Minnesota Opera opens ‘The Song Poet’ by local author Kao Kalia Yang

ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) – The confined walls of St. Paul’s historic East Side Freedom Library still create an expansive world of words and stories. One of those stories comes from a respected Hmong author whose father used to bring her and her sister to this library every week to bring home a bag of new books. 

But that very father who patiently waited in the car kept some of the best stories to himself.

Now, half a lifetime later, Kao Kalia Yang sits in the middle of this old Carnegie Library where the stories from her father pour from the pages of the book she wrote for him.

See full article below.

https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-opera-opens-the-song-poet-by-local-author-kao-kalia-yang

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Bee Yang

Hmong song poetry | kwv txhiaj hmoob

Thaum Hluas Txog Hnub Laus: When the Days of Youth are Gone (Bee Yang, 2014)

This is an album of Hmong song poetry, kwv txhiaj hmoob, composed and sung by Bee Yang, Kao Kalia Yang’s father. The album notes and English translation of one of the songs are by Kao Kalia Yang.

Kwv txhiaj is, in the words of Ralph Ellison on the American Blues, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-cosmic lyricism. As a form, the blues [and kwv txhiaj] is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

NOTE:  The duration of the songs do not reflect the actual song length.  Please consider ordering the CD for the full songs.  Thank you.

*This CD is available for purchase for $15.  Click below to order:

Bee Yang: Hmong Song Poetry

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