Consider these ordinary objects and the associations they summon up:Ī son’s note-private and personal, a reaching out to a fellow being, child to mother unlike a letter, a note is raw, unrehearsed, extemporaneous a moment’s impulse, emotionally honest.
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The named objects represent various facets of love and life: the private and personal, the public and playful, the artistic and new, the commercial and practical, the past and present. In naming common objects from everyday existence that reflect what she “loves,” the poet makes concrete for us those broad abstract concepts, those big sounding general and amorphous words: love and life. The tangible physical objects or images then assume a higher significance, their symbolic or metaphorical interpretation that bring out the poem’s ultimate meaning. The poet accomplishes her task by employing the compact and rich language of poetry where one word, a single image, can suggest a wealth of associations. That the quoted lines occur near the middle of the poem is rightly so for they constitute the focus, the center, the heart of the poem. In “Bonsai” the poet shows us how those huge concepts of love and life can be “scaled down/ To a cupped hand’s size,” making these concepts more comprehensible and, therefore, capable of nurturing us and being nurtured by us. What impresses us as readers is the individual poet’s skill in presenting his or her personal take on these broad concepts-the particularization, the personalization, the concretizing of the universal, which gives wisdom and pleasure. All other matters that engage the heart and mind are variations on these. Tiempo held at the Luce Auditorium in Silliman University, a program co-presented by the University of the Philippines' Likhaan Institute of Creative Writing, many years ago.Īnd here's poet Myrna Peña-Reyes on the poem:įor poets and writers, all words spring from and lead back to our basic universal concerns: love, life, death. This was commissioned for and first performed in the Pagpupugay: A Tribute to National Artist Edith L. This is "Bonsai," an art song composed by the College of Performing and Visual Arts' Elman Caguindangan and performed on the piano by Ricardo Cabezas Abapo Jr., based on Mom Edith's most famous poem. Here's a reading of the poem by Arlene Delloso.Īnd here's a bit of music inspired by her work. If you were to vote by prospective First Son.Ĭreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.Food Roundup Dumaguete 2016: Y'a d'la Joie.Food Roundup Dumaguete 2016: 2 Story Kitchen."They don't want to hear it, they don't care.".
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Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and HorrorįutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures University of the Philippines Press, 2011
![bonsai by edith tiempo bonsai by edith tiempo](https://ph-static.z-dn.net/files/dee/394ee1b83ea75e8d89153c87e34c9b56.jpg)
Tao Foundation and Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee, 2013 Handulantaw: Celebrating 50 Years of Culture and the Arts in Silliman Hamster lover.Ĭelebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop