Lets talk about

Lawrence
Ypil
By Group 5
BACKGROUND
Who is He?!?!
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and
nonfiction writer from Cebu,
Philippines.
Ypil is currently a Lecturer at Yale-
NUS(National University of Singapore).
Lawrence Ypil was born on August 15,
1990
For 20 years, Ypil has been living away
from his hometown.


Most of his academic years were

spent in Manila. He first went to
Ateneo de Manila to complete a
degree in biology, before
enrolling in a medical course at
University of the Philippines in
Diliman. -
On the year he was supposed to
graduate from completing a
degree in biology, he quits.
" I was obsessed—or possessed. I realized it was
poetry and writing that I wanted to do and that
some other people can do medicine,” Ypil says
laughing, now taking a distant memory of
indecisiveness with ease.

In 2003, he left the country to take up his Masters

in Fine Arts in Poetry at the Washington
University, and another Masters in Fine Arts this
time in Nonfiction Writing at the University of
Iowa.
In 2010, he released his first poetry book The
Highest Hiding Place, which bagged the Madrigal
Gonzalez Best First Book Award and the Don Carlos
Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
 He earned his first Masters of Fine
Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) while
on a Fulbright fellowship at Washington
University in St Louis, and another MFA
in Non-Fiction Writing from the
University of Iowa.
His first book,The Highest Hiding Place:
Poems won the 2011 Madrigal-Gonzalez
First Book Award and was a finalist for
the Gintong Aklat Awards in 2010.
 Ypil has returned to Cebu to launch his second
collection of poems The Experiment of the
Tropicswhich he had printed in New York City.
Now available on Amazon,it was his contest entry to
the Gaudy Boy Book Prize.


For three years, he focused on slimming down the selections,

while making the occasional appearance at the Cebuano
Study Center at the University of San Carlos to research
about local history whenever he was on a quick family trip.

Ypil's second book, The Experiment of the Tropics was the

co-winner of the 1st Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize (with
Jenifer Sang Eun Park's Autobiography of A Horse: A
Poem).

1 2
 It was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary
Awards in Gay Poetry and on the Editor's Long
List for The Believer Book Awards in 2019.
Ypil share that, “I was interested in the idea of
there (pointing to a distance), not here. I was
conscious about what it meant to write about
home while you’re away from it. The poems are
really about Cebu. Thus, the poems are about
photographs,” continues Ypil who is a literary
professor at the Yale-Nus College in Singapore.
 He said “I have always The featured pictures in the
been, in many ways, book are those of old
discontent that our notion Cebuano society in 1930.
of poetry is just tied to The book examines archival
the love song or like the photographs of Ypil's
hugot. The poem can do so hometown, Cebu, during the
much more.” American Period.

Ypil describes the process of writing this book as

revealing both historical place and himself: "By
looking at the photographs, I ended up looking
through them, and eventually discovered myself.
It felt like looking at beautiful, deep, dark
mirrors."
FAMOUS WORKS
His famous works are ( poetry
books and poem )
The Highest Hiding Place
The Experiment of the Tropics
Night Report
The Hour is a Dirty Pocket
THE HIGHEST HIDING
PLACE
- a book consist of different poems
Example: AT THE PIANO
 AT THE PIANO
Wanting to cleave clearly in the mind
the wooden chopping boards of the house
into piano keys,
and the long tables of the dining room
into some imagined concert: Do you hear it?
Yes? Do you not since then not realize
this grand scale?
The poor boy is playing a sonata
in his head, yes? Yes. Now. (Pushed
into agreement as if pushed by birth
into an empty room without choice
and flowers for wallpaper and a mirror
kept blind dark in a drawer)
There was a piano, once, in my head.
And a stage. And the world surprised
by what had been found. Difficult piece:
the left hand flying over the right
and the air-pedal stepped through and clean
to sustain. And all the world standing
behind kitchen counters and the dinner plates
waiting for the imagined overture
to complete its applause:
If only there was no need to explain.

If only the real thing was as clear

and as audible as
once the beautiful music.
 The Experiment of the Tropics
In The Experiment of the Tropics, a collection which
grapples with the legacy of colonial rule, these facts are held
up for examination.
The Experiment of the Tropics intersperses poetry with
photography drawn from the archival collections from the
Cebuano Studies Centre of the University of St Carlos. The
language of the lyric finds compatibility in the photographic
medium: in its expression of personal feeling, in its
concentrated images, harmoniously arranged and
expressed to a private audience.
 Night Report
After all, the rain falls, the sea yields its fish.
We ourselves fall, yieldand the neighbors say,
“To talk about money is to not have it.”

I have no money having just spent it.

T-bone steaks are expensive.
Foreign flowers wilt especially the iris.
My mum calls long distance with her loneliness like copper wire
and wishes I come home but won’t.
The storm does.
The store-front vegetables, maids brace
too late to figure out the face: a free shirt
pressed against itself.
I’m out often, always late.

And anyway, whatever I bring back

won’t change the news, our positions.
T
The gardener mows the lawn,
through blinds half-drawn. I watch him.

I stay up all night

thinking about the rust that gathers
around the screws of garden cutters,
the buried carcass of that dog,
attention.
 THE HOUR IS A
DIRTY POCKET
Inside it is a jacket, a blood-stained who. Who shot the man.
Who grabbed the bag.
Who left the bomb under the car and ran away?
We know him dearly, but won’t say.
All we say is lemme see, lemme see the teevee with its flip-squeeze
and spin-a-win.
The numbers glitter.
The wheels turn the car in place while the winner sits on
stage beside the market basket and waits for the
cellophanetreatment: Awe and Light. Air Time
before he’s swept again into the money-run, a dance.
Canned laughter for the man and for his sons
commercials.
We love you very much, Mom.
Toothpaste gets stuck in the hands.
Thank you!