Arm yourself against waiting. Bring books. In this traffic-plagued times of ours, when everything is left hanging because there is a general exodus—of all sorts, from home to office, from office to the weekend respite, from country to city, from country to another country—one must be able to wait. Because the exodus lurches along in infinitesimal time: the waiter awaits the waitee, the interviewer the interviewee, the appointed the appointee, and vice versa, ad inf. And wait not by fidgeting and scratching oneself, scrutinizing the warts and moles of the person next to you, or staring into the 
void, but by staring at, no, reading a page. I arm myself with books to be able to wait, for something to happen or someone to come, whether I’ve prepared for it or not, whether I’m seated in an airplane, bus, jeepney, or, as the British say, the loo. Lately, it was not the loo but the lobby of a clinic issuing health certificates (after doing the medicals) for people wanting leave for (immigrate to) the land of plenty. My son was coming back after a previous appointment for x-rays and inoculation shots, to be issued his copy of the results, so that he and the itching (itching-to-leave) multitude like him will not bring our diseases with them to the Teflon country. He was preparing, together with his sister, to join their mother in the near future, in the United States of Abundance (I am not joining, for a lot of reasons). During nearly six hours, I finished Gilgamesh, A New English Version, by Stephen Mitchell (great read), from the page where I stopped after reading it intermittently in other lobbies, waiting rooms, and the loo, and consumed it endnotes and all. And Caracoa. And by the inscrutable laws of coincidence, every time my son’s name was called over the public address for some question or to be directed to this doctor’s office for an immunization interview or something, the name of one of the authors in this issue of Caracoa would follow. It was Mark Anthony Cayanan’s (is he leaving too?). It marked the time somewhat, lessened the strangeness of the whole Kafkaesque proceedings.
Voices New and Still New in Philippine Poetry in English
“The question may be posed,” wrote issue editors Joel Toledo and Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra in their introduction to
Caracoa 2006: The Silver Issue, “as to whether or not Philippine poetry in English has undergone seismic shifts during the preceding interregnum that has been the past decade before this
Caracoa revival.”(On what took place during that intervening period, at least for the Philippine Literary Arts Council, publishers of Caracoa, read the prefatory “Our Story Thus Far…” which is an unadorned update on the 25th year of PLAC.)
There are 25 poems and poets in the Silver Issue. There are some relatively new names, and others that are like visiting relatives from the Filipino Diaspora. But they are “new” only because poetry books are still hard to come by in the country’s bookstores and in the publishing industry itself (except in the university presses), and this is the first time I will be encountering their work, but also because some of them are quite young in chronological age, though evidently not in matters of craft. And, as the editors point out, “of the literary voices that appeared in [the] last two issues, about half have gone on to win awards and publish their own collections,” but with the oft-repeated and still valid caveat that “the rest [are] puzzlingly lost in the Bermuda Triangle of modern living, perhaps consumed by other concerns, such as corporate responsibilities, rather than and art and literary forms.” And so it goes.
Although it is patently difficult to generalize about an anthology of poems (the most individualistic and individuated of the arts, each poem a personal statement, as we all know), it is apparent that the poets in this anthology are among those who have found their way through and out of the Bermuda Triangle. And for no other reason, that also enables me to play favorites (the poems I will mention are in no particular order)—after all a reviewer is not unlike a judge in the Palanca contests, but one who not “blind,” though without co-panelists either to argue choices with, and whose sole criterion is personal taste.
In language, in giving one the feeling of almost pure texture (or pure feeling of place, no matter that the place is Nature itself), because that was what the poet probably intended, “Happiness in Other Planets,” despite its length, wins hands down. I agree with the editors that the author (whom I haven’t met and from whom I am reading something for the first time), Amado Bajarias, is “criminally underrated.” If he has a collection published, I must have missed it; a book perhaps will be the best argument against invisibility and neglect. The contributors’ notes say that Mr. Bajarias is “an avid birdwatcher…” and here he is the naturalist who lets nature’s lushness freely become his poems, in an endless, continuous, uncategorized list, where “…the quiet shoal / Of mid-sigh” can seamlessly become “…a high laugh / Haikuing / Into a sudden garden in June.”
While I gravitate now towards the minimal and the monastically bare line (perhaps because I have been a long-line writer myself, and still am alternately—no strict methods or preferences), the other poems I like, as above, tend toward expression and rendition that extend the poetic line almost to the right margin of the page. One is Arkaye Kierulf’s “Horses,” and the other is Alexander Agena Jr.’s notional ekphrasis, “Lady in an Imaginary Painting.” But I am fascinated with “Horses” not because of the long lines but because it is one of the few today that shows good use of anaphora and paradox (“I believe all windows look out to the same sky. / I believe in keeping secrets. / I believe there is sincerity in lies.”). It lets these tools of classical rhetoric, with their clashing images, run at a thundering gallop, almost crashing into the corrals of our sometimes timid consciousness, before reining them in just in time, their nostrils snorting, our hearts beating.
Reining in but letting out bit by tortuous bit, while pricking us with irony even if the poem starts with such a deceptively mundane and jaded task as listing yearend resolutions, is Naya Valdellon’s “New Year at the Wake.” Irony is all but don’t let Naya fool you with her alternately “disinterested” and tender language, as in some of her best poems probing the extremes of the apparent arbitrariness of life and dying, where darkness lingers behind the next corner and doom sounds like a term of endearment. This New Year countdown takes you “Between Christmas and the cemetery,” though with a warning that “Endings are my specialty. What keeps me going / is not faith, but curiosity.”
Can happiness only be in other planets? Is everything a countdown to death? The paths these poets take lead us to the poetic mind, yes, the Filipino mind, reacting to, entering, the world around him in whatever language he uses, from whatever point of view. “Sooner or later you will go / To Araneta Avenue,” Fagela begins half-portentously in “Condolences.” He refers, of course, to that Quezon City thoroughfare lined with funeral chapels. He runs through in his mind the other funerals he has attended where “The bereavement is so intense / It is like watching them sift through / The ashes of the house they grew up in.” But the persona here, not particularly close to the dead, cannot utter his condolences to the bereaved, no matter how he might “Reach inside your wellspring / And offer water to his heart now shrunken / Like a sun-dried tomato…”
In Ken Ishikawa’s “The End of a Frontier,” the loss of one’s place of childhood and all the mythical memory that goes with it (“…suddenly memory becomes a betrayal”) is counterbalanced by a realization. Coming away from the past obliterated by lahar, he trips on an upturned root “and saw how the ash / scintillated its spread of diamonds in the dark / and wonder still exists, / hiding in the littlest of talismans.” Oscar Alvarez’s “Economy Class” possesses the talisman of keen observation as his world-wandering character lists down in plain language and wry metaphors his stopovers, from Amsterdam: “they’re volcanoes waiting / for the right visitor (that’s me) / behind the porn magazines at Schipool…” through Singapore, where “faces stand out like / nicotine stains in a sea of / generic white incisors” down to Manila, “like fake Vuitton bags that / turn into jewelry upon / touchdown.” Particularly saddening and emblematic is the persona speaking in Mikael de Lara Co’s “Tongues.” “I’ve stopped writing in a language / that doesn’t have a word for snow… In this country where there is no world for guilt … [he] borrows a word / to describe this: delikadesa. / That boy, he takes a cube of ice / and places it inside his mouth, / and speaks: snow. / The damp, bitter air / forms shapes with his breath. He sees places. / He is there. (Co is the Palanca first prize winner in poetry in English for 2007.)
Long-time residents of the Filipino Diaspora are also well represented here. Joel H. Vega, well-anthologized poet (here and abroad) from the Netherlands, in the poem “Interiors,” plies his delicate pen into the tensions of modern architecture: “…two vertical structural members / support a horizontal member called a lintel / creating a covered space / such close proximity…” to provide an objective correlative to domestic infidelity. From Napa Valley in California, Wilfredo O. Pascual Jr. unfurls the hilarious possibilities of “A Filipino in the Charlie Brown Musical.” The persona playing Schroeder, “brooding artist,” with fake accent, cannot get his lines straight and gets screamed at by the director; he gets his vengeance by imagining his father back home who, as Snoopy does his waltz, “hanged a dead dog / in a hook, / blowtorched it…” for caldereta. To this, Ateneo and Columbia University graduate Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes provides a Zen contrast with the shortest poem in the anthology, “Glimpses.” It is as momentary as it is cosmic: a view from the window of a lakeside cottage, “Two pine trees rooted in one space / are seen at once: one that remains / utterly still, and its shadow-twin, / branches shuddering in a wind made of light.” Jim Pascual Agustin, who has made Cape Town, South Africa his home since 1994, recalls the days after the fall of Apartheid in his “Those Who Still Have Black Blood Under Their Feet.”
Two “veteran” voices speak from America: Luisa Igloria, who is deep into mothering and a professorship in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, takes from her huge cache of poems stirred into being by almost everything. “Minim” takes off from a magazine article on the classic “suffering” artist Modigliani, which she reads while waiting for her daughter to emerge from piano lessons. It leads her to meditate on Modernity, “how cruel you’ve been / as Muse…” and “the painters from Manila [who] made their way to Rome and Barcelona” not sixty years before Modigliani, and Jose Garcia Villa “when he came to… write among the early Moderns: at best, a minor poet… the paradox of distance / infinitely halved, never sutured close.” From New York, Luis Cabalquinto is still the émigré who never left home, his hometown Magarao in Camarines Sur always lurking, peeking from behind the tense rhythms of his minimalist lines in “Details”: “the unnamed melody / playing inside the dark chamber / of your mind, rapt in rhythm / with the bright slow death of sun.” Cabalquinto’s poetry continues to be an effulgent ecstasy of memory.
A great deal of ambidexterity in the use of form, technique and rhetoric seems to be exhibited by the younger voices in Caracoa 2006. Franklin Cimatu (who is “young” only because we are still awaiting his first collection in a book) exercises his skills by exacerbating the already difficult sestina with a letter-jumbling wordplay on his subject and title, “The Manifest Destiny Routine, or My Fetid Sestina.” Transforming it into absurd variations (“Miss tenant deify” or “Aint my fetidness”) as the sestina winds around itself with its recurring end words, could have been hilarious if it were not about the sad history of our country. On top of this, the poem is only one in a series (about 30 now, according to the Notes) recreating the routines of the comic pair, Pugo & Tugo, popular in the 1940s-50s. I would like to be able to read the whole cycle that promises to be a valuable and artful artifact of this period of Philippine popular culture.
In the same vein, mark the peculiar rite of passage in Mark Anthony Cayanan’s “As Dina Bonnevie,” where a young boy discovers his father’s hidden Betamax tape of an archetypal Filipino “bold” movie, “Ang Babaeng Nawawala sa Sarili.” The luscious Dina Bonnevie (or her manifestation) “her calves limbered into eternity,” steps out of the TV into his living room. “…she lunged at me, her bronzed / skin, the pixels of her… I was what I could become…” This revelation and epiphany resonates in Raymond John de Borja’s “Tell Me, Where is the Soul,” an astute dissection of an actual dissection of a frog in the school laboratory. Asking this ultimate question, the poet perhaps becomes his own specimen: “…When we opened the heart, / we found more of the heart and nothing more… we were asked to scrape off / the skin and muscles, and name every bone— / here is where the heart was, / here the lungs, here the low croak.” Death, the void, is ever fascinating, whether you dissect it with scalpels or numbers, as in Rodrigo V. de la Peña Jr.’s prose poem, “Algebra,” where after a student leaps to her death from the top of the Humanities building, the other students become “painfully conscious of gravity, puzzled by integers in their disguises of x and y.”
All this contemplation of death and life’s ironies (their ultimate interchange-ability, despite how love tries to come in-between)—the doppelganger infidelity of “Weekend Couple” by Paolo Manalo, the in-your-face, internal rhyming stridency of Angelo R. Lacuesta’s “Modern Girls,” the deceptive equanimity of “Journey of the Flowers” by Glenn Atanacio—continues to be the proper subject of poetry. Caracoa 2006 does not lack in examples.
As chronicle and milepost for Philippine poetry in English, Caracoa is subject to the vagaries of funding and like-minded friends’ generosity, mainly through the initiatives and persuasive skills of its founders, especially Alfread A. Yuson and Gemino H. Abad. Caracoa must range the diversity of material available to it at the time it is able to come out. And yet, the number of contributions (eighty, trimmed down to 25 for the current issue) surprise even its editors, this time two of the country’s younger leading poets who perhaps had to sacrifice including their own works because of page limitations.
Poetry in English continues to be written in this part of the world. And written well, if we go by Caracoa 2006. Were there “seismic shifts”? In language and the physical world, the continents are always drifting. In both, they are always liable to collide.
ADDENDUM: Pancho Villanueva’s Art in Caracoa 2006
I must not neglect to mention the design and art of the issue. Caracoa has maintained its characteristic look through the years: a poet’s chapbook with off-white pages, sometimes with textured linen board cover, and always with lots of legitimate artist’s or artists’ illustrations, paintings, photography. Caracoa 2006 does not stray from the template. It was designed, with personal touches, by abstract artist Pancho Villanueva (whose works are increasingly being collected), who is himself seriously into poetry, being a recent “alumnus” of the Dumaguete workshop. Owing to their natural poverty, poetry collections are parsimonious about production values, and are thus printed in black and white. Publishing in the Internet, on the other hand, is quite inexpensive, especially via a virtually cost-free blog. Therefore some of Pancho’s paintings that adorned the book’s pages you will see here in their glorious living color. (REPROs: the Cover; "Dreamcatcher," frontispiece; Abstract 1, centerfold; Abtract 2 and Abstract 1, illustrative art)
MARNE L. KILATES
October 8, 2007
The Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC),
publishers of Caracoa, celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. It was founded in September 1981 by prominent English-language poets Gemino H. Abad, Cirilo F. Bautista, Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, Ricardo M. de Ungria, and Alfred A. Yuson. Its Honory Fellows are Carlos A. Angeles, Franz Arcellana, Tita Lacambra Ayala, Erwin E. Castillo, Ricaredo Demetillo, Ophelia A. Dimalanta, NVM Gonzales, Edna Z. Manlapaz, Bienvenido N. Santos, Edith L. Tiempo, and Emmanuel Torres. Associate Fellows are: Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Juaniyo Arcellana, Fidelito Cortes, Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., Simeon Dumdum Jr., Marjorie Evasco, Felix Fojas, Eric Gamalinda, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Luisa Igloria, Marne L. Kilates, Susan Lara, Clovis Nazareno, Charlson L. Ong, Danton Remoto, Ramon C. Sunico, Cesare A.X. Syjuco, Ma. Fatima V. Lim-Wilson and Ruel S. de Vera.The Caracoa
The caracoa was a war vessel plying the waters off Mindanao and the Moluccas in the 16th century. The rowers stayed close to the hull, while the warriors stood with their spears on a platform. The poet sat alone at the far end of the boat, manning the rudder. He was neither rower nor warrior, yet he decided where the prow should point. His own thoughts knifed through the immense sea of his solitude, though the waters kept him company.
In him was rower and warrior, he himself was a double-decked vessel of grace and irony. He was far back, yet provide direction. At times the caracoa lost its way. No matter. The sea would still be there, and the shoals would still be duly recorded. 
