ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews
Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of
Hawai'i (And Some Stories) edited by Susan M. Schultz
(TinFish, Hawai’I, 2013)
Here's an
anthology likely will induce a wait a sec response from many people. I mean
many as in the half-scad within the sadly closed circuit of the poetry world.
Schultz here collects work from people with Euro-American ancestry who live or
perhaps have lived on the islands. Schultz, a Hawai'i resident since 1990, has
for twenty years, as editor of TinFish, published work by native Hawai'ians. Do
you wonder why she here publishes writers seemingly of the fat old tradition?
It's
complicated, and I will leave the thorough explanation to Schultz' thoughtful
introduction, but I will say that Otherness sits central to her thesis. Schultz
includes a poem by a Euro-American, written in the voice of an elder Hawai'ian.
This elder throws out a trout that she catches because it is a haole
fish. Not proper Hawai'ian food. That trout is a mark of Otherness for the
Euro-American.
Those of
the Euro-American tradition—Schultz uses the term—are a distinct minority on
the islands. History, of course, paints a harsh picture of colonial malfeasance
(that's the polite word for it). The bitter remnants of colonialism don't wash
off easily.
So, see,
there's a sense that Euro-Americans cannot properly write about Hawai'i, the
land, the traditions, the mythic (you saw the invisible scare quotes I set
around properly). Like I hadn't ought to write about Cuchulain, what
with English DNA in my blood at the supposed controls. And yet.
The concept
of race is one of the foremost stupid shorthands that we clutch so
determinedly. Culture, however, reads thrillingly on our everything. The
difference between races is minor, biologically speaking, but the cultural grasp
at descriptive adjectives has created the Trumpian wall of self-satisfied
exclusion. Ef that and let's move on.
But there is
something real and bearing here. You know, we are all isolatos. You may be pure
Hawai'ian, and yet a stutterer, or obese, or painfully shy, or any other
stunting from normal. That sort of thing. Suddenly you can think that poetry
sits on the page, not comeuppance.
At which
point, I remark the book. It has poems.
Poems
gather words or other energy units into concentrations of greater energy that
could be useful. That's how we roll. Wiggly stuff gets in the way of that
concentration of greater energy. Now, I write this as an invitation to find out
for yourself. Blah blah blah culture, it concentrates prejudice. Don't get
stuck!
I should,
mench that with Potes and Poets Press, I helped initially publish Schultz's Memory
Cards & Adoption Papers, some of which she includes in this anthology.
I didn't write the goddam beautiful thing, I saw the light. The manuscript
really jumped from the pages. And isn't that the point? Schultz's TinFish has
published a number of works of national renown. The work is not exotica,
however foreign or different the provenance of the work may seem to be.
Reading the
authors in this anthology, no one style manifests itself. Scott Abels seems to mine
search engines. Short, random-sounding phrases that seem to have met each other
for the first time arise in his poems. This is “New City”, part of a series:
A Cardinal
amid scandal
is said to leave.
We shave
funny
places.
The City
Council
has a ban
on sports
metaphors
for sexual
aggression.
The people drove
Monsanto out
because
they didn't help.
Tree number
eight fifty four
has a fungus.
Let's loop
our rope
over
a natural crotch.
Don't be
lonely
in a
new city.
We see a
sense of Otherness here, looking around at normative strangeness. Much that I
read in this anthology has notes of that. Part of the landscape, but somehow
stepped aside. Suffice to say that different voices speak in this anthology, and
different ways.
So what is
culture? Why is culture? Where can we meet?
We only
have seventeen authors here, hardly a quorum, so we cannot assume tendencies or
schools. Each author received space at the end of their section to make a
statement. In a way, these statements secure the anthology's importance. The
statements make evident that all are writers and they all reside in the world,
in the words and ideas that come to them. Of course they are authentic. Let you
be an authentic reader, then, with the words and issues at hand. Poetry is the
effort to see thru the invisible wall.
*****
Re. Allen Bramhall: A diminishing flow of poems, a continuing insistence in watching superhero movies with my son, an increasing interest in the healing, lifebound elation of creativity, and some websites:
Generally cheerful.
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