ART, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY--

what more can one want? But there's more in the just-released issue of OurOwnVoice which is fresh and full of lovely lovelies. Among them, my essay on Jean Vengua's haptic drawings:

Post Visual: Jean Vengua's Haptic Drawings

which was really fun to do. We both give props to Stephen Vincent for the original inspiration of haptic drawings. I love Geej Langlois' conflation design (which you click on in OOV to get to the article):

I'm also blessed to have a review of "the avant garde" THE AWAKENING by Aileen Ibardaloza

and then

an engagement of an older (but still favorite) book, MENAGE A TROIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY,  along with Joi Barrios' fabulous poetry, by a writer new but now beloved to Moi: "The Self Revolution of Radical Love--Externalizing Internal Worlds of Freedon in Filipina Poetry" by Michaela Spangenburg. Nifty title.  

[Did you pay attention to this post?  Are you interested in a menage a trois courtesy of a book?  Click HERE for more info--if the book seems interesting and you email me in the next 24 hours (GalateaTen@aol.com) with your snailmail addy, you get a comp copy!  It's an older book, but I always thought it one of my best and I don't mind it getting more play ...   Moi loves to play!]            

I CAN MAKE YOU PURRRRRRR!

....Purrrr, based on the experience of jim mccrary's cat Iris who apparently loves my new book, THE AWAKENING!  jim, by the way, has graced Moi and Toi with a revoooo written in his inimitable style -- do check it out HERE for a belly-laugh!  Now, heeeeee...eeeee...eeere's Iris lovin' on moi new book!

GOT AWOKEN TO A REVIEW!

THE AWAKENING... just got a review in Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.  Thanks to reviewer Zvi Sesling -- who sums up my book by quoting Bette Davis, "Fasten your seatbelt you're in for a bumpy ride." Hey: why not?!

Hope you wake up to moi latest book...!

THE LOVELY YELLOW FIELD

a literary/arts journal out of Buffalo, N.Y., just gave THE AWAKENING a mini-review in its issue #7.  Thank you Edric Mesmer.  It's brief enough so I'll replicate in full here:

THE AWAKENING
Review By Edric Mesmer

Four meditations: spoofing on and getting off the modernist obsession with erotic contagion; dispatches from 9/11 for the poem that refuses to be written; the kaleidoscopic universality of pain as it dejectedly finds representation; a consideration of artwork by Filipino-American artist jenifer k. wofford. All these seeding our inheritances. The syphilitic metonym for a sexually-driven modernism is mirthful in its moves between hard-line phallocentrism and a lyrically-loaded vocab: “When I wish to soar from / the surface of words, I do not think of ‘Ezra Pound,’ // ‘penis,’ or ‘anus.’ I think of azure, kimono, aprocito, / adobe, Angkor Wat, magenta, anvil, silver moth …” From here there is a concentrated shift from the literarily investigative to the poetry of witness. Emails from September 2001 (incidentally, the author’s birthday) cohere in an antipoetic missive of community, synthesizing pathos. Ultimately, the collection must look at that which does not easily bear witness, as the many atrocities of modern poverty configure a media that cannot be or will not be televised. The poem becomes that televisionary channel-surfing: “… American press don’t buy these kinds of pictures. / Other countries do.’)” bleeds stringently back into triadic line. “Who determines what / leaves us / speechless? // Who—there is / a Who!— / determines // what’s allowed?”

Hope that tickles your interest into checking out moi book!  It's asleep until a reader wakes it!

WAKE UP WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS!

“The Erotic Life of Art: A Séance with William Carlos Williams,” is perhaps my favorite work I’ve ever read by this author.
--Joey Madia, Literary Aficionado

Really?  All those poems--24 poetry collections!--and long-time reader (and thank you for being a "long-time reader"!) Joey Madia thinks the first poem in THE AWAKENING may be his favorite?  That's something (and similarly expressed by other reviewers, to date).  Glad I rescued that poem from the depths of the trash bin where it once laid in darkness forgotten by its author Moi...

Go HERE for entire review, which also posits I'm hanging out in the frontier ... (no wonder I like love stories of settling the U.S. Western Frontier way back when...)

ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE DA VINCI

And I'm grateful, too, to Grady Harp for his review of THE AWAKENING!  Posted at Amazon.com where he's a Hall of Famer reviewer and Goodreads apparently (can't access the latter). 

While Grady mentions other threads on the book, he also (like all reviewers so far) found the first poem, "THE EROTIC LIFE OFART: A SEANCE WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS," to be his favorite.  I am guessing that poem's gonna have long legs despite being a long poem and despite its difficult birth.  As regards the former, isn't it more difficult for long poems to be widely read?  Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I'm thinking (due to Twitter like attention spans et al) ... which, undoubtedly, [she mutters] is why I went into the long poem route ...

Anyway, Grady Harp's review (with oh yes a purchase opportunity) over HERE.  His excerpting what my poem had to say about Da Vinci-- "Is this not why Da Vinci dissected criminals who died with hard-ons/ to demonstrate that erections were caused by blood/ suffusing an organ, rather than the common belief/ of his time that the penis is inflated by the retention/of wind?'..." -- apparently threw one of his readers into a snarky snit ... which only makes me laugh of course ...

A REVIEW TO WAKE UP TO!

I am very grateful for this review by Tom Beckett of my recent book, THE AWAKENING. The review is HERE, but here's an excerpt which focuses on the book's first poem:

“The Erotic Life of Art: A Séance With William Carlos Williams” is a marvelous meditation on art, artists and sex. Its cast of characters is large and its range of reference is wide. Van Gogh, Gauguin, Michelangelo, Pope Julius II, Da Vinci, Cellini, Dr. Williams, Titian, Jose Garcia Villa, Rembrandt, Li-Young Lee, Goya, Rodin, Delacroix, Jackson Pollock, Rimbaud, Wayne Thiebaud, Renoir, Seurat, Madeleine Knobloch (Seurat’s mistress who was anonymous until after his death), Tabios’ husband, Degas, Ezra Pound, Gainsborough, John Ruskin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Modigliani, Eluard, Duchamp, the Baroness, Dali, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and others constellate in its pages.

“The Erotic Life of Art” is a long associative poem of quick shifts, but there is nothing gratuitous about it. It’s incisive, sometimes humorous, and it bristles with energy and intelligence.

Thank you, Tom.  It's interesting that Thomas Fink also focuses on that poem in his blurb.  But I'm grateful for their focus because this poem made me sweat in its making (and spent an entire residency at MacDowell focused only on it).  I gave up on this poem more than once and actually lost it for several years.  Then I stumbled across a print-out of it, and decided to retype it (which irritated me) because it was the only long poem I had that I could think to submit to Octopus Magazine's Long Poem Issue (thank you editors Zachary Schomburg and Mathias Svalina for accepting!)

Anyway, that poem's sure come a long way since I "performed" it at MacDowell by, at one point, flinging colorful bits of paper up over the heads of the audience.  I had envisioned those colored papers to float up and down gracefully over the heads of the attending poets and artists.  Instead, the bits went up at the ceiling like mini-rockets and plummetted down  hard on the audience's heads like, uh, downed mini-rockets.  I couldn't find origami paper at the local store and I guess the papers I used were too hard. [Picture Moi rubbing my head here...]

So I thank Tom and Tom for their attention.

MORE (ON) AWAKENINGS!

Poet-painter-scholar-critic (that, btw, is in the order of moi preference) Thomas Fink just emailed this over about THE AWAKENING:

The Awakening, with its titular gesture boldly troping on Kate Chopin, features Eileen Tabios' William Carlos Williams poem that is one of her most powerfully feminist poems!

And why am I bragging courtesy of Tom? Because I thought it'd be a good intro to the news that THE AWAKENING is now on Amazon.com! (Ignore the references to lack of inventory; it's in transit and you can go ahead and order now).

Jest sayin'....

 

PLEASE AWAKE TO ... THE AWAKENING!

[Please Forward]

theenk Books Announcement:

THE AWAKENING: A Long Poem Triptych & A Poetics Fragment
By Eileen R. Tabios
ISBN: 978-0-9647342-8-9
Price: $16.00

theenk Books, New York
Book Info: http://www.therepublicofcalifornia.com/theenk/theenkBooks.htm
Release Date: 2013
For More Information: theenkBooks@rochester.rr.com


theenk Books is proud to announce the publication of THE AWAKENING by Eileen R. Tabios, a triptych of long poems exploring the diverse ways an awakening unfolds. Also included is an essay on the poet's personal perspectives on the indigenous and the avant garde. The poems range over such disparate elements as the sexual lives of painters (and discussing such details with Dr. William Carlos William) to real-time emails on the poet's "9-1-1" birthday after the attacks on New York's World Trade Center to Angelina Jolie's involvement with refugees. The book's attention span/expanse reflects Ms. Tabios' attempts to collapse time into a point of universal empathy as the reader is asked: "Who decides what kind of life and why? // What kind of / life and / Why?"

Special Release Offer: The first hundred purchasers of THE AWAKENING will also receive their choice of either a complimentary issue of Black Spring Lawrence Issue (value $7), free shipping, or any of a variety of chapbooks from Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press ($7 value). More information at http://www.therepublicofcalifornia.com/theenk/Order.htm (Paypal to be available soon; contact the publisher!)

About the Poet: Eileen R. Tabios has released 24 print, four electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a “collected novels” book, a poetry essay/interview anthology, and a short story collection. 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. She’s also edited, co-edited or conceptualized nine anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. She blogs as the “Chatelaine” at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com and edits Galatea Resurrects, a popular poetry review journal at http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com.

About the Press: theenk Books, headquartered in Palmyra, New York, is the publisher of the literary journal Black Spring as well as poetry collections by Eileen R. Tabios, John Roche, Stephen Ellis, Steven Farmer and Steve Tills. Forthcoming are the Black Spring‘s Sonoma Issue and Black Spring‘s Prose Poetry/Hybrid Issue. It is proud to be affiliated with sister press Hank’s Original Loose Gravel Chappers featuring Tony Leuzzi, jim mccrary, Judith Roitman, Steve Tills, Eric Selland, Aldon Nielsen, j/j hastain, Alex Gildzen, G.E. Schwartz and Crag Hill.

[Also available soon from Amazon.com]

BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS

The bad news is a thief has been filching from neighborhood postal boxes -- and I think said thief absconded with two chairs I'd ordered for SitWithMoi!  Not good -- these chairs are always ones of a kind.  The problem is so bad the local post office has ceased delivering to the neighborhood while they investigate, which means we have to go to the post office everytime we want to pick up our mail (since I'm in a small town, that's not as onerous as it sounds but it's still a pain...).

But the good, nay, THE GREAT NEWS is that my author copies of THE AWAKENING arrived safely!  My classy publisher sent them insured, priority mail which meant I had to sign for them so the boxes couldn't just be dropped off but had to be picked up by Moi.  So they arrived safely and here they are:

Official announcement to come.  Meanwhile, that's another book made and released when I'm not just sitting around (or perhaps while I'm sitting around...)!

AWAKE, ALL YE .... !

Lest you think all I'm doing is SITTING AROUND, just to alert you that I have a new book coming out -- and it's not a mini.  Thank you, Steve Tills and theenk books, for publishing my first book in 2013 (I know -- but I'm being optimistic vs arrogant in assuming I'll release more than one book; it's only January, after all ...):


      THE AWAKENING: A Long Poem Triptych & A Poetics Fragment


It's my first book to focus on the long poem, and here's a look-see at the front cover which features art by the brilliant and talented jenifer k wofford:

(Click on image to enlarge)

Await the word and It Will Come ... To Wake You Up!