MY THREE ANTHOLOGIES
Exhibit 1. Canciones Florecientes, poesía en español.
Exhibit 3. Restoration of Honour, poetry in English.I probably started writing poetry in Spanish around age 9, writing a poem for Mother’s Day. An improvement from the previous year, when my mother had written it for me. Reciting my poem was quite an experience while handling the microphone became quite a challenge. My recall of this is quite vague, but I know this did happen. I recited poetry many times during primary school, but rarely something I had written with that purpose… I am very happy about the fact that I have been able to preserve most of my poetry, although not all of it.
I wrote a few good poems since approximately age 13 and was able to publish poetry for the first time at age 14, after successful publications of regionally awarded short stories, all in Spanish. It appears that my first poem in English was written over a short period of time later at age 15, but lacked the quality and technique. It was the product of a homework proposed by my high-school English teacher Meyra Márquez. I still remember that the best poem was the one written by a classmate called Yolanda Villanueva. It was well-written and conceived, and expressive, conveying a great deal of sentiment. Her poem was about the Sadness of the Child, and an excerpt of it said something like this:
“Sadness of the child who sees his way
thinking one day he is to liberate himself
from all that evil in which he sadly loses his life.”
And remembering this excerpt, I have sometimes referred to that kind of sadness, i.e., the sadness of the child, in at least one of my own poems. It is good to talk about others' good artwork when it either relates to you or eventually inspires you when you recall it, so it does not only necessarily happen with celebrated writers. I am not sure whether she wrote her poem alone or got help from a relative or someone else, but even today, I think that it was pretty good.
Exhibit 4. With Yolanda Villanueva (at left) and other former Humboldt classmates (Edgardo, Consuegra Vilma Palencia, Otilia Meza, and Belinda Gónez), Barranquilla, Colombia, 2015.
In the meantime, I wrote many poems in Spanish, my native language, and I have been able to preserve more than half of them in my poetic anthology Canciones Florecientes [ANCP, 2023] while others were lost in time while traveling and moving from site to site. Then, there are two important events, which both had a motivational significance in my writing goals: the first event, the publishing of my poetry in a local newspaper [several times] after publishing prose with nationally awarded short stories; the second event, the reading of my poetry at a radio station, which reached the Caribbean, including Aruba, Martinique, Puerto Rico, and even Cuba, as I learned later. It was the program Aquí la Literatura [Here, literature], hosted by Professor Edmundo Ramos Vives, the first person who called me "poet," during my first reading there.
In Colombia, the greatest influence came from central Colombia poets such as Eduardo Carranza Guillermo Valencia, who bared the names of my grandfather Hermenegildo Carranza Valencia. While Caribbean [Northern Colombian] poets such as Julio Flórez and Meira del Mar had little or no influence on my writing, and so for Western Colombia's most renowned poet, Porfirio Barba Jacob. Valencia was indeed "the antithesis" of all these poetic styles, and his spirituality reached and adjusted to my model, technique, and content focus.
On the other hand, among my favourite celebrated poets are: French poets Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel, Paul Verlaine, and Alfred de Musset, among many I have read and still love to read today. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke; British playwright William Shakespeare for his Sonnets; and Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, for whom I also became an actor reciting musical verses in his play La Zapatera Prodigiosa at Humboldt’s high-school theatre, where today Psychologist Rosalía Donofrio made the female character. I still remember the starting opening exclamation: “En un cortijo de Cordova entre jarales y adelfas vivía un talabartero con una talabartera…”; Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, and American poet Edgard Alan Poe, whose spirit wanders in one of his houses, nowadays a restaurant, I once visited in New York City’s Upper West Side on Amsterdam Avenue.
From my first early poem in English at least a dozen years elapsed, before I would have written a second one. And, with my arrival in the United States on May 27, 1989, I started to develop my potential as an English writer and earned some Editor’s awards from poetry.com.
Because I wish to publish in several languages, I have encountered that self-publishing is the most practical way to do so, in a rather professional way, avoiding the difficulty of working from with unskilled editors in several languages, which could always affect the strict quality of the final publication, a goal I have endeavored to attain in every book I have published.
In 2011, I published via Xlibris my first poetry book, Alma Mater I; poetry in three languages. Later, I published, El Retrato del Fantasma [The Portrait of theGhost]; el cuento meta-psicológico, through Palibrio, and I started my self-publication of these books, accordingly, followed by other poetry books of the Alma Mater Poetry series. The new edition of Alma Mater I; poetry in English, Spanish, and French, with some editions and corrections, and the inclusion of more relevant images, including family pictures, made this great publication attractive to some publishing houses that have made offers to purchase the copywrite of my book. El Retrato del Fantasma [The Portrait of the Ghost] was also a much better edition in Spanish. Although I have a basic translation of the book, I have not proceeded yet to achieve a refined translation due to time and space, such that I could do so comfortably, yet I now estimate that this book will soon be published.
Sincerely, I was quite unhappy about the outcome of dealing with non-native publishing in my mother language or non-certified editors working in a language I am certified in. Thus, again, I started my own self-publishing practice.
Alma Mater II: surreal is our love, was a selection of poems, inspired by friends and acquaintances dedicated to visual arts, in particular, painting, where a love relationship might have either developed or occurred. There were four different books published in three languages, including one that rather following British English spelling and grammar. As a result of some criticism about the imperfection or disparity of the language, I formally adopted the British standard in my poetic anthology, recently published. Therefore, Restoration of Honour; a poetic anthology strictly enforces the British English standard for grammar and spelling, which is the English flavour that I learned at school, and even when I attended an American English school, namely, the Boston School of English, I had always a British English teacher, which affected the accent of my language upon my 1989 arrival into the United States.
In this English anthology of poetry, there are two leitmotivs: love and honour. The former focuses on the recall of romance and love relationships with women I met in school or at work. The latter, the honour portion relates to characters appearing in my poetry, who suffer the abatement of honour.
There are other aspects that I emphasize in my poetry. In particular, the explicit discipline of my heterosexuality and any complementary emotional visualization of the art of love with a woman: her beauty is usually highlighted with a hyperbolic emphasis. If a reader is not clear about this, then that reader probably does not understand poetry, and needs some schoolwork for the purpose, as, for instance, someone working in public safety ot law enforcement in general might confuse poetry and rap by definition, based on their likes and dislikes, unless explicitly educated in the field, usually due to the nature of their paradigm to view and observe reality.
There are many nations honouring poets and writers once they have died. But during their life, both poets and writers -opposite to what I learned during my years as an adolescent- are normally discriminated against and excluded from many conventional social activities, and they are only loved by those in their literary circle. Once they have died, their country comes to save them as national patrimony and, thus, recognize them for the greatness of their work. In some cases, many politicians are involved. This is a historical truth applicable to almost any country and nation in the world.
Because there were at least a dozen unpublished poems in each language in which I could write creatively. I have decided to publish my anthologies in a sequence, such that I could also include my unpublished work while publishing a more organized work in one language at the time.
I recently completed my trilogy of anthologies with my collection of poetry in French, which I entitled Mon Âme Éveillée that joins Canciones Florencientes, and Restoration of Honour, which Kindle readers have encountered to be the most interesting one.
The vast majority of my book readers are either online or via Kindle Select. Therefore, one important goal is to make any corrections to poems that I had previously published on the web, usually through my Alma Mater Literary blog. But, at this point, my greatest priority is to publish The Portrait of the Ghost, not only English but also in other languages. Then, the publication of Alma Mater I, in Italian, Portuguese, German, and Asian languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Phillipino, and quite likely Vietnamese and Thai, is an important goal and overall priority to my career market and blueprint expansion. I also trust in myself to write my first novel and attain great creative writing while developing my future academic life in science.
