MORE NOTES FROM THE STUDIO

I've never written poems that got away from me so fast. Usually, when I begin a poem I am in the poem (or want to be in the poem) and then am in its space for a while especially if I edit the poem. But with these poems, as soon as the first drafts were written they flew away from me. Which is to say, as I edited them -- and I was surprised by how much editing they required (I've been a first draft, last draft type pf poet for the past few years) -- I was outside their space. I was looking at the poems with distance between me and the poems.

And it's all good. Because, I suppose, that's what sculptures are and I consider these poem-sculptures. That is, with (most) sculptures, you can walk around them and see them 360 degrees.

Which is also to say, these poems are their own worlds. And that's fabulous. With these poems, I got out of their way to let them have their say.

I'm getting there ... let's see what there is.

CONSTRAINT-BASED WRITING

And of course SitWithMoi--with its focus on miniature chairs and books--is just another form of constraint-based writing.  I like moi LATEST POST which veers across the wonderful Dusie project of Susana Gardner, the marvelous 80 Beetles by Mark Cunningham (which had been an unplanned addition), and of course Marthe Reed's latest chap, Florula Ludoviciana. 

That's what the best of constraint-based writing offers: a universe in a grain of sand.

TWO NEW POEMS FOR YOUR GRAZIN' GAZIN'

Cerise Press is featuring two poems from a manuscript-in-progress in its latest issue:

(Ethos


and


(To Be Seen by Iamos, Calchas and Teiresias

(Yes, dears -- the lack of a close parenthesis in the titles is deliberate.  Kinda to symbolize open-endedness, youse see...?

Anyway, thanks to the Cerise Press editors: I'm delighted to be part of the current issue from one of what the Library Journals calls "Best of Magazines."

GROWING AND HARVESTING FROM THE GARDEN OF CHAIRS...TO EXPAND THE ART OF THE MINI-BOOK

Ach: how I love to watch my, correction: YOUR garden grow! Here's a LINK (ignore its date: I artificially date it into SitWithMoi's Arcbives) to show how the mini-chair collection has grown: in less than two months, from 7 to 37 chairs. Why? So that you, moi dears, may have chairs upon which to "shelve" your mini-books!

It's been great fun for Moi to participate as it has exercised, thus, expanded vision. Like, my latest "edited" mini-book, supposedly by my brother.

Through SitWithMoi, I've discovered a desire to expand the scope of the "mini-book" which often (tho not always) has been one of copying its larger avatars. Tsk! Let's expand that imagination!

A mini-book, certainly when viewed from a poet's eye, surely proposes its own Art. (Moi examples HERE, and more are coming as they're too much fun to make!) Poetry--it's not one of just repetition, but also expansion.

Enjoy!

A FONDNESS FOR FOUNDNESS: A POETICS

Everyone is invited to "Books on Chairs" but I also am making books for that project. What's been surprising is how I've taken so quickly to making the type of books I'm creating: books based on what randomly surfaces in my environment (e.g. the junk mail I receive) rather than based on something I intend to write about. Now I'm realizing that these tiny books are just another extension of my long-held poetics practice of wishing "to write in the world in the poem" versus relying on the constraints of my "I" -- and "eye." Of course, in creating works this way, one hopes that one's "I" -- and "eye" -- are also widened in expanse and vision. One hopes ... anyway, here, to date, are books reflecting my fondness for foundness. If the named author is someone else, it's because I "edited" that person's book into its tiny being. (I will update this list as I generate more books.)

READ MORE HERE.

"PHOTOEMS" FACING FEMINISM!

Annette Marie Hyder curated a project, "Facing Feminism: Feminists I Know." Participants were asked to send in photo and text to create "photoems" to explore the theme. Well, Annette just received a grant (yay!) to spread the word and do an exhibition, for which she is using Facebook to spread the word by posting a photoem daily over the next couple of weeks. You can see that brilliant and loving project HERE.  Please "Like it," as they apparently say ...

And, specifically, Moi am HERE! preening with my Achilles when he was still a puppy! Actually, I love this baby photo of Achilles so I'm going to repost below, but please do go visit the TOTAL PROJECT to see these wonderful Feminists!

German Shepherds are feminists, too! Just check out Arlene Ang's photoem!


[P.S.  I'm not really active on Facebook.  There's an "Eileen R. Tabios" page but Facebook created that for me because I'm famous (haha) and undoubtedly to ramp up its "user" statistic prior to its (flawed-haha) initial public offering.  Anyway, I don't use Facebook much but people do occasionally find their way onto my page and leave me messages, and I'm grateful for that ...]

INTRODUCING THE BALLOON POEM!

Delighted to introduce a poetic form:


            The Balloon Poem

! Badda bing. So a "Balloon Poem" (is a type of "concrete poem" which) has the following two characteristics:

1) visually shaped so that the text forms an orb followed by a "string" of words, per example below; and


2) the words in the orb should bespeak something floating, airy, light et al while the words in the string should bespeak a grounding of the words in the orb.

Of course, the interpretations of lightness and grounding are subjective. For example, in the example below, what grounds (or tethers) the words relating to how I actually spent this Memorial Day Weekend is the dilution of weekend or holiday-related breaks to keep working, with nod here ("If you still have a job, you keep working...") to Great Recession. And this knowledge makes more special -- "grounds" -- everyday experiences so that, at least in the poem, one relishes ("floats" along, if you will, in) the small pleasures of the everyday ....


MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND 2012: A BALLOON POEM



                                                                                 Relish

                                        corn ... hamburgers (of course) … sunshower

                           2004 Trevor Jones … “Battleship” … popcorn … chocolate

               -covered vanilla ice cream balls … left-over fried rice & meatloaf … pear

               tart … “Tower Heist” … bagels with lox & onion/chive cream cheese … but of

          course: coffee, coffee, coffee … swordfish grilled in home-grown Meyer lemons …

          Sunday is always “laundry day” … fresh, yellow squash … a haircut for Mom … new

               shoes—as ever, the latest from Van’s—for El Hijo … adorable son shows me

                           a fresh way of tying shoelaces (such an artist!) … review images of

                                   paintings from Haiti … “If you still have a job, you keep

                                            working on holidays & weekends” … shop

                                                                                 TARGET



                                                                                 for

                                                                                 kitty

                                                                                 litter

                                                                                 Nap

                                                                                 E-mail

                                                                                 Nap

                                                                                 Yum:

                                                                                 David

                                                                                 Eyre’s

                                                                                 sugar-

                                                                                 dusted

                                                                                 pancakes!

                                                                                 E-mail

                                                                                 Nap

                                                                                 You

                                                                                 keep

                                                                                 working—

                                                                                 The

                                                                                 New

                                                                                 Dinosaurs?

                                                                                 Weekends

                                                                                 Holidays …

                                                                                 Walk

                                                                                 dogs

                                                                                  Pet

                                                                                  cats

                                                                                  Ketchup?

                                                                                  Catch
                                                                                 
                                                                                  up!

*****

As with the hay(na)ku, I like thinking of new poetic forms but that doesn't always make me the form's best practitioner. If this moves you to write a balloon poem, please share with me! (Email Moi at GalateaTEN@aol.com)  And, Poet-Teachers: isn't this a fun way to introduce/teach poetry?  And, yeah, the first five poets to send me their samples can get five free books (chosen by Moi please) from the Community Bookshelf! Go forth and balloon, Peeps!

SCULPTING TO REPRODUCE EMPTINESS

Recently, (at least) three things converged unexpectedly to generate what looks to be a new poetry manuscript: some recent personal turmoil resulting in Loss, Marc Gaba's inaugural poetry collection HAVE that made me reconsider poetic line and (or, versus) the prose poem paragraph, and a weariness with the message-ridden form of poems I'd been writing as I explored the subject of orphans.

I was delighted, by the way, to see Tupelo Press publish Marc Gaba's HAVE. I'd been aware of this poet's writings and am pleased to see him get attention for his, among other things, tensile minimalism. In HAVE, the attention to the poetic line is so evident that reading through this collection was the final impetus – there were earlier ones which I never acted on until now – to create poems by annotating Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. This was my first U.S. book which, by being all prose poems, had always contained (I thought) wonderful phrases that could be recontextualized into new poems if they were chipped out, a la sculpting, out of their prose blocks.

Annotation is not, of course, a new poetic technique though I again stress that I wasn't focused so much on textual inspiration as pretending to be Michelangelo. To illustrate, here's a photo of my poem "The Chase" from the book--the green highlights depict phrases that I used as raw material for a new poem entitled "(The Chase". The difference in the title is the insertion of an open parenthesis mark without the close parenthesis, signifying the poem's open-endedness.



"(The Chase" and other such poems sculpted out of the poems in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole will form a new manuscript entitled

Reproductions of the reproductions of the empty

Emptiness here is partly the opposite of message-bearing. I had nothing in mind to say when I sculpted these new poems -- I was simply relying on what was already written in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. The emptiness also relates to Loss; and I just realized that this new manuscript actually bears the opposite sensibility to what underpinned Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, which was Desire.

Without going into details, my recent personal loss certainly was the negation of Desire.

Anyway, you can compare the six prose paragraphs in the original poem "The Chase" with newly-sculpted poem "(The Chase" comprised of 18 thin stanzas which has just been published in that fabulous poetic space curated by Halvard Johnson, On Barcelona. It's in great company -- do check out the other poems (I most recently enjoyed Ric Carfagna's!). Not only do my two poems look different but they really are different in content, as different as Loss vs. Desire.

SEEDING ENCOURAGEMENT

A few months ago Dan Waber asked me to participate in a project revolving around Encouragement. The manifestations were these bits of paper that one can hand out to others; said teeny papers contained encouraging messages -- here's one I wrote for the project:

That you will receive lies
does not mean you are not loved.

And here's a photo for these Bits of Encouragement.



I like the form conceived by Dan, an aficionado of minimalist poetry -- the tiny paper slips are like seeds. And seeds can grow to be quite ... BIG, pointing natch to the potential of encouragement!

(WHAT) DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "POEM" AND "SONG LYRIC"?

I mentioned previously that Cecilia Langlois aka Geejay Arriola, an award-winning songwriter and singer, has decided to put one of my poems to music! What an honor! Well, I don't think she anticipated having to slog through all my books, though, before she chose a poem (heh). Anyway, she chose an old poem of mine (it classifies as a "baby poem" since I believe it's among the first 20 poems I ever wrote) from my first poetry book Beyond Life Sentences, a poem entitled "Immigrant."

What's interesting is that she asked permission, for purpose of making the text work more for her song-writing, to edit the poem. I'm going to show the poem below with the indicated edits. But what's intriguing to me is that, the way I see the poem now, her edits improve the poem as poem anyway. Certainly, if I were writing the poem today I might edit it her way whether or not one calls it a poem or song lyric ... (even as I recall how certain poets in the past call for the poem to sing!)

... and, in turn, this all leads me to wonder about the difference between poem and song lyric. Does there really need to be a difference...?

Immigrant


The faces of the elders
Bestow a haunting
On others reciprocating
With their own weariness,
Dropping gazes like debris.

Teeth are missing
Gums full of potholes.
Long ago, shoulders sagged
To crumbling ruins.

They sit by roadsides
Under trees whose shade
They treasure for costing
Nothing.

Splayed around their feet
Are the young whose faces,
Like babies anywhere,
Eagerly turn here,
Eagerly turn there,

Searching surroundings
For treasures invisible
But I also believed existed
When I still shared their innocence.

There is a country somewhere
On the opposite of where I stand
On this earth, a country
From where I departed
For a people I thought to save
Someday with my return.

But the old and the young
Are as different from me
As the wealthy of this universe:
They do not need much,
They need too much
They do not ask,
They must often plead
—While I know what it takes
To survive

And that survival meant
To move on from where a man
And a woman joined
Before the onset of weakness
To create me

Finally I know
At this peak of my wisdom
That to return bears
No relationship to survival

Which, instead has to do
With you whose path
Crossed mine
In a new land.

There is a country somewhere
Dying without a protest
From me defensively,
Selfishly seeking
Rebirth in your arms

Hm. I couldn't ... wouldn't ... write this poem today ...

9-1-1 EXHIBIT AT LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

I'm honored to be part of a “Post 9/11”: Commemorative Display now on view in the Library of Congress’ Asian Division Reading Room, located in Room L J 150 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The exhibition runs from August 30 through September 15, 2011, with the hours of the Library of Congress’ Asian Division Reading Room being 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Actor and photographer Lia Chang posts a write-up on the exhibit at BACKSTAGE PASS. (Thanks much for highlighting my 9-1-1 poem...)

Anyway, here are some photos of my the exhibit and my contribution -- thanks to Curator Reme Grefalda:







It's always a challenge, IMHO, to exhibit a poem. Not a visual poem but a text-poem. I think it's great how Reme spliced up individual sections of the poem and then pasted them on a backdrop, evoking the collage technique that went into the writing of the poem...

MEGA MOI

Very grateful indeed to Stephen Hong Sohn for his "Megapost" on three of my books over at Asian American Literature Fans (June 19, 2011). Typos will be corrected once Stephen's had a chance to rest his eyes from reading my writings and writing about it (laugh: rest his eyes...).

Anyway, this keen critic reviews Nota Bene Eiswein (Ahadada Books, 2009), Silk Egg: Collected Novels (Shearsman Books, 2011), and Footnotes to Algebra: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 (BlazeVox Books, 2009).

I'm grateful Stephen chose to engage with my work, especially since he observed that my

work with all of its formal inventiveness always is undergirded by an attention to social contexts, however elliptically they may be represented.

Thank you, Stephen. It takes extra incisiveness to get the social in elliptic or absract spaces. I'm blessed you got it!

FROM OVAL TO EGG!

Moi DEEP THANKS to Michael Leong for his review of SILK EGG! It's one of the most interesting takes yet! Especially if you like Wunderkammers, go HERE to see how Moi, according to Michael, evolves the oval to an egg using language!

It's also mystically mathematical, which is to say, it's a blessing when, in poetry, I read something I wrote and know there's no way I can ever replicate it or even something similar to it. I want zones to which it'd later be impossible to return...because the universe contains so many mysteries to explore!

FIRST PUBLICATION FROM 147 MILLION ORPHANS

Deep gratitude to Anselm Berrigan for asking me for poems for Brooklyn Rail, whose poetry section he edits. Anselm's solicitation had an exponentially huge impact in that, by soliciting, he encouraged me to finally start writing poems from 147 Million Orphans, a poetry manuscript which I'd conceptualized but not yet began manifesting through poems. The first poems then from 147 Million Orphans (title is after one of the estimates of the number of orphans worldwide) are published HERE in the June issue of Brooklyn Rail, one of my favorite online journals.

I notice I'm in good company with poems this issue by Jennifer Moxley and Brenda Coultas. THANK YOU, Anselm.

147 Million Orphans is in the form of a haybun, with each section's impetus a hay(na)ku formed from one of Michael's 8th grade projects: a vocabulary notebook from having to learn 25 new English words each week during the schoolyear. Here's a photo of the first page from Michael's now quite dog-eared 900-new-word vocabulary journal:



Yes, I'm a poet and thus know words are not mine...and that poems surround us and my job is simply to discern them into existence.

YOU'RE WELCOME,

Jon Pineda, who writes an interesting poetry writing prompt regarding the caesura--check it HERE!

SENTENCE YOURSELF TO ... SENTENCE 8!

Issue 8 of SENTENCE: A JOURNAL OF PROSE POETICS is now out, and includes "A Forum on the Prose Poem"--I'm in good company with other commentators:

Robert Alexander, Nin Andrews, Sally Ashton, Steven Bradbury, Susan Briante, Christopher Buckley, Jeffrey Davis, Michel Delville, Paul Dickey, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Elisabeth Frost, Gloria Frym, Jeff Harrison, Bob Heman, Brooke Horvath, George Kalamaras, Janet Kaplan, David Lazar, Rachel Loden, Gian Lombardo, Robert Hill Long, Amy Newman, Renee Rossi, Nikki Santilli, Catherine Sasanov, Daryl Scroggins, Terese Svoboda, Eileen Tabios, G. C. Waldrep, Charles Harper Webb, and Gary Young.

While you might need to peruse the issue itself for the others' contributions, I am about Poetry-As-Gift and so happy to reproduce my commentary below:

RE. THE PROSE POEM

I love abstract expressionism, specifically in painting the way brushstrokes can seem—through their energy—to extend past the edge of canvas. As if a canvas cannot contain the painting. It’s an observation that led me to prose poetry because of the form’s lack of a line-break. In prose poetry, I not only wrote long lines that became a paragraph but attempted lines that seem to continue past their last words (for the same reason, in some prose poems I deleted the ending period to the last sentences). I came to love the prose poem for finding in its form the ability to present a poem that cannot be contained by the page.

Perhaps this mirrors how the poetry experience can continue past the reading of a poem—how a poem might inspire further reflection and even action.

In later explorations, however, I realized that the poem’s ending is just part of the story. The beginning of energy (or lack thereof of a “beginning” or “end” to energy whose edges need not exist) might also be explored—I manifested this exploration by writing paragraphs that can be published in one order but also shuffled out of order (e.g. in poetry readings) and, due partly to their abstraction, are still effective if they emotionally resonate with their audience.

Perhaps this mirrors how the poetry experience is subjective, and sometimes cannot be contained by narrative linearity.

In my experience then, the prose poem has shown itself to be a form [sufficiently supple to be one] of infinite expanse.

It'd be interesting to see how other prose poem practitioners approach the form. And if you want to correlate moi poetics to the actual poems, feel free of course to check out my Selected Prose Poem project, THE THORN ROSARY, which encompasses 12 years of writing prose poems.

MOI FIRST BOOK-LENGTH POEM!

Michael's humanities teacher had assigned the students to write fiction. Michael wrote a five-chapter novel entitled FITTING IN, which is especially brilliant, not because he happens to be son of a fiction writer but, because he's been learning English for less than two years.

But everyone in his 8th grade wrote fabulous work, such that the humanities teacher recently set up a "Reading Tea" where parents were invited to hear everyone read their favorite excerpts and then have a Q&A. What a fabulous way to give affirmation to the students' hard work!

I walked into the classroom where the reading was to be held. There was a table by the door with some cookies and hot water and tea bags. Suddenly, my son -- MY PUBERTY-RIDDEN SON! -- was greeting me at the door, guiding me to the table, and asking if I'd like some tea. Startled --THEN AMAZINGLY GRATIFIED OVER SUCH CIVILITY THANK YOU GOD! -- I eked out a "Yes." And I watched my son awkwardly put hot tea in a cup, put in a tea bag and give it to me. Then he led me to a chair where I could sit for the festivities.

THERE IS LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL! My son will yet grow up to be a gentleman, transcending recent knucklehead behavior! YEAHHHHHHH!

Never has tea tasted so delicious!

I am not a tea-drinker, by the way.

Anyway, he read his short story which was about the experience of a newly-adopted boy throwing a party without his parent's permission. It mentioned a hard-working Dad who often traveled away on business -- just like, ahem, the hubby! So the story was actually good in becoming a door to discuss how the hubby doesn't like traveling away from the family but it's his responsibility etc etc.

When you adopt, especially an older child, the "files" you get about their backgrounds are never complete. I've learned things, horrific things, about Michael's past from reading various stories he's written as class assignments. Horrific things ... that become yet part of the steel underpinning to my work-in-progress 147 MILLION ORPHANS. This manuscript also made major progress this week -- I think I figured out how it can become my first book-length poem (in the haybun form).

I've tried writing book-length poems before and failed miserably. And I've been affectionately egged on by my long-time editor Thomas Fink to do this form, in part because...I've never done it! Well, looks like I'll soon be putting a check-mark in that box! When it happens, I shall drink tea to celebrate the successfully-earned intimacy with such an alien!

Poetry is so mischievous with me -- of course that book is likely to be longer than my COLLECTED NOVELS. But, of course....!

Speaking of which, SILK EGG only been out a month. But it's already worth $149! Well,in Hong Kong dollars, that is. THIS IS AMUSING -- love that book description they chose. Guinness Book of World Records, Moi awaits you!

INTRODUCING THE "BYTE POEM"!

I love it when young poets write to me about their experiments and creations! Here's a letter from Benjamin C. Krause as regards the BYTE POEM! Note the invite at end of letter for more "byte creations"!

Dear Eileen,

I know I mentioned to you I had created a couple other forms besides quincouplets in my earlier emails, but am not sure if I told you anything about them. Truthfully, my quincouplets blog hasn't been updated since October, and I've recently started a new blog for a different type of form I think you might enjoy checking out.

This form is called a byte, and its origins lie partially in my interest in short forms and partially in my Computer Science background. As you probably know, on a computer, data is represented by 0s and 1s. What you might not know is that a single 0 or 1 is known as a bit. Eight bits make up a byte, from which we get terms like kilobyte (1,000 bytes), megabyte (1 million bytes), etc.

Well, a poetry byte is very similar to a computer byte, except instead of using digits as its bits, it uses syllables. Thus, long story short, a byte is an eight-syllable poem.

There are no restrictions on bytes except that they must be exactly eight syllables. Line breaks, stanza breaks, they can be wherever you want them to be. Special formatting--no problem. It is simultaneously a very open and very restricted form.

It sounds easy almost, but I've found them to be some of the hardest poems to write. I still don't think I have written a great one, just some good ones. I have six of them up on a new blog I started a week or two ago, which I'd like to request that you check out if you have the time.

http://bytepoems.com/

Prior to beginning writing bytes, I was not one to often play around with formatting, unless I was doing it for the sake of doing so (which usually meant it ended up being bad). But I play with formatting in a few of these poems, and as it so happens, they were the favorites among everyone I showed them to. I doubt it's mere showmanship or gimmick that made them enjoy them more. Instead, perhaps, playing with formatting is an almost necessary method of artistic expression in such a restricted verbal environment.

There is a heavy metal artist I used to hate; I thought he was completely tasteless. Then he got sent to prison for arson, and there the only instrument he had access to was a synthesizer. In my opinion, and in that of many others, he recorded his best music during that time.

It's not the best analogy, but I know there are tons of historic examples of artists facing a lack of resources, whether due to oppression, poverty, imprisonment, or whathaveyou, and coming up with inventive ways to make do with what they have and create great art. Forms like the byte impose similar limitations on the resources within which the poet has to work, thereby (hopefully) unlocking a creative force within them which had previously remained hidden. And no one has to go to jail to unlock it.

This may have been rambling, so I apologize. But at any rate, I think it's a form with a lot of promise. My best is yet to come, and i only hope that one day it picks up enough steam that people will be leaving me in the dust with their byte creations.

Ben

SILK EGG'S BOXING POETICS

Speaking of SILK EGG, I love Allen Bramhall's take on how it "invade(s) the notion of context, not the life of the Author." I love it because it seems to be a conclusion only a reader can get to. It makes me wonder what the response would be by a reader who has never read anything before -- a reader who learned ABCs and words and then, for the first book, read SILK EGG.

Meanwhile, go HERE for Allen's map map that provides as stepping stones -- and it's fun for me to list the names dropped so I hereby list them! -- Henry James, Charles Baudelaire’s Poèmes en Prose, Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery and citing specifically Three Poems, Buddha, Jung, Heidegger, and (I love it! even) boxer Bob Fitzsimmons (even before Manny Pacquiao got moi attention, I'd long had a boxing book in mind). What I like in part about seeing others referenced in relation to my work is learning said work's context in a way that the context was not predetermined by me as Author. Dear Reader, I've said it before: Moi is all about Toi.

INTRODUCING THE "QUINCOUPLET"

which obviously bears a "found" relationship to the hay(na)ku. The difference between the quincouplet and the hay(na)ku is that the hay(na)ku's one-word first line is a title in the quincouplet. More information is found on the blog/site of Benjamin C. Krause HERE.