This Publisher's Column shall feature developments related to Filipino literature. Each monthly update also shall include a featured poet and poem. For comments and suggestions, please e-mail Meritage Press Associate Editor Jade Afable at Jade@meritagepress.com



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September's featured poet is Vince Gotera who shares two poems inspired by his wife Mary Ann: "First Mango" and "Valentine's Day Poem." An English professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Vince recently conducted an extensive coverage of 15 Filipino American (and Filipino) books published over the last four years spanning nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. Entitled "Brave New Archipelago: Recent Filipino American Writing, his essay appears in the North American Review's May-August 2002 issue (to order a copy, e-mail Ron Sandvik at nar@uni.edu, or call 319-273-6455. In addition to serving as editor of NAR, the U.S.' oldest literary magazine (established in 1815), Vince co-founded (with Nick Carbo) the FLIPS Listserve for Filipino writers or those interested in Filipino literature. His books include a collection of poems, Dragonfly, and a critical study, Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans. A new poetry collection, Fighting Kite, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press (Texas). He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his wife Mary Ann (who inspired the two poems below) and their four children, Amanda (14), Amelia (11), Melina (9), and Gabriel (4). Vince also has a son from a previous marriage: Marty (30), who works as a graphic designer and DJ in San Francisco.

FIRST MANGO

Remember that June before our wedding we spent
in San Francisco? That first morning you woke
to my brother in silver sequins singing like
Diana Ross? What must have gone through your mind?
What kind of people were you marrying into?
My father who laughed a lot but was schizophrenic.
My stepmom who'd tried, they say, to stab him in the back
with scissors. Love may be blind, but not stone blind.

Then, one Sunday we bought at the corner market
one perfectly ripened red-gold mango.
How carefully I slit the skin with my penknife
. . . rivers of yellow juice, the furry seed . . .
then sliced the golden half-moons into quadrangles,
open petals. Your first bite of our sweet life.

VALENTINE'S DAY POEM

As we watched a laparoscopic gall-bladder surgery
on TLC last night, I was amazed how the body
seemed so much like a landscape. The gall bladder
resembling Half-Dome Rock in Yosemite,

abutting the burnt-sienna mountain range
of the liver, and the rich apricot-yellow forests
of fatty tissue. The heart was distant and strange,
the horizon pulsing, the sky of skin in chorus

with crimson land. Is this heart our symbol of love?
Like red-lace hearts and heart-shaped boxes of candy?
No, this is the real thing. That's how I love
you, Mary Ann, as much as any landscape

of flesh can love you: blood, muscle, my hands
washing your hair, bones like trees in a wind.

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COMPUTERIZED DUENDE

Among the recent hot topics of discussion on the Flips Listserve was the notion of "innovative" poetry. As a possibility, we are pleased to feature "RE: thank you for the sky," a poem by Michelle Bautista, written after one of Eileen Tabios' poetry workshops at Pusod Center. From the workshop, the idea was to write a prose poem with duende (a la Federico Garcia Lorca). Eileen believes the result incorporates computerized duende as Michelle woke up the morning after writing the poem (late at night) without recalling whether she had constructed the repetition on purpose. Yet, Eileen feels it is specifically the (quasi-)repetition that makes it a poem (in the similar way Lorca uses repetition to emphasize the song) . Michelle, also a kali gura and sometime movie actor for roles requiring warriors, spends her days answering frantic phone calls and emails regarding all sorts of technology glitches at UC Berkeley - a role she considers more as people counseling and equipment management (i.e. keeping people from throwing their computers out their windows). A Macintosh geek at heart she spends most of her time interacting through her computer.

RE: thank you for the sky

it has been 53 messages since I last looked for your reply. 10 asked if i wanted to enlarge a penis i didn't have. a dozen more had something to do with plucked, 'planted, platinum blonds. 9 from various discount sales for just as many online shops. 4 were joke forwards from my sister. 4 from my cousin. 6 from my best friend in college. i got 6 copies of the same exact joke. 7 said i should open this suspiciously large attachment from my mother who doesn't know what an attachment is. (note to self: update anti-virus on mom's comp.) and one from you, marked a week ago, that i left unread. it has been 53 messages since i last looked for your reply. 10 asked if i wanted to enlarge a penis i didn't have. a dozen more had something to do with plucked, 'planted, platinum blonds. 9 from various online registered accounts for just as many online shops. 4 were joke forwards from my sister. 4 from my cousin. 6 from my best friend in college. 6 of those forwards of the same joke. 7 said i should open this suspiciously large attachment from my mother who doesn't know what an attachment is. (note to self: update anti-virus on mom's comp.) and one from you, marked a week ago, that i left unread.

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NOEL ALUMIT

Congratulations to Noel Alumit whose novella, This is How You Say, I Love You, is being excerpted for seven weeks through the end of September at USA Today. Check out the link http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/openbooks.htm. In addition, the Southern California Booksellers Association recently released the finalists in three categories for its first ever SCBA BOOK AWARD. Winners will be announced at the Annual 2002 Authors Feast & Fall Seminars on Saturday, Oct. 26 in Pasadena, CA. Noel is in fine company, based on the finalists below for the Fiction Award:

Letters to Montgomery Clift by Noel Alumit

After the Plague & Other Stories by T.C. Boyle

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland

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ASIAN AMERICAN LITERARY AWARDS

The judging process for the Fifth Annual Asian American Literary Awards, sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) kicked off earlier this year, with over thirty literary works entered in the running by publishers, agents, and writers. The finalists are:

Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems (1969-2001) by Luis Cabalquinto (Galatea Speaks/Kaya Press)
Harmless Medicine by Justin Chin (Manic D. Press)
Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago by Luis Francia (Kaya Press)
The Unwanted by Kien Nguyen (Little, Brown & Co.)
Edinburgh by Alexander Chee (Welcome Rain Press)
Yellow by Don Lee (W. W. Norton and Co.)
The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Doubleday)
Fixer Chao by Han Ong (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Troublemaker and Other Saints by Christina Chiu (G.P. Putnam and Sons)

Winners will be announced this coming September, when AAWW members will also vote for their favorite Asian American book of 2001 through the Members' Choice competition. For more information, visit http://www.aaww.org/lit_awards/index.html.

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"POEMS FORM/FROM THE SIX DIRECTIONS"

Pusod Center
1808 Fifth Street
Berkeley CA 94710

A VISUAL POETRY EXHIBITION AND WEDDING HAPPENINGS
On Exhibit: August 10-September 15, 2002

The Pusod Center is pleased to present an exhibit of poems, drawings, sculptures and installations by Eileen Tabios "& the Universe." Representing the "Universe" are guest artists: V.C. Igarta (paintings), Patricia Wood (paintings), Alice Brody (quilts), Paolo Javier (poem), Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (poems), Max Gimblett (drawing), Thomas Fink (painting), Cal Strobel (photography), Michelle Bautista (installation), Joey Ayala (poem) and Alan Sondheim (visual/concrete poem).

"Poems Form/From The Six Directions" culminates a four-year alchemic process by Eileen who sought to cast poems as physical bodies and/or multidimensional spaces. Her project resulted from her investigation of the notion of Poetry transcending words. She created the works comprising Six Directions in an attempt to answer a question that she dreamt: "If Poetry exists between words -- "between the lines" -- thus implying intangibility, what would poems look like if they had bodies?" Eileen responded with small sculptures and drawings, as well as multidisciplinary collaborations.

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As part of Six Directions, Ms. Tabios' "Poem Tree" wedding "happening" was performed twice in August. The first occurred during the opening of the Pusod exhibit, with the second performance occurring during the launch of the groundbreaking INTERLOPE #8: SPECIAL ISSUE ON INNOVATIVE FILIPINO/A POETRY. The following are open letters from Eileen covering the performances:

Re.: Wedding Performance at Pusod

Friends,
I couldn't have asked for better company during my recent marriage to Mr/s Poetry that occurred the Exhibit's opening. Thank you once again to Wedding Sponsor Michelle Bautista, Reverend Oscar Penaranda, Poetry's Best Man Tony Robles, Brides Barbara Jane Reyes and Dori Caminong, Ukelele Master Artist Catalina Cariaga, Wedding Photographer Mike Price. All this was followed by the dynamic "Reception Music" of SPAMSilog (this group's original Pilipino poetry/music is amazing!).

Thank you, too, to Jaime Jacinto for a wedding lei and standing in as the "Mr/s Poetry" Groom for purpose of cutting the wedding cake emblazoned with my own motto: "To Poetry As A Way of Life!"

And reflecting the randomness of the universe, thanks to good sport and poet/editor Del Ray Cross for reading a poem with no prior notice.

Thanks as well to Pusod and its hard-working staff, including Mareafatima Urbi (the cover artist on the Babaylan anthology) who designed a wonderful exhibition poster.

Among the many highlights was Catie Cariaga (wearing her lovely original bridal pearls) who blew me away! In my next career, I want to be her booking manager! Check out the line-up of songs she brought to Six Directions; she sang and played on the ukulele!!! (the occasional "kitsch" sensibility being deliberate, of course):

Dundungwen canto (Ilokano)
Palmulinawen (Ilokano)
Our Love is Here to Stay (Gershwin)
It Had to Be You (Kahn/Jones)
Always (Irving Berlin)
When I Fall In Love (Nat King Cole)
Everything Little Thing She Does is Magic (Sting)
Girls Just Want to Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper)
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper)
This Guy's (Girl's) In Love With You (Bacharach)
Wishin' and Hopin' (Bachrach for Dusty Springfield)
What the World Needs Now is Love (Bacharach)

Thank you as well for your e-mailed best wishes. Though most of you logically congratulated me, I have to share the following missive from "Auntie" and wonderful poet Denise Duhamel:

My dearest Eileen,
Are you sure you want to go through with this? All of your aunties are whispering, but I'm the only one brave enough to say this--we all know Poetry is a cheat and a drunk. What if Poetry makes your life miserable? What about marrying a nice Encyclopedia? A Best Selling Novel? I know, you're young--when I was your age, I thought I knew what I wanted too. Remember you can always divorce the bastard and get half of the stanzas.

Love from your Aunt Denise

Thanks also to Joey Ayala (wonderful line: "Phrase the Lord") and Alan Sondheim whose poems became part of last-minute collaborations. The gallery room is no longer a gallery but truly a womb of Poetry. I hope you have a chance to visit the exhibit which is now up at Pusod through September 15.

I also note this particular highlight of the exhibition: the first-time showing of two abstract color-field paintings by Venancio "V.C." Igarta, the foremost artist from the Manong generation and yet now relatively unknown. More information about V.C., a Master-Colorist, is available in the inaugural issue of OurOwnVoice.com (archives) at http://www.oovrag.com/~oov/. (Some of you may also remember his wonderful cover image to the Flippin' anthology.)

Here are some excerpts from that article that relate to Igarta's exhibited works in Pusod:

In the early 1980s Igarta painted multi-colored, multi-toned brushstrokes overlapping with each other to generate new colors. [...] I consider these abstractions among Igarta's most accomplished paintings. Yet, as Igarta mentioned in several of our conversations-unable to disguise his bitterness and hurt-many Filipinos apparently thought he painted abstractly because he presumably "can't draw." By loosening such charges, these Filipinos were unaware of or dismissed his earlier figurative works. In fact, Igarta is best known for "Northern Philippines," a 1941 painting depicting a Philippine village scene dominated by a white-dressed woman with a bowl on her head. The work was reproduced in FORTUNE Magazine and subsequently became the first work by a Filipino artist to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art ("Met") in New York.

Igarta arrived in the U.S. in 1930 at age 18. In California, he worked in the lettuce farms of San Fernando Valley and the asparagus farms in Stockton. The Great Depression was underway and many Filipino migrant works became jobless after being targets of racial prejudice. [In fact, at the opening of the Met show, Igarta didn't reveal his presence because he was fearful that if people saw that the artist was a little brown man, that would cloud their viewing of his painting!]

Igarta's works from the 1940s and 1950s reflect his nostalgia for the Philippines. Villagers, the farmlands of his hometown Sinait, carabaos, nipa huts, the sea and mountains populate his canvases, including "Northern Philippines." When he began painting abstractions during the 1980s, the vividness of his palette reflected his memories of the same landscape through the colors replete in his birthland. He was attracted to tropical colors like oranges, crimson, pinks, greens, blues and yellows.

In 1982, he began exploring abstraction as a result of being inspired by Josef Albers' groundbreaking rectangle-based paintings that explored colors' interactions with each other. Igarta often took pride in having painted more color combinations than Albers. [At one point,] Igarta [took a] break from the art world to work for Color Aid, a manufacturer of silk-screened art paper, [which] actually enhanced Igarta's explorations of color; while at the company, Igarta created the paper works now used in many art schools. Igarta could mix colors without the aid of a spectograph and his "eye" helped cause two of Color Aid's competitors to go out of business.

Note to Pin@ys: Igarta said, "If I'm ever going to be remembered, it will be by Filipinos." Six Directions incorporates the importance of history. Go see the exhibit, enjoy the poems, and introduce yourself to, and then remember as part of your legacy: V.C. Igarta.

And, always, thanks to the poets around the world who sent in poems. Many are now pinned onto my original bridal train hanging in the exhibit.

It was a joyous occasion. I guess I'm an honest woman now. (Naaaahhhhh....)

All Best,
Eileen Tabios
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Re: Wedding Performance during INTERLOPE #8 Launch

Friends,
Thanks to all who showed up and helped make this celebration a standing crowd affair, as it should be for this historic document: INTERLOPE #8: SPECIAL ISSUE ON INNOVATIVE FILIPINO/A AMERICAN WRITING.

Annabelle Udo's erotic voice beautifully matched her poems. Come to think of it, so did Tony Robles. (You guys drinking the same water? Bottle it -- and label it "Aphrodisiac"!)

Jean Gier, "one of the greatest hidden secrets in contemporary American poetry," delighted the mind as well as the heart! Barbara Jane Reyes's warm reading ("the clear voice of a strong emerging poet," according to one audience member) overcame the shameful sound of her cellphone that began ringing (people: when you go to a poetry reading, you turn off the cellphones, right?). And Catalina Cariaga offered the perfect climax to the readings with her adeptly humored/ironic/wise/compassionate poem "I am not a registered nurse but I am a filipina."

Then we had my third marriage to "Mr/s Poetry." For this "happening," my bride was South Asian American and male poet Amar Ravva (because Poetry is neither ethnicity- or gender-specific). Amar looked quite...something...with his hairy chest delicately peeping out of my wedding dress' decolletage. His beard was the perfect complement to...something....I think....;)

Actually, I have to say: I was in tears, doubled over from laughing so hard when (thankfully petite) Amar first put on my dress. Then I had to give him a lesson on how to walk in it by hiking up the skirts as the dress was too long on him (he wore black men's shoes with flat heels). I never realized that something that many women take for granted, pulling up a long skirt for easier walking, can be so complicated to teach.

And, it was fabulous when, as audience members started pinning poems on Amar, some were, um, sufficiently moved to begin "kissing the bride" as they passed by (thanks Amar for being such a good sport!)....Jean, you kissed his hairy cheek, too, didn't you?

When it was time for me to cut the wedding cake, I needed a stand-in for "Mr/s Poetry" to hold jointly the cake knife and grabbed the nearest person...who happened to be poet Leslieann Hobayan. So, how neatly synchronistic that my "groom" was female since the "bride" was male.

Thanks to you poets worldwide who sent in poems for pinning onto my dress!

Anyway, it was a fabulous party and always nice to see people whom I don't usually see in person (with whom I usually only communicate in cyberspace). Await details for INTERLOPE's East Coast launch at NYU's APA Institute, November 12, 2002.

You also may order your copy of this limited edition release that's bound to become a collectible. For more information and to see the beautiful cover by artist Colleen Coover, check out http://www.interlope.org/

In fact, I'm specifically grateful that Interlope Publisher Summi Kaipa thought of the idea of a wedding cake in the same cover image of a newly-wed couple, with poems pinned on their clothes! A chocolate cake stuffed with strawberries! Along with bibingka, the fare was perfect!

Thanks all -- it was the perfect cap to the Six Directions project which required years to conceptualize (and gratifyingly noted with sweetness by the SF Chronicle, SF Bay Guardian and Asian Week).

A POET'S SUGGESTION FOR EXTENDING A TRADITION:
One pins poems, not just money, on a newly-wed couple's wedding outfit because Poetry, too, is a source of sustenance. So, perhaps from hereon, whenever one of your friends gets married and their festivities include this rite, you all might start bringing poems to also pin on their outfits! And, if you bring love poems, you might end up adding some lovely spice to their honeymoon! From The Six Directions: this can be just another way to *live* instead of just read/write Poetry.

All Best,
Eileen Tabios

P.S. Summi, please forward to the Potrero Nuevo Fund with my/our thanks again for facilitating this Celebration. And forward thanks as well to Locus Arts as well as Alliance for Emerging Creative Artists: Leon Lee, Jeff Chan, Neil Straghalis and Kirthi Nath.

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UPCOMING READINGS AND BOOK LAUNCHINGS (OPEN TO PUBLIC)

INTERLOPE East Coast Launch
6-8 p.m., Tuesday, November 12, 2002
New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute
New York University
269 Mercer Street, Suite 609
New York, NY 10003

Local contributors and Guest Editor Eileen Tabios will present poems and discuss the innovative writings by Filipino/a writers featured in this historic issue of Interlope (a journal devoted to innovative Asian American poetics). Local contributors include Eric Gamalinda, Paolo Javier, Sarah Gambito, Cristina Querrer and Veronica Corpuz. For more information, contact

Fannie H. Chan
Events Coordinator
Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute
New York University
Email: fannie.chan@nyu.edu
Website: www.apa.nyu.edu

BOOK LAUNCH: REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE
(with a reprise: BLACK LIGHTNING)
7 p.m., Thursday, November 14, 2002
Asian American Writers Workshop
16 W. 32nd Floor, 10th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10001
Eileen Tabios launches her latest poetry collection, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press) Her presentation will include a circling back to her first book (nine books ago), the ground-breaking Black Lightning (AAWW/Temple). Joined by Black Lightning poets Kimiko Hahn and John Yau, Eileen will discuss how certain strategies in Black Lightning affected the poetics of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. Q&A with the three poets will follow.

More information about Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is available at www.MarshHawkPress.org.

CELEBRATORY READING FOR MARSH HAWK PRESS
1 p.m., Saturday, November 16, 2002
Bowery Club
308 Bowery @ Bleecker, right across from CBGB's
New York City

Eileen Tabios and Stephen Paul Miller are featured poets in Bob Holman's Bowery Club. For more information, see http://www.bowerypoetry.com/

TWO PINAY WRITERS: POETRY & FICTION
(WEST COAST LAUNCH: REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE)
7 p.m., Friday, December 6, 2002
Pusod Center
1808 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710

Eileen Tabios and Tess Holthe (author of WHEN THE ELEPHANTS DANCE) will present readings and book-signings (in time for Holiday gift-giving, friends!). Reception will follow. For more information, contact Dori Caminong through http://www.bwf.org/.