“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.†-- James Baldwin, THE FIRE NEXT TIME
"My aim is to take familiar things and make
Poetry of them, and do it in such a way
That it looks as if it was easy as could be
For anybody to do it (although he'd sweat
And strain and work his head off, alll in vain).
Such is the power of judgment, of knowing what
It means to put the elements together
In just the right way; such is the power of making
A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much."
Horace's Epistle to the Pisos (trans. David Ferry)
Upcoming Readings
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Persea Books
Order My American Kundiman at Powells or
Amazon.com
Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive at Persea Books
Review of UPROCK in Time Out New York
Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive , which won the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award, and most recently My American Kundiman. His chapbook Uncommon Denominators won the Palanquin Poetry Series Award from the University of South Carolina, Aiken. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including North American Review , Pindledyboz, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity, Columbia , and the Beacon Best. His work has been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net among others.
His poems and voiceovers were included in the Argentine feature-length film Anhua: Amanecer which screened at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. Among his current writing projects is the script for the documentary film Camp Roxas, directed by Alex Munoz. He has also appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show and the BBC Radio's World Today . His invited readings include the Dodge Poetry Festival, the poetry reading series at Georgia Tech, Poetry @ MIT, the Carr Reading Series at UIUC, the Whitney Museum, Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned his MFA, and hundreds of other venues that span the United States, London, Buenos Aires, and the Philippines.
He has served as visiting writer at Penn State Altoona, Centre College and, currently, the University of Texas, Austin. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. In addition to conducting workshops in Alabama prisons through Auburn University, he has taught high school workshops through the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Sarah Lawrence College's Summer Writing Conference for High School Students, and the Volume workshops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a native of New Jersey and the son of Filipino immigrants.
