The following are nine poems by Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta---the first six culled from her recent collection titled Love Woman, the second three from 1993's Lady Polyester---which I am here presenting via the simple values of a basic DHTML, Java, or animated GIF accompaniment. The objective, aside from the obvious, is to visually stage-manage each piece on the PC webpage without the excesses of over-sophistication, so to keep the written poem's own power above movement. The other objective is to prove once again that the experiencing of poetry can be brought to spaces other than the expensive bookpage or the unfriendly and just-as-costly bar aural space. That's it! Now, enjoy the show. :-)
---V.S. de Veyra
from Love Woman:
It Is In Her Eyes
I go against the lament of the poem here by offering a textual visual progress that, however elusive like youth itself, offers the benefit of self-rewinding---akin to the experience of staying on inside an SM Megamall cinemahouse after a film for another viewing.
Turkish Resonances
I like this piece for being like an homage to the catchy tune or the memorable performance, regardless of political content or its absence, regardless of language. Also, for pointing to the potentials for personalization of any raw experience as a kind of historicism, relating something foreign or distant to something personal, even local.
Turkish Resonances 2
This presentation attempts something opposite the above presentation of the same piece, narrowing the imagination to a fictional visualization of the singer as the focus. Whereas the poem talks of a remembering and a mutation in memory, this here presentation attempts a robotic mnemonic that stays on. It's the song that has been lost. Hail to the universalized Hollywood star system!
Home Ground
What could have been a personal poem for Dimalanta I created a nationalist or racial potential, also in view of the travel pieces in this site.
Browning Revisited
As a Filipino male reacting to the poem, I defocus on the Browning bio and present two Pinoy soul-sides in my presentation imagery: the globalized, Disney-fied Pinoy and the primitive, National Geographic- and Eros Pinoy-liberated one in him. I, however, give the reader the liberty of dragging some soul-sides to the edge of the webpage and put one on top of the poem, depending on his/her personal preference.
Along the Bosphorus
As a native of the Vishnayan Islands, I love this poem. As a lover of Dimalanta's (and others') journey poems, too. In the presentation here, however, is the privilege to delay, to advance, and of rejourneying that's usually the luxury of the yachtsmen of, say, Batangas. :-) So, enjoy yourself!
Flying to Byzantium
While the poem talks about a silent rejuvenation from the Zen-like function of the "dusky islands"' mystic effects, I---though seeming to illustrate movements---try to effect a koan-like function of my own through the dizzying arrows of our Manila experience. Within the dizziness is another mystic effect on our ruined dreams that advises us to sit awhile.
from Lady Polyester:
Quickening
I seemed to have created here an environment that apes the biological works of the contemporary Spanish painter Luis Gordillo, but that was all dictated by the poem itself. Obvious is my appropriation of the Java applet's ability to mimic the heart's pulsating beat. The discarding of the stanza and other marks add to the biological quickening, allowing thus the reader to experience further the "biology" apart from the poetry, so that he/she may not need to add to the 70,000,000 population mark. :-)
Noonbound, Northbound
(From Bauang to Batac)
This piece I here present as a travel guide note. Thus the reader's reluctance in clicking the link, seeing instantly the flowing note. However, the note is a fast read, mimicking a bus journey's elusive vision upon sights. Moreover, clicking the link doesn't bring one to a journey to Marcoslandia but to the same traveling note as its own journey. The poem as journey, as its own megalomaniacal, self-serving flowerspeech?
Birth
From the moment we click on the title, we already know that---unlike the treatment for Quickening---the idea here was to simulate birth through the mouse-click and thus bowdlerize everything. We have therefore here a layout that's supposedly a paean to birthing and the idea of labor, delivery pushing, and so on, that ultimately reduces the whole process into a technical progression, finally obliquely delivering a self-critique on the achievements of this project upon the power of the poems involved. . . .
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Love Woman was published by the UST Publishing House, Manila.
Copyright © 1998 by University of Santo Tomas. All rights reserved.Lady Polyester was published by the Santo Tomas University Press, Manila.
Copyright © 1993. All rights reserved.
also see V.S. de Veyra's "official" website