Valence and Ambivalence: Science and Poetry in the Philippine Anglophone Tradition

Abstract

In the first two sections of this paper, the author surveys the
troubled history of science and modernist poetry, and identifies
the operations of metaphor and analogical thinking as the foremost
contract zone between these two “realms.” He then discusses,
in the third section, the salience of this insight in relation to the
question of Philippine poetry in English, which he argues to be, by
definition, representationally complex and ironic. This leads him to
the idea that modernist-inspired “avant-garde” experimentations
have generally not “prospered” in the Philippines’s anglophone
poetic tradition precisely because their “condition for possibility”
(a scientificized cultural ground) cannot be said to have fully taken
root in this neocolonially indentured country in the Global South.
On the other hand, a critical awareness of this tradition’s linguistic
and cultural complexity should reveal that “self-reflexive” moments
(typically exclusively associated with modernist aesthetics) are,
after all, already very much in evidence in it. The paper ends with a
presentation of science-themed poems by a selection of outstanding
Filipino poets.
Keywords: Poetry, Science, Philippine Literature, Modernism, Representation