Ivy writes: one can take one's cues from how Eileen Tabios constructs the relationship between her poems and its readers, where the onus of interpretation is placed squarely on the latter. I think there's a certain freedom in reading a work in this way -- there really is no wrong or right way to read and everyone gains whatever story they want from it.

And I had to post this here because I can't begin to say how much Eileen's poetics have influenced my life. Beginning with the hay(na)ku where I was finally able to break through that wall of crampedness inflicted by highschool study of poems in a sense of there being a right way and a wrong way to write a poem and there being a right and wrong way to read a poem.

So, how freeing it is to come to an understanding of how poetry embraces more than just being able to use imagery :) In embracing hay(na)ku I began to understand how the word omitted is just as important as the word included...how every dot, every elipsis, every comma, everything in a poem has significance...even the absence or presence of punctuation creates/shapes a different mood.

There yes, poetry catches the reader in the heart/in the cerebrum/in the cortex/ whereever it is--it touches base. I am still a student of poetry in the fullest sense. Searching for understanding... I think it will take me more than a hundred years to plumb the heart of this art form...and according to the internet clock, I haven't got that long :)