HARRIS MEMORIAL COLLEGE

I'm delighted to share that AGAINST MISANTHROPY and THE CONNOISSEUR OF ALLEYS are now part of the Library at Harris Memorial College (Philippines).

My thanks to Dean Greg Pawilen.

HAPPY 15TH ANNIVERSARY, BLAZEVOX BOOKS!

Celebrating, BlazeVOX 15 is fresh with tons of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, text-art and author interviews. As its publisher-editor Geoffrey Gatza is wont to say: Hip Hip Hooray!

And I'm also honored to be part of the issue by being one of the author interviewees. You can check my blather HERE.  Some of the answers in terms of recent reads and views are outdated but y'all get the drift...

THE DAILY ART SOURCE!

Chris Mansel over at The Daily Art Source has been generous enough to do reviews of three of my recent books.  I'm moved and grateful.  And as my poet-buddy Mark Young once said about reviews, one of the best and most interesting parts is seeing which poem(s) gets the reviewer's attention. On this matter, I am usually (pleasantly) surprised.  Thanks Chris!

For SUN STIGMATA's review, can go HERE for the entire review but here's an excerpt:

You have to admire the fluidity in the way Tabios writes. In another poem entitled Jade, she writes, "No need to turn the urn/to realize I no longer believe/ in the humility of monks." This is fitting. She is out there, where Hemingway spoke of, Sun Stigmata is like applying perfume to the pulse on your wrist and neck. The constant vibration of these words will radiate,and burst from the palms of your hands. This is a volume that is necessary. The sun gives life and so does good writing.

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For INVENT(ST)ORY's review, you can go HERE for the entire review but here's an excerpt:

Ms Tabios has put together a very handsome collection of her work spanning from 1989 to 2015. "Drink nothing but the liquid from a pigeon's egg for 40 days." That is one of the many footnotes you will find in this fascinating book...

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For AGAINST MISANTHROPY's review, you can go HERE for the entire review but here's an excerpt:

Eileen Tabios is a writer who cares about the reader.  Against Misanthropy is really in my opinion, and that is all this is after all, a gift to those who buy her books. 

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The Daily Art Source is also looking for more poetry books to review!  Go HERE, click on CONTACT and contact them if you have a review copy to share!

HELP SAVE A SCHOOL AND SUPPORT INDIGENOUS CULTURE

As the author of the forthcoming (thanks Dancing Girl Press!) chap entitled THE GILDED AGE OF KICKSTARTERS, I've seen what's out there amongst e-fundraisers. Well, this is one I feel to be really worthy: a CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN to help avert the threat of school closure in Lake Sebu, Philippines. Climate change is real, and having a disastrous impact on indigenous communities. In Lake Sebu, Mindanao’s drought has wrought big-scale damages to the rice and corn fields, as well as impacted the fishing industry.  One of the adverse results on the community is the threatened closure of a indigenous school, LASIWWA.

Please consider even the smallest donation (yes, even $5!). After all, climate change's effects on the Philippines come from outside its borders too -- Hello, You!

UPDATE: The project has just received a Matching Grant--this means every dollar donated will be matched by an Anonymous Donor!  

If you are moved to donate at least $50, then you automatically will be entered into a raffle featuring a variety of prizes, including two of my recent books:

INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New
and
AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A Life in Poetry

There are other prizes, as indicated on this flyer.

(click to enlarge)

You are encouraged to go HERE to read more about this worthwhile cause.  Meanwhile, here are some statements from the fundraiser's organizers:

“I am concerned about the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable populations - the indigenous communities! Focusing on this small-scale project is my own way of sharing responsibility for ways to mitigate climate change impact.”  
~ Leny Strobel, founder and co-director, Center for Babaylan Studies

“When you think about it, our lives as city-dwellers are not really separate from those of our indigenous brothers and sisters. They live the way they do (often impoverished, struggling, their very survival threatened) because we live the way we do (hungry for resources, dependent on raw materials often violently extracted from under their feet). We owe it to them to do what we can to halt the system that is killing them, and, in the meantime, to do what we can to keep them from totally going under.” 
~ S. Lily Mendoza, co-director, Center for Babaylan Studies

“Political unrest, religious intolerance, colonial mentality, and the dismal economic climate in the Philippines all contribute to pushing indigenous communities further out to the margins of society. Out of necessity and the everyday struggle to survive, indigenous peoples are forced to abandon their traditional ways. I believe that the work of Jenita Eko and the LASIWWAI is important in ensuring the continuity of indigenous knowledge in the Tiboli community, and provide children with a sense of self-worth, hope and determination to preserve customs and beliefs.” 
~ Maileen Hamto, project coordinator

"IT BRIMS WITH USEFUL TABIOSITY"

To live poetry

instead of just marking

words on a page—

none of it too much

or too little

It is only what it is

and all of it is

perfectly pitched

For the record, while I've never paid attention to Adam Sandler, I do swear a lot. And that's about all I can muster, really, about this generous attention to AGAINST MISANTHROPY and my  "tabiosity" as it leaves me roiling in gratitude.  Thank you Allen Bramhall for your words about my "Poetry as a way of Life" at this new Mandala Web site, which also looks to have wonderful potential -- I look forward to following it!

Isn't that a gorgeous mandala?  I'm already flabbergasted by the review but to have it contextualized within "Mandala Web" is yummy icing.  You can check out Allen's engagement HERE, and it begins with

Eileen Tabios is a Filipino-American writer, editor, activist, and so forth. The so forth is crucial. Her integration of writing, editing, activating, and otherwise living a life of artistic, aesthetic, compassionate, and supportive acts defines a creative life that we could all learn from. Not to place her too high on the pedestal: she probably swears once in a while, or enjoys Adam Sandler movies.

I never thought I'd get to this place, where I begin and end a post with Adam Sandler:

Poetry: it'll take you places you'll never expect...

ZESTILY AGAINST MISANTHROPY

Allen Bramhall says I'm zesty and keeps doors open.  Zestily, may I open the door to his engagement with I FORGOT LIGHT BURNS and AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A Life in Poetry -- go HERE for the whole review but here's my favorite section--how he responded to the line

I forgot Red for the slithering snake freezing to S in Espana

by saying he then saw "this weird ass toilet paper being pulled sinuously from the roll."  This is the kind of engagement my poems warrant.

MOI IN NAPA

I've lived in Napa Valley for about 12 years now, and I've deliberately kept a low profile here as regards being a poet.  Most of my readings as a Napa Resident occurred/occur in New York and San Francisco.  But I guess the valley is catching up with me.  April, as that hoax called "National Poetry Month," began with a reading and judging of a poetry contest forthcoming in Napa.  And, today, while doing chores along Main Street, I stopped by a bookstore and was surprised to see one of my books there, AGAINST MISANTHROPY,...which the bookseller then asked me to sign. I've not looked for this, but I guess it's all nifty.  Here's my book at the "Local Authors" section and, this being Napa, of course there's poetry but mostly cookbooks -- fortunately, another local resident is one of the most brilliant chefs alive today and it's an honor to have my book sidle up against A NEW NAPA CUISINE by Michelin 3-star chef  Christopher Kostow.  It seems fitting that AGAINST MISANTHROPY's publisher is a poet but also brilliant chef, Geoffrey Gatza.  Synchronicities!

"WHAT MAKES MOI TICK"

or, I'll take five-star reviews from wherever I can get 'em!  Thanks Grady Harp for the lovely review over at Amazon for AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A Life in Poetry!

A MOMENT

It's always a moment when one's first box of author copies arrive.  Today, two boxes of AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A Life in Poetry...

It's a moment.

AGAINST MISANTHROPY aka HAPPY 20TH ANNIVERSARY TO MOI!

Well, I got my copy and it's beautiful.  Perhaps you'll be interested, too, in reading through my latest book -- AGAINST MISANTHROPY: A LIFE IN POETRY (2015-1995).  I share the publisher's book description below ... but I should also say something about the form, to wit:

This is my fifth book that tinkers with, if not subverts, the form of autobiography and biography.*  I use disparate elements like blurbs, interviews, essays, poems as well as a paper on me written by Mom that I discovered two years after she passed. If a reader ever chose to read this book straight-through from beginning to end, a profile surfaces and that could be "Eileen R. Tabios."  Of course, only my stalkers may be interested in going through this exercise, but I'ma just sayin'....  And here's why I'ma sayin' that, to quote from an interview-in-progress:

Disrupting the (traditional) form and genre of autobiography and biography is one of my interests, primarily because it amuses me.  But there’s certainly many reasons why one (or I) desires to disrupt auto/biography—from the general factors of how one may or may not ever know the true story, how one elides the true story, and how I believe identity is both constrained by inherited circumstances as well as fluctuates such that any life story narrative is at best a snapshot narrative rather than something that can hold true over time.  I call these “general” factors because they can apply to everybody, thus how *knowing one’s self* is one of the most difficult goals to achieve.

But then when, in my case, one is forced to grapple with immigration, diaspora, minority/POC positionings in the land where the migratory transplant ends, then the memoir, by being a genre that posits it can present an accurate life story, becomes a landscape fertile for disruption. 

For now, here's info from publisher's release of the book:

2015 marks the 20^th year anniversary of Eileen R. Tabios’ “career switch” from banking to poetry.  AGAINST MISANTHROPY presents her life as a self-educated poet—from, as a newbie poet, reading through all of the poetry books of her local Barnes and Noble as she scratched her head over what poetry is supposed to be … to more recently creating a poetry generator capable of making poems without additional authorial intervention.  Along her journey, she also released about 30 poetry collections, two fiction books and four prose collections with the help of publishers in eight countries.  Ultimately, however, her so far 20-year poetry journey has taught her that poetry’s greatest gift is the means by which to forge a new life as a better person.  As one of her Facebook friends Maxwell Clark told her, and she agrees, “The best person is the best poet.”

Excerpts from AGAINST MISANTHROPY:

I think the human race is on a suicide path.…where are the moments of joy, of beauty, of grace within this doomsday path humans are on? From where or how do we come up with reasons that make it worthwhile to continue living? To rush out of our beds to greet the day? To smile? To laugh? Well, for me, these moments would occur through the positive interactions made possible by love and respect for other people, creatures and the environment….I look at these moments, and if I bear in mind my own apocalyptic forecast for the human race, I view these moments—the stubbornness of their continued existence against all odds—as poetry in the sense that poetry's task is not to affirm the (unjust) status quo but to disrupt it.

—from ARDUITY’s Interview of Eileen R. Tabios

...the moment, the space, from which I attempt to create poems. In the indigenous myth, the human, by being rooted onto the planet but also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the universe and across all time, including that the human is rooted to the past and future—indeed, there is no unfolding of time. In that moment, all of existence—past, present and future—has coalesced into a singular moment, a single gem with an infinite expanse. In that moment, were I that human, I am connected to everything so that there is nothing or no one I do not know. I am everyone and everything, and everything and everyone is me. In that moment, to paraphrase something I once I heard from some Buddhist, German or French philosopher, or Star Trek character, “No one or nothing is alien to me."

—from Eileen R. Tabios’ “Babaylan Poetics”

Ordering info from BlazeVOX and Amazon HERE.


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*The other four books are I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED (2005), THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY (2007); SILENCES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOSS (2007); and THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS (2008).