Is _Jack London is Dead_ a Community of Writers?

                                          [Flyer for the HCC event]

I drove home from Honolulu Community College wondering why I'd expressed such ambivalence when Eric Paul Shaffer, who'd organized an event for his English 201 (Introduction to Creative Writing) class expressed surprise that he felt community with other writers in Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Writing of Hawai`i (and some stories). Do we feel the same? he asked. "It's terrible, isn't it?" I began, sputtering about how, since founding Tinfish in 1995 I had tried to foster conversations between members of categories that I otherwise don't much like, how I had "succumbed" to the ethnic anthology in making this book. How I loved having the conversation with the students, most of whom are not white. These are feelings I expressed in the book's introduction and in my statement, mixed feelings (making me think perhaps Tom Gammarino's fictional place where feeling is illegal might not be all bad). But, after two fine readings and an extended conversation with Eric's students and the other writers at these events (Tyler McMahon and the writers on the flyer, above), some rethinking is in order.  Or, if not rethinking exactly, then recalibration. For, how are we to have these conversations if we haven't yet had the conversations with writers whose experiences (educational, ethnic, diasporic) are like your own? The logic of the ethnic anthology is becoming clearer to me, even as I still instinctively resist it and the very book I edited. The book is its own best defense against its editor, I suspect.

Monday's event was at Hawai`i Pacific University, and was organized by Tyler McMahon. Today's was at HCC in Kalihi, a working class concrete campus whose back parking lot was used by the makers of Lost to represent Iraq, complete with bombed out cars and Eric Paul Shaffer's part-Mexican brother-in-law, as an Iraqi. Eric's poem on the event gets at the layers of meaning and fakery in that film shoot.  "Disbelief is no longer willingly surrendered, but eagerly / and widely applied to horrendous events that overcome us," he writes in "On the Set of Lost: Dillingham Boulevard, Honolulu." "It looks so real on TV. Desert dust swirls around / my brother-in-law, the U.S. mail-carrier, an Iraqi-for-a-day. There must be / some truth in appearances, and whatever it is / must be what makes Hollywood a shrine and paves a sidewalk with stars."

[The parking lot at HCC that was made to look like war-time Iraq, with Tom Gammarino on the left and Eric Paul Shaffer on the right]


We local readers from Jack London is Dead have settled into a rhythm of sorts: one of us introduces the anthology, explains why Jack London is dead, holds forth on how contemporary white writers are working within a context more diverse and complicated than any dreamed of by Jack.  (That I am beginning to pity Jack should inspire me to read his work, now that I've proclaimed his death as a literary figure in Hawai`i. Maybe.) Then we do the following in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order: Jaimie Gusman reads from her Shekinah poems, beginning with one called "Ejaculation," which is very much about a goddess creating the world from her own thighs (today I thought of it as being like the passage in "Song of Myself" where Whitman masturbates a world, except that in Jaimie's version it's a female deity); Evan Nagle reads flarf poems in utter deadpan, moving from the crazy to occasional lyrical passages that quickly flit away; Eric Paul Shaffer reads his "Lost" poem and also a poem about the `okina (we talked later today about punctuation as meaning); I read some memory cards, today making a link between adoption and my living in Hawai`i (a relationship of love, family, but not genealogical in the usual sense); Julia Wieting reads poems about animals that are actually about parts of speech; Tom Gammarino reads one of his two short stories in the book about Peter-or-whatever who lives in a place where feeling is illegal.  Poor Peter writes a poem, which is his downfall.  He must have snuck into the poetry anthology by writing a short story about a poem. I wish that Tyler had read from his short story on Monday, but he assured us he'd read at his campus just recently.

Eric's students had read the anthology because he gave them copies, so they quoted to us from some of our statements, knew what was at stake, and mostly--this was wonderful--had questions about being a writer.  When do you write?  How do you write? What do you write about? Some of the questions then led into the territory of whiteness, of living in a place where the central wound is colonialism, of thinking about how to write about Hawai`i in ways that might help to mend that wound. It was a good, a fruitful, conversation, for both what I had imagined for Tinfish when I founded it (conversations across cultures, experiences), and for what I had not (those conversations coming from a recognition that those of us who are white writers in Hawai`i have certain experiences that mold us as writers).

                                          [Eric's marvelous class]


I've heard from several readers ("readers are the most important people," said Eric's students, on cue) that the prose statements are the most compelling parts of the book. The more I hear the contributors read their poems, however, the more I believe that the poetry is what matters, even if readers need the context offered by the prose. "Why are you in the anthology?" Eric's students asked him, thinking he was not as "innovative" as other contributors. To which I would say that it's the diversity of forms and content that draws me back to the book, as well as I think I know it. I'd like to start thinking about ways in which poems are in conversation: Eric's poem about Lost with mine about an Iraq vet calling in airstrikes on Waikiki Beach (a story told me by Adam Aitken); Evan Nagle's flarf with Tom Gammarino's wickedly dark funny prose; Scott Abels's and Rob Wilson's poems about Waikiki; Jaimie Gusman's and Janna Plant's poems about the earth; Julia Wieting's and Endi Bogue Hartigan's poems ostensibly about animals and plants. Perhaps one day we can have a call and response reading, foregoing the alphabet and entering a more fluid ground of poems as conversation.

[Tyler McMahon at HPU, 3/18/13]
















                                   [The rest of the band at HCC, 3/20/13]

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.]

M.I.A. reading series & harvest time

[Jade Sunouchi, Tom Gammarino, Ken Quilantang]


Yesterday was the second reading in the M.I.A. series at the Mercury Bar in Chinatown, organized by Ph.D. student/poet Jaimie Gusman. I'll digress first, then move on to the heart of the matter. When I asked the bar owner if owning a bar was like small press work, he said, yes, in both cases you need to define your mission. His was to set up a bar under the aegis of Mercury (a mercurial place), where the music was not too loud, and there are no televisions. So, while the Chinatown alleyway in which it sits is none too inviting, the bar itself is. The first reading in November had featured readings by Ph.D. student, Ranjan Adiga, Jerrold Shiroma, a poet new to Honolulu, Joseph Cardinale, a Ph.D. fiction writer, whose novel is forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2, and myself. Oh, and then there was the performative homage to Michael Jackson by a former flight attendant and current student in fiber at UHM, who somehow managed to make the aftermath of 9/11 funny.
Last night featured work by Anjoli Roy, an M.A. student in fiction and non-, Ken Quilantang, M.A. fiction writer, Jade Sunouchi, M.A. poet, and Tom Gammarino, whose new book, Big in Japan is just out. The readings were punctuated by the work of an improv duo (In Your Face Improv, or IYFI) that worked off prompts like "sheep" and "run" in hysterical fashion. [Photo: INFI, with Chris Riel, foreground, who MC'ed the event]

Two things strike me as significant about this reading series. The first is that there is an audience for writing in Hawai`i that is not exclusively local or indigenous. You could call this "graduate student writing," if you wished. But there has always been writing in Hawai`i that cannot be classified in the usual ways--those that fit the magazines and/or the academies here. This series confirms that power of that kind of writing, even as it sometimes mixes it in with local writing (Ken Quilantang's writing is very much of this place, but benefits from being contextualized in this way). The second is that the range of writing going on in the graduate program is wide. Ken Quilantang's work is gritty, sometimes violent (last night's story contained passages about a young man beating his father with a baseball bat, for example), while Tom Gammarino is making more postmodern moves, using a character named "Brain" to pirouette brainily through concerns like love, religion, and cross cultural desire. Joseph Cardinale's story last month about a boy who falls from a tree and then speaks from the dead oddly complements Jade Sunouchi's novella in poetic prose that features a dream sequence in the underworld of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In that dream sequence, the protagonist, Aster, confronts the wrath of Malinche (who slept with Cortez) over the incursion of tourists to Mexico. Ranjan Adiga's story was about barely suppressed homosexual desire in contemporary Nepal; Anjoli Roy's non-fiction piece about a farflung relationship and the rats who interrupted it (literal rats). Jerrold Shiroma presented slides of his Shakespeare sonnet project, in which he takes the texts of sonnets and makes them, by "photoshopping them like hell" into stunning visuals. And mine on dementia seemed out of place in a bar, except that so many of my conversations these days are about demented parents (and grandparents) that all imagined boundaries of decorum appear artificial.

Good news, then, that Jaimie has gotten some funding for the series. It's a wonderful addition to Honolulu's literary scene.

________________________





Yesterday was also harvest day, the last day of my Literature & Creative Writing (273) and Form & Theory of Poetry (410) classes, the day final projects were due. Here is a photograph of my new collection of chapbooks. First the pile of chaps on my living room floor, then some details, taken by Allegra Wilson, who is hoping to reconstruct her book based on photos she took yesterday.

Chin Music Press & Issues in Creative Writing

[Tom Gammarino, Todd Shimoda, Linda Shimoda; photo by Steve Canham]

What better way not to watch a game of the World Series sans Cardinals than to attend a reading by writers (and an artist) of Chin Music Press? And so on Thursday, I went to hear Todd and Linda Shimoda talk about their literary/artistic collaboration, OH! a mystery of mono no aware, and M. Thomas Gammarino (we call him Tom because he's a Ph.D. grad student here) reading from his first novel Big in Japan: A Ghost Story. The works were high and tight, as befits the press that published them.

Both books are as involved with ideas as with plot-lines; their subtitles tell us that. Todd Shimoda's book is the third of a "loose" trilogy: the first features woodblocks and robotics, the second calligraphy and neuroscience, and this third, poetry and social networking. OH! offers up Zack Hara, "emotional eunuch" tech writer in L.A. who goes to Japan, teaches English, gets caught up in an on-line suicide pact, and becomes a vehicle for notions of mono no aware, or "things of sadness." Thus, the mystery of the book (as I gather, having heard only bits of it at the reading) is as much what mono no aware is as how Zack resolves, or fails to resolve, his emotional vacuum. Linda Shimoda talked about the way in which she and her husband collaborate on projects. She is a visual artist, very much involved in Japanese calligraphy and art. The process sounded somewhat familiar to me from Tinfish, where our collaborations are less than concurrent conversations, more like parallel tracks on a related route. Todd and Linda talk about a shared concern, and then adjourn to separate work spaces for months. He writes a novel, she creates a series of images. When they've finished their solo projects, they come together and organize the two pieces in conversation. Thus, Linda's project on emotions entered into his project on the failure of emotion; then, a third eye entered in the person of the graphic designer for Chin Music. The result is a stunning artist's book (how can it be sold for $22.50?).

In his recent Ph.D. prospectus defense, Tom Gammarino had waved OH! around as an exemplar of what he believes will happen once trade paperbacks migrate into Kindle form. The book, as object, will then be freed up to be an art object, rather than a mere carrier of words. We shall see, but the premise sounds reasonable.

Tom began the reading with a story. When he first went to Japan, he had long hair. The summer was too hot. He went to get it cut. He only knew three phrases in Japanese, two of which were "hello" and "good-bye." He and the hair-cutter communicated through gestures and pre-linguistic noises, which he replicated for us. She cut a large swath of his hair, sounded a question, whereupon he uttered his only other phrase of Japanese, "mono no aware!"

Tom's protagonist is a white American who goes to Japan with his band, Agenbite (yes, Joyce fans, that one); Agenbite is to Tom's book what mono no aware is to Todd's. Like Zack Hara, his emotional life is not right. Brain (his name invokes Pynchon, as does a lot of the book, which hearkens back to V. to this reader) falls in love with a Japanese sex worker, cannot separate love and sex, gets involved with a student, breaks up with her (much to her failure to care), and so on. As you can tell already, Tom is ushering in every stereotype adhered to by stereotypical American white males in Asia, but he attempts at the same time to expose and demolish them. This is a dangerous course, to put it mildly. But he mostly does so. The book is flat-out funny; he plays with the stereotypes the way a cat does with its prey, like some latter-day Rabelais.

What I most appreciated about Tom's writing, aside from its go-for-broke humor, was the way in which he crafts sentences. The book is not written in the clumsy everything-for-the-plot manner of much fiction, but almost as a collection of tightly wrought sentences. Tom's attention to language finds its tightest focus, however, toward the end of the book, when Brain is high on mushrooms (he ate them in a sandwich) begins to think in Japanglish.

You speak Japanglish now. Japanglish speaking is by what you are. At least the dad was honest. Strict vew of life, was his truth, you were informed entirely, it was war. You take those, the wife while having sexual intercourse, the specialist and of substance you are polite mutually. That then a certain way.

__________


Who gets to speak, and for whom, is a huge issue in Hawai`i. Tom's book takes it on like Philippe Petit on his rope. The question loomed when I attended Craig Howes's English 620 (Introduction to the Profession of English) course this past week. I was there to introduce "issues in creative writing" to the entering M.A. students. I did so by asking them to read one issue of one of the journals published in Hawai`i now: Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, `oiwi, Tinfish. Given that all of these journals are published in Hawai`i, their sense of where they are and whom they speak for is crucial not just to the editors of these journals, but also to their readers. While all of these journals are now active, one gets the sense of a current narrative that posits Bamboo Ridge as an historical object, `oiwi as a current one, and Manoa and Tinfish as tangential to current stories told about Hawai`i's literature. While there's an inevitability to this narrative, I find it unfortunate, based more on ideas about Hawai`i than about what one actually finds in the journals. Local literature, as it is taught in my department now, is seen almost exclusively through the lens of Asian Settler Colonialism, which posits Asians as part of a problem (colonialism, cultural appropriation, and so on), not part of possible solutions. Such readings, while they aim to be ethical, often rely on binary moral paradigms to make a space for Hawaiian literature and culture by sweeping away the claims (or indeed the texts) made by Asian local writers. Sure, the stories about grandpa fishing and grandson later on eating the food placed on his grave, have lost their eclat (they probably lost that eclat in the 1980s), but Bamboo Ridge has published Lee Tonouchi and Hawaiian playwrights in recent years. That they published a book by Ian MacMillan was itself a fascinating, but not often commented upon, event. He was the first white writer to be included in their canon of single author texts.

I asked Craig's students to imagine journals that would fill literary holes. They tended toward strategies of representation (generation, gender) and genre (nonfiction came up more than once). Publishing, I suggested, should not be considered from the point of view of desire to be published, but from the need to create communities of writers by way of becoming publishers. I look forward to reading examples of the work that feels necessary to these students.

I talked a bit about how a book like Tinfish 18.5 , whose writers are all Hawai`i born and raised, tries to field a conversation between writers from Hawai`i that is not based on nationality or race. I don't mean this to be a collection of "local writers," either. The term "local" seems to have outworn its usefulness. Perhaps we can develop new terms for the literature that creates alliances between writers in Hawai`i, no matter their identity positions or even aesthetics (though Tinfish's aesthetics are pretty clear at this point). I hope Tinfish can provide one model for possible literary futures here.