What Is A Poet?

—Cirilo F. Bautista in Ricardo M. de Ungria’s A Passionate Patience: Ten Filipino Poets on the Writing of Their Poems, 1995

The true poet, the serious poet, possesses an aural expertise resulting from his kinship with all the aesthetic realities that built his folkloric mentality. This is the source of the truism that “the poet is the antenna of the race,” for he mediates between the folk elements of his society, interprets its dreams and struggles, articulates them into some heightened discourse.

I do not regard a poem as a product of print even though it has to be printed to attain reality, but as an oral discourse with a necessary cultural configuration. More so now that certain realities have disabused my mind of some false notions.

 

The thrill of language heard cannot be equaled by the thrill of language seen. The invention of the printing press, though it liberated the mind from the tyranny of ignorance, initiated the decline of the poem as “voice,” thus consigning to unimportance one form of folk literary power.

 

For one, printing immobilizes the poem on the page, pining it like a dried insect, a specimen of linguistic inutility. One the page, one can see nothing but an unrelieved expanse of syllabic blocks whose configuration very often fails to excite the mind.

 

The allure of tone, rhymes, and rhythm barely floriates through the neutral topography. Of course, one with a supreme imagination might hear all of those in the corners of his mind, but that is a poor substitute for the actual experiencing of them in real space and time.