This week on the Poetic Resurrection Podcast we have poet/actor Jasmine Di Angelo. We discuss and she reads her poem “Halves of Halves”. The poem reflects on being multicultural from Denmark and coming to Los Angeles at a young age. Check out this unique discussion on identity and acceptance.
Jasmine was born along the North Sea and learned how to walk under a Scandinavian sun (aka Denmark). She then made a quick, twenty-year pit stop in Los Angeles where she was raised acting on sound stages, in casting offices and sparring boys at her parents’ Taekwondo studio. Once baked until golden brown in the heat of the San Fernando Valley, she headed east and is now proud to call herself a New Yorker.
Jasmine has been writing poetry since age 11 and is the author of a one-woman play called S.T.A.T. (or, Stop Talking About That). Currently, she is compiling her first book of poetry to be released in late 2022. Jasmine also posts stories on her blog at jasdiangelo.com. Instagram: @jasdiangelo
“Halves of Halves”
Hum hum
Where are you from?
Stay out of the sun, stay out of the sun.
Small feet stretch and leap
From Nordic flatland to Californian heat.
Hum hum
Where are you from?
Strange sounds folded my tongue
Into halves of halves, splintered DNA wide
So I don’t look how I feel inside.
Hum hum
Where are you from?
Where there’s hygge and chocolate pastry with rum
Black licorice whiplash made syllables unsweet
And my soft consonants were rounded with concrete.
Hum hum
Where are you from?
A deep weaving of words came loose and undone
Replaced by hard R’s and confused faces
And all the wrong checkboxes naming all the wrong places.
Hum hum
Where are you from?
She gave him a daughter, but he wanted a son
Kicking and punching and dancing and screaming –
Multicolored horrors printed in all my dreaming.
Hum hum
Where are you from?
My skin is adjacent but cannot fully become
The flags in my cells, the spice in my blood
Many shades of soil heavy with flood.
I go slipping in the mud —
And my hands and feet won’t plant because
I am from everywhere and nowhere
Crossing bloodlines and flood lines
And lies
And lines and lies and lines
Pressed in the corners of my parents’ eyes.
The forward pitch
The needle stitch
Wove countries and more countries together which
Bent themselves into the shape of my body
Tucked cultures into the ridges of my irises–browned
Identity at once lost and found.
And in the mixing there was
Erasing
And in the erasing
Came something new
Brilliant in its Namelessness.
Hum hum
What are you?
And who are you from?
Someplace suspended between the moon
And the sun
Where freckles stretch footprints across the bridge of my nose
Where a new color quietly grows
Where many faces merge into one
And languages lay languid under my tongue
2022 © Jasmine Di Angelo
This week on Poetic Resurrection we welcome Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson. We discuss her poem Invention, her experiences of being an adoptee. We laugh about rejection letters and go into detail about her journey in becoming the poet laureate.
A couple of years ago, I was thinking of writing children’s books; I came up with this story called Teddy. I named it after a teddy bear that I’ve had for many years. Not that creative with the name.
Grieving Dreams is when we review our lives and realize a dream we have pursued so long doesn’t benefit us anymore.
Yearend episode 2021
This week on 
This week on Poetic Resurrection we discuss confusion. Sometimes I wonder why we go through experiences and maybe read too much into it and then we’re confused. This month didn’t get off to a great start for me. My computer crashed and I’m still recovering my info. I usually have an episode ready each Monday but that hasn’t happened this month. One of the pluses so far this month is that I visited my family in Chicago and I’m blessed to have my parents in good health.
This week, we are honored to have Luis J. Rodriguez back on the Poetic Resurrection Podcast. Luis reads his poem, Always Running. This poem describes the hardships of poverty, love loss, and how Luis dealt with his experiences. We discuss the difficulties of growing up in the hood, living in tenements full of roaches, rats, and despair. His episode aired November 27th and after I posted his episode my computer died so my blogs are behind. Hoping the audience understands. Here’s his poem Always Running from Concrete River 1991 Curbstone Press.
One evening, I had a visualization of a baker in the 1500s, working in a sweltering environment making bread. This imagery was so vivid, I wrote it down and decided to write the poem Birth of Dough. After much research into bakers of that period, I learned they were responsible for the main food source of the town. The Black Plague resurfaced around the 1530s in Europe and Nostradamus was a plague doctor then. Unfortunately, his wife and two children died during the plague.
While cleaning and decluttering, I wondered why we give our mental power to possessions? Why is it so difficult to let go of items? Will we need it later? Was it a gift from a loved one? Did we have a moment of weakness and buy an expensive item that we don’t use? Is it because we have given it a soul/spirit? Wikipedia states, “Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things-animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather system, human handiwork, and perhaps even words-as animated and alive.” Can this be the reason it’s difficult to let go? I wonder. There’s so much we don’t understand beyond what we can see. Animism has had different meanings throughout the anthropologic field. These beliefs have existed in many indigenous religions and currently adapted into some New Age beliefs.