‘Anac tiqqun diablo’
The year is young and already there are signs of summer, anywhere you look are potential aphorisms for a horse year.
Just off the LRT station Carriedo, when you get down on Avenida en route to the fountain past the hopia stores and Chinese drug stores, the caimito vendors are back early with their fruit ripened into green and purple. Almost as many as on that stretch in Balara behind UP towards Commonwealth, at the height of the season, their produce either from Bulacan or Montalban.
Can’t help it if the epic is slowly being reborn, as in the long poem of the late Juan Jose Jolicco Cuadra in the uber poetry volume Companionable Voices: Five Filipino Poets, where he mimics the National Hero Rizal in a chorus of voices from the afterlife. How these dog days have left us like dogs in our own mangers.
And I remember a time when Jolicco used to wear a Band-Aid on his forehead, as if to camouflage his third eye or protect his chakra, even in those days he was seeing much of Victoria Piedad, or at least his verses were. In the gatherings at Hagdang Bato he kept silent reading an Archie comic book, never saying a word as around him the party of poets and artists progressed with wine, laughter, smokes and stories. He was detached even before the word was invented, and the rest of us could not but be mindful of the hidden chakra.
Companionable Voices (Quinqunx Press 2013) may well represent the mythical five of Philippine poetry. The aforementioned Jolico is the small forward of the group, and to whom the barakada’s volume is dedicated having gone on ahead to the great beyond, after having outgrown Villa not by being prolific, but by sheer breadth of vision. The swagger a precursor to a fearsome visionary talent.
Cuadra’s companions in the frontcourt: at power forward, Erwin Castillo, and center Recah Trinidad. Castillo always in a class by himself, finds time to outdo the old school with “When last we said goodbye†dedicated to Nita Claravall, and where there’s mention of a “caravanserai of stars,†or is this Carlos Santana meeting Vincent Van Gogh in the rugged hills east of the poet’s beloved Cavite? The poem might be meant to be set to music, which could be superfluous, because there’s music here as it is. What a nice rebound the obsession with myth and mythmaking, what a fluid move to the basket the memory of innumerable Jack Daniels. Franz Arcellana, unofficial mentor of these young men of the ‘60s, had gone on record to say Erwin is perhaps the finest writer of his generation. Let’s add to that and say that he’s the rapid pistol father of the Sandwich guitarist, another musician, a painter, others that inhabit his poetic landscape and diorama: Inang Miyang, Birinya Ori, Lord Iolikos.
Trinidad, poet of Vergara in Mandaluyong by the Pasig, last year launched his novel Tales of my Lost River, a refracted narration of a childhood steeped in folklore and myth, as well a disconcerting realism. He may occasionally be described as uncommunicative, but his poetry isn’t. On the contrary it may read as deceptively simple, but there’s deadly kick to the colorless, sweet-smelling gin of his verse. “Song of the worm†could be a companion piece to the aphorism mentioned by the poet on a taxi ride back to Vergara from this book’s launch, that “poetry is perishable.†Apart from the river, Recah’s subject is the Black Nazarene of Quiapo, to which he is a devotee. He is arguably the most Hemingwayesque of the group, and his “Rule†we recall having read years ago in the Manila Review of Greg Brillantes, part of his prize-winning collection Acrobat from Planet F.
Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez of Illinois and Zobel Roxas is the undisputed shooting guard, and his poetry further explores the realm of the possible, which all verse should, by the way. In “Eman spelled backwards†Sanchez demystifies a generation’s communist hero whose ideology happened to be a matter of circumstance. It flits back and forth between the guerrilla poet Eman Lacaba’s hometown of Pateros and the jungles of Mindanao where he died in the mid-’70s, executed by a former comrade turned traitor to the movement. Pascua’s style here is free-flowing narrative as if he is raconteur to an audience until the wee hours, deep in their cups yet ready for more. “Eden Wake†is worth the price of admission alone, where a cuckolded Adam loses Eve to a lascivious God. In another journal Pascua writes of a long walk from Diliman to Vito Cruz along with other writers including Arcellana pere, and en route they give karate chops and flying kicks to banana plants by roadside.
Point guard is none other than Cesar Ruiz Aquino, surely the most active of the bunch with his latest poetry collection released also last year, Caesuras, 155 poems, as if to do a potential sixth man 100 poems better. The founder of Eyoterismo here comes up with an updated sampler of his poetic philosophy in verse, and the result is alternately lyrical and confounding as a chess game. “Offspringless Sawi†remembers his grandmother, traces his origins of a fatherless childhood, and how his grandma could not accept his dad’s death during the Japanese occupation, until three skeletons were found in a common grave facing each other. “Larena†is dedicated to his friend Castillo and ruminates on pre-passage to Siquijor while waiting out a storm, a rainbow between that island and nearby Negros, and how the poet’s heart “stirred for a mermaid.†Anything goes as usual in “Eyoter,†where a picaresque and ribald rain of puns is tempered by a discipline through dissimulation. Sawi el Chabacano distributing the ball splendidly.
Anac tiqqun diablo! If there’s one volume of poetry you must have to prepare for the coming insurrection, this must be it. But wait, these voices are the insurrection, knowing that poetry is nothing if not incendiary. Poison for everyone in these five mythic wells of Philippine poetry.
