Ricardo de Ungria and Philippine Poetics

Abstract

Sometimes it takes a national trauma to jolt a poet out of his necessary occupation with form, and Ricardo de Ungria is no exception. De Ungria's life as a poet spans some 20 odd years, starting with the publication of his poetry book R+A+D+I+O. In the early 1980s, like most Filipinos, he found the socio-political situation in the Philippines increasingly difficult to ignore. After 1986, with the end of the Marcos dictatorship, he went to the US to work on an MFA in creative writing. In this paper, I would like to show how the Philippine situation and a transnational experience revised and redirected his view of poetry and its writing. While in the US, he was, in his words, at “a crossroads†between “place and placelessness,†a position he put to poetic advantage even after his return to the Philippines.