Seeing as saying

As Edith Tiempo says: insight in poetry is usually “dredged up only in the depth explorations [emphasis added] of the poetic imagination. It is no accident that such concepts have been labeled as insights: sighted in (the depths) [emphasis provided]” (“Introduction” viii). For Tiempo, insight is something you look for under the surface of words, ideas, and feelings.

Another poet and regular Writers Workshop panelist, Gémino Abad, defines poetic insight as the

illumination of a thought that no idea expresses, or illumination of a feeling that no thought catches…. ¶ That insight is what is sometimes called theme, provided we do not think of ‘theme’ as an abstraction that can be formulated…. It cannot be formulated; it is lived. It lives in the poem. (“What Does One…” 61-62)

Exactly what are these “depth explorations” or “illuminations of a thought/feeling”? I was more than confused. Could poetic insight be what I took to be the “truths” in the “worlds” that I had “framed” in my poems? If it was, perhaps I am on the right track in this continuing quest for answers.

But if I was to be a decent poet at the very least, I had to find out how to make every little poem I wrote embody a poetic insight — or how to conceptualize a poem revolving around an insight. This was what the Writers Workshop panelists insisted on. And if that demand was not enough, they also cautioned that a poem’s subject must be “reimagined and made fresh”; otherwise, “[w]ithout change, art stagnates” (Wallace and Boisseau xix). It was not enough that I learn how to create “frames” of words to yield “truths.” I also had to make sure these “truths” told something new about the “worlds” contained in my poems.

Discussions on poetic insight in books on poetry or literary criticism, however, are usually given cursory treatment, with the implication that it is something that can never be taught. One book that does include a discussion on poetic insight devotes more or less two pages to the topic, but only as a part of a longer discourse on “subject matter” or “content.” I wondered: if insight “is at the center of making good poems” (Wallace and Boisseau 128), why the scant treatment? If vision is the measure of a poem being good or bad, why are discussions on insight (compared to say, rhythm or imagery) scarce?

An answer came very much later. A suspicion confirmed by Ricardo de Ungria in his landmark book, A Passionate Patience (1995). In his book, de Ungria quotes Kenneth Burke calling the kind of talk poets indulge in, when they say anything about their works, as a “high-class kind of gossip” (vii). The world had turned more scientific at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was no longer fashionable to talk about poetry as if it were an offspring of chance. How could poets be credible when “[t]he irreducible state of artistic creation argues for the irrecoverability of its moment and its contents that endlessly change and elude the nets of language” (de Ungria ix)?

But this did not stop poets from articulating their creative processes. After all, “such insufficiency of the mind is not completely irreparable, and the kind of mental disposition it seeks — one that tracks down, recovers, and assesses the successes arrived at and the losses sustained during the creative process — is recuperable [emphasis added]” (de Ungria x). This recuperation of a literary text’s biography goes by the name of genetic criticism.

This recuperation may also involve the reader second-guessing what a poem means or trying to see what its author saw. It involves the attempt to see how the author “reimagined and made fresh” the text’s subject. It assumes that the author followed what Wallace and Boisseau suggests poets should do:

Discovering a good subject may be partly luck, but luck comes to poets who are alert, who keep their antennae out, who make new combinations, who truly see…. Try to see everything with a cleansed eye. Look at things. Study a slice of bread, for instance; really see it and then write about what you notice. Free yourself of assumptions about the staff of life and shimmering fields of grain. Look at the bread. Like the purloined letter in Poe’s story, the secret is hidden in the open. Look. Notice…. ¶ Accurate perception is not just an aesthetic choice; we have a moral obligation to see what is truly there, not just what we would like to see [emphases added]. (127-28)

Not that what the poet “with a cleansed eye” will see is something original. As John Schweibert says in his literature textbook, Reading and Writing from Literature, “there is no such thing as an ‘original’ work in the pure sense” (17). Rather, the reimagining and making fresh is in being able to see “the secret … hidden in the open.” It is in seeing “what is truly there” instead of seeing “what we would like to see.”

I also believe this alertness and ability to see with “a cleansed eye” is the key to achieving poetic insight. Sometimes, though, vision becomes clouded — especially when one is busy wrestling with words. As Abad says,

language makes us its subjects or, to say the same thing, a subject of/to our community. How this happens, without our knowledge or consent, tells us just how subtle language’s hold is on us. ¶ For language, which the community continually invents, establishes all that the community perceives as “reality” and calls “our world.” Its language secretes the community’s way of looking and feeling about its “world.” So, from birth we are in-formed (formed within) by our speech; and self-identity or consciousness — what the individual imagines himself to be — arises only from those words he can speak himself. (“Lightness of Being” 31)

The quote from Abad illustrates his contention. His use of the generic “him” to refer to both men and women underlines what he means by “language makes us its subject.” He does not problematize the patriarchal nature of language, and so the quoted passage assumes a way of seeing the world.

Photo by Cookiecaper, licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0, and posted on Wikimedia

But because poets are basically “curious [about] how [they] could look with words and see things clearly again,” there is that “urge to change that form [writing/language] and make a special clearing within language for [themselves]” (Abad, “Why I Write” 13-14). And poets are able to do this in the “spaces between words, and between languages, where other meanings may take root — that is, other ways of looking, other modes of feeling. These are possible other ‘worlds’ that the community’s speech does not allow [individuals] to see lest [they] subvert its ideology or way of looking” (Abad, “Lightness of Being” 31).

Moreover, there is also poetic craft. De Ungria says that “mastery of technique also involves one’s perceptions of and relations to life itself and its own patterns, rhythms, and images [emphasis added]” (xxiii). He quotes Seamus Heaney:

Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice, and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resource to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form [emphasis added]. (de Ungria xxiii)

What de Ungria would like to understand of “form” here includes a “meaning greater than that of simple poetic form to include the ‘form’ of a poet’s perceptions and even the ‘form’ his life has taken so far and the ‘form’ he has witnessed at work in life and in the universe — an expression of which he arrives at, consciously or unconsciously, in the poems he writes” (xxiii).

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Works Cited:

Abad, Gémino H. “A Festive Lightness of Being.” State of Play: Letter-Essays and Parables. Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1990.

Abad, Gémino H. “What Does One Look for in a Poem?” Father and Daughter: The Figures of Our Speech. Gémino H. Abad and Cyan R. Abad. Pasig City: Anvil, 1996.

Abad, Gémino H. “Why I Write.” State of Play: Letter-Essays and Parables. Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1990.

de Ungria, Ricardo M., ed. “Introduction.” A Passionate Patience: Ten Filipino Poets on the Writing of Their Poems. Pasig City: Anvil, 1995.

Schweibert, John E. Reading and Writing from Literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Tiempo, Edith L. “Introduction.” Hearthstone, Sacred Tree. By Merlie M. Alunan. Manila: Anvil, 1993.

Wallace, Robert, and Michelle Boisseau. Writing Poems. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Ways of Saying

My quest started innocently enough. There were times when I would try to imitate what had somehow transported me into another “world.” But my imitations took a serious turn when I discovered the series of Palanca award-winning pieces complied by Kerima Polotan-Tuvera. Here were “worlds” closer to mine. In its pages I discovered the poems of Carlos Angeles. And when I found out that for a time his family stayed in Tacloban City, where I grew up, I realized why the images in some of his works found a home in my imagination.

Photo by Tim Pierce. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0, and posted on Wikimedia.

With this discovery, I got caught in the game of weaving webs of words. I dreamed of someday being able to spark something in the mind of someone reading my work. Just as I — crouched in a dim corner between the library stacks — felt in my mind light bulbs switching on as I read poems and stories of Angeles, Estrella Alfon, Franz Arcellana, Manuel Arguilla, Gilda Cordero Fernando, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Polotan-Tuvera, Bienvenido Santos, Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, and so many other Filipino writers in English. I wanted to know how they wove experiences of Filipinos into “worlds”; I wanted to learn how to make such “worlds.”

My quest earnestly began when I attended the 26th Silliman University National Summer Writers Workshop. (Now dubbed the National Writers Workshop, the annual event is held around April-May in Dumaguete City, where Workshop founders Edilberto and Edith Tiempo based themselves after finishing their fellowships in the Iowa International Writing Program under Paul Engle.)

Soon after that summer, I quit my job as television reporter to enroll in Silliman University’s Creative Writing Program. I continued with my quest inside the classroom, and it continues up to the present even while writing what I hope are definite answers to these questions.

Back then I was hoping the Writers Workshop would provide me ready answers. But there are no formulas to writing poetry, it seemed. At least, not like writing news for TV. What panelists in the Writers Workshop did was to ask more questions than give answers. What in essence they suggested, after training their critical eyes on my poems and those of the other writing fellows, and after some kind words about the work at hand, was the need to re-envision the poems. They pointed out that poems fail because they are not well conceived. The first important lesson I learned in that Writers Workshop may be capsulized in the term poetic conceptualization.

This simple advice was enough to deflate my greenhorn’s enthusiasm for the art. Poetic conceptualization was not just about coming up with the right arrangement of words in a “frame.” For the panelists’ diagnosis not only pointed to problems in craftsmanship but, more importantly, also a failure to develop the incipient depth of vision the poems exhibit. The panelists were unanimous in saying that while young poets may easily enough master the craft through practice and time, what was more difficult to achieve is poetic insight.

Seeing Other Worlds

We would fight who among us would get to sit where we could lean over and, puny arms parallel to our father’s, hold on tightly to the handlebars and imagine one’s self driving the motorbike. As kids, my siblings and I always thought of these rides a rare privilege. Yes, even if it was just to the public market a few blocks away to buy groceries or whatnot. There was no greater thrill for us than to feel the wind blowing across our faces as our father expertly drove his bike through the crowded streets.

[Our rides would be something like this, and I would be the child in front of the adult, but with me holding onto rather than putting my feet on top of the handlebars. Thanks to architect Mel Schenck's interesting blog, on his life in Vietnam, for the image.]

But what was more fascinating for me was not just the ride but also the view of the streets we passed by reflected in the bike’s side mirrors. The familiar scenes of our town somehow became strange as these were reflected back. To look from the mirror then to the real thing, and back to the mirror again – there was some magic at work there. So even when the bike was parked and we were allowed to clamber over it, I would sometimes tire of imagining driving across faraway lands. I would instead just sit and stare at the length of our street cast in those mirrors. And even if it was a hot lazy afternoon and nothing was going on on our street, I would wait until even just a dog would make its way across the frame. My waiting somehow became, in my young mind, my being able to will something to happen. And when something did happen within the frame, it seemed that I had something to do with it.