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In response to my questions about what she believes is the writer’s first responsibility and the role of the muse, Eileen Tabios writes: “I think a writer or poet’s first responsibility is to write well, as well as they are able.”
“If it means listening to what the muse dictates, then the responsibility is to listen as well as one can listen – by listening intently, with attention, with as much intelligence as one can muster. For others, it may be that writing is “more than listening to the muse” – and so do whatever that is.”
She feels that “we should criticize the result and not the process of writing. That there is no right way that would fit everybody.”
Reading Eileen Tabios is like sitting down to a mind feast. One never knows what to expect. Her work reveals a mastery and love of language, a talent for arousing images that remain with the reader long after the page is turned. A gift born of the artist’s dedication to her work and from her faithfulness to what it is that moves her to write.
A graduate of political science, economics and international finance. As an undergraduate, she spent most of her time working for the college newspaper, Columbia University’s Daily Spectator which, while a college publication, was a legitimate professional daily – the eight largest daily in New York City.
After receiving her MBA, she went on to work for nearly ten years in the finance industry. In 1995, she gave up a life of finance and embraced life as a fulltime creative writer.
Today, she has fifteen poetry collections to her name. Among them the much acclaimed, I take Thee, English, For My Beloved, and, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. A modern day poet, Eileen’s works appear not only in print publications, but also on electronic and cd publications.
Aside from writing, Eileen also edits and publishes collections written by other poets. Founder and Publisher of a multi-disciplinary publishing company, Meritage press. She is at once writer, poet, editor, critic, publisher and cultural activist, all these in order to achieve her goal of advancing and promoting poetry.
The Interview:
Q: How did you get into writing and what was it that made you decide to pursue a full time career as a poet and as a writer?
Eileen: My first career was journalism, and my first job out of college was being a news clerk at the New York Times; management assigned grunts like me wherever there was a need. There was a need in the Financial News department, which was my first exposure to business. Two years later, when I sought a non-writing related job (including non-journalism job), I began working on Wall Street just because I had been exposed to financial news. So my finance job was always a means for me to pay the rent while I attempted the Great American Novel during my spare time.
Meanwhile, the President of my first business job later offered to help pay for my MBA tuition, if I was interested in pursuing that. So, since it was free, I began that program...and later ended up finishing it.
I worked for nearly ten years in the finance industry. In the last two years of that, I worked on and completed a novel. That coincided with, financially, no longer having to work to pay the rent. So I quit to become a full-time creative writer. I quit on June 30, 1995 and before returning to the novel (at that point I still considered myself a fiction writer, not a poet), I thought I'd take the summer off and do something "easy"...like poetry. So I read and attempted writing poems intensively for that summer and, lo and behold, when Fall arrived, I realized the poetry was the form I'd been searching for all my life, not fiction.
I've since trashed that first novel attempt. It was egregious! But I didn't know it at the time of writing it. Still, it did its job in pushing me out of the banking door into creative writing.
Of course, I still write fiction and create in other forms -- but all as an extension of my poetry.
Anyway, this is why I feel I didn't choose poetry; it chose me.
Q: Leaving the business world to take up writing as a full time job, seems to me like such a big step. How long did it take you make that decision?
Eileen: I detested being a banker, even as I now am glad I was -- especially since the particular type of banking I practiced, project/structured finance, required me to operate in many ways that I operate today as a poet: of being observant, aware, ever in search of the non-obvious, and so on.
I would have left the finance industry earlier than I did had I had the financial means to do so.
Q: Whose works have influenced your writing the most?
Eileen: In the beginning of writing poems, the poetry of Odysseus Elytis, John Yau, Eric Gamalinda and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, among a few others. Nowadays, no one....though I continue to be inspired by techniques I observe in the visual arts (vs literary) field...
Q: Can you elaborate on this?
Eileen: I believe poetry can be about everything. I also believe that while being a poet is taking part in a dialogue that has spanned centuries of literary history, I don't need to rely on inherited literary tradition to form my own poems. So I often look to other non-literary sources for inspiration. That's what's great about poetry -- more than anything I've done, it gives me a reason to be interested in literally EVERYTHING.
I pay a lot of attention to the visual arts simply because I love art -- and have paid attention to contemporary art developments far longer than I've paid attention to poetry. I also live amidst much contemporary art -- so it's logical, inevitable, that they inspire me.
I say I'm more inspired by techniques rather than individual art objects. For instance, in writing poems, I may not have a specific abstract expressionist or cubist painting in mind, but I do allow myself to be inspired by abstract expressionism and cubism. In part, I think that's because I can get really high on concepts...and techniques, perhaps, are more directly driven (vs. resulting art works) by conceptual underpinnings. Also, to focus on techniques for me is more of an opening than the more narrow prescription that may be offered (to my mind's eye) of specific art works.
By choosing to be inspired by non-literary forms, I feel that my literary works end up being more surprising within the literary arena. And because the other non-literary forums are typically areas in which I have zero or very little expertise, it also allows me to grow more and grow less predictably as a person/artist.
Q: Can you tell us what inspires you to write? Have you ever had to make a choice between showing the world something you've written and keeping it only to yourself?
Eileen: Witnessing (including reading) other well-made works of arts (including literature) often inspires me. Actually, it's tough to come up with examples of what inspires. More accurately, I think, what inspires is a really impassioned feeling (which can be triggered by a variety of things) and I often try to write while in the space of that passion.
As regards making a choice between writing and keeping it only to myself, I'm sure there are examples from when I was just beginning the writing. But I am committed to an absence of fear -- to as much of an extent that such is possible -- in my art and so this tension rarely surfaces nowadays. I figure, if a poem compelled itself into being, it should be let out there to the public .... in part because I also believe that a poem can't be completed without its recipient (and hopefully there are more than one recipients of any individual poem).
Well, the one area where I would hesitate to show something I've written is if the work failed (in terms of my judgment of it). In that case, it doesn't leave my writing studio and, indeed, is more likely to end up in the circular file.
Q: You've called yourself a political poet. Can you tell us why?
Eileen: Simple. Because I care about politics.
This doesn't mean I go about writing or attempting to write overtly "political poems". Politics, like any thing else that interests me (from wine to sex to my dogs) will surface per the demands of the poems.
Beyond the actual poems themselves, my politics show up in how I contextualize my work in presenting them to the public....and perhaps more directly in my work as an editor and publisher, e.g. the choices I make in what kind of projects to do and who to publish. For instance, my decisions to have edited volumes like The Anchored Angel (a recovery project that reintroduces out of print works by Jose Garcia Villa) or, with co-editor Nick Carbo, BABAYLAN (the first U.S. anthology of Filipina American writers) are political decisions. Obviously, my decision to develop and then publish PINOY POETICS is a political decision.
Q: You wrote that you started writing poetry when you were in your mid-thirties. Do you think your maturity contributes to the strength of your poetry? How important is maturity in a poet/writer?
Eileen: For me -- and for me only -- I think I was lucky not to have began poetry until my mid-30s, which is to say, when I was more mature psychologically as a person. I suspect this because my poetry -- particularly my earlier ones -- were so fraught and the writing/birthing of them did affect my moods. I was/am quite porous to my poems. I frankly don't think I'd have continued writing poems had I began much earlier -- maybe I'd have quit because I wouldn't have managed psychologically to bear their toll. If you read Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, my first U.S.-published book released in 2002 but which includes some poems from my first book published in the Philippines in 1998, you'll see some dark poetry.
More generally, I wouldn't privilege maturity over other attributes in the development of a writer. Some writers/poets are effective even as they are "immature" just because they're that talented...
Q: Not only are you a poet and a writer, you also edit and publish poetry books. When a poet submist a collection to you, how do you determine whether this is a book you want to publish or not?
Eileen: I'm an editor of various anthologies which are published by a variety of presses; in the past, these have included the Asian American Writers Workshop (New York); Coffee House Press (Minneapolis); Aunt Lute Press (San Francisco); and Kaya (New York).
I also founded and operate a small press named Meritage Press. For Meritage Press, because I'm a one-person operation, I'm not open to submissions. I usually develop in-house some concepts which I then will publish, as authored or edited by others -- for instance, PINOY POETICS edited by Nick Carbo. Alternatively, I identify writers I'm interested in publishing but who otherwise may not have put together books were it not for my encouragement -- for instance, the debut poetry collections of such outstanding poets as Barry Schwabsky, Sean Finney, Bruna Mori and others.
It's pretty rare that something of interest comes in to me cold. Frankly, I read and appreciate many poetry collections out there but they don't have that extra something that would compel me to publish them, which is why I'm often in a more close conceptual dialogue with various authors that I end up publishing...
Q: While your most recent collections have been poetry collections, I do know that you also write short fiction. Which form appeals to you more and why?
Eileen: I no longer distinguish between forms (e.g. poetry vs fiction). I think all of what I do is a poet's practice -- or my poetic practice. That not only includes what I write (and in what form) but how I relate to other people, how I vote, how I blog, how I try to respect the mountain on which I'm blessed to live, how I cook (or not cook), how I watch TV (or not watch TV)....
Because I wish to live my poetry vs trap it on the page, this kind of focus on genre is, for me, amateur hour.
Q: You recently produced two e-books, Songs of the Colon and Post Bling Bling. Can you tell us more about these two books, what inspired them and why you decided to make them available for online download?
Eileen: Songs of the Colon is one of my poetic series investigating punctuation marks. I have to admit that I love the pun of that title.
POST BLING BLING was one of the offshoots of my investigation into the nature of commodities. That began via my Shopping/Spending Blog. There is a future book in the making from that project. Its working title is THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF COMMODITIES and it will feature my texts regarding shopping/spending/commodities, as well as a section reproducing images based on artist Emmy Catedral's interpretations/translations of my text into the visual art/installation art medium.
POST BLING BLING is available for free online but also for sale as a hard copy. Songs of the Colon, while available on line, will be part of my hard-copy book THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I, forthcoming in 2006 from xPress(ed).
That they are available both online and as hard copy acknowledges how poetry publishing as well as poetry dissemination and distribution are increasingly reliant on internet technology. But the internet is not as free as people think; some of my readers, for example, are in countries poorer than the U.S. where the cost of accessing the internet may be a lot but they can still afford a single book. There's also the generational gap in terms of people who go online or not; I would like my parents to read my work but they don't go into the internet.
So I rely on both hard copy and online publishing. But when you look at the numbers -- going online just makes so much sense. I read somewhere that poetry books, on average, sell 800 copies (and the kind of poets I respect for pushing the poetic form often sell less than that -- by virtue of the avant garde not as "commercial" as traditional poetic forms). Through the internet, however, my works are read significantly by more people who buy my books...and I speak as someone whose first U.S.-published poetry book, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), sold out its first printing in less than a year.
Q: Do you have a new book coming out? If so, can you tell us what the title is and can you tell us what it will be about?
Eileen: My next book is a poetry collection (with guest artists Eve Aschheim and Leny M. Strobel) entitled THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I. It will be about my fictionalized/poeticized imaginations of the "secret lives" underpinning marks that are often invisible to others: the semi-colon, the colon, the ellipsis, the parentheses and the strike-throughs. Punctuations are, if only physically, such small gestures that they're overlooked -- but their placements (meanings) are can cause significant shifts in meanings. So, I thought to imagine a whole world related to their secret lives which are mostly invisible to their readers.
Q: Do you read fantasy? What kind of books do you read during your free time?
Eileen: I have tons of fantasy novels in our library since my husband is a major fantasy reader. I can't say I read anywhere near what he does. I do read novels, essays, memoirs, art monographs, biographies. And of course I read a lot of poetry because one of my ambitions is to read every single poem ever written -- which is just me saying that I like ambition in one's acts.
My favorite fantasy story is arguably Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 whose title references the temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts.
I loved it so much that it inspired me to write my first -- and, to date, only -- sci fi story which I titled Fahrenheit 55 to reference the ideal storage temperature for wine. The story was about a future where food had become commoditized into tasteless pills, thus elevating the value of the remaining bottles of fine wine that still exists (some really great fine wines can last for a century if stored properly).
Q: How does Eileen Tabios go to work? Do you have any writing habits, rituals, things that you do in order to get into the mood to write?
Eileen: I used to have writing habits, such as making sure I'm before the pad with pen or at the keyboard for a minimum number of hours per day. But not nowadays. I've trained myself to always begin from an impassioned feeling and then go where the work leads me. When I am not in the physical act of making the poems, I am living a life that's seamless from researching for future poems. It took me years to get to this seamlessness between life and poetry -- and do it in a healthy way. Anyway, this is to say, I don't feel the need now to identify writing habit -- I'm just trying to live poetry all the time.
Q: Can you mention three top character traits that you feel a writer or poet must have in order to become successful?
Eileen: I wish to mention only one: Perseverance.
Eileen’s books are available on Amazon.com and
Small Press Distribution (Berkeley, CA) . Post Bling Bling is available as an e-book and as a hardbound copy.
Download Post Bling Bling from Moria Poetry or buy a copy from lulu.com.
Songs of the Colon can be downloaded from The Chatelaine’s Poetics
Copyright 2005, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. All rights reserved.
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