In the garden, the oleander shrub was massive, about 18 feet high and 24 feet wide. I usually ignored its greenery as backdrop for much of the year, but in the summer, it grabbed any backyard visitor’s attention since it had sprouted, as I wrote in the poem about it,
braggadocious clusters of blooms
radiating whites, pinks and reds
easily holding up the non-fallen sky
Four stanzas later, however, the poem switched gears to refer to a murder in the Philippines that I’d just learned the prior night:
Stunned, I learned even the smallest fragment
from your thin petals can send my dogs
to join you, Kerima Lorena Tariman
killed by the Armed Forces’ 70th Infantry
Battalion in Silay City, Negros Occidental
on August 20, 2021—the evening before
the 38th anniversary of the assassination
of Benigno Aquino, Jr., sparking other People’s
Revolutions around the world…
I did not expect that my poem inspired by the magnificently sprouting Nerium Oleander would lead to the murder of 42-year-old activist and poet Tariman who was wounded in a battle between the New People’s Army and the Philippine military in Negros Occidental, Philippines. The former managing editor of the University of the Philippines’ Philippine Collegian, Tariman and her husband, poet-musician Ericson Acosta (who was killed about three months later in similar circumstances), had left their son behind in Manila to live in Negros where they fought for the poor and landless. Negros has long suffered from a sugar hacienda lifestyle as well as polluted mining; the province once received global attention for a 78% infant malnourishment rate during the 1970s/80s. In fact, as an undergraduate student at Barnard College, I wrote a political science paper on the conflict of interests between politicians charged with guiding the country’s development on behalf of the entire population while belonging to wealthy families whose status quo they were incentivized to preserve if not enhance: the gap between rich and poor has widened. My poem ends with the hope:
Kerima’s flower shall be generous with seeds
blossoming to grow a Homeland no longer
Imaginary, no longer abstracted by corruption
We are a people as hardy as you and, soon
our Motherland shall be watered by other
sources than the veins of sacrificed poets.
I am glad my poem ended remembering Kerima Lorena Tariman. But I did not plan or anticipate the result, though I can understand how a mention of killing or its possibility—for example, by the oleander’s poisonous petals—and as enhanced by my decades-long awareness of Negros’ plight might evoke the revolutionary working and dying in the province known as “Sugarbowl of the Philippines.”
But I’m not surprised my would-be flower poem traveled elsewhere and far. As I consider this effect, I recall a book by Maureen Owen, Zombie Notes (Sun Books, 1985), where titles don’t always remain atop poems. In another book, The No-Travels Journal, the title of her poem, “Paris Blues,” is placed at the bottom of the verse. That format exemplifies how my better poems work: I don’t know their titles until I’ve completed writing them (or their first drafts). My poem ended up being entitled “Nerium Oleander, Shorter Than Kerima.” I certainly could not conceive of that title before finishing the poem, which appears in my new Marsh Hawk book Because I Love You, I Become War.
The poems, themselves, will provide their titles. It seems so basic to me now, but not if one understands that I’m like many who’ve been taught or introduced to poems as something that’s about something. But to approach a poem’s creation that way is, for me, too paradigmatic or stifling. The poem often transcends authorial intent and must be free to go where it chooses.
I’ve learned that my role as a poet is to capture a burst of something—whether it’s a feeling or a resonant single word or an image (like the gloriously flowering oleander)—that would open the door to the rest of the poem. My poems become due to their writing process, e.g., a word surfaces only because of the prior word or phrases. There’s a saying, “Poems write themselves,” and such has been my experience.
As a result, much of my job as a poet takes place before I begin any poem. My job is to educate myself on as many topics as possible, engage in a wide variety of experiences, hone my skills at observation, and meditate over the significance of a variety of events—not for writing a poem but by being better in the world through a basking in experience. All this knowledge and experience are filed in my brain as raw material for when I finally write the poem, e.g., the information on Negros Occidental which had marinated in my mind for three decades. In the actual creation of the poem, I trust in having filed enough mental material for the poem to access as it chooses.
Obviously, the more content there is in that mental file, the better the poem is served. I recently noted in an interview that as a poet I believe in education for education’s sake for avoiding cliches and sourcing new metaphors. As an example, for no particular reason besides education, I learned about black holes, specifically that if one is able to witness the phenomenon, one would see objects falling into those holes in falls that seem never to end. The idea of a permanent falling resonated with me and came to be included in several poems.
It is only after the poem informs me of its last word, that I then can discover its title. For a similar example, I didn’t know what this essay’s title would be until I wrote it. Here’s the title:
Freeing the Poem from the Poet
Eileen R. Tabios has released over 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 10 countries and cyberspace. She invented the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form, and the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity. Translated into 12 languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies. More information is at http://eileenrtabios.com