PINOY Reading Poetry at the Vancouver Public Library
tom choy
EDMUNDO FAROLAN will be reading from his four collections of poetry in
English, Spanish, French and Tagalog as well as excerpts from his biingual
play Rizal at the Vancouver Public Library on February 10th 1997 at 7:30
p.m.
Farolan was born in Manila on December 30, 1943. He was educated by the
Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila where he received his A.B. degree. He was
offered a grant by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1965 to pursue
studies in Spanish Literature in Madrid where he received a Certificate for
Professors of Spanish at the Instituto de Cultura Hispanica. While in
Spain, he had two painting exhibitions at the Instituto de Cultura Hispanica
and one at the Colegio Mayor de Guadalupe in Madrid in 1966. His paintings
were criticized as "ahead of his time" because he was dabbling in abstract,
pop art paintings similar to those of Pollock which Spanish artists, at that
time, were not accustomed to. Antonio Amado, director of the Colegio Mayor
de Guadalupe, an avant-garde artist and a modernist critic himself, asked
him to do a mural for the Colegio. The abstract mural still stands at the
Colegio's recreation hall.
After his "painting phase", Farolan started writing and won a poetry award
at the Colegio Mayor de Guadalupe in 1967. His first collection of poems,
Lluvias Filipinas, was published in Madrid in 1967.
He was offered a teaching position at the University of Toronto where he
received his Master's Degree in Spanish in 1969. He then proceeded to the
United States where he taught at Bowling Green State University, the College
of Great Falls, and San Francisco State University.
In 1974, he returned to the Philippines where he taught at his alma mater,
Ateneo University, and later on at the University of the Philippines. He
published his second collection of poems, The Rhythm of Despair, in Manila
in 1975. In 1978, he became the Chairman of the Spanish Department of
Pamantasan ng Lunsod ng Maynila. Three of his books were published between
1978 and 1981: Gramatica y Practica, Literatura Hispanofilipina and Don
Segundo Sombra, a tagalog translation of the Argentinian classic by
Argentinian writer Ricardo Guiraldes. In 1981, he was given a grant by the
Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Bogota to do research in Spanish Linguistics. The
results of his research were published in textbook form, Espanol Intermedio
which was later used by some Philippine universities. While in Bogota, he
published his third book of poems Tercera Primavera.
He returned to Canada in 1984 and has been living in Vancouver since then.
He has written, in the past 10 years, Palali, an historical novel, which he
has also adapted into a screenplay, two historical stage plays (Rizal and
Aguinaldo), and his fourth book of poems, Oh, Canada!,a collection of
Canadian poems from 1967 to the present, published in Toronto in 1994. His
stage play, Rizal, has recently been published by the International Readers'
Theatre.
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tom choy
"your vancouver connection"
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vancouver,bc, canada
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604-273-3155
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Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing
himself. -Leo Tolstoy