Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? I was writing what became my first novel, DOVELION: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (AC Books, New York, 2021). The novel’s primary protagonist, Elena Theeland, is a poet. When I came to Chapter 11, I wanted to present the poet-character as writing a poem about her birthland, a fictional island country named Pacifica. This is the paragraph that introduces the poem within the novel:
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https://www.acbooks.org/dovelion
With that in mind, I then turned to one of my conceptual poetry projects, “MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (MDR),” which includes “The MDR Poetry Generator.” This Generator contains a data base of 1,167 lines which can be combined randomly to make poems. I scrolled across the data base and plucked out lines that seem relevant to the idea of writing about my novel’s Pacifica. Combining the chosen lines together created my poem “The Return of DoveLion.” In the novel, Pacifica has an indigenous name of “DoveLion.”
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I feel this poem works as I present it here. But within the novel, it’s presented as an excerpt from a poem that’s presented in full as “Appendix I.” The poem in Appendix one is about three times as long as the one presented in the novel’s Chapter 11; within the novel, I wanted to present a shorter poem so as to minimize any interruption of the novel’s narrative flow.
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In the poem, there are numbers in front of each line and those numbers reflect their number within the database. I opted to retain the numbers because their random order fit one of the novel’s theme of collapsing time into what I call “Kapwa-time.” Kapwa refers to a Filipino indigenous trait whereby everything is interrelated; in Kapwa-time, there is no past, present, and future so that everything is collapsed into a “now.”
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(In reading the poem out loud, by the way, one need not read the numbers. One can ignore the numbers in the same way one can ignore the commas in a comma-poem by a poet whose works inspires me, Jose Garcia Villa, who’s written poems where each word is followed by a comma.)
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https://poets.org/poet/jose-garcia-villa
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was at my writing desk in front of a computer. This reflects the nature of how I created the poem, which wasn’t writing it so much as reading from a database and cut-and-pasting chosen lines into a Word document.
My writing desk is dominated by the computer, a desk holder of various items like pens, post-its, binder clips, scissors, and a ruler. As well, the right side of the desk is crowded with dolls (Mattel Barbies, Disney characters, and G.I. Joes). The dolls are avatars for my current novel-in-progress COLLATERAL DAMAGE. I position these dolls on my desk so that they remind me to keep working on my challenging novel rather than lapse to too-much bingeing on YouTube or Netflix. Behind all the dolls is a boxed doll of a Filipina Barbie from Mattel’s “Dolls of the World” collection. That Filipina Barbie is one of my avatars that helps me ground a writing point-of-view of being a Filipina writer in the diaspora.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I can’t recall the exact month but it’s likely within the first half of 2016. I know the year for certain because I wrote the first draft of my novel DOVELION as a daily writing exercise for each day of the year 2016.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Given the nature of how the poem was created, one could argue that every single line of the 1,167 lines that are presented in my MDR Poetry Generator was a possible line. The poem uses 22 lines, which means there are 1,145 lines that were rejected. Some of rejected lines are:
MDR’s official monograph is the book MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION that was released by Dos Madres Press in 2018. The book presents all of the 1,167 lines and readers can choose random combinations of the lines to make their own poems. One of MDR’s conceits is that any combination of the lines—from the shortest possible combination of a couplet to the longest possible combination of a 1,167-line poem—is a legitimate poem. Even the 5-line excerpt I present above that I randomly lifted from the book for purpose of this interview could be a poem—a poem that could be entitled, say, “Tart” or “The Opposite of Equanimity.”
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https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/murder-death-resurrection-by-eileen-r-tabios/
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? An evoked deep emotional response. I want the reader, not so much to understand but, to feel in response to the poem. What the reader feels is not for me to say as that type of feeling would differ with each reader. Also, not to understand something is not the same as not feeling something. So, with the poem, I wanted to create a space for the ineffable that creates a deeply emotional response.
I also hope the reader might think about how a poem gives a space for playing with language. For instance, each poem’s line begins with “I forgot.” That’s a paradoxical beginning because, obviously, when you cite what is presumably forgotten, you’re instead remembering.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The choice would be a toss-up between its first and last lines:
Regarding No. 7, I was born in the Philippines and left it at age 10 for the United States. My memory of my birthland, as I put it in the poem, “stubbornly perfumes my dreams.”
Regarding No. 1,167, this touches on my poetics and how, despite the arduousness of being a poet (because it can be hard), I want to remember always my determined poetic stance that, in poetry, all words are holy.
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Eileen R. Tabios has released over 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 10 countries and cyberspace. In 2022 she released the poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; a book-length essay Kapwa’s Novels; and her second French book, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin). Her 2021 books include her first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times and first French book La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and a first poetry book, Beyond Life Sentences, which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry. Translated into 12 languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies.
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Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html