temporary insanity

Writing is more of a sacrificial rite than an act of blessing. It is what I’ve come to realize, and I certainly believe it. Every time I write, I have to wrestle with every word as if they were energy from a strange source.

I was twelve when I started writing poems and never before did I experience this terrible heaviness of heart in perceiving them. Words, verses, and stanzas were abundant as rain. Basically, I was writing for myself then, juxtaposing memorable events of my life in the permanence of every written word. I went to college and to my consternation, I found out that poetry is a discipline, entailing rules, techniques, and forces that I have to reckon with. It is art. Following these nuances of craft, my difficulty arises. I commit myself to the maddening labyrinths of language, and as I do that, my freedom to say whatever I want to say, without carefully handling sense, sound, structure, and style, was lost. It is a very wonderful difficulty I gracefully fail to overcome. Writing was the universe of my heart when I was still beginning. My early poems reverberated, like a lamenting flute, emotions I had for a person who never returned even a little possible gaze. Later on, writing became the universe of my mind. John Masefield, a poet with monumental recognition, influenced me during my freshman year in college. His poetry is distinguished by realism in the interpretation of the minds and hearts of the masses. I embodied those ideas in my poems. Time came when I started to search for my voice when somebody asked me conspiratorially if I think I could write the same way as Masefield does. I admire so many poets. Octavio Paz, Robert Frost, Nick Joaquin, Emily Dickinson, William Ernest Henley, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were the forceful light seeking to illuminate the poetic ideas lurking in my mind – because of my immaturity – I had ignored. Until now, I always think that though the impressions breathing in my poems were my feelings and ideas, what I am doing in actuality is separated from what I write. For basically, the experiences that cover them deal with the things merely imagined, things that I did not personally go through. My poems were interpreted in a way that it is the desire of my Self to become Others, without practically losing my identity. But this, often fails. Perhaps, this is because I have not lived in this world enough. How is it to live? A friend of mine who is a poet in his own right once said that my poems are too abstract, that they vividly showed that the person who wrote them have to live. From then on, the lines of “The Psalm of Life” by H.W. Longfellow were planted inside my mind. He says there: “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrows, is our destined end or way; but to act, that each tomorrow, finds us farther than today.” And he goes on: “Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.” Perhaps, it is not really that I have not lived long enough that I cannot write things which can be identified as mine. Maybe it’s because I want to forget. Many of my experiences are of wounding, of frustration, and of disappointment with the world. I’d say I’m so attached to these experiences, and I guess that’s the reason why I can’t write them with enough poetic objectivity. Writing accounts of my life is a graceful chaos. But I believe, there will come a time that within the deepest core of my being – where even shadows grasp their breath in passing because of its infinity – there will be a poem so delicately mine my soul will never be separated from it. Though throbbing with frustrations that flourished in its entire being held upon my depth, my poem will sing out loud, and never will I ever feel the heaviness in conceiving them.