“To a cupped hand’s size”: Reading Poetics of Scale in Edith Tiempo’s Poetry

Edith Cutaran Lopez-Tiempo’s body of work, alongside her stature as Philippine National Artist for Literature, has generated substantial scholarship on the fertile imaginaries and intersections of formalist poetics, the institutionalization of the writing workshop, and Philippine poetry in English. Building on these contributions, I turn instead to Tiempo’s negotiation of self-fashioning, memory work, and imaginative practice as a way of articulating questions of scale in her oeuvre. By reading a selection of poems from several of her poetry collections, I argue that reading Tiempo’s sustained engagement with strategies of disclosure and scale, as well as her preoccupation with the intimacy of small objects and compact forms, reveals a mediative vision that apprehends the personal and the worldly as coterminous within her lyric practice. Such a vision intimates a cosmology of selves navigating and contending with the experiences of history, memory, and self-becoming. The deployment of the small—the miniature, the scaled-down gesture, the attention to the “Moment to moment/to scale all love down/To a cupped hand’s size”—thus constellates the negotiated terrains through which selfhood and scale emerge as crucial to the interplay between recollection’s backward orientation and the imaginative aspiration toward futurity and possibility.