On the process of composition

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As far as writing process goes, mine is the type that involves chronic and shameless theft. Like a magpie or a modernist, I steal conflicts, forms, words. The poems I’d been recently working on loosely follow the emotional arc of Gustav von Achenbach, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In writing my poems I leaned heavily on Stanley Appelbaum’s translation, liberally extracting swathes of text. But I also relied on writings about pressing events in the Philippines, as well as several others, including, for instance, the diaries of Joe Orton, a children’s book by Ben Brooks, the seminal book by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain on the history of punk, and the zuihitsu of Sei Shõnagon. I filched passages from these urtexts and out of the raw composite created works that attempt to conjure up the ghost of the candid confessional poem, despite the actual polyvocality of the materials of composition.

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In my mind, the methodology, willfully vacillating between arbitrariness and deliberation, serves to foreground how my context as a writer with a specific project and as a social subject is readily intersectional: I’m queer, and I’m a citizen of my country, and I’m a byproduct of my social class. Like any other individual, I’m an aggregate of selves, nonconcentric communities, multiple texts: this is the primary source of anxiety that propels my writing. Just as important, I subscribe to the belief that the process of composition is just as vital, though (thank goodness) not necessarily obvious, to telegraphing the literary work’s preoccupation with matters of identity and society. My methodology is also a response to the fact I don’t know how to respond to political turmoil, especially through writing itself, a practice that I know to be unavoidably solipsistic, in which attentiveness to social causes also functions as cultural capital. So I follow Hart Crane and resort to writing in code: I don’t want to be found out. Maybe I do. Of course I do.