Murder Death Resurrection A Poetry Generator by Eileen R. Tabios

Murder Death Resurrection

A Poetry Generator

by Eileen R. Tabios

Copyright 2018 by Eileen R. Tabios

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, OH

ISBN 978-1-939929-99-0    

Softbound, 157 pages including notes & acknowledgements, no price given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

If someone could wave a magic wand and give you the ability to write poems endlessly would you accept the offer?  

Nationally known poet Eileen R. Tabios has created the nearest thing to the magic wand, in her book Murder Death Resurrection or MDR.

This book belongs to everyone, every poet in particular because Ms. Tabios has given poets a base of 1,167 lines any combination of which may comprise a poem. Take for example lines 367, 521 and 1078:

I forgot the Bengal Tiger mimicking a helicopter’s dance                            (367)

I forgot fallen olives discarded from those awaiting virgin pressings    (521)

I forgot the difficulty of ethics: how to rationalize when

what is good does not give an advantage in a world you define

as alley? (“Can you stop running if the monster does not stop

chasing?”)                                                                                                  (1,078)

Perhaps another poet would prefer to delete the first two words, “I forgot” as if it were just a two line poem.  I personally do not believe one line can make a poem and by that I do not mean a 5, 8 or 10 line sentence is one line.  I simply mean one line.

But I digress. One can take the three lines change their positions, remove “I Forgot” and each will produce a three line poem.

The genius of Ms. Tabios is that she shows that this can be done with any – or as many – of the lines as one wishes.  Even a 1,167 line poem is as possible as a 20 or 40 line poem or a five or ten line poem.

Ms. Tabios states it thusly, “The MDR Poetry generator’s conceit is that any combination of its 1,167 lines succeeding creating a poem.  Thus one can create – generate – news poems unthinkingly from its database.”

It is not conceit but genius to have created the generator.  It is not an unthinking effort.   Reading and selecting the lines to be used is truly a thinking process which makes the MDR even more fascinating and worthwhile.

Joseph Conrad did not learn English until the age of 29 and yet wrote some of the best novels in the language. Ms. Tabios, a Filipina, has in turn manipulated English to suit her needs resulting in a poet who is one of America’s leading experimental/abstract poets as evinced by her many books – more than 50 that encompass poetry, fiction, essays and experimental biographies. 

Here is a poem I created from chained (successive) lines from the MDR, deleting the opening “I Forgot” and using lines 231-234 the following emerged:

I defined empathy through a bent spine craving

for an ellipsis bulging to imply arrival, not departure or division.

The salty pleasure of sister elongating pink necks

to snag spotlights beamed from men experienced in the utter

aliveness of dying

Painting a floor red with my hair. I forgot back-

ing myself into a corner: when you appeared to grasp my

throat, your greedy footprints completed my painting.

Whispering “Stop heavy. No such thing as a sonofabitch in turning art into flesh”

Often creating a poem will express opposites or twins, depending on how the words are used, but they will always create poems.

Finally, at the back of the book is a useful “Teaching Guide & A Workshop Suggestion” which includes study questions for those who teach or would like to teach poetry using Ms. Tabios’ system.

Writer’s block is a malady many writers encounter, and this book will assure poets in particular as well as writers of short stories and novels that they will be able to continue unblocked.

_________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Author: The Lynching of Leo Frank, Love Poems From Hell, Fire Tongue, Across Stones of Bad Dreams, King of the Jungle.

Editor of Muddy River Poetry Review, Bagel Bards Anthologies Nos. 7, 8 and #12.

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Boston National Poetry Festival April 4 to 8 2018

The Sunday Poet: Mark Stevick

       

Poet Mark Stevick

LYRICAL SOMERVILLE

EDITED BY DOUG HOLDER

Mark Stevick is a professor of Creative Writing at Gordon College in Wenham, MA.

                       Lingering

There are flowers   looking something like

red   it is dusk   trunks of pine like

black rivulets down a faint pane   one

planet   these flowers   petunias?

leaning over rails   begonias?   what

has happened?   who has been taken?

they are looking   looking   like cartoon

crowds   are they dahlias?   still the pines

blacken   there is nothing they can do

they are keeping it up   look they are

wringing their hands   they are impatiens.

                 This Birch

Civility rises as this birch

lifts its face, and stretches.

There is remembrance in these limbs,

of wind, and rain, and mute kisses.

All the gestures of the branches say

the gifts I bring must be refused.

Let this tree be dressed as light allows;

let it be white amid dark boughs.

FOR EVERYTOWN: BENEFIT FOR GUN SAFETY AT THE ONCE LOUNGE IN SOMERVILLE APRIL 12

https://www.oncesomerville.com/  ( click on for the once lounge)

 My old pal Jack Holland ---the founder of the Somerville - based band Dutch Tulips is performing with other groups at the Once Lounge in Somerville--April 12. This is a benefit for gun safety put on by the organization  FOR EVERYTOWN-- https://www.facebook.com/Everytown/?fref=mentions

 State Rep. Mike Connolly, who serves parts of Somerville and Cambridge in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, will provide a brief update on local efforts to make our state's gun laws even stronger, including last year's adoption of legislation to ban bump stocks, and this year's push to adopt legislation that would allow for Extreme Risk Protective Orders, which would allow family members and law enforcement to petition to temporarily remove guns from a dangerous individual.

 http://www.ilovedutchtulips.com

Doug Holder interviews John Canaday author of "Critical Assembly: Poems ...

Interview with writer, poet Richard Cambridge by Lo Galluccio

Richard Cambridge

Interview with writer Richard Cambridge by Lo Galluccio

Richard Cambridge was born in Suffern, NY, and grew up in Rivervale, New Jersey. He attended Northeastern University in 1967 and dropped out during the National Student Strike of May, 1970. He attended the Stonecoast creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine, in 2009, and graduated in 2011 with an MFA in Fiction. Pulsa, his poetry collection, was published in 2004 by Hanover Press. He’s been living in Cambridge since 1973. In 1992 Richard was one of four spoken word artists on the Boston team to win the National Slam tournament. I had the chance to interview Richard prior to his featuring as one of the Stonecoast alumni reading at the Lilypad in Cambridge on Saturday, April 7^th at 7:30 pm.

Q: You’re someone who writes both from personal experience and through the funnel of the imagination. Can you talk about your early work in poetry and how it relates to the personal or to the imaginative? Speak specifically about your book, Pulsa.

A: Pulsa came out of a real series of events in May of 1970 and they were so profound I couldn’t even express what had happened. Finally, 23 years later I found the vehicle of what had happened to me using the story of the boy who God asked to give up his talent. I typed it out in the basement of the Harvard Science Center one day, February 24^th.  I’ve always tried to live out my imagination and to make it real. I spend most of the time in my imagination and then express it through art, writing, poetry.

Q: How did you get into doing a theatre piece like The Cigarette Papers? What prompted you to want to stage that story of getting off nicotine?

A:  It was a constellation of getting to the point of understanding I would not be 

able to give it up, and being part of the Omega Theatre Arts, a nine month  intensive program that asked you to take your deepest fear and make art out of it.  For me that was giving up cigarettes, my friend.  In a very real way I wrote my way out of that addiction.  It really quickly became theatre, doing parts of the work in open mics.  In the beginning I was keeping a journal and then a friend said, “You’ve got something there…” The characters in the piece came from moments of going through withdrawal, when I would write down what was going on within me, and they came out as these demonic forces, like the Marlboro Man, the Dullards, and the Cookie Monster.

The Cigarette Papers and Pulsa were happening at the same time. When I went on tour I was doing the Book of Psalms from Pulsa and excerpts from The Cigarette Papers. I had a feature at The Green Door in Asheville, and Thomas Crowe, the publisher of New Native Press came out to see it. He saw a connection between the story of the boy being asked to give up his talent, and the addiction, and offered to produce The Cigarette Papers on his spoken word label, Fern Hill Records. His partner, the composer Nan Watkins, scored it. We’ve been close friends ever since.

Q:  You’ve written at least one novel, Ride, and are working on another one.  When you decided to go to Stonecoast were you sure you wanted to concentrate on fiction rather than poetry?  How did that experience shape Ride? And please tell us a bit about what that book’s about.

A:  It was clearly the main reason I went to Stonecoast – to gain access to the tools novelists use.  I’d known I’d written it with the talents of a poet.  I’d written a main draft and revised it once and my main reason for going to Stonecoast was to revise it again. It began as a memoir, as an actual experience, but pretty early on I started to re-invent it and change scenes and events and it was clearly more fun to do that.

Ride is about a journey from Cambridge to Asheville, NC for a poetry gig. My car had broken down and I felt that I could stick out my thumb (hitchhike) to get there. The structure is the rides who picked me up and the tension was about whether I was going to get there in time for the reading . It started on May 4^th, 1994 when my poet-friend Danny Solis, dropped me off at the Mass Pike exit at Newbury Street . It was 1000 miles to Ashville . I had to get there by Friday night, two days away . Practically no one was picking up hitchhikers in the 90s and I kept getting rides going in the wrong direction, that took me further west than south . What happened at Stonecoast was I Iearned how to stitch in my life as an activist with my wife Sally who died in the late 90s. Part of the artifice was putting in her death as if it had just happened . Richard Hoffman, my first mentor at Stonecoast, suggested that I had to either leave her out of the manuscript or really write about her and the relationship, embrace it . Studying with friends and mentors challenged me so much to do these things. My dissertation was the revision of the novel, which is bound in the Stonecoast archives.

Q:  Can you speak a little more about your Stonecoast experience?  How did it challenge you and encourage you in your craft?  Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?

A:  I would definitely recommend it . It certainly helped me to produce a polished novel . From Richard Hoffman I learned how to revise my memoir into a novel . From Michael Kimball I learned to write “close to the spine,” and from Scott Wolven, how to polish every page. Scott would examine a page and there would be all these circles and he would say “There are 18 ‘the’s’ and you’ve got to get rid of 12 of them.”  I had not thought that deeply about it. So it went to a whole other level of craft that I’d not even imagined.

Q:  You’ve hosted The Poets’ Theatre for many years. What is that series about for you?  What has that experience been like?  What are some of the highlights?

A:  I’ve hosted the Poets’ Theatre since 1995. Tim Mason, who was booking Club Passim, offered me a monthly series which ran until 2010. Since then, it’s been in the Café at Somerville’s Arts at the Armory, the third Friday of every month. Poets’ Theatre evolved out of the open mic scene in the early 90s, which included not just poets, but musicians, storytellers, stand-up comics, dancers—many artistic disciplines. As I began to grow as a poet I realized I needed more than my own talent to flesh out a story I wanted to tell. Being friends with many people on the scene I knew just who I wanted to ask to participate. One production, inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, examined the Columbus Quincentenial through an Indigenous perspective. It was called Where the Red Road Runs. Another show, Embargo!, called into question the decades-long U.S. blockade of Cuba. Presente!, brought to light imprisoned activists from the liberation struggles in the Sixties and Seventies.

Being a member of the Boston Championship Slam team was an amazing experience. I’d like to give a shout-out to my poetry-mates Ray McNiece, Danny Solis, and Benson Wheeler.

I read the first draft of my novel, Ride, from July 5^th 2006 to November 5^th 2008 in four-minute segments at the Cantab Lounge open mic . It was like a weekly serial and it had kind of following. I tried to keep about 30 pages ahead of the game and it reached the point where not doing it would have been catastrophic to my ego. I couldn’t show up and say that’s all I wrote, and leave the ride hanging somewhere in the Poconos. In some ways, it was the impetus to finish the story. The final night was a 30-minute feature — finally arriving in Asheville.  And that was a big highlight. Another highlight was our troupe, Singing with the Enemy, being invited by Cuban diplomats to perform Embargo! at the first U.S. — Cuba Friendship Conference in Havana in 1998.

 Q:  Talk a little about your new novel, the one you’ll be reading from on April 7^th at the Lilypad. What’s the source for the work? How is it different from your other works? Is it a political novel? 

A:  It centers around the year 1970 and the tumultuous events that happened around the National Student Strike and the Black Panther’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. It was another time in U.S. history when things could have gone one way or another. None of us were aware at the time that there was a secret program in the F.B.I. — Cointelpro — to neutralize leaders of radical movements like the Black Panthers, AIM (American Indian Movement), and the Young Lords Party. There were so many events — a national postal strike, labor uprisings, antiwar protests, it was hard to believe a revolution didn’t happen.

The novel is an imaginative re-telling of that year, as if the events, the movements had been allowed to take their natural course, instead of how they were repressed by the secret programs targeting them.

The F.B.I. was afraid the Panthers free breakfast program was raising a new generation of revolutionaries….a generation of Martin Luther Kings. If you look at the Panthers’ Ten-Point Program for the community and allow those things to come to pass and flourish, where you’d wind up is a country like Wakanda in the Black Panther film, where people were allowed to develop their talents and prosper. They were creating a future that was cut off. The novel is an attempt to create a space where that alternate future came to pass. It’s called 1970. I’m about a third of the way into it. 

Q:  What’s the best thing about being a writer? I know you also play the harp and do other things (graffiti), but what is it about writing that holds your attention, that makes you want to continue to develop?

A:  It’s like being a creator with a little “c.” Someone once asked Dorothy Parker if she believed in God and she said “Yes, when I’m writing.” It’s one of the most beautiful experiences I can imagine….something higher than just language…story…not just poetry and essays. It’s almost as if you’re writing your way into your experience and living your existence that way.  I’ve been a writer since I was fourteen or fifteen with teachers that sparked that love for poetry. I was bitten by it. It was such an amazing feeling — reading and writing poetry — I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else. I owe everything in my life to my teachers. They’re the stepping stones that allowed me to cross that wild river of creativity.

Lo Galluccio will be hosting a reading with Richard Cambridge along with two other Stonecoast Alumni writers, Michelle Soucy Martel and Tom MacDonald, on April 7^th at the Lilypad in Cambridge at 7:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

The Sunday Poet: Susan Eisenberg

 

Susan  Eisenberg

Susan Eisenberg is a poet, visual artist, and oral historian who works within and across genres. Her work re-imagines the everyday, playing with scale and juxtaposition to investigate issues of power and social policy. Stanley’s Girl (Cornell, 2018) is her fifth poetry collection. She entered the construction industry in 1978 at the start of affirmative action—among the first women in the country to become a licensed, journey-level electrician in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW); and worked fifteen years on Boston-area construction sites. In 1991, she began interviewing other tradeswomen pioneers from across the U.S., which became the basis for We’ll Call You If We Need You (Cornell, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book, being re-issued in 2018 with a New Preface. She was introduced to the craft of poetry by Denise Levertov and is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She was 2016-2017 Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women and is a Resident Artist/Scholar at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center where she directs the On Equal Terms Project. Her work has been awarded “Engaging New Audiences” and “Freedom and Justice for All” special project grants from Mass Humanities, New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Award, and three writing fellowships at Hedgebrook.

In Flight

Daybreak. I’m weeping as the airplane speeds

along the runway toward take-off.

One question I’d asked

in the just-recorded interview throbs

through my brain: Were you ever physically threatened

by co-workers or a supervisor?

On the tape, one hears early morning birdsong

and––from an upstairs window––her young son,

just awake, calling for his mom’s attention

as she answers, matter-of-factly, Three times

someone tried to kill me. Gives detail. We hug.

I’m rushed to the airport for this flight. Her eyes,

her son’s tender face, her jawline, follow.

My seatmate may have asked what was wrong.

It would not have taken much to start me babbling.

A long flight, west coast to east, for those hours

we become confidantes. A black gay man

working his way up the ranks in banking (I learn,

somewhere over the Rockies) with his own

open wounds. We exhume stories, hoping the other

will catch what we’d missed,

and together, floating over earth, we might

explain our species. We’re on deadline.

Across Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin,

Michigan, Ontario, New York, we weave

disparate threads into one loom

of history and geography. Ask out loud,

What propels a person to maim or kill

over a job. A vote. A kiss. A place in line.

I swear we try to solve all that. And fail.

Landing in Boston we become again strangers,

rushing off with suitcases of shared sorrows.

Newton Free Library/ April Poetry Month Readings--Casey/Stern/Bodwell/Hoffman April 10, 2018

( Click on Picture to enlarge)

Endicott College and Ibbetson Street Press Presents: Michael Anthony March 22, 2018 5PM

( Click on Pic to Enlarge)

The Sunday Poet: David Gullette

 

Poet David Gullette

DAVID GULLETTE was one of the first editors of Ploughshares and is Literary Director of The Poets’ Theatre, which presented his adaptation of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in December 2015 and his BOSTON ABOLITIONISTS in March 2017 at the Boston Athenaeum. He has also acted with the ART, Christmas Revels, Actors Shakespeare Project, and NPR’s The Spider’s Web. His book of poems, QUESTIONABLE SHAPES, was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2017.

ICED

The old eskimo on her ice floe keeps

A seal-blubber fire going under the pot where

The naïve frog lounges in his personal Jacuzzi

That, yes, is getting slowly warmer but

All the same down they drift toward

The Bay of Exhausted Proverbs

Whose waters are less and less frozen

Every year.

                        The emaciated polar bear

Clambers up on the floe and eyes the frog

With disgust and the old woman with curiosity.

            “I’ve heard of you,” the bear tells her.

“When you’re too old to, pardon the cliché,

‘give back to the community’ they set you adrift.”

            “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she says.

“I was bored with the long days and nights

of childcare and foodprep and lovemoans from

the next furry blanket. So I’m on sabbatical.

Call it a cruise.”