THANK YOU, TIMO TUHKANEN

Timo Tuhkanen is a Finnish composer, artist, translator and poet. Timo recently contacted me because he apparently was working on new compositions related to some Enheduanna and Gabriela Silang poems in my book, MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE21ST CENTURY.  Well, what an honor!

About his composition, Timo explains:

“Much of my composing is related to a mixed media and conceptual art approach, I make films and write as well as compose and all of these elements are for me a singular output; in them materialise specific types of ideas, some of which create combinatory and layered meanings.

I have been reading these poems intensively when working on the pieces, in the case of Enhedhuanna I even found the name of my composition from your text. I feel that though it is not necessary to read them to understand the music, they are integrally linked to what I have written and I would like this information to be available for anyone interested in reading or playing my music.

The compositions are ‘a body unable to hold’ for 6 stringed instrument and voice, the name taken from Enhedhuanna. This piece has been performed on microtonal electric guitar.”

[Eileen Note to Tom Beckett: can you play Moi on your guitar? Heh.]

Timo also recently finished the final score and you can see it at  
http://issuu.com/pteronpressmusic/docs/cut_score_timotuhkanen Below is the text written on the first page:

“The composition CUT is the second composition in a series of compositions dealing with the works, poems and prose, of Eileen R Tabios. Explicitly CUT looks at “Gabriela couple(t)s with the 21st century”, a poem about Gabriela Silang, a female rebel leader during the Spanish occupation of the Philippines in the 18th century. 

It is in the poetics of the missing, the illogical, that form becomes incomplete, and it is this that the allegory, my composition, aim at, and towards which all the musical material gears up towards. It is an expression of The cut, an allegory through the absence of material: through a corporeal Musica Povera.

This piece was composed between the 18th – 22nd.11.2013

Thank you, Timo.  It’ll take me more time to feel my way through your engagement with my poems but I wanted to post now to show my gratitude and to introduce you to some of my readers!  I adore what you say about your aesthetic:

For me ideas choose their materials.

I like scents and types of pressures.

That’s just lovely!

FABULOUS FINLAND

continues to extend the hay(na)ku! Check out some Finish hay(na)ku by Heikki Lahnaoja. Don't know what they mean but I am sure they are all fabulous! For example

Villit
eläimet asuvat
tummassa tuhmassa metsässä.

Thanks Heikki!

ROMAN HOLIDAY--MOI "101st" BOOK

Well, before my "102nd Book", there's gotta be of course the 101st!:



If that front cover drawing seems familiar, it's because of THIS. Anyway, mine is one of three inaugural releases from a new chapbook publisher, Naissance -- which of course means "a birth, an origin, or a growth". I love helping to inaugurate small presses; I remember when Menage a Trois... was the first print-book published by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's xPress(ed). Well, we all know where the brilliant poet-composer-artist Jukka since has gone on to become the ideal poet's publisher with not just xPress(ed) but also Blue Lion Books,eIghT-pAGE pREss, ankkuri (in Finnish), xStream, minimum daily requirements, epidermis, contour et al. Jukka helped me learn to understand how my choice for publishers also must reflect poetics, not just publishing's commercial facets.

Anyway, here's Naissance's official announcement -- hope it encourages you to check it out, meanwhile supporting as well a brand new press...which looked at 21st century technology and came up with a supportable way to distribute arguably one of the most difficult products to disseminate: ye olde poetry chapbook!

*****

NAISSANCE CHAPBOOKS ANNOUNCEMENT

Naissance Chapbooks (Kingston, PA) is pleased to announce the release of

ROMAN HOLIDAY
By Eileen R. Tabios

In ROMAN HOLIDAY, Eileen R. Tabios brings us a numbered sequence of prose poem Synopses that strike the mind’s eye like an oil-filled kaleidoscope. Patterns merge and emerge in shifting repetitions that succeed in what all poetry attempts: to cover more ground than they should have been able. An excerpt:

from Synopsis #7

It transcends the feminine gesture. [Consolation defined as the bat never reappeared]. She totters on ice despite thick ankles. [By his face, one can tell he’s about to deliver the boot.] He has a gaze like a mirror. [There is nothing like an infant tugging on a daddy’s white whiskers.] “Sulpicia, a Roman woman writer, wrote elegies in Latin that had been attributed to Tibullus.” [Whatever. True love is never chaste.]

ROMAN HOLIDAY is Tabios' 17th print poetry collection. It features a front cover reproduction of a drawing by her 13-year-old son Michael, as well as a back cover reproduction of a photograph of the author's family during a "Roman Holiday". The chap's witty design facilitates the author's long-held ludic approach to mixing real-life references with poetic personas.

ROMAN HOLIDAY can be ordered through the Naissance Chapbooks site at http://chapbookpublisher.com/shop.html for $10 (includes standard shipping within the continental USA). Other new releases are No L by Jennifer Hill and Two Poems by Michael Aro.

For more information: chapbookpublisher@gmail.com

BELOVED CO-PUBLISHERS

Delighted to share that moi forthcoming Selected Prose Poem book, THE THORN ROSARY, to be released next year by Marsh Hawk Press, will be co-published in the Philippines by "Publisher of the Year" recipient Anvil Publishing. Am purrrrr-ed since it was Anvil who published my very first poetry book, BEYOND LIFE SENTENCES, which received the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Poetry (Salamat again! I can't tell you how meaningful it is to have my relatives in the boondocks be able to get a book from their distant relative) -- in part for the prose poems "Life Sentences" which roots all my subsequent attempts at the prose poem form.

Delighted further to announce that THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, forthcoming next year from Meritage Press, will be co-published by that leading avant garde publisher xPress(ed) helmed by radiant Finn Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. This means that we've just created a lovely triptych of hay(na)ku anthologies (the first (and now officially sold-out) HERE and the second HERE) -- and I am blessed to have collaborated on this series with Jukka!

Woot! National borders always fall below poetry -- as they should.

MOI "102ND" BOOK

Let’s just forget all this craven watercolor
--John Olson ("The Gob of Agog")

With much thanks to book designer and wind goddess Michelle Bautista, here is the front cover for THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 (Marsh Hawk Press, Spring 2010):

My first SELECTED is edited with an introduction by poet-painter-critic-scholar Thomas Fink, and features an Afterword by poet-scholar-activist Joi Barrios. I'm grateful for their engagements, and also appreciate Joi's role since her words eliminate all my concerns (which Tom, author of "A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER", wisely understands), about being solely contextualized by a white male critic.

The cover image is a photograph of New Orleans by Eric Gamalinda, himself no shirker when it comes to prolificness in poetry, fiction, essays, visual arts, film, translations, et al. 'Twas this all-around Renaissance Man who quipped about moi THORNS, "What is this: your 102nd book?"

Then Eric said other things which made me so happy that presence will adorn my book. After all, he has said this:

The act of poetry involves all the senses, the entire body, the entire mind, and to develop as a poet is to develop body, heart, and mind. Poetry is impossible without this commitment, without this total involvement. The most difficult part about writing a poem is not the writing but the process that leads to it, the process that demands belief, compassion, a sense of hope -- all virtually impossible challenges. All of this takes a lifetime. And at the end of our lifetime, what matters is not what we have written, but what we have become.
--from "+ h E . L a N 9 u A 9 E . 0 f . L / 9 h +"

And isn't Eric's photograph striking and mysterious? That effect -- complete with the unknown Other (back of my head to ya!) -- is something I hoped to achieve in many prose poems. I think I've said before -- in my dreams, my hair is frequently colored blue. I also like that this photograph was not a planned shot -- I think it was a stray street scene that Eric quickly snapped as he was walking by. Poetry is all around us; one just needs to see...

I do wish to thank all the artists who shared their works as possible front cover images to my book. There were more than one image that would have worked and I am sad that only one image could be used.

I hope you will be interested in THE THORN ROSARY. It offers poems that many haven't read before as they include poems from hard-to-find early books and as released in the past twelve years by publishers in the U.S., Philippines, and Finland (love those Radiant Finns!). Thank you Marsh Hawk Press, Anvil Publishing, Giraffe Books, Moria Books, xPress(ed), BlazeVOX [books], and Blue Lion Books.

Last but not least, deep thanks to poet and genius John Olson for some "Advance words" (given John's own poems and approaches, I'm really very grateful):

Tabios is a seamstress of the surreal, combining erudition and art historical references with flourishes of verbal color and surge. She is a generous writer whose enthusiasm for art registers brightly in her energetic conceptions. Propositions make correlative folds in a vividness of amalgamation. Ramifications at the fringe of consciousness thread brocades of textural ardor in a luster of compound interest. Her work (to borrow one of her own phrases) is "a blissful difficulty," a quest akin to threading a letter with a metaphor, a perception with a nerve.

INSPIRATIONAL MOI!

Naturally, I also inspire others to ... uh, Say Moi Name! Say it Clear and Say it Loud, Amen! To, wit: One of the Radiant Finns waxes HERE.

Thank you Karri Kokko, A Finn-With-A-Name-That's-Huh!-Actually-Quite-Pinoy...Y'all in Finland watch for their Vizpo workshop with guests Vispo Workshop Geof Huth, Christian Bök and Derek Beaulieu...

JUKKA-PEKKA KERVINEN'S SOULFUL MACHINE

While handwriting out the text in Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's Tiny Book, Randion screpts, I handwrite texts like

eakedide drightion.
Outboard
noue. Visque Charry

Or

mativerte oweember.
stinown
preous. hotoric. sacturia

Some might consider them nonsensical words. But what I discovered, in hand-writing them out and thus paying said texts a focused attention, is that these aren't nonsense. They are witty musical notes. And meant to be performed.

This is just one of many paradoxes that keep me ever-fascinated with Jukka's output -- how his machines can't avoid soul. Yo go, bro.

P.S. Jukka considers Randion screpts a hay(na)ku collection though the tercet word-count goes 2, 1, 3. It's all legitimate as the hay(na)ku wouldn't be what it is if it didn't inspire form-evolution; and Jill Jones, too, in her hay(na)ku Tiny Book Speak Which uses the same count.

I'M A LESBIAN SKINHEAD!

For such is Moi expanse! Hilarious! Karri introduces me to "PARATRANSLATE", and specifically the translation of "the chatelaines keys" to be

"The candylike lesbians"
or
"Nicely ablest skinhead"

What a hoot!

And speaking of The Blind Chatelaine's Keys, THANK YOU ALLEN for noting the loving-ness Moi shares with Harold Bloom--

Seems like all this attention is a timely way to remind you of this CANDY certainly not limited to lesbians or skinheads!

RANDION SCREPTS AIN'T RANDOM!

Just read the GREAT Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's FIRST hay(na)ku poetry collection; 'tis entitled

RANDION SCREPTS

Its text is "English reconstituted, based on source text manipulation before feeding it to Markovian process."

Coming soon to one of Moi's many THEATERs near you ... viz the Tiny Books Project.

Oh lucky you!

THE BIG POND OF NATURE POETICS

How did Anselm Hollo know I adore Radiant Finns? Because a most pleasant surprise awaited me at my country road mailbox yesterday: a package from Anselm Hollo containing his translations of two Finnish writers:

The Edge of Europe / A Kinetic Image by Pentti Saarikoski

and

One And Twenty by Paavo Haavikko

A generous gift, and from a poet I've never met -- but highly respect! I can't wait to dig in fully, and of course I've already started. And this passage from the Translator's Note to Saarikoski's book really resonated:

Saarikoski had withdrawn from the limelight of two decades of being an only-too-enthusiastic big fish in a small pond. With his partner, Norwegian-Swedish writer Mia Berner, he established himself in an old house on an island just off the west coast of Sweden and cultivated his own backyard in a typically troll-like way, superimposing the rich and various, wild and wooly landscape of his mind on the surrounding countryside with its mountain ridges, petroglyphs, caves, and harbors....

Said passage resonates, not because I consider myself a "big fish" (or because what passes as "poetry world" so often strikes one as a small pond) but, given what I'm trying to do here on the mountain with Galatea. Today, I checked my brand-spanking new culvers beneath a new gravel road/parking lot on the property and was very pleased to see them working and being effective against this week's raging storms. From the four culvers (which you Peeps might recall I'd financed by bartering some poetry books - grin), fountain-ous streams of water cascaded over wet rocks and leaves to continue down the fountain into a seasonal waterfall visible from the road. There, too, does Poetry lie and lays.

And speaking of lies and lays, here's my latest list of Relished W(h)ines:

PUBLICATIONS:
SOME HAY, poems by Lars Palm

SELECTED POEMS OF GABRIELA MISTRAL, Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2003)

PART, PART EUPHRATES, poems by Arpine Konyalian Grenier

CLEANING THE MIRROR: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS by Joel Chace

THE BIRD CATCHER, poems by Marie Ponsot

HAPPY NEW YEAR PROSE POEMS CARD by Mark Lamoreaux

MARY OLIVER POEM HOLIDAY BROADSIDE published/distributed (grin) by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

MAY/BE, poems by Jill Stengel

SCHOOLCHILDREN, investigative journalism by Tracy Kidder

THE LONG WALK: THE TRUE STORY OF A TREK TO FREEDOM, memoir by Slavomir Rawicz

IN A FAR COUNTRY: THE TRUE STORY OF A MISSION, A MARRIAGE, A MURDER, AND THE REMARKABLE REINDEER RESCUE OF 1898 by John Taliaferro

WOODSWOMAN: LIVING ALONE IN THE ADIRONDACK WILDERNESS, memoir by Anne Labastille

DAKOTA HOME, novel by Debbie Macomber

ALWAYS DAKOTA, novel by Debbie Macomber

REMEMBERED, novel by Tamara Alexander

CARRIE'S STORY and SAFE WORD by Molly Weatherfield (I checked out these two self-described "erotic S/M novels" at Ron Silliman's recommendation, viz a footnote to one of his posts -- I was curious as to how theory and sex intersect, having explored this once through my own homage to Dominique Aury; CARRIE'S STORY is more effective for being less didactic, always an occupational hazard when theory is so overtly involved. I guess the porn uptake to "Show, don't tell" is "Embody, don't theorize". This parenthetical is shared for Moi amusement, but also hopefully for yours.)


WINES:
1998 Jacquesson Fils L'Independance Des Philippines
2006 Oberon cabernet NV
1999 Fox Creek McLaren Vale Reserve Shiraz
2004 Blanc Fume de Pouilly Didier Dageneau
2000 Dom Francois Raveneau Montee de Tonnerre Chablis Premier Cru
2001 Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-de-Pape
1989 Rocche Dei Menzoni Barolo Riserva
2005 Pavi pinot noir NV
1992 Ridge Montebello
2005 Davenport Pinot Noir
2005 Puligny Montrachet
1990 Dom Perignon
1989 Paolo Scavino Bric del Fiasc
2005 Donn Hoff Hermin Holle Brucke Riesling Auslese
2000 Behrens & Hitchcock Chien Lunatique
1989 Ch. Cantemerle
1992 Ravenswood Pickberry

MOI MOVES!

So, first, there is this lovely moving project: THE FIRST MARQUEE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY curated (?) by the radiant Karri Kokko!

Then there'd be, uh, bowel movements? Well, no. It's just that I'm currently Menage A Trois-ing with Garcia Lorca and Neruda in the lovely bathroom of a Canadian flamenco dancer. Check moi nuzzled up to the two gents in Lola's so-called "BATHROOM OF HAPPINESS."

Always good to chuckle at midnight...

IT EVEN CONTAINS FINNISH!

So, I don't have Comments on this Blog...which does mean that my backchannel email is often rip-roaringly fun. I think I'll share this one from a man with one of my favorite names, Karri Kokko--

Eileen

Well, what do you know. I just finished reading "Light." Why, I enjoyed it very much. It's not a book, it's a library. One of those rare books that you might wanna take with you on a desert island. Or carry it around on trips. Because it's got everything, for every mood and every need. Poetry & prose, foreign stuff & translations, self-help & cooking tips, prayer, humor, even pics. A few words in Finnish, too.

And, like that ain't enough, just a minute ago, on television, somebody reads these words from a book:

Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe
After night I do crowd
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increased;
For light cloth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

- from Mad Song by William Blake

Light and pain, light and pain. Oh,man.

My best,
Karri

Oh, man, indeed. And I post it not just for its Preen-ing dimension but because I had been thinking of doing an immersion in Blake this October ...and this is an email that's turned my hemming and hawing about it to a confirmed YES. Sometimes, you gotta let the universe decide for you, youse know?

And thanks, Radiant Finn, for reading me...then writing Moi.

THE SECOND COMING...BY POPULAR DEMAND!

Yay. So we at Meritage Press and xPress(ed) are near to finalizing THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, NO. 2. Decisions on acceptances will be sent out soon. Meanwhile:

               I LOVE JUKKA PEKKA KERVINEN'S MIND.

Beautiful mind. Jukka is designing the cover to the anthology. And what does he do? He wrote a program that generates hay(na)ku where words are shuffled at random to make new string combinations. From that program, he wrote another that generates images based on the shuffled words hay(na)ku and superimposed with some of his photos. Got that? So, something like

geel
esert odexc
irebt ludo cthi

lrolt
ionpt spwiy
satrd eevnr macom

wefl
nnsyu telin
trede niocc spoli

vrgae
srewo appys
nthe ergpi eesr

continuing on for a total of 100 hay(na)ku has been generated which, in turn, becomes the fertile field from which blossoms a multiplicity of evocative imageries (that also shows Jukka to be a brilliant colorist). A picture may be worth a thousand words, but poetry makes such calculating calculations irrelevant with untranslateabilities.

I love working with Jukka. He is a pro. Quintessentially so. I much appreciate Jukka's samurai sword flashed ability always to get bottom line to the bone. A pro.

For the pro,
Bone becomes
Thebottomline.

Yadda.

OH HUNGRY PLANET!

And, again, if you want to keep relishing MOI, I have a new "List as Autobiography" project that I'm blogging over HERE -- the list of my daily snailmail. Among other things, it's a convenient way for you to know whether I would have received your review copy(ies) for Galatea Resurrects (though you also can always check GR's List of Review Copies).

It's interesting how some lists work and some lists don't. My Garbage List was quite fruitful (it helped generate SILENCES and POST BLING BLING); one critic out there is writing a review on SILENCES specifically because of the Garbage List section ("innovative," daw. Hee.). My POET TIC THOUGHT List, however, hasn't done much beyond its blogged self, though there's a certain poignancy that it ended with kari edwards' name....

All right. Time to relish Others. Thanks to Jack Kimball for reviewing Tom Beckett's Tiny Book, STEPS: A NOTEBOOK. Click here for his blog (Sept. 12 post), but I like his write-up so much I'ma gonna reprint it in full below:

A counterminimalist design ethos eggs on Steps A Notebook by Tom Beckett. It's one in a set of Tiny Books from Meritage Press. Publisher Eileen Tabios accompanies her poet as graphic alter ego, supplies drawings and indeed handwrites his text, a duo then stepping onto their small stage in their shared regalia to participate in what I might describe unsneeringly as an intense art dealership. The poems come inside a little page-turner, tiny even in chap terms, a 1.5-inch square thumbnail sketchbook with a cover jacket in multicolored (Navajo? Tibetan?) fabric. The poems come forward, sideways, and upside down in one or two words per line, mostly three lines or fewer to the page. They address the ambiguities of their being composed, seeming parenthetical, always germane, or as one page smack in the middle of the text inveighs: "In / the moment / (be right there)." The poems constitute a bisexuality of sketches, suave quotations, and facts on writing, both as text and process, positing that poetry writing is like composing a music made of temporary flaws ("smudged work of Arias") or like writing on a blackboard, "Looking / at blackboards / how many Ways?" Skepticism -- "Advancement / is a kind / of ____" -- abounds. If poetry is prayer, to paraphrase, prayer is programming of thought that's overexposed and torn. To get beyond the conundrum of prayer, programming, etc., the dealers work on each other and together. Tom's Eileen accommodates the torn thought idea on a ripped page and calms prayer down with a vapor of slants, blank lines, and empty boxes that enforce a silence. Eileen's Tom returns, though, with a new quiet-breaker, "A / poetry of questions / (one answer)." To clarify, he qualifies, "When / I was / a young man." Next page, "When / I was / a little girl."

The cover fabric is Guatemalan, dear Jack. And click HERE if you want info on ordering Tom's or other authors' Tiny Books!

Then, I must say that, from recent reading, Hungry Planet is the most enjoyable work of nonfiction I've read. (And according to its survey, which is not scientific but still enjoyable, Germany spends more on food than any country.) And here are the others in my latest list of Relished W(h)ines:


PUBLICATIONS:
COMPLICATIONS, poems by Garrett Caples

AMIGO WARFARE, poems by Eric Gamalinda

WORDFLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Michael Heller

MILLENIAL HARVEST: THE LIFE & COLLECTED POEMS of Charles Greenleaf Bell

WANTON TEXTILES, poems by Reb Livingston &Ravi Shankar

FREE, poems by Amanda Laughtland

from I MEANT TO SAY, postcard poem by Amanda Laughtland

NO MATTER, poems by Joel Chace

SELECTED WRITINGS, poems by Cedar Sigo

APOSTROPHE, poems by Elizabeth Robinson

FINALMENTE / FINALLY, English poems by Hugh Fox translated into Portuguese by Glenna Luschei

ARMORED ELEVATOR, poems by Ryan Daley

) ) ), poems by Samar Abulhassan

SEDNA, poems by Michael Helsem

HOMEMADE TRAPS FOR NEW WORLD BRIANS, poems by Evan Willner

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITHOUT US? THE VOICE AND VISION OF KENNETH PATCHEN, monograph of picture-poems by Kenneth Patchen with an Afterword by James Laughlin

THE PASSIONATE SPECTATOR: ESSAYS ON ART AND POETRY by John Yau

"BURNING INTERIORS": DAVID SHAPIRO'S POETRY AND POETICS, critical study Edited by Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease

PUBLIC ACCESS #1, literary journal edited by Nicholas Grider

TEENY TINY, March 2007, Series #10 edited by Amanda Laughtland

HUNGRY PLANET: WHAT THE WORLD EATS, photographs, essays, recipes written or edited by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio

A PIG IN PROVENCE, memoir by Georgeanne Brennan

THE TREMENDOUS ADVENTURES AND THE MIGHTY DEEDS, RISE, DOWNFALL, LIFE AND DEATH OF A. JACKS (1855), novel by Henry W. Faxon and edited with a brief commentary by Jesse Glass

ASTRID & VERONIKA, novel by Linda Olsson

SIGHT HOUND, novel by Pam Houston

VOWS, novel by Lavyle Spencer


WINES:
2004 Grifolo Poderi San Lazarro Marche
2005 Kistler chardonnay
1999 Robert Hunter Brut De Noirs, Sonoma Valley
2005 Monticello Estate, Pinot Noir, Napa Valley
2004 Matchbook Syrah, Dunnigan Hills
1999 Tokaji Aszu, 5 Puttonyos, Royal Tokaji
2003 Longwood Shiraz "The Sheep Shearer"

Speaking of Whines, Karri Kokko guesses at The Secret to Happiness. Is it, he asks,

               SOAVE

What a Cheeky radiant Finn.

READING OTOLITHS

The second thing I read at newly-released Otoliths #6 is "Karri Kokko reading Tom Beckett," to which I re...:

The shadows, the half-veiled--

The angles, the left field--

The grey areas, the smoked mirrors--

Brilliant. Great job, Karri.

KITCHEN POETICS

So, once I said -- as far back as this April 2005 interview -- that I wanted my BRICK to be used as a cooking tool (curing gravlax) as Moi believes poetry belongs outside the library. I wasn't joking, you know. And so when I discovered relatively recently that Geoffrey Gatza is a CHEF(!), I naturally sent a copy of said BRICK over -- wrapped in tinfoil to be all ready to squat on the salmon!

And you know what Geoffrey -- known as well to y'all, I'm sure, as proprietor of BlazeVox Books -- said? The poet-chef sez, He was forced to read the poetry (all 504 pages?! sorry Geoffrey!) since he already had "a nice Harold Bloom anthology of English poetry that works well [as a gravlax brick]" and "a nice set of Carl Dennis books for [his] smoker."

Moi am highly amused.

Well, let me spout some Finnish since Moi just loves those Radiant, oh so Radiant Finns: Oh, Moi just Loves that Graavilohi ...

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED

the first time I ordered a copy of SILENCES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS, my new release from Blue Lion Books. I ordered SILENCES through Blue Lion Books' Cafe Press site....and what I received was a book with the correct text inside, but covered by the cover of the prior Blue Lion Books release by Richard Kostelanetz & John M. Bennett.

It had never happened before in my, or (Blue Lion publishers) Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's or Peter Ganick's experience that a book would come covered with the wrong cover. But I suppose that's part of the possibilities now with print-on-demand systems, like Cafe Press'!

Cafe Press quickly remedied the error, sending me a new and correct copy of SILENCES. But I actually love having the erroeneously-covered version -- and not just because that's the kind of error that could be worth BIG BUCKS someday to book collectors (oh let me dream...). I love my errant copy because, synchronistically, the title of the Richard Kostelanetz & John M. Bennet book is

Furtherest Fictions/BACKWORDS

Given the nature of SILENCES as "a disruption of conventional autobiography," I think "Furtherest Fictions" and "BACKWORDS" are equally legitimate titles for my work. And the identification of the author as "Richard Kostelanetz & John M. Bennet" rather than "Eileen Tabios" also fits!

One of my epigraphs in SILENCES is an excerpt from the poem "Epipoem: Conversation" by Marne L. Kilates which goes

Who minds our journeys?
Who remembers we ever left?
In our absence are places ever less?
What do our words mean
When everything has been said?

Anyway, I love the company SILENCES keeps in Blue Lion Books. For some of the most innovative literary work out there, check out Blue Lion Books' *catalogue*, conveniently encapsulated in a recent email from Peter Ganick to Buffalo Poetics List which I share here:

Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:45:40 +0000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group
From: P Ganick
Subject: revised list of BLUE LION BOOKS

someone asked me to include the author's names along with corresponding titles in the previous BLUELIONBOOKS post. at our site at www.cafepress.com/bluelionbooks66
we cannot easily list authors at first view, only titles

[[from most recent then
backwards to the first book]]

SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss
Eileen Tabios

Furtherest FIctions/BACKWORDS
Richard Kostelanetz/John M. Bennett

Huddles
John Crouse

To Delite and Instruct
Catherine Daly

Post ~ Twyla
Jack Kimball

In The Weaver's Valley
William Allegrezza

Hotel di Roma [novel]
J Hayes Hurley

myesis, vol. 1, and
myesis, vol. 2
Jim Leftwich

Proletariaria (Vol.1)
Proletariaria (Vol.2)
Kevin Magee

Structure of Experience
Peter Ganick

0x03
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

Post Empire
Scott MacLeod

why: ...1 ...2 ...3 ...4
Peter Ganick

Motion and Rest
J Hayes Hurley

thetextasifsuch
Jim LEftwich

(no subject)
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

[[available at: www.cafepress.com/bluelionbooks66]]

WANNA KNOW A SECRET?

According to the Feminist Review, I am "offering another possibility beyond narrative and the lyric in poetry."

Well, wooot!

To wit, the Feminist Review has reviewed (to my pleased surprise!) The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. I (xPress(ed). You can click HERE for the entire review which I excerpt here for your -- okay, maybe just my (heh) -- reading pleasure (and I'm punchy pleased they highlighted Jukka here!):

Some of the results are unexpected analogies, metaphors, riddles and homonyms, while others are elaborate found quatrains taken from the poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s text cornucopia. While Kervinen’s text is generated by a computer’s statistical distribution from John Locke’s “The Essay of Toleration” and Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, Tabios wants the words to express their inherent sound and spirit. In a way, The Secret Lives of Punctuations represents the organic potential of a found poem removed by two degrees from its original texts.

This book becomes more intriguing when Tabios offers her insights on this process. In addition to her interaction with Kervinen’s text, she refers to Spirits in Stone: Zimbabwe Shona Sculpture. The sculptors’ philosophy adheres to the practice of carving the spirit of what is already present in the wood, instead of trying to force what one may desire upon the wood being carved. So, these poems could also be seen as another illustration of the conflict between nature and the constraints of civilization, which her postcard art in the book intimates the impropriety of punctuations having secret trysts in a hotel.

SILENCE IS GOLDEN!

SILENCES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS is now officially released by Blue Lion Books (thank you Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Peter Ganick!). You can order it from Blue Lion's Cafe Press site HERE!

This is my 15th poetry collection, and 12th print poetry collection. Part of the challenge of being so prolific is creating books that are very different from each other. I can promise you that this poetry collection is very different from others I've done in the past -- who else can present a hidden tale of eros within a 34-day list of (real-life) garbage? Moi, but of course!

My favorite section of SILENCES' nine sections is a compilation of art criticism that meld to create a de facto autobiography ... so that though each essay was written as individual assignments covering specific art exhibits, when bundled up together, they manifest the section's title of "Art Criticism: A Recovered Memoir".

This is also a 402-page book spanning genres. And it's what I consider my authentic "black book" ... for such works as "What You Don't Know About Me" which begins

Someone once called you a file cabinet. Careful not to slur his words, the stranger explained that you are too democratic: you lack discrimination about what slips into the dark recesses of your memory. As drunks often do, he belabored his point. To be "meticulously clear," the stranger proclaimed as he waved his empty glass at the bartender, he added that your body has even come to look like a filing cabinet: dusty, dented in places, and always in the corner of a room uninvolved in the activity surrounding it. Actually, the stranger--everyone is a stranger to you--was attempting a joke. But you didn't laugh and neither did I.

Or this excerpt from the poem "Samba Pa Ti (#3)":

For fire to bloom a rose
in the middle of an ocean
a boat must burn

For our pens to mate
the red velvet chair
in the dungeon must crash

For a steeple
to spiral across night sky
a man will lose a hand

Okay. That should be enough of a tease. Hopefully, you're intrigued enough to order it.

And please to contact me at GalateaTen@aol.com if you're interested in reviewing it (though not for my Galatea Resurrects since I edit it). Oh, okay okay -- one more tease: here's an excerpt from "The Artist Looks at the Model":

*

"Never before," she acknowledged through a set of contexts as varied as my promiscuous judgments on the same slice of weather. Plus, I am a Grand Master at using names to create. Once, I called her a "landlady." I was riveted, watching her try to fix my plumbing. I counted as, one by one, her fingernails betrayed their French manicures.

*

She became the wind after she lost all misgivings about drying my feet with her hair. It was a day bequeathed by a leap year. She forgot the word she had saved secretly for a special occasion to unload on me--such a big world of meaning in what would have been spelt as a couple of letters: N-O. It would have been. Such a big world.

*

This time, I used both palms to shape "L"s into a frame. She was the wind, but still too gentle. "You can do it!" I egged her on with sincere irritation on my unshaven face. I molded wind into a body for nothing is risked without bacteria. I felled her to her knees. She was up to it. Once, she jutted out her lower lip. I bit it. She was up to it.

RADIANT MEAT AND GEMS!

asking what we want poetry to do for us is really asking what we're willing to do for poetry.
--Karri Kokko

Wow and Whew! This interview just became one of my top three favorites put out by Tom Beckett's Will To Exchange Blog! There is just SO MUCH! in this interview of Karri Kokko by Tom Beckett. Like this excerpt below -- and do click HERE for entire DAZZLING INTERVIEW -

let me recount the story of Giotto, the early Renaissance painter from Florence, of Tuscany. As a young boy Giotto worked as a shepherd, and to pass the long hours out there in the hills he used to spend his time drawing. For lack of proper materials, he drew on rocks or made his pictures right there in the sand with a stick. One day Cimabue, the most famous painter of his time, walks by and sees young Giotto's drawings. He's impressed by the boy's apparent skills and asks him to join him as a student. Giotto accepts (actually his father does) and the rest is history. Even today, seven centuries later, millions of people from all over flock to see the raw beauty of the former shepherd's images in the cathedrals of Italy.

Now, I think what we have here is analogous to all art, including poetry. We have this talent and the willingness to use it, no matter what happens. We write our poems, no matter if the wind or the rain washes it off before anybody actually sees it. Then one day maybe, just maybe, a Cimabue happens along the way to help us. And if we are talented enough, and persistent enough, maybe we find an audience. And if we're lucky, really lucky, maybe we get to touch a few people's hearts.

But there's so much more Gorgeous words -- wait till you read about Karri's Mama! Do check it out check it out check it all out!