Blogging Blindly

[photo by Bryant Webster Schultz]


Yesterday, the Affect Theory reader arrived at our doorstep in a manila air-bubbled envelope soggy with the frequent rains of winter on O`ahu. I've hardly opened it, but suspect that it will be a good companion for two other books I've been reading this week, John Elder Robison's Look Me in the Eye, an Asperger's memoir, and David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, an argument for finding transcendence inside of nature, rather than without it. I have neither book in front of me now, as they have both migrated to my in-laws' house--one as a gift, and the other as a symptom of my forgetting. So I blog blindly, though "deafly" would be perhaps the better word, as these books are as full of voices as of images. Robison writes about his own voice as one that is recognizable to other autistic people for its flatness of affect, its cadence. His voice does not betray (consider that word!) his emotions when a crisis occurs; to the news of a neighbor's death, he might say "oh," instead of the listener's desired tonal shift upward, outward. Abram's affect is anything but flat, is as mellow as a Steinway's middle register. For Abram wants us to attend to the world as it is, and that involves the recognition that we can touch the world with our hands because our hands can themselves be touched. We are in a reciprocal relation with nature; it, too, has affect. It's a relation of mutual effect.

It would be too easy to say that placing these books next to one another, putting them in a boy-meets-cat kind of staring contest, might suggest that the contemporary world--infinitely mediated, placed at all the distances provided by iPod, iPad, iPhone--creates an autistic field in which we all lose ourselves to abstraction. There is something moving in the persistence Robison displays at learning how to be in the social, natural world. But this feeling becomes one of disturbance when you consider your last walk down a sidewalk where you were the sole unplugged-in traveler. I assigned my freshmen to take the Circle Island bus this semester and to write about it. "Do NOT take an iPod, and do NOT use your phone," I told them, adding with some measure of pedagogical sadism, "and do not even take a friend, unless you intend NOT to talk to them!" I wanted them to experience what Kathleen Stewart calls "ordinary affects," those that are as strong as they are sometimes cushioned in dullness. (I had thought my own ride dull for at least two hours, when the conversation I'd been overhearing for that long turned; the young man being described in such banal terms from Sunset Beach to Mililani became the abuser discussed in hushed tones from Mililani to downtown near Bishop Street.) So, at semester's end, when all the blog posts came flying in, last minute-like, I arrived at one about by a young man who related that he had started by making sure he had his iPod with him. Many of the narratives were curtailed suddenly with an admission that the author had, halfway around the island, fallen asleep. Many of their stories, vivid, annoyed, well told, simply fell off a cliff. And then I slept.

TheBus is a fascinating place because it is both a sealed container from which you cannot touch the outside world and because it is so utterly social (if not sociable) a place. It's like my writing perch, from which I see a sliver of the field behind our townhouse, a mown green lawn, alighted on by white egrets, the occasional dog (black lab, English shepherd), fallen palm frond, boy with bat, girl with soccer ball. Just a sliver of a view. The perch is more peaceful--usually--than a bus seat, and it moves more slowly. But it suggests to me that I can touch the outside world without really allowing me to. And it contains me in a space where my daughter asks me over and again to spell family names to write on packages she's making for Christmas dinnertime. I am inside and outside the game. The one promises peacefulness, the other is as annoying as it is ultimately gratifying (I'm useful; I can spell!). Oh, and there's the constant triangulator, the computer screen and keyboard, on which thoughts about these things form and then dissolve as the blogger box moves up, line by line. "Mom," my son interrupts, "I may have gotten the first cardboard cut in the world, ever," then comments on the cat (asleep), the packages (the visiting student's name is hard to spell), then reads the screen ("spell!") and, when I tell him I'm writing about him "right now," he sits. "Let's see!" he says, then smiles. "Anything?"

Maybe it's parenthood that taught me to write about what's happening at the very moment that it's happening, something a recent Ph.D. said that she absolutely did not want to do, because she wanted time to pass, measuring (in all senses of the word) her experiences of betrayal and loss. (I remember those days.) But it's writing the distractions rather than trying to evade them or even parse them after a decent interval has passed that draws me to blogging and, increasingly, to the activity of daily life. (In those days, daily life seemed dull, an awful Musak that went with the ceaseless search for abstractions that might relieve it.) A mixed state that is neither Abram's full-bodied experience of nature nor Robison's constant act of translation from outward chaos to his internal logic maker. A mixed state that sometimes leaving me wanting either extreme. The full-bodied is harder to achieve, what with the kids and the computer. The logical parsing of moments cannot be done with kids, and cat, and partner, and egrets to attend to. (You should meditate more, the raven says from my shoulder.)

It is perhaps no mystery that this mixed state of perception brings together what is lost (chronologically) in Alzheimer's. First the present disappears into the sometimes invented (collapsed) past, so that the past is what is and the present is what gets abstracted from it (perhaps). Later on, the past itself disappears and only the present exists. My mother looking over and over at a flower, at which she exclaims each time, freshly. Finally, the mind/body shut down until whatever (metaphorically autistic) perceptions are completely closed in and down. It's a wavering between states that is finally the states' withering away.

Where is the mystery in any of this attending to, caretaking the moment? Isn't it mystery that we often want, whether spiritual or plot-based? "So what happened then?" applies equally to God and funny French detectives. Where is the rock we're meaning to turn over to find the bugs and the scary snake? Mystery perhaps becomes less mysterious over time. The mystery is that being in all these things (even in the inability to be there, in Robison's case, or that of the iPod wielding bus rider) seems to make more of them happen. It's the mystery of my one semester of teaching when every book I taught came true in my daily life over the course of about six weeks straight. It's the mystery of love and hostility in the classroom. It's the mystery of how things cluster. Rilke's "you must change your life" becoming "you must apprehend your life," and your recognition (sharp or flat!) that there's as much drama in the second as in the first demand.

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!]

"A little derivative, / but what isn't, these days?" John Beer and Gizelle Gajelonia Rewrite _The Waste Land_

Too easily forgotten amid the many spilled words over T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the fact that the waste land was and is a place. The city, by way of Baudelaire, may be "unreal," but it is also London, as is its Thames river of voices, from Cockney to the Queen's English. The place the poem keeps is also significant; it has grown streets and suburbs and exurbs by now in the voices of poets who went to school, literally, to the poem. So perhaps it's no surprise that two new volumes of poetry take The Waste Land as their place, namely John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems (ring a bell, anyone?) from Canarium Press and Gizelle Gajelonia's otherwise Stevensianly titled, Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus from Tinfish Press. Eliot left St. Louis for the metropolis of London; Beer and Gajelonia pull him back to us (if I may call us us)--Beer to Chicago, Gajelonia to Honolulu. Where Beer retains Eliot's title, Gajelonia calls her poem, "He Do Da Kine in Different Voices," after Eliot's original "He Do the Police in Different Voices."

"Save Now," my blogger helper advises in blue, right next to TheBus orange "Publish Post" button. Why now? Why re-publish The Waste Land in these different voices? Are we so far on the other side of post-modernism or Language writing or post-Language writing or new new new formalism that we can now reconsider and transpose the 20th century's great poem (or one of them) into new voices? Let us say so. And hypothesize that what we term "derivative"--in this era of derivatives (you read it, so I don't have to)--may be the new new. Make it new, Eliot's miglior fabbro, Old Ez, ordained. To that, Beer's Spicer responds, "Someone's got it in for me" and earns the moniker of "the fabber craftsman," a mixed homophonic and ordinary translation of Eliot. To be derivative is to translate, and to translate is to recreate one place in another place.

Hence Beer's setting of the first section of the poem, namely Eliot's "The Burial of the Dead," as "The Funeral March (Chicago and Orleans)." Orleans is already a wonderful playful place. Does he mean New Orleans, from which Chicago got its music, by way of the river, Mississippi, and the train tracks that threaded their way north, through St. Louis, at about the time its exile Eliot was writing about London? Does he mean a city in France? Does he mean a band that sort of flourished in the 1970s (remember "Still the One"?) I hope not. Does he refer to the Orleans Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, a place nearly as full of simulacra as his poem? Read the first section of the poem and you cannot be certain of Orleans, nor even of Chicago, despite the Heartland Cafe, where the speaker is to meet his younger brother Stetson, he of the corpse planted in Eliot's garden.

But the place in Beer's poem that is most a place is (ironically?) called "V. Death to Poetry," where Orpheus awakens to find himself not in hell so much as in the poem about hell. "Orpheus awoke in the poem of disguises, the poem once called 'The Waste Land.' Friends, listen up. He gathered the remnants of the life he had dreamed. He renounced the burden of the name he bore. He began to walk." Where does he walk? Chicago: "down Milwaukee Avenue toward the Flatiron Building." Along the way he passes a catalogue of immigrants and musicians, students, teachers, cops. The world is clearly ending, as SUVs are burning: "the asphalt ran liquid and Orpheus saw the dissolving sky and he knew that the name of the poem he had entered could not be 'The Waste Land' . . . This is the death of the poet." While this section of the poem isn't broadly parodic; it's too damn serious (and exhausted) for that, it takes a funny turn when Beer turns not to shoring fragments against his ruin, but instead footnotes. Here what had followed the text as a kind of self-parody is brought into the text as broad parody as "These footnotes I have shored against my ruins . . . / no longer the mirror, no longer the poem"[.] The narrator proclaims himself not-Orpheus and declares that the city he is in is called "Barnes and Noble" (which is where you will find it). The poem's "ruse" is abandoned, and the buildings begin to sing a song of kissing and of never getting up. The end.

Gizelle Gajelonia's "He Do Da Kine in Different Voices" is at once closer to the original (she follows its plot more closely) and farther away from it (as Honolulu is from London). Where Beer's poem takes place in Chicago and the USA more generically ("THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT BORDERS. / WE WILL BE CLOSING IN FIFTEEN MINUTES" could be anywhere), Gajelonia's poem has as its speaker Queen Liliuo`kalani, the Hawaiian Kingdom's last queen, deposed in 1893 by a gang of American businessmen. She is at once the Marie who must hold on tight (the rich girl of Eliot's opening) and a prisoner surrounded by the ruins of her kingdom, wondering how to set her lands in order at the end. She is trapped inside a canon of European and American poetry, wanting out. And she is also trapped, like us, inside the contemporary Hawai`i of tourist land and reality television:

Real Unreal City
Under the gray vog of a winterless dawn,
A crowd flowed over Waikiki Beach, so many,
I had always thought Hawai`i had fucked so many.
The mindless pimps, with their eyes fixed on the Other,
Walked up the strip and down King Kalakaua Street,
To where Dog the Bounty Hunger kept the city safe
With prayer, Beth's breasts, and pepper spray.

Where Beer lards the old poem with contemporary references and slang, Gajelonia takes Eliot's cockney and replaces it with Hawaiian Creole English, or Pidgin, which Lisa Linn Kanae and others have termed a "language of resistance" to Standard English and all it represents. The bar conversation in Eliot's "The Game of Chess" about how Albert is demobbed and Lil has an abortion becomes, in Gajelonia's poem:

BRAH HURRY UP I LIKE GO HOME ALREADY
I said, what, you no feel shame fucking around?
But she was like, whatevaz Honey Girl, Kimo fucked
Around with so many sluts, I had sex with
Junior Boy because I needed
Money to buy school supplies for the kids, because
Kimo is a good-for-nothing-son-of-a-bitch.

But Gajelonia's waste land returns to Hawai`i's queen, where in section V. she asserts that she is "the constitutional ruler of my people." The final words in Gajelonia's version of the poem belong to Queen Liliuo`kalani:

I sat on my bed
Thinking, with my people behind me,
Shall I sign the proposition handed to me?
The monarchy is falling down falling down falling down
O ka halia`loha i hiki mai,
Ke hone ae nei ku`u manawa.
O oe no ka`u ipon aloha,
A lo ko e hana nei.
It is for them that I would give th last drop of my blood;
It is for them that I would spend everything belonging to me.
Aloha `oe, aloha `oe, aloha `oe.

If you want to read the lyrics to Queen Liliuo`kalani's "Aloha Oe," you can read them here, and you can make them your ringtone. There's something horrible about that, which I can't put my finger on. But I do love the posthumous rendition of the song by Johnny Cash, which follows an ad for "Sins of the Father." No comment. Gajelonia's Queen does not speak the Queen's English; her song is in `oiwi, or Hawaiian, that has only since the 1970s been reborn.

These new waste lands are sometimes parodic, often terribly funny. But they are more than parody, pastiche, or humor at the expense of the Anglophone Eliot. It was Eliot who inspired Kamau Brathwaite's interest in nation language through his performance of The Waste Land in the 1950s, by which time he was mocking his own work, sounding more like a tuba than like a bard. It is that Eliot who inspired Gajelonia's rendering of his poem as the history of Hawai`i. And Eliot's ragtime is probably responsible for Beer's importation of the King of Pop into his version of the poem: "Buskers / danced in supplication of the shadows, / mirroring the disgraced King of Pop. / White noise announced the train. Orpheus wept." If Orpheus is made to weep, then we should be grateful for his tears. These two renditions of Eliot are, if not improvements on the classic, then worthy covers (and re-upholsterings) of it. The poem has been re-newed. Derive contains within itself both the word "riven," or "to break apart," but also the word "la rive," or river bank, shore. Shored against its ruins, Eliot's poem washes up against a new bank. There are too many puns to attend to there, you know. So I'm off on my bark until next time.

[The title of this post comes from John Beer]

Writing Off of DICTEE: A Lesson Plan

The creative writing workshop need not be all talk; workshops are also places where things are built, sturdy objects like cabinets and window frames and old-fashioned toys. So to illustrate how DICTEE works from the inside rather than from the safe distance at which we often regard works of literature, especially the "difficult" ones, I made up an exercise for my graduate students. I'm pretty sure it would work for advanced undergrads, as well. Here are the directions I gave them (the 45 minute idea proved pure folly):


DICTEE exercise

I will give you a very healthy amount of time for this, at least 45 minutes. Do this in groups of three, and do it with colleagues you don't know in the class.

You have six documents in front of you:

“Aloha `Oe”: words and music by Queen Lil`uokalani


Congresswoman Patsy Mink, “Statement Before the House Commerce Committee Subcommittee On Commerce, Trade, and Hazardous Materials Product Liability Reform,” 1995;

Selection from DA JESUS BOOK:

USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, February 25, 2020, report on Kilauea:

Honolulu Police Department, How to Acquire a Gun:

47-491 Lulani Street, Kaneohe, House for Sale:


Choose at least FOUR of these documents and create a narrative/story/idea stream with them.

Then, write between the documents (or on top of them) in ways that are personal, political, cultural, etc.

Give your piece a title. Prepare to discuss it.

[May I have your permission to blog on this exercise? SMS]


I chose the documents almost at random, although they are all about Hawai`i and range from song to real estate, handguns to Kilauea volcano, and a Pidgin translation of Genesis to the testimony of Congresswoman Patsy Mink about the effects of DES on mothers and their children. Aside from the emphasis on this place, I had very little in mind for the documents, thinking the exercise would work better that way. I knew full well that serious issues were raised in the documents, from the status of Pidgin and Hawaiian languages to handgun violence to the high cost of property (and the issue of development) in Hawai`i. I also knew that I had chosen documents about at least two famous women from Hawai`i, Queen Liliu`okalani, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai`i, and Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman in Congress. So there seemed ample documentation. The results would not be as focused as are Cha's, nor would they be autobiographical. But other of Cha's genres would participate--from document to poem to image.

Here are three images from class groups:


[Kevin W. and No`u R.]


[Jaimie G. and Marcus A.Y.]




[Lyz S. and Kate S.]


Aiko Y. and Davin K. did not do a collage, but Davin sent me a poem; the end goes like this, and combines material from several of the documents as it connects Eve to Pele, childbirth with the volcano, women with bad medical practices perpetrated on their bodies, and the Puritan prurience of American culture.

Inheritance


Always this odd device designed for women,
claimed away from women,
from the beginning;
Akamu possessing Ewa from the start
Inheritance of body by body,
chest of chest,
rib of rib:

She da wahine for me.
Her bones, come from my bones,
Her skin, come from my skin.
Dis one, I goin give her da name ‘Wahine’
Cuz God wen take her outa me, one guy.”


The oneness from the separateness,

claiming the body that stands apart from the body,
and yet is still made whole in da eyes of Ke Akua.

This dalkon shield, extended limb.
IUD, body’s I.E.D. waiting for implosion.
Tampon in my cleft, waiting to cleave me twain.

This shield of dalkon, increased member.
IUD, I.E.D. of implosion—waiting in carnate.
Plug in my column, waiting, hurtling into
tampon death.

Always dichotomizing, categorizing, probing with instruments.

Midwives displaced:
no holistic body, space embraced by women.
Only the “draped” area.
The cold stirrups.
Vulcanologists probing and assessing the pahoehoe folds
with aplomb, excess.

Cold speculum of devices into Pele, raw.


And now Aiko send me hers:

A substantial and valuable part of the science of volcanology is based on simple but careful observations.

What is reported felt:
SO2, H2O, CO2,
all of which are clear and colorless gases,
rates of dense white plumes and thin, wispy blue ones,
about one-tenth the diameter of a strand of human hair.

What is reported felt:
SO2, H2O, CO2.
Well-behaved, collated gases
unfurl their flaming hair,
red and colorless glass.

When the volcano ”reinflates.”
When?



The concrete details:
Newly remodeled, top to bottom, custom cabinets and remnants of state-of-the-art appliances.
2/2/2, w/d & over 600 sf of decking w/panoramic view of
the rubble of the Koolau mountains
--in excess.



And the people far and wide gathered
And the people came together and held hands
And silence was lost in the voids after words
And the obligatory strains swell to a crescendo:

ALOHA OE! ALOHA OE!
Unfurl the banners and let them wave
over this land, our inheritance.

We stand and we sway
We shed tears
strong in our convictions
to conspire or act alone.



I didn't write anything, but made a list of the women I found in the documents:

Pele
Eve
Queen Liliu`okalani
Patsy Mink

Eve was the first woman; Pele built the Hawaiian islands from her lava streams; Queen Liliu`okalani wrote the famous song "Aloha `Oe," and was deposed by American businessmen; Patsy Mink fought the pharmaceutical business, even as she, like Eve, was a first woman and, like Queen Liliu`okalani, she also lost in politics when she ran for the Senate against the old boy establishment. Like Cha's mother and the Korean heroines and Joan of Arc, they are part of a typology of heroic women. There's something there. And marvelous languages (click the links to the documents and you'll see). And for some strange reason, my imagined piece ended with a speaker looking out over Kane`ohe bay from the house listed for sale and chanting T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Since the class ended, I've heard from two of the students who teach English 100, who say they want to adapt the exercise for their classes. Students are often stunned by the need to make an argument, lacking the material structure on which to hang their ideas. An exercise like this one shows them how they can create narratives by putting documents in different sequences.

__________


Tinfish Press has just published a new chapbook by Gizelle Gajelonia entitled 13 Ways of Looking at TheBus. This often funny collection of 13 poems revises significant American poems, even as it chronicles rides on Honolulu's bus system. Gizelle has an amazing rewrite of The Waste Land that places the poem in Hawai`i; it likely influenced my speaker's chant at the top of Lulani Drive in Kane`ohe.

A Trip on TheBus: Monday, December 21, 2009

I've taught "Poetry & the City" a couple of times now. Better to call it "Poetry & Place," since many of my students are not from Honolulu, but from places like Whitmore Village, an old pineapple plantation community outside of Wahiawa, or from Kane`ohe. One of the assignments that works best is to get students to take photographs of the place they live; the only stipulation is that they not be in any way touristic. Then they are to add captions to the photographs and post them on the class blog. We begin to get a sense of the histories of places that way; I remember one student from Waipahu who took a picture of an old general store that has, in recent years, become a Samoan church. Another assignment that proved even more valuable was to take a public bus (TheBus) and write about the experience. (This assignment has since yielded a forthcoming bus map publication of literature about TheBus and an honors thesis by Gizelle Gajelonia, namely Stop Requested.) Once of Gizelle's best ideas, that the bus is like a cathedral, never even made it into her work. Tinfish Press will be publishing her chapbook, Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus, in the Spring.

Like many of my assignments, the bus exercise was one I had not done myself. With very few exceptions, I have not taken buses since my first year in Hawai`i, which was 1990. But today my husband decided we would travel to Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu from our home in Temple Valley as a way to show the kids how to get around. He's been working with our son on taking the bus for several months now. So we took the 65 to Bishop and King Streets, then a 20 bus to Ala Moana. On the way back, we took the 57A to Alakea and King Street, and then the 65 back to Ahuimanu. Between trips, we spent time at what used to be the biggest shopping mall in the United States, where a manic counter-recession seems to be occurring.

The bus leaves Hui Iwa Street and winds around, only to stay put next to the McDonald's for 13 minutes or so. Then it goes down Kahekili toward the Hygienic Store, a local landmark notorious for its reputed drug market, then right onto Kamehameha Highway, past Hee`ia Pier and Point and down the coast back to Kane`ohe. Once through Kane`ohe, the bus turns up the Pali Highway and into town (Honolulu). We were seated toward the back of this bus where

--a young man in jacket and sunglasses was chatting up a young woman in tank top and skirt; his voice was slurred as if he'd been in an accident or had been drinking--he talked about drinking, something about the cops, too--and he showed her a picture of a woman he'd liked on his cell phone, and later a video off his laptop. Another young man sat at the back with slatted earrings through his pierced ears, on and off his phone. After he left, another young man sat in back, talking on his phone, while the young woman fell asleep.

--near Times in Kane`ohe a man ran to get on the bus. White, in his 30s, with a neat mustache, he was carrying a large military backpack and a camouflage jacket, which he put in the seat in front of my husband and daughter. He fumbled for change, turning down Bryant's offer of a quarter, and returned to his seat. He pulled out a sushi roll, the kind with the plastic wrap around the nori, and ate it. Then he pulled out a quart of milk and started to drink it, and then he pulled out a plate lunch and started to eat that. Somewhere in there, Sangha pointed to the seat next to the man who was hungry, and I spotted the nose of a dog that had a bone in its mouth, just peeking out of the backpack. It was a black terrier, to whom the man fed bits of his sushi roll. Then he pulled a brush out of the pack and energetically brushed the dog. Every so often the man would turn to look at the woman in the back (her conversational partner had gotten off at Windward Mall). His eyes were a bit too big, perhaps. There was a story. He got off before us, and the dog, hunting for crumbs on the floor of the bus, almost missed the stop. She was an unneutered animal, looked like she'd had puppies recently.

--Ala Moana Center Makai Food Court: an old white man wearing a Santa hat and a bib wandered around, in his mouth a pacifier. A few minutes later, he came the other direction, a baby bottle hanging from his lips.

--Alakea Street bus stop on the way home. A young man started offering us advice on buses to take, thinking we were tourists. My husband promptly started reciting the bus schedule chapter and verse. The young man was from Kailua, on his way to the airport to try to get a job pushing old people around in wheelchairs, being "friendly to people," which he said he always was. But the guy in headphones and a slant cap pacing back and forth ("fucking going up and down," he said) made him nervous. The guy was overweight, appeared too old for his gangster get-up, hardly dangerous. A homeless woman sat down, asked the young man what he did for a living. He said nothing right now. "Have you trained yourself?" she asked. Yes, he did handyman work, he replied, but business was slow. "Is it Easter?" the woman asked, chomping on ice from a Starbucks plastic cup, when she wasn't taking a drag off her cigarette. She wore a black dress with floral patterns on it, could have been on break from work. "No, it's near Christmas," the man answered, then got on his bus to Hickam/Airport, along with the gang banging wannabe. The woman wandered away, talking about Easter.

--A woman with Down Syndrome, her hair curly and graying, got on at that bus stop. During the trip she leafed through a photo album (family pictures?), smiled, and stuck her hands in her mouth, as if to retrieve something she'd lost there. She got off in Kane`ohe, and trudged beside the bus, likely heading home.

--[late addition]: two overweight teen-age boys get on the bus at Windward Mall. One pulls out a paperback (looks like sci-fi fantasy, something about thieves) and starts to read it. The other guy sits with a Borders bag on his lap. The first guy says, "I can't believe you don't like to read--always watching the tv! The first book I read all the way through was a few years ago, and I loved it!" He settles into his book, while his friend sits looking out the window.

--The bus wandered back over the Pali, beside the golf course, through Kane`ohe town, and down Kam Highway. A white-haired guy in broad brimmed hat and swim trunks got off the bus with a six-pack slung over his shoulder in a plastic supermarket bag. Bryant said, "going fishing!" When I remarked that he lacked a fishing pole, Bryant said, "perfect." The bus turned left at the Hygienic Store, went as far as the sewage plant, then took a right. On Hui Ulili Street, two women got on, one older, not terribly mobile, the other tall, lanky, assisting her. The second woman had large upper arms, a long heavily powdered face and bleached blonde curls; her legs were large, thick. We smiled as I and the family exited the bus to walk home.

A friend who came through Honolulu recently noticed the homeless problem on the way in from the airport. There are Vietnam Vets begging on Nimitz Highway under the H1 freeway; there are homeless people in tents in parks from Makaha to Kapiolani Park and beyond. Today's trip did not offer witness to that level of struggle. But it did offer much else, the promise of stories that might explain something, not only about the person seated in TheBus, but about the larger community. I look forward to my next trip on public transit and to next semester's Poetry Workshop (if it makes...) which will concentrate on poems of place.

Communities of Destination 2: "Radicant Aesthetics" (Nicolas Bourriaud)

[sign by Lian Lederman]

I'm off to Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) soon to talk about Tinfish and to give a couple of readings from my own work (as it were). So the blog provides a way station to thinking toward the issues I want to touch on there, issues of editing and location, language and translation, networks and distribution (the former always easier than the latter). I apologize to readers for the inevitable repetitions involved in thinking about how Tinfish books talk to one another, and why those conversations might matter.

Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant provides an apt field for thinking these issues through, or if not "through," then wandering around these issues rather than blundering into them. As I did in my last post, I will use Bourriaud's book as a generative backboard for thoughts about Tinfish. Contemporary wisdom, like so many things, suffers from a short lifespan, fly-like, and precarious. One of Bourriaud's key words is "precarious": "the lifespan of objects is becoming shorter and shorter," he writes, as consumerist culture feeds off the disposable thing, rather than the heirloom. (During my recent trip to California, I heard tomatoes referred to as "heirloom," which seemed to be a good thing, though it suggests old age and attics to me.) In the art economy, old things can still be precious: I think of the old printing machines at the California Center for the Book, or the recycled materials Tinfish uses to make some of our covers.

As with all such states, precariousness has its down-side, and its up. Bourriaud refers to "a positive precariousness, or even an aethetic of uncluttering, of wiping the hard disk" (85). Hard to see the positive when the hard disk being wiped involves one's job or one's way of working or one's traditions of knowing. But if that wiping can become a process of "editing" (99) in art, rather than one of random and violent cutting, perhaps we're onto something. In any case, Bourriaud suggests an aesthetic of wandering, in which the artist becomes what he terms a "semionaut." Which brings me to bullet-points (not to instigate a violence on my own text here) about Tinfish Press.

On wandering itself:

***Our next full-length book, Remember to Wave, by Kaia Sand, includes a guided walk through Portland, Oregon. This is a walk that she has taken, and led. The walk is at once across the contemporary city and into its (hidden) past, so that the observer is shown not simply what is there but also ghostly presences of what was. The histories of Japanese-American internment and of African-American containment emerge out of the city as she walks it, and as her words walk across documents related to these historical moments. Barbara Jane Reyes walks San Francisco in Poeta en San Francisco, encountering homeless Vietnam vets, malign presences to her as a racialized Filipina-American, but living reminders of a past Americans largely want hidden. Hazel Smith's long poem, "The Body and the City," from The Erotics of Geography, presents a woman who walks the streets of a city, seeing it in various ways--as dream, as deconstruction, as "post-tourism," as a female geography, and as a historical place (she reaches back to the medieval city).



***For those who do not walk through the city, there are those who are transported on TheBus in poems by Ryan Oishi and Gizelle Gajelonia (in her parody of Stevens in Tinfish #19 and in a forthcoming chapbook, 13 Ways of Looking at TheBus). There are the diasporic poets, Yunte Huang, Linh Dinh, Caroline Sinavaiana, each engaged in an archeology of cultures and possible selves.

Bourriaud quotes Claude Levi-Strauss: "'a journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time and in the social hierarchy'" (123). A journey in space is also a trip into memory. The time-tourist also has responsibilities.

On language / translation:

***The precariousness of local languages, as evidenced in Lisa Kanae's Sista Tongue and Lee Tonouchi's Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture. Languages that travel, but with difficulty: Jacinta Galea`i's Aching for Mango Friends, about a girl who moves back and forth from Samoa, where her family is from, to Seattle, where she is educated in the American way. (She does this with an awareness of the problems, but without the bitter nostalgia that characterizes some post-colonial literature.) Craig Santos Perez recently reviewed the chapbook and commented on the use of Samoan words and phrases within the English text:

"Although some may read this as an exclusion, I read it as an intimate inclusion into another’s native space. Once I surrender the desire to translate, the untranslated naturalizes the foreignness of my relation to the characters. Semoana does not worry about others not understanding; instead, she speaks Samoan because she is Samoan, affirming that she needs to translate her cultural identity only to herself."

***And so the refusal to translate, which one finds more strongly yet in Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco. I sense that she is now more willing to translate, but respect her decision in this book not to. Extended sections in Tagalog and Baybayin, as well as frequent "lapses" into Spanish, create a difficult reading environment that (at least in echo) enacts some of the difficulties of colonialization and immigration.

***Second language English, like Linh Dinh's, or that found in Goro Takano's new BlazeVox book. The barriers to comprehension are smaller than those in BJR's book, but still pronounced. So that the reader much do the work of translation from near-native to native-English. Like riding on cobblestones; you get there, but not so smoothly or easily.

***Hazel Smith's "translations." "My heritage, though you may not realize it, is tangalisingly mixed. I have a few loose ends in Lithuania. But I've never travelled there, and couldn't find my way around if I did" (27). As Bourriaud puts it, "In a human space now completely surveyed and saturated, all geography becomes psychogeography" (120), or an erotics thereof. Paul Naylor's Jammed Transmission, an effort by an American poet to communicate across time and space with a Japanese Zen Buddhist text, contains in its very title, an admission that such transmissions / translations are never direct.

***Craig Santos Perez's "hesitations." In from unincorporated territory, translates Chamorro words, but often only a page or two after they appear in the text. The reader, who reads about an island in the ocean, must circulate back and forth in waves to read the book well. There is no linear progress in this book, which is made of intersecting sections and in which languages come into contact, but are not immediately comprehended.

These are linguistic translations, which aid and stand-in for larger translations of culture. (I have not addressed the "translations" that occur when artists add to Tinfish books, creating a first response to their content.) These are much harder to accomplish by publishing a small number of books; the weight of representation is heavier on our three books from Samoa (all of them by writers who have spent much of their lives in the United States) than it is on our California books. Translation is not a given, and this is one problem Tinfish faces. To what extent do our American readers "get" the books we publish from elsewhere. Do what extent do _I_ get them? Conversely, what can be gained through this not-getting, if it is respectful and alert to possibility, rather than to closing down. To movement and multiplicity, in other words, not to sitting still? Open questions all! That these books are all engaged in a similar wandering (whether geographical, linguistic, spiritual, sexual) only makes the books and their reception more complex.

***There is also a more comic wandering, typified by Gizelle Gajelonia's parodic translations of American poems by Stevens, Bishop, Crane, Ashbery and others, onto O`ahu's geography and into its Pidgin idiom. This inter-textual wandering posits O`ahu as the hub, and American poetry as the periphery. Wallace Stevens flies into HON and is transformed into a local poet. No more a 747-poet, intruding on another space and happily flying away to write about it with authority, Stevens is kidnapped, his language taken, translated, and he is then welcome into the local. Appropriations reversed, fresh networks created--not out of newness, but the circulation of the old according to new weather patterns.

On islands:

Finally, for now. Toward the end of the book, Bourriaud posits an island model for thinking, post-post-modernism and post-post-colonialism: "a new configuration of thought that no longer proceeds by building great totalizing theoretical systems but by constructing archipelagoes. A voluntary grouping of islands networked together to create an autonomous entity, the archipelago is the dominant figure of contemporary culture" 185). Not all islands are so voluntarily networked, of course, as evidenced in the uses to which Guam, the Philippines, and Hawai`i have been put. But Bourriaud, ever the optimist, would use the island map as evidence of a "struggle for diversity," rather than a shutting down, colonial-style. These are islands as openings, not islands as bastions, fortifications for someone else's armies. "The alter-modern is to culture what altermondialisation is to geopolitics, an archipelago of local insurrections against the official representations of the world" (185-86).

If we can take this model as our own, as prospect if not as fact, as hope if not as clear possibility, then Tinfish is one of its most literal enactments, wandering as it does in a Pacific archipelago characterized by local resistances to globalization, but also by poets' efforts to circulate, walk, migrate, take TheBus ceaselessly, make networks between books, between languages, between cultures.

__________

Barbara Jane Reyes has posted a third installment of statements by small press editors on Harriet's blog. Links to the other two can be found at the end of my previous post.

Creative Writing (in) Composition

My colleague Daphne Desser invited me to be on a panel later today about using creative writing in the composition classroom (other panelists will be Brandy Nalani McDougall, Tom Gammarino and Steve Goldsberry). It occurs to me that I have used less creative writing in my English 100 classroom in recent years than I did when I started teaching. Perhaps this is a signal to remedy that jolt toward the utterly analytical.

I wear two very different hats when I teach comp and creative writing. In the one classroom I tell my students that they can leave no opening or ambiguity in their writing; it is not my job to work to understand them. They must deliver the goods, make an argument, explain how it works, offer detail, and then close the thing down with a conclusion that answers the "So what?" question. In the other, I ask students to leave openings for their readers, to make them do the work; I tell them the poem must provide an analogue experience. I often ask them to chop the endings off their poems, those places where they try to tell the reader what just happened, lest they missed the point.

So why link these two kinds of writing at all, then? Probably because both kinds of writing require precision of observation and notation. If you cannot tell someone how to get from one place to another (UH to Revolution books, for example), you can't expect her to be able to argue or imagine her way there, or to buy the books for your course. And, if you are someone who has trouble setting pen to paper, key stroke to pixel, then your troubles are not solved simply by shifting genres. And, if you can't shift genres, styles, aesthetics, then you won't become a better writer.

Observation and elaboration




--Give your students each a postcard of a Hawaiian fish. Ask them to write detailed descriptions of their fish (without using its name!). Use plain language and be as exact as possible. Collect the postcards and redistribute them. Ask students to read their descriptions; the student who holds the image of the fish described then speaks up.

--Have them revise their descriptions by using metaphors to describe their fish. Each part of the fish should be compared to something else in the world. (I'm always astonished at the ways astronomers and physicists describe the world for those of us who do not speak their technical languages; invariably, they pull the arrows of metaphor out of their conceptual quivers.)

--Now rewrite the fish paragraph in the voice of one of the following: a fisherman, a cook, a naturalist, an ecologist, an artist, a child, a Martian, etc. This gives a sense of how one's perspective changes one's writing, one's way of perceiving the world.


Perspective and argument: Place




The question remains: how to use these skills of observation toward an argument? Given that students often have a hard time generating prose and constructing an argument, collage work can provide a stepping stone toward the full-throated original essay. Here are some steps toward an essay on place. Assignment: compose a collage about the place you are from. Use three points of view to create this collage. Reading: Lisa Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue, which combines memoir (in Pidgin), research paper (in standard English) and documentation. Here are possible viewpoints from which to work:

--Ask students to go take photographs of the place they live. Advise them that these photographs must not be touristic, but must show the place as they live in it. Have them post these photos on a class blog, along with short captions.

--Ask students to take TheBus through the place they are from and to take notes on what they see and hear.

--Have students do research on the place they live. They can go to resources like Sites of Oahu, which gives detailed histories of the land, and to local libraries and archives. They can xerox relevant documents for future use.

--Ask students to interview a family member about the place they live in. This works best for students whose grandparents live with them, for example, so that there are family histories in constant circulation.

--Have students write autobiographical pieces on their "small kid time" in the place they are from.

Once they've composed these pieces, each of which could be an essay on its own, ask them to make an argument about the place they're from, and to present that argument by cutting and pasting the resources they have on hand. They can clip from interviews, documents, photographs, descriptions. They can do this either on paper or on the computer, depending on their preference.

Hearing and Thinking about Language

Developing an ear in students who have not heard much language read above a dull monotone is difficult. I have students do a lot of in-class reading, and stop them when their voices flat-line, demanding that they put some energy into execution. The best way to develop an ear is to read and to watch Shakespeare videos, but one can also give in-class style exercises.

--I was about to write that I can never find Raymond Queneau's book on style when I want it, but now I see it's a google book. So here it is! [Oops--this is just a preview.] The very idea of this book is marvelous, that you can take a simple story and write it dozens and dozens of times in different ways. It reminds me of Bernadette Mayer's writing exercises, which stretch student poets out like taffy as they strive to follow arbitrary rules like "write in the mood least congenial to writing." That Queneau's story is about taking a bus means that you could pair this exercise with the bus travel element of the collage piece. And you could also ask students to read the forthcoming "map" from Kahuaomanoa Press, which contains writing about TheBus.

--Translation exercises are wonderful. Have students read a poem by Lois-Ann Yamanaka from Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre and then translate it into standard English. Or give students a poem by Ezra Pound ("The Return") or any other canonical writer and ask them to translate it either into other words or into Pidgin, Hawaiian, Japanese, any language they know or are learning. Then ask them to translate it back. Questions of vocabulary and diction come up inevitably and often with striking humor in these exercises.


NATHAN KAGEYAMA (from Tinfish #3)


Stay Come

Spock em, dey stay come; auwe, spock da scayed
Movaments, an' da luau feet,
Stay all twis' an' kooked
Walkin' all jag!

Spock em, dey stay come, one afta da udda
Scayed, haf moe moe--haf not
Wen even spook da snow all white lidat
An' soun' stay in da bareeze
An' haf stay turn da udda way;

Was da "kooks-wit-wings,"
Safe!

Kahunas wit da flyin' kine Nikes!
Dey get de silva dogs
Smellin' da hauna eya!

Ai sos! Ai sos!
Dey was da fas' mokes

Dose da shaap-smellin';
Dose was da obake of blood

Cruisin' on da leash,
Shmoke dose leash-buggas


[after Ezra Pound's "The Return"]


I'll have more to say after the panel conversation this afternoon, but now I have something to say there!

_______________________

[additions]
Some highlights of the panel, after the fact:

Tom Gammarino read and talked his paper,"Class Borders: Creative Writing in Freshman Composition," using the word "robust" to talk about the separation between composition and creative writing in the academy. He also talked about "torturing sonnets."

He had some juicy quotes by composition experts to say that fiction is useless to comp, and that there is no place of CW in composition.

His thesis was that CW does not fit with composition only if you claim that CW is pure self-expression and composition is not. He called this the "self-expressive fallacy." Then he talked about how essays are stories designed to persuade the reader of something.

Steve Goldsberry said he would tell us everything he knows about writing in five minutes. There are three kinds of writing: description, narration and exposition. Writers need to use images from the physical world. Write like you talk. The first rule is to entertain. Sentences are like jokes; the best part comes at hte end. Every title is a poem. Golden fishooks. To make a good title use oxymorons, sounds, messed up cliches, themes like sex, classic phrases. The end of the page must have a cliff hanger. "The naked man"

Brandy Nalani McDougall talked about using automatic writing as a way to release students from their fears of assessment (among other things). She set us up to do four minutes of non-stop writing, during which time she said nine words, including "light" and "sculpted" and "church" and "gravel." She talked about ways students can then supply their own words to the mix, or do the writing on their own, without the prompts. My own free-write started from the fact that my lei (which fell apart throughout the colloquium) was cold, and somehow ended with Hart Crane.

I was last because of my alphabetical challenge. I said what the blog says, above.

TheBus as literary vehicle

[Tortilla & "Stop Requested"]



This semester my honors student, Gizelle Gajelonia, wrote a book of poems about TheBus, that awkward system of transportation that circles O`ahu island, takes workers to Waikiki and ferries tourists out of it, bears the word Aloha on its dirty metal skin. Over the course of a couple of years, Gizelle has seen the world through the bus's windows; when she took a Poetry & the City course from me a couple of years back, she had a notion that buses and cathedrals were the same. Naves, you know. Indulgences. Out of discoveries like that one, she has built herself a monster thesis in which TheBus is simply one vehicle among many. Her bus moves her from Wahiawa, where she grew up, to the university; other buses perform the Circle Isle; a metaphorical bus moves between literary stops. The bus contains intertexts: voices of Filipino workers and those of Whitman, Williams, the Bible. She has chosen to inhabit the poems of others, carefully replacing their references with her own, creating a mix that is almost always funny, but sometimes quite grim. While a stop is requested at the end, these poems never refrain. The wheels on this bus just go round and round!

Last summer, while teaching in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, an odd city inelegantly shared by residents and ex-pats (many of whom own striking houses, one of which we lived in for a month, with fountain, garden, and gardener . . .), I read John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual" at the open mic. Ashbery's poem is about Guadalajara, a city he had never visited. The details are as ravishing as they are fake. Colors, moods, chatter, all figure into his hallucination of tourism, which reminds any long-time Hawai`i resident of dreams provoked in others by the tourist bureau. Whether or not Ashbery intended to criticize the bad art of tourism, he succeeded deftly. And now, along comes Gizelle Gajelonia of Wahiawa, to write "The Thesis," her take on Ashbery's take on Mexico.

"As I sit looking out of a window on the 52 Wahiawa Circle Island
I wish I did not have to write a thesis about TheBus"

answers Ashbery's own:

"As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal."

From instruction manual to thesis is not far to go, if you're on the right bus. And so Gizelle imagines her visit to Columbia's campus ("The school I most wish to attend, and would likely not attend, in New York City"), remarking on WASPS and on the "Jewish boy with the book, he is in love too; / His angst shows it." Her tour of Columbia is as extensive as Ashbery's of Guadalajara, as rife with exoticism and stereotypes as his:

"We have seen street smarts, book smarts, and the smart that is not smart enough for Ivy League
What more is there to do, except apply? And that I cannot do.
And as "Stop Requested" echoes through the 52 bus, I remember that I am but only a second-rate poet from Wahiawa,
So I open my eyes and turn my gaze
Back to the honors thesis that has made me dream of Columbia."

This is perhaps the most extreme of Gizelle's poems, this parody of a parody of an instruction manual qua tourist guidebook. Among the other poems she inhabits, hollows out, and refills, are Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" ("13 Ways of Looking at TheBus"), Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" ("The Mongoose"), Hart Crane's "The River," and closer to home, Eric Chock's "Tutu on the Curb" and Jill Yamasawa's "What We Get." And then there is "The Waste Land," which Gizelle mocks and then adopts for the voice of Hawai`i's last queen, Liliuokalani, who was deposed by American businessmen:


I sat on my bed
Thinking, with my people behind me,
Shall I sign the proposition handed to me?
The monarchy is falling down falling down falling down
O ka halia`loha ihiki mai,
Ke hone ae nei ku`u manawa
O oe no ka`u ipon aloha,
A lo ko e hana nei.
It is for them that I would give the last drop of my blood;
it is for them that I would spend everything belonging to me.
Aloha `oe, aloha `oe, aloha `oe.

I don't think that any of the terms Gizelle or I or the thesis committee came up with do these lines justice. This is not strict parody, or translation, or revision. This is the Queen entering the body of a poem by a poet grieving for the loss of his tradition--which is the tradition that did hers in. Irony doesn't say it either. Eliot's poem has been ghosted, re-appropriated. His poem is pure form, and Gizelle's borrowed words fill that form beautifully and sorrowfully.





[Tortilla & "Eulogies"]



Lyz Soto, who runs YouthSpeaks Hawai`i, wrote an extended chapbook called "Eulogies" about her late ex-husband's schizophrenia, their relationship, his suicide, her coming to terms (if such is possible). She included several maps: a map of the Atlantic as a brain; a map of Belgium's (he was Belgian) cities with parts of the brain; a map of schizophrenia itself. What links Lyz's work with Gizelle's is that, like Gizelle, Lyz began by inhabiting another poem. She was quite taken with Adrienne Rich's Atlas of the Difficult World, which was assigned on the syllabus (and discussed while I was away, alas). So her poem began as a possession by and of that poem. Over several months, Lyz wrote, rewrote, and re-re-rewrote the poem until it became "her own," insofar as any poem can be one's own. It is also very much her late husband's poem. Because schizophrenia is a disease as much as a way of seeing the world, Lyz footnoted the chapbook, including scientific work, as well as poems she was reminded of. And then the footnotes because a place for response to her call; they too became part of the poetic linguistic fabric.

One of my favorite sections runs along the right margin; I cannot do it justice here on blog-spacing. The words are these:

Did you know
there are over five hundred
waves of red?
I see them.
Letters written across
bodies,
they are speaking
even when they are silent.

Your heart has ten shadows
of red.
Mercury
irony oxide
You are scarlet.


And finally, my two sections of 273: Creative Writing & Literature, made chapbooks and other projects as containers for collages of their work for the semester. Here is a book made by Sam Hatfield out of coconut skin. It is but one of the beautiful and funny creations strewn across my offices' floors. Others include a kleenex box, a trash can, a box carved with the author's name, a score book, a bubble gum dispenser, a picture frame, a manapua box, and more!





["Roots & Branches"]

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.