Lilian Dipasupil Kunimasa was born January 14, 1965, in Manila, Philippines. She has worked as a retired Language Instructor, interpreter, caregiver, secretary, product promotion employee, and private therapeutic masseur. Her works have been published as poems and short story anthologies in several language translations for e-magazines, monthly magazines, and books; poems for cause anthologies in a Zimbabwean newspaper; a feature article in a Philippine newspaper; and had her works posted on different poetry web and blog sites. She has been writing poems since childhood but started on Facebook only in 2014. For her, poetry is life and life is poetry.
Lilian Kunimasa considers herself a student/teacher with the duty to learn, inspire, guide, and motivate others to contribute to changing what is seen as normal into a better world than when she steps into it. She has always considered life as an endless journey, searching for new goals, and challenges and how she can in small ways make a difference in every path she takes. She sees humanity as one family where each one must support the other and considers poets as a voice for truth in pursuit of equality and proper stewardship of nature despite the hindrances of distorted information and traditions.
From the Mists of the Moon
From the mists of the Moon I was born
Avalon remembered in a silky dawn
Riding side saddle out of the Sea of Tranquility
Soft, soft, pale silver light riding
Shimmering silent and still.
Oh, soul of the pale echoes
The forgotten dreams of waves,
Of motion, of eddies, the whirlpools
Of becoming will.
Carry me golden sea horse
Into the valley and over the hill
Galloping against the head wind, wayward
With wild hair flying,
Send me cascading downward
From bright rainbows mounted
Atop my bright majesty, dump me
Into the sluice of sunbeams
Rising to meet me
Careening homeward to Earth
In my quickening dreams.
From the mists of the moon I come
Riding the waves homeward
Alee of my dreams breaking shoreward
In the shadowy wake of morning.
Homeward, homeward in dreams
Of dawn and sunshine spreading
Like a mantle of gold
Worn only for best-day;
Adorned with ribbons of stars
All dripping of midnight
I stretch out to dry on the beach
Of high noon reality and breath.
From the mists of the moon I come
Giddy and girl-like, tiptoeing home
Long after midnight, dreamily disheveled
Hair tangled with the taste of night
And the songs of a lunar prom
Lingering on rose petal lips -
I enter the house of day
Pregnant with moonlight.
Annie Johnson
Annie Johnson is 84 years old. She is Shawnee Native American. She has published two, six hundred-page novels and six books of poetry. Annie has won several poetry awards from world poetry organizations including; World Union of Poets; she is a member of World Nations Writers Union; has received the World Institute for Peace award; the World Laureate of Literature from World Nations Writers Union and The William Shakespeare Poetry Award. She received a Certificate and Medal in recognition of the highest literature from International Literary Union for the year 2020, from Ayad Al Baldawi, President of the International Literary Union. She has three children, two grandchildren, and two sons-in-law. Annie played a flute in the Butler University Symphony. She still plays her flute.
From south-western Michigan, Jerry Langdon lives in Germany since the early 90’s. He is an Artist and Poet. His works bathe in a darker side of emotion and fantasy. He has released five books of Poetry titled “Temperate Darkness an Behind the Twilight Veil”, “Death and other cold things” “Rollercoaster Heart” and “Frosted Dreams” Jerry is also the editor and publisher of the literary magazine Raven Cage Zine poetry and prose. His poetic inspirations are derived from poets such as Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As well as from various Rock Bands. His apparently twisted mind, twists and intertwines fantasy with reality.
“Mere Mortals”: Davide Occhipinti, of San Francisco Ballet. From Hamill Industries; source photo: Lindsey Rallo
The Ballet of Terror
Mere Mortals
San Francisco Ballet
War Memorial Opera House
Reviewed by Christopher Bernard
Early on the gloomy day of the performance I attended, I noted it would be an unusually short evening – a mere hour and fifteen minutes, without even an intermission. And I grumbled to myself about short shrift and lean pickings.
But the city has been pasted for weeks with black-and-white photos, scored with the vaguely ominous title and its allusion to ancient gods and goddesses, of a bare-breasted dancer ensnarled in a swirl of white sheet, like a larva breaking from a chrysalis or an angel caught in a damage of wings, flogging the new work – and so my curiosity was keen.
And, as it turned out, with more justification than I could possibly have known.
“Mere Mortals,” the first dance commissioned under San Francisco Ballet’s new artistic director Tamara Rojo (the War Memorial Opera House was illuminated in red in her honor), was introduced to the world on that chilly January evening just before a weeklong train of atmospheric rivers threatened to pummel the Bay Area with reminders of nature’s (or the gods’) ultimate sovereignty.
As it happened, we didn’t have to wait for her salutary raging: the first tempest was brewed, quite satisfactorily, thank you very much, by her most gifted, and most rebellious, child inside the compact, baroque precincts of the War Memorial Opera House.
If you didn’t read the program, you might never have guessed that this dance, which seemed entirely abstract yet was radiant with an urgent and perfectly clear meaning, was in fact about the early Titans of Greek mythology, or Pandora and her cursed jar. Or that the dance drew parallels between the fraught liberation of human power found in those ancient stories, and today’s invention, by “mere mortals,” of something that may render obsolescent even our own highest gifts – namely, artificial intelligence.
But no matter: it was clear within minutes that we were witnessing an allegory about the entwining of liberation and evil at the heart of the human experiment, and the two-sided blade that is hope itself. And it was also perfectly clear that we were in the firm and steady hands of masters of dance, music, and stagecraft; at least one spectator was left in a trance of admiration at what these “mere mortals” were able to magick in a mere hour and a quarter.
The dance unfolds in half a dozen acts, at a rough count, each broken into short scenes, most of them led by Pandora (danced with a darkly inflected, impeccable grace by Jennifer Stahl), the infinitely curious woman who unleashed woe upon the world while also freeing a Hope that encompasses a touch of that creativity of the gods that menaces as much as it promises.
Pandora danced, solo, in a long opening scene until, at its apparently tranquil conclusion, she opened her infamous jar, out of which irrupted a plague of dancers, the Evils she has freed, swarming like an ink of insects onto a stage whose primary colors throughout the evening were the starkest of whites and blacks.
From then on, the dance is an intricate play of the dialectic of ferocious good and implacable evil whose paradoxical result is an endless invention: the evils themselves are provokers of beauty, and Hope itself is serpent-like, ophidian, menacing – freeing.
The Titans – a dark Prometheus (Isaac Hernández), bringer of fire and liberator of the most gifted of species (the program will inform you this character combines the rebellious Titan with his arch nemesis, Zeus, king of the gods and ruler of the world), and, later, his boyishly joyful brother Epimetheus (Parker Garrison) – compete to dominate the story, but fail to in the end: at the brilliant heart of the piece, Pandora and Epimetheus perform a remarkable pas de deux that actually embodies the romantic drama many fail to capture: most pas de deux are signs of romance but rarely persuade that the couple onstage actually is in love: this one did, profoundly, alchemically.
In the final act, Pandora is resorbed into the cosmos after a lengthy “2001”-inspired odyssey into a chaos of futurity, and the evils (or are they angels now?), dancing like ghosts glittering in silver, ring like an ouroboros and seethe like a horde of bullies and mean girls around the golden boy Hope (Wei Wang), who seems, briefly, triumphant over the chaos.
But even he, with his suspect minions, is finally sucked back into a darkness that remains, beyond either divinity or humanity, absolutely sovereign yet infinitely creative.
The choreographer of this dazzling evening was the Canadian Aszure Barton, who seems to have taken up the ink-black mantle of William Forsythe. In fact, this was one of the most powerful new dances I have been privileged to see since Forsythe’s “New Sleep,” premiered by the Ballet in the 1980s.
The brilliantly original score, by turns driving and lyrical – part electronic, part orchestral, with solos by violinist Cordula Merks, timpanist Zubin Hathi, and harpist Annabell Taubl – is by Floating Points (known, more pedestrianly, as Sam Shepherd). Conductor Martin West led with thrust and panache. Equal on the bill is a breathtaking production design and visuals by Hamill Industries: Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz, who helped shape the evening into a complex and satisfying whole. If I have any complaint, it is that the soloists were not identified in the printed program notes or the usual printed fill-in (the tyranny of the cell phone continues apace: a scrambled QR code will sesame you to the neglected information).
The gods of the Ballet were even more generous than giving us a mere work of genius: to make up for a “short” evening, they added an hour-long disco party in the lobby after the performance, with DJ, light-bearing dancers, and cash bars, that was attended by a few hundred dazed-looking audience members, some of whom let down their hair and joined in the dancing. In my mind I called it “The Party at the End of the World.”
I still felt in a bit of a trance when I got home, and posted the following on Facebook:
“I sit here at the computer, feeling relatively speechless, battered by an evening at the ballet. . . .
The words come with even greater slowness than usual, as if from a pit black as pitch, with a silence that . . .
. . . mere mortals break at their peril.
Dance needs to be cautious about evoking such gods.
Pandora danced open a treasure of evils.
Leaving, at the bottom, Hope.
Savage. Demonic. A kind of catastrophe.
If a magnificent one.“
I was left, at the end of the night, with a final question: who, after all, is Pandora?
Friend reader: is it us?
Is it you?
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”
A Review of The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu, Part VI of The Posthuman Series
by Joshua Martin
Part VI of Daniel Y. Harris’ ThePosthuman Series, The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu (BlazeVOX, 2023) further pushes Harris’ project as an extreme experimentalist forward. Harris has created a kind of modern day Merz filled with, instead of the physical trash of the 20th century, all the many incarnations of digital and cyber debris fused into an immense amalgam of dense poetics mingling words, numbers, symbols, code, script, and nearly anything and everything else in between. A 21st century Dada filled to brim with digital nonsense and encoded beauty. The sections (themselves numbered in a disorienting manner, i.e. 2.14121, 3.3521, etc., which follow the infrastructure of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus) range from a word or a line to large blocks of nearly indecipherable text, all building upon each other as part of this vast and monumental ongoing experimental project.
This work is filled with neologisms and portmanteaus to rival Khlebnikov’s or Joyce’s greatest achievements (and just as untranslatable!). Harris’ work, which he dubs posthuman, could be called post-language, post-syntax, and certainly post any conventional poetic form we’ve come to expect or understand. Throughout The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu, Harris challenges not only what writing is and can be but also what it even means being human in this noisy, cluttered, and overwhelming age of information and technology. This project suggests a means of integrating the entire language of cyberspace with our conventional language(s) to form a highly idiosyncratic, fascinating, and disarming poetic vocabulary reaching to the farthest possible future, while also astutely representing our present age.
Nothing about this work can be easily classified or understood (if its even supposed to!). Harris’ work represents the absolute best of the notion of experimental writing. This book is for the most adventurous of readers who are willing to have their brains fried by a veritable feast of linguistic gymnastics. No one should go into this work expecting to be anything less than absolutely disarmed and sent into disarray by this captivatingly obscure, unclassifiable, and unbelievably erudite project.
The Posthuman Series requires anyone approaching it to question all their notions of what literature is, what can or does make sense, and where poetics can or might go as our lives become increasingly consumed by screens, our experiences rendered by algorithms written by coders in a language most of us cannot and do not understand. In this sense, Harris’ project is aligned perfectly with our times, as he collects all the overwhelming madness of our digital world, rearranges it into an amazingly expansive and all-encompassing poetics that reaches beyond all languages (there are many languages scattered throughout the text, not just English) to create a blueprint in poetry for the computerized (posthuman?) mind.
The words, forms, and phrases of The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu pass through our minds at a dizzying rate offering us little chance to catch our breaths. This is the Dada of now. Everything is intangible, massive, filled with more information than we’ll every be able to comprehend. We, as readers, can only succumb to its extremes and allow ourselves to be consumed by the massive scale of this undertaking, in awe of Harris’ skill, innovation, and fortitude. This is literature that makes us question everything, which is, after all, what art and, in particular, experimental art should make us do.
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu is available here from publisher BlazeVOX.
A Review of gnōstos, volume VII of The Grammaton Series
by Joshua Martin
gnōstos (BlazeVOX, 2023), volume VII or Irene Koronas’ The Grammaton Series, continues her trajectory of extreme experimentalism through a fragmented poetic language filled with radical juxtapositions, snippets, neologisms, and minimalistically ecstatic aphorisms. Linguistic flares and miniature rhapsodies. Each word a new world unto itself, brimming with exaltation, reveling in the illogical and the mystic. Overflowing with rich treats and poetic mashups. A heady potpourri of languages and references, this wildly inventive and diverse work probes the very nature of our 21st century world. Filled, as it is, with huge amounts of textual varieties, never standing still, always performing new and perverse syntactical experiments and collisions.
Letters, words, language itself, are simply building blocks for an expansive and stimulating poetics that reaches into the fringes of what language can and should do. At times reminiscent of Russian Futurism (particularly Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh) and its desire to transcend conventional language, creating something spontaneous through Zaum, Koronas’ work seems to be developing a new language all its own, free from the rigidity of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, no matter its origin. And there is a myriad of origins in Koronas’ work. Her seemingly endless knowledge of a wide range subjects, alphabets, theories, languages, and texts is impressive and inspiring. Koronas’ work is written with a scholar’s information and an experimental poet’s skill. Khlebnikov’s “language of the gods” and “language of the stars” aptly applies to gnōstos.
Though the length of many of these lines are often quite brief, they are packed with beauty, sublimity, and chaos. Many words are new creations in themselves. Disorienting, transfixing, and sonically innovative, gnōstos deftly explodes poetic convention, instead offering the reader a dizzying array of staccato riffs and verbal treats. There is no net. As readers, we are free floating among her endlessly unique creations. At times, the speed at which Koronas’ lines whizz by can make us feel lightheaded in the best possible sense. We feel as though we are reading lightning strikes on a page.
Language is taken apart, constructed, reconstructed, and made into an entirely new thing. Mystical and rapturous, reading Koronas is like reading an invented language, offering us a whole new way of seeing, being, and understanding. A poetics that wishes to explode, implode, and pull apart all conventions in order to find something truly novel. Experimentation at its finest. A radical performance seeking to encompass the entire cosmos in its fragments.
Exciting, elusive, entirely readable, illogical, visionary, and virtuosic. Bending, breaking, forming and reforming. Reading gnōstos is an inspiring and disorienting experience. A work which requires multiple readings in order to truly absorb its many secrets, mysteries, and triumphs. The Grammaton Series is a massive undertaking not only in its length and scope, but in its bold and formidable search for invention. gnōstos is reaching for something unique and intangible, pulling readers along as far as it can toward something visionary and profound.
I will give thanks to you, LORD, with all my heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.
--------Psalm 9:1 NIV
My open-heart surgery on August 30th, 2023 changed me. It altered my entire view of the world and that change showed me the value of my relationship with Jesus Christ. The surgery was to repair four blocked arteries, and without it, certain death would only have been a matter of time. Before my surgery, life had become routine. Each day was a repeat of the day before, except for church on Sunday. My relationship with Jesus Christ existed throughout my life, but this experience meant a change for me. This time the void that always existed in my life changed. I always had a feeling of comfort in the Sanctuary at an early age. Listening to what God had to say to me.
My salvation started in 1957 at my birth in Baltimore Maryland. Growing up in the darkness of the streets of DC where the only light was the votive candles burning in the Sanctuary. This silence brought an awareness of peace and comfort. There was a sense of a presence that was quiet and comforting to me. This comfort surrounded me during the surgery. There were no bright lights that I can recall or noise from the heart lung machine or people hustling around me. The operation took six hours and one hour in which my heart was stopped as the heart lung machine pumped blood thru my body. I learned weeks later that once your heart stops beating you are considered legally dead. During the operation there was a sense of space around me. Upon, waking up in a state of disconnection to my surroundings except for that breathing tube in my throat. which was the sensation in my body. Once the tube was removed, I vomited out water and was unable to speak. My memory after the operation was this feeling of space but not time.
Days passed and with each passing day gradually my senses returned, however there was great discomfort from the surgery. There was still this feeling of space around me. Each day there was a disconnect between me and my surroundings. During this time my emotions were on hold. Thoughts about life without having footprints from the past before the surgery. Thinking is that what one experience when they are born in this physical world? Only thoughts about God were my connection to my surroundings. I still alive and why did God choose me to continue in this world? This feeling of an empty space lasted even as the anesthesia subsided. The physical discomfort lasted for months. God had allowed me to start a new understanding of what life really meant. Only thoughts like I mentioned in childhood of God filled that void in me.
My waking hours I meditate of God's presence in my life. No fear about life or death are of no concern to me. Wanting to return to the Sanctuary at Asbury United Methodist Church. Sitting in the Sanctuary to fill that void like in childhood. My prayers are simple prayers of gratitude. Jesus Christ have filled that void. Christ Jesus was within me all this time in my childhood. On August 30th 2023 my prayers came to fruition to live for Christ Jesus.
