For a quick lesson on Sappho and lyric poetry, I asked my World Literature (third year high school) students to continue writing what may have been lost in the fragments of Sappho’s poetry. I chose four fragments for them to choose from, and from them my students created their own poems. Below are some of… Continue reading This week’s lesson: The fragments of Sappho, “completed”
This poem brings back memories of a secret that’s happily kept as one, even though everybody else is on it anyway. 🙂 Ode to a Secret Love Pablo Neruda They’ve guessed our secret, you know. They see me, they see us, and nothing has been said— neither your eyes nor your voice, neither your hair… Continue reading Poetry Wednesdays: Ode to a Secret Love by Pablo Neruda
I bought The Best Travel Writing 2011 for a discount, and now I’m savoring each story bit by bit. It’s interesting that I’ve been reading this while I’m riding the jeepney or the bus — during those short, bumpy, dusty journeys, in other words. Travel literature is a relatively new genre for me; I considered… Continue reading Friday Reads: The Best Travel Writing 2011
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about time — about its fleetingness, about all those Latin sayings (tempus fugit – time flies; tempus edax rerum – time, devourer of all things; carpe diem – seize the day), about how little time I have in this world to do all that I want to do. 2012 was a terrible… Continue reading Poetry Wednesdays: “Get Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
It’s the first day of school again. Times like these I am reminded of my philosophy and pedagogy, which are constantly subject to self-evaluation and, sometimes, revision. I post the poem below as a reminder that there’s a whole world outside the classroom, yet I can never divorce the content of my subject from the… Continue reading Poetry Wednesdays: “For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop” by David Wagoner
We Should Talk about This Problem Hafiz There is a Beautiful Creature Living in a hole you have dug. So at night I set fruit and grains And little pots of wine and milk Beside your soft earthen mounds, And I often sing. But still, my dear, You do not come out. I have fallen… Continue reading Poetry Wednesdays: Hafiz, “We Should Talk About This Problem”
I’m actually reading some books and articles on literary theory at the moment, but I don’t want to get into that. 🙂 I want to talk about this book — The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Seventeen-year-old Hazel is a cancer patient. She falls in love with a survivor, Augustus Waters. It’s a… Continue reading Friday Reading: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The following is something like my official summer poem. It evokes to me those  images of sea waves and lovers, in a background of the sunset or of moonlight reflected on water. But unlike in the typical summer romance, the lovers in this poem seem to have already had their life behind them. For are… Continue reading Poetry Wednesdays: Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet IX”
I think I’m a Margaret Atwood fan. I never get tired of her Variations poems, and her novels The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace are contemporary favorites of mine. I started reading The Handmaid’s Tale ages ago until I lost the book in the middle of reading it — so here I am, starting again.… Continue reading Friday Reading: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I can still barely believe that just yesterday, I was in Vietnam, staring and getting goosebumps at the pictures exhibited in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The most powerful people might consider war a necessary tactic or even precaution, whereas the rest of us would just want a peaceful existence. I… Continue reading Poetry Wednesdays: Phan Nhiên Hạo, “Meeting a Cab Driver in New York”
Ang Lakwatserang Guro 