The Routes that Clutch: Circle Island / Circle Blog

The wheels on TheBus go round and round (h/t Ryan Oishi); after launching this blog in January 2009 my fourth post was about a project organized by three UHM alums about TheBus. That project, called Routes, is now out from Kahuaomanoa Press. Made in the format of a bus map, the anthology includes poems, short fiction, journalism, a strip of ads at the top, and a panel called "Route 5: My Seat," where the rider can compose her own poem (or post) as she rides.

At 9:32 a.m. on May 19, 2010 I got on the Circle Island bus (55) at the Kane`ohe Bay Shopping Center across from Windward Mall. The weather was warm, the mountains clear behind the looming mall, the wires, the SUVs. The bus headed away from Kane`ohe along the coast on Kamehameha Highway, or the route that is prettier than Kahekili Highway, on which I commute.

By 9:42 we arrived at the intersection of Kamehameha Highway and what again became Kam Highway. To my right was the gas station and 7-Eleven, and to my left as we turned was the Hygienic Store, whose name was carefully enunciated by the voice of TheBus, Puakea Nogelmeier, a deep resonant voice (even so disseminated). Every so often the Puakea voice would advise riders to "please kokua" or to "watch for suspicious behavior," but mostly it called off the names of the stops.

Chad Blair: Anyone who has taken O`ahu public transportation in the past five years knows his work: Triggered automatically at every stop, the pre-recorded spots let riders know they've arrived at Kapi`olani Boulevard or Alapa`i Street. As pronounced properly by Nogelmeier, it's Kah-pee-oh-la-need and Ah-la-pah-ee, the `okina--the upside-down apostrophe--requiring a cutting off or ending, a glottal stop.

As we rode toward Kualoa Beach Park, where the island itself turns, I saw many signs protesting development, especially in the Waiahole/Waikane area, known for resistance in the 1970s against the theft of water for leeward side golf courses and such.

PROTECT AND DEFEND WAIAHOLE / WAIKANE
KEEP THE COUNTRY COUNTRY
STOP STEALING THE WATER FROM OUR STREAMS (by the old poi factory)
THIS IS AN AG PARK / NOT AG ESTATES

At 9:40 we had made the turn to the north, and I noticed the ads above and across from me. There was a Mahalo to Our Sponsors next to an anti-methamphetamine ad (METH WILL CHANGE THAT). I learned that Darryl Valdez is Operator of the Quarter and that he has won a trip to Vegas.



Things I did not know: there's a trout farm at Kahana Bay. There is also bridge construction.

GOV. LINDA LINGLE THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

By 10:08 we were passing Hauula Beach park, where a wedding party was assembled, the bride in white dress bright against the turquoise water.

EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE
[something about Eminent Domain and YouTube: here!]

At the Polynesian Cultural Center, La`ie, a group of firemen were shooting water from a mighty hose at--what? The sign? The plants in front of the sign? A motorcycle gang, the first of several, had gathered at the La`ie McDonalds. A young white man got on wearing Koss earphones and a black teeshirt that read, "without music life would b flat" (the flat was a flat sign, mind you). He sat in front of me and pulled out a novel whose chapter heading had something to do with ice.

Next to me was a man who got on a bit later, hanging his bike on the front of the bus, whose left arm was tattooed with the word HAWAIIAN. More motorcycles went by, heading south. People were starting to know one another--many handshakes among the guys at the front.

SECUREMENT MANDATORY / MAHALO! THEBUS

Things I did not know: the circle just past Hale`iwa town is called Weed Circle.

I had a bit of a doze and came to in Wahiawa where a sign in an old restaurant read: SHOCK AND AWE BREAKFAST SPECIAL. Who could resist?

A few more turns and DIVINE PLEASURES / WELCOME HOME TROOPS with an odd mix of buxom blondes and a Pirate theme. AVOCADO PAWN.

Somewhere near Sunset Beach two women got on board and sat behind me. One was older, had grown up in Hawai`i; the second was much younger. The first was in sales, had almost bought a store in Hale`iwa Town; the second was a hair stylist (a "perfectionist," her friend said). They both knew Justin, the older woman from way back, the younger one as his girlfriend. Justin is a good guy, teaches boxing at a camp for kids (the young woman hailed a boy who got on with a "Justin is my boyfriend!" to which the little guy didn't know how to respond). Justin's former girlfriends were all losers. Jamie hated ALL of them. But younger woman doesn't want to talk about the past, even though Justin wants to know about hers: who were they, how old, what did they do for a living? She keeps telling him it just doesn't matter and she trusts him, but he keeps asking. The older woman started talking about Christine, his one ex, who had cheated on him. Christine was not so bad. And there were others the older woman knew. In Mililani Town, younger woman said she did not want to hear about Justin's past. It was over, and besides, they were all LOSERS. The women were going to Chinatown. Justin didn't want her to go anywhere herself. There were a lot of things Justin did not want. "At least he's trying now," said the younger woman with a sigh. He hates guys from the mainland, Justin does. "They're so stoopid." The way he was raised, island-style, by his granddad. "I don't bring it up any more, the mainland."

Gizelle Gajelonia: Deah God, Plz no bless Carissa though cuz I faking hate her! God, I thought she wux my fren. I saw her yesterday making out wit John Boy, my ex-boifren form ninth grade at Sushi Man. I laught though because da mean Korean lady dat works ova dea told me to stop doing dat. But I'm so pissed off! I no can believe she would do dat! Faking slut, I hope she get preggo and den John Boy dump her sorry ass . . .

The bus stopped at Alakea Street at about 1 p.m. I talked the bus driver out of a transfer. I didn't know why, but he looked at me funny. My husband says the transfers last only two hours, and I had told him I started in Kane`ohe, which would have been three hours before. He gave me one anyway. Funny thing, after half an hour off the bus for coffee and relief, I caught the same one over the Pali and back to Kane`ohe.

This time I sat on the left side of the bus, looking into the aisle. An older woman sat next to me, her hair done up (but still disordered), her face done up, wearing a dress. She was Korean, she told me, and her husband Japanese, Irish, Hawaiian, and at the Aloha Care place in Kane`ohe. Did I know where it was? When I said yes, she showed me a bag full of sushi she bought for her husband, and handed me a plastic platter with eight sushi pieces in it. "It was for the bus driver, but if you know where Aloha Care is, you can have it." We both have two children, she and I, and we both lived in northern Virginia. "Oh, people in the country are so much friendlier than people in the city," she said, as everyone on the bus who was not asleep started talking.

Eric Chock:

Tutu standing on the corner--
she look so nice!
Her hair pin up in one bun,
one huge red hibiscus hanging out
over her right ear,
her blue Hawaiian print muumuu
blowing in the wind
as one bus driver blows
one huge cloud of smoke around her,
no wonder her hair so gray!

A straw haired man on the older side of younger across from me reminded me of a colleague of mine, but had perhaps not made it so far. When a young man got on the bus with a boogie board in hand, he was accosted by the first guy, who began talking about his two cars that he had to sell (legal something), how you needed a car to get chicks, something about surf boards, working construction for the military. His talking knew no pause. So many cars on the island now, the population has changed in the 32 years he's been here.

Kai Gaspar:

When she pau school, Aunty Hemolele go Oahu
so she can go college
so she can learn how fo talk hybolic

By the time we got to Kane`ohe and my friend was safely off the bus at Aloha Care, the guy was sitting next to a young woman (she, pinned against the window) and he was grilling her about her studies. She's an English major, she said, staring straight ahead, showing no interest in the man who talked and talked. "You know how I write a five paragraph essay?" he asked. And then he told her. What to put in the first paragraph, the second, and on to the conclusion. Two sisters from Long Island who got on with some special needs kids from Benjamin Parker School sat behind him and his conversational hostage, getting the giggles. Their supervisor, an older white woman, called back, "The bus is a great place to meet people, isn't it?"

Mike Leidemann: TheBus: A metaphor for modern life. Who knew?




Routes is edited by Emelihter Kihleng, Ryan Oishi, and Aiko Yamashiro, and published by Kahuaomanoa Press. Other writers than those quoted include Emelihter Kihleng, Rodney Morales, Lisa Linn Kanae; design by Mark Guillermo. $6. Anyone interested in the anthology should contact wecatchbus@gmail.com

Craig Santos Perez blogged recently on the press, here.

Jill Yamasawa's Aftermath will be published soon by them, as well. Also an early blog entry for me.



[note: not all diacriticals are in place: blame blogger!]

Tinfish 19 (with Lyz Soto): The Launch

Yesterday's Tinfish board meeting, at Cafe 2600 in Puck's Alley on the corner of King and University Avenues, was dedicated to solving some problems, like workload. As Tinfish has grown, the strain has begun to show. We have lacked procedures for making the transitions from words to design to press easier. We find ourselves more a small business than a guerrilla enterprise these days, surely a mixed blessing. While we are publishing significant books (hell, we got bestsellers at SPD!), we aren't laughing much any more, as we did years ago at an early meeting, when Bryant and Gaye proposed setting up a Tinfish van and driving around the island serving up poetry and snacks. That the university and the non-profit sector feel the real threat of budget axes only makes the sensation one more of anxiety than celebration. So we're adjusting the workload, asking members of the board to do more work, and holding our breaths (or I am, in any case). So it was good to turn to the launch of Tinfish 19 and Lyz Soto's Eulogies, just around the corner on King Street, at Revolution Books.

Here is a picture of the audience, composed mainly of graduate students and some friends of the poets. In some ways, what Carolyn Hadfield of the bookstore calls "the poetry problem" was proved (the missing were legion), but in other ways, the liveliness of the art was evident.






Tinfish has always aimed to surprise through shifts of tone and visual design. These shifts were on display yesterday. Gizelle Gajelonia, whose 13 Ways of Looking at TheBus is forthcoming from the press, is the very image of a nervous student when she first stands in front of an audience. She breaks all the rules I always set up (no self-deprecation, no acting lost, no nervous chatter) and somehow gets away with it, because very soon she launches into a reading as funny as her tone is dr--like a very dry martini. Gizelle read her poem, "13 Ways of Looking at TheBus," which riffed off Wallace Stevens, even as it took on local places and politicians (she mentioned Mayor Mufi Hannemann so often in her reading I began to think she was on his campaign staff). She followed that up with "Bustainability," a poem about Wahiawa that featured a girl in love with "Ikaikia, numbah 52," and finally her take on John Asbhery's "Instruction Manual." This last piece takes Ashbery's mock touristic take on Guadalajara, a place he's never traveled, and goes instead to New York City, where the speaker wants to attend Columbia University and mingles with all manner of stereotyped New Yorkers. It's a kind of Versailles of parody, that poem. Gizelle was then supposed to leave and attend a wedding, but I found her mingling with the audience after the reading.

Ryan Oishi read his poem from Tinfish 19, a poem that evoked a mixed reaction in the first meeting of my graduate poetry workshop this semester. It's a letter to the editor dressed up as a poem; it's a poem that parades statistics; it's a rant about the overdevelopment of Hawai`i. It's maybe not even a poem. Ryan takes on the traffic problem, the water issue, the incredible cost of housing, and his own complicity. He finished up with a short poem about the Father, Son, the Holy Ghost, Father Damien, and three pimples that had appeared on his face. He made deft links between Father Damian's care for lepers and the outbreaks on his own face (deft because he milks--to use an utterly awful metaphor--the situation for humor, recognizing the perspectival abyss of his comoparison). Ryan and Gizelle are only two among many local poets who have proved the literary value of TheBus.

Jaimie Gusman, Rachel Wolf, Jade Sunouchi, and Lurana O'Malley were guest readers, presenting poems by authors who could not be with us for reasons of geography. And so we heard work by Janna Plant, Aurora Brackett, Jennifer Reimer, and Emelihter Kihleng. This has always been one of my favorite parts of a Tinfish reading, the reading by proxy section (though Carolyn caught me when I suggested there would be "live readers," wondering out loud if the others would be "dead.") Between that gaffe and my forgetting to buy leis, the afternoon was not all together put together well!


Lyz Soto concluded the reading with a performance of her small book, Eulogies. Lyz is head of YouthSpeaks Hawai`i and herself a slam poet, so she called this her "first poetry reading." She commented on the fact that emotion is welcomed in slam venues, but tends to be tamped down in "regular" poetry readings. Her own performance was emotional, and utterly unlike what one hears in readings where the tone is "poetic" and monotone. I have blogged elsewhere on her book, but suffice it to say that her performance was an expression of necessity, not simply duty.

Note: Tinfish's board is composed of me, Gaye Chan, Bryant Webster Schultz, Jon Osorio, Masako Ikeda and John Zuern. Last year's office assistant was Jade Sunouchi; this year's is Rawitawan Pulam. I am grateful to all of them, and especially to Gaye for over 13 years of (un)common and unpaid labor on the project.

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

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

***

"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."

_______________________

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"

____________________

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

Poetry is political and Oedipus was adopted

Friday's schedule for Poetry & Politics featured Tinfish 18.5: The Book, so I invited Ryan Oishi and Tiare Picard to join us. Then Jennifer Kwon Dobbs and Ted Pelton separately sent messages that they would be in Honolulu, so I invited them too, and opened the class up to anyone who wished to attend. The ensuing conversation was predictably a bit unfocused, but contained nuggets worth holding up to the virtual light.

Ryan read a revised version of his poem about Aloha Air Flight 243. The poem is about a flight from the Big Island to Honolulu in the late 1980s that was diverted to Kahului after most of the fuselage ripped off. Ryan imagined that the plane was damaged by a huge shark, kind of a reverse aumakua (or not?). He revised the poem after Go! had entered the local airline market, driven Aloha out of business, and then tried to appropriate Aloha's name. So the poem I had read as a commentary on tourism (shark takes big bite out of plane full of tourists) became instead a poem about one airline taking a bite out of another. This poem, like his love poem set in a Walmart (where Hawaiian bones were found, quarantined and air-conditioned), addresses issues of development and the economy.

Tiare read poems about language, militarization, and erasure. Her alphabet poem is marvelous; on one side of the page, she's written a wacky alphabet poem (each line begins with the next letter in the alphabet). On the other side, she's taken that poem and removed all the letters from Polynesian languages. The result is a syncopated burst of sound that resembles nothing so much as Christian Bok, yet whose instigations are profoundly "local" and political.

Ted Pelton read from a parable he wrote in the mid-80s about the Agency's search for employees who were honest but had always wanted to lie. Pelton's "story" ended with the very premise of the ad being called into question ("you trusted that we were actually looking for employees?!"). Tiare's question was spot on: "is that fiction?" It reminded me that the Reagan years were a more benign-seeming warm-up for the Bush II years. Nicaragua, Grenada, Lebanon, Iran-Contra, were Iraq and Afghanistan writ small.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs read poems about Korea, and also a new poem, not included in her book Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press), about Cyprus's division, and demilitarized zones in general. Her image of the divided bed at the end of the poem was apt. What I found most compelling about Jennifer's discussion of adoption (she was adopted from Korea and grew up in Oklahoma) was her notion that she begins from "negative capability" and works toward certainty, hence goes in the opposite direction of many imaginations. She also spoke of not trusting still images (which evoked Hart Crane's "still yet moving" bridge to me). Jennifer also spoke to the ancient link between poetry and politics, citing the Greeks (which reminded me how infrequent are mentions of the Greeks in my department, at least within my hearing!).






On Thursday, the day before, I attended Mary Edmond-Paul's talk on Robin Hyde's autobiographical writings. The crux of Edmond-Paul's talk was the treatment of Hyde's mental instability (she was arrested for attempting to commit suicide, such being the laws of her day (the 1930s in New Zealand/Aotearoa). Edmond-Paul spoke at some length about "kindness," the way in which Hyde, because she voluntarily submitted to treatment, was treated with a kindness lacking in the commitment of Janet Frame to the severe care of a hospital. I wish she'd said more about "kindness" as a (dare I say it?) category. The idea that someone would invoke kindness in an academic setting struck me as itself an intervention in the usual goings on, but I would have liked to have heard more. The epilogue offered on the contemporary photographer Yvonne Todd was fascinating, but the bridge between Hyde and Todd did not seem complete. What amazing photographs, though. My colleague, Craig Howes, brought up the problem with seeing writing as therapy--as "scriptotherapy." I remember that one of our visiting writers described how she would pour her problems onto the page at night, and wake up again the next morning with the same problems. To my mind, scriptotherapy works only if the illness is under control; you cannot write your way out of suffering, but you can explain that suffering to yourself later, as meaning, as story, as image (still or moving). The blur of image that Jennifer would address a day later, and the sense of trying to move from negative capability to a sense of sureness with the world, is familiar to me not as an adoptee (I am not one, though my children are), but as someone who suffered several extended bouts of "agitated depression," in which there was no stillness, only some godawful version of "shaken adult syndrome."

The rest of the weekend has been all baseball!

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!

Writer Talks #1

Inaugural edition of Writer Talks: Poetry, Politics, Publishing & More

April 24, 1:30-4:00, Kuykendall 410


Please join my Poetry & Politics honors class for what I hope will be the first in a series of Writer Talks (like the Biography brown bag series, except not so frequent). We will be joined by two writers who are coming for the AAAS meeting in Honolulu, as well as two writers from Honolulu. This roundtable will covers areas as disparate as writing & politics, adoption, development and militarization in Hawai`i; it should be quite a free for all.

Joining us will be:

RYAN OISHI earned an M.A. from UHM. Several of his poems were published in _Tinfish 18.5: The Book_. He is working on an anthology about TheBus entitled “Routes,” with Aiko Yamashiro, Emelihter Kihleng and Mark Guillermo, which will be published by Kahuaomanoa Press in Fall, 2009, as well as “Statehood Project,” a collaborative project between Kumu Kahua and Fat Ulu Productions. Ryan teaches English at Kamehameha High School.

TIARE PICARD earned an M.A. from UHM. Her work can be found in _Tinfish 18.5_. She is a founding member of Fat Ulu Productions and is currently working for the Census Bureau, driving Honolulu's neighborhoods and training employees. See http://tinfishpress.com/18-5.html for more on _Tinfish 18.5_.

TED PELTON is the author of the novel _Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals)_ and two other books, as well as being the publisher of Starcherone [start your own] Press, an independent press specializing in innovative fiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts and Isherwood Fellowships in Fiction. He lives in Buffalo, NY. See http://starcherone.blogspot.com/ for more on Ted.

JENNIFER KWON DOBBS was born in Won Ju Si, South Korean. Her first book of poetry, _Paper Pavilion_ (2007) won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her essays, reviews and poems are widely published, and have been translated into several languages. She is the founding director of the SummerTIME Writing Program, a college access program for inner-city LA students. She is currently assistant professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. See http://jkwondobbs.com/ for more on Jennifer.

Please feel free to email me about the event at sschultz@hawaii.edu.

Anthologizing TheBus

(Please make the photos larger with your mouse. I still haven't figure out how to put these photos in the places I actually want them . . . )


My former and current students, Ryan Oishi, Aiko Yamashiro, and Gizelle Gajelonia came over this afternoon to talk about Ryan's and Aiko's anthology of writing about TheBus. Ryan pulled out a mock-up of the proposed anthology of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, organized to resemble a fold-up route map and schedule (with a large map of Oahu on the front, then poems in the place of route schedules as you open the “map”). They are hoping to publish the anthology and place it among route maps in public places for people to pick up and read as they ride TheBus. The poetry map is interactive, as well, as there is also a place to write your own poem, cut it off the map, and send it to the editors.

Their anthology has many layers—historical, ethnic, generic. In literary historical terms, it begins with Eric Chock's locally famous poem, “Tutu on da Curb,” about an old woman at a bus stop who ends up breathing the air (“fut”) of “progress” as it comes out of the bus's exhaust pipe. Also from the era of the 70s are pieces by Rodney Morales, and a photograph by Ed Greevy of bus drivers protesting. And then they move toward the present, where we find poems by Gizelle and Ryan and a student at McKinley High School, as well as journalism by Mike Leidemann (the writers have not yet been asked for permission to print, so the project is still in the planning stages). They present poems about immigrants who have succeeded (like Puakea Nogelmeier) and those who are not so sure they will.

The anthology will also have bus "ads" that are relevant to local issues, if not local products. One (at the top left) features Lilikala Kame`eleihiwa, Hawaiian historian and sovereignty activist.

There is much to praise in such an anthology as a way to link communities: bus riders and poets, writers and schedulers, the idealists and the pragmatists. It cuts across lines of ethnicity and class in wonderful ways. I only hope that the purpose of the project gets better expressed on the map. I can imagine a rider thinking she has acquired a route map and schedule getting angry at getting some poems and no times to be at her stop!

The poet/editors are still considering whether to sell or give away their product, and how to get it into circulation among bus riders. The anthology certainly will provide a good reminder to riders that their rides are not mundane, but full of promise; they need only look around and overhear to get the gist of life as it is lived on this island.

Buddy Bess, of Bess Press, once told me and others that he'd figured out how to get his books into the ABC stores in Waikiki, where they would have a larger clientele than the usual bookstore crowd. He would make "books" that look like guides—guides to fish, or food, or language—and he would laminate them. It seems to me that Ryan, Aiko and Gizelle (who came because her honors thesis will be on TheBus), have found a way to do the guerrilla version of this move into a larger public. They won't just publish something about TheBus for students of writing; they will also provide access to it for bus riders themselves. A really promising act of poetry activism—now they just need the money to proceed.