly verbose and quiet, at turns epigrammatic and conversational, somber and playful, philosophical yet unapologetically profane.
7. Jesus Christ, this mindblowing stanza from “The Girl on Halcon Street”: “No one else remembers. This is your cage. This is the jagged flint in your chest, mineral and compacted. Pressured by years, strata of doubt, a borderless desolation awaits the voice from a throat of rock; an alien sun sinks in the orange dust of a world beyond mere change. A voiceless horror waits in the throat of rock.”
8. Hayup ka talaga, Gulle.
9. Ramil’s tone is confidently his own. It bears no resemblance to the stuff being written now. Is it just me or is everybody in the Philippines writing the same cloying poem? As if everyone were possessed by a garden-variety sameness that can be reduced to an already predictable formula. And I mean “garden” literally. You know what I mean. Strikingly declarative first-person opening line that, upon closer scrutiny, doesn’t really say anything. Then proceed to catalog images of vegetation and other cliches: brooks, streams, rivers, trees, leaves, rocks, shit under the rocks, more shit under the shit under the rocks and worms and shit. Shit like that. I mean, if you browse through all these literary journals, you’d think they were all living in some quiet Swedish wood cabin. I mean, dude: when was the last time you fuckers actually saw a real river unchoked by SM plastic bags and floating feces?
10. On the other hand, I am unable to sift through what David Foster Wallace terms as “the sterile abstraction of the Language poets.” I’m not even quite sure I understand what Language with a capital ‘L’ means. I mean, what do we use for writing poetry? Bricks? Wood? Taiwanese-made prefab plastic blocks?
11. Gulle’s poems are what Seamus Heaney describes as “delicate hovering between the responsibilities of the social world and the invitations of a world of possibly numinous reality.” Or, to invoke Foster Wallace again: Ramil succeeds in “marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require.”
12. These poems are set in the real world, even if sometimes his reality gravitates around the pelvic area. But the groin, together with the stomach, is the only honest aspect of humanity (The lives of saints, why/ They could begin, or end, right here, in a cheap hotel”)
13. But more than that, this collection tries to do so much. Tone to tone, they move to and fro, from the sublime to the utterly absurd. These poems dance on little hairy hooves; others hurtle across the air with fleshy bits and bloody shrapnel. Some are stuck inside existentially boring TV station editing rooms, humid vaginal chambers or the html frame of a Facebook note; others in rush-hour traffic.
14. I must mention that a part of me, however, feels that “Poisonostalgia” will go down as one of the worst titles in Philippine Literary History. But that’s Ramil for you: he operates on his own bizarrely distinct aesthetic logic. No one writes like Ramil Digal Gulle.
15. Read: “under/ the moon’s waxing cuntlight.” Hayup ka talaga, Gulle.
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