A stylistic form often associated with walking is the collage. The act of walking especially when done in a metropolis puts the writer in an environment where images come fast one after the other and encounters could happen more. Images and thoughts often come while walking in collage-like fashion and writers who employ walking sometimes want to preserve some semblance of this collage if not all of it. Collage was employed by Jose F. Lacoba in his popular poem “Ang Mga Kagilagilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz” but most of all in his often forgotten long poem “The Annotated Catechism.” According to Conchitina Cruz, the use of collage in Lacaba’s poems diverts from traditional patterns of ordering experience often employed by Filipino writers writing poetry in English as well as historians writing nationalist histories. The act of walking itself produces the collage, which then, as Cruz notices in “The Annotated Catechism,” allows the writer to “enact and exacerbate” the tensions present in the landscape and the larger context of society as well as the language used to write a walking piece. The collage, which is partly encouraged by walking, produces work that challenges conventional writing forms.
In her own walking poem entitled “Pedestrian Studies,” included in her book There is No Emergency, Cruz employs some form of collage although not in the intensity of Lacoba’s two poems. In one poem, she puts together a series of walks, one walk equals one stanza that occupies an entire page.
Lacaba’s poems use collage to depart from traditional methods of ordering experience
In “The Annotated Catechism,” collage becomes a means to disrupt commonplace methods of ordering experience, not only in the New Critical tradition of Philippine poetry, but also the tradition of nationalist Philippine history. (15)
“The Annotated Catechism” turns to collage to enact and exacerbate the fundamental incongruity between the language of the poem and the streets in which it is set. The resulting discontinuities, which recast Manila in multiple coordinates of time and space and according to multiple discourses, construct an alternative model of narrating history that draws from the techniques of poetry. Collage becomes a means to disrupt commonplace methods of ordering experience, not only in the New Critical tradition of Philippine poetry in English, but also the tradition of nationalist Philippine history. (103)
As a collage poem, “The Annotated Catechism” stages what Adorno describes. In departing from the norm of the Romantic lyric whose solitary speaker offers a singular “vision of Reality,” it privileges Aristotelian “poiesis as mimesis praxeos”; the poem becomes the site in which “the processes of the external world as we have come to know it” are played out (Perloff, “Pound/Stevens” 506); it is thus a site of provisionality rather than well-wrought coherence. (118)
“The Annotated Catechism” also generates disorientation through syntax, and in this Lacaba‘s collage technique is two-tracked. Pierre Joris distinguishes between two approaches to verbal collage: “writing, the collage elements of which show the seams of their fracture, and those that hide those seams, fold them in open themselves; writing that has invisible seams” (30). Lacaba oscillates between the two approaches, both of which produce discontinuities that dissolve the singular lyric speaker and subvert the conception of time as a linear progression. The consecutive becomes contemporaneous, as the poem features different versions of simultaneity at play. Lacaba‘s collage technique is seamless and more discreet in parts that couch incongruous elements in conventional syntax. (121)
In syntactically stitching two worlds from different periods of time together, Lacaba activates “the transfer of materials from one context to another, even as the original context cannot be erased” (122)
Lacaba’s poems are psychogeographic
Arguably excursions in psychogeography undertaken by the postcolonial poet as aspiring flaneur, the poems are pressured to confront the public space in which they seem to have no place. English is used to write the experience of walking in and around Manila, an act that itself is a form of public speech, exercised during the fiery marches of the First Quarter Storm, and later, silenced by the curfew and surveillance of martial law. (101)
both [“The Annotated Catechism” and “Ang mga kagila-gilalas na pakikipagsapalaran ni Juan de la Cruz”] track the movements of a flaneur (115)
The forms of Lacaba’s walking poems depart from the dominant tradition in Philippine poetry in English
The poems, however, are also radical departures from the dominant Romantic-New Critical aesthetic overseeing the production of Philippine poetry in English, which, at its most dogmatic, fetishizes the poem in itself and regards the realization of organic unity as the sole and paramount concern of the individual creative genius.
The laws of form they generate foreground the materiality of language and effect disorientation, which run counter to the narrativizing logic and pursuit of a coherent whole that lend poetry in the New Critical vein, as appropriated by Filipino poets, its artfulness and fortify its political reticence.
It serves as a counterpoint to what dominates the production of Philippine poetry in English, as informed by its appropriation of New Critical tenets: primarily coherent lyric subjects who are preoccupied with personal-couched-as-universal concerns, committed to organic form via the staging of tensions that are unified into insights, and complacent in the transparency of language as a carrier of meaning. The persona of “The Annotated Catechism” is neither a stable nor a placeless lyric subject, and the poem grows increasingly fragmented as it navigates Manila. Written in a language alien to the streets yet set in the streets, the poem pressures the lyric privacy that English supposedly cultivates in the postcolonial poem to contend with geography and history. The result is not only a fragmented lyric speaker, literally forced out of a singular self, but also a discontinuous conception of space and time.
the poet who is also an active participant in the surge of unrest at the onset of the 1970s can only break (and break free from) the stable lyric and the solitude of the Romantic individual genius, which, since the postwar years, has dominated the tradition of Philippine poetry in English. Without providing resolution to the disorder it formalizes and thematizes, “The Annotated Catechism” is hardly illustrative of the ideal New Critical text, which embodies, writes Cleanth Brooks, the “unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude” (126)
The form of Lacaba’s poems radicalizes them
It is through form that Lacaba‘s work radicalizes the autonomy that pervades Philippine poetry in English, with which his poems are affiliated by default. It is also through form that they transgress prevailing relations of production and become allegories of and participants in social transformation. As a limit case for activating the sociality of an autonomous poetics, Lacaba‘s resistant poems simultaneously reject separation from the political and social spheres, and refuse to be seamlessly absorbed or subsumed by them. The double duty they perform neither overstates the capacities of poetry to intervene in society nor glosses over language itself as a domain for forging resistance to the given world.
As final exhibits of what the poet deemed necessary to relinquish when he came of age as an activist on the streets of Manila, “The Annotated Catechism” and “Prometheus Unbound” throw into crisis the seeming autonomy of English-language poetry by Filipinos, as well as the nativist nationalism that forecloses the possibility of an empowering literary appropriation of the colonial tongue. (101)
Kagila-gilalas
Lacaba‘s Juan de la Cruz is “a would-be urban flaneur… who finds himself everywhere excluded by a city of prohibitive rules” (Tadiar 319). Confronted by a series of street signs that restrict his behavior in and access to public spaces, Juan de la Cruz is progressively driven out of the city and to the countryside, where he joins the armed struggle. (116-117)
The Annotated Catechism
Unlike “Kagila-gilalas,” which uses colloquial Filipino and loose rhyme to narrate a plot that unfolds in a linear fashion, “The Annotated Catechism” is a long, fragmented poem, full of associative leaps and allusions, and visually unpredictable in its lineation, which tethers the reading experience of it to the page. The poem becomes even more opaque, its persona far from representative, when cast against the protagonist of “Kagila-gilalas,” Juan de la Cruz, a stock character and stand-in for the ordinary Filipino. (116)
Next to Juan de la Cruz, who unequivocally represents the oppressed majority, the persona as bourgeois intellectual in “The Annotated Catechism” is more pronounced, its flaneur-like consciousness far freer than Juan de la Cruz to go “botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, “The Flaneur” 37). The poem appears fiercely private, highly literary, and elitist in its imagined readership, all qualities that relegate it easily to the autonomous realm. (117)
In constructing the chaos of Manila, rife with manifestations of uneven development and on the brink of Marcos‘s declaration of martial law, Lacaba employs what Charles Bernstein calls “antiabsorptive” techniques, which, through the incorporation of “nontransparent or nonnaturalizing elements” direct the reader‘s attention to the artifice of the text and the materiality of language (52). Juxtaposition, which the poet uses extensively, is made visually and auditorily apprehensible (120)
Like the metropolis, the poem is replete with heteroglossia and does not fuse into a unified whole. “A running transformer, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data” is how Marjorie Perloff characterizes the collage form of Ezra Pound‘s Cantos, a description also applicable to Lacaba‘s poem, which similarly relies on “metonymic linkages” and constructs “Cubist surfaces or aerial maps where images jostle one another” (“Pound/Stevens” 500).
The Talahardin because of the resources where it draws from should naturally be anti status quo. It raises critique on the form.
Perhaps there is a need first to develop the discussion on electronic media as a solution to access. While access to books is decreasing, access to the internet is increasing. Phones are getting cheaper and even if internet access is still subpar, it is getting wider.
The writer may not be able to influence redistribution of wealth but there are workarounds.
If the writer as producer/laborer version in print is a writer who learns the technical knowledge of setting up small presses, printing zines or books, and distributing these herself, then perhaps the writer as producer/laborer in a post-print world is a writer who learns the technical knowledge of programming and design to set up websites, apps, online payment systems, and online and electronic distribution channels to distribute her work. And she doesn’t have to do this herself. Online communities around self-publishing exist.
Art that came from walking is best done by showing how it came to where it got.
Related
References
Cruz, C. (2016). Authoring Autonomy: The Politics of Art for Art’s Sake in Filipino Poetry in English [University at Albany, State University of New York]. https://www.proquest.com/openview/a9ed1f639df33d0d2c175f668dcffd37/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
This study examines the autonomy of art as a governing principle in the artistic practice of Filipino poets in English. The Western modernist ideal of art for art‘s sake was transplanted to the Philippines via the educational system implemented during the American occupation in the early twentieth century. As appropriated in colonial Philippines, what is historically regarded as a form of artistic resistance to the capitalist and rapidly industrializing society of the West is traditionally read as a withdrawal of participation by colonial and postcolonial literary writers from the political realm. The writer who subscribes to art for art‘s sake supposedly fetishizes form in itself and simply has no stake in lived realities and no role in the production of a national literature. Authoring Autonomy interrogates the division between aesthetics and politics that occurs when the autonomy of art is presumed to be incompatible with the work of social transformation. It accounts for the potential and limits of autonomy as a form of critical intervention
this study examines how Filipino poets have authored autonomy in ways that comply with, disturb, or resist the status quo.