Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Poetry is still as intense as I have always imagined it to be. I am still in love with it.
Showing posts with label Angela Gabrielle Fabunan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angela Gabrielle Fabunan. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 August 2019
Sunday, 4 August 2019
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan : part five
How important is music to your poetry?
I think music is inherent to not only my poetry, but poetry in general. Sound is one of the components that differentiates the genre. I fiddle with the meter, sometimes with rhyme, and I do a quick scansion at times to see if what I want to say is said in the way I want to say it. A poet without a good ear will usually produce tone-deaf poems. To say that scanning a poem for meter is a thing of the past is to say that poetry is a thing of the past. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned and I just write old-fashioned poems.
I think music is inherent to not only my poetry, but poetry in general. Sound is one of the components that differentiates the genre. I fiddle with the meter, sometimes with rhyme, and I do a quick scansion at times to see if what I want to say is said in the way I want to say it. A poet without a good ear will usually produce tone-deaf poems. To say that scanning a poem for meter is a thing of the past is to say that poetry is a thing of the past. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned and I just write old-fashioned poems.
Sunday, 28 July 2019
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan : part four
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I always go back to Meditations in An Emergency by Frank O’Hara. That’s my book. It’s taken me through madness and back. It truly is my meditation. However, I also go back to District and Circle by Seamus Heaney, my collected volume of Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. And my Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English, my first introduction to Filipino writers.
I always go back to Meditations in An Emergency by Frank O’Hara. That’s my book. It’s taken me through madness and back. It truly is my meditation. However, I also go back to District and Circle by Seamus Heaney, my collected volume of Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. And my Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English, my first introduction to Filipino writers.
Sunday, 21 July 2019
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan : part three
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
My poems enters the world as lines, as images, and as concepts. It’s up to the poem, how it wants to introduce itself to me. The ways in which it enters my mind is as myriad as anyone introduce themselves to anyone else. It’s how they say it that matters, because how the poem comes to you shows you a snippet of a text or a character with a backstory. My work is delving into that past to fully develop the poem, tinkering with form, sound, meter, etc. But the first utterance or even the first concept of the poem is my blueprint.
My poems enters the world as lines, as images, and as concepts. It’s up to the poem, how it wants to introduce itself to me. The ways in which it enters my mind is as myriad as anyone introduce themselves to anyone else. It’s how they say it that matters, because how the poem comes to you shows you a snippet of a text or a character with a backstory. My work is delving into that past to fully develop the poem, tinkering with form, sound, meter, etc. But the first utterance or even the first concept of the poem is my blueprint.
Sunday, 14 July 2019
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan : part two
How do you know when a poem is finished?
I consider myself more a reviser than a writer. I don’t think a poem is ever finished. Maybe, during the revision process, the second, third, or thirteenth draft becomes a different poem altogether. But maybe, during those in-between drafts, you start to see the potential or the concept or the beginnings of a poem become your own. Somewhere in-between, you realize that a poem is finished because it is exactly in the order you want to say it, with the exact words you want to say it with. Sometimes, it requires another comma or two. But at some point, you get tired of reading your own work, and you abandon it, and it stops there. Sometimes you pick it up again. It really depends on where the poem wants to go. Just let the poem take you to where it wants to go.
I consider myself more a reviser than a writer. I don’t think a poem is ever finished. Maybe, during the revision process, the second, third, or thirteenth draft becomes a different poem altogether. But maybe, during those in-between drafts, you start to see the potential or the concept or the beginnings of a poem become your own. Somewhere in-between, you realize that a poem is finished because it is exactly in the order you want to say it, with the exact words you want to say it with. Sometimes, it requires another comma or two. But at some point, you get tired of reading your own work, and you abandon it, and it stops there. Sometimes you pick it up again. It really depends on where the poem wants to go. Just let the poem take you to where it wants to go.
Sunday, 7 July 2019
Angela Gabrielle Fabunan : part one
How did you first engage with poetry?
I was very fortunate to have an ally and a mother figure in my third-grade teacher Mrs. Lippman, during my first year in the U.S. She had an enormous library for an eight-year-old girl to feast on. I still remember the first poetry book I read, entitled Poetry For Young People: Emily Dickinson. It had a picture of a tree with a dove in it. I abandoned poetry a couple of times in my life, but thankfully I had teachers such as Professor Anthony Walton at Bowdoin College and Professor Nerissa Guevara at the University of Santo Tomas who picked up where Mrs. Lippman left off in educating me as a young writer of poetry.
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