GRATEFUL FOR THE WITNESS TO ... WITNESS

Deep gratitude to Harbor Review, editor Allison Blevins and reviewer Jeanna Paden for this new review of WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR. You can go HERE for entire review but here's an excerpt:

In poems like “Email to a Young Poet of Color,” “The Now of Heaven,” and “Eco Echo,” Tabios doesn’t shy away from blunt reactions to the political and environmental struggles we face. She writes, “As if the ill-educated parent / will not bear ill-educated children. As if billionaires would / still contribute to charities without tax-deductions.” The collection is strikingly frank. “The Optimists Ciphertext” quips, “Clarity, as lives of quiet / desperation imply, is untrustworthy.” Readers follow the speaker as she searches for something more reliable than clarity. The poems focus in and out on current culture from a precise but unforgiving angle.  

Overall, the collection reads like a social proclamation, one many will champion, though others might read as deliberately deadpan. Fans of Ashbery’s Portrait will likely enjoy the echoes of his work paired with Tabios’s take on the vantage of the convex mirror. In short, Witness in the Convex Mirror offers a biographical approach to poetry from a successful and well-published poet. 

By the way, WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is available through this very worthwhile fundraiser at Brew & Forge. Go HERE to get a copy while supporting a great cause!

DO WITNESS THE NEXT BREW & FORGE FUNDRAISER!

I'm honored to participate in Brew & Forge's 6th annual fundraising for grassroots community organizations. This year, proceeds raised will go to support the Black Mesa Water Coalition which fights climate destruction and builds restorative economies in Navajo and Hopi communities. I'm participating through offering a signed copy of WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR but as the book will come directly from me, I'll be tossing in other goodies for your $20 donation to this fundraiser. Check these and other fabulous goodies at

https://www.brewandforge.com/bookstore

We WITNESS the world and wish to aid it.

KINTSUKUROI

Alice Brody is a New York City-based artist and she just created an artist's book based on my poem "Kintsukuroi." I'm always so grateful to see a visual manifestation of one of my poems, especially as it's a "miniature book" sized at 2.5" x 3.5".

Here's poem from WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR (TinFish, 2019), and the book it inspired from Alice below.

What's not known about this poem--well, until you read about it here--is that it's a poem that surfaced when I was proofreading an earlier poetry book, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (MDR). In fact, I'm so grateful to its publisher Dos Madres Press for allowing me to insert it in the back of the book at the very last minute. I wanted it in MDR because the poem wouldn't exist without MDR. Afterwards, it slipped itself into WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR by donning the beret of a couple of lines from John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." So it's got a past, this poem. But don't all poems?



from KINTSUKUROI by Eileen R. Tabios
Designed and Created by Alice Brody

What also is interesting is that when Alice gave me the book, it came with a card featuring a Tiffany vase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY)'s collection -- look at the colors!

And here's the book shelved! On a bench within my Tiny Book Library:

NORTH OF OXFORD, A REVIEW OF WITNESS!

I'm moved and blessed to receive from g emil reutter a review of WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR. You can see entire review at North of Oxford; here's excerpt below:

The use of two of Ashbery’s lines to begin new poems is bold and courageous. Tabios has never been a poet to conform, she shatters the mirror. Its shards of images and words, both beautiful and harsh, of the comfortable and uncomfortable glitter like diamonds spilled out upon the floor.

***

P.S.
Unfortunate typo in last excerpted poem. Last two lines should be:

read you, and you professed your entire life
that you are a poet. Damnation: I am a poet!

RECENTLY PUBLISHED POEMS

Two recent publications. The first in Bellingham Review is an excerpt of series inspired by an Anselm Berrigan line. The second is a poem in The Lantern Review; the poem also is part of my newest book Witnessed in the Convex Mirror. (As latter is online, here's link to it: http://lanternreview.com/issue7_2/toc.html ) Agyamanac.

*

WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR!

Dear Friends,

My latest book, WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR, is now officially released and available through me or the following spaces:

TinFish Press

Small Press Distribution

Amazon

I hope you check out this book where much of what I've learned about the poem over the past two-plus decades culminates. Here's a description:

TinFish Book Description

When John Ashbery died in September, 2017, all the obituaries noted that he had been a member of the New York School of poets, that his roots were in western New York and that, despite living for a decade in Paris, his career had unfolded over many decades in the City. Ashbery was, indeed, something of a local poet, constantly using references from the places he had lived. Lost in the very local memorials, however, was the fact that Ashbery’s work also influenced writers in the Pacific, including writers of color. Eileen Tabios has taken up Ashbery’s influence and engaged in a project of “the browning of John Ashbery,” as she told Tinfish’s editor once. Using one or two lines at a time from Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” (1976), Tabios inhabits Ashbery’s mode, while moving our focus of attention many thousands of miles west of New York City. Tabios, who grew up in the Philippines, studied and worked in New York City, and has lived in California for many years, appropriates Ashbery to her own ends. These include cultural appropriation, genocide, militarism, sexual and racial violence, art history, and many other interests she shared—or did not share—with the older white male poet. Witness in the Convex Mirror is a tense act of homage, one that draws Ashbery away from the region that is most comfortable with him, and into a place where the discomfort is palpable, but extremely generative.

Blurbs

“You don’t write poems like he does,” the speaker says in Eileen Tabios’ poem  “Tense Past Tense.”  We, the readers, immediately notice the vertigo, the  joie de vivre  of a playful but incisive sense of the text.   She does not write like Stephane Mallarme but   you can hear the sounds of his dice rolling in the poems. She does not write like John Ashbery and yet the complexity and opacity tumbles in tune to the music of those sentences. WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is Eileen Tabios’  modus opus  and it should find a place in every public or private library.
— Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man and editor of Returning the Borrowed Tongue

Eileen Tabios cracks open Ashbery’s convex mirror to reveal a secret history of our times.   Her virtuoso riffs on Ashbery’s masterwork are no mere exercise, but open up into unexpected vistas—these poems “say ‘convex’ for widening / the gaze.”  That gaze is directed both inward and outward, offering glimpses of the quotidian life of those who find “mortality gazing back / at us from the bathroom mirror,” but also pulling back for a wide-angle view of a planet in crisis, chronicling “the body’s deterioration, ours and earth’s.”  These pages, like Ashbery’s, are filled with the pleasures of poetry, but Tabios resists the “preening that / negates the subject matter,” unafraid to peer behind the scenes of our lives in “the dim shadows / of a movie forged from the margins / of capitalism.”  The swerve of the convex mirror, allowing us a (brief) respite from confronting ourselves, is gradually replaced with an awareness of our complicity in the world reflected in the poem: “No one is / innocent in empire.”  What’s left to the poet is to be “the spy / in the house,” as Tabios’s formal inventions dig behind enemy lines to open up, however briefly, a space of plentitude: “I came into being, capacious and singing.” 
— Timothy Yu, author of Race and the Avant-garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 

To read Eileen R. Tabios’ WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is “to Ashbery,” which,  to paraphrase John Ashbery—arguably the greatest American poet of the 20th century—means to “imitate the way knowledge comes, by fits and starts and by indirection.” Ms. Tabios begins each poem with 1-2 lines from Mr. Ashbery’s oeuvre, before pivoting to Asia and Asian themes: “It happened while you were inside, asleep. / The penguins now grieve over the escalation / of silt in their bath. A mother begs a child, / “Let go. I won’t survive, but you can!” But…” In her new book, Ms. Tabios addresses super typhoons and modern-day slavery, and homonyms and reduplicative words such as wagwag and pagpag, with aplomb and intense imagination, permanently and expertly connecting these with the hermetic nature in John Ashbery’s poetry. Read these poems as through a fish eye mirror, where the field of view is ever more expansive, and objects are always closer than they appear.
— Aileen Ibardaloza Cassinetto, San Mateo Poet Laureate and author of The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems

WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR!

I'm so happy to share news of my latest book -- it's something I was moved to do when someone (rather someones) told me John Ashbery is the greatest U.S.-American poet. So, as someone who's long interrogated U.S. American English, I naturally had to address Ashbery (it helps that I actually admire his poetry). But it's a "tense act of homage," indeed. Anyway, I hope you check it out -- pre-publication sale just opened (info HERE). Below are the publisher's book description, a sample poem, and some blurbs. If you wish a review or exam copy, let me know:

TinFish Press Description

When John Ashbery died in September, 2017, all the obituaries noted that he had been a member of the New York School of poets, that his roots were in western New York and that, despite living for a decade in Paris, his career had unfolded over many decades in the City. Ashbery was, indeed, something of a local poet, constantly using references from the places he had lived. Lost in the very local memorials, however, was the fact that Ashbery’s work also influenced writers in the Pacific, including writers of color. Eileen Tabios has taken up Ashbery’s influence and engaged in a project of “the browning of John Ashbery,” as she told Tinfish’s editor once. Using one or two lines at a time from Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” (1976), Tabios inhabits Ashbery’s mode, while moving our focus of attention many thousands of miles west of New York City. Tabios, who grew up in the Philippines, studied and worked in New York City, and has lived in California for many years, appropriates Ashbery to her own ends. These include cultural appropriation, genocide, militarism, sexual and racial violence, art history, and many other interests she shared—or did not share—with the older white male poet. Witness in the Convex Mirror is a tense act of homage, one that draws Ashbery away from the region that is most comfortable with him, and into a place where the discomfort is palpable, but extremely generative.

Military Philosophy

On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball

secure on its jet of water: make your path

a circle and, Grasshopper, you shall never

be lost. Rain ceased, but so much water

still flows on the streets, releasing concrete

from their steel bindings. To be suspended

in confusion is to be protected. For one may

colonize the confused, but not necessarily

recruit their loyalty. Confusion, loyalty—both

are constructs that cancel each other. Learn

from me, General Grasshopper: you want

them fully comprehending when you invade.

You don’t want them so confused they might

think you and your soldiers to be mere ghosts

Blurbs

“You don’t write poems like he does,” the speaker says in Eileen Tabios’ poem  “Tense Past Tense.”  We, the readers, immediately notice the vertigo, the  joie de vivre  of a playful but incisive sense of the text.   She does not write like Stephane Mallarme but   you can hear the sounds of his dice rolling in the poems. She does not write like John Ashbery and yet the complexity and opacity tumbles in tune to the music of those sentences. WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is Eileen Tabios’  modus opus  and it should find a place in every public or private library.

— Nick Carbó, author of Secret Asian Man and editor of Returning the Borrowed Tongue

To read Eileen R. Tabios’ WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is “to Ashbery,” which,  to paraphrase John Ashbery—arguably the greatest American poet of the 20th century—means to “imitate the way knowledge comes, by fits and starts and by indirection.” Ms. Tabios begins each poem with 1-2 lines from Mr. Ashbery’s oeuvre, before pivoting to Asia and Asian themes: “It happened while you were inside, asleep. / The penguins now grieve over the escalation / of silt in their bath. A mother begs a child, / “Let go. I won’t survive, but you can!” But…” In her new book, Ms. Tabios addresses super typhoons and modern-day slavery, and homonyms and reduplicative words such as wagwag and pagpag, with aplomb and intense imagination, permanently and expertly connecting these with the hermetic nature in John Ashbery’s poetry. Read these poems as through a fish eye mirror, where the field of view is ever more expansive, and objects are always closer than they appear.

— Aileen Ibardaloza Cassinetto, San Mateo Poet Laureate and author of The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems

MARSH HAWK REVIEW--FALL 2018 ISSUE IS RELEASED!

As its Guest Editor, I'm pleased to release the Fall 2018 issue of The Marsh Hawk Review. Thank you to the poets for sharing their works. Here are the participants to one of the largest (if not largest) issue conducted by the Review:

Mark Young
Irene Willis
Peter Vanderberg
Lynne Thompson
Susan Terris
Eileen R. Tabios
John Simonds
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Barry Schwabsky
Susan M. Schultz
Janice Lobo Sapigao
E. San Juan, Jr.
Barbara Jane Reyes
Randy Prunty
Paul Pines
Naomi Buck Palagi
Gwynn O’Gara
David O’Connell
Geoffrey O’Brien
Rich Murphy
Michelle Murphy
Daniel Morris
Sandy McIntosh
Tricia McCallum
Agnes Marton
Mary Mackey
Hank Lazer
Amy Grace Lam
Basil King
Burt Kimmelman
Sherry Kearns
George Kalamaras
Jacqueline Jules
Paul Ilechko
Michael Hardin
Grace Grafton
Anne Gorrick
Kirk Glaser
Robert Gibb
Danny Gallardo
Thomas Fink
Thomas Fink and Maya D. Mason
Carol Dorf
Shira Dentz
Aileen I. Cassinetto
Tom Beckett
Ryan Bayless
Ivy Alvarez

NOTING THE WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR

Beginning the production phase to my next book, WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR, made me think about the Selected Notes to the Poems section in the book. This is the collection of poems where each of its first 1-2 lines are from John Ashbery's poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." I decided to share them here as possible enticement for you to check out WITNESS ... when it's released by the fantastic Tinfish Press as part of its three-part "Pacific Response" to John Ashbery's work.  Sometimes--or at least for me--the Notes to a book reveal an extra layer to the work: So FYI:


Selected Notes to the Poems:

65% Surveyed Vote Against Banning Football
The poem’s title is after Debate.org’s question “Should the NFL be banned?” (http://www.debate.org/opinions/should-the-nfl-be-banned). The poem quotes from Matthew Thorburn’s poem “Dear Almost.”

A Unique Urgency
The reference to Christina Peri Rossi reflects the inspiration provided by her book, STATE OF EXILE (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2008)

Bark’s Forthcoming Fact
Written after and during extrajudicial killings during Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs.

Beautiful Lovers
Written after Marina Abramovic’s TED Talk, “An Art Made of Trust, Vulnerability and Connection.”

Bizarria
Bibliograpy: “OUR SEXUAL FUTURE WITH ROBOTS: A Foundation For Responsible Robotics Consultation Report” Prepared by Noel Sharkey, Aimee van Wynsberghe, Scott Robbins and Eleanor Hancock; “Up close and personal with rubber sex dolls in Japan” by Alastair Himmer and Behrouz Mehri, AFP Correspondent, July 19, 2017; “Silicone Sally: Japanese men find true love with sex dolls” Channel NewsAsia, June 30, 2017; and “Bizzarria” in Wikipedia.

Broken Sunlight
The indented quote is from a Facebook post by Maria Damon, May 15, 2017, quoted with permission.

Caron Poivre
Caron Poivre is cited in “The World’s Most Expensive Perfumes” by Cory Barclay, The Richest, Aug. 26, 2014

False Meteors
Written after “How The Oceans Became Choked With Plastic” by Dominique Mosbergen, The Huffington Post, April 27, 2017.

For the Dreamers
Bibliography: “White Christmas” written by Irving Berlin and the “Top 22 Benefits of Trees,” TreePeople.org

Genocide’s Point of Diminishing Returns
The incident in the poem paraphrases from John Cusack’s and Arundhati Roy’s “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said,” Truthout.org, Nov. 16, 2015.

Graceless Days
Bibliography: “Mother Earth Water Walk” (http://www.motherearthwaterwalk.com), “Plants That Clean Water” at (http://www.kellogggarden.com/water-conservation/plants-that-clean-water/)
and a Christine Balmes post on Facebook (Aug. 4, 2017) from which the poem quotes with her permission.

Grasping Radiance
Written by reading through an earlier poem, “Hotel Narrative (06 APR 1996).”

Integrity
Written after “My Family’s Slave” by Alex Tizon, The Atlantic, June 2017.

Marhaba Shayrat
“Marhaba” is “Hello” in Arabic; Shayrat was the Syrian area bombed by the U.S. in April 2017.

Pathos
Written after “Up close and personal with rubber sex dolls in Japan” by Alastair Himmer and Behrouz Mehri, AFP Correspondent, July 19, 2017.

Post-Death
The referenced photograph is “She was the song of my dark hour” by Paul Tañedo.

Rape Wardrobe
Written after the art installation “What Were You Wearing?” at University of Kansas, Sept. 5-15, 2017, and the article “’What Were You Wearing? exhibit takes aim at age-old sexual violence myth” by Heidi Stevens, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 14, 2017.

Red Pistil, White Lily
The second-to-last line of the first stanza, “You’re the one who knows better,” begins the rest of the poem which is quoted from an earlier poem entitled “Bread.”

Seasonality
“It ought to be a song” quotes Andy Bassich in “Life Below Zero,” Season 4, Episode 15.

Tense Past Tense
After the first line, the rest of the poem consists of the second and third stanzas of an earlier poem entitled “Metaphor.”

Though She Should Have Known Better Than To Play An Asian Superpower, This Poem Is For Scarlet Johannsen
Written after the controversy over Scarlett Johansson’s playing a character with Japanese roots in the movie Ghost in the Shell (her last name is deliberately misspelled in the poem’s title) and “New Study finds that men are often their own favorite experts on any given subject” by Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post, Aug. 1, 2016.

Translating Summer
The quoted phrase is from The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball (Scribner, New York, 2010).

Uppity Ilokano on Louboutin Vulvas
The Ilokano “Nagadu ti ammok” translates to “I know plenty.” Bibliography: Wikipedia on the vulva and “Sole Mate” by Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, March 28, 2011.

WAGWAG
Ilokano-to-English translations:
wag wag - used clothes
tuk tok - head; top of head
pis pis - side of forehead
ping ping - cheek
aklo aklo - back of knee
ukel ukel - balls
kuko - nails
neng neg - not too smart; knucklehead
ngel ngel - not too smart
lag lag - stupid; dumb
los los - roll up pants/sleeves
les les - roll up pants/sleeves
anting anting - amulet
ut ot - pain
kut kot - dig
kud kod - scratch
kab kab - dead skin
gul gol - to shampoo (hair)
bul bol - pubic hair
ri ri - trouble; argument
rut rot - torn rags
ulo ulo - without head
ipo ipo - tornado
suso - nail
suso - breast
sel sel - insert; push in
bit bit - to carry
dut dot - feather
mul mol - thumbsuck
ngut ngot - scraping flesh off a bone; dog chewing a bone
but bot - hole in a fabric (of clothes or furniture)
ngal ngal - chew food
sub sob - snout of a pig
sing sing - ring
rung rong - cigarette butt
araw araw - everyday
kare kare - pilipino dish
gung gong - knucklehead
abal abal - a type of beetle that comes out during the rainy season; edible beetle