Rudy F. Alano: Friend, Poet, Teacher

There were two great memories about being with Rudy before that Sunday of his stroke and the massive hemorrhage that followed. One was the lunch we had with at another friend's place. Grace Janer is that friend and that day was ordinary Tuesday. We were out on the porch and our conversation would drift from thoughts about friends and to the soft rains and the tiny birds darting in and out of trees and the blues and ballads we were playing. Then there was the fiesta in Canaman, in the home of another friend, Danny Gerona. Rudy was talking and reminiscing, and the old songs being played by Dan helped the conversation.

In those two events, songs were present. And the skies and the clouds. Romantic images, as Rudy the poet would call them. But for those who knew Rudy, songs or poems - poems and songs - were always with him.

I got to know Rudy first as a teacher in Ateneo de Naga College. He was very young then, fresh from the Silliman Writer's Workshop. He was with a group of young teachers and they were all fearless. The group was composed of Mel and Lina Regis, Myrna Nocos and Rudy. They were advisers to this group called the SP2ASM, the only student group allowed in the campus then. It was Martial Law.

The group, as the name indicated, was into Symposium/Production/Promotion/Arts/Survey/Music. The entry to the organization, a very small one, was by invitation.

In the case of Rudy, he was directing plays and introducing works for the first time in the classroom and the campus. He let us work on poems from Dylan Thomas to the songs of Bob Dylan, reminding us to look at the songs first as poems and later as protest items. We marveled with him at the skill of Don Mclean's composition and the twists and the turns of words of e.e. cummings.

He made us see the pagan virtues in the pieces of Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." "And, in the isolation of the sky,/At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink,/Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

We suffered alone (though he watched us) to contend with the images of Ezra Pound. There was no escaping the two lines: The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet black bough. Just two lines and an honest understanding and feeling for the lines. No pretense. No false intellectualism.

In the wake that followed after Rudy's death, everyone agreed that Rudy taught everyone to be honest with one's emotion, and one's thought. Everyone agreed that if there was one fond memory they had of Rudy's, it was that he was good in pulling down anyone from a lofty intellectual perch. Or pseudo-intellectual position.