MINo H ABA D

A Habit
of
of Shores
Filipino Poetry and Versefrom English, 60's to the 90's
The Sequel to ANative Clearing

THE UNIVERSITY O EHE PHILIPPINES PRESS

 MAPPING OUR POETIC TERRAIN:
Filipino Poetry in English from 1905 to the Present

Together with Man of Earth (1989) andA Native Clearing (1993),

a in
AHabit of Shorescoversalmost hundred years of our poetry Eng-
lish. With two notable
exceptions, it comprises Filipino poets born
between
1942 and 1976; that it includes a few Filipino American
poets
is
perhaps suggestivethat even in America, the poet has a sense
torhis shores by which he forgesin its double sense, to fashion
a
and to feign-fron English vocabulary and syntax to speak the
language of his blood. Assuming my readers are familiarwith the other
two anthologies to which A Habit ofShores is the last sequel, I need
no longer explain the critical procedure nor the distinctive features of
the present anthology itselt. For it is time at last for a historical car-
tography of our poetic landscape.
ed to talk about the course of
Philippine literature in English
as though it passed somewhat miraculously through three stages: a
or growth, and a pe-
period of apprenticeship, a period of emergence
riod of maturity. It was in the50s a useful way of picturing what
was called its 'development. On the other hand, Fr. Miguel A. Bernad,
in
S.J., thought 1957 that Philippine literature was "perpetually in-
the earn a from their
choate because, first, writers couldnt living
writings second,
we were torn by
several
languages or
had not mastered
and confused or had
English well enough; third, we were culturally
not fostered enough our own hybrid culture. It is well worth quoting
Fr. Bernad:

Filipino writersSpanish flourished at the end of the nine

in

teenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. But this flow-

ering of a culture never bore fruit: its roots were soon withered.
While Apostol and Guerrero, Bernabe and Balmori, Barcelon and

1
 A Habit of Shores

in Spain,a generation
admired
were writing poems that were the language
Kecto,
that could
not understand
of Filipinos was growing up

in which they were written. to our shores. [Its]

the coming of Englishcultural windfall. Ir
This is not to deplore was a
it
was by no means deplorable: which had finally
coming letters,

however, why Philippine

that it did
not come to its full
does explain, thing
(and it is a curious was over) died
flowered domination
political to seek other
until after Spanish letters had
flowering
flower. Philippine
out so quickly, even in even after sixty years
cultural soil.
That is why
is still
roots in a different literature in English
Philippine to
of English in the Philippines, attain full
it may eventually
it has much promise:
young. But
maturity.

befall English
now that the Philippine Senate
Will the same fate closed all Ameri
not a little help from
Mt. Pinatubo in 1991,
has, with has remained
Subic? To this very day, English
can bases at Clark and in terms of employ-
a better situation in life
an undeniable route to and prestige. Yet we seek
ment and social standing, success, power in our own
than in the 50s, a literature
with more spirit and etfect from
a language evolving Tagalog
languagethatwe would
call
Filipino,
more writers today are bilingual
as lingua franca. Indeed, many young
it still cultivates English as
a second
because our school system, while
for half a century now the use of Filipino
(as
language, has promoted Ilhe mass media
as the medium of instruction.
variously conceived)
too have strengthened Filipino as linguafranca.
But if support tor
scholarship
and lexicography, translation work, and the publication of
worthwhile textbooksin Filipino are any indication, the political wil
for a common national language
would appear to be less of a fiction

in nationalist rhetoric.
only
Be that as it
may, it
may be instructive as we approach the end
of this century, to reconsiderFr. Bernad's views. He did not touch on
our poetry in English in his Bamboo and the Greenwood Tree (1961)
because he thought at the time that our most 'developed literary genre

was the short story. But I would rather focus on the poetry because
it for me at least, the root and crown of linguistic usage.
is,

By way ofa quick overview, the course of Filipino poetry in Eng

lish from 1905 to
the present may be said to have passed throug
three overlappingphases or, more
precisely perhaps, dominant strains:
an inveterate Romantic spirit, from our first published literary at
tempts in 1905 to the 40s; then, an enduring formalist or New
concern, from the 50s to the 70s; and
finally, an open,
Critical
liberative or post-structuralist space,from the 70s to the present. This
 Introduction

is of course quite arbitrary and of limited usefulness,

matter of labeling
of those phases and the im-
and so, we should insist on the overlap
brication of those strains; a century,besides, is too short for a literature,
and it is impossible to set definite time-boundaries to the poetic
course.

The Romantic Spirit

From Fernando Maramág to Jose Garcia Villa

From 7be Filipino StudentsMagazine

in
1905 to Jose Garcia Villa's
Have Come, Am Here (1942),the creative strugglewas with both the
new language, English, and the poet's subject, i.e.,
the native or Fili-

pino matter that is to be

expressed in that language. What "Filipino
matter, what humanity as Filipino -what as individuals and as a
people we have become through our colonial experience with Spain
and America and our own democratic experiment-issimply inex-
pressible, but precisely
the occupation of poetry. For the poet,
that is
thewords
the language comes alive, English or Tagalog, not from
be it

that are already there and their meanings in daily usage, bur from
their tillage, the particular our
uses to
which they are put by which
sense of our own reality is achieved. This is why our first important
poet in English Fernando Maramág. While the ironic edge of his
is

"Moonlight on Manila Bay," 1912,seems unintended, the fugitive

obvious
emphasis there on our "scene so fair subverts the poem's
the opening
praise for "bold Olympia" (imperial America) because
establish our scene as before the poet draws
eight verses first paradisal
from our history to celebrate yet another conquest of our lannd:

Not always such the scene: the din of fight

Has swelled the murmur of the peaceful air;
Here East and West have oft displayed their might;
Dark battle clouds have dimmed this scene so fair;
Here bold Olympia, one historic night,
a people's care.
Presaging freedom, claimed

Both language and history are the crucial factors ("makers) from
which our writers forge that "Filipino matter-our mychology or
imagination of ourselves. From his own notes to his poem in The
College Folio (August 1912), we know that in "Cagayano Peasant
and
Songs," Maramág sought to convey their "spirit substance thought
out in English," and so, even Wordsworth who speaks
in the poems
sen-
epigraph,is invoked only for a favorable witness to the peasant
sibility:
 4 A Habit of Shores

I know
In shady woods
the
keeping
Where the bashful jungle fowlsare
are below
Their helpless young. They
is
The trees by which the weeping
rill

frown
Beneath the rapid's
run,
Where the white ripples madly
There where I have known
is
hurdn."
Fair itubi is courted by

known
And if to me 'rwere only laid
are
Where the heron's eggs
river's bed,
In the deep still
rare to own.
T
hey were treasures

those in our first anthology, Rodolf

In our early verses, such as
Dato's Filipino Poetry, 1924, both language nor
and subjectwere bor-
of our own.
we had no thought feeling
rowed, almost as though
in English Romantic poetry were sim-
so that skylark and nightingale
(rice bird). But it
into our kuliawan (oriole) and maya
ply converted of a "literary apprenticeship" be-
would be quite misleading to speak in Spanish, Tagalog, and
cause we already had accomplished writers
was linguistic and cul-
the other native languages. The apprenticeship
art. Precisely, the inevitable
in the literary or poctic
tural, but not
the creative struggle with the new
tension which obtained between
the poet's individualresponse to his new situation cleared
language and
subdued the tutelary spirits
that poetic terrain where the Filipino poet
of his circumstances
of English Romanticism to his own perception
before World War II bloodied our shores in
and history. And thus,
into full flower in the po
1941, Filipino Romantic poetry had come and
ems of Jose Garcia Villa, Luis G. Dato, Angela Manalang Gloria, the
in Spanish before
Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, even as our poets
and id
transtormed both the sensibility
Americans came had already We
iom of the Romantic spirit into our own native clearing.
Spanish
translationof "Cagayano
might see this if we compare Maramágs
Peas
a
ant Songs with Luis Dato's rendition of what is
probably Biko
he called "Spinster, c1938:
saying, which

The dove, when newly hatched,

Has tasty meat and tender;
 Introduction

When old, howe'er you stew her,

You cannot rend her.

on Manila Bay"with
Or again, if we compare Maramág's "Moonlight
Luis Dato's "Malolos," 1939, we see how our poets tillage of
might
and tradition provoked a newfound sense
the new language poetic
of their own "scene soitsfair

The town is quiet, the houses still,

And dark the house of God;
The heroes slumber up the hil,
And in my heart their blood.

Again I see a
gay procession,
And men in bright attire;
A hundred delegates in session,
And soldiers in the mire.

Malolos, once you rent asunder

A striding tyrant's heels,
A day as this that sees us thunder
Down you with iron wheels.

It simply was not the case, as S.P. Lopez and Arturo Rotor had
1939, that the poets were besotted with roses and sunsets.
in
charged
True, romantic love was, as elsewhere at any time, a favorite subject;
e-g,ConradoRamirezs "My Wifes Hands," 1933; Luis Dato's "Day
on the Farm," 1934; Trinidad Tarrosa Subido's "You Shall Be Free,"
1934; or Angcla Manalang Gloria's "Soledad," 1935. These are, in
fact, among the finest
love lyrics of the time. But, too, Jose Garcia
Villa first breaks the taboo on explicit sex, passion, and
homosexuality
in our fictionand poetry, e.g, his "Man-Songs, 1929, and his story,
Blue
"Wingsand Flame," 1938; and the dominant male ideology in
Romantic poetry, where woman's idealization serves to keep her sub-
ject, is subverted in Manalang's "Revolt from Hymen," 1940, and in
such romantic verses by Tarrosa Subido as

If only, Love, the Code within these lands

Allowed all impulse to govern the heart,
 A Habit of Shores

of the hands
We should not feel this fever

To leap the gap that keeps us so, apart,

From "Subterfuge" 1937

but Color, Motif, Mood

Poor love, you were
womanhood.
Need of my poetry, not my
From "Love Is My Necd" 19458

the
too our poets did not
limit themselves to
subier
Most certainly ject
own cultural and social m
of love. Their engagement with their ilieu

s in fact already signalled by our first poem in English, Poncian

in The Filipino Students Magazine (April 1905
Reyes "The Flood"
appearsin
published in Berkeley, California. This engagement (wnich
in
verses and reaches clear and powerful expression
Our early patriotic of 1932, and
such poems as Amador Daguio's "Man Earth," Carloe

Bulosan's "IfYou Want To Know What We

Are," 1940) accounts also
themes and Romantic diction
tor the poet's liberation from Romantic
and imagery. If Villas poetry made a clearing within English which
and cunning, a language might
showed the poets how, through craft
Like the Molave (1940)
be reinvented, Rafael Zulueta y da Costa's
to his own milieu where language
opened again the poets sensibility to his own historical situation.
is sharpened by the poet's response
Poems by Doveglion (1941)
Zulueta's Like the Molave and Villas
of the Romantic phase in our poetry.
could very well mark the end
for the poet to reshape
With Like the Molave, it had become important
he might find his own voice and
the Romantic usage in order that
Villa found his own voice (Have
address more directly his own time.
but in 1929 he had exiled
Come, Am Here, 1942; Volume Two, 1949),
himself to America. Then the War came, and
the Romantic eftlores
did not vanish al-
cence of the 30s wilted. But the Romantic spirit
Villa, who wrote his last poem, "The
Anchored Angel, in
together. well
1953, continued to be a strong influence in the
craft of poetry
and
into the 70s, as one might see in the poems of Jolicco Cuadra
Luis Francia, and even today in Auggusta de Almeidda and Edwin
Cordevilla. More importantly, we find in Bienvenido Santos
Wounded Stag (1956) and Edith Tiempo's The Tracks ofBabylon (19%0)
moae
that the Romantic idiom has only been transformed into a new
of expression by which the poet gave form and substance to his
OW
insights.
 Introduction 1

The Formalist Strain

From Edith Tiempo to Cirilo Bautista

I think that by the 50s, we have a modern

poetry in full swing
Truly remarkable is the poetic distance that Fidel de Castro (not of
Cubal) traverses from his prose-poem, "I Follow Your
Footsteps,
1932, in Laslo's English-German Anthology (1934) to "Dog in a Room
You Just Left" in T.D. Agcaoili's Philippine Writing (1953) to "Still-
ness" and "House Mouse" in The New
Doveglion Book of Philippine
Poetry (1962). It is the same distance, in terms of
poetic control of
language and subject, that Amador Daguio travels trom such poems
as "Man of Earth,"1932, "Land
of Our Desire," 1934,"TheSwin
dler," c1938, and "When I Look at Women," c1938, to such
poems
as "Off the Aleutian Islands," 1953 and "A Letter to New Poets"
c1954 in Poet in Equinox (MS, 1965), some of which found print in
Leonard Casper's Szx Filipino Poets (1954). Daguio's poetic aim is
worth noting; he writes, he says, "trom the suffering and miseries of
my lonely and repressed boyhood... and the struggles of poor people
around me. ..Mostof all, I wish to translate the beauty, immensity,
and depth of the Filipino soul. To translate: i.e., to ferry across the
essential void of language the thought and feeling which have not yet
found their adequate expression.
Caspers Six Filipino Poets, coming two years after Nick Joaquins
Prose and Poems (1952), signalled the advent of the American New
Criticism which focuses on the formal pertection of the poem as ver-
bal icon. This new critical mode with its stress on organic unity,

emotional restraint, and metaphor, irony, and ambiguity, shaped the

poetic sensibility from the 50s well into the 80s and 90s, especially
through the Silliman Writing Program (1962 to the present) and the
U.P National Summer Writers Workshop (1964 to the present). If
we compare our poets in the "50s and "60s with the earlier Romantics,
we would immediately notice a greater number who have each his
own individual mode of expression and his own distinctive subject.
Villas in
The generation of Maramág especially, but also generation
the '30s and '40s, seem to write alike because they were drawing trom
a common hoard of Romantic themes and employing a widely ac
cepted kind of poetic diction and imagery.
It was chiefly Villa of course who, inspired by e.e. cummings,

achieved as early as Poems by Doveglion (1941)and Have Come, Am

Here (1942), a breakthrough (by way of an individual poctic idiom
be defined by a kind of
to his own distinctive subject, which may
a
dialectic between the I-Genius, God, and Death. Thus he cleared
 A Habit of Shores

our poer
toward the transtormation of
poetic ground within English
were. He had rejected
as early as 'M -
guise, as it
in new English Victorian models in Doer.
1929, not only the Romantic and for
Songs," of English grammar and syntax; ex-
but even the standard usage
One," 1933
from "Poems for an Unhumble
ample,

There was no end how young.

it because there.
I could not say

And how never yet seen for peace.

like dark.
But it was there and bright
I touched it not, for love.
in tact be
"Testament, 1929, may read
called
His last "Man-Song"
in the 30s who is becoming aware
as a portrait of the Filipino poet
the English clearing: "I have
that he must find his own voice within
write songs to put the house of
not yet sung as l want to sing. ... I
are many growths and lives thar
my mind in order. In my mind there I have many knots
entangle each
other.... song is a knot untied.
A
whose hands are trembling"
to untie. As I untie them I become a poet

If we compare the first eight verses of Maramágs "Moonlight on

Manila Bay with the same number of verses in Angeles "Gabu", we
of both language and sen-
might clearly see the poetic transtormation
sibility over 1912 to
a 1954- I
transformation, would insist, that
owes more to the poet's creative toil with language in response to his
circumstances than to any New Critical influence. Maramág's sonnet
opens thus:

A light serene,
ethereal glory, rests

Irs beams effulgent on each cresting wave;

The silver touches of the moonlight lave

The deep's bare bosom that the breeze molests;

While lingering whispersdeepen as the wavy crests

Roll withweird rhythm, now gay, now gently grave;

And floods of lambent light appear the sea to pave
All cast a spell that heeds not time's behests.

The first two stanzas of "Gabu" run:

The battering restlessness of the sea

Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
 Introduction 9
At Gabu, and its
pure consistency
Havocs the wasteland hard within its reach.

Brutal the
daylong bashing of its heart
Against the seascape where, for miles around,
Farther than
sight itself, the rock-stones part
And drop into the elemental wound.

Where Maramág "All cast a heeds not

says, spell that time's behests,"
Angeles says, in the third stanza:

The waste of centuries is grey and dead

And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,
Where the spilt salt of its heart lies spread
Among the dark habiliments of Time.

The poets subjectsare of course markedly different. When Maramág

in the opening verses of his poem, perceives our scene as ethereal and
spellbound, he implies that through our centurieswith Spain, we had,
since we lacked freedom, neither a history nor a country of our own.
Thus, he proceeds from a historical sense of our "scene so fair while

a
Angeles pursues private realization provoked by "wild dogodog waves
at Gabu which could only be symbolically expressed.And yet we could
relate the poets' insights at their own depth, despite the radical dif-

ference in their mode of expression; for where Maramág says:

Here bold Olympia, one historic

night,
Presaging freedom, claimed a people's care.

where "the elemental seems to override

Angeles, denying any history
whatever is human, says:

The vital splendor misses. For here, here

At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs

All things forfeited are most loved and dear.

It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.

The way through the changing poetic terrain since the "50s is poet
to poet because cach one who perseveres in the craft aconstantly
achieves through metamorphosis of his idiom and subject full indi-
 10 A Habit of Shores

Nick Joaquin from Prose

vidual voice. Each one's poetic careereg fros
Collected Verse (1987); Bienvenido Santos
and Poems (1952) to
to Distances: In Time (1983);Edith Tiemne
The Wounded Stag (1956) (MS, 198
from The Tracks of Babylon (1966) to The Charmer's Box
1992; 1995); Cirilo Bautista fro
1993), and Extensions, Beyond (MS, to
The Cave (1968) and The Archipelago (1970) Charts (1973), Tle
shows that the poe
Moon (1981), and Boneyard Breaking (1992) u
new discoveries in his own field of vision
(his
constantly makes his of expressioncCo
matter) and transforms mnode
distinctive subject the in his work
them. Thus, whatever be poetic intluences
formably to the work of imagination ie
or the regnant critical theory of his time,
long crea
achieved chietly by the poet's own solitary labor, that 1s, the
a to
tive struggleto forge from one's medium (say, English)
language
I do for example, thar
discover and express one's subject. not think,
was particularly
influenced by the American New Critics
Nick Joaquin
and the kind of poetry which they preferred. Self-educated like Ma-
he must have since the early '30s
ramág through extensive reading, like Villa, for a
worked at the language in his own individual way,
route to his own subject. His poetic idiom is RomantiC in texture and
it partakes of the richness
yet modern in temper; that is to say, while
and elevation of the poetic diction of an earlier time, it is yet closer
to as to catch the hum and drum of living in his
contemporary usage
own time and place.For, unlike Villa, he remained connected to his
native ground,and drew from a deep historical consciousness and a
too of journalism
Catholicism interlaced with folk religion; his love
must have contributed in no small way to the éclat and sardonic bite
of his verses.
As with Joaquin, Daguio, and Edith Tiempo, one would have to
engage with Bienvenido Santos fiction to come to a fuller appreciation
of his poetry. The haunted and wounded sensibility that one encoun-
ters
in Santos' You Lovely People (1955) also find poetic voice in The
Wounded Stag (1956). This collection, consistingof poems in the 40s
and early '50s,is a poeticlandmark. Its transmutation of theRomantic
idiom renders with pathos and restraint the condition of the colonial
the war and oppression,
subject, the lowly and bereft, the victims of
and thus lights with new poetic fire the proletarian
roughage in Carlos
Bulosan's verses and the stale rhetoric in Zulueta's Like the Molave. It

is deeply moving tohear the poor folk address Our Lady in Santos
"Processional," 1949, and in such poems as "Come Home,
Heroes,
"
1946, "Sermons to the Free, 1947, "The Gods
Next Door," 1947, and "Cornerstone
We
Worship Live
Epitaph," 1949, the New Critic
will find an admirable
sensitivity to the nuances of language, a sharp-
ness of imagery and verve of
metaphor, a tension and irony
poignant
 Introduction 11

of thought and feeling, which-in Cleanth Brooks and Robert

Penn
Warren's Approach to Literature (1936), our college
textbook in the
50s for the introductory course to literature-are the hallmarks of
genuine poetry. With The Wounded Stag, more than with Villas her
metic and narcissistic gems of verse, our
poetry in English finds more
native ground from the Romantic poetry of cre-
substantial emerging
puscule,"13
Edith Tiempo is ourfinest poet in the New Criticaltradition.
She
herselt acknowledges her spiritual kinship with the greatEnglish Ro-
mantic poets, but insists that such kinship must be understood
in
the nature
rerms of of Romanticism itself." She goes on to say: "I
think that women writers write in this tradition. If a woman is true
to she will write as a Romantic. If she turns off her inner
herself,
promptings and instead attempts to be purely objective, I think 914
the
effect will be artificial because the life are not
springs there."
There, it would seem, may well lurk the gravest danger in New
since it conceives of the poem as self-contained and
Criticism which,
autonomous, privileges the poet's subjectivityand cancels as it were
any responsible connexion with the roil and toil of daily living and
history. Likewise, the Romantic spirit is moved by the genius of the
individual mind and sensibility seeking to transcend the mundane
of to
world economicneed and political struggle and so devote itselt
Truth and Beauty. But the "life
springs" must be in both thoseinner
promptings" and the objective reality to which the poet responds.
Villa is here exemplary. He is a great poet, but his is an alienated
sensibility because hi subject is too private, an aesthete's theol
»15
ogy,of,rose,and, tiger.
A number of poets would seem to show how, since the New Criti-
cism put a premium on the poets rhetorical legerity, language could
be so polished or reworked as to distigure it-but also how,atthec
even a breakdown
same time, a poetic break-up of linguistic usage, or
of sense,might perhaps presage a new poetictranstormation. Ricaredo
Demetillos No Certain the rhetorical vigor and
Weather (1956) has all

poetic fire that the New Criticism demanded,

and yet the poetis not
trapped in the poems rhetoricfor,in
such
poems as Poet in lime a
of Darkness," 1952, "Rebellious Sonnets, 1954, and "No Certain
Weather," 1954, he excoriates the moral hypocrisy and sensuality of
in high places.
the bourgeois and inveighs against greed and corruption
But after that first collection, he seems to have exhausted the mora
Via: A Spiritual Journey (1958).
and religious lode of his poetry with La
Most his verses in Masksand Signature (1968), The Scare-Crow \sic)
of
Christ (1973), The City and the Thread of Light (1974), and Lazarus,
Troubadour (1974) seem the first drafts of poems-to-be; that is, they
 12 A Habit of Shores

seem to be of a simpler mode of expression, less thick witl

in search
rhetoric as it were, such as we find in Lines to a Novitiate," 1979
His too close
and I
Don't Invite the Tigers,Augustine, 1974.
Truth: God's male sensualityl6o
lowing of Villa on "the Gospel and revelationay
havevitiated his poctry; indeed, the great theme fire that holvghosea
Via and Lazarus, Troubadour-"Th sensual
in the groin's shrine springsdirectly from Villas
bone or "Christ
theology
ike Demetillo, both Dominador Ilioand Manuel Viray haveD
and Other Po-
remarkable first collection of verse, Ilios The Diplomat
but their
ems (1955) and Viray's Afier This Exile (1965),
late
verses
the language hewn h
endure a kind of poetic breakdown, as though
the poet's vision. Lookine
New Critical dicta can no longer sustain
for a new language then becomes the primary ocCupation. Ilio finds
less finicky aboe
a new mode, a fresher, more natural expression, and
New Criticism,in such poems as "Prokosch in Tehran, 1978" (1979
on the Road to the Hindu Kush," 1980;bur
and Hakim Popolzai
this mode, which shapes "Marikudo in Kalibo, 1979" (1979), sinks
of Romantic diction and imagery
again into prose and the easy artifice
in Madiias: Tales and Legends (MS,1988), one were
as though begin-
a foreign tradition.
ning again to master a foreign medium and
Viray's Afier This Exile is haunted by sex,aging and disease, by
our "lesh
sin and corruption, for its central motif is oppressed by
"the bestial aches in the blood That plagued us, having lost_our
innocence," and rare are the moments of "all-too-brief grace." In
the next three collections When
Blood with Light Colldes (1975),
Morning Song (1990), and TheAutomatic Glass Door (1991)-a kind
of disintegration of language and sensibility sets in, as though the

poet's quest has entered a labyrinth without clew. "I'm looking," says
Viray, "for the vitality that connects both breath and death --beauty,
order, and the idea that provokes as well as excites."But the language,
as it
seems, has not been found, so that the poet's large abstractic
seem to whirr through the text like bees desperate for bloom.
Alejandrino Hufanas poetry too is exemplary as regards that poetic
break-up of sense and imagery which seems to augur a breakaway
from New Criticism. A good example is his own verse introduction
to the "13 Kalisud" in Sickle Season (1959):

Of phosphorescence sing, of giving up to sea

The contents of the land, ..
(Look to Tutankhamen in his
depths, brought to surface

Of wicked calm, of mastery

 Introduction 13

Of storm, these regimens at sport outside

and soul
The log report, mankind's alleged
Finds terra firma in a flotsam, its coffin, where
Firmity itself is in a gyre....

His prayer man's own painful body, like Laocoön's

In oyster gaze upon the verity of air and ground,
Narcissus', too,when permanence seeped into his reflection
This or
truthfiction no man alive has yet
Absolved himselffrom, that territory in the brain:
Complete it, reader- friend, survivor.

Outside the language of poetry

"Ofphosphorescence.. the log report":
as it
has simply to be found again, "brought to surface" and tested,
It is as though, in our
were, "upon the verity of air and ground."
to the sea
obsession with the figures of our speech, we have given up
soul
of rhetoric "the contents of the land" so that "mankind's alleged
This of course may only
/ Finds terra firma in a flotsam,
its coffin."

be a reading from a certain presumption: that the New Criticism, in

and rhetoric, has absconded from those "regimens

privileging language
at sport outside/ The log report."
In any case, since Hufanas original
attitudein lan-
13 Kalisd (1952), the articulation of his feeling and
have been so problematized as to make it virtually
guage seems to
of which the tact that to the present he keeps revising
impossible,
the struggle to find
them and adding new kalisud is proof enough of
a new language.

I had to write kalisud Hufana] thanks to the Visayan term

[says
use. But how might I use the
for sad feelings that I found ready for
Like so, but it had also to
word? Just adopt the kalisud folksong?
I wasn't
made attractive to the chance listener like Odysseus.
song itself, how
it
in the
interested the escape of Odysseus but
in

ever passed the listening along the edge -how, indeed, did the

siren song do that?

with his language?

How, indeed, in Hufana's creative struggle

make myths of certain

songl was
to
My version [of the siren
assume local identities
Biblical or historical characters, make them

thatcould be finally abstracted back into what they stood for, having
14 A Habit of Shores

of relationshi
lossesof love, of fellowship,
passed disfiguring have need of
The process would
the divine or the demonic. Joyceanword
WIth jabberwocky,
the multiform of sharded words, puns, recreate itself by means
have the process
while also intending to of vignettes, chat
play,
ballads, dirges, smatter
of aubades,eveningsongs, and giving it the force to
all in the sequence
ter-scarter of
melodies
20
go on.
on the edge of gib.
Hufana's poetry teeters perilously
In that process,
of oracle.
berish. Yet, it
may be the language

The Open Clearing

the Present
From the 70s to
for the Lit-
If we compare two poems
by Edith Tiempo,Lament see the difference
and "Bonsai," 1972, we might
tlest Fellow," 1950,
and 60s in the New Critical mode
our in the 50s
between poetry liberative
and our poetry since the 70s
in that open, post-structuralist,
formal constraint upon
not exist any
where seemingly theredoes
space
what may be called poetry. language and
that, with facility 1n the
It was simply inevitable the work
would be tound of forgng
mastery of poetic form, new ways because it
sense is both a
in its
double
called poem. I say forging anew our reality that
the language and seeing
matter of reinventing
evoke. In the 70s, it was
as though
the language is used to express or not of course
free himself from New
Criticism
the poet needed to which it stresses, but from its
from the discipline of craftmanship am-
obsession with rhetoric and its figures (tension,irony, paradox,
Emmanuel Tor-
and its ideology of the poem as autonomous.
biguity) (1975), already detects
res, in his Anthology of Poems 1965/1974 Alfrredo
in the mid-60's Cirilo Bautista,
among younger poets others
Navarro Salanga,Artemio Tadena, Gelacio Guillermo, among a
more relaxed, more conversational...
"a language and rhythm
closer idiomatically to the way educated Filipinos
literary English
speak it.
effect of the
It should also be pointed out that by the 70s, as an
the Martial Law regime, it had
political activism in the mid-60s and
again become an urgent
issue
with the poet that his poems connece
with the social reality even while he recognized the requirement or
formal excellence. We
might see this move in the poems of Salanga
and Guillermo, which only stresses, however, that from the very be
ginningfrom Ponciano Reyes "The Flood" in 1905 to Carlos
Bulosan and Rafael Zulueta y da Costaour
poets in English, despiie
 Introduction 15

the trance of the English poetic and critical

sensibility, stood upon
their own native ground.
Our writers began to be aware in the 80s of new critical theories
which seem to affect their own poetry: the structuralists who fostered
an extreme type of formalism and, almost in the same breath, the
who
ravish still the voids in
post-structuralists language. Yet our poets
are not academics, even if a number find their home in universities.
It would be closer to the truth to
say that, as poets working with
language as their medium, they make their own discoveries
about po
etry in their own way which later the academic critic finds conform-
able with some theoretical
aspect or artistic criterion.
Our poetry in the80s to the present is marked by a more
height-
ened consciousness of ianguage in the way it creates its own
reality,

reality,
a
together with a deep sense of the poem as artifice or a kind of double
torgery trom language, which itself is already a fiction of
and a
forgery
in
ones own consciousness from the reality out
side language. The poet Alfred A. Yuson has
pretty well characterized
the poetry of the 80s to the very
present:

Gone are the days when a generation can produce a singular,

distinctive
voice
such
as.a T.S. Eliot ... or Jose Garcia Vila.
ahave been
All manner of experimentation to tried, and,
appears
though not necessarily found wanting, has of late given way to the
of personal voice whose treatment of
consistent projection a expe-
rience and couched in either hard-edged or tender
insight is under
statement.
is to the generic aggressiveness of other
a reaction
Perhapsit
These days the successful poet eschews the
forms of self-expression.
grandiloquentpronouncements in the manner of a Walt Whitman,
the speechifying of an Alan Ginsberg, or the politicized
provocative
rhetoric of a Yevtushenko.
The quiet image, the ironic engagement, the subtle verbal ges-
ture have come to the
forefront as
favored contemporary devices for

lyric or cerebral identification.

One other remarkable thing about our poetry today is the number
of women poets who re-create their sensibility, carving from language
a reality that is truer to their "inner promptings," as Edith Tiempo
says. In A Native Clearing, of49 poets born between 1919 and 1941
(two decades), only five are women; in the
present anthology of 96
poets, born between 1942 and 1976 (more than three decades!), 30
are women. There was nothing deliberate about this "gender distri-
bution" on my part; it simply turned out so, as I went along choosing
 A Habit of Shores

that, apart
from their artistiC merit, speak to te . Our
the poems
own native ground.

A Personal Matter

a that had been subt trans-

In our cultivation of poetic terrainof anish rule, and tilled
three centuries
formed by more than in again
fascination with
the "democratic vistas" the English lang
in
our
a
long and creative strugol
e
the poctic course was, as always,
and the poet's subiect With
both the poet's medium (language) by
the poet's subject, I do not mean any specific topic ortheme,
bur the
into own humanity and the hybrid culture which
his
poet's insight
nurtures and sustainsit; I mean the poets own deepest thought and
which
feelingwhich always long for a language by their meaningful
ness is achieved. And that creative struggle repeats itself with ever
ery
individual poet, from his youth to maturity, although not too man

persevere.
To create our own literature, English had to be naturalize
as it were, and become Filipino nothing short of a national lan
guage. We had to colonize English in and by our own turn of phrase.
as itwere, for we had to find ourselves
again and establish a homeland
that had been lost. We had
ourselves to inhabit the new language:
our own way of looking, our own
thinking and teeling in our own
historical circumstances, had to become the
nerves and sinews of
that
language. From the beginning to the that is in fact the
present,
job of work. poet's

Shouldnt it rather have been

with our own languages
Sugbuanon, lloko, Tagalog
no that
Hiligaynon-that
our
we had struggled so? There is
question writers in those
works were for a languages did, although their
long time in our
which is still marginalized system of education
English. But that is another
indicative of our matter entirely,
cultural although
subjugation under Spain and
trend, moreover, America. The
ism (or even more among our young writers
than today is toward bilingual-
galog, o.-otherthan English, Filipino or la
Sugbuanon, Hiligaynon,
Our concern now etc.).
we is what
we have made of
wrote in English, and English: at first indeea
wrought from freelyborrowed and
English, and forged adopted, and then,W
our own scene so (in its double
fair where we sense) a

been the same creative worked out our own ourselves had
and education, we struggle with destiny. t
the time lost the Spanish except that in our olitics
at will to po
least of La
preserve that Since
Solidaridad and heritage. Du
ourselvesas a
people, Inang
Rizal when we ne
Filipinowriters
first
Muse.
Bayan (Mother began t
Country) had beco
 Introduction 17

So, finally, we might return to Fr. Bernad's comments in

1957 on
Philippineliterature as perpetuallyinchoatc" because, under his view
of literature as high culture, it was first Spanish, and
then, it withered
on the vine; and then,itwas English, but in 1957, it was still
relatively
young, although full ot promise; and now, if we follow through the
same line of argument, there has been since at least the 70s a vigorous
effort to forge a national literature in
Filipino; as Emmanuel Torres
was urging in 1975, *The poet writing in
English.. may not be
completely aware that to do so is to exclude himself from certain
subjects, themes, ideas, values, and modes of thinking and feeling in
many segments of the national life that are better expressed in
fact,
in
most cases, can only be expressed- in the vernacular."
which I more heartily disagree. Ifanything at
With of course cannot
all
must needs be expressed-must, because it is somehow crucial

-
that not a single spore nor filament of the thought or feeling be lost
then one must needs also struggle with one's language, be it in-
digenous or adopted, so that the Word as it were might shine in the
essential dark of language. Otherwise, the vernacular,by its own ety-

mol js condemned to remain the same "slave born in his masters

house."

I think that the three problems about literature which exercised

Fr. Bernad have as problems (which have not quite been re-
persisted
as cannot earn
solved) rather than causes. Writers,especialy poets, still
a living from writing; but theyre still alive and well, and many more
have perversely persevered than in the generation of Maramág or Villa.
As to the linguistic problem, I think that with our writers, their mas-
tery of the medium can be assumed. It is now simply a matter of
personal choice, but I would add that, whether English or Tagalog or
some other native language, it would still be the poets task to reinvent
the language. A poem isnt given by language; rather, a language is
ot is
transtormed through insight,a,new way looking. which of the
It may be that the most serious problem is still
essence of poetry.
cultural, but it cannot be a cause for inchoateness of literature, either
or Tagalog unless, of course, our education is still confused
English
or deteriorating.
The poet must in fact liberate himself constantly from both his
that is to say, he must constantly rediscover
language and his subject:
his see his both.
language and constantly anew world,
be
tradition
in that way, to my mind, might our poetic
Solely
established upon our own native ground.

Gémino H. Abad
UP Creative Writing Center
10 July 1998
 18 A Habit of Shores

NOTES
has
only slightly revised here,
This introductoryessay, 35-43, and appeared
is also the

in Sulyap
duction to
Kultura,
the
Third Quarter, 1996:
poetry
Literature in English from
All poems referred
1900 to
to in the essay are to
An
section of 1he Likhaan 1nthology of
the Present UP Press, 1999):
be found, unless
1989), ed. Gémino H. A
Intro

oilippine
3-24
24, (
WIse
3
in Man of Earth (Ateneo, and
indicated,
Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz, and
A
ative Clearing (UR, 1993),

Gémino H.Abad.
1 Fr. Bernad, S.J., "Philippine Inchoate," 1957.
Literature: Perpetually

his Bamboo and the Greenwood (Bookmark, 1961),

Tree p. 105. See al.

his "Philippine Literature: A Twofold Renaissance, 1961, rev. 1963,in

Tradition and Discontinuity Essays on Philippine History and Culture (Na

tional Book 1983), where he says: The chiet fact in Philippine

Store,
literature up to the present is this: 1t is an
precisely inchoateliterature
in manylanguages" (p. 5);
and "there is not as yet a significant body of
in English" (p. 23).
Filipino poetry
2 As quoted from Wordsworth:

And grossly that man errs who should suppose

That the green valleys, and
the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the shepherd's thoughts.

The College Folio (Aug 1912;

both and Filipino Poetry,
p.1) ed.Ro
dolfo Dato (1924; pp. 25-26),the poem carries the notes on itubi
poet's
as "fresh water fish with ash-whitescales" and urán as "fresh water fish
--larger than itubíscales are ash-white."
yellowish
There are three other
anthologies of our poets in the '30s and 40s: Pablo
Laslo's curious
English-GermanAnthology of Filipino Poets (1934)and
Manuel A. Heart of the sland (1947) and
Viray's
nual 1947-1949 (1950). PhilippinePoetry An
5 See the
lively debate in Literature under the Commonwealth,
E.
Arguilla etal. (Alberto S.
ed.Manuel
Florentino,1973); also, S. P.
ture and Lopez, Literd-
Book Supply, 1940).
Society (University
6 "Man-Songs," for which Villa was fined
by the courts for obscenity and
suspended for one year from the UP
in College of Law, was first publisncd
The Philippines Herald,26May,2 and
donym, O. Sevilla. For the
9 June, 1929 under the pscu
story, see Villa's Footnote to Youth and Oe
Stories
(1938).
7
"Subterfuge": Sunday Tribune
Magazine, 28 February 1937, p.
21
 Introduction 19
8 "Love Is My Need": Tuo
Voices:
Selected Poems
1945), p. 17. (Manila Post Publishing,
9 Daguios early poems were
collected rather late in
(Craftsman House, 1959); see The
also his Bataan Flaming Lyre
Florentino, 1973). Harvest (Alberto S.
10 As quoted from an
interview with
Daguio in Alberto M. Nielo, "A Criti-
cal
Study of the Poetry of Amador T.
College, March 1955). Daguio" (M.A. thesis, St. Pau's
11
Of Casper's
caredo Demetillo
six,

Program; the other

-
three- Dominador
are
I.
Ilio, Edith L.
Tienpo, and Ri-
graduates of the University of lowa
three are Amador T. Writing
Carlos Angeles. Daguio, Oscar de Zuñiga, and
12
Philippines Free Press, 17
June 1933, pp. 21-22.
13 Quoted from
Bayardo E. Estrada's poem, "Dawnis Groom," The
pines Herald Mid-Week 26 July 1933, p. 14. Philip-
14 From an interview withMagazine,
Edith Tiempo in Six Women Poets
ed. Edna Z. Inter/Views
Manlapaz and Marjorie Evasco (Aria Edition, 1966),
15 Quoted from Villa's p. 62.
poem, "When,I,Was,No,Bigger,Than,a,
1948. Huge
16 From Demetillo's "A
Hymn to God, the Creator (Sung to My Beloved)"
in Lazarus,
Troubadour (New Day, 1974),
p. 71.
17 Quoted from Demetillo's
"The Sensual Fire" in No Certain Weather
(Guinhalinan Press, 1956), p. 3; the same
Book III of La Via (special number of The poem appears as poem 5 in
Diliman Review, January
1958), p. 96.
18 Quoted from two
poems: "Rock Creek Park" and "The House of the
Fathers," both in
Viray's Afier This Exile (Phoenix
Publishing, 1965),
PP. 47, 51.
19 From an interviewwith Viray in Writers and Their
Milieu,ed. Edilberto
Alegre and Doreen Fernandez (1987), p. 483.
20 Hufana's letter to G. H. Abad, 8 June 1992.
21 See my essay, "A
Reading of Two Poems by Edith L. Tiempo," Pen
Ink, Book 2, 1997: 25-29.
22 Torres,"Introduction" ro An Anthology of Poems 1965/1974
(Department
of Public Information, 1975). 13.
p.

23 Yuson, "ln the of The Manila Chronicle, 31

its
saying."plus
valley
Aug-6 S 1991: 31.
24 As to the matter of pocuc ineril andour
nativeground," I nmust reter
the reader to my Intioductionsto Man of Earth and A Native
Clearing

own life-long experience of poetry anda

reader's
betes stl. tothe
careful eading
of the poems themselves which are in the present
an
thology.
25 Torres, op. cit.
 Shores
A Habit of
20
L. Quezon
what Manuel Quezon said

.
worth noting have a national the
in 1940: "We
is well nust
26 It
Writers' League to our emotions language. Philippine
kis I

i
we cannotgive expression I have heard foreign not
because Time andd again langu
Tagalog guags
That is nonsense. the Filipino soul through ofourwTiters
we can only express say
Oh, has no n.nationality. It
I repeat....Languagewhen it dialects
nsense,
Nonsense, the
language
to the langu
adopts it." nationality

the name in terature

Litera under the
uezon,
"Wethat
gives
Have a National Language," Commonweal
D.
8.) S." Lopez: "There i
worth quoting
also well
It is itted through the mediuothing in
cannot be transmitte
Filipino
soul that
transmitted, will
not retain its peculia Of Enol

and which, when erature is the

of litera test of contiFilipinocolo
test
If the first nued
and aroma... be said tha growth
then it may safely
and development, this
test as written

other language in countty can pass

this
in any of ature in
Literatu
ccesshully
"The Future Filipino
English
as English." (Lopez, in

and Society pp. 240, 243.)

his Literature