 To je dobro, ki je v poetici, z vseh litoriških. Vseh, da boš, moji in imaginacija je različen. Znamen, je nekaj nekaj in inovitiv, način konceptu. Konceptu, ki je inovitiv, je mpi, zanimanuel kan, kako se nekaj obadi se razljavno. Vseh vrštih, vrštih, viz Dogs, vrštih, vzgledaj, vzgledaj, in vseh zvrštih in vzgledaj, vzgledaj in vzgledaj, zelo zelo se zelo sezelo in zelo svet. the man is the only being among other beings on earth, that seeks truth in knowledge. Truth seeking then is his being or essence as human. Only the truth satisfies and fulfills his nature. Every man has soul responsibility for and answers to his being. The liar abuses language, for the word by itself speaks true. Honor is honor, murder is murder. He deceives himself and others as well, and degrades his own nature when he abuses language. What we call the universal plane is not the realm of eternal verities, but rather the sight of everlasting quest and questioning. Where there are no questions, the quest ceases. What meaning dwells in one's experience of living is its truth as its interpretation. The quest for meaning is the personal aspect of the quest for the truth of things in nature and in human affairs. But one's meaning isn't always truth, all our knowing is limited. In a given scientific field, one has either a hypothesis as the most probable meaning of an empirical observation, or the truth of a theory by consensus among scientists or experts in the specific field of that theory. Yet, even there, a theory has a certain lifespan. Where an ambiguity impedes thinking, we grope to have a grip on a possible interpretation of an observation or conjecture. From lives lived or imagined, we draw our worldview, moral compass, values, ideals, faith. Our truth is there, where love, goodness, beauty are one. What we call our world is what we perceive or intuit in our day-to-day living. Nothing ever becomes real, says John Keats, until it is experience. Our world, he says, is the veil of soul-making. We create ourselves. All the meaningfulness of our human condition springs from what we take as the truth in our experience. The imagination, our mind's profoundest faculty or power, makes real to the mind what it abstracts as the truth in our experience. From there, we weave the words of a language to give it an apprehensible form. Within the writer's word weave, the interplay words bears out his meaning, saisei significance. Our reality is ever more only a human reality. Individually, we have no access to the consciousness of the other person or animal. A cat's perception of its living reality is its own. What is beyond the mind's reach is transcendental or mystical, if you like. Beyond imagination, where no words break. Let's talk about language. Language, a conceptual, evokative system of representation, is our only means. To translate into an apprehensible verbal form, our thoughts and feelings about our world in our own time and culture. Of course, other than words, there are other forms of language. Numbers, signs, symbols, graphs. Language is the finest invention of the imagination. Thus, language and imagination are one. In speech and writing, language translates, that is to say, ferries across its words, our perception of reality. Our words are concepts, abstractions. The word evokes an image, the image lights up its meaning. Say justice, an abstraction. What image in your mind does it evoke? That image lights up the concept. The imagination, to repeat, makes real to the mind what the mind abstracts from our experience. What the mind perceives or intuits in the world. What is most real is what is most imagined. The meanings of our words do not arise from themselves or from their differential play. So much as from lives lived in a given historical time and culture. What meaning dwells in one's experience is its truth, its say-say. Truth-saying or truth-bearing is the very nature of language. Words speak truth. The sense for language is the basic poetic sense. Our deepest sense of reality. It isn't language that deteriorates, but our sense for it, which our reading cultivates. Let's talk about poetry. Greek poem to make yields the English word poem. Hence poem is a generic term for all kinds of literary work. Poetry for imaginative literature. And the poet, a figure for all writers as literary artists. Poem, or literary work, is work of language and work of imagination. Both. It is not written in any given language so much as wrought or shaped from it. Wrought from. That is, the poet forges his own path through the wilderness of language. Where the words contend for their own image and meaning for his own clearing in that wilderness. Thus it can be said, the poet's language is its own. The care for words is care of life. The poet seeks the life of the living experience itself. Either as live, as imagine, or recall, or as only imagine, as live. To write then is to get real, to breathe life into language. Thus finally, the poem isn't its language. It is the living become word. The poem is to live. The poem, the literary work, is already the poet's own reading or interpretation of his own experience. As live, or as imagine. Therefore, its being or essence is its meaningfulness, or diva. Its soul or spirit. Every reader apprehends that meaningfulness, or diva, in light of his own life experience in his own historical time and cultural space. This is why and how the literary work humanizes us. Its subject, paksa, or theme is always a human experience. Our experience. Ubuntu, Sisnel Son Mandela, freely translated, I am because we are. And Albert Camus says, every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer. And this is its whole secret. Diva is essentially in the writing of the poem, or literary work, the poet's own mood or feeling stands or attitude, outlook or perspective. That mood stands or viewpoint governs the experience that the poet depicts or simulates. Therefore, diva is basically the spring of the poem's dynamics or power to persuade and move the reader intellectually and emotionally. And that power then may be taken as the ultimate organizing or structural principle of the whole poem, or literary work. In the poet's entire corpus, his poems constalate and converse with one another. And therefore, the reader or critic is able to comprehend the poet's central themes or main concerns and grasp his unique place in his own country's literary tradition. The poem bears reader to reader its size sign, the truth of the experience it depicts. Thus, to repeat, the poem is to live. Every reader who has an adequate grasp of the poet's language draws imaginatively from his own life experience, including his other readings, in order to apprehend the poem's size sign and diva. The poem's interpretation, therefore, may vary from reader to reader. It need only be plausible. Because as you read, imagine and introspect, you are also read. Thus, it may also be said, the poem achieves a life of its own, reader to reader, over the course of time. We may note, parenthetically, the word interpretation comes from Latin interpretare to negotiate, interpress, agent. Thus, one negotiate with the poet's text or word weave with absolute respect for its integrity and becomes its agent. Let's talk about our country. I agree with formalist critics as to formal excellence in the craft of writing. But I would insist, a purely formalist perspective would evacuate our poems of the Filipino sense of his world, deplete them of the grit and grace and lively humor in our people's day-to-day living, where the poem, as wrought or shaped, has earned its size sign and diva. I think of Philippine literature as an archipelago of letters, because we have many languages, including English and Spanish, both of which have been assimilated over time into our various regional languages, Tagalog, Sigbuanon, Hiligaynon, Waray, Iloco, Bicol, et cetera. There are as much Filipino as that evolving Tagalog-based Filipino that we hope would eventually, through great writing, from it become truly our national language. The fact of the matter is, any language can express anything at all that the mind seeks to grasp, because writing is a discipline of what the words are made to do, such that what is wrought can, through the evokting power of imagination, on both the writer and the reader's part, transcend the inherent inadequacies of any language to probe and encompass all of reality. I might add, the very fact that the writer deals in daily life with English and his own native tongue may even be a distinct advantage. That is, if the writer is sensitive and observant, he might become more familiar with that space between languages where precisely he must struggle for clearer expression of his insights with his language of choice. Let me repeat. The meanings of our words arise mainly from lives lived through a people's history and culture. Therefore, the poem's inmost seal is the poet's country. For one's country is how one imagines her, as when we say, inang bayang. A country is what a people's imagination owes its allegiance to. The literature by the writers, other artists of course and scholars, certainly, their writers, our writers is what creates their works, is what creates their sense of country, which ultimately is forged by their sense for language. Their literature is their racial memory. And a country is only as strong as her people's memory. Memory, which is imagination's heartland. As Nick Jochen says, to remember and to sing, that is my vocation. The writer stands upon his own ground, his own native clearing, the way his fellow countrymen think and feel about their world and so live from son to son. In that clearing, he forges, shapes language in the smithy of his mind and heart and gras his own authentic self. There, in the poetry as wrought, if one reads close and imagines well, the poet and the scholar also may well be his own country's best critic and interpreter. And thereby he might refresh or enrich a current vision of his country's destiny or renew a lost heritage or even transform it. Thank you very much.