(NOTE: This is the full text of the book’s “Introduction.” I will upload the photo soon.)
Yes, that’s me in the picture. It’s 1964. My first birthday bash and I’m hysterical. Early on, I’m flaunting my flair for drama. That’s my Auntie Tita, proud and happy, holding the family’s first grandchild. The high chair I’m standing on is her gift. It will last long enough, over the next three decades, to serve my brother’s and three sisters’ baby-feeding and picture-posing needs. Then there’s my Uncle Vic, barely five years older than I, squeezing my right knee. And those are my party guests, an assortment of cousins, young aunts, playmates, neighbors. Little girls in polka dots. Little boys sporting crew cuts. Balloons afloat. Bright day. Nice picture. Except for me. The one-year-old boy sobbing and screaming his head off, twisting his tiny torso, begging to be set free, pointing a finger at something or someone out there—unseen, unwanted, or unreachable.
I write this on the eve of my 44th birthday. The good news is that I will be celebrating it with much less hysteria. No one will be grabbing me by the waist or squeezing my knee. No more posing for photographs. No balloons. My fingers will be in the right places. As for the things or people out there—unseen or those I no longer see—they are life’s myriad details, shifting nuances, and big pictures that may remain undefined, unwanted, or unreachable. I guess they are what this book is reaching for, what these 80 poems are about.
This collection is arranged in roughly chronological order. I wrote the earliest poem here when I was 17. (Sinatra was right: “When I was 17, it was a very good year.”) I expect to finish a few more at 44. The first part of the book includes poems from college and the next phases of life as a 20-something teacher, writer, editor, part-time researcher, full-time searcher. Behold the portrait of a young man pursuing—or being pursued by—answers. The second section finds our hero still alive and sane through his 30s. How did he manage that? It’s mostly a blur to him now, though the searching ended (or so he thought) when, at 35, he entered a monastery. In part 3, he had left the monastery, though often enough the monk in him just wouldn’t quit. But he was glad to move on. He was turning 40. The little boy had stepped down from his high chair. He’s well on his way to the greatest, grandest part of the journey.
Well, that’s one way of telling the story. I’d like to think of this book as one version of a memoir I hope to write someday. So here are parts of my story as well as those of my family’s and friends’ stories. Here are arias of unrequited love, requiems for unresolved angst, paeans to ungovernable faith. Here are four decades’ worth of snapshots and flashbacks, headlines and sideshows. I see and hear them all in metaphors, photographs, songs, and everything else that memory and wishful thinking can hold.
Reading my early poems, I see shaky corners, some excesses, earnest attempts to please, to solicit sympathy. I hear someone who yearned to know what was going on, who strained to make a difference, to make it all tolerable, if not worthwhile. But just as I have refused to retouch or clean up the old, stained, creased photographs I’ve collected over the years, I have resisted “improving on” these poems from my younger years. Sure, I’ve revised them as ruthlessly as I could. But the scarred spirit, the baroque phrasings, the dated references, the lugubrious sentiments, all that ranting and raving—I let them stay. Those poetic posturings were as awkward and oddly endearing as my childhood poses. Besides, who can say that my later verses are totally free of sophomoric convulsions and meanderings?
There is, however, something about a poem’s spirit that can defy dating. Some poems simply refuse to be tied down to any particular time. One of four other titles I seriously considered for the book was Fishbowl Nirvana, after two poems from opposite ends of my linear time. “The Fishbowl” is from my adolescent years; “Nirvana sa Kuwarenta” is my midlife howl. Yet, the two could easily switch positions. Here and now, I understand so much better what I was trying to say or to look for in “The Fishbowl” over 25 years ago—all that space brimming with emptiness, the need to be broken in order to be whole. On the other hand, “Nirvana sa Kuwarenta” is definitely an older man’s poem, yet it brims with many of the themes that preoccupied me in my youth—sadness, suicide, solitude, and the so-called search for the meaning of it all. As I know better now, poetry, like life, is anything but linear.
In the early 1980s, as a college student in a Creative Writing class, I submitted “The Fishbowl” as part of my mini-portfolio to an esteemed professor who would later call it “a Zen poem.” I, of course, was grateful and flattered, though I had no idea what Zen was all about. What did I know at 17? (Well, what do I know at 44?) Yet, it was as if my teenage self had presaged what it’s like to come full circle for midlife me. I have come to this, not by following straight lines but by breaking out and breaking down and breaking through.
In 2003, I discovered the music and history of Nirvana, the legendary rock group that shot to fame in the early 1990s. Lead singer/guitarist/composer Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994. A decade after that tragedy, I somehow earned my slice of nirvana through the cutting, bruising voice of the dead god of grunge. Cobain was cremated. I read somewhere that some of his ashes were kept inside a monastery. How uncanny, how fitting, I thought.
At 40, I learned to rock like a kid. At 35, I learned to chant like a monk—as a monk. At 17, I wrote a poem about a fishbowl whose void and voice would fill the rest of my years. Once again, I hear Sinatra singing: “And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs. From the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear. It was a very good year.”*
And so the voices in my head, as those on these pages, will shift back and forth—from Nirvana to Sinatra, from children making choices at the toys department to children losing lives in a concentration camp, from the things that drive a man to burn his sleep to the things that let his soul blaze across this beautiful universe. From the brim to the dregs. From the beginning to the end and back to where it all started.
My first published poem was titled “Katahimikan.” It came out in a 1977 or 1978 issue of The Current Events Digest, which, in the Marcos decades, was a required weekly supplementary material in Social Studies classes all over the country. For the poem, I was entitled to a fee (prize money? windfall?) of five pesos. As would often happen in my “sideline” as a poet, I never bothered to get the money. Something I wrote was deemed worth publishing, and that was more than enough.
“Katahimikan” is not in this book. I lost the only copy I had. But I can still remember why and how I wrote that poem. It was one of those long, grueling days in high school. I had just come home from school one afternoon. The whole place was quiet. Apparently, everyone else was out. I sat down at our dining table, staring into space, exhausted but grateful for this rare moment when I could deeply breathe, do nothing, be no one, please no one. I was only 14. Yet I already felt like a mortally wounded veteran of countless wars that raged forever in my head. Or perhaps I just loved to wallow, preferably in my self-scripted teenage melodrama. But then it just flowed—the sweet sense of urgency to put down on paper what the moment meant to me before it was all gone. So I wrote.
Amazingly, from 14 to 44, I have managed to keep that urgency alive. I have managed to keep myself alive. Still, I often ask (and wallow in) the same old questions. Why do I write poems? How do I write them? How do I decide when to write in English or Tagalog? Why am I now publishing this book? Because I can. The way I can. I don’t know. Because I want to. I need to. My aging ego needs to be reassured that the years have taught me something about writing well and living well. Yes, all of the above and more.
In the end, writing poetry, like many things in life, is hard work and pure luck. Or, as I often remind myself, it’s all about guts and grace. These poems dare to see and say what I often refuse to or simply can’t. Most of all, these poems are gifts unearned. Sure, I’ve done my part. I’ve worked hard, perhaps too hard, to know where commas should go, what alliterations can do, how to turn sappy lines into irony and vice versa. I do what I can. But I also believe Something infinitely greater, Someone less self-absorbed, is working some magic here. And no words can ever express my gratitude and awe.
I don’t have the words of “Katahimikan” anymore. Perhaps because I don’t need to. Here and now, I still see the boy that afternoon. He is alone, sitting in a chair, taking a deep breath, starting to write a poem on silence, in silence. He doesn’t know what makes him do it. He doesn’t know where or how it will end. But he is writing. He is still writing. And that is more than enough.
