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?
