MY earliest connection with the world of poetry was during my boyhood. At age five, I used to declaim during our family reunions as well as social gatherings in our local parish. My Tatang loved to heave me up on a chair in front of everybody to display my prodigious prowess in the spoken word. From memory, with accompanying choreographed gestures, I would recite the poems of Amado Yuson and Jose Corazon de Jesus. People would never fail to shed a tear or two whenever I would recite lines from such iconic poems as “Ang Pamana” and “Ang Pagbabalik.”
Was I continuing the long lineage of the aoidos in Dark Age Greece, trained from early youth to recite their epics because human society had not yet discovered writing? Was I a forerunner of what is now called performance poetry? The truth is, I was probably just a prop used to puff up my Tatang’s pride. I was nothing more than a “performing monkey” as Antonio Salieri pejoratively described the prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
That seed planted in my childhood was forgotten, until one day in college during our Español class, it suddenly stirred up in me again and moved me to volunteer to take part in a Spanish declamation contest. As I remember, I did poorly in that contest, considering that most of my competitors were high-nosed natural Spanish speaking mestizos.
For my piece I chose “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” by Federico García Lorca. The repetition of the line “A las cinco de la tarde” (At five in the afternoon) in the said poem had a huge impact on me then. The rhythm of the repeating line reminded me of the ringing of church bells.
But every time I said the line repeatedly, I could hear the audience at the back snigger and even mockingly join me as I intoned the words. The tragic elegance of that poem was utterly lost on them. Maybe I did not deliver the lines expressively enough to reach and touch them. It was a disaster and a humiliating experience. As a consolation, I got an automatic A in that subject for being the class sacrifice.
So I vowed not to recite poems on stage again. Instead, I turned to writing them. I composed clumsy poems in the imagist style of “Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot.
My brother, Cong Caloy, fueled my enthusiasm for poem writing. A Benedictine monk on an indefinite sabbatical leave, he was then finishing his masters in Philippine Literature at UP. He was an accomplished poet himself, writing in English. Two or three of his poems were published in the weekly magazine Free Press where Nick Joaquin was then the Literary Editor. I idolized my brother and began to pass on my abysmal scribblings to him.
I wrote in English, Tagalog and even in the dialect. One time, I sent him one of the poems I wrote in Pampango. Before I knew it, it was published in the Philippine Collegian, where he was then the Literary Editor while Miriam Defensor was the editor-in-chief. That was before the pre-Martial Law days. I can still vividly remember that on a trip to the province, my brother and a friend were having a good time, belly laughing all the way, taking turns in reciting excerpts from that poem, which caricatured colorful characters in our hometown. I felt proud because I could not believe that my composition had such an impact on my brother and his friend. The memory of that night trip home will remain as a poem in my mind.
One late afternoon, Cong Caloy suddenly dropped by at the boardinghouse where I was staying and asked me to go with him to a place called Los Indios Bravos. It didn’t ring a bell to me. Anyway, I found out later that it was a joint where bohemian artists flocked and where poets could read their works on stage. At some point, my brother pushed me to go on stage and recite the poems I’ve just sent him. So there I was—a teenage college student mouthing off amateurish poems and gesticulating as if I was a five-year-old declaiming kid again!
I never became a serious poet. If I had talent for writing poems, I hid it or neglected it. Sometimes I would scribble a poem or two and then I would just shelve it. My wife has been an occasional recipient of my closet poetry since way back when we were still only engaged.
But I never stopped loving poetry as a closet poet. I’ve always been drawn to poems. I have books of them. I have come to realize that the emotion poetry evokes—joy, pain, hunger—comes in different voices. Every time I read a poem, it teaches me how to understand its language, connecting me to the speaker through idioms, metaphors, images, tones, and more.
In fact, I have channeled my skill for rhyming in crafting jingles and songs as an advertising copywriter. My colleagues gave me the moniker “nick of time” for being able to scribble jingle and song lyrics over a cup of coffee.
One thing about my excursions into poetry is the love of elegance of language and expression has been ingrained in me. When you have grown up listening quietly with your inner ear to a long list of encountered poems, you will in time eventually develop an inner rhythm that stays with you all your life.
Until now, I can hear the graceful swaying cadences of Edgar Alan Poe’s “Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary,” Alexander Pope’s “laborious, heavy busy, bold and blind,” John Keats’s “Unravished bride of silence and slow time,” Emily Dickinson’s “If I can stop one heart from breaking I shall not live in vain,” Robert Frost’s “And miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep,” Jose Corazon de Jesus’s “Apat na kandila ang nangagbabantay, sa paligid-ligid ng irog kong bangkay” and the last words written by Jose Rizal before his execution, which every high school student is required to put to memory: “Adios, Patria adorada, region del sol querida, Perla del Mar de Oriente, nuestro perdido Eden!”
The words echo on and on in one’s memory. As the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy says: “Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams; sometimes in thought the mind hears them.”
I now live my life with what the Victorians call the “sense of aesthetic felicity.” I am captivated by the sound of titles that have a poetic ring to them: “Unbearable lightness of being” “women of the weeping river.” Don’t you just love those titles, which tread trippingly or liltingly on the tongue, conjuring images in the eye of your mind. I have a notebook where I write down many ravishing words I meet while reading to caress and cherish in my solitary contemplative moments. Such words as “incardine” or “nonce.” I also write down native words that have an onomatopoeic ring to me: matarling dalumat hiraya rahuyo or dantay.
I find companionship or fellowship with all kinds of poets —the traditionalists, the formalists, the free versers, as if they are intimate friends who have bared their hearts to me. Since I have written poems, I know how it is to labor and struggle to give birth to a piece of poetry. I collect their biographies because of my avid interest to find out more about their lives as well as the art and craft we have in common.
I now find poetry everywhere. Consider the lyricism of Psalms being read or sung at mass. I am now paying more attention to them than I ever did before. I even discovered pieces of poetry in pop songs like “It’s a still life watercolor on a Sunday afternoon” from the “Dangling Conversation” by Simon and Garfunkel. Even in prose pieces I am intuitively drawn to essays or articles which exude or elicit what the French poet Baudelaire calls “the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul…”
My fervent wish in the evening of my life is that people would infuse more poetry into their mundane lives. After all, our native term for poem is tula. With poetry we may just become tulala (bewildered or mesmerized) by the beauty of life and the wonder of creation and human existence.
One and half years ago, a former classmate of 50 years ago requested me to compose a poem for a souvenir book as part of a cultural reawakening campaign he was spearheading. It is especially poignant because just a few months ago, I learned that he died due to severe Covid infection as he was waiting to be admitted to the ER at the parking lot of a full-packed hospital.
The irony is that the poem I wrote was about the hometown where I first became acquainted with poetry as a six-year-old boy. I was speaking and performing it before I understood it and even before I knew it was poetry. It was long ago, and I have kept a photograph.