March's Featured Poet is José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes who recently received his MFA from Columbia University where he was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared in The Diliman Review, Philippines Free Press, Caracoa , and the 1998 and 1999 editions of The Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction . He teaches and lives in Marlborough, Massachusetts. His discussion about “Villa,Nelle” appears below the poem.

VILLA,NELLE

Invite a tiger for a weekend.
-José Garcia Villa

Sir,place,a,comma,after,every,word,
And,make,your,rhymes,seem,somewhat,out,of,place,
So,tigers,will,come,knocking,at,your,door.

You'll,thus,become,the,planet's,goldest,draw,
With,ciphers,which,are,more,than,musical,
So,place,a,comma,after,every,word.

Few,men,are,fit,to,walk,this,gallant,road,
But,think,of,rose,gates,you,will,thus,unlock,
And,tigers,who'll,come,knocking,at,your,door.

You,must,charm,seagulls,to,accept,this,dare,
But,if,you,do,this,angels,all,must,clap,
So,place,a,comma,after,every,word.

The,hosts,without,a,sword,will,see,but,red,
And,all,their,antique,verses,will,turn,pale,
When,they,hear,tigers,knocking,at,your,door.

Now,take,your,cape,and,wand,Pure,Matador.
Display,a,star,through,what,you,will,conceal.
Go,place,a,comma,after,every,word,
So,tigers,will,come,knocking,at,your,door.

Here is what Jose says about his poem, including an epigraph by Jose Garcia Villa:

The principle involved is that of reversed consonance. The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonants of a word, are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus, a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green, reign. For light-tell, tall, tale, steal, etc.
--José Garcia Villa, "A Note on 'Reversed Consonance'"

While writing an essay on Villa for one of my classes, I began to wonder what a villanelle would look like had he actually written one, which, to the best of my knowledge, he did not. My choice of verse form was not an arbitrary one; I thought Villa would be attracted the form, first, because his name is part of the word "villanelle"; and second, because some of his works, including "Inviting a Tiger for a Weekend," my favorite of his poems, have villanelle-like traits, such as lines repeated word for word that effectively act as refrains.

What started out as an experiment became an homage to Villa. My initial decision was to simply incorporate two of his peculiar conventions, reversed consonance and commas, into the poem. By chance, I articulated this initial decision, and in doing so, came up with the first two lines of the villanelle.

All I had to do then was to finish the poem while following the rules of the verse form (i.e., meter and rhyme scheme) and of Villa's conventions. I knew that placing commas after every word would require almost no effort on my part; the challenge would be to find appropriate "reversed consonant" rhymes. Intuitively, I believed that such rhymes would be scarcer than pure rhymes. I soon discovered, however, that the stricter rhyming constraint forced me to think of end-words I would not have thought of otherwise, like "Matador." By eliminating numerous possibilities, reversed consonance actually relieved the pressure of having to decide between several words with which to end each line. As the poet Marie Ponsot once said, "Rhyme acts as a search engine." Ironically, reversed consonance made me feel comfortable playing with the language of the poem and trying to mimic his mock-heroic tone. I was thus able to mix words from Villa's lexicon, like "antique," "gallant," "rose," and "angel," with words and phrases that seemed close in register, like "ciphers," "rose,gates,you,will,thus,unlock," and "Display,a,star."

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INVITATION TO A READING

Women Poets at Barnard College Reading Series, New York City

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Eileen Tabios

Thursday, March 6, 2003
Time: 7 p.m.
Place: The James Room, 4th Floor, Barnard Hall

Co-sponsor: Francis Q. O'Neill Foundation
Contact: 854-2721, shamilto@barnard.edu

As part of Eileen Tabios' reading, performance artist Johanna Almiron will make a special guest appearance, featuring her movement-interpretation to Eileen's poem, "Corolla."

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of Four Year Old Girl from Kelsey St. Press. Eileen Tabios is the author of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole from Marsh Hawk Press.

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BOOK REVIEW OF MAGDALENA

Magdalena
By Cecilia Brainard
PlainViewPress (2002)
ISBN: 1-891386-29-8

Whenever I hear the phrase “war novel,” I expect a huge tome. War, after all, is a huge topic. Cecilia Brainard's latest novel, Magdalena , is a war novel, but a slim book (relative to many Russian or the James Michener type of approaches). However, Cecilia's more minimalistic – and “poetic” – approach is as effective as books that might be double the size of her 162 pages. For her style of writing makes war reverberate profoundly by engaging the reader to fill in the gaps of what are not explicitly stated -- in the same way that a reader reads the distilled text of a poem.

Magdalena presents the stories of three generations of women in the Philippines against the backdrops of the Philippine American War, World War II and the Vietnam War. So, this isn't just a war novel but a three-war novel! But Cecilia doesn't spoonfeed extensively-drawn out narratives about the horrors of those wars. She relies instead on offering intimate personal profiles of individual characters. I call Cecilia's approach “poetic” partly in how she links her characters to the war backdrops through implication and resonance rather than the more blunt approach of traditional story-telling.

I found this structure to be the novel's primary strength. A reader can go to the encyclopedia to learn more (technical) details about the war. But a reader only can feel the effects of war through the intimate details from the lives of the people populating this novel -– Juana, Magdalena, Luisa, Estrella and others. Fortunately, Cecilia writes character profiles with a compassionate eye; in doing so, she compels the reader to respond with similar compassion.

Another way to describe the novel's structure is “fragmentary” in the sense that each chapter often works as a stand-alone shard. If these shards are to be glued together to form a whole picture, it is the reader who must do so by engaging proactively in the reading of this story. Cecilia's approach even can be seen metaphorically through the very effective use of black and white images interspersed throughout the book as well as on the cover. The photos offer a welcome dimension to how the reader might engage with the story. The black-and-white images are snippets, in the same way that the chapters are, from a larger tale. And yet the gaps that result from such snippets only emphasize the losses that are ultimately the subject of Magdalena .

I keep focusing on the novel's form because I think it is a difficult one to pull off. Ultimately, I think Cecilia's writing structure succeeds due to how she created a sense of sadness that – and this is critical – never slips throughout her 162 pages. It is a sensibility engendered by the slow tango of loss with desire, and desire with loss. The consistency of this mood hangs like a gauzy veil across each page – one reads through this gauze, transparent but still a veil. Ultimately, this mood, if felt by the open-minded reader, becomes the source for the glue that will hold this novel together and prevents it from falling apart.

I always enjoy seeing how artists continue to develop. Having read many of Cecilia's earlier works, I know – and admire – how this already experienced writer clearly pushed herself and her craft to create this book. As a result, Magdalena also makes me look forward to what next – and how next -- Cecilia will write.

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MILA AGUILAR IN WOMEN'S PRISON WRITINGS ANTHOLOGY

Mila Aguilar is featured in Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women's Prison Writings, 200 AD to the Present (ed. Judith A. Scheffler). More information can be found at the publisher's web site at http://www.feministpress.org/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=55861100159950 .

Breaking histories of silence and invisibility, Wall Tappings presents an international collection of women's writings, from prisons around the world and across centuries. “These are the marginal texts in a tradition of marginal texts,” writes Judith A. Scheffler in introducing her groundbreaking anthology of writing by women prisoners. Unique in its geographic and historical ranges, this rich collection gives voice to women whose stories have been long neglected. Speaking from settings as diverse as a Roman prison cell in 203 AD, the labor camps of Siberia in the 1930s, and a Philippines prison in the 1980s, these writers explore the ways in which actual incarceration rests in the shadow of imprisonment within larger society.

Contributors include Mila Aguilar, Saint Perpetua, Madame Roland, Vera Figner, Lady Constance Lytton, Agnes Smedley, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Ethel Rosenberg, Lolita Lebrón, Ericka Huggins, Carolyn Baxter, Assata Shakur, Beatrice Saubin, and Nawal El Sadaawi, as well as many unknown women.

In memoir, letters, diaries, essays, fiction, and poetry, these writers affirm the power of expression. They write to vindicate themselves, to strengthen their beliefs, to call out against prison deprivations, to celebrate relationships and solidarity with other women, and to comfort themselves and their children under the duress of separation. Their motivations provide the organizing themes of the book.

However diverse their purposes may be, the writers “unite,” as Scheffler says, “in condemning an institution that labels them worthless and attempts to destroy their humanity in the name of justice.” The first edition of Wall Tappings , published in 1986, received the Susan Koppelman Award from the Women's Caucus of the Popular Culture Association. The new edition has been substantially expanded and updated. Biographical introductions give context for each contribution, and an updated, annotated bibliography offers a unique resource for teachers, researchers, and activists. For course use in: criminology, world history, literature of social movements, political science, sociology, women's studies, world literature.

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“MY LIFE ... AS A DUWENDE -- A POETRY CHAPBOOK BY MICHELLE BAUTISTA

Congratulations to Bay Area poet Michelle Bautista who's released her first poetry e-chapbook. You can download the PDF version for free at:

http://micmac74.tripod.com/cw/duwende.html

A printed version is also available for, as Michelle puts it, those who “really should stop staring at computer screens and like the feel of 50% postconsumer paper.” More information on how to obtain the print-version is available on the above link.

Here is a sample poem from Michelle's poetry e-collection:

From "Ticket of Admission VII"
(after Thomas Fink's 2002 acrylic on canvas 40"X30")

I allow my eyes
soften then blur
so that you can tell me
what I might not have seen
along the ridges of mermaid's scales
a long legged beetle
skimming still water
layers become columns
when i glimpsed you
a shadow perhaps
but still
my eyes fall
lightning streak silences the night
I dream of Inuits fishing through ice
from a seal's eye of cascading fish line.

what lies beyond the white borders
is proportionless
at this distance
you fill my palm
at another an entire room
and what if i were to
bring you close
closer still
where only minute sections
fill the space of vision

I let go of my eyes
who betray me yet again
to find truth
in the ridges of my palms
circular textured pattern
on smooth surfaces
become ragged and mountainous
irises reflected in you
legs stretched to retain cohesion

do i dare presume to know your entirety
on an outstretched arm?

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TEBOT BACH PRESS RELEASE ON CALIFORNIA POETS ANTHOLOGY

Huntington Beach, April 12, 2003
Publication Release: So Luminous the Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets.

Tebot Bach is proud to announce the release of So Luminous the Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets . Eighteen months in the making, the collection features the work of 187 California poets including Carlye Archibeque, Richard Beban, Dorothy Barresi, Laurel Ann Bogen, Christopher Buckley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Foley, Amélie Frank, Richard Garcia, Liz González, Jack Grapes, Eloise Klein Healy, Ron Koertge, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Gerald Locklin , Suzanne Lummis, Glenna Luschei , Jeffrey McDaniel, Carol Moldaw, Jim Natal, Jamie O'Halloran, Maurya Simon, David St. John, Charles Harper Webb, Jackson Wheeler, Cecilia Woloch, Robert Wynne, Eileen Tabios and more!

The book features new work from many of the poets as well as essays by David St. John and Pulitzer winner Philip Levine. This is the second in a series of Poetry Anthologies published by Tebot Bach. The first, Incidental Buildings & Accidental Beauty, An Anthology of Orange County/Long Beach Poets was published in 2000.

Tebot Bach is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to strengthening community, promoting literacy, and broadening the audience for poetry through Community Outreach Programs and Publishing, and to demonstrating the power of poetry to transform one's life experiences through readings, workshops, and publications. Tebot Bach is Welsh for little teapot.

Please join us in celebrating the release of this major collection of California poetry. Many of the contributing poets will be at the release to read their poetry from the collection.

What: Publication Release: So Luminous the Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets
When: Saturday, April 12, 2003. 7.30 PM
Where: Community Room 102,
Golden West College,
Huntington Beach, CA. Gothard Street entrance.
see http://www.tebotbach.org/newvenue.htm for detailed directions.

Contact: Mifanwy Kaiser (Publisher) 714-968-0905
Paul Suntup (Editor) 714-267-9767
Website: www.tebotbach.org

So Luminous the Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets
ISBN: 1-893670-13-9
288 pages. $17.00
Publisher: Tebot Bach
Edited by: Paul Suntup
Introduction by: Michael Paul
Assistant Editors: Mindy Nettifee, Michael Paul, Steve Ramirez

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FROM TAMAFHYR MOUNTAIN POETRY: A BOOK REVIEW

Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole by Eileen Tabios
(New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2002)
ISBN 0-9713332-8-9
Review By Barbara Jane Reyes

The poet must be primarily concerned with beauty. When all other explanations fail, remember this rule, and you will understand the poems contained in Eileen Tabios's Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole . Eileen is a poet whose concern for beauty is evident in the long, lush brushstrokes of her prose form, the richness of her language, the depth and color of her imagery, and the complex sets of emotions these poems elicit.

In Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole , a collection of prose poems written between 1996 and 2002, we see how visual art has served as Eileen's primary teacher in approaching poetry. A single color upon a canvas brings forth an onslaught of emotions and images from her own memory and experiences. Rightfully so, when approaching a piece of art, however abstract, the viewer must give him/herself adequate time for reflection. “Grey, Surreptitiously,” inspired by monochromatic grey upon canvas, brings Eileen to write of the waters of the East River, the cities of Eastern Europe, the dusty armors of museum exhibits, the feel of cashmere, the birth of pearls and the feel of a pearl between a woman's breasts, the eyes of a woman in the street. All this, from the color grey.

In “Jade,” she employs cubist technique — by piecing together four seemingly unrelated paragraphs, as a painter may create a face by placing a fragmented image of an ear alongside a fragmented image of an eye, she is providing the reader with a complete picture of something larger than the four paragraphs themselves. The reader may exercise his/her own imagination to decide what each piece, each paragraph means, what the relationship between these paragraphs is. Ultimately, the reader decides what that larger picture may be.

Eileen not only welcomes, but encourages her reader's active participation in determining her poems' meanings. The reader must bring these poems into his/her own context and reflect upon them in that context. Hence, there is no one “wrong” or “right” reading. She is generous and democratic in leaving these poems open-ended, even going so far as to omit the periods that end prose sentences: Why should the limitations of a physical page end a poem? The physical limitations of the canvas do not stop the viewer from imagining paintings continuing beyond the canvas. Similarly, the reader must imagine, even invent the poem continuing beyond the page. The reader, then, completes the experience of the poem begun by the poet. These poems become about us, the readers, what we have put into them, how we have chosen to experience them.

RETURNING THE BORROWED TONGUE
Eileen makes no apologies; the writing of these abstract poems is political. The very fact that she has skillfully crafted them, avoiding straight forward narrative, and has written them in the language imposed upon Filipinos over 100 years ago as a result of the Philippine American War is evidence of an obscured American colonial legacy in the Philippines. English was the colonizer's tool, infiltrating the nation's very infrastructure, its educational system and government. Since the coming of the American military, governors and bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and teachers, the Filipino ruling elite have made law in English; the Filipino literati have produced English work privileged over prose and poetry written in the Philippines' many vernaculars.

But the best revenge against the colonizer is to write as Eileen does, adeptly in the colonizer's own tongue. In doing so, she subverts his paradigms so deftly that he cannot recognize the subversion, having been eluded by his own language.

Reviewed by Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Gravities of Center (San Francisco: Arkipelago Books, 2003), and currently a MFA candidate at SF State University.