“The person who works at writing poetry, life is never the same again. Seeing is not the same. Hearing is not the same. Thinking is not the same. Remembering is not the same,” - Writing Poetry from the Inside Out by Sandford Lyne
You will never be the same person after writing a poem that you were before you began. Reading the poem after the workshop where it gained criticisms was harder compared to reading it right after writing it. It was like writing it all over again.
I counted months before I went back to my works after. When read the memoir, I wanted to vomit the last piece of meat I ate for dinner. It was overdramatic, overemotional, and over-sentimental. It didn’t achieve the smoothness of the language. I didn’t know how to write an essay. In simpler words, I didn’t know how to transform the incomplete, vague and abstract generalizations into a dramatic representation. I admitted the fact that it was more of prose writing than a creative non-fiction piece. There were moments of radiance, like in the third essay, A Hospital Struggle. It was agreed by Maam Jen and Sir Nino that it was the only article that deserved to be pursued, I was called a graphic writer for this essay. Happily and luckily, I took it as a compliment. “But still other articles must reach the literary level, make it more literary”, Sir Tim commented. I should have been presenting the complexity of insights; otherwise the entire essay would stay in the grounds of narrative writing.
Another comment about the memoir is to combine the four articles into one whole single article since it dealt with the same experience. One long essay with one unifying epiphany. The original plan was to write a transition of motherhood. I started the memoir with my concerns before, during and after pregnancy. It sounded so promising and easy. It was so easy to tell but so hard to show it in words. And that was the thin line created between story telling and story writing.
Writing the memoir became too personal, more than what it meant to be. Pursuing the memoir meant that nothing will be left for the preface. And so as agreed by the workshop panelists, the memoir can be part of my preface so as to specialize on poetry. There was much needed work for the memoir; I grew old and tired for it. I was not a creative non-fiction student writer, and so I resorted to focus on poetry.
“I would just like to read more poems,” Sir Nino said. This became my sole motivation in redeeming myself in writing. I wanted to save myself from sinking into the ocean of abandoned poems. I might be drowning now with forgotten poems. I might be sleeping now with wasted and ignored poems. But I am alive with the possibility of preserving the special moment of being possessed with the muse, the so called divine intervention. That moment can happen only once, the same feeling might be recovered but the same self can never be found again. I took the challenge to record the uniqueness of these moments through poetry. Hoping that when I read them again, I would remember how it was to be inside of that particular moment— to be inside of that particular poem.
The poem “Cocooned” survived without a major suggestion to revise it, only the title and the line cut. This is the original form,
NOBLE SENTIMENT
I became a familiar stranger to myself since you came.
who is being cocooned in the house
being enslaved by another , absorbed.
Who is immersed by your smell, your feedings, your needs
and I remembered my life before you came
as if it were a dream
as if it belonged to some other person
I knew only vaguely.
I lost myself within the tiny coil,
the perfect comma,
of your body.
The common problem with me in writing was to overuse italicized words. My purpose was to put emphasis, but it was irritating to dictate which word should be emphasized and should be given greater focus. It was like obviously telling the readers the meaning of the poem. Therefore, there was no need to italicized ‘another’. Another suggestion was to change the title. ‘Noble Sentiment’ was clichéd. It was asking too much sympathy to the readers. The title should be a metaphor of the unfamiliar emotion of the poem. It should show the feeling of absorption in motherhood. As Sir Nino said in poetry 1, “The poet’s job is to let his reader familiarize the unfamiliar.” And so this is the final face of the poem;
COCOONED
I became a familiar stranger to myself since you came.
who is being cocooned in the house
being enslaved by another, absorbed.
Who is immersed by your smell, your feedings, your needs
and I remembered my life before you came
as if it were a dream
as if it belonged to some other person
I knew only vaguely.
I lost myself within the tiny coil—
the perfect comma,
of your body.
My thesis adviser added the hyphen after the word coil. The purpose was to prolong the first line of the last paragraph and to give a sense of preparation of the last summing line.
“Woman No Rest” was originally written in Ilonggo. It was then translated in Bisaya as suggested by my boyfriend. My old poetic friend Jeffrey also suggested that the poem deserved to have a bisaya translation so that anybody from our Poetry 2 class could comment something. The only mistake I had was to agree with him. I was a no good bisaya since I was only forced to speak the language when I came to UP. This poem got the worst comment I have ever received. The ilonggo and bisaya terms were mixed together making it appeared to be animated. Gikapoy ang katre ug ang iya tiil naglupad, it was the first line of the poem before it went to series of revisions. This line can be best put on a comic booklet for children as one of my classmates commented and was also agreed by Sir Ricky. I felt pity for my poem. And so right after they salvaged every line of it, I gathered its parts and revised it. The next thing was a Sunstar Sunday issue with “Babayi Walay Pahulay” and “Woman No Rest” being published under my name.
I made this poem before my pregnancy days, not knowing how it was to be a wife, to be a mother. I went to the poem again, and had a different impression contrary to the idea I had when I wrote the poem. Now I understood the meaning of foreshadowing. This poem can be a very good example. It foreshadowed not just my pregnancy but the household chores awaiting my way in the road to motherhood.
“Villanelle for a Bumpy Ride”, was one of the poems that got good comments during the workshop. It was the first and only villanelle written under my literary life, as a student. The idea came to me when riding the habal-habal from Mintal to College of Science and Mathematics building. I was carrying in me my two-month old child. That time was actually one of the most dangerous stages of my pregnancy. I was closed to loosing my child forcing me to drop my subject in CSM. I was willing to lose everything except my child— willing to lose time for myself, willing to lose cigarette, willing to lose sex.
I took the challenge to write villanelle because of two reasons. First was to shy away from free verse writing and second was to incorporate the challenge of early pregnancy in poetry. The only suggestion I got from my thesis adviser was to transform the soundless rhythm of the poem into a catchy beat. Because the essence of villanelles is the tempo of the syllables (aside from the syllabic count each line). Each line should correspond to the bumpy tone of the poem. And some lines in this poem intentionally did not follow the third line pattern to achieve a rough, bumpy and bouncy tone.
The original title of this poem was “Bilyanel”. I knew it was a lame title. It was like a kindergarten’s lalaby. Then I changed it to “Lullaby for a Rocky Night”. Still the title was far out or the poem and so my adviser suggested me to come up with a title that would also speak of the poem’s beat. The job was for me to bring the reader into the tension of a pregnant woman on a habal-habal ride which gave rise to its final title, Villanelle for a Bumpy Ride.
Another reason why I wrote Villanelle was the influence of the poem “Mad Gil’s Lovesong” by Sylvia Plath. It was the poem I delivered during the first Sinews of Syllables (an annual poetry-reading under the BA English department). Part of the things that I would be losing for motherhood’s sake was the coming poetry reading. The following months after writing this poem became a pregnancy-worried life for me. I was out of school for the second semester and done nothing but stayed home and waited until the child was delivered.
That might be my last poetry-reading as a student, but there might be more chances not just to read poems of other writers, but there might be more chances to write and read poems of my own. Not necessarily on the annual poetry-reading, but a lifetime commitment with my child— my unending poetry.
Revision was twice the headache of writing. There were times that revision gave birth to new poetry ideas, grabbing you away from the poem that you are supposed to be revising. There were also times that no matter how hard you try to re-enter in your poetry, there seemed to be a wall blocking in your way. And these things I would still not understand. The feeling of being alienated by your own poem. The foreign feeling of being estranged by your poem. Being othered by your own poem. These are the barriers between poetry and revision.
