(1994). You were a founding member of the Manila Critics Circle and director of the UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies. It will take us several more pages to catalogue all the awards, grants and recognitions you’ve received, but let’s just mention some: a grant at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a lecture grant at the Modern Languages Association of America and, of course, the SEA Write Award. They should be naming you National Artist for Literature already. Searching for the right words to characterize that class, I am reminded of a critic’s description upon reading Roland Barthes: “…To enter a world of pure light and coherence—that is, of enlightenment.” I don’t know about coherence, because the comprehension of poetry, at least for me back then, was still defiantly opaque. Enlightenment? This, too, I’m quite unsure of. Such a heavy word. But light, yes, definitely. That was the sensation I walked away with—a warm, inexplicably incandescent sensation that envelops your head when things all of a sudden are revealed for what they truly are, yet not quite. I use “light” with all its biblio-mystical connotations. You were, to quote further from “The Death of Little Boys”— “doling out/ little flames to each one who sees you.” “Saying the unsayable.” “Language raised to the nth level.” Just some of the definitions of poetry thrown in our mesmerized direction—descriptions that are themselves as beautiful and mysterious as the thing being defined. But the killer part was when you finally began dissecting a poem to reveal its struc- tural details and mechanisms. That was like the parting of the Red Sea. You were, as we found out later on, schooling us in the poetics of the New Criticism, that literary coven of the ’50s that taught that art has no meaning outside the text. Stunning was the idea that a poem must be an organic entity, with its own
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