Jewels from a poetry confab

Click here to read Part I

( Part 2 )

The second half of the Asia-Pacific Conference-Workshop on Indigenous and Contemporary Poetry unfolded with as much verve and excitement as the first.

The break day on Thursday, Aug. 22, was spent on a tour of Corregidor Island, courtesy of the Department of Tourism. Later in the day, Goodwill Bookstore hosted an elegant dinner reception for the international poet-delegates and some 70 Filipino poets and writers at the Jose Garcia Villa and Balagtas Rooms of the Manila Peninsula Hotel.

It had to be explained to the foreign guests why their six-day schedule was so packed that it left them no free time at all. This was Pinoy hospitality at work. The organizers couldn’t fend off all the offers to treat the core participants to lunch or dinner.

Thus it was that Friday evening saw the delegation motoring through inner Manila traffic, after the full-day session at De La Salle University, to the Rizal Monument thence Fort Santiago, and eventually meet up with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) representative Emily Tiongco for dinner at Barbara’s in Intramuros.

On Saturday the 24th, the grand poetry reading at the Li-Seng Giap Auditorium of the University of Asia & the Pacific segued to the farewell dinner hosted by no less than Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas F. Ople at the Edsa Shangri-La Hotel.

The organizers, the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), hand in hand with the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) and the Creative Writing Foundation, Inc. (CWF), took advantage of the occasion to award Secretary Ople the prestigious Gawad Vicente Sotto given annually by UMPIL to outstanding writers in government.

Our foreign guests were no less than exultant over the solicitous attention manifested by Pinoy VIPs – from Senator Loren Legarda who had hosted the welcome dinner at the Manila Polo Club, to the Eugenio Lopez III couple who tendered a not-so private dinner at their residence, which ended with an intimate poetry reading and a sing-along engineered by Pete Lacaba, and all through the rest of the evening receptions hosted by Goodwill Bookstore, the NCCA, and Secretary Blas F. Ople. All of these social occasions also gave the local literary community the opportunity to get together, apart from striking new friendship with the guests from 11 AsPac countries.

The culminating activity at UAP, a brisk-paced reading before an enthusiastic audience, featured all of the poet-delegates and some Pinoy poets in English and Filipino. Everyone proved engaging, but none more so than South Korea’s most important poet, the 71-year-old Ko Un, reputedly a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

On Sunday close to midnight, it was only fitting that Ko Un was the last delegate to be transported to the airport. Secretariat members Jing Hidalgo and Carlomar Daoana accompanied this project officer for the privilege. Driving along in the official van, we took out a bottle of Chilean wine, a corkscrew and glasses, and found ourselves being heartily thumped, nay, pummeled, on the back by an uncontrollably appreciative Ko Un.

We have it all on video, via Nightlight – Ko Un raising his glass, imbibing away, and launching into yet anther impassioned rendition of Arirang. Should he be honored in Stockholm sometime, we think we have precious footage to lend to CNN, ANC, or the Nobel Prize organizers.

Last week we shared some excerpts from the first half of the conference. This time we end this sequel of a column with other jewels from the papers presented on the last two days at DLSU and UST.

Hail poetry! Mabuhay ang mga makata!

From Nguyen Bao Chan’s "Vietnam Poetry: Half Of The Autumn"

"The poetical history of our country is the history of two parallel flows: folk poetry (verbal poems from the masses) and scholarly poetry (poems from the literate, re-written orthographically). Both of these flows come from one original point: the people’s life. Before starting its own orthographic system in the 10th century, Vietnamese poetry was mainly that of the folk masses. Its influence remains very strong and durable, even as it directly impacts on the foundation and development of scholarly poetry. The best poets of our country are all influenced by public or folk poetry.

"Because tradition primarily passes down in an oral manner, that is, passing from mouth to mouth, or through the people’s memory from one generation to another, our folk poetry is extremely close to music. We might even say that music has become the spirit of poetry. Poems turn into songs. Poems are composed with music, and rendered. They turn into a colorful forest of folk songs, and become the precious cultural property of our country. In harmony with such wonderful songs are mothers‚ lullabies. It can be said that all Vietnamese generations are nurtured and fostered by the lullaby. Mother’s milk, poetry, music: these are the first three elements that create a Human Being."

From Sitor Situmorang’s "Linkages Between Indigenous And Contemporary Poetry: The Indonesian Case"

"Modern Indonesian poetry, led by the example of the poets of the 1970s – foremost amongst them Rendra – has developed a fusion or (re-)marriage between oral and written tradition. Poetry is not something only to be read individually in isolation, in the stillness of a room, but a ‘text‚ to be ‘performed‚ before an audience, to be listened to collectively, though still individually ‘experienced‚ by the listener.’ This reconnects modern poetry with the varied forms of indigenous poetry in Indonesia, where poetry in manuscript is to be performed in song and dance, listened to with the inner ear, and read with the ‘eyes of the soul’ (mata batin).

"Chairil Anwar’s contribution was his revolutionary use – in dialogue with his predecessors of the New Poet movement – of ‘poetic language,’ laying the foundation of genuine modern poetry as a personal and subjective form of a universal spiritual exercise. The 1970s generation led by Rendra showed the way to a creative renewal of tradition (the varied indigenous poetry of Indonesia), resulting in the broad landscape of modern Indonesian poetry that encompasses a broad tapestry of hues, tones, sound, and imagery. Fed by the many local traditions, modern Indonesian poetry is experienced by the reader/listener as a stream of continuity in progress, reflected in the new tradition in the poems of the most talented young poets of the 1990s."

From Ko Un’s "The Indigenous And The Modern In Poetry"

"Rather deeper thought reveals that the essence of poetry cannot be separated from a poetic originality that rises above the modern or from an indigenous form of experience. Personally, I have on numerous occasions sensed that poetry should seek its life-springs, not in science, but in the charms and spells of incantatory magic.

"I wonder if, perhaps, by a pure love of poetry today’s selfhood is not being led back to the indigenous by heredity, as a lost form of self-expression…

"It may be that, in face of the crisis affecting modern poetry as such and of the crisis caused by the complete disappearance of any relevance of poetry to modern society, we can derive a new poetic awakening using the indigenous as a fountainhead. In such a case, the indigenous will prove to be, not something finished and complete, but the origin and source of new possibilities. The meaning of the indigenous is not to be found in the visible forefront of the world or of society; it lies concealed in the hinterlands of each region, but contains the unrecorded authenticity by which people have lived. If we could exhume that, we might be able to attain new forms for poetry. When people today draw ancient oxygen to breathe from some region of the past, that past is no longer something old; it becomes a new past.

"…What I hope for is to find different themes for modern poetry through the recreation of the indigenous. Modernity is racing toward an amazing, post-modern society, but it cannot evade the totality that is eagerly craving for the poetic ways of thinking that flourished in the classical and many other ages. At the same time, the modern age, as it ever experiences the past, is probing and testing the bases of its own being…

"It may be that, at some point in the distant future, today’s modern poetry will itself be categorized as indigenous. I dream that the ways of poetry will come into remote contact with that future myth. However, it would be best if today the indigenous and the modern in poetry could to some extent share a common home together."

From Anthony L. Tan’s "Indigenous Forms And Contemporary Poetry: The Case Of The Tausug Proverbs And Riddles"

"For the purpose of this presentation, I have classified the proverbs into two types: those without imagery and those with imagery. As expected, those without imagery appear to be more didactic, although in some cases they are not without rhyme and rhythm and verbal felicitousness peculiar to the Tausug language. And those with imagery appear to be non-committal, less exhortatory and seem content to leave to the reader/hearer to judge for himself/herself what proper course of action to take on the basis of the wisdom or truth of the proverb. For those of us who grew up believing in Ezra Pound’s dictum of the superiority of the image over the statement, we naturally prefer the second type of proverbs…

"The following are examples of imagistic proverbs: In kasili di kabungkulan sin pisak (Eels cannot choke in mud.)‚ Anak babai iban ista’ halu’/ Di mapatut hitau. (Daughters and rotten fish/ Should not be kept long.)…

"The riddles are like the proverbs only in that they are also generally short, but whereas proverbs can get away without imagery, the essential ingredient of riddles is imagery. Riddles are basically metaphors, and as Richard Wilbur opines, as close to pure poetry as one can get... They are the finest demonstrations of Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as a medium ‘of saying one thing and meaning another.’…

"…Maybe in the future the young will not be writing riddles anymore, but it would be too extreme to say that they will never use the imagery of the riddles and other forms of oral literature. New realities will compel them to depart from the way the imagery has been used in the past, the way James Joyce irreverently transformed Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea‚’ and made it to look ugly in ‘the sotgreen sea,’ or made it to feel unpleasant in ‘the scrotumtightening sea’ (Ulysses)."

From Montri Umavijani’s "The Continuity Of Thai Poetry"

"…T.S. Eliot in his essay ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ has shown that for any poet who wants to write beyond the age of 21, he must know not only his national literature but also the literatures of Europe and Asia. He must have them in his bones. From this it is evident a great literary tradition cannot be hermetically sealed, but it must be open-ended and embracing the condition of universality.

"…I offer to take Thai poetry back to its sources and show some of its strong characteristics, with ‘links’ coming down as far as they could. We have indeed been fortunate that, despite the total destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767, the early kings of the Chakri Dynasty, and especially King Taksin the Great before them, tried to restore dramatic literature along with national independence. Where manuscripts were lost, they assembled poets and scholars to write them again, and these were known as royal compositions…

"The five major verse forms remain intact. They are the kloang, the garp, the chand, the glon, and the rai. The most compact form of the kloang is called kloang 4 or quatrain. This is an intricate pattern with the first high tone (1) in seven places and the second high tone (2) in four places. The rhyme scheme is both terminal and medial…

"The problem of tone is further complicated by the fact that three kinds of consonants are present in the Thai language, namely, high consonants, middle consonants, and low consonants. In a position where either the first high tone or the second high tone is required, it may be necessary to change a low consonant to a high one, or vice versa, to produce the tone. The processes are called, interestingly, ‘sentenced to the second high tone’ or to tot. The opposite of it is called ‘sentenced to the first high tone’ or ek tot.

"The garp (kavaya) is basic to poetry. The word for poet (kavi) is derived from it. There are three main types of garp: the yani 11, the chabang 16, and the surangkanang 28. The numbers given show syllable counts. Anybody taking up the kloang often speaks as an epic poet or at least a scholar. But the poet only sees and describes. It is probably for this ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that he is a poet."

From Frank Stewart’s "Old Intimacies And New"

"Surely one of the biggest differences between indigenous people and modern is that the former feel that they are immersed in a sentient world that listens to them and responds with calls of its own. It was and is a world in which speech is not exclusively a human behavior. For many modern people, at least in North America, the world and all of the animate creatures in it may screech and bellow, but for them that noise is certainly not speech. And for the postmodernist poets in our American universities today, not even human speech is worth listening to, because it, too, is only noise.

"I have said that the origins of poetry, at least for the indigenous North American cultures I have cited, are intimate with the Original Breath and the atmosphere that brings us all into a greater intimacy, among one another and with all things. I asked what the nature of poetry becomes when there is disregard, disrespect, or disbelief concerning our common breathing, voicing, singing, making.

"I have tried to convey so far that I am speaking only of the conviction with which poetry is made, and not about its possible subjects. I have suggested that generally speaking indigenous poets are aware that they make the work for, and the work is in turn made from, everyone who breathes, or has breathed, or will breathe. This kind of poet lives in fear of the word (not that it makes the poet cautious or overly serious – certainly not). While I have spoken about ‘air,’ ‘breath’, ‘beauty,’ I have tried to intimate how fearful and important these are as part of the poet’s conviction. Rilke said that the encounter with beauty is a kind of ‘Terror,’ and in writing about Cezanne he said, ‘surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end to where no one can go any farther.’…

"I have asked what kind of poetry we might produce with such a renewed sense of an intimate, global audience – one that we feel is made up of intimate kin – and with a sense of responsibility that we must, as poets, see things through to the end."