Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole [Paperback]

Eileen R Tabios (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2002

Poetry. REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE is the first U.S. collection by Eileen R. Tabios, winner of the Phillipines' National Book Award for Poetry. "Her poems allows out 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 captivation, utterly original imagination. In her lines, which are at once strict and sensual, Eileen Tabios inserts stingers barbed with wit and political incisiveness..Hers is a poetics of social and cultural interrogation in which she succeeds in uniting what she would call the 'covex with the concave.' REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE will stand you straight up"-Forrest Gander.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her first collection of poetry to be published in the United States, Tabios, a recipient of the Philippines' National Book Award and the editor of such anthologies such as Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress and Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers, 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 past depends on how we control memory. Memory is a controlling agent. No one can discover what lies beyond an image without the progress of light. Fearlessly, hands reach forth to turn the vase around for another view. The blue vein leaps against the pale hide of a wrist encircled by a thin strand of gold. And your finger is tracing a vein, its protrusion helpless." 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."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"a remarkable ability to move from the abstract and the intellectual to the sensual and the tangible." -- The Press Democrat, Sept. 22, 2002

"one of the foremost Filipina-American poets of the 21st century....a great read for prose-poetry experimentation" -- Asian Week, Sept. 4, 2002

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 124 pages
• Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press; 1st edition (November 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971333289
• ISBN-13: 978-0971333284
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,309,977 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sizzle of the Imperceptible and the Perceived, November 7, 2002

By 

Thomas Fink (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Paperback)

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!"

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a rebellion in prose poetry, April 28, 2007

By 

perla "Being. Differently." (Planet Earth) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Paperback)

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.