header image

HOME

This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Interested in What I Create?



Bibliography

Monday, May 05, 2008

entry arrow1:12 PM | Lacabas Staring Down the Sun

Every semester, when I gear towards discussing literary writings during Martial Law for my Philippine literature classes, three poems always strike me as the most appropriate for the occasion -- Merlie Alunan's "The Bells Count in Our Blood," because it details the everyday concerns (and recriminations) of a town seized by the period's dark evil, and the works of the two Lacaba brothers, of course: Emmanuel Lacaba, whose "Open Letter to Filipino Artists" is an anguished confessions of a young man undergoing both a geographical and a metaphysical journey, and Pete Lacaba, writing as Ruben Cuevas, who proceeds to undo Marcosian tyranny with his "Prometheus Unbound," an acrostic puzzle that somehow got past the censors and made Lacaba a hunted man.

Rome Jorge in The Manila Times has a brilliant piece on the Lacabas and their martial law poetry.

Labels: , ,


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS