SHEILA E. MURPHY WRITES A MONOBON!

I'm delighted to share master poet Sheila E. Murphy's monobon! I'm honored she wrote in this form, about which you can read more HERE.

Tone Tempura

 

Humpbacked hashtags winter here among the decibels caught up in an ear trumpet just newly cleaned. I stole a moth from the giveaway coat as beige as let-go winter trees. I writhed with smudged wings to be included in a chamber music mainly insects know. Mirroring the sotto glow of bronze bells lifted to another weather. Astride a full-grown tarp draped across a dry dark fence. A kind of limbo marks the close of trail toward and away. Any deviation, a sullen mischief marks the smudge that seeks a quiet shrillness in the cold. 

 

Mortuary science left to tithe beyond young gravitas

~~

Thanks Sheila! Here's more information about her:

Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. Recently released from Luna Bisonte Prods in 2020 is Golden Milk. Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland).  That same year, Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory. Luna Bisonte Prods published Underscore (2018), featuring a collaborative visual book by K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy is known for working in forms including such as the ghazal, haibun, and pantoum in her individual writing. As an active collaborator, she has worked with Douglas Barbour on an extended poem called Continuations. Murphy’s visual work, both individual and collaborative, is shown in galleries and in private collections. Initially educated in instrumental and vocal music, Murphy is associated with music in poetry. She earns her living as an organizational consultant, professor, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life. 

THE HAY(NA)KU IS STILL TRAVELING AROUND THE WORLD!

The Philippine Scholars Program, founded by Gary W. King (Minnesota, USA), began in 1994 with prioritizing the education of children of political detainees and desaparecidos. It since has expanded to include the children from marginalized groups encompassing farmers, urban poor, among others. Participants in its workshops come from both high school and college-level students. This year, the organizers thought to include a creative arts workshop for the first time in its summer camp that took place in the SVD retreat house in Lapulapu City, Cebu, Philippines. Writer/facilitator Malou Alorro handled poetry writing and Nenita Pacilan handled music and creative dance.

 

In presenting poetry, Malou also introduced the hay(na)ku (thank you, Malou!). Here are photos of the lovely participants Bryle, Byron, Lalaine, Maymay, Ereln, Jasper, and Prence.:

The following is a chained hay(na)ku encapsulation of the workshop:

(Malou) 

Workshop 

Its literary 

Now in culmination. 

(Bryle) 

Precious 

It's treasure 

Time well spent. 

(Jasper) 

Ideas 

Good work 

Expressing them well. 

(Maymay) 

Friendships 

Are built 

Knowledge is gained. 

(Ereln) 

Evokes 

A high 

Creative imagination, awareness 

(Lalaine) 

Scholars 

Summer camp 

Good times together. 

(Prence) 

Interesting 

Unexpected happenings 

So much learning.

 (Byron) 

Difficult 

But beautiful 

And it's enjoyable. 

(Malou) 

Poets 

Now free 

Are truly home. 

 

June 25, 2023 

Literary workshop of Philippine scholars at the SVD retreat house, Lapulapu City, Cebu, Philippines.

*

 

I continued to be envious of the hay(na)ku’s global jet-setting lifestyle, but am happy to receive such field reports. Thank you, Malou and other teachers. Thank you, Universe.

 

 

BESTSELLER: BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR

Eileen R. Tabios' new book BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR, has become an SPD Bestseller within a week of its official release date. See more information at

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780998658261/because-i-love-you-i-become-war-poems--uncollected-poetics-prose.aspx

and

https://eileenrtabios.com/poetry/because-i-love-you-i-become-war/

Available on SPD, Amazon, Bookshop, among others. You can also ask your local libraries and/or bookstores to order from SPD.

DEAR HUMANS,

It's been a long time since war didn't exist somewhere. But the biggest war being waged is Human vs. Planet. Let's do better.

FEATURED ON MARSH HAWK PRESS' "CHAPTER ONE" SERIES

You are invited to read my' essay on titling poems, the latest installment in Marsh Hawk Press' "Chapter One" series! 

The essay deliberately references poet-activists Kerima Lorena Tariman (pictured above) and Ericson Acosta because, yes, their murders should never be forgotten. Essay available HERE. Here's an excerpt:

"... much of my job as a poet takes place before I begin any poem. My job is to educate myself on as many topics as possible, engage in a wide variety of experiences, hone my skills at observation, and meditate over the significance of a variety of events—not for writing a poem but by being better in the world through a basking in experience. All this knowledge and experience are filed in my brain as raw material for when I finally write the poem, e.g., the information on Negros Occidental which had marinated in my mind for three decades. In the actual creation of the poem, I trust in having filed enough mental material for the poem to access as it chooses.

Obviously, the more content there is in that mental file, the better the poem is served. I recently noted in an interview that as a poet I believe in education for education’s sake for avoiding cliches and sourcing new metaphors. As an example, for no particular reason besides education, I learned about black holes, specifically that if one is able to witness the phenomenon, one would see objects falling into those holes in falls that seem never to end. The idea of a permanent falling resonated with me and came to be included in several poems."

~

The article also provides a link to my next book BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR. It's not scheduled for release until May, but SPD now has it available for purchase HERE.

MONSTER HIGH'S INVITATION TO POETRY

Philippine Bookshelf--through @yugto.bookclub on Instagram--is featuring my poem "Epiphany at Monster High" as part of their February Invitations to Poetry. I'll post poem in its entirety below because I don't know how to share it from Instagram to Blogger :)

Epiphany at Monster High

I realize

I like to rescue
Dolls

discarded by children
who grow old by forgetting 
Love

I dust them, shampoo
their plastic hair
(now a collection of split-ends)
and bathe their bodies
(many scarred by animal teeth)

When I rescue dolls
I revive their ghosts
who now bring me 

their language of longings

(fresh fodder to translate

for making new poems)—
I reciprocate

I clean their clothes
or give them new apparel

For one treasured skirt

I apply my inheritance

of Mom’s needle and thread

Most need new shoes

The ghosts cease crying
and masticating hapless tongues 
behind scarred stiff cheeks 

After sponge baths, smiles surface
from erased grit—most dolls 

are made with upturned lips

for they rationalize their existence

as conduits for joy, for Grace

I discover I like to rescue dolls
to rediscover 

how I love to rescue Love

DOVELION AND "INDIGENOUS FUTURISM"

I'm pleased to share a unique review of my first novel DOVELION for situating it within "Indigenous Futurism." You can see the review HERE but it pleases me so much that I’m just reprinting below:

 

Transmotion Review by Denise Low of Baker University

(Accessible online through University of Kent’s open access journals site)

 

Eileen Tabios. Dovelion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times. AC Books, 2021, 309 pages. ISBN: 978-1-939901-19-4

 

https://www.acbooks.org/dovelion

 

Eileen R. Tabios' Dovelion is a slipstream work of fiction. It has characters, and a plotline develops, slowly, in the background, like a novel. Some of this work is fictional, some autobiographical. The central site is in an imagined place, Pacifica, which is supposedly connected to the Philippines (where Tabios was born before moving to the United States). But rather than autofiction, the narrative is a work of Indigenous futurism as it shifts among strands of transcolonial experience. "Transcolonial," not postcolonial, is the better term to describe the book's political critique, to suggest how imperial powers have dominated Indigenous peoples like those of the Philippines and how their influence continues and will continue in myriad guises globally. The author is simultaneously a rebel against erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and a visionary who offers new expressions of cultural traditions and personal wholeness. 

 

Indigenous futurisms writers generate literary and other artifacts that revise western European literatures. With her textual inventions, Tabios disrupts the expectations of English-language genres. Poetry, geography, political science, dialogue, prose poetry, culinary arts, visual art critique—all wend their way through the sequential and gradual unmasking of the characters in Dovelion. This is Tabios' method of character development. There is a through-line present in the novel-like book: a Marcos-like dictator and his family terrorize the populace and exploit the environment, until overthrown. Two lovers are children of enemies. The woman's pregnancy results in a child and then grandchildren who commingle bloodlines of the feuding families. Events occur and recur in the narrative fabric, like revisited memories. 

 

Tabios' body of work includes other experiments with form, including invention of the tercet form hay(na)ku. Several of these are embedded within the work: "When I bleed / I camouflage / tears" and "When I weep / I camouflage / blood" (71-2). Each diary-like section begins with a day and month, but no year. The dates are not sequential, but instead seem random. Tabios created a random language generator for her projectMurder Death Resurrection: A Poetry Generator (2018), so the nonlinear system for dates in Dovelion is consistent with the author's modus operandi. Jumbled dates suggest entry into an alternative time, where linear sequence is irrelevant. Like oral tradition stories, the same incidents repeat with varying emphases. Point-of-view shifts among characters. Thus, Dovelion's underlying scaffolding is a three-dimensional clothesline upon which to hang moments of all shapes and sizes.

 

All entries begin with the fairy-tale phrase "Once upon a time." The chapter entitled "12 April" illustrates one of the unexpected directions of the prose; it begins with reflections on the love affair and proceeds to a quotation from "the poet Eileen R. Tabios," who is, the narrator avers, "a strong influence on my work" (60). The book's narrator and author separate here and elsewhere and re-engage, as Tabios interrogates the act of authorship. 

 

Sequential chapters, one through twenty-five, order the book, an overlay on the randomly dated subsections. And Tabios further divides the book into three overarching sections that create another mapping: "There Was Is," "There Became Is," and "There Will Be Is." English verb tenses collapse into a single tense of presence. Time is a recurring concern of the book.

 

Decolonization through restructuring of language and genre is one dimension of Dovelion. Another is revitalization of Indigenous values. Tabios writes about her book Murder, Death and Resurrection: A Poetry Generator: 

 

I also wanted to deepen my interrogation (and disruption) of English which had facilitated twentieth-century US colonialism in my birthland, the Philippines. . . . I wanted to develop a consciously closer link to the Filipino indigenous value of "Kapwa." "Kapwa" refers to "shared self" or "shared identity" whereby everyone and everything is connected." (Jacket2, June 2, 2019)

 

Dovelion defines, explicates, reveals, and dramatizes the timeless value of "kapwa." A "nanny" first explains the term in the book as "despite diversity, One is All and All is One" (57). In another embedded quotation from the author's own writings, she explains a poetics that expands on the meaning of kapwa: 

 

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. (DoveLion 60, originally published in The Awakening, 2013)

 

The author also explains kapwa in terms of the science of physics, explaining that "it's not only a cultural belief. Various physicists have long proposed time is not linear. Some call time a dimension of spacetime and, thus, [time] does not pass because spacetime doesn't" (156). The theory is a praxis. The restoration of the intact, healthy culture is predicted by its onetime existence in the past. The Filipino child's tale "An emerald island sits upon a blue sapphire ocean and both glow under the beam of a 24-carat sun" is a continuous refrain throughout the narration and a continuous expectation.

 

Islands are a motif in Dovelion, from the invented island country of Pacifica to the Philippines to a "large grey building" where the two lovers meet in isolation. Each individual is a discrete "island" of individuality, which links to others through sex, children, and social relationships. Kapwa links each person. Unspoken is the John Donne poem, "No man is an island," but it is present nonetheless as all writings in all time exist simultaneously in Kapwa time.

 

Tabios does not allow decolonization principles to devolve into rhetoric without action. Rather, she previews a future where enemies reconnect in alliances against dictatorships. She shows how the restoration of a continuous concept of time corrects the fallacy of linear time, where the past falls off the left-hand edge of the page and can be ignored (like nineteenth-century US treaties with Indigenous nations). Tabios offers options. She recognizes June 12, the day the Philippines overthrew Spanish rule, through an imaginary website June12.com. She restores Indigenous values in new form. Dovelion is a blueprint for further investigations into a future where Indigenous knowledge structures the narratives.

 

Denise Low, Baker University

 

Works Cited:

 

Tabios, Eileen. The Awakening: A Long Poem Triptych & A Poetics Fragment. Theenk Books, 2013.

 

–––. "Murder Death Resurrection: Another Way for Poetry." Jacket 2. June 2, 2019. Murder death resurrection | Jacket2.

 

–––. Murder Death Resurrection: A Poetry Generator, Dos Madres, 2018.