Wednesday, August 15, 2012

"... LEARN SO MANY WAYS"

Very grateful for this new review of my collaboration with the brilliant j/j hastain, the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA. It's written by Zvi A. Sesling and here's an except:

[Tabios] states, “…how could I not be moved by orphans – how could I remain a poet and not write about orphans? Thus, the “ORPHANED ALGEBRA” poems.
In an essay entitled "Engaging My Trans', hastain states, “I identify as Trans/Genderqueer (both in terms of physiology as well as text). …I speak of my own philosophies of Trans as someone who identifies as Trans. By Trans I mean never only feminine nor only masculine. I mean that you need you to not need me to be solely a woman or a man. I mean embodied-motility. I mean morphability. I mean mutability. I mean please inquire tenderly before assuming. I mean please have your desire to contact me be rooted in our working collaboratively to create future spaces that can include an even celebrate all bodies that in any way transgress the social norm.
As Tabios explains, “Indeed, j/j is moved by xir own circumstances to create new pronouns to reflect xirself. While, as reflected in references to xir, j/j currently uses such pronouns as “xir” and “xe” to reflect “gender free” pronouns that are socially accepted.

And I will stop here and simply urge readers to read and re-read this most fascinating of books I have engaged in a long time. Read and learn so many new ways.
I do hope you check out our book, which is quite unlike anything I'd written previously ... because if I'm going to be blessed by the Muses to be prolific, I want each book to be ... unexpected.

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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

A LOVELY YELLOW FIELD!

Missed some good stuff while I was gone.  Like, thanks (!) to Edric Mesmer and YELLOW FIELD 6 for this review of the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA:

The gift, we recall, of feminist theoreticism is the paradigm shift. Tabios and hastain place this at the eros of collaboration, and that’s its success: that the recognition of difference might make unlike circumstances empathetic frameworks. Begun through appropriated “word problems” from grammar school math equations, Tabios is able to ask, “What algebraic relationship moved you to bestow on mundane pigeons the halos of peace and other faux debris from trawling old memories of desire-ridden imagination that would come to plummet into ruin?” Transcendent then of equation, the series is able to interrogate “remainders” of information fallen outside the easiness of “whole sets,” or any given. In response, hastain posits xir own questions regarding the crepuscular—O favored of poetic words!—and relational identities: “Patina does relate to positing. Scratches secrets into the underside of blocks or blocs. That stone did hold that child’s expression.” The pairing also invites each poet’s critical reception of xir collaborator, as well as a startling sequence of stances through which hastain permutates “different set[s] of lovers” approaching the limit of Tabios’s partial problematic: What is a[p]parent?
YELLOW FIELD 6 also has 3 poems from my manuscript-in-progress, Reproductions of the Reproductions of the Empty (the more I reference that title, the more I realize I need to change it).  The poems are in great company, and I'm grateful for this particular community's support.

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Saturday, May 12, 2012

"IF YOU LABEL ME, YOU NEGATE ME"

is the quote from Soren Kierkegaard used as an epigraph -- to my grateful appreciation! -- in Joey Madia's new review of the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA. I'm grateful for the review, of course, but mostly moved by how Joey chose to do his review by taking off on the idea that the poet only begins the poem. And so in engaging with my and j/j hastain's book in this manner, Joey came up with some interesting takes, e.g. the excerpts here:

Through her deft and vivid prose-poems, Tabios tackles the underlying social ramifications of the seemingly innocent scenarios posed in the service of our children learning their math. Math that revolves around an antiquated Industrial model that has no place in the New Millenium, and yet still persists, for the American education system, as an extension of the Corporate–Military–Industrial complex, is more interested in producing Worker-Bees and Consumers than Citizens and Thinkers. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which is one of the most oxymoronic, inaccurate, and reprehensible monikers ever put forth by any government anywhere (and which is, thankfully, beginning to go away), in its effort to clamp down on the critical thinking and arts-based curriculum beginning to take hold around the country prior to its “adoption,” put all the emphasis on the Standardized Test—the shortest way, in their Other-driven thinking—of making a Standardized American, who could then join the military or a corporation that would then created a Standardized World.
Thank you, Joey, for calling it a "rare book that ... forces us to see with a different set of eyes and subsequently change our Newly Provoked Thoughts to Actions, enlivening our heart and engaging our Humanity. " See entire review HERE.

***

I was preening over the fabulous reviews the book has received to date to the hubby because I like to preen at the hubby.  "Great," he replied.  "All you need now is the subway token...."

Heeeeee...I am appreciative, but, yes, there are limits to believing one's P.R. ...  But I insist: preen!

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Saturday, May 05, 2012

THE WRITING JOB

TODAY,
--edited an existing draft into a more final form

Okay!  A new long poem.  It was unexpected, but I'm Grateful...

Unexpected because it was out of the scope of two manuscripts-in-progress.  But its existence just generated a new manuscript if I'm to combine it with some other older poems.  New manuscript-in-progress title:
***

How cheered I am by this sudden bounty of unpublished manuscripts.  Three! haven't had three unpublished manuscripts in years! My last published book was commissioned into its being, as I might not have put it together if I didn't have an offer for book publication when an opening surfaced in Marsh Hawk Press' lineup...

... even as I think of Joyce Carol Oates' riveting memoir, A WIDOW'S STORY, where the prolific author notes something about -- ... it's only when we stop doing when we then can we see our true selves. 

But perhaps it's in the doing that we're making our selves.  Anyway, I hope not to see myself for a while. 


THE AWAKENING OF A

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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

ALWAYS DELIGHTED TO EXCITE

Always grateful when I write a poem or two that excites a reader. Especially one with such finickiness (and he is finicky in a great way) as Allen Bramhall. Thanks for this (click HERE for whole thang) which is as interesting for Allen's own poetix views:

To boil it down ruthlessly, Eileen brings an interest in orphans and adoption, and j/j an interest in transgender issues. When I say interest, I mean a compelling force. Between them, they create an algebraic equation that embraces human inconsistency. I detect in my scan neither screed nor mere chiding, which maybe you were fearing as was I, given such topics.

My conviction stands that poetry doesn't last long in the frame of About. So those issues of orphans and transgender, serious and compelling, are only places where the poetry can happen. Poetry is the exertion of possible words within the magnitude of our confusion. In the rational world, neither orphans or transgender makes sense, but where is this rational world anyway? We're a confused animal.

and I do look forward to more! So won't you check out WHAT got the Dude all excited? HERE and HERE!



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Friday, April 20, 2012

AN ELATED ALOHA FROM JACKET2!

Mahalo Nui Loa to Susan Schultz for a wonderful engagement with the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA as well as with jai arun ravine's and then entwine.  Susan's review is at the fabulous Jacket2; here's an excerpt:

Tabios and hastain are most engaged in what happens when relation between persons occurs, or between genders within persons, namely in the TRANS of their "relational elations." They are fascinated by displacements, yes, but also in "active placements," whether those are adoptive relationships within families or within individuals whose gender-identities are not normative. These placements require new words, new pronouns, new definitions of family. They require new stories.
... It's that "listening differently" that is the real TRANS in Tabios's and hastain's book; it's a trans that risks appropriation. hastain is not, nor ever has been a "real" orphan, although xe has experienced gender (and generic) displacements. When a body rises into metaphor, it can easily be "assumed" to be something it is not. But better to take that risk than to leave these trans-travelers solely to their solitudes. It is the place "of someone finally watching" (66). This watching is not espionage but witness, not "at" but "with," insofar as "withness" is possible.
Perhaps this will tempt you to check out the book and be WITH us!  Available at SPD as well as Amazon.com, among others...


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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

A HALL OF FAMER REVIEW!


Okay! We've just set up the Amazon.com account for the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA, so that the info on the account that there's no inventory is not accurate. Go ahead and order from there if that's convenient for you. And I raise this, too, because it just provided my collaboration with j/j hastain with its first review! By Amazon.com "Hall of Fame" reviewer Grady Harp! (Per Amazon's format, the review is within the comment section for the book.)  An excerpt?  Short but sweet:

"unquestionably rewarding"!!!
Of course, this "sweet" book -- it's my first book that I consider "sweet", for some reason -- is also available at that organization which we should all support: SPD! (As I write this, its site says the book is not yet available but ignore that, too, as books are in transit.)   So go on: Moi lives to reward Toi!
 

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Tuesday, April 03, 2012

REVIEW!

If anyone wants to review the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA for Galatea Resurrects (GR), let Moi know at GalateaTen@aol.com .  I don't usually let my books get reviewed by GR since I edit it, but since this book is a collaboration with j/j hastain, I certainly don't want to limit my co-author's possibilities for engagement!

Actually, let me know if you'd like to review it, whether for GR or not.  Obviously, I'd be amenable to hearing from you!

But, meanwhile, there are many other fabulous poetry publications waiting to be reviewed for GR; I update frequently.  Click HERE for latest list of available review copies!

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ONWARD!

Although I am excited about my book-length haybun-in-progress (excerpts HERE and HERE), I haven't done much work on it in months. Then, this morning, for some reason, I thought to return to it. I looked up the file, did some formatting, printed out the draft so far, then wrote a new poem. Then I went to check the mail.

Guess what arrived in the mail!



Yep, my copies of the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA arrived!

The poetry muses don't want me to breathe; rather, they wish me to save my breath for the poems. I can barely eke out the minute (well, I stubbornly eked out five actually) to savor my new book. I'm now in-to the next one. Sheesh. Nothing like being fruitful and multiplying. (As I understand children are now reading my blog, I won't post the joke that just came to mind about condoms and poetry-writing...) To wit:


Yep, 147 MILLION ORPHANS -- I'm bookin' and moi gaze is on you!

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Monday, April 02, 2012

BE ELATED WITH MOI!

Press release below includes something SPECIAL: RELEASE OFFER!


[Please Forward]


MARSH HAWK PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT

Marsh Hawk Press is pleased to announce the release of

the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA

By Eileen R. Tabios and j/j hastain
ISBN No-13: 978-0-9846353-2-0
Book Page: http://marshhawkpress.org/Tabios5.html
Release Date: Spring 2012
Price: $15.00
Distribution: Small Press Distribution (Berkeley), Amazon.com, Marsh Hawk Press (http://marshhawkpress.org), among others

the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA is a ground-breaking collaboration of poems and poetics essays. "Began" by Eileen R. Tabios who crafted poems melding algebra and orphans, this unique project was "finished" by j/j hastain who echoed the poems first musically and then by way of meditations on Trans identity(ies). The collaboration presents several text approaches including essays addressing Tabios' international adoption experience and hastain's suggestion for more natural and less violent pronouns that transcend gender binaries.

Advance words include:

Eileen Tabios’ ORPHANED ALGEBRA performs numerations of loss, want, abandonment, the conditions of the invisible. Riffing on middle school math story problems, Tabios works a mathematics of disorder, the unordering of poverty, these ‘stories’ a corrective to the “ascetic’s illusion of ecstasy, a measurement made possible by its condition precedent: a suffering so unmitigated it hollows the non-survivors from children to earthworms.” j/j hastain’s “visceral echoes” of Tabios, “gestures” both textual and visual, sound “an activism of hollowing out,” whose hollows form a new space of assiduity. In “stance”—instance—hastain “grapple[s] with ethics of place and space. Was a country the host body of a child found homeless in it?” Who and where are we, and what role has language in any of this? Against abuse, against hunger, against erasure, Tabios and hastain challenge silence’s dissonant ignorance. The poets sharpen language and intention, “Creating a permanent, rather than temporary implantable. An anti-obviate hutch or hearth.” A challenge, a new “home,” a pleasure, this collection puts us in the midst.
— Marthe Reed

Categories are not abstractions, they are bodies. Family is one such embodied category, gender another. What happens to bodies when they don't fit the categories assigned them, when they lack families, when they criss-cross gender or genre lines? How can one calculate such change, compose equations to explain these trans-categorical shifts? Our very pronouns are at stake, as are nations, blood-ties, definitions to words like “dad” and “belonging.” As J/J Hastain writes, “There is a new lineage that we are trying to make more apparent.” Tabios and Hastain are trans-parents to a fresh embodiment of words and bodies, and to what they mean when they come together as books and persons. Their writing counts the change(s) in unexpected vocabularies.:
— Susan M. Schultz


To celebrate this unique new book, we are offering a SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER with discounted pricing. You can order the book for $11, which will include free domestic shipping within the U.S. For more information on this DISCOUNTED OFFER, please email GalateaTen@aol.com

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Eileen R. Tabios has released 19 print, 4 electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art-essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a short story book and a collection of novels. She has exhibited visual poetry and visual art throughout the United States and Asia. She has also edited, co-edited or conceptualized nine anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. Ms. Tabios has crafted a multi-awarded body of work, much of which is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, computer-generated hybrid languages, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Music, Modern Dance and Sculpture. As part of her poetry-as-performance approach, she blogs as the "Chatelaine" at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com, and edits a popular poetry review journal, Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement) at http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com. As a further extension of her poetics, she also founded Meritage Press (www.meritagepress.com), a multi-disciplinary literary and arts press based in San Francisco & St. Helena.

j/j hastain is the author of numerous full length, cross genre works as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books. j/j is an Elective Affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv and a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j’s books have been finalists in the Kelsey Street, Grey Book Press, Sawtooth and Ahsahta book competitions. j/j’s manuscript extant shamanisms won the Pavement Saw poetry award. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award. As a genderqueer writer maker of things, j/j’s books deal directly with the transgressive body, deviant gender, eros and identity construction as necessary compositional methods to living with empowerment in what can be a diminutive and polarizing world. j/j is interested in expanding traditional notions of what activism is/ has been/ can be, and doing so via the reimagining of spaces. j/j believes in creating texts/ spaces that are inherently non-linear and a historical. Texts as spaces that have never been patriarchally controlled and cannot be patriarchally controlled. It is j/j’s hope that in these spaces there will be room to experience contemporary moments of truth, eros, convergence, conjunction and profoundly new types and sensations of equity.





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Friday, March 30, 2012

ELATED

I am elated over THIS release!  You are invited to visit!

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Friday, March 16, 2012

PENCIL MOI IN FOR NEW YORK!

You are invited! Do please pencil in -- if you're in New York at the time -- the following:

Marsh Hawk Press Spring Launch
Presents
Eileen Tabios, Meredith Cole, Harriet Zinnes and the spirit of j/j hastain

POETS HOUSE
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
7-9 pm, Kray Hall
10 River Terrace
New York, NY 10282
Tel: (212) 431-7920
Map & Directions

Arrive early and check out the fabulous offerings at POETS HOUSE, which I haven't even seen yet in its resurrected venue.

Here's where I'll release my 19th print book (in collaboration with j/j hastain): the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA. More event details later, but you do know, right, that Marsh Hawk Press presents the best wine and hors d'ouevres fare for poetry readings...?

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Tuesday, February 07, 2012

ISN'T XE LOVELY...!

Moi next book, the relational elations of ORPHANED ALGEBRA, a collaboration with j/j hastain, is purty unique because the collaboration is rooted in a series of poems I wrote on orphans but ends up being a discourse on births and new language. That description doesn't really do it justice -- for more, just glean what you can from the blurbs from Marthe Reed and Susan Schultz. I will say that j/j's essay on "Trans/ Genderqueer (both in terms of physiology as well as text)"--hence the pronoun, "Xe"--is pretty groundbreaking and I'm blessed j/j considered my poems relevant to such an approach.

So it's forthcoming this Spring (soon!) from Marsh Hawk Press -- and I want to share the cover!!



Isn't Xe lovely!!

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

I LOVE MARSH HAWK PRESS

for many reasons but one reason is that it actually gives Author Advances (!) for poetry books! Crazy, yah? This is, after all, poetry and an indie press ... and not cash from, say, contest fees!

Anyway, thanks to New York State Literary Publishers Capacity Fund for a grant that will help finance said Author Advance for moi Spring 2012 book. I promise it is WELL SPENT!

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Sunday, January 15, 2012

THE SALTED HEART

Happy to be working on the production of my next book, a collaboration with j/j hastain entitled

        the relational elations            of ORPHANED ALGEBRA

forthcoming this Spring from Marsh Hawk Press. It's got, among other things, an interesting cover image per below -- this is j/j hastain's photograph taken of some of j/j's shrine objects. As j/j puts it, "The organ was a real turkey heart that I kept with me in a hand made 'coffin' in my jeans pocket for a year while it deteriorated. I kept it in salt to keep it from smelling." I don't know about you but, to act like a teen as I'm parenting one, That is soooooo coooool!



j/j adds, "The reason I chose to work with a turkey heart was because in researching it I knew it was an animal heart that when deteriorated would approximate what a human heart looks like in deterioration. The heart came from a ritual removal of it in my own home." Again, such a cooool poetics underpinning! Em-bodied poetics!

And here are some advanced words for this deteriorating heart...:
Eileen R. Tabios’s ORPHANED ALGEBRA performs numerations of loss, want, abandonment, the conditions of the invisible. Riffing on middle school math story problems, Tabios works a mathematics of disorder, the unordering of poverty, these “stories” a corrective to the “ascetic’s illusion of ecstasy, a measurement made possible by its condition precedent: a suffering so unmitigated it hollows the non-survivors from children to earthworms.” j/j hastain’s “visceral echoes” of Tabios, “gestures” both textual and visual, sound “an activism of hollowing out,” whose hollows form a new space of assiduity. In “stance”—instance—hastain “grapple[s] with ethics of place and space. Was a country the host body of a child found homeless in it?” Who and where are we, and what role has language in any of this? Against abuse, against hunger, against erasure, Tabios and hastain challenge silence’s dissonant ignorance. The poets sharpen language and intention, “Creating a permanent, rather than temporary implantable. An anti-obviate hutch or hearth.” A challenge, a new “home,” a pleasure, this collection puts us in the midst.
— Marthe Reed


Categories are not abstractions, they are bodies. Family is one such embodied category, gender another. What happens to bodies when they don't fit the categories assigned them, when they lack families, when they criss-cross gender or genre lines? How can one calculate such changes, compose equations to explain these trans-categorical shifts? Our very pronouns are at stake, as are nations, blood-ties, definitions to words like “dad” and “belonging.” As j/j hastain writes, “There is a new lineage that we are trying to make more apparent.” Eileen R. Tabios and hastain are trans-parents to a fresh embodiment of words and bodies, and to what they mean when they come together as books and persons. Their writing counts the change(s) in unexpected vocabularies.
—Susan M. Schultz

My 19th print poetry book--have come a long way from those toddler days of folding a page in four, slashing crayola on the pages, and calling the result a "book"! A long way, but 'twas all ... ordained.

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Saturday, July 31, 2010

THESE POEMS NOT ORPHANED!



Pleased and honored to see excerpts from my ORPHANED ALGEBRA series in the new issue of Otoliths! Thanks to editor/publisher Mark Young! Here's his announcement!
Issue 18, the southern winter 2010 issue, of Otoliths has just gone live.

Let's get the obvious pun out of the way first. This is an august issue. It's packed with text in its many forms—as story, essay, review, or poem—as well as a wide range of visual media: collages, frottages, glyphs, postcards, paintings, notebook pages & some great new vispo.

Included in the issue are Emma Smith, Eileen R. Tabios, Mark Cunningham, Ed Baker, Piotr Gwiazda, Anne Gorrick, Ed Higgins, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Manfred Weidhorn, Carlos Soto-Román, Sally Ann McIntyre, James Maughn, Mark Francis Johnson, Sheila E. Murphy, Amanda Earl, Orchid Tierney, Philip Byron Oakes, Raymond Farr, Joe Balaz, Randall Brock, Meaghan Lank, Jeff Harrison, Mary Kasimor, Bruno Neiva, Benjamin Winkler, M. V. Montgomery, Ric Carfagna, Jessica Breheny, Jal Nicholl, Alexander Jorgensen, Mark Stricker, Reed Altemus, Jenny Enochsson, Felino Soriano, Corey Wakeling, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Lars Palm, Thomas Fink, Dorothee Lang & Steve Wing, Larry Sawyer, Paul Siegell, Beth Boettcher, Charles Freeland, Jake David, Márton Koppány, Katrinka Moore, Aidan Semmens, Connor Stratman, Stephen Nelson & Mike Cannell, SJ Fowler, Cath Vidler, Cecelia Chapman, rob mclennan, Cherie Hunter Day, Neil Ellman, Geof Huth, R. Riekki, Tony Brinkley, sean burn, Scott Metz, Travis Macdonald, Stuart Barnes, Spencer Selby, Keith Higginbotham, Sam Langer, Tony Rickaby, Bob Heman, Andrew Topel, Andrew Taylor, John Martone, Brad Vogler, Bobbi Lurie, Michael Brandonisio, Yonah Korngold, J. D. Nelson, Tyler L. Gobble reviewing Adam Robinson's Say, Poem, Sheila E. Murphy reviewing Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets, Cassie Eddington, & Colleen Lookingbill.

Enough there, & of sufficient variety, to keep everybody happy.

I'm happy! Read Otoliths and you can be happy, too!

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

ORPHANS & ALGEBRA

Just typed up the eight prose poems that so far make up ORPHANED ALGEBRA, a series-in-progress. I handwrote all the first drafts, and the handwrit drafts had been staring at me by my laptop for about six months. I don't know why I was so reluctant to type them up; I suspect because once typed, it'd be easy for me to send them out to publishers. Until this morning, I'd only typed up two--I sent the first to Fieralingue and the second to Tinfish because both asked for poems and these were the only unpublished ones I had. Then, I just typed up two more to send over to another solicitation from another poet-editor I respect and don't want to reject. With half typed, I just typed them all up.

They're now printed out...and I know that if I take those to Michael's math textbook, About California Math 1 by Ron Larson, Laurie Boswell, Timothy D. Kanold and Lee Stiff, I could easily riff off more to create a new manuscript. But I probably won't, for now...even despite some favorable reactions I've received for these early pieces.

People often ask if having a son influences my writing of new poems. I would have thought it would. But, instead, what haunts my poetry-writing are the orphans I met during the two-year international adoption process: the ones longing for a family. There are nearly 200 million orphans worldwide. They're the ones who pop up in my poems, less so Michael whose obvious relief and happiness don't aggravate the Muse.

But on the other hand, I've not rushed to write these poems in ORPHANED ALGEBRA. Everything is fodder, but everything is not just fodder. When it comes to orphans, I haven't figured out yet the second part of that (poetics) statement. That relationship, its algebra, is still over my head. (When I first wrote about adoption in THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS, later reprinted in THE THORN ROSARY, it was through the inaugural haybun which included this hay(na)ku:
Ars Poetica at Age 47

Sometimes
the world
cannot become fitted

into
the poem.
Even the Poem.

What I can tell you with more fortitude is that there is a clear demographic connection between childless babyboomers and "older" (over 6 years old) orphans, and that there could (should?) be more adoptive connections between the two. Kidsave is an organization unique for focusing on older orphans (a category for which it's harder to find adoptive parents)--check them out HERE if you'd like more information. They share information about kids in foster care, and also are just starting their summer program where they bring older kids from Colombia and another country (not yet known to me) to the U.S. to meet potential parents. Please pass on the word...

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