SIT WITH MOI!

Because I'm not busy (hah), I came up yesterday with a new project -- a new way to invite you to poetry:

SIT WITH MOI!

The blog was intended to focus on my modest but growing miniature chair collection, but it ended up also being an attempt to generate new poems.  So, from miniature chairs to poetry -- why not?  But the leap was unexpected: looking at the image of my miniature chairs -- where no one is sitting on them -- it occurred to me that the image of an empty chair is poignant.  So alone.  Unless, one pulls up a chair to someone and commences a conversation.  Hence, "Sit with Moi!"

For poets, I also have a request.  As I begin detailing the etymologies (hah) of my miniature chairs, I'd like to expand the collection to include other poets.  So if you are a poet with a miniature chair you'd like to send my way (gratis or in exchange for a poetry book or for some other arrangement we can discuss), please contact me at GalateaTen@aol.com  Your miniature chair could be a former toy, a spare tiny chair, a dust collector now, etc.  But I promise it a new life within the company of my chairs!  I'd like to present "my" collection in the manner I've presented several of my poetry books (e.g. HERE): as not just authored by me but by others as well.

Interestingly, when I put out the Call for Chairs to the wonderful Pussipo Listserve, I didn't get a chair but did get a chair-photograph by Mel Nichols which already ended up generating a new poem.  So, if you want to be creative in responding to my Call, feel free!

Here I am seated.  Come SIT WITH MOI!

COLORFUL, OR ANTI-BEIGE, POETICS

Like Moi was saying, why would I let a 14-year-old boy rule moi life anyway? So, after I "dutifully apologized" for signing off with "Love, Mom" in an email to Michael, I picked up the phone and:

Moi: Hi.

The Hubby: Yes?

Moi: Do me a favor.

The Hubby (with a sigh quickly bitten off--why is that, Hub?): Yes?

Moi: Email Michael, say, a Congratulations over his latest math score...

The Hubby: Okay.

Moi: Wait, that's not all. You have to sign off with "Love, Dad"

After an explanation, the Hubby saw the wisdom of, uh, not letting a 14-year-old boy rule his parents' lives, and did as I requested.

The Hubby later forwarded Michael's reply (he's doing very well with English-acquisition, but the occasional linguistic fumbles are to be expected):

From: Michael Pollock
To: Pollock, Thomas R.
Subject: RE: my test dotay.

Dad, whaen you are sending me an E-mail. Don't use love.
I also warn you as mom.
Michael

To which the Hubby shared his reply: "LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. And today is misspelled as is when. BUT I LOVE YOU ANYWAY."

So Michael, later that evening, was complaining to me about his loving Dad. I finally asked him why he has such a problem with the "love" sign-off. He succinctly replied, "Mom! It's not cool!"

Cool? As adolescently-defined?! Snort. I simply snorted at him, then turned back to my cooking (yes, I was cooking. I was frying ham. If you have constructive criticism--like, Ham should be baked, oh my!--keep it to yourself.) Which is to say, since serving Michael ham, I've been mentally going through my email address book, considering whom I can recruit to email Michael with the sign-off

Love,
_____

That's what happens when you get a poet for a Mom. It becomes hard to abide by the parenting advice I got yesterday from one of the carpool moms. She noted that it's been suggested that, when it comes to parenting teens, the parent would be well-advised to

                  WEAR BEIGE AND LIE LOW

Well, what do you think the odds are of the Chatelaine becoming ... beige?

Hint: Take a look at my book covers on left column of the blog. (And while at it, order some of them to experience the importance of COLOR(!) in one's life!) E.G., our mutual autobiography:

DAD, ME ... & MY SON

I guess I'm surprised at how painful still remains the grief over my father's passing a few years back. I'm surprised. It's not like, after I graduated from college and the house I shared with my parents, that I tried to spend a lot of time with him. I'm surprised at how much I miss my father (I think of him daily when, while he was alive, months could pass without a thought of him!). I suspect now that I'll spend the rest of my life missing my father.

And so I wonder about Michael -- I wonder how in the future my son will resolve (or just address) his loss.

I think I was about Michael's age in this picture with my father (the same shot of him that would come to be replicated in the book cover of THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES...):



The parent-child relationship is so fragile -- there are just really too many ways for adulthood to become defined as distance...

GO FORTH AND DIE QUICKLY

My mother nearly died last week and if she had I wouldn't have been able to do anything over her medical establishment's lack of health care (pun intended).

Here's what happened: she'd been feeling poorly over the last several weeks, causing several calls to 9-1-1 and runs to the emergency rooms of Kaiser (which provides her coverage) as well as the local hospital (which is nearer to our house). When she ends up at the local hospital, as I understand it, Kaiser will have to reimburse that hospital for the health care costs WHICH IS WHY Kaiser wants -- and it's success indeed depends on being able to -- bring nearly all health treatment in-house.

But what's even more cost-effective to an institution like Kaiser, of course, is if its members don't get sick or (and it's not the same thing) don't get treated.

So, last Thursday, my mother called Kaiser for a check-up as she'd been feeling poorly all week. When she was received for said check-up, that doctor immediately referred her to their emergency room. Later in the day, I was told by Mom that Kaiser expected to keep her for overnight observation. All well and good as I had been watching her suffer for the past few weeks. Except that later that evening, the emergency room nurse called and said they wanted to discharge her as there seemed nothing wrong with her then.

Ridiculous, but the nurse wasn't interested in hearing my description of her recent ills. Much to her disgruntlement, I insisted then on talking with the doctor. I would come to have very interesting conversations with that doctor (he kept mentioning his 20-year experience and disgruntlement with emergency rooms becoming geriatric care facilities). But despite my warning him that I was sure that if they discharged Mom, I'd only be calling 9-1-1 within another 24 hours, he said she was "stable" and there was no other medical treatment to give her. That probably was true at the time, but I thought it'd be a good idea if Mom was further observed as there's obviously something wrong with her.

He said a lot of her conditions could be because of her age (Mom is nearly 80). I agreed over the distinct possibility of such, but also said that I wasn't convinced we were doing everything medically possible for her. Nonetheless, I couldn't persuade them to keep her and she came home after midnight (right, they couldn't spring for a bed for a few hours to prevent a near 80-year-old from traveling).

Well, it happened. Mom got poorly the following day, I called 9-1-1, and the ambulance took her to the local hospital. At the local hospital -- check it out: they immediately installed a temporary, then the next day, a permanent pacemaker. Absent that pacemaker, Mom would have died.

Kaiser sucks. And this incident of course reminded me of how Kaiser had treated my father in southern California. At one point, Kaiser discharged him from emergency room. My brother picked him up...and while driving home, Dad took a turn for the worse and my brother ended up driving to another Kaiser's emergency room! At that second Kaiser, a doctor asked, "Gee. Why did the other hospital discharged him?" (This incident is raised in the book I wrote for my father, The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes -- google yourself Kaiser and buy my book!) Kaiser's approach is to stabilize patients, then get them out. What this overall approach means is the disincentive to take a deep look at an individual's health situation and try to come up with a large-picture diagnosis -- not to say that there aren't Kaiser doctors who care enough to do this, but the institutional approach disincentivizes this more caring medical approach. In my mother's case, for example, she had been suffering for a while from a combination of diabetes, blood pressure problems and fatigue -- what did it take for a doctor to step back and assess proactively, before an "emergency", that she needs a pacemaker?

The only good thing that came out of this recent incident with Mom -- because this Kaiser management of her has been about cost! -- is that because they discharged her, they ended up losing the pacemaker business and will have to spend money reimbursing the local hospital.

So, I wasn't sure I'd be blogging about this but the news this morning carried this bit of hoo-haa of Democrat Alan Grayson of Florida castigating Republicans for their health care proposals that presumably can be summed up as "The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick."

What Grayson is talking about is the Republicans' supposed lack of sympathy for the uninsured. I don't know enough about this particular hoo-haa to take sides, but what I note in this health care debate is the focus on the uninsured vs the insured. That's key, of course. But here's what I learned during this debacle with Mom which also caused me to have several conversations with health care professionals who are right there at ground zero of the debate.

What one doctor is hearing is that health care is moving towards the Kaiser model. I suppose the Kaiser model is more efficient than many other alternative models. But an exponentially high percentage of health care treatment occurs for a person when said person becomes a senior citizen. This is where the model breaks down. Death is inevitable and Kaiser is quite aware of that, and there's no economic incentive to keep prolonging life. Kaiser may be quite effective and fully capable when it comes to treating curable diseases or one-off issues (like cataract surgery), but not when it comes to prolonging life.

I hope my mother can survive being a Kaiser patient. My father didn't.

Meanwhile, any health care plan that doesn't adjust for the difference between geriatric care and other health care is inherently short-sighted (and perhaps that's why there's a generational gap in the amount of support, or lack thereof, for Obama's plan, with senior citizens not as supportive as the younger generations). But watch out, ye politicians: there's a difference between senior citizens whose health care is at risk, and, say, children whose education is also being harmed by political policies. Senior Citizens are more than old enough to vote.

DIGNITY

would be Grace
when the
ancient

body is rejected
from the
Emergency

Room because death
is, not
inevitable

but, uneconomic, thus
always ill-timed.
Grace--

a white flower
poking through
that

sidewalk crack everyone
avoids when
Bad

Timing is always
Bad Luck.
Approaching

is not that
hooded guy
wielding

a scythe. Approaching
are the
pencil-pushers

whose erasers always
transform the
perfume

of white roses
into antiseptic
septic.

UPDATE: Of course the above doesn't come near to addressing the complexity of health care. But I agree with one Peep who wrote in:

I am concerned that the insistence on getting some kind of health care bill done this year is the wrong thing to do because speed is not allowing for a rational debate. I’d rather it get done next year and some real thought go into it — [though] I realize I am one of the lucky ones who is not facing the loss of a loved one or a home because of lack of insurance so I have the luxury of not needing urgent action....

All of this reminds me of Winston Churchill’s statement about Americans when he was frustrated about FDR’s slowness in joining WW2. He said that Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing, but only after they’ve tried everything else. Applying it to the health care dilemma, we will get a heath care bill passed, it will be a mess and will not provide a public option thereby allowing insurers to find loopholes on pricing and coverage, and we’ll have to go back in a few years and do the right thing in the right way — and since the Democrats do not have the balls to do the right thing by going it alone (or because a number of them are in the pockets of insurers and pharmacopia) they will end up being blamed for the ultimate failure of this year’s model.

POEM AS HOME!

Paper Kite Press is due to release in November the much-anticipated poem, home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica, which grew out of a popular collaborative blog, Ars Poetica, that expanded as each featured poet recommended five poets to share ars poetica poems and so on. To create this book, the editors chose from 569 poems sent in by 251 poets. Well, November ain't here but it is PRE-ORDER time! GO HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION!

It looks interesting -- the contributors listed below include many favorites so I'm looking forward to seeing again how they write poems about poetry's multiplicitous arts:

poem, home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica

The title says it all. Includes poems by: Kelli Russell Agodon, Flor Aguilera, Karren L. Alenier, Sandra Alland, C. J. Allen, Ivan Arguelles, Anny Ballardini, Gary Barwin, Annette Basalyga, Rick Benjamin, John M. Bennett, Maxianne Berger, F .J. Bergmann, Cliff Bernier, Gregory Betts, Celia Bland, Dean Blehert, Helen Boettcher, Peter Boyle, Allen Braden, Therese L. Broderick, Mary Buchinger, Ana Buigues, Mike Burwell, Mairéad Byrne, Nick Carbó, Cathy Carlisi, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, James Cervantes, Joel Chace, Ellen Cole, Ed Coletti, Jennifer Compton, Anne Coray, Alison Croggon, Del Ray Cross, Craig Czury, Yoko Danno, Lucille Lang Day, Denise Duhamel, Patrick Dunagan, Riccardo Duranti, Paul Dutton, Susanne Dyckman, Lynnell Edwards, Dan Featherston, Annie Finch, Thomas Fink, Alan Halsey, Sharon Harris, Lola Haskins, Nellie Hill, Nathan Hoks, Paul Hoover, Mikhail Horowitz, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Jill Jones, Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Bhanu Kapil, W. B. Keckler, Karl Kempton, Kit Kennedy, Tracy Koretsky, Greg Kosmicki, Gary Leising, Amy Lemmon, Lyn Lifshin, Diane Lockward, Rupert Mallin, Dr. Pamela McClure, Dr. D. H. Melhem, Hillary Mellon, Paul Mitchell, Carley Moore, Daniel Thomas Moran, Maggie Morley, Richard Newman, Angela O'Donnell, Shin Yu Pai, Helen Pavlin, Jonathan Penton, Alice Pero, Patrick Phillips, Paul Pines, Kevin Prufer, Chelsea Rathburn, Susan Rich, Cynthia Ris, Kim Roberts, Jay Rogoff, Kate Schapira, Barry Schwabsky, Derek Sheffield, Shoshauna Shy, Sue Stanford, Lucien Suel, Rod Summers, Eileen Tabios, Elaine Terranova, Heather Thomas, David Tipton, Juanita Torrence-Thompson, William Trowbridge, Priscilla Uppal, Katherine Varnes, Jeanne Wagner, Amy Watkins, Scott Watson, Melissa Weinstein, Carol Clark Williams, Jacquie Williams, Ernie Wormwood, Mark Young, and Andrena Zawinski.

Thanks to editors Jennifer Hill and Dan Waber for taking my poem "Athena" which previously appeared in The Light Sang...

Paper Kite Press is a press doing lovely work. I highly recommend another recent title: Magdeline & the Mermaids, by Elizabeth Kate Switaj.

TO LOVE POETRY IS TO DESTROY THE BOOK

I grew up in a country where books were (are) expensive. It was a big deal for my parents to work to buy the encyclopedia and various classics and have them line the living room of my childhood home in the Philippines. I was raised revering the Book and I continue my respect today. And I have been a reader all my life, loving books even before I became a writer.

In the past few weeks, I've had to help my son develop an art project for his sixth grade -- an "altered books" project. To "alter" the books -- and write on their pages, cut up the pages, collage other material onto the pages -- is to destroy the originals.

My son is in a class attended by 12-13-year-olds. What does it mean for them to consider the book as something that can be destroyed?

My son was only in our house for a few weeks before he started this project. Our house is crammed with books, and he knows his mother writes/makes books. He (to my appreciation) first balked when I had to explain the concept of an altered book. He balked at destroying a book.

Of course he had to do the assignment and will finish/submit it this week. And I've ceased to worry about whether the experience might make him revere the book less. His homework assignment should be more than mitigated by living in a household where books are clearly cherished.

But how many of his young classmates -- in a world where reading becomes less and less a popular activity -- might take the wrong lesson from this project? What if they come from a non-reading household and now are taught it's okay to destroy a book (even if for "art") before they learned to love/respect a book?

***

But, despite my meditations on this matter, I suggested/encouraged my son to choose one of my books to alter, to destroy. Although my son brought home a couple of books from class to alter (it looks like his art teacher may have collected from reject piles for purpose of this project), I told him to go ahead and use one of mine.

This, moithinks, is one meaning of being a poet. It's a straddled paradox that's very very irritating.

LIST POETRIES

I often begin lists hoping that they ultimately will generate some poetry project (I've also found lists to be a successful manifestation of autobiography without getting all emotionally invested on how to present -- including censor -- autobiography). Some successful list projects appear HERE, HERE, and HERE. I've also had lists that went nowhere, most recently viz a now-defunct blog I'd concocted on the theme of economy-stimulation related spending. Anyway, I just started a new list on the mundane notion of grocery shopping. So, if you nosily want to know what I buy at the grocery store (yes, I naughtily included a donut today), you can go HERE...

...and hopefully some day a poem will result.

GALATEA FLURRIES....

Rushing around preparing for my trip to South America (heh). Among other things, this trip means I'll probably extend the submission deadline for the next issue of Galatea Resurrects by at least a couple of months (I'll post more on it later); meanwhile, if any of you are interested in doing a review, please know I'm only here to snailmail you review copies for another 2-3 weeks. So you might want to check out GR's List of Available Review Copies now and email moi at GalateaTen@aol.com

Meanwhile, amidst the flurries, I did manage to fit in one interview by a Netherlands-based Peep (love the transnationalism of the internet!) -- here's an excerpt from the interview that should be out next week:


INTERVIEW X-SLURP:

Question: In "The Light Sang as It Left Your Eyes", there's a strong connection to history in particular the Martial Law Era. I found it interesting how in sections you identified yourself as a daughter of the dictator, would you like to expound a bit more on this?

I’ve just always been curious as how to a child reconciles with having a dictator as a parent—and particularly a very intelligent child (or so she seems to me) like Marcos’ eldest daughter, Imee Marcos. The poet-scholar-critic Thomas Fink, who was actually once a classmate of Imee at Princeton University, recently finished an essay on my poems and cited the primary poem in my book “The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes”. That poem is entitled “What Can A Daughter Say?” and has the persona weaving back and forth between being “Eileen” the author and Imee. The poem collages some statements Imee has made about her father’s legacy, and some of the statements come off as an apologist’s, but compassion surely has relevance here if a person is talking about a beloved parent? Fink states, in part:

Most obviously, Eileen “is” Imee to the extent that both are Filipina daughters of Filipino fathers. The central (male) political figure of a country assumes the symbolic position of that nation’s “father,” and in a household conforming to patriarchal arrangements, the father is the “leader.” In her formative years, a daughter would experience a father’s impact in ways comparable to how a nation’s citizens would be influenced by their president or dictator. But these are just preliminary generalizations.

When Tabios collages what Imee Marcos says, she underscores the problem of articulation in the prose poem’s title. For Imee, herself a member of the Philippines’ House of Representatives from 1998 to 2007, to acknowledge her father’s prodigious thievery and other crimes against Filipinos would be incredibly difficult.

(Tabios has never met Imee. In 1975 the dictator’s daughter and I sat next to each other for a semester in the front row [center] of Professor D.W. Robertson’s Chaucer class at Princeton; I sat on the left and Imee on the right. We agreed that Robertson was hard to hear. Whenever the professor let out a marvelously eccentric laugh while explicating off-color passages in The Canterbury Tales, Imee and I turned to each other and smiled. When we once asked each other’s majors and I heard that hers was Politics, I said, “That makes sense.”)

Long after a collective judgment has been rendered on her father, Imee Marcos wishes to defer assessment. Imee’s appeal for Filipinos to “‘study. . . the Marcos era,/ before, during, the Martial Law period,/ applying intellectual rigor over emotion,/ scholarship, not partisanship’” uses the rhetoric of disinterested research to mask the vexation she must feel about hearing her father condemned. She does not interrogate a basis for objectivity in assessing historical causality or account for the role of one’s subject position in developing interpretations. When Tabios responds to the passage above, “How much do we need to know to master the past?” one can ponder the difference between the verb “master” and the verb “understand.” In Nietzschian terms, Imee does not admit her “will to power” in invoking historical analysis, which can depend more on not knowing and/or evading knowledge than on presenting what one knows:

Then Mr. Fink goes on to cite excerpts from the poem quoting some statements Imee has made about her father’s legacy:

She says, “Exile has been merciful/ [for allowing me to] remember/ my father as well,/ strong, playful and brilliant.” . . .

She says about being “a child of a dictator”—“I don’t remember.” . . .

She says, “I think it should be clear/ that to torture was never/ a matter of policy./ He didn’t order the military/ to do these things.” . . .

She says, “Martial Law/ was like/ another lifetime.”

So, obviously, the position of being the daughter to someone who’s vilified as a dictator is a very complicated one. And I am attracted, as a poet, to complicated—often unresolvable—positions.


Question: "The Blind Chatelaine's Keys" provides a very intimate view into the process of adoption. I was wondering if you'd ever considered writing a memoir on the process (aside from what's in “The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys”). (On aside, I really like the honesty in "The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes" and “The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys”.) Have you ever considered writing a memoir and offering it to a major publisher?

I actually once tried to write a memoir which was more structured to be more commercial (I even had promising discussions about it with a major trade publisher). It relates to my move from New York City to Napa Valley and how in Napa I’m trying to build a home called “Galatea” wherein would lie the intersection of “nature, art, poetry and wine converg[ing] with much love.” If that phrase sounds familiar, that’s because that’s also the tag to my primary blog at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com. Given the humongous successes of wine- and/or country-house-related books based in Provence and Tuscany, and now the wine areas of other parts of the world, I thought a wine country-related memoir would do well financially (and I could use the proceeds to finance my mostly poetry-publishing press Meritage Press!). I haven’t yet finished the book partly due to time. But I also have set it aside because I sense I’m not ready to do it in the way I wish to do it, which is to integrate poetry into the project while still retaining the interest of an imagined reader who might have come to the book out of interest in wine and other matters besides poetry.

This is also to say I think it’s premature for me to be writing memoirs except relatively narrow, specialized ones. But I suspect that, at the end of the day, I’m not really interested in revealing that much about my life (except for, as I said, specialized areas like the intersection of wine and poetry into what I call “wine poetics”). This may seem ironic given my work in biography—but if you take a look at that work, it’s to disrupt the form of (auto)biography rather than because I feel I have such an interesting life that it’s worth writing a book about it.

That’s one of the things Poetry’s taught me: the Paradox.


...

MOI AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

Were I younger by a year, by a mere six months even, I would begin and headline this post with something like: THE NEW YEAR IS ABOUT MOI. Instead, Moi thought she'd try to grow up and preeen less. But then -- and this is the truth -- how do I begin the first day of 2009? By seeing Moi as "Personal Favorite" (right next to Mother Teresa!) and then this generous review by Joey Madia over at New Mystics. Maybe I shouldn't fight it. Maybe this year is about MOI!

Sip. Morning coffee. Preen.

Okay, actually, it's interesting to see this review of a book I published seven years ago. Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole was my first U.S.-published book. Sold out its first printing in something like six months. To date, I've sold more of that book than ALL OF MY SUBSEQUENT BOOKS combined. Maybe you should check it out. Joey Madia thinks so:

In an age of electronic and "disposable art," where surfing the 'Net is akin to flipping endlessly through cable TV channels in search of reconnection in an atmosphere of isolation (calling to mind Robert Pirsig's line from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that looking at nature through the car window is just more TV…), the meditative works in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole defy the reader to simply skim and move on. The hooks are finely barbed and grab you in the deepest places ....ENTIRE REVIEW HERE

"Barbed" is a word I welcome for moi poems. Roses exist only with thorns.

Yah -- check it out why not? I'm cheap, I mean, moi book is cheap. Amazon.com, one of only two companies whose revenues went up this holiday season, even has it available for an effin' penny. Quite obviously, Amazon ain't makin' its profits from poetry... Anyhooooo, let Moi not be diverted from Grace by meditating on the dollar sign, or its lack thereof. To wit:

Thank you, Joey Madia and New Mystics! And thank you Karen An-hwei Lee!

A TRAITOR'S LIGHT

I'm really moved and honored to receive Aileen Ibardaloza's review of The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the just-released issue of OurOwnVoice. Moved in part because the review, rather engagement, took place because her mother picked up my book and started reading its lead poem out loud....a mother who apparently now spends a third of each of her days reading. Thank you, Aileen -- here's an excerpt:

In “Light”, Tabios has written about grief in forms both painful and necessary, blending into her work a dictator’s legacy, a traitor’s loyalty, an existentialist philosopher’s contemplations, a supreme poet’s three-part allegory, as well as reflections on totalitarian rulers and their murdered thousands, using as tools commodity lists, ekphrasis, hay(na)ku, random collage, prose and narrative non-linearity – all parts of a multivalent sum, the sum being ‘Light’. Which is also her name and yours, points out my mother. It is comforting that her poetic “I” includes ‘you and I’, that in between these lines, one might find – dare I say it – one’s own truth (or at least, parts of it). ENTIRE REVIEW HERE.

APPARENTLY, MOI WAS READY FOR MOI CLOSE-UP!

Sniffle. Wasn't expecting THIS. Thank you Reme Grefalda and Luisa Igloria for putting this all together.

And, of course, none of this would have been possible without Marsh Hawk Press (New York), Giraffe Books (Philippines), Otoliths Books (Australia), among others.

And, hm, couldn't help noticing how all those poetry paperbacks suddenly became HARDBACKS! I guess that's what happens when you become a Poetry Book Exhibited in the United States Library of Congress! (Do those hardback-dresses make Moi look fat?)

I should also thank Dusie (Switzerland) and Ahadada (Tokyo & Toronto, in early 2009) for chap- and book-publishing the poems that represent Moi.

Salamats y'all. Moi calorie-ridden goblets runneth over...

LISSEN UP, BERKELEY!

if you're in the Berkeley area 94.1 on Sunday evening 10/26 5p-10p!

Apparently, it's "PILIPINO SPECIALS" on KPFA Radio this weekend, including "PILIPINO OURSTORY 2008" on KPFA this SUNDAY 6:30PM (until 10PM).

Which is to say, thanks to Michelle Bautista for reviewing Moi last two books, The Light Sang... and The Blind Chatelaine's Keys. Also to be reviewed moithinks is STAGE PRESENCE, Ed. by Theo Gonsalvez. Here's more info from KPFA:

INTERVIEWS/REVIEWS:  Eileen Tabios, Michelle Bautista, Theo Gonzalves, "The Romance of Magno Rubio", "GIMIKERA" (Prostituted Women), ESKAPO

VOICES FROM MINDANAO: PASTOR D, KAPATID T, & DATU MANGANSAKAN

NEW MUSIKA:  BAYANG BARRIOS * DJ QBERT * NATIVE ELEMENTS * TRACY CRUZ 

Special Guest Hosts:  Aivy Cordova & Nicole Cordova

CD & TICKET GIVEAWAYS, and much more!

Live Broadkast: KPFA~FM 94.1 Berkeley
                 KFCF~FM 88.1 Fresno
Audiostreaming & FREE mp3 Archive: www.kpfa.org

Can't tune in live?  KPFA archives our shows as FREE mp3's at www.kpfa.org under the date and time of webkast and the NAME of Program.

MEANWHILE, SHOULD I ATTEND ONCE MORE TO FOUCAULT?

[The Light...is less a book of poetry than a complex: a virtual, almost accidental honeycomb where disparate forces converge and thrive without necessarily coalescing into a stable structure."
--Fred Muratori, American Book Review

And if that excerpt doesn't intrigue, how's about this:

"No doubt many readers will be appalled..."

Chuckle. Anyway, viz Anny, I discover that Fred Muratori reviews The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the new issue of AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW.

Fred's review -- and Anny's review of the BRICK in Jacket -- make me notice again how often philosophers are cited in the more in-depth reviews of my books: Foucault, Bakhtin, Derrida, Barthes....thank Gawd Muratori also mentioned Coleridge...

The irony is that while I believe I have all these philosophers' books, and indeedy recall cracking open some Barthes and Foucault and Derrida some years back, I'm a philosophy drop-out (in a philosophical move, I traded in philosophy for political science at Barnard...) and, cough, have left the distinct majority of their pages unread. I frankly bought a lot of these books under the grim self-chastisement: "I should read these books because everyone keeps dropping their names...". Now, whenever another reviewer mentions (some of) these philosophers, I cast a sort of guilty look over at the philosophers all dusty on moi bookshelves -- what is it with me that I'd rather ignore them for ... the murder mysteries?

Whatever. I think you should read Muratori's review and not just because it's complimentary to Moi. I think he got Moi at "Hello", to wit the first sentence:

"Who is the author of The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes?"

Well, the author would be Moi....but since Moi is all about Toi, that doesn't really answer the question for those still stuck in the swamp of fixed identities, eh? (Yo, this Pinay asks, How can you kill the Author if you can't identify hir?)

IMPORTANT P.S. Thank you, Fred Muratori and Anny Ballardini -- the kind of attention you've given to my poems are rare and what poets dream of. You make her and my dreams come true....

MOI'S BRILLIANT MASK SLIPS

First and foremost, I thank Allen Gaborro for his (too-generous) review of The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the latest issue of Philippine News. Really -- thank you. ENTIRE REVIEW HERE -- and I do suggest you read it since it's quite flattering to Moi.

The problem is that I learned of his review through a Listserve email that I first read on my Iphone, as I was seated at the dining table entertaining some out-of-town guests, Fred and Lisa, who inflicted themselves on me and Galatea this weekend. So I thought, as the conversation was flagging anyway as it often does with Fred, I'd read the review out loud to the company even as I read it for the first time. Well, the review begins:

I once had a college classmate who was so exceptional as a student that our professor exclaimed, with tongue-in-cheek, that she could submit a paper with absolutely nothing written on it and still receive the highest grade.

Okay....undoubtedly, it was the fact that I was on my fourth bottle of wine but I just couldn't understand this opening sentence. I kept reading and re-reading it out loud, even as I kept asking our friends, "But what does it mean...?"

Finally, my long-suffering hubby sighed and noted, "Eileen. The reviewer is saying, You're brilliant."

At which point, Fred or some other drunk at the table snorted -- "Yeah...she's being called brilliant but she doesn't get that this reviewer is calling her brilliant. Ironic or what?"

From there, the weekend continued -- and still continues since the New Yorkers still won't leave my house -- to deteriorate...

"NEVER ENOUGH!"

Back and exhausted. Back from a trip that had me, among other things, having to sit through two pig races. Each pig -- or perhaps piglet since they were small -- were clad in the colors of a different country. England was always a loser. The winners in the two races I witnessed -- slack-jawed at the surreality of the experience -- wore red and blue as colors and, of course, are colors in many countries' flags.

Geezus. I am discussing pigs.

Anyway, catching up and, among other things, am thankful to Geof Huth for his engagement with Tom Beckett's Tiny Book and the significance of the Hows of its publication form. Click on excerpt below for whole thing -- Geof aptly has great things to say about Tom's poems but I focus on this excerpt that focuses on me not just because it's about Moi but because there have been less reactions to the Tiny Books series, to date, that addresses the publication format:

What is interesting in this book is how Eileen Tabios, the transcriber, has ostensibly taken on the role of co-writer of the book. My interpretation—possibly inaccurate—is that Eileen is the one who has visualized this writing, who has not just handwritten these words, but who has added the visual character of words presented as shapes, colored text, and varying sizes of text. When “a map” starts sloping down the page, taking text and giving it shape, I see Eileen’s hand and mind involved. She is not simply a transcriber; she is a writer. And she does more than just visualize the text intentionally; she does it unintentionally as well. Every book is in Eileen’s loose hand, one that doesn’t go for prettiness, but instead depends on speed and a kind of demotic script, generic, loose, easygoing—just about the opposite of what a book handwritten by me would look like. And this visual presence gives the book a different feel, a different message and meaning, than a typed book, even than a book written in a careful calligraphic hand. This visual presence of the text becomes an essential characteristic of the text—a source of its meaning.

And thanks, too, to Krip Yuson for his column in The Philippine Star reviewing Dredging for Atlantis as well as The Light Sang... Click on excerpt below for whole thing:

...a prose rendering on a lower, right-hand column. It's too long to quote in full, so let's skip to its arc of closure, which could well be read as Tabios' ars poetica: "... you will conclude, no matter how many poets have labored, are laboring, will labor, there are never enough poems. Never enough poems. And as you read me now, you feel me sitting before a small desk, buried in a man's plaid bathrobe, unkempt hair falling over bloodshot eyes, ink smudging all fingers, munching on 'a cookie chock full of mountainous chunks of rich milk chocolate and munchable macadamia nuts,' as I write, as I write, as I write: Never enough."

Damn right that's Moi arse poetica: chocolate and Never Enough!

MOI AS TALKING HEAD

Well, this week I'm inexplicably the Featured Poet at Poetryvlog.com, which will show a video of a reading I did during the NYC book launch for The Light....

As is the case with any video of Moi on the internet, I have no clue what it looks like since I can't access it from my mountain location that's still reliant on phone line dial-up. Also another reason why I can't do anything as brilliant as a poetry video you should see (or so I hear, since I can't access it either): brilliant Mark Young's over at The Continental Review.

But, hey, hope you enjoy moi bobbing head. And if I sound loopy, remember that WinePoetics was regalious hat eve!

MY FATHER'S LIGHT...IS ALSO FOR SHARING WITH YOU

K. Terumi Shorb, a multidisciplinary artist based in Austin writes about The Light.... at his BLOG WHERE HE AWAITS HIS LOTTO WINNINGS over HERE.

I still feel conflicted about, as Shorb puts it, letting my "father's time of passing become fodder for [my] art". All I can say is that I didn't write with a book in mind at the time of writing the play-by-play coverage of my father dying....it's just that, afterwards, what I'd written -- on real time as it was blogged as it was written -- spun out its own book. So I let it spin out....and glad that I did so....just this afternoon, I was driving from one spot to another as I rushed through errands and, at a stoplight, suddenly realized that my cheeks were wet: I was missing Dad so hard. I am missing Dad so so hard. I am glad I wrote a book for Dad.

And it's interesting to discover Shorb's post today. It seems synchronistic, since I somehow didn't realize until this afternoon, when my memories caught up with me, just how much Dad had done for me -- without going into details, I loathe how I couldn't realize his Goodness while he was alive.

Unlike, it seems, with me, Shorb experienced how his mother's death "marked a sudden dearth in [his] creative life." He honors me -- and my father -- by concluding his post with: "reading eileen tabios has forced me to wonder, what would happen if i just grit my teeth and walk down that path? who would i meet, and what would they say?"

Poetry as a way of life: you do it, just do it, to discover what it is you had wanted to say -- to form your life so that you can speak, and what you speak is something you want to say.

Even when you look at something you created and wish you didn't create it -- and I experience this a lot about my works -- you still, at the end of the day, do not begrudge its existence. As the saying goes: it didn't kill you, but it made you stronger.

Anyway, I can say it gladdens me that my work can so touch a reader as it did Shorb. No, I will say it gladdens me that my work can so touch a reader in this way.

Thank you, Daddy. You are like Poetry: the Gift that keeps giving.

****

Speaking of gifts, it really tickles my mom and me that Dad's face is part of this award logo that Michelle designed for (and is in) Jean's book, Prau:



Prau is, of course, what I'm giving many relatives and family acquaintances for the holidays this year. I hope it'll also tickle them that the family patriarch is hangin' out in the poetry world. And may I unsubtly suggest that you also allow Prau to guide your Holiday gift-giving -- you could do so, for instance, by picking up a signed copy in Berkeley this Saturday; details HERE.

Dad would be the first to say: read Prau because Jean's poems are very VERY special.

READ/SEE LESLEY DILL!

I've long wondered whether Lesley Dill is on folks' minds in the po-world. Here's another link about her "poem-sculptures" (like that "Clench").

Early on in the creation of The Light...I had thought to suggest one of Dill's Angelic sculptures for a cover image, which is not to say I have any doubts about the final cover results but just to indicate my love for Lesley Dill's works. She's known enough in the art world, but have never seen her (or don't recall ever seeing her) mentioned in po-world writings....and yet she's much invested in poetry (got her B.A. in English).

More linkies to Lesley Dill--go see her, why dontcha!

Poetry and Stitching

Ten Year Survey Through 2003

POEMS HERE AND THERE

Some poems in recently-released online sites. First, delighted as always to be part of Otoliths. My poem "Grids", written while reading Michelle Naka Pierce's new and lovely book GREEN INTEGER, is HERE. And here's Otoliths' announcement from editor Mark Young (thanks Mark!):

Issue seven of Otoliths has just gone live. It's as eclectic as ever, but that means there's something there for everybody. Lined up in this issue are Sheila E. Murphy, Nico Vassilakis, Anny Ballardini, Vernon Frazer, Matina L. Stamatakis, Geof Huth, Matt Hetherington, derek beaulieu, Andrew Taylor, Nigel Long, Marko Niemi, Michael Steven, Anne Heide, Mark Prejsnar, Márton Koppány, Jim Leftwich, Catherine Daly, Bill Drennan, Julian Jason Haladyn, Alexander Jorgensen, Jeff Harrison, Paul Siegell, Robert Gauldie, Martin Edmond, Raymond Farr, John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Friends, Andrew Topel & John M. Bennett, Andrew Topel, Mark Cunningham, Jeff Crouch, Randall Brock, Eileen R. Tabios, Jordan Stempleman, Daniel f. Bradley, Lars Palm, harry k stammer, Karri Kokko, Katrinka Moore, Tom Hibbard, dan raphael & David-Baptiste Chirot. It's what Hieronymous Bosch dreamt about, a Garden of Earthly Delights.

Secondly, four poems from my "Commodities: An Autobiography" project -- "Overseas Filipino Worker", "Ground Meat", "Blue Trunk" and "Milk" -- at the Asia and Pacific Writers Network's Autobiography Edition Guest Edited by Ivy Alvarez (thanks Ivy!). These poems are also part of The Light...which is to say, as shown by "Overseas Filipino Worker", the autobiography is fictional (heh). I don't have a "cousin Lory", nor do I also have a sister as posited elsewhere in The Light...

Well, as I once wrote elsewhere about Moi poems, "I may write fiction but I never lie..."

LOOB POETICS

And then there's Jean's (Oct. 29) "engagement" (grin) of Nicholas Manning's CORDITE review of The Light.... Here's an excerpt:

“[Manning] asks, Does such profusion, in the end, have a definable tradition, ontology and object?” In Filipino terms, we might call this profusion an expression of loob.

Thanks Jean, and thanks, too, for calling up Leny's essay on Moi and loob -- the first time I had a scholar contextualize my work with loob.

(And ain't it interesting that, with all my references to the Greeks et al -- "Greek" being both algebraic here as well as, uh, Greek -- I get to be located in a Filipino indigenous tradition? Trickster poetics is among moi favorites, I gotta say...)

Click on links to get to know "loob" -- which is to say, Let's Relate!