Imagination’s way

Last Friday, Feb. 27, a full-day literary affair was held at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Faculty Center in tribute to a premier poet, scholar extraordinaire and professor emeritus, billed as “Imagination’s Way: A Festschrift for Gémino H Abad.”  

It began with the opening of a photo exhibit at the Department of English and Comparative Literature corridor, before the activity moved to the C.M. Recto Conference Hall for the morning’s two-hour symposium.

Poet-translator Marne Kilates rendered the opening remarks, and equally distinguished poet-writers Paolo Manalo, Thomas Chaves and J. Neil Garcia read their respective papers on their esteemed colleague Jimmy’s work. These papers are due for inclusion in the festschrift being produced for publication later this year, with poet Isabela Banzon as lead editor.

This was followed by an open forum, a brief lunch break, and the afternoon session from 1 to 4 p.m., with a musical number and informal tribute from friends and family. Then the affair moved on to the Executive House for a literary reading and cocktails from 4.30 to 7.30 p.m., hosted by no less than UP president Fred Pascual.

As one of his dear friends, I had the privilege of joining in this reading, for which I chose the honoree’s exemplary poem “Stick-Writing with Mud,” which appears in Dr. Abad’s latest book, Where No Words Break: New Poems and Past (UP Press, 2014). 

I must share it in full here, for it stands out among the poems in this collection, dominant and regnant, fulfilling all the random requisites of a poem-in-full, while also expressing the poet’s entire fountainhead of rationales and personal insights as his ars poetica.

“I write, kaibigan, in two ‘styles,’/ determinations of the will, both ‘sticks,’/ if you read, in the anguish of our slime;/ I’m at odds with time, its verdure of words,/ a need ravens me, and I must write,/ depending only on what the mind gives,/ whether she is to be born yet again/ or merely speak on the porch, as it were,/ of a quiet evening awash with stars://

“Either simple, circumstantial speech, low-key,/ watching with friends perhaps the sky swinging/ her constellations like censers, so that/ our thoughts sometimes forget they’re only words;/ or rich, nervous, severe, elaborate,/ a brinkmanship of words that scatters light/ with infinitive aim, all its nouns verbs/ that chain those constellations to their roots.//

“It is of course the mind’s habit to light/ athwart those several speeches of things,/ parleying for parables of their name./ Like stick-writing with mud! there’s no language/ can track their murmurous spoor to their verge./ But at odds with time, oh! I must write still,/ whether to stake the mind’s nativity/ on the unraveling of alien speech,/ or merely to speak at midsummer’s eve/ of incense rolling across the mind’s porch/ where stars rain their infinity around.//

“A pity there’s no boon for such madness;/ our words must balk at the unnatural strain/ on their tight composition, their sounds/ but fathoming the silt of other words./ Words and words!/ how they lie shameless and bare/ like starfishes dead on bleaching coral,/ their odor the sea breeze’s crown of thorns.//

“I plant those sticks in fecundating mud,/ my mind at risk for the devil’s ruses./ But since my cap has lost its point, my bells/ their sound, I probe for that clearest pool/ where mind weeps to see her face at the brim./ And knowing how words quickly run to seed,/ I cannot grieve the loss, but rest content/ with dreamy talk on a quiet evening/ as friends gaze at the rainy Pleiades./ Those predicates we invent for speeches/ all fall down tonight like shooting comets;/ and grateful for that silent exhibit,/ I bury my black starfish in the mud.”

Now let me examine and extol the poem.

Its title’s central metaphor immediately works wonders. We accept the inherent irony, of how a seemingly mundane exercise such as scribbling on mud, with sticks as children might playfully conduct, can also reveal imagination’s way.

The poet has found his setting, venue, and métier, icky as it might seem initially, image-wise. But not only is the ludic activity presented as ground zero for a lofting into sheer air, that of the excellence of words that make up poetry; the ironic contrast is also well-defined. 

From the “anguish of our slime” then, to an “evening awash with stars,” the imagery runs apace, not just circumstantially, but with purpose and meaning beyond that contrast of extremes. The sky, the constellations (“like censers”), are traced back to their roots, with which they’re chained, “by way of all its nouns/verbs” (which takes us back to writing, whether with sticks on slime or the infinite imagination as in “infinitively.” The gamut thus spells out: as above, so below. 

“… (A) brinkmanship of words that scatters light…” “… (N)o language can track their murmurous spoor to their verge.” Such brilliant phrase-making, and still entirely in keeping with the procession of paradoxes that illumine this poem! 

The images circle, around and around in larger spirals, while introducing another nature element, that of the sea, after “fathoming the silt of other words.” But the corals and the breeze lead to a “crown of thorns.”

The centripetal, spiraling energy of the poem culminates, past “clearest pool” and “shooting comets,” in that “silent exhibit” where the poet buries his “black starfish in the mud.”

Exquisite in its crafting, the poem can only bolster the poet-scholar-critic’s sage contentions that he has expressed in various essays wrought and written over the decades — as in “A Poetics of Writing,” which Dr. Abad delivered as the UP-ICW (Institute of Creative Writing) Panayam Lecture last Feb. 12.

This essay is a revised and expanded version of what was originally titled “Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads: A Poetics,” which appears in his book All Our Nameable Days: Poems Revisited (UP Press, 2013).

He notes: “In fact, I only repeat here what I have already written about a number of times since my first attempt at poetics in In Another Light in 1976 up until Where No Words Break in 2014 and Past Mountain Dreaming: New Essays, presently at the UP Press.”

This essay on poetics offers pearls of lessons in the art of creativity through language. Every student of poetry, indeed of language, must imbed in memory such surfeit of thought that Gémino H. Abad has mined for over five decades.

Here are only some of his collected gems of discernment:

“How you blaze your own trail through language, or how you forge a language to your mind’s import and aim — that is the very art or craft of writing. … That which has been perceived and then translated may only be a moment in full consciousness of the living of it; yet that consciousness is only as afterwards imagined in memory’s clasp, flickering there like firefly fire in a thicket, until words and words endow it with a form that the imagination affirms as true.            

“… In the same light, too, every literary work transcends language by its own evocative power precisely through that mastery which is both rational and imaginative. This is to say that the language as wrought has been endowed by its writer (and afterwards, by its sensitive reader) with a force or energy of evocation that is both imaginative and rational.

“… I might add that words are like wild animals in the woods of language; they need to be tamed, daring and cunning are requisite in their wilderness. The words and their figures may turn impish, for at times (to repeat) every word meets with interpretation at every turn of phrase. For writers, words and words are always at play in the wakeful mind — perhaps, the mind’s ceaseless condition is state of play. This is why I say, the care for words is care of light.          

“…The mind dissolves our experience of the world into ideas, but the poem seeks the light of the living experience itself, and once wrought, is a marvel of interpretation. This is why I personally privilege a standpoint whence I engage with the poem as mimetic, a mime or simulation, by means of language, of an individual human action: an emotional outcry, a train of thought, a movement of feeling, a stance or attitude toward something. Reading it we enter into someone’s experience: a moment or even a lifetime that has been lived as imagined.

“One’s reading of the literary work is also work of imagination. Because the poem is essentially work of imagination, it demands a reciprocity with the reader’s own imaginative power: the fount of his own interpretive insight and delight with the work. You read the poem on its own terms; after all, the poem has already come to terms with itself.”

Such a treasure trove is Jimmy Abad’s celebration of the craft, and his finessed cerebration of it all. Bravo!