H I S T O R I E S

T O RATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS

2015

Charlie Samuya Veric

H I S

Poems

I E S

Ateneo de Manila University Press

Bellarmine Hall, Katipunan Avenue

Loyola Heights, Quezon City

P.O. Box 154, 1009 Manila, Philippines

Tel: +632 426 5984 | Fax: +632 426 5909

Email: unipress@admu.edu.ph

Website: www.ateneopress.org

© 2015 by Charlie Samuya Veric

All rights reserved. No copies can be made in part or in whole

without prior written permission from the author and the publisher.

The National Library of the Philippines CIP Data

Recommended entry:

Veric, Charlie Samuya.

Histories / Charlie Samuya Veric—Quezon City:

Ateneo de Manila University Press, c2015.

p. ; cm.

ISBN

Filipino poetry (English). I. Title.

PL

Photographs used in the book are reproduced with permission

from the following artists:

Cover: Bettina Flitner, Boatpeople Nr. 2

Section breaks: Daniel Roque

Book design by Bolix

For my Mother and a l l I l ove

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Let the Missing Be Poetics

P R O L O G U E

How to Read a Poem

P A R T I

The Human Condition According to an Unknown Artist

The City

Song

After Paradise

Sister Clytemnestra

Blue

To Van

The Brave

Neruda in India

A Singular Catastrophe

The Most Loved

Parting Time

A Lonely Man Thinks

What It Is

C O N T E N T S

P A R T I I

All These Earthly Things

Ode to Experience

Counterintuition

A Poet is Addressing My Loneliness

Unhappier

Self-Reliance

Birthday

A Fisherman’s Tale

P A R T I I I

Once We Were

The Walk of Good

If One of Those Fall Mornings

Open Anew, My Heart

Looking Out the Window During a Thunderstorm in Late Spring

The Whole Truth

Manille

The Prophecy

Our Capital of Nostalgia

Lines Composed While Biking to the House of My Grandparents, Long Gone

Histories

C O D A

Vita Nova

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S & N O T E S

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

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A team of art historians and archeologists had unearthed a 16th century Ottoman

village on Hungarian soil. The village was “of considerable size,” bounded by a

ditch that served as a fortification. Beneath the ground, shards of luxury goods

such as Chinese porcelain and Persian crystal, speckled what was once a village

that housed the invading bulls of the Ottoman Empire—90,000 strong—who were

poised to turn Vienna and the rest of Europe into a souk.

Let the Missing Be Poetics

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At the village’s center, military barracks stood in the shadow of a mosque and

dervish cloister.

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The Ottoman forces rarely built settlements on foreign ground. For customs

dictated that they claim an existing village as their own, and move into a new one

as the assault expanded.

6

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Yet the village was no ordinary ground for it purportedly bore the missing heart

of the 10th and most famous sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the

Magnificent, who croaked his last at 71 as his armies laid siege to the fortress

of Szigetvár in which 2,300 Habsburg Monarch troops were commending their

souls to God. Death was coming to the Habsburg Empire, and the blood of its

outnumbered troops would be the first to irrigate the battlefields of Europe.

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But the invasion of Vienna and the “Ottomanization” of the European gentry would

count among the greatest disappointments in human memory; the sultan died a day

before the fortress of Szigetvár was occupied.

It was decided that his death was to be kept a secret for fear that it might demoralize

his soldiers should the news spread. Only those in the tent where the sultan followed

the offensive knew of his demise. To preserve the body and keep the morale of the

soldiers high, the sultan’s internal organs, including his heart, were hollowed out

of his torso.

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In the years following the failed Ottoman march into Vienna, a shrine was

built, sometime between 1573 and 1577, to honor the memory of Suleiman the

Magnificent who presided over a golden age when his empire spread from the

Balkans to the northern tip of Africa. Out of this shrine, a village emerged. Out of

the village, a tavern and inn.

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In October of 2013, news came of art historians and archeologists stumbling into a

village while searching for the sultan’s heart.

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I, too, am looking for a missing heart.

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Over a cup of cappuccino, his, and a glass of dalandan, mine, my colleague Oscar

Campomanes asked me, one breezy day when a semester was ending at the Ateneo,

what it meant for me to write poetry. I did not know what to say. One does not

expect an archeologist to explain why he likes to dig, so why should a poet explain

why he likes to write? But I understood the question as much as I could understand

an archeologist’s devotion to excavation. It is the heart, the passion.

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But the heart is a poor explanation. And passion is all sound and fury, signifying

inadequately. Yet look at those art historians and archeologists who found a village

when they thought they would find a heart.

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Let me do my own excavation, then, in the hope that by looking for the poet’s heart,

I may discover an entire village of explanation.

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I am not your usual poet.

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I have never been to writing workshops.

No Silliman. No Baguio. No Iligan. No Malate. No Antipolo.

Never thought I would do my valediction at Hillcrest in the grand manner of

Rolando Tinio—poet and one-time fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I started writing not fearing the thought that established writers would take turns

to savage me in public.

Nick Joaquin, among the best that 20th century Filipino writing in English has

ever produced, famously told a fellow at the University of the Philippines Writers’

Workshop to plant kamote rather than write, reducing the latter to tears. A ventricle

in Joaquin’s heart twitched. Realizing what a curmudgeon he was, Joaquin vowed

never to return to workshops. For all his bitter tongue, Joaquin had, really, a jelly

of a heart.

Hence I had no literary father to murder, even if I wanted one. And I could never

be anti-Oedipal for I was non-Oedipal from the start.

Writing fatherless, I mothered myself. Without resentment, I wrote.

Poor Doctor Freud. He would be so confused.

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I have never joined the Palanca.

My friends, who love me despite myself, write for the Palanca; their year revolves

around the Palanca; they doll up on the night of the Palanca awards. I do not know

what it is like to live because of a Palanca. I do not know how to obsess over a

Palanca.

Once I knew of a graduate student in creative writing who wanted to write gay plays

because to be Filipino and gay, he was told by his mentors in the program, would get

the attention of judges in a literary competition in London.

By my lights, something is wrong when recognition turns into a fetish, or becomes

a currency for inclusion in elite circles. For writing need not begin and end with the

approval of others.

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I have never been one for literary groupies.

Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, my former teacher at UP Diliman who would come to

class in crisp white shirt, blue jeans, and high heels, had spoken once about the

literary barkada. I knew what she had in mind because I had seen her circle of

barkada.

At a cozy café on campus known as Chocolate Kiss, there was a long table at the

farthest corner from which one could view the track and field through the low

window; beyond, rising above the treetops, the jarring architecture of Iglesia ni Kristo. At that table sat Hidalgo, Gemino Abad, Jose Dalisay, and others, a group

that Edel Garcellano, a Marxist with a penchant for treasonous jokes, had called

the Gang of Diliman.

I would learn later that the barkada of Ninotchka Rosca, Gelacio Guillermo, and

Jose Maria Sison—writers who later became the brains of a Maoist revolution that

rages to this day—would congregate at the cafeteria in the basement of Palma Hall

in the post-WW II years when the campus was nothing but hills of cogon.

In my days, the members of Alay Sining, a student cultural group, would jam at

Vinzons Hall. The UP Quill, of which I was not a member, had its own tambayan

on the side of the Faculty Center where piping hipsters walked around as if the

world weighed on their shoulders.

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I, too, had seen the beginnings of High Chair, initially a team of golden boys and

girls who later decided to have a quarrel with the old masters, but the closest I ever

got to the group was through a friend who slept with one of its members.

An outsider from Aklan, a non-place on the map if not for Boracay, who went to

the city to major in comparative literature, I did not profess my loyalty. I went with

people I liked, but kept my own mind.

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I have never received an MFA.

Not too long ago, a professor at Harvard became livid when an author was hired

to teach literature. If that is the case, the livid professor said, we might as well let

animals teach zoology.

We have yet to see animals lead a zoology seminar, but a new species has been

born in both empire and postcolony: the poet as a professional academic, a recent

development whose embodiment is the institutionalization of the MFA. Today,

writers at universities do “research” on poverty alleviation by writing a poem; they

prevent the next ecological disaster by having a reading.

The MFA has changed the meaning of writing, which now requires academic

certification as if the practice itself were a science, a body of knowledge that could

be transmitted.

How do you do, Research Professor of Poetry? The weather is quite gorgeous, is it

not?

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That I have never been to a writing workshop, never joined the Palanca, never had

a literary barkada, never held an MFA, show what a f luke I am.

That I managed to get published—in Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction and special

issue on new writing of Philippine Studies, among others—strikes me now as an

oddity.

Do not get me wrong.

I am not saying I am exceptional. Come see me and you will know there is no mean

bone in my body. Drink with me and you will realize how outrageous I can be. I

am saying that one need not attend a workshop to be a poet, need not win an award

to be validated, need not join a clique to be noticed, need not get an MFA to be

published.

In a word, another path exists to become a poet. It is the path of expressive autonomy.

I also call it anti-professionalization.

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Call me anti-professional poet, then.

For to be a professional is to be an expert, to belong to a closed community that

nurtures and safeguards the expertise upon which a gated society is founded. And

to belong to this closed community is to practice a set of commonly agreed codes,

that is to say, to be socialized into a particular mode of behavior.

Let me explain what I mean.

One of the remarkable things about poets who have been trained in workshops,

especially abroad, is their almost manic drive to produce. This is not unusual in

research scholarship in which academics are compelled to publish or perish. But

when poets discipline themselves to produce, this is worth noting in that it reveals

an important point—the regimentation of poetic life.

Thus writing has become a day job for professional poets at the university, their

productivity measured not unlike a factory worker or a call center agent. Count your

poems. Count your points for promotion.

Michel Foucault receives an honorary MFA from Iowa and comes to Silliman to

lecture on the birth of the creative prison. This is not a joke.

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I accordingly refuse regimentation in my own writing. I refuse to write poems for

the sake of being productive. For I do not go to bed thinking tomorrow I will be

writing.

Poetry, for me, has its own time that defies synchronization. I cannot make an

appointment with it because it comes unbidden. We may call this moment of

unsynchronized writing the poetic time, which is the opposite of regimented time

that defines much of social activity in modern societies.

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When Mr. Poetry comes, I drop everything and tidy up my place, including myself.

Would he like water, juice, wine, or beer? Sit, please. Relax. And I scold myself for

being not good enough as a host.

What a fussy visitor he is, wanting me to abandon my everyday duties. He makes

me forget I am a scholar. He makes me forget hunger. He makes me forget I am a

man. He makes me forget the gym, my e-mail.

This is poetic time, the unseasonable spell of rote life coming undone, denoting

what Elizabeth Bishop calls, in a reference to the work of Robert Lowell, “the

exact contemporaneity,” the blast of here-and-now that occurs in poetry’s passing

lifetime. Or, in Saadi Youssef ’s comparable formulation, poetic time reveals “the

current and eternal in a wondrous embrace.”

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Poetry consequently suspends rote life, interrupting its serial repetition and the

daily performance of its obligations. The world stands still, falls away quietly,

when I write. Writing, I am no longer my vain, obsessive self. My authorial self

disappears, and I feel only the hand that hits the keys, the eye that scans the screen,

the breathing that gives the act its music. Writing, I am released from the eternally

recurring.

It is in this sense that the writing of poetry makes human freedom appear in plain

sight. For I am never freer, never more alive, than when I write.

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Walter Benjamin speaks of such aesthetic autonomy. No work of art, he writes,

presupposes human attention: “No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for

the beholder, no symphony for the audience.” For Benjamin, art is private, one that

begets autonomy.

Benjamin, it seems to me, invokes the figure of the reader, beholder, and listener to

mark what is external to art, namely, expectations, opinions, norms. That no poem

is meant for the reader suggests, I believe, that art, in its making, respects nothing

but its own reality.

It is a startling insight that compels me to think back to my own writing. And I

realize that the idea of the poem commands my writing—not my will but, rather,

the wish of the poem to see itself to completion. Before it, I am powerless. And the

poem, as it is written, is blind to all things, including my self.

I do not make the poem, then. Instead, poetry transforms me, séance-like, into a

medium for its writing. Writing, I catch my body neutralize my internal clock. The

“I” that sleeps at the appointed hour is awake, in thrall to the idea of a poem that

must be aptly ended. What constitutes the experience of poetry is therefore the

writing itself. Nowhere does the reader, even as an afterthought, appear.

Benjamin is right in this sense: no poem is meant for the reader in that the poem

writes itself into existence. Seen this way, poetic writing is a world-making activity in

which individual freedom and aesthetic autonomy become the defining experiences.

As such, poetry is unique because it allows one to leave a rote life behind, to be alive

in an untimely moment, to live, as it were, in poetic time. Poetry therefore generates

an alternate space where the humdrum is held, even if briefly, at bay.

I write therefore I am freed from rote life.

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Seen this way, poetry represents one of the last frontiers of freedom and autonomy

in our time, but its increasing professionalization poses the single most damaging

threat to itself as a creative act. This is because professionalization contributes to

the regimentation of poetic life, constricting the freedom that is inherent in its

making. In a word, professionalization turns poetic writing into an exercise in vain

accumulation. No wonder that despite the best efforts of poets to produce, many of

their books end up as the tragic detritus of the late modern age.

Poetry therefore needs to be anti-professional, which means it must deny the

temptation to turn writing into an inducement for overproduction and eventual

containment. Let I not be mistaken. That poets find themselves working at the

university is not a problem. As a scholar, I would count myself among the guilty if

academic labor were a crime. By appealing to anti-professionalism, I actually refer

to the possibility of creating more occasions for the practice of freedom despite

the limits of one’s condition. To rage against regimentation represents such an act,

one that protects the integrity of poetry as a vital connection to a vanishing way

of emancipated life. We therefore need more non-denominational poetry. That is,

poetry without a barkada: untimely, ungrateful, unaffiliated. Poetry sans MFA.

I am addressing you, and you, and you.

We are legion.