New book from Tinfish Press, by J. Vera Lee

Tinfish Press is pleased to announce publication of J. Vera Lee's first volume, Diary of Use. For more details, see our website page for the book.  Vera's self-interview can be found here, elsewhere on this blog.

"Our studies are now complete": Martha J. Schultz's earthly work is done

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]

Next Big Thing: J. Vera Lee

J. Vera Lee, aka Jee Young Lee, is a poet who has lived in Hawai`i for the past year and a few months. She grew up in Meadville, Pennsylvania, attended schools in Berkeley and Seattle, and has a son in intensest Little League here in Honolulu.  Tinfish Press will be publishing her first book of poems.

What is the working title of the book?
Diary of Use.  It will be published Summer/Fall (2013) by Tinfish Press.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
‘Diary of use’ comes from my poem ‘item’ about hummingbirds and red-tubed flowers. There’s a kind of used beauty or used idea about the flower’s red tubes and I have a strong sense of recovering images from loss and dreams.

What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Plants, water, snow, but no animals, even though there is some mention of animals in the poems. My son usually says we are animals too.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
The poems in this first collection try to make a place for human relationships in nature, that banal or spiritual place.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I started writing the many of these poems in December 2011, but I’ve included some poems that were written and published around 2005-2007.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The book started, though many of the specific images have disappeared from it, because there are no deciduous tress in my yard in Makiki. At night - the wind can seem stronger then - I noticed green shoots that would later harden into branches and had the idea of a scalpel parting the leaves. It was my first experience of a play on Eden and/or paradise, and I think my poems, though I hadn’t ever been religious, bear out the disaffection.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
The poems verge on hope, even faith. This feels almost mawkish or unfashionable to say except that the poems have a denuded look.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

No.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

What is the lineage of influence in contemporary American poetry? Is this important to evaluate?

Some fresh links

Ron Silliman did a good review the other day at his blog about new anthologies, among them Tinfish Press's Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories).  You can find that here.

Tony Trigilio interviewed Tinfish Editor, and has just posted the podcast on his Radio Free Albion series, here.  We talked about many things, from the St. Louis Cardinals, to dementia writing, to Jack London, and then to memory cards.  Tony is a lovely, lively host who already has a wonderful line-up of podcast people.

I'm just back from five sick days at the Boston AWP. The Tinfish table was located in outer nowhere.  Not the best of our conference stints, but really lovely to see some good friends and meet some more.

Next Big Thing by Stephen Collis

When I did my next thing, here, I tagged Steve Collis, here (that's his Tinfish Retro chap, for free lidat).  I previously blogged on his work, here. This is his self-interview.
 

What is the working title of the book?

To the Barricades, forthcoming from Talon Books in April.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The book is the third in a series, following Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008), to investigate the history of insurgency and revolution—especially in its “grassroots” formations. After looking at the anarchist revolution in Catalonia in 1936 and the resistance to enclosure in England, from the Diggers to John Clare, I wanted to look at the many instances of barricade building in Parisian history (although this became entangled with scenes of contemporary protest and occupation). An inspiration here was David Harvey’s book, Paris, Capital of Modernity.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Ah…maybe the non-actors from Peter Watkins’s fictional documentary film, La Commune: Paris 1871.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

A long time ago in a galaxy very nearby … we came close to revolutionary success, we can get there still, and the voices of insurgents past and present are merging into one incendiary chorus.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The book is also interested in the idea of the revolutionary potentiality of what I call the “biotariat”—the uprising of the exploited planet itself.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

When poets get agents we will know that something is deeply wrong.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

A good deal of politically engaged poetry continues to be written, but how do we get past the self-defeating idea of efficacy (if political art is defined in terms of its efficacy, poetry pales) to an enabling idea like solidarity (political art so defined works to strengthen networks of solidarity by deploying its affects of engagement, urgency, indignation, etc.)?

Tags: Jonathon Skinner, Shannon Maguire, Thom Donovan, Christine Leclerc.

Launch of _Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories)_

Fresh Cafe, Kakaako, February 18, 2013


After a brief introductory spiel by Tinfish Editor/me on why we've published an anthology of poetry by white authors, one I'm becoming all too accustomed to delivering, the poets (and one fiction) writer rose to read from their work. As Sonny Ganaden pointed out in Flux Magazine the other day, the poetry speaks for itself. The readers were Scott Abels, Margo Berdeshevsky, Tom Gammarino, Jaimie Gusman (who curates the MIA Series we participated in), Farris James (for her sister, Endi Bogue Hartigan), Evan Nagle, Janna Plant, Eric Paul Shaffer, and Julia Wieting. Some impressions follow:

Scott Abels read from his "New City" poems and from perhaps my favorite, "Dick Cheney Parade," which calls the former veep "A cheerleader / with no real heart." Of his new life in Waikiki, he writes, "In our starter home / impersonators // of Mark Twain / gain popularity." This is not so much memoir as cut-up, in the sense of cutting up, of humor. Abels's deadpan delivery is utterly appropriate to the poems. In a recent radio interview with Noe Tanigawa, Scott talked about how Hawai`i has made him think differently of sincerity; his poems do not always sound sincere in tone, but their content is. I'm not sure he read this section of his "Waikiki" series, but the lines about tourists are telling, "I thought your shirt / said Virginia / and it had a picture /of the island of O`ahu / but no / it's Virginia." I had never thought to check the map to see that Virginia does resemble O`ahu in shape, but I do remember my mother in her Alzheimer's confusing a Kailua Surf-Riders shirt for an Iowa one.

Margo Berdeshevsky flew to Hawai`i from Paris for the launch and a month-long visit to Maui, where she lived for 25 years and worked as a Poet in the Schools.  She began with "Pele's Dark Landing," a love poem about and, in many ways to, Pele, wrapped inside a poem about the speaker's own love. "There are gardens and there are not. / There is love and there is not. There are leaves and / there are not. But there is/was/ever . . . fire." She concluded by reading two paragraphs of her statement for the volume, about an incident of anti-haole racism, and then also about the "more equal" art of poetry.

M. Thomas Gammarino, aka Tom, read "The Culvert," a prose poetic piece set in a place where feeling has been outlawed (to me, it's a loose allegory of the Hawai`i the missionaries tried to make). Tom's work is characterized by wordplay that spins into plot, plot that devolves into play, but always an eye toward ideas, funny sincere ones. "Listen up. It was sometime in the twenty-teens when the town outlawed feeling. You could still do most things, but you weren't allowed to feel them anymore, expect in a muted way. Smelling other people's hair was strictly forbidden. They washed the town in Drano to burn out our olfactory sense, which came too close to the heart of things. The Artery leads away from the Heart." The piece ends with a possible revolution brewing inside the subversive culvert, but then all that's left is one character's memory and that's going too.

Jaimie Gusman lamented her place in the reading after Tom, but then began by reading a poem called "Ejaculation," so that ended that. In it, the Shekinah figure is resting in the mud and she is in prayer. She is creating a world for women out of the mud: "She spelled her name with the roots on the ground. And the earth screamed it for the women. The women began caressing the roots, their own shadows watching their bodies, then digging for their own plots." In which "plots" are many things, denoting life-lines, narratives, sex organs and, finally, death sites. Jaimie's new work, featured in the anthology, is a feminine epic that comes out of her recognition of her own cultural, literary Jewishness. Such are the pressures in Hawai`i, where people talk ethnicity and culture 24/7, that such work emerges from its relative newcomers.

Endi Bogue Hartigan's poem, "Devotion and Red Ginger," was read to us by her sister, Farris James.  In this poem human devotion to the red ginger that is not native results in its being cut: "The chorus / crescendoed / terrible beauty like / a machete clearing / all else, all else[.]"

Evan Nagle is perhaps Hawai`i's sole flarfist, a poetic movement I found myself professorizing about a bit for the benefit of Tom Gammarino, who should really know better! After some self-deprecation and self-disgust, which he termed Caucasian, Evan launched into, "HISTORY THINK SHE BIG," where the silliness of flarf devolves into some beautiful lines after we learn that the poet is driving down the H1 in a 2004 Honda Civic: "Self! / Ointment of all semblance! / I say I see me: / A bit of loose agency hovering / Over the serial procession of / Deceasements." There's something about that image of "loose agency hovering" that speaks volumes to me (though I could not remember the lines when I told Evan how much I liked them) about living here, the hover of it, so nearly Hopkinsian, though his Honda fills in for the older poets bird.

Janna Plant plays frequently with her name. Of course she's animal, not plant, but her poems are rooted in earth, in the cracks in sidewalks where plants emerge, in the keen observation of, for example, a dead horse by the river's edge: "Chestnut nostril widens, / minnows exploring new tunnels. // The drumming structure silenced, / broke-free from halter of heart. // Un-lace those bootstraps, / observe the text: / opening." Where the decaying flesh of horse finds its witness, the text opens up to a "[released] category." Like Nagle's hovering, the decaying horse is not one or the other thing, but a state of moving. Likewise, Janna's map poem, "The Course of the Blood in the West," is an autobiography/map/portrait of the body--not the mind, but the body--which leads me to think that what is unusual in Janna's work is the way she presents ideas, images, stories, as bodies, staying with her metaphor until it becomes utterly literal, earthy.

Eric Paul Shaffer read several poems, one of them a complicated piece about whales, how they are endangered, how the poet watches them with sympathy, how the poet knows that as a human being he would have killed them. "We are everywhere," he writes, of people, of those who kill such animals. What begins as a quiet contemplative poem about observing whales ends bitterly: "may we kill ourselves before we kill the last of them." Like W.S. Merwin writing about the way English took away Hawaiian even as Keats was writing his beautiful poems, Shaffer writes of how he would have been a killer of whales who "[wrote] poetry in the warm golden light of oil / rendered from their sacred, slaughtered flesh."



Julia Wieting caught us up when we were feeling poetry fatigue. She placed her closed book on the side table and recited "Getting found: A Pacific Prufrock," which opens "...And indeed, there will be time / to wonder and sit, to practice / a craft of appropriation." Wow. She takes the Master Sergeant of appropriation, Mr. Eliot, and re-appropriates him in the context of an island to which she has moved ("Shall I say, I have gone to this island, / escaped the Middle's wide, its far flung sky?")  Where Prufrock's poem is utterly personal ("shall I do this, shall I do that?"), Wieting's engages larger issues of identity. "Years after, we still do not ask, 'What are we?'" I'm fascinated by how many young poets have changed Eliot to their own purposes, from Ryan Oishi to Gizelle Gajelonia to Julia Wieting.  I never would have guessed, when I moved here, that Eliot would maintain such a presence in these islands, and that he would have been so generous in his post-colonial post-humous ruminations.


We were sorry to be missing the following writers: Diana Aehegma, Jim Chapson, Shantel Grace, Anne Kennedy, Tyler McMahon, Rob Wilson and Meg Withers. Keep your eyes out for their work, too.

[Members of the Caucasian Cat Circle at a pre-launch party. The Tinfish cat is Tortilla.]