Tag: Luisa A. Igloria

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Parable of Sound

This entry is part 15 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Never made new, only
made over— And so at the end

of the tale, the seeker finds
himself in the basement, in the vault

of an ice fort, somewhere in a remote
valley— In the stillness of a room,

a fire burns: old furniture, parts
of other buildings. Dust motes

make hundreds of shadows but only one
vibrates to the sound of his waking

heart. When he finds his voice, the eaves
drop their long-chiseled burdens. The world

is etched with a flurry of wings, the call
of crows; moaning, laughing, weeping.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Between

This entry is part 14 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Whistle of wingbeats skimming the trees,
long skein of road on which we travel—
I don’t want to ask anymore about time
or provisions. I don’t want to think
about the end. The light is milky
as tempera, tentative as flight.
The hydrangea bush we thought
was dead has come back, pushing new
buds of green. At night, the garden
pillows unsaid words and dreams.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to the Street Where I Grew Up (City Camp Alley, Baguio City)

This entry is part 13 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear alley bent like an L, shaped like an old
god’s crooked elbow, decorated with clotheslines
heavy with wash— Nearly thirty, I skidded down
your last few meters in reverse, learning to drive
a stick shift and nearly knocking over the island
of trash bins swarming with tribes of blue-black
flies. The neighbors came to their front steps
to heckle and hoot, disturbing the chickens
kept in rusted cages in each yard: the way
they carried on with cackling, you’d think
there was an egg thief in the trees. Almost
a lifetime since I’ve left, but still I see the vivid
verdigris of rusted roofs, the graveled lane
where children sat in empty lading boxes,
then tilted themselves into the wind—
And so have I. Years later, I startle
from sleep or wakeful dream, thinking
the dwarf yellow sun brings artifacts
from that other time: a map, directions
written in code by unfaithful gods.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Not Yet There

This entry is part 12 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

The tree is intricate, a lattice
with many moving parts: sparrows,
robins, a blackbird’s creak.

The ox in the sky pulls the plow.
The archer strings his one good
arrow across the bow. The dipper’s

hinged against the lip of the grassy well.
And I have only my hungry heart, my
wobbly heart: I cart it everywhere I go.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Postcard to Grey

This entry is part 11 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

How solemn the breastplates of soot
on the sides of old buildings.

How hard the rind; how the mouth
whittles away to get to its sweet.

How like a rumpled quilt, these overcast skies
above clumps of streaked magnolias.

How the train moves forward on the track,
how its whistle departs in the other direction.

How blind to the rain, these small
prisms of light that fracture at our feet.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Landscape, with Returning Things

This entry is part 10 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

From a nest on the mountain, from the skirt
of the nearest pond— something has flown away

in another time. Currents spill their salt
and the earth changes garments. And yes

it is a different season, but somehow the same.
What returns arrows silently through the trees.

Fear does the same things over. And love?
The heart resolves to face, or not to face.

The head says keep, the heart says bend.
What can we do but begin.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Silence

This entry is part 8 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear silence, the deeper I fall into your
soundproofed well, the clearer I hear
these arias: beyond the window, a rapid
scrabbling of claws on bark; indoors,
a waterfall miming a moving drape.
The clicking of the laundry cycle, tinkle of
a brass bell in the shade of the dogwood tree.
Has the reaper come, has the harvest
started? Whether or not I am ready, the grain
explodes from its golden husk. And still I crave
the warmth more than the amber in the cup;
and still I am in love with the zest of oranges,
that opening of light crosshatched with blue above.
I’ve kept fingernails, eyelashes, hair; dried stumps
that fell shortly after birth from my daughters’ navels:
the smallest things that tether us tightly to this world.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Ghazal with a Few Variations

This entry is part 7 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

She rinses her face and smooths her hair. The street
comes to life, the smells of morning from the coffee bar.

Grab your ankles, press your forehead to your knees.
I used to be able to slide a raised leg along the barre.

Sometimes I’m seized with a longing for what I don’t know.
They indulge me when I sit in the dark at the local bar.

Just when she thought she’d cleared the tests, they called
her back. Don’t you know they’re always raising the bar?

His voice on the phone, now husky with age— how long
since he whispered in my ear in a college bar?

Thirteen cattail heads in the shallows, like swizzle sticks;
water clear as vodka— You’d think this was a poetry bar.

A couple wanders in; a blinged-out dude in cowboy boots. The street
philosopher, red-lipsticked waitress. All this in one night, in a bar.

The days are getting longer. Soon we can sit on the deck, drinks
in hand, watching the sun torch sheets of water beyond the sandbar.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Luisa turns 100! (posts, that is)

Luisa A. IgloriaYesterday’s poem, “Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here,” was Luisa Igloria’s 100th post at Via Negativa. What started as a spur-of-the-moment response to one of my Morning Porchisms at Facebook, re-posted here back on November 20, has blossomed into a regular feature — and a very impressive display of poetic virtuosity and persistence by a master poet. For the first couple of weeks, Luisa wrote poems in response to random posts from the Morning Porch archives, but soon settled into her present pattern of writing daily in response to that morning’s entry. The fact that she has been able to keep it up, with all her duties as a college administrator and a mother, and produce poems of consistently high quality is nothing short of remarkable.

I remain deeply honored, but I can’t say I feel any special burden of responsibility to write better entries as a result. Lord knows I probably should; I’ve written some stinkers! But experience has shown that Luisa is very good at making lemonade out of lemons.

Back on December 27th, I noted:

It’s interesting what this collaboration is doing to our shared geographies. The blizzard missed us here in Central Pennsylvania, and I’m not sure how many ravens are found in Luisa’s neck of the woods. But there’s no reason why poems that take the natural world for their subject should be held to a stricter standard of nonfictional reportage than other poetry. In the world of these poems, Luisa and I live on the same street.

A couple days later, Luisa added some details about her process:

I always try to respond to each post new and without premeditation, trying to keep my mind limber and not dwell too much or too long or agonize over things. I’m trying to develop a better receptivity to the things that present themselves as occasions for poetry. … Visits to The Morning Porch are helping me immensely.

She wrote a bit more about her use of “found poems” and other material in poetic composition in a note included with her January 23rd post.

[L]ike a magpie I’m drawn to shiny stuff, language winking at me. I’m inclined to think that this is really the area where we work hardest to mine that “originality” that is so highly prized. All this of course has something to do with notions of appropriation, and can often lead to the question of how comfortable writers might feel in “taking” or “taking over” lines, words, language priorly or in some other form used by others. Someone famous was once reputed to have said, “Good writers imitate; great writers steal.” It’s a tough job because all our cultural and other conversations are so rife with intersubjectivities and intertextualities. I think I much prefer what happens to my writing when an interesting bit of information, an arresting line or image that I’ve found, triggers the desire for a deeper kind of poetic engagement and I find some entry point, some latitude to invent and explore its complexities further.

One thing I’ve learned about Luisa is that she’s not terribly good at numbers. Neither am I. But who can resist their manas? Thus we mark Luisa’s 100th post… and her 108th Morning Porch poem overall (a few posts combine several poems). I copied and pasted the text of all 108 poems into a document for the sole purpose of gleaning some additional statistics. MS Word counts 13,639 words altogether, or 75,747 characters counting spaces — the equivalent of 542 tweets. Had they in fact been posted to Twitter, they probably would’ve required between 575 and 600 tweets to avoid breaks in the middle of words and lines. This is of interest as a basis of comparison with the tweet-length Morning Porch entries. It means that Luisa’s poems are on average close to six times longer than the posts that spark them, which sounds about right.

I pasted the document into WordCounter.com and asked for a list of the 100 most frequently used words (excluding a, the, to, etc., and counting different forms of the same verb as one). Here’s that list, with the number of uses in parentheses.

water (42) day (40) tree (38) know (37) how (37) one (36) through (31) snow (30) want (28) come (28) open (27) dark (26) over (26) little (25) wind (25) say (24) might (24) still (24) new (22) air (22) window (22) night (22) can’t (21) down (21) long (21) just (21) light (21) blue (20) back (20) against (20) leave (19) make (19) world (19) way (18) away (18) under (18) small (18) green (17) white (17) go (17) sometime (17) sky (17) though (17) time (17) above (17) today (16) every (16) cold (16) rain (16) hand (16) i’ve (16) once (16) see (16) thing (16) dear (15) woman (15) sun (15) walk (15) morning (15) cloud (15) ear (14) old (14) it’s (14) heart (14) find (14) shadow (14) last (14) branch (14) body (14) tell (14) thin (14) gather (13) off (13) look (13) again (13) color (13) think (12) hair (12) turn (12) three (12) bird (12) did (12) glass (12) ring (12) wing (12) read (12) closer (12) head (12) around (12) wood (11) never (11) face (11) love (11) fall (11) two (11) voice (11) much (11) part (11) paper (11) ground (11)

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here

This entry is part 6 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Dear doppelganger, where in the world
have you been traveling? When I am
cleaning house, sometimes I come
upon bits and pieces of your wardrobe:
crystal teardrop earrings, those pumps
of sumptuous leather, that airy, off-
the-shoulder frock. And in the back
of the closet, what are those old
letters tied with ribbon, from Diego
and Hans, and Frank? Here, today,
there’s heavy frost, bare dirt in
the garden— though I hope one of us
might have remembered sometime ago
to put bulbs in the soil. Motes of snow
revolve like lazy angels, backlit by
the sun. I make wishes, missing your
carefree laughter, your joie de vivre,
the way you entered any department
store and charmed the discounts off
the hapless young clerks who wouldn’t
know what just hit them. Come back
soon— I have a Mozart cake with three
layers of Bavarian cream, and I promise
not to work on weekends (unless there’s
a real emergency). I dream of water-
colors, the stippled backs of fish in bright
green water, myself a little raft sailing away.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.