GEMINO H. ABAD presents Introduction to
THE ACHIEVE OF, THE MASTERY: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, mid-90s to 2016 edited by Gémino H. Abad and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta
(The University of the Philippines Press, 2018)
General Introduction: ‘The Achieve of, the Mastery’*
I
Our chief motive in this sequel
anthology to A
Habit of Shores (1999) is to present to the general
reader a
representative sample of Philippine poetry in English over the last fifteen
years or so. Apart from poetic/artistic merit, the selection rests on two
general considerations: it is focused on the Filipino -- his history and
culture, his environment, his own views on the human condition, his spiritual
landscape; it also comprises for a number of poets, insofar as interpretively
feasible, the range of the poet’s subjects or themes and the variety of verse
forms and poetic skill.
Poetic merit, of course, rests on
various grounds. There are all kinds of literary work -- “breaktexts” or “poems
dancing on their heads” (Ricardo M. de Ungria); or “spindrift verses” for wit
and lightsomeness of being, as in Cesar Ruiz Aquino and Simeon Dumdum; and many
others still, by whatever label you please: “proletarian”
(S.P. Lopez[1]), “spoken word” (Vim Nadera’s
performatura),
“conceptual,” or “language” or “wala lang” (just so) poetry.
Indeed, for some readers, a number may not appear to be “poems” at all! but the
kind a given literary work is depends on one’s basic assumptions about what a
“literary work” is and what it aims to achieve. We might add that when “poetry”
is understood as a quality of the finest use of language, it pervades all kinds
of literary work: there is poetry, for instance, in the fiction of Nick
Joaquin, Bienvenido N. Santos, Gregorio Brillantes, and Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.
There are kinds and kinds of
literary work, and various ways of crafting it, because the imagination has
infinite possibilities so that, consequently, innovations and experiments arise
which over time then comprise the national, hybrid literary tradition of a
given historical language. Even the criteria for artistic excellence change
over time, like any literary taste, fashion or fad. Each kind of literary work
-- the kind it is depending only (to stress it) on one’s principle of
classification that one needs to be clear about -- builds its own expectations
from readers; over time, readers get used to one or the other kind, those
expectations embodying the spirit of their criteria.
If there are only writers and writers
in the glocal
(global/local) homestead of creative writing, there are only readers and
readers (among them, literary theorists and critics, reviewers, teachers) who,
in the course of time, produce their people’s literature. It follows that there
is only “tradition and individual talent” (T.S. Eliot[2]):
tradition, what over the generations the readers themselves cherish of their
literature as part of their cultural heritage; and individual talent, for in
the very act of writing, the writer refreshes and renews his language of choice
for the mimesis
or representation of a human experience, as imagined as lived -- or, as
lived as imagined.
Our preferred approach to literary
works is basically what is often called “formalist,” but we are nevertheless
open to various experiments and innovations in the art of poetry: “that craft
or sullen art.”[3] Indeed, “formalist” admits
different views of poetry, and so, with the reader’s indulgence, we may here
clarify where we are coming from[4] (and beg pardon, too, for a
number of reiterations in the interest of clarity).
II
The Greek word, poiein,
“to make,” which yields the English “poem,” is an apt generic term for “literary,
or creative, work” which is a thing or artifact made of words (from Latin texere,
textus, “to weave,” also comes “text,” any word-weave); likewise, Latin versus,
“furrows,” from which English “verses” derives, is quite telling, for it
suggests that the poet as wordsmith works the soil of language to produce his
crop.
Thus, work
(Latin opus,
operari) is the key, for the poem isn’t written in
any language but rather is wrought from a given historical language that has
been mastered: thence the medium is the message. For, as
mastered, the ground of language becomes, by way of the writer’s imagination,
his people’s culture and history, their day-to-day living in their own time and
place, because these circumscribe his own
life experience. This is how the
language, as wrought into a literary work, bears the writer’s national
consciousness. And this is why our literature is our people’s memory. A people
is only as strong as their memory. Indeed, our writers, scholars, thinkers
create our sense of country: we are our own best critics and interpreters.
The writer wrestles with his medium
-- its vocabulary, grammar and syntax, all its rhetorical resources -- to endow
an experience with form and thereby wrest his prize, which is his story, poem,
essay, or play. That prize is his chief reward for the agon or
“struggle, contest” with language, his Muse. Indeed, for any artist, the medium
is
the Muse -- the medium with all its infinite possibilities for the imaginative
construct: in music, sounds; in painting, line, color, perspective; in
sculpture, wood or marble, its shape or form, its texture; in poetry, language.
The “poem” then or “literary work”
requires a high level of literacy, a capacity for abstraction, and a lively
imagination. Without such mental agility, language is a dead sea. We need to be
clear about the nature of language to realize
its Force (a form of energy whenever it is used) for empowerment and
liberation, and thereby appreciate the writer’s job of work.
Language is essentially an abstract
conceptual system of representation in a given historical community. It is the
finest invention of the human imagination. In one’s own community -- say, our
country or a particular region of it -- the language there already shapes our
consciousness as we begin to communicate in/with it; since its words already
interpret our experience, they bear our culture, the way our people feel and
think about their world. In that way, the reality one grasps with language is
already spoken for, and yet, one can always talk back, counter-say from various
standpoints, or gainsay a way of looking that inheres in the communal language.
Hence, as one matures and gains more experience, he may also become his own
interpreter in light of his own perceptions -- even against the grain or habit
of thought and feeling in his community.
Any language is essentially a translation
of reality, that is, what we perceive, imagine, or intuit. “To translate,”
etymologically, is “to carry or ferry across.” Thus, to think, speak, or write
is, in every instance, to re-translate from a given language’s abstract
conceptual system of representation, to ferry across its river of words (where the words only read one another and echo
their provenance) your own pristine text or word-weave without hurt or
injury to your own mind’s import and aim. The mind’s power of abstraction and
imagination then makes real to the mind the translation.
The meanings of our words do not
arise so much from their differential interplay as from our living experience.
Meanings, abstractions: they come to life only when writer or reader light them
up with their imagination. “When the imagination sleeps,” says Albert Camus,
“words are emptied of their meaning.”[5]
Thus, to write is to get real, and the poem is to live: indeed, as you read,
you are also read.
In short, language is our only means
with the other arts (like music or painting)
to grasp through mind and heart our human reality -- that is, to translate
an experience, to enflesh it, as it were, in order to apprehend a part of an
inexplicable whole and make sense of it. That is in fact
the whole point of writing at all: to make sense. Without
language, we would have no memory, no history, no culture, no civilization.
Now, the Real is
essentially mystery. What we apprehend as “the real world” is our own
“sense-world” -- that is, what sense we individually make from our own
impressions which come by way of our nervous system (what we see, touch, smell,
hear); but whatever sense one makes out is already an interpretation. Language,
says William H. Gass, is the “habitation of the Word“[6]
-- for all those impressions and perceptions we reinvent (find again within
language and within ourselves) our words which are concepts. Our
concepts enable us to project an image of what we call the “real
world” -- the outer and inner phenomenal world. In short, our reality is what
our language establishes and transmits: Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,
says Jacques Derrida (there is nothing outside the text). We are all
textualists, but our abstractions, our thinking, may also mislead: for any turn
of word or phrase, another interpretation may arise. And yet, what language
transmits “abounds in hints of wonder and mystery”[7]
-- intuitions about those things in our experience which
Nor
mouth had, no nor mind expressed
The
Real, the whole picture, is ever there -- beyond the intellect’s
ken, the world of man’s spiritual nature of which his own living experience is
the incontestable evidence. “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced,”
as John Keats says.[9] So, the quest for the
Real is endless because the hunger for reality is man’s profoundest
instinct[10]: where there is no
question, the quest ceases.
All we normally apprehend then of
our ordinary, day-to-day reality, what we call “our world,” is our experience
of it: of ourselves, of human affairs, of our natural environment. Quite
instructive is the rich meaningfulness of that word, “experience,” from Greek empeiran
(whence the English, “empirical”) and from Latin experiri (whence
the English, “experiment, trial”; experiri as also associated with
Latin periculum,
“danger”); etymologically then, “experience” denotes “to try or
attempt; to pass through, suffer, or endure; to fare or journey, with
uncertainty and peril.” Thus so precious is every word’s submerged history of
the human imagination! It bears stressing: in our experience, we only catch
glimpses of our human reality, what our mind grasps with words and
words, but never see whole. Likewise, a cat’s perception of its reality is its
own world to which we have no access; we can only imagine it, as in fantasy and
children’s stories which of course draw from our own individual sense of
reality. Thus, the basic poetic sense is a sense for language, which is our
most intimate connection with that we call “our world.” This is why the care
for words is care of light.
If even our normal reality at times
hints at mystery, at some ineffable spiritual
dimension, then for poetry as verbal art -- as both work of language and
work of imagination -- there must needs be clear seeing (impossible without
imagination: for the real in our experience -- say, of love, or peace, or cheer
of spirit -- is
the poem: their variant translation); clear seeing for clean
writing (impossible without practice: for the poem is
the real, because what is most real is what is most imagined). The poem is the
revel and revelation for both poet (in the writing) and his reader (in the
reading and interpreting): revel, that is, a shareable delight with one’s
medium, even joy in the solitary work of creation; and revelation, that
is, the import or significance (saysay) and the insight or
vision, the meaningfulness or soul (diwa) of the experience as
simulated or represented. Clear seeing then for clean writing, for our thoughts
and our feelings do not seamlessly coincide with the words of any given
historical language. The poetic moment, says Yves Bonnefoy, “open[s] the
intuition to all that language refuses.”[11]
The intuition or insight is a luminance of thought no idea quite expresses, a
radiance of feeling no thought quite conveys.
There is nothing mysterious about
poetry (except where its subject is a spiritual
or mystical experience, as in St. John of the Cross or Rumi). Like any
other art, it is a skill with one’s medium and a discipline of mind and
imagination. Poetry, after all, is only words not too far from their multiple
sense through their history, and yet, as poetry, a fresh and lively
representation of an experience, well-structured and insightful.
That is our basic critical “theoria”
or standpoint. (a) What is represented -- an experience, even only a
thought, a feeling, or a stance or attitude toward something or other; (b) by
what means -- the words chosen and their order; their rhythm or music as
they flow; their evocative power through metaphor and other rhetorical devices
and stratagems; (c) how represented -- the way the whole experience is
organized[12]; and (d) the resultant form
of the representation: all these drive the energy (dynamis; in
Tagalog, dating
or effect)
of the poem’s imaginary drama or narrative by which we are persuaded and
moved.[13] That imaginative/conceptual
form enables one to grasp the poem’s substance: its external form is
the precise verbal configuration of the experience as simulated on the page or
performed on stage, and its inner form, the import or signified (saysay)
of the
whole experience; beyond that import too is the poem’s spirit (diwa)
which isn’t a fixed meaning or signified[14]
but rather the meaningfulness or significance of the poem’s own
interpretation of the experience which it bears from reader to reader over the
course of time. In the course of his creative work -- a lifetime’s calling --
the poet achieves his own distinctive craft or style, what Albert Camus defines
as “the simultaneous existence of reality and of the mind that gives reality
its form.”[15]
Every poet, no doubt, has his own
“poetics” -- his own path through his own self’s inscape, through the
wilderness of language where he makes his own clearing. He is driven by his own
temperament to re-create, to forge his medium of expression for that exact
configuration of an experience, whether he has lived it or only imagined it; forge
in its triple sense: to make, bring into being, or fabricate; to represent,
mime, or simulate; and to forge ahead, advance, transcend the inherent inadequacies
of language to reality. How transcend but by language’s own evocative power
which draws upon both the poet’s and the reader’s imagination. Sometimes the
poet fails, sometimes he succeeds -- indeed, at times, masterfully! over which
he might even be amazed, just as though he had a spirit-guide: “I labour,” says
Dylan Thomas, “by singing light.”[16]
Ultimately, the poem is what you
will, because for the artist, for the writer, the only important thing
is the work itself; and the final test, for both poet and reader, is “the
achieve of, the mastery of the thing” (as Gerald Manley Hopkins says in “The
Windhover”[17]). What has been mastered,
to reiterate, is the representation of an experience lived or imagined, and
what has been achieved is an indefinable effect, what earlier we called revel and revelation,
that
power or energy of the mimesis arising from what Horace says, dulce
et utile[18]: that is,
pleasing and instructive, or as Jonathan Swift might put it, “sweetness and
light.”[19] Here I find a passage from
Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” quite apt:
The
Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does
streight its own resemblance find;
Yet
it creates, transcending these,
Far
other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating
all that’s made
To read a poem is to live
imaginatively its simulation of an experience. Often, the reader has only that piece
of the poet’s corpus where it may constellate with other poems (both the
poet’s own and others’ that the poet has read); that piece may not be the
poet’s best but a part only of the poet’s progress toward the ideal that he has
a feeling or intuition about. The poet of course has many lives -- as lover,
say, as father, as teacher -- from which he draws when he writes. The poet’s
reader likewise has as many lives -- lived and imagined -- from which he draws
when he reads, which is why as he reads,
he is also read.
Obviously, any mode of reading
proceeds from certain basic assumptions about the nature of a literary work.
Any interpretation then is governed solely by those assumptions which, though
often implicit, account for its elucidative power and limitations as well.
One’s interpretation may well vary from other readings, even in
the same given mode, simply because its assumptions are also subject to
one’s own understanding of their import and practical application, not to speak
of the adequacy of one’s knowledge about aspects of reality that the
assumptions may require (e.g., in a postcolonial reading, certain cultural/historical
facts and their variant interpretations).
Any reading -- Marxist, feminist,
postcolonial -- is contextual; context is what goes with the
text, both what goes with it inside its weave and what goes outside that weave.
Inside:
what the words singly and in their interplay denote, connote, and evoke (for
both poet and reader); outside: what circumstances in the poet’s experience,
and what knowledge of his people’s history and culture, may have shaped somehow
his poem’s representation.
IV
We
may now conclude with a brief narrative of how we proceeded to put together
this anthology.
We
did not personally know quite a number of the poets, but their friends gave us
their names and helped us contact them. Most of the poets we were able to
contact gave us their consent to include them in the anthology. We had ready
access to most of the poets’ own works that were locally available; indeed,
some poets (among them, those living abroad) or their friends generously gave
us copies of their works. We also requested the poets to send us their own
choice poems: this was truly of immense help in our own selection for the anthology;
we also asked them for their bio-notes, and they kindly obliged us. At first,
we did not limit the number of poems that we selected, but in the end, we had
to cut down (with much agon) on our own choices for a slimmer volume.
We
decided -- as in the previous historical series of anthologies of our poetry from
English -- to include (1) Poets’ bionotes and sources of their selected poems
(including, in a few instances, the poets‘ own comments on their poems, as
requested, and other authors’ comments on the poets’ works) and (2) a
Bibliography, by no means comprehensive, of works that may interest the avid
reader: individual poetry collections, other anthologies of literary works, and
literary journals and magazines.
From
the very outset of working on this sequel anthology to A Habit of Shores, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta and I have wished to preserve and pass on to
the next generation our rich cultural/literary tradition. And thus, at our
journey’s end with the poets, we gratefully acknowledge their generosity, and
celebrate with them all poets’ camaraderie as stirring image of authentic
democracy where freedom and respect for everyman’s dignity prevail.
_____________________________
Footnotes:
* I had originally wanted a title congruent with the titles of the previous anthologies and, preferably, drawn from a Filipino poet’s work. I thought of Amador T. Daguio’s “Land of Our Desire” which has that stirring line, “We could not make the ruby / Into the stone of a ring” (italics mine); and Dm. Reyes with J. Neil C. Garcia most helpfully suggested the title of Edith L. Tiempo’s poem, “Holding the Mainland.” But finally I settled on Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ “the achieve of, the mastery” (from his poem, “The Windhover”): to my mind, “the achieve of” is where a poem has got to so far, today and tomorrow, as the poet’s own clearing in the fastnesses of language (for the poet needs to perseveringly strive for perfection of his art); “the mastery of the thing” is that rare moment when and where, through the poet’s agon with language, his Muse, he’s got the poem-of-it so right, it can’t be done again: the very “thing” itself, sui generis, “immortal diamond” (again, from Hopkins‘ poem, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”)
[1] See Caracoa
7,
May 1985. Cf. two essays in Poetry (April 2015): Tara Betts, “Life
is Good: How Hip-Hop Channels Duende” and Nate Marshall, “Blueprint for
Breakbeat Writing”: [pp. 50-53, 54-57].
See
“Proletarian Literature: A Definition” in Salvador P. Lopez, Literature
and Society: Essays on Life and Letters (Manila: University Book Supply, 1940):
216-227. “It is hardly necessary to say that the proletarian writer is first an
artist, ... Passion for a cause alone cannot make the artist; neither can the
possession of a sound theoretical foundation or philosophy of life. The artist
must possess on top of all these the ultimate gift which is the gift of the
creative imagination.” (p. 224)
[2] See Eliot,
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, new edition
(N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.: 1960): 3-11. “Tradition ... cannot be
inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves
... the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who
would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical
sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its
presence; ... This historical sense, which is a sense ... of the timeless and
of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the
same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of
his own contemporaneity.” (p. 4) Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry” posits
“the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever
been written” (p. 7) -- the world’s poetry an ever-changing universe, as it
were, where all the poems constellate.
[3] See Dylan
Thomas’ “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” in DylanThomas: The Poems, ed. Daniel
Jones (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1978): 196-97.
[4]
See also “What Is a ‘Literary Work’?” in Gémino H. Abad, Past Mountain Dreaming: New Essays (UP, 2015): 6-9.
[6] Gass, Habitations
of the Word: Essays (N.Y.: Touchstone Book / Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1985.
[7]
Evelyn
Underhill, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual
Consciousness (Oxford:
Oneworld: 2001): 9. We acknowledge here our indebtedness to this classic work.
[8] From Hopkins’
poem, “Spring and Fall: to a young child,” in Poems of Gerard Manley
Hopkins,
ed. W. H. Gardner, 3rd edn. (Oxford University Press, 1964): 94.
[9] Letters
of John Keats,
selected by Frederick Page (Oxford University Press, 1954): 250.
[10] Here perhaps,
for clarity’s sake, a needful digression. That hunger for reality is at the
root of what is called mysticism -- the very living at its
deepest level where our world is, as Keats intuits, “the vale of Soul-making”
(in his Letters, op. cit.: 266). Language itself and the arts are signs and
spurs of that instinct. In “literary taste,” for instance, the tongue, as
metaphor for language, suggests that we would savor the reality, say, of awe
over an indescribable vision of Mayon Volcano on an early morning; or that of
an overpowering passion called love, or that of a devotee’s ecstasy in the traslacion
(transfer/
translation) of the Black Nazarene. Camus would say: “If the world were clear,
art would not be necessary” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Camus); or,
Robert Frost: “... the greatest adventure of man is science, the adventure of
penetrating into matter, into the material universe. But ... the best
description of us is the humanities.” (Richard Poirier’s interview of Frost in Writers
at Work
/ The
Paris Review Interviews, 2nd series, ed. George Plimpton. Penguin Books, 1977: 23.)
[11]
John Naughton’s “Interview with Yves Bonnefoy” in Bonnefoy’s In the Shadow’s Light, tr. Naughton
(University of Chicago Press, 1991): 162-63. The intuition is part of what
Underhill (op. cit., footnote 8) calls the “transcendental sense” which gave
rise to the world’s religions.
[12]
That way or manner of representation is either dramatic or narrative or a mixed
mode: when dramatic, the reader is put in the position of a witness to an
experience; when narrative, the reader’s position is that of one listening to
someone else’s account.
[13]
To persuade and so move the reader: as the poem’s desired end or final cause, that power or effect may be
regarded as the poem’s organizing principle. Any kind of literary work is epideictic: chiefly designed for
rhetorical effect; and hence, cathected:
invested with intellectual and emotional power.
[14]
Our words, alas! are at times unstable or ambiguous even in a given context.
“Signified,” as Webster defines it, is “a concept or meaning as distinguished
from the sign through which it is
communicated”; “signifier” is “a symbol, sound, or image (as a word) that represents
an underlying concept or meaning”;
and “significance” is “something that is conveyed as a meaning often obscurely
or indirectly” [italics mine]. -- Merriam
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edn., 1996.
[15]
Camus, The Rebel: an Essay on Man in
Revolt, tr. Anthony Bower (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951): 271.
[16]
See footnote 5.
[17]
In Hopkins’ Poems, ed. W. H. Gardner,
op. cit.: 73.
[18] Horace, De
Arte Poetica,
ed. H. A. Dalton (London: MacMillan, 1941): 23 -- “Aut prodesse volunt aut
delectare poëtae” (ll. 333-34). Freely translated: the poet’s function is
either to improve (prodesse) or to give delight (delectare); the perfect poet combines both
functions. See also J. W. H. Atkins, Literary Criticism in Antiquity, II
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1961): 76.
[19] See Matthew
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, ed. J. Dover
Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1963): 53-54, where he says: “ ... the
Greek word euphuía, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of
perfection as culture brings us to conceive of it: a harmonious perfection, a
perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present,
which unites ‘the two noblest of things, sweetness and light,’ as [Jonathan]
Swift calls them in his Battle of the Books.”
[20]
Helen Gardner, ed. The Metaphysical Poets
(Penguin Books, 1959): 255. See
also Krip Yuson’s “Yes You Can” and
“Islands of Words” in Islands of Words
& Other Poems (UST, 2015): 26; 63-107.
*****
Gémino Henson Abad is a literary critic from Cebu, Philippines. He earned his
B.A. English
from the University of
the Philippines Diliman in 1964 "magna cum laude". His MA
with honors and Ph.D. in English literature
degrees were obtained from the University of
Chicago in 1966 and 1970, respectively. He served the University of
the Philippines in various capacities: as Secretary of the
University, Secretary of the Board of Regents, Vice President for Academic
Affairs and Director of the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing. For many years,
he also taught English,
comparative literature
and creative writing
at U.P. Diliman.
Abad co-founded the Philippine
Literary Arts Council (PLAC) which published Caracoa, a poetry
journal in English. His other works include Fugitive Emphasis (poems,
1973); In Another Light (poems and critical essays, 1976); A Formal
Approach to Lyric Poetry (critical theory, 1978); The Space Between
(poems and critical essays, 1985); Poems and Parables (1988); Index
to Filipino Poetry in English, 1905-1950 (with Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, 1988)
and State of Play (letter-essays and parables, 1990). He edited landmark
anthologies of Filipino poetry in English, among them Man of Earth
(1989), A Native Clearing (1993) and A Habit of Shores: Filipino
Poetry and Verse from English, ‘60s to the ‘90s (1999).
The UP Diliman has elevated Abad
to the rank of University Professor, the highest academic rank awarded
by the university to an exemplary faculty member. He currently sits on the
Board of Advisers of the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing and teaches creative writing as Emeritus
University Professor at the College of Arts
and Letters, U.P. Diliman.
He also is the first Filipino to receive the Premio Feronia in Rome, Italy under the foreign
author category.
