RIP-tides: on the poetry of Steven Curry and Nell Altizer

                                                Listen:



When you hear the midnight shutter
Rattle against an autumn wind,
Make haste to rise and throw it wide,
And, lovely, let the darkness in.

--Steven Curry, "The Man Who Heard the World,"
from Waxing the Lunar Mountain Apple, 1997




                                            Each foot I put unearths



a thin place and green fear I will recall
earth long after it ends, keep remembering
water on rankled stone, whippoorwills, owls,
the lumber and listing color of howled
flesh, cow eyes, dung, how the peregrine's wing
sickles the stinkhorn mushrooms where we dwell.

--Nell Altizer, from Thin Place sonnet sequence, 1999



Three former colleagues have died since this Spring semester ended. Bob McHenry had just retired; Steve Curry and Nell Altizer, had retired some years ago. Steve and Nell were both poets and teachers of poetry, so their deaths have sent me back to their books to hear their voices again. They join Norman Hindley in the chronicle of recent poet deaths on O`ahu. Both had strongly spiritual sides. Steve was a Jungian whose dream life features prominently in his poems, along with quotations from Rumi. Nell--who wrote of an Irish tern, "The great Cloud of Unknowing on the prowl"--was involved with the mystery and mysticism that the lyric poem offers. Little in her life seemed closed except these beautiful poems, collected in The Man Who Died en Route, published in 1989 by the University of Massachusetts Press (selected by Amy Clampitt) and in Thin Place, a chapbook of 15 sonnets published by Tinfish Press in 1999. Steve left behind two books published by Anoai Press in Honolulu, namely Waxing the Lunar Mountain Apple (1997) and Dancing the Waves and Other Poems (1998).

Steve was in the Marriott Hotel room in Washington, DC with Rob Wilson when I interviewed for a job at the University of Hawai`i-Mānoa in 1989. He was the one who picked me up at the airport when I arrived on August 1, 1990 to assume my position as assistant professor. I later came to think of that long ride to faculty housing as a tour of Hawai`i's "dark side." Steve himself had a dark side, sometimes awkwardly combined with his wit, and so--when I mentioned that my parents had bought me Amelia Earhardt luggage (of all things! didn't they know what happened to her over the Pacific!) for my trip, he took me to the lookout at Diamond Head where her plane had been spotted, soon before she disappeared in the South Pacific. His wit is evident in the inscription in Dancing the Waves, where he writes "For Susan -- Another who dances the waves / (in her own peculiar fashion) / Best wishes, / Steve Curry." For a year or two, early on, he'd taken a small group of us junior faculty nearly every weekend to Makapu`u to boogie board. Those were hardly learners' waves, but Makapu`u was Steve's favorite spot on the island, even though he'd lost most of his teeth to someone's surfboard there. It remains mine, too, though I've not been in the water there since the ocean nearly swallowed me in the late 90s. His darkness can be found in "Sometimes":

When sometime, despite the fine insulation
Of these walls, I can hear myself in the other room;

When sometimes I can no longer lie,
And then find there's nothing left to say;

And when sometimes my own masks
Leave even me unconvinced;

Sometimes I try to climb out of now
And sleep, like the rock-horse child
Urgently rides in a dream to serious places.


But as one who loves rain and the painful
Beauty of the many-colored earth, I
Long to awaken, although sometimes it
Takes days to fight my way back through slumber. (Waxing, 86)

The pathos of the first three sections gives way to an awkwardly written final four lines. Awkward perhaps because they represent such difficulty, that of knowing that he is asleep to himself, but wanting--and likely not wanting--to awaken from that place.

In "Fool, Said My Muse," Nell (who knew her Sidney) writes a passionate sequence of sonnets to an adulterous lover, one that attacks him and also the masculine tradition of the sonnet ("William," she calls out Wordsworth, "old nut, what do you know of fret? / or convent rooms, or, for that matter, nuns?"). But her own version of the "hard lie" comes in sonnet 5, where she turns her attack on herself for not seeing the disconnect between her and her lover:

And you, my dear friend, sitting on the fence
of a dilapidated marriage, write
to me of the transparencies of peace. Fight-
ing the hard lie, fighting the ten-year wrench
of word from deed, calling your wife pigwench,
mouth upside down, you say we must not bite
each time we kiss. Love is a sheer (not recondite)
vocabulary, you say. Priests, poets kiss peace. Hence,

Nell, this kiss of war, opaque, not see-through,
mucked, will strike the night out with its bitter wish
that rather the man would grab his sword than shoes
and fuck appearances. God, do we just appear?
What is apparent and transparent? This:
the guileless, flimsy, obvious, and clear.  (TMWDeR, 27)

This ugly war between lovers becomes a gorgeous poem, one that gestures past the human drama, the sexual war, to the larger question: "God, do we just appear?" The "obvious, and clear" of a dying relationship is also its inverse property, a way of seeing through the world as "obvious, and clear."

Poetry was Nell's refuge. The sonnet sequence continues its passionate, turbulent way, until the pause in sonnet 8, which signals poetry's utter significance to this poet. Late in her career, she taught a course on formalist poetry and had her students perform their sestinas, their villanelles, their sonnets. She was completely wedded to form: "Mad, I'm not. Some-

times. Not now. The sestet is serene.
Beyond the troubling two-rhyme, the frame settles
into the composition of three plums.
Cities of refuge, possible as rain,
appear above the traffic. Language is
the House of Being, the sane say. And the poem comes. (30)

The sequence ends after loss. The poet picks up her daughter's homework from the table and is suddenly thrown into grief over her lover, now gone. She describes his body as "resolute as ironwood, limber" and then ushers in the pathetic fallacy of storm. But this is not any storm, it's a storm whose locus is Hawai`i:

The trades are out of line over the entire
island tonight. Koa trunks and fallen jacaranda
uproot the volcanic earth between. An edgy
weather muddies the ground from the remembered
to the real. And the squall-lined wind of desire
blows out of its six-inch pot the Tree of Knowledge. (32)

Her shifts between the remembered and the real, the actual and emotional weather are swift, and they bite (as the apple off that Tree was bitten). Only her keen sense of form, her devotion to working the poem into form, salves her inner squalls, for a time.

If this is loss, then anger at violent death threatens to upend the poem; in her clearest rage, Nell approaches Hart Crane's high octane verbal agility. Her poem, "This Day in Paradise," is about the murder of a young girl, Maile Gilbert, in 1985; the girl was kidnapped, taken to a remote location on O`ahu, and killed viciously. You can find some details of this murder here. Nell begins, again, from Biblical symbology: "The snake is cool and green, purled with desire," then finds its location in the West Virginia of her childhood. Her use of detail is nearly desperate, holding off memories of an encounter with a "tramp" in the woods, one whose "nails [are] on my shoulder." She goes home, punished (in the woods, at home, or both, I'm not sure), and curses the God of her youth. And then she turns her attention to the dead child: this attention is at once loving and keenly aware of the violence wrought by man on girl:

O holy and minute particulars,
this opening, wet earth, lochia, located,
placenta, placed, I say, our world, not shat,
its blue, uncut umbilical of stars!--
twisting and twisting out of the northeasterly
air over the deltas, over the lowered savannas,
over the slow, sidewinding slough of the surf
at Mokole'ia where his young and white and strapping
fingers bind her throat, filled with his semen,
yelling for her father yelling for her father,
seeing in the southern sky, child-wide and
yelling for her father, that half-cocked crux,
one star yanked up and sucking blackness as far away
as the hand of salvation from her forehead.

This poem is about rape, about murder, and about the failure of religion (Father) and family (father) to save an innocent girl. It is also (dare I say) an amazing piece of writing. There are lines where nearly every word is separated by a comma from the next, spat forth by this surrogate mother-poet. And there is the repetition of "yelling . . . yelling . . . yelling . . . " until the poem itself begins to scream, the poet-child helpless against the forces of the patriarchy she disdains and fears.


Both Nell and Steve were Euro-American poets who moved to Hawai`i as adults; they were part of an unmarked diaspora that ended in their being marked as white poets. Nell said to me once in a car driving through Kāne`ohe, where she lived at the time, as I do now, that she had never felt welcomed by other poets in Hawai`i. One of our local students was startled to hear Nell repeat that sentiment in the middle of an honors thesis conversation. I'm not sure Nell would have felt at home anywhere, but Hawai`i was her particular challenge. Steve seemed more of the place; he spent his weekends boogie boarding and body surfing, other days flying kites in the park. He married a local woman after his first marriage fell apart. But, in "Sufi Anger in the Late 20th Century," his own sense of dislocation cuts through:

Sometimes it's just too difficult living in a place
where the trees do not have the decency to shed
their leaves and where the birds nest in every season.

So why, especially on a warm night with a batik moon,
full and streaked with cloud, when even the insects are still,
and the ocean at rest laps languidly at every shore,

Why is this night, of all nights, the night you choose
to call me, like a nightmare, offering me a hole to fall into?
Oh, my Soul, or is it fearing your silence, I've called you? (DTW, 45)

Nature is echo chamber, as the headnote from Rumi tells us, "I've been knocking from the inside," writes the poet who came before telephones. But it was also, for Steve, a place so beautiful as to be indescribable: "There is no way to describe the crystalline water / On a sunlit Makapu`u morning" (25), which comes after a poem of directions on how to body surf the Makapu`u shorebreak. From the earlier book: "It's a perfect day at Makapu`u." That book has a photograph of Makapu`u on the cover. Many of Steve's poems tell more than they ought, show less. But he moves inevitably from the real shore break at Makapu`u to a sensation of transcending the moments he so often finds painful. There's Rumi, there's tai chi, and there's the ocean. The ocean at Makapu`u seems to win every time.

I remember Nell's description of Diamond Head / Leahi as resembling a dreadnaught. Her reference to the "cities of refuge" in her "Fool" poem was also about the Pu`uhonua, or Hawaiian place of refuge. Ever the keen eye and ear. But her real work was about sudden widowhood, love affairs, God, and--in later poems--about Ireland'; as I noted, she didn't seem to find this sense of place in Hawai`i, either as poet or as person. Her poems were more about relationships than about places, even if those relationships took "place." Most of all, her poems speak of and to loss. The West Virginia of her childhood was never Wordsworthian. And she brought that trauma to Hawai`i with her, wrote it out in her poems. If, as one of our visiting writers put it, "you write and write and write about pain and then wake up the next morning and it's still there," Nell tried to write it out. That she didn't write much over a long career speaks to the pain of confronting trauma, as well as to the difficulty of writing.

One of the best times I ever had in a classroom was when Nell came in the early 90s to a grad class I was teaching and improvised a reading of Susan Howe's Singularities with me and the students. It was then I realized she was one of the best readers of poetry I had ever encountered (and I audited a class with Harold Bloom in college). She was passionate about poetry, about her students, she was passionate as a friend and passionate as an adversary. She could be utterly exhausting. We all loved her for it, even if and when we pulled away. Steve also loved poetry. He didn't come out of Nell's Renaissance and British Romantic tradition so much as that of Gary Snyder and the Beats. He'd often stop in the hall to ask me what the status of his Tinfish subscription was (when we still published a journal). I never knew, but always said I'd look it up. From what I've heard from his former students, including Father Robert Phelps, a retired priest who was also my student, Steve was a great teacher before his illnesses (and there were many) got in the way.

Finally, some thoughts on having colleagues. My department, which had over 80 full-time faculty members when I arrived in 1990, now has fewer than 40, with more retirements coming soon. My department, which was nearly all-white when I arrived, is not all-white now. That took battles that cost many of us friends. My department, which was mostly male when I arrived, is not now. That also took battles that began before I arrived. Nell and Steve played ambivalent roles in these battles; sometimes I agreed with them, often I did not. God knows over the years I've burned some bridges and had them burned in front of me. But what seems clear in losing Nell and Steve and Bob McHenry is that the high drama of departmental battles, no matter how necessary they are when they happen, needs later to be let go. There's something more final than a bad department meeting. Perhaps these deaths will offer an opening to us. In the elegy, after all, loss becomes gain, even if it's just poem. But a poem can also be a life.


Books:

Altizer, Nell. The Man Who Died en Route. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

--. Thin Place. Kāne'ohe: Tinfish Press, 1999.

Curry, Steven. Dancing the Waves and Other Poems. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 1998.

--. Waxing the Lunar Mountain Apple. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 1997.

A poetics of publishing, part deux

This is the second of two facebook posts I put up this week. The first was removed; if you want to know its contents, ask. Otherwise, I think this series of comments speaks for itself. They answer the question posed in the box.

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Susan M. Schultz

23 hrs · Edited ·

Last year my small press publishing class hosted several publishers, by skype and by embodied presence. Among them, Charles Alexander and Kyle Schlesinger impressed us with their voluble enthusiasm, their sheer love of what they do. But Eric Chock, who co-founded Bamboo Ridge Press in 1979, talked honestly about the "scars" editors get over time. There's something about being an editor and publisher in a place that is radically diverse and post/colonial that causes scarring. My "home" community is probably "white experimental," but my publishing practice is not. That makes certain assumptions in publishing--reciprocity, for example--much more rare than they are in coterie situations. Let's face it, a lot of publishing concerns are coterie or devoted to a single ethnicity/race/nation, and that too has its place. Hell, Modernism was coterie, and there are publishers who specialize in Asian American or indigenous American or Hawaiian or African American literatures. Or in marking the generally invisible category of "Euro-American literature." That's important work.

Over time, I have come to realize that Tinfish Press's vision is impossible in the real world; King Tender had that right years ago in a review of Lee Tonouchi's book she published in the old Jacket magazine. I still hold to that notion of a community composed of difference--and hell, it works in my daughter's soccer community, or my son's school--thank you, Cecil Giscombe, for reminding me that diversity is not always difficult. But there are hopes that need to be "surrendered," as CA Conrad said in a very different context at Naropa in October. In that surrender there remains the present tense of making beautiful objects out of poems, which is what really matters. Eric Chock, again, laughed one time at one of our long lunches, which we share every few years or so, about how he used to think I wanted "to change Hawai`i literature." Oh my. Perhaps, in my middle age, I no longer want to change anything, just be in the practice of publishing and teaching. Publishing as meditation, rather than agitation and the expectations it arouses. Publishing as a possible world. Albert Saijo in his cottage in Volcano telling me he no longer wanted to be published was a great lesson, too.

I want to thank those of you who commented on my post the other day and helped me think and feel through this complex of emotions attached to publishing. Sometimes the lessons I think I've learned return and need to be rerun with a difference (one hopes positive). I've been asked to take that post down. Because I do not want to feel wedded to my own strong emotions, or disturb anyone else's, I will do so. What hurts and angers us is our teacher, and I will look to that teacher for further advice over the next few years of publishing and being a poet. I will also allow a feeling of joy occasionally to wreak havoc with my scars.

On Being Apart, or A Part (after Catherine Taylor)

Catherine Taylor's Apart: the devil's in the preposition. Apart from; a part of. Or: we play a part, or we play apart. She's writing about the aftermath of South African apartheid. I'm thinking about Hawai`i. This is an inexact analogy, but it is one.

She quotes George Oppen: "We are not coeval / with a locality / But we imagine others are" (108). Or we imagine that some of us live at a point of origin that can be found through imagination and an archive.

My colleague told me that some graduate students want "to move into identity-based work," which means away from what I offer them. I work in identities falling apart. A part of identity work, but apart from it. My mother lost her culture; almost everyone I know at the university here is trying to find theirs. As an eighth grade teacher of mine said, you can't simply undo what you did; these are two different processes, that of putting together and falling apart. One is historical, the other medical. But both base themselves on the notion of identity, that there is one, that it is somewhat stable, that you can acquire or lose it.

Judith Butler, again quoted by Catherine Taylor: "Are there modes of belonging that can be rigorously non-nationalistic?" Butler writes about Hannah Arendt, who wants to belong, but abhors nations (for reasons utterly apparent): "she poses that question: what would non-nationalist modes of belonging be? I'm not sure she is describing reality as it is, but making use of language to invoke, incite, and solicit a different future" (108).

Taylor, whose family left apartheid South Africa when she was a child, knows guilt, parses it from shame, seems to favor shame. Guilt is white, though she also understands the instabilities of racial positions, either when she encounters a "colored woman" or when she remarks on her family's skin colors, which range from pale to dark. She wonders about her brother's racial make-up, until she reads Nadine Gordimer on how finding a drop of black blood becomes yet another power play for whites.

Her mother joined a group called the Black Sash, which tried to intervene against apartheid not by overthrowing it (who could?) but by manipulating its rules to help individuals in their daily lives. To subvert the institution by treating individuals it mistreats with humanity. Taylor is ambivalent about this group. It was bourgeois; its members led otherwise comfortable lives. Did they not recognize themselves as individuals, then, self-worthy in a barbaric regime?

I am not coeval with my location in Hawai`i, though I do live here, work here, have extended family here, love the place I inhabit. There is an inherent difficulty to not belonging, a deep anxiety to it. I felt another version of it growing up in northern Virginia, where I appeared to belong, but did not feel as if I did. For my nearly 25 years here I have watched as newcomers and long-time residents of Hawai`i wrestled with this problem. Here everyone suffers it, and it's often marked by one's color and by one's culture. Usually, these are plural, though the plural also foments anxiety. There's safety in the one, the singular, the pure, or so we think.

Here are some claims to belonging that circulate at the university I work for, if not the community at large: "My family has been here over 80 generations; my family worked the land as contract labor and speaks Pidgin." Only that first claim seems to hold water now, after a couple of decades during which the latter mode of belonging held brief sway. If you are a newcomer (and feel that you always will be, no matter how long you live here), there is no way in. So many (mostly white) colleagues work to belong by allying themselves with and for those whose claims seem better. They aim to make this "a Hawaiian place of knowledge" as the University's strategic plans calls it. As allies, they belong, if only metonymically, perhaps. As allies, they have power they would not have as "haole" or as outsiders.

These actions honor a terrible history. These actions also ignore other histories, and the present. To honor the present, I would argue, we need to respect everyone who lives here, whether or not they "belong." This category of belonging, while in many ways historical, in many ways psychological, is also a wedge to wielding power. If I belong, or if I work with someone who does belong, then I can control the narrative. In an intellectual community, the narrative is all. And it becomes curriculum, syllabus, arc of a course, a student or faculty career.

And so at UHM we rehearse the past; we try to parse out settler from native, as if so many of us are not both at once. We try to make right a terrible wrong by creating an echo chamber in which what happened in 1893 (the overthrow) also happened in 1959 (statehood) and happens every day now and so makes us perpetually angry. A former student tells me her professor said she would leave the islands if she were asked to do so by native Hawaiians who attained sovereignty. "But what about those who are mixed race, or who cannot afford to leave?" this student asked her. Such ideology does not coexist with common sense.

My fear is that we will remain angry as the sea levels rise, as storms get more violent, as the drought on the Big Island intensifies, as development covers all of O`ahu with condominium towers, suburbs by Gentry, as the military continues to control 20% (is it?) of O`ahu's land. Our anger over past wrongs cannot get in the way of our need to make allies to overcome the wrongs of the present.

Our anger can also make us weaker, less inclined to act in the world as it now exists. Taylor quotes Breyton Breytenbach on apartheid: "I have come to the stage where I don't want you to talk about Apartheid unless you also recognize how it flows from our shared history, how it dovetails with elements of your ideologies and sentiments, and how talking about it can morally neutralize the unimaginable horror of it. I refuse to continue being a party to the condemnation of Apartheid, which leads only to moral posturing. We are fattening the monster on our outcries of shame" (114).

In the past year, my department has voted for the following: a) to reduce the teaching load of tenure line faculty from 3-2 to 2-2, while releasing tenure line faculty from teaching freshman composition once every four semesters; b) to slash courses from the catalogue, because we don't have the personnel to teach them; c) to require anyone who teaches the course required of English majors to include "indigenous texts" on their syllabus, and to consider them in cultural and historical terms; d) to separate out what used to be Asia/Pacific into Asia and Asian diaspora (after an earlier attempt to make that Asian/Asian American) and indigenous Pacific and Hawaiian. And more. The courses that were slashed were almost all in literary studies, namely the traditional literature offered in English departments. The courses that were added were in indigenous Hawaiian and Pacific. The end result is to segregate fields by race, rather than join them by theme or aspiration.

When asked why we ought to require faculty members to teach indigenous texts, we are told that "we are teaching on stolen land." End of conversation. Or, we are told that "this is the only ethical thing to do." End of conversation. Or we are told to "do the hard work of retooling." End of conversation. As Laura Murphy writes in a review of Taylor's book: "She suggests that the privileged are envious of the irreproachable position of the oppressed. They long to identify with a position that is ethically indisputable. They long for the right to speak from a position not sullied by a legacy of hatred and oppression." How does one both agree with the force of these statements (yes, we are in Hawai`i and the Pacific and we really ought to teach those literatures), while arguing against their totalism? Are we not also in a larger Pacific, one that includes the Philippines, the Pacific Rim, the west coast of the north American continent? Does the trash that washes up on our shores not come--of late--from Japan's tsunami? Does the military presence not affect us all, no matter our race or ethnicity?

This is all food for conversation, but I fear we will not, can not, have it. Where "the only ethical thing to do" is something I do not agree with, clearly I do not belong at the table. Where the intensity of location as defined by original inhabitants completely overcomes any notion of location as where we are now, there is no dialogue. It just is.
 
These issues leach out of the department's public life, its intellectual life (as it were), into the personal. Many colleagues refuse to attend meetings because they are so painful. Others do not speak up because they fear being called racists. There's an excess of emotion at the meetings, but it bleeds into the conversation as a wedge, becomes persuasive in the ways that rhetoric are meant to be in our line of work. We cannot talk to one another. What to do about this immediate problem, the interpersonal? The one that causes us to take circuitous paths through the corridors, to avoid eye contact, to suffer simply for being at work? I'm reminded of Thich Nat Hanh's remark in his recent book on communication, that diplomats in a peace process should not start cold. They should, he writes, spend some time on a silent retreat, preparing to listen to one another, to deal with each other as individuals rather than as enemies. I doubt this would happen in my department, but that doesn't mean it would not be a good idea.

So what do we do now, those of us who want to belong-without-belonging, who want to expand the notion of location beyond what Barrett Watten calls "bad history," who are fascinated as much by the dissolution of identity as by its recreation, as much by family as a cross-genetic, trans-racial grouping as by who got what from the Webster line? Two recent conversations with friends provided some hints as to what is still possible, even at a university where much of what I've been describing above is written into rules that govern more departments than English.

One friend, Michael Epp, who ran a Pacific health organization for years, suggests that it's in the teaching practice, as well as publications (aka Tinfish Press), that alternatives can be posed. "Teach widely," he suggests, "offer a version of the Pacific that is expansive, that gestures toward a larger economic vision essential for the survival of Pacific cultures, if they can come together as a Blue Continent and exert more control over the resources and destiny of the Pacific. This will require a more cosmopolitan, more inclusive understanding of identity and belonging." Another friend, Murray Edmond, a poet and dramaturge from New Zealand/Aotearoa, wants to investigate what he calls "Pacific Modernism." Across the Pacific there have been writers who combined the interests of their location with methods aligned with Modernism: I suggested the work of Wayne Kaumuali`i Westlake to him, and he had several other figures he wants to work on. I don't want to steal Murray's thunder, so I'll leave it there. But this imaginative bridging of indigenous and Asian and European and American literary works strikes me as very promising. It won't change the world--no study of literature seems to do that!--but it might set our students to thinking about the very real complexities of not-belonging in the Pacific, or anywhere on this globe. There are other, more overtly political, ways to address these issues, too.


I was at a memorial service recently on the beach near the surf spot "Publics." The minister delivered the Christian service in English and Hawaiian. When the man's friends came up to talk story about him--a man in his mid-40s who had been very active until he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage--they began hesitantly, formally. Then they wen bus' out the Pidgin, brought themselves and their friends to life. The communities gathered to mourn were many: family, surfing buddies, work buddies, dirt bike buddies, members of his step-daughter's soccer ohana (I was in that group). After the canoe with his remains went out past the reef, joined by dozens on surfboards and even boogie boards, and then after the ceremony there ended, paddles and hands hit the water, which splashed high in the air. Those of us still on the shore clapped. He was home.

This was our present, and might be our future, if we can keep imagining. As Taylor quoted Butler writing of Arendt (a lovely female intellectual genealogy, that):" I'm not sure she is describing reality as it is, but making use of language to invoke, incite, and solicit a different future." Let us not fatten our monsters on outcries of shame, as Breytenbach wrote, but turn ourselves toward that future, in whatever model of togetherness we can muster.

Catherine Taylor, Apart. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012.

The introduction to _Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some prose)_

To find out more about this book, and/or to order it, click here.

Susan M. Schultz, Introduction:

Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some prose) of Hawai`i

In Honolulu's multi-ethnic community, he was constantly reminded of his dearth of roots, his nonexistent heritage of homeland, customs, music, food and language. Part of a wandering family, he has no geographical place to call home. No sweetly remembered visions of hills, woods or country roads to revisit; no proud ancestral plot of land passed down through generations. Only a paltry handful of relatives, scattered across the states, for whom reunion is unthinkable because there was never any union to being with.

--John Wythe White, “Surf Cities”

FAQs (before the fact):

What are Hawai`i's demographics?

Caucasians are a numerical minority in Hawai`i. According to the 2000 census, Hawai`i's population is 24.3% white, 41.6% Asian, 9.4 native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 21.4 % two or more races. That's when you organize your statistics under “one race.” Other means of organization yield different results, elevating the percentages of all of these groups. These are not the only groups, just the most numerous. The white population is a minority among minorities, although whites, along with local Asians (with the exception of Filipinos) tend to be well-educated and to wield political and economic power in excess of their numbers.

Why do you employ the term Euro-American, which no one in Hawai`i actually uses? Euro-American seems a good umbrella term for the different categories of whiteness in Hawai`i. Kama`aina are writers whose families have lived here for generations. Local Haole include writers who grew up here, speak Pidgin, know the local culture and references. White or Caucasian writers would be those who came to live here, at least for a time, although they're also referred to locally as haole. Crucially, Euro-American is a term that does not detach whiteness from culture. If I am German and Irish (as I am), I carry aspects of those cultures and attitudes with me, whether or not I can directly identify them. I also participate in the dominant American culture, one that is often seen as bankrupt but whose influence is pervasive. (In what follows, I do tend to fall back on the term “white poet,” if only because it's shorter than Euro-American poet.”) As a poet educated on the east coast, I participate in a tradition of Euro-American poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian, a tradition that grafts itself uneasily—but surprisingly—to the traditions I have encountered and learned about in Hawai`i.

Why title the book Jack London is Dead?

The title is an homage to Jessica Hagedorn's Charlie Chan is Dead anthology of Asian American writing. Just as Charlie Chan, with his broken English and his Swedish actor's face, has been a problematic figure for Asian American writers, so Jack London is a writer whose work about Hawai`i is deeply problematic to native Hawaiians and others. The writers in this anthology work hard not to appropriate the stories of this place and its inhabitants. Euro-American poets in Hawai`i have their own material to work from, all of it vexing. [Jack London represents the old canon of Hawai`i writing; the poets in this volume represent a generation of writers who have experienced the necessary reaction against that canonization.]

What is it like to be a Haole?

Haole is the local term for “white” or “Caucasian.” Originally it meant “without breath” and “foreigner”; even as its meaning can be neutral (“that haole guy who sits in the back”), the harsh echoes of its original meaning co-exist with the neutrality of its present. “Haole” can also be used as an insult, to mean someone who is overbearing, who acts entitled, whose ear is deaf to local and Hawaiian cultures. At worst, “haole” is the word that comes after “f*cking.” Interestingly, one of the best descriptions and investigations of Haoleness is by an Asian American writer, Keiko Ohnuma, in “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and raised in Hawai`i.” In this 10-year old essay, Ohnuma writes: “White has never been invisible or normative in Hawai`i. It was superior, dominant, and then it was overthrown. It is this overthrow—at first social, then political and cultural—usually not expressed as such, that represents not only a resistance to colonization and external forces, but that has been full incorporated into the hegemonic” (274). She uses the word “overthrow,” which resounds with the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. The resonances are probably too strong, but her argument that white culture was later marginalized is right on. The word “haole,” too, connotes more than anyone outside Hawai`i would know: “For while a Caucasian appearance might open the doors to jobs or privilege, “haole” as an identity is not the same as white. Whiteness is not a culture; it is a position the local haole does not know how to take. And localism is a position they are still not allowed to take” (283). Local whites, in other words, are neither here nor there, neither local nor unmarked. In her more recent work, Haoles in Hawai`i, Judy Rohrer notes that “whiteness in Hawai`i is always marked and often challenged” (2). Rohrer is a white woman whose family moved to Kauai when she was seven; she grew up haole. She takes her cue from Ruth Frankenberg's White Woman, Race Matters:”White women need to become conscious of the histories and specificities of our cultural positions, and of the political economic, and creative fusions that form all cultures.” This is not, Frankenberg continues, in order to reinforce the too-simple dualisms or to “valorize whiteness.” Instead, she calls for a need “to develop a clearer sense of where and who we are” (1993, 204).

Where and who we are. These sound like the right cues for us poets, too. Not all the poets in this anthology grew up in Hawai`i; the roll of names reads like a cast of diasporic characters. Many of these poets came to Hawai`i when they were adults. Among those who grew up here, many left. They had the privilege to come and go, to experience the stresses of “haoleness” but then to leave. That privilege is not without its catch-22, however. The privilege to move away can be seen as a reaction against the difficulties of staying, difficulties that include publication, as well as the problem of how to make a living in such an expensive place. The complications of this position are reflected in much of the writing, which uses cultural references that are Euro-American, but also some that are native Hawaiian, and many that are simply “of Hawai`i.” Euro-American writers are expected to have their careers on the continent, not in Hawai`i. In 2005, Ron Silliman noted “that is it—or always has been, up to now—virtually impossible for a writer to go to Hawai`i & then become widely known & read on the mainland. You can go there if you’re already famous – viz. W.S. Merwin – but the more common result is either for the poet to head back to the continental U.S., usually pretty quickly, or to disappear into the sun glare more or less entirely.” Ah, the “sun glare.” Leaving aside the condescension, however well-meaning, of Silliman's statement, his desire for Hawai`i's Euro-American writers (he mentions none other in this post) to be read “back stateside,” as he calls it, there's another problem. That problem, precisely the one that concerns me here, is that Euro-American writers are read on the continent, but not so much at home in Hawai`i. Post-internet, it can be much easier to find a readership on the North American continent (and in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain) than it is to find one in Honolulu. And this is often true whether or not the poet writes about Hawai`i.

The attention paid to Euro-American writers in Hawai`i, while not always derogatory, is often so. Ian MacMillan, when he first began writing about Hawai`i, was publically called to task for doing research on canoe-making in books rather than by talking to Hawaiian elders. W.S. Merwin has taken the most severe criticism of any poet, over his book The Folding Cliffs, based on a memoir that Jack London originally appropriated from Pi`ilani. This narrative told the history of Pi`ilani's husband Koolau, who suffered leprosy and evaded authorities on Kaua`i for years in the early 1890s, at the time the Hawaiian Kingdom was being overthrown on O`ahu. In an essay titled, “The Literary Offenses of W.S. Merwin,” Kapalai`ula de Silva writes, “If it is a masterpiece [as Ted Hughes claimed in a blurb], it is a masterpiece of literary colonialism.” Later in the essay, de Silva argues: “Merwin’s epic, however grand in scope and language, fails to honor Pi‘ilani’s simple, bottom-line intent: the truth.” Here we have, at best, a cultural divide: what is truth in an epic poem? Native Hawaiian truth is different from Merwin's truth. While I find this essay extreme in its attack on Merwin, I have also found myself explaining to white writers on the continent why such an attack happened, why it is to be expected, and why it should not be dismissed. I mention this controversy not in order to flesh it out, but to point to the difficulties of writing about Hawai`i. Merwin has lived on Maui since the 1970s, where he has long been an environmental activist. But his many decades in the state hardly immunized him to being called an outsider. So the problem remains: what can a Euro-American poet write about? How can she or he be responsible to this place on which there have been so many claims? How to answer the question posed by another of Merwin's poems, “Chord,” published in The Rain in the Trees (1988), namely the question of linguistic colonization?

     While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests

     while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing through

     the forests

     while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they thought of their gardens

     their gardens dying far away on the mountain

     while the sound of the words clawed at him they thought of their wives

     while the tip of his pen travelled the iron they had coveted was hateful to themselves

     while he thought of the Grecian woods they bled under red flowers

     when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons

     when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down

     and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language 

What pronoun(s) will you use in writing about Euro-American poets? The question of whether to speak of the anthology as a collection of “us” or of “them” has been significant to me in thinking about this collection. When I talk to other white writers who say, “I was considered an artist before I moved to Hawai`i,” or “In Hawai`i, I'm an editor not a poet,” or “that's a reading I can attend, but can't participate in,” there's an implicit “we” between speakers. But the conversation usually ends there, suggesting that we are not speaking as community, but as individuals who lament the lack of community. It's not my intention in editing this anthology to create a community composed solely of white writers. It is my intention to call attention to the ways in which we (yes, we) write about Hawai`i. Such calling-attention-to is meant to suggest ways to form coalitions with non-white writers over issues like environmental destruction, militarization, politics, and—let's not forget—the ways in which we make our art. As I write, I notice the pronouns shifting from us to them, from they to we, and will honor their divergences from a stable subjectivity by permitting them their pronomial diasporas.

Who publishes Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i? Among the small presses still in operation in 2012, only Bamboo Ridge's annual journal, Tinfish Press, and occasionally the University of Hawai`i Press, publish work by white poets. Bamboo Ridge has never published a full-length book by a white poet. Tinfish Press, which I founded in 1995, has published numerous chapbooks and full-length books by white writers, but no full-length volumes by a white writer living in Hawai`i (that will change when we publish Steve Shrader's posthumous work). Meg Withers wrote A Communion of Saints, which chronicled the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Honolulu. Many of the voices spoke in Pidgin (Hawai`i Creole English). Withers lived in Hawai`i for nine years, and has since lived in the Bay Area of California. White poets publish on the continent, necessity and choice interwoven in their books' histories. Faye Kicknosway's selected poems are from Wesleyan. Juliana Spahr published four books whose central subject is her five years in Hawai`i: they were published by Wesleyan, the University of California Press, Black Sparrow, and Atelos. Eric Paul Shaffer has written books centered in Hawai`i, published by Leaping Dog Press in Raleigh, North Carolina. Margo Berdeshevsky publishes with Sheep Meadow Press in New York State, Endi Bogue Hartigan has book from the press of Colorado Review, and my poetry books have come out from Salt in the UK and Singing Horse Press in San Diego. These writers may publish on the continent because they want to, but the dearth of possibilities here in Hawai`i surely forces their hands. To be published outside the state may offer the Euro-American poet a bigger audience, but not one as well-educated in the cultural values of Hawai`i or in its history, its languages. To be published outside the state reaffirms the impression that the Euro-American poet is not committed to working in Hawai`i. That the Euro-American poet is an outsider. Another Catch-22.

Tinfish Press has resolutely refused to publish work because it is “ethnic.” We've published experimental poetry from the Pacific by poets whose work marries (however awkwardly) local and avant-garde traditions of writing. Tinfish relishes experiments. I consider this anthology to be an experiment, one likely not to be repeated. I came to it after noting that Bamboo Ridge Press's anthologies of ethnic literature from Hawai`i have been devoted to work by local Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Hapa (mixed race), and native Hawaiian playwrights. Other publishing concerns print work by native Hawaiians (`oiwi ) and by Pacific Islanders (the new Ala Press). As I read more general anthologies of literature from Hawai`i, like Gavan Daws's and Bennett Hymer's enormous compendium, O`ahu Stories: Two Centuries of Writing, I notice that Hawaiian and local writers were offered categories within the book, but Euro-American writers floated around in categories that did not reference “the local” or “the Hawaiian,” and yet never touched whiteness as category. Some of these writers could be found in a section about Waikiki, for instance, whose connection to whiteness is mostly by way of tourism. Tourism is the outside flooding in. The ways in which white writers are pegged as “outsiders” makes them, in the eyes of editors and publishers, more like tourists than like native or local writers.

Who teaches Euro-American poetry in Hawai`i?

In researching course descriptions of English 370, Ethnic Literatures of Hawai`i, I find no recent evidence of Euro-American poets or fiction writers on the syllabi. Even where the course narrative for Fall, 2011 includes the problematic category of “settler groups,” there are no books by Euro-Americans, only local Asians. The frame to the course, no matter who teaches it, oddly mirrors that of ethnic studies on the continent, marking writers of color as “ethnic,” Euro-American writers as non-existent. Surely, Hawai`i is one place where white writers are marked as ethnic, where their work can be read as such. When I went to the website for the Ethnic Studies Department at UHM, I found listed a course called “Caucasians in Hawai`i.” When I clicked to find the description of syllabi, I found a list of courses taught since 2006. Nowhere on that list did the course on Caucasians show up.

Speaking of editorial practice, in what way is this anthology an “experiment” for Tinfish Press?

Years ago, I taught a group directed reading on small press publishing, and talk turned to the ways in which publication issues are fraught in Hawai`i, we came up with the notion of “positive critique.” Positive critique is what editors do; seeing the absence of an important kind of writing, say, they move in to fill the gap. Rather than attack institutions that leave them out, they create new institutions, presses and reading series mostly. In the 1990s, Bamboo Ridge was criticized for not publishing native Hawaiian writers; `oiwi was founded to provide a place for their work. This anthology is such an act of positive critique. I write to suggest that more publishers (some not yet in place, I suspect) print work by Euro-American poets and that they do so in the long form. Books, not single poems here and there.

One of my fears in pointing to this non-category category, Euro-American poets, is that it will prove too persuasive, that white writers will read and write for themselves only, that the larger community will reify the category (either as another way to re-marginalize white poets or as a way to honor them only as such). This anthology poses a paradox; I'd like to call categories into question by asserting the presence of one that exists but has been too long left out of polite conversation. Only if white poets prove that we have something to offer to the conversation will we be able to join it, under different terms from those that existed until at least 1980, if not longer. One venue at which these literary conversations are already taking place is the MIA (Mixing Innovative Arts) Reading Series, founded in 2009 by Jaimie Gusman, a Ph.D. candidate and poet in the English department. These readings occur once a month during the school year, with workshops in the summer. It's a venue that is open to every kind of writer, musician, and performer. The cross-fertilizations have been striking.

What experiences do Hawai`i's white writers have in common, then?

I direct the reader to the statements by each of the poets included in the anthology. They are eloquent testimonies to the ambivalent status of being white in Hawai`i. These writers share the awareness that it was mostly white people who suppressed Hawaiian culture, who brought Asian contract labor into Hawai`i, and who to this day—as a dominant force in the US military and politics—have made the state into a militarized zone. They are also aware that white writers have appropriated Hawaiian texts, remade them and circulated them as flawed “truths” about Hawai`i. Does the name James Michener come to mind? There's guilt in the blood-stream of the white writer. But Euro-American poets also chafe against totalizing notions about who they are and what they can or cannot write. They chafe against the notion that they are “mainland” to the local/indigenous writer's “Hawai`i.” One of my students, Mason Donald, who grew up in Hilo, graduated from public schools and from the University of Hawai`i, wrote the following poem out of frustration. The gatekeepers he refers to were white, another of the many ironies:

My Potatoes

Don't write about Hula,

she explains to me. It's not yours.

Try working with hula

hoops instead. That's more fitting

to your . . . . personal subject position.

No, she says,

don't write about Kamapua`a.

Try working with something more

related. Do you eat pork?

No, don't write about Waikiki either.

Let's see you describe

your home. Where are you

from exactly?

I'd rather you stay away

from Pele, too, she explains.

Pele's such a wrathful God,

and I'd hate for her to disagree.

“Okay. What about tourists?” I ask.

“Can I write about the commodification

and sexual exploitation of Hawai`i?

Can I write about the gaze?”

No, no. You don't understand,

she continues.

Write about your home.

Write about your people.

“It's not easy writing about a home

to which I don't belong,” I tell her.

It's not easy writing about

potatoes.

This poem, written for my class in 2007, is part of a significant sub-genre, one that examines the costs of being identified as haole, as someone who cannot write about Hawai`i. (In this anthology, Evan Nagle has a rather different notion of what it means to write about potatoes.) Another such poem is by Tony Quagliano, a poet who died in 2007. He wrote a version of this poem many times, first as lament:

I stood there in the Pali wind
American, and local guide
despairing of cross-cultural understanding —
I had just recently learned
that I’m a haole

and later as satire:

A Haole Writes One Local Poem

My granmoddah wen fish
catch one trout
trout?
haole fish, dat
she trow back

catch one snappa den
hapa fish
bitta
she trow back

granmoddah den
catch one ***
a local fish
pure you know
good fo eat
good fo da soul
granny keep em 

The way in which white writers are taken to task became clearer to me when I taught a Tinfish Press book by Portland poet Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave. Sand's documentary work is about the Pacific Northwest, not about Hawai`i, but in writing out the “secret histories” of her hometown of Portland, Oregon, Sand includes the history of Japanese-American internment. She puts her work in context, writing both a forward and an afterword in which she explains her methods, her role as a poet-journalist, her family background. But two students in the upper-level class that was reading the book objected to her work. They reminded me that she's of Norwegian and not Japanese heritage, saying that her interest in the internment experience seemed odd to them. One student, of whom I've very fond, came to my office and extended the conversation by telling me that white teenagers have no culture of their own, so they appropriate other cultures. Even being an environmentalist she saw as a white person's appropriation of another group's cause. She was echoing a thought I've heard before, one that John Wythe White plays with when he writes about a character with no culture, no home, no roots (see the headnote to this introduction). That conversation stopped me in my tracks. Yes, there is bad appropriation. But equally troubling is the notion that we ought not to write and think about the histories of other groups of people, those with whom we share our city streets, our schools, our families.

Of course the sub-generic poem about being prevented from writing about the place you live in quickly meets its limits. One can only read so many of these poems without wondering if there isn't in fact something better to spill ink over than one's inability to write anything meaningful. Tony Quagliano wrote eloquent poems about jazz, ended up writing as much about New Orleans as about Honolulu. Mason Donald now teaches creative writing in Honolulu. One moves on. But where? What are shared experiences that lead to poetry that contributes to more than blasts of resentmentt? In what forms do we choose to write? How do we navigate the rocky shoals of acknowledging bad history while trying to make a better one? These are the questions that each of the writers in this anthology addresses.

There are no exact answers to these questions. The statements mostly generate more questions. But the refinement of these questions, the attention these writers devote to considering their work in the context of living in Hawai`i, all these are important to witness. Most of the poets whose work you will be reading write about Hawai`i; others write (as they would not do otherwise) out of the experience of whiteness they have encountered in Hawai`i. Faye Kicknosway, whose work is not included here (she did not respond to my emails) wrote a sequence of poems about the ways in which the Pacific is represented in Hollywood movies. Several of her poems were published in an issue of How2 in 2006 (see here: http://alturl.com/m9szo). In that way, she elides the problem of writing about the places themselves, instead honing in on how Hollywood interprets those places for American consumption. Living in Hawai`i often demands that the writer use more than one genre to encompass more than one voice, that the writer move away from narrative and into a more experimental (yet firmly grounded) mode. Anne Brewster's essay, “Teaching The Tracker in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness,” includes a fine meditation on the question of just how to write out of what she calls “the intersections of Anglo-Celtic creoleness with whiteness and with Australian multiculture in a way that would address my affective dispositions and equivocations.” (5). Her solution is multi-generic, as it is for many of the writers in this anthology. It's time to honor another way in which Hawai`i has affected its poets, in this instance its Euro-American ones. To consider that writing in Hawai`i is not always about Hawai`i is another way to say that “Hawai`i writing” is more than is dreamed of in our current philosophies.

Are there enough poets to fill the book? (This was a real question.)

There are more than enough Euro-American poets to fill the book. Many of the poets one might expect to see here are not here, for reasons of editorial overlook or because they did not send work. No matter: this anthology, which makes no claims to being comprehensive, presents many wonderful poets, some of them older, many of them young and just getting started. There could have been other batting orders. This is the one that came up and it's a strong one.

Works Cited

Brewster, Anne. “Teaching The Tracker in Germany: A Journal of Whiteness.” In The Racial Politics

of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges, Eds. Barbara Baird and Eamien Riggs. Newcastle on

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing [in press].

Daws, Gavan and Bennett Hymer. Honolulu Stories: Voices of the Town Through the Years: Two

Centuries of Writing. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2008.

de Silva, Kapalai‘ula. "The Literary Offences of W.S. Merwin’s Folding Cliffs.”

http://apps.ksbe.edu/kaiwakiloumoku/makalii/reviews/book/literary_offences

Frankenburg, Ruth. White Woman, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis:

U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Hagedorn, Jessica. Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction.

NY: Penguin, 1993.

Ohnuma, Keiko. “Local Haole—A Contradiction in Terms? The dilemma of being white, born and

raised in Hawai`i.” Cultural Values (6:3 2002): 273-285.

Rohrer, Judy. Haoles in Hawai`i. Honolulu: U of Hawai`i P, 2010.

Schultz, Susan M. “'Be a Haole, a Dumb Haole, or a Dumb Fucking Haole': On White Writing

in Hawai`i.” http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2010/07/be-haole-dumb-haole-or-dumb-f-ing

--. "Special Feature: Pacific Poetries." (2:4, 2006): http://alturl.com/y29gx

White, John Wythe. “Surf Cities.” In Short-Timers in Paradise. Honolulu: Anoai Press, 2000.

"the voice that left a hole in my life," on Steve Shrader

In June 2007, in our "Sister Bay Bowl" issue of the journal, Tinfish published Steve Shrader's poem, "Forensic Theology," which opens "we'll start here at the frayed edge." I'd had a hard time communicating with him during the production stage; I didn't know that he died on February 23 of that year. I google his name now and find that there were two obituaries, back when there were two Honolulu newspapers. On March 6, 2007, the Star-Advertiser reported that "STEVE SHRADER, 62, of Waimanalo . . . A writer, poet and graphic designer" had died, and that he was "born in New York." Two days later, the Star-Bulletin reported that he had "died at home" and that he was born in Cleveland. There is something appropriate about this moving origin, New York or Cleveland, Cleveland or New York. As he puts it in that poem I published, "behind us lay the boundless grid / ahead stretched the land of fractals."

At the frayed edge, indeed. Waimanalo is a community on the east side of O`ahu, known best outside the state for its beautiful long beach, and here as a farming community with a large native Hawaiian community. I vividly recall the day (in late-2006, probably) when I got an envelope of poems from Steve. I'd already been publishing Tinfish's journal for over 11 years, and had never heard of him. The poems were astonishing; they felt like pieces I'd waited all my life in Hawai`i to see. I accepted two of them, only printing one--out of my own sloppiness--and invited him to come to a reading. He came, we met, and then he disappeared. But "Forensic Theology" has stayed in my head. As of a week or two ago, I have his 1970 Ithaca House book, Leaving By The Closet Door, from the internet's magical warehouse of rare and used volumes. It's perfect bound, but stapled inside; the type is from a typewriter. Decidedly small press work from a press that published 100 titles over its 15 year lifespan. (Among the other poets published by Ithaca House were Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Mandel, C.S. Giscombe and others.) Each of them has published many books since. Less magical is the lack of record of Shrader's existence as a poet. All I have found is one review of this first book, by Erik Lichtenberg (who has also disappeared) in Chicago Review: 23/24 (1972), under "Short Notes." When I print this two page review, the last two lines disappear, the ones that read: "fantastic book of poems, full of both promise and fulfillment: Stephen Shrader will, I think, prove to be one of the best poets of our time." This was his only published book. The material in it was written before he moved to Hawai`i.

I had coffee with Shrader's friend, Warren Iwasa, a couple of weeks back. Iwasa edited an alternative Honolulu newspaper, The Hawaii Observer, in the early 1970s; Shrader was the lay-out person, and he was good at it. So they spent many long days and nights together, but Warren tells me that Shrader never told him about that review. I mentioned Albert Saijo, who refused to be published after his Bamboo Ridge volume, OUTSPEAKS, came out in the 1990s. Warren wondered if that's what happens to Hawai`i poets. I don't think so, but the thought teases me a bit. That "frayed edge" that opens Steve's Tinfish poem, "Forensic Theology," leads to this ending: "the water sloping toward a vortex / we harbored doubts about this line of enquiry." Doubts about poetry by poets are not rare, but silence is perhaps less so. By "silence," I do not mean the silence of not-writing, but that of not-publishing. It echoes in my mind that I ordered a set of Emily Dickinson poems in facsimile for Saijo (for which he paid). I had thought their use of the page and handwriting complementary; now I'm finding their joint notion that publishing amounts to an "auction of the soul" more apt.

I don't yet have a handle on Leaving by the Closet Door, which Warren Iwasa suggests may having something to do with Cary Grant, by way of Kurt Vonnegut, albeit proleptically. But the book, which begins during the winter of 1967 in Iowa City, fitfully weaves together poetic narratives of awkward love, Vietnam, echoes of the World War, mythological references, and campaigns that seem wrenched out of particular historical context. There are short poems, after Kenneth Koch. Much of the book strikes me as abstract, if only because I lack whatever historical context there was, myself. But "Retreat" jumps out first--it's on page 9--as a poem about the Vietnam War. I don't think Shrader served in that war, but its images were everywhere; as a child I watched the war on the evening news. The poem is written in the voice of a soldier; the second stanza goes like this:

Word comes down the line: miles ahead
our officers have abandoned their jeeps,
their orderlies, fresh underwear and field
latrines; and splash off across the paddies.

And then, as Shrader is always careful to measure time by its days and hours:

Two days ago, we were still looking
over our shoulders; two hours ago,
we shot birds off the rumps of water buffalo.

Under the blades of the last helicopter,
a crater of flattened grass slides off
toward distant water. A small boy
steps out of the brush, holding up his
mother's thigh. Here is where our maps end.
Here, the dust breaks in waves
through the pilings of our legs.

This is perhaps the least Shrader-like of the poems in Shrader's book, but its concerns (violence, war, family, time) are focused here in ways that open the rest of the book to my attention. The mysterious Erik Lichtenberg pronounced "The Campaign: Letters from the Front" to be "undoubtedly the best poem in the book." The "First Letter" in this sequence begins, "it is a strange land, sister," and includes these lines: "We measure the distance / to the straits by the grain's height and / if we do not sight water by harvest, this campaign / like all others shall end I fear // in white-blindness and brain-frost" (15). The poems lack a particular ground, but the lines are compelling.

What Shrader has done in these last poems is to internalize the action of the poems with more overt subject matter. As he writes in that Tinfish poem from 2007, a poem written in Hawai`i:

we'll start here at the frayed edge
and work our way inward toward the center
pausing whenever something catches our eye

This is a more gentle poetics than that I find in the 1970 book, as "Fragmentation Wound," about a man with "a shard in / his throat." This "shard protrudes / just below the chin" where he sits smoking a cigar and looking at a book of Fra Angelico paintings (of "cherubs / darting like shrapnel"). The man, who is smart, contemplates:

The key to success, he thinks, is
humor. the shard
agreed

Ah, but where is the humor in this poem? That the man has a shard protruding from his neck is humorous (perhaps) as surrealism, and that this afflicted man is looking at painted cherubs is--at its extremest sense--a bit funny. But this is not a poem that lives up to its moral. Instead, it testifies more to the artist's pain than to his wit. (Warren talked to me about his sense that Steve was living a dangerous life through his work as a poet; while this sounds a note of dubious Romanticism, it's probably got more than a grain of truth to it. See "silence," above.)

But this last poem I have before me, this "Forensic Theology," is a lighter piece. This is not to say it's not serious, because it is. But the wandering quality of the poet's lines, his thinking, sounds an Ashberyan note of in-gathering and out-taking. The poem occurs over seven stanzas; it's (ambitiously) about the origin of the world and our search for meaning in it. The poem moves from the frayed edge, to a mountain range, to a bridge, to spiritual grief, to the lotus and its Buddha, and ends with exhaustion and doubt. But this is not a doubt that destroys the poem; it merely ends it, without final punctuation, promising more days, more searches. Let me copy out two stanzas of this poem; you can find the whole in Tinfish 17. I have no more copies, but I'll wager that Small Press Distribution does (spdbooks.org). OK, so I just looked, and they have six of them left. I will also admit that you can find the issue for free here.

we could tell that space was shaped by the objects
floating in it if those are the words for it
jumping off a bridge would be like riding a rollercoaster
much whooping and screeching until
that last split second when we would enter
an enormous apple or vice
still we were pleased to think of speed
as a potential fountain of youth

day four brought spiritual grief
we found a man nailed to an X
when we saw that he was squared
we realized that he was part of an equation
and looked around for Y whom we found finally
cowering behind a dumpster at the stripmall
Z was of course their stepmother
a quick-witted suburban girl who had married up

and on the poem goes. Truly a beautiful piece of writing.

Warren tells me this about Steve by latest email:

"I believe Steve graduated from Oberlin in 1966. I think he went to iowa right after that. If Iowa is a two-year program, he probably left with an MFA in 1968. He might have come to UH to teach in the fall. The secretary of the English department should be able to find out. He then taught as an instructor for four years. I didn't meet Steve until 1973."

Of the title to the first book, he writes:

"To have somebody walk through what looks like a shallow little puddle, but which is actually six feet deep. I remember a movie where Cary Grant was loping across lawns at night. He came to a low hedge, which he cleared ever so gracefully, only there was a twenty-foot drop on the other side. But the thing my sister and I loved best was when somebody in a movie would tell everybody off, and then make a grand exit into the coat closet. He had to come out again, of course, all tangled in coat hangers and scarves.

Or so I thought, until I saw that the Paris Review interview with Kurt Vonnegut wasn't published until 1977. Did Vonnegut relate the anecdote earlier elsewhere?"

Not surprising that a man born in two places should have heard Vonnegut speak to him from out of the future of 1977, when he wrote his poems in the late 1960s. And so gratifying that he is still speaking to us out of his unknown future, now.

The department secretary is on vacation. If you read this post and knew Steve, please contact me (press.tinfish@gmail.com) The quotation in the title comes from the poem, "The Heart Transplant." "Regards, then, / finally to the voice that left a hole in / my life. Regards" (36).

September 2011

My last post was of found memories from just after 9/11/01. This post takes up the newspaperman's question ten years on:

When you think of 9/11's psychic effects on Hawai`i, what do you think?

I think of a conversation at the playground, not long after 9/11. Two mothers and their kids, Bryant and I and our son. “We've got to get Saddam Hussein,” they said. “Watching too much Fox,” Bryant responded, later on.

I think of my husband hanging up loudly on one of his oldest friends. “He's been drinking the right wing cool-aid.” That was not long after 9/11. They've never spoken since, though I'm distant facebook friends with the man's wife.

I think of the story a graduate student told me, of how he moved to a hostel when he first came to Hawai`i. His two roommates were both vets in treatment for PTSD. One told him simply, "don't startle me." The other one slept in his keflar vest every night.

I think of the graduate student I saw weeping in the hallway, how I thought perhaps she'd broken up with a boyfriend. Later, someone said her best high school friend had been killed in Iraq.

I think of my older students and parents of soccer teammates of my daughter whose spouses are far away and who are doing their best to keep things together.

I think of the obligation to send these men and women off well. “Cheer for Lauren's dad,” the soccer players are told.

I think of the day I approached the cashier at Times Supermarket and she asked if I “wanted to support the troops” by buying a yellow ribbon magnet for my car.

I think of a friend who stole such ribbons off other peoples' cars and made a Lynndie England silhouette out of them. Thumbs up!

I think I first notice Fox News on at Kaiser when I take Sangha in for his check-ups. I keep noticing Fox, ask them to turn to another station. When the World Cup is on, I ask to see that instead.

I think of the air shows over Kane`ohe, the Thunderbirds coming in low over Kahekili as I drive my car home, the jets shaking our townhouse in Ahuimanu, the neighbors coming out to watch. I hear myself saying “I hate them,” as I lift my chin to watch.

I think of a former neighbor, Intel officer with several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt. We'd talked easily about politics. On his return from Afghanistan he told us a story as we walked back from our kids' school; he's ordered an Afghan man shot (“he wasn't acting like a friend”). The man survived. He was a “friend.”

I think of another morning when he and I walked back from the school and I started talking to him about politics. His face looked different from before. He turned to look at me, said: “that would mean talking about politics, and I can't (or was it “won't”?) do that any more.”

I think of a colleague asking me if this meant the world would be forever different. Not a question, really, but a wry wondering remark.

I think it's hard to talk to people who don't agree about politics. I remember my mother's neighbor telling me we can only talk about my mother now.

I think of how my mother would cut people off if their politics got too right-wing. I think about how her wings began to change oddly when she got Alzheimer's.

I think about how, when I travel, active military are asked to get in line first. Why not teachers, electricians, plumbers, poets, physicists?

I think of how I think about “correcting” student work when they write about “defending our freedom.” “Cliche,” I write in the margin, but that doesn't quite cover it.

My son, Sangha, is now 12 years old. He loves Airsoft battles and sometimes his friend (who left Hawai`i with his parents when the economy went south) brought over the Playstation and they play hours of Halo.

I think of the effects of all these separations and losses on all of us. There is a lot of grief out there. And it cannot be compensated for through the phrases I sometimes hear, like "fighting/dying for our freedom." Abstractions simply cannot bear the weight of so much loss.