January's featured poet is Luis H. Francia. His poem, "Sanctuary," is taken from his first e-poetry chapbook entitled selections from A MUSEUM OF ABSENCES . The chapbook is available to read at and/or can be downloaded from http://www.meritagepress.com/babaylanpubs.htm Luis is a multi-awarded poet, editor and critic who recently received an Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award for his most recent semiautobiographical book, EYE OF THE FISH (Kaya Press, 2002).

SANCTUARY
(For Midori)

New York came, rampaging.
Broadway approached, barking.
The mad heavens roared down,
Clouds enveloped me.
All was motion, darkness, the
Ground rushing up.
Mountains leveled themselves
And my feet, faithful dogs, brought me
Home to you, my anchor, my light.

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OPEN LETTER REGARDING PINOYPOETICS UPDATE AND NEW CALL

Friends,

We are ecstatic and excited to provide the following update on the forthcoming and groundbreaking PINOYPOETICS , the first international anthology of Filipino English-language poets discussing their poetics with, of course, sample poems (for more information see http://www.meritagepress.com/pinoypoetics.htm ). The project will be the first published book by the Babaylan Series imprint of Meritage Press (San Francisco and St. Helena, CA).

We have chosen a group of wise, articulate, moving, cerebral, lyrical, unconventional (and conventional) poets whose thoughts will form the body of this project. Those poets will be receiving notices of acceptances shortly.

Nonetheless, we have decided to move back the publication release date from 2003 to 2004 in order to tinker with various aspects of the anthology and make it all the more purrr-fect when it is finally released to set the universe of poetry ablaze (or something like that). We also recently decided to include a brief section featuring a few writers (academics, critics, etc) discussing the works of selected Filipino poets, which requires just a bit more time to determine.

In fact, please consider this notice also a Call for any papers written on a Filipino poet(s). Deadline: February 15, 2003. Send to PinoyPoetics@aol.com.

Thank you to all who have sent in their thoughts, their submissions, and most of all their poems to us since the original Submissions Call was released.

We plan to update you further as the project develops; meanwhile, some hints at the marvels that will be available through this book are available now through Timothy Yu's essay on Jose Garcia Villa at http://www.meritagepress.com/pinoypoetics.htm . Please continue to check the "Babaylan Speaks" section as it is likely to feature updates over the upcoming months.

Nick Carbo
Editor, PinoyPoetics

Eileen Tabios,
Publisher and Editor, Meritage Press
www.MeritagePress.com

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PAOLO JAVIER SCULPTS A POEM

I sculpt poems
By Paolo Javier
ISBN 951-9198-08-3, 31 pages
An XPress(ed) Poetry E-Chapbook

Congratulations to Paolo Javier who's just been published in e-chapbook form by the prestigious and highly respected innovative poetry e-publisher, XPress(ed) of Finland. His chapbook, entitled “I sculpt poems,” is a free, downloadable chapbook. The chapbook and download information are at XPress(ed)'s website: http://www.xpressed.org/ XPress(ed) is the kind of publisher that pushes the frontier of poetical forms, with all the dissonant beauty that approach effects, so we are really proud of Paolo.

Paolo's poem was first featured as "visual poetry" in Eileen Tabios' “Six Directions” project (see http://www.oovrag.com/~oov/essays/essay2002c-1.shtml ), and, as such, offers a two-poet collaboration where one poet (Paolo) took another poet's (Eileen's) one-page poem and transformed it into an intriguing 30-page poem (29 pages, with the 30th page deliberately missing). Meanwhile, here is another, more recent poem by Paolo that offers the breadth of this young poet:

NOCTURNALLY
(for Bonnie Chang)

A castle, hollowed-out, abandoned
of red brick, white ivy-scaled
in the center of a swirling lake
of black moss & broken branches
I point to it.
Here, all of my joys, yung pagkabata ko
I try to feel for who it is I've missed with desire to visit.

But it's graduation day. Ministries of families arrive, arrive.
Is it at the heart of Central Park that you prove valorous?
I don't know. I just.....feel. & what
an immense sadness to bear. I keep missing all of my life
as it comes full circle, a violet swirl of monuments here, I mean there.

Papa, he assures us of a clearer path back in.
Pero sa tingin ko , to swim across is to sink. Before the world
discovers its way, or perhaps that way discovers him, down the slope
of a misty hill rising behind it, a hidden metal rampart is revealed.
Sure enough, troops of yammering adolescents begin their slippery descent,
they will infiltrate the only home I hold traces of
the woman I loved at both ends of the lake
I feel her mostly, somewhere within the blood red walls of this fortress
I loved her. & still, one discovers lots & lots to unpack. What a bright yellow summer it was.

A computer monitor sky darkened Papa repeating
"leave the multiple brown extension cord on the floor where
you picked it up." Only natural light for this room & its inhabitants, my love.
Newly-minted cement floors, a blue kitchen table you steal glances across
on the way up. I see every sharp occurrence
from beyond unbreakable distance, crystal clear, like silence.
I feel it mostly, such method of events as you prescribed

in the accurate world. Each time since then you question
my place
in like surroundings, I think to feel to know it's real.

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REPORT ON “TWO PINAY WRITERS: READING AND DISCUSSION”
By Barbara Jane Reyes

“Two Pinay Writers” was sponsored by Pusod Center (Berkeley, CA) on December 6, 2002, featuring Eileen Tabios and Tess Urriza Holthe.

Why this demand for P/Filipino authenticity when P/Filipino writers in America, having been subjected to the literary standards of the academy, and the political standards of reductive mainstream America culture, are (begging your pardon if this sounds cliché) experiencing a renaissance. Large, established publishers have contributed to the wide exposure of P/Filipino American narratives to diverse national and international audiences. Indie presses, as always, continue to question, even challenge the Western canon and its formation by publishing “non-conventional,” “edgy,” “risky” P/Filipino American literature.

Having said this, I argue that these two Pinay writers, Tess Uriza Holthe and Eileen Tabios, are not your typical, palatable, “authentic” Pinay writers. I commend them both for this. Besides, given the diverse history of such a large P/Filipino Bay Area population, it's useless to search for singular Pinay authenticity in the first place. The term itself, “Pinay” has its origins in West Coast stateside communities; it is a declaration of belonging to this place, upon this American landscape. Jose Garcia Villa: “Have come, am here.”

Reading from the opening scene of her debut novel When the Elephants Dance (Crown Publishers), Tess tells us in loving and vivid detail her family's story of surviving World War II. You can smell the decaying human bodies in the streets, compounded by the ever-present heat of the Philippines. You believe that she was there. But she's never been there, in the Philippines, circa WWII. In fact, Tess has never been to the Philippines at all, but let this not take away from her story's being so grounded in the details of place. And do not think for a second that even though she has never been to the Philippines, Tess is not qualified to write a widely read P/Filipino American narrative. She derives the stories contained in When the Elephants Dance from the storytelling of her family gatherings; we Americanized P/Filipinos have also learned much about our history this way. This storytelling, which ensured the survival of her novel's characters and their community, also ensures the continuity of our own communities.

Tess earned her degree as an accountant; she worked for years in that field, but do not think for a second that she is not a true storyteller. Synchronistically, Eileen Tabios also pursued a career in finance for years before diving head first into the world of poetry. But do not think for a second that her poetry is not her way of life.

Reading excerpts from her newly released Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press), a collection of deftly crafted prose poems, Eileen tells us her work is not grounded in traditional, linear narrative, nor is it necessarily grounded in “meaning,” as much as it is in the feelings and emotions elicited in the words, combinations of words, and imagery. And while her work does not obviously address P/Filipino-ness, do not think for a second that she does not think deeply about diaspora or post-coloniality; consider her relationship to “traditional” narrative as pointedly addressing the colonial imposition of the English language and of Western forms on P/Filipinos.

“Color is narrative,” she states, and I recall the “found poetry” of synonyms for “red,” appearing as though transcribed from Roget's Thesaurus , in “Muse Poem.” Indeed, a seemingly simplistic list of synonyms elicits such desire in the reader. This is not your typical P/Filipino American poetry or art. But who ever said there was anything typical about P/Filipino American poetry or art?

Given that there is no pinning down P/Filipino art, it was fitting to begin the evening with a tribute to the always boundary-pushing artist Santiago Bose, who passed away early in December. His work has influenced so many literary and visual artists alike, and was a strong influence on Eileen's collection of essays and poems derived from meditations on visual art, My Romance (Giraffe Books), released earlier this year. What audiences should have brought home with them from this evening: 1) copies of Holthe's and Tabios's books as we must always support our artists in their endeavors, and 2) a more solidified idea that it is crucial for P/Filipino writers to break the mold of what we are able to write about; P/Filipino writers write as we live.

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SANTIAGO “SANTI” BOSE (1949-2002), R.I.P.

We go places but we never leave.
Who minds our journeys?
Who remembers we ever left?
In our absence are places ever less?
What do our words mean
When everything has been said?
--from “Epipoem: Conversation” by Marne L. Kilates

[The following is excerpted from a longer article-in-progress being written by Eileen Tabios; details to come on the article's publication.]

And within the Filipino diaspora, I met Santiago “Santi” Bose (July 23, 1949 - December 1, 2002). We met while he served as visiting artist-in-residence at the Pacific Bridge Gallery in Oakland, CA, spending two days in intense conversation. I never saw him again, but those two days sufficed to provide the inspiration for an entire book on art and poetry, My Romance (Giraffe Books, 2002).

My Romance features essays on 17 artists. Though only five are Filipino, I desired for the book to be published in the Philippines to reflect what Santi told me during those two days. Specifically, Santi passionately believed that the Filipino artist needs to be as aware and open as possible to the diverse influences in the universe, including but not only Filipino. And that such engagement would only enhance the nature of that Filipino artist's work. As he put it and as I quoted him in my Preface to My Romance : “When I bring in art magazines from around the world to the artists in Baguio, it's because I wish them to have a bigger concept of the world -- to look at the Philippines and their art from many angles. I believe art empowers people, gives them a stronger vision of looking at their environment.”

[My Romance is available through www.Amazon.com]

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW OF EILEEN TABIOS'
REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

In her first collection of poetry to be published in the United States, Tabios, a recipient of the Philippines' National Book Award and the editor of such anthologies such as Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress and Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers , explores how the colonizing language both obviously and not-so-obviously alters expression, experience and perception. Tabios begins the book with a selection of ekphrastic poems inspired by ancient Greek sculptures, introducing the complex issues of cultural and linguistic domination that are to play such a large part in the long central section, titled "Returning the Borrowed Tongue." Her prose-poems balance (at times uncomfortably) on the much-contested border between "prose" and "poetry," just as the pieces themselves explore the murky boundaries between colonization and identity. Tabios investigates sensual and personal histories, conjuring subtle games of domination and submission against a backdrop of physical dislocation and echoing the conundrums of a colonized land: "The past depends on how we control memory. Memory is a controlling agent. No one can discover what lies beyond an image without the progress of light. Fearlessly, hands reach forth to turn the vase around for another view. The blue vein leaps against the pale hide of a wrist encircled by a thin strand of gold. And your finger is tracing a vein, its protrusion helpless." The book closes with an ornate triptych dedicated to Anne Truitt that exposes Tabios's search through history and art to understand her central demands-to perceive freely, to investigate color, to be a fully responsive being. "Can you pay the price for risking perception and imperceptibility?" she asks in "The Continuance of the Gaze," and then answers, "I trust in radiance. Let: Us."

(Dec.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.