Lawrence Ypil (b. 1978)

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Written by Christian Jil R. Benitez
Dated 16 Feb 2025

In his latest works, the Filipino poet Lawrence Lacambra Ypil creatively harnesses the house as both image and form, in order to let the poetic emerge. In the chapbook You know I was sentimental during the thought of a house (2022), photos of a house prompted Ypil and the Cebu-based artist and photographer Zach Aldave to pursue a conversation meandering between childhood memories, architecture, and poetry. Their discussion was then recorded by an artificial intelligence transcription software and produced into a “beautifully garbled speech” reminiscent of an overheard chat next door. Meanwhile, in the chapbook Ventanilla: Duet (2022), Ypil, together with the British historian Martin Dusinberre, takes inspiration from the small grilled windows found below the larger windows in the upper floors of old Philippine bahay na bato, or traditional stone house. Just as these openings permit light and air to enter the structure even when the main windows remain shut, the dialogue between the two is made permeable to larger histories, like “voices [merely] spoken from another room” (Ypil and Dusinberre, Ventanilla 3). 

The house—and by extension, the town where it is situated—has long preoccupied Ypil’s creative work. This can be related perhaps to his having been born and raised in Cebu, a province in the Central Visayas in the Philippines, where growing up he would often spend time in their old family house, which dates back to late 1920s (Ypil, “Night Report” 54). His fondness for the place would have grown imaginably deeper when he moved to Manila, the country’s capital, hundreds of kilometres away from his hometown, to study biology. Ypil had originally intended to pursue a career in medicine, just like his father. However, his time at the Ateneo de Manila University also developed his passion for writing, and so much so that when he graduated, he received the Joseph Mulry Award for Literary Excellence, given to the most outstanding creative writer in the batch. This would open up both a new world and a new path for Ypil: after spending three years in medical school, he decided to return to literature, teaching and earning a graduate degree in literary and cultural studies in the Philippines. A few years later, he would move to the US, teaching as well as earning Master of Fine Arts degrees in both poetry and nonfiction, before finally settling in Singapore.  

Ypil has long asserted the importance of writing that engages with one’s location (“We Can Only Write”). He put this into practice in his first poetry collection The Highest Hiding Place (2009), which gathers much of his work composed before leaving the Philippines. Here, the poems embody a commitment to place by inhabiting the domestic space, dwelling in a stillness where writing becomes an approximation of photography which ironically “keep[s] / the slow hearts of… metaphors moving” (“Slow Motion,” Highest 47). In “House,” a poem reminiscent of Filipino folk poetry and Japanese haiku with its precise descriptions, the titular place figures as where nothing seems to move:

…It was

our favorite
place. By the screen
door. Under the eaves

of the old clocks. Beside
the vases. The mornings.

The wind
that could enter but
not leave.

That stayed the long
days within. The keys

hidden under 
the dark carpet.

(Highest 17)

And yet, just as Chekhov’s gun introduced in the beginning of a literary work must somehow fire in the end (Ypil and Dusinberre, Ventenillas vi), so must the house offer a “strange / way of / insisting to leave” (“House,” Highest 17). Such a possibility is important for Ypil, especially coming from “small a community as Cebu, where everyone’s either a relative, a friend of a friend, a brother of a classmate, or a patient of my doctor-father, [where] conformity was the rule and any deviations from it entailed the most horrible consequences” (Ypil, “Impermanent Residencies”). Thus, in his writing, as he strategically evokes the most restraining of spaces, Ypil also manages to temporarily suspend their unspoken boundaries, if only to “hold the edgeless / in place (“Garden,” Highest 79). 

Like many queer poets before and after him, Ypil’s poetry is one that desires to make possible, if only for a little while, moments of liberation where everything can be re-propositioned, recast in a different light. In the poem “Porch,” for example, knowing that “every house // rested on its joys,” the persona notes with a critical eye:

[W]hen one of the guests 
nudged a glass when she was telling a joke
which fell on the floor and broke,

we laughed. We were accountable
merely for our own mistakes and
committed solely. And everything was
part of the good story, really. 

(Highest 12)

If things, just like subjects in a given photograph, are assigned to certain places by implicit social structures, it is through time, by way of narrative, that they can somehow be transformed. In other words, things, by being conferred with meanings, are granted new dimensions. And for Ypil, amid the “simple rules of the simple world” (“Impermanent Residencies”) which insists on speechlessness as to retain the reigning order, ironically lies the possibility for another utterance, an instance to begin again and say, perhaps, “let me tell you something” (“The Discovery of Poetry,” Highest 21). Thus, in his writing, an unplayed piano becomes a stage where a yearning for attention becomes articulable (“At the Piano,” Highest 22-24), and an old well becomes a place where a son can meet his father in his youth (“Being a Son,” Highest 15). This way, despite the fact that in present reality, another broken glass may be simply swept wordlessly from the porch (“Porch,” Highest 12) or an entire village may perennially remain the same (“Paradise Village: Sketches,” Highest 48-51), Ypil’s poetry insists on the otherwise, precisely on the possibility of their telling.  

Ypil further harnessed this potency of the poetic when he went to the US to pursue MFAs, first in poetry, in 2012, and then in nonfiction, in 2015. During this time, though the house and the hometown continued to occupy his works, Ypil would become more engaged with the larger colonial history not only of the province of Cebu, but Philippines writ large (see “Night Report”; “Recollect”). This crucial shift can be attributed to his time in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, as a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, where the 1904 World’s Fair took place; and his exposure to Philippine colonial artefacts in the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, this time as a graduate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In “Jose Rizal and the Essay as Letter to Home,” for instance, Ypil channels the nostalgia already distinct in his previous works; however, his meandering expands hereto include the experience of the national hero studying overseas, paralleling his own at the time. Meanwhile, in the lyric sequence “The Pedro Photographs” (“Night Report” 49-80), Ypil revisits the memory of his grand uncle, with the spectre of American colonialism lingering at the edges. “They are almost all written in English, which had only been introduced to the Philippines less than ten years earlier,” Ypil notes of the postcards he retrieved from his family house. “[T]he way English was being used was in the kind of sentimental verse that Pedro and his friends would have encountered in their English textbooks: romantic, lyrical, literary” (70).   

This expansion in his poetic preoccupation came into fruition in his second poetry collection The Experiment of the Tropics (2019), which considers the historical tapestry of early twentieth-century Philippines, particularly during the American occupation. Although Ypil began conceptualising the book during the latter of his time in the USA, he only completed it upon moving to Singapore in 2016, when he also began to teach courses on creative writing at Yale-NUS and mentor new generations of writers such as Hamid Roslan, Shawn Hoo, and Max Pasakorn. Ypil’s original manuscript, tentatively titled then as simply “There,” was selected as co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, organised by Singapore Unbound. Upon its eventual publication, Experiment then became a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and a part of the long list for the Believer Book Awards.  

Ypil’s move to Singapore was crucial in completing said work. According to him, this particular migration gave him a different perspective on both his hometown and the Philippines: after being used to “always… see[ing] oneself in relation to the somewhere far (the US, the UK, Europe),” he adjusted to seeing it as “something that is somewhere nearby. Close, but different” (“Song”). This is a sensibility that can be perceived in his approach of looking at the photographs of his hometown from 1900 to 1946. Recognising them as also “potentially problematic” (quoted in Li), Ypil strategically sees through these materials, pursuing instead the intuition that in them “there is always a somewhere-else story” (“Like That Metaphor Heard Before,” Experiment 46). By engaging with such photographs, Ypil’s poetry becomes more than ekphrastic: it is harnessed as a means to articulate what the archive fails to say or deliberately silences, making the photograph move, so to speak, by extending it beyond its own frame, if only to tell yet again the story it once captured, though this time subverting the dictum of the colonial narrative.

For instance, the opening poem “There is a River” considers a photograph taken in 1921, in barangay Bolocboloc in Cebu, featuring three women and a man standing in a river beside a newly built dam. With discernible smiles on their faces, the photograph could be easily interpreted as exhibiting the Filipinos’ amazement at the structure that the Americans would only call progress. And yet, Ypil’s poem spins this typical story by proposing a different reason as to why the women could be seen smiling to the camera:

It is magic, says the girl standing at the edge of the pool tilting her head to the right. It is magic,
says the man holding his arms above the water waving his arms above a stream that has been conjured first out of a bush then out of a cliff then out of a pipe that runs through miles acorss a city, miles across through towns where the corn is planted and the harvest reaped where the fish is snared into a net and then hauled into a ship where a church is built, coral by coral, until it is deemed a fitting place to worship. TA-DA!
[…]
A woman holds up a cup made of coconut husk into the air. 
A daughter smiles, her foot in the water on a stone, because she has been told all her life that she is beautiful and she believes it. (Experiment 11)

As Ypil’s poem proposes, these smiles could have also been for reasons other than the expected subservient awe of the natives to their American coloniser’s innovation. For why should not a Filipino woman, conscious of her own beauty, smile to the camera, and have this gesture be also seen as an instance of her agency? Or: why should this smile be even construed as genuine in the first place? Later on, in the poem “What is the Erotic,” Ypil intuits that power can be recouped, reworked “circularly” (Benitez 12), even in the most rigid of orders precisely through playing along: 

What is erotic is how slick your hair is, how clean, how you stare off into space when you are singing while he is speaking, how you appear to look at hiim, how you appear to him… To wait for directions. To read the script again. To begin somewhere midway. To pretend. (Experiment 36-37)

Indeed, even if one stays within a space dominated by the forces of heteropatriarchy and colonialism, among others, there must still be pleasure to be had in or recovered from the existent roteness of things. Such is a crucial insight that would perhaps decisively upturn even Ypil’s own earlier writings: for instance, what he believed could be “the right time, the perfect time to leave” (“Impermanent Residencies”) might turn out to be just another way of dwelling. Indeed, as Ypil also writes, more recently: “a parade [is] a way of walking around a town without leaving,” one whose “only direction was forward. / And then around,” but more importantly, “a way of walking around town—but with music” (“A Parade Was a Way of Walking,” Experiment 62; emphasis mine). 

It is in this sense that queerness as a critical disposition comes into a sharp view in Ypil’s poetry: a deviance from the imposed order of things, as a mode not only of desiring (see for instance “Five Fragments: A Confession,” Highest 72-75), but also of engagement with and refusal of existing structures of power. In many ways then, what Ypil’s poetry ultimately intuits is a kind of life, a persistence of its possibility nevertheless, in a world seemingly already predetermined in all directions. In other words: living, perhaps as a strange way to leave. As Ypil imagines it in “Window”:

See all the naughty errors
Slip through the narrow nips.
All the jours. Is this not a sweet
Menace then? Barred and bred steel

For the hurt, till the swift flit
Of a stranger strips fast
The darling drapes of the eye?
For the world to see. (Highest 69)

Works cited

Benitez, Christian Jil. “The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil.” Humanities Diliman, vol. 17, no. 1, 2020, pp. 117-122.

Li, Jaimie. “Interview//Fruitful and Dangerous: A Conversation with Lawrence Lacambra Ypil.” Poetry Northwest, March 26, 2021, https://www.poetrynw.org/interview-fruitful-and-dangerous-a-conversation-with-lawrence-lacambra-ypil/.

Ypil, Lawrence Lacambra. The Experiment of the Tropics. Gaudy Boy, LLC, 2019. 

---. The Highest Hiding Place: Poems. Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009.

---. “Impermanent Residencies.” Lawrence Ypil. N.d. 25 Aug. 2024. https://lawrenceypil.com/publications/impermanent-residencies.

---. “Jose Rizal and the Essay as Letter to Home.” Essay Daily. 19 Nov. 2013. 25 Aug. 2024. http://www.essaydaily.org/2013/11/jose-rizal-and-essay-as-letter-to-home.html.

---. Night Report. 2012. Washington U, MFA thesis. 

---. Recollect. 2015. U of Iowa, MFA thesis.

---. “recollect.” Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 27 Mar. 2018. 25 Aug. 2024. https://aaww.org/recollect/.

---. “A song of two cities.” CNN Philippines. 19 Apr. 2016. 25 Aug. 2024. https://cnnphilippines.com/life/leisure/travel/2016/04/19/a-song-of-two-cities.html. Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20230609153641/https://cnnphilippines.com/life/leisure/travel/2016/04/19/a-song-of-two-cities.html.

---. “We Can Only Write From Whereof We Speak.” Kapulongan: Conversations with Cebuano Writers. Edited by Hope S. Yu, U of San Carlos, Cebuano Studies Center, 2008. 

---, and Zach Aldave. You know I was sentimental during the thought of the house. 2022.

---, and Martin Dusinberre. Ventanilla: Duet. 2022.

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