We tell ourselves stories in order to live

This week, like any other in my so-called semi-productive life, was spent book-hunting, book-binging, reading books, dissing books, loving books, cooking pasta for lunch and dinner, grooming and feeding and amusing the cat, fantasizing about life minus work, and teaching. There was a more-than-usual amount of news monitoring, and a rare contribution to body count at the demo held in UP MassComm and UP Law, my presence courtesy of a well-informed, socially aware, and Facebook-abiding friend who, naturally, was far more updated than I was regarding events in my workplace. There were expressions of indignation, outrage, and commiseration—mostly said to myself and the three other hermits I talk to. There were fantasies about the assassinations of GMA and her allies, coupled with uncharacteristic desires for the reinstitution of capital punishment and the explosion of pure, unadulterated anarchy. But, of the 168 hours of this week, the chunks of time spent on matters outside my usual, shamelessly self-centered routine were minimal, and ultimately, inconsequential. I allowed myself the luxury of not clicking on the hundred thumbnails of ghastly photos documenting the victims of the Maguindanao Massacre, turning away from full-size images of the wholesale violence committed against, upon, unto the men and women, journalists and lawyers, Muslims and Christians, Mindanaoans and Filipinos, as I would from the scary parts of an episode of Supernatural that I happened to be awake enough to watch. Sure, I felt outrage. Sure, I felt grief. But still I ate, slept, worked, and (like everyone else this weekend, it seems) malled. As if nothing catastrophic had happened.

My capacity to go on with my life as I know it despite the Maguindanao Massacre is the outcome of two things: ignorance and literal-mindedness. I know next to nothing about Mindanao. What I know about it I keep filed in some inaccessible recess in my mind, where it vanishes into the realm of non-retrieval behind what I deem to be more pressing concerns. My friends who are from Mindanao no longer live there. I have only been to Mindanao twice—to attend the wedding of friends in a Bukidnon monastery and to conduct interviews in a Davao hotel as one of the judges in a scholarship competition—and both trips entailed severe cloistering to the point of effacing the region from the experience, only for it to surface in token touristy purchases of coffee and durian. My point being, I have no personal attachment to Mindanao. The corollary being, I am detached from Mindanao. To this Manila-centric, QC-based, middle class, feeling public school titser, Mindanao is simply somewhere else. We can’t possibly be in a war-torn country, not when places like The Fort and Greenbelt 5 are fully operational and often packed with people who look and smell good (or seem to or try to). We can’t possibly be living in the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, surpassing even Iraq and Afghanistan, not when we can step out of our houses and there are jeeps to ride, places to go, movies to see. But the fact holds, and it is loud and clear: the Philippines is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. So is Mindanao somewhere else, or—by some failure of our imagination and experience—are we?

What I am about to tell you

1.
What I am about to tell you may or may not matter in the long run.

2.
I have taken to alphabetizing the things in my kitchen. Thus colander next to coriander, dairy next to dishwashing liquid, ice next to insecticide. Anything can be held together by a web of associations: armoire to banister, by virtue of setting. Clavicle to daffodil, by family of sounds. Elephants to falafel because of that day in December, gash to harbor because of that summer with nothing better to do. Illicit to jeopardy, jeopardy to karma, karma to long life or lip service or manual labor, manual labor to never again, never again to on one condition to private practice to questionnaire. And so on. Anything is the truest beginning of what I am about to say.

3.
Words most probably included in what I am about to tell you: accept, again, alcohol, apparently, bakery, be, because, blue, bordering, come, company, continuous, crap, dashboard, definitely, don’t, drawer, end, enough, exactly, fantasy, forget, haha, how, hydrangeas, ink, insult, maybe, modern, more, must, nerve, never, no, of, period, phone, please, psycho, ridiculous, ring, slab, sleeping, sorry, splat, stash, teeth, television, tender, then, there, this, though, thus, very, wtf, yes.

4.
What I am about to say may be said in other words, and these words may be divided into several categories resembling a system of looking at flies: a) detached, with a hint of disdain, b) obligatory, c) doubt replaced by candor, d) having slipped from one room to another, e) borrowed from the library, f) a subcategory of c), g) that which replays itself, h) without resignation.

Poetry in the Making

An Incomplete Introduction

Along the literary highway known as contemporary Philippine poetry in English, how vital is the decade-long stretch from 1998 to 2008? Is it one to drive through and past, the scenery redundant, the standards on a loop, playing in the background? Is it one to careen through, windows down, volume up, the landscape breaking into versions, staccato, simultaneous, the mind aflutter, schizophrenic, fried? Is it one perpetually plagued by traffic, by roadblocks, by wayward cops? Does the decade invite tuning in or out?

For the reader perpetually in search of the new, the best bets to keep the drive interesting are bound to be voices literally never heard before. In the case of readers such as myself who do enjoy reading poets piecemeal but find far more pleasure in engaging with bodies of work, the best introductions to these voices come in the form of reading their first books, where the encounter is thorough enough to achieve a respectable intimacy with the poet’s sensibility and to justify whatever tone—dismissive, appreciative, fanatic, lukewarm—critique takes. How this decade fares against earlier decades in the production of poetry by newcomers, I have yet to investigate, and while the discomforts that come with busting one’s critical chops in studying the work of one’s generation or the generation prior are multiple—whether caused by a vantage point restricted by proximity or a culture of cliques, to name a few—it seems to be an endeavor far more necessary than yet again another contribution to studies of writers long dead, canonized, or simply, already read.

What kinds of poetry are being published by emerging poets today—many of whom are products of creative writing programs here and abroad and various national writers workshops, taught by senior writers who, in one breath, propagate their aesthetic of choice and wax nostalgic about the good old days when they were left to their own devices, with no such institutions to oversee their literary development? Based on the visibility, in the last ten years, of those who are young in the career of publishing books of poetry—be it through early acclaim, notoriety, or the single-minded, earnest, ambitious work of writing poetry never written before and carving out new spaces in which to produce and publish it—where is the poetry highway headed? “The sad fact is that most of the poems getting published these days—bearing marks of schooling (or nearly so) and threats of competence and talent aborning—are insufferably mediocre and lazy,” says Ricardo de Ungria in his introduction to the 1999 Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction. After a rundown of the various manifestations sloppy writing takes he declares that “they all [the poems] look and sound alike, aspiring for a generic so-so poem that anyway gets published just the same” and laments that “democratizing access to writing (evident in the proliferation of writing courses and degrees and workshops has come down to—vapidity: all steam and no heat; or all heat and no fire.” Later in the essay, de Ungria applauds the precious few “old-guard work continu[ing] to dominate the field.” How pertinent are these scathing assertions a decade later?