THE POETRY OF EARTH IS A NINETY-YEAR-OLD WOMAN

Books

The Galleons

by Rick Barot

Milkweed Editions, 2020

Paperback, 71 pages, $16.00

Whatever the truth is, to speak it is a great adventure.—Louise Gluck

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed: “What can be shown, cannot be said.” He seemed to be saying that the visual differs from the verbal, and that so much exists beyond and above mere articulation. Naming and labeling all day long can’t fully capture the amplitude and complexity of the world. Thus what I tell cannot ever show you everything. I was reminded of this finishing Rick Barot’s The Galleons in the time of the 21st century’s worst pandemic, with over 100,000 dead in the U.S. alone, and in a time of the death of George Floyd. In this time of broader protests against racism of which George Floyd’s death is the latest spark, I turned to The Galleons.

Rick Barot has seen things beyond words. As a ten-year-old he left the Philippines for the United States. In his first book, The Darker Fall, there is a telling poem sequence called “Wittgenstein,” comprising centos, made of lines from the philosopher’s notebooks, which includes the lines: “We must always / be prepared to learn something totally new.” In a second poem, titled “On Certainty,” he asks: “Does it make it / true? Is it right to rely on our senses / as we do?” Thus, rising up through Barot’s books, showing always overmasters telling. Enter his latest book, The Galleons, where this philosophical conundrum reaches its fullest fruition. In one poem he offers a list of a ship’s manifest: “cloves, pepper, / nutmeg, tamarind, ginger, martaban jars from Burma, / dragon jars from China, Vietnamese jars, / Siamese jars, Spanish jars.” Then later, in “The Galleons 6,” we have this:

Santiago, 1654
San Juan, 1564