This Publisher's Column shall feature developments related to Filipino literature. Each monthly update also shall include a featured poet and poem. For comments and suggestions, please e-mail Meritage Press Associate Editor Jade Afable at Jade@meritagepress.com



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October's featured poet is Emmanuel Lacaba, the poet who became a "people's warrior" when he joined in the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship. We are delighted to feature Lacaba's Tagalog poem "Kundiman" (with an English translation by Paolo Javier). Meritage Press is also grateful to Luis Francia for providing an introduction to Lacaba. The introduction is taken from Francia's description of his friendship with Lacaba in his book EYE OF THE FISH (http://www.kaya.com/ef.html) which recently received a 2002 Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop.

KUNDIMAN

Ang sabi mo pula ang paborito mo.
Ang sabi ko puti ang paborito ko.
Kagabi nang tayong dalawa'y nagkita,
nakapula ako at nakaputi ka.

KUNDIMAN

What you said was red is a favorite of yours.
What I said is white was a favorite of mine.
When the two of us saw each other last night,
I dressed in red and you wore white.

(translated from the Tagalog by Paolo Javier)

Note on Translator: Poet Paolo Javier is currently in the MFA Writing Program at Bard College, and is the founder/editor of Second Ave Editions, a press dedicated to the publication of innovative North Asian American poetries. Paolo is also in the midst of editing a folio of contemporary Tagalog poetry for the progressive Canadian journal Filling Station. The folio will be released in about December 2002 (keep checking Babaylan Speaks for updates) and present such outstanding Tagalog poets as Pete Lacaba, Ruth Mabanglo, and the late Mike Bigornia.

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An Introduction to Emmanuel Lacaba
By Luis Francia

He acted onstage, did some writing for the screen, and taught for a brief period at the University of the Philippines. In the meantime, he had gotten married and fathered two girls. His public and artistic persona was the sort that reinforced the image of the poet as a free spirit, an Ariel of society with a strain of decadence. But there was a lesser-known side to him, an activist, social-issue oriented self that was a perfect complement to the wild lyric poet who kept a wary distance from the body politic.

The activist in him emerged during the beginning of the 1970s, at the time of the First Quarter Storm, when students and workers attempted to take Malacanang Palace. He grew active in the labor movement, joining a working-class alliance and helping to man picket lines. It would only be a few years before the poet, like Byron, decided to cast his lot in favor of a war for liberation. Unlike the English poet, however, Lacaba was joining his own people's struggle against a system brought to repressive heights by the Marcos regime.

This transformation from a self-described "wild but shy young poet" to a "people's warrior" with pen "blown up to a long-barrelled gun" didn't mean the death of the poetic self, but rather its fusion with the activist self. Even when in the bush, Eman never ceased to write. When he ran out of paper, he would use cigarette tinfoil. Given the nature of a guerilla's life, he couldn't be as prolific as during his bohemian days. But the poems that he wrote as a guerilla, both in English and in Pilipino, are among his best. An unshakeable inner conviction fires these last works, the craft is sinewy, and the lyricism reveals a vision of self and of society grown simultaneously simpler and more profound.

Eman and I had become good friends from frequenting the same cafes in the period before he became politically active. I was already friends with his older brother Pete, a college mate and who was himself a poet and journalist, and who was later imprisoned by the Marcos dictatorship and released only upon the death of Eman. Eman and I often stayed up all night with other like-minded souls, drinking and discussing everything under the sun. Sometimes, we would buy beer, drive to a nearby beach, and buy fish to roast for our breakfast from fishermen who had just come in with their catch.

Once, he and I and two girlfriends took a bus to Laguna de Bay, the largest lake in the country. We were determined to get to a small uninhabited lake isle where some anthropological diggings were going on. We got off at a small town we thought was a jumping off point for the isle, but, according to the townspeople, it wasn't. The next one, they said. But the next one wasn't it either. And on it went, the isle visible as we traveled around the lakeshore area, but somehow always out of reach. As people gave us directions to shore towns where they said we could hire a banca (boat) -- directions that always turned out to be inaccurate -- Eman and I kept remarking on how like Kafka's The Castle this was, how near and visible the spires but never arrived at. Unlike Kafka's imaginary journey, however, ours became less frustrating as the day wore on. Delia, one of our companions, enumerated the names and qualities of the plants and shrubs and trees we'd see as we walked through the woods. We wound up on different beaches in different port towns, exploring them, talking to farmers and fisherfolk, walking through markets and listening to housewives bargain mercilessly, their kids noisy in the streets. We'd stop and refresh ourselves with cold beers and warmed-over food in local karinderias. More and more, the isle became an irrelevant abstraction. Seeing how many directions turned out to be dead ends became a game for us. That we never reached the lake isle finally didn't matter. What had begun as a destination in the end became an occasion for a real journey; the process itself of traveling had absorbed all our attention and energy, forcing us to notice our surroundings -- its flavors, textures, and colors, the shapes and sounds of a landscape and a people we still viewed with innocence.

It was an innocence Eman somehow never lost. He genuinely loved people and, because of his activism among the working class and the poor, was loved by them in turn. In the last lines of his last poem, 'Open Letters to Filipino Artists', with its quote from Robert Frost, he speaks of yet another -- this one of coming home:

The road less traveled by we've taken--
And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time.
Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here among workers and peasants, our lost
Generation has found its true, its only home."

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SARAH GAMBITO, A 2002 NATIONAL POETRY SERIES FINALIST

Meritage Press is also pleased to feature a previously unpublished poem, "Sonogram," by Sarah Gambito from her manuscript matadora that was a 2002 National Poetry Series Finalist. Sarah's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, and Quarterly West. She co-curates the reading series "Experiments and Disorders" at Dixon Place (New York) and holds degrees from The University of Virginia and the Creative Writing Program at Brown University.

SONOGRAM

I dreamed my mother collapsed inside of me and nothing else was true.
I was still and I cupped my heart's stream
Into my heart's mouth and
I could do nothing.
This is to say I was a child.
Casting the nets of silver so you feel
The feeling of

this is my job: the child is living
and still can be named for a dog.
A dog would be pure black emotion.
A terrycloth terror we'll rub on our bodies
and hold onto for fear of chanting

She was a child. She was a child.
And in her child she felt her mother's sadness.
Don't you understand I want to her to feel it
so I can run away if I have to.
For how can I touch her, the beatitude, the velvet veto
the hasn't happened yet.
What it feels like to hold onto the stairs for help.

That's every story--medea
plumming candle
Dead-rot dog
Finking across the need to know

As I stand in front of the "victim."
She's garrulous as we practice on the child
on her dovetail joints that despite everything
love and love and love.

Here is her secret, the furtive xylophone message--
I'm still a saturn until the satellite, a satellite into Saturn mewling away.

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We also present a second poem by Sarah entitled "The Daily Bride." This poem is featured in INTERLOPE 8: INNOVATIVE WRITING BY FILIPINO/A AMERICANS; Sarah will be one of the readers during the East Coast launch of INTERLOPE 8 (more details below).

THE DAILY BRIDE

I can think of _______ theoretically.

People without secure attachment figures may first seek ______ in a partner. Once they master this, they seek out a partner similar to their absent childhood authority figure and try to make the person _____ them.

"making them tick"

Not groin-teasing hula dances
strange web sites

My sweet scent.

Talked to _______ last night as I should have not.

I have a dream.
I am playing a board game with acquaintances. I must choose from:

1.      Man
2.      Men
3.      My Heart

What my heart said:

I'm sexually ______ our children. I'm plotting to _____ you very soon.

We go to clubs. We go to restaurants. We go to cafes. We go to raw bars. An acquaintance fashions a representative sculpture. I felt her face consumed by the veil. Its raining, deeper points.

She was steps to dancing.

I was dancing so much that I thought that way.

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BOOK LAUNCHES: REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

In November, Eileen Tabios launches her latest poetry collection, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press) in New York and Bay Area, CA. More information about Reproductions is available at www.MarshHawkPress.org. Early reviews of Eileen's book are as full of raves as the generous advance words already provided by eminent poets Arthur Sze, Forrest Gander, Barry Schwabsky, Susan Schultz and Alfred Yuson. Reproductions' early reviews include these excerpts:

Unlike most poetry books that are light as feathers, their words and images floating off the page, this one is substantial in every way imaginable. Thick with imagery, subject matter, geography and precise and inspired syntax, Eileen Tabios' work reminds me of going for a swim in the ocean -- a complete envelopment in the currents of poetry....Tabios' prolific meditations on writing, living and loving in modern times solidifies her role as one of the foremost Filipino American poets of the 21st century. A great read for anyone interested in prose-poetry experimentation.
--Neela Banerjee (ASIAN WEEK)

Tabios has a remarkable ability to move from the abstract and the intellectual to the sensual and the tangible. She's a poet of the streets, and she's above the streets, in her own head, exploring and mapping her own consciousness where ever it takes her, even into the realm of "psychological insecurity."
--Jonah Raskin (THE PRESS DEMOCRAT)

NEW YORK BOOK LAUNCH
7 p.m., Thursday, November 14, 2002
Asian American Writers Workshop
16 W. 32nd Floor, 10th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10001

Eileen Tabios' presentation will include a circling back to her first book (nine books ago), the ground-breaking Black Lightning (AAWW/Temple). Joined by Black Lightning poets Kimiko Hahn and John Yau, Eileen will discuss how certain strategies in Black Lightning affected the poetics of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. Q&A with the three poets will follow. Eileen also will present poems from Reproductions by presenting poems through multidisciplinary collaborations with performance artist Johanna Almiron and poet/jazz stylist Cristina Querrer. This book launch/reading promises to be a unique enjoyable event.

READING FOR MARSH HAWK PRESS
1 p.m., Saturday, November 16, 2002
Bowery Club
308 Bowery @ Bleecker, right across from CBGB's
New York City
Eileen Tabios will be a featured poet in Bob Holman's Bowery Club. For more information, see http://www.bowerypoetry.com/

TWO PINAY WRITERS: POETRY & FICTION
(WEST COAST LAUNCH: REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE)
7 p.m., Friday, December 6, 2002
Pusod Center
1808 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Eileen Tabios and Tess Holthe (author of WHEN THE ELEPHANTS DANCE) will present readings and book-signings (in time for Holiday gift-giving, friends!). Reception will follow. For more information, contact Dori Caminong through http://www.bwf.org/.

Attend the book launches to see what folks are raving about! As noted poet Luis Cabalquinto says about Reproductions: "I find myself appreciating these poems as compositions with no sharply-framed "subject matter;" instead, I discover each one as a diamond-faceted free configuration of a singular and ever-shifting poetic mindset. The poems are made accessible to the reader through the use of clear, sensuous, and widely (and wildly) allusive diction. I can think of Ted Hughes writing these poems, were he to use a female persona with the sensibilities and multi-cultural experience of an Eileen Tabios. Saludos!"

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INTERLOPE #8 EAST COAST LAUNCH

Free to the public
6-8 p.m., Tuesday, November 12, 2002
New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute
New York University
269 Mercer Street, Suite 609
New York, NY 10003

Local contributors and Guest Editor Eileen Tabios will present poems and discuss the innovative writings by Filipino/a writers featured in this historic issue of Interlope #8 (a journal devoted to innovative Asian American poetics). Local contributors include Eric Gamalinda, Paolo Javier, Sarah Gambito, Cristina Querrer and Veronica Corpuz. For more information, contact

Fannie H. Chan
Events Coordinator
Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute
New York University
Email: fannie.chan@nyu.edu
Website: www.apa.nyu.edu

More information about Interlope #8: Innovative Writing by Filipino/a-Americans is featured in the archived August 2002 issue of Babaylan Speaks and at http://www.interlope.org/issue8writers.html.

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THE "ITINERANT" JAIME JACINTO

Meritage Press is pleased to present a poem by poet Jaime Jacinto who describes himself as an "itinerant educator, wishful surfer, wandering dog-walker." Modestly, he doesn't mention (but Meritage Press will) that he is also the author of the critically acclaimed collection Heaven Is Just Another Country (Kearney Street Workshop) and co-editor of Without Names, the first Filipino/a-American poetry anthology in the U.S.. Jaime recently wowed listeners at one of the Intersection Literary Series readings in San Francisco with this poem:

SIRENA

     "Drowning is not so pitiful
     as the attempt to rise."
          --Emily Dickinson

When night drew near
we spoke of her
beneath a starlit sky
the air windless and still
there was no other sound
except for that soft whistle
perhaps a whale calf
lost at sea

though in our bones
we knew the sound
that circled us
entering our bodies
like rivers of starlight
was la sirena calling to us
one by one
every man believing
she was out there
a tail fin slicing through the water
trailing a glimmer of light

so that a sleepless sailor
confused and weary
would think nothing
of leaving his watch
to dive back into
the wine dark water
lured like a fish
until he too disappears
beneath a wreath
of sea grass