Reflections of the Empty Flagpole

Excerpt from Asthma. "She feels what he sees: the lack of a mountain's jade face. Traversed by a river flowing like my tears silvered by moonshine. Whose salt etched my cheeks when I watched an ocean seduce him. We share a fate perpetually revolving around water. Whose liquidity cannot cohere. Into a body one touches to ignite desire and a long-forgotten memory. We are consistent in our urges to continue traveling as if Home exists. Thus, awaits." While reading the poems of the "Empty Flagpole" there comes about a rising of your senses---touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight... A seeing comes about, one that is less about eyesight and more about insight...more about memories, feelings. In her poetry of abstractions Eileen lends to us exercises of inner sight. Her prose poetry can be ample with abstract and disjointed thoughts that evoke smells, sensations, memories. The poetry is a play on our feelings from moment to moment, abstraction to abstraction and they should not be ignored. You can catch glimpses of your emotions aroused in you as your body responds to the poetry. Dare you become aware of your feelings? Dare you to find pieces of your heart? Peel layers away and find your soul? Feelings are the soul's language being spoken in our bodies. Try reading Eileen's poetry then listen to your senses, your feelings and come to know your soul. They are also exercises in learning to be present in the moment. Every moment of our lives, our five senses and our inner feelings are working together, we are connecting our physical world with our metaphysical. How do we learn to be attune to this? We become aware. The poems are exercises in awareness of the moment.... "I soothed my sore hands on icy walls of beer" Although Tabios' poetry can stand alone as poetry and herself as a poet without prefix or suffix, I see Tabios as a rebel of sorts. Her poetry to me is the format she has chosen for her activism. Eileen is an American. Of an ethnic sort. Of a female sort. She is a Filipino-American women. Aware of the poetess' background, this book is worth a read to experiment whether there can be a healing for you in relinquishing self of illusory, patriarchal beliefs of inferiority based on gender, race or ethnicity. What's that word? Aha! Decolonization. Tabios' poetry exudes unabashed sensuality, artistry, intelligence, and lends itself to a reader's surprise at their own insight. In Tabios, I have discovered a poetess whose works are a cultural activist's. Tabios is indeed an activist whose medium of activism is her medium of prose poetry. For the Little Brown Brother to re-create his colonizer's language into unexpected syntax and exacting, stimulating prose that comes out as poetry is an act of activism in itself.

In the electrically lyrical and hauntingly meditative prose-poems of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole, Eileen Tabios is "always drawn to the imperceptible," to aporias, abstentions, and disappearances, and to the lack in appearances, such as flags and mirrors, as well as the sizzle of the richly perceptible: "A golden spark glints from a cufflink struck by a sun ray." A poet who "can be" herself "only in exile," who hovers over "alien lands that are impossible to be grasped," Tabios seizes myriad answers to the question, "How far will I descend for love?" Sidestepping and sideswiping the tyrannies of fixed identity, this postcolonial poet, one who "deconstructs rainbows," can help her readers feel "Michelangelo's slaves surge out of stone" as she shouts, "The King is dead! Long live us all!"