[The Castle, where Steve Shrader lived]
Editor's
Introduction to Arc of the Day & The
Imperfectionist
In Autumn, 1983,
East West magazine in Honolulu ran a cover story on Mother
Marianne of Molokai, who would be canonized by the Pope nearly
thirty years later, in 2012. On the cover was a painting of Mother
Marianne, her face framed by a habit, the slightest smile visible on
her lips. Only after the magazine was published would its editor,
Chris Pearce, discover that the nun's face was, in fact, a
self-portrait of its painter, the magazine's graphic designer, Steve
Shrader. I start with this anecdote because Shrader was a painter,
photographer, and poet who lived for over 35 years in Hawai`i, while
hiding in plain sight. He was not unknown—he had a circle of
friends, he'd published a book of poems in 1970 through Ithaca
Press—but he kept his poetry to himself. His apartment in a large
building on Waimanalo Beach, called The Castle, was full of
paintings, collages, books, music cd's, and poems that did not find
their way out the door and down the staircase of The Tower. He made
his living as an instructor of English, a journalist, a graphic
designer; those were his public lives. What was most important to
him—art, music, literature—he kept within the four walls of his
house, and inside his quiet exterior. Even some of his closest
friends had no idea he was so many writing poems at the end. As best
I can determine, these are the poems of his last few years, written
in a final rush of creativity before he died in February, 2007 at age
62.
It's appropriate
that Shrader, whose poetry mixes history, fairy tale, references to
the Great European Masters and to post-World War II Japanese
photography, a lover of military history, local politics and
journalism, model airplanes, Brazilian music, surrealism, and
possessed of a strong sense of place in Hawai`i, should have lived in
a building called The Castle. A looming old brown building on
Waimanalo Beach, as much apartment building as house, on whose second
floor (up a looping staircase into “the tower) Shrader lived for
some 35 years, The Castle sits among ironwoods, with views of Rabbit
Island on the one side and Mokapu Point on the other. In her 1989
memoir, My Time in Hawaii, Victoria Nelson—friend to
Shrader, who took her author photo for that book—describes “the
enormous sea captain's house known as the Castle.” The house is the
stuff of legend: “The massive Castle was flanked by the Red Barn on
one side and the Nameless House, a three-story frame house of great
elegance and beauty, on the other. Legend had it that the captain's
luau on December 7, 1941, had been strafed by Japanese fighters on
their way back from bombing Bellows army base as the terrified family
hid in the Castle's basement” (30).
As Shrader's life unfolded within the Castle's walls, it also
contracted. John Knox described Shrader in his eulogy this way as
“form and composition. And the isolated individual, the man apart.”
But the man apart entered into more than the tradition of
Transcendentalism, which celebrated the individual. He was also
engaged with Asian traditions in Hawai`i and the Pacific; he alluded
to indigenous ones in his poetry. While he alludes sometimes to being
haole (or white), in “A Constellation” he notes:
feeling
indigenous
I
squat in the sand
a
significant participant of no plan in particular
uncomfortably
at ease.
“Uncomfortably
at ease” describes much about these poems, which have a feel of
spontaneity to them, but came out of great labor. The ease with which
Shrader brings local and international traditions together belies
his--anyone's--discomfort in doing so. Here's one version of that
mixing, from “A Bossa Nova”:
drag
that bloody gringo off
the
mountaintop I say
but
in this favela
we
lack such remedies
except
that we're but
a
short walk away from
a
decent pinot noir
and
a big bad bento
Here
“gringo” sits in for “haole,” but the “favela” to which
Shrader refers is likely Waimanalo, a poor town, whose population is
largely native Hawaiian, on the eastern side of O`ahu. The “pinot
noir” sounds upper-crust and arty, the “big bad bento” a local
Japanese box lunch with a variety of foods, which came to Hawai`i by
way of contract laborers. It's an odd mix, but it's one Shrader knew
well. According to Warren Iwasa, “Bento” was also a nickname for
Shrader's son, Ben.]
In “French Bread,”
subtitled “a deformed sonnet,” what might appear to be an
arbitrary set of references reveals carefully chosen allusions to the
Vietnam War (French and American chapters), and shock waves that draw
in political/economic issues from Brazil to Spain. This is how the
poem begins:
Big bear (Ursa
Major) and little bear (Ursa Junior)
went out with
Goldilocks looking for their mother,
a brilliant dope
field. In the litter in an alley behind
the Vo Nguyen Giap
Patisserie, a work brigade
from the commune
hacked them to death with its hoes.
If “French bread”
refers to a food baked in Paris, then the Vo Nguyen Giap Patisserie
was where it was “deformed,” defeated. General Giap was the
North Vietnamese General who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu,
the Americans in 1975. The commune may allude to the Paris Commune
of 1871 or the communism of Ho Chi Minh, or to the Khmer Rouge, whose
commune members killed fellow Cambodian citizens with hoes. The
hoes, we should note, refer both to the tool and to the President of
North Vietnam, Ho. Having set up a particular historical field,
Shrader moves into more general territory:
Violent gestures
beget violent gestures.
A plutocrat shrugs
in Sao Paulo.
The diaphanous wings
of a shockwave obliterate Madrid.
He links actual
violence (Vietnam, Madrid of the Spanish Civil War and/or the
terrorist bombings of 2004) with economic violence (the Brazilian
plutocracy). And it's here that we note the apt violence of yoking
the children's fairy tale of Goldilocks to the deformed fairy tale of
political and military power:
Is this porridge
poison? Will a mother's habit kill another rabbit?
Big bear &
little bear rise from the dead
on their hind legs.
Uncle Ho rises too in his boots of fire
and blows young
Goldilocks away.
In a standard
version of the tale, Goldilocks enters the bears' house, breaks a
chair, settles in imperiously and—by extension—imperially. In
the deformed tale, she is “blown away” by Uncle Ho, who takes the
side of the bears. The poem ends with a fourth bear, Brer Bear:
Brer Bear: Easy
to walk on d'water
but hard lord to
crawl up upon d'land
The
Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit tales come out of an African-American
tradition. While I can't find the source of Shrader's quotation here,
I locate in the Chandler Harris version of the tales a story called
“Brother Bear's Big House.” In that story, Brer Bear has a large
and comfortable house to which Brer Polecat wants entry. Having
weaseled his way into the house, “he had sech a bad breff
dat dey all hatter git out—an' he stayed an' stayed twel time
stoped runnin' ag'in' him.” Another
fairy tale about home invasion, another echo around the stone of
Shrader's theme, another violent gesture promising only to beget more
violent gestures. As someone who heard about native Hawaiian issues,
Shrader would have known more than he writes in this poem about
colonialism and resistance to it.
During
his years in Iowa in the late 1960s, Shrader had protested the
Vietnam War. Alice Notley remembers bailing him out of jail once
after a protest. Vietnam references were personal as well as
political, but perhaps not as personal as those references he makes
later in Arc of the Day
to
the atom bomb. One section of the book, which is dedicated to
Shrader's son Ben, is titled “Mushroom Child.” The eponymous
first poem in this section is dedicated to Shomei Tomatsu, a Japanese
photographer whose photographs of Nagasaki atomic bomb victims are
among the most powerful responses to that event. (Ben Shrader's
middle name is Shomei, some of his ancestors from Hiroshima.) One of
Tomatsu's famous photographs is of a bottle melted and twisted by the
force of the bomb. But Shrader's half-Japanese-American son is not
the only “Mushroom Child.” Shrader was himself one, his father,
Erwin Shrader, a nuclear physicist who participated in the Manhattan
Project. In “Brookhaven,” from Arc
of the Day, Shrader
alluded to family silences and to a trip he took into Manhattan with
his father: “We ate at the automat / strode among towers / rode the
train home / in the quantum's silence.” In “Mushroom Child,” he
elaborates: “as far as my parents were concerned / I was the
Manhattan project / as is their grandson / out of the loins of
Hiroshima.” The rest of the poem offers meditations on language, on
metaphors of atoms and balls spinning, on what is born out of our
elements. Horror and love, in other words:
language will not shield us
from that flash which half cripples us
nor from the annealing flesh resembling
animated glass
indolent on the court, arcing spheres
through circles, shooting hoops
spinning on the rim and dropping in or out
fusion's offspring, mixed son
of whatever transforms the elemental
into the complex
The metaphor is nothing if not dangerous. Any direct comparison of
the atom bomb's devastation with the creation of a hapa son might
seem terribly reductive, foolish even. But Shrader's method of
spinning (like an atom) into the final metaphor by way of Tomatsu's
photographs, an image of boys playing basketball, only then alluding
to the mixing of genetic material, gives us access to the comparison,
not as fixed point on a map, but as fertile (and destructive)
movement. According to Iwasa, Shrader and his son watched NBA games
together, a fact that renders the metaphorical literal again.
Arc
of the Day is
a volume at once serious and playful. Shrader was a punster
(meanings hide in plain sight of other words) so his poem to the
Finnish Anselm Hollo is called “Finn-de-siècle.” An
anti-confessional confessional haiku ends with a telling
double-entendre: “do not mistake me / for I am invisible / oblique
oblige.”
While he may have yearned for an invisibility cloak, several of the
poems in this first collection are marred by misogyny. The second
section of this book, The
Imperfectionist, is
more wistful, more allegorical, and far more elegiac. An entire
section of the book, “52240,” is devoted to memories of Iowa
City, where Shrader earned his MFA in the late 1960s. Many of these
poems are dedicated to friends, alive and dead, from that time; that
my correspondents didn't know Shrader had dedicated poems to them
seems only logical, considering his increasing isolation.
In
“Opening the Triptych,” Shrader writes that, “the central panel
remains hidden yet still we feel / that obscurity is both its best
and worst feature,” a phrase that could perhaps be applied to his
poems. But one of the openings to the poems that I find most
interesting isn't that of discovering notes about Bosch's triptych in
Shrader's notes, but of finding clues to his life in Hawai`i in the
poems. There are codes in all the work. Another poem, “The Da Souza
Code,” (Da Souza would be a local name by way of Portuguese
plantation workers, and a friend who worked for Governor Waihee)
contains an allusion to the Da Vinci Code's Reon Tigaldo, or “golden
ratio.” While the obvious intertexts for this poem—obvious to one
who saw the poet's notes, in any case—are Bosch's “The Garden of
Earthly Delights” and Ruggiero Leoncavallo's opera, I
Pagliacci,
Shrader also paints in ordinary words as code for place names, local
parlance. “Opening the Triptych” ends with a very rare reference
to time and place, “Waimanalo,
Hawai`i 7/2006.”
That beach is clearly one of the poems many sites. There are ti
blossoms and white stretch limos, there are chopsticks with bean
sauce, and there is a kite in the sky. And then in the first stanza
of section 2, there is this:
we shook our bottles
till thumbs popped
visible as the steeple
in our tiny township
three to five foot faces
too quick to be human
insomnia and crackers
in a homespun hammock
unlawful use of a bellows
These last two or so lines bring us into Waimanalo, where one might
eat crackers on a hammock. And then there are the “bellows.”
Waimanalo Beach runs into Bellows, owned and operated by the U.S.
Military, which uses the beach and its surrounding area to practice
amphibious assaults. Knowing this casts the lines of the next stanza
in a new context; the poet writes of a “ruff rumped grouse” that
breaks away: “we wheel and shoot / blow it to smithereens.” In a
poem about a triptych whose central panel is hellish, the reference
to Bellows and to the fire nursed by a bellows is surely apt. One
could write dozens more pages on Shrader's allusions to high art and
to local places, but suffice it to say that no other poet I can think
of would write, out of his own experience, such an instruction manual
to places he had been, rather than those he simply imagined (pace
Ashbery's “The Instruction Manual”).
Shrader's poems evoke a world at once precise and ephemeral,
beautiful and awful. As he wrote these poems, he was contemplating
his own mortality. At several points in the two manuscripts, he
alludes to his own ashes, meant to be scattered (as they in fact
were) off the beach where he lived for so many years. In “Skywriter,”
for Reuel Denney, poet and cultural critic, he writes, on seeing a
biplane stunt pilot fly by:
an exhilarating appeal to reason
or to death
which is reason in disguise
simple questions
wrapped in four dimensions
demanding five
the sky unfolds
I loop and bow to you elder
kinsman high above sparkling water into which I with luck
smoke and ash likewise
shall be scattered
In “Under Construction,” Shrader alludes to Hart Crane, whose
origins were also in Ohio, who also wrote of an “arc,” the
Brooklyn Bridge: “across Crane's curve / to Brooklyn bronzed by
ash.” The “scattering” of ashes at the end of “Skywriter”
echoes the scatter of sound in Crane's late poem, “The Broken
Tower”:
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Shrader, who lived
in a tower in a castle, would have understood those lines nearly from
the inside.
That Shrader's
creative work, aside from what he did for magazines, remained
invisible for so many decades is a sad fact. But I want to argue for
the importance of his work now, over half a decade after his death.
For in these poems, especially those in The Imperfectionist, where
he works extensively in forms—among them sestina and haiku—Shrader
links traditions in highly original ways. The surfaces of his poems,
to say nothing of their titles, sometimes read like those of John
Ashbery, at once highly artificial and utterly vernacular. As Joseph
Conte argues in Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern
Poetry, traditional forms like
the sestina can be used to generate untraditional poems. John
Ashbery's “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” is no
“Ye Goat-herd Gods” (Sir Philip Sidney). Ashbery replaced the
goat-herd with Popeye and his cartoon comrades. So, in “This Idea
Has People,” Shrader writes a witty sestina about teenagers that
cultimates in this rant of a fourth stanza:
these
teens lecture us about the fall
they
lecture us about the second coming
we
have a thought (we'll run away)
teens
jeer loudly, hurl their cells at this idea
milling
in the parking lot (we are teens
you
may be older, but we've been there before)
What
the form does for (and perhaps against) the poet is to turn the
screen against teens back on the poet (we might imagine that he was,
at the time, father to a teen). The line, “you may be older, but
we've been there before,” inverts more than age. Here the teen is
father to the man and the man realizes it, the sestina returning over
and again to the words “teen” and “before” and
(tellingingly!) “the second coming.” The poem ends, “when we
were teens, that is, before the fall / ourselves an idea whose time
was surely coming / before we fell and cast it all away.” What
began as a screed against teens thus turns into an elegy to the
poet's own early years. The time that was coming has now gone. Hart
Crane wrote that “we were promised an improved infancy,” to which
Shrader responds, “we were promised an improved adolescence.” The
failure to improve memorialized in the poem, it is still as much a
verbal romp than an elegy.
“This
Idea Has People” uses the sestina's arbitrary but strict form to
create seemingly random connections. The sestina is a precise
instrument, in other words, toward a poem that courts imprecision,
ending not where the poet demands that it end but where the language
mandates it. Another way to say this might be in the conclusion to
“Toward a Lingua Anglica,” where Shrader writes that “we deal
in the language we're dealt.” And it deals with us. Everyone to
whom I spoke about Shrader noted his exactitude, his precision at his
work, whether as a painter, a photographer, or a graphic designer.
His poems, too, are precise. Their precisions are formal, but the
poems are also precise in their allusions, historical references, and
their grounding in place(s). Yet it's not accident that he might call
himself, or the author of his poems, “the imprecisionist.” In a
world where “Every Day Is an Accident,” as the last poem here
attests, “midpoints” are “shifting,” not fixed, and “time
zones / . . . are rearranged each night by the wacky moon.” The
central fulcrum of these poems, then, is the counter-weight of
accident with what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “awful, but
cheerful” untidiness of daily life.
But
Shrader's poems belong to an actual Hawai`i, not the (mostly)
imagined Hawai`i to which Ashbery alludes in his poem, “On First
Listening To Schreker's Der Schatzgraber,”
when he writes: “Now that you're in Honolulu you've got to live it
up / no matter what kind of grub they throw at you on Main Street”
(And the Stars Were Shining
58). They are often grounded as much in politics as in art and music.
Shrader's journalism from the 1970s' Hawaii Observer
centered on local politics and
the foibles of politicians in informative, witty, ever observant
articles. Shrader was possessed of a deft wit. Of one legislator in
wrote in 1976: “Kunimura is a veteran—of the 442nd
Infantry Regiment and of the Kauai Baord of Supervisors (1955-62)”.
Of another: “Rep. Andrew Poepoe (R-25th
/ Aikahi-Enchanted Lakes) is the House minority leader and, as such,
has guided his tiny band of Republicans to new heights of
ineffectiveness.” This was the Hawai`i of the 1970s, where
Republicans were as rare as nene geese, after all, and flew about as
well. Finally—though the examples are legion, of John Medeiros (R.
25th
Aikahi-Enchanted Lakes): “Medeiros's most conspicuous talents are
those of a small-town raconteur and are a part of the personability
which has allowed him to work quietly and inconspicuously toward his
own limited ends—the foremost being the initiation and subsequent
expansion of the school-security guard program.” The poems are less
focused on persons than on images, ideas, the character of Shrader's
inner world, but his wit emerges in the cryptography of his
references, the exfoliation of meaning, the uncomfortable joining
together of the New York School with this Waimanalo School of one. A
local bumpersticker reads: “New York. London. Paris. Waimanalo.”
It's not intended to be serious. But it's as if Shrader breathed
real life into that knock-off phrase, plastered onto many a rusted
old car on Oahu.
Included
in a folder shown me by Shrader's ex-partner Maile Yawata, which
contains the manuscript to “Opening the Triptych” is a brief
essay on art history by Rebecca Solnit, published in LOST
magazine
in May, 2006. She writes about the significance of the color blue in
15th
century art, especially the “blue of distance.” She notes that
painters became interested in “the faraway in their art,” unlike
earlier artists. Her second paragraph reads, in part: “Often the
band of blue toward the horizon seems exaggerated: it extends too far
forward, it is too abrupt a change in color, it is too blue, as
though they were exulting in the phenomenon by overdoing it.” But
anyone who has been to Waimanalo Beach knows that the blue of the
Pacific and the blue of the sky are intenser there than they are
elsewhere. There's no exaggeration to the turquoise blue, the blue
blue sea, the sky blue on which clouds ride toward the Ko`olau
mountains. So, to Solnit's conclusion that, “in this world we
actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when
we arrive in it. The far becomes the near and they are not the same
place,” Shrader might respond that the world we actually live in is
that very world that is the “blue of distance.” His poetry,
understated as it is, engages a world that others might consider
“exaggerated,” “unreal.” But it was Shrader's real world, and
it is ours. We have his poems to thank for seeing this world as it
was to him, and might now be to us.
Shrader
left “camera ready” manuscripts in the font he wished his books
to be published in. The files, however, could not be opened, though
we made numerous attempts to do so. So our designer, Allison
Hanabusa, has tried to be faithful to Shrader's design. There were
mistakes—typos, misspellings—throughout. I have corrected such
mistakes as I thought undeliberate, leaving only those that struck me
as possibly being puns. To title a book Arc of the Day and
then to include a section called “Ark of the Day” might be error,
or it might be intended. Both words work: “arc” as the
geometrical shape that joins unlike objects, ideas, and “ark”as
(fertile) refuge from the world. So both versions of arc/ark remain
here.
In
working on this project, I owe great debts to many of Shrader's
friends and family, including his son Ben Shrader, Maile Yawata,
Warren Iwasa, Grady Timmons, John Knox, Daphne Chu, and others. For
their financial support, Tinfish thanks John Wythe White &
Victoria Gail White's Left Wing Right Brain Fund of the Hawai`i
Community Foundation, Victoria Nelson, Buzz Poverman, Ellen Robinson,
and others.