Books by Eileen Tabios using the Hay(na)ku, a 21st century poetry word-count form.
Hay(na)ku Books by Eileen Tabios
reviewed by
Ariadne Unst
Hay(na)ku History.
Hay(na)ku Example.
Hay(na)ku Form.
Eileen Tabios, mother of Hay(na)ku.
Eileen Tabios Hay(na)ku chap (chapbook):
The Singer and Others: Flamenco Hay(na)ku.
Interview with Jean Vengua, anthologist of Hay(na)ku.
Your Hay(na)ku Composition.
References on Poetry Form.
The
hay(na)ku is a 21st-century poetry form invented by
poet Eileen Tabios,
and officially inaugurated on the Web on June 12th, 2003 (Philippine Independence Day).
The Singer and Others: Flamenco Hay(na)ku
deliciously
arrived today
Flamenco Hay(na)ku singing
from the soul
of Eileen
Tabios
web
review to
be written soon
muchas gracias escribo
la verdad
roja
Ariadne Unst
|
Review of The Singer and Others: Flamenco Hay(na)ku
by Eileen Tabios
This gorgeously presented handmade chap of 64 pages
is a joyful experience, starting with the
wrapper of recycled newsprint-de-jour
(reflecting Tabios's ecopoetics)
on which a rosy smooch has been lovingly kissed.
I take a sip from my glass of sangria,
then break the handmade sticker,
undo the glossy green gift ribbon (also ecopoetically recycled),
and
open up the package.
Anyone who would not feel anticipation at this point
has been deep-sixed.
What an exuberant double cover:
the outer cover of luminous flamingo pink shows the top of a played guitar beneath the active fret hand of a flamenco
guitarist and beside the extended hand of a flamenco dancer;
the inner cover of shiny apple green is revealed,
as a petticoat is glimpsed at a torn skirt hem,
beyond a satisfyingly raw edge to the outer cover, created by the poet's deliberate hand-tearing of
an edge strip.
Black and white images of flamenco
scenes from Tabios's travels in Spain intersperse
the poems. All are placed on faded want-ad sheets (another kind of desire).
It is delicious to
figure out how the chap is put together,
including how torn strips appear at critical places -- a labor of love and passion -- very tango-esque.
The poems are all sequences in the form of the
hay(na)ku
and
reverse hay(na)ku forms invented by Tabios:
each stanza is
a tercet (3 lines)
totaling 6 words, with 1-or-3 words in the first line, 2 in the second, and 3-or-1 in the last.
There are a dozen poems by Tabios, telling stories of flamenco dancers and singers, passionate people of the flamenco
culture, and the relationship of flamenco to poetry writing:
what
would be the
worst thing
said
about my poetry?
I created
nothing
that moved you.
[From "The Singer"]
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The writing is strong, particularly with a glory of fierce verbs, including:
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astonish,
bait, beg, bewilder, bruise, burrow,
calibrate, chop up, clap, clash, claw, cleanse, conspire, cut,
demand, drench, drown, drug,
eliminate,
flick, forbid, forced, fumble,
howl,
knock,
lance, lick, lure,
mate,
overwhelm,
pierce, pound, prolong, pucker,
rap, reveal, rip,
slam, shiver, shrivel, snarl, stain, stalk, stamp, sweat,
tap,
wither,
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The chap includes Federico García Lorca's "Cancioncilla del Primer Deseo", which starts
(restoring stress and pronunciation marks that Tabios dropped):
En la manaña verde
quería ser corazón.
Corazón.
Y en la tarde madura
quería ser ruiseñor.
Ruiseñor.
|
In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.
And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.
|
Poet and visual artist
Jean Vengua (personal communication, June 17, 2007 10:11 P.M.)
asserts the importance of Lorca:
|
His theory about duende is, I think, mostly a mystical view, in which Duende is the muse
(for Lorca, a homosexual, it was a male muse), something like a dark angel
that bequeaths a special artistic power only to those artists
who are passionate enough to risk everything, unto death, for their art.
See for example her [Tabios'] poem "Sangre Negra" on page 10,
"The way / cantaores // drown in their / own blood / singing// one last letra."
|
The Author's Notes report that much of this work is
generated from a pre-existing text, Sarah Bird's The Flamenco Academy
using the techniques of "scumbling"
and Vicente Rafael's
"fishing" technique.
The obscurity of what these mean for the text is
our main quibble with the chap.
Despite our quibble, for the four-dimensional glory experience of opening
up this smoochy chap,
contact the author.
Beg for a copy.
Kneel on your flamenco-infused knees.
Scumbling and fish-ing
A weakness of the chap is that the Author's Note alludes to scumbling and fish-ing,
but without explanation. The reference is coy.
It's irritating to have to go tracking down what she means by these words,
especially when I find them and discover that she's giving fancy names
to techniques used by other.
If an academic did this, it would be over-intellectualization: vocabulary generation
for the sake of staking out mindspace.
Scumbling and fish-ing, she tells us, are techniques of leveraging other material:
|
Much of the text in the poems were generated from a combination of
"scumbling" and "fish-ing"
techniques. The scumbled text was Sarah Bird's The Flamenco Academy
(Knopf, New York, 2006).
Information about scumbling is available in my book
Dredging For Atlantis (Otoliths, 2006)
and at http://dredgingforatlantis.blogspot.com.
Information about "fish-ing" is available in
Vincente L. Rafael's
Contracting Colonialism: Translation and
Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early
Spanish Rule (Duke University Press, 1993).
|
But the referenced books were not
available to us and the web site did not have any clear pointer to a lightning-bolt definition.
So what did we find in browsing the Web? In painting, according to
http://www.asopa.com/publications/1999spring/venetiantechnique.htm:
- "A scumble is a thin application of a lighter semi-opaque paint over a dried darker passage".
- "Subsequent glazes and scumbles were often employed
to further develop the forms and/or adjust the colors and values.".
According to
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=scumbled,
the verb form can be in this kind of sentence:
"To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides history and fiction."
Ah, this sounds like Tabios has simply used a word from art for
a technique used widely by other authors, especially by one of my favorite novelists,
Jim Crace,
in
Arcadia,
Being Dead,
etc. and by many others.
Jean Vengua (personal communication, June 17, 2007 10:11 P.M.)
reports her view that Tabios:
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sees scumbling as a process of layering words, like paint.
Not exactly like collage, with its hard edges, but think of it as a softer, tonal process, where words (some
taken from the lines of other poets or textual sources)
layered one over the other might reveal juxtapositions and relationships.
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What does scumbling mean for the poems of
The Singer and Others?
What is their relationship to found poems?
Information of the distance between Tabios's text and Bird's would be helpful.
We assume that the poems in Tabios's book are sufficiently different
(include sufficient layers of fish and scumble) from
Sarah Bird's The Flamenco Academy
that our praise of Tabios's poems should not be given instead to the brilliance of Bird's work.
On "fish-ing"
Craig Perez
(http://galatearesurrection5.blogspot.com/2007/02/2-books-by-paolo-javier.html)
comments on the use of the term by Paolo Javier and Vicente Rafael:
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[Paolo] Javier describes how "during friar rule in the Philippines,
a method of homophonic translation called 'fishing' was used during the church sermons by the uneducated,
non-Spanish speaking native congregations." He then quotes Vicente Rafael's Contracting Colonialism:
'for whom the priest's words rouse in [them] other thoughts that have only the most tenuous connections
to what he is actually saying.
It is as if they saw other possibilities in those words,
possibilities that served to mitigate the interminable verbal assaults being hurled from the pulpit.
To the extent that such random possibilities occur, the native listeners manage to find another place
from which to confront colonial authority.'
Javier suggests an analogy: the way in which he "fishes" Neruda's Spanish to find and construct
variable possibilities parallels the native congregations' "fishing" the Spanish sermons.
To me, this is a barely tenable analogy considering that Neruda's Spanish is not being hurled at Javier
from any pulpit; nor is he assaulted, linguistically, in as desperately strange a situation as the "native listeners."
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Perez's criticism of Javier's "barely tenable analogy" of Rafael's term would also apply to Tabios.
Setting aside that cricism, what does "fish-ing" mean for the poems of
The Singer and Others?
Isn't this just another name for the
English-to-English translitics (translations/conversions based on word sounds rather than meaning,
as in poetry texts such as Steve Kowit's
In the Palm of Your Hand)?
But mostly the questions don't distract from the pleasure of reading the poems.
Ariadne's Jean Vengua Interview
Jean Vengua made time from her book tour
to talk to our interviewer Ariadne Unst about Hay(na)ku
and
The First Hay(na)ku
Anthology.
Here is the transcript.
Books.
The First Hay(na)ku
Anthology
introduces the new poetic form, the hay(na)ku, invented by Eileen Tabios
(with inspiration from Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac, and meditations on the Filipino
transcolonial and diasporic experience).
Poems and essays by 38 poets.
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