Tag / poetry

by buglaswritersjournal

Alfred Yuson’s “Falling Out”

There are many poems about love. But what about poems that talk about falling out of love? It’s way past Valentine’s Day, and perhaps it’s time to talk about literature that deal with heartbreak. One of my favorite poems about exactly that is a two-stanza wonder titled “Falling Out,” by Alfred Yuson—Krip to family and friends. It goes:

Falling Out

Saddest thing.
Falling out.
World smells
Of cat poop.
Even catsup
Needs catsup.

Sun stings.
Moon blinds.
Pet stars sway
Out of reach.
Wind feels, sounds
Like sandpaper.

What’s not to like? The poem is a succinct but powerful depiction of emotional distress, likely stemming from heartbreak, loss, or personal conflict. When we asked Mr. Yuson regarding its genesis and what occasioned it, he couldn’t remember: ““Naku, so long ago na,” he said. “But if couldn’t have been a break-up. Or maybe it was. Or the idea just came, unrelated to any recent experience then.”

Nonetheless, the poem speaks for itself. And speak it does. The brevity of its lines and the stark, unembellished language amplify the rawness of the speaker’s emotions, and every phrase in the poem conveys disorientation, discomfort, and an almost absurdist sense of despair, as if the world itself has turned against the speaker in the wake of their emotional breakdown.

It is a rare poem written in this style by Mr. Yuson, a renowned poet from Manila who nonetheless has called Dumaguete his “hometown.” A Palanca Hall-of-Famer and the author of countless books of poetry, fiction, essays, drama, and children’s literature (he has also authored three novels—Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, Voyeurs & Savages, and The Music Child and the Mahjong Queen), he first came to Dumaguete in 1968 as a fellow of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, and was immediately taken in by the place. In his book, The Word on Paradise, he wrote about that introduction to Dumaguete:

“Poor Manileño never had a hometown. Until Dumaguete. I remember it as clearly as yesterday, that first ride on a slow-moving tartanilla, May of 1968. How I marveled at the manner of entry, at the fresh air of provincia, rustic redolence, aged acacias lining an avenue I instantly knew would lead to a long-imagined, long-elusive fountainhead…. I would have friends here. I just knew it. We would share time and joy together here, until the place itself would turn into a memorious intimate. It has happened. Come to pass. And it’s still, as they say, taking place. My Dumaguete friends and I continue to pass snatches of time together through decades of an evolving tapestry, absorbing layer upon fine layer of reminiscence. Those first three weeks in Dumaguete in the summer of 1968 had proven so thoroughly enjoyable that I swore to come back. Na-dagit. Hooked by her, the City of Gentle People.”

Certainly it is not a parting with Dumaguete that occasioned this poem.

The title of the poem immediately suggests a rupture—perhaps a break in a relationship, or a loss of connection, or a misunderstanding that has escalated into alienation—but the lack of a subject in the opening lines (“Saddest thing. / Falling out.”) makes the statement feel universal, applicable to any deep emotional rift. This vagueness, of course, allows readers to project their own experiences of loss onto the poem, making it widely relatable. For me, at least, it is about falling out of love.

What I like about it is its use of sensory imagery that evoke both discomfort, and eventual laughter. The phrase “World smells / Of cat poop” is both humorous and grotesque, but it also immediately sets a tone of disillusionment: the world, once familiar and perhaps even comforting, is now foul and unpleasant. (I have two cats. The smell of their poop is something else.) The humor in this line is subtle but significant, because it adds to the surreal and exaggerated quality of the speaker’s misery. This is reinforced by the next line: “Even catsup / Needs catsup.” This absurdist play on words, typical of Mr. Yuson, suggests that even simple pleasures, like a favorite condiment, have lost their ability to satisfy. The world is out of balance, and nothing is quite enough. 

Mr. Yuson extends this feeling of imbalance by describing the elements of nature in ways that make them seem harsh and unwelcoming. “Sun stings. / Moon blinds.” The sun, typically a symbol of warmth and life, becomes painful; while the moon, associated with guidance and reflection, instead overwhelms and obscures. This inversion of natural imagery reflects the speaker’s inner turmoil—everything feels wrong, even the forces of nature that usually offer stability. 

The next lines, “Pet stars sway / Out of reach,” introduce a sense of longing. The phrase “pet stars” actually evokes a personal connection to something distant and celestial, possibly dreams, or cherished memories. However, we get that these “stars” are no longer within reach, which emphasizes feelings of helplessness and isolation.

The poem ends with “Wind feels, sounds / Like sandpaper”—a particularly striking metaphor, as wind is usually associated with freedom, movement, and even solace. However, in this context, it becomes rough, grating, and painful. The fact that the wind “sounds” like sandpaper implies that even the auditory experience of the world has become abrasive, making every sensation unpleasant. 

What the poem eventually gives us is a masterful portrayal of emotional alienation. Yuson has captured the way heartbreak (or loss) can distort one’s perception of the world, making even the most ordinary experiences feel painful, frustrating, and surreal.

by buglaswritersjournal

Eva Rose Washburn-Repollo’s Ang Kabakhawan Gabantay Sa Atong Banay

Dumaguete City has a considerable tradition of writing for children. Perhaps the oldest story for children from these parts is “Catalina of Dumaguete,” written by the folklorist John Maurice Miller, which is based on the local fable, and which he included in his compendium Philippine Folklore Stories, published in 1904.

Many of its resident writers, including National Artist for Literature Edith Lopez Tiempo, have written stories for children, and a considerable number have won the Palanca for either the short story or poetry for children, among them: Leoncio Deriada [third prize for “The Vacant Lot” in 1989; and first prize for “The Man Who Hated Birds” in 1993], Alfred A. Yuson [second prize for “The Boy Who Ate the Stars” in 1990], Jaime An Lim [third prize for “Yasmin” in 1990; second prize for “The Boy and the Tree of Time” in 1993; and second prize for “The Small Bright Things” in 2016], Lakambini A. Sitoy [first prize for “Pure Magic” in 1996; third prize for “The Night Monkeys” in 2000; and first prize for “The Elusive Banana Dog” in 2007], Ian Rosales Casocot [third prize for “The Last Days of Magic” in 2007; and second prize for “Bisaya for All That We Gugma” in 2023], Francis C. Macansantos [second prize for “Mr. Bully and Other Poems for Children” in 2013], and Keisiah Dawn Tiaoson [third prize for “Tugma ng Buhay Kong Payak” in 2023].

Casocot has also won the Grand Prize of the PBBY-Salanga Award for his children’s book Rosario and the Stories in 2006 [still unpublished], had his children’s story “The Different Rabbit” included in Ladlad 3 in 2007, and finally published his first children’s book, The Great Little Warrior, with illustrations by Hersley-Ven Casero in 2022. Sitoy’s Palanca-winning story, meanwhile, lends its title to the anthology The Night Monkeys: More Palanca Prize Winners for Children, published in 2008 by Tahanan Books.

Over the years, the local independent publisher Dum.Alt.Press has helped facilitate the publication of several children’s books by Silliman University students, including Pepe’s Incredible Jumping Teeth by Michael Aaron Gomez, Carla and Her New Gift by Jamila Caroline Mirande, Aura: The Moon Jelly by Ysai Guazon, Paula and the Primary Colors by Patricia Solidarios, Ted’s Birthday Surprise by Gem Ladera, Finn & Lexi by Michelle Carroll, Sam & Charlie’s Valentine Contest by Jhudiel Brigid Plando, The Money Plant by Cahlia Faye Enero, and the anthologies Stories & Secrets (2017) and Big Dreams (2019).

In 2019, the Illuminates of the Spectra or iSpec, the LGBTQ+ group at Silliman, facilitated the publication of three children’s books for its Reading Rainbow program—including Sami Has a Secret by Renz Torres, with illustrations by Monique Cabanog; Libulan and the Three Little Stars by Lendz Barinque, with illustrations by Alex Villarino; and My Kuya, My Pride, and Joy by Ysai Guazon, with illustrations by Jhara Lae Amistoso.

Other local writers who have published children’s books include KM Levis’ The Dragon and the Lizard (2011), which is about a humble farmer who saves a kingdom from a fierce dragon by using his wit; Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez’s Julia and the Music of Light (2018), about a music prodigy who learns to accept her musical destiny; and Claire Delfin’s Mayumo: Escape from the Golden Kingdom (2022), about an enchanting escape to a world of history and magic. Of late, we have Kimberly Gari-Salvarita’s The Journey to the Orient’s Pearl (2024), which also serves as a coloring book depicting Philippine wildlife, and illustrated by the author’s young daughter Anais Vera Salvarita.

Then there is the singular honor of a Dumagueteño being the subject of a children’s book—the much-lauded marine biologist Dr. Hilconida P. Calumpong, whose story is told in Gardener of the Sea, written by Didith Rodrigo with illustrations by Corrine Golez, and published by Bookmark in 2017.

The environmental message of Salvarita’s children’s book, and the book centering on Dr. Calumpong is a popular theme in local children’s writings—which is understandable, given the island life that is distinct in Dumaguete. Part of that is Ang Kabakhawan Gabantay Sa Atong Banay [The Mangroves Protect Our Homes], a picture book in two languages—English and Binisaya—by the Tanjay writer Eva Rose Washburn-Repollo, whose birthday we celebrate today.

Published in 2019, Repollo’s picture book is dedicated “to all those who care about the environment and the preservation of the oceans for generations to come,” and in it she makes a plea for the preservation of local mangroves in an illustrated poem. We include here the entire translated text in English, although the Bisaya original is so much more powerful. [You can get a copy of the book, with the Bisaya text and its marvelous illustrations by Ionone Bangcas, from Libraria Books over at 58 EJ Blanco Drive.]

Storms that arrive to our oceans
bring strong waves that rush
to the coastlines.
Some coastlines have airports,
some coastlines have ports,
and some coastlines have homes.
Mangrove forests protect people,
fish, and shrimp.
Mangroves grow near the shore. 
There are baby and fully-grown mangroves.
Their roots are strong 
and grow deep under the sand.
And when the storms begin with 
strong winds … the mangroves are ready.
Tall, big waves have been known 
to battle against these mangrove forests.
But wherever there are mangroves,
the fish and the people are safe...
even when storms arrive
to our oceans.

Environmental conservation efforts are important in Repollo’s work, and she wants to raise awareness about the hundreds of hectares of mangroves in her hometown of Tanjay, as well as the Mantalip mangroves in Bindoy, the Bais-Manjuyod mangroves, and the protected reefs and mangroves of Apo Island in Dauin. The genesis of the book began in 1999 when she was part of a team tasked with creating visual learning displays for interactive learning environments at the Marine Lab of the Center for Excellence in Biodiversity at Silliman University. She remembers: “One of our displays, housed in the anthropology museum, explored how people interacted with their fish supplies. While researching for the project, I came across an article that described mangrove roots as ‘fish condos.’ I was fascinated by the idea that fish and shrimp had their own special homes within the mangroves. Our project highlighted the interconnected ecosystems from the mountains to the sea—and the crucial role we, as humans, play in maintaining that balance. As part of the process, I read extensive research conducted by biologists from the Silliman University Marine Lab on the flora and fauna of the Philippines, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.  I also saw how industries and resorts had their eye on developing these special entry ways of the rivers to the oceans for tourism.”

The story that bubbled in her head began as a short poem, she says, which sat in a drawer for some time. “In 1999, I participated in an international speaking contest, where I spoke about mangroves—how they ‘walk’ to grow in special salinity conditions and how their survival depends on keeping our seas free from pollution,” she says. “Years later, when Typhoon Haiyan struck, mangroves helped protect many small islands in the Visayas. Inspired by this, I decided to have my poem illustrated and published.”

Repollo is a teacher, filmmaker, cultural worker, theatre artist, and writer. She received her BA degree in Speech and Theater Arts from Silliman University, and went on to earn her MA in Literature from the same. Her passion for local culture made her start The Spotted Deer, an arts and language program to benefit the street children of Dumaguete, while also teaching at her alma mater. In 2004, she moved to Hawaii where she earned a doctorate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She wrote and directed documentaries focused on the values of multicultural selves in a diverse learning environment, including Among Gitukod [We Built It], a documentary on accountability and trust in donating to the Typhoon Haiyan disaster relief efforts. Aside from Ang Kabakhawan Gabantay sa Atong Banay, she has also written another children’s book on Visayan culture, Ang Pasko Sa Balay ni Lola Sepha, a counting book for children who want to learn Binisaya. She is currently an Associate Professor at Chaminade University in the Communications Department, and serves as a Commissioner on the Hawai’i States Foundation on Culture and the Arts. She recently received the Excellence in Education award from the United Filipino Council of Hawaii, in recognition for the many different community groups she volunteers for.

by buglaswritersjournal

Albert Faurot’s A Little Book of Wang Wei

Albert Louis Faurot was Dumaguete’s quintessential Renaissance Man—he was, after all, a consummate educator, a prolific author, a well-regarded concert pianist, a tough art critic and a sensitive collector, and a demanding choir master. The first two weeks of March is an important time to memorialize him: he was born on 7 March 1914 in Lamar, Barton, Missouri in the United States, and died on 15 March 1990 in the city he had come to love and call home, Dumaguete.

He was also a missionary, and engaged in that capacity mostly through the teaching of music. Before he came to live in the Philippines, he had spent a significant part of his young life in China, having gone there in 1936—just 22 years old—right after graduating from Oberlin. He taught music at Foochow College [in what is now Fuzhou]—and also later taught at various Chinese educational institutions, including Foochow Christian University, the National Fujian Academy of Music, and Hwa Nan College.

Even during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945, Faurot managed to build a reputation not only as a teacher but also as a choral conductor, an opera producer, and a piano recitalist. He became fluent in Mandarin and was part of a period of intercultural collaboration, forming connections with composers Huang Tzu and Zhao Yuanren. He arranged patriotic “school songs” and numerous Chinese folk songs, incorporating them into his programs alongside Western classics and new works by both Western and Chinese composers. During the Japanese occupation of Fuzhou in World War II, he and his students were evacuated to Shaowu and Yingtai. For six years, he continued teaching and performing in an abandoned temple, relying on a piano and a collection of 1,500 78rpm records as his instructional materials.

But eventually his Chinese sojourn ended. Like other foreign teachers in China, his career was disrupted in 1950 due to the outbreak of the Korean War, prompting him to join a wave of displaced academics and artists striving to rebuild their lives elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.

He settled in Dumaguete in 1952, where he began teaching at the new School of Music at Silliman University. Faurot soon found himself becoming the paragon of a man of all the arts—a Renaissance Man, so to speak. His house at the end of Langheim Road in Silliman campus—which he thusly called End House—was designed in such a way that it also became a gallery for art exhibitions, a salon that could host lectures and talks, and a performing space that could accommodate small chamber music concerts. It became a repository of picture postcards sent back by former students from great museums and monuments of the world, and also became the “hangout” place for many of Dumaguete’s artists, including musicians, writers, visual artists, dancers, theatre artists, and academicians.

He began a popular course on arts appreciation, which is still being taught today; he helped the Tiempos build the nascent National Writers Workshop, the first creative writing workshop of its kind in Asia; he founded the Order of the Golden Palette, the organization of campus visual artists; he taught for the famous Honors Program of Silliman, where he  challenged students to develop critical thinking; and he began the Silliman University Men’s Glee Club.

That choral group, which Faurot founded in 1962, became one of his greatest legacies in Dumaguete culture. Established at the request of the University Religious Life Council, the Men’s Glee Club was essentially formed to fill the need for a convocation choir. It started with 45 members [or perhaps 50—accounts do vary], all of them springing from various units in the university, and all of them chosen through auditions for their voices, and also for their talent in dancing and playing various instruments. As an enticement, a Glee Club scholarship was offered to a soloist each year. [Dumaguete Mayor Ipe Remollo was formerly a member of the Men’s Glee Club.]

On the year the Men’s Glee Club was founded, the Yale University Men’s Glee Club also gave a series of concerts at Silliman—and this group became a model for the new club to operate, and essentially helped establish its traditions. This included electing its own officers—Dr. Nichol Elman, when he was student, became its president in 1969—who were then tasked to plan and carry out the group’s many activities, including planning its various concert tours. This left Maestro Faurot to do the selection and preparation for the music.

Music was his life, but Faurot was also a prolific writer. To augment his course on arts appreciation, he authored a popular textbook, Culture Currents of World Art, first published in 1974 by New Day Publishers [later reprinted in 1981]. He would also publish a complementary book, Culture Currents of  World Music, co-authored with Isabel Dimaya-Vista. That book would come with its own recorded samples—perhaps the first of its kind in Philippine academic publishing. He would also author Prayers of Great Men in 1976.

But Faurot burnished his literary reputation with A Little Book of Wang Wei: Poems Translated from the Chinese, published in the early 1990s—around the time of his death—by the Philippine Literary Arts Council [or PLAC]. At 56 pages, it is a small but treasured book, and was lost for a time—until copies of it were found in 2022 in boxes at the house of National Artist for Literature Gemino H. Abad, an original member of PLAC. While Manila writers were instrumental in its publication, the book was very much a Dumaguete project: Faurot asked his colleague Augusto Ang Barcelona, the architect behind the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, to contribute the Chinese-style illustrations in pen and ink. He also asked another Sillimanian and Dumagueteño, Rev. Martin Liu, to do the calligraphy for the book. Meanwhile, the Tiempos and their daughter Rowena Torrevillas were on hand to advise him on the translation, some of which first saw publication in Sands and Coral, the literary folio of Silliman University. Another PLAC member [and adopted Dumagueteño], the poet Alfred A. Yuson, designed and produced the book.

The book was, in a way, a project of personal reminscences, particularly of his years as a missionary teacher in China. Faurot had enrolled at the famous Hua-Wen Hsueh Hsiao in Beijing [then Peking], and was determined to learn to read Chinese poetry in the original. “Later,” he writes in his preface to the book, “during the years as a refugee in the mountains of Fukien, I found a Mandarin scholar who came each day to read with me. My favorite book was the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, and my favorite poet, Wang Wei, the poet of field and garden, mountain and river.”

That predilection for natural observations [and social relations] was how Faurot came to love Wang Wei, whose importance in world literature stems from his mastery of both landscape poetry and Buddhist-inspired verse, and was renowned for his serene, evocative imagery and profound engagement with nature, making him a highly influential figure in Chinese literature, alongside Li Po and Tu Fu. “All his life,” Faurot writes, “Wang Wei sought out the beauty of country scenes, of rivers, lakes, mountains; and captured them in his verse. Court life involved many partings with friends, as favor smiled or frowned; and each farewell was the occasion of an exchange of poems… Wang was sensitive to the changing seasons, the weather, the times of day, and each poem no matter how short evokes its own atmosphere of place and time.”

Here are three poems by Wang Wei translated by Faurot for the book:

The Lotus Gatherer

Day after day you pick pink water-lilies,
Returning in the dusk from the long isle.
Watch how you handle that pole in the pond,
Lest you wet your water-lily bordered gown!

My Bamboo Lair

So soft I hum and strum my zither,
Nestled in my bamboo lair,
Not even mountain folk can listen.
Only moonbeams meet me there.”

My Apricot Studio

Veined apricot was hewn for rafters,
Scented sedge was sewn for roof.
Clouds unnoticed drift between them.
Go, make rain on other folk!

The conception for the book may have begun around the time Faurot was able to return to China in the improving political climate of the late 1970s and 1980s. There, he gave lectures on and recitals of contemporary music, including what were probably the first performances in China of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I (composed in 1972) for amplified piano. After these China tours, he earnestly began collecting his translations of Wang Wei’s poetry, and adding more to what was already there.

But why Wang Wei as an object of fascination? Perhaps this was one Renaissance Man recognizing another, and Faurot admitted as much in his preface for the book: “Wang Wei had a genius able to express itself in three arts—poetry, painting, and music. He has been called ‘China’s Renaissance man,’ and the period in which he lived, the early years of the Tang Dynasty [618-906], compared to the high Renaissance in Florence.” Like admiring like, so to speak.

In his 38 years in Dumaguete, Faurot raised the bar for everyone in achieving [and appreciating] great things in the arts—in music, in painting, in literature—for which he will always be remebered. The lecture series on arts and culture currently administered by the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council is named after him, and a lane near End House is also named in his honor. He is buried at the American Cemetery in Daro.

by buglaswritersjournal

Edith Lopez Tiempo’s “Bonsai”

In the 23rd December 1972 issue of Focus Philippines Magazine—the Christmas issue of a publication that was only a month old and which sprang right in the aftermath of the declaration of Martial Law in the country—a new poem by Edith Lopez Tiempo appeared. This was “Bonsai,” and the piece would go on to become one of the most anthologized poems by the soon-to-be National Artist for Literature. It is rightly celebrated today for its stark imagery, its personal details, its exquisite craft, its well-earned insight, and its sheer power. I also would like to contend that the poem demonstrates a remarkable shift in sensibility for a writer previously known for pieces that were rigid exemplars of formalism in poetry … cerebral and often daunting. In this essay, I would like to dive deep into the meaning of “Bonsai” and provide some context for its making.

When Edith Tiempo graduated from Silliman University in Dumaguete in 1947 with a BSE degree in English, she was part of the wave of people who thronged to complete their interrupted education because of the Japanese Occupation of the country during World War II. She was already writing poetry by then, writing very much in the Romantic tradition that Filipino poets in English gravitated to in that period of Philippine history, and admitted awareness of Filipino female poets like Angela Manalang-Gloria and Trinidad Tarrosa-Subido. But when she got accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop in the same year, together with her husband Edilberto Tiempo, her notions of what made poetry were challenged. And it was then that she was introduced to the tenets of New Criticism which was popular in the American writing landscape at that time. It was a painful transition for her but soon grew to master the formalist discipline, although she would later admit: “It was necessary for the writing, but I found that it robbed me of other things as a person. Inevitably it does. It’s not just a matter of using it for your writing. It gets to you as a person.”

This ambivalence would come to play when she would finally pen “Bonsai” more than 20 years later.

In the meantime, after graduating from Iowa in 1949, she would go on to make a name for herself in both fiction and poetry, and was included in the 1954 anthology Six Filipino Poets, edited by Leonard Casper. In 1960, her poems would be published by the prestigious Poetry Magazine in Chicago, and in 1964, she would publish her first book, a collection of her short fiction titled Abide Joshua and Other Stories.

In this period of prolific writing, she also began crafting poems in an exercise of what she called … “a passionate patience,” with work that gunned for the intellectual, something which she noted as being in affinity with the works of Elizabeth Jennings. This phase in her poetry would culminate in her publication in 1966 of her first poetry collection, The Tracks of Babylon and Other Poems, published by Swallow Press in Denver, Colorado. The book would collect only 20 of her poems, which included another much-anthologised piece, “Lament for the Littlest Fellow,” first published in the Sands and Coral in 1950. These works were crafted in the most exquisite demands of New Criticism, and the collection won her the Palanca Award for Poetry in 1967.

She would publish two novels in the late 1970s, but would only sporadically publish her poetry in magazines and journals during that time, which would eventually lead to her hiatus from writing in the 1980s, perhaps beset by the horrors of Martial Law and most definitely impeded by administrative problems at Silliman University where she was teaching with her husband. “Bonsai” would become one of those rare pieces she would send out to the world during this turbulent period of her life. She would finally collect all the poems from this period—including “Bonsai”—into her second collection, The Charmer’s Box and Other Poems, published by the Dela Salle University Press in 1993. What immediately sets them apart from the poems in her first collection is their personal feel and accessibility to emotional details, and a looseness in tone and construction that you could say signals a defiance against the tenets of New Criticism.

Let’s take a look at “Bonsai” in that regard, and read it in increasing order of complexity… Let’s read:

Bonsai

All that I love
I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.

All that I love?
Why, yes, but for the moment —
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son’s note or Dad’s one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a beauty queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.

It’s utter sublimation,
A feat, this heart’s control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size,

Till seashells are broken pieces
From God’s own bright teeth,
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.

It’s helpful to begin offhand with the title and the central image—although this is not necessary. A central image is the image given by the poem that is pervasive throughout, becoming the engine of meaning in the long run. In this case the title and the central image are the same: the bonsai. One must take note however that the literal bonsai is only found in the title, but the resonance of it—you can say its spirit—is everywhere else in the poem.

What is a bonsai? A bonsai is an ornamental tree or shrub grown in a pot and artificially prevented from reaching its normal size. So we can have a bonsai acacia or a bonsai narra — all very easy to keep because of their small size in a pot. And they are real trees, not fake trees — but their smallness make them pocket representations of their full-sized cousins. In doing the process of bonsai with trees, and in keeping them in pots, they become living mementos of the larger trees in the outside world which of course we cannot keep.

What I like about “Bonsai” is how it makes our interpretations of it relatively easy to do because the four stanzas of the poem seem ready-made to be interpreted variously via the literal level, the metaphorical level, and the metaphysical level.

It’s always good to start with the literal level. Going over the first stanza of the poem again, we take note of that first line: “All that I love.” What do you love and cherish the most in your life? When I ask people this question, they give various answers: family … friends … God … travel … food … pets… The things that we love are very precious to us. They occupy a large place in our lives, and in our hearts.

Take note of the next two lines: “I fold over once / And once again.” All that you love … that can be folded? This does not seem to make logical sense: this something that you love, in the poem, which can be folded twice over. You love your family. Can you fold your family? The answer is no. You love your friends. Can you fold your friends? The answer is no. You love God. Can you fold God? The answer is also no. You love travel. Can you fold travel? The answer is also no. You love food. Can you fold food? The answer is sometimes, well … yes. You love your pets. Can you fold your pets? The answer is again no.

So what does folding all that you love twice over mean? It’s a paradox, and we will get our answer very soon…

Let’s go to the next lines: “And keep in a box / Or a slit in a hollow post / Or in my shoe.” The answer to our befuddlement becomes gradually clear. You realize that in our lives, we have storage paraphernalia to keep precious personal mementos in: a shoebox … a jewelry box … a bamboo pole … a trunk … or a scrapbook. And what do we keep in these storage paraphernalia? Letters, jewellery, photos, old clothes, your wedding gown, your precious linen, postcards, and various souvenirs from all your travel…

The second stanza underlines this story: it gives us a list of things—we call this technique as “cataloguing” in poetry — that are examples of these mementos that we keep in these storage paraphernalia…

For example, your son’s note…

It’s written in crayon or pencil, and in kiddie grammar and spelling, it reads: “Dear mom, thank you so much for being my mom. If I had a different mom, I would punch her in the face and go find you.” And your reaction would be to glow and be happy and go awwww. You keep the letter which now has sentimental value for you. Maybe you will put it on the refrigerator door. After that maybe you will hide it in a shoebox or in a scrapbook…

This letter is a small memento which can be “folded once and once again, and keep in a box.” It’s just a letter, but it symbolizes something bigger — your child’s deep and innocent love for you.

Another example, your Dad’s one gaudy tie…

It’s not stylish, and looks freakish in fact. And your dad is normally a stylish man. But you gave him this tie on his birthday when you were ten years old — and your dad proceeded to wear the gaudy tie every Monday to work. And then he suddenly died because of COVID-19. And all you have left of him, aside from other unmemorable things, is this gaudy tie he wore every Monday to work because you gave it to him. Do you throw it away? No. You keep it in a box.

This gaudy tie is a small memento which can be “folded once and once again, and keep in a box.” It’s just a tie, but it symbolizes something bigger: your bond with your beloved father.

Another example, a roto picture of a beauty queen…

Let’s say you’re 90 years old, and you’re a great-grandmother. The younger members of your family only know you as an old woman, and they have no conception whatsoever of your youth, your beauty, and your vitality.

So you take out this photo from one of your albums, and you show it to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You tell them, holding this evidence, that you were young once. That you were known for your vitality. That your beauty made you a title holder like Miss Philippines. Do you throw this photo away? No. You keep it in a scrapbook or album.

This old picture of a beauty queen is a small memento which can be “folded once and once again, and keep in a box.” It’s just a picture, but it symbolizes something bigger: your youth, beauty, and vitality.

Another example, a blue Indian shawl…

Let’s say that during your honeymoon, your new husband—a handsome and good man—brought you over to India to see the Taj Mahal because of its romantic connotation. You loved the trip. When you visit the shops of Agra later, he bought you this blue Indian shawl, as a souvenir from your honeymoon. Later you would store this blue Indian shawl in your trunk, taking it out only once in a while for special occasions. And then he suddenly died because of COVID-19. When you go through your things days after the funeral, you find the blue Indian shawl in your trunk. It’s old. Do you throw this shawl away? No. You keep it in the trunk still, taking it out often when you go out.

This old blue Indian shawl is a small memento which can be “folded once and once again, and keep in a box.” It’s just a shawl , but it symbolizes something bigger: your late husband’s love for you.

They’re all mementos [or symbols] of bigger and more important things in our lives. Those things are too big to keep, but mementos of them are easier to keep and cherish.

With the third stanza of the poem, it’s easy to go to the deeper metaphorical level. Something “sublime” is something of such excellence, or grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe. But what exactly is “sublime”? According to the poem, the act of memento-keeping is actually sublime. When you keep things in boxes because these are mementos of great sentimental or personal value, that is sublime. The poem calls this act, quote unquote, “a feat.” It is an achievement that requires great courage, skill, or strength. It is exactly that because it is the human heart that drives it, “moment to moment” … “scaling down all that we love / to a cupped hand’s size,” to something small like a memento.

The small memento becomes a metaphor for the things that we love that are big. A lot of what we love are big in terms of the importance we give to them. But our mementos of them are small.

Here’s more…

Your love of travel is big. Heck, the destinations that you love — Paris! London! Tokyo! — are big. But you can scale down that love to a postcard you keep in a scrapbook! Your love of family is big. But you can scale down that love … to a locket with the photos of your mom and dad. Your love of friends is big. But you can scale down that love … to a photo of you and your friends you keep in a shoebox. Your love of movies is big. But you can scale down that love … to collectible figurines of beloved movie characters that you can store in a cabinet!

We already get the theme of the poem here … the only way to understand or keep the big things in our lives is through … small things. This, by the way, is a great paradox!

The poem also offers us a metaphysical way of reading. Is there any? In the final stanza of the poem there’s a mention of God and seashells. God is … big. Seashells are small and easy to keep. What is the biggest thing in the world to cherish? GOD! And the poem says we can begin to understand God just by looking at the smallest thing like a seashell. It’s beauty in miniature. It’s the complexities of the universe in miniature. It’s an idea of God in miniature.

Life and love are big things, but we can understand them best through small things. And small things are so simple that the poem says you can give them to a mere child, and the child can easily comprehend even things as complex as life and love.

by buglaswritersjournal

F. Jordan Carnice’s “The Electorate Weighs In”

The 2025 election is over, and the results have come in. Can we reflect poetically on the elections? Dumaguete-based poet F. Jordan Carnice has done just that with the following occasional poem:

The Electorate Weighs In

After Andrea Cohen’s “The Committee Weighs In”

I tell my mother a farmer
and a fisherman won.

Another? she says. Which
province this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend everybody’s

got a chance, she
pretends she isn’t hopeless.

Mr. Carnice lives in Dumaguete, but hails from Tagbilaran City, Bohol. A creative writing graduate of Silliman University, he is also a visual artist, and currently works as a researcher for the National Museum of the Philippines in Dumaguete. His works, both prose and poetry, have been published in the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Ani, NCCA’s Ubod, Santelmo, Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Philippines Graphic Reader, Philippine Speculative Fiction, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Manoa Journal, among others. He has also authored two poetry chapbooks, Weights & Cushions (2018) and How to Make an Accident (2019). He is also a recipient of fellowships from national writing workshops in Dumaguete, Iligan, and Bacolod, and has served as a panelist twice at the Taboan Writers Festival. He was recently hailed as Poet of the Year at both the 2023 and 2024 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards, the first poet to have ever won that award twice in a row.

I asked him what what occasioned him to write this poem. He tells me: “In the hours between work, social media, and the demands of daily survival, I challenge myself to sit still and write about anything. It could be something as significant as world-breaking news or as trivial as the lint on my shirt. After fulfilling my civic duty in the midterm elections on May 12, I felt the urge to write about it. I do not shy away from sensitive topics, and yet for this one, I didn’t know where to begin.

He says he watched on television how the country once again voted in many of the usual politicos—those who organize beauty pageants and basketball leagues, or who showcase TikTok performers and the same-old street dance competitions funded by taxpayer money. He says: “These are the politicians we see regularly at ribbon-cuttings and opening programs, often flanked by celebrities or singing and dancing at town fiestas, all while rehashing slogans and hollow promises of ‘asenso’ and ‘ginhawa.’ I let go of the idea of writing a poem.”

But the next day, he woke up with a complete text fully formed in his head. “Before it vanished,” he says, “I grabbed my phone, typed it out, and sent it to a few friends. I titled it ‘The Electorate Weighs In,’ clearly inspired by Andrea Cohen’s piercing poem, ‘The Committee Weighs In.’”

He credits Cohen for obvious reasons. “How her poem’s structure made its way into what I wanted to say about the elections wasn’t clear to me,” Mr. Carnice said. “Maybe I had reread it the day before, which was Mother’s Day. Maybe my subconscious, still reeling from the election results, simply latched onto it.”

But he acknowledges that the times are changing. “On Sibuyan Island,” Carnice says, “Nanding Marin, one of the protesters who formed a human barricade to stop mining trucks in 2023, was elected municipal mayor of San Fernando, unseating the incumbent. We also saw the likes of Ronnel Arambulo, a tricycle driver and fisherman, and Danilo Ramos, a farmer and long-time human rights defender, garner as many as three million votes each in the senatorial race. They trailed behind flashier names, but those three million votes were cast by people who believed in ordinary candidates without massive billboards or expensive TV ads, candidates who are fueled solely by the desire to serve honestly.

“Some say it will take another generation before people like them hold real power in our government. But I think the shift is already happening. If we can only keep the momentum, move forward, and finally break the cycle. It is true that literature can only do so much, and no poem has ever stopped a tank or a bullet, but I believe nothing goes to waste in writing about it.”

by buglaswritersjournal

Claro R. Ceniza’s “Philosophy is Learning to Live with Others: A Definition for Our Times”

Can a philosopher be a poet? One Dumaguete luminary exemplified that possibility.

Claro Rafols Ceniza is considered as one of the Philippines’ foremost philosophers—maintaining a fascination for metaphysics, the philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, symbolic logic, and the philosophy of language. Born on 10 May 1927 in Oroquita, Misamis Occidental, he was the third of six children of Judge Patricio C. Ceniza and Vivencia Rafols. He finished high school at Silliman University in in 1947 and, because no school in Dumaguete at that time offered a major in philosophy, he decided to take up Law instead. He made a reputation as a brilliant orator in school, winning first prize for an oratorical contest in 1950 for a piece titled “Big Man.” He would become President of the Student Government at Silliman in 1951-1952. He obtained his LL.B. degree in 1953 and passed the bar examination in 1954, placing 17th among 3,000 bar candidates.

His mind was divided between the practice of law and his interest in philosophy, so he decided to bring together his ideas in 1954, and published, in mimeographed form, The Rational Basis of the Problems of Philosophy—and sent copies to various schools and persons. [He would ultimately receive an acknowledgements from the University of Paris, which stated that the faculty of the school thought highly of his work]. The Review of Metaphysics listed his work as having appeared in 1954 (or 1955).  

In 1958, he wrote a brief summary of his major thesis on existence and had it published in pamphlet form under the title, The Relation of Man’s Concept of Space to Metaphysics. This became the first part of a longer work, which he published in 1965 entitled, simply, Metaphysics.

He would eventually quit the practice of law in 1965, and joined the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Silliman University, serving as its acting chairman of its. In 1968, Silliman Journal would publish Metaphysics in full.  By this time, he had already been happily married to Riorita Espina Ceniza, with whom he had six children: Manuel, Susana, Cecille, Ana, Vivian, and Gary.

In 1969, Prof. Ceniza and his family would move to Syracuse, New York where the he and his wife would pursue their graduate studies at Syracuse University. He would earn his MA in 1970, with his thesis on “The Argument of Parmenides,” and his Ph.D. in 1972, completing a dissertation titled, “Some Basic Presuppositions of Classical Philosophy.” That year, the family would come back home to the Philippines, stayed briefly in Dumaguete, and then began teaching in Manila. 

By his own admission, he spent some of his happiest years of teaching at the University of Santo Tomas, where he began teaching in 1975. He also taught in various schools, including the Philippine Dominican Center for Institutional Studies and the Philippine Christian University. He also became visiting professor at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, and had also been an exchange professor in Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.  After his teaching stint at the UST, he would come home to Dumaguete to teach once more at Silliman University until 1977. That year, De La Salle University would hire him as a full-time philosophy professor, where he was the first holder of the Lucian Athanasius Professorial Chair, and and daught at DLSU until his retirement in 1993. As a tribute to him, DLSU would institute the Claro R. Ceniza Lecture Series, which have produced works and philosophical discussions that honor his analytic spirit.

Among his books and monographs include The Relation of Man’s Concept of Space to the Problems of Philosophy (1960), Metaphysics: A Study of the Structure of Metaphysical Inquiry (1984), Elementary Logic (1987), What is Philosophy? (1990), Introduction to Philosophy: Selected Readings (2001), and Filipino Cultural Traits (2005).

But he was also a poet. As a student in Silliman University, he would be published regularly in The Sillimanian Magazine and Sands and Coral, and his poems were cited in Manuel A. Viray’s selected bibliography of the best poetry in the 1950s by Filipino writers. In the spirit of his philosophical inclinations, here is a poem he wrote that tackles that:

Philosophy is Learning to Live with Others: A Definition for Our Times

Philosophy is a conversation
Between two honest people.

It is being myself to the other,
and letting the other be himself to me.

Philosophy is not an intellectual exchange
(although an intellectual exchange
may take place in philosophy).

Philosophy is, in a deeper sense, a sharing
of selves.

A philosopher knows no foes,
for he who has known Being
has discovered the bridge to all other
beings.

And a philosopher should never forget that he is a man.

Philosophy is life,
and life is philosophy.

Philosophy was important to him. In an essay titled “The Problems of Philosophy,” published in 1952 on The Sillimanian Magazine, he explained why this was so: “… The question ‘why’ is asked whenever the fact presented to the mind does to conform with the mind’s preconceived idea of what the fact should be. And the mind continues to feel the disturbance—the unbalance—as long as it does not find the explanation, the cause which would explain satisfactorily the extraordinary phenomenon.  Philosophy seeks the reconciliation of the mind’s preconceived idea of what the fact should be and the fact itself as it is given to the mind.” 

by buglaswritersjournal

Merlie M. Alunan’s “Bringing the Dolls”

What is home? For poet Merlie M. Alunan, the answer is a difficult thing to come by, given the way her life has unfurled. She currently resides in Tacloban City, but was born in Dingle, Iloilo on 14 December 1943, the eldest of seven children of Flavio Alunan and Amina Muyco. She finished grade school at Victorias City, Negros Occidental, and graduated high school at Ormoc, Leyte—and then obtained a bachelor’s degree in education, major in English, at the University of the Visayas in Cebu in 1964. She would later spend a significant number of years being a resident of Dumaguete City, where she earned her master’s degree in creative writing at Silliman University in 1974. She began teaching at Divine Word College in Tagbilaran City, Bohol, and then moved back to Dumaguete to teach at Silliman. Later, she would join the literature and creative writing faculty at the University of the Philippines, both in Cebu and in Tacloban, where she would eventually retire as professor emeritus in 2008.

In a sense, her life is a criss-cross of homes—spanninig the wide stretch of the entire Visayas—which is probably why, among her many books, the one tome that has become a significant summation and culmination of her life as a teacher, as a researcher, and as a writer, is Sa Atong Dila: Introduction to Visayan Literature [University of the Philippines Press, 2015], a thick compendium of literary works—both folk and modern—in all of the major Visayan languages, including Bisaya [often mislabeled as Cebuano], Waray, Hiligaynon, Kiniray-a, and Akeanon.

So, “home” to Alunan is indeed a myriad consideration, but she will always consider Dumaguete as a primary home besides Tacloban: this was where she found her literary voice under the tutelage of Edilberto K. Tiempo and Edith L. Tiempo, and where she finally started writing—and quite a late start at that. While in Dumaguete in the early 1990s, she also co-edited Kabilin: 100 Years of Negros Oriental with Bobby Flores Villasis. It was a pathbreaking coffeetable book celebrating the history, the life, and the culture of Negros Oriental in time for the province’s centennial celebration. In Dumaguete, her son Babbu, a popular local visual artist, has also taken root, where he owns and manages El Amigo along Silliman Avenue.          

She is primarily a poet, and her works—in English, in Bisaya, and in Waray—are collected in Hearthstone, Sacred Tree (1993), Amina Among the Angels (1997), Selected Poems (2004), Tales of the Spider Woman (2011), Pagdakop sa Bulalakaw ug Uban Pang mga Balak (2012), and Running with Ghosts and Other Poems (2017). She also recently translated the Binisaya balak of Canlaon poet Ester Tapia in Húbad: Ester Tapia (2021).

Among the anthologies she has edited include Fern Garden: Women Writing in the South (1999), Mga Siday han DYVL (2005), Our Memory of Water: Words After Haiyan (2016), Susumaton: Oral Narratives of Leyte (2016), and Tinalunay: Hinugpong nga Panurat nga Winaray (2017). She also edited The Dumaguete We Know (2011), a memorable anthology of creative nonfiction mining many writers’ memores of Dumaguete.

For her contributions to literature, Merlie M. Alunan has just been announced as one of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awardees in 2025.

But to go back to her grasping for the meaning of home in her poetry, we turn to a poem she wrote when she was leaving Tacloban with her family for a prolonged stay in Dumaguete, and found that the impending departure has torn her young daughter’s sense of home:

Bringing the Dolls

Two dolls in rags and tatters,
one missing an arm and a leg,
the other blind in one eye—
I grabbed them from her arms,
“No,” I said, “they cannot come.”

Each tight luggage
I had packed
only for the barest need:
No room for sentiment or memory
to clutter loose ends
my stern resolve.
I reasoned, even a child
must learn she can’t take
what must be left behind.

And so the boat turned seaward,
a smart wind blowing dry
the stealthy tears I could not wipe.
Then I saw—rags, tatters and all—
there among the neat trim packs,
the dolls I ruled to leave behind.

Her silence should have warned me
she knew her burdens
as I knew mine:
her clean white years unlived
and mine paid.
She battened on a truth
she knew I too must own:
When what’s at stake
is loyalty or love,
hers are the true rights.
Her own faiths she must keep, not I.

A tender, if heartbreaking, poem that explores the tension between survival and sentiment in the context of forced migration or displacement, we find in the poem the speaker—focused on necessity—denying her child her battered dolls, which symbolize the past and innocence.

Yet the child quietly resists, smuggling the dolls aboard the boat bound for another home, asserting that in upheaval, love and memory must also be carried.

The poem contrasts adult pragmatism with a child’s uncompromising loyalty to what matters emotionally. And in the end, the child’s act becomes a quiet rebuke and reminder that love and belonging cannot be sacrificed, even when life demands painful choices.

by buglaswritersjournal

Rodrigo Feria’s “Testament in Mid-Passage”

More often than not, we tend to forget our founders—the people who paved the way for great things to become established. When we think of literature in Dumaguete, we usually think of the Tiempos, as we should, but one figure that should not be forgotten in the annals of local literary history is Rodrigo Feria, whose 47th death anniversary we commemorated last September 13.

He was born on the first of January in 1910, in Cabangan, Zambales, the only son of Antonio Feria, a farmer. He graduated high school in Zambales in 1918, and soon found his way, as a pensionado, to the United States in 1929, where he studied English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, and where he also took up his graduate studies. While in America, he became close friends with Carlos Bulosan, who became a mentor and pushed him to explore his literary leanings—and soon he was known in campus as an accomplished poet. While studying at USC, he met Dorothy Stephens, of Marcellus, Washington, whom he wanted to marry—but miscegenation laws [which forbid white people from marrying people of color] were quite strict in the U.S. at that time. According to their daughter Chuki Feria Miranda, “[In order for them] to marry, they had to cross state lines, from California to New Mexico, where [my father] passed for a native American with his dark skin.”

Another daughter, the late journalist Monica Feria, wrote of that marriage in an article, “Writes in Exile,” published in Kritika Kultura in 2014: “It was [Carlos] Bulosan who orchestrated their marriage in 1941—both a romantic and political event in those days of interracial marriage prohibitions—arranging for a car to whisk them across the border to New Mexico, getting lawyers to prepare their legal defense should they be stopped, alerting sympathetic Hollywood media, and hosting a small reception for the newlyweds at a favorite hangout of ‘Pinoys’—the term used to refer to Filipino migrants on the West Coast who braved backbreaking work and the harsh discrimination of those days.”

His poetry would eventually be anthologized in Bulosan’s Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets, published in 1942, and its contents included poets as Jose Garcia Villa [with 6 poems], R. Zulueta Da Costa [with 1 poem], Feria [with 4 poems], C.B. Rigor [with 1 poem], and Cecilio Baroga [with 5 poems], and, of course, Carlos Bulosan. Of his four poems included in this anthology, “Testament in Mid-Passage” remains the most popular, having also been anthologized in Brown River, White Ocean, edited by Luis Francia and published by Rutgers University Press in 1993.

Testament in Mid-Passage

Man has the right to raise a fist against fate 

On earth, air, and water 
Decisive wheels move. Swift 
Spindles intercross and weave 
Patterns we cannot overlook. 
This history of change 
Pushes us into horizons 
Of light that spills the darkness 
Back within the covers of eternity. 
Inordinate standards of dreams 
And words we thought meaningless 
Are flames that trail the crossways 
Of wonders new to us: dazzling our eyes. 
This is the seed of tomorrow, the golden 
Ideal for which men died in ignorance. 

This is home at last, O America. 
Let us fly together over 
Your naked breast. Let us give 
Back the fields to the farmers, 
Speech to the people; extol 
To their delinquent hearts the purple 
Blood that darkness destroyed. 
Let us give them new patterns. 

O America: 

New hopes behind mask-faces; 
New glitter to sunken eyes; 
Motion to new frontiers. 

Let us give them to each other's 
Safekeeping; the feeling of touch, 
The answer that glistens, 
The laughter that rings: once more 
The grandeur of praise and love.

It is a wartime poem that reflects the dislocation, anguish, and resilience of a Filipino voice caught in the turbulence of World War II. Written in spare, resonant free verse, the poem adopts an elegiac tone, like a farewell or last will, situating the speaker “in mid-passage”—a liminal state between life and death, homeland and exile, destruction and survival. The sea voyage motif serves as both literal reference to wartime journeys and symbolic marker of diaspora and dislocation, allowing Feria to connect individual trauma to a broader collective condition. The language is modernist in its economy, unsentimental yet charged with metaphor, which lends the poem both intensity and restraint. Its strength lies in this witnessing function: by distilling the uncertainty of passage, Feria offers a testament not only of personal endurance but also of a generation’s fractured journey through war. At the same time, the poem’s density of metaphor and lack of explicit historical markers may render it less accessible to readers without knowledge of its context, and its restrained tone risks muting the raw emotion of wartime experience. Yet it remains significant as one of the earliest examples of Philippine English-language poetry that brings together themes of diaspora, survival, and memory, published in Bulosan’s book to situate Philippine literature within a transpacific frame. Quiet but haunting, the poem stands as both an individual lyric of survival and a collective testament of a people suspended in history’s violent crossings.

After World War II, the couple eventually left for the Philippines, where Dorothy changed her name to Dolores. The offer to teach at Silliman University came in 1947, and off they moved to Dumaguete City, where all three of their daughters—Stephanie, Marcia, and Monica—would be born.  The Feria home in Silliman campus would soon become the gathering place for many local writers and students, something that took root organically.

The year 1948—when things normalized in Dumaguete after the devastations of the war—truly marks a period of rapid literary advance that would go on until 1961, a span of years that saw an influx of gifted writers into Negros Oriental, led by the Ferias, augmenting the efforts of Ricaredo Demetillo and the Tiempos, and that of Metta Jacobs Silliman and Abby Jacobs, the missionary teachers who were the mentors of this early generation of Silliman writers.

The founding of Sands & Coral, which Rodrigo Feria organized that year, soon caught the national literary imagination and signaled Silliman University’s growing importance in the contribution to the national literature, particularly in English, would be the main engine of the burgeoning literary culture in those years.

Founding editor Aida Rivera Ford remembers the organization of the magazine: “It was conceived over steaming cups of coffee in the living room of Rodrigo T. Feria, our adviser, and his American wife—the critic Dolores Stephens Feria. We had the terrifying job of turning out a purely literary magazine, with these aims: (1) to maintain a higher literary standard among our campus writers, (2) stimulate genuine creative thinking, and (3) develop a keener appreciation of the more serious creations of our students. We had no office; we plotted at street corners or at the North Pole where being seen drinking beer made one the talk-of-the-town; we worked at cafeteria tables or at the library; we even did some editing at a picnic. For our cover design, Reuben Canoy squiggled a skeletal figure reaching for the top of the sea, strewing sand over coral.”

In that first issue, which Rivera co-edited with Cesar Jalandoni Amigo, Claro Rafols Ceniza—who would later go on to become one of the country’s most brilliant philosophers—contributed “Of Poets and Philippine Poetry,” his response to William Van O’Connor’s comment about the “pretentiousness of Philippine literary journals,” and Ricaredo Demetillo would contribute his poem “There is a Part of Me Born on Some Battlefield.” Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo would each contribute criticism all the way from their studies in Iowa, and Dolores Feria would review Steven Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn. Aida Rivera herself would write a short story titled “Bridge Over the Morrow,” which is based on the war-time experience of a certain family in the town of Kabankalan, Negros Occidental—a story which she would later improve on and expand with “Ordeal in Hacienda Mercedes.”

By the second issue, which came out in March 1949, Rivera would become the sole editor of a thicker volume, knowing full well that it was a follow-up to the maiden issue which had caught much of the Philippine literary world by storm, eliciting praise from Manila critics. In this second issue, she would contribute “The Chieftest Mourner,” which would later on become one of her most anthologized pieces. A Muslim writer in campus, Lugum Uka, would contribute a hilarious Christmas story titled “A Deer for Jesus,” which is set in a Bilaan school in Mindanao. Among the other contributions included Reuben Canoy’s short story “Sons of Darkness” and poem “The Hypothesis: Birth”; literary criticism from Ricaredo Demetillo, Edilberto Tiempo, Edith Tiempo, and Dolores Feria, the latter writing an essay where she considered the damage done to the growth of literature wrought by the war, and surmised that producing first-rate critics would perhaps hasten the national literature’s flowering. There was also a poem by Rodrigo Feria titled “Madness We Bequeath Thee,” and an essay by Francisco Lopez, Edith’s brother, titled “A Very Proper Gentleman,” where he skewered the Filipino’s tendency for over-niceness.

Feria would eventually leave Silliman University in the late 1950s to work for the government under President Carlos Garcia, who was also an alumnus of Silliman. He worked for the public relations arms for Garcia’s Reparations Commission, the government agency tasked to administer and oversee the country’s receipt and use of Japanese war reparations after World War II.

After this stint, he began teaching at the University of the East, who eventually “asked” him to resign in the heady days of Martial Law, because Feria was identified as a member of a group of progressive teachers.  His wife, Dolores, meanwhile taught at the University of the Philippines, where she gained both fame and notoriety for her activism [and her eventual imprisonment during Martial Law], which she eventually wrote about in such books as Project Sea Hawk: The Barbed Wire Journal [1993], as well as The Long Stag Party [1991], where she wrote about literature and resistance, imperialism and gender, and the status of women writers in the Philippines, especially in the essay, “The Patriarchy and the Filipina as Writer.”

Feria died during that tumultuous decade, on 13 September 1978.

by buglaswritersjournal

Marjorie Evasco’s “Ritual for Leaving”

To speak of the celebrated Tagbilaran/Dumaguete poet Marjorie Evasco is to speak of a life devoted to poetry, to teaching, to the difficult but necessary labor of giving voice to what has long been silenced. Born in the quiet coastal town of Maribojoc, Bohol, Evasco—known to friends as Marj—grew up steeped in the cadences of both English and Binisaya. It is this dual inheritance that would shape her lifelong work of weaving language into both bridge and mirror.

Her journey began in the classrooms of Catholic schools and later at Divine Word College in Tagbilaran, where she earned her degree in English in 1973. She first worked in the Ministry of Public Information, writing features and eventually becoming editor, before leaving government for the more enduring vocation of literature. At Silliman University, where she earned her MA in creative writing in 1982, she found her footing among peers and mentors. Soon after, she began her long tenure at De La Salle University, rising to professor emeritus, where she trained generations of writers—including her annual stint as regular panelist for the Silliman University National Writers Workshop.

Her oeuvre is remarkable in both breadth and depth: Dreamweavers (1987), Ochre Tones (1999), Skin of Water (2009), and Fishes of Light/Peces de Luz: Tanrenga in Two Tongues (2013, with Venezuelan poet Alex Fleites)—all later included in her omnibus collection, It is Time to Come Home: New and Collected Poems (2023). Her work has traveled across languages and continents, finding place in anthologies from Manila to London, from Havana to Singapore. The awards have been many—the National Book Awards, the Palanca, the Free Press, the Balagtas Prize, the S.E.A. Write Award—but these are only emblems of a deeper truth: Evasco has always written with integrity, whether in the lyric hush of a farewell poem or in the luminous dialogues she curated in Six Women Poets.

She has been, for Philippine letters, both witness and weaver. Also a sometime poet of goodbyes, farewells, and departures—especially in poems like “Despedida,” “Elegy #1,” “Mama’s Death Anniversary,” and “Poet in Exile”—but also of returns or hints of return, such as in “September Fugue” and “Why I Keep Coming Back,” and most especially, “It is Time to Come Home,” the poem that gives her latest collection its title. In these poems, I find Evasco at her most devastating: tender, lyrical, and unsparing.

But my favorite of all is “Ritual for Leaving,” because it is also the most Dumaguete of all her poems—written on the occasion of two poet friends, Grace Monte de Ramos and Juaniyo Arcellana, bidding their farewell to [an unnamed] Dumaguete:

Ritual for Leaving

For Grace and Juaniyo

Go now, and go at noon 
When this city shall stand 
Intense in the light, 
Equal to your silent grief. 

There are many ways of taking leave: 
Even when we choose to be dumb 
Our bodies, hands, feet, senses, 
Motion their own speeches as we go numb 
Gathering things to pack from room to room 
Or weaving the streets and boulevard 
After the usual beer at sundown. 

It is easier to leave 
In the middle of day—
The view from the port, postcard-pretty, 
Accented by kitchen smoke 
And blooming acacia trees—
An ordinary scene on an October day 
Which will probably be the same 
When you come back: a strange assurance 
Of infinities or that something 
We call indestructible.

The poem renders departure as both ache and ordinariness. It opens with stark instruction—“Go now, and go at noon”—invoking light as witness to grief. It acknowledges the many, embodied languages of farewell: the numb hands, the weaving through streets, the rituals of beer and packing. Yet Evasco resists despair. By situating leave-taking against the backdrop of acacia trees, kitchen smoke, and postcard ports, she transforms the pain of separation into an almost consoling rhythm of continuity. The poem, finally, suggests that even in absence, the world endures, offering us the fragile assurance of return.

In the Filipino imagination, farewells are always freighted with distance. We are a people defined by departures—seafarers, migrant workers, lovers bound to leave, friends who slip away into exile. Evasco gives us a vocabulary for this grief that is tender rather than bitter, a language of leavetaking that honors the gift of having loved at all. Her metaphors—birds in flight, water slipping away, dreams that persist—are not decorative but elemental, the very grammar of our diasporic condition.

Perhaps this is why her farewell poems haunt me. They remind me that to live is to leave, over and over again. Every embrace is a prelude to parting. And yet, what remains after reading Evasco is not sorrow but light—the small flame of a candle left in the window, illuminating the memory of presence, the possibility of return. In her poetry, goodbye is not an ending but a tender promise that what has been shared will not vanish.

by buglaswritersjournal

Myrna Peña-Reyes’ “Ethnic at Checkout Counter” and “At Camp Lookout”

If you ask the poet Myrna Peña-Reyes what her favorite poem is—as I did only a few days ago—you will be surprised that it’s not “Breaking Through,” although that’s her most anthologized poem, the one she is most well-known by. I love that poem, too, and used to teach it when a course on Philippine Literature was still something to be had in college. But, to be honest, it’s also not my favorite of poem of hers.

The one I love the most is one of her most Dumaguete-centric poems, “At Camp Lookout.” But that is not her favorite poem either. It’s something titled “Ethnic at Checkout Counter”—and I completely understand why that is her choice. That poem is an incisive and ironic look, in the voice only Myrna Peña-Reyes can pen, at immigrant life she used to have when she was living in the United States. Come to think of it, my favorite of her poems and her favorite of her poems invariably talk about “home.”

She was born in Cagayan de Oro, a child of the southern landscape—lush, rivered, restless, and her early years were steeped in the pulse of provincial life. But it was in Dumaguete, where her father, the great biologist Alfredo Reyes, took up a teaching post at Silliman University, where Peña-Reyes’ sensibility as a poet truly formed. At Silliman, under the tutelage of the Tiempos, she found not only the discipline of craft but a community of writers who valued precision and quiet truth. Her poems from those years reveal an eye that lingers—on light, on silence, on the textures of ordinary days.

Later, with her husband, the American poet William Sweet, she settled in Oregon, where the distances from the Philippines grew longer, the seasons sharper. The immigrant years deepened her voice; her poems began to speak from the fault line between belonging and estrangement. In the grocery aisles, in the long grey of American rain, she traced the small negotiations of identity—Filipino, woman, writer—each one both burden and inheritance. We see this in her first book, The River Singing Stone.

When she returned to Dumaguete after many years abroad, it was not with nostalgia but with a kind of tempered clarity. Her later poems—in Almost Home and Memory’s Mercy—carry that tone: measured, unsentimental, but tender toward the landscapes that made her. Peña-Reyes’ life and work unfold across geographies, but always circle back to one enduring question—what, and where, is home?

Let’s explore this in her favorite poem:

Ethnic at Checkout Counter

The clerk chants the prices
as she punches the register keys.
Her smile is bemused.
I watch my fish heads
dive under chicken livers,
ox tails bounce against beef tongue,
pig’s feet squirm under tripe.
The line behind me stares silently.

Then when she announces the sum
and starts to bag
I take my time. I write a check.
They often think:
Another food stamp ethnic.

It is a small, searing poem of displacement—an immigrant’s moment of reckoning at the banal altar of the supermarket. In the measured precision of its imagery, the poem captures what it means to live in quiet translation: to inhabit a body, a culture, and a grocery cart that all announce otherness in a land that pretends to smile but still stares.

The poem opens in the mundane rhythm of transaction—“The clerk chants the prices / as she punches the register keys.” The verb “chants” immediately transforms the scene from mechanical to ritualistic, the checkout counter turned into a site of performance and judgment. Peña-Reyes’ speaker stands exposed under the fluorescent lights, her choice of groceries—“fish heads,” “ox tails,” “pig’s feet,” “tripe”—marking her unmistakably as alien. But the poet wields these images with both pride and unease: they are emblems of memory and inheritance, but here they are rendered almost grotesque under the gaze of an audience [presumably a white one]. The phrase “The line behind me stares silently” lands like a verdict.

The immigrant’s negotiation of identity here is not one of loud defiance but of subtle resistance. When the speaker says, “I take my time. I write a check,” it is a small assertion of dignity in a space that expects her shame. The slow gesture becomes a reclamation of agency, an insistence on visibility. Peña-Reyes’ final line—“They often think: / Another food stamp ethnic”—burns with weary irony. The voice is neither angry nor pleading; it is exhausted, aware of how stereotypes flatten complexity.

In a few taut lines, Peña-Reyes crystallizes the immigrant experience in America: the daily humiliations that pass as ordinary, the quiet strength it takes to remain seen, and the unspoken ache of carrying one’s culture through aisles that do not recognize its worth. Home, in the reality of that grocery store, feels so far away.

Her poem “At Camp Lookout,” on the other hand, is a poem of quiet distance, of standing high above the world and trying to make sense of what it means to belong to it:

At Camp Lookout

Fog haze, morning chill
chart our days:
linger under blankets,
breakfast at ten, then
ascend a weedy trail,
lift our faces to the sun,
the wind fancying our hair;
listen how the mountain sings:
bird calls, insects, wind
in the trees, billowing the grass,
the trickle of a hidden stream,
the sudden startle of wings!

Down in the sweltered plains
doll houses, offices, streets lost
in the toy towns with borders
blurred in the clustered trees;
bathtub boats streaking a silver sea,
curve of shoreline holding back
the deep; Siquijor, Sumilon, Cebu
breaking up its sparkle and sweep;
and at the airfield scarring the land
planes descending, taking off—
we’re here to escape them all.
How distant they all seem!

Late afternoon,
the monotone cricket song,
cicada wings shivering the air,
bats navigating the dusk.
Soon the firefly hour,
Night’s bright sentinels encamped in the sky.
Far below, the town lights blaze,
ship lights crawl their slow trails
across the blackened sea,
drop below the horizon,
fade, flicker, sink.

Drawn downward,
our thoughts turn home,
the lowlands closer than we think.

Here, “home” is both a physical landscape and a state of mind—something the poet must leave in order to see clearly, and something that calls her back even from the farthest vantage point. The poem becomes a meditation on the tension between escape and return, between the ache for solitude and the gravity of rootedness.

From the first lines, Peña-Reyes situates us in the rarefied air of retreat: “Fog haze, morning chill / chart our days.” The mountain is a refuge from the “sweltered plains,” where life unspools in the clutter of “doll houses, offices, streets lost / in the toy towns.” To be at Camp Lookout [in Valencia town] is to be removed—to exchange the noise of daily living for the elemental: “bird calls, insects, wind / in the trees.” The poet’s diction is stripped clean, rhythmic in its stillness. This is home reimagined as simplicity, as the purity of hearing the world breathe. Yet, beneath the serenity, there is the knowledge that this peace is only possible in absence—an absence from the very world that made her.

Home, then, is complicated. From the mountain, the towns below appear “blurred,” the sea “silver,” the islands “breaking up [their] sparkle and sweep.” The distance transforms them, miniaturizes them, but never quite erases their hold. Peña-Reyes’ gaze, however, is tender and never scornful. The poem acknowledges the beauty of detachment, but also the pull of connection. The mountain grants her perspective, but not release.

As night falls, the poem begins its slow return. The speaker listens to “cicada wings shivering the air,” then watches the “ship lights crawl their slow trails / across the blackened sea.” These images of navigation and movement [bats, ships, fireflies] are metaphors of longing. They mirror the speaker’s own drift between solitude and belonging. By the end, she concedes to the magnetic pull of home: “Drawn downward, / our thoughts turn home, / the lowlands closer than we think.”

This final image captures Peña-Reyes’s mature understanding of home—not as the idyllic space of escape, but as an ever-present gravity. No matter how high she climbs, or how far her thoughts wander, home is the pulse that calls her back. In the luminous quiet of Camp Lookout, she finds not distance from home, but a clearer way of seeing it.

In both poems, Peña-Reyes charts two dimensions of home [and exile]: the immigrant’s alienation in a foreign land and the exile of distance from home. The first unfolds in the fluorescent glare of a supermarket, where belonging is questioned with every stare; the second, in the serene remove of a mountain, where belonging is remembered from afar. One poem bristles with the quiet humiliation of being seen as other; the other softens into homesickness and return. Together they trace Peña-Reyes’s lifelong negotiation between displacement and the fragile comfort of finding home again.