Trauma, tenderness and the archive: jacket2 commentary

My third commentary for jacket2 is now up.  Please find it here.

It is about emotion and the archive, about a Hawaiian writer's talk this past week, about the poetry of a Khmer Rouge survivor published by Tinfish Press in 2007, and about Adam Aitken's Cambodia poems.

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #2: Adam Aitken's TONTO'S REVENGE

Available May 1. The second in a series of 12.

Tonto's Revenge, composed of poems written by Adam Aitken during his term as Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa, is something of a Thai-Australian version of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger. The poet, masquerading sometimes as Tonto, sometimes as Charlie Chan, meets a Sheriff; they face off over everything from tourism to nostalgia to departmental hiring. Along the way, the poet meets the Rabbit Lady of Honolulu, laments the death of Danno (James MacArthur of the original Hawai`i 5-0), and gathers in many of Honolulu's voices off buses and from the city parks burgeoning with homeless persons. "You want to shout Fuck Tourism," Aitken writes, "but that would be nostalgic.”

Adam Aitken is a Thai-Australian living in Sydney, where he teaches Creative Writing. He was born in London and as a young child he was schooled in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He has lived, worked and travelled widely through Asia and Europe, and was recently Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tinfish, Drunken Boat and Jacket. This is his fifth collection of poems.

from “The Day Danno Died (In memory of James MacArthur)"

The day Danno died

some old senators

and heroes of Pearl Harbour

last surviving ones

cried. They knew Danno

had done a lot for these islands.

The day Danno died

someone’s father entered

Harry’s Music Store

and bought his son

a Ukelele.

At Smiley’s Nails

someone mentioned in passing

that Danno had died.

Somehow, at Jimmy’s

Television Sales & Services

the owner thought

TV will never be the same,

now that Danno’s died.

Send $3 to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744 or order with credit card via tinfishpress.com (2checkout). Better yet, subscribe to the full series of 12 chapbooks we're putting out in 12 months, for $36! The first chapbook, Say Throne, by No`u Revilla, is still available for $3 or as part of a subscription. Each Retro Chapbook is designed by Eric Butler.

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

__________

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.

_The Value of Hawai`i_(Part Two), & other synchronicities

Just a few jottings, as we are preparing to host Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand & their daughter, Jessi, for a few days . . . yesterday, my English 100A class finished discussing Jill Yamasawa's documentary book of poems about McKinley High School, Aftermath. The book is notable for the way it links McKinley's military tradition to the school's current militarization (recruiters just off campus, needing to fill the maw of the Iraq/Afghanistan war machine), as well as the way it shows us the confusing and complicated lives of its students. It contains a photograph of Daniel K. Inouye, famous graduate of McKinley, and such a war hero that the Washington Post recently referred to him as more important the Hawai`i's history than Kamehameha, whose armies united the islands. I notice the article has changed title from "King of Hawai`i" to "Hawai`i's Reigning Son."

I went nearly straight from class to the second installment of the English department-sponsored teach-in's about The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, co-edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio. I blogged about the introductory segment here. This panel, composed of Kathy Ferguson, Davianna McGregor, and Ramsay Taum, focused on militarism, tourism, and sustainability in rural communities on the neighbor islands. And so Daniel K. Inouye re-entered the conversation. Oddly, having just told my class that Sen. Daniel Inouye, not Sen. Daniel Akaka, gets the bumpersticker "Dan," I heard Ferguson say the same thing. He's that important here.

Kathy Ferguson (who co-authored an essay with Phyllis Turnbull) talked about what will happen when he is no longer Senator Inouye, when his considerable power to bring us military pork, is gone. The military will leave Hawai`i eventually, was her point, and we need to prepare for that time. Evidence of the military's increasing disinterest in Hawai`i is the move of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, where Ferguson claims there is less organized resistance to the military presence. (Ask Craig Santos Perez about that.) Ferguson referred often to a book she had written on the military, asserting, with some irony, that it is "sacred ground." As Taum later pointed out, that was a pun. The military operates on Hawaiian sacred ground, even as it makes itself inaccessible to researchers like Ferguson, or to journalists. While tourism has its own UHM department and attracts the attention of many scholars and writers, the military controls its own information, as well as a great deal of land on these islands.

Davianna Pomaka`i McGregor talked about communities built upon subsistence farming, fishing and hunting: places on Moloka`i, rural Maui, and Lana`i that are overlooked by the state's powerful politicians on O`ahu. Among the projects she sees endangering the cultural kipuka she talked about is a wind turbine farm on Lana`i, which would be composed of 200 towers, each on the equivalent of a 40-storey building. These would block access to sea and mountain, among their other aesthetic problems. The power would, of course, all be sent to feed O`ahu's hungry maw.

Then it was Ramsay Remigius Mahealani Taum's turn. If everyone in Hawai`i carries their paradoxes on their sleeves, then his are long and especially fascinating. He graduated from Kamehameha, where he was a member of ROTC. He was admitted to West Point and the Air Force academy, opting for the latter. (Kamehameha was himself a military man, Taum noted.) He is also involved in the tourist industry. From there things get more interesting. What he does is to work with big companies coming in to do projects--companies like Disney. He confronts them with the need to talk to local communities (not just native Hawaiians, but Hawaiians who live in the area where the project is being developed). Even as he is well aware that they will eventually leave, he tells them they have a responsibility to the place once their debt is cleared or their profit is made. So he spoke as someone quite militant about the need to support Hawaiian culture, but he spoke in acronyms and puns (kaona!) that made him sound like a military man delivering a power point. The combination was, at first confusing, and then started to make sense in the way so many such joining of opposites begin to come into focus.

Later in the day, in the infamous Kuykendall 410 conference room, Adam Aitken read from his poetry. I tried to give a sense of Australian poetry--where it is, how it got there--but fear I mostly just talked a lot about Frank O'Hara, about whom Australians seem obsessively interested. Adam's own poems are conversational, place-oriented, like O'Hara's, often witty, but engage a very different field--his inheritance as the son of a white Australian father and a Thai mother, his travels in Malaysia and Cambodia, his clear fascination with languages and film. Once his guard was down a bit, Adam's wit came through. "I wrote a poem for the King of Thailand," he announced at one point, as if it were the usual thing. And then there were the difficulties of translating one poem into Malay, where there is only one word for insect. How to translate a line that distinguishes between an insect and a "bug"? "This was not an insect; it was an insect."


Ah, language. Buy Adam's latest book here.

Better yet, seek him out. (He's on facebook.) The out of Australia book prices are very high, but I know he has some with him.

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

Confrontations / Coalitions: The Value of Hawai`i Part One

Kuykendall 410, the room where English department faculty go to hear and deliver colloquia, like other rooms in the building, is confining. As Mari Matsuda said yesterday, you can't see the mountains (behind the back wall) and you can't feel the trade winds. It signifies public education as a proto-industrial activity, divorced from place or local purpose. This room, large and cold and capable of "holding" dozens of people, was the stage for two events in my professional life this week, events that signify to me where we are (actually, conceptually, metaphysically!) as writers and residents of this state.

On Tuesday evening, Adam Aitken's and my Foundations of Creative Writing course met in 410 to discuss readings that can be found in this previous blog post and on-line. The readings include a take-down of W.S. Merwin for rewriting Pi`ilani's narrative of the life of her husband, Ko`olau (also made internationally famous by Jack London, but that's another story, indeed); a back and forth between Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui and Dennis Kawaharada about whether or not his work (the publication of Hawaiian mo`olelo in English in books and on-line) amounts to an appropriation of Hawaiian culture; and an essay by Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright that argues (in part) against the Asian Settler Colonialism paradigm set forth in a book by that name co-edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura. The readings were intended to provoke, but I envisioned the conversation as one between friends (the students are fond of one another), where we poked at sore spots, but then worked our way toward a place where we as creative writers can all be active, productive.

Needless to say, perhaps, the class did not work to plan, although it did prove productive. A palpable tension filled the air-conditioned room. I began by suggesting that there's something Platonic about considerations of literature in Hawai`i, that more emphasis is put on "truth" than on imagination. Many of our literary controversies have entailed arguments over the truths of representations (of Filipinos, Hawaiians) or language (did you get your Pidgin right, your Hawaiian?).

We had opinions across the spectrum, from "anything goes" to "what can I write about here, when everything seems sealed off culturally?" We talked about the act of framing; if you say you don't know exactly what you're talking about, one student surmised, you can forge ahead. If you let people know you are writing what you hear, then you can get languages wrong, another posited. On the other side, there was suspicion of the audience, the readers who may know nothing about Hawai`i. One woman said she had taught someone in NYC a phrase in Hawaiian, which she worries she butchered, and is scared that the woman might consider her to have been "authentic" in some way. Another student talked about being but not appearing Hawaiian, growing up immersed in pop culture, and experiencing the sting of being told she wasn't "Hawaiian enough." And then a white male student erupted into an angry confusing diatribe about being called an "f-ing haole" and how the local community does not spend all its time thinking about these academic issues. He walked out.

On a personal level, I was left feeling that the students did not trust me or each other, that the conversation had been warped by fears of saying something that would be judged ill by someone else in class, or reported on to others outside of class. There was a sense that most of what was most valuable to say didn't touch the air-conditioned air. But Adam spoke eloquently about migration and his own experience as a mixed race person in Australia who has circulated around the globe for love and work. And I launched into my notion of "positive critique." If something is missing in the literary community here, fill it in. Write it. Publish it. Make alliances with other people who live here over the big issues, like the economy, like tourism, like militarism.

The class ended. I got some impassioned emails and much silence. I hear through the grapevine that some students didn't want to have the conversation at all; others worry that they didn't explain themselves well enough. And so the conversation will go on, mostly internally in ways that can be destructive, but one hopes can branch out, move, form, not get stuck. Stuck is a place that Hawai`i, or at least academic Hawai`i, lives in too much of the time.

Fast forward to Thursday at noon. The first of several panel discussions of The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio, and published by the University of Hawai`i Press. A large audience showed up from all over campus and the local community. We sat facing the windows that run only at the top of the room, so all you see are some clouds, if you're lucky. We sat facing Jon Osorio, Carlos Andrade (and their guitars), Tom Coffman, and Craig Howes. It was one of the few days I didn't have my camera with me, so it will need to be an imagined past for my readers. The event was advertised as an overview; the more focused discussions--of the military, tourism, education--will follow in coming weeks.

In somewhat backwards chronology, Osorio led us through the 1970s in Hawai`i, when the Hawaiian sovereignty movement became strong. No one could have imagined how strong it would become, he said, nor how many small movements it would inspire: the Protect Kaho`olawe Ohana, the Waiahole/Waikane protests, which led to the state mandating against development in that area (very near where I live), and so on. Many of these movements were peopled by the poor, the uneducated, but they spoke truth to power. Coffman then filled in the backstory of the 1960s, just after statehood, when Hawai`i took off economically, when multi-ethnic Hawai`i was a model for the rest of the country. Howes spoke of the near-universal health care coverage Hawai`i had as recently as the mid-80s and early-90s. Andrade sang a mele he wrote about Hā`ena on Kaua`i, where real estate and property tax prices are driving Hawaiians off their land. Julia Roberts, it seems, is a heavy in this discussion, as she paid $15 for a piece of property.

What impressed me most was the way that Osorio, in particular, spoke of Hawai`i as a place where we live, a place we need to protect. While he aims to work toward an independent Hawai`i (a goal toward which I have yet to figure out my own feelings and thoughts), he also means to do so un-exclusively, by figuring a community of like-minded (rather than racially-marked) citizens. As he writes in his essay from the book, restoring the Hawaiian Kingdom has garnered support over the past decade "because it does not lead to the destruction of relationships among friends and families because of race" (18).

Without in any way thinking this was a panacea for what ails us, I left the room feeling lighter, more optimistic than I have in years about how we all live and think about our lives here. I felt at home, and that's a place I want to be.

As a digression that is not one: Carlos Andrade talked about the need for self-sufficiency in growing food and trying to avoid consuming resources. I'm proud to say that my husband, Bryant Webster Schultz, has taken upon himself the project of easing us, to whatever small extent we can, off the grid.


He abandoned the dryer months ago, and hangs our clothes outside. He bought solar panels, so that our living room lights in the evening run off solar. He got us a rain barrel, so we can water our plants without using the tap. And he's now built a garden box, with plans for more on the bottom lanai, along with a second rain barrel. To a large extent this is all symbolic. We still drive too much--to Sangha's school, to my workplace, to Radhika's soccer games in Waipahu--but we are at least experimenting with the notion that we do not need to spend the world's resources at so quick a rate.




In future, I'd like to blog about the effects of this fresh paradigm of Hawai`i on the literature of Hawai`i. What does this mean for our notions of form? Practice? Publishing? Content (something we who teach CW think too little about with our students, I fear). Until then . . .

[Editor's note, 10/2/10: At this morning's soccer game, I talked to Chris Cummins (about whom a bit more at the end of this post), who remarked on the irony that the self-sufficiency I describe at the end of the post depends on privilege--space in which to grow things, put up solar panels, and the money to do it. The guy in a tent in the park can't grow his own food, Chris pointed out. Nor can he, in his small apartment, which he compared to the windowless hole of Kuykendall 410, remembered vividly from his student days. He also talked again about the "many directions" Hawaiians can go with the issues raised earlier in this post, legally, culturally, politically. Complication is the coin of the realm.]

An interview with Adam Aitken

Our Distinguished Visiting Writer for Fall 2010 will be Adam Aitken, who lives in Sydney. You can find out more about Adam here. His blog is here. And his new book, Eighth Habitation (Giramondo, 2009), which includes an amazing sequence of poems based on Adam's time in Cambodia, can be purchased here. I recently sent him a flurry of questions and give you his responses here.


--What originally drew you to poetry and why have you stayed?

When I was eight or nine I had to write a poem about a class outing. The teacher chose my poem as the 'best', and it was the first and last time I ever came first in anything! When I was fifteen I started writing little poems in math class, as I had fallen way behind and couldn't keep up. I also had a crush on a girl and since I had no confidence at direct communication, and since I was in a segregate all boys college, I wrote a poem as a substitute for a "billet doux" or love letter. Around the same time my mother had been invited to look after a flat that belonged to my Godfather, and he was a famous Australian poet who was planning to move to Tuscany and write novels. While he was away, I read a lot of his collection of poetry books, and especially Australian titles. This gave me a real context for writing back to. I was also fascinated by his collection of Penguin European classics, and in particular a volume of German Contemporary poetry, a particularly dark and brooding collection of 20th century angst, edited by Michael Hamburger. It suited my adolescent imagination. I came to poetry by reading poetry, and when I got to University I was already writing regularly. This was back in the late 1970s and my Uni didn't have creative writing classes. Instead I attended a lecturer's informal lunchtime workshops. I was very happy meeting all these older people and a few of them mentored me. I suppose I have stuck to poetry because I have been able to see my work in print regularly, and feeling that I was always part of community of poets in Sydney.


--What are your central concerns as a poet? Have these changed over time?

All the philosophical questions - the big ones! In the mid 90s I studied linguistics and I have been interested in language, discourse and power. Poetry as social critique is important to me. I have always been interested in poetry as a domain of rhetoric, as a domain of emotion, affect, persuasion, but an interest in language as a social construction of meaning has always been balanced in my case by an interest in lyric, in questions about life and death, love, hate, hope, despair etc. All that German Expressionist poetry I read as a teenager still haunts me and I still believe poetry is an alternative to "normal" speech. I have become more interested in displacement in poetry, in translation, and in the liminal space that poems open up between language and the signified. I was always thinking about the function of poetry in society, but have moved away from thinking that poetry should express all that's 'good and noble' in a culture - those post-Victorian, Leavisite notions of literature's pedagogical role. I have moved away from what I learned about the English Literature canon. I have found that my education in literature was Oxbridge centred, and while I got a huge amount out of studying Renaissance, classical, and Romantic literatures, I am more interested now in what is produced elsewhere. I guess I am a postcolonial in many ways in the sense that my own education was so mainstream, but being Australian I was exposed to American poetry and now poetries in other Englishes. My own displaced ethnicity and connection with Thailand and my mother's first culture has also taken me into cross-border poetics, and into Southeast Asian contexts. I am VERY interested in how modernity and tradition interact, in Asia but also in the west.


--What forms do you employ, and how do they help you get where you mean to go (or don't!)?

I've written verse and used William Carlos Williams' staggered lines. I have written a few sonnets, a sestina or two, and a lot of free verse. I really favour epistles, and the casual note poem ( Dear Susan this is just to say / I put the crab / in the freezer / and it's gone to sleep / for good / Forgive me /... I also recently wrote a series of aubades for my book Eighth Habitation. I also have a poem based on my father's letters, which are like diary entries. I have never been able to stick to any form, or write a chain of sonnets, or series of elegies. I experimented with mock odes, and elegies.


--Travel seems crucial to your work. I remember you wrote a poem about Gilligan's Island after coming to Hawai`i, which was published in Tinfish's journal. Can you say something about travel poetry writing?

My father was a travelling advertising gun for hire, so between ages 4 to 11 I was already a transnational subject. My mother, oddly enough is happily settled in tropical Northern Australia, and doesn't travel back to Thailand often; but travel for me is a means of reconnecting and maintaining a diasporic connection. I also travelled for work, as an English teacher. I met my English wife in Indonesia, and she is a keen traveller, and she's encouraged me to keep moving. Members of her own family live in France, Britain, and New Jersey, so if we want to see them, we have to travel (they have family and find it hard to get to Australia). Gilligan's Island was my favourite TV show when I was a kid. I think I was fascinated at these frustrated white people displaced and stranded on a "tropical" island. Their making do struck a chord with me. I think that Australians have always wanted to travel as we get quite isolated, physically speaking. I have also travelled internally, to Central Australia, which is its own world. My father sent a few years working for National Parks and Wildlife in Alice Springs, a central Australian town, and I wrote a lot about my time staying there with him in the mid 80s. Recently my wife and I spent a year in Cambodia, where she worked as a teacher.

Travel poems can be about the superficial pleasures of tourism, or they can be about the way living elsewhere effect our own deep transformation and learning. For me travel and staying put is a dialectic I explore, as the need to put down roots is more powerful I think than the need to travel. It's a dialectic with gender issues, for my mother for example, is a homebody and I am too in many ways. Travel can be a lonely experience, especially if you don't know the language, and in most cases travel does not integrate you with the place and culture you are moving in. You are merely a "sojourner". I am interested in how migrants go through the process of putting down roots, but also in how they maintain, if they can, a freedom to travel back to origins. Also, at a very local level, travelling can involve a move into an unfamiliar part of the city you live in. Travel need not be imagined as international, and more often the other place is as familiar as home. For example, shopping malls in Singapore are not much different from Sydney ones in terms of the food and commodities you can buy and the language people use.


--The Cambodia poems, from Eighth Habitation, are particularly intense, as they engage the aftermath of one of the 20th centuries genocides. How did you come to write these poems? What are some of the poetic difficulties involved in writing about "someone else's" (truly awful way to put it) genocide? Can you compare your work, say, to Tinfish Press's Corpse Watching, by Sarith Peou?

As i said above, my wife got a job teaching disadvantaged women in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and I went along. I was always interested in learning more about Cambodia, as it is the neighbouring country to Thailand. I also had a personal investment as my mother once rented out a room to a Cambodian student in Sydney in 1973. I returned to Cambodia to be with his family just before the Khmer Rouge took power. We believe he he probably perished, along with his fellow students. In Sem Reap I studied some of the key histories written about modern Cambodian history, also studied French 19th Century Indo-chinese travel literature (translated), and studied Khmer. Living in Siem Reap we did meet Cambodians, and my wife worked in an NGO with an ex-Khmer Rouge cadre (her co-teacher) and her "boss", a Chinese-Khmer urbanite who was the sole surviving member of his family. I found it incredible that these two could ever work together at all, and in reality, they really couldn't bear each other. Everyone in Cambodia has been effected by the genocide, and everyone has some kind of story, even those born after 1990 who are not orphans have parents who remember something of the 70s.

Trying to write about other people's genocide requires a lot of sympathy, but that should come from quite personal encounters with witnesses, and at the same time one should be aware that memory is unreliable and that informants may have a vested interest in lying about their past, or in exaggerating it. Caution and scepticism need not detract from sympathy. For instance, I met an ex-boy soldier who's MO was to befriend tourists, ask for money for a "village school", then if the conversation called for it, he would tell about his experiences. In a sense genocide has become a business activity for him. Another challenge is to not fall back on the most frequently cited images, stories and symbols of genocide. The challenge is to ask yourself: what can I show or say that's new? I remember reading the visitors book at S-21, the Khmer Rouge killing camp. A European visitor had compared S21 to the Nazi concentration camps. I realised how misleading this was, and how "genocide literature" can distort particularities and differences. For a start Pol Pot's program was not about purifying the Khmer race as such, but was designed to crush political dissent among his own party members. Another difference was the methods of killing - the Nazis used gas, the Khmer Rouge resorted to drowning and bludgeoning - to save bullets. All of these specifics I mention in order to reveal something new about the subject. Emotionally, there's sympathy, but it's important to allow your subject to transcend the status of victim - how to let their voices through without editorialising them is difficult. Ultimately, the challenge is the same one that faced poets after WW2 - after the horror, what is there to write about and why bother?

With Sarith's work, I can say that he's closer to the experience in some ways than me. I feel I function as an interpreter, a conduit. I feel my work approaches the subject with a detachment that is intellectual and filtered through literature and history. I want my readers to think about their difference and detachment and the consequences of being outside of the horror. My poems at now point try to create that illusion of presence, of being on the spot. I am far removed from the scene of the crime, and the dead bodies have rotted away long ago. One similarity is the sense that we know how trauma is experienced as a visceral memory. Another similarity is that I know from personal experience (of being mugged in Malaysia) what it feels like to be a target of a murderer and to be close to death or mutilation. Perhaps I have displaced my own personal trauma onto the Cambodians in my poems, and that makes them intense and felt.

--You studied film, linguistics, and creative writing. How do these various interests inform your teaching?

I learned just as much about narrative from film as from reading novels. Film offered me different sense of the image and of mis-en-scene which I have tried to use in poetry. The duration of events in film is close to what you get in poetry, the zooming in, the jump-cut, the close-up. It's all there in poetry. Linguistics focussed my attention on the incredible power of language, the choices available in forming the syntactic unit, and the choices available in semantics. Grammar is for me a dynamic tool, and I do think about linguistic descriptions when I am trying to describe stylistic features of a certain piece of writing. Linguistics a very much about systems, but as writers know, language can't be imprisoned by system. It's a very interesting relationship between linguistics as a discipline and science, and poetry as the wild child. Creative writing is I think a field that tries to make sense of creative processes, and the various approaches have merits and drawbacks. I very much like to read narratology, semiotics etc, but I don't think I helps every creative writing student to write better. I am fond of learning new terminology (or techne) to describe writing, for example a flashback can be termed "analepsis", and "prolepsis" is foreshadowing. This only becomes meaningful in the workshop situation, when you want to suggest, for example, that a bit of prolepsis might make the beginning chapter more interesting. It really depends on the student's own level of knowledge of such things. I think of sport here: if you didn't know what "bunt it to center field" meant, you probably could still play baseball but you might not understand your coach or fellow players.

Linguistics certainly offers descriptions of formal and stylistic patterns, and I have consciously taken on L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E inspired ideas to create poems. For example, I wrote a poem based on a Malay-English phrase book of the 1930s, and each section of the poem follows chapters in the phrasebook. So, for example, a chapter on "verbs" offers phrases for the most common Malay verbs, like menjadi (to become). I write a poem using variations on sentences where every line includes a variation on "to be". Another section riffs on Malay adverbs.

On a more familiar level, the literary "genres" are all material to be played with, subverted, re-mixed, defamiliarised, and I suppose this describes much of the modern poetry I enjoy.



[Adam Aitken, Tinfish Editor, and Hazel Smith, Cronulla, November 2009]

I, for one, look forward to finding out what "bunting it to center field" means when Adam gets here in August!

Australia in November: "the anti-travel travel poem"

As I left Sydney, it had reached over 40 degrees Celsius, or what my internet converter tells me is over 105 degrees Fahrenheit. I was in Australia to give talks on Tinfish Press at the University of Western Sydney and Monash University, as well as readings from Dementia Blog at UWS and Collected Works (Poetry) Bookshop in Melbourne. I arrived with a suitcase full of Tinfish publications, and left with a suitcase full of Giramondo books. Along the way I saw some dear friends, including Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, Anne Brewster, Pam Brown, and Ann Vickery, Mike Pianta and their three children. I also met some great people, from academics to poets to cab drivers; heard some young poets and older; went to a dance recital and a poetry launch; got tours of cities and beaches; learned a lot about jazz and computer music; experienced the dark side of Aussie culture on a Saturday evening train; and sweated through a wonderful farewell. I'm still in the throes of jetlag, so the post may be even more anti-narrative than usual! I don't intend to write a straight travel piece, but capture a few moments of the trip, as well as make a few recommendations for things Australian to read.

--My neighbor on the plane to Sydney was Australian, but lives in Mililani; she travels often to Australia. Confessed that her husband was piloting the plane. She dictated a list of Australian items to buy, things she loved to get at Woolies in Sydney, just off the plane. I wrote them dutifully in my copy of Daniel Tiffany's new Infidel Poetics, a book about riddles, poetic obscurity, the vernacular, and nightlife. So, underneath the last two words of Tiffany's index (two columns), "working-class philosophes" and Zukofsky, Louis, I have written:

Billy Tea & Nerada
Coles Supermarket bread mix in a box
Wett-X
licorice from Darrell Lea Shop
TimTams
lolly aisle
violet crumble bar
veet (hair wax)
Elastoplast

I didn't buy any of these items during my week in Australia, but the words remind me how far from American English is Australian. Oh, and above the last page of Tiffany's index I quoted the man sitting behind me, who asked his seat mate, "Does Australia have its own money?" before telling her a long story about traveling to Calcutta.

--Hazel Smith has a booming laugh. She has performed all her life, as a violinist, a poet, and a digital media artist. She grew up in England, graduated from Cambridge, and moved to Australia in 1989 with her husband, Roger Dean, whom she met when she was 14 and he 15, in the UK National Youth Orchestra. She is author of the amazing book of creative writing pedagogy, The Writing Experiment, and of The Erotics of Geography, book and cd-r, from Tinfish Press.

--Roger Dean is a polymath (though I think his birth year is not quite right on the link). He is a biochemist who ran a Heart Institute, a double bassist, a pianist, a composer of jazz and computer music, a researcher in music and cognition, a former Vice Chancellor and President of Canberra University. I expressed regret that I was not more musical and he told me, "none of us does everything." But I wondered.


[Hazel Smith & Roger Dean]


--My taxi driver from UWS to the Sydney airport was from Afghanistan. When I said I live in Hawai`i, he talked about Obama. Of the high expectations for this president, he said, "even the prophets could do nothing quickly." He had a degree in Public Administration from Creighton University in Nebraska, had returned to Afghanistan, realized things were crumbling, and had moved to Australia with his children. "Wars are created," he said, and told me they were made for money. "Do they know who he is?" he said of H. Clinton and Obama, who think Karzai can get rid of corruption. He liked Reagan, though Bush 1 a bully; his judgments went down from there. He took me to the wrong terminal, but who was to know that the plane to Melbourne left from the International Terminal?


[Michael Farrell]

--Michael Farrell is a Melbourne poet; he had kindly invited me there. Like many Aussie poets I know, he was deeply influenced by the New York School, Frank O'Hara in particular, though Farrell also experiments with collage, appropriated language, other slightly more avant-garde techniques. His new book is A Raider's Guide. He is getting a belated Ph.D. "for the money" (what a laugh I had about that one)--three years of a grant from the government. He has gathered about him a group of very talented younger poets. Those who read with me were Aden Rolfe, Bella Li, Claire Gaskin, Duncan Hose, Jal Nicholl, Joshua Comyn, and Sam Langer. Sam laughed all the way through Dementia Blog, which I enjoyed, as the book is (oddly) funny.

--Ann Vickery is an amazing literary critic, author of Leaving Lines of Gender, a book about women and Language writing in the US, and a newer book about Australian women poets. She's married to Mike Pianta, a scientist who loves Legos, checks his Legos blogs and website daily. Their three kids appeared since last I saw Ann and Mike together, but their cat, Puck, remains from my 1996 visit.

--I met Tom Doig on the plane from Melbourne to Sydney. He's 30, has an MA in Creative Writing from Melbourne, specialized in Hitler Humor and wrote a play on Hitler and David Hasselhoff, called Hitlerhoff. Originally from New Zealand, he's passionate about aboriginal issues, largely ignored in Australia. He's a friend of Aden Rolfe, whom I read with at Collected Works.

--Ehsan Azari is an Afghani academic, author of Lacan and the Destiny of Literature from Continuum. He came to my reading and remarked that my "muse is outside yourself, not inside, like Ashbery's." He'd read The Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, which fairly blew me away. Like the next poet, he is an exile who spends a lot of time in the Writing and Society Group at UWS.

--Muslim Al-Taan is an Iraqi poet, in and out of the hospital, who writes poems about southern Iraq and includes melancholy songs from that region, which he sings in their original language. He wants to write about Maya Angelou. He comments at the Poetry Foundation blog here.

--Ivor Indyk is an Australian editor and publisher. His press, Giramondo, publishes poetry and prose from Australia. I returned home with a box of books he's published, including one I especially like, by Adam Aitken. More on that in a minute.

--Kate Fagan is a musician, poet, literary critic (whose dissertation was about Lyn Hejinian's work). She teaches me the phrase "bitch pivot." She asks the inevitable, uncomfortable question about the white editor or teacher who presents the work of a non-white author as "experimental." Says she's thought long and hard about it, as she thinks of Lionel Fogarty's work as experimental. He does not. I suggest that if you present the work as experimental through one prism, but not others, there may be an opening.



[Judith Beveridge, Joanne Burns, SMS, Ivor Indyk]

--Judith Beveridge is a mainstream Australian poet, whose launch I went to at Gleebooks. I was surprised to find out that poetry launches feature a long introduction and a very short reading by the author. The man who introduced Beveridge said things like, "she shows us who we are by writing about what she is not" (meaning that this book is about fisherman, and she's not one), that her book is a "Mardi Gras of simile" and that her poems are primarily about poetry. Beveridge added that she likes "amenity with irksomeness" and "comedy with torment." I liked the long list of fish she read, in one of her poems; the others sounded very much in a lyrical, conservative tradition.


[Anne Brewster at The Gap, near Bondi Beach, Sydney]

--Anne Brewster travels the world talking about aboriginal writing in Australia; she is a prominent ficto-critic, a term Australian literary people have for a mix of autobiography and criticism. She showed me bats over the belfry in Sydney. (One of the things I love best about Australia is the sound of the place--birds sing and screech in tones never imagined here). The bats are often electrocuted by the wires, she says, but no one much likes them, so no measures are taken to protect them. Large black bats swooping over the streets. She fed a cockatoo while I sat on her porch; it was curious, hungry, but somewhat shy. Other cockatoos play games with her partner, Peter; when he held food behind his back, one cockatoo gently grabbed his big toe.

--Pam Brown wants to be taller than I am. She is a wonderful poet, but she is short.



[Pam Brown & SMS]





--Adam Aitken is a Thai-Australian poet who still carries an English passport. He is one of the finest contemporary poets in Australia, though his publisher, Ivor, assures me he gets very little attention. Adam's newest volume is Eighth Habitation, from Giramondo. It contains an amazing sequence of poems about Cambodia, where Adam spent at least a year. Like Pam Brown, Adam writes in a lyrical and yet vernacular tradition that contains just enough bitter truth to keep it from dancing with daffodils. "Who knows if suffering's inquiry lead you anywhere / but back to suffering?" he asks in "Forest Wat, Cambodia." His visit to Tuol Sleng netted him his poem, "S21," which concludes with an uneasy comparison of the poet to the documentarian of genocide:

I too have to write, wondering where I am
on the chain-link of paranoia
connecting a tyrant to a farmer's son
who was handy with a shovel;
someone like the accountant across the corridor
doing the company's credit/debit sheet--
the guy with all the stories, who
knew how to file, the one who said
he'd done his job protecting his nation
with a few blunt instruments
a fountain pen, and a beautiful signature. (106)

I hope to write more in the future about this poet of "The Anti-travel Travel Poem," but for now leave you to find his work.

--Sydney to Cronulla train, Saturday evening, 8 p.m. A man gets on, assisted by someone who then steps back on the platform. He sits two seats ahead of me, across the aisle, picks up his cell phone. "I just busted the screw and the wires that hold my ribs together, dear, and wonder if I'm in danger of the wire cutting my kidneys or something. I thought the doctor said no physical activity to mean no contact with other people, so I did this doing chin-ups. Yes, someone's waiting on the other side, and I told them my wife's a doctor. Love you." Click. A drunken guy gets on the train with his "girl," confers in a passionate whisper with the man who says his "chest fell out." Money is exchanged. Something about a gang attacking him over his girl. There's violence in the air, if only spoken. (The next group to get on, four young men, walk by with "her elbow was shattered" as their opening line.) The man with the broken chest hails his new friend, "you're a good man, mate!" and hobbles off the train. He is very thin. Veins wobble on his temple. He is last seen talking to a security man on the platform at Hurstville.

I'm home now and cooler (it's the rainy season here), happy to see family and cat, but with hopes for keeping ties to Australia and to Giramondo Press. I hope to have more on that in later posts. In the meantime, thank yous to everyone above, and to John Hawke and Simon West at Monash, and to the Writing and Society Group at UWS, in particular.