A.

Title
SITSIT SA KULIGLIG (Whistling at Cicadas/Shusshing Cicadas). Published 1972. Author, Rolando S.
Tinio. n.p.: Heart-Throb and Other Beats. 93 pp.

Sitsit sa Kuliglig is Tinio’s first book of poems in Filipino, after the publication of his English
poems. As one of the writers from the modernist bagay school of poetry based at the Ateneo de
Manila in the late 1960s, he veered away from the traditional rhyme and meter forms of Tagalog
poetry, with its sentimental and moralistic character. As stated in the versified preface, the
collection aimed not at being above its audience nor cater to its popular interests.

The book has a total of fifty-four (54) poems which are distributed into seven sections. In the
first section’s poem, “Bagay,” an unnamed object demands to be understood by the reader and
wants to be given a name. In “Takipsilim,” the twilight becomes the object of contemplation by
a door that proceeds to describe a wall, and the neighbor’s roof at sunset. Nothing seems to
happen in this given frame except the precise description of the changing intensity of light and
the vivid naming of things in the immediate vicinity. It ends with a statement about the coming
of night, “lansangang nilisan ng araw, dinaluhong ng anino” (street abandoned by the
sun/overcome by shadows), a rather enigmatic expression of the “thing” subject.

In section two, the speaker in “Mirindal” narrates the events in the life of a neighborhood food
vendor named Aling Pilang and her make-shift stall. It is told in meaningful detail and in a
nostalgic manner by a long-time customer from the vantage of his room. She dearly misses the
ginatan (coconut sauce dessert) and the old woman too whom she remembers so well and with
deep understanding.

The poem “Ang Burges sa Kanyang Almusal,” from section four, satirizes wealthy Filipinos
through the overly ornate use of language that signifies the sector’s outrageous affluence,
affected manners, selfishness, and scandalous indifference to poor people. Some lines allude to
the Philippine colonial experience and past exploiters of the poor, like the Spanish friars.

The book’s closing section, the seventh, contains the Taglish poems “Sa Poetry,” “Valediction sa
Hilcrest,” and “Postscript.” Code-switching had been done before by the ladino poets in the 17th
century in interspersed Tagalog and Spanish. Tinio’s poetic act certainly recalls these literary
predecessors but in these modern works, the writer combines Tagalog with English. In
“Postscript” he identifies closely with Filipino intellectuals who may or may not be acutely aware
of their colonial world-view. He severely criticizes those who idolizes the West and as a
consequence alienate themselves from the majority of fellow Filipinos.This social commentary is
expressed not only through a fast-paced, irreverent language, but also through typographical
means like capitalization, punctuations, indentions, and columnar cataloguing.

Sitsit sa Kuliglig‘s important contributions to Filipino poetry lie in its Modernist and creative
presentation of themes and subjects, which was achieved through the aesthetics of bagay
poetry. It broke away from the rigid and conventional writing style of traditional literature. It is
one of the works that made writing poetry in Filipino modern, acute, and sophisticated.

https://joeybaquiran.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/saludo-kay-tinio/

B. Author/Writer
Rolando S. Tinio was born in the packed district of Tondo, Manila in 1937, and began writing
poetry in English. He switched to Tagalog, his mother tongue, (the national language, called
Filipino) in the mid-60s. After acquiring a Masters degree in English from the Iowa Creative
Writing Program in 1958, he taught at the Ateneo de Manila University. He is better known as a
playwright and translator of plays, founding and artistically directing the Teatro Pilipino (1975-
92). The plays he translated into Tagalog range from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Chekhov and
Beckett. He worked as a set designer as well as director, had a career as an actor for film and
television, wrote film scripts and teleplays. His first book of poems in Tagalog, Sitsit sa Kuliglig
(Cricket Gossip), was published in 1972; there were two others and in 1994, a selection of his
poems in English and Tagalog. These books don’t include the lyrics to numerous songs. He died
in 1997. Among the most popular of his poems are a handful of poems not wholly in Tagalog,
but in a code-switching combination of Tagalog and English.

https://vagabondpress.net/products/poems-of-rolando-s-tinio-jose-f-lacaba-rio-alma