Torrevillas has spent most of her life either in Dumaguete City in Negros Oriental, or in Iowa City, in the great American midwest, where lately she has helped run the Iowa writer’s workshop formerly handled by Paul Engle, a bosom buddy of her parents, the National Artist Edith Tiempo and Edilberto.
The Tiempos in fact got the idea of setting up the Silliman Writers Workshop from Engle, in whose workshop at the University of Iowa they spent some time during the ’50s when Rowena was still a young girl, and where they picked up the rudiments of the New Criticism. Now that Rowena is back in Iowa, one could say that she has come full circle.
Gypsies is comprised mostly of poetry that is set primarily in the midwest, where Torrevillas has taken on the multiple roles of wife, mother, writer, and workshop administrator. Not to forget her persona as daughter, occasionally nostalgic about her hometown in Negros.
The title poem chronicles the wandering sea-borne nomads in her province, the ones with the naturally bleached hair and a wisdom that can only be won through a mobile life. When she speaks of the improbable scenario of gypsies settling down, it is like a coming home for herself, too, a kind of personal metaphor. As always there is a kind of magic involved, not just in the university that recently celebrated its centennial, but in the seaside town itself.
Anyone who reads it, and has been to Dumaguete, will understand that the description of the place is no understatement or sentimental hype: the city of gentle people.
Among the essays, there’s one relating the impression made on her by the writer Ernest Hemingway, "Eating at the Roots." She tells how, one evening during dinner, her father nonchalantly announces the news that Hemingway had just died.
Myriad emotions run through the impressionable girl, but foremost of these is her conjecture that Hemingway committed suicide even before Doc Tiempo could tell about the manner of his death. The paradox was not lost on her, or those at the table, how the robust novelist with such a lust for life would decide to snuff out his own.
There is also the somewhat longish essay on God and religion and their relation to literature, "On Depicting God’s Otherness in Poetry," which caps the author’s collection. Mention is made of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who, though not outrightly religious, has a strong devotional strain in his verses, almost as if he were talking to God. Who can forget that poem that begins: "Lord, it is time"?
Torrevillas, at the same time, pays tribute to Virgil, and marvels how Dante, in his Divine Comedy, chose to use Virgil as his guide through the bowels of hell. There must be something to be said about the poet’s role not only in society, but at different periods of history: keeper of the word, logos, almost like a talisman to drive away the hounds of various shapes and sizes, or else a key to a deeper understanding of the surreal world.
Another US-based Filipina writer, shuttling between the East and West coasts, not to mention occasional forays to the homeland, is Eileen Tabios, who traces her roots to the Ilocos. In Ecstatic Mutations (Giraffe), Tabios comes up with a workbook of sorts on the poetic process, or a step-by-step detailing of a birthing of not just one poem but several.
The poetry laboratory could very well be an indirect tribute to postmodernism, an exercise in deconstruction, or is it composition and decomposition.
But like Torrevillas, Tabios is only too aware of the duality of her situation: writing in an altogether foreign tongue while conveying a very Filipino sensibility.
There is a poem in Ecstatic Mutations about her mother and the hazards of aging, a concern not only of women but of anyone, regardless of sex, feeling the wear and tear of years on one’s bones.
Tabios explores, too, the possibilities of e-mail and how it can be used, not only as a forum for small flirtations, but as a sounding board for new friendships and even newer creative work.
An editor once advised her: Editors can improve one’s writing, but just as often they can ruin good work.
But some readers may not be too happy about the general self-consciousness of Tabios’ work, at least in this poetic laboratory, indeed as if the workshop and not the work itself were the thing.