Pantoum/Pantun

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Recently, I developed an extraordinary liking for pantuns. I think pantun is lingusitically and aesthetically pleasing and challenging. It's not simply a short poem or a stanza of four lines. As we know, pantun has its own structures; based on four lines of cyclically repeating lines based on ABAB rhyming scheme; with the first two lines serving as the foreshadow of the meaning contained in the remaining two lines. This is a Malay heritage, and shall remain such, I hope.I'll see to it :)
Recently too, I discovered that pantun was indeed introduced to the West by Victor Hugo in his book Les Orientales (1829). I guess he tried to infuse pantun into the literary culture of Europe then, but he was not that successful. Nevertheless, because of him, The West was introduced to this unique form of poetry, and pantun became pantoum.
Lately I've been updating my status in FB using pantun. First I started off with pantuns in Malay, then in English. I noticed that everytime I did this, I would get some feedback from my FB friends. One of them even suggested that I make a compilation of these pantuns! So yeah, that is why I'm writing this. If I don't appreciate my own pantuns, who will? Plus, being explicit about your feelings, frustrations, predicamants and euphoria on FB can be boring. And super vain. Hehehe. At least with pantuns I can be implicit.
I've had numerous pantuns posted on FB, so I guess I'll have to be selective.
Long live pantun!

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