 In this talk, I use the word poit as a figure for the writer as literary artist. And the word poem or poetry as the generic term for all literary works. I also distinguish between communication and expression. In communication, one conveys what one thinks and feels at the moment of speech with other speakers. In expression, one shapes the language to one's own perception or intuition about some aspect or feature of reality, whether that reality has actually been lived or has only been imagined. Literature or imaginative writing is the field of expression. Its subject or theme is our humanity, our experience as human. Literature itself, like history, culture and language, is always in flux. What we usually call fiction, poem, play, or creative non-fiction or essay are only possible forms of expression shaped or wrought from a given historical language. If so, those forms already secrete the rules and criteria of their possibility. The writer as literary artist is always in quest of other forms of expression. The imagination has infinite possibilities. Whatever kind or type a literary work is, it enacts what we are as human beings. But in our individual and in our common history, we have become and may be becoming. A symbolic or imaginative enactment literary works are reinventions of the imagination. We ourselves create the meanings that help us live. We have then, on the one hand, what we call our world, our reality, nature, people and their affairs. And on the other hand, language. The human being alone, it seems, is conscious of death. And so he has a great yearning for this world, this life. He longs for the world and the living to be the meaningful word incarnate. This impels him to translate, to carry the world over to language, to ferry, of course, the words of the language, the wonder of nature, the miracle of living. It is no accident we speak of language as a tongue. The figure suggests that we would savor, with words and words, the joy of living to the full. Any language, in fact, is by itself already translation. From Latin, trans, ferry, to carry across. Any language is a way of perceiving in a given culture during a given historical period. Writing also is essentially translation. We ferry across our words whether they are indigenous or adopted, those thoughts and feelings we have not then found their expression. Or which need again to be expressed in a new form, that they perhaps may still live after our living. What is expressed through words and the images or myths that they are made to evoke is an insight into our humanity. That insight is the luminance of thought which no concept or idea conveys. A regions of feeling which no thought catches. If this is so, then language is our first fiction. And it's working. It's being wrought into poem or story a second by which our humanity is, as it were, again created. Fiction, I said, but no less real. Because it is the imagination which makes real to the mind what it abstracts from our experience. As teachers of English, we want to privilege Filipino literature wrought from English as models of good writing. Precisely because, one, the culture and experience from which these poems arise are our own history as a people. And two, these poems show how English as a medium of expression operates to shape our own thoughts and feelings as Filipinos. In a way of the imagination, our poets have cleared a clearing of our own within that adopted language called English. Even as in our literary history, our writers have done so with Spanish. It may be remarked that the Filipino experience can be expressed only in Filipino. That is to say in Tagalog, Sibuanon, Ilocco, Hiligaynon. But that is to misconceive language. Language shapes the things that it expresses. Language is, as a given historical medium or cultural artifact, language itself is already a fixed way of looking at reality. Therefore, creating a version of that reality. Of course, as the speakers and the readers outlook changes, language also changes. Be it English or Tagalog, language is always already a partial representation of reality. An interpretation of the world and human affairs shared by the community of the language's speakers. But the poet, like most everyone, sees things through his own sensibility and imagination. However, his own self might also have been shaped by changes in his own time and culture. He may see things differently from the way of looking that inheres in the language he employs. In that case, he must work the language to make it express his own seeing and feeling. The workshop approach in creative writing may be one effective way of teaching English through models of excellent writing by Filipino writers. Here, the students are encouraged to express themselves imaginatively by probing their own experiences and exploring the resources and experimenting with the possibilities of English as a linguistic medium. This workshop approach assumes that the very act of writing itself re-creates the language. The teacher, therefore, must show how this takes place. He takes as a working hypothesis and interpretation an end or goal that the writer has set out to accomplish. So he asks, what is the poem about? That is to say, it's paksa, subject or theme. What is the poem's point or insight? It's saysay, meaning, significance. Next, he asks about the poem's final end or goal. Did the poem succeed in enforcing that theme, in expressing that insight? The story or poem itself shows how the language has been employed and deployed to achieve its effect on the sensitive reader. That effect we call the thing. The poem has arrived. The intellectual or emotional force or energy of the poem by which the poem's end is achieved. The teacher's purpose here is to make the student aware of linguistic and rhetorical resources under unlimited possibilities and, therefore, enhance the student's sense for language. This sense for language is the basic poetic sense which is nourished by the love of reading and is the foundation of proficiency in any language. The workshop approach requires close analytical reading of the literary text to open it. For as you read, you are not a passive consumer of a product. You are an active producer of meaning. So, later imaginatively, the human experience that the poem depicts. In the poem's world, you are engaged with a way of thinking and feeling. You see and feel the way the poem's speaker or the characters in the story see and feel so that at the end, when you make an assessment, about the literary or poem's imagined experience, you have first lived, as it were, another life. You have first considered the other imaginary person's viewpoint before you favor, as it may happen, your own interpretation. By cultivating this sensitivity as one reads, one can begin to appreciate what the writer has accomplished, all that he has done with the sole means of language. Let us take two points by Edith L. Ciampo. Lament for the littlest fellow and the poem Bonsai. Lament for the littlest fellow. The littlest fellow was a marmoset. He held the bars and blinked his old man's eyes. You said he knew us and took my arm and set my fingers round the bars with coaxing mimicry of squeak and twitter. Now he thinks you are another marmoset in a cage. The proud denial set you to laughing, shutting back a question far into my mind, something enormous and final. The question was unasked, but there is an answer. Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow, I would catch our own little true and unaware. And from our pain and the dark room of our rage, but I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow. You wake and I bruise my hands on the living cage. That was in 1950 from Sans and Carl. Now the next poem, Bonsai. All that I love, I fold over once and once again and keep in a box or a slit in a hollow pose or in my shoe. All that I love, why yes, but for the moment and for all time, both. Something that folds and keeps easy. Sans note or dad's one goditai, a roto picture of a young queen, even a money bill. It's utter sublimation. A feat, this heart's control, moment to moment to scale all love down to a cup hands size till seashells are broken pieces from God's own bright teeth and life and love are real, things you can run and breathless hand over to the nearest child. That was in 1972 in Focus Magazine. Now, in the first poem, what the question is and what exactly the answer to it, both something enormous and final, we would have to infer both from the imagery and the metaphor that subtly limb or delineate the human situation. The soul metaphor is the marmoset in a cage, a monkey, a monkey whose name etymologically suggests a grotesque mumbling figure. When the husband mocks his wife, as resembling a marmoset which she proudly denies, the resemblance had already been subtly fixed by her own perception of the marmoset as the littlest fellow with his old man's eyes, with smart the animal as human. The husband taunts his wife as the resemblance by setting her fingers round the bars as to simulate a prison cell for her and mimicking all the while a marmoset's squeak and twitter. All male banter or monkey business for a moment's merriment, but it provokes in the wife a realization instantly suppressed because it is dark, something enormous and final. For nights afterwards, whenever the wife would catch the image, marmoset, in her husband's sleeping face, she would only call it our own little truan as though to make light of it. Since in that past moment of truancy and banter in the zoo, she had repressed a dark intuition. The image had fled from our pain in the dark room of our rage. In the poins human situation, bedroom, a site of intimacy has become a variation upon cage and yet she would snatch him back, marmoset, from yesterday and tomorrow because the image held the truth. You wake and I bruise my hands on the living cage. At the poins and we might also ask, why in the title of the poem, why lament for? Is it because the truth is constantly denied so that its enormity, the living cage, might be lightened? But lightened indeed, it is in a later poem, a later moment of enlightenment where the image of the poem's inside appears only in the poem's title, bonsai, where of course assuming that the speaker in lament and the speaker in bonsai is the same, why? The poem bonsai is, as it were, a free form because that moment where all love is gathered is all time. In fact, it isn't so much image of bonsai as idea and feeling which the poem's words enforce. Box or slit in a hollow post or shoe, it isn't the image such as the marmoset in its cage which motivates or propels the poem but rather the idea of souvenir or memento by which one cherishes and nurtures life and love as real, as real as any material thing like a blue engine shawl. This calls to mind Eduardo Galliano's Wander's epigraph to his Book of Embraces in 1989. Recordar, he says, to remember from Latin, re-cordis to pass through the heart. So, be it son's note or dad's one godi thai or even the most ordinary thing like a money bill, the revelation or insight about those mementos is the poem and it would be the highest art to state it quite simply without any rhetoric of irony and ambiguity so cherished in the new critical mode. It's utter sublimation, a feat, this heart's control moment to moment to scale all love down to a cup hand size. Yet, the irony and the paradox are there in the very aptness of the words scale and cup hand so carefully chosen so that life and love as real things appear all the more magnificent. Till seashells are broken pieces says the poet from God's own bright peace. Ah, this for me is the most remarkable feat in the poems making. It is the poet had said for the moment and for all time, both this keeping of mementos, folding over and scaling down to keep easy and cherished so then, till seashells encompasses all time and by invoking God suggest a divinity in that simple yet mysterious affection which sustains life and love as real. The image of seashells glinting on a sunny beach evokes brightness and cheer and so fulfills what the poet speaks of as heart's control. Ah, but there is more. Seashells are broken pieces like souvenirs that is to say they are broken off as it were from those happy moments where life and love are real. Then indeed for souvenirs are deeply cherished there are things there are things that are very light so that you can run and breathless hand over to the mirror's child. That truly is the very sign that it is real for a child needs further proof of love than love. Ya, okay. Thank you.