Gods – A Personal Note

Personal Note on the Publication of “The Gods We Worship Live Next Door”

I finished a poetry collection before The Umbrella Country. At the time, it was called “In Spite of Open Eyes.” After many years of collecting rejection slips, I have managed to publish poems in highly visible literary magazines such as The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Literary Review, Manoa, Mid-American Review and New Letters. I have also won poetry contests. I did what any poet who was serious about publishing had to do (except go to an MFA program. I slowly gained visibility as a poet, being invited to many readings in universities and organized events such as the Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival. My literary network from the Asian American Writers Workshop helped tremendously in getting my work around. Outside these public settings, I also worked very hard in making sure that my poems get printed. In fact, most of the poems in the collection were previously published, if not in print, on the internet. Under the guidance of Walter Cummins, my work saw its publication in The Literary Review. I was featured in a special print and online edition that was very experimental at that time (1998). The only thing missing was a volume of published works. And year after year, I joined poetry book competitions. I probably became a finalist in many of them—three times in The National Poetry Series (one of which also had the same judge who chose my book for Utah Press). After publishing a novel, I stopped sending out the poetry collection.

It wasn’t that I stopped believing in the book, the novel simply took all my energy. Being part of a publishing machine was draining. Since writing has never been a full-time job, the novel consumed much of the time I have left outside my paid work. Needless to say, after The Umbrella Country, I didn’t pay much attention to my poetry collection and to poetry in general, albeit I continued to call myself a poet.

There came a time when I started seeing my younger Asian American poet friends get published, many of whom were unknown to me a few years back, some of whom I published. It was a wake up call. I started to look at my poetry collection again, changed the title to – The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, as a tribute to a literary ancestor, Bienvenido Santos.

Sending out a manuscript to poetry competitions means spending $20-25 each. I could have queried independent presses since I already have a credential with my first novel. But I chose the competition route because that was where I started and I didn’t feel like giving up until—I win a prize. After the exposure from having published a novel, I wanted my poetry collection—literally my first book—to be able to stand on its own. I know of novelists who were poets first, but their poetry seemed to have languished in the shadows of their fiction. I didn’t want that for my poetry book. I invested so much time in putting it together and in getting it published in magazines.

Winning a competition sounds ridiculously ambitious, but in more ways than one, it is the reality of poetry publishing in the United States. The prize has some marketing attached to it. You were after all picked from say, 800 manuscripts. Every year, the competition only gets tougher, given the number of books being produced by writing programs. I was getting older and my competition younger and hungrier, with probably newer things to say. Besides, a poetry collection that was about the Philippines, that was socio-political, written outside autobiography, was not going to be an easy sell. But hey, at the time, I thought, I had been a National Poetry Series three times, why stop now?

It was the year 2004 when I restructured my manuscript. I added a chapter time-line to the epigraphs that separated the book into five parts. I moved some poems to the front and began with “diaspora.” This set of poems was published a few times in anthologies and was always mentioned in the reviews of the books (see here). The manuscript, which started with “Azucar” before had now begun with another poem, “Filipineza.” The section was followed by original beginning with an added chapter heading, “Spain 1585-1898.”

Had I restructured the book this way much earlier, would I have published sooner?

What I have come to realize about this manuscript is how “foreign” it is to readers. As much as I write in complete English, without once code-switching, readers are so unfamiliar with the Philippines that reading the manuscript wouldn’t make sense without the sign posts that I added later. This is one of the challenges of being a Filipino-American writer in the United States: we are constantly banging ourselves against the walls of ignorance, geographical and historical, considering that I came from a country that was once an American colony. With this “guided” version, the premise of the book was historically easier to understand. In fact, in all the reviews of the book, the chapter headings are constantly mentioned.

One day at work, I got a call from a strange number. I immediately checked the area code on the internet. Utah. Why would someone from Utah call me? I had forgotten about submissions, as year after year I relinquish memory after dropping the manuscripts at the post office. The phone message told me that I had won a prize. The connection to Agha Shahid Ali was personally important to me. He was someone I admired as a poet and a human being.

What I am most grateful for in publishing this book is having the opportunity to work with such wonderful people at Utah University Press. It was an enormously gratifying experience throughout. I never knew that it was ever possible to work with publishing people without losing my soul. The staff of Utah University Press were extremely generous and very open to suggestions. Putting The Umbrella Country together was an ego-based tug-of-war. I have since lost contact with the people (agent+editor+publicity people) around the novel and have no regrets whatsoever. What was most important was that the novel survived us all. It was truly a huge learning curve for me. Publishing young definitely didn’t help.

For the poetry collection, I negotiated to have the Philippines removed from my American contract. My first novel was very expensive for local book buyers in the Philippines and I wanted the poetry collection to cost a quarter of that price. I contacted Utah with the intention of selling the collection to a Philippine press (albeit no $ were involved) and the contract was modified without question. (In American book contracts, English language countries such as the Philippines are automatically included. That means, The Umbrella Country cannot be reprinted by another press in the Philippines. They have to contend with the expensive American version—which, since its publication has increased to a lofty $20 a book, a larger, thicker print-on-demand version of a book, worth someone’s two week pay in a developing country). Since, Anvil Publishing took on the project. It will technically be my first book published in the Philippines.

Utah Press’ accommodations included their willingness to listen to my suggestions for the cover design. Most poetry books follow a template, especially ones that are part of a series of award winning volumes. I asked Utah if I could submit some ideas for the book. I also wanted to have a Filipino painting on the cover. I had two people to choose from—Santiago Bose, who I met in the Philippines in 2000 and Nunelucio Alvarado, whose works resonated with me and very much experienced visually the poems in the collection. Utah decided to go for Bose and also gave the book a new life—radically different from its two predecessors—more colorful and more alive. For the Philippine edition, we will be using Alvarado’s painting. Both artists have a wide-reaching socio-political conscience in their works and I am very grateful for having them take part in my publishing voyage.

In 1998, I won the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award for Pantoum: The Comfort Woman (read here), a prize from Poetry Society of America. In 2006, the collection, including that poem, was finally published. I do believe in hard work, that things we want in life eventually happen. It takes years and many frustrating tries before we can get anything published in the poetry market today. I know how tough it is out there. The Agha Shahid Ali Prize was not a first poetry book award; it was open to all! There are no perfect routes but one that has all the signs of perseverance, ambition, hard work and persistence. Talent of course is important, but what is talent if there is no toil attached to it?

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