English
Filipinoby Marne L. Kilates
from The National Artists of the Philippines 1999–2003, Volume 2 (Anvil and Cultural Center of the Philippines, 2003)
VIRGILIO S. ALMARIO, also known as Rio Alma, cuts a tall and controversial figure in contemporary Filipino literature. Born in the rural town of San Miguel in Bulacan, he first casts a public figure as a teacher in the locality’s public high school. Even then, he was already seeking others who shared the same interest in language by spending most of his Saturdays with poet friends at the University of the East, where he eventually enrolled in a Master’s course in Education.
It was during this time (1968) that the critic Bienvenido Lumbera spotted one of Almario’s anthologized works and cited it in an article entitled “Looking Back at the Future of Philippine Writing”, for Graphic (January 3, 1968). Writing back to Lumbera to thank him for the mention of his work (which started their long correspondence and friendship), Almario articulated what might be the original purpose of his writing: “…It was a great honor for our organization (KADIPAN) to be mentioned and recognized for our effort to bring the wind of rebellion against the constricting shroud of convention that presently envelops Filipino literature.” (Italics supplied)
Within two years Almario had published his two slim but seminal volumes, Makinasyon (Machination, 1968) and Peregrinasyon (Pilgrimage, 1970), wherein he first showed his unorthodox technique and use of language. The latter won a national award, but its most popular poem, “Elehiya sa Isang Rebelde” (Elegy for a Rebel), was voted down in a national contest for “Poet of the Year” and, in his own words “was used as pretext for a rally and subsequent organization of activist writers.” Almario had become a poet in the midst of things.
Martial law found him as a literature instructor at the Ateneo de Manila University and part-time teacher at the University of the Philippines (UP), and like many of his fellow activist-writers he went “underground”. He re-merged in mid-1973 weakened by and old lung ailment, blacklisted by the military as a suspected communist, and barred from his teaching post in the University. At this time he organized in his apartment the first of his weekend workshops for young poets, the Galian sa Arte at Tula (GAT).
He managed to teach again, enrolled as a graduate student at UP, got elected as president of the newly revived UP Writers Club and editor of the Literary Apprentice, and went into editing and writing work. In 1977 he accepted a project to head the Nutrition Center of the Philippines’ publishing house for children’s books — his other devotion. This became the Children’s Communication Center, publisher of the famous Adarna Books series, and now one of the most successful publishing houses of children’s literature in the country.
Within two decades he had published his first six volumes of poetry, his first three books of literary history and criticism, edited literary anthologies, translated poetry and plays, written children’s stories and a manual of style in Tagalog, while maintaining a regular column in a national daily.
In 1984 he was awarded a TOYM (Ten Outstanding Young Men) for Literature and a year later started his term as chairman of the Writers’ Union of the Philippines, for which he has since been a moving presence even when younger writers had taken over the helm of the organization.
THE POETRY: PROSPECTING AND PROSECUTING THE FILIPINO CONSCIOUSNESS
Almario exemplifies the migrant literary consciousness that seeks to extract meaning from the complexity and conflicts of the largely unexplored Philippine pre-colonial heritage and written colonial history, while confronting the bitter and brutalizing forces of contemporary urban experience, and (now) the even newer exacerbation of globalization.
Makinasyon and Peregrinasyon in effect catapulted (together with the works of two other poets, Rogelio Mangahas and Lamberto Antonio) Tagalog poetry into the Modernist-Formalist movements of the 1960s. The two books took up the slack in the modernist trajectory of Tagalog poetry since Alejandro Abadilla’s “Ako ang Daigdig” which, while being a landmark, was also the last before it lurched to a stop.
Thus, while Alma was one of the leading poets of the First Quarter Storm who partook of the social consciousness and experience of political suppression in the poetry of Amado V. Hernandez, he also led the breakaway from the traditionalist poetics represented by the latter. So that when he published his first major collection, Doktrinang Anakpawis (Gospel of the Oppressed), the book was hailed by Lumbera as the “poetry book of the 1970s”, while Teodoro Agoncillo proclaimed him as the legitimate successor of Hernandez.
From then on, the rest of his 10 poetry books (and eight critical and literary histories, and still counting), have continued to plumb unvisited depths and undiscovered territories of the Filipino imagination.
Doktrina is the first of a trilogy completed by Retrato at Rekwerdo (Images and Memory) and Muli sa Kandungan ng Lupa (Heartland). The first is the now acknowledged manifesto of what used to be called engagé or “committed” poetry, while Retrato, with the haunting and incantatory qualities of its poems, is a reprieve with the comforting sentiments of a Paradise Regained, even as it is a paradise that continues to be violated by a changing world. Muli not only revisits that paradise but also attempts a rigorous redefinition of it. Not only does it reawake pain and memory but also confronts the past that threatens to become an empty future, if no deep knowing is to be done.
In-between these landmark books, Almario provokes and challenges himself and us with his other collections that take us on expeditions into the exterior and interior territories of our consciousness, and by his deceptively light but satirical tweaks which are actually reinvention of meaning.
Again by their titles and themes we may glimpse their intents. The satirical Palipad Hangin (Words in the Wind) punctuates the break in his personal politics and his long running debate (”feud”, he calls it) with his former colleagues from the Left. (A)lamat at (H)istorya (Legends and Histories), with its play of parentheses, suggests the thin lines between myth (and myth making) and reality. Katon sa Limang Pandama (Catechism for the Five Senses) alludes to the first instructional pamphlet of our institutionalized religion but also invites us to see things in a new light.
Mga Retaso ng Liwanag (Fragments of Light) again puts together for constant reexamination sundry items and remnants of experience and memory. Supot ni Judas (Judas’ Pouch) whose title takes off from one of a variety of Tagalog names for the constellation Taurus, to which the group of seven stars called Pleiades belongs (but whose visible number varies depending on which part of the world you are looking from), again invites us to different manners of seeing.
Always, Almario induces and inveigles us into these inward and outward journeys. His voices are lyric, satiric and epic, and what Isagani Cruz calls the ‘semi-epic introspection’ of his long, sonorous poems. His influences range from Balagtas to Whitman, Corazon de Jesus to Yeats, Lorca and Eliot, from the French Impressionists and Existentialists to the Marxists and Social Realists, the Spanish and South American Magic Realists.
The destinations of his vigorous and itinerant mind are beyond the merely aesthetic, because both his method and instinct are those of an intense examiner, insistent prospector and prosecutor of the Filipino consciousness, whose purpose is to discover what it is to be Filipino. Adrian Cristobal comments that reading Almario is always like going on an “internal tour of Philippine history.”
While he continues to examine the soil of our consciousness, unearthing and polishing gems from it, he opens himself and us to universal and contemporary experience, taking us along the twists and turns of his literary wanderlust, into the ever-expanding universe of his imagination.
THE CRITICAL WORKS: VIGOR AND RIGOR IN EXAMINING THE FILIPINO TEXT
Despite the separate personas he assigns to the authorship of his poetic and critical works, Almario’s poetry and criticism are inextricably linked. His poetry is informed by his search for what many demur as the impossible: the finding of the true Filipino poetics; his criticism and research aspire towards the construction and codification of a Filipino literary theory, in spite and perhaps because of his long apprenticeship in Western modes and techniques.
Lumbera reminds us that it was Almario who put the word kritisismo in the Filipino language. Early in the first decade of his writing he produced his first collection of essays on literary theory, Ang Makata sa Panahon ng Makina (The Poet in the Age of the Machine). He had embarked on a relatively new course in modern Tagalog poetry. The journeyman poet was becoming a master, a poet acutely conscious of his poetics. Taking instruction from T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent; the poet had also become scholar and critic. He was charting his own territory beyond the confines of “social realism” by returning to and reexamining the native tradition, chronicling his links and breaks with it, while continuing his own encounters with modern and global literature.
Makata has since been followed by Walong Dekada ng Makabagong Tulang Pilipino (Eight Decades of Modern Tagalog Poetry), a critical anthology that demonstrates the sweep of his scholarly gaze, from his elders to his contemporaries. Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo (Balagtasism Versus Modernism) defines and maps what Almario considers as the two main and often conflicting directions in Tagalog poetry, and the book has since become an academic landmark. Jose Corazon de Jesus, Mga Piling Tula (Selected Poems of Jose Corazon de Jesus) is a selection of the works with critical biography of the foremost romantic poet of the pre-war “golden age” of Tagalog poetry.
Taludtod at Talinghaga (Verse and Metaphor), a technical codification of traditional Tagalog prosody, is now an almost indispensable text in Tagalog poetics. Kung Sino ang Kumatha kina Bagongbanta, Ossorio, Herrera, Aquino de Belen, Balagtas, Atbp. (Who Created Bagongbanta…) traces native literary tradition and its struggle against the impositions of Spanish colonization.
Panitikan ng Rebolusyon(g 1896) (Literature of the Revolution[of 1896]) is a close re-reading of the works of Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto as the two other (forgotten) landmarks of Filipino nationalist and revolutionary literature, apart from those of Francisco Balagtas’ and Jose Rizal’s. Mutyang Dilim for the first time demonstrates the use of Almario’s proposed New Filipino Formalism as basis for the close reading of 20 contemporary Filipino poets.
In all this, Almario has exerted his undiminished vigor of mind and rigor of scholarship to an extent largely unsurpassed by his contemporaries. And accordingly he has left a lasting, perhaps indelible, imprint on the continuing examination and re-examination of the Filipino text.
THE POET AS MENTOR, PUBLISHER, CULTURAL PROPAGATOR
Energy begets generosity. An abundance of the former engenders a hunger to share. But is a generosity without bias, in fact strict and demanding in its desire to instruct. Thus, Almario’s literary vision not just manifests in his writing but extends to his other vocations: mentoring, spotting the rough literary talent and helping to polish it by critical motivation and encouragement, publishing and general advocacy for culture.
Within and outside academe, in journalism, publishing and cultural management, Almario has made his presence felt. He has been regular member of the teaching staff of UP Writers Workshop, director of the UP Sentro ng Wikang Filipino, conceptualizer and editor-in-chief of the watershed UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino (2001), and director of the UP Likhaan: Institute of Creative Writing (formerly Creative Writing Center).
He has been executive director and editor of the Adarna Books series published by his Children’s Communication Center, founding secretary-general of the Philippine Board of Books on Young People (PBBY), publisher-editor of the defunct Diyaryo Filipino (the first broadsheet in Filipino) and Filipino Magazin, chairman of the Writers’ Union of the Philippines (later Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas, UMPIL) which published the Mithi literary anthologies, founding member of the Manila Critics Circle that gives the annual National Book Awards and former executive director of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).
Almario’s other devotion, children’s literature, runs parallel to his writing. Aklat Adarna, after the mythical bird, is the first comprehensive children’s book series ever developed in the Philippines. It rekindled interest in children’s literature by other writers, illustrators and publishers, spawning similar efforts and thus increasing not only published children’s books but those engaged in its production: professional children’s writers and illustrators.
The book program earned the approbation of educators and social workers, becoming part of the country’s Early Childhood Enrichment Program implemented under the auspices of the then Department of Social Welfare and Development and the UNICEF, while public and private elementary schools made Adarna books indispensable to their library collections. In his involvement with this pioneering program, Almario also became one of the prime movers in developing educational television for children, through the introduction of the Philippine version of Sesame Street.
Early in his career in the late 1970s, Almario started the now famous Galian sa Arte at Tula (GAT, or Workshop on Art and Poetry). Displaced from a teaching position by martial law, Almario spotted and gathered young potential writers in weekend marathon sessions where they submitted and critiqued their own works under his instructive supervision. The product of these sessions was a series of Galian anthologies of poetry, plays and stories.
Later in the 1980s, Almario took under his wing even younger batches of aspiring writers. He established LIRA or Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika at Anyo (Center for Image, Rhetoric and Form). The weekend sessions, which continue up to the present, are conducted under a concept of a poetry clinic, devoted exclusively to poetry and the meticulous study of the traditional and contemporary modes and techniques of the craft.
MAN OF LETTERS, MAN OF DEEDS
His words shape his actions. Almario, after Alejandro Abadilla, is the first truly engaged modern poet in Tagalog and in the continually evolving Filipino national language that he champions. This championing has taken the form not of mere rhetoric or precious meager literary output, but of a lifetime of practice — in his prodigious poetic work, in his criticism, in his journalism, lexicography and technical writing, in his advocacy and organizational work — all conducted in the Filipino language.
Whatever stage of evolution this language has reached, it owes in no small part to his practice, as he believes that no language can develop, let alone survive, if no one writes in it. And he proposes and proves, among other things, that the Filipino language is as capable as any, with and in spite of, the present paucity of readership, in expressing with richness and sophistication, with technical rigor and creative opulence, the native and global Filipino intellect and imagination.
Almario’s own personal development signifies and exemplifies the complex and authentic experience of Filipino literature, as it examines and validates its own heritages, as it continues to confront present realities, as it looks with vigor and courage towards the future. A vigor and courage that owes no little to this man’s work. And a future where language, literature and art can truly claim meaning and function as nourishment for the Filipino soul.
(First appeared online at Anvil Publishing’s Author Central.)