Teaching Poetic Form in Philippine Studies

I am on a search for some English material on the balagtasan. As I have previously blogged, I gave a cursory introduction to my students a couple of weeks back. What few specific things I know of balagtasan come from the transcript of a lecture given by Virgilio Almario at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA in 2003.

I have found the book Balagtasan: kasaysayan at antolohiya (Ateneo de Manila University Press), by Galileo S. Zafra, and it looks like I just have to bear down on the written academic Tagalog and stop being intimidated by it. I am having a rather invigorating email exchange with a Filipino poet and grad student at Princeton, and he is interested in my interest in Philippine poetic forms. They are dying, the creators and performers of balagtasan, he says, and certainly, such a performative poetic form (I have always loved the phrase, “con todo forma,” spoken with exuberant rolled r’s and a hand flourish) needs its performers in order to continue to live.

In the meantime, other poetic forms I am thinking about for my students include the Tagalog tanaga, and the Mangyan ambahan. Of course, we would take them into a contemporary Filipino American and even hip-hop English context, so what remains, I wonder, of the poetic forms’ original use/purpose.

I love that when we discuss balagtasan in class, we can talk about the rules of an MC battle or a poetry slam as approximations, as these are cultural phenomena or artistic forms with which my students are familiar. I love that we can open ourselves up to understanding poetic form as existing in all human cultures, and not just restrictive western academic settings. I love that it can be a segue into accepting contemporary use of poetic form by poets of color, that we can leave behind the notion of poetic form being antiquated and irrelevant.

I was just reciting some ambahan (and mind you, I do not speak or understand Mangyan), a poem of indeterminate length, comprised of seven syllable metered lines, spoken/sung/recited in a poetic register, and indeed it does sound contemporary. And now I am thinking that some portions of my poetic series, “For the City that Nearly Broke Me,” could afford to become or approximate ambahan. This would give the series a more substantive anchor.