July 22, 2019 at 11:15 pm (destinations, Filipino poetry, Filipino Writers, Philippine History, Recommended)
Tags: Philippine History, poetry, The Philippines
Like the Molave was a long poem in eight parts, published 1940:
The little brown brother opens his eyes to the glaring sound of
the Star Spangled;
dreams to the grand tune of the American dream;
is proud to be part of the sweeping American magnitude;
strains his neck upon the rising skyscraper of American
ideals, and on it hinges faith, hope, aspiration;
sings the American epic of souls conceived in liberty;
quivers with longing brotherhood of men created equal;
envisions great visions of the land across the sea where
dwell his strong brothers.
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July 22, 2019 at 4:58 pm (Filipino poetry, Filipino Writers, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History)
Tags: environmental literature, grief, poetry, The Philippines
Excerpt from Like the Molave
by Rafael Zulueta y da Costa (1915 – 1990)
Note: The molave is a Philippine hardwood, resistant to fire, used frequently in the construction of Philippine churches and dwellings, now extinct in the Islands.
VI
My American friend says:
show me one great Filipino speech to make your people
listen through the centuries;
show me one great Filipino song rich with the soul of your
seven thousand isles;
show me one great Filipino dream, forever sword and
shield —
speech eloquent and simple as our My Country ‘Tis of Thee;
dream age-enduring, sacred as our American democracy!
Friend, our silences are long but we also have our speeches.
Father, with my whole heart, I forgive all.
Believe me, your reverence.
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July 18, 2019 at 5:28 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Calyx, causes, poetry
The kind of activism that made Calyx great is here:
Excerpt From Children Are Color-Blind
by Genny Lim
I never painted myself yellow
The way I colored the sun when I was five.
The way I colored whitefolks with the “flesh” crayola.
Yellow pages adults thumbed through for restaurants,
taxis, airlines, plumbers . . .
The color of summer squash, corn, eggyolk, innocence and tapioca.
My children knew before they were taught.
They envisioned rainbows emblazoned over alleyways;
Clouds floating over hilltops like a freedom shroud.
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July 10, 2019 at 1:38 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Links, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Asian American Writers, Literary Magazines, poetry, websites
Luisa Igloria In Her Kingdom
Excerpt from Passing Inspection (First posted in Via Negativa, 22 June 2019)
When my father’s only sister migrated to East
Lansing, Michigan forty years ago, she hand-carried
the x-ray film of her lungs in a large brown Manila
envelope, as proof she didn’t have tuberculosis
or any other malignant respiratory condition
that in the US CDC should be aware of. She came
back to visit only thrice; we never saw her again,
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July 9, 2019 at 10:37 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Flowers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: poetry, summer
You’ve wasted another evening
sitting with imaginary friends,
discussing the simplest possible
arrangement of an iris.
— excerpt from “Replica”
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July 4, 2019 at 8:18 pm (Personal Bookshelf, Places)
Tags: discoveries, poetry, Puerto Rican writers, translation
Antille, steaming pasture
of freshly crushed cane syrup.
Constant activity of the sugar mill
Molasses Turkish bath.
White-linened aristocracy
skimming over life’s waves
on milk-curdled phrases
and mellifluous metaphors.
Stylized coast drafted
by languid palm trees.
— translated by Rosario Ferré
Luis Palés Matos was born on March 20, 1898, in Guayama, Puerto Rico, a small village with a predominantly black population.
Stay tuned.
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May 10, 2019 at 8:58 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Cork, Fridays, Ireland, poetry, translation
Self spent all morning in the Blue Room, reading poetry.
Lina’s Eyes
from Dimitrova’s collection A Visit to the Clockmaker (Southword Editions, 2005), translated from the Bulgarian by Gregory O’Donoghue
Lina, my blind colleague
always came to classes
with her mother.
They’d take the front seats
& while her mother jotted notes
Lina listened with a solemn face.
(I heard it was a medical mistake —
the nurse pushed the wrong button,
the technicians did not repair the laser?)
Once I dared meet her gaze,
peeped out of my eyes
& waved a signal lamp as
they do directing aeroplanes.
I saw just two blank windows.
Behind the masonry a prisoner
walked to & fro hoping to get
used to the darkness.
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April 6, 2019 at 4:03 pm (Books, Conversations, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Chinese writers, literary awards, Northern Ireland, novel, poetry, Saturday
Mammy! The heads! They took the heads! Where are the heads? Where’s Lassie, mammy? Where’s daddy? Have the brothers found Lassie? Where’s daddy? Where’s Lassie?
This novel, which won the Man Booker, fully deserved to win.
Graywolf Press has now given self two books that absolutely shattered her: this one, and the translation of Liu Xia’s poetry collection, Empty Chairs.
That is all.
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March 31, 2019 at 5:35 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: causes, Just published, Literary Magazines, poetry
Ray Murphy, from a letter quoted in the Introduction by Glenna Luschei:
Virtually all of my writing about opiates stems from writing about injury. I never address opiates as a recreational drug. Be interesting to see how many other submissions you get that come out of injury and pain, and then progress into dependency and possibly full-blown addiction.
The second piece in the issue is Marsha de la O’s Paradise Motel. An excerpt:
Black flame, blue spoon, now the shadow
draws close a cloak as wide as Lake Michigan,
robed and rocked in god’s water, rippling
indigo. From out on the street the rush of cars
weave through their harmonies —
those vessels I’ve entered one by one,
riding out currents on a raft of fire.
Marsha de la O’s new collection, Every Ravening Thing, is just out from Pitt Poetry.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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March 10, 2019 at 6:03 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: English writers, history, poetry, reading lists, wisdom
Two books self put on hold are waiting for pick-up at the downtown Redwood City Library: one is Milkman, the prize-winning novel by Irish writer Anna Burns. The other is nonfiction by Doris Kearns Goodwin about Leadership.
The rain seems to be holding off a bit. She planted some lilies and spread organic fertilizer around her roses.
She really needs to get on with her writing, always difficult when she’d much rather be planting. To help her, she’s reading Jenny Lewis’s memoir in poetry of her father’s time in the British Army: Taking Mesopotamia (Carcanet, 2014)
This is a re-read. Self has known Jenny for five years. She heard Jenny read at the British Museum. She was there when Jenny read from her new collection, Gilgamesh Retold, at the Woodstock Poetry Festival in Oxfordshire, last November.
The collection begins with two quotes, the first from the epic of Gilgamesh, the second from Lord Grey of Falloden.
Here’s what Lord Grey has to say about the taking of Mesopotamia, 1919:
- I think the best thing would be if, at the end of the war we could say we had taken and gained nothing. Taking Mesopotamia, for instance, means spending millions on irrigation and development with no immediate return . . . keeping up a large army in an unfamiliar country and tangling every kind of administrative question.
Self loves the idea of an occupying army taking and gaining nothing.
Stay tuned.
Sunday Morning, First Day of Daylight Saving, March 2019
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