What I could have learned from Mr. Icban

Mr. Icban never really noticed me, until I wrote a poem.

- AA PATAWARAN

I attended the 10day Singapore Writers Festival and brought home with me this burning desire to write in verse. I used to write poetry as a kid, but I outgrew it. While working for glossy magazines, I started writing poetry again to accompany the fashion editorials or travel photographs when, instead of facts, what I would like to convey was a mood or an atmosphere— but moving to the newspaper, I had this mistaken notion that there was no room for poetry in the news, even in the lifestyle beat.

“Poet ka pala. You are a poet,” said Mr. Icban, when my coverage of the writers’ festival came out in the lifestyle section of this paper. I was overwhelmed by the many voices and the many writing styles I encountered during the two-week-long writing congregation that, instead of a straight-up report or an elaborate essay, I decided to write about it in the form of a poem I called “A Few Words to Our Poets in Hiding.”