Dead Jack at the Hawai`i Book & Music Festival, May 18-19

After years of nothing to do at the annual festival, the jackpot (so to speak) seemed to find me this year, when I moderated a panel on documentary poetry and participated in a reading by Jack London is Dead authors. Then I spoke on a panel whose working title, "The Right to Write," was perhaps more accurate than the final title, something to do with one place and many voices. Some notes on the path I wore around the Honolulu Hale area:

The Documentary Poetry panel: Gary Pak, Amalia Bueno, Wing Tek Lum.

Wing Tek Lum's new Bamboo Ridge book is out, called The Nanjing Massacre: Poems.

Don't let the flowery cover fool you. This book joins the genealogy of Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust, which comes almost directly out of Nuremberg Trial testimony about Nazi atrocities. It also comes out of the work of Iris Chang, who was scheduled to come to Hawai`i just months before her suicide in 2004. Lum has worked on the project for fifteen years, researching, re-imagining, traveling to China, writing down the details of massacres and rapes and pillage. As moderator of the panel he was on, I had a good view of the audience. At some point during his reading, I saw heads bow, bodies turn as if away from the words being used as blunt instruments. Lum has never been a poet of anything other than plain speech. In these poems, such speech becomes a kind of weapon.  "It's a great work against war," one woman said. There's an element of massacre porn to it, too, one that makes me uncomfortable, but  this book demands attention in ways that most books do not, cannot.

Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories): Saturday

The reading for the book was sparsely attended, but the reception was warm.  Afterwards, Neal Milner, emeritus professor of Political Science and local actor (originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin), offered us a story.  He said he once performed at a senior center alongside a local Asian storyteller; his story was about being a Jewish storyteller in Hawai`i (where there are very few Jews).  At the end of the story, a tiny old woman, about 80 pounds, asked if he would come to meet her church group to explain Jews.  He said no, he could not, but recommended someone who might be able to talk about Judaism.  You know, the old woman said, looking a the other storyteller, there are two kinds of Jews, ones like him (Neal) and those who killed Christ. The incident came so out of context to how Neal had always imagined anti-semitism--the woman was too old, too frail, and this was Hawai`i, after all--that he couldn't get angry.

That's a parable about Hawai`i, by the way.

On Sunday, I joined the panel about writing in this place, who can, who should not, and how they ought to do it. This kind of conversation always invites in the "ought/should/must" verbs in ways that make me nervous. The panel was organized by Craig Howes and included Brandy Nalani McDougall, Puakea Nogelmeier, myself, and Jean Toyama.  To over-simplify the matter and to anticipate Ruth Hsu's question about how we define our identities, Brandy spoke about Hawaiian literature, how it was suppressed like the Hawaiian language for many decades, about efforts to revive it; Puakea, who comes originally from Minnesota but is an authority on Hawaiian language and culture, addressed the issue with his usual wit (I confess to being too anxious to listen accurately). I talked about the Jack London is Dead anthology, namely about being a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i, and then Jean Toyama talked about the linked poems she's written with three other woman, published by Bamboo Ridge Press.

I hadn't known how Craig Howes would frame the panel, exactly.  He bobbed and weaved when I asked. But he began our hour by alluding to a mythical (and also real, alas) character who was much talked about in the 1990s in our department, the "747-poet." This is the poet who flies to Hawai`i (on a now out-of-date airplane), sits in Waikiki for a week, then returns home to write The Authoritative Poem about Hawai`i. I remember running into one of these in the American Book Review once. It was by a poet who had spent more than a week here, maybe a semester even, but his poem was about sitting in Waikiki realizing why people in Hawai`i can't think.  Too sunny.  Too warm.  I remember feeling sick about it. So I asked the audience to visualize this interloper poet.  What's his gender? (male!) and what's his race? (white!).  There you have it. The problem, I suggested, is that this stereotype carries over to writers who've lived here for decades, have families here, sometimes grew up in Hawai`i. (How long you've lived here, your family's lived here, matters always.) But, because they're "haole," their work is often not thought to honor the place, but to appropriate from its traditions.  This led me into a version of my Jack London is Dead spiel about trying to find an audience for work if you are not local (a category developed in opposition to haole) or Hawaiian (a category more recently developed in opposition to haole and to local Asian). I talked about Mason Donald's poem about growing up in Hilo and being told he should write about potatoes (he ate rice). Judging by the faces of the audience members, the reception was mixed.

Since then, I've been talking to other members of the dead Jack group.  Is that what we might call ourselves? Some issues have come up, including a persistent discomfort with category, the question of how long one needs to live here before one is permitted a voice, and the question of audience.  Here was my response (someone amended) to the category issue:

--I'm with you on the dangers of category, and I fought with myself over doing the anthology in the first place because of that feeling, and because Tinfish has always been about creating conversations between poets who might not know of each other, not those who seem alike in some immediate way.  But I've also come to think that there ought to be a place for "us" to think about our position here,  as well as a foundation for talking to other people about what we do, who we are. We may think we are our own selves, but we are also the selves others demand that we be. If we do not like those constructions, or if we simply want to think through those constructions, we need a space in which to do it.  The reactions I get seem to assume that white writers are dead and still appropriating this place, or that they are dead but that it's great they existed so they could influence indigenous Pacific writers.  It's worth pointing out (despite the wicked obviousness of it) that we exist.

On the fact that I spoke at length without using the word "haole," as one woman noted in the Q&A and another dead Jack poet picked up on:

--Yes, I told the woman who asked me how I'd managed to talk for so long without using the h-word and I explained (in part) that the term "Euro-American" reintroduces culture into the equation.  Whites and haole are seen as being without culture--except insofar as they appropriate it--and that's simply not the case.  What I didn't say is that my husband grew up here, and so hates the h-word that I hardly ever utter it in the house.

[Tom Gammarino, front, Julia Wieting, Eric Paul Schaffer, Evan Nagle, Jaimie Gusman, authors]

On the question of not having an audience here, to a poet much younger than myself:

-- I have found that issue so dispiriting over many years.  In most literary communities there are gifts and then reciprocal gifts, exchanges, thoughts.  I have found here (and too often in my publishing practice) that the gift is taken and there's no response (or worse).  This is not to say I expect grand gifts in return, but I do expect to be treated with respect.  So I know where you're coming from on that.  Just keep sending work out.  Your audience will find you. The conversation will happen.

I want, now, to move past this particular conversation, which has replayed itself over and again since well before my time here, 1990-. There's a horrible seductiveness to thinking about it incessantly, as if the possibility that one does NOT belong holds the key to whatever ails the place, or oneself. But of course that's seduction, not love. Love is what keeps many of us here, despite the difficulties, sometimes because of them. Not having such conversations is hardly a remedy for having them awkwardly. Which reminds me, I need to pick up my daughter from soccer practice now. Tomorrow morning we go hiking in Ka`a`awa with her grandfather Brad.

For a fun take on the "747-poem," see Pam Brown's Wild Honey chapbook: here.

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As I left my panel, having talked at length about the need to make a place for Euro-American writers in Hawai`i, I turned the corner and found this woman's teeshirt staring me in the face.  I asked if I could took her picture, and she said yes. I hereby appropriate it, and add irony, because that's the wisdom of my--and her--tradition.

Writing While White: Thoughts on Writing Race as a White Poet

When I think about writing (across) race as a white poet--using a non-universal example of two white poets writing about injustices against African-Americans--Reznikoff of legal cases from early in the 20th century, C.D. Wright during the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. I am profoundly skeptical about categories, but am trying to engage discussions being held at Harriet blog, and also here, Claudia Rankine's site, jacket2 and the blog posts that follow, as best I can within the limitations of the question and this form.


Tenets:

I want lyric, but I want lyric responses, not poems.

I want the poet to create the conditions for feeling, thinking, but not to offer her own directly.

I want the truth, but believe the only way to tell it is slant.

I want a poem less about any category than about histories of categories.

I want a poem that both honors boundaries & questions them. One before the other.

I want a poem whose intimacies reside & grow out of their distances.

I want a poem based on facts, not limited by them.

I want a poem that takes language seriously, points to our misuses of it.

I want a poem that makes the reader call herself to action.


Two Examples:

Charles Reznikoff: "Negroes"; and under Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "Negroes"

C.D. Wright, One with Others, Copper Canyon, 2010.


Charles Reznikoff:

Several white men went at night to the Negro's
house,
shot into it,
and set fire to his cotton on the gallery
his wife and children ran under the bed
and as the firing from guns and pistols went on
and the cotton blazed up, ran through a side door
into the woods.
The Negro himself, badly wounded, fled to the
house of a neighbor—
a white man--
and got inside.
He was followed,
and one of those who ran after him
put a shotgun against the white man's door
and shot a hole through it.
Justice, however, was not to be thwarted,
for five of the men who did this to the Negro
were tried:
for "unlawfully and maliciously
injuring and disfiguring"-
the white man's property.

Aldon Lynn Nielsen writes:

"Reznikoff allows the irony of America's racial injustices to foreground itself in these pieces, as in this one, which makes no comment on the fact that there were no charges for destroying a black man's property or for assaulting him and his family."

Reading Race" White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (U of Georgia P, 1986)

C.D. Wright:

"Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for 'insubordination' or a 'derogatory' letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer." (3)

What Reznikoff and Wright do in these poems (among other things) is to point at words. They don't point at the words themselves so much as at how those words are being used in particular historical contexts. Reznikoff's quotation comes from the legal case itself; read out of context, or in a more appropriate one, words like "injuring" and especially "disfiguring," suggest bodies, faces, human features. The brief line, "the white man's property," with which Reznikoff concludes the poem, echoes a time when black men were white men's property during slavery, and on the deep and unjust irony that the law will prosecute for destruction of a white man's property, but not a black man's body/figure. On re-reading the poem, the word "justice," cannot not be read with the reader's own quotation marks. A disfigured word re-figured by the reader.

Likewise, C.D. Wright points to the words "insubordination" and "derogatory" by placing them in quotes. These quotes un-veil (by paradoxically clothing in marks) misuses of the words by the school system.

The other day I was in a meeting to discuss the Ph.D. prospectus of a writer from Nepal who writes in English rather than in his native tongue. His writing was too intensely personal, he said, to work in his first language; instead, he chooses to write in the language that offers him distance from his subject and from the face that appears over his shoulder when he writes (read father, read culture). One committee member advised him to look into what might happen if he were to engage the fireworks in his native tongue. I am jealous that he can choose. But not all choices are between languages; some come within a single one. What Reznikoff and Wright have done is to write poetry not in a "native tongue" of feeling and lyricality, but in a "second language" of distance. They don't avoid feelings, but they instigate them in others. They trust their reader to translate back. They also trust themselves to see clearly, not through the damp lenses of passion or anger, instantly gratified.

[I've written elsewhere on being a white poet in Hawai`i; I've tried to complicate the notion of "whiteness" beyond what's inscribed in an essentialist category. One should perhaps add lines of modifiers to any reference to a poet by race or gender . . . I'll leave those modifiers to the poems themselves, which inevitably modify, indeed transform, our categories if we do well by our readers.]