 | |
| Author | Oliver de la Paz |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Liveright |
Publication date | July 18, 2023 |
| Pages | 112 |
| Awards | New England Book Award for Poetry |
| ISBN | 978-1324092988 |
| Preceded by | The Boy in the Labyrinth |
The Diaspora Sonnets is a 2023 poetry collection by Oliver de la Paz, published by Liveright. [1] It was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry and won the New England Book Award for Poetry. [2] [3]
De la Paz grew up in a Filipino American family in Eastern Oregon. His family had moved there following the Vietnam War; they resettled "between the Umatilla Army Depot and the Mountain Home Airforce Base", where de la Paz's mother worked as a pediatrician. There, de la Paz stated, there was no Filipino American community, and he stopped speaking Tagalog. As a response to boredom, de la Paz approached literature. [4]
De la Paz stated in International Examiner that his poetry "arises from attempts to explain myself and my family to others, and in my failure to make initial sense of these attempts. I’d have to create metaphor so that people would understand my point of view. Essentially use of poetic expression developed as a survival mechanism for my immigrant family." Accordingly, The Diaspora Sonnets, in three sections, enlists the sonnet form but also questions de la Paz's allegiance to formalism; he intended to pose the question of "In the case of the sonnet, what does it mean when a Filipino American writes in a Western European form?" [5]
In November of 2022, the poem "Diaspora Sonnet Traveling Between Apartment Rentals" was selected by Victoria Chang for The New York Times. Chang said that "These sonnets don’t have all the elements of typical sonnets, such as rhyme and meter, but they have the usual 14 lines and a volta, or turn, in the penultimate stanza ... The final volta tightly encapsulates the immigrant experience — that of new grammar and new lands that are both alluring and tenuous." [6]
Electric Literature called the book one of the best poetry collections in 2023. [7] LitHub recommended the book in a list of forthcoming poetry collections for July 2024, stating "One of Oliver de la Paz’s gifts is his sense of the book as a whole ... Amidst poems rich in details of the resulting changing natural landscapes emerge vivid portraits: we see the father in his twenties holding a hatbox, later, a gun." [8]
Some critics observed de la Paz's technique in relation to his professed themes of diaspora. [9] The Poetry Foundation said "De la Paz creates loops of words, actions, and images within the patterned design of poetic form, rhyme scheme, anaphoric titling, and poem ordering ... The book’s repeating motifs, the pantoum’s repeating lines, the chain migration poem’s rhyme scheme, and the sonnet’s metrical rhythms work on literary traditions to mediate readers’ relationships to diasporic dislocation and trauma." [10]
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα. This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia.
Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet.
The term sonnet refers to a fixed verse poetic form, traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. It derives from the Italian word sonetto. Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person. The term for both modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature, the Greek lyric, which was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on an instrument known as a kithara, a seven-stringed lyre. These three are not equivalent, though song lyrics are often in the lyric mode and Ancient Greek lyric poetry was principally chanted verse.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote sonnets on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
Canadian poetry is poetry of or typical of Canada. The term encompasses poetry written in Canada or by Canadian people in the official languages of English and French, and an increasingly prominent body of work in both other European and Indigenous languages.
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) in October 1816. It tells of the author's astonishment while he was reading the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer as translated by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman.
French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.
José García Villa was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the pen name Doveglion, based on the characters he derived from his own works. These animals were also explored by another poet, E. E. Cummings, in "Doveglion, Adventures in Value", a poem dedicated to Villa.
Italian poetry is a category of Italian literature. Italian poetry has its origins in the thirteenth century and has heavily influenced the poetic traditions of many European languages, including that of English.
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
This is a glossary of poetry terms.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Jordie Albiston was an Australian poet.
Ernest Hilbert is an American poet, critic, opera librettist, and editor.
Lawrence Schimel is a bilingual (Spanish/English) American writer, translator, and anthologist. His work, which frequently deals with gay and lesbian themes as well as matters of Jewish identity, often falls into the genres of science fiction and fantasy and takes the form of both poetry and prose for adults and for children.
Richard Berengarten is an English poet. Having lived in Italy, Greece, the US and the former Yugoslavia, his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His poems explore historical and political material, inner worlds and their archetypal resonances, and relationships and everyday life. His work is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth of themes, and variety of forms. In the 1970s, he founded and ran the international Cambridge Poetry Festival. He has been an important presence in contemporary poetry for the past 40 years, and his work has been translated into more than 90 languages.
John Iremil Teodoro is a Filipino writer, creative writing and literature teacher, literary critic, translator, and cultural scholar. He is also considered to be a leading pioneer in Philippine gay literature and the most published author in Kinaray-a.
Oliver de la Paz is an American poet and educator. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Requiem for the Orchard, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry. His honors include a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award and a 2009 GAP Grant from Artist Trust. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Virginia Quarterly Review,North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation.
Rosebud Ben-oni is a Latina-Jewish American poet and writer known for her "Poet Wrestling with" series. Her 2021 work If This Is the Age We End Discovery won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. Her poetry and lyrical essays have been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC.