criticism

The Carabao with Wings: A Study of Filipino Poetry in English
by Francisco Arcellana

IN THE CURRENT issue (Winter 1959) of the Yale Review, Thom Gunn, one of England’s younger poets (he has two books of poems?The Sense of Movement and Fighting Terms) and a member of the new movement in English poetry called the Movement, who is now teaching at Berkeley, says in an omnibus review of new books of verse:

With the next two books (Body of Waking by Muriel Rukeyser and Selected Poems and New by Jose Garcia Villa) we reach the lower limits of poetry. At least Cummings has energy and a sense of humor, and at least he knows what he wants to say. I doubt if either Muriel Rukeyser or Jose Garcia Villa has any idea of what she or he is saying…

The jacket of Selected Poems and New states that ”Mr. Villa is a literary experimenter.” This is very true: Mr. Villa is a professional experimenter who makes Cummings look like a prince of discretion. The experiments are pretty naif, and it is surprising that any one should take them seriously. For example, there is a comma after every word in some poems, and in one every word is put inside parentheses. He explains, that the commas, are, there, to, remind, you, to, pause, after, every, word, (but) (does) (not) (explain) (the) (parentheses).

The Yale Review is a reputable university quarterly, a very learned journal; Mr. Gunn is a young British poet, young in years and obviously young as a poet. When Volume Two, Villa’s second American book of poems appeared in 1949, the Yale Literary Magazine (the student counterpart of the faculty-edited Yale Review) sent one of its more alert staff members to New York to interview Villa. (The interview, subsequently feature in the magazine, was called Jose, Garcia, Villa?an, Interview; very responsive although not very understanding.) The Yale Review isn’t anything like Time but in this one instance at least it seems to have descended to the level of the newsmagazine. Villa isn’t any one like the president of the Republic of the Philippines. And I doubt that there is anything common between Mr. Gunn and James Bell unless it is that both were to the same language born. Burning copies of the current Yale Review is inconceivable since there probably aren’t enough copies around to make a comfortable fire: and what would be the point to burning print if you can’t at least get a comfortable fire? (I can’t offer my copy because it isn’t mind.) And burning Mr. Gunn in effigy is out of the question too since we don’t know how he looks and it is unlikely that he would oblige us with a likeness; besides, a poet’s effigy would properly be in his poems and who would be likely to have copies of Mr. Gunn’s two volumes of verse? Mr. Gunn is at Berkeley teaching (a long way from the olde countree) and I don’t suppose he will venture farther west than that unless the U.S. State Department or the foundations get hold of him, then we would have the unspeakable delight of denying him a visa.

Mr. Gunn ways that with Villa we reach the lower limits of poetry. (A critic’s reach, I suppose, should exceed his grasp or what would be the upper limits of poetry for?) Villa, of course, Mr. Gunn notwithstanding and whether we like it or not, is the highest we have ever achieved in Filipino poetry in English; he is almost our only peak, lonely. Mr. Gunn thinks that Villa is a denizen of the lower slopes of Parnassus. If this is so then one can’t help wondering how high timberline would be. In any case, if this is true?and it ain’t necessarily so?it would be more forgivable in Villa than in British and American poets, including Mr. Gunn himself. After all, the English poet has horse with wings and Villa has only the winged carabao (albino).

What Mr. Gunn has found to say about Villa in his appraisal seems to have drawn from a very attentive reading of the jacket of Villa’s book and a less than casual reading of the book itself. Mr. Gunn’s evaluation of Villa would be outstanding in that one regard: it would seem to be the first criticism ever written that takes fuller account of a book’s jacket than (both British and American) who has followed it faithfully, who has read it with love and care, read it and not about it in critical journals and book jackets, can deny that in English poetry today E.E. Cummings is the experimenter, that Villa can’t even be said to approach anywhere near the truly high degree of experimentation that has been the supreme quality of Cumming’s poetry through centuries of composing. At this point, one reluctantly confesses to a realization that Mr. Gunn has been clearly, with Villa, committed to a campaign of detraction. Mr. Gunn calls Villa’s experiments naif and expresses surprise that anyone, but absolutely anyone, should take them seriously: one wonders at the state of sustained surprise (shock that Mr. Gunn must be in when we look at the list (partial) of people who take Villa seriously: in England, to name two, Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden; in Scotland, to name one, David Daiches; in America, Cummings himself, Mark Van Doren, Conrad Aiken, Horace Gregory, Richard Eberhart, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, May Sarton; in the Philippines, to name one, the honorable secretary of Foreign Affairs.

Mr. Gunn’s quaint last sentence parody, intended, I suppose, to complete Villa’s devastation, may be cleverness but not criticism: it is probably an adequate demonstration that Mr. Gunn could be a better writer than the Yale undergraduate who wrote Villa up in 1949; it is also perhaps the exhibit to show that if he cared, that is, should he, like the young American of today, decide to go East, not west, young man, but East, then Mr. Gunn could land a job with Time anytime?a consummation not to be sneezed at.

Although Mr. Gunn is clever, this doesn’t mean that he can not be critical?for indeed he can. His attitude towards Villa is highly critical, to say the least. When, at the head of his review, he endorses mightily Ezra Pound’s famous dictum?that poetry should be at least as well written as prose?as if this were going to be the text of his sermon (as indeed it turns out to be), Mr. Gunn is really showing that he recognizes only one kind of poetry?the kind that springs, as a kind of refinement, from prose: not Villa’s kind of poetry.

Mr. Gunn’s mistake is, I think and decisive: it is in regarding Villa’s poetry as if it were his (Mr. Gunn’s) kind of poetry?which of course it is not. Mr. Gunn’s poetry is, as I have already said, the kind that of the book itself. The least that Mr. Gunn should know, I think, is that you aren’t supposed to believe everything that you read in or outside of book jacket flaps.

Mr. Gunn says that at least Cummings (Edward Estlin) has energy. The implication of course is that Villa has none. If the force that drives Villa’s poetry is not energy then what is it?

Mr. Gunn says that Cummings (again at the least) has a sense of humor, the implication (again) being that Villa has none. I wonder how Mr. Gunn reacted to Villa’s “The Emperor’s New Sonnet”? And the other, “Caprices”? Did Mr. Gunn, perhaps, weep?

Mr. Gunn thinks that at least Cummings knows what he wants to say?for which, I suppose, Cummings should be prostrate with gratitude or perhaps not since Mr. Gunn might also mean that Cummings doesn’t always succeed in saying what it is that he wants to say?again the implication of course is that Villa doesn’t know what he wants to say. Mr. Gunn doubts that Villa has any idea of what he is saying. This, I’m afraid, is what happens when one pays more attention to what the book jacket says rather than the book; when one believes everything that one reads?when one reads; when one reads about the poet rather than the poems. It would be, I think, in this case more accurate and more fair to report that perhaps it is Mr. Gunn who does not know what Villa wants to say, that it is Mr. Gunn who has no idea what Villa is saying. How else could it be I don’t suppose Mr. Gunn can help his helplessness; he got stuck with the book jacket. One thing you can say to Mr. Gunn’s credit: you can’t blame him?the Villa book has an attractive jacket.

The jacket of Villa’s book, Mr. Gunn says, calls Villa a literary experimenter. Mr. Gunn affirms: “This is very true”; and then he calls Villa a professional experimenter the way you would call some politicians professional crooks. Then Mr. Gunn says that compared to Villa, Cummings is a prince of discretion. Surely Cummings is a prince among poets; he is also perhaps even a prince of indiscretion. But I can’t imagine Cummings being a prince of discretion, even in this sense. For poetry is an Indiscreet Act; the poetry of Cummings is a poetry of indiscretion if one doesn’t wish to say courage, one shouldn’t hesitate to say even a poetry of brash boldness. And any one who knows poetry (not just English poetry) knows that poetry is made possible exactly because of experimentation. And no one, but absolutely no one, who reads English poetry springs, as a kind of refinement, from prose; the kind that is, at the very least, as well written as prose; that is, at the very greatest, very great poetry indeed. Which is not Villa’s kind of poetry?a poetry that doesn’t even try to be at least as well written as prose since it is not, but simply and plainly and merely and absolutely not, prose; that doesn’t even try to be at least as well written as prose since it doesn’t care to, the prose intention not being part of this poetry’s intention; a poetry pure; a poetry instinctive; a poetry that comes already poems or parts of poems. It is possible that Mr. Gunn may have been thrown off by (again) what the jacket says Villa himself says about the series of poems called “Adaptations”: “poems: from prose, experiments in the conversion of prose, through technical manipulation, into poems with line movement, focus and shape, as against loose verse,” may have concluded from the poet’s testimony that Villa’s poetry is his (Mr. Gunn’s) kind of poetry. Of course Mr. Gunn is wrong; and Villa is wrong too when he says that his adaptations are poems from prose?because they are not; they are poems from poems.

But with Filipino poetry in English one can not begin with prose; one has to begin with the beginning. Somewhere, W.H. Auden, professor of poetry at Oxford and to me quite simply and plainly the greatest English poet living, a British native turned American citizen, asks the question: is the writing of poetry then already possible? The last time it was possible, before Auden, was with Yeats who was Irish. Eliot who was born an American but has become a British subject has found the going hard and has now turned to drama. If Auden can wonder of poetry whether it is already possible to write it, and Eliot found writing it barely possible, what can we find to say about Filipino poetry in English?

Is the writing of poetry then already possible? It has not always been possible. As a matter of fact, there have been times when it has been all but impossible. I think that the writing of poetry has very intimately to do with: how much of the life of the people is lived through language. Poetry is the life of the people realized through language. It has of course to do with the genius of the people, the poet; but it has equally to do with the genius of the language too.

Then there is prose. The writing of prose, like the writing of poetry, has not always been possible?although naturally not to the same degree. Sometimes the verbal needs of a people have not been so deep and then prose has sufficed; then we have an age of prose. At other times we have found it difficult to survive with less than prose; then the real man spoke in poems. But whether the age is one of prose or poetry, the problem is verbal, one of language.

Is the writing of Filipino poetry in English possible? Is it possible to ask the question at all? We are not talking about translations. Poetry, by its very nature, is not translatable. When a translation seems to be succeeding, it is not really what is happening is that one poems in one language is being transformed into another poem in another language; yes, it is a transfiguration; the two poems are not the same. The verbal surprises that are quite frequently achieved in happy translations, specially from the Chinese (as in Arthur Waley) or Japanese (as in Donald Keene) into English, are functions of the translating, rather than qualities of the translated, language.

Is the writing of Filipino poetry in English possible? We are not talking about translation?and perhaps we are. Waley, talking about the art of translating, says that you have to be able to think in the language into which you are translating and your translation succeeds to the degree that it can be articulated as that language. This is to say that, granting for the sake of argument that it is possible to write Filipino poetry in English, than that poetry must stand or fall as English articulation and not as Filipino. Villa himself says of the Filipino writer in English that it is very very possible he may not even get the point where he can begin to think of writing poetry in English.

In any case, as soon as we began to write what hopefully we called English prose, we began to write just as hopefully what we might just as well call English poetry or English verse or something written in English that didn’t look on the printed page like the English prose that we were writing. There are always poets around; or, in any case, writers who think they are also poets. Fernando Maramag, who is still remembered as the finest editorial writer we ever had, wrote verses: this, I suspect, must explain the authority with which he wrote his prose. Scott Fitzgerald, whose narrative prose is still the finest America has ever produced; used to tell his daughter, Pie, that there is nothing like the writing of iambic pentameter for learning to write prose. At any rate, it seems that the writing of verse compels a regard for language that you wouldn’t otherwise have with just the composing of prose. Juan F. Salazar wrote a poem for his mother?I suppose that is one subject that can’t help being poetic about; this was one poem that we memorized and recited at declamation contests and won prizes with. There was a time in our young life when we thought no poem was more witty than Ana Chavez’s “Sampaguita.” Villa thought very highly of Luis Dato who wrote in traditional verse. M. de Gracia Concepcion wrote a poem called “Rest” which we all of us admired; later G. P. Putnam was to put out his first book of poems?Azucena; his second (and last) book was to be published here in Manila when he came for a brief visit; after the war he was to go back to America to die.

In 1940 the first Commonwealth literary award in poetry was won by R. Zulueta da Costa with Like the Molave?more patriotism than poetry; special award was given to the Selected Poems of Doveglion. For this Villa has never been able to forgive Zulueta; he doesn’t have to any more.

Meanwhile, during the five-year period from 1937 to 1941, before the outbreak of the war, Serafin Lanot who was conducting a column of verse in the prewar Sunday Tribune Magazine was publishing the poems of a young poet by the name of Nick Joaquin. Joaquin was also writing fiction; his first story he had published under his full first name. He was then setting type for the TVT publishing company and writing the first poems and stories that would eventually win recognition as the first literary artist of the country. Although A. E. Litiatco first recognized him as a fictionist, it was Lanot who first published him as a poet. But it was Villa who was the first to hail him: “Nick Joaquin is in my opinion, the only Filipino writer with a real imagination?that imagination of power and depth and great metaphysical seeing?and which knows how to express itself in great language. He is our only poet who has language, who writes poetry, and who reveals behind his writings a genuine first-rate mind.” And Villa having said so, we all of us read and admired Nick Joaquin and despaired of ever writing again.

Like Villa, Nick Joaquin is probably a born poet too; he has himself admitted that he writes verse with greater facility than he does prose, the prose that he writes, that is?the prose that you first read in “The Legend of the Dying Wanton” and never again even in Nick Joaquin: but he is a self-made one also. (He is also a self-made fictionist and a self-made playwright: his fiction is the best that we have and his one play is the best play that we have.)

Because Joaquin is the only Filipino writer in English who ever learned to write poetry in it, he is probably the only Filipino poet who can teach the writing of it. During the years of the Occupation when Carlos A. Angeles was learning to write poetry, he was in close correspondence with Joaquin; Angeles wanted an opinion on the poetry that he was writing then but Joaquin never gave him an opinion. All his letters, however, ended with the injunction: “Keep ‘em riming! ?a play on the USAFFE (Joaquin’s USAFFEET) slogan: “Keep ‘em flying!” Angeles kept ‘em riming and by the time he was ready to make a choice of signatures he had already written enough poems to make a couple of volumes: one of his early poems and a second of his later ones.

During the Japanese Occupation, Joaquin wrote some of his finest poems, including the fourteen stations of the Cross; Angeles learned everything that there was to learn about prosody; Carlos Bulosan was writing his war poems and putting together Chorus for America, war poems by six Filipino poets which included R. Zulueta da Costa, Rodrigo T. Feria, P.C. Morante, J. C. Dionisio and Bulosan himself; Juan L. Raso was writing and putting together Guerilla Flower, a collection of war verses by the De la Cruz brothers, Beato, Leopoldo and Roman, Dominador Ilio, Rex Drilon and Maximo G. Salvador; Villa was being discovered by the world and America; Ricaredo Demetillo was going through the experiences that he was going to put to such good account a decade later; Salvador Faustino was writing his strange stories and poems; Joseph B. Man was probing the poetic possibilities of the Chinese strain in Filipino life; Morli Dharan was beginning to write verse; Oscar de Zuñiga was continuing to write the same verse that was eventually to get him into a Filipino literature number of the Pacific Spectator; R. Vinzons Asis was exploring the possibilities of the free form in verse; Manuel B. Buenafe was writing the poems that he was to include in his own anthology of guerilla writing.

Since war’s end, Trinidad Tarrosa and Abelardo Subido have put out Two Voices, a kind of anthem for love; Jose Garcia Villa had a second volume of poems published by New Directions; Josefa Cabanos put out a sheaf of poems by Homero Ch. Veloso, the young poet who had killed himself; Ramon Echevarria published his first book of poems called Effigies; Dominador I. Ilio put his poems together in a book called The Diplomat; Ricaredo Demetillo published No Certain Weather; and Bienvenido N. Santos came out with his first book of poems called The Wounded Stag.

Manuel A. Viray put out his Heart of the Island in 1947 and his first Philippine Poetry Annual (1947 to 1949) in 1950.

And in 1954, the American poet and fictionist Leonard Casper edited Six Filipino Poets, a fine collection of the best poems of Amador T. Daguio, Oscar de Zuñiga, Edith L. Tiempo, Dominador I. Ilio, Carlos A. Angeles and Ricaredo Demetillo.

There are uncollected poems and unpublished manuscripts of poems; besides those of Angeles that I have already mentioned, there are the manuscripts of Amado Unite, Viray himself and the poetry winners in the recently held U.P. Golden Jubilee Literary Contests, including P. C. Morante, Rolando Tinio, Amador T. Daguio and Ricaredo Demetillo.

After Villa and not necessarily second to him, our finest poet is Nick Joaquin. Teodoro M. Locsin would put Joaquin on a par with Villa and Locsin is probably not wrong. It would be interesting to know what Mr. Gunn’s reaction would be to Joaquin’s poetry. I must say though that I think Joaquin’s poetry is Mr. Gunn’s kind of poetry and if he thought Joaquin superior to Villa I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Joaquin’s poetry is at least as well written as prose?something that you can’t say of all other Filipino poetry in English before or after him; and it isn’t just as well written as prose, it is poetry too. Joaquin has himself admitted he has not much patience for Whitman’s sort of poetry; this, I suppose, is implicit in his injunction to Angeles to “keep ‘em riming!” His own allegiance, he confesses, is to Federico Garc?a Lorca, the Spaniard, and Rubén Dar?o the Nicaraguan; his own debt to English poetry would range from Donne through Hopkins to Yeats and Eliot. The certain thing is that it is possible to learn something about Filipino poetry in English from the poetry of Joaquin in a way unlike any other Filipino poet. When Villa himself said that Joaquin is our only poet who has language and who writes poetry, he probably meant Joaquin is the first of our poets to accept the form of the poem and the responsibilities that go with this acceptance. In any case, Joaquin is to my mind the first Filipino poet who has begun to work within the structure of the poem.

Carlos A. Angeles, the Filipino poet who has profited most from the example of Nick Joaquin and who has had poems published abroad in a little magazine called Kaleidograph, after poems enough to make two books, has possibly achieved the consciousness and the control necessary for the production of work of real worth. It seems to me that Angeles has been most successful where he has followed Joaquin’s injunction to rime; he has failed to convince where he has not; a poem like “The Eye” has tension where a poem like “Gabu” has not.

Ricaredo Demetillo studied with Robert Lowell; I don’t know if he ever heard Dylan Thomas read when Thomas was in America; Lowell and Thomas are two great influences in Demetillo’s poetry. This is obvious from the form and language and imagery which oscillate between these two poets. Lowell is a great American poet; Thomas is perhaps not nearly as great an English one?I’m using two different scales. Demetillo who has had poems in Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and Botteghe Oscure in Rome, remains the most interesting Filipino poet writing in English today. A second collection of verse, La Via, is scheduled for early publication by the University of the Philippines. His third book, Barter in Panay, is one of the U.P. Golden Jubilee literary award winners. He is at present working on a poem-sequence on the Magdalene and a poetic drama on Rizal.

Edith L. Tiempo who has published in Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Western Revew and Botteghe Oscure is possibly our finest woman poet. Robert Penn Warren has praised the poem called “Lament for the Littlest Fellow” which I think is a very fine one indeed. Mrs. Tiempo is also one of our finest fictionists. She, according to Edilberto K. Tiempo, owes everything she knows about poetry from Paul Engle who teaches poetry at the University of Iowa besides directing the Writers’ Workshop there. Mrs. Tiempo, like Joaquin, Angeles and Demetillo, has accepted the challenge of the form: the strength of her poetry springs from her recognition of the structure of the poem.

Amador T. Daguio, whose poem, “Information,” is in the Filipino contemporary literature number of the Pacific Spectator, and whose story, “Wedding Dance,” Wallace Stegner thinks the finest story ever written at Stanford by a Filipino, has been writing poetry longer than any of the poets I have mentioned above except Villa. Daguio is probably an instinctive poet although perhaps not a pure one. His work is uneven where it is loose; but when it is tight it is quite unlike any other poet’s poetry: I’m speaking of the metaphor of his verse?the yellow green aches of rice fields.

Dominador I. Ilio who has appeared in Botteghe Oscure in Rome, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop writes a poetry of metaphor. Of course metaphor is poetry and poetry metaphor but the poem is in the working of these two?how they are wedded.

Oscar de Zuñiga, whose “Love Song” is in the Filipino literature number of the Pacific Spectator, is the most completely instinctive and the most completely unconscious of our poets in English; he has been writing for a long time and probably has enough poems to make any number of books. His work is uneven, not only in the body of his work but also in the body of single poems. But where he succeeds, he is poignant.

I think that it is possible to measure the vitality of a literature by the amount of poetry that is being written in it. Very little poetry is being published now; it doesn’t seem likely that much more is being written. If the writing of Filipino poetry in English has been barely possible, it doesn’t seem likely that the writing of it will be more possible in the future. Yet there is no reason why this should be so: Villa is there to show that it is possible to be born a poet, Joaquin is there to show that it is possible to be a made one. As long as we can accept the language, we might as well accept the form too?and see what can be done; too much and too long we have resisted the responsibilities of the form.

CODA: FILIPINO POETRY IN ENGLISH TODAY

The third number of the only poetry magazine in the country today, Signatures, is still awaiting publication. Its new editor, Emmanuel Torres, is projecting a series of readings of Eliot’s The Cocktail Party to be able to raise funds with which to publish it. Originally planned as a quarterly, in three years Signatures has not been able to appear as many times. It is not because not enough poems are being written. The most active poetry group in the country has been identified with it from the very beginning. Its first editor, Alejandrino Hufana, who returned recently from America, has long been recognized as the finest craftsman of his group. A new volume of verse written in Berkeley with Thomas Parkinson won a special award at the U.P. Golden Jubilee literary contests. Leonidas V. Benesa, its second editor, who is now in Laos writing scripts for the USIS, is one of our most gifted younger painters and art critics: and he writes a well-wrought poetry. The present editor, Emmanuel Torres, has published in Botteghe Oscure in Rome, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and New Campus Writing No. 2. A new poem of his in Signatures 2 entitled “Amor Brujo” Stephen Spender admires very much. An active member of the Signatures group is Rolando S. Tinio who has also published in Botteghe Oscure; a recent volume called Rage and Ritual won one of the big poetry prizes in the U.P. Golden Jubilee literary contests. Other Signatures poets are R. Raul Ingles; Jesus T. Peralta who is better known as a playwright; Hilario Francia Jr. who is also a painter, and the short story writer in English and Tagalog, Andres Cristobal Cruz.

1959: The Sunday Times Magazine

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