Adam & the eve of our poetry: Read Doveglion

One night recently, I broke tradition and actually purchased a local title, a book of poetry at that.

Darn these indie productions. The usual reverence for my erstwhile membership in the Manila Critics Circle that hands out annual National Book Awards is blithely tossed out the window. Used as we are to being swamped with piles of freebie Filipiniana year in and year out, it’s a shock when one’s seduced into actually paying for a young Filipino’s debut collection of poetry.

Well, that happened in Mag:net Katips, amid the poetic concatenation of Benmore whisky glasses clinking and the all-poets band Los Chupacabras regaling the bar habitués with highly audible if melodic obscenities...yes, all that helped the sale along. 

That the young poet from Cubao and UP was named Adam, and that he had produced his own first book, sold us, plain and simple. Oh, and he had a lady prodding our ribs with a sample elbow of gung-ho critical appraisal. Which turned out to be valid, once we opened the book The El Bimbo Variations by Adam David (published by The Youth & Beauty Brigade, 2008) to its first page of poetry, titled “Reductive”: “Kamukha mo dati/ si Paraluman.”

Wait, no, the book’s not entirely in Filipino; it’s bilingual, with rock ‘n’ roll riffs thrown in. Languages don’t really matter much when universal deference to words and how they interact with one another, let alone with hearers and readers, is given the pink bimbo slip.

The poet says he owes the title, the first poem and its variegated spin-offs, and perhaps all other antic affectations to the first line from the lyrics of Ang Huling El Bimbo by the Eraserheads. “Ninety-nine retellings” in all, per the back-cover text — “from the conversational to the poetic to the abstract to the graphic, all the while keeping intact the original line’s poetic and narrative breadth and width.”

Thus: “Antonymy”: “Hindi niya kamukha si Paraluman/ ngayong sila ay matanda na.” And “Another Point of View”: “Kamukha ko si Paraluman/ nang kabataan namin.” And “Subtle Insight”: “Maganda ka dati.” And “Synonymous”: “Kahawig mo si Atang de la Rama/ nung may gatas pa tayo sa labi.” And so forth.

Thence, “Spoonerisms”: “Your lace fu*ks a lit bike hers/ when we your wang.”

“Gertrude Stein”: “Gleam seems merely violet.”

“James Joyce”: “riverrun, past Why and If, from swerve of Gee to bend of Eh, brings us by a sea of recirculation back to Genuine Amour and Co.”

“Acronymic”: “Exuberant loneliness/ bosoms in motion beyond observation.”

“Limerick”: “There once was a girl from Bulacan/ Shook her hips like no other girl can/ To cha-cha and boogie/ Bebop and rocksteady/ Back when she looked like Paraluman.”

Follow trad-form take-offs such as on the American haiku, the koan, the Tagalog diona and tanaga, etc., as well as instances of concrete poetry, where typographical shape/form becomes as much a consideration as line content, as with “Square Poem” (influenced by Lewis Carroll), all the way to framed and bold-ened words/letters, a “Comic Strip,” a “Chordbook”...

In the back-of-the-book “Notes On these Pages” that draws up an invaluable map for the peripherally perplexed (and which supplies more words than the poems themselves multiplied tenfold), Adam David acknowledges his book’s “great debt to Raymond Queaneau, Georges Perece, Marc Madden, and the entire roster of the Oulipo” — which in turn “stands for Ouvroir de Littérateur Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature... founded by Queaneau and François le Lionnais in France in 1960, hoping to address the apparent potential of using ordered logical systems (i.e. mathematics) to produce literature.”

There’s so much more to share on this movement that marries “math with lit” — but like Adam you can Wiki or Google it yourself. Suffix (?) it to say that the litany of adventurous, nay, venturesome, aphorisms (one to a page, with much blank space left over) that constitute this cycle of poems might be considered as brave new lit’s in-your-face take on venture capital.

It can delight, it can make you smile, it can confound, it can elicit a dismissive snort, unless the gains are appreciated as the evolutionary way.

Indeed, in the Note on Gertrude Stein, Adam offers the raison d’etre, however moot its need: “... Stein reduced poems to their most basic units of meaning — words — and in doing so attacked the ‘denotation of words’... Thus, “... the reader is forced to question the meaning of words, to become reacquainted with a language that Stein thought had become dulled by long use.”

Dulled by long use. Aye, there’s the rub-a-dub-dub key to evolutionary/revolutionary counter-diction, as to any extended narrative legalese or fictive SONA (such as today’s), or even, shucks, good old poetry. 

Myriad’s the menu for reactionary poses: (1) appreciate the playfulness, as Intro writer Conchitina Cruz suggests (“Resistant to paraphrase, comfortably bilingual, and casual in its blending of high art and pop culture, it confronts and provokes big questions about language, form and content, originality and other such matters while remaining lighthearted, entertaining, and accessible.”); (2) believe the above and seek out the author somewhere in Cubao or UP to ask for a copy, I mean ask to buy a copy (‘twas Printed on Demand by Central Book Supply Inc, Phoenix Bldg., 927 Quezon Avenue, Q.C.); (3) DIY, and see if you at least get to look as Buddhist as Adam, LOL!; (4) dismiss it as child’s play, an easy way out of the supposed rigors of discipline required by mainstream “page poetry”; and/or (5) turn the other cheek, and tolerate the likes (ilk?) of Adam David. 

Nearly 80 years ago, another Filipino poet took the eve of our poetry to another level, climbing up a coconut tree in the UP campus and himself emerging as the wily serpent consumed by teats, yes, nipples better than apples. Sundry fruits of the tree of courage, experimentation and delight took him abroad, where as an imagined dove, eagle and lion he parlayed his poetic gifts, his playfulness with words (and ideas!) into ludic heights of an intoxicating lyricism — rife with supple-surreal imagery, antic imagination, and exuberant brilliance of the first water. 

Oh how he divined language and played with language. He hid it and sought it, exclaimed “Pung!” and “Save!” whenever he uncovered the gods he created and teasingly concealed. He played Trip to Jerusalem with them, with muses and duendes as well. He indulged in Kick the Can with divinity, with notions of love and lust, with Himself as sparkplug of all that he created as a mythic poet-persona called Doveglion.

That poet, José Garcia Villa, comes back to hunt us (not haunt) in the complacency of our days. He is back, in town (or will soon be), courtesy of a Penguin Classics paperback edition titled Doveglion: Collected Poems (published by Penguin Books, with an Introduction by Luis H. Francia and edited by John Edwin Cohen).   

Here are the poems from Have Come, Am Here (Villa’s first collection, The Viking Press, 1942) — with that luminous first poem, No. 1 of the suite Lyrics: I (“It is what I never said/ What I’ll always sing —/ It’s not found in days,/ It’s what always begins/ In half dark, in half light./ It’s shining so curved/ Yet rises so tall and tells/ Where the first flower dove/ When God’s hands lost love./ It’s a great word without sound/ Without echo to reveal/ Where fragrance went down!/ O, but it’s all of it there/ Above my poems a Wreath.”); from Volume Two (New Directions, 1949), re-versified by the author and “reprinted here as they appeared in Selected Poems & New” — with the famous “comma poems” (and his Note on them) and the Aphorisms, Caprices, New Poems and Adaptations, Early Poems...; from Appasionata, Poems in Praise of Love (King and Cowen, 1979); and finally the unpublished Duo Technique and Xocerisms (with Notes on both, as well as on his Unpublished Versification Method).

A long time coming, this book, but our wait is rewarded. It even displays the E.E. Cummings poem titled “Doveglion” — “written in praise of Jose Garcia Villa...”: “he isn’t looking at anything/ he isn’t looking for something/ he isn’t looking/ he is seeing// what// not something outside himself/ not anything inside himself/ but himself// himself how// not as some anyone/ not as any someone// only as a noone (who is everyone)”

Francia’s intro is inestimably engrossing and should prove instructive to students, teachers, and writers of poetry. Apart from tracing Villa’s life in broad strokes interspersed with precious detail, and his literary course through the New York apogee and engagement with a literary pantheon of a barkada (W.S. Auden et al.), Francia notes:

“He believed fervently in a first line that grabbed the reader’s attention. Without that initial lapel-grabber — what he termed ‘the coiled cobra’ — the poem limps along, unable to vault forward,. Once hooked, the reader continues, but the challenge for the poet is to ensure that succeeding lines sustain the initial burst of linguistic energy.” 

Villa is quoted as saying: “When your breath pauses, (the line) stops. There is no craft there. Any ignorant person can write like that; a child can write like that... Art is craft before it is meaning.”

Francia concludes: “...(O)n the centennial of his birth, this  reissuance of José Garcia Villa’s poems will accelerate the growing revival of interest in his work. There is no question that he deserves a place in the pantheon of American literature... Sadly, most current American poetry anthologies exclude him, rendering this Penguin edition all the more valuable.”

What about his “Filipino-ness?” Francia writes: “Taken to task for his insistent desire to be regarded as ‘universal’ — he was, after all, a creature of the age — wherein ‘universal’ was synonymous with the Western tradition, still he felt no obligation to display in his art overt signs of his situation in the world, believing that this was irrelevant and, moreover, lay in the province of prose.

“... In the end, what should matter most is what mattered to Villa: the words themselves, unmediated except by the reader’s own perceptions. Villa’s music, language, imagery, and versification mesh in a totality that is deeply pleasurable and magical, with an adamantine beauty that simultaneously cuts and illuminates. These poems ensorcell...(!)”

Now we make a leap — of faith in the young and intrepid.

From Villa to David, then, is a cycle of long night and early morning, when we wake and realize that dewdrops from the youth and beauty of Paraluman have recast the lyric intensity of... uhh, poetry as the unwithered vine, as de-virginity, as Doveglion’s divinity.