I was glad to be able to make the latest SOON Productions poetry reading here in Ithaca last night.
Meredith Ramirez Talusan, a graduate student in Cornell’s MFA program, read from a selection of her work that included poems derived from drama (the piece “Pinter” was given to members of the audience as a broadside) and a number of short pieces written originally in Tagalog (Talusan was raised in the Philippines) and translated multiple times into English: ambiguities in the Tagalog-English translation process allow the original to have multiple, interesting, different meanings.
The second reader, Timothy Green, a Rochester NY native now living in Los Angeles, read very engagingly from his forthcoming book American Fractal. His pieces were wry and often touching personal narratives that moved up and down the scales of personal, local, and global concerns, investigating the fractal similarity in human dynamics over these different orders of magnitude. Timothy also edits Rattle magazine.
Thanks to both writers for a great reading.