nameabledays Archive One

...at the 12th Biennial Symposium on the Literatures & Cultures of the Asia-Pacific Region

Premier Singapore novelist & playwright Robert Yeo, not a rare visitor to Manila and Krip Yuson's Iowa Writers Workshop buddy, feels at home with bibulous Filipino writers











A nd they take pictures of themselves. After soaking in the possibilities and future of literature in this part of the world, they squint their eyes trying to make out what’s on the horizon, while holding on to a rope. For the Filipinos among them, they contemplate the future being created beyond the UP-Ateneo-Miriam academic triangle, while shuttling along roads named Tandang Sora and Katipunan, which is the same highway (under construction in stretches) that on a road map might only be labeled C5. The future is still there somewhere in the confusion of names. Or literature might as well be there, molting in its burrow in the Diliman hinterland, between the UP-Ayala Technopark rising along Commonwealth Avenue, and the Eastwood-Ortigas-Ayala Business Processing Corridor. Well, maybe it looks like this when you come from the 12th Biennial Symposium on the Literatures & Cultures of the Asia-Pacific Region, for the first time held in UP, hosted by the Department of English and Comparative Literature last November 22-24, 2007.

Some of us were not privy to the discussions of the scholarly papers since we were invited only for the poetry reading on the last night, but Kaibigan Dr. Jimmy Abad, Prof. Butch Dalisay, and famous Singapore novelist and playwright Robert Yeo, our special guest at Mag:Net, each delivered a paper at the Symposium. It might suffice the curious to cite the official data sheet of this year’s symposium: focusing on the “enthusiastic production of literature and other cultural texts” in the huge and culturally diverse area of the Asia Pacific, it aimed to address the “token presence in anthologies and scholarship outside the region,” and even within, the “minimal… knowledge of each other’s literatures and cultures.” Titled “RE-WOR(L)DINGS: Contestations & Reconfigurations in the in the Literatures and Cultures of the Asia Pacific Region,” it sought specifically to “up the ante by questioning the paradigms that have forced the writer and scholar in this region to retrieve, negotiate and recuperate, contesting the worlding that has relegated the region to the margins. It will explore possibilities of re-mapping culture so that no center has single dominance, and every center retains a fidelity to its people’s history and culture without negating a colonial past or current global imperatives.”

That should speak for itself. The sessions consisting of the presentation of papers ranging from literary theory and linguistics to the literary blog and the narratives of video games must have been taxing even to the rigorous scholarly mind, so at the end of each session a poetry reading was held, with cocktails of course. The first night the Asian scholars and poets read their works, and on the second and last night was the Filipino poets’ turn. Among our friends who read were Vim Nadera, Marjorie Evasco, Joel Toledo, Mikael de Lara Co and Alfred (Krip) Yuson, and yours truly (I read the original and my translation of Rio Alma’s “Pinatubo”). Krip Yuson, who was reuniting after a long time with Iowa Writers’ Workshop mate and friend Robert Yeo, wanted to do some catching up with his friend, so we all hied off Mag:Net. And the poets took pictures of themselves. Or mainly it was Butch Dalisay, with his slim-and-mean, up to the minute Leica C-Lux 2, who emailed the pictures to us not long after. So, here we are in another kind of worlding. (More Asian, Southeast Asian, Australian and New Zealand scholars joined us later in the lively literary discussions and glass-and-beer-bottle-lifting exercises but unfortunately, while they took pictures of the instant eisteddfod, we were not able to exchange email addies with them.)

PHOTOS, the duets & trio (All by Butch Dalisay, except that of himself): Robert Yeo, Katipunan guest of honor; long-time buddies, Robert makes a point while Krip meditaties; Robert & Jim seem unconvinced by the Sage, while the late Maningning Miclat's picture at the Poet's Alcove looks on amused; Robert tells a skeptical Jim about his adventures in a French nudist colony; Charlson & Robert, two prominent overseas Chinese; poets Drey Teran and Joel Toledo persuade each other on the dangers of tobacco; Krip surrenders an argument to a pleased Larry Ypil.

(This is a correction. My apologies to both Kristian Abe Dalao, the name I previously and erroneously assigned to Larry, and to Larry Ypil himself, who is now porperly identified—MLK.)

THE SOLOS: Photographer Butch Dalisay and his trusty Leica on another Mag:Netic Night, taken by Exie Abola; Robin Padilla pretends to be the poetic-looking Joel Toledo; Pu Yi, the Last Emperor; and the Emperor of Single Malt.

My new Profile Photo by Butch Dalisay

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New at the Poet’s Alcove: “Bakunawa, the Moon Eater”

Just to announce the new poem and installation now on display at Mag:Net’s Poet’s Alcove. The alcove is café and gallery owner Rock Drilon’s permanent space for poets and poems (upon the inspiration of Krip Yuson who saw the niche at a corner of the smoking deck and had the epiphany to make poetic use of it), so that even if it’s not Happy Mondays poetry night, the interested might have a poem to read after viewing the paintings at the gallery. The creative challenge for the poet (or the artist, if he partners with one in doing the alcove) is to use its natural depth, integrate the poem and the artwork in the enclosed quadrihedral space, including its front glass panel. The simplest way perhaps is to make the poem seem to float by using the glass as field for the text, with an artwork, painting or installation in the inner space of the niche. One memorable alcove display was that of Ravi Sunico who used wine bottles and took good advantage of the light. Mine is simple only (done on the last hour, just the morning before its unveiling—dahil di kaagad naasikaso—but with the help of good friend, the fine abstract artist and poet Pancho Villanueva, with his painting and installation complementing the text, interested readers might pause at Mag:Net’s Poet’s Alcove to appraise its new offering.

Bakunawa, the Moon Eater

for Bikolanos, one year after the Deluge

Beware of his beauty because
He has never been called beautiful:
Ghostly serpent slinking in a circle,
Nibbling a shadow, a quarter, the whole,
And cats moon, dogs bay, cocks crow:
Night, darker than dawn, is red as blood.

Listen. In beauty he is even more
Dangerous: Watch how he makes haloes
‘Round the gorgeous glinting disk,
Wooing with a ring of icy sparkle,
Quickening breasts and breaking hearts,
Seducing all worshippers of borrowed light.

Sailors read it well: even in calm
Waters, where ripples become stars,
And the horizon gone, now and then
Outlined only by phosphorescent spray,
The farther beyond the disk the halo’s
Unbroken arc will reach, they say,

Will tell of the creeping darkness
The coming wind will bring. It is no
Respecter of land or man: dislodging
The black mud and sand that cling
To the shoulders of volcanoes, choking
Rivers that will break their dams,

Rushing bridges, toppling walls,
Uprooting trees and homes, burying
Sleeping infants, changing the face of cities.
So take a look at the full moon and marvel
At the cold coruscation of her halo:
Ring of troth from her ravenous groom.


Marne L. Kilates
November 29, 2007

Installation by
Pancho Villanueva

(Alcove photo by Pancho)

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A Note on the New Blog Header

Did some housekeeping. There's a new picture of me in the Profile, thanks to Butch D., and at last, for this non-techie (or kibitzer techie—he loves watching kids and other adepts do wonders on their computers and blogs), or simply a bumbler in the Net, I’ve been able to change my blog header! That’s the masthead (for us print people) with the new cyan color letters and the new font, at the topmost of this page. And change it into something that I could call my own (sob!), after countless experiments, trial and error (more of the latter). So that’s that, a most exhilarating event in this blogger’s life. Since I can only do minimal Photoshop, I used the Mac presentation program called Keynote to choose and set the type (the really elegant Zapfino), the colors, and pasted in the only images I could manage. There’s only one, actually, a bird of paradise from a horticultural site I visited a long time ago (here’s to say thank you, if they see my blog), and the other is not actually an image but an icon or wingding (actually a leaf), which corresponds to the lower case n in the font called Type Embellishments. (I added the violin-playing cherub later, from Liam Quin's superb art site, www.fromoldbooks.org/, and cut and pasted a strip from the background of the Keynote template called White Corners—such little blessings.) I converted the Keynote slide into a JPEG image via the Keynote export menu, and I had cobbled together an image I could upload to my photo hosting site (either Flickr or Picasa), to be welcomed by the layout configuration menu of Blogger. I know it was quite a roundabout and painful route, but there it is. My own! My own blog header, which frees me somewhat from the Blogger template that has served me well since I started on this engagement with the Web (which has kept me writing what I want to write about, mainly literature, music, art, and of course, poetry). This must be a miniscule achievement in the eyes of the adepts, but I’m happy.

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