Poetry amidst the prosaic

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Today is World Poetry Day.

This celebration seems paradoxical: ours has become a prosaic world, in both cultural and linguistic senses. Our institutions lean towards the streamlined and the standardized; academia prefers formal text, divested of florid phrasings and semantic interpretations. So why bother writing poetry when prose will suffice?

The simplest reason: because we can.

Among the Romantic aesthetes, there was this maxim ars gratia artis, that art – in all its forms – exists for its own sake. “…If eyes were made for seeing/Then Beauty is its own excuse for Being,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. John Keats further speculated: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness…” While both poets penned these verses to describe Art in general, they inadvertently established as well the aesthetic premise on which every verse and poem stands on.

So we write poems – because we can. For poetry has no other purpose to exist than to express creatively and profoundly: any passionate high school literature teacher will tell you that. (Mr. Keating, anyone?) Perhaps the blandness of plain language compelled the simplest of men and women to search for combinations to elevate the simplest of thoughts and ideas into remarkable statements of great beauty and depth. That would be poetry’s basic and best apologia.

Essentially, poetry is an effusion of paradoxes: the whimsical meets the intellectual in the phrasing, and they both perfectly make sense. These open themselves to both the writer’s semantics and the readers’ stylistics, opposing these may be – and they still perfectly make sense. José Garcia Villa, in his attempt to define it, can only versify it at best: “First, a poem must be magical,/Then musical as a sea-gull./It must be a brightness moving/And hold secret a bird’s flowering.” No clear definition at all; just pure vivid imagery and figurative language – and yet, the reader arrives to that profundity with which he remarkably describes what constitutes poetry.

It follows then that poems have the power to inspire, to move hearts and minds, to both comfort and disturb, to reassure that there is some beauty hidden in the most sordid of things – as they too and their creators have been inspired, moved, comforted, disturbed, and reassured.

But as mentioned before, ours has become a prosaic world. As such, poetry and its crafting become an act of resistance, insisting that language may be aesthetically celebrated for its own sake and not merely reduced as a rhetorical tool for the academic and the institutionalized.

It is heartwarming to see this resistance take form in our own verse-weavers and their verses. Our region’s literary scene is replete with poets: the likes of Genevieve Asenjo, Marcel Milliam, Alain Russ Dimzon, Early Sol Gadong, Mel Turao, Alice Tan Gonzales, among others, keep that poetic tradition aflame while burgeoning young poets like Robin Yankin (with his iconic typewriter and his penchant for Haruki Murakami), Jag Muyco, Al Gonzales, Leonard Alcoran, and Kim Pillo-Frufonga, to name a few, lend a fresh flare of inspiration, especially to other young people who also aspire to contribute their verse into the powerful play of words.

So no: prose will not suffice. Let there be excess of verses; let the versification continue – in all its forms, genres, and structures, whether in bound volumes or on social media, whether as metered haiku or free verse, whether as metrical tale or song lyrics, whether as spoken word or battle rap.

For as long as humanity breathes on and its existence demands noble expressions of his thoughts through language, so too must poetry breathe on. Beyond meanings or interpretations, it will insist on its existence. Archibald MacLeish puts it succinctly as his closing lines: “A poem should not mean/But be.” Mic drop.

(The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools in the city. Garcia Villa’s poem is extracted from the webpage of The American Academy of Poets.)