Seeing Other WorldsWe 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 streets.
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 if it was a lazy hot 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 my enchantment with the world reflected in “mirrors” did not end there. My siblings and I would borrow children’s books from the public library. It seemed we would never tire of reading those books, sometimes going back twice in the day to borrow more of the same. (Our father had to explain to the librarian that we did read, and not just flipped through the pages for pictures, every book we signed out.) Among the books we would borrow were some that schoolchildren in the US most probably used to learn about their communities. It had stories about the different people who lived in these neighborhoods, what they did for a living, and how they all contributed to making their community into such an ideal place. Some even had maps or bird’s-eye-view pictures that would show where the firehouse is, or the church, or the mayor’s office, etc.
When television came to our part of the world, all of us—even the eldest who was in the higher grades—got hooked on Sesame Street. By then we were a lot older than the show’s target audience, and our command of English made us aware of more than the program’s ABCs and arithmetic. Yet, every time we came home from school we would all rush to sit so quietly before this magical box.
What I found so entrancing about the show was the whole fictional community of people and puppets living in what seemed to be a New York neighborhood. There was the black couple and the Hispanic sweethearts and, yes, even the grocer himself. Of course there was Oscar the Grouch, the affable Big Bird, the reclusive Mr. Snafflelapagus, the Count, and the roommates Ernie and Bert. There was also the voracious Cookie Monster, the gangly Grover who sometimes thought he was a superhero, there was Kermit the Frog, and so many other colorful characters. Here was a “world” that seemed, if only it was not so perfect to my young eyes, so much like the one I lived in. Except mine did not have puppets for neighbors or brownstone apartments and stoops, and had a sari-sari store instead of a grocer’s. But it was basically the same world to me. It was the same length of street in the mirror. It was those books all over again (though by this time I had graduated to juvenile and not-so-juvenile novels). There was something in that TV show that made me look at our neighborhood in a different and more comprehending light.
Much later I read the multiawarded scriptwriter Ricky Lee say of the writer’s work:
"The writer’s task is to see, and to show others what s/he sees. When we watch a magic show, we just don’t enjoy it with jaws hanging in amazement. We go backstage because we need to see how the magic is done. And if we aren’t allowed backstage, we imagine what is there. We writers like going backstage" [my translation] (3). My fascination 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 more serious turn when I discovered the series of Palanca award-winning pieces compiled by Kerima Polotan-Tuvera. In its pages were "worlds" closer to mine; here were Filipino "worlds" in the poems and stories by Carlos 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. With this discovery, I got caught in the magical world of words. I dreamed of someday being able to spark something in the mind of someone reading my own works, just as I—crouched in a dim corner between the library stacks—saw light bulbs lighting up as I read the poems and stories of these Filipino masters. My fascination soon became a quest to learn how to write like these Filipino writers. It earnestly began when I attended the 26th Silliman University National Summer Writers Workshop founded by Edilberto and Edith Tiempo. Back then, I was hoping the Writers Workshop would provide me ready answers to my questions about writing poetry. But there are no formulas to writing poetry, I soon found out—at least not like writing news for TV. What the 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 "re-visioning" of the poem. They pointed out that poems fail because they are not well conceived. The first important lesson I learned in that Writers Workshop could be summed up by the term poetic conceptualization. This simple advice was enough to temporarily deflate my greenhorn's enthusiasm for the art. Poetic conceptualization was not just about coming up with the right arrangement of words in lines and stanzas. The panelists' diagnosis not only pointed to problems in conceptualization but, and more importantly, also a failure to develop the incipient depth of vision the poems exhibit. The panelists were unanimous in saying that while young or beginning poets may easily master the craft through practice and time, what was more difficult to achieve is poetic insight. What exactly is poetic insight, and how do I attain this? How do I use this insight to effectively conceptualize a poem? Soon after that summer's Writers Workshop, I quit my job as a television reporter to enroll in the university's Creative Writing Program. Works Cited
Next: Ways of Seeing
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AbstractCritical PrefaceRationale
Review of Related Literature Theoretical/Conceptual Framework Statement of the Problem Significance of the Study Objectives of the Study Research Design Analysis of Selected Works Summary of Findings Conclusion Implications of the Study Recommendations Creative Work Seeing Other Worlds by Nino Soria de Veyra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Philippines License.  |
