Ilokano poets and poetics and moral cowardice

BAYANGGUDAW NOTES. 24 DEC 2016. SAT. N2.
Excerpt of an ongoing work on literary history.

This is for all Ilokano poets--all Ilokano poets who ought to understand what 'moral cowardice' is all about and its effects on their commitment to writing, to poetry, to all Ilokano letters in general.

**In Seamus Heaney, there is that parallelism in the act of a poet and that act of a hero. Include here, therefore, the act of the rebel and the revolutionary, the inherent outlier of an unjust collective life: “In the case of heroes, it is not so much their procedures on the page which are influential as the opposite image which been projected on their conduct. That image, congruent with reality, feature a poet tested by dangerous times. What is demanded is not any great public act of confrontation or submission, but rather a certain self-censorship, an agreement to forge, in the bad sense, the uncreated conscience of a race. Their resistance to this pressure is not initially or intentionally political, but there is of course a spin-off, a ripple effect, to their deviant artistic conduct. It is the refusal by this rear-guard minority which exposes to the majority the abjectness of their collapse, as they flee for security into whatever self-deceptions the party liners require of them. And it is because they effect this exposure that the poets become endangered: people are never grateful for being reminded of their moral cowardice.”

/Source: from a work-in-progress.