Archipelagic Interiority: Notes and Reflections on Poetic Voice and Trans Writing in the Philippines
Author
Shane Carreon
College of Communication, Art, and Design, University of the Philippines Cebu
Travelling to and from centers, between “worlds”
I am interested in thinking about voice in poetry. In particular, the voice in my poetry collections spanning nearly a decade: travelbook (2013); Then, Beast (2017); and In Praise of Wilderness (2021). It is often supposed that the poetic voice is imbued and animated by the poet’s sense of self. By sense of self, however, I am suggesting neither the autobiographical mode in writing poetry nor confessional poems per se; what I am gesturing at is the poetic voice that embodies the simultaneously singular and communal experiences and sensibilities of a self that is continually shaped in relation to its movements to and from spaces as well as its (re)positions in its provisional habitations. In my thinking, which is to me a form of wondering, wandering, and exploration, I read the poems I have written in the past decade or so with the notions of archipelagic thinking and “world”-travelling. I ask how the poetic voice in my own poetry so far expresses my oscillatory movements to and from varying centers, and my transsituatedness and archipelagic interiority as a trans person poet writing in English in the Philippines; and how a sense of itinerancy might allow for a reimagining of what anti-colonial work might be in Philippine literature.