Images from a waking dream

One might be hard-pressed to review a book like Eileen R. Tabios’ Reflections of the Empty Flagpole, a collection of prose poems published by the New York-based Marsh Hawk Press, without the risk of intellectualizing too much its chimeric contents.

For the most part, Tabios herself admits that her compositions are sculpted poems, complementary to a suggestion that they are in a manner poem-paintings, effectively betraying the strong visual stylist the poet is throughout her prose meanderings.

But these reflections may only be difficult on the surface of things, for in the day to day business of living one’s somewhat ordinary life, they come across like images from a waking dream, or better still, excerpts from a short film in progress.

It matters little that Tabios was a devout student of the late National Artist Jose Garcia Villa, who in his lifetime held that poetry was different from prose and never the twain shall meet, because in Tabios’ own inexhaustible experiments in the written word all schools and philosophies and deconstructivist axioms can go hang, not that the old master would be turning in his grave because of it.

Villa anyway shocked a good number of readers, too, while he was at it, and what could be a lasting influence on his student was the same dogged persistence to stick to the artist’s vision, like a kind of faith.

Reflections then is not your conventional book that must be read from beginning to end, for in the spatial order of things the lines can shimmer and roll like distant flashes of lightning in the horizon.

But maybe we are already intellectualizing too much Tabios’ poetry, which is prose only in form but is poetry in all other aspects, not the least of which is its ability to reinvent the language, any language.

We see familiar themes of the exile forever searching for the long road home, relationships between elusive and/or evasive lovers, as well the mother-daughter dichotomy and journeys into the soul’s dark night, both actual and metaphorical and in real time approximating 12-bar blues.

We’ve mentioned sculpture and Tabios’ natural affinity with the visual if not spatial arts, but if her poems were music, which they are, too, in any case, then they would be closer to the jazz phrasings of, say, Joni Mitchell in her "Hejira" phase, forever on the run while the ghost of Jaco Pastorius’ bass colored the background like a shade of magenta.

There are references in her poems to the Greeks and the feminists, though her words skirt around the classics or any thong-wearing postmodern woman.

At times the language may induce a kind of dizziness in the casual reader, but Reflections as reflections go do not require full concentration to be appreciated; again it is as if we’ve walked into a movie house during the middle of a screening, while perhaps the heroine is about to disrobe or slash her wrists or something, which leaves us gawking and wondering and trying to make heads or tails what all this life and death drama is about.

We feel like rambling in our minds as we peruse through the book and read familiar names like Eric Gamalinda, Joey Ayala, guys who we were in the same writers workshop with in the late 1970s, when Tabios herself was somewhere in the US of A, growing up western nonetheless, yet feeling occasionally the tug and pull of the homeland, as inevitable as balut and sinigang and the design of weavers up north from where the poet’s ancestors hail.

Reflections is quite modern, too, if you get right down to it, landing right smack in the cyber age where love can be lost and found in a click of a mouse or sent vie e-mail to the inconsolable void.

Some detractors may label Tabios’ work pretentious but that may be just another way of saying it is way ahead of its time and so would understandably make many a new critic uncomfortable.

Or that she has a big ego which is true of many a controversial and ground-breaking artist. But only in the sense that Mallarme and Valery and the rest of those weird, turn of the last century French poets were ground-breaking and whose very poetry was a way of life.

In her "Lies," which is just the other side of the truth, the persona imagines having kids, and that one of them would surely grow up to be president of the United States. Then she realizes she is fooling herself and admits that she’ll end up alone, alone, alone.

But for her art Tabios too is alone, which in the end could be one and the same not altogether sad thing.