We were not always pulling amorseko or scrubbing the PC’s office or serving coffee. Rather surprisingly we had relatively some good free time under detention, perhaps because the team of Ajax agents were busy hunting for other activists.  I made use of this time reading another anthology in my continuing self-instruction on poetry. I had my girlfriend then, Nene Narvaez, borrow and re-borrow from the open-shelf DWC library the book, Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Oscar Williams. I had the book in hand when we were finally released from detention. I had also started reading the huge tome, A Treasury of the Theater edited by John Gassner, an extensive survey of texts from the Greeks through Ibsen, Pirandello, Lorca, to the contemporaries like Auden, Beckett, and Edward Albee. There was no actual or performed theater then in the province, so I read the plays as literature.

 

Back to Marcos’s martial law. With our group of detainees was a fellow CEGP member from Pili, a wiry young man as small as I was but more muscled. He had a ready smile and would laugh easily. But it turned out later he would join the military and let himself be commissioned. We didn’t know if he had anything to do with the missing attendance sheet. Get Alim and I were released after a month (the local Rotary had petitioned for our freedom), the others were later sent to Fort Bonifacio. They had been “promoted” to national detention to join the more famous or “notorious” detainees like “Doc” Bienvenido Lumbera, Jose F. Lacaba, Diego “Ogid” Oñate (also from Daraga), and others. They would spend a longer time in detention, some as long as three or five years.

 

This was our relative “peace” in local campus activism. The classes had resumed after their suspension with Proclamation 1081. The school organ was suspended as well so I was back to my inchoate poetry writing. I was reading The Voice that is Great Within Us edited by Hayden Carruth. It was a landmark collection of contemporary American poetry of the 20th century. I had found a job (ironically) with the local office of the National Grains Authority (now NFA) and I bought the book with first salary. I was recruited by a classmate, the radio announcer Grace Arnedo (nee Azupardo), a sister to two college friends, Roger and the late Edgar Azupardo, who remained my friends since then. With such books, I was looking forward to a poet’s career, whatever it was or whatever my idea of it was. But. And here’s the other part of the binary, our activist counterparts were being hosed down by the police at the boundary of Daraga and Legazpi, just in front of the Division Office and Regan Barracks (now Camp Bagong Ibalon). Or in far-off Libon near the boundary of Camarines Sur, and other “hotbeds.” They were shouting Ibagsak! while I was reading Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Have I gone astray and took the road less travelled by activists? Was I melting into the misty edges of the bourgeoisie?