Your Eye Needs to See All This

Enrico E. Manalo

Interview by L. Valena

Can you start by telling me what you responded to?

The first thing I responded to was the red tape that I saw being laid down in the video. There's a lot of cultural connotations in terms of red tape, so my mind really started wandering around that concept. Placing some kind of barrier in the way. And from there, kinda thinking about definition or not definition.

What do you mean by that?

If you're dealing with some kind of issue, in science and social science, then your definitions really matter in terms of what it is that you're measuring. We know that measuring things also has an effect- not just on perception, but on the approach. The framing is just as important as what is being framed.

Where did you go from there?

In a lot of the writing I've been doing recently, I've been thinking a lot more about my own voice, and things that inform that voice. If my voice is what I'm defining, or if the things I say are defining something, then I also think that everything that goes into my thinking is also part of that. I've become really curious about what it is I'm taking in, and playing with found poetry, and things like that.

I've been doing a lot of things like recording snatches of sound. There's some kind of project that I'm building up to, but I'm not sure what. And then also just writing down interesting little snippets of conversation, little bits of text, and things like that. From there, just kind of cobbling those things together through my own sensibility. It's something I'm producing, but it's not necessarily something that my mind is directing to the degree that it would be directing if I just sat down and wrote something.

So it sounds like your process, lately, has been a response-based process to begin with. Is that what you're saying?

I think in general, a lot of things are responses to other things, whether or not we're aware of that. I study human behavior, and my specialization is in conflict resolution. A lot of the time what I'm dealing with are people telling me what they think the problem is, and trying to gain as much contextual information to see not only if that's the case, but what other things are leading into that? So if you think about a knot, people often think about the knot, and not necessarily about all of the strands that lead to that kind of entanglement. But if you want to untangle the knot, you have to pay attention to those things too.

Can you say something about the format? You've kind of arranged it into something that's visual as well.

There are many different forms of poetry. They can be fun to play around with, but this response was in blank verse and free verse poetry. I've been thinking about line breaks a lot. Again, it's a framing device. For language, a lot of how things are framed is not only through connotation, but through grammar. I think it's really interesting to break sentences strategically, because you can elicit meaning from that or else be very intentional about creating meaning through breaking lines in certain ways. So that's kind of the starting point.

In terms of how I organized this particular poem, is I did want to have it somewhat reflect that process of... I guess you could call it cutting and pasting, or creating a pastiche, or something. To make it really clear that it was something that was assembled, and joined together, in a way that is perhaps not perfect and it's not really supposed to be perfect. My thought about doing that was to create something that looks like it's supposed to be stanzas or paragraphs, but actually are things that I just broke. Maybe they made me laugh, or I liked the idea of breaking them at that particular place. And then in playing with the idea, in responding to the video, there's the idea of red tape that becomes something else in that piece. So I thought I would use different colors to kind of show that, and draw borders around things. What's maybe not obvious at first glance, is I'm playing around with the definitions of the different shapes by playing with thicknesses of lines, and arranging those shapes in ways that create boundaries. But not real actual boundaries, because it's created on a computer or a piece of paper.

The corners show where the end of the poem is, but it's not a container.

I was playing around with how the poem begins as well. You might notice that it's not capitalized in the beginning. One thing that I do typically in prose- I will lay out my first draft, and there's that old maxim that the first draft (of anything) is shit. So I have to reorganize it a bit. Even if I have great stuff, sometimes I have to move a paragraph somewhere else, and then do the work to connect those things in a fluid way. Move these paragraphs around to form different combinations and different connotations of things. In some sense I wanted to indicate that maybe the ending of the poem is the first part of the sentence that the poem begins with.

That sort of cyclical idea- is that something you picked up in the video?

Yeah, absolutely. Part of it was just how I was watching the video. I watched it one time through, and then I had to watch it again, and again. And again and again.

I think that for a lot of people who are maybe casual fans of art, there's this idea that you go to a museum, look at the thing, read the little card, and then you move onto the next one. And then there are a lot of people who are much more involved in appreciating the work. They might go back to different pieces again and again, and each time it evokes something different. That's certainly the case in my experience watching this video. When you rewatch movies, you're probably picking up on details that you didn't consciously register the first time through. It's the same piece, but it's a different experience, and that's one of the enduring qualities of art, I think.

Every time you saw this video, did you have a different experience watching it?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's kind of a limitation of language and human senses. For example, you and I have known each other forever; I still recognize you as my friend, but we're totally different people. And that's true biologically, mentally, and physically. Our friendship has evolved- it's not the same friendship it was 20 years ago, but it still exists. You and I have talked about this. This friendship is something we keep coming back to, over and over again. It's different each time, but there are definitely things that we can recognize. It's something that's evolving as each of us are evolving in our own right.

Yes. It's so interesting how our experience of language and visuals evolves. Unlike a relationship with another person, although our experience evolves, the thing itself sticks. Language sticks. Especially when you export it into an image file, it kind of freezes it into this fixed state. And yet, our experience of it is different every time we read it.

I do think that words are very interesting objects because we recognize them as objects. They don't exactly exist in physical space in the way that, say, a book does. The binding, the pages, the covers- that all exists. The words are… what? Ink? Sound?

Binary code in a computer somewhere?

Right. A lot of what we're doing as humans is highly dependent on this thing that we haven't really bothered to define to a great degree. We see that it causes a lot of confusion. For me there's always been a great amount of pleasure in leading people to believe that they understand something, and then surprising them by inserting another meaning or another layer of meaning. I think that's why I like jokes, and puns, and things like that so much.

It kind of subverts things, and makes you question yourself a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, reality is a highly tenuous endeavor. I think often you can hear it in people's rhetoric- "The reality is...". As a human being, am I really well-placed to comment on that?

Right. Or the phrase 'universal truth'! A nonsense statement.

Yeah. What I see is people doing their best to make sense of things so they can find meaning and do things that are important and have real impact. You could zoom out from that and think that it's kind of tragic or cynical, but I don't think so at all. I think it's really a part of the human experience that does unite us. We all know what it's like to do your best, and fuck up real bad, and have to face the people in your life that believed in you. That's scary and terrifying, and we put it off as much as possible, but it's something we all have to go through.

Is there anything else you have to say about this process, or about this piece?

I think a lot of times, creative people can feel like what comes out of them is not really their own, because that inspiration or impetus comes from somewhere. But the assumption of people seeing it is, "Oh wow- maybe this person is a real genius and they have some secret, hidden knowledge that allows them to do these things that I don't know how to do." For people who are involved in that process, we know that for every gem there's a lot of dirt and soil, and that's all part of the thing. You have to produce a bunch of terrible things to ever produce something that's kinda good. And part of the pressure for the creator and the person who appreciates it is that hunt, that discovery. Sifting through all the other stuff to find something that really resonates with them. So, the Bait/Switch format is really fascinating because it is curated by you. So it's not like we're just bumping into these other pieces in the wild, there's some kind of directed sense to it. I think that's a really interesting format.

Yeah. I'm excited to see what the next person does with this- it's so cool. Do you have any advice for another participant in this project?

Well, I did really appreciate the note that I received with the piece- the emphasis is just to have fun with it. I think it's really easy when you're thinking about creating art and things, you set these expectations for yourself that can at times be like an assignment. Instead of just saying, "I'm going to write a poem today!", you're like, "I'm going to write a good poem today." And then things kind of go off the rails. So I guess the advice I would give is to just do it. It's not about producing something great, or good necessarily, it's a lot of that call and response thing. Call and response is how we learn a lot of things, so I think that for me this was more of a learning process, not only about myself and what I'm doing creatively, but learning about what other people are doing as well.

Call Number: M28FI | M29PP.maYo

Enrico E. Manalo is a Boston-based poet and conflict resolution practitioner working toward racial equity. He is also the lead producer and host of All Aces On Air, a conversational interview show that elevates voices engaged in the work of racial equity through their various disciplines, fields, and passions. In his free time, Manalo can mostly be found listening to audiobooks while walking his dog, Chunk, or else cooking up a storm.