What exactly is “ek-ek?” That is the question that confronts you when approaching Paolo Manalo’s new poetry collection, “Happily Ever Ek-ek: Poems” (Gacha Press, Manila, 2019, 120 pages).

“Ek-ek,” of course, is Filipino slang for nonsense, a throwaway expression for things that do not matter, which clearly Manalo uses ironically in the title because it is preceded by the fairy-tale expression “happily ever.” These are high stakes, subverted by a faux careless brush-off. This is a new twist in the same direction.

In 2003, Manalo came out with the excellent collection “Jolography,” from the University of the Philippines Press.

That book exhibited part of what makes Manalo’s poetry so distinctive: its pitch-perfect balancing act of formal poetic craftsmanship and its brazen popular phraseology. This is true for its content as well, as it discusses rhetoric and pop culture in the same breath and breadth.

Manalo put out a pamphlet in 2018 titled “E is for Epal,” but “Happily” is the true successor to “Jolography.” So readers had to wait 16 years between books.

“The short of it is, the gap between the two books is a retrograding process of unlearning and relearning how to write observing the more traditional forms without abandoning the previous knowledge in the writing of ‘Jolography,’” Manalo said. “It also doesn’t help when your poetry teachers tend to release a poetry collection once per decade. They caution against excess and repetition of output.”

“Happily” goes forth from “Jolography” but takes a turn: “Both are immersed in Pinoy culture—‘Jolography’ being a misreading/mishearing and mangled love letter to Rizal—but ‘Happily’ was written following a retrograde poetics. The poems in ‘Happily’ are more informed by traditional forms, and more conscious of submitting to their limitations. So ‘Happily’ has sonnets, triolets, curtal tanaga, a pantoum, an abused ghazal, a barkada in a sestina and quatrain variations. The more open-formed pieces are probably contained by the blank verse they began with. I’m fond of the poems in ‘Happily’ where the endings are provided by other works—video games, a movie and a song—and the writing becomes the discovery and justification of the beginnings and middles that they deserve. The pleasure’s also in having to find justifications to deviate from the forms it inhabits. Usually the justifications are in that immersion in the culture it is coming from, pressured by the formal tradition it identifies with. I find that I have more confidence to say and write within this dynamic.”

Manalo compares “the process of treating poetic form as a homestay at first, vacationing one’s thoughts in a particular form and then readjusting the poem in the revisions when one leaves the homestay and returns to ‘work’ or everyday activity. So the poem negotiates with that mental and psychic real estate of poetic form, settling into it by, making adjustments to make it habitable and to make it hospitable to what the poem needs.”

Distilled

Manalo distills all the emotion and the cultural trappings that surround him into these poems: messy love, pop songs, video games, movies, Filipino habits.

The 48 poems are divided into five chapters. There is the TV summary that is “Teleserye The Sonnet,” which is exactly what it sounds like. There are the poems which end with lines from everything from “Super Mario Brothers” to misheard Jose Marie Chan lyrics. There are odes to the working men and women in “Petsa de Peligro” and “Closing Time.”

There is the aforementioned experimentation with traditional forms such as the “#tanag.” Those updated tanaga and several Taglish poems were originally included in “E is for Epal.” Take this beauty: Sinta, ika’y sorbetes//At ako’y may d’yabetes/ So, huwag na.”That’s pretty humorous, but can get dark. “Open City” breaks out the war years. In a stunning bait-and-switch, “Poem Ending with a Line from the Legend of Zelda” reads: “You who fight monsters, beware the police./ Beware planted drugs, the palit-ulo scheme…You have no extra lives, no fairies that heal//But it’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”

Manalo mixes Taglish seamlessly into the poems, perhaps in no better example than the epic “Happy Meal for the Now.” And this is a poet who knows how to rhyme in exactly the right places for the right reasons to the right effect.

Reworked collection

It is significant as well that “Happily Ever Ek-ek” is the reworked collection he had been working on while finishing his PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Manalo teaches English and creative writing at the University of the Philippines, where he is the curricular coordinator of the creative writing program of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. It’s been rumored that Manalo is the pseudonymous writer Bob Ong; he has repeatedly and good-naturedly denied this. There is a poem in the book called “A Poem About Bob Ong.”

“Happily Ever Ek-ek” is best exemplified by its best poem, the terrific “Bahala Na,” where Manalo writes: “It comes easy: loneliness, happiness,/ And everything in between… We want to complain about the sad fate/ Of our country but all that plagues the mind/ Is that last song we couldn’t help but hear… Maybe someone thinks of us back home:/ People we’ve wronged who wants us more than dead… We think of them sometimes when we pick/ Our noses. Like the house keys we misplace/ They’ll always be where we forgot to look.”

Worth the wait

It’s a unicorn of a book: funny, heart-breaking, self-aware, romantic and experimental, truly more “Happily Ever” than “Ek-ek” and worth waiting 16 years for. You will not have to wait that long for Manalo’s next book, that’s for sure. “The next book is actually out from the University of the Philippines Press, he said. “This is ‘Jolography Retconned’ which attempts to convince you that the first poetry collection does not exist and so ‘Happily Ever Ek-ek’ is my first full collection. It’s also a different collection, with new material and a new sequence. It was supposed to be launched last April but again, the quarantine happened. I’m working on my next full collection which should be finished by 2022 if we live long enough to reach it, and it is tentatively titled ‘Junior Senior Citizen.’ It builds on the forms and schemes established in ‘Happily Ever Ek-ek’ and ‘Jolography Retconned.’” INQAvailable in paperback from Roel’s Bookshop, Solidaridad Bookshop and on Shopee.

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