Merlie Alunan

A Sillimanian poet is set to receive her seventh Palanca win. Merlie Alunan won First Prize for Poetry in English for her collection entitled “Tales of the Spider Woman.”

Alunan, who received her M.A. in Creative Writing from Silliman University in 1975, is a professor at the University of the Philippines in Tacloban, where she resides. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Lillian Jerome Thornton Award for Nonfiction, Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, and the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards. Her books of poetry include Hearthstone, Sacred Tree (Anvil, 1993) and Amina among the Angels (UP Press, 1997). Her other works also include Kabilin: 100 Years of Negros Oriental and the anthology Fern Garden: An Anthology of Women Writing in the South.

“My collections is a little too hard to describe,” Alunan says of her winning poetry. “’Tale of the Spider Woman’ is a weird love poem. [But I’m] feeling good about this win, because I had a mind that I’m not writing poetry that’s like the poetry coming out today, like a bit out of date. So it’s good to win.”

She will receive the prize on 1 September 2010 in ceremonies to honor this year’s roster of literary winners in Manila Peninsula Hotel in Makati.

The Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature is the Philippines’ most prestigious and longest-running literary award. Established in 1950, the prize has also been awarded to other Sillimanian writers, including National Artist for Literature Edith Tiempo, Edilberto Tiempo, Rowena Torrevillas, Leoncio Derriada, Marjorie Evasco, Anthony Tan, Jaime An Lim, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Bobby Flores Villasis, Lakambini Sitoy, Timothy Montes, and Ian Rosales Casocot. (SUCAC) 

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF POEM WRITTEN BY: MERLIE ALUNAN

TALE OF THE SPIDERWOMAN

BY: MERLIE ALUNAN

Pyres of leaves burn away summer.

Cicada shells pile under the marsh grass,

still memorial of seasons past.

I’ve no words for these—

lean boys and slender girls pass by my window

drinking the sun on their golden skin.

Apple-breasted women with melons in their bellies

snitch sprigs of basil from my herb pots,

and curious-eyed strangers scan the veiled glass

for glimpses of my blurred face, but hurry off

with any stranger’s indifference.

How endless the mazes I inhabit,

layer on layer of silence shield me.

Odd monsters breed here, I warrant.

I myself daily grow smaller and smaller until

almost invisible. Fuzz on my skin, my eyes

multiply a hundredfold in this darkness

and split the light in thousand prisms—

and now I can see what’s before and after.

I become light as air, my sweetness distils

to fatal potency. I practice a patience

vaster than ten worlds. I wait.

`If, at last, the merest rumor of your scent

warms the air drifting to my door,

I shall shake my thin thighs loose.

My hair will grow back in the usual places,

my eyes regain their focus, my ears

will hear words and speeches again.

Cicadas will chirr live under the marsh grass.

Perhaps it would be June,

the green returning to the trees.

When your shadow crosses my door,

please enter without fear.

But remember not to ask where I’d been

or what had fed me in this empty room

curtained with fine webs of silk.

Ignore the seethe of all my memories.

Come, take my hand.

I am human at your touch.

SOURCES: 

• http://merliemalunan.blogspot.com/
• http://poieinkaiprattein.org/poetry/merlie-m-alunan/tale-of-the-spiderwoman---poems-by-merlie-m-alunan/

Cell phone use and texting cause lower levels of concentration and focus

  

Today’s cell phones are more than just phones, they are high-tech gadgets that also serve as a mini-computers. Today’s cell phones allow users to surf the web, conduct text chats with others, take photos, record video, download and listen to music, play games, update blogs, send instant text messages, keep a calendar and to-do list, and much more. For children and teenagers, they allow for anytime, anywhere communication especially with friends. With cell phones, children are always only a few buttons away, highly connected and instantaneously available. Parents who allow their children to have cell phones feel secure that they too can contact their sons and daughters at a moment’s notice.

Many parents also feel relieved to know that their children have easy access to them and to emergency personnel if needed. For instance, a cell phone is especially convenient for kids who participate in after school activities such as sports or clubs. If the activity ends early or late, or has been canceled, kids can call their parents to let them know about the changes. Kids can also call their parents to ask for permission should last-minute changes in their plans occur. Some parents even use their children’s cell phones as tracking devices that allow them to identify their child’s location at any time which would certainly come in handy in the event of a kidnapping or lost child. From a parent’s perspective, these are all good reasons to supply our children with cell phones. However, the convenience that cell phones offer us must be judged against the hazards they pose to all people and especially the cell phone user. The remainder of this chapter reviews the downsides of child cell phone use and provides recommendations for parents to consider.

Cellphones can be a really distractions for children like Time Away from Homework. Technology affords teens (and adults) a host of ways to do something other than what they are supposed to such as homework. In the adult world, it is a common experience that the lines between work and leisure have been blurred. Adults often work at home and play at work – e-mailing and text messaging friends and family, passing along jokes and family photos, shopping, viewing pornography, reading the news, and even gambling. Business owners are increasingly relying on stealth spying programs to snoop on their employees to make sure that their activities are both appropriate and work related. Their bottom lines are at stake. As parents, we too have the responsibility to help our children focus on their productivity. Their “bottom lines” are academic achievement and success.



SOURCES: 

• http://www.education.com/reference/article/cellphones-texting-cell-phone-distraction/
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2739380/Students-addicted-mobile-phones-Some-spending-ten-hours-day-texting-emailing-social-media.html

Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Bulosan emigrated to the United States from his native Philippines in 1930. Like countless other young men who had been driven to the United States by the promise of better jobs, Bulosan found instead the crushing defeats of the worst economic depression in U.S. history. The story of his struggles during the 1930’s and early 1940’s, chronicled in the autobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946), had a profound impact on ethnic writing after it was republished by the University of Washington Press in 1973.

It is difficult to piece together Bulosan’s real life story, in part because his most important literary legacy is itself a creative mix of fact and fiction. Even the basic outline of his life is in some dispute: Scholars disagree about the date of his birth, the date and location of his death, and his age when he died. What is known is that he was born in the village of Mangusmana, near Binalonan (in Pangasinan province, on the island of Luzon) in the Philippines and was one of several children. Like many rural Filipino families at that time, his parents suffered economic hardship due in part to U.S. colonialism. He completed only three years of schooling and, drawn to the United States by the promises of wealth and education and the dream of becoming a writer, he followed two older brothers and purchased a steerage ticket to Seattle for seventy-five dollars, arriving on July 22, 1930, while still a teenager. He would never return to the Philippines, and he would never become an American citizen. He worked at a series of low-paying jobs in an Alaskan fish cannery and as a fruit and vegetable picker in Washington and California. Conditions in the early 1930’s were miserable for all migrant workers (as documented in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath) but particularly for Filipinos (then called “Pinoys”) such as Bulosan, and he experienced racial discrimination and poverty. However, he slowly improved his English, befriended other immigrant laborers suffering similar conditions.

Here is an example of a poem by: Carlos Bulosan

Now That You Are Still
By Carlos Bulosan

The child of laughter. . . how often had he
Watched that disastrous fire creep upon the plain
Of home, that became, as the years rolled, a sea
Of truth, and loneliness, and pain.
How often had he caught the prodigal winds in his hands
To make a singing lyre of laughter, when you were gone,
Looking for the living sound of your voice in other lands,
Looking, under the lengthening shadow of a booming gun,
For the one I love, for the one I truly love.
How often had he sighted the spend drifts of swirling seas
Gazing heavenward, athwart the sun,
Making every nightfall a quiet memory of peace,
Making every boy a man of peace, every man a man,
For the one I love, for the one I truly love.

I am that child of laughter, Father
With the glorious laughter, my dear father
Who worked and lived and died in the country of big rains,
Sleep peacefully, for your labors are done, your pains
Are turned into tales and songs,
Your days are swept away by the tide of my songs.
You are the one I love, you are the one I truly love.

SOURCES:

• http://www.enotes.com/topics/carlos-bulosan
• http://www.oovrag.com/poems/poems2011c-bulosan1.shtml