Small Talk And The Quiet Watch
Small Talk And The Quiet Watch
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, November 07, 1987
T. B. ABAYAN sings a bold, barefaced lyric in his latest volume “Asian Dreams", much as I had thought all good poets ought to do in my youth. At a time when so much poetry is skillful double-talk, and so very much of social discourse is poetry, Abayan's simplistic, straightforward manner is clearly a travesty of the norm. And it should make of him a marked man at the very least.
At any rate, it should make him a ready target for the critic's roving eye. What, then, are Abayan's “weak” points, disarming though his honesty might be? Where should our critics aim their poisoned barbs to pierce this poet’s stout heart from alternate routes like some malevolent acupuncturist’s slender probes?
The discriminating critic might begin by saying that T.B. Abayan is no major poet, no gifted stylist, no artful innovator. His language is too plain, much too clumsy and unadorned. His tone is crude and conversational when all poetry of import must soar on wings of song and roar with the rage of a cleansing fire. See for yourself that Abayan’s pen is a homespun quill, blunt and unmelodic:
“The Filipinos / Love to sing their own love songs / Praising their own birds . . .”
“When I walk on our / Village road and the fast car / Passes me by, I / Get covered by the thick dust / During the rainless summer . . .”
“An ambassador / Is a good man sent by his / Government abroad / To lie for his own country / So that she can remain free . . . ”
Abayan is a poet of the quiet watch, plying an interminable trek through back-alleys and sweatshops, rice paddies and newspaper stalls. His preoccupation is small talk, his outspoken sensibility akin to beerhouse banter. See that his gaze is turned outward on the small and insignificant, marking time not with heroism but with a malignant drudgery:
“The bundy clock ticks / To measure the workers’ pace / And punch out their toil . . .”
“The Smokey Mountain / Is where the rich share their trash / With the city flies . . .”
“As soon as the drought / Is ended by the first rains / That drench our village / The lean dehydrated frogs / Have their impromptu concert . . . ”
And for all his grandiose pretention to a new manner of versework that he has cleverly dubbed “haikeabayan”— coined in essence from the traditional Asian haiku, tanka, and his own annexed surname — Abayan does not as much explore form as he does the meanderings of his consciousness in an invariable recourse to brooding soliloquy:
“Because man is kind / City streets and avenues / Are lined with beggars . . .”
“One must bear in mind / The distance of his house from / The cemetery / As always a whole number / That decreases every year . . .”
“Any hook when bare / Invites no fish to a feast / And merely rusts by . . .”
Truly, T. B. Abayan would be fair game for bloodthirsty critics on the prowl. Defenseless, relatively unheralded and unknown, his obvious fate would be sealed between the covers.
It is strange, then, that for all its failings, for all its author’s glaring inadequacies, “Asian Dreams” acquits itself as a purposeful testimonial of an abiding faith. Perhaps it is because we have seen so much of poetry as craft, poetry as ART, poetry as ageless artifact, that we are now all too easily won by the credibility of heartfelt verse. The essential poetry, after all, is the voice of the soul, and he who speaks plainly, speaks well.
“The literary critic,” writes Abayan in a closing bit of verse, “slits an author's throat and then sews it up.” Who can argue the wisdom to that?
Write on, brave poet! Shine on, brave light!
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Small Talk And The Quiet Watch” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, November 07, 1987
