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Copyright 2000-2001
Beverly Claire L. Fangonon.
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Life is a Lark...Not!
A quick roll call of the poets I read and loved from childhood to early adulthood. Written despite my knowing that it will bore you to repose. My sincere apologies to the great and beloved poets I identified here, for mentioning their names in such a dull and boring manner.
The Long Blah: Poetry Of My Youth 11 November 2001
Auntie Ann, who babysat me and my siblings when we were toddlers, told me that I was a very well-behaved child, and when scolded, never bawled loudly nor threw tantrums, but instead would just sit and cry silently.
As a child I was pretty quiet and introspective, the one who seldom smiled. Like my older sister and younger brother, I loved to read, and one of my favorite childhood books was Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. It was not surprising, then, that when I wrote my first ever poem at the age of 9, it was about a bee on a tree. Other poems that followed were garden-related: flowers, sunshine. Growing up, I loved poems by Lear, Nash, Kipling, Frost and Joyce Kilmer. Kilmer's "Trees", in particular, influenced me heavily in my sense of what a good poem should be like, and it took me ages to write a short poem because even then I was already very much concerned with rhyme and meter (Of course, I didn't know until high school that these elements were named as such).
High school literature introduced me to a much wider range of poetry, all of which I enjoyed reading, though admittedly I had difficulty appreciating free verse. The poems I loved to read and memorize were formal masterpieces by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Blake and most especially, Wilde, whose poetry I worshipped in high school. By then I had turned into the typical angry, sullen teenager, who dreamed of running away from home. Along with that, however, was this desire to know everything that was going on with society, and thus I started reading newspapers and political magazines from the age of 13. I took everything seriously, and would carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. This showed in my writings. At school, I hated Math, and was average at Science, but fortunately reading, composition and extra-curricular activities--especially those that involved fairs, stage performance and arts and crafts--made school fun for me. I enjoyed the class presentations where I would lead a group and not only be in charge of costumes and props, but also script writing and music selection.
I stopped writing poetry altogether by the time I entered college, although by this time I doubled my reading load. It was in college that I encountered the works of Yeats, Auden, Pound, Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was instrumental in my learning to appreciate, and later on, even write, free verse. I actually made an attempt to memorize "Howl". It was Sylvia Plath, though, that forever changed my way of looking at poetry. Growing up in a very conservative environment, I had a very long list of words and emotions considered to be "bad", and I was--not surprisingly--very inhibited both in practice and in writing. Plath, whose works I adored (and still do), showed me how raging passion and raw emotion could be channeled into beautiful, carefully crafted verses, mercilessly thought-out and rewritten, painfully confessional. Her poems were what finally made me realize that I didn't have to end everything with a rhymed couplet in order to be happy.
More than two years of reading but very little writing resulted in the bursting of the dam, so to speak, that when I left home at the age of 19, I felt that now I could write whatever I felt like writing, nevermind my upbringing. In the Philippines my vocabulary was squeaky clean, but it was in a co-ed dorm in Tokyo where I learned how to swear, courtesy of a group of international friends, including an Argentine who teasingly referred to me as "Sister Claire". It was here in Japan that I finally had the courage to include adult words in a poem, without having to cringe or squirm. (The religious right in me, though, is disgusted with this and longs for the day when I could write effectively without having to employ such words.)
I may be an avid reader of poetry, but am certainly not a prolific writer of it. I can only write upon inspiration, and most days I am not inspired, which means that usually I am unproductive. This is why I don't consider myself a poet. I love poetry, and I write poems sometimes, but that doesn't make me into a poet. Which is okay, because I am content enough to read, listen to, and admire the works of others.
Click on the notebook to open 16: Literary Jottings
This little notebook of poems, which I titled 16, were works written by me between the ages of 9 and 16. Hopefully I could collect sixteen of such early poems and upload them here, although this is quite difficult as at that time I wrote in loose sheets of paper, and being quite disorganized, left (or more accurately, lost) them in unknown places. My sister Sharon managed to dig up four pieces of paper with finalized poems, and sent them to me last week. I'm uploading them here at ClaireWorks, for two reasons: posterity's sake, and the fact that once I start my life as a corporate animal next year, I doubt that I'll have the time to indulge in such sentimental endeavors.
[I do hope you enjoy the few that we've managed to find and upload.]
Related Links
16: The Early Works - A small notebook with a sampling of the poems I wrote back when the days were young and I got 8 hours of sleep each night (1987-1994).
The ClaireWorks Poetry Folio - A little book of twenty lousy poems by yours truly, written from April 1997 to present.
