To my sorrow, I’ve been writing poems
the entirety of my writing life on the collapse of language-- I camouflage my subversions under theories of poetics responding to colonialism replacing my mother tongue with English: Thus, I fashionably cited surrealism, abstraction, the collage of found texts… to remain stubborn against narrative for the anguish inflicted by invaders, the latest being China who literally exports truck loads of earth from Philippine land to create false islands for gambling dens atop an oceanic territory it stripped of fish and polluted with exported waste (perhaps in exchange for decades of receiving shipping fleets of the world’s garbage)-- Now, as the Corona virus spreads-- Corona offers $10 million to rename it “Bud Light Virus”-- I grieve again over the poem’s power to foretell, to gather what stains the air until it alchemizes into the clarity of blown-up, detailed scenes gleaned through the polished lens of a psychological microscope-- I fold into a fetal position against my new mattress of toilet paper rolls speechless like a baby who cannot communicate except for the presence or absence of tears. Photographs reveal that the image of a dried tear shows similar passages of erosion as have etched earth for years. “Amazing how the patterns of nature seem so similar, regardless of scale,” notes the photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher. Anguish begets the same images of branched crystals whether from dried tears that formed in moments or from the consistent deterioration of a terrain over prolonged passages of time “as though each tear is a microcosm of collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean,” says Fisher. If a poet presents Fisher’s observation to you, Reader, unmitigated by “art,” is the poem more effective? Any fetal position I undertake is metaphorical-- should I forego metaphor as if language suffices? I still want to know though now I know I will never overcome N.B.: References to Rose-Lynn Fisher from “The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears” by Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 19, 2013 _______________________________________________ Eileen R. Tabios has released about 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in ten countries and cyberspace. Most recently, she released a short story collection, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora and a poetry collection, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |