COME ONE, COME ALL TO THE RESURRECTION!

So far, the next issue of Galatea Resurrects looks to cover at least 92 books.  This includes a close reading of one poem each from 50 books.  But it's not too late to participate by sending in your reviews -- the deadline is May 13 and I likely can wait an extra week if you alert me to such. 

So dear Poetry Reviewers, do consider this a reminder to engage with the book(s) you have and share your reviews for the next issue!

Moiself is implicated--as I write this, I am eye-ing those four poetry books I'm supposed to review and yet am so ... behind ... oh moi back!

IT'S NOT BECAUSE POETS ARE WRITING IRRELEVANTLY

I attended middle school -- we called it "junior high" back then -- nearly 40 years ago. Entonces, being childless, there was no reason for me to pay attention to children's education until Michael came into our lives just four months ago. And let me tell you, I don't recognize this effin' terrain mislabeled "public education."

The thing with knowing something only at point A and then point B 40 years later is that you have two specific environments to compare. The result of educational deterioration between my point A and today's point B is stark. Stark, stark, stark -- and I can see this easily as one who didn't get inured to said deterioration by living through government cutbacks of public education over the years.

As I write this, I'm in conversation with my best friend who happens to be educating, among others, an 11-year-old son at what is considered an excellent public school (hi M!). She's talking about (hitting mostly financially strapped parents for) fundraisings for basic pen and paper supplies. She's talking about California public schools narrowly focusing their students to pass STAR tests (thresholds in math and reading) so as to maximize government funding; but, check this out: if a school tests well, it gets more funds while schools who don't test well get reduced funding -- does that make sense? And, as M also says, "What happened to infusing the love of learning itself?" Extra tutoring after school (at least for those who can afford it) is now the norm, rather than the exception if parents really wish students to understand a subject.

M notes that she would be reluctant to send her son today to the same high school she and I once attended! I am unsure, as I write this, that the public schools M and I attended would be able to prepare children for attending (for example) Ivy League institutions. They did so for M and me. And we managed to go to these universities without extra tutorings in subjects because they were successfully being taught at the schools, or extra tutoring for college prep tests like SATs.

Couple this with some of the idiotic expectations we get in response to my ex-orphan son with currently limited English. We hear things like, "Just get him through high school and that's already great for him."

Speakers like that reveal their lazy belief that since my son was "saved" from such a bad situation, everything is gravy. He possibly wouldn't have gotten a high school diploma as an institutionalized child in a financially-poor country, so the fact that (i) he's now in the great Estados Unidos is great, and (ii), his education, regardless of its quality, is good enough for being better than what was available to him pre-adoption. When I talk college planning with some of these folks -- and they are supposed to be "educators" -- you can see the expressions shift on their faces to hide incredulity at my naivete.

What's worse is that their reactions are colored by their own low threshold for the "normal" (non-adopted) students (I'm talking about their regular student body, kids who don't have the academic disadvantages that an adopted immigrant has) -- that is, if these kids get to community college (and, hey, is that the "New Normal" under Obama or what?), that's supposedly a home run.

People, if my son ends up a working at a fast food restaurant because that is all he is capable of, BUT HE IS A GOOD PERSON, then it's a home run for me. But until my child indicates that such is all he is capable of, my job as a parent is to maximize his education and assume he is capable of attending the best university that exists in the world. And it's my job -- and should be as well a school system's job -- to help nurture this potential. Beset in pragmatism defined by misguided political decisions on how to spend tax revenues, expectations for children are being lowered at exactly the place where expectations should be high: schools.

I talk like this and I'm greeted as an effin' anachronism.

And since this is a poetry blog, if you believe poetry is marginalized in today's (U.S.) culture and want to know why poetry is marginalized, it's NOT BECAUSE POETS ARE WRITING IRRELEVANTLY. It's not because poets aren't writing about what's "important" to write about like politics (what's "important" is subjective, yah?). It's not because poets are writing "elliptically". It's not because poets are writing "narcissistically". It's not because poets are "writing to each other." It's not because poets are flarf-in'. It's not because they're too "quiet" or too "avant". It's not because too many poets write "academically" or got their MFAs. It's not because poets aren't doing their job -- anyone who feels they can define a poet's "job" is generally just arrogant or looking for a way to grab attention for himself (yes, it's usually a him).

If you believe poetry is marginalized (and that is an "if"), then poetry is marginalized today in large part because K-12 (Kindergarten to 12th grade) education has, in too many cases, eliminated the relevance of the arts....including any notion that a particular art form can be expanded beyond what is inherited by an artist.

It's ironic because, speaking of the effects of the dollar (or euro, or yen, etc), poetry is one of the greatest preparations for facilitating something as bottom line as "business vision". (Hello -- does the economy suck due to forces beyond the usual business cycle?) To simplify the articulation of this matter, many of Poetry's approaches facilitate one's ability to think outside of the box, to look beyond the obvious and discern patterns which foretell how a particular industry might unfold, to manage complicated infrastructures and unstable human resources, et al. (If you want to know the source of whatever modest success I had in my ex-finance career, it ain't because I can add; it's because I was good at concepts...and I left it up to computers and calculators to add.) It's not a coincidence that in my time I've met at least one successful CEO out there who has poetry books in his office bookshelves!

As regards public education, I'd like to say Rome is burning while the politicos are playing the violins. The problem, of course, is that if these politicos were educated in public school, they probably wouldn't know how to play a musical instrument. The arts have been cut back and music, after all, is merely part of the "arts".

Blah. And as I end this, Schwarzenneger's California continues to be bankrupt. Blach.

*****

Update: I don't, of course, believe that Obama means that community college is as high as we should aspire; I wrote that tongue-in-cheek. Having said that, M notes that that today's budget compromise includes "cutting cut another $9.5 billion from public schools and another $2 billion from the state’s higher education system,... " Where was I...? Oh yeah: BLACH!

I SAW THE DEATH OF POETRY

tonight when I attended a local poetry reading just because poetry readings rarely occur in my part of the woods. The featured poet clearly believed himself to have some prominence though he suffers from that American poetic disease of being unknown no matter what his achievements may be.

Anyway, he described himself as an academic ... which meant two things in his case. First, his presentation was ponderous, pedantic, replete with unnecessary explanations (I repeat moiself for emphasis). And this reminds me to note what I have noticed from some poet-academics doing readings in non-academic contexts: they treat their audience (even if it's not comprised of their students) like they are folks to be taught rather than folks with whom to share poetry.

Second, this poet said something like this: "I'm an academic and one of the wonderful things about being a poet laureate is realizing the diversity of poetry. A poem can be witty, funny, ..." etcetera et-banal-cetera.

Bathos: it's not when a poet writes his own P.R. but when that poet be believing his own P.R.

As for his poems? I can't remember...and that seems logical, though sad.



.

BEHIND THE EPIGRAPH-CROCHETED VEIL

I finally finished organizing THE THORN ROSARY, the manuscript for a forthcoming book of Selected Prose Poems spanning ten years. The manuscript is nearly 300 pages, which means it's likely to have a higher page count in book pages. Because I felt in a navel-gazing mood (well, Toi ask, since when is Moi not in a navel-gazing mood...but that's a different story....), I went through the manuscript to pluck out every single epigraph that's featured. I wondered what my selection of quotes from other writers would say about Moi. But the answer, of course, is for you to say. Here are the epigraphs:

"The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. The power of the rosary is beyond description."
--Archbishop Fulton Sheen


What will it be like when we reach
the remnants of yesterday's weather?
I ask. This is not the time to begin
speculating. We must stick to the
sentences we assigned ourselves,
the ones fleeing the muse of
representation
--from "Big Island Notebook 7" by John Yau


warm stones gather the rainfall
speaking a gray language
i've tried to imitate.
i read books compiled
from anonymous scrolls.
i eat their dust
hoping to trace
the steps to heaven.
--from ": Looking For Buddha" by Jaime Jacinto


She was beginning to understand
some pale bravado
in her horizontal line
--from "Pack Rat Sieve" by Mei-mei Berssenbruge


You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.
--Juan Gris


I am concerned with a thing's not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away at that moment, with at any moment seeing or saying and letting it go at that.
--Jasper Johns


Poetry is like painting. You say you are going to paint a portrait. You start with a blob of color and then wash, and when the lines are taking shape, you see a landscape, perhaps people. You are not quite sure what you're driving at, but it means something in the end. And the first person to be surprised is the one who made it.
--Tita Lacambra-Ayala


only raid the world of
its radiance and wonder
--from "Cezanne's Apples" by Manuel Viray


I carry the light of all countries
everywhere I go
I declare myself responsible
for the upkeep of their bridges
their poor their balconies
the fading lamps
and evanescence of dawn
I claim you as my burden
the you I will never meet
I bear your music
and your histories
and your children begging in the streets
and your mothers
counting the bullets
in the hollow nest of corpses
--from "Manifesto of Myself" by Eric Gamalinda


The,hands,on,the,piano,are,armless,
--Jose Garcia Villa


When a term like symmetria is used by a late antique rhetorician, one should probably not expect it to have the rigorous precision of meaning that it conveyed to a sculptor of the fifth century B.C. In general, it may be expected that the technical value of a particular term-that is, the value which is dependent upon the special knowledge and training of a particular group-will diminish as the size of the group using the term increases.
--from "The Ancient View of Greek Art" by J.J. Pollitt


"we have never really left anywhere we have been"
--Salman Rushdie


"No movement independent of time"
--Myung Mi Kim


The shifting relationship between the senses and the intelligence makes the apprehension of reality problematic, even when one repeatedly refuses, as Johns does, to succumb to the desire for asylum.
--from The United States of Jasper Johns by John Yau


Perhaps I could silence this firebird swelling my sails with blood winds, fevers, but even the Seine today was restless.
--from "Nearer the moon" by Anais Nin


. . . as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, . . . so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed . . . .
--Wallace Stevens


I would have to find someone who would follow me in my wanderings.
--November 10, 1890 letter from Arthur Rimbaud to his mother



To be taken up higher and higher by uneven stone stairs and to stand there with your heart beating outside the gate of the near world. To gather laurel and marble for the white architecture of your destiny.
                  And to be as you were born, the center of the world.
--Odysseus Elytis



"dissonance may abandon miserere"
--from "Dissonance Royal Traveller" by Barbara Guest



"stairs rising to platforms lower than themselves,
doors leading outside that bring you back inside"
--Clifford Geertz, on Michel Foucault


"A stake, an axis is thus driven into the earth in order to mark out the boundaries of the sacred space in many patriarchal traditions. It defines a meeting place for men that is based upon an immolation. Women will in the end be allowed to enter that space, provided that they do so as nonparticipants."
--Luce Irigaray


Lehren die Musen ihn gleich bescheiden Geheimnisse sprechen
--Goethe


In a global, capitalistic culture logotypes exist (Nike, McDonalds, Red Cross) which are recognizable by almost all of the planet's inhabitants. Their meanings and connotations are familiar to more people than any other proper noun of any given language. This phenomenon has caused some artists to reflect on the semiotic content of the words they use, (for example, in the names of perfumes) and isolate them, stripping them down to their pure advertising content. Words are no longer associated with a product, package or price, and go back to their original meaning or to a new one created by the artist
--from Galeria Helga de Alvear's exhibition statement for "Ads, Logos and Videotapes" (Estudio Helga de Alvear), Nov. 16-Jan. 13, 2001


I don't take English for granted. I have to fight for every word of it.
--Aleksandar Hemon


I wrestled with my bed sheets
What I was looking for was this,
Innocent and tremulous like a vineyard
Deep and unscarred like the sky's other face,
A drop of soul amidst the clay
--from "THE GENESIS" by Odysseus Elytis


"The work is treated as thesis, an antithesis is posited, and a synthesis arrived at which in turn becomes thesis."
--from "In Support of Meta-Art" by Adrian Piper


I made up rhymes in dark and scary places,
And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces
Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart.
--from "Wandering" by Arthur Rimbaud
(trans. by Paul Schmidt)


(problem margin mad hymn optical slaying
--from "OBEYED DILEMMA" by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen


I tell myself to be open to all experience,
to take what is ugly and find something nourishing in it;
as penicillin may be found in green, moldy bread,
or as, in the morning, a child of the earth
floating in a porcelain jar full of rain water
is something astonishing.
--from "Written The Day I Was To Begin A Residency At The State Penitentiary" by Arthur Sze


The healing process is simultaneously an individual and communal effort. What is summoned from the depths of one's soul comes from the wounded collective memory of colonized peoples, but so does the healing power that comes from woundedness. The memories must be shared with others. It is the telling that makes them available to the consciousness for further critical reflection.
--from "Coming Full Circle" by Leny Mendoza Strobel


Telling a story about oneself is not the same as giving an account of oneself.
--from "Giving An Account of Oneself" by Judith Butler


Ferdinand Marcos might not be one of the all-time killers but he is certainly one of the biggest thieves in the history of the planet. Estimates of his ill-gotten gains range from US$3 to US$35 billion. Some suggest that the true amount is over US$100 billion, perhaps even trillions of dollars. // While these latter sums may be fanciful, the legacy of the Marcos dictatorship is all too real-an economy struggling just to pay the interest on its foreign debt and a seriously compromised democracy seemingly unable to shake off entrenched corruption...It took Marcos 20 years to pillage and wreck the Philippines. Unfortunately it may take far longer for the damage to be undone.
--from More or Less: Heroes & Killers of the 20th Century


In 1901, just after the Americans took over the civil administration of the Philippines, young Filipinos-in quest for a better life-went to work in the pineapple plantations in Hawaii. Thus began the Filipino Diaspora that has brought millions of Filipinos to different countries in the world today.
--Perry Diaz, a frequent internet commentator on Filipino topics


our youth is where the only gods we ever created live.
--Jonathan Carroll



To bring a poem into the world
Is to bring the world into the poem
--from "Conjurations #3" by Eileen R. Tabios


"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."
--from "Corolla" by Eileen R. Tabios

There's one more epigraph I can cite, but which I separate out from the above:

"I do not know English"
--from "I Do Not" by Michael Palmer

In the context that I cited the Palmer quote, my intention was negating said epigraph, a different intention from how I cited the other epigraphs (usually in an honoring / affirming way rather than negation). And so, in the poem "I DO", the Palmer epigraph is swiftly followed by a second epigraph:

"Marunong akong mag-ingles" (I do know English)
--any 21st-century Filipino poet

Believe it: Moi knows English, even as English does not know Me.

SWAMPED IN THE SWAMP!

Dealing right now with ramifications of having to leave the country soon for approximately six weeks.

So if I'm ignoring you, it ain't personal.

More deets later.

BACKING BEAUTY'S (BLOODY ACHING) BACK

I got a phone call from a reading series curator this weekend, and thought of why Tom Beckett dubbed me a "Thinking Blogger" (neat -- how I segue into that preen, eh?). To wit, Tom specifically cited:

a rose is eros is arroz. Beauty is passion and sustenance, poetry is a way of life. Eileen through her efforts as a cross-genre writer,visual artist, promoter, publisher, and shape-shifting Chatelaine, embodies what it means to live poetry.

What's salubrious (am on a phase of using that salubrious word) about Tom's reasons is his reference to Beauty. Yep, that's really my poetics. Beauty. Full Stop.

And Beauty has been one reason why I've been ignored (marginalized?) by certain camps in the poetry world. I don't do the overt ethnic thing. The overt political thing. The overt post avante thing. I don't even fit into what many people accept as those inherently-fluctuating categories of "prose poem" or "ekphrasis." I'm not preening about being a noble individual(ist) here -- I got Beauty's back and I'm not proud or defensive about it. I got Beauty's back and that's just a matter of fact (she matter of factly notes).

Which doesn't mean various poets of different styles haven't been welcoming -- they have and I am truly grateful. I'm just noting that the opposite also occurs....because I stick ultimately with Beauty (Ach! Le irony of slighting Beauty!) . And it goes relatedly to why your Chatelaine, as Tom notes, shape-shifts. Beauty comes in many forms.

But I'm not writing this post to belabor Tom's adoration (yeah, not really). I thought of his reasons because of the reading series curator who telephoned me (yes, telephoned; it's possibly the first time in months if not over a year that I've discussed poetry biz by phone instead of by email, worth N.B.-ing by itself: you should have seen the shocked face I turned to the hubby who picked up the phone and he said it's this poet....). Anyway, said curator asked me to read for this series and during the conversation, she said she asked me because "these spoken word folks need to hear something different" (or words to that effect).

Obviously (obviously, right?), "spoken word" -- as that term is bandied about in the poetry world -- is NOT the immediate category that comes to mind for me.

But "different"? I can get behind that. It's about time being different was a reason for being invited, rather than shunned.

Apparently, Beauty also got my back....

...which is good because it's an ever-sore sore back....

(Now, off to see if there's a petsitter available for that evening of spoken word. Whether it's spoken word or any other category, all are subject to Moi's Dawg Poetics. And because a DOG is inherently PURE LOVE, Missy Beauty wouldn't have it any other way...)

RED EYES: A POETIX

Well. That was bloody exhausting. And as the Chatelaine reaches for the goblet of wine at 7:58 a.m., her ears ring from the ghastly sound of

the Dance of
Why? Listen
all

you nightingales! Why?
I curse
all

you nightingales! Why?
En compas/s!
I

thought it was
only a
story.

I thought the
story was
mine:

a bird caws
from my
mirror.

My mirror spits
out bloodied
feathers.

Fortunately since I have zero interest in suffering, I think "La Loca" is the last of these flamenco hay(na)ku. Will now gather them up to edit into a Dusie chap. Oh you lucky nightingale lovers -- forthcoming this summer, Moi chap entitled

THE SINGER And Others

Sip. At 8 a.m., the great wine from Spain: Vega Sicilia...

Let me share some history as I greet the brilliantly-lit Napa morning by getting blotto: when I was invited to do a chap for Dusie (my lovely Swiss publisher -- tossing in this parenthetical since I love the notion of having a Swiss publisher), I swiftly came up with an idea which resulted from scumbling from an earlier book. Easy enough. So did the project and sat on it until it was time to put it together for Dusie.

"Easy enough," I thought and thought so smugly. Sip. And that's when the poker-playing angels got mischievous (and probably a bit mad at Moi).

"We don't think so!" said angels sez.

And they cracked the whip into having your Would-Be-Lazy-Chatelaine crack out a dozen flamenco hay(na)ku sequences.

Well blather and yadda. And I couldn't stop until my back muscles got as hard as the big rock that is Galatea's mountain.

Fortunately, at noon today, I get an hour-and-a-half deep massage from one of the greatest Russian exports to the U.S. -- strongly-muscled Zamyra. Toast to Zamyra. May Zamyra massage the flamenco out of my flesh, out of my veins. Sip.

And the angels pause the poker game, look at each other, and cackle softly: "We don't think so..."