The Blind Chatelaine's Keys: Her Biography Through Your Poetics

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS takes its impetus from three impossibilities: (i) biography (and autobiography)-something is always left out, (ii) artistic criticism: the critic's subjectivity inevitably comes to play, and (iii) pure persona in poems-the poet's self remains a presence no matter how much a poet may wish to disrupt the I. Eileen R. Tabios, known as Chatelaine in poetry blogland, uses others' criticisms and engagements of her writings to create a narrative arc that serves as a biography. Since the biography is based (mostly) on her poems, it conceptually pushes the idea summed up by Ted Berrigan: there is a self inside almost all of the poems.