Functions: Poems

• Main Author: Puangco, Gesuina Marie Datu
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Philippine poetry > Collections; Creative Writing; Poetry
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_lit/7; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=etdm_lit
• Institution: De La Salle University

Functions: Poems is a poetry collection which seeks to employ the constraint of mathematical functions as a means of lending new-ness to the narrative and images of old Filipino cinema. The narrative aspect and images of these poems will be taken from Nora Aunor’s romantic comedies, particularly Hindi Kita Malimot (1973), Always in My Heart (1971), and Gift of Love (1972). The collection aims to explore borrowed situations and how they interact with romance and how they color the persona’s “real” life, with the “borrowedness” being seen in two contexts: first, the context of film as a medium which came to the Philippines by way of our colonizers (a borrowing of form)—with the first Filipino feature film being patterned after the Spanish zarzuela and produced by American filmmakers Yearsley and Gross (Fernandez 1980), and second, in the context of the prevalent “versionizing” in the field of Filipino film wherein filmmakers in the sixties and seventies favored casting mestizaje as its stars because their features were direct allusions to or approximations of American Hollywood icons (a borrowing of character/content)—for example, Eddie Mesa being dubbed “Elvis of the Philippines” or Barbara Perez being named “The Filipina Audrey Hepburn” (Lim 2009). These poems seek to give an old machine new wheels while also trying to make sense of the chaos within the machine—what happens when these images and narratives are subjected to restrictions and constraints in the poetic form? What happens when they’re taken apart? What happens when the machine is at once adoration and suffering? Stardom and grief?