HALLOWEEN & PHILLY COVERAGE OF BARRY SCHWABSKY

Spending an hour with Schwabsky's poems is like spending an hour in a postmodern art gallery. You come away confused and provoked by the coded musings--with their mystifying private and public references and words that scan like machine-gun fire. The book's most intriguing feature is the poetic voice that coos and argues, wheedles and slaps, slipping from turgid stream-of-consciousness to breezy colloquialisms.
--Roberta Fallon

I'm having Halloween candy -- chocolates! -- for breakfast! YaY! I'm about 5 hours away from hopping on a plane to New York but, basically, will be flirting with the moon whilst Halloween escapades unfold across North America tonight.

Actually -- and this is a HUGE WOUND -- I've never experienced "Trick or Treating." When I came to this country, my brothers of course were allowed to go out in the neighborhood (coz they're guys) while Moi, the only girl, had to stay at home (safely) with my parents. This also meant that I doled out the tricks as the Trick or Treaters went by....can you imagine the trauma everytime I saw a dressed up girl with her full bag pass by the front door.....

....if my parents had my way, I'd be cocoooned forever within a box lined with soft blue velvet. Yah: doesn't that sound like a coffin?

Corpse thinks...It's so difficult to parent or be parented....

Huh: Anyway, when Barry was in town and I was talking about blogs and whether that was publishing or not, he said it seemed to him that one HUGE difference between a blog or a journal is that the latter has an editor that would ask at appropos moments: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SAY THAT?

But those lapses, of course, are what generate so much of the charm in blogland! Well, and other things besides charm but....munch: much of which can be addressed by chocolate?

Blather. But really, now, what I really came online to post is FABULOUS NEWS! Lookit this review from Roberta Fallon of the Philadelphia Weekly (Oct. 22, 2003) on Barry Schwabsky's recent visit there:

POETRY IN NOTION
I'm not a fan of art that appropriates poetry for its raison d'etre, like the work of Lesley Dill, for example, which uses the poems of Emily Dickinson as its base. But when I heard about poet, art critic and curator Barry Schwabsky's poem-and-art collaborations with artists Jessica Stockholder and Luisa Rabbia, I was intrigued. Maybe when art and poems are produced in collaboration, the result is a stronger product.

Schwabsky, a New Jersey-born, London-based author widely known for his books and magazine pieces on art, is in town for two events. Tonight (Wed., Oct. 22) he'll lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Art about the video art of Gillian Wearing, and tomorrow he'll read from his new book of poems Opera: Poems 1981-2002 at the Penn Bookstore. You may remember Schwabsky from a show he curated at Locks Gallery earlier this year, "Post Flat: New Art from London."

Spending an hour with Schwabsky's poems is like spending an hour in a postmodern art gallery. You come away confused and provoked by the coded musings--with their mystifying private and public references and words that scan like machine-gun fire. The book's most intriguing feature is the poetic voice that coos and argues, wheedles and slaps, slipping from turgid stream-of-consciousness to breezy colloquialisms.

As for the art-collaboration poems, it's not fair to judge them without the art (not included in this volume). But like the other poems in Opera, they are earnestly romantic--which, come to think of it, is something you can also find in art galleries these days.

=========

Now, I like the above article for many reasons. The first is that this is a reviewer who wasn't predisposed to say anything positive (in fact, do I sense a bit of caution in terms of preconception?) .... and yet found a means to engage with Barry's poems. Now, I imagine that the way Ms. Fallon phrases it (e.g. the excerpt with which I begin this post) doesn't necessarily make the poems attractive to some for pursuit. But if you see some of the prior coverage of Barry's poems (many of which are in prior posts), I suggest that what you see is the wide-ranging nature of the response to his poems. I think there is something positive in the diversity with which people react to Barry's writings. These are clearly not one-note poems.

By the way, I've seen Barry's collaboration with Luisa Rabbia. It is gorgeous -- prints using my favorite type of blue; you can sense the beauty from the images here. I'm glad to have their collaboration in my library.

(And, for the record, I disagree with Ms. Fallon: I think Lesley Dill makes some beautiful works. It's so tough to see works without bringing preconceptions to art, isn't it? I mean, why should the strategy itself -- in this case using poems as a base -- be an almost paradigmatic constraint to how one sees the results of the strategy?)

Both the poems Barry wrote with Luisa Rabbia and Jessica Stockholder are in OPERA. I'ma tellin' you: get this book for something unexpected in contemporary poetry!

HOPE TO SEE YOU IN NEW YORK

I'm flying (pun intended) to New York for two events over the next few days. The first is AAWW's Intimacy & Geography, a national conference on Asian American poetry, in which I participate on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2003; click on the link for full conference schedule while here are my panels:

11:30AM - 1PM / $7 / @ CUNY
Lightning Strikes
In this panel, poets trace the editing process for one of their poems, from first draft to published version. Eileen Tabios (moderator), editor of Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress. Participants include Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Arthur Sze. and Timothy Liu.

2 - 3PM / $7 / @ AAWW
Poet Squared (a conversation): Arthur Sze & Eileen Tabios

Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW)
16 West 32nd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
10th floor
New York, New York 10001

CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY)
East 34th Street, at 5th Avenue
New York, New York 10001

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

My second event is on Monday evening, Nov. 3, 2003:

Bold Girls: authors from the great new Filipina anthology, GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE
in an Evening of Poetry, Prose and Music
Monday, November 3, 2003
7:00PM to 9:00 PM
$2 Admission

Location:
Galapagos Art Space
70 North 6th St.
Brooklyn
Info: bookings@galapagosartspace.com

Authors Reading and Signing their work on Nov. 3:
Melissa Aranzamendez
Luisa Igloria
Isabelita Reyes
Elda Rotor
Eileen Tabios
Marianne Villanueva

Musical Accompaniment
Michael Dadap—Classical Guitar (check out his website: http://dadap.com)

For those taking the subway, take the "L" train to Bedford, exit towards the rear of the train. You should find yourself on North 7th and Bedford. Turn left, walk one block to North 6th. Turn right on North 6th, walk two or three blocks (towards Manhattan). Galapagos should be on your left-hand side; there is a reflecting pool in front of the building.

HMMMM

back again
the form of persuasion based on emotion
extremely important in the effectiveness of a speech
the appeal most likely to get the audience to do something
not inherently wrong
based on character

not limited only to cellular tissue changes as it also includes the pathogen

like a sports car while you are more like a dodge mini van or a yugo
the part of an argument that appeals to the reader's emotions
a testament to that

is in the first place of all of us
a series of works which i will be pursuing all of my life
ruled over by a giant sentient tree
from gothenburg

a greek word that derives from pathein
meaning "suffering" and becomes a major movement in later hellenistic styles

the rise of aggressive dilettantism in philosophical matters

a group of extremely talented musicians from tucson

is zeal

is always thoughtfully beaten down with the cugel of slapstick

not a bad thing

PROVOCATIVE READING: ART AND FEMINISM

it might make sense to speak to how a growing hunger for spiritual fulfillment in a spiritually degraded society is leading people to feminist art (or, I could add, any other idealistic art practice).
--Dan Cameron

I appreciated reading this today from Artforum which presents its IN PRINT section with:

HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM'S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES—REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES—SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT ("IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM," AS PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.
*****

So I posted the link above but it seems you may not be able to access it unless you're an Artforum subscriber. But since I'd already typed out the excerpts below, I'll post it anyway and you can pick up Artforum directly if enough intrigues you to do so and you don't necessarily read it (okay, I'm a subscriber but I don't necessarily read it either; I like looking at the pictures). There are bio notes about the contributors at the end of post:

LINDA NOCHLIN: Today, it seems to me that the fundamental differences within feminism exist between those artists and critics who think of "woman" as a fixed category and those who think of it as something more fluid, constructed, and variable. There is also a difference between those who think of feminist art and art history as critical practices and those who think that pure, "positive" images of woman are possible—that there is some essence of femininity out there to be captured. Perhaps '70s feminism, powerful and necessary though it was, is now outmoded; feminism has transformed and is itself transformed in contemporary practice. Feminist politics today is far more multivalent and self-aware; the battle lines are less clearly drawn. The binaries—oppressor/victim, good woman/bad man, pure/impure, beautiful/ugly, active/passive—are not the point of feminist art anymore. Ambiguity, androgyny, and self-consciousness, both formal and psychic, are de rigueur in challenging thought and practice.

ANDREA FRASER: my conception of institutional critique as an ethical rather than a political practice—a practice, that is, concerned not with the condition of being dominated so much as the condition of being dominant—also seemed to lead me away from explicitly feminist engagements. While that notion of an ethical practice was also deeply rooted in feminism—particularly in feminist critiques of expertise and mastery—it led me away from work through which I might engage my own experiences of gender-based domination or even determination. So while I continued to consider myself a feminist, it become more difficult for me to consider my work feminist. // Recently, however, that began to change .... Returning to performance also meant returning to my own body as a primary site, to my own subjectivity, and also, reflexively, to my own (institutionally constituted) fantasies as objects of critique.

AMELIA JONES: Today, I think feminisms need to address and theorize gendered identity so as to accommodate the intersectionality (per Kimberlé Crenshaw's valuable theorization in her essay on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings) of how we position ourselves in the world and how we are understood by others. Women, if there is such a discrete category—Sandy Stone and others might argue otherwise—are never perceived simply or exclusively as women: Our feminine identity is always already imbricated in other aspects of our perceived and experienced identity. Every woman of color and every queer woman knows this because she has to. She has no choice. // I see the most interesting artists instinctively or explicitly working through intersectional identifications, producing work that navigates the complexities of identity in the contemporary world of highly technologized global capitalism. All we have to do is think about the difference between how "American" (as an identity category) was understood on September 10, 2001, and how it is now understood today (after 9/11, in the midst of the Bush presidency) to understand why conceptions of gendered identity from the '70s, '80s, and even '90s (with its "Bad Girls" shows) must be rethought. A woman wearing a veil on a Manhattan subway reads very differently today from how she would have read before 9/11 (and before the current US administration suddenly noticed the misogyny of the Taliban). Given this situation, I find myself admiring and learning from Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Kara Walker, Renée Cox, Susan Smith-Pinelo, and Laura Aguilar—artists whose work presses a feminist critique into, and along with, a critique of racial and ethnic identity, as these inflect sexual identifications of all kinds—and from artists such as Susan Silton, Mira Schor, and Catherine Opie who explore gendered experience through aspects of pleasure and sexual orientation or self-identified sexual positionalities.

DAN CAMERON: In discussing feminism within the art world today, I have to confess to feeling somewhat estranged by a discourse that often seems distant from my experience of contemporary art and theory. Perhaps that is compounded by the fact that I am writing this from Turkey, where so many issues associated with the "heroic" phase of '70s feminism are at the forefront of current popular debate—precisely because the women's movement of the past is very much a phenomenon of the present here and in other less-industrialized countries. (My research over the past several years has taken me to countries like Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey, where achievements that we take for granted—birth control, antirape laws, no-fault divorce—are sometimes a matter of women's life and death.) The women's movement has triggered broad cultural changes with extraordinary social and political repercussions, and therefore I believe that addressing contemporary feminism from a global perspective is of particular importance. Granted, no feminist has yet been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize or offered a retrospective by MoMA, but I would rather focus on the movement's ongoing accomplishments than on its underrecognition (or underestimation) within mainstream culture. I have always believed that it is semidelusional to seek reward from the very system you have set out to reform.

COLLIER SCHORR: As excited as I was by late-'80s and early-'90s postfeminism and French theory, as applied to the work of Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons and others, these arguments were situated in a dialogue with men. At that point, you began to see a schism between the goals of a more homogeneous feminism and the ideologies of queer theory. In fact, queer theory, which includes the possibility of changing one's gender through grammar (i.e., a woman sees herself as a man, so she calls herself a man, a "he"), could hardly be seen as celebratory of femininity when it offers a clear desire for masculine privilege. In that sense, contemporary queer theory actually almost becomes reactive conservatism: The same woman—who may sleep with other women—adopts a different gender and simultaneously opts out of homosexuality. The advent of this nonsurgical sex change has all the uncomfortable baggage of racial "passing" and creates, in its most political sense, an erasure of early feminism. But then we must ask: Is feminism a celebration of the "feminine" or of freedom and optimal choice? Clearly, the two are not always the same.

JAN AVGIKOS: I'm thinking about a lecture I gave last year on Roni Horn's work during her exhibition at Dia. Looking at a wide range of her art, from the first trip to Iceland to the clowns, and working directly with her drawings, photographs, sculptures, and book works, I explored many subjectivities in her art—personal, psychological, sexual, and, I posited, lesbian. Several of her collectors attended the lecture, and one called the artist the next day, joking that she didn't know she was a collector of "lesbian art." (Yuk, yuk.) The connotation was that any such content in Horn's work was put there by (my own) whimsy and could easily be erased, as one would remove dust from the surface of a sculpture. Meanwhile, Horn's market is well established and can easily tolerate such "aberrant" readings of the art. No one loses, and everybody has a nice day. Feminism in art is something that interests scholars and artists but that dealers, museums, and most other people often politely tolerate or assiduously avoid.

CATHERINE DE ZEGHER: I am hopeful that it will be possible to "degender" and "deracialize" difference and to think of it in positive, nonreifying terms. If modernism's radical and inventive strategies were dependent on alienation, separation, negativity, violence, and de(con)struction, the twenty-first century may well develop an aesthetics of relation and reciprocity defined by reconstruction, inclusion, connectivity, binding impulses, and even by healing attitudes.

ADRIAN PIPER: After reading all of this stimulating talk I find I have nothing to contribute after all.

PEGGY PHELAN: The zigzagging successes and failures of feminism throughout the world today—women are routinely prime ministers in some places, and routinely maimed or killed for alleged sexual infidelity in those and other places—are symptoms of the ambivalence that still haunts feminism as an intellectual revolution. Yet that ambivalent zigzag is one of the most radical consequences of feminism as thought practice and, I believe, anticipates the likely trajectory of the next great intellectual revolution, the biogenetic one. Uneven distribution, economic access, and the larger forces of what we might call medical capital will similarly compromise it.

CONTRIBUTORS

Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

Andrea Fraser's midcareer retrospective is on view at the Hamburger Kunstverein through November 9.

Amelia Jones is Pilkington Chair and Professor in the History of Art at the University of Manchester, England.

Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and curator of the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which remains on view through November 16.

Collier Schorr will have simultaneous shows of new work at 303 Gallery, New York, and Modern Art, London, in January 2004.

Jan Avgikos is a contributing editor of Artforum.

Catherine de Zegher is director of the Drawing Center, New York.

"Adrian Piper Since 1965: Meta-art and Art Criticism" travels this month to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

Peggy Phelan is Ann O'Day Maples Professor in the Arts at Stanford University.

UNNERVED

When I quote someone, I do it as an act of homage. (Who was it who said he'd love it if people used or even stole lines from his poems as he'd view that as a huge compliment?)

So, this morning, I'm trying to recover from someone whom I'd sometimes quoted as claiming I am quoting "to compete" -- i.e., that by quoting said quote within my own work I am attempting to "improve" the quoted text.

I care about this person. Equally significant, this person cares about me. I think the paranoia underlying this person's statement implies something about his experiences -- and I am saddened to think about how this person must have been so hurt in the past to have become sufficiently cynical to make this charge.

Wounds can make for great poets -- but I'm tired of that poetics program. I long for its post-________ that is not stuck at compassion.

P.S. I don't know that I know what I'm saying here; mostly, I'm unnerved.

AS/IS

Per blog moderator Andrew Lundwall's gracious invitation, I joined the As/Is Group Blog. I just go on, ya know...

Which reminds me to speculate, I'm not sure "blogger fatigue" reflects the constraints of the (blog) form, as some have posited. I wonder whether the fatigue mostly reflects the blogging individuals (whether it's time constraints or something deeper within their psyche about the particulars of their blogging experiences to date) versus reflecting something about the form itself. As regards form, it's not like mere *pen on paper* hasn't produced enough volumes to decimate rain forests, ya know what I mean? I'm sure the (potential) interactivity of the medium -- as well as the immediacy of such -- may surface a source of tension; but I mean, isn't that more linked to the individual than the blog form?

Please note that I'ma just chewing the cud generally here as opposed to having any particular ex-blogger or potential ex-blogger in mind.

Anyway, I joined As/Is because kewl poet-peeps are on it and because I like the idea of it being a space for spontaneity: that firstness in the gasp. I just posted my first post there! As you might glean, I don't necessarily agree with the (temporally *hip*) assessment by Ennio Flaiano that "the verses of a poet in love don't count."

I love Love.

THE ARMOR OF INNOCENCE

Someone recently called me "innocent." It occurs to me: said innocence is my only defense against the fact that Poetry consistently betrays.

BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS

I LOVE MOMMY GLO.

So let me tell ya of my Mommy Glo. She is Gloria Rodriguez, recipient of a "Life-time Achievement Award" from the Philippines's Manila Critics Circle for her work as a publisher. For years, she directed New Day Publishers, a leading publisher in the Philippines. When she "retired," she began Giraffe Books. Since 1993, Giraffe Books -- named after her own unique distillation of her name into that long-legged animal -- has published over 160 titles. But it's a one-person operation; as Mommy Glo puts it, "Giraffe has four employees--me, myself and I, and Gloria Rodriguez!"

Now, Mommy Glo probably would be the first to admit she's not the most technically-savvy person about. When I sent her my manuscripts, I could have e-mailed them to her. But she wants them in hard copy, and she typesets them individually -- which, I believe, facilitates her own reading and editing of the manuscripts. She also finances Giraffe Books out of what I've always imagined to be her household budget. The results are decidedly low-tech: e.g., books with a giraffe on the cover with the cook cover design being basically what she puts together (no separate book designer here, peeps).

But what also results is a perversely charming outcome. It is so easy nowadays to come out with glossy production given advances in technology that the more homespun quality of Giraffe Books -- which Mommy Glo operates out of her living room -- just leave me....enchanted.

And Mommy Glo is on my mind as I just received the page proofs for the third book she will publish for me -- and my first short story collection -- BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS. The book cover will be in pale blue, and there will be a small rectangle of darker blue in the middle of the front cover. Title above, and author's name below, said dark blue rectangle. Then the ubiquitous giraffe beneath the author's name. Low tech, but more than does the job. Thank you, Mommy Glo.

=========

All of the stories in BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS are related to the visual arts world -- the characters are artists, collectors, art dealers and so on. Thanks to poet-scholar Jean Vengua for the Introduction; here's an excerpt from her essay:

"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 by Dominique Aury (using the pseudonym Pauline Reage). 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."

*****

BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS will be out by year's end, or shortly thereafter. Though published in the Philippines, the book will be available internationally (e.g. through Amazon).

This project is dedicated to Dominique Aury. Her lover Jean Paulhan had made the chauvinistic remark that no female was capable of writing an erotic novel. To prove him wrong, she wrote the graphic Histoire d'O (The Story of O) under the pseudonym “Pauline Reage.” For the longest time, no one suspected that a woman -- let alone the demure, intellectual and almost prudish Dominique Aury -- authored the book.

Flap in wings.....the Mischievous One looks at her nine million peeps. Surely you all know that, despite my hair and lashes, I'm actually....prudish? She bats her lashes and a wingtip flicks her uncut hair tips into a mini ebony wave briefly painting air...

TIRED OF MYSELF THAT IS NOT MYSELF

From "it's that thing again" by kari edwards in her newest book, iduna (O Books, 2003):

that stonewalled wreck keeping out the bits -
those fly-by night landings on the street -
worse could be saying something out of or -
maybe the big one or the little one -
yelling fire in a mirror -
where did it say I could say what I say -
and what does it mean I mean maybe -
maybe it was wrong -
words without a body -
maybe I don't know which way back from where I came from -

*****

Tonight, I'm living out one of the two epigraphs to the poem I'd read Sunday at kari's home:

Vivo sin vivir en mi
“I live without inhabiting myself”
--St. John of the Cross

PARALLEL PARKING HAD BETTER BE DAMN GOOD FOR THE SOUL!

In chauffering Barry Schwabsky about town, I've back-ended parallel-parked perhaps nearly 10 times in the past 48 hours. That is more times than I've back-ended parallel-parked in the past two decades. But it's tough to find parking in San Francisco and would have been difficult to explain to Mr. Schwabsky why I should keep driving miles away from any one particular destination because Moi here tries to avoid parallel parking unless there is enough room to do front-entry parallel parking. It would have been even more difficult to explain to same Mr. Schwabsky that I hear a flock of fallen angels pontificating their irritating dos centavos about my driving skills -- specifically, lack thereof -- whenever I conduct 12-point turns into a parking space. Certainly, it would have been most convenient for Moi if I'da just strapped Mr. Schwabsky on my back and then flown him across the city -- but that would have even been more difficult to explain. Still, the trials have been good for my soul, no doubt. Soul -- can you hear moi?

========


In case you didn't have the stamina to read to the end of my prior post, here's a heads-up: Barry Schwabsky and I will read at Halcyon in Brooklyn on February 8, 2004 -- a 1 p.m. reading that Sunday afternoon. I am mostly relieved that said event won't involve me driving him around New York City. In 20 years of living in NYC, I'd successfully avoided driving within its cityscape. Wings have such an advantage....

OPERA REPORTAGE

Since Meritage Press published Barry Schwabsky's OPERA, which is my first project as a publisher that involves a book-length poetry collection, y'all are just going to have to deal with moi maternal side as I lovingly gather the reports on Sunday night into a neat packet here for Barry's reading pleasure when he gets back to his London home and, thus, online. I mostly want to record the Barry-related coverage but I'll have to include references to moi-self to faciliate articulating the whole of the experience for him.... though, I do include said references to moi-self unrepentingly since I was there not being a potted plant and because said references to moi are complimentary and...what is this blog but not an OPERA ABOUT MOI-SELF?!

Sip. Morning coffee that is desperately needed....

So, first, Michelle Bautista wrote:

Monday, October 27, 2003
A night at the Opera

Capped off a wonderful weekend with, but of course, a night at the Opera. No, no, not at Davies Symphony Hall, but at the abode of Kari Edwards and Fran in a live/work space that was an old Sears building 30 years ago.

Good to see the Well-Nourished Moon, Stephanie Young again. We only seem to run into each other when Eileen is around. Stephanie flipped through the pages of Kari's new book "iduna" just out from O Books. Can I tell you? It's a feast for the eyes with an aspect of mystery novel to boot. The text literally bounces around the page forcing you to flip and turn the pages up, down, upside down and around. There is text literally everywhere as if she's hidden messages and clues throughout the book.

Soon the crowd settled down as Kari took the podium and introduced Eileen who did a 15 minute piece, which was breathtaking, both for her and for us about entering one's skin. The speed and repetitiveness felt like a rollercoaster ride on the downslope. It left everyone dizzy, in that good, let's ride it again way. Or maybe it was the wine. It caused one attendee, a painter from Atlanta who was with one of the Chris' (I obviously painstakingly can't recall her name), to say, "Eileen's writing is like ballet, we fall in line accordingly."

Next up, debuting his new book from Meritage Press was Barry Schwabsky. Rhett would comment later it was like getting hit by cannon fire, til he realized he should just sit back and relax to let the words enter him.

Afterwards we chatted a bit more over the ube bread (which you can get at Valerio's bakery in Union City, Vallejo, and Daly City) and the heavenly brie, while Barry signed his wonderful collection.

We drove home still humming its melodic arias.
posted by Gura on 10:36 AM
*****

Thanks Michelle (and the Sweetie "kari edwards" doesn't capitalize her name). That poem I read was 167 tercets and the longest I'd ever read -- I learned, for one, that if I'ma gonna do that kind of long poem reading, I shouldn't imbibe a glass, let alone three glasses, of wine beforehand. Anyway, I had some folo-up backchannels with Gura Michelle about Rhett's "canon fire" reference and, yes, apparently Rhett felt "like there were so many images and emotions that it came like canon fire, [but] then he just let it wash over him."

Isn't that sweet? The Long-Lashed One Sniffles....

Then Stephanie Young followed up with:

October 27, 2003
Michelle reports on last night's reading, also where to get that delicious bread.

Eileen's reading ended with a breathtaking repetition of vowels, what became a trancelike call and response of I I I O O O U U U.
Posted by Stephanie at 01:44 PM

James teased me for uttering several sighs during Barry Schwabsky's reading last night. I immediately reprimanded myself with Invective Verse ("Let us heave no more sighs unless we are falling in love") until I realized that duh, I was heaving exactly the sort of sighs Moxley's writing urges us toward. I'm guessing that I was falling in love with Barry Schwabsky, or his poetry, or something. Schwabsky is a love poet. I don't have my little red notebook with me at work, but I'll tell you one thing I remember: he read from a new series of poems titled something very much like The verses written by a poet in love don't count. I have it on record that James himself sighed quite heavily upon hearing this title, clearly the kind of sigh one heaves when falling in love with something they wish to have written themselves, and isn't that the whole problem of desire? Do we really want the object of our wish craft, or would we like to *be* them? Landing - or sleeping, in their skin, territory covered / shared by both Tabios and Schwabsky last night.
Posted by Stephanie at 01:55 PM
*****


Ah, indeed. James and Stephanie are referring to the epigraph to Barry's post-OPERA poem (or poetic series) entitled "For Despair." The epigraph is as follows:

I versi del poeta innamorato non contano.
--Ennio Flaiano

which does translate to "The verses of a poet in love do not count."

Barry does have a knack for choosing epigraphs well. (Recall that Kevin Killian once marveled in a post to the Poetics List that he'd never seen a poem boast an epigraph by A.A. Fair until one of Barry's poems in OPERA.)


Rhett himself would end up posting about last night:

Monday, October 27, 2003

Sunday night was a book launch for Barry Schwabsky's OPERA. Barry's reading was like a series of cannonballs being fired into your face. Boom! Boom! Boom! Wait! I need a rest, damn it! Now that I have the book in my hands, it is absolutely a pleasure to read his words with my spacings/timing.

Eileen Tabios is the publisher for Meritage Press and Eileen graced us with a reading of her "20 minute" poem. The title escapes me at the moment, but I bring up the poem because once again, Eileen managed to teach me something.

The poem is inspired/derived from various poems that Eileen wrote. The repeating theme is about "you falling into my skin." The amazing part of the reading is that the poem was essentially a representation of making love. Now, how Eileen accomplished to describe/show/discuss lovemaking without making it seem like porn (from a Republican Moral Majority point of view) is amazing. The poem will be coming out in her next book which will be published by a Finnish publishing company.
posted by TatangRetong at 6:49 PM
*****


Thank you Tatang Rhett. Yes, that poem will be published in Menage A Trois With The 21st Century and, cough, you got it -- there is a reason why moi blurber Kevin Killian calls it a "half diary of dildo desire" (such a good blurber you are, Senor Killian.) But, shoot, there should be enough romance to even soften a Republican, I hope.

Then Michelle posts again, to my relief as she helps address my lax in forgetting the "Atlanta painter"'s name with whom I had a very enjoyable conversation (Welcome to the Bay Area, Miriam! I look forward to seeing you at Chris's concerts someday!):

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Ay, pala! The Atlanta Painter Revealed!

So the painter from the Opera book launching has revealed herself to be Miriam Jacobson, who will soon be a SF Bay Area convert. She's here scoping out the place to find a place to move to in a few months. Take it from Stephanie and me, the east side of the bay is better! But then again, we're rather smitten over Oakland.

The multi-talented Miriam is not only a painter but also a singer and song writer and hopes to pen some operatic tones to Barry's Opera. Can't wait to hear it!

She leaves the email with a P.S., inspired words from Barry's poems:

Your words are like a sword
That call us to a horde.

posted by Gura on 12:00 AM
*****


WELL. So doesn't all that make you all salivate to hear more? Fortunately for you East Coasters, Barry Schwabsky and I will be reading in your territory. Watch for us coming your way to Halcyon in Brooklyn on February 8, 2004 -- a 1 p.m. reading that Sunday afternoon reading for eros that should, uh, ... uplift your Sunday evening?

And off the Mischievous One goes cackling to play with the rest of the day!

THREE EVENTS IN NEW YORK

I'm flying to New York this Friday for two events. The first is AAWW's Intimacy & Geography, a national conference on Asian American poetry, in which I'm participating Saturday, Nov. 1.

I'm posting more information about this second event as my prior post on it apparently contained incorrect travel instructions. This is the correct information:

Bold Girls: authors from the great new Filipina anthology, GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE
in an Evening of Poetry, Prose and Music
Monday, November 3, 2003
7:00PM to 9:00 PM
$2 Admission

Location:
Galapagos Art Space
70 North 6th St.
Brooklyn
Info: bookings@galapagosartspace.com

Authors Reading and Signing their work on Nov. 3:
Melissa Aranzamendez
Luisa Igloria
Isabelita Reyes
Elda Rotor
Eileen Tabios
Marianne Villanueva

Musical Accompaniment
Michael Dadap—Classical Guitar (check out his website: www.dadap.com)

For those taking the subway, take the "L" train to Bedford, exit towards the rear of the train. You should find yourself on North 7th and Bedford. Turn left, walk one block to North 6th. Turn right on North 6th, walk two or three blocks (towards Manhattan). Galapagos should be on your left-hand side; there is a reflecting pool in front of the building.

=========

An event I'll miss as I'll be in transit back from NY to CA is the following, which is an event I wish I wouldn't have to miss -- from Kundiman organizer Joseph O. Legaspi:

Kundiman is co-sponsoring a visual poetry exhibit at Verlaine, a funky bar in the lower east side, serving excellent drinks. (lychee martini, anyone?) poems are blown-up and hung on the walls: a visual rather than oral representation, you dig.

this event is FREE and includes 1 hour of OPEN BAR.
what's not to love?

Kundiman & Verlaine - a Visual Poetry Exhibit

Poems by:

Paolo Javier
Joseph O. Legaspi
Tan Lin
Sanjana Nair
Prageeta Sharma
and more....

Opening Reception
Tuesday, November 4, 2003

Open Bar 6 - 7 pm
Sponsored by
Stoli
Happy Hour until 10 pm

Verlaine
110 Rivington Street
(Between Essex & Ludlow)
F Train to Second Ave
212.614.2494

THANK YOU, BAY AREA!

Thank you poets, artists and friends for your warm welcome last night to Barry Schwabsky -- to both the Bay Area as well as back into the *poetry world.* I couldn't have imagined a nicer group to shepherd him back to the Way as those attending his launch for OPERA, courtesy of the HOUSE READING SERIES put together by cheese expert kari edwards, Stephanie Young and Taylor Brady. Attendees included said sponsors, as well as co-host (and wonderful colorist) Fran, Chris Stroffolino, Chris Nealon, James Meetze (thanks, too, for the INVOLUNTARY VISION: after Akira Kurosawa's Dreams!), Sean Finney, Joseph Lease, Donna de la Perriere, David Larsen, Rodney Koeneke (I do appreciate the thought-flower! thanx Rodney), Michelle Bautista (whose ube-filled pastries were a clear hit with the crowd!), Rhett Pascual, Liz Oliveria, Chris Oliveria, Stella Lai, Laura Y. and others whose names I am stupidly forgetting here. But, HEART'S GRATITUDE to you all. Namaste.

For those who want more of Barry, he is delivering a lecture this Tuesday evening, as noted in this CCA notice:

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO
Graduate Studies/Wattis Institute Public Lecture Series
7 PM, Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.551.9251

Coeditor of the international review section of Artforum, Barry Schwabsky is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Opera: Poems 1981–2002 (Meritage Press, 2003). Schwabsky also wrote the main text for Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press, 2002). Schwabsky has taught at Goldsmiths College, Yale University, and New York University; he currently resides in London.

ACH SYLVIA -- HOW YOU KEEP BEING SERVED UP!

Recently saw the movie "Sylvia" and read the novel about Sylvia Plath, Wintering by Kate Moses. Neither the good acting and lighting in the former or the attractive language in the latter can hide how both projects lack any urgency for their beings.

GAIL SCOTT'S PARIS

Oh! So, yah: I guessed it right! kari edwards had been the one who wrote the e-mail that began the prior post. I can seeeeee youuuuuuuuu.

Anyway, so I heard kari read Friday at Small Press Traffic with Gail Scott. Together, both made me so so pleased to have flown down from moi mountain. Gail Scott was first introduced -- and lovingly so -- by Robert Gluck who noted that Gail's novel MY PARIS had been cited as one of the top ten novels of the year in Canada when it was first released (sorry, can't recall the organization that cited it as such). Gail read then to celebrate the novel's re-release from Dalkey Archive. My notes offer a "word cloud" below, which may give a sense of the evocative and refreshing approach taken by MY PARIS; the book refers to Paris in the 1990s, with the war in Bosnia raging in the background (again, a caveat that my note-taking is not ... scientific):

".....mint in the margins ..... not a real history, rather a vast collection of 19th century anecdotes ..... languor ultimately not resisting capitalistic market ..... "a person could wander here for months" .... my reflection in concave mirrors [...] still, looking pretty good ..... (as regards Collette) an old hedonist knowing how to take the pleasures of the body without ruining her skin ..... you are among the old fossilized remnants of the old regime ..... I open my knees so he can ssee the spot -- Why? ..... my women of the Left Bank; raining in Sarajevo ..... ennui covering a tear in the surface ....."

Gail had an enjoyable reading style, at times seeming to read the whole as if it were a single paragraph. Gail Scott's Paris is clearly worth exploring.

REVOLUTIONARY LIVING, REVOLUTIONARY LANGUAGE

revolutionary living is an act of living in a rolling thunder of questions; poetic language can be an act of revolution; there is no act but acting that is repetitive and preformatted, a repeatable act is a conmodification of the body; there is a living revolution in poetic language that is a continuum...their is a question that questions the question and folds in on itself... there is veggie dogs and a bun for 2.98 at Sam dogs at 28th and Broadway....

p. or both,

So someone sent me the above missive in response to my post on "There's More Than One Way [in Poetry]" (Oct. 23). Was that you, kari?

Or maybe kari edwards is much on my mind, not just because kari is kindly hosting my reading with Barry Schwabsky tonight (maraming salamat!) but because I saw hir read with Gail Scott Friday night at Small Press Traffic. (I'll post later on Gail Scott's reading.) kari was reading partly to celebrate the launch of hir new book, iduna (O Books, 2003). I AM AWED, EXCITED, FLABBERGASTED AND SO SO SO SO PLEASED TO SEE iduna CREATED THAT I'M EVEN TEARY WITH EXCITEMENT AND INSPIRATION!!!

So many wonderful poetry books have come out of late and iduna is just the latest testament to the supremely healthy state of poetry (those who bemoan what's coming out of "new poets" clearly are not looking in the right places....or simply not looking).

Kevin Killian introduced kari and here are some of my notes from his introduction (my notes are scattered and my handwriting bathetic so assume such caveats):

...iduna extends kari's range -- of gender confusion....gut-splittingly funny when it wants to be; mystical when it wants to be....[challenges preconceived] ideas on heroism, kindness and lucidity...

I don't have much notes from kari's reading, but I think Kevin's notion of how kari's work challenges preconceived ideas on heroism, kindness and lucidity is as fabulous a summation as said summation can be.

And the reason I don't have much notes is that I got lost, at one point, into the rhythm of hir words (kari is also a great reader), my eyes noting (with much appreciation) the occasional rolling of her shoulders as hir words affected hir body....and in that voluntary loss to rhythm, I mentally returned to one of my own poems and ended up rewriting -- and improving -- its ending. For me, the most elemental proof of another writer inspiring me is when hir work moves me back to my own words with fresh eyes.

I allowed myself the brief distraction from kari's reading because in the 15 or so minutes of sitting there at the SPT auditorium waiting for the event to start, I'd already inhaled (so effortlessly!) iduna which I'd just bought. It is not just a revolutionary poetic text but a revolutionary way of presenting the book.

When I first saw Kevin that evening, he joked with much affection, "Have you read iduna? I can't even see it; it makes me dizzy."

The book is indeed dizzying...but with a center of calm so that one ends up, as a result of reading it, more learned -- which is to say, more lucid. How many authors can lead you into their works and release you as a much less blinded being?

In iduna, each page transforms itself before your eyes into skin -- specifically, tattooed flesh. The verses were presented, but each page was no longer a one-dimensional field. It became a layered space through a backdrop of other text printed in lighter tones; the result strips out layers to create depth from what is usually the flat page.

But the space is not "white space" -- it is the mussed up space of flesh that's shown a lot of living: wrinkles, scars, bruises, love marks, orgasmic stains, lost teeth, calluses and so on. Visually dizzy, such that as one continues entering this *book* it was absolutely LOGICAL that the verses sometimes would be presented on their sides or upside down, rather than top to bottom. That, too, is a smart strategy -- by compelling the reader to manipulate the book (to reverse it or turn it sideways), the book provides a reason for physical engagement (as with touching flesh) instead of just reading words.

But the visual is not privileged -- read the damn words and they are still masterful in ways that text is (conventionally) judged. Not only do several of her poems out-Flarf Flarf but, like, how's this for upending, while paying homage to, lyricism:


the hand that commits the most

I sit in those that would swim past a nobody morse code

there is harm dropping against the wall and blue screams
surround arithmetic beforehands

it is worth noting (not in any order): turquoise manners, deafen glass, and those tiny humming condolence(s) regulate tropical pastels between stilled yellows and mechanical joy

it's vowel time now and my opponents arrive -- we form exploding tongue ruts
               a contortionist shifts red, the light backs up, an engine glares --
               the sea crumbles dawn --
               hard known tips labor in consequence --

I notice a tumbling down, a tumbling down -- at half mast, as when one is indecisive in the advances of lawn care.

upon approaching the sea I think carefully and then as before --

off-color sights arrive in their appointed side lock feelings,
the margin sits and I sit in the margin.

we envelop blank falls, out of an amassing cache of unassigned sins, sodomy lights my cathode-ray tube, the jury sweeps by in a cause and effect maneuver --

"what we have . . . is . . . . . form . . ."


                                             *****


I knew I was witnessing something special and unique when I read kari's prior book, a day in the life of p. (subpress collective, 2002). iduna exceeded my expectations....and makes me salivate with eagerness to see where next this poet will go. (Oooops: sorry -- and the Wet But Long-Lashed One reaches forth a wingtip into nine million screens to wipe saliva of the readership's grimacing cheeks.)

The revolution. What I also appreciate about kari is how hir activities as a gender activist becomes integrated into her words. This writing may or may not be fiction. But it is truth because, first, something was lived before it showed up in the telling. I am not up to speed on kari's activities as a gender activist so won't go into that much here. Let me just say that kari signed hir books partly by crossing out the title to replace it with the phrase "No Gender." (I think the interview in Rain Taxi, though, helps shed some light on kari's thinking here.)

As one who aspires to be a poet, I am inspired to see and read and feel iduna. As a practitioner, I saw the horizon of my imagination recede, which is to say, the field has become ever more wide in which I can play with Poetry. Thank you, kari -- you have birthed nothing less than a gift!

Here's one more from kari, a poem whose fabulous title is from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Enjoy!:


have you ever retired a human

take a deep breath

turn the sky into a bite sized ball

swallow

imagine all the filth of time

the screams from war

blood shed particles

lost memories of genocide

exhaust, fumes, vapors and particles
from every motor, coal furnace, and nuclear reactor

the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines or become machines

all the hate and violence caused by fear times 1 million and fifty-five

isolation and madness in the upper atmostphere

each and every cry from the last of a kind each and every ten billion

greed and the road paved with good intentions

take a deep breath

swallow

AUGHT IS AN OUGHT-READ

Thanks to Ron Henry for having been most supportive of my series "Epilogue Poems." His wonderful journal AUGHT has printed a generous selection. Thus, I dedicate the last poem in this 21-poem series to Ron:


EPILOGUE POEM (EPILOGUE)

________________And_________________

And ________________________________

And ________________________________

________________________________And
--from “White, Throbbing”


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HAPPY BIRTHDAY

to Ms. Positive Energy Herself: Chris Murray!

INVITATION (HOPE TO SEE YOU THIS WEEKEND!)

Thank you Taylor Brady, Stephanie Young, and kari edwards for:

HOUSE READING SERIES ANNOUNCES

> Reading by:
> Barry Schwabsky
> &
> Eileen Tabios
>
> Sunday, Oct. 26 7:00 p.m.
> 3435 Cesar Chavez
> #327
> San Francisco, CA
>
Barry Schwabsky was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and now lives in London. He is a curator, an editor for several leading art magazines including Artforum, an art/literary critic who writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of several monographs on contemporary artists, The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), and the critically-praised Introduction to Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting_ (Phaidon). Information about his book OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 is available at http://meritagepress.com/opera.htm.

Eileen Tabios is ... MOI.
>
********************************************************
>
> DIRECTIONS: to 3435 Cesar Chavez #327
>
> between Valencia and Mission, on the South side of Cesar Chavez is a parking lot entrance; which when you first enter from Cesar Chavez will be (some) guest parking. Parking in the area (on the street) is not to bad. Once you have entered the parking lot go to your left past a small printing company and directly behind that (to the west) will be double glass doors. @ left of the Doors is a "buzzer system" press the number 043. Someone will pick up the phone and buzz you in.

> Mass transit.
>
> Bart - get off at 24th go south on Mission, (the numbers will get higher) walk 3 blocks, cross Cesar Chavez (there will be a stop light) go right 3/4 of a block, turn left in to parking lot.
>
> MUNI- get off @ 27th walk north (the opposite direction the muni would be going from down town) walk one block turn right on Cesar chavez, Cross Delores, Guerrero and then cross valencia, turn right into first parking lot.
>
> Buses- on Mission take (going southish)- 14. 14L, 49 (get off at 26th - 1/2 block from cesar chavez - walk south - cross Cesar Chavez turn right; Valencia - 26 get off just past Cesar Chavez, cross Valencia on Cesar Chavez, turn right into parking lot..
>
____________________________________________________
>
> This is another home reading brought to you by Taylor Brady, Stephanie Young, and kari edwards.
>

DANIEL HOFFMAN AND "IRONIC CINEMA"

It is as though the thought of angels fell
Ejaculating from a cloud
--from "Snow"

I can tell from reading Daniel Hoffman's poems that he got to a certain space my favorite poets attain. Here's a timely poem:

The Way It Is

They were waiting here to say
This is the way it is

This is the way

I came bawling into their domain
Of harsher light
Remembering a place
Of purer light and messages
Passed across a darkened transom
From that place
Remembering

They said this is the way it is
In this light this dust
This scuffle for the scraps, bad blood
Between unequals............You'll get wise
You can break
your heart against stones here
Remembering

Counsellors, betake your
Covenants of convenience
To a place of stones,

I
Must lift the shadow of each shadow
To find the dooryard
To that place.

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


The "space" I refer to above is one where, among other things, irony is transcended. I mention "irony" again because I don't wish anything I said in a prior post to be (mis)construed as a diss against the wonderful blog -- and my newest link -- called "Ironic Cinema." (Thanks for the note, Lisa.) I actually am in deep empathy with Ironic Cinema's approaches -- akin, I think, to (my) annotating others' texts in an attempt to chisel out the hidden song from a boulder of prose... And, after all, how can one not drool over such lines from Ironic Cinema as this (ironically lyrical and) supremely evocative "found poem #29":

A red sofa in the living room
David eats raisins reading
science fiction.
Ghostly gazing towards April
afraid.

THERE'S MORE THAN ONE WAY

Poetry can be affected by anything and everything. How one chooses to live one's life very much can affect what is written. The action affecting the word and, in turn, the word affecting the action.

There is also more than one way to approach how a poet may change his/her approach to the Poetry practice. The approach of de-emphasizing "action" is unnecessary. I know several poets who are "cultural activists" -- dare I say their activism *improved* the literary merits of their poems? There's no automatic causal relationship of course -- Poetry doesn't work that way.

To write Poetry is an act.

For me, the writing is secondary to the primacy of living Poetry. I don't think I'm the only one who believes this way, either -- it's just that when one takes this approach, one inevitably is more likely not to be encapsulated by a canon-making framework that relies primarily on...words.

*****

The above words skirt a more basic issue, though: there are no canons within Poetry.

BOREDOM POETICS

Opposition without content.

ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET (REPRISE)

Advice to a Young Poet: "do not believe your own press"

"Let the Master/ of Fine Arts require building/ of roads or houses"
--Indran Amirthanayagam

I know I said earlier I'd post the advice to young poets given by Luis Cabalquinto, Jessica Hagedorn, Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, David Mura and John Yau through my book Black Lightning. I changed my mind (get the book yourself; you won't be sorry). Instead, I'm moved by certain developments to post an excerpt from the article on poet-diplomat Indran Amirthanayagam (who, I believe, is currently representing the U.S. in Belgium). The article began with an epigraph quoting Pablo Neruda:

I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness...

I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour,...

Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?
--from "Sweetness, always" by Pablo Neruda

For the Sri Lankan-born poet Indran Amirthanayagam, 1993 should have been a good year. It was the year Hanging Loose Press published his first book, Elephants of Reckoning. But in May 1993, a young man, bombs strapped to his chest, crashed his bicycle into then President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The explosion killed both bomber and president mere days after a leader of the opposition, Lalith Athulathmudalli, was gunned down during a campaign rally. Even in a country that had become accustomed to high levels of violence in recent years, the two assassinations were extraordinarily shocking and brutal.

Thus, in May 1993 when Amirthanayagam should have been happily celebrating his book's publication, his attention was focused on calling for an end to the violence in his birthland. In the same month his book was officially released, The New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by Amirthanayagam bemoaning "the latest public violations by villains, bogeymen, crazed boys, rogue elephants. Violations. Rape. Murder."

[...]"It was a bittersweet time. Why did this paradise become bloody? I was in pain. Part of my goal as a poet was to tell the Sri Lankan conflict to the world. When I lived there, it was called Ceylon and it was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. What was this Sri Lankan conflict? Did I support it? Can I support it? Does it matter if I support it? Who am I?" Amirthanayagam says, recalling some of the questions he faced. "I didn't have a gun in hand, but I did have a pen. Though I had the frustration of not being able to fight physically for either the independent Eelam, or Sri Lanka directly, as I have avoided both choices, I had an emotional anger that I channeled through my poems."

[...]As Amirthanayagam watched the violence escalate in his birthland, other factors exacerbated the tumultous emotions he was feeling in 1993. Earlier that year he received an acceptance into the American Foreign Service and, thus, knew his days in New York City -- just when he felt he had achieved a certain literary success in what he considered a leading center of American poetry -- were numbered. But before leaving for Washington D.C. and the rest of the world, he had one last poetry reading scheduled at St. Marks Poetry Project to mark the release of Elephants of Reckoning.

Thus, Amirthanayagam wrote the poem, "WORDS FOR THE ENTERPRISE," both to introduce his book during the reading and to reflect on the events then affecting his life. "When I say in the poem that 'Spain is New York', I was trying to evoke the sense of idelaism that inspired the world's artists to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Franco won. Fascism took over. But it was a noble fight and Federico Garcia Lorca was one of its victims," he says. "Though it was 1993 and not 1935, I was trying to evoke that sense of bravado. That, as we look towards the Millenium, we should gather ourselves and assume the heroics and idelaism that infused earlier generations.

"Because I wrote the poem as an introduction to my book, I was acting as a cheerleader to the audience," he continues. "I wanted to rouse the audience to get the elephants out. Elephants are a symbol for many things in my book, including the best of ourselves -- the best of human potential. That, too, is the role of the poet: to enter the hearts and minds of people and ask them to realize their own potentials."

Tellingly, Amirthanayagam adds that he concocted the poem's title partly in reference to the popular television and movie series, "Star Trek." He explains, "I was actually thinking of the U.S.S. Enterprise because that starship had all of the world's races represented as they went out there to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Finally, Amirthanayagam says, he considered "WORDS FOR THE ENTERPRISE" a response to what he found disappointing in contemporary poetry.

[...]"I wanted to say to the M.F.A.-ers to go out there and build roads and houses," he recalls. Or, as the poem states: '...let the Master/ of Fine Arts require building/ of roads or houses, breaking/ eggs for sweet cakes and meats,/ watching eggs break/ and chicks blind-hungry/ jump for worms, fly oceans."

For Amirthanayagam, part of the "ENTERPRISE" is what he calls "the literary tradition of being political and social, wher ehte social is equal to caring" -- a tradition practiced by such admired poets as Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. For him, it translated into a new career: diplomacy....

"It was a tortured decision. I was comfortable in New York, but felt I needed a new challenge to grow further as a poet...I had this romantic idea that through diplomacy I could do this (social role) on a planetary scale, as Neruda did in Mexico when he squired away David Siqueiros who had been accused of trying to kill Trotsky."

*end of excerpt*

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

For more on Amirthanayagam and his poem "WORDS FOR THE ENTERPRISE," you got it: get Black Lightning. Meanwhile, the issue I'm considering is -- there is a point when irony becomes an escape. Don't get me wrong: I'm not dissing anyone here (after all, I'm a Romantic and romanticism also can be escapist). But perhaps it's time to see irony (and romanticism) as it's become in this very problematic age: a poetic period of adolescence that's time to outgrow. [UPDATE AFTER A NIGHT'S SLEEP: BUT PERHAPS NOT....]

WHY PAYING A COMPLIMENT IS AN ART FORM

Poets should learn to compliment other poets without, in the process, dismissing other poets. Poetry is not a fixed closed pie, contrary to peeps getting masturbatory pleasure and/or financial compensation from forming (de facto) canons.

It's more insidious than you think, too. These judgments can form cracks through which less benign factors like racism, objectification, sexism, and other biases can poke their ugly weenie heads.

UNTITLED

I miss David Hess. So I pressed my soft cheek against the soft t-shirt he gave me, the one with the fading words "I Lack Lacan"....and had an epiphany.

ABSENCE IS NOT PRESENCE

So many idiots who've been spouting that and why have I been an idiot believing said idiots?

Sip. Morning coffee.

Anyway, interesting reading this morning from two new additions to my links, except I don't know who's experiencing behind dawn over couch(?).

http://someonescouch.typepad.com/

Amy Bernier

ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET

So I've been leafing through my first book BLACK LIGHTNING in preparation for my "Lightning Strikes" panel during the upcoming AAWW national conference on Asian American poetry.

I'd forgotten the pretty nifty (if I do say so moiself) feature I'd incorporated -- I'd asked the 15 subject poets to end each of their "Bios" by answering the question:

What advice would you give to a young poet?

Here are some of the answers:

Arthur Sze: Read the chapter "Reflections and Aphorisms" contained in The Art of Rosanjin by Sidney Cardozo and Msaaki Hirano (Kodansha, Tokyo, Japan, 1987).

Kimiko Hahn: Take risks. Leave the map at home.

Timothy Liu: Read all the poets (living and dead) you can so that you can then get in on the great conversation that poetry is, a conversation that exists both in time and in eternity. And during times when you're not reading or writing, fill your life with as much beauty as you can afford: great food, great art, great music, great sex. To apprehend what is great is to fill oneself with awe and gratitude as armor agains thte vile and the ugly and the small which is also life, a life that seeks to negotiate the abyss between what is imagined and what is real.

Li-Young Lee: The writing of poetry is a sacred endeavor and to never forget that. So that even if the world doesn't find it marketable or translatable into coarse values, keep in mind that the writing of poetry creates soulful values, subtle values. And remember, never lose heart; realize how important your work is. It occurs to me that everything valuable is invisible, like love. The creation of art is invisible and subtle.

Mei-mei Berssenbruge: Advice: finding or creating a peer group; wide experience; wide reading.

Indran Amirthanayagam wrote a long poem entitled "Advice to Young Poets." Here are excerpts: Read The Republic, if only to make yourself angry....[F]ollow all advice offered by Allen Ginsberg except the hallucinogenics....As I've said to the mirror, do not believe your own press....Finally, first, last, at least on paper, at least in life, love-make....And if you prefer holy orders, let them batter / your heart like Donne's three-personed god.

Meena Alexander: Whatever you do, do not lose heart. Remember that the lines you work with, work through, need the quietness that only you can give so that the act of composition might fulfill itself. Once I heard Joseph Brodsky speaking. It was at Columbia University just after he got the Nobel Prize. And this is what I recall him saying: "I'm a poet. I send something out and it comes back to me. I send it out again and again. There is no certitude here." To which I would like to add, this is the palimpsest of time through which we make ourselves as poets. Going the long road. There are no shortcuts. Remember that the poem on the page is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of what endures, turning into the soil of the poem, is carried within, unseen, even worldless. An act of meditation without cease. Poetry is a small scale art, an art of exquisite detail and this is its power. It can be recited, shared, sung. It need not be bought and sold.

Sesshu Foster: In a corollary of the dictum, "Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will," patiently endure your frustrations and try to write as much as you can; save as much time as you can for writing -- give readings whenever asked: they're instant, free workshops. A lot of people are looking for happiness in life, but why bother to do that in poetry? Go for revenge. It has to taste sweeter when you're young.

I'll post the rest later; coming up are advice from Luis Cabalquinto, Jessica Hagedorn, Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, David Mura and John Yau.

This feature is just one of the many reasons why I've always considered Black Lightning a *poet's poetry book* (though it's also been helpful to many laypeople, according to feedback I've received). Do please check this out (and support my nonprofit publisher AAWW), if you haven't already! Among other things, you can witness moi fumble since I began this project just three months after I started paying attention to poetry (in this particular lifetime).

Barry Schwabsky Reminders: Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco

-- to celebrate the release of his book OPERA: Poems 1981-2002

PHILADELPHIA
Penn Bookstore
3601 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-898-7595
Thursday, October 23
Noon-1 PM

NEW YORK
Friday, October 24
6-7:30 PM
303 Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

SAN FRANCISCO
Poetry Readings by Barry Schwabsky and Eileen Tabios
HOUSE READING SERIES
at the residence of kari edwards at
3435 Cesar Chavez, #327
San Francisco, CA
7 p.m., Sunday, October 26, 2003


I should note for you art lovers that Barry -- also a highly respected art critic -- is also doing visual arts-related lectures in Philadelphia and San Francisco:

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Whenever Wednesday: Lecture
Lecture: Barry Schwabsky

Schwabsky will discuss Gillian Wearing’s work in its art historical context. He is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art, coeditor of international reviews for Artforum, and a professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London. ICA Tuttleman Auditorium

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS, SAN FRANCISCO
Graduate Studies/Wattis Institute Public Lecture Series
7 PM, Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.551.9251

Coeditor of the international review section of Artforum, Barry Schwabsky is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Opera: Poems 1981–2002 (Meritage Press, 2003). Schwabsky also wrote the main text for Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press, 2002). Schwabsky has taught at Goldsmiths College, Yale University, and New York University; he currently resides in London.

AS REGARDS BARRY'S FIRST POETRY COLLECTION, OPERA:

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:
Putting 20 years of work into one intensely wrought luminously gripping book, Artforum critic Barry Schwabsky here stages his Opera: Poems 1981-2002. His approach to the eponymous form -- colloquial, lived-in, forking the vulgar tongue, mixing in trailer park trash talk, throwing out references to Wittgenstein, Larbaud and Traherne -- rises to the other-worldly.
Meritage Press, Small Press Distribution, 104 pages, ISBN 0970917929.

ADVANCE WORDS:
The word "song" resonates over and over and the poems here will often suddenly burst into an intricate, complicated melody.
--Juliana Spahr

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.
--David Shapiro

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.
--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.
--John Yau

CONUNDRUM DU JOUR

I'm dying to comment on one of the hot issues currently floating about on poetry blogland but it would only serve up more "cultural capital" fodder for a certain peep and it's not like anything I would say would change said peep's mind. Cultural capital, I keep reminding myself, is not necessarily based on agreement. It's based on attention.

Too bad, too, as my comment would have been brilliant.

BIRD LESSON DU JOUR

I love the animals on the mountain. Just now, I heard a tapping against the window. When I went over to investigate, a huge -- must have been nearly three feet high -- crow was on the windowsill, flapping its wings against the glass. As I neared the window, it languidly spread its huge wings to fly away. Beautiful. BLUE-BLACK WINGS. Such glossy feathers -- such sheen! And I could hear the bird's message: This is how you must fly -- with grace, no effort showing, expansively....

Good lesson -- I'm still a newbie with my wings...

LENY'S GIFT

Scholar and newly-out-of-the-closet-poet Leny Strobel had given me this gift, a charming piece of bamboo etched with decorative patterns. I'd been using it as a bookmark. For some reason, I didn't think until this morning to read the description of it that was on its packaging. Said description states:

This precisely formed and decorated item of buho bamboo is a louse pick. T'boli tribeswomen of South Cotabato, Mindanao, find it a socially rewarding time for exchange of local news whiile assisting one another in the search and destruction of such vermin from each other's scalps.

Uh. Okay. Girlfriends -- if any of youse ever want to sit around in a circle swapping gossip and picking lice of each other's heads, I got a louse pick. Please, uh, bring your own...

More seriously, check out this beautiful site for more information on the T'Boli:

"Women must continue to weave, to make jewelry, baskets,to sing and tell stories," she stated. Her daughter brought out her tribal clothing: necklaces, bracelets, earrings, the 13-pound brass belt adorned with T'Boli bells and carved metal, an embroidered shirt, eight thick brass anklets and six wrist bracelets, the beaded wooden hairpiece and a pair of earrings which extended from the earlobe and wrapped around the neck like a collar. He put them on with the daughter's help. Transforming herself into a veritable temple, she became a visible map of her ancestors, her culture, and nature. She smiled proudly. Then she lifted her skirt and showed her tattooed calves, which would make her recognizable at death to the ancestors in the other world."

ON DEPICTIONS OF WHITE AND THE GAZE

One of the most interesting (and pleasure-inducing) painters today of "white-on-white" works is Eve Aschheim. Eve just alerted me to a group show, "White," now ongoing through November 15 at Bill Maynes Gallery in Chelsea, New York. I plan to see it later this month, and would have seen it just for Eve's works which I've admired for years. But other artists in the show are respectable and probably worth seeing: Noriko Ambe, Lois Dodd, Chie Fueki, Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz, Suzanne McClelland, William Pope L., Dorothea Rockburne, and Gil Shani.

Before my trip to New York, though, I'll be seeing the Diane Arbus exhibit at SFMoma which opens this Saturday. I am thinking of writing on this exhibit, though not from a pure review standpoint. If you edit a literary/arts journal and are interested in an essay about this show, e-mail me and I'll give more details about the perspective I'm considering.

MY MARTHA STEWART MOMENT

So, some posts back, I spoke about reintroducing moiself to the art of gardening. After nearly two decades in New York City and thoughlessly plonking plants atop radiators, I'd had this assumption I had a Brown Thumb. But now that I live "in the (wine) country" of Napa, I figured I'd try again since I had this mud patch in front of the house. So I hoisted my lovely ass on over to Walmart's and got plants for said mud patch. Well, now, they are presenting a veritable riot of supremely lovely colors. It's not Giverny but it's something.

So, this weekend, very self-consciously but also quite quite cheerfully, I took my lovely ass on over to my former mud patch whilst my right hand brandished a brand new pair of gardening clippers. I have this lovely white rose bush just spilling forth flowers -- and what better way to enjoy fresh roses than to have them actually come from your garden!! The crystal vase was waiting in the kitchen! With much graceful swinging of moi biceps, I clipped and clipped and took into the kitchen a huge gathering of fresh white roses.

So I'ma trimming them here and there and plunking them into the waiting crystal vase. Every so often, I'd feel a nip on moi fingers but assumed they came from a stray thorn....until Tom enters the kitchen, looks at humming me, and observes:

OH MY GAWD YOU'VE BROUGHT IN BUGS!!!

I looked more closely at the pile of branches before me. They were CRAWLING with huge brown bugs, some of which were feasting on my fingers! We had to throw out all the branches and roses...and now Tom won't stop talking about how I've infested the house!

Well, crap. That just about made me miss my former view on Amsterdam Avenue -- staring at the backside of a brick building.

Slap! Excuuuse me! Had to get a bug that was hiding over there in the corner.

It drove me to drink, I tell you (1999 Noon Winery Reserve Cabernet from Southern Australia).

Martha Stewart never mentioned this! I'd sue her but ... isn't it already a long line?

Here I am with a glorious flower garden and I'm still skulking about Safeway for their specials on Guatemalan-bred roses.

Ah well. Anything to help out the Guatemalan economy -- after all, I am internationalist in thinking....

SOIREE (A NOUN TURNED VERB) WITH SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC!

As I have just joined the Board of Small Press Traffic, do allow moi to do Board duty by suggesting: save the date for the following event spotlighted in an open message from SPT Director Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson:

Nine Lives--Small Press Traffic's 9th Annual Literary Soiree & Auction
Saturday, November 8, 2003, from 3-8 p.m.
California College of Arts (CCA)
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th &
Wisconsin)
email: smallpress@ccac-art.edu
415-551-9278

Over the past years our auctions have been enlivened by the appearance of all kinds of extraordinary one of a kind items. Zadie Smith, the UK author of WHITE TEETH, autographed a tube of toothpaste for us. Gore Vidal sent us his proof copy of his New Yorker article on Monica Lewinsky, while Don DeLillo sent a manuscript page from MAO II. Anonymous art activists raided Michael Ondaatje's waste paper basket, and we sold his trash--an action that got us dubious press in the New York Times. Last year reclusive wunderkind JT Leroy let us auction off his corrected version of METEORS,--and on and on. This year, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Cunningham pried the face off a travel alarm, and signed it with THE HOURS, while Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill (AT SWIM, TWO BOYS) made a St Patrick's Day T-shirt that will bring tears to your eyes--all to help us raise money for San Francisco's premier avant-garde poetry showcase.

$10 admission for a full day of

SURVIVING, THRIVING and JIVING at NINE LIVES

It's our ninth annual soiree event and what better trope to employ in the copy than the nine lives of the cat? We're an organization that lives like a cat, on kindness, dexterity and dumb luck, but we reward you with so much affection!

Food * Music * Cash Bar--featuring the Meow Mix cocktail! * Celebrity Appearances * Raffle for Fabulous Prizes * Poet's Theater * Presentation of SPT's 2nd annual Book Awards, the best books of poetry published all of last year . . . and our 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Barbara Guest

OUR BIG ANNUAL AUCTION OF LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS, MEMENTOS, AUTOGRAPHS, SIGNED BROADSIDES, LETTERS, PHOTOS, ARTWORK AND EPHEMERA
You'll claw your way to the front. Highlights of this year's CAT-alogue include:

* Michael Cunningham, alarm clock, yes, alarm clock signed by the author of THE HOURS for our auction

*Gertrude Stein HOW TO WRITE, Allen Ginsberg's copy annotated by him

*1963 San Francisco Poetry Festival broadsides MINT (Helen Adam, Blaser, Duncan, Lew Welch, Ferlinghetti, LaVigne, Jess, and many more) thanks to Donald Allen's generosity

*Early US modernists Lola Ridge, Waldo Frank, Marianne Moore, the whole Cary Nelson crowd!

*Robert Creeley, unpublished poem

*Barbara Walters ALS to Ann Landers

*Rare double display manuscripts by Karl Shapiro AND David Shapiro

*Manuscript material, signed books et cetera, graphic works by--Anne Rice, Anne Carson, Ted Berrigan, Josephine Miles, Barbara Guest, Terry Eagleton, Andre Maurois, William Plomer, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian McEwan, Jamie O'Neill, William Meredith, Isabel Allende, Christopher Fry, Leslie Scalapino, Philip Whalen, Rosmarie Waldrop, too many in fact to mention! Come and gawk, come and bid, it's all for a good cause.

WORLD PREMIERE OF "THE SMITH FAMILY,"
A NEW PLAY BY CRAIG GOODMAN AND KEVIN KILLIAN
A tornado's heading toward Fort Smith, Arkansas, where the Smith family is hosting their annual reunion. Barometer's falling, pressure's mounting, Jack Smith is up on the roof filming "Flaming Creatures," Wayne Smith torn between his devotion to his wife Liz Smith and her sister, former Angel Jaclyn Smith. Patti Smith conducts a secret Romeo and Juliet affair with one of the Jones family (Tommy Lee), while Anna Nicole Smith struggles with demons of her own. Kiki Smith has made a 500-ton vagina for the Venice Biennale, while Will Smith ponders his floundering career. Meanwhile an interloper's moving on in, and the ghost of tall, elegant Alexis Smith prowls the plantation with her spectral dog. Susan Smith looks at her two kids in the back seat and then looks at the lake and then--As Morrissey (from the Smiths) croons in the background, Heaven knows we're miserable now. When you've got a big family, who's to blame for all the problems of the world? With Taylor Brady, Anne Collier, Gerald Corbin, Margaret Crane, Kota Ezawa, Tanya Hollis, Kevin Killian, John Koch, Karla Milosevich, Yedda Morrison, Rex Ray, Laurie Reid, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Wayne Smith (as himself).

Soiree opens 3:00 p.m.
Auction Preview 3:30--5:30 p.m.
Presentation of Book Awards 5:00 p.m.
Auction 5:30 p.m.
Raffle drawing 7:00 p.m.
Play 7:00 p.m.
Continuous food, drink, entertainment and stupid pet tricks, it's the 9 Lives of the Cat at Small Press Traffic!

Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center promotes and supports writers from all over the globe--particularly those who push the limits of how we speak and think about the world. Since 1974 SPT has been at the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area innovative writing scenes, bringing together independent readers, writers, and presses through publications, conferences, and our influential reading series.

For more information about Small Press Traffic, check out our website at: http://www.sptraffic.org

"THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO"

It's boring to see poets scramble with such a lack of subtlety for public recognition and validation. But let's talk about me. I once thought said scrambling to be interesting. Now: yawn. This afternoon, I saw three pretty bluebirds flash blue wings as they soared past the windshield. Their color allowed them to mate with the blue sky. A lovely fusion because color did not privilege.

"CHOKEPO"!!

I sent a chokin' prose poem over to Timothy Yu. He sez:

Thanks--for revealing the as yet unexplored lyricism of choking...duly posted.

You're welcome! Check me -- and other poets -- choking over at Timothy's Tympan Blog!

SO SNAILMAIL COMES TO THE MOUNTAIN WHERE I, NOT MOHAMMED, AWAIT

There is a god that separates mother and child.
--W.B. Keckler

Since I'm hanging out in wine country, I usually get my snailmail once a week as said mail is usually delivered to my San Francisco address (which is how I prefer it as, in the country, I have one of those country road post office boxes with zero security).

Among the voluminous pile were the twin (east coast and west coast) issues of ambit (thank you west coast editor kari edwards for including me). I haven't finished reading through the issues but I am savoring a new discovery for me: W.B. Keckler. From his poem "For Sonia Balassanian":

Substance pours into resemblance.

The world awakens inside a murderer
dividing and replicating
like a god, an amoeba.

And later:

"You may stumble onto the sleepless universe,"
she whispered to the guard
as he stepped on the bus home.

But of course she wasn't there.

Neither was he.

The god is that which divides

time from place
or soul from face.

This often happens in basements.
Under the earth. Windowless.

It is a mythic place that stops.

That stops energy like the color black
or a blackhole bending light

hence time.

So compelling. Thank you W.B. Keckler, whoever you are, for writing and writing....

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

Also among the pile was a shimmering gem: Nick Piombino's Theoretical Objects. It warrants more than what I can offer right now. But I already know from my first pass-through that I am impressed by both this collection's underlying concept (which I reduce into saying: theory turned tangible) and the way it is manifested with a marvelous sensibility of lightness even as it retains complexity -- not easy to pull of and which speaks to the deftness of this poet: Here's an excerpt from Nick's "Missing":

I've known what you looked like and have followed you without having certainty, without an image. Your tracks were felt with my feet, your face a visage without signs, your name a way of holding, your thoughts a strumming instrument. Please don't let precision take away the in-between. Don't let them classify the kind of jokes that stumbled in front of us, as we heard them passing on the street. Even this is closer than that. Even this protects the surface from too much grazing.

"Your name a way of holding" -- beautiful. Thank you Nick -- and, yes, I am blinking in the shadows...trying not to become addicted to ... blinking in the shadows because, after all, the sun awaits.

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

Also among the voluminous pile from this week was an order for Barry Schwabsky's OPERA through a Publisher's Discount of 25% off of the $14 retail price and free shipping (the latter at least a $3 value). Since OPERA probably won't be available through Amazon for at least two more weeks, I'm extending the Publisher's Special (which expired on Oct. 15) through to the rest of the month (e-mail me if you wish info). Thus, for $10.20, you can get a copy of Barry's book -- probably the lowest price you can get it for now. Barry's book is also available through Small Press Distribution.

BULLSHIT

As a Filipino-American, I resent the double blow of seeing my hard-earned U.S. tax dollars go over to support a Philippine president who uses the terrorism issue to mask her incompetence with other domestic policies.

JADE EYES (FROM NOTES TO "THE HISTORY OF FALLEN ANGELS)

Jean writes:
"While Eileen will be reading for _Going Home to a Landscape_, in NYC in a catered affair (wine and good food always seems to follow the poetic corpse around), and music by a relative of Yo Yo Ma, I will also be reading at the perhaps slightly more dangerous (?) Bindlestiff Studios in San Francisco..."

Yep -- that food and wine just follows me; I wasn't the one who planned the Galapagos event, though I certainly plan to be a beneficiary in scarfing down that food. But, speaking of Bindlestiff, I once met a fallen angel near "dangerous" Bindlestiff. He mugged me. Corpse nods head: Yah, really. I was doing a Poets' Theater performance there (Valentine's Day's infamous "Clit Chat" two years ago). I had my props in my former banker's briefcase. And as I walked towards the theater, three guys who (with hindsight) had been tracking me for two blocks came up from behind me and yanked my briefcase off my shoulders.

As I felt the strap slid off my shoulder, I turned to look at them. When my head turned, my eyes turned to look directly into the eyes of the one who'd grabbed my briefcase. Green eyes. Time stopped. It must have been all of one second but it seemed like time stopped. He and I looked deep into each other. Our noses must have been literally one inch from each other, which just made that locked stare action quite shivery. Then, as if I was outside looking at a movie instead of inside the suffering, the scene continued -- he joining his two accomplices as they ran down the alley.

I stood at the entrance of the alley and yelled at them, words like, "Please don't take the briefcase! You can take my money and everything! But the rest of it is paperwork, useless to you!"

As I was screaming, I was 10 minutes away from the opening of the play and, vaguely, I remembered that I needed the "paperwork" that was in the briefcase, otherwise I couldn't go on with the play.

Amazingly enough, the three of them paused, looked back at me briefly, put the briefcase down onto the middle of alley, opened it and took out my wallet and cellphone and left the rest. Two of them ran away immediately. Mr. Green Eyes kept standing there, though. He picked up my briefcase and held it to me. He said, "Here."

Incredibly, I took a step into the alley before stopping. He and I must have realized at the same time: there was no way I could enter that alley. He'd just mugged me. The regret was palpable -- for some reason, I felt that he felt what I did: regret that this had to be the way our paths intersected. He put the briefcase down, cast one more look at me, then turned and ran.

Hours later, I would wonder what the three men thought when they opened the briefcase and saw one of my "props" -- a long necklace (I wear it wrapped twice around and it still falls to my belly button) of thumb-size skulls carved out of yak bones by Nepalese tribesmen. It served as a prop but that necklace also protects me.

Anyway, after Mr. Green Eyes ran off, I hovered about the alley's entrance for a few seconds to make sure they really were gone. Then I then ran into the alley, picked up my briefcase, and continued running back out towards the theater. It was five minutes before the curtain was due to rise. The Bindlestiff peeps called the police. A cop car arrived promptly. They said they'd hold the curtain for a few minutes while I acquiesced to the cops' request to join them in their car and tour the immediate vicinity. We drove around a few blocks. But nothing. The cops returned me to the theater. I was the the opening act.

I knew I was the opening act, and so couldn't begin my logical meltdown process from the mugging until after the play was over. The spine held because, indeed, "the show must go on." (How I suddenly detest that phrase.)

That Poets' Theater was scheduled to run for three days. But I lost my voice after that first night. I spent the next two evenings miming while Barbara Reyes became my voice. As it turns out, it actually was a better performance with me pretending to silently order Barbara around.

Anyway, I've always wondered what happened to Mr. Green Eyes. I recognized him, you see: a fallen angel. These fallen ones often end up with tough lives: it's not surprising many become poets or criminals.

Today, I bought a novel just because of its title: The Mark of The Angel by Nancy Huston. A good read -- devoured it in one seating. 1957. France. Germany. Algeria. Of course the protagonist is miserable.

Of course the protagonist, Saffie, has green eyes: "Green and opaque, like two fragments of jade."

The angels hovering over me are named for the color of their eyes. One of them is "Jade."

Once, I revealed through a poem titled "Jade" -- a poem I wrote before my eyes discerned the presence of these angels beneath my ceiling -- "My favorite stone is jade for the impassivity of its face."

My eyes must remain impassive next week when I fully anticipate heartbreak.

"I loathe Poetry."

Poetry has taken over my life. I never asked for it.

"I loathe Poetry."

BURP, BLURP...ON BLURBS!

A poet once told me, "Blurbs are for whores."

I don't necessarily disagree, but then I have been known to act as "a high-class prostitute for Poetry" (Reference: the Berkeley 2002 reading for the anthology collecting Filipino and Singaporean English-language poems entitled Love Gathers All. Michelle calculated my hourly rate from that gig at $12,000 an hour, causing her to quip, "We poets should unionize.").

More to the point, as another poet pointed out, certain institutions (including journals that publish reviews) don't recognize poetry books without blurbs. So I've not minded gathering blurbs primarily to support my publishers who typically can use all the marketing help they can get. The marketing arena, in my mind, is simply not the place for me to act all precious and pure. (Purity in marketing? -- now there goes an oxymoron!) In the Poem's space, on the other hand, I am fucking driven snow....

Sip. Diet coke.

Anyway, I am posting to share a blurb I just wrote for Paolo Javier's forthcoming -- and first! -- poetry collection, The Time At The End of This Writing. It's a first draft; if Paolo wants me to change it, I probably will -- I'm just a Poetry whore:

Paolo Javier may end his book by "submit"-ting to Rilke, Neruda and Berrigan. But not with a bowed head. He submits to Poetry's Call and deservedly ascends the crowded shelves with his first book equal to those whose works he imbibed, but then alchemized into his history as a poet. His history as the "Original Brown Boy" Poet. By forming original poems, Javier subverts the colonialism that imposed a language upon his ancestors. He does so by finding the gold not previously found by other poets whose first language is English. Piquant, passionate, perky, panting, "pointy" Paolo-poems result from Javier's refusal to "lament the decisions that made me." In no uncertain English terms, Paolo dares, "Fuck me." Which is to say, Fuck lineage -- dismissively as well as lovingly.

Paolo Javier -- Ladies and Gentlemen -- a poet making poems you would do well to savor.

ON FOOD AND MOI SCHEDULE

"Take a black poet to lunch" -- Eeksy Peeksy's "jovial" Malcolm cracks me up. But, hey, did y'all know October is Filipino American Historical Month? Youse peeps know what this means right? But, hey, that's strange -- I'ma checking my e-mail and there ain't a single offer there to take me to lunch!!!

Angel furrows brow. She still looks enchanting. She goes on....

But speaking of food, one of my readings in New York -- November 3 at the Galapagos Arts Center (see info below) -- apparently will be crammed with wine and Filipino food!!! It's to celebrate the anthology Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas. Co-editor Marianne Villanueva reveals the reading will be catered. Catered?! All poetry readings should be catered, yah? This caterer is the same who caters the Philippine Embassy in New York and....check this out: Michael Dadap (brother-in-law of the cellist Yo-yo Ma) will play in between readers.

Yo New York peeps -- drop by and meet enchanting moi and scarf food with said moi!! You don't know food until you've had Filipino lumpia, empanada, siopao, siomai, etcetera etcetera...FOOD POEMS!!!!

Meanwhile, back by popular demand in my lovely head, here's my reading/appearance schedule:

NEW YORK
Monday, November 3, 2003
7 - 9 p.m.
Galapagos Art Space
70 N. 60th St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Contact: Willis Johnson
Phone: 718.782.5188
WITH: Luisa Igloria, Katrina Tuvera, Melissa Aranzamendez, Elda Rotor, Isabelita Reyes, and Marianne Villanueva


SAN FRANCISCO
Poetry Readings by Barry Schwabsky and Eileen Tabios
Sunday, October 26, 2003
7 p.m.
HOUSE READING SERIES
at the residence of kari edwards at
3435 Cesar Chavez, #327
San Francisco, CA
[I am threatening to bake for this event.]


Tuesday, December 2, 2003
7 p.m.
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94133
Contact: Peter Maravelis
Phone: 415.362.8193
E-mail: peter@citylights.com
WITH: Marianne Villanueva, Barbara Reyes, Angela Torres, Dawn Mabalon, and Michelle Bautista

And then of course there's my Nov. 1, 2003 appearance in New York at the Asian American Writers Workshop's National Conference on Asian American Poetry -- I'll be presenting my lovely eyes along with the equally lovely eyes of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Timothy Liu and Arthur Sze. Check here for schedule and more information: http://www.aaww.org/poetry.html. Meanwhile, here's its spiel:

INTIMACY & GEOGRAPHY
The National Asian American Poetry Conference & Festival
Oct. 30 - Nov. 1, 2003

An unprecedented three-days series of panels, readings, discussions, and performances illuminating the world of contemporary Asian American poets and their work. Conceived in order to support, explore and highlight the work of contemporary Asian American poets across the nation, the multiple projects of Intimacy & Geography, funded by The Ford Foundation, will take place simultaneously over a series of two years and will be managed by departments within the Workshop, each of which is devoted to supporting Asian American literature through author readings and events, publications, and youth programs.

BUT IT'S NOT SEX! REALLY! REALLY!

Last night, I dreamt of the color red. A black mask kept floating throughout this tiny room where I saw myself contained. I was sitting on an old armchair covered with fading cabbages against a lime background. How ugly, I thought about the fabric as I looked down on my knees. I seemed to want to avoid your eyes, as I am often compelled to hide from them when I am not dreaming and, in a rare moment, we occupy the same space. I felt you in my dream looking at me, even as I now realize that I never actually saw you within the dream. I looked at the scars on my knees to avoid your eyes. I was naked. Then you whispered, "Spread." And the air turned red.
--from "The Lucidity of Detachment"

I've got two books coming out in early 2004, including my first short story collection entitled BEHIND THE BLUE CANVAS (some stuff about it in early Archives). So I've been working on the manuscript recently, after a few months of absence from the project. I'm remembering again some concerns about coming out with a book of erotica....until I remembered how I'd wussily fudged the issue: I got Jean Gier to write a scholarly introduction!

So, I can say when it's the appropriate time: "But Mom and Dad, it's not really all about sex. Read the introduction! The SCHOLAR Jean Gier sez this and this and this about politics and culture and ....!"

I wonder if the strategy will work.

And my Dad is getting on in years -- I should probably try to avoid having him read the book. Wouldn't want the old man to get a heart attack....

I'm so glad my parents don't do the Internet...so much hogwash out there about me (especially the stuff I feed it).

Meanwhile, sip (morning coffee). Thanks Jean! You helped with my conundrum....but still don't know what to say about yours! That's what you get for getting involved with Moi! But at least my loco space ain't boring, right?

ON MALAISE

Generic Unrequited Love Poem;
Please Fill In The Blanks

There's _________
There's _________

One of us
threw away
the other

"It wasn't me"

FOR YOU PEEPS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS: NOEL ALUMIT & MICHAEL KUN

My buddy Noel writes:

I'll be having a paperback party on Sunday, Oct. 19th, from 5-7. I'll be having it with Michael Kun who wrote "Locklear Letters." There will be food and drink. It'll be fun.

Noel

Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont. (cross is Franklin in Los Feliz)
LA CA 90029

Time: Sunday, October 19, 2003 5:00-7pm
NOEL ALUMIT and MICHAEL KUN
"Letters to Montgomery Clift" and "The Locklear Letters"

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Two L.A. novelists tell their stories through the unique use of letters. Alumit's multi-award-winning novel is now out in paperback, dealing with the coming of age of a young Filipino boy who is sent to L.A. when his parents disappear during the Marcos Regime. And Kun's tongue-in-cheek look at celebrity worship traces the downward spiral of a salesman through an obsessive series of letters to his famous college classmate, Heather Locklear. (Alyson; MacAdam/Cage)

Letters to Montgomery Clift
by Noel Alumit

Winner!!!
Stonewall Book Award, American Library Association
Violet Quill Award, InsightOut Books
Gold Seal, ForeWord Magazine
Ben Franklin Award, PMA publishing
Global Filipino Literary Award, Our Own Voice

Some awards I was up for but didn't win (though pleased to be recognized):
Lambda Literary Award
PEN Center USA West Literary Award
Southern California Book Award
Asian American Literary Award

Honorable Mentions:
One of the Ten Best Books of Year, The Advocate
Notable Book, Kiriyama Foundation

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

Sorry to miss it Noel -- and reading your second novel's manuscript is my November project (I promise).

YAY

Ya know: something rare this morning. I have absolutely nothing to say.

That being the case, let me just do something equally rare: post a compliment about moi-self.

Chris Murray is calling me a "genius." Now, Chris, I notice you just said "genius." Gabe Gudding, for one, considers me a "complete genius." So, Chris, is your genius affectation of a slightly lower caliber than Gabe's assessment? Let it not be so, please.

Okay....off to the....no, wait. First, I of course must PREEEEEN.

Check.

Now that that's out of the way, off to the rest of the world to see what mischief I can concoct today!

BARRY SCHWABSKY IN NEW YORK, PHILADELPHIA AND SAN FRANCISCO...AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

DUM DA DA DUM! The lovely Kevin Killian just informed me that Barry Schwabsky's book OPERA had been featured in the September issue of Publisher's Weekly (PW)! Since I didn't fork over the hundreds of dollars required to be a PW subscriber, I didn't see the article when it came out. But here's the text below! And, apparently, PW rarely reviews "first books" but this mention was part of a "feature article" on first books, of which Barry's book was the first listed!

September 1, 2003
Publishers' Weekly [P. 85-86]
"Fall First Book Blow Out"

Putting 20 years of work into one intensely wrought luminously gripping book, Artforum critic Barry Schwabsky here stages his Opera : Poems 1981-2002. His approach to the eponymous form -- colloquial, lived-in, forking the vulgar tongue, mixing in trailer park trash talk, throwing out references to Wittgenstein, Larbaud and Traherne -- rises to the other-worldly.
Meritage Press, Small Press Distribution, 104 pages, ISBN 0970917929.

So this seems like a good reason to remind you all of Barry's schedule over the next couple of weeks, culminating with a reading with Moi. You may want to catch him while he's in the U.S. since Barry lives in London:

NEW YORK
Friday, October 24
6-7:30 PM
303 Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011


PHILADELPHIA
Penn Bookstore
3601 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-898-7595
Thursday, October 23
Noon-1 PM


SAN FRANCISCO
Poetry Readings by Barry Schwabsky and Eileen Tabios
HOUSE READING SERIES
at the residence of kari edwards at
3435 Cesar Chavez, #327
San Francisco, CA
7 p.m., Sunday, October 26, 2003

All events are free and open to the public. Wine will be poured in New York and San Francisco.

These three events revolve around celebrating the release of Barry's book OPERA. Here's some of the early reviews on it:

FROM JANE SPRAGUE'S ARTICLE IN BOOG CITY, SEPTEMBER ISSUE:
As a one-person publishing endeavor (and the assistance of a poet-intern) Tabios spends a year working on the production of each book. The latest Meritage book, OPERA: Poems 1981-2002, by Barry Schwabsky exemplifies Tabios' intent for the press, which is "to publish those who otherwise may not ever be published, a difficulty beyond the general poetry threshold difficulty. In (Schwabsky's) case, this is a poet who's been invisible in the poetry scene for over a decade, despite a brilliant start by being published in POETRY at age 19! OPERA encompasses 21 years of writing which occurred outside of any poetry scenes, having been developed mostly in private."

OPERA is a remarkable book. Ideas of song, language play, and delicate negotiations of desire and love create poetry deft and strange- strangely beautiful and bound with dual meanings, the piecing apart of things, of language, of the unsaid, the left out, the impossible to contain. From the title poem, "Opera":

Corrected hair. Face smooth
as mirror. Unsurpassable song.
Living death. Unhanded. Unhanded.
Theatrical weeping. "He" becomes "she"
and "you" becomes "he" and "we"
becomes "we" becomes "we" becomes "we."
Pears shaped like apples. Pears
that taste like apples that taste like grapes. (10)

Schwabsky pairs words with their opposite and twins images that resonate in the ear and on the page. Words are repeated, then altered, then paired again or broken apart newly, revealing other hidden/revealed aspects of the voices between this "we" grappling with the doubleness of desire and experience and their (our) shared complications. The final poem:

Clearing

Favorable moonlight
in all directions. Don't try
and make it real. You'll never have that experience
long enough to write about. Someone else's voice

will have to burn with it. You keep
starting something you don't know how to stop
but it stops. (102)

The doubleness of love, desire, of thinking in language, emotion and image in simultaneity and how to reconcile aspects of "we" among others, of individuals in the blur of longing where boundaries mesh, dissolve, break and give way to something more: those moments of "the nothing / but desire / you've seen / I am." (45)


FROM CHRIS MURRAY'S TEXFILES BLOG:

These extremely artful poems, individually (including the writer's careful attention to minute details in each poem) and then again as an intriguing whole, fascinate me. They draw one in from both perspectives, the large and the smaller views, simultaneously--a not uncomfortable predicament in terms of result, per the ways Schwabsky sends forth this verbal art. They are like looking at one of those photographs of an object, say, a face, enlarged to consume an entire wall, but of course up close each point of what was thought to be the comfortable blur of plain graininess actually turns out to have other entire images--full of other stories--at work within the whole. Captivating, almost overwhelming, but in ways well worth contemplating, studying forth.


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

ADVANCE WORDS ON OPERA:
[And do check out links to blurbers' names for some interesting stuff!]

The word "song" resonates over and over and the poems here will often suddenly burst into an intricate, complicated melody.
--Juliana Spahr

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.
--David Shapiro

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.
--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.
--John Yau

MY GRAVELLY VOICE IS HAUNTING TEXFILES

Heart's Gratitude to Chris Murray for asking me over and hosting me as a guest audblogger at her TexFiles Blog to read my poem "Profiles."

Chris, I am glad your students are enjoying it. If it's of interest, you might mention to them that I wrote that poem with cubism in mind -- I felt that the edges created between the paragraphs by seemingly unrelated topics-per-paragraphs was like how Picasso might split up a face so that the nose is suddenly above a forehead, or a piece of violin is where the chin should be, and so on.

Oh, and then I'm coming out of a slight cold that makes my voice gravelly and so I thought I'd try to read the poem by emulating what I imagine T.S. Eliot and Artaud would sound like combined....not to say I succeeded in doing anything with said attempt but confusing myself here...

Anyway, the above is all blather that need not be of concern to anyone listening to the poem. I just mention such background because it's fascinating to moi-self because said background is about moi. Particularly when I'm sipping my second glass of wine.

Sip. Tonight, the Hayden & Henry 100% Napa Valley Cabernet, part of a 50-case special production put together to celebrate the birth of Thornton Boswell's two grandsons in 2002 and 1999. Isn't that sweet? The wine was bottled over at moi neighbor's -- Chateau Boswell on the Silverado Trail. Cheers!

HOW MY ABSENCE IS PRESENCE IN WASHINGTON D.C. THIS FRIDAY

Thanks to Reme Grefalda for setting this up, and sending over the "Programme Notes." What a pleasant surprise to learn that poems from my first book, Beyond Life Sentences, are involved. Apparently, rehearsals took place this week and Clare Maneja, reader of my poems, has a "beautiful voice"! Perhaps some of you in Washington can attend this gathering:

[UPDATE: This event is open to public, according to Reme. First come, first serve seating, with a 6:30 free refreshments, and 7 pm prompt start of program. Only 80 seats. Call 202 467 9399 and leave number of reservations (this is for the food preparation count, not for reserved seating).]


FRIDAY HERITAGE EVENINGS
at
THE EMBASSY OF THE PHILIPPINES
1600 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington DC

PROGRAMME NOTES
FRIDAY, 17th OF OCTOBER

An Evening of Music & Poetry

ALLAN CHAN, JR., baritone
"Pur dicesti, o bocca bella" by Antonio Lotti (1667- 1740) (5.12 minutes)
"Beau Soir" by Claude Debussy (3 minutes)
"Nach Der Velchen Art Und Weise" from La Finta Giardiniera by W.A. Mozart (4 minutes)


JENNIFER ESCANO LAURON, soprano
"Nacht Und Traume" by Schubert
"Apres Un Reve" by Gabriel Faure
"Quando Me'n Vo" by Puccini from the opera La Boheme
"Sa Ugoy Ng Duyan" by Lucio D. San Pedro


JENNIFER LAURON & ALLAN CHAN JR.
Duet Selections


DUDLEY OAKS, pianist

Musical Interlude by
VICTOR COO, Cello

J. S. Bach
Prelude from Suite No. 6 in D major


"Poetry as a Way of Life"

EILEEN R. TABIOS
Poet Extraordinaire*

Selected Poems from her book, Beyond Life Sentences
read by

CLAIRE MANEJA


-------------
*Reme, this extraordinary description is over the top but typical of your warmth and generosity. Salamat.

FOR THE RECORD

I "know" most poet bloggers only through their blogs. I've since met some in person, of course, and it's always been a pleasure. Nonetheless, one or two meetings does not make for an in-depth knowledge -- which leads me back to my point: I know most poet bloggers only through their blogs. So the comments I may make about poet-bloggers usually refer to the content of their blogs.

This is to say, I've never trafficked much in poetry scenes and I don't usually know anything about poet-bloggers' background, reputations, likes and dislikes, sexual hang-ups, as well as who poets date, who poets hate, who poets studied under, who poets have taught, etc. Frankly, I usually operate by the rule that your lives are none of my business, except for what you may post on your publicly-read blogs.

So if I make a comment that seems "odd" -- like correlating some poets together in some manner that others who know these people better would never think of doing, there's a good reason for such: I don't usually know anything about poet-bloggers except what they blog. So, certain peeps, don't drag me into these behind-the-(blog)scenes b.s. That was never and will never be my thing. Okay?

Okay!

So, now, let me move on to the more important topic (per my prior post) of clearing the last vestiges of hairspray from my armpits ...


P.S. Of course, nothing in the above should be construed as that I would not enjoy meeting many of you in person someday. Of course!

STRAIN MY COMPASSIONATE BONE, WHY DONTCHA!

Look. One tries to navigate one's way in the world with compassion. Usually, that's a good thing. Even for dufuses. But under the category of "Why Am I Surrounded by Idiots!", let me tell you a story of when my compassion ran out today.

And she wiggles her lovely butt comfortably into the cushion of her computer chair while nine million peeps pause what they're doing to listen.

So I'm at the gym. No, no -- this isn't one of my treadmill stories. What happens is, I'm at the gym. I do my thing (such as it is). Then I pretend my thing was major enough to warrant a shower and take said shower. Now, this gym -- like many gyms -- accommodate the hygienic practice of offering spray deodorants (vs. roll-on deodorants) to peeps who've just showered. In my gym, said spray deodorant is lined up right next to hairspray.

Here's the dufus factor: both bottles are white with the identifiers "Deodorant" and "Hair Spray" printed in teeeny black print.

Now, Gym Managers -- why do you do that? Why do you not differentiate the bottles at least by color or use larger type so that peeps who might be a tad bleary-eyed with water in their eyes will not confuse the two so as to

APPLY HAIRSPRAY UNDER THEIR ARMPITS?!!!!!!!

Dufuses!!!! I am trying to learn the agricultural business! I am trying to write even just one poem that's a keeper before I say Bye-bye to my mortal remains! I am trying to publish a few poets because the poetry publishing bidness sucks! I am trying to feed content to nine million peeps! I am trying to learn how to parallel park! Do you get the idea, Dufus Gym Manager, that I do not have time to go through your gym bidness to suggest ways in which to improve your effin' customer service?!

It's a good thing my armpits are clean-shaven as can you imagine how even more sticky it would have been under there?!!!

Is that more information than you need to know?! Of course it is -- THAT, too, is my particular specialty!

But let me not digress, pleeeeze. Gym Managers -- go through your locker rooms and bathrooms and start improving your operations, INCLUDING NOT PUTTING HAIR SPRAY AND DEODORANT IN VERY SIMILAR BOTTLES AND LINING THEM UP NEXT TO EACH OTHER!!!

She settles back from screaming at her computer screen. Whew. Well. I feel better now after loosing forth that rant. Okay. Now I can go back to my enchanting self...

ANTI-LINEAGE POETICS BECAUSE POETRY IS AN ARCHETYPAL WATER THAT CAN'T BE LINEARLY RIVERED (SOMETHING LIKE THAT)

A friend recently e-mailed me about one of his former teachers remembering Jose Garcia Villa -- how Villa "became a much-praised figure when Have Come, Am Here (1942, Viking) appeared while most other poets were elsewhere in uniform."

The comment resonates as I've been thinking lately about how some poet-peeps do seem to wear uniforms, and specifically how willing they seem to don said uniforms. Gads: I would think uniforms would itch poets....

Anyway, I replied to my friend's e-mail: "I possibly had been the only Filipino poet who'd never heard of Villa when I was asked by Kaya Press to edit a book on Villa. In fact, [some] poets thought that 'honor' belonged to them instead of some newbie like me -- but it makes sense to me. Because Villa is a fallen angel, and had to break some pretty heavy chains anchoring him to earth in order to finally ascend (I met him just once, looked angelic indeed with white parchment skin like complexion....then perhaps 3 months later he was dead; I think our meeting was the last social occasion he did before his death....all that is quite synchronistic for something...)..."

Yadda...angels editing each other -- it's a special type of expertise, you know. Anyway, a lot of people now think I'm one of those influenced by Villa after my edited book The Anchored Angel was released. Uh, no. But my work certainly would show why I would have much appreciation for Villa's poems -- like this:

No. 5

Between God's eyelashes I look at you,
Contend with the Lord to love you,
In this house without death I break His skull
I ache, I ache to love you.

I will batter God's skull God's skull God's skull!
I will batter it till He love you
And out of Him I'll dash I'll dash
To thy coasts, O mortal flesh.

He'll be broken He'll be broken He'll be broken
By my force of love He'll be broken
And when I reach your side O Eve
You'll break me you'll break me you'll break me.

Now, I don't have any of Villa's poems memorized so didn't remember poems like this while I've been writing on this blog, or my recent (religious) poems at the Gasping Blog -- including this reference I absolutely adore to "God's eyelashes."

And writing this also reminds me of a recent jog through blogland when, amongst others, I read Henry Gould and Nick Piombino's interview at Sidereality. I actually wrote up a post about how I saw affinity between some recent statements by these two gentlemen but I lost the post and just take my word for it that it was brilliant coz I'm too senile now to write it again. My point, though, from seeing affinity between these two gentlemen (that I take it most poet-peeps in the know would never think wear the same "uniform"?) is that if a poet is concerned about Poetry with a capital "P", such a peep inevitably taps into the archetypal strain that Poetry is too. I would explain this very important point but since no one is paying me to do so, I'll just head of for the breakfast awaiting me. Yum. Breakfast.

Oh, but just to close off my very interesting discussion here, to go back to Villa -- I think my lovely toes dipped into the same archetypal Holy Water Villa's elegant toes sampled, but that doesn't mean Villa influenced me. I choose my influences. So Villa influenced me only because I influenced the choice for him to influence me....Or "influence" and "lineage" are really irrelevant because what's happening is that we both ended up swimming in the archetypal poetic water -- that's clear, right?

I think poets become very very interesting when they lose their influences and start choosing their own. (Or as my punk rocker friend Nova would put it, "School is out!")

All this, of course, is from the perspective of someone who believes her eyelashes are much more enchanting than God's. Flutter Eyelashes. And such is not just *arrogance* -- it's about humbling your ego to be simply ... a Poet.

Gads: I love it when I write clearly....Okay: breakfast! Tom made French toast and I gotta get to that maple syrup before Mari slurps it all up!

ON EXUBERANT "FORM"

There were -- sigh -- sports this weekend.

Beyond window, skunk makes its presence known.

Wore a silk blouse.

Skipped the pumpkin & pancetta tartlettes.

"9-1-1" will never be over.

Exhausted from neediness, except my own.

Imagined a baby rattlesnake's skin to be lime green because the color generated a poem that became a Movado watch on my wrist.

Once, Philip Lamantia told me a story of Movado watches in men's pants pockets.

You stitch a poem together from the fragments available from the parents you never chose and still a critic will look at -- without reading -- your lines and claim you to be formless.

To stand, the fattest person alive still requires, not wings, but bones.

I am exhausted from chasing you because you won't sear my cheeks.

As if I would not welcome deliberately blinded will.

"The memories come in flashes, like sunlight shining in a forest grove, while all around lies the blind blackness of lost time." [18]

I loathe "_____" (that lava poem) which doesn't make it non-Poetry.

Elliptical? Everything is when you and I are speaking to you and I.

Why can't I ever say no to a cigar? (I loathe "______.")

Prefer to dip cigar into port ('85 Graham), then smoke through boozy sweetness.

Leading me to note the other wines of the weekend for Oenophiles who brattily complain I spend too much time on poetry and not enough on wine:

This was a big wine weekend -- it's harvest season here in wine country with the air cupped within the valley perfumed by the scents of every winery's fermentation tanks receiving newly-harvested grapes: something to celebrate! Other wines I drank besides those I've already tasted in celebration of Harvest -- and all were FABULOSO:

1996 Chevalier Montrachet Clos des Chevaliers Chartron et Trebachet
1993 Turley Hayne Vineyard Zinfandel (the first release by this winery and just excellent!)
1993 Turley Aida Vineyard Zinfandel
1999 Kistler Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir
2000 100 Acre Cabernet
Some Australian shiraz which name escapes me

Last but not least, a family visited from Japan. We sent them to Terra for Sunday dinner with a wine we have not yet tasted though we gifted them a bottle for their dinner: the 1997 Bryant Family Cabernet, rated 100 points by Robert Parker Esq himself.

"Which is to say," THIS IS A POST ON EXUBERANCE POETICS!

GOOD GOD AGAIN!

And now I'm St. Jude??!!

I am at a stage where chains burden my soul. Eileen is a vision of the Virgin Mary that gives me hope. St. Jude is the patron saint of all hopeless causes, my mother always told me. Eileen is my St. Jude. // I am a visual artist trying to write. No, I do not speak to Eileen about writing. I do not speak to Eileen for that matter about technicality. However, learning does not have to be in the form of lessons. Eileen teaches me that seeing things in a new light can co-opt, coerce and subvert the dominant paradigm.
--Tatang Rhett

Rhett!!! Peep -- you are not hopeless! You are as hopeless as I am .... uh, Saintly....or, uh, Virgin Mary!

Nonetheless, "Preeeeeeeeen. Bats long lashes. Wingtip perkily flicks up uncut hair. Black wings flare for a brief twirl up off chair before settling bony ass back onto chair." So ain't that just a special deja vu all over again.

Thankfully, Rhett also adds, " I have not been paid nor is this an advertisement for the long-lashed one who hears the fallen angels. It is simply the truth."

Thus, does the Long-Lashed One rips up the check she'd been about to mail...as she thinks, My, My -- So exhausting fluttering these lashes, long and lush that they are....then she admires the lovely sheen on her black wing...

Huy. Kung serioso, Salamat naman...

GOOD GOD!! THAT IS, GASP!!

Kasey just annointed my Gasping Poem Blog as Limetree's Blog of the Week!! As Kasey puts it:

Eileen’s Gasps, Because, wow, look! at that: rounding the corner on 100 fallen angel pome-bursts of spectacular Tabiotic passion and devotionistic precise DIVINE CORPSE-ART from poor lost HEAVEN-MIND and longingly always for SOUL-BONES-BODY!!!! Dig!

Preeeeeeeeen. Bats long lashes. Wingtip perkily flicks up uncut hair. Black wings flare for a brief twirl up off chair before settling bony ass back onto chair.

Bless you, my child. Oooops. I mean: Thank you Kasey. Just for that, I dedicate No. 82 to Sweetie you.


82.
My feathers are mangled and bleeding.
So what? God blinds me with His

gaze before His eyes of burning mirrors
spotlit a fate he negates for my wingtips:

“hands yellow and shriveled, palms
pierced with deep purple wounds,

fingers curled inward like the claws
of a dead chicken.” Unlike Lucretia,

if ever I wish to fire a rifle, I shall pull
the trigger with deadly accuracy.

Let me never, Lord, shoot a gun.
Let me never scent air with sulphur.

Let me never, Lord, shoot a gun.
My aim is true. My aim is a Poem.

PICK: EDWARD DEL ROSARIO

"ignorance is cancelled"
--Clayton Couch

What I said to Edward del Rosario:
> Edward,
> Here's the notice on new issue of Sidereality with commentary on your work.
> Hope you like it. I was pressed for time this month and would have wanted to
> write more on your work -- hope there's another opportunity in the future as
> your work develops. But I do totally love what you've done to date and hope
> all continues to go well.
>
> All Best,
> Eileen Tabios

Edward replied by, among other things, noting that I'm the first person ever to write/review his art work. Well, it's a privilege. I am highly confident Edward is an artist to watch, and whose works will source much enjoyment for viewers. So ... you might want to watch for him. You can begin by seeing some of the images featured at Sidereality.

Thanks, too, to Clayton Couch for always being supportive.

GALATEA: "WHERE POETRY, ART, WINE AND NATURE CONVERGE"

HARVEST WELCOME DINNER

Hors d’Ouevres
Rice Paper Rolls filled with Vegetables, Cilantro & Mint with Peanut Dripping Sauce
Smoked Trout with Frisee & Apple Rabbit Rillete on Gaufrette
Torchon of Foie Gras on Brioche with Fall Fruit Compote
Enndive Spears with Date & Blue Cheese
Brandade of Cod on Housemade Cracker
Ahi Tuna Tartare with Lime & Avocado on Lotus Root Chip
Green Bean & Goat Cheese Arrenchini
Pumpkin & Pancetta Tartlettes

2000 Kistler Dutton Ranch Chardonnay
1990 Dom Perignon
Assorted Single Vineyard Designate Turley Zinfandels

“Amuse Bouche”
Lobster Martini: Tomato Water, Lobster, Lobster Tail & Marscapone Ravioli

1st Course
Chervil Orcchetti, Crispy Pork, Truffle Broth & Chervil Oil
1996 Etienne Sauzet Batard Montrachet

2nd Course
Truffled Potato Ssalad Frisee, Haricots Verts, Sotto Cenere
1988 Chateau Lafite Rothschild

Entrée
Roasted Lamb, Goat Cheese Spoon Bread & Roasted Red Pepper Gastrique
Or
Pan Roasted Sea Bass, Sweet Corn Soubise, Lemon Butter Sauce & Thyme
1982 Giacomo Conterno Monfortino

Dessert
Apple Tart Tatin & Housemade Vanilla Bean Ice Cream
1990 Chateau d’Yquem

Coffee and Tea Service

Mignardise
Little Chocolate Earthquake Cookies

Cigars
1985 Grahams Port

FROM LATEST ISSUE OF TABIOS WINE TASTING REVIEW

Wine Club 2003 Annual Meeting:
1997 Peter Michael Point Rouge
1999 Kistler Cuvee Cathline
1991 Araujo Estate Cabernet
1992 Maya
1994 Abreu
1994 Colgin
1995 Bryant Family
1996 Pride Reserve Cabernet
1997 Harlan
1997 Screaming Eagle
1999 Blankiet
1935 Chateau Filhot

Richie likened the Kistler to "vanilla leather." Fred used a box of Maya as a footstool for about a year in his office. Cheryl aptly described the Colgin as "started out as broccoli only to end up as Shalimar." Debbie's oenophiliac performance made her an honorary member of the Wine Club while her husband David remains in the "needs simply to be tolerated" category. Dan and Eileen had same thought on Screaming Eagle -- that it's much like the Cheval Blanc. Betty pulled an Eileen-in-her-younger-days and abruptly got up in middle of meal to go crash in the car.

Between the two whites, eight preferred the Peter Michael.

The top three choices by those articulate enough to rate:

Richie: Colgin, Bryant, Kistler
Fred: Colgin, Screaming Eagle, tie between Harlan and Blankiet
David G: Colgin and then "whatever Fred says"
Debbie: Colgin, Pride and Screaming Eagle
Cheryl: Screaming Eagle, Bryant, Colgin
Mari: Screaming Eagle, Pride, Blankiet
Dan: Screaming Eagle, Bryant, Peter Michael
Tom: Screaming Eagle, Harlan, Bryant
David D.: Filhot (which he feels suffered in reception from rest of the group who had an inappropriate Sauterne-preconception -- yadda); Harlan, Bryant. Also notes that Screaming Eagle and Maya would have been better 5 years from now.
Eileen: Screaming Eagle, Colgin, Peter Michael (but whose tongue was not lucid enough to do justice to tasting Harland and Blankiet by the time the bottles rolled around...)
Alice: Screaming Eagle, Colgin, Pride

SWIMMING POETICS

Replicating a comment I posted on Mike Snider's comment box as regards "Swimming Lessons" because my comment is poetic:

You are a true cobalt sweetie.
Incidentally, I can't swim and have never been able to learn. I couldn't graduate, though, from college without being able to swim successfully across two lengths of a swimming pool. So, I just took a deep breath and plunged in and swam said two lengths without actually "swimming" in that I was just rushing my way across before my breath ran out. That ability to hold my breath for a long time translated, too, to long lines in poems that facilitated my affinity for the prose paragraph form. YaY! SWIMMING POETICS! by the Non-Swimmer!

CONNECTING DOTS

I don't think I've actually come out on record as noting Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's (GMA) decision to reverse her earlier decision not to run for re-election as President of the Philippines.

Connect the dots: at the time she'd announced she wouldn't run again, her popularity was so low that polls showed it was unlikely she'd win any presidential election anyway.

Then Bush invaded Iraq. GMA came out fully in support of that policy. Bush gave GMA's administration money. Money talks and helped her standing in some areas of the Philippines. Bush also began pushing GMA to try to remain in power as it solidifies an ally for him.

Who said colonialism is dead?

*****

Over at Elsewhere, Gary Sulllivan's first post in his look-see at CHAIN mentions "Tagalog" as one of the non-colonial languages. Yes, but only from the perspective undertaken by that particular CHAIN piece. Within the Philippines, one could make the argument that Tagalog -- as the lingo spoken in the (U.S.-supported) seats of power like Manila -- reflects colonialism through domestic policies (often unhelpful policies) imposed across the rest of the archipelago.

There are always so many layers to any one story -- particularly when the story is first understood to not be only about the "Western perspective"...

FOR GALATEA'S PARTY

I stuffed 72 gift bags today. Each contained a bottle of wine, a bottle of water, a scroll and my book Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. The scroll notes that Galatea is "where poetry, art, wine and nature converge." Bless you Galatea.

I stumbled today across an old poem I'd forgotten I once wrote (and printed in my first poetry book Beyond Life Sentences) -- one of those foretellings coming true (Bless you, Galatea):


Johnny Be Good

Kevin Sessums: "It's the redemption that's attractive."

Johnny Depp: "We chase our tails for so long. Getting high is about fucking trying to numb something. Getting loaded and trying to destroy yourself. Well, you just get to a point and you go, Fuck! What am I doing? What the fuck am I trying to do to myself?...It's not so much redemption as it is clarity. This really shows I'm getting older. I'm sound like John Denver or something. But I look forward to having a kind of peace of mind. I know that we all get there eventually, but it entails -- at least for me -- going through a lot of chaos."
--Dialogue from "Johnny Be Good" by Kevin Sessums, Vanity Fair, February 1977

               *

a wing rises
behind you

reach back:
stroke it

horns recede

               *

desert air
simmering

sutures
lining air

sun implodes:
orange

               *

reach for
cold Coronas

the line
in the distance
hints at blue

depths of water--

the cool wash
soothing

the fever
abating

AFTER MORNING JOG

The more idiotic politics get, the more compelled I am to protect my poems from their eroticized handcuffs. Come smell my hair...

Get windows damp

PRE-MIDNIGHT

My ex-life was lovely but unhealthy.

What to do with that knowledge that veils my eyes looking at what seduced angels?

Now the thought of pregnant spiders makes me swoon.

Buddhist web.

Invaders stumble across my island atop a mountain and believe they've reached the frontier of a dream.

They do not know they are correct.

They drop their swords.

O!

This landscape will not decay like the archipelago in which I began.

Blades are leached off blood.

I take bloodless metal and form crowns whose diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, jades and pearls I personally plucked from angels' eyes.

The summit will not crumble to the same point when islanders began whispering -- "depravity" -- about the poems of St. John of the Cross:

I entered in, I know not where,
And I remained, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with my thought.

Yo no supe donde entraba,
Pero, cuando alli me vi,
Sin saber donde me estaba,
Grandes cosas entendi;
No dire lo que senti,
Que me quede no sabiendo,
Toda sciencia trascendiendo.

I will note tonight's "saving grace" -- when I did not laugh like the others, you made sure I didn't lose my skin while undressing my mind for your listening eyes.

Hear me say I want to talk to you but the poem is too personal and you claim that's not what you want when what you really mean to say is

"100" POEMS IN 15 DAYS GETS ME HUGE, BLACK, GLOSSY WINGS...AND A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE TO COO AT MOI AS IT POOPS ON MOI HAIR

I can't believe I've kicked off a cooking discussion at the Wily Filipino's Blog. Dang -- Missy Melted A Teapot here is even better than I thought and, cough, I already thought I was GREAT! Then, over at Chris Lott's (with lovely and helpful feedback from Chris Murray) -- it's "Baudelaire, Ashbery and Tabios." Dang, I suppose I've suffered through worse menage a trois-es....(get out: I just threw that in for amusement, okay?!).

So, lookit...I'm actually here just to confirm I've just posted the entire series of the Footnotes to the History of Fallen Angels. Now, do note that there are only 99 poems posted, but it is "100" if you round it up. And, yes, dear Reader -- that's the space I gave to you, if you wish it: round up 99 to 100. Because that act, if you are so moved to do it, is a metaphor for how I wish the reader to invest hirself in my poems (something that may be relevant to our recent discussion, dear Chris Lott who I, like the other Chris, hope will never stop quest-ing).

As one might expect, some of the poems are better than others. But (to my own surprise) I actually don't think it's a bad body of "first draft, last draft" work generated over 15 days. I am not belaboring this to brag (for once). I am belaboring this because I want to raise one of the ten thousand sub-texts to this project. To wit: I want to show that *writing* a poem is not that difficult...it's living the Poetry that's a true challenge....I could explain that but I'd rather go to bed now -- for what I anticipate to be my first smooth sleeping in 15 days.

I deserve it, and need it -- because a Poet's Novel awaits...

But do let me end my 15-day, punched-out craziness on a cheerful note. Here's No. 95 (not dedicated to Chris Lott; for you, Sweetie, No. 72 at the Gasp-ing Blog):

95.
I obviated atheism
for a critic. I destroyed

a critic’s career.
Preen! Hell shrunk!

NOVEL POETICS

This excerpt from an e-mail I sent a peep this morning will partly explain my recent project "Footnotes to the History of Fallen Angels" (I'll post the rest of the poems this afternoon):

So the poems obviously footnote a story that doesn't exist. Now that the Footnotes are written, I'm going to write that story -- a novel I've been dying to write all my life...

I am so undisciplined....I think the poems shall work as scaffolding for a narrative....

But it's all alchemy. The Footnotes just welled up with no consciously intended....intent, but the references obviously have been simmering in my belly's cauldron for a while. Well, now they're out....

...and now let's see if novel can hold. I think it's, at best, a 50-50% shot. I think part of my difficulty is that I may be trying to tell a story that should never be told..."Should"? If so, eh. What's a poet but one who also must occasionally attack the "should"s...?

*****

So, that's it. A few weeks ago, there was a thread in poetry blogland about poets who write novels. This is how this poet -- that's lovely Moi -- is attacking the novel. As background, I'll share that, to date, I must have written over ten thousand pages of failed attempts at the novel -- it's time I spare the trees.

Such lovely trees on my mountain...Peeps, did you know that trees comprise the feathers on God's own wings? Yep -- God has green wings. The things you learn on this Blog, eh?! Cackle....

AND IT AIN'T EVEN NOON

Nine million peeps widen their eyes. Their screens are suddenly all-black. But a weird -- the word "unearthly" comes to mind -- black. The black is glossy. The field quivers every so often and one sees a hint of silver, a hint of cobalt, a hint of crimson....then all black glossing again over their screens.

Just before nine million peeps are about to hit the "Restart" buttons on their computers, the screens fade away to reveal....a black wing. Oh, the blackness is from Eileen's wing! But of course! Nine million peeps have been anticipating this result!

She turns her crimson lips towards her beloved peeps. Hello, Peeps, she croons. Aren't my wings just splendiferous? She waggles her wings and, yes, they are lovely indeed. Helplessly, nine million peeps nod their heads.

Well, I did it! I finished 100 poems within 15 days. YaY!!!! I'll post them all soon at my literally GASP-ing Blog. But, first, I must go -- cackle -- hunt some angels!!!!!!

WHOOOOOOSH! WHOOOOOOOSH! WHOOOOOOSH!!!!

And as the Winged Corpse flies, the mortals see that she is glorious and magnificent and luminous -- YADDA! -- from receiving God's generous blessings...including forgiveness.

For she is the one annointed by the Lord to bring back the Fallen Angels into the Heavenly Fold. To take all Fallen Angels out from the cold Cold, to bring all Fallen Angels back Home.

Amen.

AN OBSERVATION BEFORE RETURNING TO TODAY'S COUNTDOWN/MELTDOWN/MELTUP

When there are people who've been silenced and/or remain unacknowledged, the *accessibility* of a mere "Hello" from them would be Poetry itself. Even despite the lack of linguistic challenge from such a banal word like "Hello."

CATCHING UP WITH BLOGLAND

It would be easy to stop paying attention here and just fog off into the congenial semiotic flow. It's not only the subtle, implicit critique of "realism" that might be missed, though. What else would be missed is the too-much the more-than-naming, the excess of what is delicate, pressing and refusing to be "cajoled" in and by the driven flow of predictability: "patterns," endlessly chasing themselves around in the "sea-light." Indeed that is always in danger of being missed and yet is missed--so longed for, if only because such can only be intuited from the “wilderness of water,” or fluidity that holds what what can be known alongside what escapes knowing and any naming. This asks for consideration of what is both unquantifiable and qualitative, what happens when we participate in attempts to name things even though hopelessly “starminded” much of the time. We are caught up in the need to account for detail even while flowing in what is conceptualized as a poetic whole, here, a constellated, though happily unnameable poetic universe. One wants more, indeed feels the fraying corners of a paperback Beckett in the back pocket during reading moments such as this.
--Lovely Chris Murray on Lovely Barry Schwabsky's LOVELY OPERA


Heartfelt gratitude to Chris Murray for gracious shout-outs. Agyamanac unay -- Ilokano for Thank You Very Much -- for your fabulous close reading of Barry Schwabsky's OPERA. I can't wait to tell him....so I shall!

98%-ANGEL POKES HER LOVELY HEAD OUT THE WINDOW AND YELLS TOWARDS LONDON: OH, BARRY!!!! GO SEEEEEE CHRIIIIIIISSSSS!!!

Cough. Pokes head back into room with computer....and continues typing. Next!

Barbara Jane Reyes has gotten her ass -- a lovely one, mind you -- in gear and joined us in poetry blogland (I've amended her link address to the right to her new blog). Plus there's a nifty tattoo above her ass....

What else. Stephanie!!!! Thank you for the postcard, which features a color version of the black-and-white photo of Stephanie with a bird atop her blog. Wait, is that a bird or a scarf? I hope it's a scarf coz if it's a bird, that means your nose would be in its...okay, toss that thought. Anyway, Stephanie -- your postcard is on my bookshelf with your eyes staring at me in color as I type!!!

Sip. Some House chardonnay. What else? Oh, yes, I just posted a comment at Chris Lott's Blog in response to his "scratchy head" comments on Reproductions. The whole thing makes me giggle....and not just because I'ma at the peak of punchiness. Chris -- visit the other Chris who said, quite accurately, Reproductions is about that *sable* feeling! Sip. Cackle.

Now, I'ma thinking it's better to say something brief rather than not say anything at all about a most enjoyable menage a trois I enjoyed this weekend. That is, reading Kasey Silem Mohammad's DEER HEAD NATION and Michael Magee's MS, alternating on the poems between the two books. Sound machines with a human touch, as opposed to, uh, humans trying to write like machines?

Lookit -- I'ma punchy with the angels; just assume I said something deep just now okay? But GIVE YOUR EYES SOME TRUFFLES AND GET THESE TWO BOOKS!

Here's an excerpt from "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" in MS that resonates for moi because of my ongoing (non-)angelic project:

if Jeeves loves you, if doves leave you
if the Lord above chugalugs your sneaker
then you the man mice spy from the pylon
as a wise man once borrowed my speakers.

Yo the man, Michael. And here's Kasey...who, uh, is also a man! From his "Keep Honking, I'm Reloading":

started off the evening with Larry King on CNN, honking
....."fulfill the pact, maggot! face him!"
and as if that wasn't enough of a bummer
this guy starts honking
honking and waving
his mama was cooking corned beef in the dugout
with him shouting, "Go, Jesus Christ, Go!"
waving, giving him a thumbs up, honking
to get into heaven, you had to have
about 5 kilos of frozen beef.

Now, see Peeps -- Michael and Kasey, these dudes are just like moi: religious poets indeed! And I'ma packing in those kilos!

Cackle. Okay, back to the Fallen Ones...if I hit No. 90 tonight, then I'm on schedule to 100 poems in 15 days...

...afterwhich would come the explanation to this whole rigamarole (is that how one spells "rigamarole"?). And 8,999,999 peeps join Chris Lott in scratching their heads as they ask: what do you mean? But the Mischievous One goes off into her beloved night, humming a hymn under her sweet breath...a hymn that begins with the line....

Da, dum: is nothing sacred? Dum dum dum....

CHICKEN ADOBO....OR MEBBE, ANGEL ADOBO

Please. No, you peep who asked. I don't sit 24-7 at my desk writing these non-angelic poems. I'ma woman, dude; I don't have time to be sitting preciously on my precious ass writing poems. It's just that as I go about doing my usual stuff, I just am totally open to whenever the Muse rages....so some of these poems I've written in the midst of meals, after getting off the treadmill to scratch some out, after interrupting myself in conversation with someone else (you should see the looks I get), while dusting (okay, that I just tossed in for amusement), while washing dishes, and of course late at night while I'm hovering over my desk.....which is to say, while going through my usual days.

Huh, I just looked at that litany of my "usual days." Dang if I'm not actually boring...

Anyway, during one of my usual days last week, I was visited by Bruce who was helping me hang a drape (like I said, I'm actually quite boring off of this highly-interesting blog). Now, if you want to know just how PATHETIC I am as a cook, check this out....I'ma talkin' with said Bruce about my lack of culinary talents and....all of a sudden, the guy is giving me a recipe.

But it's a recipe for CHICKEN ADOBO!!! Is this really sad? The Filipinos among her nine million peeps rear back from their computers in horror. Yah, I know. This White Guy is instructing a Filipina on how to cook chicken adobo. (The context here is that Filipina women are usually great cooks...and then there's moi.) Tsk tsk at myself indeed. But, here's the White Guy's recipe and if you Filipinos have an objection, go ahead and squawk at me via e-mail; it's not like, cough, I've actually tried out his recipe. Me, cook? I just blog ....

The Adorable Long-Lashed One wonders, humming, as she posts said recipe -- I wonder what Angel Adobo would taste like:

Chicken Adobo By Bruce The Drapery Fella

Ingredients:

3 - 4 lb. frying chicken, washed and cut up
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup light or dark soy sauce
4 or 5 1/4" slices of fresh ginger
5 cloves of garlic, crushed and skins removed
1/2 cup vinegar
chicken stock to cover (three or four 14 oz. cans of off-the-shelf stock should do)
1/2 teaspoon of corn starch, diluted in water (if thicker sauce is desired)


Method:
Put all ingredients (except corn starch) into a large pot, bring to the boil and then reduce heat to simmer until chicken is tender (approx. 1 - 1 1/2 hours).

Remove the chicken when it is cooked and "finish and adjust" the sauce to taste. At this point you'll want to remove the ginger and garlic, add the corn starch mixture, sugar, vinegar or spices like chiles or a dash of Chinese Five Spice. Don't forget to start the rice!

==========

Can you believe his last line -- "Don't forget to start the rice!" Bruce really figured me out. Now, rice, however, I do very well indeed! It's like washing those grains and hitting the "On" button on the rice-cooker, right? I do that quite quite masterfully....and in quite a fetching manner!

85 OUT OF 100 POEMS FOOTNOTING THE STORY OF FALLEN ANGELS

15 left to go. Cakework.

She looks up. Hisses at the angels cheerfully hovering beneath her ceiling: Hisssss! When I finish the hundredth, I'ma gonna unfurl my fresh black wings and soar up to your poker table and clean you all out of the gems you poke into your pupil-less eyes!!!

HISSSSS!!!

More than one peep can be heard muttering under their breath, Gee: I didn't know angelic eyes lacked pupils....Ach! The things you learn on this blog!!!!!

FUEL

The angels are voracious. Fortunately, some special peeps are visiting, allowing me to fuel up for the next couple of days, with some of the best California has to offer:

1999 Peter Michael Point Rouge
1999 Kistler Cuvee Cathleen
1991 Araujo
1992 Maya
1994 Abreu
1994 Colgin
1995 Bryant Family
1997 Harlan
1996 Pride Reserve Cabernet
1997 Screaming Eagle
1999 Blankiet
1935 Chateau Filhot
1970 BV Private Reserve
1987 Mondavi Reserve Cabernet

As always, I remain your Ms. WinePoetics!

WHAT'S TEN POEMS A DAY?

Somebody needs to jog 10,000 miles in place and do it on my back as I lie face-down on the floor. Damn you angels for chaining me to a chair.

Okay. Just finished No. 80. Eighty poems in 13 days. I have two days left to reach 100. Two days to write 20 poems. 100 poems in 15 days – no fuckin’ problema, ya matadora!

Oh, yes, Dear Peeps. There is a reason for the rush. I can’t go past Tuesday writing these Footnotes to a story I don’t know, the Story of Fallen Angels. I can’t go past Tuesday because ___________________ [ye, sinners, fill in the blank].


Then she raises her right wing and points its black, mangled and bleeding tip at the poker-playing angels. Just you wait, she hisses. You think you know how to torture an angel? Two more days, you who look at me with mirrored flames. Then I'ma gonna come after you and show you things you thought you'd known so well you forgot them!

JUST CALL ME MISSY BLASPHEMOUS

Dang. I had thought using the word "Love" in a poem is tricky. But nothing compared to writing "God" in a poem. And I can't believe I just cussed Him out....

I am burning....but deliciously.

Either nothing is sacred in a Poem, or all is sacred.

BARRY SCHWABSKY'S OPERA

Okay, we just set up the New York launch for Barry's book; official announcement below. So he'll launch in New York on Oct. 24 and launch in San Francisco on Oct. 26. He'll also do a booksigning in Philadelphia on Oct. 23 (see Ron Silliman's posted Philly calendar). Pencil in the dates!

==========

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM MERITAGE PRESS
(St. Helena & San Francisco):

MERITAGE PRESS INVITES YOU TO THE NEW YORK LAUNCH AND SIGNING

FOR ITS NEW PUBLICATION:

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002
By Barry Schwabsky

Friday, October 24
6-7:30 PM

303 Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

ADVANCE WORDS:
The word "song" resonates over and over and the poems here will often suddenly burst into an intricate, complicated melody.
--Juliana Spahr

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.
--David Shapiro

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.
--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.
--John Yau

More information is available at the Meritage Press web site for OPERA: http://meritagepress.com/opera.htm

A PROCESS-DRIVEN, VERSUS INTENTIONAL, RESULT

In general, I find myself intriguing and hilarious. More specifically of late, I've been intrigued and highly amused by how several mannerisms and phrases that I concocted for WinePoetics/CorpsePoetics are finding themselves into the fallen angel personas over at my Gasping Poem Blog. Phrases like, or references to:

--Preen
--Moi
--Yadda
--Yadda yadda
--Yadda yadda yadda
--etcetera
--"longest lashes west of the Missisippi"
--the modest but albeit and determinedly infamous "cleavage"
--mah hewn biceps
--mah midnights
--mah hair
--mah tiny snorting nose
--the incident when I melted a teapot whilst trying to boil water (actually, that's a true non-virtual story)
....among others

I mean, it's almost as if -- cackle -- I really am a Fallen Angel. Ca...

Uh, wait a dang minute. She looks up at the poker-playing angels. They pause and look down at her. She decides to become irritated by the amusement in said angels' eyes. Thus, she raises her wingtip, uh, fist, nuh, wingtip...yadda, whatever and shakes it at them whilst she yells:

I AM NOT ONE OF YOU!!!! I CAN STILL HAVE SEX AND LET ME TELL YOU ANGELIC PEEPS SOMETHING!!! THERE IS NOTHING MORE HEAVENLY THAN SEX WITH MOI!!!! GET IT???!!!!

Nine million peeps feel their computers shake as the angels snort.

Meanwhile, the Long-Lashed One retracts her fist, uh, wingtip and begins to nibble at it while she wonders and mutters: On the other hand, have I used the word "peeps" yet in those damned poems?

MEET THERESA CHONG AND HER WONDERFUL, CEREBRAL WORKS

Artist Theresa Chong, about whom I blogged during my trip to New York, is offering an artist talk! Details and her recent New Yorker review below -- I recommend this to New York peeps (go and tell her I say Hi!):

Meet the Artist
New Works on Paper
with
Theresa Chong
2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Recipient

Friday, October 10, 2003
Artist Talk 5:00 pm • Danese Gallery
41 East 57th Street, Sixth Floor • New York City
(three blocks west of The Korea Society)

Artist Slide Lecture 6:00 pm • The Korea Society
950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor • New York City

Theresa Chong is currently having her fourth solo exhibition at Danese Gallery. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University among others.

This project was initiated by the New York Foundation for the Arts as part of the Artist Audience Exchange Program. To RSVP, please contact Rebecca Brabant at 212-759-7525 x326 or rebecca.ny@koreasociety.org.

Here is a recent New Yorker review of Theresa's show at Danese, which is up through October 11:

New Yorker review Oct 6,03
THERESA CHONG
Chong’s new drawings look blandly pretty at first, like nighttime constellations or power grids: it seems to be their secret to invite indifference and then gently hook you. The artist uses a computer to print random distributions of tiny squares onto big sheets of paper. Then she plays connect-the-dots. Sometimes her pencil follows the patterns suggested by the squares themselves. Elsewhere she resists, linking one square to a distant cluster, doubling back, creating little culs-de-sac and neighborhoods. The result is a form of improvised, highly constrained, abstract doodling—and a deft metaphor for the way we turn chance into choice. Through Oct. 11.

SQUAWKING AT RON SILLIMAN OVER PETAH COYNE

I ADORE PETAH COYNE!! I think she is one of the greatest sculptors working today. I once visited her studio and entering it was like entering a different planet. The room was filled with hanging black huge pods fabricated from stretched rubber. Totally kewl!!! I'm sure Petah wouldn't remember my visit as I'd been brought over by some wealthy collectors and attention of course focused on said wealthy collectors; I was just sniffing along at the time....but then, Pow! PETAH COYNE!!!

So, what pleasure to be reminded of by reading Ron Silliman this morning. I saw the exhibits Ron mentions and, yah, they were great! I'da squawked at Ron over at his blog but Ron -- Honey, youse gotta renew your Squawker feature if you want peeps to continue squawking at you. So, squawk. Meanwhile, here's an illustrated article on Petah by Lynne Tillman.

Now, Ron, about that angel tickling your ear....

BRIEF PROSE AS THE ANGELS ARE SCREAMING FOR MY RETURN TO THEIR HIDDEN STORIES

Michelle sweetly writes (as regards a recent post; scroll down): "why should you be afraid of poems from hell? if the angels above torment you so, what could be worse than heaven when poems burn through your veins?"

There's a koan in this question, but I'm too exhausted to explore it now. The Angels won't leave me alone....so that, in response to Michelle's question, I only ended up thinking more about the concept of negation....for FODDER for yet another poem to please my raucous, greedy angels. So No. 64 is for you Michelle.

And, Jean, Jose Garcia Villa is the purrrrrr-fect name for a lemon tree!!! YaY! (By the way, in deference to Chris, "YaY" should be spelled with the last "Y" as capitalized. Let's get that word spelled right!!!! Cough.)

Garcia Villa, of course, is also an angel: THE ANCHORED ANGEL!

ON SUBJECTIVITY

laugh getting breath from another mouth
--Clayton Couch


I'm so pleased that Sidereality -- thanks Clayton! -- will be featuring an essay I wrote on New York artist Edward del Rosario (whose works were introduced to me by poet Sarah Gambito). It should come out in Sidereality's next issue. But as I was cleaning up the hard drive, I paused to re-read that essay. And now I'ma thinking, Mischievous Angels, they also had to stick their teensy noses into that matter -- the Muse is so....jealous. Was I looking at del Rosario's images with my eyes or my angels'...and what's the difference, if any? Oh ye fallen angels... Here's an excerpt from my essay on del Rosario -- it seems a bit perfumed by incense wafted about by boys in white gowns as they leave an altar of shivering red roses and weeping statues of saints...

Once, del Rosario considered this question while working in the studio: “What would it be like if religion were a spectator sport?” Some of these works may come from that question. But, of course, as del Rosario’s images prove when they move us, the question references an oxymoron. Something that is a “spectator sport” cannot be religion. That is, organized religion can be -- and often is -- a spectator sport. But not that (I believe) upon which religion ultimately depends: Faith.

Religion, as affirmed by del Rosario’s works, inherently means the viewer cannot be a spectator. To be human is to be fragile and exposed. For this viewer, del Rosario’s images here are about the redemption brought about by Faith.

BUT THESE POEMS ARE COMING FROM HELL

I feel like I should be scared. What does it say about me that I'm not?

PUNCHY PUNCHY ME!!!!!!

"But enough about me." (Okay, worry not -- I only thought I'd begin a post with that phrase so as to amuse myself.) But, on not-me issues, The Wily Filipino wants me to tell Dr. Leny Strobel of the infamous

I Lack Lacan
Fart Barthes
Dare Derrida
Fuck Spivak

that Leny got her homonyms wrong. The wily Dr. Benito Vergara says, it's

Fuck Foucault.

Okay. Word passed on. Geeez: everyone's a fuckin' critic....

Oh, wait: these two ARE....critics.

By the way, Leny is one of the most ladylike peeps I have ever met. I believe her quatrain above is the first time I've ever heard her use the word "fuck." It's my influence, of course. I encouraged Leny to explore her non-academic side and now she's writing booootiful poems. And now that she's a poet, she's saying "fuck." My, my. Cackle. But, hey, Dr. Leny -- a poet shouldn't be timid around words, ya know what I fuckin' mean?

Cackle. Gads: what I do to amuse myself....

Wingtips smack air. Poor air...

...reminding me, gotta get back to the Damned Angels. I just finished Part 60; will post it soon....But forty more poems await....and I need to finish in a matter of days, coz, Peeps, amusing as it is to be an angelic conduit, the process is painting purple shadows beneath my eyes and my soft, silky, lovely complexion (preeeen!) is very very important to me.

By the way, what is the opposite of constipation again?

Shit. Pun intended -- but as the Punchy One was saying, the Black Winged Ones are calling and dang if they ain't raucous!!!! The only way to shut them up is for me to write poems! So here I go:

WRITING POEMS FOR THE GOAL OF SILENCE!

LORDY, LORDY...

First, she cursed the angels. $%()(*%#^#()+@^%%)*&%%*##(&_)(*%$^$^%*_(&^%!!!!!!

They look down from the poker table. One sighs and asks on behalf of all: Now what's got your wing all bent and ugly?

She screams at them: IT'S YOUR FAULT!!!!

Do you know what I just did? I just ran over a truck parked in front of the front door!!!! I had to go run errands and because your damned footnote poems are monopolizing my attention, I get into my car and backed into one of the workmen's trucks!!! I AM RUNNING OVER PARKED VEHICLES BECAUSE OF YOUR BLASTED FOOTNOTES!!!!!

Well, that got their attention. And the Fallen Angels started laughing so hard they started spitting starmilk at the Long-Lashed One...who spouted off a few more obscenities before taking her wingtips away to sulk.

Five hours later, she's still sitting there in her studio chewing the same wingtip -- chew, spit, chew spit....'twas not a pretty sight. Even the angels got disgusted. So they ordered her to take a break and go jogging into blogland. And what did the One With the Mangled Wingtip See?

Good God -- pun intended. Uh, sorry God. Anyway, Good God! Chris just annointed me the inaugural

TEXFILES POET OF THE WEEK!!!!

Well, of course, I immediately rushed to share that with mah nine million peeps since it is highly complimentary to me.

Sip. Diet Coke.

But, still, that's so generous. Chris, Sweetie, I would reach forth a wingtip to stroke your cheek in gratitude but, uh, said wingtip is rather mangled at the moment and undoubtedly would feel coarse. But, lookit, let me pat your shoulder. Pat pat with stump -- and Chris feels something jostle her shoulder twice, pat pat -- and....

THANK YOU!!!!!!

I am humbled, she whispers (as, to Chris's relief, she withdraws her stumpy wingtip): Really humbled. Bless you...

AMBIT!!!!

I was supposed to read for this -- and apologies again to kari edwards -- for having to bail. I have to stay in the country this weekend. But, Bay Area peeps, do go to this!

AMBIT : Journal of Poetry & Poetics
WEST COAST RELEASE
PAR-TAY AND READING
3435 Cesar Chavez #327
San Francisco
7:30 p.m.

Readers: taylor brady, rob halpern, camille roy, jocelyn saidenberg, stephanie young, kari edwards

I hope someone blogs a report so I can kick my lovely butt harder over what I'm missing....hmmm, can one kick one's butt? Is that physically possible....?

She looks behind her....

SUCH DUMB TERMS, THOUGH

To me, all poems are "religious" (and "experimental") in how their very existence posits/manifests....Faith.

FEEDBACK

Barbara Guest popped up in my dreams last night to say about my new poems: "Too much light and too much Irish."

I don't know what that means but, Geeeeez.

Then someone (whom I should have dreamt) said: "A religious poet? You are being so unfashionable. Un-hip."

Well, I don't disagree there's a problem. But it ain't mine....or Poetry's.

ANGEL BRIGHT

For the past three days, an artist has been staying with me, Sapphire and Mr. Cigar on the mountain. She just left after painting a mural in my bedroom. And, two days ago, she had expressed nervousness about incorporating some text in her image because I am a poet.

Of course I encouraged her to go ahead. Here's the text that ended up on her mural (and all this time, she hadn't known the type of poems I'd been making):

ANGEL BRIGHT
CAME TONIGHT
AND HELD
MY HAND AND
WE
OUTRAN
EVERYTHING

The largest-painted line was the first, the smallest the last. The scale is brilliant. As if the "EVERYTHING" from which we -- "we"? -- ran was smaller because it was already distant. And, BIGgest of course should be:

ANGEL BRIGHT

HALFWAY

50 poems, nine days. Weakly, she says to the Hovering Ones: Thank you....

The Hovering Ones giggle and inform: Let's do the next 50 in eight days.

She looks up. She says it weakly but still says it: Aaarghhh...

PUNCHY

I wanted to be a slut but ended up a "religious poet."

?Como no? I'm various.

But I guess that makes sense. Some of the greatests saints are those who know what's wrought through human flesh.

Not that I'm a saint, but I have wrought...

Now I wrought to write to wrought...

I am punchy is what I've wrought....

Hic. I mean, sip...diet coke......while the angels twirl over her wrought-ing head and gleefully cackle, Oh no, Missy Punchy. You can't go to sleep yet ...!!!!

RELIGION AWAITS, NYAHAHAHA!!!!!

KEEPING SCORE?

why do poets such as Tom Beckett and Nico Vassilakis and Miekal And and... fall through the cracks? The world of poetry is missing worlds of poetry...
--Crag Hill

I just posted a new link to Crag Hill who is proposing an interesting idea for a publishing collective. There's an appropriate shout-out in his recent posts for Tom Beckett, one of the winners of this blog's "Hay(na)ku" contest and whom Mr. Hill proposes to publish through such a collective.

I'm still beset by the damned angels so haven't mulled much yet over Mr. Hill's proposal which I just read minutes before posting this. What I can say, briefly, refers to his note:

Optimistically, publishing by demand, first pioneered by Miekal And and Liz Was and their Xexoxial Editions early in the 1980s (though they get no credit for the concept), has been one possible, economical solution – printing smaller editions of 25-50 books at a time, reprinting as sales dictate. In publishing by demand, then, a book never goes out of print unless the publisher folds (which, pessimistically, happens more often than not). One drawback, however, to this practical, financial publishing strategy: a book issued in this manner never gains the momentum – coast-to-coast exposure – that sustains even modest sales. (As publisher of many a title under the SCORE imprint, none that I would consider to be out-of-print, I know this from personal experience.) A book such as this does not generate reviews, does not gain distribution from Small Press Distribution or other distributors, does not inspire book tours and readings in cities across the U.S.

As you know if you read me, I just published Barry Schwabsky's OPERA which is Barry's first book and spans 21 years of poetry-writing (so I'm sympathetic to issues raised by Mr. Hill here for publishing poets like Tom Becket who has a twenty-year plus body of work and has yet to see his first book). As OPERA's publisher, I'm committed to spreading the word on Barry Schwabsky's poetry and have disseminated over 200 complimentary and review copies to date. I expect to distribute more. For such dissemination, based on my experience with my own books, you may end up with a handful of reviews (though, hopefully, the word-of mouth is more significant). Yes, if it takes a publisher willing to eat the costs of as much as 30% of the print-run to generate momentum for a poet's book, that may explain partly why print-on-demand has not yet lived up to expectations about it. For me, that's part of my sunk-in costs for dealing with an area where cultural capital is as significant as financial capital for poems to fly out there finding their "others."

My comment, I'm sure, is just a minor aside as regards the complexity of the poetry "market" issue. Meanwhile, do go read Crag Hill's proposal....whether or not you participate in his idea for a publishing collective, his concerns pose larger implications about poetry and culture.

And dear Tom Becket -- meanwhile, do keep writing and sharing your lovely poems.

INSOMNIA COZ THE ANGELIC CLENCH IS INCREDIBLY TIGHT

Just finished No. 47, though it's not yet transcribed for posting. The angels won't let me go to sleep. They keep singing and their voices are ... gravelly. So, meanwhile, lemme note so as not to waste this post: Jean, I have an oak tree named "Sapphire" and an olive tree named "Mr. Cigar." Name those trees! Naming focuses the eyes and...that's often a good thing.

STIGMATA POETICS (Part III)

Amazing. I'm being tortured by the black-winged ones and yet...I seem to be in good humor this evening....Like, No. 43. Which also evokes Ron Silliman when he did a reading this summer in Oakland. Some of youse peeps may recall my blog report on his reading where, in addition to providing the urgently necessary fashion commentary -- I mentioned that I thought I'd never forget the sight of Ron singing the phrase "Limbo, limbo, limbo..."

Well, said reference made it No. 43. That one's a weird one. Uh, not that it's weird -- cough -- because you surfaced, Ron. Just that...in a way, this whole series is weird. Among other things....all that religious stuff.

I mean, I'm not even a Catholic or a lapsed Catholic. Yes, my birthland the Philippines is primarily a Catholic country. But, religiously, my family was more influenced, I suppose, by American versus Spanish colonizers so that what I am is a ... lapsed Methodist. Yawner, right?

But I was exposed to Catholicism because I attended a Catholic school until Grade 5 (at which point I then came to the U.S.). I attended Catholic school because my parents felt it provided the best quality schooling in the area. What it did mean, though, is that I couldn't participate in various Catholic rites -- which was fraught-ening because I felt the sense of being excluded. (Gads. Parents, pleeeeeze, do try to not expose your kiddies to situations where they're going to be....excluded at such a young age! Anyway....)

For instance, the nuns/teachers would sometimes bring class to a nearby Catholic church. There, they would line up the schoolchildren in rows formed to go in and out of the Confessional booths. In "Religion" class, I learned the various rites of confession but could never actually enact it in church because I was not Catholic. So I would sit in one of the otherwise empty pews envying the other kids who were able to practice what we learned. At some point, I began sitting right next to a confessional booth so that I could coach the kiddies on various Q&A rites they'd forgotten. They'd whisper as they filed by, "Eileen, when the priest says ________, what do I say again?" It's pathetic how much comfort I took then at being asked for advice, when what I really wanted to do was enter one of those booths and answer those ritual questions correctly.

Anyway, I'm glad now that I was exposed to Catholicism primarily because I'm writing on angels. Rituals can be so evocative. For one, I have never forgotten the feel of "holy water" in cool marble bowls within the foyers (there's a religious term for foyers but I can't remember such) of dim Catholic churches. In one poem, I'd romanticized that experience into

I feel a memory

surface from days of unremitting light
when I ignored all ancestors

to stare directly at the sun:
the cool dimness of a cathedral

where hands penetrated marble bowls
for holy water whose oily musk lingered

on my filigreed fingers
as if to sheath my flesh

against all that will come
all that will not come

and the accompanying relevance,
if any, of Love—
--from "Looking Past the Birth"

Reality is so different from memory -- particularly the memories a poet must concoct for certain poems. That "oily musk" must have meant the water was ... filthy. Oh, hey -- that could be a metaphor for....okay, I won't go there...

In any event, I feel No. 45 coming on. Damn -- I can't wait to get to 100. Take my word for it, Peeps. When a fallen angel cracks a whip, said angel does it ruthlessly. We ain't talkin' cherubs here....