NOTATING A POETRY OF ABSENCE, SILENCE, WHITE SPACE, ITALICS, PARENTHESES ... EMPHASIS (Part II)

ANDREW JORON:
Read from the book Fair Realism. However, Andrew read his chosen poem "Dissonance Royal Traveler" from the issue of Sulfur in which he first discovered Barbara's poem because he now considers that issue an "oratic" object, "bowled over" as he was when he first encountered the poem in it. The poem, Andrew said, reminds him of "a knight on a chessboard" -- in that if "the chessboard is conventional language," then the knight moves in different, unorthodox ways. Andrew also offered an intelligent observation that concluded, in my notes, of how the poem illustrates the "gothic roots of surrealism which, in turn, roots abstract expressionism."

From "Dissonance Royal Traveler":
sound opens sound ... cloudless movement ... a hypnotic lull in porcelain ... a small seizure from monumentality ... a puddle of minnows ... music disappears into oars ... in the middle, the earth is brown ... the sleeve of heaven ... dissonance may abandon misere ... music imagines this cardboard ... red summit red ... dissonance royal traveler altered the gray sound...


KEVIN KILLIAN:
Read/sang from "Often." As I later told him during the reception, it was the first time I saw Kevin read/perform and "now I understand all the things I'd heard about him." He laughed. Amongst what he shared to the audience's delight, singing to the accompaniment of music and sound effects from a CD player:

Often there's a person who assumes several names in the office ... a whisper in the corridor ... over there in underlight....the woman who holds an old shoe wants him to kiss it ... she forgets he's dead ... oh bliss,... hanging on the grapevine .... ostriches in the white air feel their way ... sip a strange drink from the water cooler ... we can see you approve of us....

No one has ever breathed out the word "haircut" -- haiiiiiiiir-cuuuuuut" -- in such a, a....humid tropical way as the man deservedly introduced as "Kevin Killian Karaoke."


LAURIE REID is another artist who's collaborated with Barbara. Fondly, she remembered the luncheon at which Rena Rosenwasser (the indefatigable planner for the event) introduced her to Barbara. Laurie mentioned that she's originally from Eugene, Oregon. To which Barbara proclaimed, "There is a lull in Eugene, Oregon."

Laurie replied, "You're right!"

The rest of the lunch was spent discussing the lull in Eugene, Oregon.


Laurie read from "If So, Tell Me" --

the lull in rain is green ... part of surrendered air

in the mind, a held-back lightning

land unshackled in another country, while dark here

the sensibility that strengthens the page

it may be that absence is the plot of the poem


CAMILLE ROY read from Barbara's only novel, Seeking Air. Camille said she "loves its sense of conundrums....a model for prose consistently seeking poetry. Nourished me first as rumor, then possibility, then text."

Camille read from the novel's Section 22 and here's the line I noted (I could have noted more but, by now, I'm writing on the margins of this one piece of paper):

Come dressed as a perfume.


JOCELYN SAIDENBERG read from The Countess, a work that "nourished me to the space of the 'not yet'." I feel very indebted to Barbara Guest and The Countess for initiating me to that investigation...."

Noted line:

like searching for hen's teeth in the rain


Last but certainly not least, Barbara was persuaded to read. It was quite moving to watch her make her way up to the podium. She began by saying, "It's late...but it's nice."

Barbara also read from "Nostalgia" --

I have lost my detachment

a smile in sunshine

beneath shadows of Columbus waving Farewell

I have lost the doves of Milan

assorted bulletins permit us to be freer in Rome

Recognize me in sunshine

NOTATING A POETRY OF ABSENCE, SILENCE, WHITE SPACE, ITALICS, PARENTHESES ... EMPHASIS (Part I)

Just back from the “Audacious Imagination” event in honor of Barbara Guest, which took place at the Berkeley Art Museum, and where the sense and sensibility debate has, judging from Ann Lauterbach’s little talk, adopted the rhetoric of 30’s American left-literary debates in order to assure itself it is NOT “post-modern” nor “reactionary” – and (importantly) that “critical theory” is on its way “back” where it came from. Despite this pretentious failure to articulate, much less recognize, critical values, the readers somewhat fleshed-out a vast and difficult poetics which, interestingly, teemed with critical insight.
--from Sorter by Patrick F. Durgin

Patrick Durgin's Sorter Blog beat me to reporting on the Barbara Guest event. Unfortunately, I have no clue what he's talking about since there was an accident on the freeway and I was late getting to the event, thus missing the referenced introduction by Ann Lauterbach (it'll undoubtedly be published, though, so we can all have a second chance to conclude for ourselves). Fortunately, however, I have a few notes that may help flesh out what he appropriately called the "critical insight" of the readers.

I'm going to use first names as the conviviality of the occasion seems to warrant such....friendliness. I'll share the notes as I took them during the event, which is to say that I'm sure my notes can't accurately render what was literally said and my quotes of Barbara's poems undoubtedly misquote from the actual lines published in her books....but perhaps that's okay as what I transcribe now (from the scrap of paper that had been in my pocket) offers the honesty of impressions -- at least according to one person: Ms. CorpsePoetics, your diligent reporter (who, at least unlike Ms. WinePoetics, was sober).

ROBERT GLUCK:
Started out by sharing a converation with Barbara who apparently called him up to ask if he had any recommendations about places in San Franciso where she might move (from Berkeley). The idea of becoming Barbara's neighbor delighted him, he said, then added: "Moving to San Francisco is one of life's delusions -- with varying results." [laughter from audience]

On Barbara's poems, he offered the words

"....a filigree....Stripped Tales is a narrative of negative space [I thought that very well-put]....when she breaks an italicized phrase with a block of story, the phrase is suspended by the story"

Some lines from Stripped Tales from his reading:

always a midday sun or moon....in sight of a bruised city

opposing eyes: literature, phantom

Philosophy: if linguistics or a pattern of stars rule

intuitionism is a fraud....in Norway

linear lines of a narrative are intrusive. break it up: instead of lines, planes

a stair (stare) of nutmeg


MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE:
Read the poem "Nostalgia (after di Chirico)" because it was the most recent poem Barbara had written at the time she made her choice. Mei-mei didn't read long enough, which was unfortunate as I feel she has the perfect(ly breathy) voice for Barbara's poems. To paraphrase from Robert Hass's prefatory remarks (see below), Mei-mei (to me) reads italics better than anyone I know. Frankly, Mei-mei reads caesuras -- reads silences -- better than any poet I've ever heard.

Some lines from "Nostalgia":

I have lost my detachment

I have lost my detachment...the domes of Milan floating politely

Recognize me in sunshine


JUNE FELTER and MARY ABBOTT, the next speakers, are both artists who've collaborated with Barbara. June read from Musicality while Mary offered a brief slide presentation that began with photos of Barbara on a beach -- closeups of Barbara's face showed a luminous smile that fits the radiance of her poetry. Sunlit smile; sunlit poems... Then Mary offered a slide of a collaborative collage, oil on paper, Greek reference. Mary couldn't remember the title; she looked over at Barbara....who couldn't remember either.


ROBERT HASS:
Chose to read from Quill Solitary Apparition. Said that when he, in preparation, was reading "Finally To The Italian Girl," he realized how visual Barbara's poetry is; "the mind can hear italics, though not sure how the voice renders" said italics. The mind also hears the parenthesis. "We represent silence as white space but they're not the same thing." The spelling of body is "bodie" in Quill Solitary Apparition and the spelling renders a difference.

a bodie, not luxury, a bodie....not imperial, a guise


BRENDA HILLMAN:
Read from Rocks on a Platter:

you walk in hawk shadow, a guise. sad rose.

In many chimed things, a conduit

Midday appears massive .... attraction to distance

You betray biography ... image exchanged for a feather

BIG POST ERROR, POST ID 105703701043179842
REPORT IT

AND THERE GOES MY ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT REPORT ON THE BARBARA GUEST EXTRAVAGANZA YESTERDAY. SIGH. DO I TRY AGAIN? MUST I TRY AGAIN? SHE LOOKS UP AT THE POKER-PLAYING ANGELS. ONE DEIGNS TO LOOK DOWN; SHE SNIFFS BEFORE SHE LOOSENS ONE WORD:

K
A
R
M
A

AND THE LONG-LASHED ONE MIGHT HAVE GRUMBLED ANYWAY BUT THE THOUGHT SUDDENLY ARISES:

A CORPSE CANNOT GET EXHAUSTED....

FROM THE POSTAL SYSTEM'S DEAD LETTERS BRANCH:
kari edwards' TAKE ON CORPSEPOETICS

One essay down; one to go. But I'ma taking a break. Let me tell you of kari edwards -- author of a day in the life of p. which I very much recommend. Sip (diet coke) -- yes, yes corpses "sip", 'k?!!

So I was telling kari of CorpsePoetics and asked her to send in a poem on the blog's theme. She said she'd be happy to do so. Preen.

Well, sip. But, first, kari (yah: she doesn't capitalize her name) thinks to check out our Blog -- bearing in mind, I'm sure, that I'd asked for a poem that indicates relevance to this Blog's theme. Checks it out. Then writes me, "I checked out your blog, and.. well.. could you clarify a little..."

So, after a fit of giggles (gads! I so excel at amusing myself!), yours truly makes something up and sends it to her, as follows:

Oh I'm very loooose... Corpse-dom is sorta like the "rested mind" which could be that "zone" that artists (and athletes) get onto and they're writing works that are really *on* with absolutely no intention --

zen-ish

or ya could do wordplay on whatever corpse is.....or however you chooose to interpret (certainly it could include exquisite corpse but it's not just that).

But if corpse-dom is death to intention, it's another way (to me) of letting in the totality of the world.... which means corpse-dom, like poetry can be, is about anything and everything....

ya realize I'ma making this all up....as I write,
cheers,

So, the operative thing in my response above is obviously that "I'ma making this all up."

kari is game, though. She sent in this fabulous poem -- thank you, kari! Among other things, I think this poem is great for showing how many ways exist for forming....music!

send back the stamp


whenever I find myself a and a and above.......................................when the modest sounds are especially comprehensive..................................fixed not principled............................................as when many are found alive...............................high time 9¢ distant..........................a 4th with a pistol...........................this philosophical present................................................this test pattern promise..............................................aims like a census data handgun..............................................or a lead balloon's claim to the last day..................................I intimate the possible.............................................with line and style................................................mayhem and mayhem descend................................a and a and the once fixed not printable.....................a pistol.................................................a philosophical fashion and native plastic normal.......................................navigate past.........................................balloon with canned attendance.................................................dawn the cause and a 10 cent plan contaminate............................................that sends half that and a sentence...........................especially that soft highly dynamic.........cause.........................then another semblance............................like a comment................like a possible cutback


*****


It's so purrrr-fect!!! CorpsePoetics = SEND BACK THE STAMP!!!! I'M DEAD, DEAD, DEAD!!!!! Or, as kari would put it (lower case and all):

send back the stamp

i'm dead, dead, etcetera....

IT COULD BE WORSE

Am supposed to be writing an essay on hay(na)ku for a literary journal. Am finding this theorizing after the art unbearably painful. At least it's better than theorizing before the art. Here, a digresssion from pain:

DIGRESSION MEMOIR (#1)

Weekend heat resonates. Windchime of French lilies sing lullabye. Lizards scamper on concrete cooled by looming shadows. Body in my bed. Bodies in my bed. Vulture pecks at library window in early a.m. Tongue explores charbono grape. Calistoga water flows continuous through veins. Blind kitten recognizes me. Clip toenails. Hawk surfs the wind's funnel. Water leaves ellipsis on peach marble. I hear from you. I don't hear from you. Resonating, resonating -- this heat with no end, no end, no end.

MORNING, NOT MOURNING, WITH MURAT NEMET-NEJAT

dashes -
in the counterspace -
broken dishes
....................a
....................silly
....................sil-
....................louh-
....................ette

must have a lush roundness at the waist
--from "Steps" by Murat Nemet-Nejat


I meant to post on the fete for Barbara Guest yesterday, and so was going through the material I brought back from the Berkeley Art Museum where the affair was held. My hand paused over the latest issue of MIRAGE #4/PERIOD(ICAL) edited by Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy, a stack of which had been on a table by the podium. They'd once published some of my poems shortly after I moved from NYC -- which I'd always appreciated because it made me feel more welcome in the Bay Area. So, with a fond smile, I paused to pick up MIRAGE. Flipping through it, the page happened to fall right on the first page of "Steps," a poem by Murat Nemet-Nejat.

I began reading and the world fell away until I simply became a pair of eyes spotlighting a poem by someone I'd never read before.

Ten thousand minutes later, the Corpse raises her eyes -- glowing golden -- and tells her eight million peeps:

Forgive me for reverting momentarily to Valley-Speak but....

O...H...M....Y...G...O...D...!!!!

This nine-page poem absolutely transported me into super-blatherdom, which is to say: speechlessness.

Which is to say, Corpse-dom. Thank you, Murat Nemet-Nejat!!

Check out these lines -- just from the first page!

silence -
saturated
with a
face -

Or

without the original sin
you are my natural world
..................................not a chin too sharp

And it moves on and on with finely-edged words, whose resonance is elongated by a mix of luminous lyricism and pop:

Off,
ma!
I am after
mistletoes
...................the door
...................collapsed
...................by the absence
...................of wall

It's a visual poem, too -- befitting its title of "Steps." The right profile of the words against the page often form steps, both fully formed and crumbling -- offering an effective way of layering the page's white space.

Textually, the crumbling also cast new meaning onto the words -- for a words is also the sum of letters, and when a word is deconstructed, it may spell the original meaning while yet creating a new layer of meaning:

A
q
u
a
r
r
e
l
In
the
k
i
t
c
h
e
n
Can
be
a
s
c
r
e
w
into
the
u
n
i
v
e
r
s
e


Who is this poet? I absolutely love his poem! It exemplifies the best that a project like MIRAGE does so well -- offer more venues to poets one should know better.

Murat Nemet-Nejat -- I want more, please. More poems, please! (And if I should have known who you are long before, forgive me -- it's tough to keep up, you know?)

You write:

ma,
my co-author,
holds me by the hand
and teaches me death

Murat Nemet-Nejat -- I await more of your lessons. On "Steps," I died this morning and, yes, went to Heaven!

OLIVES, ONE PLUCK AT A TIME

Saw Anna Naruda and Garrett Caples, among others, during the reception after the celebration for Barbara Guest at the Berkeley Arts Museum this afternoon (report to follow). Kisses and hugs all around as Garrett is now Dr. Caples -- having successfully gotten his Ph.D.: I'ma so proud, Sweetie.

Then they introduce me to Chris Nealon -- another who deserves congratulations as his wonderful ECSTASY SHIELD looks to be republished by Black Square Editions.

Yammer, yammer...and we're having a convivial time and Dr. Garrett asks about my "olive harvest." I look at him fondly and say -- brace yourself, eight million peeps -- "Well, but with everything I say on the internet, I tend to exagerrate everything you know."

Chris smartly looks at me and says, "Well, you must really exagerrate as an olive grove takes, what, over a hundred years to develop?'

I look at him equally smartly over the glass of my chardonnay (didn't catch the name but know it costs $10 a bottle and it was delicious, having been smartly chosen by Penny Cooper, the partner of Rena Rosenwasser who organized the absolutely luminous event for Barbara Guest). And I tell Chris, "Well I only have one olive tree....but it is over a hundred years old."

Then I describe our "harvest" earlier this year. A classic city slickers-in-the-country tale. Tom and I had gotten our neighbors at Dutch Henry Vineyards to agree to take our olives and add it to theirs for making olive oil. In exchange, they would give us a few bottles from the results. So, that day of harvest, Tom and I duly got up early in the morning. We walked on over to our olive tree carrying these plastic buckets around our necks. And we proceeded to pluck the olives from the tree. After said plucking, each olive got dropped into the bucket around our neck; when the buckets were full, we'd empty them into larger plastic bins that would go into the trucks hauling olives to the local olive press. We plucked each olive conscientiously, fully being "in" the moment, given that it was our first time "harvesting" olives.

Now, our tree happens to be by the side of the road adjoining our property. So we were able to notice quite a few farm trucks slow down as the peeps watched our harvest. We thought nothing of it. Perhaps we should have thought something as I recall now that a few were laughing and pointing, but we were really into our "first olive harvest"!

So we spent the whole morning plucking olives, almost all one olive at a time. Our backs were sore but we're high on experiencing a ... new experience. Actually, Tom did once mutter under his breath, "I can't believe I'm going to get a few bottles of olive oil for an entire day of doing this -- do you know what my billable rate is?!" Back aching but spirit high, I cheerfully ignored his attempt to morose down the morning.

Lunchtime arrived. We've harvested perhaps one-twentieth of the olives on our big ol' tree. We started getting concerned as Dutch Henry was scheduled to send its truck around in a few hours. Then Scott Chafen, Dutch Henry's winemaker, arrived with ladders and began helping us. We were heartened. Still, we never got all of the olives from that one tree.

Well, a few weeks later (probably over dinner with some Napa Valley local too inebriated to be diplomatic) we learned that one olive at a time ain't the way to harvest olives. What you do: put tarpaulin under the tree and shake shake shake all the branches. And all the olives that warrant harvesting should be loose enough to drop. Then you empty the dropped olives from tarp to the plastic containers for hauling to the olive press. No wonder the farm workers passing by were holding on to their bellies guffawing as they saw us.

I shared all this during the reception as, what else do poets talk about during a ... reading reception anyway? Dr. Garrett, Chris and Ana look at me after I finish my story. Diplomatically, they remained silent. Then I said very brightly, "Gotta go!"

And off I went!

After all, an entire universe awaits my next ... caper.

FREEDOM TO BE WHO YOU'RE NOT
(AND A PUBLISHER'S SPECIAL)

It was like listening to a tune that comes out of the air, note by note, and then transcribing it. Who knows who wrote the song? Who knows who's listening?
--from John Yau's "Afterword" to 100 More Jokes From The Book of the Dead

Kasey reproduced one of the etchings from the book with which I launched Meritage Press in 2001: 100 More Jokes From The Book of the Dead, a documentation of an etchings-based collaboration between Archie Rand and John Yau. That same image -- from the etching "Cold Water Flat" -- happens to be the one that I chose from the nearly 100 images in the book to produce a special limited edition etching. (Yes, the title says 100, though there are only 91 images, because of various reasons -- I could theorize by, say, going into "wabi sabi" but probably John's sense of humor also came into play as he chose the title).

Anyway, if you take a look at the image on Kasey's site (or at Meritage Press' site), you'll notice the words "Cold Water Flat. What You Say In An American Restaurant When The Waiter Brings The Wrong Bottle." I chose that etching because it relates to a wine theme and I anticipated that I could place that etching into the collection of several oenophiles (which I've since done, but a few more are available for anyone interested). The wine theme is ever-present at Meritage Press; I titled the press after the word "meritage" because it is a word concocted by California winemakers; the word describes a wine made like Bordeaux-style wines, but which Californians didn't want to identify with a French appellation because it uses California grapes (cabernet, cabernet franc and merlot). Indeed, the word "meritage" is not pronounced "mer-it-uhj", which is how many mis-pronounce it (akin to French), but "mer-it-ij."

Thus, I named my press after "meritage" to reflect how poets might make instead of inherit language.

Having said all that, I remember when I told John that I wanted this particular image (out of all the images in the book) to be highlighted through an edition of etchings, separate from the book. He looked at the picture (a hilarious image of a lady leaning her cleavage over a restaurant table), and said something about how he'd forgotten he and Archie had created that particular image. And that one of the great things about collaborating with Archie is how their relationship allows him to do things that he doesn't anticipate doing. (At the time of our conversation, John wasn't even drinking wine.)

John's comment reflects the special basis for his collaborations with Archie -- instantaneous creations. They've collaborated for over 20 years and they don't edit themselves; they sit at a table and just pass whatever they've done back and forth, reacting right then and there to whatever each receives from the other. In fact, the etching medium was deliberately chosen because it's supposed to be a form of refinement and John and Archie used that medium to push themselves on achieving something "refined" instantaneously. The medium further pushed themselves because whatever they inscribed on the plates had to be etched on backwards from how the images were to be printed. (Instantaneity is an approach John also uses with other artists like Max Gimblett, and that Archie has introduced to another poet, Robert Creeley.) In considering his collaborative process with Rand, Yau once quoted Frank O'Hara’s statement, "You have to go on your nerve alone."

Immersed as I currently am in an essay that explores the nature of ekphrasis, I've recently been appreciating John and Archie's collaborative approach because the instantaneous nature of their collaboration is one way of addressing "ekphrastic fear" -- the acknowledgment that one medium (words) can't be synonymous with another medium (visual arts). John and Archie *transcend* this debate by, yes, being inspired by each other's works, but also by creating an entirely new third creature that is its own entity instead of being simply based on something else.

And I suspect that John's example with instantaneous collaborations helped inspire my own love for a "first draft, last draft" attempt at poetry-writing. As John puts it in his essay within the book: "Mooch the pooch says, First scratch, best scratch."

But it's not just about instantaneity (if this isn't a word, I just made it -- get it?). It's about freedom -- it makes sense that John's instantaneity is synchronistic with his ever-consistent encouragement of poets and artists to go to places they hadn't previously entered -- even for results that might offend people. In the visual arts context, (noting that John is also an art critic), it's how he once observed -- was it in Rain Taxi or in a Poetry Project Newsletter -- how few poets display (both literally and metaphorically for courage) what O'Hara did in a Larry Rivers painting. In an Asian American (AA) context, it's why he once said AA literature must accept portrayals of renegades and not just those profiles fitting themes of achievement, struggle and decorum. In poetry, it's why he encourages the open mind and to Dare All.

With that kind of approach, "you" may end up writing as someone different from who you thought "you" are (I might end up writing as a corpse). But that's okay, isn't it? But that's marvelous, isn't it? Isn't Poetry larger than anything any individual poet can imagine? John says, "Who knows who wrote the song?" Indeed -- what's important is that the point is made: the "song."

So, to celebrate peeps who inspire other peeps, here's a publisher's special: the first five poets to e-mail me their snailmail addys can get a comp copy of 100 More Jokes From The Book of the Dead so that you can see what I and Kasey are talking about.

BY FRONT-CHANNEL: A CAT STORY FOR CAT

The nine-day-old kitten fit within one palm -- one day away from opening its eyes. But this still unnamed, still blind one loved me. Dutch Henry winemaker Scott Chafen said the kitten usually cried around strangers. Around me, the kitten kept playing with my fingers, licking and biting with its teeeeny teeth. Or it rubbed its cheek barely the size of a quarter-fingerprint against my skin. Or it dug in its teeeeny claws as it tried to clamber up my arm. Its claws and teeth were too tiny to hurt me -- its gritty fragility just offered tactile bliss.

I fed it with a small baby bottle containing half a tablespoon of milk warmed by Sophie. Then -- proving that all that babies mostly do is eat, shit and sleep -- Scott had to facilitate its pooping. But newborn cats can't do it on their own. Apparently, mommy cats usually lick the kitties' asses so that they can poop. Scott played surrogate by wiping damp tissue against the kitty's teeeny butt. A yellowish fluid came out.

Black and white kitty. Its face had diamond-shaped white fur across its yet-to-be-opened eyes. Pale pink lines draw eyelids that have yet to open. BLOGGER ATE THE REST OF THE MESSAGE. IF I REMEMBER, I'LL RETYPE. BUT I BELIEVE ITS LAST PARAGRAPH WAS SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF:

What am I seeing when my eyes are not open? As a corpse, how and what do I see? How do I trust and love what is beyond my vision? How do I attain even the briefest spark of enlightenment?

DEAR POET-PAINTER WHO LIKED MY "MEDIUM-RARE" COMMENTARY ON PHILIP GUSTON

You may be interested in Matt Bourbon's recent review at New York Arts magazine on Guston's retrospective. At one point, Bourbon says:

"Guston's paintings feel as if he is concretely depicting something that falls a few steps short of being namable."

Regardless of your response to the overall review, I like the above sentence for a nifty way of saying that Guston is a *poet's painter.*

=========

Philip Guston's Retrospective is currently at SFMoma until Sept. 27. It then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (Oct. 27, 2003 - Jan. 4, 2004) and then the Royal Academy of Arts, London (Jan. 24 - April 12, 2004). Check it out!

MORE ON CORPSE-DOM

It just occurred to me: Gary said,

"Black Lightning is to anthologies what people are to statues."

Indeed, a corpse is not a statue.

Indeed, Indeedy: the definitive -- DEFINITIVE -- image of Ms. CorpsePoetics is over at Limetree on the linksbar! Definitely not a statue -- and love that mass o' hair and fan (it is hot today!)!. Thanks Kasey!

PUNK

"Don't call it love, but don't call it nothing else."
--from "Mission Impossible" by Nova Lee

My new friend Nova said there's something "better than sex, coffee and yoga combined." My finely-outlined, purty jaw dropped and nearly busted the floor. I hauled said jaw back up to my head and riposted,"What can that possibly be?"

It's RIOT - A - GO - GO!!!!!!!!

It's hot this morning. And I'ma hunched over a steaming Java. And Sandy is e-mailing me lines like "She was wet behind the stairs but, no one knew it." Last but not least, my computer's rockin' with Riot-A-Go-Go's "Radio Calisthenics" CD.

I'ma so proud. Nova does guitars and vocals and also writes the lyrics. Her music's melting my walls -- I'm all flushed and I'm not awake yet. Check out their site, please, with upcoming gigs. If you see an angel with black, tattered wings in the corner of the room, check out her lashes. If her lashes are long.....

Shout, shout baby, tell me what it's all about

So, having my ears lovingly hammered by punk is reminding me of my first job out of college. It was in one of those news clerk "grunt" positions at The New York Times. I started out grunting with three peeps who'd later win the Pulitzer Prize: Susan Faludi, Alix Freedman and ______ (can't recall the third, but suffice it to say I obviously was in a stellar group). I was jazzed to be in the Big Time. And everything seemed going my way; a few key editors were noticing me, et al. This was all of a high for someone like me who'd been a journalist beginning in the 7th grade -- I couldn't imagine doing anything else but working as a reporter.

But I had a boyfriend. Leather jacket and motorcycle. Attempting The Great American Novel while driving a cab. I was into him. Between the career and him, I chose him -- which is to say, I didn't do what was necessary to perform and excel in what also was a quite competitive boot camp. By the time I left the NYTimes, I'd ruined whatever momentum I had in the beginning by not paying attention to its demands (though that wasn't the reason I left). I also suffered through a year-long (or was it two-year-long) attempt to break-up with that boy.

I used to feel bad about that period, even after I'd lost interest in journalism as a career. I'd so wanted to be a journalist that I felt bad I never gave it my all when I was at the NYTimes -- I'd long felt I'll never really know what I could have done in that particular profession (it wasn't like banking which I felt I'd explored to its fullest potential for me, prior to leaving it for Poetry). Years later, I remembered this part of my life of ending my journalism career and shared it with a friend. She said, "Well, it just means you were a poet all along."

You see, to be a grunt at the NYTimes is like being a grunt anywhere, too. Most of us took the bad with the chance to be where we were; obviously it can work out, as it did with my three Pulitzer-Prize winning colleagues. But there was one guy -- skinny, always dressed in black, the son of a brilliant author (which is to say, in that landscape's own version of "cultural capital," he arrived with plenty), and also known to be quite brilliant himself. He opted out of that system. Later, I heard he was a punk rocker, too.

Punk -- I don't claim to know what it is. But I suspect it shares much with Poetry -- that goin' your own way....I'm thinking this morning -- as Nova whispers loudly in mah ear "Your mission, should you choose to accept it,/ Is to draw your own conclusions on my skin" -- I so loved journalism that I'd excelled at it in my own way, which had helped me land at the NYTimes in the first place. But I had to fail at the "Big Time" to clear the space for what would come to be Poetry.

I loved journalism. Had I excelled at the NYTimes, I suspect I might never have left that profession. I loved journalism. I loved journalism....and, perhaps sometimes, you also have to give up what you love ... to be a poet.

=======

Thanks Gary for the "Shout Out" -- I think it fair to say that when I wrote Black Lightning, I was also attempting punk. From Nova and Riot A-Go-Go,

Class is out break the rules.

STAR TREK, REVISED

I can write a three-part post (my Guston/Ekphrasis posts below) and still not be able to articulate the question I'm trying to answer. Then Jack writes 7 words that get right to the heart of both question and answer:

Choose to enter and still retain yours.

I think you've lived long and now I'm prospering. Not that I mean to imply your blog is about me....but: Thanks Jack.

CORPSE HAY(NA)KU!

David "You Are Missed" Hess: "corpsepoetics" -- why the change?"
Eileen: "As a challenge. I thought, what would a dead person say on poetics because [after all] on poetry, I am ultimately....mute"


Well here's a rather avant garde hay(na)ku from Sandy McIntosh":

The Correct Way To Read My Hay(na)ku Aloud

Lorca!
His foot
in the doorway!


Annotated version (where the number replaces the preceding letter):

L1 o2 r3 c4 a5!

H6 i7 s8 f9 o10 o10 t11

i7 n12 t11 h6 e13 d14 o10 o10 r3 w15 a5 y!

Pronunciation Guide:
1="l" as second “l” in “Llewellyn”
2="o" as “o” in “amoeba”
3="r" as “r” in Southern US “cornpone”
4="c" as fourth “c” in “acciaccatura”
5="a" as “a” in “aesthetic”
6="h" as “h” in “catachresis”
7="i" as “i” in “poiesis”
8="s" as second “s” in “sans serif”
9="f" as first “f” in “afflatus”
10="o" as second “o” in alternate spelling “encyclopoedia”
11="t" as first “t” in “attorney”
12="n" as “n” in “limn”
13="e" as “e” in “eidetic”
14="d" as first “d” in “addiction”
15="w" as “w” in “wrist”

NOTE: “Y” is pronounced “the the”.

================

Thanks Sandy for this new perspective on the hay(na)ku. How synchronistic that you sent me this just after I scratched out this poem below for the cover letter to those receiving books from the hay(na)ku contest. Your unpronounceable poem reflects the impossibility of articulating Poetry (the "Loss" of sound), and yet the poem still exists!

Double Hay(na)ku

Whoever
Writes Hay(na)ku
Is A Winner

For
Whoever Writes
Poetry Obviates Loss

========================


Ah. Midnight. Her day begins.

Flutter of wings sends a few feathers floating down to land on the Long-Lashed One's shoulders. She pauses for her tiny nose to twitch appreciatively at the jasmine perfume of the poker-playing angels overhead. Then she continues typing her blog post to include another hay(na)ku she received today from Sweetie Barbara Jane:

dark
angels inhabiting
this luminous space

ANOTHER TYPE OF EKPHRASISTIC PARADOX
(AKA, ON BEING A CRUMMY ART CRITIC)

I'm tempted to delete the prior three posts but....won't. Corpse-dom accepts....flaws.

GUSTON AND THE SUSPICIOUS PARADOX OF EKPHRASIS
(Part III)

I had said in Part I of this Guston/Ekphrasis discussion that

"The relationship between drawing and painting comes up again when I start looking at the abstractions by Andrea Higgins -- see below -- one of four young artists showing a floor below Guston in a group exhibition featuring the 2002 SECA Art Awardees."

But I failed to address it in Part II. So this is a(n unplanned) Part III post. I suspect I omitted addressing the above because it points to something I am finding difficult to articulate, hence, I shall blog about it -- and, hopefully, the risk of public humiliation shall force me to sharpen my thoughts (well, the track record ain't that good but, ya know, one must persevere...).

So...I'ma thinking along these lines:

All art is conceptual.

When Guston switched back to figuration in the 1960s, he had stories to tell. He told them.

Higgins's paintings also depend on a narrative -- the First Ladies.

But Guston did something visually that I consider more interesting than Higgins. He turned his colors into irradiated muds. Combined with the intensity of his lines, he created vivid paintings just bursting with his presence. His personality, his force, is ever-present....and yet because he did something visually interesting, the viewer is still very much invited *into the image.* Guston's works are very much about painting even as he doesn't erase himself.

For me, the result is like the way literature or poetry about something that may not be of interest to a reader still engages the reader because the language is so compelling that one is drawn into the story through how the writer manipulated the words.

I didn't see this layer in Higgins' work, in part because the gridded monochromatic paintings she's done seem more familiar than, say, Guston's cigar-smoking pink. (Higgins' work reminds me of other contemporary "pattern"-based painters as well as those who investigate the grid so that I didn't feel the wonderful sense of a surprise from seeing her works that I feel whenever I see Guston's pink.)

And you can see precedents in Guston's approach when one compares his "Drawing No. 2" of Ischia with the painting it could have inspired, "Painting No. 9." The drawing features line profiles of a Ischia's landscape, which seem reflected in the center pattern within the painting. But the painting doesn't rely on merely distilling the landscape of Ischa; it also investigates how to dilute reds, yellows, blue grays (scummed them up, if you will) without reducing their...vividness. Guston's colors play with the mind's eye; we see the muted colors and expect pallidity. But the colors don't pale at all.....not even his whites (I'm sure this result has to do with the intensity of his brushstrokes).

In conclusion -- I'ma writing "in conclusion" here coz I'm trying to force myself to a conclusion of sorts: Guston kept his eye on the ball that is his medium: he's painting.

Higgins is a good painter, and her conceptual treatise as regards the First Ladies is well-considered. But her results make me ache for less of a separation between the two, the separation here being a privileging of the latter over the former.

If, in painting, Guston is about "freedom" (as de Kooning put it), Higgins in these works is about restraint.

*****

I've been citing ekphrasis here and, in Higgins' instance, it's the reverse of the practice usually associated with the term. Rather than an attempted verbalization of an image, Higgins' paintings attempt a visual representation of an assessment, a tale, as regards First Ladies. I made this association because I just read W.J.T. Mitchell's essay "Ekphrasis and the Other" which included this:

"...from the semantic point of view, from the standpoint of referring, expressing intentions and producing effects in a viewer/listener, there is no essential difference between texts and images and thus no gap between the media to be overcome by any special ekphrastic strategies. Language can stand in for depiction and depiction can stand in for language because communicative, expressive acts, narration, argument, description, exposition and other so-called 'speech acts' are not medium-specific, are not 'proper' to some medium or other. I can make a promise or threaten with a visual sign as eloquently as with an utterance. While it's true that Western painting isn't generally used to perform these sorts of speech acts, there is no warrant for concluding that they could never do so, or that pictures more generally cannot be used to say just about anything."

=============

It's still not clear to me. Dangit -- the problem with painting is that it's like poetry: can't be articulated. Maybe I'll try again later. Maybe. Right now, I'm just gonna give up and become a corpse.

GUSTON AND THE SUSPICIOUS PARADOX OF EKPHRASIS
(Part II)

"Me, I'm sweet on the unhinged locale, the sentence city whose borders are so vague they cannot predicate a center."
--from "Bad Cop, Good Cop" by Albert Mobilio

From Guston, I walked down to the next floor where John Bankston, Andrea Higgins, Chris Johanson, Will Rogan are providing an enjoyable show. I stress that I *enjoyed* this exhibit overall though I'm going to focus on Higgins' paintings. Higgins's work is a real crowd-pleaser (based on the crowd I was in). She made almost monochromatic paintings where the choice of color was dictated by Higgins' research into and opinion of former U.S. First Ladies. Research included addressing the palette of the wardrobe of the First Ladies. Perhaps my favorite was a diptych of a pink panel and blue panel entitled "Jackie." Naturally, "Nancy" was red. "Hilary" was black-ish.

The surface of Higgins' paintings also is interesting as the field of color is presented through stripes and then ellipses of paints of the same color. Not a boring surface at all.

But what I'm mulling over now is how much of my enjoyment of Higgins' exhibit related to the context of the paintings being presented as symbols for First Ladies. There is a bit of a flatness in her color -- a lack of resonance that I suspect may lead me to tire of these works if I ever had to live with them.* Yet, there is a pleasure to be found in knowing that these colors do aptly represent the First Ladies mentioned in their titles.

But I feel that the paintings should *also* (perhaps, *first*?) work on their own as visual works before they get the icing of the conceptual titular references. But am I looking at Higgins' paintings appropriately or too narrowly? At this moment, I don't honestly know.

I've blathered many times in the past about the significance of context....and authorial intention. But, just using my own poems as an example, I also firmly believe that for my poems to be effective, they should be able to engage even the reader(s) who is not cognizant of my decolonial Filipino politics/poetics.

Huh. Yet, ultimately, this is an old debate, isn't it?

Yes, it's an old issue but perhaps I'm also aware of it because I've now rewriting an earlier blog post on Sharon Dolin's wonderful collection Serious Pink for use as a book review elsewhere. I'm sure I'm not unusual in using this blog for "first drafts" of many things. What the blog allows me to do is "notes for" other things that, if I ever were to pursue them, would generally require more time, thought and care than I put into these blog posts.

And part of what I am expanding now in my earlier blog post on Dolin is the section on ekphrasis: writing based on visual images. This obviously goes into the paradoxical nature of ekphrasis -- whether one medium can ever mirror another medium -- as well as whether the ekphrasized object is really an entirely new entity.

What was interesting to me about Higgins' paintings is that I do think she brilliantly captured the personalities of First Ladies through color. But I suspect that her process is more rewarding for me to think about than in terms of looking at the color-ful results. And, now, I must consider the implications of that .... suspicion.

**********

The 2002 SECA Art Award Show at SFMoma featuring John Bankston, Andrea Higgins, Chris Johanson and Will Rogan will be up through July 27.

------------

(* I don't intend this as negative criticism; I consider that comment on color flatness to be a matter of personal preference versus aesthetics.)

GUSTON AND THE SUSPICIOUS PARADOX OF EKPHRASIS
(Part I)

At times, I detest my best intentions. They always get in the way of my ever-strong desire to be lazy.

Like, so I thought I'd do this small press (Meritage Press) just to offer one more venue for poetry. Well, so why can't I just put together the books and distribute them? But oh no!!! The government has to get involved with its reams of paperwork. I spent the whole morning at the California State Board of Equalization getting my "Seller's Permit" to sell books. The form forced me to calculate my monthly gross sales and taxable sales. I don't want to embarass us all in the poetry community by revealing my estimates of revenues as a poetry press. Suffice it to say, the clerk looked at my figures and gave me the permit right away as my potential tax liability (reflecting my anticipated revenues) is so teeeeeeeeny it's likely to be not worth the papers it will require for the government to fill out in order to accept my payment.

Bleeeech.

Now, corpes have no business spitting at air.

So, to heal myself into the unconsciouness of the dead, I stopped by the hubby's office which also is in downtown San Francisco and allowed him to take me to a nice soothing Chinese lunch at a restaurant right next to SFMoma. The choice of the restaurant was deliberate as, to further heal myself from a morning of bureaucratic machinations (I'ma exagerrating all this but the local heat is making me all ma-drama naman!), I entered the museum all cheered by the prospect of seeing one of my favorite artists:

Philip Guston at SFMoma
Retrospective (June 28-September 28, 2003)

At museums, guards often approach me with ridiculously short pencils. Because, at some point of going through an exhibit whose works move me, I delve into my bag for pad and pen and start taking notes. Except, at museums (I don't think SFMoma is unusual in this), guard-peeps get nervous when they see you with anything but the pencil -- I assume coz ink is more dangerous than graphite if one wanted to graffiti the works, or something like that.

So, yes, there I was being approached by a lovely guard. Sigh. We smiled at each other, though, as we recognized each other and remembered we'd done this tango together before: she gives me a yellow pencil (half-pencil really) and I sheepishly drop my pen into my bag. Anyway, here are notes from an artist I've long admired:

--"Painting No. 9," 1952 oil on canvas. Lyrical white field rupturing into muted reds, yellows, glue grays and more whites. reminds me that I never tire of white-on-white variations. Guston turns colors into mud and yet it works.

-- In same room, a 1949 "Drawing No. 2, Ischia" which I take it is the underlying figurative reference (city of Ischia) of the abstract "Painting No. 9." (The relationship between drawing and painting comes up again when I start looking at the abstractions by Andrea Higgins -- see below -- one of four young artists showing a floor below Guston in a group exhibition featuring the 2002 SECA Art Awardees.)

-- The Guston exhibit features over 100 paintings and drawings from different stages of the artist's career. As I moved into the room of his 1950s abstraction, I felt his own way of painting "inside the image" (refer to prior post on "Ekphrasis" about *looking at* versus *being the* paint). As the wall placard aptly notes, whereas many abstract expressionists enlarged their scale to draw in the viewer "inside the image," Guston took another path by making more intimate his proximity to his work. He made small brushstrokes close up at the canvas without necessarily stepping back to look at the canvas. Consequently, the expressionist gesture was not "expansive" as in large works by his peers but nonetheless possessed an intensity due to concentration.

-- Guston's approach resulted partly in paintings (like in "Painting No. 9") where the bulk of brushstrokes and/or color are within an area of the canvas that's off-center and may seem imbalanced when you look at the painting as a whole. What's marvelous, though, is that despite the imbalance, the eye doesn't get turned off by the lack of harmony. In any event, the dissonance seems apt to me as doesn't a narrowed focus often result in a general imbalance even as one might come to know better the particular target of such focus?

-- The 1960s paintings show Guston's return to figuration (reflecting his desire to "tell stories" which, in turn, reflected his more social concerns as no doubt enhanced by Vietnam). It was a switch not popular during his time -- but which also made de Kooning tell him during his first show of these figurative works, "[Guston]'s real subject is freedom!"

-- I've always respected -- and with this retrospective came to love -- Guston's use of pink. A bubblegum pink. But it's a macho pink: a cigar-smoking pink. It doesn't, unfortunately, reproduce very well. For instance, Guston's 1968 painting "Paw" is reproduced on the cover of Albert Mobilio's wonderful book of poems, Me, With Animal Towering; you can see a small reproduction of the book at http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0971248516. As is often the case, the painting far resonates in a way one would not necessarily expect from seeing a reproduction.

-- I'm looking at visual art but I'm responding to Guston's 1960s and 1970s work with this statement going through my mind: "What a fabulous voice!"

-- 1970s work made muscular by a heightened consciousness of his mortality.

-- Muscular, muscular paintings.

(To be continued)

BIG POST ERROR, POST ID 105667084350523664
REPORT IT

Dangit, Blogger! This means the next post will be in two portions....!

AND THEN

Whilst patting at her *sleeeeeeeek new sheets* courtesy of Blogger (well put, Chris!), she pauses, looks at the screen and whispers a letter at You-Know-Who-You-Are:

Mysticism depends on what is experienced, not fictionalized. You can judge experience -- that is your right. But why attempt to judge it out of its existence?

Love,
The Radiant Corpse

THE ATTACK OF THE TROPHY WIFE

Henry Gould writes writes:
"Indian pipes for Eileen Tabios. I saw a pair of them in Parker Woodland last weekend. They're tiny."

The Long-Lashed Corpse Glows Gold from Pleasure: Oh, thank you Mr. Gould! I adore receiving flowers -- even cyberflowers! So the Beaming Corpse cheerfully clicks onto the link and sees:

Monotropa uniflora (Pyrolaceae) -- This member of the wintergreen family is saprophytic; it gets its nutrients from decaying plant matter rather than through photosynthesis. Because it has no chlorophyll and thus no green pigmentation, another name for it is "corpse plant". It was used for medicinal purposes by Native Americans. Indian pipes bloom in summer to early fall.

Sigh. A "corpse plant." How perfect.

And, Babaylans! it's used for "medicinal purposes"! Puuuuuurfectly synchronistic! ["Babaylan" = poet/healer/(good)witch from pre-colonial days of the Philippines]

All this, of course, reminds me of another installment I'ma bout to write now (why not? do you think I have a life? of course not: I'm a corpse!) on the misshapen, misbegotten, erratic series called "Adventures of a Wife." Sip. (Morning Coffee.)

So, after years of travail, we finish this house in Napa Valley. And, it was finished just in time for me to dutifully host a lunch for the summer interns at Tom's law firm (I blogged about this earlier; scroll down yourself as my rested mind is too rested to ... scroll).

Well, a few days before the luncheon, my neighbor J was visiting shortly after a rain. She points to a patch of cleared area in front of the house and says, "It's just a mud patch there."

I unfurl long lashes to look at the area. Judiciously, I nod up and down and agree, "Yep."

J offers, "If you want, I can plant some flowers there for you."

Now, I'd lived in a New York City apartment for about 20 years and have zero experience in gardening. I'd even forgotten almost all of the names of plants and flowers besides the rose (and possibly retained that just because it's my middle name -- so perfumed am I, you see).

So I gleefully accept J's offer and gleefully tell Tom. We gleefully make our way down to a nursery in St. Helena. Very non-gleefully, we look at the prices of plants. Why does a rose bush with 3 branches and one-and-a-half feet high cost $29.99 a bunch? But, not knowing any better, we assume that's "normal" pricing and get a few, along with some cheaper but pretty flower plants whose names I don't know but are in the colors of red, yellow, white and pink.

We then take that all back to the house and leave it at the yard for J to plant. Then we returned to San Francisco. A phone call a day later. J says, "I planted them." Hurray. A phone call the following day from J again. She says, "The deer ate your roses."

Deer. Deer?! I don't recall any deer on 94th Street and Broadway?!!

Sigh. So, yes, I agree that J can hire some local guy to plant a make-shift fence around the area. And I further agree that Tom and I will have to go buy more plants.

But, this time, Tom did some scoping and we knew to go to the nursery at Walmart in Santa Rosa -- rose bushes: $5.99 a bunch. Okay! So, gleefully, we lug back several bunches for J to plant .... all in time for the mud patch to be lookin' festive in time for the summer interns' lunch.

So, in between filching freshly-made Madeleines from the kitchen, I'ma feeling all perky during this lunch thing. Then, a drop-dead gorgeous tall blonde comes up to me. Wife of one of the up-and-coming partners. She says....but let me back up a bit to say as it's relevant to her statement: the house we built reflects the inspiration of homes in the Loire Valley. And I know this lady is a Francophile. Okay. So, where was I? Oh, yes: the blonde says, "Your garden...."

I interrupt her. "Yes, isn't it sweet?!" I say effusively and proudly. "It's brand new!"

She wrinkles her nose (oh, those wrinkling noses!). Said wrinkle makes me quickly add, "Oh, the fence is just temporary!" (The fence, here, is just three oak sticks stuck in the ground, around which wire fencing was wrapped -- but, still, the flowers look so pretty in the mud, uh, garden!)

But she's not wrinkling her elegant nose over the fence. She says, "Your flowers."

With originality, I repeat, "My flowers?"

She explains, "Your flowers are not French. You should replace them all with purple lavender....sprays of them."

I look up at her (she was so tall) and I .....

Hmmm. You know something? This tale isn't turning out as funny as I thought it would be. I'll stop now.

To practice Corpse-dom is to know when to cease and desist.

YES! WRITE ME! RIGHT ME!
(CAN YOU TELL I'M TEETERING?! RIGHT ME!)

This poem is not a critique of you,
but a method of acceptance for me.
--from "Pledge" by Kenneth Gurney

Stephen Kirbach writes:

I
owe you
tons of thanks

for posting my haynakus along with so many others which are so wonderful, providing a link to my blog, keeping me informed about wines, the term "peeps," and generally providing so much excellent reading material.

Thanks too for offering to send me a book. This is exciting and nice as I just "lost" a book a couple of days ago to an unanticipated overhead oil spill from a refer unit on the truck I drove. It got drenched as did my lunch box when hot black oil dripped in the window on the passenger side of the truck where I always carry a library in a tomato box (just in case I get stuck someplace with too much time stretching into the beyond). Luckily, my notebook as well as some other books escaped major damage. This book, a collection of Puritan writings, was a nice old paperback I picked up for about $.50, but its damage distressed me considerably, at least until I got a good night's sleep. It had a lovely 3 color cover ink drawing of a snowy New England meadow under a pink sky. It is currently wrapped in paper towels and rubber bands and is seriously stained black, yuck, but maybe I can salvage it.

=========

Thomas Fink writes about Michelle Bautista's earlier hay(na)ku which I shall reprint first (for obvious reasons):

Eileen
I lean
Eileen, I lean

So Prof. Tom sez, "Michelle's hay(na)ku reminds me of a song by Keith Richards in one of his nineties solo albums: 'Eileen, won't you lean on me?' Keith Richards is one of the most amazingly good bad singers in rock 'n roll, as well as being one of the greatest rhythm guitarists, unsung wits, and tropes of survival beyond dissolution. His song lyrics are often bizarrely simple and simply bizarre, and they work well in context of the musical arrangements, as they would not on the page."

=========

Leny Strobel writes, "I was browsing thru stuff and came upon this old square box that contained a 'multiply function pot' with the following instructions:

Method of usage:
1. Put the body into the lid and push it gently.
2. While you set the body first, put the head into it then push it lightly.
3. Push the base of body to separate then you can clean it.
4. Don't put over fire directly
5. Easy to fragile be attention
6. Hot tempture resisted:120C

I thought of corpses...which may or may not have anything to do with your version of the corpse, Eileen..."

Well, okay Dr. Leny -- that sure sounded morbid. So I queried the never-morbid scholar and, giggling (I can hear her!), she replied,"This is a teapot...the body(the pot itself) is inserted into a plastic cradle...head is the cover..."

Whew! A teapot!

=========

Sandy McIntosh writes me and, yay, has posted a group photo of contemporary Filipino poets at Marsh Hawk Press's site. Go to it, Pin@ys in the 'Pinas -- do you miss us?

=========

Last but not least, Kenneth Gurney writes me a poem that, what do you know, explores Corpse-dom!

Pledge

Some days, we get frantic
on the mountain,
erupt into wild dance
for moments
that might as well be years.

I edge myself closer
to the skin you refuse to shed.
Your turquoise and silver appear
to be sunlight glinting off
a mountain lake.

Sometimes I am afraid
of the sound of your silence.

Vibrating, the grass emits
a endless hum, an Ulmm.

There is a music in the rocks,
a concert of trees -- the birds
bear witness to Mozart.

Pressing my ear to your chest
I seek your song, but you are silent.

This poem is not a critique of you,
but a method of acceptance for me.
I trust you know your part
and attentively read the scripted music
ready to sing at the right moment.

THE POSE OF THE PAUSE

Prayer

For I don't need
you, "My Liege"
so I need you most

You are quicksilver
masked among scales
forming a new coast

as you anticipated this
consequence of tears
rusting the bowl you clasp

I release one year
of mortality to ask,
"Can we not finish? Why not?"

Still you will not close
your eyes to empty
the sky of sound, this music

The path of a vulture's
feather floating down
releases a new interval

the latest in a lineage
whose potential kneeled me
by your oft-locked door

More, my Liege. More


Lately, I've not been feeling that I've been writing poems particularly well. And if you read me -- well of course you read me -- you'll know that I've also been yammering a lot lately about Poetry not being words. Yep -- I've doubted that it was a coincidence.

That is, I really do believe Poetry is not words -- but it's a bit convenient, I thought, to be stuck on that concept if I also believed my words have not been sheen-ing as I wish.

Then, today, yoga. Sluggish poses. Such that I apologized afterwards to my teacher Liza. And, somehow, that conversation ended up transitioning to Liza telling me that, in yoga, the pauses between the physical poses are poses in themselves.

Lightbulb. O, golden light...

But of course!

Like the Poetry that exists between the words ... as I quickly likened the words to poses. Or, as Liza replied, how "negative space" in the visual arts is also an image.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Then we continued our session. At the end of the session, Liza said, "By the way, I know you feel your asanas (poses) were not good today, but as someone who's been watching you, they didn't look worse than your normal positions."

After some thought, we agreed that perhaps I had to feel they were "bad" to focus on something else that I -- a neophyte yogi -- had not considered before: that the pause is also a pose.

Liza: "It's all one big flow." A statement that evoked another Synchronicity: Ms. WinePoetics at Barbara Reyes' book launch this past Sunday (see June 23 post on "Bloom, You Young Poets") as she held up Barbara's book to the audience: "I don't believe in books of poetry. I think there is One Book of Poetry and all books are just part of that singular Book."

Then, just before she left, Liza said, "It is said that the space between the Inhale and the Exhale is where you find God."

Okay, if I address that now, I'ma gonna get a headache. So let me just pour a glass -- tonight, the 1996 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir (Sonoma Coast, Coastlands Vineyard) -- and offer a poem by Leza Lowitz from her collection Yoga Poems (Stone Bridge Press, 2000). This is titled "Savasana," the "Corpse" pose that inspired CorpsePoetics:

Savasana

Behold, The Dead
teacher of The Dreamer
whose lessons take a
lifetime to learn.
One third of our lives
spent in the night
yet we have trouble
embracing the darkness
in ourselves.
Outside,
sheep sleep under the stars
worms sleep under the earth
mindless of
insomnias &
nightmares.
Inside,
we sleep under
the illusion
of daybreak,
oblivious to
the light.

TODAY, I TOLD HIM

...the more I see of your new poems, the easier I breathe .... the more you write, and write so wonderfully, you see .... the easier it'll be for when, someday, I end up wordless....

You're my gift back to the Poetry Dark Angels who gave me their blood for my veins....

SO THAT CORPSE-DOM FORM = CONTENT,
PRIOR POST DELETED INTO

blackness

blackness

blackness

BLACKNESS
BLACKNESS
BLACKNESS

BLOGGER'S COMIC* SENSE OF HUMOR
(*pun intended)

A few weeks ago, I put that freebie links-tracker thingie on my blog that reveal which sites has referred readers over a preceding 24-hour period. I did so as a symbolic bow to community-making (via cyber-community), not because I want to count you peeps reading me (which is why I didn't put that peep-counter thingie on here). Besides, we already know that my readership is about eight million. So, anyway, last night, my link-tracking device was along the lines of the following.

http://www.blogger.com/blog_view_header.pyra [195]
http://limetree.blogspot.com/ [105]
the well nourished moon [84]
Google [80]
Mike Snider's Formal Blog [64]
MHP Blogs! [63]
[54]
Heathens in Heat [54]
The Messiah is My Sister [50]
Love's Last Gasps [45]
http://nickpiombino.blogspot.com/ [40]
http://www.limetree.blogspot.com/ [33]
Elsewhere [33]
Welcome to My Yahoo! [32]
The Wily Filipino [31]
~~ululations~~ [26]
Yahoo! Search Results for [24]
BLOGGER [24]
Entre Révolte et Dérision, On a le Désir [22]
sidereality (ISSN 1543-0316) | links [20]
Cahiers de Corey - poetry, language, thought [19]
Site Meter - Counter and Statistics Tracker [18]
word placements [13]
Aimee Nezhukumatathil's gila monster [11]
Marsh Hawk Press Homepage [11]
Technorati: Link Cosmos [9]
Million Poems [8]
BLOGGER [5]
Yahoo! Mail [3]
The Wily Filipino: Hey, I Got Published! [2]
hatstuck snarl [2]
Babaylan Speaks [2]

This morning (and you can see it at the right column unless and until Blogger corrects itself as I assume this is a mistake), my links are:

Google [2280]
The Comics Journal: ¡Journalista! [982]
Franklin's Findings [428]
Yahoo! Search Results for [310]
Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog [303]
Bookmarks [301]
Mad World/80's Revival [296]
Pop Culture Gadabout [261]
MSN Search -- More Useful Everyday [148]
Escrito en las estrellas [145]
Flat Earth [140]
Ask Jeeves Answer [110]
AltaVista [88]
Weblogs.Com: Recently Changed Weblogs [83]
BLOGGER [81]
blo.gs [68]
Comic Book Galaxy Links [61]
Fluxblog: A Return To Form [52]
AOL Search: Home [38]
Unqualified Offerings [37]
Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat [28]
http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html [25]
eddynewell @ eddynewell.com [9]
moniblog [7]
Franklin's Findings [5]
Love's Last Gasps [2]
Mike Snider's Formal Blog [2]

Gary Sullivan -- thanks for mentioning my blog (along with Sweetie Nick Piombino) as a "personal web log" whose content never gets anemic. But I am speculating that given your blog's recent coverage of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts fair, Blogger somehow has conflated the links so that the above link record from this morning more reflects someone interested in comics versus poetry. Hence, on the above links you see references to such peeps as Comic Book Galaxy Links or Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog. Gee, I guess Gary's observation about crowds for comics versus poetry is accurate. But I wish Blogger would heal itself. Much as I got a kick out of a cumulative 2,280 references from Google in this mis-applied link-tracks.....I very much miss my modest but more sweet references, e.g. "hatstuck snarl [2]."

PETTINESS SUCKS AS MUCH AS RUDENESS....OR, OBVIATING THE TYRANNY OF THE QUOTIDIAN (E.G. 32 CENTS)

The Alumnae Office at Barnard College is good with keeping in contact. Yesterday, I got an e-mail from one of their lovely staffers alerting me, as the Subject Header Line proclaimed, to "Exciting Poetry News." To wit, they directed me to http://www.barnard.edu/newnews/news052903.html. As I always do what I'm told (just throwing in that phrase for comic effect, peeps -- don't get a heart attack now), I go to said link and see said exciting news:

-- Barnard has started a new poetry prize for a woman poet's second collection; and

-- the first recipient is Rebecca Wolff for her manuscript, Figment.

I immediately applauded the first bit of news (notwithstanding the recent hay(na)ku contest, I don't care for poetry "prizes" and "competitions" but, heck, am always happy for a new venue for publishing poetry). But I wrinkled my nose at the second bit of news.

My spirit separated from my body and witnessed said wrinkle on my nose. Ach. And said spirit started chastising me, as I should be chastised for that petty response [right hand duly slaps left hand on keyboard]. I've never met Rebecca Wolff and am mostly indifferent to the FENCE affair, but I wrinkled my nose partly because they owe me $0.32. Yah: that's thirty-two cents -- once the cost of a first-class stamp (today, it's $0.37 but I'm sure you peeps know that).

Anyway, what happened is that when FENCE first began, they were among the journals I spammed, uh, to whom I sent submissions. I didn't know anything about them and didn't really care. I was just papering the continent back then with submissions (don't worry Dear Trees -- I don't do that anymore; nowadays, I spam, uh, grace mostly cyberspace with my gems of wisdom and beauty). The thing is, FENCE never replied. Not a rejection. Not an acceptance. Just silence -- and I had included an SASE, after all.

Intellectually, I'm okay with that in the sense that I can only imagine that in the beginnings of a literary journal, things must get pretty hectic and things can fall through the crack, e.g. my submission or my SASE envelope with its $0.32 stamp. Actually, as a former editor of a literary journal myself, I know that things continue to fall through the cracks despite an editorial staff's best intentions. But, for whatever reason, I took this personally in the sense that.....I am very offended by....discourtesy. (Yah, ironic, I know -- given how I've often explored the Impolite as an Art Form.) I thought it quite rude that they never responded. A "rejection" would be okay. But no response when I dutifully followed their guidelines? I detest rudeness, even as I feel I have mastered it. I guess rudeness is one of my "hot buttons" -- to the extent that I wasn't able to rationalize away FENCE's silence by imagining how hectic it was in its early days to run a brand new journal out of one's living room.

Anyway, this all is a memory from years back since it's not as if I lose sleep over the matter. In fact, I haven't thought of this in a while. But because I wrinkled my nose at this recent news, I shall empty my mind of this matter by publicly abasing myself to reveal it for your reading pleasure. Secondly, I offer a public "Congratulations" to Rebecca Wolff. Thirdly, I shall reprint in full Barnard College's press release -- see below. Because, dear Peeps, Pettiness gets in the way of Corpse-dom.

*****

Barnard College Poetry Prize Goes One More Step: W.W. Norton To Publish 2003 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Rebecca Wolff’s Figment

New York, NY— Barnard College, in collaboration with W. W. Norton & Company, has established a new annual award to publish a woman poet’s second collection and has chosen Rebecca Wolff’s book Figment to receive the 2003 Barnard Women Poets Prize.

"Wolff’s poetry has a vivacity and edge which gives it immediate presence," the judges said in a citation. "Her poems make the sound of dark, witty talk… They are full of the cadences of a sort of fearless knowing – determined to confront loss, contradiction, absurdity with language itself. Combining a sheer faith in words with a true doubt about ready-made meanings, these poems sparkle and challenge the reader."

Wolff’s book will be published by Norton in the spring of 2004 and Barnard will host a reading to celebrate the book.

Saskia Hamilton, director of the Women Poets at Barnard program and a contest judge, explained the rationale behind awarding a prize for a writer’s second book. "Because there are so many opportunities for young poets to find publishers for their first books, we thought we would address a real need in the literary community by making this a second-book prize. Poets with second books have far fewer places to turn. We believe this is the first time a college and a major publishing house have collaborated to publish a second book by an emerging female poet," she said. Other judges included poets Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland, and Vice President and Senior Editor at W.W. Norton Jill Bialosky.

Bialosky, the Norton Senior Editor, said: "We are delighted to be the publisher for Barnard’s second-book poetry competition. Women Poets at Barnard has had a distinguished presence in American poetry, and we are pleased to be continuing with that tradition. We feel that there is a particular challenge for poets publishing their second book, and we want the prize to reflect these challenges—an author’s second book frames the voice and presence more solidly."

"The fact that Norton's poetry editor is one of the judges of the contest together with the poetry faculty judges of Barnard, makes this a truly collaborative project with a mutually satisfying result. I can feel certain that Norton will support my book and put as much effort into promoting it as any other on their list," said Wolff.

Barnard had worked for 15 years with Beacon Press, establishing a noted award for an author’s first book of poems. Barnard’s original poetry award was acclaimed as "the best series currently introducing new writers to the public" by Booklist, and poet Mona Van Duyn remarked that it was "this series that has most consistently convinced us that, in the rich and multi-directional advances of American poetry, young women are in the forefront." This tradition of excellence is being continued through the new award presented to Wolff.

Wolff’s first book, Manderley, was selected for the 2000 National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky, and received critical acclaim. Publisher’s Weekly wrote that it "tears mosses off the old manse of Du Maurier's haunted classic Rebecca, tosses them with a heady late ’90s bravura."

Wolff earned a MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1993 and founded the literary journal Fence in 1997. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Grand Street, Exquisite Corpse, and other journals. She lives in New York City where she edits Fence and works as a freelance copyeditor.

The Barnard Women Poets Prize was first awarded in 1986 to Patricia Storace for Heredity, chosen by judge Louise Bernikow. Other past winners include Donna Masini (That Kind of Danger chosen by Mona Van Duyn), Ruth Forman (We Are the Young Magicians chosen by Cherrie Moraga), Jena Osman (The Character chosen by Lyn Hejinian), Larissa Szporluk (Dark Sky chosen by Brenda Hillman), Christine Hume (Musca Domestica chosen by Heather McHugh) and Reetika Vazirani (White Elephants chosen by Marilyn Hacker).

Known for the strength of its writing program, Barnard includes among its faculty and novelists Mary Gordon ’71 and Caryl Phillips, and poets Claudia Rankine and Saskia Hamilton. Each year, literary scholars from around the world join the staff. This year’s guest lecturers include poet Marie Ponsot, British author Bernadine Evaristo, and fiction writer Sheri Holman.

Barnard’s notable literary alumnae also include Zora Neale Hurston ’28, Francine du Plessix Gray ’52, June Jordan ’57, Erica Jong ’63, Ntozake Shange ’70, Jhumpa Lahiri ’89, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, and Edwidge Danticuat ’90. In addition to Lahiri, six of Barnard’s alumnae in journalism have won or shared the Pulitzer Prize, including novelist and Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen ’74, who is currently chair of the Barnard Trustees; Natalie Angier ’78, author and science writer for The New York Times; Rose Marie Arce ’86 and Suzanne Bilello ’77, members of a Newsday team which shared the Pulitzer for spot news reporting in 1992; and Eileen McNamara ’74, who won the Pulitzer in 1997 for commentary in The Boston Globe; and Katherine Boo ’88 who was recognized for her work at The Washington Post for a series on abuse in District of Columbia group homes.

W.W. Norton & Company is the nation’s largest independent, employee-owned book publishing firm. Founded in 1923, the firm now publishes 450 books annually in its combined divisions. Its poetry program presents works by National Book Award winners including Adrienne Rich, Gerald Stern, A.R. Ammons, Marilyn Hacker, and Ai, as well as former U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, and Robert Pinsky. Norton continues to adhere to its original motto, "Books that Live," striving to works of enduring distinction in the realm of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and textbooks.

THE PALM OPEN AND FACING OUT TO THE WORLD

The fantasy is so ... Real

FROM THE (AR)RESTED MIND

I've written tons of prose poems. I love that form. When I emptied my mind and helped facilitate the birth of hay(na)ku, it's ironic to me that I ended up facilitating a highly compressed form -- metaphorically (for me) the opposite of the type of prose poems I've been writing for years (that a reviewer once called "baroque"). Kewl. Whatever. It's all purrrrr-fectly pitched.

Cat Hay(na)ku
--for Gary

Purrrrrrrrr
-fect pitch
is is hissssssss

WORDLESS POEMS: THE RAM SERIES

"Ram" means "God" and my blog, Love's Last Gasps (LLG), features two poems from my "Ram Series." The underlying concept behind the series reflects my June 22, 2003 post (scroll below). I wrote the first "Ram Poem" -- entitled "Ideal Coping" -- on LLG where the text of the poem was the word "Ram" repeated over and over. Shortly after I wrote it, I realized that you could use the same body of the text for a lot of poems and just change the title of the poem, as I did with the second poem on LLG entitled "Is This Thy Will?"

The result -- a marvelous result, in my view -- are books that need not be written: say, extremely THICK volume of poems where all the text is "Ram, Ram, Ram....." and where each poem is differentiated simply by the titles. But I'll stick with the Conceptual Idea without needing to write or publish such books. Or I could envision publishing the books with the explanation of the body of the text and just publish the different titles (helps minimize cutting down the trees that way). This all seems appropriate if one is to believe that (i) God and Poetry encompasses all (or, for the latter, that Poetry can encompass all); and (ii) that Poetry is not just words.

The Rested Mind. CorpsePoetics. Last but not least, to repeat the word "Ram" over and over -- that is, if one were to read a poem from the "Ram Series" -- is perhaps to engender a similar experience as one feels in repeating the word "Om."

BLOOM, YOU YOUNG POETS

The poetics of a "Rested Mind." I had an idea that it may be impossible, or certainly very difficult, for me to write from the perspective of a "Corpse" -- from a "Rested Mind." So I finished a bottle of wine and decided to go for it. Well, I find my mind rests -- at least momentarily -- when I am witnessing young poets. There is a different type of energy at the beginning of a process -- before experience exerts influence.

It's a joy to see a bud begin to bloom. And though the process -- for flowers and poets -- may be not be easy, there's a certain calmness in knowing that what is going on is a blooming, a necessary and vivid and beautiful growing.

I find blooming very evocative. It's like how I've always treasured the metaphor of the Blue Event Horizon. As my memory is a sieve, I may get this wrong now (I should google this topic or something before bothering to write on it but, ya know, I wanna rest my mind). As I remember it -- or have transformed it within my memory -- the "Blue Event Horizon" is a line surrounding a black hole. Black holes contain immense gravity so that, theoretically, they pull things traveling in space (chunks of meteors, etc) into their void; there's always a rush of energy surrounding them. And if it were possible for someone to witness the fall of matter into a black hole, you would see, however, that within the Blue Event Horizon, things become suspended. You can never see the fall complete itself. You see the fall-ing, never the fall.

There's an ecstasy in falling; I'm not that interested in the end of that fall. (This is not to say I privilege the falling over the fall -- a topic for another day.)

Huh. I just conflated blooming with falling. Interesting what happens when the mind "rests."

Anyway, my mind finds a certain calm in witnessing the blooming. And I was blessed to have my mind so eased last night during the book launch for Barbara Jane Reyes' first book, Gravities of Center.

Barbara asked me to say a few words during the celebration, partly to reflect my role as her editor of the manuscript. Having just downed a glass of pale ale, I babbled something about how -- though I write and edit books -- I have a conflicted relationship with the "book" of poetry as I feel a book (like the page, like words) never quite capture the totality of the poetic experience. For instance, Barbara's poems are formed partly by her engagement with her "community," some of whom showed up last night for the celebration. They included Tony Robles whose work I've enjoyed for quite some time now, as well as these two young poets whose performance I saw for the first time:

Jason Bayani (with whom I'd traded a few e-mails in the past but met for the first time), the freshly-crowned San Francisco Grand Slam Performance Champion, Berkeley Chapter! I probably mangled that title but -- you go, Sweetie! I was so happy to be wearing a black blazer (of course, notwithstanding the blog name changes, this is still all about me!) when he delivered the lines:

You look so good in black i can only imagine you with one less article of clothing off....

Line after penetrating line from Jason! Here's another one:

I'm afraid of you the way I'm afraid of Christian Fellowship meetings.

Ooooomph! And I got the same .... uh, oooomph from his cohort Josh Wheeler more known as "Messej1" Messej1 also messaged out (I know, that was a horrid pun but I'm sober as I write this) this powerful poem about bike messengers, with such lines as:

....unscientific physics of the streets....

....you simply look for Murphy's Law -- what can go wrong, will go wrong....

....I stop to call my girlfriend. "Hey. Nothin'. I just want to hear your voice...."

These peeps have, as Messej1 said in another poem, "bullets [that] move through mouths, not guns." Jason and Messej1, along with Rupert Estanislao, Leonard Shek, Mush and Jaglee will be delivering their poetry this Thursday, June 26 (8-10 p.m.) at Locus 1640 Post (betw. Webster and Buchanan) San Francisco.

Also helping to celebrate Barbara's book was Teri Untalan, composer of "songs and other stuff" -- said "stuff" definitely including poetry -- who sang and played the guitar. The San Francisco Bay Times' Tom Kelly sure got it right (I first typed "write") when he said about Teri, "magnificent voice completely at her imaginative control...combines crystalline clarity with formidable...evocative power, providing sensual surprises with every note."

Check out Teri -- along with Barbara and Gennifer Hirano, the Asian Princess-Performance Artist-- at "Passion: 3 Women, 3 Voices" on June 29, 7:30 p.m., Romeo 5 Asian Art Cafe & Bar, Kinokuniya Bldg., Japan Center, 1581 Webster, 2nd Floor, San Francisco.

And, by the way, what a pleasure to spend some time with poet, editor and simply nice guy Del Ray Cross whose Shampoo has been supportive of Barbara's poems, some of which are featured in her book. We spoke partly on blogging (of course) and his thoughts about how he may (may, not will) get involved in this form. I spoke about the challenge of WinePoetics in trying to deliver a fictitious persona, an effort that often collapsed since the author is still known to be me and I do incorporate elements of my own life....well, enough about me and here's a poem by Barbara to celebrate her first poetry book!

*****

FORETELLINGS
After Kenneth Tanemura’s poem of the same name

We awaken in Banaue, as the fog lifts itself marvelously, revealing terraced rice paddies through the open bedroom window of our temporary home. I scribble poem after poem here, ceaselessly capturing every moment of another vagabond summer. With his smooth arms wrapped around my shoulders and my face tucked beneath his unshaven chin, with the plain white sheets of our tiny bed bunched at our feet, shrouded by mosquito netting draping the narra wood floor, we wonder if there are still quiet corners in my ancestors’ archipelago where we may spend next season.

Cradled between his knees in a galvanized metal tub barely large enough to fit the both of us, I light my cigarette and he methodically washes every inch of my rapidly growing hair. In the afternoon, he settles at his ancient mahogany desk, fountain pen poised between thumb and forefinger. Scratching its well-worn gold plated nib upon coarse cream colored paper, he insists upon writing the most tormented of memoirs, but I have the habit of casually plopping myself down in his lap, straddling his torso, my bare feet dangling just a couple of inches above the floor. I insist instead, we have a lifetime to which we can look forward. He rolls his eyes at me, mutters tantrum, privately reveling in my intrusion.

CHANGE IS NOT DEPARTURE

Passage

Ram
Ram Ram
Ram Ram Ram
Ram Ram Ram Ram
Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram
Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram
Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram
Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram


Thank you, Jean Gier, for calling me a "Radiant Corpse" -- naturally, I preened and will be sure to inflict that phrase many a time in the future upon my eight million peeps. And thank you, Tom Beckett, for your "impromptu Hay(na)ku in celebration of "CorpsePoetics":

Laying
down, nothing
is clear, love

In renaming my blog CorpsePoetics, I didn't erase the reference to WinePoetics (and the blog address remains the same at "http://winepoetics.blogspot.com" despite the change in name). Change is not synonymous with departure, and I believe history is significant, that the past is part of Identity, and that part of my lineage of pain involves erased histories and the need to recover what has been erased. Undoubtedly, as CorpsePoetics unfolds, these themes will be expanded, though they were addressed earlier, too, through WinePoetics*.

I suppose I feel that one need not grow by leaving others (whether people or matters). My past, however, is replete with such departures. Perhaps some were unavoidable or for the best, but I now realize that I probably didn't need to end my engagements with many of these former friends and, moving forward, I'd like not to make the same mistakes. Beauty -- and Poetry -- is fashioned in so many ways and I hope my eyes are not as easily dismissive as they have been.

Fortunately, for you oenophile-readers who are worriedly-querying (please, peeps, rest your mind -- be a Radiant Corpse like me! -- don't worry, be happy!), the idea that change is not the same as departure also means that I still will share wine recommendations (though have released myself from the requirement that I must post such a recommendation every day). From this weekend's wine tastings, I enjoyed and recommend the 2001 Pride Viognier, 2000 Behrens & Hitchcock "King of the Gypsies" cabernet, and the R. Buller & Sons Fine Muscat. The latter is the Australian gem I mentioned in my June 19 post, and features no year as it was blended "Solera" style -- which is to say, blended from wine from a variety of years, ranging from harvests of 10 to 80 years ago.

And, now, I'd like to share a *found* prose poem -- a caption to an image in the new publication Namarupa. The image it captions can be found at the magazine's site as a black-and-white photograph by Martin Brading of a man writing in a notebook, Asutos Baba:

CAPTION

Asutos Baba is one of the more extreme renunciates, or one who follows severe ascetic practices. We found him lying on the side of the road, writing the name of God (in this case Ram**) in his notebook, as he does for three to five hours every day. This practice, called Likhita Japa, was given to him by his guru, Jaya Gurudev, back in September 2000. Thus far, he has copied the name 2.5 lakh (250,000) times and has taken a vow to continue on to 84 lakh. He will then offer all this to the sacred River Ganga. His guru also told him to have all his teeth removed (which he did and was happy to show us), as he had too much of a liking for solid food. He lives in remote jungles and cooks on people's funeral pyres whenever possible. He was wearing a homemade sackcloth outfit (another act of penance, or "tapas,' as it is known in India). He wouldn't accept any money (though he did take a new pen after much persuasion), nor would he look at the camera, but kept his attention focussed on his notebook and its endless Ram, Ram.

============

This weekend, I told a poet how much his poems moved me. Perhaps my enthusiastically-delivered praise embarassed him or *something* as he said, "Let's not exagerrate." As gently as I could -- and as firmly as I could -- I replied, "I NEVER exagerrate when it comes to Poetry. NEVER."

Split Ziggurat Hay(na)ku
--for Liza

Ram,
Ram, Ram,
Ram, Ram, Ram





-------------------
* For example, these factors helped affect my exploration of the prose poem, a form that I had adopted partly to set up long lines that reflected my former ability to hold breath for a long time. When my breathing changed and I felt compelled to shorten the long line, I used periods to shorten lines, in the same way one could use line-breaks to accomplish the same thing. But I still retained the paragraph form, not wishing to replace it with, say, free-verse stanzas. I didn't wish to depart from the prose poem paragraph just because the nature of my breathing had changed and could no longer accommodate breath-based long lines -- I wanted to keep showing my respect for that form, a form that fully reciprocated my love. Yes, "reciprocated my love" -- didn't I tell you, Peeps, that poems are living, breathing critters?

** There is a brief dash-line over the "a" in "Ram" which I can't reproduce in blog-format.

"THE CORPSE SMILES AND SAYS, 'HELLO...'"

will I recognize the moment when I start to repeat myself & become predictable?
--Ron Silliman

Eileen always articulates the things I can't pin down re: The magic relationship I have with my poems, as w/ friends -- ecstatic, churning, wonderful, privileged, always alive.
--Li Bloom

Thank you Li. But I am failing all the time. Because I am a poet. And Poetry is not words.

Shall I tell you Peeps a story? And the whispered "Yes" from eight million Peeps flare across her screen. And the sound is of ten thousand beds of jasmine dying to heighten the perfume of white petals. This shall be a story of how poems -- whether yours or mine -- interact with me.

Each poem sears my flesh.

Oh, it's not painful. At the center of Poetry, there is no pain. There simply Is.

Dear Peeps, here's one secret: Is is molten...

For me, poems are physical. They're critters. Like, just as I write this, there is a Poem that can never be articulated about a man thousands of miles away smiling now as he thinks of me. A pained smile. A sweet smile. He has made me weep often -- this man. Wine cannot eradicate him. I can only cease my tears by eradicating myself.

Hay(na)ku is a poetic form that I could claim to have invented. But it wasn't. It was birthed by many parents -- by a community of poets. The birthing occured when I eradicated myself. Hay(na)ku, therefore, is also my transition now to the next phase of "my" Blog:

This is the last post of WinePoetics. This is the first post of Savasana Poetics -- of "CorpsePoetics."

This is a Farewell. This is a Hello.

"Laying down on the ground, like a corpse, is called sava-asana. It removes fatigue and gives rest to the mind."
--from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika of Yogin Swatmarama

Savasana Poetics: The Corpse Smiles and Says, "Hello."

I am exploring a "Corpse's Poetics" specifically because I don't know it.

I don't write what I know. I write to know.

I am also an exhausted poet. I want to know "rested mind."

The Is that is a Void yawns, then smiles. Hello.

The Corpse glows golden and beams: Hello. Hello. Hello!

BLESSED BY YOUR HAY(NA)KU

Well, okay!! Or, rather: Hay naku!!! As judge Barbara Jane Reyes puts it with absolutely no irony: this was really very hard! i really did enjoy reading these!

So many of you submitted with absolutely fabulous Hay(na)ku. It was impossible to pick one top winner. So we picked three winners. But even the three couldn’t accommodate the many fine offerings. So Barbara, backed against the wall, chose three poets, but I also share below equally marvelous offerings by others. As we all are sophisticated peeps here, I’m sure we all realize that a contest’s outcome depends on who the judge is; had I or someone else judged, the outcome may be different. So this is to say that if your name and poem is even mentioned in this post, you already did well, you Sweetie-Peeps. Barbara’s choices, in no particular order for the top position, are

Tom Beckett
Jon Pineda
Dennis Somera

Other masterful hay(na)ku poets reveal themselves to be Stephen Kirbach, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Luis Cabalquinto, Kenneth Tanemura, Terri Leigh Relf, Kasey Mohammad, Benito "Sunny" Vergara, Bill Freind, Shirlie Mae Mamaril, Clayton Couch, Michael Snider, Michael Helsem and Rosanne Virata.

Here then are all the winning Hay(na)ku with some commentary:

TOM BECKETT

Three Hay(na)ku: a sequence

Ghost
world split
in human halves

Shadow
man, shadow
woman making love

Bodies--
apples bumping
bruised in sack

Comments: Barbara chose the first “Ghost” hay(na)ku for “working the line breaks quite deftly. it's so quiet and potent.” Since we noticed that Tom had characterized his three-hay(na)ku submission as a “sequence” and because Ms. WinePoetics has a soft heart, we decided to feature all three.

===========

JON PINEDA

After Reading Shakespeare, I Contemplate Breakfast And English Literature

Tomorrow
tomorrow, tomorrow
I'm still hungry

America

Brown
clouds blossom
into your chrysanthemums

Barbara’s comments: the title "after reading shakespeare, i contemplate breakfast and english literature" being larger than the poem itself -- this i find amusing and apt, this vague unkept promise of tomorrow; title and poem together are loaded with all kinds of post-colonial meaning! as regards “america,” in "dirges" i am attracted to the assigning of persona to natural phenomena. i am interested in how this poem reads as a dirge; what is being mourned and who is in mourning?

==============

DENNIS M. SOMERA

uno
Oo Op`o
me me me

uno
yeah joe
ako ako ako

uno
Oo Op`o
siac siac siac

uno
si si
sica sica siac

uno
si si
sica siac sica

uno
dos xx's
tres tres tresses

uno
si si
moi moi moi

uno
sica saan
awan awan awan

uno
ilokano
tagalog english espagnol

Comments: Barbara sez: dennis somera's polyglot spanish/tagalog/ilocano/french series works the sound quality and code switches language in each subsequent hay(na)ku to create a narrative. dennis employs very simple words (mostly pronouns) and a deceptively simple (ac)counting of pronouns. i also can't help being impressed with his use of ilocano, which i rarely ever see written: siac and sica (ilocano for "I" and "you"). (Submissions were limited to five per poet, but after Barbara chose from Dennis’s series, we decided to publish his entire series.)

===========

We also enjoyed these fine offerings. Maraming Salamat! Agyamanac Unay! Thank you, Everyone!

FIVE BY STEPHEN KIRBACH

slaphappy
doodads confound
sunder unto doublespeak

acrobat
dapper before
it’s too late

anagrammatic
reticulant hash
blooper cartoony perchance

trundle
ye thunk
fabulant babble begone

sidle
stray slipper
dapple banter kerplash

===================

TWO BY AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

PEACOCK

Green
feathers burst--
large confetti thrown


FROM THE PLANE

Pools
look like
little blue margaritas.

=============

TWO BY LUIS CABALQUINTO

DURIAN

Past
The smell --
You've licked it!


PAYO NG MAGULANG

Buhay:
Kapag may
Hirap, may ginhawa.

A loose translation of this Tagalog hay(na)ku is “life: even though there is difficulty, there is also comfort." It’s interesting how so few tagalog words can say so much.

==============

TWO BY KENNETH TANEMURA

Daytona,
Ah, Daytona,
Ah, Daytona, Ah...

You
Go, I
Stay: sixty autumns

===============

FIVE BY TERRI LEIGH RELF

this
just in--
lies at 11:00

first
date--you
touch your toto

billy
goat--braying
on the spit

bagoong
with dinner--
now kiss me!

phone
call--cops
asking for donations

===============

FOUR BY K. SILEM MOHAMMAD

receiver
hovers over
the telephone cradle

frog
jumps in
old [kerplunk] pond

attic
noise: scurry ::
scurry :: scurry :: BAM!

Nada's
descending scale:
*wah wah wah*

=================

BENITO “SUNNY” VERGARA

Green
leaves insist
on the moon.

=============

FIVE BY BILL FREIND

mt. fuji webcam

elsewhere
water in
a white box


reresigned

a
silence crammed
with planes, be-ish


still, "it was probably a fairly significant impact"

buttoning
the contaminated
dumbshow, ketamine prairie


fewer copies

thank
god for
the clear macaw


what does that whistle mean?

triumph
demands pureé,
o deductive motherfucker

================

A SEQUENCE OF FOUR BY SHIRLIE MAE MAMARIL

Pag-alay
Four hay(na)kus
For my mother

Sayaw
her feet
gliding across wood

Kamay
gentle, loving
roughened from overwork

Merienda
all day
symbols of love

Nanay
strong woman
a daughter's foundation

Translation notes: pag-alay is offering; sayaw is dance; kamay is hand; merienda is snack; Nanay is Mom

================

CLAYTON COUCH

paradise
hotel slanders
quiet rainy night

================

THREE FROM MICHAEL SNIDER

meetings
all day
while Cobras chatter

bored,
I tape
numbers on fighters

nothing
but code
fills the window

=================

MICHAEL HELSEM

Mormon
cricket flood
like poetry wars

===========

ROSANNE VIRATA

reluctantly
I am
missing his magnificence

======================

As promised, the top three winners will receive the following four books. Others will receive two of the following books (such choice depending simply on which best Ms. WinePoetics – who is in the midst of moving – must send out to help ease her packing). I toast you all with my glass; tonight in it the 1996 Luna Cabernet (Napa Valley). WINNERS: PLEASE E-MAIL ME YOUR SNAILMAIL ADDRESSES OTHERWISE YOU DON'T GET THE GOODIES:

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 by Barry Schwabsky (forthcoming from Meritage Press, Fall 2003).

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole by Eileen Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002)

100 More Jokes From The Book of the Dead by John Yau and Archie Rand (Meritage Press, 2001)

Gravities of Center by Barbara Jane Reyes (2003, Arkipelago Books)

MY IMPISH FRIEND SHOUTS OUT: HAY (NA)KU!!!

The Hay(na)ku Contest results are being tallied as we speak and should be blogged shortly. Meanwhile, Michelle Bautista gets in the way of the count to poke:

Hey Eileen,

yeah, i know i totally blew the haynaku deadline. been crazy this week with work and everything else. strange, contests don't really inspire me to write poems, i always end up hearing the poems after the contests are finished.

anyway...

h(Ay)naku, Eileen

Eileen
I lean
Eileen, I lean

***
hehehehe
it's friday -michelle

========

Okay, Michelle. It's Friday. You as punchy as I am, too:

Happy
Friday. Hay(na)ku
Results Soon To Be Announced

--and if that third line broke the form, hic: it's because I'm with Michelle: I detest "poetry contests" because

Hay(na)ku
is not
a Poetry Contest

LOOKIT'!!!

Okay okay okay. So one of you poet-sweeties told me today that you enjoy my blog even though, cough, you usually "skip the wine parts." I'ma like, Sip: Dude -- I clearly have got to better my training of youse! Don't you understand? Poetry is EVERYTHING! If you were just to stick to what interests you, why the roasted patootie would your poetry ever develop along any kinda interesting line that .... might interest anyone else?

Haven't you ever heard that saying about poets: that, really, our lives really are not that interesting to others so we should try to make sure we write ... beyond our lives? Not to say, we should avoid writing about our lives, but you know: howzabout expanding our horizons a leeeetle, toooo?

Now: pay attention to my wine chatter!!!! Do you not see how I suffer doing research so I can do a wine recommendation du jour on this blog blog blog?!!!

Sip.

That's "Sip" for research.

So, anyway, I told the hubby about my wonderful write-up today from Ron Silliman. (At a minimum, I thought maybe the news -- given its humongous "cultural capital" -- would stop Tom from joking in the future about the "opportunity costs" from my career switch from banking to poetry.) Being a lawyer, Tom replied quite on point with: "You know that Australian desert muscat we liked that we have been drinking a lot of? I got another 12 bottles at $10.99/bottle. Parker gave it 97 points!"

"Parker" is Robert Parker, a lawyer turned wine-critic (hmmmm...I think that's what Tom wants to be) whose ratings can make or break a vintner's sales. Well, since oenophiles -- and not just poets -- read this blog, I'll share this information (but, by the way, for $10.99 a bottle, it may be within budget for some of you poet-peeps peeping at me as well):

R.L. Buller & Son
Premium Fine Muscat NV

Check out this wine description; ain't it poetic! (Have I mentioned here before that my "entry" into fine wine was through the wine tasting jargon?)

This wine is nearly flawless. Fabulously perfumed as well as unctuously textured, it offers incredible notes of prunes, raisins, honey, molasses, roasted nuts, etc., etc. Australia continues to be a treasure trove for fortified, after-dinner wines. Once bottled, they do not change, and often age up to a decade where well stored. After opening, most will last for a week. This is one of the top wine discoveries of this year's tastings. Many consumers are going to be overjoyed with this offering.

Granted, I think that description is by the wine's promoter but, Sip: "Unctous," peeps. The wine is UNCTUOUS! Sip. (Oh, I'ma sipping another bottle of the neighbor's: a 2001 Dutch Henry chardonnay (Los Carneros).) To place an order for this Aussie gem -- AND THIS IS A SO-CALLED "LIMITED OFFER" -- call Frank Hanson Jr. at (800) 966-5432 or contact him at frankhanson@thewineclub.com. Don't ever say I don't give you gems of wisdom!

So, after I said, "That's nice, Dear" to Tom about said Aussie gem, I then nudged him again -- "Did you go to Ron Silliman's blog?"

Being a lawyer, he got on point again: "So this Ron Silliman fellow is calling you a 'vinter'."

Uh, I thought. "Uh," I said.

Tom followed up, still on point: "What do you tell these poets about yourself anyway?"

"Uh," I began...then continued, "Well, I sort of tell them I'm a budding grape farmer in Napa...."

"And?" Tom said, since he knows me so well.

"Well," I said through my wine, "Some peeps think that means I'm a winemaker. A vintner."

"Peeps?"

Cough. I coughed, then muttered (albeit a charming mutter), "I mean, some people are under the impression that I now make wine."

"Let me get this straight," Tom said. "You, the peep who once melted a tea kettle on the stove when you wanted to make hot water are supposed to be making wine?"

Sip. I, uh, nodded my head "Uh, huh."

He's still laughing, Peeps. And it's been at least six hours since our conversation. And that was the first time I ever discussed Ron Silliman with my husband.

FOR RON SILLIMAN: DIOS TI AGNGINA*

Double Hay(na)ku With Duck Tail**

Susmariosep!
Ron's Faith
like green mango

salted
by bagoong
for the paradox

of Sweetness, sweet

+++++
*"Dios ti agngina" -- an Ilokano phrase of gratitude that translates to "God will be the one to return the favor"

**A duck's tail is brief, helping to inspire the *form* of the last line for the above Double Hay(na)ku. But I also had in mind this type of haircut called "duck tail" where a lock of hair remains much longer than the rest of trimmed hair, flowing down one's back. Poetry -- one need not make it up; it surrounds us and we need only see...

================

Today is the last day to send poems for the Hay(na)ku Contest! And thanks Sweetie Aimee for your post today; check out Aimee's Gila Monster blog for two wonderful White Stripes Hay(na)ku!

MUTE POETICS

“NOVAMUTE”

Angel is coming Is opening christ's tomb Is at the top of the tree Is in the sun Is watching dragon tones Is a centerfold Is my watermark Is the devil Is standing up Is essentially a microchip device designed to be worn close to the body Is a pit bull So what? Irony is so not dead Is at cheap price in U.K. Is code Is so tasty Is a special category of comedy Is derived from the greek eiron Is often implicit Is novamute Is like god or germs or voice mail Is a subdivision of tone Is a deaf kid playing soccer with a diabetic So what? Verticality is done using the two ropes Is celebrated with the towering space of the stair hall Is reinforced by the exposed roof structure and the chimney that extends from the fireplace to the roof Is accentuated by streaks of erosion caused by rain Is epitomized by the skyscraper Is ended in bulb Is allowed in pygmies than in standard dairy breeds Is allowed in dwarves than in standard dairy breeds Is enhanced by the spandrels between the windows Is the key Is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic Is complemented by the single strip pilaster on each face of the tower So what? Horizontality is violated in some cases when lava flows down hills Is totally intentional Is applied as a particular way of thinking about tents Is being left Is our new mentality Is not strictly applicable to volcanic rocks Is emphasized by the water table Is salient in the first step Is affected by no Is found in the mosque at Cordoba Is too raw Is a sign of mirage conditions Is that we forget god with the excuse of serving our neighbours Is measured by water Is linked to insufficiency So What? Squirrels are their teeth Are principally nuts Are chewing on electrical Are the ratufa which can grow to up to 3 feet in length Are used in artist's brushes Are rodent Are the disruption at bird feeders So what? Transcendence is an unmet need Is from absinthe films Is a miami based alternative/modern rock band with a twist of their own style Is commited to supporting the exploration of the rich variety of tantra as a spiritual path Is a dark fantasy game taking place in europe during the dark ages Is a 5 Is his first comic Is the entry into the ethical Is an affirmation Is immanent Is necessarily attended by problems of reentry Is frighteningly within our grasps So what? Matthew Barney is very interested in his balls Is a mutant form Is the daddy of bjork's baby? Is orlans haar grime niet sculptural So what? Cobalt can’t be googled as “Googlism doesn’t know enough about cobalt yet” So what?

Translation is not the word Is no magic Is broken Is a hoot and helps web users discover one of the great new idle distractions of the moment Is a cooperative activity Is the art of failure Is a natural human function like breathing Is a cost Is returned Is "hot rear end" but is used to refer to a "woman who is willing to jump into bed with any man" Is based on the text of the explanation of the method of mental prayer So what? Inarticulate is actually a law graduate Is a small mountain to climb Is feasting on a dinner of spare ribs So what? Berlin is waiting Is pretentious Is one of those strange movies that critics will heap adoration upon Is divided into seven research departments Is possible? So what? Border is burning Is just a line on a map eh? Is you Is a nested table with a background of black Is opaque Is edged in blue Is a sieve Is quite startling being backed by the wonderful green of the monterey pine with rosa rugosa “red max graf” climbing up into it Is silver border Is gold So what? Circle is still unbroken Is not a valentine Is a non Is not simply round Is defecting Is with me in every aspect of the work I do Is in contact with a tangent line Is not a side project Is not for observers; it is participatory and experiential So what?

Oh Poet, Without Opposition, What Is At Your Center?

So. What? So. What?

===========

She finishes her latest, then reaches for the left-over bottle of 2001 Dutch Henry Chardonnay and begins to live the words of a poem sent to her today by one of her Sweetie-Peeps. It's worthy of a toast because it is a gift. She treasures all gifts. But it doesn't cancel loneliness either: Ms. WinePoetics is always always alone:

Drinking Alone with the Moon
By Li Bau, Trans. by Vikram Seth

A pot of wine among the flowers.
I drink alone, no friend with with me.
I raise my cup to invite the moon.
He and my shadow and I make three.

The moon does not know how to drink;
My shadow mimes my capering;
But I'll make merry with them both --
And soon enough it will be Spring.

I sing -- the moon moves to and fro.
I dance -- my shadow leaps and sways.
Still sober, we exchange our joys.
Drunk -- and we'll go our separate ways.

Let's pledge -- beyond human ties -- to be friends,
And meet where the Silver River ends.

HEY Y'ALL! HEY(NA)KU!

A Reminder
By Michael Snider

hay(na)ku
by Thursday--
sleep and poetry!

I love it. Thanks to Mike Snider's Formal Blog for posting a sweet reminder on tomorrow's deadline for the Hay(na)ku Poetry Contest! But what I also adored is how I think he inadvertently typed "Hey(na)ku" in the comments section on his blog....and that replacement of "Hey" is just purrrr-fecto. Hey -- addressing "you" Sweeties to submit!

Thomas Fink also had a marvelous idea for a future variation of "hay(na)ku" -- something that I should have thought more about since Vince Gotera had also called this form "Stairstep Tercets" (except I was too busy imbibing to tax my mind with thinking). That is, Tom thought that one should consider more the "visual" aspect -- I interpret his comment to mean that in addition to the form being lines of one word, two words and three words.....that the words chosen may also create the half-ziggurat (couldn't resist: I simply love the word "ziggurat") effect of visually creating steps....

Well, we've had the "Dyslexic Hay(na)ku" first written (albeit inadvertently) by Luisa Igloria. We also now have the "Hey(na)ku" variation offered (though inadvertently, too?) by Mike Snider as a form that does a direct address of sorts to the reader. And now we've got the "Split Ziggurat Hay(na)ku" suggested by Thomas Fink and Vince Gotera. And, earlier, Vince also had suggested the "Double Hay(na)ku"! I just love these variations....I don't have to do anything except just sit here and cheerfully drink my way through the cellar! The Poetry evolves beyond the poet -- as it should, always has and always will!

Sip. And dang that I'ma only sippin' morning coffee here cause I feel like celebrating. I mean, Peeps -- lookit at how we've created this poetic form, that began simply when I was packing through my studio, stumbled across an old "Counting Journal" and so on and so on in a process documented through Da Blahg! I'ma tellin' ya Peeps interested in *innovation*: Try it my way! First, get an M.B.A. in economics -- or don't get an M.B.A. but always -- go down the road of Drunken Boxing! Sip. Hmmm...that reminds me of when Linh Dinh issued a poetry chapbook entitled Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press 1998). Sip. Anyway....

And Maraming Salamat as well to Stephanie Young who's posted a hay(na)ku on her nourishing blog!

For Eileen. Las Vegas on the head.

Metrograde,
a nap
of las vegas.

Metrograde the retrograde way! Thank you Sweetie! I love it love it....a nap of Las Vegas. "Nap" is purr-fect for me because there really is no "map" to LV. LV is like a poem -- the visitor gets out of it what the visitor puts into it. Like, the last time I visited LV, for example, I didn't gamble once....but did nap a lot during the day and attend shows at night, as well as had tons of steak dinners which were all relatively inexpensive because gambling subsidized many of the alternative entertainment. LV has a multilayered lanscape -- like a poem -- and I've never forgotten Meena Alexander once telling me something I found very helpful when confronted by so-called "difficult" poems: the doorway into a poem can occur in different parts of a poem per reader....so that you need not even "get" the entirety of a poem to enjoy or have a meaningful engagement with that poem: you may just get your subjective frisson from, say, one line or one stanza. Why not? To me, that, too, can be a fine way to experience the poem -- like experiencing Las Vegas by enjoying it without necessarily gambling.

Anyway, one of you Sweetie-peeps also wrote wanting to know more about the term "Hay naku." It is Tagalog. "Hay" is like "oh" and "naku" combines the words "Ina Ko" which means "my mother." So, "Hay naku" might be literally translated as "Oh, my mother."

But of course it means more than its literal translation (again, like a poem!) "(H)Ay, naku" is like "my goodness" or, at times, "oh shit" -- usually as an expression of shock or disbelief. Michelle Bautista reminded me recently that a "lovely full phrase" is "ay, naku, susmariosep!"

"Susmariosep" (pronounced soos-mah-ri-oh-sep) is actually a personal favorite of mine among Filipino phrases, and shortens the referenced to "Jesus, Mary, Joseph!"

Ms. WinePoetics pushes up her metaphorical glasses on her enchanting and enchantingly tiny nose to continue her lecture plaigarized liberally from an e-mail from Michelle:

"Hay naku" is actually quite an interesting play on words because it uses the Spanish word "hay" where the "h" is not pronounced. Filipinos have an amazing knack of playing not only with Filipino words but playing and subverting Spanish, English and whatever other language we acquire.

"Thus, the phrase becomes 'There is naku.' Naku, in this way, is another expression but one of warning. Rhett tells us that "naku" by itself is an expression emphasizing warning.

"Filipinos have a way of being "efficient" with their meanings. I think double entendre is really a national pastime."

Oh sure on those doble nga entendres! My favorite has always been one coined by Jose Aguirre and Dennis Damian of Piscataway, New Jersey -- about whom Patrick Rosal says, "please give them credit since they haven't gotten credit for much else in their lives except trouble":

Use African, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Egypt, and Indonesia in the same sentence:

A-freakin' guy threw I-raq. It was qu-ait big. So I-ran into E-jeept and hit him in-da-knees-yah?

==========

Meanwhile, here's some information about our Hay(na)ku contest judge Barbara Jane Reyes, who is just coming out with her own first poetry collection! I know coz I edited it! And it was a pleasurable experience to do so. Having said that, I notice that the excerpt from my Editor's Intro in her press release below presents me as less than coherent; well, sigh -- such is my fate as Ms. WinePoetics!!

I note that Barbara's press release includes a reference to a future reading she shall be doing with Ishle Park! Lovely Ishle -- another one of my discoveries and now she's in Best American Poetry 2003! I remember when she sent me poems to apply for being a poetry editor at The Asian Pacific American Journal....then I and Eric Gamalinda gave her her first poetry reading.....Sigh, feeling my age (all 42 years) is enough to .... send me to the wine in the a.m.:

*****

Arkipelago Books Publishing is proud to announce the release of GRAVITIES OF CENTER, a book of poems by Barbara Jane Reyes.

Please join us in celebration.

Where:
Romeo 5 Asian Art Cafe and Bar in the Kinokuniya Building, Japantown
1581 Webster St., #202, S.F., 415-563-7400

When:
Sunday June 22, 2003 at 4:30 pm.

How much to get in: FREE

Sake, cocktails. ***21 AND UP, WITH ID***

Featuring special guests:
Tony Robles, author of LAKAS AND THE MANILTOWN FISH
Teri Untalan of LUSH LIFE PLAYERS
PROLETARIAT BRONZE Collective
and others TBA

GRAVITIES OF CENTER:
"...to experience Barbara's poems is to learn about the specifics of a Pilipina's experience. And it is also to experience the 'universality' of desire and loss - that is, despite the consistency of losses, the stubbornness of never-ending desire ... by
engaging us all in the poetry of Desire, you need to be as present as Barbara is in her poems. So enter these poems, and stay a while."
--Eileen Tabios, from her Preface to GRAVITIES

"Always mindful of the terrible past that still haunts her native country today, Reyes writes with urgency, but her poems contain an anger quite tempered by maturity and dignity. That past also haunts her own personal life in America: her poetry offers an acute look of what new ethnic identity means, but again, without sanctimonious complaints. Even when she writes about that other terrible topic, love, she is devastating in conveying loss, but without reaching for sentimental sympathy. At once tender and tough, her precise voice shatters us."
--Nguyen Qui Duc, Host/Producer, Pacific Time Public Radio

"Intelligent, energetic, and inventive, Reyes's writing is nourished by the confluence of cultures at which she resides as an urban twenty-first century Pilipina American. Seen as both a post-colonial chronicle and an intimate exploration of self, community, and history, Gravities of Center hovers between conventionalpoetry or prose, bending the genres until what emerges is a work that will illuminate us like 'garnet crystalline fire ... burning, to light the way back home' ."
--Jaime Jacinto, author of HEAVEN IS JUST ANOTHER COUNTRY

***
Barbara Jane Reyes's upcoming readings:

6.28.03 Saturday, 8:00 pm ODC Theatre
Joel Tan and Youthspeaks -- Queeriosity: The MONSTER Debut Ball
3153 - 17th Street @ Shotwell, SF

6.29.03 Sunday, 3:00 pm Eastwind Books of Berkeley
Joint CD/Book Launch with Ishle Park WORK IS LOVE and GRAVITIES
2066 University Avenue, Berkeley
http://www.ewbb.com

SPEAKING OF ARTHUR SZE

Black Lightning strikes again! Arthur and I are hoping to be together for your listening pleasure (and/or amusement) at the forthcoming national conference on Asian American poetry in November sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop (New York City). Await details here!

Meanwhile, Arthur is also a brilliant translator. Here's a link to one of his translations of a poem, "To the Tune of 'Telling My Most Intimate Feelings'," by Li Ch'ing-chao, with this excerpt that Ms. WinePoetics cuts-n-pastes here for .... obvious reasons, as she...sips:

When night comes,
.....................I am so flushed with wine,
I undo my hair slowly...

REDEEMING MY FAITH IN EKPHRASIS AND COLOR
(ON SHARON DOLIN AND JIM BEHRLE)

Objects in the Mirror

are angry
feel kinda betrayed. are huffy,
unappeasable. pace the room
determined. check their faces
for stray white whiskers.
wait patiently to make love.
--Jim Behrle

I've been practicing ekphrasis for a while. And I've been reconsidering ekphrasis for a while. Specifically, I'd been thinking about its inherent nature of translation, and I've become...uncertain. Because ekphrasis is partly about the thing not being the thing whose thingness it professes to be (hence my reminder of this issue when reading through Jim Behrle's terrific chaps from Pressed Wafer to stumble across the lines: "Objects in the Mirror // are angry / feel kinda betrayed").

So it was with much delight that I received and read Sharon Dolin's recently-released book, Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press) -- a collection of poems on / about/ inspired by paintings by three abstract painters: Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell and Howard Hodgkin. In fact, I thought it was a good idea to place the "Notes" to her poems in a separate section in the back of the book; the placement helps open up Sharon's poems to readers who may never see -- and need not see -- the referenced paintings in order to enjoy the poems. For instance, you don't need to know of, say, Diebenkorn's 1957 painting "Sea Wall" to enjoy the poem with the same title, that begins with

"Randomness is the opposite of being adored.

Where there is minute definition color concentrates.

Gash of green before the slip
down to sea......................where a couple embraces."

[In excerpting from Sharon's poems, I'm going to insert "....." to denote indentations or caesuras to cope with blog format]

I might wonder -- and did wonder wandering through these poems -- whether some of the indentations and caesuras were as much a visual as well as literary technique. For example, from my eye and read, the way the alternating stanzas (all couplets except for the last line) indent and don't indent in the poem "Objects" serves nicely to emphasize the "object"-ness of what the text describes. In this middle section where the three couplets refer to the same scene (unlike for other couplets that offer one object per couplet), the indentations help prevent a type of smooth flow across the three stanzas; by doing so, attention is focused singly on each couplet's thought:

"........poppies may be as orange
........as the line

down the table's center
which does not go

........with the shadow
........is blue."

*****

Much of what I enjoy about ekphrasis is how the underlying inspiration to the work enables one to transcend one's limits of imagination. This seems to me to be part of what is happening in "Ochre" which refers to Diebenkorn's 1983 woodblock print of the same name that was reproduced in Richard Diebenkorn Prints: 1948-1992 (Susan Sheehan Gallery, NY, 1993). Here's an excerpt, from which you also might glimpse what I saw: a music whose notes glint silver like sunrays spearing against stones:

"..............................I've given you two ideas:
.................forethought and afterthought
overlaid by a Venetian-green door.

You are mistaken if you think I planned it this way

only by being mistaken
..................about diagonal rose
................................beside powder blue

could I hope to swathe almost all in honey

live life not as one grand mistake
...................but as shards of thousands
................................with time to cover the bruise"

(The luminosity of a poem like this reminds me, by the way, of the works of one of my most favorite poets: Arthur Sze.)

Ekphrasis, as Sharon exemplifies, is not about verbalizing an intention (including an image). It's about letting something else begin an experience or revelation that the poet might not otherwise experience or know. But Sharon doesn't keep the experiences solipsistic -- her poems use a lot of "you" for a reason. After the above excerpt from "Ochre," the poem ends with "let the shapes -- once removed -- // move you."

Ultimately, Sharon didn't make the mistake of attempting to text-ually mimic another art work. Her ekphrastic process begins with the paintings, but the paintings appropriately are left behind in order to allow the poems become their own entities: poems. Significantly because I think it a source of strength for these poems (and is an integral part of how they become poems), Sharon incorporates an epistemological perspective that you might glean from some of the excerpts, including these lines from "Looking Again" (that's informed by Diebenkorn's 1961 painting "Seated Nude -- Black Background"):

"........................Shoes left on a patterned tile --
It's not true you never have to travel;
her knee's been cooked so long in his
attention it's burnt red as is the spot
between her breasts so fiercely shadowed
we look away to look back."

*****

"And what is seeing?" I had asked in my poem "The Color of A Scratch In Metal" (inspired by abstract expressionist paintings and a poem by Rick Barot poem entitled "Some Remarks on Color"). To the extent that you, the reader, are or will be moved by Sharon's poems, it's because Sharon did her job as a poet: she saw and then was moved by what she saw before she would write the words that would come to affect her reader(s). This means Sharon had to see proactively. As she puts it in her poem "Black Painting #1: 'No Black'," (from a series inspired by Joan Mitchell's 1964 series of the same name), "if you look/ if you insist."

Nor is such insistence the end of the "looking" experience. As Sharon puts it in "Black Painting #2: The Dead" -- "Blue winter rain / that's what you've become." These lines remind me of something I had learned as an occasional art reviewer; I learned that I could write about the visual arts in at least two different ways: by looking *at* the paint or by being *in* the paint. Sometimes, I've called the latter *being* the paint. Basically I'm talking about feeling -- a passionate and passionately radicalizing feeling -- in addition to thinking about the art you're perusing. To see "blue winter rain" and then be-come "blue winter rain" due to empathy.

And Sharon becomes, not just the paintings she's looking at but, the artists as well with her "Ode to Color" collaged from 17 different sources -- from Mark Rothko: A Biography to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour to a New York Times article referring to "two signing chimpanzees" to Paul Eluard's "L'Amour, la Poesie" to Goethe's Theory of Colours (which Philip Lamantia suggested I investigate after I did a review on master colorist and painter Joseph Marioni; the review is somewhere in my Archives). I enjoy this type of writing wherein one relies on found text to create a new entity, thus transcending original context. As with the referenced paintings, the reader need not know of Sharon's original sources to appreciate lines like

"A color will carry you
around the world immediately

Why this poverty when we deal with colors? Why comparisons?
Birch leaves are like small, pale-yellow coins, sparsely attached to twigs
which are of what hue? Lilac, from the lilacs, and violet, from the violet.

Red as the blonde-bearded face
.....bloodied by another fighting
.....over deposit cans

or as miscarried week-old life
.....draining out a full week
.....between my legs"

[A digression: replace the word "colors" with the word "poems" to see: "Why this poverty when we deal with poems? Why comparisons?" Well, certain comparisons anyway -- you peeps know what I mean....]

There are just so many gems in this long poem that receives and warrants its own section in Sharon's book:

"Black is not enough to show the absence of light."

or

"Call it the color of bark, call it
the impasse of color."

Bark as the "impasse of color"! This is the point of *reviewing* where the reviewer should just shut up and get out of the poem's way! Here are more lines:

"Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?"

or

"This placid space ...
......not so blue as we thought. To be blue,
......There must be no questions."

Blue happens to be my favorite color. Sunlit sky. Sea. The sky as unfurrowed brow or clean plate requires an uninterrupted color -- "there must be no questions." Which is to say, Simply: Accept -- as when you stand before nature, become nature, understand you are one of All and All is in you ... so that the sky becomes simply the Other's skin against your eyes now melting into the caress....

*****

In the poem "In the Honeymoon Suite," Sharon writes

"To go so inside
each person had to be mastered:

they scorned,
he and she banished

so that you and I
could reverse

up with down
then vanish.

All conversation is round"

A conversation can be a road. A poet brings what she sees and, by writing a poem about it, draws the attentive reader within its space. The conversation is circular but the line forming the circle is never visible because that line can be a limit, can define inside versus outside, when, in fact, the painting's and poem's welcome is infinite. "You" are encouraged to be-come brushstroke and word, not simply a witness to both. Here, the poet's name is Sharon Dolin but these poems are not about her. She has generously written in the aptly titled "Writing Painting: A Ghazal" [aptly titled because the word "Painting" has a line crossing through it but I can't reproduce that through blog format]

"Past desert's edge -- plum trees;
off the plain of Sharon -- the sea rung blue."

Her name is "Sharon" but she suggests go beyond her and a specific landscape evoked -- which is to say, go on your own to voluntarily commit to a deeper reading -- and you'll hear the music of the "sea rung blue."

============================

ON JIM BEHRLE AND COLORS AS ADJECTIVES

yellow footsteps of the escalator
a path of them up.
--from "Kennedy & Co." by JB

Sharon Dolin's book takes its title Serious Pink from a question by Howard Hodgkin:

Can you imagine a serious pink next to a trivial blue or even a ridiculous black?

I like this quote for matter-of-factly breaking two rules of poetry that I try to maintain for myself (which is not to say, I don't break them): generally, avoid adjectives and, specifically, avoid color adjectives.

That I find it difficult to use color adjectives in my poems makes it all the more pleasurable for me to have read Jim Behrle's poems this week through his Pressed Wafer chapbooks. There are so many wonderful things to say about his two chaps (definitely: if you want to know Jim Behrle, you can't just read his blog; you must read his poems), but I'll just focus on his deft touch with color adjectives, as in this excerpt from his poem "Beach"

"yours the whitest fingers.
eyes black from travel.
write a poem on my leg
and I will write
a poem on your leg."

Or from the simply breathtaking -- FRANKLY, IT'S JUST SIMPLY MAGNIFICENT -- chap title poem "City Point":

"freckled sky blushed by brown clouds.
no chance under. locked in."

This is the only poem I can remember that so lushly -- lyrically -- uses the word "brown." Let me add, too, that though this poem stands on its own, there is something marvelous about reading "City Point" within the context of the other poems that make up this chapbook. I definitely recommend you get the chap, rather than, say, asking Jim to e-mail the poem to you!

Anyway, speaking of the visual arts and "pink," here's a poem in its entirety from CITY POINT (Pressed Wafer, 2000).

Winter Untitled

the first reader framed by white walls.
thunder, forest, mountain hang
pecked by petunias. two trees poke
in green. a nude runs from
trees, sprinting away or sprinting
toward or just sprinting.

we hang in the Mercer Gallery.
ears hot, happy to be in.
wonder when the snow will start.

"the poetry of earth is never dead"
it's just resting,
a can of creamy tomato soup
spilled on Prospect Park this sunrise.

branches, long as arms, have fallen,
block the path. air too chilly, ridiculous.
skin pink, wanting in.

trust the two trees that twist up and stop the sun,
red for miles along the edges.
the center of the canvas untouched,
bare for winter. breath curling up
and away, or toward, like a short poem.

Gads. It just is BLISS to read what many of my peers are writing nowadays. To Sharon and Jim, I raise my glass -- tonight some 2001 Dutch Henry chardonnay. And Jim -- I fell in love with "pondlights pushed into / long shivering questionmarks / across water's skin"....to think that, from your poems, that was just a beginning to an experience that is still -- still! -- resonating!

PAKIKIRAMDAM: A POETICS
--for Jack "Your MisReads Are Golden" Kimball

I had a thought today and it horrified me.

Sip. No -- I wasn't horrified by the fact that I had a thought! I was horrified by this specific thought: Words bore me.

I thought that thought, and immediately reached for the glass for an uncivilized gulp of the 1950 Petrus! How could words bore me? I'm a poet!

And, yes, MEA CULPA MEA CULPA to all the poets, muses, fallen angels and other elements out there that also simmer within the poem-making cauldron by the window. In fact, I LOVE WORDS.

Sip. Still, at times: words bore me....! Peeps, I'ma thinking Love is just so HUGE that it even encompasses ... the boring. Sip then yawn. Yawn then sip.

Now, not to call any of you boring but this rather meandering train of thought leads me to beaming a loving gaze at you eight million peeps -- Beam, Beam A Golden Glow Atcha -- to say:

Thank you all for your receptivity to hay(na)ku! Specifically, thank you John Erhardt today for your lovely gift of 15 (fifteeeeeen!!!) hay(na)ku! You are now officially a Sweetie for such naku-poems as this one that made me giggle:

Everyone
I know
likes my snail

Peeps, do go on over to John's black-and-blue blog for more of his hay(na)ku! And please do keep sending in yours for the quickly-conceived but nonetheless fun-serious hay(na)ku contest (Deadline: this Thursday!)

And Maraming Salamat as well to Chris Murray who wrote many many lovely things -- Preeeeen! -- and then specifically noted how the hay(na)ku contest is "a real community building gesture."

Preen. And I was continuing to preen until my silky-haired head got bonked by a poker chip from one of the angels overhead. So, yes, what I want to say is that I particularly appreciate Chris' comment is the reference to "community building." I know that "community" is a word laden with much baggage -- both good and bad. I, too, have a conflicted reaction to the word. But I have to say that some of my favorite poetic projects are those where I consciously am building towards a community -- through both poetic form and content. Why? Because I think a poem doesn't fully mature without a particular community called reader(s).

I suspect (don't know for sure, but suspect) that I came to be so conscious of the reader's role because of years of wallowing in abstract paintings. Simply, what I realized from that experience is that what one sees -- undefined, non-figurative -- becomes meaningful only if the viewer fully invested in the looking experience: if I put my-self there *in* the paint -- feeling the paint rather than just looking at the painting. (What does that color evoke? What does that break in the line mean? Where am I being transported by the energy of that brushstroke?) It's a type of engagement that I also desire for readers or listeners of my poems -- that my words move them somehow to, ultimately, a revelation about themselves. This explains why I've sometimes thought the perfect book cover to one of my poetry collections (in terms of reflecting my poetics) would be a mirror.

Some of my favorite "poems" have been those that manifested most clearly my desire to integrate the reader into the work. The most vivid example to date would have to be the three weddings I did as part of the "Poems Form/From The Six Directions" (see link). The project's culmination involved receiving poems from over 100 poets representing 13 countries and half of the U.S. states. Print-outs of those poems played the integral role of being pinned by audience participants onto my original wedding dress during three performance wedding happenings.

Hay(na)ku is another example of my desire to integrate others into my poems, beginning with how I incorporated others' thoughts -- and even suggested name (by Vince Gotera) -- into this poetic form. I've spoken about that process in my June 12 posts. But I also wanted to get beyond the ego in the formation of the hay(na)ku -- integrating others' involvements, to me, was a way of ensuring form matched content. And the "content" I was interested in saying was partly that I feel the Poem transcends autobiography, as well as the poetic experience is as dependent on its audience as it is on the author. When I said earlier then that "words bore me," I possibly was thinking about how the *successful* engagement through poetry far transcends the limitations of text....and how being a poet, for me, means exposing mySelf and not just my paltry (pun intended) vocabulary.

Ultimately, this all reflects a poetics of the "pakikiramdam" -- our capacity for compassion, empathy and sympathy. Scholar and budding poet (yay!) Leny Strobel has written an essay addressing this aspect of my poetics. Available at the wonderful README site, a relevant excerpt notes:

The key concept of loob, according to Filipino philosopher/theologian Fr. Bert Alejo, has the same meaning as the Greek word Aletheia (truth revealed), Chinese Tao (the Way), or the Japanese Zen (the Unnameable). Loob has the power to shape our reality, to unite, link and connect us to our Kapwa (our fellow human being). Our loob is in a dialectical relationship with the loob of our others/kapwa through pakikiramdam (the capacity for compassion, empathy, and sympathy). The deeper our experience of our loob the more we know and feel our interconnectedness with each other, with the world, and with Nature and its Creator.

Leny had written her essay from the context of addressing Filipinos in the diaspora and how Filipinos may connect to each other in said diaspora. But it's fair to say that, for me, the community-building aspect of my poetics desires to engage with anybody and everybody. It's an impossible goal. But by acknowledging that impossibility, I come nearer to accuracy when I try to ... articulate Poetry, instead of merely lapsing to poetics.

Ms. WinePoetics beams again at her peeps. Now, altogether now, Ms. WinePoetics luminously suggests by quoting from John Erhardt:

Pretend
that you
can see me

And eight million computer screens start to glow as the peeps see *HER* -- and what they see is a wine goblet carved from a huge single diamond, its facets catching the light in some inexplicable fashion so that the facets become mirrors....and as the eight million see their reflection refracted over and over on their screens, they all realize concurrently:

WOW! AS GOLD, I AM RAVISHINGLY GORGEOUS!!!!

Of course the peeps' complexion has to be gold! For as winged ones frequently whisper in Ms. WinePoetics's forgotten dreams:

Gold
colors enlightenment,
reflection of light

FROM A POETICS OF LUCIDITY, SEEING BAGONGPINAY AND STEPHANIE NAGORKA

Well I'ma sitting here in the studio minding my own business and enjoying a glass of the 1996 Behrens & Hitchcock Syrah (Napa Valley), and I get the kind of news that'd turn fine wine into vinegar in the mouth. Peeps -- when that happens, I get pissed off.

So. Jean Gier first pointed it out to me. Among the banner ads that's been *guesting* recently atop my precious blog (and, synchronicity, it appeared again as I'm writing this blog post!) is:

Filipino Brides
Beautiful Filipino ladies seeking marriage and romance with US Men
www.FilipinaHeart.com

Well, what the roasted patooty is that about?!!!! So I click on this irksome reference to see:

"filipinaheart.com is a specialist matchmaking and marriage site that assists devoted men to find a loving partner from the heart of the Philippines. With advanced technology and friendly service, we can assist you to find your dream match, no matter where in the world he or she may be. Filipinaheart offers ladies the opportunity to post their details and communicate with men completely free of charge!"

Scrolling further through this site, I discover:

"Why choose a Filipina? Women from the Philippines are noted for their beauty, grace, charm and loyalty. With their sweet nature and shy smiles, Filipina's posses an inner beauty that most men find irresistible. Filipinas are by their nature family-orientated, resourceful and devoted. What's more, English is one of the official languages of the Philippines, so communication is straight forward, and as the majority of Filipinas are Christian, cultural compatibility is easier than some other Asian countries."

WTF!!!! Ms. WinePoetics hereby officially declares that she in no way supports this mail order bride B.S., nor is she willing to ignore the existence of Moslem population (whose rights are often ignored or misunderstood by Manila-centric politicians) in the Philippines.

I scroll further through this site to discover that it's managed by AsianEuro Introductions, a specialist Asian-Western Introductions service based in Sydney, Australia. They describe their organization as "a specialist dating and matchmaking agency that assists people from the Philippines and Western countries to find their perfect match."

Not surprisingly, AsianEuro Introductions says that it's not liable for any negative stuff that might occur through their site. Really? Yo AsianEuro -- you can disclaim your sorry self all you want but, meanwhile, you're making money off these peeps to the tune of $24.99 to $99.99 for a 3-12 month membership for your services. You are generating revenues from this sorry ass situation, AsianEuro, and I don't think your disclaimer is necessarily enforceable.

Now, I'ma just irritated over this, of course, because the basic reason why this industry thrives speaks to a failure by politicans and governmental policies to address poverty in a variety of countries, from Russia to the Philippines.

One example -- and this is a fairly benign example -- is how much older men opt for mail order brides, not just for whatever sexual gratification they may get but, because younger mail order brides are a way to ensure that someone will take care of them when they've become older -- a cheaper way, in many cases, to get managed care. Then there are the rapes and murders....

I don't know anything about filipinaheart.com. But I am uncomfortable with this blog being at all associated with the mail order bride business. It is unregulated, leading to many abuses. Jean rightly leads us to an article on mail order brides from the Columbia Grad School of Journalism which includes some info about murders of Filipina mail order brides. Here's an excerpt from the article "Eighteen-year-old Internet mail-order bride seeks husband, age 20-99 -- A new booming Web business" by Katherine Cheng:

"Every year, more than 100,000 women advertise themselves for marriage on the Internet. And every year, up to 4,000 men find wives through these advertisements, according to estimates from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The Internet boom has revolutionized the old catalog-bride trade, creating a modern-age email-order bride industry. Like the old, the new links foreign women, desperate to flee dead-end lives with American men.

"In 1995, there were 150 web portals devoted to the business. Now there are more than 400. The women, typically aged 18 to 30, put photos and translated mini-profiles on web sites, which often specialize in certain regions of the world. Men can log onto these sites and for a small fee, request addresses to write to the women.

"Mila Glodiva counseled 30 mail-order bride couples when she served on the board of directors at the Asian Pacific Development Center, a mental health agency in the Rocky Mountain area. She published a book about the mail-order bride industry in 1995. Since then, she’s noticed some significant changes. “The women are getting younger and younger and the vehicle to engage in this industry has become truly global with the Internet,” she said....

"In recent years, the mail-order bride industry has drawn publicity from a string of domestic abuse cases. In 1996, a computer technician, Timothy Blackwell was convicted of shooting to death his pregnant mail-order Filipino wife and two of her friends in a Seattle courthouse. In 1997, Donald A. Young, a lawyer and real estate agent in Pennsylvania, was charged with raping and imprisoning two Honduran women and abusing their children. He married at least one of the women after meeting her through an ad, and he may have also imprisoned Polish and Russian women. And last December, the body of Anastasia King, 20, a mail-order bride from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, was found in a shallow grave near Marysville, Wash. King had complained to family and friends of sexual and physical assault inflicted by her husband, Indle King, Jr., who is now being investigated for her murder....

"The United States has no regulatory control over the industry, aside from its laws seeking to prevent fraudulent marriages and abuse. The issue has been presented at the United Nations, but no regulations have been passed. The counter-argument often arises that mail-order bride companies are nothing more than pen-pal clubs, and are advertised as such, and that arranged marriages, which are not so different from mail-order marriages, are still common in many countries. But opponents, like Glodiva, are quick to point out the modern day differences, “The old pen-pal exchange programs were meant for cultural exchange and do not have marriage as their real reason for letter-writing, which is so in the case of the mail-order industry,” she said. "And age old arranged marriages were usually of the same culture, and there is a sense of equality between the partners.”

"Glodiva touches on the larger issue of the industry -- the imbalance between sending and receiving nations. The mail-order bride industry is sustained by the poverty and misery of women worldwide. The women engaging in the industry are searching for a better life. They come from places where jobs and educational opportunities are scarce, and wages are low, and they see the United States as a means of escape. They voluntarily post themselves on web pages, because they have little opportunity for advancement in their own country. And the industry thrives on this desperation -- oftentimes emphasizing the eagerness of women as a way to draw more suitors in. "From this day forward, remember that you are no longer in a 'seller’s market,' powerless to choose,” writes the owner of A World Class Affair. “You now have the ability to select from hundreds of suitable women. You can now speak to women from a position of strength."

Here are other articles based on a quick search on the Internet about this issue:

http://www.filipinaforever.com/mailorderbrideguide/news3.html
http://us_asians.tripod.com/articles-mailorder-bride.html

=========

This issue logically reminds me of Perla Daley and her hardworking staff at NewFilipina.com. This is a website dedicated to empowering Filipinas, and was created specifically in response to taking back the Internet-based *Identity* of Filipina from such sectors as those promoting mail order brides. I'll let BagongPinay (New Filipina) speak for herself:

"In 1996, a Filipina web site designer wanted to check out the Internet to see what web sites were out there for Filipino women. Out of curiosity she surfed to www.filipina.com, but was disappointed and angry to find that it was a mail-order-bride(MOB) site... not the kind of web site that the many Filipinas of the world are likely to identify with.

"Also, a query done on “filipina” at major Internet search engines resulted in the listing mostly of

1) Filipina mail-order-bride sites, 2) pen-pal service sites, 3) personal web pages of Filipino women looking for men-friends, and 4) porn sites. (Today, this is still the case.)

"In February of 1998, that Filipina web designer decided to bring about a NEW web site at www.NEWfilipina.com.

"So she e-mailed and called other Filipino men and women about this. With the help of their ideas and together with a friend she thought of a web site called BagongPinay. They hoped it would be a start for a NEW, wholesome and positive representation for Filipino women on the Internet. And they hoped that the unbalanced representation of Filipinas on the Web would someday change.

"For almost 4 years now, Newfilipina.com aka "BagongPinay" has been a web site for Filipinas created by Filipinas and friends. It is an online community for Filipinas and has strived to bring to the Internet the following content:

Open Forums (including those with Filipina mail-order-brides)
Art and poetry by Filipinas and Filipinos
Filipina achievers
Tips on communication and healthy relationships with self, within family, workplace, society and the world
Self-esteem tips, books, links
Exploration of beliefs, spiritual and soul journeys
Socio-political topics and current events
Sexuality issues; gender issues
Great books written by Filipinos and books about Filipinos and the Philippines
Insightful, thought-provoking and inspiring quotes wise words from our Lolas, Titas and Moms
Filipina perspective in the Philippines, the U.S. and the world.

"BagongPinay not only hopes to help redefine the identity of Filipinas on the Internet and in the world, but to also redefine it in Philippine society and Filipino communities. Most importantly of all it hopes that it can help open up doors to ideas and options for Filipinas so that they can create their own identity and better decide who they can be for themselves."

BagongPinay is the kind of "New Filipina" with whom Ms. WinePoetics is proud to be related. Now, all you Filipino politicians -- let's understand this much about the mail order bride phenomenon. It's not about romance -- it is about poverty.

=============

Some of you ask how Ms. WinePoetics can be so prolific. Well, it's not because I have all these ideas on what to write about. For me, it's about attempting to practice a poetics of Lucidity: of paying attention. Part of the challenge for me in doing this blog is seeking what each new day brings and writing from that -- thus further giving me a reason to pay attention -- to live in the Now. I don't always succeed in my attempts to be *lucid*, but this post, for instance, was generated because I thought to take the opportunity of a particular banner ad to raise some attention about a troublesome issue. In many cases, unfortunately, I don't have the time or space to devote in-depth analyses, but at times a reminder may have its own value.

Paying attention -- it's another reason why (speaking of Jean with whom I just have so many worthwhile conversations!) I was so happy to see a note a few weeks ago from Jean on Stephanie Nagorka. This artist lost her studio and, out of necessity, has become the "Andy Goldsworthy of Home Depot." Her very interesting story and reproduction of fabulous sculptures are available at http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1266165.html

I think (and believe Jean agrees) that what Nagorka is doing is brilliant, partly for incorporating irony without dismissing beauty. But there are so many layers to her work -- reflecting on notions briefly touched on my Jean's thoughts: "[Nagorka's] work makes me see how essentially romantic Goldsworthy & Long are, in making their commentaries about the transience of nature and humanity, (with a romantic/gothic subtext of the sublime). I wonder if Nagorka's work will be taken as seriously as theirs? I doubt it, because it has the feel of populism about it, it exposes the everydayness of mercantile life, it's not "heroic"; it's not "elevated" (e.g. sublime), and it doesn't elevate the democratic and western sense of individuality and angsty lone-ness (as in pensive enlightened artist pondering the essential transience and aloneness of his wonderful self)."

If Nagorka's work fails to receive the type of adulation given to Goldsworthy, it will have nothing to do with the work so much as, in my view, the way the gallery-propped art world infrastructure works. To obviate the limitations of that infrastructure, I've decided to raise -- and praise -- Stephanie Nagorka's work to you eight million peeps. Spread the word...!

And, perhaps needless to say but I'll say it, Nagorka's conceptual approach of cruising the aisles and using "found" material on the shelves with which to create her temporary sculptures -- also reflects a profound exercise of .... Lucidity.

HAY
NAKU!!! THESE
LOVELY HAY(NA)KU, YOU!

Dear Lovely Poets who are sending me your Hay(na)ku,

It feels a bit like Christmas over here as I'm receiving so many. Thank you! Maraming Salamat!

This notice is just to say, as I don't think I said it before, that I hope you will allow me to reprint whatever you are sending for the Hay(na)ku contest. I would like to feature more hay(na)ku than the *official* winner. The tedious logistics of a contest require a choice to be made by judge Barbara Jane Reyes, but I already know -- as I read everything send -- that there are more than one lovely hay(na)ku that warrants being shared with this blog's eight million peeps.

So you're on notice -- whatever you send (unless you say otherwise) -- might get reprinted here, regardless of the contest's outcome. Please keep sending your lovely hay(na)ku poems until the deadline, this Thursday.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!

Ms. WinePoetics

MELTED

This is why I am crying as I write this post. Well, first, I returned home from one of those 3-4 hour lunches; I entered my studio just to type in today's lunch menu because it would fulfill this blog's required wine recommendation(s) du jour. Okay, sniffle, so first let me get that out of the way by cutnpasting in:

BROTHERHOOD OF THE KNIGHTS OF THE VINE
Luncheon at Robert Mondavi Winery
June 14, 2003

2001 Robert Mondavi Winery Fume Blanc

Rock Shrimp and Heirloom Tomato Risotto with Gremolata
2000 Robert Mondavi Winery Carneros District Chardonnay

Seared Chateubriand with Ratatouille and Potato Gaufrettes
2000 Robert Mondavi Winery Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve

Strawberry Shortcake, Buttermilk Almond Biscuits, Chantilly Cream
2001 Robert Mondavi Winery Napa Valley Moscato d'Oro

Chef: Annie Roberts

========

This weekend, I was visited by relatives, including my only niece Treva. Eleven years old. Stunningly beautiful. Almond eyes. Already taller than I am. Loves basketball -- she traveled around with a basketball rarely a few inches away from her (there is something, to me, so ... affecting about a girl with a ball nearly always attached to her body -- I initially said she loves soccer instead of basketball, perhaps because her image reminded me of the key character in that movie about Bending It With Beckam (sp). Red-tinged ebony hair. I hadn't seen her for perhaps four years.

I had made the luncheon commitment before I knew the clan would visit me this weekend. So, this morning, before leaving them briefly for lunch, I was talking to Treva. And I pulled up WinePoetics blog and showed Treva some samples of hay(na)ku. She listened intently, but it was hard to tell what she was thinking of my blather.

Well, I returned home from lunch to see a piece of paper by my computer. Pencilled poems (do you know how long its been since I've seen poems handwritten out in graphite?) Yellow notepad paper with neatly written handwriting (so laboriously neat that I wondered if she had to write these out more than once, her tongue perhaps sticking out unconsciously from a corner of her lips). Treva -- beautiful 11-year-old Treva -- had written out for me:

1.
Boys
stupid, cute,
never ever ugly

2.
Friends
best friends
till the end

3.
Family
loving, always
there for you

4.
Love
crying, laughing,
fresterating, happiness, caring

5.
School
work, fresteration,
fun, hard, teachers

6.
Cats
fury, fuzzy,
picky, cuddly, sweet

7.
Kids
messy, unorganized
little bratz, evil

8.
Girls
sweet, nice
picky, little Angles

9.
Grandparents
money give,
loving grandparents

10.
Food
yummy, filling,
yucky, good, tasty

Can you blame me for bawling as I sit here typing and blathering at you eight million peeps?

I absolutely adored how she used "Angles" instead of, perhaps, "Angels" in No. 8.

I plan to see Treva much more frequently from hereon than once every four years. Now, if you'll all excuse me, I have to go look for her. I need to ask her what "frenestration" means... Meanwhile, keep sending in those hay(na)ku submissions for the poetry contest!

Hic

Love
what you
write, uh, fresterating...ly

HAY(NA)KU ON THE TONGUE

Some of you ask how to pronounce "hay(na)ku." If you're Filipino, I think you'll know what I mean when I say that it's pronounced exactly as you would pronounce the Filipino expression -- Hay! Naku! -- with "naku" having the accent on the second syllable.

So, hay(na)ku is pronounced with a strongly emhasized "hay," a soft "na," and "ku" also emphasized -- with "ku" perhaps elongating slightly into a "koooooooo" depending on your state of inebriation. Sip.

Meanwhile, here's a HAYnakooooooo:

Distilled

This
is the
now: This. Now.

HAY(NA)KU POETRY CONTEST

Dear Poet,
You are invited to participate in

Hay(na)ku Poetry Contest
Deadline: June 19, 2003
E-mail no more than 5 submissions to GalateaTen@aol.com (no dumb submission fees)
Sponsor: WinePoetics

On June 12, 2003, in commemoration of Philippine Independence Day, Ms. WinePoetics (sometimes known as "Eileen Tabios") counted, uh, concocted "Hay(na)ku" -- a poetic form of three lines, with each line consisting of one word, two word, three words. Partly inspired by Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac and originally called "Filipino Haiku," Ms. WinePoetics was persuaded by poet Vince Gotera to rename it "Hay(na)ku." The renaming reflects a word play on the Filipino expression "Hay(na)ku!" and also seeks to avoid problematic postcolonial and prosodic implications to the term "Filipino Haiku." If this background is fascinating the heck out of you, you can learn more about it from the June 12 posts (scroll down).

But now, let's cut to the chase. Sip (tonight, the 1996 Wiliams Selyem Pinot Noir, Anderson Valley (Ferrington Vineyard)). Ms. WinePoetics is pleased to announce

a "Hay(na)ku" Poetry contest.

In addition to conforming to the form as described above, a "Hay(na)ku" often possesses a charge (volta) that may best be described as "bagoong." Bagoong is a pungent Filipino fish sauce that both repels and provides pleasure (e.g., Ms. WinePoetics loves bagoong, but the sight of its bottle tends to make her husband leave the house in San Francisco and fly to Sioux Falls). Here are some examples of Hay(na)ku by various Filipino poets (but you need not be Filipino to enter this contest).

God-
damn -- same
shit/different dog
--Patrick Rosal

**

onion
just eaten;
smell my breath
--Catalina Cariaga

**

M.F.('ing)A.

summers
at bard:
ngerve-wracking, ngauseating
--Paolo Javier

**

marine's
peace candle
says blow me
--Tony Robles


However, the referenced bagoong pungency is not inherent to the form. For example, Oliver de la Paz shows a more imagistic turn with this example:

Dogs
tongues loll.
Emphatic earth sponges.

E-mail your hay(na)ku -- no more than five submissions per person -- to GalateaTen@aol.com. Deadline: next Thursday, July 12, 2003. The winning entrant(s) will be featured on WinePoetics, a blog with "eight million peeps" readership. The top winner (and probably a few other top contenders since Ms. WinePoetics tends to be generous with books) will receive the following books as prizes:

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 by Barry Schwabsky (forthcoming from Meritage Press, Fall 2003).

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole by Eileen Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002)

100 More Jokes From The Book of the Dead by John Yau and Archie Rand (Meritage Press, 2001)

Gravities of Center by Barbara Jane Reyes (2003, Arkipelago Books)

The contest will be judged by Barbara Jane Reyes -- whom Ms. WinePoetics chose over more famous poets because Barbara has just tattooed her back with a black thunderbird. But to make this announcement seem as officious, uh, official as possible, Ms. WinePoetics asked Ms. Reyes to provide a "Judge's Bio." Here it is:

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila and raised in the SF Bay Area suburb of Fremont, where she was educated by Catholic hippies (not nuns) for 12 years. After a 10 year on-again-off-again stint at UC Berkeley, where she served as editor-in-chief of the groundbreaking Pilipino American literary publication Maganda, she is now a MFA candidate at San Francisco State University, where she has happily found herself in a balancing act upon the bleeding edges separating the Pilipino/a American community and the Ivory Tower/academy. Barbara’s poetry, prose, and essays are published in the anthologies Babaylan (Aunt Lute, 2000), Turnings (Women’s Studies at ODU, 2000), Eros Pinoy (Anvil 2001), Invasian (Asian Women United of CA, 2003), Times New Roman: Poets Oppose 21st Century Empire (on-line at http://www.nthposition.com), and are forthcoming in Going Home to a Landscape, Writers From the Philippine Diaspora, the UK-based Graphic Poetry Anthology, and Pinoy Poetics. Gravities of Center is Barbara’s first book. She is currently at work on her second book, a series of poems written after the paintings of two ironically-named Bay Area Pinoy visual artists.

==============

Meanwhile, our occasionally dyslexic poet Luisa A. Igloria writes in response to the prior post:

Dear Eileen,

hay naku reply to you:

dyslexic
oh poem
sight me anyway

*

[and a kind of mirror image of the original-- here's a few versions]

scriptorium:
marigold, my
domes of heat

*

scriptorium
marigold my
heat of domes

*

Last, but not least:

coil
tendril braid
weave of snake

=====

Thanks Luisa. Enjoy St. Petersburg. I've always adored how they paint the buildings with pastel colors to obviate the typically gray cast of that hovering sky. Never have colors like lime green, pink and yellow seemed so vivid to me as when I flapped my wings through St. Petersburg. Sip.

FILIPINO POETS: "YOU ARE A LOVELY PEOPLE"

Lenin's
beard descends.
Reversed pubis lisping.
-- Oliver de la Paz

**

morning
cleanses all
but human breath
-- Oscar Penaranda

**

independence
depends on
who you trust
-- Erna Hernandez

Okay. Happy Philippine Independence Day and here are more Hay(na)ku from among the most loveable-y talented peeps you'll ever meet: Filipino poets!

Cat
tongues rasp.
Seeds on balsam.
-- Oliver de la Paz

**

Season's Turn

Snow
melts into
lazy daisy spring.
--Melissa Martirez

**

"lOOk
out below!"
cOcOnuts can kill.
-- dennis M. somera

**

Tigyawat // a pimple
konting nana // with a little pus
bunga ng puyat // the fruit of insomnia
-- Oscar Penaranda

**

marine's
peace candle
says blow me
--Tony Robles

Tony sez he wrote this after he "saw a lot of marine/army recruiters at Sacramento's Pilipino festival this past Saturday."

**

I
crave big
bowls of taho
--Barb Natividad

Taho is a yummy Filipino dessert made out of bean curd -- basically soft tofu with a sweet syrup, sometimes also with sago (tapioca balls). One of you need to be bringing Ms. WinePoetics this....

**

Pigs
noses swelter.
Blossoms of mud.
-- Oliver de la Paz

**

Espresso
Darkens thickly.
Rehearsal of dusk.
-- Oliver de la Paz

**

Mao's
head glistens.
Red stone receding.
-- Oliver de la Paz

**

Confucius
says "don't."
So I don't.
-- Oliver de la Paz

**

psssst!
forget it;
ay, kasta, anaco
-- Catalina "Catie" Cariaga

"Ay, kasta, anaco" is an Ilokano saying that loosely translates to, "That's the way it is, child."

**

Domes of heat --
my marigold
scriptorium
--Luisa A. Igloria

Obviously, Luisa reversed the order of the hay(na)ku's number of words -- perhaps because she read the definition wrong as I know she was rushing around preparing to leave for the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia (where she said she'll be sure to raise a glass to Flipsters). But as I said in a prior post, sometimes rules are made to be broken in Poetry! And by doing so, Luisa gives us the Dyslexic Hay(na)ku! Why not!

**

lazones
peels burning
fend off vampires.
-- Michelle Bautista

**

shifting
fish schools
sheets: silver, shimmering
-- Michelle Bautista

**

tree
roots intertw(in)ed
church ruin walls
-- Michelle Bautista

**

A balut hay(na)ku

sprinkling
salt from
skin into steam
--Michelle Bautista

"Balut" is a Filipino delicacy....it's, um, a boiled ... duck embryo egg....yummy with lots of salt....if you can avoid the teensy feathers....Sip.

**

After Turning off the TV at Night

Fuzz
Then hush
Then the crickets
-- Benito "Sunny" Vergara

**

Peripheries
of mollusk;
Inflection of sea.
--Benito "Sunny" Vergara

**

une
touch touche
menage et trois...
-- dennis M. somera

**

Is
grey overcast
or jeepney exhaust?
-- dennis M. somera

**

white
sand beaches:
color-coordinated owners?!
-- dennis M. somera

**

fucking
brown-out
use my fingers
-- dennis M. somera

**

And because Poetry is a paradox, Erna Hernandez shall have this post's last word with:

artists
(re)create images
forgotten by tomorrow

HAY (NA)KU!!!!

i
honor you
with pinoy haiku
--Ben Soriano

Most of the "haiku" (scare quotes deliberate...) sent to me come from writers who also happen to belong to the Flips Listserve, a listserve of either Filipino writers or anyone interested in Filipino Literature that was co-founded by poets Nick Carbo and Vince Gotera. While my compadres and comadres happily sent me what Vince called these "Stairstep Tercets," my project also ended up eliciting a discussion on the implications of Naming -- and how I was approaching it by using the phrase "Pinoy Haiku."

Vince asked:

Appropriating the "haiku" name has all sorts of prosodic and postcolonial problems (by which I mean the WWII "colonizing" of the Philippines by Japan, among other things). Am I being overly serious here? When Kerouac refers to "American haiku" not having more than three words per line, I think he might have been reacting to Allen Ginsberg's "American haiku" which has 17 syllables per line. I guess my concern about calling it a "Pinoy haiku" is that readers could say hey, "Pinoys can't even get the haiku right?" They won't always have the Kerouac quote to guide them.

Besides, why must we always be doing things in reaction to the term "American"? An interesting parallel poetic-form-naming might be Baraka's "low coup" form (the diametrical opposite of "high coup" / haiku). Maybe the Pinoy version could be the "hay (na)ku"?

Incidentally, for you non-Pinoy peeps, "Hay naku" is a common Filipino expression covering a variety of contexts -- like the word "Oh."

So I replied that these were being written for WinePoetics whose readers (presumably) have access to the backdrop of how I came to concoct this idea, including the Kerouac reference in my "Counting Journal" that cites his version of "American haiku." And, certainly, I hadn't "seriously" thought through the implications of my project (as you peeps know, I was just ... counting). But, I think what's wonderful about any form of Art is how it also serves as an entryway into other discussions -- into a variety of engagements.

Consequently, I modestly bow (egad: nearly broke my back doing that bow -- bowing just doesn't come naturally with Ms. WinePoetics, ya know) to Vince's wisdom (he is, after all, older than I am; wink here at Vince) and rename this form

"HAY-(NA)KU"

Sip. Morning coffee. I must admit, though, that Vince's reference to the colonial implications of the term "Pinoy Haiku'' was most persuasive to me. Another poet had suggested that I also rename the project because the traditional haiku form should be respected. Well, yes and no. As I told that poet -- I also think that, in Poetry, rules are sometimes made to be broken.

And, frankly, I initially wasn't moved either by Vince's notion as regards Japan "colonizing" the Philippines during WWII. If anything, I thought that were I to move down that line of thinking (which I hadn't been), I didn't mind subverting the Japanese haiku form specifically because I thought of it as *talking back* against Japanese imperialism. But, on closer consideration, I realized that the perspective could work both ways...and that using the "haiku" reference also could imply a continuation of "colonial mentality."

Another pinay poet-peep who's much smarter than I am (since we all know I mostly blather through what I'm drinking), Catalina "Catie" Cariaga also appreciated Vince's comments:

Hey Vince,I like "hay(na)ku." That's the spirit! Like halo-halo. There's a chapter in Vicente Rafael's Contracting Colonializm about that guy Pin Pin who translated the Spanish grammar book into the Filipino vernacular -- which ended taking all types of forms, songs, explanations and translations -- perhaps to SUBVERT the very project he was assigned to "translate." I read Rafael's comments very seriously. Pin Pin used combinations of long languid fluid lines and short syllabic bursts. We have those kinds of macro and micro-rhthyms in our F(P)ilipino American repertoire. Like halo-halo.

Vicente's observations, indeed, should be read by many (I found it so compelling that I cited it in my Introduction to Interlope 8, which had focused on innovative Filipino writings). But, with all due respect to Vicente-peep, I also found Catie's reply most persuasive due to the reference to halo-halo: an incredibly yummy-licious Filipino dessert of shaved ice, coconut shavings, bits of fruit jello and tropical fruits like jackfruit, banana, .....I'ma getting hungry. Let me move on...

So, Vince also sent in a .... drumroll ... hay (na)ku, an homage to Nick Carbo who frequently writes in his "bios" that Nick is "married to the beautiful poet Denise Duhamel." Thus, from Vince:

Homage to Denise Duhamel's "Handsome Poet"

bulaklak61
nick carbo
tunay na lalaki

As I know my eight million peeps include many non-Filipinos, I'll reveal that "bulaklak61" is part of Nick's e-mail addy and means "flower" and that "tunay na lalaki" is both the title of a series of poems by Nick as well as means "the real man." But then, Vince noticed that his title is longer than the poem, and so maybe "this should be a double hay(na)ku." This made me wonder if Vince has a life, by the way, but I'ma remaining appreciative here. His revised version then is:

homage
to denise
duhamel's "handsome poet":

bulaklak61
nick carbo
tunay na lalaki

To which Nick pungently replies with his own hay (na)ku:

conVince
two birds
with one shoo

==========

Aw right! Now we're ridin' that carabao! Here are more HAY (NA)KU from Filipino poets in both the Philippines and the U.S.:

breakfa$t:

croi$$ant,
almond, chocolate
two ninety eight.
--Bino A. Realuyo

karaoke
meddles with
conceptions of love.
--Michelle Bautista

Dogs
tongues loll.
Emphatic earth sponges.
--Oliver de la Paz

Bato // stone
Kasing tigas // hard as
Ng puso mo // your smiling heart
--Oscar Penaranda

Deer
bleeds on
asphalt at noon
--Melissa Martirez

mass
healing seeks
memory in song
--Erna Hernandez

Intercontinentalizationalism.
Kilometric word
For a poem.
--Alfred "Krip" Yuson

Krip mischievously notes that the first word in his hay (na)ku could also be "pneumonoultramicrosccopicsilicovolkanoconiosis"! I wanted to rattle that off quickly ten times but I'd need to finish a bottle of wine before I can even pronounce it completely the first time!

Last but not least, Benito "Sunny" Vergara arouses himself from the humid heat of Los Banos where he's being a balikbayan to write "one just for you, Eileen." For writing his blog post "Eating, Shopping and Laughing. Oh, and Massages" -- which should be read by any Filipino interested in decolonialism -- and last but not least for dedicating his hay (na)ku to me, Sunny shall have this post's last word:

Sips
the fruit
of her words.

PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE DAY ~~ PINOY HAIKU

isa
dalawa, tatlo.
ako'y hindi gago!
--Barbara Jane Reyes

NYC Pinoy Blues or
The Ay Naku Haiku

God-
damn -- same
shit/different dog
--Patrick Rosal

It seems most apt to introduce the "Pinoy Haiku" on June 12, Philippine Independence Day. This was the day in 1898 that General Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed Philippine independence from Spain.

But soon afterwards, the United States -- having just tasted, and found sweet, its entry as a world power into the arena of global politics -- chose not to recognize the Philippines's successfully fought battle against Spain for self-determination. The U.S. invaded the Philippines to turn it into a colony. It wasn't until 1946 that the U.S. formally ended its colonial regime on a day coinciding with the U.S. Independence Day of July 4. Consequently, the Philippines only began to commemorate June 12 in the early 1960s when President Diosdado Macagapal changed Philippine Independence Day from the 4th of July to June 12.

June 12 is certainly a more accurate reflection than the American "July 4" for the Philippines' "Independence Day." More information about these events may be found at

http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/vof/kalaw1605.html: Maximo Kalaw's "Philippine Independence" speech from 1916.
http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/ail/campaign.html: Jim Zwick's essay "The Profits of Racism."

Here is an excerpt (addressed to U.S.- Americans) from Maximo Kalaw's speech which, in my view, bears special resonance given the recent U.S. activities in Iraq and elsewhere as the U.S. exercises "pre-emptiveness" as part of its foreign policy (note that part of the U.S.'s rationale for invading the Philippines had been presumably because Filipinos were not equipped to determine their own destinies):

For the complete establishment of your sovereignty you had to wage a war of subjugation -- a war which lasted three years, which necessitated the presence in the islands of 120,000 American soldiers and the establishment of reconcentration camps, which cost your treasury more than half a billion dollars and the Philippines many thousands of human lives. Peace was possible only after complete exhaustion of the Filipino soldiers. Convinced that their independence could not be secured by force of arms, they laid down their guns and returned to peaceful pursuits.

I shall not here minimize the work of reconstruction done by the American Government. Public schools were established and Filipino children flocked to them with an enthusiasm for learning never before manifested by any people. Roads, hospitals, and public buildings were planned and completed, for which the Filipino people willingly gave their money. But they had never for a moment given up their idea of independence. Despite the material improvement brought about by the American Government, they still considered themselves unjustly deprived of their right to manage their own affairs; and when the first Philippine Assembly met in 1901, it made the solemn declaration that American rule in the Philippines remained unsanctioned by the people whose great desire then, as ever, was their complete political emancipation. The independence idea grew by leaps and bounds. The schoolboy with his hard-learned English greets the American visitor with a petition for independence. The spellbinder moves the masses with drastic plans for political emancipation; for political parties in the Philippines are built primarily on programs for independence. No human contrivance has been able to check that movement; for, as a Filipino statesman has said, "when people feel in their hearts the revelation of their political unity and are convinced that the time has come for them to assume a place in the world's history, it is impossible to detain them from their march; it is in vain to amuse them with other scenes and allurements, because they have their eyes fixed ahead, and, invoking the help of man and of the Almighty, they will continue to follow the dictates of their inner self, the voice of their destiny."

=========

In my June 10 post, I mentioned how I conceived -- counted out -- the idea of a "Filipino Haiku" while writing in my "Counting Journal" on 1/28/01:

On plane returning to San Francisco, read Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac. P. 46 -- Kerouac says, "I think American haikus should never have more than 3 words in a line -- e.g.

Trees can't reach
for a glass
of water

I am inaugurating the Filipino Haiku [PinoyPoets: Attention! I'll post if you send me some!]: 3 lines each having one, two, three words in order -- e.g.

Trees
can't reach
for a glass

Well, Filipino poets responded to my call with enthusiasm. Perhaps in part because, as Michelle Bautista points out, the idea of one-two-three "works with the Filipino nursery rhyme: isa, dalawa, tatlo, ang tatay mo'y kalbo [pronounce phonetically to catch the rhythm] -- which translates into English as "one two three, your dad is bald."

Here are some fresh examples of the Pinoy Haiku, beginning with one written by Barbara Jane Reyes in time for Philippine Independence Day:

land
of the
mo(u)rning, i toast.

Barbara deftly conflates the reference of "land of the morning" from the Philippine national anthem with the wine theme of this blog. Thanks, Barbara.

Meanwhile, Leny M. Strobel and Oscar Penaranda's contributions reflect both the events over a century ago as well as the current times --befitting their shared status as scholars/teachers as well as poets:

Freedom
Is Cheap
When You're Bushed
--Leny M. Strobel

Power
Drippingly exudes
And always stains
--Oscar Penaranda

Here are some riffed off by Oliver de la Paz while he was doing laundry:

Pavlova
dances gruffly.
Flats poorly tied.

Keats
writes darkly.
Birds trill unseen.

Watches
around wrists
make teeth marks.

In these works, what's evident to me is that the charge associated with the haiku remains in the Pinoy form with the type of paradox that one might find in the Filipino bagoong -- a pungent fish sauce enjoyed by Filipinos but, ahem, misunderstood by non-Filipinos (okay: Tom starts fearfully quaking when he sees there's a bottle in the fridge). It is with such pungency or bagoong, that Paolo Javier, currently a student at Bard and soon-to-be a first-time poetry book author (I'm so proud of you!), writes:

M.F.('ing)A.

summers
at bard:
ngerve-wracking, ngauseating

I think the title is self-explanatory. Paolo is also the guest editor for a forthcoming Special Issue on Filipino Poetry at CanWeHaveOurBallBack. Thanks -- indeed, Maraming Salamat! -- to Jim Behrle, the publisher of CanWeHaveOurBallBack and for also posting group photos of various Filipino poets on his blog to help us commemorate Philippine Independence Day.

The next post will feature more Pinoy Haiku by these poets as well as Oliver de la Paz, Alfred Yuson, Melissa Martirez, Benito M. Vergara, Barb Natividad, Ben Soriano and others. To all of you for participating, agyamanac unay and I'ma toasting you with a glass of Tapey. For now, let's have Catalina Cariaga have the last word:

onion
just eaten;
smell my breath

WINEPOETICS: IN THE BEGINNING, THE LABEL SAID ....

Amazing what packing does to me. It makes me want to do anything else but ... pack. During desired interruptions, I ended up writing seven posts within hours of each other, totalling 5,884 words. But the last word is offered by another poet offering another poet's words. A friend kindly sent over a copy of "The Sunday Poem" from the May 25, 2003 issue of The Independent (London): "Word Tasting" by British poet Sarah Wardle. For so many reasons, I needed to read a poem like this -- thank you, Dear One who knew I would love this poem -- and not just for the wine....

I honor The Word: the last word is the first word and it is the final word in this Poem:

Word Tasting
By Sarah Wardle

First agitate the word in your glass,
swilling it round anti-clockwise
to let the air into the language.

Tilt the glass against the tablecloth.
Notice the colour. Is this word golden
or brick-red? Does the nose remind you

of freshly-mown grass or tropical fruit?
Is the word smoky or woody on the palate?
Do the syllables have a long aftertaste?

Has the word been aged? Do you like it?
Now try this. It is a controversial word,
the oldest vintage known to man. The seeds

can be used to grow this word in Europe
or the New World. Each climate gives
the word a different flavour. It's versatile,

easily turned into language. Growers love it
across the financial spectrum. Many find
this word smooth and buttery, fruity and ripe.

They say it is an alpha word, their favourite.
Some drink it early and often, others will
store it in their cellars for drinking later.

Then again, still others find the word bitter
and acidic, screwing up their faces, saying
it reminds them of cat's pee on gooseberry bushes.

There's no accounting for taste. Make up
your own mind. What does it remind you of?
In the beginning the label said God.

THE END OF THE COUNT

"Cameron was a counter. He vomited nineteen times to San Francisco. He liked to count everything."
--from The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

All the snippets I've shared so far from my "Counting Journal" are from the first one-fifth of that diary's contents. It's actually an interesting memoir, now that I've been reading it today with fresh eyes (and if you don't think it's interesting based on the snippets shared, then, you got it: go away). Plus this exercise elicited a new poem from Sandy McIntosh! And the birth of a new poem, peeps, is always -- always! -- something to be toasted. Sip.

But rather than spend more days having you witness me gazing into that part of my navel where Brautigan's eyes are twinkling back, let me write just one last Counting post. This one will feature snippets based on which page the journal opens to when I drop it on the floor. The idea came to me when .... I dropped the journal on the floor as I was polishing off my 2nd glass of the 2001 Dutch Henry Chardonnay Los Carneros. So: pick a number, Sweetie, she tells herself. Five, she tells herself. Okay, here are five snippets!

Drop Journal. Page opens onto 12/18/00: Bush secured Electoral College majority -- 271 votes -- to become the U.S.' 43rd President. It was announced that Hillary Clinton received an $8.0 mio. advance for a memoir for her years in the White House. W/ Simon and Schuster. So much $ for tsismis, whereas one can't even find $5,000 to publish a poetry book!

Ugh. Close Journal. Drop Journal Again. Page opens onto 1/28/01: On plane returning to San Francisco, read Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac. P. 46 -- Kerouac says, "I think American haikus should never have more than 3 words in a line -- e.g.

Trees can't reach
for a glass
of water

I am inaugurating the Filipino Haiku [PinoyPoets: Attention! I'll post if you send me some!]: 3 lines each having one, two, three words in order -- e.g.

Trees
can't reach
for a glass

Okay. Well, so. Close Journal. Drop Journal etcetera: 1/28/01: I detest the Hudson Hotel. I'm on the internet all the time and because they charge for all phone calls, I had to pay $231.80 in internet-related phone costs this week. This on top of having to repair the laptop after spilling coffee on the keyboard: $162.37, not to mention the keyboard rental while it was being repaired: $25.00. [After returning to San Francisco, I would end up complaining to the hotel because I hadn't seen the phone instructions in my hotel room specifying that local calls are not free. In response, an Ian Nicholson, General Manager of the Hudson Hotel at 356 W. 58th Street wrote -- in a Feb. 8, 2001 letter -- that he would rebate $115.90 back to my credit card. But Mr. Nicholson never did....so you and the Hudson are wusses, not to mention incredibly rude, and I hope you Google yourselves soon and stumble on this blog where I AM TELLING MY EIGHT-MILLION READERS that the Hudson Hotel reneged on its promise to rebate back part of my phone costs and needless to say I have never returned to your hotel! Sip.]

Close Journal ... etcetera. 1/19/01: Ianthe e-mails, "I'm doing a Brautigan B'day celebration on KRCB on Jan. 30th. It will be prerecorded and I was wondering if you wanted to read something of my dad's -- 10-90 seconds. You can choose -- or I can? I hope all is well. Love...."

I'd forgotten about that! Well, so okay! Let's make the 5th and last snippet from this Counting Journal come from the diary entry where I'd spoken -- gleefully -- of participating in KRCB's radio birthday homage. For that celebration, I had read Richard Brautigan's poem:

In Her Sweetness Where She Folds My Wounds

In her sweetness where she folds my wounds
there is a flower that bees cannot afford.
It is too rich for them and would change
their wings into operas and all their honey
into the lonesome maps of a nonexistent California county.
When she has finished folding all my wounds
she puts them away in a dresser where the
drawers smell like the ghost of a bicycle.
Afterwards I rage at her: demanding that her
affections always be constant to my questions.

============

My Richard Brautigan experience! To think that I began reading his books because his daughter's memoir inspired me to begin a "Counting Journal"....and end up meeting Ianthe who then would write in that journal....and then to end up closing the journal by describing my participation in KRCB's Birthday Homage to Richard Brautigan ... all the while glossing over what, with hindsight, was a pretty important period in my development as a writer as I discovered my own way of writing on the visual arts (with such essays later forming my book My Romance -- see link at right) and extended my investigation of the prose poem form with the help of the Merriam-Webster internet dictionary program. Last but not least, because of the journal's counting theme, it kept meticulous coverage of the Florida count that would result in the controversial beginnings of this current Presidential administration. [Brief digression -- to the Philippine voters, do please join me in heaving over the idea of Bush encouraging GMA to run for re-election -- puhleze to leave that colonial mentality in the 20th century, okay? Anyway....]

Through *counting,* the journal offered the kind of narrative that one could never fictionalize -- an experience that I suspect is now making Richard Brautigan smile. It's almost like....WinePoetics -- where the conflation of wine and poetics leads me to address matters I may not otherwise! Nifty, nifty -- where words take you! In fact, hmmmm, did I just hear Richard Brautigan laugh? She cranes her head upward. Oh yes! There he is! There he is flirting with my poker-playing angels....

.....and now...he's turning his attention to me...to wink and whisper a date.

Sip as I catch said whisper on my elegant palm. I then look up said date in the Counting Journal. Sip again -- an astonished sip as I'd forgotten this particular entry. An entry where I had written, "Someday, I should fictionalize this journal into a novel...entitled The Abortion, Part II."

=========

P.S. Since I do have a lot of class, it makes me wonder about Richard Brautigan's poem with which I'd began posting about him:

the eternal she

I gave
a girl my soul.

She looked at it.

Smiled faintly.

And dropped
it into the gutter.

Casually.

God! She had class.

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Yes I'm gorgeous. But I suppose I should note that Jim-Peep's photo of me was taken a gazillion years ago. Or as the caption to this same photo says at my Six Directions project (see link at right):

The image of Eileen Tabios as a Barnard College undergraduate student (1982) is a detail from "The Brown Paper Bag Series.

Okay now. Some math:

2003
minus
1982
equals......

....after 10,000 minutes of rumination, the bulb glows yellow and the answer is:
21 years ago. I could be Aimee Nezhukumatathil's mom.

But who's counting?

COUNTING THROUGH LIFE (#3)

[Selected snippets from my "Counting Journal" (9/20/00 to February 2001) inspired by reading about Cameron, a character in Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster: "Cameron was a counter. He vomited nineteen times to San Francisco. He liked to count everything."]

10/30/00: Behind 14 poems in my MW poem-du-jour project, partly due to the requirements of writing on Art. Bought two, 3-lb. and two, 5-lb. weights from Copeland Sports in Berkeley.

10/31/00: On setting up Meritage Press's website, Duration is cheapest option at $24.95 a year, whereas ____ would be $107.40 a year. Tried to read Brautigan's A Confederate General From Big Sur but couldn't get into it.

11/1/00: Writing this at Royal Ground cafe -- $1.75 for a cafe au lait. I don't want to count the days since I last wrote a new poem. Nadine e-mailed. She and her writing group in Singapore have given themselves an assignment: write a short story using only one-syllable words and see if that "limits" the story in any way. I enthusiastically e-mailed back that Georges Perec's novel, A VOID, uses words avoiding the letter "e"

11/8/00: Finished first draft of review of Ed Moses: 3,020 words.

-- Presidential election: Gore has 255 Electoral College votes (popular vote of 48,705,011); Bush has 246 Electoral College votes (popular vote of 48,569,111. Todd Swift sends out a group e-mail with subject heading of "New Phrase for the American Language." Body of e-mail contains phrase: "Tight as a Florida election." I told Todd I want to use that phrase in one of my poems.

-- Ecstatic. Finally written a new poem. My first long poem since I got caught up in art writing. Title is "I Do," written in response to Michael Palmer's "I Do Not" -- both of us referring to *knowing English.* Includes the line "tight as a Florida election."

-- Can't believe I'll see Ianthe Brautigan tonight, whose memoir introduced me to her father's work and inspired this Counting Journal.

-- Am reading through Richard Brautigan's short story collection Revenge of the Lawn: 62 stories written from 1962-1970. Just finished -- and loved! -- "1/3, 1/3, 1/3."

NOTES FROM IANTHE BRAUTIGAN READING AT PRESIDIO BRANCH LIBRARY:
-- says Dad was a real "numbers" guy
--At 6, she played with RB's IBM Selectric; at 9, RB bought her her own typewriter; "I will give the typewriter to my daughter when she turns 9."
--RB left home at age 21. Trying to be a poet -- no place for that as a member of a lower-class family in Eugene, Oregon.
--First Poem Ianthe Memorized: "It's so nice not to have to wake up in the morning and tell someone you love them when you don't love them anymore."

AFTER HER READING, IANTHE BRAUTIGAN WROTE IN MY COUNTING JOURNAL (a light airy handwriting):

I'm now part of Eileen's diary. I have become an object to be counted. I read 5 sections from my book, and read one section from Revenge of the Lawn. I'm now on the inside looking out on November 8th, 2000. This makes me....

POETRY-IN-PROGRESS

Sandy McIntosh writes about my June 9 posts, "Counting Through Life," inspired by Richard Brautigan:

You were reminiscing about Brautigan, and I was dying to interrupt -- I loved him, too, of course. Anyway, I didn't interrupt because I had a sudden memory of making love in a dream only to be awakened by the actual person I’d been dreaming about who had been sleeping next to me, but was now shaking me to stop my terrible snoring.

And again, that was similar to another experience I had, this time at an academic conference at which eight of us read our papers on the poetry of David Ignatow. The man next to me had been happily reading his when in walked Ignatow, an unexpected guest.

Ignatow took his seat and the man whispered to me: "Now what do I do if he interrupts me because he doesn't agree with something I wrote? Why, oh why didn't I pick some dead poet to work on?”

*****

And as I'm chuckling over Sandy's post, I get a second e-mail from Sandy:

"Since writing my e-mail to you, I changed "Brautigan" to "Ignatow" and added two other parts, thus making it into a poem called "Ignatow Interrupts a Dream." Since you inspired it, I'm dedicating it to you. Here it is below. (It didn't occur to me until just now that I must have associated the name of the famous painter in the third part with the name I see on your check, which is before me on the desk.)"

Well, okay! Sandy joins the lineage of men writing poems for or inspired by me! A lineage that should be honored, of course!

(As for Sandy's parenthetical note above, well, my check -- for "services rendered" -- is from a joint account with my husband whose last name is _______.) So here's Sandy's poem!

=======

Ignatow Interrupts a Dream
--for Eileen R. Tabios

You were reminiscing about Ignatow, and I was dying to interrupt--I loved him, too, of course. Anyway, I didn't interrupt because I had a sudden memory of making love in a dream only to be awakened by the actual person I’d been dreaming about who had been sleeping next to me, but was now shaking me to stop my terrible snoring.

And again, that was similar to another experience I had, this time at an academic conference at which eight of us read our papers on the poetry of David Ignatow. The man next to me had been happily reading his when in walked Ignatow, an unexpected guest.

Ignatow took his seat and the man whispered to me: "Now what do I do if he interrupts me because he doesn't agree with something I wrote? Why, oh why didn't I pick some dead poet to work on?”

*

James Tate once sat next to a young woman on an airplane who was sobbing softly. He offered her a tissue. She explained that her father had died and she was returning home for his funeral.

Tate had been reading the newest David Ignatow. Without thinking too much about it, he gave the girl his copy to read.

“Thank you,” she told him after they’d landed.

“He made me see something I hadn’t seen before. That helped a lot.”

*

Ignatow, Hays, Ginsberg and I where sitting on Hays’ front porch. It was a quiet summer night in the Hamptons.

Hays was telling us how it had been the night Jackson Pollock was killed. “We had been having a musical evening at the Ossorio’s,” said Hays. “The night was like tonight. I think someone was playing a dreamy jazz sax. I had drifted off. Then Julie was shaking me. ‘Wake up Hoffman,’ she whispered. ‘Look over there.’ I looked and saw the evil lights of police emergency down at the end of the road.”

“Are you sure?” asked Ginsberg. “I thought Pollock was killed at the end of Fireplace Road, that hairpin curve.”

“Well,” said Hays petulantly. “That’s where we all were at the time. That’s where Alfonso Ossorio lived.”

“I didn’t even live here then,” said Ignatow.

“We weren’t talking about you,” muttered Hays.

That evening was a long time ago. Hays died first, then several years later, Ginsberg. Ignatow, never subtle in person, looked significantly at his wrist watch, than at me.

When Ignatow died he left me his watch.

COUNTING THROUGH LIFE (#2)

[Selected snippets from my "Counting Journal" (9/20/00 to February 2001) inspired by reading about Cameron, a character in Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster: "Cameron was a counter. He vomited nineteen times to San Francisco. He liked to count everything."]

10/20/00: Wrote two MW dictionary poems. But still behind by 4 MW poems. Finished second Richard Brautigan book, Sombrero Fallout. Strong effect; got deliciously lost going back and forth between the book and this journal. Third Brautigan book awaits: The Abortion, set in Presidio Library, my local library! [Library contains a glass display of letters from around the world and other ephemera related to The Abortion.]

10/21/00: Sent, unsent and resent one e-mail to ____ [AOL allows unread mail to be "unsent" if between two AOL subscribers. Could be the cyber-equivalent of walking/driving by the house of someone you have a crush on]. Let's not repeat this phase of sending and unsending e-mails: admonishment, admonishment!

10/22/00: Unsent one e-mail to ____.

--San Francisco hosts "Open Studios" on October weekends each year. Tom and I saw over 100 artists, of which a handful were interesting. We'll get a large abstract painting from Michelle O'Connor (starving artist w/ no gallery representation. Huge talent -- she spoke of silly Kinkos wanting cash before she could get her cards or resumes).

--Saw over 300 artists via Pierogi Flat Files Traveling Show at Yerba Buena. Beautiful drawings, as expected, from Sharon Louden. Bowled over by drawings of Shari Mendelson. Good work, too, by John Byers, David Zeller, Jane Fine but would have hoped for more from 300 artists (though exclude photographs from our assessment). Happy to see Leona Chrystie's and Jessica Snow's drawings, too.

10/23/00: Began third art essay -- this on V.C. Igarta and Carlos Villa. A new form of writing for me. A new form that's just pouring out. Must ensure it flows as long as it needs to flow.

-- Did 2 orders and bookkeeping at Kelsey Street Press [where I was volunteering at the time]. I had to add SPD's 2nd-quarter report eight times before it would almost balance out with our internal reporting -- "almost" as I was off by a penny. But the day simply begged to be continued in another manner.

-- Rena gave me 3 green apples

10/24/00: Returned two and checked out 4 Richard Brautigan books: Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General From Big Sur, Revenge of the Lawn, and The Hawkline Monster

-- jogged for 40 minutes

-- $8 for lunch at Coffee n Crepe: cafe latte, sesame seed bagel & caesar salad weighed down with the salad dressing -- sad as I wanted to, but couldn't, eat the healthy lettuce as the dressing was too thick

-- Reading/skimming through Trout Fishing during lunch. Am now on P. 92. Boring. None of the words stick....

-- Done with Trout Fishing...I did like the last 2 chapters -- how the book ended with word "mayonaise"

-- Slow boat from Manila arrived w/ 69 copies of my 2nd book, Ecstatic Mutations. Sold 6 to [bookstore] for $5.75 each (vs. acquisition cost of $5.35 each) and 1 copy to E___ at full retail price of $14.95.

-- Received ___'s first draft of editorial introduction to ____ anthology. A good job but strident. I think most people don't understand that to wallow in rebellion can be a form of enslavement, and that it is as significant to write a poem on the beauty of the sunset as on a racist incident. Well, that's not the politically-correct thought now, is it....

10/25/00: Spent $7.80 in postage sending books and CDs out

10/26/00: Sent e-mailed invitation to Babaylan's Publisher's Party to 47 recipients. Aunt Lute said they'll also mail me 40 postcard-flyers.

-- Mailed one poetry submission comprised of 6 poems

-- Pearl said she'll help me get my Johannes Girardoni art essay published by REVIEW. 2,200 words.

10/27/00: E-mailed Babaylan invite to 8 more recipients, four of whom I met at Skyline's reading re. Filipino literature. Read there with Cecilia Brainard, Jaime Jacinto and Lou Syquie whom I met for the first time. Skyline paid $100. I sold 3 Babaylans. Ate four pieces of ochenta (sp), a Pinoy dessert topped with coconut shavings.

-- Am in a cafe. Just finished a piece of cinnamon cake. Am now reading Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster whose character "Cameron" inspired this Counting Journal. From P. 24:

Cameron was carrying a long narrow trunk over his shoulder. The trunk contained a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump shotgun, a 25:35 Winchester rifle, a 30-40 Krag, two .38 caliber revolvers and an automatic .38 caliber pistol that Cameron ahd bought from a soldier in Hawaii who was just back from the Philippines where he had been fighting the rebels for two years ... // "This gun is for killing Filipino motherfuckers," the soldier had said. "It kills one of those bastards so dead that you need two graves to bury him in."

-- Am now on P. 72 -- the chapter "Miss Hawkline" has the feel of a film by that Cremaster fella.

-- Took about 45 minutes to skim/read through The Hawkline Monster which mentioned the word "Filipino" three times. Perhaps four, but don't wish to return to the book and risk reading through *killing bastard Filipino motherfuckers* just so I can get an accurate count.

PERIOD-IC BREATH

My "Countings Journal" was written during a period when I was exploring poems written in response to a Merriam Webster-sponsored program that did daily e-mails of a word and its definition. I then would use that word as a title and write a poem -- nearly all one-paragraph prose poems.

The poems started out relying on complete sentences. At some point, I began breaking up sentences into phrases through the use of periods. I generally used the periods to denote a pause in breath, versus the ending of a sentence -- a thought I briefly referenced in my prior post). In a forthcoming essay in the January 2004 issue of MELUS (being primarily a one olive tree-farmer, I'm tickled, by the way, that an "academic" journal has opened itself up to my w(h)ine), I explained what I was trying to do more fully through this excerpt:

"....Speaking of enlightenment, an unexpected side-result is that as I continued to write the dictionary-based poems, I came to extend my investigations of the prose poem, a form whose long lines I originally found compatible with my ability to hold my breath for long periods. As I've aged, I've noticed a diminishment in that ability and I find that I cannot read some of my older long lines without the interruption of another inhale. The MW poems allowed me to explore the effect of breath on poetic lines through my use of the period as like a line-break to note the pause required by inhalation, and not just to end a sentence. This has led to my still early investigations on how to break up the prose poem paragraph without obviating the paragraph. This poem reflects an example of this form, new to me and which arose organically as I disciplined myself to write a WM poem on a daily basis:

OBSEQUIOUS

He possessed a power. over her. because she could be anyone. with him. even creatures whose existence she could not predict. until she found herself clothed. by their skin. Once, she tried to embody a concept. that she would loathe. like "obsequiousness," a concept. that forces her to consider. her forlorn toes. forlorn because her toes comprehend. their ugliness. To be obsequious. she began by accepting. a blindfold. fashioned through a silk, floral scarf. her grandmother has never given her. Oh cloudless sky--a plate where I spread my thighs for the hunger in his eyes. Oh, royal blue sky. What is signified when the attempt for obsequiousness becomes a boulder rolling away from the entrance to a cave? He awaited her. He showed her. how to create shadows. to live on the wall as physically. as his hand curving around her breast. for the first time. It was the last time. he was gentle. which could not prevent her. from soaring. whenever she bowed before him. subsequently.

*****
The relationship between breath and poetic line has been addressed by many poets and theorists, with ideas ranging over the thought that line breaks should mirror pauses to American poet Charles Olson's theory of "projective verse" whereby the poem is energetically thrown forward from the poet. Though I empathize with Olson's burst-of-energy approach [which is why I wrote these poems out under a "first draft, last draft" attempt], I am equally interested in the internal alchemy that occurs within the poet prior to the surfacing of the poem. (Olson does address the importance of an "interior listening process," as Jean Gier puts it, but also seems to "valorize the projective, exteriorizing act.")

I see the intake of breath to be related to the alchemical and transformative process of creation, followed by the projected out-breath. Perhaps this is why, in writing the MW poems, I have not opted for the free-stanza form despite noticing how my breath no longer mirrors the long lines I integrated into my earlier prose poems. I didn't wish to negate my history with the prose poem form by now eliminating it from my work. In addition, the line break -- that actual cutting off of a line -- is a much more blunt cut than the inclusion of a period within the still flowing long line. As a student of Kali, I was taught the significance of "soft" breath by poet and Kali instructor Michelle Bautista. Kali is a Filipino martial arts form that I study because I consider it a metaphor for (how I consider) Poetry. This relationship is evident in my poem "Kali." The poem's last stanza explicitly states the importance of perfect pitch, including for me, not privileging (as Olson's emphasis does) the outtake to the intake (which Bautista also relates to female energies) of breath.

[....from the poem "Kali"]

To live poetry
instead of just marking
words on a page
is to live like a poem--
none of it is too much
or too little
It is only what it is
and all of it is
perfectly pitched

COUNTING THROUGH LIFE

the eternal she
by Richard Brautigan

I gave
a girl my soul.

She looked at it.

Smiled faintly.

And dropped
it into the gutter.

Casually.

God! She had class.

So all this talk recently of my former banking career made me think of numbers....which, in turn, made me recall a "Countings Journal" that I once kept. That journal only lasted for five months because I could maintain its underlying obsession, which was to count everything, for only that long. It was inspired, as this first entry explained on 9/20/2000, by:

I'm reading Ianthe Brautigan's You Can't Catch Death -- A Daughter's Memoir which noted the character Cameron in her father Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster: "Cameron was a counter. He vomited nineteen times to San Francisco. He liked to count everything."

I shall begin a Counting Journal -- counting to be just another mechanism for me to understand my days.

==========

I found that journal while continuing to pack up my writing studio. So I'm flipping through it for the first time since I ended it in February 2001. I've forgotten 99% of the entries so I also just now realize that the writing in this journal is *flat* relative to how I usually write (more Liechtenstein-like than abstract expressionist). I'll post some selected snippets as I read it now -- they sort of....speak for themselves (although I'll insert occasional commentary in italics). :

9/20/00: Wrote 2 poems: "Yen" and "Purple Light" from the Merriam-Webster dictionary project [This was a project where MW e-mailed me daily a word and its definition; I'd given myself the task of writing a poem entitled by each such word.] Returned three books to the library -- brainless romances (e.g. Nora Roberts stuff) because reading popcorn books sometimes soothes my brain. At library, checked out one CD: Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Read through one book: Charles Baudelaire's Letters From His Youth. Did 3 loads of laundry.

9/21/00: Mailed 5 letters and one postcard. Wrote 1 failed poem. Listened twice to my new poetry CD ("The Empty Flagpole," Jeepney Dash Productions)

9/22/00: Mailed 2 bill payments, 3 letters and 1 submission. I did not write a single poem.

9/23/00: I did not write a million poems [no lie, Jordan, I wrote that!]. Missing my poem-du-jour hurts.

9/24/00: Read a positive review of ____ with my story "as its single most successful piece" eight times. E-mailed that review to 44 recipients -- shameless I am!

9/24/00: Asked Miriam Bloom for 100 copies of her catalogue in which I will write essay for her sculpture show. Miriam said they will publish 1,500 copies of her catalogue. Cool!

9/26/00: Mailed one letter. Collaged more than one MW word into one poem since I'm getting behind the one-poem-a-day schedule.

9/27/00: Wrote one MW dictionary poem ("Rebus") -- whew! I really must keep up with these poem-du-jours on schedule. Wrote two Gabriela Silang poems. Did reading at Cafe Sapporo with Michelle Murphy and Vincent Carolla -- about 20 people attended. Did 2 loads of laundry.

9/28/00-10/1/00: Wrote zero poems because worked on my first catalogue essay for an artist. Traded e-mails with John Yau -- yes: writing on Art is like writing poetry! Finished one short story ("Defining Peregrine...") [John had counseled me when I first began writing on art and, among other things that I found meaningful, were his suggestions that art-writing is like poetry in how "it's about nouns and verbs; avoid adjectives." Of course, we both break that rule anyway but at least I'm conscious of not reviewing art by simply relying on stand-alone adjectives....]

10/4/00: Mailed six poetry submissions and one fiction submission.

10/5/00: Mailed six submissions. Interview by student for his class paper lasted 3 1/2 hours. Young poet J Guevara. He'd researched me on the Internet. He discovered I like wine and brought me a bottle of the 1997 J. Lohr cabernet. Laugh (sweet laugh).

10/6-10/8/00: Did two readings in L.A., at Brentwood Dutton's on Friday and Fil-American Library on Sunday. 12 people attended on Friday; sold 5 Babaylans and one CD. 14 people attended at Library; sold 6 Babaylans, one The Anchored Angel, one Beyond Life Sentences and one CD. At airport, bumped into M_____ and sold one CD.

10/7/00: Toured galleries at Bergamot Station -- favorites among those seen: Dori and John Decamillis, Marcel Dzama and Ann Chamberlin. Bought one Decamillos painting; may buy second one. Seriously considering the other two.

10/10/00: Wrote John yesterday I hadn't written a new poem in 9 days due to the art writing. Today he said "nine days between poems will be short" if I end up doing a lot of art writing. Said John Ashberry warned him of the same thing years back. Oh well.

-- Behind in my MW project. Wrote a poem using 13 MW words to catch up on the project titled "Nugatory" -- used the words: nugatory, doozy, anneal, trammel, affable, nimrod, kneejerk, riot act, yawp, cirumspect, altruism, emote, didactic...

-- Julie e-mailed; son Felix came in at 8.5 lbs but is now over 9 lbs.

-- Waited 35 minutes in post office line.

-- Did 3 loads of laundry.

-- Donated 5 books to Filipino American Library. Catie e-mailed to say she'll be donating her poetry book, too.

10/11/00: Mailed two submissions. Wrote one MW poem ("Objurant"); am still behind by one word.

10/13/00: Saw one movie "Remember the Titans" (normally not worth recounting but we rarely see movies nowadays). Did 2 loads of laundry.

10/16/00: Mailed one submission. Wrote 2 MW-dictionary poems.

10/17/00: Drove to *Diesel A Bookstore* in Oakland so I don't get lost driving there tomorrow when I do a reading. Put nearly $10 of gas in car before I realized it was the wrong octane. Bought 2 books at Diesel; Joanne Kyger's Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals (1960-64) and Adultery. Finished Adultery quickly, but I think it's the second time I've read it [I read so much and my memory is so poor that I forget which books I've read.] Wrote one MW dictionary-poem and am grateful I managed my poem-du-jour.

10/18/00: Five people showed up at Diesel reading -- traumatized at low turnout! But what was I thinking to rely on someone 3,000 miles away to set up a reading and then not publicize it? This is a poetry reading -- people don't just show up because it's there!

-- Reworked three Gabriela poems -- I am always grateful nowadays to write a new poem; it keeps getting more and more difficult.

-- Lunch at crepes-cafe. Two Russians in corner....Russian -- a language for poetry: that sound! Contained music...

-- From Kyger's reference to Ezra Pound's biography by Charles Norman: "For, in the end what differentiates one poet from another is the structure of his line, and as this structure comes from the very depths of his being it is unlikely that it can be taught, and if taught, followed. The poet's line reveals not only his manner of expression, hence the way he thinks; it reveals his intensity -- almost, it might be said, his way of breathing. And this individual structure is all that can be called different in the poets, for they resemble each other more often than they do not.....thus, no matter where the discussion starts, it is always necesary to return to the line and its structure." ==> This is why I am so excited to have discovered the stoppages via inserting periods within the prose poem paragraph while I was developing the MW dictionary poems. Must try to do more with this form, though....

-- I am currently behind by 5 word-poems in my MW cyberspace collaboration with Merriam-Webster....

-- Did 2 loads of laundry

-- Picked up 4 of Tom's shirts from dry cleaner's

10/19/00: Read one book in one sitting during lunch at Cafe Crepe N' Coffee: Robin Magowan's Memoirs of a Minotaur. Read another book in one sitting, this at a bookstore -- the memoir of an "unfinished woman" (I seem to be attracted to this type of diaries, by "unfinished" authors).

10/20/00: I am in library intending to finish reading in one seating Richard Brautigan's An Unfortunate Woman. From P. 77:
     "I've always had at times a certain interest in counting. I don't know why this is. It seems to come without a preconceived plan and then my counting goes away. Often without me ever having noticed its departure.
     I think I counted the words on the early pages of this book because I wanted to have a feeling of continuity, that I was actually doing something, though I don't know exactly why counting words on a piece of paper served that purpose because I was actually doing something.
     Anyway, I stopped counting words on page 22 on February 1, 1982, with a total of 1,885 words. I hope that is the correct sum. I can count, but I can't add which, in itself, is sort of interesting."

-- So Richard Brautigan was also into counting -- as I've said often: no such thing as an original idea!

-- Jogged today: 45 minutes w/ a 10-minute break watching the birds by the lake in Presidio Park. Should note my jogs since I don't do it often enough.

-- Omigod. I happened to read the first page of this journal just now [due to my lousy memory, I'd already forgotten what I'd written a month earlier]. Of course Richard Brautigan is into counting! That's how I thought to begin this journal -- after seeing reference to him in Ianthe's memoir. And now I'm reading her father Brautigan for the first time! And I just checked out his book The Abortion, which is set in the Presidio Library, just a few blocks away from the apartment! There is a reason for this coincidence which I do not at all believe to be a coincidence. I shall write -- and thus create this prophecy to protect me: THE SIGNIFICANCE SHALL BE THAT I SHALL NOT COMMIT SUICIDE SOMEDAY. As Ianthe wrote: You Can't Catch Death.


[To Be Continued]

"AMUSE BOUCHE": MORE FROM ADVENTURES OF A WIFE

New York memories! The mid to late '80s. There was the year when Tom was fresh out of law school and I was finishing up my last year in business school. We were awash in student loans and also paying exorbitant rent on this teensy apartment (real estate space being particularly tight back then). Tom got paid every other Friday. One Thursday, we were literally out of money....and we still had Thursday dinner to go. We could have gone out and charged dinner on a credit card, but we didn't want to do that because our budget was so tight that we knew that if we started charging things, we might never catch up with payments. So we checked the cupboards. One can of tuna. That was our dinner that night....and ever since then, we always have a minimum dozen cans of tuna in the cupboard. We could win Lotto and it wouldn't matter: we'd always have at least a dozen cans of tuna in the cupboard. If the number ever drops beneath 12, the universe doesn't seem in balance for us -- well, for me, anyway; Tom doesn't get as fanciful as I do. But, seriously, I really *feeeel* it when those cans diminish below the number 12 -- and I'm not even a fan of tuna!

By no means was this real suffering or like "The Year of Living Dangerously," of course. I'ma just trying to entertain you greeedy greeedy reader-peeps. So, here's another thing we used to do to survive high-priced Manhattan. Come summer-time, many law firms would have "summer associates" or interns. And, basically, these puppies are just entertained up the gazoo because the law firms use the internships as recruitment tools. Generally all top law firms will always want that editor of the Law Review at Harvard and all the Ivy League schools, Stanford, yadda yadda boring yadda....(yawn).

So Tom and I would always try to wangle our way into these affairs -- it was the only way we could afford to eat at many fabulous restaurants (one less meal from our tight budget!); go to concerts (as a matter of mooching policy, we once attended a Madonna concert just because we got freebie tickets and can I tell ya?! -- it simply was not aesthetically pleasing to the eye to watch said Madonna in a white bridal gown get on her back and go rolling over and over from one end of the stage to the other); attend high-priced shows on Broadway, etc.

Anyway, times sure have changed for these law school interns. Why is this on my mind? Because today 40 lawyer-peeps converged on the house for lunch -- members of Tom's corporate department plus some summer interns that his firm may wish to recruit. Now, granted, it was catered (like I was gonna cook, she snorts) -- but from sunset cruises and the like, now these summer associates are having lunch on my veranda?! Dang! I'd like to think it's because of my priceless charm ...and so I shall! And, of course I didn't mind as it gave me another reason to be fed. Here's the menu catered by Roux (thanks to chef Dominique and pastry chef Penelope dropping by!):

Amuse Bouche
White bean crostini with sage
Candied walnuts with cachel (Scottish) blue cheese
Pureed salmon tartare

First Course
Asparagus morel mushroom salad with warm sherry vinaigrette

Second Course (choice of)
Pacific seared halibut with spicy vegetables
Crispy skin duckling breast with forni brown greens and potato galleta

Dessert
Strawberry napoleon with pistacchio ice cream
Cinnamon chocolate truffles
Lemon-honey madeleines (I filched some of these while they dirtied up the sculpture, uh, stove, in my kitchen)

Actually, since we're in Napa Valley, the idea was to give these the interns a "wine country experience." So we had four tables set out, and at each table, a member of the wonderful Chafen family -- Scott, Les, Maggie and Sophia -- proprietors of Dutch Henry Vineyards, sat and poured the wines and discussed whatever peeps wanted to discuss about winemaking. The wines:

DH 2001 chardonnay Los Carneros
DH 2000 zinfandel
DH 1999 cabernet (Chafen Vineyards)

Hopefully, a good time was had by all and some of these interns will join Tom's firm. I mean, I even behaved myself -- which is always a pain for me to do, ya know what I mean?! (Well, of course ya know what I mean -- are you not one of my 8 million peeps?) For some reason, though, today being on good behavior didn't make me grumpy. It made me feel quite expansive. So, feeling quite fetching with my fetching self, I suggested -- very generously and graciously -- to Tom, "Well, like -- should I stand up at the end of the meal and declaim my poetry to this captive audience?"

He looked at me consideringly (shades of that gaze that means "Who is this woman I married?!") reached over slowly to quite fondly pat me on the head.....patted said head again (my hair is just so silky soft, you know).....then said, "Honey, I really appreciate your offer. I really do. But we're trying to do some recruiting here...."

*****

Fortunately, there is another Tom in my life. This seems as good a time as any to publicly thank Thomas Fink for having asked me to submit a manuscript to Marsh Hawk Press, which subsequently accepted then published Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (see link). If you read Tom's report on the Boston Poetry Marathon over at MHP Blogs!, you'll undoubtedly notice something you'll rarely find on WinePoetics: the quite civilized strain of ... civility that underpins Tom's words. I'm glad. There is always a place for civility, even if not on my blog.

*****

And, thanks to Melissa, a poet -- and mom of an 8-month old boy! -- who says she stumbled on my blog a month ago and now can't keep up! That's okay, Sweetie. I can't keep up with myself either...but, methinks, no need to as I wouldn't want this blog to interfere with your mom duties. It's difficult to believe but, yah, there is *also* life outside of WinePoetics! Sip. Sipping more wine from the vineyard also known for its hospitality to dogs! Now, I must go write a poem entitled "Amuse Bouche"!

THE "RELIQUARY"

Dear Lovely Lovely Poets --

One of you wrote and spoke for others when you said about my prior post:

I loved your blog post ....The motherhood/poetry question really resonates with me too. I'm 35, worried about having/not having children, and feeling time's urgent passing. Your post made me feel less alone. Thank you.

You're welcome. And thanks as well to Stephanie for your fullsome response. Your and others' reactions now make me wonder -- if we take a look at poetry blogland, aren't many of you peeps in your 20s and 30s? Which would certainly be the age where parenthood becomes more of a possibility? Well, if I said something meaningful, I'm glad. But of course you can only be the one for yourself finding meaning in what I've written. I don't have any wisdom to impart. Poetry and parenting -- it's all such an individual thing, right? And perhaps those poets who, unlike me, are actually parents would have other (more valid?) things to say about....the relationship between the two roles.

Meanwhile, I do want to say -- without discounting my sorrow at how this issue seems to have come out for me -- there are compensations. In the same essay (in Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival) that I referenced in my prior post, I also had written:

I came to love poetry [partly] because I have discovered that the writing and reading of it works best [for me anyway] if the person does not bring to the experience such negative characteristics that the external world sometimes engenders. As a banker, for instance, it was healthy for me to be a bit skeptical of things (sometimes even cynical) in order to penetrate the marketing bluffs underlying requests to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from my employers. It was also healthy for me to feel a certain level of competitiveness in order to win the mandates for transactions. Unlike some of the activiites in banking, poetry requires me to open my heart in addition to my mind and to respond emotionally instead of dispassionately. As a result, I believe poetry has made me a psychologically healthier person -- a person I would rather be.

==============

And I also said in that essay

By "writing well," I don't just mean literally writing well. I also believe in "living well." For me, this means living as a responsible member of the literary community. Thus, I have targeted the encouragement of young writers as a primary concern.

My desire to be supportive of writers (whether young or old) remains strong. What the years have proven since I wrote this essay in 1997 or 1998 is that one gets out of poetry only what one puts into it. And I remain blessed today by my ROI (banker's term: "Return in Investment"). Just this week, Annabelle Udo, a young poet I hadn't heard from for a while wrote:

hello, hello...was going through some old e-mail and came across something that you had advised me:

"Poetry is all of your life."

. . .just as the world has, i have been experiencing a lot in the past few months--of births, deaths, marriages, and other promotions. .and realized that i can never get away from poetry--it's everywhere.

Here is a poem then from this wonderful young poet about the poetry that never sunders itself from life:

April 10, 2002
"He Slurs, She Slurs"
By Annabelle A. Udo

Slurring and mean
She came home drunk last night.
He says all she does is boss him around.
No sex,
No booze,
No fatty foods.
He encourages me to send him
erotic electronic poetry.
He fantasizes that we'll run away together and live as hippies
in a wigwam somewhere in Oregon,
With a hot tub made of stone
While I sit around half naked in a sarong
with jasmine in my hair
Smelling sweet.

Slurring and stumbling
He didn't come home drunk last night.
Ended up in prison and bright orange overalls
For public intoxication--
Broke his foot.
No sex,
No booze,
Just Vicodin.
She tells me the real story that
begins from the previous night.
The missing chapter from a dramatic evening.
She speaks with the poise of a warrior
but lives her life grumbling about the ghetto.

Thanks Annabelle. It's been a while, yes, but I'm not surprised to hear you are continuing with poetry. Keep writing, Sweetie...

==========

No lie -- minutes after hearing from Annabelle, I also received a poem from another lovely poet: Barbara Jane Reyes . Once, I pretended to have poetic words of wisdom for this young lady; well, she's now coming out with her first book and I'm so proud, Sweetie (but can I now tell you -- all those so-called gems of wisdom I'd told you about Poetry? I just made them up. Forget my blather; I have....)

ASKING
By Barbara Jane Reyes

there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of foretelling, of small miracles, cactus flowers in bloom on this city fire escape, where inside your tongue touches every inch of her skin, where you lay your hand on her belly and sleep. here, she fingers the ornate remains of ancient mosques. here, some mythic angel will rise from the dust of ancestors’ bones. this is where you shall worship, at the intersections of distilled deities and memory’s sharp edges. the country is quite a poetic place; water and rock contain verse and metaphor, even wild grasses reply in rhyme. you are not broken. she knows this having captured a moment of lucidity; summer lightning bugs, sun’s rays in a jelly jar.

this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however momentary. she is still a child, confabulating the fantastic; please do not erode her wonder for the liquid that is your language. there is a thunderstorm in her chest, wanting to burst through her skin. this is neither love poem nor plea. this is not river, nor stone.

==========

And more more more! Michelle Bautista also writes (within hours from Annabelle's and Barbara's missives -- were you Pinays sensing I needed to hear your lovely poems?) that she "finally used the line from [our] writing workshop! haha!" in this yummy poem below (also reprinted in Michelle's blog):

Stone Temples and Organ Music
By Michelle Bautista

For Ros at Tagub Hot Spring

A near pregnant moon lights our path in subtle shades of cobalt blue. This light melts the clothes from our bodies. There is no shame in the form of silhouettes. In pools of tide sculpted stones, tiny crabs nibble near our backs. The moon is shaded from view by the jagged outlines of coconut leaves. Enter the volcano's fading breath as waves crash forth. Rustling palm leaves and gecko croaks play hymns. We balance ocean polished stones atop each other to form temples. Seven steps to heaven. The water ripples from humming resonance in our lungs like deep organ tones heard in the cathedral. The heat of our prayers boils the water permeates our very being. Who says heaven is up?

==========

Speaking of young poets, Andrew Lundwall is a peep who's just done something fabulous: used the Net's resources to put together an anthology: Eye Peasant is a linked anthology of literature found online. It's a great way to provide a focus from the almost infinite variety of resources on the web. It's nifty because though I'd read some of these works elsewhere, I wouldn't have found a reason to revisit -- and enjoy -- them again if Andrew hadn't put this together: a labor of love and one that fosters "community" -- thanks, Andrew! And I liked that Andre Gide quote!

More information about Andrew may be found at his "collaborative site" with Star Jewel Smith: Poetic Inhalation." Thanks for the best wishes, Andrew; the same to you and your poems.

=================

Today, I drank the house chardonnay at Vitte's (St. Helena) for lunch. I ate Tom's Greek salad piadinni, and then I had my lamb fusilli. Yum. And we sat outdoors as the sky hung blue, blue, a sunlit blue! A blue as pretty as the blue that made it into my poem with David at perky-licious Shampoo! And the sunrays tickled my toe cleavages. And teeny poem-critters kept swinging like Tarzan from the tips of my uncut hair.... Peeps: life is....good. Really.

=================

Ann Townsend is today's featured poet on Verse Daily. I couldn't help but apply the first half of her poem, "The Reliquary" to my the issues raised by my prior post (which also means that I recontextualized her poem that is *about* something else -- and such recontextualizatione is a remark on the fabulous fluidity of poems's identities):

The Reliquary

The world with its dangers
submits to me,
my spells, my potions,
for I outrank the heavens,
and with that blasphemy

which makes better my heart,
I tap the seatbelt,
the helmet, the pavement,
and other hard surfaces,

Yes, I know that applying that to myself is a heap of aggrandizement....but, sip (diet coke), it's time I return to aggrandizing myself and committing more blasphemies (aren't I so much more fun that way?!). So, anyway, as I said in the prior post, Poetry also has caused ... pain. But don't cry for me, Argentina and elsewhere. I may be a mere reliquary, but to be that for poems ... is a sacred curse. For

Poetry is not a gift one should squander.

HOW TO BE A POET: THE CAREERIST PATH
(AKA, AS REGARDS MY POTENTIAL AS AN IRONIST)

You: "telling secrets all night as a way of making love / tacitly. Or rather, tacit."

She: "This is the secret no one knows about angels: Poetry -- it gave me wings. Glorious. Wide-spanned (it's why I do yoga; I need muscular biceps because my wings, unfurled, extend past the horizon). // But to give me wings, first, Poetry had to gut me gut me gut me..."

*****

I was cleaning my files (preparing to move studios) and I stumbled across an old resume. It's a resume before I became a writer. It feels so .... weird to read it now. Here, let me share it, though I'm going to replace the companies with "XXXX" because I don't want to risk breaching various confidentiality contracts I'd signed with these former employers. So, after my name and contact information, the resume continues:

EDUCATION

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
Masters in Business Administration, June 1987.
Double Major: Economics and International Business. Selected by Faculty to participate in International Business Negotiations Program.

BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Bachelor of Arts, June 1982.
Major: Political Science. Gemco Inc. College Scholar. Editor/writer at Spectator, Sundial, Broadway, Asian Journal and Bulletin publications and Columbia Television News. Delegate to West Point's 33rd Annual Conference on Foreign Affairs and Mount Holyoke's 6th Annual Conference on International Affairs. Columbia University awards for outstanding contribution to student activities.

EXPERIENCE

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Company
Vice President, Project Finance, September 1992-June 1995
Senior credit officer for "start-up" Portfolio Management Group ("PMG") within the Project Finance Section which has about 50 projects with net exposure totalling nearly $1.2 billion and spanning energy, mining, resource recovery, infrastructure and industrial manufacturing facilities. Primary duties involve (i) developing and implementing PMG's business plan, (ii) conducting portfolio-related projects (e.g. acted as XXX representative to the Energy Finance Forum, a group of financial institutions which presented recommendations to the California Public Utilities Commission regarding the drop of avoided cost rates) and (iii) acting as account officer for 17 project loans. Acted as lead banker in a resource recovery project refinancing agented by XXXX; co-lead banker in a waste project "work-out" co-agented by XXXX; and lead banker in a resource recovery "work-out" agented by XXXX.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Company
Vice President, Project Finance, June 1989-July 1992
As one of three account officers in 10 member Project Financing team, responsible for developing financing opportunities and analyzing, structuring, preparing credit applications for and closing project and other structured finance transactions. Target markets included energy, infrastructure, mining, industrial manufacturing, resource recovery, stadium/arena and equipment leasing transactions.

Market directly to chief executives, other senior management and finance professionals at investment/commercial banks; utility non-regulated subsidiaries; and corporations.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Company
Assistant Vice President, Project Finance, 1987-1989
Conducted economic, risk and cash flow analyses; recommended ways to structure transactions; and prepared credit applications for financing a variety of projects including cogeneration facilities, resource recovery plants, sports arenas, geothermal projects and medical waste plants.

Four promotions in first 15 months of employment is the fastest promotional record within Financial Services Group (which included Project, Public and Corporate Finance). Completed Bank's credit training program.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Company
Economist, Part-time Spring and Full-time Summer, 1986
Analyzed statistical and qualitative/industry data on financial and economic issues for writing reports published weekly in XXXXXX Economic Research. Wrote commentaries on timely economic indicators for stock market investors.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Company
Asia and Pacific Editor, (Freelance) 1985-1986
Conducted economic, political and financial risk analyses; and predicted economic and political regional trends in 19 countries for an audience of bankers and institutional investors.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Company
Securities Analyst, 1983-1985
Analyzed companies in numerous industries including oil and gas, technology, banking, consumer goods and health care for possible inclusion in a $125MM managed portfolio.

OTHER INFORMATION
More than six years experience as a journalist for numerous publications. Anchored and wrote for a weekly television news program for KLCS-TV (Los Angeles).

Member, Board of Directors (1986-1987) for XXXX, a non-profit organization which disseminates information on international trade and countertrade. Organized seminar on "Countertrade in the Pacific Basin Nations" (June 1986) which brought together representatives of Asian industrialized nations, multinational corporations and countertrade specialists.

Treasurer and Member, Board of Directors (1992-1995) of XXXX Corp., a New York City cooperative building. Refinanced the cooperative's mortgage to take advantage of the drop of interest rates, thereby preventing significant maintenance increases and funding a capital reserve fund in excess of $1.0 mio.

=============

Well. So that was really weird for me to read. Anything before my literarily-oriented life is so...different! And it's from that background that I became Ms. WinePoetics?! Who'da thunk!?. I can't even fathom how I did any of the above: I can't even add! No wonder I drink. Sip. Tonight, more of the 1999 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast (Hirsch Vineyards). But there's more: within the same file as this old resume was a 1999 article written by Clinton Palanca, a Philippines-based writer and, I believe, gourmet chef when his muse departs. I think this article was published by the Manila Times, but don't hold me to that as the version in my files is an e-mailed text. Anyway, here's an excerpt:

Those who used to write
By Clinton Palanca, Columnist
02 FEB 1999

A recent magazine article on the New York-based poet Eileen Tabios reminded me of how powerful the muse can be, just as my own recent impotence in front of the computer reminded me of the same, only in reverse. The muse is both subject and master, albeit capricious, and we all have our ways of dealing with its sulks. For many, or in fact for most, the muse is one that must be invoked each time one writes, and it is not an easy process. The most common reasons for writers' block are fear and lassitude, and they usually prevail.

Yet for some, the opposite is true. The muse calls, and calls again. For Eileen Tabios, for instance, it beckoned from the gray lonely world of writing into a life that was not unfruitful and a career that was not unglamorous: Wall Street and high finance. Who would abandon this to inhabit instead the never-never land of silent apartments and typewriters, prowling in half-empty bookstores while everyone is at work, agonizing in bed over a stuck phrase? Well, she did. And so did many others. Noelle de Jesus-Chua has had a long, ongoing flirtation with the writing of fiction: unable to commit, she staged, instead, a series of tempestuous affairs that ended just as abruptly--often, she admits, out of boredom; rather like real-life affairs, actually. Carla Pacis, similarly, did an abrupt U-turn on her career when she decided to be a children's book writer.

[....]

Makati, which is I suppose our version of Wall Street, is a surprising place. An amazing number of the people who occupy grayish, mysterious positions in large corporations are actually closet poets and writers. Their attire does seem a little more conservative than the usual poet's garb, but they do read a great deal and they scribble at night. What's stopping them from writing the Great Philippine Novel, or the next "Four Quartets"? Work, they claim. I have to feed a family/a wife/my lust for luxury cars, so I must stay in this "damn" job. And the pressures, they claim, are so intense that they have barely enough time to crank out a few lines in a journal before retiring.

I'm not here to be supercilious; I am, believe it or not, leading up to a point. Now if people who quit their jobs and go freelance have trouble writing, then does that mean that there's no recourse? If you're 40 years old, what are your options if you want to write? Abandon everything and go "full-time" into writing? Those who have tried it will tell you it doesn't work. So is there nothing left but to be an occasional diarist?

The muse, the muse, the muse. It calls, it is capricious, but it can be sought; and once in a while it does come when you ask it to. All you need is blankness--a screen, a sheet of paper--and passion. There's nothing sadder than someone who "used to write". I am introduced to some of them sometimes: they say with a rueful smile, yes, I used to write. Oh, they are sad! Not because they are pathetic figures, but because they seem to have accepted the imperfect tense so easily. They feel that writing has passed them by, as though it is a period of one's life when one rode about with the windows open and seduced young women. That, indeed, requires youth. But writing doesn't require youth--in fact, youth is inimical to writing. Young "poets" sit around with bottles of beer and talk about the moon and Schopenhauer and the futility of life, and then write blather which they read with trembling hands at poetry readings. Fire and vitality and vigour, yes, coupled with a complete lack of talent: all that sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To abandon everything, and follow the muse, in an apostolic tradition, works for some, doesn't work for others. To each his own, but whatever age you are, and whatever your occupation might be, when the muse beckons, turn on your computer, or feed a sheet into your Remington, or dry out a fresh sheet of parchment, and begin. You are a writer.

==========

Clinton obviously writes from an experience that may not be shared by all writers. At any rate, it's ... painful for me to read the above article now. One of the few things that remains quite clear -- TOO CLEAR -- in my otherwise fragile memory is the day I submitted my resignation to the bank which was my last finance employer. I first told my manager, who then asked the same question everyone else came to ask when they learned of my resignation: "So which bank are you joining?"

That is, everyone assumed I was resigning to move elsewhere -- a competitor who managed to offer a more lucrative position. To all of them, I had replied, "No one. I'm going home. I'm just going to stay home and write. I want to write."

I would calculate (huh: "calculate" -- banking word) that 95% reacted in the same manner. A silent pause. The world stood still for an immeasurable moment -- I could see the light leave their eyes as they all looked inward. I was 35 years old when I resigned from my financial career. Most of the people I worked with were in their mid-30s to their 40s. I knew what was happening as they looked inward: in part, to look away from me who was standing right in front of them; in part, to look back at what their "past dreams" had been as, most likely, they were then in situations to which they had not aspired. (I worked in a highly-competitive industry which, like many competitive areas, generated much unhappy participants.)

By saying I was quitting to become a writer, I was really telling them that I was dropping out of the grind we shared -- in whose sharing validation exists -- to do something I *really* wanted to do....not something I woke up one day to find myself doing whether or not I wanted to be in that place.

That day, as we discussed my career switch from finance to creative writing, I actually felt pangs of hatred spear up towards me before, as my very professional colleagues collected themselves, their acrimony just as quickly evaporated. I understood them because I felt I knew part of what went on in their minds when they looked inward. They were remembering some old dreams, some old goals, and considering then why they couldn't do what I was doing: to return to those desires and try to manifest them.

Well, most of my colleagues couldn't do it because ... of those reasons Clinton noted in his article: families to feed and educate, huge mortgages to service, et al. Though I was opting for a different path, I never dismissed these factors -- why wouldn't these be honorable reasons for my colleagues for sticking to the course of the lives my departure gave them reason to momentarily question? In any event, I think they were as relieved as I was when I finally walked out of the bank's steel and glass doors.

*****

Whatever I've done in my literary career has been more than I'd ever hoped hoped initially to realize. But, I don't feel more privileged than the former business colleagues I left behind. Shortly after I left banking to become a "full-time" writer, one of my essays appeared in an anthology that I've only cracked twice: the first time I received it and today when this blog post reminded me of it. But until today, it was a book I could not bear to open, and thought I'd never ever again open. This is a book edited by Marilyn Kallet and Judith Ortiz Cofer entitled Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival.

The publisher describes this book with:

How do women writers cope with changes and juggle the demands in their already full lives to make time for their lives as artists? In this anthology, noted female novelists, journalists, essayists, poets, and nonfiction writers address the old and new challenges of "doing it all" that face women writers as the twenty-first century approaches. With eloquence, sensitivity, and more than a touch of wry humor, Sleeping with One Eye Open relates positive stories from women who lead effective lives as artists, emphasizing how sources of inspiration, discipline, resourcefulness, and determination help them succeed despite the obstacle of "no time." The title essay, Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Woman Who Slept with One Eye Open," defines the collection. Cofer relates the ways in which a mythological story from her Puerto Rican culture gave her confidence and courage, encouraging her creative success and emphasizing the rewards of "women's power" and personal strength. Denise Levertov's "The Vital Necessity" urges poets to make time for daydreams--essential, empowering creative food. Tillie Olsen offers a frank discussion of the pressures of work and expectations that too often sap creative energy. Tess Gallagher connects her mother's creative gardening with her own inspiration as a poet and the need for growth in her writing. Marilyn Kallet's interview with Lucille Clifton relates the personal strength that helped Clifton raise six children and publish her first book at the same time. This affirming collection offers a wealth of writing advice, given through honest accounts of perseverance and accomplishment.

Here is a passage from my essay in that book -- the particular passage that haunted me for years and for which I never though I'd ever open this book again:

"When I first anounced to business colleages that I was planning to work full-time as a writer, I did not expect some of their reactions....To some, I became a reminder of dreams they once had before ending up "locked" into their careers, whether because of financial pressures or the need to ensure they could provide for their children. I remain sympathetic with their constraints -- I think that one misses what one has known....

Similarly, perhaps one doesn't miss what one does not know. Children. There's the rub; I accept that childlessness might become the price I pay for my decision to become a writer. I was nearly thirty-five years old when I switched careers to become a full-time writer. Writing, I believe, is a process, and I need finally to allow myself the time to begin this process, which I felt I had deferred for too long. This need has translated into a reluctance to bear children in the foreseeable future. I do not believe that I can "have it all" -- that is, that I can be effective both as a mother and a writer. I don't know how long it will take for me to become comfortable with the notion that I have put in enough time "catching up" with my late start in writing so that I can turn to other matters like parenthood. This conflict makes me respect even more those women who have combined motherhood and writing. I feel I would not be able to manage the combination as adeptly as others have.

I am thirty-six years old as I write this essay. Perhaps the parenthood issue may end up resolving itself happily. But its potential for causing regret -- that maybe I will wish one day to have a child and it will be too late -- has only enhanced my resolve to write well and, in my mind, thereby deserve the joys of the writer's life."

==============

So stumbling across that old resume today kicked off a train of thought that ended up with this essay -- an essay that I always knew I'd have to revisit someday. Suddenly (oh so suddenly!) and unexpectedly, that day is today.

Today, I am 42 years old, childless, and unlikely to bear children. I would love to be a mother. But because of my feeling for several years that I would not be able to manage both roles well, I felt I had to choose. Obviously, other women have done both concurrently and done both concurrently well. Rightly or wrongly, I never felt myself to be among those wonderful -- and strong -- women. I felt I had to choose. I chose .... Poetry.

For that decision, Poetry has given and continues to give me many blessings. But the decision also took away my child-bearing years. I sincerely believe I can handle both roles now, but it seems too late for my body. Today, whenever I see someone else's baby, toddler, teenager....I can tell you that I am absolutely devastated by that decision I made when I was 36 years old. In those moments, I can share with total honesty ... and passion ... and a deep, deep agony:

I ABSOLUTELY LOATHE POETRY.

CORRESPONDENCES

Okay. I need to catch up on correspondences. First -- and he must be first -- David "Ex-Vegas" Hess appropriately writes me because he adores me. But in terms of what he actually sez, he sez (among other things):

"I placed my hand on the furry rock
of her crotch, now hot with lust and excitement,
pressed my thumb on her wet clit and,
with my other hand, took out my raging cock
and entered her. It felt great and glorious.

what in the world has been going on at your blog while i've been gone?!"

Trust David to get to the meat of the matter, eh? I riposted charmingly, "I missed you, David -- I told you. My blog gets less cerebral when you're not around...."

Then David wrote: "WHORE NOODLES"?? I riposted charmingly again, "hehehe."

Then David wrote: "I like these titles: SUBMITTING TO THE CANVAS and A HARD-ON FOR ART."

She sighs, thinks to herself *Everyone is a critic* and riposted nothing.

Then David wrote: "I also like WINE BELLY."

She riposted less charmingly than before but still quite enchantingly, "That one would be too much parataxis for someone picking up the book...."

Then she blew a kiss at the screen -- Welcome back, Sweetie! -- and moved on to the next correspondent agitating for her very demanded attention.

==============

Referring to an earlier post (I believe the one with Garrett Caples's "Absinthe" poem but check the Archives yourself if you want to know the date as I'ma too much in my glass), Sandy dutifully informs me that, as Reuters puts it, "Absinthe, the fiery tipple with purported hallucinogenic properties, has stirred up fresh controversy in Britain where it will go on sale in nightclubs and bars next month packaged to be mixed with beer."

The article describes "Deco" as a small bottle of Kronenbourg lager with a shot of absinthe attached. The idea is to down the 45 percent-strong absinthe and drink the five-percent strength lager as a chaser. The article goes on to note the popular myth the absinthe is responsible for Vincent Van Gogh's mutilation of his own ear as well as that the bitter drink was nicknamed "the green fairy" because of its emerald hue. Most interesting to me, though, were the references to Oscar Wilde:

Irish writer Oscar Wilde described its devastating kick.

"After the first glass you see things as you wish they were," absinthe lover Wilde wrote. "After the second, you see things as they are not."

"Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world," Wilde concluded.

Yep. As I said in prior post, sometimes one must know "Hell" too if one is to practice Lucidity as poetics.

==============

You're welcome, Li Bloom. And you made me reconsider the phrase, "... as one can muster." From hereon, "...as one can mustard"!!!


==============

Jean writes about the author of The Story of O:

Got this info from www.wikipedia.org:
"Her lover and employer, Jean Paulhan, had made the chauvinistic remark to her that no female was capable of writing an erotic novel. To prove him wrong she wrote a graphic, sadomasochistic novel that was published under the pseudonym "Pauline Réage" in June of 1954. Titled the Histoire d'O (The Story of O), it proved Paulhan wrong and was an enormous, though controversial, commercial success. The book caused much speculation as to the identity of the author. No one suspected that it was a woman let alone the demure, intellectual, and almost prudish, Dominique Aury."

Interesting, eh? You are joining the ranks of the erotic feminists...

********

Thank you Jean. Unlike most of the eight million peeps who reads my blog, you know me and, thus, know that Ms. WinePoetics is actually quite "demure, intellectual, and almost prudish." But let's keep that to ourselves, Comadre! Sssshhhhh.

Just beneath the ceiling to Ms. WinePoetics' studio, a table floats where a poker game is raging in full-force. But at her latest comment, the poker-playing angels pause, look down at the Long-Lashed One and bare their teeth: HAH?!!!!

Okay, OKAY! She waves her hands up at them, fearful that they'll pee on her again. I only have two of those characteristics! But, hey, two out of three -- as the saying goes -- ain't bad!!!!

SCULPTING POEMS

While doing my blog-jog this morning, I stumbled across Nick's reference to my poem "Boulder: A Concrete Poem" at my Love's Last Gasps blog. Nick wrote:

regret is an appalling waste of energy....

I loved seeing Nick's reaction (perhaps perversely so). I appreciated it for many reasons -- including how the word "appalling" so fits the mucho time we so often cogitate over a failed romance (which is also part of the theme in my Poem Blog)....and, in this sense, I think Nick responded to the poem with perfect succinctness....

and, omigod, it would have been appalling indeed if I actually had written the poem's text from scratch: a single paragraph of 3,112 words whose density I intended metaphorically to be a boulder. But it would have been, to me, an appropriate "appalling" since the obsessiveness with which poets address their material can be part of what poetry demands from its practitioners. Simply, commitment costs.

But I also enjoyed Nick's response because, of course, that poem didn't require much time to write. The text itself is the word "regret" googled. Then I deleted the line breaks to make it a prose poem, then copied-and-pasted to elongate that poem -- and I'd intended the repetition of the text to mirror, too, how soon-to-be-ex lovers go over and over the terrains of past battles trying to figure out what went wrong or trying to figure out what to avoid doing in the future or generally trying to figure out how to console one's self etc....

It's possible, of course, that Nick meant that reading the poem (not the writing of it, which, as a process, did not require as much from me as my very modest poem in the preceding post) is the appalling waste of energy....in which case: well, I unapologetically giggle...

But perhaps Nick was just commenting generally on the wasteful nature of regret...which, obviously, is fine as well. I just find that his one-liner elicited so many thoughts from me.

In fact, another irony from seeing Nick's one-liner is that I didn't even read the text of the poem yesterday when I "wrote" it. Consequently, I didn't realize until I was looking over the poem today that, actually "regret is an appalling waste of energy" was one of the googled lines .... which means Nick read the poem, while I didn't. I just had shaped text into a poem. I wasn't writing the poem; I was sculpting it!

Sculpting vs writing poems. The visual is impossible to articulate....

Anyway, cogitating over Nick's reaction made me take up my sculpture's mallet and return to that boulder of a poem and smash it. I then delicately picked my way through the fragments for this new poem -- I ADORE THE FEELING OF SCULPTING, VS WRITING, POEMS! As I tip-toed through the fragments, I decided to pick out words that began with the letter "R" since that's the first letter in "regret." I plucked:

regret
retrospective
refugees
ranger
reflection
ray's
rocks
repentance
rational
(wrong) [I decided to include this word because, phonetically, it began with the "r" sound; because the first letter is not "r," however, I placed parentheses around the word]

I decided to write a poem incorporating the above words. Here's the result:

R-Factors

"regret is an appalling waste of energy"

a retrospective that creates refugees

in hiding from a bribed ranger
's sunglasses seeking bandanaed reflections

Sunrays coating gray rocks
offer a sheen, pretty

but false as a repentance

also in hiding
for what is rational is not what serves the day:

right = negative X (wrong)

=================

I've explored "sculpting" versus writing poems before. Some information is available at the online description of my "Six Directions" Project (see link). Here also is an interview of me by Nick Carbo that partly was published in Summi Kaipa's terrific project Interlope 8. In this interview, Nick and I referenced my poem-sculptures through which I made mixed-media works via a process that also generated text-poems:

"POEMS FORM/FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS"
Nick Carbo conducted an interview with Eileen Tabios about her exhibition at the Babilonia Wilner Foundation’s Pusod Center. Nick is the author of two poetry collections, Secret Asian Man and El Grupo McDonalds, as well as the editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Returning the Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino Poets. He also co-edited, with Eileen, BABAYLAN: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers. He and Eileen are also co-founders of the NPA (New Poets Army).

You say that this series, "Poems Form/From The Six Directions" began when you thought of "sculpting" versus "writing" poems. What do you mean? And what caused you to think of a way of writing words without, initially, writing?

About four years ago I started looking at my poems in a different way. I wanted to reflect my thinking of poems as things that do not simply lie against the flat plane of a page. I was interested in giving poems a body -- a physical body -- to reflect my belief that, while reliant on words, poems are breathing, living creatures like you and me. And that they are multidimensional and contain spaces much deeper than the field of a page.

I know you would agree with me that to read -- to experience -- a poem is not a one-dimensional experience. Words alone can contain many dimensions. It seems like you were looking at poems visually.

Undoubtedly so, since a significant portion of my creative writing is inspired by the visual arts. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past two decades looking at paintings and other types of art works. Visually, I wanted to create poems that were more than just marks against a page. By using the term "sculpture," I am referring to how the sculpture is supposed to be more multi-dimensional than painting (which is not necessarily true, but that‘s a story for another day).

Multidimensionality, relates to why I call this series "Poems Form/From The Six Directions." The Six Directions refer to the Native American concept of total and wholesome multidimensionality -- that the world is not just north, south, east, west but also up and down.

What’s the relationship of Six Directions to how you also call this work a “postcolonial Filipino poetics” project?

I feel that multidimensionality is relevant to my position as a Filipino in the diaspora. I am someone forced to find "Home" beyond the border of the Philippines as well as someone for whom "Philippines" has become a state of mind rather than the actual country that exists today, given the many upheavals that have taken place since my childhood there in the 1960s. So, in defining "Home," I choose now to integrate ALL of the world into myself. For instance, I relate to a Native American concept (rather than an indigenous Filipino concept) to title this series. The title is appropriate because, as a diasporic Filipino, I wish to be open to all cultures. Well, and I believe a poet should be open, in any event, to all possibilities of human life.

None of your sculptures are large.

The more intimate scale is part of the work. I wished to reflect multidimensionality through how I sculpturally integrate the viewer/reader into the object/poem. The works need to be handled physically in order to be perceived – whether it’s through flipping up the pages in "Bryant Park," leafing through the newspaper in "Page 3," uncovering and opening envelopes within "The World Is Yours," or unwinding the ribbon that ties together the scroll in "From the Gray Monster in a Yellow Taxi." By integrating the viewer/reader within the space of the Poem-sculpture, this subverts the passive reading of a poem on the page where an inattentive reader need not get fully involved. Or where some poems, I feel, spoonfeed their meanings to the readers without leaving more spaces for the readers’ imaginations, thus, heightening the readers’ involvements.

The viewer’s tactile involvement also subverts the notion of not touching objects of "fine art." I believe Art transcends the museum -- just as, in my mind, poetry and literature transcend what are included in (the museums of) literary canons.

You have said that you also tried to integrate the viewer into some versions of the sculpture "Dear One" through the viewer’s reflection in the sheen of the book covers.

Yes, and it’s the same reason why I hung the scrolls in front of each other in the sculpture "For Charles Henri Ford." The way they’re hung, you have to lift up the top and then the middle scroll in order to see all of its contents.

So it’s an interactive approach. You didn’t just want to create multidimensional poems but you wished for the reader/viewer to move between those dimensions?

I wanted to challenge the reader/viewer as I had challenged myself. I also thought of sculpting poems because I thought its process -- dealing with materiality of objects -- is different from relying on personal narrative to create a poem. I appreciate narrative poetry written by other poets. But I am uncomfortable with relying on traditional narrative due to the history of English for Filipinos. As you know, the spread of English was used to solidify the U.S. colonization of the Philippines after the Philippine-American War over a century ago. So narrative, to me, reflects the imperialist way English was utilized to become the mode for communication.

I notice you used found material and collage in these sculpted poems.

I do so to integrate my environment -- the outside world -- into the world of my poems. Again, it partly reflects my location in the Filipino diaspora. I don’t use found material and collage in an attempt to get away from my "I," as has been ascribed to this method. I do it from a more spiritual basis that may be encapsulated by the Buddhist concept of "All is One, One is All."

In fact, I used a "found" page with which I created "Dear One," the first work in this series. I made "Dear One" after I noticed a blank empty white square in the middle of an advertisement in a magazine. I began that work by trying to fill in the empty square with words that would reflect the poignancy of the images surrounding the white square. I xeroxed it 20 times, which meant to me that I had to write 20 stanzas. Because that advertisement was in Town & Country, I leafed through that magazine to find text I could use for writing the verse.

From my work on "Dear One," I began other sculptures where the intent was partly to use words to fill in what seemed to be blank or almost-blank spaces that approximate pages in various images I would come across while reading magazines and newspaper. For example, "Bryant Park" was inspired by the reproduction of "Live It Up In Lilac," a 1967 sculpture by John McCracken. Made of polyester resin, fiberglass, plywood, it’s a rectangular piece featured as it leans against the wall. Its reproduction in the New Art Examiner (July/August 2001) shows it to be a white slab. So, just as I wanted to put text in the white square of "Dear One," I thought to write a poem by envisioning text written at the bottom of the sculpture. The poem is comprised of mostly alternating one or two-word lines because I thought of writing a poem by emblazoning text that would fit in the bottom of this band of white space; the poem had to be comprised of short lines because I assumed only one or two words would fit in that space. Similarly, "Page 3" began through the blank space within a Tiffany advertisement that I considered ironic given its juxtaposition next to an article about abused women in Cambodia. In these works, the visual image of a blank space (or blank page) engendered my writing/sculpting of the poems.

Later, I began sculpting poems that were inspired by found text instead of found spaces. "The Erotic Angel" was inspired by text in Rafael Alberti’s poetry collection Concerning The Angels; "For Charles Henri Ford" by Ford’s poetry collection Labyrinths; "Material Integrity" by text within American Artists In Their New York Studios by Stephen Gotz; and “The Gray Monster In A Yellow Taxi“ by Rain Taxi magazine. "The World Is Yours" and "Dear Daddy" were inspired by text in The New York Times. The change in the process seemed to be the turning of a circle to complete itself: that is, image begets text begets image. I welcomed this development as a circle’s depiction of unity resonated in terms of my desire to integrate the world into my poet-self.

Did you also collage found text within the verse-poems?

I used found text, but not always by quoting them. Between my discovery of the text and my writing down the words in the verse-poem, I may adjust the words -- this is deliberate, not just for editing the text to be more effective but because I may be bringing in the world but I’m not trying to deny my own existence. My disinterest in originality due to English’s colonial history is not the same as wanting to erase myself.

My personal involvement beyond mere copying also relates to that non-articulable process of finding the poetry that permeates, but is not just, the material of language: the Poem wrote me -- instead of I wrote the words -- in "Dear One."

I think I see your point reflected in your "Artist Statement" where you say the phrases "I am a media artist because I use the authority of editing" and "I would rehash it and spit it out."

Yes, the former relates to a statement by Robert Longo and the latter to Cindy Sherman, from their printed interviews in Art Talk: The Early 80s edited by Jeanne Siegel. Both artists have been charged with "appropriating" material but that would be a simplistic assessment of their processes.

I appreciate your point on the death of the author. Didn’t you reflect that concern in your poem "I Do"? By emphasizing that you do speak English, you wrote a rallying call to Filipino poets in the 21st Century to "colonize" English by writing well.

Writing well is the best revenge for any Filipino English-language writer interested in exploring the implications of (post)colonialism.

Are you happy with these sculptures, given that they are your first efforts as a visual artist?

I’ve previously attempted paintings and drawing, so this series is not my first attempt at visual art. Nonetheless, I don’t concern myself with others’ judgments on whether these works are Art, or whether the verses succeeds as poems. Though I work as hard as I can to create good work, the subsequent judgment of others is not my key interest. For me to be concerned about whether they pass someone else’s judgment relates to a larger disease, and I’m not interested in being infected. That is, I don’t create poems to please anyone. I come to and from this position as a Filipino (given our history of being invaded or colonized and then being discriminated within the diaspora), as an ethnic-American artist in this country whose canons have not been immune from racism, and as a poet who believes that art-making is about something else beyond pleasing someone. To please someone else is a form of assimilation, isn’t it?

What about the verse version of the poems?

Some are more effective than others. But it is always the case with a group of works that some may be more effective than others. As a series, the works satisfy me enough for me to release for public viewing. I feel I am dealing with another larger topic than whether any of my particular works are great. Art is also a process.

Having said that, I then decided to take what I thought were the weakest sculpture and weakest poem in the first ten works that I made in this series. For sculptures, this was "Wine Tasting Notes" and, among the verses, this was "The Erotic Angel." Rather than trying to improve them on my own, I invited Alice Brody to create a quilt based on the former and asked poet Paolo Javier to write a new or edited poem based on the latter. My invitations offered another way to involve others -- which was another way to bring the world into that poem. I deliberately chose a quilt-maker instead of, say, a painter to reflect my interest in subverting notions of privilege in art; a quilt may be considered a "craft" rather than "fine art" in some circles. I asked for help from another poet to reflect my offering of a relationship -- a “community.” To me, the search for community in the diaspora is a moving concept, as much as it can be a painful reality. As so many artists before me have said, all of our efforts is also always about Identity.

You have said that unless the object-making process doesn’t throw off an effective verse-poem, you wouldn’t consider the work successful.

Yes, because I consider myself a poet, not sculptor. I would not have considered any of these works successful if they ultimately had not created the verse-poem. Having said that, I didn’t know – and could not anticipate prior to the process – how I would come to view the objects themselves. Now that I’ve finished these works, I realize that I’ve also entered a different realm from writing: the arenas of the physical material and visual imagery. One result, to my surprise, is that I have come to believe that the drawings on white paper allow me to create a minimalist impact that I don’t find easy to achieve through poetic compression in words.

At some point, the series led me to making large drawings concerned simply with drawing space by placing small marks against paper. The approach emphasized the unmarked sections of the page as space instead of background to the drawing marks -- this all makes sense to me. I find it wonderfully synchronistic that I came to draw invisible space, since my concern of Poetry relates to the intangible matter between the words that create a verse-poem.

Did you intend to do drawings at the beginning of the series?

No. I only thought I would be sculpting objects and writing verses from them. But this is what’s wonderful about the Poem and all Art. Art can be a doorway into new experiences. The last poem-sculpture I made was "For Charles Henri Ford" which utilized brown paper bags. Its material led me to explore drawings using brown paper bags that were piling up in my kitchen. There is something, to me, very evocative about this mundane material that we don't usually notice. It gets beyond the whole recyling aspect of the work. I’m sure my Filipino sensibility is partly reflected in how I started empathizing with the lowly brown paper bag that is used frequently for utilitarian purposes in our society, but usually doesn‘t get our attention. Filipino-American novelist Brian Ascaloney Roley wrote an editorial in the San Francisco Examiner marveling at the invisibility of Filipinos in this country. One of the lines in the poem "Material Integrity" notes, "To recognize the paper bag by using the paper bag." That line was inspired by a quote from Michael Jenkins in the book American Artists In Their New York Studios by Stephan Gotz; the interviews focused on artists’ concerns about the (archival concerns of) their material, which I found relevant to my concern of seeing something for its true nature.

What’s the significance of your drawings of a tiny truck?

I drew a toy garbage truck that happens to sit in front of my computer. Since I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer, I suppose that image has embedded itself into my brain. But I actually think that it’s appropriate for this work. Certainly, the recyling of found material into "Art" objects may lead one to consider -- or led me to consider -- the nature of how society defines "trash" and how we make decisions to discard. Metaphorically, this question relates to how we discard people as much as we discard objects. For a Filipino who’s quite aware that economic privations have caused people to be treated as disposable commodities -- such as children to prostitution and women to economically-based marriages -- my considerations of the garbage question is very much part of the research I underwent for this series.

I like the way, in "For Charles Henri Ford," you created the scroll aspects with tubes emptied of paper towel and toilet paper; sculpturally, or materially, it’s an effective approach.

The "For Charles Henri Ford" process was nifty for making me realize that the brown paper bag, once cut up, offered a drawing paper with a natural hook -- through the paper bag handle -- for use in hanging from a wall. And, also, consider how the smallest sculpture includes the words "Blue veins, transparent membrane." To me, I’ve created a Filipino body with that scroll – because you’ve got brown skin and blue veins. Yet "Blue veins, transparent membrane" has a different meaning within the verse version of the poem. Hmmm...I’ve Filipinized Charles Henri Ford!

That seems consistent with what I know of your previous work. In the past, you’ve said that with your earlier series of prose poems, you were "Filipinizing" the American art movement of abstract expressionism! That the long lines available through the prose poem paragraph were, to you, like the elongated brushstrokes of abstract expressionist painters.

This all relates to how – as a Filipino in the diaspora – I wish to welcome all of the world into myself. As poet Eric Gamalinda once put it, and I agree and personalize this in my poetic approach: "The history of the Philippines is the history of the world."

1999 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast
(Hirsch Vineyards)
-- after "Ways" by B.S.

When the pages flutter
from the breeze unseen

but so exceedingly there

I suddenly know your caress
as if -- oh, you know --

And a bottle is tilting

its carmine shoulders for
my pleasure: I know you

I know you!

MY "STORY OF O"

Sip. And I'ma ready to announce the title of my forthcoming short story collection! Sip again! In my glass: a quite yummy 1999 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast (Hirsch Vineyards). And, ooooooh! It smells so good I'ma tempted to spill it all over myself but the hubby is off on a business trip so what would be the point? Ain't no one else in here to rock the house tonight! Sip.

Now, Steve -- before I continue, since I am discussing a book of fiction not poetry, let me be the first to say that per The Dictionary of Received Ideas (thanks for sending it) -- I don't have an agent! So I guess I'm still a poet! Because, as said Dictionary notes about the definition of "Agent" -- "If you have one you're a fiction writer."

Sip.

Anyway. But before I share said title of my first book of short stories (8 million peeps release baited breaths to sigh), I have to say that, first, it was a real chore trying to decide how to title the book (sympathies to Josh Corey as you cogitated over the title of your Fourier Series). Initially, I assumed I'd title it MY AFFAIRS because this is supposed to be a sort of a sister to the other book published by Giraffe Books entitled MY ROMANCE (see link). But MY AFFAIRS doesn't have quite the kick as MY ROMANCE. So, for the past several weeks, I'd been mulling over various options, like in the list below. I'll type them out below, but remember, Peeps, that the stories are all set in the art world and generally are love or lust stories....well, with great philosophical underpinnings (of course!). So, after wrinkling my modest but nonetheless enchanting nose over the boring state of MY AFFAIRS (pun intended), I thought of the possible titles below (in chronological order as they came up over the past few weeks):

AESTHETIC AFFAIRS

AFFAIRS OF THE (HE)ART

AFFAIRS OF THE HE/ART

AFFAIRS OF THE HE//ART
[for some reason, I thought the double versus single slash was significant]

SEDUCTIONS OF THE (HE)ART

TOPPING THE CANVAS
[well, there are dom/sub references scattered throughout....oh nevuh mind; just get the book when it comes out -- possibly the one with a brown paper bag cover....coz brown is kayumangi and kayumangi is ...oh nevuh mind]

SLAVES TO THE CANVAS

SLAVES OF THE CANVAS

SUBMITTING TO THE CANVAS

ON A BED OF CANVAS
[there's an Asian American erotica anthology out there entitled On A Bed of Rice]

A HARD-ON FOR ART
[that was Tom the hubby pretending either to be helpful or exasperated when I insisted on dragging him into my titular obsession during these past weeks; the problem was that he yelled out this suggestion when he was feeding me at some posh French restaurant, intimate in scale and all that, thereby causing our waiter and various patrons to look at us quizzically. Tom turned beet red while I...naturally, giggled with much charm at everyone]

BRUSHSTROKES
[I loved this option for a long time-- how suddenly this word's become eroticized]

BEHIND THE CANVAS

UNDER THE CANVAS

NEGATIVE SPACE

OBVIATING THE GRID

THE CAUSTIC SURFACE

TEXT-URED SURFACES

HAND MADE

And yammer, yammer in my brain. I still didn't know what title to use until I began receiving Jean Gier's drafts on her introductory essay. Yah -- that's Jean of Nightjar2 Blog -- a brilliant poet, but she's also a critic and scholar. So, here's an excerpt from her Introduction:

My immediate reaction to the "aesthetic affairs" in this book is both attraction and repulsion. This is not negative criticism. Both exist, and are crucial to any work of art. And I find here a certain repulsion to the world inhabited by these artists. That is, one is attracted by the promise of eros, but to see artists as they exist within the economy and spin of the art world, and to read this as a narrative of sexual desire, is also to be repulsed. For sex itself, and sexual desire is narrative. To paint, to construct, sculpt, conceive (as in conceptual art, as in artistic creation) is, after all, to make oneself, or the extensions of oneself, interesting and desirable. In one sense, it is to love. Even that which appears repulsive wants to please someone.

At the same time, there is the lie. That is, the nostalgic and very western vision we have of the artist's seemingly autonomous, or at least democratically independent, purity of vision. But the valorization of independence and autonomy obscures the relations of economy beneath the surface. We have here a counter-narrative that runs against the grain of the romantic notion of the artist, the genius in his garret, or in her expensive loft studio, working on some "pure" or original vision or concept. The New York City art world in these stories is itself stripped and exposed. You, the reader, are a voyeur into its intricate social and material network, not unlike that in the mansion from the Story of O. The galleries of New York City provide the context. They are the mansion, the community, and city. But none of them, no matter how tasteful or avant garde, transcend the marketplace.

Kewl, eh? That was a nifty thing Jean came up with -- comparing art galleries to, like, the rooms in the mansion from Story of O! Sip.

But she also noted in her essay that she thought my stories were like the "blues":

Tabios's stories are not predictable, and they swerve into poetry, even as a musical note might bend into blues. What makes these narratives blue? The fact that love exists, suffers and enjoys, alongside that which is distant, cold, calculating, imperative....// The blues as music rarely gives us "answers," in the intellectual sense; blues is itself an answer to alienation, separation and violence. If these narratives constitute an alternative, then I suspect it is in the cognitive experience and recognition of distance, desire, and love. In the world of monetary values, of critical exegesis, of categorizing and so-called "discriminating" taste, we must come to recognize how we swerve, bend, and slip, how we desire to be mastered and to master, how we desire to destroy and be destroyed, and how we love. If sex and sexual desire is narrative, it is also knowledge.

Now I know none of the above may mean much to you until you actually read the stories to which they refer. But they will help explain how I arrived at my title:

BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS

It's also partly a pun off of that porno flick "Behind the Green Door" -- not that I ever saw it, of course. Just heard of it. Sip.

So I naturally asked the source of inspiration, Jean, what she thought of my title. She approved, noting: "This is what I love about blues, is that the notes don't stay where they are "supposed" to stay...they slip and slide, and they live with irony. Much like your "virgin moon," red when it first rises, but the irony of its rising is that it becomes pale, like a body drained of blood (and yet shines brighter)."

Ach. My desire to suck out your blood, oh dear eight million Peeps. How much more post avante can you get?! (I have no idea what I just said but whenever I say the words "post avante" I always feel so big-brained intellectual so: post avante! Avanti!.... )

Meanwhile, I also just got my blurbs (gotta do it; the publisher wants blurbs) so lemme inflict them on you:

“...a rich, sensual collection of stories -- a breathtaking, pulsating ride through art, sex, love, and longing.”
--Noel Alumit, Letters to Montgomery Clift

Why thank you Noel! You also are making this long-lashed Lioness purrrrrr.....but I also share Noel's blurb as an excuse to proclaim!!!!

Check out Noel's photo at Asian Week!. Isn't he a cutie-pie?

Then, yesterday, Luis Cabalquinto (who's been guest-starring recently over at Tympan) sent me his blurb:

"In reading the stories of Eileen Tabios, seductive in their imagery and language, we are drawn into a world peopled by artists, art lovers and art tasters who, variously, are either yielding to or struggling against the irresistible lures of passion. We are compelled to share the characters' ecstasy or torment, recognizing the universality of their human engagements. Our recognition comes quickly, given the finesse and integrity of Ms. Tabios' writing."
-- Luis Cabalquinto, author of Bridgeable Shores

Yadda. Luis, of course, knows whereof he speaks. Nooo -- not from direct experience with me (get your mind out of the gutter, you-know-who-you are!) Though primarily a poet, Luis also writes fiction. Here are some poems from his last published collection, Bridgeable Shores, that seem relevant to the topic of my post du jour:

PASTA PUTTANESCA

Here is the reason why they're
called whore noodles:

First, insert one finger into the hole
of the noodle and that finger will move
around easily.

Then insert two fingers and the two
will move about just as easily.
Try three, then four fingers and
the same ease of movement will
result.

Now insert the whole fist and,
surprise, even the fist can still move,
with room to spare.

Finally, shove both hands in
and try to clap them, as if
applauding at a performance.
Now you see you can't. And you
hear a voice, the noodle tittering
and whispering: "Tight, eh?"

Sip. Peeps, I do so love to titter. Okay, here's another poem by Luis. I'll dedicate my reproduction of it to Timothy:

QUALITY SHOPPER

Thoughtfully, she
Pressed her
Manicured index
Finger on
His nipples,
Belly button,
Balls, penis --

Dainty shopper
Checking a
Display of
Tropical fruits
For quality.

Okay, Timothy. Roll your eyes. Don't disappoint me now. Now: why would I dedicate that poem to you? Say the word, Timothy. (Btw, speaking of synchronicity, isn't it weird how we're coming up with different reasons -- with no planning -- to print Luis Cabalquinto poems on our blogs within hours of each other?! Nick must be busily punching buttons on his "Six Degrees of Separations" monitor to facilitate this alignment....)

Last but not least (8 million peeps groan at the thought of her ending this too-short post), here's another one of Luis Cabalquinto's poems as this one seems quite quite relevant to Behind The Blue Canvas:

THE PORNOGRAPHER LABORS ON HIS LEAD

I placed my hand on the furry rock
of her crotch, now hot with lust and excitement,
pressed my thumb on her wet clit and,
with my other hand, took out my raging cock
and entered her. It felt great and glorious.

He did not like the passage. He would work
on it some more, though it was late. He rose
and went to the fridge, reached for a Bud.

Outside, a wondrous dawn.
Someone's small dog, barking.

"THE PROPER ARENA FOR JEWISH THOUGHT AND POETRY IS THE WORLD"

As regards my June 1 post referencing Tom Fink's note that Hitler killed six million Jews as well as Stephen Paul Miller's query on "secular American Judaism and poetry," Herb Levy writes. (Thanks for the feedback, Herb, as even the briefest dialogue, I think, can make us pause and remember....things that should never be forgotten). First, for easier reference, here's Stephen's earlier query:

I asked Samantha Power who just won a Pulitzer what she meant about the Holocaust only being known in the 70's. She said she and others mean that people didn't feel it as a galvanizing force, museums were not built about it, etc. 'till then. But I think a more useful way of describing that is that perhaps conservative Jews got more efficient in pushing their agenda through the Holocaust. Maybe it was better understood before people "knew" about it in that way. What do you think? Am I being out of line here? Does anyone have any ideas about secular American Judaism and poetry?

Herb comments:

Reinforcing your quote from Stephen Paul Miller on the roots and limits of Holocaust awareness: While 6 million has become the most often cited number for people who died in Nazi concentration camps, the actual number is estimated to be between 10-12 million. 6 million is the number of Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps. But there were also many Catholics, gypsies, gays, handicapped, 7th day adventists, etc who were killed in concentration camps.

Stephen responds.

I've heard several different numbers. But I think the major point is that the Holocaust should not be considered exclusively Jewish, even if Jews can make some kind of claim to being some kind of quitessential victims. I don't think the unnamed Holocaust was viewed as exclusively Jewish before the seventies, and I think this paradoxically served what I consider to be the truer interests of Jews both here and in Israel because the notion that Jews were part of a larger class of victims produced more empathy for them and contributed to the rapid decline of overt anti-Semitism in America and the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel. My guess is that both developments owe much to a knowledge of and revulsion with the Holocaust. That's why I think Samantha Power's comments to the effect that the Holocaust only became a galvanizing issue in the seventies are shockingly off. After World War II, people knew about the Holocaust and they reacted to it. It is in the interests of those wishing to justify inhumane treatment of others in the name of Israel to pretend that the Holocaust did not have an effect before the seventies. I do not think someone like Samantha Power is like that, but I think she has fallen prey to their assumptions.

So what does this have to do with poetry? I'm definitely not sure but I think it points to the added power of Jewish discourse when it extends beyond its seemingly natural sphere of influence. When Jews did not "own" the Holocaust, it did more for them. I think there is unique cultural and religious sense in which Jewish probing is generated, but, nonetheless, the proper arena for Jewish thought and poetry is the world.

=============

The above is a topic that first came up on MHP Blogs! so I'm going to move any folo-ups on this issue over there; feel free to send further responses to GalateaTen@aol.com and I'll post on that blog (I haven't yet figgered out how to do an e-mail link on that new blogger template that MHP Blogs! uses). And, certainly, check out MHP Blogs! I try to be as varied an individual as I can be on WinePoetics, but MHP Blogs! represents the variety of 13 poets!

MEA CULPA: I'M AN IDIOT (AKA: "POETRY -- IF YOU TAKE CARE OF IT, IT TAKES CARE OF YOU")

I just returned to the computer all full of cheer after seeing an hour-and-a-half TV special on a Bee Gees concert ("a true poet truly appreciates disco" -- that's as good a poetics statement as I can muster, okay?!). So, hearing "You should be dancin'!" still resonating within my lovely seashell-like ears, I was full of good cheer. Sip. Tonight, more of the 2000 Behrens & Hitchcock Las Amigas Merlot (Beckstoffer Vineyards) -- still good after having been opened 24 hours ago! Gads, I love robust wines! (Or "Big Reds" -- as we enos sometimes say!) Cheeriness!

But then I started scrolling through my e-mails and realized with much diminishment of cheer:

I'MA IDIOT!

I apologize. I had no clue that 16 or 10 reviews out of 70 review copies of a poetry book sent out to this cold cold world is a good result -- no, not just "good" -- as one of you peeps said, "It's a tremendous accomplishment."

I apologize to ... the Poetry Muse. I know I frequently complain -- and bitterly -- at your demands. I suppose I lost track of that...you also bless me through Poetry....

The angels above her head who had been about to piss on her for being ridiculously (albeit unintentionally) insufferable ... look at each other, get up from their squatting positions and return to the poker table.

My faux pas, of course (of course!), reminds me of Michelangelo. Specifically, of when he wrote a friend this sonneto caudato -- sonnet with a tail -- with said tail complaining over Pope Julius II giving him the task of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling when ne io pittore -- "I am not a painter."

Oh gads. Speaking of insufferable, there I go comparing my poems to the Sistine Chapel paintings...STOP!!! And the long-haired one pleads with the fallen angels, who had interrupted poker again, to belay the golden shower. Mea culpa! The angels "look at each other, get up from their squatting positions and return to the poker table." Relieved, the dry-haired poet gulps from her glass and continues:

So, Michelangelo -- he wrote this poem:

I' HO GIA FATTO UN GOZZO IN QUESTO STENTO*

This comes of dangling from the ceiling--
I'm goitered like a Lombard cat
(or wherever else their throats grow fat)--
it's my belly that's beyond concealing,
it hangs beneath my chin like peeling.
My beard points skyward, I seem a bat
upon its back, I've breasts and splat!
On my face the paint's congealing.

Loins concertina'd in my gut,
I drop an arse as counterweight
and move without the help of eyes.
Like a skinned martyr I abut
on air, and, wrinkled, show my fate.
Bow-like, I strain towards the skies.

No wonder then I size
things crookedly; I'm on all fours.
Bent blowpipes send their darts off-course.

Defend my labour's cause,
good Giovanni, from all strictures:
I live in hell and paint its pictures.

=============

Yes, at times Poetry forces me to live in Hell. But it's only so that I know how to write its opposite: Heaven.

Sip. No -- that's not quite it, either. I mean, that is it but not all of it. That is -- yes, what is it, 8 million peeps groan, rubbing their foreheads --

...that is, for me as a poet, there is no binary defined as Hell vs. Heaven. Poetry is simply Life, which is to say: all of Life. Because Hell exists as much as the mountain, I must live in it, too, as much as ... Mohammad went to the mountain partly because that mountain was there...! Poets should try to go exploring wherever there is a there, there! There!

It is a moral responsibility for poets to know Hell if Hell exists!

The angels look at each other and agree with the one who mutters: Let's go pee on her anyway....

I heard that! The long-lashed one yells at the fallen winged peeps. Don't tell me I got that wrong! I know damn well you all opted to plummet from Paradise!

To no avail / gold fractures air...!


--------------
* Poem trans. by Peter Porter; published in Michelangelo: Life, Letters and Poetry, trans. George Bull and Peter Porter (Oxford University Press).

LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT A REVIEW COPY OF BARRY SCHWABSKY'S PILGRIMAGE

HIS PILGRIMAGE
by: Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

Ive me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

Blood must be my body's balmer;
No other balm will there be given;
Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,
Travelleth towards the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains;
There will I kiss
The bowl of bliss;
And drink mine everlasting fill
Upon every milken hill.
My soul will be a-dry before;
But, after, it will thirst no more.


Tom has only ever compared me to two cartoons: Garfield the Cat and the Tasmanian Devil. Feed me! Then, I become a whirling dervish! I mow down mountains! Or something like that. Sip. Actually, I would never mow down a mountain -- there are spirits in them there trees. They coo at me and I coo back at them whenever I go flitting about the trees on the mountain where I hide among, no lie, the bunnies with foot-long ears!!!!

Where was I? Oh, yes. So someone was saying the other day -- as a compliment, mind you -- that he was impressed I never ended up being "merely a lady who lunches." I looked at him with a frown on my otherwise smooth brow, moued the lips that have moved many a male and female stranger to stumble on the street from desire, lifted a perfectly shaped right eyebrow (naturally shaped silk fringes, my eyebrows are), raised a Platonically-shaped finger to stroke at my perfumed cheek, and then proclaimed, "Yo, buddy -- that's actually a goal to which I aspire, okay!?!"

Gads. Sip. She nods at the eight million peeps utterly engrossed in her words, Sometimes I am just so misunderstood. That is, okay, I work very hard. Work, work, work. Write, write, write. So much time away from the wine and the moon demanded by my insatiable fingers pounding pounding pounding at the keyboard! But I'ma no martyr, peeps. If the danged fallen angels who claim to be at the service of my Muse would just leave me alone, I'd scramble away from poetry as fast as I can! Heck! I have dreams of being a plumber, okay!? I want a toolbelt I can sling about my hips from a wide leather band! I want a toolbelt whose tools I can...understand! I want leather and steel juxtaposed over my hips...oh, wait, cough: that's another blog (the secret one).

Sip. Tonight, the first bottle from that case I picked up this weekend of the 2000 Behrens & Hitchcock Las Amigas Merlot (Beckstoffer Vineyards). Anyway. Craning her adorably-shaped head this way and that, she says as she looks over the mess crowding her studio floor, there was something quite quite critical that I was working on over the past week or so. Something critical for which many of youse have baited your breaths in anticipation. Oh yeah -- I was working on finalizing the proofs to the next book I'll publish through my baby Meritage Press (see link). Here's a press release about it, hot off the ...uh, presses otherwise known as the wordprocessing program....uh, Word.

Official release date is likely to be in November 2003, but review copies are likely to be available this summer. So if you want a review copy, just e-mail me. It'll also be a good way for some of you to get on my good side -- and believe me, peeps, my good side is....rather good.

Pause. She interrupts her naturally-languid flow. Sip. You know, peeps -- when I came out with my book Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (see link), we must have sent out about 70 review copies. From which I got 10 reviews, and another six who've said their reviews are forthcoming. Hopefully, there's others but 16 out of 70 is the result I know. Now, Reproductions is my first U.S.-published poetry collection and so I don't really have a feel as to how good a result that is -- all I know is that that still leaves a lot of books popping up at used bookstores (like the ones who then hook onto the gigantic Amazon network to resell!). I mean, what's happening here, anyway? You reviewers get freebies, which is par for the course, but then you sell them on consignment? I wish someone would do an investigative article on what happens to all those hoards of review copies -- is there some underground economy based on review copies? Not that I begrudge anyone (particularly poets) any freebie copies of books they can get! But if you're gonna resell to buy yourself a beer, I hope you at least read the poems? Oh, but anyway, this post was about...

Meritage Press Announcement:

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002
By Barry Schwabsky
ISBN No.: 0970917929
Price: $14.00
Release Date: Fall 2002
Meritage Press (St. Helena and San Francisco, CA)
Contact: MeritagePress@aol.com, www.MeritagePress.com

Meritage Press is pleased to announce the publication of OPERA, the first book-length collection of poems by Barry Schwabsky. Written over a 21-year-period, OPERA presents a compelling, often ecstatic, poetic body of work by a writer who has been more visible over the past two decades as a respected art critic. Mr. Schwabsky was first published as a college undergraduate in POETRY magazine and has since published his work in various journals as well as in two chapbooks, the last being FATE/SEEN IN THE DARK in 1985 through the respected poetry publisher, Burning Deck. Over the last decade, however, he has circulated his poems informally or published them only as limited-edition poet-artist collaborations. OPERA now allows Mr. Schwabsky's poetry to be accessible to the larger public.

Reflecting a primarily private poetic development, Mr. Schwabsky has created a poetry that transcends the schools and categories that sprung up within the poetry world of recent decades. Various poet-critics offer advance words:

Barry Schwabsky is a wonderful poet and a poet of wonders. His poetry is exactly as strange as the familiar may permit. His work, born of a strange encounter between American poetry and European masters such as Celan and Novalis, always surprises me by its exploratory investigations. He writes one of the most loving poetries today, filled with a sexual myth as strong as anyone's. I am amazed that in one poem he can be as clear as Guston and in another as opaque as Johns. The "beautiful" as defined in this book of poetry is something the skeptical lover can never affix with certainty to the page. That is why each page of Schwabsky, so compressed, so lenient, so observed, keeps to an erotic variety: the experiment, the experience is all. Such poetry makes difficulty its pleasure and can never be explained away any more than love itself. But for all that, this poetry is not old-fashioned but is really wandering in the newest waters of our art.
--David Shapiro

The word "song" resonates over and over and the poems here will often suddenly burst into an intricate, complicated melody. Particularly beautiful are the opening four poems ("Opera") full of refrain and echoes. A distinctive musicality defines this book.
--Juliana Spahr

As the title suggests, these might be choruses and arias from some lost Venetian music drama of the early 1600s--an allegory of the nature of light and of desire, set on one of those abandoned islands where every imaginable encounter becomes possible--transmuted over the intervening centuries of silence into a software program for a new species of lyrical electronica. "The world widens / As it flows": on the thread of a rarefied music, Schwabsky strings the immediacies of the half-submerged life of every day as it unfolds in real time: "And sometimes breathing / is also dancing." A luminous and quietly unsettling libretto.
--Geoffrey O'Brien

Imagine poems written by Sir Walter Raleigh after he has read Wittgenstein and Lorine Neidecker, listened to bands whose names weren't in the air but whose one song was on the airwaves, and learned more about contemporary art than anyone thought possible, and you might get a sense of the compactness of these poems, an airy abstract density unlike anyone else's. In the compressed music of these poems Barry Schwabsky registers the distance imagination travels: "And past the evening's scattered amplitudes/enormous night stretched across power lines." His diction is infused with subtle tonalities, lightning shifts, and an attentiveness to words as facts and sounds, as vibrant things. Had Raleigh not disappeared while sailing up the Orinoco in his rented canoe, he would have sighed when he read, "In the kind of light/that buries you, grow older now."
--John Yau

In addition to working as an art critic, Mr. Schwabsky is a curator, an editor for several leading art magazines including Artforum, and a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of several monographs on contemporary artists and The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), as well as the critically-praised Introduction to Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon). He attended Haverford College and Yale University, and has taught at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, New York University, and Yale University, among others. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, he currently makes his home in London.

Inevitably, Mr. Schwabsky's activities as an art critic has affected his poems as reflected in an elegant exactitude to his form: in his poems, each word earns its presence.

*****

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER:
Meritage Press ("Meritage") seeks to expand fresh ways of featuring literary and other art forms. Meritage expects to publish a wide range of artists -- poets, writers, visual artists, dancers, and performance artists. By acknowledging the multiplicity of aesthetic concerns, Meritage's interests necessarily encompass a variety of disciplines: politics, culture, identity, science, humor, religion, history, technology, philosophy and wine.

Meritage's previous projects include 100 More Jokes From The Book of the Dead, an etchings-based collaborative book by poet John Yau and artist Archie Rand; "Cold Water Flat," a limited edition etching by John Yau and Archie Rand; er, um, a special edition chapbook featuring the poems of Garrett Caples and the first published ink drawings by Beijing-based painter Hu Xin; and A Museum of Absences, a poetry e-chapbook by Luis H. Francia. In 2004, Meritage also will publish PinoyPoetics, a groundbreaking anthology of poetics by Filipino English-language poets, edited by Nick Carbo. For more information, go to www.MeritagePress.com. Meritage's books are distributed by Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org) and Amazon.com.

MY READERSHIP HAS JUMPED TO EIGHT MILLION PEEPS

I just picked up a custom-made jeroboam of the Dutch Henry 2000 Reserve Zinfandel!!! Winemaker Scott Chafen, cradled it in his arms before giving it to me and crowed, "It's a BOY!!!" A jeroboam contains about 6.75 normal bottles of wine -- very heavy bottle, not the kind to play spin-the-bottle with! I also tasted two chards today: 1997 Kistler (Sonoma Valley) and the 2001 Sokel (Russian River Valley). The Sokel was okay "does the job" kinda wine (which is not to dismiss it at all), but the Kistler was....transcendent.

Anyway, there's interesting query over at MHP Blogs! There, Stephen Paul Miller posits and asks:

I asked Samantha Power who just won a Pulitzer what she meant about the Holocaust only being known in the 70's. She said she and others mean that people didn't feel it as a galvanizing force, museums were not built about it, etc. 'till then. But I think a more useful way of describing that is that perhaps conservative Jews got more efficient in pushing their agenda through the Holocaust. Maybe it was better understood before people "knew" about it in that way. What do you think? Am I being out of line here? Does anyone have any ideas about secular American Judiasm and poetry?

I'm helping to manage Marsh Hawk Press's blog. But since I'm its administrator, you eight million peep-readers of mine will not be surprised to learn that I have yet to figure out how to input an e-mail link over there (since that's the new blogger format versus the old blogger format that WinePoetics uses). But if you wish to reply to Stephen's query, write to him or the MHP Blog c/o GalateaTen@aol.com (let us know if we can print your replies).

MHP Blogs just added Basil King and Martha King to its roster today. So that blog is up to 13 poets officially represented (and I think there's more to come....).

Oh, and yes, my readership just jumped two million to eight million. As Tom Fink, another Marsh Hawker notes, six million (though accurate when it was ... accurate) is not a good figure given how that number references the number slaughtered by Hitler. Geez. Well put, Tom...and thanks for consistently watching out for me. As you well know, I need a lot of guardian angels....