(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 1996)
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The
more than 7,000 islands that comprise the Philippine Archipelago extend like a
string of emeralds on the northeastern edge of South East Asia. They are bounded on the north and east by the
Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Celebes Sea, and on the west by the South
China Sea. Dr. Jose Rizal, the Filipino
national hero martyred during the revolution against Spain, romantically
referred to this archipelago as La perla
del mar de oriente or pearl of the orient sea. The archipelago is part of the western
Pacific Rim of Fire and more than twelve active volcanos periodically erupt in
bombastic displays of fiery lava and plumes of ash. There are devastating earthquakes, floods of
biblical proportions, and typhoons that wipe out whole villages. These sensational images of natural disasters
make good copy for newspaper reports and most of what Americans have learned
about the Philippines is connected to one sort of disaster or another. Not much is known about the country’s complex
history, its diverse cultures, and its literature.
The
earliest known human fossils found in the Philippines were discovered in the
Tabon Caves on the westernmost island of Palawan. These fossils are about 22,000 years old,
suggesting that the first human migrations into the islands occurred during the
Late Pleistocene of the last Ice Age.
Physical anthropologists have determined that these human fossils share
the characteristics of modern man, homo
erectus. The succeeding waves of
migration to the archipelago were those of the Mongoloid stock. By the third
century B.C., these inhabitants were goldsmithing, making pottery, weaving
cloth, building sailing vessel, and trading with ports as far away as China,
Champa (Vietnam) and Malacca.
The
written history of the archipelago began in 1521 with the arrival of Ferdinand
Magellan, who was sailing under the Spanish Crown. Magellan was eventually killed in a skirmish
with the warriors of Lapu Lapu, the leader of the island of Mactan. In 1543, Ruy Gómez de Villalobos set sail
from Mexico to establish a colony in the archipelago. The expedition ended up in utter failure
except that Villalobos was able to give the islands a name, Las Islas Filipinas, after the crown
prince Filipe Segundo, or Phillip the
Second. In 1565 Miguel Lopez de Legaspi established a permanent Spanish
presence on the island of Cebu. In 1571
he sailed north towards Luzon and captured the city of Manila from a local
Muslim potentate. Manila was then made the
capital of the archipelago. From this point on the Spanish Empire colonized and
controlled the islands for more than three hundred years.
The
entrance of the United States into the Philippines affairs began with the
Spanish-American War in 1898. The Spanish
possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were lost to the
U.S. With the signing of the Treaty of
Paris later that year, the Spanish government agreed to cede the Philippine
Archipelago to the United States. This agreement cost the U.S. $20,000,000. The native population of the
Philippines did not accept this change in the colonial masters with open
arms. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the Filipinos were well on their way towards a Filipino national
identity with the hopes of achieving independence from Spain. In 1896 a secret society called the Katipunan
led the revolt against Spain. The
independence of the first Philippine Republic was proclaimed in 1898 and the
first republican government in Asia was formed.
But having just paid twenty million dollars for this new territory, the
U.S. could not morally and financially afford to lose its investment in prime
Pacific real estate. The government of
President McKinley decided to ignore the sovereign rights of this newly
declared independent republic. Realizing
the United States’ true intent of taking the archipelago from themselves, the
Filipinos resisted this new enemy in the Philippine-American War from 1899 to
1902. During this conflict, the Filipino
population suffered more than a million losses under the might of emerging
industrial and military giant. The
United States not only won the military battlefield, but also on the cultural
and linguistic terrain in their attempt at colonizing their newly found
colonial subjects.
When
one considers the historical factors of the America’s colonization, that its
language, its cultural and its educational institutions were imposed (in the
guise of the policy of Benevolent Assimilation) on a native Filipino
population, a pattern of dominance/subjugation and superiority/inferiority
begins to emerge. Emilio Aguinaldo, the President of the first Philippine
Republic and main “Insurrecto” leader, was captured in 1901 by Frederick
Funston. Within the same year, the U.S. transport ship Thomas arrived in Manila Bay carrying five hundred young American
teachers whose mission was to “educate, uplift, and civilize” the Filipinos.
The English spoken by Americans spread across the Philippines and quickly took
root as the preferred language for education, administration, commerce, and
daily living. So, by 1910, U.S.
officials claimed that more Filipinos could read, write, and speak English than
any other single language. For the next
forty years, American culture and its language assumed a dominant position in
the life of Filipinos. The transmission of culture was undoubtedly
one-sided. Many indigenous expressions
remained hidden and were suppressed because of their presumed inferiority.
The
period between 1900 to 1940 is generally considered a period of tutelage under
the Americans. Filipinos were seen as
mere students of English, and thus their early literary efforts in the language
were not always taken seriously. It is
important to note, however, that the American teaching efforts did not include
creative writing. As the Filipino critic
Gemino Abad points out: “…it is little misleading to speak of literary
apprenticeship during those first forty years because we already had
accomplished writers in Spanish, Tagalog, and other native languages. The apprenticeship was linguistic and
cultural, but not in the literary or poetic art itself. We simply had to master another foreign
language (English) and its poetic tradition from Shakespeare to the English Romantic and Victorian poets—a Romantic tradition
that, be it noted, was not unfamiliar to our writers in Spanish and in our
native languages—and fit the English language and its poetic tradition to our
own scene and sensibility, what as individuals and as a people we had become
through three centuries of Spanish rule.”
English, as an imposed language, was then “naturalized” or “colonized”
by Filipino poets and made to reflect a native experience and an indigenous
imagination.
The
beginnings of Filipino poetry in English can be traced back to 1905 with the
publication in Berkeley, California of The
Filipino Students’ Magazine edited by Ponciano Reyes and Jaime
Araneta. This magazine contains several
poems in English and in Spanish written in pensionados
(Philippine American government scholars).
During the formative period of Filipino poetry, the newspapers,
magazines, and literary presses in Manila were mostly controlled by Americans
who were not eager to publish Filipinos. So it is ironic that the first
attempts of the Filipino poets writing in English would find light on the
shores of the very country that was their “colonial master”. The pensionados
soon learned that the democratic ideal of freedom of the speech were taken more
seriously and had a wider definition in the United States than in the islands
back home. In 1924, Rodolfo Dato’s
anthology of verse, Filipino Poetry,
was published in Manila. Although the poems represented in that volume are not
of the best quality (there is ample evidence of stilted use of language and
inattention to grammar), they do portray the local surroundings as only native
poets can. Employing imagery learned
from the poets of the English Romantic period, Filipino poets converted the
skylark and nightingale into the kuliawan
(oriole) and the maya (rice bird). In
this introduction to the volume, Dato refers to the poems as “the maiden songs
of our native bards warbling in a borrowed language.”
After
only twenty-five years of colonization, one Filipino poet, Marcelo de Gracia
Concepcion,1 had eventually matured and was worthy of being
recognized by the American literary establishment. This poem, “Ili-Na” is from his collection Azucena:
ILI-NA
And he is carried
back into dreams
to the beautiful
sundowns of his ili-na.
There is the music
of young laughter.
He well remembers
now his old friendships,
the long-lost ties
of long ago.
There he sits under
the shadows of the bells
at vesper-time.
The scenes are
different now.
The voices are not
the same he used to hear.
He is all alone now in the world,
for he feels strange
himself.
Seemingly out of
place.
Seemingly
miscarried by the current of time.
He stands to
go. He cannot go.
For the scent of
azucena at sundown
brings back to him
the long-lost ties
of long ago.
This poem shows a surprisingly
modern style. The imitation of the
language found in the English Romantic and Victorian periods has been dropped
and the use of formal diction is minimal.
Aside from the strong rhyme of “go” with “ago,” Concepcion does not use
any other rhymes. “Ili-Na” certainly
displays the characteristics of Modern poetry in English. But is the poem worthy of inclusion in the
canon of Modern American poetry? When
one takes into account the history of American poetry in the 1920s when the
styles, the concerns of form and meter of English Romantic and Victorian poetry
still had a strong influence on American poets, we see in “Ili-Na” a breaking
away from that English tradition. It is
also important to note that the formalization of American free verse in the
style of William Carlos William remained to be fully articulated until the
thirties and forties. In Marcelo de Gracia
Concepcion’s poems we have lines of clear language and the preferred use of
“plain speech.” If he were given his due
by the American critics of his time, can you imagine the rich textures he could
have added to the Modernist movement in American poetry? But that did not happen and Azucena was quickly forgotten by the
American literary establishment, and consequently, forgotten by the Filipinos
themselves.
Another example of these early
“successes” is the publication of four early poems of N.V.M. Gonzales by
Harriet Monroe in the January 1934 issue of Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse: 2
CIRCUS SONG
I am a juggler
of hazardous
moments.
My oranges are real
oranges
and I eat them all
when my show is
over.
My daggers—ah,
one of them pricked
the heart of
my Antonieta.
This poem shows traces of Ezra
Pound’s Imagist movement. From these two
poems, and from looking at others in the various anthologies, we can infer that
Filipinos have closely followed the development of American poetry and its
poetics. From the 1940s to the present,
the Filipino poet has been aware of the Modern, New Criticism, Beat,
Projectivist, New York School, Confessional, New Narrative, Multicultural, and
Postmodern movements or phases of American poetry. It would be tempting to
delineate the development of Filipino poetry within the same phases of its
American counterparts, but that would betray the separate historical realities
which occurred and influenced the writing of Filipinos. In his influential textbook Philippine Literature: A History and
Anthology, Bienvenido Lumbera interprets the development of Filipino
literature as “an alternation of assertion and acquiescence by the Filipino
creative imagination” (Lumbera, IX). By
responding to American literary influences in this give-and-take manner,
Filipino poets gain footholds in their development of a unique poetic
tradition.
The history of the Filipino poetic
tradition in English can be divided into four generations: the Pioneering
generation (1905-1925), which includes the poets in Rodolfo Dato’s anthology Filipino Poetry; the Modern generation
(1926-1945), which includes N.V.M. Gonzales (1915), Alejandrino G. Hufana
(1926), Dolores de Iruretagoyena de Humphrey (1919), and Manuel A. Viray
(1917); the Post-War of New Critical generation (1946-1965), which includes
Carlos A. Angeles (1921), Dominador I. Ilio (1913), Epifanio San Juan, Jr.
(1938), and Gemino H. Abad (1939); and the Contemporary generation (1966-to
present) which includes Mila D. Aguilar, Maria Luisa B. Aguilar-Cariňo,
Merlinda Bobis, Rofel G. Brion, Fidelito Cortes, Simeon Dumdum, Jr., Morjorie
M. Evasco, Luis H. Francia, Eric Gamalinda, Fatima Lim-Wilson, Danton R.
Remoto, Ricardo M. De Ungria, and Alfred Yuson.
Because Filipino poetic tradition in
English has not yet reached the hundred-year mark, these “generations” should
not be taken as definite categories where a poet or series of poets would
represent just one area. Some of the
poets who were born in the early part of this century and who had published
work in the thirties, forties, and fifties like Manuel Viray, N.V.M. Gonzales,
and Alejandrino G. Hufana have continued to produce work that has grown in
different stylistic and thematic directions.
These generations should be taken as wide, permeable frames in which the
poets’ milieu, themes and styles may indicate a certain affinity with their
contemporaries, but not necessarily link them as a cohesive whole.
A separate “grouping” may be
utilized for poetry written by Filipinos living in America and Filipino
Americans. By mentioning a separate
grouping of poets, I do not wish to imply they have developed a poetic
tradition radically different from that which developed the Philippines. The only demarcating factor is that of
geography. The writing of Filipino poets
in these two continents is inextricably linked by not only the use of the
English language but also by patterns of migration and immigration. In addition, many second generation Filipino
American poets do not consider English a learned or foreign language but a
language they have always known and grew up speaking.
The first wave of Filipino
immigrants that came to the United States arrived between 1903 and 1930. They consisted mainly of male laborers who
were recruited to work in the agricultural fields of Hawaii, California, and
Washington and in the salmon canneries of Alaska. Along with the first wave were a small group
of pensionados who generally came
from the middle and upper classes of Filipino society and who were awarded
scholarships to the “trained” in the valuable processes of democratic
government, the free enterprise system, and the aesthetics of Anglo American
culture in various institutions of higher learning in the United States. From the pensionados
we find an auspicious beginning of the Filipino American tradition of poetry in
English with the publication of the Filipino
Students’ Magazine in 1905 in Berkeley, California.
Included in the is first wave was
Jose Garcia Villa, who arrived in the United States in 1930 to subsequently
earn his BA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1933. That same year, he moved to New York City to
take some courses at Columbia University and have his first and only collection
of Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines
and Others, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. He then went on to publish several
collections of poems that have exerted a considerable influence in the
Philippines, and to a lesser extent, here in the United States: they are Have Come, Am Here (The Viking Press,
1942); Volume Two (New Directions,
1949); and Selected Poems and New
(McDowell, Oblensky, 1958). Some
Americans may remember him as the inventor of the “comma poem” or the winner of
such prestigious American literary prizes as the Guggenheim Fellowship and
Shelley Memorial Award.
However, the most compelling writing
detailing the early immigrant experience in America would come from the
laboring class in the short stories, poems, in the semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart (1946) by Carlos
Bulosan, and in Azucena by Marcelo de
Gracia Concepcion. The issues of
alienation, nostalgia for the homeland, exile, poverty, exploitation, racism,
and invisibility are tackled by these pioneering writers.
In his poem “Landscape with
Figures”, poet Carlos Bulosan touches on the theme alienation.
The sun was most
unkind to the place:
history: names of
men: patterns of life:
all that the
distant floodtide heaved and moved,
breaking familiar
names that immortal tongues
clipped for the
heart to cry, “Home is a foreign address,
every step toward it
is a step toward three hundred years
of exile from the
truth…”
In “For a Child Dying in a
Tenement,” Bulosan exposes the effects of poverty on an immigrant child. Note the use of the word “terror” to modify
the ideal of the word “plenty.” The
common myth of America as “the land of plenty” becomes ironic when the author
of the poem is faced with the reality of “the despair of being poor.”
Dear child, you are
among the first to know
the terror of
plenty, the crime of innocence,
the anguish of
poverty…
I guess I know
the cold of winter,
the despair of being poor,
the terror of
loneliness and of not having fun.
The second wave of Filipino
immigrants arrived between 1945 and 1969.
The earliest of these immigrants were the families of the more than
7,000 men who joined the Armed Forces of the United States during the Second
World War. Along with this second wave
came immigrants with professional and semi-professional skills which included
doctors, nurses, teachers, and domestic servants. They settled in cities like San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans,
Norfolk, and New York. It is the
children of these immigrants that provide the first “boom” in Filipino American
writing. First and second generation
Filipino American writers like Jaime Jacinto, Virginia Cerenio, Serafin Syquia,
Jessica Hagedorn, and Al Robles helped organize workshops, readings and
literary centers where their creative efforts could affect a presence in their
communities. The locus of this “boom”
was in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area where a beehive e of literary
activity occurred in the late sixties and late seventies in such organizations
as the Liwanag Collective, Bay Area Pilipino American Writers, and the Kearny
Street Workshop. This assertion of
Filipino writing was due, in large part, to the consciousness raising and
ethnic movements of the late sixties and early seventies. But, however intensely felt and
well-organized this assertion of Filipino writing was in the Bay Area, it did
not translate into the kinds of successes the African American, Native
American, or Hispanic American writers had in the national literary venues.
The third wave, which is still in
effect, began with the further relaxation of U.S. immigration policy during the
late sixties. Arriving with this wave of
immigrants were the “politically expatriated generation” (Campomanes p. 55) who
left the Philippines just before or during the fourteen years of the Marcos
dictatorship, 1972-1986. The writers
included are: Luis Cabalquinto, Luis Francia, Ninotchka Rosca, Epifanio San
Juan, Jr., and Linda Ty-Casper. During
the eighties and up to the present, several Filipino poets came to the United
States to attend various creative writing programs: Maria Luisa Be Aguilar-
Cariňo (PhD) University of Denver; Ricardo M. De Ungria (MFA) Washington
University, St. Louis. After graduating,
many of them went back to the Philippines to continue to publish and establish
teaching careers. Some chose to stay
here and put their shoulders to the American literary wheel. Among the first and second generation
Filipino American Poets that have received degrees in Creative Writing are:
Maria Ellena Caballero-Robb (MFA) University of Michigan; Catalina Cariaga
(MFA) San Francisco State University; Eugene Gloria (MFA) University of Oregon;
Vince Gotera (MFA, PhD) University of Indiana, Bloomington; cyn. zarco (MFA)
Columbia University.
The poems collected in this
anthology are contemporary. All the
poets are alive and continue to produce work important work. What are the concerns of these contemporary
Filipino poets?
Prevalent themes of longing or
nostalgia for the Philippines. In Rofel
Brion’s poem “Good Friday,” he describes events in his home town: “If I were
home right now / I’d be dressing up the Virgin / For this afternoon’s
procession.” And in Luis Cabalquinto’s poem “Depths of Fields,” he writes: “As
I look again, embraced by depths of an old / loneliness, I’m permanently
returned to this world, // to the meanings it has saved for me.” In Alejandrino G. Hufana’s poem “From the
Raw,” “he longs for ways of healing only found back home: Due the hilot,
faithful to my father / and before that my grandfather through to me, /I seek
this malodorous, franking cures / of root mixes with lilies of the fields.”
Other poems document struggles with
the English language Fatima Lim-Wilson’s poem “Alphabet Soup” has the
parenthetical subtitle “Mimicry as a Second Language.” She finds that even the basic elements (the
alphabet) of English are not sufficient to describe her state of being: “Angel
of letters, feed me. / Beat your wings till I remember / Cardboard cut-outs of
ABC’s.” In Michael Melo’s poem “Unlearning English,” he describes the difficult
process of unlearning English in order to assimilate back into society where
Tagalog is spoken: “[Unlearning English] …is slow. Tedious. Like midnight mass
on Christmas Eve. / The mating of tortoises.
The struggle with strands / of jumbled phonics, hybrids of “Hoy, how are you’.” In Catalina Cariaga’s poem “Family Tree,”
she quotes one of her parents describing what would happen in class if a
student spoke in a native tongue and forgot to use English: “The teachers would
fine us a centavo each time we used /
an Ilocano word.”
Themes of desire and erotic
encounters are also prevalent.3 In Maria Luisa B. Aguilar Cariňo’s
poem “For the Lover,” she assumes the voice of a French woman as she makes love
to a Chinese lover: “Do this to me, / I say, do / what you do with others— /
again, again— / the body at this moment / uninhabitable / except by you.” In
Marjorie Evasco’s poem “Baked Oysters Rockefeller,” she uses the dinner table
at a restaurant in contemplating an erotic encounter with her lover: “Will I, I
wonder, be so bold as to say / with a straight face to the waiter: we are /
Carnal, you see, hungry for the Other.”
With the poem “Sui Veneris / The Poet No Return,” Ricardo de Ungria
deftly captures the sexual act in a sustained long poem which ends this
climatic couplet: “As now uncontained she sings, fuck-fresh and profane. / And
leaves me the fragrance and the stain.”
An anthology of this scope has never
been published in this country. Prior to
my involvement with this project, I knew very little of the distinguished
history of Filipino poetry written in English.
This was not due to a lack of desire to acquaint myself with the
subject, but rather due to the simple fact that it was not taught or given any
consideration by the English departments of the American undergraduate and
graduate institutions I attended. When I
began researching this subject three years ago, I found few books that covered
Filipino literature in the catalogs of many university and public libraries in
this country. Although there is a
substantial collection of published books (written mostly by Americans)
describing the history, politics, religions, and ethnic cultures of the
Philippines, there has been recent publication in this country of the novels of
Ninotchka Rosca (State of War, 1988),
Jessica Hagedorn (Dogeaters, 1990),
Peter Bachu (Cebu, 1991) and Cecilia
Manguerra-Brainard (When the Rainbow
Goddess Wept, 1994), and of the short story collections of Bienvenido N.
Santos (Scent of Apples, 1979), Marrianne Villanueava (Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila, 1992), and N.V.M. Gonzalez (The Bread of Salt and Other Stories,
1993) may indicate a second “boom” of Filipino literature in the United States.
As far as I am aware, there have
been only six anthologies published in the United States that are dedicated to
the writing of Filipinos or Filipino Americans.
They are: Chorus for America: Six
Philippine Poets, edited by Carlos Bulosan (Wagon and Star Publishers,
1942); New Writing from the
Philippines: A Critique and Anthology
(stories and poems) edited by Leonard Casper (Syracuse University Press, 1966);
Philippine Writing: An Anthology
(stories and poems) edited by T.D. Agcaoili (Greenwood Press, 1971); Liwanag: Anthology of Filipino Writers and
Artists in America (stories and poems) edited by the Liwanag Collective
(Liwanag Publishers, 1975); Without
Names: Poems by Bay Area Pilipino American Writers, edited by Shirley
Ancheta, Jaime Jacinto, and Jeff Tagami (Kearny Street Workshop Press, 1985);
and the recent Brown, River, White Ocean:
An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English (stories
and poems) edited by Luis H. Francia (Rutgers University Press, 1993). Except for Brown River, White Ocean, most of these anthologies have been out
of print and are difficult to locate. In
a very real way they have been “lost” or “forgotten.” In using these terms, I take into account the
polemics of “historical amnesia” and of “invisibility” which has been applied
to the Filipino condition in its relation to the experience of American
colonization and necolonization. As the
Filipino critic Oscar V. Campomanes points out: “The invisibility of the
Philippines became a necessary historiographical phenomenon because of the
annexation of the Philippines proved to be constitutionally and culturally
problematic for American political and civil society around the turn of the
century and thereafter.” Thus, as the
consequence of American colonization and because of America’s “invisibility” to
its own imperialistic acts in the Philippines, the Filipino writer has been
burdened with the label of being “forgotten.”
In her introduction to the
ground-breaking anthology of Asian American fiction Charlie Chang Is Dead (Penguin Books, 1993), Jessica Hagedorn
states a personal reason for creating the book: “This anthology I created for
selfish reasons; a book I wanted to read that had never been available to
me.” The poems and poets represented in Returning a Borrowed Tongue are really
parts of ourselves that have been denied, lost, hidden, or forgotten. To many, this book may serve as a
(re)discovery of a notable poetic tradition.
It should also signify a (re)beginning that will propel the Filipino
poet well into the next century. In the
early period of tutelage, Filipino poets borrowed a foreign tongue to express
their poetic voices. Today, with this
anthology of poems written in English, we return this borrowed tongue.
I would like to thank Allan Kornblum
and the wonderful staff at Coffee House Press for believing in this
anthology. Also to more Filipino
poets: Inez Baranay, Naomi Shihab Nye,
Howard Junker, and Jeffrey McDaniel. To
the Corporation of Yaddo for support and encouragement. To Jimmy Abad, Luis Francia, N.V.M. Gonzales,
Jean Gier, Eric Gamalinda, Maneng Viray, Sonny San Juan, Jr., and all the poets
in this anthology, my deepest gratitude. And, finally, to my parents Alfonso
and Sophie who have made this all possible.
___________
FOOTNOTES
1It is interesting to
note what the American publisher thought of this book. The following is a quote from its own blurb,
“Azucena is, as far as its publishers are aware, the first volume of English
poetry to be written by a Philippine poet, and this fact alone would make the
appearance of the book notable…The words are those of a Western land but the
accent ant the sentiment come to us from the East” (Abad, Man of the Earth, 323).
2I quote the anecdote
provided by N.V.M. Gonzales concerning this event: “One day the ferry boat came
with my copy of Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse—perhaps the first to ever reach Calapan. In fact, there was no one with whom could
share my joy. I was nineteen and had
actually sold my first poems. No one in
town, for that matter, could honor Harriet Monroe’s check for twelve dollars”
(Abad, Man of Earth, 322).
3It is important to note
that the Philippines has long been dominated by the Catholic Church and its
ideals of morality. Consequently, the
publication of erotic literature, especially by women, carries with it the
burden of being ostracized by society.
Sexual expression through any public medium is such a taboo in Filipino
society that even the Tagalog word for “sex” does not appear in most local
dictionaries. Noel Mateo’s poem in this
anthology, “There is No Word for Sex in Tagalog,” Illustrates the effects of
prudish behavior.
4In the Philippines there
has been a strong tradition in publishing Filipino poetry in English in
individual collections and in anthologies.
It is useful to mention that the first of these anthologies was Filipino Poetry, edited by Rodolfo Dato
(J.S. Agustin and Sons, Manila, 1924). Other important anthologies of Filipino
poetry are: Heart of the Island: An
Anthology of Philippine Poetry in English, edited by Manuel A. Viray
(University Publishing Co., Manila, 1947); Philippine
Poetry Annual 1947-1949, edited by Manuel A. Viray (Barangay Press Book,
Manila, 1950); A Doveglion Book of
Philippine Poetry: From Its Beginnings to the Present (1910 to 1962),
edited by Jose Garcia Villa (Lyd Arguilla-Sallas and Alberto S. Florentino,
Manila, 1962); and the recent Native
Clearing, edited by Gemino Abad (University of the Philippines Press,
Quezon City, 1993).
WORKS CITED
Abad, Gemino H.,
and Edna Z. Manlapaz, ed. Man of Earth:
An Anthology of Filipino Poetry and Verse from English: 1905 to the Mid-‘50s. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press,
1989.
-------, “Towards a
‘Poetic’ History of Filipinas: The Theme
of the Lost Country.” Journal of English
Studies I (December, 1993): 1-14.
Campomanes, Oscar
V. “Filipinos in the United States.” Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992.
Lumbera,
Bienvenido, and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera, ed. Philippine Literature; A History and Anthology. Manila: National Book Store Inc., 1982.
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