http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/FJ1115.html The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Bulovas, and desktop lint. Sun, 14 May 2006 23:26:06 +0800 60 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/FJ1115.html#kqb166266126
I'D LIKE to thank Butch Perez for sending me this copy of a poem by Pablo Neruda--something to ponder, so soon after the Baguio writers' workshop.


POET'S OBLIGATION
by Pablo Neruda

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying "How can I reach the sea?"
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

(Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid)]]> Sun, 09 Apr 2006 17:02:05 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/FJ1115.html#pep165331988

I DON'T KNOW why, these days, I’m suddenly feeling like Rilke (not like him, but like rereading his poetry). But today’s as good as any to introduce him to you, if you’ve never read him. (And then go on and read Neruda, Lorca, and Cavafy—and understand why poetry isn’t just stringing one line and one emotion after another.) Here’s a Rilke poem you wish you could recite or sing out an open window or on some rainswept boulevard:

YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED
Rainer Maria Rilke
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

And here’s more on Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) by Renate Hannaford (from http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/4027/bio.html).

"Rose, o pure contradiction,
desire to be no one's sleep
beneath so many lids."

--Rilke's self-composed epitaph, written before leukemia took his life December 29, 1926.

It was the rose, a symbol of love, beauty, and devotion in much of Rilke's writings, which ironically caused the onset of his illness that took his life so suddenly. Months before, Rilke had been gathering roses from his garden for a visitor, and while doing so, pricked his hand on a thorn. The small wound failed to heal and grew rapidly worse, leading to his tragic death at age 51.

In his relatively short life, Rilke had produced a body of poetry and writings unsurpassed in its genius of emotion, insight, and sensuality. "It is my conviction that, by any measure, the two greatest writers of the twentieth-century are James Joyce (1882-1914) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)" [Mood 17]. Other scholars and poetry lovers would undoubtedly agree, as Rilke's life and poetry have, especially in recent here in America, attracted the minds of many, with translations of his works and biographies abounding.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born December 4, 1875 in Prague, the only child of an unhappy marriage which eventually dissolved. Rilke's childhood was an unhappy one, being placed into military school by his parents who desired that he become an officer. With the help of his Uncle, who realized that Rilke was a highly sensitive and gifted boy unfit for a military career, Rilke left the military academy and entered the German gymnasium (college prepatory school). By the time he left the gymansium and entered Charles University in Prague in 1895, he had already published his first volume of poetry. There was no doubt in Rilke's mind, that he would pursue a literary career.

In 1896, Rilke decided to leave the university for the bustling and cosmopolitan city of Munich, Germany, where his poetic career and life would begin to unfold. Rilke's life would thereafter take him to many places, meeting many people, women he would come to love and lose, and giving him experiences that would enrich and influence the unique voice of his poetry. As Rilke writes, "poems are not...simply emotions..they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things...and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning..." -The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It was his travels to Russia that would prove to be a milestone in Rilke's life, and which he believed marked the true beginning of his early serious works, as the Stunden Buch/Book of Hours published in 1905.

Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime, to Italy, Spain and Egypt, among many other places, but Paris would serve as the geographic center of his life, where he first came as a young man to write a commissioned work on the great sculptor Rodin. It was in Paris that Rilke began to develop a new style of lyrical poetry, influenced by the visual arts, and which Neue Gedichte/New Poems (1907-08), would come to be.

Rilke spent his later life in Switzerland, where he completed the Duino Elesien/Duino Elegies and Sonnette an Orpheus/Sonnets to Orpheus, both published in 1923. These later works would reflect the culmination of the development of Rilke's poetry... gathering all of his dominant themes of love and the idolization of women, life and death, God and religion, into something all encompassing, a unity. The following quote summarizes Rilke's life and character quite well:

"Rilke proclaimed the poet's saintly need to accept reality in all its aspects, meanwhile welcoming only those parts of the world for which he could compose and ennobling description. He was venomous about organized religion, yet there are more Virgin Marys, Saints and Angels in his work than in many cathedrals. And he hid inside The Poet he eventually became, both secure there and scared, empty and fulfilled; the inspired author of the Duino Elegies, sensitive, insightful, gifted nearly beyond compare; a man with many devoted and distant friends, many extraordinary though frequently fatuous enthusiasms, but still a lonely unloving homeless boy as well, with fears words couldn't wave away, a self-pity there were rarely buckets enough to contain; yet a persistence in the pursuit of his goals, a courage, that overcame weakness and worry and made them into poems... no... into lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrifical, could never have achieved by itself... lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish--an honesty bitter about weakness from which it took its strength" [Gass 32].

]]> Wed, 29 Mar 2006 21:33:07 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/FJ1115.html#byn164258218


I LOVE THE greenery of Diliman in the afternoon. Next week's Penman will be an ode to the Sunken Garden, but meanwhile, here's a view of what I see jogging around campus these days, and a poem to go with it, from one of my favorites, Robert Graves.


VARIABLES OF GREEN

Grass-green and aspen green,
Laurel-green and sea-green,
Fine-emerald-green,
And many another hue:
As green commands the variables of green
So love my loves of you.








]]> Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:16:58 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/FJ1115.html#rac162400287


RAMON C. Sunico (RayVi to most) is one of a few Filipino poets—a bilingual one at that—who can serve up any number of poems each one of which I will be glad to read. (The others would be Alfred Yuson, Fidelito Cortes, and Ricardo de Ungria, chiefly because I think I can understand them, and because they express what Robert Graves called his "obdurately male mind".) After having posted a number of love poems yesterday, I little expected to run into RayVi, who delivered a wonderful lecture-reading this afternoon at the University of the Philippines as a fellow of the Institute of Creative Writing.

Never mind the official stuff; RayVi read some poems, and to close the program (in response to a personal request from me), he read these two, which I’m publishing with his permission. Let me just add, apropos of nothing, that RayVi—who works as a manager for Cacho Publishing, speaks German, and majored in philosophy—was also my publisher and editor for Penmanship and Other Stories (Cacho, 1995). I trust him implicitly with my own text.

There’s a bittersweet story behind these poems, but let’s be proper formalists for the time being and disregard identities. Just note that the first, set in Chicago, marks the beginning of a long albeit tempestuous love, and the second, its smoldering aftermath some eight years later. For us non-poets, they're great examples of how poetry can serve less to give free rein to, but more to master, rampant emotions. Many thanks, RayVi, for sharing such exquisite work.


I. FOR TESS WHO LOVES SCARVES

Some gifts one can never give
like waking up in April
to a morning frost,

the bed warmer than cinnamon bread,
pure and irresistible
as one’s own nakedness.

Shock-haired palm trees
find the night frozen into their leaves
that glisten now with the texture

of emerald and jade.
On such a day, I will pick out
your scarf to match

these brigand’s boots that
we will sacrifice to the snow.
And we will walk, searching

for the nearest lake.
And as the sun makes cold
love to the tropical wind

we shall watch the waves
struggle not to be ice,
their white edges

sharp against the sharper
blue of sky. it will be
of such beauty that your eyes

will weep diamonds
while my arms wish they were
scarves, while my eyes

watch you watch the morning
splinter from so much joy.
And our hair stands

from the burning glacier
of love, stands
wanting to be fur.


II. HUWAG KA SANANG MAGAGALIT

Huwag ka sanang magagalit
kung sasabihin ko
na hanap-hanap ka
ng aking mga tula.

Huwag ka sanang maiilang
kung tuwing umuulan
isip-isip ko ang init
ng ating katawan.

Ngayon, butas lamang
sa langit ang lahat ng bituin,
Ngayon, sukatan lamang ang buwan
ng layo mo sa akin.

Anumang kuwento
ang simulan ko’y
sa iyo rin nauuwi.
Sa bawat aklat
na aking buklatin
naroroon ang iyong tingin

Alam ko:
may sarili kang tanong
na dapat sagutin;
may sarili kang misteryo
na dapat harapin.
Huwag magmadali: panahon ngayon
ng liwanag at sari-saring dilim;
Oras ng sugat at lamig
at ng paurong-sulong na pagpapaumanhin.

Ngunit Tess, mahal,
pinakamatalik kong kaibigan,
huwag ka sanang magagalit
huwag ka sanang maiilang
kung aking sasabihin

na tuwing humihinga ako
naaamoy kita,
na tuwing pumipikit ako,
ikaw ang nagiging umaga. ]]> Thu, 23 Feb 2006 23:11:26 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/FJ1115.html#xhn162308976


BEFORE WE say goodbye to this month of February—for most, a month of love refreshed and reaffirmed, for some a most unseasonable time of loss and separation—let me offer up this nosegay (“a small bouquet of flowers”) of love poems. Most of them, oddly enough, are sad ones, suggesting the likelihood that lost love strikes a more plangent chord in the heart than the bliss of a new romance.

This first poem was written by the British poet Robert Graves, a sudden infatuation with whose love poetry drove me back to school in the early ‘80s. It’s a simple image, but exuberant, expressive of a kind of love that yields all yet expects nothing back.


LOVE WITHOUT HOPE
Robert Graves

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the squire’s own daughter
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing above her head as she rode by.


When I returned to college, this was the kind of verse I learned to read and revere as an English major. Written in 1620, Drayton’s sonnet is a poem of love on the brink of death. Is everything lost then? Not if the beloved says “Not yet.”


SONNET 61
Michael Drayton

Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have giv'n him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.


Krip Yuson wrote this poem out on a length of manila paper and added “For Butch”—must’ve been sometime in the early ‘90s. I tacked it on my door, and stared at it for years. I don’t think he wrote it specifically for me, but, as they say, it spoke to me, of me, for me.


UNLUCK
Alfred Yuson

Name of his star
was melancholy.

when it shone
the sky dropped

everything else,
even the moon

took umbrage
in mad shadow.

Name of his pain
was rose of folly.

when it moaned
thorns turned red

within its hand:
deranged and delicate.

Name of his dream
was the song sullen.

when it smirked,
sleep's very sadness

sailed past fringes
as if angry, as if...

Name of his eye
was the vow broken.

when it gazed
round corners

it saw nothing
but dead end.

(Name of his love
was best unspoken.)


This last (prose) poem was sent to me by a gentle reader named Watooz. It appeals to me as a latter-day “Desiderata”, ca. 1995, expressed perhaps in the negative (“It doesn’t interest me...”) but otherwise affirming what the speaker seeks in a worthy mate. The author has sometimes been referred to as a “Hopi Indian elder”, but the name’s a pseudonym for a mother of two—a reality I find more romantic than the shamanic bit. It’s a tough desiderata, but I especially like the part about the need to “feed the children” after “the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone”—alas, that part, I know too well.


THE INVITATION
Oriah Mountain Dreamer


It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.]]> Wed, 22 Feb 2006 21:49:36 +0800