Philippine Literary Workshops and Contests: Forces in Literary Growth by Cirilo F. Bautista
As a communal text, any literary discourse is a contrived utterance that addresses several levels of reality, but to communicate through this text, writer and reader must put into operation certain sociological processes that will make it intelligible. "I write, therefore, I am," might as well provide the structural foundation of this sociology. To write a poem or a story involves the deliberate reworking of social elements to achieve the writer's intention. But it is, first of all, a linguistic construction, fixed in a situs of specific explication, demanding of the writer and the reader a vast expertise in language, in the first, to configurate the human condition according to a planned aesthetics, in the second, to be able to embrace it.
Yet another poem in Pangasinan language:
dala na tumatagaumen*
insulat mo so ampait a bilay
asugat tan apuulan so papil ed dalam
pinaekatan moy lua so matam
piraoat moy mareen iran agew
nen akila kan akibakal
ed kapalandeyan
mannangis iray musa
nen inateyan moy sanlasos a patey
inuran na bala so malangoer a laman
say sampot ya terter na dalam
mansa ed dalin no iner nisulat
so sampot mo met ya anlong
* tumatagaumen - a poet; a storyteller
As a communal text, any literary discourse is a contrived utterance that addresses several levels of reality, but to communicate through this text, writer and reader must put into operation certain sociological processes that will make it intelligible. "I write, therefore, I am," might as well provide the structural foundation of this sociology. To write a poem or a story involves the deliberate reworking of social elements to achieve the writer's intention. But it is, first of all, a linguistic construction, fixed in a situs of specific explication, demanding of the writer and the reader a vast expertise in language, in the first, to configurate the human condition according to a planned aesthetics, in the second, to be able to embrace it.
Yet another poem in Pangasinan language:
dala na tumatagaumen*
insulat mo so ampait a bilay
asugat tan apuulan so papil ed dalam
pinaekatan moy lua so matam
piraoat moy mareen iran agew
nen akila kan akibakal
ed kapalandeyan
mannangis iray musa
nen inateyan moy sanlasos a patey
inuran na bala so malangoer a laman
say sampot ya terter na dalam
mansa ed dalin no iner nisulat
so sampot mo met ya anlong
* tumatagaumen - a poet; a storyteller
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