Post by thepoetslizard on Oct 10, 2008 16:04:07 GMT 2
Marjorie Evasco
Author Website
marjorieevasco.jimdo.com/
Bio from the Panitikan Website
www.panitikan.com.ph/authors/e/mevasco.htm
Marjorie Evasco finished her B.A. from Divine Word College of Tagbilaran (now Holy Name University), her M.A. in Creative Writing at Silliman University and her Doctor of Philosophy in Literature (Ph.D. Litt.) at De La Salle University-Manila. She became a member of the faculty at De La Salle University, while completing her doctoral degree in 1998. For many years, she was Director of DLSU's Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center.
Evasco has received several Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, National Book Awards from the Manila Critics' Circle, Arinday (Silliman University), Gintong Aklat (Book Development Association of the Philippines) and Philippines Free Press prizes for her poems and essays. Her poems have appeared in many important anthologies including Luna Caledonia and Six Women Poets. She has been published extensively in Asia, Europe and North America. She has also received various international fellowships; among them, a writing fellowship at the International Retreat for Writers in Hawthornden Castle, Midlothian, Scotland in 1991; a Rockefeller grant and residency in Bellagio, Italy in 1992; 10th Vancouver International Writers' Festival in 1997; International Writers' Program fellowship at the University of Iowa in 2002; University of Malaya Cultural Centre grant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2003; the Wordfeast 1st Singapore International Literary Festival in 2004 and the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival in 2006.
Evasco's prizewinning poetry books are: Dreamweavers: Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987) and Ochre Tones: Poems in English and Cebuano (1999). Evasco calls this volume a "book of changes," following Dreamweavers which for her was a "book of origins." Evasco hopes to finish her third poetry collection soon.
Evasco's other books include A Legacy of Light: 100 Years of Sun Life in the Philippines, Six Women Poets: Inter/Views (co-written with Edna Manlapaz), Kung Ibig Mo: Love Poetry by Women (co-edited with Benilda Santos, A Life Shaped by Music: Andrea O. Veneracion and the Philippine Madrigal Singers and ANI: The Life and Art of Hermogena Borja Lungay, Boholano Painter
Evasco was a founding member of two organizations espousing the cause of women writers: Writers Involved in Creating Cultural Alternatives (WICCA) and Women in Literary Arts (WILA). She has written many essays on women's poetry, several of them finding their place in various anthologies.
~ from Wikipedia
"Dreamweavers"
We are entitled to our own
definitions of the world
we have in common
earth house (stay)
water well (carry)
fire stove (tend)
air song (sigh)
ether dream (die)
and try out new combinations
with key words
unlocking power
house on fire sing!
stove under water stay,
earth filled well die.
The spells and spellings
of our vocabularies
are oracular
in translation.
One woman in Pagnito-an
another in Solentiname
still another in Harxheim
naming
half the world together
can move their earth
must house their fire
be water to their song
will their dreams well.
*
"La Condition Humaine"
This is how we see the world.
-René Magritte, 1938 lecture
There is a room where a man lies next
To a woman whose shoulders are lit
By morning. He wakes her to drift
Of clouds, wash of skies, drizzle
Of leaves in the air. “Magritte,”
He says into her ear, tracing
With a long slender finger,
A frame beyond the windowpane.
Another room in another time
Suddenly opens inside her.
She is standing by a window
Before the painting’s expanse of grass,
The cut of dirt road, and on the horizon
A stand of mountains measuring the reach
Of a single aspen. “La Condition Humaine,”
She turns to the man beside her,
As if to say she understood how inside
And outside the rooms of love
The landscape was not always seamless;
How, every time she turned her heart
Into an eye to invent with words the true form
Of being, dustmotes were already trapped
In the light of images, like this morning
Vanished fast into another day.
In no time they shall each be elsewhere.
*
"Sic Transit Mundi"
This must be the taste of Language--
the tongue mapped by many colors,
parsed by the vowels of memory, the roof
of the mouth the dome of a world
circumscribed by consonants, whose edges
suggest the sour-sweetness of oranges
the bittermelon's green rind, the river-
scent of mangoes all the way to the grove.
When I sing of Balicasag, island
whose name inscribes the upturned
crab, I am translating a story of fire
razing a whole village to the ground
when the revolution was fought.
In whatever month dolphins are born,
mothers weaving pandan mats
pause to tell the story
of how it happened one day in May,
in the month of fiestas in Bohol:
The churchbells rang mad at dawn.
Someone had set fire to the orchard
of Padre Domingo del Valle;
by noon even the grasshoppers
had turned to ashes.
I sing this story now to let you taste
the aroma of milagrosa rice boiling
on the earthen stove, or catch
from your open window
the pod of lumba-lumba playing near
the island's shore. And I want
the edges of your tongue to water
from the hint of acid in the air, as if
invisible trees stood windward, still
ripening in the burning sun.
(*for Franz Arcellana born Sept. 6, 1916)
Marjorie Evasco, "Why I Write; What I Write; How I Write"
www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVENpubpresentations/MarjorieEvasco.html
Marjorie Evasco, "Song and Substance: Women Writing Poetry in Cebuano" (from Kritika Kultura)
www.ateneo.edu/kritikakultura/pdf/issue1/Song%20and%20Substance%20by%20Evasco.pdf
Marjorie Evasco, Selected Poems
from Dreamweavers and Ochre Tones
www.iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/archive/2002works/Evasco-Pernia_marjorie.pdf
Marc Gaba Interviews Marjorie Evasco for High Chair, Issue #2
www.highchair.com.ph/interview_pop-evasco.html
