Eileen Tabios is a poet, fiction writer, editor, critic and publisher. She has released a poetry CD and written, edited or co-edited 16 books of poetry, fiction and essays. Her most recent books are a selected prose poem collection (1996–2002) entitled Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, N.Y. 2002), her first short story collection Behind The Blue Canvas (Giraffe Books, Quezon City, 2004), a poetry collection Menage A Trois With The 21st Century (xPressed, Espoo, 2004) and the multi-genre collection I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005). Forthcoming are two poetry books, Menage A Trois With The 21st Century (xPressed, 2004) and I Take Thee English For My Beloved (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005). Her other books include Beyond Life Sentences: Poems (Anvil Press, Manila. 1998); Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress (The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1998); The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa (Kaya Press, NY. 1999); Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers which she co-edited with poet Nick Carbo (Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 2000); Ecstatic Mutations: Experiments in the Poetry Laboratory (Giraffe Books, Manila, 2000); My Romance : Essays (Giraffe Books, Philippines. 2001). Her awards include the Philippines' Manila Critics Circle National Book Award for Poetry, the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award, a Witter Bynner Poetry Grant and a PEN Open Book Award. She is the founder of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary literary and arts press based in St. Helena, CA.

What Others Say

Her poems allow our minds to be excited twice, by the psychological and artistic reference points from which the words zoom-out like handpicked bees from a hive, and by the vivid hum of the poems themselves demonstrating a captivating, utterly original imagination. In her lines, which are at once strict and sensual, Eileen Tabios inserts stingers barbed with wit and political incisiveness. The crisp, almost scientific clarity of her syntax is relentlessly undermined by fabulous leaps from sentence to sentence, by paradox, radical juxtaposition, lurking sexual innuendo, and unpredictable narrative swerve. Hers is a poetics of social and cultural interrogation in which she succeeds in uniting what she would call "the convex with the concave." Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole will stand you straight up.
    —Forrest Gander

How often do you come across language so lavishly expansive that any description you can think of seems laughably one-sided? Better just to slap a warning label on it: "Danger: Contents combustible on contact with reading. Includes poems so fired up they'll sear your fingerprints off as you feel your way through them (instant identity loss). Others brilliant enough to burn after images into your retina. Handle recklessly if at all.
    —Barry Schwabsky

"And what is seeing?" asks Eileen Tabios, in this volume of prose meditations on travel, eros, art, and innumerable other subjects, objects. Tabios' answers--her seeings--come out of an amazing range of references, from Buddha to Salman Rushdie to Anais Nin to Anne Truitt to a nameless investment banker; from the Ancients to the Romantics to the Moderns and back again; from the Philippines, as from the United States. Through it all, reader and writer find themselves "losing uncertainty" through Tabios' "eroticized history," which earns its final exclamation, "worthy is the price: Yes!"
    —Susan M. Schultz

Primal in its experimentation, fugitive in its tactile manipulation of recalcitrance and romance, ultimately there blooms a hardcore quality to her corpus' radical engagements. None of the formulaic ploys is on show here; rather a robust desire to attach, if so subtly, vivid back stories that pique and shape our palpable interest with full-bodied allure. The uniformly sensuous appeal of her wide-ranging work -- from the lyric to the exegesic, to the imperial prose units -- is served by no less than either a canny courtesan or a come-hither voluptuary. Or both. Universally is she betrothed.
    —Alfred Yuson

Tabios ... explores how the colonizing language both obviously and not-so-obviously alters expression, experience and perception. Tabios begins the book with a selection of ekphrastic poems inspired by ancient Greek sculptures, introducing the complex issues of cultural and linguistic domination that are to play such a large part in the long central section, titled "Returning the Borrowed Tongue." Her prose-poems balance (at times uncomfortably) on the much-contested border between "prose" and "poetry," just as the pieces themselves explore the murky boundaries between colonization and identity. Tabios investigates sensual and personal histories, conjuring subtle games of domination and submission against a backdrop of physical dislocation and echoing the conundrums of a colonized land.... The book closes with an ornate triptych dedicated to Anne Truitt that exposes Tabios's search through history and art to understand her central demands-to perceive freely, to investigate color, to be a fully responsive being. "Can you pay the price for risking perception and imperceptibility?" she asks in "The Continuance of the Gaze," and then answers, "I trust in radiance. Let: Us." 
    —Publishers Weekly

"To my mind, the measure of a poetry book's success would linger over questions of intellectual usefulness--the book's continuing, viable rhetorical challenges. In that sense alone, then, volumes could be written about how and why Eileen Tabios's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is important both for purposes of study in creative rhetorics or poetics, and as a most satisfying, pleasurable read."
    —Chris Murray, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics

[Tabios] pledges allegiance to her art. And the act of writing is a political one, staking out territory word by word....Her prose-poems are fiercely intelligent, though they're lush, musical, sensuous, mysterious....[Reproductions] is not the world of fixed identities, and its language is neither Tagalog nor English. It's a different world, whose poets are forging a cultural identity that is post-colonial, revolutionary, universal, and peaceful. Theirs won't be a unifying flag under one god, but one that's as various as the hands that raise it. 
    —Leza Lowitz, for KQED Radio Show Pacific Time's "Monthly Selection"

[Tabios] is a poet whose concern for beauty is evident in the long, lush brushstrokes of her prose form, the richness of her language, the depth and color of her imagery, and the complex sets of emotions these poems elicit....The reader may exercise his/her own imagination to decide what each piece, each paragraph means, what the relationship between these paragraphs is.

Ultimately, the reader decides what that larger picture may be. Eileen not only welcomes, but encourages her reader’s active participation in determining her poems’ meanings.

A dense tropical forest of words, home to thousands upon thousands of linguistic species—some large and looming, others tiny and fragile -- and blanketed by a moist emotional web of letters, Eileen Tabios' Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is one of my favorite poetry books of 2002. ... Rachel Barenblat says in her article, "Prose Poems and Microfiction" (http://www.lapetitezine.org/barenblat.htm)..., "the writer of a prose poem does away with the expectations of verse, and is thereby freed to borrow from other forms of discourse and create something new and surprising." [Tabios] has clearly created something new with this collection of prose poems, and her work does indeed borrow from a dizzying number of other forms of discourse, forms shaped lovingly into gardens that tempt the reader into exploring their verdant depths. But these gardens aren't as benign as they appear at first glance, and we would do well, while walking the paths in Tabios' book, to keep our ears alert for wild, hungry sounds in the shadows.
    —Clayton A. Couch, Sidereality

Unlike most poetry books that are light as feathers, their words and images floating off the page, this one is substantial in every way imaginable. Thick with imagery, subject matter, geography and precise and inspired syntax, Eileen Tabios' work reminds me of going for a swim in the ocean -- a complete envelopment in the currents of poetry. There is beauty, as in "Adultery": "In the scent of wet earth, the hold of dark leaves clinging to my ankles, the sound of fireflies mating, the thin sliver of a distant moon, there had been no premonition for such blinding light." But her prose forms also tackle the grim and boding, as in "My Saison Between Baudelaire and Morrison": "The blood still seeps through the darkened continent you left without succor. The blood still spills. A century later I must reconcile with your grandchildren. They never spill viscous tears. Nor do they satiate. But I lose myself in their indigent beds, lick the drawn shadows beneath their eyes, to goad your hand into mine." Tabios' prolific meditations on writing, living and loving in modern times solidifies her role as one of the foremost Filipino American poets of the 21st century. A great read for anyone interested in prose-poetry experimentation. 
    —Neela A. Banerjee's "LitPicks," Asian Week

Is it so rare to be completely changed by what you have read? To instantly want to hand the book to someone and say, "Please read this!" Well, it has happened to me. Eileen R. Tabios has written a book that will leave you flipping back to the first page in hopes that you have indeed forgotten to read a page, that one or hopefully two of the pages were stuck together somehow, and you have the chance to read more... The language seethes with a beauty that one usually would inherit through translation or through personal diaries. It's a personal story she tells with each new poem that exists to provide us with beauty... 
    —Chris Mansel, The Muse Apprentice Guild

...in Tabios’ own inexhaustible experiments in the written word all schools and philosophies and deconstructivist axioms can go hang... // 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. 
    —Juaniyo Arcellana, The Philippine Star

Her 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 is her poetry. For the Little Brown Brother to re-write his colonizer's language into unexpected structure and exacting, stimulating prose that comes out as poetry excellence --- it is an act of activism in itself. 
    —Perla Daley, October 2002 "Book of the Month," BagongPinay

Tabios has a remarkable ability to move from the abstract and the intellectual to the sensual and the tangible. She's a poet of the streets, and she's above the streets, in her own head, exploring and mapping her own consciousness where ever it takes her, even into the realm of "psychological insecurity." 
    —Jonah Raskin, The Press Democrat

I find myself appreciating these poems as compositions with no sharply-framed "subject matter;" instead, I discover each one as a diamond-faceted free configuration of a singular and ever-shifting poetic mindset. The poems are made accessible to the reader through the use of clear, sensuous, and widely (and wildly) allusive diction. I can think of Ted Hughes writing these poems, were he to use a female persona with the sensibilities and multi-cultural experience of an Eileen Tabios. Saludos! 
    —Luis Cabalquinto, OurOwnVoice

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is able to narrate the political implications of place and identity without giving up the desirous, inquisitive or uncertain nature of human interactions. From Greece to Nepal, New York to the Mindanao Sea, the multiple paragraphs of these poems consistently demonstrate a devotion to the life of the pronouns which people them.
    —Noah Eli Gordon for St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter

Eileen Tabios’ first book of poetry to be published in the United States and this volume of art-inspired prose poems should bring to an American audience what the Philippine and Southeast Asian publishing world has already known for several years: Eileen Tabios is a world class poet with serious talent. In ancient Greece, Philosophers defined ekphrasis as a vivid description intended to bring the subject before the mind’s eye of the listener. [She] is ultimately successful in this artistic enterprise of bringing the subject before the mind’s eye of the readers and these readers will not only be enlightened but informed. 
    —Nick Carbo for 2ndAvenuePoetry

Links

• The Chatelaine's Poetics