Poetry Speaks to the Inner Man

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Writing the Nation in Poetry

Poetry Speaks to the Inner Man

(Brief remarks as member of the panel in the first literary session of the 61st Philippine PEN Congress, "Writing the Nation in Poetry," 23 November 2018, Silangan Hall, Cultural Center of the Philippines.)

Do poets really build nations with their pens? How flattering even to ask. But poets themselves and their critics are quick to deny poets this privileged task of power and influence reserved for politicians and economists. Even the Roman Horace said not with a little disdain in his Ars Poetica,“Poets and painters have never had equal authority for attempting anything.”

Because poets, indeed, have no business “writing the nation” unless they were directly involved in preparing documents that perhaps became laws for presidents and citizens to execute or obey, or prescribed directions for progress, such as five-year plans, campaigns or crusades, or even at least road-building between country and city—unless they are technocrats and only on the side, poets. "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits," funny old man Carl Sandburg wrote wryly.

Though what we’ve tried to describe is the literal meaning of “building a nation,” the question we put to ourselves at this moment, of “writing the nation” might perhaps be a bit more metaphorically accommodating of a poet’s rather equivocal function of “giving voice,” of “remembering” or “recreating” life and experiences in some lines of verse. We might be, at this point, obliged to define poetry, another task A.E. Houseman was reluctant to face, and who wrote instead:

"And if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class

of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether

a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid

secretion, like the pearl in the oyster.”

To which W.H. Auden responded more the three decades later, in his poem “September 1, 1939,” on the eve of WWII:

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Or closer to home, even as Jose Rizal nurtured his love of country from the inspiration of Francisco Balagtas’ metaphorical exercise in Florante at Laura, the whole generational chain of patriotic passion culminated in the poet, essayist, and organizer Andres Bonifacio, whose ultimate project was the Philippine Revolution of 1886. As poet-revolutionary, he called on those who would join the Katipunan with one of his long poems, Pag-Ibig sa Tinbuang Lupa, with the following opening lines:

Aling pag-ibig pa ang hihigit kaya
Sa pagkadalisay at pagkadakila
Gaya ng pag-ibig sa Tinubuang lupa?
Aling pag-ibig pa? Wala na nga, wala.

On the other hand, some critics, like the recently departed and much lamented John Berger, were more kind to poetry. Berger wrote:

Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart… Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it

does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been

scattered.

All this points to the fact that poetry can or does only speak to the inner man. It speaks only with the language of soul, if I may, and not with lifeless statistics or the nameless demographics of mass communication. It speaks the language of the whole human person, and only of the five senses and memory, including love and pain, victimization and revolution, and skepticism and irony.

In the tone of the last two (skepticism and irony), the Ugandan poet Christopher Henry Muwanga Barlow writes in his famous poem, “Building the Nation,” which, in closing, I quote in its entirety:

Today I did my share in building the nation.
I drove a Permanent Secretary to an
important, urgent function
In fact, to a luncheon at the Vic.

The menu reflected its importance
Cold bell beer with small talk,
Then fried chicken with niceties
Wine to fill the hollowness of the laughs
Ice-cream to cover the stereotype jokes
Coffee to keep the PS awake on the return journey
I drove the Permanent Secretary back.

He yawned many times in the back of the car
Then to keep awake, he suddenly asked,
Did you have any lunch friend?
I replied looking straight ahead
And secretly smiling at his belated concern
That I had not, but was slimming!

Upon which he said with a seriousness
Which amused more than annoyed me,
Mwanachi, I too had none!
I attended to matters of state.
Highly delicate diplomatic duties you know,
And friend, it goes against my grain,
Causes me stomach ulcers and wind,
Ah, he continued, yawning again,
The pains we suffer in building the nation!

So the PS had ulcers too!
My ulcers I think are equally painful
Only they are caused by hunger
Not sumptuous lunches!

So two nation builders
Arrived home this evening
With terrible stomach pains
The result of building the nation – in different ways”

And that, more or less, is how we might write the nation in poetry.

Marne Kilates

20 Nov. 2018

Such job of secretions does not accommodate anything like poetry is supposed to do, such as opening the sluices for Wordsworth “spontaneous overflow” of emotions “recollected in tranquility.” Poetry, especially our kind today, if we can even pinpoint anything from the endless variety, is almost left to lurk in the sidelines, timid, self-effacing, amid the conceited strutting of economics and technology.

Again, the poet’s role in history is honored more in the breach, so to speak, than in his actual participation. Auden, lamenting Yeat’s death, wrote:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

Or at some later time during WWII, Randall Jarrel, a poet who served in (or survived) the American armed forces, describes the short and lonely life of the ball turret gunner:

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jarrel provides an explanation:

A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B- 24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the

turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the

fetus in the womb [in fact, the ball-turret gunner sat upright, if in

an uncomfortable position. In a real foetus he would be in a breech

position, even more vulnerable to the foetus]. The fighters which

attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The

hose was a steam hose.

But going back to a more solemn tone, we have William Butler Yeats lamenting Ireland’s heroes, in his poem on the eve of WWI, “September 1913”:

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’:

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

Rene Magritte: Boite de Pandore (Pandora's Box)

Poetry&Stuffby

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