Persona

Life, love, loss in the hands of Pablo Tariman

How the musical impresario became the now-renowned bard of Facebook, reaching more than a million netizens

In the '80s, Pablo Tariman a brooding figure on the rooftop of the Cultural Center of the Philippines

Tariman’s first poetry book, its two poems selected for Best Asian Poetry 2021, is now available for advanced orders,

For 2004 outreach concert, Cecile Licad shelters Tariman upon arrival at Baguio’s Loakan Airport.

In August 2005, I decided to be a Cecile Licad groupie, following her around wherever she held her piano concerts—from Philamlife Auditorium to Dr. Joven Cuanang’s Pinto Art Gallery to the Carabao Center Auditorium in the Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, and finally to St. Paul University Auditorium in Tuguegarao, Cagayan. All these trips were facilitated by writer-impresario Pablo A. Tariman.

After the Cagayan outreach, there was time to tour. I’m not sure if Banaue, Ifugao, was really in the group’s itinerary, but before long we were headed for the rice terraces where Pablo, Cecile, her son Otavio, another groupie in director Marilou Diaz-Abaya breathed easy after a hectic schedule. Cecile earlier fulfilled a promise to allow Otavio, who was turning 16 in a few days, to see the Callao Cave which she liked very much from a trip the year before. En route to Banaue, we stopped in the Isabela jail where Pablo’s daughter Kerima was detained in 2001.

With heroic daughter Kerima, nicknamed Kima

As the late journalist Rustie Otico liked to put it, “It took Kerima’s imprisonment for the province of Isabela to have an active cultural life.” Every time Pablo traveled north to visit his daughter and attend a hearing, he’d bring musicians and stage a concert. What he called “guerrilla concerts” would be repeated when his son-in-law Ericson Acosta, Kerima’s husband, was arrested and jailed in Calbayog City, Samar, in 2011. And I would be there once again.

We were going to hike it out of Banaue, in hopes that Cecile Licad and Otavio could catch their plane back to the US

It could’ve been an ordinary day in Banaue, with lots of sunlight and opportunity to take photos, enjoy the cuisine, the after-dinner cultural show. But it rained torrents that night. The next day, we were told there was a major mudslide on the highway leading out of the capital town. We were stranded, or so it seemed, until Pablo contacted Muñoz Mayor Nestor Alvarez to request for a vehicle to meet us at the other end of the mudslide. We were going to hike it out of Banaue, if it came to that, in hopes that Cecile and Otavio could catch their plane back to the US.

We rolled up our pants, found porters to carry our luggage, but the pianist clung to her piano sheets, holding them close to her chest while she determinedly struggled to walk through the mud and fallen debris. Meanwhile, Pablo got a call on his mobile from Irene Marcos Araneta asking how the Licad party was faring. He answered something to the effect that we were singing Sa Kabukiran while trekking through the mud. Irene was shocked, but to her credit she quickly mobilized her connections so a chopper could rescue the party.

Tariman with Hill Station’s Mitos Benitez Yniguez (standing), the author (second from right)  and Cecile Licad

There was just time to pour some water to get the sticky mud out of our shoes and feet. I walked barefoot because I knew my toes could cling better to the soil than my slippers or shoes. The mayor’s van was waiting, and we hied off to a small airport where barely minutes upon arrival, we heard the buzz of the whirring rotor of a helicopter (owned by Danding Cojuangco) as it approached the runway. Right away, Pablo volunteered to give up his seat for Marilou.

He and I motored to the mayor’s residence to freshen up. En route to Manila, Pablo looked at our weary feet and quipped, “Mine are suited for Swan Lake. Yours, Babeth, are for Bayanihan Dance Company!” Such has been our joshing relationship as friends of old. Even amid disaster or emergency, Pablo finds something to make light of.

The impresario in him has taken a back seat these days so he can attend to the publication of his very first book, a collection of poems called Life, Love and Loss During the Pandemic, out in mid-December. It has been 50 years since his first poem was published in Sunday Times Magazine, a work inspired by the Beatles’ song Let It Be.

He was, as he put it, “enjoying my first breaks as short story writer in Graphic Magazine (Ninotchka Rosca was the literary editor), Now Magazine (Norma Miraflor was editor) and Nation  Magazine. I also wrote fiction for the bold magazine PIC edited by Franklin Cabaluna. But once in a while I wrote poetry in between, mostly for the Quezonian and The Quill (of Manuel L. Quezon University).”

When he joined Graphic in 1971 as proofreader, he wrote more fiction and weekly feature assignments which added to his monthly income of P270 a month. At that time, he was also doing articles for The Asia-Philippine Leader, edited by Nick Joaquin and Jose Lacaba.

‘Every time I got drunk, I would profess my love for Kerima Polotan….’

But he found himself in the company of poets from the University of the East’s The Dawn like Mike Bigornia and Cesar Mella who joined beer sessions hosted by Nick. Pablo recalled, “Every time I got drunk, I would profess my love for Kerima Polotan so that Nick hollered at me, ‘If you love her that much, why don’t you just marry her?’”  Cesar wrote about this in UE’s Dawn, and Pablo heard that Kerima’s husband, Johnny Tuvera, was furious.

He continued to write poetry, this time in Filipino, for Expressweek after Martial Law. But this came to a halt when he got married and his priorities changed into how to survive as husband and head of the family. He joined the Cultural Center of the Philippines where I first met him and where I contributed to the magazine he edited, Arts Monthly.

He realized that his journalistic and literary output could not support a family. He said, “My last short story was in 1976 in Mr. and Ms. Magazine where the literary editor was Chato Garcellano. I totally forgot poetry and wrote again after almost 50 years when the pandemic broke out in February 2020. It was a miracle I was writing poetry almost every day for 20 months! I was lucky my Frankfurt-based daughter Kalon subsidized me and my grandson Emman when I lost my Inquirer and Philstar income and was left with just Vera Files (and later The Diarist.ph). I believe I was meant to resume writing poetry during the pandemic with no visible income and with some friends dying one after the other and while surviving bad governance.”

Emman Acosta and his grandfather Pablo before Kerima’s burial

Asked if there were poets he turned to during the pandemic, Pablo answered, “Strange but during the pandemic I didn’t turn to poets for comfort. But Pablo Neruda has had a special appeal to me since college. In college I thought I fell in love with a poet and during those times, I got Neruda recordings from her. She got married to another poet from Samar. I was godfather to one of their first sons. Meanwhile, I got married to someone in Albay who wrote poetry. I don’t know if Kerima was drawn to poetry by osmosis. During the pandemic, I didn’t turn to my favorite poets for comfort. I wrote poetry instead. It became instinctive that I turned to poetry in a time of extreme grief and sorrow: friends and colleagues dying one after the other, netizens saying goodbye to loved ones in crematoria, an eight-year-old boy selling his school medals to survive and a 72-year-old jeepney driver detained for breaking health protocols while a police chief was serenaded with buckets of beer and offering of roses.”

He continued, “It didn’t occur to me that death would visit the family on the second year of pandemic. The poems on Kerima that went viral were mostly written while I was contemplating my grandson’s fate without his mother and while I was preparing to fly to Silay City to claim her lifeless body. I turned to poetry as I read about jeepney drivers begging for food on the streets. My angry poems were born out of despair over the government’s bad response to the pandemic. My kind of poetry would not have been possible during normal times. When my anger was over, I was surprised I could write poetry on inner peace, solace and the beauty of my island province of Catanduanes and more so about my grandchildren.”

Two poems were accepted in the anthology The Best of Asian Poetry 2021

The poems have attracted notice not just from Facebook friends of Pablo. Two poems were accepted in the anthology The Best of Asian Poetry 2021, published in Singapore. Another one paying tribute to health frontliners is featured in a marker with his name on it. Pasig Mayor Vico Sotto unveiled the last three stanzas of this poem coincidentally on Pablo’s 72nd birthday last year which falls on Rizal Day. He said, “I didn’t ask for it. Someone from Mayor Vico’s office asked me if I could write a poem for frontliners. I didn’t realize it was going to be made into a marker at Plaza Familia, formerly Plaza Bonfacio.”

Asked how he and his wife raised Kerima into the second-generation poet, he said, “We did not lure her into poetry. But the house is full of poetry books by Edel Garcellano, Jose Garcia Villa, Cirilo Bautista, Virgilio Almario and others. She read them all without our telling her. She had a natural attraction to poetry. I didn’t even know she was into poetry until she started winning prizes one after the other and joining poetry workshops. We raised her the way low-income families do it. We were more into reading than shopping.”

Was Kerima’s untimely death also the cause for his sudden flurry of preparations for his first book? Pablo replied, “Yes, I want to document that stage of my life when I confronted death and wrote about it. I was surprised poems about my daughter reached more than a million netizens. It means many people the world over connected with my poetry. I got thousands of comments—I only managed to read the first 200 or 300 comments. I was surprised how novelist Cecilia Brainard found my poem on my daughter and mentioned it in one of her lectures. That’s one of the wonders of FB. You reach non-friends the world over.”

Despite his boldness in self-publishing his book, he still nurtures what he called “a deep insecurity about my kind of poetry since I have not written one in ages before the pandemic. I tried talking to a publisher, but I got cold feet. As my followers in FB increased with more compliments, I realized I needed to compile them. After all, I am 72 and have little time left. Many of my colleagues are dying. I told myself: what if I die tomorrow? I had to take a good look at my output a second time. I am not compiling my works anticipating some awards. I am doing it simply to document an aspect of my life that I didn’t realize was there. For one, I didn’t look at writing poetry as a competition. I am ready to face rotten tomatoes. That’s how I am open about my work. Maybe I can be better in my next book. But a first output has to come out. It is my life and no one else’s.”

The response to my pre-selling campaign yielded a miraculous response. They ordered not just one but five, 10 and 15 copies

Considering that he is a freelancer, isn’t an out-of-pocket publishing venture hurting him financially? What follows is a lesson for would-be independent publishers. He said, “It’s hard to raise funds for a poetry book especially at this time when many people have lost jobs. But I’d like to own up to my first book and be solely responsible for whatever public response it will get. I don’t want my first publisher getting my share of pelted tomatoes. The response to my pre-selling campaign yielded a miraculous response. They ordered not just one but five, 10 and 15 copies for their friends and relatives. Before the book was out, I was able to pay token honoraria for my copy editor, layout artist and the entire printing cost! Again, that’s the wonder of FB. They love your works and are more than willing to buy more than a copy. But then, I have to sign the first 200 copies. Early buyers only have one request: my autograph. Now I get more orders from as far as Germany, Brooklyn, New York, Australia, among other places.”

When he looks back on his life, including his salaried stints at the CCP and the former Metropolitan Theater, he recalled being with the CCP while Lucrecia Kasilag was president, then moving to the Met when she was replaced by Bing Roxas. It was at the Met when I saw him again while I waited for a show to start. He invited me for a bottle of cold Coke to his office (space was free in exchange for his doing publicity for the theater and producing concerts on the side). I remember his floor-to-ceiling shelves of long-playing records of the classics. Sadly, these had to go when he suffered a financial crisis.

But still he is recognized as the impresario who introduced the Romanian soprano Nelly Miricioiu to the Philippines. The Met’s Conching Sunico appointed him as orchestra manager of the Manila Symphony Orchestra for the last concert of MSO icon Herbert Zipper in the late’80s. In the’90s, he resumed freelancing and hasn’t looked back.

He rued, “Old age gives you some advantages over younger poets. You see life as you actually lived it, not as younger writers imagined it. Maturity teaches you the value of simplicity in prose and poetry. I don’t like my readers consulting dictionaries to find out what I mean. I am not what you would consider a brilliant poet. I am just one of those simple creatures who happens to be doubly sensitive at this stage of my last season.”

In one heated argument, I told his parents, ‘Huwag na ninyong ialay sa bayan ang apo ko

As guardian to Emman, now a math major at the University of the Philippines, did he ever wish that the boy would grow up normally with his parents instead of being parted from them because of the revolutionary cause they embraced? Pablo confessed to “mixed feelings. I prefer to see Emman with his parents, but knowing their involvements, I prefer him with me. I always have nightmares of him being jailed with his parents. Remember Emman visiting his father in Calbayog jail? I don’t want him to suffer his father’s fate. Now that a bullet ended the life of his mother, I am glad he stayed with me. This may sound selfish. In one heated argument, I told his parents, ‘Huwag na ninyong ialay sa bayan ang apo ko.’”

A rare visit with youngest grandchild Teo during the lockdown

Provincial trips with Pablo are always memorable. We still kid around about our Argo-like exit from Calbayog with the newly released Ericson, Persida Acosta, Public Attorney’s Office chief, and her team. PAO Acosta (not related to Ericson) intuited that an early flight would be best and safest for us. We fetched Ericson from his jail cell before the break of dawn. We went past highway barricades without incident until we reached the airport and checked in. An informant told us that a battalion of soldiers in a truck was chasing after us, apparently intent on putting Ericson back in jail. Before the truck could reach the airport, we were safely on board a plane and flying to Manila.

If there is a cinematic quality to Pablo’s life, complete with an operatic soundtrack or the cannons in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture firing, the once poor boy from the municipality of Baras, Catanduanes is the least surprised.

Advanced orders of the Author’s Edition at P1000 each, including delivery, are accepted.

For reservation, email: artsnewsservice@gmail.com or pabloopera@yahoo.com. Text 09065104270.

FATHER’S SONG

We will let you go, my child,
As I turn to your son’s bike
For our share of memories.

We will let you go, my child,
On a Friday
On the day of your grandmother’s birth.

We will let you go in peace,
My child,
As I gather memories of you:
Teaching your son
How to ride on his first bike.

It used to be that I biked
All over Pasig,
Feeling a new sense of freedom
Every time I feel the wind
Brush my face
During past days of road adventure.
Into my early sixties.

I re-learned it
To be able to ride
With my grandkids with ease
Early in the morning.
I remember
I bought my grandson his own bike
And guided him into Pasig’s narrow streets.

How I loved the new look of adventure
On his young face
As he negotiated the old
Quiet streets in the neighborhood.

In his grade school days
I would fetch him early at five
On a bicycle
Shouting vroom-vroom!
To bring him to school

Before sunrise.
When we moved
To the heart of the city
I thought the place had become
Too crowded
And too dangerous.

Knowing my grandson’s life
Depended on me,
The old bike
Ended up in my daughter’s garage.
It was like putting away old toys
That had outlived their usefulness.

Now I miss the cold breeze
On my face as I am
Astride on the bike
Of my younger days.

Go gently, my child,
As you head to your final resting place
On a Friday of your grandmother’s birthday.
I will hold on
To the picture of this bike
And relish
The highways we had crossed
During our riding days.

Pablo A. Tariman

Read more:

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I have declared Stanley Tucci my dreamboat

I still need Anthony Bourdain to teleport me away from my armchair

The eternal bonne vivante Virginia R. Moreno

Philamlife Theater: A quiet death

About author

Articles

She is a freelance journalist. The pandemic has turned her into a homebody.

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