Tinfish in Japan, October 19 and 20

Tinfish in 20/20 Hindsight

I'll have more to say about this soon, but for now an announcement!

In 2020 Tinfish will turn 25. The press has made an argument that experimental poetry in the Pacific not only exists, but exists for important reasons. It's been the project of a lifetime, in many ways. Next year I'm handing the press off to Jaimie Gusman Nagle, a wonderful poet (ANYJAR from Black Radish) and curator (she founded the MIA reading series in Honolulu). I look forward to the process of making this transition with her.

Long Tim Dyke interview on IT'S LIT

Please have a listen. Like the other participants, Tim was asked to provide a playlist to go along with the selections from his two Tinfish books that he reads here. https://www.mixcloud.com/anjoli-roy/ep-89-22419-feat-timothy-dyke-cohosted-with-jocelyn-kapumealani-ng/

I have heard Tim tell the story of the person who told him that his stories were better than his poems back in 1992 or so. I have never heard him say that that person was me! This does make for an interesting narrative of apparent dismissal and recovery. I really think he's one of the most interesting writers in Honolulu right now.

Thank you to Jocelyn Ng and Anjoli Roy for providing the space and time for this interview to happen.

Readings by Tim Dyke in Honolulu, January, 2019

Tim will also be reading at Da Shop in Kaimuki on Jan. 20 at 1 p.m.--from MAGA--

Dear colleagues--

Tinfish Press has several new titles; you can see three of them in the display case by the elevator on the fourth floor. Our very newest is Tim Dyke's MAGA, a wild take on making everything great again. He will be reading soon in the MIA series and at Da Shop in Kaimuki on January 20th (for obvious symbolic reasons).

Please see our website for details: tinfishpress.com.

I'm happy to provide desk copies to any of you who are possibly interested in teaching Tinfish books. While our mission is to feature writing practices and hence to work across categories, we have titles in Asian American poetry; Pacific Islander poetry; poetry in translation (from Japanese and Chinese); political poetry; place-based poetry, and much else. There are also freebies on the website (see especially the Retro Chapbook series).

aloha, Susan

New from Tinfish Press: MAGA, by Tim Dyke

Out in time for the second anniversary . . . see tinfishpress.com for details and a button to order by!

Timothy Dyke lives with parrots in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His chapbook, Awkward Hugger, and his prose poem collection, Atoms of Muses, were published by Tinfish Press.

MAGA
By Timothy Dyke • 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-7329286-1-9 • 60 pages; $15 (pre-pub for $13)
The official publication date will be January 20, 2019, the second anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. We hope to have at least as many sales as there were persons on the Mall in Washington, DC (by official count, or his).

Tim Dyke has a neighbor who loves Trump, and Tim Dyke tried to talk to him. The event did not end well. So he energetically sublimated his asexual gay male rage into this virtuosic and obsessive book, each of whose words begins with an M or an A or a G or an A, and in that order. Like a perverse and be-pompommed cheerleader, Dyke systematically unravels Trump’s slogan about making America great again, reveling over the course of dozens of pages in the poetic gift of a dangerous brand offered to him above the sullen brims of red caps. In this work, form destroys the original intended content with hilarious, angry angst. Who can ever regard the president again after reading hilariously honest lines like these:

Blurbs

Spiralling like an endless string of amino acids, unravelling the DNA of the dark heart of contemporary America, Timothy Dyke’s MAGA just might make protest poetry great again. By turns aggressive, sexy, outraged and outrageous, this is a howl from the shop floor where the nation is “manufacturing atrocity, genocide, amorality.” But rather than buckle under the horror of the presidential pestilence, Dyke decides to “make art; get angry.” We need this tonic. It burns going down, but it will fortify us in the long cold night.
— Stephen Collis

In  MAGA, Timothy Dyke achieves a procedural feat, unspooling the MAGA acronym into an unpredictable, raucous ride where realpolitik meets art on Alchemy Avenue in Alabama and where it’s possible to “Make / America Gyrate Again.” In a book thick with social criticism, Dyke spins language through the political rock tumbler and out pops a searing anthem against unremitting grift in an age of creeping authoritarianism. This is poetry that refuses to accept the status quo with all its Attorneys General, “masculinity addiction,” and ethical atrophy. This is a poetic plea for a refreshed ethical metric.
— Jules Boykoff

The poems in Timothy Dyke’s  MAGA  are tragically hilarious, measuredly intimate, addictive, and positively grim. Dyke is a poet-magician who repeatedly chips away at the acronym so skillfully you almost forget that it stood for anything.  MAGA  reminds me that art is our only hope or, at the very least, a hopeful departure.
— Jaimie Gusman

Excerpt

My ass gives attitude.
Maybe attitude goes
awry more as guys age.

Many axes give aggressive
men access. Go assault
my aging grandmother,

asshole. My air gets annexed.
Metaphor alert. Go away.
My angels got annulled.

Pre-Publication Sale on LONG RIVER, by Yang Jian

Tinfish Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Yang Jian's LONG RIVER. We also have quite a queue of books to come: three responses to Ashbery from the Pacific by Eileen Tabios, Tiare Picard, and one of Australian poets edited by Michael Farrell; MAGA, by Timothy Dyke, and then assorted chaps . . . please buy books from us, and/or send a donation via the handy "donate" button at the bottom of our website: tinfishpress.com

Thank you for your support of small press poetry.

aloha, Susan


PS Click to render large.

FIREWORKS, by Jules Boykoff: Pre-publication sale!

Jules Boykoff is a serious man. Jules Boykoff is a critic of global capitalism, especially as manifest in the Olympic movement, about which he has written three important books. Jules Boykoff is a serious champion of whatever is anti-hegemonic, anti-hierarchical, and anti-patriarchal. Jules Boykoff is a serious family man. Jules Boykoff is also full of what he calls “felonious spunk,” in a poem called “Overdetermination Meets Polysemy in a Two-Fall-Ten-Minute-Time-Limit, Pay-Per-View Cage Match at the Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.” In other words, Jules Boykoff is a wordslinger, his third book of poems offering content strained through many forms (including collages and photographs), but always walking a tightrope between anger, angst, and puckish punsterism. Reminiscent to this reader of the mad tonal shifts of The Death of Stalin, this book shows us a different mode of resistance, one that with mordant wit seeks to destroy the humorless flat acreage of incipient (or actual) fascism.


Please click here for more details and the sale information: https://tinfishpress.com/?projects=book-of-cord-2-2

Attention paid to Leona Chen's new BOOK OF CORD, from Tinfish Press

Shawna Yang Ryan's introduction: http://galatearesurrects2017.blogspot.com/2017/12/book-of-cord-by-leona-chen-1.html

Eileen Tabios's response: http://galatearesurrects2017.blogspot.com/2017/12/book-of-cord-by-leona-chen-2.html

Available from Tinfish Press: https://tinfishpress.com/?projects=book-of-cord

and from Small Press Distribution: https://www.spdbooks.org/AdvancedSearch/DefaultWFilter.aspx?SearchTerm=Leona+Chen

Toward a talk on Albert Saijo

On June 1, my husband and I arrived on the Big Island to stay in Volcano, right around the corner from Albert Saijo's old cottage (now spruced up considerably and suddenly in the open, as the next lot down the loop has been scraped horribly clean). We turned on the rental car radio and heard that Trump was taking the US out of the Paris Climate Accord.


The earth in Volcano is damp, soft, porous, built as it is on old lava fields. My husband spent a morning jacking up an old steam house on our property, because one side had started to sink. It's crumbly ground, composed of dead ferns, o'hia leaves, koa and o'hia trees, and other organic matter, with a layer of moss on stones and tree trunks. The land is incredibly fragile. For a couple days I heard, through the screen of rain and bird song, a loud mechanical noise from about half a mile away. I walked to it, finding a large bulldozer clearing a lot of all vegetation, leaving only the dark brown mud. A couple lots further down the road, another lot was clear, except for chopped off trees standing like the warriors of Xian. Downtown Volcano, if there is one, features a huge new strip mall, with Thai restaurant, hardware store, and a "lodge" being built next to a large parking lot.



We met Albert Saijo in the late 1990s, not too long after his Bamboo Ridge book, OUTSPEAKS, came out. (He was then in his 70s; he died in June, 2011.) He lived in a wood cottage he'd built himself, sat next to the fire and talked and talked to us. He filled notebooks of writing that are now stored down the street at a friends house in plastic tubs. His writing was all-caps in pencil, included drawings and lots of strike-overs and re-dos. There were no poems in these notebooks, though occasionally a square had been drawn around a section of prose. That small acreage became a poem. He wanted his house to be like that of the woodrat--to live no longer than its inhabitant (it would indeed have fallen apart had his widow's second husband not renovated it)--and his poems seem also to aspire to that quality of coming and going. When you open the lid to one of the bins, you feel a blast of moldy air. It's as if the pages are living their own dying.


I want to think a bit about why Saijo was so important to me, and why--more importantly--he ought to be more important to other writers and thinkers. He falls through so many cracks: an Asian-American Beat poet, known mostly for being the basis for George Baso in Jack Kerouac's novel, Big Sur; a prophetic poet who shied away (that's an understatement) from being published; a very talkative hermit. After a brief flirtation with the literary life in the late 1990s, he kept his paradoxes mostly to himself. A group reading in Honolulu with Gary Snyder and Nanao Sakaki was an unrepeated event. There's a grainy video of his trip to Los Angeles to meet with a class and discourse to the birds in Echo Park. Otherwise, hardly anything. There are a few mentions of him in literary critcism: Snyder scholarship acknowledges him; Jacqueline Park mentions him in passing. Saijo's wife, Laura, said people wanted to come interview him, but he always said no.


If we're looking for poets of resistance, then, we might look to one who resisted being a poet. In his pre-1990 work, published posthumously by Tinfish Press as WOODRAT FLAT, he writes an aphorism about being against literature. He resisted the government, society, the law (when he was a northern California marijuana farmer), traditional form and prosody, and other people. He kept to himself. But in his notebooks he preached ("like John Muir's father"--and his own): "I WANT TO STAND UNDER AN OPEN SKY IN A FIELD & I WANT TO EXHORT & LAMENT ORACULATE ENTHUSE INVEIGH SCOLD RAIL STORM & RAGE RAGE ON WAIL & BEWAIL ELEGIZE & LYRICIZE INCITE DECLAIM EXPOSTULATE RAZZ SERMONIZE HARANGUE -- I WANT TO OUTSPEAK -- I WANT TO HOLD FORTH -- RANT & RAVE -- I WANT TO LAY IT ON THICK -- I WANT TO MUCKRAKE -- I WANT TO RHAPSODISE -- I WANT TO PREACH TILL I'M SWEATING" (O 17).

So the man who would stand in a field and rant actually stayed at home and wrote. But the resistances he outlined in his writing of the 1990s and earlier should be significant to us now. Paramount among them were his resistance to consumer culture, the military and its Gulf War (as well as the war that resulted in his own internment at Heart Mountain as a teenager), and the desecration of the land that all of these flaws in American culture involve. He writes as a poet steeped in the American Transcendental tradition--he read John Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman--but he came to the love of solitude through direct political oppression of his family for their race. The rage inspired by FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans drove him into the rain forest. He didn't go there because he had some good ideas, though of course he had those, as well. His hatred of the military came as a result of his three years in Italy with the 442nd; like many young men, he was drafted out of the internment camp and straight into the American army.

What I find most compelling in his resistances are the following:

--The links he makes between military power and the desecration of the land and oceans. This is not a connection I see in most eco-poetry except what's being written now in the Pacific, perhaps.

--The model of opposition to institutions, foremost among them--for our purposes--literature.

--A model of intense observation of what is rather than one of acting in the world. His last notebooks, written when he was old and sick, amounted to notes about the weather outside his cabin. He had stopped meditation practice and simply meditated all the time.

--What George B. Handley calls, in his fine essay, "Laudato si' and the Postsecularism of the Environmental Humanities," "a more spiritual existence": he writes of Pope Francis's encyclical that "His ecumenism as well as his adept revisionary hermeneutics of the same texts and traditions that have often betrayed the environment ought to signal that what makes education and the arts transformative is not content: transformation is not intellectual but experiential." This spiritual education shows us that all things are bound together. While Saijo, unlike the Pope, rejects community and its institutions, he does posit a resistance that effects change through the transformation of the self in the natural world.

I wanted to find a way to enact this resistance, to show Saijo in action, as it were. So I've taken excerpts from Trump's speech taking the US out of the Paris Accord and inserted responses by Albert Saijo from his book published in 1997.

TRUMP : I have just returned from a trip overseas where we concluded nearly $350 billion of military and economic development for the United States, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.  It was a very, very successful trip, believe me.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Thank you.

SAIJO: RANK ON RANK OF HUMANS UNDER INVIDIOUS FORMS OF POLITY FORCED TO GIVE UP THE PRIME OF THEIR LIFE TO ASSEMBLY LINE REGIMENTATION MAKING THE TOYS OF OUR DESIRE – I KNOW BOTH SMOKESTACK & KLEEN INDUSTRY BUST UP EARTH & BELCH POLLUTION – I HEARD EARTH CRYING YOU’RE HURTING ME -- (65)

Echoed by THOREAU: they have designs on them for our own benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. . . I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. (350)

TRUMP: Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord -- (applause) -- thank you, thank you -- but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.  So we’re getting out.

THOREAU: The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.

SAIJO: HOW VERY PRESUMPTUOUS OF US TO RESIGN UNILATERALLY FROM THE REST OF NATURE & MAKE EARTH SUN STARS ATMOSPHERE NEAR & DEEP SPACE INTO ONE BIG NATURAL RESOURCE CALLING FOR EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN HOMO SAPIENS’ BEHALF SOLELY...

TRUMP: We have among the most abundant energy reserves on the planet, sufficient to lift millions of America’s poorest workers out of poverty.  Yet, under this agreement, we are effectively putting these reserves under lock and key, taking away the great wealth of our nation -- it's great wealth, it's phenomenal wealth; not so long ago, we had no idea we had such wealth -- and leaving millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness.

THOREAU: Flints’ Pond! . . . Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it . . . not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him,--him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it . . . and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom.

SAIJO: LOOK AT PANORAMIC SCENERY & SAY IT LOOKS LIKE A PAINTING IN A GALLERY – WHATS OUR TRIP – CONTROL – DOMINATION – CAUGHT IN A TRULY MONSTRUOUS INSTANCE OF PATHETIC FALLACY – ANTHROPOMORPHIZE EARTH – TURN ALL OF NATURE INTO STOREBOUGHT – SCREW LOOSE IN BRAIN PAN MAKE EARTH LOOK LIKE GOODS ON STORE SHELF (44-45).

TRUMP: As the Wall Street Journal wrote this morning:  “The reality is that withdrawing is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.”  The United States, under the Trump administration, will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth.  We'll be the cleanest.  We're going to have the cleanest air.  We're going to have the cleanest water. 

SAIJO: LET’S ALL BE POISONED TOGETHER WHO WANTS TO BE A LONE SURVIVOR – WHO WANTS TO BE ALIVE IF EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD . . . COME LET’S POISON OUTSELVES TOGETHER WHO WANTS TO BE A LONE SURVIVOR – BUT THIS WATER IN THIS GLASS – ARE YOU MAD AT ME & ARE YOU OFFERING ME THIS WATER TO INSULT ME – THIS DIRTY WATER IN A CLEAN GLASS THAT SMELLS BAD & TASTES WORSE – DRINK IT – IT’S 100% SAFE – 9 OUT OF 10 DOCTORS RECOMMEND IT – THE NOXIOUS & TOXIC ADULTERANTS HAVE BEEN NEUTRALIZED BY OTHER LESS NOXIOUS & TOXIC ADULTERANTS . . . . AND WHY BE A CLEAN AIR FREAK – WHY LIVE IN VIEW OF OCEAN WITH NOTHING HUMAN UPWIND ACROSS 3000 MILES OF WATER WITH WINDS ALWAYS DELIVERING AIR THAT IS LAMBENT CLEAR & MARINE IF CHERNOBYL GOES BLAM & WE FEEL LIKE PUKING & OUR HAIR FALLS OUT & WE FEEL SICK TO THE VERY MARROW OF OUR BONES . . .

TRUMP: The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.  At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand, but at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country -- (applause) -- will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts, our businesses will come to a halt in many cases, and the American family will suffer the consequences in the form of lost jobs and a very diminished quality of life.

SAIJO: O SMART & BEAUTIFUL – O LUSCIOUS FULFILLMENT – O PROTEAN DESIRE – O EVER SHINY – KEEP ME IN COMMODITY FROM YOUR ENDLESS LARGESS O THOU RICHNESS – GET ME WHERE I’M GOIN FAST FAST WITHOUT PERSPIRATION – MAKE THINGS EZ – KEEP ME EVER NEW & IN MOTION (62)

TRUMP: I have just returned from a trip overseas where we concluded nearly $350 billion of military and economic development for the United States, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.  It was a very, very successful trip, believe me.  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Thank you.  

SAIJO: SWEET BREATH OF TRADES BLOW LIGHTLY WHILE BACK AT THE RANCH THIS LAST GASP OF WHITE COLONIALISM SOUNDS HORRIFICALLY OVER ARABIA DESERTA . . . WE ARE A DESERVEDLY ENDANGERED SPECIES BOUND FOR EXTINCTION (80)

TRUMP:  We’re also working very hard for peace in the Middle East, and perhaps even peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Our attacks on terrorism are greatly stepped up -- and you see that, you see it all over -- from the previous administration, including getting many other countries to make major contributions to the fight against terror.  Big, big contributions are being made by countries that weren’t doing so much in the form of contribution.

SAIJO: HERE LET US GIVE A SHORT WWAIL FOR THE GONE BIOME OF MESOPOTAMIA & FOR THE GONE WATERS OF PERSIAN GULF . . . THINK OF BIRDS BLASTED OF THEIR FEATHERS . . . .THINK OF THE STARTLED SKY – AND THE WAY WE DID IT – PUSH BUTTON WAR (86-7)

[BOMBS] WHAT A WONDERFUL COMMODITY – YOU CAN ONLY USE IT ONCE—THAT’S ALL THE LONGER IT LASTS – IT’S A THROWAWAY ITEM--

DEATH IS GOOD NEWS – THE BEST NEWS – SO WHEN YOU DROP THE V-BOMB ON EM THINK OF IT AS 100,000 TO 200,000 PEOPLE GETTING THE BEST NEWS THEY EVER GOT IN THEIR WHOLE LIVES – LETS GET ON WITH IT – BOMBS AWAY (106)

TRUMP: At what point does America get demeaned?  At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?   We want fair treatment for its citizens, and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers.  We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore.  And they won’t be.  They won’t be.

SAIJO: I MUST BE APOSTATE FROM HUMAN BECAUSE I BELIEVE THERE IS NOT ONE THING WE DO GOOD – NOT ONE THING – WE’RE FUCKED – FIRST WE FUCK OVER OURSELVES THEN WE TURN & FUCK OVER OUR SURROUND

I MUST BE APOSTATE FROM HUMAN BECAUSE I BELIEVE THE HUMAN RACE INDIVIDUALLY & IN AGGREGATE IS A RACE GONE TOTALLY PSYCHOTIC AND I BELIEVE THE LEADING SYMPTOM OF THIS ABERRANT CONDITION IS WHAT WE CALL CIVILIZATION (122)

I MUST BE APOSTATE FROM HUMAN BECAUSE IT LOOKS TO ME LIKE CIVILIZATION IS BASED ON INVIDIOUS DISTINCTIONS WHEN WE ARE SAME WHERE IT COUNTS (123)

And so Saijo's influence on me, greater than seems reasonable perhaps, is more personal than political or poetical. He (and older age) has taught me that gain is so often a loss, that having more desecrates the earth, that having ambition is not wise, that as Pope Francis writes, "Happiness means knowing how to limit some needs which only diminish us, and being open to the many different possibilities that life can offer"; that "peace is much more than the absence of war" (but that it would be absence of war). And that cultivating a spiritual life is one way to act upon the world, even if (especially if!), as Saijo advised backpackers in the early 1970s, we leave no trace of ourselves behind us.

Note:

George Handley:
https://www.academia.edu/30578081/Laudato_si_and_the_Postsecularism_of_the_Environmental_Humanities

At the New Orleans Poetry Festival, April, 2017

Eileen Tabios, Tim Dyke, Lo Mei Wa and myself before the Tinfish Press reading.

Eileen Tabios's EXCAVATING THE FILIPINO IN ME is now available.

The chapbook features Eileen's self-interview on her poetics, as well as a long poem.

http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=excavating-the-filipino-in-me

Tinfish Press interview at Entropy Magazine

Entropy has a series of interviews with editors that's a real resource. We're now part of it. Please read here: http://entropymag.org/tinfish-press/

The Economics of Small Press Publishing

For now, I'm leaving my Facebook status here. At some point, I need to write at length on this issue of how much poetry books cost, and why they only seem to cost too much.

Don Share writes that poetry books cost too much. They seem to. But here are details on Tinfish Press's next book. Granted, the production values are high. To make the books, ship from MN to HI, and put in specially designed and silk-screened envelopes costs $5.40 per book; the designer gets a very minimal fee; we then ship some to SPD, which will take 50% of cover price to distribute the books; 30 copies to the author (international postage); copies sent out for review (with postage) and to blurbers. For the first time ever, I bought a $20 facebook ad, which netted no sales. What we don't need is to rent space to store books. I work hard at this project, and pay myself nothing, though I often fund my travels to AWP to sit behind a table for three days and sell fewer books than the table costs. The pre-publication price is $16. Go buy one, Mr. Share! 

Our designer is Jeff Sanner.
 

A Review of Tinfish Press books by Albert Saijo and Donovan Kūhiō Colleps

Today's Star-Advertiser features a lovely review by Janine Oshiro of two Tinfish books. If you subscribe, you can see the review here:

 
http://www.staradvertiser.com/featurespremium/20150517_firmly_in_place.html?id=303991381

If not, here, in liberated form, it is:

By Janine Oshiro / Special to the Star-Advertiser

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, May 17, 2015

1 / 2 ▶
“Woodrat Flat,” by Albert Saijo (TinFish Press, $19)

Click here for more info!

"Woodrat Flat," by Albert Saijo (TinFish Press, $19)

"Proposed Additions," by Donovan Kuhio Colleps (TinFish Press, $14)

Reviews by Janine Oshiro
Special to the Star-Advertiser

Walt Whitman once sounded his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world" — yes, the whole world — but it's specificity of place that matters in two new books of experimental poetry by Hawaii writers.

In the posthumously published "Woodrat Flat," Albert Saijo barks rhapsodic over his marijuana plot in Humboldt County. In "Proposed Additions," Donovan Kuhio Colleps figuratively straps his grandfather's file cabinet to his back to take a walk in Ewa as multiple voices flow through him. You never forget where you are in these books.

Written all in capital letters, in chunks of prose roughly stitched together with dashes, Saijo's poems are rooted firmly in the soil of California and the Big Island. This poet is above all a human animal. "WHEN I CRUMBLE I WANT MY SHELTER TO CRUMBLE RIGHT AFTER ME — CRUMBLE INTO A MOUND OF RICH EARTH LIKE FEMALE WOOD RAT HOUSE DOES."

Saijo's poetry can be read as traditional pastoral or contemporary zui­hi­tsu, the wandering Japanese form that casually gathers up daily observations and fragments. The author himself was incarcerated at Heart Mountain Internment Camp, roamed free as a Beat poet and eventually made his home in Volcano. His strongest poems wed a naturalist's keen eye to the fundamental questions of existence: "IS EARTH LIFE SHORT BURST OF QUAIL FLIGHT." This is visionary work; it contains multitudes.

Multitudinous in other ways, "Proposed Additions" is an astonishing collection of poems constructed by Colleps from his grandfather's cancer journal and plans to build an addition to his home, interviews with family members, song lyrics, historical records and myths. In "Kalapu (A Walking Poem for ‘Ewa)," individuals and stories seem to swell, overlap and break over each other as waves: Kane and Kanaloa, Captain Barber, Hi‘i­aka, grandfather. The result is not an unveiling of a single place, but a convergence of currents remaking and re-mythologizing home.

A luminous elegy for a grandfather, "Proposed Additions" also reads as a guide toward a better future. Proposing an addition can show a desire to keep family close by building a place expansive enough for all. The title poem exhorts: "Build! Build! / While the light is here / while the breeze weaves through the / lo‘i that flourish from his forearms / this is the good that must be found … brass or chrome? / Family or no other option?"

Both books reward readers with "the good that must be found." Is there any other option for our human animal family?

You can order the books from tinfishpress.com or from spdbooks.org

Pre-publication sale on Jonathan Stalling's LOST WAX from Tinfish Press

Poetry in translation is a trust exercise; reader must rely on translator to turn words into other words, while preserving the larger meaning of the original. Jonathan Stalling’s book is for those readers less inclined to trust, and/or for those more fascinated by the playfulness of language(s). In Lost Wax, Stalling presents a sequence of poems about his wife’s work as a sculptor. Those poems are translated into Chinese and back into English by members of a “workshop” of eight fellow translators. Each poem is then presented in a) the original; b) the Chinese; c) the new English version. An additional workshop page illustrates choices made by translators on both sides of the English/Chinese divide. Lost Wax is a marvelous book of poems that also presents an argument for translation as process, as variation. This book, as well as Stalling’s fine introduction, will prove of interest to readers of contemporary American poetry, poetry in Chinese, as well as readers and practitioners of translation.

For more, see:

http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=lost-wax-translation-through-the-void

Please help us pay our bills by ordering directly from Tinfish Press. List price: $20. Until the books arrive, the price is $16.

A poetics of publishing, part deux

This is the second of two facebook posts I put up this week. The first was removed; if you want to know its contents, ask. Otherwise, I think this series of comments speaks for itself. They answer the question posed in the box.

News Feed

Susan M. Schultz

23 hrs · Edited ·

Last year my small press publishing class hosted several publishers, by skype and by embodied presence. Among them, Charles Alexander and Kyle Schlesinger impressed us with their voluble enthusiasm, their sheer love of what they do. But Eric Chock, who co-founded Bamboo Ridge Press in 1979, talked honestly about the "scars" editors get over time. There's something about being an editor and publisher in a place that is radically diverse and post/colonial that causes scarring. My "home" community is probably "white experimental," but my publishing practice is not. That makes certain assumptions in publishing--reciprocity, for example--much more rare than they are in coterie situations. Let's face it, a lot of publishing concerns are coterie or devoted to a single ethnicity/race/nation, and that too has its place. Hell, Modernism was coterie, and there are publishers who specialize in Asian American or indigenous American or Hawaiian or African American literatures. Or in marking the generally invisible category of "Euro-American literature." That's important work.

Over time, I have come to realize that Tinfish Press's vision is impossible in the real world; King Tender had that right years ago in a review of Lee Tonouchi's book she published in the old Jacket magazine. I still hold to that notion of a community composed of difference--and hell, it works in my daughter's soccer community, or my son's school--thank you, Cecil Giscombe, for reminding me that diversity is not always difficult. But there are hopes that need to be "surrendered," as CA Conrad said in a very different context at Naropa in October. In that surrender there remains the present tense of making beautiful objects out of poems, which is what really matters. Eric Chock, again, laughed one time at one of our long lunches, which we share every few years or so, about how he used to think I wanted "to change Hawai`i literature." Oh my. Perhaps, in my middle age, I no longer want to change anything, just be in the practice of publishing and teaching. Publishing as meditation, rather than agitation and the expectations it arouses. Publishing as a possible world. Albert Saijo in his cottage in Volcano telling me he no longer wanted to be published was a great lesson, too.

I want to thank those of you who commented on my post the other day and helped me think and feel through this complex of emotions attached to publishing. Sometimes the lessons I think I've learned return and need to be rerun with a difference (one hopes positive). I've been asked to take that post down. Because I do not want to feel wedded to my own strong emotions, or disturb anyone else's, I will do so. What hurts and angers us is our teacher, and I will look to that teacher for further advice over the next few years of publishing and being a poet. I will also allow a feeling of joy occasionally to wreak havoc with my scars.

On finding a typo (is it?) in WOODRAT FLAT by Albert Saijo (Tinfish Press, 2015)

This is most of the Albert Saijo archive. I spent several days on the Big Island going through these two tubs of notebooks and miscellaneous bits of paper, two calendars, a posthumous certificate from Barack Obama to thank him for his military service (he would have hated that), and other items. The updraft of dust and mold kept me high, which was only appropriate, as Saijo was a marijuana farmer and advocate, among his many (a)vocations. Some of the notebooks are very large; many were "Utility Notebooks." Such was their utility that Saijo filled them with his block print meditations. Others were small hardcovers, sketch pads with ring bindings, tiny notebooks. There are single pages, large and small, covered in penciled writing. Very few of the meditations came out in linear fashion; most pages are covered with emendations, some with print at myriad angles. Others are unreadable, but visually stunning. They all enact his process of thinking. Mostly forward, but occasionally back, or on top of, or below, or sideways. Few are his central subjects: his hatred of civilization (or "CIV" as he terms it); the appeal of "IV" (which I take to be the opposite of CIV, though I don't know for sure); time; space; love; fasting; marijuana. Much of his work is abstract, taking on big concepts. It's the sort of work that goes terribly wrong in the hand of a lesser thinker or poet. Other of the work is incredibly tangible, both in language (he uses Latin as if it were still spoken, at least by lovers of nature) and in image. Not image, exactly, because in his state of constant meditation--he writes somewhere that he no longer knows the difference between meditative and non-meditative states--he observed precisely what was in front of him. At the end, he wrote only about the weather, keeping track almost by the hour in fragile hand, but always he was looking out the window or through the grass and seeing animals, birds, plants, human beings--not as elevated creatures, but as one among the mix. He writes about piss and shit, and he writes about love, sex. He writes angry and he writes contemplative. He rants, he lets go. He quotes, over and again, the Baudelaire line about "luxe, calme, et volupté," and he repeats an admonition to himself about Tilopa. Read Tilopa's advice to Naropa, and you'll know why: 

Cut the root of the vine that chokes the tree,
and its clinging tendrils wither away entirely.
Sever the conventionally grasping mind,
and all bondage and desperation dissolve.

Much of Saijo's thinking is violent in this way: he "cuts," "severs," he interrupts. But alongside this violence is the calm and voluptuousness of Baudelaire's "L'invitation au voyage," a love poem about ease, about pleasure.  

I found the originals for WOODRAT FLAT (Tinfish Press, 2015) in two of the notebooks, one utility size, the other just a bit smaller. The notebooks are taller than the published book, and the handwriting less consistent, by far, than the block print we used. That said, our all-caps rendition of Saijo's texts is less dark than the Bamboo Ridge versions; I found those too in-your-face. The less bold version echoes Albert's voice, which was calm and slow and considered. Or so I hope. One of the poems from the book, ably edited by Jerry Martien, who re-ordered the poems to make them more book than note-book, is called "Chuang Tze Update." Here are three photographs of the text. The first has the book seated on top of the notebook; the second and third are the notebook version of the poem. 

[Click to enlarge images]

As an editor, I have a good eye for typos, especially after the book has been published. So I notice that toward the beginning of the poem, Saijo has written, "THESE 2 TREES SURVIVED BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO ODD TO LOG," while at the end, the Tinfish version replaces "ODD" with "OLD": "CHUANG TZE YOU'RE RIGHT BE TOO OLD TO LOG." The editor has taken out some of the writing that wanders above and below the final lines. Did he change "ODD" to "OLD"? Did our scanner do it? Did we do it? The mysteriousness of the mistake is appropriate to any consideration of editing, especially when the manuscript is by someone so prone to over-writing, to self-editing, to making the reader's life at once pleasurable and difficult. The replacement does not ruin the poem: Chuang Tzu is, after all, quite old. Too old to log, one might add, except that Saijo has taken a cutting from him in writing about the tree. I find a biography of Chuang Tzu that gives no dates for him. And then I find one that does. This one notes that he may not have existed. Go figure.

But why the poem about the tree, with a punch line about Chuang Tzu, a punch-line that seems to have turned into a title? (Kevin Dimyanitz tells me that Laura Saijo said Albert did not fight in World War II in the 442nd, but became a stand-up comic; he had them rolling in the aisles, he said.) Google "Chuang Tzu and trees" and you get this, by way of Thomas Merton. It's a parable about usefulness, that uses a tree as its central image. The tree, like Chuang Tzu's teachings, one says, is "useless." Then, by way of a wildcat, a mouse, and a yak, the writer of the parable gets to his punchline, which is also a warning. "So for your big tree, no use?" The teacher advises his interlocutor to plant the useless tree in a waste land, and to walk around it, meditating. No one will ever cut the tree down. "Useless? You should worry!" concludes the teaching.

Saijo's 2 old Douglas firs, the ones that survived "ANIMAL WHO IS BIOTIC SCOURGE" are different. One sways in the wind like a young tree, losing branches; the other does not. They are perhaps two ways of looking at the world "oddly": the first involves bending, the other involves remaining still. Their oddness saved them. Saijo was himself an able carpenter. Many of his notebooks contain conceptual and more detailed drawings of houses and furniture, including his own house and chair. He knew use value. But he was also someone who knew non-value, the art of sitting around in front of the fire, sketching out his thoughts as they flickered by. One of the funniest poems in WOODRAT FLAT is called "FLICKER FACT." It's about a flicker who seems to have a hurt wing and leads the poet for twenty or so paces. "AFTER LEADING ME ON THIS WAY FOR TWENTY PACES OR SO IT FLEW OFF DOWN CANYON PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT -- DIDN'T KNOW FLICKERS DO THIS"[.]

What is a typo but the most un-useful of mistakes, leading the reader astray without (in this case, because one word has become another word) his or her realizing it? The typo is the most useless feature of an otherwise useless art, that of poetry. It signifies danger, one reason Albert may not have wanted his work published (though that's a stretch, I suspect). But it also signifies the fertility generated by standing or sitting still. Luxe, calme et volupté. Or, as Tilopa advised Naropa in his own in-utility notebook:

Renounce arbitrary, habitual views.
Go forth courageously to meditate
in the real mountain wilderness,
the wide open Mahamudra.
Transcend boundaries of kinship
by embracing all living beings
as one family of consciousness.
Remain without any compulsion
in the landscape of natural freedom:
spontaneous, generous, joyful.

See blog post #2 on Saijo here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-think-i-could-turn-and-live-with.html

Announcing publication of WOODRAT FLAT, by Albert Saijo

Read more about the book, and order it here.

For more on the late Albert Saijo, see here.

There will be a gallery show, a symposium, and a book launch in Hilo in March. Tinfish's editor will keep you posted.

Tinfish Press publishes experimental poetry from the Pacific region. We recently launched a new poetry reading series, in collaboration with Na Mea / Native Books in Honolulu.

Please support Tinfish's work by buying our books and/or by donating to the press (there's a button on the website). We are non-profit.

PROPOSED ADDITIONS, by Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, has arrived!

To order our new book, go to http://tinfishpress.com/?projects=proposed-additions.
It's $14, printed at Obun in Honolulu. Thanks Vince Watabu, for your help, and all the baseball talk over the last few years!


Donovan Kūhiō Colleps constructs Proposed Additions out of many parts: a house blueprint; his grandfather’s cancer journal; the instructions to a pulmonary respirator; the story of a daddy sea horse; and an investigation of O‘ahu’s leeward side, its histories and its mo‘olelo. In this hybrid work—documentary poem, prose reflection, elegy—Colleps recovers his grandfather’s memory by way of the filing cabinet he left behind. As the poet carries the metal cabinet strapped to his back across the ‘Ewa plain, he recovers more than this intimate past. He also recovers significant cultural and linguistic histories of place in a part of Hawai‘i now being turned into fields of templated suburban houses.

from “Daddy Sea Horse”

I found him behind
the Appliances folder.
Daddy Sea Horse, preserved
like so many things aren’t.
In a dirty plastic
watch box tomb.
His perfect shape
a memory organ,
his dried skin
a dark yellow. Each
ridge of his spine
confirming the fractal
geometry of generations.

reason 3: sight & sound. the daddy sea horse is anchored to a plastic plant in the tank and people are yelling behind me. i do not understand the words being thrown but i see hands cutting the air in the glass reflection. my sister storms out with her naked children, and when the front door slams, daddy sea horse explodes. i do not count his babies because there are too many. a desire to make a shaka in the water overwhelms me. but it passes.

I brought him
to the dining table
to Ma.
“Here,” I said, “here.”
Standing in the spot
where I swear
it all happened,
and placed the box
in front of her.
“Where dis came from den?”
The hole in daddy sea
horse’s belly was
still there cavernous, and
he was leaning
against the clear side
of his container, staring
out at the empty
plate of sausages.
“Nana bought dat,”
she said,
“long time ago,
probly
from one adoze
touris-tee stoas


Donovan Kūhiō Colleps was born in Honolulu and lives in Pu‘uloa, ‘Ewa, on the island of O‘ahu. He is currently working toward a PhD in English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, focusing on creative writing and Pacific literatures.

If you find Donovan's book compelling, try other Tinfish titles. Books about place include Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave, Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco, and Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory [hacha]. Hawai`i authors include Steve Shrader, J. Vera Lee, Lee A. Tonouchi, Lisa Linn Kanae, and the many authors of Jack London is Dead. Books of documentary poetry include jai arun ravine's and then entwine. Elizabeth Soto's book, Eulogies, complements Donovan's elegy to his grandfather. And so on. It's a weave, a lei, a labor of love.