CLOSE READING

OF FILIPINO
POETRY
Prepared by: Ma'am Laarni
Organic Unity
Established by the New
Criticism school of thought
It says that all the
interdependent parts of a
literary selection must add
up to create one whole.
To understand the organic
unity of a poem, you must
use the process of Close
Reading.
Close Reading
It is a way for you to
analyze the poem by
carefully reading and
rereading a text until you
have found its
interpretation.
How To Read
Close?
You may try to find the
context of the poem:
when it was written
the setting in which it
was written
the reason why it was
written
also look at its
interdependent elements
try to identify who the
persona is
Marjorie Evasco
Was born in Bohol on 21 September 1953
She writes bilingually in English and
Cebuano-Visayan
Considered one of the country’s earliest
feminist poets
Received numerous awards for her poetry in
2010, she received the prestigious South East
Asian Write Award (SEA Write) currently a
professor emeritus og De La Salle
University—Manila.
Author of Is It The Kingfisher?
Is It the Kingfisher?
analyzes the relationships
one has with a Supreme
Being, in a tropical island
where everything seems
clear through nature
 Is It The Kingfisher
by: Marjorie Evasco

This is how I desire god on this island

With you today: basic and blue
As the sea that softens our feet with salt And
brings the living wave to our mouths Playing
with sounds of a primary language.
 “God is blue,” sang the poet
Juan Ramon Jimenez,
Drunk with desiring, his hair, eyebrows, Eyelashes
turned blue as the kingfisher’s wings.

It is this bird that greets us as we come

 Round the eastern bend of this island; Tells
us the hairbreadth boundary between us
Is transient in the air, permeable to the blue Of
tropic skies and mountain gentian.
 Where we sit on this rock covered with
seaweeds,
I suddenly feel the blueness embrace us,
This rock, this island, this changed air, The
distance between us and the Self We have
longed to be.
 A bolt of burning blue
Lights in my brain, gives the answer
We’ve pursued this whole day:
Sea waves sing it, the kingfisher flies in it,
This island is rooted in it. Desiring God is
transparent blue–the color

Which makes our souls visible.

Jose Garcia Villa
A National Artist for Literature who introduced
the reversed consonance rhyme scheme and the
comma poems that used the punctuation mark
in poetry in innovative ways
Received the Guggenheim, Bollingen, and
the American Academy of Arts Big Idea
Letters Awards
Credited to be a proponent of
experimentation and invention in poetry
First, A Poem Must Be Magical
by: Jose Garcia Villa

First, a poem must be magical,

Then musical as a seagull.
It must be a brightness moving And
hold secret a bird’s flowering It must
be slender as a bell,

And it must hold fire as well.

 And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide What
it seeks, like a bride.
And over all I would like to hover God,
smiling from the poem’s cover.
End of
Slide

Thank
You!