Temporary change of venue for Tinfish Editor

For the next three months, most of my blog posts will be available at Jacket2.

My commentaries will appear here, but I'll also announce them when they're posted.

And so the first is titled, "Gizelle Gajelonia, Timothy Yu, and Jonathan Stalling in Conversation: No Intertexts!  But Inhabitations!"  You can take a look here.

This space will remain reserved for more argumentative and more personal posts, but most of my words will appear in the virtual Philadelphia of our imaginations.

Language Acquisition: _Dictee_ and the "Radhika Book, 2005"

When I speak my native language, English, I eagerly await error. John Shoptaw wrote about the "crypt words" Ashbery employs to wrench surprises out of pat assumptions, to find gold in the lead of cliche. Thus "borders" become "boarders" and one can be caught trying to cross a fellow boarder as easily as by the Rio Grande. My mother thought "ticket to ride" began with the word "chicken," which amuses me to this day. "To air is human" I saw the other day in an on-line publication. But when I try to write or speak in French, which I sometimes do, I anguish over any slip of the tongue (well, in French it's usually not a "slip," because my tongue lacks the solid palate of sound equaling sense). I want to get every syllable right (I wrote "write," but that takes me to an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle, which is probably not where I want to be now, except that I'm thinking about the loss of a language). When I told my French family decades ago (when my French was good) that "j'essuie donc je suis" (I was wiping the table at the time), they thought I was making a mistake; I knew I was making a pun. But that's as close as I ever got to playing with that language consciously. These days, I dream of being as true as a ruler in French, even as my skill is as wobbly as an old tape measure.

Tomorrow I teach Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. It's a book I very much admire, but never quite get the hang of teaching. This time a record of my daughter's past has given me fresh access to the book, to its record of learning a "foreign" language, of taking down dictation (which aims to be perfect, no errors!). At the beginning of Cha's book, we hear a dictee in progress; the paragraph being read is very simple. At least half of what is said involves instructions about punctuation: "point" "virgule" "guillemets" "ouvre" "ferme": "period" "comma" "quotations" "open" "close." Clearly, this is not the acquisition of language as transparent meaning, but acquisition of the mechanics of grammar, with just a few words slipped in for good measure: "Elle venait de loin" or "She had come from a far," and a few others. By the end one sees the puncutation coming from a far, not the "she" who is merely a pronoun. Having just read Ashbery, we know all about those pronouns that refer mostly to themselves as words.

The text is replete with typos, errors of all sorts, both conscious and unconscious (we think we can tell them apart). Sometimes what appears to be an error is not, comes to us from that other language. So "DISEUSE" means "speaker," but in the way "FCUK" looks like something else, this word looks like "disease" or "disuse," and so the word intends to be read, as the language itself has intention, translating from the French to the English in such a way as to make more than a simple transfer between them. The word is an immigrant, crossing those "borders" that might also be "boarders." The "she" "mimicks [sic] the speaking" here early in the book. And then she says, in italics:

It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void. (3)

Her efforts to speak English are very physical, and quite painful. "From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. She swallows once more . . . Endless drone, refueling itself. Autonomous. Self-generating. Swallows with last efforts last wills against the pain that wishes it to speak." The "it" is at once the "she" and her "neck," the "tongue," the machinery of speech. No transparency here, only gears and levers and an ungreased engine.

Much of the drama of Dictee, of course, is that coming into language, at once painful, political (she is not learning her mother tongue here, but bearing the story of education, imperialism--her mother's forced use of Japanese, while living in China--the languages that alter us in ways we don't mean to be altered). And yet, translate this into French, or any other language:

1. I want you to speak.
2. I wanted him to speak.
3. I shall want you to speak.
4. Are you afraid he will speak?
5. Were you afraid they would speak?
6. It will be better for him to speak to us.
7. Was it necessary for you to write?
8. Wait till I write. (8)

That last line is marvelous. "Wait till I write." No longer is someone demanding that another speak; instead, the writer asserts her power to make sense on her own terms, at her own time, even inside of the language learning exercise.

The other day my husband found an old composition book, a blue marbled one, with the words "Radhika Book (2005)" on the cover. Such are the delights of living in a persistently messy house. I opened it to find notes I'd taken in the early months of Radhika's life with us. We adopted her in December 2004 when she was three years old, and traveled from Nepal to Hawai`i with her as she spoke Nepali to us and we English to her. In those early days, Radhika spent several hours a day with a Nepalese woman who spoke her native language to her. But quickly it became clear that Radhika had opted out of her native language and insisted on speaking English, even to Aunty Khusum. When we left day care and got on the choked freeway, she would yell "Traffics!" from the back seat. The day I took her out of Aunty Khusum's care to put her in a place closer to our home, I felt the incredible weight of her language loss. But Radhika had other things in mind.

First entry:

R points to the stone Buddha.
I say, "Buddha," "Buddha's hands." She says "mouth."
R points to a smaller statuette, also Buddha.
R thrusts a hot wheel truck at me, says, "Buddha!"

Knowing her as I know her now, I suspect she knew full well that she was being funny. But then, who knows what I thought; I mostly wrote down our conversations, not usually my reactions to them.

There is my question about what she sang that day with Aunty. She did sing songs, she said. Which ones? "Chicken!" She would see a temple in Bakhtapur when we left a walk-up apartment in Honolulu. She would run into a class to look for the "durdle" and the "peesh" that Sangha's teacher kept in aquariums. In early February, 2005, she was at the noun blurt stage of English; by the end of that same month, she was creating sentences: "I'm go home" and "I'm close door" and then in early March, when she switched to Aunty Rose up the hill, "Radhika fish no!" and "Radhika Sangha dinner no!" When asked if she liked a little boy at day care, she responded, "No, Keoni very hitting." Then on the 28th of March, a curious comment in my hand: "As she learns more English, she gets harder to understand." By May, she was saying "I have flower for you hanging." And in June, "I don't want chicken. I want other eating."

A constant, from the third to the last page of this composition book, is Radhika's obsession with paper. In February, she was calling her drawings "books." That same month she wanted to take paper to day care: "Tomorrow Khusum paper no!" In March, she wanted to draw: "Mommy paper no. Barney paper." (How that purple dinosaur entered into her desire for paper I'll never remember.) In May, there was a "picture for you hanging." These days, paper and pens are constantly disappearing into her hands. She draws and writes cards, practices her signature, leaves traces of herself everywhere.

That summer, we spent a month in Madrid, where Spanish entered her world (she has proved to have a real gift at picking up languages); there, she and Sangha invented their own language, which they called "Melaconese," a mix of English with Spanish and Hawaiian sounds. By then, I'm not sure how much of her native language she remembered; like other children, her gift at language acquisition was matched by a gift at language loss. Where that loss takes her, I can't say. "Sang. Encre" (65)? Following Timothy Yu, will she find that "a model of how blood--the basis of race and nation--can be the product of writing rather than its basis" (134)? What she will think of that ghost language when she's older I can't imagine. But one thing that binds us together is our love of paper, pen, and pixel. "Wait till I write"!

The poetics of rage: cant and Cantos

Yesterday I read the manifesto of Joe Stack (1956-2010)--after he set fire to his Austin, Texas house and then flew his Piper Cherokee into an IRS office building. I found myself for the first time in many years wanting to turn to Ezra Pound's Cantos. I am an insufficient Modernist scholar, one who adores Hart Crane but never quite took to T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound; this may explain why I now teach contemporary poetry more than any other and get at the Modernists through allusions rather than texts. But when I taught a Foundations in Creative Writing Course several years ago, I assigned Pound's ABC of Reading--less as an instruction manual than as a model. I wanted students to think about their own canons, and about how they might present those canons to their own students. I also love the voice in that book, that of an American hick auto-didact, as once folksy and tyrannical, learned and self-consciously entertaining. My students balked. They did not want to read the book. They knew Pound's politics were malicious, racist, fascist. The more I tried to get them to separate out the tone and content of this book from the Pound they knew of, the less they wanted to follow me. Now I might complain (as I did) that the political atmosphere of my English department, one that sometimes emphasizes "correct thinking" over (or as) literary value, was to blame. As perhaps it was. But none can argue that the Pound problem is an easy one.

So I put the stack of Joe Stack's print-outs down and came to the computer to look for Pound's "Usura" canto. Stack's life-long obsession with the economic system seemed ripe for comparison, however attenutated, with Pound's Canto. The first google link comes us this way: "CANTO XLV — WITH USURA, by Ezra Loomis Pound (1937)." Fair enough. On the Pound page there's a link to a recording of Pound reading, and there are two columns, one of the Canto in English and the other of the Canto in a language I don't know, which I'm pretty sure is Portuguese. Click to the home page and you get a curious mix of advertising on how to program computers, advice on how to learn Hebrew, and ending with, "The Big Lies of Our Times," which includes these statements: "Language evolved from bird whistles and chimpanzee chatter"; "Man has stepped on the moon"; "Democracy is good" and "Mortgages, bank loans and credit cards aren't usury."

When I went to the next screen of my google search for Pound's Canto, the second item came up from Stormfront, a white supremicist website. I had just gone to their site a week ago by accident, when I looked for the victims of Dr. Amy Bishop, the biology professor who shot up a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. The victims were there, names and photographs, as proof to the Stormfront people that diversity is a bad thing, and that of course a white woman from Harvard shot the non-white members of her department. So here again they were, with a page devoted to Pound's "Usura," printed out in its entirety. It is a beautiful poem; in fact, one of the commenters on the stormfront stream notes that this is "Perhaps the best poem ever written, IMO." Another remarks, "Beautiful, thank you."

This is hardly the Pound of the radio speeches. I have not read those speeches, but when I open a termite-gnawed copy of Ben Friedlander's "Draft Text of Pound's World War II Radio Speeches," I find this: "The American has the head, evidently, of a chicken. He is incapable of political reverie. The existence of a secret and irresponsible government does not worry him." A couple pages later: "Why does the intelligent American, the bright lad who can write but doesn't, why does such a man take it as a matter of course that to earn his living he has to hide his intelligence and work for some blob-headed vulgarian slob?" This was from a Pound's address on "Violence," delivered on 16 June 1942.

Now we've located the proleptic voice of Joe Stack, who winds up toward the end of his manifesto with a call to revolt: "I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are." What an American voice this is. Stack lacks the imagination of Pound's "blob-headed vulgarian slob," but he does have his "pompous political thugs" and "zombies." Radio has given way to the internet, but the voice is fairly consistent, churning away against taxation and advocating for violence.

None of this is surprising. Joe Stack, like Ezra Pound, is full of rage. He writes in an American voice. His manifesto, like Pound's radio addresses, "rambles," is a "diatribe," presents no clear politics except anger. But there's a moment in Stack's manifesto that I return to this morning, one closer to Pound's poetry perhaps than to his rant. It's a moment I wish Stack had interpreted differently, because it is the single moment of compassion in his document. In college, Stack lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His neighbor was a widow (of a retired steel worker) who was even poorer than himself. He lived on peanut butter and crackers, she on cat food. When he gets to her his prose loses its rage for a moment and becomes more Dickensian than Poundian:

"When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be 'healthier' eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn't quite go there, but the impression was made." This is the one point in the piece where I can identify directly with Stack. Not over the piano, his business asset, that he needs to declare on his taxes but can't figure out how; not over his tax code obsession (even if, like me, he is something of a literary critic on that score). While I understand his anger over big business and a system that crushes some while advancing the wealth of others, his final act makes me a lot less inclined to sympathize with him. (That his politics are incoherent is telling, but also not inclined to draw this reader in.) But here is a woman for whom he--and I--can feel compassion. Through her, I feel for Stack.

This is a moment of beauty, of feeling. It is not the beauty of Pound's lines, which mingle rage with music ("no picture is made to endure nor to live with / is it is made to sell and sell quickly" . . . "Stonecutter is kept from his stone / weaver is kept from his loom"). But it is a moment of connection. That Stack uses it to return to his obsessions is perhaps inevitable: "I decided that I didn't trust big business of take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for own future and myself." Nonetheless, at one point he saw his own "sad figure" in the person of another. I wish he'd gone elsewhere with the moment than toward his act of terror thirty or so years later.

I'm not the only one making the Pound connection this morning. Tim Yu has posted this link, for example, on his Facebook page. Nor am I the only person who feels unsettled by the way in which Stack gets at some truths about our economic and governmental system. (Why are we surprised that an irrational person is also thought-full?) But what strikes me, moves me even, is that Stack has used the language of fellow feeling in the middle of his manifesto. Stack was not a racist or a hater of particular persons, unlike many who preceded and will follow him. He includes himself among "blacks and immigrants" rather than blaming them for what has happened to him. He turned to writing as "therapy," he notes, but there was no therapy there. I don't teach writing as therapy, but I do consider it a vehicle of and toward compassion. Had I been his writing instructor, I would have circled the paragraph about the old woman and asked to see more of that.

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde

Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford UP, 2009.


In Fall, 1992, I taught Ron Silliman's The Chinese Notebook to a class of exceptional undergraduates at UH. Even in the years before cell phones, ipods, laptops, all the many paraphernalia of distraction, students had no trouble with Silliman's parataxes; their disjointed lives matched his torqued new sentences in a syncopated but exact rhythm. At the end of the course, I required each student to write a meditation on poetry in the form used by one of our authors. Several students wrote their own versions of Silliman's Wittgensteinian propositions. I best remember the title of one: "The Chinese-Italian Notebook." The shock I felt at receiving this essay came from the way the student had taken a title that refers to material (the Chinese notebook), and used it to mark his own ethnicity. The student's nationalities, as we say in Hawai`i, were Chinese and Italian.

Timothy Yu's new book addresses questions of race and Language writing and does two important things with them. First, he historicizes them. Then, he makes of that history a compelling argument about parallel avant-garde movements, both of them grounded in protest movements of the sixties, both existing on the margins of 1970s poetry, both entering the mainstream from the 1980s forward. I am most interested in what ethnic and experimental writing have to say to one another when placed side by side, or inter-leaved (I might credit this student's title with at least some of the impetus to start Tinfish Press in 1995). But Yu writes that his “interest lies in the vexed history of division between the two bodies of work . . . rather than in any argument for their unification” (16). Using a definition of the avant-garde that has less to do with aesthetics than with social groups composed of like-minded artists, Yu argues that Asian American poetry and Language writing formed parallel movements in the 1970s. (This is no critical Poems for the Millennium, in other words.) Both presented themselves in opposition to the mainstream; both were marked by questions of form and racial identity. Both meant to create art out of social groups, and reconstitute the social through the reception of their art.

The way in which Yu gets at his argument is sometimes paradoxical. While he's arguing about groups, his chapters focus on individuals. So Ron Silliman becomes the emblematic Language writer, while Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (by way of an excellent reading of her critics) and John Yau become representative Asian American writers. I'm being a tad simplistic, as Yu's narrative also includes a long discussion of what it meant to create an Asian American culture. Unlike African American culture, which can be defined through music, language, and other features, Asian American culture had to be constructed out of its parts—Korean, Chinese and Japanese (all featured in Yu's book), Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai (all outside the purview of this study). Also outside his study is the vexing realm of Hawai`i's Asian American writing, which is at once part of the larger category and a significant sub-category of its own. That Yu can call Cathy Song's poetry “apolitical” shows that his interest is in Asian American poetry outside Hawai`i, where even titles like “Easter, 1959,” bear a political freight, 1959 being the year of statehood. But I needn't torture that point, as Yu has enough fish to fry. The story of Hawai`i's avant-gardes remains to be written.

As I said, many of the larger issues he raises about social and artistic formations are treated at length in case studies of individual writers. As the prime representative of his avant-garde, Ron Silliman is at once the fool and the hero of Yu's narrative. At his worst, Silliman is the proto-Rush Limbaugh (“the Republican party is the oppressed minority”) of the avant-garde. In a letter to about Messerli's anthology of Language writing, Silliman wrote: “I hope, in choosing your title, that you are aware of the comparability of the phrase 'language poetry' to epithets such as nigger, cunt, kike or faggot” (Letter to Peter Glassgold of New Directions, 58). At his best, Silliman simply and honestly acknowledges (in the face of late-60s and 70s identity politics) that his identity is marked, as well. That Yu occasionally takes Silliman at his word, and assigns “white male subjectivity” to Language writing seems problematic to this reader. Ann Vickery has elucidated arguments about gender issues between members of the Language group, which included Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Susan Howe almost from the beginning. But he's right on target when he argues that “Silliman claims his own position as particular and universal, capable of registering class, race, gender, and sexuality while simultaneously transcending their limits” (50). Language writers such as Charles Bernstein and Barrett Watten, in their own ways, have tackled the issue of identity politics, vis-a-vis their nearly absolute distrust of identity. (This, too, is an historical point; Bernstein has embraced the Jewish American tradition of poetry increasingly as he has gotten older.) That they have often failed to do so persuasively illustrates Yu's point about the “vexed history of division” between movements, if not about future possibilities for migrations across them (more on this in a bit).

Yu is adept at revealing the history of Asian American poetry before Garrett Hongo's The Open Boat (1993), in whose introduction the editor tries to place Asian American writers in a mainstream where prizes are earned (Cathy Song won the 1982 Yale Younger Poet award) and photos accompany the poets professional bios. Yu is also good at reading David Mura against Li Young Lee, in terms of the ways in which they express their senses of Asian Americanness. Suffice it to say that Mura does not do well. He is most drawn to what might be termed “problem poets” like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and John Yau, both of whom test the categories of Asian American and experimental poetry in fascinating ways. The chapter on Cha is comprised mainly of close-readings of other critics on Cha, from those who treat Dictee as a narrative about nation and ethnicity to those who treat it as an anti-narrative about the failures of identities and histories to cohere. And then Yu comes in to show how these readings apply—but only to parts of the text. His reading locates her as both an Asian American and an experimental writer, if not at the same time. “Dictee charts a kind of path from the Asian American to the experimental and (perhaps) back again . . . Like modes of contemporary political criticism, it cannot escape the tension between the need for a foundation for action and the knowledge that no such foundation can any longer be taken for granted” (137).

John Yau's parodic postmodern work (Yau describes himself as “'the poet who is too postmodern for the modernists and too modern for the postmodernists'” 139) uses Chinese American identity to show that it cannot stand as such. For Yau, Asian American identities are produced by the work, and must remain provisional. It's with Yau one senses Yu is most at home, even if that home is like Ashbery's houseboat, sturdy yet afloat, at the whim of the literary and social winds and waters that surround it.

That writers do not organize themselves around their perceived (and actual) differences has sometimes been a disappointment to me, as editor of Tinfish (and member of an adoptive family). If Hawai`i's avant-gardes have included movements for Local Poetry (the late 1970s Bamboo Ridge group), for Hawaiian poetry (strongest since the mid-90s launching of `oiwi, Hawai`i's literary communities have not so easily welcomed the formalist avant-garde. And yet, as I watch some Tinfish poets, I see writers who can participate in many different groups. Craig Santos Perez is a Chamorro activist, a Latino poet, an indigenous poet, an experimental poet, and so on. Tinfish may be a place where he can be all at once, but the luxury (and responsibility) to move across and through alliances is his. I would be eager to hear what Yu thinks the future of his avant-gardes holds for him and for us. Have we arrived at the place pointed out to us by "The Chinese Italian Notebook," in the era of Obama's own multiple ethnic and political identities? Or have we, as I sometimes fear, simply entered into a new series of divisions, disalliances?