Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

 (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). ISBN: 9798416501051 Just prior to this review, I reviewed another, much different book on the misconceptions and myths surrounding the survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body. Dr. Terry Gordon’s No Beginning… No End is written from the point of view of a crisis cardiologist with a highly spiritual focus. Anthony David Vernon’s The Assumption of Death , while also highly spiritual, is written by a poet. In place of case studies, we have meditations on classic works on death. Instead of a physician’s scalpel, we have a poet’s. Together, the two books prove that, from numerous angles, death as conceived and sold by religion and the medical field is by and large a lie and, in the words of Ram Dass, “Dying is perfectly safe.” The poems in this collection vary in length from a few lines to several pages of poetic prose. These longer poems are sometimes presented as parables. The opening poem is in many ways representative both str...

The best books, the ones with deepest meaning—the ones we know upon our first engagement with them that we will go to them over and over again—invariably have an interesting genesis.  Möbius: Meditations on Home, by first-time writer W. David Hubbard, is no exception. Born of a question asked after the celebration of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday at the Kennedy Center, as a group of participants stopped to look at an exhibit of displaced peoples from around the world, this collection of reflections and meditations on the meaning of home is timely, profound, and, in my case, cause for misty eyes.  I have been a longtime fan of poetry and other writing that functions as a meditation. My longtime friend and subject of several of my reviews, the poet Ed Baker, who left us for the eternal home several years ago, wrote meditations on home restorations, and, even in his more traditional work, there was always a sense of searching for, celebrating, and marking the boundaries of home....

“Inspirational Innovation”: A Review of Eileen R. Tabios’ The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku (East Rockaway: Marsh Hawk Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-9969911-6-2) The great white whale for all true Creatives is the alchemical creation of something New. Wholly new. Something Never Before Done. But, in reality, how many emotional crews and spiritual lower legs have we sacrificed in the pursuit of such seeming folly? I was recently engaged in a discussion with creative colleagues when the idea that “there is nothing new” left to create came up. For one of us, it was a statement originally made to him some 30 years ago by a professor in the college where he had enrolled. So—is it true? Outside of deconstructionism and post-postmodernism, aside from homage and pastiche (all four of which are prevalent in my own work), is there anything truly new? This retrospective collection says yes. Embracing variations on the haiku and tercet forms while honoring Philippine culture and elements...

(Kāne’ohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-9987438-9-9) It is always a special day when a new work by this innovative and energetic writer arrives in my mailbox. Over the past 10 years, I’ve reviewed about 20 percent of Tabios’ over fifty published works, at times being inspired to be as innovative as the poet and the particular work in how I did so. Part of her ability to be so prolific is the way she reworks, recycles, and reimagines her own writings and the writings of others—in this case, as the Author’s Note indicates: “Each poem begins with 1 or 1–2 lines from ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ by John Ashbery.” In many of my previous Tabios reviews I talk at length about her various means of working with existing pieces to create something new, so I won’t belabor it here. Instead, I’ll say that ALL work a writer or other artist produces is linked to and derivative of something— many things —that have come before. Tabios simply has the self-awareness to be up front ab...

(Paloma Press, palomapress.net, 2017). ISBN: 978-2-365-87509-0 Innovation is not easy. Being innovative and prolific—well, that approaches the ultra rare. And that is why, year after year, I try to do at least one review of Eileen Tabios’s works. When the work spoke clearly as to how, I have attempted to be as innovative in my reviews as Tabios is in her art. A scroll through the 145 reviews currently on New Mystics Reviews (newmysticsreviews.blogspot.com) will show ten other reviews of Tabios’s work, some of which use lines from my other reviews or a poetic form to honor the range of inspirations and innovations Tabios has employed in her 40-plus collections, which have now been published in nine countries and in numerous languages. Manhattan: An Archaeology , from the relatively new Paloma Press (they list only one other offering so far— Blue by St. Jo and Grefalda, which I reviewed last month), has a multi-page list of inspirations, ranging from Tabios’s own previously publis...

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...

(Boston, MA: Black Widow Press, 2015). ISBN: 978-0-9960079-8-6 To engage with Heller Levinson’s poetry is to make the commitment to immerse . To commit . Reminding me of a combination of the visual–typographic poetry of Vernon Frazer, the fractal approach of Ric Carfagna, and the boundary-pushing poetic theories of Eileen Tabios, Levinson’s barrage of words and forms and breadth of artistic starting places (plasticity of language and its meaning, philosophy, music, visual arts) comes forth from the writer’s inner alchemical furnace into a vortex powered by a girding energy of quantum physics and Eastern spiritual tenets that swirl the material together, where it places on the page, not randomly, but in a molecular–textual structure that one could walk the exploratory halls of for days on end. Given that there is no chance of even scratching the surface of this work in a two-page review, I am choosing a handful of sections (what Levinson terms “modules”) that were particularly reso...

(Chicago: Moria Books, http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html , 2015), ISBN: 9780991212132 This month marks 10 years since I wrote my first book review. In that time, I have had the opportunity to review multiple books by the same author (in several cases, different books from a continuous series, but not always). Of the 110 reviews that I have done, there are half a dozen reviews of books that Eileen Tabios has either written or edited. This has been an easy decision to make, because no two are the same. Tabios is not only a talented wordsmith, and visual artist of language—she truly is an innovator. She invented a style of poetry called the Hay(na)ku, which numerous authors have adopted. She writes poems that pull in visual and literary art, music and dance, and that employ an impressive array of styles. She can go from dense prose poems that fill page after page with compact images and historical/literary references to very brief forms. Some months ago, I reviewed Tabios’s ...

 (1998/2015; Moria Press; paperback: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ed-baker/neighbor/paperback/product-22165655.html ; free ebook: http://www.moriapoetry.com/bakerebook.pdf) Some poets write in a minimalist, Eastern style that reads like a sutra or a prayer, as opposed to the at-times very dense poetry of Western writers. Poets writing in the former style give the reader ample space in which to graft their interpretations and morph their experiences with the work, allowing their poems to operate like myths, folk tales, and fairytales. It was five years ago that I first reviewed Ed Baker’s work, when I received for the purpose his Restoration Letters (1972–1978) —co-authored with Cid Corman—and his solo book, Restoration Poems (1972–2007) . I had been a fan of his writing and goddess illustrations for years prior, and since publishing that review, we have kept in touch through email. Neighbor unfolds like a classic mystery (at least to this reader, who has recent experienc...

(Marsh Hawk Press, www.marshhawkpress.org , 2002) In 2009 I reviewed Eileen Tabios’ Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (2002, Marsh Hawk Press; http://newmysticsreviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/poetic-meditation-review-of-eileen.html ). I encourage the reader to take a few moments to read that review, because what follows, including a reconstitution of that review as a poem, proceeds directly from where it ends. Always pushing boundaries, Tabios, after 12 years, took the prose poems from Reproductions and reworked them as “written-sculpted” poems, likening the process in her Preface to a sculptor releasing the image from a block of stone. While the prose poems in Reproductions employed mainly painting metaphors, this re-constituted collection brings in music, dancing, architecture, writing, and, of course, sculpture. Revisiting and reworking one’s work is not without precedent. Poets such as Walt Whitman and novelists such as F. Paul Wilson have made edits and updates t...