Documentary Poetry & Being in the World

Several years ago, when we still walked our kids to the neighborhood school in the morning, my husband did a photography project he called "sidewalk blog." Each morning he took a photograph of the sidewalk, one of those concrete suburban walkways that runs parallel to the asphalt road. Looking back nearly at random I find these photographs, some of which he thinks I took. No matter:

--A soap bubble
--A bic lighter
--A worm
--Some leaves
--Metal cover
--Pre-paid movie card

And then are the photos that he printed out and hung on the wall, among them:

--A red curb, fluted cement gutter, leaves
--Manhole cover filled in with multi-colored leaves, twigs
--What appears to be a moon crater

The term isn't used in this way, but these are "found photographs," images in which the world rises to meet us, unmediated (except in the angle of the shot). Photographs like these may prove a corrective to what happens when introductory level poetry students are asked to "write a poem." Even after setting up topics that accentuated the documentary nature of the course (English 273: Docuwriting), most students succumbed to the lure of "Poetry." Instead of looking at the world as it is, they did dervish dances of mediation, remediation, imposing their thoughts, feelings and (alas) cliches on their subjects.

 

But when my Ph.D. apprentice, No`u Revilla, asked these students to take their own photographs of walks they'd been on, they came up with many stunning images.  The ratty stuffed bear who lives under a bench beside Kuykendall Hall, the stylized image of a man's face at the bottom of another bench. They see the world, but can't describe it.

We've set to work removing the veil of anxious subjectivity and clotted multi-syllables from their writing. Having asked them earlier in the class to write verbal portraits of each other (an exercise that caused great consternation), we more recently asked them to compose "verbal portraits or photographs" and to post them on the class blog. I asked them to go for a walk and to take nothing (no phone, no iPod, no iPad, nothing) except for a pad and pen. When they saw an image that they would otherwise take a picture of, they were to stop, sit down, and write the image as they saw it. No commentary. The ticket should emerge from the sidewalk not as evidence of "a lonely night," but as a ratty piece of paper with the numbers 1446-2023 on it.

The results have been good, sometimes stunning.  One that begins with two women talking about pronouns (yes, sound images work, too) includes this series of vivid lines:

Red flowers in clusters, no in umbels,

Behind a brown, rusting fence,
Beneath black lamp posts.
Rows of shrubs line the boundaries of the grey building.
A man in pink picks a leaf.

There are tables shaped as hexagons; there's a girder; there are roofs, pigeons, canoes, a baseball field, motorcycles, a woman in a tank top. Suddenly, we see what we see when we look at the world without so many distractions (such as our electronic devices, our monkey minds). 

Alfred Corn asked on facebook the other day whether we read Stevens or Williams. I responded that I read both, but teach Williams more. In college, when I took a couple of courses from Alfred, I was enamored of Stevens. My poems were full of blue musical instruments, fluttering ideas, lots of ifs. He told me to try to write a poem so utterly like Stevens that I might cure myself of the tendency; at another point, he pointed to Chieftain Iffucan as my muse. I learned later on to appreciate the value of writing about the world as something that was not so much an hallucination behind the eye, but (scary thought when you're 20) a place that confronts the eye, is not the I.

That this is a spiritual, as well as a quasi-scientific, discovery brings the opposition into focus for me, if focus is a kind of synthesis, as I believe it is. This is what I learned best in writing about my mother, that to watch her and to describe her decline as it happened, was difficult precisely because it meant pulling away the veils of my own emotions, memories, desires. Talking yesterday to a colleague in Family Resources with whom I will be teaching a class next semester on Alzheimer's, I was gratified to hear her talk about this act of witness (of a parent's dementia) as one that involves pulling away from personal desires, and of settling into the present tense. Meaning comes after, but only when words themselves can be seen as precisely as that bear who sits under the concrete bench, a companion for the black cat who eats there.

Field notes from the teaching life

The students of English 273: Introduction to Literature and Creative Writing: Documentary Writing, were terrified. My course apprentice, doctoral student No`u Revilla, had asked them to break into pairs and push their desks up against each other, so that each student could look at another student face to face. Nervous laughter. Some blushing. Lots of chatter. They were to spend five minutes taking notes on the other student's face, in preparation for writing a portrait of the other student. (We've been reading Eleni Sikelianos's The Book of Jon, which is an extended portrait of the poet's usually absent, heroin-addicted, father.) The five minutes of observation reminded me of the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of John Cage I imposed on a composition class once. The anxiety became palpable in that class when one football player began drumming on his desk and another leaped to his feet to perform a dance for the others. In this class, the silence was only part of the unease; the rest brought together a fear that often blocks us writers from writing with clarity.

The equation goes like this: observation = judgment. We live in a culture where a famous person can proffer judgment even on an empty chair. We go to college and learn to think critically, which too often gets interpreted as "with moral judgment." Our churches leave out the "lest ye be judged" part of the proverb. Perhaps it would have been easier for each student to write a description of an object: rock, paper or scissors, say. I've had classes do that exercise before, and it works well for generating metaphors. What the portrait exercise achieves is the crisis of associating observation with judgment, when the student realizes that he or she is also being observed. What will my partner (who doesn't even know me!) write about me? Has anyone ever looked this closely at me, or I at them? No`u eased their minds retroactively, when she described these portraits as "gifts" from each student to his or her partner. That's a beautiful way to put what I would describe as a lesson in realizing that the world not only calls out for observation, but that such close observation can be done most lovingly--or merely effectively--if we put aside our fears of being judged.  (I know, that's especially difficult when you're 20 years old!)

Our early discussions of Sikelianos's book were fraught with questions of judgment. One student wondered why Sikelianos sometimes portrayed her father in a loving way, and sometimes called him a bastard. Why not one or the other? Perhaps we can bring this conversation around, pointing to the way in which human relationships are inevitably complicated. But even more instructive is the way in which Sikelianos's book is most effective (to my mind) when she is trying to paint a picture of her father apart from her interest in him. Who was he as himself? How utterly impossible is it to create such a portrait, when you are the neglected daughter? And yet, how beautiful the task of trying to give him back his life.

Ed. note: the morning after I wrote this post, I found something about Maria Abramovic's MOMA exhibition/performance (where she sat and invited people to come look at her for as long as they wanted to) on Andrew Sullivan's blog, with a link to an earlier post about people who began to cry as they looked at her. Find that link here. 

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In more personal poetry news, the new issue of NAP, an on-line journal, includes my mash-up of The Little Prince and King Lear, which originally appeared on this blog. The last book her social worker read to her was the pop-up version of Saint-Exupery's book. I bought my own copy to "read along" with them. The new issue (#100!) of Bamboo Ridge includes three of my memory cards from the recent Singing Horse Press book. I will be participating in the September 30 BR reading at the UHM Art Auditorium at 3 p.m. There are two other BR readings, as well, at Native Books and at Kumu Kahua Theater.

Juliana Spahr in/on Hawai`i: _well then there now_

Last Fall I taught an honors composition class, which focused on place-based writing. One of our texts was Juliana Spahr's "Dole Street," an essay she wrote in 2001 about the street on which she lived, which runs through the makai (ocean, south) side of the University of Hawai`i, where she taught. "It's amazing that someone who had lived here for such a brief time learned so much about this place," said one student who has lived here all her life. The essay is a marvel of observation, built from a question: what is the history of the street I live on? Out of that question came others: what is my place on this street that I live on? What is my place in the history of what this street means to Hawai`i's history? I begin to feel the force of Spahr's characteristic repetitions in my own syntax. This is her fourth book about Hawai`i, and the one I like best. The others are Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan, 2001), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), and The Transformation (Atelos, 2007). well then there now is published by Black Sparrow (2011). The book has been reviewed in the Honolulu Weekly by Shantel Grace.

Spahr's essay "Dole Street," collected in this volume, is built of narrative history, photographs, personal memories, stories told about place by Hawaiians, immigrants, settlers (more on that last word in a moment). There is a schematic map of the street that reminds me of the image puzzle in The Little Prince. Instead of a snake who has swallowed an elephant, however, this map shows a snake swallowing Honolulu, from St. Louis Heights on one end, to Maryknoll and Punahou Schools on the other. The elephant in the room is what it means to be a white schoolteacher in Hawai`i: "As the stereotypical continental schoolteacher, I need to think about how to respect the water that is there," she writes, "how not to suck it all up with my root system, how to make a syncretism that matters, how to allow fresh water to flow through it, how to acknowledge and how to change in various unpredictable ways" (49).

The best teaching often involves little more than pointing one's stereotypical teacher-finger and asking questions. Here, look at this place you think you know and find out its history, its ecology, its names. While tourism gets a bad name, and for good reason, there's something beautifully touristic about looking at the place you live in with fresh eyes--and then doing the non-touristic hard work of finding out what you've looked at. It's a move from looking to seeing, not one from looking to taking. That's what Spahr tells us throughout this essay and this book.

Asking what this means matters.
And the answer also matters.


But back to that word, "settler." Near the end of "Dole Street," Spahr takes issue with a syncretistic view of Hawai`i (the happy multi-culti view that everyone mixes and gets along, which the tourist bureau propagates): "It is that Dole Street mainly tells a certain history, a history of how the arrival of western education and its separations and refusals to mix came with and was propped up by settlers who came mainly from the continent and their powers" (49). And then the clincher: "It tells an old story, which is also a current story."

Yes and no. Let me historicize a bit. The power of the word "settler" (more powerful to me than to a reader unfamiliar with Hawai`i, no doubt) comes with a long story attached to it. Spahr lived in Hawai`i from 1997 through 2003, spending 2001 in New York City. The Acknowledgments to her book page tells us where her work from that time was published, but there are no dates, except for mention that "Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours" was reprinted in Best American Poems of 2001 (ironic considering its content). It might bear saying that she wrote her Hawai`i pieces while she was living here. "Dole Street" was published for the Subpoetics collective (selfpublish or perish, it was called) in 2001. This would be five years after Haunani-Kay Trask's well known remarks to the MELUS conference, which was held in Honolulu in 1997. In that address, Trask shifted the operating paradigm in Hawai`i from one that privileged "locals" (for the most part non-white people born and raised in Hawai`i) to one that privileged native Hawaiians and declared that haole and Asians were all "settlers." The first concept was made current by the Bamboo Ridge group (founded, 1979), and the second by `oiwi journal (founded, 1998) and other publications. This speech inspired Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura to collect essays on Asian Settler Colonialism, a text that is used often in English department classes to this day. That text, with less rhetorical panache than Trask's speech, ordains that everyone who came to Hawai`i, whether to own a plantation or to work as contract labor (or as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge), is responsible for the ills that have befallen Hawai`i and for keeping Hawaiians from being sovereign in their own islands.

It's important to think about power, history, race, class. But the Asian settler colonialism argument would not be so powerful if it did not leave out so much out. While it has caused everyone I know here to think and rethink their lives, it paradoxically dehistoricizes Hawai`i and the literature of Hawai`i in ways that mask change. More significantly, it has worked against the creation of alliances across categories, especially racial ones, but also class differences. By making politics a question of blood quantum, it ignores our (inclusive) urgent need to come together in opposition to military build-up, environmental destruction, houselessness, the third-worldization of Hawai`i. And against globalization. The UHM campus displays a huge banner in front of the main administration building welcoming APEC to Honolulu. That is a problem for all of us to tackle.

Spahr's book replays many of these arguments, without explaining them for the reader outside of Hawai`i. Her arguments waver between extremes. Her sonnets on blood take both sides of the debate, showing how everything is interconnected, but also castigating "settlers" (including her and her partners) for "bunkering." "And because we could not figure it out bunkering was a way for us / to claim what wasn't really ours, what could never really be / ours and it gave us a power we otherwise would not have had / and and we believed that this made the place ours." This comes before the very end of this sequence, exquisite in its ambivalences: "this place was not ours until we

grew and flowed into something other than what we were we
continued to make things worse for this place of growing
and flowing into even while some of us came to love it and let
it grow in our own hearts, flow in our own blood. (29)

The enjambment is telling: "what we were we / continued to make things worse." Were the second "we" to fall to the next line, it would be easy: "we continued to make things worse," which is part of what she's writing. But "what we were we" is a crucial question, too, and a more surprising one. That's the question. Are we we because we belong to one or another group, or because we care about this place. So often one's desire to participate in group 2 gets blocked by one's perception that groups 1 matter more.

But I don't think that is the final view, or even the majority view, certainly not when I take my kids to soccer or baseball or hula practice and feel the pull of a larger community than that of the university or the anger in the voice of a father berating his kids, or people yelling insults at one another. All of these happen, but "we" are also welcomed into community, if we enter it on its terms. Which we will we be also provocatively shuts out the possibility of "I." The "I" is lyric, but it is also a bunker, I think I hear (want to hear) Juliana saying to me. Rewrite the lyric as a we and we're getting somewhere. Especially if "we" is that difficult thing, a hard-earned syncretism.

Another essay, "2199 Kalia Road," gets at the conflict between private ownership and beach access in Waikiki. There's an admirable playfulness here; Spahr writes that she liked to "indulge in the myths of Waikiki as much as possible" and to suggest visitors drink a mai tai at the Halekulani, otherwise the villain in this piece. (This reminds me of Charles Bernstein who, on catching sight of the old Tahitian Lanai bar in 1992, exclaimed, "now here's the real Hawai`i!") She gets at the many things missing from the Halekulani's presentation of itself to its temporary residents, including the seediness of its surround. She tells us that the beach has been renamed Gray's Beach from the original Kawehewehe, "which means the opening up." She tells us how nostalgia sells. But she also moralizes. The "fellow working class midwesterners [wander] around with fake smiles on their faces." How are we to know the authenticity of a midwestern smile? The midwest from which these tourists flee is full of "awful midwestern rust and environmental decay" (115), where one presumes the frowns are real. And so it's not surprising that the centerpiece of this essay is a fairy tale in reverse, one that begins in happiness and ends very badly indeed, with a dead haole, pushed into the Ala Wai canal by a man with "anti-caucasian psychosis" (120). In the fairy tale (and like a fairy tale), people are divided into neat binaries. Dillingham is "an evil man," while "now there are two sorts of people associated with Waikiki[,] those who sign deals in the spirit of the Kewalo and live the way of the dredge". . . and those who live the way of the watershed as much as they can" (120).

Yes, Hawai`i often seems to live according to fairy tales, whether those that govern the tourist industry's propaganda, or the one in which the wicked witch of Dillingham is thrown in the canal and destroyed in the very place he (or someone with his skin color) had dredged. I applaud Spahr for offering up these narratives about this place. Her observation and her reportage are wonderful. Less compelling to this reader are those moments when she falls into a previously charted narrative about the role of the "haole" in Hawai`i's history. That's a hard one to think your way out of, but I hope some of us can begin to do that work, make things rather than feed the binaries of inside and outside.

Last weekend I thought I detected a shift in the tectonic plates that compose Hawai`i's literary world. At a reading of "native voices," organized by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nalani MacDougall, there was no mention of settlers, no visceral bitterness. The anger there was (and is) folded into erotic narratives (by No`u Revilla, for one). The force of the literature and orature came from within. There were links being made between Pacific Islanders, if not others. There was power there, and it was not the power of division, but of making, joyful making. This is not to say that anger has been overcome, or that it has no role in changing this place. Everyone but everyone in Hawai`i is always already angry about something. But it is to say that things may be happening that push us past the colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial moment and into a new place, where literatures--whether native or Asian or white--can operate without constant fault-finding.

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Note: there are at least two links to the Honolulu Weekly in this post. The Weekly is suffering from the economic downturn, among other woes. Please support their work, either by advertising in their pages, or by offering them a donation. Follow this link to find out how.

Tinfish Press Retro Chapbook series faces imminent launch

The first in a series of 12 retro chapbooks--made inexpensively and in short runs--is coming soon. It's Say Throne, by No`u Revilla, who describes herself as follows, "No'ukahau'oli is rooted in Maui, while pursuing her Cultural Studies scholarship in O'ahu at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa. Her palapala is based on Native women's voices and indigenous storytelling. And like her kūpuna said: 'I wai no'u.'" The designer for these upcoming books is Eric Butler.

No`u Revilla's work melds sex and sovereignty, stark detail and flat-out lyricism. The center-piece of this 16 page chapbook is the title poem, a verse play of a sort, which features a chair and a lady (clearly the Hawaiian queen). Here's a brief passage:

But salads brought you destiny. You ordered new appetities, pulling pushing Fancy chair--luxurious furniture with a capital "F" like fuck, like feed, like fiction. To your table the appetites arrived but Fancy chair fuck kept you occupied.

[occupied was occupation but not occupation that kept lady occupied]

Say Throne will be followed most immediately by a series of poems written by Adam Aitken while he served as UHM's Distinguished Visiting Writer this past autumn.

Each chapbook can be purchased for a donation of $3 to Tinfish Press; you can pre-order all 12 for $36. (Of course you're also welcome to throw in a few extra dollars so that we can send out review copies and give writers more copies of their own chapbooks.)

Our address is Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744. Our email is press.tinfish@gmail.com

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Tinfish's editor will be in Kansas for a few days, snooping around KU's English department and giving a reading in Topeka, but on return expects to be ready to send the first chapbook out. Please sign on! Support small press publishing. Hell, we just got smaller again.

Art and Poetry at The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, April 18, 2010

[I cannot turn this program right-side up, so in the spirit of a piece Elizabeth Berdann sent me on email the other day (I said, "it's fine, but it's sideways," and she responded, "I wanted it that way"), I am presenting it as a rectangle. Turn your head and/or your screen, the better to read it.]


At 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 18, 2010, in the city of Honolulu in the neighborhood of Makiki, poets gathered to read work they had written in response to the Words Off the Wall exhibition at the Museum. I wrote an earlier post about the pre-write tour of the exhibition organized by Quala-Lynn Young. The post-write tour included "teams" of poets who had written on particular artists, chosen because of their concern for the body.


Team Fay Ku included Christina Low, Jade Sunouchi (seen above with the artist), Julie Tanji, Amalia Bueno, and No`u Revilla.




Team Elizabeth Berdann consisted of Neomary Soriano-Calderon (a 9th grader at Mililani High School), Susan M. Schultz, Jaimie Gusman, and Rachel Wolf. Allison Schulnik's team was made up of Tayla Yogi, another 9th grader, and Evan Nagle, a post-MFA newcomer to Hawai`i, by way of his girlfriend, Jaimie Gusman. Judy Fox provoked a poem from Jeff Walt, a Goddard MFA discovered at the reception desk of the museum, where he volunteers once a week.

I was unable to take down full accounts of the poems, but registered some single lines:

--Christina Low, from "Mer": "Make me a stone that sinks to the bottom of the sea"; later she said she saw the painting, "Alarmed Mermaid," once and then worked off her memory of it.

--Jade Sunouchi, from "Birdfeed": "wings partitioned into fingers," a fine image for metamorphosis. Here is the painting she and Julie and Amalia wrote about.

--Julie Tanji, who carried Japanese characters with her and held them up, yelled, "I am not invisible!"

--Amalia Bueno used Prometheus as her mythological reference for the Fay Ku painting that three poets chose to write on;

--No`u Revilla performed her poem about four young women braiding a horse's mane, largely from memory, and repeated the refrain, "I am your mother." She said she wrote about this painting because the one young woman seemed not to fit, belong, seemed outside the emotional energy of the poem. That was the woman on whom she focused her care.

--Jaimie Gusman wrote about Elizabeth Berdann's wall of 31 tongues, considering the tongues to be a map. Her speaker put the tongues on, over her head. As usual, Jaimie's work featured quick cuts between pathos and silliness, lyric and faux advertising copy.

--Rachel Wolf wrote about Berdann's "Ghost," the painting of an old person upside down on cloth. Among her zingers was the phrase "chamois shaman."

--Tayla Yogi, one of Steve Schick's 9th graders from Mililani, wrote a poem of various pronouns, "she/her/me/myself/I" to go along with the melting hobo of Allison Schulnik's video. Everyone was impressed by how bravely she and Neomary performed their poems.

--Evan Nagle took that video and made text values for the pixels, found phrases through webcrawler, employed a spam/poetic filter, and ended up with phrases like "save a puppy from the pound or something." His was the least representative of the poems--it was not in the least so--but an eye opener for the audience.

The reading was followed by a reception that featured cheese sticks, hunks of cheese, and fruit, mingling, and much photography before we dispersed and I, for one, returned to the Sunday "night" baseball game between the Cardinals and the Mets, which the Cardinals won.



[from left to right: Jeff Walt, Quala-Lynn Young, Jaimie Gusman, Evan Nagle, Christina Low, Rachel Wolf, Julie Tanji, No`u Revilla, Susan M. Schultz, Jade Sunouchi, Amalia Bueno, Neomary Soriano-Calderon; not in the picture because she had a softball game to play in was Tayla Yogi)

Many thanks to Quala-Lynn Young for organizing the event and to Shantel Grace for writing about it, over and again.