LYNN M. GROW Engages
Drawing the Six Directions by Eileen R. Tabios
(Sandy Press, 2024)
The Aesthetic of Eileen R. Tabios
It might, at the outset, seem odd to address the multifaceted artistic creativity of Eileen R. Tabios in terms of a singular aesthetic. After all, the range of written literary works, visual arts, and performance art works in which she has participated is prodigious.
The interconnections among these productions lie in the belief that “Poetry is not just to be read but also to be lived.” (Tabios, The Inventor: A Transcolonial Autobiography. East Rockway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2023). In the introductory essay “Drawing form / from the Six Directions” to her 2024 book Drawing the Six Directions (Santa Barbara/Australia: Sandy Press), she elaborates on this point: “I believe that the more that a poet educates one's self—the more that a poet sees!—the more likely that a poet will be able to respect and reach many among the different peoples who exist in our universe of diverse cultures, personalities, styles, and contexts.”
Tabios then applies her outlook to Drawing the Six Directions: “My attempts to live instead of just write poetry resulted in a multidisciplinary and interactive project entitled 'Poems form / from the Six Directions'. This 2002 project encompassed several performances, exhibitions, and readings in California's Bay Area....The project's least known element is a series of drawings (featured in this book), most of which have never been seen in public.” (9) As readers and viewers, we can be thankful that this collection now is public.
Unmistakably, Tabios here and throughout her oeuvre is invoking Kapwa, the indigenous Filipino concept that, as the character Elena puts it in Tabios' first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale For Our Times ([New York]: AC Books, 2021): “In Kapwa-time, all of time collapses. In that collapsed space, everyone and everything has always been, is, and will be connected to each other. There is no such thing as separation. There is no such thing as Other.” (263) Elena here is articulating the belief of the author in propria sua, as is confirmed by Tabios's own explanation in several books, including The Inventor: A Poet's Transcolonial Autobiography (42-43) and The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019 (East Rockway, New York; Marsh Hawk Press, 2019) (203). In each case, different wording conveys the meaning of Kapwa in equally clear form, but together these and yet more articulations of it elsewhere reflect the multitudinous of the concept.
Katrin De Guia, in her book Kapwa:The Self in the Other: Worldviews and Lifestyles of Filipino Culture–Bearers(Pasig City: Anvil, 2005) emphasizes a very important—if easily overlooked—element of Kapwa. She reminds us that, as Tabios also intends us to recall, the Tagalog term Kapwa means “the shared self,” not the “I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together” muddle of the Beatles' 1967 song “I Am the Walrus.”1 De Guia stresses that pagkatao(Tagalog for “personhood”) is intact in Kapwa, that inner and outer self, personality, and character are maintained: “...each individual, although unique, is an integral part of humanity.” (8) Furthermore, “... the shared self turns into a 'shared life.' This means that respect and consideration for the other is extended to all that is; animals, plants, springs, rocks, the living planet and the spirit worlds.” (9) Tabios specifically reiterates this need for respect in the closing lines of her “Introduction” to Drawing the Six Directions: “...respect is an integral concept underlying 'Poems Form / From The Six Directions'” and words the complimentary close as “Respectfully, / Eileen R, Tabios.” (15) Thus, when Tabios writes “All is One and One is All” (The Inventor, 44), she means this in a sense similar to what it means for the yogin who meditates in the Tantric tradition and achieves the apex of the undertaking: the sense of being coterminous with the universe while preserving the sense of being a discrete entity. We do not in Tabios encounter the formless cosmos of Ninotchka Rosca.2
In fact, perhaps the most impressive feature of Drawing the Six Directions is its cogent multitudinousness, starting with the title. “Drawing” does principally designate “the act of producing a visual representation,” but it can also mean “extracting” (e.g., “drawing water from a well”) and/or “pulling” (e.g. “Only one horse was drawing my carriage.”) As we read Tabios' Six Directions poems and view her drawings one by one, and element by element within them, we extract their meanings, and we pull these meanings into our understanding of their contextual significance.
The contextual significance of the drawings, however, can't be encapsulated in an identifier of any one period, style, or movement in visual art. At first, we might try to typecast the drawings as Suprematist,3 the extension of Abstractionism pioneered by Kazimir Malevich, that calls for simple geometric shapes (e.g., squares, circles but nothing as complex as icosahedrons) on white backgrounds to connote “pure feeling” (which can include spiritual experience), with no attempt to reference the physical world. However, the Six Directions drawings use light blue / light grey backgrounds to conjure not the intensity of “pure feeling” but on the contrary the placidity of a work like Paul Klee's Winterbild (1930)4 or Jennifer K. Wofford's MacArthur's Nurses (2008). Again, Suprematist art works have palettes limited to, aside from white and black, primary colors; Six Directions drawings include, among others, browns, tans, and yellows.
Thomas Fink's blurb suggestion about stone placement in a Japanese garden is more consonant with the effect of placidity that the Six Directions' background colors create. Stones symbolize natural elements like mountains and islands. The stones' arrangement is carefully designed to create a sense of balance, permanence, and stability and to guide a visitor through a landscape of spiritual and aesthetic meaning. In Zen gardens the landscape encourages peaceful reflection. The largest stones are placed first, and subsequent placements are proportional to the largest stones, a layout which creates an impression of anchorage and order. In Shinto tradition, the stones are even seen as possessing spiritual power (Kami) and their placement is designed to foster respect for, and connection to, nature. Nothing could be more removed from the effects of scenes that depict upheaval and violence [e.g. Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son (1823) or Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893)], conveying as it does existential dread and terror.
The stability and order that conduces to placidity in the Six Directions drawings can be attributed to a mathematical underpinning in them as well as in the order of nature. At the base of the mathematical element here is the “o” (the circle), which in the early going of the Six Directions drawings Tabios identifies as an emphasis: “I drew many circles because the circle is a simple image...” (13) It is simple for the artist who draws it, but it is much more than a simple entity unless by “simple” we mean only “basic.” Apparently Max Gimblett, the Buddhist artist with whom Tabios spent considerable time, didn't think it was simple in the sense of “simplistic” since he “frequently painted / drew the enso” [Japanese for “circle”]5 (13).
The circle symbolizes eternity, since as a completed figure it has no discernible beginning or end. For the same reason, it symbolizes infinity. Because it is unbounded temporally and spatially, it is coterminous with the more concretely conceived concept of Kapwa: “...everyone and everything has always been, is and will be connected to each other.” (DoveLion, 263)
Even more telling is Tabios' explanation of her progression from the enso to the gourd icon that is the dominant entity in each drawing: “I learned to transform the circle into an abstract outline of a vegetable gourd—this abstracted icon is a humanized circle atop a larger circle.” (13) If the two circles were non-abstracted and placed side-by-side instead of one atop the other, they would form “oo,” the mathematical symbol for infinity (the lemniscate), introduced to mathematics by English mathematician John Wallis in 1655. Tabios didn't visually represent her icon this way, nor did she mention the lemniscate, but this step would seem to be available because of the unlimited reach of Kapwa and because there is an implication at least of unboundedness, if not of infinity per se, in her unframed paintings, which seem to extend beyond the canvases, and her poems with lines that extend past the margins, both procedures explicitly intentional.
But, adding another layer of adaptation to her use of the enso, Tabios writes “I came to transform the circle into an abstracted outline of a vegetable gourd...” (13) The gourd has long been a phallic symbol, but its symbolism is complex, used to represent feminine fertility (the womb) as well as male reproductive capability (genitalia). The effect, of course, is that, across different cultures' perceptions in different eras, the phallus is a universal. It stands for the strongest urge of all living things: survival, both as individuals and as species, because, though no living thing is immortal (at least in terms of material existence), part of a living thing survives in its offspring. Here again, Kapwa comes to the fore. All living things across all time share this primal instinct.
Granted that the gourd icon represents the human, we might next inquire about the different colors, sizes, and groupings of these icons. The significance of their varying sizes is twofold. Most basically, the diverse sizes represent different stages in growth from childhood to adulthood6 and the range of human physiques from short to tall and thin to thick. The different sizes also provide three–dimensionality, as though the larger icons are closer to us and the smaller icons farther away, an effect clearly visible on p.19 and more subtly in the cluster of two groups of faint figures and an angled yellow line on Page 31.7
The different colors of the icons are not solely symbolic of different human races. We do get tannish brown, red, yellow, and white but also blue, green, and pink, symbolic of the rainbow of human gender and facets of human diversity beyond race and gender. Some icons are in outline only, some are partially filled in, and some are fully filled in, reflecting the different degrees to which humans develop themselves in terms of their physical and mental capabilities and respective moral worth. The large variation in number of icons in a grouping, from one by itself (20) to a very large agglomeration (21), represents the many degrees to which humans seek companionship, from standing alone (20) to being members of a crowed. (21) Some icons cluster solely with those identical to themselves (20) while others embrace diversity. (21) The diversity is unlimited, unbounded in its extension, which is symbolically represented in icons that are cut off from our vision by the border of the drawing (cf., the top and bottom icons on p. 25) but, we realize, extend beyond the border. This is parallel to a practice Tabios has used in some of her poetry: running lines past the margins of a page to obviate the notion of arbitrary boundaries.8 Thus, it is not surprising that Tabios' drawings are untitled; to label them would be to impose the restrictions of compartmentalization.
As impressive as the intellectual elements of The Six Directions drawings are, these elements do not overshadow the aesthetic qualities, such as the degree of balance of an individual drawing. Page 19's drawing is balanced top to bottom but not side to side, and the figures, three rectangles composed of icons, are tilted. Conversely, in the drawing on page 20, the rectangular boxes of icons located top right and bottom left largely balance, though the bottom left icon is larger and its enclosing box is a dark brown, in contrast to the upper right tan box and smaller size. The three middle icons are also balanced, with the top two angled and the bottom one straight up and down. The page 19 and page 20 drawings therefore constitute a type of diptych, each “panel” counterbalancing the other. The interrelationships of all 18 drawings form them into a series, not an amalgamation. The coherence of the series is subtly provided by the progressively brighter colors of icons, figures, and backgrounds as well as that the drawings become increasingly busy. The brightness by page 30 reaches the level of Joaquin Sorolla's Elena en las Rocas (1905) and on page 34 the brightness meter has reached the level of Gaugin's The Yellow Christ (1889) or Matisse's Harmony in Red (Red Room) (1908-1909). The effect is like watching early dawn slowly turn to sun-splashed mid-day brightness. It might be fanciful to see this effect as imbuing the drawing series with a fourth dimension—time, to complete the three dimensions of height, width, and depth in the series, but it is tempting to think so because Tabios draws on the Native American concept of six directions—north, south, east, west, up, and down—as a completed series (10), rather than leaving the series at the first four.
Yet the aesthetic standing of any one drawing is not dependent on the presence of some or all of the series. Even the drawings that have the fewest figures and/or icons (pp. 19, 23, and 24) would pass the eye test if they were hung as standalones in a residential hallway or on a guest bedroom wall: will the single work being observed sustain the aesthetic satisfaction it conveys to the observer, regardless of whether the observer can or will analyze it? The answer for 16 of the 18 drawings here is “yes,” and this is why we won't categorize them as Conceptual art. Conceptual art considers the concept or idea behind a work to be more important than the finished physical object or its aesthetic value. In 16 of the drawings, concept and aesthetic value have equal footing. The two exceptions are on page 34 and page 36, respectively. The former is dominated by a “Butterfly Game” board.9 The latter features an icon with “HATE” enclosed in an enso and bisected by an angled line. The figure is, then, an international highway sign prohibiting hate from being directed at the enso for which the circle and its enclosure are the torso, a figure representing any human and all humans. Like the international highway sign for “No Parking” or “Do Not Enter,” it is a command, not a suggestion; thus. Its idea is paramount. Two columns with type too small to read, resembling an excerpt from a legal statute, reinforce the primacy of idea over aesthetic.
Another aspect of Tabios' drawings—though not in Drawing the Six Directions—is that she “... began by drawing on what was available to me: brown paper bags that were piling up in my kitchen...I also appreciated the paper bags because they were found objects...found objects symbolize how I integrate (elements of ) the world into my work.” (12) The Conceptualist art use of this found object does have a personal resonance for Tabios: “The brown color of Filipino Kayumangi (brown) skin...” (13) The specific application of found objects to contemporary Filipino art as a whole is presented in almost inventory detail in Tabios' second novel, The Balikbayan Artist (Singapore : Penguin Random House, 2024) by the protagonist and first person narrator Vance Igorta:
I saw how Baguio artists were heavily into mixed media. They were experimenting with different types of materials…. They used bamboo, used nails, old posters, books, textiles, feathers, rocks, computer parts, broken tiles, broken glass, hand-made paper, threads, rubber pieces, trash, bones, beads. One even used a dead cat. They were sticking everything and anything that they thought would enhance their visual story telling. (69)
Igorta, of course, describes what the Baguio writers had to use because little else was available locally under the dictator who plundered the country, leaving children in Manila with bloated stomachs, starving, barely clothed, in want of almost everything. Tabios has no need to use found items but experiences “the pleasurable frisson of dealing with the tangible: the found materials that made their way into my mixed–media sculptures (e.g. old coasters, used magazines, ribbons, recycled cardboard and so on).” (11) 10
The found materials constitute a segue to her poetry in Drawing the Six Directions because they are a staple in the poems well as the drawings. The linkage also seems natural granted Tabios' first artistic endeavor—at age three: she created her first “book” by “...folding a piece of paper to emulate a book's pages. The first page bore a green Crayola circle at the top right corner of the page. The second page bore a yellow Crayola circle at the top right corner of the page. The third page bore a brown Crayola scrawl at the bottom of the page.” (The Inventor, 14) Together, the marks on these three pages would have formed a triangle. The deployment of color, the simple geometric figures of triangle and circle (an enso, perhaps?), and the placement of the figures (icons, maybe?) sound a good deal like a drawing from The Six Directions. Tabios next writes, “But those childish images clearly contained meaning akin to what would be found in text. It could be considered visual and asemic poetries. The 'text' of its three pages might be interpreted as follows:
The grass is green.
The sun is out shining.
The sun burnt the grass.” (The Inventor, 14-15)
This tercet foreshadows Tabios' extensive use of tercets in her adult poems, as the very title of her book The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019 announces in several different ways besides the subtitle's overt wording. “In(ter)vention” has three parts: “In,” “(ter),”and “vention,” and “ter” is the first three letters of “tercet.” “Hay(na)ku” also has three parts: “Hay,” “(na)”, and “ku.” Each part has a separate Tagalog meaning or function. “Hay” is an interjection that may only convey surprise but more commonly indicates annoyance or frustration. “Na” connects adjectives and nouns and specifies completion or immediacy. It can be used to make a command sound less imperious (e.g., “Let's go now” instead of “Get moving!”) “Ku” is not a standalone; it is a morpheme. It conveys respect in a word like “kuya,” a respectful term for an older male. Furthermore, if the parentheses are dropped and “Hay(na)Ku” is re-spaced as “Hay naku,” we get an interjection connoting exasperation, at times something grainier. If we further reduce “Haynaku” by dropping “na,” we get a near homonym for the poetry genre “Haiku.” The cherry on the linguistic sundae here is that if we combine the word components in parentheses, we get “terna,” a Spanish loan word meaning “a list of three,” “a trio” or a “threesome.” Though not part of modern standard Tagalog or Filipino, it is used the Philippines, especially in Chabacano language varieties such as Zamboangueňo.11
The likelihood that all these derivations of three are fortuitous is about the same as what a south Florida Protestant minister once asserted about the universe being brought into existence by natural process alone: a hurricane assembling all the separate parts into a Boeing 747 passenger aircraft, especially considering Tabios' familiarity with, and use of, the fairy tale, in which, invariably, there are three roads, three bridges, three bears, etc. In DoveLion not only is the subtitle A Fairy Tale for Our Times, but also every chapter begins with the fairy tale opening phrase “Once upon a time.”12
The ascendancy of the tercet in Drawing the Six Directions, therefore, is based on a broad and deep experience with it. The depth is best gauged by the hay(na)ku, a genre created by Tabios. In this structure, each tercet has a first line of three words, a second line of two words, and a third line of one word, but she and other writers have, since the hay(na)ku's inception, introduced many variations of it; Tabios enumerates a number of these in her essay “The History of the Hay(na)ku” (The In(ter)vention, 107-112). How well it travels can be assessed by the quality of one variation, a reverse hay(na)ku titled “Die We Do” but which is even more compelling in Rebeka Lembo's Spanish translation into “Morir hacemos” (The In(ter)vention, 197), which is, if anything, more fluent than the English original. In fact, in The In(ter)vention the reader will encounter terms from seven different languages.13 In its own way, this is another manifestation of Tabios' central aesthetic principle—in life as well as art—of Kapwa.
Aside from the hay(na)ku, in my judgment Tabios' greatest poetic achievements are the pieces done in non–hay(na)ku tercets. Near, if not at, the apex of Tabios masterpieces is the superb “Enheduanna #20” (30-50) in The In(ter)vention. It is mellifluous, richly allusive, incantatory without sacrifice of intellectual and cultural substance. Its first three stanzas are as primal as Tabios' age three drawing–inspired, 3–line text is, but perhaps even more compelling. With that in mind, we can, so to speak, “go back to the future” with an The In(ter)vention poem, “For Charles Henri Ford” (62-63) in Drawing the Six Directions (67-68). Its short lines of unrhymed tercets hearken back to Tabios ab ovo at age three and recall the early and mid-career Angela Manalang–Gloria's rich sensuousness and emotional tensile strength. Each stanza is also a complete sentence, though, in the interest of maintaining the rapidly–flowing pace, no punctuation, end or internal, is used. Aside from this poem, though, the tenor of The Six Directions poems changes as much from that of The Inter)vention as the content does, but, with Tabios' writings, even a seismic shift in tone, diction, content, pace, genre, or implication is only to be expected. As the lead character's attribution to his mother in the movie Forrest Gump (1994) goes, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get.” The same goes for the reader of Tabios from one publication to the next or even, as the case is in Drawing the Six Directions, from one poem to the next. This is all to the good, since it prevents Tabios from becoming stuck in a rut and then starting to imitate herself, which is what so painfully happened to, among others, Wordsworth and Hemingway. As Henry Crabbe Robinson, supposedly Wordsworth's best friend, said of Wordsworth, “He died in 1818 but was not buried till 1850.” Ouch. The title of Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees (New York: Scribner's, 1950) accurately specifies where this novel, which reads like a bad imitation of Hemingway, should have ended up. Even Jose Garcia Villa, a great poet whom Tabios has justifiably lionized, was not immune from the malady of stasis. In his Selected Poem and New (New York: McDowell, Obelensky, 1958) he included more than forty pages of “found poems.” There is nothing illegitimate about found material, properly utilized, as Tabios demonstrates in Drawing the Six Directions. But with material used unchanged to the extent that Villa did, the practice was a space- filler gimmick.14
Tabios' admiration for Villa is judicious, as her title note in her first novel, DoveLion, makes clear: “'DoveLion'...name was inspired by Jose Garcia Villa's coining of “Doveglion,” an abbreviated reference to Dove, Eagle, and Lion. Other than honoring the Philippines' most important 20th century English–language poet with this reference, the novel 'DoveLion' has no relationship to José Garcia Villa.” (289) In The In(ter)vention, 10 poems appear under the title “Girl Singing” and in each case begin with “Girl Singing. Day.” This opening line is also the title of an exquisite poem published in Villa's Volume Two (New York: Viking, 1942): 15.
“Exquisite” also applies to the sole tercet–structured poem in Drawing the Six Directions: “For Charles Henri Ford.” Each stanza encases a declarative sentence with the haiku-like image compression that would have drawn Bashō's approval, had Tabios been his contemporary:
A white azalea
quiets the shade
into a girl
…....
You, there
with blue veins
crackling transparent membrane
“For Charles Henri Ford” is the last poem in this brief six-poem assembly, and appropriately, “Dear One” (47-50) is the first; “appropriately” not because of its stanza structure, which is irregular, but because of its quiet tone and because in it, too, a stanza houses a complete declarative sentence, even if so abbreviated as to be aphoristic. E.g., stanza one's three words “Beauty is reasonable.” Here, though, “abbreviated” does not equate to “sparse.” E.g., stanza 2 of Part ii (48):
grounding the border
with abashed aubergine.
These two lines are also a direct pathway to the drawings. “Aubergine,” a purple, egg–shaped fruit of a tropical old–world plant, immediately recalls the top half of the drawing on Page 32 of the violet gourd figures, to the left in a rectangle but on the right encircled by a yolk-yellow egg-shaped margin.15
“Abrashed,” the visible shift of gradation in color within a single area (usually of a rug or textile but not necessarily confined to those applications) describes the gradations of background grey–blue color in The Six Directions drawings. The subtitles also include meaningful allusion, as the mention of the Villa D' Este in stanza 2 of Part iii, indicates. The Villa is one of the most outstanding remnants of Renaissance culture at its height; the gardens and fountains are marvels of hydraulic engineering and the Villa is exceptional, even for the Renaissance, in its design and, especially, external aesthetics, certainly on par with what we know of the as yet unearthed but I think actual, not mythological, Hanging Gardens of Babylon in antiquity. Ironically, and it is tempting to add “almost literally,” the Villa is sandwiched, if you will, between the concluding stanza of Part ii and the second stanza of Part iv:
ALOHA
means
a fifth night free
plus a daily buffet breakfast for two
….....
A Five–Star Mobil Home
(courtesy of the Carlyle)
A buffet breakfast often involves powdered scrambled eggs and greasy bacon, among other non–delectables, and, granted the “help yourself” buffet approach—who knows what impurities may have fallen into the bins and trays, especially courtesy of children, before a given guest arrived at the buffet. A “Five–Star Mobil Home” is as blatant an oxymoron as the concluding two-word phrase “momentary immortality” (50) of “Dear One”. If “Carlyle” is supposed by the reader, not necessarily Tabios, to add prestige to the trailer park dwelling, it is worth remembering that though the Carlyle is a hotel group, it is a global private equity investment firm, specializing in alternative assets as well as private equity. Its primary mission is not to assure haute qualite throughout its entire portfolio.
Even the poem title, Dear One,” subtly introduces an irony. The title is that of a tub-thumping country western song co-written and recorded by John Lawrence (Larry) Finneran. It rose to #11 on the pop charts in the U.S. and #1 in Australia in 1962. The song is certainly engaging, but no one is likely to equate it, even in the world of popular, non-classical music, to something on the order of Julie Andrews' “Edelweiss,” made famous in the 1965 movie The Sound of Music but better rendered in the fully–orchestrated studio version. \ These ironies are backdropped against the first person narrator's world–view, one not tainted by frivolous jet–setting to Auckland (stanza 7, part i); appearing “at the equestrian center...” (stanza 1, part ii); popping off to “the 60 plus British Virgin Islands” (stanza 4, part ii); or seeing the Bengal Tiger, presumably in its native habitat (stanza 5, part ii). Stanza 5 of Part i expresses the narrator's commitment:
Dear One–
Fervently,
I believe in
the ancient fisherman's motto:
“Allah does not subtract
from the allotted time of man
the hours spent fishing.”
But perhaps Allah does do the math for devotees of “Manolo Blahnik's elegy for crocodiles.” (stanza 3, part iv)16
The incursion of popular culture into Tabios' always serious poetic art may seem anomalous, but it is actually consonant with—if not mandated by—her controlling aesthetic: Kapwa. Do junked car parts belong in serious visual artworks? Yes, if the artist is gifted enough to incorporate them. Does found material belong in serious poetry, even if we concede that it can have a place in the visual arts? Yes, because Kapwa encompasses all human experience. As Tabios clearly enunciates this principle, “'No one or nothing' is alien to me.” (The Intervention, 203)
The key to using found material properly and effectively is integrating it into a work of art, not simply appropriating it. Yes, as the Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel song “The Sounds of Silence” (1965) so tellingly put it, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, tenement halls,” but seeing them and recognizing them as poetic does not make them the observer's. The words are solely those of the prophets who uttered them. Tabios is scrupulous about this matter. She implants information—facts, quotes (enclosed in quotation marks), and other concrete particulars into the fabric of a poem. The particulars are elements of the finished aesthetic project, not the fabric itself. This process is especially visible in “The World is Yours” (51-53) and “From the Gray Monster in a Yellow Taxi” (63-66). The former poem's title has two contrasting meanings, one an invitation to plenitude based on rightful entitlement and the second a reprimand for the way things are. The three couplets of part i are examples of the first, “The World is Your Oyster,” sense, assuming that the introductory word “when” doesn't make each stanza's statement condition-contrary-to-fact. Parts ii-iv are collections of current event headline style snippets ranging in scope from “when 'Mutual Funds' / is clearly an oxymoron” and “Merrill Lynch's growth funds / post negative yields, year–to–date” to “Mike Saltzeim's heart has failed” (52) and “Today, in San Antonio and Fresno, / the temperature topped 100 degrees.” (53) All these announcements are of negative events, supporting the second meaning of the poem's title. “Sadly, this is the world you've helped to make.” The world of this poem is largely unveiled in found material (the announcements from, presumably, newspapers, social media, and T.V.) arranged into intermixed couplets and quatrains. One quintet and one sestet accompany them.
“From the Gray Monster in A Yellow Taxi” also notes actual occurrences, but only two: “The Tale of the “Dirty War” / in Argentina (1976-1983)” (64) and “...Diane di Prima aborting a child / because the man she loved / 'willed it so.'” (64-65). This found material largely gives place to the first–person narrator's ruminations, in stanzas 2-6 in the interrogatory mode. In stanza 7 the verbalizations begin, and they continue to the end, couched in a lilting, fluent though not mellifluous style.17 E. g.,
Antarctica keens
the siren song
of an unnamed woman
longing to be overcome
by an avalanche
not made of snow (stanza 7)
This stanza creates an ironic contrast with the Christian Biblical (Genesis 19: 25-26) account of Lot's wife, the account referenced in “The Gray Monster” in stanza 20 and then fleshed out in the poem's concluding stanza:
Look back
Look back
The Bible is only a book–
I am still here
And I am breathing
I Breathe (66)
The unnamed woman of stanza 7 longs to be overcome by an avalanche not made of snow, which is white. Lot's wife is involuntarily turned into a pillar of salt, which is also white. Why? Because she looked back at Sodom while God was destroying it. The narrator defies either fate–avalanche or pillar–and instead recommends that poets should engage in “'Foundational questioning' / To rhapsodize over / 'The River of Heaven” (stanzas 8-9). In Hinduism The River of Heaven is the Ganges, which is a metaphor for the night sky, where stars seem to be a flowing celestial river. If this seems to have obviated the troubling, massive disjunction between cause and effect in the Lot's wife account, we soon see that it hasn't. If we are poets, we are enjoined in stanza 8 to do “foundational questioning.” Why? Because if we don't do that and rhapsodize over the celestial river (stanza 9) “...Pain / becomes / 'our own lack of pain'” (stanza 10). What? Our lack of pain is our pain? This convoluted illogic is only trumped by stanza 20's self–annihilating “sometimes we have nothing / to give / but still give.” Ever since the De Rerum Natura (ca. 49-55 B.C. ) of Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the inviolability of “Nothing can from nothing come” has been firmly established. Along the way between our lack of pain is our pain and from nothing we extract something we encounter “'karmic traces'” (stanza 17), which are psychic remainders of acts of grasping or aversion—hardly the way of logical progression—and “Dream = / = Democracy”18 The attempt to define something by what it is not is only tenable within a very closed system. E.g., A piano is a keyboard musical instrument that is not a clavichord.” Before long we will determine by elimination the identity of the piano. But in an open system like “Dream ≠ Democracy,” we can proceed ad infinitum or at least until the furniture of the universe is exhausted. E.g., “A walrus is not a streetcar.” “A walrus is not a swimming pool.” Etc. Finally, we encounter a series of “This could be” assertions (65-66), which are hazardously open–ended. E.g., “This could be religion....This could be orgasm.” (65) Are these two possibilities so much alike that we can't differentiate them? If we can't, “This” may experience a large surge of devout practitioners and a stream of converts from other faiths. It is, then, only fitting that “This issue of Rain Taxi ends / with a non–coincidence: / 'Catastrophe Theory' –” (66) Perhaps, to go one step further, the rain taxi's destination is the Dead Universe. If so, may the Dead Universe remain only a theory. It goes without saying that the intellectual muddle of the poem lies in the found material, not Tabios. Tabios is well–grounded in logic, mathematics, and physics, along with literature and visual arts. She explores reality and does not hesitate to break new ground, but she never loses her bearings.
The remarkable range in subject, tone, density, and design of Tabios' poetry can nowhere be better exemplified than it is in the very small Drawing the Six Directions portfolio. It would be difficult to find elsewhere in the Tabios canon two poems contrasting any more than “The Gray Monster” and “At Bryant Park: Perfected form” (54-60) do. The latter is like a silk screen printing screen: delicate and seemingly fragile. The poem flows with ballerina–like gracefulness, and it has a light and airy tone reminiscent of Noȅl Cowand's play Blithe Spirit (1941) minus the comedy and wraith elements of the play. The gracefulness, delicacy, fragility, and fluidity are facilitated by the stanza and line structure in each of the ten parts.19 Each stanza consists of one or two lines only, and each line is only one word. Aside from the identification of the Bryant Park Hotel as a posh, luxury establishment in Midtown, New York City (currently carrying a 4.5 star rating), the only passage calling for explication is Part ii. (54-55) The “Miniature Environments” reference not only movie sets, but, more importantly, that Chris Burden's large installations use toy parts as material. Burden is famous for performance art, often extreme and body–focused; the first person narrator is certainly keen on both body focus and performance, as Parts v and vii so unmistakably reveal.20
The quest for Perfect Form (54, 58, 60), though ballasted by the Burden allusion, is a key factor in the delight radiated from the poem. The centrality of the quest is accentuated by the italics used throughout Part vi, as it discusses the narrator's “Flawless Level / of / Technical Expertise.” (57) The reader's delight is enhanced by the likely status of the narrator as a paramour. A paid professional purveyor of pleasure would hardly be as rhapsodic about the tryst as the narrator's “Oh / Bryant Park / “Oh” (59) demonstrates that she is. The “Oh!” sounds much more like the voices in the ancient Greek supplicatory hymns, like Sappho's invoking Aphrodite or Hera or like Homeric Hymn 1 to Dionysus (“O, Insewn, inspirer of frenzied women”)21 than it does the yearning of “Oh!” expressed in Emmy Lou Harris' song “If You Were a Bluebird” (Extended Version, 2024).
“Wine Tasting Notes” (61-62) is a fitting poem to conclude a discussion of the “Selected Poems from the Six Directions,” not only because of the above–cited line from “Homeric Hymn 1 to Dionysus,” but also because “Wine Tasting Notes,” brief as it is—16 lines parceled out into five stanzas—is a synopsis of the other five poems. It contains, in stanza 1, the mental range of art: “An expanding idea / shifts scale to larger than life / imagery from pictorial to abstraction / tone from silent to aggressive.” Stanza 2 links the mental range of art to its concrete manifestations: “Tactile pleasures / suggest a world worth experiencing / by celebrating the perplexities / of knowing.” Stanza 3 then links both mental and physical explorations to each individual's “self encounter.” The degree of melding of the intellectual, physical, and experiential is emblemized by the fact that none of the lines or sentences in any of these poems are end–stopped, except for the quotation in stanza 5 of “Dear One.” The only terminal punctuation is the exclamation point, and that only in “At Bryant Park: Perfect Form.”
In fact, “Wine Tasting Notes” is laid out like an emblem poem, illustrating its first–line mention of “An Expanding Idea” by triple spacing within stanzas and quadruple spacing between them. The poem's concluding quatrain is a striking piece of sensuous imagery, recalling Tabios' approach to a substantial number of poems in The In(ter)vention and hearkening back to the early poems of Angela Manalang–Gloria: “Subjectivity is / the plankton beneath the wave / radiating from green into gold / with the onset of wet sunlight.” (62) In the synesthesia of the last two words alone lies the evidence of the poetic gift that has enabled Tabios to honor the lyric legacy of Villa and Manalang–Gloria while by innovation to expand the parameters into genres of poetry she created besides the hay(na)ku, such as the haybun (defined and exemplified in The Inventor 29-30) and the Flooid (discussed and abundantly exemplified in Chapter 7 of The Inventor).
Tabios' drawings in The Six Directions have roots everywhere that great painting, sculpture, and performance art have flourished, but the wellspring is the Philippines, Juan Luna in particular. The bright color Luna uses in Lady in a Red Dress with a Manila Shawl (Una Manola) (1886) shines undiminished in Tabios' The Butterfly Game. The placid, unruffled, and unhurried thoughtfulness of the seated woman with a lugubriousness in her facial expression and bodily demeanor in Luna's Figura Feminina (1898) is palpable, thanks to the subtle ebb and confluence of shades, hues, and tints of background grey, consonant with the Klee and Wofford canvases, and resonant throughout Tabios' Drawing the Six Directions folio. The only object portrayed in Figura Feminina is an olpe. We might fantasize that it contains a flagon's worth of d'Yquem, an “onset of wet sunlight” (62), which we as readers and viewers can enjoy with the seated woman and Tabios on “a sun–drenched white granite balcony overlooking a sunlit sapphire Aegean Sea,” the wine “an orange–gold liquid the viscosity of honey.” (DoveLion, 9-10)
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Notes
1 To be fair, the composer, John Lennon, created the song as a satire on Lewis Carroll's “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a poem incorporated into Carroll's novel Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
2 Discussed in detail in L. M. Grow, “The Formless Cosmos of Ninotchka Rosca.” Pilipinas 14 (Spring, 1990): 7-23. Rptd. in L.M. Grow, Distillation and Essence: World View in Modern Philippine Literature. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2002. 177-196.
3 Thomas Fink notes in his blurb on the back cover of Six Directions that he sometimes recalls supremacist canvases and at other times is reminded of stone placement in a Japanese garden.
4 Interestingly, Klee cycled through different movements—Cubism, Expressionism, and Abstractionism most prominently—in the course of his career. I am indebted to Linda Ty-Casper for calling my attention to Klee's Winterbild.
5 It is worth noting that the circle, used to represent zero in mathematics, is indispensable. Ancient Greek mathematicians were severely limited because they considered zero to be either nothing or, at best, a placeholder. Only when Indian mathematician Brahma Agupta (628 B.C.) treated zero as a number did mathematics in India flourish. The mathematicians of India were followed by Arab practitioners who also accepted zero as a number.
6 CF., the two famous Lewis Carroll novels, Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, in which rapid and radical changes in size, position, and shape can be seen as early, pre-scientific consciousness of macroparticle / microparticle bifurcation and in which a parallel universe is conceptualized. Though those possibilities are usually written off as “anachronistic,” they have at least one forerunner in antiquity and an heir in late Victorian literature. 5th century B.C. Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus hypothesized, after observing the motes in what appeared to be continuous shafts of light (sunbeams) and the individual droplets in waterfalls that at first had appeared to be solid objects, that all “solid” objects were composed of tiny, indivisible, and indestructible pieces of matter, called “atoms,” and the spaces between them. The particles of matter move through an infinite empty space, called Khaos, meaning “void,” “chasm,” or “gaping emptiness.” All observed changes in particles result from changes in atoms' rearrangement, size, and grouping. There is no denying that this theory fore- shadowed modern particle physics. Democritus and Leucippus even named their theory atomos, which means “uncuttable.”
The late Victorian harbinger of the parallel universe is in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story “The Yellow Wall–paper” (1892). The protagonist, suffering from post–partum depression, is confined by her husband to a room in her house. She sees in the wallpaper a figure of a woman trying to get in but is prevented from doing so by the barred design in the wallpaper. This parallel universe depiction is more problematic than particle theory is in through Through the Looking Glass, granted the woman's mental state, but still not improbable.
7 Interestingly, Tabios makes no use of the vanishing point technique, which in depictions of scenes like a road stretching ahead of the observer, the parallel lines of the roadway's left and right shoulders, as well as the road itself, appear to converge in the distance.
8 Some visual artists, like Katharina Grosse, are even known for larger–scale installations in which the work of art spills over onto the walls and floors.
9 The Butterfly Game is a set collection challenge in which players move a “hedgehog” around a board of various insect tiles. The object is to collect the most valuable butterflies and avoid the wasps. Though the butterflies represent aesthetic beauty and the wasps represent unpleasant aspects of reality, the game itself is not an aesthetic asset, so the idea of the game takes precedence over aesthetic experience.
10 Igorta's statement and Tabios' elaboration of it exemplify another feature that is present throughout Tabios' creative work: didacticism. This feature is often considered a flaw that detracts from the aesthetic standing of a work of art because it injects non–creative material, sometimes even preachiness and / or propaganda, that dilutes or even supplants creative artistry. The Marxist street murals of 1930's-1950's Russia and Eastern Europe exemplify the propaganda – especially of the political stripe. Medieval morality plays exemplify the preachy part. The characters have labels of virtues and vices instead of names. E.g., we meet Mercy and Mischief in the play Mankind (ca. 1470). Modern audiences are prone to lampoon them as “M&M.” Especially because the then–contemporary audiences knew what the plot of a play with characters like Miss Chastity and Mr. Temptation would contain—no suspense, everyone knowing that nothing would happen between them—a performance would spawn all manner of bawdy jokes.
But nothing crude or wooden, boring or an affront to a reader's intelligence, awaits in Tabios' poetry, novels, or works of visual art, as the long–sustained infusion of didacticism into the aesthetic fabric of the novel The Balikbayan Artist (Singapore: Penguin, 2024) perhaps best exemplifies. This novel, Tabios' second, is dedicated to Venancio C. Igarta, whom Tabios identifies as “The Foremost Artist of the Manong Generation,” and every chapter of Part I (chapters 1-32) opens with “The artist thought...” Igarta is, in the novel, Vance Igorta, the protagonist, so quite naturally Igorta speaks extensively about not just his own approach to painting, but also art theory and history. My review article “The Balikbayan Artist by Eileen R, Tabios” (The Halo – Halo Review June 30, 2025: n.p.) provides a more extended and detailed discussion of this point, but, suffice it to say, the artistic information is skillfully interwoven into the novel's fabric, as it also is in DoveLion.
The forms that didacticism takes in Drawing the Six Directions are essays, first about art: The “Introduction” (9-15) and “The Glitchy Mini – Folio.” (39-40) The “Afterword: Poems from the Six Directions” (69-82) is principally made up of documentation and explanatory notes about the six poems, stanza by stanza. It is, of course, no more a coincidence that the poetry section of the book consists of six poems, matching the Six Directions of the book title, than the abundance of 3's is in The In(ter)vention. The unusual practice of including documentation and explanatory notes in a work of creative writing is even more extensive in The In(ter)vention, DoveLion, and The Balikbayan Artist than it is in Drawing the Six Directions.
11 The Portuguese meaning of “gentle” or “tender” is not applicable.
12 For elaboration about this point, see my review of DoveLion. To gild the proverbial lily, three was considered to be the perfect number in Greek and Roman antiquity because it conveyed wholeness, completeness, and even divinity. Cf., the Aristotelian golden mean. In the Christian era, of course the Holy Trinity comes first to mind, but we are no doubt also reminded of the tongue–in–cheek Filipino myth about God's creation of humanity. At first, God didn't bake the human enough, so the result was the white man. Second, God left the human in the oven too long. The result was the black man. Then God left the human in the oven just long enough, and the result was the brown man.
13 See my review “The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku by Eileen R. Tabios,” The Halo–Halo Review 16 (November 25, 2023) for translations of the expressions in the poems I comment upon.
14 For a more in–depth analysis of Villa's poetry in general and his development of found material in particular, see my article “Jose Garcia Villa: The Poetry of Calibration.” World Literature Written in English 27.2 (Autumn 1987): 326-344. Rptd. in L. M. Grow, World Enough and Time: Epistemologies and Ontologies in Modern Philippine Poetry (Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2000): 40-62.
15 Applicable, of course, only to caged, non free–range chickens. Eggs from free–range chickens have orange yolks and harder shells.
16 Manuel (“Manolo”) Blahnik Rodriguez is a Spanish fashion designer and founder of the eponymous high–end shoe brand. The line of the poem, however, is not a quote or the name of a specific product line; it is from a 2016 Tabios poem “INVEN(STORY) 4;” originally published in the Tabios chapbook INVENT (ST)ORY 4. Loveland, Ohio: Dos Madres Press, 2008 and later (2015) in INVENT (ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New (1996-2015) by Dos Madres Press.
17 In terms of “The Gray Monster's” stylistic fluidity, an interesting near counterpart can be found in Charlie Sumaya Veric's poetry excerpts in his “Notes from Exile” in Exploding Galaxies issue 6 (December 22, 2025: n.p.), especially since they are complemented by two Kristi Taniguchi drawings. In answer to an interview question, Taniguchi says that she tried to reflect Veric's descriptions of the natural beauty of Siquijor, and his emotional reactions to both the landscape and the fate of people who had suffered from both natural and human–created brutalities. Taniguchi's drawings have elements of both Expressionism and Impressionism, and may even evoke comparison with modern and contemporary Balinese painting. In this regard, Jean Couteau's article “Balinese Contemporary Art: Between Ethnic Memory and Meta-questioning” (Mudra 26.3 [December 2011]: 280-285) provides a valuable parallel context for Taniguchi's work as well as for Tabios' Drawing the Six Directions portfolio of visual art and poetry.
18 =/= is an ASC ll art version of ≠ (not equal).
19 A misprint occurs in the lower–case Roman numeral sequence. At the top of p. 59, “(vii)” should be “(viii)”; otherwise, we jump from “vii” to ix.”
20 Other aspects of Burden's art, such as using his own body to explore danger, violence, and technology and, later in his career, his transition to engineering and architecture, do not figure in the allusion in the poem.
21 Trans. Hugh Gerard Evelyn–White. London: Loeb Classical Library, 1914. I've used this somewhat hoary translation because of its straightforwardness.
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Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California: B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.
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