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The Russia Suite

(Notes on a Tourist's Russia, 1989)

These poems are are part of my book, Poems en Route (UST Press, 1998) but have stayed mainly unnoticed as a featured long-form travel suite for leisurely reading. When Facebook became available in the country in 2008, I decided to post old and new poems of mine on a weekly basis, mostly during weekends, for my Facebook friends. When I published the suite in the Notes section of my page (over four weekends), it was already some 20 years after the poems were written, but many were reading the poems for the first time. To my delight, they were received quite warmly by the FB readership. I am reproducing here the introductory notes I wrote for FB readers to provide some context for the poems.

It was the height of glasnost and perestroika, and Mike Bigornia (late, great and sorely-missed friend and poet) and I grabbed the chance the first time we got when the Soviet Writers Union sent invitations for an exchange visit. That was July 1989, we had just taken over the reins of the local counterpart organization, the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL). Mike was Chairman then and I was Secretary General, replacing Virgilio S. Almario and the late, much-loved Alfrredo Navarro Salanga respectively. It was my first trip abroad (so far from home, but excited to be away halfway around the world), I was in-between jobs, newly-redundanced from my government work, before I joined the advertising industry, where I would work for the next 14 years.

In this time of “openness” and “restructuring,” there was a thrill in the air in the three cities we visited: Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again), and Kiev. Still, beer was being rationed (people lined up at 7 o’clock in the morning at the tap of tank-trailers, bringing bottles and damajuanas to be filled with the precious brew, and there was only one kind and shape of soft drink bottle for all brands, but books, even in English translation, were cheap). Most of the bigger names of the Soviet Writer’s Union were summering in their dachas (so we never got to meet them) but we were hosted well in the three cities. We soaked up the sites, 

The magnificent pictures are by Maxim Popykin, whose friendship I made several years later on the Net. When I asked his permission, he said, “I will be happy if you use my pictures (whatever you like) on your blog! You don't have to get permission in the future, it's pleasure for me to share my work with a lot of people around the Globe.” They are not, of course, of the Russia I saw 12 years ago. They are from Maxim's artistic eyes. In the pictures, the architecture may not have changed much, but they reflect something entirely different, something perhaps that was happening to the culture, after the mantle of Soviet hegemony had gone. 

I dedicate these poems to our two guides, Dmitri and Vladimir who, as much as they could, became our friends and not just our guides. Tall and bespectabled Dmitri, who looked like he was fresh from university, and though conscious about his work was always smiling. And fiery Vladimir, quick to offer vodka, beer and ice cream, in that order, fervent Ukrainian nationalist. May they have realized the dreams, for home and country, that they shared with us.

Spasskaya Tower, with fireworks. Maxim Popykin

FireworksSpasskaya Tower.jpg

sampled the food, visited the museums and—at the end of the day (white night actually, it was late summer)—our main guide, Dmitri, for our whole stay, or Vladimir in Kiev, deposited us back at the hotel and we were left mainly on our own. Thus the germ of these poems stirred vaguely in my mind. It was also the 

time I was fond of the long rambling line, the meditating journalizing, the embroidery of threads and colors that could create shapes that sometimes surprised even myself... thus, too, the tentative "Notes" in the subtitle.

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