Poetry&Stuffby
MARNE KILATES
MARNE
S
KRIPTS
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
(An anthology of the same title recently
asked the exact same question. Which led
me to thinking. Why Indeed? For those who
care or are interested at all, this is a longish
rumination but I'd like you to see that there
can really be no long or short of it.)
Well, if go the mechanical or even just visual way, first, a poem on a page has lines and line breaks and stanzas. Sometimes it has a definite or prescribed number of lines and numbers of stanzas. A sonnet has fourteen lines. The Elizabethan or Shakesperean variety has three quatrains and a concluding couplet or envoi (or send off). The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is divided into eight and six lines and there is a so-called turn after the eighth and the last six lines go a different direction. We’re not even talking of the rhyme schemes. In either variety there is a prescribed rhyme or sound of the end-words. The sonnet is the most familiar of the so-called “closed” forms. There is the villanelle and the sestina, the last being a more complex form of six lines in six stanzas, with a prescribed order or sequencing of the end-words per stanza, and those end-words’ obligatory presence in the three-line envoi at the end. Arnaut Daniel, a French troubadour from 12th century Provence (France), is credited with inventing the sestina. The villanelle, on the other hand, is “a nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain.” (Oxford). The recurring lines are similar to the Malaysian pantoum although it has no closing quatrain.
Why I Write Poetry
(Or My Experience of Writing It)
GILGAMESH-like hero mastering a lion. (Louvre)
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IT’S ALMOST rhetorical. Why do I breathe? Or the mountaineer’s postulate: Why climb Mount Everest? Because it is there. Or maybe the native Tenzing Norgay who calls the peak Sagarmatha would say it differently: Because I live here. Does that mean poetry is as natural as breathing? Or is it in fact an undertaking so monumental that one trains for it for a lifetime? How many hours must one devote to practice to become a tennis pro? Or a triathlon athlete? Ten thousand, as Malcolm Gladwell says? Or is it both monumental and ordinary that when one comes to the final act all one has to do is walk or trek or lob a ball with a racquet? How does one strike a tiny ball to make it travel 500 yards and avoid a sand trap? And so, it is not, after all, as natural as breathing. And poetry or tennis, as the poet or athlete knows, is not a natural thing. The golfer is fighting against himself. The marathoner, the same. It is artificial. No one speaks in pentameters or amphibrachs or free verse or with rhyme and meter. No one speaks in sonnets or sestinas or chants an epic unless one is a “professional” chanter. So, maybe “professional” is the key word? A professional, by definition, is one who gets paid for rendering a specialized service. But who gets paid for writing poetry? Wait. This back-and-forth and to-and-fro, this arguing for and against anything will take us nowhere. Let us better go back to the most basic. The definition. What is the thing? What is poetry?
This reminds us, I think, why we write in the first place, the purpose being not only to communicate but help, stir/stimulate the reader into the further search for their own
meaning.
ALIGUYON, the Igorot hero
in the Hudhud epice
BEOWOLF in an animated movie
But even the apparently simpler forms have their own complications (like clocks or watches with moving displays). A three-line haiku must have a definite number syllables per line but it must make that turn somewhere (usually in the middle line), where the seasons described might change or nature is supposed to give its lesson. The same is true with the four-line Tagalog tanaga and the three-line dalit, the Hanunuo Mangyan ambahan (no prescribed number of lines). Somewhere in the exposition or recollection there must be a subtly didactic turn or an interpretation of nature, a proffer of value or insight. This reminds us, I think, why we write in the first place, the purpose being not only to communicate but help, stir/stimulate the reader into the further search for their own meaning. Now that is the page poem, as we now call it. The poem printed on a page. We have performed poems, as in the more or less popular poetry sessions in bars or special venues where the performers sometimes dress up (as in cosplay) to perform their poems. That is not, of course a new thing. There is a whole tradition behind it, from the Greek choruses with their strophes and antistrophes, to the chanters of the Iliad and the Odyssey which may or may not be one blind Homer but a collective of singers taking up the chore as they ran out of breath. Our Biag ni Lam-Ang, Hudhud hi Aliguyon, the epic fragment Ibalong of the Bikols chanted by the blind Kadunung are all in this tradition. The modern composo sung or chanted in Visayas and Mindanao, about exploits of contemporary characters (villains or heroes), also follows this tradition. But what we still must attempt to define or survey this vast landscape of poetry from its beginnings in the simplest use of language to the simple song or recitation, to the casting of magical spells or even the airing of protest: we protest thorny issues or oppressive regimes and the word itself is the same as protestation―the public demonstration as well as the emphatic declaration of the validity or invalidity of something. The emulation of such a spell is at the core of the current reversion to either the performative or the page poetry. This also underlines the fact all poetry is both written and oral, or any written poem can be performed (performance poets invariably write their poems or scripts that is why I am always compelled to define performative poetry as theater.)
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