AN AWARD-WINNING writer has urged aspiring poets to write in their regional languages to come up with the best poems.
“It is a form of witnessing. If you do not use your mother tongue, that tongue will die,” said Jaime An Lim in his lecture at the Solidaridad Bookstore last Sept. 30.
Lim, who has won awards from the Don Carlos Palanca Awards for Literature, Philippines Free Press and The Academy of American Poets, also advised those who write poems in English to use conversational language.
“I used to write esoteric words and I realized it is the wrong way of writing poems. I realized that you can use the simplest words and arrange it in a way that is beautiful,” he said.
Writers should also make it a habit to write at least one poem every day to develop their craft, Lim added.
The lecture served as the launching of Lim’s “Auguries” published by the UST Publishing House.
Lim’s poetry collection deals with the themes of love, life and religiosity, as well as “terrible things [happening] in the outside world” such as calamities, misery and death.
Lim read the poems “Auguries on a Monday Morning,” “Random Thoughts Awaiting Completion,” “An Incident in the Park,” “A Sort of Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “Ferrying the Dead,” “Lunar Variations,” “St. Francis with Cats and Sparrows” and “Last Days” from his collection.
