3.

In a creative nonfiction class, we talk about how a present context informs a past memory; your distance from an event shifts the memory itself. You might hate a parent for scolding you over your younger sibling and laugh about it several years later, even though the event remains to be a valid wound. I tell high school students to be aware of things that happen twice in their lives, like a motif. You can fall in love with a person because he does the same things your father did. You can make sense of a past event after a second event has occurred from which to view the repeated memory. This is how a present context changes a past event, how time changes memories. My students all have wounds to write about. We sometimes cringe at our wounds in class, but we focus on how we can write the story with restraint. We search for the fulcrum by which events in our lives could make sense. We know that we must still write the story we dread writing, but I do not force them to die on the page; there are stories that eventually come out in time.

For much of my twenties, I worked on a poetry sequence in a process that spanned two national elections, a pandemic, and multiple deaths in the family. The early part of this decade saw me as a film student who mobilized as part of the UP Cineastes’ Studio and of a student mass organization on women’s rights that made me self-conscious of how I looked at and presented topics of violence and abuse in my works. I was in denial by thinking myself only as a witness and sought a way to reject my position of power as author. In 2015, I accompanied my partner to his hometown where we spent the summer solstice shooting a documentary film on the religious practice of panata. It was to be about his deceased grandfather, who used to play a Roman soldier in Marinduque’s Lenten rites. Around 2019, I began to write poems about this visit as if I was a cinematographer recording the images and scenes we saw. In the manuscript, I present a distanced view of violence, suicide, and death, which in hindsight was also a trauma response. There are different speakers in the work, each one a witness to a form of violence. Sometimes, the speaker will not be important, as in a shot list. Some of the poems turned out to be epistolary love poems where the speaker writes to someone who leaves her behind in the sea town. We visited again in 2025; I was no longer the same person.

There is no childhood story for these poems because I was writing from the present. I was 22. In 2016, the state took on a new face of violence just as I was fresh out of film school. I couldn’t get film grants or paid cinematography stints while my partner began to earn from editing rakets within a competitive industry. I would juggle different jobs, the longest years under a children’s rights NGO, and then a development bank. My parents did not understand me and I did not understand their support for the Duterte government who committed extrajudicial killings just streets away from where we lived. Obsessed with the idea of an independent creative life, I decided to write poetry in graduate school, something I sustained by becoming a teaching assistant. In my mind, I was writing poetry because I could not make films. My relationship with poetry became an everyday relationship, while with film, it was sporadic, if not once-in-a-lifetime, even though they were not that different. The difference between the two mediums came only from their material reality.

At the University of the Philippines, I began to conceptualize my work as documentary poetry, prompted by my thesis adviser whose works I also read. I discovered that documentary poetry has no single parentage, geographically and contextually.¹ But it does have conventions, a unifying aesthetic that is itself implication-heavy. Its impulse is anti-lyric, anti-narrative, and anti-institution. It is temporal, refusing to be ahistorical, and it seeks to align the poet to the causes of marginalized sectors. It suited my rhizomatic influences, which included my film background but also works that were temporal. In class, I first read a translation of Purgatory and began to write in fragments. Outside of the syllabus, I looked at generational and historical trauma in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and artist books, preoccupied with the destabilized relationship between image and language, the surface quality of words. When you take apart a word, there is nothing to be found, only the sound of each syllable.

In documentary poetry, the orientation of a work is exterior to self. It is not that an image or metaphor is impenetrable. But that a wound can be traced back and connected to outside machines and external systems meant that it is possible to name and survive our wounds. The interiority of a poem permitted my non-repression, my non-urgency. To write documentary poetry then is to welcome the turn inward but also to find a political immediacy in writing. It could not be one or the other. At once I had to recognize my wounds in the work and redistribute my inner truth outside of self. I cut open the person in the mirror, but the image was never in the opposite direction.


4.

Time moves differently in documentary poems. It has some of the sensibilities of writing a diary entry or taking a photo where one writes, grounded if not bound by the recording process, the present timeline before them. The priority is not to immediately process the images but to document them. A documentary work is always ongoing, not concerned with perfection. When I revised my poems, I would sometimes make violent and unnecessary changes, but the changes were not historical revisionism or erasure, they were yet another way to grapple with history, with trauma.

The poetry sequence told the story of my writing process, my preoccupation with lyric and documentary. The verses, a poetics essay that persists to exist for as long as there is writing happening outside of it. When does my manuscript end? When does my writing end? These two questions might as well be the same question, like deciding to write between what is timely and timeless. At this point, I will contradict myself and say that perhaps clarity does not arrive when one writes poetry as document. Time itself does not heal all wounds but only changes the context surrounding the document. It is language that constitutes the present and leaves a trail behind. What I feel could have only been true in how I write it.

The language I used in these poems was often described as veiled or sparse even though I would write in simple and accessible English. My speechlessness came from writing in my second language, the language of my oppressors, even as I made films in Filipino, my first language. As well as applying film language in poetry, a sensibility that allowed me to resist interiority. Paradoxically, this speech became the access point to recognize violence in my life, that began a slow descent into my wounds of silence. Even though in some works, the specific experiences and autobiographical details would be masked in fictive realities, I still called these works documentary.² The images referred to reality, to an actual memory or experience from my personal history, but language has already severed me from this referent. What remains is my subjective imprint, a time stamp, that keeps poetry as document from becoming finalized or formalized. Nothing about the work could have been official, objective.

From here, I developed a documentary poetics that refused to delimit documentary poetry as a genre. My two manuscripts were radically different, one looked at trauma in my life and the other one looked away, but both works still speak to the same wound. Poetry as archive is anti-archive: we push the boundaries of what we know, so we can shift the trajectory of our history. The task at hand was to kill the ego but persist to live and breathe on the page. I might refuse to lyricize violence but the confessional self leaves traces on the post-confessional document. A poem is a demonstration of my wounding, of my most valid hopes and freedoms, the ones I have and the ones I still have to fight for. And it is, in the end, a demonstration of itself, of words on a page and nothing more, its meaning constructed as it is encountered.

Only after my graduate studies did I actively think of publishing my poems, did I imagine a public life for what was supposed to be only private documents. There was nothing and everything to do for me as a writer outside the walls of institution. Every time I sent out my poems, I would revise them, afraid of finally sealing off the work. But soon, the time will be up to revise anything from the work. The contexts for writing them would have changed or faded. The writing, once endless, will end.

The work is taken up by the reader who might change the shape or the qualities of the wound.


5.

I write this essay from a small room with a desk and chair. This room is the sanctuary for my thoughts, for my body to return to itself. Now I look out the window and watch a scene that is insidiously calm: the old-world house of my neighbors across, their giant tree that remained nameless to me, a sleeping cat that threatens to die. There is something these images fail to say. I am at the end point of writing, where there is little left to say. Toward what end was I writing all along? A scene flashes back to me, a light-hearted moment with friends who, in a game, voted me as the most likely to quit writing. I did not understand what they meant then. I was petty about it, declaring that I would never quit writing, until I lowered my defenses and looked at my practice truthfully. I would quit between writing film and writing poems or notes that occur in-between. These shifts meant that I was lost but that I trusted what my body was asking me to write. I feared and fantasized about the end of my writing. There should be nothing wrong with quitting, with doing something else besides writing and art. Perhaps if my wounds of silence have fully healed, there would be no use in writing. Or if I am free, there will be no ammunition to sustain a writing life in my country.

Literary works serve as documents and traces of time but also as frames – they reveal what I am writing about, but also what I fail to write about.³ In the face of genocide and dispossession, the poem as an archive starts to disintegrate, and words themselves lose meaning, or their meaning becomes the very opposite of action. The work demanded of me as a writer is now outside or elsewhere of the poem. Writing ends this way, when I lose faith in words. My only recourse is to document, to abandon writing in my writing, to abandon narrativizing and poeticizing, which is to say, the old ways we use poetry. By decentralizing and deterritorializing meaning, I resist the urge to tear my works apart. To write self-reflexive work is simply to ask: what is the language required of our time?

For a time, this language looked to me like film in poetry, but the way I use language continues to shift and fluctuate. I began to imagine a use for language besides literature, one that removes euphemisms in speech, that decidedly cuts us from oppression and enacts radical empathy – poetry became the beginning and endpoint of action, not its opposite. The failures and complicities of language demanded that I keep writing or at least keep attempting to; perhaps that is what it means for me to struggle. There is no assurance for when the work would have ended, but my promise to you is that it will end.

My mythic conception of a writing life disintegrates when I look back and no longer feel the same, when the metaphors no longer serve as open wounds. Because I was wounded, I sought to name the systems that hurt me. At the end of my writing, my memory would be that I never gave up and that I still extended myself to others. And yet poetry saved me before I could save anyone else.