Gathering for Hopkins

I delivered my paper on “The Hopkins Influence on SouthEast Asian Poetry” on Monday, July 22 at the Newbridge College theater where the 26th International Festival of the Gerald Manley Hopkins Society was conducted for the most part.

Preceding me for the morning presentations was Professor William Adamson of the University of Ulm in Germany, whose paper was simply titled “To R.B.” — in reference to Robert Bridges, the friend and mentor to whom Hopkins had sent his early verse, and who, as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, became instrumental in publishing Hopkins posthumously. 

Now, for the uninitiated but would-be Googler, Wikipedia will tell you that “Gerald Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.”

He pioneered in escaping the constraints of what he called “running rhythm” — or what was the fashionably strict metric verse of the time, which relied on a regular sing-song quality as provided by, say, iambic pentameter (ta-RAN ta-RAN ta-RAN ta-RAN  ta-RAN). An example would be Shakespeare’s popular “Shall-I / com-PARE / thee-TO / a-SUM / mer’s DAY?”

Hopkins varied the prosody or rhythmic patterns of stress and intonation, as in his poem “Pied Beauty”:

“Glory be to God for dappled things—/ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;/ For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/ Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;/ Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;/ And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim…”

Here the first line is all dactyls (the opposite of iambs), followed by a couple of lines in iambic hexameter. And then the next lines turn varied in their use of metrical feet.

If you think all those are much like dental terms, hover closer like the wind to the idea of syncopation in terms of musical beat. Aw, heck, suffice it to say, as some of us keepers of the lyrical faith like to say, that poetry aspires to music.

In Hopkins’ case, he struck away from what may pejoratively be branded as nursery rhymes and rhythms, and forged something that would be comparable these days to Astor Piazzolla’s jaggedly cadenced versions of the tango.

Sprung rhythm! Ha-ha! Hopkins also spiced his poetry with neologisms and portmanteaus, meaning freshly invented words and compound words, respectively. The latter sometimes he didn’t hyphenate; other times he did, as with the phrase “dapple-dawn-drawn falcon…” You’ll note the alliteration, of which he was almost Agnew-fond. Other poetry/dental terms f/or tricks of the trade, such as assonance, onomotopoeia, internal besides end rhymes, also became common features of his poetry.

And oftentimes I like to think he simply played (around) — with words, stresses, diction, inflection, so that the whole caboodle could sometimes sound like a hip-hopping, sputtering locomotive, e.g. (from “Pied Beauty”) “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;/ As tumbled over rim in roundy wells/ Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s/
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;…”

Ha-ha. Methinks now that if and when I return to Newbridge next year for a repeat participation in the wonderful Hopkins fest, my next paper would be on “Hopkins and Hip-hop Cum Rap.”

Anyway, on that Monday exactly a fortnight ago, for the allotted presentation time of half an hour, I cited several confreres in the furtive business of Philippine poetry in English, plus a poet-friend from Singapore — as examples of what could be or likely was the Hopkins influence.

I began my paper with a recollectoon of how last May in Dumaguete, the Siliman University National Writers Workshop had a midweek excursion to Bais City and its bay for lechon lunch on a sandbar, and primarily for watching dolphins at play in the sea. And how it had occasioned a Hopkins experience.

The older folks that were us panelists were on one pumpboat, while the young fellows were on another. Surely they had their fun while gliding across Tañon Strait. So did we, especially when the incorrigible trio of Jimmy Abad, Marj Evasvo and balik-fellow Ceres Abanil started reciting poems from memory. To the wind! And to our delight! Why, Dokirok Jim even sprung a surprise by doing Hopkins “God’s Grandeur!?” Or was it the Kingfisher poem?

Anyway, I recounted all that as a backgrounder on our familiarity with the Newbridge conference subject. Then I said the following:

“… I can vouch for an ear for music that has been the birthright of every single Filipino.

 â€œWhen I teach poetry to college students, I make sure that they learn the fundamentals, only after which they may break the early rules, as I say, inclusive of the use of iambs, trochees, anapest and dactyl. And to keep them entertained, I point out the Beatles’ lyrics for When I’m 64 as a sample of the anapestic line: “What / would you do / if I sang /out of tune?”

“… We still train our eyes and ears towards happenstance occurrences among the lines in poems — until we manage to rationalize that certain parts were augmented or enhanced in terms of musicality by the presence of generally iambic meter, or as happens most frequently, a line that may start out with two iambs, move on to an anapest, and even end in a dactyl  — ta-RAN / ta-RAN / ta-ta-RAN / RAN-tan … Or, say, anapests bookending a couple of iambs, even only accidentally, so that what you get, metrically, musically, would be somethng like

“And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.” Hopkins.

“Incidentally, as I started to write this paper, what should I find suddenly appearing on my News Feed in Facebook but a poem written by a Filipina who now heads the creative writing deartment in Old Dominion University in Florida? Her name is Luisa Igloria, she is very prolific, has won many literary prizes, has had maybe 8 or 9 poetry collections published, writes a poem a day and all that…

“… The poem of hers that she posted was titled ‘99 LINES’ and was dedicated to her mother, or so says the postscript In memoriam, at the end of her poem. But what do you know? She also uses an epigram. Appearing below the poem title is the line:

“’…áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.’ ~ ‘Pied Beauty,’ Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Let me read some of her lines, even if not exactly fashioned à la Hopkins, yet revealing certain touches…

“For doors unbarred and locks unlatched at first light/ For gentle rumbling within rooms as bodies pulled out of the station of sleep/ For the shuffling of slippered feet on creaking floors
… // For the woman who squeezed milk from her breasts/ into the child’s eye because she had conjunctivitis …// For the night you cried I think you cried/ what was it for you cried sitting by yourself/ on the porch in your kamiseta/ For the dream that visits as if to say this time/ is that time and some things do not change …”
 

I started with the lady, Luisa, then followed that up with brief excerpts from several Filipino poets in English (our limited space here behooves me to excerpt those excerpts:

Gémino H. Abad’s “How Our Towns Drown”: “How in the downpour our towns drown,/ downstream of doom to sea we are returned,/ houses and pigs in ceaseless procession/ as skies boom and fall thundering spears/ to beat down all curses and tears to tide —/ among seaweed and driftwood and water hyacinths, prayer-wreaths for the dead and the drowned,// downstream of doom to sea we are returned./ Tottering over manholes, shivering in the blast/ of a blind monsoon, its hollow howl/ the rolling dreariness of our emptied hills,/ our feet doubt their ground where streets/ vanish in the gorge and swill of slime —/to flood at last we are flotsam and scum,// … how in the downpour our towns drown.”

Cirilo F. Bautista’s excerpt from Telex moon  (Part Three)

“The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus”: “In the begininng God was pain in the void,/ a cosmic wound pulsing with brilliant blood/ like a poem, like the bullets floating in/ my flesh after the smoke, the existent// who is non-existent. To say that of man/ or of any categoric being,/ is only to philosophize, …// The sea crawls as it ought to crawl,…// To say/ of this City that it is the City/ of God favored by the cross-sticks and cross-lights/ Aramaic, is to dress violence// in pied puppetry...”

“’Pied puppetry’ indeed. I also read Cirilo’s poem ‘The Fountains at Villa D’Este, Tivoli’ — because I love to read it, starting with the brilliant first line: ‘As if he owned the ocean./…’”

Ricardo de Ungria’s “Platonic”: “… Most everything’s stove-dry to touch,/ odorless, warm, unkempt with husks// Unknown to all but their fever-shy/ surfaces, fuck-stuck or just clinging on// To keep up all appearances of norm and virtue./ From wingspan to widgets, cool wind// Is but a dream, like mangosteen and rain./ Sheen is its own sweat, seeds drone in air,// And shadows cast still other shadows./ Spit dries before it hits the ground.// Greater forces must be settling/ differences. So will I, drunk// Only with the furnace of day, go out,// pick on gods or punk and start a fight.”

Of course I’ll cite my best buddies in poetry. But they do offer exemplary examples. And I had fun reading this paper. But I’ve run out of space here, so I will reserve the excerpts from three other poets — Jose Garcia Villa, Jolico Cuadra, and Alvin Pang of Singapore — for next week.

Oh, but the Hopkins conference/fest was indeed much fun. We also read our own poems, and in a special pub night, were asked to read our favorite Hopkins poems, one each. Co-Pinoy delegate Ditas Antenor did “Spring and Fall: To A Young Child.” I did “Windhover.” This was at O’Rourke’s Bar. Our fellow pub crawlers said we were both quite courageous to read two of the most popular, therefore heavily read, Hopkins poems. But that not only did we acquit ourselves well (with help from Guinness stout and Aberlour single malt whisky), but that our versions were both superb. No kidding! You know the Irish. They’re always serious. Especially with poetry.

Slainte!