The poet’s voice
July 23, 2001 | 12:00am
I haven’t found it yet on-line, but I was glad to hear from Nemie Bermejo–the Palanca Foundation’s busybody for the longest time–that the Foundation has finally put up a website. For more than half a century now, the Palanca family has been the largest single contributor to the growth of Philippine literature, through the annual Palanca Awards which will mark their 51st year come September. The website will bring the Palancas–now under the able stewardship of Mrs. Sylvia Palanca-Quirino--into the digital age, and should become an important factor in promoting Philippine literature on the World Wide Web.
Mrs. Quirino had actually asked some of us a few months ago for suggestions on what such a website should contain. I was eager to share my ideas with the Palancas, knowing that–with their history and their resources–they could put up what can very well become the Web’s portal into Philippine literature, publicizing not only the Palanca Awards themselves but the Filipino writing community and their products as a whole.
Again, I haven’t seen it yet, but I expect the Palanca website to contain, at some point or other, the following elements:
• A brief backgrounder on the Palanca family, its La Tondeña business, and its sponsorship of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
• The rules of the Palanca Awards, including downloadable entry forms, preferably in both plain text and portable document (PDF) formats.
• A "Gallery of Filipino Writers" that would contain the pictures, brief biographies, and contact information of some of our best-known and most important writers. This could later be expanded into a fuller version, an on-line Directory of Filipino Writers. The photographs alone should do much to distinguish the website among quite a number of others devoted to Philippine literature. While most Filipino writers would never be mistaken for Brad Pitt or Gwyneth Paltrow on the street, it’s always interesting to be able to attach faces to names we’ve only read all these years. This gallery could also include selections from the considerable albums of Awards-Night photographs the family would have collected over 50 years–Nick Joaquin bellowing from his chair, Greg Brillantes at the keyboard, Augusta de Almeidda in a shimmering green dress, yours truly 50 pounds and a shock of hair ago.
• A complete list of winners in the various categories. It’s a lot of data, but this has already been released in booklet form by the Foundation, so it shouldn’t be a problem porting the files over to the website.
• Excerpts from winning pieces. This is a tricky subject, but worth exploring. The rules of the contest give the Palanca Foundation certain publication and production rights over the winning pieces, but the authors retain the copyright. The Foundation has already published many winning works in their entirety, but print is one thing and the Internet another. To put full texts on the Web would be, in effect, to release them for free, to the disadvantage of authors who might earn royalties from these works otherwise (however paltry). A workable compromise would be to publish excerpts–just enough to give the Web audience a taste of our writers’ concerns and styles, without infringing on the authors’ rights to their intellectual property.
• A Philippine literary calendar, featuring upcoming literary events–readings, book launchings, conferences, workshops, other literary contests (with the indulgence of the Palancas) and such. Writers’ groups, publishers, schools, and individual authors could submit items to the webmaster for this list.
• A directory of Philippine literary magazines, journals, publishers, and other publication outlets. This can be accompanied by an article on submission formats, protocols, and other SOPs, especially for the benefit of new writers.
• Links to other Philippine literary websites, literary resources (such as university-based writing centers and programs), e-groups, and mailing lists, including such well-known and useful sites as Tanikalang Ginto, Akda, and Likhaan (the on-line magazine of the UP Creative Writing Center) and groups such as the US-based "Flips" list.
• Monthly features that might include an interview with a "Writer of the Month," a piece on a recent workshop or new writing program, reviews of current books, and debates on literary and cultural issues.
• A literary chat room and/or message board, for incurable and insatiable literary junkies who insist on talking about Arundathi Roy at three in the morning.
The Palanca Foundation doesn’t have to have all these sections or features on their website immediately or all at once. I expect that they’ll start modestly with what they already have, such as the contest rules, forms, and list of winners. But the Foundation should realize that it has it within its power to become the focal point of Philippine literary concerns on the Internet–to become the "portal" I was talking about earlier–at not too much cost. What a great help this would be to students, researchers, the general reader, and the writers themselves.
I’d almost forgotten what a pleasure and a thrill it was to listen to the poet’s voice until I got a CD on my desk a few days ago, a gift from my colleague May Jurilla–yes, the same perky May who complained the last time about being depressed by what I’d written about our teachers’ wages. Inspired, perhaps, to seek a psychic fix for our situation, she compiled and burned a CD full of poems being read out loud by the poets themselves. This was no mean selection, for it included such stalwarts of 20th century poetry in English as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and Charles Simic.
I have to admit that I often dread poetry readings, mainly because many poets can’t seem to tell the difference between reading a poem and a bus ticket. They either mumble or rant–incomprehensibly, either way–and, worse, choose to read a poem you simply can’t figure out for the life of you (but politely applaud, anyway) because of modern poetry’s often idiosyncratic syntax. Some poems are truly better appreciated on the page–where your senses can have all the time to luxuriate in layers of language and meaning–than in speech. I know: it was in speech and music that poetry began, and perhaps in some ways is returning to. But still, not all poets read well. Reading well isn’t just a function of voice or enunciation, although that helps. It’s understanding the poem, one’s own poem, infusing its delivery with all manner of ambient significances: a pause here, a smack of the lips there, a tremble, a buried laugh.
May’s poets deliver magnificently, for the most part. What an experience it is to hear Robert Frost say, in his raspy voice: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I / I took the one less traveled by / and that has made all the difference." He pauses for a millisecond after the second "I," as if to give himself one last chance to change his mind, before plunging headlong into an emphatic "took," and reaffirming the correctness of his decision with an extended "all."
Eliot reads as through a mouth the size of a thimble; Plath’s and Sexton’s clarity and vibrancy lend their work a certain poignance; Thomas’s tremulous "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" seems far removed from the strident manifesto we made of it in the 1970s.
It was Dylan Thomas’s reading voice, I remember now, that I heard on a video at the British Council some 20 years ago, and hearing which convinced me that I had made the right choice in becoming an English major. (I’d actually heard Thomas much more recently: Apple Computers bundles MP3s of Thomas reading his poems with the iTunes application in their new Macs, along with MP3s of Harry Potter and other works. Try getting that out of IBM, Dell, or Compaq.) May Jurilla’s selections, by the way, were downloaded from the Salon website–not a bad choice for a homepage–at http://www.salon.com/audio/index.html. There’s much more where they came from, if you have the time (and, need I add, the taste?).
Now, if the Palancas or some other benefactor could only sponsor a recording of Filipino poets reading their work–in Filipino, English, and the other Philippine languages!
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com...
Mrs. Quirino had actually asked some of us a few months ago for suggestions on what such a website should contain. I was eager to share my ideas with the Palancas, knowing that–with their history and their resources–they could put up what can very well become the Web’s portal into Philippine literature, publicizing not only the Palanca Awards themselves but the Filipino writing community and their products as a whole.
Again, I haven’t seen it yet, but I expect the Palanca website to contain, at some point or other, the following elements:
• A brief backgrounder on the Palanca family, its La Tondeña business, and its sponsorship of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
• The rules of the Palanca Awards, including downloadable entry forms, preferably in both plain text and portable document (PDF) formats.
• A "Gallery of Filipino Writers" that would contain the pictures, brief biographies, and contact information of some of our best-known and most important writers. This could later be expanded into a fuller version, an on-line Directory of Filipino Writers. The photographs alone should do much to distinguish the website among quite a number of others devoted to Philippine literature. While most Filipino writers would never be mistaken for Brad Pitt or Gwyneth Paltrow on the street, it’s always interesting to be able to attach faces to names we’ve only read all these years. This gallery could also include selections from the considerable albums of Awards-Night photographs the family would have collected over 50 years–Nick Joaquin bellowing from his chair, Greg Brillantes at the keyboard, Augusta de Almeidda in a shimmering green dress, yours truly 50 pounds and a shock of hair ago.
• A complete list of winners in the various categories. It’s a lot of data, but this has already been released in booklet form by the Foundation, so it shouldn’t be a problem porting the files over to the website.
• Excerpts from winning pieces. This is a tricky subject, but worth exploring. The rules of the contest give the Palanca Foundation certain publication and production rights over the winning pieces, but the authors retain the copyright. The Foundation has already published many winning works in their entirety, but print is one thing and the Internet another. To put full texts on the Web would be, in effect, to release them for free, to the disadvantage of authors who might earn royalties from these works otherwise (however paltry). A workable compromise would be to publish excerpts–just enough to give the Web audience a taste of our writers’ concerns and styles, without infringing on the authors’ rights to their intellectual property.
• A Philippine literary calendar, featuring upcoming literary events–readings, book launchings, conferences, workshops, other literary contests (with the indulgence of the Palancas) and such. Writers’ groups, publishers, schools, and individual authors could submit items to the webmaster for this list.
• A directory of Philippine literary magazines, journals, publishers, and other publication outlets. This can be accompanied by an article on submission formats, protocols, and other SOPs, especially for the benefit of new writers.
• Links to other Philippine literary websites, literary resources (such as university-based writing centers and programs), e-groups, and mailing lists, including such well-known and useful sites as Tanikalang Ginto, Akda, and Likhaan (the on-line magazine of the UP Creative Writing Center) and groups such as the US-based "Flips" list.
• Monthly features that might include an interview with a "Writer of the Month," a piece on a recent workshop or new writing program, reviews of current books, and debates on literary and cultural issues.
• A literary chat room and/or message board, for incurable and insatiable literary junkies who insist on talking about Arundathi Roy at three in the morning.
The Palanca Foundation doesn’t have to have all these sections or features on their website immediately or all at once. I expect that they’ll start modestly with what they already have, such as the contest rules, forms, and list of winners. But the Foundation should realize that it has it within its power to become the focal point of Philippine literary concerns on the Internet–to become the "portal" I was talking about earlier–at not too much cost. What a great help this would be to students, researchers, the general reader, and the writers themselves.
I have to admit that I often dread poetry readings, mainly because many poets can’t seem to tell the difference between reading a poem and a bus ticket. They either mumble or rant–incomprehensibly, either way–and, worse, choose to read a poem you simply can’t figure out for the life of you (but politely applaud, anyway) because of modern poetry’s often idiosyncratic syntax. Some poems are truly better appreciated on the page–where your senses can have all the time to luxuriate in layers of language and meaning–than in speech. I know: it was in speech and music that poetry began, and perhaps in some ways is returning to. But still, not all poets read well. Reading well isn’t just a function of voice or enunciation, although that helps. It’s understanding the poem, one’s own poem, infusing its delivery with all manner of ambient significances: a pause here, a smack of the lips there, a tremble, a buried laugh.
May’s poets deliver magnificently, for the most part. What an experience it is to hear Robert Frost say, in his raspy voice: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I / I took the one less traveled by / and that has made all the difference." He pauses for a millisecond after the second "I," as if to give himself one last chance to change his mind, before plunging headlong into an emphatic "took," and reaffirming the correctness of his decision with an extended "all."
Eliot reads as through a mouth the size of a thimble; Plath’s and Sexton’s clarity and vibrancy lend their work a certain poignance; Thomas’s tremulous "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" seems far removed from the strident manifesto we made of it in the 1970s.
It was Dylan Thomas’s reading voice, I remember now, that I heard on a video at the British Council some 20 years ago, and hearing which convinced me that I had made the right choice in becoming an English major. (I’d actually heard Thomas much more recently: Apple Computers bundles MP3s of Thomas reading his poems with the iTunes application in their new Macs, along with MP3s of Harry Potter and other works. Try getting that out of IBM, Dell, or Compaq.) May Jurilla’s selections, by the way, were downloaded from the Salon website–not a bad choice for a homepage–at http://www.salon.com/audio/index.html. There’s much more where they came from, if you have the time (and, need I add, the taste?).
Now, if the Palancas or some other benefactor could only sponsor a recording of Filipino poets reading their work–in Filipino, English, and the other Philippine languages!
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