Epitaph for the Man who Died Holding a Hammer

from a poet with a sword name

The hammer poem

by Dennis Espada

He delivers a blow to the gods
of capital and–against all odds–
grinds die-hard icons of greed,
pounds emancipation they forbid.
Hail the man holding the hammer
who lives on like roaring thunder.

Eugene's Poem (and Comment)

To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City 
Poem Literary Review,  Spring, 2000
by Eugene Gloria

   My window is serenaded by crickets.
   I try to sleep through the sawing
   of their cellos' sad music.
   Forgive me, I want none of it.

   You were in the mountains when my father's soldiers
   strolled into our classroom to escort me out
   of the campus. The army had infiltrated
   our cause to pluck from our ranks their own.

   You left before my father retired as a full colonel,
   before the nuns knelt in front of the dictator's tanks
   before the Maneros and the Alsa Masa
   scooped out and ate the brains of the dissident priest.

   And when you renounced the revolution
   and dreamed of corn and the language of Iowa,
   I came back to the Church, and then left again.
   Found true rebellion in marrying

   a man who spoke Hebrew and wanted to take me
   to Tel Aviv. Gellacio,
   I am reading you in English.
   Your brindled skin is sweating Iowa sun,

   your hair in a tight chignon,
   you, barefoot and G-stringed like the Manobo
   prince in St. Louis one hundred years ago.
   I want the Church to beg me back,

   long for the faint tinkle of the hand bell
   before the Elevation,
   the monstrance gold as unhusked grain
   drying on the asphalt road.

   I want to believe that sentences
   can hold bread in baskets, and multiply.
   Let the salvaged, naked as drowned cattle,
   find their way to my house.

   Ring the bell and call them in, Gellacio.
   Anything but this music,
   all silence and this nothing music.

Here's Gellacio's answer eight years later (see comment)

Joy/Division

When routine bites hard, and ambitions are low
And resentment rides high, but emotions won't grow
And we're changing our ways, taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again


Bakit? Feel ko lang.

The Silliman Rengga

Here's an old poem I discovered:

Silliman Beach
Random Lines written at Siliman Beach by five young poets 16^th of June 1968

Here where we leave prints running to the coves
The sea’s want of our presences is felt; like
Waves, ripples, your shriek, or the breakneck wind:
We are, we shall be, but we’re not – the lost prints
Are imaginings; our images conjured in sand
Are incomplete like tops of shells or pairless shoes.
DONEL PACIS

Sails and shoes are prints indeed, lost in the sea;
Patterns change as patterns leave the light –
But children’s voices spilling over pebbles echo
Through the jagged coves of mirthless hearts.
Yet even these will like the falling waves subside.
ELSA VICTORIA MARTINEZ

Subside, fall off like paper waves rolled out
By the sea’s typewriter carriage, the heart a battered
Machine: the single shoe stringless and tattered
EMMANUEL LACABA

Tattered too are paper plates and prosaic poems
Left in the summer aquarium. Suddenly our presences
Are days descending. We hold a snail, think of seagulls:
The ship shrills two distinct notes; the sea watches us
Draw shadows tall tailed by tense time.
CESAR MELLA JR

And so we stand, mute spectators
As the sea draws these prints –
Prints once real as salt spray
Upon our faces now lost.
AIDA CUNANAN

From Weekly Nation August 5, 1968

Sid's Easter Poem

Poet's Easter Morning at the Beach

The sun shedding its cloudy shroud;
The grey mountain rising up to green;
The shore reclaiming its former shape;
The early swimmer surfacing to air;
The crab scurrying out of its burrow;
The hermit abandoning its shell;
The driftwood touching land;
The poet at the threshold of wakefulness,

for a time losing all words for all things,
forgetting all names and all meanings,
and it doesn’t have to be a Sunday.

Update on the Punctuation Family

Cory Aquino's : puts -PGMA force in ?
Kris's delayed . becomes ...
Colon cancer is in the genes so Noynoy has a ;

W.H.Auden's Porn Poem

The Platonic Poem

Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn't move. I didn't know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
"Will you come to my room?" Then a husky voice, "O.K."

This is the only stanza I can quote. The rest are pornographic but in rhyme.

Wanted: Author of "Requiem" Poem

This is a poem submitted to Roland T for the "Mondo Marcos." We don't know the poet and if you do, please tell us immediately or else we have no choice but to drop this poem:

Requiem

Memory is a mosaic of tongues licking dirt, of lies embroidered to protect the King of Martial Law.

He was born. He is risen. He will kill again. And his kingdom will have no end.

Memory is a 1972 machine gun fired on Sunday morning. Four bodies on the edge of a dirt road. An act of suspended drowning.

This is a cup of his blood, the new and everlasting covenant.

Memory is a woman who howls wolf past curfew. Late night dinner parties and spilled champagne.

She drinks it so that their sins may be forgiven.

Memory is a spinning bottle, a top with no base, a mad pack of white dogs eating brown tails, brown dogs eating spotted tails.

She breaks the bread, gives it to their disciples, and says, Eat this in memory of us.

Memory is an archipelago of closed-view coffins, eaten calmly like sugared fingers of bread.

When the Column About the Poems that Came Back to Haunt You Also Came Back to Haunt You

While looking for the author of a poem which we wanted included in "Mondo Marcos," I came upon my poetry column in Sun Star five years ago. This was written in Nov 26, 2002:

When your poems come back to haunt you
By Frank Cimatu

LAST Friday, I got a copy of my old poems. These were made more than 10 years ago. Many of these poems I have not seen since sending them to Palanca. I was still using those huge, really floppy disks then and using Wordstar 5. They were killed by primitive viruses and molds. Anyway, my poems looked primitive now with those ribbon printers. Some of the poems I didn't know I submitted.

And the typos! I was surprised these poems won the Palanca. For one, my Filipino poems were titled Desaparacido/Desparadico. It should be "Desaparadico" but in my haste, I forgot the crucial "a." Then looking at them last Friday, I realized it should be "Desaparadiso." How I want to creep into the Palanca office and edit my poems.

Because I have the worst filing system in Baguio, I have no copies of many of these poems and the sight of them is similar to a passage I recalled about an archeologist opening a tomb unopened for centuries. When he opened the lid, the body was intact and right before the archeologist's eyes, the body collapsed upon contact with air, leaving a tempest of dust. It was so Spielberg.

When I saw my early poems, I was so filled with pride seeing those twist of lines and rhymes. And then the air filled these poems as you recall those attempts of revisions filling at least five spiral notebooks. And then you see the grammatical errors, waylaid commas and semicolons, and a line (in one instance, a crucial stanza) that you forgot to put in. How can I be so stupid! How can the judges not see these? Then your poems collapsed in front of you.

In the case of the archeologist, he was left with dust and also, the fine battle uniform and the jewels. At least I have my old poems, that I have to edit and rework until they look fine again. Or until the next long-time-no-see.

I remember Jun Cruz Reyes, the Raymond Carver of Philippine literature, saying that he has some things that some of our great writers would die to retrieve from him. He has their works which they submitted to the UP National Writer's Workshop. Now don't get me wrong! The UP workshop is the most prestigious rite-of-passage in the country and getting there is no easy task. Talent, or even the occasional brilliant flash-in-the-pan is not enough.

Sometimes, I think the panelists bring in some fellows who has some potential but is still not of workshop caliber. Or some of the usual suspects. You know your Sun Tzu - you kill a rooster to scare the monkeys. Bring in a fellow who is really terrible and slaughter him or her in front of the other people. Watch them cringe and swear literature off their bodies for the rest of their lives.

I attended the UP workshop in 1988 (yes, The Great Batch of 1988) and believe me, it was a bloodshed, not like the patronizing ones I observed later.

Philippine literature is looking for those rare ones who rise from the trenches and eventually become the greatest of their generation.

Let us not be ashamed of our juvenilias. Except for a few exceptions, and I assure you it's not the brand of baby milk that made the difference, all of us were terrible ones. Some of us are enfant terribles, others remained terrible and infantile while the rest rose from the ranks.

It's not easy to be a writer. You need your formulas: Three Ps (persistence, patience, peskiness), Three Rs (read, revise and revise again) and others.

You need your muses (Don't marry them. The unrequited ones are more ideal) and your succubi and incubi.. You need to love and fall in love and when you fall, fall down hard. (I remember writing a review on the Eraserheads' Cutterpillow and telling them to find more heartbreaks for your own good. Last year, I got an email from another rocker saying he clipped that review and highlighted that particular advice. Told you I am better than Joe D'Mango).

Release your poems and let them live by themselves. When they come back to you like what some of them did last Friday, you feel like the prodigal father who had to serve a feast for them. That's why I have to pay the bill even if I didn't order what you ate and drank (Tes, Etot, Day, Mary, Vince and Evie), it's because my poems had come home (Thanks, Grace).

Dead at 64

Fischer tried to abandon chess but chess refused to abandon him. He died, like Nabokov's character in "The Defense" at 64. Only non-chess playing writers would not see the poetry there. We talk about his anti-Americanism now but if you were a young boy still learning the ropes, his games are the best you can find because they go against the logic and so directed at winning. He may lose a queen but the opponent's king would be pathetically pinned down by a knight and bishop. At 13 years old, he was already KO'ing greats like Donald Byrne with this move (after Byrne's 17th move 17. Ke1-f1):
Fischer moved not his threatened queen but his bishop to e5. Quiet move. So after 18. Bxb6 (thanks for the Queen), Fischer gets the lowly bishop and checks. B's King moves to g1 and F's knight checks him at E2. So it was pinning back and forth (20. Kf1 Nxd4+ 21. Kg1 Ne2+ 22. Kf1 Nc3+ 23. Kg1 axb6). How great was that? A year after that game, Fischer won his first US championship. He would win seven more times including the 1963 to 1964 where he won 11 times with no tie or loss. That was US championship level!
Of course, out of the playing board, Fischer was another story.

G.K. Chesterton on why Chess Players and Literary Critics Go Crazy and Great Poets Don't

There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.

Poetry in, Like, Woot

"Right from the start, I encountered a host of unexpected misunderstandings. The first question I er.got was, “But how long should my poems be?” This question was repeated throughout the semester when we turned to the genres of drama and fiction, and I never found a satisfactory answer. How long should any poem, play, or story be? I responded with a quip I’d once heard an English teacher of mine use to answer a similar question. “Don’t worry about word count. Just make it long enough to cover the subject matter and short enough to keep it interesting.” Judging from the confused looks on their faces, I could tell it wasn’t a popular answer."
Poet Aaron Hamburger gives us insights on how to teach poetry to the Millennial Generation. From P&W

Thank You

A Thank You Note
Wislawa Szymborska

To Nash, thanks for the moleskine

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

Cannibal Poet R.I.P.

The Mexicano arrested for eating his girlfriend (and seasoning) and who was reported to have completing a book entitled "The Cannibal Poet," was found hanging from his belt in his jail cell

The World AIDS Poetry Reading

The Safe Sex Poetry Reading went well. People warned me about the audience, that they won't appreciate it but they did. The DKT people did not bring as many condoms as we thought but our prizes for our contests (putting on the condom using the hand and mouth and condom blowing) were a toaster oven, sandwich maker and blender. The contestants were really game. I can't wait for the photos. I would like to thank Andy and Dennis of Rumours, BCBC for the sound system, the media and my friends for being there, the Ubbog and the Baguio Writers Group for being such a fun group. I'm now in Ilocos.

Even Donald Hall Knows Safe Sex

When I came out with the idea of a Safe Sex Poetry Night, I got emails asking me "Why?" and "What's safe sex?" Why not? Sex is a sexy topic and putting on a condom is not? The Catholic Church is winning the battle of words in this aspect. They call withdrawal, calendar and putting a thermometer in the sex organ of the woman to determine if she's not fertile natural family planning. What's natural with these? Then PGMA should mandate that Victoria's Secret and Anito should put a thermometer, pocket calendar and beads (for the bead method) alongside the Gideon's Bible. Hey, the natural family planning method got 90 percent of the FP budget!
Anyway, here's a poem from the former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall (from White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Copyright 2006 by D.H.)

Safe Sex

If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words; if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel— then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread, no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation, no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge

Safe Sex Poetry Reading for World AIDS Day

The Baguio Writers Group and the Ubbog (a group of younger Baguio writers) will be holding a poetry reading on safe sex on December 1 at Rumours Bar in celebration of the International AIDS Day. Entitled: RIBBED, DOTTED OR STRAWBERRY, the reading will have the poets celebrating sex and romance without the life-changing results like pregnancy and STD. Virtual sex, condoms, the ineffectiveness of rhythm as a contraceptive method and bondage are among the subjects of the poems to be read. Ten of the poets would be reading and an open-mike follows. The poems would be the seed of a book on safe sex literature (definitely will not be considered for the Catholic Mass Media Awards) expected to come out next year. Sponsors of the reading are Rumours, Philippine NGO Council on Health, Population and Welfare and DKT Philippines. For more details contact: brutallyfrank@gmail.com

Happy Monday, Pensive as Usual Poets

Hey, Mag:net Gallery at Katips will have Pictura Poeisis: A Night of Ekphrasis Poetry with poets including honorary members of the Baguio Writer's Group (4 & 5) and friends Marne and Joel reading their poems with the paintings projected behind them. I hope Sid would assume the Parisian girl stance while Rizal, Luna and the rest of the Propagandists would be swooning on him. And I hope Marne chose the photo of this dancing Chinese couple:
1. Ida Anita Del Mundo – on "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt
2. Kristian Abe Dalao – on "Dreamcatcher" by Pancho Villanueva
3. Noelle Leslie Dela Cruz – on Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist"
4. Sid Gomez Hildawa – on Juan Luna's "Tampuhan" and "Parisian Life"
5. Dr. Marjorie Evasco – on Picasso's "Maternidad"
6. Dr. Benilda Santos – on Ang Kiukok's "Crucifixion" series
7. Joel M. Toledo – on Monet's "Haystacks, Snow Effects, Morning"
8. Marne Kilates – on photographs by Claro Cortes

Jimmy Abad's Talk Part Two

Now form is the bottom-line consideration when we regard the literary work as a work of art.

We said earlier that creative writing is that process of imagining by which a form or structure is imposed on the writer's material which is language.

That form is the very form of a human experience that has been simulated by a particular use of language.

Without a masterful use of language, no literary work can rise to the level of art.

For the writer, poem or short story is only a convenient label; when they write they do not adhere to any fixed criteria or theory of the literary work. They only aspire to creating something unique in their playing field which is the field of imagination; they make things anew or make new things.

This is why we need to restore to our reading of the literary text the performance of the text itself precisely by attending first to its form.

Form is "achieved content." (Mark Schorer). When Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr., was asked whether his stories are true, he said, Yes, because "on the page," where the story is, "is the life that matters." That life is achieved by the story's form.

Form is the matter of art, content the matter of interpretation.

In Horace's critical dictum, dulce et utile, "delightful and instructive, " I should think that utile refers to the literary work's content, which is the matter of interpretation, and dulce to the form that has been wrought, by which the content is achieved – that is, endowed with the meaningfulness of a human experience. Not a fixed meaning, but meaningfulness.

The appreciation of the form of the literary work is that which must direct and validate the interpretation of its content. Only then might a critique, from some theoretical standpoint – say, a Marxist or feminist perspective – be brought to bear on the poem's or the story's subject as interpreted.

Jimmy Abad's Talk at Ortigas Part I and II

OUR SENSE OF COUNTRY IN OUR POETRY IN ENGLISH
October 18, Ortigas Foundation Library

Let us first have a clear idea about the literary work. The literary work – story or poem or play – is work of language and work of imagination, both.

1. So, let us first consider the matter of language.

It is significant that poetry is associated with verse, which comes from Latin versus, which refers to "furrows," those cuts in the earth made by the plow. Thus, as the farmer works the soil to produce a crop, so the poet works his language to produce his poems.

In fact, language is already translation of reality. The word "translation" comes from Latin transferre, translatus, meaning "to carry or ferry across." Thus, when we write we ferry across our words our perceptions of reality. So it is that language makes real to our human consciousness or mind our perceptions of reality. In that profound sense, language creates our reality. That is the essential power of language.

I have in mind this idea of language as essentially translation when I say that at first, our writers wrote in English, but later, they wrought from English. In fact, all literary artists work or forge from a given natural language their stories and poems.

II. Now let us consider the literary work as work of imagination.

Creative writing is imaginative writing. That activity used to be called by the Greek word, mimesis, from which comes the English "mime, mimicry," the act of feigning or imitating. Mimesis then is the creative process of imagining whereby a form comes to be imposed upon the artist's material.

That material, as regards the literary arts, is language and human experience. The etymology of the English word "experience" is very illuminating if we bear in mind that what distinguishes the literary work from other forms of writing is the representation or simulation of a human experience as imagined as lived.

The Greek word for "experience" is empeiria, from the verb, enpeiran, "to try or attempt," and also, peran, "to go or pass through, or undergo." Thus we have the English word "empirical." But the Greek vocabulary passes to Latin experiri, "to try or attempt," from which come the English words "experience" and "experiment"; moreover, the Latin experiri relates to Latin periculum, which means both "attempt" and "danger." Such the meaningfulness of the single word "experience." It is associated with faring, going on a journey, with peril and fear: one goes forth, tries and is tried, meets with chance and danger, and nothing is certain.

I said earlier that what distinguishes the literary work from other verbal works is its mime or simulation of a human experience as imagined as lived. It is that human experience by which we are moved as we read. That is the essential power of a literary work, be it story or poem: it gives us the very sensation of living, it gives us a vivid sense of our humanity.

For what is most real is what is most imagined.