In verbo tuo

Gera (War) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (Isang Balangay Media Productions, 2016)

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.

Arguelles made gera with all but one part of speech. The leftovers were highly selected verbs. He verbed the novel into submission. He prosed the lines into annular eclipse-like concealment. He warred against the notion of novel(ty) to produce poetry. And then, after doing the deed, as with Pesoa, he then set out to print a book where verbs appeared on white pages, with the original black redactions now dissolving into the white spaces. He hid the telling evidence of his heinous crime. White stone on a black stone. A humument to humeri. Readers who have no copy of Gerilya at their disposal would have no way of ascertaining the veracity of erasure. They would just have to take the poet's word for it.

Write with nouns and verbs, exhorted Strunk and White. The poet Arguelles took it to another level. He fixated on verbs, verbatim from Wilwayco's transgressive novel. Whether verbal abuse or verbal ruse, the unpaged verbs were clothed in a continuity of variegated tenses – past, present, future, past perfect. The process was bared without map or compass. I would have to take the invisible on faith.

In poetry, context was useful. But here context was a mere pretext. It was not the end-all. Experimentalism was the subtext. The violence of erasures left yawning gaps of white spaces that buried the subjects and predicates. The seemingly random placements of verbs evoked the feeling of dislocation. All words may be verbed, said Stan Carey. But I must tell you the experience of reading an all-verb book was quite an un-verbing feeling.

Below is an excerpt from a random page. I could not say what exact page since, as mentioned, the book was not paginated. The word locations are only approximate.

                                                 nagpupulong
                                                                     nag-uumpisa
                                                                                dumarating

nag-iinuman



                                                        tinitimbang
                              sasabihin
                                                 ipapaliwanag


          Nagtitimpi

nagngangalit


              binuhusan







              pinagsasamantalahan

                                                     sumampa

I suppose I do not need to translate the specific page of Gerilya book to translate the above passage from Gera. No matter how I see it, replicating the process of erasure – this time on the translated page – would not produce a good approximation since the exact placement of the above verbs in the original would never correspond to spatial orientation of the verbs in translation. Talk about the impossibility of spatial alignment in translation, no less than the impossibility of perfect translation, the impossibility of Walter Benjamin's dream. (The poem's preface quoted Walter Benjamin: All language communicates itself.) The complete translation would breed another warlike species of monster. Anyway, a translation of the above would read: conferring ... commencing ... comes ... drinking ... weighing ... tell ... discuss ... Suppressing ... gnashing ... watered ... savaged ... sat. Yet another page can be translated – without reproducing the jumbled positions – as: waiting ... covered ... Palpitating ... boiling ... chose ... sided ... robbed ... lighted up ... rising ... starting. It was obvious to me that the original verbs were more forceful and thrilling than their translation.      

The Filipino word for verb is pandiwa. Diwa means spirit. As constituent elements, the verbs were the vital life force that gave rise to the book of poetry. The book's epigraph, borrowed from Anne Carson, announced that Verbs are savage. But the aftermath of savagery is what? Beauty? Redemption? Regret?

Imagine pages and pages of this silent verbosity. The violence was staggering. I planned on taking pictures of a few pages but I have no camera on hand. You will have to take my word for it.

In verbo tuo.

On The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus

The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus by Cirilo F. Bautista (De La Salle University Press, 2012)

In his foreword to the three collected volumes of his poetic trilogy, Cirilo F. Bautista, recently elected as National Artist of the Philippines, explained his motivation for his undertaking the writing of an epic poem.

In 1967, I realized that I could not be writing poetry all my life. Not only was it impractical for me to engage in a profession patronized by a negligible sector of society but I also had other interests in mind. But before I ceased writing poetry, I had to finish a project that would justify such a stoppage.... I decided I would write an epic trilogy about the development of the Filipino soul from the very start of Philippine history to the twentieth century. I would call it The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, Saint Lazarus being the original name the Spanish colonizers gave our country in honor of the worker-saint. For it was on March 16, [1521] the feastday of the saint, that they sighted the Archipelago.

...

The story in the trilogy builds upon the discourses of various [historical] personas—their cogitations, explications, justifications, and interpretations of the significant realities that affected their time and milieu in connection with the nation's struggle for selfhood and freedom. The events and circumstances that connect them are told not in chronological sequence ... but in psychological sequence, the focus being the passionate retrieval of national memories. Each of the voices in the plot relates a story or several stories, and these stories merge and submerge with each other in interrogative and confirmative moods.

1. The Archipelago 

Of Malacca, the Portuguese wine bowl in Ior,
Cramped with cloves and nutmegs kings bent maps for, moving
The sun by Papal error higher and lower
Than the fish, amongst waterlilies and metals,
How shall I sing the blood? Ruyfarelo lost in
His islands which like chesspieces lynched their mover.
Serrano gone. Caño, Loaysa, Saavedra:
Gone. If it is a virtue polishes the sword and
Denies its teeth, I am rock who this dark island
Coveted, and am weeping. The ship we rode, the ship
We cut the whales with when powder and prayer would
Not blind their nose—to know how much my foreparents
Stamped their limbs in the vineyard, crushing the olives
And the light to put as by magic chocolated
Bread on a square of table, to hear the clang of ax
That broke butter, will show how lumber rules the high seas,
How salt is the price of sceptre. Gone. Olive. Onion.

The first part of Cirilo F. Bautista's famous lyrical epic is called The Archipelago. It contains some very good lines of poetry. In terms of scope, theme, and stylistic flourishes, the trilogy is a truly national epic. The entire work is obviously a labor of love, having been constructed over a period of years: over three decades! Bautista clearly wanted to display his talent through the use of different poetic registers (sometimes narrative, sometimes dialectical like dialogues in a play), various line lengths and divisions (long lines, short and clipped lines, lines cut at various indentations), and various points of view. The use of lines of various lengths creates a kind of symphonic diversity and makes for a dynamic rhythm and cadence. Like all the good poems, I think this was meant to be recited. It could certainly be adapted as a musical or play. I would have liked to listen to the varied sounds of this poem and see how it will be interpreted on stage, complete with costumes by Spanish conquistadors and native peoples. Some of the speakers are easily identified and recognizable. The voices are dominated by historical figures like Ferdinand Magellan, Miguel López de Legazpi, Limahon, and Rizal. The quotations from historians Antonio de Morga and Pigafetta, etc., in the epigraphs provide a clue as to which historical sources were consulted in the writing of the poem.

2. Telex Moon

The middle part of the trilogy is a departure from the first part's diverse form. In place of variable lengths of the lines, varied indentations, and varying stanza lengths is a strict sequence of quintains (stanzas of five lines) all throughout this second book.

The multiple voices in the first part give way to the single voice of the national hero. The epic shifts from many perspectives and places to one quiet and intimate sojourn in Dapitan, right before Rizal's death in Luneta. Rizal meditates on religion, on love, on armed revolution versus pacifism, on the "house of memory", on life in the city.

The internal rhymes and alliterations are sustained for long stretches. Brilliant really. But rather than staid, straight lines, the rhythm is often broken by punctuations—e.g., by a series of em dashes, or long passages in "quotations"—and sometimes lines within poetic lines are signified by slashes ("/").

The image of the telex is elaborate and complex, but it is playfully introduced.

The sex of telex brings the grex an ax,
tells exactly the factly lack of lex
though in electric stockrooms it is rex;
its shocky hair that shakes the air mirific

connects the coin machines to the dreamers
in the stars, twenty-one ladders to Mars
with no crossroad in the main, and every brain
pulsing to the monetary tune....

I don't completely understand the image of the telex moon but it is quite curious.

... Slowly—electric nervure—

once embossed in cornfields and banana groves—
chiselled in emblazonry—coaxes now
to bloom the telex moon! The rooty galax—
the rootless galaxy—the telstar legion

all flow magically to coax the telex
moon! And out of the escutcheon jumps
the telex moon! The fecund—the fictive—
the florid! Telex moon! Pollex moon! For

from afar it measures a finger long—
a finger song—from side to side/ It contains
the techniques—the tactics for clarity
and form—but none of the erotica

the City drags its bones by/

Bautista luxuriates in wordplay and fancy word combinations here. Telex is the prototype of mobile phone. It can represent the modern city, its technology and its evils. It can represent modern progress through faster communication. It is an instrument that can bridge the past and present. Sort of like telepathy through time, or time travel. The past and present can coincide through memory. In this section, the story of Rizal still has relevance to the present and still communicates something to us.

The moon's classical meaning is death. And death is constant in the same way that the moon is always out there, a satellite orbiting the earth. Telex moon is the enduring witness to Rizal's despair while in exile in Dapitan and also the same witness to his death in Bagumbayan. Right now, above us is the telex moon, beaming a silent message through light: time is eternal, history is a cycle.

3. Sunlight on Broken Stones

With Sunlight on Broken Stones, it becomes obvious that Bautista is concerned with the political trajectory of Philippine history. This final volume is an ethical poetic sequence describing the challenges faced by the country in instituting good governance. It describes the "broken" condition of the country in the aftermath of colonialism (Spain, America, Japan) and neocolonialism characterized by endemic corruption in government (at all levels!), endless hunger and poverty, oligarchy, and military abuses.

The epic has become a little closer to current events, spanning the period of Martial Law right up to People Power Revolution and the years under Cory. For the Marcos babies, the references to Marcos, Imelda, Cory, and Cardinal Sin are recognizable.

Marcos:

... Why then should I hide
anything when I have nothing to hide? Look
at the medals that fill my chests, and the bright
citations embracing my walls—are they not

the categorical imprimatur on
my legitimacy?

We also hear the first person monologues of national heroes Bonifacio and Rizal and, also from beyond the grave, the dead Marcos despairing over Cory's refusal to allow his corpse to return home from Hawaii.

There's Imelda vs Cory (+ Cardinal Sin); + their dead hubbies:

... "Revenge is mine," says one, and will not
permit homecoming for a corpse. "Must I mourn
till the close of doom?" says the other, and oils
the gearsprings that feed her money. How many
times must memory mock their bright peacock pride?

Tarmac-hero? Christ-like tyrant? Their husbands
are dead weights now though the cardinal with some
crazy name would canonize the first, condemn
the second, as if Virtue resided in
his fingertips.

An interesting passage is one attributed to Tolstoy, from a section which contains one epigraph after another. It perpetuates the cliche (especially among our national writers) about the "collective" imaginings of a race, contained in so-called "national literatures":

However important a political
literature may be, a literature
that reflects society's passing problems, and
however necessary to national

progress, there is however, still another
type of literature that reflects the true
eternal necessities of all mankind,
the dearest and deepest imaginings of
a whole race, one that is accessible to

all and to every age, one without which no
people has been able to grow powerful
and fertile.—L. Tolstoy, 1859.

As to the title, the "sunlight" signifies hope after a long period of shadows and darkness hovering over the "broken" spirit of the Filipino people.

"And what language must rise out of broken stones
that serve as landscapes for a people's desire
to relight the fire of harmony and strength?
Where are they now, the words Jaena splattered
at Barcelona and Madrid in splendid

"subversiveness? Where are the contracts for death,
or for life, that rich men and poor men inscribed
with the blood of their faith in reckless pursuit
of a common rule?"

In terms of geography, the Philippines is a pile of "broken stones" because of its archipelagic nature. In historical terms, the country is broken by colonization of three imperial powers and later (up to the turn of the twenty-first century) by the rule of the oligarchs and the elite, the often corrupt leaders who, with impunity, plundered the country of its resources. Notwithstanding the reign of these modern-day conquistadors, Bautista's elegy ends with an unqualified hope derived, in part, from embracing the lessons of history.

          Keep the books now
the won patrimony
all letters not fetters
to announce the anthem
           to the four winds

          Keep eternal
account of our shared griefs
and pains   gaiety and goals
gold lost    now recovered
           birthright returned

Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes

Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and Sean O'Brien (Archipelago Books, 2014)

"All of parting is power in death / And all return is a child learning to spell", wrote the Cape Verdean poet Corsino Fortes (b. 1933) in a selection of poems made available in English this year. These lines ended the poem "Emigrant" from his first collection of poems Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme, 1974). The emigrant's homecoming and leavetaking were equated with learning her native language. The emigrant's own return perfected her learning through mastery of the language.

Go and plant
           in dead Amilcar's mouth
This fistful of watercress
And spread from goal to goal
           A fresh phonetics
And with the commas of the street
     and syllables from door to door
You will sweep away before the night
The roads that go
           as far as the night-schools
For all departure means a growing alphabet
     for all return is a nation's language

Language was the life-force that kept the emigrant moored in the world, her loyal companion and the educational standard by which she measured her adventures. The reference to Amílcar Cabral, the assassinated Guinea-Bissauan nationalist leader, made this poem a part of nationalist contemplation.

The two collaborating translators, Daniel Hahn and Sean O'Brien, evoked an English that must have wrestled with the poet's non-standard Portuguese. It seemed to be a methodical process: Hahn prepared a literal translation from which O'Brien crafted a final version. [For a glimpse into the delicate balancing act that the two translators follow in their rendering of Fortes's poems, see (or listen to) their version of and their illuminating notes to "Postcards from the High Seas".]

Fortes used Cape Verdean Creole in writing about African islands milieu. It was an organic language whose remnants in English was evident from powerful imagery, as in "Gate of the Sun", where African children are like the very islands they hail from.

I

From the straw hills
                     whose doors are the sun
Children descend
                      naked and thin
                                 like guitars
ribs showing under the strings
All of them
           the first-born
                      of the one belly
And daughters
           of the same volcano And of the same guitar
           Of the same rock and the same cry

...

III

The child does not
Always breathe
                     its lung was
                                 torn from the map

And thus
           like the islands themselves
At sunset
They are fed
                     on phonemes
Each child
Is a diphthong of milk
                     with blood in its vowels

[Nem sempre
A criança respira
                     um pulmão
                                 roto de mapas

E assim
           como as ilhas
Ao pôr do Sol
Se alimentam
                     de fonemas
Cada criança
É ditongo de leite
                     com sangue nas vogais]

The "diphthong of milk" denoted a dual or hybrid language or consciousness or race that marked each child's identity. Fortes was asserting his linguistic heritage using images that recognize the power to express one's cultural, dialectical spirit. The influence of geography ["its lung was / torn from the map"] in the makeup of a child was significant but did not make a complete breathing being. "The child" was once again invoked, for every citizen was a child of circumstances: the sum total of a child's life experience in an island was not only the island but her linguistic relations and transactions.

Fortes was a proponent of indigenous culture. His education abroad and occupation as diplomat probably made him an observer of cultures and a champion of his own chaotic tradition. As he declared in "Act of Culture"—a poem  from Árvore & Tambor (Tree & Drum)—culture and expression are intimately linked (by chaos, if you will). The "drum on a tree" was in fact the poetic image from which this chaos was mapped out.

Act of Culture

How the sound swells in the fruit: the drum
                                                    Is on the tree
And opposed to erosion: the politics of seduction

                            And

'If the destiny of man is ceaseless labour'

                            And

The word love has no mouth to its river

Culture! is entirely
Old chaos given dynamic expression

"Dynamic expression" was what Fortes was able to convey in his singular poems. "Old chaos" was visualized in the above poem itself where the swelling sound of the drum-like fruit, an auditory sensation, shared space with the "politics of seduction", a Sisyphus figure ["ceaseless labour"], and love that lacks a river mouth. This melange of seemingly surreal but actually organically delicate touches was a characteristic of the poet's output.

His description of the works of the artist Tchalé Figueira, in "Three Canvases for Tchalé Figueira", was not now surprising, considering the vibrant poetic strokes of the lines. Fortes painted his own canvas, as the conjuring of vowels from words, of letters or diphthongs, show:

The landscape was throwing stones at children
As ... if nature were
           A weapon to be aimed
And the children were stoning life itself
As! If the 'lh' of 'ilha'
           Were the wound left
Between the coin of the body and the price of the soul

................................................................................

If Tchale is caught
                     Between jazz and painting
The children flow away
           over the 'L' of Landscape and the 'A' of the plain
And onwards
           Down the luminous highway of the salt-beds
To offer the faces that come to their doorways
                                the calm that comes after the storm

In Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes, the reader was given a well distilled, well calibrated version of an African/Cape Verdean/Portuguese poetic sensibility. "Between jazz and painting", the poems had this transporting sense of language and of place.




Book copy received from NetGalley. 

What Passes for Answers

What Passes for Answers by Mikael de Lara Co (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013)

What passes for answers is a book of poetry, conceived in the mind of a poet, held in the mind of a reader. It is a quiet type of book, and the answers are withheld by careful writing. So careful it is that it never trips even if abstract concepts are animated into being.

The young poet, Mikael de Lara Co (b. 1983), has already arrived. His first collection is an instant collectible. The lines register a vision of kindness and humble reflection and yet the feelings evoked are palpable, heartfelt. The main thread of his discourse centers on silence and its variations. The title poem – or poems, there are four of them – already hints at plural approaches to understanding the mystery of existence. A question is asked in each of the title poems' first line: "What is true?"; "Where will this path lead?"; "Whom should we believe?"; "What disturbs the trees?" The answers are more hesitant questions. Nature is revealed as the bearer of answers; the seeker only needs to commune with her. The last lines of each of these title poems may provide an answer. The declarative nudges at the interrogative mood:

To dig for roots and breathe along
to the crackle of wood
as the water lies waiting.

*

What passes for radiance
in this shadowbound space
is the sound of a river
singing not far from here.

*

I would like to speak to you now
in rustles and twig-snaps.
Please hum with me.
Let us forget the way
out of this forest.

*

The berries keep me full,
and I have taken nothing from the forest.
My clothes dampen from sweat and dew.
Two birds flit past, answering
each other's caws.
My heart quickens. I am warm.

What passes for answers is the warmth and generosity of people. The selfless offering, the gift giving. A poet's recognition of the saving power of listening.

... If only [the walls] had fists
they would know how a hand
is defined by its unclenching.
By opening. Some day listening
will save the world.
What music is is five fingers
pointing outward. A palm
facing skyward. Asking
for nothing. Receiving.

["Choir"]

Listening (to a choir singing, to someone) saves the world, if only because in the serenity of listening we can recognize another generous point of view. This poem reminds me of Edith L. Tiempo's dual image of open hands offering and receiving.

True that life is given,
And received. But truer still:
The single-act of giving
Makes the offerer the beggar, too –

For when down on the knees
The man (or god) stretches the arms
In giving,
It is no accident the hands
Are curled like bowls or cups,
For he offers self, yet
Begs it back again,

[from "Guru Puja: The Offering" by Edith L. Tiempo]

"Now I desire no more from poetry than silence," the poet declares in a prose poem, humbly requesting its (future) reader not to consider his book as a work of poetry: "These are just lines. This is just a gift, not even wrapped, its silence the only thing of value to anyone."

What passes for answers is silence. Perhaps the silence of a night, so deep one can hear the soft stirrings of sleeping living things. It is a type of silence that allows sufficient space for rumination of pregnant meanings.

Metapoetry is another manifest element in this collection. The self-questioning metapoet is already building an aesthetic position that will inevitably measure his future outputs. In "The Doomed", the poet acknowledges the difficulty of writing beautiful lines when the subject of the poem is terrorism.

One word for lily is enough;
there is enough beauty in flowers.
I want to find beauty in suffering.
I want to fail.

Even if, as the poet writes, "The task of poetry / is to never run out of words", in the face of terrorist attacks the poet asserts that it is his ethical obligation not to find appropriate synonyms and for his poetry not to be beautiful. It is a reflexive contradiction and yet a compassionate position. The poet's success lies in his failure to be poetic.

A kind of poetry
that does not need poetry
to speak it ...

["Pith"]

What passes for answers is a grasping for words. In "Pith", the open fruit with its pith of seeds is the essence of poetry itself. The poem is so short and yet the main idea is already compressed in it. The last lines read:

What other truth is there
than this broken fruit?
Its seeds peek from inside
a fist of pulp. Once
I had a word for this.
It is not lost. Look.

One need only look. One looks back at the title ("Pith") to recognize the word. But this is not only looking at a title or a fruit visually. One looks inside, at the essence of a thing.

One way of discovering the pith of things is to give them a right to exist and an opportunity to express their innermost thoughts. Two poems in the collection have this unique approach of personification. In "Archipelago", "the horizon, lover of light" and "priestesses rummaging through their rucksacks" – two entities introduced early in the poem – are suddenly privileged to communicate with each other. In "Pastoral", the inanimate "mossless cheek of a boulder" and "knife" suddenly engage in a conversation.

MOSSLESS CHEEK OF A BOULDER:
Too much shade
stunts the saplings.

KNIFE:
Do we wait for the trees
to fell themselves?

MOSSLESS CHEEK OF A BOULDER:
Upon this brittle pile of leaves.
Upon this fading patch of light.

KNIFE:
See me poised to gut you.
See my [serrations], blessed by time.

MOSSLESS CHEEK OF A BOULDER:
Examine the canopy.
Brother, who called us here?

KNIFE:
...

From which technique we can glean a direct confrontation with ordinary things often neglected in life. Much like Pablo Neruda's odes to common things, the poet here celebrates common nouns to find their proper place in the world. He awards them the right to self-determination in a universe continually challenged by disequilibrium such as deforestation, the felling of trees. In this collection, the balance of nature depends on every component part of the natural and built environments, an all-inclusive eco-poetic worldview.

I am glad to finally read a full length poetry collection from Mikael Co. I have only read his four poems appearing in Crowns and Oranges: Works by Young Philippine Poets (2009). His first poem in that anthology already signals his affinity for certain thematic areas described above. The first stanza already announces brooding silence:

We begin with a house.
The spaces we inhabit
or used to inhabit. The silences.

["A House"]

There is the turn into metapoetry: "But this is not a poem about return / ... / This is a poem / about a house." There is the appeal to the pith-essence of a poem about a house: "See / the pith of an orange sits hardened, // orphaned on the kitchen counter."

For his poetry, Mikael Co has already received three grand prizes in the Palanca. As a translator, he has equally built an impressive résumé. He has translations of a section of poems in Shockbox: Ang Butas na Kahon ni Kulas Talon: The Complete Posthumous Poetry (2013) by Kulas Talon [Khavn De La Cruz] and couple of contributions in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry (2011). His co-translation of the novel Eight Muses of the Fall (2013) by Edgar Calabia Samar is a finalist in the 2014 (Philippine) National Book Awards, where this book is also in contention in the category of best poetry book in English. One other finalist – To the Evening Star by Simeon Dumdum Jr. – I read last year. It is a strong bet. The other finalists – Luisa A. Igloria, Ricardo M. de Ungria, and Allan Popa – are seasoned Filipino poets. It is a tight race; it is a particularly strong field of poets. What Passes for Answers is in fine company, and they are in his.

The Antigone Poems

The Antigone Poems by Marie Slaight, drawings by Terrence Tasker (Altaire Production & Publication, 2013)



Many feelings are evoked in this short book and in so few words. The short, clipped untitled poems are so confident in their lack of volubility they almost contain an entire biography of a truncated life in their tiny membranes. There is a Greek and tragic sense of violence ("Let blood pour fountains.") in the atmosphere of its pages, a violence spoken posthumously and no less graphic for the intervening time. The lines appear to describe the existential pains of an unspecified mid-life, domestic crisis. But one might as well be reading about a king's sobering behest and a subject's principled opposition to it. The brutal images announce the book's elliptical concerns. They range from the search for the closure of personal sorrows, coping with unimaginable frustration and grief, and erotic experiences. Like wrought iron, there is flexibility in the metaphors: "Your anguish sought this blackened veil. / Your anger wrought this iron hell." The statements might as well be a response to the iniquity of absolute power embodied by Creon's edict: Leave him unburied, leave his corpse disgraced, / a dinner for the birds and for the dogs.

Despite the inner darkness, there is the overriding figure of the sun that starkly burns with passion and abandon at the center of the poem. The blinding fires of "sunlove" purge and purify the deathly serious tone of the work ("All is aflame with life desirous / And death submits / To the laughing wilds."). And for champions of printed matter, The Antigone Poems is an objet d'art. Six charcoal drawings on French folds created from 1974-79 are interspersed between poems written in 1972-81. In space and time, the images are fittingly enclosed by poetry. Shadowy, textured sketches of faces and masks, brooding or menacing or with the countenance of indifferent death masks, the drawings reinforce the power of words to express, to startle, and to silence.


I received an advance review copy of the book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

The poet's burden

100 Poems: Old and New by Rudyard Kipling, selected and edited by Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University Press, 2013)


Old favorites and new gems are bound together in the latest selection of poems by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). From a round figure of 100, a fourth are old poems and the rest appears for the first time in book form. It is a modest cut from the three-volume The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, published earlier this year and with the same editor, Thomas Pinney. The new are harvested from the more than 550 pieces found in obscure newspapers and magazines and unpublished manuscripts. It is not clear why Kipling left them uncollected. Perhaps they are not what he considered his best.

But the labels old and new might as well be arbitrary. The poems are not actually marked as such in the text, and the distinction is only given in the index of sources at the end of the book. One can assume the titles using the first lines of the poems and enclosed in brackets are the "old" poems. In any case, readers unfamiliar or uninitiated with the poet's work might as well be in for the shock of the new. The poems span more than half a century (1882-1935) of the poet's career. Collectively, they reveal a voice of quiet forcefulness and political controversy. They leave some impressions of an imperialist age, fruits of both wisdom and failing.

The sample also manages to showcase a mix of Kipling's registers and styles: tender, lyric, playful, political. His engagement with the historical developments in his own time is apparent from signature works like "The White Man's Burden". The poem's subject is spelled out below the title: "1899 / (The United States and the Philippine Islands)".

Take up the White Man's burden –
   In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
   And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
   An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit,
   And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden –
   The savage wars of peace –
Fill full the mouth of Famine
   And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
   The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
   Bring all your hope to nought.

After all these years the myth, and now concept, of "the White Man's burden" still speaks of the moral questions behind invasions, and conquests of nations and territories. The poem can be seen as a moral justification for American imperialism as Kipling's position was supportive of the US policy of "benevolent assimilation" in the Philippine islands. Kipling can't be serious.

And yet the poet appears to satirize his own glum position. With the "burden" of imperialism comes the false burden of a false conscience and the all too recognizable arrogance associated with any colonial design. I will not go so far as to call Kipling 'racist' – as others have done with regard to this poem – when there's an alternative, and more damning, reading of it. An interesting poem, after all, has two or more faces. Kipling may be expressing this very idea when he wrote in another poem, "Do I write jestingly? Believe me no – / Between the lines a deeper meaning lies".

Less problematic is his poem about the loss of a son in wartime. "My Boy Jack" almost condenses the whole World War I enterprise into a narrative of loss and mourning. Its subtitle "1914-18" says as much about the poem's emblematic rendering of the cost of war coincident with the "last" years of his son who went missing in 1915.

"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"
   None this tide,
   Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind –
   Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
   This tide,
   And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
   And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

It is a very personal poem and yet it is also a poem of the age, seeming to bottle up parental sorrows in the world. The empty consolation of pride is not enough compensation for lost children in the war. But there's a quiet dignity in grieving. I can't think of more fitting lines to commemorate the 100th year of the war next year.

Elsewhere, the poems use a freer, looser slang language. In poems like "The Irish Conspiracy", one hardly needs to strain hard to catch the drift of the slang. The poet's strong ear for the gossip of suspected conspiracy actually makes for a suspenseful reading. Some poems feel like military marching songs; others are almost like children's poems with an unsettling theme and rhythm. The following lines are examples of the latter:

[from "The Dedication":]

Time has whirled the spade away,
    Turned to slang the baby-speech,
And the child of yesterday
     Hunts, alone, a flinty beach –
Catches starfish as of old,
Gives 'em not for Love but gold.

[from "As One Who Throws Earth's Gold Away in Scorn":]

Wherefore, while each new day brings some new thought
    And life's chain sparkles, golden link by link
Write quickly; good or evil, all is fraught
    More deeply than you think.

And then there are the fickle, mischievous lines. "New Year Resolutions" is so heartfelt and true it bests the promise of every smoker not to light a smoke the whole year. One can safely bet the promise will not go up in flames.

I am resolved – throughout the year
    To lay my vices on the shelf;
A godly, sober course to steer
    And love my neighbours as myself –
Excepting always two or three
Whom I detest as they hate me.

.....................................................

I am resolved – to flirt no more,
    It leads to strife and tribulation;
Not that I used to flirt before,
    But as a bar against temptation.
Here I except (cut out the names)
x perfectly Platonic flames.

Overall, the 100 Poems selection distills the poetic works of Kipling in an accessible, balanced volume. His poems on empire, wars, and human nature are still potent pieces for reflection and debate. The new and old throw a new light on the poet and his times. Culled from the trenches of a life, the poems still carry the burden of their meanings.


I received a NetGalley copy of the book from the publisher.

Poems (in conversation)

Poems from two poetry collections I read in the last two days: Marginal Annotations and Other Poems (Giraffe Books, 2001) by Edith L. Tiempo and To the Evening Star (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013) by Simeon Dumdum Jr.


From Spelling It Out
Edith L. Tiempo

How like a spell the dusk falls
On the jaded eyes.
It's not day or dark, in that deviant time
When the ways of rhyme
And the ways of reason
Do not play the sorcerer's part;
Just disarray, the random, distortions,
The turns and twists, surprise, surmise,
When the wavery decibel calls
The world to intimations,
In this twilight of the heart
Where a freakish glimmer reinvents,
And we startle
Into a place of perpetual
Sheer astonishments.


Thank You
Simeon Dumdum Jr.

To think that I owe you my deepest thanks,
And I have done nothing except sit here,
As though expecting someone to appear
Suddenly on the path between the banks
Of flowers, but the glare of noontime blanks
The eyes, and happily the inner ear
Catches your voice ever present and clear,
Calls on the mind and the heart to close ranks,
And begs the mouth to mutter something true,
And hands to reach for the path and to pick
A rose or two before someone arrives,
And then who knows if that someone is you
Because you're in my mind, and I am quick
To celebrate the linkage of our lives.

Music of fire in the forest of darkness

Himno ng Apoy sa Gubat ng Dilim by Arlan Camba, Pia Montalban, and MJ Rafal (Aklatang Batlaya Publishing Collective, 2011)

Three young poets met in a book launch and gradually became close friends. They found common grounds on political issues, proletarian causes, and advocacy for social justice. They eventually decided to collect their poems and publish them independently. They called it Himno ng Apoy sa Gubat ng Dilim (Music of Fire in the Forest of Darkness).

The music of the poets' lines were indeed set on fire. They were so intense they glowed, creating a wall of forest fire keeping out the wild animals of the night. Their voices were raised loud from deep within the tangle of vegetation, making readers feel not only the heat but the light of day.

I spent the better part of the first of May listening to the music of these poems. The occasion couldn't be more auspicious. The book is dedicated to "the tillers and toilers of our land" ("para sa mga magbubukid at manggagawa ng aming bayan").

The selection of poems here displayed an uncompromising stance against those in power who perpetuate oppression and human rights abuses. It essayed not only the harrowing condition of marginalized farm workers and ordinary people in a cruel capitalist society. More importantly, it boldly called for immediate action and social reforms to resist that untenable condition.

Some pages of the book were like downsized placards containing the sentiments and exclamations of protestors and demonstrators in the streets. Yet the raging voices were often tempered by compassion for human struggles.

Arlan Camba opened the book with an invitation to the collection's rhythmic, fiery singing. His poems usually began with lines and chants heard in street demonstrations. Some of these may already be familiar gripes, tired and overused, but at the end of his poems, the final lines realigned the familiar protestations into a literal call to arms. The poet was crafting his novel protest through the fortification of his previous litanies of disenfranchisement. By reconstructing the street protest in a poem, it enacted its own galvanizing protest. The electric atmosphere of his protest poems secured empowerment through the power of words.

Here's the final stanza of "Gusto Kong Tumula" (I Want to Recite a Poem). It consolidated the poet's plan of a violent revenge on the bourgeoisie:

Gusto kong tumula, sapagkat gaano man kapurol at padaskul-daskol ang pananalinghaga, gaano man kapudpod ang mga pananaludtod,    sa tulad kong nagmamaka-makata may sasarap pa ba sa pagpatay gamit lamang ang salita?

I want to recite a poem,          however feckless          and reckless the act of composition          however clichéd          the imperative to create,           to the likes of me—poetaster—          is there anything more satisfying                   than to kill using words?

And here is the final stanza of Camba's "Saan Patungo ang mga Alitaptap?" (Where Are the Fireflies Going?):

saan patungo ang mga alitaptap? makapangyarihan ang lagablab ng apoy sa nagliliyab na kaluluwa;  tutupukin ang 'sang uniberso ng mga berso't talinghaga        ng pakikidigma... hahalakhak ang makata, luluha ng dugo ang mga salita, lalatay ang hagupit ng mga taludtod  sa isip, kaluluwa at katawan; sapagkat...  bantayan man sa magdamag    ang mga alitaptap walang pagsisidlan sa kasaysayan ang katapusan ng lahat-lahat...

where are the fireflies going?               forceful the blaze               of fire on combusting soul;               it levels one universe               of verses and the war's                     metaphors...               the poet screams in joy,                        words spill blood,               the lash of lines reddens               the mind, spirit and body;               and...               even if the flights of fireflies                  are closely monitored               the death of all               has no place in history...

The direct target of the poems was the the ruling class who erected a "forest of darkness" to strangle the poor "weeds", robbing them of sustenance, depriving them of air and the light of sun. The images were necessarily violent as they explicitly dramatized an all out war against the oligarchs.

Pia Montalban, the second poet, continued to fan the flames of the fire that will guide the way for those languishing in the dark prisons of poverty and powerlessness. She did not shy away from depicting contemporary issues that bedevil the present national administration. Issues like agrarian reform and the displacement of the poor were explored through the introduction of female personae, perhaps the poet's own. Her identification with the national body politic, as "Pi(lipin)a" for instance, was an inventive way of communicating a personalized vision/version of reality at the mercy of capitalism. The latter was a threat to sustaining the things that make humans human, like love.

In "Tunay na Sining" (True Art), Montalban probably described the three poets' unified ars poetica, their collective aesthetics of resistance. Here's an excerpt:

Patay ang manunulat  sa simulang maglakbay kanyang mga akda.         Ni hindi ito makapagmumulto sa bawat mailalathalang misteryo, buhay, kathang-isip o katotohanan kaya't mawawalang silbi mga hinabing salita kung mensahe'y nakasulat sa diyalektong wala nang nakauunawa. Mahalaga sa tula ang tugma, aliw-iw o daloy o alindog pag-indak sa tyempo't kumpas ng panitikang nakalipas, metapora't talinhagang magbibihis ng estetika Ngunit aking igigiit ito'y dapat na maging daluyan ng nilalamang may kahulugan. Nailuluwal ang sining kapag ang salita'y nakapagpipinta ng imaheng kumikintal sa diwa ng mambabasa-- ngunit sining na walang saysay kung imahe'y hiwa-hiwalay at pagkakaugnay-ugnay iilan lamang makapagbubulay-bulay Lalo namang sining na walang buhay sining na sa sarili lamang at sa iilan iniaalay.

The writer expires                   the moment her works take flight.          She will not be a specter          haunting each posthumoous          mystery, biography, fiction          or truth          and so words woven             become stale          if the message is writ          in a language no one understands.                    Rhyme in poetry is important,          rhythm, pacing, charm          dancing in time to the beat           of literatures of the past,          metaphors and figures          putting on an aesthetic          But I shall insist          it must be a conduit          of words of substance.           Art is birthed          when words illustrate          images that last          in the minds of readers--          art is worthless          when the images are disjointed          and coherence          only a few anticipates           More so the art that's lifeless          art that is offered           only to self, or a mere few.

The poet argued for simple art, grounded in reality and abhorring the fireworks of obscurity. If resistance art is to speak, then it has to speak with the legibility of black letters on white paper. It has to be meaningful to the large segment of society, those who are many but vulnerable.

MJ Rafal, the final featured poet, was the most experimental of the three. His poems were diverse narratives of playful forms and subjects. He showed a gift for storytelling and a mastery in the deployment of particularized details, as with the daily struggles of low income workers. If I make him sound like a writer of fiction, that was only because his poems here had an engrossing plot and action.

Below is one poem by Rafal, a sample of the anthemic output of this talented poet. It was dedicated to the memory of Alexander Martin Remollino (1977-2010): the poet, journalist, and activist who was an acknowledged influence and inspiration to many poems in the collection.

Pananatili kung isa ka nang hangin ngayon  ihip kang nagpapaalab ng mga sulo ng pakikibaka't pakikitalad ihip kang nagpapaindak sa mga palay at tubo ihip kang tumutuyo sa pawis ng mga manggagawa't magsasaka   kung isa ka nang hamog ngayon nakayakap ka sa mga talahib at dahon doon sa kabundukan at nagmamasid sa mga kasamang namamahinga't kasiping ng gabi butil ka ng hamog na kumikislap sa pagtama ng liwanag ng buwan sa munti mong katawan kung isa ka nang ulan ngayon hinahaplos ng masisinsin mong patak mga buhok at pisngi ng iniwang mga kasama't kaibigan nagpapaunawa na ika'y hindi nawawala at nananatili sa puso at dugo ng masa na iyong pinag-alayan ng buhay at musa kung isa ka nang apoy ngayon tinutupok mo ang mga tanikala ng pananamantala't inaabo ang inhustisya sinusunog mo ang mga barong at saya ng mga hunyango't elitista lalagi kang tanglaw sa mga tahanang kaniig ang isang pirasong kandila at kung isa ka nang lupa ngayon hayaan mong tumindig kami sa dibdib mo bigyan mo kami ng tuntungan na di matitibag ng mga medalya't trono hayaan mong magtanim kami sa dibdib mo ng mga binhi ng ganap na paglaya na aanihin namin, natin sa nalalapit na panahon

Abiding          if you're now turned into air you're the gust that flares up the torches of resistance and defiance the gust that sways the stalks of cane and rice   the gust that dries the sweat   of tillers and toilers of the land          if you're now turned into dew clasping the cogon grass and leaves         in the mountain and observing the people resting and enfolding the night  a piece of dew that shines when the light of moon grazes your tiny body if you're now turned into rain your too fine drops will stroke the hair and cheeks of friends and dear ones left behind telling them you are present, abiding in the heart and blood of the common mass to whom you offered your life and muse if you're now turned into fire you raze the shackles of abuses, turn iniquity into ash burn down the suits and skirts of elitists and pretenders you are ever the light of homes holding a sole candle in their midst and if you're now turned into earth let us stand tall on your chest give us a steady foothold that can withstand medals and thrones let us sow on your chest seeds of sustainable freedom that we will, shall reap in the days to come

The three poets of Himno ng Apoy are rock stars in their own right. One after the other, one catharsis after another, the poems were building into a concert for an important cause: the fight for a just moral order. The music was enough to see us through the night. Hardcore.


Thanks to K.D. for the book. Translations above are mine.