Analysis Of Superman

One might ask how it is possible for someone to be a teacher, an award-winning poet, a part-time PhD student and a festival director for Poetry Festival Singapore (PFS) all at the same time.

If you are thinking of Superman, you could probably be forgiven. Eric Tinsay Valles is the guy who could split himself up in different places.

Not literally, but as he says, through “careful planning” and concentrating on “core activities” such as his family and friends.

When ask if he is married, the 49-year-old writer cum poet says that he’s “married to the church”. And to prove his point, he is a devout Catholic who manages to find time to go church every day at six in the morning.

“It allows the neurons to connect better to be one with the world,”

However, it was music that got Valles interested in writing poetry. He says that despite liking music, he couldn’t play any of the instruments and instead explore the rhythm of words on the page.

His literary works began at 10 when he wrote for the school magazine and a poem about a wanderer. The poem becomes a recurring theme in his works when he writes and publishes his first book titled “A World in Transit”, which is about wandering and migration.

Valles describe his book like a song album featuring the “greatest hits” of his youth and early adulthood as it contains all his work from high school till 2011.

The book also contains pieces of his life as a university student back in the Philippines during the last years of the Marcos Regime in 1986.

He recalls a coup attempt taking place at a wedding. There were snipers in the neighbourhood and rebels were fighting for control over a TV station near where he stay.

“There were gunfights all around and we couldn’t get out of the house for a while. When we walk down the stairs, we had to crouch and make sure not to go near the windows. I was lucky not to get shot,” he says, with a slight

The book has since been shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize under the poetry category.

But when ask why trauma? Valles says that life in this world is a whole extended trauma and it’s an imperfect world where one is here not by choice and one write a quote when living here to various means and poetry is one of those means.

As he proceeds on about how there are better ways and suggestions of living despite the bleakness in life, there is an optimism about him that will inspire others to follow him. It’s no wonder that he is an award-winning poet given that he shines light on the work he created.

As a global citizen (as he calls himself), Valles has been to where work opportunities can be found. So what brought him to Singapore? Turns out, education opportunities play a part in convincing him to come here. The National University of Singapore (NUS) offered him a PhD programme. However, he got a full-time teaching position at Hwa Chong Institution where he teach for about a year before quitting due to the stress and the difficulty to write and teach at the same time. Currently, he is teaching at NUS high school as a literature and English