Back to Tinfish Press! M.I.A. Reading, February 9, 2011

In recent weeks, this blog has been hijacked by its "owner" into a space for writing exclusively about dementia. I will now return it to its original purpose, as a record of Tinfish Press's recent activities.

This past Wednesday, the MIA reading at the Mercury Bar in Chinatown, curated by Jaimie Gusman, featured readers from the new Hawai`i Review (#73 ably edited by Donovan Colleps) and Tinfish issues. Before the reading, the Tinfish board met outside Govindaji's vegetarian restaurant, where the editor could eat nearly nothing due to her allergies, for a conversation on this past year's activities. More on that and some future plans later on in the post.

In many ways, this reading was typical of Hawai`i readings: the subjects-matter included land, colonialism, language suppression (and rediscovery), land, food, local landmarks, ethnic identity positions, land, food, cultural tensions. All those things, in other words, that seem mostly to lack at the huge readings at MLA and AWP. Many of the writers combined their dishes into what exotic Europeans call a potpourri:

Craig Santos Perez wrote about Guam by way of canned meat, devoting one poem to Vienna sausages and another to corned beef. But the "indigenous food practice poems," as he called them wryly, got at issues of colonialism (who brought the sausages anyway?), family (who cooked the corned beef anyway?), and language (who named the shit anyway?). Tiare Picard got at words themselves, and beneath the words their sounds, as she did brilliantly in Tinfish 18.5.




Jade Sunouchi's prose piece, set in Mexico, got at a tension familiar to Hawai`i residents between tourists and local vendors. She threw a pinch of gender and a dash of class into her lyrical prose. Amalia Bueno wrote about teen-pregnancy by using names of local establishments in Waipahu.


Jaimie Gusman read an elegy for her Aunt Rose from a marvelous series of poems called the Anyjar Series. She followed that with a romp through one woman's love life. Monica Lee read a very funny story on male/female non-communication (the man and the woman are thinking the same thoughts, but prove unwilling to share them with each other, until their relationship becomes one of boring sameness). Joe Tsujimoto went next with his own poem about food and the sexes delivered in the gravelly New York voice that never ceases to surprise this listener.

This was the last reading at the familiar Mercury Bar venue, which has done well by its readers, but has grown louder and less hospitable to them and their listeners. On to Fresh Cafe as of next month!



[This photo does not present an editorial comment on the reading, as it preceded the event; it's Radhika with Gaye Chan doing their Stinky & Smelly routine.]

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And now for some future plans, an email I sent to Tinfish friends this morning:

OK, enough rest already [this refers to the sabbatical that the editor and her press are currently enjoying].

Tinfish Press is preparing to launch a new chapbook series. It will be very retro, simple, cheap, small print runs (100), sent for small donations (aka for free) to people on mailing lists yet to be established. We will try to do a bunch of them fairly quickly, perhaps one a month for a time. Eric Butler has kindly agreed to be the designer; he lives in Hawai`i, has worked in publishing and in making zines for quite some time. I trust he'll come up with compelling designs appropriate to the inexpensive format. You can find out a bit more about him here: http://www.manta.com/c/mvt3jc4/eric-butler-book-design

One of the benefits of this series is that the chaps can be very short in length. So poets and writers who do not have heaps of work already on their desks can have their poems circulated in this way. Writers with something to say who don't require great length can make a point quickly. I think back on something Ron Silliman said once, that when he publishes in a large journal, he never hears from readers. When he publishes with small mags of just a few pages, he gets a lot of responses.

As ever, our focus will be on experimental poetry from the Pacific region. Short manifestos or proses are also welcome. I'm asking you to consider sending work but--especially if Tinfish has published you recently--I ask that you recommend poets to us. Be our eyes and ears for good material. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions. We're open to work by students of whatever age (children, high schoolers, college students, and the rest of us life-long learners). The work can be political, personal, or any combination.

We're looking for 5-20 pages of work, preferably 8-15.

We have no idea how long this project will last. But that's half the fun of it. Let's get more work out there!

I'm sending this call to those of you considered long term "friends of Tinfish." But feel free to spread the circle.

aloha, Susan

PS Alain Cressan--many thanks for the inspiration! Je te remercie pour les beaux livres d'Ink!

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Also look in the near future for the non-winners of our No Contest, not judged by our non-judge, Craig Santos Perez. The first volume in the No Contest series of two books will be by Jai Arun Ravine. The poetry in this book will cross more boundaries than I knew existed!

What we teach when we teach creative writing

Let me share a creative writing success story with you.

I was teaching 273: Creative Writing & Literature, an introductory class where students read analytically and write creatively. We were reading Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory, a book that isn't an easy read at any level. I was having them work in groups with their laptops to look up terms and references, and we were blogging with Craig. Students would ask questions, and he would pop up with answers. Craig is not a pompous guy. When I asked the students what they'd taken away from their exchange with Craig, they responded: "he's like us!" Not what I expected, but a wonderful perception. The poet does not hearken from a different life form; he is one of us.

I've chosen this story, not one about a student's wonderful poem (I get those, too), because many of the successes in my creative writing classrooms--especially on the introductory levels--have less to do with finished products than with perception, what one of my facebook correspondents calls ATTENTION. (My question about what we teach when we teach creative writing elicited a wonderful comment stream on facebook; I'd like to thank everyone who wrote a comment on my wall.) My Foundations of Creative Writing class this past week thought about issues of pedagogy. They were split between those who liked their reading for the week, the experiment-based approach of Hazel Smith's The Writing Experiment. These students took exception to her claim that everyone can be taught to write. One student thought her approach "soulless," and wanted a course that included a basis for compassion.

I began teaching creative writing in the mid-1990s. I was hired as an academic to teach "20th Century Poetry in English," and moved into creative writing several years later. At the outset, I too was worried that creative writing could not be taught, or that the less-than-wonderful-writing I was bound to harvest would somehow influence my own, according to some odd contagious lack of magic. But I've come to love teaching the subject (insofar as it is one), but perhaps not for the reasons I would have expected.

And why have expectations? The terms we use in talking about writing are so ambiguous (even in their earnestness) that they are as hard to hold onto as a greased pig on a pole. Even the seeming certitude of a word like "craft" slips out of its holster as soon as you start looking at poems whose content is cliche. Words like "emotion" and "heart" and "expression" seem to make sense until you use them in a sentence in class to a group of 18-22 years olds, or even to the occasional senior citizens who grace the classroom. The problems are manifold. Here's a list of a few of the problems I (as everywoman CW Pedagogue) have faced:

--Students have not read much literature, poetry, fiction, or drama.

--Students have a notion that creative writing equals "freedom of expression."

--Students themselves believe they are not writers and cannot be taught to be writers.

--Students think that writing is about a very limited set of subjects. In poetry these might be feelings--love, depression--or family or vague ideas.

--Students think in blocks of words, phrases rather than in images, details, particulars, sounds, syllables.

--On the upper level, student assumptions are stronger, harder to contest; there's a lot of resistance. Such resistance can be good or it can simply get in the way of playing around.

--Students have forgotten how to play.

That last item is crucial. As any creative writing teacher knows, students are scared. And why not be? The semester is only so long, and risks often lead to worse grades than do tame attempts to fulfill the assignment and move on to another. For me to say "take risks!" is also to suggest the possibility of jumping off the cliff of assessment, which is also a necessary mystery to creative writing students. "How will you grade our work?" is one of the FAQs.

So if I think through how I present creative writing (at almost every level, but in different ways), I try to do the following:

--Break the ice. Start from an exquisite corpse and keep playing. Have students make collages, get on the floor with scissors and glue, do Bernadette Mayer exercises several times a week, limber up. Make sure the class is loose, laughs a lot. Set that model of compassionate action, if not by approving of everything you read. Challenge students to address their favorite subjects in new ways.

--Begin with the material, which is language. Content is very important in creative writing, but don't start there. Writing block lurks around every corner, or its false antidote, the cliche.

--Move into content by using themes. I've taught several courses in Poetry & the City or Poetry & Place, which channel students into working on subjects they think they know but do not. Having them write about their neighborhoods tends to prove to them that they are not paying close enough attention to what is in front of them at all times.

--Have them read books. Not poems, but books of poems. Or novels. Or memoirs. Something whole, not chopped up. A book that shows writers as perceivers with stamina. Have them write about the reading (on a blog, say) and talk about it at length. Break them into groups and have them "teach" the reading. Insist that they google words they don't know. (I have been putting off a student the past couple of weeks who asks me over and again what the term "eminent domain" means. Every time she asks, I tell her to look it up.)

--Have them talk to authors, however they can, either on Skype or on a blog or in person. Direct contact makes it clear to students that writers are people. It's sometimes hard for them to realize this, when they've been told how great Shakespeare and Milton were. Those guys are dead, and besides, dey wen nevah talk da kine.

--Have them write about familiar subjects in vocabularies not usually associated with them. OK, write a love poem, I might say, but use the vocabulary of a social science class or physics or car mechanics. Write a poem about feeling badly, but never tell us that's how you feel except through the language of the Hawai`i Tourist Bureau. Ah, how cliches can be turned on end and used to good effect! Have them write in other languages they know, are learning, or have partially forgotten.

--Have them walk around the halls of the classroom building, or around their neighborhoods, finding language on the walls and then return to the class to write with these found words. Have them go to a pond on campus and take notes. Tell them to go sit in a public area and eavesdrop. Make sure they realize that all language is up for grabs, not just narrow bands of it that include flowers and clouds.

--Make sure you explain that writing can be offensive, but needs to make a claim on the reader that is not merely shock value. This one's tough, but I learned the hard way in a class of young men who all seemed to want to write about rape and violence. Limits are ok; you just need to explain them and then hold fast.

--Be prepared to argue, especially with graduate students, and to meet resistances. You will remember feeling your own resistances. You still have them, but cannot hold them against your students. If a student wants to write out of a very personal point of view, don't shut him or her down, but suggest ways to speak to an audience of more than one. Even if we write "only for ourselves," we want readers and those readers are not ourselves, so we need to touch something in them that is not ours. That place of not being ours is also sacred.

Above all, since not all of your students will continue to write, make sure that they use their semester with you to discover how to look at the world, really attend to it. (An attendance policy is also recommended.) If all you do is have them write a haiku in which they see--actually see--a frog or a turtle or a lily pad or someone's facial expression, and then make a quick shift to abstract statement, one that may be quite amusing, then you have done something. Then he's not like you so much as you are also like him!

More Final Project Wonders, Spring 2010

Blogger is less hungry this morning, allows me to post more pictures of student projects for this semester. Those on the left are by graduate students Lyz Soto, Jaimie Gusman and Davin Kubota (the latter being an auditor/free loader, visitation from a past life in the 1990s!). Lyz Soto, whose book Eulogies was published by Tinfish Press earlier in the year, composed an "Accretion Disk," based on her propensity to rewrite a single poem until it expands into book form. In this case, a short lyric about the sun morphed into a long sequence of meditations on being mother to a son. Lyz performed her usual operations on her own text, "translating" it repeatedly, and also including equations. Real ones, the mathematical kind. Jaimie Gusman wrote a sequence about the Anyjar, which I like to think of as a proud descendant of Wallace Stevens's Tennessee jar. This jar is a universal container into which the poet stashes feelings (there's an elegy, or three in here), memories (there's a love story), and includes Jaimie's usual whimsical and yet incisive wordplay. Davin's chapbook is funnier; he puts on traditions like clothes. He also did a "newspaper" about poetry, in which he included his own Hart Cranian elegy of a dog amid a page of shtick. Effective, odd, juxtapositions are his mode. He could give Lee Cataluna a run for her money.






Yesterday, I posted a photograph of No`u Revilla's chapbook; here's another. She calls her "press" Filipino Broom because those brooms require so much work to perform the art of sweeping. (Her description brought back the vivid image of old Russian women sweeping the sidewalks of Moscow, circa 1981, and my father's eyes bright with feeling that they should not have to do so.) No`u's work has a lot of sexuality in it, but always at the service (wrong word!) of ideas about the world, whether about young girls discovering their sexuality, the `aina, or larger issues in relationships between lovers.

Here are three more chapbooks from English 713, left to right, Peter Forman's "Boarding Pass: Trans-Perception Airways," made AS a boarding pass; Marcus Au Young's "Image Not Found," and Aiko Yamashiro's "notes toward a love poem."



Aiko's poems "toward love" or her love "toward a poem" graft themselves onto song lyrics, then move off into the world of the hospital where her grandfather had surgery on his heart valve. The word "valve" then takes off (not a stone, as in Dickinson) and merges into other things (sinks, faucets) and voices (her grandfather's stream-of-consciousness life story, that starts and stops as the poet wills it). Marcus's deck of cards includes the concrete poem seen here, where "settlers" and "natives" cover the island of O`ahu in arbitrary binary fashion. Peter Forman, a former TWA pilot, is a local authority on the airline industry. His chapbook contains multi-layered narrative poems about his travels. The strongest, to my mind, is a poem about Kiribati (where my husband spent two years in the Peace Corps). In that poem he layers a personal narrative with the colonial history of the place and the subsequent ecological disasters there.










Amalia Bueno, like Davin Kubota, was a freeloader. But oh to have such auditors always! Her chapbook for 411 (Poetry of Place workshop) is a wide-ranging piece, featuring poems about her own locations (the Philippines, Waipahu and "upper Waipahu," which is what she calls Waikele,). Amalia's work is kinetic, funny, wise slapstick. She write da kine, too.

There were many other wonderful projects between the two classes. One student, Kate Stilwell, who is teaching for Teach for America, made her own paper (but left me with the xeroxed version of her book, alas); Moriah Amey made enormous sheets out of card stock, which feature photographs on which she has applied her poems; Nicole Manuel's chapbook is as understated as she is not, a lovely meditation on motherhood and direction (of various kinds) off Pensacola Street in Makiki. Nicole appreciated Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day in a way few of my students have. Her chapbook begins, "Stately." Homage to Mayer's homage to Joyce, indeed.


Craig Perez was a surprise guest to our last class of English 411. Here's a photograph of him reading a poem about Spam. (That's a fiction; this is a photo of him, and he read a poem about Spam.) The class had read his first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha]. He was overheard telling another visitor that this was "the craziest class he'd ever been to."

Thanks to everyone in both classes for making this such a rewarding semester, especially in light of the budget cuts, faculty losses, falling down building, uncollegiality by some, and the other downers that make one question one's desire to pursue this "life of the mind." Mind is pleased.

Communities of Destination 2: "Radicant Aesthetics" (Nicolas Bourriaud)

[sign by Lian Lederman]

I'm off to Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) soon to talk about Tinfish and to give a couple of readings from my own work (as it were). So the blog provides a way station to thinking toward the issues I want to touch on there, issues of editing and location, language and translation, networks and distribution (the former always easier than the latter). I apologize to readers for the inevitable repetitions involved in thinking about how Tinfish books talk to one another, and why those conversations might matter.

Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant provides an apt field for thinking these issues through, or if not "through," then wandering around these issues rather than blundering into them. As I did in my last post, I will use Bourriaud's book as a generative backboard for thoughts about Tinfish. Contemporary wisdom, like so many things, suffers from a short lifespan, fly-like, and precarious. One of Bourriaud's key words is "precarious": "the lifespan of objects is becoming shorter and shorter," he writes, as consumerist culture feeds off the disposable thing, rather than the heirloom. (During my recent trip to California, I heard tomatoes referred to as "heirloom," which seemed to be a good thing, though it suggests old age and attics to me.) In the art economy, old things can still be precious: I think of the old printing machines at the California Center for the Book, or the recycled materials Tinfish uses to make some of our covers.

As with all such states, precariousness has its down-side, and its up. Bourriaud refers to "a positive precariousness, or even an aethetic of uncluttering, of wiping the hard disk" (85). Hard to see the positive when the hard disk being wiped involves one's job or one's way of working or one's traditions of knowing. But if that wiping can become a process of "editing" (99) in art, rather than one of random and violent cutting, perhaps we're onto something. In any case, Bourriaud suggests an aesthetic of wandering, in which the artist becomes what he terms a "semionaut." Which brings me to bullet-points (not to instigate a violence on my own text here) about Tinfish Press.

On wandering itself:

***Our next full-length book, Remember to Wave, by Kaia Sand, includes a guided walk through Portland, Oregon. This is a walk that she has taken, and led. The walk is at once across the contemporary city and into its (hidden) past, so that the observer is shown not simply what is there but also ghostly presences of what was. The histories of Japanese-American internment and of African-American containment emerge out of the city as she walks it, and as her words walk across documents related to these historical moments. Barbara Jane Reyes walks San Francisco in Poeta en San Francisco, encountering homeless Vietnam vets, malign presences to her as a racialized Filipina-American, but living reminders of a past Americans largely want hidden. Hazel Smith's long poem, "The Body and the City," from The Erotics of Geography, presents a woman who walks the streets of a city, seeing it in various ways--as dream, as deconstruction, as "post-tourism," as a female geography, and as a historical place (she reaches back to the medieval city).



***For those who do not walk through the city, there are those who are transported on TheBus in poems by Ryan Oishi and Gizelle Gajelonia (in her parody of Stevens in Tinfish #19 and in a forthcoming chapbook, 13 Ways of Looking at TheBus). There are the diasporic poets, Yunte Huang, Linh Dinh, Caroline Sinavaiana, each engaged in an archeology of cultures and possible selves.

Bourriaud quotes Claude Levi-Strauss: "'a journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time and in the social hierarchy'" (123). A journey in space is also a trip into memory. The time-tourist also has responsibilities.

On language / translation:

***The precariousness of local languages, as evidenced in Lisa Kanae's Sista Tongue and Lee Tonouchi's Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture. Languages that travel, but with difficulty: Jacinta Galea`i's Aching for Mango Friends, about a girl who moves back and forth from Samoa, where her family is from, to Seattle, where she is educated in the American way. (She does this with an awareness of the problems, but without the bitter nostalgia that characterizes some post-colonial literature.) Craig Santos Perez recently reviewed the chapbook and commented on the use of Samoan words and phrases within the English text:

"Although some may read this as an exclusion, I read it as an intimate inclusion into another’s native space. Once I surrender the desire to translate, the untranslated naturalizes the foreignness of my relation to the characters. Semoana does not worry about others not understanding; instead, she speaks Samoan because she is Samoan, affirming that she needs to translate her cultural identity only to herself."

***And so the refusal to translate, which one finds more strongly yet in Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco. I sense that she is now more willing to translate, but respect her decision in this book not to. Extended sections in Tagalog and Baybayin, as well as frequent "lapses" into Spanish, create a difficult reading environment that (at least in echo) enacts some of the difficulties of colonialization and immigration.

***Second language English, like Linh Dinh's, or that found in Goro Takano's new BlazeVox book. The barriers to comprehension are smaller than those in BJR's book, but still pronounced. So that the reader much do the work of translation from near-native to native-English. Like riding on cobblestones; you get there, but not so smoothly or easily.

***Hazel Smith's "translations." "My heritage, though you may not realize it, is tangalisingly mixed. I have a few loose ends in Lithuania. But I've never travelled there, and couldn't find my way around if I did" (27). As Bourriaud puts it, "In a human space now completely surveyed and saturated, all geography becomes psychogeography" (120), or an erotics thereof. Paul Naylor's Jammed Transmission, an effort by an American poet to communicate across time and space with a Japanese Zen Buddhist text, contains in its very title, an admission that such transmissions / translations are never direct.

***Craig Santos Perez's "hesitations." In from unincorporated territory, translates Chamorro words, but often only a page or two after they appear in the text. The reader, who reads about an island in the ocean, must circulate back and forth in waves to read the book well. There is no linear progress in this book, which is made of intersecting sections and in which languages come into contact, but are not immediately comprehended.

These are linguistic translations, which aid and stand-in for larger translations of culture. (I have not addressed the "translations" that occur when artists add to Tinfish books, creating a first response to their content.) These are much harder to accomplish by publishing a small number of books; the weight of representation is heavier on our three books from Samoa (all of them by writers who have spent much of their lives in the United States) than it is on our California books. Translation is not a given, and this is one problem Tinfish faces. To what extent do our American readers "get" the books we publish from elsewhere. Do what extent do _I_ get them? Conversely, what can be gained through this not-getting, if it is respectful and alert to possibility, rather than to closing down. To movement and multiplicity, in other words, not to sitting still? Open questions all! That these books are all engaged in a similar wandering (whether geographical, linguistic, spiritual, sexual) only makes the books and their reception more complex.

***There is also a more comic wandering, typified by Gizelle Gajelonia's parodic translations of American poems by Stevens, Bishop, Crane, Ashbery and others, onto O`ahu's geography and into its Pidgin idiom. This inter-textual wandering posits O`ahu as the hub, and American poetry as the periphery. Wallace Stevens flies into HON and is transformed into a local poet. No more a 747-poet, intruding on another space and happily flying away to write about it with authority, Stevens is kidnapped, his language taken, translated, and he is then welcome into the local. Appropriations reversed, fresh networks created--not out of newness, but the circulation of the old according to new weather patterns.

On islands:

Finally, for now. Toward the end of the book, Bourriaud posits an island model for thinking, post-post-modernism and post-post-colonialism: "a new configuration of thought that no longer proceeds by building great totalizing theoretical systems but by constructing archipelagoes. A voluntary grouping of islands networked together to create an autonomous entity, the archipelago is the dominant figure of contemporary culture" 185). Not all islands are so voluntarily networked, of course, as evidenced in the uses to which Guam, the Philippines, and Hawai`i have been put. But Bourriaud, ever the optimist, would use the island map as evidence of a "struggle for diversity," rather than a shutting down, colonial-style. These are islands as openings, not islands as bastions, fortifications for someone else's armies. "The alter-modern is to culture what altermondialisation is to geopolitics, an archipelago of local insurrections against the official representations of the world" (185-86).

If we can take this model as our own, as prospect if not as fact, as hope if not as clear possibility, then Tinfish is one of its most literal enactments, wandering as it does in a Pacific archipelago characterized by local resistances to globalization, but also by poets' efforts to circulate, walk, migrate, take TheBus ceaselessly, make networks between books, between languages, between cultures.

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Barbara Jane Reyes has posted a third installment of statements by small press editors on Harriet's blog. Links to the other two can be found at the end of my previous post.

Communities of destination: Independent small presses & Nicolas Bourriaud's _The Radicant_

At the risk of sounding precious, I'll post a quotation from Barbara Jane Reyes's blog, which she put out as a way to generate a valuable conversation. The quotation is by the editor of Tinfish Press, and goes as follows:

"My frustration at the moment comes of the fact that no publisher can demand her customers read the press as well as its authors. So the conversations we mean to get going are sometimes overlooked when people buy only work by Pacific writers, or Buddhist writers, or Asian American writers or Bay Area writers (for example). But the publisher may have died (Roland Barthes style) with her authors."

While respecting the needs of communities to organize along lines of gender, ethnicity, national origin, class, and so on, I'm also looking toward a third (fourth, fifth . . .) way, one that is not either nor or. Nicolas Bourriaud states the problem this way: "Between modern universalism and postmodern relativism, it is said, we have no choice" (The Radicant, 14). I'm fascinated by the way he addresses the way old paradigms tend to flip over, changing the actors involved, while maintaining a master narrative, where power and prestige remain centered, rather than diffused--accumulated, rather than shared.

Bourriaud gets closer yet to the problem I'm trying to articulate in response to Reyes's question when he writes about aesthetic theories born out of the "cultural postcolonialism" as "in their most dogmatic form, . . . [going] so far as to obliterate any possibility of dialogue among individuals who do not share the same history or cultural identity" (25). Bourriaud worries about what he calls "postmodern aesthetic courtesy," which silences critical conversations between western and non-western authors.

I'm less interested in critical readings these days, or in who is allowed to do them, than I am in positive interventions. Where there are missing voices, perspectives, my sense is that we (publishers, editors) do better to try filling them with new sounds than to shut down those who are already talking. Conversation works better than talking down. (I write this with an ironic smile, as I am also a critic.) Given that adding voices is not always a courteous act, perhaps this is one way to get away from over-deference. But again, that's not my kuleana. What I do want to avoid is the isolation of writers and audiences that I sometimes see when I go to readings in Honolulu. There's the crowd that attends Hawaiian poetry events, the crowd that goes to Bamboo Ridge readings, the Wayne Westlake readers, the Asian Settler Colonialism group, the slam poets, the Art Academy types. Rarely do these audiences cross over. I seem to remember that they once did, but perhaps that's an hallucination on my inner eye of memory. Thus, Bourriaud's citation from Claude Levi-Strauss, who died just yesterday, has resonance: "'The one real calamity, the one fatal flaw which can afflict a human group and prevent it from achieving fulfillment is to be alone'" (36).

Filling gaps in rather than accusing others of failing to do so is one way to acknowledge that the future is as important as the past, that origins are no more sacred than are the places we want to get to from here. Hence, the forging of connections between (overly) carefully delineated groups of writers strikes me as necessary. "It is a matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination," Bourriaud writes. Later he writes of the importance of the "itinerary, the path" (55), and the need for movement. Now history, too, is a kind of movement. We need not let the past go in order to imagine a future.

Bourriaud is big on translation. "Translation thus appears as the cornerstone of diversity" (65). Translation is negotiation, is relation, is acknowledgment of difference. It is objectivism to the smothering forces of subjectivity. Small presses that devote themselves to translation, on and off the internet and the page, are doing readers a great service. What is lost in translation gains us another voice, one we cannot quite hear on its own terms, but which can bend us toward a new understanding ("new thresholds, new anatomies," as Hart Crane wrote). That bending process reminds me that we mustn't assume what is being translated is solely a text. It is also the reader that is translated, in conversation with the text. If we hold too closely to our existing "identities," we cannot be translated, cannot communicate effectively, cannot create alliances with others.

If texts are identities, then how much better it is to read more than one text at a time! That's where I return to the notion of reading presses instead of single texts, and of reading presses that are as devoted to differences as to samenesses (though we need both for the conversation to happen). Then we arrive at a more interesting mathematical equation. "Translation is a kind of pass: a deliberate, intentional act that begins with the designation of a singular object and continues with the desire to share this singular object with others" (68-69) If too many books and too many poetry audiences are singular (and in so many ways), then translation suggests a way to make community happen with new energies. Acknowledging that members of minority communities often do not want to share their intimate conversations with "dominant" ones, the writers from each community can still share more finished products and begin from there. It matters less where we start tracing our itinerary than it does starting on its noisy chaotic path.

How these conversations (as presses rather than as singular books) can begin is a question Barbara Jane Reyes is asking on her blog. Ideas float around as to how to "market" such conversations, as perhaps we must. Rusty Morrison suggested that Tinfish put slips of paper in its books that suggested other books to read to continue the conversation. Craig Santos Perez suggests a discount of 25% for following the suggested conversation. Maybe this is one way. But BJR also asks this question about responsibility:

"am wondering then if it’s the independent publishers, or if it’s the authors, or if it’s both together somehow, who are responsible for confronting and challenging these conventions. Certainly, this is something I am finding my indie publisher respondents saying: certain things in the literary establishment (and academic literature departments, and other departments which use literature in their studies of culture and history are included here) need to change."

So the answer may involve advertising copy, but is surely larger. Academic disciplines have been created to investigate only certain kinds of communities, whether ethnic or aesthetic or both. Teachers use xeroxed poems instead of books. There's an atomism at work, sometimes necessary to create a coherent syllabus, yes, but also a danger. We need to look at literature as a larger, incessantly moving, set of objects, subjects, not as any manner of stillness.

For more on indie publishing issues see BJR's guest blogs at Harriet:
here and here.

"Activity's Time-Running Antidote": Tourism & Poetry in Ara Shirinyan, Jennifer Firestone, and Rap Reiplinger

The Daily Show's advertisements are heavy on horror and suspense movies; my husband and I have sat through many a bad trailer while watching Jon Stewart skewer the stooges of the right. Last night, I thought the horror was that the trailer had eaten The Daily Show. An ad for A Perfect Getaway went on and on, until I thought we must be watching the movie itself. Set on the Na Pali coast of Kaua`i (by the look of it) the movie tells the sad tale of a couple of newlyweds who, thinking they're going to spend time in Paradise, find big-time apples instead. Someone is killing honeymooners, and they might be the other couple on the trail, the ones with matted hair and sinister smiles. At some point, people start jumping off cliffs and badly managing get-away kayaks.

I've lived near or in tourist locations nearly all my life: Washington, DC, Williamsburg, VA, Honolulu and now the windward side of O`ahu, with stays in places like San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is overrun by ex-pats, the tourists who come and never leave. I have also been a tourist, spending three weeks mostly inside a van driving through Chinese cities; having my wallet professionally lifted in the Madrid subway; gawking at the burned out buildings in Highland Park, Michigan outside Detroit. If tourism too often resembles watching a video (if it's in another language, there are no subtitles), then the language of tourism is equally superficial. "Look around. There's no place on earth like Hawaii." "THE PEOPLE OF HAWAII WOULD LIKE TO SHARE THEIR ISLANDS WITH YOU." It's this language that causes such a frisson when A Perfect Getaway suggests that someone in Hawai`i would actually prefer to kill you.

And it's precisely this language that Ara Shirinyan skewers in Your Country is Great: Afghanistan-Guyana (Futurepoem Books, 2008). This is not the "great" of Alexander the, but the "great" of "Hawaii is great year-round, but prices fall in autumn," or "Hawaii is great even with the cursed idols," or even "Hawaii was great, not what I expected though??" or "Paris Hilton in Maui Hawaii, looking great in a new bikini." That's what I got when I googled "Hawaii is great." And Your Country is Great is what Shirinyan got (with editing, of course) when he googled the countries from A-G in the CIA fact book and called them "great." What he got, beyond the humor of second language English and the degradation of the word "great," is an examination of the various strands of (male) tourist talk:

--what's to eat?
--what's to drink?
--who's to screw?
--what's the music like?
--what's to fear? (robbers, mostly)
--what's to do?
--where's the "but"? There's the standard line that goes something like, "Hawaii is great, but I wouldn't want to live there."

The word "great" becomes an engine for locating touristic cliches, not simply about each country, but about any country tourists visit. The generic nature of language elicited by the phrase "X is great" is initially eye-opening (if only to see shallow spaces), but begins to grate pretty quickly. As someone who recognizes the lingo, I begin at about the letter B or C to want more. Give me the CIA fact book material! (It's actually a really neat resource, even if the source is spooky.) Kenneth Goldsmith's blurb is accurate: "Instead of accepting current notions of language as a medium of differentiation, Shirinyan persuasively demonstrates its leveling quality, demolishing meaning into a puddle of platitudes." He is also wrong, of course. Because this is merely the language of the tourist bureau and the unreconstructed tourist imaginary. Need I say we don't get the view from the shore?

Not that the view from the shore is necessarily more benign. There's a genre of "tourist go home" poem that objectifies the tourist every bit as capably as the tourist objectifies the natives. The motivation may be different, but the poems aren't necessarily more interesting. At least they get away from the eye candy quality (or lack thereof) of the unreconstructed 747 poem. This is what Rob Wilson and others call a poem by a poet who flies in, flies out, then writes an authoritative poem about the place he (usually) saw from the plane window. But there are alternative views, those that pillory the language of tourism and then add to our knowledge of the place. Take "Guam is Great." Shirinyan covers the bases: the volcano, the beach, the people, the diving, the hotel, the service (not so great), the food, the water activities, the ww2 history (unexamined). Now compare that to Craig Santos Perez's Guam and you'll see the limitation to the "Guam is Great" formula, as well as to the touristic one. Perez shows us the destructiveness of tourism (empire, the military, the loss of indigenous culture and language), but he gives the outsider reader access to the insider's story. Much of the stark pathos (and I realize Shirinyan is not into pathos) of Perez's book comes in the poet's recognition that he is something of a tourist in his own home. He speaks the language, but not well enough. He knows the culture because his grandmother tells him, but she too has gaps in her knowledge. The gaps were instituted by imperial laws against speaking Chamorro (or Hawaiian or Korean, as the case may be). This seems a richer vein to tap than the artery of banal language Shirinyan mainlines.

Jennifer Firestone's Holiday (Shearsman Press, 2008) offers us the language of a tourist who knows she's a tourist, knows she's missing something, and spends her vacation wondering what that might be. While lacking in the ginned-up suspense of A Perfect Getaway, there's suspense in the not-knowing-but-still-sensing that she describes. She knows that holidays are usually "made up" (13), that

Over the bridge
slopes dictate the way
below it shines
don't stop for reflection (13)

where reflection is at once a visual and a meditative act. Firestone meditates, then, on her vacation, and what her vacation prevents her from knowing:

no where or precise memory
just land mountains (14)

[apologies for the lost formatting] and "each shape had names"--but not names that she knows, or she might write them down. The forms of Firestone's poems, airy, open, reflect not simply her reflectiveness, but also draw out the gaps in knowledge that are the paradoxical subject of the book.

Firestone, like the honeymoon couple in the movie trailer, senses danger: "Michelangelo / despised painting / 'fit for women'"; the old masters were out to erase you. (The impressionistic descriptions of the old paintings are among the best passages in the book.) There's violence in the art, there's violence at home (a murder), and there's violence in the American invasion of Iraq.

What Firestone does not offer is the research, the historical depth of someone who returns from vacation and tries to discover what it was she saw. Nor does she offer what Hank Lazer does in Elegies & Vacations, namely a meditation on the self, inspired by travel and by the re-reading of familiar poems in unfamiliar places. Lazer mixes the here and there in fruitful ways, ones that largely and wisely evade the temptation to "own" the place one visits. Pam Brown has performed similar experiments; her chapbook 747 Poems (Wild Honey Press) includes self-aware tourist poems. Firestone begins a process that I would hope she continues. Knowing that she has not lived the places she's visited, this reader would like to see her write poems out of what she looks for when the trip is over.

Shirinyan's book is funny. We laugh at tourist language because we know its banalities so well. What it lacks is something one can find in Rap Reiplinger's skit, namely the voice of a member of the service industry. S/he speaks in "a medium of differentiation," namely Pidgin. Rap manages to mock both the tourist, "Mr. Fogarty/ Frogtree," whom he plays, and the hotel desk clerk he likewise plays--in drag. Click here to watch the skit. Chart in your laughter lessons we might get from reading Shirinyan and Firestone in the same sitting, while overhearing the voices of hotel workers in the paradise getaway we're inhabiting for a week or two. Ah, but who the hell are "we"? And "they"?


["Activity's time-running antidote" is the last line of Jennifer Firestone's book (80)]

Skyping Craig Santos Perez

Friday was the day to Skype Craig Perez in my Poetry & Politics class. After the usual series of technical glitches, we commenced. I asked Craig to read the first page of poetry in his book and to talk to us about his concept of the page as space. On this first page, "from Lisiensan Ga1lago"(15), names given to Guam are put in dialogue and spread like islands across white space--not an Olsonian field, but a Perezian ocean. Craig considers that there are currents between the words; the closer the words are to one another, the more tension is created between them.

Our next conversation was about translation. from unincorporated territory offers the non-Chamorro reader translations into English, although many of them have jet lag, the English translation following its Chamorro word by a page or two or three. This forces the reader to go back in the book, Craig says. He then told us about a significant moment in the text, where words are mistranslated. It happened to be my favorite moment in the text, when the word "teritoriu" is said to mean "my heart" (79). But that is not the case, so the English speaking reader gets it wrong (tourist asks for directions to Hanauma Bay and is told how to get to Yokohama Bay instead?). Translation is an aesthetic and a prosodic act, Craig told us, as well as one that includes readers on different sides of linguistic borders. Given two paths in a wood (or two currents in a sea), Craig chooses them both--he both translates and does not, spells Chamorro in the accepted way and spells Chamoru in the nationalist manner. He writes in the tradition of his storytelling grandparents and in that of the MFA program at USF from which he graduated in 2005. His poetry is as diasporic as he is; what is inevitably not a perfect fit becomes a place in which to play with different possibilities. He is at once Duncan the mythologizer and Truth seeker and Levertov the activist and political truth teller.

Craig talked about his work as a Chamorro activist, including his five minute speech at the United Nations this past October, where he talked about the negative effects of militarization on Guam. He considers this a moral act rather than a political strategy, considering the UN's lack of power to change conditions on Guam. Significantly, Craig also talks about working to inform the community of Guamanians in the Bay Area. The goals of this work are to get petitions signed, raise money and stop the military build-up on Guam by the United States.

When asked to talk about the organization of his book, Craig said that the poem's several sections had each been self-contained in early drafts. But each section seemed heavy and long when he read it in toto. So he began to tease out sections, weave them back and forth through the book, until he arrived at a poem he describes as being like a banyan tree, its roots aerial and spawning new parts of the tree. The ancestors live in these trees, and so can inhabit the book itself.

Oh, and Craig says his manuscript was rejected by another press months after it was published by Tinfish, and at about the point that it was #1 on the SPD best seller list. Hele on!

Prepositions and masculinities

My Poetry & Politics class lingered yesterday over the preface to Craig Santos Perez's from Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish, 2008). I'm struck, on teaching the book, at the very different way I'm reading it--not as a manuscript to decide for or against, or at a book to proofread for "errors," but as a coherent text. This time the experience feels profounder (and reminds me of trying to get Radhika to pronounce "Federer" correctly: the player who is more than simply "Feder"). How appropriate that a poet who gleans one of his headnotes from Gertrude Stein (more on these marvelous epigraphs in a bit), stops to consider how crucial is the preposition "from."

"I" am "from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY." From indicates a particular time or place as a starting point; from refers to a specific location as the first of two limits; from imagines a source, a cause, an agent, or an instrument; from marks separation, removal, or exclusion; from differentiates borders. (p. 12)

It is the discovery of a prospective "from" that preoccupies Perez (in the face of his country's occupation by the Spanish, the Japanese, the American military). It is the way in which his "from" includes both an oral Chamorro tradition (by way of his grandparents) and an avant-garde western tradition (by way of the mother of us all and other writers) that pre-occupies me, his publisher. If Guam, according to one of the schematic maps drawn by designer Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul, is the center of a Pacific airport hub, then this book is the hub from which many traditions radiate. One of my students described the book as "inoffensive," which caused us to wonder what charge to put on that word: does it indicate a calm that is itself an act of poetry-politics, or is it a word that means "ineffective"? (The student who said this quite liked the book, but was wondering about it as political praxis.) We will keep this question alive for at least two weeks, as we'll be skyping with Craig on April 17.

I would, for now, point to Perez's own language maps, such as the one on the first page of the poetry section of the book, "from LISIENSAN GA`LAGO" (these were ID tags the Japanese forced Guamanians to wear during the Japanese occupation of the early 1940s, before the U.S. retook the island). Each word for Guam on this page is presented as an island on a larger map (page as ocean). None of these words is erased or rejected (as Chamorro was outlawed by the U.S. educational system), but presented as a map including history (to modify Pound). Over the course of the book, through more than one form of translation, Perez introduces the non-Guamanian reader to crucial words in Chamorro; he tries, as he says at the end of his Preface, "to being re-territorializing the Chamorro language in relation to my own body, by way of the page." That "territory" and the Chamorro word for "heart" are close sonic cousins (79) points to a place "beyond territory," or at least beyond territories that "belong" to colonial powers.

But Perez's use of the western avant-garde is an acknowledgment that this tradition, however problematic in its own right, also tries to de- or re-territorialize the languages we speak. Re-territorializing differs from de-territorializing in its creation of allegiances across cultures. That is certainly why Perez's book fits so well in the Tinfish catalogue. More than that, the book offers a positive critique of any attempt to fence off traditions from each other. Fences don't work well on islands, which may be why so much work along these lines comes from islands--the Caribbean, Hawai`i, Guam, and elsewhere.

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My life is consumed these days with Sangha's and Radhika's baseball practices and games. Sangha's coach has a baseball event every day of the week, while Radhika's more moderate coach only has them practicing three or four days a week for their weekend game. (As Radhika would say, "mom, you're being sarcastic!").

The culture of kids' baseball is perhaps not different here from anywhere (aside from the omnipresence of Pidgin among the coaches). But this is what I know, and so I'd like to think more about it, in particular about the models of masculinity that are being offered to my children, especially my nine-year old son. On the one hand, there's a loving-doing-bonding among boys and men, with only the coach's barking of instructions to bring in the linguistic world, which I find very attractive. On the other--there is the governing idea that masculinity involves physical and mental toughness (if the taboo on tears is toughness . . . ) only. That you gotta suck it up, gotta be tough, gotta battle, gotta believe, gotta find yourself, gotta tink baseball, gotta be strong. So many "gotta's." So that learning the rules of the game, which are one thing, bleeds over into the rules of that larger game, which is another thing entirely. On some level playing the game teaches you the game, but you learn other lessons at your peril. (Coach was quoted as saying, don't cheat yourself, cuz you're only cheating yourself.) Yes, and yet.

When I coached t-ball years ago, one father approached me and said, please tell my son not to act like a girl.

That's what I want to think about. Like a girl.