AVANTE-GARDE

POETRY
21st Century Philippine Literature
Ma. Julie Anne C. Gajes
BONFAL NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

AVANTE-GARDE POETRY
THESE ARE POEMS THAT PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IS

EXPECTED AS THE NORM. IN THAT SENSE, THESE KINDS OF POEMS

EXPERIMENT WITH FORM, PHRASING, IDEAS, IMAGERY, AND THE LIKE.
SOME POETS WHO HAVE WRITTEN AVANTE-GARDE POEMS ARE ANGELO
SUAREZ, PAOLO MANALO, CONCHINITA CRUZ, ARBEEN ACUNA AND
MARC GABBA.

Conchitina Cruz
Conchitina Cruz is a Filipina poet who teaches creative writing

and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines

Diliman. She graduated magna cum laude from the Creative
Writing Program, and a valedictorian from the College of Arts
and Letters in 1998. She has received a Fulbright grant for
her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing in the
University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is currently taking
up her PhD in the State University of New York (SUNY),
Albany. She has published several poetry books such as dark
hours and Elsewhere Held and Lingered.

Vocabulary Words
Irreverence disrespect
Passageways hallways
Wretched worthless

Permit us to refresh your memory

Permit us to refresh your memory; what comes

from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is

not the rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind
gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your
irreverence: in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere
to go. Where is the ground that knows only the
love of water? What are passageways to your
heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the
streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so
dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead
leaves and plastic.

 How ashamed water is to be what you have

made it. What have you done to its beauty, its

graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face
in a glass? We walk home and cannot see our
feet in the flood. We forget to thank the gods for
their kindness. We look for someone to blame
and turn to you, wretched city, because we are
men and women of honor, we feed our children
three meals a day, we never miss an election.
The only election is you, dear city. This is the end
of our discussion. There is no other culprit.

Questions to answer:
Why do you think is the poem entitled Permit us to

refresh your memory?

How do you perceive rain? Is rain for you a blessing or
a curse?
Have you ever experienced being affected by natural
calamities such as flood etc.? How does it feel to be
helpless against these forces of nature?
What are comparisons being made by Cruz in the
story?
Why does she consider the city as the culprit?
How is the poem different from the other poems that
we are used to reading?