"I FIND IT hard to like poets. They don’t say what they mean,” Damaso said. We had taught in the same college in Benguet.

After some thirty years, we bumped into each other outside a music store in Quezon City. I invited him to a nearby shop for coffee. He was now an executive vice president of an insurance company. After the obligatory polite inquiries into each other’s individual life, our talk meandered into the matter of communication. I mentioned that I had become a serious creative writer and had published some six books of poems. That was when he made his critical remark. "They beat around the bush, you know, and that’s misleading," he continued. "In my line of job, we value straight talk, we lay everything clearly on the table so there won’t be any misunderstanding. But you, poets—and don’t take this personally—enjoy torturing your readers with your verbal obscurity. I remember the book you gave me, your first book I think, The Ark and Other Poems—"

"The Cave and Other Poems," I corrected him.

"Yes. It was published in Baguio City. I carried it with me for one week, trying to figure out what you were trying to say about Rizal and Bonifacio and Helen of Troy and Giotto but I gave up. You always had me puzzled and guessing. Why don’t you just say what you mean and be finished with it?" He flicked the cuff of his silk shirt.

"But that’s not how poetry works," I said. "It epitomizes people’s highest aesthetic verbalization of social realities. Its linguistic configurations attempt to capture the human condition at its evanescent point. It is language raised to the ultimate degree, as the American poet Paul Engle said, because the poem, limited as it is by the insufficiency of language to transmit experience in its complete form, tries to subvert that language and squeeze as much meaning from it as possible—"

"There you go again," he interrupted me. "You’ll not make an insurance salesman. You’ll never close a deal with obliqueness and indirection coloring your words. The target client must be told quickly and briefly and exactly what he’s getting into so that he knows where he’s putting his money."

"Not if he reads the fine prints, ha ha."

"But even our fine prints have clarity of expression. You won’t misunderstand them. Now, if the target client doesn’t read them, that’s his mistake. But a poem—I don’t know…It seems to be an apology for bad communication. Soon you’ll be quoting Robert Frost on poetry being the only possible way of saying something and meaning another, or Marianne Moore that it is an imagined garden with real frogs in it or something. Well, it can have a zebra or a panda in it for all I care, but if it doesn’t tell me what it means, it has no value to me."

"I see you are a literalist. It will really be difficult for you to appreciate poetry which requires a profound imagination to sort out linguistic indirection, implicitness and allusiveness. You don’t like reading between the lines to see meaning that are not obvious in the text, but which are embedded there by the very arrangement of the words. You must realize that the poem represents a kind of code—it is a human experience waiting to be uncovered and discovered. Its tropes increase the sense of urgency needed to grasp its significance and the subsequent aesthetic pleasure upon its understanding. The imaginary is transformed into the real through the machinery of the metaphoric mind."

"Hey, are you talking to me? Stop being dynamic. All I want to know is why poetic language is roundabout. Can’t it be linear or straight forward?"

"That’s the way of prose, but suggestiveness creates poetry’s essential beauty. What you see is not what you get, but you get much more than what you see. The trouble is, there are as many definitions of poetry as there are person who will define it, and they will define it poetically, out of necessity. That is why I become academic, even philosophical, in trying to explain what they mean. But all these definitions will invariably agree on language as the dominating ingredient of the art. It is not the language of your insurance world, nor of the prose world in general. Poetry tries to communicate and communicate in a more powerful manner than prose. For that, it needs all means to amaze or astound the mind, doesn’t it?"

He seemed unconvinced but nodded just the same. "Perhaps, but I prefer to get my astonishment somewhere else. By the way, do you like Ultimate Fighting Championship?"

– from Breaking Signs by Cirilo F. Bautista (Philippine Panorama, 22 Jun. 2008)
Website at www.cirilofbautista.tk

Labels: Breaking Signs, Cirilo Bautista

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TWO interesting things occurred to the judges of this year’s Gawad Surian sa Tula-Gantimpalang Colantes. In their deliberation to determine which among the fifty-one or so entries would be included in the roster of winners (see Breaking Signs, April 20), Jesus Santiago and Cirilo F. Bautista found, first, a number of authors attempting to infuse new energy into Filipino poetry’s form and substance. This is most desirable, as Filipino poets seem to be frozen in the timeframe of traditional expressionism or discourse. The infusion comes from the influences of urbanism on the development of the Filipino language. Mass media, cultural politics, and population mobility have fueled the spread of Tagalog across regional boundaries, giving it an access into other languages. This results in its filtration into those languages and vice-versa. The new dynamism defines its present contour. The migration history from "Tagalog" to "Pilipino" to "Filipino" can be read, for instance, in vocabulary borrowings or in thematic viewpoints. These three variations of the same language continue to exist, but Filipino, according to the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF), is the language spoken in Metro Manila and other multi-ethnic cities.

Without going into further linguistic distinctions, we can say that because Filipino — which is now called our national language — has a democratic character, it offers contemporary poets new inroads and challenges. Indeed, some of them have shown that words, phraseology, and imagery from one region can be positioned within the structure of Tagalog. John Iremil Teodoro and Genevieve Asenjo of Antique, Jose Jason Chancoco of Bicol, and Santiago Villafania of Pangasinan have done exactly that and, consequently, contribute to the enrichment of the poetic medium. Also, because it accommodates other languages within its semantic system, Filipino appears to be most appropriate for poets to delineate the complex urban world with its ethnical and international character. Eros Atalia’s winning poem, "Remedyo," is a successful capturing of the way common urbanites of the working class speak and think. The repairman in the poem has a native voice, that is, he appears to be a flesh-and-blood embodiment of a character in a critical situation wanting to improve his fractured relationship with his girl, just as he wants to repair the broken appliances his customers leave to his care. Reuel Aguila employs a Japanese form of prose-poem to articulate the thoughts of a man returning to his native soil in "Haibun sa Pagbabalik." If this freshness blowing into the space of Filipino letters will be sustained on a large scale, a really new linguistic dimension will evolve in our poetic heritage.

Second, the contest judges found plagiarism rearing its vexed head among the entries. Plagiarism is defined as "the appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas, and thoughts of another author, and representation of them as one’s original work." Plagiary, a synonym for both plagiarist and plagiarism, has for its rootword the Latin plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper." Plagiarism, thus, indicates an infringement on the intellectual property of the true originator because the plagiarist steals or kidnaps it. As a literary crime, plagiarism will never be eradicated — it can only be minimized — but editors and contest organizers are helpless in this regard. The discovery of plagiarism is burdensome, and frustrating matter. The many poems literary editors receive, for instance, cannot be all investigated to establish their authorial authenticity. Because they just do not have the time and money for that, they take every poem at its face value and rely on the author’s integrity. In the case of this year’s Surian entries, one was an outright copying of the idea and structure of "Ulat Buhat Sa Bulkan," Cirilo F. Bautista’s prizewinning poem in the same contest sometime in the 1990s. The copyist simply reset the theme — the supremacy of art over mundane events — in another location, but the narrative lines of the two poems were similar. When Jesus Santiago was notified of this plagiarism, he smiled and said that his own winning poem in the same contest was also plagiarized some years back. We brought this matter to the attention of Dr. Ricardo D. Nolasco, commissioner of the KWF, with no hope that he would initiate steps to discourage plagiarists from tainting the fine reputation of the Surian contest.

Source: Breaking Signs, Philippine Panorama (May 4, 2008).
Visit Dr. Ciirilo Bautista's website at www.cirilofbautista.tk

Labels: Breaking Signs, Cirilo Bautista

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