When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd

Walt Whitman's supernal elegy to Abraham Lincoln seems fitting in the context of a raging debate over race in America...

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd

This is the forest primeval...

Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Part I Chapter 1

A Million Peso Poem

The following is a very short excerpt from near the end of Cirilo F. Bautista's epic poem in English, Sunlight on Broken Stones which won a million peso First Prize in the 1998 Centennial Heritage Prize Literary Contest. With over 20 million pesos awarded that year for English and Filipino poetry, novels, essays, screenplays and drama, it was perhaps the most generous support given to literature. When President Joseph Estrada, who gave out the cash awards and medals, announced that he would do it again and double the cash prizes, most of the winners excitedly began planning their next entries. But it never happened again ... See however, this post from Butch Dalisay...

Sunlight on Broken Stones by Cirilo F. Bautista

Copies availabe from the University of the Philippines Press, Diliman, Quezon City, or National Bookstore.

Chinese Poem

Here's a poem by J.D. McClatch published in The New Yorker (via Spy in the Sandwich).

Download the mp3 if you don't have Flash.

Childhood

I shall never tire of Longfellow's music, I think.

Three Poems from Dragonfly in Amber

These are three recent poems written by Leslie Noelle de la Cruz of Dragonfly in Amber.

Three Poems

Sic Itur Ad Astra (Such is the Way to the Stars!)

Of course José Rizál was a poet...

Riding down the Pasig River on the Steamer Tabo...

What a Little Thing

Dame Edith Sitwell was actually quite disdainful of the following type of poem that typified for her the effete nature of British Victorian poetry, which she compares unfavorably in The Poet's Vision, written about a time when Walt Whitman was ascendant and glorious in America. Filipinos might like it...

What a Little Thing...

Picture Writing

A legend about how we learned to read and write...

Picture Writing