I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

In the Philippines in March

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November 1, 2024: JoAnn Balingit

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JoAnn Balingit was Delaware’s 16th poet laureate, the first person of color to hold the title, and she served from 2008 to 2015. Born in Columbus, Ohio to to a German American mother and a Filipino immigrant father, she grew up in Lakeland, Florida.

“Today the world begins again” is the first line of her poem “Still Life with Rows of Forgive,” which can be found in her full-length collection Words for House Story, a 2015 Best Books selection at Beltway Poetry. In this poem, a father pushes a red lawnmower.

Today the world begins again
with a weekend in October
lawnmowers spewing chords
laundry snapping dogs barking
from every corner
family surrounded
with noise of living on lawns
my father aspired to
but did not love

To love him properly
I need outside…

In this collection, you’ll also find a mother without whereabouts (maybe lost in the shower), windows over kitchen sinks, and migrations of birds. The narrator of “History Textbook America” receives a phone call from an uncle and then, “a dial tone erased the Philippines.”

In her poem “Meteor Shower,” the narrator and Julian have stolen away from the dishes and the black cast iron skillet to create a moment under the stars. Conversation bursts into the poem, making it feel intimate and playful. Eight couplets plus a final single line, highlighting that last line. And in each set of two couplets, the last word of each line is, respectively, spread, leave, clear, free.

The poem begins,

Julian caught the first one as we got blankets spread,
heads settled back, let the stars burn into focus to leave
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the days dregs, dishwater down the drain…

“Home School” is a prose poem. I majored in linguistics and love words and so does this poem. Here’s the first stanza:

His science glossary does not have contrary so he fetches The Junior
Book of Knowledge. He watches as I lower my OED to the table
like a baby or a side of beef, A hunk of pages drapes my forearm as
if somebody fainted. “Onion skin!” he crows, then asks, “Which
would you want: A little dictionary with big words, or a big
dictionary with little words?”

In 2023 JoAnn received a Fulbright Scholarship for the 2023-24 academic year, and at the beginning of 2024, she spent four months in the Philippines, the land of her father.

Dr. Balingit’s project, entitled WHAT WERE the NAMES of the TREES? A Memoir, is a hybrid-genre lyrical work about growing up bi-racial in the American South, and coming of age in the aftermath of the violent loss of her parents. Separated from her eight younger siblings, the lonely teen enters adulthood desperate to belong. During her stay in Pampanga Province, she will seek an understanding of her Filipino family history and the forces that shaped her father’s education and environment as a U.S. colonial subject before he migrated to the United States.

JoAnn holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from Indiana University, and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership from the University of Delaware. She worked as a school librarian and a teacher trainer in the public schools for twelve years. She is also a nonfiction writer and the author of Forage, winner of the 2011 Whitebird Chapbook Prize, and Your Heart and How It Works, which explores female identity and Philippine ancestry and received the 2010 Global Filipino Literary Award for poetry. She is the mother of four children born in Morocco, Portugal, Kentucky, and Delaware. She has lived in Delaware for over twenty-five years.

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Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how JOANN BALINGIT spends her days.