Reading next Sunday with Caroline Sinavaiana

Book Launch and Readings with authors
Caroline Sinavaiana and Susan M. Schultz Sunday, February 9, 3pm
at Revolution Books

Caroline Sinavaiana, born in Utulei, Tutuila, is Associate Professor of English at UH-Manoa. Her creative work includes two collections of poetry: Alchemies of Distance and Mohawk/Samoa. She is co-editor of a special issue for Pacific Studies: Women Writing Oceania."Sina" will be reading from "Nuclear Medicine," her soon-to-be published memoir about her treatment for breast cancer. The memoir is written in three traditions, American, Samoan, and Buddhist, but also concerns western medicine, which she terms "another country." Susan M. Schultz is author of Dementia Blog (Volumes 1 and 2) and Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series, among other books. She edits Tinfish Press and professes poetry and American literature at UH-Manoa. The two volumes of Dementia Blog chronicle her mother's illness from 2006 until her death in 2011.
Susan will read from "Welcome to Her Disease". She also promises that, in spite of the seriousness of the pieces each poet will be presenting, they'll also bring a lot of humor to the afternoon.

Meditation: On Belonging

It starts in my head with a joke: "To be is to do" (Aristotle?); "To do is to be" (Nietzsche); "Shoo be do be do" (Frank Sinatra). It morphs to: To be is to long; to long is to be; to be is to long to belong.

Nowhere is belonging so longed for and being so suspect as in Hawai`i.

I was driving near Pearl City once, where I invariably get lost. I pulled into a church parking lot to look for someone to ask directions from. Opening the church door, I found a congregation of Pacific Islanders speaking a language I did not recognize, and realized this was a community I did not know. How often that kind of experience has repeated itself over the years, that sense of moving in and out of communities you might not see ever again. If one were to slice O`ahu like an onion, or like brain cells, you would see layers and layers of communities. Then you might see the Venn diagram that links them. Or you might not. It turns out that the move from layer to Venn diagram, from discrete communities to mixed ones, is a choice. And it's not always the choice you might suspect. Members of mixed families might choose to define themselves as parts of one layer; members of more mono-tone families might choose to see the diagram, the space (empty or not) that emerges between layers. Of course, when is "choice" really ever chosen in a place as fraught as this one?

Much of this negotiation of belonging has to do with names. Before you meet me, my last name marks me as Euro-American; before you meet me, my first name indicates I was almost certainly born in the 1950s or 1960s. After 1966, or thereabouts, the name "Susan" died out. There are complexities here, too, because our children bear first names from their places of origin, but our last names. You would not know that they are Asian-Americans if you only saw their last names, Webster Schultz. Their middle names link them to my father and to my husband's mother; like my name, they are old-fashioned Euro-American names. But their full names assert their entry into a mixed community created by adoption, migration, and, yes, love.

In her first documentary piece of writing, my honors student, whose family fled Vietnam in the 1970s, offers us her grandmother's Vietnamese name, but not the names of her other relatives. We have a hard time pronouncing grandmother's name, but she's patient with us. She tells us that the family experienced hardships, but not what they were. Name a hardship, I ask her. Her mother did not speak English well as a child, and was put in special education, says her daughter. And what is your mother's name? I ask. "Karen," she responds. My student's name is likewise "American." I ask if there is not a story in the move from a Vietnamese to an American name, and she nods.

Another local Vietnamese student in the class has a Vietnamese name. He does not communicate well with his family, he says. His father is a fisherman who leaves home for weeks, comes back only for short respites. He asks his father about the family's history by starting, "this is for a school project." The history is one of dislocation and work, further dislocation and more work. It's a hard story. I notice that the son, my student, also works hard, that what distinguishes him more in the honors class is his public school in a tough part of town, not his name.

Many of my students are the children of immigrants, others are native Hawaiian, sometimes with their own family history of migration out and back; the linguistic history of my English 100 class last semester was fascinating. At home, students heard Tagalog, Ilocano, Chinese, Vietnamese, Pidgin, Japanese, English with an English or a Canadian accent, Spanish. Hardly anyone had grown up in a family that spoke only English, even if that was their sole language. There were two Hawaiian students who spoke only English. One had fallen in love with Korean soap operas and wanted to study Korean. The other had been discouraged from learning Pidgin by her family, which had lived for a long time on the continent, and then moved back. Neither Hawaiian student spoke Hawaiian. Most of the students had some notion of judgment imbedded in them: either they hated the fact that they hadn't learned the other family language, or they hated that language. The choice of language seemed moral; students berated themselves rather than open up to the possibility that they had made choices as small children that they could not be held to account for.  Their narratives were narratives of choice--"at four years old I chose English"--not of larger historical or cultural or family issues.

That gets me to typos. Those of us who edit work in Hawai`i try very hard to avoid typos, not simply because they are mistakes, but because these mistakes contain meanings that are overdetermined. To get diacritical marks wrong in Hawaiian is considered an insult, though some Hawaiian writers (Sage Uilani Takehiro comes to mind) choose not to use diacriticals because there's more poetic ambiguity to be mined without them. Getting things wrong is what the missionaries did. They transcribed the Hawaiian language using letters whose sounds did not occur in Hawaiian. And much worse. So there's a history to orthography here that is incredibly complex--for Hawaiian especially. For the Hawaiian students in my English 100 class to speak only English reflected back on this history (though I've also had students from immersion schools who speak Hawaiian as well as they speak English).

The new Hawai`i Review came out this week. The design is beautiful. Many of the poems are deeply anti-colonial. (More on the content another time, perhaps.) There is also a typo. The poetry editor's name is No`u Revilla. Her full first name is No'ukahau'oli, but on the masthead of the new issue the name was spelled Noʻukahouʻoli. This changed the meaning from "the pleasure is mine" to "the joyous sweat is mine" (not so big a difference, if you read No`u's joyous sexually charged poems). The editor's reaction was one of despair: she declared that the typo made her "want to die." (The editor is not Hawaiian; she is also not Euro-American.) She writes: "I am a guest/outsider/settler in an illegally overthrown, occupied nation, and I have just participated in the callous misspelling of the name of a kanaka maoli friend whom I am fortunate enough to work alongside."

She is not alone in using this language; it's been in circulation for nearly two decades now. Candace Fujikane, whose book Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life helped to institutionalize the term named in the title, has said: "You can’t talk about alliances between local non-Hawaiians and Hawaiians. If you’re not Hawaiian, you’re a settler and part of the colonial problem. You have to look at in what ways Asians in Hawaii have engaged in practices that obstruct Hawaiians’ struggle for justice." (2009) Fujikane and her co-editor, Jonathan Okamura, are also not the original authors of this idea. I do not know that she is, but Haunani-Kay Trask was the strongest voice in asserting the non-belonging of Asians, as well as Euro-Americans, in Hawai`i. On the first page of the Fujikane/Okamura book, Trask is quoted as writing, "Hawai`i is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been murdered, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands" (2). The history is very bad, as Barrett Watten would say, but for the editor of a literary magazine to feel herself charged with a perpetuation of "murder" after noticing a typo is surely not a solution. It feels like another act of violence.

So the editor is hardly the first person to describe herself as "guest," as "outsider," as "settler"; she is hardly the first to do so with self-lacerating tones. She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to make an outright assertion that she does not belong here. That she is perpetuating a historical wound by way of the typo. I wonder why the self-laceration: she works hard, she publishes work from Hawai`i, she participates in communities on the island. She is a lovely, caring person. I want to hug her.

But I also want to suggest that these self-lacerating terms, these terms that mark people as outsiders no matter how long they live here, that these terms are paradoxically intended to mark those who use them as belonging. (I would like to thank my friend, Vera Lee, for helping me with this during a conversation some months back.) This is a difficult paradox to explain (to myself, let alone to anyone else). But to say one does not belong is to establish a stable identity position based on blood. To be "guest/settler/outsider" is to be somewhere, here but not of here. It's not to float, it is to be, and to be certain. To be [choose your term] is to belong in however difficult a way. But it also tells those of us who do not use the words "outsider" and "settler" to describe ourselves that we are that. It pre-judges our choices. It suggests that my students who are trying to deal with family stories of flight (including students from Vietnam, Cambodia) immigration, changes of language, that these students do not belong here either. That they inhabit that space of "not-belonging" that is not liberating, but which hurts, lacerates.

More difficult, perhaps, to let those titles go, to be here without longing to belong, without the judgment. It's appropriate that there are "slashes" between those words, for they are judgment words. To say: I am here, I do no intentional harm, I do good work. My life a gerund, not a noun. To put the emphasis on process rather than on static position. To think long and hard about these issues, and then to let oneself long--to let oneself be--that is my hope.

Small Press Publishing (English 713): The Material Text from Emily Dickinson to Albert Saijo

In the reader for my Small Press Publishing course, essays by Jerome McGann and George Bornstein hammer down the materiality of the text. McGann shows how Yeats's "rag and bone shop of the heart" refers, in large part, to the rags gathered to make paper. While McGann considers the rag-picker to be like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, a figure of nostalgia, I'm more inclined to think of the rags as the origin of the poem, precisely because they compose the paper the poem is written and then printed on. McGann's essay considers Emily Dickinson's manuscripts vis-à-vis what happens when they are printed, however "faithfully." Bornstein discusses the ways interpretation alters when the text moves from manuscript to journal to book to Norton Anthology.  Anyone who's taught out of one of those Nortons knows to what extent the poem disappears into the apparatus of the canon, the literary history that is only implied by the heft of the volume itself.

Years ago, when we visited Albert Saijo every so often on the Big Island, I mentioned Dickinson's manuscripts, the Franklin edition of the fascicles, to him. His handwritten pages reminded me of hers; nothing was normalized into lines, straight or not! I ordered the two volume set for him (he paid me back). When I went to see Laura Saijo a few weeks ago to talk about publishing his Woodrat Flat, poems from the 1980s and early 1990s in northern California, she suggested I take some of his poetry books. I asked only for the Dickinson volumes, but of course ended up taking others, mainly books with some sign of Albert in them. There were at least two lovely Joanne Kyger inscriptions to him in books of hers.

Yesterday I prepared some class time for moving backwards from the final versions of Saijo's poems in Bamboo Ridge #100, from his Bamboo Ridge book of the late 1990s, from the edited typescript of his forthcoming Tinfish book (edited by Jerry Martien), from the original pile of poems and scatter that Laura sent me, and--finally--with all its Benjaminian aura intact, several manuscript pages. But how marvelous to realize that there was a further "poem" by Saijo that led to all of these. In the first volume of the Franklin Dickinson fascimiles, one page was dog-eared.  I went there and found that Saijo had written in his own pencil above many of Dickinson's words; he had translated her handwriting into his. Here's a photograph of that beautiful moment:

Here is Dickinson, interpreted by Saijo, both using pencil.

This is how Bamboo Ridge Press renders Saijo's writing

This is a screen shot of the Tinfish manuscript, Woodrat Flat, which our intern Kailana Kahawaii is scanning in.

There's a shock in looking back from these all-caps pages dense with print to Saijo's original page (below). It's the shock of losing something, of seeing blunt force where so many tones seem to have been intended, of seeing mass produced product where the workshop had been. This is more than nostalgia; there is something lost in translation from pencil to type.

What I wonder most is how to preserve some of the manuscript in the book. Bamboo Ridge uses occasional scanned pages in amid the caps, but that's only a gesture at the motivation of the writer, the odd grace to his handwriting, the "authenticity" that I usually abhor except here--I'll be asking our designer, Allison Hanabusa, if there might be a third way. Part of me thinks not, but Julia Wieting, a member of the class suggested that alternatives of someone else's handwriting (a form of mimicry that sounds wrong to me, but it may simply be my lack of imagination, or attachment to Albert himself); others suggested a book that might include a sheaf of these pages, or a set of two books. We do not have enough manuscript pages for that, but perhaps a few individual pages slipped into the book? That takes me back to the strong feeling I have when I touch these old pieces of paper of his.

I'm not usually one to coo over manuscripts, though I recall seeing a typed page of an odd Wallace Stevens poem in a case at Yale's Sterling Library and feeling a strange chill. That piece of paper made it clear that someone actually HAD written that odd poem, in a way that seeing the poem in The Palm at the End of The Mind never could. Still, that was typed, and Saijo's work is printed in pencil on smudgy pieces of thick paper; one of these manuscript pages has a tiny round burn mark. The book is, in part, about being a marijuana farmer in California, after all! Perhaps because I knew Albert, albeit not well, these few pieces of paper seem, if not quite sacred, then imbued with his presence, two years after he died, several decades after his pencil wrote on this piece of paper.

Here is the Saijo poem in manuscript

Charles Alexander, who joined us on a laptop via Skype, talked about how much small press publishers love when they do, and at moments like the one last night, I felt that rush of joy in making books (or, in my case, making it possible for them to be made). To the left is a photograph of the class huddled around Charles's head on the computer screen. The room is cold. The weather outside so blustery that the building's louvers have taken to singing; they sound like the wax-paper covered combs we used to "play" as children.


Notes:

George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, Cambridge UP, 2001.

Emily Dickinson, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, Volume 1, edited by R.W. Franklin, The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981.

Jerome McGann, "Introduction" to Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Princeton UP, 1993.

The Suburban Sex Trade

Late last year I drove most evenings to Windward City Shopping Center, at the junction of Kamehameha Highway and the Likelike Highway, to pick up my daughter, getting a ride from soccer practice in Honolulu. Our meeting point was Starbucks, which sits at the corner of the shopping center across the highway from Kaiser Permanente's newly renovated facility. The bus stop nearby is usually populated with Castle High School kids, homeless people, commuters. It was usually getting dark when I arrived and it was dark by the time she and I left for home. One evening I got there a little earlier than usual and parked my car in a stall that faced away from Starbucks, toward the First Hawaiian bank building. Maybe I had the radio on, and certainly I was making an inventory of the day, my time in the classroom, the state of my department, how much I drive these days, and so forth. I noticed a large sedan parked in front of me, one stall to the side, facing me. A local man sat in the car's driver's seat, his arm braced against his car door. I went back to my inventory. There was a young woman in very short shorts knocking at the dark window of the passenger side of the car. The door opened. My scattered inventory continued. A few minutes later I noticed that the car had not gone anywhere, that the man, whom I could see in only shadowy form, was no longer leaning against the driver's window, that there were movements in the car. I returned to consideration of my course on Memory & Forgetting and vaguely wondered if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. The windows the dark sedan began to fog up, but the car itself went nowhere. Whatever going was happening did not involve the car's engine. People came and went from the parking lot, but no one noticed that car, or me. My vague wondering gathered coherence, its laces knotted. My daughter arrived. It was dark, the man and the young woman had been in the car at least 15 minutes, and his headlights came on. My daughter and I drove home.

I told my husband what I'd seen: "Talk to the shopping center security, not the cops; the cops won't do anything."

I told two ministers, former neighbors, what I'd seen, and the man replied, "It wasn't me!"

I told the woman who drove my daughter to the mall and she said, "I guess Kāneʻohe's more interesting than we all thought!"

I told a colleague, who yelled at me, saying I was complicit, that the children need to be safe. Call 911, he told me.

I told a second colleague about the first colleague; she said we're all under stress.

I filled in an on-line HPD form about the incident; there was no response. I looked several times for security, but found no one. A cashier at Foodland said they wear Securitas uniforms, but none were to be found.

I told a friend, wondering what to do, who said, "prostitution is illegal." 


When I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, one summer, I was in a second story apartment near the corner of Prospect and York (was it?). That corner was where women in Yale gym shorts came to advertise their bodies, where cars went around and around the block slowly. That corner was where one night, and one night only, the prostitutes were men. When my mother drove to pick me up at the end of the summer, I said, "there's something I need to tell you." When she came to the apartment in the evening and looked out the window, she inquired, "where's the action?"

We went to Cambodia last winter with a Baptist missionary group, because the local Cambodians we know attend a Baptist Church. In Phnom Penh, we stayed in a hotel that looked like "Mean Hour" in English. It was a large building with large rooms and beds that were more springs than mattresses. There were no shower doors, just a slanted floor with a drain in the middle. The views were of Phnom Penh, vast, chaotic, full of motor bikes and markets, crowds of people (mostly young, for reasons historical and cultural), and of tourists. There was only one small elevator for those of us staying in this large hotel. I got on with my children (13 and 11 at the time). More than once we were greeted by a young woman (or another) in tight short dress, standing next to a man. She would make eye contact, might look at the kids in a way I could not fathom. She and she and the men always got off at the fourth floor.


When we mentioned this to the group leader, a very devout and beautiful man, he said he liked having an enormous room in that hotel where he could store the mission's supplies (everything from toothbrushes to over the counter medications to toys), that he could keep the room even when he was traveling to other parts of the country.

On Thursday, I presented Charles Reznikoff's "Negroes" to my new class of documentary writing students. They talked about their emotions in the face of a poem that conveyed none. Shock, sadness, anger. "He's calling on us to do something," one student said. I might worry that what I've written asks too little of its reader, or of me.

The nearly completed syllabi in Documentary Writing & Small Press Publishing

On the graduate level, I'll be teaching a course in Small Press Publishing; much of what follows is contingent, but the flux is more sea-worthy than it was:

https://sites.google.com/site/smallpresspublishinguhm/syllabus-spring-2014

On the sophomore honors level, I'm teaching a course in Documentary Writing:

https://sites.google.com/site/documentarywritingspring2014/syllabus

Both syllabi will ramify, especially at the beginning of the course. In any case, I'm really looking forward to both these classes.

Talisman #42: The Women's Occupation

When I was in college in the late 1970s I carried around a blue heavy hardcover edition of the Norton Modern anthology; that book was my education in poetry (I was a history major then). When someone told me that John Ashbery loved the work of Laura Riding, I was able to track her down in its thicket of thin print-clogged pages. That was before she renounced not just poetry, but also anthologies, refused further permission to put her work in the Norton. Or so I recall. That anthology, like so many teaching anthologies, was organized chronologically. The sense of history that emerged from its pages was like an old film-strip, a sequence of images that lurched across a tiny temporal space, and suggested the coherence that in fact eluded it. But what seemed most important about that book was that it was full of conversations. I was at the institution best known at that time for a theory of literary influence, but I'm not talking about that father-son family romance model so much as about a larger social space, where poets' words called out to each other. It was a big, messy neighborhood, that Norton. While later reading offered more neatness, tighter narratives, meaner-spirited arguments over poetics (oh, Laura Riding!), that one was the big event that drew me in, as if it were the slide show to introduce me to poetic time shares.

I thought about Laura Riding's rejection of anthologies, especially her distaste for all-women anthologies, when Lisa Bourbeau wrote to ask me for work several months back for a "women's section" in a forthcoming issue of Talisman. One of the best literary experiences I've ever had was a Russian-American poetry conference in Hoboken in the mid-90s, organized by Ed Foster in the spirit of his Talisman House Press and journal. The two or three days were full of cigarette smoke, drink, loud voices, men bonding over hearing gunfire in the streets of American and Russian cities, and poets who (in one instance) bounded over the backs of our chairs, and (in another) tried to walk out of his own reading. It featured animated arguments between Russians; I remember asking Lynn Hejinian at one point to tell me what was going on. But it almost didn't matter, there was so much energy in the room, and because so much of the poetry was performative. There was Forrest Gander standing on a desk reciting a poem, asking Michael Palmer to help him when he faltered. Looking back, this seems a model for the journal, albeit a very noisy one. Talisman has always, with a tremendous lack of assumptions, presented experimental work that matters. The plain covers, whose insides were covered with dense type, were decoys for anyone wanting flash with their poetry. Those of us happy with the pan itself got another poetry education in its pages.

But Talisman House has never published many women. In the 1990s, there was a Selected Poems by Alica Notley, which kicks a pebble in my mind, but otherwise not many. (Talisman published a chapbook version of my first Memory Cards before the full-length book came out.) I go now to their website and find, under their "new" section, a list of 20 new books. Of the books by a single author, which number 15, two are by women, one by the Turkish poet, Gulten Akm, and the other by Donna de la Perrière. Otherwise, there are books by Leonard Schwartz (his If is a terrific book, by the way), Joe Donahue, Brian Henry, John High, and the late William Bronk, among others.

So it seemed a good thing that Talisman was going to publish women. I suggested doing it without marking it as a "women's section," to see if anyone noticed. But that did not happen. Instead, the new issue (read it here) comes in several sections: a section of miscellany running from Artaud to Marjorie Perloff's fine interview of Hank Lazer, with photographs of William Bronk in the bundle; a section on gnostic poetry; "The Occupation: The First of Three Major Selections of Works by and about Women Writers Around the World"; "Poetry"; and then, finally, "Commentary." The subjects of the first section are men; the writers of the second are all men; the "Poetry" section is male, and the commentator is Thomas Fink. Islanded in the middle of this male sea is the "Occupation," a fulsome gathering of women's work from Alice Notley's introductory essay on dreams to poetry by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge . . . Anne Tardos, and many others. Just after this occupation by women poets who write in English there is a section on translation that features women poets with their both-gender translators.

 

"The Occupation": In New York City, the occupation resonates with the after-echoes of the Occupy movement of 2011, with people reclaiming public spaces, living in them, setting up tents, small villages engaging in direct democracy, places from which to speak out. That makes sense, this occupation at the center of Talisman's male space. "Wall Street" is not simply an economic hub; it's also, at least according to its name, walled off. It will keep you out. Occupying it forces you in. But as someone who's lived in Hawai`i for any length of time knows, "occupation" is primarily what colonizers do, what armies do. (In Hawai`i, the Occupy movement changed their name to "de-Occupy.") They take up space that is not their own, and they do it by force of weaponry or culture or economy. Israel occupies Palestine, we're reminded daily. The USA occupies the world's movie theaters and radio waves. The English language occupies a vast territory, across continents and oceans. And so, Thomas Fink, in the "Commentary" section of the issue, writes this about Paolo Javier's work: 

“English Is an Occupation,” the title of a poem in 60 lv bo(e)mbs, embodies a metaphor performing a metonymic linkage between the imposition of the English language on Filipinos during the nearly half-century U.S. occupation ( resulting in the devaluation of Tagalog and other local languages) and the occupation itself. However, confirming Cura’s notion of “mongrel identity,” it also reflects the job of an English teacher or professor and of the “polyglot” poet writing in English: “persevere      counter ardor mystic parables/ today Paolo occupies you, today Paolo occupies you” (7). In this poem and in the book as a whole, density of allusions and the syntactically unpredictable juxtaposition of fragmentary utterances make the critic’s “occupation” of “translation” challenging, (Fink)

Here, the poet occupies more and less than a public space; he occupies the reader himself or herself--"Paolo occupies you." Paolo is not an English word, and many of the words Javier uses are Tagalog, so the English-only reader is carted off to the margins of this public/private square (El Centro Paolo). Fink writes about Javier's as "immigrant" poetry. He's the guy from the occupied place who leaves it, only to occupy the imperial power's language, space. He's the guy who gets translated and now occupies those translations. He's the guy who causes discomfort. After all, he's living in a tent, and he might not be washing himself enough with imperial soap!

At the end of Fink's long, patient, cogent review of Forrest Gander, Paolo Javier, and Stephen Paul Miller under the concept of "(un)translatability," he makes a kind of apology. While he has written about a white guy steeped in Mexican culture, a Filipino guy who lives in Queens, and a Jewish poet who loves Meher Baba, he has not written about any women, as he admits here: 


In the early stages of developing this essay, I believed that the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge would be especially suitable for it. My impression, it turned out, was based on a handful of fragmentary utterances in different poems, and each time I tried to read Berssenbrugge’s powerfully abstract yet imagistic, disjunctive yet meditative poetry in relation to (un)translatability, I found that the work’s particular flux disabled whatever generalizations I hoped to cull from it. (Fink)

In other words, her work was so untranslatable that it defeated his attempt to write about it. To critique a poem is to describe it, and if the poem cannot be described, put into context, or otherwise closely read, its "particular flux" defeats the writer. Fair enough. He notes that he has written about three male poets, notes the absence of women poets. But it's not that there are not women in the work of these three men, however: "My subjects are three men, the first of whom engages in ekphrastic conversation with the art of a woman and the second of whom deploys the persona of a woman." So he hopes for some work on "translatability" between men and women: "That fact reminds me that one possibility for future criticism in this vein is the area that psychologist Deborah Tannen has so compellingly investigated: cross-gender communication. How do men and women foreground their efforts to translate what they wish to communicate to the opposite gender? How do they think about translating the “language” of the opposite gender to themselves? And also, for transgendered poets, how are the complexities of translation enacted and absorbed?"

I want to think about the difference between "cross-gender" and "transgender." To cross genders means to move back and forth between them, for men to communicate with women and vice versa. To be transgender means a crossing over, a leaving behind, a movement from one to another place. Both posit difference as the most important feature of communication. (And who am I to disagree?) But given that most of the essays and poems in this issue where there is cross-gender communication involve men writing about women (Gander, yes, but also the gnostic critics writing about Dickinson and Notley) that's like a Chris Christie bridge. You can cross it only one way. 

Thus far, I've left the women poets out of this conversation, as I engage with the men who seem walled off from them. Does Fink's notion of Berssenbrugge's "flux" and untranslatability apply to the women's section? Is that why it's walled off, lest it flood the other more masculine boroughs? In 2013 do we still need special sections devoted to women's writing? What IS women's writing? I'm loathe to say it's got flux, while the men do not; after all, gnosticism seems to reside in brokenness, which is a non-state of flux. (What new gnosticism is is still vague to me, even after reading much of the section.) There's no sense given by Bourbeau or Ed Foster of what they mean by "women's writing," so I'm going to the first essay of the "Occupation" by Alice Notley for clues. And here I find what Fink might call a cross-gender moment, or is it trans-? The essay is about dreaming, how poems emerge from dreams, how communication occurs (about the past and the future) during dreaming. And it's also about how Alice Notley becomes Allen Ginsberg:

"In 1997, after I had been informed that Allen Ginsberg had died, I became afraid for him in death. I wanted -- because he was my friend -- to be sure that in death he was safe. I dreamed that night that my stepdaughter Kate, who is deceased and in dreams is often my messenger from the world of the dead, came for me, in a rich dark blue skirt and sweater, to take me to the ‘second world.’ I gathered that this second world was an afterlife with an active artistic component, for there was a professor there who was trying to achieve an intense enough red for the second world’s mosaics. Then, my name became Ellen Goodman (yes like the columnist), so I knew that I was Allen, the good man, and I waited in a small apartment to die."

The woman poet becomes a "good man," who occupies a small apartment in his dying. Notley's dream-life is all flux, all symbol, all transformation. Dreaming reshapes the world; it is the world. Is this women's work? I don't think this "occupation" answers that question, nor do I think it really even poses it. But what it does is to open a space in a journal that has welcomed some of the best experimental writers now alive--especially those with spiritual affinities toward gnosticism--for women writers, however you define them. To define is to wall in and wall out, as Robert Frost would say, but the act of definition can also mend differences by creating a space where they can exist gently. Frost's wall was of uneven stones, not the barbed wire of many an occupation. To "disobey" is what Notley has often said she does. Next time, I hope Talisman disobeys its own categorical imperative and admits the company of men, women, transgender people, people of color, to the gathering. It might feel like the mob around security in the Madrid Airport, but things sort themselves out, we "translate" ourselves elsewhere, occupying our languages, ourselves.

A final digression that is not one. I'm about to embark on a course in small press publishing on the graduate level; it scares me, as I know so little about the subject. I collect poems, I even sometimes edit them a bit, but mostly I glory in the designs of others who are more talented than I am visually, and work the tired mill of publicity. But I do know that I will emphasize the need for a small press to have a mission, for young editors to find gaps that need to be filled, and to fill them. I will also ask them to consider that there is a difference between collecting poems and curating them. This issue of Talisman has collected some of the best poems I've seen in a long time. But the issue's curation is what troubles me. To collect marvelous poems by women, which is what Bourbeau has done, is one thing. But to organize an issue in which those women "occupy" a central and yet highly marked place, is problematic. Why is the last section, called "Poetry," composed only of poems by men? Why is the gnostic section composed only of men (even if it's based on a panel at a conference--another problem)? Why are there so few poets of color within the category of "women," and how do white women fit with international women poets with American "immigrant" poets like Eileen Tabios? This is not to say they do not, but to occupy those questions is where Talisman might move next--or we. Most of all, there's a difference between counting how many men and how many women are published (an activity that's telling, to put it mildly, as Spahr and Young have shown in "Numbers Trouble") and organizing a public/private square where they are not blocked off from one another in groups of apparent same. 

My own contribution to the new issue is here. It's a long prose poem in sections about baseball for my son on his 14th birthday. In other words, it's a long poem by a woman for a young man and about young men.


An after-thought: a diagram could at least be made of some of the crossings in this issue. Gnostic men joined by gnostic women (Notley, F. Howe, DuPlessis); gnostic women joined by members of the Talisman "poetry section," and so forth. A flow chart to suggest flux, rather than a group of isolated groups, in other words.

"Thinking like an Asian": an interview on Jee Yoon Lee's blog

The cognitive hiccup involved in seeing that title and my face (photo by Anne Kennedy) together is part of what Tinfish is about, so I'm very pleased to be here. Joon-Young's sister, J. Vera Lee, is author of 2013's second book, Diary of Use.

So have a look at the interview, and also at Jee Yoon's blog more generally.