Submission to Cordite 87: DIFFICULT

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Holly Isemonger

Difficult

Poetry for Cordite 87: DIFFICULT is guest-edited by Oscar Schwartz and Holly Isemonger.

Says Holly: Poems can be spiky, sassy, cutting and frustrating – difficulty is built into how we perceive them. Probably as a result of schooling – a process that can excel at removing pleasure from thinking, learning and reading – we grow up learning to sap ‘meaning’ from poetry rather than enjoy the experience of the words. We don’t give a shit, as young children, about the ‘message’ of songs and nursery rhymes … the pleasure comes from the sounds and shapes of words, humour, formal invention, strange narratives and sensual descriptions. The term ‘difficult’ is often levelled at poems that don’t have an easily accessible meaning. We worry that we didn’t ‘get it’ and we worry that we are dumb because we don’t. This anxiety removes the pleasure from poetry that, in turn, makes poems ‘difficult’. We want poems that don’t worry about being difficult. Poems that bask in the pleasure of the ‘not knowing’.

Says Oscar: Difficult poems pose a challenge and don’t fit in. They are restless and refuse to conform, and they must annoy at least one person. We want these poems. But we don’t want to limit what’s ‘difficult’ in the way others have historically used this term. Difficult doesn’t just mean difficult language or difficult syntax or difficult grammar or difficult form. Difficult poetry can be written with simple phrases. A rhyming quatrain can be difficult. A simple poem about your feelings can be difficult, maybe the most difficult of all. Difficult poetry doesn’t have to be open for multiple interpretations: maybe it’s difficult because it poses a single political interpretation. Difficult poetry can even be ornamental. Just as long as it is thorny and sticks in the side of something or someone. It must annoy one person. That person would call you difficult if they read the poem … maybe write it with this person in mind.

Submit poems (prose, comics, visual, concrete) or works of micro-fiction (500 words maximum). Read more about submitting to Cordite Poetry Review. Please note:

1. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.

2. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.

3. Simultaneous submissions or previously published material will not be considered. This includes works published in print and web journals but does not apply to material first published on personal blogs.

4. Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.

5. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.

6. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …

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Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged ,

Kishore Ryan Reviews Lachlan Brown

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Kishore Ryan

Lunar Inheritance by Lachlan Brown
Giramondo Publishing, 2017


‘Toward dusk,’ writes Brown in the book’s penultimate poem, ‘when the sky is passport blue, / you return via the National Performing Arts Centre, / its vast half-egg reflected in the stirring water.’ This poem, ‘Blank face double vision’, is reminiscent in certain ways of Lorca’s Poet in New York. Both Brown and Lorca use the phrase ‘blank face’ as well as the word ‘egg’. Also, both Brown’s poem and Lorca’s ‘After a Walk’ – like Lunar Inheritance and Poet in New York in general – evoke a sense of alienation within an anonymous, urbanised environment. Whereas Brown’s ‘half-egg’ is a realist description of the National Performing Arts Centre in Beijing, Lorca’s ‘egg’ is a surrealist image of anonymity: ‘With the amputated tree that doesn’t sing / and the child with the blank face of an egg.’ Lorca’s portrayal of a nature-less conurbation is, in many ways, somewhat more unsettling than Brown’s depiction of metropolitan China, but both books are similarly formed around a poet’s wanderings through foreign cityscapes.

Lunar Inheritance is a collection of 17 poems and comprises five sonnets interposed between 12 longer works. Each of the sonnets moulds itself to a Petrarchan rhyme scheme (abba, abba, cde, cde). In ‘Tell it like it is’ Brown takes on the voice of a Pauline-Hanson-type (‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped / by Asians’). The fact that this is the book’s ninth poem, third sonnet and, therefore, is positioned in the exact centre of the collection is, perhaps, a deliberate reference to the racist attitudes at the core of the Australian psyche:

                                                                       […] Fail rates
indicate that many international students just cheat,
and they’re taking places from my Sandra and your Jack.

Just think about it. If no one in Sydney ever assimilates,
what were the ANZACs even fighting for? So keep
up the pressure and we’ll soon take this country back.

The longer poems are composed in free verse and adhere to a precise stanzaic form of eight octets (except for the last poem, which is seven octets). Curiously, each octet is preceded by a noncapitalised, parenthetical line, which acts as a subtitle to the subsequent stanza:

(pride)
Switch off face-recognition
when your mother cries out 
after being abused in the street.
Just get to a stage where it’s all expected,
for example, at cocktail parties where
even the glasses adjectivise you, because
wealth’s a dog-whistling politician building
a platform on graduated levels of hatred.

The poet’s directive to ‘get to a stage where it’s all expected’ is reiterated through the collection. In ‘Artistic Licenses’ the poet attempts to discharge racist incidents from his mind, ‘your brother … / … is yelled at by a tradie mimicking ‘Gangnam Style’ / … a rival- / ry in your creative writing class ends with two guys / joking about Asians eating cats.’ Moreover, the title ‘Blank face double vision’ is redolent of a vacant expression, an apathetic or at least externally impassive attitude to the prejudice and antagonism that people of colour experience in Australia on a daily basis. The poet’s apathy, if it can be called that, is a survival device.

(where are you really from?)
Mechanically looping this question
through the speakers at Beijing Workers’ 
Stadium, the concrete reverberates like
holes in your starting line-up.

The bitter irony of the subtitle is promisingly engaging, but the following sentence is somewhat less compelling. Brown’s simile, ‘the concrete reverberates like / holes in your starting line-up’, suffers from its lack of imagism. Soundwaves bouncing off concrete are an invisible occurrence and, likewise, the effect that mediocre players have on the outcome of a sports game, although observable, is a protracted event lacking in pictorial value. Also, Brown’s combining of the literal meaning of ‘reverberate’, ‘to echo’, with the figurative meaning, ‘to have continuing and serious effects’, is, if not quite a pun, an example of wordplay comparable to the ball bounces like a bad check. This is not to say that every sentence of every poem has to be imagistic, or that every simile has to be as inventive as those of, for example, John Forbes (‘your profile / fills out like a bin-liner caught by the / wind’, ‘Colonial Aubade’), but the abstractness here is likely to leave the reader unengaged.

Elsewhere in Lunar Inheritance Brown’s similes are more imagistic and direct: ‘jackets with price tags that / flash like the white teeth of…sharks’, or, ‘sky as white as a Chinese model’s white skin’. Both similes – the former of which has consumerist, predatory and exploitative associations, and the latter of which indirectly calls attention to the popularity of skin whitening products in Asia – make use of the word ‘white’, a word that is imbued with not only the violence inflicted by white Australians on Indigenous peoples, but also the White Australia Policy and the laws that excluded people from Asia, particularly China, from migrating to Australia.

Much of Lunar Inheritance is back-dropped by urban Chinese settings seen from the perspective of an Australian with Chinese ancestry, a foreigner visiting his ‘grandmothercountry’ [sic]. When Brown writes about Beijing or Guangzhou, suburban Sydney and his family are always nearby:

                                                                                           your gaze
                caught by a workshop that is filled with clothes 
        and striped bags, and for less than a second this is 
your grandmother’s brimming house in Ashfield

Similarly, in ‘Sanctioned Entry’, as the poet approaches Guangzhou:

                                                          buildings 
seen from the air become Mahjong tiles 
neatly stacked by your grandfather’s
imagined hands as he meets with the clan
on Dixon street, Sydney

Brown’s use of ‘imagined’ is an example of the type of word Richard Hugo in Triggering Town encourages poets to remove from their poems:

words that seem necessitated by grammar to make things clear but dilute the drama of the statement. These are words of temporality, causality, and opposition, and often indicate a momentary lack of faith in the imagination.

The fact that poetry has the ability to traverse, from one word to the next, space and time, makes the inclusion of ‘imagined’ slightly superfluous to the poem.

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14 Works by Marikit Santiago

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Marikit Santiago


Marikit Santiago | He (2017) | oil, acrylic, Dutch metal gold leaf and pyrography on ply | 52cm x 40cm

My practice examines a personal conflict of cultural plurality at the conjunction of Filipina ethnicity and Australian nationality. My work navigates the simultaneous sensations of acceptance and rejection of adopted and inherited cultures, which has been conditioned by autobiographical experiences within and between developed and developing worlds.

In engaging with these concerns, I access Filipino history and culture. A study of the military legacy, literature, mythology, religion, politics, socio-economic status and popular culture inform my work. The collective experiences and memory of my immediate family provides access to the oral traditions of mythology and religious customs.

My work employs traditional, figurative oil painting techniques as well as more innovative methods of pyrography (burning) and ‘polar painting’ (painting the negative colours of an image). A combination of these techniques is used to construct a layering of imagery and various types of marks.

I source recycled or repurposed material such as plywood, MDF board and other found objects and surfaces referencing the makeshift domestic constructions found in the Philippines and the ethos of ‘making-do’, an aspect of Filipino life. In addition, the use of found materials challenges the perception of value; oscillating between high and low, demonstrating my own perceptions of value and how it is ascribed to my cultural identities.

My work aims to reflect the interweaving of my ethnic, cultural and social identities. In this way, my practice has become more than a mode of artistic production, expanding to become a space for decolonising, intersectional thinking and cross-cultural dialogue. In motherhood, my practice has evolved not only crossing disciplines to include creative writing, installation and community engagement, but also further in the way of multigenerational story-telling and seeks ways to pass Filipino culture to my children in a contemporary Australian context.

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Posted in ARTWORKS | Tagged

PHILIPPINES Editorial

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta

To enter the mind of Philippine literature in English, it is important to note the evolution of English in the Philippines. We were colonised by Spain in 1521 and sold to America in 1898. According to eminent Filipino poet and scholar, Gémino Abad, Philippine poetry in English only took flight in the 1920s – it is a considerably young poetry, being less than a hundred years old. At this point, Filipinos spoke so many vernacular languages and even variants of ethno-languages that the establishment of a stable literature in English seemed an unlikely project.

Abad proposes three movements in Philippine Literature in English: the Romantic Tradition from 1904 to the 1940s, which espoused romanticism, poetic diction and imagery; followed by the New Critical Movement, which took place from the 1950s to the 1970s, and was imported from the Iowa Writers Workshop through the writing and scholarship of Edith and Edilberto Tiempo; finally, the drive towards the Postmodern / Postcolonial praxes from the 1980s to the present.

It is in the last movement that we find ourselves, in 2018, well-aware of our colonial reality and the role of English as both second language and colonial apparatus. English remains a linguistic battlefield; we have nonetheless appropriated the master’s weapon to wield such power of the word and to sing back with rhythmic passion.

As guest editors for this special issue in Philippine poetry, we wanted to include as wide a survey of Philippine literature that we could. The poets selected hail from all our regions – each one carrying with them their politics, predilections and their lives. Yet, all carry the Archipelago in their heart. As we near the centenary of Philippine literature in English, we celebrate all our hybrid Englishes even as we strive towards the imagining of a stable and cohesive literature.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

Migration and Melancholia and Settler Discontentment

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Angela Biscotti 


I do know what I am talking about! It is you who have lost your way … I laugh, Creon, because I see
suddenly what a transparent hypocrite you are. Creon, the family man! Creon, the contented sitter on
benches, in the evening, in his garden! Creon, desecrating the dead while he tries to fob me off with
platitudes about happiness! I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life – that life must go
on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a
humdrum happiness – provided a person doesn’t ask too much of life.

–Antigone to Creon in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone 


to make all this trouble
about fixing tiny little things

xi
there is nothing here 
needs fixing …
love lives here 
though things are tight

–Maxine Beneba Clarke, ‘nothing here needs fixing’ in Carrying the World

Filipino-ness is a weight I did not choose to be born with, but I carry on my back every day. As an immigrant to Australia, I am expected to uncritically wave the flag and do my birth country proud with my achievements; be the smiling migrant who hangs out at Australia Day parades, tags oneself on Facebook selfies beneath the Melbourne Central shot tower, lands a full-time office job, acquires property and authentic Louis Vuitton handbags, wears the trappings of aspirational middle-classness with the serenity of one who has ‘made it.’ To be a Filipino whose worth is tied up with her ability to demonstrate her gratitude and usefulness to society and to the narrative of a welcoming white Australia. Because to just be is never enough.

My colleague C B Mako wrote on how she severed ties with the Philippines after her Filipino family members in Melbourne ostracised her for not owning property and for having a disabled child. The warm hospitality for which Filipinos are stereotypically known was not extended to this young family that needed it the most. I read her words and wondered what love of country meant? What country meant? Whether people sometimes confuse family and country? Whether it was possible or even necessary to love that which spat you out in your moments of vulnerability?

Growing up in the Philippines in the nineties, I was old enough for the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution to be a big deal, hailed by my school teachers (if not some family members) as an internationally celebrated democratic moment, where people of different classes and creeds orchestrated the non-violent overthrow of a vicious dictator – a symbol of how awesome we could be as a nation. I had no memory of the Martial Law years, and all I knew were the conflicting narratives I learned at home and in school. At home, family members told me of how much cleaner the streets were, how vibrant the night life was, how strong the leadership was, how everything seemed to function like a global city should. In school, history teachers stressed the Faustian ambition of the Marcoses, who cut corners to put the Philippines on the international map, primping and powdering and disciplining the national image as though it were a model to be sent out on a catwalk, not a polis where leadership had to be earned.

Love of country was drummed into my sensibilities as early as I could remember. My mum bought me kids’ versions of Philippine folk tales and biographies of Philippine heroes. My dad talked about surviving the second World War, and his pride in his father, a former congressman and ambassador representing the Philippines at the United Nations. From a line of Nacionalista Party stalwarts, my dad believed in the words of second Philippine President Manuel Quezon: ‘I would rather have a country run like hell by Filipinos than a country run like heaven by Americans.’ It was important for them that I love my country. Serve my country. But, it was a strange kind of love. My parents were adamant that English be my and my brother’s first language, that the Filipino language should only be spoken with the household help, not amongst people we should consider equals. I learned Filipino not at home but in school, from peers, from Filipino songs playing over the radio, from Filipino-dubbed Japanese anime TV shows that played on TV while my parents were still at work. I was taught that I had to serve my country, at a table where we were being served, by people with whom we shared this country, but for whom service was clearly something different, something less dignified, not biography-worthy, not dinner-table-talk-worthy. The implicit lesson was that it was better to be served than to serve. Service, here, an empty signifier, and maybe love, and maybe country, were as well.

As a teenager in Manila, I spent some time in the company of nationalistic creative writers and teachers. They wrote and taught in English. They felt strongly about working an obvious Filipino-ness into their work. Mention Jollibee in your short stories, they said. Use Filipino folklore in your speculative fiction, they said. I saw the point, but I could never organically work it into my own writing and felt guilty. Of not only not being good enough as a writer, but of not being loving enough of my country. I wonder now if it was – on my and my creative writing peers’ parts – a knee-jerk reaction to an unconscious guilt about writing in English, for people who read, write, talk and think in English, unlike the vast majority of a 100-million-strong Filipino population. But is there a kind of poverty in this sort of thinking, too? As if the mere use of the English language – a global language, not necessarily just a colonial one today – means that it is automatically work about and for the Global North?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote in The Argentine Writer and Tradition that ‘The idea that Argentine poetry should abound in differential Argentine traits and Argentine local colour seems to me a mistake … The Argentine cult of local colour is a recent European cult which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign. Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local colour.’ The Filipino literature that spoke to me while I was growing up had less to do with being-Filipino than simply being. I knew what I enjoyed, and that drew me to national and international literature alike. I was enchanted by the tales of King Arthur and his knights, as I was about political prisoner Franciso Balagtas’s metrical romance Florante at Laura, about the romantic and political turmoils of Albanian Catholic and Persian Muslim royal couples. I loved queer Japanese erotica and I loved J Neil Garcia and Danton Remoto’s co-edited Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. I enjoyed swashbuckling classics like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo and I enjoyed Ambeth Ocampo’s gossipy, journalistic take on Philippine history in his Looking Back column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

I read the sociological columns of Randy David, which incorporated European social theory into reflections about Philippine politics and everyday life. I learned so much from Michael Tan’s Filipino-Chinese perspective on Philippine and global culture in his Pinoy Kasi column in the Inquirer. Quirky cultural critic Jessica Zafra made me feel like the extreme vernacular could be a vehicle for wit, wisdom and whimsy, not unlike the memoirs and commentary of Anthony Bourdain.

There was nothing exotic about these writers. They were at the same time worldly and as intimate as the next street corner. They did not have to strain to be what they already were.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

Lucy Van Reviews Merlinda Bobis

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Lucy Van

Accidents of Composition by Merlinda Bobis
Spinifex Press, 2017

Marianne Moore called it ‘courageous attack’:

today, you span the far mountains
with an arm and say,
‘this I offer you —
all this blue sweat
of eucalypt.’

So begins ‘driving to katoomba’, from the first poetry collection that Merlinda Bobis published in Australia, Summer was a fast train without terminals (Spinifex, 1998). The opening is typical of Bobis’s inimitable gusto and extravagance: the lines follow the gesture of the body that reaches for a view, simultaneously craving and offering the world while delighting in the knowledge that both impulses remain unfulfilled.

Sappho wrote, ‘I love extravagance,’ and she would have loved it here – the speaker and her fellow traveller entwined in mutual acts of impossible exchange under a high noon throb: one offers the scent of the Blue Mountains; the other, her recognition of love in the fertile yet futile gesture. Trips to the Blue Mountains often appear in Australian poetry; recently, in ‘blue mountains line’, Andy Jackson wrote ‘the carriage is the colour / of tendon and bone’. I notice a similarity in each poem’s approach to this iconic Australian landscape, in the way the body’s relation to this space is framed through cinematic motion. There is a shared sense of fleeting vision, of temporary impression, of passing through rather than staying put, of un-belonging to the land. The fellow traveller offers nothing concrete to the speaker, only the ether made by leaves waving in the air.

Accidents of Composition is Bobis’s sixth book of poetry. It sits alongside an impressive and multiform body of work that includes prize-winning fiction, drama, radio production and musical performance. After reading through the collection several times, I discovered a disarming afterward:

Let the poem speak for itself. No poet must explain. Do not betray the labour. Yet I choose to reveal the accidents, the gifts behind the book.

It began on the 18 October 2014 in a tourist bus across the desert, after visiting the Grand Canyon. As we sped along, behind the glass window was a black bird close to the eerie sun, like a white hole against storm grey sky. I took a picture: an accident of composition. A poem. (‘Because: An Afterward’)

It is a privilege to witness this accomplished writer illuminate her work with such naturalness, and it is precisely in this spirit that the poetry in Accidents of Composition proceeds. Bobis concatenates sets of impressions made at high speed; hidden meanings and relations reveal themselves under the speaker’s powers of observation. As a form of representation a poem can be so like a photograph, somehow indexical, tracing felicitous transits in time through an uncanny framing of things briefly seen and gone: ‘Recall is loss / turned inside out’ (‘A Little Scene’). An assemblage of images carefully brought together, the collection often resembles montage film. Accidents of Composition is full of jump cuts across the globe and its history: Spain in the sixteenth century, China and the Philippines in the twenty-first. One particularly cinematic passage presents a striking play on poetry’s ur-metaphor – movement – in which the speaker crosses three train lines over three poems: Legazpi to Manila, Wollongong to Sydney, and a slow train from Albuquerque to a destination undisclosed. What does it mean to cross a border, and what does it mean to never arrive?

Napupungaw ako
for a train about to leave.
Napupungaw ako
for that trip from home:
Legazpi to Manila.

I hear it now
four decades or so later.
Napupungaw: untranslatable.
Intransitive verb: without an object.
Present tense: it’s ongoing

like a train of thought
that never quite arrives, because the pink
is too pink, the red
too swirly when one remembers

(‘A Little Scene’)

Unsettled modes of habitation have recently emerged in Australian literature as the substantial ethical improvement upon the putative notions of belonging shaped by earlier national writing. The problem with creative visions that claim a ‘sacred’ relation between settler-colonial culture and the land – as the critic Julie Mullaney observes in her analysis of David Malouf – is that these invoke Indigenous Australian discourses of belonging to place, often while simultaneously erasing actual Aboriginal people from that textual landscape and ignoring the historical realities of settlement. The tradition of ‘white nativism’ or ‘white indigeneity’ traverses genre and medium in Australian cultural production – film, television, poetry, popular music, literary and popular fiction, and photography. Australian modernist photography reified the notion of the white native through figures such as the bronzed surfer and the athletic life-saver and these images still dominate the global branding of Australia. Born out of a quest for national identity that began in earnest in the 1930s, white nativist ‘home-grown’ tropes appear time and again in Australian literature. And though anti-colonial and postcolonial interventions have made some headway in contesting and destabilising this tradition, writers of all colours still come up against what Mark Davis describes as the ‘white logic of nation’.

Bobis’s writing materialises in the overlapping contexts of emerging unsettlement and the de-facto tradition of writers of colour reporting from the margins. Bobis begins her 2010 essay, ‘The Asian Conspiracy: Deploying Voice/Deploying Story’, with this directive:

Imagine Australia sharing ONE tongue. I do not mean language, but literally that little pink and perpetually moist animal in the mouth.

There’s that courageous attack. How would we hold this slippery thing, use it for what we want to say, pass it to our neighbour when it is time to listen? In the essay Bobis presents an account of her nineteen-year ‘problematic journey’ towards her place in Australian literature. This story, she stresses, is only one story among the narratives of storymaking of Australian writers from varied Asian backgrounds. In a discussion on Australian literature, these personal stories behind the publishing lines are as crucial as our literature works or the theoretical discourse about us. Our creative production is more than the ‘finished texts’, products to be unpacked or projects to be problematised. It is a story-in-progress. Just as in immigration, hardly any one of us can fly over the gate, straight into citizenship.

How does one acquire ‘citizenship’ of a nation’s literature? Bobis arrived in Australia in 1991 from the Philippines. She came with ten years of university teaching experience and, already a published author, brought an aesthetic sensibility that had developed in part through formal literary training and in part through formative years of immersion in the hybrid dynamic of cultures and languages of the Philippines. Long after her arrival in Australia, Bobis continues to write in all three of her languages: the Bikol of her home in Albay (at the foot of the active volcano Mt Magayon); the Tagalog of Manila, the metropolitan centre; and English, the imperial language of the American colonisers. As Bobis wrote and researched her creative doctorate during her first years in Wollongong, she continued to chant, to sing, and to dance – code-switching between languages and methods of expression.

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Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Paleontology

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Victor Sugbo

for Victorio Sugbo y Rojas

Grandfather, you had left long before
You even heard my very first gasp of air.

Only these papers wrapped in
Manila paper are all I have of you.

I had long wanted to see you
And knew this was a long shot.

Father is gone. So is mother.
On my table I place

Your Ateneo diploma de mercantil
Your marriage contract with grandmother

This roto picture when you ran for city mayor
The twelve land titles, your letters to grandmother

This brownish piece of cloth that graphs the streets of our house
This cursive Spanish-worded document with your signature.

I arrange your papers,
Hoping I would see you here.


This poem first appeared in Madras Courier on February 4, 2017.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Siquijor

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela

Folks say they do not live there
Anymore, witches stitching
Rag figures of souls to slay,
Or warlocks brewing potions
Of bark and root three moons
Before Jesus-God lies cold
On a slab of stone.

They say they have grown weary
Of chanting the same old incantations,
Casting the same spells over loves
Lost or betrayed, claiming justice
For the helpless and oppressed,
Or setting our small worlds back
On their proper tilt and turn.

They say they have their own lives
To live, burdens to bear: fields
To till, seeds to sow, waterjars
To fill, and sons and daughters
To tend and teach mysteries
Of blood and bone, earth and sky,
Wind, water and fire.

Folks say when you first set foot
On the shores of Siquijor
That those you seek do not live
There anymore, but if you truly ache
For righteous remedy, you might linger
For a night: one might fly by
With a magic brew for you.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

The story, you think, is around

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Allan Justo Pastrana

the corner, just there, whereto the index
lands. That is, ulilang kawayan1 comes
before you cross the road on your way home, or
your mother is off to mayhaligue
notwithstanding no poles. Barely a fence, muros
to hem in moro, barrio—prisoners
escape only from a game of twos, or threes
in the wake of something in your belly—
entrada, interna. Internar, if right under
your nose is a mile or two to boarding school.
Keep left, and the drugstore is marked zero. Count
to ten—bituka, butiki, botika2. See,
in the outskirts it is also a madhouse. Six
is the hour, and the sinuous route.
Ang ati lumilipat ng ilog kapagka nilangaw na.3
Toward the mountains, downstream: one
heads for the long shot. To orient is not
yet a direction. Nanay4 told you
she never saw the river again. When the nomads
disappear in her stories, the birds
with legs like stilts return. Mantil,
softly, as if you knew. That is not even their name.


Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Sestina for Street-side Sorrow

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

Nothing famous ever came out of Cuatro de Julio,
The street that always interrupted the sleep
Of its inhabitants, including my grandmother’s,
Who had to listen through the bawling sorrow
Of drunkards, the scampering of the police,
All of us under their mercy: our inheritance.

Largely debt and unhappiness, our inheritance
Was not visible to those living outside Cuatro de Julio—
If it were, other people, especially the police,
Would have been more forgiving, allowing our sleep,
Our silence and our poverty. Exposed to sorrow
Like salt, we swallowed our tears, like grandmother.

Setting up a house by the street, my grandmother
Soldiered through a husbandless life, her inheritance
From God. No one was a witness to this sorrow
Except her five children and Cuatro de Julio
Which, in its early years, was conducive for sleep.
They would be meddlesome decades later, the police.

Once, on my way to public school, I saw the police
Chase my cousins for drug pushing. My grandmother
Never intervened. Soap operas and afternoon sleep
Were her chosen companion, her inheritance.
For living so long in a street called Cuatro de Julio
She should have been spared from this kind of sorrow.

Sometimes, like shabu or cough syrup, sorrow
Could be addictive. Even the steadfast among the police
Are honeycombed by it. Patrolling Cuatro de Julio,
What wild sadness were they storing? My grandmother
Could teach them a thing about this native inheritance
So instead of beating their wives, they could sleep.

In a riot or in the stoning of our house, I feigned sleep.
There’s a limit to a boy’s body in containing sorrow;
Feverish, I once wept complainingly over this inheritance.
They were busy searching another’s house, the police
But I knew she heard me loud and clear, my grandmother.
In shame, I would write my address as Fourth of July.

Grandmother, forgive me for forsaking my inheritance.
I may have left Cuatro de Julio but not its sorrow.
The police have one less thing to worry about now. Sleep.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Photo, Circa 1982

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Merlie Alunan

Ah, a photo of the stunning Imelda
And her children, everyone so fine,
And healthy, not a day of hunger
Have they known. Her husband,
That Ilocano, look, quite regal I’d say.
Smart, that man, brought a whole nation
To heel. Fourteen, fifteen years, no one
Squealed. A few college brats now and then.
Can’t be helped, one supposes.
A bit of bloodshed here and there,
Half-hearted rebellions quickly quelled.

For twenty years, more or less,
The Ilocano’s word was law.
Everyone nodding yes–judge, laborer,
Beggar, philosopher, merchant, soldier–
Soldier above all. Complain, and
Vanish like smoke, simple, just like that,
Murdered, jailed, lost properties, positions.
The national debt ballooned, still
No jobs, wages shrunk,
The poor grew poorer, or died.

Imelda never stopped shopping–
Shoes, clothes, jewelry, paintings—
Because she can, of course, as though
The children selling sampaguita garlands
—Or their bodies—for food and shelter
In the streets of the capital did not exist.
Look at this photo now, how fine they look,
All her children round-cheeked, rosy smooth
Skin, perfection–these little godlings
In their seeming innocent pose.
Ay, but patience has its bounds,
Skim off the excess, the old folks would say,
When the time’s up. That day did come
For the Ilocano and his queen, skimmed off
By people power thirty-one years to the day.

This photo now, look carefully, look steady,
For the spawns, these cherubic godlings,
Are crawling slowly back to grab the seat
Of governance they think is theirs by descent.

Ay, Filipinas, now gather your hungry
Homeless children, dispossessed
By generations of venality and greed,
Now tell them the proud sagas of your saints,
Don’t allow forgetfulness. Give them to drink
The bile of your memories, aye, also its sweet,
Feed their minds with lays of honor, and truth,
Its clarity. Their dreams haunt with the sheen
Of daggers. Lull them to sleep with the staccato
Of bullets crippling old bastions of deception.
One day when all is ready, Anger will rise
From the ground to call for blood.
Ay, Filipinas, on that day, pray the angel of Peace
Sits on its shoulders to show the way home.


October 24, 2017

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

ɫ i b a w

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Ricardo M de Ungria

dumbstruck poming poms wordless biting back the birthland chieftains bereft of right reason and scales of justice sprouted ilk of the silver-minted kind of various shades of pelt and pose and puddle of politics death and deathlessness of death the butthole gallbladder liver lung spleen pancreas kidney gray matter white matter no matter of rulership in this land of birth now land for loons and dodos my dear kuya eddie on the signboard of fate drawn since balanggiga bud dajo maliwalu jabidah patikul escalante mendiola cawa-cawa ipil maguindanao talipao mamasapano until metro manila without or with a whit of reason doomed examples shot down to shut up or else dumped in vacant lots blindsided by tandems on motorbikes or roused by raps on the door pleading alias this alias that a motley lot unidentified suspected alleged marked out or mere collateral damage nobody knowing who knows the one behind the back of the back of the one covering the back of the one behind it all no one with eyes that see no one with mouths that speak no one with laws to stand on riddled with rights of the almighty one playing chief of police to the weak and the poor no leaf of swamp cabbage unstained by drops of blood no nook remote enough not to catch the anguished moans no stand of trees not rooted in lamentations light and darkness graveyards and candles lighted go on birthing in earnest more than the hallowed grounds of bloodsoaked stars starry in the fist of heaven above the land of birth brightness of star and scream in the nothingness are one energy of feeling and chili stir-fried stone thrown blindly in the chink between heavens worsening to the worst conundrum without end or sizzle of tinsel gunpowder on a pom nothing now pom pom pom struck dumb poming wordless no thing not a thing ting

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Living Room

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Ulysses Aparece

(The living room seemed to be where
no living ever actually occurred.
– Alice Sebold)


Voices were kept in domestic quiet

Until the last decade claimed three.
Father: someone pushed his chair
In a town’s grievance center.
He fell face first, lips now cleft
Got orphaned by pipe and cigar.

Brother and mother: civilians in red
Plated van pelted our home with stones,
Destroying jalousies, music players,
Vases, kitchenware, and later them,
Scaring what else the house kept.

Ripening sentiments gave way
To their own gradual wastage.
Postponing their appointed time required
My attempts of the repair man’s and stone
And glass cutter’s excellent finish.

To unload keepsakes needed more than
Just any human skill, craft or trick.
Better borrow the kitten’s purr or pigeon’s coo,
Maybe the parakeet’s mimicry–-
They can temper compelling memories.

Their seeking for lost years–-like echoes
In search of geckos–-is reiterative as day:
Father’s smoke invading the nostrils;
Brother’s march songs advancing; scents
From mother’s trumpet flowers pervading;

Her teakettle’s whistling now my own.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Less than, Equal to, Greater than

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Rodrigo Dela Peña Jr

I’m teaching my nephew the basics
of math, how a sign can be used

to compare numbers. Two is greater
than one, five is less than ten.

The key is to have each alligator
mouth swallowing the bigger

number: hunger points in one
direction, unless both sides being

compared are equal, two lines
to match the balance, the fulcrum

between a pound of iron
and a pound of feathers. Soon

the child weighs one against
another, the world divided

into all that is greater, all
that is less. Consider how rain

in a storm is greater than
the day’s threads of drizzle. How

our hands can only grasp
what’s less than a palm-sized

morsel. And I who will never bear
a son of my own, will I ever be equal

to or always less than my brother?

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

The Spectator

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Jose Jason Chancoco

He unhooks the rope, places the knot to the skiff
and drags it towards the water. Unreadable, the waves
are pages that keep on rewriting themselves, like thoughts
of the American President on China’s artificial islands
at West Philippine Sea. He could see the structures
from where he stood, as if some rich neighbor

decided to build a strip club on a sand bar. But he was not
bent on avoiding them, these “builders in bad faith,”
as the Barangay Captain calls them. For he, his father
before him, and all the village fishermen had long
considered that reef as their inter-island waiting shed,
shoal away from shore. So he packs his provisions of fresh

water, dried fish, rice, kerosene lamp, transistor radio.
He fixes the nets and of course, the bayonet. He once
found it during an oyster dive, sharp metal stabbing sand,
glinting in underwater sunlight. Did some WWII soldier
drop it to mark our Exclusive Economic Zone as prelude
to the UNCLOS? He asks himself, aware of the proviso

in the Constitution reserving all archipelagic marine
resources for Filipinos. He pushes for the sea, the skiff,
a sharp pen piercing through sand and waves as if writing
land titles. Better occupy the waves than be written off.
Treaties redefining territoriality become useless in the context
of man-made shores and artificial islands. He turns the radio

on and Floyd Mayweather is now being booed, declared
winner over Manny Pacquiao. The “Pambansang Kamao,”
they say, carried the game, the elusive American, all form,
all technique, won by points before a jeering live audience.
Is this how boxing should be, won by crafty non-fighters
with cheap tricks? Boxing can’t win wars. He thinks. “I thought

I won,” said Pacquiao, apparently, more dizzy with the defeat
than the punches. Manny, you can never win against Money, no.
Not against this undefeated American in US shores. Their government
needs him in this age of ISIS and Chinese threat. He tells the Las Vegas
prize fighter, still thinking of how Obama danced around, ran,
hugged, elbowed, jabbed, and smiled his way off a China issue,

whether or not the Philippines can expect American military
support in case of war. His motor is roaring now, in full throttle
towards the Chinese firmament. “Manny can’t beat Floyd
because he’s not bright enough,” he hears Floyd’s father.
So he throws the net down the water, a Chinese vessel
speeding towards him, his bayonet shining under the sun.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

A Momentry

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Myrna Peña Reyes

Father thigh-deep in the sea
lapping gently against his body
carries me against his chest
his free hand peeling seaweed off
my feet his hips
flinging them aside
as he strides forward
stops and shifts me onto his back
then dog paddles into deeper water

Piggyback I look around us
am suddenly afraid cry out
Go back! Go back!
as shore birds flap our way
then veer back heading elsewhere
The dark mass of seaweed sways
between us and the shore

Ahead the sea rolls outward
to the curved sweep of the sky
Over Father’s shoulder
I peer down through glass
sunlight snaking downward
bathing the grassy bottom
sloping deep deep deep
I tighten my arms around his neck

But he holds me up
his pale feet treading water
his hands and arms sweeping the water
like bird wings stroking the air
hovering in place
Don’t look down he says

And I discover I am floating off his back
one hand resting on his shoulder—
blue sweep of sky
sun gilding the water
the warm sea reaching farther than the eye
and Father and I
poised in a moment
like birds hanging in the air

Flown away elsewhere forever


This poem first appeared in Memory’s Mercy: New and Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press, 2015).

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Upon Seeing a Couple Kiss While I Am Taking Coffee Near the Airport

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Simeon Dumdum Jr

What if no one witnessed the couple’s quick kiss? 
What if I was not in the coffee shop now,
Having cappuccino alone and gazing at those who pass by? 

Coincidences mark the imprint of this hour.
Whether they be casual or one of great weight,
How could I tell? Only the kissers knew the import of their kiss.

Kisses I have known (and among them were yours,
I recall one when we were going upstairs,
That’s another story, however youthful, honest, a pure joy—

As I think all kisses must be if done here,
At a coffee shop just beside the airport).
Well, to them, the kissers, I raise this cup of coffee and my heart.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

WAR: Marawi Siege

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Christine Godinez Ortega

For the AFP’s Women Pilots and for Yuko Olga Kirsten, 7.

The helicopters fly low during the day.
Yuko Olga Kirsten (she’s seven!) waves
at the unseen Good Men, teal and dark green
iron birds camouflage their faces.
In the air, the sound of the turning blades
Keeps Iligan sane.

We’re at war but we must trust
Good men in Fatigues to push back
Evil Men in Black.

At the war zone,
Scared souls, rosary beads around their necks
Crawl, dodging sniper bullets
Whizzing past concrete buildings. At noon,

another helmet flies in the air,
severed head and rosary race for the sky,
one more Good Man falls, drops among the heap.
Starving dogs gnaw at human flesh –- in the heat.

Our wish is for women pilots to fly the jets
Comfort us before we sleep.
We know what comes after the bombings
flying objects’ roaring loudest at dawn.

All the grandfathers, Little Boy, Fat Man and Thin Man
Would’ve squirmed when the bombs
settle at the lake’s bed.
But, when bombs hit home, invisible
Particles keep us smiling and coughing.

Before bed, I pray for the women pilots’
precise moves. In their hands,
Dying Men in Black know well their fates,
death from women pilots keep close
Heaven’s gate.

Listen well, little girl. Fighter jets are back.
And the cycle begins. We call it, in three letters
out of the alphabet’s 26 — W-A-R.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

I Higaonon

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Telesforo Sungkit Jr

I.

I you called pagan,
you say pagan is bad people.
You say you is Christian
and Christian is good people.

You laugh I kneel on big rock
or I pray before big tree.
You angry I call Migbaya,
you say my God is devil.

I not laugh you kneel on dead tree
or you pray to hanging God there.
I not angry you call your God,
and I not call Him devil.

I angry you get my lands,
I angry you get my golds,
I angry you burn my wood books,
but you say I should love enemy.

You say love enemy
but you killed grandpa baylan,
you killed grandma bae,
you killed uncle bagani,
you killed even dog talamuod.

II.

I you called savage
you say savage is bad people.
You say you is civilized
and civilized is good people.

You laugh I speak wrong your tongue
or I not knowing you say.
You angry I speak my tongue,
you say I silent I not speak your tongue.

I not laugh you speak in your noses
or you kalamura speak my tongue.
I not angry you speak your tongue,
I not say you silent you not speak my tongue.

I angry you kill my datus,
I angry you burn my house,
I angry you get my honey,
I angry you get my sakop,
but you say I should know democracy.

You say know democracy
but you commanding all
you telling I not speak
you forcing I live near plantations
You making all us sakop
you killing my brothers not liking you.

III.

I you called brother
you say brother skin also brown.
You say you is my brother
and brother is good people.

You laugh I kneel on big rock
or I pray before big tree.
You laugh I speak wrong your tongue
or I not knowing you say.
You angry I call Migbaya,
you say my God is devil.
You angry I speak my tongue,
you say I silent I not speak your tongue.

I not laugh you kneel on dead tree
or you pray to hanging God there.
I not angry you call your God,
and I not call Him devil.

I not laugh you speak in your teeth
or you kalamura speak my tongue.
I not angry you speak your tongue,
I not say you silent you not speak my tongue.

I angry you get my lands,
I angry you get my golds,
I angry you dishonor my sisters,
but you say I should love brother, skin also brown.

You say love brother, skin also brown
but you help kill grandpa baylan,
you help kill grandma bae,
you help kill uncle bagani,
you help kill dog talamuod,
you help kill even my balangkawitan rooster.

I angry you help kill my datus,
I angry you help burn my house,
I angry you help steal my honey,
I angry you paying cheap my abaka, coffee, coconut, banana, etc.
but you say I should know government.

You say know government
but you commanding all
you telling I not speak
you forcing I live near plantations
you making us all sakop
you killing us not liking you.

IV.

I pagan?
I savage?
I brother?

V.

I knowing gooder, I knowing bad.
I knowing badder, I knowing good.
I knowing brother, I knowing stranger.

I knowing things yesterday, today, tomorrow.

I ancient.

I Higaonon.


This poem first published in Dagmay, the literary journal of the Davao Writers’ Guild. It was also included in Philippine PEN’s Peace Mindanao anthology published in 2013.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Children of Homeland

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Mohammad Nassefh Macla

I.
In their bamboo huts, where bullets
Could trace them, they tried to hide
Behind their mothers’ bodies as if
They could be infants in wombs again.

Their mothers’ pleas the only shield,
“Tama na! Mga sibilyan lang mi!”
But foes remained unmindful—the ears
Did not hear what the hearts refused to see.

Like dominoes standing, the mothers fell.
Blood ran to the edges of bamboo floors
Before they even hit the ground.
The children were left alone standing.

Datu Camsa sings their song in stillness,
They are now the birds of paradise,
Flying after their heads caught bullets
And their young hearts stopped to beat.

II.
Today they dance with Jamail. They swing
Their arms like leaves of banana trees
Of Tibungol swaying in the wind.
On the stage, they portray the birds

Of paradise, the children who were once
Like them but remained as children
Breathing now the quiet air of peace,
Behind them their watchful mothers,

Clasping hands with one another,
Remembering the previous nights –
The fumbling and the laughter
Shrill with surrender and innocence.

Papanok sa Surga still ring around
The hall. And in the huts left standing,
No traces nor shadows remain, only
The empty wind going and returning.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Why this Isn’t a Haiku

Posted on March 1, 2018 by RayVi Sunico

My pa taught me
putang ina
and wow,
the suddenness
of joy, the stun
of beauty:

how life is taken best
when taken by surprise.

He taught me
the jangle of keys at night
meant he was home
the brown bag in his hand
plump with the promise
of dumplings or sweetbreads

that a week of work meant
Saturdays tasted sweeter
and Sundays blazed brighter.

He taught me
the three meanings of shuffle
two good
one sad:

the riffled peacock tails
of playing cards
those snappy rainbows
of aces and jacks;
the effortless astronomy
of boogeying with mama

as she twirled and spun
and whirled and hummed
around the steady axis
of his smile, her feet
approximating the twinkle
of stars, his own gliding
sliding in that inch by inch
unruffled shuffle to
syncopated time.

Oh my papa taught me:
he taught me comics
he taught me words.

Areglado? he would always ask.
Agreglado! I would reply.

And as time passed
he taught me
how to wade
through boilerplates and contracts
how the intricate constructions
of syntax and phrase
restrain the larceny of men
in ways no poems can.

How he loves life my father;
oh how he loves the game.

And that man over there
stooped and shuffling
so gingerly, so carefully
so daunted by the treachery
of cracks in the floor
of unexpected steps,
shuffling more carefully
than he ever shuffled cards
shuffling in the grip
of gravity and time
that’s the man who taught me
the slow sad shuffle
of loving someone for life.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Auguries on a Monday Morning

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Jaime An Lim

Before stepping out, examine the sky.
Is it dark and heavy, swimming with fish and portents?
Beware. Better to reschedule your day’s appointments.
Is it implausibly blue with no hint of an afternoon shower?
Again beware. Think twice. What you see is not what you get.
Is it unspectacular? Cauliflower clouds with a silver lining?
Beware most of all. The black magician’s dirty trick.
Danger awaits on every street corner. A falling pipe.
A speeding truck. A madman with an automatic rifle.
The black cat crossing your path is a messenger of death
Ditto with the old man dragging a bagful of plastic bottles.
Or the tricycle with the busted muffler spewing black smoke.
You are a sleepwalker innocently shuffling into slaughter.
The bleeding earth is your best evidence:
Denuded forests, disemboweled mountains, poisoned
Waters, clogged seas, islands of trash, smog and polluted air.
If a random stray bullet does not kill you,
The very air you breathe will. The world is a time bomb.
Best to stay put. Call in sick. Say migraine or LBM.

Posted in 85: PHILIPPINES | Tagged

Cause or Consequence

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Lawrence Bernabe

If it blurs your eyes, if it enters your dreams.
If you ever cry in it, the one in your heart might hear it.
If it has been over forty-nine days, gone far too long,
you have lost the mandate of heaven.
If the frogs thunder and croak, the hungry dead afoot.

If you sing in it, your own spittle turned green.
If you scream with it, your eye a-gleaming.
If you kiss it, a demon who weeps.
If you wed in it, you make a home in the eye of the gyre.
If you dance with it, ogres to cripple your knees.
If you worry over it, an angel who means well and leads you astray.
If an elbow ever soaks in it, a spell of good fortune.

If it catches you by both arms, it cannot be helped. Carry on.
If it brushes you on the shoulder, tarry no more, you must hurry.
If you have asked too many times, up to you to ask once more.
If it catches you, disappointment awaits at the end of the road.
Turn back or meander.
If suddenly a land newly-found, you might have foundered on your luck.

If your head steeps in it, your body in knots, wracked with fever.
If your head steeps in it, chase it with water.
If a dog comes up, make two wishes if it walks with you.
One of them forfeited if it howls or barks. Choose which one.
If it carries on the next day, it carries on.
If it falls over the hills, monitor the rivers.
If it has fallen in your sleep, it falls.
If clouds fly out before it, keep close watch on the coasts and the stars.

If you look out to it beseeching, prepare to be faced with vast silence.
If you look out to it in silence, it returns to you wordless looking.
If you have drank too deep of it, treachery begins in the pit of your gut.
If you wade through it, it grows in your feet.
If you walk slowly with it, and so it goes.

If you walk with it, may it yet go well.
If you speak to the voice on the mountain, it will follow you home.

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Phenomenological: Musings on Contemporary Filipino Poetry

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Ramon Loyola

Suburbia

On my frequent trips back to Manila, I often marvel at the range of books and literary material now occupying the shelves of bookstores. There’s the usual fare of fiction thrillers, children’s books, academic and scholarly reference books, and religion-based how-to guides. There’s also a flood of young adult and poetry books.

The poetic offerings are usually about love, a testament to the country’s predilection for romance and those ‘sweet nothings’ that feed the face-flushed, rosy-cheeked moments in many a rom-com movie. A quick glance at the bestsellers list compiled by National Book Store, the country’s biggest bookstore chain, indicates a proliferation of poetry books that carry the common themes of love, loss and disillusionment.

For someone like me, whose propensity to further romanticise the plight of a lovelorn poet (if that’s even remotely possible?), it sounds like heaven. But, I find it frustrating that more readers would pander to the sweet poems of Lang Leav (all her love poetry books have been bestsellers for years now), Michael Faudet and Rupi Kaur rather than the deep mutterings of other poets who write with nationalistic fervour, or of protest against the lack of natural justice. For a country of more than 100 million people, where everybody speaks English and whose default language is Tagalog – and who are still reeling from the continued influence of centuries of colonial occupation – it is a confounding revelation. It is difficult to expound on the state of contemporary poetry in the Philippines today because there are so many ways of describing the platforms that are apparent in the local poetic scene at the moment.

Growing up in the 1970s during the martial law regime under the Marcos dictatorship, the only instruction on poetic form and style instilled in my school-aged psyche was the traditional metre-rhyme of classical poems and the orations of Francisco Balagtas, whose extemporaneous verses brought on a spate of school competitions called Balagtasan. I would practise my Tagalog enunciations in front of the mirror with the pseudo-confidence of a statesman and nationalistic pride. Outside, the machinations of a despotic ruler bludgeoned the back of a muted society with an iron fist, but which later informed the ‘underground’ creative industries in setting up mechanisms for protest. The writers and poets who would do so usually faced the threat of persecution for treason or, worse, the prospect of becoming desaparecidos (the disappeared).

There were a few Filipino proponents of traditional poetics who turned the form into a post-modern motif, the likes of whom include Virgilio Almario (writing as Rio Alma) and Nick Joaquin, both recognised as national artists. The motivation then was to deliver a scathing reaction towards the oppressive socio-cultural and political ideologies of the day, astride a movement that activated the despondent masses into open rebellion and to rise above censure.

What I believe was a turning point in the distinct literary Filipino voice was the People Power Revolution in 1986, when, as a young student, I marched along the length of EDSA with the no-longer-silent populace in the ousting from power of an oppressive dictator. Even then, in the hot and stifling environment of the longest highway in Manila, body pressed against body to face military tanks and gun-wielding soldiers, I remember thinking to myself that the future generation would report on this, make songs out of it, write poems about it. True to my own predictions, a new sense of freedom was blossoming.

Joaquin, Bienvenido Lumbera, Rio Alma, Rolando Tinio and many others maintained the traditional forms in their writing, but the newfound freedom had also paved the way to stronger, more reactionary tropes among writers and poets that still subsist today. Nowhere is this more evident than in the creative initiatives of millennial artists who seem hyperaware of the current challenges faced by a country still mired in third-world sensibilities as it catches up with the highly interconnected world of the 21st century.

Contemporary poetics in the Philippines now seem steeped in phenomenology, in narratives about personal struggles with and the experience of diaspora, identity, climate change, poverty, discrimination, feminism and women’s rights, colonial mentality, natural catastrophe, social malnutrition and the lack of diversity and equality.

The confluence of the need to interrogate the current realities in the Philippines and the desire to scream out against the shortcomings of the powers-that-be has given birth to a voice that stands against the normative pillars of repression and the whip of social injustice. And those voices keep getting younger, with groups of teenagers and young adults embracing progressive forms of creative expression to get their voices heard.

Despite this, the young Filipino voice appears still beset with pain and spite, cautious but keen to participate in the debate. It’s not a surprising observation, where the current socio-political reality under Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines seems to be a cyclical phenomenon: the socio-political atmosphere today is a mirror image of that during the insidious Marcos regime. The threat of censorship and banishment remains spectral but foreboding.

Nevertheless, there are indicators that contemporary Filipino poetry is finally ripening into full maturity. My literary radar has caught up with the writing of new and younger Filipino poets that deliberate fearlessly on issues that plague our modern society and threaten personal freedoms. There is a political urgency in their voices that addresses challenges of an evolving nation, and that deeply impacts the way they live and on how they strive to guarantee a promising future.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged