I'm glad that TPT Magazine features four of my poems in their latest November 25, 2024 issue (Issue VII). Three can be read on this page. One, "The Snakeman's Dream," is not printed but an audio recording of my reading can be accessed here. And that's why I'm sharing the text of the poem in this blog post:
The poems in Karlo Sevilla’s Recumbent can seem an arbitrary selection without a particular
theme.Here we can find vignettes of
family life, dreamlike sequences, vivid images of street violence and political
murder, even fully surreal poems and surreal images secreted in others.A surface reading cannot adequately reveal a
consistent theme which may run through these poems.There’s something else going on here, a
barely hidden backdrop to the tales Sevilla brings to the table.The poet suggests a deeper and darker theme
when he writes “I’m here fallen / where even shadows / dare not fall.”
This collection of poems is an illusion, a trick of
the eye and the heart by a clever magician.
At surface, the poems here may appear to tell simple tales of home life
and family, uncomplicated slices of the poet’s personal life. But something else is here, just below the
surface. Karlo Sevilla hints at this
subtext in his epigraph, a self-written type of subtitle: these are, he says,
“poems about and from the body laid or lying on any surface–steady or unsteady,
dead or alive.” This theme is repeated
and enhanced in poems throughout this collection. Sevilla’s poems are less about the hard-copy
world we inhabit than a sense of the absolute Silence through which we all move
from birth to death. In a poem
describing a man tortured and dying, the poet writes that the man “ never
squealed; / not another’s whereabouts compromised / nor a single real name
revealed.” In his poetry, Karlo Sevilla
walks a thin line between our mundane lives and another, darker place where,
his narrator says, “it’s the light that
makes the shadows” but his young daughter “shakes her head, ‘It’s the
dark.’” It’s along this subtle line that
we will see the magic in Sevilla’s poetry.
In the world Karlo Sevilla describes in his poems, each of our lives
includes a place of shadows where our secrets hide in the Silence.
August 25, 2023 UPDATE: I am sad to share that Bob Mackenzie passed away about two days ago. He has been a peer of mine in Rat's Ass Review's online poetry workshop, and has been one of the most exacting and helpful in giving valuable feedback to the poems forged in that crucible. We'll miss him badly. And I also deeply appreciate that my book's publisher, just this morning, kindly decided to reedit its manuscript to make Bob's review as the introduction to my book. Rest in peace, Bob. This one's for you.
The following is a revision of my LinkedIn post earlier today:
First, congratulations to InnTechGreat, a group of
Bachelor in Multimedia Arts students at FEU Institute of Technology for their
successful final thesis defense recently. Secondly, thanks to them for choosing
my poems as material for their thesis on how to promote Philippine poetry via
multi-media arts.
And their thesis is Alpas, a 1)
"live-action and hybrid animated short film showcasing the art of
poetry" (again, "incidentally," my poems) and 2) an accompanying
website of a collection of (more) poems from the same poet (and, again
"incidentally," it's yours truly).
The film's current version, November 2022.
The film’s story is about “a young adult writer trying to overcome his past trauma through
writing poems,” and weaves through my three previously published poems. Below are the poems and the respective times when each appears in the film, with links to the original pages where they were first published):
04:39: First Shot of the Philippine-American War - Unlikely Stories Mark V, July 18, 2019
(This poem, for this film, was slightly revised from the original for historical accuracy and posterity.),
The website features my politically-oriented
poems – all previously published, with the exception of one, in literary
magazines and/or my first full-length poetry collection, "Metro Manila
Mammal" (Soma Publishing, 2018). Here's the link to the sole exception, Atty. Hermon C. Lagman:, a
rhyming quatrain in Filipino that I wrote last September in time for the 50th
anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines. It is about a
prominent human rights abuse/enforced disappearance victim during that dark era
under the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The film can also be accessed through the website’s
homepage.
And previously, I talked about this project in part 1 of my interview (October 3, 2022) with Thomas White for his poetry mini interviews blog.
Note: Both the film and the website are still
works in progress. The panelists advised the students to make a few revisions
on the film, and the website is still incomplete (a few credits are still
missing, among others). Thank you and ever onwards for humanity – and poetry!
The following is an excerpt from my first post on my Ko-fi page, I'm a Litmag Freak*:
Now, why do I submit to literary magazines? Aside from the fact that I love reading and writing poetry, let me quote from the following two articles about literary magazines:
“A little magazine, as Jonathan Farmer, of At Length, explains, ‘depends on creating a community.’”
(Incidentally, this article mentions the magazine DIAGRAM that has published two poems of mine.)
“The magazines are a runway, where new literary styles are tested and emerge. New voices break through.”
(Incidentally, this article also mentions Protean magazine that likewise published a poem of mine.)
So I submit to literary magazines because I want to belong to an international community of writers and have my small voice heard once in a while – subject to the discernment and mercy of editors.
*Initially, I wanted to use "junkie" instead of "freak" but I thought the former ain't "wholesome enough" for Ko-fi.
Check out my three-dollar (only) first full-length poetry collection, "Metro Manila Mammal" (Soma Publishing, May 1, 2018), here in Amazon! This baby peaked at top 9 among Amazon's Best Sellers in Asian Poetry for March 2021! And, select poems from this collection were the subjects of Dr. Henrikus Joko Yulianto's 2021 article published in a journal of the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. Previously, Dr. Yulianto presented an analysis of these same poems in the 3rd Association for the Study of Literature and Environment - ASEAN Ecocritical Workshop held in the University of the Philippines - Diliman in 2019.
And for FREE you can 1) download my 2017 microchap "You" from this page of its publisher Origami Poems Project's website, then 2) print on one sheet of short bond paper 2) and fold into a mini book!
Contributor to Pandemic: A Community Poem, Muse-Press's nominated poem for the 2020 Pushcart Prize Wolfpack Member/Honorary Regular Contributor to Fevers of the Mind literary blog
Two poems are subjects of a scholarly article by Dr. Henrikus Yulianto and published in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, National University of Singapore (NUS), November 2021
from latest to earliest (dates mostly in Philippine time):
•Functional - Unlikely Stories Mark V's F_ck Florida Issue, August 23, 2023 (Note: According to the Blogger Team, I can't directly link to the journal's pages, so visit the linked post first, then from there you can click again to reach my poem as published in the magazine. Thank you.)
•Seiches - ""(Note: According to the Blogger Team, I can't directly link to SAR's pages, so visit the linked pages first, then from there you can click again to reach my poems as published in the magazine.)
• Mob Rule - Bulb Culture Collective, May 13, 2023 (first published in Collective Unrest, February 28, 2019; Best of the Net nominee)
•White Cloud - page 41, Moss Puppy Magazine's Issue 4: Caged, May 11, 2023 (Poem shortlisted for the the 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Contest)
• I Promise What I Can't Deliver - Coming Out of Isolation: Poems on Resilience, Triumph, and Hope, anthology edited by Dr. Christopher Okemwa, October 2022
• The Protracted Game - Love in the Time of COVID, A Chronicle of the Pandemic, June 3, 2021 • Dear Milo - Fevers of the Mind, June 2, 2021 (first published in The Poet Community, February 3, 2018)
• My Queen - Poetry Corner, Sanctuary Magazine, June 2, 2021
• At Low Tide - {m}aganda magazine, KAPWA Issue 34, May 24, 2021
• Untitled micro story - Boozy Shrek Photo Prompt, The Daily Drunk, August 25, 2020 (Yup, it's not a poem.)
• Only on Trains - Poetry and Covid, a "Project Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Plymouth, and Nottingham Trent University," August 21, 2020
• Night Shift Snack Break - Collective Unrest, March 7, 2019 • Mob Rule - Collective Unrest, February 28, 2019, nominated for Best of the Net 2019 • Because neither subtlety ... - (republished in) Derelict Lit, January 24, 2019 • Empty Spaces - (republished in) Derelict Lit, January 24, 2019
Black Bough Poetry and its #TopTweetTuesday weekly poetry sharing event on Twitter, the "victory parade" of poems where everybody can share and complement each other's work;
whoever is lured into checking my blog and reading my poem(s). :-)
