Culture and Arts Notebook

ARTIST’S PROFILE I first met Junyee when I was a student at the University of the Philippines in the early seventies. Together with some artist friends, we would later visit him when he began living in the campus of UP,…

POEM  I love your poetry he said and poured his soul into my teacup   I was as usual afire with thirst It was still winter   No end in sight   Being a geisha of words an angel stunned…

INDIGENOUS CULTURE By Fr. Samuel Maximo and Genevieve Balance Kupang Ayuweng emanates from the sacred land, the heartbeats and music of the Cordillera indigenous peoples. The animating sound-beats of the land in harmony with the umili’s (village’s) chants, the sound…

ESSAY by Trudi Lee Richards “If you believe your life will end with death, nothing you think, feel, or do has any meaning. Everything will end with incoherence and disintegration. If you believe your life does not end with death, you…

POEM         If you don’t want to love I’ll take care of it I will love.   If you don’t want to smile I’ll take care of it I will smile.   If you don’t want to…

TALK/PRESENTATION   My talk can be summed up in three things: First, the context and my experience during this pandemic time. Second, the Well of Ginhawa, and its related metaphors. And third, how I started and built this poetry community.…

INTERVIEW         Once I read the short story “Life Sentence” in Lightspeed Magazine, I decided to save it to my collections of short stories I should revisit. It was 2019, and Matthew Baker was on my radar.…

ESSAY We must safeguard the web of life and care about the other living species that we share this planet with. Pygmy tarsiers eat and host bugs that we’ve seen at home — insects, spiders, lizards, bedbugs, lice, fleas, roundworms,…

POETRY             <A Prelude> In the early days of the Co-vid 19 pandemic, everyone was trying to come to grips with the isolation that the lockdown imposed on almost everyone. Anxiety over the unknown was…

POEMS by Erlie Lopez   #1.Yellow Bursts Yellow is the color of sorrow: the ribbons tied around trees, the shirts and pins from seasons of arduous street protests. Yellow is the color of love: lovely flowers around the urn, the…