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http://manrnescriptsmain.blogspot.com/A completely redone poet'sPicturebook
on its first anniversary is now online. With the newest features.
A Black Cover Page featuring the finest art and photography
from the Philippines & elsewhere. Like the windows to another world
that they are. A new Contents page
where you can click the titles to go to the poems & articles.
And still, paper-white inside pages for the latest
poems, photos, and art from some our leading writers and artists.
And a black About Us page to close.
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Read and enjoy the completely new, one-year-old
poet'sPicturebook.
Excerpts from the intro...
Wormholes & windows. We made a complete turnabout and went back to our first background color when we started blogging for poetry & art: black. (Nothing to do with the U.S. president-elect.) But only for our Cover and our About Us pages, to distinguish them from the inside ones and, well, there is always the elegance and drama of black. While we “modernize” a bit, we wanted at the same time to pay tribute to the publishing technologies that went before us, from before Gutenburg to the pick-up type, and of course to digitally picking up the images of Letterpress wood types and assembling them for our header; for our other display types we chose the thinnest of san-serif fonts (still serif for the poetry pages), and bolder solid colors to nod to our being electronic, and to signal the sanguine presence we’d like to make for our poetry and art on the Literary Web. Plus, when we think of Space, the cosmos and cyber-, we imagine black. Only the stars are “white.” And our cover pictures, enveloped in black, could become windows of sorts—into the alternative realities of the frozen image—perhaps a bit like the wormholes of physics. And yes, the pictures and paintings! We promise to give you fabulous images on our cover starting this issue. We’ve touched base with friends from all over—photographers and artists, professionals and serious amateurs from various trades who will generously lend us their fantastic work. And so will our poets. I’ve seen some of their work, on websites and albums and notebooks and studios redolent with pigment and imagination, and I oohed and ahed. I hope you do too, and share my excitement for this new edition of poet’sPicturebook. So there, as we salute in our own way the history that brought us to the virtual page, click and enter and linger in our completely redone pages. All in all, as we improve how we look and work, we are just preparing for better contributions for 2009. Because there are lots of them coming.
This Issue. Our first anniversary issue is in more ways than one, a translation issue (in two ways actually). It is also, once again, more international in terms of contributors. Kim Ming’i, perhaps the greatest contemporary songwriter and poet from South Korea, appears with his poem, in the original Korean ideographic characters, courtesy of his English translator Lee Sanghee and his Filipino translator, Jesus Manuel Santiago, who is perhaps one of our best (and ironically unsung) contemporary songwriter and singer, and who is a poet firstly. That’s why we publish the song lyrics and translations as poems, and we wonder why Kim Ming’i’s exquisitely lyrical pieces earned him the ire of Korean military regimes. (Incidentally, Jess Santiago launches his first CD collection in a long time, of his newer compositions, in 2009. This is our own little promotional effort for the CD, and our first tribute to his art; since more will be coming to these pages.) The second poem and translation piece is a villanelle written in the Bikol language (the editor’s native one) by Jaime Jesus Borlagdan. Jimple, as he is called by friends, appears for the second time in poet’sPicturebook. Our attempt to translate his poem into a villanelle in English thrilled us but it will be Jimple and readers who will tell us if they are satisfied. Another first is a poem from one of our better short story writers, Maryanne Moll. The poem takes us to places that belie its apparent whimsicality (and for the first time to most of us, perhaps, we discover her “secret” poetry). Our last poem is my own, springing from a painting of antique icons (of our, or my, ambivalent faith) that architect, painter, and poet Pancho Villanueva has daubed with a surprisingly realistic brush, because he is better known, and is a well-collected, abstract artist. We close our anniversary issue with the “smiling” letters of our readers from our first year in what is now called the literary web. These are what made us smile in return and kept us doing, as we enter our second year, and doing better, this little online poetry and art magazine, poet’sPicturebook.
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