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Showing posts from July, 2016

“A Collaborator in Alleys”: A Poem-Review of Eileen Tabios’ The Connoisseur of Alleys

(Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, www.marshhawkpress.org , 2016) To mark the occasion of my tenth review of a poetry collection by the prolific and boundary-stretching poet Eileen Tabios, I knew I wanted to do something special—something that would honor Eileen’s ability to take the reader from a position of relative passivity to one of co-creation. I made an attempt at this before, ending my review of Tabios’ Sumptuous Sculpture (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002) with a poem crafted from another one of my reviews ( Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole , same publisher and year). This review, however, takes things much further. Since beginning her ongoing work “Murder, Death, and Resurrection (MDR),” Eileen has created new poems and published seven books that use re-constituted lines from a database of 1,146 lines from her previous works. The Connoisseur of Alleys is one such work. Following suit, the following is a poem formed from 27 lines taken from my 9 previous reviews of Tabios’ wo

A Review of The Unseen Partner: Love and Longing in the Unconscious, by Diane Croft (Interleaf, 2016). ISBN: 978-0-9967771-0-0 (hardcover)

The source and substance of inspiration are as enigmatic and oft-debated as any of life’s deepest mysteries. Artists in all areas of creativity have been known to undertake ritual, engage in the use of various substances, or conceive of the work in terms of some vast, metaphorical battlefield where the artist must pay in pints of etheric, ghostly blood for the Muses to bestow even the smallest gift of good art upon them. Creativity gurus such as Elizabeth Gilbert ( Big Magic ) and Steven Pressfield ( The War of Art ) lead the field with their insights and ideas regarding creativity and inspiration and their relationship to the work. In Unseen Partner , Diane Croft tells her story of the source and substance of inspiration through the lens of automatic writing: ten years ago she had an experience of this phenomenon that produced, over the course of three years, in excess of 700 poetry verses. The experience would happen “about the same time every morning.” Croft, in an endnote, men