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.

Language Acquisition: _Dictee_ and the "Radhika Book, 2005"

When I speak my native language, English, I eagerly await error. John Shoptaw wrote about the "crypt words" Ashbery employs to wrench surprises out of pat assumptions, to find gold in the lead of cliche. Thus "borders" become "boarders" and one can be caught trying to cross a fellow boarder as easily as by the Rio Grande. My mother thought "ticket to ride" began with the word "chicken," which amuses me to this day. "To air is human" I saw the other day in an on-line publication. But when I try to write or speak in French, which I sometimes do, I anguish over any slip of the tongue (well, in French it's usually not a "slip," because my tongue lacks the solid palate of sound equaling sense). I want to get every syllable right (I wrote "write," but that takes me to an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle, which is probably not where I want to be now, except that I'm thinking about the loss of a language). When I told my French family decades ago (when my French was good) that "j'essuie donc je suis" (I was wiping the table at the time), they thought I was making a mistake; I knew I was making a pun. But that's as close as I ever got to playing with that language consciously. These days, I dream of being as true as a ruler in French, even as my skill is as wobbly as an old tape measure.

Tomorrow I teach Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. It's a book I very much admire, but never quite get the hang of teaching. This time a record of my daughter's past has given me fresh access to the book, to its record of learning a "foreign" language, of taking down dictation (which aims to be perfect, no errors!). At the beginning of Cha's book, we hear a dictee in progress; the paragraph being read is very simple. At least half of what is said involves instructions about punctuation: "point" "virgule" "guillemets" "ouvre" "ferme": "period" "comma" "quotations" "open" "close." Clearly, this is not the acquisition of language as transparent meaning, but acquisition of the mechanics of grammar, with just a few words slipped in for good measure: "Elle venait de loin" or "She had come from a far," and a few others. By the end one sees the puncutation coming from a far, not the "she" who is merely a pronoun. Having just read Ashbery, we know all about those pronouns that refer mostly to themselves as words.

The text is replete with typos, errors of all sorts, both conscious and unconscious (we think we can tell them apart). Sometimes what appears to be an error is not, comes to us from that other language. So "DISEUSE" means "speaker," but in the way "FCUK" looks like something else, this word looks like "disease" or "disuse," and so the word intends to be read, as the language itself has intention, translating from the French to the English in such a way as to make more than a simple transfer between them. The word is an immigrant, crossing those "borders" that might also be "boarders." The "she" "mimicks [sic] the speaking" here early in the book. And then she says, in italics:

It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void. (3)

Her efforts to speak English are very physical, and quite painful. "From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. She swallows once more . . . Endless drone, refueling itself. Autonomous. Self-generating. Swallows with last efforts last wills against the pain that wishes it to speak." The "it" is at once the "she" and her "neck," the "tongue," the machinery of speech. No transparency here, only gears and levers and an ungreased engine.

Much of the drama of Dictee, of course, is that coming into language, at once painful, political (she is not learning her mother tongue here, but bearing the story of education, imperialism--her mother's forced use of Japanese, while living in China--the languages that alter us in ways we don't mean to be altered). And yet, translate this into French, or any other language:

1. I want you to speak.
2. I wanted him to speak.
3. I shall want you to speak.
4. Are you afraid he will speak?
5. Were you afraid they would speak?
6. It will be better for him to speak to us.
7. Was it necessary for you to write?
8. Wait till I write. (8)

That last line is marvelous. "Wait till I write." No longer is someone demanding that another speak; instead, the writer asserts her power to make sense on her own terms, at her own time, even inside of the language learning exercise.

The other day my husband found an old composition book, a blue marbled one, with the words "Radhika Book (2005)" on the cover. Such are the delights of living in a persistently messy house. I opened it to find notes I'd taken in the early months of Radhika's life with us. We adopted her in December 2004 when she was three years old, and traveled from Nepal to Hawai`i with her as she spoke Nepali to us and we English to her. In those early days, Radhika spent several hours a day with a Nepalese woman who spoke her native language to her. But quickly it became clear that Radhika had opted out of her native language and insisted on speaking English, even to Aunty Khusum. When we left day care and got on the choked freeway, she would yell "Traffics!" from the back seat. The day I took her out of Aunty Khusum's care to put her in a place closer to our home, I felt the incredible weight of her language loss. But Radhika had other things in mind.

First entry:

R points to the stone Buddha.
I say, "Buddha," "Buddha's hands." She says "mouth."
R points to a smaller statuette, also Buddha.
R thrusts a hot wheel truck at me, says, "Buddha!"

Knowing her as I know her now, I suspect she knew full well that she was being funny. But then, who knows what I thought; I mostly wrote down our conversations, not usually my reactions to them.

There is my question about what she sang that day with Aunty. She did sing songs, she said. Which ones? "Chicken!" She would see a temple in Bakhtapur when we left a walk-up apartment in Honolulu. She would run into a class to look for the "durdle" and the "peesh" that Sangha's teacher kept in aquariums. In early February, 2005, she was at the noun blurt stage of English; by the end of that same month, she was creating sentences: "I'm go home" and "I'm close door" and then in early March, when she switched to Aunty Rose up the hill, "Radhika fish no!" and "Radhika Sangha dinner no!" When asked if she liked a little boy at day care, she responded, "No, Keoni very hitting." Then on the 28th of March, a curious comment in my hand: "As she learns more English, she gets harder to understand." By May, she was saying "I have flower for you hanging." And in June, "I don't want chicken. I want other eating."

A constant, from the third to the last page of this composition book, is Radhika's obsession with paper. In February, she was calling her drawings "books." That same month she wanted to take paper to day care: "Tomorrow Khusum paper no!" In March, she wanted to draw: "Mommy paper no. Barney paper." (How that purple dinosaur entered into her desire for paper I'll never remember.) In May, there was a "picture for you hanging." These days, paper and pens are constantly disappearing into her hands. She draws and writes cards, practices her signature, leaves traces of herself everywhere.

That summer, we spent a month in Madrid, where Spanish entered her world (she has proved to have a real gift at picking up languages); there, she and Sangha invented their own language, which they called "Melaconese," a mix of English with Spanish and Hawaiian sounds. By then, I'm not sure how much of her native language she remembered; like other children, her gift at language acquisition was matched by a gift at language loss. Where that loss takes her, I can't say. "Sang. Encre" (65)? Following Timothy Yu, will she find that "a model of how blood--the basis of race and nation--can be the product of writing rather than its basis" (134)? What she will think of that ghost language when she's older I can't imagine. But one thing that binds us together is our love of paper, pen, and pixel. "Wait till I write"!

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford UP, 2009.


In Fall, 1992, I taught Ron Silliman's The Chinese Notebook to a class of exceptional undergraduates at UH. Even in the years before cell phones, ipods, laptops, all the many paraphernalia of distraction, students had no trouble with Silliman's parataxes; their disjointed lives matched his torqued new sentences in a syncopated but exact rhythm. At the end of the course, I required each student to write a meditation on poetry in the form used by one of our authors. Several students wrote their own versions of Silliman's Wittgensteinian propositions. I best remember the title of one: "The Chinese-Italian Notebook." The shock I felt at receiving this essay came from the way the student had taken a title that refers to material (the Chinese notebook), and used it to mark his own ethnicity. The student's nationalities, as we say in Hawai`i, were Chinese and Italian.

Timothy Yu's new book addresses questions of race and Language writing and does two important things with them. First, he historicizes them. Then, he makes of that history a compelling argument about parallel avant-garde movements, both of them grounded in protest movements of the sixties, both existing on the margins of 1970s poetry, both entering the mainstream from the 1980s forward. I am most interested in what ethnic and experimental writing have to say to one another when placed side by side, or inter-leaved (I might credit this student's title with at least some of the impetus to start Tinfish Press in 1995). But Yu writes that his “interest lies in the vexed history of division between the two bodies of work . . . rather than in any argument for their unification” (16). Using a definition of the avant-garde that has less to do with aesthetics than with social groups composed of like-minded artists, Yu argues that Asian American poetry and Language writing formed parallel movements in the 1970s. (This is no critical Poems for the Millennium, in other words.) Both presented themselves in opposition to the mainstream; both were marked by questions of form and racial identity. Both meant to create art out of social groups, and reconstitute the social through the reception of their art.

The way in which Yu gets at his argument is sometimes paradoxical. While he's arguing about groups, his chapters focus on individuals. So Ron Silliman becomes the emblematic Language writer, while Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (by way of an excellent reading of her critics) and John Yau become representative Asian American writers. I'm being a tad simplistic, as Yu's narrative also includes a long discussion of what it meant to create an Asian American culture. Unlike African American culture, which can be defined through music, language, and other features, Asian American culture had to be constructed out of its parts—Korean, Chinese and Japanese (all featured in Yu's book), Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai (all outside the purview of this study). Also outside his study is the vexing realm of Hawai`i's Asian American writing, which is at once part of the larger category and a significant sub-category of its own. That Yu can call Cathy Song's poetry “apolitical” shows that his interest is in Asian American poetry outside Hawai`i, where even titles like “Easter, 1959,” bear a political freight, 1959 being the year of statehood. But I needn't torture that point, as Yu has enough fish to fry. The story of Hawai`i's avant-gardes remains to be written.

As I said, many of the larger issues he raises about social and artistic formations are treated at length in case studies of individual writers. As the prime representative of his avant-garde, Ron Silliman is at once the fool and the hero of Yu's narrative. At his worst, Silliman is the proto-Rush Limbaugh (“the Republican party is the oppressed minority”) of the avant-garde. In a letter to about Messerli's anthology of Language writing, Silliman wrote: “I hope, in choosing your title, that you are aware of the comparability of the phrase 'language poetry' to epithets such as nigger, cunt, kike or faggot” (Letter to Peter Glassgold of New Directions, 58). At his best, Silliman simply and honestly acknowledges (in the face of late-60s and 70s identity politics) that his identity is marked, as well. That Yu occasionally takes Silliman at his word, and assigns “white male subjectivity” to Language writing seems problematic to this reader. Ann Vickery has elucidated arguments about gender issues between members of the Language group, which included Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Susan Howe almost from the beginning. But he's right on target when he argues that “Silliman claims his own position as particular and universal, capable of registering class, race, gender, and sexuality while simultaneously transcending their limits” (50). Language writers such as Charles Bernstein and Barrett Watten, in their own ways, have tackled the issue of identity politics, vis-a-vis their nearly absolute distrust of identity. (This, too, is an historical point; Bernstein has embraced the Jewish American tradition of poetry increasingly as he has gotten older.) That they have often failed to do so persuasively illustrates Yu's point about the “vexed history of division” between movements, if not about future possibilities for migrations across them (more on this in a bit).

Yu is adept at revealing the history of Asian American poetry before Garrett Hongo's The Open Boat (1993), in whose introduction the editor tries to place Asian American writers in a mainstream where prizes are earned (Cathy Song won the 1982 Yale Younger Poet award) and photos accompany the poets professional bios. Yu is also good at reading David Mura against Li Young Lee, in terms of the ways in which they express their senses of Asian Americanness. Suffice it to say that Mura does not do well. He is most drawn to what might be termed “problem poets” like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Yau, both of whom test the categories of Asian American and experimental poetry in fascinating ways. The chapter on Cha is comprised mainly of close-readings of other critics on Cha, from those who treat Dictee as a narrative about nation and ethnicity to those who treat it as an anti-narrative about the failures of identities and histories to cohere. And then Yu comes in to show how these readings apply—but only to parts of the text. His reading locates her as both an Asian American and an experimental writer, if not at the same time. “Dictee charts a kind of path from the Asian American to the experimental and (perhaps) back again . . . Like modes of contemporary political criticism, it cannot escape the tension between the need for a foundation for action and the knowledge that no such foundation can any longer be taken for granted” (137).

John Yau's parodic postmodern work (Yau describes himself as “'the poet who is too postmodern for the modernists and too modern for the postmodernists'” 139) uses Chinese American identity to show that it cannot stand as such. For Yau, Asian American identities are produced by the work, and must remain provisional. It's with Yau one senses Yu is most at home, even if that home is like Ashbery's houseboat, sturdy yet afloat, at the whim of the literary and social winds and waters that surround it.

That writers do not organize themselves around their perceived (and actual) differences has sometimes been a disappointment to me, as editor of Tinfish (and member of an adoptive family). If Hawai`i's avant-gardes have included movements for Local Poetry (the late 1970s Bamboo Ridge group), for Hawaiian poetry (strongest since the mid-90s launching of `oiwi, Hawai`i's literary communities have not so easily welcomed the formalist avant-garde. And yet, as I watch some Tinfish poets, I see writers who can participate in many different groups. Craig Santos Perez is a Chamorro activist, a Latino poet, an indigenous poet, an experimental poet, and so on. Tinfish may be a place where he can be all at once, but the luxury (and responsibility) to move across and through alliances is his. I would be eager to hear what Yu thinks the future of his avant-gardes holds for him and for us. Have we arrived at the place pointed out to us by "The Chinese Italian Notebook," in the era of Obama's own multiple ethnic and political identities? Or have we, as I sometimes fear, simply entered into a new series of divisions, disalliances?