DRY THE RAIN #04: "Sea Fireflies of Mindoro" by Jim Pascual Agustin

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the fourth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




How to regard critically Jim Pascual Agustin's "Sea Fireflies of Mindoro," this poem of Kodak moments? I see it as a modern face/phase of the pastorale, where instead of a shepherd waxing poetic bucolic with a lyre on his actual rural life, it is a tourist waning heartfelt earnestness with a camera on an ideal/ised rural life. Loss is the primary melody in this sort of poetry, although the loss of what exactly is not too clear, what is is only the vague notion of something being lost, or rather, of having lost something. Could it be that that something is the ideal/ised rural life partially experienced by the tourist? Only the politics of tourism - the ideal/ised rural life paid for by the tourist in cash and vacation days - dictate that the experience will always remain purely virtual, thus unattainable in any true coherent form. So the loss felt in this poem, in this poetry of Kodak moments is merely the loss of something that the tourist in fact has never bought or owned, can never buy or own, will never be able to in any way that truly matters, thus the photographs shown, thus the memories shared. Is this poetry of Kodak moments yet another symptom of our modern lives lived neck-deep in capitalism? Maybe. What is clear, though, is that this poetry, this poem, works because we all had sunny days and cool nights loitering on the beach watching the world go by, and two days later we all had to go back home, back to the city, back to school, back to work; what is clear is that we were there back then, and we are not there now.