Philippines-based and Filipino American Poetry: A Brain Dump

I was recently contacted by a Filipino American UC Berkeley undergraduate who was looking for information on Philippines-based Filipino poetry, and he came to me as he perceived me as some kind of authority on the subject.

I’d originally agreed to meet with him and brain dump on him. But then something in his email made me think again. He asked me for some recommendations on Philippine poetic traditions, and mentioned that in this area, he was reading the anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue, edited by Nick Carbó. I thought, curious, this anthology as the student’s primary resource on Philippine poetry traditions.

OK, so certainly there are intersections between Philippines-based and Filipino American poets, poetry, and poetics, one commonality is the use of English, rather than Tagalog, other Filipino languages, and Spanish (though certainly, this is an overgeneralization). And certainly, there are a good handful of Filipino poets whose literary careers started and flourished in the Philippines before they immigrated to the USA. I think of Luisa Igloria (in/for many of her Philippines-published collections, she was Maria Luisa Aguilar Cariño), Eric Gamalinda, Luis Francia.

But I am thinking that there are entire populations of Filipino American poets who have little or no direct experience or contact with Philippine literary traditions. I was reminded of this at UCSC when I read with Shirley Ancheta and Jeff Tagami. Shirley read a poem I think was titled, “Carabao,” which she introduced by saying that for Filipino Americans who have never been to the Philippines, the carabao has become a very powerful symbol. Apart from the actual beast of burden itself, and how it must seem to people who’ve never actually seen one in real life, I think of Manong Al Robles’ numerous carabao, figurative language for the manongs, in Rappin with Ten Thousand Carabaos in the Dark.

I think of Manong Al Robles’ poetics perhaps following Carlos Bulosan, who followed Walt Whitman and simultaneously paid tribute to Jose Rizal (arguably in Whitmanesque ways). I think of Manong Al Robles’ poetics also paralleling the Beats, if only via geographic proximity. I also think of the similarities between Manong Al Robles’ poetics and those of the Nuyoricans. I think of Jessica Hagedorn, not only in relation to Al Robles, not only in relation to Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth’s mentorship, but especially Ntozake Shange’s “Colored Girls.” I think of Catalina Cariaga’s Cultural Evidence, and its apparent “avant garde”-ness. I think of Cariaga as influenced by her teacher Myung Mi Kim, and existing as a poet within an apparent “innovative Pacific writing,” “movement,” that may include such aesthetically disparate folks as Juliana Spahr and Lee A. Tonouchi. I remember that all these poetic traditions are American poetic traditions.

And it’s not just the West Coast based Flips and/or those descended from Manongs whose poetic trajectories do not abide by Philippine traditions. José Garcia Villa, for example, we place thick in American Modernism. I think of Nick Carbó, and while his first book, El Grupo McDonalds, as I recall is firmly planted in Philippine geopolitics, I still see his actual writing and language within a Western context, and how this is affected by (reflected in?) his likely addressing Western readerships. I think of San Francisco raised Eugene Gloria as well, and while I have not read Drivers at the Short-Time Motel in its entirety (I know! It’s been time!), I am familiar with his poems from Flippin, and especially the “I am Through with You, Carlos Bulosan,” in his poem, “Carlos Bulosan,” in which Gloria directly addresses that cultural and literary tradition which Bulosan has come to represent.

And then I think of the poets of my generation, either immigrants at a young age or born stateside, whether or not our families are transnational, whether or not we grew up in multilingual homes and communities, whether or not we’ve been processed through the MFA machine, formally or informally taught by American teachers and poets, and what a can’t really nail down heterogeneous body within American letters we are.

And that’s where I’m at this morning.

I haven’t decided whether I’d be helpful to this student or not.