_The Value of Hawai`i_(Part Two), & other synchronicities

Just a few jottings, as we are preparing to host Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand & their daughter, Jessi, for a few days . . . yesterday, my English 100A class finished discussing Jill Yamasawa's documentary book of poems about McKinley High School, Aftermath. The book is notable for the way it links McKinley's military tradition to the school's current militarization (recruiters just off campus, needing to fill the maw of the Iraq/Afghanistan war machine), as well as the way it shows us the confusing and complicated lives of its students. It contains a photograph of Daniel K. Inouye, famous graduate of McKinley, and such a war hero that the Washington Post recently referred to him as more important the Hawai`i's history than Kamehameha, whose armies united the islands. I notice the article has changed title from "King of Hawai`i" to "Hawai`i's Reigning Son."

I went nearly straight from class to the second installment of the English department-sponsored teach-in's about The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, co-edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio. I blogged about the introductory segment here. This panel, composed of Kathy Ferguson, Davianna McGregor, and Ramsay Taum, focused on militarism, tourism, and sustainability in rural communities on the neighbor islands. And so Daniel K. Inouye re-entered the conversation. Oddly, having just told my class that Sen. Daniel Inouye, not Sen. Daniel Akaka, gets the bumpersticker "Dan," I heard Ferguson say the same thing. He's that important here.

Kathy Ferguson (who co-authored an essay with Phyllis Turnbull) talked about what will happen when he is no longer Senator Inouye, when his considerable power to bring us military pork, is gone. The military will leave Hawai`i eventually, was her point, and we need to prepare for that time. Evidence of the military's increasing disinterest in Hawai`i is the move of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, where Ferguson claims there is less organized resistance to the military presence. (Ask Craig Santos Perez about that.) Ferguson referred often to a book she had written on the military, asserting, with some irony, that it is "sacred ground." As Taum later pointed out, that was a pun. The military operates on Hawaiian sacred ground, even as it makes itself inaccessible to researchers like Ferguson, or to journalists. While tourism has its own UHM department and attracts the attention of many scholars and writers, the military controls its own information, as well as a great deal of land on these islands.

Davianna Pomaka`i McGregor talked about communities built upon subsistence farming, fishing and hunting: places on Moloka`i, rural Maui, and Lana`i that are overlooked by the state's powerful politicians on O`ahu. Among the projects she sees endangering the cultural kipuka she talked about is a wind turbine farm on Lana`i, which would be composed of 200 towers, each on the equivalent of a 40-storey building. These would block access to sea and mountain, among their other aesthetic problems. The power would, of course, all be sent to feed O`ahu's hungry maw.

Then it was Ramsay Remigius Mahealani Taum's turn. If everyone in Hawai`i carries their paradoxes on their sleeves, then his are long and especially fascinating. He graduated from Kamehameha, where he was a member of ROTC. He was admitted to West Point and the Air Force academy, opting for the latter. (Kamehameha was himself a military man, Taum noted.) He is also involved in the tourist industry. From there things get more interesting. What he does is to work with big companies coming in to do projects--companies like Disney. He confronts them with the need to talk to local communities (not just native Hawaiians, but Hawaiians who live in the area where the project is being developed). Even as he is well aware that they will eventually leave, he tells them they have a responsibility to the place once their debt is cleared or their profit is made. So he spoke as someone quite militant about the need to support Hawaiian culture, but he spoke in acronyms and puns (kaona!) that made him sound like a military man delivering a power point. The combination was, at first confusing, and then started to make sense in the way so many such joining of opposites begin to come into focus.

Later in the day, in the infamous Kuykendall 410 conference room, Adam Aitken read from his poetry. I tried to give a sense of Australian poetry--where it is, how it got there--but fear I mostly just talked a lot about Frank O'Hara, about whom Australians seem obsessively interested. Adam's own poems are conversational, place-oriented, like O'Hara's, often witty, but engage a very different field--his inheritance as the son of a white Australian father and a Thai mother, his travels in Malaysia and Cambodia, his clear fascination with languages and film. Once his guard was down a bit, Adam's wit came through. "I wrote a poem for the King of Thailand," he announced at one point, as if it were the usual thing. And then there were the difficulties of translating one poem into Malay, where there is only one word for insect. How to translate a line that distinguishes between an insect and a "bug"? "This was not an insect; it was an insect."


Ah, language. Buy Adam's latest book here.

Better yet, seek him out. (He's on facebook.) The out of Australia book prices are very high, but I know he has some with him.

Editing as collage: Tinfish 19 in the making

Given the right manuscript (complete) and the right designer, Tinfish can publish a book promptly; such was the case with Paul Naylor's new Jammed Transmission. I could say more about the way in which the design's strengths bring out those of that text, but for now would like to think about putting together our annual journal issue. We're up to 19 issues, not including the half-issue that turned into a book, namely 18.5. While we never announce theme issues, #18 turned into a long poem issue, and so was relatively easy to put together. Non-themed issues that develop themes; non-coordinated art and poetry that coordinate; poets who don't know each other locked (sometimes happily) in conversations they would not otherwise have--these, along with the recycled materials used to create our covers, are what I think of as signatures of Tinfish's journal. Accident and randomness cohering into a "still yet moving" anthology (to wrench Hart Crane's bridge utterly out of context), that is what we do. Cohering and yet not necessarily coherent, suggesting and yet not insisting, these are our trajectories.

There are many ways to organize accidental anthologies of poems; some editors place poems in alphabetical order, by poets' last names. This is an arbitrary and in many ways unsatisfying means of conveyance, although it does allow poems to stand on their own, not infect one another with the editor's machinations. I will confess that Tinfish's agenda is very much on my mind as I put together sequences of poems by poets as different as Emelihter Kihleng and Daniel Tiffany, Kenny Tanemura and Mandy Luo. As my assistant editor for this issue, Jade Sunouchi, remarked, this issue is "weird"--so are many of them. Part of this weirdness comes out of the difficulty in finding conversations between poets. Take Kihleng, whose Tinfish 19 poem is a Haunani-Kay Trask-like anti-tourist screed, and Tiffany, whose selections from a longer piece use Middle English lyrics to generate songs in our vernacular. Sit with these poems a while and you realize they do talk to each other. Here is the end of the Tiffany excerpt from our next issue:

I am for wowing al forwake
Lest any reve me my make
Eyes shining through
Like she was
Who-whooin somebody
Leave us all alone

which is to be followed by Kihleng's Don't come to my island, which includes these lines:

and if I, a native of this island, still haven't convinced you
really, you don't want to come
it's so hot and humid
simply miserable it is

In his note, Tiffany tells the reader that the Middle English passages come from a volume that attacked the use of the vernacular; he is appropriating its quotations toward a more positive purpose, the creation of a poem many centuries later that celebrates the vernacular--its and ours. Kihleng also celebrates the vernacular in her attack on "the Mexican woman from Texas" (an unexpected imperial tourist):

the island is surrounded by mangrove swamp
or naniak, we call it
naniak full of elimoang
mehn wai who come to visit
are fond of eating these giant mangrove crabs
(but the crabs alone shouldn't make one want to travel all that distance)
they don't taste that good

Kihleng distances herself from the tourist even as she sarcastically agrees with her that things just aren't that tasty or beautiful on the island. But to anyone with an ear for local language, she is also celebrating its powers to name, to claim, to distinguish between speaker and listener, if that listener is not listening or cannot understand the words.

The poem that will follow Kihleng's, Jill Yamasawa's The Kona Coast, invokes a different kind of conversation, one between a Micronesian writer and a writer from the Big Island. In this poem, Yamasawa takes material off a Kona resort's website and lineates it as "free verse." With a deft use of italics, not found in the original (or so I'm presuming, as I have some trouble "navigating" it), Yamasawa casts doubt on the seeming reverence of the resort's PR:

Hokuli`a reflects the same reverence
to the Island of Hawai`i's historical
and cultural legacy,
clearly embracing the native saying,
Nui ke aloha no ka`aina
(Our love for the land
is without limits).

The italics here are not used to mark the Hawaiian saying (as words from a "foreign" language); they are used as scare quotes to mark precisely the lack of clarity in the relationship between resort and the `aina, or land.

In this sequence of three poems from the many in our forthcoming issue, I've tried to do several things at once. I've tried to create contexts out of juxtapositions that suggest the opposite of context. Middle English lyrics and Kihleng's angry anti-tourist words hardly form what we might call a "natural" context. Yet I would argue that there is context, that even as Tiffany's words (through their sound and their hidden context, in a history that is lost to most of us) mitigate the roughness of Kihleng's, they participate in a move into the vernacular, away from the standard American English that characterizes most of the work in the issue. The move from Kihleng to Yamasawa is more direct, and yet their methods are different. Yamasawa damns the resort simply by parroting its PR; Kihleng turns tourist rhetoric on its head by seeming to agree with the tourist that her island is nothing to pay a steep airfare to visit.

I make such sequences knowing full well that I have added my voice into the mix, a voice that is different in many ways from those of the authors whose work I am organizing, putting in sequence, asking to talk. What I hope is that our readers realize that they too have the power to play with the poems, either by leaving each be on its own, or by reading them in a different order (or dis-). I am reminded of the Cortazar novel whose title I can't remember that included a key in the back to all the many different ways you could read the book, switching chapters around. [Editor's note: must have been this one.] This was before the age of the computer, when such playfulness comes without saying. Yet Tinfish is resolutely a paper production, so it's harder to rearrange our intentions (or even our lacks thereof, since we thrive on accidents). The editor's job is to quote, but to quote out of one context and into another. It's one reason I love the job more than I ever imagined I would. Editing is "writing" in the way that collage is. And collage is a form of appropriation that is always aware of itself as such, ever attempting to undercut (sometimes with scissors!) its own authority.

Other conversations we discovered as we leafed through "accepted" poems: Kenny Tanemura's "On Mao's Indigestion" with Mandy Luo's "The Silk Road" (h/t to Jade on that one); Yamasawa and Gajelonia on Wallace Stevens, Gajelonia and Oishi on TheBus; Janna Plant, Barbara Jane Reyes, Jody Arthur and others on oral traditions and mythologies from the Bible to Samoa; Oscar Bermeo and Deborah Woodard on landlords; Paul Naylor on place and parenthood; Michael McPherson in a good-bye (he died this past year).

The verbal material of the issue has not yet been successfully transferred to a designer (though I did fail miserably at the file transfers last evening). Chae Ho Lee will do the graphic design. Maya Portner is making the covers, and another artist will be doing a centerfold. The final issue will have both centrifugal and coherent force to it; centrifugal because ideas and images will be flying outward unpredictably, coherent because we do not want to escape the force of our limitations. We are not the resort, claiming its own lack of limits by quoting from a Hawaiian saying (and thereby attempting control over its words). And so there is a lack of ambition in all this, as well. We do not aim to cover a territory (bad metaphor, that!) but to open up the torqued and untorqued spaces of the poems we publish. That said, these journal issues involve the most labor of any of our publications. The covers (500 0f them) are hand-made and then stapled onto the books. Many hands are involved, from mine and Jade's to Gaye Chan's, a graphic designer, an artist (or two or three). When I get complaints that our issues cost good money, I think of all these unpaid hands, to say nothing of the costs of distribution, mailing, advertising, and so on.

Celebrate Reading: TINFISH 18.5 meets junior high school!

[Top: Tiare Picard, Ryan Oishi, Kai Gaspar, Jill Yamasawa
Bottom: Enthusiasts from Kalakaua Intermediate School in Kalihi; click on photo to see more students]

Today, April 17, was the large Celebrate Reading festival at UHM, organized by Lorna Hershinow, local literary activist--readings at the Art Auditorium and HIG, as well as break out sessions in Kuykendall, where the English department resides. Ryan Oishi read his "Walmart: A Love Poem" at one of the two opening sessions, and then he and I and Tiare Picard and Jill Yamanasawa and Kai Gaspar met a raucous group of students for a 50 minute session of readings and Q&A. We quickly found out that a large group of the students had taken the bus from Kalihi (they are Kalakaua Intermediate School students) to earn extra credit from their teacher (praise be to him or her). Another couple of students had taken TheBus from the North Shore. This speaks volumes about wonderful teachers inspiring their kids in the public schools. After Kai and Ryan and Jill and Tiare had read from their poems in 18.5, the questions began. One girl from the Kalihi group was especially eager to ask questions, and her questions were themselves a form of poetry, clearly marvelous, but also like koans, hard to comprehend. After she had asked a mysterious question about the imagination and poetry, she followed up by asking: "does the imagination interfere with your past?" After much back and forth, I asked for a final comment and one boy raised his hand and said, "poetry is AWESOME."

After lunch, Ryan, Jill, Tiare, and I had a workshop session. Jill offered an exercise based on the phrase "I am," which included naming yourself based on the objects in your house, historical events, food, and a couple of other items. Tiare chose to give them a word game. Find a word, any word, and play with it, see what happens. Ryan had little time, but proposed an exercise that caused one sentence to grow and ramify with words and phrases added to the end and the beginning. "Love is a mango" erupted into a marvelous compound thing!

Here is my riff off of Tiare's exercise. My word was "torture."

I torture syllables--
I screw down their toe nails until they bleed
I pour water into their mouths until they drown
I sic dogs on them
I smear syllables with fecal matter
I take off my clothes for the shy ones, put them on for the brazen
I keep them awake, play them loud music, interrupt them with guards
I make syllables stand until they cannot, put them in tiny boxes
and introduce insects to them
I pry open their tiny hearts and replace them with handcuffs
My syllables will say anything.

And so I return to the subject of poetry & politics & the way language has been degraded by such as Bybee and Yoo, Cheney, Addington, and Bush.

But let me end by saying how lovely it was to see all these young people listening to poetry, and then writing it themselves!

Jill Yamasawa's _Aftermath_

Jill Yamasawa's Aftermath (Kahuaomanoa Press, forthcoming 2009)

In preparing to teach a course in poetry & politics this Spring (beginning in a week!), I've been reading books about public uses of poetry (Joan Shelley Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America) and about the suppression of leftist poetry (John Lowney's History, Memory, and the Literary Left and Cary Nelson's revolutionary memory). Rubin's book explains the significance not only of historical memory but also the early 20th century practice of memorizing and performing verse in school. This reading helps me better understand my father's many recitations of “Snowbound” as well as my mother's obsession with “Invictus." According to Rubin, poetry played a crucial role in creating a public vocabulary with which to bind friendships and discuss ethical issues. But it's Lowney who helps me get where I want to go in my thoughts on Jill Yamasawa's forthcoming book, Aftermath, which is the biography of a place, McKinley High School, in Honolulu. Like so many places in Hawai`i, McKinley High School is only the most recent building, name, ideological construction for what have been other names, other uses, other cultural values. While Lowney notes that “the problem of memory is, of course, fundamental to modernity and constitutive of literary modernism” (4), poets in Hawai`i know this as a problem closer to home. At home. The problem of memory is inscribed in the names used to mark places in Hawai`i. To the winner go the names. What is now called Ford Island (at Pearl Harbor) was Moku `ume `ume, Chinaman's Hat was Mokoli`i, Diamond Head was Leahi, and so on. (In recent years, however, these names are often used in tandem, or as political and cultural choices.) McKinley High School was built in Kewalo. Yamasawa quotes the “Dictionary of Hawaiian Localities” from 1883:

A fishpond and surrounding land
on the plains below King Street,
and beyond Koula.

Kewalo contained a spring called “Drowning waters,” after a spring used by priests for human sacrifice. As we find out some pages later, Kakaako / Kewalo “was a place of recreation” where Kamehameha had a residence, “along with his family, and personal kahuna.” That the militarization of Hawai`i, the thirst of the military for young soldiers from local high schools, is linked to this is clear in Yamasawa's sequence, although the sacrifices have a very different meaning or provenance. And therein lies much of her tale. It is a story of empires (McKinley's and Bush's, by way of the Vietnam War), as much as a story of the young people who participate in it, either as its victims or perpetrators, often as both (children of immigrants from colonized places who become soldiers in the American army). It is a tale of institutions attempting to organize multiple pasts into one, and it is equally the tale of challenges to those institutions.

Yamasawa builds her project on an axis. On the synchronic line is the study of mathematics; Yamasawa's narrator, Shirley, is a math teacher at McKinley High School, where she works with special ed students. Math, as we know (even if we sometimes suspect otherwise) makes sense, provides an abstract logical view of the world. The other, diachronic, line represents history. This is where logic and sense threaten at every turn to collapse, whether because a student has no family to record on his family tree project, or because McKinley High School itself is a colonial implant on the `aina. While the sections of her book are titled with reassuring words like “slope,” “variables,” “equations,” and where even “inequalities” takes on a neutral cast, what falls into these categories is less easily organized. While Shirley can teach math, it is clear that most of what is to be learned (via Shirley) is about Hawai`i's social and economic inequalities, its fraught linguistic history, its various amnesias (including those of the present about the present). There are moments in the text where these axes come together violently, as in “A Long Walk of Thresholds”:

There's an Original Sin
that taints our country. The radicals wrote
men and women are created equal.

The historical radicals—before McKinley—set down an ideal line that could not bear the press of American history.

Words, too, exist on this axis. Take the name “Pele,” as one example. In her poem, “Madame Pele,” Yamasawa offers up the many meanings of the words “Madame” and “Pele,” including the Brazilian soccer player, Pele. In Hawai`i we know Pele as the volcano goddess, a spiritual life force. But the astounding turn in Yamasawa's poem comes here:

I mean the bomber so named before its presentation
to the Air Force by McKinley High School students after
a successful bond drive to cover the cost.

This would be during the Second World War, Pele's name appropriated by the military for a very different kind of firepower. Yamasawa draws attention to other words, as well, from “Homeland Security,” “Mission Accomplished,” and many others. She uses several forms of English, standard, non-standard (including Pidgin and the immigrants' accented English), as well as Hawaiian words that bring with them large cultural concepts. Yet one among the many ironies about McKinley High School was its status as a non-standard English school, meaning its students spoke Pidgin, not what some still refer to as "proper English." The split between standard and non-standard schools in Hawai`i lasted many decades. See Lisa Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue for a personal/political history of Pidgin.

Jill Yamasawa's documentary poetry reflects the poet/teacher's capacity to empathize with her students (if you know Jill, she's hard to separate from Shirley), caught up in domestic dramas that are also national in scope. Nowhere in the book are we permitted to forget the Iraq War or the military recruiters settled just off-campus. Empathy is an ethical act; the reader is not permitted ever to forget that the words she uses for place or politics are pre-selected for her. Yamasawa has performed the discipline of research, peeled back the layers of history and language, re-membered for us the meaning of the many sites that are McKinley High School, as well as the students shaped by it.

Yamasawa's book will be published later this Spring. In the meantime, sections are available in Tinfish 18.5: The Book.