Witness in the Convex Mirror

by Eileen R. Tabios

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. When John Ashbery died in September, 2017, all the obituaries noted that he had been a member of the New York School of poets, that his roots were in western New York and that, despite living for a decade in Paris, his career had unfolded over many decades in the City. Ashbery was, indeed, something of a local poet, constantly using references from the places he had lived. Lost in the very local memorials, however, was the fact that Ashbery's work also influenced writers in the Pacific, including writers of color. Eileen Tabios has taken up Ashbery's influence and engaged in a project of "the browning of John Ashbery," as she told Tinfish's editor once. Using one or two lines at a time from Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror , (1976), Tabios inhabits Ashbery's mode, while moving our focus of attention many thousands of miles west of New York City. Tabios, who grew up in the Philippines, studied and worked in New York City, and has lived in California for many years, appropriates Ashbery to her own ends. These include cultural appropriation, genocide, militarism, sexual and racial violence, art history, and many other interests she shared--or did not share--with the older white male poet. WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR is a tense act of homage, one that draws Ashbery away from the region that is most comfortable with him, and into a place where the discomfort is palpable, but extremely generative.

152 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2019

About the author

Eileen Tabios (born 1960) is an award-winning Filipino-American poet, fiction writer, conceptual/visual artist, editor, anthologist, critic, and publisher.

Born in Ilocos Sur, Philippines, Tabios moved to the United States at the age of ten. She holds a B.A. in political science from Barnard College and an M.B.A. in economics and international business from New York University Graduate School of Business. Her last corporate career was involved with international project finance. She began to write poetry in 1995.

Tabios has released eighteen print, four electronic, one CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a novel, and a short story book. Tabios has created a body of work melding transcolonialism with ekphrasis. Inventor of the poetic form called "hay(na)ku," she has had her poems translated into Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese, Italian, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture.

Tabios has edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays released in the United States. She also founded and edits the poetry review journal, "GALATEA RESURRECTS, a Poetry Engagement".

She is the founder of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary literary and arts press based in St. Helena, California.

In addition to recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, her poetry and editing projects have also received numerous awards including the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award in the Advancement of Human Rights, Foreword Magazine Anthology of the Year Award, Poet Magazine's Iva Mary Williams Poetry Award, Judds Hill's Annual Poetry Prize and the Philippine American Writers & Artists’ Catalagan Award; recognition from the Academy of American Poets, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association and the PEN/Open Book Committee; as well as grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, and the New York City Downtown Cultural Council.

Reviews

[Joey Madia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is always a special day when a new work by this innovative and energetic writer arrives in my mailbox. Over the past 10 years, I’ve reviewed about 20 percent of Tabios’ over fifty published works, at times being inspired to be as innovative as the poet and the particular work in how I did so.
Part of her ability to be so prolific is the way she reworks, recycles, and reimagines her own writings and the writings of others—in this case, as the Author’s Note indicates: “Each poem begins with 1 or 1–2 lines from ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ by John Ashbery.” In many of my previous Tabios reviews I talk at length about her various means of working with existing pieces to create something new, so I won’t belabor it here. Instead, I’ll say that ALL work a writer or other artist produces is linked to and derivative of something—many things—that have come before.
Tabios simply has the self-awareness to be up front about it, even when it is more ephemeral than repurposing lines from another poet’s already existing poem.
Although Tabios has always been to some extent political, be it the Filipino diaspora, 9/11 and the world ever since, or the complexities of gender or adoption for adopter and adoptee, I found Witness in the Convex Mirror to take it to a new level. And the clue is in the substitution of Witness for Self-Portrait. As many a wise and wizened soul has told us, to Witness is to be responsible to Speak. And speak Tabios does, on a variety of pressing subjects in a hurting and hurtful world. So this review will be less about the technical achievement and more about the content of the poems and the responses they evoke.
Within the first few poems, Tabios makes her declarations on the state of things. Take these lines from “History”:
“We imbue objects with worth as determined by the artifice of scarcity”; “We break proven ancestral wisdom by taking more from the land than what we give back to it” (11)
Pressing and thorny themes, including History itself (who “owns,” who teaches, who manipulates it) that are very much in the current consciousness run all through the poems in this volume. She continues in this vein with “The Temporal,” writing: “I am exhausted from living in the dim shadows of a movie forged from the margins of capitalism” (32). The use of “movie” conjures images of Plato’s Cave, where the illusions are mistaken for reality. Neoliberalism anyone? During a recent historical education tour of a wealthy oil area I was shocked to learn that most of the attendees of my workshops and performances as Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara were not familiar with, nor aware of the etymology of, “neoliberalism.” Talk about a snake successfully inserted into a garden…
So as not to get too, too serious, Tabios interjects (one might say ejaculates) two poems in the mix—“Processing the Sheriff’s Advice” and “The Sheriff’s Advice”—the first the setup and the second the punchline on the subject of terms for male masturbation. The second is also a good example of Tabios’s use of list poems in her cumulative body of work.
The section that follows, Cubism of Color, tackles gender, race, and other political complexities through the modern lens. We have Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman; Scarlet(t) Johansson’s turn as an Asian character in Ghost in the Shell (as I was writing this she defended her right to play any kind of human—or an animal or tree); struggles in the Sudan and the bombing of Syria; riffs on an article from The Atlantic and a report about the CDC from the Washington Post; the poverty politics of government cheese (which was a staple of my childhood family meals one particularly desperate year); irresponsibility and the environment; and rape politics and sex dolls (which are already overlapping).
And, because I spent 18 months immersed in the world of Che before the historical education tour last month, I have to quote from “A Revolt at the Ready”: “I bet you’ll choose Che Guevara’s face, stubbled and with eyes haunting under a black beret—a logo for determination.” The co-optation of his image beautifully represents the distorted reflection and the witness in the convex mirror.
The collection concludes with the Selected Notes and Acknowledgments, which will clue you in to the extent of both the origin material for the collection beyond the Ashbery poem and the true reach and influence of this talented and always innovative poet.
Have a look inside the mirror, and let the poems ask a response.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tabios and Ashbery: a treasure trove homage

Eileen R. Tabios is one of the more adventuresome and truly creative poets before the public today. She is absolutely able to write poems in the usual styles and make her works resonate with every reader. But she always is searching for ways to push the use of words into formats or situation that challenge the brain as well as heart. She makes us think: she makes us work. And she is able in this book to entertain.

It is not surprising that Eileen should compose a book referencing the great American poet John Ashbery – 1927 -2017 - yet in doing so she unveils an even more resplendent aspect of her art. This book is one that should be experienced by all lovers of fine poetry: excerpts only tantalize. But while that portal may be encouraged to open on its own, it doesn’t hurt to offer a brief excerpt of one of her responses to Ashbery’s 1976 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’

FILIBUSTER

The balloon pops. Attention
yanks itself awake to a season
of televised men voting for, then
against, X, who coopted his spine
from echinoderms and crustaceans.
Balloon popped. But such if life:
“attention turns dully away.” Fight
or Flight? Fat pigeons in the plaza
peck busily at crumbs, dirt soiling
their suits, the same worn to
camouflage useless Senators

Read Eileen R. Tabios and connect with the mind of the universe – or at least the minds of the inhabitants of the globe. She requires us to think, readjust our thoughts, and find that thread that connects us all. I never tire from discovering new works by Eileen R. Tabios. She makes my eyes more open, my brain more alert, my heart - richer.