Walt Whitman and Umberto Fiori Agree

Walt Whitman wrote:

I AM THE POET

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea
And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,
And bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one
And that what thhey seem to the child they are
[And that the world is not joke,
Nor any part of it a sham].

(A poem Whitman didn't complete. Taken from Ceslaw Milosz's anthology, A Book of Luminous Things)

Umberto Fiori wrote:

CHIN

If someone in the street
shouts at me "What was that you said?".
stops the motorbike, gets off, takes a run at me,
grabs me by the collar --
it means that words
when somebody says them
don't just drop into the void:
somewhere, somebody hears them.

And people see me: I'm not just stared through.
I'm not alone, if my head-butts
find a chin. If the face is sore
and the teeth have a taste of blood
then it's true: there is a place
where we all are present.

And that is where every second
I wait, expecting you.

(trans. Alistair Elliot, in Oxford Poetry, Summer Issue, 1999)

Comments

Good mother, good academic?

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Cordillera Folktales and Story-telling

It was cold and wet outside on the day of the launching of The Golden Arrow of Mt. Makilkilang and other Cordillera Folktales . But inside Mt. Cloud Bookshop we were warmed by stories read and performed by the Aanak di Kabiligan community theater group. Storytelling on a stormy afternoon. Paco Paco. A Benguet story from the book, published by the Cordillera Green Network. Aanak di Kabiligan means children of the mountains. The theater group was born out of the Cordillera Green Network's eleven years of conducting workshops in which children transform their grandparents' stories into theater productions. Here they perform the title story of the Golden Arrow of Mt. Makilkilang and Other Cordillera Folktales.

Now/here no/where woman

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