>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [Silence] >> Morning, everyone. My name is Franklin Odo. I'm the acting chief of the Asian Division here at the Library of Congress, and it's my pleasure to welcome you here and open the proceedings for a very, very I think interesting and informative and pleasant session with Eileen Tabios, to whose work I was introduced earlier this year, and I wondered why nobody had introduced her to me years earlier, because I felt like I was missing out. Anyway, there are books in the front. I just got one, which I want Eileen to sign and scribe for me before we let her go from this particular session. I will have Reme Grefalda, who's reference librarian at the Asian Division, introduce her, because Reme knows her and her work extremely well. But I wanted to just take a minute to tell you about the Asian Division and the Asian Pacific American program. We know and are grateful for the Poetry Center for hosting this program, and later on you will meet Brian Cohen, who will moderate the Q&A session right after her reading. But I want to tell you that the Asian Division has something like 3.1 million volumes in the Library of Congress. Most of our work, and all of our work in the past has been in the vernacular, in the Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Telugu, Thai, Laotian, South Asian in Hindi or Urdu or Swahili -- not Swahili, we leave that to our African and Middle Eastern Division folks. But a few years ago, the Division was tasked with the collecting of Asian Pacific American folks, and we are looking forward to collecting from Eileen as well. But we have a modest but growing number of manuscript collections within our division, and so a number of talented and well-respected poets, playwrights and scholars whose works are coming into our division, we intend to make our division a designation place for people who want to research the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. It's a growing population. So I want to thank Reme Grefalda for having arranged this event, and I want to introduce our speaker. Reme? >> Hello, Eileen. Welcome to the Library of Congress. First of all, I want to explain that most people are in retirement parties today, and so they may come in and out during the lunch hour. I met Eileen about 11 or 12 years ago. If any of you want to write a book or you're starting a magazine, you know that in the forward of your book or in the preface, you have to have somebody important write your preface for you, and if possible, you might as well put it in the front of your cover that so-and-so is giving the preface to your book. This way, if you're the unknown, they may buy your book because they know the person writing the forward. Well, I was more than a rookie editor when I founded Our Own Voice, and I was stuck with the idea that, how can I get people to read this magazine when everyone is a new name? So I turned to my staff. One of us was a writer. Her name was Nadine Soriel, and I told her my problem. I said, you know, we're not going to get anybody to come and visit our Web site, Our Own Voice, first issue, Maiden. I said, I need a writer. I need an essay. I don't care what they talk about. They can talk about the jungles of the Philippines. They can talk about migration stories -- anything. But the writer has to be kind of known. She said, well, let me see a few, and she mentioned the name of Eileen Tabios. I said, hey, don't know her but go ahead. So she connected with Eileen and she came back to me. She said, you won't believe it. Eileen will give us an essay on a very well-known Filipino artist who passed away a few years ago, and she said she was looking for an excuse to write about this artist. His name was Igarta. What was his first name? >> Venancio. >> Venancio C. Igarta. Igarta was lamenting the fact that nobody knew him here in America in spite of the fact that he practically invented the color scheme for Monsanto textile. So Eileen came along. She gave a beautiful more than 5,000-word essay, complete with images, and we had it as our number one essay. And what do you know, the Filipino literary world paid attention. She also invited other literary icons to come and submit to our own voice. And that's how I met her. And when I met -- when I saw the Ps, I said, I have to go to San Francisco. I'm poor as a church mouse; I got to go meet the woman. So I went. And she was wonderful. I met her at her apartment. We talked at her kitchen table, and I told her about this idea of a new magazine. And from then on -- when I knew her she had written a book called "Beyond Life Sentences." It was my favorite book, and from then on she now has more than 18 books. And her latest one is "The Thorn Rosary." I'm so proud and so delighted to present to you Eileen Tabios. At the same time, at the same time we will probably have the reading first and then Brian -- what was our last name, Brian? Because we only met. >> Cohen. >> Brian Cohen of the Poetry and Literature Center has consented to interview Eileen, and we hope his questions really punch her so that she answers with full faith and authority. Okay, Eileen, please come? >> Thank you, Reme, and thank you to the Library of Congress and specifically its Asian Division for inviting me to share poems. I'm reluctant to be up here; I'd rather keep sitting down there and listen to you, but I guess I'll share poems. I thought I'd start with a poem entitled "Faith," because I found that to persevere with poetry required faith in something that cannot be mapped. I found poetry to be an inexplicable devotion. "Faith." "Stalactites etching wooden cheeks, statutes of weeping saints bobbing in its waves. You, the unknown port behind distant mist. The image of tears carving wood. Of what? Is this a seed? Include these dreams by a battered mind. Inhale deeply. Breathe. To bring the poem into the world is to bring the world into the poem. Did not St. John of the Cross muster a great lyric poem despite severe sensual deprivation? Then exhale the white light, off the North Star, constantly whispering, 'You can always know where you are.' Thus moving one hand to my wrist, the other to my waist, pulling me closer to lean against you my wood. Beloved, what respite exists when I search for you whom I do not know? And pass notes the link between Christians and Dadaists for both speak and tongues. And harmony, the essence of music and poetry produces only confusion. And we are free with each other, though we cannot memorize each other's scent. Love as pure form and no self is a self. And your mass offers what a red rose offers. Reflection, I recognize as my face." My next poem was actually stitched together from fragments written by 40 Filipina writers. You know, I love Filipina women writers but they don't have as much recognition as the male writers of time, so I made this poem to honor them, entitled "Corolla." "Sometimes, I pray. Love is always haggled before it becomes. I clasp my hands around my disembodied truth: I am forever halved by edges-- in group photos, on classroom seats, at mahogany dining tables whose lengths still fail to include me. I play myself perfectly, containing a Catholic hell within my silence to preserve the consolation of hope. Hope-- once, I tipped Bing cherries into a blue bowl until I felt replete in the red overflow. If my bones were hollow, like flutes made from reeds, I might savor the transcendence of Bach flowing through me rather than the fragile movement of marrow. 'These are thoughts which occur only to those entranced by the layered auras of decay,' my mother scolds me. I agree, but note the trend among artisans in sculpting prominent breasts on immobilized Virgin Marys. She replies, 'But these are moments lifted out of context.' The green calyx emphasizes the burden of generously-watered corollas, though beauty can be emphasized from an opposite perspective. I have no use for calm seas, though I appreciate a delicadeza moonlight as much as any long-haired maiden. You see, my people are always hungry with an insistence found only in virgins or fools. It is my people's fate for focusing on reprieves instead of etched wrinkles on politicians' brows and mothers' cheeks. We are uncomfortable encouraging dust to rise as tears. Attempt witnessing pain as wine staining silk-- a gray wing, then grey sky. 'Only God,' I begin to whisper, before relenting to the tunes hummed by ladies with veiled eyes. The definition of holidays becomes the temporary diminishment of hostile noise. I do not wish to know what engenders fear from fathers, even if it means one must simulate an aging beauty queen clutching photos of tilted crowns. I prefer to appreciate from a distance those points where land chandelier. When lucidity becomes too weighty, when the calyx sunders, I concede that I make decisions out of diluting my capacity for degradation. I frequently camouflage my body into a Christmas tree. I cannot afford to consider soot-faced children stumbling out of tunnels dug deep enough to plunge into China's womb. You say the rice cooker is flirting with its lid; I say, I am drowning in air. I have discovered the limitations of wantonness only in the act of listening. There is no value in negative space without the intuitive grid. I am called 'Balikbayan' because the girl in me is a country of rope hammocks and waling-waling orchids-- a land with irresistible gravity because, in it, I forget the world's magnificent indifference. In this country, my grandmother's birthland, even the dead are never cold and I become a child at ease with trawling through rooms in the dark. In this land, throughout this archipelago, I am capable of silencing afternoons with a finger. In this country where citizens know better than to pick tomatoes green, smiling grandmothers unfurl my petals and begin the journey of pollen from anthers to ovary. There, stigma transcends the mark of shame or grief to be the willing recipient of gold-rimmed pollen. In my grandmother's country, votive lights are driven into dark cathedrals by the flames of la luna naranja, a blood-orange sun." In the prior poem, that last line, "la luna naranja," is deliberately mistranslated to be "blood orange sun" rather than moon. I like tinkering with so-called mistranslations, so-called because the same word can mean different things to different people. My next poem is "Vulcan's Aftermath." " Skyscrapers implode as streets buckle. The city is torching its ancient violins. If only I comprehend why we must meet in hotel rooms with monographed towels. With stationery-embossed silver by French lilies. Why are you addicted to lobbies edged by blue marble wombs sprouting yellow grass? Where all lucre is filthy. Where hovering waitresses look underage except for their breasts or where skirts split. Which Frenchman said the most erotic span is where a breach reveals female flesh? The midriff between sweater and jeans? The cleavage when a blue velvet blouse is unbuttoned? (I can still feel the callused tips of your fingers clawing there.) There must be another section of this city where even you would be at ease with revealing your face. Where you would touch me from a motivation that excludes fear of mortality. Where, as a poet has whispered, (flowers need never be ferocious.) Where there is no such thing as invisible ink. Where, as a poet has whispered, (carnivores forget their nature.) There must be another neighborhood where cherry blossoms never miss their seasons. Yet the flames continue rising and now the sky cringes from black smoke. An angel sacrifices his wings only to be jailed by the Mayor and three Senators. I raise my hand to beckon a waitress, my diamond ring beaming forth rapiers that slice at light. I summon a girl with red hair who reeks of lilac perfume. The split on her skirt reveals a ziggurat tattooed on her inner left thigh. But I am most struck by her eyes-- they lack color, and I am felled by this evidence of a life force dissipating. If only the city has not spent a century squandering its water supply. If only women were still expert at wearing their hair up. If only blue velvet never slithered off my shoulders. If only your hands were not chilled by the acts of former lovers. If only my mother believed Rapunzel wants to be isolated in a turret. If only Vulcan retained humility after he discovered fire. If only, if only, men in dark suits paid pale boys to go to school instead of boxing with each other bare-fisted." [Background noise] >> So that's why our poem was actually inspired by a painting of two boxers. But while a figurative painting can offer many sources of reference, what if the image is as simple as a monocolor, for example, a single color, and I was thinking maybe the face of a bit of jade. So to explore the question, I wrote the next poem I'm going to share, which is entitled, "Jade." "I can see how I've misinterpreted the fall of night against a Grecian Urn shadows sunder. The clay is ageless and I ache to press my forehead against it. Once, I stopped a burn on my fingertips by peeling a grape. I forced perfection on its nakedness. It is so difficult to find innocence in accomplished men. There is always something to be paid. Once, someone asked for my views on fidelity. Upon confirming the questioner was not discussing radio waves, I nodded and proclaimed with gusto, 'Sexual fidelity is an admirable trait. I believe all my lovers should possess it.' I never show my scars, though allow an occasional easing of pressure with a flushed countenance. My favorite stone is jade for the impassivity of its face. Perhaps I will meet an optical illusion that is solid. That would surprise me like a boulder sporting a black, bowler hat. My friends are astounded at my naivete. I met a man attending a party without his wife. I was the only one who believed there was no foretelling. But I remember when I, too, paid attention to symbols. I can't recall the beginning of when I stopped. And I no longer believe in the humility of monks." Perhaps it's obvious by now, but in many of my poems I'm not trying to say something specific, deliver a message; I'm just trying to evoke a feeling. "Come Knocking." "You quirked an eyebrow when I said I loved the flag. What else can be summoned when you have never seen me drop a smile? Then you admired the cherries hanging from the ears of a lady behind me, But as I turned my back I felt you raise your hand before it sadly lapsed. Someday we will discuss, you promised. It makes me order a drink. I know you admire encaustic for protecting forever the fragility of paper. But my friends begrudge you. Your blue shadows repel them. And they weep as I dive into the deep end. I once rode an elephant through a field of tall grass. I laugh at a bear baring its yellow teeth. My guide was a pygmy who called me 'Sir.' My arms grew wiry tugging at rope. That evening, welts rose on my palms and I soothed them with the wet walls of a beer bottle. What is the surface of reality? Do not our ancestors matter? Life so transcends one's intention. With what are we grappling when we are not sleeping? Why need we grapple when we are dreaming? How difficult it must be for you. And still, I must come knocking." [Background noise] >> These last two poems I want to share are reconfigurations of the Rapunzel fairy tale. The first was inspired by the epigraph by Clifford Geertz writing on Foucault where he said, " Stairs rising to platforms lower than themselves, doors leading outside that bring you back inside." "Rapunzel Enrapt." "She locks the entrance to the turret containing a thousand diaries whose papers are yellowed and leather covers cracked. Then she feeds the key to an alligator. She is outside where ants clamber up the velvet flows masking her thighs. She actually sense grass. She understand gloves are old-fashioned but has resigned herself to certain constraints. It takes time for the ink stains on her hands to fade. But she has crossed the moat. As she peers at the stolid grey tower that she once draped with her hair that a man once climbed, she shivers but smiles. First, she must eliminate her guise. Her godfather, an emperor of two continents and the eagles overhead has sent a troupe of retired generals. She can feel their white beards swaying as they urge black stallions toward her. She can hear the horses gasp as effort glazes a wet sheen over their hides. Though the shimmer of air in the distance simply must be the temper of a summer day, she lifts her skirts and breaks forth into a whine. Once a man buried his face into her shaking hands. She treasured the alien rush of warmth against her fingers as he spoke of sand, gritty but fine, of waves, liquid yet hard, of ships, finite spaces, but treasured for what they may explore, of ocean breezes, invisible but salty on the tongue. 'Lack the potential for grief?' she asked. He raised his eyes in surprise and she captured his gaze. She pressed on. 'I have read that grief is inevitable with joy.' Still, she woke one day to a harsh rope dangling from an opened window, and emptiness was infinite by her side. Now, she is taking that path, opposite from the direction she saw the man choose when he departed. As his hands left the rope, he looked up and saw her lack of bitterness framed in the window. The forests respected her grief with a matching silence. But she had learned from the Egyptians how to measure intangible light, a lesson that revealed Earth to curve. Now she runs, and as she begins to gasp, she can feel the sand between her toes, the breezes tangle the long strands of her hair and the waves weight her skirt. And as she begins to feel his ship disrupting the horizon, a sheen breaks across her brow and she feels her lips part. Enrapt, she knows she soon will take off her gloves. Enrapt, she feels. She is getting bare." [Background noise] >> And the second Rapunzel poem, the last I'll share, has an epigraph by Luce Eroguli [phonetic], who once wrote, "A stake, an axis is thus driven into the Earth in order to mark out the boundaries of the sacred space in many patriarchal traditions. It defines a meeting place for man that is based upon an emollition. When in will in the end, be allowed to enter that space provided that they do so as non-participants." "Against Disappearance." "After she climbed down the tower, Rapunzel looked at the welts rising on her palms. She had not expected the burn inflicted by the braided rope; still she allowed her tears to water the red tracks that began her new journey. For she had learned that bliss is possible only to those who first experience pain. As the salt of her tears soaked at the fire in her grasp, she pronounced to the dubs that she felt lurking among the high branches of surrounding trees, 'One must fly toward the space where the distance towards the horizon can never be measured.' Once, a man dodged the floating spotlights of her guards to climb towards the window of the turret, where she spent her days in velvet gowns, living through words she read behind covers of cracked leather. She was surprised, as she had not drawn down her hair, which remained pinned under her inheritance of gold combs festooned with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls. 'Don't move,' he ordered, as he walked towards her. 'I want to memorize the way you look. Before your hair will fall from the pleasure, I will teach you.' And as the sun's departure stained a scar beyond her window, her hair fell and her lips moved and her gown slipped on her shoulders to reveal the silk and lace woven by those who once served her ancestors whose portraits adorned her walls. She looked at her father and nodded slightly to acknowledge the foretelling of a frown the artist had painted on his brow. But her hands rose to grasp the man tighter against her breasts as she whispered, 'Before the first one, how does one know sin?' The shadow of a dove in flight interrupted her reverie. Her tears seized, and she wiped her palms against a velvet covering her size. Then she lifted her skirts and danced on a gravel path whose unknown destination in that mind. She danced with a swath of silver butterflies who appeared from nowhere and lingered over her smile until an old male dwarf from another fairytale popped his head from behind a boulder by the band of their path and asked, 'Who are you?' She proclaimed with glee and pride, 'I am Rapunzel, to which the dwarf replied, 'Nonsense! Rapunzel has long hair.' And she laughed and announced, as she twirled in a circle so that her skirts flared high, 'I cut my hair, braided it into a rope, and used it to escape my turret' Amazed, the dwarf said. 'How did you think of that idea?' Rapunzel stopped her dance, fixed a cold stare at the dwarf, and hissed, like Colotinestra [phonetic], 'When women control their destinies, they are only exercising a law of nature. How dare you be surprised.' Thank you for listening. [ Applause ] >> I didn't -- I'm so glad to hear you. You know, I've seen your work endorsed by [inaudible] many that I admire, and somehow never quite got around to advocating your book, but having had the opportunity to read [inaudible]. So I'm glad we're here to celebrate your poems and we're also here to celebrate the poetry [inaudible]. So I thought I'd start off by asking you a bit about [inaudible] in the United States [inaudible]. So taking from your biography into your work, how do you think the experiences of moving to the United States, [inaudible] surrounded by [inaudible]. I don't know if [inaudible]. How did usual encounters sort of start to shape [inaudible]. >> It's interesting. I never really thought to explore my identity as a Filipino-American until I became a poet at age 35. And to move here to the United States, [inaudible] fairly obvious that English was the education of education in poetry. And that's when I started to explore my identity and by using words as my material, I was very taken by the notion of English as a colonizing language, because in the history of the Filipinos in the United States, after the United states became Filipinos agnostic, they partly manifested colonization by forcing Filipinos to use English as much as the language of education, but as the language of commerce, as the language of everyday life. So English was used to manifest the United States [inaudible]. So later as a poet, as I started writing poems, the only language [inaudible] And knowing the history of English from my birth parents, I started writing a lot of so-called abstract poems, where I think I once got a lot of interesting, conveying a message. I just wanted to invoke a feeling. Sort of like an abstract painting; you don't know what the painting's about but there's something that moves you, that's why you started painting. The reason I took that approach, because the opposite of colonizing is to make things uncertain. You're not telling something; you're not forcing a message on something. So the opposite of that, the type of strange words where the meaning was an affirmative response. And really up to the reader, each individual reader [inaudible], which is sort of the opposite of someone colonizing, force feeding a reader [inaudible]. And that's how I explored identity for poetry by trying to disrupt that sense of [inaudible]. But then poetry at a later, once I get kind of [inaudible] -- poetry has its own language anyway so [inaudible]. >> I guess -- yes, sir. >> I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the reading. >> Thank you. >> And look forward to reading the book. But I wanted to ask, how do you think having adopted two children will impact your writing? Where do you think this might lead you? >> I adopted -- for people who don't know -- my son from Columbia about one or two years ago and I adopted a daughter just three and a half months ago, both twins, they're twins. And they come from Columbia, and when they arrived in the United States they did not know English. So the immediate obvious example is again the notion of being part of a process where you write someone to learn English, which is actually not the easiest language in the world you want to learn. And the frustrations that come forth, the gaps that exist when communication fails. And so that actually heightens my feelings of responsibility to word choice and culture. And the second impact is that who I was talking about, not necessarily wanting to convey a message, I actually now do post-adoption forums. I'm very interested in conveying certain messages, one of which is that is my own opinion, that the situation with orphans around the world is the greatest human tragedy [inaudible]. But that kind of statistic is lost behind some of the major impacts of disasters -- tsunamis, or even divorce. If you take enough of that number orphans around the world, to me that's something I'm really drawn with paying attention to and continue [inaudible]. [Inaudible question from audience.] >> Well, it -- of course it never all female, I mean, it's all female, the of person probably connects with politics. It's not so here although I think we should touch on it a bit more. But in many ways [inaudible] adoption centers. And I'm going to do that. [Inaudible question from audience.] >> Well, the -- when I say deliberately, I've taken English for my beloved. It's because to be a colonial subject is also to be mired in colonial history, and I wanted to get beyond that. I think for females it's more than just the influence of pre-colonial past. And I certainly wanted to see that play out in that plane. And since English is the language I'm working on, I didn't want to have an adversarial relationship with [inaudible]. I actually wanted to love my material. And a lot of the post-colonial aspects [inaudible] was when I was a younger poet. I think time and maturity allows you to work and as I said, poetry is the language and it's not just colonial, it was [inaudible]. >> Well, go ahead. >> I wanted to know the background of why your book was called "The Thorn Rosary"? >> I think I read the quote, "To bring a poem into the world is to bring the world into the poem." And so I put together a manuscript that became this book. And I stumbled across this book by Archbishop Fulton Sheen. And it's a quote by this gentleman I never paid attention to before, but I decided to use it as an epigraph and also take a cardinal from it because I found the excerpt from his book inspiring. And I collage a lot of things into my poems. I don't judge the sources; I just [inaudible]. So I entitled this book "Thorn Rosary" because of this book by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, "The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open in the substance of the next. The power of the rosary is beyond description." And so that helps me. >> You spoke a little bit about your problem with preoccupation with mistranslation while you're reading. Can you talk a little bit more, you said that you do some of the other more political elements of our poems. Can you explain a little bit? >> Sure. Now, the Spanish phrase that was mistranslated in the poem was Spanish. And if we call [inaudible] 300 years. And in the process of that period, Spanish colonizing for those years. But there was a term from that [inaudible]. It was described how Filipinos would listen to the Spanish and then pluck down words from the Spanish. They didn't know what it meant but they liked how it sounded, and so they would mimic the Spanish and Filipinize the Spanish, which is a new version. They would colonize the Spanish, new version. And so I [inaudible]. I just translated that. If I forgave my own definition to Spanish, it was [inaudible]. But of course, more generally speaking the notion relates to subjectivity, and how people can interpret statements in new ways. [Inaudible question from audience.] >> So before Rosary I had a collection of prose poems written over a period of 12 years, and a lot of those poems are conventional postponed forms, words. And I liked the postponed form initially because the elimination of the line break meant the elimination of the pause as I read them out loud. I like the long line I like feeling it and I like reading it. And the long line, afford me both many things, one of which was recognizing [inaudible]. But the other is the influence of traditional art and abstract expressionism. I wanted to write prose poems like [inaudible] and abstract painting where the long where the brushstrokes have so much energy they seem to go past the edge of the [inaudible].. And even if you look at my prose poems, sometimes they lack something that's missing or curious. That's because I wanted to convey the idea of sentence or the poem continuing on past the limits of the page. So I was trying to evoke abstract, kind of abstract effect, especially in the [inaudible]. In the later prose poems, they don't look like prose paragraphs. They might even look like keepers on the line. But when you're talking about meaning, subjectivity, you can then picture a page, fragments, phrases on the page. On the white spaces around these fragments, like lines propos point. To me that's what's actually significant for these phrases [inaudible]. So to me it's all actually one page all filled with content through one space [inaudible]; it just looks like one space. That's what prose. But this time [inaudible]. >> The space? >> Yes, space [inaudible]. >> How would you distinguish that, the way you sort of approach the abstract [inaudible]. Do you see similarities between the way you [inaudible]? >> [Inaudible]. But not really. In fact, I delivered the -- I love [inaudible]. But I did not start reading him until much after I developed what I was doing. Just by coincidence he wasn't among the initial poets I was reading this far back. I would say one of the major differences that is his sense of [inaudible]. So I think they're different, although I would certainly as well as respect for his poems. >> There's a literary sway [inaudible]. But I think sort of in the way that you [inaudible]. Yes? >> You were saying you had become a poet at 35. And I was wondering if it was something -- you always loved poetry or had you gone to school for it, or what sparked at 35 that interest in dedicating, because it's not easy to be a poet. >> Well, I know that I've always loved words from the beginning. When I first [inaudible]. At age 35 by then I was -- my [inaudible] switch careers, and I assumed that as a creative writer I wanted to write a novel. In fact, I [inaudible]. And I took the words an in the bottom of a [inaudible]. I wrote a mystery novel "710." It was atrocious, but I didn't know better then. And as I did that and then I thought I'd relax a little bit before going back into writing a novel. And I thought I'd take that summer off and do something easy, writing a poem. And so I was meticulous about getting up in the morning and spending 9 to 5 without [inaudible] to either read or write poems, because I didn't want to get hooked on working at home. And what was interesting in hindsight is that by the end of the summer when I thought I was I thought was my summer of relaxation, I realized that actually poetry was the forum I had been looking for all my life. So I had done many, many forms of writing, [inaudible]. Okay, this is [inaudible]. So I always think that poetry [inaudible]. >> Yes. >> You asked something about that because [inaudible] in all my work, we're very careful to distinguish what you do from [inaudible], you call your own [inaudible] So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about [inaudible], why it's important how you feel you should approach [inaudible]. >> Well, it's not a secret that poetry is not one of the best-selling art forms in our culture, so I wanted to do a poetry review journal so that it would be another venue for people reviewing or interacting or engaging or responding to poems. I differentiate myself not what I write about poems, I find that engagements rather than criticism, because there's a whole slew of, large school of thought, what criticism should do, what a critic's role is, and I wasn't interested in any of that. I also wasn't -- I also thought that engagement -- if you read a poem, you could engage theoretically with just part of the poem, not necessarily the whole thing. And if you wrote about that, your own engagement with that, you would often not be good enough by the standards of criticism. So I wanted to have the freedom to engage with any thought in any way I felt, whether it was engagement of totality of the poem's body or just [inaudible] and engaging any way -- I don't think one can force a person to react to any form of art in a certain way, in any predetermined way through that person, because your reaction to art is as much defined by who that person is and not just the art form. So it seems to me everyone has standards for that and engage the identities of the people who are reading the poems or are responding to the poem. So [inaudible]. >> I think it's a great Web site, and if you get a chance, to check out galaxy [inaudible] -dot-com, please do. Is there anybody you've been particularly excited about in doing this book [inaudible]. >> No. I mean, also that project is part of my possible role as a poet. I want to read every single poem with it. That will never happen, but that's the goal, so I was hoping also. >> Yes. We can start a book signing. This is for Frances. The books are outside for sale. If you would like to pick up a copy, then you can come inside and get some or we can go outside. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc-dot-gov.