Inviting everyone to attend the one-night-only bboy poetry reading of Fil-Am poet Patrick Rosal tomorrow, November 21 (Tuesday), 8PM at mag:net, Katipunan. I will be reading with other guest readers including Asha Macam and Mookie Katigbak. See you there.
Patrick Rosal is the celebrated author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea Books), finalist for the Asian-American Writers' Workshop Literary Awards and winner of the AAWW Member's Choice Award. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award. His work has appeared in journals such as North American Review, Columbia, Folio, and many anthologies including The NuyorAsian Anthology, Pinoy Poetics, and The Beacon Best. He has been a featured reader at many venues around the country, in Buenos Aires, London, and on the BBC radio program "The World Today". The 2001 Emerging Writer in Residence at Penn State Altoona, he is currently Assistant Professor of English at Bloomfield College. My American Kundiman, was recently published by Persea Books in fall 2006.
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The Poet with His Face in His Hands
You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need any more of that sound.
So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across
the forty fields and forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets
like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you
want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched
by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.
-- Mary Oliver, from The Best American Poetry 2006 (I got a copy
yesterday from Booksale. hehe.)
