To write is to put yourself in war against a blank page, against your own self, adjacent to your belief, your orgasm fantasies, your being a man or a woman. When you write, you lose your sexuality and rediscover yourself. It is of losing what is not there. You lose the emptiness in you and you put in words not necessarily to form poetry or memoir. You write without necessarily knowing what you are writing and what writing is really all about. The process will let you know what writing is; who is the persona in you writing it; who you are and where your writing would bring you.

I chose Poetry because I thought it was the easiest genre. It can be short, but it can’t be easy at all. There was no easy way or short way or right way. There is only try. You tried to incorporate your life experiences together with your imagination into the lines of poetry.

Poetry needed to be born. You needed to be pregnant with words. You have to have sex with your mind. You have to have sex with yourself. You have to have sex with words. You craved for Sylvia Plath and Kate Choppin in the middle of the night. And when you had them inside your mouth, you feed them to the hungry little poetry inside your womb, inside your mind, in-side of you. You have eaten too much of them. You vomit; it’s not called morning sickness because you are not really pregnant. You just hoped you are. You just imagined being pregnant. You vomit everything on top of the paper. “Its not poetry”, your critic said. It’s still not poetry. Nothing was left in your stomach; remember that you vomited Sylvia Plath and Kate Choppin. Nothing was left inside your stomach; remember that there was really nothing in it. Nothing creative. Nothing poetic. But you kept on vomiting words. Words on the paper. Words on your table, on your floor. Words like these. Words like these.

What really is Poetry? “Poetry gud, kanang nay rhyme-rhyme, poetry na”, being exposed to elementary and high school publication, we have had pseudo poems published by proud pseudo writers. These poems spoke of young love all the time, being drunk with too much emotion, forgetting and failing home works. That was poetry. Not until I read Poetics in CL 121. By then I knew that there should be a certain distance between the work of art. We called it aesthetic distance. Poetry is not always all about strong emotions on top of the paper. It is not always all about unrequited love or juvenile shit. It can be about a cup of coffee, a cigarette butt, a fly buzzing around you. What is important is how the fluidity of your language transcends into a startling insight. Catharsis must be there, but catharsis can only be achieved if we see something that is both recognizable and distant. And for that, I hated to talk about poetry. I hated to write what I thought was poetry. And for that, I failed de Ungria’s Poetry 2. Writing this preface is having is too much courage to defend a thesis of poetry without retaking a failed poetry class. Not knowing what lies ahead.

I wanted to abort poetry ideas in my mind. If only cortal tablets can abort the desire to write poetry, I would probably overdose myself. Part of my journey in writing is the intimidation to write. I was intimidated by my own writing, and so, as always, I would end up abandoning what I thought was poetry. Words may have failed me, but I still had them. As with any emotion that feels unspeakable, I turned to poetry.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Irony of Baking Thoughts



While waiting for my son’s arrival, I attended a commercial cooking short term course in my family’s school for more than two months now.

Just this morning, while I was making a meringue for the heart cakes, an unknown intrusion passes through my mind...

The baking pan seemed to be battling with the spatula and the noise was a shotgun to my ears. The sound coming from the electric mixer was grinding my teeth. If it’s not for my desire to bake my first cake, I would definitely leave the kitchen room.
But since I have so much interest with different colors of sugars and sweets, I go with the noise’s flow and wait until a toothpick became clear enough signaling that my cakes were done.

I never imagined myself wearing a chef’s uniform neither holding a cooking pan in front of the gas range. Two months were gone and I have learned the essential element of having a kitchen (which will be part of my new role, being a mother). *char

The irony behind all this is that the water inside my womb is more than half of that of my son’s, and so, my ob restricted me from eating sweets. Too much sugar can poison my son. Even fruits are not allowed to be part of my meal. My carbohydrate intake was trimmed down to ¾ cup per meal. I could only eat unflavored crackers for my merienda. One more reason why I was given a strict diet is that my son is too big to pass through my cervix diagnosing to a positive cesarean operation.

All my butterscotch, brownies, tarts, cakes and durian candies seemed to be so far away even they were just right in front of me.

When things seemed to be so unfair in my part, I just look at my son’s ultrasound photos and I can taste the sweetest thing called motherly sacrifice.
Posted by at

2 comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

My Blog List