The Wily Filipino

Hey, I Got Published Again!

Back when I was in sixth grade at the North Davis Elementary School in Davis, California -- my folks were on sabbatical -- I wrote a poem called "Life." There was little about the poem -- I should really say "poem" -- that I remember, except for the ponderous ending ("Life is like / a long trip.") and one sentence ("The river was / a ribbon of moon."). Hey, it was sixth grade.

Then I didn't think about poetry again for another 22 years or so, except for a detour through Eliot and Cummings in high school. But in the past few months I started plunging into it again, and the immersion has been life-changing, like learning a new language.

Then I started actually making them up just about a couple of weeks ago (see my "Hey, I Got Published!" post from a week back) -- specifically, in Eileen Tabios's hay(na)ku form.

Indeed, I still have a couple about Madeline here, which I'm suddenly emboldened to post:

Your
eyes Your
lips and Your

Purple
kissed bruise
on: right knee.

And I've been thinking as well of organizing those dream couplets into some sort of series, like:

A tangle of horseflies.
The inadequacy of grass.

Peripheries of mollusk.
Inflection of sea.

Sheaves of punches.
The grammar of bees.

Then the best kick in the pants, as it were, was the following message from Eileen the other day:

Congrats to the winners:

Top Three Chosen By Judge Barbara Jane Reyes:

Tom Beckett
Jon Pineda
Dennis Somera

Other masterful hay(na)ku poets reveal themselves to be Stephen Kirbach, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Luis Cabalquinto, Kenneth Tanemura, Terri Leigh Relf, Kasey Mohammad, Benito "Sunny" Vergara, Bill Freind, Shirlie Mae Mamaril, Clayton Couch, Michael Snider, Michael Helsem and Rosanne Virata.

Please check the June 20, 2003 post at http://winepoetics.blogspot.com/ for more details.

Thanks to all participants; your words are a blessing,
Eileen

And in the company of real poets too!

All in all, I think, a nice beginning to things.

Posted by the wily filipino at June 22, 2003 11:45 PM