AWARD-WINNING Thomasian poet Allan Justo Pastrana launched his second collection of poetry, “Field,” a decade-long project, on Aug. 11 at the Good Intentions Publishing House in Makati.
Pastrana said his work was inspired by continuous change and activity in real-life places, and the concept of liminal spaces.
“I wanna say that real places are also propositional–you propose the reality of places,” Pastrana told the Varsitarian.
People should deliberately “break the powers” that impose on people how they should perceive a particular place, he said.
“All of these institutions, all of the powers that be, tell us exactly how we’re supposed to perceive these places based on a lot of many different things. Even some of them are very physical limitations that are created in specific spaces. [W]e should have that power to question these imposed perceptions,” he said.
Pastrana defines his work, “Field” as a “labyrinth,” a representation or an intimation of an active process.
“Places are always changing. Even with all the limitations that we have for us to be able to navigate spaces and places, they’re always changing. [T]hey’re not static, they’re very dynamic,” he added.
“Field” extends beyond geographic ideas, touching topics of psychology, “lexical dimensions,” and other temporal aspects, the poet said.
Pastrana, an alumnus of the Conservatory of Music, said his training in music such as understanding forms and structures, helped him in writing poetry.
“When I’m writing, I feel like the intuitive part of how I think about the rhythm of the poem is in a sense also informed by my knowledge about music,” he said.
Ramil Digal Gulle, an acclaimed poet, recalled how excited he and the ‘V’ staffers and alumni were when Pastrana won first prize for the Gawad Ustetika in 1999, the longest-running campus literary derby in the country.
“When you have someone like Allan, who’s a music major, suddenly writing excellent poetry, we were very excited. We were thinking then na, ‘Ustetika is doing its job,’ which is to produce excellence in campus literature,” Gulle added. Rafael Paolo P. Salaya
