By Joe Stertz
I have met many who seem shocked to learn that there are still those who write and publish poetry, and that people still spend money to buy and read it. Such encounters, I have to admit, always make me a bit sad. That is why I was so happy to have had the opportunity to meet and talk with Jon Pineda, just one of the award-winning poets living and writing in Hampton Roads.
Jon Pineda grew up in Tidewater. It is also where he lives and works today. He knows the city, its landscape, its diverse people, and the importance of the poetry found all around us. Fortunately, we will all have the opportunity to hear his poetry and meet him at this year's Old Dominion University Literary Festival when he reads from his first published collection Birthmark.
Birthmark won the 2004 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry, an award also given to Denise Duhamel's The Star-Spangled Banner in 1999. Pineda's poems are intimate and set largely against the backdrop of Hampton Roads, a city full of various places and people, a city that he reminds us to look at once again and see with new eyes.
Jon Pineda draws on the geography of the area because he grew up here. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, his family moved to this part of Virginia when he was a boy. His father was in the Navy, and he began his life in Hampton Roads in base housing. After a short period, they moved to the Great Bridge section of Chesapeake where he spent his childhood and later graduated from Great Bridge High School. He continued his education in Virginia at James Madison University and then in the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Jon Pineda is a Filipino American, or in his own words, mestizo or 'half Filipino'." He lives, as we all do, in one of the largest Filipino American communities on the Eastern Seaboard. And so, more important than geography, though in some ways bound to it, Jon Pineda's ethnic background and his life of "forever [exploring] the dividing line" between Filipino and American, serves as another integral backdrop in Birthmark . His mother is from the South. His father is Filipino, and the collection takes its title from the poem "Birthmark," a poem about a literal birthmark in the shape of the Philippine Islands, his father's home, "the place he has never been."
In both cases though, ethnicity and landscape, though essential, only serve as starting locations, as touchstones, from where each poem in the book begins and then spins outward into something more universal. Specific memories become places to start; specific events are only beginnings. Pineda shows us a boxing match at the Amphibious Base, or a local Midnight Mass. A child holds a folded postcard from his father who is in port somewhere in Spain. Another poem narrates a high school wrestling match between two boys, one full Filipino and one, half.
In his poetry, Pineda is more than happy to take us to those places that he has been, places many of us will find familiar. Indeed, the beauty of his poetry lies in the way that each poem helps us to reimagine those seemingly mundane places that we see most days. How many of us have found anything redeeming about our city's many congested bridges and tunnels? In his poem "Willoughby Spit," Jon Pineda finds something of wonder in the bridge-tunnel to Hampton, a moment worth holding onto, even though "In the middle of the tunnel, his car loses power & coasts," backing up traffic and hostile drivers "past Willoughby Spit".
As the speaker in the poem leaves the scene in a tow truck, he looks back at Willoughby, "the thin boats tied // to the docks" and realizes how they hint at something larger, "some freedom for those stalled on the bridge." The boats become metaphor for our desire for freedom, for getting away. It's then that the speaker illuminates everything that a tunnel can be, the cars descending "into the mouth of the tunnel, where there is some hope // of leaving it all behind."
Pineda's collection gives form and shape to these words. We find in its pages the complexities of one individual's life, his memories with all of their varied textures, one person's struggle to leave behind his past and make his way back to his reality. It is that fullness of experience revealed in the poems, which makes the idea of freedom so sweet, the idea that we all need to pass through that dark tunnel so that we might live free in the present moment. We need poets who remind us, as Pineda does so well, to "Forget it all & come back to your life."
Jon Pineda reads at the ODU Literary Festival at 3 pm on Thursday, October 7.
