OPHELIA ALCANTARA-DIMALANTA

By Mann Rentoy

born 16 June 1934 in San Juan, Rizal

and

died 4 November 2010

completed her BA, MA and Ph.D. in Literature at the

University of Santo Tomas (UST)

taught Literature and Creative Writing in UST from 1953 to 2010

Founding Member of the Manila Critics' Circle (which hands out the National Book Awards yearly) Full Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Dean of the UST Faculty of Arts and Letters

Director of the Center for Creative Writing and Studies of UST

Writer in Residence of the Center for Creative Writing and Studies of UST

Best Poem Award from Iowa State University (1968)

Palanca Awards for Poetry (1974, 1983)

Fernando Maria Guerrero Award (1976)

Focus Literary Award for Fiction (1977, 1981)

Cultural Center of the Philippines Literature Grant for Criticism (1983)

the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas from the Writers' Union of the Philippines (1990)

South-East Asia (SEA) Writer's Award from King Bhumibol of Thailand (1999)

WIDELY REGARDED AS ONE OF THREE POETIC MATRIARCHS IN

POST-WAR PHILIPPINE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH, THE OTHER TWO BEING

EDITH TIEMPO AND VIRGINIA MORENO

Often acknowledged by readers and critics for her language, style, poetic theme, passion and maturity National Artist Nick Joaquin: "again and again she speaks in the true pure poet's voice"

Edith Tiempo: believes that "much of the burbling waters of the poetic imagination has penetrated and fertilized the deep dry sands of contemplation"

Gemino H. Abad: "Ophelia in fact is the poem still to write: to find, to invent, where the words do not break" Alfred Yuson: “Dimalanta's lines and phrases careen and jolt in the multiple process of vivid accretion, battening of insight and seduction into headlong discovery”

Served as panelist in practically all

the most respected writing workshops in the

country

Served as judge in practically all the most respected

award-giving bodies for literature

WOMAN AS ARTIST

Marginalization of women not just in literature, but in general. Samuel Johnson:

A man is in general better pleasedWhen he has a good dinner upon his tableThan when his wife talks Greek.

Sarah Morton, a US poet:

“It is a pity that to men belong professions, dignities, authorities, and pleasures;

for women, there remain only duties, domestic virtue, and perhaps as a result of these, the happiness of tranquil submission.”

“What is imperative is not to define in rigid terms this concept of woman as an artist perhaps as different from man as an artist, but to formulate certain norms for the woman upholding human dignity in the pursuit of her profession as artist.”

“Dignity is not merely empowerment as envisioned by radical feminist…

Dignity is empowerment only in the sense that women upholding such, demands the power, the right, the opportunity to assert herself, to be heard, to offer her meaningful share in all areas of human experience…someone not necessarily inferior to man.”

“Ultimately, both male and female artists must be equally involved in artistic projects of creativity and transcendence…in which as much range is open to women as it is to

men.”

“concept of canon-formulating for women”

“..to come up with an authoritative selection of what should constitute the

best and the brightest of texts by the best and brightest of authors.”

In the West, the call is for an “expansion of the canon” to include alternative voices like those of women and minority groups…

“patriarchal domination”

In the 80s, there was only 1 woman in the Top 10 of poets alongside Jose Garcia Villa, Cirilo Bautista, Amando Hernandez and Jose Rizal.

Today (1995), more female poets have been added to the Canon– I hope not because of token regard for feminist sensibilities, but because they have really earned the right to be there by sheer artistic merit .

“…female poet must write her poetry not in terms of man’s needs or men’s readings or expectations, but according to her own felt truths... Challenging the hegemony of male values and to insist on the woman’s voice...”

“Poetry then has been dignified this way by the Filipino poet as a woman, opening up, and extending to horizons undreamt of.”

‘This becomes an exercise of power, of power to name themselves, and the power they feel in the new name, part of the need to become women in this particular time and space, all in the service of that human dignity which they so deserve, which she deserves in her vocation, as artist, as writer, as poet, as women, as academician.”

WRITING IN THE ACADEME

Matthew Arnold:

“..the exercise of the creative power is the true function of man.

“…this creative activity in the form of works of literature and art may be ranked as one of the highest forms of the exercise of creative power.”

- Research, critical thinking and creative writing are supposed to complement each other in an academe

If education is meant to be a means by which an individual realizes his fullest and highest potentials as human beings, then writing is undeniably a direct instrument of education, let alone creative writing which uses language not only as a tool for transmitting ideas but also for producing pleasure in the highest sense.

- Creative writing empowers. Reflecting, sifting through images, memory, experience. Choosing words and syntax, one takes on authority, becomes an author. To write is to examine, contemplate, extend, inhabit an inner space so to speak, preserve awareness, mediate experience and thought.

The chief strength of the writer is his amazing command of words. This is not mere vocabulary, for it is not really the quantity of words that the writer has at his disposal which counts; rather, it is in the way in which he disposes them, how they modify one another, how their effects on the mind combine, how they fit into the whole artistic scheme, falling into the right place without the writer’s conscious control, the feeling of rightness and inevitability after.”

Anyone who expects or hopes to be a serious writer must learn as much as he can about the art, all its methods, devices, even tricks, and try to apply such to every piece he writes until the application becomes for him almost second nature.

Uncreative writing is unimaginative - Style as a virtue, is the developed expression of the writer’s individuality, a distinction of person, of feeling, of imagination.

Higher poetry and unforgettable prose:- ability to transform- facility for creating multitude of

comparisons- intensity of emotion

Literature is meant for us to recover our senses, to see more, hear more, feel more. Conditions of modern life, its materials plenitude, its sheer crowdedness, all conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. Information technology, a computer-centered society, even our characteristic intellectualized education, mere utilitarian living, all these may contribute to the impoverishment of finer sensibilities and the creative imagination.

But can the teacher have time to read and write given their load? Research work? Or Writing? Reading, plus thinking, must lead to writing.

Schopenhauer: “Much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring continually under pressure.” Pope: “forever reading, never to be read…”

The academician must at least be open to original thinking, which is part of creativity. His skill at articulation, verbally or written, need not be spectacular but at least unimpeachable.

 The academician must have

LearningSpecial knowledgePower to theorizeCapacity for creative interpretation

 Finally, a creative work is a work of art and as such gives testimony to what and how it is to be totally human. It bears witness, extracts and generates meaning. It is the most authentic non-physical way of communicating emotions from one human being to another.

 The writer becomes an antenna capturing the voices of the world, and forging a bond. Literature, finally, is a “momentary stay against confusion”, quoting Frost. And certainly called for in these terribly confused and critical times.

THE MORE – THAN – HOUSE IMAGE AS BURNING

METAPHOR : A REDEFINING OF POETICS

 Shift from Romantic vein to a kind of objectively achieved unity, a preoccupation with an aesthetic structure which crystallizes a certain response to a personal experience expressed in literary language resorting to devices like paradox, tension, irony, ambiguities, etc. in the process of aesthetic objectification. Organized imagery, then. A subjectified concrete objective situation expressed in terms of a central image, with the subsidiary images revolving around the central or major image, consistent and functional, and providing a pattern of freely floating peripheral details in the service of a structure-texture scheme, and a well-thought out harmonization of elements within the poem; in brief, an emphasis on poetic technique as art.

The poet has her own unique identity: “to discover, to invent if need be, the special language which will best express this signature, through changing moments, demiurges, influences, this one beyond forging, surfacing through seeming divergences in stylistics in various works.”

 Poetic process for me begins with the desire for self-expression (as all activities are meant to be to a certain extent) that is not merely spontaneous utterance but a way of restoring balance to a disequilibrium brought about, perhaps, by a severe personal experience.

 “…a kind of embryonic subject waiting to take shape in a final fruition.”

 Emotions are transformed into feelings which are in turn concretized into details.

 A certain point surfaces gradually which calls for counterpoints, modulations, motifs rising and ebbing, and finally, consummation. One extreme of pure utterance may lead to the so-called barbarism in art; while the other extreme may lead to studied craft, or mere virtuosity.

 This poetics aspires for a balance between the two in the process of translating raw feelings and original moods into something else – a direction, a principle of aesthetic ferment.

defamiliarization

One writes a poem about something quite unfamiliar or novel, or about one familiar or common tragedy or subject, revitalizing it, giving it new color, new slant, new life….

…the reader then, in the process of reading, is confronted by something familiar with an unfamiliar context.”

Russian Formalistic influence

Schlovsky

Sovereignty of the author

Sovereignty of the text

Sovereignty of the reader

I believe in the sovereignty of the text without taking it as the sole

arbiter.

It sets the terms, with the reader actualizing meaning in the challenging process of adjustments and readjustments in order to gain access to authorial consciousness.

OPHELIA ALCANTARA-DIMALANTA

By Mann Rentoy

Sunsetthis moment’s sinkinginto a deeper cove;tentative caving in,a vanishing of colorsdusky and sullenagainst the water’s slightest blue,

is dipping into a morefestive bower, to gear upfor a new coming outand back into livelier shadesand bloom and a vaster spreading—nature springing once againinto brighter life!

Sunset

An exiting thus is but an enteringinto dark and then backto a splurge of light,and sunsets do not closebut open into another thresholdof a wider faith-full space,a furtive falling and then—

a rising up and aboutinto another fitful day!

Montage

Monday jolts and she bogs down, a ragbag

Splayed off at tangents. WindowsTo the outside and flecks of facesSpring the morning clear at herTo set her into her old dimensions.

Montage

Piece by piece she puts on eight o'clock;

Pillows and bedcovers in a tumble pat

Her in place. The clearest cutglass

Of grapefruit juice teetering on a silver

Tray for breakfast-in-bed exigencies

(Both for effect and effectivity)Is for a fact but fictive in the mind

Which holds the fleeing moment longer,

MontageStalls the stupor of the previous spree,

Images of her beautiful in blank spaces

Wandering truantlike in private regions

Of the night, wisps of clouds jammed

In one wicked corner of sleep. She hoards

Them like a child at play, triumphantly

Pieces them into a single total perspective:

Montage

Splayed off tatters of Sunday, a darkUndiscipline of clouds settled rightInto this alarming set-up environingHer Monday-world, jolted suddenlyInto the teeth of everyday peopleAnd cluttering sounds of slapdash.

MontageShe exudes it now becomingly

As she glides and putters aboutBy turns, spreads it as a scentAmbiguously enwombing her, her form

Dissolved in semi-tones, nameless jewel

Durably ensphered in mist, constantly reborn,

Solid, whole in ever renewing shades.

A FEASTING

Stalking hunger takes on variedShades and voices; worst is thatOf a child’s whimper in the dark,An imprisoned cry, voiceless,Struggling for release, for the open;Three meals a day, a warming touch,Sunspace, one’s personal cornerIn the most chilling night.

A FEASTINGHere they are, all twelve,

Deprivations in all shapes,Gathered in His bosom,His Presence, core of light,As fragile limbs draw strengthAnd faith from that reaching out,One magnificent Host in oneGlorious feasting, on a tableSpecially laid out for childrenAnd all, in their direst need,

A FEASTINGHungry in more than body,For more than food, and soon,

Hunger takes on the glowOf a glorious brightening…Sunwarm, vibrant againstA backdrop of sheerest dark,Beyond the deepest bluesAnd the somber brownsBeyond that hovering gloom,

A FEASTINGA grand feasting here, on a tableLaid out for all… each childA part in us, us children all,Partaking now of life of love,Around his radiant presence,A bounteous feastingOf faith and ever abiding hope.

A Kind of Burning it is perhaps because one way or the other we keep this distance closeness will tug as apart in many directions in absolute din how we love the same trivial pursuits and insignificant gewgaws spoken or inert

A Kind of Burning

claw at the same straws pore over the same jigsaws trying to make heads or tails you take the edges i take the center keeping fancy guard loving beyond what is there you sling at the stars i bedeck the weeds

A Kind of Burning straining in song or profanities towards some fabled meeting apart from what dreams read and suns dismantle we have been all the hapless lovers in this wayward world in almost all kinds of ways except we never really meet but for this kind of burning.