An Interview with Eric Valles

by Morgan, Jessica and Xin Yi

Introduction to Writing Poetry — Poet Interview with Eric Valles 1st October 2019

This evening, established poet and editor Eric Tinsay Valles (b. Manila, Philippines) joins us at Yale-NUS College for a casual interview with some aspiring poets, Morgan, Jessica, and Xin Yi. You may know him from his award-winning published works, A World in Transit (2011) and After the Fall: dirges among ruins (2014). After some quick introductions, we begin the interview.

Eric Valles at Yale-NUS College, 1st October, 2019

Valles: I’m Eric Tinsay Valles, I teach English at NUS High School; I’ve published a couple of poetry collections and edited maybe three more anthologies. I’m also a director of Poetry Festival Singapore. We organize a national poetry competition and we publish this Singapore poem anthology every other year. I’ve been here in Singapore for 19 years, I was living in the Philippines and Taiwan before coming here.

Morgan: I wanted to talk to you about your origin story or how you got started in writing. When did you start writing poetry? Or when did you realize that you wanted to develop your writing into poetry?

Valles: I was in grade four, and I had to write a poem for the school newspaper. And the topic, I think was actually about wandering, something that I’ve been doing all my adult life, and that was that. I wasn’t very good at other things, I never picked up a musical instrument, although we always had a guitar at home, but I never learned how to play it. I was awful at sports, and writing poetry was something I could cultivate without being embarrassed about that. And it just so happened that that’s a talent which I’ve had and which I’ve tried to develop since then.

Morgan: And so it became like extracurricular for you, during school?

Valles: You could say that, although there really wasn’t much motivation to write poetry in school before I reached university. So if there was a call for papers for the school newspaper, I would contribute, and that was that. But I read a lot. Not all of the things I wrote -- that I read, were poetry books. I read a lot of folk tales from all over, novels, and in the university I had a writer teacher who introduced us to Auden and Dylan Thomas and all that, and it was probably from her that I really got to learn about writing poetry. Her name is Doreen Fernandez. She’s a food writer actually, and I think there was an article about her in the New York Times, recently. So she was very influential, because she encouraged us to write, she was very motherly, and she was kind of cold blooded when it came to editing. So she encouraged us to be very precise when we wrote so that’s something I’ve been trying to do as well.

Morgan: Right now, what would you say your motives are for writing poetry? And I know that’s quite broad.

Valles: A lot of people want to leave some legacy and for me that would be writing poetry because as I said, I’m not good at many other things, yeah... and I can’t think of anything else to do during my free time that’s meaningful other than that and that could lead to the upliftment of other people, so that’s why I write poetry.

Morgan: And so when you say the uplifting of other people, so with your readers, how exactly do you try to connect with them through your poetry? Whether it be an experience that you’re writing about, or if it’s sound and line and more technical things, where do you try to make that connection and where do you try to in[luence your readers?

Valles: I try to influence the reader as myself first, really, so I’m writing for myself. And am I the ideal reader? Yeah, I can’t think of any other readers. I try to send out my work to friends but its really difficult to get honest critiques from them. I try to work on imagery, and I look for images corresponding to the emotions that I want to describe, and then try to set the imagery to music. So I approach poetry -- as Baz Luhrmann, creating a musical of sorts. If I Qind my work pleasing, I think there will be others out there that will Qind it the same.

Morgan: I have one more question, and this is sort of going back to your motives or why you think that you write poetry. Can you pinpoint a moment in time where those motives changed for you, or you started to question them?

Valles: It’s hard to answer, because as a published poet I’m really quite new. My Qirst book came out in 2011. I don’t think my motivations have changed since then, but I’ve known more poets and more statutory boards because over here it’s important for you to get to know them because they have plenty of money to publish anthologies. It’s the same, I try to write my best for myself and then I hope that that could please other people. I’m not trying to write the Southeast Asian epic poem. I wish I could write in Singlish, I will have to do some research to pull that off. Maybe there’s greater consciousness of belonging to a bigger collective after several years. So I’m not writing for myself anymore, there’s actually readers out there, people who borrow my books from the libraries. I’m always challenged by the desire for me to say something meaningful, something worthwhile.

Jessica: Are you reading anything at the moment?

Valles: Yes! I’m reading a memoir of some Japanese soldiers over here in Syonan-To, in World War 2. I’m also reading a letter written by a Japanese ofQicer in a Rex Shelley novel. I forget the title... ah, Island in the Centre. Later on, after this, I will try to see if I can write something about the Japanese officer revealing his frustrations about the war, and revealing his love for her.

Jessica: What are some things you struggle with, if any, when you write your poetry, and how do you overcome them?

Valles: It’s a constant struggle, in all aspects. Many times. There will always be distractions, and Qinding the right words, and after it’s done, if it’s ever good enough, or if it should be thrown to the dustbin. There are a lot of insecurities that come with writing or writing poetry. You just have to face the insecurities. Walter Benjamin says that you can’t ever really overcome trauma, and writing poetry is traumatic, in many ways. So, the only way to cope is to relive the trauma, over and over again. And, somehow you get work done. And some of it could be good, good enough, yeah.

Jessica: What is some advice you could give to poets who are just starting out? And what would you have liked to know before you embarked on your own journey in poetry?

Valles: You need to have grit. Writing poetry is hard, and there will be setbacks, small setbacks, bigger frustrations, but you have to keep on going. I don’t know if you were in the Creative Arts Programme in your secondary school or JC years? I’m mentoring a few of those people now, and these are people who... these want to be the best literary writers in Singapore. There are a lot of them, about 150 every year.

But then, when they go to the university, they study law, and medicine, and then they just forget about literary writing. That’s how it is for most people, so if you want to continue writing after high school... For you, you’re starting in university, so there’s a bigger chance that the writing will continue. You just have to go on, go on. There’s no such thing as a mental block, you’ll just have to force yourself, really. And it’s good to network, if you want to get published. You need to build some friends, a base on social media, because these are the people who can buy your work. And who can help you out later. There are many ways. You can join competitions, sign up for workshops, attend festivals. You’ll get tips from them, publishing tips, calls for papers for publications.

Xin Yi: You had mentioned that an otherness, having stemmed from living abroad in Taiwan, Singapore, and the Philippines, opened up opportunities to incorporate forms of cultural traditions in your writing. How has your editing style progressed over the years as informed by your changing world view?

Valles: It has not changed; editing is editing- you have to be hard on yourself when you do that. Yeah, maybe I should be harder on myself when I edit. But it hasn’t changed much. It’s just that every time you read a work, you get to spot some hidden grace, also you spot some pitfalls there. You just have to be very alert when you get to spot those, and make adjustments where necessary.

Xin Yi: Are there certain things you would automatically categorise as pitfalls.

Valles: For poetry, wordiness. I have to constantly cut down on words.

Xin Yi: How do you choose poems when curating for specific collections? Is there any particular meaning you’d like to convey through personal quirks like your extensive use of adjectives and footnotes?

Valles: Yeah, people now don’t like footnotes; I’m trying to avoid footnotes. For editing, there’s not too many poets around so we accept most of the contributions except that we have to pay attention to the Qirst sense of the poem and if they are saying something valuable or new. But on the whole we don’t reject too many contributions and as for the arrangement, it’s usually based on themes. In the works that I’ve edited, I’ve had to make adjustments and talk to other editors so the decisions were not entirely mine. In some of them, we tried to make the poems in the work talk to each other as if they were juxtaposed close to each other in the anthology.

Xin Yi: For your personal publications, do you write your poems according to themes or gather all of them and categorise them later? How does that work?

Valles: I just write continuously until I have about 40 poems, and then I categorise them according to themes. In the current one that I’m working on, it’s chronological, and there’s actually a story that’s evolving so it’s based on time.

Xin Yi: Have there been any experiences from the writing residencies you’ve attended that made you think about writing in a different way?

Valles: Yeah, there was a jail break in upstate New York. There were a couple of them who broke out of jail and I was all alone in a cottage, and that made me write as much as I could. And I was very careful not to go out -- there were also bears, there were brown bears and they can be very ferocious from the videos, so I just stayed inside the cottage for two weeks. At night I would play music in one of the rooms so people might think there were a lot of people in the cottage.

Writing is a precarious thing -- you never know when you’ll be done, so write the best that you could. I had poetry issues with me in the cottage, so I was able to read a lot of poetry which I wasn’t very familiar with. As I may have mentioned before, I used to read just the canonical but very creative emerging poets. I couldn’t go anywhere else, so I just read poetry issues and at one point, there was a storm, so I didn’t have any internet in the cottage for a day. So I just had to read and... write.

Xin Yi: That’s super eventful.

Valles: Yeah, poets can have exciting lives!