Marne Kilates: Music Man, Activist, and Poet Laureate of Nice

By Joey Salgado

I knew Marne Kilates the copywriter before I knew Marne the poet. He worked at the same advertising agency as Romy Bohol, a good friend from way, way back. I joined their agency briefly, as a consultant for their PR department. We usually had long lunches, followed by coffee, with  one of our bosses, Jing Montealegre.  

Marne Kilates the poet, I would find out, was a rock star. I once introduced him to a college professor, a contemporary in the movement. “Marne? Marne Kilates? Children of the Snarl?,” he asked, referring to Marne’s first book of poetry. His eyes were lit up. He narrated how he first read the book while studying in the US, and cited verses from the poems. Typically, Marne responded to this fanboy moment with a smile. A daughter, a literature major, once told me her classmates were surprised that I knew Marne. I asked why. “Idol nila si Tito Marne!,” was the reply.

Years flowed, and with it the conversations, some dangling, over coffee and cinnamon buns or beer or wine, at venues where writers, musicians and creative types gather, or at our unofficial hangout Trellis. It was an ever expanding circle of people and interests, but Marne and I always talked about music. 

Marne loved Steely Dan. The first time we met in the early 90s, at a journalists’ watering hole on Scout Tobias, no more than a sari-sari store with benches where a Mao ZeDong wall clock - a gift from a solon with a progressive past - stood out among the displays of sardines and corned beef, we got to talking about rock and jazz, and how Steely Dan fused the two genres effortlessly. We talked about Aja, their outstanding 1978 album, and Marne pointed out that the lyrics of “Home at Last” referenced Homer’s Odyssey, of Ulysses’ perilous journey home. I was impressed. 

Marne was older by nine years, but we liked the same musicians. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Simon & Garfunkel, Paul Simon’s solo years. We would discuss Lennon the philosopher and McCartney the pop genius, and debate who was the better Beatle. One of the high points of his advertising stint, he said on many occasions, was attending a forum where George Martin, yes, the George Martin, The Beatles’ legendary record producer known as the fifth Beatle, was the guest speaker.

A discussion of Paul Simon would not be complete without Marne singing, a cappella, the lyrics of the little-known Simon & Garfunkel song “Wednesday Morning 3AM,” from their first album of the same title. Released in 1964, it was a flop that sent Simon packing to England where he found his muse. A college girlfriend, a DJ at a radio station, introduced Marne to the album.  

“I can hear the soft breathing/Of the girl that I love
As she lies here beside me/Asleep with the night
And her hair, in a fine mist/Floats on my pillow
Reflecting the glow/Of the winter moonlight”

Marne frequented venues for live music - 70s Bistro for Noel Cabangon, Ang Grupong Pendong, Cynthia Alexander; Balete at Kamias for the AMP Big Band. And expect Marne to sing a song or two, even more, at any party or drinking session with a videoke machine or a piano.

But Marne’s choices in music were, to use his own words, catholic. He also listened to standards, jazz, musicals, and classical music. He loved OPM, hailing the genius of George Canseco and Rey Valera, the latter he regarded as the equivalent of Paul Williams in pop sensibility. Lately I found out from Grace, his longtime partner, that Joey Albert was one of Marne’s favorite OPM singers.

There are people who suck the oxygen out from a room. Marne is different. He lights up a room with his presence, bringing light and air. And when he speaks about a topic close to his heart, he would do so with a poet’s exactness for words and the learned, patient cadence of a philosopher. In the years I have known him, I never saw him raise his voice in anger, or try to outshout someone at the table, or make those of us less engaged or caring about poetry feel unworthy of his presence. Marne was the poet laureate of nice.

Marne belonged to the generation raised on rock and roll and rebellion. It was a generation - okay, I’m talking about boomers - that sought to change the world, then later retreated into self-imposed cocoons. This generation found its passion and fulfillment during the First Quarter Storm of 1970 and the EDSA Revolution of February 1986, and in the decades that followed, fought small battles to recapture its sense of purpose and its soul. 

It’s hard to imagine Marne, mild-mannered and self-effacing, as a student activist, but in 1973 he was arrested and detained in Legaspi City, a life experience he shared when our small club of geezers once talked about our activist talambuhay over beer and sisig.

He also wrote about it, and the church on the hill of Sta. Maria in his hometown of Daraga, Albay, in an article for Our Brew.

“On the slope of Sta. Maria I wrote my first fumbling attempts at poetry. I also encountered there my first contact with what was brewing in Manila - the beginnings of revolution. Before then I had been the timid sacristan eyeing the nubile girls tugging at the habitos of their grandmothers; now there were three of us acknowledging the presence of Our Lady of the Gate in the violet dusk, a teach-in crowd of three discussing the shortcomings of government, the roots of poverty, the evils of dictatorship, the hopes of revolution. But it would come to naught. My would-be co-revolutionists were coopted by the military. The one who liked wearing a straw fedora disappeared, never to be seen again. The lanky good-looking one was gunned down on Ateneo Avenue in Naga City; his eyes were gouged out apparently to make him an example. My own run-in with the dictatorship resulted in a month-long detention; as a courier of the local militia, I was a minor concern. Upon petition of the local Rotary, I was released magnanimously, also to show me up as an example.”

Marne’s ashes were interred in Legaspi City this week, at a hilltop cemetery much like Sta. Maria hill. Grace sent me pictures of the cemetery with its commanding view of the city. It had just rained, and the place was shrouded in fog. And like the day I learned of his passing, Steely Dan’s “Home at Last,” the song of Ulysses that we parsed enthusiastically on the first time we met, played in my head.

“Who wrote that tired sea song/Set on this peaceful shore/You think you’ve heard this one before?/Well the danger on the rocks is surely past/Still I remain tied to the mast/Could it be that I have found my home at last?/Home at last”