Philippine poetry

Ang Pagpupugay: Pambansang Alagad ng Sining at Literatura celebrated the 2008 Philippine Arts Month Celebration and it showcased the promotion of literature through lectures and performances and the living National Artist for Literature Dr. Edith Lopez Tiempo with her poetic works were staged during the said event.

According to Tiempo, creating a poem means the proper structuring of its two basic constituents, the form and the content, and poetry writers know that in the actual performance, the emphasis is concentrated on the structuring of form rather than on content, and the reason is obvious: At the very start, it is taken for granted that the writer has something to say; the content is therefore early established and takes a back seat while the form and its craftsmanship, gets the writer’s prominent attention.

She scrutinized the works of a number of seasoned writers, and fortunately – at least for her as a writer of poems - she has isolated four ways of enriching the poetic content: 1) by reverberating the theme of the poem; 2) by including indigenous wit and humor; 3) by using very learned and scholarly esoteric materials; and 4) by adopting an unusual and startling idea or concept to serve as the core of the poetic content.

Tiempo also added that there is so much concentration on form in our poetry writing today, so that crafting has become more and more refined through the use of subtle and intricate devices such as indirection, tone control, suggestiveness, ambivalence and ambiguity, thematic tension, understatement, among many others. This is not to say that the writer should reduce his attention regarding form; what we are saying is that all this meticulous crafting on the poetic form has been at the cost of poetic content, the constituent that has largely been taken for granted.