kagablog

I happened to have participated in the 9th Poetry Africa festival held in Durban, South Africa in October 2005. There I met over 30 other poets who read their works to an appreciative audience for a full week.

The welter of voices was extraordinary, with its stunning wealth of styles, modes and poetic forms – from the quiet and subtle exhalations of the conventional “page poets,” for whom the poem as seen on the printed page is the ultimate in creative expression, with its verbal reading only an occasional offshoot – to the wildly munificent oratory of performance poets, usually younger, who spun all sorts of technique-accented hark-back to the bardic tradition by sharing their faux-spontaneous lines with live audiences.

Why, if this is what they call “hip-hop,” I said to myself in Durban, then by all means let’s have more of it. And let there be a happy merging of the spoken word, rap, performance poem, slam jam and what-have-you with the written verse, for all its dependence on traditional else evolving forms.

It was the substance of poetry as oracle that became primary. We had a communion of spirits whose sacred host was passion. And it was the poetry of openness, of no exclusion, of no borders or delimiting categories such as gender, age, color, nationality, language, and, why, yes, even poetic form.

I was aware that performance poetry had also been thriving to a certain appealing degree back home, so that to hear the slam jam poets in Durban was to be reminded of the efforts of our own performance and spoken word adherents in Manila.

A convergence and not a confrontation is what this special TOMAS issue is all about. Here we have a dozen Filipino poets exercising varied forms of poetry, in a rich, woven tapestry alongside a dozen foreign poets doing the same. To say that each contributor is of international caliber is to beg, uhmm, the issue.

Mphutlane Wa Bofelo and Leo Janssen of South Africa were the major attractions in the Durban Slam Jam contest. Lemn Sissay of the United Kingdom and Celena Glenn of the USA are seasoned Spoken Word performers who blow everyone off the stage, worldwide.

Here their poetry finds like company in the experimental, jazzed-up or rock-n-roll lines of singer-composer Lourd de Veyra and the precocious neo-Dadaist Angelo Suarez. De Veyra’s music sheets, and artist-rocker Igan D’Bayan’s illustrations, also find a counterpart in Aryan Kaganof’s in-your-face poetry that has been recited to the accompaniment of jazz, just as Sissay’s has been.

The love poems of young poets Anna Bernaldo and Natasha Gamalinda find kindred insights with those of Dutch poet Hagar Peeters, whose translated works also find a parallel in the contributions of Mamta Sagar of India and the very young Joseph Saguid of the Philippines. These last two are also represented by works in their original languages, Kannada and Filipino.

Exile poetry, often driving home strong socio-political commentary, finds expression in the haunting works of Tibetan Tenzin Tsundue, South African Gabeba Baderoon, and

Filipino expatriates Bino Realuyo, Wendell Capili and Merlinda Bobis, whose poetic prose excerpts somehow find echoes in the extended, ruminative lines of Joan Metelerkamp of Cape Town. Eric Gamalinda and Allan Pastrana deliver poems of lissome but strong cerebration, while Njoki Muhoho of Kenya and Malika Ndlovu of South Africa celebrate womanhood in all of its poignant, defiant, and regnant evocations.

Stirring the brew is a splendid “prose divider” – ironically functioning as an equalizer – an essay on the art of the lyric, subtitled “A Way to Hear,” by esteemed poet-critic Dr. Gémino H. Abad, who himself grew up in the periphery of the great university on Manila’s España. He enlightens us: The ear can only be universal when it listens to echoes of poetic craft.

From Manila to Durban, then, by way of New York, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, Wollongong, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and the Himalayas, the poetry in this truly special issue of TOMAS offers a wide array of oracles. The forms are myriad, the substance lyrically strong and memorable.

krip yuson
this article originally appeared on krip’s blog