7 X 10 for a world made of verse

Launched auspiciously during world poetry day last month was this rare volume of excerpted ars poetica and found autobiography by seven Filipino poets – dare we say the leaders of the craft in the English medium – and their top 10 choices of poems that made a lasting impression, if not altogether changed their lives or way of seeing things.

7X10: World Poetry Choices by Seven Filipino Poets (Elibris Books 2003) edited by neighboring Philippine STAR columnist and all around handy man Alfred Yuson, a fact which in itself might get the reader harboring rightful suspicions of bias in this review, or is it?, is valuable in the sense that here, for all to see, are Gemino Abad, Cirilo Bautista, Marjorie Evasco, Luisa Igloria, Rowena Torrevillas, Ricardo de Ungria and Yuson himself each coming up with a list of 10 poems that stuck with them through the years, in their waking hours or in their subconscious, between adolescence and middle age, between dream and sleep and love and sex and all the precious dregs that go with the flow of a protracted, perhaps piecemeal enlightenment.

Well, what else can one say but try to be careful when treading on such tricky ground involving lists, and so proceed with caution where even angels are fearful and full of dread. We are well aware of the danger of lists entailing exclusion, because one possible choice or another is bound to be left out, and with it the accompanying howl of disapproval of self-righteous fence-sitters saying, why not this or that, or does so and so deserve to be mentioned at all, and aren’t that fellow’s choices dated? The risks notwithstanding, 7X10 cannot but be a pleasant read, and anyone who has even the slightest inclination towards poetry is likely to find at least two or three poems that ring familiar from the old college literature class days, and from which amateur lovers like us would quote a line or two to impress a sweet snobbish one, may she swoon on the lines of Rimbaud or Rilke.

We are treated to snatches of autobiography in the choices of Abad, how in his listing of poems he recounts and remembers incidents with his parents long since passed away, and mentions in passing a son gone too to the great beyond, so that we get the idea that poetry can be the last resort of succor for the unconscionable: Abad, whose essay sounds as if he’s speaking at a class or workshop, or some sundry remembrance of times past during a wake, coming down for the nonce from an imaginary ivory tower, and dealing with the mortals to convince us that, contrary to what Doming de Guzman wrote in the defunct Who Magazine, an Abad poem is not necessarily a bad poem.

And how can we bypass Bautista, Cirilo of the St. La Salle on Taft way, riding on the floods from Balic-Balic to Vito Cruz with his list that includes T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and the late Ricaredo Demetillo, now harvesting various species of potatoes in the Elysian Fields. Prufrock turns up again in the list of Yuson, just as the evening was spread out against the sky in the Dumaguete workshop of 1978, and Eliot seeped from the pores of our skin like Tanduay rhum, the better to endure the critiquing in store for our manuscripts by the experts on the panel.

The Tres Marias in Evasco, Igloria and Torrevillas form a kind of grand trine to counterpoint the grand cross of the four surviving founding members of the Philippine Literary Arts Council, and so by their very lucky seven mayhaps get another stab to rearrange the face of Philippine arts and letters.

Evasco cites a couple of riddles written in the regional dialects but herein translated by the poet herself into English, and which demonstrate that the roots of Philippine verse can be gleaned in something as old and obscure and akin to a zen koan:

From the Aetas, here’s Water: "When you cut it,/It heals without any scar."; and

From the Cebuanos, here’s Waves: "Always rolling, always rolling,/ Nothing rolled."

Evasco lists down Jellaludin Rumi as an example of the thoroughly sensual and gustatory delights of poetry, while De Ungria also lists down Rumi as an influence as far as an ear to music and the internal contrapuntal rhythms of verse are concerned.

Evasco for good measure pays tribute to the Siasi poet Anthony L. Tan, certainly one of the more underrated poets hereabouts, and whom we should hear more from especially in these post-Abu Sayyaf days.

Igloria, a poet forever reinventing herself in the true sense of the word, includes in her choices Fil-Ams Eugene Gloria and Rick Barot, the latter a kind of discovery for the random browser and occasional reader of Plato. Gloria, it will be recalled, did some graduate work at the University of the Philippines, and we recall having once run into him at ’70s Bistro with his very pretty girlfriend, they were probably getting soused a bit before stopping over at a short-time motel.

And where would an Igloria list be without Carlos "Gabu" Angeles, the late lamented dean of Filipino poets who, as Dr. Cesar Ruiz Aquino correctly noted, also exerted a considerable influence on Abad, enough for Abad to entitle a volume of a three-part anthology on Philippine poetry in English after an Angeles verse, "A Habit of Shores."

Torrevillas, long since resettled in Iowa to take up where Engle and his Midwestern muses left off, also cannot avoid being autobiographical in her choices, particularly in the mention of the National Artist Edith Tiempo’s "Mid-Morning for Sheba": "That’s Mom! That’s me! That’s me and Mom!"

Here is where verisimilitude becomes too weak a word, and where poetry imitates life imitating art, or it the other roundabout way, art imitating life imitating poetry?

Whatever your wild, Torrevillas’ exuberant list is definitely not one for the grocer’s, though there’s food for thought here too.

De Ungria, before the inspired and a bit double-taking enumeration (because without hint of remuneration?), asserts that he’s wary of such lists mainly because it reminded him of an old Rolling Stone magazine exercise on what albums you’d like to get stuck on a desert island with.

Aside from Rumi, De Ungria also cites Rimbaud, as well Rilke, admittedly translations. Then the time-defying meters of Robert Frost are given their rightful due, in fact the second time around (after Igloria) for "To Earthward." He also lists Eliot ("Four Quartets") and, perhaps recognizing a cerebrally abstract twin, Wallace Stevens ("Angels Surrounded by Paysans").

Yuson’s list is the most noteworthy in that it contains the most local choices – 50 percent or five out of his top 10. So he gives a lasting salute to Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin, Edith Tiempo, Eman Lacaba and Jun Lansang, this last one a poetic justice. "Yet sing now of beauty/Which lasts not forever…" are the opening lines of Lansang’s "Song" and the reader cannot help but sing along and recognize the music that many years later, goes beyond beauty because merely ephemeral and a moment’s seizure on the seashore. Like a glimpse of madness in the old sad sack both terribly lonely and holy. There but for the grace…