Dahilan (Reason) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2026)
It wouldn’t be too much to require that before reading Parra one consider the question Wittgenstein asks of us and himself: Is this hand a hand or is it not a hand? (One should ask the question while looking at one’s hand.)
—Roberto Bolaño, "Eight Seconds with Nicanor Parra," tr. Guillermo Parra
Two poetry collections—Dahilan and Sa Wala Ka Maniwala—were launched last July 30 by De La Salle University (DLSU) Publishing House. They were the last two books to complete the sonnet septology Sonetoismo by Mesándel "Ayer" Virtusio Arguelles. I will write a couple of posts—one each for Books 6 and 7—on this masterful dismantling of the sonnet.
Looking back at the entire poetry cycle (including its accompanying monograph, "Not the Stuff of Sonnets": Ilang Talâ sa Sonetoismo), published over a span of three years, I find the whole enterprise much more than the sum of its seven volumes. Through the fixed form of the sonnet, the poet wanted to accommodate his ideas about life routines, memories, books, authors, writing, artworks, literary influence, wars, civilization, and other topics that may or may not fall under the rubric "not the stuff of sonnets." Who are we after all to prescribe what the sonnets can and cannot take up as topics? To simplify, Sonetoismo tackled some of the most mundane and some of the most critical subjects of modern life and art. The urgency of its concerns was palpable in its conscious integration of form and content. The poet clearly outlined his intentions in his monograph:
Ito ang pangunahing proyekto sa Sonetoismo, ang lingguwistikong inobasyon at pormal na imbestigasyon sa anyo sa isang buong serye ng sunuran. Ang patuloy na pakikipagbuno sa soneto sa loob ng mga taon, sa palagay ko, ay mahalaga at pangunahing udyok at puwersang nagtulak sa akin upang proyektuhin ang Sonetoismo.
This is the main concern of the Sonetoismo project: linguistic innovation and investigations of form in a series of sonnet sequences. My constant wrangling with the sonnet form over the years, to my mind, has been the central motivation and force that compelled me to undertake the Sonetoismo project.
In his lecture during the double-book launch at DLSU, Arguelles differentiated between a poetic sequence (sunuran) and series (serye) and gave distinct examples from Philippine poetry. Sonetoismo was governed by a restless reflection on forms and innovation and the constant reaching out for a new and vital kind of poetry. In traversing various sonnet-form variations and diverse subject matter, its original ambition yielded new forms and ways of thinking about what a modern sonnet can do in these interesting times.
A perfect example of the poet's flair for reinventing the sonnet was "Dahilan," the title poem of Book 6 of Sonetoismo. Reproduced on the page was a photograph of a checklist posted on a wall. The photograph had no caption but its title was listed in the TOC as "Dahilan" (Reason).
The immediate puzzle of this found poem—reproduced without context—was, of course, to decipher what the question behind it was, the answer being any one of these 14 unique codes lines of poetry. Given some of the entries, one would evidently suspect that the matter has to do with attending a church service (pagsamba). It was not until the end of Book 6 that the suspicion was validated by the poet's notes at the end. The piece of paper containing the various reasons was posted on Reddit by a certain Impulsive-Egg-308 in a community group called exIglesiaNiCristo. Figures.
And since we know the fate of Marcoleta—and history always shakes up the foundations of everything—we should add another line to that found sonnet, making it "a sonnet in excess of a line" (like Allan Popa's poem quoted by Arguelles in "Not the Stuff of Sonnets"):
O: Incarcerated
Or maybe another code, making this a sonnet with an extra couplet:
P: Incarcerated, due to one’s own _______
You get the drift.
Elsewhere in Dahilan, we get 14-album discographies of rock bands and pop stars, 14 lines of blurbs the poet wrote for various works by Filipino writers, and, as with previous volumes, sonnets that violate the 14-line rule. This could make us question not only the found-ness of the sonnet but also its pliable form, bendable contents, and provenance.
A clue on how to approach these quasi-sonnets was a poem about a certain infamous Chilean poet.
Parra
Binasa ko ang mga
tula ni Nicanor Parra
hindi para unawain
ang mga tinawag na
anti-tula kundi para,
gaya ng sa simula pa,
magbasa ng mga tula,
na sa pagkakataong
ito, sinulat ng isang
Parra, at sa sandaling
ito, dito, sinulat ko.
Kung nababasa mo
ito, ngayon, ano pa
ang hinihintay mo?
Parra
I read the
poetry of Nicanor Parra
not to understand
the so-called
anti-poetry but rather,
as I have from the start,
to read poems,
which, in this
instance, were written by a
certain Parra, and which at
this moment, here, I wrote about.
If you are reading
this, now, what is it you're
still waiting for?
The translation lost the compact block form of the sonnet in the original. But here the reader was told not to waste time and go ahead and read Parra's poems, presumably not mainly for their treatment of a movement called anti-poetry but simply to read for the sake of reading. Reading Parra's antipoems would enable us to understand not just his themes but an entirely novel way of thinking about poetry and an idiosyncratic view of it. It was up to the reader to discover in Parra the mechanism behind resistance art and a pragmatic view of poker poetry written with a straight face.
"There's nothing unimpeachable that the sonnet can't impeach," I said in my impressions of books 3 to 5 of the series. Arguelles has shown that the hallowed and longstanding institution of the sonnet, revivified through innovative methods and approaches, would be a credible court in which to hold a trial for all forms of infamy and iniquity, political or otherwise.
In "Letters from a Poet Who Sleeps in a Chair," Parra shared his antipoetics:
Young poets
Say whatever you want
Pick your own style
Too much blood has gone under the bridge
To still believe—I believe—
That there's only one way to cross the road:
You can do anything in poetry.
[tr. David Unger, from Emergency Poems (1972)]
With creative instinct informing his conceptual writing, Arguelles did to the sonnet what Parra instructed young poets to do. He picked various styles suited to his purpose and explored the powerful possibilities of anything.
* * *
In the spirit of Arguelles's Sonetoismo, I want to share these three found poems:
Mga Alyas ng NPA na Binanggit ni Robin Padilla
Ka-Cobra
Ka-Agila
Ka-Lawin
Ka-Tigre
Ka-Kapre
Ka-Sirena
Ka-Adobo
Ka-Sinigang
Ka-Pansit
Ka-Tinola
Ka-Sili
Ka-Kamote
Ka-Bawang
Ka-Labuyo
Benepisyaryo ng Confi Funds ng OVP: Kalahating Soneto
Mary Grace Piattos
Antonio Pagong
Timon Andrew Pusa
Don Piang
Shane Ngitngit
Xuniso P. Bela
May Pamana
Makasaysayang Alyas: Sonetong Lumabis ng Apat na Linya
Dimasalang
Siling Labuyo
Tikbalang
Taga-Ilog
Maypagasa
Buwan
Magdalo
Leon Kilat
Debora
Lakambini
Paralitiko
Dimas
Alipato
Liwanag
Baliti
Marcial Bonifacio
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