2024 Lamont Poet Patrick Rosal Presents at Evening Reading

By  ROXANE PARK and CELIA VALDEZ

Patrick Rosal presents his poetry to assembly

On the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 24, members of the Exeter community hurried into the Assembly Hall, despite the icy paths and biting rain to listen to the 2024 Lamont Poet, Patrick Rosal, as he came to deliver a riveting reading from his most recent book The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems.

Each year, with the support of the Lamont Fund, the Academy invites two gifted poets to give readings of their poetry and attend English classes. This year, students and faculty alike gathered to enjoy this year’s Lamont Poet as he sang, danced, and shared with us snapshots of his history. 

Rosal is a Filipino-American poet who has authored five books and received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Highlight, and the Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award.

Students found Rosal’s hour-long reading on Wednesday to be enthralling, with many noting the rhythmic nature of his delivery, how the words flowed together with a beat and a tune. Upper Anika Bhatnagar reflected that “he has a really musical way of reading,” while lower Avery Im agreed that Rosal “showed hope and pain through expressive tones and purposeful pauses. [He] empathized with the audience to create a long-lasting effect.” 

Rosal took a moment after each poem to contextualize, then share a snippet of history relating to the following piece. The audience buzzed with laughter at Rosal’s teenage self’s romantic endeavors, then went silent in the next moment, plagiarism surfaced, and as Rosal grappled with history’s brutal realities. 

He began the night with a reading of his poem “A Scavenger’s Ode to the Turntable (aka a Note to Thomas Alva Edison),” which he precluded with a historical account of Thomas Edison, the poem’s namesake and his invention of the phonograph. “During the colonial era,” he recounted, “the phonograph was brought over to the islands and used to mesmerize the islanders, to convince them of their inferiority, and literally…have them listening to their masters’ words.” Rosal himself spent his childhood in Edison, NJ, a town named after the inventor, and could even ride his bike to the place where Edison invented the phonograph. 

The next two poems Rosal presented were “When Prince was Filipino,” a recount of an early experience with love, and “Typhoon Poem,” through which he expressed his deep concern for global climate and the devastation that a typhoon had caused in the Philippines.

Rosal’s description of his poem “As Glass” took a closer look at Rosal’s relationship with his father and his heritage as a multilingual boy in a colonized land, solemnly saying, “I realized that Spanish was a language that me and my father had never been angry any at one another [in].”

“Brokeheart: Just Like That” was a chilling rendition of heartbreak, filled with short and simple, but powerful lines. “Just like that, I’m water,” he read. “Just like that, I’m the boat. / Just like that, I’m both things in the whole world / rocking.” The audience was silent in awe as he delivered the final lines: The wood’s splitting. The hinges are / falling off. When the first bridge ends, / just like that, I’m a flung open door.”

Finally, Rosal concluded the night by reading a new poem that he had written recently, entitled “Prayer for Those of Us who Fail to Floss.” 

On both Wednesday night and the next afternoon on Thursday, Jan. 25, during lunch, Rosal welcomed student questions and his answers were as eloquent and poetic as his writing. 

“I enjoyed when he responded to Forrest Zeng’s question about inspirations in his life, where Rosal then talked about his difficult childhood and how language acted as a barrier between him and his family,” Im recalled. 

At the lunch Q&A session in the Elting Room on Thursday, Rosal centered on the loss of his mother, his brother, his homeland, his heritage, and how it filled him with the need to find a “sanctuary.”

“I built a sanctuary out of poetry,” he said. “Out of sound.” As many students had noticed, Rosal notices that “there is a shape to sound,” and utilizes it in every one of his poems, rendering them into entirely different but equally meaningful works on and off the page. 

Many students noted these central themes of identity and self-discovery, praising the command Rosal held over not only his words and his story, but the crowd. “I noticed many themes of cultural inheritance as well as coming of age and struggles like relearning a language that you’ve lost or facing discrimination,” said upper Roy Liu. “From the first moment when he danced onto stage I was enraptured. He has this amazing stage presence and you feel like you two could become great friends. Every moment stuck out to me,” Liu added. 

For those of you who missed Rosal’s brief but impactful visit to campus, his most recent book, The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, is still available at the bookstore, a winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.