In Praise of Blurbs

I've long been a fan of those parts of a book that aren't the book itself, but situate themselves in the book's suburbs. (Yesterday, in talking to graduate students about Ashbery's Three Poems, I found myself in a long digression about Ashbery's use of the trope, the ways in which his poems are almost inevitably suburbs of a city that cannot be mapped.) Among the suburbs of a book of poems or criticism are the acknowledgments, awkward testimonies to professional debts, previous publications, friends, lovers, and children. Never have I felt so strangely happy in opening a book as when I saw a scholar dedicate his book to himself, with thanks to himself for all the hard work he had done on it. Must have been that I was writing a dissertation at the time, a thankless task if there ever was one. I have not yet had the courage to thank the pharmaceuticals that make my work possible, but those too belong in these testaments to literary non-solitude. Then there are the indexes, governed by alphabetical order, that guide us through books and--if we read them on their own--offer myriad juxtapositional jollies. Janus and Jesus. Teabagger and tempest. Derrida and deep image. Bernadette Mayer's exercise, mandating that you write a poem as an index, is a brilliant prompt.

When I first began composing blurbs, I assumed that the only rule was to use the word "brilliant." My first blurb, as I recall, contained that word (as an inside joke, as well as praise for Michelle Murphy's work). The book is Jackknife & Light, published by Avec Books in 1998. But I quickly realized that the blurb form was to criticism as haiku is to the epic poem, or a tweet to a blog post, a blog post to a vetted essay. It was the jar in Tennessee that claimed to order the wilderness of the text that (usually) preceded it. It was a see-through containment principle. And so I fell in love with the blurb form. I only wish Ron Padgett had written one of his down home, pragmatic descriptions of "the blurb" in his handbook of poetic forms, because blurbs can be poetic (if you leave out tired words like "brilliant"). Such a Padgett definition might read as follows:

"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the blurb is 'said to have been originated in 1907 by Gelett Burgess in a comic book jacket embellished with a drawing of a pulchritudinous young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Blinda Blurb. (D.A.)' The blurb is very like a definition: short, active, exacting, if also necessarily a song of praise. An extension of the marketing arm of the publishing house or office or small room (the latter devoted to small press work), the blurber (or blurbista, as she is often under the spell of caffeine) seeks to seduce a jacket reader into opening the book to gaze upon the naked words within. The blurb writer's name is crucial. It ought to be recognizable, crisp, a blurb in and of itself. Often, the blurbist's name will be followed by something of their own that is blurb-worthy--a book, a journal, a department, an institution, some prizes. How do you write a blurb? Imagine yourself privy to writing no one else has seen, but ought to read. Look in your heart and write. Make it snappy."

Late in the process of putting together Kaia Sand's new book Remember to Wave, we realized that, while Lawson Inada had sent us both delightful letters, full of riffs on Tinfish and the book, he had not come up with the requested blurb. He does not do computers, so I pushed some buttons and informed him that I was "calling in his blurb." His blurb came in much less satisfying than the letters, so Kaia had him agree to present letter copy as the blurb, which came out this way:

"Woooo weee!--this book is really something! It's both "too much" and the "total package," and then some--sort of like an "All You Can Eat" site--a "smelter"--in a rock-alcove below petroglyphs. "Sand" plus "Wave" plus "Tinfish"--that's the cool combo, combined with Vision, Heart, Smarts, Reach, Diligence, Direction, and good doses of downhome, downright Whimsy! Are you ready? Step lively now. Be on alert. Keep up with Kaia. And REMEMBER TO WAVE!"

Lawson Fusao Inada, Oregon Poet Laureate


Let me append some of my recent blurbs, with links to where the books can be bought. I've never signed a blurb, but why not begin now? Buy the book, send it to me, and I'll sign the blurb. Appropriation has its place.


Bartleby, the Sportscaster, by Ted Pelton
Ted Pelton has written an allegory about an allegory about real life. The memoir of the end of his first marriage, sandwiched between chapters about a fictional sportscaster and his silent colleague, Bartleby, offers us a sober frame for interpreting the fiction (his and Melville's). More importantly, perhaps, fiction gives us access to the life. Bartleby is real; marriage is allegory. Vice versa, too. Neither life nor art can be imitated in Pelton's novel, for they are one and the same. For an avowed Mets fan, Pelton's a pretty savvy writer.


I really enjoyed that last sentence, as the Mets have been rivals of the St. Louis Cardinals forever, and in my mind since the mid-1980s, when Doc Gooden and that catcher with a perm regularly took on Whitey Herzog's crew, and sometimes won.

Ted's book is very short; Goro Takano's, on the other hand, is a hefty piece of lumber. He wrote his novel as a dissertation and it still includes an extensive bibliography. Were I to blurb it again, I'd mention that a very fine graduate course could be made of the book and its bibliography alone. So there.

Goro Takano, With One More Step Ahead, Blazevox

In One More Step Ahead Goro Takano has composed an amazing post-national post-apocalyptic encyclopedic philosophical trans-genre literary critical untranslated novel with poems about post-war Japan, African America, Hawai`i, film, Japanese literature, television news, dementia, paralysis, a sex cult, the atom bomb, gender, race, culture, the corporate state and much more. Read this book and chant after Virginia Woolf: What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables!


Linking the blurb to a blog post I wrote on the book was a technical mistake, but I'll own it by keeping it there. As I said to a student yesterday, everything's intentional once you've put it down.

Bill Howe also has a new Blazevox book, Translanations:

iPod to a postmodern aeolian harp, William R. Howe projects the altered music of Emily Dickinson’s poems through our ear’s buds. His is not a lyric “I,” but the first person of a dyslexic subject at once trapped and transformed by the sounds of a language that perpetually evades him, and us. While his method is ostensibly that of homolinguistic translation, Howe also ventures into synecdoche (“sign that doc”), as when he offers us Dickinson’s line, “I felt siroccos crawl,” as “Eiffel Volkswagens – scrawl --” Like Janet Holmes in THE MS OF MY KIN, Howe discovers our present in Dickinson’s own. Her “The Soul has Bandaged moments --” becomes “These mole his Baghdad ad foments.” One could write the history of America from that bandaged moment to this Baghdad ad. Perhaps this is Howe. —Susan M. Schultz


Sometimes I'm asked to write blurbs to books by writers whose work I don't know. I was very happy to pass word of Jean Vengua's Meritage Press book, thusly:

Jean Vengua, Prau

Jean Vengua is a poet of the typo, the missed step, the happy and unhappy accident; in short, she is a poet of linguistic and global migration. Prau moves its reader from the Philippines to the Bay Area and back, "always mining past present tenses." In her aptly titled prose poem, "Momentum," Vengua links Gustav Mahler, her mother, Buffalo Soldiers, Marie Curie, Roberto Matta, and Jose Rizal in a dance of histories real and imagined. The momentum of her writing brings together what is otherwise ripped asunder: "That is to make beautiful where the dissonance begins to tear."
--Susan M. Schultz, Editor of Tinfish Press


And there, with my moniker, Editor of Tinfish Press, I end this blog on blurbs. Someday I may get around to blurbing the blog from my perch in the Ahuimanu suburbs.

[Ed. note: the critic who thanked himself was Thomas Vogler in Preludes to Vision: The Epic Venture in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart Crane. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1971. 222pp. I remember it was a good book.]

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!

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.