Invent[st]ory by Eileen Tabios, and So Forth
“Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?” Those words were supposedly spoken or written by some English prince (Who, I ask in passing, is your top five favourite English princes?). The subject of this response: the author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Why bring this up in reference to Eileen Tabios?
1) The thick book part. This book cannot claim to be Eileen's thickest brick released to the public. It is a goodly large-format handful nonetheless. To me, thick brickitude is not nothing. Big books represent the siting of continued energy towards a what that the author seeks to uncover. I mean, I am all for concision, in its place, but there's something nifty about allowing extent, both for the author and the reader. “Limits,” writes Mr Olson, “are what each of us are inside of.” Eileen appreciates a little elbow room, is all. In sooth, this extent is a matter of inclusion, a welcoming inclusion.
2) The scribble scribble scribble part. Writers write. Some write more than others, and publish more. It's an exercise, and a maintenance of an order, to write. You can't sit back waiting for the Muses. The Muses, always fickle, have apparently been bought by Donald Trump to give him half an idea. Eileen's not waiting for the Muses to visit. Instead, she seems to be making a continual transcript of the energy markers of her world. By her world I mean her concerns and interests (refer back to Olson quote). These concerns and interests embrace cultural, historical, aesthetic, social, and political elements.
I suppose I could write specifically about this book, tho I am not of the weather to review it. I haven't read it cover to cover. I rarely read poetry books cover to cover. Poetry often abstains from serial logic, and so do I. Oops, I have yet to exactly mench till now that there's poetry in this book. Awful me!
It may not look like poetry, tho many of us have adjusted our eyes to see that poetry can look like a lot of things. A lot of things is what this book is about.
Okay, paragraph 6: I mention that this book consists of selected and new poems (says so on the cover). Specifically, catalog poems. What are catalog poems? They are the type of poems that Eileen put into this book, by way of editor Thomas Fink. I'm not trying to be cute here, or what if I am?
Eileen used lists to create the work here. Some of the lists are as homely as a shopping list. In fact, “Letters from the Balikbayan Box” derives from a request by Eileen on a Philippine-oriented listserv asking what others would send home to friends and relatives from the lush marketplace of the United States. These include specific items that we here may hardly think about, like Colgate toothpaste and Spam. Elsewhere we find a detailed listing of what Eileen et famille threw out trashwise. Some fun!
There's a list of questions concerning the Philippines and the reader's ignorance of same. There's simply a ton more work in this book. It is a book readily skimmed or perused, at your pleasure.
Aesthetics aside—at least I think so—Eileen Tabios brings in her work an example of attention. She remains mindful of the situation she inhabits, politically, socially, and culturally. Her work is not something outside her life. I won't say it is her life, but I will say it is the mechanism by which she receives and shares the world. She writes mindful of the details. We all meet by those very details.