Tatlong Libong Araw (Three Thousand Days), Anyo ng Kalatagan (The Lay of the Land), and Sa Halip na mga Bulaklak (In Lieu of Flowers) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2025)
1) The Japanese conceptual artist Kawara On (1932–2014) produced a fascinating series of date paintings that function like totem poles for human existence. Each date painting celebrated one more day of life lived on Earth. The stuff of ordinary lives, the minutiae of the daily grind, the friction between pop culture and modern realities – they were memorialized by Kawara into tablets bearing months, dates, and years. The timestamp of our momentary existence was turned into treasures of lived experiences.
Sonetoismo, the seven-book cycle of modern sonnets by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, tipped its hat off to Kawara's creations. The indefatigable poet borrowed Kawara's sense of time and timelessness into lines that scan the paradox of memory, the simple snapshot of the beauty and horrors of modern life.
2) "There are millions of suns left," wrote Whitman and quoted in Filipino by Arguelles in "Kalahating Soneto" (Half a Sonnet), the opening sonnet (albeit a half-sonnet) in Tatlong Libong Araw (Three Thousand Days), the third volume of Sonetoismo. The half-sonnet was a play on the Filipino word araw which means both "day" and "sun" in English. When translated into English, the double-meaning of araw was broken. The celestial body sun was a totem pole for the passage of days. The translator would choose between day and sun to render araw and the unity of time (day) and its arbiter (sun) would be lost. Dichotomies emerged from language swallowing meanings whole.
3) Sonetoismo, in its first five published volumes to date, along with the accompanying monograph "Not the Stuff of Sonnets": Ilang Talâ sa Sonetoismo (Notes on Sonetoismo, 2024), appeared to view the sonnet form with utter suspicion. Form was a constraint; it was a prison of one's making. The poet had all the freedom to break from the sonnet form, to demolish and shatter it like a poet-activist committed to bringing down structures of naked power in a manner and method it could readily muster: the unstoppable lines of poetry. That was perhaps what committed art means. In "Octavio Paz," the poet aligned itself with the Mexican poet's call for growing a conscience and bearing witness: "Pero nauunawaan ko / si Paz, kailangang / may saksi, may budhi / upang may lumaya" (I understand / Paz, witness / and conscience are needed / to regain freedom).
4) Hence, the poet made his assault on form – the 14-line sonnet – through exploration of various linear and graphic innovations and possibilities to re-form form. Facebook posts turned into sonnets, a playlist containing 14 songs, combinations of a tic-tac-toe game, art exhibition posters, song lyrics. The self-imposed prison of the sonnet was there for the escaping. The poet of innovation was a fugitive running away from regimented meter, rhyme, measure, and whatnot. The poet of creativity was as resourceful as MacGyver. He had a use for every material that comes his way, a function for every knickknack. He could get out of any sticky situation. If he saw a flying saucer, he could transform it into a sonnet.
5) A sonnet from the third volume, followed by my translation:
Sonetoismo
Maliit ang bahay,
ilang dipa lang
ang dulo't dulo.
Pero ngayong
ako ang naiwan
at walang masilip
na araw sa labas,
para akong nasa
palasyo. Kasya
ang tatlong libong
araw ni Kawara
o maging daang
libong bilyong
tula ni Queneau.
Sonetoismo
A miniature house,
just a few yards
from end to end.
But finding myself
here, alone,
unable to glimpse
the sun outside,
it's as if I'm inside
a palace. Holding
three thousand
days of Kawara
or even a hundred
thousand billion
poems of Queneau.
6) Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), author of the form-breaking Exercises in Style (translated by Barbara Wright), published his famous flip-chart poetry collection Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), the Guinness world record holder for the most number of sonnets (and poems) included in a single book. More than a poet, Queneau was a mathematical genius.
In the sonnets assembled in Sonetoismo, Arguelles was as if distilling the works of Queneau and the other proponents of the Oulipo movement, the literary innovators of the day. A symptom of his radicality was already evident in his poetic works, collected in Atra: Mga Tula 1999–2019 (Isang Balangay Media Productions, 2020), a generous compendium from a twenty-year career of a poet in constant search of radical breaks and radical forms.
In his oeuvre, we saw how the poet curated his ideas and pieces with great care, juxtaposing improvisation with found objects. In the true spirit of daring experimentalists – Alfred Jarry in The Ubu Plays (translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor), Walter Abish in Alphabetical Africa –avant-garde, surrealism, cubism, progressive cinema found footing in Sonetoismo's formal and whimsical inventiveness.
Innovation has no limits.
7) Beyond form, the poet filed his protest on subject matter too. Pop culture rubbed shoulders with literary arts. Random thoughts and occasions merged with art appreciation, dissolving the boundaries between high and low.
8) The cover art of the septology featured works by the artist, writer, and curator Koki Lxx (stylized name of Koki Lee). Lee arranged the G-lock, a reusable plastic material used in resealing bread, into configurations of calendar days and months. The use of this color-coded material representing expiration days was almost inspired by Kawara's dates. One colored G-lock represented a day of the week. In his monograph, the poet said that each volume of the sonnet cycle would number to around 50 poems or so and would eventually total to some 365 poems, a year's harvest of a daily sonnet.
(I owe the identification of the G-lock in the book covers to my daughter S. who loves loaf bread. She recognized it when I was trying to identify the material.)
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| Image from Yummy.ph |
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes, five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear. / Five hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes – how do you measure, measure a year?
9) We could trace Arguelles's propensity for breaking forms in his previous experimental outings, notably in his erasure poetry, as in Gera (War), Pesoa, and Three Books, the latter two appearing in translations by Kristine Ong Muslim. In his review of Gera, Rise already observed the author's habit of constructing something from the ashes of destruction, producing monstrosities that defied categorization.
The title Gera was abbreviated from Gerilya, the 2008 novel of Norman Wilwayco. The poet Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles prepared his black highlighter pen and attacked Wilwayco's novel. Like what he did in Pesoa (2014), derived from Rene O. Villanueva's childhood memoirs Personal, he crafted yet another constellation of erasure poetry, redacting to his heart's content, assiduously leaving out extraneous material, contracting blocks of narrative into floating words. He ruthlessly deconstructed Wilwayco's novel and murdered the past. He declared war against semantics to construct a new monster.
It's no wonder the second volume of Sonetoismo was called Monstruo.
10) "Soneto [Playlist]" was a screenshot of an actual Spotify playlist compiled by a certain Ayer, 14 songs in all with running time of around 55 minutes. The first song was spoken poetry set to music: "Nang Salakayin Mo Ang Aking Pananahimik" by The Axel Pinpin Propaganda Machine (listen to it here). It was an odd title for an opening "song", let alone the first line of a sonnet. The poem (translated here) was from Axel Pinpin's collection Tugmaang Matatabil (Irreverent Verses). The list also had three brooding songs by Zild. I haven't played and listened to the whole song list yet.
Can a musical playlist be an actual sonnet? The answer to this rhetorical question would make for a good subject of a sonnet.
11) In an unauthorized non-interview of the poet, a clueless reader bombarded Ayer with questions about the composition of the sonnets. He was hard put to elicit sonnetic ideas from the poet. Everything the poet had to say about his project to date was already sonnetized in the five volumes and in the companion monograph "Not the Stuff of Sonnets". What was apparent was how the sonnets themselves, constituted as whole, formed into a commentary on life and art, the poet's own and those of his chosen precursors. It was a curated enterprise that sometimes mimicked or commented on other art forms. By volume five, the focus concentrated on three figures: Agnes Martin and her grid paintings, Abbas Kiarostami and the framed shots of his last film, and Mikhail Tal and his masterful chess moves on a chess board.
In "[Kuwadro 23]" ([Frame 23]) under the section called "Kuwadro [Abbas Kiarostami]", the poet ended his sonnet with a rhetorical question, "Ano ba ang tula / kundi ang tunog na ito?" (What is a poem / but this selfsame sound?) The italics were in the original.
In the facing page, "[Kuwadro 24]", another question was asked, "Saan nga ba nagwawakas ang / ang buhay at nagsisimula / ang sining?" (Where does life / end and art / begin?)
12) Paintings, film frames, chess games. They contained the symptoms of sonnet form that speaks to other art forms and mental games, to exercises in style.
In Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, translated by David Bellos, the narrative shifted from one character to the next, the shift being dictated by the knight's move in a chess, corresponding to the location of the character's room in a housing complex. This Knight's Tour was the narrative constraint of an experimental novel, a spatial configuration seemingly amplified in the compositional strategy of the work.
The Knight piece of chess played a big part in Mikhail Tal's games and in Arguelles's appropriation of the tablero (chess board) for his sonnets on the life of Mikhail Tal.
13) A sonnet can be a diary entry, a commentary on art and games, an artifact of history, an ekphrasis. Time mediates all of them.
Interesado ang manlilikha sa oras. O higit pa, kung paano mapatitigil ang oras. Karera sa oras ang buhay at tanging oras ang nananalo, pero hindi ibig sabihi'y susuko na tayo. Sa isang obra ni Balisi, ipininta nya ang tapyas na mga mukha ng orasan. Sa pinta, walang paglalahad ng oras. Nasa isang kuwadro lang ang lahat. Walang nakaraan at kinabukasan. Kasalukuyan ang tinutunghayan.
*
Sa paggawa, gamit ang mga kamay at madalas kaysa hindi, naipapako ng paggawa ang ating mga kamay habang gumagawa hanggang wala nang iba pang magawa, wala nang magagawa. Mga manggagawa tayong walang palad sa kamay ng kapital. Kailangang magkuyon ng palad, magtaas-kamao. Sa mga ipinintang tapyas na mukha ng orasan ni Balisi, makikita ang mga kamay na napako sa sandali ng paghinto o paghinto ng sandali. Isang araw, hindi na tayo mapapaikot sa mga kamay ng orasan.
[The painter was interested in time. But more than that: how to stop time. Life is a race against time and time always wins, but it doesn't mean we'll just give up and surrender. In one of Balisi's works, he painted the broken face of a clock. In the painting, time was at a standstill. In a single frame, everything was frozen in time. Past and future did not exist, Only the present counted.
*
In labor, we worked with our hands and more often than not, our hands were tied to the labor while at work until no work could be done any longer, no work was forthcoming. We were laborers at the mercy of the hands of capital. We had to clench our fists and raise them high. In Balisi's paintings of broken faces of the clock, we recognized the hands frozen at the moment of their stoppage or the stoppage of their moment. One day, we would no longer be beholden to the hands of the time.]
– from Sa Ibang Kariktan (Another Beauty) by Arguelles (The University of the Philippines Press, 2024):
14) "Sonetong Walang mga Kuwarteto" (Sonnet Without Quartets) was only a couplet, having lost the three quartets: "Hindi minsang karanasan / ang karahasan kada araw" (A daily dose of violence / is not an unusual experience). So was ""Sonetong Walang mga Kuwarteto [Drug War]":
Kung balewala
sa iyo ang pagpatay.
If killing
is your thing.
That sonnet should be framed and accompany Digong in The Hague.
15) The sonnet called "Sonetong Walang Isang Salita" was a blank page. The title could mean "Sonnet Without a Single Word", but "walang isang salita" was a Filipino idiom meaning someone who is not a man of his word, or who reneges on his word and breaks his promise under oath. A faithful translation of the poem (or rather the title, since below it was a blank page) could be as follows.
Sonnet Which Failed to Keep Its Word
16) The above non-poem (or non-sonnet) by Arguelles called to mind José García Villa's (1908–1997) blank-page poem called "The Emperor's New Sonnet". Arguelles's minimalist depiction of a politician was as loud as Villa's stark-naked poetry. The two were linked by a dash of whim, a sprinkle of whimsy, and a hint of whimsicality. If it was worth its salt (pardon the pun), a sonnet had to emerge from its long tradition of summer's day, God's grandeur, doomed youth, and the many ways a love is compared to. The emergent property of a sonnet had to transcend the fixed number of lines of its traditional existence. The modern sonnet not only had to break free from the shackles of convention. It had to fly. It had to stop time.
17) The last poem in volume 3:
Walong-Linyang Soneto
Ito ang mga linya ng tulang pinagyaman
sa bundok. Nilinang mula sa mga kamay
ng ninunong mataimtim na nagmasid
sa lawas ng katahimikan ng kagubatan,
ng kapatagan, at ng kalangitan. Narito
ang hagdan-hagdang kariktang bumababa
sa lupa at idinadambana kong unibersal.
Mga baiting na kailanman ay di-mabilang.
Eight-Line Sonnet
Here are the lines of a poem nurtured
in the mountains. Polished by the hands
of ancestors solemnly gazing
at the expanse of the hushed forest,
of the plains, of the heavens. Here
are terraces of beauty descending
on earth and which I extol as universal.
The steps that can never be counted.
18) Like the orthogonal steps of rice terraces carved on the curving ridges of mountains, the discrete sonnet could contain infinite lines too.
19) What isn't a sonnet? What can't a sonnet do? What can't a sonnet make one do?
20) Tomorrow I'll download Spotify.
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