Launch of _Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories)_

Fresh Cafe, Kakaako, February 18, 2013


After a brief introductory spiel by Tinfish Editor/me on why we've published an anthology of poetry by white authors, one I'm becoming all too accustomed to delivering, the poets (and one fiction) writer rose to read from their work. As Sonny Ganaden pointed out in Flux Magazine the other day, the poetry speaks for itself. The readers were Scott Abels, Margo Berdeshevsky, Tom Gammarino, Jaimie Gusman (who curates the MIA Series we participated in), Farris James (for her sister, Endi Bogue Hartigan), Evan Nagle, Janna Plant, Eric Paul Shaffer, and Julia Wieting. Some impressions follow:

Scott Abels read from his "New City" poems and from perhaps my favorite, "Dick Cheney Parade," which calls the former veep "A cheerleader / with no real heart." Of his new life in Waikiki, he writes, "In our starter home / impersonators // of Mark Twain / gain popularity." This is not so much memoir as cut-up, in the sense of cutting up, of humor. Abels's deadpan delivery is utterly appropriate to the poems. In a recent radio interview with Noe Tanigawa, Scott talked about how Hawai`i has made him think differently of sincerity; his poems do not always sound sincere in tone, but their content is. I'm not sure he read this section of his "Waikiki" series, but the lines about tourists are telling, "I thought your shirt / said Virginia / and it had a picture /of the island of O`ahu / but no / it's Virginia." I had never thought to check the map to see that Virginia does resemble O`ahu in shape, but I do remember my mother in her Alzheimer's confusing a Kailua Surf-Riders shirt for an Iowa one.

Margo Berdeshevsky flew to Hawai`i from Paris for the launch and a month-long visit to Maui, where she lived for 25 years and worked as a Poet in the Schools.  She began with "Pele's Dark Landing," a love poem about and, in many ways to, Pele, wrapped inside a poem about the speaker's own love. "There are gardens and there are not. / There is love and there is not. There are leaves and / there are not. But there is/was/ever . . . fire." She concluded by reading two paragraphs of her statement for the volume, about an incident of anti-haole racism, and then also about the "more equal" art of poetry.

M. Thomas Gammarino, aka Tom, read "The Culvert," a prose poetic piece set in a place where feeling has been outlawed (to me, it's a loose allegory of the Hawai`i the missionaries tried to make). Tom's work is characterized by wordplay that spins into plot, plot that devolves into play, but always an eye toward ideas, funny sincere ones. "Listen up. It was sometime in the twenty-teens when the town outlawed feeling. You could still do most things, but you weren't allowed to feel them anymore, expect in a muted way. Smelling other people's hair was strictly forbidden. They washed the town in Drano to burn out our olfactory sense, which came too close to the heart of things. The Artery leads away from the Heart." The piece ends with a possible revolution brewing inside the subversive culvert, but then all that's left is one character's memory and that's going too.

Jaimie Gusman lamented her place in the reading after Tom, but then began by reading a poem called "Ejaculation," so that ended that. In it, the Shekinah figure is resting in the mud and she is in prayer. She is creating a world for women out of the mud: "She spelled her name with the roots on the ground. And the earth screamed it for the women. The women began caressing the roots, their own shadows watching their bodies, then digging for their own plots." In which "plots" are many things, denoting life-lines, narratives, sex organs and, finally, death sites. Jaimie's new work, featured in the anthology, is a feminine epic that comes out of her recognition of her own cultural, literary Jewishness. Such are the pressures in Hawai`i, where people talk ethnicity and culture 24/7, that such work emerges from its relative newcomers.

Endi Bogue Hartigan's poem, "Devotion and Red Ginger," was read to us by her sister, Farris James.  In this poem human devotion to the red ginger that is not native results in its being cut: "The chorus / crescendoed / terrible beauty like / a machete clearing / all else, all else[.]"

Evan Nagle is perhaps Hawai`i's sole flarfist, a poetic movement I found myself professorizing about a bit for the benefit of Tom Gammarino, who should really know better! After some self-deprecation and self-disgust, which he termed Caucasian, Evan launched into, "HISTORY THINK SHE BIG," where the silliness of flarf devolves into some beautiful lines after we learn that the poet is driving down the H1 in a 2004 Honda Civic: "Self! / Ointment of all semblance! / I say I see me: / A bit of loose agency hovering / Over the serial procession of / Deceasements." There's something about that image of "loose agency hovering" that speaks volumes to me (though I could not remember the lines when I told Evan how much I liked them) about living here, the hover of it, so nearly Hopkinsian, though his Honda fills in for the older poets bird.

Janna Plant plays frequently with her name. Of course she's animal, not plant, but her poems are rooted in earth, in the cracks in sidewalks where plants emerge, in the keen observation of, for example, a dead horse by the river's edge: "Chestnut nostril widens, / minnows exploring new tunnels. // The drumming structure silenced, / broke-free from halter of heart. // Un-lace those bootstraps, / observe the text: / opening." Where the decaying flesh of horse finds its witness, the text opens up to a "[released] category." Like Nagle's hovering, the decaying horse is not one or the other thing, but a state of moving. Likewise, Janna's map poem, "The Course of the Blood in the West," is an autobiography/map/portrait of the body--not the mind, but the body--which leads me to think that what is unusual in Janna's work is the way she presents ideas, images, stories, as bodies, staying with her metaphor until it becomes utterly literal, earthy.

Eric Paul Shaffer read several poems, one of them a complicated piece about whales, how they are endangered, how the poet watches them with sympathy, how the poet knows that as a human being he would have killed them. "We are everywhere," he writes, of people, of those who kill such animals. What begins as a quiet contemplative poem about observing whales ends bitterly: "may we kill ourselves before we kill the last of them." Like W.S. Merwin writing about the way English took away Hawaiian even as Keats was writing his beautiful poems, Shaffer writes of how he would have been a killer of whales who "[wrote] poetry in the warm golden light of oil / rendered from their sacred, slaughtered flesh."



Julia Wieting caught us up when we were feeling poetry fatigue. She placed her closed book on the side table and recited "Getting found: A Pacific Prufrock," which opens "...And indeed, there will be time / to wonder and sit, to practice / a craft of appropriation." Wow. She takes the Master Sergeant of appropriation, Mr. Eliot, and re-appropriates him in the context of an island to which she has moved ("Shall I say, I have gone to this island, / escaped the Middle's wide, its far flung sky?")  Where Prufrock's poem is utterly personal ("shall I do this, shall I do that?"), Wieting's engages larger issues of identity. "Years after, we still do not ask, 'What are we?'" I'm fascinated by how many young poets have changed Eliot to their own purposes, from Ryan Oishi to Gizelle Gajelonia to Julia Wieting.  I never would have guessed, when I moved here, that Eliot would maintain such a presence in these islands, and that he would have been so generous in his post-colonial post-humous ruminations.


We were sorry to be missing the following writers: Diana Aehegma, Jim Chapson, Shantel Grace, Anne Kennedy, Tyler McMahon, Rob Wilson and Meg Withers. Keep your eyes out for their work, too.

[Members of the Caucasian Cat Circle at a pre-launch party. The Tinfish cat is Tortilla.]

On BlazeVox, and other publishing kerfuffles

Facebook has lit up like the 4th of July over BlazeVox's policy of asking authors for $250 toward publication of their books. The first wave involved a blog post (or 5) and some facebook comments accusing Geoffrey Gatza of running a literary scam; the second wave, of BlazeVox admirers and fellow small press publishers, has crashed dialectically on the first. The impression is of a lot of foam. But what lurks beneath the foam is important, very important.

There are a series of needs addressed by small press publishing; these needs often come in conflict. Authors want their work out, increasingly because their professional lives depend upon it. Publishers want the work out, too, but are faced with issues the author doesn't have to deal with, or even know about. How to edit the book, how to fund the book, how to get the book designed, how to distribute the book, how to market the book, how to create and maintain a webpage, how to pay for postage, how to find the time--or the help--to do all of these things--all of these are immediate, practical concerns for the publisher. Time and money.

There is also a terrific impasse at the point books get published. When I think of this problem I see in my mind's eye the AWP book fair (which takes money to get to and stay at), where hundreds upon hundreds of small press publishers sit behind tables under the klieg lights covered with their goods, and try to sell to . . . other small press publishers and writers with a vested interest (if they're lucky) with another press. At the same time, they come under the eye of writers looking for a publisher, eyes that wander quickly past if your press's mission statement does not meet their manuscript. This is not the little magazine scene of Modernism. This is a market-place where writers come because they need work. Poets need publications so that they can work as teachers. Hence a kind of frenzy around publishing. For the publisher, it's the problem not of late capitalism but of a very rudimentary form of it, one where making money is not an option (the guys in the booths sometimes do that), but where scraping by is the point. Well, scraping by and loving the fact of making things, two activities that find themselves at logger-heads.

When I started Tinfish Press in 1995, I had no idea. Over the years, I've poured thousands of my own dollars into the enterprise. That would have accomplished nearly nothing were it not for several titles that have kept us going because they sell. Let me name these titles: Sista Tongue, by Lisa Kanae; Living Pidgin, by Lee Tonouchi; Poeta en San Francisco, by Barbara Jane Reyes; from unincorporated territory, by Craig Santos Perez; Remember to Wave, by Kaia Sand. That's about it. These books have helped to pay for others, including the very worthy Erotics of Geography, by Hazel Smith, a book that seems to wear a heavy raincoat against purchase. So it's not only quality that sells a book; we've published as many good books that don't sell as good books that do. Enter market forces! The way to sell books is to publish at least some (which ones?) that will be taken up by teachers and professors; you need to create a captive audience for them. Selling books toward knowledge--but via coercion. That's the rub, I guess.

And yet students (and sometimes poets) are unaware of this mechanism. Students tell me that books cost too much (which elicits quite an accounting from me--take 40-60% off the top for distribution, add shipping costs from the mainland, etc.), and they probably do. Authors have, on occasion (usually when I screwed up) accused me of making money. I have taken not one cent from the enterprise, nor have I paid any royalties or paid any designers. When I pay people to work for us, I pay out of my pocket so that the books can keep coming.

Our current Retro Chapbook Series has been an effort, among other things, to step outside this series of market forces, to make it simple (again), to create a buzz without overhead. I've had more fun with this project than I've had in years with Tinfish. But the real need for authors is that book with a spine, the book with an aura around it, the book you might just might possibly get a job for having written. And those books, if a publisher is to make them, cost money. Yes, there is the DIY/POD model, and that's been important in bringing down costs. But that model does not open up the work to designers, who have been nearly as important to Tinfish's process as the authors. Not that spending $2,000-$3,000 dollars (plus nearly half that in shipping) is really a ton of money, compared to most consumables. It's just that with grant funding drying up, with people spending more on groceries and gas than on books . . . there are very few resources with which to make these books, especially if you don't have a good job.

Which brings me back to BlazeVox. Their catalogue is impressive. Whatever the problems with Gatza's model of funding his books or distributing them, he's gotten out a lot of books that would otherwise not be published, including a few I sent his way, including work by Goro Takano and Janna Plant. He publishes many books that simply will not sell. That is not to say they are not worth reading, however. That's another rub. Anyone who publishes books that don't sell is either a damn fool or a saint. Geoffrey may be a bit of both, but bless him for it. I'm glad to see just now that he will maintain his enterprise.

"Dissention is Patriotic": Fat Ulu's and Kumu Kahua's _The Statehood Project_

"Commemorating."
"Celebrating or mourning?"
"Expounding upon."

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"Paradox. Ambivalence. A dialogue looking from all angles."

--Janna Plant, "Dialogue Notes RE: Statehood 6Feb09 Land Use Commission Meeting"


To read responses to Hawai`i's recent 50th anniversary of statehood (August 21, 1959) is to encounter stark either-or positions. In Nancy Moss's The Statehood Project skit, "Debate," the student Kenji says, "Think what it will mean for business!" while Ah Quon responds, "More people to oppress. Stick out in the fields cutting sugar cane." While Moss's skit is set at McKinley High School in 1937, in some ways the debate has not changed an iota. Consider the Governor's press release about the 50th anniversary. "Key breakout workshops include: Hawai‘i’s Tourism Future; Military Partnerships – Part of Our ‘Ohana . . ." These first two items speak volumes as to why Hawai`i became a state in the first place, and to the precariousness of its current economy, based almost exclusively on tourism and the military. Another gem among the celebrations of this 50th year is this one: "July 23, 2009 – The state’s namesake submarine, the USS Hawaii (SSN 776), the first Virginia-class submarine to be home-ported in the Pacific, arrived in Hawai‘i." The official celebrations, then, are more about what comes in from the outside than for what the inside is, a rich group of cultures and conflicts, a "state" unto itself.

Then there's this, from a series of articles in the Honolulu Advertiser by Michael Tsai. The money quote comes in the second paragraph:

"Fifty years later, Hawaiian activists are calling for an end to the statehood era, not as a goal unto itself but as a necessary step in remediating a series of illegal acts through which, they say, the United States robbed Hawai'i of its rightful status as a sovereign nation."

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The "or" in Janna Plant's question (above) is crucial: "commemorating or mourning?" It's also what makes conversation on the subject of statehood so difficult, and the series of skits and monologues now at Kumu Kahua Theatre in downtown Honolulu so hard to pull off. Pull them off they have--Harry Wong and his troupe of seven actors and a participating stage manager.

While mourning is clearly foremost in the minds of the "spontaneous collaborators" of The Statehood Project (more on the project's origins here), contemporary hot button issues (Hawaiian sovereignty, Asian Settler Colonialism, tourism, the military presence, and on and on) are mostly presented satirically. There's a joy and a lightness to the presentation that does not cover over, but opens up, these issues to fruitful discussion. Or so it seems to this audience member. (My colleague Ruth Hsu, whose piece "`Ohana" is included, says a few people walked out of the theatre the first week; no one but an actor walked out last night, yelling as she went that she would cancel her subscription.) Much of the humor is physical--a young woman's unspoken anger comes to life as she pummels her Navy sailor date--and its physicality proposes an immediate release, or redirection, to the tensions built up in dialogue.

The "spontaneous collaboration" is necessarily uneven, poem ceding to skit ceding to monologue. What holds the pieces together is a series of performances of Wayne Westlake's poem, "Statehood" which goes:






The poem is performed several times, first by a single actor, later by all the actors. The poem is spoken and sung as lament, as cry, as fugue.

If the Westlake poem is the chord that resolves the piece, the project itself is quite diffuse. Ann Inoshita's skit on a young local Japanese girl who discovers Asian Settler Colonialism on her own and decides she needs to go back to Japan, ends when she finds a sympathetic ear in the psychiatrist her parents take her to. The shrink persuades her that she needs to speak standard English and ought to learn American history, if only to oppose it. Gavin McCall's "Detention," about kids picking up trash at school as punishment, also comes close to a breaking point when one character asks how mixed race people could go back to their "homelands": "Yeah, yeah, so what, spend half my time one place, the other half somewhere else? How that would work with half-Hawaiian people, then?" The irresolution of the piece comes when character #2 tells his friend (#1, who favors statehood) that "Maybe no can actually do anything. But bra, no try deny what happened, the go rip on Ms. Kanaka`ole for talking about it."

Other highlights of the production were Ryan Oishi's "Ballad of the Last Goat on Kaho`olawe," spoken by an actor wearing goat ears and occasionally braying a bit, surrounded as she is by her dead (bombed) peers; Sage Uilani Takehiro's potty-humored take down of ethnic stereotypes, "State Throne," in which actors are all pooping together on one small pot; and Jason K. Ellinwood's "The 1959 Joint-Ethnic Commission on Hawaiian Statehood," another take-down of stereotypes. Double take-down, actually, as actors assume non-blood roles. The skinny white woman actor becomes a large Samoan; another actor is sometimes Korean, sometimes Puerto Rican; another is Chinese and Filipino.

The writing is good throughout, though I found "Bringing Donna Home" tedious and badly placed at the end of the show. But what makes this production work is that Kumu Kahua's actors perform the roles assigned them so well. Yes, it's a play and so of necessity a performance. But what they get at with near perfect pitch is that Hawai`i is a place where people are assigned--or assign themselves--roles. The state is a performance, often a deadly serious one. No wonder so much art here is broadly performative, whether it's slam poetry or comedy or theater. It's no mistake that The Statehood Project works best when it is most satirical; it's through our (sometimes angry, always self-directed) laughter that we recognize our parts in the ambivalent, fraught, paradoxical dialogue.






For performance times, ticket prices, other details, see here.

Buy the book here.

"Dissention is patriotic" is a quote from Kimo Armitage's "Onelauena"

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Now available in a second edition, Lee Tonouchi's Living Pidgin from Tinfish Press.