Because Krip Yuson Is Just Too Cool To Approach

Nonfiction by | March 27, 2011

When I first heard that Alfred ” Krip” Yuson would be attending the 3rd Taboan Writers Festival, I knew I just had to meet him. Undeniable as this urge may have been, it was also unexplainable and that made it rather awkward. I needed an excuse for going up to him. And then it came: Mr. Cimafranca, our Creative Writing teacher told us that our midterm examination would be to “attach” ourselves to one of the Delegates in the Festival and write about him or her.

I first encountered the Krip Yuson brand when I read a haiku he wrote that appeared in our Literature book. I was in first year college, and though I had been writing earlier than that, that was my first exposure to the Philippine literary scene. The haiku went:

Is Galman the one?
or are there two, maybe three?
each day, brief to grief.

That haiku fascinated me even though I didn’t understand it. When I dug into its background, I couldn’t help reading about the poet as well.

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Kalingkawasan, Katitikan, Katilingban: Ang lamdaman sa akong dagang

Nonfiction by | March 20, 2011

PASIUNA
Sa nagpurol pa ko, gimatuto kos akong mga ginikanan sa pagpangayog katahoran kang bisan kinsa nga akong ikahibalag sa dalan. Busa sugo sa maayong pamatasan, Maayong palis kanatong tanan.

Sa matag tapok-tapok, anaa gayod ang hudyaka. Ug mas lanog ang dahunog sa hudyaka kon mga alagad na sa arte ang magkatapok. Bililhon ang matag gutlo sa kalibotan sa mga alagad sa arte. Panagsa ra ang bakante. Kanunay silang nagpulaw sa pagsulat og balak, sugilanon, nobela. Busa kon sila na ang magkatapok, wa gyoy pugong-pugong. Ug salamat sa komite nga gitahasan niini nga panagtapok sa ilang pagdapit kanako isip delegado ning maong Taboan.

Karong hapona, akong ipaambit kaninyo ang akong kasinatian samtang nagsubay sa dalan sa akong dagang.

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Ang Taboan Writers Festival 2011 at ang manunulat na Higaonon/lumad

Nonfiction by | March 13, 2011

Ang Taboan Writers Festival 2011 ang pangalawang pagkakataon kung saan narinig ang naratibong Higaonon/lumad sa isang uri ng pagtitipong may pambansang malawakang saklaw. Ang pakikibahagi ko sa ganoong uri ng pagtitipon ay bahagi ng panimulang artikulasyon ng Higaonon/lumad, sa larangan ng panitikan, sa naratibong kaakibat ng kanyang pag-iral sa panig na ito ng sansinukob.

Isang magandang pagsalubong ng taon ang pagbibigay-diin sa panitikang lumad sa Taboan 2011 nitong nakaraang Pebrero 10-12. Tinitingnan ko ito bilang isang palatandaan na kahit pa sa gitna ng lahat na di kanais-nais na nangyari at nangyayari sa mga tribung lumad, hindi mababalaho sa ganoong kalagayan ang pakikisangkot ng lumad sa paghuhubog ng pambansang naratibo. Bagaman sa aktuwal na kumperensiya’y iisa lamang yata akong kumatawan sa panitikang lumad.

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Language and Literature: Imagination’s Way

Nonfiction by | March 5, 2011

  1. Any written work is text. “Text” is from Latin texere, textus, “to weave.” So then, to write is to weave language anew, and all we read and unravel is a word-weave, a text-tale.

The text is not so much written in a historical language, like English or Tagalog, as wrought from language. For the writer, the language is not a given. In every instance of writing, language is re-woven, reinvented, because the writer must find his own path through the wilderness of language. Our thoughts and feeling without our words are like brambles – the underbrush of the human psyche, dream and intuition.

To write is to breathe life into language. For the words of any language are single and bereft in the dead sea of the language’s dictionary. No meaningfulness arises from there, from that dead sea, because the meanings of words do not arise from themselves, but from lives lived. The words come to life only when writer or reader light them up with their imagination – then, and only then, are the words brought into interplay in some order by which a thought or feeling, a human experience, is endowed with a definite form. From there – that form made up wholly of elected words, that configuration of a human experience constructed with words – a meaningfulness arises, from reader to reader, from critic to critic, each one drawing imaginatively from his/her experience of the world in his/her own community of a shared ideology.

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Most Things

Poetry by | February 27, 2011

Among other things that fill my day is poetry
But among most things in poetry; it is love
Many speak of emptiness, brokenness, tears and hate
While some dripping with lust; conjuring contours of bodies in friction
And many, long for the distant lover
Some, lovers in the distance
Like a bargain sale of love poems
Pick your choice, match your experience, hurt yourself
So you take a breath, you step back

And all around, it is like Love, littered.

—-
Fritz is a graduate of AdDU with BA in Psychology and minor in Philosophy.

Requiescat In Pace

Poetry by | February 27, 2011

Verdi’s Dies Irae is playing in the background.
Carefully I listen, without wonder.
I am in the mood for it, as if I intended that
it be played.
No one cared.

I am alone and I feel very light.
Nothing seems to matter.
Slow is time’s passing
as if a second is forever
and a minute, unspeakable.

I see people around me;
their mouths moving as if speaking —
Whispers. Murmurs.
They do not talk to each other,
they are speaking to me.
Not a word is audible, comprehensible;
in fact, I hear nothing.
What they speak is silence.

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Auction

Poetry by | February 27, 2011

I have borrowed you from Moment
when life’s stringent as my budget,
tricked it into pawning up to my last
breath at such a sky-high interest.
I didn’t notice the grace period
and before I knew it, it’s already
auctioned. Soon I will become somebody
else’s secondhand treasured possession.

— 
Orlando Sayman is an A.B. Literature graduate from AdDu and is currently teaching at DMMA College of Southern Philippines.

Edi and the Riddle of the Lady

Fiction by | February 13, 2011

Adapted from Greek Mythology. Illustrations by Juan Carlos Tejada and Kevin Hiram Tejada+

When Edi reached the city’s gate
all was quiet and sedate.
So Edi called with his voice out loud
“HEY MONSTER, WHEREVER YOU ARE, COME OUT!”

Suddenly there was loud flapping of wings
And a large, dark shadow loomed over him.

The winged creature was large and furry
With the body of lion
And the head of a lady.

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