The poet from Dumas Goethe
In Dumas Goethe is a place that exists mostly in the poetry of Cesar Ruiz Aquino, and his latest comprehensive collection of verse In Samarkand is due out shortly from University of Santo Tomas Press.
Of course one can Google the word Samarkand all day, and find that it is a place in Uzbekistan both of exotic and ancient curiosity, in fact a favorite symbolic location of some works of literature, most notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” which, according to lore, was written by the poet while emerging from a wondrous opium daze.
More wondrous days and well-worn nights in Dumas Goethe and other far-flung places from Zamboanga to Baguio to Manila can be read in the poetry of Ruiz Aquino, nearly half a century’s work finally brought together under one cover.
Those familiar with Aquino’s fiction and meta-narrative experiments would delight in his poems, since he is a poet to begin with. Well even his stories have a lilt of song in them, like blind Homer singing his epics in ancient Greece.
But here’s the rub, and we don’t mean Vicks or Bronco: there are at least three poems in the present collection that have their root in stories the author had previously written. Or, could have fool’s gold us, the poet might just as easily claim that he was returning the stories — “Anak Bulan,” “Kalisud a la Dante Varona,” and “Jerahmeel” — back to their rightful source, the poetic, sublunary subconscious.
I remember, for example, coming across a recollection of circumstances surrounding his wartime birth in an essay that came out in Ermita magazine in the mid-’70s, and the passage itself stood out for its lyricism, something about riding on a giant butterfly.
After all these years we come across it again in “Anak Bulan,” though slightly different and not exactly how we recall it — indeed the words stake a separate ground and come through with a secret life of their own.
Same is true with “Kalisud a la Dante Varona” with its diverse incarnations through the decades, first as essay that came out in the early ’80s in Who magazine about a Palarong Pambansa, which later evolved into a short story published in Midweek in the late ’80s roughly about the sporting competition, memorable for its protagonist trying to find a place to sleep on an overcrowded inter-island vessel. Comes the poem version that contains echoed lines from the prose pieces like distilled or aged spirits.
The case of “Jerahmeel” is a bit more complex. The template for this came out either in Expressweek magazine or Manila Review in the 70s, both as a short story and under a different title. Both stories and poem portray people having recurrent dreams about a lost moon, a magic realist concept worthy of Cortazar and Marquez and even — with a dash of physics thrown in — Calvino.
Back then it already read like a prose poem, and here presented as a full-fledged poem, the narrative verse style is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” perhaps better. Just one detail is a departure from the earlier versions — that of the insomniac-somnambulist pacing the floor pondering on the implications of the missing orbit, in effect suggesting that the moon may be present only in the most restful sleep, the sleeper reassured that though unseen, the moon is there. Presence in absence.
Aquino’s contemporary at the UP, Willy Sanchez, in his afterword comments that the poet sort of veered towards modernism in his later poems, specifically the kilometric “Eyoter,” which is chockfull of puns and private jokes and then some. We can only guess that the outsider and casual browser will find amusement in it, with literary references from humorous here to even more comic eternity.
We can only imagine that “Eyoter” (a Freudian slip in Cebuano) might have caused a minor stir when it was first published in the Free Press, as readers possibly didn’t know what to make of it, but surely provided lively classroom discussions in literature courses that took up the authors mentioned.
Another poem in this modernist vein could be “Miguelitito,” a harrowing chronicle of the poet’s second insomniac nervous breakdown in 50 years.
We recall Aquino himself telling us of that particular journey to Ixtlan, in the summer of 1992 during the writers workshop and the presidential elections, and the details are more vivid when set down in verse: the struggle against the straitjacket, the concerned look of his friends and students, and his whispering to one of them the magic word like a secret talisman before it is lost forever to a madness however fleeting: “Miguelitito.”
The poet’s experience, as far as we can tell, was no small beer, but this much we can say: like all survivors Aquino can say that he has felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over him. Watch that birdie!
Then there are the verse-literations, chopped up works (à la Lucila Lalu) of other authors so as to be paraphrased, if that is at all possible, into verse.
But how he succeeds, proving that poetry is the art of the possible, or turning the post-structuralists inside out, the poet’s mission impossible is to turn chaos into art.
We will never read Norman Mailer, William Butler Yeats, WS Merwin, Wallace Stevens the same way again.
The early poems are a revelation by how well they have held up through the years: “Song” remains Sanchez’s favorite and the Baguio-based Francis Macansantos still swears by it; “Ultimately She Couples with the Sun” has hardly faded since being published in the Collegian; even “Boticcelli Blues” strikes a fine balance between gravitas and levity.
In the 1962 PEN Anthology of short stories, issue editor Francisco Arcellana included Aquino’s “In the Smithy of My Soul,” hailing the work of the Zamboanga teenager as the “new wave” of Philippine fiction.
If he was once regarded as the Jean Paul Belmondo of local letters, Ruiz Aquino by his own admission is presently the old man and the sea. In Samarkand is enough evidence of this, older and wiser but none the worse for wear in Dumas Goethe.
