NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: ON UNDERGRADUATE WORK, PUBLIC VIEWS, AND DREAMS TO COME

 

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: LIVE CREATION ON FAITH, LOVE, AND NATURE

 

NATIONAL POÉTRY MONTH: APRIL STORIES

 

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: LOVE POETRY IN THREE LANGUAGES

 

POETRY IN ENGLISH, SPANISH, AND FRENCH

THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL

The first day of April brings us
the sun and no rain for the storm,
we endured last night in the warm
pace of changed weather, passed.

The rhythm of the rain was steadfast.
Nature woke up from a winter nap,
long and cold as none in the early past.

Only your deep kiss felt quite warm
as today the sun has shown a myth

that murmurs a lying, brief love song. 

Only your kiss is mine as it yearns,
arriving by ship at the port of arms,
the recent love story of all ill ghosts
sent for pleasure, not in bare arms.

EL SOL DE ABRIL

El sol de abril ha llegado primero
antes que la lluvia moje el campo
antes que yo escriba un poema
mucho antes que bese tu pelo.

Anhelo abrazar tu cabello de nuevo

que el sol abrasa a paso certero
que un beso ardiente es mi deseo.

La luna nos espera para saciar
ese deseo de la avenida furtiva

que la villa poco conoce al andar.

Me queda un día lejos como hoy.
La memoria ciega de tu dulce voz.
El cálido beso lento que es de vos
el cadencioso ritmo, miel de amor.

L’AMOUR À L’AVENUE
SIXIÈME ET DEMIE
(AVENUE 6½)

On se retrouve un jour sans y penser
au premier site où l’on s’avait aimé
sur l’avenue fermée au transit cassé. 

On s’embrasse sur le trottoir encerclé.

Elle et moi, dans la nuit, le soir vivant.
La soirée vit encore dans le sombre noir.

On ne se rappelle plus ou bien pour quoi.
Je l’avais vue tout parée en douce noire.
Ça fut l’inspiration du matin prochain.
Et l’homme succombe au désir lointain.

Peu importe si c’était New York ou Paris.
On ne s’en dérange pas, on se déménage

et on ne se voit point à la petite avenue

où le rêve vivant dort et s’y en partage.

CELEBRATING OVER 40 YEARS OF POETRY

 MY THREE ANTHOLOGIES

Exhibit 1. Canciones Florecientes, poesía en español.

Exhibit 2. Mon Âme Éveillée, poésoe en français.

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.

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, APRIL 2002. FINE POETRY FROM ALMA MATER III: COLUMBA

 THE QUEEN OF THE RIVERS

She rendered the river waters in my dream

as real gold plates filled the borderline pastures

as if El Dorado had become alive in a beam

of light and beauty, the soft silk is precious.

She rendered the waters all the way uphill

where the stream became a love channel

with birds singing above the arched tunnel,

while no one looked at the birth of April.

She gazed at the lit heaven in an unusual way

seeking a divine word, as if a queen she were,

trusting the vision in her eyes, a flowery array.

She longed for an affluent endowment for every year

until, in the end, she would become an immortal wizard,

for her true silence was just a golden ring on each ear.

2022

En el día de la mujer. On women's day. Au jour des femmes.

MUJERES

Mujeres que han llenado mi vida

trayendo alegría, ventura y paz

buscando en alborada despedida

del amor que no duda y es capaz.

Las escucho en vivo a medianoche 

cual duermo la siesta a mediodía

y las encuentro así allí cada noche 

como a esa mujer que no dormía.

Celeste fue plácida la inspiración

mirando al cielo claro sin nubes

en que me dieron besos de pasión.

Ellas vuelan tal cual ave que sube

y van desdeñando al árbol caído,

desgajando flores del ramo furtivo.

 

WOMEN

Women who have given me all

that they had to offer as real love

just a caress, a sweet kiss, or a hug,

or just the pure passion of the dove.

The tantric touch and look in the eye

which hinders no pain in the heart

and relieves the fatigue and the cry

of the lonely man already set apart.

Women who don’t know about the truth

that wakes them up at dawn for love

enticing the passion of love and its ruth.

The man they value is by being proud of all.

That cherishing is real as they disappear

to sweetly ask for care from their dear.

LES FEMMES 

Les femmes, non pas prises d'une folie,

quand elles nous aiment plutôt à peine

pour gagner une place dans nos vies

qui rend l'amour d'une façon pleine.

Elles verront l'amour tel qu'un nuage

qui ne laisse pas voir les vraies scènes

que l'on voit sans douter du courage

qui remplit le cœur sans les chaînes.

Les femmes sont des voyages à l'infini

où l'on retrouve presque tout parfait

et on rejoint la raison de l'amour parti.

Les femmes, très jolies ou bien fardées,

elles nous aiment dès notre naissance ;

oui, un jour d'été, d'une belle essence.