Glimpses: A Poetic Memoir by Leny Mendoza Strobel shows a more personal side of the noted academic, a departure from her usual scholarly output. Glimpses is still infused with plenty of academic language characteristic of Strobel’s voice, despite her having declared herself “free from the obligatory academic language, citations, footnotes and such.”

Strobel’s prosaic musings riff off prolific author Eileen Tabios’ book Murder, Death, Resurrection (Dos Madres Press, 2018), a 1,167-line poem culled from her earlier poetry books. Tabios puts to death (the “Murder” in the title) earlier works with the notion that in resurrecting them in new forms -- through what she names the MDR Generator -- a reader might be able to select any number of these lines and create a new poem.

Turn to any page in Glimpses, no matter the personal revelation within, and you will also learn of Strobel’s impersonal insights, almost always with an eye toward the broader picture beyond the moment. Line 537 of (MDR), “I forgot strolling outside to hear trees murmur” (p.65), is followed by Strobel’s observation that “Trees murmur. Trees sing. Trees dance…Both science and indigenous knowledge agree on interspecies communication.”  Simply looking leads inevitably to seeing: “My intellectual work opened up to indigenous scholarship and there came a time when my body longed to experience this knowing that everything is alive and interconnected.”  She goes on to share that she became a tree hugger and then… a Tree.

In Glimpses: A Poetic Memoir (Through the MDR Generator) Filipino-American author, academic and local community leader Leny Mendoza Strobel takes an arguably more personal approach to this work than in her previous writing. However, as the reader soon learns, the distinctions between the personal and the political, between poetics and polemics, and between the individual and the social world in which individuals operate are all just more cultural assumptions worth challenging. For example, her memories of young love and high school experiences are not disconnected from the forces of globalization nor oppressive experiences of hierarchy. Her poetry is a reflection of a thought process always questioning the foundations on which it was formed. The result is an unflinching look at how personal memories and personal dreams can affect and are affected by culture, spirit, and society. After all, she says, “I do not have an I without You”.

Hello po, Ka Leny:

It’s a beautiful thing, reading Glimpses, reading your words and thoughts, freed finally from the confines of academic writing. Over the last few years, you’ve expressed anticipation of retirement: walking away from the demands of an academic life. In your social media posts, it’s apparent that you find absolute joy in embodying kapwa: exchanging ideas with your Filipino American students, inviting them to dig deeper into their wonderings about and wanderings into decoloniality. 

IF you have walked the Camino de Santiago, you will come across acres and acres of wheatfields. The wheatfields have no shade and you will see colors of yellow-brown as far as the eyes can see on the horizon. They are called mesetas or plateaus found in the high plains of central Spain. You will also find irrigation dams constructed, of course descending columns of water to irrigate these wheatfields.

The pages in Leny Mendoza Strobel’s memoir, “Glimpses: A Poetic Memoir (Through the MDR Generator),” struck me as this plateau of wheatfields. Read the pages, and embedded are nuggets of her observations, experiences and reflections. The memoirs are easy to read, a page at night gets you to discover what she has gone through in her childhood, but not replete with detail, it leaves you to imagine what is embedded in those wheatfields, or when she describes a camping trip, she hints at the joy she gets in moving freely in a dance.

A gift of a Journal. A Poem with over a thousand lines. A gift published as a book: MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (MDR) by Eileen R. Tabios.

Eileen’s promise: You can randomly choose however many lines and put them together to form a new poem. And if the poet is successful, the new poem will be beautiful!

In another journal, I did just this and I was surprised that this promise is true. I wrote about it HERE. Then I decided to begin a new journal for writing a one-page entry every day in response to a randomly chosen poetic line; I planned to do a free-write following what feelings, images, memories, stories the words evoke.

For three months, before going to bed, I made a date with Poetry.