Two for the road map to rapture

This coming Saturday marks a milestone of sorts for Philippine poetry in English, with two important books being launched on the same day, thankfully, serially, in terms of hours.

Ricardo M. de Ungria’s 7th poetry collection, M’mory Wire (UST Publishing House, 2013) will fire up the general public on Saturday, March 8, 2-4 p.m. at Lopez Museum and Library, Benpres Bldg., Ortigas Center. The event is organized by the Adverbum 1 writers, who will fete the Davao-based poet barely a week after his return from representing our country at the Granada International Poetry Festival in Nicaragua.

Collected in M’Mory Wire are over a hundred poems that didn’t see inclusion in De Ungria’s previous collections — whch doesn’t mean that they’re dross; far from it. Our buddy Ricky we know to store poems for rainy days and sun days, from all kinds of periods, and commas, in his life.

Time there was, in fact, when he scribbled draft verses on tinfoil from Marlboro hard-packs. That was in the early ’80s, before he gave up the habit (of Marlboros), when we novena-ed together on Wednesdays and weekends at Penguin, Moviola, and other bars in Ermita-Malate. Sure as sure, some of that tinfoil poetry made it to this collection, let flown as it were via craftsmanship and bardic devotion.

The poems here would then cover four decades, so that they’re presented as cyclic folios or sections. The book is designed to read backwards, in the Western sense, that is. The cover opens to the right, as in a Japanese publication, and one reads the poem-pages from right to left. 

Ricky has earned more than enough quixotic spurs to claim quirkiness, heh heh. It starts with a tribute-poem to Franz Arcellana, National Artist for Literature, followed by a paean in prose regarding other friends and relations who have also gone ahead (Pepito Bosch, Bienvenido N. Santos…). 

The individual poems addressed to them are still wired to collective memory. Love the lines in “Redeployment”: “… Perhaps the poems will become/  truer poems if planted with the yams and beets/ or else into fighter squadrons origamied.” There’s that curious slide from realism to off-the wall, peripheral entitlement, that subtle sudden “bend” a la Nippon that most modern poets now apply as a signification of personal, even private, insight. But what a purposeful image!

The prose notes continue to herald thematic groupings, from “Dumaguete Blues” involving mentors and young poets, colleagues and confreres, to comradeship as in “Jim’s Beam, Antipolo.”

Quotidian unpleasantries segue to votive curtseys to maternal figures. The poet is bilked in Ubud, Bali. Oh what wonderful narrative tightness and tension in “Christmas Day at the Movies”: “Shitheel sits beside me on the last row,/ Jacket atop his crotch, left hand moving/ Up and down in no time he must have kept/ His fly open walking in. From the corner/ Of my eye I catch the stinker’s head turned/ Toward the girl beside him…”)

The poet De Ungria is at the peak of his powers with his story-poems. “Two Mothers” is no less than terrific!

“On the way to showing me/ the telemetry ward at the end of the corridor/ where her mother had lain with weakened heart/ and she had shared her bed/ like a guardian angel/ more weak and bed-bound/ than the guarded over,/ there/ stopped on her tracks/ she stands,/ warmed by a call/ from her four-year old daughter/ —a smiling statue/ of immaculate melancholy/ holding up her dextrose bottle/ like a torch of new knowledge/ on some harbor beyond fear.”

There’s the masterful instance where simile commits to image and vice versa, and the liplock of technique turns rapturous!

Then there are the poems written in Bellagio, Italia, 1993, accompanied by pen-and-ink sketches of Villa Serbelloni, followed by a haibun (prose and poetry interspersed) occasioned by a first visit to Japan on a 2004 fellowship grant. Mastery! 

The next sequence features “Eros in Thanatos” poems, which of course the desirous poet himself best ushers in:

“In the realm of the senses, feelings are first and intensest. There the faun makes his bed.

“All the above just to put in a frame of a kind the following folio of poems I have orchestrated, so to speak, with a wink and a wand.”

From this folio, we quote one poem in full, not because it’s brief or briefest, but owing to our own allegiance to the efficacy (and efficiency) of a near taciturn slant demarcating the first-person mythos of a privacy setting.  

“Lagoon”: “At the appointed hour and/ agreed-at place—/ always the blue heron/ of your not coming/ stands on the tabletop/ that begins to turn into water/ at my elbows// if not for this mind’s wings/ beating it back/ to glass”

A series of ekphrastic poems on Davao artists’ works also includes photos of the art — perhaps intentioned as a prelude to the concluding section of “prose-y” Davao poems, his most recent  in response to “violence and death,” including a poem in Filipino (“Balai Pequeño”).

This plucky, lucky 7th poetry book by De Ungria furthers more than upholds his tradition of excellence. What more can we say but toast “Prosit!” to his now increasingly nurtured art of cadencing the occasional tripwire farther and farther away from the poetically obtuse thus accursed?

We know it to be of German(-efficiency) use, “Prosit,” but it comes from Latin, literally meaning “May it benefit.” This formidable collection should do just that to lovers of poetry, inclusive of apprentices dipping their fingers into it — oh such fields of possible electrocution! That is, if wet and without the terse eloquence — the treasure that brims the magical memory cups of Ricardo M. de Ungria. 

Come to the launch, where Fil-Am writer Almira Gilles who leads the Adverbum writers retreat group will present the book, which will then be introed by Jimmy Abad, followed by readings through the book-signing. Among the poet-friends invited to read Ricky’s poems are Butch Dalisay, Ed Maranan, Marne Kilates, Marj Evasco, Alice Sun Cua, RayVi Sunico, Juaniyo Arcellana, Lourd de Veyra, Alma Anonas-Carpio, and this buddy — while Ricky’s cousin Tad Ermitaño is expected to conduct some electronic audio tripping. To m’mory! 

Then we all troop to Powerbooks in Greenbelt 4, Makati City, for the 4 p.m. launch of Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta’s second poetry book, Burning Houses: Poems (also from UST Publishing House). The event is organized by the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (BNSCWC) of De La Salle University, in partnership with UST Publishing House and Powerbooks.

Katigbak-Lacuesta won first prize in the Philippines Free Press poetry contest in 2007, and third and second prizes for poetry in English (2005, 2008) from the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. Her first collection, The Proxy Eros, was short-listed for the National Book Award by the Manila Critics Circle in 2008. She is editor of the Metro Serye series, an anthology of poems and stories in a road-map format. She is also DLSU BNSCWC Associate Director for Poetry.

Mookie was in my first Poetry class in Ateneo, way back in 2002, if I recall right, when I first marvelled at a poem of hers set in Michigan. But I have had nothing to do with her gift, except perhaps to encourage her to turn it on full wolverine blast! Oh, and she met her would-be husband, prize-winning fiction writer Sarge Lacuesta, at our dining room during an evening of callos and single malt whisky. That one of the godsons I am now privileged to set a Christian example for is their son Lucas ought to be part of full disclosure.

Let me assure everyone however that all that is not why I will now rave over Mookie’s stuff, which is already so full, and fully disclosed, as with “The Half of It”:

“Oh, I could go on, dear reader./ In metaphor: the road is long but I’ll soldier it./ In simile: the road is like life but like a soldier I’ll soldier on./ Paradox: the inanimate road is strangely life-like./ Irony: I’ve never dsliked anything so intimately as this road./ Which, as you’ve read, is like life, or, if you like, is life itself./ Reversal: I have come to like this road./ Ambiguity: read this how you like.//

“Everything that I’ve told you is true, and I’ve told it/ As best a human can: in four parts and endless metaphors./ But if you insist on baring wounds, I’ve shown you mine;/ Now show me yours—which is a way of saying,/ Be tender despite everything.//

“When you tell me the story of your life and I tell you mine,/ You will lose me somewhere and that is part of the point./ The thing is, even lovers are unfamiliar. And so I’ll end/ With the five words only known by the extravagant/ Number of anyone who’s ever lived, the only part/ In this story that’s true, which is this, dear berth/ In the hip: you don’t know, do you.”

O, laban kayo riyan?

Ha ha! So happy for Mookie the young poet is this compadre, who long-toothed recognizes the claws and fangs earned from constant application of tenderness.

In today’s poetry, the magic is in the telling of ordinary stories with the signature of one’s own voice. Sentiments confirm the affinities and the contagion. Toughness and tenderness coalesce into a mock-precious game of charade. Early wisdom, too, is not proffered as pretense, but at the price of the present, the now, the moment’s cognition.

Themes, concerns, leitmotifs are a dime-a-dozen. But singular is that translation into one’s own code of adages. The persona affirms her role as only she can. Listen:

From “Fable of the Southern Wives”: “When a wife calls her husband Husband,/ Rice hails in the throw; saplings grow// lean boughs on their young geeen./ When a wife calls her husband Husband,// tempests clear out mangoes in wet groves; hale trees are felled by lightning.// Between them, years are secret snares/ waiting to spark. When a wife sets a house// on fire, she burns old lives, turns to cinder/ and ash old years. Husbands are survived.”  

This is also a book that’s remarkably strong in its tribute to fathers, and sons, her own, and her husband’s — as well the memory of bittersweet growth. 

From “The Spaces We Leave Empty”: “… Each time is the first time. Each time/ there is a song your father used to play so loud// you could hear him two blocks down the street,/ the steady canter of his drive easing into the music.// Each time you leave a space so that you’re ten years old again,/ opening the gates, letting him ease nto the drive.// Each time you break your heart better, the gravel smoothens,/ The hurt young sparrow in the garden sings. And you ask him,/ Where have you been, I’ve been waiting all day. Come in.”

We hope to enter again and again these portals of welcome to a poetry that keeps leaping from strength to strength — not the maturity of plain and simple domestication, but rather blessed with precocious insights into all the worlds of union.

Another comadre, the illustrious Fil-Am poet-writer Luisa A. Igloria, buttresses whatever token subjectivity may have been betrayed. She writes of this book: “(T)he poet continues the exploration of those themes which she first took up in The Proxy Eros: the lives of the body in love, in relationship with self and/or other. In this new work, however, the poet’s voice has acquired more complex richness, a resonance made possible by her willingness to deeply live the questions that language details… Here is a poet who is wise beyond her years, whose address of contemporary life and its postmodern predicaments is unsentimental without jettisoning tenderness.”

We would also have to agree with Daryll Delgado, who writes of Burning Houses: “It makes a statement about how poetry is about the insistence of poetry.”

Readers at the launch will include Husband Sarge, the horrible crooks Jimmy Abad and me, Glenn Mas, Joel Salud, Anina Abola, and the poet’s students Jam Pascual and Bea Osmeña.

Insistence. Constancy. Consistency. Fluency. Quiet eloquence. Fresh and new. How many wonderful poets we have, because of these hallmarks they abide by. Besides Ricky and Mookie, you know who you are. And don’t worry, I’ll get around to your bravely foolish stuff, too.