Editor's Note:

Shortly after the publication of this collection, Michael J. Bugeja received Maltese citizenship, acting on legislation that allows dual citizenship if an applicant’s parents were Maltese citizens. Michael’s mother, Josephine, was born in Marsa. His father, Michael, was born in Ghajnsielem, Gozo, where Bugeja plans to retire, returning to his family’s ancestral home. In the meantime Dr. Bugeja plans to enhance educational ties between Malta and the United States.

Dr. Bugeja has published eight poetry collections, including Millennium’s End (Archer), Talk (Univ. of Arkansas Press), and Flight from Valhalla (Livingston University Press). Millennium’s End and Flight from Valhalla were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has published individual poems in some of the world’s premiere magazines, including Harper’s, Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and Georgia Review.

Dr. Bugeja also has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction and an Ohio Arts Council fellowship in poetry, in addition to poetry awards from Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and the Associated Writing Programs, among others. He is former chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, a position held by such literary masters as Tess Gallagher, John Crowe Ransom, Scott Momaday, James Dickey, Rodney Jones and Robert Penn Warren.

A longtime poetry columnist for Writer’s Digest, Bugeja has authored several textbooks on writing, including the acclaimed Art & Craft of Poetry (Writer’s Digest Books), Poet’s Guide: How to Place and Perform Your Work (Story Line Press), and Guide to Writing Magazine Nonfiction (Allyn & Bacon). His latest work is Living Without Fear: Understanding Cancer and the New Therapies (Whitston), which he co-authored with molecular biologist Tom Wagner, distinguished professor at Clemson University.

Dr. Bugeja teaches writing and ethics at Ohio University where he serves as professor and associate director of the prestigious E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.
 

Introduction

By what criteria does a writer select his greatest poetic hits? Most poems are misses, metaphorically and literally. Should one choose poems that appear in premiere magazines and journals like Harper’s or Kenyon Review? Any poet who has placed work in such prestigious periodicals usually has suffered a dozen rejections for each acceptance. “Why this poem,” one wonders, “and not the others?” Or should the writer choose instead poems that speak to his core as a person, poems of identity or loss thereof, whose meaning defines and eludes him?

I have done that here. My greatest hits are ones that define me as a first generation American who was reared as a Maltese oldest son. These date back to my earliest poems in 1980 when I entered the doctoral program in creative writing at Oklahoma State University, composing “The Only Morning My Mother Didn’t Worship Her Husband” and winning an Academy of American Poets prize on my first attempt. That’s luck. Or maybe a greatest hit.

All of these poems come with stories. In “The Den of Swallows,” composed a few years later, I chronicle the true account of a maternal grandfather who was arrested by the British, occupying Malta during World War II. He swept flour dust from the docks each night and brought that mixture of grain and grit home for my grandmother to bake bread, feeding his starving family. Had he not done this, the Apap clan might have perished. Divine justice, too: I published this poem in a British magazine, Orbis. That’s why it’s a “hit.”

“The Hutch” and “The New Dress” are based on other family stories—which I witnessed in Malta visiting relatives during the turbulent 1970s, when Malta declared independence from England. Aunt Lena, a feisty former nun who married late in life, passed away two years ago. She is the inspiration for “Luna Fortuna,” a fictional character of mine in short stories about Malta, one of which won a National Endowment for the Arts in 1990. These are my greatest “hits of heritage.”

My father who looked more Irish than Maltese and who was as tough as James Cagney, whom he uncannily resembled, appears in “The Slap.” I loved my father because he looked so American (which I do not). I look like my mother, with black hair and dark brown eyes. Whenever I saw my father, I felt joy, which he seldom allowed, fearing displays of affection. “The Slap” and “The Professional”—he actually was a pro soccer player in Detroit—capture Michael Carl Bugeja’s impact on his son. The “hits” here are literal.

“Death of a War Hero” is the true narrative of Emanuel Apap, my mother’s brother, who enlisted in the U.S. Army in the months before Pearl Harbor and ended up serving for the duration, outlasting everyone, even General Patton, with whom he served, without a scratch, a miracle that haunted him for a half century. Why him, and not the others, spared in battle? This poem recounts my uncle’s capture of a Nazi platoon leader who loathed being bested by a Semite-looking man, possibly a Jew with his long Maltese nose. This is a greatest hit because of the structure, rhymed and metered like a march, as we all must march, including my Uncle, in time—however seemingly untouchable—to fate.

“The Landgrant Professor” is a series of three poems that concern my professional life at Oklahoma State University, where I taught in the 1980s. I wrote the poem in a dramatic voice, adopting the persona of a physicist rather than a journalist. The poem documents what it feels like to be born in America and still seem like a foreigner to others—bound up in the absurdity of academic life—with colleagues who might know better, but don’t. “The Landgrant Professor” is included because it remains one of the most requested poems at readings. It has been a “hit” with audiences.

My greatest hits end with lyrics about Malta whose siren voice still calls to me as I turn 50. At present I am seeking dual citizenship, repatriation with an archipelago whose land mass is small but whose history is immense. My own history, along with my genome, appears in poems printed here, my greatest hits, my deepest songs.

Michael J. Bugeja
Athens, Ohio
20 November 2001

The Song I Cannot Sing

                     for Dun Karm  (1871-1961)
                     National Poet of Malta.

My grandmother came to this country
On a boat, a whalebone woman in black
& white passport photos flaked with age.
She laughs when I try to speak
Her throaty language. Once, maybe twice
She thought about teaching me
The hard syllables
And only before cheek-pinching uncles
Who also laughed and played
Mandolins on the patio--
Like puppeteers, lifted the moon with melody,
The trapped chord from my heart.

Two Sounds

         for my son

Grandmother came here in the cargo hold
Of a great vessel and loved the tap of rain
On roofs, the ocean ever in her ears,
Grooved cornucopias that echo still
In this empty shell like a wavelength.
Can you hear the soothing rattle-tap-tap
Gutter-drip, her fingertip on your pane?
You, too, will lose and find me in this hymn

At 40, dreading another dawn. Listen
Then to the arias of robin and starling
Grandmother fed with bread I did not eat
On her lawn, happy to wake to the warbling,
As we wait now, sleepless but together.
I have loaned you these legacies of sound
To outlast the apparitions of light
Which always fade, as I will, in the night.

The Obedient Chorus

I don’t trust dreams, especially
In poems. You can read so much
Into them. But tonight in my sleep
I sang the impossible octaves
A capella, my voice clearer

Than these lines. I was south
Of Sicily on the dangerous rocks
Of Gozo. A great mass gathered
To chant my lyrics in a chord
I can’t name for you now, though

It was minor: What counts
Is those good Gozoans
Answered anything I sang,
And they were not going to ruin
The night by taking it seriously.