Happy to Meet Again My Poet-Friend Eric Tinsay Valles

I have been very lucky and honored to have met some real geniuses among my contemporaries - people who have far more intellectual superiority than I have - and yet are also very humble and unassuming.

I am quite humbled that some of them are my friends here in Facebook and that they read what I write and react to it sometimes - because there are many things I could not see or comprehend that they could articulate with startling clarity.

Naturally, most of them are engineers since that was what I took in college, but as I grew older, I've met some who are from the fields of medicine, law and this guy, whom I've always respected very much - who chose to invest his talent in poetry.

Like many UP freshmen, I got lost in the maze and the academic rigors of that school. UP, especially Diliman, is not for the weak-hearted, certainly not for the academically feeble.

Nurturing and caring for their students is NOT in the vocabulary of my teachers then - and I hope until now. The academically challenged will just naturally drown while the rest like me, crawl very very slowly until we f****ing graduate.

So with that backdrop, Eric was one of the people who helped me survive the school. We were both avid Top 40 music followers and I guess that was the glue that made us become friends.

He has an impeccable academic background and certainly set the bar for me as to how smart Ateneans really are.

He loved literature then and with his life work now - I could see that he has really chosen poetry as his work.

He is also a teacher like me but he teaches in a more prestigious school - you cannot get more prestigious than the revered NUS High School of Mathematics and Science.

I guess like many smart Filipinos who knew that the Philippines just could not accommodate their talent (my peers in electrical engineering, molecular biology and biotechnology, genetics, physics) they have had to live expatriate lives because the country has nothing to offer them talent-wise - so the First World countries have become the beneficiaries of their talent.

He is now an active member of Singapore's literature community and he has two poetry books which have been published by Ethos, one of the bitchier publishers here in Singapore - as my sister said, they will not publish you - if you aren't any good!

I am writing this for my friends and parent-friends here who think that making a living as a person of words - a writer, a poet - is not feasible.

Yes, it is feasible. It may not make you a millionaire, but at least, it will make you do what you're supposed to do in this world.

At least Singapore allows talent like Eric's to prosper and has given him the opportunity to truly practice his art.

To Actually Make A Living As A Poet

I met two gentlemen from Myanmar during this trip, one was a draft artist for an architectural firm, the other one was the poet, Han Lynn.

I didn't even know before that there were poets from Myanmar (Burma if you still didn't know), but to actually meet one was in itself a good point of conversation.

I did not ask about the Rohingyas though lest I be given a lecture on Burmese history but I did ask about Aung Sang Suu Kyi.

Han actually works as a translator of international poetry and his English is pretty good.

He autographed his poetry book and he wrote in Burmese, and it was very cute. He's currently based now in South Africa where he is a poet-in-residence in one of the universities there.

To actually make your living as a poet.

Tell that to your Mama!

Remembering Dylan Thomas - "Do not go gently into that good night"

"Do not go gently into that good night" became one of my mottos as a young person and the poem was reintroduced to me in Michelle Pfeiffer's 1995 movie, Dangerous Minds, when, as a teacher in an inner city school, she used poetry to inspire her students.

"Do not go gently into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light"

Those words came to me at the right moment of my life, at 24 years old, when I just decided to live the life I wanted - I had some idea how it should be - but I didn't know how to go about it.

Much like Robert Frost's line "I chose the road less traveled by", I was supposed to turn right (and everything was telling me to turn right), but I guess the Lord pointed me to the path on the left, and as they say, the rest is history.

I am already middle-aged now but Dylan Thomas' words continue to ring as strongly as when I was half this age. I guess now that I'm getting a little bit closer to my mortality, it even weighs more heavily, because now, the finish line is much closer than I would really want it to be.

I bought this book today in my favorite Book Sale shop and it's a biography of this esteemed poet. He's Welsh pala. Interesting! I hope I find the time lang to read it!