Writing from The Heart

"Writing from The Heart" is a workshop on creative writing, creative drawing, and creative drama. There are three available versions of this workshop: one for beginners on the secondary, tertiary, and graduate levels, and another for practitioners. A third version of this workshop is designed as an outreach program to disadvantaged and underserved audiences such as the disabled, the poor and the marginalized, victims of human trafficking, battered women and abused children, drug rehabilitation center residents, child combatants, children in conflict with the law, prisoners, and gang leaders. This third version incorporates creativity and problem awareness, conflict resolution, crisis intervention, trauma therapy, and peacemaking.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Hello Mark,

Thank you for the nine sonnets you sent me for critiquing. I appreciated them more than the first poem you showed me the last time we were together in the coffee shop.

My comments:

--It is all right to explore and experiment with forms established by earlier poets from Europe, but, always have the objective of developing your own, unique style of writing that can separate you from the rest. It can be done. I am referring not only to Western sonnets but also to Filipino awits and koridos.

--Try writing more loosely rather than constraining your work to fit rhyme and meter. Do look for a copy of the 1969 Penguin Modern Poets 13: Charles Bukowski, Philip Lamantia, Harold Norse. The works therein are timeless.

--You are very young; your poetic sensibility needs to mature, like wine. I could tell, from your lines, that there were instances when you were writing not from your own experience but from your visual observation of the world around you and from stories told by others. Poetry is condensed truth. Do not attempt to write about a night with a prostitute if you've never spent a night with a prostitute--that is an example I am using not from anything of the sort in your writing. In short, do not be a man writing about having an abortion because you can never have one in this lifetime. (The latter can be done, but only through a complicated process called regression, in which you visit, on the astral plane, a previous lifetime in which you were a woman who had an actual abortion. Let me attempt to do a regression on you sometime. Not many writers can do that, by the way.)

--Do keep on writing no matter what. It's the only way to get where you want to be.

--Further develop your powers of observation using ALL YOUR SENSES. Read through my blog on developing powers of observation; the exercises there apply not only to young psychics but also to artists and creative writers:

http://tonyperezphilippinescyberspacebook19.blogspot.com/

I look forward to being with you again soon.