Norman Hindley (1944-2014) RIP

Several short weeks ago, Joe Tsujimoto put a late poem by Norman Hindley on his facebook page. The word "late" rang hard, as it was--at least to me--also a death announcement. I had not seen him since the late 90s, around the time of my marriage, but hold to some vivid memories of him.

Here are two:

The early 90s, when slam poetry was just inventing itself, and the local scene was just imagining what it might be. At the Lizard Loft on Kapahulu I went to a competitive reading of page poems, as it would later seem, and witnessed a face-off between Joe and Norman, who both taught at Punahou. Joe read a poem including drunkenness, and Norman an episode of domestic terror where the speaker was hunted down by his wife and shut in a freezer locker. Punahou may mostly be for rich kids, but there's some rawness in the faculty.

Then my friend Diana S., who also taught at Punahou, became Norman's partner for a time. It was her birthday and so Bryant and I (as yet unmarried) went to their townhouse for a party. I was sitting minding my own business when I heard the clarion call of Hindley: "SCHULTZY!!! You MUST try my noodle dish." Like a meek friend who wanted only to please, I began to eat the dish until I started to feel flush, asthmatic, ill. Staring down my boyfriend, I realized I had eaten peanuts (turned out it was Thai noodle with peanut butter, to which I am--literally--deathly allergic). Bryant caught the horrible glare from me and we left. We ended up in the ER that night. "I DIDN'T MEAN TO KILL YOU, SCHULTZY," was the later response. 

It seemed at the time that Norman's best poetry was behind him. He had published Winter Eel through Frank Stewart's Petronium Press in 1984. The cover design is by Steve Shrader, whose posthumous work Tinfish published last year. (The image of barbed wire across an ocean vista is appropriate to Hindley's work, as to Shrader's, however different their poetics.) It was perhaps the high water mark of Euro-American poetry on O`ahu, the 1970s and early 1980s. I wasn't to arrive here until 1990, so I can't know for sure. But I edited and published a book of Euro-American poetry from Hawai`i last year because it's considered outsider work; I regret not asking Norman for poems. His poems are not "Tinfish poems," but they are very very good. Apparently there are some four volumes of Norman's poetry yet to be published. Joe said that there was a pile of manuscripts at Norman's house that went up to his waist. The poems that comprise his first book, the one I have on my desk as I write, are few but stern. Solid, sharp objects, like the knives that appear in them, there do not need to be many to reflect the poet's anger, his reticence, and his stark rhetoric.

The poems in Winter Eel are violent and loving in equal measure. What is loved is earth's details, curt words slotted into measured, chiseled lines. Many of the poems are about a family romance gone desperately wrong: a violent father who could not be pleased; a wandering mother who "snapped one day"; a son locked in Oedipal desire (there's a poem about him looking at her looking at herself in the mirror); sexual abuse at the hands of an uncle and of a man of the cloth. As childhood violence abates, another kind of violence erupts. This is the violence of the hunt for muskrat, for fish, for sharks, and an aborted hunt for men who stole from him. A woman is murdered by a stranger and cut into tiny parts. The book itself seems to teeter on that moment when the poet nearly murdered the men who violated him. It is also, as so many poet's first books are, a book about writing, about art, about the way in which art only partially comes to redeem a life. Let me dip into the book, write through some of these poems. (I'm doing some of this after reading the comments sent to an earlier version of the post; so many people knew Norman, yet not perhaps his poems.)

I turn to "You Pour into the Audi like Mud," from the 1984 collection. This poem, like the others in this slim volume, is in free verse, each line commencing with a capital letter, an odd schism between formal verse and informal reportage. Like other poems in this style--why am I thinking James Wright?--the poem tells a straightforward story, though there's a catch at the end. The language is simple, as are the lines, though their simplicity packs a punch. The story is of a man who films his own mother's funeral in ways that are disturbing to the speaker, whose anger against the subject accumulates with the poem's line. Consider the tight, angry language:

The Ford that's been riding my ass

then:

And your body went riding into the furnace
For burning
And your tendons tightened like strapping
Making you bend a bit at the waist
As if to rise

As it turns out, the man who filmed his dead mother in near pornographic terms and who has himself died was the poet's uncle. We don't find that out until the end, but we already know that the uncle showed the strange film to anyone who would watch--boys, including the poet--which raises the specter of other kinds of violence, other intimate intrusions.

The uncle is burned, and his urn put "as close to your mother / As allowed." "Dignified."

But what I'll tell you uncle
That left to me
You'd of been thrown down a hole
In a can
No flowers, no mother
No black Fairlane to ride.

I'm not sure where the Audi of the title comes in, as the poem is all black Fairlane, a word that stands in stark contrast to the unfair boundary-less presence of the uncle. But the poem is strong.

Starker yet is "Sinner," addressed to a "Reverend" who abused boys in South America, and then abused the poet as an 11-year old child. "His hand-picked boy." For three years. The poet writing the poem is now 36, and feels himself hardened by the abuse:

It's for the shot of ice you left in me
Which I can and do turn on others,
For the deadlands in my heart 
That are windy
Empty as any March.

March may be a poetic month (consider Stevens's and Bishop's poems, just for starters, about that early spring month), but it's crueler than cruel April in this poem. The brash machismo of the poetic surfaces--language hard, unemotional--comes to unveil (as through dense rust) hurt as powerful as the anger that attempts to defeat it.

The betrayals of these poems--son by mother, mother by father, boy by priest--are alchemized later in a poem about sharks, "Sharks in Shapes of 8." In this poem, the poet fills a gallon bottle with bull's blood and goes out onto the reef with a gun. He will attract a shark, kill the shark, then watch the other sharks attack. It's a gruesome act, told in beautiful language:

Converging currents carried the blood in carnations,
It shawled through the coral like dinner bells,
Some would tongue outward,
And I'd stand with the Winchester and wait
For the white tips, the hammerheads, the occasional tiger
To swim in from their blue vaults,
To cruise the reef,
Picturing wounds, fresh meat.

Then, like an abuser of substance or person or other being, the poet announces, "I've quit." Not because he puts himself in danger out on the reef, blooming in the bought blood, but because, "I was ashamed of deceiving, killing / These long swimmers, these survivors / Of ice, of cataclysm." A final stanza to this poem stands in excess, relates his desire to join the sharks, whom he watches on a camping trip. There's a generalization to that last stanza that doesn't bite as hard as what came before. We already recognized that love in his abnegation. He has not given up on violence, but his violence will now be direct, honest. He will not cheat.

There are also poems about poetry, art. The third poem in the book is "Painting by Numbers." The poem tells the first person story of someone who paints by numbers, "stayed inside the borders, / Faithful to paint, the commandment of numbers." He loses that organization, begins to lose control of his paints, gets closer to memory than to schooled artistry. He is taken back to a Massachusetts winter when a young woman plays Mozart on the piano (this takes us outside image, leads us into the porches of the ear):

But there are no numbers for Mozart.
The canvas hangs like ice, violet,
It is the amethyst of winter.
Or the still life with pears.

When first I became obsessed with Wallace Stevens, dog-earing A Palm at the End of the Mind even before its pages turned brown with age and tropical air, there were two poems I most loved. The first was "Mozart, 1935," and the second was "A Study of Two Pears."  Hindley's poem weaves on, taking in people enjoying a good meal, a man in Oakland who feeds a toad he never sees, a self-portrait that is nothing but spilled quicksilver, then ends on a note of hidden greyness, not bright paint. Like Stevens, Hindley pares (sic) away summer foliage and ends up with a mind of winter, free of metaphor, free to be, "that wintry sound"

As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

Another of Hindley's poems about art is "Keyboard," about a young pianist whose mother pushes her, causes her to hate the instrument, "like shit in bed." The girl turns to visual art, frequenting the Boston Museum when she was supposed to be rehearsing. She is poor, knows the poet (and nurses him back from sickness) because they lived "in opposite rat holes." She paints with Dutch Boy until she runs out, then works with any material at hand. She cannot stop making things. As the poem ends, we learn that her mother is still alive--"she's 200 or so"--and trots out the early recital program.  She "doesn't know that you've been an instrument / For 50 years, a violin of lines and form, / She doesn't give a goddamn that you will go on always, / Covering canvas after canvas with exquisite women / Alone in powerful, warm rooms."

American poetry, like American culture, so often sets art up against the practical world. "I've got a fight going," a student said to me just yesterday, "between my passions and more practical matters." Less frequently do poets set one art form up against another as a way to explore family conflict, artistic ambivalence. But the woman who becomes the art instrument her mother does not recognize is, in its own way, just as powerful a conceit for the situation of art. Forced to choose between sound and image, this woman ends up destitute in a cold studio, unloved by her sole family member. The poet, who chooses both, knows the anguish of losing one to the other. There's an allegory here that cannot be neatly unpacked; this makes the poem more powerful than it would have been had he chosen one or the other vehicle. But it's about making choices and suffering through the redemption they offer us.

If I needed to categorize Hindley's poetry, I'd put it in the box on which is scrawled "post-Romanticism." Emerson lives in these poems, but he's lost his arms and legs. Thoreau is stationed at an outpost in Hindley's mind, but he's steeped in violence, not peaceful resistance. Dickinson is present, a solitary maker in a cold room with an unsympathetic family, but her transcendent language has been put down for boards and planks and fishing poles and Winchesters. There is desire for heroism, but recognition that heroism isn't what it used to be. In "Water Born," written for his brother, Hindley recounts a near death experience diving in sea, when he thought his brother was drowning. At the last minute, Norman releases himself into the current (becomes an instrument of it) and his brother, too, emerges alive, his catch intact. "We headed back, / Renewed, heroic, or as close as we'd ever get." So much in that or (rhymes with "oar"). Renewal is not heroism, though it is survival. These are the poems of a survivor who knows a kind of heroism that cannot be bruited about. It must remain stoic, because it covers over so many silences: abuse, violence, anti-social desire. The poems, in their honesty, give us access to heroism, even as we recoil from the gunshots.

While most of the poems are set in the New England of the poet's difficult youth, there are Hawai`i poems, poems about fishing, about the natural (if not friendly) world. Hindley lived for many decades on Moloka'i and O'ahu, came slowly--as do many Euro-American poets--to write about it. I hope that that there are many more set here in the poems that remain in manuscript . For one of my purposes in writing this is to acknowledge the contribution of this outsider/insider poet to Hawai`i's literature. A tense departmental meeting in the spring featured a colleague's guffaw at the mention of "white poets in Hawai`i," a laugh I will not long forget. (The laugher was white, which is perhaps not a surprise. My anger is not at the speaker but at the symptom.) In response, I can hear a kind of dark laughter from Norman Hindley, who would have understood the deep ambivalences of his position in this vexed tradition.

___________________________


Diana sent me a link to a reading Norman gave at Punahou a few years ago. I had forgotten his strong New England accent (he was originally from Pawtucket, RI). And, while the poems remind me more of Wright and Bly perhaps, the accent brings into play the inheritance from Frost, for whom the outside world--whether farming or, in Norman's case, hunting and fishing--was an inevitable allegory for the cruelties of the human heart. Here is the YouTube video from 2008. "A Note for Amy" is worth listening to for the taut "t" sounds alone. Beauty's spit / ting image.

Let me copy the poem I mentioned at the outset, the one posted by Joe Tsujimoto on facebook, and lineate it as best I can, using facebook's lineation and my own guess work. I have Chris Hindley's permission to do so.


hill Mary
a song of heaven


behind the orchard
a pathway winds
enchanted as a wand
rising in graceful increments
toward the balm of proclaimed lands


fields 
of vigorous grass effect
a well-abounding yellow-green
they preen and ripple
on a threadbare breeze
an inland sea of radiant hay


abiding orphic
to the native ear
its compass points 
implied by titanic trees
their august leaves
stupendous green


registered on these are
destinations dates e.t.a.'s
of ships of men of rank and names
stark delphic inklings of solar
winds that scorch the seas auroral
vaults in arctic freeze
scribed by prescient sailors
onto trunks limbs stumps
and skins on concentric rings
of transcendent trees


From "hill Mary" on, this poem brings Hindley's keen eye for the world together with a spiritual impulse that seems absent from the 1984 book. "Hill Mary" may not be hailed, but perhaps offers some grace to the aging poet. He still recognizes the orphic, violated, fragments in his own voice, but ends with "transcendent trees" and no punctuation, rather than with an empty March, and a period. From March to Mary, from blood in the water to "a well-abounding yellow-green" is quite a voyage. I look forward to seeing more of how he got there.

The introduction to _Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some prose)_

To find out more about this book, and/or to order it, click here.

Susan M. Schultz, Introduction:

Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some prose) of Hawai`i

In Honolulu's multi-ethnic community, he was constantly reminded of his dearth of roots, his nonexistent heritage of homeland, customs, music, food and language. Part of a wandering family, he has no geographical place to call home. No sweetly remembered visions of hills, woods or country roads to revisit; no proud ancestral plot of land passed down through generations. Only a paltry handful of relatives, scattered across the states, for whom reunion is unthinkable because there was never any union to being with.

--John Wythe White, “Surf Cities”

FAQs (before the fact):

What are Hawai`i's demographics?

Caucasians are a numerical minority in Hawai`i. According to the 2000 census, Hawai`i's population is 24.3% white, 41.6% Asian, 9.4 native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 21.4 % two or more races. That's when you organize your statistics under “one race.” Other means of organization yield different results, elevating the percentages of all of these groups. These are not the only groups, just the most numerous. The white population is a minority among minorities, although whites, along with local Asians (with the exception of Filipinos) tend to be well-educated and to wield political and economic power in excess of their numbers.

Why do you employ the term Euro-American, which no one in Hawai`i actually uses? Euro-American seems a good umbrella term for the different categories of whiteness in Hawai`i. Kama`aina are writers whose families have lived here for generations. Local Haole include writers who grew up here, speak Pidgin, know the local culture and references. White or Caucasian writers would be those who came to live here, at least for a time, although they're also referred to locally as haole. Crucially, Euro-American is a term that does not detach whiteness from culture. If I am German and Irish (as I am), I carry aspects of those cultures and attitudes with me, whether or not I can directly identify them. I also participate in the dominant American culture, one that is often seen as bankrupt but whose influence is pervasive. (In what follows, I do tend to fall back on the term “white poet,” if only because it's shorter than Euro-American poet.”) As a poet educated on the east coast, I participate in a tradition of Euro-American poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian, a tradition that grafts itself uneasily—but surprisingly—to the traditions I have encountered and learned about in Hawai`i.

Why title the book Jack London is Dead?

The title is an homage to Jessica Hagedorn's Charlie Chan is Dead anthology of Asian American writing. Just as Charlie Chan, with his broken English and his Swedish actor's face, has been a problematic figure for Asian American writers, so Jack London is a writer whose work about Hawai`i is deeply problematic to native Hawaiians and others. The writers in this anthology work hard not to appropriate the stories of this place and its inhabitants. Euro-American poets in Hawai`i have their own material to work from, all of it vexing. [Jack London represents the old canon of Hawai`i writing; the poets in this volume represent a generation of writers who have experienced the necessary reaction against that canonization.]

What is it like to be a Haole?

Haole is the local term for “white” or “Caucasian.” Originally it meant “without breath” and “foreigner”; even as its meaning can be neutral (“that haole guy who sits in the back”), the harsh echoes of its original meaning co-exist with the neutrality of its present. “Haole” can also be used as an insult, to mean someone who is overbearing, who acts entitled, whose ear is deaf to local and Hawaiian cultures. At worst, “haole” is the word that comes after “f*cking.” Interestingly, one of the best descriptions and investigations of Haoleness is by an Asian American writer, Keiko Ohnuma, in “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and raised in Hawai`i.” In this 10-year old essay, Ohnuma writes: “White has never been invisible or normative in Hawai`i. It was superior, dominant, and then it was overthrown. It is this overthrow—at first social, then political and cultural—usually not expressed as such, that represents not only a resistance to colonization and external forces, but that has been full incorporated into the hegemonic” (274). She uses the word “overthrow,” which resounds with the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. The resonances are probably too strong, but her argument that white culture was later marginalized is right on. The word “haole,” too, connotes more than anyone outside Hawai`i would know: “For while a Caucasian appearance might open the doors to jobs or privilege, “haole” as an identity is not the same as white. Whiteness is not a culture; it is a position the local haole does not know how to take. And localism is a position they are still not allowed to take” (283). Local whites, in other words, are neither here nor there, neither local nor unmarked. In her more recent work, Haoles in Hawai`i, Judy Rohrer notes that “whiteness in Hawai`i is always marked and often challenged” (2). Rohrer is a white woman whose family moved to Kauai when she was seven; she grew up haole. She takes her cue from Ruth Frankenberg's White Woman, Race Matters:”White women need to become conscious of the histories and specificities of our cultural positions, and of the political economic, and creative fusions that form all cultures.” This is not, Frankenberg continues, in order to reinforce the too-simple dualisms or to “valorize whiteness.” Instead, she calls for a need “to develop a clearer sense of where and who we are” (1993, 204).

Where and who we are. These sound like the right cues for us poets, too. Not all the poets in this anthology grew up in Hawai`i; the roll of names reads like a cast of diasporic characters. Many of these poets came to Hawai`i when they were adults. Among those who grew up here, many left. They had the privilege to come and go, to experience the stresses of “haoleness” but then to leave. That privilege is not without its catch-22, however. The privilege to move away can be seen as a reaction against the difficulties of staying, difficulties that include publication, as well as the problem of how to make a living in such an expensive place. The complications of this position are reflected in much of the writing, which uses cultural references that are Euro-American, but also some that are native Hawaiian, and many that are simply “of Hawai`i.” Euro-American writers are expected to have their careers on the continent, not in Hawai`i. In 2005, Ron Silliman noted “that is it—or always has been, up to now—virtually impossible for a writer to go to Hawai`i & then become widely known & read on the mainland. You can go there if you’re already famous – viz. W.S. Merwin – but the more common result is either for the poet to head back to the continental U.S., usually pretty quickly, or to disappear into the sun glare more or less entirely.” Ah, the “sun glare.” Leaving aside the condescension, however well-meaning, of Silliman's statement, his desire for Hawai`i's Euro-American writers (he mentions none other in this post) to be read “back stateside,” as he calls it, there's another problem. That problem, precisely the one that concerns me here, is that Euro-American writers are read on the continent, but not so much at home in Hawai`i. Post-internet, it can be much easier to find a readership on the North American continent (and in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain) than it is to find one in Honolulu. And this is often true whether or not the poet writes about Hawai`i.

The attention paid to Euro-American writers in Hawai`i, while not always derogatory, is often so. Ian MacMillan, when he first began writing about Hawai`i, was publically called to task for doing research on canoe-making in books rather than by talking to Hawaiian elders. W.S. Merwin has taken the most severe criticism of any poet, over his book The Folding Cliffs, based on a memoir that Jack London originally appropriated from Pi`ilani. This narrative told the history of Pi`ilani's husband Koolau, who suffered leprosy and evaded authorities on Kaua`i for years in the early 1890s, at the time the Hawaiian Kingdom was being overthrown on O`ahu. In an essay titled, “The Literary Offenses of W.S. Merwin,” Kapalai`ula de Silva writes, “If it is a masterpiece [as Ted Hughes claimed in a blurb], it is a masterpiece of literary colonialism.” Later in the essay, de Silva argues: “Merwin’s epic, however grand in scope and language, fails to honor Pi‘ilani’s simple, bottom-line intent: the truth.” Here we have, at best, a cultural divide: what is truth in an epic poem? Native Hawaiian truth is different from Merwin's truth. While I find this essay extreme in its attack on Merwin, I have also found myself explaining to white writers on the continent why such an attack happened, why it is to be expected, and why it should not be dismissed. I mention this controversy not in order to flesh it out, but to point to the difficulties of writing about Hawai`i. Merwin has lived on Maui since the 1970s, where he has long been an environmental activist. But his many decades in the state hardly immunized him to being called an outsider. So the problem remains: what can a Euro-American poet write about? How can she or he be responsible to this place on which there have been so many claims? How to answer the question posed by another of Merwin's poems, “Chord,” published in The Rain in the Trees (1988), namely the question of linguistic colonization?

     While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests

     while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through

     the forests

     while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of their gardens

     their gardens dying far away on the mountain

     while the sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives

     while the tip of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to themselves

     while he thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red flowers

     when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons

     when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down

     and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language 

What pronoun(s) will you use in writing about Euro-American poets? The question of whether to speak of the anthology as a collection of “us” or of “them” has been significant to me in thinking about this collection. When I talk to other white writers who say, “I was considered an artist before I moved to Hawai`i,” or “In Hawai`i, I'm an editor not a poet,” or “that's a reading I can attend, but can't participate in,” there's an implicit “we” between speakers. But the conversation usually ends there, suggesting that we are not speaking as community, but as individuals who lament the lack of community. It's not my intention in editing this anthology to create a community composed solely of white writers. It is my intention to call attention to the ways in which we (yes, we) write about Hawai`i. Such calling-attention-to is meant to suggest ways to form coalitions with non-white writers over issues like environmental destruction, militarization, politics, and—let's not forget—the ways in which we make our art. As I write, I notice the pronouns shifting from us to them, from they to we, and will honor their divergences from a stable subjectivity by permitting them their pronomial diasporas.

Who publishes Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i? Among the small presses still in operation in 2012, only Bamboo Ridge's annual journal, Tinfish Press, and occasionally the University of Hawai`i Press, publish work by white poets. Bamboo Ridge has never published a full-length book by a white poet. Tinfish Press, which I founded in 1995, has published numerous chapbooks and full-length books by white writers, but no full-length volumes by a white writer living in Hawai`i (that will change when we publish Steve Shrader's posthumous work). Meg Withers wrote A Communion of Saints, which chronicled the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Honolulu. Many of the voices spoke in Pidgin (Hawai`i Creole English). Withers lived in Hawai`i for nine years, and has since lived in the Bay Area of California. White poets publish on the continent, necessity and choice interwoven in their books' histories. Faye Kicknosway's selected poems are from Wesleyan. Juliana Spahr published four books whose central subject is her five years in Hawai`i: they were published by Wesleyan, the University of California Press, Black Sparrow, and Atelos. Eric Paul Shaffer has written books centered in Hawai`i, published by Leaping Dog Press in Raleigh, North Carolina. Margo Berdeshevsky publishes with Sheep Meadow Press in New York State, Endi Bogue Hartigan has book from the press of Colorado Review, and my poetry books have come out from Salt in the UK and Singing Horse Press in San Diego. These writers may publish on the continent because they want to, but the dearth of possibilities here in Hawai`i surely forces their hands. To be published outside the state may offer the Euro-American poet a bigger audience, but not one as well-educated in the cultural values of Hawai`i or in its history, its languages. To be published outside the state reaffirms the impression that the Euro-American poet is not committed to working in Hawai`i. That the Euro-American poet is an outsider. Another Catch-22.

Tinfish Press has resolutely refused to publish work because it is “ethnic.” We've published experimental poetry from the Pacific by poets whose work marries (however awkwardly) local and avant-garde traditions of writing. Tinfish relishes experiments. I consider this anthology to be an experiment, one likely not to be repeated. I came to it after noting that Bamboo Ridge Press's anthologies of ethnic literature from Hawai`i have been devoted to work by local Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Hapa (mixed race), and native Hawaiian playwrights. Other publishing concerns print work by native Hawaiians (`oiwi ) and by Pacific Islanders (the new Ala Press). As I read more general anthologies of literature from Hawai`i, like Gavan Daws's and Bennett Hymer's enormous compendium, O`ahu Stories: Two Centuries of Writing, I notice that Hawaiian and local writers were offered categories within the book, but Euro-American writers floated around in categories that did not reference “the local” or “the Hawaiian,” and yet never touched whiteness as category. Some of these writers could be found in a section about Waikiki, for instance, whose connection to whiteness is mostly by way of tourism. Tourism is the outside flooding in. The ways in which white writers are pegged as “outsiders” makes them, in the eyes of editors and publishers, more like tourists than like native or local writers.

Who teaches Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i?

In researching course descriptions of English 370, Ethnic Literatures of Hawai`i, I find no recent evidence of Euro-American poets or fiction writers on the syllabi. Even where the course narrative for Fall, 2011 includes the problematic category of “settler groups,” there are no books by Euro-Americans, only local Asians. The frame to the course, no matter who teaches it, oddly mirrors that of ethnic studies on the continent, marking writers of color as “ethnic,” Euro-American writers as non-existent. Surely, Hawai`i is one place where white writers are marked as ethnic, where their work can be read as such. When I went to the website for the Ethnic Studies Department at UHM, I found listed a course called “Caucasians in Hawai`i.” When I clicked to find the description of syllabi, I found a list of courses taught since 2006. Nowhere on that list did the course on Caucasians show up.

Speaking of editorial practice, in what way is this anthology an “experiment” for Tinfish Press?

Years ago, I taught a group directed reading on small press publishing, and talk turned to the ways in which publication issues are fraught in Hawai`i, we came up with the notion of “positive critique.” Positive critique is what editors do; seeing the absence of an important kind of writing, say, they move in to fill the gap. Rather than attack institutions that leave them out, they create new institutions, presses and reading series mostly. In the 1990s, Bamboo Ridge was criticized for not publishing native Hawaiian writers; `oiwi was founded to provide a place for their work. This anthology is such an act of positive critique. I write to suggest that more publishers (some not yet in place, I suspect) print work by Euro-American poets and that they do so in the long form. Books, not single poems here and there.

One of my fears in pointing to this non-category category, Euro-American poets, is that it will prove too persuasive, that white writers will read and write for themselves only, that the larger community will reify the category (either as another way to re-marginalize white poets or as a way to honor them only as such). This anthology poses a paradox; I'd like to call categories into question by asserting the presence of one that exists but has been too long left out of polite conversation. Only if white poets prove that we have something to offer to the conversation will we be able to join it, under different terms from those that existed until at least 1980, if not longer. One venue at which these literary conversations are already taking place is the MIA (Mixing Innovative Arts) Reading Series, founded in 2009 by Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. candidate and poet in the English department. These readings occur once a month during the school year, with workshops in the summer. It's a venue that is open to every kind of writer, musician, and performer. The cross-fertilizations have been striking.

What experiences do Hawai`i's white writers have in common, then?

I direct the reader to the statements by each of the poets included in the anthology. They are eloquent testimonies to the ambivalent status of being white in Hawai`i. These writers share the awareness that it was mostly white people who suppressed Hawaiian culture, who brought Asian contract labor into Hawai`i, and who to this day—as a dominant force in the US military and politics—have made the state into a militarized zone. They are also aware that white writers have appropriated Hawaiian texts, remade them and circulated them as flawed “truths” about Hawai`i. Does the name James Michener come to mind? There's guilt in the blood-stream of the white writer. But Euro-American poets also chafe against totalizing notions about who they are and what they can or cannot write. They chafe against the notion that they are “mainland” to the local/indigenous writer's “Hawai`i.” One of my students, Mason Donald, who grew up in Hilo, graduated from public schools and from the University of Hawai`i, wrote the following poem out of frustration. The gatekeepers he refers to were white, another of the many ironies:

My Potatoes

Don't write about Hula,

she explains to me. It's not yours.

Try working with hula

hoops instead. That's more fitting

to your . . . . personal subject position.

No, she says,

don't write about Kamapua`a.

Try working with something more

related. Do you eat pork?

No, don't write about Waikiki either.

Let's see you describe

your home. Where are you

from exactly?

I'd rather you stay away

from Pele, too, she explains.

Pele's such a wrathful God,

and I'd hate for her to disagree.

“Okay. What about tourists?” I ask.

“Can I write about the commodification

and sexual exploitation of Hawai`i?

Can I write about the gaze?”

No, no. You don't understand,

she continues.

Write about your home.

Write about your people.

“It's not easy writing about a home

to which I don't belong,” I tell her.

It's not easy writing about

potatoes.

This poem, written for my class in 2007, is part of a significant sub-genre, one that examines the costs of being identified as haole, as someone who cannot write about Hawai`i. (In this anthology, Evan Nagle has a rather different notion of what it means to write about potatoes.) Another such poem is by Tony Quagliano, a poet who died in 2007. He wrote a version of this poem many times, first as lament:

I stood there in the Pali wind
American, and local guide
despairing of cross-cultural understanding —
I had just recently learned
that I’m a haole

and later as satire:

A Haole Writes One Local Poem

My granmoddah wen fish
catch one trout
trout?
haole fish, dat
she trow back

catch one snappa den
hapa fish
bitta
she trow back

granmoddah den
catch one ***
a local fish
pure you know
good fo eat
good fo da soul
granny keep em 

The way in which white writers are taken to task became clearer to me when I taught a Tinfish Press book by Portland poet Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave. Sand's documentary work is about the Pacific Northwest, not about Hawai`i, but in writing out the “secret histories” of her hometown of Portland, Oregon, Sand includes the history of Japanese-American internment. She puts her work in context, writing both a forward and an afterword in which she explains her methods, her role as a poet-journalist, her family background. But two students in the upper-level class that was reading the book objected to her work. They reminded me that she's of Norwegian and not Japanese heritage, saying that her interest in the internment experience seemed odd to them. One student, of whom I've very fond, came to my office and extended the conversation by telling me that white teenagers have no culture of their own, so they appropriate other cultures. Even being an environmentalist she saw as a white person's appropriation of another group's cause. She was echoing a thought I've heard before, one that John Wythe White plays with when he writes about a character with no culture, no home, no roots (see the headnote to this introduction). That conversation stopped me in my tracks. Yes, there is bad appropriation. But equally troubling is the notion that we ought not to write and think about the histories of other groups of people, those with whom we share our city streets, our schools, our families.

Of course the sub-generic poem about being prevented from writing about the place you live in quickly meets its limits. One can only read so many of these poems without wondering if there isn't in fact something better to spill ink over than one's inability to write anything meaningful. Tony Quagliano wrote eloquent poems about jazz, ended up writing as much about New Orleans as about Honolulu. Mason Donald now teaches creative writing in Honolulu. One moves on. But where? What are shared experiences that lead to poetry that contributes to more than blasts of resentmentt? In what forms do we choose to write? How do we navigate the rocky shoals of acknowledging bad history while trying to make a better one? These are the questions that each of the writers in this anthology addresses.

There are no exact answers to these questions. The statements mostly generate more questions. But the refinement of these questions, the attention these writers devote to considering their work in the context of living in Hawai`i, all these are important to witness. Most of the poets whose work you will be reading write about Hawai`i; others write (as they would not do otherwise) out of the experience of whiteness they have encountered in Hawai`i. Faye Kicknosway, whose work is not included here (she did not respond to my emails) wrote a sequence of poems about the ways in which the Pacific is represented in Hollywood movies. Several of her poems were published in an issue of How2 in 2006 (see here: http://alturl.com/m9szo). In that way, she elides the problem of writing about the places themselves, instead honing in on how Hollywood interprets those places for American consumption. Living in Hawai`i often demands that the writer use more than one genre to encompass more than one voice, that the writer move away from narrative and into a more experimental (yet firmly grounded) mode. Anne Brewster's essay, “Teaching The Tracker in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness,” includes a fine meditation on the question of just how to write out of what she calls “the intersections of Anglo-Celtic creoleness with whiteness and with Australian multiculture in a way that would address my affective dispositions and equivocations.” (5). Her solution is multi-generic, as it is for many of the writers in this anthology. It's time to honor another way in which Hawai`i has affected its poets, in this instance its Euro-American ones. To consider that writing in Hawai`i is not always about Hawai`i is another way to say that “Hawai`i writing” is more than is dreamed of in our current philosophies.

Are there enough poets to fill the book? (This was a real question.)

There are more than enough Euro-American poets to fill the book. Many of the poets one might expect to see here are not here, for reasons of editorial overlook or because they did not send work. No matter: this anthology, which makes no claims to being comprehensive, presents many wonderful poets, some of them older, many of them young and just getting started. There could have been other batting orders. This is the one that came up and it's a strong one.

Works Cited

Brewster, Anne. “Teaching The Tracker in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness.” In The Racial Politics

of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges, Eds. Barbara Baird and Eamien Riggs. Newcastle on

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing [in press].

Daws, Gavan and Bennett Hymer. Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Through the Years: Two

Centuries of Writing. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2008.

de Silva, Kapalai‘ula. "The Literary Offences of W.S. Merwin’s Folding Cliffs.”

http://apps.ksbe.edu/kaiwakiloumoku/makalii/reviews/book/literary_offences

Frankenburg, Ruth. White Woman, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Hagedorn, Jessica. Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction.

NY: Penguin, 1993.

Ohnuma, Keiko. “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and

raised in Hawai`i.” Cultural Values (6:3 2002): 273-285.

Rohrer, Judy. Haoles in Hawai`i. Honolulu: U of Hawai`i P, 2010.

Schultz, Susan M. “'Be a Haole, a Dumb Haole, or a Dumb Fucking Haole': On White Writing

in Hawai`i.” http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2010/07/be-haole-dumb-haole-or-dumb-f-ing

--. "Special Feature: Pacific Poetries." (2:4, 2006): http://alturl.com/y29gx

White, John Wythe. “Surf Cities.” In Short-Timers in Paradise. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 2000.

JACK LONDON IS DEAD launch now available at PennSound

For a recording of the launch of Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some stories), go to PennSound, here.

This anthology is an important intervention in Hawai`i's literary politics, and offers a fine selection of poetry, as well as statements by the writers on what it means to be a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i in the 21st century.

To buy the book, go to our website, here.

You can also buy this book along with three others published during this past year. See our website for details of the sale.

Tinfish Press Sale: Our 2013 Collection!

Please go to our website--here--and find the sales offer.  20% off this year's four titles, gorgeous books all: Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some prose), edited by Susan M. Schultz; Diary of Use, by J. Vera Lee; The Arc of the Day / The Imperfectionist, by Steve Shrader; and A Bell Made of Stones, by Lehua Taitano.

Video! Two Counterpath Events in June: Tinfish Press & Singing Horse Press

Counterpath has a wonderful space in Denver, right near the corner where the bus to Mexico stops. They host readings by presses. As the editor of a press who wishes everyone could buy all of our titles, the better to understand our press's argument, I love this practice. In June I was there with several Tinfish authors (Margo Berdeshevsky, Ya-Wen Ho, Janna Plant, Eric Paul Shaffer, and Maged Zaher) to launch Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories), as well as the new volumes by Ya-Wen and Maged.  You can watch the reading here.


Singing Horse Press was featured the next evening (watch video here). Paul Naylor, Andrew Schelling, and I read from our work. If you wonder why my reading starts with music going on, that was deliberate--I was reading from work that takes place in an Alzheimer's home, so I asked the Counterpath person to play some Frank Sinatra in the the background.


I'm very grateful to Counterpath (especially to Julie Carr, Michael Flatt, Ariella Ruth), not only for sharing their space with all of us--and with so many other presses--but also for preserving a record of our having been there to read. They also publish amazing books. My favorite has been Jonathan Stalling's Yinglishi,  but there's a whole catalogue of wonders.

l-r: Maged Zaher, Susan M. Schultz, Janna Plant, K. Lorraine Graham (guest!), and Margo Berdeshevky, after the reading. Photo by Ya-Wen Ho. Missing: Eric Paul Shaffer.

Design for all the Tinfish books launched is by Allison Hanabusa.

Dead Jack at the Hawai`i Book & Music Festival, May 18-19

After years of nothing to do at the annual festival, the jackpot (so to speak) seemed to find me this year, when I moderated a panel on documentary poetry and participated in a reading by Jack London is Dead authors. Then I spoke on a panel whose working title, "The Right to Write," was perhaps more accurate than the final title, something to do with one place and many voices. Some notes on the path I wore around the Honolulu Hale area:

The Documentary Poetry panel: Gary Pak, Amalia Bueno, Wing Tek Lum.

Wing Tek Lum's new Bamboo Ridge book is out, called The Nanjing Massacre: Poems.

Don't let the flowery cover fool you. This book joins the genealogy of Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust, which comes almost directly out of Nuremberg Trial testimony about Nazi atrocities. It also comes out of the work of Iris Chang, who was scheduled to come to Hawai`i just months before her suicide in 2004. Lum has worked on the project for fifteen years, researching, re-imagining, traveling to China, writing down the details of massacres and rapes and pillage. As moderator of the panel he was on, I had a good view of the audience. At some point during his reading, I saw heads bow, bodies turn as if away from the words being used as blunt instruments. Lum has never been a poet of anything other than plain speech. In these poems, such speech becomes a kind of weapon.  "It's a great work against war," one woman said. There's an element of massacre porn to it, too, one that makes me uncomfortable, but  this book demands attention in ways that most books do not, cannot.

Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories): Saturday

The reading for the book was sparsely attended, but the reception was warm.  Afterwards, Neal Milner, emeritus professor of Political Science and local actor (originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin), offered us a story.  He said he once performed at a senior center alongside a local Asian storyteller; his story was about being a Jewish storyteller in Hawai`i (where there are very few Jews).  At the end of the story, a tiny old woman, about 80 pounds, asked if he would come to meet her church group to explain Jews.  He said no, he could not, but recommended someone who might be able to talk about Judaism.  You know, the old woman said, looking a the other storyteller, there are two kinds of Jews, ones like him (Neal) and those who killed Christ. The incident came so out of context to how Neal had always imagined anti-semitism--the woman was too old, too frail, and this was Hawai`i, after all--that he couldn't get angry.

That's a parable about Hawai`i, by the way.

On Sunday, I joined the panel about writing in this place, who can, who should not, and how they ought to do it. This kind of conversation always invites in the "ought/should/must" verbs in ways that make me nervous. The panel was organized by Craig Howes and included Brandy Nalani McDougall, Puakea Nogelmeier, myself, and Jean Toyama.  To over-simplify the matter and to anticipate Ruth Hsu's question about how we define our identities, Brandy spoke about Hawaiian literature, how it was suppressed like the Hawaiian language for many decades, about efforts to revive it; Puakea, who comes originally from Minnesota but is an authority on Hawaiian language and culture, addressed the issue with his usual wit (I confess to being too anxious to listen accurately). I talked about the Jack London is Dead anthology, namely about being a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i, and then Jean Toyama talked about the linked poems she's written with three other woman, published by Bamboo Ridge Press.

I hadn't known how Craig Howes would frame the panel, exactly.  He bobbed and weaved when I asked. But he began our hour by alluding to a mythical (and also real, alas) character who was much talked about in the 1990s in our department, the "747-poet." This is the poet who flies to Hawai`i (on a now out-of-date airplane), sits in Waikiki for a week, then returns home to write The Authoritative Poem about Hawai`i. I remember running into one of these in the American Book Review once. It was by a poet who had spent more than a week here, maybe a semester even, but his poem was about sitting in Waikiki realizing why people in Hawai`i can't think.  Too sunny.  Too warm.  I remember feeling sick about it. So I asked the audience to visualize this interloper poet.  What's his gender? (male!) and what's his race? (white!).  There you have it. The problem, I suggested, is that this stereotype carries over to writers who've lived here for decades, have families here, sometimes grew up in Hawai`i. (How long you've lived here, your family's lived here, matters always.) But, because they're "haole," their work is often not thought to honor the place, but to appropriate from its traditions.  This led me into a version of my Jack London is Dead spiel about trying to find an audience for work if you are not local (a category developed in opposition to haole) or Hawaiian (a category more recently developed in opposition to haole and to local Asian). I talked about Mason Donald's poem about growing up in Hilo and being told he should write about potatoes (he ate rice). Judging by the faces of the audience members, the reception was mixed.

Since then, I've been talking to other members of the dead Jack group.  Is that what we might call ourselves? Some issues have come up, including a persistent discomfort with category, the question of how long one needs to live here before one is permitted a voice, and the question of audience.  Here was my response (someone amended) to the category issue:

--I'm with you on the dangers of category, and I fought with myself over doing the anthology in the first place because of that feeling, and because Tinfish has always been about creating conversations between poets who might not know of each other, not those who seem alike in some immediate way.  But I've also come to think that there ought to be a place for "us" to think about our position here,  as well as a foundation for talking to other people about what we do, who we are. We may think we are our own selves, but we are also the selves others demand that we be. If we do not like those constructions, or if we simply want to think through those constructions, we need a space in which to do it.  The reactions I get seem to assume that white writers are dead and still appropriating this place, or that they are dead but that it's great they existed so they could influence indigenous Pacific writers.  It's worth pointing out (despite the wicked obviousness of it) that we exist.

On the fact that I spoke at length without using the word "haole," as one woman noted in the Q&A and another dead Jack poet picked up on:

--Yes, I told the woman who asked me how I'd managed to talk for so long without using the h-word and I explained (in part) that the term "Euro-American" reintroduces culture into the equation.  Whites and haole are seen as being without culture--except insofar as they appropriate it--and that's simply not the case.  What I didn't say is that my husband grew up here, and so hates the h-word that I hardly ever utter it in the house.

[Tom Gammarino, front, Julia Wieting, Eric Paul Schaffer, Evan Nagle, Jaimie Gusman, authors]

On the question of not having an audience here, to a poet much younger than myself:

-- I have found that issue so dispiriting over many years.  In most literary communities there are gifts and then reciprocal gifts, exchanges, thoughts.  I have found here (and too often in my publishing practice) that the gift is taken and there's no response (or worse).  This is not to say I expect grand gifts in return, but I do expect to be treated with respect.  So I know where you're coming from on that.  Just keep sending work out.  Your audience will find you. The conversation will happen.

I want, now, to move past this particular conversation, which has replayed itself over and again since well before my time here, 1990-. There's a horrible seductiveness to thinking about it incessantly, as if the possibility that one does NOT belong holds the key to whatever ails the place, or oneself. But of course that's seduction, not love. Love is what keeps many of us here, despite the difficulties, sometimes because of them. Not having such conversations is hardly a remedy for having them awkwardly. Which reminds me, I need to pick up my daughter from soccer practice now. Tomorrow morning we go hiking in Ka`a`awa with her grandfather Brad.

For a fun take on the "747-poem," see Pam Brown's Wild Honey chapbook: here.

________________________________


As I left my panel, having talked at length about the need to make a place for Euro-American writers in Hawai`i, I turned the corner and found this woman's teeshirt staring me in the face.  I asked if I could took her picture, and she said yes. I hereby appropriate it, and add irony, because that's the wisdom of my--and her--tradition.

Is _Jack London is Dead_ a Community of Writers?

                                          [Flyer for the HCC event]

I drove home from Honolulu Community College wondering why I'd expressed such ambivalence when Eric Paul Shaffer, who'd organized an event for his English 201 (Introduction to Creative Writing) class expressed surprise that he felt community with other writers in Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Writing of Hawai`i (and some stories). Do we feel the same? he asked. "It's terrible, isn't it?" I began, sputtering about how, since founding Tinfish in 1995 I had tried to foster conversations between members of categories that I otherwise don't much like, how I had "succumbed" to the ethnic anthology in making this book. How I loved having the conversation with the students, most of whom are not white. These are feelings I expressed in the book's introduction and in my statement, mixed feelings (making me think perhaps Tom Gammarino's fictional place where feeling is illegal might not be all bad). But, after two fine readings and an extended conversation with Eric's students and the other writers at these events (Tyler McMahon and the writers on the flyer, above), some rethinking is in order.  Or, if not rethinking exactly, then recalibration. For, how are we to have these conversations if we haven't yet had the conversations with writers whose experiences (educational, ethnic, diasporic) are like your own? The logic of the ethnic anthology is becoming clearer to me, even as I still instinctively resist it and the very book I edited. The book is its own best defense against its editor, I suspect.

Monday's event was at Hawai`i Pacific University, and was organized by Tyler McMahon. Today's was at HCC in Kalihi, a working class concrete campus whose back parking lot was used by the makers of Lost to represent Iraq, complete with bombed out cars and Eric Paul Shaffer's part-Mexican brother-in-law, as an Iraqi. Eric's poem on the event gets at the layers of meaning and fakery in that film shoot.  "Disbelief is no longer willingly surrendered, but eagerly / and widely applied to horrendous events that overcome us," he writes in "On the Set of Lost: Dillingham Boulevard, Honolulu." "It looks so real on TV. Desert dust swirls around / my brother-in-law, the U.S. mail-carrier, an Iraqi-for-a-day. There must be / some truth in appearances, and whatever it is / must be what makes Hollywood a shrine and paves a sidewalk with stars."

[The parking lot at HCC that was made to look like war-time Iraq, with Tom Gammarino on the left and Eric Paul Shaffer on the right]


We local readers from Jack London is Dead have settled into a rhythm of sorts: one of us introduces the anthology, explains why Jack London is dead, holds forth on how contemporary white writers are working within a context more diverse and complicated than any dreamed of by Jack.  (That I am beginning to pity Jack should inspire me to read his work, now that I've proclaimed his death as a literary figure in Hawai`i. Maybe.) Then we do the following in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order: Jaimie Gusman reads from her Shekinah poems, beginning with one called "Ejaculation," which is very much about a goddess creating the world from her own thighs (today I thought of it as being like the passage in "Song of Myself" where Whitman masturbates a world, except that in Jaimie's version it's a female deity); Evan Nagle reads flarf poems in utter deadpan, moving from the crazy to occasional lyrical passages that quickly flit away; Eric Paul Shaffer reads his "Lost" poem and also a poem about the `okina (we talked later today about punctuation as meaning); I read some memory cards, today making a link between adoption and my living in Hawai`i (a relationship of love, family, but not genealogical in the usual sense); Julia Wieting reads poems about animals that are actually about parts of speech; Tom Gammarino reads one of his two short stories in the book about Peter-or-whatever who lives in a place where feeling is illegal.  Poor Peter writes a poem, which is his downfall.  He must have snuck into the poetry anthology by writing a short story about a poem. I wish that Tyler had read from his short story on Monday, but he assured us he'd read at his campus just recently.

Eric's students had read the anthology because he gave them copies, so they quoted to us from some of our statements, knew what was at stake, and mostly--this was wonderful--had questions about being a writer.  When do you write?  How do you write? What do you write about? Some of the questions then led into the territory of whiteness, of living in a place where the central wound is colonialism, of thinking about how to write about Hawai`i in ways that might help to mend that wound. It was a good, a fruitful, conversation, for both what I had imagined for Tinfish when I founded it (conversations across cultures, experiences), and for what I had not (those conversations coming from a recognition that those of us who are white writers in Hawai`i have certain experiences that mold us as writers).

                                          [Eric's marvelous class]


I've heard from several readers ("readers are the most important people," said Eric's students, on cue) that the prose statements are the most compelling parts of the book. The more I hear the contributors read their poems, however, the more I believe that the poetry is what matters, even if readers need the context offered by the prose. "Why are you in the anthology?" Eric's students asked him, thinking he was not as "innovative" as other contributors. To which I would say that it's the diversity of forms and content that draws me back to the book, as well as I think I know it. I'd like to start thinking about ways in which poems are in conversation: Eric's poem about Lost with mine about an Iraq vet calling in airstrikes on Waikiki Beach (a story told me by Adam Aitken); Evan Nagle's flarf with Tom Gammarino's wickedly dark funny prose; Scott Abels's and Rob Wilson's poems about Waikiki; Jaimie Gusman's and Janna Plant's poems about the earth; Julia Wieting's and Endi Bogue Hartigan's poems ostensibly about animals and plants. Perhaps one day we can have a call and response reading, foregoing the alphabet and entering a more fluid ground of poems as conversation.

[Tyler McMahon at HPU, 3/18/13]
















                                   [The rest of the band at HCC, 3/20/13]