This week, we welcome poet Paolo Javier, who held the title of Queens’ poet laureate between 2010 and 2014. Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Piñas, Metro Manila; Katonah, Westchester County; El-Ma’adi, Cairo; Burnaby and North Delta, Metro Vancouver. He’s produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), including the limited edition pamphlet/cassette Ur’lyeh/ Aklopolis and the booklet/cassette Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours. A featured artist in Greater NY 2015 and Queens International 2018: Volumes, he is author of O.B.B. aka The Original Brown Boy, a full-length (weird postcolonial techno dreampop) comics poem forthcoming in 2021 from Nightboat books. You can find more of Javier’s work on his Tumblr page.
On last week’s news of Poets House shuttering, we asked poets to weigh in with … poems on this loss. On Saturday, they plan to read protest poems in solidarity with laid-off workers. Here’s a look at Javier’s work, titled “Cento.”
We are tribeless and all tribes are ours
Reflected in a world that they themselves
Assigned the word rapture to its strangeness and obscurity
Preliminary Materials for a Theory
The impossibility of making equivalent
Rather than passively suffer its tyranny
Empire, is thus also the moment
One who has preferred to become a commodity
That results from desire and consciousness
and to see themselves
Pass off what has always been a SACRIFICE
Society’s final moment
And yet all our thinking is memory
Still from this point we’ll make our world
A poet must also learn how to lead an attack
