Private resort in hotspring capital Pansol, Philippines named after great romantic poet from Chile

Neruda Resort in Pansol honors world’s greatest poet of the 20th century

            Just a little over half an hour from Makati and below the slopes of Mount Makiling in the Philippines' hotspring capital of Pansol in Calamba City, Laguna province, a new oasis for leisure has recently opened---a private resort with two swimming pools, kitchen, barbecue grill, videoke, air-conditioned rooms good for 30 people---with Neruda Hotspring Resort at address 724 Natalie Street, Norville Subdivision, Purok 5, Pansol (very near and on the way to La Vista Pansol).

            Named in honor of great Chilean poet, writer, diplomat, Nobel Prize winner and statesman Pablo Neruda whom Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language”, Neruda Hotspring Resort is an elegant private resort with two swimming pools, air-conditioned rooms good for over 30 people, modern karaoke and sound system, kitchen and barbecue grille, and a social hall or seminar place. It is also the only resort in Laguna with a free library of books, mostly on poetry.

           The natural mineral-rich hotspring water pools have medicinal or therapeutic benefits to health, like lower blood pressure, eliminate toxins, help better sleep, improve joint and muscle mobility.

Now popular for summer outings, Neruda Resort Pansol is also ideal for romance like dates, a private wedding celebration or even for the most unforgettable wedding proposal.  Poets, writers, artists and teachers will be given special discounted rates, just go to the Neruda Hotspring Resort Facebook page  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Neruda-Hotspring-Resort/118129861706136?ref=ts&fref=ts. Call or text Rose 09228901892 or Grace 09255877878 or email gh_realty@yahoo.com for inquiries, reservations and special discounted rates.

Below is an old photo of poet Pablo Neruda in is youth

  

Poet, diplomat and activist politician Pablo Neruda in his youth and latter years

Congratulations to the inaugural poem of the 45-year-old---youngest ever poet at a USA presidential inauguration ceremony---civil engineer and teacher of Cuban descent Richard Blanco.


New York Times news report just now:

Inaugural Poem

‘One Today’

 

‘One Today’: Richard Blanco, the 2013 inaugural poet, read ‘One Today’ following President Obama’s swearing in for his second term.

Published: January 21, 2013

Following is the text of the poem, “One Today,” delivered by Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet.

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,

peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces

of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth

across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.

One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story

told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,

each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:

pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,

fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows

begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—

bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,

on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—

to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did

for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,

the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:

equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,

the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,

or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain

the empty desks of twenty children marked absent

today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light

breathing color into stained glass windows,

life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth

onto the steps of our museums and park benches 2

as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk

of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat

and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills

in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands

digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands

as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane

so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains

mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it

through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,

buses launching down avenues, the symphony

of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,

the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling, or whispers across café tables, Hear:

the doors we open

for each other all day, saying: hello| shalom,

buon giorno |howdy |namaste |or buenos días

in the language my mother taught me—in every language

spoken into one wind carrying our lives

without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed

their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked

their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:

weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report

for the boss on time, stitching another wound 3

or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,

or the last floor on the Freedom Tower

jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes

tired from work: some days guessing at the weather

of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love

that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother

who knew how to give, or forgiving a father

who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight

of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,

always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon

like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop

and every window, of one country—all of us—

facing the stars

hope—a new constellation

waiting for us to map it,

waiting for us to name it—together

(Image below sourced from cnn.com)




Watch the video below...

Inauguration 2013: Richard Blanco's Poetry Pays Homage to American Exper...: http://youtu.be/1mDrk8AC4G4 via @youtube

Congratulations Richard Blanco, poet to be part of the coming U.S. presidential inaugural ceremony!

Kudos to President Obama for again highlighting the great art of poetry in his forthcoming inaugural rites!

Presidents John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama of the United States of America deserve our great respect for inviting poets to be part of their historic inaugural ceremonies.

Kennedy in 1961 invited Robert Frost to become the first poet to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration when he recited "The Gift Outright". Other inaugural included: Maya Angelou, Miller Williams and Elizabeth Alexander. Congratulations to Richard Blanco for being the youngest ever inaugural poet!

I admire poetry and used to write poems when I was a student, I will write poems again soon!


(This image below of poet Richard Blanco sourced from npr.org)





(Robert Frost in 1961 reading his controversial poem at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, this image below sourced from voiceseducation.org)






Below is the poem "Photo Shop" from Richard Blanco's first poetry book in 1998, entitled "City of a Hundred Fires"...

Photo Shop

These faces are fifteen under faux diamond tiaras
and grandmother's smuggled brillantes;
these faces are pierced with the mango smiles
that dress hopeful Teresitas and Marías-
quinceañeras with coffee bean eyes;
these pearl faces are mother's taffeta dream,
a decorated anguish in painful pink manicures.
These young faces can't remember that last day-
the innocence of their small steps into the propeller
plane drifting above palms waving elegant farewells.
These barefoot faces are those red mountains
never climbed, a Caribbean never drunk,
they are a guajiro sugar never tasted.
These faces are displaced Miritas and Susanitas.
These faces are a 50s revolution
they are the Beatles and battles,
they are Celia Cruz-AZUCAR-loud and brown;
these faces rock-n-roll and roll their r's,
they are eery botánicas and 7-Elevens.
These fiery faces are rifles and bongos,
they are maracas shaking, machetes hacking;
these faces carry too many names:
their white eyes are toppling dominoes
their glossy eyes are rum and iced tea
their African eyes are gods and Castilian saints
haloed with the finest tabaco smoke.
These faces rest an entire ocean on Taino eyebrows;
they are Kennedy, Batista, and Nixon,
they are a dragon in uniform;
these faces are singing two anthems,
nailed against walls, the walls are chipping.
These overflowing faces are swollen barrels
with rusting hoops and corset seams straining;
these faces are beans: black, red, white and blue,
with steaming rice on chipped china;
these faces are pork fat and lace gowns.
These standing faces are a sentinel-
when the Vietnamese kitchen next door stops
when the alley veils itself and closes like a fresh widow
when the flower shop draws in buckets of red carnations
when gold and diamonds are pulled from late windows
when neon flashes relieve the sun over these fading faces.
These chromatic faces are nothing important,
they are nada we need to understand,
they will transform in their photo chemistry,
these faces will collage very Americanly.


From CITY OF A HUNDRED FIRES (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998)









Here is an interesting news report:

Poet’s Kinship With the President

Craig Dilger for The New York Times

Richard Blanco has been chosen as the 2013 inaugural poet.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG     The New York Times 

Published: January 8, 2013

WASHINGTON — From the moment Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, the poet Richard Blanco, a son of Cuban exiles, says he felt “a spiritual connection” with the man who would become the nation’s 44th president.

Like Mr. Obama, who chronicled his multicultural upbringing in a best-selling autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Blanco has been on a quest for personal identity through the written word. He said his affinity for Mr. Obama springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay (and worked as a civil engineer while pursuing poetry). His poems are laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind.

Now Mr. Obama is about to pluck Mr. Blanco out of the relatively obscure and quiet world of poetry and put him on display before the entire world. On Wednesday the president’s inaugural planners will announce that Mr. Blanco is to be the 2013 inaugural poet, joining the ranks of notables like Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.

“Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to his life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background,” Mr. Blanco said in a telephone interview from the rural village of Bethel, Me., where he lives with his partner. “There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some ways that when I’m writing about my family, I’m writing about him.”

Mr. Blanco must now compose an original poem for the president’s ceremonial swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 21. (Mr. Obama will take the official oath at the White House on Jan. 20, as required by the Constitution.) Addie Whisenant, the inaugural committee’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Obama picked Mr. Blanco because the poet’s “deeply personal poems are rooted in the idea of what it means to be an American.”

Friends of Mr. Blanco’s, and fellow poets, say the president could not have found a more perfect fit.

“I think he was chosen because his America is very similar to the president’s America,” said Liz Balmaseda, who met Mr. Blanco in the mid-1990s when he was just emerging as a poet, and she was working as a columnist for The Miami Herald. “You don’t have to be an exile, you don’t have to be Latino or gay to get the yearning in Richard’s poetry.”

Mr. Blanco, 44, was conceived in Cuba, born in Spain and raised and educated in Miami, where his mother was a bank teller, his father a bookkeeper, and his grandmother — “abuela” in his poems — was a looming, powerful presence. Family folklore has it that he was named for Richard M. Nixon, his father’s favorite president, who took a strong stand against Fidel Castro.

The Blanco home was a modest place where pork was served on Thanksgiving (in his first published poem, "America," Mr. Blanco writes that he insisted one year on having turkey), and Latin music played on holidays and birthdays. Theirs was a world dominated by food and family, where “mango,” as Mr. Blanco writes in another poem, "Mango, Number 61," “was abuela and I hunched over the counter covered with the Spanish newspaper, devouring the dissected flesh of the fruit slithering like molten gold through our fingers.”

Like many immigrant families, Mr. Blanco’s parents wanted a better life for their son. “The business was survival,” he said. He was instructed that he had three career choices: doctor, lawyer or engineer. He was “a whiz at math,” he said, so he chose engineering, suppressing his creative side (and his homosexuality) to win the approval of his grandmother, who thought he was too feminine.

As an engineer, Mr. Blanco helped design bridges, road improvements and an architectural site plan for City Hall in South Miami. But in his mid-20s, he said, he began asking himself questions about “identity and cultural negotiations and who am I, where do I belong, what is this stuff about Cuba my parents keep talking about?” Suddenly he felt “a deep need” to write.

Mr. Blanco decided to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts and creative writing, taking courses at night at Florida International University, where he had earned his engineering degree. His mentor there, Campbell McGrath (who also happens to be a childhood friend of Elizabeth Alexander, Mr. Obama’s first inaugural poet), said Mr. Blanco’s facility with numbers and structural design shines through in his writing.

“Richard was always a complete engineer within poetry,” Professor McGrath said. “If you said it needs a little work here or there, a whole transfiguration of a poem emerged. He understood revision not to be just a touch-up job but a complete reimagining, a reworking. I know that’s connected to his engineering skill.”

Mr. Blanco’s first collection, “City of a Hundred Fires,” which grew out of his graduate thesis, won the 1997 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, a prestigious literary award for a first full-length book of poetry, and was published the next year by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Soon he was flooded with teaching offers; he taught for a time at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, and Georgetown University and American University in Washington while continuing his engineering work. Only recently did he give up engineering to write full time.

While “City of a Hundred Fires” and Mr. Blanco’s second book, “Directions to the Beach of the Dead” (University of Arizona Press, 2005) explore his Cuban heritage, Mr. Blanco’s most recent collection, “Looking for the Gulf Motel,” published last year, incorporates his life as a gay man in the very conservative Cuban culture.

“It’s trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay,” he said.

Now Mr. Blanco, who is also at work on a memoir, is focused on an entirely new and, colleagues say, exceedingly difficult endeavor: composing what is known in his trade as an “occasional poem,” written to commemorate a specific event. After learning of his selection on Dec. 12 — he has kept it a secret even from his mother — he began drafting three poems; the Obama team will pick one for him to read at the inaugural ceremony.

“The challenge,” he said, “is how to be me in the poem, to have a voice that’s still intimate but yet can encompass a multitude of what America is.”

Mr. Blanco will be the nation’s fifth inaugural poet; the practice was begun by John F. Kennedy, picked up by Bill Clinton and continued by Mr. Obama. Cynics might say that in picking a Latino gay poet, Mr. Obama is covering his political bases; some gay people objected to his selection of the Rev. Rick Warren, an opponent of same-sex marriage, to deliver the invocation at his 2009 inauguration.

But Mr. Blanco says Mr. Obama’s inaugural theme, “Our People, Our Future,” resonates with him. He wants to write, he said, about “the salt-of-the-earth sense that I think all Americans have, of hard work, we can work it out together, that incredible American spirit that after 200-plus years is still there.”

Rupert Brooke was one of the best poets of the English language, he died young in war.  (Below is a photograph by Sherrill Schell, of the poet Rupert Brooke in 1913. The photo is from the book The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke published 1926) Rupert Brooke  Nationality - English Lifespan - 1887 - 1915 Family - Father was House Master at Rugby School Education - Cambridge University Career - Poet and Officer in Royal Navy First Published in 1909  Famous Poems Peace Retrospect Safety The Chilterns The Dead The Soldier The Great Lover This informations from poets.org of the Academy of American poets: Rupert Brooke English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke was born in 1887. The son of the Rugby School's housemaster, Brooke excelled in both academics and athletics. He entered his father's school at the age of fourteen. A lover of verse since the age of nine, he won the school poetry prize in 1905. A year later, he attended King's College, Cambridge, where he was known for his striking good looks, charm, and intellect. While at Cambridge, he developed an interest in acting and was president of the University Fabian Society. Brooke published his first poems in 1909; his first book, Poems, appeared in 1911. While working on his dissertation on John Webster and Elizabethan dramatists, he lived in the house that he made famous by his poem "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester." Popular in both literary and political circles, he befriended Winston Churchill, Henry James, and members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf. Although he was popular, Brooke had a troubled love life. Between 1908 and 1912 he fell in love with three women: Noel Olivier, youngest daughter of the governor of Jamaica; Ka Cox, who preceded him as president of the Fabian Society; and Cathleen Nesbitt, a British actress. None of the relationships were long lasting. In 1912, after his third romance failed, Brooke left England to travel in France and Germany for several months. Upon his return to England, Brooke received a fellowship at King's College and spent time in both Cambridge and London. In 1912 he compiled an anthology entitled Georgian Poetry, 1911-12, with Edward Marsh. The Georgian poets wrote in an anti-Victorian style, using rustic themes and subjects such as friendship and love. While critics viewed Brooke's poetry as too sentimental and lacking depth, they also considered his work a reflection of the mood in England during the years leading up to World War I. After experiencing a mental breakdown in 1913, Brooke traveled again, spending several months in America, Canada, and the South Seas. During his trip, he wrote essays about his impressions for the Westminster Gazette, which were collected in Letters From America (1916). While in the South Seas, he wrote some of his best poems, including "Tiare Tahiti" and "The Great Lover." He returned to England at the outbreak of World War I and enlisted in the Royal Naval Division. His most famous work, the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems, appeared in 1915. Later that year, after taking part in the Antwerp Expedition, he died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite while en route to Gallipoli with the Navy. He was buried on the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea. Following his death, Brooke, who was already famous, became a symbol in England of the tragic loss of talented youth during the war. A Selected Bibliography Poetry Poems (1911) Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912 (1912) 1914, and Other Poems (1915) The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1915) The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1918) The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke (1946) Prose Lithuania: A Drama in One Act (1915) John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (1916) Letters From America (1916) Democracy and the Arts (1946) The Prose of Rupert Brooke (1956) The Letters of Rupert Brooke (1968) Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection From His Writings, Some Hitherto Unpublished (1971) Letters From Rupert Brooke to His Publisher, 1911-1914 (1975) Rupert Brooke 1887-1915 'Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English Navy, who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks'

The late talented and patriotic English poet lies buried in an olive grove on Skyros Island of Greece, near Tris Boukes Bay. The tomb is some 50 yards to the left of the road which descends down to the bay.   Tomb of Rupert Brooke Photograph by Neil Maybin When he was at Cambridge University, the poet moved out of London and lived at The Old Vicarage in Grantchester. Years later when feeling in Berlin, the poet reminisce about the past he had spent there and composed the poem: The Old Vicarage, Grantchester and concludiong it with this well-known famous couplet: Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea? Brooke in 1913 Brooke suffered a nervous breakdown, he tried to recover by travelling to the United States, Canada and the Pacific islands. When he was in Tahiti, Brooke wrote Tiara Tahiti and other poetry considered to be among his best poems.

In 1914 Brooke joined the Royal Navy and took part in the Antwerp expedition. The poet died of blood-poisoning aboard a hospital ship on the way to the Dardanelles. He was originally buried by his fellow officers. The body was carried to the olive grove in the evening and a simple stone cairn was built, with a wooden cross bearing the above inscription was erected. After World War I ended, at the instigation of his mother, Brooke's tomb was replaced by the present grave and has the inscription of his famous war sonnet The Soldier.

If I should die, think only this of me:   That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air,   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;   Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,   In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.