Bücher von Eileen R Tabios

The "hay(na)ku" is a tercet-based poetic form invented by Eileen R. Tabios and named by Filipino-American poet Vince Gotera. The basic tercet presents the first line as one word, the second line as two words, and the third line as three words. The words can be as long or short as desired by the poet. The "1, 2, 3" aspect of the form relates to a Filipino nursery rhyme: isa, dalawa, tatlo, ang tatay mo'y kalbo. The rhyme translates into English as "one two three, your dad is bald." Advance words: I find the word-based formal constraint of hay(na)ku (as opposed to a syllable or metrical foot based constraint) leads to poems that are in many ways more natural, and that, in particular, the 1-2-3 structure is a pattern that comes up continually in the course of the daily. Poetry lives and breathes in the daily, and hay(na)ku has the ability to capture profound and delightful pieces that might otherwise be missed. -Dan Waber

With The Great American Novel: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019), Eileen Tabios not only presents 19 years of her forays into visual poetry, but takes the reader on an extremely personal journey of exploration of cultural identity, the ramifications of colonialism, the functions of language and the possibilities of connectivity in love and pain where each poem acts as a poignant marker along the way. Each sequence in this collection vastly differs-from asemic chance operations composed of Tabios's plucked white hairs let fall into place (recalling how Duchamp composed 3 Standard Stoppages) to a description of each poem-object in a destroyed mail art correspondence of sculptural visual poems. Tabios's openness to possibility has created poems radiating with life which are as heavy as they are celebratory. If you're looking for bubblegum, move on-here is something entirely different for your eyes to chew on. -Sacha Archer, author of Detour Eileen Tabios takes part by taking apart then seaming beyond seeming. Commas as visuals take form, flight, shape. Real lines of once alive things plucked from hair inventing poetry without genuflection. Achromotricia re(de)fines asemia, emerging a new version of whiteness against cloth backdrops. Finding poetry as poetry is. Eileen asserts in natural form the joining of worlds by being knowing learning doing becoming fascinated by what creates itself around her as she fascinates us by what she makes herself. -Sheila E. Murphy, author of Reporting Live From You Know Where I immediately got attracted to the first images, documenting an installation titled "Pilipinz Cloudygenous." Then I read the notes, and went back to the images. The effect got stronger and stronger. While the mobiles of say, Fischli & Weiss, are about the funny chain of causality, Tabios' work is about a funnily represented, rather absurd, but still functioning chain-leading back to the sources. "Hanging (from a ceiling)," roots in the sky. -Márton Koppány, author of Endgames