Creative Writing (in) Composition

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

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

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

Observation and elaboration




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

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

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


Perspective and argument: Place




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hearing and Thinking about Language

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

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

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


NATHAN KAGEYAMA (from Tinfish #3)


Stay Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cruisin' on da leash,
Shmoke dose leash-buggas


[after Ezra Pound's "The Return"]


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

_______________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chin Music Press & Issues in Creative Writing

[Tom Gammarino, Todd Shimoda, Linda Shimoda; photo by Steve Canham]

What better way not to watch a game of the World Series sans Cardinals than to attend a reading by writers (and an artist) of Chin Music Press? And so on Thursday, I went to hear Todd and Linda Shimoda talk about their literary/artistic collaboration, OH! a mystery of mono no aware, and M. Thomas Gammarino (we call him Tom because he's a Ph.D. grad student here) reading from his first novel Big in Japan: A Ghost Story. The works were high and tight, as befits the press that published them.

Both books are as involved with ideas as with plot-lines; their subtitles tell us that. Todd Shimoda's book is the third of a "loose" trilogy: the first features woodblocks and robotics, the second calligraphy and neuroscience, and this third, poetry and social networking. OH! offers up Zack Hara, "emotional eunuch" tech writer in L.A. who goes to Japan, teaches English, gets caught up in an on-line suicide pact, and becomes a vehicle for notions of mono no aware, or "things of sadness." Thus, the mystery of the book (as I gather, having heard only bits of it at the reading) is as much what mono no aware is as how Zack resolves, or fails to resolve, his emotional vacuum. Linda Shimoda talked about the way in which she and her husband collaborate on projects. She is a visual artist, very much involved in Japanese calligraphy and art. The process sounded somewhat familiar to me from Tinfish, where our collaborations are less than concurrent conversations, more like parallel tracks on a related route. Todd and Linda talk about a shared concern, and then adjourn to separate work spaces for months. He writes a novel, she creates a series of images. When they've finished their solo projects, they come together and organize the two pieces in conversation. Thus, Linda's project on emotions entered into his project on the failure of emotion; then, a third eye entered in the person of the graphic designer for Chin Music. The result is a stunning artist's book (how can it be sold for $22.50?).

In his recent Ph.D. prospectus defense, Tom Gammarino had waved OH! around as an exemplar of what he believes will happen once trade paperbacks migrate into Kindle form. The book, as object, will then be freed up to be an art object, rather than a mere carrier of words. We shall see, but the premise sounds reasonable.

Tom began the reading with a story. When he first went to Japan, he had long hair. The summer was too hot. He went to get it cut. He only knew three phrases in Japanese, two of which were "hello" and "good-bye." He and the hair-cutter communicated through gestures and pre-linguistic noises, which he replicated for us. She cut a large swath of his hair, sounded a question, whereupon he uttered his only other phrase of Japanese, "mono no aware!"

Tom's protagonist is a white American who goes to Japan with his band, Agenbite (yes, Joyce fans, that one); Agenbite is to Tom's book what mono no aware is to Todd's. Like Zack Hara, his emotional life is not right. Brain (his name invokes Pynchon, as does a lot of the book, which hearkens back to V. to this reader) falls in love with a Japanese sex worker, cannot separate love and sex, gets involved with a student, breaks up with her (much to her failure to care), and so on. As you can tell already, Tom is ushering in every stereotype adhered to by stereotypical American white males in Asia, but he attempts at the same time to expose and demolish them. This is a dangerous course, to put it mildly. But he mostly does so. The book is flat-out funny; he plays with the stereotypes the way a cat does with its prey, like some latter-day Rabelais.

What I most appreciated about Tom's writing, aside from its go-for-broke humor, was the way in which he crafts sentences. The book is not written in the clumsy everything-for-the-plot manner of much fiction, but almost as a collection of tightly wrought sentences. Tom's attention to language finds its tightest focus, however, toward the end of the book, when Brain is high on mushrooms (he ate them in a sandwich) begins to think in Japanglish.

You speak Japanglish now. Japanglish speaking is by what you are. At least the dad was honest. Strict vew of life, was his truth, you were informed entirely, it was war. You take those, the wife while having sexual intercourse, the specialist and of substance you are polite mutually. That then a certain way.

__________


Who gets to speak, and for whom, is a huge issue in Hawai`i. Tom's book takes it on like Philippe Petit on his rope. The question loomed when I attended Craig Howes's English 620 (Introduction to the Profession of English) course this past week. I was there to introduce "issues in creative writing" to the entering M.A. students. I did so by asking them to read one issue of one of the journals published in Hawai`i now: Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, `oiwi, Tinfish. Given that all of these journals are published in Hawai`i, their sense of where they are and whom they speak for is crucial not just to the editors of these journals, but also to their readers. While all of these journals are now active, one gets the sense of a current narrative that posits Bamboo Ridge as an historical object, `oiwi as a current one, and Manoa and Tinfish as tangential to current stories told about Hawai`i's literature. While there's an inevitability to this narrative, I find it unfortunate, based more on ideas about Hawai`i than about what one actually finds in the journals. Local literature, as it is taught in my department now, is seen almost exclusively through the lens of Asian Settler Colonialism, which posits Asians as part of a problem (colonialism, cultural appropriation, and so on), not part of possible solutions. Such readings, while they aim to be ethical, often rely on binary moral paradigms to make a space for Hawaiian literature and culture by sweeping away the claims (or indeed the texts) made by Asian local writers. Sure, the stories about grandpa fishing and grandson later on eating the food placed on his grave, have lost their eclat (they probably lost that eclat in the 1980s), but Bamboo Ridge has published Lee Tonouchi and Hawaiian playwrights in recent years. That they published a book by Ian MacMillan was itself a fascinating, but not often commented upon, event. He was the first white writer to be included in their canon of single author texts.

I asked Craig's students to imagine journals that would fill literary holes. They tended toward strategies of representation (generation, gender) and genre (nonfiction came up more than once). Publishing, I suggested, should not be considered from the point of view of desire to be published, but from the need to create communities of writers by way of becoming publishers. I look forward to reading examples of the work that feels necessary to these students.

I talked a bit about how a book like Tinfish 18.5 , whose writers are all Hawai`i born and raised, tries to field a conversation between writers from Hawai`i that is not based on nationality or race. I don't mean this to be a collection of "local writers," either. The term "local" seems to have outworn its usefulness. Perhaps we can develop new terms for the literature that creates alliances between writers in Hawai`i, no matter their identity positions or even aesthetics (though Tinfish's aesthetics are pretty clear at this point). I hope Tinfish can provide one model for possible literary futures here.

Tinfish Thanksgiving Sale

Tinfish Editor's Blog brings you a brief commercial break before regular blogging continues--tomorrow.


Give more than thanks for wonderful books from Tinfish Press! Buy one or both of our sales packages as presents for friends at Christmas, or for yourself right now! A good way to experience some of the strengths of experimental poetry (and some prose) from the Pacific, while supporting the future of small press poetry. We have two offers:

--The 2009 package:

Living Pidgin, by Lee Tonouchi: a second edition of our 2002 collection of essays and poems in Pidgin by Da Pidgin Guerrilla, Hawai`i's foremost agitator for da kine nonstandard English.

Jammed Transmission, by Paul Naylor, with introduction by Norman Fischer: the latest in our sublist of Buddhist-inflected books, a conversation between a contemporary California poet and a 13th century Japanese Buddhist writer.

Tinfish 19: lovingly and laboriously made issue #19 includes work about Hawai`i's TheBus, landlords, the White House, Mao's insides, and much more.

List price for these three is $42. Yours for $30 plus $4 shipping.


--Package #2

Erotics of Geography, by Hazel Smith, with CD-R. Poetry by an English/Australian poet, pedagogue, musician. Performances on cd are not to be missed.

Cribs, by Yunte Huang. Seriously funny collage work by Huang about being Chinese in America. A linguistic romp.

farout_library_software, by Pam Brown & Maged Zaher. A poetic conversation between an important Australian writer and an engineer-poet from Egypt, now living in Seattle. Truly world literature!

List price for three is $41: all three for $30 plus $4 shipping. Go to http://tinfishpress.com and click on "purchase."

You can get both packages for $50 plus $5 shipping, as well. We also have back issues of the journal available at a discount—simply inquire at press.tinfish@google.com

In coming months, we will be publishing more beautifully designed work by Kaia Sand, Lyz Soto, Daniel Tiffany, Gizelle Gajelonia and others. Your purchase of books now means that we will more easily be able to publish more.

Thanks very much,

Susan M. Schultz
Editor, Tinfish Press
47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9
Kaneohe, HI 96744

Documentary surrealism: Matt Jasper's _Moth Moon_

I'm reading "Surrealism" (from Rothenberg and Joris's vol. 1) for Wednesday's Form & Theory of Poetry class. Andre Breton is telling me, from the echo chamber of 1924, that he believes "in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak" (469). This surreality will present "the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern" (468). The difficulties involved in arriving at the "actual functioning of thought" can be seen in the fact that many Surrealist exercises were collaborative, rather than singular, communal rather than solitary. The exquisite corpses I ask my students to write end by approximating Ashbery's solitary writing practice, perhaps, but even Ashbery was schooled on Surrealist techniques in the early 1960s. The "Language Events" recorded in the anthology depend upon pairs of writers composing separately, then "taping" together their questions and answers. In that sense, as in many of the Surrealist exercises, two very ordinary statements, when taped together, make for one "marvelous" (Breton's word) event. The exchange between Benjamin Peret and Andre Breton goes as follows:

If orchids grew in the palm of my hand
masseurs would have plenty of work.

or, this between Yves Tanguy and Andre Breton:

When children slap their father's face
all young men will have white hair.

In neither case is there anything terribly strange about either half of the pseudo-logical statement. Even where one half of the statement is dream-like, "When shoestrings grow in the workers' gardens," for example, the syntax is normative, the image possible to see, the world still ordered in its self-estrangement.

When I began to write about my mother's dementia, I noticed that what she said was often sur-real in this way. She would take two unrelated true statements and splice them together to create what was to me a fiction--to her a true event. She would confuse time periods and run them together in grammatical sentences, which asserted that they were the same. She would confuse cause and effect, putting the latter before the former and creating an effect-cause effect. Much of the confusion I felt as her audience (daughter!) was in the fact I understood the elements of her conversation to be elements she shared with me. Even when her conversation became more strange, as when she asserted that she was in Afghanistan and needed a ride to Wooster, Ohio, I could infer that she had heard the word "Afghanistan" on the news and remembered that her mother and brother had lived and died in Wooster, Ohio. (Something similar happens when Ian Lind visits his dad on O`ahu and is told that he has been driving cars on Maui. Ian's occasional posts on his father's dementia are lovingly documented.)

To say that dementia is a surreal condition is probably not to say anything anyone doubts who has confronted a relative or friend with Alzheimer's disease. More interesting, on a literary level, is the way in which writing about dementia creates a hybrid form, documentary surrealism. If documentary poetry combines the strengths of historical writing, journalism, collage, and the lyric, then documentary surrealism opens up the field to the ways in which the imagination is actualized by mental illness or other extreme states (such as the post-traumatic syndrome Andre Breton dealt with during WWI when he treated soldiers off the battlefield).

Matt Jasper's book of poems, Moth Moon, owes a lot to what Pagan Kennedy terms "every surrealist who ever leashed a lobster," in one blurb. But the opening sequence of poems, based on the poet's experiences in a home for geriatric schizophrenics, has less to do with performing the imagination's oddities (walking lobsters) but with true mental states, recorded straightforwardly. The poet is not imagining anything; he is taking down dictation from those whose minds do not separate the real from the dream-state. Hence, in the title poem, he shows us a man who wears his hair away on the pillow saying "no," and a woman I don't think I shall soon forget:

A woman who suffers from Dutch elm disease,
who speaks to her hands as they turn to dried leaves
falling
outside the window--
her hands covering the ground. (11)

Or, in "Anastasia, Purdy Group Home":

At nine in the morning I try to wake you.
I say your name, I rock you back and forth.
You open one eye
and say, "what you touching my hip bone for,
you going to make soup?" (10)

Or David D. who was arrested for "pounding nails into the yellow line on a busy city street." Or the woman in "The Tip of the Iceberg," who contemplates murdering the poet who says, "I've had mobsters tell me everything. / I mean everything" (37)

What to make of this conjunction of documentation and surrealism? Certainly it puts the focus on something other than imagination, other than aesthetics (though Breton said he didn't care about them, he surely did), other than "systematic displacement" (466). What to a surrealist is "displaced" is to a documentary writer (and his or her subject) a fact. It may not be a "true fact," but by the same token, it cannot be doubted.

"Why are we doing this?" Education as explanation.

"Why are we doing this?"

I was in the midst of asking my Literature & Creative Writing (English 273) students what sounds vowels make and then having them, Christian Bok style, write sentences in which they used as much of one vowel as they possibly could. We were reading these sentences out loud when the student next to me asked this simple question.

I was annoyed. I put him off. And then, for the next day, I contemplated the question, which was, after all, a good one. Why were we doing that? My intention, which I had not yet stated, was to have the students think about sound. When they enter the class (these are introductory level students), they read poetry out loud as if their voices were filtered through a tone-reduction device. Their renderings are flat, affectless, unmusical. We spend a lot of time in class reading out loud, precisely to mitigate this atonality, this lack of engagement with sound. The students are bathed in music by their ipods, but have not been immersed in the musicality of language.

So I asked the students during the next class to say simple sentences like "how are you today?" as if they were in very different contexts. As if they were speaking to a lover, or to a lover they thought had cheated on them, or to a dog (not to be confused with that middle term). We talked about what it's like to find oneself surrounded by speakers of a language we don't know, and what we can tell about the speakers simply through the sounds of their speech. We talked about listening through a wall. And I'm hoping it began to make sense to them, why we were indulging in the non-sense of a week of sound poetry.

But that question also resonates in a larger echo chamber. Why we do what we do is not something teachers and scholars do well. That lack of communication shows, when you read the comments section of the local newspapers, or talk to people who wonder why you're not at work at 10 a.m. on a given day, or who ask how many hours a week you teach or how many books you sell. (This reminds me that I was once confronted at a Halloween party by a man dressed as a gypsy who loved the football coach, but wanted to know how many hours a week I was in the classroom; I responded that I was pretty sure the coach only coached three hours a week.) What we seem precisely to lack is what we're constantly asked about: product, and quantity of product. Who knows if explanation will work; during my recent trip to SFSU I was told that the cutbacks are so severe that they're allowing students to enter classes five weeks into the term. Needless to say, the classes are larger than they had been, and faculty are teaching more of them. But we owe it to ourselves to explain the value of what we do to those who do not consider it important enough to maintain during this recession.

What is our product? We like to think that we teach critical thinking, observation, even enjoyment. But what is that? I like to think that in encouraging my students' creativity, I am freeing them from the very questions we are always asked--about practical realities. These are interior qualities, not something one can see, or purchase. They are not consumables. That one of my students came to me at the end of his college career and said he had discovered a love for theater and opera touched me deeply, but just won't cut it in the public sphere. There, intangible goods are not good; they are excess, luxury, inessential.

My husband, who is a high school science teacher, says that our "product" is those students who graduate and make the state work, the lawyers, the politicians (well . . .), the teachers, the architects, and so on. He says we need to claim that we're creating something tangible in this way. Much as my idealism still pushes hard against my gorge, I think we must say these things. We also need to assert, as my colleague Joan Peters did to me yesterday, that the public sector cannot be compared to the private, as it so often is in the comment streams. It exists for other reasons, and in another economy. But no one who succeeds in the private sphere who went to a public university has done it "alone," without the support of a community larger than self, than family.

While we cannot lay claim to our students' successes, we can fairly lay claim to having provided the materials and the methods (critical thinking, creativity) for their success. Let's start making lists of UHM grads who are prominent in our community, and elsewhere, and send them to the newspapers and the television stations. Recently, my blog post on the UH crisis went viral, my colleague S. Shankar wrote an op-ed in the Star-Bulletin, and several of my colleagues wrote and signed a letter in the Advertiser. Our union's website archives letters by faculty to the administration. Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui wrote an open letter to her school friend, Lee Cataluna, whose opinion piece in the Advertiser presented the university's faculty in a very poor light. This is all to the good.

Today a facebook friend sent me a link to the UK Guardian about the four-day weeks Hawai`i schoolchildren are facing as of tomorrow, the first "Furlough Friday." (The school week in public schools will actually be three and a half days, due to early dismissal on Wednesdays.) And what will the end result of that be? I tell you, that's a rhetorical question.

New Reading Series!

The brains behind this new series mostly belong to Jaimie Gusman, a new Ph.D. student at UHM. The brawn will be reading once a month from now on. The organizers plan to present readers from Hawai`i and from elsewhere. Along with me, the first readers will be Ranjan Adiga and Joseph Cardinale, both Ph.D. fiction writers at UHM, Jerrold Shiroma of durationpress.com, who has recently moved to O`ahu, and Robert Reed, the mystery entrant. I'm a bit worried about the metaphorical field, (MIAs, Van Gogh and his ear, and kamikazes), but we will surely prevail, peacefully.

[Click the image, as ever, to make it bigger.]

Prose at the Poetry Center: Futurism Now, Or, My Trip to San Francisco

I went to San Francisco to give a reading with Renee Gladman at the SFSU Poetry Center. Along the way a few things happened.

[Honolulu to San Francisco flight, 10/13, a woman and a man across the aisle begin to talk, at first about health care]

--We're just going to have to suffer through this for a while.
--They're so starry eyed.
--They play the race card all the time, but they won't admit it.
--They don't see the evil that's being done underneath.
--You know how much they hated Bush. Those liberal bozos.
--Yes, George Bush and Cheney were good men who cared about this country.
--I sometimes don't say these things out loud.
--We've been in business for 40 years; it doesn't get easier. I never noticed the mortgage crisis.
--It was because the Democrats in Congress insisted that minorities buy houses with bad loans.
--And WE worked so hard to get what we have.
--The economy was very good there for a while.
--I'll think of you when I'm suffering through this.

__________

Steve Vincent shows me the Mission District's murals. He rings the bell at Hamburger Eyes and someone named Roy peers out from the second floor, remembers Steve, invites us up. No public gallery any more, need to make money. He shows us the case of publications, points to the roof, which leaked during the recent storm, says he grew up on O`ahu and do I know Naomi Long? Yes, I say, wishing I could send him a link to Radiant Field.

__________

Norman Fischer, Buddhist priest and poet, sits at Mel's Diner in the Mission District and asks, "what is the role of poetry now?"

__________

It was prose day at the Poetry Center, SFSU, on October 15. Renee Gladman and I read, she from a 60 page novel and I from my retrofitted Dementia Blog book. Renee is obsessed with the sentence, not so much as a unit of grammar as with a unit of experience. We live in sentences, she says, and our lives are as confusing as they are. She spoke of wanting to write of experiences that don't go anywhere in particular. Her character lived with a sentence that moved around her room. The sentence flew to the window and sat on it for a while. The character was supposed to murder someone. The character had occasional outbursts. The world (and the sentence) were so changeable that plots erupted and disappeared in their course. This seemed like my Dementia Blog, whose concerns are more quotidian, more "true" perhaps, but recall a world every bit as like dandelion fluff. Stephen Vincent's haptics were good maps to the breaths of air that scattered those seeds. The Q&A was about our being publishers and writers, about Gertrude Stein's distinction between the sentence (unemotional) and the paragraph (emotional), about doing research, genre blurring, sentences.

__________

Marjorie Perloff lectured on Futurism at SFMOMA during the President Obama traffic jam on October 15. She began by invoking a blog post by Julian Myers that Rachel Loden told me about, in which a writer announced he would boycott the Futurist events of the weekend because F.T. Marinetti wished for the "hygiene of war" and hated women so. Perloff did not take the position I might have taken, that while Marinetti's positions were horrid things, his style and energy remain significant, his attempt to deal with the machine. But Perloff's narrative excused Marinetti, citing his humor, the context of his Manifesto, and the way in which his Manifesto turned--later on--into a Manifesto more about writing style than revolution. That his use of the word "war" was misunderstood. She lost me there, but the slides kept coming and the wonderful details and the definitions of Manifesto and the "words in freedom" divorced from syntax kept appearing in gorgeous typographical manifestations. Free words, not free verse, which drew a caustic commentary from our speaker, who lamented the bane of the form that refuses to fold. Afterward, Johanna Drucker joined Perloff on stage; they sparred verbally over Marjorie's allusion to Russia as "backward," even as she spoke glowingly of its Futurists. They agreed with one another that Manifestos are "quaint" and have outlived their purpose.

__________

Rusty Morrison and I had breakfast in Berkeley and talked small presses. I broached my current train of thought, a very heavy and smoky one, about the ways in which small presses can make arguments, and wondered if she'd had the experience of having Omnidawn's argument misunderstood (or taken otherwise). She spoke about books as singularities, about the way in which she looks in manuscripts for an instance of inspiration. So that certain singularities of vision seem to be her way of organizing a book list. I said I wish that more people wrote reviews of presses, rather than simply of books.

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[BART train from Berkeley to Powell, 10/16: two men and two women with bicycles get on; across from me is a man reading a book called The Intelligence of Dogs. One woman gets off with her boyfriend; as she leaves, her bike gets caught up with the other woman's bike, the one who is wearing gray shorts, a helmet, and running shoes. Her bike is a Specialized. The woman in gray begins to shout in Russian-accented English]

--Get off the train; fuck you! No FUCK YOU!
[The man reading]--Just be quiet, you are a MAGPIE!! Shut up!!
--I have hurt fooot. My fooot had surgery. My fooot hurt.
--You shouldn't be riding a bike, then.
--You should be encouraging me; I am getting help for my fooot.
--I hope they amputate your foot. I hope your foot ROTS OFF.
--Oh, Fuck You.

As I exit the train, a woman is saying to her grown son:

--You should NEVER talk to anyone in BART. Never.
--What did you say? [I ask, wondering how others absorbed the shouting match).
--I told him he should have just kept reading his book. It was cruel to egg that woman on.

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San Francisco Center for the Book had a open house on Friday to show off their presses and have visitors make their own broadsides of a Futurist poem, "Let me have my fun," written by Aldo Palazzeschi, and translated by Paul Vangelisti, who was there to talk Futurism, discuss and read the poem and watch visitors (who included Standard Schaefer's entire writing workshop) print over a John McBride broadside with bright red letters and signs. Kathleen Burch was very warm and accommodating; she co-founded the center in the mid-1990s and has been going strong ever since, with series of workshops and classes. People wandered in and out. When Paul Vangelisti began to present his own new book AZUSA, designed by Rebecca Chamblee of Otis, a curious man began to videotape the performance. It became clear that no one present had any idea who the man was. He had a strong accent, gray hair pulled up into a small bun, tinted with remnant orange dye. And he loved the letter H, kept asking Paul to read the H page of his alphabetarium. H, he wanted H. He wanted H to have more space in the book; he noticed that I followed more closely than did most letters to one another. So Paul read from A-H, as the man, who proved to be Rumanian, roamed around the large table with his video camera.



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By then I was fast friends with one Ann Tashjian, who introduced herself as "the driver." For her husband, that was, the man with the white mustache in a bright green shirt and a hat. The man who buys fine books, rare ones. Standard says he studies Joseph Cornell, taught at UC Irvine. Ann says she watched the inauguration to "make sure nothing untoward happened" and then, when she ("an avid smoker") thought of the sadness of Obama's attempts to quit smoking, she decided to quit for him. And she did. She was talking to a man in his 70s about Obama, a man in L.A. who had gone to Punahou, then Harvard. She had asked him if his wife was Hawaiian. "His entire body changed position," she said, "and he turned to me and said, 'NO, she's Japanese!'" Ann found this story odd; I confessed that I did not. She had once seen a man in skin tight pink, shoes and hood to match, who rode his unicycle back and forth in her BART car. It was his day to ride about town on one wheel.

We attended a concert played on 16 Futurist "noise intoners." The instruments resemble stereo speakers of various sizes, with large cones attached; at the top of the wooden box are levers, and behind the box is a crank mechanism. The players of these instruments were thus engaged in a lot of pulling, pushing, and cranking; occasionally they beat upon their boxes. There were singers, too, who sang sounds, not words, and a woman who both sang and played a violin. She was accompanied by a man who blew into a small instrument with a keyboard, then moved to his noise intoners (one stacked on the other), and by another man who played something that might have been a xylophone had it been a normative instrument. He also had a drum he banged. It was the concert of a lifetime. I will not need another such, but was delighted to see that 400 people came to a concert to hear the music of asthmatics and difficult to start cars and tuning violins. The wheezy spirit of it was immense.

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When I left town this morning, the women's marathon runners had arrived to take the places of the intricately name-tagged Oracle conventioneers. The Futurists were still in place for the weekend, Obama was leaving the city, and all the voices were noise intoners until they could be transcribed. So here they are.


Thanks also to Janine Scancarelli, Steve Dickison, Carrie Takahata, Rachel Loden and Jussi Katonen, for making the trip such a rewarding one.