I started writing a poem when I was all of seventeen. Actually, I tried writing poems when I was all of thirteen, but according to my poetry mentor, Dr Leoncio Deriada, they were not poems, they were rubbish. My poems rhymed perfectly and every line of them was flawlessly cut. How come they were not poems, I asked myself. How come those poems in Home Life, where Dr Deriada was the poetry editor, had been published, I thought. Mine sounded like of Shakespeare. Possibly Dr Deriada just didn’t like me, I began to justify the rejection. The thing I wanted to avoid was my piece might be discussed in his monthly column in Home Life. I hated criticism then and I wouldn’t have known what to do if he had picked my piece.
One day, when I was at university, I received a letter from Dr Deriada. He wanted me to see him. The next day, I met him at the Sentro ng Wikang Filipino. He looked simple yet witty. When he started to speak, I fell in love with his mind. Dr Deriada is a brilliant teacher. It was he who has made me think more cogently and realistically.
‘Roger, a poem suggests; it never states.’ He then took a piece of paper and wrote what he had just told me. ‘Have you read the poem The Golf Links?’ he asked me. ‘No, sir,’ I honestly told him. ‘It is by Sarah Cleghorn,’ he continued. He wrote the poem on the same paper he had taken out. The poem was so short, I noticed. ‘It is so short, but it is a poem. And that is how a poem should be written,’ the old man said to me. I felt lost. My receptiveness was very poor at that time. When I went home, I began to ruminate on it. Then all of a sudden I was afraid to write a poem because what I had written were not poems but rubbish. What I did was I catalogued the words in line fragments and arranged them like those of a poem. I loved writing abstruse ideas, something nobody can understand. All I thought that the more my reader couldn’t understand my poem, the better poet I would be.
The next week I started to write a simple poem, The Golf Links as my inspiration. The poem is titled Angels in the Street: abandoned by their gods/ these little angels/ walk and beg/ their wings are gone/ their clothes so white/ have turned black/ they will grow up/ into demons. Dr Deriada edited the poem. He pruned some long lines until the poem became very short. ‘This is how your poem should look like,’ he advised me. After two months, my poem appeared in Home Life, yet I couldn’t understand what a poem really is. I wrote and wrote, which he always advised me when I met him. I felt good, seeing my poems published in Home Life.
In 1997, I had my poems published in Panorama. I gradually weaned myself off seeing Dr Deriada on to editing my own writing. In 2000, he anthologised my poems in Mantala, a publication published by NCCA. In 2002, I was named Fellow for Poetry to the 41st UP National Writers Workshop.
So what is a poem? Now it’s 2013 and I guess for years of searching for its meaning and importance, I’m ready to tell tenderfoots what I have discovered.
A poem is The Golf Links by Sarah Cleghorn: ‘The golf links lie near the mill/That almost every day/The labouring children can look out/And see the men at play.
A poem could also be my poem Dagmayhood: Water, earth, or rays are superfluous to it./Deep down in the core, come hell/ or high water, something pushes,/then parched curls of the corm tingles,/and that something starts to lay out,/makes space for a sprout to shift up/ through all the coats that have moulded/ bit by bit, one about the other,/for a spell long past remembering,/and set off the outer skin dry russet,/ to tore asunder and chip off. /Inside, the core kips - up to that instant, /unidentified, cryptic, when it stirs, rouses,/calls on the root and sends /new shoots skyward headed for the glow.
A poem could also be my other poem Mangoes: Don’t pluck a stalk of green mangoes /from the tree –/then I was only ill once/ and that came /of eating unripe mangoes./They were acrid /even with honey./Always choose/firm, but ripe mangoes./Wait about –/they’ll fall when they become fully grown.
A poem is Airs Poetica by Denver Ejem Torres: A poem is that thing behind a fly./ That thing here I will explore/ because it is the desire of the groins/ of my mind. That thing excites,/ charms, invites. It is beautiful/ whether it's up in the air/ or sleeping on a brown branch./ A poem indeed it is if it is/ as big, bold and brave/ as the Philippine Serpent Eagle/ that stands on its own/ and goes beyond its black nest./ Well, if the Black Shama/ can sing a haiku, I may like it too./ A poem shall make me want to steal it/ and give me the desire to desire./ It shall be covetable,/ like a banana to a bird./ A poem must fly me/ beyond grasslands and chaparrals./ It has to have a border,/a breakable, penetrable border./ A poem, more importantly,/ must convince and can make/ a man say yes to the offer:/ If I write you this poem, /will you open your fly?
A poem is Water (for B.) by Danton Remoto: For you, my lover, I will be like water./ I will be Lock Lomond flowing/ in loneliness from Ardlui to Arden./ I will be the Falls of Dochart hurling itself/ down the hills of Breadalbane,/ the rocks rumbling with my cascading force/ I will be the rain, slanting/ over Stirling in needles tiny as pores./ I will be snowflakes drifting/ From the Orkney to the Isle of Skye,/ falling in silent fury, as if focusing themselves/ in the cold eye of memory./ For you, my lover, I will be like water.
Thus, a poem makes claims on our lives or enacts historical, social, literary, and spiritual awareness, while remaining grounded in the multiple facets of our lives.
A poem is something that defamiliarises the well-known. It is taut and elegant in its unfolding, yet not overwrought or overtly inventive.
A poem delves into underexplored areas or risks saying the unsayable. A poem exhibits rich moments of figuration. A poem is conscious of rhythm and meaning.
For years, I’ve realised that poetry is a place of interconnection, where mind and body, self and other, innermost and exterior, may come across. And so I see poetry not as an endeavour to truthfully portray an involvement already known but as the making of a new familiarity that presses into some place not yet recognised. I write poems when I am mystified, stimulated, suffering, questioning, uncentred. The poem tries to answer that mystification, to expand the periphery of what I can know and understand; in that long-drawn-out understanding what was shimmering at the fringe can now come into the fundamental. A good poem is fairly like a volcanic islet. It produces new landscape of my depth.
One time, it just came as lightning and it lit it up in my mind. I then began to think that a poem is meant to be shared, discussed, misunderstood or understood, but always contemplated. Not by the educated or uneducated, or the high or the low, but by the reader existing as a contemplative, thoughtful being.
As a poet, I believe that poems deimpossibilise human liberty by allowing the alchemical fire of unheard-of imageries melt the walls of reified realisation, in so doing at one hit obliterating the captivity of the mind and raising the dangers in the struggle to resolve the ambiguity between ordinary life and the marvellous.
So what is a poem? I hope you’ve got the answer. I know it is not easy, but try reading a lot of poems and writing one, and trying means not once – it could be one hundred times.
