THE ENVOY The official newsletter of the
Canada Cuba Literary Alliance I.S.S.N. – 1911‐0693
November 2021 Issue 116 www.CanadaCubaLiteraryAlliance.org
Photo by José Alberto The Envoy 116
Page 1
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Poems and Photographs 101 Portraits SandCrab Books along with the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance CCLA and its affiliate, CCLA Federation of Photography, are looking for poems, micro prose and photographs that explore and navigate the theme of portraits to be included in an upcoming eBook of Photographs and Poetry, edited by poetry editor, Antony Di Nardo, and photography curator, Wency Rosales. See samples of our photography/ poetry eBooks at True Identity – https://issuu.com/richardgrove1/docs/book_‐_true_identity_‐_editor_april_bulmer_‐_book_ In Silence We Wait – https://issuu.com/richardgrove1/docs/book_‐_in_silence_we_wait_‐_2020_into_2021_‐_book_ AND you can click here and find the CCLA newsletter and other eMags: https://issuu.com/richardgrove1 Publication in spring of 2022 For your poem, your micro prose and your photographs, feel free to interpret the theme as broadly as possible — a family portrait framed in couplets, a profile sketched in single syllables, a lyrical snap, the selfie as distortion, or even a sweeping epic pic. Portraits capture our human essence, our longings and desires, both our comic and tragic sensibilities. Portraits can project our innermost and outermost dimensions. Portraits put a stamp on identity as well as mark a “Wanted” poster. A portrait can be either biographical or unreal, domestic or surreal. Think self‐portrait in a convex mirror. Think Picasso. Think Lucian Freud. Think Yousuf Karsh or Annie Leibowitz. Think all that words can do when a picture is only worth a thousand! Send up to three poems and a brief fifty word bio to poetsonaplane@gmail.com by Monday, February 28, 2022. Submission Info: – Submissions will be accepted on the topic of Portraits – interpret the theme as broadly as possible (See description above). – Submissions in English only. – Include your name, email address, your mailing address in a MS Word document attachment. – Send 3 poems maximum. – Send a 50-word bio with your submissions in the same MS Word document attachment. – Send your poetry submission as an attachment – one attachment only – including all your poems in one document. NOT in the body of the email. – Previously unpublished work only. Submission Size: – Poetry – maximum 60 lines including title and line spaces – maximum 50 characters and spaces per line – Haiku – maximum 12 haiku – Micro Prose – maximum 300 words
The Envoy 116
Page 2
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Deadline: February 28, 2022 Where to send your submission: Send your poetry, haiku and micro prose by email to editor Antony Di Nardo – poetsonaplane@gmail.com Send all text for your submission in an MS Word document as an attachment only. Copyright: Authors and photographers will retain copyright of their own work. Compensation: Because this is a fundraiser for the CCLA, authors will not receive a free copy if we publish a printed book. The eBook will be free. Stay tuned for printing details after the eBook is published. No Submission Fee: There is no reading or submission fee for this anthology. Call for Portrait Photographs: All photographs must be posted on the CCLA Federation of Photography Facebook page in an Album . Do not email your photographs. All photographs must be posted in an album with your name. Interpret the idea of portraits liberally as mentioned above. Selfies are welcome BUT they had better be interesting, wild, interpreting, thought-provoking, stimulating. Boring normal narcissistic selfies will not be included. Facebook Location: Find the CCLA Federation of Photography Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/270081688228336/media/albums. First you will be required to join the group. Then click on the “Media” tab and then the “Album” tab. When you post your pics be sure to put your full name and title of the book in the “title” section of your album. Example – Mary Smith 101 Portraits Submission. NO Signature: Do not add a signature / water mark to your photographs. Any photograph with a visible signature will be disqualified. Number of Pics: Maximum 10 photographs per person. Later: Once your photograph has been accepted we will need: A – a 300 dpi jpg. ( Low res images will not be published. ) B – Images must be no larger than 600kb ( larger images will not be processed). Pass on this Information: We hope that you will pass on the word to fellow writers around the world. Our goal is to bring new members into the CCLA community with this call for submissions. The mandate of the Canada Cuba Literary Alliance is to advance cultural solidarity between Canada and Cuba through the creative expression of poetry, prose, art and photography. With this call for submissions we hope to spread our goal of bringing writers, poets and artists together from all over the world into a single international literary community. Aspiring writers as well as established writers need all the help they can get to find publishing opportunities. The CCLA is offering this opportunity for talented writers in all genres to share and exchange their work and to integrate with writers from both Canada and Cuba. We look forward to seeing your work published.
The Envoy 116
Page 3
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Donna Allard
Visiting Historic Kings Landing
By Donna Allard
i noticed straw hanging on fences to be spun and woven into linen fabric i didn't know you could do this with Flax. it is Thanksgiving weekend and the apple wood smoke stacks are beckoning us. we strolled to the historic dwellings. removed our jackets and enjoyed the eternal fire and the dinner for two. it was difficult to leave this quaint life and the moon lit paths that lead to our car. we kissed; as autumn leaves spun and weaved into evening dreams.
The Envoy 116
Page 4
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Armistice By Donna Allard he was thinking of wild horses as he placed the wreath his head bowed, his hand grasping invisible reins, he went and shook hands with the veterans he’d joke with them, ‘you son-of-a-gun,’ he’d say, ‘nothing can kill you,’ their belly’s jiggled and all was right with the world, he had that way about him, dad, he could calm wild horses and he did today Inspired by author Donna Morrissey.
A WORD ABOUT Beginning with The Envoy #116 on, our assistant editor (AE), Miguel Angel Olive Iglesias, will be presenting his views on John B. Lee´s poetry from an original angle: his 20 favorite Lee poems commented upon by him and the poet himself. Each issue will bring us one or two poems by Lee, how they were born, what inspired them according to the author, and fleshed out with the experienced opinion of our AE, who has been steadily publishing reviews and essays on many Canadian writers for the last three years. May this section be another tribute to Poet Laureate John B. Lee and to Canadian poetry. My Twenty Favorite John B. Lee Poems by Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias CCLA President in Cuba author, editor, reviewer Introduction: I have often stated how difficult it is to choose the favorite one or more poems of some poets. After long battles, we surrender to the urge of selection because, in the end, there are poems that relate to our lives, have a world view that is more significant than the others or touch our innermost niches of emotion in a unique manner.
The Envoy 116
Page 5
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
In that light, I reread John B. Lee´s vast poetic production (I was skimming over and drafting notes on Lee’s collection for a comprehensive project I was working on), and it struck me that I could make a twenty favorite John B. Lee poems list. The first word of notice to readers is that this is my list. The second is the poems are not organized in level of preference. While I am positive some of the poems included will appear in a number of readers´ own lists, others might have entirely dissimilar preferences – John himself surely has his own, although he has always said his best poem is the one he hasn´t written yet! This is a list of my selected poems for a reason, which does not necessarily meet other people´s reasons, tastes or arguments. With this thought in mind, I invite you to a journey of reading some of Lee´s most remarkable poems in my modest view. Lee honored my quest by applying himself to the generous task of explaining each poem, how it came to life, and shared his experiences with me. I contemplated his gestures plus my opinions – compiled from previous analyses I had made, added new insights. chose my favorite poems and integrated them into these lines of mine. What began as a modest personal search of my appreciation of Lee´s poems became an original, collaborative approach to his work. Thank you, John. The selected poems are: 1. How Beautiful We Are 2.... how to read this poem 3. By the Shore’s Collapsing Waters 4. I Wake to Breathe Your Beauty In 5. …and this. 6. Kissing the Darkness when the Pages Close 7. Starwatchers 8. I Too Can Show the Way 9. One Leaf in the Breath of the World 10. Bread, Water, Love 11. Lovely Woman in the Lake, My Wife, My Love 12. The Sad Mathematics of Our Lives 13. The Place Where Poets Pause 14. Starless and Blue at Midnight 15. Loneliness as an Art 16. Taken 17. An Afterness 18. Echo’s Revenge 19. The Silence of Secret Singing 20. So, this is a place of places ... JOHN EXPLAINS THE FIRST POEM, “How Beautiful We Are,” in the following way: “… the eponymous poem in the book of that title was written at a cottage I used to own. The tiny cottage sat right on the beach in the commercial fishing town of Port Dover. I used to sit at the table overlooking the beach and write. Sometimes the poem was entirely interior. On this particular day I was struck by how the sun, the sand, and the water love us all the same as I gazed upon the sun bathers, the families, the young people in bikinis and speedos flexing their The Envoy 116
Page 6
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
muscles and enjoyed the Narcissism of their own (to them) obvious beauty and youth. As I considered the ideals of beauty in the dominant culture I found myself rejecting the limitations of youth and hard body (or in the case of the young women curvaceous) and I saw how we are beautiful in all our shapes and sizes, ages and forms, from children to elders, from youth to old age. My favourite image in the poem is the one where I wrote of the water rising up the thighs "like expensive stockings drawn on slow" that luxuriating natural caress of a wave struck me as a kind of confirmation of my conviction. God loves us all the same. Nature cherishes every life, every living thing. At the same time, the war at the edge of the sea, like the closing lines in Dover Beach, creates a kind of backlash against the potential of shallow sentimentality. We are loved and loving, yes, but at the same time we are cruel and unkind.” Aided by his comments, I presumed to “decode” his thoughts and write down my understanding of the poem. The divine is obvious in “How Beautiful We Are,” an elegy to beauty and truth, two essential pillars of poetry. We read an alert poet singing to life, voicing his dreams, his urges to cross dimensional frontiers and fuse with nature. Two recurrent elements we perceive in this poem are sky and water, as Lee tells us in the previous quotation. Lee is drawn to a reality that unfolds before him, taking in both the actual physicality it narrates and the poetic elaborations deriving therefrom in the poet´s tireless mind. The ending is objectively set in by the poet as a warning, a truth, yet we optimistically choose to be the ocean, the river. We choose to fly “when the sky looks down and sees how beautiful we are”: there is beauty in our existence and “we believe in flying because we've been dreaming the dew,” a treasured possession, that of dreaming. A convinced believer in God and what surrounds us, Lee deposits on a sheet of paper what the muses bring to him. This is how the poem flowed:
How Beautiful We Are I say to you I want to be the water the way the lake waves love our bodies to the very heavening even old men stand their loud red shoulders shining in the sun as if scrubbing away a difficulty their bellies puckered like gathered rubber and women with legs like thin ink a wet bluing on white and the trickling off of secret longing like roses after the rain if I watch wet weather greening a burned brown lawn how then
The Envoy 116
Page 7
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
the drought drowsed Fuchsia lifts itself like someone waking in the heat some shy dancer rising to take my hand as we leap beyond the window we’re that sad about the gravity of clouds but we believe in flying because we’ve been dreaming the dew that clings to the filigree of web and weed I want to be both tide pool and the ocean I want to be the river rising like expensive stockings drawn on slow as you walk deeper and deeper into love I want to be what happens when the sky looks down and sees how beautiful we are but there’s war at the edge of the sea where nothing is true but dying
Jose Alberto picture
The Envoy 116
Page 8
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Photo by José Alberto
Photo by José Alberto
The Envoy 116
Page 9
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
9:30 pm
By Miguel Angel Olivé Iglesias
I look at my father´s watch, now on my wrist. It reads 9:30 pm. Five years ago he gave it to me – for the first time – during one of his many post-op recoveries at home. Fearing he would not make it then, he told me to keep it. Happily, two days later he asked me, smiling, to please “lend” it to him a little longer. Today 9:30 pm marks exactly 3 months since he passed away. Can´t lend it to him again. Can´t have him here to recall that day together and laugh. I look at his Seiko on my wrist and smile, sadly. November 2, 2021
THE DAY I DIE
By Miriam Estrella Vera Delgado
The day I die… I´ll lie inside a coffin With a smile on my face Watching how hypocrisy Runs its endless race. The people at the funeral Will say how much they care Death always makes remorse Show its brightest glare. Just give all those you care for Some Love while they´re alive That´s something they will Always keep A treasure to retrieve.
The Envoy 116
Page 10
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Yo que te escucho Marianela Rabell López Yo que te escucho esta noche de domingo siento que las cuerdas de mi cuerpo se tensan ante tu voz. De tantos sitios venimos que te reconozco en cada verso y “cuando cese la lluvia cambiaré los calendarios para desenredar la espera Te humedeceré el alma y me tendrás sobre las hojas secas” Yo que te escucho esta noche de domingo vuelvo sobre mis pasos para convencerme en el lugar donde te encontré que “no fingí despertares y si una vez más andas descalzo entre las rocas cortantes del destino es porque aunque te lo prometiste no es tan fácil escampar después de una tormenta”
Photo by Raidel Castellanos
The Envoy 116
Page 11
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Photo by Lisa Makarchuk
The Envoy 116
Page 12
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Photo by Héctor Silva
Extinción
Por Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández
Un rayo de luz cruza el firmamento, deja todo el cielo limpio, sin imágenes. Solo hay luceros fríos que van huyendo. Las estrellas tiemblan y caen al inerte mar. Es la última vez que el mar refleja la noche. Olas tristes y aturdidas. El mar tiene muerte en su fondo, su color ahora es pálido, corre ensangrentado hacia la gran herida del ocaso.
The Envoy 116
Page 13
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
Photo by Tuba Oya Akar
Photo by Liomara Angulo
Photo by Juan Javier Medina
The Envoy 116
Page 14
THE ENVOY 116 2021 –EDITOR-
Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com
MASTHEAD – Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández, CCLA Ambassador as editor – Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias, Cuban President as Assistant editor – Adonay Pérez Luengo, Cuban vp as reviewing editor – Lisa Makarchuk, Canadian vp as reviewing editor – Miriam Estrella Vera Delgado, CCLA Cuban poet laureate as reviewing editor _ Wency Rosales, Cuban Photography Curator
Editor´s emails:
joyph@nauta.cu joyphccla@gmail.com jorgealbertoph@infomed.sld.cu
CANADA CUBA LITERARY ALLIANCE FROM THE EDITOR: IN OUR UPCOMING ISSUES, WE WOULD LIKE SUBMISSIONS FROM EVERY CCLA MEMBER SO THAT WE ARE NURTURED BY YOU! IF YOU HAVE BOOKS COMING OUT, A POETRY EVENT, JUST LET US KNOW!
The Envoy 116
Page 15