RP wins Thai award / Israeli poet’s visit / ‘Search’ journal out

These diverse notes should be of interest to the literati.

Dr. Domingo G. Landicho, RP’s S.E.A. Awardee for 2003, and nine other ASEAN literary writers, will receive their awards from Queen Sirikit on Oct. 15 at the Royal Ballroom of The Oriental in Bangkok. The awardees will be entertained at Baan Phraya, and will visit Ayuthaya and Bang-Pa-In Palace, the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha temple.

Poet, fictionist, essayist, editor, dramatist and novelist, the multi-awarded Landicho has authored more than 50 books in all genres, including pedagogy and literature for children. His poems have been read widely through the CCP extension program.

Recently, one of his novels, Bulaklak ng Maynila (Manila Blooms), a Palanca Award Grand Prize Winner, was made into an award-winning movie. His latest novel, Mata ng Apoy (Eye of Fire) on the martial law regime, was launched by the UP Press last month. The Gawad Balagtas for Fiction was conferred on him at the Goethe Institut by Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas last August.

Mrs. Landicho, Edna May, is a playwright and a theater arts professor at the UP.

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As official guest of the Israeli Embassy headed by Chargé d’Affaires Roi Dvir, the eminent Israeli poet Ronny Someck visited Manila to exchange insights and impressions with his peers.

Born in Baghdad in 1951, Someck moved to Israel with his family a year and half later. As a child, he lived in an Israeli transit camp for new immigrants until the family moved to an apartment complex in Tel Aviv. Ronny studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Tel Aviv U., and sketching at the Avni Art Academy.

His eight volumes of poetry, originally written in Hebrew, have been translated into 22 languages including Arabic, Catalan, Albanian, English and French. His latest book, Fire Stays in Red, is his first full-length publication in English.

Here are some quotable quotes the poet shared with me when he and Mr. Dvir dropped by my residence upon my invitation:

For every poem, you need to find the Black Box – the metaphor. This box will make all the difference between a poem and a grocery list. / Everything is material for poetry. / Westerns (the movies) are a big metaphor in our life. / The poet’s mission is to reveal reality through another point of view to change the mind – to revolutionize it. A poet is a one-man Mafia. the only weapon he needs is his pen.

Still, the best way of giving the reader an idea of Someck’s poems is to reprint a few of them, with his permission, of course. Bliss is viewed by some as a political poem and by others, a love poem. The Polish poet Wislba Simborska, 1995 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, earnestly believes the poem should be printed in every wedding invitation.

Bliss

A wedding cake with us on high / bride and groom/two dolls in the sky. /We fight to stay on the same slice. /When the blade descends, by and by.

Wheat

Waves of wheat ripple over the head/of my wife, over the head of my daughter. /How trite it is to describe blond this way/yet there grows the bread of my life.

Baghdad, February 1991

Along these bombed-out streets I was pushed in a baby carriage. / Babylonian girls pinched my cheeks and waved palm fronds/over my blond down. / What’s left from then became very black /like Baghdad / and the baby carriage we removed from the shelter/the days we waited for another war.

Oh Tigris, oh Euphrates, pet snakes in the first map of my life, how you shed your skin and become vipers.

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The October issue of "Search, the Agustinian Journal of Cultural Excellence", which is published by Colegio San Agustin Makati, and distributed worldwide, is out. It highlights philosophy, theology, art and culture through scholarly essays, fiction and poetry.

Since 1990, the journal has been coming out every March and October, attracting a convergence of international talents from Asia to Africa to Europe to N. America. Editor Gilbert Luis R. Centina III, OSA, a multi-awarded poet and author, is earnestly inviting local talents to write for the journal.

Regular contributors include Fil-American poet Luis Cabalquinto, NY-based playwright Bert Florentino, American theologian Theodore V. Tack, OSA; Fil-Spanish author Pedro Galende, director of the San Agustine Museum; Fil-Am free lancer Susan Sanares Tan, homegrown theology professor-missionary Peter A. Casiño, OSA, and the winners of the annual contest "Best Search on the Life and Works of St. Agustine".

Janet Frances White, Search art consultant, has worked with some of the world’s best publication agencies including Bantam Books in NY.

In the March 2004 issue, Spanish historian Policarpio F. Hernandez, OSA, comes up with "Fray Martin de Rada" and the Pacification of the Philippines – a fresh look at the country’s early colonization – a vivid account of the moral and legal pitfalls attendant to the nation’s birth.