Linda Ty-Casper's “Running Secretly, Singing”
By Lynn M. Grow
The reader who comes across the title of this very recently recovered poem,1 “Running Secretly, Singing,” might assume that it is for a short story.2 But this poem, unique as it is in Ty-Casper's corpus, suffices to confirm Eileen R. Tabios' conviction that “Linda Ty-Casper clearly had / has the chops to write gorgeous and brilliant poems,” a conclusion amply attested to: “something already implied by the evocative writing style in her novels....As a poet, I bow to the loveliness, the power, and the charismatic diction of Linda Ty-Casper's words.” (Tabios n.p.) So do I, and in “Running Secretly, Singing” for the reasons Tabios quotes Aileen Cassinetto for specifying: “The poem's strength lies in its layering as a speaker struggles to reconcile grief, exhaustion, memory, and history. I recognize in its shifting interiority the tension in weaving together so many selves and wounds, the generational haunting forged by our hegemonic histories, and the burden of wrestling with impossible expectations. The poem triumphs through relentless witnessing which is the truest act of resilience.” (cited in Tabios n.p.) The poem achieves the level needed to justify those encomia, coming from two of the finest contemporary literary minds and creative writing practitioners, and the technical features of the poem sustain the quality assessment.
A conspicuous aspect of the poem is its length, the visual perception of which is affected by the unusually large space between stanzas and the brevity of the lines. But the reading experience is far different. The poem's flow is very swift, parallel to that in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), and sustained by its hypnotic rhythm, quiet tone, and well-integrated imagery. In “Prufrock” we are awed by the trumpet crescendo of lines of simile like “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (lines 2-3). In “Running, Secretly, Singing,” we are calmly assured by the lute diminuendo of lines of simile, like “Some days, I must admit, / come so quietly I think I am at peace.” (lines 6-7)
This consideration immediately provokes another: to what genre does “Running Secretly, Singing” belong? The answer is dramatic monologue, though we don't realize this until the first two lines of stanza 37, where we become aware that there is an unidentified listener: “Is that the year of your birth / or the day of the week?” This departure from what has heretofore been an uninterrupted monologue is obtrusive because there is nothing like the high octane presence of the Bishop throughout Robert Browning's “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church” (1845). Perhaps the next nearest genre to fill the bill for “Running Secretly, Singing” is confessional literature of 20th Century America, like that of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton minus their previously taboo subject matters. Lines 1 and 6 of “Running Secretly, Singing” do contain “I must admit,” but the poem is not a snug fit in either category: dramatic monologue or confessional literature. It even leans a little toward the quest poem, the quest here being intellectual and aesthetic, not on the order of a physical search for the Holy Grail or Don Quixote's futile journey to recover the chivalric ideals of a vanished era of knighthood. The intellectual side of the quest in “Running Secretly, Singing” is not freighted with too much learned lumber, but we do get paradox (“It takes memory not to know...” stanza 4, line 9) and ontological impossibility: “The upper part [of a tree] with hidden roots I gave them. / I kept the shade.” (stanza 10, lines 8-9) Roots are hidden because they are a tree's lower part, growing into the ground. And how can anyone keep an intangible like shade? Stanza 7, lines 4-5, delivers an unanswerable epistemological question: “if nothing should happen / how do I know nothing did?” E.g., Does the refrigerator light really go out when the door is closed?
The quest in “Running Secretly, Singing” is primarily aesthetic, as “Singing” in the title suggests. Most of stanza 2 is a joyful extension of “my body sings”3 (line 4) to everyone and everything:
Like a bird from a different forest
my body sings
running words together
in and out of key.
I also sing to lie to myself.
I sing because someone might bury me
if I fall silent.
I notice some trees sing.
And some stones sing.
Attempting to climb above the song, light sings.
The men with seven or eleven fingers sing
And lying, accusing
confessing, breathing
are also singing.
The richness of allusive invocation here is remarkable, ranging from the microcasm of Jose Garcia Villa's lovely lyric “Girl Singing, Day”4 to the macroscopic universal of Kapwa.5 Appropriately, the next stanza provides the aesthetic beauty of the quest:
I don't remember the wind moving deep and still.
Full of blooms.
I don't recall the sun swinging
with hungry arms
above the wind.
But I remember stones lighter than rain,
birds clinging with their beaks–
to summer.
This stanza alone refutes the incredibly obtuse conclusion of the “poet” who made Ty-Casper feel that “she wasn't a poet and by implication should not continue writing poems.” (Tabios n.p.) If such were the case, perhaps, during his annusmirabilis of 1819, Keats should have more assiduously pursued his medical studies instead of spending time producing “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) or “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819; published 1820).
A possible, though charitable and at best only partial explanation for the “poet” missing the literary boat could be that “Running Secretly, Singing” has dispensed with many of the formal and traditional benchmarks of poetry in the pre-modern period and that is why the “poet” described it (though with specific reference to Telly's poems in Awaiting Trespass) as “not 'poetic' or real poems,” (Tabios n.p.) rather than “bad poetry.”
Are the lines encased in an overall structure, such as the villanelle, or organized by a system like dactylic hexameter? No. In fact, the respective stanzas are composed of irregular numbers of lines, and neither the stanzas nor the lines are numbered; only small, decorative asterisks separate stanzas.
The lines are not end-stopped and are either flush left or indented in no consistent pattern. Doing otherwise would have meant building beaver dams in the fluid stream of the lines. In keeping with the overall structural conception, Ty-Casper has eschewed the internal rhetorical devices so familiar to readers of classical and neo-classical works, like zeugma and litotes, and the thrusts and parries of wit in poems like Pope's parodic The Dunciad (final, complete version published in 1743). Ty-Casper sought to stay clear of anything resembling William Blake's mythological character Urizen, who uses a compass to measure and organize the universe and thus limit its scope by dint of rational, mathematical principles. Keats would never have implicated the work of Ty-Casper in his famous toast to the “confusion of mathematics” because to Keats Newton's scientific, mathematical finds threatened to “unweave the rainbow” by explaining it as a naturally occurring prism.
Even the seemingly mundane portions of “Running Secretly, Singing,” however, echo the approach of one of the oldest Greek poets, Hesiod, in The Works and Days, a late 8th Century B.C. dactylic hexameter account of his instruction to his brother Perseus, overtly about agricultural methods and general household husbandry, but covertly about values and commitments incumbent upon him. In the same vein, stanza 5 of “Running Secretly, Singing” takes us home, though not in the soupy sentimentality that the John Denver (birth name Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr.) song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” (1971) does:
In honor of my coming
My parents opened the window of their house.
It clung to the sun.
They set the chairs against the light,
covered the table with newspapers,
lit an empty box for a candle.
We didn't have time to sit together.
The years–twenty, thirty–of mutual absence–
sat between us.
I cried. They cried.
But not together.
Twice the narrator even morphs into whimsy, providing the reader a species of pressure release valve from the otherwise sustained intensity of concentration needed for the serious scrutiny of “Running Secretly, Singing”:
Once, I received a letter addressed to a house
we have never lived in.
keep in touch, it said.
I turned it over, tore the corners.
Nothing fell out.
It bore my name, nothing else.
I should write to the house
to ask for directions. (stanza 6)
Again,
Sundays, I take coffee.
Spread it on my brow.
Butter it on my palms.
Test it with my toe.
After it gets cold, I pour it
for the birds,
The price of coffee is beyond their means.
Besides, it shines their soft feathers
and they can preen
While I,
can wait for Monday
to have tea again. (stanza 21)
The lighter interludes counterbalance the narrator's engagement with the traditional, yet ongoing, issues in macro and quantum physics, philosophy, and logic. For instance, in stanza 23 the congruence of temporal and spatial extension: “a waterfall that doesn't reach the earth, / that hangs forever / from now to now.” The last line here builds on the narrator's admitted difficulty, mentioned in the first line of stanza 8: “I have trouble realizing how strange time is.” So do many other people, as demand for Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, orig. pub. 1998) shows, perhaps in some measure due to its tongue–in–cheek title and non-mathematical, layman–accessible text. The narrator, while grounded enough to have “pressed my face upon the lily,” hypothesizes that “there are other skies” (lines 1 and 5 of stanza 11), although she doesn't venture to propose their location(s). In stanza 15, the narrator melds time and spatial extension, here not even just hypothesizing: “...this other habit I have / of running up and down the hours...” The concluding two lines of stanza 13 say of the monardas the narrator has planted, “their absent leaves bearing thorns / In place of flowers.” If the leaves are absent—or the narrator is absent—how can she know what they bear, if anything at all? We are left with a logical stalemate.
It may well be that the narrator's experience with and perception of the spatial–temporal continuum is distorted by the nature of the continuum itself, as it certainly is for the controlling consciousness in Manuel Viray's poems.6 In “Running Secretly, Singing,” “The stars fix the hours as they please.” (stanza7, line 1), adding the element of whim, unpredictability as inscrutable as the moods of the Roman gods and goddesses were, to the already unsettling Principle of Uncertainty (as Werner Heisenberg labeled it in 1927).7 As Ty-Casper's fluidly flowing style of poetry here might suggest to the reader of her later short stories, which also eschew the strict plot linearity and stable, relentlessly empirical physical object focus of her earlier prose fiction in favor of a prose that flows, sometimes to the point of seemingly drifting, her poetic approach was the result of a sea change of authorial intent. Starting in the mid–1980's,8 Ty-Casper shifted from stories with Filipino characters and Philippine (mostly rural) settings to stories first with American locales and primarily American characters and then to stories with solely American geographical references and only American characters. Simultaneous was the remarkably radical transition from a prose style in her creative writings that would well suit a directional process instructional essay to a prose style approaching stream–of–consciousness.
This parallel approach to her short fiction and her poem is slightly signposted by allusions in the poem to two of her short stories and one collection of them. In the aforementioned short story “Sometimes My Body Remembers Singing,” stanza 16, line 7 in “Running Secretly, Singing” “Like dead wells buried in the dust,” hearkens back in time to “The Dead Well” in her first short story collection, The Transparent Sun and Other Stories (Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1963): 40-47. The first two words of the poem's title, “Running Secretly,” reference the title of Ty-Casper's second short story collection: The Secret Runner and Other Stories. [Manila]: Alberto S. Florentino, 1974.
In the poem, these short story allusions are accompanied by other types of allusions that add some externalization to a narrative that could have suffered compression into a claustrophobically tight geographic and personal space. One cluster of geographic allusions is in stanza 27: “Antofagasta” in line 2; “Cauit” in line 7; and “Antipolo” and “Bocaue” in line 8.9 Toward the end of the poem, a succession of Biblical allusions is outward facing, but the thought accompanying them remains personal. The intermixture creates a tiptoe effect between self and other, but it is a dynamic tension, not a still point. This tension is reminiscent of that in Ralph Ellison's only novel Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), in which the emblem for bifurcation of inner and outer is the character Rinehart, simultaneously “rind” and “heart.” In Running Secretly, Singing,” stanza 45 houses the first Biblical reference: “Paul...took to writing letters” (lines 3-4).10 The almost breezy, John Donne-like familiarity here continues through the rest of the poem. Stanza 48 centers around St. Peter, whose honorific is added here, unlike in stanza 45, where St. Paul is simply “Paul.” The stanza accurately handles St. Peter's major shortcoming, indecisiveness: “In the end, how can Saint Peter / tell which war killed which: / by the wounds perhaps” (lines 1-3) and “Saint Peter will have trouble / guessing about me.” (lines 8-9). However, scholars do not accept the popular notion that Matthew 16:19 anoints St. Peter as keeper of the gates of heaven, deciding who may enter and who may not. Nonetheless, “Running Secretly, Singing” portrays the narrator as fully at ease with her religion and her practice of it: “When the Kingdom comes / if I am saved in it...I must remember to ask / if I will be allowed / a moment to myself.” (stanza 49, lines 1-2, 5-7) She is not haunted by the spectre of sin: “...I've been reciting my sins (stanza 42 line1)...I've hidden them where I cannot find them.” (stanza 42, line 4) And she is at best casual about church service attendance: “I meant to go to church today / but remembered the other people.” (stanza 45, lines 1-2) The narrator's comfort with her religion does stop at equanimity; it does not extend to equal footing with the Divinity, as Austris A. Whithol's 1932 hymn “My God and I” does: “My God and I go in the fields together, / We walk and talk as good friends should and do.” And, though she has “My own dream. And waking. / An eternity in a closed garden” (stanza 49, lines 8-9), she knows that the dream will come to fruition only “if [my emphasis] I am saved...and brought to the tree / that first yielded.” (stanza 49, lines 2-4). The tree is, of course, the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, lost when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and reclaimed by Christ's crucifixion.11
“An eternity in a closed garden” is wording that could be mistaken for an utterance of Emily Dickinson, who was intensely involved with her large flower garden, which in turn was an inspiration for her poetry and personal letters. In “Running Secretly, Singing,” the narrator's garden is first mentioned in stanza 10 and her first interactions with it in stanza 12. The voice making the cameo appearance in stanza 37 says “bones are buried in gardens” (line 3), drawing the narrator's rejoinder “...bones are buried / in hanging gardens.” (lines 10-11) These are the storied Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.12
A final recurrent motif, not bearing on externalization / internalization, is the concatenation “Secret,” “hidden,” and, occurring only in the poem's penultimate line, “closed.” Each of these modifiers imposes a boundary around an item and in so doing highlights it. Reader attention is increased by the interest in what the secret is (perhaps it's juicy) and what is hidden (perhaps something valuable, like a string of cultured pearls). “Closed” focuses attention on what is enshrined within the enclosure.
In fact, “Running Secretly, Singing” is like a string of cultured pearls: very valuable. All of us who read Philippine literature should be grateful to Linda Ty-Casper for writing it and grateful to Eileen R. Tabios for unearthing this hidden gem and, with Ty-Casper's concurrence, sharing it with us.
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Notes:
1I am deeply indebted to Eileen R. Tabios for receiving the poem from Ty-Casper's files and sharing it, in advance of its publication, with Aileen Cassinetto and me, along with Tabios' essay “The Revelation of Linda Ty-Casper's poem “'Running Secretly, Singing.'” LINK
2 Because Ty-Casper's oeuvre is almost entirely composed of prose, predominantly novels and short stories. The only other known Ty-Casper poem aside from those in the novel Awaiting Trespass: A Pasion (London: Readers International, 1985) is one thought to have been published in the Philippine Journal of Education when she was nine years old. (Tabios. n.p.)
3 A more direct allusion than the poem title is to Ty-Casper's short story “Sometimes My Body Remembers Singing,” first published in The Nantucket Review, 1979, 30-33 and reprinted in her last collection of prose fiction: A River, One-Woman Deep (Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2017): 43-47. And this is a ring within a ring, since the book title is a takeoff on the short story “One-Man Deep,” published in Ty-Casper's third collection: Common Continent:Selected Stories (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991): 119-130.
4 Accessible in Villa's collection Have Come, Am Here (New York: Viking, 1942): 15.
5 Succinctly defined by Tabios as the connection of “everything in the universe and across all time.” The In(ter) vention of the Hay(na)Ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019 (East Rockaway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2019): 203. Elaboration about Kapwa and its application to human lifestyle is in Katrin De Guia, Kapwa [:] The Self in the Other [:] Worldviews and Lifestyles of Filipino Culture–Bearers. Pasig City: Anvil, 2005.
6 Morning Song, Viray's late-in-life culminating collection, was published in Manila in 1990 by De La Salle University Press. Appended to each poem is a notation of the precise time and date of its composition. One poem especially exemplifying Viray's approach–and helpful in appreciating Ty-Casper's—is “Sliding Lights.” (57-59) At its end is documentation of its final form and two preceding versions: “9:53 a.m. Monday [,] July 6, 1987 (10:46 a.m. Sunday, February 8, 1977; 9:39 a.m. Thursday, June 18, 1987).” This practice of exactitude is, of course, the opposite pole to what the poems convey: “always the exquisite light / watches, barely pauses, / then vanishes into the / darkeness of our unuttered, / unravelled but wished for / splendor.” (stanza 8). A more extended treatment of this point is in my essay “The Haeccity, the Essentiality of Man” on pp. x-xvii.
7 Heisenberg had, in 1925, at least found a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices, a feat for which he was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics.
8 In an e-mail to me of September 25, 2025, Ty-Casper confirmed this approximate time of composition of “Running Secretly, Singing.”
9 Antofagasta is a major metropolis in northern Chile. Cauit (also written as “Kawit”) is a municipality in the province of Cavite, part of the Calabarzon region of Luzon. “Cauit” means “hook” because of the land shape along the coast of Bacoor Bay. Antipolo is the capital of Rizal Province. Bocaue is a municipality in Bulacan Province. Admittedly, even for students who didn't sleep through the Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies) curriculum in school, Cauit or Bocaue, at least, might seem only like “a galaxy far, far away,” but even in that case they externalize reader focus.
10 Known as the Pauline epistles, in the New Testament of the Christian Bible they are in Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First and Second Thessalonians, First and Second Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.
11 Genesis, Chapters 2-3 in the Christian Bible.
12 Historians and archaeologists are divided about whether they really existed and, if they were actual, their location. The Christian Bible makes no mention of them. If they were not mythological, necessarily they would have been marvels of engineering and horticulture, in order to supply the irrigation needs of such an installation in a desert climate, and marvels of aesthetic exterior design. Real or imaginary, they symbolize human ingenuity, a testament to what humans can achieve.
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Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California: B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.
