THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

I'm grateful to Neil Leadbeater for his review of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. You can see the entire review at the just-released issue of the ever-outstanding Otoliths, but here's an excerpt:

“Mooring After Loss” (2016) demonstrates the close association that can sometimes be present between the word “image” and the word “imagination”. A camera has been positioned in such a way as to photograph someone walking across a floor. In the photograph we see the floor and a left foot (the one that is in the act of striding forward). The right foot is not to be seen but an outline of it has been drawn on a blank piece of white paper and placed on the floor beside the left foot. At first, I misread the title as “Mourning After Loss” and thought that the blank outline of the right foot represented the departed one but then I reread the title and recognized how important it is in a time of loss that we still keep ourselves anchored to the ground, even if it is only with one foot, so that we can keep moving on, one foot at a time. The soul of the departed one is always close to us, closer than we think, in our daily walk through life. 

In this collection Tabios, always at the vanguard of poetic expression and invention, offers up a thoughtful fusion of text and image that is at once multilayered, satisfying and visual. Beneath the surface of her strikingly original artistry, she speaks out courageously against the horrors of injustice and makes a plea for all that is beautiful and tender in our fragile world. Fully recommended.

"WITHIN THE FILIPINO DIASPORIC CLOUD"

I’m really proud of this sculpture-illustrated poetics/aesthetics essay … which is why it’s the opening piece in my vizpo book THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL—a lot of my poetry/art concerns just jelled in my project “Pilipinz Cloudygenous.” I hope you check it out at Verity LA where it’s presented as part of its “Discoursing Diaspora” series. I thank the great thinkers of Verity LA, and was also moved to hear that my work was accepted by the gifted Ramon Loyola before he prematurely passed (Condolences to his family).

Here’s an excerpt from my essay (you can see the whole thing HERE):

“You leave the land of your ancestors and your birth. In the 20^th and 21^st century, you need not retain that land simply through memory. Starting last century, you can access images of and from that land through the internet. But you don’t feel, when touching your computer screen, the dirt with which you once made mud with a beloved Apong, Grandmother, to create toys of tiny pots and plates. You don’t feel, when touching your computer screen, the sweet scent of Apong’s breath as she bends over your small fingers fumbling to shape a small plate.  You don’t feel, when touching your computer screen, her gentle kiss on your brow as she places small pieces of a ripped leaf on your plate as ‘dinengdeng’ or Ilocano vegetable stew… “My project ‘PILIPINZ CLOUDYGENOUS’ interrogates Filipino identity as affected by virtual reality. Part of my interrogation is a series of mobile sculptures. By hanging (from a ceiling), the mobiles float in space — a space that I consider a metaphor for (internet) cloud. The mobile which I present here intends to symbolize the Filipino diaspora. It hangs from a Star of David so as to reference humanity’s oldest diaspora (The Jews of Iraq)...”

Also, in one of the illustrations, you can see one of Jenifer Wofford's images from her brilliant Nurses series--I think it befits the diaspora theme and, indeed, the mobile sculpture hangs in my home next to her work:

SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF BOOKS COVER GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL!

I'm grateful to Grady Harp for engaging with THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL and reviewing it for the San Francisco Review of Books!  You can see the review HERE, but here's its excerpted beginning:

Eileen R. Tabios is one of the more adventuresome and truly creative poets before the public today. She is absolutely able to write poems in the usual styles and make her works resonate with every reader. But she always is searching for ways to push the use of words into formats or situation that challenge the brain as well as heart. She makes us think: she makes us work. And she is able in this book to entertain.

GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL GETS FIRST REVIEW ... AND A PODCAST INTERVIEW!

I'm grateful to decolonialism scholar Leny M. Strobel for engaging with THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL (she initially thought she was going to read a novel instead of peruse a collection of visual poetry--laugh) and then providing it with its first review!  You can see her review HERE, but here's an excerpt:

Boundless creativity can be unleashed when one is not attached to limiting beliefs. 

Ergo, Eileen invents the words “Pilipinz” and “cloudygenous” to write about the paradox of being a settler and a diasporic person at the same time. Those of us who have been displaced from a homeland may be interminably pining for “Home” so, in the place where we are settlers on indigenous lands, we create home on the (i)Cloud and we sustain our virtual connections to the homeland using facebook chat, zoom, whatsapp, instagram., etc. What are the implications of technology as the mediator of our deepest desires and longings? You will have to read the book to see how these dilemmas express themselves in a Eileen’s visual poetry (14–20). 

“…my (poetry) words attempt to transcend dictionary definitions…As a poet, I attempt not to work only within what I inherit because what’s inherited is fucked up, of which colonial history is only one fact. English was the colonizer of my birthland, the Philippines. English, but not Poetry.” (25)

As well, recently I was interviewed by Cristina Querrer for her YOURARTSYGIRL's new podcast series. Our interview notes indicated that we'd partly focus on THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. Guess what we didn't touch on at all!  Yep. But we did discuss everything else: writerly beginnings, collaborations with both writers and artists in other genre, colonialism and English, the start of the hay(na)ku, my art gallery North Fork Arts Project, my website’s file cabinet aesthetic, process process process… everything and way more than you might want to know about me.

You can listen to me HERE. Also available on Spotify if you're going to be stuck in traffic. And coming soon on ITunes!

P.S. Actually, I still have the pre-recording interview notes. As the blog is also a file cabinet, I'll post them here--questions are from Cristina:

Can you give me a bio of yourself and tidbits you'd like to me to mention concerning yourself and your work?

Here’s a somewhat canned bio:

Eileen R. Tabios has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her books include a form-based “Selected Poems” series, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019, THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019), INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New 1996-2015, and THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New 1998-2010. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku poetic form (whose 15-year anniversary was celebrated in 2018 at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries in California) as well as a first poetry book, BEYOND LIFE SENTENCES (1998), which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry. Translated into nine languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays, as well as exhibited visual art in the United States, Asia and Serbia. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com

In terms of tidbits to mention, it may be worth noting that I am the only poet (as far as I know) who’s doing Selected Poems projects based on poetry form. I prefer this approach for two reasons:

1) The traditional way of doing Selecteds is “Best of” or Most Favored” poems as the perspective. That’s not particularly challenging for me. I also know subjectivity: what one person favors or considers “best” could be disputed by another person’s taste.

2) Doing Selected Poems based on poetry form allows me and the readers to see if I’ve done anything to expand the possibilities of that form. So I’ve done this now for the prose poem, the catalog or list poem, visual poetry, and tercets. Within the tercets form, I’ve also done a Selected Hay(na)ku to show how I’ve further expanded the possibilities of a form even after  I invented it.

1) I know on Facebook, you post your daily check lists of what creative projects and tasks you've accomplished, do you find this helpful?  If so, why?

I’m doing the daily checklist only for my novel-in-progress (not all of my creative projects). I did daily checklists everyday in 2016 when I wrote the first draft—my first successful first draft of a long-form novel. Starting in 2019, I begin editing the novel and that’s what I’m posting daily about. I do this for several reasons—all related to how the novel is (for me) such a big and unwieldy task:

a) I’ve long noticed how lists really help me manage tasks

b) I post it publicly—and use Facebook for the public forum—to keep me honest about putting in the editing work. I believe editing the novel is just as time-consuming as writing the novel’s first draft so I need the infrastructure to make sure I put in the time. Already, I’ve caught myself thinking about certain posts: Wow, you put in less than an hour that day…or you should put in more time, etc.  Netflix-bingeing is a big danger to my novel J 

By the way, though I haven’t finished the novel itself, my 2016 daily notes became its own book—writing about writing the book! Love the meta of it all. That book, entitled appropriate #EileenWritesNovel was published as a special issue by Otoliths. It’s a favorite project because it’s illustrated by selfies taken of me during the writing process … and I usually loathe selfies.

2) You do a lot of reviews, promote other artists and writers as well as your own works, does that hinder or boost your creative process and creative projects?

Reviewing is a logical offshoot of another task that all good writers should do: READ.

Reading as a writer provides many benefits for one’s own creative work, and is, IMHO, a different type of reading than the reading done by non-writers. For a writer, reading is a responsibility—you do so to know your craft, to know how writing can unfold in different ways than you might conjure, to avoid treading in clichés in your own work, etc.  It’s amazing to me to see how poets don’t read widely. More than once, I’ve read prize-winning books and concluded, That approach was already done by this other poet, and done better. This may mean something about the reading habits of the prize judges, too (haha).

As for promoting other writers and artists, I need to clarify one important detail. I promote the art and the writing. To do so, I end up promoting their authors or makers.  But it’s the actual art I’m promoting, not the ones who did it – which, by the way, is a complicated balancing act when dealing with “community” perspective.  There are exceptions—usually when I’m focusing on non-individual based perspectives. Like, I promote Filipino writers and artists in general. But in terms of individual achievements, my focus is on the work itself—whether it succeeded—not who created it.

This is important to understand in a context where folks sometimes automatically promote their friends. I can understand that impetus: a friend is someone who’s got your back no matter what. But if I have promoted YOU in the past, know that it’s because I sincerely admire your work and not because I like you. 

You can see this, btw, in how I do reviews. I don’t assign myself books to review. I just read as widely as I can and the books which end up moving me to review them are the ones I review.

3) What are you working on now?

I just released my Selected Visual Poetry book entitled THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL so I suppose I need to spread the word about it. Info about it is at https://palomapress.net/2019/01/18/the-great-american-novel/  Note that Paloma Press is offering a pre-order special rate prior to February 14 which is its official release date. It’s already available too on Amazon.  I’m also in the editing/production phase of two more poetry books due out later this year. And, of course, daily, I am editing my novel.

4) When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

My mother tells me I knew at age five when I was folding together pieces of paper to make “books”. (Mom writes about it at http://www.oovrag.com/oovnew/daughter-eileen-story-respect/ ) As far as I can remember, I’ve always loved words and always been a reader. But my first attempt at a career with words was through journalism, and I’ve worked for several newspapers and briefly in TV news (I wasn’t enamoured with broadcast journalism as it didn’t have the writing dimension I wanted which I got from print journalism). I never got my act together to write creatively until my early 30s.

5) How do you find inspiration and motivation?

Nowadays, I don’t look to be inspired and motivated. I just do. And my wish-list of Projects-To-Do exceed my capability at the moment. For example, I now have an idea for a second novel … but I can’t or won’t touch that until I’ve finished or gotten the first novel to a certain finished stage.

When I did need a source of inspiration, I usually find it through reading. Reading gives ideas.

6) Does place matter?  Where you live, I mean?  How much does nature and landscape affect you and influence your work?

Place does not matter for my writing—geographical space, that is. Whether it’s been in a small New York apartment or a large house in the country, it’s not been an issue as my focus has been on the screen and the benefits of the internet. As a result, I invented a word, “cloudygenous” which is in the anthology COUNTER DESECRATION (Eds Linda Russo and Marthe Reed) a Wesleyan University press book of writings in the anthropocene. Cloudygenous, a word play, is about being “indigenous” to the cloud of the internet. That’s me, and in that sense place has been significant.

Where place does  matter is through memory—my remembrances of my birth land, the Philippines. That’s a permanent presence within my psyche and affects my work. But the land in that memory no longer exists; i.e. what we have today is a different country from what I remember in my childhood.  Chalk it up to one of the costs of my diaspora.

Lastly, would you prefer to do video or just audio?  I might have a YouTube channel as another venue but funnel the audience through the podcast first.

Audio

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL ... ACKNOWLEDGES:

I'm pleased to share my next book will be THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry 2001-2019 (Paloma Press, 2019). I hope it will come out next month. A strong believer, in "Thank  you," I'd like to acknowledge those in its acknowledgements page:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Deep gratitude to the editors, curators, and publishers of the following publications and spaces that first featured individual works from this collection:

Facebook hashtag #thebigboxstorepoetryproject curated by Pamela Hart: “Arrival: An Impossibility” (2016)

1000 VIEWS OF “GIRL SINGING”, Editor John Bloomberg-Rissman (Leafe Press, Nottingham, U.K., 2009): “GIRL SINGING” (2009), as well as the Afterword and referenced poem, “ANTI-WINTER: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF AN ANGEL”

2006 INTERNATIONAL HAND MADE POSTCARD EXHIBITION curated by Suzlee Ibrahim and Nalur Seni at the Garden of Art, in collaboration with ARTPROJECT2006, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: “The Secret Lives of Punctuations” (2006)

Berfrois, Editor Russell Bennetts: “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Tense Past Tense / Tanka #160”

“CHROMATEXT REBOOTED” curated by Jean Marie Syjuco and Alfred A. Yuson, Cultural Center of the Philippines (Manila), 2015-2016: “DON’T CALL ME FILIPINO” (2015)

“CHROMATEXT RELOADED,” an exhibition curated by Sid Hildawa, Jean Marie Syjuco and Alfred A. Yuson; sponsored by the Philippine Literary Arts Council; and held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (Manila), 2007: “LISTING POEM: TOWARDS THE NEW FILIPINO SOCIETY” (2007)

Datableed, Editors Eleanor Perry and Juha Virtanen: “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror (#23) / Tanka #159”

E-Ratio, Editor Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror #27): Beyond the Stars / Tanka #148”; “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror (#16): Blind Physicists / Tanka #149”; and “Witnessed in the Convex Mirror (#59) / Tanka #150”

Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics (Issue 33)—Women of Visual Poetry Issue, Editor Jessica Smith: “Entry” (2013)

EVIDENCE OF FETUS DIVERSITY, Editor Eileen R. Tabios (Moria Books’ Locofo Chaps, Chicago, 2018): “Colonial Mentality”

EXCAVATING THE FILIPINO IN ME by Eileen R. Tabios (Tinfish, Hawai’I, 2016): “DON’T CALL ME FILIPINO” (2015)

“FACING FEMINISM” curated by Annette Marie Hyder (The McKnight Foundation and Walker Art Center): “A Feminist Can Make Achilles Heel” (2006)

Fieralingue, Editor Anny Ballardini: “ANTI-WINTER: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF AN ANGEL”

h&, a journal of visual/concrete poetry curated by Ian Whistle: From “The Limits of CLOUDYGENOUS” (2018); “MY ADOPTION” (2018); “I Recall Forgetting A Secret From My Youth” (2018); “Erasing Amnesia” (2018); “KOMMAS: A Speculative Fiction” (2016); “Excerpt from the Novelist’s Diary (2016); “Mooring After Loss” (2016); “The Great American Novel” (2016); “For Christmas, the Hay(na)ku Visits Serbia” (2015); “The Outsider’s Dilemma” (2015); and “I Forget Forgetting My Skin Was Ruin” (2015)

I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2005): “POEMS FORM/FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS” (2002)

Nota Bene Eiswein by Eileen R. Tabios (Ahadada Books, Tokyo & Toronto, 2009): “Global Warming” (2009)

Otoliths, Editor Mark H. Young: “CLOUDYGENOUS ARS POETICA (2018); “Community of Vowels” (2018); “The Mortality Asemics” (Series #3) (2015); “The Corporate Cat” (2007); and “GRIDS” (2007)

Our Own Voice, Editor Reme Grefalda: “POEMS FORM/FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS” (2002)

and “LISTING POEM: TOWARDS THE NEW FILIPINO SOCIETY” (2007)

qarrtsiluni, Jan. 23, 2009, Editor Dave Bonta: “Poem-Sculpture Collaborations with Nick Carbo” (2005)

Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Editor Reb Livingston: “The Mortality Asemics” (Series #2) (2015)

Rigorous, Vol. Two, Issue 1, Editors Rosalyn Spencer, Kenyatta JP Garcia, Carla Williams, and Jonathan Penton: “Translation: Colonialism” (2018)

SitWithMoi Blog: “THE SECRET (An Unreadable Book)” (2013)

TANKA, VOL. I by Eileen R. Tabios (Simulacrum Press, Ontario, Canada, 2018): From “The MDR Poetry Generator: RE-MEMBER-ING TANKA (#10)”

The Big Box Poetry Project curated by Pamela Hart: “Arrival: An Impossibility” (2016)

THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: Our Autobiography by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2007): “LISTING POEM: TOWARDS THE NEW FILIPINO SOCIETY” (2007); and “The Corporate Cat” (2007)

The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing curated by Michael Jacobson: “The Mortality Asemics” (Series #1) (2015)

THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I by Eileen R. Tabios (xPress(ed), Espoo, Finland, 2006): “The Secret Lives of Punctuations” (2006)

Verity La, Managing Editor Michele Seminara: “From ‘PILIPINZ CLOUDYGENOUS’ (2018-2019)”

“World Association of Visual and Experimental Artists,” an international mail art exhibit, Curator Dejan Bogojevic, 19 Club National Musseum Valjevo, Serbia: “The Hay(na)ku Visits Serbia” (2015)

SALAMAT, AGYAMANAC UNAY, THANK YOU!

SELECT THE SELECTEDS!

I’ve had about five poetics essays accepted for publication in the last couple of months—folks seem to like my blather. (Indeed, I write this while on a break from writing another such essay requested by another poet.) I think if I have a lot to say on poetics, it comes from how I approach poem-making. And, ever multi-tasking, I’d like to talk about it by answering another question that’s recently come up to me: 

“You have so many books and I’m new to your work—how do  choose?”

My answer is three-fold:

1) Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole as it’s what I consider my true first poetry book (includes sizeable excerpts from technically my first book, Beyond Life Sentences which is not distributed well outside of the Philippines) and it’s always interesting to see any poet’s first book; 

2) Any of my recent books as they would benefit from experience and maturity (hopefully); and/or

3) My favored answer—the one I would say if I could only choose one of these three numbered options: books from my form-based Selected Poem series.

I create Selected Poem books based on a single poetry form. I do so for one reason: so that I can prove to the reader that I didn’t just write poems but helped to expand the landscape of its particular form ... because I believe that if I didn’t expand poetry’s expanse, then my poems threaten to be solipsistic, masturbatory, or derivative (yes, I'm my toughest critic).

Relatedly, the poems inside each book are presented chronologically so that the reader can track how the writing developed before it ends up in expanding the form. I think this layer is interesting as art is a process as much as a result.  

To date, I’ve released three such Selected Poems books:

One Two Three: Selected Hay(na)kuPoems

INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected CatalogPoems & New 1996-2015

THE THORN ROSARY: Selected ProsePoems & New (1998-2010)

Forthcoming are two more Selected Poems collections:

The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets (1996-2019)

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019)

So I have addressed four forms through my Selected Poems series: the prose poem, the catalog or list poem, the tercet, and visual poetry.

I write/have written in other forms but if I haven’t released a “Selected Poem” addressing a particular form, it likely will be because I don’t feel I’ve explored it sufficiently and thus provided my own value-added on to its form. I’ve written, for example, in quatrains, sonnets,  ghazals, etc. and while individual poems may have merit, I don’t feel I’ve (yet) expanded on the form.

An exception to my Selecteds will be the tanka. In the future, I likely will present a Collected Tanka book of the tankas that I will have written only in 2018 (I don't anticipate writing more tankas after this year this year). Thus, that book will be a Collected rather than Selected and, yes, I also feel I expanded that form (for proof until I release that Collected, you can check out  my TANKA, Vol. 1 from Simulacrum Press, 2018).

But to get back to poetics, I don’t think I’d have much to blather about poetry were it  not for my desire to expand the possibilities of whatever form I’m writing. So, if you have to choose among my many books, you might consider one of my Selecteds. Thank you for asking.