Ang Tunay Na Lalaki (The Real Man): Remembering Nick Carbó

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

"Anger is loaded with information and energy."
—Audre Lorde

As young poets, Nick Carbó and I were enraged. That rage influenced our poetry and our lives. We were angry at how we had become English-language Filipino poets—through the lethal colonialism inflicted on our birthland, the Philippines. We were further aggravated that Filipino-authored poems had to be contextualized within the often myopic histories of English and US-American poetry.

This last realization came to Nick while he was pursuing his MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Though he was grateful for teachers like Jean Valentine, Thomas Lux, and Brooks Haxton, he did not consider these writers his role models. And while he respected prominent Asian American poets like Kimiko Hahn, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura, among others, they did not embody the culture he felt he “carried in [his] blood.” The only Filipino author whose work he was exposed to in graduate school was Jessica Hagedorn. So he asked himself, “Where are the Filipino poets? Are they invisible?” In fact, Filipino poets such as José García Villa, Carlos Bulosan, and N.V.M. Gonzalez had been publishing their work in the United States as early as the 1930s in Poetry (edited by Harriet Monroe), and 1942 saw the release of Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets (Wagon and Star), the first anthology of Filipino writing published in the United States. And yet, Filipino poets were entirely absent from leading poetry anthologies published in the 1990s.

Thus, Nick created his own edited anthology of Filipino poetry, Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffee House Press, 1996). The title’s “Borrowed Tongue” refers to how English became widespread among Filipinos through US colonialism across the Philippine archipelago. The phrase, however, is a euphemism. “Enforced tongue” would more accurately capture the sequence of events that led to the dominance of English in the country, specifically the Philippine-American War that caused the deaths, according to some estimates, of as many as one million Filipino civilians.  

Nick and I first met in the late 1990s through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) in New York City. Our shared sociopolitical leanings turned us into collaborators, and Nick and I coedited Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (Aunt Lute Press, 2000), the first international anthology of Filipina writers published in the United States. From our joint anger, and recognizing the need for more critical discussions of Filipino poetry, I formed a press—Meritage Press (2001–2021)—specifically to publish PINOY POETICS: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino American Poetics (2004), the first anthology of autobiographical poetics essays by Filipino poets, edited by Nick. From Nick’s introduction to PINOY POETICS:

Derek Walcott said in his Nobel acceptance address, “There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.” I realized that one of my jobs as a poet, a Filipino poet writing in America, was to excavate and rediscover the invisible history of Filipino poets. … [A]re these omissions of Filipino poets from international and world poetry anthologies just accidents or is there something more sinister at work? I believe that sinister factor is pure ignorance.

Nick further insisted that “the end result” of such erasure was “a stubborn invisibility […] that is dehumanizing a whole nation and personal identity. It must stop here!”

On a roll (or so we thought), Nick and I planned to continue working on Filipino anthologies. Next up would be an anthology of innovative writing, which we saw as a logical progression of the work we had been doing. Since English came to the Philippines through coercion, we thought transforming the language could be a way of exacting metaphorical revenge. Through linguistic innovations we could make English our own. Nick was willing, but counseled we wait a little longer for more of these innovative Filipino poets to come into themselves. I will always be sad we ran out of time for our last planned anthology as coeditors.

For Nick, innovation meant that his award-winning poetry sometimes moved in other directions besides narrative and lyric texts, for example, visual poetry, film poetry, and three-dimensional poetry works. We once created a series of poetry sculptures. The works have been lost due to flooding on his end and a wildfire on mine, but I still have a rare image from our collaboration. It is a toilet fill valve that regulates water flow; along its side, Nick had written lines from an associated verse poem, “Can you regulate / The flow of desire.” The combination of the lyrical couplet and the hilarious use of a toilet part wonderfully exemplifies Nick’s edgy humor.

In the aftermath of his death, many of Nick’s friends and acquaintances noted his likeability—his puckish sense of humor and sweetness. But while age tempered the passionate anger we felt as younger poets, I always look for the balisong’s edge—so named for the folding pocketknife that originated in the Philippines—in Nick’s poems. “The Filipino Politician” begins: “When he finds his wife in bed with another man” and cheerfully rollicks forward, only to end as the politician “begins to curse / and throw rocks at the American embassy.” And, in “Little Brown Brother” Nick wittily deconstructs US cultural icons that made their way into Filipino culture.

Nick once bemoaned that we only met after Returning a Borrowed Tongue’s 1996 release, so that he couldn’t include my poems (I was touched but pointed out that 1996 was when I began writing poems). He would go on to blurb my first poetry collection, Beyond Life Sentences (Anvil, 1998), as follows:

Eileen Tabios incorporates the American precision of Marianne Moore, the language of Angela Manalang-Gloria’s blood, and the emotive power of Gabriela Mistral in this astounding collection of poems. A world-class literary debut. Bravo!

Ridiculously generous, right? I share the blurb as an example of how supportive he was of Filipino writers, often going over-the-top with his praise. Many then-young Filipino poets blossomed under his lavish encomiums: Paolo Javier, Aileen Cassinetto, Ivy Alvarez, Barbara Jane Reyes, Michelle Bautista, Patrick Rosal, Oliver de la Paz … I could continue with many—so many!—more, among them leading contemporary Filipino and American poets.

Nick’s cultural activism made him one of the greatest supporters of (emerging) Filipino poets and a beloved mentor to many. He partnered with other Filipino poets (Hagedorn, Luis H. Francia, Eric Gamalinda, Bino A. Realuyo, and Nancy Bulalacao, among others) in creating opportunities that would promote Filipino poetry, including events, the first email list devoted to Filipino literature (FLIPS, cofounded with Vince Gotera), and, of course, books. In 1998, AAWW published Flippin’: Filipinos on America coedited by Francia and Gamalinda, and its launch was a special cause for celebration. We hoped that Flippin’ would continue the rollout of books featuring Filipino poets.

Nick’s legacy continues. Earlier this year, visual artist and poet Cristina Querrer received her MFA from Western Connecticut State University. Her thesis exhibition included an installation honoring Nick, complete with a Filipino ancestral altar fashioned from a writing desk that featured Nick’s photograph, books, and objects found in his poems: a glass of wine, some Filipino snacks, oranges, a rope, and rattan décor. The exhibit also included a video amalgamation of Filipino American poets (Gotera, Tony Robles, Regie Cabico, and me) honoring Nick. My contribution was:

For as long as I’ve been a poet, I’ve spent nearly as much of that time being an advocate for Filipino and Filipino American literature. I attribute this partly to the ground-breaking research Nick Carbó had done on the silencing of Filipino voices within mainstream as well as Asian American literature. His work grounded me in helping to manifest my prediction from the late 1990s: that if the 20th century was when the seed for Filipino English-language literature was planted, if forcibly so through colonialism, then the 21st century will be when Filipino English-language writers will transform the English language that previously transformed them.

While health issues over the last few years made it impossible for Nick to actively participate in the various projects we’d discussed, he remained committed to the work and I never tired of exploring potential projects with him, regardless of whether they would come to fruition.

How committed was Nick to promoting Filipino literature? Well, let me share something about his last day alive. The day before he passed in his sleep on October 16, 2024, he contacted me about my just-released novel, The Balikbayan Artist (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024). He suggested, “Maybe I can do a review.” I emailed him a PDF of the book. Then, mere hours later, I learned that he had passed. I was grief-stricken, but I was also appalled. I was appalled that he would take the time to be concerned about my new book when he was, as it turned out, just hours from transitioning. To the very end of his last—o sweetest!—breath, Nick Carbó blessed me and the literature that we both loved and that had been a primary focus of the life we shared as poets.

Maraming Salamat (thank you), Nico. One of your popular collections was Secret Asian Man (Cherry Grove Editions, 2004). You were truly, to borrow from the title of one of the book’s poetry cycles, “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki”—The Real Man.