Jean Vengua Wins "The Filamore Tabios, Sr.
Memorial Poetry Prize"
By Eileen R. Tabios

In April 2007, my family marks the one-year anniversary of the death of my father, Filamore Tabios, Sr. (May 8, 1925 - April 11, 2006).

Shortly after my father's death, my mother and I decided to honor my father through Poetry by setting out a global search for a poetry manuscript which can be published as a beneficiary of "The Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize". Here are some salient points from the original Submissions Call for entrants:

THE FILAMORE TABIOS, SR. MEMORIAL POETRY PRIZE:
From Mrs. Beatriz Tabios: "My late husband, Filamore Tabios, Sr., and I were absolutely delighted when our daughter Eileen started to write short stories and poems. In memory of my dearly beloved husband and her dearly beloved father, we would like to encourage Filipino poets by sponsoring this Memorial Poetry Prize."

PRIZE: The winning manuscript will garner U.S.$1,000.00 for its author and be published by Meritage Press (www.meritagepress.com).

SUBMISSION FEE: None because Meritage Press prizes all poets.

ELIGIBILITY: Poets of full or partial Filipino descent, living anywhere around the world. All such poets are encouraged to send your best work. Whether you're an "emerging" vs "established" poet is irrelevant as judging will be based only on the merits of the submitted manuscripts.

JUDGING PROCESS: From the submissions, a group of Finalist manuscripts will be chosen by Eileen Tabios. From the Finalists, the winning manuscript will be chosen by Beatriz Tabios. Judging for the winner will be done anonymously.

ABOUT THE JUDGES:

FOR FINALISTS: Eileen Tabios is a poet and the publisher of the multidisciplinary literary and arts press, Meritage Press (St. Helena and San Francisco, CA). More information about her are available at http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios2.htm, http://chattydance.blogspot.com, http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com, http://secretpunctuations.blogspot.com, http://silencestheautobiographyofloss.blogspot.com and http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios1.htm

FOR FINAL WINNER: Beatriz Tabios received her B.A. with English as her major from the Silliman University in Dumaguete, Philippines. She developed her love for poetry as a sixth-grader reading Homer, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Alexander Pope, William Wordworth and Samuel Coleridge while trying to survive World War II. She would further develop her appreciation for poetry as a college student instructed by poet Edith Tiempo, the first woman to receive the title of National Artist for Literature in the Philippines. The late Dr. Edilberto Tiempo, then the head of the English Department, encouraged Mrs. Tabios to continue her study of English and American literature. With Edilberto Tiempo's encouragement, Mrs. Tabios wrote her Master of Arts thesis which was the first investigation, regarding Filipino literature, of "(The Use of) Local Color in Short Stories in English." Later, she taught English literature at Dagupan College (now University of Pangasinan) and University of Baguio, before becoming a teacher at Brent School, a boarding school initially built for children from U.S.-American military, missionary and gold-mining families stationed in the Far East.

BOOK PRIZES:
Finalists also will receive a set of books including these selected Meritage Press titles which present Filipino poetry:

The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, coedited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young; information at http://meritagepress.com/haynaku.htm

Not Even Dogs, the first single-author hay(na)ku poem collection, by Ernesto Priego; information at http://meritagepress.com/notevendogs.htm

Pinoy Poetics: A Collection of Autobiographical & Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American Poetics, edited by Nick Carbo; information at http://meritagepress.com/pinoypoetics.htm

*****

My mother judged the entrants on an anonymous basis—that is, all poets' names were excised from the manuscripts she screened, I would come to be ecstatic that the winner ended up being Santa Cruz resident Jean Vengua. Here is her bio:

Jean Vengua's poetry has been published in many print and online journals and anthologies, including Going Home to a Landscape, Babaylan, Proliferation, Returning a Borrowed Tongue, Moria and  Otoliths. Her essays, articles and reviews on literature and music have been published in Jouvert, Geopolitics of the Visual (Ateneo U. Press), Pinoy Poetics, Our Own Voice, and CultureCatch.com. Jean lives in Santa Cruz California. Currently, she teaches at Gavilan College, and works as a content editor for McGraw-Hill publishing. She is the first place recipient of the Filamore Tabios Sr. Memorial Prize for her poetry book manuscript entitled Prau.

I've long admired Jean's poems for years—shortly after I'd moved from New York to San Francisco, I sponsored book launchings for then newly- released BABAYLAN: Filipina and Filipina American Writings, edited by Nick Carbo and published by Meritage Press. When Jean was part of the featured readers, I relished introducing her as "one of the greatest secrets in contemporary poetry."

When I first discovered Jean's work, I was surprised that she had not yet released poetry books. And, as it turns out, Prau would be her first book. But this partly results from the nature of her poems and poetics—for years, Jean actively wrote poems as much as others who ended up with more print publishing credits, but Jean had written much of her work for electronic publication (e.g. her original blog "Nightjar"), reflecting her interest in how internet spaces might affect poems.It was from mostly her e-publications that I became aware of the deep intelligence and deep music (yes, deep song a la duende, if you will) that permeated Jean's poems. Both combined to engender Prau, where individual poems are not just marvels but the sum of the poems offer a resonant, lyric arc.

"Prau", by the way, is a type of boat. But not just any ol' boat! A boat typically without a deck and propelled by sails and paddles....doesn't that sound as ever-shifting as poetry? And the poets "in the longboats row and row."

Oh, and prau was once popular with Malayan pirates—a touch I don't mind saying I enjoy.

Filipino-American poet Oscar Penaranda also notes that "prau" a prau can be a womb (as how his mother carried him during WWII as they fled Manila to return to their home in the Island of Leyte, as well as that "prau" is the provenance, according to folktale, of Princess Urduha's historical and original name.

Jean Vengua / photo by Michael Fink

Jean, herself, says of Prau's concept:

Prau (also paráw) being a vessel upon the waters (hopefully a swift one), or as Oscar Peñaranda noted, also a kind of "womb" for transferring us humans from one life to the next, one moment to the next. // So it seems I'm always looking for the right vessel, and the right way to get it moving. I don't want no clunky longboat, yo.

All to say—Jean's come up with quite a unique collection. It's complicated, multi-layered, often despairing, always simmering with desire, tensile, diasporic, always stunning—such as this prose poem.

TURNCOAT

position the bird in a side pocket or put it to sleep in poetry. step right up to the shining path. a broken column is pinned to the collar bone, pillar to support her head. she paints a portrait, enlarges upon puddles hidden behind creative writing, drips tears onto a palette, rips open her camisa de dormir. there are two fine breasts cleaved up the middle, and crowning the brow a hairy sliver of moon. the bees are joined in marriage behind literature, european. i kiss your hand, madelaine. i eat your cookies. she unstraps her camisa de fuerza. el corazón beats between science and the mystery of moths and myths. there is cooking for my mother's rosary, juvenile for our apocalypse. choose your color, advance one square, retreat six. cambiarse la camisa is to change categories. in fiction, one must cross two rivers, being careful to avoid the black holes, center stage. fall forever into universe, tell a story, make place.

The poem samples featured in the Meritage Press announcement at this link—http://meritagepress.com/babaylan/—don't capture the depths and circularities in the manuscript. There's a poem "Momentum" in the deceptive form of essay that begins:

Gustav Mahler died in 1911. He saw himself as an outsider. "I am thrice homeless," he wrote, "as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed." His music is polyphonic, bursting with emotion. He is inspired by the cacophony of the carnival fairground. My mother was born in 1911, in Fort Stotsenberg, now the abandoned Clark Air Force Base in Iba, Zambales, in the shadow of the volcano, Pinatubo.

and the poem continues to span a wide historical range, encompassing how Moses Browning developed the M-1911 Colt 45 to kill intransigent Filipino "Moros" in Mindanao; 1911's "Buffalo Soldiers"; Marie Curie isolating radium (for which she'd receive the Nobel Prize); Filipino Alaskero workers; the ukelele; Eniwetok where in 1952 the first hydrogen bomb exploded (500 times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima); the relevance of Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta to all of this... and how Vengua's ancestors were related to all these developments—as we all are.

So Jean's first book begins:

She dredges up old boats, barkentines, praus, longboats
vessels with rigging. There is no more new. A lot of

nakedness around here lately, though. it shuffles, goes
everyday under the radar, shifts sightlines (a surface thing)

we anesthetize. the long trip home.

Jean Vengua's Prau is a poetry collection that makes the art "new"... by making it fresh. ON behalf of my family, we are pleased to mid-wife it into being presented to the world. We hope you all will check it out when the time comes. Prau will be released in Fall 2007.

*****

Ed Maranan

It's also worth noting the finalist/second place winner Edgar B. Maranan of Quezon City. Ed offered poems with lovely lyricism and imagery, as displayed in his manuscript Star Maps & Other Poems.

Ed is no stranger to OOV's readership. One of his manuscript's highlights is "Cordillera Chronicle" which is available the OOV archives at http://www.ourownvoice.com/poems/poems2004a-maranan.shtml Here also are two more poems from Ed's manuscript:

Earthquake day
(July 16, 1990)

With snorkel, mask and guilt
he lived his exile days beneath
the waters, off the burial caves

where ascendants in the mist
must have known his fears, perhaps
lived them, having no escape.

Would they have known the many
painless ways of self-extinction?

Perhaps they lived full lives,
or particles of lives, contented
to be living for the day of rowing
in the sacred dugout, towards
the life beyond, bereft of burden,
freed from hurt.

He glided merely a foot beneath
the unstirring water off the shore,
touching the seabed's sand for signs
of the Palawan dragon's awakening.

There was only the puny puffing
of a fish scared out of its hole,
the only devastation in this world
was that of twigs, small shells,
pebbles, weeds a carpenter crab
had assembled for its angelfish.

The sea turned warm, then hot,
when rains poured on a jade afternoon.
He felt distance, an absence.

Alone, in a universe of empty craft
and slightly bobbing tide, menageries
of animals and birds, he walked on froth
and sand, towards the sunset dazzling
as at the dawn of time, an olive undertow
tugging at his feet.

His heart beat like the cave of winds,
roots and tendrils of tremor on its walls.

Suddenly night, he sought out constellations
—balatik, gubang, manipuru, buntal the boat
of Asok—as though from them could come
a spell that cleanses evil from the souls
of atoning men of dust.

He came home to a fisherman and wife
struck dumb by the flame-red AM radio
shaking the bamboo hut with shockwaves
of voices from the epicenter.

The island itself did not stir.
The surf subsided.
There are many ways the world ends.

+++++

IN MEMORIAM

'my daughters are now blessed'

April 13,2001 : The Philippine boat ML Annahada, overloaded with passengers, capsized off the Jolo island coast. Eighty-seven people en route to Malaysia drowned, including twenty-seven children aged 3 months to 9 years.

 

 

We are alone, no matter that the world
consoles us, in our grief of losing those
we should precede in death.

Who chooses us to share, between ourselves,
the sudden absence of these laughing youth
who could someday be jewels of the earth?

Gone, bloated flotsam, suspended in the cold
waters of a heartless sea, their eyes gazeless
and irreplaceable by all the pearls we crave.

In these dark regions, we ply the poorer routes,
consign our lives, with all the dreams we muster,
to the hands of chance, their inept helmsman.

No brine can further hurt my eyes, they saw
the bright faces of my daughters in a spell
of brief enchantment, dreaming of Sandakan.

O Annahada! What cursed vessel do we pit
against the laws of fate's unfathomed currents?
We paid our passage on a teeming craft

and prayed, all huddled on the listing stern.
Can recompense, the carcasses of men of greed
restore a young girl's strand of hair or tiny grip?

In all my days, I will remember only the silence
as my daughters took in sea, trapped underneath,
my name struggling in their drowning throats.

My daughters are now blessed in the earth
while I must journey on, waterlogged in grief.

© Eileen R. Tabios

top | about the author