Patikim by Mark Angeles
Words. About. Love.
By Mikee dela Cruz
PUBLISHED: MARCH 2010

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"Poetry is,” says poet (obviously) Mark Angeles, “the most intimate form of art. It needs a lot of memory and time. It is not as free as prose writing. You normally see poems printed in verses but the gist is to recite the poem aloud, to hear it aloud. As Czesław Miłosz said, prose is made to be written, a poem is made to be read.”

This is the drive that eventually led to Mark writing – and publishing on his own – Patikim, a book that “is all about love. It is a collection of poems about longing, hurting, infatuation, and reaffirmation. It is a journey all of us experience from unrequited love to perpetual,” Mark says, adding, on a side note, that the book also contains “poems where I fused love and politics, an aesthetic that most poets think we can't do.”

LONG JOURNEY

Publishing was not a walk in the park for Mark.

“There's a big competition in publishing poetry books, (and you have to compete with) other established poets – those who are already in the academe, those who had won literary contests, or (those who) joined national workshops because they have many connections,” Mark says, also noting that the “competition” is made stiffer by the 2009 recession that hot the print media, as it did everything (“More and more audiences are turning into the Internet to get their information, so that there are publications forced to close due to decline of profit”).

Mark submitted his work to the UST Press, but “they had changed their publication head, and I think they are still in transition. When you pass your manuscript to a big publishing house, you have to wait for a year (or more, there are books that are still pending after five years), you have to go through a tedious process: getting some personalities to review your work, having the press get some people to review your work as well, and then wait for the laying-out and printing, et cetera.”

He was, of course, told of opting for digital publication (a friend, Adam David, told “me about the reprinting of his award-winning book, El Bimbo Variations, and how easy it was to get published through digital press. So I also contacted them and got it all sorted out”).
After “a long journey of five years, the book was finally released in November 2009.”

POET AT HEART

“I started writing since high school. I became a part of the campus paper, and I started reading and writing profusely,” says Mark, who, when he was in his fourth and final year in high school, became a contributor to the now defunct Filipino Magasin, whose publisher was renowned poet Virgilio Almario, who was also the founder of LIRA, a group that sets poetry workshops held at the office of the Adarna Publishing House.  “I have always been infatuated with beautiful words, and how they are written. The music of words.”

Influences include the love poems of Pablo Neruda (“Just like most poetry enthusiasts,” Mark says. “I love his metaphor. They all circle around nature: bread, wind, sea, et cetera”). Gradually, though, “I searched for other poets and tried to study their techniques. Poetry is the most dynamic form of art. It always moves. There is always something new be it in form or content.”

WORDS HEAL

Mark believes that poetry can be a great – not just good – tool for LGBT expression.  In his case, particularly, “the personas in my poems are so in touch with my anima. There is always the expression of a feminine personality in my stories, mainly (this is because) we connect (LGBT struggles) with a woman's struggle against feudal and colonial culture, which I think (LGBTs) also share.”

Mark adds: “The LGBT community is always at the forefront of the arts. We see it in history. In poetry, we have Sappho, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud and many others. Even Michaelangelo wrote love sonnets.”

With his family backing his (“Since I started writing, my family has always welcomed what I am doing”), Mark is already about to have his second book (Emotero, a collection of prose poems) get printed.  And so words of love – in this case, of LGBT love – are finding their way to be read.

To buy Patikim, email akosimakoy@gmail.com.