THE CONDITION OF PHILIPPINE VERSE A the outset, let me state that although Iam essentially a humanist (asall my work will testify) and believe in kindness in human relations, I think this virtue has no place in criticism. Itis in this sense that the critic is impersonal; he maintains esthetic distance and looks at an object only for itself. I begin this essay this way because what I have to say may sound very unkind. The title of this piece says “Philippine verse.” That is intentional; J do not think there is a poetry in the Philippines. Although a prose already exists (chronologically Mangahas, Rotor, Arguilla, Gonzalez, Joaquin), a valid poetry is nonexistent. The Philippines will have a poetry only when valid poems are written. Right now, in the condition of aspiring, the right term is Verse, But there is good verse and bad verse, and bad verse and poor verse. How does one differentiate between them? The axial point of all art is craft: therefore it is craftsmanship that will distinguish the good from the poor and the bad, ptovided of course that we have the awareness for craftsmanship, But between the bad and the poor? What then is bad art and what is poor art? J think that is bad art which is pure ineptitude, pure incapacity, and therefore of complete inval- idity. And that is poor art where, in spite of technical or vehicular inad- equacy, a certain residual vitality persists. Thus I would call Sandburg a poor poet, but Edgar Guest a bad poet. It is on this basis that I find Philippine verse not even good verse— i.e,, it is not even good verse but mostly bad verse and avery little of poor verse. Manalang, Tarrosa, Santos, Mafio, Zulueta are not simply poor poets but bad poets and high it is time to abandon the polite fiction that they are poets. Perhaps [the only proficient poet] is Joaquin, although his Going by the allusions, especially for Tarrosa Subido’s article (“Why I Have Stopped Writing Poetry,” Saturday Mirror Magazine, 10 January 1953, 7), one can infer that Villa wrote this essay in the 1950s, 294EEE THE CONDITION OF PHILIPPINE VERSE | eet unsatisfactory, sometimes downright bad and ridiculous as a a verse requires fortitude, I have found. Although far from the sylvan nonsensities of Mendez, although it has relieved its scrotal sabia although it has abandoned unicellular language—its subtrac- apport somes ie doe Te interesting they succeed onl in bes and unpardonable; far from even being lary wretched. Me. Viray’ y in being exteresting, since they are so spectacu- y . Mr. Viray’s big haul accordioned into his anthologies [is] lyrics of the purest lead, not even brass—since they have no glow whatever, poverties in the guise of poetry.” The greatest central deficiencies in Philippine verse are its intellectual tenuity and emotional incompetence. A basic intelligence is lacking—the in- telligence behind the imagination, There is, in good poetry, always an intelli- gence at work behind the creativity; and this intelligence brings forth in the m an intellectual fabric, a sinew, a weave, let us say, behind the weave of words: a gird of mind and spirit: a backbone of thinking personality. The emotional incompetence I speak of does not mean that Filipino poets do not know what emotion is, for every human being knows what emotion is. What I mean is that their emotions are incompetent because induced for the wrong object or induced disproportionately. This, added to the prosodical inefficiency, [leaves matter mere matter and results in] inert experience. Emotion in art, to be registrable, requires the discipline of intelli- gence and the transmutation into esthetic emotion, emotion refined by form and control and translated unto form itself: raw emotion is not esthetic emo- tion, and for the purposes of art is noneffectual. Bad emotional poems yield no emotion. Thus Manalang,s sentimentalism, Tarrosa,s heart-in-the-throat emotionalism, Fidel de Castro,s divine excursions—all remain excursions, outside the in-realm of esthetic emotion and outside the [illegible]. Not alone is the metaphysical cement lacking in Castro, but the basic emotional which yields proportion and rightness of feeling, is lacking. For the reality of emotion in art is not the raw conceiving emotion of the artist fined, disciplined and finally concretized in the work as but this emotion re onct . part of the wisdom of the artist, re-realizable again in the work for being realized there. competence, of the end stop and the gap in the typescript suggest that Villa was planning to quote from Joaquin but did not have the passage at hand. villa was eeferring to Viray’s Heart ofthe Island: An Anthology of Philippine Poetry in English (Manila: University Publishing Co. 1947)- See Villa’s letter in appendix F for more of his comments on the book. 1. The absence 295THE CONDITION OF PHILIPPINE VERSE The externalization or verbalization of Philippine verse is even worse, First: there is no form, as regards the totality as a unit: ie., there is no struc. ture, no structural form: the so-called poem is mere ,,expression,, Le., mere jotting down without the intermediary of discipline and the ee, This Lazybone technique—is the same as having no technique. e lack of an executive imagination is as great in the Filipino poet as his lack of the conceiy- ing imagination. The result [is] poems of simon-pure incompetence, where the vehicle is inoperative. For all Manalang,s strivings after ,correctness,, and classicism, her poems answer only to a peasant conception of art, [a highschooler,s penny-art conception] of classicism. They are in the most rudimentary and mechanical versification, the crudest state of poetic level; and as for Zulueta,s modern abandons, they are sure as verse death-plunges, Second: Philippine poets being unacculturated to both the internal and the external objectives of poetry, their verses are purely statemental. Philippine verse is always in the declarative. They [the verses] can only state and declare: Whereas it is the virtue of poetry to say what is unexpressed.* To the unexpressed belongs the inexpressible, the mysterious core and heart of poetry. Third: It is in the realm of language, the very medium of poetry, where the Filipino poet is utterly lost. Here his sensory inefficiency is so great that as word-handler he is spectacularly four-fourths ham: either his language is at the most fossil state (as in Manalang or Tarrosa) or, being ambitious, he essays to create a poetic language through ,,vocabulary,—i.e., new coinages, new uses, the startling word—and achieves only the ludicrous and Preposter- ous, the absurd and wretched (as in Zulueta, de Castro, etc). The effect, despite the poet,s seriousness, is to excite the risibles: it is comical, not comic. (Edward Lear,s poems are comic and yet not comical. [ Manalang’s, Tarrosa’s, Santos’, Zulueta’s] poems are all comical—like tramps caparisoned in for- mulas.°) This unconscious humor, this caricatural quality, springs from nonidentification with language and results in unliter: cy. So poor is the Filipino poet,s managerial ability with English words that, when not comical, he kills whatever resident life is in the word originally! Through misuse of language he demolishes even the original vigor of words 3- In the typescript, the clause is preceded by “Handicapped majorly and centrally by these inner requisites of poetry”—a dangling modifier 4+ Cf “First, a Poem Must Be Magical” (Poems by Dovigion [Manila: Philippine Writers’ League, 1940], 45): “It is what I never said, / What I'll always sing” (ll, 1-2). 5. It is interesting that Salvador P. Lopez had earlier raised the same point against Villa’s “Poems for an Unhumble One” (see “On Villa's Poetic Credo,” Philippine Magazine, August 1933, 96-97, 116-117), “ 296Po PPE eS eer THE CONDITION OF PHILIPPINE ‘VERSE and leaves them verbal husks. On the other hand, the ambitious Filipino poet, wword-tangles, a wranguage,, but himself unincorporate wih the lan- ages cones words til they are completely uglified. His words, monsters exaneous a a ae las Constitutive and harmonic rightness icceet mi : = Y eal ‘ouch, g his lines leprous. The words are in hemorrhage wi — avduak ea anart of fine thinking and of word selection— itis a In Philippi kpetes(ultes the finest sensory ear and requires hat- monics. In PE rep verse there is an absolute lack of harmonics, with the result that = ws hes y graceless—and, as I said in an essay long ago—grace is the very sign of the true poet. It is in the poet,s music that the poet,s grace is most shown. Zulueta is not only absolutely , deaf, in poetry—he is absolutely devoid of any true poetic quality. Manalang’s “nunc isthe cuckoo-clock nek te singsong, a ready-made prefabricated rhythm like the hairdresser,s “perma- nent waves : in fact, when she gets this way she is like a motor running, a continuous monotonous chain reaction. The culturally underdiscerning are mesmerized, find this not only “music” but “finish and elegance” —but I shall confess to finding Manalang’s thythms simply repulsive. This semieducated thythm of hers, of course, is heavenly compared to Tarrosa’s, whose voice is sheerest gravel. I cannot help interpolating here my reaction to Miss Tarrosa’s recent explanation on why she stopped writing poetry: “There is no readership for poetry,” she complains. I should like to believe that she has stopped writing poetry for the reason that she is simply no poet and has confused her youth- ful enthusiasm for poetry for the gift itself No poet writes because of an audience; he writes poetry because he cannot help himself. It is well then that Miss T has retired to her matronage. The activation of poetry is from creativ- ity itself, which is internal and subjective, and not external factors of reward or audience. Of music in poetry, it must be realized that it is not an independent element. No element in poetry is independent of the others: so much [are] their interrelation and interdependence, so great [are] the interaction and tension between each element, that poetry “is the most ambitious act of the mind.” And I say this, not because I write poetry myself and wish to com- mend my own sphere of work, but because it is a fact. Poetry requires the whole mind, the whole man: all his wisdom, all his experience, and all his skill. A poet is a poet all of the time and with his whole being. Where an engineer ora chemist or a clerk ceases being so at the end of his day, the poet remains 6. See the second part of “The Status of Philippine Poetry.” 297| a THE CONDITION OF PHILIPPINE VERSE a poet all his 24 hours, awake and asleep. He is a poet even when asleep and sleeping he is awake.” fmusici Thave brought up the nonindependence of | the element of bara in poetry because in Philippine verse, where there is ,music,, as in Manalang,s—few tealize that the music has to be integral with the poetry, and not extraneous, Therefore does the true poet work to achieve appropriate modulation of | his music to tone or meaning. The Filipino poet is unaware of this and tries to achieve, if he can, an independent music; but music in poetry must go with the rhythm of the blood of the poem. (For ex.: Manalang,s To a Colum. nist,” a censuring poem, is in a very frolicsome meter, so inappropriate to the tone of what she has to say.) Fifth: One must also note the tuberculous grammar lameness of most Filipino poets. It is not that they fracture or dislocate meaning, in those up- to-date and ambitious enough to do so, but that whether they intend to fracture language deliberately or not, the simplest straight construction comes out mangled from sheer syntactical ignorance. Without the ability to com- pose a straight sentence even in prose, to affect the difficult grandeurs of expert poets is to expertize ludicrously. In such a case it is not only unliteracy but illiteracy present. There is a literate group, however, among those who write verse. But their trouble is that they are such flat poets—i.e., of so uninspired a constitution that they really have no business with poetry. Exhibiting literacy and me- chanical proficiency, their poems drone in flat prostration, flat as pancakes and very dull. Such is the flatfoot verse of Edith Tiempo. Summary. On the whole, Philippine verse is of an utter impossibility. Inefficient poems but not fully accomplished poems, II Is there any prospect for a poetry in English by Filipinos? My answer is in the negative. A very great block, the block of the English language itself, exists between the Filipino and the poetry he wants to write. 7. CE Villa quoted by Arcellana: “I willed to be a Poet is the highest thing, the hardest thing to be. There is nothing I would rather be” ("The Short Story,” in Antonio G. Manuud, ed. Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature [Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967], 608). But later after abandoning poetry for poctica, he told Leonidas Benesa, Poetry up to now, you have not grown, Poetry is for the immatu: (Villa: Portrait of the Poet as a Painter,” Asia-Ph poet. I willed to be a poet because a “If you are still writing re, art is for the young” ilippines Leader, 28 May 1971, 21). 298