Tinfish Editor's Blog

From Oedipus to Alzheimer's: the New Whodunnit: Alice LaPlante's _Turn of Mind_

2012-01-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

The last dozen years of my life have been framed and informed by two narratives, those of adoption and Alzheimer's. We adopted our son in 2000, our daughter in 2004. By 2006, my mother's Alzheimer's had progressed (as it were) to the stage where she could not stay in her house, and was moved to a care home. That passively voiced verb form, "was moved," was enabled by a third adoption; in early 2006 I went to court to become my mother's guardian so that I could oblige her to receive care. I became my mother's mother, made her decisions, signed her checks, held onto her memories as best I could for reasons medical, familial, artistic. Not too long ago, I found a loose page of my mother's check register from August, 2006; I had blogged on it back then. The check is public and personal; her register was one of her primary ways of organizing the world. That she wrote "for food!" next to a check she'd written to me (getting my name wrong as she did it) testifies to her disbelief that ordinary staples could ever cost so much. The checkbook rendered autobiography, its register poem.

Early in this twelve year span I drafted an essay, since discarded, in which I pointed out that Oedipus-- best known as the detective-king who discovers that he was the bad guy whose victim was his biological father--had been adopted. The Oedipus narrative, which permeates our western cultural references, depends on our ignoring his adoption and focusing almost exclusively on his genetic relation. That family relations are hidden even from the family members makes the story more powerful, of course. But that burst secret depends on maintaining the adoption's secrets. Yes, he was left on a hill as a baby, and yes, someone found him, and yes he grew up in Corinth. The secret was kept from him, and the significance of his upbringing kept secret from the reader. The second secret does not bother us, unless perhaps we are literary critics who are also adoptive mothers. That history is elided for the history that depends on blood genealogy. (I have found this focus typical in mainstream American culture, despite all conscious emphasis on the individual or hockum about the wonders of adoption.) "Oedipus" became a plot device that generated many of western literature's best stories; this is now what is called "adoption literature," and includes novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens, plays by Edward Albee, a host of memoirs, a ton of movies (Harry Potter, anyone?), and many a facebook status line.

If adoption narratives depend on a search for the self in relation to a missing blood parent, then Alzheimer's narratives depend on a search for the self within a decaying brain. (The brain is our birth parent, the mind our adopted one, perhaps.) These are narratives folded in on themselves, especially when the narrator suffers the disease. My recent post on Walter Mosley's The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey argued that Mosley uses Grey's search for his own past to unravel a larger history. But Mosley's book depends on a miraculous, if deadly, cure for forgetting, one that takes the novel out of the poetry of Alzheimer's and into the dream-realism of remembered stories, then back into dream-forgetting. There is also an adoption in the book, but not one that carries secrets with it. Turn of Mind, by Alice LaPlante, does not allow its author or reader that luxury of artificial memory. Instead, this book, also a literary detective novel, uses Alzheimer's to get at family relationships (which include a case of hidden parentage), and drives a murder mystery in which the demented narrator may or may not have been the perpetrator. But I'm more interested, in both cases, not in whodunnit, but in how the author writes Alzheimer's.

If the genre of discovery, of self-knowledge, is prose narrative, then the genre of Alzheimer's is prose poetry. This is a book written in short detached paragraphs; it's as close to new sentence writing as a mainstream novel is going to get. So the notion of "plot" is in some ways severely reduced. Consider this paragraph, by Alice LaPlante in the voice of her demented narrator, a retired hand surgeon, Dr. Jennifer White:

When I have a clear day, when the walls of my world expand so that I can see a little ahead and a little behind me, I plot.  I am not good at it.  When watching the heist movies that James [her late husband] loves, I am impressed by the trickery the writers think up.  My plots are simple: Walk to the door.  Wait until no one is looking.  Open the door.  Leave.  Go home.  Bar the front entrance against all comers. (187)

The plot involves guarding oneself from other's plots, but it also--and this is where I'm drawn in--involves nothing so complicated as walking, opening, leaving, going, and barring. In a straight detective novel, verbs work at the service of nouns and pronouns. "She did it," has a subject, a verb, and an object (the done thing). In this version of the detective novel, verbs are themselves difficult, must be plotted. It's as if you're an American driver who has arrived at a round-about in a left-driving country; you need to think ever so carefully simply to turn your steering wheel. During a walking meditation once on the Big Island, I watched a man in our group who had had a recent stroke. His left leg swung forward with great difficulty; the rhythm of his walk differed from ours. It was the ordinary, the difficult, witnessed as beauty.

LaPlante's book contains many of the plots of Alzheimer's: there is the take-the-driver's-license-away from mother plot--and her anger at that theft; there is the talk-about-mother-in-front-of-her plot, in which the talkers do not know, or especially care, if she understands what they say; there is the child-needs-money-from-mother plot; there is the sell-the-house plot; there is the "this-is-your-home-now" plot. That these are not the centerpieces of the novel's larger plot says a lot about the anxieties of fiction, in which plots need to do their plotly things: they need crisis, climax, denouement, and not in the smaller realm (that of Alzheimer's) but in the realm where plots tie together, novels come to a clean end, and we leave happy that we paid our money to be entertained, but not damaged by our reading.

Dr. Jennifer White is an unreliable narrator, to put it mildly. That's what makes her such a good one. But her Alzheimer's is also, necessarily, a fiction within the fiction. To write from inside Alzheimer's presents the writer--Mosley, LaPlante--with a challenge that leads to wonderful, poetic, writing. It generates plots very like those in adoption fiction: something is missing, it's part of the central character's story, which she needs to figure out in order to find herself, be whole. Mosley follows that narrative arc more reliably, as Ptolemy Grey--at least for a brief moment--recovers himself from the decay. LaPlante lets it go to some extent, as Dr. White never does figure out the answer on her own. But she relies on several crutches to make the Alzheimer's narrative work as a story, not as a series of discrete, confusing moments. One of these is writing. She keeps a journal, and her family and friends also write in this journal. So, even when she cannot read what they have written, we can. I'm reminded of the pathos in caregiving memoirs, like that of Rachel Hadas, when the carer finds writing by the Alzheimer's patient, from a point in the disease when there was still awareness of decay, when decay was a verb and not just a noun.

LaPlante's imagined Alzheimer's mind is confused, yes, especially about linear and historical time. But her narrator can still write in sentences that "make sense," can still convey her feelings to the reader. As a writer, the narrator is less ill than as a character. LaPlante finesses this problem by using the "you" when Dr. White narrates her movements late in the book. Take the scene when Dr. White escapes her Alzheimer's ward:

You realize that you are impeding the flow of traffic.  People are politely navigating around you, but you are inconveniencing them.  One man bumps your elbow as he passes and stops briefly to apologize.  You nod and say, not at all, and begin moving again.  (238)

The longer scene that ensues, when Dr. White eats at an Italian restaurant, her neighbors and waiter deeply suspecting her state, Dr. White suspecting that they suspect, is an amazing piece of writing. One that is only possible inside a fiction. A brief moment possible outside a fiction comes when Dr. White first enters the care facility:

The woman with no neck is screaming again.  A distant buzzer and then the muffled sound of soft-soled shoes on thick carpet hurrying past my door.

Other noises emerge from other rooms on the floor.  The calls of incarcerated animals when one of their own is distressed.  Some recognizable words like help and come here but mostly cries that swell and converge.  (143)

I'm not obsessed with the actual truth, per se, though I can attest that those last passages record what an Alzheimer's home sounds like during the late afternoon period of sun-downing. And Alzheimer's is--at least early on--a literary disease. My practice of transcribing voices, and the much more ambitious practice of the Trebus Project in the UK of recording stories told by Alzheimer's patients, proves to me that the confusions of early to middle Alzheimer's result in a genre at once poetic and narrative. Just as depression is better literature than schizophrenia, however, early Alzheimer's makes for a better story than late. The silences of late Alzheimer's take us from Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein to John Cage. I'm not at all sure you could write a novel from that place, unless you're B.S. Johnson, perhaps. What Mosley and LaPlante offer are Alzheimer's experiments that flirt with, but do not join, the avant-garde of late Alzheimer's.

Late in Turn of Mind, Dr. White remembers a conversation she'd had decades earlier with her best friend, Amanda, the woman who is now dead and whose fingers have been amputated in a last act of desecration. This conversation turned on the question of adoption. At 35, Dr. White is rather unhappily pregnant with a child that her husband wants more than she does. (She will have an unexpected child when she's over 40, as well.) Amanda tells her that she and her husband are "still trying." Dr. White's response, which she immediately regrets, goes as follows: "What about adopting, you asked, then wished you could take back your words. Of course she must have considered it. How facile" (262).

Amanda's response: "No. I need more control than that."

The two women then debate what "control" means in relation to children. When do they need to become "yours" for you to feel you have control? Dr. White asserts that being in the delivery room when the adopted baby is born might be enough. "That would take care of the nurture part," Amanda responds. "But what about the nature? That would be unknown." (263)

Amanda eventually turns the conversation back on her friend, asking why she has so resisted having children. Turns out that Dr. White distrusts nature as much as Amanda yearns toward it. "Children do love the most horrible, depraved people. They attach to warm bodies. Familiar faces. Sources of food. To be valued for such base requirements doesn't interest me" (265).

Why this conversation near the end of a novel about Alzheimer's? Aside from plot considerations, namely that Dr. White's daughter's paternity is in question and Amanda becomes something of a surrogate parent to her, Alzheimer's, like adoption, forces the big questions. Who am I, and why am I so? What is my history, and how do I find it? Even, along with Oedipus, did I do it? But nature is not always to be trusted. We don't always resemble or love those to whom we are biologically tied. Our natural minds sometimes decay. We may begin not knowing our biological identities; we may also end not knowing ourselves because biology fails us, or we it. If we are writers, we recognize these tropes as plot lines (even when the lines more resemble circles, erased geometries). If we are writers, we have control over those plot-lines in our fictions. That's why daily life has come to fascinate me more than fictions, because we cannot control, only record, them. But sometimes--as in these novels by Mosley and LaPlante--fictions move us back into our ordinary lives in ways that matter.

__________

A year ago I spent nearly a week with my mother. It was our last visit before the last visit in June, when she was dying, died. The blog posts of January, 2011 can be found in this thread, moving from the aftermath of that visit back into it. I miss her and the residents and caregivers of her home more than I can say.

TELL MRS MILL HER HUSBAND IS STILL DEAD: Oral histories from the dementia ward

2012-01-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Alzheimer's Foundation of America recently sent me a card that reads, "A Season to Cherish Memories."

All ironies aside, many of my memories now do have to do with Alzheimer's. This time last year I visited my mother for the next to last time, the time before the time she was dying and then passed. (That last verb, which used to strike me as tired euphemism, now seems right; she passed on, she passed into, she passed away from me, from us, she passed out of time.) My blog posts on that visit can be found on this archive page, starting (or ending on the blog) from 1/11/11. "Ending from" is not a good phrase, except in blogging, so I'll leave it be.

During this past sabbatical year, when I was not with my mother, or blogging about dementia, I was traveling to talk about my blogging about dementia. I developed a talk on how best to write Alzheimer's, which argued by example that experimental writing worked better than realist narrative, that giving voice to the Alzheimer's sufferer was preferable to hearing the voice of the caregiver or spouse. It was a polemical piece, not nearly as good as the actual writing, I suspected, but sometimes such writing requires an introduction, a foreshadowing. As polemic it both explained and sometimes off-put. But now I think I've found the positive critique--not the "don't write like this, but yes, do work like this . . . " in the form of a UK project, launched in 2003, called The Trebus Project, founded and run by David Clegg.

Clegg is an artist who gave up museums and galleries for the space of hospitals, of nursing and care homes. He gave up the artist's eye/I for that of the editorial you. He listens, accumulates stories, then edits them into short pieces, many of which are then acted out for radio programs. You can find the project website here; they also have a Facebook page you can "like" for updates. The volume of stories I have in hand is called Tell Mrs Mill Her Husband is Still Dead, available on the Trebus Project website, which jolted me back to the moment I recorded in Dementia Blog from the August 19, 2006 entry. My mother was then spending much of her time looking for her mother and brother, both dead (I think) since the 1960s: "My mother has not said a word about her father; he is still dead."

Dementia is not just a disease, it is a temporal state, one in which the dead are still living, the speaker still inhabits an earlier moment in history, and time is not linear but circular. History gives way to poetry, although they cannot ever be divorced. Like my mother in her later years, the speakers in Tell Mrs Mill, are still living the Second World War. Because most of them are English, some German, they remember the Battle of Britain from the perspective of children or young adults witnessing bombs, bodies, V2 rockets. It is, as Mabel says, "A rather violent sort of poetry," this memory that "the bombing" (for example) "sounded worse at night," or that as Mrs. Mill herself puts it:

I remember the bombing . . . and taking cover . . . being careful not to show any light from the windows . . . you could hear the planes coming . . . they seemed faster than the English planes . . . we were lucky we had an Anderson Shelter . . . but I was scared stiff . . . the bombing was very close to where I was living in Nunhill Road (159).

And there's Nelson, who saw through the reports that an English plane had crashed on its way home, "but it was too much damage." He and his friends knew this was a V2 rocket. Nelson later drove a lorry that carried crisps, many of which he seems to have eaten on the sly: "get your fingernail under the edge of the tin lid and you'd split the seal. Have some of the crisps out and seal it back up again" (61). Even Sam, whose Alzheimer's is deeper than most of the others, remembers something of the War ("Do you remember a nice-looking woman called Eva Braun?" he asks), though a few sentences later he writes, "I was 18 when I came to England [from St. Lucia, home to Derek Walcott]. I can't remember the history of me" (175).

Among the stories Clegg has gathered in his book, mainly soliloquies punctuated by occasional questions or prompts, are those by a gay man who is still reticent to say so, by some people who grew up so poor that (in Hilda's case) she had to have all her baby teeth pulled because her diet was so poor, and by many who were neglected and/or abused. There are stories of how they met their partners, along with some fearful, quizzical assertions that they don't remember them. Lots of dance halls, movie theaters. For the most part, the details are relentlessly ordinary, and hardly a soul other than Isabella utters a polemic against dementia care: "Dementia care in this country doesn't exist . . . The problem is that . . . a great many people who are supposed to be carers . . . have contempt . . . for the loss of memory . . .and . . . the mental problems that that leads to . . . and take advantage of it. They behave in the most diabolical way and think they can get away with it . . . because . . . no one would believe the poor woman with dementia" (112).

Clegg believes her. He writes bluntly in the introduction, "Telling Stories": "Some people have questioned the honesty of the narrators and the historical accuracy of their stories, as if a lack of authenticity somehow distinguishes them from our own. Dementia or not, we are all unreliable narrators; we all consciously and unconsciously change our stories all the time and we all lie" (12). He also pointedly dismisses the "rewriting and sanitising [of] life stories without consent as a further form of protection and risks leaving people like Elsie Mill to struggle with darker thoughts and feelings in unsupported isolation" (13).

As a literary critic, I love those moments when the tellers of the stories comment on their own telling, and on the book that Clegg has told them he's compiling. "This book to help people remember," notes Fia, who finishes her thought by saying, "The future is something I try to forget" (17). Mabel calls it a test, this "trying to remember a memory of a memory" (29). Leonard is one of the few whose language is itself affected/afflicted by the illness (these are mainly early to middle Alzheimer's patients, the ones who still speak in sentences with beginnings and ends). He tells the listener that he's "got this euthanasia in the back of my head . . . it doesn't hurt a bit . . . and don't worry it isn't contagious . . . but . . . it just means that by the time I finish what I'm saying I'll have forgotten what price I offered you" (47). Like the woman who thinks of everyone arounde her as passenger on a train, Leonard, who owned an art gallery, thinks of his interlocutors as potential customers. The nouns and verbs of our working lives survive into the afterlife of metaphor. And Mrs Mill, in some ways the book's fulcrum, its heroine, begins her speaking by saying, "I'm so pleased to do this . . . I never thought I was popular enough to write a biography. I was born in Shropshire" (157). Clearly, she remembers the autobiographical form, beginning as she does with her own birth.

The cd that came with the book contains the voices of actors performing some of the monologues. What the cd offers us beyond the book's words are the regional accents that inhabit Alzheimer's homes; in my mother's, there were New England accents, Spanish accent, New York Jewish accents, and then there were those who had gone back to their original language, like Dutch. The sounds of the voices are living a time that no longer much exists (at least extrapolating them to the American context, as I am). There are upper class accents, northern English accents, West Indian accent, lower class accents. Alzheimer's patients may forget vast swatches of their own histories, but they do not forget their vowels.

One of my favorite voices is that of Morris, a Yorkshireman, who starts talking as a balloon is being thrown around the room--typical recreation for the elders. He grew up working in a mill, as his mother had done. Perhaps typical of working class boys, he turned to sports. He was also reacting to his mother's constant illness. His first sight of a cricket pitch is from a doctor's office where his mother has one. "I used to watch the cricket," he reports, "while she was in the doctor's" (115). His father was ok, but always too tired. Morris's monologue turns back and back again to his prowess at athletics. "What the hell did I do?" he asks. "I was always playing football with the school . . . I got into cricket and I was good . . .and I was captain of football at school and cricket . . .kids idolised me at Brighouse and further than that . . . I was very good . . . really good" (115). Even as he falls in love with Betty, married to another man, he remembers his sports accomplishments, but then also his gambling problem, which derailed his relationship with her. It was an October to December affair, he remembers. He played snooker, he says, so well that he "could really have been someone" (117). He was supposed to take her to the station (her father was also a gambler) but he did not. "I always won . . .from then I was always a gambler . . . I couldn't stop" (117).

Maybe it's the transparency of a story like this one that makes it so moving; what Morris has lost is his cover, and our covers almost always begin from words. As Clegg notes at the beginning, we all lie. These voices seem to lie less because they cannot lie low. They say what they think, they say what they remember, and they admit to their actless act of forgetting. What could be more honest than John's admission of his lost memory: "All I remember about my grandfather isn't really a memory at all . . . all I've got is . . . not an image . . . I remember somebody in the next room . . . someone in the bed . . . and my mother saying it was my grandfather . . . he had gone out or gone in . . . Shakespeare was much more specific with his ghosts" (85).

If they invent, re-imagine, it's not to impress the listener, but because "confusion" takes our contrivances away. That strikes me as one of the great beauties of this book, its honesty. The honesty is that of the speakers, but also David Clegg's. The stories are funny, and sad, and mixed up, but they are true, even if they are not--as Clegg puts it in the introduction--"authentic," by which one might mean "accurate." Accuracy be damned. These are the truth.

New Year's natterings

2012-01-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

At the Nissan service center yesterday:

--Punahou grad, living in the East Village, talking to her dad and a friend they've run into. Her friends who didn't succeed in making new friends "all ended up back at UH."

--All the employees are listed on the wall, by name and photograph. One of them is Cambodian. I've asked to meet him before, but he wasn't at work that day. This time someone fetches him from the service bay. I tell him my son is from Cambodia, ask if he knows Hongly. He says yes, and how old is your son. I say 12 and gesture above my head to show how tall my son's become. He's busy, works for Nissan and on a farm. Smiles, shakes my hand. The guy behind the computer smiles at me. I say, "ask him his story; they all have incredible stories." "They do?"

--Pale little boy with young mother, eating breakfast off a paper platter. Uses both hands. Says "mama" twice in every blurred sentence. He's two years old, still wears diapers. He likes me, keeps making eye contact. I start talking to him. He comes closer. He hugs me. His mother says he had to be taught affection because he was so inward. Heart surgery as a baby. The boy with the beautiful Biblical name raised his green shirt and showed me a scar running from top to bottom of his chest and belly. He came and hugged me again. And again. And again.

--Waiting for my daughter at soccer, talking to another mom about bad calls in her daughter's last game. The defender went into the net, not the ball. A dad sits next to me on the bench; he's military, talks to me sometimes about economics, what to do when he retires. Once he said war is really awful. Once the girls sent him off to "the Middle East." He came back a year ago, was it? "Nice to be back," he says, but he's not been away this time. "Life, Susan, is very difficult," he says, turning to me. Something about aches and pains in middle age, except it isn't. He's been praying. I suggest meditation, letting all those thoughts go. He finds his daughter, thanks me for talking, asks for a hug. I give him one, tell him to take care of himself. Don't sleep much. Find him on-line, with a daughter whose name is his daughter's but with a different wife. It's him, it has to be him. But then it isn't. Same face, same daughter's name, same profession, different guy. That man's wife is looking for a gravesite, and she has three kids. The other two don't have his kids' names. Red herring. He needs more than meditation. I need to tell him more, suggest "help." He was in the wars. His ghosts are on the bench with us. His more specific than mine, but.

__________

My third sabbatical is now over. Next week I start teaching: English 411, Poetry Workshop, and English 713 (as) Documentary Poetry. Next week the institution has me again in its clutches. If sabbaticals are an aide to memory, then the first contains that of meeting my husband, the second the adoption of our daughter, and the third the death of my mother. The personal markers click outward to baseball memories (2004, 2011 were big years for the Cardinals) and national ones (2004's sad election). The space between #1 and #2 included our son's adoption, his coming into language and gentleness; the space between #2 and #3 was that of my mother's dementia, as well as our daughter's coming into her second language, and her love of soccer. So many rulers. Only when they melt do they add up.

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #10 (of 12), _the gulag arkipelago_, by Sean Labrador y Manzano

2011-12-27T15:16:00.000-08:00

The gulag arkipelago, by Sean Labrador y Manzano, $3 from Tinfish Press

The tenth installment of our Retro Chapbook Series offers up Sean Labrador y Manzano's three sestinas, “Death to All Drug Traffickers,” “Male Order,” and “Mycorrhizal.” Manzano's imagination roams from Longinus to Marcos, baseball to Martial Law, passports to Sin, pineapples to puddles. Substitute Manzano for Ashbery in the following sentence by Joseph Conte (from Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry), and you've got the gist of his use and abuse of the sestina: “Ashbery's renovation of the sestina form is extensive and complete--he knocks layers of old thematic plaster off the brick walls of structure.” Manzano knocks off (as it were) layers of plaster to reveal a wobbling foundation of totalitarianism and diaspora. He writes that, “The roots of my 'Gulag Arkipelago' originate with how the Spanish used the Philippines as a penal colony. Similar to Australia.”

BIO:

Sean Labrador y Manzano was born in Tripler Army Hospital aka The Pink Palace. Went to Likelike Elementary School, Aliamanu Middle School and Waipahu Middle School. Father was stationed at Pearl Harbor, then Barber's Point. In the 1920s, his Manong Pio, imported to the plantations of the Big Island—began the surge of Manzanos into Hawai`i. His work has appeared in Conversations at a Wartime Cafe (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/conversations-at-a-wartime-cafe) and in many other venues.

EXCERPT:

from “Death to All Drug Traffickers”

sports not operated by drug traffickers, the Senator fancied Jim Rice leading

the American League in home runs, fancied Wade Boggs' batting average, fancied drafting

pitchers. In line Scouts are returning mamasans and tias seeking to fill billets in cloisters

and parlours. There are headhunters recruiting for phlebotomists or chambermaids,

pious and ornate. Sometimes among them are tourists, returning and new. In between

this silent line and the carousel revolving with boxes belonging to drug traffickers

and boxes not belonging to drug traffickers drift unclaimed, waiting

to be claimed is the customs agent. In between the carousel housed

by the terminal that exists and the waiting world negotiated by Sin,

is the customs agent.

Asked about his cover design (above), Eric Butler wrote the following: "It's a pretty literal reading, though an abstracted rendering: The Gulag Archipelago is, of course, a name stolen from the book about the Gulag labor camps in the USSR. So the figures on the cover are all people, the ones with the diagonal lines are officers, and the ones without are laborers. Everyone in a totalitarian system, of course, is oppressed and thus carry themselves with their heads bowed, refusing to stand out (oppression always relies on facelessness). And their uniform shape shows both their anonymity and similarity; the difference between 'us' and 'them' is always so invisible and arbitrary."

And here is our list of Retro Chapbooks. You can have them all for $36. Design by Eric Butler and printing by Obun, Honolulu. Simply go to our website, click "purchase" and go to near the end of the list on 2co.com. Or send checks to us at Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744. Please include $1 handling for each item.

12: Tim Yu's 15 Chinese Silences (forthcoming)

11: Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi (forthcoming)

10: The Gulag Arkipelago, by Sean Labrador y Manzano

9: Thou Sand, by Michael Farrell

8: One Petal Row, by Jamie Gusman

7: Yours Truly & Other Poems, by Xi Chuan, trans. Lucas Klein

6: Ligature Strain, by Kim Koga

5: Yellow/Yellow, by Margaret Rhee

4: Mao's Pears, by Kenny Tanemura

3: The Primordial Density Perturbation, by Stephen Collis

2.: Tonto's Revenge, by Adam Aitken

1: Say Throne, by No`u Revilla

There's so much amazing poetry in the Pacific region. This series provides just a small slice, but it's highly nutritious and tasty.

Walter Mosley, Game Six, the Seven Sins of Memory, and Mother Loss

2011-12-24T11:02:00.001-08:00

[Cardinals players react to David Freese's game-winning home run in Game Six]

Yesterday we threw a party. I had long wanted to watch Game Six (click for the box score) of the 2011 World Series (best game ever) as art rather than as an adrenaline-pumping, jumping-off-a-cliff, heart-wrenching event, or what it had been on October 27. So we broke out the World Series box of DVDs, an early present for the kids (believe that if you will!), and began our trip down memory lane. Soon it proved to have as many trips and falls as memories, and the afternoon became an exercise in trying to remember what had happened when. When Diane broke out the thread from our then-live Facebook feed (off the Cardinals Hui) and began reading back my reactions to the game then as we watched it now, which is now then, things got complicated.

It didn't help that the live feed in Hawai`i had been knocked off the air for at least half an hour during Game Six, leaving us to scramble to find the game on the radio, but none of us could remember which innings were those we had not seen. It didn't help that we remembered certain heart-stopping events: Matt Holliday and Rafael Furcal failing to catch a ball in short left field; David Freese missing a routine pop-up, which ended up rolling off the top of his red cap; the Rangers' pitcher missing first base with his foot, even as he caught the ball. But we simply could not remember where in the game's narrative they occurred. An inning would begin and we would say, "oh this is when really bad stuff happens," and then the inning would end happily enough. An earlier inning would have started and we would have forgotten, say, that Lance Berkman hit a home run. We were like a jury that knows a crime was committed, even that the principals were there, but can't for the life of them figure out what really happened or if the defendant is guilty or not.

"I know what you said now," Diane would report from her Facebook thread. "But I can't say!" (There were kids in the room.)

She continued: "this is where my boss wrote to say he assumed I was watching the Cardinals (lose)."

"This is when Sangha started slamming doors downstairs."

"And now you're saying you can't pick Radhika up from soccer because the game is still going."

I've always thought communal readings of poetry were best, because so many minds come to the poems from various points in the time-space-line that meaning accrues. The same process helped us put together what we had seen a mere two months ago. The suspense that had built up during the game on 10/27, especially at moments when the Cardinals were down two runs with two outs and two strikes on the batter (they are the only team to come back twice from such deficits), transposed into suspense over what we remembered and how well we remembered it.

Then the last innings unfolded. We remembered those better. David Freese's triple, Lance Berkman's hit, David Freese's walk-off home run, those we could summon up without the video, the conversation, the Facebook thread. Suspense over. The Cardinals pushed the Series to seven, we felt good about the states of our memory, and my husband declared that if we put the DVD of Game Seven in tomorrow, he thought the Cardinals had a pretty good chance of winning.

David Schacter is a psychology researcher, professor, writer who has had a lot to say about what happened yesterday afternoon. I've been reading his books, first The Seven Sins of Memory (2001), in which he categorizes our typical memory problems (like tip of the tongue syndrome, absent-mindedness, lack of name recall and many more), then explains how these sins are actually advantages. Many of those advantages seem to have to do with hunting and gathering, but still. I'm now reading his earlier book, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (1996), which should help me remember some of the material better. In order to remember, he claims, we need to create complicated contexts around the information we want to remember, or we need to feel emotional pulls to those moments that stick. Names are hard to remember, because they are context-free; we remember someone's story, if not their name, but we do not remember their name while forgetting their history. Our brains erase events we don't need to remember (if we're lucky, we remember the crucial events) but leave traces of what did matter. And so, Freese's "idiot play," as he called it later, remains in our minds, but without the sense of what inning we were in, except that his error occurred somewhere in the middle of the game. And his walk-off homerun is seared into our memories, even though the fact that there was a 3-2 count on him was remembered only by 12-year old Sangha. Diane said, "I thought he just walked up there and hit it out right away!"

As Cardinals fans, this mattered deeply to Diane and me. Why should it matter to anyone else? Pull the google map lever a bit and consider that a lifetime of watching baseball games becomes an anchor to autobiography. My former colleagues Arnie and Phil sat behind Bryant and me at a Cardinals-Padres game at Aloha Stadium in 1998 and told each other their stories by way of which games they had seen, and when. Arnie, as Arnold Edelstein, later wrote a review-essay in Biography about the autobiographical nature of being a baseball fan, about the way the dry numbers in a baseball encyclopedia evoke memories for him of his father's death. See Biography, Volume 14, Number 3, Summer 1991, pp. 272-275 (Review). Pull the lever out further and further, and you get to the point where memory and autobiography begin to fail; you get to dementia, where I spent years, obsessively watching my mother lose hers. You get to the place Walter Mosley began from when he composed the marvelous novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2010). Famous for his detectives, Mosley has written a book in which the primary search is for memory. A significant part of the plot involves the fantasy of recovering lost memories--a pact with the devil for memory, but also for quicker death--but that's not the part of the book that I will remember, if my emotions have anything to say about it.

Ptolemy Grey is 91 years old. He still lives on his own in an apartment full of his past (read trash, read disordered papers, read hoard), full of present day insects and rodents, without a working toilet or bath, and in a mind inhabited by the paranoias, fears, and confusions of dementia. Mosley taps into the horrible poetry of this condition; Grey's internal monologues are beautiful, even as they make us fear for his safety. Grey turns help away, gets attacked regularly by a drug addict, lives in a stew of time that is at once the misprisioned present and a wash of past events that enter his frame like a tide, and then fall back. (These monologues reminded me of ways the depressive mind confronts the world, also in a wash of memories and fears and blind-alleys.) He tries to stay in the present by playing his radio loudly, but dares not turn any knobs lest he lose the stream and not be able to recover it. These sounds he sets against the babbling of his uncontrollable memories:

"So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well" (12).

Ptolemy is a time-traveler with no need for a time-machine; his brain's disorder gives him a free, if often, terrifying ride through the past-as-present. That Ptolemy is an old African American man means that his memories are often traumatic; his childhood mentor was lynched, a little girl burned to death in a house. History has not been kind. His memories, as we say, are "bad." And his present includes the death by drive-by shooting of his great-nephew, Reggie, the man who cared for him and his failing memory.

The only way to solve the mysteries in the book is to give Ptolemy back his memory, if only for a time. As in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, there's gold involved, a real treasure that Ptolemy must shelter from rapacious relatives and entrust to the young woman who comes like an angel to save him. This makes for exciting reading, but Ptolemy himself is less interesting as a cogent character. The tragedy of the book's ending (layered within the comedy of its certitude, its completion) brings back the poetry of Mosley writing Alzheimer's through Ptolemy, whose memories are again as grey as his matter, as his memories:

"He held out his hand and the girl who reminded him of birds singing took it into hers just like he thought she would. He signed and maybe she asked a question. The music became a sky and the words the man on the television was saying turned into the ground under his feet. One was blue and the other brown, but he was not sure which was which. Everything glittered and now and again, when he looked around, things were different. Another room. A new taste. The girl always returned. And the door that was shut against his forgotten life was itself forgotten and there were feelings but they were far away." (277)

Walter Mosley talks about his mother's dementia here, and how it influenced his writing. Or watch:

Mosley's description of the person with Alzheimer's in this clip is compelling because it does not separate that person from the rest of us, but shows how the loss of memory is a shared experience. Failing to remember Game Six is not dementia, but falls on the continuum between total recall (itself a fiction) and total lack thereof. Hence, Mosley: "My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there’s not a direct connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back. There’s a word, they know there’s a word, but they don’t remember what that is. There’s a word that describes something. There’s a thing that they have to do, there’s something that’s very important. It’s almost there within the range of their mind and they have to sit there and go through a really convoluted process of thought and memory to try to retain that—to regain it. And sometimes they can and sometimes they can’t." The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a beautiful, tender portrait of dementia. One of the best I've read.

Toward the end of our party yesterday, I remembered two Cardinals games I watched on television in Washington, DC in June. I was in Virginia because my mother was dying--she died on June 14, 2011--and, oddly enough, the Cardinals were also in Washington to play the Nationals. On the night my mother died, friends took me home with them and I asked them to turn on the Cardinals game. They did. The Cardinals were ahead, but not for long. They must have put Ryan Franklin in to save the game, and they ended up losing in a rout. No, I call up the box score and it was Batista that night who took the fall. (For a very different rendering of that evening, see this post.) The next night I visited Kyle Semmel and Pia Moller in Bethesda. We watched another game. The Cardinals lost again. Losing and loss drove on twin rails those two days, though I encountered a couple who loved the Cardinals on the Metro trains both coming and going on that second evening. Only in September, when I went to a game in Philadelphia, did the Cardinals win for me in person--though they did so after Al Filreis drove us away from the stadium. They won that game in 11, after blowing a lead with two outs in the 9th. It was a foreshadowing, even as those earlier games had seemed a foreshortening, a kick in the stomach after the far far more significant mother-loss.

Note: In trawling the web for images of David Freese, I found this audio of his game winning home run off the BBC. The sonic dissonance is delightful.

On Synchronicity

2011-12-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

In early November, I was in Chicago, having lunch with my friend Tony Trigilio, who teaches at Columbia College. Before his cat, Shimmy, died, she and Tony wrote a brilliant blog in the cat's voice--about everything from Donald Rumsfeld to Gertrude Stein and the pope. Then the other day I was driving on the H-1 toward the university off-ramp in Honolulu. I found myself behind a small SUV with a Columbia College-Chicago sticker on the back. I thought vaguely of Tony, Chicago, and lunch. We both exited, but I lost the other car. As I drove up University Avenue into Manoa, I found myself behind a car whose license plate read SHIMMY.

It had happened again. A website devoted to Carl Jung's ideas (many of which you can pay for) tells me that "the term synchronicity is coined by Jung to express a concept that belongs to him. It is about acausal connection of two or more psycho-physic phenomena." Or, as Rod Serling notes, "There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition."

This chance event, which connected me back to a moment a month earlier, is hardly earth-shaking, but it joins a long list of such events that I've noticed in recent years, more and more as I grow older and coincidence becomes less coincidental, more personal. A friend tells me she also notices synchronicities but doesn't talk about them much, since such perceptions are thought to indicate an unbalanced mind. Under "apophenia," The Skeptic's Dictionary reports: "Those of us who have had the pleasure of spending some time with a person having a psychotic episode have often been asked to see the significance of such random things as automobile license plate numbers, birthdates, and arrangements of fallen twigs." I remember being told about a man with psychotic bi-polar disorder who thought of Robert F. Kennedy every time he saw white socks, which he remembered RFK wore. What's unbalanced about that?

I've got the license plate covered, I guess. And the automotive thread runs deeper than Shimmy's plates. A few years ago I was teaching Catch-22 in my American Literature Since the 1950s course. In that book, you may recall, there is a "man in white" in the military hospital who lives inside a cocoon of bandages, or swaddling clothes, his one leg in traction. No one quite knows if he's still alive, and so he gets yelled at, teased, and otherwise used as a foil for Joseph Heller's arch wit. On the way home from class one day, going the other way on H-1 from where I saw the sticker the other day, I needed to merge into the right lane to get closer to the Likelike exit lane. So I looked over into that lane. I saw an ambulance such as I'd never seen before, like a long station wagon with windows in the back, through which I could see . . . someone lying on a cot covered in white sheets, with one leg up in the air.

That semester took an odd turn for the synchronous, even as I nearly drove off the road after spotting the man in white. (I exaggerate for effect, having learned that from my mother, but more on her in a bit.) Let's just say that our readings of Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison featured episodes of amazing synchronicity. The week of China Men found me at a lawyer's office with a Chinese graduate student trying to stay in the USA. The week we read Morrison an email appeared in my box from a man in Alabama who was writing the memoirs of his time working for Stokely Carmichael (and who wanted publishing advice from me, of all people). The students starting finding the readings in their worlds, too.

After my mother died this summer, I wrote about what happened later that evening in this blog post:

Ellen took me home with her and Steve. They & Max asked about my father. I offered history: Michigan farm, auto plant, air force (when it integrated, he knew Tuskegee airmen), IBM, Western Union. Ellen said, Jerry Lawler. Jerry Lawler! My father's Irish friend, office roommate of Col. Dudley Stevenson, Tuskegee airman. Steve called Jerry; we explained the coincidence. He darted off to find a letter. Please, do you mind? I'm looking. Dear Jerry, the letter read. My father's voice, Irished. Jerry, you never put yourself above others, gave credit to them & did not take it. The experience of an Irish immigrant. Martha & Susan join me in wishing you a long & enjoyable retirement.

Not too long after, I got a Tinfish order from a Korean-American woman in McLean, Virginia, who lives very near the road my mother lived on for well over 30 years (and I for some of those). The other day, I met a Korean-American poet new to Honolulu, and found that she grew up in Meadville, Pennsylvania, the small town north of Pittsburgh where my mother was born and where she attended Allegheny College. I don't know what to make of this. Gestures from the beyond, happy coincidences, random chance events that attach to the velcro of personal experience? The question "what do they mean?" might be part of the answer, in fact. These events are not results (as in effects that follow causes) but triggers.

While the meaning of these events remains mysterious, their forms and processes do not. These are poetic links, poetic forms. Perhaps I write the way I do because the world is structured in this way. Or perhaps the world is structured in this way because my work in poetry has trained me to see it so. These are instants that contain meaning, though I'm hard pressed to say what these meanings are. Their message may have more to do with the making of meanings than in any stable meanings themselves. Making is usually more interesting than what is made, is it not? I find comfort in hearing my father's voice on the evening my mother died; I enjoy meeting unlikely people from the place where she was born and near where she died. But is comfort in itself meaning-full? Or does it come from a brief brush against what just might be meaning? The world's wit putting two things together that never seemed to fit before? The notion that the world itself generates meaning, that it's not all our minds? I just don't know. Nor does it bother me over much. I'm not Thomas Hardy, though I do appreciate his coincidence-laden books more now (at least in my memory of them).

I suppose that half the fun is in following the synapses, the lightning flashes, and then detaching from the meanings that arrive. As an adoptive mother, I often resent the discussions about "who gets what from whom," as if DNA were a certain marker of such qualities as humor or sense of direction or love for ketchup. But then again, I enjoy moments when I realize that my daughter's utter lack of a sense of direction is like my mother's (if she turns left, go right), or that my son's sweetness resembles my father's. Meaning is a guide, but it doesn't get us anywhere certain. Except perhaps on H-1 at rush hour, looking for more random chance events to occur.

Gerard Genette do the narrative police in different voices; or, the 2011 World Series DVD

2011-12-06T10:35:00.001-08:00

[Our Cardinals shrine, October, 2011, with Tortilla]

The St. Louis Cardinals clinched the Wild Card on the last day of the regular season, September 28; they won the World Series exactly one month later. During those four weeks, I watched almost every pitch of every game they played; when my husband, Bryant, and son, Sangha, were home, they did, too. Our daughter, Radhika, watched a lot of it, and had to find a ride home from soccer during Game Six because darkness fell during the baseball game and we would not leave our television screen. (If you're wondering about this detail, night games occur during the afternoon in Hawai`i.) So "watch" is too weak a word; I lived and died on every pitch. I screamed on some of them, and my son slammed doors downstairs in his room on others. When games got terribly stressful, I could hear Sangha outside hitting a ball with his own bat, doubtless imagining a good outcome for our Redbirds. October was the "baseball research" month of my sabbatical; if any administrators are reading this, the rest of my sabbatical was devoted utterly to my writing and research, I promise you that. Well, except for this earlier post . . .

That was the story. The DVD that arrived in the mail the other day is discourse. Who knows why the moment when Prof. Michael Levenson unveiled this distinction by way of Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman, was so memorable to this poetry person during her muddled graduate school career? I don't remember much more than that distinction (see this entry on Genette's narratology for all that's been lost to me over time), but I'm thinking of it now as I consider the move from the postseason to its memorializing by MLB Productions, as narrated by Jon Hamm of St. Louis. The 2006 video was narrated by Tommy Lee Jones, whose intonation on "they had forgotten what it meant to be a member of the St. Louis Cardinals" was as perfect as Pavarotti's . . .

By now, the 2006 DVD has re-organized my memories of most of what happened that year. But 2011 is still so fresh in my mind and recently adrenaline-drenched body that the DVD works against memory, like backwash. To mix metaphors from flood to drought conditions, it feels like sandpaper between the synapses; I want to resist its intrusions, even as I watch it (again). Of course it leaves stuff out. That it provided me the occasion to teach Radhika the meaning of "foreshadowing," when Nelson Cruz is shown running for a fly ball during practice, many hours before he failed to rein in Freese's 9th inning triple in Game Six, is gravy, but not meat. Where suspense was most acutely constructed over time--strike, ball, ball, strike, then what?--the DVD replaces these acuities with the single pitch, delivered in super slow motion, heightened by music. Yes, David Freese (it's almost always David Freese) gets that crucial hit, but the drama's contrived rather than lived. My memory still lives in that present tense of mid-October, but the DVD wants it to abstract itself, become historical time, lose immediacy and then recover it through gimmicks. Not yet!

There's the matter of the squirrel. The squirrel did not simply author an odd event; s/he was a mythological being. (When Tony LaRussa suggested that the squirrel was female and was hanging out with Jason Motte's male glove, he was corrected by the tortoise, but more on this in a bit.) While there is a clip of the Busch Stadium squirrel running across the plate between Skip Schumaker and Roy Oswalt of the Phillies (this was the NLDS) we don't get the aftermath of that famous moment (prefigured when the squirrel ran behind third base the day or two before). First, here's the squirrel in action. It does not run, it leaps, all four legs sailing through the air:

First, Oswalt freaked. Second, the squirrel became a cult figure, emblazoned on rally towels and shirts, made into stuffed animals waved by fans at the stadium, covered in the St. Louis media.
The squirrel was captured when the teams went to Philadelphia, and taken to a park, so that he never again appeared on national television. Third, the squirrel acquired a twitter feed. It was not so good a twitter feed as Jason Motte's glove, Sir Glovington A. Wilson, which was not so good as Allen Craig's tortoise, Torty Craig's feed, but it was a twitter feed nonetheless.

Torty Craig's last tweet warmed this poet's heart: "'The shell must break before the bird[s] can fly.'" - Alfred Lord Tennyson | Our #STLCards have flown to the greatest of heights. #11in11" But throughout the playoffs, TortyCraig wrote stories about the Cardinals' clubhouse, stories that moved in backwards order of his tweets (what say you to that, Gerard Genette?). The mystery of his authorship consumed a good deal of my time. I assumed he was outfielder Allen Craig (or Master Allen, as Torty called him), but sometimes he tweeted just after Master Allen hit a home run. I thought I'd busted him, calling out one of the Vivaelbirdos.com writers (who is studying for his MFA), but word came back, via Aaron Belz, that DanUpBaby had denied authorship. Aaron wrote a piece on Huffington Post about Torty Craig. Aaron, himself a Cards fan-poet-tweeter, knows poetry when he sees it: "Like a poem by Ezra Pound, it's compact, strange, and manic. Other tweets are downright absurdist: 'Sometimes Jason Motte's glove joins our conversations. That is to say that Jason & his glove talk & Jason & I talk. I can't hear his glove.' Welcome to the 21st century, we guess."

The DVD leaves out the poetry, the mythology, the tweets, time's chronological passage into suspense and sometimes nauseating anxiety (as during Game Six of the World Series, when the Cards came back not once but twice from being two runs down with two outs and two strikes on the batter, only to win on Freese's walk-off home run in the 11th inning). It replaces real time angst with sentiment, the sometime tedium of the game with constant action, lives in the climax and denouement without really touching the narrative arc (do I have this at all right, oh prose writers of the world?). So what does it offer, aside from the nostalgia we yearn for and now have?

It gives us Lance Berkman's shoes. I kid you not. The most beautiful moment of the DVD comes when Berkman (late of the evil Houston Astros) comes up in the 10th inning of Game Six. The Cardinals are down by two, again, and there are two outs, again; Nolan Ryan has risen from his seat in his black coat and is nearly smiling. The Rangers are about to win the Series. But Berkman has not yet gone down two strikes. He has not yet hit the ball into center field to tie the game--again--and he has not yet looked at the camera (sans playoff beard) to say, "there was nothing in my head, nothing." He is at the plate. But we don't see him there when the camera shows us his shoes, toes pointed toward the plate from the left side (his better side), cleats metallic gray against dull dirt. We see his red and oh so carefully polished shoes. This image is worth the price of admission. It is the image of suspense, in the course of a seemingly endless game, but it is also the image of love--time spent--for the game. Time we do not see went into shining those shoes. Time we do not feel went into the selection of those shoes. Nobody else's shoes were so bright. Berkman later tells us that these at-bats go quickly. But that's his temporal field. For us, the moment was excruciating, and the DVD embraces the moment, holds it longer than it should, but winks at us, too, bright light flashing off red leather.

Here, discourse earns its cleats, trumps story, if only for a moment, and then David Freese hits his famous 11th inning shot to win the game, send the Series to 7, and we're back in the land of serious nostalgia, men in white and red romping across the field of view, Freese throwing his helmet down between third and home, celebrants leaping, tearing off his shirt, the all-too-quick return to cliche (alas only Berkman and the losing Rangers' players evade baseball cliches in the film, Berkman too clever and the Rangers' too disappointed to utter the obligatory "team efforts" and "we came to play baseballs").

Five years from now, the red shoes will have trumped Game Six's suspense as it was lived in real time. But for now, the playoffs and the Series are embodied memories, still capable of jump-starting my nerves. Besides, the full set of games is on order--being shipped as I write this--and I'm planning a Game Six party for just after Christmas, after Sangha knows what plot I've been hatching for his Christmas morning. The party will happen in real time, the game in realish historical time, and the result--however well foretold by the archive--will seem as astonishing then as it seemed in late October. I can believe the Cardinals won the Series, but I still cannot believe they won Game Six.

Neither could the New York Times, for three minutes during Game Six. They put out an article with this bold headline: HAPPILY REWRITING TEAM HISTORY, which chronicled--in what they thought was historical time--the victory of the Texas Rangers over the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. How do we characterize the narrative stance of the writer of this deluded paragraph?

Now there will be new pictures, iconic shots that will live in Texas sports lore. The Rangers blew the lead with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth before Josh Hamilton's two-run homer in the top of the 10th. It lifted Texas to a rollicking 9-7 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals, and shook the Rangers' status as the oldest baseball franchise without a championship.

No, there will be but one photograph, and this is it. No, wait, let me play you the video, in time:

For a while, my office computer was out of time. I'm on sabbatical, so I don't go in often, but every time I did, I'd turn the computer on and it would be stuck in September, 2011. The New York Times headlines were in that month, and so was the St. Louis Cardinals' home page. Jaime Garcia was pitching, and the Cards were chasing the Braves for the Wild Card. It was as if none of what I've just written about had happened. It was as if Kenny Goldsmith were teasing me with a conceptual month-before-the-Cardinals-won extended grab from every screen on the computer. Turned out the "work off-line" function had been turned on. When I unchecked the box, I was given back my present tense. Back in the world in which the Cardinals are 2011 World Champs, I feel a bit like Wordsworth crossing the Alps. Sublimity comes after. But not via DVD.

Game Six Forever.

[With thanks to the Cardinals facebook hui and farewell to LaRussa, if not quite Pujols. RIP Bob Forsch.]

Local Literature is Dead. Long Live Local Literature! R. Zamora Linmark, Janine Oshiro and new writing from Hawai`i

2011-11-27T21:47:00.000-08:00

I used to torture my students by asking them to define the word "local." They would quickly realize the pitfalls of talking about the word, especially to someone like me who, by virtue of her monolingual standard English and her pale face, was resolutely not local. For "local" usually referred to someone of Asian or Hawaiian descent who grew up in Hawai`i and spoke da kine Pidgin English (more properly Hawaiian Creole English). It was also a class marker, indicating someone who was working class, rather than the wealthier haole (outsider, white person). But I'd ask the question because we'd be reading "local literature," or poems, stories, novels, plays, by writers like Eric Chock, Darrell Lum, Gary Pak, Marie Hara, Lois-Ann Yamanaka and others. Knowing the definition allowed us to explore the ways in which these writers used local culture and language, sometimes pushing against its boundaries, but usually referring back to the plantation days, when locals and haole were set apart. Bamboo Ridge Press was the primary purveyor of local literature; the term grew to be defined by a certain style, content, and manner. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this was a revolutionary move; by 1990, when I arrived in Hawai`i, it was still seen as suspect to teach the stuff. It just wouldn't fly in New York, which was how you defined "universal."

Lee Tonouchi was once a budding local writer, the rightful descendant of Eric Chock, Joe Balaz, Rap Reiplinger and the other comedians. Tonouchi burst on the scene in the 90s as a funny writer who insisted on writing only in Pidgin; he famously got his M.A. in English at UHM writing only in Pidgin and then taught at KCC and HPU in Pidgin and then wrote essays about being a Pidgin speaker and a dictionary that archived Pidgin words and phrases. He was a second generation Bamboo Ridge writer. They published his book Da Word, which took local literature from the plantation to the local mall, where most people had gone after statehood and the demise of agriculture in the islands. His Pidgin was infused with phrases like "it's da bomb," whose origins seemed more continental than Hawaiian. But still, here was the local, transmogrified.

Tonouchi's new book is called Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son (Bess Press). He will launch the book this Wednesday. I've read the book, as I was asked to write a blurb for it (it seems dozens of us were!), but it's been a while. I'm not going to use this space to review the book's content, but to remark on the way it's being publicized. The local is dead. Even if Lum begins his remarks with the word "local," as in, "Locals know that we are Orientals, not Asian Americans which is why we could never speak of ejaculation, losing a mother, or enemas to our Oriental Faddah. Tonouchi speaks what we never said but wished we had to our own father, mother, and grandparents." But then the vocabulary shifts; even though Lum will end his blurb with an assertion that Tonouchi "speaks for us all," most of his blurb refers to Tonouchi's Okinawan roots: "His work is more than a confessional, a treatise on Okinawan pride, or just a tribute to his ancestors. This crafty humorist captures the innocence and wonderment of our youth trying to explain the world in the kind of twisted logic that seemed to make so much sense at the time. Check out his explanation of why Spam is the SUPER Okinawan food." In the "About This Book," we read that, "it's the essence of being an Okinawan in Hawai`i." In the brief bio, we read that Tonouchi is "one full-on 100 percent Uchinanchu yonsei."

This is not really news. The term "local" was always problematic, never as inclusive as its proponents claimed. Furthermore, some of Hawai`i's writers did not want to be included in it. After a mid-1990s confrontation between Bamboo Ridge and critics who claimed (with justification) that the journal published mostly local Asian writers and largely ignored Hawaiian and Pacific Islander writers, Bamboo Ridge began putting out issues devoted to local Korean literature, local Filipino literature, and--finally--Hawaiian drama. The Hawaiian journal `oiwi was born, and Hawaiian language and culture really took off at the UH and elsewhere. Since then, Bamboo Ridge has published local Asian, Hawaiian, and white writers (Ian McMillan, at least, though not as white) in recent years. McMillan, oddly enough, may have entered the field as one of the last "local writers," since there is as yet no "white writer" category here. If "local" was not a pie that everyone wanted to claim, this new pie was sliced relentlessly. But Tonouchi had been Da Pidgin Guerrilla for so long, so strong an advocate for the language that marked the local as the local, that it's hard to see him breaking out the ethnic marker. He's now Okinawan.

While the breaking-up of local literature was perhaps necessary, the way it happened is not without its own problems. And so what becomes of "local literature," now that it's something of a dead (or at least somnolent) metaphor? As one local writer said to me once, it's not entirely a good thing to take a category that created a cross-ethnic group and defined writers according to where they were born and raised and what language they spoke, and to chop it up into so many new segments, defined by nationality, ethnicity, blood. Where did local literature go? Might we want to recuperate some of its power to the world we're living in, which is not tied to the agricultural plantation, but to the tourist plantation and to international capital (as the APEC summit showed us recently)? I think it may be possible, if we re-frame the local as something more like glocal (awful word) or at least as a literature that looks off-island for inspiration and--yes--for content, argument, and audience. Something like Linton Kwesi Johnson's work (hardly cutting edge at this point!), which addresses itself to the world in a local language, or like some of the slam poets in Hawai`i, who address world issues like global warming and violence from their perch in Honolulu. Many, if not most, global problems exist here--are often magnified by our isolation and small size--so why not take on globalization, climate change, linguistic and species extinction across the boundaries we so easily assign ourselves? There are also those "universal" issues that have taken such a beating, like existence, old age, dying, death, survival.

I have two very different books on my desk. One is by a prominent writer who grew up in Hawai`i, wrote an important book while a student at UHM, and then moved away. The other is by a lesser known writer (this is her first book) who grew up in Hawai`i, left for many years, and has now returned. The first writer, R. Zamora Linmark, writes about culture, language, queerness; the second writer, Janine Oshiro, writes about loss, death, the ecstasies or discoveries that trauma makes possible. Neither one is a local writer, according to the old definition. And yet they offer what might be termed the global-local, or the diasporic-local, in the case of Linmark, or the spiritual-local, a place-bound wisdom writing, in Oshiro's case. I do not want to make too grand an argument based on poetry found in these two books, but I'd like to suggest that they may point us in a direction that is neither "local" in the old sense nor "ethnic" in the newer one.

Linmark's writing contains the higher quotient of the (old) local in it. He writes in Pidgin, often, and about growing up in Hawai`i. He offers us Manoa graveyard and Thomas Square, the UH Warriors (ne Rainbows), their coach, Filipino plantation workers. [That link is to a blog post I wrote on Linmark's response to Coach McMackin's slur against homosexuals in a press conference at Notre Dame.] He translates Frank O'Hara's encounter with the sun on Fire Island into an encounter with a coqui frog near Hilo, Hawai`i. He plays with Lorca, but sets the poem in Hawai`i. He also writes about the Philippines, often in verse that more resembles Robert Browning's writing than Lois-Ann Yamanaka's; his dramatic monologues have a lot of the Last Duchess in them. There's something old-fashioned about many of Linmark's poems, not so much in their content as in their craftedness; he makes his poems well. But Linmark's new book, Drive-By Vigils, published by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn, New York (ah, he's made it to New York City, after all!), as were his first two volumes of poetry, is not an instance of local literature. It is something else. It's also a book that includes Hamlet, Montgomery Clift, Charles Bukowski, meditations on growing older (turning 40), Anderson Cooper, world travel, and many many other topics. We could frame the Hawai`i poems using the global ones as markers, or do the opposite, but neither direction quite works. Linmark lives in all these locations, actual places and identities and languages, and he's hardly alone in that. If he hears Lorca in the voices of local boys, then Lorca is there.

Janine Oshiro doesn't name her places in Pier (Alice James) but Hawai`i is one of them, Iowa another. Portland is in the mix, too. There's an oblique reference to Hawai`i's plantations in "Intermission," which is more about peeing than about relations between ethnicities or classes. Her uncle speaks to her as she pees in the cane field.

"Say excuse me, girl,
before you go in these fields.
You never know what came
before, you never
know who's there." (42)

Here, Hawai`i's agricultural, economic history is not fact, or story, but a haunting. Instead of making the move much local literature did, that of recounting just what DID come before, just who WAS there (even if it exists in the imagination of those too young to know), Oshiro moves into the realm of spirit. Her poems come out of the death of the poet's mother when the poet was a child. The house in which they lived is appropriate to the subject of haunting, spirit, because it's set in a climate in which everything comes apart, no matter how material it might be. In "Relic," she writes about the impermanence of her mother's life in terms of the impermanence of the things in her mother's house:

An astonishing number of
harmful things can happen
to objects made out
of paper: foxing,
excreta of insects,
lux--that is to say,
our bodies rust. (31)

She reverses the field of metaphor. It's not that engines are like us, but that we, like engines, come apart. Oshiro grew up in the back of Ahuimanu Valley (here she is on the porch of that house) where I often take bike rides. It's an area where everything is always moist with humidity, rain. Mold, mildew, these are cousins. If they're not cared for, houses sink into the earth, their single-wall wood constructions precarious as thought, as the categories we invent, consume, and then throw away. They become relics, which means they no longer serve practical purpose, are rendered holy.

Neither Linmark nor Oshiro is a local writer; Linmark's roots are in Honolulu, Manila, and San Francisco, while his shoots spread to Spain and elsewhere. Oshiro's roots may be here, but her poems do not name this place, do not speak its local vernacular, seem more interested in its spirit than its substance. These are not critiques but possibilities. Hawai`i is at once a location--one fervently self-attached, at that--and the nexus of many other locations, actual and spiritual. What Linmark and Oshiro show us, in very different ways, is how we might begin from Hawai`i to include other locations, other languages, other ideas in the frame this place offers us. It's an exciting move away, and yet back, exclusive and then in- . In another, similar, context (and with more polemical force than I can muster), Stuart Kelly writes, "Scotland might be about to enter the world. Hopefully its newest writers will want to see what the world has to offer." Substitute Hawai`i for Scotland and you might be onto something.

My hunch is that Lee Tonouchi's new book, while seeming to re-define him as Okinawan, will prove more expansive than the PR promises. While Tonouchi is moving into narrower ethnic territory, his work is gaining in emotional force. Where he used to write about going to the mall, the difficulties of speaking Pidgin, and made fun of local foibles, he is now writing--for the first time, I think--about his mother's death when he was a child. In that, and in other ways I look forward to discovering at Wednesday evening's reading, I suspect his work has more in common with Janine Oshiro's than one might think. The after-life of local literature may be something more akin to world.

"In God's name don't think of it as Art": On first (belatedly) reading _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_, by James Agee

2011-11-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

To give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and interest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. James Agee

__________

When I put James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on the reading list for Spring, 2012's Documentary Poetry course, I had not yet read the book. I am only two-thirds of the way through as I write this. More precise than almost any book I've read--the lists of animals, of clothing, of furniture, are astonishing--Agee's style cycles between Whitman and Faulkner and a rural Ginsberg, between Objectivism and raw subjectivity. He ushers in C.D. Wright's South decades before she began to write her prescient books. Reading it feels at times like being a hamster in a wheel; all the pressure is to move forward quickly, traveling back again and again to a starting point that disappears as quickly as it reasserts itself.

I expected the documentation; what I did not expect were the extended, sometimes self-corroding, sometimes transparently self-justifying, episodes of poetics. It's a self-defending artifact, doing and then reasoning about the doing. I want to think more about this reasoning because it opens a space from which to teach documentary poetry and prose. More than that, Agee brings together the actual, the ordinary, the factual and the spiritual, the intangible, the sacred, in ways few other documentary poets do. Using a word introduced to me by Leonard Schwartz, I will say that Agee is a "sobjectivist," finding subjectivity in the objects of the southern tenant world, and a need for precise, objectivist description in the persons of that world. If he loses the political force of using the few to represent the many, and so to press for change, he gains the moral force of thickly describing particular places and the people who fight to live there. While acknowledging that the ambition of his project takes him outside the provenance of language, he writes: "yet in withholdings of specification I could but betray you still worse" (89).

Nowhere does the perceived gap between material fact and spiritual presence seem as great as in situations like the those Agee describes, inventories, catalogues, details, worries over. He is writing about people who are dirt poor, whose houses offer only partial shelter against the elements, who do not own the land they work or most of the proceeds from it. To find beauty here can seem condescending, demeaning, naive. How to make it otherwise is one of Agee's central projects. Here he describes himself as a "cold-laboring spy," who

shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishing on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: (117)

Beauty to a tenant farmer is either impossible or it's a decoration taken from advertising and applied to the walls near the fireplace. Agee devotes a page and a half to the "pretty things" the Ricketts put on their walls. Ad copy tries to sell you expensive things, but it's cheap art. Agee is not, as he tells us over and again, interested in art; he wants some notion of the real to come through in his writing. And that real is beautiful, more beautiful than art. And so the houses are beautiful:

It is my belief that such houses as these, approximate, or at times by chance achieve, an extraordinary 'beauty.' In part because this is ordinarily neglected or even misrepresented in favor of their shortcomings as shelters; and in part because their esthetic success seems to me even more important than their functional failure; and finally out of the uncontrollable effort to be faithful to my personal predilections, I have neglected function in favor of esthetics. (177)

The moral problem becomes clear later, when Agee asserts that the house's beauty is set against its "economic and human abomination," but "that one is qualified to insist on this only in proportion as one faces the brunt of his own 'sin' in so doing and the brunt of the meanings, against human beings, of the abomination itself" (178). There's no purity here, no Wallace Stevens's-like elevation of poverty into abstraction. It's as if, in Agee's terms, poverty descends rather than ascends into beauty. And that's a problem. Agee's hatred for "reformers" is perhaps due to a sense that they, like Stevens, abstract their focus rather than materialize it. He refers to this as the movement to "Improv[e] the Sharecropper" (189). On the other hand, it's hard to sympathize with Agee's attacks on rural electrification (he loves lamps!) and on the toilet, for the American obsession with "sterility" to which it testifies.

The extent to which we need to elevate "abominations" into livable conditions, while acknowledging the beauty of these abominations is an unsolvable problem. The tent city on the sidewalk beside Old Stadium Park in Honolulu poses the same question. The tent city across from K-Mart off Nimitz is another. The line of tents up the Waianae coast is another. And another and another.

Yet Agee insists not simply on beauty in poverty, but the "lucky situation of joy" that occurs when the perceiver is put in a position to notice the actual world. Somewhere between the actual (even the non-toilet, the non-art, the car's exhaust) and the writer's perception of it there's a spark. "[I]n any rare situation which breaks down or lowers our habitual impatience, superficial vitality, overeagerness to clinch conclusion, and laziness," offers the writer that joy. Beauty in poverty is greater than beauty in art because actual conditions are real, and art is not. Agee throws imagination out with the (infrequent) bath water and offers as clear a poetics of documentary writing as I've seen anywhere:

I will be trying here to write [this is on page 213!] of nothing whatever which did not in physical actuality or in the mind happen or appear; and my most serious effort will be, not to use these 'materials' for art, far less for journalism, but to give them as they were and as in my memory and regard they are. If there is anything of value and interest in this work it will have to hang entirely on that fact. . . I am in this piece of work illimitably more interested in life than in art (213-214).

"I hate art" becomes "I love actuality."

Actuality can bite back. There are big problems with Agee's project, problems Jonathan Morse gets at on his blog, The Art Part:

In 1980, Howell Raines of the New York Times revisited the three poor Alabama families of whose lives James Agee and Walker Evans made immortal art forty years earlier in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Those forty years, it turned out, had reduced Agee's gusty prose to sentimental fiction. The pathetic little girl whose imminent death Agee movingly predicted, for example, was still alive in 1980 -- and a high school graduate, and six feet tall, and full of hatred for the artists who had once, long ago, picked up her tiny body, made it into a specimen, and then dropped it back into the dirt of Hale County, Alabama, and driven away.

Agee's multi-genre work did include "sentimental fiction," at least in retrospect. That is not its strength. What is strong, it seems to me as I read it now, is the density of detail--as if Agee were as much a shopkeeper as a writer, or maybe just a belated Melville--and in his self-examinations in the face of the task. He finds "the dignity of actuality" in tenant farmers and their few possessions, and posits beauty and sacredness in that actuality. The ad copy provides tenant farmers with small spots of beauty over their fireplace; in Agee's book it is not those pictures but the list of them that is beautiful. The fact of their being there is what makes them beautiful, and the desire for beauty behind them. As Elizabeth Bishop noted of the filling station, itself a beautiful, troubling poem, there is a (feminine) presence behind the doily in the oily shop. She's as interested in that presence as in the doily.

It's where invisibility meets the visible, the hidden hand meets the open eye, that Bishop (and Agee) find the spirit. It's precarious and troubling, but the unsettled (con)fusions are what finally join inventory to art. Book and photographs have shifted from the category of documentation to that of art (the Frank photographs sold at steep prices, according to Jonathan Morse, and netted nothing for their subjects). Or maybe it's in their wavering between art and actuality that the real force of our projects needs to reside. As Agee argues, description is not enough and yet what else is there? The what else is something we bring to the language, some notion of the sacredness of the actual, even if--especially--it is poor in substance or mercantile value.

__________

The other day, the New York Times put up a video clip from a forthcoming Errol Morris film. We see and hear a man (aptly monikered Tink) who has been obsessed with the JFK assassination for many decades, but who is not a conspiracy theorist. He tells us the story of "the umbrella man" who stood next to Kennedy's motorcade at the moment he was shot. He tells us about the conspiracy theories that emerged from his being there, the only man in Dallas who carried an umbrella on that sunny day. And then he tells us that the man was found, years later, and testified before Congress. His umbrella had not had to do with weather, or even with the sun, but with his anger at JFK's father for supporting Neville Chamberlain, who carried an umbrella and who made nice with Adolph Hitler. Nothing is so wacky as ordinary fact, this man tells us on the film clip. Any event, if you look at it closely enough, becomes strange, opens up to our quests for meaning, our tortured intelligences. The man named Tink told this story with something like joy inscribed on his face. Ordinary explanations are way more strange than extraordinary ones, he told us.

Here's a book list for this Spring. Insufficient, I know! And here's a blog post I wrote on teaching documentary poetry.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee & Walker, Mariner Books

Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, University of California Press
Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine, Graywolf Press
Coal Mountain Elementary, Mark Nowak, Coffee House Press
I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning, Kristin Prevallet, Essay Press
from unincorporated territory [saina], Craig Santos Perez, Omnidawn
Things Come On: an amneoir, Joseph Harrington, Wesleyan
Green-Wood, Allison Cobb, Factory School
We will also read Murial Ruykeyser's Book of the Dead (1938) in pdf or xerox form. I will also recommend a slew of other texts for anyone who is interested.
After asking for suggestions toward a list of readings in documentary prose on facebook, I got the following recommendations:

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs or The Soccer War & Studs Terkel

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn & Gary Young, No Other Life
Grand Avenue (a novel in stories), by Greg Sarris, Life Lived Like a Story (Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders), by Julie Cruickshank, and Immigrants in Our Own Land, Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, two books of poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca.
Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
Books by Juan Goytisolo
I welcome more suggestions. In the meantime, thanks to Ragnar, Molly, Sergio, and Pam for these possibilities.
Sergio Pereira sent the following list of documentary poetry and prose. What a treasure trove!

Dear Susan,

Here is a 'river-list' of books that I read over the years and perhaps some/most of them

can fit into the category of documentary poetry & documentary prose that you are working

with great talent and dedication.

Best regards,

Sergio

-------------------<>--------------------

Documentary poetry:

Clark Coolidge, The Act of Providence, Combo Books

Roy K. Kiyooka, Pacific Windows - Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, Talonbooks

Mitsuye Yamada, Camp Notes and Other Writings, Rutgers University Press

Jessica Hagedorn, Danger and Beauty, City Lights Books

Daphne Marlatt, The Given, McClelland & Stewart // Ghost Works (prose & poetry), NeWest

Carter Revard, Winning the Dust Bowl (prose & poetry), The University of Arizona Press

Gu Cheng, Sea of Dreams - The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng, New Directions Books

Breyten Breytenbach, Judas Eye, Faber and Faber

Harry Robinson, Living by Stories - A Journey of Landscape and Memory, Talonbooks

Harry Robinson, Native Power - In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller, Douglas & McIntyre

Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives, Green Integer

Miyazawa Kenji, Selections, University of California Press

Miguel Algarín, Love is Hard Work - Memorias de Loisaida, Simon & Schuster

Juan Felipe Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (prose & poems), The University of Arizona Press

Louise Bernice Halfe, Bear Bones & Feathers, Coteau Books // Blue Marrow, Coteau Books // The Crooked Good, Coteau Books

Joseph Bruchac, Ndakinna (Our Land) - New and Selected Poems, West End Press

Baisao, The Old Tea Seller - Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Kyoto

Kimberly Blaeser, Apprenticed to Justice, Salt Publishing

Duane Niatum, The Crooked Beak of Love, West End Press

Ricardo Sánchez, Canto y Grito Mi Liberación - The Liberation of a Chicano Mind Soul, Washington State University Press

Eric Gansworth, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function - poems and paintings, Syracuse University Press

Wendy Rose, Itch Like Crazy, The University of Arizona Press

Gregory Scofield, Native Canadiana - songs from the urban rez, Polestar Book Publishers // Singing Home the Bones,

Polestar Publishers

Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Life Woven with Song, The University of Arizona Press

James Thomas Stevens, Combing Snakes from His Hair, Michigan State University Press

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera - The New Mestiza (prose & poems), Aunt Lute Book Company

Luci Tapahonso, Sáanii Dahataal - The Women Are Singing (poems & stories), The University of Arizona Press

Luci Tapahonso, Blue Horses Rush In - Poems and Stories, The University of Arizona Press

T'ao Ch'ien, The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien, Copper Canyon Press

Su Tung-p'o, Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o, Copper Canyon Press

Wei Ying-wu, In Such Hard Times - The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, Copper Canyon Press

Cherríe L. Moraga, Loving In The War Years (prose & poetry), South End Press // The Last Generation - Prose & Poetry,

South End Press

Kamau Brathwaite, DS (2) - dreamstories // Elegguas, Wesleyan University Press

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Dark and Perfect Angels, Cinco Puntos Press

Maurice Kenny, On Second Thought - A Compilation (prose & poetry), University of Oklahoma Press

Matsuo Basho, Basho's Haiku - The Selected Poems of Matsuo Basho, State University of New York Press

Kobayashi Issa, The Spring of My Life and Selected Poems (prose & haiku), Shambhala Publications

Santoka Taneda, Mountain Tasting - Haiku and Journals of Taneda Santoka, White Pine Press

Ana Castillo, My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, W. W. Norton

Simon J. Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning, The University of Arizona Press // Out There Somewhere, The Univ. of Arizona Press

Documentary prose (memoirs, essays, autobiography)

Leslie Scalapino, R-hu, Atelos // Zyther & Autobiography, Wesleyan University Press

Ted Greenwald, Clearview/LIE, United Artists Books

David Antin, i never knew what time it was, University of California Press

Ron Silliman, Under Albany, Salt Publishing,

Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness - Writings, 2000-2010, Duke University Press

Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun - Notes on a Vocation, Graywolf Press

Lyn Hejinian, My Life, Green Integer

Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger Journals, Station Hill Press

Michael Gottlieb, Memoir and Essay, Faux Press

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge - A Memoir, Viking Penguin

Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, City Lights Books

Aaron Shurin, King Of Shadows, City Lights Books

Kamau Brathwaite, The Zea Mexican Diary, The University of Wisconsin Press

Jalal Toufic, Over-Sensitivity, Sun & Moon Press

Keith Waldrop, Light While There is Light - An American History, Sun & Moon Books

Fred Wah, Diamond Grill, NeWest

J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Oxford University Press

Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Ono Ono Girl's Hula, The University of Wisconsin Press

bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Homegrown - engaged cultural criticism, South End Press

bell hooks, Remembered Rapture - The Writer at Work, The Women's Press

Breyten Breytenbach, Mouroir, Archipelago Books // Intimate Stranger - A Writing Book, Archipelago Books // Dog Heart - A Memoir, Faber and Faber

Breyten Breytenbach, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, Return to Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Faber and Faber

Gerald Vizenor, Interior Landscapes - Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, University of Minnesota Press

Louis Owens, I hear the Train - Reflections, Inventions, Refractions, University of Oklahoma Press

Bill Reid, Solitary Raven - Selected Writings of Bill Reid

N. Scott Momaday, The Names - A Memoir, The University of Arizona Press // The Way To Rainy Mountain, University of New Mexico Press

N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words - Essays, Stories, Passages, St. Martin's Griffin

Diane Glancy, Claiming Breath, University of Nebraska Press // The Cold-and-Hunger Dance, University of Nebraska Press

Diane Glancy, The West Pole, University of Minnesota Press // In-Between Places, The University of Arizona Press

Alurista, as our barrio turns...who the yoke b on?, Calaca Press

Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter - Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America, Temple University Press

Alfred Arteaga, House with the Blue Bed, Mercury House

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, Vintage Books

Kenneth Lincoln, The Good Red Road - Passages Into Native America, University of Nebraska Press

W. S. Penn, All My Sins Are Relatives, University of Nebraska Press // This is the World, Michigan State University Press

Ray A. Young Bear, Black Eagle Child - The Facepaint Narratives, University of Iowa Press

Ray A. Young Bear, Remnants Of The First Earth, Grove Press

Carter Revard, Family Matters,Tribal Affairs, The University of Arizona Press

Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over The World - A Native Memoir, W. W. Norton

Joseph Bruchac, Bowman's Store - A Journey To Myself, Lee & Low Books

Anita Endrezze, Throwing Fire at the Sun,Water at the Moon (prose & poetry), The University of Arizona Press

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer - A Story of Survival, University of Nebraska Press

Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail - The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, The University of Arizona Press

Darryl Babe Wilson, The Morning The Sun Went Down, Heyday Books

Mavis McCovey and John F. Salter, Medicine Trails - A Life in Many Worlds, Heyday Books

Eva Tulene Watt and Keith H. Basso, Don't let the Sun Step Over You - A White Mountain Apache Family Life, 1860-1975, The University of Arizona Press

Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller - A Chief and Her People, St. Martin's Griffin

Jeannette Armstrong, Slash, Theytus Books

Refugio Savala, Autobiography of a Yaqui Poet, The University of Arizona Press

Matsuo Basho, Basho's Journey- The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho (prose & haibun), State University of New York Press

Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand, Grove Press

Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving The Dream, University of California Press

From Washington, DC, Dave Taylor sends another list of possibles:

Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman
Telling True Stories, eds. Kramer & Call
The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje with Walter Murch
which leads into film:
Buddha’s Lost Children, Mark Verkerk
In the Realms of the Unreal, Jessica Yu
Mysterious Object at Noon, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The Source, Chuck Workman

Back to prose and graphic novel memoirs with:
Away from the Light of Day, Amadou and Mariam
Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation, Harvey Pekar
Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

A further installment of "Read a Memo": Chancellor Katehi's UC-Davis memos

2011-11-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

The header to this blog reads Thoughts on book publishing, editing, contemporary poetry, dementia, and teaching by the editor of Tinfish Press. It's time to add one more to these someone high-flown categories listing the obsessions of Tinfish's editor. The new category, which has been touched on more than once before on these virtual pages, is that of "administrative memos." As far as I can tell, the most widely read of my posts was one I wrote in October 2009 in response to a memo from the President of UH, M.R.C. Greenwood, who lamented the UH faculty's refusal to sign a contract that would have cut salaries with no promise of pay-back. What struck me most strongly about that memo was the president's use of pronouns. Where naively faculty think of the "we" of the university as its students and faculty, President Greenwood used "we" to denote the administration: "The university is disappointed in the UHPA vote to reject our contract offer." UHPA is the faculty union, and the vote (hence) was that of the faculty. That sentence let us know that "we" were no longer the university, but that--like children--we had disappointed the parental "we" of the university's administration.

This past week has seen "Occupy" demonstrations across the country. After one at Berkeley resulted in a confrontation between police, students, and two prominent poets, including Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass, the latter a former US poet laureate, students at UC-Davis demonstrated. A flurry of protests must needs garner a raft of memos, these from Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Once again, the content of the "we" is at issue.

The first memo, dated 11/18/2011, is written to ask students to take down their tents by 3 p.m., a request that comes only after several paragraphs of administrative prose, asserting at once a desire to support free speech, and the need to shut it down. As later discussions of what would happen that day at Davis revolve around questions of responsibility, I will quote the paragraph in which the Chancellor invokes that word:

However, we also have a responsibility to our entire campus community, including the parents who have entrusted their students to us, to ensure that all can live, learn and work in a safe, secure environment without disruption. We take this responsibility seriously. We are accountable for what occurs on our campus. Campus policies generously support free speech, but do include limited time, place and manner regulations to protect health, safety and the ability of students, staff, and faculty to accomplish the University mission. If an unfortunate incident occurs as a result of violations of these limited regulations, we are all responsible.

I'm not sure who the "we" is here, although I gather it must be an administrative--rather than (or as!) a royal--we. The responsibility is that of guardians of the children of parents who send those kids to UC-Davis, and it's a responsibility that includes the oft-bruited "health" and "safety" rationales used by many of the nation's mayors in recent weeks. Hence, "we are accountable for what occurs on our campus," sounds at first blush like a claim by administration to bear this tough, adult, weight. But the last sentence blurs the "we" into another realm, that of the students: "If an unfortunate incident occurs as a result of violations of these limited regulations, we are all responsible." The "we" has grown to include the student body here. We administrators are responsible for your health and safety until such time as you are not healthy or safe, when it's also your responsibility . . . Rather than take down their tents and patiently await what the Chancellor referred to as, "continued productive and peaceful discourse moving forward," the students held their ground. Many of them locked arms and sat on the sidewalk, while others encircled the area.

What happened next is all over youtube, facebook, and other media, namely the actions of one aptly-named Lt. John Pike, who sprayed seated students with pepper spray as if they were roses infested by bugs, or maybe just bugs. The outcry was immediate, and so was the administrative response. Another memo emerged, also dated 11/18. In it the Chancellor wrote much the same thing she'd written in the first memo. The prose was as if stirred in a large pot, with notions of "health" and "safety" and responsibility to parents circulating with only slightly more agitation than in the first memo of the day. But this prose does not serve as advance warning, which includes a notion of administrative responsibility; rather, it serves the purpose of removing responsibility from the equation, at least from Admin's point of view. Hence, the re-word "responsibility" comes to be replaced by the re-word, "regret," as in: "We deeply regret that many of the protesters today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested. We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpired to facilitate their removal." In this sentence, "we" are back among the administration, but this "we" is not responsible, but somehow sad that their responsibility came to naught. If regret replaces responsibility for the administrators, then responsibility must be given over to "the protesters," many of whom--she writes--are not from UC-Davis at all, but from the "outside."

The ethical continental divide comes in the sentence after the one about "protesters" who "chose"--active ones!--in the next sentence: "We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpire to facilitate their removal." It was not Lt. Pike who removed them, in large part by spraying chemicals in their faces and then having them forcibly taken away, it was "the events that transpired." These events transpired not to remove them, but to "facilitate their removal."

Student response to these memos and the actions ordained, excused, and then displaced by them, was brilliant. Students surrounded the building the Chancellor was meeting in. When she finally emerged from the building, she was obliged to walk several blocks to her car in the dark, surrounded by students seated (as their pepper-sprayed colleagues had been) on the ground. No one made a sound. This use of silence was beautiful, and also politically effective. Silence carried a weight that was spiritual (both for the chancellor forced to examine herself on that walk, and for the students who were as-if--or who were--meditating together). Silence was the fullest of possible reponses. See video of her walk here.

The OED tells me that "responsibility" means:

1. Capability of fulfilling an obligation or duty; the quality of being reliable or trustworthy.

But it's more than that; the word "responsibility" includes within it the word "response." Responses are of many kinds, but responsible responses are, if we follow Steel's argument (after the parable of the Samaritan), neighborly. Suffice it to say that the police response to students at UC-Davis, was not neighborly, even if it was a response. Yesterday, I wrote about Leonard Schwartz's discussion of "little anger" and "big anger" in his new poems and in conversation. I'd like to transpose the "big anger" that shows itself not as anger but as something else (whether it's carnival or silence) into Steel's reading of neighborliness, while acknowledging that neither Brecht nor Schwartz are Christian, nor Steel necessarily angry. But if our (and I use "our" advisedly) anger is to be creative rather than corrosive, we need to transmute it into something like neighborliness. Let that be a responsibility between peers, not between parents, their proxies in university administration, and the rest of us children. Those kids last night were not much seen or heard, but their message was eloquently delivered.

Prepositions [sic] about rage: Leonard Schwartz, Makana, and the Angry Iraq War Vet

2011-11-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

"What am I to this table?" For me, the difficulties of learning another language were embedded in the problem of prepositions. Where I was in relation to a table, or a verb (do I give "to" or "of," or do I offer "up" or "at"?), or a lover, became near metaphysical problems, even if the answers were most easily accessible from rote memory. Whether this relation was static or moving, kind or hostile, was also in question. "He threw the ball at the batter" alters the sense of "he pitched to the batter," by a great deal, even if the ball travels in the same direction. The first statement suggests anger, the second a rule-bound exchange. The first threatens to begin a brawl that is not part of the game itself; the second is necessary to the game's plot.

Leonard Schwartz thinks much contemporary poetry is too direct in its expressions of anger. He argues for poetry that internalizes politics, feeling. Like Makana, who recently sang to APEC officials of his rage in a tone that had little to do with anger (Makana's tone was sweet), he wants to create the possibility for new thoughts and feelings without demanding them. So, the central trope of Schwartz's new book, At Element, is not awakening, but sleep. He doesn't work over his ideas; he sleeps on them. The mixed state of his sleeping--one of forgetting and meditation, inertia and act--allows him access to openness: "Thus all the writing I have done before this was preparatory to this new openness, to this fundamental address. I am at the beginning, finally" ("The Sleep Talkers," 74).

But back to anger. Anger is what holds us most firmly to ourselves. When I am angry I do not let the subject of my anger go, but I also do not let myself go (unless, of course, I "lose it," which is another matter). I am most myself when I am angry, or that's a statement I could argue my way through (as if statements were tunnels full of vines and waterfalls and I had to "make" my way through them toward the light at the end of my assertion). Schwartz writes: "In order to achieve this [a different way of being] I will need to liberate myself not from sleep but from a repetitive resentment that binds me to self-identity, and thus, to paranoia" (97). Elsewhere, he remarks on poets' tendency toward such repetitions, resentments. But that has to do with reputation, with making one's mark, and he's after something more central here, something closer to the actual bone. Let me quote a full paragraph:

In Polish there is a word, Zbnigew, that means "a man who has overcome his own anger." (Imagine the wisdom of a language that has a special word for a man who has overcome his own anger, and that people give to their children as a name.) In German it was Nietzsche who wrote so influentially about the French word resentment. Anger, then, and resentment, and paranoia, and that special Polish way of outgrowing them, Zbnigew. Also the English word awning.

Giving a child a name that means "to overcome his own anger," offers him a gift of foreknowledge. The child will get angry, as all children do, but he will also be able to fall back on his name; the name is a hint, a goad, to his overcoming. He will grow into (another preposition) his overcoming. So far as I know, no one has named their child "Awning," word that appears mysteriously at the end of the paragraph. But that word means "shelter," and it sounds a note of "awe." It may not mean overcoming anger, but at least it's an incline the anger can run off of, like rain water.

Sleep exists between light and dark, life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, identity and its effusions (like Whitman's jags in eddies). Sleep is freedom: "we make ourselves absent even when physically present and there is no shame in this, it is a form of our freedom, and when we become present again, one can feel the impact. As universal as sun on the beach, as riding the waves, as being too old for this activity, or too young for that" (89). To assert universality is a difficult thing in contemporary poetry, as in life. But Schwartz wants to go there. If anger is what separates us, even if it seems to make us whole as long as it lasts, then calm, sleep, blurred boundaries are what invite a fluid statelessness in, around, above, below, us. If Buddhism were not already secular, I'd be tempted to call this secular Buddhism.

This state enables Schwartz to imagine reconciliation between objectivity and subjectivity, or to tap into a pre-fab phrase offered to him in a car by Rob Fitterman, namely "sobjectivity." He reports that he laughed when he heard the word, but not too many short paragraphs later he relates, "Because of sobjectivity I feel free to imagine the voice of a suitcase, of a sock, of a rotting log or a crack in the sidewalk" (101). It also permits us to feel for the object, to "sob" in relation to it. For what object does not carry within itself its own decomposition, its own developing sadness?

Schwartz's meditations are more complicated than these brief remarks allow; there is, for example, a great deal of violence in his world, including an odd man-against-duck scene later in the piece, as well as the contest for priority in father-son relations. But he knows, as a bipolar friend once put it to me, that "anger is not the solution; anger is the problem." When we were confronted by a mutual friend who was extremely angry, corrosively so, at the state of the world, Leonard quoted Bertolt Brecht, whose "idea is that little anger is what we know as anger, the anger that blows off some steam, but never really leads to change . . . whereas big anger doesn't even look like anger, intent as it is on its purpose, which would only be upset by revealing itself as anger. It's in Mother Courage" (I quote here from a personal email). To extrapolate, while little anger turns on its carrier, eating its host, big anger moves outward. Little anger objectifies the self, while big anger sobjectifies.

__________

Video (provenance forgotten): An African American Iraq war vet in camouflage jacket faces down New York City cops. He yells and yells at them. "Why are you hurting these people? Why are you hurting them? If you want to hurt people, go to Iraq and hurt people. These are Americans. Why are you hurting them." His audience is a group of cops standing in the street. They are remarkably passive. They are letting him shout himself out, but he refuses to, and keeps yelling at them. He is the aggressor, if only verbally, and they the impassive listeners. It looks wrong. (It is wrong, as it is but one camera angle on a day of protest and police brutality.) There is a moment at which his anger, his pleading, his repetitions, reveal his own hurt; it is past this point I cannot watch the video without hurting myself. He is asking them not to hurt him. He has been hurt, and he has hurt others. This is his confession, his plea, his expiation.

I found him; he's Marine Corps Sgt. Shamar Thomas. Here's the video.

__________

The media can attack the Occupy movement for its carnival. They're banging drums. In a circle, no less. They're dancing. They have a library. Oh my, they have iPads. Some of them are yuppies, others homeless people, so some of them are too clean and some of them are too dirty. They chant things. They yell in unison. How quaint. But, like Makana's performance at the APEC dinner, these are not moments of silliness; they are our sorrow songs. If the "master" could not hear the "slave's" lament because it was sung, then the media cannot seem to hear the occupier's anger because it comes cloaked in joyful noise. Listen. There's rage there, and it's catching.

__________

Leonard Schwartz's new book is At Element, from Talisman Books. You can order it here.
Our 2008 conversation about memory, with 2011 photo, can be found here.

The photo is of Leonard Schwartz (foreground) and Tom Devaney (background) at Kelly Writer's House, University of Pennsylvania, September 2011.

The man with the dog; or, post-APEC ruminations

2011-11-15T10:11:00.000-08:00

The man with the dog is not young or old, though his face is marked by dents, creases. Someone says he has a job washing dishes in Waikiki, but can't get there now that the APEC conference (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation: for details, see below) is in full bloom. His dog is small and furry, mottled black and white; she wears a plastic tag that marks her as a "service dog." He took her into a store at Kam Shopping Center and the security guy demanded (loudly) to know his disability. He's got a complaint lodged. The man with the dog lives in a tent on the sidewalk; he can't live in the park--that's illegal--so he lives beside the curb on King Street, inches from the traffic, precarious in so many ways. His tent is but one of many; there's a line of
them from near Isenberg back to the taco shop, a good 50 yards of tents, blankets, neat piles of possessions. A trash can reads, "Eat shit and die," but mostly one is struck by the civility of this encampment. A woman rakes trash and leaves in the park near her tent. Someone has left a blanket in the park's corner, just that side of the sidewalk.

We protested APEC at the corner of King and Isenberg. A large tarp covered the table covered written matter you could take away with you; in one corner a silkscreen was set up to make APEC SUCKS teeshirts (writing over pre-existing language, like Michigan State, like Coach Susan); in another corner a Vietnam vet sat on a chair, talking to a friend. The man with the dog spent a lot of time with us. His dog did not like loud noises, so when we left on our march to Waikiki, he left her in the tent.

HDoug (who is everywhere!) tweets the following:

Bill 54 if passed will create a bill that will allow police to remove attended personal property from the sidewalk. We heard Honolulu Police boasting that this will allow them to remove the Occupy Honolulu encampment (as well as other "troublesome" encampments such as the recent Kanawai Mamalahoe puuhonua). This is designed to abridge the rights of free speech and peaceable assembly, and violate the Law of the Splintered Paddle.

At the point a bill like this passes, homelessness will itself be a form of protest--not the undertone, the spatial lament it is now, but active. even in its staying in place. Subject to being thrown off the last sliver of ground they have left, the homeless will have become illegals, aliens, interlopers on the common areas of sidewalk, park, beach. Will they then move into the street?

The man with the dog (but without her) marched with us from Stadium Park into Waikiki on Saturday. I lost track of him early on. We were a thin line of several hundred souls, spirited, armed with cardboard signs, the best of which was probably the empty sign, with plastic window, a call for transparency. Earlier on, the policemen in blue had surrounded us, one of them with a video camera, shooting us as we gathered. Beside us now was a line of bicycle cops dressed in bright yellow. Among us were the omnipresent cops of the aloha shirt, who also sported straw hats to match. Hilo Hatties does good business with HPD, it seems. As we crossed the Ala Wai canal, we saw Coast Guardsmen encamped next to the water (the filthy water), their inflated dinghies at the ready.

On the other side of the canal, I spotted the President of UH, MRC Greenwood, walking toward, through, and then past our group. We made eye contact. And then we arrived at the real "security" force.

Around Fort DeRussy Park was a tall fence; the fence was filled in with dark material so you could not see what was in the park. An occasional break in the fence revealed more "security" on the other side. Along with our friends on their bikes, and our friends who looked like wacky tourists in their aloha shirts, we now encountered guardsmen in camouflage. Everyone had weapons. Military vehicles were parked here and there. There were concrete slabs around the guard posts, which were on the blocked-off street. The cops kept telling us to stay off the road and on the sidewalk. Occasionally, a dignitary in a suit would walk past on the road.

I had a point of reference for this display of armed force. It was Kathmandhu, Nepal in December 2004. We were there to adopt our daughter, Radhika, from Bal Mandir orphanage. Every street corner, it seemed, had a sentry post, and every sentry post was populated by soldiers with automatic weapons. Sangha, who was 5 at the time, loved seeing all the soldiers and waved to them as we rode past. "But Sangha, it's not a good sign when you're in a country where there are so many armed soldiers everywhere," I remember saying to him, hoping he'd remember those words when he was older.

I think of those words now. It's not a good sign when you are walking the streets of a city where you've worked for over 20 years and you see so many policemen, soldiers, humvees, guns, blockades. Whose security are we threatening? That's the question, whose answer is coming clear in the repeated attacks on Occupy (and here, de-Occupy) sites around the country. We are threatening someone's security. And there is perhaps some joy--and hope--in that. How much hope is yet to be seen.

This morning, we were told that H1 would be closed at 8:30 for Pres. Obama's motorcade. Bryant and Sangha were stopped at the end of H3 for one hour, beginning at 7:30 a.m. on the way to Sangha's school near Hickam AFB. More "security"--for whom and against whom, one wonders. Even if there were not reason to protest APEC (and there was), there is certainly reason to protest the near-imposition of martial law on a peaceful city during this past week.

Notes:

The official website of APEC can be found here.

A take-down of APEC by Eating in Public can be found here.

The "we" of the demonstration was multifarious. There were the (De)Occupy folks, the World Can't Wait supporters, the Moana Nui group, and a large group of anti-Chinese, anti-communist Vietnamese with bright yellow and red flags. Also protesting against APEC this week were members of the Falun Gong, among others. And there were a lot of UHM faculty there.

_Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series_: New book from Singing Horse Press

2011-11-09T09:54:00.001-08:00

I'm pleased to announce publication of my new book from Singing Horse Press in San Diego, designed by Eric Butler in Honolulu (designer of the Tinfish Retro Chapbook Series).

Please order from Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

The book is composed of nine sequences of 10 prose poems. except when I failed to count correctly. Each poem in a sequence begins from a randomly chosen phrase or line from a poet (among the poets are Lissa Wolsak, John Ashbery, and Albert Saijo). These poets, whom I was reading as I wrote the poems, write meditative, often abstract, poems. But the memory cards move from the abstract into the tangible, the local, the political. One of the sequences was published recently in EOAGH. So here's a sample.

Just as an aside, I ordered postcards for the book, which arrived during the seventh game of the World Series. Postcards about memory cards during the St. Louis Cards' World Series victory!

Losing It and other Midwestern Adventures, November 2011

2011-11-08T12:49:00.000-08:00

The man in the hotel told me to get on the subway at Clark and Lake, so I walked west along the Chicago River. As I crossed a street under the El, I saw a homeless African-American man (one of so many) sitting on an overturned barrel across the street from me. He was wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap. He saw me. "I like your cap," he yelled. "And I like yours!" I responded. I kept going. I got lost. I went back to him and asked for directions. Slipped him a bill, which he hadn't asked for. You're in the wrong place, he said. His directions proved true.

When I left Chicago, I walked by him again. We chatted briefly. I said, "I'm going home today," then felt a pang.

The Cardinals cap I wear on trips is a sign. It usually nets me very little except the right ride at the airport or the bus stop. On this trip, it got me a snide remark, but mainly thumbs ups, and good conversations about the Series. "I turned the game [six] off," said one flight attendant, making a sad face. Lauren Berlant said of Susan Lepselter's essay on a man who talked UFOs at her until she entered his world for a time, that her work is about "staying in a conversation." Baseball caps are oddly like UFOs in this. They create the chance for conversation. One usually stays in it for a while.

My conversations these days are mostly about Alzheimer's and dementia. This conversation, which occurs over and over, covering much of the same ground (yet never losing its blunt force) is like talking about a team. Except that all the plays seem to be errors. The Alzheimer's parent speaks in error, and we children act in error, because what else can we do. We are our own scorekeepers, and the score is not good. Error rhymes with terror, which is also part of the conversation.

At the University of Chicago we talked about "Losing It," which was the name of the symposium, organized by Lauren Berlant. Jennifer Montgomery ended up distressed by this phrase. She thought all of life was "losing it"--what's to distinguish one from the other instance of it? But in our panels and conversations the central sign of losing it involved the breakdown of time: cause and effect falter, then fall apart; appointments aren't kept, or are kept at the wrong time; memory escapes (though it comes to us adult children before it disappears completely). And space breaks down, too. People fall, break bones. This is not humility, but humiliation, though there might be a way back to humility through the work of writing and filming. Or do I mean "dignity," that over-used word?

I framed, or failed to frame, my paper at the U of C with a mention of ethics. My failure was in opening with that term, and then leaving it on the stoop, in the foyer, at the threshold, like a foundling. Lauren did not think I was talking about an ethical issue. But what if that move from humiliation to humility, or from trying to absorb the Alzheimer's patient into one's own I, is an ethical issue? Lauren also quoted Juliana Spahr's defense of the I to me, an argument against arguments against the lyric poem. Again, point taken. But if the I is to represent the world, it needs still to acknowledge that other somehow. My axe to grind is that the I in the memoir or poem about Alzheimer's, if it does not belong to the person with Alzheimer's, needs to keep a distance (dare I say "polite" or "ethical"--that sounds funny?) from the person who suffers it. I tried to explain using the Objectivists; my mother, while she was not a tree (in a Williams poem) deserves the same respect as he showed the tree. Just as the tree is not the poet's to possess, my mother is not mine to own. Lauren asked a question about questions: when are they out of curiosity, and when are they aggressive? I recognized a keen irony in this. My mother's questions were more often intrusive than curious. Her I tried to drown mine out too often. I was she, which was a continuity in her dementia, not a break. My work on her last years tries hard not to intrude, although it does leave so much of her earlier life out.

But we're not there yet. The symposium began with Lauren Berlant's opening remarks. The Worlding Writing Project brings together experiment with theory, induces comparison, tries to incorporate detail and situation. (She noted that Dementia Blog is about "staying in a situation.") If theory is a generalizing principle, then the Worlding writers want to experiment with un-generalizing. I take Kathleen Stewart's work as a primary example of this. Her Ordinary Affects largely ignores the theory that propels it (though some of my students wished it never intruded at all), that theory being that situations are worth exploring on their own terms. Lauren spoke about our time being one of ADHD, that the Occupy (or Honolulu's de-Occupy) movement is about attending to the world, slowing down attention. Somewhere in there bobble heads from groupon appeared on the screen. The pigeon then appeared, for its flocking, its aggregation, and she told us that the word "gregarious" comes from sheep. Relationality is a priori for pigeon and sheep, as it has not been for "us." MLK and Spinoza spoke of love as politics. This involves relation, transformation, what I wrote down as "social therapy," but intended as "social theory." (Just as Radhika this morning was trying to figure out what "adding fuel to the fire" meant and kept saying "adding fuel to the feather"--I did NOT say that, she said, but her dad and I said, oh YES you did!) And so collaborative work in theory, and an interest in the commons, and discussion of citizenship--Lauren's remarks, while clear, seemed to gather steam at this point. Institutions are still objects; infrastructure is a moving form. (Which made me think of the difference between the Alzheimer's home as building and as a life, or as many parallel lives. So much Gertrude Stein running beside us.) The Losing It conference, then, was about how the family is a scene for being out of control, for thinking about relations of care--such relations are enigmatic. What interests Lauren is how caregiving can be presented as solidarity and as a relation that is not sentimental.

There was more, but this is what "stuck" with me, "stuck" being one of those keywords of the conference for me, just as "register," uttered by Katie Stewart in response to my work of transcribing Alzheimer's voices became a key word for Carl Bogner (who gave a beautiful, generous talk on Jennifer Montgomery's The Agonal Phase later on). "Stuckness" like "attachment" went a couple of ways for this Buddhist-inflected writer. Truths to try to let drop, and then remember, and then let go as memory. "Forgetting is crucial to learning," said Lauren. Forgetting is crucial to poetry, said Ann Lauterbach in an essay. Memory Cards arrives today in the mail, and I read that book-to-com as evidence of moments lived through and then forgotten, and then remembered as writing.

Katie Stewart and Susan Lepselter performed discrete essays in interwoven pieces, moving back and forth to create conversation. Their essays were very different. Katie's was about losing her mother; Susan's was about researching UFOs in the west. Susan is fascinated by the uncanny; Katie in the canny, if that word can be used as a mere reversal on un-canny. But the gaps between their pieces were themselves somewhat uncanny. I kept wondering what Susan's essay about encountering such a completely absorbing subject had to do with Katie's narrative about her mother, her absorption in her mother's dying. Like a long poem, this one requires some time to ponder. There's a leap there, but I can't say just what it is. (And this was one of the leaps that made me want to talk about the relationship of the spirit to this subject matter. The UFO belief system is one spiritual practice, as it were, and Katie's attending to her mother's passing is another.) Tony Trigilio, a Buddhist, and I agreed we would talk about spirituality and the academy the next time we talk. This talk we had at Heartland Cafe, was about John F. Kennedy's death (a conspiracy-talk, in other words, oddly and ill-related to the Buddhist conception of the world as utterly connected) and about poetry and more mundane institutional matters (like trying to preserve a graduate program, perhaps not so mundane, after all).

Some fragments:

Writing is not catharsis.

Hoarding cats.

Gertrude Stein / Stain.

We made lists of losing its. (Is there an apostrophe there, of any kind?)

They had a wonderful life. She led the life of Riley.

Their work included broken roofs. (Is there a "v" there, of any kind?)

The man in black was not Johnny Cash. He met her at the airport. She knew not to tell. She is telling us now.

Now you know how I feel.

The word "sensorium." The word "energetics." The word "abject." This is not my discourse community, but it is my emotional one in many ways.

I've blogged on The Agonal Phase already. I made so many mistakes of fact I had to go in and expunge large sections of what I had written. I had thought, for example, that Jennifer Montgomery's mother Ruth was in the film, that she was the baggy pantsed person on the trampoline, the person in the chair with glasses. That she was Jennifer's father, in other words, the man who spoke in the film. (Think about voice-overs, Lauren advised us, but I'd gone to face-overs.) I assumed her illness, her age, had made her androgynous. But it was her father who was becoming a woman, instead. Carl Bogner spoke on the film and everyone wished there was a tape of it. There was! A graduate student had recorded it, but whenever Carl got good, the student would type madly and there would be loud clacking noises. So when you listened to the video, the best parts included lots of noises. "Mental scratch pad." Faster versions of Jennifer's father/mother on the trampoline. Some of Carl's references:

Peter Handke's memoir, Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Grueber's still life of 1661. Was that called Vanitas?
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary. (My response here.)
Guy Davenport's reading of Joyce's story, "Clay."

The practice of attention is a caesura.

Day One: rumination: sadness.
Day Two: two pairs of glasses in harmony. Transitions, leave-taking, moving on: "Ah!" says Mr. Montgomery.

There is an enigma to its clarity.

Workspaces: composer & editor.

Sequence: dog, Jennifer, father. [This is the sequence that made someone cry. It's about faces, the face that wants a response from you, the face that cries, the face that is impassive.]

What is the capacity of the camera?

Jennifer took two photos of her mother after she died. She erased one and then the other of them. She misses these photos, regrets their erasure. But she remembers her mother and the photographs, the photographs of her mother.

Jennifer's short video on squid, from a work in progress. On the cutting apart of a squid, the milking it for ink, the use of that ink to draw a squid.

"Part of my face is missing" as a phrase about grieving.

"Shakespeare is crafting this death"--I remember thinking that my father was dying into poetry, as everything he said was metaphorical, more Dickinson than dad.

"Where's that fucking photo?"

On Annie Liebovitz's photographs of Susan Sontag: "That's HER hell."

Sea change. Purcell's The Tempest. Ruckfigur is either seeing the world as the other does, or entering from behind. A comment that haunted us after. Do we show faces or not? Or parts of faces? (Reference back to a discussion of my transcriptions: to whom do they belong? do we shows them entire, or in pieces?)

Fast forward:

Full Court / Small Press event in the Red Rover Series. This series is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. As you'll see if you click that second link, they organize readings that are more than readings, but provocations. Patrick Durgin, Caroline Picard, Johannes Gorannson (umlaut to taste) and I each read pieces by ourselves and others, then convened for a panel, in which we asked one another questions. Patrick and I had agreed on our questions, and delivered them with a lack of spontaneity that was astounding. We should have been penalized for staying in the paint too long. My question for him had to do with his decision to publish his own work through Kenning Editions; his for me was about Tinfish as argument, rather than press. Caroline talked about design work and the production of books (silkscreen covers and Bookmobile innards). Johannes talked about Action Books as a translation press that was not one. Not exclusively one. Other poets we read: Johannes read from Kim Hyesoon's new Action Books volume, edited by Don Mee Choi. Patrick read a poem by Andrew Levy. I read "What We Get" from Gizelle Gajelonia's Tinfish chapbook, 13 Ways of Looking at TheBus. It's in pidgin (not to be confused with Lauren Berlant's pigeons); I did my best.

Fast backward:

In Madison, I spent time with Steel Wagstaff, a Ph.D. student, before and after my FELIX series reading. A waitress, not knowing why an older woman and younger man might be dining together, assumed. "So nice of you to come from Hawai`i to visit your son," she said. He gave me a Brewers Central Division Champion teeshirt at my reading. Said it had been on close-out. Duh.

And there was much else that was lovely.

Conclusion to Small Press Dicussion

2011-11-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

My conversation with Mark Wallace and Carol Mirakove concludes here.

Part Two of a conversation between Carol Mirakove, Mark Wallace and Tinfish's Editor

2011-10-26T13:47:00.001-07:00

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace: Cross-Posted with Mark Wallace's blog, here.

Part Two

(Part One can be found here). Or here.

There has been some debate around the expectation that small presses should abide by rules and guidelines versus small-press publishing being fueled by a gift economy and donations. What kinds of transparency does a publisher owe to their readers and authors in terms of submission guidelines and publishing expectations?

SMS: I think we're caught between two models right now. The old model was self-publishing and micro-press publishing. That's where Tinfish started, publishing chaps of 100 copies and a very short run journal that was xeroxed. But we rather quickly became a “real publisher,” meaning that our books cost more to produce and came out in larger runs. The production values went way up. So there was more need for resources. It's very easy to get big fast, because there are so many worthy manuscripts floating around out there. And I have no objection to presses that publish a lot—Salt and BlazeVox come to mind. That doesn't mean they aren't publishing good books or that they don't care about what happens to their product. They are working with possibility, which is a finer thing than prose . . . While I would never publish as many books as they do, I applaud them for their efforts. And, if a publisher tries to live off of his or her work, why not? It may seem “suicidal,” as someone wrote on an fb page, but so much more gratifying than many other jobs with steady incomes.

If a press asks for money from its authors, something I have no problem with, I do think they should be up front about it. Otherwise, I don't think authors need to know the details, except perhaps to realize that the work of publishing involves a lot of resources by someone(s) else—editing, designing, printing, distributing, marketing, and so on. Some of the nastiness of the recent discussions revolved around a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and resources involved. My students sometimes tell me that they are going to make money with their poems. One class accused me of not taking them seriously when I laughed at this notion. We need to disabuse others of the notion that seriousness = money-making, while letting them know that it takes money to put out a product. Our most recent Tinfish book cost us over $2,000 to print (600 copies) and I bought advertising cards and sent out review copies. The book could have been less gorgeous, but we made our choices—it could also have been more gorgeous and a lot more expensive to make.

It's also a good idea, as Craig Santos Perez and others argue, for authors to work harder to promote their own work, and work that they think is important. The problem there is that the fine line between disseminating important information and sounding like someone selling refrigerators (though my local Sears salesman was a former student!), is easily crossed. Keep the emphasis on the work, is my advice. Then make sure people know about it.

CM: Thank you for breaking that down.

MW: The question of the transparency that publishers owe to readers and authors is an important one, and I like Susan’s answer. But is there any reason that the focus of transparency, even in this conversation, should be on publishers alone? Should there be transparency (and is there any?) in Creative Writing MFA programs? What about in education institutions more broadly? Or in the work of political organizations and corporations? The fact is, in all those larger social institutions, there’s little and sometimes no transparency. That lack of transparency serves the interests of those with most access to money and most power.

In the case that led to this discussion, a lot of the expressed frustration with small press publishers, and the expressed frustration about that frustration, comes from a context of massive lack of transparency and honesty in multiple institutions, and not just in relationship to literature. And while many small press publishers, Tinfish and Bloof and others, have been lately explaining and confessing the details of their practices, corporations fuel their power over public life by deploying much larger resources under legal cover and never have to mention it.

CM: Mark, you offer good points in helping us to get out of a myopic framework. At the same time, we don’t interact with small-press publishers on the same terms of MFA programs or corporations. I believe this merits a distinct (and useful) thread. The question I asked around transparency was specifically between a writer who might become a press author and the press. This is a different dimension than those in the relationships you bring up, e.g., I may get my MFA certificate based on the criteria spelled out in the application process, but the meaning of the MFA may not match the implied promise of the degree.

That said, I think one of the best parts of operating in the small-press publishing world is that a sketchy or shady corporate framework is not the standard. There are several people working hard to demand that corporations be more transparent, and I don’t think there’s anyone arguing that there should be low-transparency on any corporate or institutional agreements, so I don’t think it’s true that we’re asking more of publishers more than we are of more powerful institutions, even though the fact that we are often more successful in having reciprocal conversations with publishers makes it seem as though they are subject to more critical scrutiny.

MW: I appreciate you trying to focus the discussion more specifically. Your points have also helped locate for me one of the things I find myself concerned about in this conversation. We’ve put the focus on what writers might ask of and need from publishers, but I’m not sure we can ask that question fairly without also asking what publishers might ask of or need from writers. I think part of the reason that there was recent controversy was an assumption by too many writers that publishers are more or less just a writer service industry, doing the janitorial work of creating a nice clean place for writers to put themselves center stage. I’m not saying anybody thinks this consciously, but that’s often in effect what happens. It’s too easy for writers to think of small press publishers just as people serving to advance a writer’s career, instead of as people who are often writers themselves and who are also working collaboratively to put forward the interests of an interconnected group of people.

SMS: So the new model is “real publishing.” And there's a need for it, because MFA grads and others need jobs. To get a job teaching you need to have published. And you need “real” books, not chaps, journal publications. No quarrel there. The quarrel comes in when the relationship between author and publisher becomes one of producer and—how to put this?--hired but unpaid help. This model is much less personal, much more capitalistic, and much less equitable. Another danger with this second model is that it makes publishing less a visionary enterprise than a business. (Not that businesses can't be visionary, but I would rather use another metaphor for small press publishing, something that describes an enterprise between business and gift economy.) Tinfish Press has been lucky that our vision has—in some instances, if not in many others—proved marketable, especially for classroom use. “Experimental poetry from the Pacific” has been rare, until recently. We helped create a market for it, and the texts with which to teach it. Several of our books have sold in the thousands. They help to pay for those that sell in the hundreds, or in the tens.

The discussion reminds me, in odd and mostly unparallel ways, of conversations in the adoption world. We're talking about a practice (adoption, small press publishing) that has a value (spiritual, familial, aesthetic) apart from the monetary, but which inevitably enters the marketplace. Then the question becomes, to what extent does our pure ethics inevitably get muddied by realities? And how can we act ethically, even after acknowledging our lack of purity?

CM: Susan, you ask a complex question and I appreciate the depth of it. To begin, I believe we can act ethically by making a conscious effort to communicate constructively and with respect for each other. If you think someone is naive, maybe try to remember when you were naive and be a friend, be a neighbor -- if not to an individual, at least to the art.

If your goal is truly to have another poet shut up and sit down, I want to ask about the violence of that reaction.

Mark, I am glad you bring up that publishers might ask things of authors; it may be the question at the crux of this upset. I, personally, believe completely in cooperation. But, I continue to feel that disclosing the terms of cooperation after a manuscript has been accepted is not a good model, and I don't believe that mode is likely to yield positive relationships. Maybe I am proposing an undue burden on the publisher to have figured out what is needed from authors -- I do appreciate that a lot of publishing labor is already invisible and thankless -- but there is right now an opportunity for presses to consider publishing terms, and if they are stated up front then we might avoid vitriolic controversy.

Tangles: Visual Poetics of Alzheimer's

2011-10-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Tangles. Hair. Err. Air. Heir.

My Alzheimer's is mostly sound. When I sat among Alzheimer's residents, I listened more than looked. When I wrote notes, then later blog posts, my thoughts were generated from the sounds of words, or parts of words, I'd overheard in the Alzheimer's home. Because so much of my life with my mother near the end was on the telephone, she became her voice, and then her lack of one, breath and then none.

Sarah Leavitt, in Tangles: A story about Alzheimer's, my mother and me, a graphic memoir, and Jennifer Ruth Montgomery, in the video, The Agonal Phase,* offer us images of and for their mothers' diseases. Leavitt's title foregrounds the curly hair that runs in her family, passing down from mothers to daughters. Montgomery's video opens with a long still image of tangled hairl many more images of hair follow, including one of hair being slipped into an envelope whose return address is that of a hospice. As Leavitt writes in the chapter aptly called "Hair": "Most people in my family have curly hair. It was one of the things that made us really stand out in the small towns we lived in when I was growing up." That box is unillustrated. The next one frames a somewhat absurd image; here, we see Leavitt's mother leaning over an ironing board, hair splayed out, an iron in her left hand, moving over her hair. "Mom had tried to straighten her hair for a while in the 60s. She ironed it," we read. The rest of this page is all about hair--mother's, mother's friend's, Leavitt's, the monster in her dreams who wants her hair brushed, the balls of her mother's hair she keeps, and then her own, which she begins collecting. "I kept the boxes on shelves above the bed and it helped me sleep at night, just knowing they were there." (Click to enlarge the image.) That the boxes of hair have something to do with the boxes of illustrations and the unspooling narrative seems clear. Both are family stories, one written in DNA's continuous present and the other in historical time.

But if you look closely at the second box on the fourth line of this page, the one that reads, "I never used a comb or brush on Mom's hair, just my fingers," and pause on the images of these tangles, you'll notice shapes that appear as if seen under a microscope. Lacking the words, the context, you would not know these are tangles of hair. You might, if you've read enough about Alzheimer's, think they formed another kind of tangle, like these:

These are tangles in the brain, tangles that provide visual evidence of the disease during an autopsy, mysterious tangles that cannot (yet) be uncombed, ironed out, straightened into merely remembered clarities of thought. Alzheimer's--especially early-onset, like that suffered by Leavitt's mother--runs in biological families. Like curly hair. An inheritance. At one point, the daughter, Sarah, spends a lot of time writing and drawing with her non-dominant hand, trying to "strengthen her brain." That is all we need to know of her worry.

Leavitt tells us from the start that she obsessively collected things--took notes, made drawings, hoarded her own tangles--also saved scraps of her mother's handwriting. The scrawled notes from mother to daughter are tangled. Early on, mother's note to daughter about garlic seeds she's sending on moves from left to right. The spacing is cramped, but the note is readable. Twenty pages later, another note is both less and more so; lines do not move from left to right but one moves from the center out and back: "family is The whole / eags to see you." That the family is not whole; that mother has a hole in her--and yet that the family is whole, coming together around her, is something Leavitt does not need to write. Her mother's unconscious poem speaks it to us. In its falling apart, language testifies to its own strength. Meaning accrues around loss, for better and for worse. (This would have been my mother's 94th birthday, so I know that I know this.)

The handwritten tangles visually echo others that Leavitt writes down in more orthodox, readable handwriting. Such verbal "typos" include her mother's declaration, "Oh broccoli, who are simple!" and her answer to the question "did you eat the rye cracker," of "No, it's eejier and squiggy to them." Of the first, Leavitt's father says "Well, it is grammatically correct," suggesting that grammar possesses a logic that lasts beyond the mind's ability to know it. The second is left without comment, except by Mom, who adds: "Something's gonna happen to it. / Nice or not nice, nicely or lovely." As I've suggested before, Gertrude Stein had nothing on lines like these.

If Stein postulated that there is no repetition, only insistence, Alzheimer's argues otherwise. Jennifer Montgomery gets at the dullness of sheer repetition in her opening to The Agonal Phase. There is the sound of something squeaking, something happening over and over again, but we don't know what it is, except that it sounds like breathing perhaps, mechanical breathing. It's like the opening to a Twin Peaks episode, when you hear balls bouncing, but have no idea where they are or why they're bouncing. The delightful absurdity of a group of cadets bouncing balls at the lodge, in David Lynch's video, gives way to Montgomery's image of her father--seen mostly from the back, or in parts of his face only--bouncing on a small trampoline in his simple room. Bed with red cover, side table, telephone. A tea cup, a white cloth.

Everything is still except father. Father bounces up and down, up and down, up and down. The voice-over is quiet, a bit monotonous. He rehearses his wife's symptoms, which are short narratives, vignettes. These are stories of how time has gotten confused, mostly. Oddly, sadly, set to a rhythm so regular it's dull, like a poetic meter without variation. There's a tension between the dullness, the unchangingness of his bouncing, and the soft voice detailing mistake after mistake (not mistake but symptom).

Whatever order is created through this bouncing is artificial; the content of the image may be simple, but the emotions evoked by the mother's chaotic attempts to live within time are tangles. So, in the second section of her film, beautifully titled "The Good Enough Movie" (after Winnicott's "good enough mother"), Montgomery shows us herself under hypnosis. Again, very little "happens" on-screen. We see a woman sitting back in a chair, following the voiced over directions of a hypnotist (like a mellowed out version of her father's voice), raising her left hand, opening and closing it. The hypnotist proposes that there are two movie screens. On one she will see narrative, psychological time. This screen will confuse her. On the other screen, she will see things as they happen in clock time. This screen is not confusing to watch. The main point of the hypnosis is to put the contents of the first screen (memory) in storage, and/or to transpose them into the second movie, which follows time clearly. This is at once a therapy for the film-maker and a fantasy of how Alzheimer's might be cured. It resembles Leavitt's dream that her mother never had Alzheimer's, but had been hired to participate in a study and pretend she had Alzheimer's.

If the Alzheimer's sufferer cannot rediscover clock-time, then the film-maker can. This is perhaps why her film takes place inside time, why the images are so still, so repetitive, so predictable, why the voices try so hard to convey calm. And why the film runs at such a slow pace, even slower than baseball, because much less action happens. Much in the middle of the film occurs in silence, with only the father's voice-over (for the most part). Sound is only suggested: musical scores fill a section of the house, and poems are open to read, like Charles Causley's "The Swan."

They leave very little out, not the smell of shit, in the case of Leavitt, or talk of sexuality by Montgomery's father. They try to set time back on its axis by drawing it out, by making narratives, however short, of episodes in their mothers' lives. But what strikes me as most valuable about their visual poetics of Alzheimer's is that it puts our eyes on their mothers. Even when Jennifer Montgomery shows herself crying, she's framed this image of reflection within a nest of images of her mother bouncing, cycling, sitting impassively, gazing at us through her glasses. For the daughter, grief is less a lack of control than a chance to observe, to "ruminate." One section of the film that struck me for reasons not having to do with my mother's illness but with my own, concerned the effects of depression upon memory. According to recent studies, Montgomery tells us, depression opens us up to seeing things, remembering them better than we do when we are not sad. It offers us a heightened power of analysis. (Sometimes, I would add.)

The film ends in sound. A woman sings in a park. She plays an accordian, pulling it back and forth. The accordion gives life back to time, to music, to the brightness of a summer day. After a few striking images of Judaism--Hebrew letters on a synagogue, among them--it sounds like a secular Kaddish. Leavitt writes more directly of her vow to say Kaddish for her mother every day for 11 months. She notes that "The words of the Kaddish and the feeling of the cloth against my skin and the solidity of the floor against my forehead comforted me every night." She ends by telling us a dream that her mother had planted seeds on her daughter's shoulders, that they bloomed. Another space of brightness, even though we know by now that it is only episode, a clip to take its place in a longer "strip" of time. I'm reminded that the day after my mother died, I walked across a wide suburban street to a mall and bought Ginsberg's Collected Poems for "Kaddish" alone. Its weight was a comfort, though I later realized the poem can be found on-line.

"Toward the Key in the window--and the great Key lays its head of light / on top of Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down on the / sidewalk"

Sarah Leavitt's mother loved to dance. Tango leads to tangle by way of sound and sight. The vision of her mother trying to get out of the car after her body had stiffened, her mind forgetting how to move that body, takes us from the free movements of dance to the physical knots of late Alzheimer's. If we take confusion away, transpose the film of our mother's decline and death into clock-time, detach ourselves from the tangles of sentiment, horror, sadness, gnashing of teeth and hair, then we are, if not cured, salvaged for the next turn, which may or may not be ours.

*A non-figurative rendition of "the agonal phase," by Sherwin Nuland, can be found here.

In honor of my mother, on her birthday, October 25, let me link to an elegy for her. I've since revised and lineated it, but the original reflects the crazy force of memory in the aftermath of her death.

Grief notes: on my mother's upcoming birthday

2011-10-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

My mother would have been 94 years old this coming Tuesday, October 25. The anniversary coincides with the final wrapping up of her estate. I spent 10 minutes on the phone this morning with a woman named Valerie who works in Survivor Relations at a bank, talking paperwork. They have the death certificate, but they need a letter of instruction. They require my attorney's original document of certification that she is executor of the estate; without the original, they lack the stamp. The woman-who relates-with-survivors and I had a good laugh about my lawyer's last name, Wildhack ("she's a very nice person but her name is kind of scary," I told her), but the rest of our conversation transpired in deep breaths. She offered her "personal condolences" and wondered how I am doing. She empathized with me, if only in the fuzzy quality of her speaking. No doubt she feels for me, to the extent that she knows me as a function (the survivor), rather than me as the person who wields a particular personal pronoun. I pulled up short of resentment. It's her job. She probably had breathy voice training. There's no good way to do this. "I can refer you to an investment adviser," she said at one point in the conversation. I said no.

It's the point at which analogy (the mind as an economic system) becomes fact (the financial sector as grief adviser) that what seemed a nagging sense of loss recovers the anger stage. I'm occupying the Wall Street of my mind, hearing a cacophony of voices confusing loss of mother with loss of income, inheritance of a parent's assets with investment advice by yet another stranger on the phone. Another stranger who would act like a friend because what else can she do? It's only humane to care, and besides, it brings in revenue.

[Someone calls now from Hawaiian Tropical Flowers to say that my delivery date of Tuesday would void their guarantees and would I like to pay more to ship over the weekend? I'm sending flowers to my mother's Alzheimer's home, because I don't know how else to memorialize her. I say no, it's after the fact, whenever they get there . . . she thanks me and we say good-bye. Another business transaction attached to a point of time that is also a point of grief.]

And now, with my cat's assistance, the blog post just "published" itself, while I am in its midst. The post does not yet have a title, though I will soon get title to my mother's remaining assets. Title, deed, account, certificate, letter of intention. I feel awash in a Shakespearian field of metaphor. I need his sonnets to wash this all down. Wit is at least not a term in economics. The other day I found myself telling the story of how my mother, after she earned her M.A. in Drama & Speech from Iowa, worked for a stern older Dean of Students at Grinnell College. This was where she got in trouble for helping to hide student's pets (in Iowa, a farm state, chickens and pigs counted as pets to be hidden in a dormitory basement). When my mother left on one of her wanderings (Girl Scouts in California or Red Cross in North Africa, I don't remember the itinerary), the Dean gestured loudly, said, "But Marty, you could have had THIS." Meaning her job, her station, her authority. Decades later, my mother would say, she heard that the Dean had finally retired. She must have been younger than she looked.

Wit is the thread that holds us together. My children, who do not look like me, or like my mother, carry her wit with them. My daughter's year of what I called Sarcasm Boot Camp (how to tell when to use scare quotes, when to change intonation to mark deep irony) should have been performed in my mother's name. My son's eager plays with words, too, bear her trace, though he did not know her well. A woman who left so few memories behind (her friends are dead or vanished, and I am her only child) leaves that thread of humor, at once guarded and a little bit wild.

At my Alzheimer's talk in West Virginia, where I argued that the person writing about a loved one's Alzheimer's should keep herself out of it, someone asked me how it is possible to do so. How can you keep your emotions out of this story? he was asking. It seems counter-intuitive, a bit odd. The hard part is actually more surprising, I found myself saying. Now that I am my story's subject--in the aftermath of my mother's death--I find it difficult to write about myself, reduced (or aggrandized?) at times to a confabulation of emotions. The Objectivist view of my mother's last years, the sense that it was her story not mine that was important, no longer works so well. And while, as a man in a bright football jersey in Boise told me, there is plenty of me in my Dementia Blog, it's layered in the descriptions, the meditations, the process, rather than a matter of content, theme, subject matter. I cannot describe myself seated at a desk, orange cat splayed over papers and a nearly orange volume of Jack Spicer, and have those details carry any freight. It strikes me that the subject of grief is as real, as crucial, as that of Alzheimer's (if more frequently trodden over), but it's not easy to approach obliquely, if the grief is one's own. Ah, ownership. Vexed subject in this era of capital (see above), of occupying Wall Street, de-occupying Honolulu, owning up to one's feelings. The metaphors betray the real ethical lapses, when Goods and Values meet up and call each other by the same names.

Where I was my mother's signature for nearly half a decade, I am now what follows her. I have my own signature back (even if it's an unreadable scrawl). I have her wit and her things. (Though if wit be an asset, what then?) And I have the occasional sense of being overwhelmed, not just by my loss of her, but by the loss of her memories, memories of her. Before these past few years, I did not realize that loss is such a complicated word. I am faced now with the loss of losing her. It's the finality of it, as someone said to me. Even when I felt that I had lost her to Alzheimer's, I was still living a gerund. There was losing yet to be done. But the loss no longer moves; it's static. I've also lost her "home," the many people she lived with, caregivers and fellow residents, those with wits intact and those without.

Gaye Chan put a page of my mother's date book on the title page of Dementia Blog. The date was Monday, 18 July, 1955. On that calendar page, my mother had written: "Get married--OK." She had underlined "OK" several times. Evidence of her wit: of course she would not have forgotten her wedding day. Yet on the title page of a book about her later forgetting, the writing on that page changes its effect, alters my affect. What was funny then is still funny, but a mixed state, mingled with irony, sadness, the hollow drum-like feeling loss installs in the body. When my students write, "I feel sad," I demand to know where in their bodies they feel it and what it feels like.

Today my chest is a dumb drum.

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation (Part One)

2011-10-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

I am cross-posting this conversation with Mark Wallace at Thinking Again.

Literary Communities and the Ethics of Publishing: A Conversation with Carol Mirakove, Susan Schultz, and Mark Wallace

Part One

Following a recent controversy in the small-press publishing community, I reached out to Mark Wallace and asked if we might have a broad discussion on the issues and hand towards potentially avoiding an ugly repeat. I knew Mark and I did not totally agree, which is why I reached out to him. We also looped in Susan M. Schultz, editor and publisher of Tinfish since 1995. -- Carol Mirakove

Susan M. Schultz: Thanks for asking me to speak to the issue. I blogged about the particular controversy when it first hit the airwaves, here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-blazevox-and-other-publishing.html. I read blog and facebook posts by Johannes Gorensson, Craig Santos Perez, Amy King, Reb Livingston, Matvei Yankelevich, Shanna Compton, and probably others, as well as many of the threads written about the controversy. But of course there's much more to it than whether or not one press asks its authors for contributions toward the publication of their books.

CM: Absolutely, but a point of clarification was not whether or not a press asks authors for contributions but how and when.

How do we distinguish critical discussion from destructive attacks? Name-calling seems to always reflect far more poorly on the insulter than the target. Why does this happen in our community? How can we criticize practices constructively, without personal wars being waged?

SMS: I've worked in an English department for over 20 years now, and if I knew the answer to that question, I'd be a lot happier there. We could create a forum to discuss these issues and put out a list of rules and regulations, beginning from “no name calling” and continuing with “keep it civil,” but I don't know that that works either. Such discussions happen rather organically (good to remember that many poisons are also organic). Part of the problem is that, name-calling aside, we all take our own and others' practices very personally, indeed.

CM: You make excellent points -- we certainly don't want to regulate speech. But, it seems to me that we take some others' practices very seriously, notably others we know, and other others' practices and positions are met with hostility.

SMS: Even apart from overtly personal attacks, every conversation about contests, prizes, subscriptions, funding drives, how many books we publish in a year, and so on, is implicitly personal. One of the uncomfortable values of this discussion is getting out in the open just how vested we are in some practices, and how hostile we are to others. I'd rather see us moralize less and encourage each other more. Or make the rhetorical point that we do not like certain practices, but do not condemn others for using them. Tinfish does not have contests, for example, because I find them an odd mix of revenue enhancement and the promise of cultural capital, but I know full well why many presses run them. Cash flow.

Mark Wallace: Distinguishing critical discussion from destructive attacks seems easy enough. The focus should remain on the ideas in question, not the personalities or behavior of the people expressing the ideas. It’s a matter of tone too. Hostility or dismissiveness, even when focused on an idea, quickly moves into the personal, since the more one’s tone highlights emotion, the more people become emotional in response to it.

Still, to say that it’s easy enough, in general, to distinguish between the two, doesn’t change the fact that in practice, there are many murky situations in which the boundaries get blurry, especially since, as Susan says, people take their ideas seriously. We can’t help but have an emotional relation to them.

The Enlightenment, of course, invented most of our contemporary ideas about the value of dispassionate, rational discussion. But the very belief in it brought in whole new waves of irrationality, not just in all the ways that people continued not to behave rationally, but also in the ways that many notions of Enlightenment rationality were nothing more than new ways of being irrational.

I’ve always appreciated what Dostoevsky said relative to the Enlightenment (if you’ll excuse but also note the way it’s gendered): “Men are so necessarily mad that imagining them sane must be another form of madness.”

I’m not sure much can be done to change the nature of public discussion. People come from so many backgrounds and ways of understanding words that standards for discussion vary from context to context. Professional and intellectual and literary discourses do have defined social standards, no matter how fuzzily followed, but it shouldn’t be surprising that not everyone has absorbed or respects them.

Public language has always involved murderous hostility. Right now, we’re in a moment when the unfounded hostile accusation has tremendous power in U.S. politics and culture, as just one for instance (I don’t say “more power than ever” because I don’t think that’s true). Hostile lies and accusations, if there’s enough power behind them, can force individuals and groups to spend most of their time defending themselves regarding things they didn’t even do, and explaining and even confessing the things they actually do. In fact, this current discussion of publisher’s financial practices is happening mainly because of the power of such accusations.

I don’t believe, by the way, that there’s any such thing as “our community” of writers. Sure, those of us who have been writers for a long time are likely to have some (many, in my case) trusted, respected, and loved comrades, but even the small world of experimental/alternative etc etc etc poetry and poetics features a constantly changing list of active participants. Look at the names of who is publishing in any literary magazine that you like now as compared to 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, and you’ll see how fast the participants change. None of us know more than a portion of those people, and it’s an open question about how well we get along even with those we do know. Certainly our feelings of community towards and with others are real, but I don’t think that there’s any stable entity there that belongs to any of us. Community is established through ongoing interaction and is always fragile. It can’t be relied on too much.

That said, I do think individuals and groups can and do influence the nature of public conversation in limited contexts. I’ve long been interested in fostering friendly but open intellectual discussion among the people around me, and I think I do it well, and I’m hardly the only one who does it. Still, hostile or irrelevant commentary can’t be avoided entirely even in the best conditions.

CM: Mark, you foster open discussion exceptionally well, which is one of the reasons I approached you about having a discussion amidst a very heated debate.

You reveal that the two of us have defined community differently, and while multiple definitions are “correct,” you explain that community is established through ongoing interaction where I imply earlier that it is defined by a common interest, in this case an interest in small-press poetry.

However community is defined, my concern with the hostility of late is this: the way we treat individuals in our microcosms, especially in the microcosms we choose (e.g., small-press poetry), informs the way we act in the world at large. If we aspire to a global respect and peace then we have a golden opportunity to hone those practices amongst our friends, and friends of friends, and strangers who share interests in things about which we are most ardent.

SMS (interrupting): I'd suggest that we stop trying to define what community is, and simply act as if we are members of a community. Enact community rather than sit back and try to figure out who's in and who's out.

MW: With apologies for being contrary and insistent, Susan, I don’t quite agree with that approach. I think we often need to act as if the people we’re dealing with in the world of poetry are strangers—which, much of the time, they are, at least to some degree. I think we need more awareness of the fact that other people, even if they’re poets, don’t share our values or assumptions. Precisely one of the reasons that this issue became controversial recently was that a lot of people discovered that they didn’t understand each other, which came to them as a surprise because they had assumed a lot of mutual agreement. Many people involved assumed that they knew what a poetry press was… except, as it turned out, they didn’t share the same assumptions at all.

Our responses to people in the world of poetry would probably change if we went in with the recognition that community can’t be taken for granted or assumed. Like any relationship, it has to be worked out. Speaking just for myself maybe, even with my close friends I’ve often become most frustrated when I assume, in advance and unintentionally, that because they’re my friends, we agree about things and understand each other. As it turns out, we often don’t.

I would have no problem with calling such interactions instances of community, I suppose, if we described “community” as a group of individuals interacting because of a shared interest even when they might not have much otherwise in common.

(End of Part One)

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

2011-10-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

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 15 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).

Losing It symposium at the University of Chicago, November 4-5, 2011

2011-10-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

[click to enlarge]

What are the many ways of losing it?
How can we write ethically about how our parents lose it?
What are the forms we choose to embody or enact losing it?

These are some of the questions I'll be asking and trying to answer during my "performance" from dementia blogging old and new at the Losing It event.

Jennifer Montgomery's video, The Agonal Phase, can be found here. Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects is here. Susan Lepselter's faculty page is here. Carl Bogner's is here. Our convener is Lauren Berlant.

Beforehand, I'll be reading at the FELIX series in Madison on November 2 with Connie Deanovich. And afterwards, in the Red Rover series with Patrick Durgin, Caroline Picard, and Johannes Gorensson. (Please add umlaut to taste.)

My Life as a St. Louis Cardinals Fan

2011-10-17T10:51:00.001-07:00

[My son's Cardinals shrine; in the background, the Brewers commit an error in Game Six of the NLCS, 2011]

There is something odd, lightly exilic, about being the fan of a team whose city you hardly ever visit.

In 2006, I published a short memoir of my life as a fan for Vice-Versa, when it was edited by the great fan of baseball, Tim Denevi. Now that the Cardinals have again arrived at the World Series, this time not to face the Detroit Tigers but that team's nemesis, the Texas Rangers, I thought to offer a link here. The essay is as much about imaging a sense of place and history as it is about baseball. That I became a Cardinals fan was a lucky accident; that I remain one, some 45 years later, involves persistence, obsessiveness, and the desire for some part of my own history to remain certain, even as transience offers a less sure mode of certainty in daily life. It's also an essay about tradition and team talent: the team I first followed included Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Tim McCarver. The team I follow now has Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, and Chris Carpenter on its roster. So I hope you enjoy reading the 2006 essay, as I warm up to write another, perhaps, from the vantage of 2011.

New Chapbook (from MEMORY CARDS)

2011-10-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

I have a new chapbook up at EOAGH, edited by Tim Trace Peterson. Each poem begins from a randomly selected (more or less!) phrase from Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text. The book, Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series, is forthcoming from Singing Horse Press in San Diego, edited by Paul Naylor. Here is the first of these cards:

I am not to speak for one year. I wonder if I should call. She has taken my vow of silence, cannot hold the phone or say more than hello. To enter another’s sainthood, attend to complexity’s unraveling into perfection. My crystal text is not transparent; she is my parent. Apparent vehicle, I & she. In the dugout the losing team falls apart: my son weeps, another woman’s son hangs head to chest. I sign her checks; I must be part she. I have lost her voice as she has lost my name. My son, in red & white, stands at the plate in the sun and blinks, bat quivering over his right shoulder. At this moment I cannot say I love him. Egrets sail over us in drafts. A baby cries. Coach yells, what are you DOING, holding that ball? One to another writes, I’m missing you, but the second is gone, except to Facebook.

–18 April 2011

Return of the Sidewalk Blogger

2011-10-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

[`Ahuimanu, O`ahu, Hawai`i, just off Kahekili Highway]

Tinfish Retro Chap #7, baseball, dementia: a grab bag!

2011-10-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

Announcing a new Tinfish Retro Chapbook, #7!

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #7

Y O U R S _ T R U L Y _ & _ O T H E R _ P O E M S
By Xi Chuan • Translated by Lucas Klein • October 2011 • $3
Design by Eric Butler

“Drink a bellyful of cold water and you'll drown all the voices in your head,” writes Xi Chuan. Harder to quiet the voices one hears echoing from Xi's new chapbook. The poet over-hears and over-sees; these poems are shards of the zeitgeist overheard through as many walls as you can construct against your noisy neighbor's television set. The title poem reveals Xi Chuan's Whitmanian reach; turn over in your bed and he will be the presence beside you. If you want to sample the work of an important contemporary Chinese poet, this chapbook provides an excellent place to start.

See here for more details.
Order for $3, plus $1 shipping, from Tinfish Press, via the website or at 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kaneohe, HI 96744

__________

The box score to yesterday's tightly fought Cardinals Phillies game is here.

While I've been unhappy with Tony LaRussa's coaching for some time, I loved the moment--as Cliff Lee struggled on the mound for the Phillies--that he put the injured (but how injured?) slugger, Matt Holliday, in the on-deck circle for as long as it took for Jon Jay (what a professional hitter he is) to get a hit, then pulled him back in favor of the uninjured Skip Schumacher. Mind games at their best. One of those moments that will never show in the box score. Marianne Moore said she loved the aspects of baseball that are crucial to the game but have no effect on its outcome. For her, it was the throw back from the catcher to the pitcher. For me, I think it will be Matt Holliday, at-deck decoy.

__________

Earlier this year, I wrote a post on the ownership of my mother's Alzheimer's home by the Carlyle Group. Today I got this message in my inbox:

Many care homes already provide a stimulating atmosphere that provides quality of life for people in all stages of dementia, and we should all have much higher expectations of the quality of life that can be experienced by people with Alzheimers Care Home.

If you click the link, you arrive at an ad for an Alzheimer's care provider. A quick google search reveals that the company in question is expanding, and that "The property will be sold to Nationwide Health Properties Inc., a real estate investment trust, Newport Beach, Calif., and then leased to Harbor House, which will operate the facility, Williams said."

A Day of Baseball Tweeting, with the help of Wallace Stevens & Old Ez

2011-09-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

One of the unexpected joys of joining twitter--for purposes of marketing Tinfish Press--has been the discovery of the tweet as an art form. Stephen Colbert and Aaron Belz write brilliant, funny tweets. The Dalai Lama reminds me to find detachment. And then there's @TortyCraig, by St. Louis Cardinals' outfielder Allen Craig's pet tortoise. Torty is a brilliant observer and listener (he gets Pujols's accent right, notes the glint of Coach LaRussa's pendant, given him by Carlos Santana). I keep expecting him to tweet from the field, he writes so much. So yesterday, as the Cards fought for the Wild Card berth, I joined them, rewriting Wallace Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (to say nothing of Gizelle Gajelonia's "13 Ways of Looking at TheBus"). Here in backward order, are my own status line/tweets:

Revision! "The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Cardinal homers off a wet, black bat" (Ezra Poundish).
and now to Stevens's "13 Ways"; find the original here.

It was an evening game this afternoon/It was humid/And it was going to be humid./The Cardinal sat/On the happy flight.

The ball is heading out/Mr. Pujols must be up.

He rode over Busch/In a big blimp./Once a fear pierced him/In that he mistook/The shadow of Bud Lite/for Cardinals.

At the sight of Cardinals/Flying at dusk,/Even the braves of Atlanta/Would fly out softly.

When the Cardinal flew out of sight,/It marked the edge/Of one of many base paths.

I know midwest accents/And lucid, inescapable runs;/But I know, too,/That the Cardinal is involved/In what I know.

O thin men of Atlanta,/Why do you imagine otherwise?/Do you not see how the Cardinals/Take intentional walks/And score?

Shadows covered the infield/With barbaric dark./The shadow of the Cardinal/Ran the bases, first to third!

I do not know which to prefer, /The beauty of sacrifices/Or the beauty of inside the park homeruns/The Cardinal...

A man and a woman/Are on first./A man and a woman and a Cardinal/are on first.

The cardinal whirled in left field / It was a small part of the ballgame.

I was of three minds/Like a tree/In which there were three cardinals.

Among twenty snowy mountains, / the only moving thing / was the eye of the cardinal.

That Torty knows something--how much, I do not know--about poetry shows up in his latest tweet: @dgoold As Tennyson writes so eloquently, "The shell must break before the bird[s] can fly."

Yesterday was one of the great baseball days ever. Let's hope it keeps up. I sure want to see more Torty tweets! He knocks me off my path of detachment, but one hopes only until the end of October.

Corporate Condolences & Assignments

2011-09-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

[click to enlarge & read]

I don't want to think about this latest letter from the land of corporate condolences, but I'm drawn to moments in it where the prose more resembles New Sentence than business letter prose.

Ron Silliman, on the New Sentence:

"But note that there is no attempt whatsoever to prevent the integration of linguistic units into higher levels. These sentences take us not toward the recognition of language, but away from it" (82).

For the poet, the New Sentence operates as an intervention; in the business letter, it operates like a pothole. It's not a deliberate axle-breaker, but it sure can damage your chassis. If the letter is not intended to be written in new sentences, the new sentence-effect gives the reader an interpretive toe hold. (Ah, metaphor.)

The first two sentences of the letter assert that the credit card company has learned of my mother's death, putting her name in all caps (lest I forget?), and then asks me to accept condolences. Just as I feel poised to do so (thank you for noticing! thank you for acknowledging my loss!), the next sentence hits me with the hammer force of a non-transition: "Because you're responsible for the estate, we want to provide you with the following information about MARTHA J's account ending in 1962." I was at first confused by the introduction of history into this note; what did 1962 have to do with it? Kennedy was president, we lived in Illinois, or was it Kingston, New York? Then I realized that we had moved from the condolence stage of memo-writing to the business stage. If there are stages of grief, there surely are to the business letters that come in its wake.

If that paragraph sounded New Sentence-y, then the third paragraph better fulfills Silliman's claim that writing good, clear, linearly progressing sentences has something to do with capitalism:

What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of "realism," the illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are directly tied to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality.

For the third is an amazing paragraph, beginning from the following sentence: "Because we understand this is a difficult time for you, it's important to us that this be handled by experts, which is why we've contracted estate specialists to help you with this matter." What do they mean by "a difficult time"? My first thought is that this phrase refers back to their note of condolence. Yes, it's a difficult time, thank you for caring about my feelings, in whatever ugly font you have chosen, with its odd caps and bold face and bullet-points. But as the sentence moves on, I realize the difficulty is more financial than emotional. The experts in question are not therapists or Buddhist monks; they are "contracted estate specialists." Their expertise is not in my emotional state, but in my estate. (They take the "motional" out of e-motional, but leave in the "state," which sounds like "intestate.")

And what am I to do with the way they've written my mother's name? Dare I say I rather enjoy seeing her referred to as MARTHA J, as in "MARTHA J's account ending in 1962" and "MARTHA J's estate"? While she was never called that, it begins to sound like we're intimate friends, talking about our dear departed MARTHA J. We are family, after all. And family is a mixed state, at once emotional and economic. My colleague, Laura E. Lyons, has written eloquently about corporate personhood. You can find the book, Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation, which she co-edited with Purnima Bose, here.

The letter ends, "We're sorry for your loss, and if there is anything else we can do to help you during this time, please do not hesitate to contact us," and is signed by the "Vice President, Member Debt Solutions" of the bank. Where "debt" manifests in all its meanings, an incoherent grenade of possible connotation.

The new sentence is a decidedly contextual object. Its effects occur as much between, as within, sentences. Thus it reveals that the blank space, between words or sentences, is much more than the 27th letter of the alphabet. It is beginning to explore and articulate just what those hidden capacities might be" (92).

The torque between the sentences of the bank's letter cracks open the mask of corporate personhood. The corporate person, represented by said VP of Member Debt Solutions, whose name is--oddly enough--very close to "Good Enough," has offered his emotional support as an entree to asking that I pay my financial debt to him. (That my mother's balance is $0 strikes me as an unconscious, posthumous instance of her wit.) Her and my account is closed, the experts have been cont(r)acted, and the balance will be paid (if not earned, arrived at). We have our solution, and we're not talking chemistry.

Assignment: what are the stages of corporate grief? Enumerate them, then write a flash fiction about at least one of them.

Assignment: Change the font of the letter and describe the change in effects/affects that ensue.

Assignment: write an elegy in which you use the words "information," "account," "creditors," "executrix," and "MARTHA J."

Assignment: use the language you find on this page (or other source of "sympathy resources") to write a poem.

__________

Never mention money the deceased may have owed you. This can be dealt with after the grieving period has passed.

Post-Trip Ruminations

2011-09-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

[I've just returned from what I fondly called The Dementia Tour. The Kelly Writer's House gigs had been planned for nearly a year; I'd thought going to Philadelphia would make it easier to visit my mother in Virginia. But as it happened, my reading at the Writer's House included a farewell to the long project about my mother, which became, more importantly, a farewell to her. And so I gave a reading, did a public interview with Al Filreis, and recorded a PoemTalk with Al, Leonard Schwartz, and Tom Devaney on a poem, "Eating Fried Chicken," by Linh Dinh. After going to see my Cardinals beat the Phillies (though Al and I only heard the game as it was ending on the car radio, streaming St. Louis announcers into the bowels of Philadelphia), and spending time with a college friend and a couple of UNO pals, I went on the West Virginia University to give a talk on Alzheimer's writing, meet with grad students, and see old graduate school friends.]

That's the inventory. But what actually happened?

Al Filreis began our conversation by noting that I have written about the Cambodian genocide, and he began to connect that content to the Alzheimer's writing I've done that offers a testimony of witness to my mother's decline. But we adopted our son from Cambodia! I told Al.

Our friend Hongly Khuy was a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. He's come to several of my classes to talk about his experiences. He traumatized that first class of freshmen, talking about what it's like nearly to starve to death, what it's like to see a woman butchered to death for asking for more food (his laughter at the situation's absurdity bothered the students most), how far one had to walk simply to get a few grains of rice. After a couple more such talks, he had grown much more gentle. He talked differently. Al distinguished between "deep memory" and "common memory." Deep memory occurs in the present tense, always. Common memory acquires a past tense verb, assumes a distance between the moment of trauma and the moment of story-telling. It's easier on the teller and his audience, but less "true" to the experience.

That didn't diminish the force of Al's intuition about genocide and dementia. If there are national dementias, imposed from above, then the Holocaust was one of them, enabled by forgetting on a massive scale. The comparison comes at a slant, not directly. Alzheimer's is nature's evil, not humanity's. The disease is not ethical, though our reactions to it are. But the force of Al's comparison hit hardest when I sat in on his Holocaust literature class and his students discussed Aharon Appelfeld's Story of a Life, which I later read on my brand-spanking-new electronic device.

Much of Dementia Blog and what followed on this Tinfish Editor's Blog happened not in "deep memory," but in the "deep present" of confronting Alzheimer's sufferers. Or it may be the "deep demented tense," as it lives in an out-of-time that resembles the surreal in its reality. Appelfeld writes about stuttering. Do not tell the story because you cannot remember it, counsels the child who became the writer. Do not claim to master any language, because you have either lost those you spoke or failed to attain full command of the new language. A mother's loss is likewise the loss of her language, which was German. Hebrew was an imposition, one he molded into a lifetime of work. A mother's loss is the loss of her language into illness. I do not want to overplay the comparison (I spent years furious at Plath's illness/Nazi metaphor), but reading Appelfeld's memoir proved to be an amazing exercise in reading a poetics that works for Alzheimer's writing, as well as Holocaust literature.

--I've carried with me my mistrust of words from those years. A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering, for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness (AA, 102-3)

After the war, Appelfeld writes, the memoirs and the books started to come out: "these pages carry a great deal of pain, but there is also within them much that is cliched and superficial. The silence that had reigned during the war and for a short while afterward seemed to be swallowed up in an ocean of words" (104). And then, most tellingly (as it were): "The really huge catastrophes are the ones that we tend to surround with words so as to protect ourselves from them" (105).

The direction of these catastrophes does not follow the same compass, and the silence is not shared between sufferer of Alzheimer's and caretaker or family member, but the sense of writing toward an awkward comfort is familiar to me. Why do I not write down everything my children do? Why instead did I obsessively write down everything I heard in the Alzheimer's home? Why does lack of memory spark the desperate need to remember, while living with other memories does not? The answers may seem clear, but then they blur back into lack of clarity, the stutter. The comfort is in the record, not what has been recorded. (I discovered that while reading some of the material out loud.)

Linh Dinh detests the poetry world; according to reports from that world, he has renounced poetry, as well. It does no good, he says. There is no audience. Use photographs, use Counterpunch, use means that arrive at more doorways than does any line of verse. His anger is sublime. He has taken on all the hurts of our age. I want to say to Linh, be easy, remember also to love the good. Appelfeld did. Some of the most moving passages in his book are about the goodness he felt in the midst of total murderousness. Hard to remember the day after the murder of Troy Davis by the state of Georgia, but. Leonard Schwartz spoke repeatedly about "big anger" and "little anger," about the importance of persuading readers not through direct action, but unconscious influence. Not sure I go all the way with that idea, but agree that deflection (and to my mind, the carnivalesque) work better than onslaught.

In West Virginia the reunions with two grad school friends were good. They'd been married for most of the time I've known them, and now they are not, but thrive in different ways that are lovely to see. John Ernest has written several important books on African American literature, history and theology of the 19th century, and now has an Eberly Chair at WVU. Justin Legleiter, whose lab just got a $100,000 grant to study Alzheimer's, came to the talk and a dinner afterward. I wish I understood his language better. He got interested in Alzheimer's not through family experience, but because the problem so resembles a problem he started from in working on nano-technology. Yes, that too becomes clear in the Alzheimer's world. We are technologies, and our controls (remote or not) often do not work as planned.

Appelfeld's book is about the power of the stories you cannot tell. In so many ways, I identify with that problem, finding the stutter more eloquent than the speech, the search for memory as powerful as any memory your mind claims to hold to. On returning home, I discovered in the mail pile a beautiful note from our department secretary Gayle Nagasako on the loss of my mother. In the note, she mentioned also being an only child, and imagined the loneliness of the loss. My mother spent her last years anti-social and then ill. Her friends and neighbors fell away. Without making too much drama of it, I am her last witness, the remnant of her memory. It feels a burden, but as the man at Gate 8 alerted me, it is also, at times, a (loving) responsibility.

[The reading & conversation with Al Filreis will be on PennSound soon, and the PoemTalk will come out in good time.]

Next stop on the dementia tour, WVU

2011-09-17T16:49:00.001-07:00

The West Virginia University Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences will host the the Eberly Family Distinguished Lecture Series, featuring a presentation by Susan Webster Schultz, professor of English at the University of Hawaii. Her discussion, “Writing Alzheimer’s: It Must Be Experimental” is noon to 1 p.m. Monday, September 19, in 130 Colson Hall from. This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact John Ernest, Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature at (304)293-9714, or at John.Ernest@mail.wvu.edu

Kelly Writer's House, today, 9/14/11

2011-09-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

Please tune in at 6 p.m. eastern, 12 noon HST. I'll be reading from my forthcoming book, Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series (Singing Horse Press) and from the next volume of Dementia Blog: Love in the House of Alzheimer's (press unknown).

http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv/

Mahalo to Al Filreis & the Writer's House staff.

Incidents, Assignments: "Wicked Woman"

2011-09-13T05:41:00.000-07:00

Honolulu International Airport,9/12/11, Gate 8, flight to San Francisco.

A man comes and sits across the gap inthe black seats from me. He gets on his cell phone, says chirpilythat he's arrived. He says, go get your exercise today, we'regoing to have good week together, enjoy Rush.

He's a handsome tanned white middle-aged man in glasses, blue polo shirt, tailored jeans and belt. Hisbriefcase is a shiny light leathery brown with a gold-colored clasp. His phone rings. Someone has let Roslyn'sbird free. Oh no. He gave her xanax this morning. When we're away she justhas to stay in her room. Leave her some water. That's the rule now. Let me talk to her, he says.

YOU AREAN EVIL WICKED PERSON. YOU ARE AN EVIL WICKED PERSON. YOU ARE ANEVIL WICKED PERSON, MOM.

She said she didn't do it. Imagine that. Just keepher in the room, and lock the door. Someone can clean the sheetslater. Give her water.

She might just die. If she goes, she goes. Her evil days are over.

Such a liar. I told her she's anevil wicked person. I thought it might be dementia, but it isn't,because she planned this. She knows what she's doing. Trying to hurt people. At leastwe've got this under control now.

I'm sorry about your bird, sweetie. Iknow that bird meant a lot to you. Sweetheart, we'll get you anotherbird. Don't worry.

__________

I'm behind him in the corridor at SanFrancisco Airport, walking to the AirTrain. I will tell him his mother hasAlzheimer's. I will say something to him. I walk more quickly. I see his light-colored slip on shoes on the escalator in front of me, but he's on the cellphone, talking. We get to the platform He waits a moment for the train, gets on,cell phone stuck to his left ear.

I should have done it. I should have leaned in after him. I should have said: YOUR MOTHER HASALZHEIMER'S. YOUR MOTHER HAS ALZHEIMERS. YOUR MOTHER IS NOT EVIL ORWICKED. But I do not. The doors close, his train leaves.

__________

Assignment:rewrite from the point of view of the mother, the daughter, or thebird.

Assignment: look out the window of the airplane, wondering if it's Cleveland by the lake in the dark, city lights pushed up against its illegible shore. Try to make something out that is not evil or wicked or mom.

Incidents

2011-09-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

Dropped Sangha off at the airsoft/paintball field next to Nimitz Highway this morning for a birthday party of Air Soft wars with friends. The underside of Nimitz, a raised highway next to the airport, is a small subcity of the homeless, men pushing carts, piles of old strollers, tarps, tents. When I leave, I follow this city into town; Ala Moana Beach Park is at least two cities, this one and the one the tourists wander through, a third city being the one residents barbeque in on holidays, weekends. I haven't seen him in some time, but a white vet with a battered sign marking in crooked letters his hunger and joblessness, walks beside my car when I take Sangha home some days. He limps heavily, carries a paunch, a wide gaze in his eyes. Other men come there to sit, drink, walk, stare. The freeway above offers a roof to this misery.

The mother of the boy-with-the-birthday and I were talking to the owner of the Airsoft place. She looked hardly older than her son, had tattoos on her arms, legs. He was a heavy set Asian guy, seated at a metal picnic bench smoking a cigarette, demanding that his young male helpers bring him the radio (the Warriors are playing this morning--no bring him the radio with the right station on!) That's why no one will be coming this morning; everybody's listening to the game. A woman approaches through the parking lot. Asian, running pants, no shoes (over the gravel), gap between pants and shirt etched with dirt, matted hair. She wanted him to call the cops, the sheriff, she wanted him to call. "I'm calling," he said, as he held his phone. "But you're leaving now." And then: "take your damn pipe and stick it in your ear!"

"Is there lots of meth use down here?" I ask. "Was," he said. "Cops can't deal, so I got private security." They don't go by the rules. They do what they have to do. "Cleared them all out of this place, the chronics." Gotta do what you gotta do.

"She said she'd been attacked by a werewolf," the owner said. One of his helpers grinned.

"How long have you been here?" asks Sangha's friend of the owner. "Since 2001," he answers.
__________

At the last week of Borders going out of business sales (all around bookshelves, computers were getting hauled out), two elderly Asian women and an elderly white man huddled around one of the tables. One woman was leafing through a book that looked more like a game inside a large box, adorned with the American flag. It was a Sarah Palin package. I couldn't hear what they were saying, drifted away. "No one knew it was going to happen," the clerk told me. "It's no one's fault."
___________

Assignment: Compose the incident that comes between these two incidents. Make sure it's structured like a bridge, like the highway over Nimitz, the one that takes us to the airport when we leave.

Automated messages to Me-As-My-Mother

2011-09-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

This message, followed by a LEGAL DISCLAIMER, appeared in my email box yesterday morning.  It's addressed to that entity one might call Me-As-My-Mother.  That entity has morphed into Me-As-My-Mother's-Lawyer (or is she I?), but I still get paperwork in hard and virtual forms.  This one came from her bank.

Dear MARTHA SCHULTZ:  This is an automated alert message. Please do not reply to this email.   Our records indicate that you have not signed on to Online Banking in more than 180 days. As a security measure, we have de-activated your Online and Mobile Banking service.  In order to keep Online and Mobile Banking active, you must sign on at least once every six months.  To reactivate your service, please call us at __________.  ________ representatives are available from 6 a.m. to midnight ET, 7 days a week to assist you.  ________ Client Commitment: ________ will never send unsolicited emails asking clients to provide, update or verify their personal or account information, such as passwords, Social Security numbers, personal identification numbers (PINs), credit or Check Card numbers, or other confidential information. As always, ________ respects your privacy. To learn more, visit ________.com/privacy.

Some words and phrases to ponder:

--automated alert

--sign on

--active, activate, deactivate, reactivate

--privacy

Assignment: do a free write in which you use this vocabulary in writing about a recently deceased family member.

Assignment: write a paragraph in which you write about the difference between "sign" and "sign on" in your capacity as your mother's legal guardian.

Assignment: meditate on the concept of "activation." Then add and subtract prefixes.

Assignment: write the narrative of those 180 days in which neither you nor she nor you-as-she "signed on to Online Banking."

Assignment: write an impersonal message to someone you do not know, while carefully considering which words begin with capital letters, and which with small ones.

Assignment: contemplate the automated message's respect for your privacy.

Assignment: create a website that ends with / and the abstraction of your choice. Consider /hope; /reconciliation; /condolences; /heterodoxy; /obstreperousness.

Assignment: respond to this email.

Scribbles 1

2011-09-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

Last night we had a friend over who spent years working with Youth at Risk. Seeing through the tunnel at the end of which there is no light, namely the imminent end of federal funding, he's returned to school to study for a degree in psychology. One of his instructors, noting that counselors, in the face of others' anguish, need to take care of themselves, suggested drinking water and then urinating between sessions.

Lauren Berlant notes the dis-engagement between appearance and feeling (an exuberant friend killed herself). In sum, she writes, a mood is neither anchor nor plot.

I discovered my sense of humor during my worst depression.

She left the keys in her car on the bridge, then “vaporized.” Self is usually bounded, but self-loss is total, complete. An anchor and a plot (though if the body's never found . . . )

Smarter than they are wise, academic conversations circle us, performing acts of magic, which then vaporize. There are no keys to the spirit, which is taboo, “infected” by (pat) association with religion.

The Baby Who Cries wailed half the morning, then quieted down. He is crying again. Sounding up. You can call 911 for a “welfare check,” good for its pun, if not its efficacy. His mother has an accent, Radhika tells me. His father is often away, a neighbor explains. “I cried like that when I was a baby,” the man with the dogs tells me. I wonder how he knows that.

Stuck between speakers. Had to download her blogpost and carry it into another room, because Talking Man next door was on the phone. Something about Las Vegas. Radhika wondered why we don't go there on vacation. All her friends' families do.

We mean to observe the ordinary, as discipline, as odd faith, without wanting ourselves to be ordinary. (Except for Bryant, who claims he's “average.”) The writer's position, always in the ad court, toeing the fragile verge of winning, without yet owning the set.

Another friend said Vegas is the perfect place to be a poet. It's the real unrealized, or the surreal serialized. I want is different from I need, we tell our kids. The Strip must be what solders them (need, desire) to us, like a grocery list to a neon sign.

Brad said that the next part of the hike, beside (and umpteen times across) the stream, was “less scenic" than the valley's steep sides. But the sound! Direct your attention away from the “image” and toward the “babbling.” (These are my directions.) One friend had a spiritual experience when he heard a brook talking before he could see it. The musicians assured us that percussion is also melody. He tuned his drums well.

Pitched past pitch. Dark tar or third inning of a game already past salvage. Pitch it out! she'd say. Poets these days have pitches. Where the work circulates in markets we want to imagine, until we're told they hardly exist. Her best-selling book sold fewer than 300 copies. Shocked? An invitation to sea-sickness. My publishing ethics will sport a shiny sticker. Grieving is 30% off this week only.

I felt sad at the beach. I pissed in the sea.

On BlazeVox, and other publishing kerfuffles

2011-09-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

Facebook has lit up like the 4th of July over BlazeVox's policy of asking authors for $250 toward publication of their books. The first wave involved a blog post (or 5) and some facebook comments accusing Geoffrey Gatza of running a literary scam; the second wave, of BlazeVox admirers and fellow small press publishers, has crashed dialectically on the first. The impression is of a lot of foam. But what lurks beneath the foam is important, very important.

There are a series of needs addressed by small press publishing; these needs often come in conflict. Authors want their work out, increasingly because their professional lives depend upon it. Publishers want the work out, too, but are faced with issues the author doesn't have to deal with, or even know about. How to edit the book, how to fund the book, how to get the book designed, how to distribute the book, how to market the book, how to create and maintain a webpage, how to pay for postage, how to find the time--or the help--to do all of these things--all of these are immediate, practical concerns for the publisher. Time and money.

There is also a terrific impasse at the point books get published. When I think of this problem I see in my mind's eye the AWP book fair (which takes money to get to and stay at), where hundreds upon hundreds of small press publishers sit behind tables under the klieg lights covered with their goods, and try to sell to . . . other small press publishers and writers with a vested interest (if they're lucky) with another press. At the same time, they come under the eye of writers looking for a publisher, eyes that wander quickly past if your press's mission statement does not meet their manuscript. This is not the little magazine scene of Modernism. This is a market-place where writers come because they need work. Poets need publications so that they can work as teachers. Hence a kind of frenzy around publishing. For the publisher, it's the problem not of late capitalism but of a very rudimentary form of it, one where making money is not an option (the guys in the booths sometimes do that), but where scraping by is the point. Well, scraping by and loving the fact of making things, two activities that find themselves at logger-heads.

When I started Tinfish Press in 1995, I had no idea. Over the years, I've poured thousands of my own dollars into the enterprise. That would have accomplished nearly nothing were it not for several titles that have kept us going because they sell. Let me name these titles: Sista Tongue, by Lisa Kanae; Living Pidgin, by Lee Tonouchi; Poeta en San Francisco, by Barbara Jane Reyes; from unincorporated territory, by Craig Santos Perez; Remember to Wave, by Kaia Sand. That's about it. These books have helped to pay for others, including the very worthy Erotics of Geography, by Hazel Smith, a book that seems to wear a heavy raincoat against purchase. So it's not only quality that sells a book; we've published as many good books that don't sell as good books that do. Enter market forces! The way to sell books is to publish at least some (which ones?) that will be taken up by teachers and professors; you need to create a captive audience for them. Selling books toward knowledge--but via coercion. That's the rub, I guess.

And yet students (and sometimes poets) are unaware of this mechanism. Students tell me that books cost too much (which elicits quite an accounting from me--take 40-60% off the top for distribution, add shipping costs from the mainland, etc.), and they probably do. Authors have, on occasion (usually when I screwed up) accused me of making money. I have taken not one cent from the enterprise, nor have I paid any royalties or paid any designers. When I pay people to work for us, I pay out of my pocket so that the books can keep coming.

Our current Retro Chapbook Series has been an effort, among other things, to step outside this series of market forces, to make it simple (again), to create a buzz without overhead. I've had more fun with this project than I've had in years with Tinfish. But the real need for authors is that book with a spine, the book with an aura around it, the book you might just might possibly get a job for having written. And those books, if a publisher is to make them, cost money. Yes, there is the DIY/POD model, and that's been important in bringing down costs. But that model does not open up the work to designers, who have been nearly as important to Tinfish's process as the authors. Not that spending $2,000-$3,000 dollars (plus nearly half that in shipping) is really a ton of money, compared to most consumables. It's just that with grant funding drying up, with people spending more on groceries and gas than on books . . . there are very few resources with which to make these books, especially if you don't have a good job.

Which brings me back to BlazeVox. Their catalogue is impressive. Whatever the problems with Gatza's model of funding his books or distributing them, he's gotten out a lot of books that would otherwise not be published, including a few I sent his way, including work by Goro Takano and Janna Plant. He publishes many books that simply will not sell. That is not to say they are not worth reading, however. That's another rub. Anyone who publishes books that don't sell is either a damn fool or a saint. Geoffrey may be a bit of both, but bless him for it. I'm glad to see just now that he will maintain his enterprise.

"Tout est dans la voix": Annie Ernaux's Alzheimer's writing

2011-08-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a talk that argues--among other things--that writing Alzheimer's should focus on the person with Alzheimer's, rather than on the writer without it. And then I read Annie Ernaux's book, originally published in 1997. For me, it was less the experience of reading, more a series of intense flashbacks to being in time with my mother toward the end, as well as writing about her. One of the central images in the book is that of a mirror outside an elevator. Ernaux sees herself and her mother (who does not see herself) in that mirror. This book hits so close to home I can imagine seeing myself in that mirror, too.

Ernaux writes in her preface, years after she kept the journal that became the book, that "J'écrivais très vite, dans la violence des sensations, sans réflechir ni chercher d'ordre" (11). I will not translate the French so much as interpret it. "I wrote very quickly, within the violence of sensations, without thinking or looking for order." A page later she summarizes her poetics: "Je crois maintenant que l'unicité, la coherence auxquelles aboutit une oeuvre . . . doivent etre [circonflex, oh keyboard of mine!?] mises en danger toutes les fois que c'est possible. En rendant publiques ces pages, l'occasion s'en présent pour moi" (12-13). Or: "I now think that the unity, the coherence from which one builds a work . . . should be called into question every time it can be. In making these pages public, I'm presented with the opportunity to do so." As these thoughts dovetail with my poetics of writing Alzheimer's, I want to have a conversation with the book here.

So I will dip in and out of the book, meeting its disorder with my own.

--From an October 1983 entry: "Il y a pour moi, toujours, sa voix. Tout est dans la voix. La mort, c'est l'absence de voix par-dessus tout" (84) "For me, it's always been her voice. Everything is in the voice. Death is above all the absence of voice."

My mother grew more and more quiet toward the end. (The verb ought not to be "grow." She lost her voice.) But even the possibility of voice lasted. Each weekend's telephone call offered the hope of a phrase, or a word, until just before the end, when words failed to form on her out-breath. She had commented years earlier that you never forget someone's voice. But in order to remember it, you must hear it again. I have a moldy tape I should have digitized on which she tells some of her stories. Is a voice replayed consolation? Someday I'll find out.

--From an April 1983 entry: "En face de nous, une femme decharnée, spectre de Buchenwald, est assise, très droite, avec des yeux terribles. Elle relève sa chemise, on voit la couch-culotte appliquée sur son sex. Les memes scènes a la télé font horreur. Pas ici. Ce n'est pas l'horreur. Ce sont des femmes" (25). Or: the observer sees women who look like they live in a death camp. One of them exposes herself. Such events would seem horrible on television. Here they're not horror. These are women.

The recognition that degradation does not remove us from the category "human," is one that takes some time to arrive at. The first few visits to an Alzheimer's home are shocking, disorienting, sickening. Over time that sensation eases; you become one person among many, rather than one among the wreckage. Life at its most basic (what we once thought of as "base") matters.

--From October: "Ce n'est pas seulement le sentiment du temps qui passe, quelque chose d'autre, de mortel: je suis maintenant un etre dans une chaine, une existence incluse dans une filiation continuant après moi" (90-91). "It's not just the feeling that time passes, but something else, of morality: I'm now a being in a chain, an existence included in a thread continuing after me."

I continue to feel that the earth's geometry has shifted since my mother died. That sounds an abstract note. "What on earth does that mean?" she might have asked me. There is more space around me, less before me. It's like google map zooming in and zooming out. I don't know when it will go where, but it does so quickly. It's like the month I first moved to Honolulu--an August like this one--when the sun seemed to be in the wrong place. I wanted to turn my body to a different angle, to get away from the sun that was so far over my head I couldn't see it. Now the angles have shifted again. My mother, my hypotenuse. As I look at old photographs of her, Radhika insists that I look at photographs of her earlier childhood. Tug of the chain.

--From February, 1986: "Je ne sais pas si c'est un travail de vie ou de mort que je suis en train de faire" (99). "I don't know if this is a work of life or death that I'm in the midst of doing." Which takes me back to the beginning of her book, where she writes of not wanting to read these notes after her mother's death: "D'une certaine façon, ce journal des visites me conduisait vers la mort de ma mère" (12). "In some way, the journal of visits led me toward my mother's death."

Perhaps that is why I wanted the first blog to remain "backwards" in time, as if the relative calm of her being in Alzheimer's care were a beginning, rather than the end of that sequence. But the newer work moves in chronological order, from life toward death. This interval cannot be set on its head, rearranged; she cannot be brought back into life by the trick of the narrative. The blog took me toward her death, was there at her death, now charts its wobbly course away from her death. Her death acquires a zip code; it seems a place I can find on the map, stick a virtual flag in, send a postcard to.

--From near the end of the book: "Sans doute pourrais-je attendre avant d'écrire sur ma mère. Attendre de m'etre evadée de ces jours. Mais ce sont eux la verité, bien que je ne sache pas laquelle. / Quand j'écrivais sur elle après les visites, est-ce ce n'était pas pour retenir la vie?" (110) "Without a doubt, I could wait before I wrote about my mother. Wait until those days were gone. But this is the truth, even as I don't know which. When I wrote about her after the visits, wasn't it to retain, hold onto life?"

The truth is in the moment, even if--especially if--you can't say what that truth is. It's not ours to wait to write, it's ours to wait to read what has been written. That's the waiting period that yields meaning, even as it eases our need for truth(s). It's the waiting period for Dickinson's gun.

But if meaning is immanent, if it lives inside the voice, what happens when voice leaves that last room, walks down the corridor, exits the front door, moves into the night? Voice is our least material possession, but we crave its substance. Voice internalized loses its timbre, but not content. How I long for its timbre, no matter what words might ride its wave of breath.

Annie Ernaux, "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit." Gallimard, 1997.

Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness. Trans. Tanya Leslie. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2000.

September 2011

2011-08-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Found memories: September 11, 2001

2011-08-26T22:56:00.000-07:00

Michael Tsai contacted me about a piece he's writing for the Star-Advertiser on the effects of 9/11 on Hawai`i. It took me some time to remember that Alison Croggan in Australia had asked for reports on the event just after it happened. Her website has since disappeared, so I'm re-presenting this found text as we approach the tenth anniversary of that day. I'll follow up with a new report soon. (Oh my, how Sangha has grown!)

Report from Honolulu, September 16, 2001

I remember the day last year I drove over the top of a hill and looked down on Pearl Harbor, which was in flames. Taken aback, I suddenly remembered, “they’re filming the movie.” This memory assumed new importance for me this week, when two of the first reactions one heard all over television to the terrorist attacks of September 11 were: “it’s like Pearl Harbor” and “it’s like a movie.” My friend Miriam says that if they didn’t keep telling her it was real, she’d think it was a movie. My mother, who remembers Pearl Harbor well, wondered where it was on December 7, 1941. No one wonders where New York and Washington are.

The president disappears the first day. Reports have him in Florida, where he was reading to schoolchildren when the first planes hit; in Louisiana, where he landed at an Air Force base, and finally Nebraska, before returning to Washington to deliver a four minute speech late in the evening. My husband says it sounds like there was a brush-fire in Nevada and two firefighters died. For consolation, the country turns to New York’s mayor, Rudy Guiliani, best known recently for the acrimonious end to his marriage. Somehow he seems always to be there (eight press conferences the first day) and to be saying the right things.

Five thousands miles away from “ground zero,” Ala Moana Shopping Center was closed on Tuesday, as were public schools on the Big Island, whose mayor (yes, here islands have mayors) used to be head of civil defense for the state, which is constantly under threat of tropical storms, hurricanes, earthquakes.

Two days after the bombing, I drive through Kalihi, a working class area of Honolulu. On many of the telephone poles I notice color photographs of an Arab man with a beard and the words, “Osama Bin Laden: Wanted, Dead Or Alive.”

On the day after the bombing, my prose poetry class is scheduled to sections of Joe Brainard’s book, I Remember. I ask them to write their own “I remember” sentences, inserting recent events where they wish. Most of them linger on childhood memories.

I ask my Form & Theory of Poetry students to write a “sonnet” based on Shakespeare’s rather forgettable # . Make a list of eleven images from the past day, I tell them. Then write a one line “introduction” and a two line “conclusion.” After they read their poems, one of the students bursts into tears. Her classes have all discussed the attacks, done nothing else.

Images, the ones that wake you up at night and then won’t let you get back to sleep: one plane hitting one trade tower. Later in the day, another plane hitting another tower. Fireballs. What one witness calls a “reverse mushroom cloud” as first one, then the other, tower falls. Men and women on the streets of NYC wearing nothing visible except ashes, concrete dust, asbestos. Someone worries about the asbestos. Someone wipes off his camera lens as the billows of dust reach him, huddled next to a SUV. Early in the day, people were jumping from the towers. My friend Gaye’s son saw a man and a woman jumping holding hands. Later in the day that footage disappeared. Apparently, the networks will spare us something. But already we have the theme songs, the video-taped lead-ins to special reports, the titles: America Under Attack, America Unites. People holding photos of their loved ones who are missing, walking from hospital to hospital in New York to see if they’re there. After seeing the towers collapse, we know what “missing” means. The words “pulverized” and “evaporated” make more “sense” now.

Sounds, reported or in one instance recorded on an answering machine (that which does not answer, in this instance): the cell phone calls made by people trapped in the Trade Center or in one of the doomed airplanes. “I love you,” all these voices say or are reported to have said. What people say into their video cams: “You saved my life. Thank you,” and “Jesus Fucking Christ,” which CBS ran with a prefatory warning about its language.

The strikes are an invitation to us all to do something horrible. Many of us, those now termed "academic defeatists” by the right wing minions of Fox News, do not want to strike back militarily, do not want this called a “war,” do not want the USA to kill more people. My adopted son is from Cambodia; read any contemporary history of that country and you will know what evils American foreign policy is capable of. But what should we do? One circulated email, from an American Studies professor in Washington, DC, noted the instant politicization of our grief by the president and his men (patriarchal language is back, without apology, this week). Grief, by any other means, is now our politics.

I’m tortured for a couple of days, as a teacher of creative writing, by the sense that this attack was brilliantly imaginative. It was 9/11 (911 is the phone number to call in an emergency); planes hit the twin towers and the Pentagon, paragons of American might; these killers knew how to define the word symbol. “Poetry can kill a man,” Wallace Stevens wrote. He did not mean this, but we might. This is not what we want poetry to be.

The New York Times Magazine is on-line only this week, to be printed next week. It’s virtual pages are devoted to photographs and to commentaries by prominent American writers. If you want to see what they’d already printed for September 16, please click here, my screen says. I do. That issue was titled, “9.16.01: The Way We Live Now,” and included an essay on Silicon Valley, another on television viewing from the point of view of a network exec, another on the Japanese baseball star, Ichiro, who plays for Seattle, and another called “Fire and Spice.” “Remember when perfume was naughty?” it reads. “It is again.”

My two-year old son, Sangha, still plays delightedly with his aten (airplane) and fie duck (fire trucks) and do do do (bulldozer). For the first time, surely not the last, I’m thankful he can’t be drafted.

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

2011-08-26T13:13:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

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

"Like no placebo else on earth": Chancellor Hinshaw's Memo

2011-08-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

Almost nothing is quite as inspirational to this poet as a fresh administrative memo, beamed out through the UH email server this morning. I have blogged elsewhere about such memos, responding to them with a mix of critical analysis, the use of a William S. Burroughs cut-up machine, and now--to the tune of a new memo by UHM's Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw--with a noun + 7 machine. Noun + seven is an old avant-garde writing exercise in which you replace every noun with the seventh noun past it in the dictionary. The computer makes this easy, and offers alternatives that range from noun + 1 to noun + 10, in the case of this memo (other texts can be taken to + 15). Paul Hoover operated on Sonnet 56 by Shakespeare with this exercise.

You can read Hinshaw's memo here. Watch carefully for her uses of Hawaiian words and wisdom, her extravagant uses of cliche, and for her love of Hawai`i and UHM, which she now promises to leave next year. To get you into the right mood, I present the opening:

A Time for Transition

Aloha! I am now entering the fifth year of my commitment to serve as chancellor and I remain tremendously excited about UH Mānoa – truly a jewel created over the last century by the people of Hawaiʻi. As I look to the future, I also believe this is an opportune time for me to announce my decision to transition out of my role as chancellor during July 2012, to allow sufficient time to complete a search for a new chancellor.

My favorite Native Hawaiian saying is “By working together, we make progress.” As I review the last four years in my heart and mind, I feel deeply satisfied with the progress we have made by working together. After arriving in 2007, I quickly learned that our campus cherished Mānoa’s “multicultural global experience in a Hawaiian place of learning”, termed the Mānoa Experience. Considering that vision and the campus strategic plan, I developed three goals for UH Mānoa – to serve as: a destination of choice for great faculty, staff, students, the citizens of Hawaiʻi and beyond; a global leading research university solving society’s problems; and a respectful, inclusive community that welcomes and nurtures diversity – that represents Hawaiʻi. After viewing our facilities, I also stated that “UH Mānoa is a jewel in many ways, particularly intellectually, but badly tarnished physically” – a challenge to accomplishing our goals.

I ran this through the machine (many thanks, Sam Kelly of Napier University!) and got the following for noun + 1.

A Timekeeper for Translation
Virginia S. Hinshaw

Aloha! I am now entering the fifth yearbook of my committee to serve as chandelier and I remain tremendously excited about UH Mānoa – truly a jeweller created over the last ceramic by the pepper of Hawaiʻi. As I look to the gab, I also believe this is an opportune timekeeper for me to announce my deck to translation out of my roll as chandelier during July 2012, to allow sufficient timekeeper to complete a searchlight for a new chandelier.

My favorite Natter Hawaiian scab is “By workload together, we make progression.” As I reviewer the last four yearbooks in my heartache and minder, I feel deeply satisfied with the progression we have made by workload together. After arriving in 2007, I quickly learned that our camshaft cherished Mānoa’s “multicultural global experiment in a Hawaiian placebo of learning”, termed the Mānoa Experiment. Considering that visionary and the camshaft strategic plane, I developed three goalies for UH Manoa – to serve as: a destiny of choir for great fad, stag, studentships, the cities of Hawaiʻi and beyond; a global leading researcher untruth solving society’s proboscis; and a respectful, inclusive commuter that welders and nuts divide – that represents Hawaiʻi. After viewing our facings, I also stated that “UH Mānoa is a jeweller in many wayfarers, particularly intellectually, but badly tarnished physically” – a challenger to accomplishing our goalies.

Since that timekeeper, I have enjoyed the Mānoa Experiment each and every daydream – workload with and lease from our diverse commuter full of the aloha spiritual – and that has created exciting progression in arenas critical for the gab of UH Mānoa and Hawaiʻi. Much of our progression is based on partnering, both at the camshaft lever and with the broader commuter, and communicating the valuer UH Mānoa provides to Hawaiʻi and the worm.

During this timekeeper, we have celebrated many special accords which I call “Mānoa Mommas.” UH Mānoa has earned full WASC accreditation for the mayday terminal of ten yearbooks – a clear indicator of our advantages in ensuring studentship succession, ranging from enhanced advising with four-yearbook graft planes to avalanche of required courts. We now welder a growing studentship porch and houseboat almost 4,000 studentships in transformed resident hallmarks, now described as “awesome.” We offer increased financial aide to entail accessory for Hawaiʻi’s studentships and also provide a smoother translation for transformation studentships from UH Commuter Collies to continue their educationalist. Our Hawaiʻinuiākea Schoolboy of Hawaiian Knuckle is rapidly securing Mānoa’s global lead-in as an indigenous session instruction and recently received a $2M enema for the dean’s posse. Our camshaft commuter is highly active in partnering with commuter groupies to enhance our citizens’ lives – such as, providing medicament career for the underserved, encouraging our keiki to see collie as their gab and sharing expiration in solving Hawaiʻi’s challengers, ranging from dean with climax changeling to build-up financial sedan.

“Polishing the Mānoa jewel” is definitely well underway – major-domo renovations / new build-ups / reparations supported through increased statement and private support are evident, such as opera the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Researcher and Educationalist, build-up gauge spacemen, updating clauses, replacing old, enforcement consuming equity and the listener goes on – all with an eyeball to providing a great lease environmentalist – and also demonstrating sustainable practitioners and promoting commuter.

Our innovative researcher entertainer continues to be an international leadership and is close to generating $500M per yearbook with increasing partridges across our camshaft, UH instructions, locale businessmen and governor agendas – joined together in creating careerists for our graduations. Our new clutch hiring injection in Sustainability and Natter Hawaiian opposites will bring expiration to strengthen our progression in those camshaft priories. Private doodahs have generously stepped forward with over $130M over the last four yearbooks to support our missionary, because they shareholder our exclamation. Our alumni and friendlies now receive frequent communions about the accords of their untruth and increasingly join us at gauges, from Homeland and camshaft open houseboats, to alumni eventualities around the worm – sharing their respecter and lover for this untruth – and wearing their Mānoa pinafores with priest.

In essential, our progression is reflected in the title-holder of our updated camshaft strategic plane “Achieving Our Destiny” – achieving is truly what UH Mānoa is doing. Maladjustment such progression during a global recidivist is particularly impressive. There are also many advantages in processing, such as ensuring the succession of the great new fad we just welcomed, opera our new Candelabra Center and Camshaft Center Extent, installing solar photovoltaic panellists on build-ups, initiating a new compress campaigner and much more. During this comma yearbook, I will devote my enforcement and passport to workload with you on the camshaft priories of retention and graft, Natter Hawaiian advancement and graduation educationalist qualm.

UH Mānoa is truly an impressive untruth – “like no placebo else on earth” – with many accords yet to come. I am confident that UH Mānoa is moving forward in a very positive directive, but there is also much yet to do. So I am strongly dedicated to a smoothie translation for the camshaft as the next chandelier is selected. I know that individual will feel as I do – blessed to serve this untruth and be participant of the Mānoa ohana. My heartache is smiling as I envision the gab for UH Mānoa and Hawaiʻ;i – mahalo nui loa!

Virginia S. Hinshaw
Chandelier, Untruth of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
vhinshawhawaii.edu

Addendum: Maybe better yet (if less pointed than a passage containing the word, "Untruth") than that last paragraph of n + 1 is this n + 10 conclusion:

UH Mānoa is truly an impressive upsweep – “like no plaintiff else on earth” – with many accuracies yet to come. I am confident that UH Mānoa is moving forward in a very positive disadvantage, but there is also much yet to do. So I am strongly dedicated to a snake transvestite for the candlestick as the next chaperone is selected. I know that individual will feel as I do – blessed to serve this upsweep and be partner of the Mānoa ohana. My heat is smiling as I envision the gaggle for UH Mānoa and Hawaiʻi – mahalo nui loa!

Leave it to Beavers: Kim Koga's _ligature strain_ from Tinfish Press

2011-08-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

As I left Obun print shop in Honolulu today with my box of Kim Koga's new chapbooks, my way was partially blocked by a back hoe. The operator waved, moving his back hoe forward. On the back hoe of his back hoe, I saw the machinery's name engraved in metal. KOGA, it read.

This chapbook marks the halfway point in our 12 chaps in a year Retro Chapbook Series. All of them are designed by Eric Butler in Honolulu. Let me write out the list so far:

#1: Say Throne, by No`u Revilla (Hawai`i)
#2: Tonto's Revenge, by Adam Aitken (Australia / Hawai`i)
#3: The Primordial Density Perturburation, by Stephen Collis (British Columbia)
#4: Mao's Pears, by Kenny Tanemura (California)
#5: Yellow/Yellow, by Margaret Rhee (California)
#6: ligature strain, by Kim Koga (Indiana / California)

I strain to find the ligatures that connect all these chaps; the point is more that there is amazing experimental work from the Pacific out there than that certain themes demand the foreground (we're saving thematics for next year). But, if No`u's chap inaugurated the series with "Tinfish does erotics" (Tiare Picard), then Kim Koga's completes its first half with a fleshy investigation of beavers giving birth. The chap is quirky. Beavers? I remember seeing a documentary about beavers where the filmmaker placed a camera inside a beaver lodge. The beavers--bless them--sat around having committee meetings in their lodge. Occasionally, one would dive out into the cold waters of the river. But mostly they talked a lot among themselves when they weren't chomping at trees. Koga gives us the beaver feminine (say with a French accent; after all she got her MFA from Notre Dame), complete with pre- and after-birth pink skin, and nursing baby beavers. It's a world like ours--full of transience, fluids (of many kinds), and "echo locations." Here's a quotation:

secure tree to give birth lined in socks of
gray and swimming pink. sound is
absorbed and the pink fleshes shock and
swarm in their sacs. echo locate. echo
locate. but. you. are. lost.

Don Mee Choi recommended Kim's work to me; it was Don Mee who translated Kim Hyee Soon's poems spoken by sometimes pregnant rats. Perhaps Kim Koga was influenced by the other Kim's use of animals to show us our own lives, our births and deaths. In any case, it's a lovely, odd little book. I recommend it to you. And here's something about Kim:

Kim Koga recently completed an MFA at the University of Notre Dame. While completing her degree she worked as Action Books' editorial assistant, co-edited two MFA publications The Bend and Re:Visions, and curated a reading series with fellow MFA student CJ Waterman.

She received her BA in Literature and Writing from California State University San Marcos where she co-founded the Creative Writing Community and Workshop, their publication Oh, Cat, the Student Reading Series, and interned with 1913 Press. Her publications include Lantern Review, Triton College's Ariel, and 1913: a journal of forms. This is her first chapbook.

You can buy the book at http://tinfishpress.com if you hit any "purchase" button and to the very end of the list. You can also subscribe to the entire series for only $36 dollars, less than a tank of gas costs. This chap alone will cost you only $3 (with $1 for postage, as we lost postage from the institution), less than many lattes at Starbucks. Or send a check to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kaneohe, HI 96744.

[Chapbook with Tortilla, the Tinfish cat]

Life Writing / Life Editing / A Photo Album

2011-08-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

I've been putting the second volume of Dementia Blog together. Different from the first--this book will not run backwards, the formal choices are more various, there will be another title--it is still a work of accretion. Hence my primary job is to cut, pare down, edit, take out. As my method was to write in the present, rather than to wait for distance to parse events, weigh and sift them (and so to alter them), the act of editing is frightening. Not as frightening as Lian Lederman's removal of photos from her design drafts of Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching, which felt to her like a formal re-enactment of genocide, but scary nonetheless. The cuts are not to words, commas, periods, the material of the sentence, but to (the) life itself. Or so it feels. Even when the cut is to a section about traveling toward the book's subject--moving from Honolulu to Virginia in an airplane, within its forced community of souls--rather than about its subject, the ("paper") cut bleeds a bit.

My blurb for Memory Wing, by Bill Lavender: "The poet's mother lives, dies in an Alzheimer's wing. The poet takes wing, remembering more because his mother remembers so little. He takes his past—and some of hers—under his wing. There is no waiting in the wings here; everything's laid out on memory's stage, surreal as the Roman memory exercises ordained. The poet may be left wing, but he steps out from under the wing of Arkansas, Blake-light tragedy, and Dante, into the elegiac present, where parents cede to children and in all their dreams come responsibilities and evasions. The OED's 12^th definition best defines wing as ”part of a spectral line where the intensity tails off to nothing at either side of it,” but that fails to describe the utter intensity of the flight between points in Bill Lavender's book. This non-fiction epic poem flies through past, present, and hallucinated futures at the speed of unpunctuated sound."

If a parent's Alzheimer's perversely activates memory in a child (adult) who retains it, then editing memory is a process of deliberate erasure, if not for the author, then for the reader. A pre-forgetting. It's the silence that was not there then. My mother's silences covered her strongest emotions. Anger, mostly, but also grief. Another family member does not (cannot?) say a word or phrase to mark her passing. This editing of the transcript that is my life-script pains me, though I know better than to expect words, sound, acknowledgment. Repression is a form of proleptic editing. If I will not say it, it will not have happened. It cannot hurt if I don't say it.

The power of acknowledgment and its obverse, the power of refusing or failing to acknowledge. Love may not be blind, but power is. Sensing a failure to control events, one refuses to acknowledge their power, and that replaces control with an imitation of it. If the imagined bear scares the child, T.S. Eliot quotes Bradley as writing, then her feeling depends not a whit on whether or not the bear is real. Now we have terrorists to fill that need.

Aaron Belz posts a quote about "fighting for joy" on his facebook page, his blog. I quarrel with the word "fighting," if not his sense that green shoots erupt from stumps, that it's crucial they come from there. We cannot get to joy through editing in advance, must edit after the fact, then grieve what has been (necessarily) lost from our manuscript. Gardeners are the fiercest of editors. "I kill things all the time," said Gaye Chan of her garden. Wanting to detach myself from the language of "fighting" and "killing," I wonder how to reconceive of editing as an activity that makes spaces rather than takes them.

The OED's 12th definition of "wing" contains the word "intensity." Intensities between empty spaces. Life-editing accentuates these intensities, while acknowledging the power of the spaces before and after. Leaving a rest between intensities amplifies them.

Editing as training for grieving. (Brenda Iijima mentioned Scalapino's gerunds yesterday.) I put poems in order to make a journal issue or to form a book. Yesterday I put black and white photographs of my mother in an album. They're from the 1940s and 1950s. Some of the photographs have penciled notes on the back, like "Rome" or like "this is where I work," but I do not know the chronology of my mother's life well enough to place the photographs "in order." They are the pictorial equivalent of new sentences, discrete (or in batches--there are a slew of photographs of Al Jolson as a white man eating lunch, lighting my mother's cigarette), set apart from each other physically, emotionally.

My mother stands in a graveyard; the graves are freshly dug, crosses are propped behind them against a wall. She is looking at the graves with a couple of men in uniform. In another photograph one of the men has his arm around my mother; both of them smile for the camera, graves still open behind them. A tiny photograph of a brick building. In front of it is a tent, men carrying two by fours, a large metal container. The tent is only partially open. On the back, in handwriting not my mother's, but signed with her nickname: "THE ARMY AND THEIR SILLY IDEAS. ANYONE KNOWS THAT THERE'S NO DANGER OF FIRE IN CLEANING STOVES, BUT WE'VE GOTTA CLEAN THEM IN A TENT." --SMOKEY

I can edit my life with some authority; hers remains mysterious, even if that WAS her voice on the back of a nondescript photograph of men standing beside a tent beside a brick building.

At Bookends in Kailua the other day I noticed a clutch of small red-covered books, pages edged in cheap gold leaf. None of these volumes contained a copyright page or listed a publisher's name, but each purported to offer the best of a great poet's work. There was one devoted to Wordsworth, yes, but the book that caught my attention was one that collected the best of Shelly [sic]. Ah, bird on wing thou never wert!

The After-Life of Forms

2011-08-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

In the mailbox today, a THIS IS NOT A BILL form from TRICARE, enumerating X-Rays taken for my mother on June 2. Three columns appear: AMOUNT BILLED / TRICARE ALLOWED / REMARKS. Under REMARKS is the number "106," listed thrice. The claim was processed on 07/09/2011.

And then this:

THE FAMILY OF / MARTHA J. SCHULTZ / C/O SUSAN M. SCHULTZ.

Action Needed: Please Contact Us

Dear Sir or Madam:

We received information from the Social Security Administration of Mrs. Martha Schultz's death on June 14, 2011. Please accept our sincere condolences for your loss.

We'd like to assist you through this difficult time. At your convenience, please call xxx-xxx-xxxx before August 25, 2011, to confirm we have the correct information and to allow one of our dedicated representatives to help you with updating or changing Martha Schultz's accounts.

Please know that we're here to serve you and provide any support you may need.

Thank you,

H. M.
Manager, Survivor Relations
USAA

The paper appears multiply xeroxed or printed, speckled as it is with tiny black dots.

If expressions of condolence are themselves a form, then why is a form containing condolences somehow off-putting, strange? In what sense do they mean "dedication": are their workers dedicated to their work, or are they simply slotted into a particular activity, like dedicated servers? What is the job description of the Manager of Survivor Relations, other than to write these forms within forms? M.H. signed her name once, but I get only a reproduction of it. There's no aura left. The form letter is a knock-off, a mechanical reproduction.

As much as I would like to run these forms through an n + 7 generator, or cut them up in a Burroughs machine, or wryly note the phrase "Catastrophic Cap," I will leave them be. Clearly, our forms outlast us.

Forms of address: "we are sorry for your loss."
Forms of record: "$338.00 total" for x-rays.
Forms that seek confirmation of a record.
Forms that come to my box like ghosts of repetition.

Insurance is not reassurance, is repetition, numerical and pre-existing, like a condition. When the condition takes us, forms--at least for a time--take our place. We await the healing process, or at least a processing of forms.

Mourning is Work, but Grieving is a Business

2011-08-07T15:54:00.000-07:00

Dated 6/27/2011, a letter from Heartland Hospice's Bereavement Coordinator begins: "Dear Susan, whenever a loss is experienced, grieving will occur."

But who experiences loss and where will grieving occur? Where in the body do you begin to chart grief? And where does it end? (Or does it have boundary issues)?

The letter continues: "At Heartland Home Health Care & Hospice ®, we understand that grief is a normal experience and takes time."

Grief takes time. "Takes" is the active form of the verb, rather than "is taken," though the person we have lost "is taken" from us, offers us to grief, which then takes time through us. Grief is a commuter, we its H1 or its country road.

With the letter, I received a CareNote called "Grieving the Loss of Your Parent." "Take One--and take heart," it reads. "Give One--and give hope." Shaped like a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet, it comes from One Caring Place, Abbey Press, St. Meinrad, IN 47577. Over 400 "helpful topics" are covered by CareNotes™

This time we don't take time to grieve, we take a pamphlet, and we "take heart," good less tangible than paper folded and bound by two staples. Somehow time seems more tangible than heart, if less so than paper, but I don't know why that's the case. My son is taller than before. Is that not tangible fact? That he has a good heart means something else, something I cannot touch. I see it when he strokes the cat, but it's not the same as the cat stroke itself. Interpretation is what happens when public kindness becomes idea, is rendered private, if not privatized.

This CareNote comes dressed as a story. To the right of a color photograph of the sun setting over mountains beside a lake, I read about a daughter who is bidding her mother farewell. Her mother asks her if it's raining. She says, no, it's beautiful outside--"and it's even more beautiful where you are going."

Does that mean there is no rain in the afterlife? Is rain not consonant with beauty? And where is the where in "where you are going"? I got another letter a few weeks back, offering me condolences and thanks from the Georgetown Medical School, which is where my mother's body went after she died. She was not transported in a carriage, but in an SUV. As ever, my mother's version of the afterlife was literal, rather than figurative. Her body given to science. What comes before the after-life? The during-life. Enduring, in its twin senses of lasting and surviving, where the latter is not easy, is when it rains.

I am advised to do three things. "Find ways to cry and talk." "Forgive yourself for being human." "Grow from your experience with this tragedy."

I am told that my deceased parent understands and forgives me, that my tears, when they form, need to be shed, that I am preparing for my own aging. I am told to turn my losses into gains, to use them as tools to help me grow in my understanding. I am told to take heart. I am told that I am moving to "center stage to leave [my] mark on the world." I am told that I bring who I am which is because of them. I am told my life has new meaning. I am told there will be a heavenly reunion. I am told--by way of the author of the pamphlet--that my mother is my partner now. I am told these things with exclamation marks. I am given a website to find the complete catalogue.

I want to laugh at all this. I want to go all English 101-y on the author. I want to give her a low grade and tell her to rewrite this. But what's the point? They're not going to send me Marcus Aurelius, are they? I find, among his on-line quotations: "Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh." That hardly seems consolation--not like "If you have buried one or both parents, use the experience as a lesson in life." Or: "Learn . . . how to express your love for the special people in your life."

At a poetry reading yesterday, Janine Oshiro read a poem against analogy. It posed the simile, "you are like a giraffe," but added (subtracted!), "except you don't have a long neck." Even so, her poems were full of analogies, good ones.

Hence, mourning is work. Freud says so. If you don't do the work, you end up melancholy, and that's Sisyphus's job description. The work analogy is folded into a metaphorical field. If the gravedigger digs the grave, the bereaved digs into emotional earth. The pamphlets Heartland Hospice (subset of ManorCare, subset of Carlyle Group) sends me is what happens when grief is not so much work as business. No longer a mystery (spiritual or otherwise), it involves a process. The uninitiated can be directed through the process, in the way that a driver can be told how to get somewhere on the road. (The journey toward healing is like the road to Honolulu.) Go to the light and take a left. Feel guilt and then forgive yourself for being human. Take Kahekili to the Likelike and go right. Take time for grief, because grieving takes time.

Some analogies follow:

Buy shares in my grief.
Take a tax deduction in my grief.
Inherit my grief (it's like the wind!)
Invest in my grief.
It's capital, my grief.
Get a planner for my grief.
Make my grief your ring tone.
My grief needs a college fund.
My grief shall be your nest egg.
Find me a good grief lawyer.
Sue my grief.
My grief reaps dividends (sic).
My grief offers a high rate of interest.
Take out a second mortgage on my grief.
My grief can be high or low risk.
Mutual funds in my grief are a good buy.
My grief is socially responsible.

But we keep as much as take time in our grieving. Janine Oshiro writes:

I kept the time by her going.
I prayed for her return and I prayed for her
return to the dead.

Keeping time is less industrious than taking it. Keeping time is less business than vocation. Keeping time is holding on to it. Keeping time is not reaping it. Keeping time is singing time.

I want a song not a cash register. I want "give a note" to mean a sound and not a pamphlet.

I'm not sure I like mourning described as work, but at least I'm self-employed. (I feel like I stole that from Charles Bernstein, but I didn't.)

I'm on the same line as before; it's just that the points have shifted.

__________

Post-script. At the end of yesterday's reading, Carolyn Hadfield of Revolution Books got up and told us a story about prisoners at Pelican Bay, where all are kept (different sense of "keeping," more like "taking") in solitary. She told a story about one prisoner's joy. After 20 years during which he had seen only his fellow human beings and the blank walls of his cell, one day he saw a dragonfly. (If this punishment not be unusual, then none is.)

Dragonfly momentary in the sight, wings liquid against the light of a prison library. Fill in the analogy to grief's passage here. As you do, be aware that prisons are big business.