Gathering for Hopkins

Last week I shared parts of the paper I delivered at the 26th International Hopkins Festival held in Newbridge College, County Kildare, Ireland. The paper titled “The Hopkins Influence on SouthEast Asian Poetry” sought to highlight such influence as I have noted in some of the works of my colleagues, namely Luisa A. Igloria, who teaches in Virginia, USA, and our homegrown premier poets Gémino H. Abad, Cirilo F. Bautista, and Ricardo M. de Ungria.

This week I continue with excerpts from the rest of the paper, quoting from works by Jose Garcia Villa, Jolico Cuadra, and Singaporean poet Alvin Pang.

We here in Manila all know about Villa, but in Ireland of course I had to render quick brushtrokes to give a flavor of the man, the character, and the poet. Now those don’t quite add up to Doveglion, as he had billed himself. But I let on about that, too: Dove, Eagle and Lion, as JGV romantically (some say mock-heroically) saw himself — after the expulsion from U.P. for a “coconut poem” that likened the nut to a woman’s breast, and self-exile in the USA initially financed by literary prize money.   

I spoke briefly on Villa’s own verse innovations. In a sense he was our Hopkins. I mentioned his “Divinity poems” and of course his “comma poems” — and read one of each as a sample.

“My most. My most. O my most!/ O my bright, my ineradicable ghost/ At whose bright coast God seeks/ Shelter and is lost is lost. O/ Coast of Brightness. O cause of/ Grief. O rose of purest grief./ O thou in my breast so stark and/ Holy-bright. O thou melancholy/ Light. Me. Me. My own perfidy./ O my most my most. O the bright/ The beautiful the terrible Accost.”

I’m sure not a small part of the audience found the poem strange. It doesn’t quite have the kind of sprung rhythm Hopkins affected or effected, rather its own sonorous sort of music that also relied on repetition, here to the point of echolalia, as well as euphony, half-rhymes, and that single compound word, “Holy-bright” that tipped a hat in Gerard Manley’s direction.

The comma poem, No. 29, was even more strange. “Much , beauty , is , less , than , the , face , of ,/ My , dark , hero. His , under , is , pure ,/ Lightning , His , under , is , the , socket ,// Of , the , sun. Not , Christ , the , Fox , not ,/ Christ , the , Lord , His , beauty , is , too ,/ Sly , too , meek. But , Christ , Oppositor ,// Christ , Foeman: The , true , dark , Hero./ He , with , the , three-eyed , thunder , he ,/ With , the , rigorous , terrors: this ,// Man’s , under , is , pure . lightning. This,/ Man’s , under , is , the , socket , of , the ,/ Sun. After , pure , eyes , have , peeled.// Off , skin , who , can , gaze , unburned? Who ,/ Can , stand , unbowed? Well , be , perceived ,/ And , well , perceive. Receive, be , received.”

I said that Villa’s enforced commas were more of a visual treat or trick, dictating serial focus on each word, but that other than in the graphic sense it doesn’t quite work, as Villa couldn’t avoid using articles and prepositions for which no gravity can be assigned other than with arbitrary whim — itself so light. I tried to honor the mannerism, however, by reading each word with a stress and a vacuum pause that made it sound like it was pumped by a piston.

“Now, Mr. Villa had many disciples in the Philippine poetry scene of the 1950s/60s. One of them was Jolico Cuadra, who seemed to have sought to out-Villa Mr. Villa, with none of the initiated eccentricities, but definitely with Hopkinesque features — even if his lines are short and have a clip-clop rather than hopping quality.”

I shared dear (recently departed) Jolico’s “Dogstar”: “Wing-hard, white-stallioned time/ The whirlwind sun upride// Where no sheerer/ The crude bird flies.// Hanged in the mind’s eye, hold/ Fast — shake out/ The canines of God.// The mankind locked in God’s bones/ Him dogstar till the phoenix hour/ The manbird locked/ Till the phoenix hour”

Compound words, hyphenated portmanteaus, neologisms, repetitions, the concern with divinity, and of course, in a departure from Hopkins, challenging that divinity. As in yet another Cuadra poem that shoots a fist to the sky, “Now Is He The God-invading Man”:

“Now is he the God-invading man, he/ Whose greatness is a progressing circle;/ Now by whose tempering fire can/ You who bequeathe him// … Name this life the phoenix-prefaces?/ Him the sex of perdition, the magnet of violence/ portending,/ This deity in bliss of hectic triumphs,/ In perfection must achieve dear pain./ Him always in creations all is,/ Suffering not the God-hyphenating I, man,/ But now let him curse The Great Moral No!/Lest.”

This poem, written in 1976, may be said to be well-nigh indecipherable, hermetic, mayhap sealed in all privacy but for deep dark places in Cubao. And yet the juxtapositions of image-words can reverberate, much like Hopkins’, what with Cuadra’s “The manbird… skullwork of Time… The high-haunting mind blowing/ The gold out of the sun…” 

My last example was an excellent erotic poem by our Singaporean friend Alvin Pang, who’s been no stranger to our own poets (and nooks and crannies in Cubao). Decidedly Hopkinesque is his “The Memory of Your Taste”:

“How easily you forget but it was I always/ to stoop to the cup of you, lace lip/ to lip, rehearse tongue-twisters like slurp/
malleable  laryngeal  slither and  O  swallow/ and you would wriggle in sibilants/ delectable sheet scribbles  every wet lick/
on nosetip and earlobe the hollow of your/ collarbone, sloped syntax of peak and peak, how/ the slick shimmies through plain towards forest/ of fingers tugging at air and hair  there,  there/ like bud shivering open in heat, like snowmelt/ at first touch of footstep in spring coming/ the same metal and moonlight tang and I eschew/ known names like nectar, mead, ambrosia  when all/ bursts in drizzle-juice and ripe pear and pearl/ gumdrops and sweet black sauce and sweat/ mucus-honey and piss-wine and curd O the/ whole sweet cart of woe only the living/ 
remember to love.”

This poem features compound words, hyphenations, but like the sample from De Ungria, also exhibits that hard-edge quality of good current poetry, sometimes even taking concrete form (mildly here, with the extra letter-spaces), and with imagery that’s sharp and very now: “metal and moonlight tang”; “drizzle-juice”; “gumdrops”; “mucus-honey and piss-wine” — recaling De Ungria’s “stove-dry,” “fever-shy,” “fuck-stuck” and the marvelous last line of tough-driven mono-syllables: “pick on gods or punk and start a fight.”

Bravo then for the Hophins influence on poetry in our neck of the woods in this English-versifying globe. Well, I didn’t exactly end my paper that way, albeit it was still in a bit of a rush, as my 30-minute allotment had fulfilled itself. Not a few participants said they wished I had shown the excerpts I had cited on the screen mounted onstage. Yes, I agreed, a PP would’ve been effective. No excuses. I couldn’t own up that I had barely finished the paper the night before.

Now, blame that on the usual la ultima ahora syndrome coupled with sheer preoccupation with multiple simul deadlines until the flight out from Manila. But yes, I’d finesse the paper now that I knew exactly what fit 30 minutes, and soon enough I could hand it over for joining the rest of the papers to be placed on the conference website. But first let us get to see more of your lovely country, the mythic misty isle.

In fact that’s how I did end my paper, by quoting from my own early poem titled “Travelogue” — written decades ago in Iowa City where I had met a poet who said he thought little of poems in praise of place, but that someday I should come visit him in Eire, “since our leprechauns are for real.”

The 12th and final section of that long poem had gone this way: “Remember. Up North Dubuque St. one Midwest evening/ Tom the Irishman professed disbelief in place paeans./ We shook our heads smiling at this young man who now/ Sends us cards from the land of Donegal, Glendalough,// Limerick. We’ll make it yet to his emerald isle/ If we beat our dusty breasts enough, tell him grieving/ How well we’ve lived by upper case, how the rise/ And fall of haunting names are like candles weaving// In a slow processionade, votive for the tongue and eye./ Pilgrims together we course thru apogee and epilogue,/ Knowing home to be where halo is, how it’s your/ Turn and how mine, now your, now my, your, my, your, my…” 

Indeed, we’d come. As pilgrims. For a couple of days we rented a car and first drove east to reach the coast below Dublin, whooping through wide motorway and narrow country road to green green country and up rock-stud mountains for a whistlestop at Glendalough, one down of the names we’d picked decades ago from a map. We greeted the Celtic Sea from the port town of Wicklow of the flower-bedecked town hall and sunny plaza with a fisherman’s statue, strolled up the grassy knoll of the Blackwater Fort Ruins with its token black cannons and majestic sweep of coast. Arklow also beckoned with its antique shops, and the next day, it was Galway on the west coast, facing the Atlantic, where traditional weather came to bear with harsh wind, mists and pelting rain. But of course it cleared, enough for us to say hello to JFK and the plaque in his memory at Eyre Park. Also affixed our names with Pentel pen to the tourist wall for The Gathering.

On our penultimate day we took the bus to Dublin, had a meal at The Bachelor Inn, where literature adorned the walls outside, especially around the green portal marked Poets Corner: from W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Cavanagh, Bram Stoker…

We walked up O’Connell St. past monuments, street musicians playing Piazzolla, a cobblestoned street with a tram line and Café Manila and Salon de Manila standing right beside Bookworms shop, then all the way to the Garden of Remembrance, crossed over to Dublin Writers Museum, another block and a half away the James Joyce Centre, and before we knew it, not much time was left except for a quick hop through the Temple Bar strip, never mind Trinity College, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin Castle…

We’ll do them next year. Of course. We’ll have to course through apogee and epilogue enough, once again, as we’ve not had our fill of frothy Eire. And next year, too, we’ll hit Donegal and Limerick, add the Cliffs of Moher north of Galway, more, more, as it’s our turn, your, their, our… turn once again at poet’s pilgrimage.