POET-EDITORS/ 22


Aileen Ibardaloza

Aileen Ibardaloza is a poet and memoirist who first trained as a molecular biologist. She grew up in Manila, and studied and traveled around Asia and Europe before joining her family in the United States in 2000. She was married in 2009; she and her husband live in the San Francisco bay area with their two cats. Also the Associate Editor of Our Own Voice Literary Ezine, she has seen writings appear in various online and print media including Manorborn; 1,000 Views of Girl Singing (Leafe Press, U.K. and California, 2009); A Taste of Home (Anvil, Manila, 2008); Fellowship; Moria Poetry; and Galatea Resurrects. traje de boda, her first poetry collection, has just been published by Meritage Press.

What is (or has been) your favorite editing project and why?

I would say, Bibliographies, such as –

Our Own Voice Literary Ezine. “Filipino Ancestry and Progeny: A Partial Bibliography.”

Our Own Voice Literary Ezine. “Bibliography: Martial Law Retrospective.”

which give overviews of works relating to Filipino genealogy and a specific period in Philippine history. I consider these editing projects since they involved my ploughing through and reviewing as much material as I could, so that the end product reads like a summary (or a body of work unto itself), giving the readers a sense of what has been studied and published on these particular topics. As wiki puts it,

Bibliography, literally, “book writing”, [which is concerned] with the “bookness” of books,… is a systematic list of [writings]…

In other words, a process of gathering for the purpose of making whole. Yet, it is rarely ever complete, it only constantly approaches “wholeness”, like poetry. I like it for this reason, and because the format allows me to do this:

So, Poet. What is Your Favorite Editing Project?. WWW: Your Voice, continuing.

---

Traje de Boda
        — For Sophie

I
longed to
be beautiful, outside

of
you. See
me live my

ironies.
I will
drape exquisitely, therefore,

be
still. Let
us be perfect

for
a day,
and, thereafter, depend

on
incompleteness, which
begs for beginnings.

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