UST Publishing House Director Benedict Parfan compiled a decade’s worth of poetry sequences in his newly released poetry collection, “Beloved Antimatter.”
According to Parfan, the title is an allusion to loss, taken from the first sequence of the book.
“Antimatter is the reverse of matter, of course. It’s an address to what or who is no longer here,” Parfan told the Varsitarian.
Deviating from his previous poetry collections, Parfan structured “Beloved Antimatter” using four chapbook-length sequences, with each sequence having its own individual theme.
“It’s basically a collection of sequences rather than a collection of individual poems. Each sequence is focused on a particular theme, so each sequence is its own project,” Parfan said.
While this experimental approach may affect the coherence of the overall work when shuffled, Parfan said he “feels more at home” with writing sequences than writing just single poems.
“I can be more adventurous. I could have more fun in terms of form. I could have a sequence of fragments as opposed to a sequence of full poems,” he said.
“Beloved Antimatter” is also a homage to two Thomasian poets: Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters and former Varsitarian assistant literary editor and Lourd de Veyra, a journalism alumnus and former Varsitarian literary writer.
Published by the University of the Philippines (UP) Press, Parfan said that he started writing the book when he was getting his master’s degree.
Parfan said he hopes aspiring writers learn from his book that poetry collections do not always have to be thematically consistent.
“I hope the takeaway is that it’s completely acceptable to try to create a variety of things within one collection [and] that you don’t have to be so focused on just one thing,” he said.
Apart from heading the UST Publishing House, Parfan is also a resident fellow at the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies (CCWLS) and a researcher under the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities (RCCAH).
