The kids are alright: Poetry slamming in Malate

When was the last time you heard poetry read out loud, in a dim bar or from a bright stage, letting the sound of the spoken word wash over you? Granted, it is not always like this, as poets for the most part prefer that their work be one of the occult arts, better read than seen or heard.

But in the old days—going as far back as the Greeks—poetry was meant to be read, if not sung, the performances stretching for days and nights as in the Homeric verses.

When a poet reads out his work to an audience, whether from a notepad or a cellphone or from memory, one can expect a charge to fill the air that turns the reading into part narrative, part confession, and full-tilt subliminal disclosure, as if the listener were looking for signs or guideposts along the way to his own routes of redemption or perdition, while at times tempted to ask that radio-friendly question: kailangan pa bang imemorize 'yan?

It is not always like this, but when the workshops start coming your way you can expect at least a couple of poetry readings to be held, in café or conference room, even impromptu in the much-maligned beer garden. In days past, the Philippine Literary Arts Council did campus tours to read out verses, wowing listeners and curious crowds of onlookers with their capacity for onomatopoeia and metaphor, alliteration and synecdoche and, if accompanied by musical instrument, perhaps a touch of the metallurgic arts. Yes, when read aloud poetry can take a life of its own…electricity!

Just because you can hear the verse doesn’t mean the words are less occult. In fact, such vocalizing can only spread the immediacy of magic. In the bygone days there was the Sanctum in Intramuros, the bomb shelter that reverberated verses in the mid to late ‘90s, steered mainly by the doyenne of spoken word at the time, Triccia David—who I saw many years later in Sev’s Café off Vito Cruz, during one of its poetry slam nights, a safe zone for anyone who wanted to try out their work.

Crowds at Sev’s are mostly young students from the nearby universities and colleges like De La Salle, St. Benilde and UP Manila, kids who’ve discovered the therapy of indirect disclosure. If the bunch seems to be tight, don’t be fooled: many of them have just met, bonded together like desperados and doolin-Daltons for poetry.

The spicy eggplant is swell. Ditto the tawilis, to be washed down with pale, pale pilsen, and there’s pickled radish in jars to take home to boot. If you’re middle-aged and sitting alone at a table nursing your nth beer, you might be mistaken for a DOM, what with all the young blood around. Just kids out on a lark to read poems of misbegotten redemption/perdition, or listen to friends pray their verses in a safe zone, a safe conduct pass to be read and sung. Every first Wednesday of the month there’s a competition of sorts with a special theme: love’s revenge, mothers, maybe independence, the college editors guild of poetry.

One of the Maytime judges, Sylvia Mayuga, remarked that some of the entries didn’t strike them outright as poetry when read. When read aloud by the poet-performer, however, it was entirely a different story. Because of this, she said, they would treat the entries on a case to case basis. Cases of pale pilsen, her co-judge might want to add.

On a night like this you might run into Triccia David again, she with her bomb shelter and bombshell verse, and you are flung back in time, less dirty and less old, within the walls of Intramuros with students of Letran, PLM, Mapua: where have I heard you before?

There’s a poem from memory meant to be read and sung, otherwise it would not fulfill its destiny as poem. Haiku, renga or tanka, sonnet or villanelle, the verses threatening to wash over you like a sudden thunderstorm. Or is that the monsoon waiting in the corner in Sev’s, love or romance unrequited lying in ambush among the pickled radish, an accidental poem to be pulled out of pocket?

There’s beauty in the evenings across from CCP. The open mic beckons. The kids are all right; they’ve found a refuge in their verses at Sev’s. — BM, GMA News

Disclosure: Sev's Cafe is co-owned by the former editor-in-chief of GMA News Online, Howie Severino. The review was not commissioned.