Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Luisa’s three years of daily poems, and a call for submissions

Over at her own website, Luisa Igloria mentions that today is a special day for her — and for Via Negativa. After describing her thinking behind the recently completed series Chance: A Poetic Tarot, she adds:

Three years ago (on November 20, 2010) I began writing at least a poem a day and posting these on Dave Bonta’s Via Negativa website.

Without initially intending to do so, I have since become fully engaged in and by the daily practice of writing poems. Not only has “running with my muse” daily made me more limber and given me much valuable biofeedback about my writing; it has also taught me many lessons about fear and anxiety, my habits (both good and bad), the many little (and big) excuses that the self seems to conveniently find when confronted with things it is afraid of and/or that must get done…

Three years later, I realize with so much gratefulness: not only have I written many poems which I can return to in order to revise and gather up into books— I have also “met” and made so many new friends thanks to the collaborative spirit of electronic communication.

This leads to the next part of my idea—

To commemorate my three years of daily poems, I thought of making a chapbook of the Tarot poems with illustrations, which will be produced as POD (print on demand) copy perhaps via a service like Peecho–

Furthermore, Pennsylvania-based poet and publisher Dave Bonta and UK-based writer Rachel Rawlins have kindly offered to produce PDF/iBook templates of the book and publish the chapbook under the Via Negativa Press imprint.

There are 78 “Tarot” poems in all, and if they are laid out 6 to a page, Dave and Rachel suggested that we could have 13 illustrations in the chapbook.

Dear artist friends, this is where you come in—

I would like to invite you to (1) choose one of the sets of 6 Tarot poems, and to (2) submit for consideration, original art work inspired by one or all of the six you chose together, to fill one facing page that will go with the poems.

(Please also send to luisa dot igloria61 at gmail dot com a 3-6 sentence artist’s bio, along with your name, postal mailing and e-mail address, and phone number.)

Deadline to submit original art work for consideration is DECEMBER 31, 2013: submit clear resolution digital copies in 300 dpi or better; we will make our final selections of art work before January 15, 2014.

She goes on to explain that all profits from the sale of the chapbook will go to support Typhoon Haiyan relief. Do click through and read the rest of her post if you’re interested in contributing, or know an artist who might be. But please join me regardless in congratulating Luisa on this remarkable achievement of writing (at least) one poem every day for three years. Wow! To say that I am honored to be hosting the fruits of this practice would be a huge understatement.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Stage Directions

This entry is part 17 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2013

Thirst and dreams in the middle of the night. Smoked herring in oil; sardines, anchovies. Capers and capelin roe. This strange, intense longing for salt, unkillable like a roach that skitters out from under the shelves as soon as the lights are doused. Nervous twitching behind walls, beneath the floorboards. Don’t give me a fake geode to lick; let me have a bead of citrine, a yellow sapphire, a tiger’s-eye, a crystal facet around which to fit my tongue. In other words, the thing itself: because everything else would be poor copy. I groom my retinue of desires to impeccable standards— only the best will do. I march them through daily drills, hup hup; review their syntax, applaud all vaults and clumsy dismounts, attempts to clear the pommel horse. Up high, the bars and wires glint sharper than walls in a knife thrower’s gallery. But darlings, don’t fret. You work hard, you’re lovely as newborn lyrics. Don’t worry yourselves about the weather, ticket sales, secret shoppers, masquerading critics, the ennui of the damned. Don’t pay attention to anything but the beautiful wings waving you onward, the ones that flush the currant bushes with color and sound.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Disintegrate

This entry is part 16 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2013

(a partly found poem)

“The death toll could still climb higher, with an additional 1,000 cadaver bags sent to provinces, the disaster council announced as search-and-rescue operations continued in Tacloban City.” ~ from a news report on the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines

Different cells die at different rates.
Hair and nails continue to grow a little
while, but nature is more efficient.

In the air decomposition is twice as fast
as when the body is under water, four times
more than underground. Clostridia

and coliforms, enzymes; greens and blues
that blister. Methane and mercaptans,
sulfides. More rapid in the tropics,

where the sun brings everything up
to a melon boil. Bluebottle flies,
carrion flies, ants and beetles

and maggots and wasps. Nails and teeth
detach, their ivory falling, letter
after letter that will never

again be sent. After weeks, a month,
a year, a decade: rags and bones,
motes indistinguishable

from dust. Finally
everything the body held,
burst open like a secret.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Audrey Hepburn

This entry is part 15 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2013

So many yards of cloth:
good cotton, polyester, rayon;
prim edge of childhood’s
Peter Pan collars, chaste tents
of A-line skirts that crept
up and up as silhouettes tightened
and searched for the key
in any keyhole neckline,
the getaway boat in any bateau.
I was no exception: I could not
bind a blanket stitch,
would not feather a herringbone.
What chance did I have without
the curved swan of your neck,
my feet shod but shoddy
in ballerinas, un-dainty from birth,
limbs decorated with scars or scabs,
stitched together with dark
needle and thread? And so I flew
the nest right after breakfast,
kissed the first tear-shaped bar
of light from the chandelier,
hurried to find myself
a fit bustle. I do, I do,
I do regret more than a few
things: but guess what, finally
I’m old enough to admit I don’t
rue it all! —though you hit it
right on the head when you said
those things about the sky
being vague and empty— Marriage
(whatever that means), or what you give
yourself to, can be like that: just a country
where the thunder goes and things disappear
sometimes, but not forever.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

On trying to reach the poet who had no phone or e-mail

When I tried to reach
the poet-farmer, I was told
that I must write a letter

in the old-fashioned way
for he had no phone, no email,
no computer, and only relied

on the post office which he
walked to and from every day
since it was just a mile or so

up the road from where he lived
in a tiny rural town tucked into
the eastern part of south central

but modern-day America—
And being from a small town myself,
a hill station in the northern outposts

of the Philippine cordillera, I felt
an immediate affinity for that kind
of natural isolation; so immediately

I took a pen and wrote what I had to say
—my letter of invitation, the inked
words drawn in neat lines

on a clear rectangle of paper,
today’s date, then the salutation
and the complimentary close

and then my name, my signature,
before I folded the paper once
and then once over, slid it

into an envelope, sealed it
then sent it off, hoping the gesture
would end in meaningful connection,

the way it might feel
to bear a little water cupped
in one’s hands to the sea.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Offering.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ghazal for the Dead: In Tacloban

Processed but not identified: scattered by wind,
splintered, battered where the flood left them in Tacloban.

The dark is a cave is the mouth of God or the unfathomable—
O for sleep without such helpless waking in Tacloban.

How many baubles and stolen billions will bring lives back? Ask
the former First Lady, who attended Holy Infant Academy in Tacloban.

The mayor was lashed to a coconut tree. The mayor was the coconut in the tree.
The tree was in a ballroom. This is not about the oral tradition in Tacloban.

In the midst of calamity, would you have time to worry about your shoes?
Through the waters, a typhoon victim bore a general on his back in Tacloban.

Why were the military first on the scene? Why did it take so long for relief
to arrive? The dead are past blame, the dead are past games in Tacloban.

The actors and actresses turned politicians flash smiles at the camera
while the living vomit with grief, hunger, dysentery, in Tacloban.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

(10 More:) Afterwards

is the gasp and the catch of ten thousand mouths singing wordless as they come up for air

is the burn of brine and the salt that streams and streams in the lungs afterwards

is a muddy hem and the sleeve of what once was a tree or a door that opens the chest

is the buoy or the bell or the shape of the coast or the bodice of a church folded at the seams

is the thread of a voice that left its hungry tongue at the door of the ear

is the staircase spiraling down to the floor of the sea where the ghost of a ship explores

is the room in the school where people sleep under blankets of powdered chalk

is chicken coop wire unrolled like a carpet in the plaza where statues have been bent

is red and red and brown and red and blue and sheets of lime in the open grave

is the scar that climbs the trellis to rest on the cheek of the moon

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Afterwards

is an edifice half on stilts and half unroofed for a newborn’s entrance into the world

is the crimson edging his mother’s skirt as she lies on a makeshift couch waiting for the afterbirth

is the blueprint of darkness drawn in detail beneath a swell of water

is the hollow in the wall of the factory and the sign over a buried church reading Esperar

is the ring of beaten silver around the Badjao woman’s finger and the slow listing of the ferry

is the peeling bark of trees disguised as outriggers stranded in the shoals

is the lantern burning its last store of oil and the doctor tearing his surgical coat into strips

is the helicopter and its cargo of bottled water hovering over no place to land

is the republic of the drowned and its plazas decorated with abandoned basketball courts

is the bread of nothing and the salt of nothing and the crust of nothing freely shared

is the new address of the dead whose gravestones have all been moved to the sea

is the children carrying a jug of water and a clutch of nearly deflated balloons they found lashed to a tree

 

In response to Via Negativa: Typhoon.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Elegy, with lines from e.e. cummings

This entry is part 14 of 28 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2013

(Tacloban City, Philippines)

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands: but I do not agree. Time, perhaps, has the illusion of small hands. Time is made of wings we cannot see or feel even if they brush against our faces in the dark. In the daytime, they take the shape of pauses, those moments we think we have forgotten something important and we retrace our steps. Somewhere in the mind, the sound of a shutter clicking open and close. Warnings and sirens, and then the wind: rising, insistent, forcing open all closed doors, all shelters. The pictures show how, before it made landfall, the storm was a magnitude of elegiac proportions: its one eye did not blink, so bent it was on bearing down with the unbearable weight of its sadness. No, this rain did not have small hands. But the child did, the one whose frail body spun like a compass needle wrenched free of its battered case. Let me go, and you live, she said to her mother, before the current took her. None of this is metaphor. Ten thousand lives did not shut very beautifully, suddenly, or close like roses.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.