EILEEN TABIOS ON "ANOTHER WAY FOR POETRY"

From Jacket2, June 20, 2019


Eileen Tabios' poetics essay, "MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: Another Way for Poetry," has just been published as part of Jacket2's "Extreme Texts" feature. While the essay focuses on her 2018 book MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION, it also discusses poems from her first Marsh Hawk Press book, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. Go HERE for this unique essay; here's how it begins:

In 2013, I was weary of everything I’d written. So I decided to murder my poems — specifically twenty-seven poetry collections published up to that point — in an attempt to find another way for creating poems. For this attempt, I also wanted to deepen my interrogation (and disruption) of English which had facilitated twentieth-century US colonialism in my birthland, the Philippines. Finally, I wanted to develop a consciously closer link to the Filipino indigenous value of “Kapwa.” “Kapwa” refers to “shared self” or “shared identity” whereby everyone and everything is connected.