Author: Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, June 20, 2011





ONE OF the great things about a Civitella Ranieri fellowship is the castle’s proximity to a host of cultural destinations, which could range from single works like Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in nearby Monterchi and the contents of fabulous palaces such as the Duke of Urbino’s to entire cities like Florence and Venice, reachable by train. I had been to Italy twice before, but never, in an almost literal sense, this close to Italy’s cultural glories.

Strolling in the vicinity of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence with no fixed plan in mind (sometimes, I take this approach to escape the frenzied anxiety of the guidebook-driven first-time visitor, which I was, to Florence), I strayed into the Galileo Museum and marveled at the telescopes, globes, and scientific instruments that described not only the frontiers of the physical world but also those of the human mind. As if that were not enough, as soon as I stepped out of the museum and turned right, I found myself at the Uffizi Gallery and saw a door leading to a free exhibition of drawings by the masters, and soon brought my nose within two inches of work by Mantegna, Titian, Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Raphael.

While our immediate brief was to work on a creative project over the five to six weeks of our stay at the castle, Civitella’s executive director Dana Prescott made it clear that it was all right, even encouraged, to spend some of our fellowship time exploring the cultural countryside, especially for those of us to whom these opportunities would come very rarely. We plunged into this diversion with relish, availing ourselves of day trips or even overnighters organized or suggested by our sponsors (but payable out of our pockets, being optional activities). There’s no country, after all, like Italy for stepping back into the Renaissance, and even today, on a train ride across Tuscany, many scenes appear like they might have five centuries ago, with castles and churches towering over the farms and ochre houses of the common folk.

And thus it happened that my Malaysian friend Lat and I decided to run off to Venice during our last week in Italy. I had never been to Venice, the setting of some of my favorite movies: Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice and Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 psycho-thriller Don’t Look Now (okay, I’ll admit, I watched The Tourist as well—I’m a sucker for anything with Angelina Jolie in it—and let’s not forget that fabulous chase scene from 1979’s Moonraker).

We did Florence as a day trip, but it seemed such a pity to rush through Venice, especially since it was more than five hours away by train from Perugia, the city we were closest to. So Lat and I decided to look for an inexpensive bed and breakfast online—a tough job, since we were going to Venice around the June 2 national holiday (their equivalent of our June 12) and the opening of the big Biennale art festival, which guaranteed that all the good, affordable places in Venice itself were going to be either booked or overpriced.

Thankfully we found a small B&B in Mestre, a residential district across the long bridge, close to the train station; this way, Venice was a five-minute, 1-euro ride away. The optimistically named B&B Romantica was a tiny, Hong Kong-style walk-up on the third floor of a building; it had no name on the street, and we had to call the owner, Giorgio, 20 minutes in advance of our arrival, as soon as our train hit Padova, so he could stand on the street to wait for us and to let us in.

Despite that curious touch, the Romantica proved just fine for two hefty, middle-aged Asian guys; our two-bed room was so small there wasn't even space for a desk, but the place was clean, fresh, and well maintained. Our room even had a balcony to sit out on for watching the street life. We had to share a toilet and bath with other guests, but there was free wi-fi, and best of all, it cost us only 30 euros a night per person. Giorgio himself turned out to be a very amiable person who, in halting but clear English, advised us to take the vaporetto shuttle boats around the island using a 12-hour pass, to skip the tourist trap that was Murano, and to spend time on Burano and Torcello instead.

That’s exactly what Lat and I did the next day. But we couldn’t wait for morning to get into Venice itself, so as soon as we dropped off our bags and got our briefing from Giorgio, we ran back to the train station at Mestre, and rode off into Venice just in time for sunset and a dinner date with Dana Prescott, who was also in Venice for the Biennale. We let the Italian-speaking Dana guide us to a small but apparently very popular restaurant along the edge of the canal for a five-course all-seafood dinner—something Lat and I had sorely missed in the hills of Umbria—and we laughed and swapped life stories as the setting sun, casting the kind of light I’d always associated with the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner, gilded everything around us. Indeed to be in Venice is to live in a painting—the city, after all, having been home to Bellini, Canaletto, and Tintoretto.

A Civitella colleague had told me this before we left the castle, and it proved to be true: when you step into Venice for the very first time, coming out of the Sta. Lucia train terminal, you smile, and smile. There’s everything you’d always imagined Venice to be, right at the doorstep: the Grand Canal and all the vaporetti and gondolas weaving past each other, the brilliant blue sky, the new glass bridge by Calatrava, the marvelous architectural mix-up of the Byzantine and the Moorish (something, I thought, that a set designer today would have been hard-pressed to conjure, given absolute liberty). I had expected to see this for ages, but I still smiled to understand with my own eyes that Venice meant islands without shores; standing flush against the water’s edge, its buildings looked like upthrust apparitions.

Like James Bond, Lat and I had secret missions to accomplish in Venice: our wives’ birthdays were coming up on that same first week of June, and we had to find and bring home suitable presents to show for our six-week bachelorhood in Italy. The next day, in a shop in colorful Burano, we settled that issue like real men, with decisiveness. “How much for this necklace, please?” I asked the salesgirl. “Twenty-one euros,” she said, “but for you, I give it for eighteen.” Thinking I had scored a bargain without even asking, I said, “Excellent, I’ll take it!” Lat quickly chimed in: “I want one as well!”

We walked out of that shop laden with trinkets, and, pleased with our accomplishment, we spent the rest of our one full day in Venice hopping from one island and vaporetto stop to another, parking ourselves for most of the afternoon in the vicinity of the Piazza San Marco, enjoying the doves, the pretty signorinas, and the bands playing everything from “Al Di La” to Broadway showtunes. I didn’t get myself any Venetian souvenir, but back at Mestre, I found Ligo sardines at an Asian food store near our B&B (“Prodotto in Filippine,” the label said proudly), and brought back two cans of comfort food to the castle for my final week.

Just a few days later, Lat and I were together again, on a bus taking us from Perugia to our flights home at Rome’s Fiumicino airport. Outside the window, a rash of vermilion poppies was welling in the fields. Given all that beauty and vitality, it wasn’t hard to imagine how the Renaissance could have come about where we had just been.

Penman for Monday, June 13, 2011


AS YOU read this, I would have just returned from a 40-day residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy—still dizzy, no doubt, not just from the long plane ride via Doha, but also from nearly six weeks of immersion in the thickest of cultural brews: the company of a dozen artists, writers, and musicians in a castle in Italy’s medieval heartland. I went there to begin work on a new novel, and as far as that’s concerned, I’m happy to report: mission accomplished. I can’t possibly write a full novel in a month (some people have, but they’re better than I am), but I’m glad to have stepped out of my Italian hermitage with a substantial, 20,000-word beginning that I feel good about and know what to do with.

Let me just get this clear: like I said last week, no one needs a castle to write a novel, and I suspect that the best novels were written in much more difficult circumstances, driven by some inner urgency rather than by leisure. Indeed, it’s been my experience that a comfortable bed and sumptuous food in a postcard-pretty setting don’t necessarily conduce to sharp, energetic writing; rather, they encourage slumber and sightseeing.

But in the meanwhile, with the mind and body at rest, the imagination rejuvenates, and inevitably fresh work begins; sometimes artists also seek residencies to finish nearly-completed work, or to achieve a breakthrough in a project that has reached an impasse, and the alien surroundings provide just enough defamiliarization for them to see their own work in a literally new light. The real luxury of a residency is time and concentration. Away from the clamors of office and home, artists can focus on the work and the aesthetic problem at hand.


The company of fellow artists, while not always easy, can also be stimulating, especially in a non-competitive atmosphere of mutual respect and support. Since these residencies are international, typically few of the fellows know each other beforehand, except perhaps by reputation, and it’s a special treat when one gets to meet and to know an icon in one’s own field.

There are few more knowledgeable and distinguished figures in the art of the personal essay, for example, than Phillip Lopate, who wrote a seminal work with precisely that title. We had many interesting discussions over dinner at Civitella because Phillip (I know, it still sounds strange and presumptuous to use their first names), a cinephile, has had a longstanding interest in the work of Lino Brocka, and had employed a Filipino main character in a recent novella. Civitella, Phillip said, was the first time he’d stayed in a castle: “It’s cold, it’s dark, but otherwise it’s great.” (That's him with me in the pic below.)


There are other, similar programs available to creative artists and scholars from around the world, aside from the better-known ones in the United States, such as Iowa, Breadloaf, Macdowell, and Yaddo. In Italy, aside from Civitella Ranieri, the Rockefeller Foundation has run a residency program at its Bellagio Center on Lake Como, and the Bogliasco Foundation runs the Liguria Study Center for Arts and the Humanities on the seacoast near Genoa.

All of these programs offer residencies of at least a month, board and lodging included, and each one happens to be located in a place conducive to contemplation and quiet work, but they have their minor differences. The schedules at Bellagio tend to be more fluid, with overlaps between artists’ stays, creating a larger community but also more people to deal with; dinners are also more formal, with place cards on the table and jackets required. You can, however, bring your spouse or partner with you, and Bellagio is also open to a wider range of disciplines, including historians, lawyers, and even, in my 2002 batch, an arms expert. Civitella is much more relaxed, the batches better defined, the work likely more focused. (I haven’t been nor have I applied to Bogliasco yet, so I can’t talk about that experience.) Bellagio and Bogliasco take applications online (do make sure to read the guidelines first, as they both require a body of past work, along with a proposal); Civitella is by invitation only, the fellows culled from a long list of several hundred names contributed by experts in the field.

The fellows’ presentations are privileged glimpses into the work of some of the world’s most accomplished and most avant-garde artists. In our batch, percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson gave a mind-blowing performance using mainly found objects—wooden planks, wine bottles, clay tiles, porcelain cups and saucers, even ropes and plastic grocery bags. Performance artist Pat Oleszko’s outrageous visual puns (she’s been described as a “cunning artist and punning linguist”) were at once politically scathing and yet childishly delightful. Guitarist Marc Ducret played notes with one hand in a way that most of us didn't even think was possible. Lat’s cartoons of a boyhood in rural Malaysia might as well have described many a Pinoy’s experience. Whether by novelty or familiarity, the presentations confirmed the bond that ties together artists from all places—a compulsion to see and to represent the world in a way that most other people don’t or won’t.






I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say that I abhorred the luxury of our situation—all the hardship and privation I went through in martial-law prison didn’t yield me more than a few pages of actual writing; the novel came much later—but precisely because these were not your everyday digs and I was not your everyday duke, castle life took some adjustment.

My greatest adjustment, as I’d expected, was the food. I know that I just said I didn’t abhor the luxury, but in this case I think the luxury abhorred me. Italy’s gastronomical wonders were largely wasted on me, a self-confessed culinary philistine whose idea of haute cuisine is a bucket of KFC, and who landed in Rome with 13 packets of Lucky Me ramen and two bags of Boy Bawang cornik. If truth be told, I love Europe’s museums, but dread traveling there because of the need to adjust to the local fare, which Beng and Demi and maybe nine out of ten other folks would kill for. I’d rather go to China on assignment than to France, for the noodles and the congee.

I happened to be among some of the world’s most gifted and accomplished artists, whose connoisseurship naturally extended to food. Common subjects of passionate discussion included the best coffees, wines, and cheeses. The meals at the Castle were, I’m sure, impeccably delicious and nutritious; our chef was a slow-food advocate working only with the best and freshest produce, much of it from the Castle gardens, and if you were the foodie I’m not, you’d have been in seventh heaven. Thankfully, Italy is also a carnivore’s Paradiso. I’m adding bistecca fiorentina (think of it as Italian porterhouse) to my death-row, last-supper menu; the porchetta (roast pork) sandwiches were great, although our lechon is much more flavorful and softer.


On our Wednesday morning trips to the Co-op, the local supermarket, I noticed that I was the only one lugging home two-liter bottles of Coke (or Sprite, as a break from Coke), sliced bread, rice, cans of tuna, Knorr seasoning, and Nescafe instant coffee. Everyone else seemed to be stocking up, logically enough, on the best of the region. Central Italy’s one of the world’s best places for truffles, and, one Sunday, most of my batchmates went off on a truffle binge, to a local restaurant that served nothing but truffles in various dishes—pasta, quiche, etc.—for a very reasonable sum. I, of course, stayed home with my canned tuna, secretly lusting for the pig that found the truffles (here, though, they use dogs, because the pigs, being even smarter than I am, eat the truffles).

One of my best buddies at Civitella was the renowned cartoonist known as “Lat,” the Malaysian equivalent of his late friend Larry Alcala, whose depictions of kampung life are both mordant and hilarious. A practicing Muslim who likes Elvis and Patsy Cline, Lat couldn’t share in the wine and the porchetta, but he must’ve seen how homesick I was when he slipped me a packet of what turned out to be dried anchovies, which his wife packed into his bag. That packet was my lifesaver, imparting a salty lick of the ocean to nearly everything I ate, from my macaroni soup (rigatoni, actually, but of course all pasta except spaghetti is macaroni to us Pinoys) to my rice.

Late in our residency, Lat and I decided to run off to Venice, where neither of us had ever been, and that will be part of next week’s concluding piece on my Italian sojourn.

Penman for Monday, June 13, 2011


AS YOU read this, I would have just returned from a 40-day residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy—still dizzy, no doubt, not just from the long plane ride via Doha, but also from nearly six weeks of immersion in the thickest of cultural brews: the company of a dozen artists, writers, and musicians in a castle in Italy’s medieval heartland. I went there to begin work on a new novel, and as far as that’s concerned, I’m happy to report: mission accomplished. I can’t possibly write a full novel in a month (some people have, but they’re better than I am), but I’m glad to have stepped out of my Italian hermitage with a substantial, 20,000-word beginning that I feel good about and know what to do with.

Let me just get this clear: like I said last week, no one needs a castle to write a novel, and I suspect that the best novels were written in much more difficult circumstances, driven by some inner urgency rather than by leisure. Indeed, it’s been my experience that a comfortable bed and sumptuous food in a postcard-pretty setting don’t necessarily conduce to sharp, energetic writing; rather, they encourage slumber and sightseeing.

But in the meanwhile, with the mind and body at rest, the imagination rejuvenates, and inevitably fresh work begins; sometimes artists also seek residencies to finish nearly-completed work, or to achieve a breakthrough in a project that has reached an impasse, and the alien surroundings provide just enough defamiliarization for them to see their own work in a literally new light. The real luxury of a residency is time and concentration. Away from the clamors of office and home, artists can focus on the work and the aesthetic problem at hand.


The company of fellow artists, while not always easy, can also be stimulating, especially in a non-competitive atmosphere of mutual respect and support. Since these residencies are international, typically few of the fellows know each other beforehand, except perhaps by reputation, and it’s a special treat when one gets to meet and to know an icon in one’s own field.

There are few more knowledgeable and distinguished figures in the art of the personal essay, for example, than Phillip Lopate, who wrote a seminal work with precisely that title. We had many interesting discussions over dinner at Civitella because Phillip (I know, it still sounds strange and presumptuous to use their first names), a cinephile, has had a longstanding interest in the work of Lino Brocka, and had employed a Filipino main character in a recent novella. Civitella, Phillip said, was the first time he’d stayed in a castle: “It’s cold, it’s dark, but otherwise it’s great.” (That's him with me in the pic below.)


There are other, similar programs available to creative artists and scholars from around the world, aside from the better-known ones in the United States, such as Iowa, Breadloaf, Macdowell, and Yaddo. In Italy, aside from Civitella Ranieri, the Rockefeller Foundation has run a residency program at its Bellagio Center on Lake Como, and the Bogliasco Foundation runs the Liguria Study Center for Arts and the Humanities on the seacoast near Genoa.

All of these programs offer residencies of at least a month, board and lodging included, and each one happens to be located in a place conducive to contemplation and quiet work, but they have their minor differences. The schedules at Bellagio tend to be more fluid, with overlaps between artists’ stays, creating a larger community but also more people to deal with; dinners are also more formal, with place cards on the table and jackets required. You can, however, bring your spouse or partner with you, and Bellagio is also open to a wider range of disciplines, including historians, lawyers, and even, in my 2002 batch, an arms expert. Civitella is much more relaxed, the batches better defined, the work likely more focused. (I haven’t been nor have I applied to Bogliasco yet, so I can’t talk about that experience.) Bellagio and Bogliasco take applications online (do make sure to read the guidelines first, as they both require a body of past work, along with a proposal); Civitella is by invitation only, the fellows culled from a long list of several hundred names contributed by experts in the field.

The fellows’ presentations are privileged glimpses into the work of some of the world’s most accomplished and most avant-garde artists. In our batch, percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson gave a mind-blowing performance using mainly found objects—wooden planks, wine bottles, clay tiles, porcelain cups and saucers, even ropes and plastic grocery bags. Performance artist Pat Oleszko’s outrageous visual puns (she’s been described as a “cunning artist and punning linguist”) were at once politically scathing and yet childishly delightful. Guitarist Marc Ducret played notes with one hand in a way that most of us didn't even think was possible. Lat’s cartoons of a boyhood in rural Malaysia might as well have described many a Pinoy’s experience. Whether by novelty or familiarity, the presentations confirmed the bond that ties together artists from all places—a compulsion to see and to represent the world in a way that most other people don’t or won’t.






I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say that I abhorred the luxury of our situation—all the hardship and privation I went through in martial-law prison didn’t yield me more than a few pages of actual writing; the novel came much later—but precisely because these were not your everyday digs and I was not your everyday duke, castle life took some adjustment.

My greatest adjustment, as I’d expected, was the food. I know that I just said I didn’t abhor the luxury, but in this case I think the luxury abhorred me. Italy’s gastronomical wonders were largely wasted on me, a self-confessed culinary philistine whose idea of haute cuisine is a bucket of KFC, and who landed in Rome with 13 packets of Lucky Me ramen and two bags of Boy Bawang cornik. If truth be told, I love Europe’s museums, but dread traveling there because of the need to adjust to the local fare, which Beng and Demi and maybe nine out of ten other folks would kill for. I’d rather go to China on assignment than to France, for the noodles and the congee.

I happened to be among some of the world’s most gifted and accomplished artists, whose connoisseurship naturally extended to food. Common subjects of passionate discussion included the best coffees, wines, and cheeses. The meals at the Castle were, I’m sure, impeccably delicious and nutritious; our chef was a slow-food advocate working only with the best and freshest produce, much of it from the Castle gardens, and if you were the foodie I’m not, you’d have been in seventh heaven. Thankfully, Italy is also a carnivore’s Paradiso. I’m adding bistecca fiorentina (think of it as Italian porterhouse) to my death-row, last-supper menu; the porchetta (roast pork) sandwiches were great, although our lechon is much more flavorful and softer.


On our Wednesday morning trips to the Co-op, the local supermarket, I noticed that I was the only one lugging home two-liter bottles of Coke (or Sprite, as a break from Coke), sliced bread, rice, cans of tuna, Knorr seasoning, and Nescafe instant coffee. Everyone else seemed to be stocking up, logically enough, on the best of the region. Central Italy’s one of the world’s best places for truffles, and, one Sunday, most of my batchmates went off on a truffle binge, to a local restaurant that served nothing but truffles in various dishes—pasta, quiche, etc.—for a very reasonable sum. I, of course, stayed home with my canned tuna, secretly lusting for the pig that found the truffles (here, though, they use dogs, because the pigs, being even smarter than I am, eat the truffles).

One of my best buddies at Civitella was the renowned cartoonist known as “Lat,” the Malaysian equivalent of his late friend Larry Alcala, whose depictions of kampung life are both mordant and hilarious. A practicing Muslim who likes Elvis and Patsy Cline, Lat couldn’t share in the wine and the porchetta, but he must’ve seen how homesick I was when he slipped me a packet of what turned out to be dried anchovies, which his wife packed into his bag. That packet was my lifesaver, imparting a salty lick of the ocean to nearly everything I ate, from my macaroni soup (rigatoni, actually, but of course all pasta except spaghetti is macaroni to us Pinoys) to my rice.

Late in our residency, Lat and I decided to run off to Venice, where neither of us had ever been, and that will be part of next week’s concluding piece on my Italian sojourn.

Penman for Monday, June 6, 2011



IT'S OFTEN said that a man’s home is his castle, but now and then, once in a lucky while, a castle is his home. That’s been my unusual lot for a month now, here at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, near Perugia in the region of Umbria in Central Italy, where I’m working on my third novel—and, when I need a break, on odd jobs like this column, which I’ve been putting off for as long as I could.

The Civitella Ranieri is actually a 15th-century castle, standing on a hilltop overlooking the broad Tiber valley, with turrets, stone walls, and heavy wooden doors of the kind you see in medieval costume dramas. The family tree which is the first thing you encounter upon entering the castle keep goes back a thousand years, and counts a Pope and two cardinals. The recorded history of the Ranieris is a colorful and bloody one, including at least one massacre while they were sleeping in bed in the late 1300s. The castle itself has survived wars and earthquakes, and it’s uncanny to be living in a place that essentially hasn’t changed for centuries.


In 1968, the late American benefactress Ursula Corning, a relative of the Ranieris, decided to lease the castle indefinitely, so it could be used as an international retreat for writers, visual artists, and musicians. Every year, in batches, several dozen such fellows are invited from around the world to spend five to six weeks at the castle to work on their projects, to rest, to enjoy the art- and history-rich environs, and to interact with one another. Fellows get free airfare and board and lodging; their spouses or partners can join them, but only for the last three days (making it too expensive for me to fly Beng over, especially since I have to fly back right after my fellowship to start teaching in June).

I don't mean for this to sound like a boastful habit or a habitual boast, but as it happens, I’ve lived in castles and villas before—and not just for overnight stays, either, but for weeks on end. That’s what you get for applying to fellowships and residencies in princely places to write, ironically enough, about the Third-World miseries of home. Like quite a few other Filipino writers, I’ve had the privilege of enjoying residencies in such places as Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, another 15th-century castle overlooking the River Esk not far from Edinburgh, and close to the Rosslyn Chapel whose equanimity was disturbed by the fanciful fiction of The Da Vinci Code; this was where I wrote much of Penmanship and Other Stories over a month in 1994. A picture window looking out on a lakeful of swans and ducks in Norwich, England served as the backdrop for initial work on Soledad’s Sister, pursued later in a villa in Bellagio, Italy, perched above and between Lakes Como and Lecco. On my second visit to Italy in 2005, I spent some time in the mountain fortress of Cervara di Roma, not too far from Rome.

Whether all that majestic beauty necessarily translates to good artistic production is another matter which I’ll discuss next week, but just so you don’t have to hold your breath, let me tell you right now that in my experience—and that of other artists I’ve spoken with—our best work often happens on the run, produced in dinky, oppressive, everyday surroundings and situations.



But these retreats, as the word implies, provide space and time for the imagination to rest and to recover, removed from its accustomed orientation, and allow it to take risks and to explore other possibilities. The artist’s body rests as well, given a respite from its daily chores. Sooner or later, we do get down to work, whether out of guilt or sheer routine, but the refreshment of the mind, body, and spirit is a retreat’s greatest boon to the artist.

Six Filipinos have preceded me to Civitella: the musicians Jose Maceda, Ramon Santos, and Josefino Toledo; the LA-based artist Reanne Augustin Estrada; and the writers Eric Gamalinda and Gina Apostol; after me will come the New York-based artist Lan Tuazon and novelist Miguel Syjuco. This isn’t a workshop, so there are no panelists and sessions here, only fellows. My batch includes the composers Martin Bresnick (US), Marc Ducret (France), Oliver Schneller (Germany), and Vanessa Tomlinson (Australia); the visual artists Lat (Malaysia), Yael Kanarek (US), Loredana Longo (Italy), Pat Oleszko (US), and Jorge Queiroz (Portugal); and, aside from myself, the writers Alexander Chee (US), Eliza Griswold (US), and Phillip Lopate (US). We were also joined at various points by several Director’s Guests, accomplished individuals invited for shorter stays: writers Julia Glass and Cynthia Hoffman, philosopher Richard Lee, and visual artist Catherine Lord, all from the US. (Of note, the acclaimed composer Oliver Schneller, now based in his native Germany, has many fond memories of his school days at the International School in Manila, where he went when his father was assigned here as director of the Goethe Institut in the early 1980s.)

Each fellow is assigned a spacious suite containing a bedroom, a studio, a small dining room, and a toilet. The musicians and composers, who tend to make what others might consider noise, may be farmed out to corners or even separate villas around the premises. Each suite has a name, and mine—“Pontenuovo”—denotes the “bridge” that was built in more recent centuries between one wing of the castle and another; my three rooms on the third floor look out to the inner courtyard on one side and to the garden, the valley, and the mountains on the other. It’s not a five-star hotel and wasn’t meant to be one. While every effort has been made to introduce modern necessities and amenities where possible and suitable, the furniture is not just antique but ancient; my door closes not with a key but a hammered iron bolt. At the same time, the entire grounds are covered by wi-fi, and photoelectric sensors light up the hallways and staircases as soon as you step into them.

Given that all the residents here are artists with different body clocks and habits of work, there are few schedules observed in Civitella. Breakfast is to each his own—a good thing, because it allows me to start the day with rice. Lunch is served at 1:00 pm, in three-level metal “lunchboxes”, typically containing some salad and some pasta, each one coded to the fellow’s suite and mindful of the fellow’s preferences and peculiarities (mine says “no cheese”). Bread and fruit are also always available, along with the ubiquitous olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We can take these back to our rooms, although, on sunny days, we might sit in the garden and have lunch together. Each fellow is expected to wash and return his or her lunchbox back to the kitchen. (After a couple of weeks, I opted out of lunch entirely, preferring to work late, wake up late, and have a hearty brunch of rice, tuna, egg, and banana.)


Dinner is served at 7:30 either at the Volte dining room or in the garden, and it’s the only time of the day when all the fellows are expected to gather together, often joined by Civitella’s executive director, the writer-painter Dana Prescott. Every now and then we make individual half-hour presentations, in which we introduce ourselves and our work to the others.

The Italian-speaking Dana and her husband Don are Americans who have lived and worked for many years in Italy, and have come to love the country and its culture so much that they have acquired Italian citizenship. Dana’s deep and insightful knowledge of Italian art and her impeccable taste allow her to authoritatively curate our occasional sorties to places of interest around the region like Gubbio, Arezzo, and Monterchi and even as far afield as Urbino and Florence, without neglecting the fun side of things.

On Sundays, we’re left entirely on our own, so some fellows might drive into Umbertide—about five minutes away—for pizza, or cook in the castle kitchen; I, of course, see Sunday as my all-rice day.

Over the next couple of Mondays, I’ll sum up this experience by talking about the writing itself, my companions, and personal discoveries of Italy gleaned from my Umbrian holiday.

Penman for Monday, May 30, 2011


IT MAY be silly and presumptuous to introduce a book that hasn’t even been accepted yet for publication, but humor me as I compose this piece—here in my Umbrian hermitage about which I’ll write some other time—trying to justify why I just emailed a collection of my poems to a friend who just might be foolish enough to publish them.

This friend, a publisher, had asked me some time ago if I had any unpublished manuscripts left that she could consider for her press, and I had quickly said no, certain that I had exhausted even my juvenilia (I finally yielded my first Palanca-winning story from 1975, a fanciful piece titled "Agcalan Point" which I was never happy with, to Ateneo’s Kritika Kultura last year). And then I suddenly remembered that I had a rarely-visited folder somewhere in my computer, and finding both challenge and opportunity in my friend’s inquiry, I boldly went where I had never gone before and said, “Well, how about my poems?”

If my friend looked surprised by my response, she should have been; I, too, felt instantly embarrassed by my audacity. At 57, I’ve written and published over 20 books and edited as many others, but never a book of my poems. Very few people know that they exist, and I myself practically forgot about them; I’m not even sure they’d qualify as publishable poems, by today’s standards, which seem to eschew rhyme, fun, and things too comfortably familiar. Many of my poems were and are jokes, happy to be met with a few chuckles; I find—the philistine—that I can't much appreciate poems that I can’t read aloud or memorize, or that I need a thesaurus or Google for.

In his introduction to my first book, Oldtimer and Other Stories, in 1984, Franz Arcellana mentioned that he expected me, at some point, to publish a book of poems. I remember being mystified by that remark, because I simply couldn’t imagine it happening. I had written stories, plays, and screenplays, and even some doggerel for Jimmy Abad’s poetry class, which I attended as an undergraduate returning from almost a decade of dropping out. But seriously good poetry was for me then—as it still is, today—something that better writers wrote.

But indeed it was poetry, not fiction, that brought me back to school. Not my poetry, which was non-existent, but that of Robert Graves, that prolific, white-maned Englishman who lived to be 100, had a tempestuous love life, and who reportedly rendered speechless our own young Nick Joaquin, who went to visit him in Majorca. (You can find the Gravesian influence all over “Summer Solstice” and “May Day Eve,” but that’s another story.) I came to know about Graves and his unabashedly male—but not macho—poetry through Cesar Ruiz Aquino, on the boat that took us to Dumaguete in 1981, where he was a panelist and I was a fellow at the workshop.

By the end of that summer I was so intoxicated by the stuff that I gave up my job and went back to school for an English degree, supported only by Beng’s charity. If I had any doubts about whether I had done the right thing, they quickly vanished when I heard a video, at the old British Council, of the poems of Dylan Thomas being read by Thomas himself. I say “heard”, because you didn’t see the poet, just visual interpretations of such stirring pieces as “Fern Hill” and “Poem in October.” That last poem begins with “It was my thirtieth year to heaven…” and I was 27 at the time, but I felt like the poem had been written for me. When I went to class, it was to savor the sonneteers—Wyatt, Sidney, and of course Shakespeare himself. I soon discovered more poets whose voices resonated in me: Rilke, Lorca, Dickey, Larkin, Neruda, Cavafy. In my own work, I was happily married to fiction—but poetry was that dark-eyed witch who could quicken my blood within seconds of glimpsing her in the window.

I began writing more of what literally passed for poetry for a graduate class in Wisconsin under a professor named Robert Siegel—a very fine poet, going by the comments on his own work ("To meet the unpretentious versatility of Robert Siegel after the single-mindedness of other poets is like returning to the mainland after a tour of the islands," said the Times Literary Supplement). One day, he called me to his office and said, “This Septych poem—do you know that it has 49 lines?” I honestly did not, and was surprised that he had bothered to count them. I came out thinking that my intuition was probably working harder than I imagined, and that maybe I was on to something. After that semester, I had about a dozen poems, most of them about Pinoy life in the USA, and having nothing more to do with them, I sent them off to the Palancas in Manila, and promptly forgot about them.

Of all the literary prizes I’ve won, the one I’m proudest of is the second-prize Palanca (or, technically, one-third of it) that I received for that small collection titled “Pinoy Septych and Others Poems” which I submitted, anonymously of course, in 1990. It didn’t matter to me that I had to share that prize, modest as it was, with two other winners—Fidelito Cortes and Jaime An Lim. This was back when the Palancas allowed prize-splitting—trading, I suppose, a little cash for a lot more glory. If anything, I was ecstatic to have been able to slip into that realm, the naked swimmer in a pool of Philippine poetry’s great white sharks (Ricky de Ungria shared the first prize with himself, for “Body English and “Decimal Places”; the third prize was shared by Luisa Igloria, Neil Garcia, and Lina Sagaral Reyes.)

I’ve never joined a poetry competition since, because I just haven’t written that much more, and still don’t and can’t think of myself as a poet, 1990’s fluke victory notwithstanding. Indeed I cringe when I hear the word “poet” tossed around at universities and workshops the way a bored and sleepy dealer hands out the cards at a poker table, and the way a losing player desperate for a pair of aces grabs them. I suspect that poets should wait to be called that by others; until then we just write poems, or try to. Poetry remains for me the hardest thing to write well and the easiest thing to do badly.

Whatever happens, this slim book, if it gets published, will very likely be my first and last fling with poetry. That should make it something of a novelty or even a collector’s item, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be doing most of the collecting.