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.

Monday, February 15, 2010

PANYO (HANDKERCHIEF)

PANYO

Ari ako—
Gatapis ka tu-alya
kag nagakuso sang mga lampin nga lagu
sa labador sang bula— ako nagduko
ginhulom ang mga kamut
kag ginbatyag ang imo panyo
panyo nga ginmalhan na
ka aton mga luha (sang nabal-an mo nga ginadala ko
ang iya bata
kag hindi iya imo)
mahapdus sa mata ining sabon
nagpisngo sa baho sang sabon
kag nagnguygoy sa nagriligad
ta nga kahapon.

TRANSLATION..

HANDKERCHIEF

There I was—
wrapped with a towel
while washing baby’s wet diaper,
I soaked my hands with soap
and felt your handkerchief
(that you once used to wipe your tears
when you found out that I was carrying his child
and not yours)
this soap stung my eyes
and a tear fell in the water basin
of our abandoned past.
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