Poetry for starters

One of my forthcoming books is “Poetry for Starters,” to be published by San Anselmo Press. In this book, I distilled everything I have learnt in writing poetry, starting from the classes I had with Professor Emmanuel Torres at the Art Gallery of the Ateneo de Manila University. I also had conversations with the late National Artist Rolando S. Tinio and Rayvi Sunico, which further polished my craft. The late National Artist Edith L. Tiempo was also helpful, when she taught us about the concept of the poem at the Silliman National Writers’ Workshop.

Short poems were a specialty of the precolonial Filipinos. At the heart of these poems was the talinghaga or metaphor. A metaphor is a suggested or implied comparison between two things. It does not use “like” or “as” when it does the comparison, the way a simile does. The two things being compared are different from each other. The pleasure in the text is the realization that there is a link between the two things being compared. This realization then leads to some form of enlightenment. The American poet Mark Doty said that we should give thanks to metaphors because they “go on ahead of us, they know before we do… [they] serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what’s too slippery or charged or too difficult to touch.”

The Hanunuo-Mangyans also wrote the ambahan, which is composed of seven-syllable metric lines and the poem can run to more than four lines. It is usually chanted, like many forms of oral literature, and owned by no one but the community. The author of the text is not a single individual but the whole community, in whose womb the words of the poem sprang. The ambahan usually teaches lessons about life and love. It is recited by parents to educate their children, by young people to express their love, by the old to impart their experiences and by the community in its tribal ceremonies.

Using knives, the ambahan is carved onto pieces of bamboo or barks of trees. The Hanunuo-Mangyan script is one of the three forms of ancient baybayin (alphabet) that is still in use today. Some of the poems are haunting: they have the clarity and depth of the haiku. One of them is a beautiful love poem for us who are separated from our loved ones by distance. Listen: “You, my friend, dearest of all,/ thinking of you makes me sad;/ rivers deep are in between,/ forests vast keep us apart./ But thinking of you with love,/ as if you are here nearby,/ standing, sitting at my side.”

The lyrical utterance is there, the cry of longing sharp and keening. But the ambahan is not just a repository of personal feelings; it can also give strong statements about contemporary concerns like illegal logging and the destruction of the environment. Look at this poem: “I would like to take a bath/ scoop the water with a plate/ wash my hair with lemon juice;/ but I could not take a bath,/ because the river is dammed/ with a lot of sturdy trunks.”

This poem reminds me of an interview I once had with a politician from the north. I was asking him why, in spite of the ban on illegal logging, there are still many furniture shops selling chairs and tables made of narra, the national tree, whose felling is not allowed by law. Without batting a corrupt eyelash, he looked at me and said, “But those tree trunks fell because of the typhoon and the river currents just carried them downstream. And that is how the furniture makers got those big tree trunks.”

The triple subjects of birth, childhood and adolescence are contained in many ambahan. A sample poem runs like this: “When the bush knife is still blunt/ You should whet it on a stone/ Then you try it on the wood./ Its effect you then will see/ On a bamboo or a tree.”

Among other things, I think this poem talks about how to raise a child: how you raise your child now will be mirrored by his or her acts when the child grows up.This small gem sounds like a parent telling the child to be aware of the world and its wonders – or its many horrors. Listen: “Says the bird lado-lado:/ Far away you shouldn’t go!/ Mind the snares of evil spooks/ That are scattered in the woods!”

The “evil spooks” could refer to the mischievous elementals and spirits that abound in the forest, river, hill and plain. A Western literary critic would be quick to coin this as an instance of “magic realism,” or la maravelloso real. But here, in a world of spirits where wonders never cease, we just call them simply as “classic realism.”

The precolonial Filipinos lived near the rivers and the sea. These bodies of water provided them food in the form of fish, clams and crabs and seaweed. They also served as avenues for mobility and transportation. It was said that the water did not divide the islands of the precolonial Philippines.

Compare and contrast the ambahan with a poem by Luis Cabalquinto on his hometown of Magarao, Camarines Sur. This poem was written in 1973, and shows through very specific, sensory details why he loves his hometown, which National Artist Edith L. Tiempo calls “the first plot of land that we call home.” Cabalquinto studied at New York University under Galway Kinnel, the famous American poet, and he has received awards for his poetry in the United States.

He has also lived most of his adult life in New York City, but his heart remains at home, as this poem “Hometown” vividly shows: “After a supper of mountain rice/ and wood-roasted river crab/ I sit on a long bench outside/ the old house, looking at a river:/ Alone, myself, again away/ from that other self in the city/ on this piece of ancestor land,/ my pulses slowed, I am at peace./ I have no wish but this place –/ to remain here in a stopped time/ with stars moving on that water/ and in the sky a brightness/ answering: I want nothing else/ but this stillness filling me/ from a pure darkness over the land/ that smells freshly of trees./ The night and I are quiet now./ But for small laughter from a neighbor,/ The quick sweep of a winged creature/ And a warm dog, snuggled by my feet.”

Indeed, hometowns are forever.

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Email: [email protected] Danton Remoto’s novel, Riverrun, has been published by Penguin Books.