INTERVIEW: How Jim Pascual Agustin’s poetry bears witness

It was midwinter in South Africa when Jim Pascual Agustin wrote to me via email. Since 1994, he has lived in the country, particularly in a semi-rural community about 30 kilometers from the urban center of Cape Town, with his partner. It’s this time of year, he told me, when the “dirt roads of summer turn into mud.” 

With their home situated a few minutes’ drive from the snow-capped mountains, Agustin shared, “You sense the snow once you step outside the door, even before you get a glimpse of those peaks… the chill in the unpolluted air, the sudden bite on your fingertips. You exhale and curls of mist come out of your lips. Pretend to be a dragon for a moment and laugh like a kid.”

I find this keenness to detail and vibrant imagery in his response particularly fitting, as though it reflects the several books of poetry and fiction he has authored over the years.

Our conversation centered on some of his work, particularly his latest poetry collection Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight, published by Ateneo de Manila University Press earlier this year, alongside his other poetry titles such as Bloodred Dragonflies (2022), Crocodiles in Belfast & other poems (2019), and How to Make a Salagubang Helicopter & other poems (2018).

Waking Up, which contains nearly 60 poems sectioned into four parts, can be quite overwhelming to the unseasoned reader at first but also inviting in how it harnesses language and intimates even its harshest assertions; at times it goes inward but does not remain there.

There are moments when you can feel the frustration or the subtle hints of descent into madness, like a beating heart; at others, you simply admire the beauty and playfulness the author extends to each work. “Are we lucky to hope / to remember today, instead / of being remembered?” he writes in “Masked Days,” while in “Vinegar Eyes,” he asks, “After everything is done, / how does one hold / a box of ash?” 

Bloodred Dragonflies, released under San Anselmo Publications in the Philippines and completed in the span of eight years, carries similar preoccupations as those in Waking Up. It is Agustin’s first book published in South Africa, and this is where the reader can feel more cohesion and musicality, as if some pieces are in conversation with each other. 

For instance, in “You Had to Leave,” the closing line goes, “What you took with you feels / like an open wound / the dogs can smell,” which registers like a response to another poem in the collection, “Lines Too Late to Utter,” which ends with “Forget what I wrote you years ago. / Those promises have found / their boundaries. Go, take flight, / my love.”

Meanwhile, Crocodiles in Belfast, which was first printed by San Anselmo Publications in 2019 and had a South African edition in the last quarter of 2023, marvels in how it maps life in the author’s “adopted country,” which is really not far from our own, unafraid to discourse on the grand and unravel more searing discussions.

And then there’s Salagubang Helicopter, at once cutting and disorienting for a particular section, aptly titled “Abominations,” excavating the carnage enabled by former president Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war. Here, Agustin not only renders grief on the page but its very inner life, the shrapnels that remain. Lines like “The President’s helicopter will never land / near your barangay” or “the worms render / each body / nearly identical” locate us into that exact feeling.

In many ways, Agustin’s poetry wields memory as a cardinal point, allowing us to look past the apparent and immediate and instead draw closer attention to what is unjustly underseen, the deeper trenches of the human condition. It bears witness. In every work, there is stillness and terror, but there is also an assertion to shape better ways forward, to carry hope.

Agustin also describes the “usual way” he would work on a manuscript: he’d print the poems on small pieces of paper, gather them in a box, and see if there’s a thread running through them. Waking Up saw Agustin putting both older poems, and newer ones in the same box, surprised at how “some of the new poems I was writing seemed to gravitate together with those older poems, like they were seeking each other out.”

The poet praises the artists who worked on the book’s cover: Flora Chan for the US version which features “text like an intricate puzzle for the reader to decipher,” and John Marin Flores for the Philippine version whose designs “always capture your eyes, making you pause and wonder what it is that has snared your attention.”

In this interview, Agustin shares his process, his intentions, and his fascination with Björk’s first solo album. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How did the idea for the collection begin?

The titular poem came about after a photo I took of our living room window one morning. It had been a cold night and water had collected on the glass. There was a pattern made by a snail that seemed to have gone from edge to edge many times, sometimes intersecting a path it had previously taken. I shared the photograph online with some friends, one of whom described it as “manic,” like the traces of someone who had been wandering for hours through the night unable to sleep or escape. Another friend suggested it would be a great book cover. 

I didn’t plan on having a manuscript with that title. But looking back at the poems that I selected I felt that it had to be that rather long title, almost a poem on its own. The original edition of the book, as part of the prize, was published in the first quarter of 2023 in New York and launched in March in Seattle during the Association of Writing Programs Conference and Book Fair. It is exactly the same manuscript I submitted for the competition way back in mid-2022, when I told myself there’s probably little chance it will even get shortlisted. But nothing comes out of not trying at all. Only the cover was changed for the Philippine edition.

I find the final section “resonate: a series of poems after a line mis/heard from Björk’s ‘Anchor Song’” particularly interesting in the way each piece sort of builds and expands on each other. How did you come up with it?

There are times when writing a poem may seem too planned and predictable, often because it comes from a point of easy certainty. So I’ve come up with a few ways to challenge myself through the years by setting odd and weird limitations, just to see what happens.

Anchor Song from Björk’s first solo album, Debut (1992), has probably been stuck in a loop in the back of my mind for decades since I first heard it. A very good friend had a copy of Debut, which she regretted buying, so she gave it to me. I was uncomfortably entranced by the album, for electronic dance music wasn’t really what any of my friends listened to in Manila. I played the album with headphones on full blast, and still do. 

I was drawn by the song’s almost discordant instrumentation, the repeating lines, the atmosphere of desolation and hope mixed with a sense of both sadness and playfulness. In “resonate” I tried to capture some of that, while also playing with the Filipino tendency to mispronounce words and make up new meanings.

In Salagubang Helicopter, Crocodiles in Belfast, and Bloodred Dragonflies, you seem to gravitate towards political history and ecology, which also parallels your chief preoccupations in Waking Up. Can you say that this is your poetics, and has it always been your intention to shape this sort of spiritual connection between these collections?

In these more recent books I focused on the disturbing political situations of my two homes. Salagubang Helicopter has an entire section that critiques Duterte’s so-called war on drugs. In less direct ways, the other sections of the book expound on the value of life no matter how seemingly insignificant.

Meanwhile, considerable portions of Crocodiles in Belfast tackle the effects of state capture, the orchestrated theft, and corruption in the South African government during the regime of Jacob Zuma. But it also contains poems that are not overtly political. Love poems and narratives of imagined lives also populate the book.

Bloodred Dragonflies took over eight years in the making. Robert Berold, one of the most respected poets and editors in South Africa, patiently worked with me on it. As my first book to come out in my adopted country, he wanted it to be an introduction to my writing. He found fascinating the poems that hint at how my personal history figures in the national experience.

I was hesitant to write the personal essay he suggested we include at the end of the book, but he convinced me that South African readers would appreciate being given a frame for the poetry. I’m glad that San Anselmo Publications released a Philippine edition of the book, as it also includes translations and versions from the Filipino that have never been collected.

You could say that Waking Up contains similar concerns. But I’d like to think it is its own beast. If anything, it is a lot more playful while also much darker. I think, in many ways, it is more cinematic and musical than my previous books, with a heart woven from many threads.

“Duterte’s Dead” in Salagubang Helicopter is among the sharpest pieces in the collection, which as you’ve said is your “anti-Duterte drug war collection.” Can you share how you created the piece?

I was on the other side of the world. I felt intense anger and frustration over the senseless killings. My family and friends warned me not to come home. There was one thing I could do – write. Months before I wrote the poem, the daily news updates I was gathering over the internet, from both Philippine and international journalists, depicted a dire and tragic situation that would not end anytime soon.

“Duterte’s Dead” was among those that I felt I had to write, not because it could affect any sort of change, but because staying silent meant supporting the carnage. I had to keep looking for any way to fight the insanity, a way to hope.

The title itself, “Duterte’s Dead,” is meant to be double-edged and partly misleading. I wrote it over a few days from March 16 to 20, 2017, less than a year since the start of the murderous regime’s campaign. I started the poem late in the afternoon while sitting in a parked car, waiting for my twin daughters’ school bus.

The mostly North American members of The Boathouse, the private online critique group I’ve been with for many years now, loved the first draft of the poem. They gave minor suggestions that I then incorporated. They commented that the understated tone and treatment, almost a kind of distancing, worked well on such a harrowing subject.

Soon after Duterte came to power, I had to part ways with some dear mentors and friends who I could not believe would support such a violent and vile character. Through the years I’ve seen relatives who could not cope with what life had thrown their way, and they ended up with various addictions. In a very personal perspective, I saw that the fake solutions Duterte and his minions championed were reprehensible. They were clear violations of our most basic human rights.

You’ve been living in South Africa for quite a time now. Has it in any way affected your creative process? Is writing poetry there more viable than it is here in the Philippines?

I left Manila in 1994 to be with the woman I fell in love with the year before while on a brief trip to the Mountain Province. She came back and tried life in the Philippines for a while, and it was my turn to see her part of the world. I ended up staying.

Of course any change affects one’s creative process. I saw the world in totally different ways, like the sheer chance of where one is born and considered to belong, and where one is seen as a stranger no matter what happens.

It took me a while to find my own way, with a lot of adventures and misadventures. One day I may write a piece of prose work as a record of this experience while I still remember the details. The literary landscape is very different, more vibrant in some ways, more unpredictable, though smaller. 30 years after the first free national elections and there’s still a lot of uncertainty, which in a way is good. Nothing is quite set in stone. 

As for poetry being viable, that’s something most poets struggle with wherever they may be. South Africa is not exactly high on buying or reading poetry books. Publishers of poetry books and journals are few, although there is the back door to the European market thanks to former colonial masters.

There’s a thriving slam poetry scene where the more accessible performers tend to garner louder applause, if not acclaim. Taking part in Poetry Africa is one of the dreams of most poets here. I was lucky enough to get invited once. And then there are national competitions that are judged blind. That’s mainly how I managed to get a foot in, by getting my work noticed by those who didn’t care where I came from, who I was.

You’ve published several poetry collections over the years. I’m curious to know where you situate your body of work in larger poetic traditions? Any poets or artists that have influenced your craft?

I’m wary of that phrase, poetic tradition. I think it’s unhealthy to set these borders, like one is choosing to be fenced in. I’d rather let free thinking readers (and genuine critics) decide what they make of my writing. 

I don’t know how to assess the influence from other poets or artists I once admired. I do find the visual language of the late Polish film director Krystof Kieslowski hypnotic and I wish I could capture that in my writing. I consider John Berger’s work essential and necessary, so I keep going back to them. Eman and Pete Lacaba were early heroes. It would have been nice to meet Polish poets Adam Zagajewsky and Wislawa Szymborska. Raymond Carver and Anne Sexton I also keep going back to see how my view of their work has changed since I first read them.

Japanese haiku masters keep teaching me new things no matter how many times I read them. I prefer not to name them here, but there are many contemporary poets I have found deserving of more than one reading, while others I feel should not have been allowed to make use of so many murdered trees. – Rappler.com