Revisiting 22 year old Philip

I wish I were still this bold and extroverted (though also naive), but ah! how experience changes us...


Philip Jucaban
Professor Gimenez-Rosello
Due: 9/28/00
Assignment: Concrete Abstraction Essay
Word Count: 1612

Dizzy Ranting Non Sequitur-ism

Poetry came into my life and I have been her slave ever since. I feel I must write everything in my head or it will be lost to the world forever. A pen and paper are chained to my body so that I may never miss writing down a thought, for one of these thoughts may become words that will change society or give the rest of my writing some attention. I don’t really know if my muse is waiting for an opportunity when I am without a writing utensil to inspire me, but I’m not willing to take that risk.

My relationship with Poetry is a paradox. While I have this excessive need to write until my hand goes numb, I feel a sense of freedom when I write. There is no need to make “sense.” There are no concrete rules to follow. My mind can wander and drift . . . and go surfing before class, and follow a path I’ve never walked before, and float through the clouds, and strum the same D minor chord a few million times on my acoustic guitar while sitting on a boulder in the desert, or do a pirouette while spotting my dance instructor’s funky looking nose, and then do a quick hop-shuffle-step-flap-flap, and then hop onto the track, sprint the straight-aways and jog the curves. My mind can go anywhere when I’m thinking of something to write.

And by the way, Poetry is a written art form that allows me to express myself freely and without restriction, but must be refined or then again…

I would say the first poetry I ever wrote was NOT what I was assigned to do in high school English class. Rather, it happened naturally, almost unconsciously. It was based on raw experience and came from my adolescent soul.

I was finding my way through the thick of the emotional, turbulent high school years by writing my troubles and triumphs in a journal-- not quite poetry, but more like: My girlfriend and I broke up a few days ago, I am sad, I want to die, but this other girl thinks I’m hot, so now I am popular, type of writing. Pouring out my daily ups and downs onto paper became my therapy, my escape from the world of social pressure-- trying to be cool, being all that my parents wanted me to be, and giving my teachers what they anticipated from a promising student like myself. I scored in the top ninety percentiles for the standardized Math, English and Science tests. For that reason, I was expected to excel in all my classes.

Even with all the pressure on my shoulders, I did perform as well as my teachers and parents expected. I completed all my assignments on time and got no grade less than an ‘A.’ On the outside, I was a confident and yet shy, over achieving nerd, but inside I felt trapped, confined by sets of scientific, mathematical and grammatical rules. Of these three subjects, it was in English I chose to start a silent rebellion. On the surface, I played by the rules. I followed the prescribed rules of high school English essays. Of course, I divided my essays into an introduction with a thesis followed by body paragraphs that started with topic sentences and closed it with a conclusion that restated all the main points in a fresh new way. During the section in poetry, I wrote sonnets with precise use of iambic pentameter in the set the rhyme scheme like my teacher told me to do. Little did they know I was starting my own little literary revolution.

In my journal it was rage against the machine, baby.
no capitalization, no verbs in every single sentences-- incorrect, use; of. punctuation?! no topic sentences or main ideas and no periods at the ends of sentences

It was liberating. There, in my journal, I protested against a set system of language, speaking to the page of paper in my own unique voice. Only after abandoning set sentence structure and letting go of the formal rules of essay writing did I discover the joy of truly expressing what I feel inside in free flowing words. Hegel said: “Words fail . . . but they are all we have.” This is to say we can never truly communicate what we feel into words that others can understand in the same way we understand them. But that’s all we have to work with, words, so let me expand his idea and say we should use words as much as we can and in many different ways. By doing so, we come closer to the truth that these words attempt to reveal.

I began to write in my journal religiously about various subjects. I wrote it all-- the rain that fell, the sunny days, the pain of love lost, the boredom of class, and about the Broadway plays and Sunday mass-- there was nothing that I couldn't write about in that journal. My writing took on a new direction. It would often be a list of adjectives, a comparison between two unlikely objects or events, an appreciation for the world around me, a description of nature, an attempt to capture a moment, details and more details, questions and possible answers to those questions. I didn’t realize it then, but some of what I wrote was poetic. Through the teenage experience I laid my poetic roots into the earth and was now ready to suck the essence of life out of the world and spit poems out onto the page.

I am a tree that walks around and does not stay in one place. My roots our feet that allow me to jump and run and do cart wheels. I may stop for a while to catch my breath, smell the roses and watch a sunrise, but then after that I’m off and running again out to learn of other environments.

Reckless writer, Philip Jucaban, young and rebellious, some may call brilliant and unfortunately lazy, or a radical literary theoretician, maybe even stupid or naive, but “Hey!” That’s me.

In the first two years of my collegiate career, which was in a junior college, I took Creative Writing and Poetry classes to learn more about what I thought I was doing when I wrote in my journal. I had no clue what work it was to write poetry. Taking junior college Poetry courses was a humbling experience.

I found I knew little compared to what I thought I knew about writing poetry. After gaining a fuller understanding of the craft of writing poems-- the constant revision, the significance of word choice, the various uses of sound, the use of space and all the other particulars-- I viewed my journal with disenchanted eyes. My writing was: superfluous, flowery, fluffy, Rainbow Brite, unjustified sentimentality-ish, semantically ambiguous in a confusing (not double meaning) way, void of any tangible emotion-- prose.

Here’s how I described how passion took hold of me, (It’s a bunch of goo.)

It came into my life like a crazy weathered day, like a roaming fog settling in one location then swallowing itself whole, and then clearing out as a tropical, Pina Colada-yellow sun slowly ascends-- mightily, gloriously into the sky, and is followed by translucent, warm drops of water combined with rays of morning light that caress my young face as a child-- admiring eyes half shut, a smiled painted on and a head as round as a deflated soccer ball that looks with an appreciative gaze skyward.

That is not to say it was done without inspiration or the desire to capture the world in words. One of my English professors told me I had the impulse and that was essential. With that in mind, I went about learning of all the poetic devices and ways to improve my writing.

This running tree decide to stop jumping and doing cart wheels to learn about assonance, off rhyme, poem structure and things of that sort.

I added those poetic devices and perspectives to my repertoire. They opened up new fields for me to play in. I no longer ran in circles around the track; now I had a mountain bike and in-line skates and a razor scooter to move around. I might run on the beach one day, then do some trail running in the forest another day. I could use these tools to write poetry with different aspirations in mind: music, vivid imagery and sentiment without being sentimental. This newly discovered knowledge allowed me to do things like draw with words my lover’s face in detail, with colorful emotion and a rhythm that guided you through the poem. (I would rather not share it, though) My poetry became more sophisticated, complex and secular.

I hope to further develop my style and wait for the day that my crazy, off-the-wall way of writing will be accepted by the literary community. I write as if everything is everything, and logic is what makes sense to me. It may not be fair to leave the reader with the task of deciphering my patterns of thought. Maybe I should consider my audience with more compassion. Maybe I should try to play by the rules and not make up my own. Will I cool off, slow down, take time to think, to revise and restrict myself from flying over the rainbow and into outer space, or shall I die a young, stubborn romantic and be put into a coffin, psychotic eyes left open and a crazy smile? Hmmm. . .


Well, eight years have passed and I’m not dead yet!