Dark Backward

little announcement: the happy mondays poetry nights installment that was supposedly scheduled for tonight has been moved to July 7, so as to maintain that the readings are held on the 1st and third mondays of the month.

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here's a song by Los Chupacabras. link to the video here.


Locked inside my room
I am just a ghost of myself
There’s so much to do
Somewhere else

Yellow suburban house
In this warm Manila town
I’d like to see it all
Tumble down

I don’t want to go out
I don’t want to go dark backward
I don’t want to go out
I don’t want to go,
I don’t want to go out

Take me somewhere else
Take me to a war-torn hell
Nothing, like something,
Happens everywhere

I don’t want to go out
I don’t want to go dark backward
I don’t want to go out
I don’t want to go,
I don’t want to go out

Don’t matter where we are we’re never there
Let’s close our eyes and watch the world die
Tinfoil animals, hanging over us,
Thrown matches burning up like shooting stars

Like shooting stars
Like shooting stars
Like shooting stars

-Easy Fagela

Juan Luna's Revolver

Forthcoming January 2009 from University of Notre Dame Press :

Juan Luna’s Revolver
by Luisa A. Igloria

The poems in Juan Luna’s Revolver trace journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial power. Luisa A. Igloria alludes to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero José Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World’s Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility.
Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria’s poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically- charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.
Luisa A. Igloria is an associate professor in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University. The winner of numerous national and international creative writing awards, she is the author of nine books.


2009 Winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry
ISBN 978-0-268-03178-7
$18.00 paperback
104 pages

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Advance Praise . . .

"In Juan Luna’s Revolver, Luisa Igloria establishes herself as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry. Here, she explores the dichotomy of Filipino: interwoven yet hermetically singular, acquisitive yet inventive, docile yet amok. Her engrossing poems hide, behind their gorgeous scrims, a bristling wall of spears." —Sabina Murray, author of Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and The Caprices

"When I read a Luisa Igloria poem, a bright enchanted light falls over my being. Juan Luna’s Revolver is Igloria’s best work to date. These poems never let us forget they are wrought from an immigrant’s love for family, country, and the history of the reinvented self." —Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles

" ‘What a world to have lived in, to have arrived in,’ Luisa Igloria writes early on in this brilliant collection that explores colonization and cultural displacement, and how the artist must live in the aftermath of both. Even when she writes about places many miles away, Igloria constructs a luminous portrait of what is utterly human and ultimately familiar. These poems reveal a poet devoted to the truth of her craft." —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of Outlandish Blues and Red Clay Suite

"In sure and compelling measures, with richly textured turns, and attending to the mystery of matter, Luisa Igloria’s poems offer a powerfully tangible world, and a world within, and a world beyond." —Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

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Happy Mondays XXX

Please come join us for the 30th installment of the Happy Mondays Poetry Nights @ mag:net cafe Katipunan this June 16, Monday. FREE ADMISSION 7:30pm till midnight.

Featured readers for the night are:

1. Lourd De Veyra
2. Eric Melendez
3. Adam David
4. Mikael Co
5. Ronald Benusa
6. Kash Avena
7. Marie La Viña
8. Enuh Iglesias
9. Hussein Macarambon
10. Pocholo Goitia

plus other regular and guest readers. to celebrate this 30th reading, there will be special solo acoustic numbers by Wincy Ong of Narda, Johnoy Danao of Bridge, and Waps San Diego of The Bayaw Collective.

PLUS rakenrol performances by our main bands for the evening:

1. Los Chupacabras
2. Taggu Ndios
3. Weedisneys
4. Dissent

Moleskine notebooks will be raffled off courtesy of Jasper Ong of http://www.avalon.ph/.

Kitakits!

Poetrip

Here's Waps San Diego reading his new poem Galileo.

Galileo
Rafael C. San Diego

Because the wood is old and the varnish older
because we sleep under shafts of night
the full moon looks like a child’s finger
pointing at what it cannot trace and the songs

that blink out of the land rise to meet it
everywhere they are doomed to miss
each other like a word spoken to an ocean

like sin and a bird like a comet streaming
across the void and the blanket of dust
that burns but does not vanish like the memory

of a perfect rainbow in the sky when one
is out walking in despair and quickly smiles
after the rain but does not look for it again
like a child’s hand one day touching the fabric

of her mother’s last dress and reason
and logic trying to find its place in a masterpiece

made one day by a hungry man his feet
as ice his heart warm with understanding
knowing that his hand moves unwilled

that his eyes move across the canvass across
the notes with speed that does not come from
any sort of light any sort of pang any sort
of muse because the mind is made of meat

because the old are full of dreams because
the young are not so bright because the moon
is looking for us because it will not come back

until next month because that is how it all
began because the night is full of promises
and windows are bereft of color and the eye

can only dream of piercing the atmosphere
without technology honed through eons
of dreaming eons of telling everybody that
there is something out there something

that resembles the moon that resembles a song
resembles the world only they burn but do not
come closer because there are some things
that are not meant to touch like a finger and a star
like an eye and a soul like Galileo and the answers
he so yearned for like an empty chair waiting
for a god to finally sit down on it and take it far away.

Happy Mondays XXIX

Featured readers for the 29th installment of the Happy Mondays Poetry Nights @ mag:net cafe, Katipunan tomorrow, June 2, are as follows:

1. Pocholo Goitia
2. Ken Ishikawa
3. Marie La Viña
4. Angelo Suarez
5. Easy Fagela
6. Glenn Atanacio
7. Gabe Mercado
8. Daryll Delgado
9. Adam David
10. Joseph Saguid
11. Khavn Dela Cruz
12. Eric Melendez
13. John Torres
14. Lourd De Veyra
15. Waps San Diego
16. Pancho Villanueva

plus other regular and guest readers. please come and bring your own poems for the open mic.

FREE ADMISSION the whole night. Reading starts at 730 pm. bands performing during and after the reading include
Carnivale
Shotgun Lola
Chongkeys
Khavn and Friends
Los Chupacabras

kitakits!