The Official Website of Pinoy Poets

UP Press year-end blast

2007-12-17T01:59:00.000-08:00

The University of the Philippines Press ends the year on a high note by staging Paglulunsad 2007: Ikatlong Yugto at Pasasalamat.

Everyone is invited to this grand book launch cum cocktail party happening on December 14, 2007 at the Balay Kalinaw in UP Diliman campus, Quezon City .The event will highlight six important factors in UP Press, as follows: launch of the third installment of book titles for 2007 introduction of UP Press' new Editorial Board announcement of the UP Centennial Books project the celebration of UP Press authors who won or became finalists of this year's National Book Awards by the Manila Critics Circle the five-year anniversary of UP Press bookstores launch of the new UP Press website The event will start at 6 p.m. Food, music and books will be abundant in this year-end celebration. It is also a way of thanking UP Press patrons and partners. Ikatlong Yugto will complete the 2007 roster of titles. Some of the titles in this third installment include the following:

Best Filipino Stories: The NVM Gonzalez Awards 2000-2005 edited by Gemino Abad and Gregorio Brillantes Cordillera in June by Ben Tapang,Defiant Daughters by Rina Corpuz
Forcing The Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas: From Foundation to Armed Struggle by Ken Fuller Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Issue I edited by Jose Dalisay Jr. Mannahatta Mahal: Collected Expatriate Poems by Luis Cabalquinto
Mostly in Monsoon Weather by Marne Kilates,Sexuality and the Filipina by Lilia Quindoza-Santiago, Sawikaan 2006: Mga Salita ng Taon edited by Robert Anonuevo and Galileo Zafra,
Some of the authors will be present in the event. Balay Kalinaw is at the corner of Guerrero and Dagohoy streets, UP Diliman, Quezon City (near Ilang-Ilang Residence Hall). Dress code for the party is smart casual.

For confirmation of attendance or for more information, please contact: Ms. Libay Linsangan Cantor (UP Press Special Projects Assistant) 0918 249 5377; 920-6863; libay.cantor@gmail.com

Rica Bolipata-Santos wins Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award 2007

2007-12-17T01:57:00.000-08:00

Rica Bolipata-Santos' Love, Desire, Children, Etc.: Reflections of a Young Wife won this year's Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. Published in 2005 by Milflores Publishing, Inc., the book is a collection of essays which Dr. Neil Garcia praised for its “candor, grace and humor…”
At ceremonies held at the UP Diliman Bulwagang Rizal last December 8, Garcia announced the winner, who was congratulated by UP ICW Director Vim Nadera and Atty. Gizela Gonzalez-Montinola. Bolipata-Santos received a P50,000 check and certificate. She delivered a short acceptance speech as her children rejoiced at her success, her youngest son joining her onstage and bowing like a performer, further endearing them to the audience. She described herself as a “closet writer,” talked about the sheer joy of writing as her hand moves across the page, and described her delight when Antonio Hidalgo of Milflores said he was extremely interested in publishing Love …

The award is the only such prize that recognizes literary debuts of Filipino writers and was established in memory of Gonzalo Gonzalez. Previous winners are Elena Sicat, Luna Sicat-Cleto, F.H. Batacan, Sarg Lacuesta, Vince Groyon and Kristian Cordero. This year's panel of judges was composed of Garcia, Jaime An-Lim and previous winner Vince Groyon.

Below is the transcript from Garcia's presentation of the winner and other nominees:
The six finalists for this year's Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award are:
First, Salamanca , a novel by Dean Alfar. This is the only avowed book of fiction to make it to the short list in what has turned out to be the year of creative nonfiction. A verbal conjuration of the magical realist sort, Salamanca is a campy verbal adventure written in Alfar's trademark rambunctious and irreverent prose. In typical postmodernist fashion, this fabulation's impressively scintillant surface—its medium—is quite possibly already the innermost depth of its message. Second, Barbara-Ann Gamboa Lewis's Barefoot in Fire: A World War II Childhood . This charmingly illustrated, book-length memoir reads like a compelling little novel, whose narrative carefully imparts to the reader a sense of its precocious narrator's unfolding life—a life that is by turns impressionable and courageous, vulnerable and steadfast, reckless and prudent. Like other memorable books of the same genre, Lewis's Barefoot in Fire is an eloquent indictment of the utter evil of war, as well as a moving study of the indomitable human spirit.
Third, Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature, and Becoming Human by Maria Isabel Garcia. This book, possibly the first of its kind in the history of Philippine literary publishing, is an interesting collection of nonfiction essays about science, written in a generous and accessible language. In essay after essay, the author strikes the reader as being at once a naturalist and a philosopher—a student of creation, who intimately participates in the very thing that she observes, and who seeks, in the world's tangible and mutable forms, the harmony and meaningfulness that affirm our deepest sense of being.

Fourth, Kapwa: the Self in the Other by Katrin De Guia. This beautifully produced and capaciously heavy book emerged out of the multi-talented author's dissertation in Filipino Psychology. A singular achievement in intelligent fellow-feeling and scholarly sympathy, De Guia's Kapwa is at once an academic inquiry into the Filipino concepts and rituals of the shared inner self, as well as an intricate interweaving of six, richly textured biographical essays on culture-bearing Filipino artists, whose complex worldviews and lifeways the author painstakingly and passionately brings to light.
Fifth, Helen T. Yap's From Inside the Berlin Wall. A series of letters to her family back in the Philippines, Yap's book traces a narrative arc that articulates the “Pinoy abroad” perspective in a way that is remarkably different from the garden variety travelogue, probably because the author actually resided rather than merely toured in the strange and estranging landscape of East Germany, right before the end of the Cold War. This experience afforded Yap the time to piece together her book's fragmentary but finally singular vision—that of a temporary Filipino exile's haunting and haunted inner world.

And finally, the sixth finalist and this year's winner of the coveted Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award is… Love, Desire, Children, Etc.: Reflections of a Young Wife by Rica Bolipata-Santos. Published in 2005 by Milflores Publishing, Inc., Bolipata-Santos's first book is a rewarding collection of thirteen thematically unified essays that addresses with uncommon candor, grace, and humor some of life's more mundane realities and mysteries: love and desire, marriage and children, family and friends, teaching and writing. The author treads the uneven terrain of the quotidian with an open compass, unafraid to confront and scrutinize even her own intimate fears and insecurities and confusions. Again and again, in these luminous little personal narratives, what triumphs is a clear-eyed self-understanding, which is utterly convincing because it is earned at the cost of so much soul-searching and inner struggle. In these provocative and well-shaped essays, Bolipata-Santos (following the words of Peter Walsh from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway ) has taken hold of fragments of her public and private life and turned them round, slowly, in the light, to discover designs that are finally comprehensible, startling, consoling, and wise.

A deeply celebratory book worthy of the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award.
Congratulations to all author-finalists, and congratulations to our winner, Rica Bolipata-Santos.

UP ICW launches LIKHAAN Journal 2007

2007-12-17T01:13:00.000-08:00

To commemorate the University of the Philippines Centennial, the UP Institute of Creative Writing has launched the LIKHAAN: The Journal of Philippine Contemporary Literature. Asserts editor Dr. Jose Dalisay Jr.: “(N)o Philippine university has produced as splendid, as significant, and as sustained a crop of literary work and talent as the University of the Philippines .”

The journal was launched at the Writers Night last December 8. UP Chancellor Sergio Cao, one of the individuals who made the journal possible, and National Artist Virgilio Almario were on hand to receive the first copies from Dr. Dalisay.

The volume, containing works in Filipino and English, features fiction from Alwin Aguirre, Mayette Bayuga, Catherine Bucu, Amelia Lapena-Bonifacio, Charlson Ong and Socorro Villanueva; poetry from Raymond de Borja, Mikael de Lara Co, Francis Arias Montesena and Joel Toledo; essays by Gemino Abad, Exie Abola and Reuel Molina Aguila; a photo essay by Vim Nadera, drama from Rene O. Villanueva and an interview of National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera.

The LIKHAAN Journal is available for P250.00 at the UP ICW and at UP Press Bookstores.

Who are the best young poets in the Philippines?

2007-12-17T01:12:00.001-08:00

Philippine PEN recently launched At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Postcolonial Poetry in English . Edited by Dr. Neil Garcia and published by the UST Publishing House, the volume contains 82 poems by 29 of the Philippines best young poets writing in English.
Says Garcia in his Introduction : “(T)hese poems , like the rest of Philippine literature in English, will in fact be largely incomprehensible when decontextualized from the histories that engendered them- particularly, the violent histories of colonization that the Philippines , as a geopolitical and indeed national reality, has endured.”

The poets featured are: Michael Balili, Ronald Baytan, Catherine Candano, Jose Wendell Capili, Jennifer Carino, Mark Cayanan, Mikael de Lara Co, Conchitina Cruz, Carlomar Arcangel Daona, Raymond John de Borja, Cecille La Verne de la Cruz, Lourd Ernest de Veyra, Israfel Fagela, Marc Gaba, Ralph Semino Galan, Ramil Digal Gulle, Sid Gomez Hildawa, Joy Icayan, Mookie Katigbak, Kris Lacaba, Paolo Manalo, Arvin Abejo Mangohig, Allan Pastrana, Dinah Romah-Sianturi, Rafael San Diego, Michelle Sarile, Angelo Suarez, Joel Toledo and Lawrence Lacambra Ypil.

Call for submissions for Coming Soon

2007-12-17T01:10:00.000-08:00

Coming Soon, an anthology of erotic poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction on the loss of virginity. The piece must specifically address a first (human, as opposed to something like bestial) sexual experience.

What we are looking for are pieces that depict an initiation into the sexual act, therefore we will not consider works that try to be coy: for instance, please don't send a piece on how some character/persona discovers there is such a thing as fornication, yet doesn't engage in it. We'd consider that a cop-out. Neither are we looking for pieces on, er, giving one's self sexual pleasure. No, no, no. Works submitted should involve at least two conscious people (no corpses, please!), with an exchange of bodily fluids or whatnot. (If there is no exchange of bodily fluids, the work should address the question: But why the heck not?)Open to Philippine writers in English and Filipino. Past published works are welcome as long as they have not yet appeared in an anthology.

Deadline: 31 January 2008.
Editors: Conchitina Cruz, Edgar Samar and Katrina Tuvera.
Please send submissions as MSWord documents to comingsoonantho@gmail.com. On the subject line of your e-mail, please indicate your genre (poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction) and language (English/Filipino).
Multiple submissions are welcome, but each entry must be sent seperately. Inquiries should be sent to the same e-mail address.

Call for submissions for CFP: The Commons

2007-12-17T01:09:00.000-08:00

The editors of Currents in Electronic Literacy (an MLA-indexed, peer-reviewed, e-journal) seek manuscripts that address the role or the relevance of the cultural commons for those working, teaching, or living in a mediated age. The term itself has received attention from those on the far left, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, to those defending free-market economics, such as Lawrence Lessig. As new media enable us to collaborate, share information, disseminate texts, and pull from the collective and creative resources that the humanities have traditionally celebrated, we face new challenges on a variety of fronts. What are the legal implications of sharing copyrighted (or copylefted texts)? What constitutes "fair use" in an age when most cultural artifacts can quickly be scanned and posted for public consumption? (How) are we ethically and scholastically obligated to evaluate or cite sources that have been read and reviewed by a worldwide community of arguably critical and invested readers? (How) do profit (or exploitation) work when users determine content willfully and energetically?
We encourage submission of scholarly articles and review essays (including reviews of books, software, websites, and conferences) that relate any of the above questions or others not mentioned to the task of teaching and studying literacy.
Submissions for reviews should be approximately 1500 words for individual reviews and 2500 for omnibus reviews of multiple texts or applications and 5000 words for scholarly articles. Submission deadline is December 15, 2007. For questions or to submit reviews email ejournal@lists.cwrl.utexas.edu.
Currents in Electronic Literacy is an online publication of the Computer Writing and Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin. Currents strives to provide a forum for the scholarly discussion of issues pertaining to electronic literacy, widely construed. In general, Currents publishes work addressing the use of electronic texts and technologies for reading, writing, teaching, and learning in fields including but not restricted to the following: literature (in English and in other languages), rhetoric and composition, languages (English, foreign, and ESL), communications, media studies, and education.
Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and EBSCO.

Pasko ng Komiks in UP Diliman

2007-12-17T01:08:00.000-08:00

As part of the U.P. College of Arts and Letters "Linggo ng KAL" event on December 6-14, the U.P. Likhaan: Institute of Creative Writing (UP-ICW) and Read or Die sponsor Pasko ng Komiks or PASKOM symposium on December 11 (Tues), 9am at the Pulungang Claro M. Recto, College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman, Quezon City.
PASKOM will discuss the relevance of comics arts in contemporary Filipino life. Four related topics, which foreground new perpectives on a growing popular arts tradition, will be discussed, namely "Komiks in Philippine Culture and History," "The Study and Collection of Komiks," "Women in Komiks," and "Creating Komiks."
In the morning , Pablo Gomez, Patrick Flores, Gerry Alanguilan, Glady Gimena, Dennis Villegas, and Orvy Jundis will talk on the two first topics. Then in the afternoon, the women artists—Sherry Baet, Ofelia Concepcion, Vivian Limpin, Elizabeth Chionglo, Joannah Tinio-Catinglo, and Gilda Olvidado—will talk about how the feminine and comics arts intertwine toward a liberative cause.
Still later in the day, comics creators Carlo Vergara, Andrew Drilon, Andrew Villar, Carlo Pagulayan, Randy Valiente, Jonas Diego, Melvin Catinglo, Rey Tiempo, KC Cordero and Victor Balanon will unravel the energy and inspiration behind their works.
The day long discussion will be synthesized and commented upon by Bobby Yonzon (Mango Comics), Emil Flores, Joey Baquiran, and Lawrence Mijares.
Prior to the symposium, a comics exhibit, featuring the actual works of contemporary and past comics artists will be on show beginning December 8. It will be set at the Galleries 1 & 2 of Bulwagang Rizal, College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman.
PASKOM is made possible through the support of National Books Development Board, Powerbooks, Mango Comics, WikiPilipinas, New Worlds Alliance, Read or Die, Komikera, Subway Productions, and the U.P. College of Arts and Letters.
Comics fans, students, and teachers are welcome to attend the symposium and see the exhibit which will run until December 14. For details, call Ms. Eva Cadiz at 9221830.

Writers Night set for December 8

2007-12-17T01:07:00.000-08:00

Writers Night on December 8 at the Bulwagang Rizal in U.P. Diliman promises to be more than a chance to meet the idols of Philippine literature. If one stays on long enough, one will actually see many of them do poetry performances. Or sing. Yes, many writers are singers. And band members too. So expect this December affair to be a party experience that will be just as fun and memorable as the previous writers night.

The event starts off at 5:30 pm with the awarding ceremony of the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award at the Teatro Hermogenes Ylagan. This award honors authors whose maiden publications merit an auspicious introduction to modern day readers. Among the sterling nominees are Dean Francis Alfar's Salamanca (novel); Barbara-Ann Gamboa Lewis's Barefoot in Fire (creative non-fiction); Maria Isabel Garcia's Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature and Becoming Human (essays); Rica Bolipata-Santos's Love, Desire, Children, Etc (essay); Helen Yap's From Inside the Berlin Wall (essay); and Katrin De Guia's Kapwa: The Self In The Other (essay).

After the awards, partying begins with performances by invited guests Cesare Syjuco, Heber Bartolome, DJ Alvaro, dancer/choreographer Myra Beltran, zitar player Joey Valenciano, ventriloquist Ony Carcamo, experimental artist Jeena Marquez, Romancing Venus, and poets Marne Kilates and Teo Antonio.
Then, everyone will be in for a surprise as daring writers join a mock fashion show staged by campus groups UP Quill, UP Speca, UP Ugat and UP Writers Club. All in the spirit of carnivalesque play.

Friends and guests of writers, as well as readers and fans are welcome to attend the 2007 Writers Night. For details, call Ms. Eva Cadiz at U.P. ICW, 9221830.

Meritage Press holds annual poetry tilt

2007-12-17T01:06:00.000-08:00

Meritage Press is calling on all Filipino poets to join their annual holiday poetry contest. Poet and novelist Eric Gamalinda, author of My Sad Republic and Zero Gravity, is this year's judge.
Interested parties may submit by e-mail, 1 to 2 unpublished poems (you may, however, submit poems that you have featured on your own web sites oror blogs, or that have been published in limited edition chapbooks of no more than 250 copies) with your full name and contact information to MeritagePress@aol.com (please present poems within the body of the email as the organizers will not open attachments).

There are no limitations to poetry styles or content.
Deadline of entries is on December 31, 2007.

The winning poem/s will be published in the February 2008 edition of “Babaylan Speaks” at http://meritagepress.com/babaylan/. The winners will also recieve a selection of book published by Meritage Press.

Call for Submissions: Growing Up Filipino II

2007-12-17T01:03:00.000-08:00

This is a call for submissions of short stories for an anthology tentatively titled, Growing Up Filipino II - Stories for Young Adults. The book will be edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and will be published by both Anvil and PALH. Contributors will receive copies of the book as compensation for the use of their work.The manuscript should be approximately 8-10 pages long, typed, double-spaced (approximately 1,800-2,300 words). This should be emailed to CBrainard@aol.com. You may also send it by air mail to:Cecilia Brainardc/o PALHPO Box 5099Santa Monica, CA 90409USA.This book project is a follow-up of an earlier short story collection entitled Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults (published by PALH 2002, and Anvil). The following review describes the 2002 collection: From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up-These 29 short stories offer a highly textured portrait of Filipino youth and an excellent sampling of creative writing. Thematically arranged, most of the pieces have been written since the turn of the 21st century. Each story is introduced by a thumbnail sketch of the author and a paragraph or two about some element of Filipino culture or history that is relevant to the story. Authors include those born and continuing to live in the Philippines, emigres, and American-born Filipinos. Tough but relevant topics addressed include a gay youth's affection for his supportive mother, the role of religious didacticism in the formation of a childhood perception, consumer culture as it is experienced by modern teens in Manila, and coping with bullies of all ages and stations in life. … The high caliber and broad but wholly accessible range of this collection, however, makes this title a solid purchase for multiple reasons.

The 29 stories in the 2002 edition of Growing Up Filipino were written before 9/11 (September 11, 2001). The editor would now like to collect a second volume that continues to address the young adult audience. The stories in the collection will still be about the Filipino experience in the Philippines or any part of the world. But in this second volume, the editor is seeing contemporary stories, or post 9/11 stories. The editor is seeking the best stories about growing up Filipino. The editor is not looking for stories written by young adults, but about Filipino young adults. The editor envisions the stories dealing with relationships, family, falling in love perhaps, and other issues that the young adults deal with. Character-driven stories are encouraged. Those interested in submitting are encouraged to read the first volume of Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults, to get an idea of the kind of stories the editor is looking for. Deadline for submission has been extended. Please send your bio (approx. 150 words) in people-friendly narrative form. Make sure your contact information is included with the story.ABOUT THE EDITOR: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the author/editor of over a dozen books. She has a website at http://www.ceciliabrainard.com/ and a blog at cbrainard.blogspot.com

Tanghalang Ateneo Stages The Death of Memory

2007-12-17T01:02:00.002-08:00

Tanghalang Ateneo goes contemporary Filipino in The Death of Memory, the second production of the company’s 29th season. Written by Glenn Mas, it is a Palanca-prize winning play and an awarded thesis production of the Catholic University of America. Tangahalang Ateneo’s Staging would be the play’s Philippine opremiere production.

In the play, four people are trapped in a nowhere land where time has topped, and with no memory how they got there, and no ides on how to get out. Eah one carries a painful and violent memory- sexual abuse, abandonment, murder- that assaults them at unpredictable moments and ties them to this purgatorial prison.

Ralph Quiblat and Brian Sy alternate as the newcomer Juan, while Rachel Quong and Margarita Paje play the Keeper, the ethereal guardian of the nowhere land. The rest of the faculty cast is Randy Solis, Dianne Laserna, Miguel Lizada and Angela Serrano. In turn, the rest of the student cast is composed of BJ Crisostomo, Regina Francisco, Nicolo Magno and Gianna Villavicencio.
Director Ricardo Abad and porduction designer Salvador Bernal depart from their Asian motifs to create an abstract world that is replete with surreal and violent images. Joining them are choreographer Matthew santamaria, lighting designer Jonjon Villareal, and sounds and graphic designer Reamur David. Kastski Flores, finalist in Cinemalaya 2007, incorporates film images of the character’s memories.

The Death of Memory runs from Nov. 29 to Dec. 1, 4 to 8, and 11 to 15 at 7 p.m., with additional 2 p.m. shows on Dec. 1, 8, 15 at the Rizal Mini-Theater of the Ateneo de Manila University. For inquiries call Sheila Concina at 0915-5715665 or the Rizal Mini-Theater at 426-6001 local 5121. The play is for mature audiences only.

From The Philippine Star, November 19, 2007

Villafania's poetry book launched

2007-12-17T01:02:00.001-08:00

The latest Pangasinan collection of poems by Santiago B. Villafania was launched at Urdaneta City on Friday, November 9.

Malagilion: Sonnets tan Villanelles is Villafania’s second collection of poems in Pangasinan language which was launched shortly after the 2-day Conference on “Revitalizing the Pangasinan Language and Cultural Heritage” held at the Urdaneta City Sports and Cultural Center last November 8-9, 2007.

The 390-page book includes some 300 sonnets and 50 villanelles, published through grants from the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) and Emilio Aguinaldo College (EAC) under the helm of Dr. Jose Paulo E. Campos.

KWF Chair Dr. Ricardo Ma. Duran Nolasco and UP Professor Dr. Ma. Crisanta Nelmida-Flores wrote the preface and the introduction to the book, respectively. Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista, Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr., Aurelio S. Agcaoili, Kristian S. Cordero, Jose Jason L. Chancoco, Christopher Q. Gozum, Jaime P. Lucas, Leonarda “Amor Cico” Carrera, Sergio A. Bumadilla and Melchor E. Orpilla contributed their respective blurbs.

Multi-award winning poet Cirilo F. Bautista says: “Villafania is the leading poet of his generation in Pangasinan today.” Villafania is currently a senior web developer/designer in Emilio Aguinaldo College – Manila. He lovingly maintains the site www.dalityapi.com.

UP ICW and Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Awards announce 2007 shortlist

2007-12-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

A brilliant debut for any artist goes a long way. The Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award is probably the only award that recognizes the first published works of Filipino writers. The exclusivity alone that the award confers is much coveted. What more then the weight of acknowledgement from the established writers on its panel of judges. The award is coordinated by the UP Institute of Creative Writing and was established by the family of Gonzalo Gonzalez, former UP President.

Dr. Jose Neil Garcia, Dr. Jaime An Lim and Prof. Vicente Groyon, himself a winner of the award, have come up with the shortlist for 2007 (only works in English were screened, as the award switches between languages every year). The shortlist follows: Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar and Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature and Becoming Human by Maria Isabel Garcia (ADMU Press), Barefoot in Fire by Barbara-Ann Gamboa Lewis (Tahanan Books), Love, Desire, Children etc by Rica Bolipata-Santos (Milflores), From Inside the Berlin Wall by Helen Yap (UP Press) and Kapwa: The Self in the Other by Katrin de Guia (Anvil).

This year's winner will be announced on Writers Night in UP Diliman. The annual gathering will be held at the Teatro Hermogenes Ylagan, Bulwagang Rizal on December 8, Saturday. The program will start on 6 p.m. Gizela Gonzalez-Montinola herself will be on hand to award the P50,000 check and certificate to the winner. UP ICW director Vim Nadera and the ICW associates will also be present to witness the winner's debut in the literary scene.

Dr. Jose Dalisay Shortlisted in 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize

2007-12-17T00:56:00.000-08:00

Five authors made the shortlist for the award. Jose Dalisay Jr., Reeti Gadekar, Jiang Rong, Nu Nu Yi Inwa and Xu Xi are the five authors selected for the shortlist by the judging panel for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, the first regional prize for a work unpublished in English. The winner of the prize will be announced on Saturday 10 November, 2007 at a ceremony in Hong Kong .

The five shortlisted works were chosen from a long list of 23 are:
Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad 's Sister
Reeti Gadekar, Families at Home
Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Smile As They Bow
Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem
Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky

Dr. Dalisay is an Associate of the UP Institute of Creative Writing and teaches at the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Dr. Anthony Tan Dominates the 2007 Pinoy Poet Award

2007-12-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

Anthony Tan was born on 26 August 1947, Siasi [Muddas], Sulu. His degrees AB English, 1968, MA Creative Writing, 1975, and Ph.D. English Lit., 1982 were all obtained from the Silliman University where he edited Sands and Coral, 1976. For more than a decade, he was a member of the English faculty at SU and regular member of the panel of critics in the Silliman Writers
Workshop. He taught briefly at the DLSU and was Chair of the English Dept. at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology where he continues to teach. A member of the Iligan Arts Council, he helps Jaime An Lim and Christine Godinez-Ortega run the Iligan Writers Workshop/Literature Teachers Conference. He also writes fiction and children's stories.

He has won a number of awards, among them, the Focus award for poetry, the Palanca 1 st prize for Poems for Muddas in 1993; also the Palanca for essay. Among his works are The Badjao Cemetery and Other Poems , 1985 and Poems for Muddas , Anvil, 1996.

Dr Anthony Tan is the 1st Grand Winner of the 2007 Pinoy Poet Award. For winning the 6 major awards in all category.

The Winners Reveal!-2007 Pinoy Poet Award

2007-12-15T01:03:00.000-08:00

The 2007 Pinoy Poet Award held at the Online Judging done at yahoo messenger forum. All Judges compose of Filipino Free Lance Writer or Poet; Founder of Poetry Group and Diffrent Respective Poet in the Philippines. The Scores of the Winners are based of Different percentage probably creativity,skills and knowledge. Its been quite difficult to our judges to choose among different poet to win, but they are all good in term of participation. but as they alsway said, to be nominate atleast one is considered as winner, better luck next time. But as we promise to you people of the Philippines we will help our brighter and talented poet to improve and to be competetive in field of poetry.

see the winners at the 2007 Pinoy Poet Award

Judges 1 2 3 4 5 =final

Best Skills by a Male Poet-Dr. Anthony 94 95 98 98 100= 97%
Best Skills by a Female Poet-Chi 89 84 90 89 94= 89.2%
Best Ode-Quils Poetic Craft by Nora Caldero 92 95 96 94 95 =94.4%
Best Classical-Crossing the River by Dr. Anthony Tan 98 98 98 99 99 =98.4%
Best Epic-Gutom na Makata by William Rodriquez 92 94 90 94 95= 93%
Best Rhyme-Back from what we've started by Jaemie Falcon 85 86 82 84 89 =85.2%
Best Line-Death is not an Option by Nora Caldero 95 95 95 95 95 =95%
Best Lyric-Crossing the river by Dr. Anthony 99 98 99 98 99 =98.6%
Best Poem-A cynic's New Millenium by Dr. Anthony Tan 90 89 90 85 90 =88.8%
Nation of Survivors by Nora Caldero 88 92 89 88 87 =88.8%
Best Haiku-Haiku Marshland by Vinci Bueza 85 88 89 92 89= 88.6%
Best Sonnet-Pinakahalaba ngunian an Banggi by Vinci 92 94 95 96 94= 94.2%
Best New Female Poet-Nora Caldero 95 96 95 96 93 =95%
Best New Male Poet-Vinci Bueza 92 93 96 95 94 =94%
Poet of the Year-Dr. Anthony Tan 98 97 99 98 99 =98.2%
Poem of the Year-Crossing the river by Dr. Anthony Tan 98 99 99 99 99= 98.8%

Entry /Total Votes

People's Choice Favorite New Male Poet-Argel Sanga 473 votes
People's Choice Favorite New Female Poet-Chi 345 votes
People's Choice Favorite Poem-Love is Soul by Argel Sanga 859 votes

All Right Reserved 2007

People's Choice Favorite New Male Poet

2007-11-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

Get your own Poll!

TO VOTE SIMPLY CLICK THE KEY;

B1:Michael Angelo (Mandaluyong City)
B2:Windel Z. Canband (Talisay City)
B3:William Rodriguez (Antipolo City)
B4:xyrusace (Dubai)
B5:Argel Sanga (Makati City)
B6:Vinci Bueza (Naga City)
B7:epohcrite bovary (iligan City)
B8:Berny Hermosa (Masbate City)
B9:Jonas San Pedro(Manila)

NOTE: ONLY 1 VOTE PER IP ADDRESS -
THIS POLL WILL BE CONCLUDED ON DECEMBER 07, 2007

People's Choice Favorite New Female Poet

2007-11-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

Get your own Poll!

TO VOTE: CLICK OUR KEY ON

A1: Baby Raych (Baguio City)
A2:Ana Angeles (Mindoro City)
A3:Honee (Zamboanga City)
A4:Chi (Roxas City)
A5:Jaemie Falcon (Quezon City)
A6:Irene Chiqui (Light House)
A7: Princess Luna (Visaya)
A8:Nora Caldelero (Ilo-Ilo City)

NOTE: ONLY 1 VOTE PER IP ADDRESS
THIS POLL WILL BE CONCLUDED ON DECEMBER 07, 2007

The 2007 Pinoy Poets Award

2007-11-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

The year end program is now finally open, for its 1st awarding ceremony. Which will differenciate the most promising talents in the field of poetry. As they show there skills and talent in there own technical ways. The 2007 Pinoy Poets Awrad will be held at December 09, 2007 at the University of Siliman.

Check out all the nomination entry for the first anual ceremony,to be posted at 12:00 am.

All entry pass all the free judging period which is held on September 2007.

Here are the Category;

Individual Category

Best New Male Poet 40% Originality 40% Skills 20% Overall Impact
Best New Female Poet 40% Originality 40% Skills 20% Overall Impact
Poet of the Year 40% Originality 40% Skills 20% Overall Impact
Poem of the Year 40% Originality 40% Skills 20% Overall Impact

Poetry Awards

Best Poem 50% Originality 40% Technical Skills 10% votes
Best Haiku 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills
Best Rhyme 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills
Best Sonnet 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills
Best Lyric 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills
Best Ode 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills
Best Epic 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills
Best Classical 50% Originality 50% Technical Skills

Performance Category : 50% Originality/Skills 50% Total Techincal Perfomance

Best
Best Line
Best Performance by a Female Poet Artist
Best Performance by Male Poet Artist

People’s Choice Award (Voting System using POLL)

Favorite New Male Poet
Favorite New Female Poet
Favorite Poem
Favorite Sonnet
People’s Choice Poet of the Year
People’s Choice Poem of the Year

Weekly Top Pem

2007-10-06T22:57:00.000-07:00

See and Read our first ever Weekly Top Poem. Our 10 of the best ranked in Weekly Top Poem for vying the Hit Chart. After the week we were waiting for, the moment of truth is now reveal. Poem are all voted base on our Poll last week, we separate them in to 2 group. The group A and the group B, where the poem most voted will be ranked into 10.

See our First Weekly Top Poem in Ranking Order:

Weekly Top Poem

1. Love is Soul by Argel Sanga : 22.8 votes

2. Death is not an option by Nora Caldelero : 11.34 votes

3. What is Love by Argel Sanga : 7.98 votes

4. When only a half-inch glass separates by Vinci Bueza : 7.14 votes

5. Back from where we've started by Jaemie Falcon : 4.2 votes

6. Death and Rebirth by Chi : 4.18 votes

7. A cynic's new millenium by Dr. Anthony Tan : 3.04 votes

8. You and your love by Princess Luna : 2.94 votes
Crossing the river by Dr. Anthony Tan : 2.94 votes

9. Hollow by Baby Raych : 2.1 votes
Sweet Goodbye by Berny Hermosa : 2.1 votes
You, Beggar by Ana Angeles : 2.1 votes

10. Veritas by Windel Z. Canband : 1.9 votes
Light and Shade by Irene Chiqui : 1.9 votes
Writing new lines from old sorrow by Vinci Bueza :1.9 votes

Hot Seat- The Poem Failed in our Weekly Top Poem but still be on hitting the Chart
Cut by Baby Raych : 1.14 votes
Of memories, stains and kisses by Ana Angeles : 1.14 votes

Note: Commenst and any other opinion is accepted.

Death is not an Option Dominates Group B Poll

2007-10-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

Death is not an option by Nora Caldelero bested 7 other poem in group by the most vote of 27% or 10.5 votes out of 42 correspondents. while Love is Soul, ranked 2nd placer is another hit of Argel Sanga Poem Collection.

View the Voting Result here.

Death is not an option by Nora Caldelero : 10.5 votes
What is Love by Argel Sanga : 7.98 votes
When only a half-inch glass separates by Vinci Bueza : 7.14 votes
Back from where we've started by Jaemie Falcon : 4.2 votes
You and your love by Princess Luna : 2.94 votes
Crossing the river by Dr. Anthony Tan : 2.94 votes
Hollow by Baby Raych : 2.1 votes
Sweet Goodbye by Berny Hermosa : 2.1 votes
You, Beggar by Ana Angeles : 2.1 votes

This Poll was concluded, October 06-Saturday at 11:00 Pm

Love is Soul(Poem) Dominates Group A for Weekly Top Poem

2007-10-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Love is Soul by Argel Sanga Dominated Group A for Weekly Top Poem garnering the most of the votes by 60% or 22.8 votes out of 38 correspondents. The Poem is now vying for the First ever Weekly Top Poem. While Death and Rebirth a poem by Chi ranked 02 in this group garnering of 11% or 4.18 votes.

See the voting result here.

Group A

Love is Soul by Argel Sanga : 22.8 votes
Death and Rebirth by Chi : 4.18 votes
A cynic's new millenium by Dr. Anthony Tan : 3.04 votes
Veritas by Windel Z. Canband : 1.9 votes
Light and Shade by Irene Chiqui : 1.9 votes
Writing new lines from old sorrow by Vinci Bueza : 1.9 votes
Cut by Baby Raych : 1.14 votes
Of memories,stains and kisses by Ana Angeles : 1.14 votes

The Poll concluded last Saturday (October 06 at 11:00 Pm)

"Ang Hiwaga, sa Gabing payapa"- Jonas B. San Pedro

2007-09-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

Nakatutulig,nakatutulig, sa aking pandinig,

sa sobrang tahimik, ay walang marinig,

pusikit ang kadiliman, di sukat malirip,

nang biglang sa may kuarto...,ang papag ay lumangitngit.

Kumalabog ang pinto't,nag sara ang bintana,

celedura'y napihit, mula kanan pakaliwa,

para bang lumilindol, doon sa may dambana,

ako nga'y nag usisa't, inalam ang hiwaga.

Tumunog ang agunyas, at ako'y nangilabot,

kaba sa dibdib ko'y, labas masok labas masok,

ako'y napasigaw.., ng maipit ang buhok,

nawala ang diwa't, ang ulo'y kinamot.

Nang ako'y lumapit, sa kuarto'ng madilim,

may isang aninong, lumapit sa akin,

pawis ko ay namuo, ang mata ko'y naduling,

nang aking tanglawan, ay puno ng saging.

Dagli ako'ng lumabas, at ako'y nakakita,

ng isang kabayo'ng, may pakpak na pula,

maitim ang binti, ma asul ang mata...nang aking lapitan...ay DROWING lang pala.

links:http://www.friendster.com/group-discussion/index.php?t=msg&th=977879&start=0&

Why Do We Have To Love? by William

2007-09-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

Why do we have to appreciate and admire?
These little things will soon turn into desire
Which we cannot extinguish like a blazing fire
Until we are lost and drowned into the mire.

Why we are so bold and beyond compare?
Despite the imminent danger we never care
With the person we love our lives we want to share
But with the naked dream is only a nightmare.

Why do we have to love and cry?
As we ask the heavens without knowing why
From the very start we cannot say goodbye
It is our fault because we cannot break the tie.

From the underground we hear the voice of Edgar Allan Poe
The Nightangle died but the Raven came too
Illusion and frustration become our mortal foe
Because our fantasies will never come true.

In the midst of the night we are like zombies
We buried ourselves and created our own cemeteries
We are willing victims of human infirmities
Our hearts are shattered klike scattered pennies.

We are like ghost and the chilly wind
Visiting and blowing in the darkest end
We deceive ourselves even when we cannot pretend
In a world of make believe, we cannot pretend.

Shamefulness and self pity is in our side
In our eyes the painful truth can never hide
At the edge of despondency we will marry our bride
We are totally destructed and tortured deep inside.

It is better to be numb and calloused
When we will only be wounded and double-crossed
In this experiment we are just an apparatus
Which kill ourselves like a lifeless fetus.

links: http://www.friendster.com/group-discussion/index.php?t=msg&th=965915&start=0&

Weekly Top Poem Group B

2007-09-27T02:29:00.000-07:00

Get your own Poll!

Here are the 9 Poem vying for the Weekly Top Poem Group B:

1 Hollow by Baby Raych
2. Sweet Goodbye by Berny Hermosa
3. What is Love By Argel Sanga
4. Crossing the river by Dr. Anthony Tan
5. You and your love by Princess Luna
6. When only a half-inch glass separates by Vinci Bueza
7. You, Beggar by Ana Angeles
8.Back from where we've Started by Jaemie Falcon
9. Death is not an option by Nora Caldelero

Note: Only one vote per IP Adress/1 vote per PC

Weekly Top Poem Group A

2007-09-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

Get your own Poll!

Group A compose of:

1. Cut by Baby Raych
2. (what is Love)Love is soul by Argel Sanga
3. Veritas by Windel Z. Canband
4. Death and Rebirth by Chi
5. Light and Shade by Irene Chiqui
6. Writing new lines from old sorrow by Vinci Bueza
7. A cynic's new millenium by Dr. Anthony Tan
8. of memories,stains and kisses by Ana Angeles

I apologize to Mr. Argel Sanga for being inconvenience. His entry Love is Soul is being replaced by his another poem What is Love thats why i'm saying i deeply apologize to you.
your enrty here in Grou A Poll is considered a valid entry. Love is Soul by Argel Sanga
instead of What is Love.

Poetic Techniques

2007-09-21T00:36:00.000-07:00

Poetic Metamorphosis: Revising Your Work

By Kathy Hoeck

Inspiration is a fleeting thing; any writer knows that. To make sure that “perfect” feeling, idea, or word doesn’t get lost forever, we often just grab the nearest scrap of paper and scribble our thoughts down. Yes, at the moment, we have written poetry. But we have not necessarily written good poetry.

It’s tempting to say, “Well, this is what I was feeling, so this is what I wrote. I can’t change what I was feeling, you know.” Of course, feelings are not revisable, but the words with which we choose to express those most personal thoughts and emotions are. When the inspiration hits you, you probably not only scrambled for the nearest piece of paper, but you scrambled for the easiest words possible, the ones that came to mind most quickly. It may be destructive to think that your initial scrawlings are sacred, for often they are not precise or may not convey the fullest possible meaning you felt or intended.

Careful revision of the words you first wrote down at the moment of inspiration may be required in order to give your work polish, depth, and a more professional sound. Your true feelings and intentions can be clarified through the use of language that is more vivid and accurate. Imagery, which has been called “the soul of poetry,” can be incorporated into your work after giving some time to deeper thought and reflection. And since the rhythm and lyricism of poetry is an important aspect of the art, your poetry’s sound can be examined and bettered through the matching and arranging of words that create a certain feeling through the timbre of their syllables.

Learning Through Example
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the power of revision is to show how it can work. Here is a line of poetry:

“The singing of the birds in the morning makes me want to fly with them.”

This line of poetry certainly attempts to convey a dramatic idea. However, its intended strength is weighed down by words that do not mirror the joy and inspiration the author must be feeling. So the revision begins. First, since conciseness and precise word choice are keys to good poetry, this line is probably too long. The use of the prepositional phrases “of the birds” and “in the morning” could be removed or changed to “The birds’ morning singing.”

Second, although alliteration is a good technique to use in your work, the repetition of the “th” sound here isn’t especially lyrical. “With them” could be removed, since it repeats the “th” sound twice in a row. It is also unnecessary since we can assume that the author wants to fly with who else? the birds.

So here is our first revision, removing unnecessary phrases and non-lyrical alliteration:

“The birds’ morning singing makes me want to fly.”

Reading this line, you will notice and alliteration—the “ing” sound that is a little difficult to say. This could be changed to “The birds’ morning song,” a grouping that now has the pleasing repetition of the “o” and “n” sounds.

Now consider the phrase “makes me want to fly.” Actually, these words are the crux of the poem. They are meant to express the depth of feeling that the author derives from the song of the birds. These words, however, do not really capture such a strong emotion. Perhaps a phrase such as “moves mountains within” can better illustrate those feelings inside that so moved the author. The imagery used here helps convey the intensity and magnitude of the author’s feeling. These words also sound pleasing, with alliteration of the “m” sound at the beginning and the “n” sound at the ends of the last two words.

The next revision looks and sounds like this:

“The birds’ morning song moves mountains within.”

Now, the revisions are almost complete. As it is now, the line does not really express the author’s desire to fly with the birds. Our prior revision helps to clarify the author’s deep emotion but leaves out the desire to fly. Since it is morning, the author has probably just awoken to the singing, so perhaps “I rise to fly” would be good. These words are filled with action that surpasses the wish to soar with the birds and instead supposes that they author can fly though it may be in spirit rather than reality. The “i” sound that appears three times in this short phrase sounds good in contrast to the previous repetition of the harder “n” and “m” sounds.

Here is the result of the third revision:

“The birds’ morning song moves mountains within and I rise to fly.”

One final change could be made here. As it is a truly unnecessary word, “The” could be removed altogether. “Birds’ morning song” is a beautiful and adequate expression of what the author hears when he awakes.

Now that your revisions are complete, compare the two lines of poetry:

“The singing of the birds in the morning makes me want to fly with them.”

Versus

“Birds’ morning song moves mountains within and I rise to fly.”

The original line of poetry sounds almost like a statement of fact, whereas the second, revised line sounds lyrical, ethereal and more like a statement of feeling.

Rules of Revising

Revision of this one line of poetry took three groups of changes. It may even take more than that to give your work that correct meaning and sound, but it is essential in order to make your first thoughts into a good poem. Poetry is a brief look into the soul through careful description of feeling, yet it takes as much effort to polish a poem as it does to complete a short story.

As E. C. Stedman wrote: “Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true perfection.”

Important things to remember when you have written poetry and are faced with the task of revising:

--Use your Thesaurus (or use the online Thesaurus here at Poetry.com – just click on “Need Help Rhyming?”). It is a valuable source for those words that might not come quickly to mind but may help you express your ideas more accurately and vividly.

--Remember that the use of imagery and symbolism can give your poem a special depth. If you are too literal in your writing, your readers may be able to relate only to your words and not to any deeper meaning.

--Avoid phrases, images, and rhymings that are overused clichés, such as shady nook, babbling brook, moon-June, etc. Be creative and explore new words and descriptions.

--Be objective. This is difficult since it is easy to confuse the power of your feelings with your original words. Don’t make your first draft sacred. Time and thought help your work blossom and revisions allow for new thoughts to seep into and flavor your poetry.

Your original writings capture your strongest emotions. Your revisions should do that as well, but they can also reveal just how much you care about your work and your desire to fashion words in the most lyrical and beautiful way.

Francisco Balagtas

2007-09-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

Francisco Balagtas, later Francisco Baltazar or nickname Kikong Balagtas or Kiko, was born on April 2, 1788 in the barrio Panginay in the town of Bigaa, now known as Balagtas in his honor, in the province of Bulacan. He was the youngest of four children: Felipe, Concha, and Nicholasa. His parents where a blacksmith, Juan Baltazar, and Juana de la Cruz.

As a young boy, Balagtas loved to watch the land and hear the sound of the leaves. He saw beauty in the sparks caused by the pounding hammer of his blacksmith father. He even heard music in the sound of the horses' shoes.

Balagtas studied in a parochial school in Bigaa, where he studied prayers and catechism during his elementary years. Once Baltazar was eleven he moved to Tondo, Manila to work as a houseboy for his aunt, Doña Trinidad, who sponsored his studies. He enrolled at the Colegio de San Jose, where he graduated with degrees in Crown Law, Spanish, Latin, Physics, Christian Doctrine, Humanities, and Philosophy.

Dr. Mariano Pilapil taught him how to write while one of the most famous Tondo poets, José de la Cruz (Huseng Sisiw) mentored his poetry. Cruz challenged Balagtas to improve his writing, and even refused to edit Balagta's poetry. He continued to write more awits, corridos and moro-moros.

In 1835, Balagtas moved to Pandacan and met Maria Asuncion Rivera, who would later serve as a muse for his writings, such as in Florante at Laura as 'Celia' and 'MAR'.

Balagtas' feelings for Maria were challenged by Mariano Capule. The influential Capule used his wealth to imprison Balagtas and marry Maria. In prison, Balagtas relates the parallels of his own situation in Florante at Laura.

During an age when Filipino writings were written in Spanish, Balagtas wrote his poems in Tagalog. Scholars are lead to believe his poems reflect the abuses of the Spanish colonists.

Upon Balagtas' release from prison, he published Florante at Laura in 1838. In 1840, he moved to Udyong, Bataan and served as a Major Lieutenant. There, he met Juana Tiambeng of Orion, Bataan whom he would wed in 1842. Together, they had eleven - five boys and six girls - although seven died.

In 1849, Governor-General Narciso Claveria ordered that every Filipino native adopt a Spanish surname. Henceforth, Balagtas became known as Francisco Baltazar. He was imprisoned in 1856 for shaving the head of Alferez Lucas' housemaid, forcing his wife to spend their entire fortune to pay the court expenses. In 1860, he was released and continued writing to support his family.

Upon his death bed, Baltazar asked that none of his children become poets like him, who had suffered under his gift. He stated that it would be better to cut their hands off than to let them be writers.

Francisco Baltazar died on February 20, 1862.

Balagtas is considered the equivalent of William Shakespeare and the "Prince of Tagalog Poets" for his impact on Filipino literature with Florante at Laura regarded as his defining work. In fact, he is so greatly revered in the Philippines that a tradition held for debating in extemporaneous verse is known as 'Balagtasan'.

Death is Not An Option by Nora Caldero

2007-09-15T23:09:00.000-07:00

A TRIBUTE FOR THE: 9/11 TRAGEDY
As I sit here and I wonder why
Somewhere, some way we all must die

Do we believe we can miss the boat
Somehow redirect its path without cutting our throat

Can we fly south or take a sabbatical to France
Can we miss life's most infamous dance

No matter how far you travel or where you go
Death will be there to answer the door

There is no option when it comes to death
No matter how healthy or how much wealth

There is no road that will lead you astray
No miraculous prayer that will save the day

Death has been promised to all kind
Nothing lives forever that is the design

Now life after death that's the true story
The only way there is in Gods' Glory!

Now you must pay attention if you have the need to live on
There are some basic instructions that will not steer you wrong

Try picking this up when you see the next paper or hardback
Some wonderful instructions to help keep your life

"Battle of the All time Favorite Poet"

2007-09-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

Sa inyong palagay? sino ba ang karapat dapat hiranging pinaka paboritong manunulat sa buong kasaysayan.

Sabaysabay tayung mag bigay ng kanya-kanyang napupusuan. Mag bigay komento lang para sa mga nominado.

Sa kabilang banda mag kakaroon tayo ng isang survey sa mga nominado. Sa pamamagitan ng inyong boto, ang pinaka maraming nakalap na boto ang siyang hihiranging numero uno sa "Most Favorite Poet of All Time".

Pero para sa akin, ito ay isa lang survey at hindi nito dapat bigyan ng mababaw na pag-unawa,

Back from where we've Started by Jaemie Falcon

2007-08-31T03:38:00.000-07:00

Little do I know about you,
mysterious friend... I know its you.

Days swept so fast, days become years,
until I found myself counting my tears.

Pain and misery of my heart will soon mend,
but going back for me is hard to understand.

A different love that never lasted,
and now we're back from where we've started.

Yesterday, I saw you standing there,
Gloomy.. in the sky you stared.

Instead of talking, you walked astray,
deeply wounded, I hate that day!

Slowly, you and our memories fade,
shadow covering the happy thoughts I've made.

My feelings concealed with so much stealth,
It took me 3 months to finally feel the guilt.

The Compassion of a broken hearted

2007-08-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

I heard an awful song,when the river flow
I felt like numb,when I feel wind starts to blow
I can’t imagine life without full of glow
I have the greatest fear that is a big throe

Whenever I look every scene as I recall
The memories that fade I can’t follow
All I can do is seen the picture, I fall
A love that treasure as boon as your eyebrow

I, , the compassion of the broken hearted
Wave that makes me remind, I affected
I relate from the story of titanic
Your my eternal spirit thats a magic.

Crossing the River by Dr. Anthony Tan

2007-08-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

Came upon a river shrouded in mist.
Too early for bird call, or wing beat,
Too early even for wind.
A giant conch shell on a beaded string
Hung on the branch of a leafless tree.
it belonged to the boatman of the river.
With little energy I blew it long and thin,
Remembering what I had been taught,
Cupping it between my delicate hands.
On the edge of that feeble call
An apparition darkened the thick mist.
Slowly the bow emerged in the hush of dawn.
Beckoned me to his boat. Didn't tell him
Where to and he didn't ask, as if
My destination were already foreknown
He didn't paddle. He hesitated.
He waited as if he had forgotten something.
Looked me straight in the eye.
When I didnt't respond immediately,
he opened a bony hand,
The bwhite palm trembling with greed.
The other hand gripped the head of a long pole.
then I remembered what I had been taught:
I dropped a silver coin into his open palm.
He gripped it, dropped it into a bulging purse
That was tightly sewn to his leather belt.
the drop of silver on silver
Was the only sound in the soundless mist.
Only then did a fugitive grin light up his face.
Only then did he strike
The murky water in the pole.
There was no one to say goodbye to.
No friends. No kinsmen. No lovers.
the gurgle int he wake took the place of words.
The boat moved toward the other bank, where
He had unloaded his boat of so many strangers.

A Cynic's New Millenium by Dr. Anthony Tan

2007-08-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

During a lull between typhoon rains
Nine white-breasted birds sat on a wire
Under the canopy of low, gray clouds.
On sodden ground the trees and shrubs
Wore the vestigial gloom of late December.
I thought of Hardy and his frail, gaunt thrush
And wished the birds would repeat to me
The thrush's song of hope, celestial solace
They would design to pour on world-weary souls.
I waited for their song. None of them sang,
Engrossed they were with pimping their feathers.
If nine presaged good luck, thought I,
It would be a prosperous year, or decade.
"Happy New Year!" I hailed them cheerily.
Six scampered away, startled, as I was myself,
By the zing and suddenness of my salutation.
Twithced their tails in unison,
Dropped something white and watery
On my bare head and whisked into the dark.

Sweet Goodbye by Berny Hermosa

2007-08-27T08:30:00.001-07:00

i never thought i would fall
someone greater than you before

its the thin line of my desire
that no one dare to cross that line

all day past
never thought that it has a better part
this sweet sensation i felt
just assure me that i have a safety
belt

but tears fell one night
and it grasp my life with fright
and all i want to have is might

how can i make it through this pain
when all i hear are drops of rain
how could i heal this part again
when all i know is i've nothing to gain

you said u need to
but u said you'll never go
how can i stand without you
now that i dont know what can i do

now the stars are fading
all of the sudden
i am only looking
in this note saying
Goodbye

Sweet Goodbye by Berny Hermosa

2007-08-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

Hollow by bAby rAych

2007-08-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

I am empty, I am hollow
That when you yell at me
You might hear an echo
As the waves of your voice
Bounce in this hollow body of mine

I have no soul
Long have I sold it to the devil
And for what
For someone like you
To love me back

I have no heart
And you should not even wonder why
You ripped it out
When you took my breathe away
You crushed it

Right in front of my very eyes
And I listened to you as you laughed mercilessly
As you see blood drip
Emptying each chamber of my heart
For I am nothing to you
Not even close
To someone you can call worthy

Hollow
I have nothing left in me
I could not call myself human
My soul
My heart
they are all with you now
And they don’t even mean anything

Cut by bAby rAych

2007-08-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

i cut myself
just right there
on my wrist
where I felt
my pulse

stupid heart
why are you still beating
stop
just stop
won’t you

what are you beating for
he’s no longer here
the only reason
that I let you beat
so that I may live

crimson fluid
draining from my vessels
they feel warm
against my skin
my skin turning blue

i feel cold
my hands are clammy
sweat trickling down my face
i am losing sight
all i see is darkness

take me
take me away from here
this pain I can no longer bear
set me free from the grief
help me, help me

i cut myself
just like that
when you left
turned your back
and said goodbye

y0u aNd y0uR LovE by Princess Luna

2007-08-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

broken promises and shattered dreams
are all that's left... they're all i see

i'm bound and chained by my anger and fears
the plague that's slowly killing my heart that' s in tears

i can say: no one loves me...
not now... not even before
i keep knocking time and again
but they've all shut their doors

time itself has proven that forever was a lie
what we had was the eclipse that darkened my once bright sky

YOU BROKE MY HEART...
YOU CORRUPTED MY MIND...
YOU SHATTERED MY DREAMS...

AND YOUR LOVE WAS A LIE

Sex Without Love By Sharon Olds

2007-08-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Death and Rebirth by Chi

2007-08-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

it was not the sun
that died that morning
but us finding darkness
more comfortable.
we dropped our tools,
dropped to our knees
and crawled back to
the womb of memory
and there we dreamt
of better mornings, warmer sunshine.
But how could we know
while we floated in the belly
of silence and cold?

limbo is the worst place.

in another world,
we were ready to die again
suffocated in this sac of stagnancy--
but a push and a heave,
a breathe of protest
against the bred silence,
and we pass through another birthing.
this one slower and more painful
until we see
the light
again
and burst out laughing.

Light and Shade by Irene Chicqui

2007-08-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

Your warmth,

Send pulses humming;

Hastens the flight of decaying memories,

Of a white rose left to wither;

Of an old flame smothered,

mingle with the passing wind

Gathering dust at the corners of a locked away corridor,

Meant to be forgotten;

Now forgotten.

How can I not?

You’re always there,

With bright lips and quiet eyes

That send red flags

To unconsenting cheeks;

Removing knives,

Cleaning stitches,

Already healed.

Your hand next to mine,

I can not breathe without;

Waiting to touch,

But not touching,

Cradles my soul,

Crushes my heart.

But why such hesitation?

mine of exhaustion,

Yours I know not,

We are free.

let definitions be for dictionaries.

Together we dance solo,

Separate steps to the same tune,

Content with the silence

Of hushed pounding pulses,

Beating each other’s names

Nailed burning within guarded chests

To an indulgent stillness.

Such sweet torment

We hum the same melody

But sing a different song

We stand together

Yet apart.

Veritas by Windel Zamora Canbando

2007-08-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

Life is but a fancy poetry;
Truths are hidden in genuine irony.
Behold it's true,so hard to famthom,
As a child with wondered eyes over the fallen leaves of Autumn.

So many faces along the way,
Yet what's inside is kindling enmity.
And there are few who used to smile,
In midst of their wounded knees to vanish the pain a while...

And why this sole man in the empty street so gay?
Who can hardly eat his meals a day...
But here is a man who owns gold and silver,
Yet still finds himself nil and meager!

Quid veritas est?
So hard to answer...
But please remember...
"Magna est veritas et praevalebit!"

"Biyahe Tayo" Various OPM Artist

2007-08-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

Sa Aking mga Kabata ni Jose Rizal

2007-08-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

Kapagka ang baya’y sadyang umiibig
Sa langit salitang kaloob ng langit
Sanlang kalayaan nasa ring masapi
Katulad ng ibong nasa himpapawid

Pagka’t ang salita’y isang kahatulan
Sa bayan, sa nayo't mga kaharian
At ang isang tao’y katulad, kabagay
Ng alin mang likha noong kalayaan.

Ang hindi magmahal sa kanyang salita
Mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda
Kaya ang marapat pagyamanin kusa
Na tulad sa inang tunay na nagpala

Ang wikang Tagalog tulad din sa Latin,
Sa Ingles, Kastila, at salitang anghel,
Sapagkat ang Poong maalam tumingin
Ang siyang naggagawad, nagbibigay sa atin.

Ang salita nati’y tulad din sa iba
Na may alfabeto at sariling letra,
Na kaya nawala’y dinatnan ng sigwa
Ang lunday sa lawa noong dakong una.

Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson

2007-08-26T01:40:00.000-07:00

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Semantics by John E. Donovan

2007-08-26T01:25:00.000-07:00

Call a woman a kitten, but never a cat;
You can call her amouse, cannot calle her a rat;
Call a woman a chiken, but never a hen;
Or you surely willnot be her caller again.

You can call her a duck, cannot call her a goose;
You can call her a deer, but never a moose;
you can call her a lamb, but never a sheep;
Economic she lives, but you can't call her a cheap.

You can say she's a vision, can't say she's a sight;
A no woman's skinny, she's slender and slight.
If she should burn you up, say she sets you afire,
And you'll always be welcome, you trickly old liar.

Political Greatness by Percy Bysshe Shelly

2007-08-26T01:17:00.000-07:00

1.Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
2.Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
3.Shepherd those herds whom Tyranny makes tame;
4.Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts;
5.History is but the shadow of their shame;
6.Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts,
7.As to Oblivion their millions fleet
8.Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
9.Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
10.By force or custom? Man, who man would be,
11.Must rule the empire of himself; in it
12.Must be supreme, establishing his throne
13.On vanquish'd will, quelling the anarchy
14.Of hopes and fears, --- being himself alone.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

2007-08-26T01:13:00.000-07:00

1.Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
2.Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
3.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
4.And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
5.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
6.And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
7.And every fair from fair sometime declines,
8.By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
9.But thy eternal summer shall not fade
10.Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
11.Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
12.When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
13.So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
14.So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

I Heard An Angel by William Blake

2007-08-25T23:06:00.000-07:00

I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing,
"Mercy, Pity, Peace
Is the world's release."

Thus he sung all day
Over the new mown hay,
Till the sun went down
And haycocks looked brown.

I heard a Devil curse
Over the heath and the furze,
"Mercy could be no more,
If there was nobody poor,

And pity no more could be,
If all were as happy as we."
At his curse the sun went down,
And the heavens gave a frown.

Down pour'd the heavy rain
Over the new reap'd grain ...
And Miseries' increase
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

2007-08-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

To the lake by Edgar Allan Poe

2007-08-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

In Spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less -
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody -
Then - ah, then, I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight -
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define -
Nor Love - although the love were thine

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining -
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

2007-08-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Pinakahalaba ngunian an Banggi by Vinci Bueza

2007-08-25T01:13:00.000-07:00

May mga tinatago an diklom na dai na dapat aramon.
may mga aram ining midbidkan mga lambana dwende asin
kapre pero sarong misteryo sa sato.
ini na kaya an kasimbagan sa gabos tang mga kahaputan?
ini na kaya an nagsusup-ay na simbag na mahip-no sa satong pagkatawo?
Sa bangging ini, sa bangging kampyon an kadikloman, makua akonin
sagradong kalayona malinig sa sakongkalag,dalipay
na sakong tutungtungan,tubig na mapalibot,paros na ma-giya,
asin aapudan ko an sakong mga ninuno asin katambay.
Sa sarong moog na minuknakan diklomkahoyasin gapo,
ako maluhod,asin mahabi nin mga pangiturugan

HAIKU MARSHLANDS by Vinci Bueza

2007-08-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

1 the rain falls sadly
as i wait for the last bus.
i cried rain that night

2 kahlil gibran wrote.
i laughed my heart
with the rainthe rain is kahlil

3 aspirin kisses
cigarette-angels teases;
friday night's home-jail.

4 my dog has gone mad:
she made friends with our orchid.
i said: Hi, TV!

5 a haiku i made;
pen and paper in coitus -
welcome my vampires!

6 the athame drawn
invoking the power sprites.
ancient water-I.

7 philosophical.
queery anatomical.
platonic my arse.

8 vanity fairy
with your fair and golden locks.
lend me your mirror.

9 a wound and a stitich
in my heart with your picture;
a lonely teardrop.

10 rain falling angry
on nanay's bold mango leaves
scraping green paint,

11 i planted a poem
on a saint's lonely ashes.
lo, M & M's fruits!

12 checkered silver dusts,
ribboned tissues on canvass.
picasso alive.

13 the divorce of ice
and water is in headlines;
a third party tear.

14 bandanaed tadpoles
homosexual coconuts.
god is creative!

When only a half-inch glass separates by Vinci Bueza

2007-08-25T01:04:00.000-07:00

cool, sanitized air
in an otherworldly box
reeking with belches and half-digested fries.
in an unseen magic-gad
getbritney spears spews:
polluted poetry

outside:a homeless child
begs for bones,
an hour earlier had been
the happy meal of a lucky child.

he knocks at the glass.
the couple inside feigned dumb.
or is it their hearts that're numb?

meanwhile:
a fly zooms in -and munched at the unsuspecting
couple's melting ice cream.
if only the child was a fly.
or better;
if only there is no glass that separates,worlds,and hearts.

Writing new lines from old sorrows by Vinci Bueza

2007-08-25T00:45:00.000-07:00

Ibelieve that old wounds never heal completely.

they may be covered by new skins but they fester inside that body

which seems incapable of forgetting sorrows, and they leave scars in that part of the soul between consciousness and recollectionsthere -you are most vivid.

I see you in thatcolorless haze,right off Boticelli's.

I can see clearly the light of the moonmirrored by youreyeson multi-colored ice;hazelnut and mocha,espresso with a bit of cocoa,

a little tinge of cappucinowith a dash of macchiato.yellow curryspicy turmeric.

ah, your eyes are as addictiveas caffeineas dangerous as inviting as cigar.

sometimes,you are there,betweenasleep and awake;

i can smell you faintlyunderneath my pillows -or is it dried tears?

old sorrows never heal completely.

they are betweenhere and there,being and non-being.

they are ghoststhat haunt the silent, emptyspaces of our hearts.

You, Beggar by Ana Angeles

2007-08-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

Stop chasing fantasies of someone else's reality.
Don't eat crumbs from someone else's bread..
Or better yet, don't eat crumbs at all.
Don't kiss someone's ass
Not unless if it is yours alone.
Quit licking the drops on the floor
from another kid's ice cream.
Don't you wish that once in your life,

You had it all to yourself?

Of Memories, Stains and Kisses by Ana Angeles

2007-08-25T00:38:00.000-07:00

Memories on the sand are washed away by the tide.
The stains left as one kisses the glass are wiped off
As someone else's lips touched it.
But how can tears wash away memories left in the heart?
And how can someone else's lips wipe away
The essence of a great love's kiss?

What is Love? by Argel Sanga

2007-08-25T00:27:00.000-07:00

1.Love is a hymn, sing it.
2.Love is worship, praise it.
3.Love is a disciple, follow it.
4.Love is faith, trust it.
5.Love is struggle, fight it.
6.Love is game, play it.
7.Life is journey,travel it.
8.Love is a challenge, face it.
9.Love is perfect, combine it.
10.Love is text, reply it.
11.Love is secret, keep it.
12.Love is dream, enjoy it.
13.Love is crush, admire it.
14.Love is God’s gift, cherish it.

Love is Soul by Argel Sanga

2007-08-25T00:25:00.000-07:00

Do you believe that loves never last?
A resurrection as unusual happens to us
The spiritual part of a person that does not die
For eternal spirit as love that ever last.

Love is soul a part of our life
A mercy for rules that never lies
To love is to be honor as respect to god.
Though you remember love before you say goodbye

Robert Browning

2007-08-24T23:38:00.000-07:00

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, England. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father, who worked as a bank clerk, was also an artist, scholar, antiquarian, and collector of books and pictures. His rare book collection of more than 6,000 volumes included works in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. Much of Browning's education came from his well-read father. It is believed that he was already proficient at reading and writing by the age of five. A bright and anxious student, Browning learned Latin, Greek, and French by the time he was fourteen. From fourteen to sixteen he was educated at home, attended to by various tutors in music, drawing, dancing, and horsemanship. At the age of twelve he wrote a volume of Byronic verse entitled Incondita, which his parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to have published. In 1825, a cousin gave Browning a collection of Shelley's poetry; Browning was so taken with the book that he asked for the rest of Shelley's works for his thirteenth birthday, and declared himself a vegetarian and an atheist in emulation of the poet. Despite this early passion, he apparently wrote no poems between the ages of thirteen and twenty. In 1828, Browning enrolled at the University of London, but he soon left, anxious to read and learn at his own pace. The random nature of his education later surfaced in his writing, leading to criticism of his poems' obscurities.
In 1833, Browning anonymously published his first major published work, Pauline, and in 1840 he published Sordello, which was widely regarded as a failure. He also tried his hand at drama, but his plays, including Strafford, which ran for five nights in 1837, and the Bells and Pomegranates series, were for the most part unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the techniques he developed through his dramatic monologues—especially his use of diction, rhythm, and symbol—are regarded as his most important contribution to poetry, influencing such major poets of the twentieth century as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.
After reading Elizabeth Barrett's Poems (1844) and corresponding with her for a few months, Browning met her in 1845. They were married in 1846, against the wishes of Barrett's father. The couple moved to Pisa and then Florence, where they continued to write. They had a son, Robert "Pen" Browning, in 1849, the same year his Collected Poems was published. Elizabeth inspired Robert's collection of poems Men and Women (1855), which he dedicated to her. Now regarded as one of Browning's best works, the book was received with little notice at the time; its author was then primarily known as Elizabeth Barrett's husband.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861, and Robert and Pen Browning soon moved to London. Browning went on to publish Dramatis Personae (1863), and The Ring and the Book (1868). The latter, based on a seventeenth-century Italian murder trial, received wide critical acclaim, finally earning a twilight of reknown and respect in Browning's career. The Browning Society was founded while he still lived, in 1881, and he was awarded honorary degrees by Oxford University in 1882 and the University of Edinburgh in 1884. Robert Browning died on the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published, in 1889.

Poetry
Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889)Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning (1895)Dramatic Idyls (1879)Dramatic Idyls: Second Series (1880)Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)Jocoseria (1883)La Saisiaz, and The Two Poets of Croisicv (1878)Men and Women (1855)New Poems by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914)Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper, with Other Poems (1876)Paracelsus (1835)Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Turf and Towers (1873)Robert Browning: The Poems (1981)Robert Browning: The Ring and the Book (1971)Sordell (1840)The Brownings to the Tennysons (1971)The Complete Works of Robert Browning (1898)The Inn Album (1875)The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (1868)The Ring and the Book (1868)The Works of Robert Browning (1912)Two Poems (1854)

Prose
Browning to His American Friends (1965)Dearest Isa: Browning's Letters to Isa Blagden (1951)Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald 1876-1889 (1966)Letters of Robert Browning Collected by Thomas J. Wise (1933)New Letters of Robert Browning (1950)Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed in Their Letters (1937)The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, 1845-1846 (1969)Thomas Jones, The Divine Order: Sermons (1884)

Anthology
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)

Drama
Aristophanes' Apology (1875)Balaustion's Adventure, Including a Transcript from Euripides (1871)Bells and Pomegranates, No. IV - The Return of the Druses: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1943)Bells and Pomegranates. No. I - Pippa Passes (1841)Bells and Pomegranates. No. II - King Victor and King Charles (1842)Bells and Pomegranates. No. III - Dramatic Lyrics (1842)Bells and Pomegranates. No. V - A Blot in the 'Scutcheon: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1843)Bells and Pomegranates. No. V - Colombe's Birthday: A Play in Five Acts (1844)Bells and Pomegranates. No. VII - Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (1845)Bells and Pomegranates. No. VIII - and Last, Luria; and A Soul's Tragedy (1846)Dramatis Personae (1864)Fifine at the Fair (1872)Poems: A New Edition (1849)Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837)

William Shakespeare

2007-08-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon. The son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward IV Grammar School in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585.
Little is known about Shakespeare's activities between 1585 and 1592. Robert Greene's A Groatsworth of Wit alludes to him as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare may have taught at school during this period, but it seems more probable that shortly after 1585 he went to London to begin his apprenticeship as an actor. Due to the plague, the London theaters were often closed between June 1592 and April 1594. During that period, Shakespeare probably had some income from his patron, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first two poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The fomer was a long narrative poem depicting the rejection of Venus by Adonis, his death, and the consequent disappearance of beauty from the world. Despite conservative objections to the poem's glorification of sensuality, it was immensely popular and was reprinted six times during the nine years following its publication.
In 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's company of actors, the most popular of the companies acting at Court. In 1599 Shakespeare joined a group of Chamberlain's Men that would form a syndicate to build and operate a new playhouse: the Globe, which became the most famous theater of its time. With his share of the income from the Globe, Shakespeare was able to purchase New Place, his home in Stratford.
While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his world looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. Shakespeare's sonnets were composed between 1593 and 1601, though not published until 1609. That edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare, consists of 154 sonnets, all written in the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean. The sonnets fall into two groups: sonnets 1-126, addressed to a beloved friend, a handsome and noble young man, and sonnets 127-152, to a malignant but fascinating "Dark Lady," whom the poet loves in spite of himself. Nearly all of Shakespeare's sonnets examine the inevitable decay of time, and the immortalization of beauty and love in poetry.
In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany.
Shakespeare wrote more than 30 plays. These are usually divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, but in 1596, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his second tragedy, and over the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which he is now best known: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Only eighteen of Shakespeare's plays were published separately in quarto editions during his lifetime; a complete collection of his works did not appear until the publication of the First Folio in 1623, several years after his death. Nonetheless, his contemporaries recognized Shakespeare's achievements. Francis Meres cited "honey-tongued" Shakespeare for his plays and poems in 1598, and the Chamberlain's Men rose to become the leading dramatic company in London, installed as members of the royal household in 1603.
Sometime after 1612, Shakespeare retired from the stage and returned to his home in Stratford. He drew up his will in January of 1616, which included his famous bequest to his wife of his "second best bed." He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried two days later at Stratford Church.

Poetry
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1609)Venus and Adonis (1593)

Drama
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)All's Well that Ends Well (1602)Antony and Cleopatra (1607)As You Like It (1599)Coriolanus (1608)Cymbeline (1609)Hamlet (1600)Henry IV (1597)Henry V (1598)Henry VI (Parts I, II, and III) (1590)Henry VIII (1612)Julius Caesar (1599)King John (1596)King Lear (1605)Love's Labour's Lost (1593)Macbeth (1606)Measure for Measure (1604)Much Ado About Nothing (1598)Othello (1604)Pericles (1608)Richard II (1595)Richard III (1594)Romeo and Juliet (1596)The Comedy of Errors (1590)The Merchant of Venice (1596)The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)The Taming of the Shrew (1593)The Tempest (1611)The Winter's Tale (1610)Timon of Athens (1607)Titus Andronicus (1590)Troilus and Cressida (1600)Twelfth Night (1599)Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592)

Ezra Pound

2007-08-24T23:33:00.000-07:00

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry--stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.

Poetry
A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI (1934)A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)A Lume Spento (1908)Cantos I-XVI (1925)Cantos LII-LXXI (1940)Cantos XVII-XXVII (1928)Canzoni (1911)Exultations (1909)Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934)Lustra and Other Poems (1917)Patria Mia (1950)Personae (1909)Provenca (1910)Quia Pauper Amavi (1919)The Cantos (1972)The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937)The Pisan Cantos (1948)Umbra: Collected Poems (1920)

Prose
ABC of Economics (1933)Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924)Digest of the Analects (1937)Gaudier Brzeska (1916)Guide to Kulchur (1938)How To Read (1931)Imaginary Letters (1930)Indiscretions (1923)Instigations (1920)Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935)Literary Essays (1954)Make It New (1934)Pavannes and Divisions (1918)Polite Essays (1936)Prolegomena: Volume I (1932)Selected Prose: 1909-1965 (1973)Social Credit and Impact (1935)The ABC of Reading (1934)The Spirit of Romance (1953)What is Money For? (1939)

Anthology
Cathay (1915)The Classic Anthology Defined (1954)The Great Digest, and the Unwobbling Point (1951)The Translations of Ezra Pound (1953)

Anne Sexton

2007-08-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

Anne Gray Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, suffered her first mental breakdown, and was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a neuropsychiatric hospital she would repeatedly return to for help. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband's parents. That same year, on her birthday, she attempted suicide.
She was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in writing poetry she had developed in high school, and in the fall of 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In her introduction to Anne Sexton's Complete Poems, the poet Maxine Kumin, who was enrolled with Sexton in the 1957 workshop and became her close friend, describes her belief that it was the writing of poetry that gave Sexton something to work towards and develop and thus enabled her to endure life for as long as she did. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career--she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die--she lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.
Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other "confessional" poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter.

Poetry
45 Mercy Street (1976)All My Pretty Ones (1962)Live or Die (1966)Love Poems (1969)Selected Poems (1964)The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)The Book of Folly (1973)The Complete Poems (1981)The Death Notebooks (1974)To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)Transformations (1971)Words for Dr. Y.: Uncollected Poems (1978)

Prose Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977)

Gwendolyn Brooks

2007-08-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (1987); To Disembark (1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986); Riot (1969); In the Mecca (1968); The Bean Eaters (1960); Annie Allen (1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971). In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

Poetry
A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

Aloneness (1971)

Annie Allen (1949)

Aurora (1972)

Beckonings (1975)

Black Love (1981)

Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971)

Blacks (1987)

Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)

Children Coming Home (1991)

Family Pictures (1970)

In the Mecca (1968)

Riot (1970)

Selected Poems (1963)

The Bean Eaters (1960)

The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)

The Wall (1967)

The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971)

To Disembark (1981)

We Real Cool (1966)

Winnie (1988)

Prose
A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975)Primer for Blacks (1981)Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972)Very Young Poets (1983)Young Poet's Primer (1981)

Fiction
Maud Martha (1953)This bio was last updated on , . --->

Elizabeth Bishop

2007-08-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died, her mother was committed to a mental asylum, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She earned a bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1934.
She was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North and South, published in 1946.
She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the "confessional" style, Bishop's poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life, and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world.
Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She wrote slowly and published sparingly (her Collected Poems number barely a hundred), but the technical brilliance and formal variety of her work is astonishing. For years she was considered a "poet's poet," but with the publication of her last book, Geography III, in 1976, Bishop was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature.
Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets in 1964 and served as a Chancellor from 1966 to 1979. She died in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in 1979, and her stature as a major poet continues to grow through the high regard of the poets and critics who have followed her.

Poetry
North and South (1946)Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring (1955)Poems (1956)Questions of Travel (1965)The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968)The Complete Poems (1969)Poem (1973)Geography III (1977)The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (1983)Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006)

Prose
Brazil (1962)The Collected Prose (1984)One Art: Letters (1993)

Anthology

The Diary of Helena Morley (1977)

William Blake

2007-08-24T23:16:00.000-07:00

William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Two of his six siblings died in infancy. From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God "put his head to the window"; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels. Although his parents tried to discourage him from "lying," they did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school. He learned to read and write at home. At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school. Two years later, Blake began writing poetry. When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with an engraver because art school proved too costly. One of Blake's assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career. After his seven-year term ended, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy.
In 1782, he married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and to write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship. Later, she helped him print the illuminated poetry for which he is remembered today; the couple had no children. In 1784 he set up a printshop with a friend and former fellow apprentice, James Parker, but this venture failed after several years. For the remainder of his life, Blake made a meager living as an engraver and illustrator for books and magazines. In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother Robert in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of 1787 and succumbed, probably to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother's spirit rise up through the ceiling, "clapping its hands for joy." He believed that Robert's spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other "illuminated" works.
Blake's first printed work, Poetical Sketches (1783), is a collection of apprentice verse, mostly imitating classical models. The poems protest against war, tyranny, and King George III's treatment of the American colonies. He published his most popular collection, Songs of Innocence, in 1789 and followed it, in 1794, with Songs of Experience. Some readers interpret Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, considering it primarily a children's book, but others have found hints at parody or critique in its seemingly naive and simple lyrics. Both books of Songs were printed in an illustrated format reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and each picture was finished by hand in watercolors.
Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of 18th-century neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." Works such as "The French Revolution" (1791), "America, a Prophecy" (1793), "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (1793), and "Europe, a Prophecy" (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to 18th-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he satirized oppressive authority in church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest.
In 1800 Blake moved to the seacoast town of Felpham, where he lived and worked until 1803 under the patronage of William Hayley. He taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, so that he could read classical works in their original language. In Felpham he experienced profound spiritual insights that prepared him for his mature work, the great visionary epics written and etched between about 1804 and 1820. Milton (1804-08), Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-20) have neither traditional plot, characters, rhyme, nor meter. They envision a new and higher kind of innocence, the human spirit triumphant over reason.
Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by common people, but he was determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. In 1808 he exhibited some of his watercolors at the Royal Academy, and in May of 1809 he exhibited his works at his brother James's house. Some of those who saw the exhibit praised Blake's artistry, but others thought the paintings "hideous" and more than a few called him insane. Blake's poetry was not well known by the general public, but he was mentioned in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1816. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been lent a copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, considered Blake a "man of Genius," and Wordsworth made his own copies of several songs. Charles Lamb sent a copy of "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence to James Montgomery for his Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing Boys' Album (1824), and Robert Southey (who, like Wordsworth, considered Blake insane) attended Blake's exhibition and included the "Mad Song" from Poetical Sketches in his miscellany, The Doctor (1834-1837).
Blake's final years, spent in great poverty, were cheered by the admiring friendship of a group of younger artists who called themselves "the Ancients." In 1818 he met John Linnell, a young artist who helped him financially and also helped to create new interest in his work. It was Linnell who, in 1825, commissioned him to design illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, the cycle of drawings that Blake worked on until his death in 1827.

Poetry
All Religions Are One (1788)America, a Prophecy (1793)Europe, a Prophecy (1794)For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820)Poetical Sketches (1783)Songs of Experience (1794)Songs of Innocence (1789)The Book of Ahania (1795)The Book of Los (1795)The First Book of Urizen (1794)The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)The Song of Los (1795)There Is No Natural Religion (1788)Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)This bio was last updated on , . --->
Poems by William Blake
A Divine Image
A Poison Tree
Auguries of Innocence
From "Milton"
Infant Joy
London
Proverbs of Hell
The Chimney-Sweeper
The Divine Image
The Lamb
The Tyger

T. S. Eliot

2007-08-24T23:14:00.000-07:00

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.

Poetry
Ash Wednesday (1930)Burnt Norton (1941)Collected Poems (1962)East Coker (1940)Four Quartets (1943)Poems (1919)Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)The Dry Salvages (1941)The Waste Land (1922)

Prose
After Strange Gods (1933)Andrew Marvell (1922)Dante (1929)Elizabethan Essays (1934)Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)For Lancelot Andrews (1928)John Dryden (1932)Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)Poetry and Drama (1951)Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)The Sacred Wood (1920)The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Drama
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)Sweeney Agonistes (1932)The Cocktail Party (1950)The Confidential Clerk (1953)The Elder Statesman (1958)The Family Reunion (1939)The Rock (1934)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

2007-08-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Barrett, an English poet of the Romantic Movement, was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.
In 1826 Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barrett's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.
Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay and Elizabeth returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.
Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets—one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English—to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.
Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-51) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe.Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.

Poetry
A Drama of Exile: and other Poems (1845)An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826)Aurora Leigh (1857)Casa Guidi Windows: A Poem (1851)Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories (1914)Last Poems (1862)Miscellaneous Poems (1833)Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (1860)New Poems by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914)Poems (1844)Poems before Congress (1860)Poems: Fourth Edition (1856)Poems: New Edition (1850)Poems: Third Edition (1853)Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)The Battle of Marathon: A Poem (1820)The Complete Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900)The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1900)The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1889)The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897)The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838)Two Poems (1854)

Prose
"Queen Annelida and False Arcite;" "The Complaint of Annelida to False Arcite," (1841)"The Daughters of Pandarus" from the Odyssey (1846)A New Spirit of the Age (1844)Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1831-1832 (1969)Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849-1861 (1973)Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Letters to Her Sister, 1846-1859 (1929)Invisible Friends (1972)Letters from Elizabeth Barrett to B. R. Haydon (1939)Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne (1877)Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett (1958)Letters to Robert Browning and Other Correspondents by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1916)New Letters from Mrs. Browning to Isa Blagden (1951)Psyche Apocalyptè: A Lyrical Drama (1876)The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (1863)The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897)The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-1846 (1969)The Poet's Enchiridion (1914)The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford (1954)Twenty Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1950)Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Hugh Stuart Boyd (1955)
Anthology

Pablo Neruda

2007-08-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923 he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario ("Twilight"). He published the volume under the pseudonym "Pablo Neruda" to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.
In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together the two men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda's poetic and political development. He chronicled the horrendous years which included the execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front. Neruda's outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then returned to Europe to help settle republican refugees in the United States.
Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto general (1950).
In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people's poet. During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position thus ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile's democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin-American poet since Darío, died of leukemia in Santiago, Chile.
A Selected Bibliography

Poetry
Alturas de Macchu-Picchu (1948)

Anillos (1926)

Canto General (1950)

Cantos ceremoniales (1961)

Cien sonetos de amor (1959)

El corazon amarillo (1974)

El mar y las campanas: Poemas (1973)

Espana en el corazon: Himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra (1937)

Estravagario (1958)

Jardin de invierno (1974)

La rosa separada (1973)

Las piedras de Chile (1961)

Las piedras del cielo (1970)

Las uvas y el viento (1954)

Libro de las preguntas (1974)

Los versos del capitan: Poemas de amor (1952)

Memorial de Isla Negra (1964)

Odas elementales (1954)

Plenos poderes (1962)

Residencia en la tierra (1933)

Viente poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (1924)

Prose
Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (1974)

Correspondancia (1980)

Discurso pronunciado con ocasion de la entrega del premio Nobel de literatura (1971)

El habitante y su esperanza (1925)

Anthology
Cuarenta y cuatro (1967)

Paginas escogidas de Anatole France (1924)

Romeo y Julieta (1964)

Visiones de las hijas de Albion y el viajero mental (1935)

Drama
Fulgor y muerte de Joaquin Murieta: Bandido chileno injusticiado en California el 23 julio 1853 (1967)

Poetry in Translation
100 Love Sonnets (1986)

A New Decade: Poems, 1958-1967 (1969)

A Separate Rose (1985)

Extravagaria (1972)

Five Decades: A Selection (Poems 1925-1970) (1974)

Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon : Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (1998)

Fully Empowered: Plenos poderes (1975)

Isla Negra: A Notebook (1980)

Late and Posthumous Poems, 1968-1974 (1989)

Memoirs (1976)

Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1971)

New Poems, 1968-1970 (1972)

Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra Face to Face (1977)

Pablo Neruda: An Anthology of Odes (1994)

Pablo Neruda: The Early Poems (1969)

Passions and Impressions (1982)

Residence on Earth (1962)

Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda (1990)

Selected Poems (1970)

Spain in the Heart: Hymn to the Glories of the People at War (1993)

Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta (1972)

Stones of the Sky (1970)

The Book of Questions (1991)

The Captain's Verses (1972)

The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1966)

The House at Isla Negra (1988)

The Sea and the Bells (1988)

The Stones of Chile (1987)

The Yellow Heart (1990)

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1969)

Twenty Poems (1967)

Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile (1984)

Winter Garden (1986)

The Essential Neruda (2004)

Dylan Thomas

2007-08-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition. Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.

Poetry

Collected Poems (1952)

Deaths and Entrances (1946)

Eighteen Poems (1934)

In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (1952)

New Poems (1942)

New Poems (1943)

Poems (1971)

The Map of Love (1939)

The World I Breath (1939)

Twenty-Five Poems (1936)

Prose

A Child's Christmas in Wales (1954)

A Prospect of the Sea (1955)

Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories (1955)

Collected Prose (1969)

Early Prose Writings (1971)

Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957)

Notebooks (1934)

Quite Early One Morning (1954)

The Beach of Falesá (1964)

The Doctor and the Devils (1953)

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)

Under Milkwood (1954)
Drama
Under Milk Wood (1954)This bio was last updated on , . --->

Edgar Allan Poe

2007-08-24T22:43:00.000-07:00

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. Poe's father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the University when Allan refused to pay his gambling debts.
Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, he moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems, was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He brought his aunt and twelve-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, with him to Richmond. He married Virginia in 1836. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short-story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Raven." After Virginia's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's life-long struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of "acute congestion of the brain."
Poe's work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the "architect" of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of the style and of the structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the "art for art's sake" movement. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.
Selected Bibliography

Poetry
Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)

Poems (1831)

The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

Fiction
Berenice (1835)

Ligeia (1838)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

The Black Cat (1843)

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

The Purloined Letter (1845)

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

The Oval Portrait (1850)

The Narrative of Arthut Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)

Sylvia Plath

2007-08-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.
In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy."
Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.
In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.
After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.
Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.

Poetry
The Colossus (1960)

Ariel (1965)

Crossing the Water (1971)

Winter Trees (1972)

The Collected Poems (1981)

Prose
The Bell Jar (1963)

Letters Home (1975,to and edited by her mother)

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)

The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

The Magic Mirror (1989, Plath's Smith College senior thesis)

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000, edited by Karen V. Kukil)

Books for Young Readers
The Bed Book (1976)

The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)

Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)

Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

W. H. Auden

2007-08-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.
In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.
Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.
He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.
W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

Poetry
Poems (privately printed, 1928) Poems (1930) The Orators prose and verse (1932) Look, Stranger! in America: On This Island (1936) Spain (1937) Another Time (1940) The Double Man (1941) The Quest (1941) For the Time Being (1944) The Sea and the Mirror (1944) Collected Poetry (1945) The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950) Nones (1952) The Shield of Achilles (1955) Selected Poetry (1956) The Old Man's Road (1956) Homage to Clio (1960) About the House About the House (1965) Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966) Collected Longer Poems (1968) City without Walls (1969) Academic Graffiti (1971) Epistle to a Godson (1972) Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974) Selected Poems (1979) Collected Poems (1991)

Prose

Letters from Iceland (1937)

Journey to a War (1939)

Enchaféd Flood (1950)T

he Dyer's Hand (1962)

Selected Essays (1964)

Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Anthology

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

Drama

Paid On Both Sides (1928)

The Dance of Death (1933)

The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935)

The Ascent of F.6 (1936)

On the Frontier (1938)

William Carlos Williams

2007-08-24T22:27:00.000-07:00

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970). Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.

E. E. Cummings

2007-08-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard. His studies there introduced him to avant garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

In 1917, Cummings' first published poems appeared in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions.
After the war, he settled into a life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired.
I

n his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant.At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.
A Selected Bibliography

Poetry
Tulips and Chimneys (1923)& (1925)

XLI Poems (1925)

ViVa (1931)

No Thanks (1935)

Tom (1935)

1/20 (1936)

Fifty Poems (1941)

1 x 1 (1944)

Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems (1950)

Ninety-five Poems (1958)

73 Poems (1962)

Complete Poems (1991)

Prose
The Enormous Room (1922)

Eimi (1933)

Robert Frost

2007-08-24T06:31:00.000-07:00

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree.
Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work.
By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as The American Bard: "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain."
About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

Poetry

A Boy's Will (1913)North of Boston (1914)

Mountain Interval (1916)New Hampshire (1923)

West-Running Brook (1928)

The Lovely Shall Be Choosers (1929)

The Lone Striker (1933)

From Snow to Snow (1936)

A Further Range (1936)

A Witness Tree (1942)

Come In, and Other Poems (1943)

Masque of Reason (1945)

Steeple Bush (1947)

Hard Not to be King (1951)

Walt Whitman

2007-08-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s. At the age of twelve Whitman began to learn the printer's trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city.
On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his subsequent career, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a "purged" and "cleansed" life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals. Whitman stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet.
Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington he lived on a clerk's salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him "purses" of money so that he could get by.
In the early 1870s, Whitman settled in Camden, where he had come to visit his dying mother at his brother's house. However, after suffering a stroke, Whitman found it impossible to return to Washington. He stayed with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman enough money to buy a home in Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

Poetry

Drum Taps (1865)

Good-Bye, My Fancy (1891)

Leaves of Grass (1855)

Leaves of Grass (1856)

Leaves of Grass (1860)

Leaves of Grass (1867)

Leaves of Grass (1870)

Leaves of Grass (1876)

Leaves of Grass (1881)

Leaves of Grass (1891)

Passage to India (1870)

Sequel to Drum Taps (1865)

Prose

Complete Prose Works (1892)

Democratic Vistas (1871)

Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842)

Memoranda During the War (1875)

November Boughs (1888)

Specimen Days and Collect (1881)

Emily Dickinson

2007-08-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him "my closest earthly friend." Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother Austin attended law school and became an attorney, but lived next door once he married Susan Gilbert (one of the speculated—albeit less persuasively—unrequited loves of Emily). Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions during Dickinson’s lifetime.
Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of more than 800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard "n-dash," which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.
A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (1945)

Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems (1962)

Further Poems of Emily Dickinson: Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (1929

)Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890)

Poems: Second Series (1891)

Poems: Third Series (1896)T

he Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924)

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914)

Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (1935)

Prose
Emily Dickinson Face to Face: Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminisces (1932)

Letters of Emily Dickinson (1894)

Langston Hughes

2007-08-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

Langston Hughes

James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry. Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy, and travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature.Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred." His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed "Langston Hughes Place."
In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Stakes a Claim,Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple's Uncle Sam. He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography (The Big Sea) and co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston.
A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961)
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994)
Dear Lovely Death (1931)
Fields of Wonder (1947)
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
Freedom's Plow (1943)
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
One-Way Ticket (1949)
Scottsboro Limited (1932)
Selected Poems (1959)
Shakespeare in Harlem (1942)
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932)
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (1967)
The Weary Blues (1926)

Prose

Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes (1973)
I Wonder as I Wander (1956)Laughing to Keep From Crying (1952)
Not Without Laughter (1930)
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 (2001)
Simple Speaks His Mind (1950)
Simple Stakes a Claim (1957)
Simple Takes a Wife (1953)Simple's Uncle Sam (1965)
Something in Common and Other Stories (1963)
Tambourines to Glory (1958)The Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters (1980)
The Big Sea (1940)
The Langston Hughes Reader (1958)
The Ways of White Folks (1934)
Drama
Black Nativity (1961)
Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 5: The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move (2000)
Don't You Want to Be Free? (1938)
Five Plays by Langston Hughes (1963)
Little Ham (1935)
Mulatto (1935)
Mule Bone (1930)
Simply Heavenly (1957)
Soul Gone Home (1937)
The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (2000)

Poetry in Translation

Cuba Libre (1948)
Gypsy Ballads (1951)
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1957)

Translation

Masters of the Dew (1947)This bio was last updated on