Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Merlie M. Alunan

Merlie M. Alunan

She has lived and worked all her life in the Philippines but not in Manila, a city she describes as a huge urban conglomeration.

On the map of her country one can spot a group of islands between two large ones--the island of Luzon and of Mindanao. The group of islands is known as the Visayas. She lives on the island of Leyte where she has been here since 1959 when she was just in high school.

While she has traveled a bit around the Visayan islands, she finally settled in Leyte in 2000. The island is largely rural. Most of the people are engaged either in fishing or farming. It means that there is not much of an intellectual life. In that sense, poetry is a way to resist the mind becoming numb due to a lack of activities and intellectual challenges.

She has a Master's Degree in English, major in Creative Writing. By the time she was 26, she had completed her MA.

Once she started her family of five children, she no longer wrote. Also she had started on a Ph.D. but due to all the family pressure lost the momentum. She only resumed writing poetry in her early forties, beleaguered as she was with raising her children alone. She brought her five children through alone by holding down her job as teacher. In that sense, poetry gave her strength and sanity to see all these things through.

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