MORE GOODS ON THE CHATELAINE

INDEX

2011-10-09T02:03:00.000-07:00

For convenience, here's an Index. The dates are when the articles are posted on this blog, versus date of their original publication.

Oct. 11, 2011:
Drew Butler writes report on Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement)

March 28, 2011
Edric Mesmer reviews THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. 1

Nov. 1, 2010
ALFRED A. YUSON writes column "New Filipiniana Titles"

April 15, 2010
ALFRED A. YUSON writes column on the exhibition “Remix: Santiago Bose” at the Yuchengco Museum

June 14, 2008
ALLEN GABORRO reviews THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

February 17, 2008
ALFRED A. YUSON writes column reviewing DREDGING FOR ATLANTIS and THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES

October 9, 2007
JUANIYO ARCELLANA writes COLUMN ADDRESSING THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES

March 6, 2007
ALFRED YUSON writes FEATURE ARTICLE ON CHROMATEXT RELOADED EXHIBIT

ALFRED YUSON writes FEATURE ARTICLE ON CHROMATEXT RELOADED EXHIBIT AND FILAMORE TABIOS, SR. MEMORIAL POETRY PRIZE

Jan. 17, 2007
ALFRED YUSON writes FEATURE ARTICLE ON CHROMATEXT RELOADED EXHIBIT

Aug. 14, 2006
DIMITRA KESSENIDES writes FEATURE ARTICLE

May 21, 2006
ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ writes FEATURE ARTICLE ON THE HAY(NA)KU

Feb. 6, 2006
ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ writes FEATURE ARTICLE

Feb. 5, 2006
SHIN YU PAI reviews ASIAN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGIES

CIRILO BAUTISTA reviews PINOY POETICS

JUANIYO ARCELLANA reviews PINOY POETS

Feb. 1, 2006
CHRIS MURRAY reviews REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

Jan. 30, 2006
THOMAS FINK reviews I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED

THOMAS FINK reviews REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

DAVE JOHNSON reviews MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY

Jan. 29, 2006
LEZA LOWITZ reviews REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

RIC CARFAGNA reviews MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY

NICK CARBO reviews REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

ALFRED YUSON reviews I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED

DREW BUTLER REPORTS ON GALATEA RESURRECTS

2011-10-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Drew Butler reports on Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement) for one of his classes classes at the University of Colorado. Here's an excerpt:

The Journal: Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement)
Founded in 2006
Editor and Founder: Eileen Tabios

Her visions for the journal: “GALATEA RESURRECTS (GR) synthesizes some thoughts as regards poetry, the internet, poetry publishing, and cultural activism. I was interested in GR being specifically an online publication because online readership is often higher than for many poetry print publications. Relatedly, I wanted to add to the internet data base as regards poetry, given the widespread use of the internet for researching a variety of topics. Moreover, GR's addition to e-data would be accessible long after each issue's release date (I still get queries involving articles that were published in the internet many years ago). Thus, in addition to new reviews, GR is open to publishing commentary previously published in a print publication but unavailable within the internet.

“As regards cultural activism, I go back to the nature of the internet. My intent with GR is partly inspired by the existence of BagongPinay.com founded by Perla Daly and others. These Filipinas founded the site to offset how internet searches for "Filipina" usually comes up with negative myths, mail order bride sites which may be unsafe, porn sites, among other things. Similarly, I and other Filipina poets and scholars recently set up -- via Blogger -- Your Filipina Pen Pal to disrupt internet search results for various phrases related to Filipinas and/or pen pals. In this sense, I consider that boosting data content gratis for profit-making corporations is an acceptable price for longer-term benefits: in GR's case, more attention to poetry in all its forms, schools, approaches and other variety.”

Editing is open to anyone. Works are listed and there is an open call for submissions.

Total of 16 issues ever. Between 2 and 4 come out each year.

The Editor:
Writing for 16 years, in which she has created 18 print poetry collections, four online collections, one CD poetry collection, a book of short stories, a novel, a collection of essays on art, and a collection of essays on poetry. Before her writing career, she worked in International finance using her MBA in economics.

Invented the poetic form of hay(na)ku [1 word, 2 words, 3 words]

Born in Philippines, moved to America at age ten. Filipina heritage is still very important to her work in the Journal.

An Interview with Eileen Tabios:

How do you choose which books of poetry to put up on GR for review? Is there a particular style you look for? Do you feel these pieces reflect your initial goal of cultural activism?

My cultural activism is for Poetry -- not a particular style of poetry. Therefore, all types of poetry are welcomed to be reviewed on GR. Although I have a list of available review copies (at http://grarchives.blogspot.com ), I tell folks out there that they can review any poetry project including books on their personal bookshelves. Each Editor's Intro provides a breakdown of the number of books reviewed from review copies sent to me, versus those chosen elsewhere by the reviewer (e.g., http://galatearesurrection16.blogspot.com/2011/04/editors-introduction.html) But GR doesn't just review books (though, most reviews are of books) -- they can be reviews of poetry readings, poetry performances, etc. I even allow the review of books in other genre (e.g. fiction) if the author is a poet. The latter reflects my belief that everything inevitably affects one's poetry; for example, if a person writes in more than one genre, that could affect that person's use of poetic form.

Having said that, while I publish reviews of all sorts of poetry styles, it is true that GR has come to be known in some circles are being empathetic towards the "innovative" strain in poetry. That has arisen organically, though, as people who write for GR as often also poets. In most cases, I do not assign poetry reviews but let the reviewers choose which publications they wish to review. If poets tend to review those works with which they themselves empathize as practitioners of the art, then I suppose a lot of poet-reviewers who write for GR may come from a camp described as innovative or experimental poets.

Publishers of many styles of poetry do send review copies. I personally have reviewed many different styles of poetry. So I lean towards poetry being a huge tent but if the actual issue or issues reflect an emphasis on a particular style, that is caused as much by those who volunteer to write for GR and not because of any intent on my part.

What editorial process do the reviews go through before publication? Are the guidelines relatively lenient or do you receive quite a few more submissions than get put up on the blog?

Any poetry project, or any project by a poet, is eligible for review in GR. I don't publish all reviews that are sent for my consideration. But I do publish the majority of submissions for at least a couple of reasons:

1) reflecting my initial editorial introduction to the GR project, I was invested in just generating volumes of poetry-related information in the BIG net of the internet; and

2) as part of my cultural activism on behalf of poetry, I wanted to encourage others to start writing critically about poetry as I believe the art could stand more critics. As with anything else, we all improve with practice but I was willing for GR to be the host of many newbie critics' efforts. It has turned out over time, as I had hoped, that some critics have persevered as a result of GR's encouragement and gotten better. GR has enough professional, brilliant critics lending their names to the effort that I'm not at all worried that the occasional less-than-brilliant review would dilute GR's reputation.

Having said the above, if there is one editorial standard that I try to make sure exists in all reviews (and I'm not sure I succeed all the time, but I try), it's that the reviewer always includes an excerpt from the reviewed work to exemplify whatever opinion that reviewer is offering.

I noticed that sections of the blog have a lot of references to your children and your personal life. Do you view GR as a primarily personal blog with some poetry reviewing aspects or a more professional review journal with personal sections?

My poetics reflect that I don't believe in the separation of "life" from "poetry-writing", and so I reference my personal life. This approach should be contextualized, though, in that it reflects generally my approach to blogs. I was, I believe, among the initial group of poet-bloggers who began blogging before it really took off. I appreciate the blog for its informality due in part to how its (internet) medium allows for almost-immediate publication of something one has written. That informality, of course, does not necessarily mean lack of rigor...but I think the blog-space is obviously very different from other contexts, for example, a peer-reviewed journal. Anyway, I do view GR as primarily what I reference it in its subtitle: An Engagement with Poetry (with such "engagements" often manifesting themselves as reviews).

My views on the form of the poetry review probably has bearing on this question. You may notice that when I write "reviews" for GR, I don't say I "review" but say I "engage." That's because I think there's value to the non-traditional way of reviewing poetry, including the very emotional, the very personal, the fragmented outlooks which may not be the norm in more traditional criticism. I mean, as a poet, when I receive a fumbling, at times inarticulate response to some of my own poems, I often glean some value to that type of response -- as much as the more well-written, well-wrought critical review. So I allow a space for all styles of poetry reviewing.

You mentioned on the blog that you chose the medium of the Internet in order to increase readership and because of its low cost. How do you feel about the fears some have voiced concerning the Internet weakening the strength of writing in poetry reviews?

That has always been an artificial debate to me. First, take a look at who's providing such criticism. Does that person, for example, have a vested interest in narrowing the gate through which others learn about a multitude of poetry publications or projects? Secondly, it always amazes me when those interested in poetry, be they poets or not but surely people of some intelligence (?), fail to scratch deeper into their questions -- doesn't their complaint reflect an undeserved reliance on wealth as a controlling factor on what will create cultural capital and isn't it true that efforts that push the edges of the art form of poetry often start out on low-cost bases because of the general lack of support of poetry and specifically even more constrained support for innovative poetry? Thirdly, the question assumes that a way to assess poetry reviews is to assess them as a group (e.g., it's from the group of "online" reviews versus "printed" reviews). That doesn't make sense. Read a poetry review, and assess that individual poetry review. You don't assess the merits of a single poetry review based on the overall outlook of whether poetry reviews have increased in number and venues. (This ridiculous conflation of the macro with the micro is a point that's both irritating and amusing to me, btw, who's been trained as an economist,...) I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this type of group-think, though. If you take a look at various discussions about poems, you can tell that poems are often read based on what category folks fit them into, versus based on the individual poems' merits....(which is not to say a poem's generative source, including its context, may not be relevant...)

Last but not least, the beauty of the internet and, specifically the blog, is that if there's nothing worth reading in your project, people will not read it. It seems to me that a blog's success -- or even redeeming value -- can be judged in a very bottom-line way for a blog like GR. Are people reading it? The answer is YES. Are publishers sending review copies? The answer is not just YES but even long-standing publishers (vs. indie publishers looking for rare marketing venues) are sending books. Are people continuing to volunteer to write for it for almost zero compensation? Absolutely and I am so grateful to answer this question, too, as YES (I offer books as compensation and while some reviewers pass on those offers as what I have may not be of interest to them as readers, they nonetheless continue to write for GR...). Believe me--if and when GR ceases to be of interest, I will be the first to pull the plug on it. I'm not looking to spend a lot of effort on something that is of zero interest to internet readers out there... in fact, GR takes up so much effort that I've thought a lot about ending it but haven't done so yet specifically because there is such interest in it as a project....

A significant portion of your original intention statment concerns cultural activism in relation to Filipinas and in particular the website BagongPinay.com. Do you feel GR has continued to reflect this goal through its work? How so?

Really? Because I went back to re-read the Introduction to Issue NO. 1 where I inaugurated GR and this factor was just one of four factors cited, isn't it? I wouldn't say it's more significant than the other three factors. But it is a factor, and I would say about this that GR has probably achieved just 60% of the goals related to this factor. That is, the two goals related to BagongPinay would be (1) just increasing poetry content on the internet, and (2) increasing the content of reviews of Filipino poetry (and because I happen to be Filipino with contacts in the Filipino literary community I was hopeful of GR being used to promote Filipino English-language poetry which, in my opinion, doesn't get as much attention as it deserves). Anyway, I would say that we've achieved No. 1. But in terms of No. 2, the distinct majority of poetry reviews have to do with non-Filipino poetry so I would say that GR has helped draw attention to Filipino poetry but not as much as I hoped it would do.

List of Available Works for Review:
http://grarchives.blogspot.com/

Blog Main Page:
http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com/

EDRIC MESMER REVIEWS THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I

2011-03-28T01:55:00.000-07:00

[First published in Yellow Field, Spring 2011]

Received & Noted
The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. I
Eileen Tabios xPress(ed), 2006)

By Edric Mesmer

Ever slow to catch-up, new to me is Tabios's first volume of Punctuations. (Was there ever a second?) Rife with the stuff of Language Poetry, disseminated here in the investigatory practices of a secular grammarian, Tabios takes for her organizing principle the diacritically punctual gesture--thus a poem like "; No Music in His Voice" may begin "; when accomplishing a portrait ends the relationship". Too Dorian for you? Supporting such columnar effects rids us of the indices of affectation; serials, editorial drafts, and asides open and flex here in the full catalog of our representational enquiring. Epigraphix and a healthy amount of notes at back lead the reader to consider the functional afterthoughts of "?"; the parenthetical series may dilate the eye, but these queries are most bountiful when considering the colon and double-colon: "pauperism: owlish symptom / mulatto: wineglass emphysema / concrete: argue requisite / ulna: weary median". I'm awaiting Volume II.

ALFRED A. YUSON WRITES COLUMN ON "NEW FILIPINIANA TITLES"

2010-11-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

[First published in The Philippine Star, Nov. 1, 2010]

New Filipiniana titles (Part One)
The following titles are all worthy additions to everyone’s Filipiniana shelves.

[...]

Mondo Marcos: Writings on Martial Law and the Marcos Babies, edited by Frank Cimatu and Rolando B. Tolentino (also published by Anvil), collects short fiction, personal essays, and poetry — mostly from “Martial law babies” — that theme up on the Marcos world.

Contributors for fiction are R. Zamora Linmark, Paula Angeles, Cyan Abad-Jugo, David Hontiveros, Robert J.A. Basilio Jr., and Cesar Ruiz Aquino, whose meta-fiction piece titled “The Diaries of Mojud Remontado: 55 Days in Dumaguete” is certainly worth more than the price of this volume alone.

Essays are by Wilfredo Pascual, Jr. (who has two), Ige Ramos (three), Sandra Roldan, Apol Lejano-Massebieu, Oscar Atadero, Grace Celeste T. Subido, Johanns Fernandez, Gabe Mercado, Pete Rajon, and Shubert Lazaro Ciencia.

Poetry is contributed by US-based Pinoy poets Eileen Tabios, Luisa A. Igloria, Vince Gotera, and R. Zamora Linmark, as well as co-editor Frank Cimatu, Alma Anonas-Carpio, Padmapani L. Perez, BJ Patiño, G. Mae Aquino, and one bashful Anonymous.

It seems Mondo Marcos is a two-volume collection, with one in Filipino, also of essays, poetry and fiction — but I don’t have that copy.

In his Epilog, co-editor Tolentino writes: “The writers are from the generation of young people who have grown up, lived through, and generated their consciousness and being primarily during the martial law period. Forced into singing the New Society theme song, gardening vegetable patches, and deprived of a chunk of the Voltes V series, these ‘martial law’ babies had little choice than to involve themselves in materially and symbolically slaying the Marcos-father....

“...There was no language outside the Marcos dictatorship. On the other hand, the world given unto them, the officialdom of the conjugal dictatorship’s nation-building is engaged, critiqued and re-worlded. Even as there can be no language other than those uttered by the Marcoses, the idioms for rearticulating the language are retransformed by this generation of writers....

“... The Mondo Marcos volumes seek to memorialize the generation’s coming of age with the legacy of the Marcos era, whose utmost legacy may be surmised in the slogan, ‘never again.’”

ALFRED A. YUSON REVIEWS "“REMIX: SANTIAGO BOSE” EXHIBITION

2010-04-15T01:18:00.000-07:00

[First published in The Philippine Star, March 1, 2010]

Santi's spectacle of influence

I found it quite spectacular, and I’m sorry I can only write about it now. But one of the strongest art shows I’ve seen recently just has to be “Remix: Santiago Bose” at the Yuchengco Museum.

While going through the virtual maze of splendid visual offerings themed to an eclectic mix yet partaking of one central influence, I kept muttering to myself that no way would any verdict coming from me be taken at its word.

Santi Bose had been a close buddy, after all. His dear wife Peggy still bakes unparalleled cakes and cookies for me and my family, while his daughters, son, girlfriends, and all former co-conspirators and common friends still take of my time, attention and care as tight kindred, even beyond spirit/s.

And there they all were now, at the Feb. 11 opening of a tribute to Santi’s phenomenal influence — with everyone apparently having pasted on a goofy smile that went well with the Xeroxed Bose facemasks some participating performers had donned.

In one hall were Santi’s Anting-anting illustrations, below which were tacked poetry and prose written by an all-too-willing coterie of poets, writers, historians and cultural purveyors from New York and San Francisco to Pasig and Cubao.

Luis Francia, Jessica Hagedorn, Bino Realuyo and Eileen Tabios of the USA had penned and sent over their literary takes on a particular, selected image among the 60 that made up Bose’s “Confessions of a Talisman.” These literary reactions to Santi’s amulets collection were joined by those of John Silva, Victor Peñaranda, Howie Severino, Ed Geronia and Lilledeshan Bose, among others.

As Santi’s daughter Lille had envisioned, each writer drew literary inspiration from her dad’s anting-anting drawings to “bridge visual and literary art forms, while breaking cultural barriers.”

The next halls showcased a splendid array of distinctive art works by eight relatively young artists who also “took off” from Bose’s talisman collection.

And I tell you, the sets of canvases, multi-media works, and sculpture that each artist created were superlative delights to behold — from Kawayan de Guia’s ethnic/electric chair to Alwin Reamillo’s piano-part dragonflies as bas relief, John Frank Sabado’s geometric excellence to Mark Justiniani’s striking sovereignties, Arnel Agawin’s elegant output to Jordan Mangosan’s solar art, and Bose mentees Leonard Aguinaldo’s and Ged Alangui’s equally creative alarums that wailed in the wake of a shaman’s aesthetic skullduggery.

In the main hall, where Bose’s auto-portraits dwelled on a narrative utterly his own as well as ours, the eight young immortals also collaborated on Santi’s version of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” — endowing the 12-by-12-foot canvas that the artist was working on when he died in 2002 with a picaresque, personalized life of its own.

There too was a prized set of photo collages by Wig Tysman, inclusive of secret narratives that had not a few of the guests at the opening — National Artist BenCab, filmmaker Butch Perez and grand chef Louie Llamado among them — going giddy with recognition.

Australian artist and writer Pat Hoffie and her daughter Visaya Bose also sent in superlative contributions. It was Pat who had best encapsulated the scope of territorial imperative Santiago Bose had mapped out in the international art scene as early as the 1980s.

In a 2003 critique titled “Santiago Bose: Magic, Humor and Cultural Resistance,” Hoffie wrote:

“The extent to which Santiago Bose’s art has influenced the development of contemporary art in the Philippines has yet to be fully fathomed. His introduction of indigenous materials, his mining of Filipino iconography, his re-writing of Filipino history, his commitment to indigenous forms and practices, his bringing together of new media — such as performance, video and installation — with older forms such as rituals, festival paraphernalia and altarpieces — have made a rich and deep contribution to contemporary art practice not only in the Philippines but also abroad. ... Santi’s work wove past histories into the present, and then on into probable and improbable futures. In the face of what often looked like insurmountable odds, he always continued to make art that breathed with the potential for new imaginings.”

Indeed, we all breathed a universally tribal sigh of a wow as we took in the exhibit’s collective interpretation of a singular legacy. Bose’s apprentice Perry Mamaril pitched in, too, as did percussionists and dancers, so that the music that soon enveloped the venue became another medium of transport into Santi’s world: a heritage of endless beginnings.

Days later, his buddy Boy Yuchengco applied yet another piece to add to the 3-D puzzle (read: cosmic conundrum) that Santi’s effect on everyone had, very much like his maniacal guffaw. As if redux and reload were not enough (and with Santi nothing was ever enough), an incendiary altar now enhances the Grand Guignol remix.

Poet-rocker-daughter Lille says it best:

“Art critics lamented that when Santiago Bose died, his influence on the development of contemporary art was impossible to recognize completely. Seven years later, artists have co-opted (and) reinterpreted... Bose’s ideas, forms, and ideology in various mediums.”

You should all catch this exhibit born out of the vestiges of a legacy that has stayed luminous, like lovely lunacy.

ALLEN GABORRO REVIEWS THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

2008-06-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

[First published in Philippine News, June 11, 2008]

I once had a college classmate who was so exceptional as a student that our professor exclaimed, with tongue-in-cheek, that she could submit a paper with absolutely nothing written on it and still receive the highest grade. I can easily say the same for artist, poet, writer, and publisher Eileen R. Tabios. Of all of her admirable pursuits, it is her poetry that has proven her artistic worth. Her poems are transcendent, expressive, and provocative. What is more is that they are human, all too human to borrow from Nietzsche, in the emotions they evoke and in the wisdom they reflect.

Tabios’s The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography,” is an eloquent testimony to her artistry as a poet and to the sublimity of her verses. It is also rich and extensive in its subject-matter, covering the historical, the spiritual, the social, the literary, and the personal.

More than anything else, The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes is the story of two lives told in verse. It is the story of Eileen Tabios herself and that of her deceased father Filamore B. Tabios, Sr., a victim of brain cancer. Having to cope with his illness and subsequent death was quite an emotional burden to bear for Tabios. However, if there can ever be a silver lining in the death of a loved one, it is that private suffering can emerge as a source of creative inspiration. This notion forms much of the basis of the book’s poetry.

While love and devotion for her father runs throughout Tabios’s poetry, her book is by no means an unequivocally starry-eyed paean to the man who sired, as Tabios calls herself, “the most prodigal of daughters.” The reader can almost feel Tabios’s emotions pulsing as she struggles to make a clean breast of her troubled relationship with her father. Describing her mind as “an open wound,” Tabios plaintively asks how did her relationship with her father reach a juncture where “he could not feel my love to be guaranteed?” She compounds this question with another heartrending one: “How did our relationship come to encompass so much loss?”

It takes her father to fall into a bedridden state for Tabios to find the opportunity to repair the damage caused to their relationship. It is under these circumstances that she has “finally returned” after having “left him nearly 30 years ago.” Content in the knowledge that she has reconciled for the most part with her father, and cognizant that he doesn’t have much longer to live, Tabios writes of wanting him to be “immortal” because “hell, we finally like each other!”

In the multifaceted, philosophically-edged poem “What Can a Daughter Say?” Tabios’s poetic genius intersects with the weight of contemporary history, particularly that of the Philippines. Here, in her own, creative way, and as a Filipina who was born into the Marcos era generation, Tabios speaks for Imee Marcos, the former dictator’s daughter. In a fictional voice that is complemented by a dose of pathos from Tabios, Imee jumps from rationalization to denial to a loving daughter’s affection and back again, in what would seem like a reluctant attempt to evaluate the legacy of her father, Ferdinand Marcos. More than not however, Imee’s fictive ruminations segue into the realms of what Tabios envisages as the “flux of language” and the “logic of amnesia.”

The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes is intended to be a postmodern blending of eclectic themes, images, and words. As hallmarks of the postmodern style, Tabios’s poems steer people away from simple-minded assumptions and towards being more contemplative about things, about ideas, about life in general. That is why readers should understand that the divergence and subjective impressionism in her poems are what make them not only distinct works of art, but also a significantly meaningful body of verses.

Categorical readings in art or literature should never be raised from the bottom of the interpretive receptacle. Meanings are subversive things, always ready to supplant the interpretation that was previously arrived at until they too, are subverted in turn. Tabios’s poetry is built on the same foundation.

It is within that approach that Tabios keeps the spirit of her beloved father alive in the pages of her extraordinary book. It is a spirit and memory that will never die out thanks to a daughter’s belated, at times painful, journey of self-discovery.

2008-02-17T21:06:00.000-08:00

ALFRED A. YUSON REVIEWS DREDGING FOR ATLANTIS and THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES

[First published in The Philippine Star, February 11, 2008]

Verses for the extra-terrestrial heart
(First of 2 parts)

KRIPOTKIN By Alfred A. Yuson
The Philippine Star
Monday, February 11, 2008

To all the friends and wannabes who sent their latest titles in the year just past, my sincere apologies. Been so busy over the past months that I couldn't find time to conduct any literary reviews. But since my extra-galactic powers allow me to trilocate sometime around Valentine's Day and adopt various life forms, such as an amoeba, a paramecium, and a Jarjar Binks-type of mutant, these manifestations managed to go through every single, letter-perfect page in your wonderful additions to Filipiniana, let alone my shelves.

Why, my holy synergy even found the gravy time to render the following report. Not an omnibus review; no, let's not call it that. But a report, plain and simple, glowing as it must be, for good Happy Lunar New Year measure.

The books are cited in the order received by this visiting Neptunian. But I'll initially confine this first part of a series to books of verse, that is, human poetry, which is close to my extraterrestrial heart.

Early last year, Eileen Tabios sent her 11th poetry book from California, where she tends a vinery while still writing poetry and occasionally publishing other poets' books.

Dredging for Atlantis is published by Otoliths of Australia. It's a slim chapbook of 56 pages, but rather delightful, not only for the continuing experimentation in poetic form and provenance, but also for the brief works' aphoristic value.

Most of the poems are of the ekphrasis variety, which means they're inspired by or based on works in other art forms, such as paintings. Here, too, they utilize the painterly technique of scumbling — that is, softening lines or colors by rubbing or coating opaquely. Thus she creates poems from other poets' works.

Whichever the technique, her deceptively simple lines radiate memorably in various directions, as in the poem "Burning Pulpit": "Could our two miseries/ copulate/ into one opulent being?// Men simplify/ then slink back/ to antediluvian burrows// Baby priests/ turn away/ to cast profiles forsworn to Donatello// But she is clutching lilac print/ within a shadow burning/ away/ salvation's seedlings."

The two-line poem "Futurism" is Villaesque: "The truants of heaven/ possess a startling velocity"; so is "Winged Victory": "Defile/ that Carrara// A nude woman stands for the universe// All of her names end/ with 'A'// Then her eyes..."

Also from other writers' texts, she extracts sequences of the "hay(na)ku" — a poetic form she introduced in 2003, and managed to have international poets try their hand at it. It involves tercets with a stepladder progression from one word to three words in each of the three lines in a stanza, or in reverse hay(na)ku, the other way around. As in "Windfalls": "The olives' oil/ contents grow/ substantially// from October to/ December. It's/ risky,// however, to leave/ them too/ long// on trees because/ if they/ become// 'windfalls' they cannot/ be considered/ for/ virgin pressings."

Tabios sent yet another book later in the year, the 366-page The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography (Marsh Hawk Press, New York), her 12th among what are now 15 poetry collections (the others being online editions). The soft-cover tome is basically an intense, loving testament to her father, Filamore B. Tabios Sr., who passed away in 2006.

It is also her most comprehensive collage, or quilt or tapestry, of poetic utterances, melding political statement with found art, childhood memoir with e-mailed texts, and ranging from translations by other poets in Filipino and Spanish to poem-installations, anti-Marcos diatribe to fond recollections of an Ilocano Baguio, prose poems to memoirs, more hay(na)ku poems to blog entries, collaborations to deconstructions, detailed notations on her dad's demise to Artist's Statements etc. She includes her "List(ing) Poem: Towards the New Filipino Society" as well as its visual rendering, as displayed in PLAC's "Chromatext Reloaded" exhibit at the CCP Main Gallery in January 2007.

This book has been reviewed in full in these pages by Juaniyo Arcellana, so that since we've been beaten to the earlybird prize, suffice it to say that Eileen Tabios commands breadth and depth in her ongoing affair with poetry, surely a passionate one that involves all senses and evolving forms, and yet still drawing — as against the risks of too prolific and possibly profligate an output — on fundamental strengths. As in "Canto 32": "You dare to stare/ at the sun.// When you turn away/ from the light.// You can no longer see/ anything but its absence.// I see you, Daddy./ I see myself// seeing you looking back/ at me...."

These five couplets are followed by a prose rendering on a lower, right-hand column. It's too long to quote in full, so let's skip to its arc of closure, which could well be read as Tabios' ars poetica: "... you will conclude, no matter how many poets have labored, are laboring, will labor, there are never enough poems. Never enough poems. And as you read me now, you feel me sitting before a small desk, buried in a man's plaid bathrobe, unkempt hair falling over bloodshot eyes, ink smudging all fingers, munching on 'a cookie chock full of mountainous chunks of rich
milk chocolate and munchable macadamia nuts,' as I write, as I write, as I write: Never enough."

In his new poetry collection, Textual Relations (UP Press), Ramil Digal Gulle begins his preface titled "A view from the Hellsmouth": "There might be too many words in this book."

It is in direct contrast to Eileen Tabios' theory of all-inclusive poetic peroration. The truth or wisdom may be somewhere in between, or much more likely, twirling like an angel on the pinhead of both standpoints. For with and on poetry one can say anything, utter anything. Hear out William Stafford, whom Gulle quotes in the pages of aphorisms serving to introduce his book sections: "... A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu."

It may be in that sporting vein that Gulle expands his repertoire from the years when he early gained university and Palanca prizes. His collection is rife with levity, figure-of-eights, stark somersaults and in-your-face audacity. He employs the F word and the Tagalog rendition of the MF word, curses like anything, sexes up his themes and topics by marrying the medieval to the macho mundane: "... Legend has it, Merlin still/ screams his blueballs through the forest/ after sixteen-hundred years and nobody/ gives a shit. Nobody.// Just beat it, kid. Beat it, be done, and walk on." (from "Eating Merlin")

There's a lot of tough talk, of Gonzo verse (after all, he's also a journalist), of adroit lyricism when consumed by lust, tender to cariño brutal: "He thumbs the air behind her: a dark./ Comma, a cipher for the hidden cameraman/ adjusting the focus on his bare butt." (from "D'Pure Sight of Fior's Panties")

His titles are relentlessly engaging: "Shopping Maul"; "The Boredom of Borges"; "Brasserie Speak"; "Dildo Shopping"; "Four O'Clock Nipple"; "Det for the Next World"; "Cream, No Pussy"; "Ophelia's Water-Method to Ecstasy"... Like a savvy rock band composing for a shock-jock CD, he sallies forth on riffs given as much to urban legend as to apocalyptic apocrypha.

I like his sleight-of-hand tricks, the diverse rhythms and forms he employs, nay, plays with. He is poet as homo ludens, not taking himself seriously except in the spirit of play. Why, he can even console himself in such a poem as "How to Lose a Poetry Competition" — which I heard him read in Singapore's Wordfeast, a couple of years ago, as part of a circle of grass lawn picnickers.

Yes, it's a picnic with poetry for Gulle, and we catch him even doing and serving up the barbecue. In "Making Love to Ingeborg," he implores in self-mockery: "I'm going to die impaled on a limp metaphor./ They'll throw my body on the grassy lot to rot./ Will you be the yellow-haired bitch who eats me? // Please."

He quotes from Janice de Belen as he does Czeslaw Milosz, National Artist of the Philippines F. Sionil Jose ("Poetry? I can't even pronounce it."), and The Catholic Almanac/Quick Questions/Online edition, among many others, from fore to aft in a ship of tomfoolery. He even ends a poem with "Baby, yeah!"

And in some poems he goes dark and nearly Gothic, such is the range he exhibits: "Close the gate, watchman, shut the gyre on those/ souls forever. Let the dark winds whip and flay/ the, black flags in a night without names." (from "Inspiratorium")

Gulle is at his best when he commands, or reminds his audience, such as of a to-do list, as in "Ten Things to Remember in a Nuclear War in the Philippines." His voice certainly commands attention — to his growing prowess as a Gonzo commando who takes no prisoners but himself. In that sport, he surrenders to an all-knowing jauntiness, and we are all made captive.

JUANIYO ARCELLANA REVIEWS THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES

2007-10-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

[First published in The Philippine Star, October 8, 2007]

Two from the Bay Area
ZOETROPE By Juaniyo Arcellana
Monday, October 8, 2007

Jarjar Binks left for the Bay Area very possibly with one old copy of Granta, a special issue titled “Unbelievable,” that featured the death of the Princess Diana of Wales and the accompanying hyperbolic media coverage. The subtitle read, “Unlikely ends, fateful escapes, and the fascism of flowers.”

We can well imagine Jarjar leafing through the somewhat dog-eared copy of what’s been described as the paperback magazine of new writing, then looking wistfully out the window of an apartment on the rolling streets of San Francisco, we’re not sure if she has a glimpse of the bay and the almost mythic golden bridge, but with Granta there is always the sensation of the nearness of water.

So Jarjar joins a growing legion of our Filipino compatriots who have relocated to San Francisco, Oakland, and their environs, even if only for a more or less temporary basis or until visa runs out, whichever comes first or is more feasible.

Among the long-time exiles by choice is Benjamin Pimentel, who worked for National Midweek after the first EDSA revolt and the San Francisco Chronicle when he migrated to the United States, and who has lately sent a manuscript to the Ateneo de Manila University Press, his first novel Mga Gerilya sa Powell Street, published middle of this year.

That it is written in Filipino or the native Tagalog should perhaps make it all the more significant, as noted by another expatriate writer on the West Coast, Oscar Peñaranda.

Mga Gerilya tells the different stories of a group of Filipino veterans of the Pacific War who are forever waiting for the equity benefits promised to them by the US administration, with all the attendant heartaches, shifting dramas back and forth in time and to the home country and back to Powell Street, where they while away the hours engaged in small talk and good old fashioned ribbing and sentimental reminiscing of life in ’Pinas, which to most of them seems like a dream now.

Pimentel, who also wrote the biography of the late middle class revolutionary Edgar Jopson, relies mostly on dialogue to develop his characters and flesh out the plot, and the barebones functional narrative owes as much to his mentor Pete Lacaba for the lack of artifice and its political correctness, as to Lualhati Bautista in its seething potential for translation into cinema: there’s even a scene where the old-timers gather around a modest dinner of Kentucky Fried and some well-kept booze, kidding each other on which actors they would choose to play their life story.

And speaking of political correctness, the reader cannot also help but be reminded of Carlos Bulosan, particularly on the underlying theme of being a stranger in a strange land, not only in terms of the characters in the novel but also the writer himself who through his fiction must eventually face off with his own alienation.

In this wise it was a good decision for Pimentel to write his first novel in the native tongue, and so make us privy to the almost occult world of the veteran old-timer on Powell Street, which cannot just be any street on that hemisphere, and at the same time cure his own version of homesickness.

It is a bittersweet story, but throughout its disillusions and disenchantments, there still rings true the unshakable voice of a Filipino that says country is not just of the imagination, but a very real respite from homelessness.

Another writer who has been abroad longer than Pimentel or Jarjar Binks, also on the West Coast but more specifically in the Napa Valley area, is the Fil-Am Eileen Tabios, who comes out with books as if they were going out of style, then again maybe they are.

Her latest, and according to her the last in a long while, is The Light Sang as It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press), subtitled “Our Autobiography.” And though the selections here are classified as poetry one isn’t really sure as Tabios has been known to subvert the genres almost as if it were a fetish, perhaps even deriving some satisfaction out of our inability to place her under one label or category.

The Light Sang is a heart wrenching chronicle of the death of her father, a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of how the Tabios patriarch wastes away on a hospital bed, as well as the diffuse aftermath of regret, catharsis, self-examination, whatnot, whatever it is a poet or writer needs to come to terms with oneself and one’s past.

Indeed there are several sections that seem too personal, and make the reader feel like a voyeur or intruder, or for us to suspect that the writer is something of an exhibitionist. Maybe it is a little bit of both sides of the existential coin.

The writer makes good use of autobiography as in itself a conceit for her poetry, a construct that when left alone may soon enough crumple by the wayside like the shattered feeling of one who has just been orphaned.

Tabios’ evocations too of her hometown Baguio are both wistful and winsome, though in instances contrived like the references to Marcos and the episode of the fishheads when as children she withheld them from her kid brother, also now departed.

It however is a good sign that the writer has called time for reflection, giving us leeway to digest such prior mind benders like Secret Life of Punctuations and Dredging for Atlantis. Books never go out of style anyway, neither poetry, which might be the only verse that outlives us. To poetry then, to poetry: From bay to glimmering bay, and Jarjar reading about the dead Diana on the other side of the world.

ALFRED A. YUSON WRITES FEATURE ARTICLE

2007-03-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

[First published in The Philippine Star, March 5, 2007]

KRIPOTKIN

A poem of mine that's been much-anthologized, titled "Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipino Maids," starts with these lines:

"Art, my dears, is not cleaning up/ after the act. Neither is it washing off/ grime with the soap of tact. In fact/ and in truth, my dears, art is dead// center, between meals, amid spices/ and spoilage..."

This came to mind at the penultimate day of the five-week-old exhibit titled "Chromatext Reloaded" at the CCP Main Gallery. The poets, writers and artists who had participated were ready to help strike down the display the next day and take the works home. In a way we had enjoyed our Warholian 15 minutes of public scrutiny if not exactly fame.

But at the scheduled closing event last Tuesday — a performed poetry gig billed as "Word of Mouth" that drew an audience of over 150 people who gave of their engrossed time "between meals" — CCP Visual Arts head Sid Gomez Hildawa announced that "owing to overwhelming public demand," the show would be extended by another week. This means that those who still have to catch it can do so until 6 p.m. tomorrow.

It could have been the appreciation drawn from the public, especially from groups of students from Los Baños, Dasmariñas in Cavite, Tarlac and Baguio City that visited the gallery and filled up the attendance ledger with glowing remarks like "Unique!" and "Fantastic!" Or it might have been the voiced request of not a few writer-artists themselves, such as culture honcho Nick Tiongson, hear tell, who hoped to yet find a chance to view the exhibit.

Well, a co-participant has claimed that it's been one of the most exciting displays mounted at the CCP over the past year. I wouldn't know about that. But at the risk of being accused of unabated self-promotion, I can't help but share the glad tidings that "Chromatext Reloaded" did bring together quite a bunch of spirited "Sunday artists" — whose tokens of creative expression were allowed the privilege of hanging alongside others of a legitimate claim to gallery walls, floors, ledges and glassed-in boxes.

These latter works included textually highlighted wood sculpture by National Artist Billy Abueva, writers' portraits by National Artist Bencab, distinctive canvases and graphic art by multimedia artists David Medalla, Manny Baldemor, Pandy Aviado, Danny Dalena, Rock Drilon, Fil de la Cruz, Tita Lacambra Ayala, Gilda Cordero Fernando, Erlinda Panlilio, Mav Rufino, Margot Marfori, Barbara Gonzalez, Beaulah Taguiwalo, Heber Bartolome, Pete Lacaba, Jun Cruz Reyes, Frank Rivera, Jean Marie Syjuco and Cesare A.X. Syjuco, among others.

Toss in holographs (in their own write, that is) of poems by National Artists Edith L. Tiempo and Virgilio S. Almario, stunning sculpture by Agnes Arellano and riveting installation art by Vim Carmelo Nadera, Lorina Javier, and Raul Funilas, plus movie actor Piolo Pascual's handwritten appropriation of poet-novelist R. Zamora Linmark's couplets — inscribed across the heartthrob's own glossy photos in a magazine — and you get an idea of the kind of mélange, motley and multi-dimensional, offered on view.

A few days before the performance reading, I had a chance to revisit the scene of these startling crimes of verbal-visual fusion. In the quiet and relative solitude (only a couple was around, intently taking notes before each work), I managed to appreciate the whole shebang even more.

Certain sections of the grand exhibit involving over 80 literary and visual artists will stay in the mind, or mind's eye. That end corner occupied by Jean Marie's tantalizing sculptural installation. Boy Yuchengco's altar. RayVi Sunico's wine bottles with poem labels. Handcrafted books by Babeth Lolarga and Del Tolentino. Xerography by Raul Ingles and the late Larry Francia of the writers' group named The Ravens.

Then there's a section that is probably the most hypermodern of the lot. From the left wall and panning right were Maxine Syjuco's arresting photo assemblage, followed by Fran Ng's self-portrait in oil upon which is layered quasi-graffiti on a plastic sheet, thence three illustrated poems by Danton Remoto, one of these half-concealed in a wooden frame, and then a small audio-video gizmo hooked up to the wall with earphones, allowing anyone to listen privately to Lourd de Veyra's recitation while viewing flowing images concocted by Nona Garcia.

Off the wall, at the center of this recessed area, are a couple of monitor screens playing text-layered video by both Sarge Lacuesta and Mookie Katigbak, while fronting them, on the floor, is a weighing scale where one can stand and view the poundage tape reel through, and stop at the word "Kulang."

Towards the right is Judy Freya Sibayan's wall installation that incorporates alphabet blocks, followed by Angelo Suarez's corner installation of a chair mounted with his cheeky deconstruction of mentor Ophie Dimalanta's poem. Taking up the right wall are Igan D'Bayan's oil painting of sheep-men's faces pregnant with the silence of a howl, and lastly, a Red Cross paper installation that is visual poetry decanted by Eileen Tabios from Marcos' literary era.

The assemblage turns even more dynamic when one sees viewers padding up to each work in reverential gaze and/or perusal/participation, such as at last Tuesday's event. Lasting nearly three hours, "Word of Mouth" was something else again, combining the energies of senior "page poet" readers with those of electric (in more ways than one!) musicians, performance crews, spoken word adepts, hip-hop rappers in both Tagalog and English... Such dynamism, mesmerizing as a litany!

Particularly memorable was the opening number by Lirio Salvador of the experimental band Elemento, conducted on a gleaming metal contraption that took the electronic organ into the 22nd century. Same with the harmonium and electric violin duo of Punnu Wasu and Oz Arcilla, who were eventually joined by verbalist Yanna Acosta (she who has just written two original songs with master guitarist Sammy Asuncion, for Candid!).

In the epic midst of all that sound confabulation, a student from PSID, Nityalila Saulo, lofted the evening into ether with her lovely, powerful voice — rendering with solo acoustic guitar a finely melodic song she herself composed, as an adaptation of Marjorie Evasco's classic poem "Origami."

Took everyone's breath away, before we could fold and tuck our corners of delight into a night's gigabyte of awe.

Now, art, my dears, can be all that and more. More often than not, in this country that fairly brims with transcendental creative genius, particularly in the visual and performing fields, we wish for more time — "amid spices and spoilage" — to soak ourselves in the cornucopia.

I for one would like nothing more than to declare retirement in my over-preening dotage, so I may spend my whiles and wherefores in the comfort of art galleries and theaters, taking in what's best in the Pinoy. So many artists, so much art stuff to revel in. But breadwinning chores prevent us from attending every exhibit opening we're invited to, so that we can only defer to old friendships in the appreciation of across-the-board, across-the-archipelago talent.

There was our young buddy Igan D'Bayan's second solo exhibit at The Crucible, another sold-out affair, even if not consisting of garden-variety sala decor, but rather of provocatively "dark" paintings that seemed to marry Goth and Meta, their connubial bliss spiced up with rock-and-roll!

Why, that's what I should have said to Jaime Zobel when we ran into one another before the opening at Megamall's Art Walk, and he had asked me to explain the appeal of Igan's art. He had made sure to visit the exhibit before the crowd came, something to do with a wisdom tooth pre-empting sosyal chitchat.

So we stood there by another gallery, wondering about the vagaries of art, including the beautiful accidents occasioned by such group shows as his recent one with my cousin Reggie Yuson (I claim kinship!) and company. It is possibly the same with "Chromatext Reloaded," which I urged him to view, if only to see a title card for an oil painting that read: "After Jaime Zobel's Red Flower Photograph."

We feed on one another, on the healthy diet of competition and mutual, collegial, communal support. Rockers Chikoy Pura and Mon Espia perform live at Igan's opening, and somehow we see (and hear, resoundingly) how Igan's art relates to the retro music in the air.

Before crossing paths with Don Jaime, himself an accomplished artist, I had been taking in the proliferation of architectural art ("Gimme Shelter!") among the display in three galleries at Art Walk: Prisms, Passionata, and Purple, which all owe their materials to Chuckie Arellano's fabulous personal collection.

I've begun to think that art is like that, too: democratic even if conducted mostly by aristocrats of creative expression. Finally it becomes meritocracy at work, and play.

At "Word of Mouth," I finally get to meet the widow and artist-daughter of old friend Ibarra de la Rosa (bless his comic soul), who once stayed with me in Dumaguete during a Negros painting foray with Jon Altomonte, way back in 1970. I tell Camille de la Rosa that I've been following her early success as a painter, in the papers. Genetically predisposed she is, of course. But what she does next, or progressively, would owe as much to what she sees being done around her, and how she reacts to it, as to her father's legacy.

Also last week, while planning a commemorative affair for the third anniversary by late April of Nick Joaquin's demise, his literary executor Billy Lacaba recounted a funny story.

It seems Billy had tried to make "arbor" an oil portrait of what he thought was a religious lady, veiled and all, that hang in Nick's room. The master's voice boomed: "Hindi taga Cofradia 'yan, kundi lady of the night. At kay Abe Aguilar Cruz 'yan! Hindi ko bibigay sayo!" Inspecting the painting, however, Billy found its authorship on the back of the framed canvas. It wasn't Abe's at all. Showing this to Nick, Billy got this response: "A, di pala sa kaibigan kong si Abe. Kung ganun, sayo na lang."

Names can be important, my dears. As is, of course, friendship. Take the current display of "Macau Magic" at the second floor lounge of The Podium. With friends Bencab, Soler, Phyllis Zaballero and Claude Tayag as the featured artists, and Nilo Ilarde as curator, how could I decline the invite from organizer Finale Art File and Bob Zozobrado?

No way. And I was glad, too, that I attended the unveiling, for not only was a lion and dragon dance presented; I also ran into my old buddy FVR who was a guest of honor. (To think that only a week earlier I had photographed beloved Tita Cory Aquino presenting her paintings to Benedictine fathers at the Red & White Ball. And I had interjected, "Fathers, she's the finest Sunday lady painter I know." To which the ever-gracious lady riposted: "Ikaw naman, oo.")

Now here was her successor in the flesh, too, at an art opening. Why, shaking hands with the best president we've had in recent memory is to learn that he makes a living now out of the golf course.

"Not from sandbagging, Sir, I hope?"

"Not on your life. From honestly playing the game, against all dishonest comers."

Bravo. That could be a quip applied to art, too. And so, my dears, from Andy Warhol to El Tabako, wisdom is gained that will see us through for more than 15 minutes — rather a lifetime of tact, of truth, and of being right on center.

ALFRED YUSON writes FEATURE ARTICLE

2007-03-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

[First published in Philippine Star, Manila, Feb. 26, 2007]

Mouthing the word

The milestone of an integrated literary and visual arts exhibit, Chromatext Reloaded, which has been on display at the CCP's Main Gallery since its ebullient opening on January 25, comes to a rip-roaring close tomorrow night with a session of performed poetry billed as "Word of Mouth."

Sponsored by the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC) and organized by exhibit co-curator Jean Marie Syjuco, the closing event starts at 6:30 p.m. It will consist of readings and performances by PLAC &Friends, the same spontaneously combusting association that put together the well-received Chromatext edition.

"Word of Mouth" features a sterling assembly of seasoned literary performance artists, poets and musicians led by PLAC members Jimmy Abad, Cesare A.X. Syjuco, RayVi Sunico, Marne Kilates, and yours truly. Joining us are fellow poets and writer-painters Gilda Cordero Fernando, Marivic Rufino, Joel Toledo, Carlomar Arcangel Daoana and Angelo Suarez, along with a dynamic mix of multi-media artists, young musicians and Spoken Word ensembles.

The performers include the prizewinning playwright and theater artist Frank Rivera, painters Rock Drilon, Alan Rivera and Danny Sillada, singer-composer Nityalila Sauro, conceptual and installation arrtist Raul Funilas, and Spoken Word / Slam Jam performers G.P. Abrajano, Siege Malvar, Trix Syjuco, Jevijoe Vitug, Yanna Verbo Acosta, Lorina Javier and Ria Munoz.

Performing coteries count the fast-rising underground hip-hop collective AMPON (which released a bestselling CD album late last year, Dekoding Rhythm); Vim Nadera &Friends; Maxine Syjuco &Utakan; When Wor(l)ds Collide (with Twinkle, Gino, Otto, and Happy Ferraren); Controlled Chaos (with Ronaldo Ruiz &The Tupada Core); Lirio Salvador &Elemento; Ida, Kookie &Viva; and Mitch Garcia &Ian Madrigal.

Guests are enjoined to come early to appreciate the exhibit a first or second/last time. Chromatext Reloaded includes works by over 80 poets, writers and visual artists, including National Artists Napoleon Abueva, Edith L. Tiempo, Virgilio S. Almario, and Benedicto Cabrera or Bencab.

We've been congratulating triumphant poets almost every week now. Prizes galore have been a boon for numerous Filipino poets in English, just as much as they've been for Fil-Am poets.

Our latest poetry contest winner is Jean Vengua, per an announcement posted late last week by Meritage Press of San Francisco. She's received the Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize for her manuscript titled "Prau." A $1,000 prize accompanies the award, and the winning work is due for publication by Meritage Press (www.meritagepress.com) by autumn this year.

Instituted by Meritage Press and poet-editor Eileen R. Tabios in honor of her late father, the prize is being awarded for the first time. Submissions were reportedly screened by Ms. Tabios herself, and the finalists were passed on to her mother, Beatriz Tabios. All entries were reviewed on an anonymous basis to ensure that the shortlist selection and final judging would be based solely on the merits of the poems.

Eileen writes: "We are pleased to present some samples from Jean Vengua's winning manuscript 'Prau,' and hope you will remember her entire book — as it turns out, her debut poetry book — when it is released later in 2007. (If formats get lost by e-mail, you can see her poems at http://www.meritagepress.com/ babaylan/)

"We would like to thank the poets who participated in this contest. We read many wonderful poems by other participants. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the finalist and Second Place winner Edgar B. Maranan (Quezon City) for the lovely lyricism and imagery displayed in his manuscript, "Star Maps &Other Poems." (N.B. Our friend Ed Maranan is currently back in London, packing up his stuff for the final time before he returns to MetroManila and his Baguio hometown.)

Jean Vengua lives in Santa Cruz, California. She~teaches at Gavilan College and also works as a content editor for McGraw-Hill Publishing. Her poetry has gained inclusion in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including Going Home to a Landscape, Babaylan, Proliferation, Returning a Borrowed Tongue, Moria and Otoliths. Her essays, articles and reviews on literature and music~have been published in Jouvert, Geopolitics of the Visual (from Ateneo de Manila University Press), Pinoy Poetics, the e-zine Our Own Voice, and CultureCatch.com.

Checking out the sampler of five brief poems sent along by Eileen, I see how Vengua's poetry made a distinct impression. Three of them are prose poems, one of which I must share for your delectation.

Note how even the matter of applying italics can heighten a poem, especially one that is hard-edged and which takes abrupt, surprising turns of thought and imagery. I like it so much that I intend to read it at the "Word of Mouth" affair at CCP tomorrow. It's somewhat appropriate for the start of another zany election campaign season, since it's titled "Turncoat."

"position the bird in a side pocket or put it to sleep in poetry. step
right up to the shining path. a broken column is pinned to the collar
bone, pillar to support her head. she paints a portrait, enlarges upon
puddles hidden behind creative writing, drips tears onto a palette, rips
open her camisa de dormir. there are two fine breasts cleaved up the
middle, and crowning the brow a hairy sliver of moon. the bees are joined
in marriage behind literature, european. i kiss your hand, madelaine. i
eat your cookies. she unstraps her camisa de fuerza. el corazon beats
between science and the mystery of moths and myths. there is cooking for
my mother's rosary, juvenile for our apocalypse. choose your color,
advance one square, retreat six. cambiarse la camisa is to change
categories. in fiction, one must cross two rivers, being careful to avoid
the black holes, center stage. fall forever into universe, tell a story,
make place."

Bravo, Jean Vengua.

ALFRED YUSON writes FEATURE ARTICLE

2007-01-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

[First published in Philippine Graphic, Manila, Jan. 22, 2007]

Chromatext Reloaded at the CCP

In this space a fortnight ago, we touted the revival of Caracoa, the poetry journal of the Philippine Literary Arts Council or PLAC. The long-running journal that was started in 1981 had lain dormant for nearly a decade since its last issue in 1997. The current generation of outstanding young poets in English reawakened it from slumber in time for Christmas last month, as Caracoa 2006: The Silver Issue, which thus served to commemorate PLAC's 25th anniversary.

The celebration continues this month with a grand verse-cum-visual exhibit mounted by PLAC & Friends at no less than the Main Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Opening at 6pm on January 25 and lasting till February 28, the show is billed as Chromatext Reloaded, in recall of two previous Chromatext exhibits held by PLAC in the 1980s at the then celebrated Pinaglabanan Galleries in San Juan.

Some fifty Filipino poets and writers from here and abroad, spanning several generations, get together for this rare exhibit that assembles visual art works by PLAC poet-members and special guest artists, co-curated by Sid Gomez Hildawa, Jean Marie Syjuco and yours truly.

An array of works — from holographs to photographs, poem-integrated illustrations and paintings to sculptural installations and video that also incorporates literary text — will be displayed in this exhibit led off by PLAC's original core members: Jimmy Abad, Cirilo Bautista, Ricky de Ungria and Krip Yuson.

They are joined by other distinguished writers, among them Gilda Cordero Fernando, Raul Ingles, Tita Lacambra-Ayala, Sylvia Mendez-Ventura, Lilia Amansec, Ophelia Dimalanta, Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Butch Dalisay, Cesare A.X. Syjuco, Juaniyo Arcellana, RayVi Sunico, Danton Remoto, and Sid Gomez Hildawa.

From abroad, PLAC members and friends have sent in their contributions, such as from David Cortes Medalla in London and Eric Gamalinda, Nick Carbo, Luisa Igloria, Eileen Tabios, Zack Linmark, and Melissa Kristoffel-Nolledo in the U.S.

From Baguio City, the participating poet-artists include Butch Macansantos, Babeth Lolarga and Frank Cimatu.

Special guest artists who happen to be intimate with writers, if not writers themselves, include National Artist for Sculpture Billy Abueva and National Artist for Painting Ben Cabrera or Bencab, graphic artist Pandy Aviado, painter-sculptor-writer Manny Baldemor, sculptor Agnes Arellano, painters Rock Drilon and Jean Marie Syjuco, painter-musician Heber Bartolome, conceptual artist Judy Freya Sibayan, designer-illustrator Beaulah Taguiwalo, and writer-painters Erlinda Panlilio, Marivic Rufino, Barbara Gonzalez and Igan D'Bayan.

Among the younger generation of poets and writers joining the exhibit are Jovi Miroy, Vim Nadera, Fran Ng, Lourd de Veyra, Jessica Zafra, Sarge Lacuesta, Joel Toledo, Ginny Mata, Carlomar Daoana, Mookie Katigbak, and Angelo Suarez.

Performance art, musical works, dance and readings will highlight the exhibit opening, to which the public is invited, as well as the closing ceremonies at 6pm on Saturday, February 27.

Copies of the revived poetry journal Caracoa and special commemorative editions of CD albums featuring the recorded readings of PLAC poets will also be on sale for the duration of the exhibit.

And what an assortment of visual/verbal/verse art it is.

From London, Medalla has sent a colored xerograph of an image with "manipulated text." From New York, Gamalinda has mailed handwritten poems in brittle old paper. From Virginia comes a video of readings by Igloria, from San Francisco conceptual art sheets with a deconstructionist poem and visual collage by Eileen Tabios, from Seattle several fine canvas prints of digital art based on short stories by the late lamented Wilfrido "Ding" Nolledo, as done by his oldest daughter, Melissa Nolledo-Christoffels. Below her works are excerpts of her father's equally mesmerizing prose.

Dimalanta displays two of her poems that have spawned visual works by artist-friends: a cross-stitched piece of her "A Kind of Burning" by Dr. Alice Sun Cua, as well as a text-based painting by Prof. Noel Flores of UST's College of Fine Arts and Design; and a holograph or in-her-own-write rendering of her "Surreal Love" paired off with a charcoal painting by the excellent artist Fil de la Cruz that has been inspired by the poem.

Arcellana contributes part of a fallen, post-Milenyo ylang-ylang tree planted by his father Franz in their old home garden in UP Village. Bencab lends his portraits of writers (including his fellow National Artists Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzalez), while printmaker non pareil Pandy Aviado joins in with woodcuts of poems by his early Ateneo mentors Eric Torres and Tony Manuud.

Lacuesta and Suarez have remarkable floor installations, while Sunico's wine-rack installation features his poems as bottle labels. Cimatu has submitted blown-up "komiks." Linmark's short poems have been handwritten by movie actor Piolo Pascual on his own glamour photos. Hildawa's poem "How To Be a Door" is written with a marker pen on the gallery's glass doors.

Evasco shows a calligraphed poem plus an image of Zobel’s “Tension Luminosa” painting. Daoana comes across with a hand-sewn wedding dress embroidered with his poem "(A Notion of) Marital Bliss.” Zafra collaborates with a group of digital artists on a scintillating slideshow.

Amansec, Baldemor, Bartolome, Cordero-Fernando, D'Bayan, Drilon, "Tweetums" Gonzales, Mendez-Ventura and Rufino are represented by paintings, most of which have related text. Each of Panlilio's three oil paintings is paired off with her own haiku. Ng has an auto-portrait with integrated text.

Fictionist-photographer Ginny Mata's "Exposure" is a large, 4-ft.-by-7-ft. tarpaulin with images of body parts, nude and otherwise, along with accompanying text, and is meant to be a commentary on the commercialization of beauty in popular media.

All in all, Chromatext Reloaded is a dazzling celebration of the word, in dynamic fusion with visible, palpable, electrifying and endearing art.

DIMITRA KESSENIDES writes FEATURE ARTICLE

2006-08-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

[First published in BARNARD COLLEGE ALUMNAE MAGAZINE, August 2006]

THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I

Eileen Tabios has been exploring language since she worked on both the barnard bulletin and the Columbia Spectator as an undergraduate at the College. "My first career interest was journalism," she says. After graduation, Tabios went to work as a copy person at the New York Times, then came a career as a Wall Street banker. In the midst of that, at age 32, Tabios tackled The Great American Novel. After she finished the book -- it was never published, but did its job in turning Tabios to writing full time -- poetry became her next way of exploring language. It was then that she found her true love. "I realized that it's the form I've been looking for my whole life, it's language in its most pure form." (Her love runs so deep that she titled her first collection of poems I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved*).

Over the years, Tabios has written and published 10 collections of poetry, and edited or co-edited five anthologies of poetry and fiction. Compared to her previous works, her newest collection, The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. 1, is, as she describes it, "a very minimalist project" both in size and scope. "Punctuations are often overlooked, ignored, and never seen within language," Tabios says [the poem ": CONTEXT AND STRAWBERRIES" is a reprint from the book). Asked for her favorite form of punctuation, Tabios responds, "The exclamation point -- I'm saying this of the tope of my head -- the exclamation point symbolizes passion."

++++++
[* CORREX: Tabios' first collection was BEYOND LIFE SENTENCES, Anvil, Manila, 1998)

ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ writes FEATURE ARTICLE

2006-05-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

[First published in MUNTING NAYON, Issue 194, Netherlands, March 2006]

Hay(na)ku: The Philippine Haiku and Eileen Tabios, Its Creator

DIE WE DO

Die
we do
as much as

we
live. Then
we write: right

what
we lived
when we write

-hay(na)ku poem by Eileen Tabios

On the Hay(na)ku blog, which can be found at http://eileentabios.blogspot.com, the Hay(na)ku is described as a Filipino poetic form involving three lines. Each line consisting of:

Oneword
Two words
Three nga words.

Launched, by Eileen Tabios on June 12, 2003 the hay(na)ku form has, since it’s conception, rapidly gained a large following and is now used by poets from all around the world. These poets include the 38 poets and editors whose works are included in The First Hay(na)ku Anthology which was published in 2005.

To me, the beauty of the hay(na)ku form lies in it’s allowing a poet in the diaspora to enter spaces that might have been closed to him or her.

As Ernesto Priego writes:

The diasporic nature of the hay(na)ku attracted me from the very beginning because it allowed me to express myself in English without being a native speaker. The apparently simple form is, in practice, very challenging, and allows for a series of singular possibilities. I feel the hay(na)ku is a form that grants a common space for poetic practice in different languages; a way of writing in English without completely obliterating one's "mothertongue". Instead of the conquest and influx that has defined English in relation to other "less powerful" languages, the hay(na)ku is open and flexible, an invitation to share different ways of thought and writing.
-- quoted from Contributor’s notes on The First Hay(na)ku Anthology

The simplicity and grace of the form, allow space for the poet to play. Its flexibility allows room to explore. Where other forms tend to be exclusive, the hay(na)ku is inclusive, allowing say a Filipino poet to enter the space of Dutch poetry or allowing a Dutch poet to enter the space of English and even Filipino poetry.

What is so beautiful about hay(na)ku is how it allows room for experimentation on the part of the poet. Seductive in its rhythm of one-two-three, it can become quite an obsession.

To my mind, this form, more than any other form, provides an open door, an invitation to writers who have dreamed of, but not yet dared, to write poetry.

Mark Young, writing about the hay(na)ku tells readers to “regard the hay(na)ku as postcards from wherever their author has touched earth.”

This statement speaks of how the poet given this space utilizes words to great effect, weighing carefully what is included and what is excluded. To my mind, hay(na)ku’s universal appeal lies in its accessibility.

As Kari Kokko says:

It is a form that travels well.
-quoted from contributors notes on The First Hay(na)ku Anthology

Eileen Tabios, creator of the hay(na)ku form, answers the following questions related to the hay(na)ku form:

What was the inspiration behind the Hay(na)ku form?

Three inspirations: Cameron, a character in one of Richard Brautigan's novel The Hawkline Monster who liked to count everything; Jack Kerouac whose notion of an "American haiku" made me think of creating a "Pinoy haiku"; and a wish to create a poetic form that reflected the Filipino diaspora, which is to say: a transnational form.

Would you like to comment on the Diasporic nature of the hay(na)ku and its success?

Well, what's been interesting is although the hay(na)ku started out being written primarily by Filipino poets -- in celebration of Philippine Independence Day when I inaugurated it on June 12, 2003 -- most hay(na)ku writers are now non-Filipino and live all over the world, from the U.S. to Australia to Finland to the Netherlands and so on. Also, the first single-author hay(na)ku poetry collection will come out this year and it is NOT EVEN DOGS by Mexican poet Ernesto Priego.

I'm really heartened by how swiftly it became popular and global. I had conceived of the hay(na)ku when I was thinking of creating a welcoming poetic form. This partly stemmed from my early efforts to write the haiku -- many of my efforts were met with the response, "But it's not a real haiku" for many reasons. As a result, I rarely write haiku. And so I hoped, with the hay(na)ku, to create a form that invites, that welcomes.

When you first introduced the form, did you see other writers (including non-Filipinos) embracing the form?

No! Not at all. It’s amazing to me!

What do you think makes the hay(na)ku so addictive?

Well, according to those who write hay(na)ku more frequently than I do, the one, two, three scheme is helpful for rhythm and meter purposes. Also, the word count constraint is more loose than a syllabic constraint. Also, you got me the inventor not precluding any variant from the basic tercet form from not being a "genuine" hay(na)ku.

What should someone writing hay(na)ku for the first time, bear in mind?

To quote Mark Young, co-editor of THE FIRST HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY: "Any subject. No code."

What does hay(na)ku mean to you? What does it represent?

So many things! A love for poetry and poetries. The expansiveness of poetry as a doorway into considering many varied things, from culture to politics to history and so on. Openness to life. Faith -- and specifically faith in Poetry's power. Last but not least, how the Filipino need not be victimized by the history s/he inherits -- that is, if we're colonial subjects, we can use that to rise above such a context's limitations and create anew, which is partly why it's nifty that it's mostly non-Filipino poets now writing in a "Filipino" poetic form.

------o0o------

Readers wishing to learn more about the hay(na)ku form may wish to visit the hay(na)ku blog at: http://eileentabios.blogspot.com. The First Hay(na)ku Anthology is also available from Meritage Press at http://www.meritagepress.com/haynaku.htm, http://www.spdbooks.org, and from amazon.com

-----o0o--------

In the interest of encouraging poets and writers, I would like to announce an upcoming hay(na)ku writing contest. Watch this column for more details or feel free to contact me at janchie@wanadoo.nl

ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ writes FEATURE ARTICLE

2006-02-06T20:29:00.000-08:00

[First published in MUNTING NAYON, Netherlands, February 2006]

Eileen Tabios, Poet and Writer

In her book, I take Thee English, My beloved, Eileen Tabios writes:

“I consider Poetry to be a practice, a way of living. For me, living as a poet requires maximizing awareness of the world in order to be effective as a poet. By “effective”, I refer to my hope that my poems create spaces for experiences that readers find meaningful if not pleasurable.” -Six Directions: Poetry as a way of Life -

Reading Eileen’s poetry requires more than a cursory glance. Her poems have a compelling effect on the reader so one is called back and back again to read and reread lines and verses. Her work evokes an emotional and physical response in the reader. One never tires of reading it. With regards to her poetics, its effectiveness is in how her work extends beyond the written page.

Eileen Tabios’ work moves the reader to beyond the page, beyond thought into action. Whether that action implies picking up the pen, awakening to the vibrancy of an undeniable heritage and doing something about it, or buying more books by Filipino authors is what the writer leaves to the reader.

Born in the Philippines, Eileen moved to the U.S. when she was ten years old.

A graduate of political science, economics and international finance. As an undergraduate, she spent most of her time working for the college newspaper, Columbia University’s Daily Spectator which, while a college publication, was a legitimate professional daily -- the eight largest daily in New York City.

After receiving her MBA, she went on to work for nearly ten years in the finance industry. In 1995, she gave up a life of finance and embraced life as a fulltime creative writer.

Today, she has ten poetry collections to her name. Among them the much acclaimed, I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved, and, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. A modern day poet, Eileen’s works appear not only in print publications, but also on electronic and cd publications. She has also released a short story collection, and a collection of art essays, as well as edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays.

Aside from writing, Eileen also edits and publishes collections written by other poets. Founder and Publisher of a multi-disciplinary publishing company, Meritage Press. She is at once writer, poet, editor, critic, publisher and cultural activist, all these in order to achieve her goal of advancing and promoting poetry.

To someone reading Eileen’s work for the first time, it is impossible to ignore the influence of heritage on her work. In her book, Reproductions of an Empty Flagpole, Eileen writes

“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.”
-excerpt from Corolla, Reproductions of an Empty Flagpole -

There is so much in this book that resonates with readers like you and me. In the poem, “Eulogy”, she speaks of consistently travelling “to search for what will touch off an implosion in my heart”, and in the poem “The Empty Flagpole” she asks “What does it say about me when I ask for asylum in places where people wish to leave?”

It is statements like these that reach out and cause us to face the truth of our lives as wanderers and travellers, far from home, but still at home. Perhaps, these are questions we have asked, and perhaps these are statements we could have said.

In her blog, http://chatelaine-poetics.blogspot.com, Eileen Tabios speaks of going home to a people and not to a country. Regarding identity, she says the following:

I am reluctant to define identity because I feel identity is not stable, or that it's in flux (or perhaps this instability is my definition of it). And such instability, I believe, would exist regardless of any immigration issues. But, synchronistically, this seems to fit with how I sense my position as a diasporic Filipino: that is, without denying my "roots", as you put it, I feel that ultimately I am rootless. By this I mean that my "Philippines" is a place in my mind and heart, which may or may not fit the actual country identified today as the Philippines.

Certainly, the Philippines that existed when I was still living there (from ages 1-10) no longer exists -- it was before Marcos declared Martial Law and I still hold dear within my memory the sense from that time that the Philippines was at the brink of major progress. Well, what's transpired with and after Marcos has not been, on many levels, progressive, and I've not come to any accommodations with this in part because I've not really returned there. So I'm left with my childhood memory, and often dismay at what I've observed has happened with and since Marcos....

Politics, of course, are not culture or the people. Where I feel at home with Filipinos often has to do with my relationship and engagements with other Filipinos. To the extent that certain races are more warm-hearted than others, I do feel a warmth and gentleness from Filipinos that I sometimes don't experience with non-Filipinos.

So how despite growing up in the United States, in a culture that is different from what we know, how is it that Eileen retains a strong connection to her roots, an awareness of culture, history and heritage that resonates in her work.

Eileen: Poetry brought me back to my roots. Since age 10, I grew up as an "Americanized teenager" and didn't really pay much attention to Filipino culture until age 35 when I rebirthed myself (if you will) as a poet. I think the return to one's culture is logical -- if art is inherently about identity, then I would have been a blockhead if I hadn't begun to explore my Filipinoness. What I hadn't expected was how that search would create more questions than answers.

In Reproductions of an Empty Flagpole, she calls our attention to historical facts we might have forgotten, such as the Philippine-American war and how English which is sometimes called by Filipinos to be the borrowed tongue would be more accurately called the enforced tongue.

Referring to “subverting the language”, Eileen says:

My intentions as regards that phrase has changed over time. When I was a younger poet, I was interested in subverting English because of its historical role as a tool for U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. But over time I've also come to find that position to be limiting. When I subvert language nowadays, which is to say, attempt to use it in a more fresh or an unexpected way, it's more of an aesthetic decision rather than a political one. Basically, language is alive and so I'd like to use words beyond the contexts in which I inherit them, e.g. when one uses a word not based on its dictionary definition but based on its sound, image against the page, or how they feel against your tongue or mold the insides of your mouth.

And again in reference to herself as a poet straddling two cultures, she replies:

Actually, I've decided to avoid having my identity be limited by this notion of straddling two cultures. My imagination, especially as a poet, needs a larger expanse than this notion for purpose of identity.

Having said that, I don't mind being called Filipino because that's what I am. But I don't actually believe in the hyphenated Filipino phrase, whether it's Filipino-American or Filipino-European or anything else. I believe in just the single word "Filipino" and that it's a large enough word to be applicable anywhere around the world -- it's a position of faith that I proactively take up because I am a poet who believes in the power of words, specifically how the Word can expand instead of limit.

Named as one of the foremost Filipino American poets of the 21st century. I asked her what this statement means to her, and her is what she said in response to my question:

Absolutely nothing. One should never believe one's p.r., though this phrase is something that others applied to me versus something I say about myself.

And, actually, in thinking about this phrase a bit more, I've decided it's irritating. I'm sure the author of the phrase meant well, but the nature of this phrase's approach is something I find limiting. If I'm to have ambition as a poet, it's to be, to use the phrase's jargon, foremost among all poets of all time. (Not to say that's my ambition, but I'm just deconstructing the phrase as presented....wink).

Hmmmm. Or maybe I should just shut up and accept all compliments with a simple "thank you." It's not like poets get so many compliments about what they do, you know what I mean?

Anyway, the only time I take any poetry-related compliments seriously is when I have to sell a book or promote a gig. But that's called marketing, not poetry -- or my poetry anyway. I often have to promote so many poetry projects (not just mine but also other poets') and so I've learned to be careful never to confuse marketing with poetry.

To the growing mass of Filipinos who are adopting other countries and other tongues, and to their children, she says:

That to learn and immerse oneself in a new culture or new cultures is not contradictory with remaining true to one's ancestral heritage.

******

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a writer of speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy. Her works have appeared in various publications. Aside from this column, she also writes a regular interview column for the U.S.-based electronic publication: The Sword Review. She blogs sporadically at http://rcloenen-ruiz.blogspot.com

SHIN YU PAI reviews ASIAN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGIES

2006-02-05T17:53:00.001-08:00

[First published in HYPHEN, San Francisco, Summer 2005]

Surveying Recent Asian American Literary Anthologies

Ask any anthology editor the rationale behind organizing a together a new collection of work and you’ll get a wide and complex range of answers. Market need. The wish to showcase a new generation of voices. Political imperatives. The reshaping of the canon. When Bay area poet Eileen Tabios talks about her history of involvement editing various anthology projects, Tabios explains, “I've involved myself in editing Asian American literary anthologies for generally two reasons. The first is to expand previously narrow categorizations of "Asian American Poetry, helping to expand offerings to include the avant garde or other poetic forms that depart from strict story-telling narratives about overt Asian American experience. The second reason I've involved myself in this area is to address certain ethnicities that previously were not as fully presented in Asian American texts.”

In an era when the new crop of literary anthologies are edited by practicing writers and cultural activists for the communities in which these editors participate, The Norton Anthologies no longer hold poetic authority. This article will take a closer look at three literary anthologies which have recently hit the market and are slowly making their way into classrooms: Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, and Pinoy Poetics. While there is some overlap in authors appearing throughout the collections to be discussed, each of these books makes its own unique contribution to the ongoing discussion of Asian American literature, reflecting specific political and editorial sensibilities.

Taking its cue from anthologies like Jim Daniels and Edward Costanzo’s American Poetry: The Next Generation and David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series, Victoria Chang’s Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2003) gathers together and canonizes the work of 28 poets under the age of 35, including Cathy Park Hong, Mong Lan, Tina Chang, Skrikanth Reddy and Paisley Rekdal, who are framed in the editor’s introduction as representing the “new generation of Asian American poets”. Chang writes of her desire to assemble together a collection of work departing from a “recognizable Asian voice.” While poets such as Reginald Gibbons and David Baker have publicly praised the collection, The Next Generation drew fierce criticism from the Asian American literary community for its closed editorial approach and its assertion of authority which has prevented dialogue around issues of editorial process, the lack of poets outside the academy and the exclusion of radically experimental and innovative writers notably absent from this anthology. To find work for her collection, Chang, a Stanford business school graduate who exists on the fringes of the poetry world, combed through dozens of literary journals from which she created a master list of poets to solicit work. Chang mailed out approximately 60 queries to ”friends, friends of friends, editors, professors, and anyone that would respond” in order to get recommendations. In total, Chang considered the work of nearly 140 poets for her project, ultimately narrowing her selection to 28 contributors, the vast majority of whom have MFAs or PhDs and have some involvement with academia. The poets are arranged in alphabetical order and placed in context by essays from Marilyn Chin and the project editor.

Winner of the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and Foreward Magazine’s Gold Award for Anthologies Winner, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press, 2003) has quickly caught the spotlight for its ambitiousness, vision, and range. Screaming Monkeys grew out of a call put out to a community of writers, scholars, and artists by Editor M. Evelina Galang to respond to an article that appeared in an issue of Milwaukee Magazine in which a writer reviewing a Filipino restaurant referred to the owner’s child as a “rambunctious little monkey”. The Screaming Monkeys anthology is organized into thematic sections (including a final section on “transcendence” -- works that both depart from and transcend a “recognizeable Asian voice”) and compiles together historical documents and timelines, media quotes, and news headlines alongside fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, and commercial images of Asians as represented by mainstream media. The collection is diverse in its range of writing styles and voice, and across generations, pairing elder established writers, such as Marilyn Chin, Walter Lew, Garrett Hongo, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, alongside emerging writers such as Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, S.L. Kim, and Brian Komei Dempster. Loosely inserted throughout the book are artworks by Asian American artists including Barry McGee, James Yang, and Dindo Llana, and “found images” from sources including Apu from popular T.V. show “The Simpsons” to “go geisha” fashion images , which lack a clear editorial context or focus and more often than not distract from the textual works. Assembled by a collaborative team of editors under the leadership of Galang, Eileen Tabios, Sunaina Maira, Jordan Isip, and Anida Youe Esguerra contributed to giving shape to this collection, and scholar Leslie Bow provides a reading companion highlighting areas of inquiry to help make sense of the over 500 page collection. While Screaming Monkeys presents older work that has been previously anthologized or published before such as Li-Young Lee’s famous poem “The Cleaving”, the project of this collection was clearly to cast a wide as net as possible in gathering together a range of voices and to reframe these works in the context of the Asian American experience,

Pinoy Poetics: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American Poetics is published by Meritage Press, an independent publishing company founded by cultural activist Eileen Tabios who contributed to editing the Screaming Monkeys anthology, and who has also edited several other projects including Black Lightning (Asian American Writers Workshop, 1998) and Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers (Aunt Lute Press, 2000) co-edited with poet Nick Carbo. Conceptualized by Tabios and edited again by Carbo, Pinoy Poetics collects together the work of 40 international Filipino English-language poets. The poets speak for themselves, touching on issues of poetic craft, identity, and practice, approaching the call with a variety of strategies -- Vince Gotera conducts a self-interview, Paolo Javier plays with typography and the visual presentation of text in his anti-narrative essay “Marginalia”, Oakland based poet Barbara Jane Reyes discusses the process of writing and revising her long poem “Anthropologic” from her collection Gravities of Center, Jean Vengua talks about the experience of writing poems “in public” for the internet, and others speak of poets influential to the development of their poetic sensibilities, defining a personal poetic and presenting poems which mirror aspects of their practice. Carbo includes a literary timeline marking major events in the history of Phillipine writing and Tim Yu contributes an essay on the work of modernist poet and former “National Artist of the Phillipines” Jose Garcia Villa.

Keep an eye out next year for Carbo’s latest editorial project, Son of the Dragon: Literary Dialogues with Asian America Men, an anthology of writings on Asian American male identity and experiences which Carbo is co-editing with performance poet Marlon Esguerra of "I Was Born With Two Tongues" fame. The idea for this project grew out of a discussion over Whitney McNally’s "Gay or Asian?" piece that ran in the April 2004 issue of Details Magazine. The project will examine what it is to be male and Asian in America and both respond to and subvert how Asian American males are portrayed by mainstream media.

*****

Other Asian-American literary anthologies for further exploration:

• Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas
Edited by Marianne Villanueva & Virginia Cerenio

• Black Lightning
Edited by Eileen Tabios

• Babaylan
Edited by Nick Carbo & Eileen Tabios

• Watermark: Vietnamese Prose and Poetry
Edited by Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong & Luu Truong Khoi

also see other titles available at the www.aaww.org website

CONTRIBUTOR’S BIO

Shin Yu Pai is the author of Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998), and two titles which are forthcoming in 2005, Nutritional Feed (Tupelo Press) and Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks).

CIRILO F. BAUTISTA reviews PINOY POETICS

2006-02-05T17:53:00.000-08:00

Filipino Poetics
By Cirilo F Bautista
Philippine Panorama, Manila, Sept. 12, 2004

Another book that explores the so-called “diasporic difficulties” of Filipino-American poets in the United States of America is Pinoy Poetics, edited by Nick Carbo (San Francisco & St. Helena, Meritage Press, 2004). Subtitled, “A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American poetics,” it features some 41 Filipino and Filipino American poets who articulate the workings of their poetic consciousness leading to the production of a poem.

The essays vary in perspective and mode of presentation, but in content, they all reflect the westernization of the writer’s consciousness. They abound with quotations from European writers, references to influences by American poets, and the intrusion of the American landscapes and values -- the major elements which have created the Filipino psyche which is forever resenting its colonization while taking advantage of the new language it has acquired. The irony is that this has produced the inescapable situation of the Filipino writers in America -- though they may cling to ideas of their native land, they will be alienated from it; while they may adapt to the American culture and environment, they will never be completely American. That is the curse of using a foreign language -- you will never be part of it even if you think you are writing in it. You will remain faceless because you have no language and your identity has not achieved a settlement. The very hyphen in “Filipino-American” indicates a perpetual transpositioning between two places, never a coming home.

That is why these essays are interesting. They clarify the complex character of that psyche through expositions on the creative process. The styles are varied, from the philosophical to the polemical to the patchwork or cut-and-paste, but all offer unique insights into the craft. Sometimes, the writers themselves are unsure of how the process works; they strive to explain the inexplicable through poems that have other explanations. That is unavoidable because, though the process, the step-by-step physical crafting, may be graspable, the evolution of the inner being at the moment of composition possesses no specific system. It is the mystery in the process that seems to lie beyond understanding and utterance.

The ars poetica exploration is just one aspect of hte book's purpose; the main intention is to bring to a forum -- and examine the reasons for -- the prevailing neglect of the Filipino writers in America. For it is a fact that they have not, after all these years, succeeded in breaking into that country’s literary mainstream. Carbo complains that this is not their deficiency, but that there seems to be a sinister plot to keep them hidden from general knowledge. Though they have been trained in the best workshops in the world, Filipino poets continue to be ignored by editors and anthologies. This glaring marginalization needs clarification. Carbo asks, “What is causing this stubborn invisibility? Is it the Filipino poet’s own fault by not publishing enough poems in the U.S. or the Philippines? Can the poetry written by Filipinos be so bad that many Americans have refused to even look our way?”

To dispel doubts about the ability of the Filipino poets, Carbo traces their development and progress in the U.S.A. He comes to the conclusion that “the literary history of Filipinos in America is a hidden history…Is literary America ready to accept the notion that Filipinos have published poems and developed their craft at the same place alongside the American poets? Taking the known historical fact of slavery, racism, and colonial domination by America, it is easy to see why literary America may not be ready to relinquish their position of cultural nad literary superiority.” Carbo has answered his own question, and we agree with him.

Literary history is written by the literary winners. In fact, they really do not have to write it. By simply ignoring the existence of other literatures, they effectively truncate them and ultimately eradicate them. Out of sight, out of mind. They would not like an admixture to the mainstream, for it would dilute the richness of their achievement. This drives the Filipinos more and more to reach back to their island origins for cultural ammunitions that would support their imagined identity -- myths, legends, folk beliefs, etc. -- while trying to show that they could function as well as anyone in the American society. But they cannot rise to any position of power, being invisible. That is, they will find it difficult to alter the direction of American letters. Why? The poets in this book give a variety of reasons, and they all help us piece together a picture of a cultural and aesthetic struggle that is almost epical in its implications.

JUANIYO ARCELLANA reviews PINOY POETICS

2006-02-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

The Poetics of Being Pinoy
By Juaniyo Arcellana
The Philippine Star, Manila, October 18, 2004

There’s some kind of map being drawn in the largely diasporic world of Filipino poetry in English in the book Pinoy Poetics edited by Fil-Am Nick Carbo which gathers essays by Filipino poets and writers based in the homeland as well as in the United States, among other point sin between.

It is on the whole an ambitious volume filled with possibilities both profound and mundane, and its very existence stakes its own ground in the highly competitive publishing circles of North American, where about half of the Filipino writes represented here are based.

Carbo and partner in crime Eileen Tabios through this book have done much to fix demarcation lines on where exactly Filipino poetry in English in this our 21st century is and where it may be headed. Judging by the essays that appear in Pinoy Poetics, there is no other way to situate our work except in a wholly global (read: western) context. That our poetry has survived and even thrived through the decades despite stacked up odds having to do with race, gender, not to mention second language handicap, is enough testament to the perseverance and tough mindedness of the Pinoy writer in time.

Perhaps the most significant of the essays here are those written by Filipinos who reached maturity as writers in a foreign land, with added spice being if the writer had visited the home country to further sharpen the perspective, almost like Alice stepping back out of the looking glass. Because in poetry there is much romance and vagabond recklessness, the Filipino as poet cannot but feel at home in this medium, and in which a still place could be found for the crafting of verse.

Many years removed form Manila and his old Sampaloc district haunts, Eric Gamalinda comes up with an essay that is exhaustive in its scholarliness, complete with footnotes and properly attributed references, “Language, Light and the Language of Light” shows more than enough signs that he has grown well enough alone through the years, and has taken to heart the advice of a former teacher Franz Arcellana, that if one is to mature as a writer, one has to get as far away from home as possible.

Gamalinda’s colleague at the Philippine Literary Arts Council and fellow expatriate Luisa Igloria, uses a recent poem as a centerpiece for discussion of the creative process, in particular varied sources and a shifting point of view. Her poem “The Incredible Tale of the Ice Cream Cone Dog” spans the centuries by leaps and bounds, harking back to the World’s Fair at the turn of the century and fast-forwards in a modern conundrum that is the soda parlor juxtaposed with warm memories of azucena.

Another poet who spent most of his formative years in the home country only to migrate in adulthood is Mike Maniquiz, a natural in the language. Maniquiz recalls growing up in the middle class projects of Quezon City, and unearthing a book of Jose Garcia Villa at a public library while waiting to pass the time. He tells of a Caucasian woman who sits beside him on a place, and who is driven to tears when he lets her read from his book of poems. But is that the real reason why she weeps or is it her sensing here yet another poet far from home?

Corollarily of interest are the essays by those who migrated while they were young, and returned to the homeland only when they were well into maturity.

Eugene Gloria, now since relocated in an Indiana suburb ,spent some years here in graduate school at the University of the Philippines, which becomes the gist of his remembrance of a childhood in Avenida, Sta. Cruz. Of course the Sta. Cruz of his memory is a mere shadow of the Rizal Avenue circa early 1990s, time of his visit, underneath the clatter of the LRT and winding thorugh the dark alleyways preceding the good mayor’s buhayin ang Maynila program. But this is not simple nostalgia, rather a method of staying connected with his Filipino-ness, indeed no mean feat in a world of perpetual deconstruction. His Drivers at the Short-Time Motel remains a book of poems we’ve long wanted to read, and in the poem that ends his essay here we get to know the meaning of the word “scree.”

Oscar Penaranda did time in the grape farms of California and canning factories of Alaska, and so is familiar with the experiences of the first wave of Filipino migrants, one of whom became the benchmark of the Filipino American writer in the brave new western world, Carlos Bulosan. Penaranda posits correctly that the Filipino writer in America faces tremendous odds in a society where power is centered on the basically white, male and Protestant. Yet he knows whereof he writes and keeps faith in the root of the matter, those shifting concerns of a largely amorphous race.

The girl with the thorn on her side, Tabios in her essays gives a few hints on why she is writing not only as if her life depended on it but also as if there were no tomorrow. Lines between the genres and forms blur with Tabios, who uses performance and the visual arts as spark plugs for her poetry. For her poetry is the only way to live, and she intends to suck the marrow and everything else out of it.

There too are the poets who chose to remain close to home for the most part -- Gemino Abad, Ricardo de Ungria, Ruey de Vera, Krip Yuson et al. -- but on the whole we can glean that traveling and being Filipino or even staying put is a state of mind, in itself already a kind of elusive ars poetica.

CHRIS MURRAY REVIEWS REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

2006-02-01T22:15:00.000-08:00

[First published in SENTENCE, A JOURNAL OF PROSE POETICS, Winter 2004]

Eileen Tabios. Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole
Marsh Hawk Press, New York, NY: 2002. ISBN: 0-9713332-8-9.
By Chris Murray

"She knows she said I won't reach out to you again. But even as I write this, I don't think I'll have broken that promise. You don't exist."
--Eileen Tabios, "Eclipse," Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole

Those smallish parts of language, pronouns, are a significant source of artful excess: they are representatives, or reproductions of various speaking persons. The fact that there is no material substance to any poetic relationship of "I" to "You" is not news--think Rolling Stones, "Paint it Black," for the abject in that kind of relation of presence to absence. In language use, material referents always seem to shy from, to recede from their pronouns, and vice versa. Think silent films, the swirling of light down to a pinhole, then nothing. In the rhetorical economy necessary for poetry pronouns are an especial focal point of recession and reproduction for their referents. The prose poem as form makes this even more interesting since requiring that the relations be sustained at length, although they can never be anything but partial.

The prose poems in Eileen Tabios's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002) are laden with loss, with the problematics of lyric, in terms of addressing the absent other, the loss of physical other, the various problem of missing someone in space and in time. No small order for poetry to fill. Yet it is those smallish parts of language, pronouns, in their relations, which are given the work of reflecting and poetically resonating with the larger metonymic, a problematic of situating parts to wholes.

The pronoun-woven quote above, from the book's opening poem, "Eclipse," resonates exponentially with both the promise and the loss of physical meeting, "She knows ... I won't reach out to you... " (13). Thus it highlights a certain pronomial eclipse (and literally, too, given the poem's title), an excess, a wandering swirl of voice(s) that suggests the promise of known people, people warm with identity and voice--yet these are never quite manifest nor fulfilling to the speaker: the addressee, the unspecified "you," does "not exist," so is eclipsed by the reproduction, the pronoun. This is one way that the contradictions eddying around pronomial relations nevertheless provide renewed ways to think about lyric poetry and the in-turning of to speaker, the first person voice(s): "But even as I write this, I don't think I'll have broken that promise." Promise resonates continually, yet never manifests. It is the very problem of writing itself, as this speaker also notes. A book of poems focused to that relation and how variously it works is always news for readers of poetry.

News, and yet also a mainstay of poetic tradition in terms of lyric poetry. Here is the opening of "How Cyberspace Lost Midnight," one of many places in these poems that tightly link and configure to maximum economy all of these matters: representations of material body, grief over its loss, the presence/absence of the other, lyric image and voice. What drives the poetic economy here is that the pronouns resonate with the work of indicating people caught up in poetic regions of excess, here, that very contemporary space of excess, "Cyberspace":

Petals cling to the wet pavement, forlorn in their solitude and with the insistence of their grasp. She tries to avoid stepping on them, then considers the intention silly. But she continues to avoid their pale flesh, seeking instead the stolid indifference of the pavement. In the fragility of a cyclamen's aftermath, she senses a storm's apology.

She is familiar with departures: the loosening of embraces, the forfeiture of birthplaces... . Before the millennium, this thing called the Internet sought to intervene... . She wrinkles her brow in understanding for the first time how much she is about to lose, even as she refuses to pull the emergency rope that would cease the train she discovers herself piloting. There are bodies laid on the tracks. (65-66)

There is a strong subtext of drama in this poem, of narrative driving the lyric, staging it, and in very effective ways. Throughout the book there is a metatextually feminist subtext, as well, as shown in that primacy of regard for both real and symbolic dramas of material body, its desires and limits.

The feminist voice here should not come as a surprise: Tabios has made it known that this book contains poems authored as a way of exorcising "the dehumanizing aspects" of her own past life in the finance industry. Of the poem, "The Investment Banker," she writes: "I realized that -- particularly with this poem's ending -- I had written it in an attempt to obviate the dehumanizing aspects of my finance career."(1) The poem dwells on loss of "avoidance," which should be "under control" in terms of the speaker's loss of self: "At 4 a.m. he is not displeased to be alone walking the streets. At 4 a.m., he feels that the hour offers a certain excuse for his loneliness" (70), yet no excuse for the anomie, the eroding of necessary, humanizing, connectedness to people, to life.

The poem resonates with issues of male-centered gendering. And on the metatextual level, something of a coup de grace: written by a woman in the voice of a banker, a man, exposing his personal longings and the vapid nature of his work, it is as if to say, I, a woman, do hereby exorcise this particular, dehumanizingly male-centered way of being through my art. Indeed, a very freeing, assertive mode given any gender orientation and cultural situation.

To my mind, the measure of a poetry book's success would linger over questions of intellectual usefulness--the book's continuing, viable rhetorical challenges. In that sense alone, then, volumes could be written about how and why Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is important both for purposes of study in creative rhetorics or poetics, and as a most satisfying, pleasurable read.

--------------
(1) Eileen Tabios, "Humanizing a Dehumanizing Career," article posted to Tabios' weblog, Chatelaine-Poetics, http://chatelaine-poetics.blogspot.com. Archived Sunday 28 Dec 03, 9:25 a.m.

TOM FINK REVIEWS I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED

2006-01-30T06:30:00.000-08:00

[First published in BOOKMARK, 2005]

Review by Thomas Fink
I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED
Poems by Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, N.Y.
$25.00, 502 pp, Paper

In her poem “I Do,” Filipina-American author Eileen R. Tabios’s assertion “I do know English” is followed closely by the line, “I do know English and still will not ask permission”). But why does Tabios, in her book’s title, perform a kind of marriage vow to English, the language that was instrumental in the colonization of her native land between 1898 and 1946? “I Do,” which contains ironic references to the 2000 U.S. Presidential election and efforts to wring some honesty or feeling from a game-playing lover, also includes the information: “Because I do know English, I have been variously called Miss Slanted Vagina, The Mail Order Bride, The One With The Shoe Fetish, The Squat Brunette Who Wears A Plaid Blazer Over a Polka-Dot Blouse, The Maid”. Wouldn’t marrying English accord European-American masculinity patriarchal privilege over Filipina otherness? Instead, this kind of wedding brings a “knowledge” (in both the cognitive and erotic sense) of English that bespeaks the woman’s agency (despite the colonial and patriarchal past) and equality (especially in the refusal to “ask permission”). It also acknowledges that the poet has lived in the U.S. most of her life, speaks and writes, at this point, only English, cannot return to some pristine “origin” of the Philippines, as it does not exist, and gives herself the right to use the English language in a way that resists residues of colonial power relations.

If this sounds “postcolonial,” Tabios would rather be known as “transcolonial”: her work implicitly acknowledges colonial oppression and her people’s postcolonial difficulties stemming from prior and enduring exploitative relations, but she insists that this must not be the only subject matter: she must be able to write “across” these challenges to take on whatever aesthetic and social realms her imagination and elective associations bring her. The poet insists upon the freedom to seduce English, be seduced by its pleasures, and transform it in ways that produce effects and structures that the old colonizers could neither fathom nor countenance. For example, her “Clyfford Still Studies,” a suite of prose-poems with some verse-lines, spotlight Tabios’s ekphrastic mode, a dominant feature in her 2002 book of prose-poems, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. These texts do not literally convey the dark, jagged fields of the abstract expressionist’s big paintings but use them as a departure point for emotive journeys: “You know what I mean, that feeling of the very air pressing against you, the leaves whispering snidely overhead, the bees conspiring on what should be only a randomly-executed attack” (“On the Limits of Context”).

Indeed, Tabios’s work is more frequently abstract and disjunction-studded--in a word, “experimental,” and so it is helpful that, along with poems and prose-poems, Tabios provides ample discursive clarification of social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Tabios devotes space to her weblog explorations of poetics--which are well known in the cyber-poetry world--to accounts of her poetic processes (including “poem-sculptures”), to her invention of the “hay(na)ku),” a cousin of the haiku, and to her orchestration of “happenings,” involving many people and various other art forms, that constitute her belief in poetry as performance, not merely dramatic but worldly. Filipino-American poet Nick Carbo’s interview with Tabios is also included, as are e-mail exchanges with other poets. The book ends with a close reading by Ron Silliman, not only a pre-eminent Language Poet but a widely “hit” blogger.

As for the organization of the poetry, prose-poetry, and other elements (including a few of Tabios’s actual wedding photos) in the book, this is part of the “performance” of poetry/poetics. The first section spans 214 pages (more than twice as long as the average poetry collection) and includes 10 sections, each of which has a particular thematic or formal rationale. Section III, “an autobiography” that is not an autobiography, comprises a verse novel (“The Definitive History of Fallen Angels”) about a female character’s adventures in love and longing that offers many flashes of psychological insight without a traditional novel’s recognizable plot structure and closure.

For someone so intent on establishing ways of situating her poetic production, Tabios also manages to sound like 70s Reader-Response literary theorists, even more than the Language Poets, in insisting that the reader, not the author, “completes” the text. She even includes a section of “Footnote” poems that appear on the bottom of otherwise blank pages. As noted on the back cover, “the texts which generate the footnote-poems are not included, thus enabling a space where readers play the role of speculating what story(ies) is (are) being footnoted.” Even contextual specifications about race, ethnicity, international history, and (for that matter) gender and class cannot fully control the instability of reference in such texts as the “Conjuration” poems, where multiple “ands” and blank spaces disrupt any sense of continuity, and the “Epilogue Poems,” where ampersands abound and some lines are simultaneously present and crossed out.

I read many of Tabios’s poetic explorations of romantic/erotic themes as a testing of the claims of freedom and deterministic constraints. “Rapunzel’s Deaf Eyes” rewrites the old western fairy tale to articulate an imprisonment of self within others’ idealized expectations ("I live in a turret now/ No stairs, no hair// Reading yourself/ into a stranger’s poem// for a ‘hidden track’/ lying// beneath lemonade days/ envied by all// except their owner,” but it ends with the possibility of an overriding illumination:

meat withers
in the freezer

children and spouses
lose innocence

Only the moon
remains to write

me of something
the rumors profess

is called “light.”

Moonlight is both a (traditional) external source of inspiration and a trope of internal fortitude that “writes” the poet’s unflagging determination to exceed socially imposed limitations, to persist in the “transcolonial” goal of “transit” expressed in the title of one of her poems: “Fly Luminously, Please”

*****

Thomas Fink, a Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, has published three books of poetry and two books of criticism. A Different Sense of Power (Fairleigh Dickinson UP) appeared in 2001. His paintings hang in various collections.

TOM FINK REVIEWS REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

2006-01-30T06:07:00.000-08:00

[For a lecture at Cuny-LaGuardia, 2004]

Some Paragraphs on a Paragraph by Eileen Tabios
by Thomas Fink

The concluding section of Eileen Tabios's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2002) is "A Triptych for Anne Truitt." and this "triptych" exemplifies the conceptual density, imagistic richness, and subtle narrative layering of the book as a whole. The title of the third prose-poem in this triptych, "The Continuance of the Gaze" (117-119), announces the text as an anthem for the viewer and the artist's endurance, and indeed, the artist is "always already" a viewer, and visa-versa. The "you" in the opening paragraph might be an art lover, a lover of human beings, an artist, two or all of the three, or yet others, but I am interested in reading this paragraph as guidance for a contemporary painter hungry for a clarification of his/her painterly poetics when the usual "trial and error" is too trying and error-laden:

Can you see with such compassion that I might mistake your lucidity for the high line of a clearing sky, when instead it is the song of foam cresting a distant wave? Can you pay the price for risking perception and imperceptibility? Can you be surrounded-- sink into, then be uplifted -- by the singularity of a color emanating from a teal painting tiny enough to stand on one hand? I have felt Michelangelo's slaves surge out of stone. I trust in radiance. Let: Us. (117)

How does the artist assume the challenge of "seeing" what is unfolding, let's say, in her/his canvas or sculpture with "compassion"--with the ability to set aside personal gain and self-flattering gestures in order to make a contribution to the perceptual experience of others? Is it to "trust in radiance," to pay attention to that unfoldingpatiently until "radiance" manifests itself?

The co-presence and equivalence of "let" and "us," rather than the obvious "let us," urges the artist to "let" the artmaking process lead to "radiance," so that the felicitous intersubjectivity of an "us" can be established. If this successfully achieved "compassion" is posed as a cause not only for significant "perception," like the ecstatic release of "Michelangelo's slaves" from the "prison" of his "stone," for miscommunication-- the viewer's mistaking the intention of one tropological imagistic/figurative possibility for another--"imperceptibility" is not necessarily a negative result of the artist's "risk" but the inevitability of endlessly proliferating imaginations.

Further, "imperceptibility" may not be caused by flawed rendering; the very mystery of what is considered imperceptible enhances the appeal of the artwork for the viewer and the artist who cannot, as interpreter, contain effects produced by her "creation." Both of these participants in the art-making process can be psychologically "surrounded" by emergent "radiance"--paradoxically in a spatially tiny area--and then experience aesthetic immersion, a further relinquishing of control that makes them "sink into" a kind of quicksand, and finally, realize the reward of being "uplifted"--relieved of the discomfort of surrendering the ego by a lightening of psychic gravity, an exquisite simultaneity of plenitude and weightlessness. And if the "song of foam" lasts only a moment, it can come again in other "emanations" of color, shape, and motion.

Tabios's notion of "compassion," then, is as far from self-sacrificism as it is from self-indulgence. Its "trust" in "radiance" nurtures the open, patient cultivation of possible causes and conditions of perceptual "lucidity" in selves and others.

DAVE JOHNSON REVIEWS MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY

2006-01-30T06:02:00.000-08:00

[First published in THE ASIAN REPORTER, Oct. 26, 2004]

Two Poetry Collections Celebrate Philippine Heritage Month
By Dave Johnson

Menage a Trois with the 21st Century
By Eileen R. Tabios

Museum of Absences
By Luis H. Francia

As part of the celebration of Philippine Heritage Month, here are collections by two poets that reflect upon the history and culture of the islands and push vigorously on the stuffy envelope of poetry itself.

While it is easy to find references to his ethnic origins through museum of absences, it’s also exciting to join Luis Francia on the broader literary playing field. I his big-hearted, pull-no-punches verse, Francia takes on the personae of a Manong (Pilipino for older brother), a lyrical revolutionary behind the enemy lines that interlace our glove, and the re-embodiment of Walt Whitman singing songs o fhis brothers, sisters, and himself.

In "New York Mythologies: For the undocumented victims of the Twin Towers collapse," he melds history and legend into art:

In the aeries of an ever-evolving city
In the strets of a revolving text, wher ea

Derelict contemplates the Bhagavad-Gita
A messenger dreams of running through Machu Picchu

Our bones are marrow’d with hope
Our childhood gods and duendes in tow

Cradles an dgraves on our backs.

Manhatta, you who no one can own
Listen!

In the days that whisper of the past
In nights without history

Our bodies are your capital

Our lives and deaths your new mythologies

An eloquent rebel against all warmongers, Francia wishes in "Meditations, #7: Prayer for Peace":

May a bird kill a cannon
and a baby destroy a gun
May buildings banish missiles
and children stop tanks
May a mother’s love bury bombs
and hand grenades
May palm trees and olive groves
overwhelm planes with their
beauty and bounty

And, closer to his homeland, the poet muses about:

Our odors, our foods
Our violent tempers and gentle manners
Our delicate bones, our
Millenial colonial contradictions
The humanity of the subjugated

These are the thoughts of a brown man
Indomitable in the season of aridity

Francia is the author of the semi-autobiographical Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, which earned him 2002 PEN and Asian American Writers Workshop awards. An essayist, editor, and journalist, Francia writes, in New York, for The Village Voice and The Nation, and in Manila for The Sunday Inquirer Magazine. He also teaches at New York University.

*

Forty-three centuries ago, Enheduanna, a Mesopotamian poet-priestess, wrote hymns to the love goddess Inanna or ishtar. In 1763, after the assassination of Diego Silang, who started the Ilokano Revolt against the Spanish, his wife Gabriela Silang, who continued the rebellion, was captured and subsequently hanged.

In Menage a Trois with the 21st Century, Eileen R. Tabios voluptuously resurrects these two women and offers them to the reader to form a ménage. It’s a scholarly affair with a bounty of historical details, a romp in the upside-down meadows of Dada, an da fantastic romance between the present, past, and future.

It’s also an honest self-portrayal of the poet who not only channels historical figures but leaves her own psyche exposed and vulnerable to the reader’s eye.

The result is a brilliant juggle of realtime and innerspace that reminds me of poet Sharon Doubiago’s matchmaking when she brought Marilyn Monroe and Jack Kerouac together on a sandy beach in southern Oregon, and Ray Brandbury’s ephemeral encounter with Pablo Picasso on yet another shore in France.

Tabios’ style is elegiac and breezy. In "Italics: As Gabriela Continues to Stand," Tabios ponders the use of commas as well as …

We can never anticipate
what shall make corners

of a room stretch instead of crouch--

I, do, not, wish, to, ovulate,
for, mystery’s, overrated, charms--

I wish to enter a room,
see rose petals yawning

like girls
(like the daughters I may never loosen)

and flick my finger at
the macrodactylus suspinosus:

set the peasant beetles soaring
over the windowsill

Tabios left a career in economics and international business to write, edit, and publish poetry. Inspired by the visual arts, she has explored ways to create poetry using multi-dimensional space. This pursuit has led to performance art, “happenings,” and mixed-media installations. Well-known for her controversial poetics blog, www.chatelaine-poet.blogspot.com, …she lives in St. Helena, California where she grows grapes and operates Meritage Press.

LEZA LOWITZ REVIEWS REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

2006-01-29T20:34:00.000-08:00

KQED Radio Show Pacific Time (2002/3)

Host intro: Time now for our book review. Leza Lowitz joins us this month with her take on ..."Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole:" poems by Eileen Tabios.

Imagine yourself... at home in America.

Hard to do? It is for poet and editor Eileen Tabios, who left the Philippines for America when she was ten. Martial law and corruption changed her homeland, so she can never go back. But Tabios never really feels "at home" in America either. Even when she's most comfortable, there's a sense of feeling alien because she looks "other." She grapples with dislocation, being asked even today, "Do you speak English?" Especially after 9/11. She worries about the dissolution of civil liberties. That's why there's no flag on the flagpole. Even, or especially, in these days of enthusiastic flagwaving.

VOICE [for poem excerpt]: "What does it say about me when I ask for asylum in places where people wish to leave? I try to find meaning in flags. But they repel me when buffeted by an incidental breeze."

So she pledges allegiance to her art. And the act of writing is a political one, staking out territory word by word.

VOICE: "And because I don't know what else to do, I flee to an alien land whose history has become like you-impossible to be grasped. To escape chaos, the Greeks created art with abstractions. It is a familiar approach, having long used geometry to deny myself caresses."

Tabios is at home with abstractions. Her prose-poems are fiercely intelligent, though they're lush, musical, sensuous, mysterious. Yet it is in he erotic landscape of the flesh that she seeks refuge. But that geography, too, is not without its territorial disputes:

VOICE: "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."

This is not the world of fixed identities, and its language is neither Tagalog nor English. It's a different world, whose poets are forging a cultural identity that is post-colonial, revolutionary, universal, and peaceful. Theirs won't be a unifying flag under one god, but one that's as various as the hands that raise it.

Host Outro./credit: Leza Lowitz is a writer and editor, author of Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By and Reviews Editor for Manoa Journal. Her selection this month was...Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole...by Eileen Tabios Published by Marsh Hawk Press.

RIC CARFAGNA REVIEWS MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY

2006-01-29T18:07:00.000-08:00

[First published in Poetic Inhalation, 2004]

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women . . . .
Book review by Ric Carfagna

As in the 19th century when humanism sought to break the grip of the theocratic hierarchal influence pervading society, it seems it's now time (high time) to move, or at least adjust, the spotlight away from the patriarchal domination that overshadows so many aspects of our world; and it is the art (poetry) world that I'm particularly interested in here. So now it is time to Praise, or at least acknowledge with gratitude the accomplishments of women. Eileen Tabios and her new book, Ménage A Trois With The 21st Century does this quite nicely. And although the women Eileen 'acknowledges' might not necessarily be household names or even personages whom we have ever heard of before, their accomplishments in society and the world is significant, as we realize upon reading Ménage. Eileen's book comes on the heels of another work, Catherine Daly's Da Da Da, that prominently features the undertakings -- some overtly obvious, some more subtly hidden -- of women through the ages.... Eileen and Catherine's books provide a good one-two punch to the petrified patriarchal institutions that set themselves up as consummate 'taste-makers' and authorities. Hopefully the positive trend these two poets have initiated will continue and to some degree 'even the score', if such a thing is possible, tracing such literary and other practices back to Eve! Eileen in her wisdom understands this, featuring as her heroines two women from diverse time periods: one ancient (2300BCE) and one more modern, well modern in a relative sense (18th Century). I will speak in some detail on these personas momentarily but first I would like to expound the 'physicality' of Eileen's book in general.

xPress(ed) has been offering first rate quality e-books since 2002. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen is the editor of both xPressed and x-Stream, the companion e-zine of new poetry vistas. What makes this new release so special is that it is the inaugural foray of xPress(ed) into the world of the 'empirical' book. Ménage A Trois With The 21st Century is an appropriate jumping off point for xPress(ed) so soon into this new century. It sets the stage for what will hopefully be a long illustrious publishing career. Jukka, who is a first rate poet and cutting-edge poetic experimenter, is also proving himself to be a top-notch editor. He possesses a keen eye for uncovering and disseminating new and exceptional poetic talent, and 'exceptional' is most assuredly the word I would use to describe the poetry of Eileen Tabios.

Ménage sports a unique cover, designed by Jukka: it bears a ghostly image of Eileen embedded in a random computer generated sequence of alpha-numeric characters. It seems as if Eileen's voice is emanating from behind a din of garbled mechanistic background noise. On the back cover the image is reversed and Eileen's image is fore grounded with the random code fading into near invisibility. The book contains 3 works: a three page preface poem and two longer sequences taking up the remainder of the book's 120 plus pages. In the review copy Eileen sent to me she included a lovely, personal message: "For Ric, To poetry as a way of Life." Indeed, Eileen does approach poetry as a way of life. Her words speak from the depths of her being, emanating a truth and beauty that is simply brilliant. Even when Eileen delves into abstractions and transcendent speech she has an inimitable way of relating it to the pragmatic world we inhabit. The reader never feels lost in an etheric haze of non-tangibilities. One can savor each word and image she creates as a tasty morsel being part of a bigger feast. Her poetic vision is a unique experience:

If, as I have dreamt, I possess twenty-ten vision, I then can see wind shift along an ocean's silver surface. Or the curl of a leaf dropping a few miles away. . . .

. . .

this poem
whose reality is the ideal
for you in me

~

"Venus Rising For The First Time in the 21st Century" serves as an epigraph, an opening poem which sets the stage both physically and spiritually for what is to follow. It takes us back to the first time we saw the evening/morning 'star', Venus, rising above the horizon in this new century: so silent and unassuming, swimming in a celestial sea far removed from all the joys and tragedies acted out on this small insignificant speck of dust called earth. Through the still air we see our 'sister' planet, a radiant sentinel in the sky. We choose to acknowledge it or not. Maybe we think of Botticelli's Birth of Venus and knowing how appropriate an image that might serve: her emergence into the world of 'flesh', her conception brought to full term and its fecundity gracing our eyes with its beauty, its perfection:

fleshed creature
once hiding
in a sea's dim depths

towards a sun
in whose light
scars reveal themselves

However we envision it, 'it' is life manifesting, attempting to teach the terrestrial mind to transcend earthly binds, seeing light and love removed from the shackles that 'mankind' so ignorantly places it its hearts and minds:

you want to see
her seeing
herself. You want

her seeing
her wanting
you behind the wave
. . .

We next encounter the first of the two large poetic sequences: "Enheduanna In The 21st Century." It is divided into twenty sections with an introduction. It is a work that draws us viscerally in by its massive proclamation. Its length and breadth rises from the poetic depths like a great leviathan threatening to devour the reader in a great flourish of poetic passion. In the opening pages we are introduced to Enheduanna (born 2300BCE). She is considered the world's first recorded poet to have her work preserved on cuneiform tablets. She is a moon princess and daughter of the King of Sumeria. She was known to summon Innanna (or Ishtar), the Sumerian goddess of love who would descend to the earth in response to her invocations. But we are told that once Innanna deserted Enheduanna and Enheduanna removed herself to a leper colony to mourn. Eileen has taken that event and moment in time to explore, in her words, "the sensibility underlying this period of Enheduanna's anguish: desire."

Through its twenty sections Eileen weaves for us sublime tapestry of beauty and perfection. By looking upon and meditating upon her words, we are transformed and translated-fused to both the present moment and the ancient arcane past. We enter a realm beyond the pedestrian ego's ability to imagine and become enveloped in a state of an unfolding enlightenment. Eileen speaks not only as if she is exploring and meditating upon this ancient princess but as if she has taken on her actual identity, enshrouded in the flesh, an incarnated oracle appearing to impart an ancient, clandestine wisdom and how it relates to this current century. Ultimately she reveals how all things change, yet how all things remain the same:

And because I see today how the sky waxes and wanes between white and grey, I know you have become uncertain. How difficult it is to remain impassive before the sight of tremor? You are learning how a secret contains seemingly infinite depth . . .

. . .

Tell me, you who reads me: are you as unmoved as your reticence implies? Unmoved as you witness me "lose myself from (my) view" of you? . . .

Each of the twenty sections takes on the appearance of a meditative personal journal, an internal conversation. There are musings on current modern situations, the architecture, the technology and the landscape, and how Enheduanna might herself react when placed in the author's current timeline and circumstances:

And are you thinking of me while you pace the streets of a city whose sidewalks have
memorized the atonal rhythm of my footsteps? Surely you have walked through the spaces I have hollowed out from air left behind in anticipation of you.

. . .

There, now. When you turn this corner and feel Baudelaire's "infinite expanse" at the sight of a sky thinned by two parallel skyscrapers . . .

There are times I am reminded of Olson: how he took Maximus of Tyre as his spiritual-poetic mentor, placing him in the Gloucester of the 20th century. Eileen's circumstance is not too dissimilar a situation. Where the two differ is in the messages they both 'receive' from their respective muse, and then 'translate' that message to us the reader. Olson sought to bring forth a historical account rooted in empirical facts. His 'message', entangled within his infamous lists of 'stuff', his profiles and accounts of the Gloucester's place and personalities currently and throughout its history, this colored by his attempt to expound "The Tale of The Tribe", to quote the title of Michael Bernstein's book. Eileen differs in her approach. We come to know her mind in a more intimate, compassionate way. She probes with depth and questions her surroundings, relating them back to her ancient muse, thereby placing Enheduanna in the present day. She seems at times to be entranced, totally absorbed in 'otherness'. This 'experience' reaches beyond the mere cognition of facts and figures, it assumes the nature of a mystical/transcendent phenomenon. We come to know that all occurrence emanates from the reality the mind manifests; and this is a 'true' reality to the eyes and emotions of the author, and vicariously, to the reader.

Should we pause this expressionist brushstroke so I may ask: What can I do to break a certain pattern? What can I do to avoid the birth of regret in this space you and I have fashioned from moon, light, wind, sky, mules, paintings, rainbows, diamonds, chocolates, "aggressive speculation," and the wings of six fallen angels?

Moon, light, wind, mules, rainbows, angel wings, etc., quite a different itemization than an Olson 'list' of things. These are the trinkets and jewels that capture Eileen's eye, mind and imagination. Although Olson did speak of jewels and miracles,they were off-shore, by islands; Eileen's are within her being.

There is a curious note in "Enheduanna #20," which also happens to be the longest section in the poem. It begins with an epigraph from St. John of the Cross:

"I live without inhabiting myself"

Eileen has surrendered a part of her identity to bring to life her ancient poetic counterpart. She has resurrected this kindred spirit through her will and through Eileen's eyes Enheduanna sees again and probes all that transpires in her new surroundings. There is the questioning, the quest and the longing to understand the driving force behind desire, behind anguish, their outward manifestations and the inner facets, how they intimately shape who we are. And though time and distance might seem to separate one from another, ultimately it is a common ontological/metaphysical inheritance that is shared, This is one of the mysteries the self seeks to unravel in the relatively short amount of time allotted to this physical existence. Eileen puts it so perfectly:

I have memorized this girl's tale
for its location in a city
you once shared with me

in the same time zone,
a period both our memories failed
to grasp so that I may write

this Poem
whose reality is the Ideal
for you in me

~

In the third of the poems, "Gabriela Silang Couple(t)s With The 21st Century," Eileen once more 'entangles' herself with a historical personage. This time it is Gabriela Silang, the wife of the slain Philippine revolutionary Filipino Diego Silang. The setting is the 18th century Philippines and the revolt against forced colonization by the Spanish authorities. Gabriela, was more a revolutionary than her husband, leading, in Eileen words, "one the longest (possibly the longest) local rebellion against the Spaniards." Although historically significant, the revolt was short lived. Gabriela and her followers were captured and hanged; Gabriela was thirty two years old. The poem is an extensive testament continuing sixty pages. In her treatment of an 'unsung' heroine, I am reminded of Susan Howe's work on similar themes. The design of the poem does stay true to the title: couplets; also the play on couple(t)s shouldn't go unnoticed. As in the previous poem, Eileen transforms the past to present, this time via someone not so far removed from current day. Eileen states in the intro "I wrote these poems to create a new life for Gabriela Silang in the 21st century." This Eileen accomplishes in her of structure of 'coupling' with Gabriela. The style and approach is different than it was for Enheduanna. In Gabriela Eileen states that she has "inserted details from my life because I sensed that I could best speak for/about Gabriela by not denying who was then speaking on her behalf." These personal inserted details augment our understanding of both Eileen and Gabriela. They show us the mind of Eileen at work, her imagination, compassion and sincerity. These and other qualities fuse with the historical personage of Gabriella, creating for the reader an ongoing conversation, an anamnesis and a revelatory experience:

She keeps losing
this ancient lesson:

"white" does not signify
a bleached bone

and an orchid petal
share each other's complexion --

she keeps losing
this same lesson

No metaphors exist
for genocide --

Eileen's work serves as a historical testimony to Gabriela's revolutionary courage. We witness her reaching beyond the safe haven of insular self in her attempts to 'break the back' of the will-to-power: the subjugating force that threatened to oppress her people:

The Book of Genesis
Authorizes men

"to have dominion
over the fish of the sea

over the fowl of the air
over the cattle, over the earth"--

Like many other things
enforced upon my people

the gospel of invaders
offers no succor--

It is interesting to note the similarities of the words genesis and genocide, how one denotes a beginning and one denotes an end. This did not escape Eileen's notice, and even though the above two excerpts are separated by thirty pages, the message comes through with a ringing clarity, not obfuscated by superfluous rhetoric.

In "Domestic," Eileen ruminates on ". . . If A Revolution Had Not Interfered," what Gabriela's life might have offered her:

I am a stranger
to laced-edged aprons--

My melons
are rarely ripe--

My dining room boasts
a long mahogany table

whose silk flowers
offer the fragrance of dust--

Just in the first two lines we get an idea of Gabriela's nonconformist, revolutionary spirit, the unease in her heart and her innate knowing that there is more to life than domestic prattle and the trivialities that consume so many others:

That I have money
for perfect hems

consoles
like martyrdom--

Here we sense another facet of her disquietude: her innate realization that all materiality is transient, a momentary glimmer and then a passing to dust:

Perhaps I hold the potential
for a poem keening

for the sun
to irradiate the sky

until we all inhabit
the same room

in Walt Whitman's
expansive ocean--

Here we have Eileen/ Gabriela coming to a realization of the inherent potential for transformation that indwells all existence; a rising above the insignificant ephemeralities that fill our world. There is the aspiration at the core of every person to find the 'meaning', to ultimately understand the reason why, and the purpose of

The "fragile balance"
between "sterility"

and "sensuality"--
. . .

She would have compromised
for fortitude

~

"Gabriela Silang Couple(t)s With The 21st Century" and "Enheduanna In The 21st Century" are diverse, multi-faceted and eclectic in their construction and their offering. They cover the spectrum from tragedy to ecstasy and every emotion in between like the changing hues and patterns in a fine embroided fabric. The reader comes upon these shifts in sentiment and sensibilities and is compelled to adopt a new frame of reference, a new landscape in which they must navigate. But the compass remains always in the hands of Eileen's good sense of structure, logic and fluid readability. This allows the reader to easily flow from one transition to another:

And perhaps you are looking today at a sky whose blue sapphire radiance often makes her sing, and you hear her singing now. . . .

. . .

And you suddenly become a statue in the midst of a crowded street, a horde of black-clad strangers dividing itself about you (making you remember, even as you continue to fall into this dream, a photograph of nuns lifting their skirts as they run towards the edge of a wave). . . .

. . .

I remember the rice fields
sometimes melancholy at dusk

. . .

I am empty
and emptying

. . .

pellucid bliss
engendered by beauty
~

What I find fascinating is Eileen's ability to incite us to explore the many aspects of our emotional makeup. Her poetry displays a higher level of creation, one that takes our consciousness beyond the mundane world of a diurnal immediacy, out of our 'quiet lives of desperation' and lifts our awareness, seating us in the upper echelons of a transcendent reality. Eileen's poetry also serves as a 'reverse' prophetic utterance. She is more than a historian spewing forth dry facts and dates. She understands human nature, she expresses in her writing the burden of freedom, of beauty and knowledge of the sublime nature existing at the core of all things. Her visions are articulated with a graceful poetic poise and though she at times relates the cruel and godless aspects of humanity, she never wanders far from her center of peace. This comes across wonderfully and honestly to the reader. The closing lines from the poem Wedding Veil best serve to describe Eileen's poetry and Eileen:

Only beauty,
Beauty --

NICK CARBO REVIEWS REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE

2006-01-29T06:50:00.000-08:00

[First Published in Second Avenue Press, 2003-4]

Review of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole. Marsh Hawk Press. 2002.
ISBN: 09713332-8-9. $12.95

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is Eileen Tabios’ first book of poetry to be published in the United States and this volume of art-inspired prose poems should bring to an American audience what the Philippine and Southeast Asian publishing world has already known for several years: Eileen Tabios is a world class poet with serious talent. She has had three previous books of poetry published in the Philippines since 1989. They are Beyond Life Sentences (1989) which won the Manila Book Critics’ Circle National Book Award, Ecstatic Mutations (2000), and My Romance (2001).

Reproductions begins with the poem “Eclipse” which asserts the poet’s intimate connection to the world of art, “To escape chaos, the Greeks created art with abstractions. It is a familiar approach, having long used geometry to deny myself caresses.” Many of the poems in the book are inspired by works of art like “The Kritios Boy,” “Jade,” “Adultery,” “The Color of a Scratch in Metal,” “The Wire Sculpture,” “The Fairy Child’s Prayer,” “The Destiny of Rain,” “My Saison Between Baudelair and Morrison,” “Muse Poem,” “Franz Kline Kindly Says About Three Gersture-Laden Brushstrokes,” “Insomnia’s Lullaby,” and the whole last section of the book entitled “Triptych for Anne Truit.” Tabio’s approach to these poems is pure ekphrasis. In ancient Greece, philosophers defined ekphrasis as a vivid description intended to bring the subject before the mind’s eye of the listener.

The author of this book is ultimately successful in this artistic enterprise of bringing the subject before the mind’s eye of the readers and these readers will not only be enlightened but informed.

ALFRED YUSON REVIEWS I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH, FOR MY BELOVED

2006-01-29T06:43:00.000-08:00

[First published in THE PHILIPPINE STAR, Manila, February 21, 2005]

Excerpt from a column:
I TAKE THEE, ENGLISH . . .
By Alfred A. Yuson

A synchronicity tax, oh yes, thank goodness we don’t have that yet. Otherwise I might have landed in the poorhouse last week when, starting on this column-review of certain titles that should enhance our current drive toward regaining excellence in the English language, what should fall on my lap but this heavy tome straight out of California, titled I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved.

Why, wunnerful!

The book is authored by our friend Eileen R. Tabios, poet, editor, ekphrasis expert, publisher, proselytizer for Fil-Am literature. An all-around Wonder Woman, she also tends an orchard at Napa Valley when she’s not consuming bottles of produce as a bibulous epicurean cum blogger on the comparative merits of the red-or-white stuff.

The hefty, 504-page volume, published by Marsh Hawk Press in New York (MarshHawkPress@cs.com), is quintessential Madame Eileen, starting with its charming cover that features a young bride, brown and very pretty, pairing of with a dashing groom, Caucasian, for a highlight photo-op climaxing that sacrament called matrimony.

The contents are also quintessentially Tabios, which is to say that it’s something like manifest destiny turned manifold. To call it a grab bag is to do postmodern palaver an injustice. Let’s say multi-disciplinary, assembling as it does, rather ambitiously, her extraordinary output in several literary genres: poems, prose poems, essays, exegeses on others’ works as well as on her own, by others, etc.

There’s a scenario that’s section-titled “Obviating the Proscenium’s Edge’ and piece-titled “But Seriously, When I was Jasper Johns’ Filipino Lover …” -- where she plays herself as a character, while a Kali artist and a Bride are supposed to be played by her fellow Fil-Am poets form SF, Michelle Bautista and Barbara Jane Reyes.

There’s an ars poetica essay, “Six Directions: Poetry as a Way of Life,” that’s illustrated by photos documenting a performance “happening” that featured what Tabios billed as a poem sculpture -- the interactive “Poem Tree” which required the participating audience to pi poems on Eileen’s very own, now vintage, bridal dress.

There’s an interview of her by poet Nick Carbo, an epistolary Poetics via e-mail, “Sculpted Poems,” and “hay(na)ku” poems which are a Pinoy take on the haiku in a stepladder tercet form that Tabios initiated.

Why, the handsomely designed book even has all of 90-odd pages that are nearly, concretely, blank, but for one-to-two-line footnotes at the bottom. I suppose this extravagant feature presciently addresses any possible allegation that the multiplicity of dazzling entries constitutes a top-heavy offering.

Yet indeed, spectacularly over the top is the direction Eileen Tabios seems to have always gravitated towards; she is a Baz Luhrman of an entrancing, entranced poet-aesthete. And her Moulin Rouge of exultant literary treats is run by a first-class Madame, graciously, elegantly, exquisitely at all hours.

But this is not to say that Tabios’ fundamental verse belongs to the province of frippery. Space considerations dictate that I offer but one quote; for this I select the first few lines of the emblematic, native hark-back that is “Season of Durian,” which starts with epigraphs from Joey Ayala (“Durian defies categories.”) and Jacques Derrida (too long to be quoted here). “Somewhere/ a crop/ teases a wet opening/ to soften bones// Nipples nail a man/ into silence. So loud the stars,/ for once, are audible…”

We hear you, Eileen. Loud-speakers blaring or muted, your marriage ot poetry ,to English, to universes beloved and betrothed, scan only signals joy, ecstasy, and fulfillment. Hear! Hear! And we are all so much less benighted.