I didn't know him from Adam.
This guy Doc Penpen whose real name is Epitacio Tongohan.
It was former Chair of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) Joe Lad Santos who invited me over to lunch out with Doc Penpen at SM Manila on a recent Sunday.
In the middle of editing the doc film "Dumagat" at SFX Productions in Scout Castor, Joe Lad kept on calling me for our twelve o'clock meeting.
I had to request for a time reset of our interview as I was multitasking—as producer, production manager, scriptwriter, prod assistant, transcriber, utility etc.—in my docu project.
The lunch time became merienda at 2 pm which Santos haggled for an earlier re-sked which I still couldn't grant.
Until I finally and conscientiously called on my director Bon Labora and editor Ramil Vela that I would squeeze in a post-siesta time appointment at three pm which both of them willingly left.
Inside the speeding cab where I was transcribing the sound bites of my IP subjects and an NGO worker on the construction of the Kaliwa Dam in Tanay, Rizal and Infanta, Quezon, I was wondering who this founding President of World Friendship Poetry would be.
At a chicken house in SM Manila, I waited for Doc Penpen who might have been tired of waiting for me but his fellow artists from Tanay and Joe Lad were around to assist and tell stories about my future subject.
After a while, my interviewee came rushing in.
As he sat down opposite me, Doc Penpen explained why he is called as such.
Epitacio is indeed a medical doctor but he opts to focus on his art.
He finished his course at the UERM but got his training in Pathology at the UST College of Medicine.
Very unusually, though, among doctors, Tongohan specialized in Forensic Pathology or in layman's terms, Autopsy.
Meanwhile, his moniker was derived from the folk song or Filipino nursery rhyme lullaby, "Penpen de sarapen de kutsilyo de almasen..."
At the moment, Tongohan has been endorsed as a National Artist for Visual Arts by the Local Government Unit (LGU) of Tanay by passing a resolution of his nomination citing his achievements as an eligible candidate to the Order.
Most of Epitacio's claim to prominence in visual arts are international recognitions of his creations of the so-called visual poetry.
Visual poetry is a contemporary art movement where verses and their meanings are intermediary juxtaposed in texts and images.
According to Doc Penpen, he is recognized as the first Filipino Father of Visual Poetry.
What do we call the other visual artists who also mix words and images to convey a message like Gem Suguitan or Pepot Atienza?
Epitacio enumerated his hobnobbing with international and local poet laureates, writers and Palanca awardees.
He even asked me to Google Epitacio Tongohan to see that in the Wikipedia page, the Father of Visual Poetry is written and alluded to in a paragraph without a direct reference.
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