Thomas Fink introduces INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog
Poems & New 1996-2015 by Eileen R. Tabios
(Dos Madres Press, Loveland, OH, 2015)
In the United States, the catalog or list poem first made its appearance
in the work of Walt Whitman, who himself was evidently influenced by Old
Testament verse-lists. Formally and thematically, Whitman was a democratizing
force in American, and catalogs in Song
of Myself and many other poems refused to separate high and low, significant
and insignificant. Many modern and contemporary poets have followed the bearded
bard in his forays into list-poems, but perhaps Eileen R. Tabios is the first
to gather a Selected Poems comprised
entirely of such texts. Since her debut in the late nineties, Tabios has been a
restless experimenter; list poems have served as one major fulcrum for her diverse poetic experiments.
Like
Whitman, Tabios has prioritized democratic impulses in the conscious shaping
and articulation of her poetics. However, while Whitman stands as a figure
claiming centrality for his American-ness and for an idea of “America,” Tabios’
postcolonial—or as she chooses to put it, “transcolonial”—subjectivity has done
much to shape her poetics. (Writings on her work by such critics as Leny
Mendoza-Strobel and Joi Barrios should be consulted for a thorough
contextualization of postcolonial themes, and Tabios herself has frequently
commented directly on this matter in autobiographical prose and in her art
criticism.) Born in the Philippines during the Marcos era and less than two
decades after the U.S. relinquished its last vestige of the colonial authority
wrested from Spain in 1898, Tabios is the inventor of what she has identified
as a Filipino diasporic poetic form, the hay(na)ku, and she has lived in the
U.S. since the age of ten.
The
two-columned poem “You Must Have Read Elizabeth’s Many Ways of Loving” (1998),
boldly juxtaposes “words you memorized
from my mother’s tongue,” a Filipino language, with English equivalents,
and most of the words are tantalizingly gendered and intimate. In “Letters from
the Balikbayan Box” (2005), lists that come from various Filipinos as
reflections encourage us to relate diasporic subjects’ gift-giving to those who
remained at home to economic disparities caused by contemporary multinational
capitalism. Tabios identifies “a balikbayan” as “someone who ‘brings home the bacon,’ so to speak. He
represents the Pinoy quest for the dollar, the deutschmark, the Gulf money, all
in the name of prosperity.” “Commodities: An Autobiography” (2007),
which offers poignant narrative snippets of the poet’s transcontinental
uprooting, speaks of “products [that] were so prized” by Filipinos “that their
names were turned into verbs or the labels themselves became synonyms for the
products.”
The
section from Tabios’ “Filipina Pen Pal” project, also published in 2007, takes
aim at the fetishizing of Filipina women by white European and American men. A
catalogue of questions like “Can you find the Philippines on a map?”, “Why do
Filipinos typically have Spanish names?”, and “Do you anticipate that your wife
will be submissive and obedient?”, followed by correct answers, and then point
totals with explanations
goads the white men to recognize their
ignorance of Filipino culture(s) and their projection of vague fantasies on
women, though the poem does account for the possibility that some of the men
have done “their homework” and might even have legitimate reasons for marrying
a particular Filipina.
I
have written extensively in my introduction to The Thorn Rosary (East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2010, 15-20)
on Tabios’ remarkably historically nuanced list poem about her own father, the
national “father” Marcos, and the dictator’s daughter/apologist, “What Can a Daughter
Say?” (2007). So here is a passage devoted to the catalog-effect:
At
various points in the text’s six sections, Tabios takes statistics… about how many
people were killed by such redoubtable evildoers as Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier,
Francisco Franco, Saddam Hussein, Hitler and her major henchmen, Mao… and
Stalin. And then there are quite a few villains, including Yasuhiko Asaka, Elie
Hobeika, … and Ante Pavelic, who are undoubtedly extremely well known in
certain parts of the world or to particular communities but lack name recognition
in the U.S. The order of names may not be random, but it is far from chronological.
The cumulative effect of this continually interrupted catalog is powerful, but
one important aspect that links the poet’s two themes [of atrocity and mourning
for her father, with whom she had a fraught relationship in her youth] is the
use of anaphora….
As a counterpoint to “What
Can a Daughter Say?” Tabios includes a list poem in this volume that seems to
purport to teach the people of the Philippines ways to overcome the horrors of
their colonial past, the Marcos regime, and more recent postcolonial debacles.
“List(ing) Poem: the New Filipino Society” may imply some valid general ideas
like “A Budget for National Self-Reliance,” but the joke is on us: at the end,
we learn that all the phrases are taken from the writings of none other than
Ferdinand Marcos. (Nevertheless, I think that Tabios should rise to the challenge of a catalog poem that literally tries
to prescribe effective sociopolitical measures for the land of her birth.)
If George W. Bush, one of the most divisive occupants of
the oval office in recent memory, self-flatteringly claimed to be “a uniter,
not a divider,” Eileen R. Tabios could honestly
boast that she is an includer, not an excluder. Any discussion of her catalog
poetry should consider how randomness impinges on this work as an “includer” of
much that many people might think does not seem to belong together. In a discursive “Introduction” herein to her
“recent work, ‘Murder, Death and Resurrection’ (MDR),” she describes reliance
on a “Poetry Generator contain[ing] a data base of 1,146 lines which [she] can
combine randomly to make a poem of” varying lengths—up “to 1,146 lines.” But
though the poet notes that she “can create—generate—new poems unthinkingly from
its database,” “the poems cohere partly by the scaffolding of beginning each
line with the phrase ‘I forgot...’ (a tactic inspired by reading Tom Beckett's
fabulous poem "I Forgot" in his book DIPSTICK (DIPTYCH)).”
Pointing
to her “long-held interests in abstract and cubist language” and the infinite
possibilities to reorder line-progressions, Tabios suggests that her process is
not exactly random, nor does it signal Barthes’ “death of the author”: she “created
the 1,146 lines from reading through 27 previously-published poetry collections.”
She “murders” each pre-text while “resurrecting” it, and so “the results
dislocate without eliminating authorship.” But perhaps “murder” conveys
something far more violent than she is doing in her acts of displacement, which
are more positively seen as “relocation” or “recycling” rather than
“dislocation.” On the other hand, through effects of randomness, like New York
School poets, Language poets, and older Asian-American poets such as John Yau
and Tan Lin, she is “murdering” any
sense that “the imperial self” (a phrase coined by Americanist Quentin
Anderson) unifies poetic discourse. She is especially murdering her own
potential imperial self that might otherwise be seen as a foundation of the
coherent meditative or narrative lyric. Along these lines, Tabios’ "Babaylan
Poetics," “based on indigenous Filipino practices,” emphasizes the
cataloging poet as immersed in all other beings, materials, and processes—not
separate from them in some sovereign “command” of “her” materials. Or as the
poet puts it in “(Muse Poem” (2014),
No
reason to censor
mountain
from saffron, sky from
celadon,
boulder from lavender
bougainvillea
from cobalt, grass
from
ebony, diamond from cerise
you
from me. Me from you
Nothing must
be silenced.
Obvious
as it might seem, I must insist that what makes Tabios’ use of randomness
poetically viable in her “forgetting” poems and much other work in this volume,
is not only a fine diversity of represented experience, but the felicity of
juxtapositions, as well as departures/returns. Take, for example, these
successive monostichs from “In the Beginning, Before Words, There Was Poetry”:
I
forgot love is always haggled.
I
forgot you were the altar that made me stay.
I forgot you wanted to see her seeing
herself…
I
forgot, for him, she released milk to orphaned baby birds.
I
forgot I yearned for amnesia—
I
forgot the joy of eliding the vocabulary found in margins.
I
forgot the zoo with retired cages.
As in Beckett’s poem,
which itself signifies on Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” the speaker of Tabios’
performs an act of remembering an act of forgetting that either recuperates the
gist of the forgotten—as, I believe, in all of the examples above—or points to
its inability to do so. The fifth line is especially layered or torqued because
the speaker has now remembered that she had forgotten about a desire to forget,
thus, at one point, fulfilling the desire by not consciously desiring it. In
the first two lines above, “love” as a bargaining process (“haggled”) is
connected with the influence of concrete symbols of religion (“altar”) on the
fluctuation of individuals’ devotion. The third line also may concern love or
simply fascination about another’s self-consciousness, but it is surely linked
to the latter topic in the penultimate line, in which “vocabulary” of the
representation of inside/outside is central to desire and hence “joy.” The
“release” of “milk” to the birds is a different kind of love; it may reflect
“his” love for the birds and/or her love
for him. In addition, note the challenge posed to an overall narrative by the
pronoun shifts in the first four lines, as well as the adjective “retired” that
makes us wonder why it goes with the noun “cages”: are the animals that should
be in the cages dead or released into the wild, or are they in new, high-tech
cages? And could “zoo” and “cages” be tropes for the display and confinement of
human emotions and behaviors—such as
love and loving?
Another example of lucid juxtapositions can be found in
“Untitled (Bookstore), 2000” (2005), a poem comprising a collection of titles
of books on the shelves of a San Francisco bookstore,
The
Case For Marriage
The
Path Of Practice
Field
Guide To The American Teenager
The
Zen Of Listening
Immutable
Laws Of Internet Branding
Darkness
In El Dorado
A
Brief History of Tomorrow
Brunelleschi's
Rome
A book making a “case for
marriage” might consider wedded life as requiring the “path of practice,” perhaps
of a spiritual discipline, but more likely of communication strategies,
including active “listening.” Also, marriage in the U.S. is often complicated
by the “wild” nature of “the American Teenager,” for whom parents apparently
need their own “field guide”! Of course, Tabios is also parodying the
transformation of so many activities into “Zen,” a trend which began with “the
Zen of archery,” in the realm of self-help books. Such a use of Zen is in the
interest of corporate “branding,” whose “laws” can only be judged “immutable”
insofar as one can crunch the numbers of a gigantic batch of sales reports in a
way that supports the assertion. Even then, one is exceedingly presumptuous to
assert anything like the book title promising an anticipation of “tomorrow’s”
“history”—whether “briefly” or extensively. Branding, in fact, is a sign of
mutability: whatever it happens to sell proves transient, and branding
techniques must continually change to manufacture desire for new products. Even
representations of the splendors of something like “Brunelleschi’s Rome” must
be attractively re-historicized periodically to re-emerge as saleable.
Perhaps
forgotten and surely discarded, garbage in a dumpster (or a landfill) is the
ultimate collection of contiguously placed items that bespeak both randomness
and relation. To create “Garbage: A True Story” (2007), Tabios imposed
surveillance on herself during the 2005 Christmas season (up to New Year’s day,
2006 in this selection). The result is essentially a group of lists of “trash,”
items “saved for re-use,” and items actually “recycled or re-used,” as well as
commentary (“notes”) on garbage—for example, from Elizabeth Royte’s book, Garbage Land—and related topics like
dumpster-diving. When the “trash” lists are much longer than the other two for
a given day, the disparity gives pause. The reader can recall and/or learn a
good deal about social and ecological contexts of garbage and trash-disposal,
but the overwhelming effect is that the text, if read attentively, forces one
to drown in a plethora of things and their tremendous specificity and
capability of being differentiated from each other. One can come away from such
immersion with a Thoreauian desire to simplify, an enhanced skepticism about
commodity culture, and/or a desire for the kind of collectively responsible
behavior needed to avert environmental catastrophe. In one of the “Notes,”
Tabios writes: “We’re flooding here in Napa Valley. It’s our own taste of the
effects of global warming—the tsunami, hurricanes and now increasingly intense
rainy weather. I relate the flooding waters to this Trash Project as I know
that while I try with recycling, there's still a lot of paper and plastic
(especially plastic!) that I trash instead of recycle.” Lists, then, are not “more
trash,” but a call to action.
The push/pull of juxtaposed elements in the catalog poems of Tabios’ Invent(st)ory continually raise questions about the slippery characterization of what is valuable or worthless, what is coherent or fragmented or both, what is to be deemed relevant or irrelevant, what is given to accretion and/or dispersal, what is clear or opaque, what is (politically) inclusive or exclusive, and what is communitarian or atomizing. Yes, her inventories tell stories—complicated ones, full of allusive and overall signifying power—and her stories partake of the processes of inventory.
*****
Thomas Fink is the author of two books of criticism,
including “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in
Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
2001), eight books of poetry, including Joyride (Marsh Hawk
Press, 2013), and three chapbooks. He has co-edited two critical anthologies.
His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at City
University of New York—LaGuardia.
No comments:
Post a Comment