LANGUAGE in poetry should be treated with responsibility due to its power to shape discourse, award-winning Thomasian poet Allan Juno Pastrana said in a forum on Feb. 18.
“Language, even in poetry, is never disinterested,” Pastrana told the Varsitarian. “It should always be treated responsibly because language can also be used to oppress people.”
Pastrana quoted Toni Morrison’s Nobel speech in 1993: “Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge.
“I think we should also treat writing as a kind of game or a play,” he said. “I really enjoy playing with words. But always, because the words can have implications–you have to treat it responsibly.”
For Pastrana, imagination in poetry is also a “function of engagement” with the real world. Some writers, he noted, insist on a distinction between our usual perception of the ordinary world, compared with a concentrated perception where moments are translated through poetry.
“The poet creates a record or a trace of that perception in the poem, and the reader recognizes it as a record of the real world. […] The world is fleeting, and the perception of the world that gets approximated in poetry heightens the experience,” he said.
The lecture, titled “Cutting Deep: The Personal Language of Poetry,” was the second part of the UST MaKatha Circle’s “MaKathAklatan: An Author Lecture Series.”
An alumnus of the Conservatory of Music, Pastrana is a two-time Thomasian Poet of the Year and a recipient of the Rector’s Literary Award during his college days.
He is the author of poetry books, “Body Haul” and “Field.” The former won the 2013 Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award.
Pastrana bagged the grand prize in the English division of the Maningning Miclat Award for Poetry in 2005.
In 2007, he won third prize in the Essay category of the Don Carlos Memorial Palanca Awards for Literature. John Kobe S. Balod
