SALMAGUNDI 3: ON NICK JOAQUIN, POETS,
POETRY, SIMPLE LANGUAGE, COMPLEX IDEAS,
BOOKS, FRIENDS, AND OTHER HEROES

+ If women were won through words alone, Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro and his Spanish counterpart Luis Cernuda must have been picking apples in their lifetime. Women, listen to Huidobro and swoon:

the world gains in majesty everytime you pass; as well when he says,
nothing compares with the legend of seeds left by your presence.

Cernuda was not one to mince poetic words for the beautiful gender either, here's proof:

You justify my existence - if I don't get to know you, I have not lived; if I die without knowing you, I do not die because I have not lived.

Asus!

+ Mark Strand and Czeslaw Milosz have interesting words on time and space - simply provoking (and provokingly simple), coming from different perspectives. One speaks of emptiness, the other of fullness, one brings himself down, the other lifts himself up. Strand's take is this: Wherever I am, I am what is missing. Milosz, on the other hand, declares from the other end. To him, the most complete sentence where everything begins and ends is comprised of these three words: I am here.

+ Poetry knows no bounds, the art goes beyond paper. Some quaint shops sell sets of a hundred words, each word appearing in little magnetic squares that you jumble and post in your ref for some instant refrigerator poetry. If I were a kid owning a set with every word in it, our refrigerator could breathe my poetic mood one morning:

heaved heavy in syrup my three layered pancakes
a glassful of chocomilk, what heaven a day makes!
a tower of sherbet and topped with bear gummies
big breakfast beams big heart, none else but my mommy's

or if there were sets in Tagalog, I could be bata makata, sang perang muta -

ang sariwang gulay sa bundok ng kanin
manok at isda, sari-saring pagkain
kaya mga magulang, dapat lamang isipin
ang batang malusog ay yamang maituturing!

asus ulit!

+ There's ref, and then there's men's room. In my university back home, poetry abounds in the comfort of the comfort room. Making a leak in the urinal, some verse made me contemplatively ruminal -

Tucayan theory: no matter how much you squirm and squirt,
the last three drops will fall on your pants.

+ Poetry is essential despite words to the contrary. Like food and water or air pumped into a flat tire, the need for poetry is fundamental. Coming from work dead tired, a reading of William Blake's The Blossom will suffice to resurrect my bones and muscles. You tired too? Here's Bill, read him aloud, even with your dead voice, even in a place where there's no spring -

Merry Merry Sparrow
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Sees you swift as arrow
Seek your cradle narrow
Near my Bosom.

Pretty Pretty Robin
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing sobbing
Pretty Pretty Robin
Near my Bosom.

+ World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse From Antiquity to Our Time (1998, K. Washburn, JS Major, C. Fadiman, eds.) is the most definitive collection of world poetry I have ever encountered. Still and all, only two Filipinos made it to the selection: Jose Rizal and Jose Garcia Villa, although considerably reverential words were made to explain the non-inclusion of who could have been the third: Francisco Balagtas. According to the editors, the existing translations do not give justice to the greatness of Florante at Laura.

+ Rizal's poem Water and Fire is the one chosen by the eds. When I read it, aloud in a remote corner of the bookstore, my little Filipino heart beamed with pride. If you're feeling pat with me, you will, too, so I'll share -

Water are we, you say,
and yourselves fire,
so let us be what we are
and co-exist without ire,
and may no conflagration ever
bind us at war.

But, rather, fuse together
by cunning science
within the cauldrons of the
ardent breast,
Without rage, without defiance,
do we form steam, fifth element indeed:
progress, life, enlightenment,
and speed.

+ The poem, by the way, was translated from the Spanish by Lelong Nick Joaquin.

+++ And so to you, Sir Lelong Nick -

our water, our steam -
bathe us, refresh us, rise up in streams
see us, watch over us -
while your words emblazon us in dreams

we already miss you, Sir, to us whom you're so dear
rise up like steam, and pour us some cold, cold beer

Asus, asus talaga!