Join us at Jorge B. Vargas Museum (UP) & get a ticket to art, song & poetry

Hello there. Haven't blogged here for sometime. Many things happening and to attend to. It's the Philppine literary season. I get called here and there to look at some of the best work being done—mainly in poetry (mostly the stuff I know how to do). Joined the panel with poets Krip Yuson and Bimboy Peñaranda to judge at the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, and it was their 100th anniversary too. That's why there was some waiting involved at the ceremonies: the Head of State, everyone's Tita, was guest of honor. We had to endure pangs of hunger while nibbling nuts and sipping wine at the Mandarin's Captain's Bar, while waiting for her arrival. But she had to endure sitting with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful advocate Imelda Marcos somewhere near her table, who had to sit through a loooong AVP extolling the Free Press' crusading journalism, mostly against Marcos, with some praises for Tita Glo's venerable and late old man Cong Dadong who introduced the Land Reform Law. Before then, the month previous actually, I had to finish a new translation into English of the immortal Florante at Laura, for the UP Centennial Edition, then the awarding the Likhaan Centennial Awards, which no one shouldn't miss (I did not join the contest, my poems were not qualified, having been published on the Net). Then, just the other day, the Palancas. I did not judge there this year (it was our turn, with Jimmy Abad and Krip Yuson, to judge the previous year). But I went to the ceremonies anyway, gatecrashed to partake of celebrations, the excitement of the winners, the nice food, and the flowing cognac. And in between these events of course, just plain old hanapbuhay while cocooning at home. And, too, within these times, Susan's party at My Brother's Mustache, where an army of her friends gathered to help her raise some of the wherewithal for the treatment of her ailment—something that will need not just a few friends to muster. And later, too, after the example of her other friends in the NGO circles and the Kawemenan, the barakos naman came together to do their part. Well, not necessarily barakos but real, honest-to-goodness artists who won't shrink from a fight (of any kind), wield brushes and fists.






At first, three of them, Neil Doloricon, Adi Baens Santos, and the ubiquitous Ed Manalo, met at Susan's home to propose and explore the possibility of a fund-raising exhibit, and they apparently thought I so was good at words and conceiving these things that they asked me to join them. I could not (too many things happening), and I just had to content myself with an email from Susan on the proceedings. Then, a week later, while I was dawdling (waiting for a meeting) at TriNoMa, I didn't know I had missed a meeting again with the artists and Susan. I had to think up of a name for the Exhibit. I hurried to the parking garage, lit a cigarette and sat in the car. There had to be a word somewhere that Susan's friends might associate with her. Well, it could be in the emails she sends or exchanges with them. Ah. She always signs her letters or email with "Lagi, Susan." Always. Laging Nagmamahal would be the great salutation, from her or from her friends. What better words? I texted it to her before I drove off pronto to Vargas Museum to meet up with the three initiators, Susan, and the gracious Ma. Victoria Herrera, the museum curator. Now the three artists are no longer just three, there will be at least 30 or even 40 artists who will give their paintings to the exhibit. Tickets (shown above), will be pre-sold. The buyers will only know which painting they will take home during the raffle at the closing of the exhibit on September 9. Poets will read (or sing), some singers will sing poems, and it will be a night of Maririkit na Guhit para kay Susan Fernandez. Get your tickets now. See you there.






Susan's first album of her famous, beautiful older songs, Habi at Himig (cover above right), has been digitally remastered and the CD will be sold at the Exhibit.

Jorge B. Vargas Museum (right) not hard to find, along the eastern part of the University Loop, just beside the College of Arts and Letters Faculty Center. (Courtesy of ChocolateKiss.Com)

OTHER PHOTOS: topmost, Susan at the Concert in My Brother's Mustache ("Mass Action on Madriñan," previous posting), courtesy of Ino Magno's Multiply site, and apologies to him for Photoshopping it to look like a painting, just a sneak preview of sorts of the great art you will encounter at Laging Nagmamahal Exhibit, and the Ticket to the Exhibit.

---

Sneek-peek: My new Website

Frontispiece photo of a door & steps to the Chapel of St. Elm, San Feliu de Guixols, Catalunya, by Marjorie Evasco. The site welcomes contributed photos for the Home Page.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT. You might perhaps notice the modifier in parenthesis at the blog header on top, which says "(the blog)." That's because I have adopted the same name for my new personal website, Nameable Days at Jimdo.Com. It's mainly devoted to samples of my poetry from my three books, newer ones, and "sundrynotes." If you like poetry, visit it at http://nameabledays.jimdo.com/. This Blogger site becomes my real blog, while Nameable Days, the Website, becomes the online resource for my poetry, for those who may have "encountered any one of them somewhere and hopefully would like to see more." There are at least three links to the site in this sentence. Just sweep your mouse across this text. Any word or words glow with a highlight, or is underlined, click it.

---

Florante at Laura with my new translation

At right is the cover of Francisco Balagtas' Florante at Laura, the University of the Philippines Centennial Edition (UP Press, 2008), edited by Virgilio S. Almario, with a new English translation by Marne L. Kilates, and illustrated lavishly by 23 of our best artists and illustrators, with their paintings of scenes from the Balagtas masterpiece presented in the Komedya Fiesta Exhibit at Vargas Museum as part of the UP Centennial. Available at UP Press Bookstore.

---

Arts Month in our part of the world officially ended on Leap Year Day last February…

but a whirl of art events continues despite or even because of what’s happening all around

1. Living on Loring

Last posting, about a serendipitous find in the Net of pictures by Maxim Popykin that reminded me of a trip to Russia twelve years ago, we also featured here the announcement for the art exhibit and event “Living on Loring.” Galleria Duemila is uniquely—or even typically—located. Just about next door to this patch of gentility and haven for the arts is a “huddled mass of shanties,” as Romina Diaz describes them. She is the photographer daughter of Silvana (nee Ancelloti) and Ramon Diaz who own the gallery. And she is the level-headed, socially-aware fine arts student who shuttles between Italy and Manila, who apparently cannot ignore the face of loneliness and squalor living nearby.

Around the old genteel enclave of Loring (where the residences of Manila’s old rich were located more or less before or just after the last War and until Edsa Extension cut through the area to connect to Roxas Boulevard), is the unignorable din of the city: the MRT commuter train station on the intersection of Taft Avenue and Edsa, and their obstreperous traffic—of vehicles, commuters, and God knows whatever else. Romina and siblings grew up among these, and she and the children of the other end of Loring Street would inevitably cross paths.

It is perhaps emblematic that Romina is called Ate (Big Sister) by the neighborhood girls, that she used to be walked by them to her bus stop or fetched by them at night during earlier school days. And that on the first night we got acquainted with her mother, on Lina Llaguno Ciani’s opening (the previous exhibit which ended February 29), as we lingered for last beers, they had to be excused because one of the kids of the neighborhood had got bitten by a dog and they had to take him to the hospital. And the days before as I prepared for a poetry reading for Lina’s show, I witnessed one of the sessions of the intensive photography workshop Romina conducted for the “Wild Cat” girls of Loring.



Thus “Living on Loring, Art for Social Change” came about. The photographic installations by the Wild Cat Girls of Loring Street, composed mainly of their photographs and portraits of the shanty life, were assembled together with LBC cartons and Balikbyan boxes. They also wrote journals and letters to their loved ones, or simply expressed their innermost thoughts on paper, all of which became their painted declarations on one part of the surrounding walls of the compound.

And to put the whole thing together, Romina joined hands with other artists, notably her collaborator Ann Wizer and curator Angel Velasco Shaw, the cross-cultural artist, writer, and activist. Velaco Shaw’s bigger project, “Trade Routes: Converging Cultures–Southeast Asia and Asia America,” had made “Living on Loring / Who’s Sita?” its kick-off venue, at the start of the International Women’s Month.

On hand to attend the affair, apart from most of the children of the neighborhood, were numerous artist friends of the Gallery, among them fellow Bikolanos, the abstract master Gus Albor, social-realist/expressionist Dante Perez, Maya Muñoz, film director Butch Perez (who I was surprised to find was a reader of this blog), and the great Tiny Nuyda, my idol since I've been following Filipino art, whom I met for the first time, and publisher Karina Bolasco, and social worker Hope Abella. Hope marveled at the “lightness” of the affair while taking on such serious issues as women and teenage problems, the ramifications of poverty on the young who, it seemed, found some relief, a possible way out, by means of self-expression. And this time it was through the art of photography that Romina shared with them, which in the end helped them confront themselves, and not least, their surroundings.

Romina Diaz


Myself, who’s back into the starving artist mode, freelancing after exiting from the comfort zone of a day job, was simply amazed at the whole thing—this seemingly impossible cohesion or collision between the realm of art, its patrons and consumers (the comparably rarefied), and the realm of the improvised box of discarded wood and galvanized iron and hard things, and the so called public art sprouting in between. It was both edifying and discomfiting, as I remarked to my companions half facetiosusly, that it felt guilty to be bringing a full wine glass into the territory of the fish ball. Eventually, when I asked for a refill at the bar inside the compound, I was relieved to be given a cup of Styrofoam.

“Living on Loring” opened on March 8 and runs for the whole month. It was a “wild,” exuberant carnival afternoon, a street party of deep-fried fish balls, corn-on-the-cob, banana cue, ice cream, poetry reading by Romina’s friends, the group Romancing Venus, composed of my friends Ginny Mata (host), Annabel Bosch, Kookie Tuason and Karen Kunawicz. There was a series storytelling by various groups that was evidently enjoyed by the kids, the last being hosted by Kuya Bodjie (Pascua) of Batibot fame, and of course music by the Bahaghari Kalidrum and other performers.


CAPTIONS & CREDITS from top: Photos 1-3, Loring Street & kids, girls in their boxes, reading, courtesy of the Living on Loring blog at WordPress; the invitation/poster; one of the photo-and-Balikbayan box installations; Romina Diaz reading her poetry at MagNet, by Ginny Mata; the installation art pieces.

❜

From My Shelf:

Children of the Snarl

Streetwise at starfall they come,
Taunting the clumsy behemoths of the rush-hour,
The Children of the Snarl, unstartled
At the demented hunger of the highway,
Weaving a dance among eyes and fangs
Of myriad metal, prompted by their own hungers.

Merchants of poverty, dodgers of death,
They cheat mad chance in the flash of chrome,
In the glint of the fume-choked sun
Caught on the grime of the windshield glass,
In the storm-sunset on the fender-shine, offering
Flowers, appeasements for our own stale airs.

Our vision hurtles forward at morning
And dusk, borne by wheels tearing at space.
It hurtles between our faces in jeeps
Where we avoid each other’s gaze, somnambulant
Or asleep, with our sorrows and hurryings
Hidden, dressed and made up in haste.

There is no pause in the eyes that pursue
Their own appeasements. They peer at us,
We roll up our windows in vague defense,
Or concede buying a garland for our own icons
And talismans. Or choose a lottery ticket
For our chase of Ultimate Chance.

What link of flowers and lottery tickets
Joins us across the chasms of our classes?
What mindless mirth, hunger of eyes, insane dance
Of peddling small vices and poverty’s sweets
In the traffic of our haste convey us across
Craters in the asphalt, fissures in the concrete?

The lights time the rhythms of our chase.
The lurch and the wheel-skid summon their swarm
And us, Children of the Snarl: Slap of slippered
Feet, gnash of wheels worn smooth by pavements
Worn smooth by wheels, fume-storm in the crepuscular
Swelter of crushed petals and burning rubber.

And the rain season devours us, the headlights
Blind us: grit in the metal gutter, leaf-shard and
Insect-wing on the windscreen, stale air and perfume
From the aerosol spray. As dust, dirt and debris
And the day’s wrappers sail downstream, in the watery
Iridescences of the monsoon in the ditches.


Marne L. Kilates
from Children of the Snarl & Other Poems
Aklat Peskador, Manila (1986)

The Russia I saw & Russia now from Maxim Popykin’s camera

It was the height of glasnost and perestroika, and Mike Bigornia (late, great and sorely-missed friend and poet) and I grabbed the chance the first time we got when the Soviet Writers Union sent invitations for an exchange visit. That was July 1989, we had just taken over the reins of the local counterpart organization, the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL). Mike was Chairman then and I was Secretary General, replacing Virgilio S. Almario and the late, much-loved, Alfrredo Navarro Salanga respectively. It was my first trip abroad (so far from home, but excited to be away halfway around the world), I was in-between jobs, newly-redundanced from my government work, before I joined the advertising industry, where I would work for the next 14 years.



Mike Bigornia on the cover of his book, Prosang Itim (Black Prose), designed by Fidel Rillo.

In this time of “openness” and “restructuring,” there was a thrill in the air in the three cities we visited: Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again), and Kiev. Still, beer was being rationed (people lined up at 7 o’clock in the morning at the tap of tank-trailer, bringing bottles and damajuanas to be filled with the precious brew, and there was only one kind and shape of soft drink bottle for all brands, but books, even in English translation, were cheap). Most of the bigger names of the Soviet Writer’s Union were summering in their dachas (so we didn’t get to meet them) but we were hosted well in the three cities. We soaked up the sites, sampled the food, visited the museums and—at the end of the day (white night actually, it was late summer)—our main guide, Dmitri, for our whole stay, or Vladimir in Kiev, deposited us back at the hotel and we were left mainly on our own. Although, in Kiev, Vladimir never "deposited" us back to our hotel but got drunk with us in his flat before taking us back towards dawn. Thus the germ of these poems stirred vaguely in my mind, I was able to start writing about my Russia experience only a year after. It was also the time I was fond of the long rambling line, the meditative journalizing, the embroidery of threads and colors that could create shapes that sometimes surprised even myself… thus, too, the tentative “Notes” in the title.

I thought to feature these poems here, from my second book, Poems en Route (University of Santo Tomas Press, 1998), only because I found in the Net fantastic pictures that reminded me of that trip. They are not, of course, of the Russia I saw 12 years ago. The architecture may not have changed much (and not much physical change is visible), but they reflect something entirely different, something perhaps that is happening to the culture, after the mantle of Soviet hegemony had gone. One thing, though, that stays through the centuries is the Russian's umbilical link to his religion, despite the socialist denigration of it, how Russia is not what it is without its Orthodox Church. It is part of her landscape, the interior one as well as that which is the subject of these pictures.

I dedicate these poems to our two guides, Dmitri and Vladimir who, as much as they could, became our friends and not just our guides. Tall and bespectabled Dmitri, who looked like he was fresh from university, and though conscious about his work was always smiling. And fiery Vladimir, quick to offer vodka, beer and ice cream, in that order, fervent Ukrainian nationalist. I have no way of knowing how they had fared in the perturbing times their country went through, or where they are now. May they have realized the dreams, for home and country, that they shared with us. And to Maxim Popykin, photographic artist, who lent me his pictures and reminded me of his great nation.

These magnificent pictures by Maxim Popykin I saw featured on Maurice Oliver’s serendipitous online literary magazine, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review. (Some of my newer poems were featured there in January 2008, the month after Isaw Maxim's pictures.) This is the Russia as seen from Mr. Popykin’s skilled camera lenses, and his artistic eagle eyes. I visited Maxim’s site at PBase.Com and sought his permission to use these pictures, on referral by Maurice, and Maxim answered my mail, “I will be happy if you use my pictures (whatever your like) on your blog! You don't have to get permission in the future, it's pleasure for me to share my work with a lot of people around the Globe.” This while apologizing for his English, to which I wrote back, “Don't worry about the English (I wish I knew Russian!)—your great pictures are appreciated in any language!” Maxim’s bionote is found in the photo credits at the end of this posting (page 2).

Notes on a Tourist’s Russia

for Dmitri and Vladimir, able guides; and Maxim, photographer

I. Kiev

Red as flesh in an open wound,
Bricks gaze up from a gash in the asphalt
Down an avenue in Kiev.
Intent as the memory of ages they keep,
Preserved by state edict, they crunch
Under our tires as we speed
Toward the museums of the Vladimirs.
Cities lie beneath this city. Or beside.
Streets intersect, entwine, run parallel,
One below or before the other,
In mirror images, in simultaneous existences:
As the crystal blue of the Dnieper
Cuts between the old capital and the new
District of clustering towers
Of the proletarian housing dream,
Each looks across to the shimmering
Reflection of its twin.
Even our guide is called Vladimir,
And no heady vodka can assuage
The ache that history awakes in him:
It derives from the darkest reaches
Behind the stare of ikons, the sky
Of the Ukrainian steppes, the loneliness
Of siege towers when Rus awaited
The Golden Horde at the gates.
Other hordes have since then ridden down
These brick and cobbled roads, other tyrannies.
Even state edifices and their marble silences
Impose an awe, demand a different sanctity.
I, privileged catechumen, genuflect
Before the varied cathedrals of destiny:
I hear Mussorgsky in the feudal hall
Behind the oaken portcullis of Golden Gates,
The wail of peasants in the ululating
Chorus of folk sopranos, and echoes drowning
In the pottery imbedded in the mortar
Of St. Sofia’s, where ancient fires burn wax
On gilt candelabra, and Yaroslav the Wise
Sleeps like a spider in his sarcophagus.
In jest, history has let a giddy farm swine
Leave his hoofprint on the plinfa,
As the fool’s gold of the mosaic pieces
Dazzled the avid minions of Khan Batu.
I am dazed as I descend the winding turns
Of Andreyevsky Street and gaze back
At the green cupolas of St. Andrew’s.
So is the stranger in his own moment
Of light more intimate with the ghosts
In the house of his hosts:
They stand clearer before him,
More at ease, less circumspect.
For there is no bad blood between,
Nor recrimination, nor ageless pain.
Only the comfort of distance,
The pleasure of mutual surprise.

Marne L. Kilates
(1990)

PHOTOS by Maxim Popykin, from top: Spassky Tower fireworks, Moscow, 2007; in Kiev: Vladimirsky Cathedral, Mikhailovsky Monastery, sarcophagus of Yaroslav the Wise inside Vladimirsky church





















✑

Bilingual Statement of the Nation's Artitsts for Truth
on Page 2

One of those unnameable days...

Dogma, Umbra, and Insurrecto by Dante Perez

Dante’s Triptych

Dogma
Insurrecto
Umbra

Wounds dry
Into scab
Words into
Silence
Beneath them, rot

We pray
to falls gods
Imposed on us

Our betters
Betray us
Because we let them:

We cringe
We grovel
We fawn
We grin
We lie like them

We betray each other

In the dark side
Of the moon
In the ninth circle

Dogma
Insurrecto
Umbra

Marne L. Kilates
February 20, 2008

Accompanying My Son
to an Immigration Clinic

The hours we wait
to be told there’s nothing
wrong with our skin or lungs
our mind or even our sex

The day we await
to be told we can enter
the land of our dreams
& we didn’t bring them our

disease. Ah, the pain
we go through to be given
a clean slate to leave
the country of our unease.

October 17, 2007

Poem Found in Phone

—did u c an angel?
—stl luking

—just saw 1
—any gud?

—yes preti
—how much?

—10 pesos. angel onli?
—r thr othrs?

—dolphin moon sun stars leaves
—wow! how much?

—three for 25 angels & all
—gr8t! get me dozen of each

—terra cota?
—terra cota

October 12, 2007


(It is one of those unnameable days, when the chaos around us freezes us on our tracks, but teaches us not to seek refuge in our art—because it is not an escape—and to look deeper into ourselves.)

A Business Mirror "Clipping" on the Art & Poetry in Lina Llaguno Ciani's After the Rain

NOON MOON(clock wise), SISYPHUS HOMETOWN, SIX-FIFTY-NINE PM, BIRDSONG, AFTER THE STORM

By Tito Genova Valiente
titovaliente@yahoo.com

ONGOING at the Galeria Duemila is an exhibit featuring the works of two artists: a painter and a poet. Lina Llaguno Ciani is the painter and Marne Kilates is the poet. The preoccupations of these two individuals might as well be considered interchangeable considering that poems paint images, while paintings bring in the poetics of that who wields the brush.

Ciani is a noted Bicolana painter, from Albay, who has produced a series of paintings representing what she felt after seeing her hometown and province following the floods caused by Typhoon Reming. Ciani believes “gloom is not perpetual.” This is coming from an artist whose works have been described by critics as surrealism without angst. For this show, she has invited Kilates, a Bicolano whose poems are marked by their daring incursions into the potency of words to suggest alternative spaces, or to plumb the world of myths where words open paths and light the way to more narratives.

The usual expectation from this tandem is for the words of the poem to traditionally repeat the points visualized on canvas, with the requirements of reading and understanding immediately relegated to a subordinate art or exercise in communication. In the hands and minds—and hearts—of these two artists, however, something else has been accomplished. Perhaps, it is the sharing of ethnicity and geography and the shared memories that go with such alliance. Perhaps, it is being an audience to Nature running berserk and coming back full circle into its nonthreatening origin. Whatever it is, the exhibit is a demonstration of two artists in a conversation, not in a feedback relation.

To Ciani’s leitmotif of eggs, strings, birds, flowers and the solitary figure of a woman, Kilates—agreeing with the painter about the pieces to be addressed through a poem—brings in lines detailing things that have happened in the past, and promising to happen again in the future. In both selected painting and poem, you can smell the scent of wistfulness. An overpowering anxiety of silence has its temporal equivalent in the massive blankness of the spaces created, not left to chance, by the painter.

In the ‘Noon Moon’, the famed belfry of Cagsawa, an icon to a more ancient destruction of Mayon Volcano, is reburied again. Looming above it is a sun too muted to be a sun that it has become the moon. Around it are white spherical shapes. Are they eggs of a mighty serpent? Kilates picks the pun of the landscape and writes about the bakunawa, the Moon Eater. The play does not terminate with words for the poet seizes the forbidding puslike yellow sky and the absence of living things and asks us to Beware of his beauty because/He has never been beautiful:/Ghostly serpent slinking in a circle…/.

The poet composes three tanaga, a convention often compared with the Japanese haiku. A seven-syllable quatrain, the tanaga renders itself crucially well in three paintings dominated by a tree. One tree has its twigs and branches bent to one side by a strong wind even as they seem to balance numerous eggs on its nonexistent crown. From this tree an egg has already fallen as the poem talks about In purple air everything swirls,/Life hangs or clings like eggs or pearls…. The picture is dramatic and superliteral and the poem pushes its literalness, achieving in the double negative a positive way of looking at destruction. The other tanaga is for a tree almost shrouded in an orange that is organically scary. The twigs and the branches this time are home to tiny butterflies metamorphosed into eerie loveliness.

Breathtaking is the painting labeled ‘Six-Fifty-Nine PM’ and there are solid reasons behind its beguiling force. There is the painting itself, which evokes the simplicity of a card that memorializes an event. The field is dominated by funereal purple and the saddest of blues. A strip of transparent pastel white-blue field appears embossed on the upper right-hand corner and carries butterflies (or moths) and brown rotting leaves, a compendium of the living and the dying and the dead. Then comes the tanaga that is both an elegy and a thanksgiving: Grave visits us like moth and leaves,/The rain drumming on roof and eaves./Always, God has something up His sleeve:/Mists and colors after nature grieves./. That’s what the poet says, but the painter returns the metaphor for she also has some tricks up her sleeves. In that strip containing the artifacts of the storm lives on a kakejiku, the Japanese scroll that incorporates a poem with the kana or syllabaries flowing down on one side, a form where image and words are fused in one endearing agreement or even dissonance.

There are more paintings that are not displayed with poems. It is to the credit of these two artists that the poems can be read and enjoyed outside the galleries, and the paintings—all of them—can terrify, or exalt our fear and incite us to hope even without words or poems.

‘After the Rain’ is the 34th show for Lina Llaguno Ciani, an artist schooled in the University of the Philippines-School of Fine Arts and the Academia delle Belli Arti in Perugia, Italy. Marne Kilates was the 1998 Southeast Asia Write Award (SEA Write) recipient, an award bestowed by the Thai Royalty to honor outstanding writers in the region. He has also won several awards, among them from the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Literary Awards and the Manila Critics Circle’s National Book Awards. The show runs until February 29 at Galeria Duemila, on 210 Loring Street, Pasay City.

TITO GENOVA VALIENTE is a poet who has been a long-time scholar in Japan. We crossed paths when we were both working with the old NFA Directorate for Public Affairs and somehow lost track until we saw each other's bylines again.

---

After the Rain 3: Poems from the Paintings of Lina Llaguno Ciani

Six Fifty-Nine PM, oil on canvas, 100x60cm

Tree Tanaga #3

Grace visits us like moths and leaves,
The rain drumming on roof and eaves.
Always, God has something up His sleeve:
Mists and colors after nature grieves.

We come to one of the last of a series on that rare (for me and any other poet, I suppose) occasion when one is asked to write poems on somebody’s paintings and read the same during the art show opening itself. One is honored by the request from an artist who is—apologies for bringing this up—my senior in the craft, as well as in artistic experience. Indulge me some more, although a promise is a promise.

It has been an experience, as has been obvious the way I’ve narrated it in the last postings, the reading and writing. I was facing “real,” “live” and contemporary paintings by a living artist (different from our ekphrastic exercises on, say Luna, Hidalgo, Delacroix, or even the late lamented Santi Bose), as exciting, indeed, as when I first encountered Alfredo “Ding” Roces’ paintings on his blog and furiously tapping away at the keyboard, or when I saw Delotavo's huge canvas of the Filipino diaspora at a group exhibit. I was discovering a new territory, a “scaffolding,” as they say now, with which to build new poems, and a slightly different poetic. Ekphrasis, of course, had been invented or defined, by the Greeks, but doing it in our own contemporary time on the works of living artists, is another thing. Thanks and thanks again to Lina LLaguno Ciani and to Galleria Duemila and its owner Silvana Diaz, for welcoming me and my poetry into a live gallery (quite different from a color plate in an art book).

Why all this fuss about art and painting? (Of course we're always "fussing" about art, and if they’re like Ciani’s art, all the more.) Painting and poetry have always been called the sister arts in classicism. Horace said “ut pictura poesis,” as is painting so is poetry (which I’ve made into a motto of my other blog and ezine, poets’picturebook), and closer to home: I’ve always thought I’d be a painter when I was this big, before poetry seized me, and when I was gawking at my (late) eldest brother doing his boards of frames and talk balloons for the komiks (he was a paid dibuhista for some time). I drew and wrote my own comic books. I went from Superman and Batman and the Justice League to Sci-Fi and Heavy Metal and, well, I somehow gave up comic books for books, pictures for words, along the way, though not completely. It never stopped. I still stop at the new, pricey, and cultic comic book shops (or illustrated novels, as they call them now), I still gawk at art exhibits.

So, here they are. This may be the penultimate post of series, as I might have to reserve a long poem for a separate post (it needs some some work since there are lot of indentions among the the verse lines.) To remind readers, the first post on Ciani’s art was my own review of the show, the second a society page of sorts (beautiful people coming to the show and, in the process, listening to my poetry), and now, for my blog readers, esp. Bikolanos (because this is about us): with their respective paintings, the poems.








Eastern Wind,oil on canvas, 70x100cm

Blue

Across the grass nothing is blue,
Nothing and the feel of nothing,
The nothing we are brothers to,
That will slay us in our sleeping.

Cirilo F. Bautista

Desiring
God is transparent blue—the color

Which makes our souls visible.


Marjorie Evasco


Is this the river or the ocean?
Where is the garden?

Whose blue is this?
Not the fisherman’s blue
Where he casts his net
To haul in his blessings.

What blue is this?
Not the kingfisher’s blue
Whose wing is made of sky,
Not the soul’s blue
That makes him visible,
If God were looking.

Whose whites are these?
Where is the altar
That shall receive these
Votive stems, these
Unsullied petals?

There is only the blue
Of wind and dark water
Rising:

The ocean is a river,
There is no garden.

Tree#1, oil on canvas, 90x100cm

Tree Tanaga #1

In purple air everything swirls,
Life hangs or clings like eggs or pearls;
What wing or claw can brave the storm,
Man curls under roots: piteous worm.

After November,oil on canvas, 70x95cm

Apáy Leaf

There is a pool below
The leaf left by either flood

Or tears. Even in mud
It catches the limpid droplet

Become a gem as it slid
Down the leaf’s velvet skin.

Taste lingers: Noons of
Rice and coconut milk,

Tang of dried fish stirred
Into the thick stew of leaves,

And the sudden epiphany
Of spice on the tongue…

Beauty,
Bruised and smudged, still
Resides in the blood-caked

Sod mixed with sand
Left by the river choked

With boulders spilling down
The Volcano’s slope.

Life,
Shedding a pellucid tear,
Sprouts like a hear-shaped

Leaf.

Tree#2, oil on canvas, 90x100cm

Tree Tanagà #2

Stripped of bark, the old life lingers,
Its branches a-flutter with green.
The new one sleeps in its chamber,
And soon will wake to tangerine.

NOTES
Apáy. Taro, gabi, Colocasia esculenta
Tanagà. A traditional Tagalog verse form of four rhymed lines of seven or eight syllables each.