Motivation

I want to learn how to write a personal writing poetics so I could write one. The poetics I will be writing will guide me in practicing writing, primarily poetry, as my jiyū shūkyō.

The objective of this project is two-fold:

1. To learn how to write a personal writing poetics by looking into how others did it.
2. To arrive at my own personal writing poetics and digest it into a succinct provisional manifesto I could use to guide my practice.

Product: my new poetics
Reference: thoughts on my poetics

Knowledge structure & bottlenecks

Concepts

Poetics

Facts

The various writers who wrote their poetics to guide their writing life.
The traditions where they come from.
The era they existed.
Books specifically written about writing one's poetics

Statement of poetics
Artist statements

Procedures

How to articulate the specific ground (situation, condition, life, etc.) that necessitates the emergence and articulation of this poetics
How to write a poetics that is uniquely individual but universally comprehensive
How to integrate other people's theories into one's poetics
How to make sure the poetics guides practice, not just thinking about writing poetry
How to write one's poetics (including succinctly so it becomes useful)
How to write a poetics that isn't overly theoretical and intellectual
Applying the poetics on a specific piece of writing
Applying the poetics on a larger project

How to write statement of poetics
How to write artist statements

Benchmarking and emphasizing-excluding

Focus

Update: 2025-09-17

1. Begin by articulating what I need from a spiritual writing practice.
2. Arrive at a minimum viable poetics based on what I personally need.
3. Arrive at a basic spiritual writing practice I can do.
4. Begin research and report (write a diary of research progress then send a weekly newsletter).

I don't want to describe how I am already doing my poetry writing because this is the very thing I want to change. What I intend to do is to create my provisional philosophy of poetry and provide several detailed applications of how that philosophy might be applied in the writing of a poem. I could elaborate this philosophy and write about it further but a succinct provisional manifesto or principles of writing poetry would be the ideal product of this project.

Similar to what Olson and Levertov did.

Process I could take:

1. Do a survey of the modernist movement from Pound onwards until the Filipino poets influenced by it and highlight individuals whose poetics and poems I want to dive deeper into (particularly those with religious and spiritual tendencies or approaches that could be applied in a jiyū shūkyō sense).
2. Research the poetics of each.
3. Slowly piece together a poetics composed of theory and suggestions for practice. Remember that secular ideas could be integrated or be used as tools for this religio-spiritual poetics.
4. Digest this poetics into a statement of poetics or manifesto that is provisional.
5. Begin practicing poetry through the guide of this manifesto.

Survey

• Poetics of the New American Poetry” (1973) edited by Donald Allen & Warren Tallman

framework for developing a poetics

Manifesto examples

• Personism: A Manifesto (1959) by Frank O'Hara
• The Futurist Manifesto (1909) by Marinetti (https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-marinetti/the-futurist-manifesto/)
• Dada Manifesto (1918) by Tristan Tzara (https://www.arthistoryproject.com/timeline/modernism/dada/dada-manifesto/)

Poetics essays

• Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” (1950)
• Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure" (1983) (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure)
• Ron Silliman, "The New Sentence" (1987)

Poetics books

• Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World (1973)

Philippine poetry

• Bienvenido L. Lumbera & Cynthia N. Lumbera, Philippine Literature: A History & Anthology
• Luis H. Francia, Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English
• Adam David - Better Living Through Xeroxography: Literary Patricide by way of the Small Independent Press (2009)
• Conchitina Cruz - The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer: The Tiempo Age and Institutionalized Creative Writing in the Philippines (2017)
• Niccolo Rocamora Vitug - Bagay: A Structural-Phenomenological Discussion of a Movement (2022)

Someday/Maybe

Artist or poetics statements per poem

Artist or poetics statements for the specific artist

Philosophy of poetry essays

• This seems to be what was commonly done outside institutions.

Research notes

In literary history, the order is often reversed—many poets write their work first, then articulate poetics after the fact (often as a way of explaining, defending, or extending what they have already been doing).

Writers who articulated a poetics before creating

Ezra Pound

• Pound began with very programmatic ideas (Imagism, then Vorticism) before producing his most influential works (Cantos).
• His early manifestos—short, sharp principles like “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective”—came before many of the poems we now associate with him.
• His poetics guided him into writing the experimental free verse, translations, and long-form collage-style poetry he became known for.

Stéphane Mallarmé

• His essays (such as “Crisis in Poetry”) articulate a poetics that he then tried to embody in works like Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard.
• His theory of poetry as approaching the ineffable arguably preceded and drove his late experimental works.

The Futurists & Dadaists

• Many avant-garde movements of the early 20th century began with manifestos first.
• Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto
• Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifestos
• Laid out radical principles about speed, violence, nonsense, chance, and destruction of tradition.
• The poems and performances followed as enactments of these theories.

Paul Valéry

• Valéry spent decades refining his ideas about poetry in his Cahiers (Notebooks), sometimes more than writing poetry itself.
• His concept of the poem as a self-sufficient, endlessly re-readable object was worked out theoretically and then realized in works like La Jeune Parque.

Charles Olson

• Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” (1950)
• It argued for “composition by field,” open form, and breath-based rhythm.
• His Maximus Poems were written as attempts to enact that poetics, almost like a testing ground for the theory.

Language Poets (1970s–80s)

• Poets like Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein wrote essays and manifestos (“The New Sentence,” “The Rejection of Closure”) outlining their theory of how language constructs meaning.

there’s a strong tradition of “theory first, practice after,” especially in avant-garde or experimental movements where breaking from tradition needed a clear rationale before the poetry could exist.

Bibliography

“American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement” (ed. Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell, 2012)

Ezra Pound – “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (1913)

Ezra Pound – ABC of Reading (1934)

William Carlos Williams – Spring and All (1923)

William Carlos Williams – “The Poem as a Field of Action”

William Carlos Williams – “Against the Weather”

Charles Olson – “Projective Verse” (1950)

Charles Olson – "Human Universe"

Allen Ginsberg - "Meditation and Poetics"

Marjorie Perloff – The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (1985)

Needs more probing

Robert Hass – Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984)

Charles Bernstein – A Poetics (1992)

Ellen Bryant Voigt – The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (2009)

Joan Retallack – The Poethical Wager (2003)

Notes and insights

It might be good to have a short and succinct manifesto like Imaoka's principles of living. But it will take time for me to arrive there.

For now, a wide range of notes would suffice, capturing the evolution of my thought on this subject.

Not a manifesto (because I am not calling people to take up arms). This is a very personal and individual project--one that needs to satisfy my genuine religious needs.

So this is my "lineage" -- writers (priority: poetry) who fused spirituality (priority: free spirituality) with their writing.

Need

Self and spiritual considered
Freedom but attempts to be understandable or consider others
Always consider the people

I need to be kind to my mind.
My state of mind should be reflected in the poem.

Freer religion leads to a generation of new words and thoughts. And so when I left the JWs, I saw myself writing more.

Now the way of doing writing like the way of doing religion have been heavily institutionalized. Although with writing particularly in the Philippines, they happened fairly recently. And by being institutionalized, the thoughts being created look almost the same. The styles approved etc. The interests of the academe has dominated individual interests and freedom.

Treating my writing as a jiyu shukyo, I might learn how Imaoka theorized religous practice and see similarities in how to do it with writing.

1. Writing is everything. There is no division between non-writing and writing / non-literature and literature.
2. Aspire for a custom-made writing life.
3. See your writing not as an exclusively solitary act but one that is in tight conversation with the other.
4. See your writing's relevance and urgency to the larger society.
5. Expand your writing's beneficiaries further to the entire cosmos.

My possible contemplative writing processes

1. Collect seeds, meditate on them and write lengthier journal entries on them, publish them later.
2. Choose events, flesh them out in journal, develop them further for publication.
3. Use reading to collect seeds for meditation. Reading and writing should happen in the same morning.
4. Walking has to be done more intentionally: gather seeds or meditate.
5. Dedicate specific days for writing to fleshout material and produce either essays or poems.
6. View writing itself as the spiritual practice.
7. Books are the goal. The books are collections of these practices or were born out of these practices.

Transform the talahardin as contemplative tool.