Wednesday, February 20, 2013

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.]





Monday, February 18, 2013

New Reviews of Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawaii

Two fresh reviews came out in recent days, one by Sonny Ganaden in Flux Magazine, and the other by Misty Sanico of Hawaii Book Blog.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Story on Jack London is Dead by Noe Tanigawa, Hawai`i Public Radio

The quotes from this piece come from the longer podcast that I posted a few days back.  She interviewed me, Scott Abels, and Jaimie Gusman, then came up with this story, which aired on February 16, 2013.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Next Big Thing Meme


Wednesday, February 6, 2013


The Next Big Thing: A Meme about New Books

Thanks to Don Share for the tag.

 

What is the working title of the book?


"She's Welcome to Her Disease": Dementia Blog, Volume 2
.  It will be published later this spring by Singing Horse Press, which published volume 1.


Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea came out of the first volume; the idea for that came as I composed a blog for family and friends and it occurred to me that the experience was worth recording, that the form of the blog was ideal for doing it. The second volume does not run in reverse order, like a blog, however.  Can't write back from someone's death, at least not in this context.
 
What genre does your book fall under?


Poetry, non-fiction, prose, drama, documentation.


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


My mother adored Katharine Hepburn, but like my mother, Kate is dead. So I don't know.


What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

This book completes a two volume project on my mother's life and death with Alzheimer's, as well as those lives and deaths governed by the disease, including (metaphorically) those of American citizens caught up in government lies.


How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

This volume covers the years 2009-2011, and was composed during those years.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

This book was inspired by the first, the first by any number of writers who write about subjective experience as objectively as they can, starting from Montaigne. I hope there's also a Buddhist attention to presence evidenced here, non-judgmental.

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

The book is for readers of experimental poetry; it is also for those whose parents, spouses, friends, suffer from dementia and/or Alzheimer's. It's not a self-help book, except insofar as meditation on our most extreme experiences is of value.

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

This is my agency.

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


As a publisher, I like the use of the word "pressing" in this sentence.  But really: How better to disseminate poetry, not so much as writing, but as a way of looking at the world, accessible to anyone and everyon?


Tags: J. Vera Lee, Mark Wallace, Kaia Sand, Steve Collis, Caroline Sinavaiana

Noe Tanigawa interviews writers from _Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories)_

You can find the audio here.  She speaks first with Scott Abels, and then with me and Jaimie Gusman. She's a lovely person who asks tough questions.  And I now know that I say "I think" too much.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Early responses to _Jack London is Dead_


"Are you still terrified, now that the book is out?" asked a Honolulu Weekly reporter.

 --No. If only for the wonderful poems and responses to the question, "what is it like to be a Euro-American writer in/from Hawai`i," the project was worth the early feeling of breaking a taboo.

"If a Hawaiian writer were not in touch with his heritage, could he be included in the anthology?"asked a graduate student.

 --No. First, because the arbitrary nature of the inclusion (and exclusion) process imitates that of other ethnic anthologies and so forces this very question. What does it mean to be Caucasian, to be Hawaiian, in Hawai`i? The question presumes that "white writing" is dominant, that if a Hawaiian writer is not in touch with his culture, he will "write white." But this anthology is not about dominant white culture; instead, it's about a culture that is perpetually questioned, like all cultures in Hawai`i. It's not the culture presumed to exist on the mainland (which does not include Appalachia, certainly, or other regional white cultures), the culture that is seen to blot out other cultures. The writing in this anthology is not central, it's also the activity of "outsiders." As such, the book could have included other "outsiders," like African Americans who live and write in Hawai`i. It's about whiteness as an experience, not with race as essentialism. There's a sense in Hawai`i of "whiteness" as a monolith; this book attempts to break that model. The multitude of approaches to poetry (and fiction) found in the book obviate the notion of monolithic, monotone, mono-culture, or (tellingly) of white culture as no culture at all.

"Your announcement to the department sounded defensive, especially the part about not wanting to go back to the old days [of the A. Grove Day anthology, A Hawaiian Reader]."

--This has been a huge issue from the beginning, that of tone. One of my outside readers for the book (hardly anonymous, as I asked them!), Anne Brewster, was sometimes exceptionally hard on me over my tone. Several times I resisted her, thinking that honesty was better than avoidance (that's my spin, not hers), but occasionally I decided to re-phrase a sentence, or take material out of my own statement. I asked the writers to avoid the twin sins of the white writer in Hawai`i, guilt and/or whininess, and they did. Acknowledgment and wit are better approaches. Scott Abels's "thanks for asking what it's like to be a haole; no one ever asked before," is a marvelous locution.

--I forget Noe Tanigawa's particular question at HPR the other day for a feature on Jack coming out soon (to include Jaimie Gusman and Scott Abels). But I found myself responding that we are living twin tracks of a life that is at once individual and historical, that being a white writer can be confusing due to the sense that the history of white people in Hawai`i has been complicated (to put it mildly!) but that as individuals we want to be included in the literary conversation. To be a member of a group with relative economic and political privilege but, at the same time, to find oneself marginalized as an artist, feels like a Catch-22. (Of course many of the homeless men begging by the road are white, so privilege is hardly monolithic either.)

--"Will this launch an era of 'haole power'?" asked Noe, playfully.

--No, that's not what we're after at all. The Black Arts movement, the Hawaiian Renaissance, the feminist movement, all asserted the need for political power to go with literary power. This anthology, while it of course posits the need for political action on the environment, the rampant militarism of the USA, and so on, does not assert the need for "haole power."

--"I'm showing this book to my student whose definition paper is going to be about the term 'Haole'."
Now that's what this book is for!

Finally, in response to a comment by Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, here are a few other essay-posts I've written on the subject of Euro-American writing in Hawai`i: on Judy Rohrer's book on haoles; on "writing while white"; on Tony Quagliano's work; on Juliana Spahr's Hawai`i writing; on Steve Shrader. More on Hawai`i writing in jacket2, here.