The Chatelaine's Poetics

MOI SUNDAY BLATHE...I MEAN, SERMON

Somebody's husband raped you while you were supposed to be in the choir pounding a tambourine, not a chest. Early Sunday morning, must have been an Easter Sunday because something came back from death, it came with a wedding ring and it was black and it smiled and it was good. You got pregnant. Good. Had an abortion. Good. That's what the Lord said in Genesis, he saw the world and what was happening, and it was still good.
--from "Goodness And The Salt of the Earth" by Thylias Moss, one of the prose poems in Models of the Universe

The second printing of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole recalls a conversation I once had with another poet. I told him that I seemed to have better luck getting books published than individual poems.

And it's true about the work in Reproductions -- several of those poems got rejected by journals which specialize in the prose poem form (Reproductions is a selected prose poem collection from 1996-2002).

I think there are implications to this. It's not just that it may not make sense for rejected poems to find book publication if the rejected poems really are bad. It's that some editors of journals who rejected individual poems ended up loving the book -- now, why would that be the case?

I speculate that one implication has to do with the popular misconception that the prose poem form is not concerned with line or the line-break, which relates to the larger implication over peeps' abilities to accept something that doesn't follow what they understand to be proscribed definitions of poetry....as if Poetry can be defined.

A few years back, after writing a whole bunch of poems that came to be in Reproductions, I thought I'd better figure out what the heck the prose poem is supposed to be, and ended up perusing Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem (Eds. Stuart Friebert and David Young, Oberlin College Press, 1995). I found it a wonderful project, and quite useful for purpose of being introduced to the history of the prose poem. But nothing I wrote was like anything in that anthology -- that's when I realized: I may not know what I was doing but I was on the right track!

Okay, nuff said. Sorry for being elliptical (if I am) but it is Sunday.

What does Sunday have to do with this? Well, it's today -- so feel free to consider this blog...Church. The Chatelaine, you see, believes with absolutely no apology: Poetry can be

A Holy Space

EVEN THE PLUTOCRATIC LIBERTARIAN RIGHT WINGER SAYS YEA!

One of moi peeps writes in about moi prior post:

"I'm glad you are promoting the whole gay marriage issue. I may be a plutocratic libertarian right winger, but I have seen no logical reason why gays should not be allowed the same civil rights to marriage as heterosexuals. In fact, I wish I could remember to whom to attribute the statement, but one blog I read recently compared a certain screwed up pop star diva who got drunk and married in Vegas only to have it annulled less than 24 hours later to a lesbian couple she has known who have been together for more than 20 years. The author then asked, who should be allowed to make the choice to marry.

"I don't think that the government should intrude on religious doctrine and if a religion wants to say homosexuality is an abomination and deny church weddings, fine. But as to civil marriages, there is no logical rationale against it that anyone has posted. And I have looked long and hard."

kari edwards' transdada offers coverage in real-time!

READ KARI EDWARDS ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Achilles' toy box is in disarray. The angels are too distracted making pink triangles to pay attention to the latest project requested by the Chatelaine who spoils Achilles.

"I know!" the angel with mother-of-pearl eyes proclaims. Let's just recycle Petrus' wooden box for Achilles' toys!"

Great idea! the rest agree.

Thus, Achilles' toys (his favorite being the plastic keys provided by Meritage Press 2005 author Sean Finney) are now located in a wooden box, which is all for the better as ... Achilles also seems to like chewing on ... said wooden box.

Meanwhile: PINK TRIANGLES. Because a revolution is occuring beyond the Iron Gate and we all must be concerned. If there's anything the U.S. can learn from the Philippines, it's being wary of making "actor" be synonymous with "politican." That is just one unsatisfactory metaphor.

Read kari edwards' transdada blog for coverage on an issue that should concern everyone: gay marriage, yes, but more accurately: human rights.

ACHILLES POETICS

The denizens of St. Helena and Calistoga may be used to seeing a long-haired lady in a New Trier soccer jacket (stolen from a college boyfriend) go up and down their respective Main Streets with a German shepherd puppy. Leash-training, folks. It's all part of this intensive obedience training for Achilles, now 17 weeks old -- but already weighs in at about 43 pounds. Now's the time to ingrain training into this pup...who, if I may digress, is even more drop-dead gorgeous than Moi and...that's saying a lot.

I've explained before that I want to be sure Achilles is well-trained as he looks to top 100 pounds as a mature dog and bad training can cause a dangerous animal.

But there's also another reason. Though Achilles comes from championship stock, I wasn't looking for a dog to compete in dog shows like the Westminster etc. I just wanted a fine dog for moi fallen angels. So, when I first ordered Achilles from his North Carolina breeder, I said, Yah, Moi prefers the dog neutered. The breeder BEGGED me to wait to see how Achilles develops -- because of Achilles' lineage. Mom was the No. 1 German Shepherd in the U.S. last year and Dad was the North American champion in 2001. If I'm bragging about Achilles again and you don't like it? Go away -- this is moi blog. Nope -- correcto: from hereon, this is the Chatelaine and Puppy Achilles' Blog!

Anyway, on neutering: this isn't an issue I'd thought about before -- I had just thought -- yeah, neuter the dog cause it's not like I plan to breed him. But the breeder begged...and, ya know, the Chatelaine has a soft heart.

What I've since learned is that not neutering a dog enhances Alpha Male tendencies. So this also means that if all these trainers floating about the mountain don't succeed in training Achilles to be a gentleman, he's more likely to be neutered:

FUCKIN' BALLS ARE ACTUALLY AT STAKE.

Now, I've since fallen in love with moi puppy -- I'm sure you peeps can tell. And the very idea of cutting off Achilles' balls....well, it's just too painful. As I once wrote in a poem entitled "Latin" (from my Reproductions Of The Empty Flagpole -- SECOND PRINTING, not SECOND EDITION -- get that dang jargon correct, okay?!):

I have never liked my men on their knees.

So, peeps -- wish me luck with teaching Achilles to heel. A poet shouldn't ever desire to cut off anyone's balls. For Poetry....always retains its balls!

But then again, maybe Poetry ... also ... should never heel ...

Oh Ye Paradox -- are ye also a puppy?!

BRINGING ATTENTION TO TWO POET-TEACHERS

Now that the seven wonders of the night
have been stolen by history

Now that the sky is lost and the stars
have slipped into a book

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

Now that there are no blossoms left
to glue to the sky

What can I do, I who never invented
anything

and who dreamed of you so much
I was amazed to discover

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor
--from "Borrowed Love Poems" by John Yau

One of the Chatelaine's favorite duties is bringing attention to poets -- particularly poet-teachers -- who make a difference. Artist and poet Bard Edlund writes about my prior post:

Eileen,
thanks for bringing to mind Tan Lin. i met him at the Maryland Institute College of Art, as John Yau (my teacher) invited him to do a reading. i thought he was very interesting, and his way of thinking about language opened my mind further (that whole class opened my mind in different ways to what one can do with words). i think i'll have to check out his new book.

My pleasure to remind you, Bard. Yes -- do check out Tan's words. The "sculptural" (my word) approach he brings to text undoubtedly will be of interest as well.

And, thanks, too, for reminding me of John Yau -- one of my favorite poets and one of the most generous poet-teachers I have ever met. Check out this heartbreakingly beautiful poem, the title poem to his most recent poetry collection which everyone should read: BORROWED LOVE POEMS -- here's an excerpt:

What can I do, I never believed happiness
could be premeditated

What can I do, having argued with the obedient world
that language will infiltrate its walls

What can I do, now that I have sent you
a necklace of dead dried bees

and now that I want to
be like the necklace

and turn flowers into red candles
pouring from the sun

POETRY VIA ABDICATING CRITICAL FACULTIES?

If Language Poets might see “relaxing” as an abdication of critical faculties, [Tan] Lin apparently uses “boredom” and stimulation of a “relaxed” state to help readers stray from habits and expectations of reading and arrive at unfamiliar (perhaps “beautiful”) musical, linguistic, and perceptual enchantments: “Because most literature and especially poetry are fundamentally false forms of excitation and dread, it is necessary to repeat them”--through fragmentary sampling--“and by repeating forget what they were ‘about’” (17). In the poem itself, he intones: “I wrote this was repeated/ I wrote this again and again// . . . . All styles are the same” (322).
--from a circulating review by Thomas Fink of Tan Lin's BLIPSOAK01

Tan Lin sends forth an invitation. Though I won't be in New York to make it, I do recommend New Yorkers and those in New York this weekend check this out:

BLIP SOAK 01

book signing | Tan Lin

Printed Matter Bookstore
535 W 22nd
New York City

saturday 2.28.04
5-7pm

*****

I met Tan Lin, by the way, shortly after leaving banking for poetry, when I interviewed him about his first book LOTION BULLWHIP GIRAFFE. Can you imagine never having paid much attention to poetry before and being faced with his Sun & Moon book? (Read said book to know what I mean; you may enjoy the ride anyway....) But I loved his poems -- and I decided to write on it specifically because I didn't understand why I loved those poems. Well, I'm not sure that I now *know* why I love Tan's (or anyone's) poems -- what I do know is to not get moi feathers all ruffled from the uncertainty. (By the way, I used that interview to ask Tan a question I'd been dying to ask but was too embarassed to ask anyone else -- this was in 1986 or 1987, mind you -- "What is Language Poetry?")

Relatedly, Tom Fink's description in above epigraph recalls for me a favorite line by Charles Bernstein (from his Log Rhythms):

"you can't leave the theater humming the critique"

Ya know, the most brilliant artists I know are often those who aren't afraid to look dumb. I haven't yet had a chance to read BLIP SOAK 01 (though it's on my looooooong to-do list), but from this excerpt I saw in Tom Fink's review, it sounds like Tan succeeded in achieving his desire. Because Tan may have wanted to use boredom, but he certainly achieved beauty with such lines as these (due to Blogger format and moi ineptness, I rely on periods to indicate caesuras in the last lines):

I dined aroma
ginger oscillation flunk

I thought of you
You were silver

Like a page or
penitentiary

And what is gold when....................nois
handcuffs dimpled...........................surro

them, the
eyelash

of your former..................................PARC.......AE
gelatin.............................................larynx

that they were my family implants pumping the dia.....pers
the dew scratches shoes

WELCOME BACK, HEATHEN

David Hess!

WHY SANDY MCINTOSH AMUSES MOI

So, currently up on the Marsh Hawk Press Blog is an announcement, drafted by MHP Managing Editor Sandy McIntosh, as regards some happy news: 15 months after its release, moi book Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole has just been sent to press for a new SECOND EDITION! YaY! Bless the muses...

...and bless you all who have supported my work, including these poet-teachers who used it for their classes: Juliana Spahr (Mills College), Nick Carbo (Columbia College, Chicago), Chris Murray (University of Texas at Austin), Thomas Fink (LaGuardia Community College), Robert Gluck (San Francisco State University), Leny Strobel (Sonoma State University), Justin Chin (San Francisco State University)....I'm sure I'm missing others and I apologize ahead of time. I did want to thank the teachers specifically because many poetry books sell in volume mostly through textbook usage. By the way, I will be visiting Bob Gluck's class at SFSU on Monday (7-8:30 p.m.), March 9, to discuss the poems in Reproductions -- I believe it's open to the public (Humanities 133).

Oh, and yes, yes, I'm sure you oenophiles had something to do with the book's sales, too. Let Moi never, after all, forget my drunken constituency....

But anyway, there's something missing in the announcement at the Marsh Hawk Blog; the last paragraph is this one sentence:

Eileen R. Tabios is the winner of the Philippines National Book Award, among other distinguished prizes.

But when Sandy sent me the draft to look at, he had added another sentence to tweak my performance act of preening on this Chatelaine Blog, so that the first version I saw had this ending last paragraph:

Eileen R. Tabios is the winner of the Philippines National Book Award, among other distinguished prizes. And yet, she is so becomingly modest….

So, okay, yadda, we had a good laugh. Then Sandy proceeded to spam the world...except he forgot to delete the second sentence in his first group e-mail out there....

...which reminds me of yet another recent faux pas by Sandy. Whilst we were discussing his 12-inch measurement of what is actually 3 inches (about which I blogged last week) -- he swears he was talking about a poem instead of another thingie signified by another p-word -- we, as you peeps can imagine, were generating some purty ribald backchannel e-mails. Well, apparently, my name is next to the name of a MAJOR POET in Sandy's e-mail address book....and he mistakenly e-mailed said MAJOR POET one of those e-mails....had to to do with, if I recall correctly, hardness...

THE CHATELAINE'S DESIRE

I will do it with words, if words mean anything to you.
--Eric Gamalinda

Among contemporary Filipino English-language poets, I feel the most affinity with the work of Eric Gamalinda. ("Affinity, if I need to say it, bespeaks personal preference, not an aesthetic judgement here -- a difference that I often think people don't understand...). Eric's essay in PINOYPOETICS is simply brilliant; I won't reprint it, but I do want to share his sample poem for the anthology....as that poem happens to capture The Chatelaine's Poetics: BEAUTY.

And given the times, let me clarify that it is a Beauty that partly represents the notion of lyric as protest against you ugly politicians, ugly warmongerers, ugly anti-gay marriage pontificators -- all y'all ugly hypocrites. You all should read this poem, too, and find God by denying your shadow gods.

Ach. I paused in the writing of this post to re-read Eric's PINOYPOETICS essay. It really is brilliant; here -- I'll share this much:

In the future, only beauty will shock us.

Interior language, exterior world. In the Philippines I wrote in English, the language that represented for me the interior, distinct from my material reality. It enabled me to go within, into a secret realm, because there was no chance for my poems to be read by too many people. It was also a language that filled me with contradictory emotions: while it expressed my innermost thoughts and emotions, it was nonetheless a language to which I had no native claim, and it deprived me of the immediacy a “native” language is supposed to give. It was a language that obliterated me, not only to myself but to the rest of the world, and especially to the empire which imposed it upon me, where a non-native speaker, an immigrant in the language, will always be inferior. But in the U.S., English has surfaced as my everyday language, not just the language of my poetry. It brought me face to face with my interior world, the world I had previously articulated only in private, and brought it up from its depths for everyone to see; it was a terrifying experience in the beginning, but it demolished another barrier for me: the barrier I had imposed upon language to protect me from my own emotions and memories. When people ask me if I have changed after years of living in America, I say yes: I have finally made my peace with the language.

*****

And, finally, the narrative lurking beneath Eric's poem? It's how the Chatelaine ended up building a fortress on a mountain, then locking the Iron Gate.

So it's also quite synchronistic that Eric's poems, for me, represent the Chatelaine's Desire. His poems can't help but reflect the Renaissance that is his mind. Eric is a poet, novelist, critic, teacher, editor, visual artist and the list can go on. In fact, his most recent foray is into video and, immediately, he also became a master at it. His poem below was originally written for his video "Vera's Room" which just won 2nd and 3rd prizes at the recent Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Festival!!! Congrats, Eric! Were Eric to visit Galatea, the creatures in the forest would pause and hail the second coming of Da Vinci who, after all, spent his last days at Chateaux de Cloux...:

Final point -- this poem is presented in public by Eric as read out by a computer. Like...the Chatelaine is presented by Eileen Tabios as written out by a computer....[insert computerized cackle here]....nifty, eh?....[insert computerized fallen angel's giggle here]...

MELTING CITY
By Eric Gamalinda

One of these days I'm going to melt all the gold of Paris and turn it
                into money.
I'll spread it all over the ghettoes of the Arabs,
over the palm of the old woman begging on the steps of Barbes
                Rochechouart;
she'll wake up with brilliant tattoos burning in her hands.
I'll take all the hunger of the world and use it as my ammunition.
I'll live in frontiers where languages merge and confuse the tongue.
I'll eat only chickpeas and pepper and learn to crush olives for oil.
I'll use the oil for bathing and nourishment and sex.
I'll follow an angel in the fog of the baths
and sit next to him while three men take turns sucking his cock.
I'll dream only on Tuesdays and only at 4 AM.
I'll be a prostitute for a night and earn my living giving pleasure.
I've already told you how the earth spins backward
                in the wrong direction and we'll wind up
in the first moment of the world.
I've told you that water decrees its own fate
and the deeper it is the less light you need;
that light moves in circles,
what you are now is already a reflection in a hundred years.
I've told you how I've seen the end of the world,
it will come slowly like madness, like a boat on the Seine.
I feel every life that is shown to me
comes when it is most broken and most in need,
and I tell you what I've already said:
I will pave the gold of Paris all over your lives,
I will do it with words, if words mean anything to you.
This is the way I've always known it,
though all my life I wanted not to believe,
I did everything I could not to believe.

AIN'T NO EFFIN WAY MOI IS GONNA SILENCE THE PEOPLE!

PINOYPOETICS is 150 pages over budget. At the moment, this anthology looks to clock over 500 pages. As its publisher through Meritage Press, I'ma scrambling here and there considering things like -- uh, 50 pound vs 70 pound weight paper, Publish-on-Demand technology any help?, or Should Moi Learn To Cook So's Moi Can Do Potluck Fundraising Events?...and so on.

The one option I'm not doing, which would be the easy fix, is to drop any author. How can I when even the young uns have reached deeeeeeeep to deliver messages like this below by Marlon Unas Esguerra. Who else would tell his story if not his own "people"? Forty-two English language Filipino poets in PINOYPOETICS (old vs young, established vs emerging -- it don't matter as most have been obscure(d) in the literary world). In PINOYPOETICS, they've all been undammed to damn a history of silencing. Here's Marlon with a poetics, followed by a sample poem:

THE POETRY OF REBOLUSYON
By Marlon Unas Esguerra

FOR MANY Filipino Americans who do not deny their “Filipinoness,” there is that defining moment that makes them more than just a writer, more than just a purveyor of Asian American literature, more than just a spectator. There is that moment in college when you pick up Carlos Bulosan and read, “I know in my heart I live in exile in America.” Someone hands you a thin book with a picture of Bienvenido Santos on the cover (who looks like your Lolo) and you say to yourself skeptically, “Scent of Apples? Yeah, whatever.” You come upon Hagedorn, Roska, and Constantino as easily or randomly or magically as you do a Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, or The Last Poets. Or better yet, you hit that first open mic. There is a featured reading by a group of cats (showing my age) who look just like you, wear their hearts on their sloganized sleeves and have names like Kiwi, Faith, Balagtasan Collective, Isangmahal, 8th Wonder, Feedback, re:Verse or Two Tongues.

There is that moment when you realize that this is all connected. That the six degrees of separation among Filipinos is really just two degrees. That in the end you do have a story to tell that is worth telling. Somewhere between your identity politic and consciousness, your contradiction and critical analysis is poetry.

In the summer of 1998, the National Filipino American Youth Association (NFAYA) held its National Conference in an isolated Northwest suburb of Chicago.

Twist: a feature performance by Isangmahal Arts Kollective. Their One Love comprised of emcees, b-girls & b-boys, poets, singers, musicians, performance artists, visual artists, activists in-training, future teachers and social workers. All were under 25 years old. All were students or had recently graduated. All were Filipino and Filipino American. It was REBOLUSYON manifest, with all the unrelenting sincerity, audacity to dream, and passion for art and community that would frighten their parents but inspire a new generation. All this in the middle of Illinois Suburbia!

Twist: an open mic after their reading. A young poet Dennis Sangmin Kim and I had found each other in the people of color, politically-charged open mic scene in Chicago a year before. Our 14-minute duet/tirade at the open mic forged a bond between Isangmahal and what would soon be (with Emily Chang and Anida Yoeu Esguerra) the panAsian spoken word group, I Was Born with Two Tongues. Several group poems, 300 miles, no sleep, another conference, and twenty-four hours later, the two degrees set forth to rewrite the world.

What I’ve found in my process is simple. There is a continuity in community that I cannot deny. There is a responsibility to my art that is intrinsically political, anti-empire, and anti-assimilationist. I will change the world with a pen. On my sleeve are the tools and in MAKIBAKA are the two degrees massive: Hagedorn, Linmark, Galang, Carbo, Santos, Isangmahal, Santilla, Freedom, Kiwi, Bindlestiff, Balagtasan, SIPA, Maganda Mag, MaARTe, P.A.C.I.F.I.C.S., Blue Scholars, Mango Tribe and on.

I am not only a high school teacher because it pays the bills, nor do I teach to fill my time while I pursue my aspirations as a young writer. I strive to change the world with a pen and I feel my time as an artist is contingent upon my accountability and responsibility to community. My audience may be the world, but my work is congruent to those who have been failed by the falsehood of the American Dream and American material prosperity. My poetics include the story of my father, my neighborhood in gentrification, a corrupt Chicago, a cowboy America. I start from a place that I know, and that place does not deny my privilege nor my internalized patriarchy.

*****

JUDGEMENT DAY

Eliza wants to be a botanist
because she needs to believe
that grass is just grass–
it's the fences we need to work on.
A+

Francisco is always on the verge
of falling asleep because high school,
high school ain't a life and death matter,
and in one year all that rest will come in handy
when he has 24/7 of real life to deal with.
B

Jose scribbled all of two lines
in our last G.E.D. class.
Where will you be in five years, I asked.
His answer–
I'll be dead or in county.
I'll be with God, and I'll finally be safe.
A+

Maria claims the West Siiiide!
She dots all her I's with those cute little hearts
but transferred out of my class to enroll in gym.
F

Daniel journals everyday.
A+
but smoked up two weeks before graduation
and got kicked out.
INCOMPLETE

Gus? No one has seen Gus for weeks.
Some king wants him dead for looking at his girl.
INCOMPLETE

Raul wants to know,
Yo, teach? We gonna watch a movie today, man?
F+, man!
but said yesterday,
Yo, check it, words are only meaningful to those
who need to know that words can heal.
A-

David? Well, David calls himself Bob.
A+
but yo, check it–
Bob says he spells his name backwards.
EXTRA CREDIT

Vladimir hates poetry
because he just can't get it sometimes.
C-
but he never, ever, quits trying.
A+++++

And what of their teacher?
What of his grade?
What of this teacher who wants something to die for?
Who wants to tell them–
It will be alright.
You will survive this.
This from the teacher
on the undergraduate ten-year plan.
This from the teacher
who needs to know it will be alright.
F – self pity
who knows he has a chance to do it right this time.
D+ – better
who knows that ten hours of lesson planning
can fall apart depending on what time of day class begins.
C-
who needs to write more love poems to his wife.
F, minus
who cries over the words his students write.
B-
who cries when classes fall
from twelve to six to two all the time.
B
who wants it all for his students
and knows there is work to be done.
INCOMPLETE

HOW POETRY AND SWIMMING SHARE THE SAME ASS

in brazil/ the women samba/ only with their legs/ their faces are somber/ and their upper torsos/ never move

her dreams were filled with ghosts/ perched on her bony wrists/ grinning gargoyles/ who menaced her every step/ and wouldn't/ let her go

she longed to be/ her mother/ in a silver dress/ some softly fading memory/ lifting her legs/ in a sinuous tango
--from "The Woman Who Thought She Was More Than A Samba" by Jessica Hagedorn

So I learned recently that Poetry and Swimming share the same ass. Yah, I returned to the pool to attempt swimming again -- this time, I was just trying to improve my endurance and form by going as long as I can by kicking and holding forth to a blue floating thingie across the pool. And as I kept doing such, I discovered that if you lift up your ass up so you're more horizontally-inclined, it improves your speed and is, I assume, improving your form.

Now, I'm sure you savvy swimmers out there are all a hoo-haa or rolling your eyes over my eensy-teensy swimming steps. But are you entertaining me or am I entertaining you? Anyhow....so, there I was in the pool and, yes, I discovered that I should lift my breathtakingly lovely ass as I must have been swimming forward at an incline off of the horizontal.

And lifting that ass, you see, has to do with poetry -- at least in terms of how Jessica Hagedorn discussed such in Black Lightning. To wit, La Jessica noted (and aptly so): a poem shouldn't be words sittin down,fannin themselves....

So if you wish to write a good poem, peeps, just raise said poem's ass up to the sky. Cause a poem, baby, don't just sit on its ass, hoarding its gas....(And, Michael -- thanks for calling moi Reproductions "extraordinary" but, Sweetie -- not being flatulent seems a higher standard to me than the line break for judging a poem...wink).

See all the poetry lessons that you can glean from only this blog?

Here's a poem I scratched out last night that seems relevant to this topic, and as dictated by Carlos Santana!


"Samba Pa Ti" (#2)
--for Jim, who swims and writes poems with equal flux-ibility

A fifth of my life
in water, I defined myself

to her who now asks
after her second swimming class

"Raising my ass
improves my kick, right?"

Air shifts, and the water
I see is suddenly elsewhere

Two turtles side by side
traversing the Sea of Cortes

I focus to respond, "No
You want to be parallel

with the water surface. You
want as little splash as possible"

The turtles return before my mind's
eyes. As before, their languid wake

the most erotic thing I have ever
witnessed not made by a woman

Now, she is telling me, "Damn
While swimming, I'd so wanted to

moon the sun"

I WANNA HEAR YOU SCREAMING IN CHICAGO!!!

So, today, I took Achilles for a car drive for the first time without his doggy seat belt!! And moi puppy behaved like ... an angel!!! We ended up driving for a couple of hours through the pretty vineyards under a beautiful sunlit and seamless blue sky as I was just so pleased that he just sat there like a princely gentleman....which is to say, he didn't fart -- which The Adorable One has done in his favored petsitter's jeep!

Unfortunately, Chatelaine duty on continuing to take care of moi puppy precludes me from visiting Chicago for AWP and this -- but hope you attend! Comadre Evelina just sent this notice:

Wednesday, March 24th, 7:30*
$7/$5 (guild members/AWP members)

Screaming Monkeys
Hosted by Marlon and Anida Esguerra

For the first time, collaborators from Screaming Monkeys gather from across America to read from this ground-breaking anthology about the complexity of being Asian American. Screaming Monkeys was conceptualized by fiction writer M. Evelina Galang, poet Eileen Tabios, scholar Sunaina Maira, artist Jordin Isip, and spoken word activist and graphic artist Anida Yoeu Esguerra. Like the editors of this anthology, the contributors of Screaming Monkeys speak from a multiplicity of experiences as writers, artists, scholars and activists. This anthology illustrates the diverse and often disparate perspectives within Asian American culture and the many histories integral to understanding America. A book signing by the contributors follows the reading.

*$5 special admission price with Associated Writing Programs conference badge

For more information, call 773-227-6117

The Guild Complex is located at the Chopin Theater, 1543 W. Division, Chicago, IL 60622
Free Parking at Holy Trinity Church, two blocks east of Milwaukee, on Division between Cleaver and Noble
Public Transportation directions: Take Blue Line, stop at Division. go south on Ashland, make a left on Division, the Chopin is on the South side (right hand side) on Division (next to Right on Futon).

POEMS AFTER THE ANALYST OR (AS) AN ANALYSIS

"as ever, light"
--from "Tuesday Afternoon" by Evelyn Lau

Joseph Garver writes in to say, "Did you see that Diane Ackerman has a molecule named after her, dianeackerone, a hormone secreted by crocodiles, I think?" Very kewl! I'm now reading my second Ackerman book, ORIGAMI BRIDGES. I'm going to share an excerpt from her Author's Note to Readers because it may fascinate youse as it did moi:

"Perhaps readers would find it interesting to learn how these poems were written and the unusual role they played. This wasn't a planned book, but one that geysered up naturally over a year and a half, during which I wrote poems daily. I began writing them to corrol the unruly emotions that arose during intense psychotherapy...

"An unusual aspect of my therapy was that my analyst and I lived in distant towns. Once a month of so I would visit him in his office. However, most weeks we spoke by telephone, which in some ways allowed greater intimacy and risk, although it deprived us of the lavish visual cues that can be so telling. The voice is lavish, too. I had been a telephone crisis-line counselor for several years, and so I felt comfortable dealing with steep emotions by phone, a drama which has its own fascinating dynamics. Although I don't know my doctor's background, he was a profoundly nuanced listener. Somehow this combination of methods worked remarkably well. A telephone receiver is perforated like a confessional screen, you miss the shame of eye contact, the other's voice seems to originate inside your head, mental portraits of the other form while you're talking, and so on. As in traditional psychoanalysis, you don't see the analyst. Then, when you do meet face-to-face, other elementes come into play.

"I sent him the poems that emerged, hot off the heart, and they became an important part of therapy, another place where we could meet. There's a tradition of using artworks in this way, children's drawings especially, and it opened up some unexpected avenues. of course, psychotherapy and lyrical poetry address many of the same issues, and they both create a space where one can explore one's relationship with one's self and others. However, my chief goal with this book was to write the best poetry I could; its usefulness in therapy was felicitous, but secondary. That's why I sent out, and subsequently published, many of the poems in literary journals without telling the editors anything about them. They are, after all, simply deeply felt poems about one of the most important relationships in one's life."

*****

Here's a sample poem from ORIGAMI BRIDGES -- just gorgeous and what a fluid movement between visiting a psychoanalyst and scubadiving!

The Ascent

Your building's facial muscles
set long ago in a beautiful countenance
of iron, granite, and swirling cement.
Now all who visit must pass
through a glittering darkness--
a wide cave of black stone
flashing splinters of light
with tiny patches of feldspar
translucent as skin.

I have no key to your door.
When the buzzer smarts
I respond on cue and push in,
then enter a narrow elevator
built just for two, and rise
at a surprisingly tranquil rate.

The last time I levitated
as imperceptibly as this
I was 90 feet below the waves
traveling through canyons
of brain coral and anemones,
then watching a blur
of boat and sky far above,
a guide pacing the climb,
while I surfaced in slow motion
lest my heart explode.

Oh, the bubbles that can form
in the blood, dropping one cold.
Rising, falling--in half light
it's hard to know which way is up.
The senses are easily bedeviled.
Sometimes one needs a journeyman
to keep one's spirit level.

I love the ending of this poem -- for also recalling a topic of conversation I've sometimes had with other poets and artists, that is, the idea of whether one should marry/partner up with another artist. That is, assuming poets and artists are "flakier" (so to speak) than more solid citizens (so to speak), it may not be the best idea to be hooked up with another artist. So there's a lot of (false) assumptions in that line of thinking that lead to a (false) stereotype as a conclusion. But I can't help but be grateful, too, that I've been married to a lawyer with an even keel of a personality; I've sometimes thought of my husband as the necessary person on ground holding on to the string from which I, as kite, flies but ... without becoming so unmoored as to be blown away onto some dangerous space...

...which is not to say, the kite's not trapped in longing to penetrate that sunlit cobalt sky...

*****

I'd said earlier that Ackerman also evokes, for me, Evelyn Lau -- I'd made that observation prior to reading ORIGAMI BRIDGES. Lau, of course, has written brilliantly as well on experiences with an analyst, such as in her poem "Tuesday Afternoon" (from OEDIPAL DREAMS) excerpted below:

your office stays white like princesses,
as in fairy tales.
some days you laugh, some days your eyes harbor
a suspicion of wet, your legs are
crossed or uncrosse,d your hands
are filled with pens or toy hearts or marble sticks.
sometimes you speak as if there were a child in the room
when there is only me.
I spoke for years as if there were a crowd in the room
when there was only you.
you survived the hatreds and the lusts,
black, red, you knew the colors.

when light shattered across the floor
and briefly there was thunder between us, if your eyes
had held water it would not have spilled
and when we peeled aside the dreams the skin underneath
was still young. when all was black
you smoothed aside the words and said, It's there,
the light, when you want it
it'll be waiting for you--
and a certain peace came into your eyes,
that this was no different, that this was so different
yet every bit the same, and your hands stilled with satisfaction.
you did this without touch
so that all around me your hands stood
shaped like shelters, all around me there was room
and after each hour the hallways outside were like caverns
and around the corner and down the stairs
there lurked as always, light,
as ever, light.

STRUCK GOLD: DIANE ACKERMAN SENDS ME!

...it was grace to live
among the fruits of summer, to love by design,
and walk the startling Earth
for what seemed
an endless resurrection of days.
--from "I Praise My Destroyer" by Diane Ackerman

Lordy! Lordy! There I was at a bookstore causing eyebrows to rise as I praised no less than Lord God Almighty as I flipped through Diane Ackerman's I PRAISE MY DESTROYER. She got me with the first poem....then hooked me in with the title poem that sort of melds (for me) Arthur Sze, William Blake and (of all people) Evelyn Lau (yes, that last might cause more eyebrows to rise; I refer here to Lau's -- and Ackerman's -- scientifically lucid and penetrating sights). I immediately purchased the book, along with the only other Ackerman title there, ORIGAMI BRIDGES. I do that -- when I fall in love with a poet, I try to read everything they've ever written. I have a feeling I'm about to enter an Ackerman phase.

It's calmer to look away,
not swallow the light whole,
but I crave its riveting heat
and molten tears, its lifebloom
and bomb-bright hurrahs.
For last night I dreamed death
pawing at my chest -- an invisible beast
with an antler of stars.
--from "San Francisco Sunrise" by Diane Ackerman

She apparently has been around for a while but she is new to me. This poet....is GOLD, GOLD, GOLD! Ackerman is also a naturalist, and so it's fitting that from one of her poems, I finally understand why birds fly at maximum speed to crash and die before certain windows of Galatea -- I've been stunned and shaken by the sight of bleeding and dying birds on various pathways after they failed to penetrate Galatea's glass shields. Now I understand why the birds choose to die -- for loneliness is difficult to survive, particularly when one still remembers desire:

AVIATRIX

In dawn's feathered light,
a lady cardinal hurls herself
against my bedroom window:

Hallucinations stalk the glass
as she slams her softness
into a flat, cold world,

trying to perch on a limb
perfect in the sunlight,
but it will not hold her
skidding feet, her urgent thumping.

The hours are long panes
of glass she cannot enter:
Love wings through
another world without her.

Tomorrow, it will begin again,
only louder, the frantic pounding
of her feathery will,

the grinding down of her notes,
one by one, in the glare of reflection,
where loneliness stuns her.

GALATEA HOUSE WINES

Richard and Phyllis in town. Dinner last night at Terra, one of the great restaurants in wine country. (If you're into cooking, check out chefs Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani's cookbook here.) We brought our own wines for dinner:

1996 Etienne Sauzet Batard Montrachet
1997 Torbreck Run Rig Barossa Valley
Chambers NV Fine Muscat (Solera style)

And here are this week's house wines at Galatea. For white, still plowing through the 2000 Kistler Dutton Ranch chardonnay. For reds:

1996 Pahlmeyer Merlot Napa Valley
1996 Seavey Cabernet
2001 Dutch Henry Merlot (Dutch Henry is our neighbor and its airedales play with moi Achilles!)
1997 Classic McLaren Shiraz
2000 Volker Eisele Family Estate Terzetto

Hic. I mean, Sip.

COROLLA: A COMPARISON OF SONG VS. POEM

As a manifestation of my poetics, I offer the prose poem "Corolla," which I began in homage to Filipina women's literature. I began to write this prose poem by "plagiarizing," then collaging, and then rewriting fragments from the works of many of the Filpina writers represented in Babaylan. I titled it "Corolla" because when I think of Filipina women, I think of flowers: the beauty and variety of flowers -- including the lush bloom who is my mother -- that comprise my motherland.
--from "Rupturing Language for the Rapture of Beauty," Editor's Essay for BABAYLAN

I'm moving files from one computer to the other....and it suddenly occured to me I can use Blogger as a bulletin board (temporarily in some cases) rather than continuously e-mailing myself. This works out particularly well for noting some information regarding my poem "Corolla" (from Reproductions) which, to date, is the poem I've used the most for collaborations with other artists from a variety of disciplines, including dancer-choreographers Pearl Ubungen and Johanna Almiron. "Corolla" also was interpreted by poet-painter-jazz singer Christina Querrer and jazz pianist Don Profitt. They had performed it during the book's 2002 launch in New York.

What's nifty now about comparing the lyrics with my six-paragraph prose poem is to see which phrases caught their ear as well as eye -- recalling, too, how I'd marveled at the honor of hearing the "song" version of my poem (which is also to say, contrary to that oft-told phrase, No -- a poem is not song; it can sing, but a poem is not song. A poem is simply a poem.)

Heart's gratitude once more for

vocals & lyrics by Cristina Querrer
musical score/arrangement & piano by Don Profitt

lyrics derived from Eileen Tabios' poem entitled "Corolla"

"Corolla"

If my bones were hollow
Like flutes made from reeds
Movement from marrow
I have no use for calm seas

Sometimes I pray
Sometimes I pray

Only God
Only God
Only God

A girl in me is a country
Throughout this archipelago
My people are always hungry
(There's no place I'd rather go...no, no, no)

I'm drowning in air
I'm drowning in air

Only God
Only God
Only God

(can take me there)
(can take me there)

**********

Here's the original poem

COROLLA

Sometimes, I pray. Love is always haggled before it becomes. I clasp my hands around my disembodied truth: I am forever halved by edges--in group photos, on classroom seats, at mahogany dining tables whose lengths still fail to include me. I play myself perfectly, containing a Catholic hell within my silence to preserve the consolation of hope. Hope--once, I tipped Bing cherries into a blue bowl until I felt replete in the red overflow.

If my bones were hollow, like flutes made from reeds, I might savor the transcendence of Bach flowing through me rather than the fragile movement of marrow. "These are thoughts which occur only to those entranced by the layered auras of decay," my mother scolds me. I agree, but note the trend among artisans in sculpting prominent breasts on immobilized Virgin Marys. She replies, "But these are moments lifted out of context."

The green calyx emphasizes the burden of generously-watered corollas, though beauty can be emphasized from an opposite perspective. I have no use for calm seas, though I appreciate a delicadeza moonlight as much as any long-haired maiden. You see, my people are always hungry with an insistence found only in virgins or fools. It is my people's fate for focusing on reprieves instead of etched wrinkles on politicians' brows and mothers' cheeks. We are uncomfortable encouraging dust to rise.

I feel pain spread like wine staining silk--a gray wing, then grey sky. "Only God," I begin to whisper, before relenting to the tunes hummed by ladies with veiled eyes. The definition of holidays becomes the temporary diminishment of hostile noise. I do not wish to know what engenders fear from my father, even if it means I must simulate an aging beauty queen clutching photos of tilted crowns. I prefer to appreciate from a distance those points where land meets water: I prefer the position of an ignored chandelier.

When lucidity becomes too weighty, when the calyx sunders, I concede that I make decisions out of diluting my capacity for degradation. I frequently camouflage my body into a Christmas tree. I cannot afford to consider soot-faced children stumbling out of tunnels dug deep enough to plunge into China's womb. You say the rice cooker is flirting with its lid; I say, I AM DROWNING IN AIR. I have discovered the limitations of wantonness only in the act of listening. There is no value in negative space without the intuitive grid.

I am called "Balikbayan"* because the girl in me is a country of rope hammocks and waling-waling orchids--a land with irresistible gravity because, in it, I forget the world's magnificent indifference. In this country, my grandmother's birthland, even the dead are never cold and I become a child at ease with trawling through rooms in the dark. In this land, throughout this archipelago, I am capable of silencing afternoons with a finger. In this country where citizens know better than to pick tomatoes green, smiling grandmothers unfurl my petals and begin the journey of pollen from anthers to ovary. There, stigma transcends the mark of shame or grief to be the willing recipient of gold-rimmed pollen. In my grandmother's country, votive lights are driven into dark cathedrals by the flames of la luna naranja, a blood-orange sun.


------------
Footnote *: "Balikbayan" means "one who returns"

I STILL HAVE NOTHING TO SAY BUT

Sandy McIntosh just wrote in. He says he keeps "measuring it and measuring it and it is really 12 inches!"

FRIDAY HI-JINKS

You know -- when I have nothing to say, that's usually when I get into trouble when I still open my mouth. Like, this morning, I e-mailed Sandy McIntosh to make sure he sees what Shanna Compton nicely said about his poem about moi. The way I put it though, was as follows, because, sigh, how I love to amuse moiself:

Shanna praised your poem on her blog (Feb. 19 post). I really think you should title that poem

"Eileen Tabios"

Then, I think you should include it in your next poetry collection.

Then, I think you should make that poem the book's title poem, which means of course that you should title your next book

EILEEN TABIOS

That's not too narcissistic of moi, is it?

*****

To which Sandy replied:

Just looked on Shanna's site. Wow. Thanks for alerting me. That's great praise for something I just tossed off in the middle of a restless sleep (thinking of you, apparently).

Or, as Jim Tate puts it (in "Fire Dance"):

O once in a while
I roll over and dictate a poem:
I smile graciously at this
charming act of condescension
and my thirty-three wives applaud

quietly. The next day it appears
in The New Yorker and I donate
the paltry reward to the veterans
of the Turko-Cuban Civil War...
(etc. etc.) 

Then Sandy continues, "What happened to the "R", as in "Eileen R Us", or "Eileen R Moi"?

Graciously, I replied, "Well, if you insist.  Fine, include moi middle initial..."

Consequently, as I have nothing else to blog about except perhaps to remind you all of Chris Stroffolino's and Joseph Lease's reading tonight at Small Press Traffic (I'm trying my darnedest to be there -- if you see the Long-Lashed-One, say Hi!), here is Sandy's poem again with its brand new title. As this blog is about moi, needless to say, I don't mind repeating the poem.

EILEEN TABIOS
 
"I really think you should title that poem 'Eileen Tabios'"
--Eileen R. Tabios

Eileen Tabios
Today announced
That her next book
Will be
5000 pages long.
In an unrelated development
Eileen Tabios
Announced
That she has acquired
A major interest
In International Harvester,
The only U.S. manufacturer
Of oversized-poetry book forklifts.

It was learned
Early today
That Eileen Tabios'
Book for the following year
Will be
13,000 pages long.
In an unrelated development
Eileen Tabios
Announced
That she has acquired
San Francisco's famous
Coit Tower
Which she will convert
To a library
Housing one large print
Version of her book.

It was learned
Early today
That Eileen Tabios
Has acquired large tracts
Of the Pacific Ocean
For an unknown purpose.
In an unrelated development
Eileen Tabios
Announced
That the number of pages
Of her future books
Will be measured
In leagues and fathoms.

It was learned
Early today

(continued next page)

*****

Sandy adds about the poem: "I propose that it appear in the new Meritage Press anthology, The Thousand Best Poems Dedicated To Eileen Tabios. I shall edit it, of course, and include only the most heart-felt examples of piosity."

Preeeen. I'll think about it Sandy. And she returns to preening before said preening is rudely interrupted by YET ANOTHER e-mail from him apparently protesting my note in my prior post saying, "the -- hmph! -- 3-inch-pretending-to-be-12-inch poem by Sandy McIntosh in my post "I WANT IT THICK AND LONG"...
 
Sandy: Well, I gotta think anyone who's next book will be ____ hundreds of pages is compensating for something.

Chatelaine: Well, it ain't penis envy, Sandy!

*****

And the moral of the story is (continued next page)....

POEM WHERE A TITLE WOULD BE SUPERFLUOUS

BANANA
SPLIT
ME

MORE ON LENGTH...AND PASSION, A COMBINATION OTHERWISE KNOWN AS HAAGEN-DAZ

Speaking of passion, Moi is voracious, you know -- like, I've had four homemade banana splits with Haagen Daaz Tres Leche ice cream with caramel and hot fudge sauce in the past five days. Each serving was of the size that normally would be shared by two peeps. Voracious -- that's moi. (Plus I got angels to heal with moi own blood). Work hard, play hard. But, still, to come out with -- and I'm not revealing moi page count yet -- a thick book in the hundreds of pages in a world of 48-72-pagers? Eh -- why not? That's moi book I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED... (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005).

What a relief to hear from Leny:

The chatelaine's ancestor in writing the longest poem is a Filipino named Padre Anselmo Jorge de Pajardo (1785-1845) from Bacolor, Pampanga, who after theological studies at the University of Santo Tomas, sailed to Spain and upon his return wrote "Gozales de Cordona," a three volume epic of 832 pages, 31,000 lines, which took seven nights (instead of the usual three nights) to stage.

And Shanna Compton also writes about the -- hmph! -- 3-inch-pretending-to-be-12-inch poem by Sandy McIntosh in my post "I WANT IT THICK AND LONG" (scroll below and I'da been dying for a flimsy excuse to proclaim that phrase anew, btw):

It was learned early today... that this poem is wonderful. I love poems friends write for each other.
And as for the promised # of pages--go Eileen!

Thanks, Leny (though it's not quite a "long poem.") And thanks Shanna. Go indeed I shall!

Relatedly as regards lengthy projects, I'm in the midst of becoming acquainted with DaDaDa by Catherine Daly. And on my to-do list is a book review of Basil King's "Mirage" project. Marsh Hawk Press just released his latest volume, MIRAGE: A POEM IN 22 SECTIONS. But that volume is only the last of a four-book series which includes THE COMPLETE MINIATURES (Stop Press, 1997), DEVOTIONS (Stop Press, 1997) and WARP SPASM (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001). The series works, too, in a single volume.

I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED... could have worked as four different volumes as well. But its combination in one book would have precluded this collection from being called a "quar(quin)tuplet" -- a word concocted by Sandy in his capacity as MHP Managing Editor. You see, the combination of the four volumes allow for the generation of a fifth invisible book....obviously, more details later.

Her Chatty Eyes Gleam The Sunset "Right Back Atcha!" as she adds: Right now, I gotta heed the call of another huge bowl of banana split out there with moi name on it, and it ain't "Slim" or "Shorty"!

RELIEF FOR MOI, THE MAMA!!!!!

Moi is so stressed. It's partly what caused my newest poem on Gasps -- the feeling of these hard scales on my tensed up shoulders. I am stressed for several reasons -- but, thankfully, the one related to Achilles was just resolved! Do I feel one scale soften?!

Achilles, as I write this, is now four months and four days old!!! Well, in the past week, his right ear flopped over. He's been looking quite clownlike going about the mountain with one long elegant ear and ... one floppy ear. So, at first, I thought the problem was that the cartilage was not developing well in one ear...or one of his handlers had mis-handled said ear. (If you see German Shepherd puppies, play with them but please leave their ears alone).

Well, I just heard from Achilles' breeder in North Carolina, to wit:

So he's big, beautiful and spoiled....well that sounds good to me. As far as the ears go, he is just getting ready to start losing baby teeth....you may start finding them in your hands as you play with him over the next couple weeks....during this teething period, very often the ears fall down.....you don't need to do anything. Leave them alone....that's best. Once the second set of teeth are fully in, the ears should be back up and stay up. Often times, the bigger boned dogs take a little longer for the ears to go up and stay up. He's in that category. But nothing to do or worry about. I'm really looking forward to a photo from him....I'd love to put it on my website with a little note from you if you care to put a testimonial together.

Whew! Well, when his photo is placed up on that website, you all -- to wit, my beloved 9.7 million peeps plus a handful of college sophomores -- naturally will be the first to know!!! And, for the record, Achilles is waaaaay more handsome and glorious than any of the photos of his relatives on the website!

Naturally, I shall bronze each and everyone of Achilles' baby teeth....!

TRADING POETRY BOOKS

I once bought Van Gogh's LETTERS TO THEO a dozen times in a dozen different cities. See, I bought it to read and it just never left the to-read pile. Then I'd pick it up at a bookstore during my travels planning to read it on the plane or during my trip...and never got to it. I kept picking it up at different cities while the unread copies piled up at home. Finally, I read it -- AND ENJOYED IT -- though the initial impetus for reading it was simply my tiredness of continually buying the dang book.

Anyway, if there's anyone out there with extra copies of the same poetry book for whatever reason and would like to trade for some of my extra copies, let me know. Or if you have a poetry book I don't have that you wish to trade, let me know. We can just e-mail them book rate to teach other! Here are some extra copies that I can trade for books I don't have:

THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH
UNDER FLAG by Myung Mi Kim
SAY GOODNIGHT (uncorrected page proofs) by Timothy Liu
HOW MANY MORE OF THEM ARE YOU by Lisa Lubasch
GRAVITIES OF CENTER by Barbara Jane Reyes
UNRAVELING WORDS & THE WEAVING OF WATER by Cecilia Vicuna
SEEKING AIR by Barbara Guest
AUTUMN SONATA by Georg Trakl
TRADING IN MERMAIDS by Alfred Yuson
THE EPISTOLARY CRITICISM OF MANUEL A. VIRAY collected by L.M. Grow

The above really are spare copies. If it needs to be said, I view poetry books like paintings and other works of art. I don't resell them. I do keep them permanently at home with me. Whether or not I cared for an individual poetry collection, I keep the books around -- it's all part and parcel of yet another belief of mine: as poets, ultimately, we're all writing the same book.

Oh, and I suppose I also would trade for the books I publish via Meritage Press:

OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002 by Barry Schwabsky
100 MORE JOKES FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD by John Yau and Archie Rand

(Moi other title, Garret Caples' er, um, is basically out of print -- Yay!!! That is, out of stock in terms of my publisher's stock; though there may be some left still at moi distributor SPD.)

LOOKIT MOI WINGS OF FLAMES!

Well, I had to take this test since, from Michelle's link, it was a matter of wingtips!


You are a PHOENIX in your soul and your
wings make a statement. Huge and born of flame,
they burn with light and power and rebirth.
Ashes fall from your wingtips. You are an
amazingly strong person. You survive, even
flourish in adversity and hardship. A firm
believer in the phrase, 'Whatever doesn't kill
you only makes you stronger,' you rarely fear
failure. You know that any mistake you make
will teach you more about yourself and allow
you to 'rise from the ashes' as a still greater
being. Because of this, you rarely make the
same mistake twice, and are not among the most
forgiving people. You're extremely powerful and
wise, and are capable of fierce pride, passion,
and anger. Perhaps you're this way because you
were forced to survive a rough childhood. Or
maybe you just have a strong grasp on reality
and know that life is tough and the world is
cruel, and it takes strength and independence
to survive it. And independence is your
strongest point - you may care for others, and
even depend on them...but when it comes right
down to it, the only one you need is yourself.
Thus you trust your own intuition, and rely on
a mind almost as brilliant as the fire of your
wings to guide you.You are eternal and because
you have a strong sense of who and what you
are, no one can control your heart or mind, or
even really influence your thinking. A symbol
of rebirth and renewal, you tend to be a very
spiritual person with a serious mind - never
acting immature and harboring a superior
disgust of those who do. Likewise, humanity's
stupidity and tendency to want others to solve
their problems for them frustrates you
endlessly. Though you can be stubborn,
outspoken, and haughty, I admire you greatly.


*~*~*Claim Your Wings - Pics and Long Answers*~*~*
brought to you by Quizilla

Yeah-right; I'm sure it's correct -- particularly since it proclaims I never act "immature...." Cackle. Although, amazingly, the result hearkens my "Muse Poem" from moi book:


MUSE POEM

She spends her days in a dusty room, its lone window shuttered, the air lit with the glow from a computer screen, and stacks of books melting into the shadows. This is the way it should be. Her eyes are open to a parallel universe where silence is alien, for silence has no color. She sees no reason to censor the mountain from saffron, the sky from celadon, the boulder from lavender, the bougainvillea from cobalt, the grass from ebony, the diamond from cerise, or you from me.

Or me from you. But everything costs. To define the Muse as forgetting memory is to begin by birthing a mask, then becoming subservient to it. Even if one must learn to allow shackles on one's wrists, fall to one's knees--then bow once more after begging for more lashes from the whip. All for the hope that welts will be permanent to create new parts of my body that may rise at the thought of your touch.

The use of third-party pronouns in a poem will not spare me from the sight of your back receding as the door slowly closes. This is the way it should be. I must crawl towards where I recall the door to be, uncertain of who you have become on the other side. When I find the door by scenting blood, I must open it by first remembering fear. I must remember fear. For nothing must be silenced. There must be color.

Like the color of Wet: bittersweet, bloodshot, blooming, blush, brick, burgundy, cardinal, carmine, cerise, cherry, chestnut, claret, copper, coral, crimson, dahlia, flaming, florid, flushed, fuchsia, garnet, geranium, glowing, healthy, inflamed, infrared, magenta, maroon, pink, puce, rose, roseate, rosy, rubicund, ruby, ruddy, russet, rust, salmon, sanguine, scarlet, titian, vermilion, wine. . .

Nothing must be silenced. There must be color. Though I remember fear, I have heard the memory of a Taoist shaman whispering: "Bright pure color represents the virtue. Bright white for strength, courage and rectitude. Bright blue for gentleness and wisdom. Bright green for kindness and benevolence. Bright golden yellow for balance, centeredness and fairness. Bright red for love, joy and compassion." I must remember fear, before remembering to forgive myself.

Nothing must be silenced. There must be color. Like the color of Wet: RED.

FROM AIRPLANE READING: ON PASSION

It doesn't matter how high the pile of unread books are at home. Whenever I travel (and I often bring books I've long been planning to read), I still stop by airport bookstores and buy books to read. Now, I realize that I have a different mindset for air travel reading -- that entertainment value ranks high, which I suspect is to obviate the tedious boredom of being stuck in a plane for hours. In the plane, I don't want to work or deep-think; I want to be entertained.

From my last trip to New York, two novels (out of perhaps seven I read) are worth mentioning for the ways they address passion:

All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve (though this wasn't as good, for me, as some of her prior works like Sea Glass or Fortune's Rocks) and The Green Hour by Frederic Tuten. The latter is clearly the more masterful; just compare how both write about Ye Olde Passionate Life:

From All He Ever Wanted:
"In a further aside, I should just like to add here that I have observed in my sixty-four years that passion both erodes and enhances character in equal measure, and not slowly but instantly, and in such a manner that what is left is not in balance but is thrown desperately out of kilter in both directions. The erosion the result of the willingness to do whatever is necessary to obtain the object of one's desire, even if it means engaging in lies or deception or debasing what was once treasured. The enhancement a result of the knowledge that one is capable of loving greatly, an understanding that leaves one, paradoxically, with a feeling of gratitude and pride in spite of all the carnage."

Sorry Anita Shreve -- I don't buy the above. The passage is posited to be offered by a 64-year-old who's learned some wisdom through his experiences, such that he concludes the above. Wisdom, I believe, would have required just a bit less of the self-centeredness that allows one to feel "gratitude and pride" from being capable of creating "carnage." Don't get me wrong -- for passion, one may end up in a situation where one wouldn't have done things differently despite the carnage; but to feel "gratitude and pride"? Worse -- the kind of dispassion that would make the protagonist confident that there's a 100% balance ("equal measure") between the erosion and enhancement of character?

On the other hand, here's

From The Green Hour:
"Class interests inform class thinking, she did not need Rex to remind her of that. They were now informing hers, even if only at Eric's secondhand. Long ago she had conceived of a world above such interests, when she was alone facing a painting she loved and feeling its beauty divorced from the world and the artist who had created it or when she stood alone before the sea, swelling to join the sky, herself melting away into the greater universe where the world's struggles were not registered in eternity.
               "Such heightened moments even her practical father had felt, at night, on deck, his head ot the constellations, his body swaying with the sea swells. She could recognize in his voice the little ecstasy that had come over him in the starry darkness.
               "'Better than church, isn't it? His voice soft like a child's just woken from a beautiful dream....
               She wanted, for the years she had left, her life free of guilt, without Rex's social reminders or his moral example. At the bottom there was no value, principle, ideal, or person worth sacrificing a moment of her life. In the end, there was only the life lived, with its intensity, and its freedom."

*****

Whether or not one would agree with what's offered in Tuten's excerpt, I think Tuten's approach works better than Shreve's for lacking hypocrisy.

Unfortunately, avoiding hypocrisy is easier said than done. In Shreve's novel, it effects a less nuanced work despite the lyricism that thread through the writing. And the fictional construct also reveals itself as a construct, rather than (believably) felt.

I WANT IT THICK AND LONG

So my beloved publisher is pretending to be discombobulated by a recent message from moi alerting them to the page count of my 2005 book.

Who reads _____ pages of poems, Marsh Hawk Press Managing Editor Sandy McIntosh asks? (This, btw, is after he advised that I cut down on the sauce as regards my recent post on the "blackout".)

What Moi didn't say was: Please. Who reads 40 pages -- or 4 pages -- of poems, fullstop?

Many poetry collections are slim due to economic constraints -- i.e., it's difficult to make money off poetry books so it's best to keep the costs down. But that's an economic -- not necessarily an aesthetic -- consideration. If we poets don't allow Poetry's marginalized position in culture to stop us from writing poems, why should we believe that poetry collections are better off thin than thick? Of course many poetry collections work effectively as slim collections -- but I'ma talking about slimness being a paradigm here...

I assume this "slim" way of thinking has to do with the underlying thought that a poem is a distillation of sorts anyway. But for the same reason that some poems are "long poems" versus short or a haiku or a hay(na)ku, some poetry books might warrant a large scale because that larger expanse is part of the form. Scale matters -- and (ideally) shouldn't be determined by the 8- or 16-page signatures of books or economic budgets.

Of course, I publish with MH Press because they understand all this. Still, this doesn't prevent Sandy from sending me a poem because ... I want it thick and long:

Eileen Tabios
Today announced
That her next book
Will be
5000 pages long.
In an unrelated development
Eileen Tabios
Announced
That she has acquired
A major interest
In International Harvester,
The only U.S. manufacturer
Of oversized-poetry book forklifts.

It was learned
Early today
That Eileen Tabios'
Book for the following year
Will be
13,000 pages long.
In an unrelated development
Eileen Tabios
Announced
That she has acquired
San Francisco's famous
Coit Tower
Which she will convert
To a library
Housing one large print
Version of her book.

It was learned
Early today
That Eileen Tabios
Has acquired large tracts
Of the Pacific Ocean
For an unknown purpose.
In an unrelated development
Eileen Tabios
Announced
That the number of pages
Of her future books
Will be measured
In leagues and fathoms.

It was learned
Early today

(continued next page)

PRE-JAVA BLATHER

I didn't see this morning's episode of Good Morning America (since I generally don't watch TV), but I heard of the Asian American (AA) guy who had auditioned for "American Idol." He's apparently a civil engineering student at Berkeley. He was so bad during the auditions --

Simon (one of three judges): to what do you attribute just how bad you are?
AA guy: I've had no formal training in music
Simon: Well, that's the shock of the century...

Anyway. But the AA guy was apparently so bad that it became funny....and now he's being hailed all over talk shows, has a web site that's gotten 4 million hits...and is even actually cutting a song.

This is all poetically interesting to me as it recalls certain tendencies by poets to do something deliberately bad or bland or boring ... or any host of qualities that are judged "bad." (I've just read a friend's draft review of a poet's new book; said book was written deliberately to be "uninteresting" and yet I found some of the resulting poems to be just beautiful....)

This AA guy is the authentic thing -- he really is a bad singer/performer....it's just that I guess his way of doing it hit at many people's funny bones and now he's perversely a hit.

The poets I know who try to subvert historical (good) standards of poetry are actually fine poets. There's a difference between being naturally bad and a good poet trying to be bad. Does the artifice (in the latter) matter when the reading of a poem gets so subjective that many "found" poems ultimately are effective (good) poems?

I don't know. I'm just blathering....although this may just be another -- very basic -- case of a poet's intention only going so far and it's just the results that matter. Anyhooo. Now, I must go get a cuppa java so that I can make even less sense as the day unfolds...

FIRE THE CANONS AT THOSE CANONS

The issues raised by Michele C. Cone's review of Donald Kuspit's new book The End of Art (Cambridge University Press) also has to do with poetry. Dang -- if there's anything that makes the Chatelaine prettily yawn, it's conservative, unimaginative readings/seeings of art.

UNDERWATER POETICS

I do believe I've mentioned previously how moi ass, lovely though it may be, is actually lazy. So said lovely ass sure did a lot of moaning at noon today when for the first time in 25-plus years, I attempted swimming through a lesson at the local club.

See, the pool is outdoors and, thus, usually crowded when the weather is great. But it's winter here in Napa and, though the pool is heated, there could be as little as 1-2 people using it during rainy days. I knew all that, so I decided that, maybe, it's about time I learned how to swim and, if so, it might be best to do so off-season.

I'm a Baguio Girl. If you don't know what that means, it means I came from a city atop a mountain in the Philippines. So, though people are always surprised to meet a Filipino who cannot swim -- after all, the Philippines is an archipelago of over 7,100 islands -- swimming wasn't as common in Baguio City.

Anyway, there I was at the pool today with a swimming instructor who actually had me flitting about on the water surface -- that is, not sinking like a boulder -- albeit within a 15-feet length.

And revelation du jour: dang if swimming doeesn't require endurance! No wonder swimmers make great lovers since they can go on and on and....cough, oops. Yank moi brain back from the gutter, thank you....and let moi get back on point....

So, yes, I took a swimming lesson today and I didn't embarass moiself!!!!

Okay, what was mucho embarassing was the 20-year-old bathing suit I used. After the instructor stopped laughing and picked himself up off the tiled floor (humph: what is it with these kids nowadays!?), he was very encouraging over moi progress.

Yeah, yeah....but though I realized that one needed to get wet in order to swim, no one ever told me that it'd require so much work from moi lazy-assed Self. I'm beginning to rethink....

And all this, of course, has to do with poetry. Researching a poem, I wanted to know what it'd be like to be under water while it's raining -- I wanted to witness the image of rain coming through the surface of water from the perspective of someone underwater. I was thinking of translucent knitting needles piercing water -- and as you can see from that metaphor, I needed the research.

Well, I never did get to witness the research....too busy trying to keep moi lazy ass afloat.

But think about it: if I ever learn how to swim, it will be because of Poetry. Who ever said Poetry remains on the page?

Now, as regards a bathing suit...that's the real toughie! In addition to assiduously cultivating a wine belly, I've managed all these years to maintain the self-illusion of a lovely ass by not entering changing rooms to see how said ass looks in a bathing suit. I don't know, Peeps: I'm starting to feel a bit over moi head on this whole matter....underwater, that is.

WHAT ARTEMIS WITNESSED

Rain floods and electrical black-out on mountain yesterday. Thus,

"The Wet Promise"

JEAN VENGUA'S LATEST BLOG

In addition to Blue Kangaroo, Jean has two poetry blogs -- Diaryo and The Nightjar.

Now, she's just created a new blog that's equally nifty -- and of particular interest to those interested in music and Filipino culture:

"Enchanting Melodies on Native Instruments"

at

http://filammuse.blogspot.com

GRAYWYVERN ON DOVEGLION (AKA, READING PAST AUTHORIAL INTENTION

I always like sharing other people's takes on poets whose works I feel have not received sufficient recognition. Michael Helsem says of Jose Garcia Villa's "comma-poems" (in his 2/13/04 post):

Perhaps i was wrong to, although i always did, read the comma-poems as a more spatially economical way of representing a series of single-word lines.

No real right or wrong here, is there, in how to read a poem? In any event -- I think you've got something there, Michael....

Here's one of Villa's "comma poems" from his Aphorisms, as Villa wrote it and as presented under Michael's alternative -- makes for an interesting comparison:

Only, the, hero, may, take,
A, snapshot, of, God.
And, then, it, would, be,
A, self-portrait.


Only
the
hero
may
take
A
snapshot
of
God.
And
then
it
would
be
A
self-portrait.

I am now scratching my flawed memory, though, over whether the spaces after each comma in the original Villa version are half-spaces. That's how we printed them in The Anchored Angel, the recovery work I edited on Villa. But I can't recall now if my publisher had used half-spaces instead of full spaces as a typographical convenience or because that had to do with Villa's intention. Because if those half-spaces were intended as such by Villa, that might go against Michael's reading of the comma as a de facto line-break...? Though, of course, one can also read poems past authorial intention...

MARSH HAWK PRESS IS SOPHISTICATION INCARNATE!

Art on the road to God
--from "A Thousand Years" by Corinne Robins

I adore my New York publisher, Marsh Hawk Press (MHP). We're a collective of 18 poets. And the reason I adore MHP is that we're all a bunch of poets who've been around for a while and gone through the whole machinations that make up poetry publishing...and, idealistically, we banded together to try to do it right rather than relying on a flawed publishing infrastructure. And by banding together, we pool together all our knowledge and experience and -- we've come out with 17 fabulous books since just Spring 2002! Now, consider the membership (which also are listed atop the MH Blog). To know our work is to prove what we say: "Our books' forms and sensibilities assimilate modern and post-modern traditions but expand from these without political or aesthetic bias."

There's a point Moi wishes to make so bear with me. But first, the MHP Collective's members:

Jane Augustine, Patricia Carlin, Chard deNiord, Sharon Dolin, Ed Foster, Thomas Fink, Burt Kimmelman, Basil King, Martha King, Sandy McIntosh, Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel Morris, Rochelle Ratner,Corinne Robins, Eileen Tabios, Susan Terris, Madeline Tiger, and Harriet Zinnes.

BUT THE BIG NEWS is another list! Here is our brand new Artists' Advisory Board Members:

Robert Creeley
Toi Derricotte
Denise Duhamel
Marilyn Hacker
Allan Kornblum
Maria Mazzioti Gillan
Alicia Ostriker
David Shapiro
Nathaniel Tarn
Ann Waldman
John Yau

Now that you all know how fabulous we are, don't you want to...join the family? One way is through the

FIRST ANNUAL MARSH HAWK POETRY PRIZE

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2004

JUDGED BY MARIE PONSOT.

The Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize offers a cash award of $1,000.00 plus publication of the winning book.

NOTA BENE: Though only one contest entry will win the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, our current publishing schedule calls for six new titles per year. Thus, the editors will be looking for publishable manuscripts among the contest entries.

For more information, go to this link:

http://www.marshhawkpress.org/Contests%20and%20Submissions.htm

MOI IS HANGIN' OUT ON THE AVENUE

Thanks to Paolo Javier for including me; sure is nice watching the traffic with you! I like this street corner. Now, wanna race up the chain-link fence?

ANNOUNCING A NEW ONLINE POETRY JOURNAL

2nd AVENUE POETRY, volume I

http://www.2ndavenuepoetry.com/

featuring:

kazim ALI
christine BALANCE
anselm BERRIGAN
nick CARBO
del ray CROSS
oliver DE LA PAZ
luis h. FRANCIA
rigoberto GONZALEZ
paolo JAVIER
kevin KILLIAN
joseph LEGASPI
sanjana NAIR
salvador NOVO
aaron PECK
jon PINEDA
meredith QUARTERMAIN
peter QUARTERMAIN
bino REALUYO
barbara jane REYES
patrick ROSAL
thaddeus RUTKOWSKI
ravi SHANKAR
eileen TABIOS

& two downloadable e-chapbooks by:

bruce ANDREWS
sarah GAMBITO

ON LARIAT POETICS

If Poet Laureates are often asked to do poems for special events (the Queen's coronation, the Mayor's birthday, the Plumber of the Year Award et al), why do I suspect that my poem over Valentine's Day takes me out as a candidate for said positions?

Eh -- but then again, when I love and lust, it's not so's Moi can get a card, you know...

GUEST POET: JOSE MANUEL LUGO

And another college sophomore sends me poems! Here is Jose Manuel Lugo, a student at LaGuardia (thanks for sharing, Jose):

It’s a warhead in the palm of my hand.
I get closer to pulling the trigger every time I close my eyes.
With every second that passes, I loose time to think about you.
I no longer feel free to touch your face or close my eyes while
cheek-to-cheek.
A whisper will be heard inside me.
A bullet enters my mind and quickly leaves at the speed of life.
A sound is heard, the timer, as started
5 seconds till I regret all I’ve done in life
4 seconds till your name leaves my lips
3 seconds to detach your soul from mines
2 seconds till my heart splits into pieces
1 second till my death
ZERO seconds before it is all restarted

***

Silent Poet

I am, the silent poet
The poet that speaks, without lips
The poet that bleeds ink, through his finger tips
I am the poet that breathes life into paper, the same paper that breathes
life into me
the same paper that accepts my love, my hate, and my passion
I am the silent poet
The poet that speaks, without lips
The poet that ages in words, and not in time
The poet that speaks in silence

ON "THE MANY SIDES OF ... POETRY"

Men die.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates will die.
--Gregory Bateson's example of Socratic "good thinking"

Grass dies.
Men die.
Men are grass.
--Gregory Bateson's example of Socratic "bad thinking"

Adobo is pinoy.
I am pinoy.
Moi is adobo.
--The Chatelaine's riff off of Bateson's example of bad

Anyway.

I'm so sad that I missed the adobo fest at Pusod today -- I had so looked forward to attending in all moi glory and inflicting all moi blather on the attendees who -- as befits moi people! -- would have tolerated moi idiosyncracies with much love. But: I'm sick. Still, there's some compensation to staying home via reading a letter from Jean Vengua in response to my Friday the 13th post (scroll below):


Eileen,
Thanks so much for mentioning my poetics (and Nick's) in your blog recently. It seems that one must continually loosen the bindings on these categories, that almost seem to have a busybody, constraining life of their own -- the categories, I mean. And while it's sad that the term, "activist" should seem to denigrate the poet, it's also a good thing to be able to take such terms apart, to look at the duality and oppositional energy of these categories, and show how many sides there actually are to this wonderful "vocation" of poetry that we have chosen.

Everything is in context, relational, in eros. Language slips and slides, rubs up against meaning, or evades it. (OK -- I admit I'm reading Susan Griffin's book-length essay, The Eros of Everyday Life -- it's helping me get ready for the panel in May). There's an excerpt in: http://www.aislingmagazine.com/articles/TAM24/TheEros.html)

I liked your quote from Leny, too, about the paradox of no-self/self. It's true and yet so paradoxical: it seems that the best poetry I write is written when I let go of my Self. Yet what emerges sounds more like the true "Me" than anything else I write. Strange. And somewhere in that "letting go," there's even room for intent -- the intent to foreground Filipina "presence," or reference historical contexts, for example.

Jean

==========

Thanks for writing, Jean, and I'm sorry to have missed you and others at Pusod today. Thanks as well to introducing me to Susan Griffin; from the link you shared, I post this excerpt which seems to be of relevance to blogland, which is to say, cyberspace:

And a return to what is a birthright of meaning is more than a philosophical journey. Something changes in the mood. An atmosphere of nihilism dissolves. Certainly I notice this shift when turning away from the page, or the computer screen: the living world is suddenly present. When I rise and walk under the trees in my neighbourhood, the russet colour of their leaves burnishes my mind. Even turning in my chair, opening the window, feeling a cold wind against my face, my mind is joined, taken up, educated. This simple experience is one that most of us regard as an emotional necessity. A room, an enclosure, must have a window. Yet out of the mentality of this civilization we have made a windowless room.


Also, might as well put this on your calendar, peeps. The "panel in May" to which Jean refers relates to:

Sunday, May 9
1-4 p.m.
San Francisco Public Library (downtown)

"Transcending Nostalgia: Filipino Writings in the Diaspora" (Bay Area Book Launch for Beyond The Blue Canvas by Eileen Tabios; Not Home, But Here ed. by Luisa Igloria; and OurOwnVoice ed. by Reme Grefalda)

That's Mother's Day and all the panelists are daughters: Moi, Jean Vengua, Leny Strobel, Barbara Reyes, and flying in from the East Coast: Luisa Igloria and Reme Grefalda. Seems like the poifect Mother's Day event to bring said Moms to, then follow up with taking said Moms to dinner. Needless to say, all fathers and sons and other beloved humans not encapsulated by gender pronouns are also welcome!

JES CALL MOI "THE CHATTY FARMER"!!

I had big burly men grunting all over moi yesterday....which I very much enjoyed, thank you very much....then ended the day with a lovely bottle of the 1997 Jones Family Cabernet. Sip.

And the reason said big burly men were all a-crawling is that they were helping the Chatelaine install her brand-new fruit orchard!!!! Here are salient and fruity details -- we planted trees from which the Chatty One (and visiting poets hoping to earn their lunch) shall harvest someday while birds and gophers (leeches!) go a-twitter and a-hopper:

Peaches
Santa Rosa Plums
Cherries
Persimmons -- Fuya (whatever the heck Fuya is)
Mission Figs
Green Figs
Myer Lemons
Bears Limes
Washington Navel Oranges

We were amuck in mulch but, cobalt sky hanging like a clean plate, we were happy as clams that never stained a clean plate. Life is Good!

Now -- if I might find a tinge of sadness, Moi might yet birth a poem over this....but, eh, no need to force that fictional construct. Martyr Poetics doesn't interest the Chatelaine....and Moi very much wants future harvests simply replete with joyous fruits!

SPD POETRY BESTSELLERS

Small Press Distribution just released its Winter 2004 Poetry Bestsellers -- moi Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is No. 12!!!! YaY! But I'm printing the entire list below to encourage y'all to check out all these fabuloso titles! Or, as SPD puts it, do encourage your bookstore or library to stock up!

Bestselling SPD Poetry Titles
(Winter 2004)

1) TIS OF THEE ISBN: 1-891190-16-4 , AUTHOR: Howe, Fanny , PRICE: $12.95
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2) THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING ISBN: 0-914610-00-7 , AUTHOR: Alexie, Sherman , PRICE: $12.00
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3) NEST ISBN: 0-932716-63-6 , AUTHOR: Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei , PRICE: $14.00
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7) THE GRANITE PAIL: THE SELECTED POEMS OF LORINE NIEDECKER [EXPANDED EDITION] ISBN: 0-917788-61-3 , AUTHOR: Niedecker, Lorine/Edited by Cid Corman , PRICE: $14.50
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8) NEVER MIND: TWENTY POEMS AND A STORY ISBN: 965-90125-2-7 , AUTHOR: Ali, Taha Muhammad , PRICE: $11.95
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9) BLACK DOG SONGS ISBN: 0-9710059-9-0 , AUTHOR: Jarnot, Lisa , PRICE: $13.00
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11) MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES ISBN: 0-9664871-9-2 , AUTHOR: Hejinian, Lyn , PRICE: $12.00
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12) REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE ISBN: 0-9713332-8-9 , AUTHOR: Tabios, Eileen R. , PRICE: $12.95
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13) MUSE & DRUDGE ISBN: 0-935162-15-1 , AUTHOR: Mullen, Harryette , PRICE: $12.50
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14) ONE MAN'S MOON: EXPANDED EDITION: POEMS BY BASHO AND OTHER JAPANESE POETS ISBN: 0-917788-76-1 , AUTHOR: Corman, Cid,, Translator , PRICE: $15.00
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15) LOVE, LIKE PRONOUNS ISBN: 1-890650-14-5 , AUTHOR: Waldrop, Rosmarie , PRICE: 12.95
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17) EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY JOURNEY OF SIMONE MARTINI ISBN: 1-931243-53-0 , AUTHOR: Luzi, Mario , PRICE: $14.95
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18) DUST AND CONSCIENCE ISBN: 0-9669937-8-0 , AUTHOR: Tran, Truong , PRICE: $12.95
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19) A PARADE OF HANDS ISBN: 1-878851-19-5 , AUTHOR: Hoch, James , PRICE: $12.95
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20) SISTA TONGUE ISBN: 0-97121982-6 , AUTHOR: Kanae, Lisa Linn , PRICE: $10.00
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21) O TASTE AND SEE: FOOD POEMS (A Collection of Modern & Contemporary Poems) ISBN: 0-933087-82-9 , AUTHOR: Garrison, David Lee/Terry Hermsen, Eds. , PRICE: $14.00
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24) AS IN EVERY DEAFNESS ISBN: 0-9710059-8-2 , AUTHOR: Foust, Graham , PRICE: $13.00
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25) MINT SNOWBALL ISBN: 0-938078-68-2 , AUTHOR: Nye, Naomi Shihab , PRICE: $12.00
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FRIDAY BLATHER: KELSEY, COLLAGE POEMS, USE OF ADJECTIVES & ACTIVIST POETICS

Kelsey Street Press, if you don't know, happens to be celebrating its 30th year anniversary this year!!!! How many poetry collectives are able to accomplish such, and accomplish such in such a stellar fashion, based on their list of authors? And now, you Dear Peep, get to benefit! In celebration of 30 years, Kelsey is having a

30TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY SALE

Get fabulous books at a generous discount because, at Kelsey, we are fabulous and generous!

*****

Next, I am moved and honored by Leny's collage poem made from one of my poems, "Eulogy" (Leny is posting notes and poems that result from her and her class's review of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole). Interesting that she crafted a 10-line, 2-stanza poem from my 3-page, 5-paragraph prose poem. Methinks me verbose, poihaps? Eh -- but enchantingly so, as I like to say about moiself. Check out Leny at Kathang-Pinay.

And what's interesting is how Kristin Thomas does (often amusing) collages, too, from spam poetry at her blog, the latest addition to my links!

*****

James wonders if "activist poetry" is a "funny coupling." Like many adjectives, the usefulness of the qualifer, IMHO, depends on context. So the phrase "activist poetry" might seem dismissive or even pretentious when referenced in a vacuum. But when set in context, it can become meaningful and useful. For instance, one reason that Oscar Penaranda (a poet I choose as an example only because he's mentioned in my recent posts) probably would not mind being called an "activist poet" and his work "activist poems" is because the choice for many of his poems' topics relates to his cultural activism, specifically the desire to speak of the Manong experience (or the experience, often unknown to many, of the first generation of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. at the late 19th-early20th centuries).

Adjectives are interesting. The poet-art critic who taught me much about how to write art criticism, once counseled, "Writing on art is like writing poems -- use nouns and verbs and forego the adjectives." Now, of course we both break that rule all the time....but I've found it useful to keep that in mind so that I don't rely on abstractions as adjectives. Like, were I to call Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (whose concerns are about as *pure* poetically as anyone) an "activist poet," I'd immediately qualify that by explaining that Mei-mei, for instance, takes a feminist perspective to language by poeticizing technical jargon in male-dominated industries (for more on this, see Black Lightning).

By the way, obviously this all may not have anything to do with James (I'm just grateful his words opened up this train of thought), but said train of thought -- on adjectives -- now leads me to recall when I first started out as a poet eight years ago, a nationally-renowned poet/writer advised me never to call myself an "Asian American" or "Filipino American" poet. Well-meaning poet explained, "You're too good to be categorized as such."

Obviously, I've ignored that advise (while, may I add, feeling quite sorry for this person whose wider experience seemed to have taught said person to assimilate before so-called "mainstream" or "dominant canonical" tendencies, rather than to be more of a deep thinker). Poetry is HUGE and can encompass everything so that, yes, on one level, one need not revert to qualifyers. But the lack of specificity -- depending on context -- is also a dismissal of aspects of significance to a poem.

If, say, I write a poem about the Filipino dish adobo and the poem has universal appeal because my text about this very delicious dish appeals to the non-Filipino areas of the universe, all well and good. But if one were to wish to understand the significance of adobo -- particularly as Filipinos disperse around the world -- one would see it as a means for finding "home" within the diaspora and as a tool for exercising the Filipino trait of "pakikipagkapwa-tao" that poet-scholar Leny Strobel has ascribed to my poetry.

In a more distant example, I call the hay(na)ku a Filipino diasporic form. The use of the two words "Filipino" and "diasporic" relate to an activist (cultural activism) component of my poetics. I call it Filipino as the term refers to the Filipino expression "Hay naku!" but I am also careful to refer to underlying inspirations for its creation to non-Filipinos like Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan...and such is appropriate because, in the diaspora, a Filipino encounters non-Filipino elements. And by doing so, I am *ALSO* hearkening to the (in my not humble opinion this time) rather fascist thinking of certain Filipino cultural workers who seem to think that Filipinos being interested in other cultures automatically denotes eurocentrism....

Let the adjectives in -- they don't necessarily denigrate. How can they diss when their qualities may be embedded in the poem....or the poet. That train of thought (to me) implies there's something pure about Poetry. IMHO (I'm on a phase, too, with using that "IMHO"), if Poetry is pure, it's the purity of impurity.

Finally, this excerpt from my essay "Maganda: Thoughts on Poetic Form" (forthcoming in the Spring 2004 issue of MELUS) may be relevant:

As a Filipino poet living in the United States, I am interested in transcending personality or ego, but not “personhood,” a word I derived from pagkatao, the essence of being. Avoiding self-erasure is significant for addressing the political implications of my context through residence. In the United States, Filipinos have been called a “silent majority,” where Filipinos often are ignored or invisible, whether due to racism or because of Filipino immigrant assimilationist tendencies. This may seem paradoxical with the idea of emptying the mind to move out of the Poem’s way. But Poetry is full of paradoxes. And Poetry must contain a multiplicity of paradoxes because Poetry is about the totality of Life (hence my poems’ varied references to ancient Greek, East Asian, European and American cultures as much as the Filipino culture). In navigating across the universe, poetic alchemy does not require the Poet to give up choice. A related approach—this paradoxical juggling of choice and yet reflecting one’s concerns--may be seen in the poetics of Jean Vengua and Nick Carbó.

Nowadays, Vengua writes most of her poems through a cyberspace “blog” (online journal). She notes, “I write about 90% of my poetry online, and ‘in public’ with a minimum of revisions. Naturally, this format changes the very nature of my writing, tends to shorten the line length, forces me to pause at the end of every line to insert a linebreak code.” Thus, Vengua utilizes a format that constrains her, and yet she is the one who chooses to be constrained as such. This approach reflects her views that poetry is not “something ‘fixed’ on paper, [but is] a language that is always in flux, always changing, and even--to the extent to which I forego the ‘save’ command, or commit the words to floppy disk--fleeting.”

In turn, the evanescence of Vengua's approach reflects her desires for “1) a need to radically move beyond authoritative, categorizing and totalizing forms; 2) a poetry that embraces process unashamedly, and which utilizes everything in the poets’ life as a changing “field” which flows into, and effects the language and event of writing; 3) use of language that acknowledges the discrepancies and violence of modernity and the colonial/post-colonial experience.

Nick Carbó also plays with disrupting authority by, for instance, writing what he calls “Cube Dice Poems.” One such poem is comprised of the lines:

Kiss along the ochre edge
Take your half of my soul
Obsidian songs sliding along your neck
An apple, an ankle, a tickle touch
I found your fragmented forgiveness under the bed
Verdigris is how I feel your shadow

The poem is a “cube dice poem” because each line is featured within a square. Squares form a pattern on the page that the reader can cut out and, using tape, use to form a cube. The reader then can roll the paper cube and each time, a different square, i.e. a different line, would end up facing upward. According to Carbó, the reader should roll the cube as one would roll a die. Repeat rolling and write down lines that are facing up. Keep rolling until the reader attains all the combination the reader desires.This means that there can be a large number of poems, even if their material is the same six lines, depending on the roll of the die and the reader’s decision on how many times to roll it. While the six lines themselves do not seem political in any way, Carbó’s approach to this poem is, indeed, political for it subverts the traditional approaches to how the poem is taught, read and written.

Our poetic approaches, while seemingly facilitating an erasure of our “selves” still promote our presence. Ultimately no paradox may exist in straddling the tension between ego-emptiness and the erasure of personhood. Decolonization scholar Leny M. Strobel notes that the Buddhist notion of “no Self” (which I relate to my notion of emptying the mind to move out of the Poem’s way) is still a “Self” that replaces ego. Strobel adds, “The decolonized Filipino self may be akin to the emergence of this Buddhist no-self/Self because the Filipino values of kapwa and loob already integrate this non-dualist, inclusive view of the self in relation to the universe.”

Relatedly, I concede a private agenda in relating the Maganda [Filipino] myth to my poetics--particularly for publications whose audiences go beyond Filipino readership. “Filipinizing” my poetics helps me address the historical silencing of Filipino stories--my act of recovery is a way to participate in Filipino decolonization. In addition to Filipinizing my poetics by correlating the fully-formed poem to not just Athena but also the mythological woman Maganda, I also create poetics statements that offer emphases on issues that are of concern to me. [Such concerns may be too political for some, but the marvel of Poetry is that its expanse can be accepting of everything, everything, everything....*]

----------
Footnote *: Synchronistically, the title of my own essay in PINOY POETICS is "A Poetics of Everything, Everything, Everything..."

"ONE SCARY PINAY"'S VERSION OF SKIING POETICS

It's ski season, dammit, and no slope is benefiting from my zippy presence due to the animals! Did I tell you that Achilles got a Valentine's Day present from one of the trainers, who addressed it "To My Handsome Young Achilles"? Dang -- makes me wonder what she's training him for....!

Anyway, due to Achilles who's too young to be separated from Mommy Moi, I won't be zipping about Colorado, Utah, New Mexico or elsewhere in California this ski season (though I presumably moved out West partly to be nearer to such)....which, perhaps, is why I was floating about Veronica's blog blathering about skiing in the comments boxes to her post on "Snow Talk"; to wit (I'm on a witless phrase of being enamoured, it seems, with said phrase "to wit"):

On : 2/11/2004 10:27:58 PM Eileen said:
It's best for kiddies to learn to ski when they're, uh, kiddies. Less distance to fall. Then there's moi way. Learned to ski at age 25 -- never fell and, indeed, learnt on icy slopes of New Hampshire (afterwhich, the rest of the world's ski slopes are easy). The key? Take a lesson from a Germanic...German who pronounces "w" as "v" so that when he proclaims YU VILL TURN, you turn coz you're scared witless....

On : 2/11/2004 11:33:01 PM veronica said:
Hi Eileen! Yes, kiddos will go to ski school next year for sure.

YOU NEVER FELL? It must have been all thanks to the scary German person because it just ain't right that a Filipina--an ISLAND lass--should remain upright in the snow her first time. You are one scary pinay...

On : 2/12/2004 10:24:31 AM Eileen said:
"one scary pinay"? hah! that, of course, is one of the most complimentary compliments one can say about Moi....what is truly scary, tho, is how I look in ski clothes -- like a radioactive alien snowball....[Nota Bene to moi peeps -- obviously, I was declaiming false modesty here as I look superb...]

On : 2/12/2004 12:32:40 PM veronica said:
I hereby vote that your next blog be called ONE SCARY PINAY and that your tag should be "Look Out or She'll Flip You Off."

=======

"Flip You Off," of course, works as a word pun when one understands that "Flip" is short for "Filipino...."

Anyway, what this ONE SCARY PINAY realizes is that my experience with learning how to ski very much mirrors my learning about poems. Because the first poet I had to immerse moiself in (through the Black Lightning exercise) was Arthur Sze...and the third poet was Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. These two poets are considered by many to be not easily accessible. Whatever. But after Arthur and Mei-mei, I don't consider any poem to be "difficult".

Ya see? The importance of the correct teachers (see prior post). And, which is also to say: Skiing Poetics!!!!

Hmmm. Can dogs ski? And the Chatty One looks over at Achilles who's busy swiping about an inch-long piece of banana across Galatea's limestone floor because -- ugh -- the feel of said banana obviously evokes a type of small animal that his wolfish predecessors once hunted in the wild....One more swipe and -- yep! -- Achilles pounces and wolfs down that unlucky wild banana! Sigh -- isn't moi life fascinating....

PRAISE BE THE TEACHER!

Here's a letter from Crag Hill which I love posting because great teachers deserve all the praise they get! Crag is writing in response to my recent post on Oscar Penaranda (scroll below):

Eileen:

How excited I am to hear Oscar P. was coming forth with a book of poetry. It's about time.

He was my master teacher at Everitt (sic) Middle School in 1989. I'm teaching, I've made a difference with hundreds of young people, because of the faith, trust, and confidence Oscar showed in me that difficult autumn. Everyday I was ready to quit after 4th Period (I had another master teacher), but the following day's 2nd Period ( the ESL class I taught under Oscar's eyes) re-affirmed my desire, brought out, incrementally, my gift. Dammit, Oscar! In a lot of ways I owe him the life, the living, I'm proud of. I'd like to pass some of that on to him if I can.

Best, Crag

*****

And the Chatelaine lifts a sapphire-edged velvet sleeve to hide a sniffle ...

YOU CAN CALL ME "ESL" OR "A GREASED MACHINE GUN"
(A post dedicated to Denise Duhamel who says she's new to the world of blogland but came to mine!)


Pierre Joris sends an e-mail to Poetics with a quote from Muriel Rukeyser which, I believe, denotes THE REAL Poetics:

"Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems."

Yadda!

Meanwhile, Moi poetry moves fella wanderer, poet, fictionist and author of the acclaimed novel THE UMBRELLA COUNTRY (Random House, 1999) Bino A. Realuyo to place me in one of his newly-finished short stories. Bino just returned from Spain (where he fell in love with Barcelona, also one of moi's favorite cities) and the Fundacion Valparaiso artist colony ... where he saw my picture in the colony and "laughed." Laughed, Hon? Anyway, Bino finished a new short story collection whilst in Mojacar in whose town plaza I once supped from the world's largest paella pan (a special pan almost as huge as the town square itself!). Here's the excerpt from his story "In Sisterhood, Lina, Queen of Maids" which references Moi, the Muse:
 
On the third Consuelo day, I got a message on my answering machine. It was the last person I called, E. Shanette Lee Tabios. She said, let’s meet. Coffee. NYU? I could go there. Name a coffee shop. Well-lit please.

A woman of brief sentences. I liked that. In person, she spoke with the regularity of a well-greased machine gun.

I’m a lawyer. I ran this organization. The Babaylan Group. I call it the Bee Gee. An advocacy group for Filiipino women. A group of activists. Mosly lawyers who volunteer time to defend Filipino women who can’t afford high lawyer fees. We believe in justice for Filipino women. We cover a gamut: domestic issues, domestic abuse, sex trafficking. Not limited to those. I’m thirty-seven. Harvard Law. Columbia U, pre-law. You can call me ESL. Do you have any questions?

Um, no.

I would like to meet with Consuelo, she said. Could you arrange a meeting?

Sure will.

Just the two of us. If you don’t mind.

I have no problem with that at all. You’re free tomorrow?

Do you need a brush?

I’m sorry? I asked.

Your hair. Disheveled. Brush?

Rat-tat-tat, I thought. My hair? I asked. My hair is always like this. College you know?

I see, she said. She unzipped her Coach bag, and took out a Gucci brush, Take this. I’m free tomorrow at 11 am. Same place.

Her posture, her looks, and her vocal delivery were as regimented as a military leader’s, except the army was in a boutique. She had magazine-cover looks, but not strikingly beautiful. A little airbrush here and there, she could be perfection.

***

Of course it's fiction. Moi don't need to be airbrushed to be "perfection."
 

KUNDIMAN: OSCAR PENARANDA

I was honored when Oscar Penaranda asked me for a blurb for his first poetry collection FULL DECK (JOKER'S PLAYING) (Tboli Publishing, San Francisco, April 2004). Oscar has been well-renowned for being an educator and activist (didn't he create the first Filipino Studies Department in a U.S. college?), but is also an excellent poet (e.g., part of a group of the first Filipino-American poets to appear in American Poetry Review when chosen by Kay Boyle in 1974). He has focused more on education rather than pitching his poetry, and so I am delighted to support this long overdue project with a measly blurb. Here's his "bio" (from PINOYPOETICS), Moi blurb, and a sample poem below:

BIO: Oscar Peñaranda was born in the Philippines but came to America right after turning 12. He has experienced and written about the Filipino American experience since the 60's. He is an educator, a storyteller and an advocate of Filipino heritage studies and events. Though he has traveled some, the San Francisco Bay Area has been his home for 5 decades. His materials cover the Filipino migrant farmworker and Alaskero experiences, among other things. Here he writes about the earlier days of Filipino American writing when the term "Filipino American" was coined.

ON FULL DECK (JOKER'S PLAYING):
Oscar Penaranda chose Poetry to tell stories, most notably of the Filipino American experience. So why didn't he choose fiction? Because the stories resonate beyond what can be expressed by words. What breathes between the lines of his poems is an ache-ridden love borne of the mating of loss and desire -- a haunting that transcends such references as "There was this/ ragged iron bar/ that by accident crushed my/ toe/ when I with leathered gloves/ worked with steel/ in Alaska..." Fortunately, Poetry also chose Oscar Penaranda, as evident in a poem like "A Song" where he sings, "So long as the world / touches me/ my heart strings will never stop/ playing the music."
--Eileen Tabios


Real Estate
(for w.c.w.)
by Oscar Penaranda

No one tends to the weeds anymore
that's all right, I understand

I'm an old graveyard of a
small salmon-fishing village
in the middle of nowhere South Naknek, Alaska
"Boomtown, USA"

I had many more than those markers indicate:
corroded stones, tilted, balding wreaths
in the slant of rain I hold
many more

and no one knows
who planted them and
no one knows who's buried where

most didn't bother with inscriptions, a few
had Chinese characters mixed with English like

                              Chong
                              ?-1916

                              or

                              Olaf
                              1888-1939

As time passed
the cannery grew around
me so that I

grew in
the middle of everything. They couldn't
shove me off to a corner anymore it
was too late.
Bunkhouses and the cannery were below me
the nightlife (bar, movie house, dance floor, restaurant, all in one building)
of the village to my left. No one notices me but of course everyone
does not like to be reminded. The best thing they could do was fence
me in. Below was the river which snakily-
emptied into the bay far beyond

I'm an old cemetery
who hasn't been used lately.
Even rats and lean dogs refuse me now.
I have been dead I think
for a long time,
never having had a heyday

It's hard to be liked anymore.
I don't want to hurry anyone
of something that needs no hurrying

No one visits
but the wind
whose memory planted those markers
and who knows who's buried where

But who will bury me?

Like Bill the american poet with a spanish grandmother said:
If in passing you bring nothing
with you but your carcass,
do me a favor
get out
and take the long way

to the bar

"NEED LEADS TO GREED"

Carolyn Canales is one of the students I met in Prof. Thomas Fink's class of college sophomores at LaGuardia. Though the class had been full of much energetic discussion, she had been one of the handful of students who remained quiet and only came up to me afterwards...to my delight. She just sent me this poem:

(need leads to greed, and we cannot live without its company, infatual can be unnatural, different form of sodomy, what you fear, all your tears, your traumatic tormentation, all your problems, how you solve them, or your lack of confrontation, your devotion, self-destruction, and all internal contradiction, your emotions, thoughts-in-motion, these things are my addiction)

Thank you, Carolyne -- I did check out your site; may your poetry-writing continue to fare well...!

ON DENNIS OPPENHEIM

I would want to be in NYC this Friday just to see this; am passing on the word as I did see the exhibit and think it fabuloso! Here's the announcement from White Box Gallery:

DENNIS OPPENHEIM PANEL DISCUSSION
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13TH 6:00 p.m., 2004

DENNIS OPPENHEIM WITH
ELEANOR HEARTNEY (New York based art critic and Co-President of AICA-USA, the American Section of the International Art Critics Association)
DR. STEVEN POSER (Practicing Psychoanalyst and Faculty Member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, NYC) and
RAUL ZAMUDIO (Curatorial Director for White Box, Correspondent for Flash Art and Foreign Correspondent Art Nexus)

Currently at White Box
DENNIS OPPENHEIM:
ARMATURES FOR PROJECTION ­ THE EARLY FACTORY PROJECTS
CURATED BY RAUL ZAMUDIO
16 JANUARY - 14 FEBRUARY, 2004

WHITE BOX
525 WEST 26TH STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10001
TEL 212-714-2347
www.whiteboxny.org
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 6 pm

SOMETHING UNUSUAL ON THIS BLOG: SELF-PROMOTION (AKA, SUPPORT POETRY PUBLISHERS!)

So the Chatelaine has finally finished soothing cats Artemis and Scarlet and puppy Achilles over her recent absence from Galatea, and now can turn her attention to some mail, both e- and S. Imagine her surprise -- and delight -- over the munificent bounty she had not known awaited her return to the mountain....where colors love to meld to form the gems that hem her sleeves and hems....something like that -- anyway:

Pre-first, thanks to Michael for retaining Moi on your list (I'da thought I'd drop out due to NYC truncating my posts last week -- but I am honored! (And, btw, I agree on your comments re. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's -- they never cared to blog their personal details and the latest novel Winterland and movie "Sylvia" are just taking advantage and offer no incremental insight...). Now, how's about some reviews and blurbs -- I mean, you don't really think I write this blog for the amusement of 9.7 million-plus-a-handful-of-college-sophomores, do you? Naaah -- I maintain this blog to pitch Moiself and I full-frontally acknowledge such!

So.

First, Noah Eli Gordon does a service to Poetry with his Roundup of Mini Reviews in the current issue of St. Marks Poetry Newsletter. Noah prefaces his article with, "Although impossible to give a book its due in a few sentences, I hope these reviews will at least draw some additional and well-deserved attention to the following works." The thing is, even a ten thousand-word review might still be insufficient to "give a book its due." So I appreciate Noah's approach because inclusion already does its job, in that presumably there was a reason why Noah chose to include a book for mention in the first place. And yet -- and this is a testament to his writerly talent! -- Noah's pithy reviews also elucidate! Thanks Noah.

Naturally, I'm grateful that he included Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole in his 13-book round-up; I am going to quote his mention since...uh, this blog is about Moi (but in my excerpting, I'll include the prior mention of another book, this one by Geoffrey Dyer because I also love it and it mentions my loveable and irritating angels):

Also focused on alternate uses of narrative, Geoffrey Dyer's The Dirty Halo of Everything (Krupskaya, 2003, $11) unfolds a musical dream world, where travel logs late night talks, and enigmatic characters are taken through a philoosophically spiritual sense of interconnection. Mostly in prose the poems here gesture both toward and out of events, which include angels as often as they do the more earthly delights of bisuits, cornstalks and roadside oddities. Another book of prose poems, Eileen R. Tabios's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002, $12.95) is able to narrate the political implications of place and identity without giving up the desirous, inquisitive or uncertain nature of human interactions. From Greece to Nepal, New York to the Mindanao Sea, the multiple paragraphs of these poems consistently demonstrate a devotion to the life of the pronouns which people them.

"Devotion" -- what a lovely word. Other noted books in Noah's round-up (and thanks for bringing my attention to those I hadn't already known):

Kit Robinson's 9:45 (Post-Apollo, 2003, $10)
Graham Foust's As In Every Deafness (Flood Editions, 2003, $13)
Stephen Ratcliffe's Portraits & Repetition (Post-Apollo, 2002, $14)
Laura Solomon's Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002, $12.95)
Li Bloom's Radish (iUniverse, 2003, $12.95)
Tomaz Salamun's Poker, trans. by Joshua Beckman and author (Ugly Duckling, 2003, $10)
George Kalamaras's Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw, 2003, $12)
Eric Baus's The To Sound (Verse, 2004, $12)
Leslie Scalapino's It's go in / quiet illumined grass / land with fabulous sculptur Petah Coyne (Post-Apollo, 2002, $12)
Shin Yu Pai's Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003, $14)
Diane Wald's The Yellow Hotel (Verse, 2002, $12

*****

Also receiving a review is the anthology I co-edited with Evelina M. Galang and others: SCREAMING MONKEYS which will be launched at AWP next month! The review is written by scholar (and prof at University of Pamplona en Espana, si?) Rocio Davis for PALH E-Zine. To wit:

Screaming Monkeys enacts one of the most challenging, yet culturally rewarding, subversions of prevailing stereotypes of Asian Americans in contemporary mass media. The title of the anthology comes from a controversial incident that sparked the editor's anger: in a restaurant review published in Milwaukee Magazine in 1998, the reviewer calls a young Filipino American boy a "rambunctious little monkey," leading to a flurry of indignant responses by Asians. The key issue was simple: the writer's ignorance of Filipino and Filipino American history led her to frivolously write what she probably considered a cute anecdote. How exceedingly misguided she was is evidenced by this amazing anthology, a dramatic work of creativity and resistance to uninformed cultural categories and a vital document that professors of Asian American studies or anyone interested in the complex history of Asians in America will appreciate.

Sunaina Maira, noting the "rise of Indo-chic" in the last couple of years, "part of a wider marketing of 'Asian cool' in fashion, music, and film," asks the crucial question: "So what kinds of representations do we, and can we, construct in response?" Here is the answer: M. Evelina Galang and her amazing team of editors have constructed an anthology of a wide range of texts and images that illustrate how Asian America has been uncritically represented in the media and in art, to challenge those representations with art itself. The juxtaposition of creative modes-fiction, poetry, essay, art with advertisements and critical pieces-provides a nuanced perspective of the vexed position of Asian Americans in mainstream America, and obliges us to rethink our manner of cultural classifications. The range and quality of the contributions is to be applauded-texts by established writers such as Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Li-Young Lee dialogue with work by young artists, "found" images and texts that include a Skyy Vodka ad, a photograph of Madonna "channeling her inner geisha" (488), a reproduction of a Newsweek article from 2000 that claims that Asian men are the latest trophy boyfriends, Bill Clinton's apology to Japanese America, and critical or personal essays, like Wen Ho Lee's account of his interrogation by the CIA and an essay by David Mura where he explains why he's glad he didn't get a role in Fargo. As such, the anthology's vital metacritical design is to make Asian American voices (screams!) heard-loudly! These texts subvert stereotypical images by presenting them in a new strategic light: they show how the media invents, advocates, and sustains the stereotypes of Asians in America precisely because they have misunderstood, ignored or trivialized the presence of Asians in American history, culture, cities, sports, and entertainment. And it allows Asian Americans to speak for themselves, though an extraordinary assemblage of artistic modes. The selections are warm and funny, cynical and offensive, suspect and strange, but, as a whole, the anthology will not leave one indifferent. Galang's intelligent and thoughtful anthology is a vital contribution to the development of Asian American cultural studies.

*****

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole receives another review! This, by Nick Carbo, in the new poetry publication, 2ndAvenuePoetry.com:

Eileen Tabios’ first book of poetry to be published in the United States and this volume of art-inspired prose poems should bring to an American audience what the Philippine and Southeast Asian publishing world has already known for several years: Eileen Tabios is a world class poet with serious talent. She has had three previous books of poetry published in the Philippines since 1989. They are Beyond Life Sentences (1989) which won the Manila Book Critics’ Circle National Book Award, Ecstatic Mutations (2000), and My Romance (2001).

Reproductions begins with the poem “Eclipse” which asserts the poet’s intimate connection to the world of art, “To escape chaos, the Greeks created art with abstractions. It is a familiar approach, having long used geometry to deny myself caresses.” Many of the poems in the book are inspired by works of art like “The Kritios Boy,” “Jade,” “Adultery,” “The Color of a Scratch in Metal,” “The Wire Sculpture,” “The Fairy Child’s Prayer,” “The Destiny of Rain,” “My Saison Between Baudelair and Morrison,” “Muse Poem,” “Franz Kline Kindly Says About Three Gersture-Laden Brushstrokes,” “Insomnia’s Lullaby,” and the whole last section of the book entitled “Triptych for Anne Truit.” Tabios's approach to these poems is pure ekphrasis. In ancient Greece, philosophers defined ekphrasis as a vivid description intended to bring the subject before the mind’s eye of the listener.

The author of this book is ultimately successful in this artistic enterprise of bringing the subject before the mind’s eye of the readers and these readers will not only be enlightened but informed.

*****

Last but definitely not least, poet-painter-critic-scholar Thomas Fink turns his eye on my book MY ROMANCE for the Spring 2004 issue of MELUS. Here's an excerpt from his review:

In My Romance, which juxtaposes poetry and visual art writings, Eileen Tabios carefully addresses political ramifications of art-making/reception and aesthetic issues. For example, she praises political painter Susan Bee for incorporating "sometimes dysfunctional fragments" of "a troubled world" in order to unify them "through color as well as the surface and gesture of her brushstrokes."

Form has political relevance in Tabios's poetics. The poem "Babaylan" speaks of "Filipina poets colonizing English." Seeking "to avoid narrative because it had facilitated the use of English to consolidate American colonialism in the Philippines"-- her native land-- as "the language for education, commerce, and politics," she favors "abstract" collagistic construction "to subvert meaning." A powerful erotic charge, tinged with surrealism, pervades many poems: "I am swooning into you with eyes of open stones." Poems like "The Color of a Scratch on Metal" and "Perhaps This Second Drift" abound with plural meanings, juxtaposing erotic adventure, aesthetic speculation, and awareness of power relations. Perspective is ever questioned: "Who is subject and who is observer?/ . . . . What if the observer is the controlling agent?"

Amid varieties of "romance," the poet/critic is "learning not to yearn for amnesia." Thus, she foregrounds postcolonial emphases on the relation of language, economics, eros, and "othering":

I do know English and therefore, when hungry, can ask for more
than minimum wage, pointing repeatedly at my mouth and yours.

Such a gesture can only mean what it means: I do not want to
remain hungry and I am looking at your mouth.

I do know English and still will not ask permission. ("I Do")

Tabios writes compellingly, as well, on artists who explore perception, spirituality, and psychology. In "Teacher," My Romance's cover painting, Max Gimblett, achieves a fissure-spanning "wholeness" when "the circle on the right panel of the diptych extends into the left panel so that it includes within its span the crack between the diptych's two panels" and imitates natural and psychic "fractures." "The circle allows for the break even as it doesn't break," and, by "crowd[ing] the edge of the canvas," it even points "beyond the edges of the painting" to incorporate "the world within the painting." She affirms "the juxtaposition of motion (the moving circle) and stillness (the 'Z' mark)" as "acceptance" of possibilities without the necessity of a reductive "choice." Indeed, My Romance's collaging of poetry, historical data, symbolic analysis of art, and formal evaluation itself embodies a critique of reductiveness and a championing of pluralism with a critical edge.

========*****========

Thanks to all who see something in my work besides my blather. Most times, actually, I prefer Moi blather as I never lose sight of my goal to AMUSE MOISELF. Like....the title of this post -- yes, right: it is just so rare for me to....preen, ain't it?!

By the way, why is Moi preening this morning? Well, amongst other things, here's another example of the moronic oxymorons of poetry economics. San Francisco's Tax Collector -- belay the standing ovation -- just sent me a bill that'll cost my teensy but highly prestigious press, Meritage Press, $25. Now, what is the significance of $25? To have $25, I gotta earn $50 because the Federal and State Governments require their pound of flesh from Moi Lovely Body. To earn $50, I gotta sell ten books. It is hard to SELL (vs. comp) a poetry book. Buy poetry books! Hay(na)ku-defined-Patrick-Rosal's-Way!* Just because I became a poetry publisher to lose money doesn't mean....I like losing money! SUPPORT POETRY PUBLISHERS!

-----------
Footnote * In response to a peep about the definition of "hay naku", the Filipino phrase after which the poetic form is named, it is a context-based definition/exclamation. So it could mean something benign like "Is that so?" for, say, emphasis of a point being made. But in Patrick's context, apparently, it was often used to mean something like "motherfucker!" Well, I didn't follow up with Patrick on the kind of contexts this lad must have found himself in to be defining "hay naku" in that manner....but I'ma sure we can ... extrapolate!

KULTURE & CULTURE

I was in the alley and then I was in the restaurant.
Something had happened and I didn’t know what it was.
All I knew was I was changed.
The train goes into the tunnel and comes out the other side;
the trembling child emerges from behind the curtain.
Unchain my heart, thou monstrous god.
--Sarah Manguso

Barry Schwabsky is on the road, but this doesn't prevent said Dude from sending forth two "public service announcements" -- so the least I can do is share tell:

First, to announce a new poetry program at kultureflash. Barry, as Contributing Editor, just added a new section to feature a new poem each week aptly entitled "Poem of the Week." The first to be featured is Sarah Manguso, to be followed (I believe) by Arthur Sze. So click on the link to see Sarah's poem.

The second is to share an invitation for a very worthwhile cause: a benefit for artist Chris Hackett. The invitation can be viewed in full at http://www.laughingsquid.org/sfmad/ but here are some salient details as it is open to whoever's in San Francisco on:

Friday the 13th of February, 2004

SomArts
934 Brannan Street
San Francisco

9:00pm-5:00am

21+

Sliding-Scale cover, To Be Announced

The story:

On Saturday January 24, Chris Hackett, Founder of the Madagascar Institute in Brooklyn, New York, sustained massive physical injuries when an explosive art-piece he was developing detonated in his face. The explosion left him with broken bones in his face, a broken jaw, and burns throughout his body. Like many working artists, Hackett has no medical insurance and no money to pay for the reconstructive surgery he will need for his face. In response to the explosion, the NYPD sent their anti-terrorism unit to The Institute and confiscated all of the Institute's computers, maps of various spots in New York City, and other personal and professional materials.

The Madagascar Institute is a seminal arts organization in New York City. The Institute's artists have spearheaded dozens of street performances and events both in New York and around the world. Including: Glastonbury Festival in England, Robodoc in Rotterdam, and have been a regular presence at the Burning Man festival. In addition to staging performances and creating art, The Madagascar Institute holds both free and inexpensive classes on everything from sewing, to welding and auto-repair. People from all over New York's many diverse communities are drawn to The Madagascar Institute. The Institute has helped shape these individuals into skilled artists, welders, and machinists and many of these artisans have in turn moved on to create their own projects and art throughout the country.

The purpose of the benefit at SomArts is two-fold. Firstly, to raise much needed monies to cover Chris Hackett's exorbitant medical expenses and to keep The Institute afloat while he recuperates. Secondly, to rouse dialogue in the creative community as a whole, to discuss legal, privacy, and other First Amendment issues pressingly relevant to artists in the post-September Eleventh anti-terror sociopolitical climate.

POETIC NOURISHMENTS

Actually, my recent "New York Diary" would not be complete without saying more about Thursday which I spent doing a morning class lecture/discussion/reading and afternoon reading at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. Thanks so much to Professors Thomas Fink, Karlyn Koh and Gordon Tapper of the English Department, as well as LaGuardia's Educational Development Team for a "2003 Professional Development Grant" which supported the event. The students were fabulous, lively, energetic, curious and animated -- the kind of audience one dreams of. Several were moved to share their own dreams about poetry in private conversations, which naturally made the Chatelaine mentally sniffle though she had to keep a non-teary "adult" face. In fact, just an hour or so before I write this post, one of the students, "Jose," followed up with two poems he e-mailed to this blog's address (my readership just jumped by at least two to five college sophomores as a result of this trip!)

It seemed a good time was had by all; the College's president even stopped by the afternoon reading....and one of the other English professors later told me that several students whispered to her after my reading, "We didn't know poems could be ... sexy." Hah! But I'm glad peeps had a good time since I was told they have had a visiting poet come by perhaps only once every other year (?). Tom could only remember two others before me, one of which was Yusef Kumonyakaa -- I guess that's respectable company for Moi to be in...

Afterwards, the wonderful profs took me to dinner at a wonderful local Korean! I believe they took Kumonyakaa to a local Greek...I am mentioning these details, if you must know, to josh certain poets who keep trying to locate Poetry *simply* on the page instead of as a living, breathing force....(wink)....

Speaking of food since ... is not Poetry food?!!!!, I apparently must apologize to Sandy McIntosh for implying that it was "easy" to conduct the cooking of the Tangerine-themed Chinese meal reference in the prior post. Of course it was not "easy" -- it's just that all I did was sip from a glass and pontificate about things I know nothing about while watching him slave away...so whilst Moi found the whole experience "easy", the stellar masterpieces naturally required more effort than what I contributed to the evening.

One of moi peeps, by the way, followed up with an e-mail asking for Sandy's recipe for potstickers. Here it is -- the Chatelaine is here to serve (yes, I'm serving so belay those snorts, dears):

Pot Stickers, In Sandy's Own Words

In traditional Chinese cooking, pot stickers consist of a pork mixture in a distinctively shaped dough crust. Having spent a good deal of time doing it the traditional way, I now take the quick way out and use Vietnamese rice paper to roll them like spring rolls. (I could tell you how to make the traditional dough crust but I’m much too lazy to type it all out.) So, therefore, we go directly to the pork filling:

½ lb ground, fatty pork
¼ lb. Small shrimp
2-3 dried black mushrooms
2 T minced scallion
1 T minced garlic
1 T minced ginger
1 T thin soy
1 T sugar (or Splenda)
1 T sesame oil
1 egg white
3-4 T. peanut or corn oil

Soak black mushrooms in hot water for 20 minutes, or until reconstituted.

Peel the shrimp and puree them.

Drain the mushrooms, squeeze dry and mince finely. Place the pork in a bowl; add the shrimp, mushrooms, scallion, ginger, garlic, thin soy, sugar and sesame oil. Mix well than add the egg white. Mix again and let stand for the flavors to set.

If using frozen dumplings (and I always make them ahead of time and freeze them because that cuts out the prep time on the day you’re cooking them) defrost them on wax paper before hand.

One at a time, immerse rice paper circles in hot water. Let stand for 10 seconds, or until wilted. (Watch out: they tend to become invisible when immersed in water.) Remove to a board. Take a tablespoon of the pork mixture and place in the center. Roll into a spring roll of your own shaping using your aesthetic and mechanical skills. I’ve forgotten how many this makes, but plenty.

Heat a 12 inch skillet and add enough oil to cover the bottom to a depth of ¼ inch. Allow the oil to heat then add, one-at-a-time, the pot stickers. Push them into the oil away from you. Do about 4 at a time so they don’t attach themselves to each other. When the bottoms are crispy and brown flip them over. Brown on the other side.

The key to this dish is the dipping sauce; see prior post.

FROM NEW YORK DIARY

What a wonderful turnout -- of ye olde *poets & painters* type of crowd -- in Brooklyn's halcyon this Sunday! Thanks everyone for coming and packing the room! Great to share it with Barry Schwabsky (reading from a new manuscript in progress with a fabulous title that, uh, I may not recall exactly -- but something about *from the pages of a book left out in the rain*; as well as New Jersey lad Patrick Rosal who reminded me that "hay(na)ku" also can mean "motherfucker." Well now -- sometimes, I don't even know the mischief I get into. Nice to see longtime poet-friends (kundiman to you Joseph Legaspi) as well as lovely to meet Murat Nemet-Nejat and Geoffrey O'Brien for the first time! And fabulous to catch up with artists Sonita Singwi and Richard Tsao -- two of the most interesting painters out there; do check out their works.

Saturday was also filled with catching up with poets, including meeting the wonderful Eleni Sikelianos following her reading at the Bowery Club. Eleni performed partly with "younger brother" Chris who did an outstanding guitar accompaniment to Eleni's poems. First up was Christopher Stackhouse who delivered several stunning lines -- the one I recall as I write this (and do note that my brain is fried -- I first said "fired" -- as I write this as I'm coming off a long plane ride between the coasts) had to do with "petals (was it rose petals?) along a toilet's rim..." Before the reading began, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and I shared wine across the street, admiring the hacked-up dolls hanging from the walls of CBGB's Gallery....we went there first because it was *quieter* and we had much catching up to do; when I mentioned that to Barry later, he had to laugh as he recalled his CBGB days of punk bands which were hardly "quiet"....but CBGB's has changed over the past couple of decades....(sorry to miss Catherine Daly that Saturday, though, yes, Bob Holman gave me your message in time)...and I also enjoyed meeting Lee Ann Brown and specifically watching her 14-month-old daughter Miranda perform yoga poses (albeit unintentionally)...

I try to visit NYC 3-4 times a year, primarily for reasons related to the art world, though I am open to doing a reading or two when I'm there anyway. But, this trip, I could only manage a two-hour "hit-and-run" cruise through Chelsea -- I liked some exhibits better than others but the totality of the art immersion provided its own joy during the afternoon cruising through, among others:

--Dennis Oppenheim: Armatures For Projection -- The Early Factory Projects curated by Raul Zamudio at White Box (thru 2/14) [a wonderful chance to look at some early works and see how Oppenheim explores lines and biomorphism through the full-frontal impact of collaging together serrated blades and other materials with a twist]
--group exhibit on theme "The Game Show" at James Cohen featuring Ellen Gallagher, Kristen Geisler, among others (thru 3/6) [highly recommend]
--group exhibit on theme "Future Noir" at Gorney Bravin + Lee with (new to me) Syd Mead and the always satisfying Alexis Rockman [another highly recommend]
-- Adriean Esparga (chosen by KIate Bonansiga) and David Storey (chosen by Trevor Winkfield) at CUE ART FOUNDATION [the latter sort of smacks though of one choosing someone for sharing the chooser's style]
--Robert Whitman and Richard Misrach at Pace Wildenstein [liked this a lot for the generated *sense of the ecstatic*]
--Chris Burden and Franz Gertsh at Gagosian [turn off for its *context of cynicism* which I forthwith pronounce passe]
--Gina Magid paintings at FEATURE INC (thru 2/14)
--Philip Pearlstein's paintings and watercolors at Robert Miller Gallery (but was up only through 2/7)
--Small gouaches by Liam Roberts (behind the featured Sabine Friesicke) at Robert Steele Gallery (thru 2/7)
--Thierry Feuz's paintings at Kashya Hildebrand Gallery
--Joan Hernandez Pijuan's New Paintings at Galeria Ramis Barquet (thru 2/14)
--the threesome of Chiho Aoshima, Mr. (yes, "Mr." is artist's name) and Aya Takano at LFL Gallery (thru 2/21)
--Marc Quinn at Mary Boone

And, speaking of Bob Holman, he is part of a very satisfying exhibit of portraits by Chuck Close (thru 2/14) at Volume...but satisfying because the exhibit features his homage-poems next to the portraits of 20 artists photographed by Close. The artists include Cindy Sherman, Lisa Yuskavage etc but I'm not a groupie so I couldn't find myself caring that much about Close's photographs of them....until I saw Bob's poems next to each of the artist who inspired said poems. A nifty one was a photograph of Robert Wilson with eyes closed, and then Bob's couplet: "Not looking at something / Is looking at something."

Perhaps my favorite was the photo of James Turrell with a poem of three letters each counting from one to twelve. The poem flows down slanted (which I'll accomplish on blog format by inserting periods, but the periods weren't there) but if you know James Turrell's work with art fashiioned partly from long lightbulbs, then you would understand the idea of the viewer being the one to complete the full text of each number below that's not fully spelled out from a constraint of three letters per line....because light goes beyond the physical source. Here's Bob's homage poem for James Turrell:

one
...two
......thr
.........fou
............fiv
...............six
..................sev
.....................eig
........................nin
...........................ten
..............................ele
..................................twe

================

Last but not least, I should thank Sandy and Barbara McIntosh for hosting me to dinner Friday night. I arrived at their house, and the two of them proclaimed: LOOK AT US! Moi very dutifully looked at them as she was about to be fed, and noticed their radioactively orange shirts both have donned, as well as the parrot on Barbara's shoulder with an orange tufted head. They explained: Chinese with a Tangerine Theme! Tangerines are in season! Well Moi gleefully clapped her hands and was rewarded with this menu, cutnpasted from Sandy's missive. Sandy, by the way, is not only a fabuloso poet but a master Chinese chef, who's also authored a book on Chinese cooking! So, yum! Read and envy moi! But I'm also sharing such because these are easy recipes to follow and I definitely recommend:

Dinner for Eileen—February 6, 2004

Tangerine Martini
Prep: Chill Martini glasses

2 oz Absolut Mandrin
¾ oz Campari
1 oz tangerine juice
Tangerine peel

Pot Stickers W/Tangerine Dipping Sauce
Prep: Prepare pot stickers, freeze and defrost.

Dipping sauce:
½ T diced tangerine skin
1 ½ T thin soy
3 T black vinegar
2 T mined ginger
2 T minced scallion
1 T sesame oil
1 tsp. Chili oil

Scallops in Tangerine Sauce
Prep: (It’s all prep.)

(Comment: Scallops are the easy part. They’re broiled for 2 minutes on each side. It’s the sauce that takes work: 8-10 tangerines are juiced and reduced to ¼ cup. Fish stock is reduced to ¼ cup. 2 T of demi glace are added. This mixture is simmered and combined with ½ cup heavy cream in a technique known as “stratification.” Yields a rich, creamy sauce without flour thickeners.)

Tangerine Risotto
2 cups chicken stock
3 slices ginger
2 T ponzo
3 T vegetable oil
garlic
1 cup Arborio
almonds
snow peas
scallions
½ t. diced tangerine skin

Tangerine Flavored Chicken
Prep: debone chicken & marinate in: 1T soy; 1T rice wine, 1 T thicker, 1 tsp. Sesame oil, egg white
4 ½ slices ginger
6 pieces tangerine peel
8 dried chili
1 tsp. Szechwan peppercorns
2 tsp. Minced scallion

Sauce:
2 T rice wine
2 T red vinegar
2 T. black soy
1 T Splenda
1 tsp. Chili oil

Whole Tangerine Soufflé w/ Strawberry Sauce
Prep: 4 tangerines are juiced. 2 tangerines are halved and boiled together with the juice. Similar prep for the strawberry sauce.

(Comment: A Martha Stewart recipe using 6 egg whites for the body of the soufflé. Oddly written, but once decoded the result was pretty good.)

Tangerine/ Onion Salad

(Comment: A successful, easy salad dressed only with vinegar since the acid from the tangerines is already present.)

3 tangerines, halved
Red onion
Fresh oregano
Olive oil
Pinch salt
Black olives

Naturally, Sandy and Barbara also chose wines to befit the meal: the 2002 Cabit Pinot Grigio, 2000 Alsace Trimbach Gewurztraminer and the 2002 Kunde Viognier.

By the way, on this trip of making the rounds of bars, galleries and readings that serve inexpensive wine, it always seemed better to opt for the Pinot Griogio over a chardonnay, and a chianti over a cabernet....There you have it: low-shelf wine tips as Poetry encompasses both dross as well as divine...!

NEW YORK CITY SO FAR....

Cab driver said I barely look "30" after I said I'm 43 years old -- no, don't ask what we were discussing that I would end up mentioning moi age (I just felt in the mood to preen)....a Ralph Goings watercolor in friend's apartment....young poets at LaGuardia Community College (from whose English Department I am blogging) giving me their URL addies...."Black and White" exhibition of paintings by poet-painter-critic-teacher Thomas Fink....90-minute massage....Korean food....very pleasant New Yorkers....dirty snow on clean streets....during class lecture touching on colonialism, Identity issues, abstraction, politics and power in the poetry world, the synchronicity of me calling a poem a kiss before summing up my poetics as "Beauty" ...

Now, Brooklyn awaits...

BROOKLYN READING: EILEEN TABIOS, PATRICK ROSAL & BARRY SCHWABSKY

I may not blog for the rest of the week as I'm leaving for New York where I'll be creating mischief at this -- and you are invited:

ALL WORDSMITHS EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 12:30PM:
POETRY with EILEEN TABIOS, PATRICK ROSAL and BARRY SCHWABSKY

EILEEN TABIOS is [Yadda]. PATRICK ROSAL's collection Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive: Poems was hailed as an "astonishing first collection by a young poet of immense gifts," by Thomas Lux. Rosal's poems have appeared in Footwork, The NuyorAsian Anthology and The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures. He teaches literature and writing at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. Art and literary critic BARRY SCHWABSKY is an editor for Artforum Magazine and the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press). In addition to penning the introduction to Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon), Schwabsky has written a number of monographs of contemporary artists. The first full-length collection of his poetry, Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, September 2003), was called "an intensely wrought, luminously gripping book" by Publisher's Weekly.

WORDSMITHS, a spoken-word series showcasing both established and up-and-coming writing talent is curated by Marisa Simon. Winter 2003 Wordsmiths readings take place on the 1st Sunday afternoon and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Thursday evenings of the month

halcyon
227 Smith St. (between Butler and Douglass Sts.)
Brooklyn, NY
p: 718 260-WAXY
w: www.halcyonline.com
e: info@halcyonline.com or wordsmiths@worldnet.att.net

Take the F or G train to Bergen St. Walk four blocks vs. traffic to #227.

MILA D. AGUILAR: HER POETRY TRANSCENDS POEMS

you find ideas in things
you find the truth in people
...
poems, as I now strive for one, are purer
but flesh is surer
--from "A Sermon" by Oscar Penaranda


And as I keep reviewing PINOYPOETICS, I do keep marveling how the project has far exceeded my high expectations for it years ago when I, by being both bored and cogitating, thought of its possibilities. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from the essay submitted by Mila Aguilar, author of two poetry books, Journey: An Autobiography in Verse (1996) and A Comrade is as Precious as a Rice Seedling (1987). From August 6, 1984, to February 27, 1986, Mila had been jailed by agents of the Marcos dictatorship on charges of "subversion and conspiracy to commit rebellion." She was released only when Corazon Aquino ascended to power after the People Power Revolution.

One of my early recollections on Mila Aguilar's work was a discussion over whether her protest poetry is any good. The excerpt below from Mila's forthcoming essay in PINOYPOETICS partly addresses that criticism, and is followed by a poem for which Mila is probably most known -- even as it's dismissed by certain critics ... who do not understand and choose not to educate themselves on how the *Art* of protest poetry can be far different from the lyrics handed down through the ages and marble-ized in pristine white pages. Mila's poem below is titled "To A Foreigner" for addressing a Western critic who had dismissed her poems.

A more recent example of "protest poetry," by the way, is available through the post on Joi Barrios in the December 2002 Archives of Meritage Press's "Babaylan Speaks"). Meanwhile, here's Mila Aguilar -- a poet, and whose track of communist-turned-born-again Christian reminds me of a college political science paper where I'd posited that many so-called "communists" in the Philippines had turned to such, not necessarily out of Marxist or Maoist adherence but from ... poverty and political abuse:


Excerpt from "The Poetics of Clarita Roja" by Mila D. Aguilar

Clarita Roja was the nom de guerre of Mila D. Aguilar during the period of martial rule in the Philippines. The name meant "clear red," a reference to the author's adoption of the communist creed. Some may argue that the author's resignation from the central "guidance" of the Communist Party was the reason that she shed the nomenclature. The position of this paper is that Mila D. Aguilar, the years of discovery notwithstanding, remains Clarita Roja, the red now symbolizing not only revolution, but the blood of the Redeemer shed for that revolution.

We will proceed to show this through an analysis of the poetry of the two personages-in-one, beginning [with] the ... "To a Foreigner," published both under the name Clarita Roja and Mila D. Aguilar ....

"To a Foreigner" was written in the period from 1974 to 1975, when the author, then in her mid-twenties, was new to Mindanao, the second largest island in the southern end of the Philippines. She had just emerged from a trip to the mountains, where she brought a boy not much younger than herself, a new graduate of the law, to the arms of the New People's Army. They had ridden in a jeep owned by the young man's cousin into some unnamed mountain barrio in Davao Oriental, in the dead of night, then dislodged the young man in the middle of the barely passable road. An armed squad waited for him there, in the dark.

The jeep riders lost no time going back to Davao City, for the times were dangerous. On the ride back, the playful author thought to tell the young man's mestiza cousin a story she had heard about Balete Drive in Quezon City, the Philippine capital in the northern island of Luzon. The night was completely dark, the riders' faces illumined only by the jeep's headlights. The story goes that a taxi driver once picked up a mestiza in a white nightgown on Balete Drive. As he drove, he noticed from his rear-view mirror that her eyes were bleeding. He asked the mestiza, "Miss, bakit dumudugo ang mata niyo? Miss, why are your eyes bleeding?" The mestiza answered, "Anoooo??? Whaaaat???" And this the author enunciated with a horrendous drawl. So the driver repeated the question three times, to which the mestiza replied with the same answer, also three times. On the fourth, the driver had to turn his head to see the mestiza, for it seemed she was not only bleeding in the eyes, but also deaf. But as soon as he looked at her, the woman reached into her eye sockets, took out her eyes and handed them to him, saying, "Anooooo, itooooo? You mean, thiiiiis?"

The author said the story with such drama, the play of total darkness and headlight and the lone roar of the vehicle's machine in the midst of the deafening silence cooperating perfectly with her, that the mestiza cousin could not help but let out a horrified shriek.

The send-off party had a good laugh that night.

The shock was to come a few days later. The Party's regional secretary came to see the author, to tell her that shortly after she had brought the young man to the mountains, he had been shot to death by the enemy, a victim of some petty informer.

And so the poem.

TO A FOREIGNER

You accuse me of sloganeering
And being unpoetic
My writing lines like
"Damn the US-Marcos dictatorship."

Friend, my reply is
You do not understand
The weight, the ocean depth
Of our class hatred.

Yesterday I heard
A comrade had been ambushed.
One of five bullets
Had smashed through his young heart.

When my ears caught
The uttered syllables of his name
The muscles of my jaw tightened
To the hardness of a gun butt.

My fingers curled up
To a firm trigger squeeze
And the heat of anger exploded
Like bullets out of my eyes.

Have you not heard
What the people do to the traitors
Who betray their precious ones?
They cut them up

Into pieces so small
You could hardly tell
They once had the force
To murder a Red fighter.

You are a foreigner indeed,
Foreign to the rhythm of our struggle.
In the face of class murder,
How can we be lyrical?

- Circa 1974-75

*****

Mila D. Aguilar's contribution is but one of many essays that shall turn Poetry a lovely kayumangi color. Await this book -- 40 English-language Filipino poets whose words shall blow apart that door upon which once was hung the sign:

NO FILIPINOS ALLOWED.

GALATEA HOUSE WINE UPDATE

Mother of Romans, delight of gods and men
Sweet Venus, who under the wheeling signs of heaven
Rouse the ship-shouldering sea and the fruitful earth
And make them teem--
--from "De rerum natura" by Lucretius

House wines this week and next at Galatea:

1996 Pahlmeyer Merlot Napa Valley
1996 Oakford Vineyards Cabernet
1996 Seavey Cabernet

Then, there are the new additions from Rudd Vineyard because, this weekend, many vineyards throughout wine country celebrated new Releases. Given the constraints of potty-training Achilles, I only was able to attend one open house -- at Rudd Vineyards. But it was a good visit as it added two wines to Galatea's cellar, the first of which will be a house wine over the next couple of weeks:

2000 Rudd Jericho Canyon Vineyard Proprietary Red -- excellent nose. Flavorful -- chocolatey, fruity and velvety against the tongue. Ready to drink now -- and, in fact, probably preferable to drink soon as it doesn't have as great a structure as the best wine tasted today:

2001 Rudd Oakville Estate Grown Cabernet Sauvignon -- more complex than the above wine, and thus needs more cellaring. Its rating of 95 out of 100 by Robert Parker (despite his grade inflation) does bespeak the quality of the wine yet to come. Best wine tasted during the Rudd Release Party. Here's Parker's tasting notes: "spectacular. An inky/pyurple color is accompanied by aromas of espresso roast, melted fudge, blackberries, currants, and smoke. Rich, with great intensity, tremendous purity, an opulent, full-bodied mouthfeel, and good underlying tannin as well as freshness, it should drink well for 12-15 years." Yadda.

Incidentally, Dean and Deluca naturally offered the appetizers since Leslie Rudd owns both D&D as well as Rudd. An outstanding cheese: the 5 year Roomano, an aged Gouda with sweet butterscotch flavors and crumbly crystalline texture....

THE E-MAIL I WOKE UP TO

Nick Carbo writes as regards my prior post to suggest a title for my would-be essay collection:

RUB MY YADDA, DON'T YA

Uh, thanks Nico.

*****

Meanwhile, Moi is generous and shall pitch on behalf of Nick (can I bet that the most significant lessons might take place during referenced "pub crawls"?):

STUDY POETRY IN TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN IRELAND
this summer with poets

NICK CARBO, DENISE DUHAMEL, CAMPBELL McGRATH

July 12th-August 12th 2004 (that's one whole month!)

Cost of trip $3395* (includes airfare, lodging at Trinity College dorms located in center of Dublin, and many other extras like literary tours, pub crawls, book of kels, etc. etc.)

Come join us in one of the most literary cities in the world. Land of Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Beckett and many more. Study the craft of Poetry with award winning poets at historic Trinity College in the heart of Dublin. The program offers both graduate and undergraduate credit and is open to anyone interested in learning how to write poetry. Courses qualify for Teacher Re-certification. You do not need to be enrolled in a college or University to participate.

* Price subject to change due to currency fluctuations
March 1 deadline for applications.

For more information follow link: http://2studyabroad.com/default.htm

EROTICIZING YADDA

"But perhaps there are other -- better -- questions to ask. For instance: "Does it make you wet your underwear?" -- it being hopefully understood that underwear can dampen from a variety of sources ranging over unbridled laughter to unbridled eros to unbridled anger to unbridled...bridles."
--from Moi contribution to High Chair Poetry Journal


I stumbled across this brief "essay" I'd scratched out in response to a solicitation by the High Chair Poetry Journal who wanted me to respond to the topic: "Is the question 'Is it a poem?' still a valid question?" I'd forgotten I'd written it -- and reading it now also made me realize just how long the fallen angels have been haunting me. Anyway, after refreshing my memory of my answer to a question that I do recall having muchly irritated me at the time, I'm now considering putting together a Selected Essay Collection entitled

YADDA, BLATHER, AND MORE YADDA

except I need a more erotic version of said Yadda title...

...well, so maybe not.

Oh, and if you click on the link above, you'll see an even briefer prose piece by Philippines-based poet Conchitina R. Cruz. Looking at her words now, what struck me is the phrase:

"the prose poem, for example, which abandons the line"

Wrong-o! Perhaps for many who claim to write the prose poem, the prose poem doesn't have line. My prose poems definitely are formed based on a line -- a long line that lends itself to the paragraph as line....and which I forged originally because of my ability to speak for a long time without taking a breath...

...said breathless capacity = line of the horizon whose beginning and end is not visible to the eye...and most definitely an *erotic* line as Moi, for one, am often seduced by the unknown...

Okay, back to the wine in moi goblet.

EROTICIZING AMBER

"the past needs us. That very past in poetry which simplified us ... now needs us to change it ... Therefore we need to change the past. Not by intellectualizing it. But by eroticizing it ... a template of poetic authority can actually be changed, altered, radicalized by those very aspects of humanity which are excluded from it ..."
-- from "Letter To A Young Woman Poet" by Eavan Boland

Leny and her students at Sonoma State University are apparently writing journal entries in response to poems in my book Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. Leny's posted a couple of responses so far on her blog. I'm honored -- thank you Leny. For you and your class, here's an excerpt from my prose poem "Amber" which you reference:

"...she agreed with the poet, which is why she longed to become the fossilized secret within the immoveable embrace of gold. This would be her suspension lit by a flame: a beauty unable to lose its luster despite the unrelenting advent of karma."

THE IRON GATE

rose and sundered light ... for a reason

TWO LETTERS: ON JOSE GARCIA VILLA AND COMMON MAN'S POETRY

...for a period in the 1940s and 1950s, Villa was considered a major American modernist writer, a fixture in the New York literary scene and protégé of such luminaries as Edith Sitwell, Mark Van Doren, and Marianne Moore. But Villa’s prominence in the United States was short-lived. His work was falling out of favor by the late 1950s, and by the 1960s he was nearly unknown, though the decline of his American reputation seemed to have little effect on his dominance of the Filipino literary world.
--from "Asian/American Modernisms: José Garcia Villa’s Transnational Poetics" by Timothy Yu

A Sweetie-peep writes in about my post on moi Jan. 29 post on Jose Garcia Villa (scroll down):
 
Have you ever considered stairs? Architects do not consider stairs as mere ways to get up. They build stairs to force the walker to speed up or slow down his pace. Your Villa does too. He forces the reader to slow down and look at each word with his commas. With a few exceptions. And since you are the expert, I must ask --Does he mean for us to fly over the exceptions or does he mean for us to explore them further? I don't know Villa's works, but should you consider them in light of the architects' stairs?

Why do you want Villa to be an "ethnic" poet? From the little I have seen, he is anything but. And he tried not to be "ethnic". Why not celebrate him as a poet who happened to be Filipino?

Thanks for the interest, Sweet One. And, yes, I think your reference to stairs is quite apt for what Villa tried to do with commas. But as regards what Villa intended -- I think he suggested how one may read his "comma poems," but he did also say that the reader can ignore the effect of said commas.

In that looseness (so to speak), Villa shows himself to be a true poet rather than critic -- as Villa, too, happened to be a critic. That is, in this particular instance, I think a poet is open to varied interpretations of the work and it's the critic (or the critic-part of the poet) who would be arrogant enough to insist on only one way to interpret the work I mention this partly because the role of "poet-critic" has been on my mind of late. For a person who performs both roles, it's sometimes possible to sense when one is more of a critic than a poet (and vice versa). I'm not critical of either position here -- because even if one is primarily a critic, I think engagement in poetry can aid criticism. Anyway, that's a topic for another time....back to Villa, a true poet....

I don't have any particular wish to portray Villa as an ethnic poet -- particularly as he probably would complain over such efforts. But I don't mind doing so for a few reasons: (i) the reader's response to a poem is up to the reader, not the poet; (ii) notwithstanding Villa's achievements which went beyond the ethnic literature frame, he was forgotten by poets and critics, except for Filipinos...and it is Filipino Americans who have recovered his work out of out-of-print obscurity in the U.S.; and (iii) Villa nonetheless never denied his ethnicity -- he, as an example, was buried in a Barong Tagalog (the Filipino national costume for men). For more info, of course, check out The Anchored Angel which includes essays about Villa...as well as Timothy Yu's essay that's available online at the Meritage Press web site.

*****

The Chatelaine also received a letter about her prior post:

As I am going to bed, I do what I have come into the habit of doing: I read your blog. And I wish you would do more of what you said [in prior post]. Poetry is almost dead to the common man and it need not be. Poets need to stop being "punk" and need to start being "common". There is so much poetry in "common" please preach that. Freeways are poetry, subways are poetry, airplanes and busses are poetry. But only for poets who are willing. And only poets who are willing to address the every day man can do that.

Thanks Sweetie (moi blog is nighttime reading! I hope your dreams are, um, Sweet.). So, there is such poetry as you desire out there, and I appreciate you writing for giving me a reason to point you to Guillermo Parra's Venepoetics blog. It currently features poems which may interest you, such as "Miami Beach Sunstrokes" by Jacqueline Goldberg. Here's an excerpt from the poem (which also illustrates the brilliance, sunlit brilliance, of the title):

(1)

the balcony is a chunk of Collins Avenue

a view
reduced to extremes
no one notices
during lunch

we watch its blend of bathing suits
we've got towels
tuna sandwiches
Diet Coke

we pause at the dry shot
of an airplane over the bay


Actually, Venepoetics has been valuable for, among other things, showing the wealth of talent among Venezuelan poets. Gracias, Guillermo!

*****

The Chatelaine loves receiving letters. Feel free always to sail some through the Iron Gate!

IMHO, THE NEW CLICHE: PUNK ANTI-SENTIMENTALITY

Lookit. I read a lot of work by Live Poets, okay? I don't always reveal who I'm reading. But I try to pay attention to what moi peer-poets write -- I read a lot. In fact, peeps, if you're writing more than you're reading....hmmm. Not to say you should write less poems. But mebbe read some more, okay?

So this is a preamble to my thought du jour (yah: I only had one thought today besides the self-satisfied thought that moi breasts look better than Janet Jackson's during Superbowl halftime). And said thought du jour popped out after I finished reading a poetry collection by an unnamed poet we shall lovingly call Ms. X. In her collection (I believe her first poetry book), there exists the usual parataxis, the usual word puns....but what struck me here is what I'ma calling *punk sentimentality.*

I'm talkin' about text that borders on the lyric, only to be yanked hard back away from said lyric by some hard-ass word or phrase. In Ms. X's poems, she achieves this effect by juxtaposing "mouse shit" with "lavender," qualifying "firefly" as "fucking firefly", inserting parentheticals like "(long cliche night)" etcetera etcetera.

The thing is, so many of us are doing this. I've even done it. But when one of us contemporary poets -- in this case, your lovely Moi -- is able to discern such a tendency enough to articulate said tendency's existence, I think this means the birth of a new cliche. Which is to say: Poets, let's move on.

How's about we try to do something else besides this suddenly tired...punk anti-sentimentality.

I'MA NUMBER ONE

Wow! Thanks Michael!

And the Chatelaine looks over her shoulder to the past week's posts to see what made her deserve the ranking....and her gaze drops to her LOVELY, ALBEIT LAZY, ASS...and she thinks, Yeah -- that must be it....even as the poker-playing angels floating beneath her ceiling look over their cards at each other and roll their eyes....

WHEN "THE ARTIST LOOKS...."

As some of you were kind enough to ask, Behind the Blue Canvas is now available through Amazon.com (for now the only distributor outside the Philippines). Here's an excerpt from one of the stories in it, "The Artist Looks At The Model" -- a story in which I wrote paragraphs that could, I felt, have been re-ordered in any which way without adversely affecting the underlying "narrative":


No one is impervious to Romanticism. Perhaps I would have stayed seated in my oversized corduroy armchair. I had turned professorial after all with a box of Cubans harrummphing by my side. Damn that itch that blocked the pinkness of her wrists.

*****

She also throbbed from evacuating mornings. How would she look through a window? Would she remain indifferent to the same view of a neighboring building's backside from behind the velvet-draped windows of a hundred hotels? My depicted conclusions of her eyes are unable to transcend bleakness. She is forever a ripe rose.

*****

I will concede her interior is an effective compass. While she ruptures the blackboard, I am unable to form anything but circles and squares. She demands I invest interpretations on her flesh now poised vs. posed because she is the wind. I hide in concepts stuck in the theoretical realm. I am surprised to be pained by the scar traversing her belly. White fringes hair. It is good to feel, I whisper as a failed partition.