MANILA, Philippines – In his first collection of poems, With Decade, published by local independent press Grana Books, Austere Rex Gamao, acts as an irreverent queer god who makes and unmakes a life imagined through the persona of Decade, a “creature of time” that reconfigures and subverts the masculine tendencies of epic poetry.
“In epic poetry, there are rules that [heroes] have to follow,” Gamao tells me. “They have to have an adventure. When they are born, they are fully formed, they’re already speaking. They always win a war. So I wanted to have a queer epic hero who doesn’t really undergo any [grand] adventure; they’re just existing.”
He continues, “I don’t want it to be masculine. I want it to be genderfluid, genderful, sometimes genderless. I guess ultimately what I like about Decade is the myth of rejection that even their creator, which is me, they also despise. They’re free to be whatever they want to be.”
With Decade, a novel in verse, was developed as Gamao’s thesis at De La Salle University, where he took his MFA in Creative Writing. But he began working on the book as part of an informal workshop outside of class, under the mentorship of Mark Anthony Cayanan, author of books like Narcissus and Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous. It was a workshop often held at a Bo’s Coffee chain near the university.
“I made a poem titled City, the one with the ‘Avon brochure sad’ line, that was the first poem I created outside of class, but it was also for a workshop,” says Gamao, “but it was just a workshop of our own classmates because we wanted to read and write more poetry that the subject could not give us.”
The author’s time as a graduate student at DLSU was also his formal training in poetry, after taking mass communication as his undergraduate degree at University of St. La Salle in Bacolod. As an undergrad, Gamao wasn’t really fond of literature, despite his penchant for the Animorphs book series when he was young, because his university “didn’t really see its importance.”
In fact, Gamao was already in his fourth year in college when his ex-partner introduced him to poetry through Richard Siken’s Crush. “When I read Crush, I was like, ‘This is what poetry can do?’ There was a moment of awe, like of course I couldn’t write poetry as good as Richard Siken, but there’s a different kind of pleasure in poetry that I don’t encounter in fiction.”
But upon entering graduate school, he felt that poetry wasn’t really innate to him. “I think that’s why I was challenged,” shares the author. “I really wanna know more about poetry because I also admire its wildness, that you can turn an image into something else with just a line. That excited me because I’m very image-based, like [I use] a lot of descriptions, there are insights as well, but I really want to play with images. And I think the capacity of poetry to be amorphous, to be something insane, I appreciated through it.”
At turns meta and erudite, mawkish and sober, With Decade succeeds because of Gamao’s lyricism that magnifies the everyday anxieties of the central persona, who jumps between timelines and moves across space, reflecting the instability that informs encounters of queerness at large, where “Nothing survives / Long enough to feel glad it’s / Been there.”
Queering has always been a towering presence in Gamao’s craft. In an essay for Cordite Poetry Review, Gamao, who also teaches at Far Eastern University, wrote about his poetics and how pivotal queering language and forms is to his work, and how “Decade existing, desiring, trying to escape its author’s control” is also him mulling over queer futurity.
In the book, Gamao at times corners Decade in cruel relationships and renders them as the villain, as the recurring flood that ruins and controls; at others, he extends them agency and makes them rebel from his own trappings, from the confines of the genre. It is a wayward lexicon where each poem plays out as part self, part other, and part othered self, where “I can man and / Woman, I surpass with home.”
Past this, the text is particularly tempting because of its stubborn fixation on “the aftertaste of time,” this push and pull that the author can’t seem to outrun.
“I chose decade [as a phenomenon of time] because I wanted it to be immature enough,” explains Gamao. “I wanted to talk about time, to talk about a character that doesn’t hold much wisdom yet. A decade is small enough but big enough for things to happen to a person.”
Gamao says further, “To me, there’s magic in our perception of time. How do we actually perceive time? How do we actually process time? How do we actually contend with time? What is the past? What is the future?”
Recently, I spoke to the Negros-born writer at a cafe in Maginhawa about With Decade, how he started in fiction, and his fascination with surrealism. This conversation has been translated into English and edited for brevity and clarity.
First, I want to learn about your journey into poetry. What made you gravitate towards this craft?
Yeah, that question, like why would anyone write poetry because it’s very flaccid sometimes, but I think I’m also changing my relationship with poetry. I thought it was flaccid, but I do think that poetry exists in a different space. There’s action that we can do in the world, and then there’s poetry that you can write.
There are poets and poetry that could change the world, I’m not one of them. Like my poetry is not one of them, which is fine with me because I also don’t want to be self-important or self-aggrandizing. That’s not my point or goal when I write poetry. What I want is to challenge myself mostly.
But I was actually a fiction writer. I started in fiction, it was what I was reading every day of my life before, since childhood, like Scholastics books, the Animorphs series. There were Scholastic fairs before in schools, and since my mother was a principal, she would often attend seminars and sometimes she would come across them, and before Animorphs books would only cost 10 pesos, so my mother would buy me 10 books.
That was my happiness, really. We’re poor like we only had one TV, and my father would just watch basketball. So the one other avenue is to read. I’m really a voracious reader. I love Stephen King, I love horror. So I wrote fiction.
With Decade is a novel in verse, and I’m curious if you always intended for your first book to be in this particular form.
No, [I wanted it to be a] short story collection. I started writing flash fiction and then it evolved into poetry because flash fiction is kinda like poetry. Because flash fiction’s boundaries to prose poetry are so thin, so blurry that you can mistake it. I really wanted it to be a short story collection — speculative, fantasy, surreal.
Because I came into [my MFA] program wanting to do fiction then came out loving poetry, I wanted to kind of smoosh them together. [Anne Carson’s] Autobiography of Red is such a big influence on me, and then I discovered epic poetry. Like I said, I’m queer, I’m gay, and there’s already instability there, and I wanted the form of my would-be thesis to be connected to my SOGIE.
And also, prose and poetry are kind of fighting for their position in the genre, and I wanted to think more about that, not really wanting the other to win, but because I wanted that instability to really show until the end of the book.
I really wanted to push the idea of instability in a way that each poem, each chapter is fragmented and exists in a different time, different place. Decade jumps in time, and there’s not much happening, which is fun. That fragmentation, indeterminacy, like ‘Who is Decade? What is Decade?’ I wanted my reader to participate in the meaning-making. I didn’t want to control how people see Decade, I want people to see how they see Decade, like their appearance, their life, their history, they can put it on Decade.
I made a character and I use it in any way I want because I wanted to question the relationship of the author and their characters. I wanted Decade to have their own mind. I wanted them to say no to me, which is weird because even their saying no is predestined. And, you know, with all of the oppression, with all of the hatred, with all of the controlling in our community, people in the margins, I wanted to reject authority, to reject how people impose their wants.
Since you already had the material for your first book, when did Grana Books entire the picture?
Grana was created around 2022, and the owner, [Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles], was my thesis adviser. So when I was writing With Decade, he told me that after I’m done writing, they’ll publish it. After I defended it, we had a contract signing and then it’s smooth sailing already. I didn’t look for any other publishers because I knew they would take care of the book and that’s really their goal — to publish books that don’t have a mainstream sensibility to it.
You mentioned earlier that there’s a presumption that the book is semi-autobiographical, which is also the initial feeling I have with it because in many ways it feels like you’re not only toying with the making and unmaking of Decade the persona but also of yourself, and I wonder, how much of yourself did you intend to reveal or obscure in the collection?
When I write, I don’t really plan much. Sometimes, it just arises. There’s like a divine thing that I think that Decade is not me but something that came down, like that’s how I view Decade. I never see myself as Decade. But I think it’s important to show other lives outside of Manila; my experiences of Decade are very provincial.
And what I did was I looked at my life and made it more ridiculous, then it became something else. Like the mother, the sister, the father [in the book], yes, they borrow from my family but they’re not actually those people, which is the trick of fiction. Poetry is very blatant in its form, in how you see the actual book, but with the characters, the settings, there’s fiction there.
In terms of obscurity, I think that’s my sickness. That’s kind of how I deal with heavy stuff. I like to talk about things that are about me in a way that it is not about me. My thesis panel also pinpointed it and said ‘Why not make it autobiographical?’ And I said if I make it autobiographical, then I would lose Decade, I would lose the fun, I would actually lose the essence of the book.
Now let’s talk about how the book harnesses surrealism because it’s astonishing how you were able to sustain it throughout the work that it doesn’t feel like a sort of tacked-on design. Were you always conscious of this aspect — that each poem should come together and somehow find a way to exist in this surrealist realm?
It is by design but a very insane, loose design. All of these [poems] are fragments from the life of Decade, but I didn’t want it to feel like you can locate where it is. And because I really love surrealism. I have a genuine love for weird shit, like Animorphs in a way that the character can go through a transformation over and over again, which I also hope to achieve.
I like to write in a state that’s just fun or in a state of discovery. It’s important to me that I also discover things about Decade or in Decade’s world because I’ve also deleted a lot of poems that do not serve their purpose, and there are poems that I was planning to write but then when I went back to the draft, I was like “This is bad. I don’t like it anymore.” They were still surreal but they no longer fit into the character itself.
Stunning and visceral cover you have here. How did you come up with it?
The [initial] cover was supposed to be an egg that was kind of hatching because that was one of the poems where Decade emerged from the egg. But I really wanted a mysterious creature. I wanted something amorphous, ambiguous, and queer.
So I started with a chair with wings or hands that aren’t complete, like I didn’t want to color it all because of [the idea of] creation and decreation. Of course the figure would be sitting down because it’s the easiest to draw, and I didn’t put hands [in it] because there’s no more space (laughs). I wanted some ripples like [the layers you get] when you cut off sedimentary rocks, like this creature ripples and can transform into a new thing, which is what Decade is.
And there’s boots because Decade is queer; there’s a camp element into it. – Rappler.com
