Jose Perez Beduya
Photo by Jessica del Mundo
Bio
Jose Perez Beduya is the author of Throng (&Now Books, 2012), selected by Jennifer Moxley for the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize. A graduate of Cornell University's MFA program, he has received fellowships from the Santa Fe Art Institute and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, High Chair, Lana Turner, Ploughshares, and the Toadsuck Review.
A transplant from Manila, Philippines, he lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, Jessica del Mundo, and their two cats, Pablo and Nona. He is working on his second collection.
Author's Statement
It's been argued that once a gift is recognized as a gift, it inescapably enters an economy of expectation and calculation. When a gift is also the gift of recognition, this quandary doubles.
The NEA fellowship is one such tremendous gift, conferring both awe and anxiety. But what makes this fellowship--as well as other gifts in support of the arts--wonderful, bearable, and necessary is its promotion of risk and its power to stimulate vital self-doubt, as much as confidence. It sponsors creativity and experimentation that exceeds the circuit of return. Therein lies its magic.
When I reflect on receiving the fellowship, I think about the contours and heft of this gift--its material generosity and yet also its ghostly force. I feel its presence as I write, knowing that it is only ever partially earned, that it is perpetually deferred and pointing to an unrelenting future music.
The Reunification of the Body
Stay down beside your confirmation number
And be someone's garden
The orders of magnitude will mount
And thunder past us
This is the part
When you put everything away
Where no one can tell
The difference between the wind
And a human being
The haze has migrated to the other eye
Cracks have begun at the knees
And green-grey wilt in the waist
And wrists of the everlasting
Remember that you fell
When you speak again
Use your wilderness
Not your factory voice
(first appeared in Ploughshares, 2008)