About a year ago, I suggested to my local newspaper, the Saint Helena Star, that I write a poetry-related column. Specifically, I would write about a local experience and then write a poem inspired by it. While the local connection would give the Star a reason to be interested, I envisioned the column as a way to feature a poem as it is being made.
I’ve long been fascinated by the progress of a poem—it’s the topic of my first prose book, Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress (AAWW/Temple University Press, 1998). I am especially intrigued by how a poem might evolve beyond its initial inspiration. I also considered a newspaper column because I wanted to reach an audience beyond the academic and literary sectors—all part of my belief that poetry is for everyone.
As well, I thought being forced to focus on the local would make me pay more attention to place—a consideration I’ve mostly ignored as a poet since I tend to be inspired more by ideas rather than physical elements, including one’s environment.
As a poetry columnist, I wrote about topics like a local veterinarian’s grumpy cat, book sales from donations to my local public library, spring’s arrival that caused my backyard’s dogwood tree to bloom with Barbie-pleasing pink blossoms, an elegant white chair on a sidewalk with a cardboard sign announcing “FREE,” the effect of tariffs on a local florist, and the 19th century Bear Flag Revolt (as shown in a sample column below), among other topics. While some columns addressed big issues like how to live as a poet during authoritarian times (a topic requested by the Star’s editor, Jesse Duarte), most focused on life’s minutiae, since I wanted to explore place and show how poetry can live all around us.
My column is entitled “Love’s Labours Found” in a riff, of course, from Shakespeare’s comedy, “Love’s Labours Lost.” My title, though, is meant to refer to the literal labor of finding a poem through some experience. In most cases, I showed how the poem can move beyond its initial impetus—I wanted to illustrate how poems don’t come with how-to maps but are unruly creatures that can swerve unpredictably.
After several monthly columns, I had to adjust the type of poems I wrote for the column in unexpected ways. One effect is technical: I changed to short lines to accommodate the newspaper column where broken lines often were printed as two separate lines versus a single poetic line that continues onto an indented second line. Apparently, such indents had to be inserted manually since the Star relied on software that doesn’t capture all formatting elements. In addition, I had to be willing to see the poem published without stanza breaks since the newspaper’s software also could not insert extra line breaks. (Chapter One’s presentation of the sample column below is the first publication of the column’s poem, “HISTORY IS [TEMPORARILY] WRITTEN BY VICTORS,” with appropriate stanza breaks.)
More significantly, I reverted to overtly narrative poems, which is a complication for me as an experimental poet. I felt I had to adjust to accommodate a readership not likely to be concerned with my own poetic concerns, e.g., how the mere elimination of a period after the last line of a poem is a way of expanding poetic landscape—I could write essays on this topic, but would that capture the interest of the reader looking for a weather update? I decided that the context of a newspaper column mostly—not always, but mostly—must accommodate storytelling as much if not more than the experimentations I like bringing to poetry.
Nonetheless, after a year of writing this column, I am still grappling with this effect of (my perception of) audience: I don’t wish to diminish either the poem’s capacity to soar or the possible reader’s potential interest.
It’s a blessing when I can incorporate both storytelling and tinkering with poetic forms. In the sample column’s poem below, I am happy that I was able to play around with the concept of a poem’s last line by bringing it back to its title—the poem, thus, is an example of what I call the “Circle Poem.”
In a poetry context (such as this Chapter One article), I would discuss the Circle Poem structure, but for the newspaper readership, I didn’t bother addressing the poem’s form. Today, with hindsight, I feel I was wrong in thinking the poetics aspects of “the circle turning” or circularity poetics—including its implication for time, linear progression, or meaning—would not interest a newspaper’s readers. I now believe it—possibly all topics—would have been of interest if I had written it in an interesting manner.
Thus, a year of writing a poetry column for a publication of “mass readership” offers me this takeaway: when one is writing for the unknown reader, the writer should try to avoid preconceptions about that reader. Ultimately, it’s not that different from writing poems whose readers may never be known by the poet. It’s the writer’s job to write as well as possible, not assume they know the type of future readers who will come upon their writings.
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A SAMPLE NEWSPAPER POETRY COLUMN
LOVE’S LABOURS FOUND: The Bear Flag History Report
(Editor’s Note: “Love’s Labours Found” will present Saint Helena experiences and the poems they inspire.)
I wrote my novel The Balikbayan Artist (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024) while living in Saint Helena. Because of my residence, I wanted to incorporate a bit of local lore even though it might seem unrelated to my novel’s plot. I did so because I wanted the novel to reflect the Filipino indigenous trait of “kapwa,” which posits that everyone and everything is connected across all time.
The Balikbayan Artist is about an artist and member of the “Manongs,” that large diaspora of Filipinos who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s to work primarily in California’s agricultural fields. This Manong character would return to the Philippines—such returnees are called “balikbayan”—where he would become embroiled in the people’s revolt against a dictatorship, an unfolding revolution that he would reflect in his paintings.
In developing the plot, I inserted a reference to the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt that created a three-week California Republic. At that time, more than 30 settlers had surrounded the home of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo in Sonoma as part of disputing Mexico’s rule and with the goal of becoming part of the United States.
In my family, we’d often discussed this incident as humorous because Vallejo, who actually supported U.S. annexation of California, responded to the settlers by inviting them into his home for a discussion over drinks. After several hours of imbibing together, the settlers then arrested Vallejo and his family, declared California an independent republic, and created a new flag on a petticoat with a painted drawing of a grizzly bear and a lone red star (referencing Texas’ Lone Star Republic).
Because I’d found this incident funny, I’d created a scene in my novel that involved six rebels who were also, um, intellectually challenged. One night, they got drunk and went to accost the local Mayor who supported the dictator. They even waved a make-shift flag of a sunflower drawn on a white t-shirt to reflect the inspiration of the Bear Flag, the flag that outlived its rebellion by now being California’s state flag. My novel’s hapless rebels were first threatened by the Mayor’s elderly housekeeper who, brandishing a broom, shouted, “You lunatics! I’m going to cook all of you over my brand-new barbecue grill before feeding you to my pigs!”
Less amusingly, the rebels were overcome by members of the Mayor’s private army who were lounging about the Mayor’s house; except for one rebel who escaped, the others were assumed later to be tortured to death. But I intended the Bear Flag Revolt’s presence in the novel to symbolize the close ties between the U.S. and the Philippines in a comic way.
And laugh Louise Dunlap did as she read over my novel’s account. Dunlap is a writer, teacher, and Buddhist who is interested in “ancestral and social healing,” a notion exemplified by her support of returning lands to indigenous people who lost them through colonization. But she also is the great-great-granddaughter of Nathan Coombs, the pioneer who went west from Cape Cod, Massachusetts and who was among the party who participated in the Bear Flag Revolt. Coombs arrived in California in 1843 and later got hold of land, a piece of which founded the town of Napa.
In her book, Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind (NYU Press/New Village Press, 2022), Dunlap reflects on her family history. Her publisher’s description notes: “Inherited Silence tells the story of beloved land in California’s Napa Valley—how the land fared during the onslaught of colonization and how it fares now in the drought, development, and wildfires that are the consequences of the colonial mind…. Dunlap’s ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the [indigenous] people during a period of genocide. As settlers, her ancestors lived the dream of Manifest Destiny, their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations.”
Even before Dunlap’s generation inherited their ancestors’ land, she already had begun wondering about what was unspoken in her family history—questions like “What had kept her ancestors from seeing and telling the truth of their history? What had they brought west with them from the very earliest colonial experience in New England?”
It was through Dunlap’s book that I realized I had elided the brutal context of the Bear Flag Revolt and focused more on a narrow (very narrow) aspect—the accosting of General Vallejo who responded to the settlers with cocktails—that I’d found humorous. In her book, Dunlap also shares how she felt “sick” when she realized that the Bear Flag Revolt was “not the benign, near-bloodless’ rebellion’ [she] had been led to imagine.”
In fact, as detailed in Inherited Silence, the Bear Flag period was “messy, disorganized, violent, and racist…. bands of armed gringos… roamed the region, looting from the ranchos, stealing, and intimidating—riding into Indigenous villages and raping women.”
Moreover, Dunlap writes, “Bear Flagger violence targeted women and darker-skinned people. The more European-looking Californios mostly survived, but darker-skinned families like the Berryessas (who were classified ‘mestizo’) attracted special violence.” (A lake in Napa Valley and a district in San Jose are named after the Berryessa family, prominent “Californios” or Hispanic Californians descended from Spanish and Mexicans settlers who arrived in California before it became part of the United States.)
I can’t recount here all the more sober and somber details of the Bear Flag period. But elements of its dark side obviously were not addressed through how, as Dunlap writes, “the Bear Flaggers [became] a focus of public adulation [while] writing for newspapers, creating celebrations, and spreading their version of the hostilities.”
Indeed, researching my novel also provided the sense of the Bear Flaggers deserving more “adulation” than not. By residing in Saint Helena, I learned about details unmentioned by various history sources, including what I’d used for my novel. If there’s ever an opportunity for me to create a “Second Edition” of The Balikbayan Artist, this will be an area that I will adjust. The Bear Flag Revolt is a miniscule component of my novel, but what Dunlap calls “wars of conquest” are never funny.
***
I write this column to unearth poems from Saint Helena experiences, and this poem is rooted in what I learned writing “The Bear Flag History Report.”
“HISTORY IS [TEMPORARILY] WRITTEN BY VICTORS”
Perhaps you’ve heard
those famous Big-Eyed
paintings were not
created by Walter Keane
but his wife Margaret.
Perhaps you’ve heard
the game Monopoly
was not created by
Charles Darrow but
based on an earlier game
by Elizabeth Magie called
“The Landlord’s Game.”
Perhaps you’ve heard
Scott Fitzgerald
incorporated his wife
Zelda’s words into
his “creative writing.”
Perhaps you’ve heard
of the young female golfer
who used pink golf
paraphernalia because
old men kept taking
credit for her shots
unless she used pink balls.
Perhaps you’ve heard
the Bear Flag Revolt
is a story of patriotism
and nothing else
because of this poem’s
title…
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; a novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; an autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography; and a flash fiction collection Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French poetry books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Forthcoming in 2026 is a selected art stories collection, The Erotic Space Around Objects. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
