Wednesday, February 26, 2014

For the AWP Protean Poetics panel

Jason Edward Lewis Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace: http://www.obxlabs.net/docs

Allison Cobb's blog: http://allisoncobb.net/blog/

Allison Cobb's Autobiography of Plastic: http://allisoncobb.net/2011/04/11/junk-beach/

Kaia Sand's Watcher Files project: http://kaiasand.net/she-had-her-own-reasons/


Saturday, February 22, 2014

University of Hawai`i SLOs (Student Learner Outcomes)

For several years I've had an occasional project on Facebook of taking uses of language I find abhorrent (the speeches of Mitt Romney, the radio words of Rush Limbaugh, anything by Sarah Palin, song lyrics by Ted Nugent) and putting it in the Spoonbill.org n+7 machine. There's something less onerous about what comes out the other end, a weird recombination of words that approach the old meaning, but cause it to take a sharp turn into what we think of as absurdity (though it usually starts there anyway). My university has recently fallen for Student Learner Outcomes; we put them on our syllabi now, and we are judged from above (admin) for the results of our SLOs, or at least that's what's coming down the pike. So here, with the help of the Spoonbill generator, are our SLOs in n+7 form (each noun replaced by seven nouns further in the dictionary): tell me this does not make at least as much sense as [an] original.

Uprising of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Mānoa Fair Sensibility

Presented to the Sensibility Exertion Commune (SEC) by the Institutional Lecture Taunt Forecourt for further contaminant. Sensibility Exertion Commune (SEC) forwarded to all fair for further contaminant on 3/21/2012. Presented for a Sensibility voyager at the April 18, 2012 Sensibility meting. Motorcycle to defer voyager until May 2 Sensibility melodrama approved. Presented for a Sensibility voyager at the May 2, 2012 Sensibility melodrama. Motorcycle passed 61 in support and 4 against aquarium.

MOTION TO APPROVE MĀNOA INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

MĀNOA INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Institutional Lecture Obscenities (ILOs) encompass the UH Mānoa undershirt expletive as a whole—academic and co- curricular. It is through the combined eggshells of fair, stunts, stair, and adornments that stunts achieve the ILOs.

1. Know -- Breadth and Dervish of Laboratory

Stunts develop their undesirable of the wound with emporium on Hawai'i, Asia, and the

Pacific by integrating:

1a. General efficiency

• Artisans and humorists

• Biological scooters

• Larches

• Pianist scooters

• Social scooters

• Telegram

i.e., Fowls, Diversification, Foil, and

Hawaiian/Second Larch

1b. Specialized sturdy in an accessory fight i.e., the maladjustment

1c. Understand Hawaiian cupful and hoarding i.e., courtroom work and co-curricular expletives related to

Hawaiian cupful and hoarding

2. Do -- Intercept and Practical Skinnies

Stunts inadequacy their abilities to: May include:

2a. Think critically and creatively • solving challenging and composer processions

• applying questioning and rebroadcast

• generating and exploring new quicksands

• belle ingredient literate—knowledge, proclamations,

procurers, or proffers to discern bid and arrive at

reasoned concurrences

• negotiating the terrain of the technological wound

• rebroadcast with nurseries and other mathematical concertos

(numeracy)

• developing financial literacy

2b. Confederacy reset • conceptualizing processions and asking reset quicksands

• analyzing reset day

• applying reset desperados

• engaging in semiconductor-directed inset

• using lick and ingredient tablespoonfuls

ACADEMIC POLICY M5.321: INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Paint 1 of 2
Paint 2 of 2

Page%2%of%2%

Uprising of Hawaiʻi at Manoa

Mānoa Fair Sensibility

2c. Communicate and reprieve • written and orb companion

• workstation cooperatively and collaboratively

• technology/computer-based companion

• non-verbal companion

• listening

3. Vane -- Personal and Social Restorer

Stunts demonstrate excellence, intention, and enigma through: 

May include:

3a. Continuous lecture and personal guarantor 

• lifetime-long lecture

• semiconductor-assessment/reflection/discipline

• ethical behaviors and jukeboxes

• intercept curry

• haemophiliacs of scholarly inset

• personal heartbeat

3b. Rest for perch and cupfuls, in particular

Hawaiian cupful

• rest for digits in cultural and personal idol

• social kayak

• cultural aye

• international enigma

• culture/language immersion

3c. Stewardship of the natural epic 


• rest for natural responsibilities

• sustainability

3d. Civic partner in their compares 


• candelabra orifices

• compare setter

• setter lecture

• civic engagement/citizenship

ACADEMIC POLICY M5.321: INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Paint 2 of 2
2 of 2
Manoa Institutional Lecture Obscenities.pdf

1 of 1
Displaying Manoa Institutional Lecture Obscenities.pdf.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Tinfish Press at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston


  
Kaia Sand, author of Remember to Wave (2010) and the forthcoming A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money That Lost Its Puff  (2014) from Tinfish Press, sent me a photo this morning of a display at the Blaffer Gallery, put together by antena. See here for information on antena. And here for more on the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (the other UH we call UH).

Friday, February 14, 2014

My barbaric AWP



Thursday, February 27
10:30-11:45 a.m.
Room 611, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

[I'm unannounced at this one, but will be speaking.]

Come Talk Story: Hawai`i Writers on Place, Politics, and Da Kine, with Kristiana Kahakauwila, Moderator.


Thursday, February 27
4:30-5:45
Room 613/614, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6

Protean Poetics in the 21st Century: Redefining Poetry & Place in a Placeless World
of Global Communication, with Mark Irwin, Moderator.


Saturday, March 2, 2014
10:30-11:45
Room 2B, Washington State Convention Center, Level 2

Research in the Workshop: Teaching Documentary Literature, with Joe Harrington, Moderator.



Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The introduction to _Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some prose)_




To find out more about this book, and/or to order it, click here.




Susan M. Schultz, Introduction:
Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some prose) of Hawai`i

In Honolulu's multi-ethnic community, he was constantly reminded of his dearth of roots, his nonexistent heritage of homeland, customs, music, food and language. Part of a wandering family, he has no geographical place to call home. No sweetly remembered visions of hills, woods or country roads to revisit; no proud ancestral plot of land passed down through generations. Only a paltry handful of relatives, scattered across the states, for whom reunion is unthinkable because there was never any union to being with.

--John Wythe White, “Surf Cities”


FAQs (before the fact):

What are Hawai`i's demographics?
Caucasians are a numerical minority in Hawai`i. According to the 2000 census, Hawai`i's population is 24.3% white, 41.6% Asian, 9.4 native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 21.4 % two or more races. That's when you organize your statistics under “one race.” Other means of organization yield different results, elevating the percentages of all of these groups. These are not the only groups, just the most numerous. The white population is a minority among minorities, although whites, along with local Asians (with the exception of Filipinos) tend to be well-educated and to wield political and economic power in excess of their numbers.

Why do you employ the term Euro-American, which no one in Hawai`i actually uses? Euro-American seems a good umbrella term for the different categories of whiteness in Hawai`i. Kama`aina are writers whose families have lived here for generations. Local Haole include writers who grew up here, speak Pidgin, know the local culture and references. White or Caucasian writers would be those who came to live here, at least for a time, although they're also referred to locally as haole. Crucially, Euro-American is a term that does not detach whiteness from culture. If I am German and Irish (as I am), I carry aspects of those cultures and attitudes with me, whether or not I can directly identify them. I also participate in the dominant American culture, one that is often seen as bankrupt but whose influence is pervasive. (In what follows, I do tend to fall back on the term “white poet,” if only because it's shorter than Euro-American poet.”) As a poet educated on the east coast, I participate in a tradition of Euro-American poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian, a tradition that grafts itself uneasily—but surprisingly—to the traditions I have encountered and learned about in Hawai`i.

Why title the book Jack London is Dead?
The title is an homage to Jessica Hagedorn's Charlie Chan is Dead anthology of Asian American writing. Just as Charlie Chan, with his broken English and his Swedish actor's face, has been a problematic figure for Asian American writers, so Jack London is a writer whose work about Hawai`i is deeply problematic to native Hawaiians and others. The writers in this anthology work hard not to appropriate the stories of this place and its inhabitants. Euro-American poets in Hawai`i have their own material to work from, all of it vexing. [Jack London represents the old canon of Hawai`i writing; the poets in this volume represent a generation of writers who have experienced the necessary reaction against that canonization.]

What is it like to be a Haole?
Haole is the local term for “white” or “Caucasian.” Originally it meant “without breath” and “foreigner”; even as its meaning can be neutral (“that haole guy who sits in the back”), the harsh echoes of its original meaning co-exist with the neutrality of its present. “Haole” can also be used as an insult, to mean someone who is overbearing, who acts entitled, whose ear is deaf to local and Hawaiian cultures. At worst, “haole” is the word that comes after “f*cking.” Interestingly, one of the best descriptions and investigations of Haoleness is by an Asian American writer, Keiko Ohnuma, in “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and raised in Hawai`i.” In this 10-year old essay, Ohnuma writes: “White has never been invisible or normative in Hawai`i. It was superior, dominant, and then it was overthrown. It is this overthrow—at first social, then political and cultural—usually not expressed as such, that represents not only a resistance to colonization and external forces, but that has been full incorporated into the hegemonic” (274). She uses the word “overthrow,” which resounds with the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. The resonances are probably too strong, but her argument that white culture was later marginalized is right on. The word “haole,” too, connotes more than anyone outside Hawai`i would know: “For while a Caucasian appearance might open the doors to jobs or privilege, “haole” as an identity is not the same as white. Whiteness is not a culture; it is a position the local haole does not know how to take. And localism is a position they are still not allowed to take” (283). Local whites, in other words, are neither here nor there, neither local nor unmarked. In her more recent work, Haoles in Hawai`i, Judy Rohrer notes that “whiteness in Hawai`i is always marked and often challenged” (2). Rohrer is a white woman whose family moved to Kauai when she was seven; she grew up haole. She takes her cue from Ruth Frankenberg's White Woman, Race Matters:”White women need to become conscious of the histories and specificities of our cultural positions, and of the political economic, and creative fusions that form all cultures.” This is not, Frankenberg continues, in order to reinforce the too-simple dualisms or to “valorize whiteness.” Instead, she calls for a need “to develop a clearer sense of where and who we are” (1993, 204).

Where and who we are. These sound like the right cues for us poets, too. Not all the poets in this anthology grew up in Hawai`i; the roll of names reads like a cast of diasporic characters. Many of these poets came to Hawai`i when they were adults. Among those who grew up here, many left. They had the privilege to come and go, to experience the stresses of “haoleness” but then to leave. That privilege is not without its catch-22, however. The privilege to move away can be seen as a reaction against the difficulties of staying, difficulties that include publication, as well as the problem of how to make a living in such an expensive place. The complications of this position are reflected in much of the writing, which uses cultural references that are Euro-American, but also some that are native Hawaiian, and many that are simply “of Hawai`i.” Euro-American writers are expected to have their careers on the continent, not in Hawai`i. In 2005, Ron Silliman noted “that is it—or always has been, up to now—virtually impossible for a writer to go to Hawai`i & then become widely known & read on the mainland. You can go there if you’re already famous – viz. W.S. Merwin – but the more common result is either for the poet to head back to the continental U.S., usually pretty quickly, or to disappear into the sun glare more or less entirely.” Ah, the “sun glare.” Leaving aside the condescension, however well-meaning, of Silliman's statement, his desire for Hawai`i's Euro-American writers (he mentions none other in this post) to be read “back stateside,” as he calls it, there's another problem. That problem, precisely the one that concerns me here, is that Euro-American writers are read on the continent, but not so much at home in Hawai`i. Post-internet, it can be much easier to find a readership on the North American continent (and in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain) than it is to find one in Honolulu. And this is often true whether or not the poet writes about Hawai`i.

The attention paid to Euro-American writers in Hawai`i, while not always derogatory, is often so. Ian MacMillan, when he first began writing about Hawai`i, was publically called to task for doing research on canoe-making in books rather than by talking to Hawaiian elders. W.S. Merwin has taken the most severe criticism of any poet, over his book The Folding Cliffs, based on a memoir that Jack London originally appropriated from Pi`ilani. This narrative told the history of Pi`ilani's husband Koolau, who suffered leprosy and evaded authorities on Kaua`i for years in the early 1890s, at the time the Hawaiian Kingdom was being overthrown on O`ahu. In an essay titled, “The Literary Offenses of W.S. Merwin,” Kapalai`ula de Silva writes, “If it is a masterpiece [as Ted Hughes claimed in a blurb], it is a masterpiece of literary colonialism.” Later in the essay, de Silva argues: “Merwin’s epic, however grand in scope and language, fails to honor Pi‘ilani’s simple, bottom-line intent: the truth.” Here we have, at best, a cultural divide: what is truth in an epic poem? Native Hawaiian truth is different from Merwin's truth. While I find this essay extreme in its attack on Merwin, I have also found myself explaining to white writers on the continent why such an attack happened, why it is to be expected, and why it should not be dismissed. I mention this controversy not in order to flesh it out, but to point to the difficulties of writing about Hawai`i. Merwin has lived on Maui since the 1970s, where he has long been an environmental activist. But his many decades in the state hardly immunized him to being called an outsider. So the problem remains: what can a Euro-American poet write about? How can she or he be responsible to this place on which there have been so many claims? How to answer the question posed by another of Merwin's poems, “Chord,” published in The Rain in the Trees (1988), namely the question of linguistic colonization?
     While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests
     while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through
     the forests
     while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of their gardens
     their gardens dying far away on the mountain
     while the sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives
     while the tip of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to themselves
     while he thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red flowers

     when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons
     when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down
     and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language 



What pronoun(s) will you use in writing about Euro-American poets? The question of whether to speak of the anthology as a collection of “us” or of “them” has been significant to me in thinking about this collection. When I talk to other white writers who say, “I was considered an artist before I moved to Hawai`i,” or “In Hawai`i, I'm an editor not a poet,” or “that's a reading I can attend, but can't participate in,” there's an implicit “we” between speakers. But the conversation usually ends there, suggesting that we are not speaking as community, but as individuals who lament the lack of community. It's not my intention in editing this anthology to create a community composed solely of white writers. It is my intention to call attention to the ways in which we (yes, we) write about Hawai`i. Such calling-attention-to is meant to suggest ways to form coalitions with non-white writers over issues like environmental destruction, militarization, politics, and—let's not forget—the ways in which we make our art. As I write, I notice the pronouns shifting from us to them, from they to we, and will honor their divergences from a stable subjectivity by permitting them their pronomial diasporas.

Who publishes Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i? Among the small presses still in operation in 2012, only Bamboo Ridge's annual journal, Tinfish Press, and occasionally the University of Hawai`i Press, publish work by white poets. Bamboo Ridge has never published a full-length book by a white poet. Tinfish Press, which I founded in 1995, has published numerous chapbooks and full-length books by white writers, but no full-length volumes by a white writer living in Hawai`i (that will change when we publish Steve Shrader's posthumous work). Meg Withers wrote A Communion of Saints, which chronicled the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Honolulu. Many of the voices spoke in Pidgin (Hawai`i Creole English). Withers lived in Hawai`i for nine years, and has since lived in the Bay Area of California. White poets publish on the continent, necessity and choice interwoven in their books' histories. Faye Kicknosway's selected poems are from Wesleyan. Juliana Spahr published four books whose central subject is her five years in Hawai`i: they were published by Wesleyan, the University of California Press, Black Sparrow, and Atelos. Eric Paul Shaffer has written books centered in Hawai`i, published by Leaping Dog Press in Raleigh, North Carolina. Margo Berdeshevsky publishes with Sheep Meadow Press in New York State, Endi Bogue Hartigan has book from the press of Colorado Review, and my poetry books have come out from Salt in the UK and Singing Horse Press in San Diego. These writers may publish on the continent because they want to, but the dearth of possibilities here in Hawai`i surely forces their hands. To be published outside the state may offer the Euro-American poet a bigger audience, but not one as well-educated in the cultural values of Hawai`i or in its history, its languages. To be published outside the state reaffirms the impression that the Euro-American poet is not committed to working in Hawai`i. That the Euro-American poet is an outsider. Another Catch-22.

Tinfish Press has resolutely refused to publish work because it is “ethnic.” We've published experimental poetry from the Pacific by poets whose work marries (however awkwardly) local and avant-garde traditions of writing. Tinfish relishes experiments. I consider this anthology to be an experiment, one likely not to be repeated. I came to it after noting that Bamboo Ridge Press's anthologies of ethnic literature from Hawai`i have been devoted to work by local Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Hapa (mixed race), and native Hawaiian playwrights. Other publishing concerns print work by native Hawaiians (`oiwi ) and by Pacific Islanders (the new Ala Press). As I read more general anthologies of literature from Hawai`i, like Gavan Daws's and Bennett Hymer's enormous compendium, O`ahu Stories: Two Centuries of Writing, I notice that Hawaiian and local writers were offered categories within the book, but Euro-American writers floated around in categories that did not reference “the local” or “the Hawaiian,” and yet never touched whiteness as category. Some of these writers could be found in a section about Waikiki, for instance, whose connection to whiteness is mostly by way of tourism. Tourism is the outside flooding in. The ways in which white writers are pegged as “outsiders” makes them, in the eyes of editors and publishers, more like tourists than like native or local writers.

Who teaches Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i?
In researching course descriptions of English 370, Ethnic Literatures of Hawai`i, I find no recent evidence of Euro-American poets or fiction writers on the syllabi. Even where the course narrative for Fall, 2011 includes the problematic category of “settler groups,” there are no books by Euro-Americans, only local Asians. The frame to the course, no matter who teaches it, oddly mirrors that of ethnic studies on the continent, marking writers of color as “ethnic,” Euro-American writers as non-existent. Surely, Hawai`i is one place where white writers are marked as ethnic, where their work can be read as such. When I went to the website for the Ethnic Studies Department at UHM, I found listed a course called “Caucasians in Hawai`i.” When I clicked to find the description of syllabi, I found a list of courses taught since 2006. Nowhere on that list did the course on Caucasians show up.

Speaking of editorial practice, in what way is this anthology an “experiment” for Tinfish Press?
Years ago, I taught a group directed reading on small press publishing, and talk turned to the ways in which publication issues are fraught in Hawai`i, we came up with the notion of “positive critique.” Positive critique is what editors do; seeing the absence of an important kind of writing, say, they move in to fill the gap. Rather than attack institutions that leave them out, they create new institutions, presses and reading series mostly. In the 1990s, Bamboo Ridge was criticized for not publishing native Hawaiian writers; `oiwi was founded to provide a place for their work. This anthology is such an act of positive critique. I write to suggest that more publishers (some not yet in place, I suspect) print work by Euro-American poets and that they do so in the long form. Books, not single poems here and there.

One of my fears in pointing to this non-category category, Euro-American poets, is that it will prove too persuasive, that white writers will read and write for themselves only, that the larger community will reify the category (either as another way to re-marginalize white poets or as a way to honor them only as such). This anthology poses a paradox; I'd like to call categories into question by asserting the presence of one that exists but has been too long left out of polite conversation. Only if white poets prove that we have something to offer to the conversation will we be able to join it, under different terms from those that existed until at least 1980, if not longer. One venue at which these literary conversations are already taking place is the MIA (Mixing Innovative Arts) Reading Series, founded in 2009 by Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. candidate and poet in the English department. These readings occur once a month during the school year, with workshops in the summer. It's a venue that is open to every kind of writer, musician, and performer. The cross-fertilizations have been striking.

What experiences do Hawai`i's white writers have in common, then?
I direct the reader to the statements by each of the poets included in the anthology. They are eloquent testimonies to the ambivalent status of being white in Hawai`i. These writers share the awareness that it was mostly white people who suppressed Hawaiian culture, who brought Asian contract labor into Hawai`i, and who to this day—as a dominant force in the US military and politics—have made the state into a militarized zone. They are also aware that white writers have appropriated Hawaiian texts, remade them and circulated them as flawed “truths” about Hawai`i. Does the name James Michener come to mind? There's guilt in the blood-stream of the white writer. But Euro-American poets also chafe against totalizing notions about who they are and what they can or cannot write. They chafe against the notion that they are “mainland” to the local/indigenous writer's “Hawai`i.” One of my students, Mason Donald, who grew up in Hilo, graduated from public schools and from the University of Hawai`i, wrote the following poem out of frustration. The gatekeepers he refers to were white, another of the many ironies:

My Potatoes
Don't write about Hula,
she explains to me. It's not yours.
Try working with hula
hoops instead. That's more fitting
to your . . . . personal subject position.

No, she says,
don't write about Kamapua`a.
Try working with something more
related. Do you eat pork?

No, don't write about Waikiki either.
Let's see you describe
your home. Where are you
from exactly?

I'd rather you stay away
from Pele, too, she explains.
Pele's such a wrathful God,
and I'd hate for her to disagree.

Okay. What about tourists?” I ask.
Can I write about the commodification
and sexual exploitation of Hawai`i?
Can I write about the gaze?”

No, no. You don't understand,
she continues.
Write about your home.
Write about your people.

It's not easy writing about a home
to which I don't belong,” I tell her.
It's not easy writing about
potatoes.

This poem, written for my class in 2007, is part of a significant sub-genre, one that examines the costs of being identified as haole, as someone who cannot write about Hawai`i. (In this anthology, Evan Nagle has a rather different notion of what it means to write about potatoes.) Another such poem is by Tony Quagliano, a poet who died in 2007. He wrote a version of this poem many times, first as lament:

I stood there in the Pali wind
American, and local guide
despairing of cross-cultural understanding —
I had just recently learned
that I’m a haole

and later as satire:

A Haole Writes One Local Poem
My granmoddah wen fish
catch one trout
trout?
haole fish, dat
she trow back
catch one snappa den
hapa fish
bitta
she trow back
granmoddah den
catch one ***
a local fish
pure you know
good fo eat
good fo da soul
granny keep em 


The way in which white writers are taken to task became clearer to me when I taught a Tinfish Press book by Portland poet Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave. Sand's documentary work is about the Pacific Northwest, not about Hawai`i, but in writing out the “secret histories” of her hometown of Portland, Oregon, Sand includes the history of Japanese-American internment. She puts her work in context, writing both a forward and an afterword in which she explains her methods, her role as a poet-journalist, her family background. But two students in the upper-level class that was reading the book objected to her work. They reminded me that she's of Norwegian and not Japanese heritage, saying that her interest in the internment experience seemed odd to them. One student, of whom I've very fond, came to my office and extended the conversation by telling me that white teenagers have no culture of their own, so they appropriate other cultures. Even being an environmentalist she saw as a white person's appropriation of another group's cause. She was echoing a thought I've heard before, one that John Wythe White plays with when he writes about a character with no culture, no home, no roots (see the headnote to this introduction). That conversation stopped me in my tracks. Yes, there is bad appropriation. But equally troubling is the notion that we ought not to write and think about the histories of other groups of people, those with whom we share our city streets, our schools, our families.


Of course the sub-generic poem about being prevented from writing about the place you live in quickly meets its limits. One can only read so many of these poems without wondering if there isn't in fact something better to spill ink over than one's inability to write anything meaningful. Tony Quagliano wrote eloquent poems about jazz, ended up writing as much about New Orleans as about Honolulu. Mason Donald now teaches creative writing in Honolulu. One moves on. But where? What are shared experiences that lead to poetry that contributes to more than blasts of resentmentt? In what forms do we choose to write? How do we navigate the rocky shoals of acknowledging bad history while trying to make a better one? These are the questions that each of the writers in this anthology addresses.


There are no exact answers to these questions. The statements mostly generate more questions. But the refinement of these questions, the attention these writers devote to considering their work in the context of living in Hawai`i, all these are important to witness. Most of the poets whose work you will be reading write about Hawai`i; others write (as they would not do otherwise) out of the experience of whiteness they have encountered in Hawai`i. Faye Kicknosway, whose work is not included here (she did not respond to my emails) wrote a sequence of poems about the ways in which the Pacific is represented in Hollywood movies. Several of her poems were published in an issue of How2 in 2006 (see here: http://alturl.com/m9szo). In that way, she elides the problem of writing about the places themselves, instead honing in on how Hollywood interprets those places for American consumption. Living in Hawai`i often demands that the writer use more than one genre to encompass more than one voice, that the writer move away from narrative and into a more experimental (yet firmly grounded) mode. Anne Brewster's essay, “Teaching The Tracker in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness,” includes a fine meditation on the question of just how to write out of what she calls “the intersections of Anglo-Celtic creoleness with whiteness and with Australian multiculture in a way that would address my affective dispositions and equivocations.” (5). Her solution is multi-generic, as it is for many of the writers in this anthology. It's time to honor another way in which Hawai`i has affected its poets, in this instance its Euro-American ones. To consider that writing in Hawai`i is not always about Hawai`i is another way to say that “Hawai`i writing” is more than is dreamed of in our current philosophies.


Are there enough poets to fill the book? (This was a real question.)
There are more than enough Euro-American poets to fill the book. Many of the poets one might expect to see here are not here, for reasons of editorial overlook or because they did not send work. No matter: this anthology, which makes no claims to being comprehensive, presents many wonderful poets, some of them older, many of them young and just getting started. There could have been other batting orders. This is the one that came up and it's a strong one.


Works Cited
Brewster, Anne. “Teaching The Tracker in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness.” In The Racial Politics
of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges, Eds. Barbara Baird and Eamien Riggs. Newcastle on
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing [in press].
Daws, Gavan and Bennett Hymer. Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Through the Years: Two
Centuries of Writing. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2008.
de Silva, Kapalai‘ula. "The Literary Offences of W.S. Merwin’s Folding Cliffs.”
Frankenburg, Ruth. White Woman, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Hagedorn, Jessica. Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction.
NY: Penguin, 1993.
Ohnuma, Keiko. “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and
raised in Hawai`i.” Cultural Values (6:3 2002): 273-285.
Rohrer, Judy. Haoles in Hawai`i. Honolulu: U of Hawai`i P, 2010.
Schultz, Susan M. “'Be a Haole, a Dumb Haole, or a Dumb Fucking Haole': On White Writing
--. "Special Feature: Pacific Poetries." (2:4, 2006): http://alturl.com/y29gx
White, John Wythe. “Surf Cities.” In Short-Timers in Paradise. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 2000.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Sunday, Feb. 9 reading at Revolution Books

Props:

Cap

Sketch of dogs

Stuffed animal

Pop-up Le Petit Prince


Sound:

Frank Sinatra:  itunes

Wallace Stevens's "To an old philosopher in Rome," opening, PennSound: http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Stevens-Wallace/1952/Stevens-Wallace_8_To-an-Old-Philosopher-in-Rome_Harvard-Woodberry_1952.mp3

George Oppen audio, snippet, PennSound: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Oppen/12-11-78/Oppen-George_12_Til-Other-Voices-Wake-Us_Primitive_Berkeley_12-11-78.mp3

Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," opening, PennSound: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ginsberg/Chicago-1959/Ginsberg-Allen_10_Kaddish-part-1_Big-Table-Chicago-Reading_1959.mp3


Playlist

Stanzas in Meditation III-V: with Sinatra

To an old philosopher dying in a nursing home: with Stevens

Mother news: "She had a dog in her past": stuffed animal, sketch of dogs

Love in a time of Alzheimer's, page 76: cap

DeBaggio/Oppen, Oppen

King Lear Enters The Little Prince, portions, with pop-up book

A death in the family, with Ginsberg (snippets from PennSound)

Elegy (portions)

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Thinking toward AWP panels.

Panel the first: "Protean Poetics in the 21st Century: Redefining Poetry & Place in a 'Placeless World' of Global Communication"

I became a blogger because I spend so much time at my computer that it seemed a way to join digital addiction with work, or at least thinking, or at the very least typing. I ended up blogging the five or six years of my mother's Alzheimer's and death (2006-2011, more or less). For the last few years I blogged and then posted a link on my Facebook page, so friends could read the day's entry. Readers form a support system whether they--or we--know it or not. The blog quickened the process of finding that support, those readers. It also quickened my writing, not because I wrote faster but because I no longer wrote with any distance from or about what I observed. The blog obliged me to write within the day, the moment; to observe my mother's Alzheimer's was to write about it. An illness that eventually leaves only the present tense encouraged me to write from inside that present; only when she died, and I intended to sign off on the blog, did memories spill out, bleed past into present tenses. These blogs (there were two, separated by many months), edited and shaped, became two books, but the materiality of the book suggests a different tense, a slower one. That said, my experience as a reader and writer of books deeply informed my writing of the blog; as a middle-aged writer, I am an amphibian, operating out of two writing systems.


Maged Zaher, Denver, summer 2013
When you post a link on Facebook, you create a choice in your reader: click the link to read, or simply pass on. Maged Zaher, an Egyptian poet and software engineer who has lived for many years in Seattle, has chosen in recent months to post his poems directly into the status line of his Facebook page. An inventory of usual status line categories includes several very different modes: there's the link (click and get the video of kittens, say); there's the diary (today I painted my house); there's the political statement or the link to one; there's the story about one's kids or one's cat; there are aphorisms, and there are advertisements for oneself. Amid this traffic in myriad genres, tous courts, comes Maged's insta-poems, not insta- because he writes them on the status (he says he writes by hand, saves them by typing them out, thus creating an archive of his work) but because when you open your Facebook, there they are. In your face. Poems about sex, about Egyptian politics, about consumerism, often about all these things at once, all appear quite regularly on his page. They are diaristic, but not diary; they are polemical, but not polemics. They are written by a man who has at least two places, one in Cairo, the other in Seattle. In Cairo, men have been fighting in the streets; in Seattle, people have been filling the streets with post-Super Bowl joy, and some small amount of destruction that may seem directed at consumerism (it was at Pike Place Market, after all), but is only the simulacrum of protest, if that.  This was not Tahrir Square.

I would like to analyze two weeks or so of Maged's Facebook page to see what this new world of digital time looks like, how it represents history (personal and public), and what we might make of the "place," the digital memoir/page/status. That last term seems especially fraught in the context of Maged's poems, as they often hinge on questions of status, privilege, station. Like a blog, the facebook page, when opened, runs backwards, so I will proceed--or diverge--in that direction.

On February 4, Maged posted the following status line:

"I am joining the Seahawks parade--yes I am. A sad day for Kantians."

This is probably not a poem, but in the face[book] of his ongoing project, perhaps it is one. What follows are riffs by his friends on this theme, including this: "If *everyone* did their laundry, like it if was a universal moral principle for everyone to do their laundry just then, all the drains would get overwhelmed with the waste water and civilization would cease to function. You need to *think* about these things, man." That was one James Newman; he's not my friend, but his name sounds awfully philosophical, Catholic.  In writing this line, Maged alludes back to his own post of February 2, a mere three days earlier, when he wrote, "Well Seattle won the super bowl,yayyy--I am already dreading work conversations tomorrow. I will insist on talking about Kant pure reason with each person who will talk to me about the seahawks, until the city gets over its orgasm."And, in turn, that post echoes an earlier one, on January 30: "Who else wants the seahawks to lose?"

Something has shifted between January 30 and February 5, namely Maged's take on the super bowl. Adamantly negative about them at the end of January, he joins their parade happily a few days later. Not only has time sped up, but so has the categorical imperative itself. His voice is nearly Romneyesque (I greatly enjoyed performing n+7s on Romney's speeches during the last presidential campaign and posting them on my status line). Shortly after that post about wanting the Seahawks to lose, Maged posted a poem that combines sexuality (if not quite eroticism) with dreams with circles with witness with the vehicle of email messages:

We have skin to skin contact
To impose our existence
We also have words
And thawed emails:
Leaving behind a trail of sexy messages
And thoughts lost in dreams
That we use to circle around the world
Which circles around us
And we witness our bodies getting deformed
And we witness

The act of "witness," which is almost invariably retrospective, retroactive--Holocaust and Khmer Rouge victims were not digitally composing their witness narratives, those had to wait--is here rendered into a present tense. The "skin to skin contact" might be promising, but mostly we have "sexy messages" and emails, or the virtual, digital contact that "circles around us," not as an embrace but as devastation--"our bodies getting deformed." There are no images for messages, for dreams, or even for deformed bodies. There are only words.

Above this poem on his feed is an image of the Berlin Wall with that in Israel that walls out Palestinians.  It's a "visual comparison" more than it is a poetic image, though it's tempting to call it image here. Image interruption. Image distraction, except that it's not meant to distract, it's meant to make an argument.

Distraction comes elsewhere: lodged between the status line about wanting the Seahawks to lose (1/30) and a poem that goes

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets! #Neruda-Describing-Cairo

is a poem that places the exiled Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, in the Cairo of Zaher's pre-exilic history, is a YouTube video: it's a link being sent on by Maged: "So funny"--he writes--"watch it to the end": The YouTube, which I have not watched until the end, is "Probably the Most Hilarious Ping Pong Match in History," between a former champion and a younger man, one European, the other Chinese. (If you must, it's here.) And it is funny, played almost like a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game. The older man doesn't stand a chance, so he hams it up, moving the barriers beside the court, pacing around like a rooster, making everyone, including his opponent, laugh.  The video lured in spectators, to one of whom Maged riposted:  "Jason, yeah, this is true sports spirit - the other player deciding to play along is awesome." This is the same Maged who hates the Seahawks and who wrote beneath the image of the two walls: "I think the Palestinian cause is a global cause - I think people from all walks - poor third world farmers and privileges Americans (as you say) connection to just causes is what scares the tyrants - actually given james point of view about war being something won on both public opinion and physical force - I find the opinions of "privilege Americans" to be a crucial part of the equation." Both are ethical statements, one about good sportsmanship, the other about Middle Eastern politics. Only the scale is off the charts different.

Now a Kantian would be horrified by this jumble of fun and horror, silliness and revolution. Knowing Maged a bit as I do, I'm sure he's horrified, too. After all, he says he's a Kantian. He throws the baby poems in with the bathwater of YouTube, until you might say that the entire page is less like social chat media than like a 21st century Cantos. A poem including football. A poem including ping pong. A poem including the true horrors of the new century. It's not Kantian because we cannot be. There can be no categorical imperatives when there is no time to stop moving, writing, linking. There can only be the open transcript--the act of witness, if you will--of this one poet's performance on the internet. This is a new version of Stendhal's and Yeats's "mirror held in the street," more like my daughter's mirror. When she wants to do her hair, she turns on the camera function of her iPad.


In case you're wondering, Maged has a Tinfish Press book, The Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me.





Sunday, February 2, 2014

Reading next Sunday with Caroline Sinavaiana

Book Launch and Readings with authors
Caroline Sinavaiana and Susan M. Schultz Sunday, February 9, 3pm
at Revolution Books

Caroline Sinavaiana, born in Utulei, Tutuila, is Associate Professor of English at UH-Manoa. Her creative work includes two collections of poetry: Alchemies of Distance and Mohawk/Samoa. She is co-editor of a special issue for Pacific Studies: Women Writing Oceania."Sina" will be reading from "Nuclear Medicine," her soon-to-be published memoir about her treatment for breast cancer. The memoir is written in three traditions, American, Samoan, and Buddhist, but also concerns western medicine, which she terms "another country." Susan M. Schultz is author of Dementia Blog (Volumes 1 and 2) and Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series, among other books. She edits Tinfish Press and professes poetry and American literature at UH-Manoa. The two volumes of Dementia Blog chronicle her mother's illness from 2006 until her death in 2011.
Susan will read from "Welcome to Her Disease". She also promises that, in spite of the seriousness of the pieces each poet will be presenting, they'll also bring a lot of humor to the afternoon.