Note: Eileen R. Tabios’s new autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography, focuses on her inventions of the hay(na)ku, the MDR Poetry Generator, and the Flooid poetry forms. This essay presents the early history of her fourth invention: the monobon poetry form.
Monobon: a poetic form comprised of prose and ending with a monostich or one-line poem.
I felt as if I’d stopped breathing. The doctors found a lump in my left breast. The occasion was my annual mammogram. They scheduled me to return for a biopsy two weeks after the diagnosis. I pleaded for a quicker appointment since I knew the waiting would be almost unbearable. They gave it to me, two days later, after someone’s cancellation. The following week, they deemed the lump benign—“just a cyst”—and I began breathing again.
I’ve never paid much attention to my health—with the arrogance of youth, perhaps, but continuing on to the current period of receiving membership encouragements in the mail from AARP (an interest group for those over age fifty), I’ve long considered my body indestructible. I might become heavier, hair-challenged, or wrinkled with time but I nonetheless considered my body indestructible… until it wouldn’t be but by then I’d blithely assumed my age would be in the three figures. To be challenged in such assumptions was, for me, equivalent to feeling mortal for the first time—and it was unsettling.
This is all to say that when I was told about my breast lump, my weeklong cancer scare was one of the most intense bouts of fear I’ve ever experienced, rivaled only by escaping from my burning residence down a winding hillside road during and amidst the 2020 Glass Fire, one of the mega wildfires afflicting the Western U.S.
Fear. Intense fear. In my poetry, I didn’t address the fear I felt while escaping the wildfire that began in my neighborhood before burning nearly 70,000 acres in two Northern California counties. But I’ve never forgotten the intensity of that fear, so that I recalled it when the same intense fear was caused by a lump smaller than half of an inch. I felt and observed that fear again while waiting for my breast lump’s diagnosis.
The fear kept threatening, too, to hurtle me down a meditative journey I did not want to begin. The journey would start with the thought, Is that it? Does my life end now? and I didn’t want to start thinking that way. I recalled thinking during the Glass Fire that I could reconcile with dying then because I felt I’d lived “enough.” But, ironically, having survived the wildfires, I then wanted to live longer. Truthfully, there were and are still plenty of things I’d like to do and experience. The bathos of surviving wildfires only to be felled by cancer seemed… cruel. Is that it? Whenever one considers a life with that question, no matter how much a person has experienced, many—I—inevitably would feel, There could be more…
This fear—with its threat of regret over an unexpectedly cancelled life—was a severe emotion to bear for over a week. After confirming I didn’t have cancer, I paused to consider the emotion’s ferocity. I couldn’t help but marvel over, not just the fear but specifically, its intensity. And being a damned poet (pun intended), I began exploring how I might use that emotion in my poetry.
I’ve long experienced—and other poets have said as much—that intense emotion can be an effective muse. Many of my poems begin from an intense feeling—I’ve felt it physically in the past as a simmer in my belly that wouldn’t go away until I’d written it out of me through a poem (or short story). This time, I at first didn’t know how to incorporate it in my writings but began to explore by writing a poem. I chose the prose poem form as I wanted my emotions to flow freely, for which I wanted to avoid line-breaks for the pauses they would effect.
I also chose to write a poem because I wanted to write one as a thank you for Prageeta Sharma who wrote a poem, “Annual,” in which she quoted me. The poem was published in The Bellingham Review so that I read it while I awaited my breast lump diagnosis. In her poem, Prageeta says a nurse told her cysts can be from “coffee or chocolate, two things I love.” As I note in my response poem below, I took much comfort from her nurse’s statement, too, as I waited for my diagnosis:
Without
Have poems always been conscious of mortality or has my aging recently passed some threshold that makes me now read poignancy in any poem? Prageeta Sharma reveals relief when she discovers her “breasts are okay, just dense with benign cysts” and that her nurse told her those cysts are “from coffee or chocolate, two things I love.” This is from her poem “Annual” where she quotes me when I wrote (and forgot) on Facebook, “A problem with entering your sixth decade is that death is no longer unimaginable. To continue, you must renew your commitment to an art/poetic practice that most others find irrelevant. That renewed commitment is… hard.” I quote her now in this poem because Prageeta doesn’t know that I read her poem shortly after my doctor discovered a cyst in my left breast. Prageeta doesn’t know how I kept the news private and relied on the comfort of sharing her coffee and chocolate habit until my doctor confirmed the cyst was benign. “It wasn’t cancer, but it was still a brush with death,” I wrote in another Facebook post that concludes, “A brush with death is a potent muse.” With these words, I inaugurate a new poetry form I call “monobon,” a prose paragraph that concludes with a monostich. My first draft wanted to end this inaugural monobon by citing another poet and Facebook friend with this line: “Harry K Stammer says Death’s pause by your door ‘will fuck with your head’ long after the peevishly immortal Death ends its brush to move on with its breath turned dank and hair turned oily by wide experience whose breadth cannot avoid regret.” But the sentence’s length would diminish its visual impact on the page; nor do I wish to hearken Walt Whitman’s long monostich from his 1860 Leaves of Grass. Thus, I shall end this poem instead with
A life without is darker, especially without you
As with most of my poems, my poem “Without” traveled from its initial impetus (of thanking Prageeta) to become an announcement for a new poetry invention, what I call the “monobon.” The monobon combines a prose paragraph(s) with a monostich (a single line that can stand on its own to be an entire poem). I believe the monobon welled up from within me because I’ve experienced how creating something new from a painful experience can make the experience worthwhile—or at least bearable—despite the anguish it caused.
I also believe the monostich reared its head because at the time of writing “Without,” I had been meditating over the form of the monostich. On my writing table where I’d written “Without” lay a journal where I write lines or fragments that I could consider for potential monostich poems. “Without,” in fact, ends with one of those lines: “A life without is darker, especially without you.”
My monostich journal also reflects a long-standing interest in the one-liner and one-line poem. The first time I explored the one-line poem, I wasn’t thinking of the monostich so much as another attempt to create a new poetry form—I called it “Footnote Poem.” Basically, these are one-liners or short lines—the way footnotes are—that also comprise poems. In 2003, I released a chapbook of such poems entitled There, Where the Pages Would End (xPress(ed), Finland). The poems were presented at the bottom of otherwise empty pages; I thought that the reader could read the poems and then write out a story or something on the top, empty parts of the pages that would fictionalize what caused or inspired the footnotes (a type of reader-response). Here are two examples, the first inspired by Barbara Guest’s Forces of the Imagination (Kelsey Street Press, 2002) and the second by Barry Schwabsky’s OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003):
Except that, audacity too often must remain a private affair.
In reality, he came to begin each sleep by stuffing his mouth with her jasmine-scented hair.
There, Where the Pages Would End is one of my favorite poetry projects and was reprinted in my immediately subsequent full-length book, I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005). The one-line form that comprised most of the Footnote Poems would pique my interest again through the monostich that, in turn, would turn my attention to the monobon.
I started telling other poets through Facebook. The form seemed to intrigue enough to affirm the form can resonate with others. Carol Dorf pointed me to Jane Huffman’s haibun (a combination of prose and haiku) online at The American Poetry Review. Carol noted the similarity because Jane Huffman had presented the haiku as a single line with slashes indicating where the line break would occur if the haiku was presented as a tercet. For instance, in her poem “On Theatre,” her ending is
I quit theatre / because it spoiled other / darknesses for me.
Versus
I quit theatre
because it spoiled other
darknesses for me.
While the term “haibun” (and “haybun,” a variation on another poetic invention, the “hay(na)ku”) had come to mind as I tinkered with the form which I first called “monobun” with a last vowel of “u” instead of “o,” I didn’t rest on these forms’ similarity since, with the monobon, I was focused on the monostich. Indeed, I thought of the monobon as an extension of my experiments on the monostich without any thought to the haiku. Consequently, I renamed the form “monobon” to dilute the suggestion of the forms haibun and haybun which both utilize “u”s. I did so despite appreciating how “monobun” also refers to a hairstyle that provides an apt metaphor, a gathering of hair atop the head—above the brain—to clear one’s vision of impediments to seeing clearly before alchemizing what’s seen into the single line of the monostich.
Later, I was heartened when Carol complimented the new moniker as “a nicer word [than monobun] with all those o’s.” Such a stray comment may seem an incidental gesture, but affirmations are important in the early days of creating—rather, fumbling one’s way through creating—something new like a poetry form. These early days can be turbulent with uncertainty; at one point, I even thought “monobun” inadvertently evokes the result if cancer indeed had afflicted my left breast and caused me to excise it. From deleting the “u” that evoked other non-related poetry forms to reminding me of my breast cancer scare, I wanted to avoid “monobun.”
I also discussed renaming the form with Sheila E. Murphy, who coined the term “American Haibun” for the form of a prose passage followed by a single-line haiku of a varying number of syllables. At one point, I suggested two alternatives to Sheila: monobon and monobin. I thought of the latter as I thought its “i” would relate to the last vowel in monostich. Sheila said she preferred “monobon” in part because it “rhymes with Audubon.” I laughed in response since I thought the ornithologist had zero relationship to the matter being discussed. Nonetheless, I felt affirmed for “monobon” for two reasons: 1) rhyme and music are always relevant in poems; as well as 2) challenging my initial assumption that John James Audubon had no relationship to what was being discussed. As regards the latter, for me to assume Audubon had no relationship would contradict my fundamental poetics based on Kapwa, an indigenous Filipino trait of seeing one’s self in the other, which is to say, that all things and everyone are interconnected across all space and time. (In fact, this matter later caused me to write my second monobon, “Love in a Time of Kapwa” wherein I combine seemingly unrelated narratives.)
As I settled into being comfortable with monobon, several days later I thought of another alternative: monobonbon. I’m sorry, but I really really love that “bonbon” presence! I passed the idea by Sheila. She replied that while monobonbon is playful, she preferred the “tautness” of monobon. I bowed to her wisdom and leashed my maximalism. Monobon it—finally—will be. I share these behind-the-scenes conversations because I believe it’s important in the early days of creating a form to not leap too quickly to judgement as to how a form might work or unfold or be called. Creation is a balance between focus and fluidity. (That said, if monobonbon—which is so pleasing on the tongue (sweet pun intended)—becomes a nickname for the formally-named monobon, feel free to cite it!)
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The monobon is very much a contemporary creature reflecting the zeitgeist. That is, the monobon is created in the Zoom age. I’ve noticed that during poetry readings on Zoom, Zoom attendees frequently type up a line they heard and liked on the Zoom event’s Chat screen. This emphasizes a favored line and I’ve observed some can stand alone as a monostich. Thus, I consider the monobon to reflect the nature of attention in the digital age.
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One of the few living poets whose work has influenced me is Arthur Sze. He writes poems that—and this is a simplistic description, of course, of his poems/poetics—connects one-liners that are so powerful that each could be a poem on its own, or a monostich. We had a conversation sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop that touched in part on the monostich where he said, “In writing a series of monostiches, I don’t consider the lines as a kind of list because each line is free-floating and has its own autonomy. Each line is a microcosm that I trust will eventually connect to a macrocosm that I can’t yet see or understand.”
Arthur articulated why the monostich attracts me—to paraphrase, the monostich is a microcosm that connects to a macrocosm that the poet-author may not yet see or understand. In the monobon, I viewed the monostich as a seed to birth the prose paragraph(s). Indeed, when I set up the order of the monobon as the prose paragraph(s) before the monostich, it’s not because I consider the one-liner to be the poem’s ending or conclusion. Conceptually, I thought the one-liner could act as a writing prompt for the prose but I locate it within the monobon after the prose so that the poem’s last line remains a seed for others, such as its readers. For this reason, I do prefer more open-ended monostiches than those which present (a sense of) completed worlds within the totality of the poems; examples of the latter (to me) are John Ashbery’s monostich with the title “The Cathedral Is” followed by its one-line text of “Slated for demolition” or A.R. Ammons’ monostich with the title “Coward” followed by “Bravery runs in my family” or Yvor Winter’s monostich with title “Winter Echo” followed by “Thin air! My mind is gone.” All such poems are exemplary but, I feel, are complete unto themselves. For the monobon, I wished to see a monostich whose “completion,” remains a potential as in awaiting a finish provided by the reader (on this point, I can’t help but recall William Matthews’ monostich with the title “Premature Ejaculation” followed by “I’m sorry this poem’s already finished.”).
From my Monostich Journal, here are some one-liners that I know can spark monobons in the future—I consider them open enough to allow imagination to roam freely:
In one’s diary, write without wearing underwear
Time is brutal: there’s an infinite amount and yet it runs out
There are reasons for tomorrows
The book was my country
Life becomes about deferring the inevitable: monsters
This last example is a monostich inspired by my cancer scare:
A brush with death is a powerful parent
In this case, the cancer scare parented the monobon.
It’s also worth noting that my monostiches have no ending periods to facilitate their capacities as beginnings or seeds.
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Thomas Fink, another master poet, had questioned whether the monobon was similar to American Haibun, a term coined by Sheila E. Murphy whose first full-length book, With House Silence (Stride Publications, U.K., 1987), was comprised exclusively of haibun and who since has written several hundreds of haibun in a variety of approaches. She had been inspired by John Ashbery’s one-line haikus which she notes are “often a sprawling affair much longer than a single line or monostich.” I’d replied to Tom that Sheila’s incorporated short form or “seed” (as I thought of it) is haiku whereas the monobon’s is monostich. Despite their seeming similarity, I felt the two forms should be different—as different as the monostich is different from haiku. While Tom agreed with my point, I thought then to ask Sheila—who, by then had written in both forms—how she would compare the monobon and American haibun. She replied:
“I find the short form [as a] seed a remarkable and valuable idea. It’s challenging to write a monostich, and your bringing this opportunity to my attention has had the interesting effect of pressuring some of the single-line haiku following my haibun to be shorter. (Inevitable consequence!)”
Anyhow, I propose some differences between the two forms are these:
- The prose passage of the monobon can accommodate more narrative than the haibun. This is by no means hard and fast, but certainly something I observed in your initial example [“Without”]. I loved the way you integrated personal experience with philosophical perspectives in the monobon. (I have seen many haibun that are more story than poem, but I tend toward the latter.)
- The monostich is beautifully tight and concentrated, as distinct from the lengthier single-line haiku that ends the American haibun.
I should note that the monostich being shorter than a single-line haiku is how Sheila chooses to view the two forms. From the monobon’s standpoint, there is no particular length constraint so that it can even be a long line. One of my variations on the form is what I call the “Fishing Line Monobon” where the prose would be followed by an extremely long single line (even longer than the prose) to evoke a fishing line flung out over water. I love this variation in the sense that the monostich is looking to engender prose, in the same way the cast fishing line is searching for fish.
Sheila also mentioned the significance of sequence in composition. As I’ve noted, I prefer for the monobon to begin with a monostich that later seeds the prose, even though the monostich is presented last in the poem’s final draft. In haibun, Sheila has written in both sequences; she actually first released a book of “reverse haibun” where the single-line haiku is placed before the prose, Reverse Haibun (2011) before the book with the form for which she’s known, American Haibun (2012). Both books were published by innovative poet Peter Ganick’s White Sky Books. She observed, “I found it VERY difficult to write the monostich first, and you perceptively suggested that differences occurred between the two sequences. It was worth doing!”
Her recognition of the two sequences’ different effects is meaningful, coming from an experienced haibun poet who began writing in the form in 1984 after discovering John Ashbery’s “Six Haibun” in Sulfur (editor Clayton Eshelman).
Thomas Fink, in fact, would coin the variation “reverse monobon” for monobon poems that begin rather than end with the monostich. This seems simple but the articulation of the form’s “reversal” emphasizes how the core monobon was meant to conclude with a seed, to end with an opening to more possibilities.
Nonetheless, though I prefer that the monostich is created first so that it can act as a seed for the prose, I won’t consider that a strict rule. I don’t make it a rule because when a monobon is released to public readership, it’s conceivable that the reader would not be able to tell whether the monostich or prose was written first—and, indeed, it may be irrelevant to the reader’s enjoyment of the poem. So I am open to a monobon that’s created in the reverse order of how I’d considered the prose and monostich. In the haibun, prose is often presented first before ending with the haiku. But when I write haybuns (which use hay(na)ku instead of haiku), I usually place the hay(na)ku before the prose. As I wondered about the significance, if any, of the writing order, I decided to test the issue.
I first tested the significance of order with Bruce Niedt, a poet experienced in hay(na)ku (among other forms). I thought of Bruce because, as soon as he heard of the monobon, he contacted me wondering if a previously written poem from his book The Bungalow of Colorful Aging (Kelsay Books, 2022) would qualify as a monobon.
Möbius Avenue
I step outside my house this evening, evaluating the stars and my position. Off on another constitutional. It’s always been exactly one mile, but since they repaved the street, it’s now twice as long. It must be that strange pitch and roll, a half-twist about five blocks down, that has changed things, left me strangely unsettled. My perspective feels different, even though the stars, the trees and houses look the same. The thing is, when I’ve gone two miles in a straight line, I’m back at my own house. Another two miles, and it happens again. And again. My street has become a tape loop, a repeating echo, a real-life GIF. I am constantly leaving and returning to my house at the same time. I feel a combination of homesickness and wanderlust. Others I have encountered on my street have the same puzzled expression that I must possess. They don’t know whether to be dismayed or reassured.
We’re never too far from home, but we’re never far enough.
I appreciate Bruce’s poem which he wrote as a “continuous prose poem” before “separating the last line for effect.”
However, I wanted the monobon’s monostich to be strong enough to stand on its own and I didn’t want the preceding prose to dilute its power by providing a context that limits it(s meaning). A test of the monostich’s power would be that it generates the poem’s prose, not the other way around. This was one reason I thought of writing the monostich first even though it would be presented last within the final monobon poem. Thus, I asked Bruce if he’d be willing to create a new monobon where he conceived first of the monostich. The result is his new poem
Two Sides of Temptation
A little six-ounce screw-top jar. Every 90 degrees, a hole drilled through the glass near the neck, four in all. Through each hole, a red rubber stopper, flower-shaped with a smaller hole in the middle. A half-cup solution of one part sugar, four parts water, almost fills the jar, which hangs by a hook over a piece of clothesline, strung under the eaves of the back porch. A ruby-throated hummingbird accepts the invitation to quench his thirst and need for energy, and he flits and darts around it, dipping his needled beak, hovering with blurred wings, before he flashes off just as quickly as he came. He remembers this station, this sweet oasis, returning again and again, and if we let it go dry, that clever little dynamo reminds us by buzzing around our back porch door, peering in at the humans who feed him. Today, though, there are different visitors, and they march single file up the post that leads to the tied-on clothesline, tightrope-walk across it to the jar, and crawl in through the little faux-flower holes to find the source of what they smelled, that sugary lake inside. But they are trapped, unable to get a foothold, and drown there by the dozens, while a parade of unsuspecting comrades pushes on to a deadly objective. By the end of the day, the sugar-water is black with bodies.
The sweetness, the trap—a hundred ants in a syrupy grave.
In presenting “Two Sides of Temptation,” Bruce said that while he wrote the monostich first, he’d also had a narrative in mind. I responded by noting, “To me, the fact you had a narrative in mind (vs. using the one liner as like a writing prompt) matters. Specifically, if you hadn’t had the narrative in mind, you could have had a one-line ending like “the sweetness, the trap—” (and I’d still include that M-dash). If I, for one, just looked at those four words, they also work.”
Bruce replied, “I really like your suggestion of the monostich being simply, ‘The sweetness, the trap—’. The sudden finality of it appeals to me, almost like a trap snapping shut. I was concerned that I would have to explain that I was speaking of ants in the latter part, but I guess that is obvious. I guess I wrote the monostich as a sort of ‘plot summary’ of my idea for the narrative, then wrote the story.”
With Bruce’s agreement, the final draft of “Two Sides of Temptation” would have as its ending monostich, “The sweetness, the trap—” I prefer this ending because one could envision it being a successful prompt for numerous monobons (or other poems) addressing a wide variety of concerns. As an ending, it exemplifies my desired “open-ended ending.”
I also tested the writing order with Sheila E. Murphy. For her first monobon, Sheila had written:
Tone Tempura
Humpbacked hashtags winter here among the decibels caught up in an ear trumpet just newly cleaned. I stole a moth from the giveaway coat as beige as let-go winter trees. I writhed with smudged wings to be included in a chamber music mainly insects know. Mirroring the sotto glow of bronze bells lifted to another weather. Astride a full-grown tarp draped across a dry dark fence. A kind of limbo marks the close of trail toward and away. Any deviation, a sullen mischief marks the smudge that seeks a quiet shrillness in the cold.
Mortuary science left to tithe beyond young gravitas
After confirming she first wrote the prose before the ending one-liner, I expressed the same issues I’d raised with Bruce and wondered what a monobon would look like if she first started with the monostich. Generously, she agreed to write a new one, noting that she usually writes the prose first in her haibuns. In Mudlark No. 8 (1998) that presents 50 of her American Haibuns, she explains, “… the poems arrive quite naturally, along with each delicate surprise that happens at the end when prose is followed by a space that in turn is followed by a line.” Nonetheless, Sheila said she “found it quite stimulating” to reverse the order. This is the result of her writing the monostich first for a monobon:
Resistance
He named himself Divinity to ward off a plethora of sycophants stepping up to court him and win his heart rumored to be vacant. Gusto notwithstanding countless suitors spoke his name in warbled tones resembling voices of an aging choir. Whose chipped-sounding melody perspired a lack of harmony. Such imperative social gatherings held a sitcom quality minus his now forgotten will to laugh. He impolitely bade each intruder adieu, preferring his shades drawn to match the windows he’d sealed shut. The furniture remained clean, plastic covered, and unused. Hermithood felt almost jaunty compared with the infinity of imaginary conversations he would not endure.
Curmudgeon for rent, inquire within
While comparisons are subjective, I was surprised by my comparison. I felt—and Sheila came to agree—that the first poem, “Tone Tempura,” seems to have a “more free flow” than the second, “Resistance,” whose narrative is more discernible, thus possibly more constraining on what the poem can signify.
We also agreed that reversing the placement of the monostich to begin rather than end the first poem would be effective, but not so for the second poem—this affirms there exists more “freedom” in “Tone Tempura,” a freedom Sheila said she desired for creating poems. She associates such freedom with a poem versus story (with its narrative) and privileges the poem in her approach.
Nonetheless, what these two comparisons illustrate—albeit non-scientifically, especially with the small number of the “sampling size”—is that narrative need not be a constraint on searching for a monostich that is an opening as much as an ending (e.g. the one line ending Bruce Niedt’s “Möbius Avenue.”) In addition, in discussing the process, we’re discussing authorial intention but when it comes to the poem, no poet can control its reception, or how it’s read. It’s quite conceivable that many monobons may not reveal, after release to readers, whether its prose or monostich was first written. I am reminded of the opening to Leny M. Strobel’s first monobon:
A Morning Monobon
“A poem is slippery,” she says, as I asked her to define this poetic form. I like slippery things—sliding from boxes, walls, fences, the borders of a page, the edges of thoughts in my mind looking for a flight path. Slippery things that defy being fixed, contained, stabilized, theorized, frozen, stored, shelved.
I chant, dance, sing, cook.
In conclusion, as I encourage the rest of the world to write monobon poems, I suggest: write the monobon in any manner you wish, including the order of the prose versus monostich. Feel free!
But part of the monobon’s form must be that it ends with a monostich—if it’s a short enough line, it can even be visual poetry where its smaller form relative to the prose evokes a seed. As a seed, I’d like the monobon’s last line to be so effective—e.g., powerful, moving, and/or evocative—that it can generate additional prose by the reader. I think of a visual metaphor: a vase of flowers. A vase can contain a multiplicity and variety of flowers—they need not all be blooms of the same type (here, a thought just arose for a new monostich: “They need not all be roses”). Metaphorically, the vase might be the monostich and its variety of flowers the different sets of prose inspired by the same monostich. With but a single line or from the same vase, a bouquet of flowers can flower through the monobon.
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As I did with my earlier invention, the hay(na)ku poetry form, I want to encourage other poets to create variations on the monobon. The first variation I conceived was the “found monobon” whose prose is from text already written, or found text, before its monostich that the text inspired. I was fortunate that Sandy McIntosh, a poet-writer with hay(na)ku experience, was willing to create the first example of this variation:
Newsprint (The New York Times, September 10, 1908)
A living storage battery is E. G. Atloy who lives with his widowed mother. He is a human magnet, with the electric properties of a dynamo engine. A metal filling had been put in one tooth, and when the boy came home, he picked up the knob used to connect an electric fan and thrust it into his mouth. His head jerked slightly. The fan began to revolve and to buzz frantically. A piece of iron held in the boy’s hand became highly magnetized. A hammer with an iron handle attracted tacks at four feet. The mother was frightened and feared witchcraft. He has red hair, large freckles, and blue eyes.
From faded newsprint, his evanescent smile.
The last line, “From faded newsprint, his evanescent smile” also works on a stand-alone basis as a monostich poem! Moreover, I thought one could expand the effect of the found monobon by using the resulting monostich as a writing prompt for different prose. So, I returned to Sandy and asked whether the monostich might work as a prompt for him to write a new poem, specifically where the prose has no relationship to his found text. After a few days, Sandy returned with this new monobon:
Newsprint (The New York Times, April 12, 1962)
My father’s obituary photograph on the faded newsprint: rigid, glowering—a formal businessman’s portrait by Fabian Bachrach. I wish I could see my father now, in vivo, perhaps moving among his colleagues, gesturing, making a presentation, witty. Or relaxed at the beach, sipping a dewy iced tea, his skin tanned, his tennis racket and sweaty towel in the sand against the leg of his chair.
But I’m left with that photograph to remember a man sacrificed by his own choice to the sarcophagus of formality.
Clearly, the line “From faded newsprint, his evanescent smile” was fluid enough to generate a second poem related to the poet’s father. The fluidity of the monobon’s last line is what makes its last line a monostich—what makes it a stand-alone poem.
Sandy’s results also inspired me to conceive of another variation, the “Book Cover Monobon.” Sandy’s monobons don’t qualify because each of the two poems have different titles (to reflect the different dates of the referenced newspaper articles). But if a monobon begins with a prose paragraph, is followed by a monostich, and is followed by a second paragraph whose prose differs from the first but was inspired by the same monostich, the form would look like:
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
As you can see by the above diagram, this monobon could evoke a book cover where the first paragraph is the front cover, the monostich the spine, and the second paragraph the back cover—hence, Book Cover Monobon.
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Intense emotion can be a powerful muse. Here, intense fear would end up generating the monobon which, to date, has the following variations:
Reverse Monobon
Fishing Line Monobon
Book Cover Monobon
Readers are encouraged not just to write monobon poems but conceive of their own variations. Don’t forget the final test: is the monobon’s one line effective as a seed for more prose in new poems? Does that one line work, too, as a monostich or stand-alone poem?
Have fun!
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Eileen R. Tabios has released over 70 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 10 countries and cyberspace. In 2023 she released the poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection collaboration with harry k stammer, Getting To One. Other recent books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times; two French books, PRISES (Double Take)(trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery); and a book-length essay Kapwa’s Novels. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. She also edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at http://eileenrtabios.com