T.C. MARSHALL Reviews
The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography by Eileen R. Tabios
(Marsh Hawk Press, 2023)
THE INVENTOR: A Poet's Transcolonial Autobiography is not just about one person who invented things. It is about several inventions in poetics brought to us by Eileen R. Tabios. For all that Mary Anderson and her windshield wiper did to improve life on the road, Tabios’ story is larger and involves nearly all of us as it works to transcend and repair the damage done by colonial attitudes and practices. In this book, you hear about poetic inventions, forms and methods and approaches that make for new possibilities in poetry and beyond, about poetry as a purposeful practice and a way of improving life.
Poetry itself is named for invention: “poietes” means “maker” in ancient Greek. Tabios has made a ton of poems and put out over fifty collections of them. She also writes in other genres. Without this book, it might be easy to miss the fact that she has invented new forms and approaches in each genre, and many in poetry. These are not just for her own practice but for all of us who find out about them.
This book tells the story of Tabios’ expanding awareness as a poet and an inventor in poetry. It is a narrative, but it also includes Theory. And it presents exciting new ways to actually make poems. It is, as it must be, political in several ways, just as its subtitle suggests. “A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography” insists that this story is the tale of recognition of and resistance to the colonizing forces in our lives as they range from armed occupation to economic exploitation and onward into our very uses of language and literary form. This autobiography unfolds the many ways in which Tabios has disciplined her writing into shapes and forms that can bridge or even defeat colonialisms.
The back cover blurb about the author lists three major inventions of form and approach from the book. It says “she invented the hay(na)ku poetry form, The MDR Poetry Generator …, and Flooid poetry that’s rooted in a good deed.” THE INVENTOR presents the stories of all three along with examples from herself and others she has worked with as a teacher or guide. The examples are not Eliotic in grandeur, not by far, but they are alive in the hands of poets and learners and rise from their lived lives. Each method has as its origins the desire and necessity to overthrow conventions and ignorances that play a colonizing role through writing. How do writers de-colonize themselves? Tabios shows us some possibilities.
The “hay(na)ku” was developed partly on the basis of Jack Kerouac’s American Haiku and Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences. The book tells you the origin of the inventive name of this invention, incorporating a common phrase from Philippine culture, and tells what happened when others got hold of the form: over twenty variations on it in the first year of poets publishing hay(na)ku. It also tells how this has become a “Philippine diasporic form” and how it “became a metaphor for disrupting the colonizer’s desire to control others” (18). Haiku with their rules and American applications of them become a basis for making something completely different. The new form’s applicability to any experience, and its disruption of haiku stiffness with everyday language and concerns, even in the term “hay(na)ku,” becomes its liberating force.
The MDR Poetry Generator gets its name from the initials of Murder, Death, & Resurrection along with the idea of generating poems from random or loosely guided choices of elements for their construction. Tabios tells of how in 2013 she tried to “forget” her earlier poetry and create fresh possibilities by rewriting each line of her earlier poetry and then collecting lines written counter to the originals in one big listing. She then went about finding ways to assemble new poems “murdering” and reviving the lines in the old ones. The examples show how this actually worked to “deepen [her] interrogation of English for facilitating 20th-centurty U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Her assertion is that this helped “develop a consciously closer link to the Filipino indigenous value of ‘shared self’ by making the writer be a reader and user of others’ lines.” It’s a big claim, but “MDR’s way of creating poems shifts emphasis away from author to reader in determining the poem’s effectiveness.” Again, the form becomes a metaphoric bearer of this desired shift by destabilizing the standard speaker pose in poetry (42). It helps the poetry world to “move away from us & them” thinking (48). It creates a “double-take perspective (54).
The third big form dealt with in this book is a whole approach Tabios calls “Flooid” poetry. As she introduces it, she calls it “reportage poetry dependent on goodness” (77). It produces “a short poem—no more than five lines—that only can be written after the poet first undertook a ‘good deed’ ” (78). This has a touch of sentimentality about it, but it makes the work “activist” in a fresh way. The poem is not just thoughts and feelings, not just a report or a plea, but based in actually doing something. Examples in the book include making a meal for others, saving someone from a fire, and running a program for victims of wartime PTSD, along with many more good deeds. The poems reflect these actions, but in a way they also include them; the good deed is part of the poem itself in an appreciable way. Tabios herself says, “With the Flooid, I wanted to create an activist poetry form based on hope” (93). She writes about how that hope even reaches as far as Ukraine. THE INVENTOR is about poetry reaching beyond itself as poets reach beyond themselves. One of the effects of The Flooid comes from how it is “open and inclusive to everybody, and not just those already involved in poetry” (80). It expands not only poetry and how it may be written but the pool of who may write it.
The book also catalogues and explains this inventor’s efforts at “promoting Asian American or Filipino / Filipino-American poetries and creating spaces for presenting poetry” (56). They have been many. “What my projects share in common is how I didn’t rely on existing literary infrastructure.” This is another anti-colonial gesture. Her ambitious projects, her “trying for a lot,” and her embrace of “why not be an author larger than oneself” also push back at colonizing and colonized language uses (68-69). She includes a chapter on how her roots fed her work, and how they led to that Flooid form and its basis in a real-world act. THE INVENTOR is as broad as its author’s life and efforts, and it makes them more available to us not just as consumer/readers but as writers.
The delights of this book come from its inventiveness in itself as a new kind of autobiography with a fresh approach to “person.” It also raises the essential issue of how poetry gets applied in our lives. The purposes here are somewhat “anti-personal,” but they are not without person and people at every level. Tabios’ approach loosens poetry from the grip of the personal and reaches into social and political dimensions through this loosening.
One of the very most delightful things about Tabios’ writings is the way they incorporate the lyrical personal “I” and concrete experience with “avant” considerations of form and diction. She clearly feels no need to resolve tensions between the two angles. She, instead, uses them both together to “triangulate” positions for creativity and thinking. On pages 11 and 17, obviously near the beginning of the book, she repeats a striking formula: “my poetry is not in my words.” What she means by that and what that means for us readers and fellow writers is illuminated on page 22 where she tells the origin of the term hay(na)ku. She writes: “I don’t feel poetry should sing so much as it should think. In poetry (unlike perhaps elsewhere), thinking is not the opposite of music and, indeed, concepts can sing.” In Tabios’ work, they do—as they blend the lyrical with the conceptual.
All poetry implies a poetics. Eileen Tabios’ has made this fact a focus without stopping there. The poetics of her poetry has social implications. It is actively anti-colonial, pointedly de-colonizing, and perpetually inventive. It is a good deed, a mitzvah, an action of connection as it makes such mitzvot more possible for more of us. Read THE INVENTOR and try some of its approaches; you’ll get it, and you’ll want to become a “Transcolonial” inventor too. As Tabios says, “through poetry, I wish for no one or nothing to be alien to me” (43); you can get there yourself by employing forms and approaches that let anything arise. As she says at the end, “Dear Reader, my poetry has never been my words, but yours” (99). This book is a seed packet; so read it, and go grow some poetry yourself.
*****
T.C. Marshall is a California poet with half a century of publications in five nations and a career teaching College English and poetry and literature in two of them. He helped produce and edit The End of The World Project (Moria Books, 2019), and is about to launch the Compass Project for poetry in resistance to the end of our democracies.
No comments:
Post a Comment