Small Press Publishing (English 713): The Material Text from Emily Dickinson to Albert Saijo

In the reader for my Small Press Publishing course, essays by Jerome McGann and George Bornstein hammer down the materiality of the text. McGann shows how Yeats's "rag and bone shop of the heart" refers, in large part, to the rags gathered to make paper. While McGann considers the rag-picker to be like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, a figure of nostalgia, I'm more inclined to think of the rags as the origin of the poem, precisely because they compose the paper the poem is written and then printed on. McGann's essay considers Emily Dickinson's manuscripts vis-à-vis what happens when they are printed, however "faithfully." Bornstein discusses the ways interpretation alters when the text moves from manuscript to journal to book to Norton Anthology.  Anyone who's taught out of one of those Nortons knows to what extent the poem disappears into the apparatus of the canon, the literary history that is only implied by the heft of the volume itself.

Years ago, when we visited Albert Saijo every so often on the Big Island, I mentioned Dickinson's manuscripts, the Franklin edition of the fascicles, to him. His handwritten pages reminded me of hers; nothing was normalized into lines, straight or not! I ordered the two volume set for him (he paid me back). When I went to see Laura Saijo a few weeks ago to talk about publishing his Woodrat Flat, poems from the 1980s and early 1990s in northern California, she suggested I take some of his poetry books. I asked only for the Dickinson volumes, but of course ended up taking others, mainly books with some sign of Albert in them. There were at least two lovely Joanne Kyger inscriptions to him in books of hers.

Yesterday I prepared some class time for moving backwards from the final versions of Saijo's poems in Bamboo Ridge #100, from his Bamboo Ridge book of the late 1990s, from the edited typescript of his forthcoming Tinfish book (edited by Jerry Martien), from the original pile of poems and scatter that Laura sent me, and--finally--with all its Benjaminian aura intact, several manuscript pages. But how marvelous to realize that there was a further "poem" by Saijo that led to all of these. In the first volume of the Franklin Dickinson fascimiles, one page was dog-eared.  I went there and found that Saijo had written in his own pencil above many of Dickinson's words; he had translated her handwriting into his. Here's a photograph of that beautiful moment:

Here is Dickinson, interpreted by Saijo, both using pencil.

This is how Bamboo Ridge Press renders Saijo's writing

This is a screen shot of the Tinfish manuscript, Woodrat Flat, which our intern Kailana Kahawaii is scanning in.

There's a shock in looking back from these all-caps pages dense with print to Saijo's original page (below). It's the shock of losing something, of seeing blunt force where so many tones seem to have been intended, of seeing mass produced product where the workshop had been. This is more than nostalgia; there is something lost in translation from pencil to type.

What I wonder most is how to preserve some of the manuscript in the book. Bamboo Ridge uses occasional scanned pages in amid the caps, but that's only a gesture at the motivation of the writer, the odd grace to his handwriting, the "authenticity" that I usually abhor except here--I'll be asking our designer, Allison Hanabusa, if there might be a third way. Part of me thinks not, but Julia Wieting, a member of the class suggested that alternatives of someone else's handwriting (a form of mimicry that sounds wrong to me, but it may simply be my lack of imagination, or attachment to Albert himself); others suggested a book that might include a sheaf of these pages, or a set of two books. We do not have enough manuscript pages for that, but perhaps a few individual pages slipped into the book? That takes me back to the strong feeling I have when I touch these old pieces of paper of his.

I'm not usually one to coo over manuscripts, though I recall seeing a typed page of an odd Wallace Stevens poem in a case at Yale's Sterling Library and feeling a strange chill. That piece of paper made it clear that someone actually HAD written that odd poem, in a way that seeing the poem in The Palm at the End of The Mind never could. Still, that was typed, and Saijo's work is printed in pencil on smudgy pieces of thick paper; one of these manuscript pages has a tiny round burn mark. The book is, in part, about being a marijuana farmer in California, after all! Perhaps because I knew Albert, albeit not well, these few pieces of paper seem, if not quite sacred, then imbued with his presence, two years after he died, several decades after his pencil wrote on this piece of paper.

Here is the Saijo poem in manuscript

Charles Alexander, who joined us on a laptop via Skype, talked about how much small press publishers love when they do, and at moments like the one last night, I felt that rush of joy in making books (or, in my case, making it possible for them to be made). To the left is a photograph of the class huddled around Charles's head on the computer screen. The room is cold. The weather outside so blustery that the building's louvers have taken to singing; they sound like the wax-paper covered combs we used to "play" as children.


Notes:

George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, Cambridge UP, 2001.

Emily Dickinson, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, Volume 1, edited by R.W. Franklin, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981.

Jerome McGann, "Introduction" to Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Princeton UP, 1993.

Thank You for the Window Office / Home by Dark: traipsing alongside Maged Zaher & Pam Brown

I've been reading Rebecca Solnit's book about walking, learning to distinguish between the walking of aristocrats and the walking of workers, and to see in Wordsworth the poet who empathized with ordinary people by way of his purposeful strides. The way we walk, or more particularly our reasons for walking, are themselves a language. My wander through her book has brought me to the Romantics, but not as far as Frank O'Hara (is he in this book?) and his brisk urban(e) walks through Manhattan. I remember asking a student this past semester why he thought O'Hara's lunch poems were all accurate to what had happened to O'Hara on any given walk. Why assume that they're non-fiction poems, as opposed to poems whose lines matter more than steps? I realized, as I asked, that I too had made that assumption about the truth of O'Hara's walks.

It's Frank O'Hara on the telephone that appears in Pam Brown's new book, Home By Dark--the telephone you can see him on, even as he types a poem, on a youtube video--not on one of his urban gallops. She's writing a poem to Gig Ryan, starting from the telephone.  (See O'Hara's "Personism" on poems as phone calls.) And her poem, "In my phone," is indeed about poems: "in a poetry world / everything is providential, / or not, / and / sometimes, / just life on hold, call waiting," though very little in Pam Brown's poetry waits. It's kinetic, her mind skipping like her lines across the page, quickly, an eye to the world's scatter and ear to its white noise. Her poem walks are loopy; they come back around. Maged Zaher's new Ugly Duckling book, Thank You for the Window Office, also includes O'Hara, while charting a history of the past 40-50 years that offers new meaning to the walk:

In the middle of the acquisition meeting
I thought of Frank O'Hara walking New York streets
My lunch poems were composed over Chinese take out
While we decided whom to fire

In the window office of Zaher's software corporation, there is no longer a lunch hour in which to play flaneur. There is no break between work and walk. The lucky ones sit; the less lucky will walk. There is only a business meeting, and the question of who will walk, take a hike, lose their jobs. Walking on the street outside that office means walking away from a living wage and literally and figuratively to be "on the street." No window to one's soul this window, but (as the cover image shows us) a window from which to jump. Jumping is not walking, is more violent, more sudden, thought-shattering rather than meditative (to put it mildly).

One of Tinfish's plum chapbooks was a collaboration between Pam Brown of Sydney and Maged Zaher of Seattle/Cairo. You can read the story behind their chapbook here.  (Tinfish Press also published a book by Zaher tout seul, here.) Despite the distances between their cities and their Englishes, they wrote poems so seamless that no one could tell whose voice was whose. Uncanny collaboration. It made sense, however, as they are both poetic kids of O'Hara, both urban poets, both write in the demotic, and both cast sharply ironic eyes at the daily worlds they inhabit. Brown wrote from her station at the library where she worked, Zaher from his software corporation. If O'Hara's walks on the concrete of Manhattan turned his mind to matters of art and friendship, Brown's and Zaher's walks can be said to be like his. And, if O'Hara commented on the civil rights movement and on being a gay man, then Brown and Zaher are also walking in their own time.

What is this time? It's one where metaphors get coopted as method. Hence, the time well spent on a walk now returns the metaphor to the literal "spending" that consumerist culture insists upon. In Brown's "Opportunities," she turns to the language of surfing the web:

Sitting duck
     in Toodyay

add to cart

Lost toy panda
     by the roadside

add to cart

Digital creature,
     crowd-sourced

add to cart

and so forth. That "lost toy panda," at once adorable and missing to a small child, might evoke pity were it not so quickly added to the cart, a cart that suggests our very observational empathies are best described as planned purchases. The cart is the shopper's purgatory; she can still change her mind, but the consumable is there (somewhere) to be paid for.  We don't see the warehouse, and we don't feel the sore knees and backs of the workers, but we sense the aura of the object, and we want it. The very past cannot be remembered as before: "I can't google-map my past," she writes in "Windows wound down," "where we lived is classified." Classified as in secreted away by google, or classified as in up for sale, little difference.

If Brown renders "add to cart" poetic--the line is biting but it's also funny--then Zaher renders poetry into bitter reality. In a poem that includes the line, "Because it is time to save civilization," he continues:

One iPhone user at a time
Historical materialists of Cairo unite
And let us partake in the power of the masses
I saw the great minds of my generation working
For Microsoft and Boeing to be laid off later
Like dogs

How far we've moved from Wordsworth's similes to Zaher's "like a dog." His is a cliche, but it does not feel like one in this poem. This is not a poem about historical materialism in the philosophical sense but in the consumable one. "And these are the masses--they buy the stuff the leaders create," he writes near the top. In this context, "the power of the masses" is a dubious force, at best, like that of the crowds in Cairo that overturned one dictator only to suffer under another, and who are gathering once again as I write. No wonder he writes on another page, "I am tired of history / I am tired of this poem."

"Romanticism was something to brag about," notes Zaher and, while both poets emerge from the Romantic tradition, they find they have less to brag about. All that keeps them from the bitter is (if not wine, then) wit. Both poets have the ability to write punch lines, sometimes at the end of a poem ("One more poem about police brutality," writes Zaher,  "Thank you for the opportunity to join the subculture") and sometimes not: "recessions don't stop / for Sunday" (Brown). And while neither poet is a symbolist, they have each arrived at their primary vehicle to deliver these messages about the ravages of capital and destructiveness, namely the United States. Brown's poems about traveling to the United States are some of the darkest in her book. "No worries" begins with the haunting lines, "flat out, too tired to die" and records new world factoids, like "tumbling economies" reported on CNN and panhandlers and exhortations to "live better" that only make the poet feel worse. In the poem after, she notes the evil of US drones, the black derricks of oil rigs in LA and tree clearing for better tourist vistas.

Zaher in his software office informs us

They selected me to die
I am proud though of the design I left on the whiteboard
And as I am close enough to heaven
It is time to remove this sentence

This is nearly Dickinsonian in it double-entendres (dying as being laid off; the whiteboard written on by a man of color; the sentence that is at once linguistic and legal). It might also serve as the eulogy to an expectation of steady employment in the late 20th century. It's a Romantic poem of sorts, but also a Trojan horse. Inside the horse is the empty office, not empty and Transcendental, but empty and lacking a pay check. No mistake that Zaher's lines, while vernacular and slangy, are not casual. They walk across the page like caged animals, pacing forward and then forward again, never past the ragged right margin that keeps beckoning them. He never ends his lines with punctuation, except for a couple of question marks. I'm tempted (it's so funny) to compare them to Merwin's unpunctuated poems, except that Zaher's do not breeze correspondingly from line to line, but seem instead to fall. There's a jarring at the end of his lines, as if enjambment were less a right turn than a wall to be schepped over, fallen off of. It doesn't mend, it scars.

The political content of these books is compelling. So too are the old provinces of the lyric, love, sex, and dying. Zaher's poetry is often about desire, sexual desire, though it's not thought through, and there are no flowers in it. Brown's poetry, in this book more than in her others, is about illness and aging. In fits and starts, amid and between her more political thoughts, she writes lines like these:

Leaving the World

is not as bad
as you'd think

the grand movement
masks
the small movement,
you pull your swifty
and disappear

I'm not persuaded that my Urban Dictionary has informed me what "swifty" means in this context, but the "is not as bad / as you'd think" is as moving as it is casual. Many of the details include memories of past lovers, other layers of personal history, and then there's this: "mid april / & / the xmas wreath / is still pinned / to the front door / of the neighbour / who died / on boxing day" These lines acknowledge a refusal that has earned the poet's empathy. It might be irony, but then again it is not.

Photographs:

Pam Brown at Michelle Leggott's house, Auckland, 2012.

Maged Zaher at Coors Field, Denver, June, 2013. Rockies 10-Padres 9, on a walk-off homer by the rookie third baseman.


NOTE: as I finish this post, Maged puts this on his facebook status line. He is writing a nearly moment-by-moment account of events in Egypt.

The US is currently supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the wrong move. You can't turn around, execute bad policies against the will of a whole people then complain that you can't do business with them. Please write to your congress representative that you don't want the US supporting the Muslim Brotherhood not just because of their horrible record on freedom and on women but because it is the wrong move for the US interests.

 

Docupoem as elegy: collage of docupoetry students & prof on Kristin Prevallet's _I, Afterlife_

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;	490
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.	495
	Percy B. Shelley, "Adonais"

 
This is a book working towards the embracing of uncertainty, of doubt, of the fact that there are holes in what we find meaningful, what we want to be meaningful.  (Jerrold)


Not that your sense of time is 'distorted'.  What's changed is more radical than that.  Simply, you are no longer in time.  (Denise Riley, "Time lived, without its flow")


It's as if any death causes the collapse of the simplest referring language.  As if the grammatical subject of the sentence and the human subject have been felled together by the one blow.  (DR)

Another way to think about this section is to recognize it as failure, as just words following rules of grammar, signs that are empty, but whose structure comforts us.  (Aiko)

 

Dementia is bricolage, is collage, is mixed-up syntax.  It is nothing new.  To describe it is to say nothing new.  It cannot be analyzed, because its origins, and its ends, cannot be located.  The maps are hanging from laundry lines in a humid country; the ink that is their roads has dripped off the dark paper that had enclosed them.   (SMS, Dementia Blog)

The separation of sound from sequence would chip away at consecutive thinking, and so at the whole principle of induction.  That this is exactly what can happen in the aftermath of a sudden death ...  (DR)

"Nothing" is closure" (15). This kills me, and defines my attitude to visiting graves, especially my grandfather's. I've only done it once, since he died, and I can't really explain to my family why, unless I point them to these three words. It's not that I have an uneasy feeling about cemeteries, or the thought of my decomposing grandfather under my feet. I think I just have a different ritual for remembrance; one that involves bowing over a blank page, or caring for the people that he spent his entire life sweating and bleeding for.  (Donovan)

Dementia as poetic form.  Reverse Stein: not insistence, but repetition.  Repetition as diminishment.  Nothing accrues.  Sentences do not stick to each other; the mind is humid, deflects meaning as something that becomes, as a post-it note flutters off a solid surface.  Meaning happens only as instances of it tear apart.  (SMS)

 

It feels as if some palpable cerebral alteration has taken place.  (DR)

 

With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –

Between the light – and me –

And then the Windows failed – and then

I could not see to see –   (ED)

 

Prevallet's mourning is made whole by filling her gaps and spatial distances with “their own energies, force fields, and pulls.” She finds sustenance in these "anti-matter items" and works to “find in holes a certain kind of completion.” (60).  (Amalia)

 

What is the prosody of dementia, and can it vary without altering what it is?  Look at is.  Really look at it.  To find meaning there is to flinch.  To flinch is to make a necessary sound of this.  (SMS)

But once there's no longer any element of sequence because the sensation of flowing time has been halted, narration can't proceed.  (DR)

  

I find KP's fearless inhabitation and exploration of the gap, or void, left after a loss to be refreshing in our present day culture that allows for no gaps; no gaps in productivity, no gaps in moving forward, no gaps in information, no gaps in conversations, no gaps in time, no gaps in space.  No gaps and precious little silence.  Instead of joining the herd of positively pushing forward, Prevallet asks us to;  “Be. Negatively. Capable.” (48)   (Lynn)

--She asks me the difference between eulogy and elegy.  (SMS)

 For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew [ 10 ]
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not flote upon his watry bear
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of som melodious tear.    (John Milton)

Prevallet is defiant: “I’m a shrine builder” (58). Generic phrases such as “the twelve stages of grief” and “maximum efficiency” enact the assumption that shrines are static and unmoving (58). Consequently, pamphlet closure recommends mourners to dismantle shrines for the sake of “moving on” and “letting go.” However, as Prevallet demonstrates, these assumptions do not consider the various ways objects and spatial arrangements evolve in response to mourning; as if memory-making is not dynamic and effervescent. Prevallet states: “I don’t see it so much as holding on to my dead parents, but rather holding on to an awareness of spatial distance.  (No`u)

A sculptural imagination rises to grip you.  The intuited hollow of the old shelter for the living child [or parent] has now been gouged out of you.  That was the space of the child's past, which used to lie like an inner shell enveloped by your own time.   (DR)

 

--We used to write elegies for the dead, and they became stars in our firmament.  I write of my mother in her dying, not past it.  The prepositions are always the hardest.  These words are for her, through you.  The poem is a vessel of blood.  (SMS)

The cost of recovering your conventional apprehension of flowing time is intolerably high.  The dead slip away, as unwillingly we realise that we have left them behind us in their timelessness.  (DR)

Scatter these well-meant idioms
Into the smoky spring that fills
The suburbs, where they will be lost.
They are no trophies of the sun.  (Hart Crane, "Praise for an Urn")

“I am filled with holes.”  (KP)

__________

Some questions:

1.  Shrines or symphonies?  Tombs or laments?  Objects or sounds?

2.  Time before?  Time after?  Time as?  In time?  Out of it?

3.   Comment on Riley's sentence: "It's not the same 'I' who lives in her altered sense of no-time, but a reshaped person."

4.  Make a list of your holes.  Make a vow, when you write, not to fill them in.

Note:

I can't label this I, Afterlife, because my computer changes "I" instantly to Daniel K. Inouye. 

My essay on Denise Riley, adoption and quotation can be found here.

17 Innings with Michael Snediker, Jack Spicer, Queer Theory, and Disability

Michael Snediker was our Joseph Keene Chadwick lecturer this year in the English department; he delivered a talk on Jack Spicer this past Thursday. Along with this starring role, he played utility infielder by reading his poems at the M.I.A. reading on Wednesday and by leading a seminar on disability theory on Friday. How felicitous to have the author of a book on optimism speak to us during this cruel April of the soul in Honolulu, where cuts in education lead the headlines nearly every day. No furlough for Michael, who devoted hours to talking to my students, in addition to fulfilling his obligations to lecture and run a seminar.


Snediker is a theorist whose theories are creative and a poet whose poems bob and weave through theoretical notions, alongside descriptions of cauliflower and broccoli, water and nervous pastorals (landscapes of the nervous system). Most striking to this reader of his work is the way in which Snediker turns a long tradition that equates pessimism with knowledge, constancy with suffering, and asks why we do not consider our moments of happiness as of equal interest? Once he sets up this experiment, he finds such moments in astonishing places, the poems of Emily Dickinson and Hart Crane, for example. He finds worth in "the junk heap of happy poems" by Dickinson. One of my favorite chapters in his book, Queer Optimism, locates Hart Crane in the very vocabulary of Elizabeth Bishop, inducing smiles for me, like the smiles he interrogates in Crane's poetry. Lest we think Michael's extemporaneous and playful monologues are mere language games, he tells us that theory equipped him to become a gay man, not the other way around. This is not to say that theory becomes his belief system, but his method of weighing transiencies (I begin to write as he speaks!) in such a way that they offer up their joyful instances. (The audio emanating from my computer tells me that the Cardinals/Mets game enters the 15th inning with no score, and as I hope against hope that the moment of joy will be mine and not that of a Mets fan.) His is a mind in which the actual and the allegorical are in profound relationship to each other, in which sex and theory nuzzle, where his own episode of depression relates to the landscape of England (as he told my class) and to the lack of coherence described by queer theorists before him (Butler and Bersani and Edelman, for example). He defined "melancholy" to a seminar group as what might happen if he were to discover that his friend Susan had been a Mets fan all along, instead of a Cardinals fan. (This will not happen, no matter what the 15th inning brings, as we move to the bottom, Yadier Molina at the plate, the announcers giggling at memories of a game from the 1970s or 1980s that lasted this long, when the aptly named (?) Bake McBride ran from first to home on a pick-off attempt, cooking the goose of the opposing team.)

If not Bake McBride, then Demi Moore. Less is more. Half is more. Raise or raze. Long Island or New Canaan. New Canaan or Kingston. Kingston or Honolulu. Everything appears as possibility in Michael's intellect. Including the possibility that Jack Spicer is worthwhile not only for those who come to him with hope, but also those who approach him with disgust. Snediker hated Spicer when first asked to write about him, collected quotations that he especially disliked, culled them, read and reread the work and then allowed Spicer to educate him as a reader of poetry. Isn't this what we want for our students and colleagues and friends, this opening out that poetry promises, but whose promise must be accepted by the reader, cannot be forced on her?

The prodigal son in Spicer evidently mirrors that in Snediker, who went west mid-way through college to find himself as a gay man in San Francisco, even as Spicer's trip east did not go so well. Michael's description of Spicer wove in and out of the biographical and the steadfastly anti-biographical. His assertion that Language writers appreciate Spicer for reasons of biography and not the work was left to hang in the air; I would like to hear more development of that idea, though I can see that Snediker's Spicer is a poet who folds meaning to his chest rather than alienating and then educating his audiences via obscurity or other verbal obstacle.

Snediker's definition of optimism is not quite ours (as we go to inning 16 on my computer audio stream, a broken bat out having foreclosed the Cardinals potential win, man stranded on third base), not a Disneyland of the soul but instead a long but forward-moving drive (like Manos Hand of Fire's interminable opening scene). His use of the word "disability" is likewise untethered from subject positions (so and so is handicapped, say, and this is how they walk) but let fly into a description of how characters read themselves. If Michael's neck IS a neck because it hurts (after Blanchot's declaration that "a broken fork is most a fork"), then characters are best able to read themselves when they are dis-abled. Disabling is a condition of reading and interpreting oneself. Hence Snediker tropes suffering as a launching pad for the joy of thinking about literature within literature (and of course without it).

(The Mets have their first runner on third in 15 innings of this game. "Here's trouble." I feel optimistic yet, as the Cardinals will bat again in the bottom of this inning.) What was most striking about Michael was not the way he speaks of himself as the subject of theory and theory as an integral part of his life, as the way by which he reads himself (STRIKE THREE AT THE KNEES), but the wisdom that sits underneath a wild shelf of fancy lexical doodads. As one colleague wrote to me, "I'm an overnight fan - mostly of the way he kept bringing theory back to how we live." It's the way we live that means most, and seems most difficult to approach through the academy and its trivial (and sometimes untrivial) differences and bitterness. Michael's theory of living combines incision with kindness, the profoundly temporal (he was utterly present to my daughter Radhika yesterday and this morning as he brushed and braided her hair) with the atemporality optimism provides. Optimism may be short, but it is true.

As the 16th inning dawns, my friend Aaron Belz writes to say he hates that LaRussa has left two relievers in to bat for themselves with two outs in their innings, and the game goes on. The game's very fascination is now in its tediousness; my optimism at a good outcome is almost met by a strong desire simply THAT it end. Base hit to centerfield by Ryan Ludwick brings Albert Pujols to the plate (that most poetic of baseball names, as Sandra Dollar said to me in Denver last week). I am not finishing my blog post because the game refuses to end, but I enjoy the fact that I am writing Snediker through baseball as he's a Spicer scholar who does not know an out from an at-bat. Strike to Pujols. The announcer chuckles. Base hit for Pujols; two men on. Peter Gizzi writes about Spicer's use of baseball: "It turns out, in fact, that baseball works for Spicer as a model of individual and social composition; in the lecture he uses it to describe his practice of dictation and in his last book, Book of Magazine Verse, the diamond becomes an incarnation or synthesis of heavenly and earthly cities." But incarnation depends upon the grinding of time on the diamond, this game going into its fifth hour, at least. And a double play ends this inning, 20 players having been stranded by the Cardinals in this game. I have begun not to feel anything for this game except anxiety. But to paraphrase Michael, "These baseball players, to paraphrase Dante, show the way one might feel eternal, but also the way one might, more generally, differently, feel. (41). Poets and theorists, like baseball players, cannot predetermine their temporal fields. What they can do is read the ground ball or the bounce or the instant of happiness, hard earned after so many innings. Jack Spicer's radio drones on (the game was blacked out, even though it's nowhere to be seen on Hawai`i television) and he would appreciate the ways his voice informs Snediker's informs the baseball commentators (on the verge of hysterical laughter) informs mine. The game has not ended, seems not to want to end, but this post has ended at the bottom of the 17th with no score, six hours in.


[in the pictures with Michael are Cindy Ward (seated with MS) and Radhika Webster Schultz (standing)]

"I AM SURPRISED WHEN THE SAME SEASON RETURNS": Albert Saijo in Volcano

[Albert Saijo at 71, 1997]


“Star-crossed sideshow (misheard for Saijo)”: I remember reading that phrase at a Van Gogh's Ear launch in Paris, off the Champs Elysee in November 2002, after saying it alluded to the poet Albert Saijo. After the reading, a man came up to me and handed me his address; said he'd known Saijo's sister when she was Lew Welch's secretary. A couple of years later I handed the address to Albert as he sat beside his wood-burning stove in the cottage he had built himself. The cottage sits near the end of a rutted road in the rain forest that surrounds the active volcano, Kilauea.

The “sideshow” I alluded to was that of William Shawcross, whose book on the Nixon administration's murderous policies in Cambodia I was reading at the time. We would adopt our son Sangha the month after that poem was written. But unintentional allusions are as powerful as intended ones, and seem every bit as striking when the author has some years in which to become the intentional reader of her text. So it seems to me, rereading this memory card, that Saijo's treatment as "sideshow" to official narratives of Beat poetry (or any other kind) needs to end. He has a rightful place in the literary history of the last half-century. (His wife has said that Saijo is often asked to speak to graduate students who want to write about his work, but he turns them away.) There are recent mentions of Saijo in important books on Gary Snyder by Timothy Gray, and on Modernism and Asian-American poetry by Josephine Park. But still.

In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Counter-Cultural Community, Timothy Gray makes the point that counter-culture was not cross-cultural: “Rarely did their [the Beats'] journeys into that space include conversations with Asian-Americans. Indeed, for all the talk about Asian religion and philosophy during these years, Albert Saijo (whom Kerouac disguised as the 'hepcat' George Baso in Big Sur, and Welch once referred to as a 'very swinging but repressed little Jap, really beautiful . . . with the open little moon face of the children of his race') and Shigeyoshi Murao . . . are the only Asian-Americans to receive much mention in the literature and popular accounts of the Beat era” (168). I will leave that language to speak for itself.

Saijo read at the University of Hawai`i Art Auditorium with Gary Snyder and Nanao Sakaki in 2000. Their approach to reading was dynamic, as they sat facing the audience, calling and responding to each other's work rather than reading from a fixed menu. The event called up all that is best and most problematic about the Zen tradition of American poetry (with Sakaki as spiritual cousin), its reverence for the earth, its reverence for a decidedly male tradition of poetry-making. Snyder was especially problematic on that score.

I forget exactly when my husband Bryant and I first visited Saijo on the Big Island. It must have been not too long after we were married in 1998, because we knew him before we adopted Sangha, and then Radhika, and took them to meet him. So it was the late 1990s. We visited, and talked for hours about things Albert should have known nothing about, but strangely did. He abhorred the internet, but not in knee-jerk fashion. So, while he didn't have a computer, let alone an internet connection, he had read computer magazines and knew whereof he disapproved. He talked about the internet, as he did so many things, conceptually. On a later visit, we noted that he had acquired a laptop—a relative had sent it to him, he said. For a time, he even had an email address that we knew, but it lapsed. Bryant speaks of Saijo as a man who is always present, always engaged, always sitting in his chair beside the stove, as the large windows let the rain forest into his cottage. "He belongs there," Bryant tells me.

Saijo is a peaceful man, though one senses a peacefulness that has been hard earned. The "author's note" to OUTSPEAKS is acrid in its references to President Roosevelt, who was responsible for imprisoning his family, and then drafting him into the segregated army. In his poem, “January 16, 1991,” titled after a date we know as the beginning of the First Gulf War, day after Martin Luther King's real birthday, Saijo writes:

I AM TEMPTED TO GET A TV SET—COLOR OF COURSE—12 VOLT—THE KIND JUST DRAWS 4 OR 5 AMPS—WANT TO SEE BLOODY SMASHUP IN COLOR—LOTSA BLOODY DETACHED YOUTHFUL LIMBS EYES EARS NOSES & TONGUES SACRIFICED TO DIVINITY—LOTSA MOTHER LIGHT EXPLODING ALL OVER DESERT LIKE NOVAS OF COMPASSION—WELL I GOT THE SWEET POTATOES BOILED FOR SUPPER—I GOT CHOPPED UP CHICKEN CORPSE UNFROZEN—THE GREEN BEANS ARE READY—BRING ON THE WAR (Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, 82)

(My students always thought the caps meant he was shouting; he says he always liked the big print books for people who can't see well, all I can say is that his voice was soft but carried weight.) In this passage, the lack of a television cannot save Saijo from witnessing--even participating in--the violence he would see there. Actually he would not have, as the Gulf War was pre-cleansed by the US government and media. Without ever playing a video game, however, Saijo would have understood what had happened, as military power postured as play, inverting the expected movement from war to war-game.

As a teenager, Saijo spent years in an internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. I find a photograph of him as a very young man, inspecting a camp newspaper, as another teenager turns the mimeo machine:




He spoke of that time as awful and yet strangely liberating to a teen allowed to wander the camp, set free from the usual ties of family and community. When I told him, circa 2004, that I was writing about internment poetry for a conference in Maine, he offered to send me writing by his mother, Misa Saijo, who had been an important haiku poet on the west coast. A large manila envelope arrived some time later, filled with manuscripts. In the short essay I wrote, I noted that she had written about almost everything except internment. No. She had written of that, too, but her internment writings had been lost, leaving her autobiographical writings with a significant gap.

Here, from my essay, which ended up in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry:


The papers Saijo sent me, in a large manila envelope, offered an initial clue as to what was to come in my research on internment camp poetry. The writings by his mother, Asana Miyata Saijo (pen name Misa Saijo), are all from the 1930s and the 1950s and 1960s. There are no camp poems from the 1940s in the small collection. One essay tells a funny story about ticks in the camp, and concludes with the following lines: “How bathed in nostalgia are the memories / of that long ago camp life” (1956, Los Angeles), which hardly seems a final word on such an experience. In the short biography of the mother by her son, running just over 30 pages, printed (in the capital letters Saijo uses for all his writing), this absence is clarified. “HER HAIKU SOCIETY FLOURISHED AS THERE WERE POETS FROM ALL PARTS OF THE WEST COAST IN HEART MOUNTAIN – UNFORTUNATELY ALL HER WRITINGS FROM THESE CAMP DAYS WERE LOST IN THE MOVES MY PARENTS HAD TO MAKE AFTER LEAVING CAMP – HEARTBREAKING.” Saijo’s barely suppressed conflation of the name, Heart Mountain, with the “heartbreaking” nature of his mother’s loss, speaks volumes about the silences that surrounded the internment camp experience and its poetry for decades after they were closed by the US government. [end of quotation] Like many internees, Saijo fought in World War II in Italy. I like to imagine that he crossed paths with my mother, who was in Italy then, and who owned boots given her by "one of the Neecy boys," as she called them. I'm not even sure she knew that the word was Nisei.





Those big capital letters do appear loud on the page when set into type. In their original form, they were not “set” but “pencilled” into letters that illuminate (in the many senses, textual and otherwise, of that word) the words. Juliana Spahr reviewed OUTSPEAKS for Tinfish 6 (1998), and noticed how much was lost in the transfer from handwriting to type in the Bamboo Ridge volume: “since I am a text fetishist, I can't let this review go by without complaining just a little. Saijo writes a visual poetry of scribble and revelation in different colored inks. There is an interesting reproduction on the cover and there are tantalizing black and white glimpses of the visual poems through the book but the book itself presents word by word translations of these poems. Saijo, I want to argue, is a new Blake and his readers deserve an illustrated edition. His manuscript pages are beautiful because they are messy yet readable” (Tinfish 6, 53).” Spahr writes about Saijo's participation in the tradition of Blake and Emerson; to that I would add Dickinson, especially in manuscript. While Dickinson's writings were not bardic, like Blake's, like Saijo's, her sense of paradox, alive in the scribbled forms of the handwritten words themselves, resemble his. Where she said "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” he writes: “HERE IS A BOMB—IT IS MADE OF WORDS—READ IT & IT GOES OFF IN YOUR HEAD & BLOWS YOU AWAY” ( 77). Dickinson writes of herself as reader; Saijo of us as readers. That shift of address marks over a century of attrition on many assumptions, one of them being the ability of the poet to operate as a free agent. That they have both come to be associated with volcanoes is appropriate. Dickinson never saw one, but understood volcanic power; Saijo lives on top of one.

Saijo, like Dickinson, seems a solitary figure. He moved to Volcano in the early 1990s with his wife, Laura, and by the time we knew him, could not be teased out of his cottage. He would have us over and make us lunch and coffee and we would talk, but it was always in his space. He was quoted in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1997, about the time his book was published and his life became more public for a while, as saying: “All you can do is do something with your personal life. Ask yourself how you are supporting what is happening out there and how can you take energy away from this madness.” When I asked two years ago if I could publish one of his books in manuscript, he declined. He was not interested in publishing any more; he was interested in writing. While I hope his later work finds a home soon (in its original handwriting), I respect that sense of privacy, that sense that the work is what matters, that the personal is more than solitary, and that readers ought not be a poet's first priority.

For, while it belongs in literary histories, Saijo's poetry does not reside in a particular time or category (he is not exclusively a Beat poet, or a Bamboo Ridge poet, though he is of course both of those). He is also a contemporary poet whose work crosses--transgresses--many boundaries, whether ethnic or temporal. Saijo's poems concern the particular lacks we now face head on due to our ravaging of the land, air, and the moral environment. And his voice is pitched to speak to readers beyond our time, as well. When I googled "Albert Saijo" I arrived at an odd map that claimed to tell me what authors other than Saijo a reader of his was likely to read. Walt Whitman was virtually alone on the map. Like Whitman, who still speaks to ferry-riders in Brooklyn, Saijo will continue to speak to anyone who cares to listen. His concerns will more and more be ours, and we ought to cup our ears, the better to hear him. His work is urgent.

O MUSE

YES I BELIEVE IN THE MUSE--LIPS PARTED
TONGUE CURLED BUT MUTE--BLANK EYE-SHINE
FOR EYES--O RADIOCARBONIC--HEART TO
HEART TRANSMITTER--NOT JINXABLE--NEVER
STINGY--BIOLUMINESCENT ONE--TELL ME THE
UNIVERSE--GUIDE ME TO THE LAST PERIOD





[photograph of ohia lehua taken on the Kilauea Iki trail, July 3, 2009]