Caracoa 2006: The Silver Issue
Edited by Lourd Ernest De Veyra and Joel M. Toledo
Philippine Literary Arts Council
"After a ten-year absence, the PLAC's poetry journal again gathers the powerfully polished voices of poets both established and new. This all-English compilation features the work of 25 poets, among them Luis Cabalquinto, Frank Cimatu, Luisa Igloria, and Paolo Manalo. In their introduction, the editors point out that much has indeed changed for Filipino poets over the last decade. On the occasion of PLAC's 25th anniversary, this volume is intended to "reflect how our poetry in English has achieved, in that span of time, a state of maturity and luminous grace." Experience that grace by partaking of this poetic banquet, done up in glorious silver."
congrats also to bayaws imo quibilan and ramil gulle whose books were likewise on the list.
eto nga pala si prins stardust, just in case you're wondering.
*spoiler* kapatid 'yan ni little dyan, big berd, and medium steeve.
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okay. now back to irregular programming....
from sir butch's very moving column today on the past week's 46th UP National Writers Workshop:
"(Today, when some writers all-too-stridently denounce these contests and their joiners as a sell-out and swear never to join them—or join them again, in the case of at least one perennially loud whiner—I want to tell them to put on some shorts, take a walk, drink some buko juice, and get back to their own writing.)...
"Ultimately, every literary life follows its own trajectory. You can take the safe and proven path by going to writing school and maybe taking an MA or an MFA in creative writing abroad; you win a few Palancas, publish a couple of books, teach a course or a workshop in creative writing, and then one day you wake up to find someone asking you to write a blurb for the back of his or her first book. You have arrived—somewhere, somehow—slightly dazed, vaguely unhappy, but gratified to have a family, a house, and maybe a car you can call your own.
"Or you could choose the rebel’s way, slaying every literary father and every literary dragon you encounter, piling on the inevitable welts and bruises, refusing to accept a peso you didn’t bleed for, embracing struggle and suffering with a martyr’s passion. And then you wake up alone, embittered and unloved, wondering if anything you ever said made a difference to the world, or even to someone else."
