FIREWORKS, by Jules Boykoff: Pre-publication sale!

Jules Boykoff is a serious man. Jules Boykoff is a critic of global capitalism, especially as manifest in the Olympic movement, about which he has written three important books. Jules Boykoff is a serious champion of whatever is anti-hegemonic, anti-hierarchical, and anti-patriarchal. Jules Boykoff is a serious family man. Jules Boykoff is also full of what he calls “felonious spunk,” in a poem called “Overdetermination Meets Polysemy in a Two-Fall-Ten-Minute-Time-Limit, Pay-Per-View Cage Match at the Convention Center in Portland, Oregon.” In other words, Jules Boykoff is a wordslinger, his third book of poems offering content strained through many forms (including collages and photographs), but always walking a tightrope between anger, angst, and puckish punsterism. Reminiscent to this reader of the mad tonal shifts of The Death of Stalin, this book shows us a different mode of resistance, one that with mordant wit seeks to destroy the humorless flat acreage of incipient (or actual) fascism.


Please click here for more details and the sale information: https://tinfishpress.com/?projects=book-of-cord-2-2

Warehouse Cafe, SE Portland

Consider this an experiment. While blogging is in some ways a very public activity, I always blog alone. But now I'm seated in a bustling cafe in Portland, resembling what I've heard of the television show, Portlandia, in its emphasis on the organic, the mellow, the friendly, the enthusiastic, the unironic, where overheard conversations are about healing, zen and healthy dance options for one's daughter. The last time I was in here, a musician was singing to children about the need to floss, lest they acquire gingivitis. As I write this I feel an odd tension between my own tendencies toward irony and an equal sense that this earnestness can be a very good thing. The woman who served me coffee told me about a pro-Wisconsin protester rally downtown today and about the phone banking she's doing for women's health issues.

Speaking of irony, last night Donald Rumsfeld was on the Daily Show. Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, my wonderful hosts, get the show on itunes, so we saw the whole 45 gory minutes of the show, nearly all of which were devoted to Stewart's attempts to get Rumsfeld to admit that evidence had been cooked up and propaganda waged in the effort to get the USA into war in Iraq. Rumsfeld, while looking older, was a cool customer, alternately admitting to the truth of Stewart's critiques and "nuancing" them into neutrality. Rumsfeld is good with words--I once wrote an essay on him and contemporary American poetry, and two song cycles have used his "lyrics"--in ways that the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is not. It's as if the ability to snow the public requires less and less snow. It's like a blizzard in Portland, in other words, during which one takes a long walk in the sunshine, while looking for tiny patches of the white stuff, already blackened with dirt. And so we require "pranksters" to suss out the truth, the spoken truth, not the stuff you can simply see for your own eyes. Why we require hearing it is fascinating; why hearing itself sometimes fails to persuade us is more troubling. As Bryant said this morning on the phone, "Rumsfeld is a war criminal who admits it and is on a tour selling books about it." If anyone has a free copy of the book to send me, I'd appreciate it. I haven't wanted to read a book this much in years. At least not one that's called "non-fiction."

This morning's Star-Advertiser relays the information that the National Parks may preserve internment sites in Hawaii. I remember writing an essay on internment poets from Hawaii and having an editor call me on it. His friend had told him that Japanese Americans in Hawaii were NOT interned, so why was I writing about it? I recently started a memory card sequence based on lines from Albert Saijo's work; he was interned as a child, although he only came to Hawaii later. And, as these synchronicities go, I went on Kaia Sand's walk yesterday with her and her daughter Jessica, the walk that is featured in her Tinfish Press book, Remember to Wave. We drove to North Portland, then walked to the old Expo Center, just beyond some amazing installations by a local artist, torii held up by posts covered in old newspaper articles about the absence of "Nippos" and other slurs. This Center is where Japanese Americans were warehoused (why am I in the Warehouse Cafe?) before being sent inland to Wyoming and other remote locations. We walked to the Columbia River, than in a circle back past the PODS she writes about. She stopped to talk to a POD truck driver, then we continued to the marshlands that were Vanport, where the flood wiped out an entire community of mostly African American workers. (The revisions on the Kaiser Permanente sponsored sign are astonishing, though I don't know that I can access my photos of it yet. There's a happy narrative to this unethical placement of workers in a flood plain, believe me.) By a pond we saw the signs contained in Kaia's book about how deadly the water is to the unborn; silhouettes of pregnant women are there to alert them of the water's toxicity. The ducks paddle on. Canada geese fly in formation overhead, honking. "This place is not bucolic," Kaia says and I see how history transforms the natural world into a more complicated stage. But still, it's gorgeous, this marsh, the dogs running from a large dog park, the clouds, the geese, the little girl in pink roller skates who goes with us.

Earlier in the week I read for Kaia's students and others at Pacific University in Forest Grove. The student body is 30% Hawaii residents and the town comes to seem a cold extra island that has moved inland from the Pacific. When I first began to talk about dementia and Alzheimer's with audiences, I assumed it would be older people who would know from experience what having a loved one with the illness is like. But no, about a third to a half of the students have relatives with Alzheimer's. The next day, Kaia and I went to a Psychology class--it was Kaia's brave idea to create interdisciplinarity out of her reading series--taught by Prof. Erica Kleinknecht. She is teaching an entire course on Mind and Memory, a course I wish I could take. She introduced a section of the course on episodic memory, and then asked me to read and talk about my work. She also requested that I read the lovers' dialogue from my more recent blogging. I also read a couple of memory cards and talked about their link to episodic memory, the way they weave back and forth between present and past, drawing up, or improvising from memories that emerge and then disappear again during the day. Prof. Kleinknecht's students were bright and curious, though I had to call out the young women, who were letting the men ask all the questions at first. One young man perked up when I started to talk about George Oppen, and wanted to know more about where I was going in my thinking about Oppen's Alzheimer's. Stay tuned.

In Portland I have also met a radical economist Cardinals' fan, a scholar of German film, a former U of Portland soccer player, a fellow poet who is a scholar of British history and his son, spent time with my sister-in-law and her family, and met other good folks. Tonight is the reading at the Spare Room, with Donald Dunbar, about whom much good is said, organized in part by Endi Hartigan, who hails from Kailua. Tomorrow I head to Seattle by train. Just wish I had the Webster Schultzes all in tow. Love you much, Radhika, Sangha, Bryant. (Tortilla.)

Ruins Visible and In- : Mid-October's Situational Rhymes

The television is my witness to the Yankees and the Rangers, Andy Pettite versus Cliff Lee; I'm only half watching, especially since Lee's perfect game was lost with two outs in the 5th. But lately I've not been thinking of Texas Rangers but of Washington Senators, a team I watched at RFK Stadium several times with my father when I was a child. That was before they moved away from the Arlington, Virginia area to Arlington, Texas, and long before they were owned by George W. Bush, even longer before they acquired Vlad Guerrero and his much dented, blackened helmet. Long before I ended up in Hawai`i, a Cardinals fan in exile.

Oddly, my memory of one of those baseball games is pretty acute. We watched Vida Blue in his phenom season, when he and his A's beat the Senators, I think, 8-2. When I look the game up on the internet, I find that it was actually 8-1. When I post my memory onto my Facebook page, Dave Taylor in Washington, D.C. reports that he was at that game, too. The box score is here. I remember more of the Oakland players than the home town Senators, though Toby Harrah is a name I recall fondly, if only because I liked his name. Later, Laurence Sterne would remind me of him. Were it not for Wikipedia and the internet, Harrah would be a blank page to me now.

Two details astonish me. The opposing pitcher was Denny McClain, whose 31 victories in 1968 I remember a bit less than Mickey Lolich's defeat of Bob Gibson's Cardinals in the 7th game of that year's World Series. Marianne Moore, I found out in another context, had called the Series for the Cards due to Gibson's prowess. (That was the year before they lowered the mound to prevent other pitchers from ERAs verging on 1.) The other detail, which I find now as I return to the page that contains the box score, is that the rookie Vida Blue was paid just over $12,750 dollars that year. The minimum rookie salary is now $390,000.

A 40 year old memory. Over $370,000 in would-be Vida Blue wages, were he now 21, instead of the man in his early 60s that he now is. I'm now 52; I was then 12 or 13. There were 40,246 fans at the game, as it was a Children's Hospital benefit game (something I did not remember). We sat in the corner of left field, and I think I remember wearing my glove on my right hand, hoping. Zero foul ball snags. My father died November 4, 1992 at age 78, and I'm inhabiting again that space just before he died. It's been 18 years. There are many scores to box, settle, account for, enumerate.

I share something of this memory with Dave Taylor in DC. I share something of it with Nick Smith of Luray, Virginia, who cared enough about the game to ask the folks at Baseball Digest to print the box score. The numbers carry affect. They make an equation that is not mathematical but emotive. They remind me that words themselves have no affect; it's the layers we place upon them, or (conversely) the layers we peel off (the first is P.B. Shelley, Hart Crane, the Kumu Lipo the second William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wing Tek Lum). Word genealogies are like resonant waves, the waves Kaia Sand talked about in my classes, where moments in history touch in unexpected ways. This is not to force them together, like memories of tectonic plates before they split. It is to trust a momentary hunch that they might. A hunch requires trust. It's an equation that has a right answer, but one you have to find accidentally.

If I were a freshman in my own English 100A class, Kaia Sand would have taught me one important thing. That is that we operate on our hunches--our hypotheses about how the world is connected--but that these hunches do not always come true. She talked about her walk poem by taking us on a pre-walk, the one that got her to the place she started the poem, not the place where we start it. That her hunches led to to immerse herself in details; that if the details did not pan out, neither did her prospective argument. As a freshman, I often helicoptered in from the idea I wanted to be true, parachuting into details that hardly mattered, but existed for purposes of "proving" my point. Kaia stays on the ground, though her leaps are real, between internment centers to PODS, between what we see and what is now invisible to us. "Do we need our ruins visible?" she asks in Remember to Wave. Whoever sets up memorials, or maintains ruins, believes we do. By bringing forth the documents that made possible or recorded what we no longer see before us she makes the invisible seeable again, if not in the place it was, then in the text. It is not a book, the designer Bao Nguyen insists, but an experience. (I'm confused, as I thought I published and paid for a book to be made!) The book is what is visible; the walk that we contemplate making, is an invisible analogue to it. Hunch confirmed.

[Jules & Kaia]

The affect in Kaia Sand's work arrives in the sound. Her voice (on the page and in the air) is lyrical, melodic. She and Jules Boykoff and I and Alex Dorcean read at the MIA series this past Wednesday in Chinatown. She got us to her walk by way of Honolulu International Airport, Portland's airport and several public transportation stops. Behind her, on the wall across the alley from the Mercury Bar, images flickered as she read "Uptick," also from her Tinfish volume. What is ghostly is also lyrical, though hers was not nostalgia but intervention in its possibilities.
Jules Boykoff, whose concerns are very like hers (economics, politics, history) read poems whose tone was utterly other. They reminded me of Charles Bernstein poems sent through a laser machine; they did not wander, but they playfully inhabited very structured spaces. Das Greenspan became a machine of late-capitalism; Reagan and other 1980s politicians met reggae singers and sang odd lyrics. It was postmodernism as stern ethics, but it was damn funny. Alex Dorcean's work was about his Haitian mother, her language. It too was hilarious seriousness.


The launch of Tinfish 20 occurred yesterday at Revolution Books. It's our first perfect bound journal issue, paradoxically more expensive to buy than the others because of the prestige of its cover. It did not take weeks to put together, like the last issue, which was made of recycled covers. It did not take months of gathering materials. It simply took a pdf to Bookmobile in Minnesota. Vida Blue might understand the odd monetary differential, albeit at a ratio much more extreme. As per ritual, we had guest readers for writers not from Hawai`i, and we had real live readers, the ones who got the lei. Gizelle Gajelonia, who turns 25 in a couple of weeks, read Cheryl Quimba's "Self-Portrait at 25," and Craig Howes, of Toronto, read Steve Collis, of Vancouver's poem, "Stroke." Those were the opposite ends of the age spectrum that the issue contains; I had asked for poems about aging, thinking I would get poems about OLD age, but got instead quite a range. Jaimie Gusman read her "Anyjar Elegy" about her Aunt Rose; Joe Tsujimoto read a poem to Toge Sankihi (1917-1953), using my favorite word, "gimlet"; Kai Gaspar read an allegorical rendering of Le`ahi (Diamond Head) as a homeless woman in Kapiolani Park; Jade Sunouchi read about old Mexican women and their dolls for sale; Amalia Bueno celebrated Filipino writers' texts by making a cento of them; Lynn Young read for Janna Plant; Eric Butler for Xi Xi by way of Jennifer Feeley; Lyz Soto for Lehua Taitano; current Distinguished Visiting Writer, Adam Aitken, for future visiting writer, Craig Santos Perez. Fifty people came to hear.

The Senators/Rangers just defeated the Yankees in New York, 8-0 on a two hitter. It's autumn on the east coast. I went to see my dad for the last time 18 years ago this week or next. The leaves were yellow and orange; they were on the trees and on the ground, too many to count. He had helped me with my "new math," and my later, so much more difficult, math. He had led me marching down apartment building corridors while calling out the steps, in military style. "Hut two three four! Hut two three four!" (That was before we moved to the proper suburbs in Virginia!) He'd read my dissertation, all umpteen pages of it. We're joined by the numbers.

In two days I leave for Vancouver, where I'll read at Simon Fraser University and the Kootenay School, with David Buuck. A few days later I'll head to Boise, where I'll read for Janet Holmes's students and talk Tinfish. I hope to report from the road.

On Time & Teaching: a Meditation

My graduate course had another heated argument/discussion this past Tuesday on the question of why there is no fiction on the reading list. I launched a defense of the course as one on poetics rather than genre, on ways of thinking about writing qua writing, rather than on generic issues. But this latest moment of tension in the class has got me to thinking on a couple of issues in teaching. There is the obvious question of expertness and inexpertness, which fits neatly with a discussion we were having with Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff on that same evening. If Professor Schultz is an expert in creative writing, then the students are "inexperts" with strong needs of their own. When perceived needs and desires (the professor for her students' background in poetics; the student for her own more pragmatic needs) conflict, we get more than a Paolo Freire scenario, the banker tussling with the liberation theologists. We also get a conflict in the way time is framed in the classroom.

My desires in teaching often focus on (the unfocusable) future tense. While what happens in the classroom each day matters, and while the essays and poems my students write matter to me, what matters most is an imagined later moment when any student (no longer my student) makes a significant connection between an everyday occurrence and something that happened in the now disappeared course. This is also true for me; what I teach and how I teach it changes, and those changes often become significant stories for me. They are stories about change, but they are also stories about synchronicities. Kaia calls them "situational rhymes," those moments that create waves of resonance across time. Sometimes they're even situational puns or analogies or chords (major and minor, at times dissonant). And tastes change. Where I used to detest poems by Wordsworth and Williams I now use them (especially the good doctor's) quite frequently in my classrooms.

But a student is more rooted in the present, and its necessities. There are books to read, discussions to have, essays to write, presentations to present. They happen in such quick succession, and in different classes at the same time, that the time for expansiveness is merely theoretical. Hank Lazer has told me that he enjoys not-teaching because he can devote more time to reading, not rush through things simply to get on to the next on the syllabus. Life's syllabus is slower, potentially, and less demanding of actual material effort. For the student, the syllabus is a life, but it's a life that lasts only several months before the engine restarts and she's onto something else. There are grades to work for, tangible returns on actual investments (first of tuition, then of time, effort, toner and paper). There is a sense that what one does in each class should fit neatly into the next. That foundations should apply to workshops, for example.

And that brings me to the source of contention in my Foundations course, that there is no fiction on the syllabus. We have passed through two weeks of poetry, which I used to get at issues of place, and we did a book of non-fiction, Katie Stewart's Ordinary Affects, which I used to get at forms of attention, but no short stories, no novel. My defense of the course involved an invocation of "writing" as the mode we are talking about. All writers, I argued, need to consider questions of language, of place, of tradition. (And I would argue, contra some of my students, that even if you don't intend to stay in Hawai`i, questions of place and space are worthy of consideration, framed as they are for many of us here.) I get up my goat a bit, say to myself that I want them to think about issues they do not consider relevant because, damn it!, they will on that five year plan I have in my mind. But their plan is for one semester. So here is my list of foundational questions about fiction. I hope to generate more, and invite readers to send in their own.


--Given that the novel's origins were in journalism in the 18th century, what links do these genres still have to one another? Can Kaia Sand's work help us to think about relationships between creative writing and journalism, as she claims to be a "journalist-poet"?

--One semester I taught short stories by Lydia Davis. She writes stories that tell more than show and that contain no dialogue. She provokes the question: why do most of us place so much value on dialogue and on "showing" rather than "telling"? Replace these items with any items that are repeated over and over in CW classrooms ("write what you know"; "write from your imagination"; "climax & denouement"; "narrative arc" and so on). Imagine how you might write a story that deliberately broke all these rules and succeeded. What would that story be?

--Mikhail Bakhtin loved the novel for the way in which it includes all other genres; it is (arguably) the most multi-voiced of the genres. How do you approach your fiction, knowing that you can use ALL the tools out there?

--Poetry's market is tiny, a fact that allows poets enormous freedom, because their work is not considered marketable. Fiction is, at least potentially, another story. Think about ways in which market demands affect fiction. (Uzma Khan has interesting things to say along these lines, as she has had an editor who demanded certain kinds of writing from her.)

--Writing workshops tend to devote more time and space to issues of craft than to issues of content (such as politics and place). What do you write about? Why? What would you like to write about, but can't yet? How do you mean to get there?

--Write a resume/cv for a fiction writer (or poet or dramatist). What does this writer need to know to write well? What are the books s/he he should read? What languages should s/he learn? Where should s/he travel?

--Consider the ways in which the truism "you can reach truth best through fiction" works and does not work. What truths are we talking about?

--If you write fantasy fiction, what are links between your genre and poetry, say, or science fiction? How can you use symbols in ways that realist novelists cannot?

--Why is realist fiction generally privileged in university MFA programs? How might you learn more about experimental fiction and adapt its techniques and fascinations to your own work?

--Rewrite a short piece--a Shakespeare sonnet--as a short story. What happens? In what ways do these pieces of writing work? What gets lost, or gained, in translation?

--If you write in more than one language, how do you use them in your fiction/poetry/drama? Do you translate? Do you draw your reader in or alienate him or her? Are you Brecht or are you Spielberg?

--What do you want to do with your fiction other than "tell a good story"? Do you want to engage political, cultural, linguistic issues? Do you want to create a certain music in your work? What is the relationship of sound to sense in your prose?

--What writers have you read who operate successfully in more than one genre? How do they do that? Do they do different work in each genre, or is there significant overlap?

--What happens when you mix genres? If you are a novelist, have you ever put a poem in your fiction, or a section of a play? What would be the point of doing so?

As you can see, many of these questions work for more than fiction only, but I've framed them in such a way that fiction is foregrounded. But try to re-frame other questions we've asked this semester--questions about tradition, place, publishing, form--in the context of your particular genre.

This evening I am reading from and talking about my dementia work with Prof. Miriam Fuchs's class on memoir. I'll blog soon on that and especially on the wonderful visit by Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff that ended at noon-time today when I left them and Jessi at the airport for their return trip home to Portland.

Tinfish #20 is on its way; home & away events

The new issue of Tinfish, our 20th, will soon be available. Please see our website for details. The cost to you is $15, including postage. We are not taking subscriptions at present, or submissions.

If you don't press the links, here's the description:

Tinfish 20 will be our last issue for at least two years; along with its editor, the journal will go on sabbatical in 2011. Unlike our previous issues, whose covers were made of recycled materials, #20 is perfect bound and relatively thick. While Tinfish does not run themed issues, #20 includes many poems on aging—on being 25, 41, 60 and older—and also on dying. Also included are an engaging mix of poems from Hawai‘i, Guam, Korea, China, and the west coast of North America. Among the poets in issue #20 are Aaron Belz, Caroline Sinavaiana, R. Zamora Linmark, Craig Santos Perez, Lehua M. Taitano, Janna Plant, Eileen Tabios, Juan Gelman, Kenny Tanemura, Linda Russo, Kai Gaspar, Joe Tsujimoto, Stephen Collis and others. This will be the last issue produced under the art direction of Gaye Chan, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude (and good fun) for her many years with Tinfish Press.

Cover Art by Tava Tedesco
Interior Art and centerfold by Allison Uttley
Design by Chae Ho Lee

The first launch of #20 will take place at Revolution Books on King Street on October 17, Sunday, at 3 p.m.

Other upcoming events:

--October 7, Kuykendall 410, 3 p.m.: reading by the UHM English department's Distinguished Visiting Writer, Adam Aitken.

--October 11, Monday: Political Science department talk by Jules Boykoff. Boykoff and Kaia Sand are authors of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press). He is also author of Hegemonic Love Potion, a book of poems.

--October 12, Tuesday: Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff will be speaking to my classes. Kaia is author of Tinfish's Remember to Wave about Portland, Oregon's secret histories. I blogged about the book here.

--October 13, Wednesday, 7:30 until: MIA reading series, Mercury Bar, Fort Street Mall, Chinatown, Honolulu (world, universe . . .): Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff, vudu munki (Alex Dorcean), Susan M. Schultz

--October 17: Tinfish 20 launch

I will be traveling (10/20-28) to Vancouver to give readings and speak at Simon Fraser University and the Kootenay School, then the Boise MFA program, on my dementia work and on Tinfish.

A busy month! Hope to see many of you (who are you, fair reader?) at one or more of these events.

aloha, Susan

Kaia Sand, Jules Boykoff & Guerrilla Poetries

Yesterday, the Poetry & Politics crew (few but firm) interviewed Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff at their Portland home offices via Skype--and, when that failed to work well, by speaker phone. We had read their 2008 Palm Press book, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space; a couple of the students had already completed the assignment of plastering poem messages in public places.

I began by setting up the argument that seems to frame the course, namely one made famous by Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, among others, between autonomous and overtly political poetries. It's a binary that (like so many brute oppositions) ultimately seems to collapse, but which spurs good conversation before it goes. Kaia talked about the problem of didacticism in poetry and mentioned her recent reading of Gary Snyder's Turtle Island, a book she found overly didactic. She said that the question comes down to one of tactics, namely to the question: what works? Jules likewise addressed the problem of a "look down your nose didacticism," at about the time his image froze and we switched to the speaker phone. He then froze the dichotomy itself, suggesting that what is really crucial is context (which I take to be a spatial variant of Kaia's more temporal tactics). Then he suggested that overt politics work better in the context of--say--the Bush administration than do a Duncanesque "politics through the back door" approach.

Much of what we discussed relates also to the question of humor in political poetry. We began our interview by agreeing that humor is a necessary step in engaging the public, and in engaging the poet him or herself in the political act (Jules mentioned that a couple of the projects they performed were inspired by parties they'd been at). Jules spoke of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as doing the work of "critical journalism," nearly by themselves, over the past eight years. By the end, Kaia argued for seriousness, but by then we were all laughing, so that binary also crashed tellingly. After Jules and Kaia left us, we talked about a recent SNL skit about Hawai`i, which bashes the myth of tourist paradise in favor of a hard reality of meth labs and teen pregnancy. Clearly, that skit was also an act of critical entertainment, one that alerts people who ought to know better that Hawai`i is not a place set apart from history, but suffers through it along with other rural and urban American spaces.

When one student, the head of YouthSpeaks Hawai`i, asked about oral performance, Kaia acknowledged that their book is more about (delayed) visual performances done in public spaces than about (present) oral performances. Kaia's and Jules's own projects began in rural Maryland, where the economy is based largely on fishing and the military (sounds familiar). What they learned, among other things, was how to place signs strategically in the landscape. See their book for some artful placements, especially in what they call "sign groves," where their signs (anti-capitalist, anti-Cheney) were citizen signs among many others in front of churches and other places that attract language. Later in the conversation, Jules addressed the question of performance by developing ideas for performing on buses and in other public spaces by "seeding" the audience. The ramifications of such performances--both visual and staged as spontaneity--are that the performers also breeak out of the predictable "gestures" of poetry, whether it be performance, nature, lyric, or other mode. Not simply anti-capitalist, but also anti-received form (like advertising, like other attempts to manipulate us into acting in someone else's interest, rather than our own).

Location is crucial in setting up one's signs. Jules used an example from the Sidewalk Blogger in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i, who placed a "Torture = Frat Pranks" sign next to an official state sign forbidding such transgressions as skateboarding and dogs. In that way, signs speak to signs, and the audience (inadvertant, as Kaia said) participates in drawing out the political ironies. In another example, I talked about putting up mock lost pet signs that advertised rewards for locating the US Bill of Rights, which has been lost. Jules mentioned a couple in Portland whose son has been caught up in the "war on terror," and their intent to put up "lost son" signs (surely a higher degree of difficulty, in so many senses of the word).

We also talked about signs as--or as not--forms of graffitti, the extent to which activists are willing to "vandalize" the landscape to imprint their messages on the landscape. The projects discussed in Jules and Kaia's book pull up short of the artificial permanence of official tagging. It demands less work by underpaid employees of corporations or the state than does paint on a wall. But what names remain at places like Angel Island and internment camps remain because someone chose to carve them into the walls.

According to Jules, Steven Duncombe has recently argued for embracing humor and popular culture in advancing a progressive politics. So, why not (metaphorically!) embrace Britney Spears? Or Nascar? Or other symbols of our fantasy lives as consumers of entertainment culture? There's a lovely cooptation here, taking emblems of big money and absorbing them into one of the few markets that cannot make money. Frank Sherlock talks about the freedom involved in not making money. One of the students was especially moved by a photograph in the book that shows a pedestrian hugging Sherlock after Sherlock hands him a poem on the street. That kind of connection, however transient, matters.

Later in the conversation, Kaia talked about a project performed by Laura Elrick in New York City. NYC is so drenched in language that Elrick decided to do a silent performance, walking around in an orange uniform as if she were a shackled Guantanamo "detainee." I remember one of the most compelling public performances I ever witnessed was one in which a speaker at Hyde Park Corner in London simply prepared to speak, but came up short of uttering a single word. When finally he did, the crowd dispersed. While that performance seemed contentless, if compelling, one like Elrick's folds together the effect/affect of silence with an image that damns US policies in the so-called war on terror (a phrase that has been retired under the current administration, even if some of the US's actions have not).

And of course transience is something this kind of art courts more than dismisses. We can create archives of our signs, our writing upon the landscape, but we cannot make our signs permanent, so we play with the necessity of their quick disappearance. It is a temporal, not a plastic, art.

So the skype / phone session ended. Next we read Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory and move from the militarized landscapes of Oregon and Hawai`i to that of Guam.


This past Thursday, I attended Lisa Linn Kanae's book launch for Islands Linked by Ocean (Bamboo Ridge Press) and will have something to say about it after I've read the book. Lisa's Sista Tongue is one of the most important books Tinfish has published, widely read and taught as it is. So it's good to see Lisa finding success with her book of short stories, as well.

The Book of Greenspan and Gonzales

Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) by Jules Boykoff
OR
The Book of Remembering Forgetting


One of the first things you notice when you enter Jules Boykoff's and Kaia Sand's house in Portland (apart from the cats, the books, the happy happy clutter) is a gallery of collages. These collages by Jules Boykoff contain images of Ronald Reagan; the Gipper stares from nearly every wall of the house, or so it seemed when I visited in November 2007. Needless to say, perhaps, these are not the icons of a properous era; instead, they are emblems of rampant capital (aka “free” trade), the demands such “freedom” makes on ordinary folks. They are the Reagans of Mark Nowak's poem "Capitalization," who fired air-traffic controllers in 1981 for threatening to strike for better working conditions. This odd and welcome mix of political science, art, and poetry comes naturally to Boykoff, who teaches Poli Sci at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon (which appears to be a satellite campus of the University of Hawai`i, such are their recruiting methods). His book, Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (2007) is a prose/academic analogue to his poetry, as is his book with Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space. The latter presents case studies of public poetries that resist power, whether that power is literary or political, governmental. Boykoff's first book of poems, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (2006) might then be said to be the poetic analogue to his academic work; in it, we find the Reagan obsession in full flower.

In Hegemonic Love Potion, Reagan has given way to new counter-muses, namely Alan Greenspan and Alberto Gonzales, among others. I do not have the time or energy to devote to the entire volume (43 student essays await my attention, among other tasks!), but I want to point to a couple sections of the book, crucial to an understanding not just of Boykoff's work, but also the larger work poetry can do to intervene in our politics. For poetry is a crucial form of our collective memory, precisely because (through form, through innovative content) poetry is what lends itself to memory. Boykoff's uses of anaphora and sound are memorable, performative. Thus, one of the most crucial sections of Boykoff's book, “Notes from the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment” (a title he took from Martin Luther King, Jr., not widely known for his sense of humor,) is a collage of testimony by Albert Gonzales before a Senate Panel in April, 2007. Boykoff collages sections of the transcript—what is a transcript, if it presents full-bore amnesia?--from the Congressional Quarterly Transcripts Wire. The then-attorney general sings!

Boykoff proves what we do not want to hear, that bad testimony, like Donald Rumsfeld's press conferences, can be compelling poetry, and that poetry can absorb as well as perpetuate memory. So Boykoff creates a public record of a calculated amnesia. This record is sadly funny, a severe indictment of the Bush administration's refusal to answer to checks and balances. And so the mazurka begins: after a list of failures to recollect, Gonzales says, “I may have no recollection, but I presume it is true.” The failures to recollect add up, add up, add up: “I have searched my memory. I have no recollection . . .”. Failure to remember is magical: “My understanding is that the gentleman had hazy recollections about it as well.” “I have no memory of this.”

“I recall making the decision—I recall making the decision.

But I don't recall when the decision was made.”

I could go on, quoting and quoting the words for which Gonzales will be best forgotten. Except by Boykoff, whose memory of all this forgetting is crucial to any history of the Bush administration. That he makes the forgotten memorable is a strike against the amnesia that cost Americans part of their Constitution between at least 2000-2008. President Obama has recovered some of it already, but much remains to be reinstated.

The book's title, its cover by Jim Dine (a heart!), suggests that this is a book about love. So far, I've described a book about anger, albeit often comedic in its force/farce. But there are love poems toward the beginning of the book, none quite so amusing as the triangle of Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, and Andrea Mitchell. Another flurry of amnesia, perhaps, or what Boykoff calls “rampant dismantling redux”: “Ayn or Andrea? Ayn or Andrea? Ayn or Andrea”? Ayn Rand was Greenspan's mentor; Andrea Mitchell is his wife.

The last sequence, “The Slow Motion Underneath,” is worth lingering on as a lyric love poem that refuses to separate itself from the world, yet opens a possible space for transformation. In a wonderful way, it is a poem about ethics (“barely audible as it was at the time / it all sliced mightily to your ethical metric” is a statement about a person and about poetry.) Each section contains 11 lines. Boykoff's birthday was September 11, personal marker of what later became a public nightmare. One might ask, “11 or 11?” In the sequence, the poet meets the love of his life (“kinetic moment of fortune”), even as he references the reality that “is a wooden handle for a hatchet in the ice”; a No-No boy from Heart Mountain, Pablo Neruda, erosion (Sand has written about water issues in her poems), labor strikes, deaths in Iraq, “a decade-old list of nice things to say,” and daffodils. Of that last, surprising, element Boykoff has spoken of his early love of Wordsworth, his memorization of his poems, and the non-poets he knows who commit verse to memory (Here Comes Everybody). Again, the significance of memory.

And of hope. A full-time job, as he writes on the last page of the book. “Hope is a category, an object, a toothbrush, an unmarked door, a metric of leisure, a decolonized mind. Hope is a volcano, a train platform, an island, a thumbtack, an impediment, a bombshell, an intellectual pitbull.”

While bad testimony can make compelling poetry, like a Happy Meal it cannot sustain itself for long. So Boykoff has included much richness in his book, as well, including this potion poem at the end. Anyone who wants to understand the formal and tonal possibilities of political poetry, as well as its bull's-eyes, ought to read Boykoff's book. Hope exists, and it is ordinary. Go brush your teeth.