In the absence of us being altered: A psychogeography of the city and points beyond (A collection of 51 poems in five parts and a poetics)

• Main Author: Bernabe, Lawrence Anthony Rivera
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2024
• Subjects: Poetry—Collections; Poetry
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_lit/19; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etdm_lit/article/1019/viewcontent/2024_Bernabe_In_the_Absence_of_Us_Being_Altered__A_Psychogeography_of_the_City.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

“In the Absence of Us Being Altered” is an autoethnography of mobility. This poetic project of 51 psychogeographical and autobiographical poems traces my experiences of Metro Manila, a megapolis whose stun of disparities, overlaps, and adjacencies prompt poetic forms: from the aphoristic to the serial to the lyrical narrative, from sonnet to ekphrasis, prose poem and hybrid essay. Bricolage, meditation, imagism, enjambment, lineation, meter, free verse, puns, syncopation and conceit comprise its repertoire of techniques, exploring the limits of a colloquial idiom, the page and the line. As an autoethnography of mobility, the poems also explore urbanities, scapes and spaces of dwelling in Central Philippines, Southeast Asia, East Asia and beyond. This poetic project deploys psychogeography’s principles of dérive (drifting, or rapid digressions through disparate urban spaces) and détournement (a repurposing, or a wandering), explicated by French Marxist theorist Guy Debord (1954), for compositional modes encompassing lyricism, argumentative discourse and translation, materializing as superimpositions between languages, discourses, and genres. Psychogeography, enabling encounters with language/text/paratext, generates a “superimposition” of terms outlining principles of poetic composition and revision. Poetic forms become an exploration of my contiguities to social crises and catastrophes. Given fragmented, marginalized, or suppressed subjectivity, what poetic forms might resonate with ecocritical, queer, or emancipatory concerns? These poems critique simulacra while reveling in felicities, invoking through them alternative futurities and histories. By flitting through gallery, arcade, transit, reclamation, arbor, and hypermedias, tracing absences in and through incidents, the poems summon presences that aim to haunt our thinking of/into the contemporary. Preceding the poems is a critico-creative essay that maps my journey into poetry, a survey of psychogeographical poetry and adjacent works published in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and an exegesis of creative processes involved in the collection. KEYWORDS: psychogeography, autoethnography, hybridity, urbanity, mobility, philosophy of poetry, ecocriticism, translation, lyric