Daughter's paean to Dr. Edith L. Tiempo

So many words have been printed in the papers about Edith L. Tiempo, National Artist for Literature, who passed away August 21. Words of mourning, words of praise for the joy she brought with her amazing love affair with words, with her fiction and poetry, and her magical honing of young artists.

I thought it fitting to let someone who knows her best, speak about the “secret mysterious processes” with which Edith wrote her poems. I am reproducing the introduction of Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas in her mother’s book of poems, “The Charmer’s Box.” (Published by the De la Salle University Press, 1992.) It is a most charming piece, written from the heart of another poet and essayist.

“My mother writes poetry much the same way the violets in her garden grow — and the other living, well-loved things in her care, as well: the furious secret mysterious processes taking place unobtrusively underneath the carefully tended balance of sun and shade and a gentle hand, with lots of open space. Always the open space, the door to her study that is never shut; where rhythm, though ‘prisoner/In the careful cage’ keeps mainly to the metrics picked up by a fine inner ear from the wind on a mountainside, the crickets at dusk, a noisy city side-street.

“I’ve sometimes wondered if the deceptive effortlessness in the appearance of my mother’s poems was arrived at without a lot of unseen struggle; while the rest of us perform that same juggling act in serio-comic awkwardness, she balances all the pins (and pens), and the angels dancing on them as well: writing the menu and the marketing lists, marking students’ papers, cutting through the plethora of university administrative paperwork, while giving total ear to her teenagers’ transitory head-and heart-aches. One wonders what her poems would have been like (if there would have been poems at all), had the household been like, say, Anne Sexton’s, where at certain hours of the morning the children tiptoed about: ‘Shh, Mommy’s writing a poem,’ and everyone felt faintly guilty, not least the poet herself, at the intrusion of the mundane necessities — life breaking into the poetry as it were, where perhaps it should have been the other way around.

“At marvelously unpredictable intervals my mother’s poems appeared, breaking into life with a certain wondering silence at the heart of each of them, and no distracted, inattentive look to signal their coming. She probably wrote many of them on the run, but the breathless quality comes from their durable and enduring sense of discovery: that ‘The merest thing is magic.’

“There was no mystery in the act itself: not for her the ponderous lifting of pen to paper, in sacred darkness after the kids had been tucked in bed. I see the poems being born in the sunshine, in the shade of a mango tree while the harvesters banter and count the fruit, in the pool of light cast by her study lamp at twilight in the short interregnum before supper is served. Being born; being written.

“They were being written, even when she didn’t have the pen in her hand. (How reassuring it was, never to have heard from her or my father those awful bogeyman-words, ‘Writer’s block,’ though I did know the books often came too few and far between.) Living is writing; never the other way around where the simple joy of the word is dented by the uneasy scramble after pence and the publisher’s deadline. There was peril enough in considering the edges of things and the edges of thinking, of plumbing that brink where ‘some place present but unseen/Has total loneliness.’ Pain enough in the inward pull of ‘the sea under/Its coat of grassy soil,’ the tug of flotsam at the corner of the heart’s eye, the marginal zones where wildflowers gallantly blaze into life, the deer that died unseen in its corner of the forest — The poems made of these ’shells and ghosts/A felt pain or a monument.’

“And the derelictions that puzzle and disarrange the order of that life were quietly re-plated, scaled down as a kind of verbal bonsai, ‘utter sublimation,/A feat, this heart’s control/Moment to moment/To scale all love down,/to a cupped hand’s size’ — and all life’s unease, as well. In poems like ‘Nameless,’ written in Hong Kong during her tenure as the first Elisabeth Luce Moore Distinguished Asian Professor, I see her coping with the aloneness, the fear of heights and susceptibility to cold, in the best and only way she knew: by turning the nameless gray stranger of her own alienness into a poem.

“The larger terrors are made man-size, mushroom-size bombs turning into toadstools, the ravages of an old aunt’s face transfigured by triumphant perception into an enduring glow. The paradoxes turn inward-outward for her, a habit of mind made effortless by a stern discipline, ‘perfected pulse by pulse’ to make the moment’s playful grace. One thinks of Tracks of Babylon, her first collection, how daunting it was to try to emulate that tightly-leashed density.

“There’s a singular joyfulness in this collection that is its best achievement: in it, I see the unfettered and free-spirited young girl that now neither I nor she can, bodily, be; it’s Sheba at mid-morning running through each of these billowing, breathless lines. It’s ‘this young girl on the slope . . . Crying out (as now) a startled praise: ‘Look, rambler roses all along the vine!’” — Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas

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ON ANOTHER FRONT: To many universities, getting 100 percent passing rate in professional licensure examination is an achievement in itself. But it seems that in UP Manila, the norm is getting a majority spot in the Top 10.

UP Manila, the Health Science Center of our country, dominated this year’s board examinations as examinees from its different colleges made it to the Top Ten. Eight examinees from UP College of Medicine topped the medical board exams; six from the College of Nursing, four from the College of Pharmacy, and six from the College of Dentistry.

The eight medical graduates who made it to the Top Ten in the 2011 Physician Licensure Examination given by the Board of Medicine are Mark Augustine Saguido Onglao, first place; Eugene Guerrero Odonol, 3rd place; John Lyle Tron Montero Gomez, 4th place; Deonne Thaddeus Vite Gauiran, 5th; Marie Shella Baduel de Robles, 8th; Juan Carlos Reyes Abon, Jan Miguel Clutario Deogracias and Erickson Fernando Torio, 9th place. By the way, all UPCM examinees posted a 100 percent passing rate.

I have been to UP Manila many times and have seen how budgetary limitations put significant constraints on its logistical capabilities. What I failed to notice is the dedication and expertise of the men and women behind the institution. Chancellor Ramon Arcadio really deserves our gratitude and congratulations for effectively leading UP Manila.

As a model institution, UP Manila has led the way in uplifting the standards of education. For instance, Dean Alberto Roxas told me that the College of Medicine is the first to be given the highest accreditation by the Philippine Accrediting Association for Schools, Colleges and Universities (PAASCU).

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My e-mail: [email protected]