My review of Anne Waldman's _Bard, Kinetic_

can be found at Ron Slate's _On the Seawall_ website. Here is the Waldman piece:https://www.ronslate.com/on-bard-kinetic-by-anne-waldman/  I also call attention to the work of poet, Selina Tusitala Marsh. For more on her, see here (and elsewhere!): https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/authors-and-editors/selina-tusitala-marsh/

 

This morning (afternoon in Rhode Island) I spoke and read to a group on Block Island, off Rhode Island, about writing on dementia. https://islandfreelibrary.org/event/book-group-susan-m-schultzs-memory-cards/ Thank you to Susana Gardner for making this happen.

RIP-tides: on the poetry of Steven Curry and Nell Altizer

                                                Listen:



When you hear the midnight shutter
Rattle against an autumn wind,
Make haste to rise and throw it wide,
And, lovely, let the darkness in.

--Steven Curry, "The Man Who Heard the World,"
from Waxing the Lunar Mountain Apple, 1997




                                            Each foot I put unearths



a thin place and green fear I will recall
earth long after it ends, keep remembering
water on rankled stone, whippoorwills, owls,
the lumber and listing color of howled
flesh, cow eyes, dung, how the peregrine's wing
sickles the stinkhorn mushrooms where we dwell.

--Nell Altizer, from Thin Place sonnet sequence, 1999



Three former colleagues have died since this Spring semester ended. Bob McHenry had just retired; Steve Curry and Nell Altizer, had retired some years ago. Steve and Nell were both poets and teachers of poetry, so their deaths have sent me back to their books to hear their voices again. They join Norman Hindley in the chronicle of recent poet deaths on O`ahu. Both had strongly spiritual sides. Steve was a Jungian whose dream life features prominently in his poems, along with quotations from Rumi. Nell--who wrote of an Irish tern, "The great Cloud of Unknowing on the prowl"--was involved with the mystery and mysticism that the lyric poem offers. Little in her life seemed closed except these beautiful poems, collected in The Man Who Died en Route, published in 1989 by the University of Massachusetts Press (selected by Amy Clampitt) and in Thin Place, a chapbook of 15 sonnets published by Tinfish Press in 1999. Steve left behind two books published by Anoai Press in Honolulu, namely Waxing the Lunar Mountain Apple (1997) and Dancing the Waves and Other Poems (1998).

Steve was in the Marriott Hotel room in Washington, DC with Rob Wilson when I interviewed for a job at the University of Hawai`i-Mānoa in 1989. He was the one who picked me up at the airport when I arrived on August 1, 1990 to assume my position as assistant professor. I later came to think of that long ride to faculty housing as a tour of Hawai`i's "dark side." Steve himself had a dark side, sometimes awkwardly combined with his wit, and so--when I mentioned that my parents had bought me Amelia Earhardt luggage (of all things! didn't they know what happened to her over the Pacific!) for my trip, he took me to the lookout at Diamond Head where her plane had been spotted, soon before she disappeared in the South Pacific. His wit is evident in the inscription in Dancing the Waves, where he writes "For Susan -- Another who dances the waves / (in her own peculiar fashion) / Best wishes, / Steve Curry." For a year or two, early on, he'd taken a small group of us junior faculty nearly every weekend to Makapu`u to boogie board. Those were hardly learners' waves, but Makapu`u was Steve's favorite spot on the island, even though he'd lost most of his teeth to someone's surfboard there. It remains mine, too, though I've not been in the water there since the ocean nearly swallowed me in the late 90s. His darkness can be found in "Sometimes":

When sometime, despite the fine insulation
Of these walls, I can hear myself in the other room;

When sometimes I can no longer lie,
And then find there's nothing left to say;

And when sometimes my own masks
Leave even me unconvinced;

Sometimes I try to climb out of now
And sleep, like the rock-horse child
Urgently rides in a dream to serious places.


But as one who loves rain and the painful
Beauty of the many-colored earth, I
Long to awaken, although sometimes it
Takes days to fight my way back through slumber. (Waxing, 86)

The pathos of the first three sections gives way to an awkwardly written final four lines. Awkward perhaps because they represent such difficulty, that of knowing that he is asleep to himself, but wanting--and likely not wanting--to awaken from that place.

In "Fool, Said My Muse," Nell (who knew her Sidney) writes a passionate sequence of sonnets to an adulterous lover, one that attacks him and also the masculine tradition of the sonnet ("William," she calls out Wordsworth, "old nut, what do you know of fret? / or convent rooms, or, for that matter, nuns?"). But her own version of the "hard lie" comes in sonnet 5, where she turns her attack on herself for not seeing the disconnect between her and her lover:

And you, my dear friend, sitting on the fence
of a dilapidated marriage, write
to me of the transparencies of peace. Fight-
ing the hard lie, fighting the ten-year wrench
of word from deed, calling your wife pigwench,
mouth upside down, you say we must not bite
each time we kiss. Love is a sheer (not recondite)
vocabulary, you say. Priests, poets kiss peace. Hence,

Nell, this kiss of war, opaque, not see-through,
mucked, will strike the night out with its bitter wish
that rather the man would grab his sword than shoes
and fuck appearances. God, do we just appear?
What is apparent and transparent? This:
the guileless, flimsy, obvious, and clear.  (TMWDeR, 27)

This ugly war between lovers becomes a gorgeous poem, one that gestures past the human drama, the sexual war, to the larger question: "God, do we just appear?" The "obvious, and clear" of a dying relationship is also its inverse property, a way of seeing through the world as "obvious, and clear."

Poetry was Nell's refuge. The sonnet sequence continues its passionate, turbulent way, until the pause in sonnet 8, which signals poetry's utter significance to this poet. Late in her career, she taught a course on formalist poetry and had her students perform their sestinas, their villanelles, their sonnets. She was completely wedded to form: "Mad, I'm not. Some-

times. Not now. The sestet is serene.
Beyond the troubling two-rhyme, the frame settles
into the composition of three plums.
Cities of refuge, possible as rain,
appear above the traffic. Language is
the House of Being, the sane say. And the poem comes. (30)

The sequence ends after loss. The poet picks up her daughter's homework from the table and is suddenly thrown into grief over her lover, now gone. She describes his body as "resolute as ironwood, limber" and then ushers in the pathetic fallacy of storm. But this is not any storm, it's a storm whose locus is Hawai`i:

The trades are out of line over the entire
island tonight. Koa trunks and fallen jacaranda
uproot the volcanic earth between. An edgy
weather muddies the ground from the remembered
to the real. And the squall-lined wind of desire
blows out of its six-inch pot the Tree of Knowledge. (32)

Her shifts between the remembered and the real, the actual and emotional weather are swift, and they bite (as the apple off that Tree was bitten). Only her keen sense of form, her devotion to working the poem into form, salves her inner squalls, for a time.

If this is loss, then anger at violent death threatens to upend the poem; in her clearest rage, Nell approaches Hart Crane's high octane verbal agility. Her poem, "This Day in Paradise," is about the murder of a young girl, Maile Gilbert, in 1985; the girl was kidnapped, taken to a remote location on O`ahu, and killed viciously. You can find some details of this murder here. Nell begins, again, from Biblical symbology: "The snake is cool and green, purled with desire," then finds its location in the West Virginia of her childhood. Her use of detail is nearly desperate, holding off memories of an encounter with a "tramp" in the woods, one whose "nails [are] on my shoulder." She goes home, punished (in the woods, at home, or both, I'm not sure), and curses the God of her youth. And then she turns her attention to the dead child: this attention is at once loving and keenly aware of the violence wrought by man on girl:

O holy and minute particulars,
this opening, wet earth, lochia, located,
placenta, placed, I say, our world, not shat,
its blue, uncut umbilical of stars!--
twisting and twisting out of the northeasterly
air over the deltas, over the lowered savannas,
over the slow, sidewinding slough of the surf
at Mokole'ia where his young and white and strapping
fingers bind her throat, filled with his semen,
yelling for her father yelling for her father,
seeing in the southern sky, child-wide and
yelling for her father, that half-cocked crux,
one star yanked up and sucking blackness as far away
as the hand of salvation from her forehead.

This poem is about rape, about murder, and about the failure of religion (Father) and family (father) to save an innocent girl. It is also (dare I say) an amazing piece of writing. There are lines where nearly every word is separated by a comma from the next, spat forth by this surrogate mother-poet. And there is the repetition of "yelling . . . yelling . . . yelling . . . " until the poem itself begins to scream, the poet-child helpless against the forces of the patriarchy she disdains and fears.


Both Nell and Steve were Euro-American poets who moved to Hawai`i as adults; they were part of an unmarked diaspora that ended in their being marked as white poets. Nell said to me once in a car driving through Kāne`ohe, where she lived at the time, as I do now, that she had never felt welcomed by other poets in Hawai`i. One of our local students was startled to hear Nell repeat that sentiment in the middle of an honors thesis conversation. I'm not sure Nell would have felt at home anywhere, but Hawai`i was her particular challenge. Steve seemed more of the place; he spent his weekends boogie boarding and body surfing, other days flying kites in the park. He married a local woman after his first marriage fell apart. But, in "Sufi Anger in the Late 20th Century," his own sense of dislocation cuts through:

Sometimes it's just too difficult living in a place
where the trees do not have the decency to shed
their leaves and where the birds nest in every season.

So why, especially on a warm night with a batik moon,
full and streaked with cloud, when even the insects are still,
and the ocean at rest laps languidly at every shore,

Why is this night, of all nights, the night you choose
to call me, like a nightmare, offering me a hole to fall into?
Oh, my Soul, or is it fearing your silence, I've called you? (DTW, 45)

Nature is echo chamber, as the headnote from Rumi tells us, "I've been knocking from the inside," writes the poet who came before telephones. But it was also, for Steve, a place so beautiful as to be indescribable: "There is no way to describe the crystalline water / On a sunlit Makapu`u morning" (25), which comes after a poem of directions on how to body surf the Makapu`u shorebreak. From the earlier book: "It's a perfect day at Makapu`u." That book has a photograph of Makapu`u on the cover. Many of Steve's poems tell more than they ought, show less. But he moves inevitably from the real shore break at Makapu`u to a sensation of transcending the moments he so often finds painful. There's Rumi, there's tai chi, and there's the ocean. The ocean at Makapu`u seems to win every time.

I remember Nell's description of Diamond Head / Leahi as resembling a dreadnaught. Her reference to the "cities of refuge" in her "Fool" poem was also about the Pu`uhonua, or Hawaiian place of refuge. Ever the keen eye and ear. But her real work was about sudden widowhood, love affairs, God, and--in later poems--about Ireland'; as I noted, she didn't seem to find this sense of place in Hawai`i, either as poet or as person. Her poems were more about relationships than about places, even if those relationships took "place." Most of all, her poems speak of and to loss. The West Virginia of her childhood was never Wordsworthian. And she brought that trauma to Hawai`i with her, wrote it out in her poems. If, as one of our visiting writers put it, "you write and write and write about pain and then wake up the next morning and it's still there," Nell tried to write it out. That she didn't write much over a long career speaks to the pain of confronting trauma, as well as to the difficulty of writing.

One of the best times I ever had in a classroom was when Nell came in the early 90s to a grad class I was teaching and improvised a reading of Susan Howe's Singularities with me and the students. It was then I realized she was one of the best readers of poetry I had ever encountered (and I audited a class with Harold Bloom in college). She was passionate about poetry, about her students, she was passionate as a friend and passionate as an adversary. She could be utterly exhausting. We all loved her for it, even if and when we pulled away. Steve also loved poetry. He didn't come out of Nell's Renaissance and British Romantic tradition so much as that of Gary Snyder and the Beats. He'd often stop in the hall to ask me what the status of his Tinfish subscription was (when we still published a journal). I never knew, but always said I'd look it up. From what I've heard from his former students, including Father Robert Phelps, a retired priest who was also my student, Steve was a great teacher before his illnesses (and there were many) got in the way.

Finally, some thoughts on having colleagues. My department, which had over 80 full-time faculty members when I arrived in 1990, now has fewer than 40, with more retirements coming soon. My department, which was nearly all-white when I arrived, is not all-white now. That took battles that cost many of us friends. My department, which was mostly male when I arrived, is not now. That also took battles that began before I arrived. Nell and Steve played ambivalent roles in these battles; sometimes I agreed with them, often I did not. God knows over the years I've burned some bridges and had them burned in front of me. But what seems clear in losing Nell and Steve and Bob McHenry is that the high drama of departmental battles, no matter how necessary they are when they happen, needs later to be let go. There's something more final than a bad department meeting. Perhaps these deaths will offer an opening to us. In the elegy, after all, loss becomes gain, even if it's just poem. But a poem can also be a life.


Books:

Altizer, Nell. The Man Who Died en Route. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

--. Thin Place. Kāne'ohe: Tinfish Press, 1999.

Curry, Steven. Dancing the Waves and Other Poems. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 1998.

--. Waxing the Lunar Mountain Apple. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 1997.

Norman Hindley (1944-2014) RIP

Several short weeks ago, Joe Tsujimoto put a late poem by Norman Hindley on his facebook page. The word "late" rang hard, as it was--at least to me--also a death announcement. I had not seen him since the late 90s, around the time of my marriage, but hold to some vivid memories of him.

Here are two:

The early 90s, when slam poetry was just inventing itself, and the local scene was just imagining what it might be. At the Lizard Loft on Kapahulu I went to a competitive reading of page poems, as it would later seem, and witnessed a face-off between Joe and Norman, who both taught at Punahou. Joe read a poem including drunkenness, and Norman an episode of domestic terror where the speaker was hunted down by his wife and shut in a freezer locker. Punahou may mostly be for rich kids, but there's some rawness in the faculty.

Then my friend Diana S., who also taught at Punahou, became Norman's partner for a time. It was her birthday and so Bryant and I (as yet unmarried) went to their townhouse for a party. I was sitting minding my own business when I heard the clarion call of Hindley: "SCHULTZY!!! You MUST try my noodle dish." Like a meek friend who wanted only to please, I began to eat the dish until I started to feel flush, asthmatic, ill. Staring down my boyfriend, I realized I had eaten peanuts (turned out it was Thai noodle with peanut butter, to which I am--literally--deathly allergic). Bryant caught the horrible glare from me and we left. We ended up in the ER that night. "I DIDN'T MEAN TO KILL YOU, SCHULTZY," was the later response. 

It seemed at the time that Norman's best poetry was behind him. He had published Winter Eel through Frank Stewart's Petronium Press in 1984. The cover design is by Steve Shrader, whose posthumous work Tinfish published last year. (The image of barbed wire across an ocean vista is appropriate to Hindley's work, as to Shrader's, however different their poetics.) It was perhaps the high water mark of Euro-American poetry on O`ahu, the 1970s and early 1980s. I wasn't to arrive here until 1990, so I can't know for sure. But I edited and published a book of Euro-American poetry from Hawai`i last year because it's considered outsider work; I regret not asking Norman for poems. His poems are not "Tinfish poems," but they are very very good. Apparently there are some four volumes of Norman's poetry yet to be published. Joe said that there was a pile of manuscripts at Norman's house that went up to his waist. The poems that comprise his first book, the one I have on my desk as I write, are few but stern. Solid, sharp objects, like the knives that appear in them, there do not need to be many to reflect the poet's anger, his reticence, and his stark rhetoric.

The poems in Winter Eel are violent and loving in equal measure. What is loved is earth's details, curt words slotted into measured, chiseled lines. Many of the poems are about a family romance gone desperately wrong: a violent father who could not be pleased; a wandering mother who "snapped one day"; a son locked in Oedipal desire (there's a poem about him looking at her looking at herself in the mirror); sexual abuse at the hands of an uncle and of a man of the cloth. As childhood violence abates, another kind of violence erupts. This is the violence of the hunt for muskrat, for fish, for sharks, and an aborted hunt for men who stole from him. A woman is murdered by a stranger and cut into tiny parts. The book itself seems to teeter on that moment when the poet nearly murdered the men who violated him. It is also, as so many poet's first books are, a book about writing, about art, about the way in which art only partially comes to redeem a life. Let me dip into the book, write through some of these poems. (I'm doing some of this after reading the comments sent to an earlier version of the post; so many people knew Norman, yet not perhaps his poems.)

I turn to "You Pour into the Audi like Mud," from the 1984 collection. This poem, like the others in this slim volume, is in free verse, each line commencing with a capital letter, an odd schism between formal verse and informal reportage. Like other poems in this style--why am I thinking James Wright?--the poem tells a straightforward story, though there's a catch at the end. The language is simple, as are the lines, though their simplicity packs a punch. The story is of a man who films his own mother's funeral in ways that are disturbing to the speaker, whose anger against the subject accumulates with the poem's line. Consider the tight, angry language:

The Ford that's been riding my ass

then:

And your body went riding into the furnace
For burning
And your tendons tightened like strapping
Making you bend a bit at the waist
As if to rise

As it turns out, the man who filmed his dead mother in near pornographic terms and who has himself died was the poet's uncle. We don't find that out until the end, but we already know that the uncle showed the strange film to anyone who would watch--boys, including the poet--which raises the specter of other kinds of violence, other intimate intrusions.

The uncle is burned, and his urn put "as close to your mother / As allowed." "Dignified."

But what I'll tell you uncle
That left to me
You'd of been thrown down a hole
In a can
No flowers, no mother
No black Fairlane to ride.

I'm not sure where the Audi of the title comes in, as the poem is all black Fairlane, a word that stands in stark contrast to the unfair boundary-less presence of the uncle. But the poem is strong.

Starker yet is "Sinner," addressed to a "Reverend" who abused boys in South America, and then abused the poet as an 11-year old child. "His hand-picked boy." For three years. The poet writing the poem is now 36, and feels himself hardened by the abuse:

It's for the shot of ice you left in me
Which I can and do turn on others,
For the deadlands in my heart 
That are windy
Empty as any March.

March may be a poetic month (consider Stevens's and Bishop's poems, just for starters, about that early spring month), but it's crueler than cruel April in this poem. The brash machismo of the poetic surfaces--language hard, unemotional--comes to unveil (as through dense rust) hurt as powerful as the anger that attempts to defeat it.

The betrayals of these poems--son by mother, mother by father, boy by priest--are alchemized later in a poem about sharks, "Sharks in Shapes of 8." In this poem, the poet fills a gallon bottle with bull's blood and goes out onto the reef with a gun. He will attract a shark, kill the shark, then watch the other sharks attack. It's a gruesome act, told in beautiful language:

Converging currents carried the blood in carnations,
It shawled through the coral like dinner bells,
Some would tongue outward,
And I'd stand with the Winchester and wait
For the white tips, the hammerheads, the occasional tiger
To swim in from their blue vaults,
To cruise the reef,
Picturing wounds, fresh meat.

Then, like an abuser of substance or person or other being, the poet announces, "I've quit." Not because he puts himself in danger out on the reef, blooming in the bought blood, but because, "I was ashamed of deceiving, killing / These long swimmers, these survivors / Of ice, of cataclysm." A final stanza to this poem stands in excess, relates his desire to join the sharks, whom he watches on a camping trip. There's a generalization to that last stanza that doesn't bite as hard as what came before. We already recognized that love in his abnegation. He has not given up on violence, but his violence will now be direct, honest. He will not cheat.

There are also poems about poetry, art. The third poem in the book is "Painting by Numbers." The poem tells the first person story of someone who paints by numbers, "stayed inside the borders, / Faithful to paint, the commandment of numbers." He loses that organization, begins to lose control of his paints, gets closer to memory than to schooled artistry. He is taken back to a Massachusetts winter when a young woman plays Mozart on the piano (this takes us outside image, leads us into the porches of the ear):

But there are no numbers for Mozart.
The canvas hangs like ice, violet,
It is the amethyst of winter.
Or the still life with pears.

When first I became obsessed with Wallace Stevens, dog-earing A Palm at the End of the Mind even before its pages turned brown with age and tropical air, there were two poems I most loved. The first was "Mozart, 1935," and the second was "A Study of Two Pears."  Hindley's poem weaves on, taking in people enjoying a good meal, a man in Oakland who feeds a toad he never sees, a self-portrait that is nothing but spilled quicksilver, then ends on a note of hidden greyness, not bright paint. Like Stevens, Hindley pares (sic) away summer foliage and ends up with a mind of winter, free of metaphor, free to be, "that wintry sound"

As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

Another of Hindley's poems about art is "Keyboard," about a young pianist whose mother pushes her, causes her to hate the instrument, "like shit in bed." The girl turns to visual art, frequenting the Boston Museum when she was supposed to be rehearsing. She is poor, knows the poet (and nurses him back from sickness) because they lived "in opposite rat holes." She paints with Dutch Boy until she runs out, then works with any material at hand. She cannot stop making things. As the poem ends, we learn that her mother is still alive--"she's 200 or so"--and trots out the early recital program.  She "doesn't know that you've been an instrument / For 50 years, a violin of lines and form, / She doesn't give a goddamn that you will go on always, / Covering canvas after canvas with exquisite women / Alone in powerful, warm rooms."

American poetry, like American culture, so often sets art up against the practical world. "I've got a fight going," a student said to me just yesterday, "between my passions and more practical matters." Less frequently do poets set one art form up against another as a way to explore family conflict, artistic ambivalence. But the woman who becomes the art instrument her mother does not recognize is, in its own way, just as powerful a conceit for the situation of art. Forced to choose between sound and image, this woman ends up destitute in a cold studio, unloved by her sole family member. The poet, who chooses both, knows the anguish of losing one to the other. There's an allegory here that cannot be neatly unpacked; this makes the poem more powerful than it would have been had he chosen one or the other vehicle. But it's about making choices and suffering through the redemption they offer us.

If I needed to categorize Hindley's poetry, I'd put it in the box on which is scrawled "post-Romanticism." Emerson lives in these poems, but he's lost his arms and legs. Thoreau is stationed at an outpost in Hindley's mind, but he's steeped in violence, not peaceful resistance. Dickinson is present, a solitary maker in a cold room with an unsympathetic family, but her transcendent language has been put down for boards and planks and fishing poles and Winchesters. There is desire for heroism, but recognition that heroism isn't what it used to be. In "Water Born," written for his brother, Hindley recounts a near death experience diving in sea, when he thought his brother was drowning. At the last minute, Norman releases himself into the current (becomes an instrument of it) and his brother, too, emerges alive, his catch intact. "We headed back, / Renewed, heroic, or as close as we'd ever get." So much in that or (rhymes with "oar"). Renewal is not heroism, though it is survival. These are the poems of a survivor who knows a kind of heroism that cannot be bruited about. It must remain stoic, because it covers over so many silences: abuse, violence, anti-social desire. The poems, in their honesty, give us access to heroism, even as we recoil from the gunshots.

While most of the poems are set in the New England of the poet's difficult youth, there are Hawai`i poems, poems about fishing, about the natural (if not friendly) world. Hindley lived for many decades on Moloka'i and O'ahu, came slowly--as do many Euro-American poets--to write about it. I hope that that there are many more set here in the poems that remain in manuscript . For one of my purposes in writing this is to acknowledge the contribution of this outsider/insider poet to Hawai`i's literature. A tense departmental meeting in the spring featured a colleague's guffaw at the mention of "white poets in Hawai`i," a laugh I will not long forget. (The laugher was white, which is perhaps not a surprise. My anger is not at the speaker but at the symptom.) In response, I can hear a kind of dark laughter from Norman Hindley, who would have understood the deep ambivalences of his position in this vexed tradition.

___________________________


Diana sent me a link to a reading Norman gave at Punahou a few years ago. I had forgotten his strong New England accent (he was originally from Pawtucket, RI). And, while the poems remind me more of Wright and Bly perhaps, the accent brings into play the inheritance from Frost, for whom the outside world--whether farming or, in Norman's case, hunting and fishing--was an inevitable allegory for the cruelties of the human heart. Here is the YouTube video from 2008. "A Note for Amy" is worth listening to for the taut "t" sounds alone. Beauty's spit / ting image.

Let me copy the poem I mentioned at the outset, the one posted by Joe Tsujimoto on facebook, and lineate it as best I can, using facebook's lineation and my own guess work. I have Chris Hindley's permission to do so.


hill Mary
a song of heaven


behind the orchard
a pathway winds
enchanted as a wand
rising in graceful increments
toward the balm of proclaimed lands


fields 
of vigorous grass effect
a well-abounding yellow-green
they preen and ripple
on a threadbare breeze
an inland sea of radiant hay


abiding orphic
to the native ear
its compass points 
implied by titanic trees
their august leaves
stupendous green


registered on these are
destinations dates e.t.a.'s
of ships of men of rank and names
stark delphic inklings of solar
winds that scorch the seas auroral
vaults in arctic freeze
scribed by prescient sailors
onto trunks limbs stumps
and skins on concentric rings
of transcendent trees


From "hill Mary" on, this poem brings Hindley's keen eye for the world together with a spiritual impulse that seems absent from the 1984 book. "Hill Mary" may not be hailed, but perhaps offers some grace to the aging poet. He still recognizes the orphic, violated, fragments in his own voice, but ends with "transcendent trees" and no punctuation, rather than with an empty March, and a period. From March to Mary, from blood in the water to "a well-abounding yellow-green" is quite a voyage. I look forward to seeing more of how he got there.

Meditation: On Belonging

It starts in my head with a joke: "To be is to do" (Aristotle?); "To do is to be" (Nietzsche); "Shoo be do be do" (Frank Sinatra). It morphs to: To be is to long; to long is to be; to be is to long to belong.

Nowhere is belonging so longed for and being so suspect as in Hawai`i.

I was driving near Pearl City once, where I invariably get lost. I pulled into a church parking lot to look for someone to ask directions from. Opening the church door, I found a congregation of Pacific Islanders speaking a language I did not recognize, and realized this was a community I did not know. How often that kind of experience has repeated itself over the years, that sense of moving in and out of communities you might not see ever again. If one were to slice O`ahu like an onion, or like brain cells, you would see layers and layers of communities. Then you might see the Venn diagram that links them. Or you might not. It turns out that the move from layer to Venn diagram, from discrete communities to mixed ones, is a choice. And it's not always the choice you might suspect. Members of mixed families might choose to define themselves as parts of one layer; members of more mono-tone families might choose to see the diagram, the space (empty or not) that emerges between layers. Of course, when is "choice" really ever chosen in a place as fraught as this one?

Much of this negotiation of belonging has to do with names. Before you meet me, my last name marks me as Euro-American; before you meet me, my first name indicates I was almost certainly born in the 1950s or 1960s. After 1966, or thereabouts, the name "Susan" died out. There are complexities here, too, because our children bear first names from their places of origin, but our last names. You would not know that they are Asian-Americans if you only saw their last names, Webster Schultz. Their middle names link them to my father and to my husband's mother; like my name, they are old-fashioned Euro-American names. But their full names assert their entry into a mixed community created by adoption, migration, and, yes, love.

In her first documentary piece of writing, my honors student, whose family fled Vietnam in the 1970s, offers us her grandmother's Vietnamese name, but not the names of her other relatives. We have a hard time pronouncing grandmother's name, but she's patient with us. She tells us that the family experienced hardships, but not what they were. Name a hardship, I ask her. Her mother did not speak English well as a child, and was put in special education, says her daughter. And what is your mother's name? I ask. "Karen," she responds. My student's name is likewise "American." I ask if there is not a story in the move from a Vietnamese to an American name, and she nods.

Another local Vietnamese student in the class has a Vietnamese name. He does not communicate well with his family, he says. His father is a fisherman who leaves home for weeks, comes back only for short respites. He asks his father about the family's history by starting, "this is for a school project." The history is one of dislocation and work, further dislocation and more work. It's a hard story. I notice that the son, my student, also works hard, that what distinguishes him more in the honors class is his public school in a tough part of town, not his name.

Many of my students are the children of immigrants, others are native Hawaiian, sometimes with their own family history of migration out and back; the linguistic history of my English 100 class last semester was fascinating. At home, students heard Tagalog, Ilocano, Chinese, Vietnamese, Pidgin, Japanese, English with an English or a Canadian accent, Spanish. Hardly anyone had grown up in a family that spoke only English, even if that was their sole language. There were two Hawaiian students who spoke only English. One had fallen in love with Korean soap operas and wanted to study Korean. The other had been discouraged from learning Pidgin by her family, which had lived for a long time on the continent, and then moved back. Neither Hawaiian student spoke Hawaiian. Most of the students had some notion of judgment imbedded in them: either they hated the fact that they hadn't learned the other family language, or they hated that language. The choice of language seemed moral; students berated themselves rather than open up to the possibility that they had made choices as small children that they could not be held to account for.  Their narratives were narratives of choice--"at four years old I chose English"--not of larger historical or cultural or family issues.

That gets me to typos. Those of us who edit work in Hawai`i try very hard to avoid typos, not simply because they are mistakes, but because these mistakes contain meanings that are overdetermined. To get diacritical marks wrong in Hawaiian is considered an insult, though some Hawaiian writers (Sage Uilani Takehiro comes to mind) choose not to use diacriticals because there's more poetic ambiguity to be mined without them. Getting things wrong is what the missionaries did. They transcribed the Hawaiian language using letters whose sounds did not occur in Hawaiian. And much worse. So there's a history to orthography here that is incredibly complex--for Hawaiian especially. For the Hawaiian students in my English 100 class to speak only English reflected back on this history (though I've also had students from immersion schools who speak Hawaiian as well as they speak English).

The new Hawai`i Review came out this week. The design is beautiful. Many of the poems are deeply anti-colonial. (More on the content another time, perhaps.) There is also a typo. The poetry editor's name is No`u Revilla. Her full first name is No'ukahau'oli, but on the masthead of the new issue the name was spelled Noʻukahouʻoli. This changed the meaning from "the pleasure is mine" to "the joyous sweat is mine" (not so big a difference, if you read No`u's joyous sexually charged poems). The editor's reaction was one of despair: she declared that the typo made her "want to die." (The editor is not Hawaiian; she is also not Euro-American.) She writes: "I am a guest/outsider/settler in an illegally overthrown, occupied nation, and I have just participated in the callous misspelling of the name of a kanaka maoli friend whom I am fortunate enough to work alongside."

She is not alone in using this language; it's been in circulation for nearly two decades now. Candace Fujikane, whose book Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life helped to institutionalize the term named in the title, has said: "You can’t talk about alliances between local non-Hawaiians and Hawaiians. If you’re not Hawaiian, you’re a settler and part of the colonial problem. You have to look at in what ways Asians in Hawaii have engaged in practices that obstruct Hawaiians’ struggle for justice." (2009) Fujikane and her co-editor, Jonathan Okamura, are also not the original authors of this idea. I do not know that she is, but Haunani-Kay Trask was the strongest voice in asserting the non-belonging of Asians, as well as Euro-Americans, in Hawai`i. On the first page of the Fujikane/Okamura book, Trask is quoted as writing, "Hawai`i is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been murdered, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands" (2). The history is very bad, as Barrett Watten would say, but for the editor of a literary magazine to feel herself charged with a perpetuation of "murder" after noticing a typo is surely not a solution. It feels like another act of violence.

So the editor is hardly the first person to describe herself as "guest," as "outsider," as "settler"; she is hardly the first to do so with self-lacerating tones. She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to make an outright assertion that she does not belong here. That she is perpetuating a historical wound by way of the typo. I wonder why the self-laceration: she works hard, she publishes work from Hawai`i, she participates in communities on the island. She is a lovely, caring person. I want to hug her.

But I also want to suggest that these self-lacerating terms, these terms that mark people as outsiders no matter how long they live here, that these terms are paradoxically intended to mark those who use them as belonging. (I would like to thank my friend, Vera Lee, for helping me with this during a conversation some months back.) This is a difficult paradox to explain (to myself, let alone to anyone else). But to say one does not belong is to establish a stable identity position based on blood. To be "guest/settler/outsider" is to be somewhere, here but not of here. It's not to float, it is to be, and to be certain. To be [choose your term] is to belong in however difficult a way. But it also tells those of us who do not use the words "outsider" and "settler" to describe ourselves that we are that. It pre-judges our choices. It suggests that my students who are trying to deal with family stories of flight (including students from Vietnam, Cambodia) immigration, changes of language, that these students do not belong here either. That they inhabit that space of "not-belonging" that is not liberating, but which hurts, lacerates.

More difficult, perhaps, to let those titles go, to be here without longing to belong, without the judgment. It's appropriate that there are "slashes" between those words, for they are judgment words. To say: I am here, I do no intentional harm, I do good work. My life a gerund, not a noun. To put the emphasis on process rather than on static position. To think long and hard about these issues, and then to let oneself long--to let oneself be--that is my hope.

JACK LONDON IS DEAD launch now available at PennSound

For a recording of the launch of Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some stories), go to PennSound, here.

This anthology is an important intervention in Hawai`i's literary politics, and offers a fine selection of poetry, as well as statements by the writers on what it means to be a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i in the 21st century.

To buy the book, go to our website, here.

You can also buy this book along with three others published during this past year. See our website for details of the sale.

"But it matters": Mark Edmundson and the extremely bad state of contemporary American poetry

The year was 1991. I was teaching "20th Century Poetry in English" to a lively group of students at the University of Hawai`i. The day I'd chosen to have them read poetry by Frank O'Hara from the anthology, I knew there'd be a lot of laughter in class. We began our discussion. No one laughed. In fact, there was no response at all. My students' eyes looked blank. Knowing something was desperately wrong, but not sure what it might be, I read O'Hara's lines out loud, using the ironic tone of voice that's appropriate to his work. The classroom was quiet, deadly quiet.

What I learned from that day is this: Frank O'Hara is a local poet. He lived in New York City; he wrote about New York City; and his tone is New York City. This is not to say that he's not a wonderful poet. I still teach his work, though these days I ask students to use it toward their own experiences. Make his local your local, I advise them. Poetry is a goad to experience, not simply a set of marks on a page. Last semester several groups of my students did videos of Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," set here. To teach O'Hara in my classrooms is to engage in an act of translation, where I explicate not only the words on the page, but the culture of the east coast, where I grew up.

I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Mark Edmundson directed my dissertation on the poetry of Hart Crane. The dissertation was worth abandoning, but the fault was all mine. I've followed his career as a public intellectual with some interest, if not utter devotion. I've read his books about poetry, used his critical work on the fight between poetry and philosophy in at least one of my graduate classes. So I was intrigued when I started seeing strong responses to his new article in Harper's, "Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse." I begged a copy of the piece, outside the pay wall. Edmundson's essay reads like something out of my recent trip east. I remember these arguments, these disappointments, these poets' names, but they feel strange, as if translated from another language, another time. After nearly 23 years in Hawai`i, I read the piece as an outsider, one for whom critiques of this American poetry (and its cousins) mean very little. I can't muster up the anger expressed by many of my facebook friends, because the poetry about which Edmundson writes is not the poetry I read (or: even if I read it, I don't read it the way he reads it). Edmundson, it seems, is a local critic. His location is east coast, Ivy League-trained, New Yorker-reading, and he as much as admits that in his essay. But it's hard to find this caveat amid his strong rhetoric, namely the shoulds and the musts and the references to ambition and to a communal "we" that still reaches for some sublime space beyond us.

How does Edmundson define poetry? "It is, to speak very generally," he writes, "a moment of illumination. One might call it . . . a spot of time." Its vision needs to be comprehensive. What does Edmundson want in such poetry? By way of lines by Robert Lowell, he admires "artistry," "subtlety," "melancholy grace," "rhymes," and he wants the "ambition" of "a graying weary seer  . . . pronouncing judgment."  He wants poets who are inclusive, who use the pronouns "us" and "our" (though if they're like Lowell, they don't always consider whom they include in these inclusivities). He wants poets who speak not only an "internal language," but also make public arguments. He wants poets who hunger after "the universal." He wants poet who "have something to say." 

Edmundson argues for ambition in contemporary poetry, an ambition that might bring together lyric poetry and public intervention, a poetry that argues for something. But his own essay sounds more ambitious than it is. If, like Frost, he believes in poetry that uses a net, Edmundson's tennis court is one populated by award-winning mainstream poets, the ones published in the New Yorker, Ashbery post-tennis court oath (though he slams a few lines from that book, too) and almost exclusively white and male. Ask him for a tradition he approves of and, no matter how often he uses the pronoun "she," you get this: "Blake and Wordsworth and Whitman, and also . . . Auden . . . Eliot. It [this completeness and expanse that he yearns for] came in Frost, Pound, Williams, Hart Crane, and . . . in Stevens. One expected it of Lowell and Ginsberg." These tennis players wear white, which is not to say that they were not wonderful poets, but that their ability to write in the vatic mode was in many ways determined by that fact. This is not to agree with Edmundson's (sometimes accurate) notion of cultural studies as a purity-inducing machine, which more than cautions against crossing boundaries of race, class, gender. But it is to say that such views of the world come from somewhere other than the academy, however the academy chooses to present them. That Frost and Williams were also intensely local poets argues against their inclusion in this group, but Edmundson is into canon-confirming by name.

It's very tempting to shoot back a list of names, as some of my facebook friends have done. One sputters with names of amazing poets not on this list, nor even on the list of Edmundson's contemporary failures (Hass, Muldoon, Ashbery, Olds, Rich, et al). But part of the problem with that argument is that it too closely resembles Edmundson's own: it's about names, about individuals, and not about the real state of contemporary poetry. Poetry is more than the individual lyric voice or the individual vatic call to "us" and "we," which Edmundson repeats over and again, without questioning the demographics of the "we." (It's not my students, or likely yours.) Poetry is a way of looking at the world, one that involves particular lenses, those created within and across traditions. Sometimes it's not verse, but a frame, a vision. It is a way of reading literary history that includes political, economic, and cultural histories, and not just those of MFA programs, which he goes on to bash as career-establishing institutions only. Romantic poetry involved "spots of time," but contemporary poetry has other ambitions.

Some of these ways of seeing the world are as follows. I leave out (most) names deliberately, though if anyone wants names and titles I'd be happy to offer them up. Even better, I'm happy to recommend presses far away from FS&G. Most of these modes overlap:

--Language writing. Though it has not existed in its pure form since the 1980s, its influence has been vast. Based on a critique of advertising language and the language of governmental dishonesty, this mode retains a power to intervene in the way we think about the world. No, it does not offer the direct arguments Edmundson wishes to hear, but that is part of the point. Direct arguments are too often canned, too easily composed because they are already floating in the virtual air like templates, or Hallmark cards.

--Documentary writing/poetry, which takes as its foundation the prosaic news of the world and offers arguments about it, arguments that are not about God or transcendence but about politics and grieving. The poetry of witness is part of this. So much to witness: war, crimes against humanity, Alzheimer's.

--Long poems, those that navigate philosophical and material vocabularies. An astonishing number of contemporary poets are working in this mode, and successfully.

--Ethnic poetries. Choose one. African American. Native American. Asian American. Latino. And yes, Euro-American.

--Post-colonial poetries, or anti-colonial. These poetries often overlap with postmodern poetry, not for reasons of belief but because colonialism shatters cultures and languages. See a different version of Eliot from Edmundson's. See Brathwaite, who found inspiration in Eliot.

--Feminist poetry. Not just Adrienne Rich, either.

--Gay poetry. Edmundson devotes some space to Ginsberg, without ever mentioning that one of Ginsberg's real ambitions was to break poetry out of its sexual closet.

--Conceptual writing and flarf.  I'm not a huge fan of these modes, but they're out there, and conceptually (at least) they work against the mainstream. Even when their ambition is/was to be unambitious, that was part of the intervention in the larger culture. Flarf began as a mom-and-pop response to Target. That it now sometimes seems more like Target than like the local superette (if it indeed survived) is part of the problem of late capitalist culture.

--Ecopoetry. Ahsahta Press has an enormous new anthology, and that's just the tip of the iceberg (what's left of it).

--Poetry of spirit. Not spirit disengaged from world, but deeply implicated in it.

--Yes, even slam poetry, outside the essay's punning title. Not always my cup of tea, but most of its practitioners are engaged with external realities, not simply internal meanderings. They, too, are interested in "voice," but in a public/private voice.

But even if Edmundson hasn't read these modes of poetry, he has read John Ashbery. Back in the late 1980s, he told me (after I asked him to write about JA's work for my Tribe of John) that Ashbery lacked the kind of clarity he valued. Fair enough. But that is not an argument. In this essay, Edmundson leaves it at this slap to the face: "From the point of view of the reader who hopes occasionally for prophecy, Ashbery's work is a perpetual hedging." Along with the word "hedge," Edmundson offers "evasion." He lumps all of Ashbery's work together, as indeed he does Heaney's and other poets with long careers. If the best lack all conviction, then Edmundson puts Ashbery in this category; otherwise, he finds only disappointment there, in the pages of the New Yorker.

I've not read Ashbery's new volume with the care I mean to read it. But there is ample evidence that Ashbery is not simply hedging his bets. If Stevens wrote about the "climate" as a mode of thinking, then Ashbery engages the actual climate.  In "Recent History," he opens with "Desperate asks, how driven batty / by climate change." In "Laughing Creek": "We were in Samoa. The sea will wash over us. He came like the Johnstown flood." If Ashbery follows these lines with "It was worth waiting around for," that is not to say he believes it; typical Ashbery undermining (the deconstructive urge Edmundson alludes to) expresses more anxiety than glee. He is undermining his own poetic practice, finding the precise lack that Edmundson finds, but with more lyrical subtlety. "We're very into whatever it is we're doing. / I say. // But it matters." What else matters is the economy, and Ashbery's got more hedgefund than hedge invested in such material. In "This Economy," he writes an elegy to the U.S. (or is it "us"?):

Somewhere in America adoring legions blush

in the sunset, crimson madder, and madder still.

Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out

how to pay for this, bouncing a ball

off a wooden strut. Somewhere 

in America the lonely enchanged eye each other

on a bus. It goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue.

Somewhere in America it says you must die, you know too much.

This is the America that also fills Ashbery's poems with terms like "anti-personnel" or "Marine" in the sense not only of the ocean, but also of "Action figures [that] take us just so far, to the edge / of the abyss. The fucking man swears by rifles." There is "Time enough for the purple brine of consequences," for "bugle and castanets." And it's "bungled." Woodrow Wilson was an idealist; he invented the League of Nations. He failed, and Ashbery knows it. Knows too much.

A more direct poet is Seamus Heaney, but Edmundson also takes him on for his evasions. (There are not enough American poets for Edmundson, so he takes on an "adopted" one, which makes this reader wonder where Derek Walcott might be, or Kamau Brathwaite.) The lines of Heaney's taken to task are these:

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape

of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,

it shakes the frail rigging

of her ribs.

Edmundson claims that this verse is about "voice" only, that it lacks the ambition that comes with content. He claims that it does not have an argument. "Here and often elsewhere, Heaney can't find a difference he won't split," Edmundson writes. But it does have an argument that anyone who's lived in a colonial or postcolonial space understands. That Heaney sympathizes both with those who would punish the woman (for sleeping with the enemy) and with the woman herself (she is a human being, after all) surely makes sense. It makes the sense of ambivalence, which is also an argument, one that points to the knot created by colonial situations. It speaks against pure ideology (aka argument, in Edmundson's words), and as such, is an important call to wait, to consider consequences, to empathize. The sublime contains no empathy (as I found myself in trouble in the ocean once, I realized it would not stop for me), but "our" poetry "must" include that impulse too, no?

Odd, then, that Edmundson finds fault with theory, with the "war of philosophy against poetry" that has interested him for decades now. For Edmundson is himself theorizing a mode of poetry that hardly exists for readers like me and my students. While much of it may be worth reading, this poetry usually feels beside the point. Ironically, this is what Edmundson argues.  There's no good poetry post 9/11 he argues. But that's because he's not been reading anything except the prize-winners.  A strong argument often leaves out a great deal. But Edmundson makes the mistake of not including the counter-argument that is writ all around him, and not in water. He wants a poetry like that of Robert Lowell, whose "we" included us all: "Now, using Lowell's 'our' and Whitman's 'we' can register as a transgression against taste and morals." I happen to agree with the sentiment, without abiding by the content of Edmundson's sentence. The "we" that might be spoken is a terribly complicated thing, and operates largely outside of the otherwise wonderful tradition from Blake to Whitman to the Ginsberg who is all bard, and not a minority poet (Jewish homosexual). Had Edmundson simply admitted that he was writing about one tradition, not many, the essay would have been more persuasive, if less ambitious sounding. But Edmundson's voice demands ambition, and that's what sinks his simplified argument. 

I've occasionally wondered what my intellectual life would have been like had I stayed on the east coast, had I been a good enough student to get a plum job (so-called), to have published in the organs of good poetry. I can't imagine that it would have been so interesting a life as that of a diasporic academic living in Hawai`i and reading work whose "we" explicitly excludes her own. I can't imagine that it would have been so good as to be in a place where a student (again, long ago) read Ron Silliman's "The Chinese Notebook," and rewrote it as "The Chinese-Italian Notebook," because those were his ethnicities. I can't imagine it would have been as rewarding to start a small press whose utopian goal was to create communities out of writers who did not yet know of one another's work or existence. With the narrowing of my sense of who "we" are has come a paradoxical expansion. Empirical, but without the empire. These new thresholds and new anatomies are available to the readers of Harper's, but only if they wander off I-95 and into the side roads. Sometimes the road not taken does not resemble the one that got took.

Thanks to everyone who sent pdf of the article or promised one. You can read the Harper's piece here for free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________


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

Forthcoming books from Tinfish Press

 Tinfish Press will be rolling out our new website soon.  Many thanks to those who are making it happen: Jeff Sanner, Luanna Pescador, John Zuern, and Vera Lee.

Here are two books you will find on that new site (as well as the one that is still running at tinfishpress.com):

TO PURCHASE THESE BOOKS, GO TO http://tinfishpress.com, FIND A PURCHASE BUTTON, THEN GO TO THE END OF A LONG LIST.  Our new website will make this all a lot easier.


Coming soonest:

last edited [insert time here], by Ya Wen Ho

Ya Wen Ho's poetry sits on the (pointed, unsturdy) edge of the spoken and the digitized word. In last edited [insert time here], she presents performance texts based on google searches, drawing out accidents that occur when words crack and blend together. In his work on Shakespeare, Garrett Stewart termed this process “lexical bucklings and permutations.” Hence, for Ho, “18 is XVII- / '(aye)_-da' translated into English means 'to take a / sound / beating_two eggs and a wife together,” or “anger / 'issues'_rhymes with 'tissues,' which can either refer to / a class of soft, absorbent, disposable papers or / an ensemble_of jazz musicians played at his mother's / funeral_home directors earn on average...” This short book is a romp through contemporary life, mining the spot where virtual and actual cannot be wrenched apart, except between the syllables of quickly streaming words.

ISBNs: 978-0-9824203-9-3; 0-9824203-9-0

43 pages, $13

Sample:

from “today I will stop procrastinating and clear my desk”:

desk_top pot plants thrive in her new corner

office_politics destroys many a work

ethic_ally I find the planting of trees with fermentable fruit in public places objectionable for the sake of alcohol-poisoned

birds_of a feather flock

together_together

to gather_one ounce of rose essential oil requires

60,000 fresh

roses_are red, violets are blue, sugar is 1sweet and so are

You_tube is a hugely popular video-sharing platform. Other notable examples include Dailymotion, Flickr, Photobucket, Vimeo and

more_than 15,000 works are held within the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o

Tama_gotchi is a virtual digital pet.

Poet bio:

Ya-Wen Ho graduated from her BA/BFA(Hons) at the University of Auckland in 2012 and  works as a writer, editor and independent publisher of chapbooks and zines. She has previously been published in The Deformed, Bravado,JAAM and Poetry New Zealand.

Blurb

Ya-wen Ho's last edited [insert time here] sits in a complex place, and how fortunate for us that this poet negotiates these intricacies with smooth turns between playful, intelligent, and funny. Ya-Wen Ho's poetry stream of conscious word play rushes us through everything from pop culture to population control in China to PhDs driving taxis asking us to try and not "detonate the sleeping dog" and have a fabulous time while (not) doing it.

Lyz Soto, author of Eulogies, Co-Executive Director of Youth Speaks Hawaiʻi, and Co-Founder of Pacific Tongues

Coming in the new year:

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JACK LONDON IS DEAD: CONTEMPORARY EURO-AMERICAN POETRY OF HAWAI`I
(AND SOME STORIES)
Susan M. Schultz, Editor
Tinfish Press

ISBN: 978-0-9824203-7-9
0-9824203-7-4
Copyright 2013
$20

 Many white (or, as this anthology calls them, Euro-American) poets have made Hawai`i home, either permanently or for a significant portion of their lives. But in a place marked by communities of writers marked as Local or Asian or Indigenous, there is no such community of Euro-American writers. Euro-American poetry seems to exist at two poles, either as the writing still to be resisted by non-white writers, or as work that comes from somewhere else, and is thus not relevant to Hawai`i’s literature.  This anthology features seventeen writers of poetry (and some prose), as well as their statements about being a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i. It looks at what happens after Euro-American literature has been de-centered, de-canonized.  Jack London is Dead presents writers whose work has been deeply influenced by Hawai`i, and whose poetry adds valuable voices to a complicated mix of ethnic cultures. Featured in this volume are the more experimental of the myriad Euro-American voices among Hawai`i’s many exciting writers.



Contributors: Scott Abels, Diana Aehegma, Margo Berdeshevsky, Jim Chapson, M. Thomas Gammarino, Shantel Grace, Jaimie Gusman, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Anne Kennedy, Tyler McMahon, Evan Nagle, Janna Plant, Susan M. Schultz, Eric Paul Shaffer, Julia Wieting, Rob Wilson, Meg Withers.

Blurbs:
 To contested questions of agency and authenticity in contemporary Hawai`i, this collection makes an important contribution. By clearing a public space for White authors to think (and write) through issues of a positionality compromised by the ruptures of historical violence and present day colonialism, editor Susan M. Schultz has done a brave thing. There are those who will object to this project by challenging the right of non-Indigenous “others” to write about Hawai`i. However, the sensitivity of featured authors to the complex instability of their own standing as White writers in Hawai`i offers a nuanced, layered response to that call of challenge. Without closing our eyes to history, without denying any legacy of oppression or cooptation, and as citizens of the 21^st century with so much at stake for a shared planet, it seems to me that this conversation may be one of the most important and difficult, yes, but necessary ones before us.

--Caroline Sinavaiana, author of Alchemies of Distance; Side Effects, A Pilgrimage; and co-author of Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations.

The volume exemplifies ways in which ethnicity and ethnic identities are indeed fluid and historically contingent. Through this “experiment,” we see a poignant example of how the positionality of ethnic identities tends to shift quite quickly when one factors in the political, social and cultural circumstances in which such identities are formed and experienced in the contexts of power, discrimination, and belonging.

--Elisa Joy White, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, author of Modernity, Freedom and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris

This anthology sets itself the ambitious task of convening a group of white (Euro-American) writers for the purposes of a poetic conversation, both with Euro-American and Hawaiian literary traditions and cultural histories. In convening this assortment of writers – which it hesitates to label a community - its project is not so much to map a genealogy of whiteness as to open out new perspectives on white writers who may find themselves inhabiting positions as both majority and minority practitioners, who may index white hegemony while simultaneously being marked by a lack of legitimacy. The writers represented in this book defy easy categorisation in spite of the apparent self-evidence of the subtitle.

--Anne Brewster, Associate Professor, School of English, Media and Performing Arts at University of New South Wales

While many of the writers are stylistically “experimental,” aiming to convey new experiences of being, the Introduction and Author Statements provide inviting roadmaps that actively include readers—a poignant reversal of the theme of racial and cultural exclusion often expressed here. Jack London is Dead is essential reading for anyone interested in discovering the best of contemporary writing. How we mythologize ourselves and others, the difficulties of expressing our identities in language, the relationship between humans and nature, the sense of being and not-being part of where we are, the complexities of aesthetic heritage—these are abiding themes of art addressed by the exhilaratingly varied writers in this anthology. This volume feels both rooted in a place and rooted in its creators. This collection will be a classic.

--Lauri Ramey, author of Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry, Director of the

Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, California State University, Los Angeles

Both books were designed by Allison Hanabusa.