Read Or Die July 2007 Meeting: Love Gathers All

Still have to post about the National Conference On Children’s Literature, the launch of Teens Read Too, the LIKHAAN lecture series, etc. And the book fair is in a MONTH. Kill us now.

In the meantime, here’s a truncated report of our July 28 event at A Different Bookstore (Serendra), entitled (ex post facto) “Love Gathers All.” Much thanks again to our sponsors: the National Book Development Board, Anvil Publishing, Mr. Lew Edwards, Cyberstream, and A Different Bookstore. Thanks as well to Kenneth Yu of Philippine Genre Stories, Ex Libris UP, NWA and Komiks.ph for lending their support!

The event pretty much went according to schedule. RoD sorted a ton of business matters–this basically involved a lot of pointing and ducking under tables when it came to assigning errands–from 2PM to 4PM. Join. Us. We can has needs your help. It has been agreed that the Bagong Libro secretariat will be dressing up as the Six Wives of Henry VIII at the Book Fair. The only exception will be Rotch, who will appear as Mary, Queen of Scots, complete with a slave boy carrying her train. Since she will be in charge of everything cosplay-related, um, if you hear particularly pointed heels clacking towards you, followed by a jeweled fan narrowly missing swiping off your head (haha!), please take it as a reminder to proceed to the pre-judging area. Nothing personal, just business. Also, if you see a white-wigged, ominously ruffled, gimlet-eyed woman bearing down in your direction, that will be M as Catherine of Aragon (i.e., Logistics Head). Volunteers, take note!

Rael should be Anne Boleyn, I think. I’ll be Jane Seymour lol. Maybe we should all just come toting beheaded heads with labels.

The National Book Development Board Book Club arrived at around 4PM with Atty. Andrea Flores (the Executive Director, Erin Cabanawan (Executive Assistant), moderator Tara FT Sering, and author Romina Gonzalez. We discussed Gonzalez’s enchanting anthology “Welostit & Other Stories” (UP Press). I think more than a few members of the book club had read it already–M pronounced the collection particularly fine and we would encourage young adult readers, especially, to read it–so the discussion went smoothly. Though I was missing for a great deal of it since Ms. Joyce (of Anvil) and I were out and about looking for dislocated poets (and coffee).

(Pic c/o Arpee. L-R: Romina Gonzalez, Tara FT Sering, Andrea Pasion-Flores)

Ms. Gwen Galvez (the marketing manager of Anvil) also came with bags of chips and nuts which added to the rather domestic atmosphere of the intermission, i.e., meal time! The Bookworm Cafe served a very delicious repast–the crepes and fruit shakes? Eat and die, that’s our new motto! A Different Bookstore Serendra really is a nice place for literary gatherings of this sort. Dean Alfar’s LitCritters conduct their bimonthly meetings in the store. While this was our first time hosting a meeting in ADB, it turned out to be our most memorable. We should thank the store management–Mr. Chito Bauzon (marketing manager) and Ms. Catherine Lopez-Uy (bookstore owner)–and the staff, of course, for making sure that we had everything we needed and for providing such a conducive atmosphere. I think they’re open to other groups hosting their meetings in the store so just contact them at 8560330 if interested.

Back to the meeting: Sarge Lacuesta and Mookie Katigbak had also arrived by then, followed closely by Marra PL Lanot and Pete Lacaba. Teo Antonio had arrived early with the Anvil staff, wearing his ubiquitous beret. You could sense people imploding from some shared sense of expectancy though we settled our stomachs–and nerves–with even better coffee. I’ve always been a huge fan of Mr. Lacaba so having him there was both gratifying and unsettling at the same time. And though Teo Antonio had conducted a balagtasan in RodCon with Mike Coroza, I didn’t see any of it since I was too busy losing my mind over the logistics of the convention, so I was personally looking forward to listening to his poetry (which I admire tremendously), at last.

The poetry reading began at around 6PM. In her opening remarks, Ms. Gwen Galvez noted that it was the perfect time and place for such a gathering–a thunderstorm outside, nowhere to go, good poetry in the offing, and coffee in the sideboard.

Mr. Lacuesta and Ms. Katigbak both read from “Love Gathers All,” a beautiful collection of poetry by Filipino and Singaporean poets published by Anvil and Ethos Press. Ms. Katigbak read Ramon Sunico’s moving “Wet Sonnet” (the weather proved more cooperative than expected by providing the apposite sound effects with a loud thunderclap in the middle of the reading) and Mr. Lacuesta evoked memories of his father and shared afternoons with “Sundays At The Harbor.”

Ms. Lanot read from “Witch’s Dance at Iba Pang Tula,” her renowned collection of Spanish, Filipino and English poems (Anvil Publishing). She read “Tadyang,” a soft, brutal commentary on the language of love, and “Ako’y Ibigin Mo, Lalaking Matapang,” a feminist narrative of the perverse and perverted sexual nature of colonialism. The audience prevailed upon her to read one of her Spanish poems, which she did with charming hesitation, a short poem called “Como Quieras.” She also read a poem which she crafted as a response to Pablo Neruda though the title escapes me now (Karen took more judicious notes, I think, and should be coming along to edit this entry because I’m not sure if my illegible notes are up to par. I fail).

Pete Lacaba followed with poems from “Edad Medya (Anvil Publishing),” a pungent and humorous collection of poetry about the attritions and (dubious) joys of encroaching middle age. Mr. Lacaba began with a provocative question which set the tenor of his reading: “Are there minors in the audience?” which elicited predictable howls of denial (and bad puns about virgin ears). Mr. Lacaba read briskly and with a celebrated screenwriter’s ear for good pacing. His poems retain something of a cinematic precision–a man wryly recounting the various ills (the itis) of his aging body, a satirical catalog of the ways of whores, the scene of a lovers’ denouement. It would be interesting to compare his poetic language with that of Marra Lanot (his ‘roommate), I think. Lanot’s poetry, despite being very pure in form, retains the baroque and sinuous curvatures of the romantic mode, which might or might not be an inevitable function of being a trilingual poet. Her predecessors are Pablo Neruda, Francisco Arcellana and Nick Joaquin (of whom she has written a scholarly study). Lacaba’s poems are underlined with the sharply critical sensibilities which informed Orapronobis and Sister Stella, layered with symbols and paradoxes and metaphysical soliloquies.

Teo Antonio stood up to thunderous applause. He read from “Mga Tula Ng Pag-Ibig,” (Anvil Publishing) an anthology of love poems which he dedicated to his wife. The book itself is out of print, which is unfortunate, because I think it contains some of Antonio’s best poems. What I find most striking about Antonio’s poetry is how so much of his language is musically and lyrically wedded to the poetic traditions of Philippine folk literature. I wonder if this is a deliberate aesthetic choice or simply an organic result of decades worth of immersing himself in native poetic forms. Like the poets he most admire–Francisco Balagtas and Jose Corazon de Jesus–Antonio is clearly meant to be heard, not really read, though some of his most dexterous compositions are nuanced, ironic, verbal puns which render well to the arduous meanderings of reading and re-reading.

A dialog with the audience followed in which issues of influence and continuity arose. While there were writers in the audience, the majority of us were readers, and readers who did not read much Filipino poetry at that. It was an enlightening session in more ways than one in the sense that I think there was a lot of honesty between readers and poets. One of our members, Emil, noted the disjunction between the poetry taught at school by educators and poetry as it has evolved in the hands of its practitioners. He asked whether rap, for example, was poetry and if so what sort of poetry was it since it violated most of the decorous requirements of canon (see Kae’s thoughts on the literary canon). If one had–forcibly or otherwise–assimilated the meters of William Shakespeare’s sonnets, one might therefore be constitutionally incapable of absorbing the ill-starred, dissonant forms of rap or street poetry. Mr. Lacaba replied that there could be ambiguous notions of morality and of the uses of poetry which were at play here, and that it wasn’t simply an issue of aesthetic preferences. What was considered sacred in poetry, and what was profane? Who should make the distinction?

Teo Antonio mentioned the delinquent youth communities of Tondo as profiled in the ground-breaking documentary “Tribu.” These young people composed scathing, transgressive and obscene poems about sex, politics, power, and personality, but there is no chance in hell that their poems would ever be mentioned in school curricula, or that these poems would be considered primarily as literary creations and not just sociological curiosities which have to be deconstructed according to the very politics which spawned them. I thought of the 19th century ladino poets of Tondo–among whom could be counted Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto along with Jose Corazon de Jesus–who for the most part declaimed their poetry in the twin contexts of drama and rebellion. Theater was inseparable from protest and the actor-poet was the harbinger of revolution. I wondered whether Emil’s perceived disjunction could be located at this very intersection between history and literature, where the sacral quality of the new nation was elevated at the cost of its profane origins, where myth was valued at the expense of play, where poetry was written and not acted upon.

It was at this point, as if on cue, that Angelo Suarez arrived, smiling and a little shy, bearing his poem, the very brazen and Shakesperean “Ako Ang World.” Suarez has been making waves (sometimes literally) in the literary scene for his idiosyncratic poetry readings and his even more daring approach to poetry, which has been given serious praise (and criticism) by his peers and established writers like Jun Cruz Reyes and Teo Antonio. Friends who have read his poetry told me that they loved Suarez’s poems because of his bravura ‘word plays,’ which loop in and around themselves in endlessly fascinating arcs. Suarez’s implied affinity with what he calls the ‘process-based’ Oulipo poets like Raymond Queaneau and Alain Robbe-Grillet is reflected in in his poetry, in which the frenetically entangled linguistic wiring short-circuits itself in a burst of objectified declaration: Ako ang world. At the same time, Suarez is obviously rooted in the works of iconoclastic Filipino poets like Alejandro Abadilla from whose poem “Ako ang daigdig” Suarez’s title epigraph is taken. The resolution of the divisive impulses current in Filipino poetry, Suarez implies, lies in closing the gap between the poem and the poet, for whom sacredness and profanity are subjective attitudes to the world at large, at rest, at war. The poem is the world, and the world is the poet, and the poem is the poet, and the poet is the world.

Needless to say, everything that followed was necessarily anti-climactic. We had some more coffee, people bought books for signing, and we noted that we should definitely do this again. One of Read Or Die’s avowed goals is to bring readers and writers together but this is the first time that we had done something like this for ourselves (second, actually, since Dean Alfar, Vin Simbulan and Andrew Drilon had spoken for us more than a year ago on speculative fiction). Ms. Gwen was also pleased and promised to help us organize another panel–this time focusing on contemporary Filipino essayists–for our next meeting. Watch out for that one. Thank you again, Anvil and NBDB!! Both institutions have been very supportive of endeavors promoting and advocating Filipino literature.

Read Or Die Meeting 7/07

(Seated on the second row — Teo Antonio, Angelo Suarez, Marra Lanot, Pete Lacaba. Sarge Lacuesta and Mookie Katigbak had to leave early).

More pictures at Mia’s Multiply and at Arpee’s blog.

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July 31, 2007 Written by: tin | Filed Under Latest, Read or Die, Events 

Comments

2 Responses to “Read Or Die July 2007 Meeting: Love Gathers All”

  1. Read Or Die Weblog » Blog Archive » Biglang Kambyo–Poetry Time! on September 27th, 2007 3:14 pm

    […] been writing down a review of Love Gather’s All: an anthology I bought during Read or Die’s July Meeting. But, um, got distracted. So I decided to make a poetry post instead. I was inspired by what has […]

  2. The Laughter of the Theologian — Biography. writers and their biography on May 30th, 2008 8:59 am

    […] 28 event at A Different Bookstore (Serendra), entitled (ex post facto) Love Gathers All source: Read Or Die July 2007 Meeting: Love Gathers All, Read Or Die […]

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