Adam In France

Poetry and travel - quotes from Andrew Zawacki

2012-01-03T06:29:00.000+11:00

Still in Paris, but leaving to return to Sydney in a month's time. Inclined to mourning impending separation from this city which one can never get to grips with, even if I imagine, one is from here, and while not quite ready for homecoming reunifications, I am in a mood to post pithy wisdom from my contemporary cosmopolitans.

'[p]oetry isn’t merely about travel—itis travel, a geographical itinerary that necessitates openness to othernessand, on the ontological plane, willingness to risk one’s so-called identity, tohave it revised by constant exposure to difference.'

- Andrew Zawacki http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2702/erica_wright_andrew_zawacki_on/

Full article here

and

"We may recallNicolas Malebranche’s disquieting assertion that, rather than lead us intoforeign lands, he will show us we are estranged within our own."

- Andrew Zawackireview of Peter Gizzi in Boston Review

Hotel in the Marais Paris

A quote by Eileen Myles

2012-01-02T02:47:00.001+11:00

Eileen Myles:

Most likely we travel to exist inan analogue to our life’s dilemmas. It’s like a spaceship. The work for thetraveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are movingthrough is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems isforgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travelis not transcendence. It’s immanence. It’s trying to be here.

Todd Swift's Review of Laurie Duggan's Allotments

2011-11-25T09:41:00.001+11:00

Laurie Duggan's Allotments is a good read.
See Todd Swift's review here .

Mark Roberts and P76

2011-11-23T04:37:00.001+11:00

Mark Roberts and I co-edited a journal in the early eighties called P76. It was roneoed, a pre-digital technology that required a Gestetner stencil-printing machine and heaps of thick black ink. We were inspired by Ken Bolton and crew of "Magic Sam" press.

The machine looked like this:

I looked like this:

Adam Aitken in 1985 by John Tranter

Here's a link to Mark's remarkable reviews of Australian poets Gary Catalano, Craig Powell, Jill Jones, and Martin Harrison:

Go here.

Paris poems - Laurie Duggan

2011-11-21T00:36:00.001+11:00

shirt collars, 4th arrondissement, Paris

LittleJournal

by Laurie Duggan

From last century, the art

of Henri Laurens: its domestic scale

alive in our moment of ones and zeros

Once, in the 5ième, on AvenueGay-Lussac,

I stayed in a triangular apartment,

balcony adjoining the bathroom,

travelled north through Place Monge,

named for a geometer, its stalls

of onion and garlic, en route

for the International City of Art

Metal chimney extensions ascend

a wall by a viaduct, seeking light;

the park below inhabited by emptybottles

4 (July 14)

After a washed out parade

an image of the General

commands blank space

before the Hôtel de Ville

Après midi, the clouds scatter,

commandos drop into the Tuileries

protected by gendarmes

as they fold their chutes

Prose poems on Paris - John Foulcher

2011-11-17T19:39:00.001+11:00

A street near Montmartre

Australian poet John Foulcher is publishing a new book, The Sunset Assumption, which contains work he began at the Keesing studio. He kindly sent me an electronic copy. Here's a sample prose poem, which is part of a sequence that opens the book. I've chosen it because it is one of the more ambiguous and less transparent ones, and a departure from a certain "clarity and straightforwardness" of his earlier work, which has earned Foulcher a place on the Australian high school syllabus (he is also a teacher).

I have to say I prefer poetry that is less clear, the poems which have more resistence to interpretation, like the following which is all the more interesting for the ambivalent way it both records and undermines the touristic response to Paris. I find Paris so layered, dense and often unreadable, yet too easy to reduce to tableaux and poetic equivalents of postcards, and perhaps Foulcher is wrestling with this here:

Art

There’s safety in art. Youkeep it an arm’s length while you hold it in both hands. Lifetimes are lost inthe Louvre, and much more than that. You think the Mona Lisa should be set up on an easel in the street. That way,there could be peace among the masters. You take the metro to the MuséeD’Orsay, a station with all kinds of transport. Coubert fills the place withdarkness and steam, Degas with mist. The bed in La chambre de Van Goghà Arles shows nothing of sleepless nights. You wander to the Orangerie,where perspective deserts you. You can’t get a grip on the lilies. They’respattered all over the curved walls, they bloom at all times of the day. In thedusk light they’re impossible, like white blood cells. Nothing is privilegedamong the lilies. Everything is a long way from the river. She stands at yourside and says I don’t know much aboutlilies, but I know what I like. You know what you despise. You’re drowningamong the lilies. You think of Millay’s Ophelia as she drifts on a bed oflilies, and you wish you were somewhere else.

The cliche, I don’t know much about lilies, but I know what I like takes on a sinister overtone. it is the tourist who is aggressive, who consumes without discretion. I prefer the poems like this one, in which Foulcher allows a disturbance of the status quo, argues with the apparent reality of a scene, and goes looking for the destabilising moment. At the same time this objectivist framing of a scene is almost impossible to destabilise, given the way it has become a dominant mode of writing. There is however an ambiguity in the point-of-view. Who is looking? The paintings colour the present in obvious ways - Degas denotes 'mist', Coubert equals 'darkness', but perhaps that is the tourist eye that Foulcher adopts with mild irony. Death is the form of Ophelia, and the flowers of blood reminds the reader of Baudelaire, the pre-Raphaelites, and to the symbolists' obsessions with death and (non)transcendence. There's an interesting and discomforting tension here between the materialist/agnostic and the religious/spiritual in Foulcher's poems, and a sustained reading of Foulcher's new book might reveal who's won the struggle.

Prose Poems - Suneeta Perez da Costa

2011-11-17T00:57:00.001+11:00

Bedroom, Saint Victor des Oules France

Check out the latest Mascara Literary Review for a great selection of prose poetry edited by Keri Glastonbury.

Includes Jill Jones, Jaimie Gusman, Susan Schultz, Tim Wright, Bella Li, Michael Farell and other great poets.

Here is one by Suneeta Perez da Costa, an Australian writer who shows the strong influence of French modernism/post modernism.

TheChanged Woman

Had she changed, she wondered? For though there were somevisible signs of her transformation what was difficult was that the moresignificant changes had happened inside her and therefore could not really beseen at all. Often she tried to remember and make the gestures of her old self,and while this might have reassured the others, she herself knew this old selfwas merely a sheath, an elaborate and outmoded disguise. When she discarded it,however, it seemed these people, much beloved by her, could not recognise herand spoke disapprovingly of her new ways. Despite her efforts to win them over,they were unwilling, or else incapable, of understanding her. They went abouttheir lives, faithful to their old habits, while she grew restive and weary ofit all, dreaming of circuses and caravans and distant lands. Eventually shedevised an escape plan. The heartbreaking thing was she could not say goodbyefor if she so much as looked into the eyes of these familiar people, nowvirtual strangers, she was sure her resolve to leave would itself breakforever. So on the appointed day, she rose at dawn, placed a fewpossessions—heirlooms and relics as she already considered them—in a bag andmade her way to the end of the valley and up through the mountain pass. The skychanged, the vegetation changed, but somehow, despite the heavy cloak she worefor protection from the elements, she felt a sure-footed lightheartedness.

Poems on Paris 2 - Gary Catalano

2011-11-13T06:15:00.001+11:00

If you knew the poetry scene in the 80s and 90s you mightremember Gary Catalano, who had been an art critic for the Age and wrote 10poetry collections before he died in 2002. In the Keesing studio there areabout a dozen poetry books, including Catalano's UQP volume, The Empire of Grass. Here I only want toquote and comment on those poems of his that refer to Paris.

I post them, not because I think they are very good, but because I find them to be symptomatic of an imagistic trying to make discursive commentary, which is the temptation for the expatriate poet in Paris. The use of stereotype "Italian hug" also seems to be weak, and sentimental.

Here's an excerpt from a poem-sequence 'Postcards for Peter(Peter Lyssiotis)'. This is is probably not one of Catalano's best poems.

Paris can

be spooky.

Everywhere you go

you ask yourself

was Modigliani drunk

on this spot?

10.

When you are almost skittled

in the Tuileries

by a kid on a bike

with a black and white kitten

perched on his shoulder

you have to agree: the French are

a wee bit crazy

and don't deserve to be screwed

by Brezhnev's mob.

13.

On telling the waitress

at the Café des Beaux-Arts

that we were leaving France

I received a real

Italian hug

and big kiss

on each cheek

- and therefore

am walking on air.

In Jacket 4 he published these prose poems, which in theireabstraction in engagement with creative thinking and surreal imagination are more 'French' I feel,though in imagery are Australian, with a familiar feel for the bush iconography- hay bales, cockatoos, red dirt, the trees, the fly-swatter:

Thoughts
Those trees in the distancehave gone through so many transformations that I hardly know where to begin. Icould start with a thought-balloon, for that is what they initially appeared tobe when I glimpsed them between the haybales' Maginot Line. Or should I startwith a fly-swatter, for that is what they have become as we stretch our legs onthe red dirt and brush at our mouths and eyes?

But already I have a better idea. If I can't think of them as parachutes justabout to crumple as they touch earth, I'd like to propose that each one of themis a table-tennis bat. Look, if you listen really hard you'll even hear a ballwhizz past your ear at a speed as fast as that of thought itself.

Parisian Sketch

2011-11-04T23:27:00.002+11:00


La Défense, and Neela

In an earlier post French Poetry I commented that Paris never seemed to be the putative subject of a lot of French poems. So now I find this one by Paul Verlaine, at Poetryintranslation.comParisian SketchTranslated by A. S. Kline

(from Poèmes Saturniens: Eaux-Fortes I 1866)

The moon was shedding her plates of zinc

In obtuse angles.

The plumes of smoke like ‘fives’ distinct

Rose thick and black from high roof-tangles.

The sky was grey, there wept a breeze

Like a bassoon.

Far off, a tom-cat, stealthy, discreet,

Miaowed, oh, strangely out of tune.

I, walked, of divine Plato dreaming

And of Phidias,Salamis, Marathon, under twinkling

Eyes, eyes of blue jets of gas.

Here's another translation that does not attempt to preserve the rhyme:

The moon was laying her plates of zinc
on the oblique.
Like figure fives the plumes of smoke
rose thick and black from the tall roof-peaks.
In the gray sky the breeze wept loud
as a bassoon.
In a funk a stealthy tomcat miaowed,
far away, his shrill strange tune.
Dreaming of Plato, I walked on,
and of Phidias,
of Salamis and Marathon,
under winking eyes of blue jets of gas.

Trans. C. F.MacIntyre, Paul Verlaine: Selected Poems, Berkley:U of California P, 1970: 17.

Here's another "Paris", with my own novice interpretation:

Paris n'a de beauté qu'en son histoire,

Mais cette histoire est belle tellement !

La Seine est encaissée absurdement,

Mais son vert clair à lui seul vaut la gloire.

(Paris, not the story of its beauty, but that there's so much of it! The Seine absurdly framed, its limpid green is its own glory.)

Paris n'a de gaîté que son bagout,

Mais ce bagout, encor qu'assez immonde,

Il fait le tour des langages du monde,

Salant un peu ce trop fade ragoût.

(Paris, not of its chattering gaity, but of its blather, so vile, babbel of the world, it's watered-down bog)

Paris n'a de sagesse que le sombre

Flux de son peuple et de ses factions,

Alors qu'il fait des révolutions

Avec l'Ordre embusqué dans la pénombre.

Paris, not of its blue-greem wisdom, its crowd, its gangs or its cash-flow, it makes its revolutions so, giving orders like a sniper in the shadows)

Paris n'a que sa Fille de charmant

Laquelle n'est au prix de l'Exotique

Que torts gentils et vice peu pratique

Et ce quasi désintéressement.

(Paris, not of her Woman of charm, who's no exotic prize, who tittilates with her sexual tricks, feigning disinterest.)

Paris n'a de bonté que sa légère

Ivresse de désir et de plaisir,

Sans rien de trop que le vague désir

De voir son plaisir égayer son frère.

(Paris, not of the goodness of your froth, your drunken pleasure and desire, with nothing but a vague yearning to liven up your brother.)

Paris n'a rien de triste et de cruel

Que le poëte annuel ou chronique,

Crevant d'ennui sous l'oeil d'une clinique

Non loin du vieil ouvrier fraternel

(Paris, nothing but sadness and cruelty, that the poet once or always, grounded down under the eye of the sickbay, no friend now to the old brotherhood of work)

Vive Paris quand même et son histoire

Et son bagout et sa Fille, naïf

Produit d'un art pervers et primitif,

Et meure son poëte expiatoire !

(Long live Paris and your testament, your nonsense and your Woman, idiot offspring of art's perverse and primitive, and for your sins your poet sacrifice!)

2011-11-04T20:08:00.000+11:00

SMALL PRESS, BIG FISH
by Matthew DeKneef | Nov 2, 2011
Honolulu Weekly

Remember when you first read Howl and Other Poems? (Go ahead, take a moment…) From its radical ‘60s sentiment in both political ideology and eyeball kick prose, down to its compact 6” x 5” dimensions, Ginsberg’s poetry continues to feel that much more secretive, urgent and necessary, even in the 21st century.
Local publisher Tinfish Press, which has been around for over 15 years now, publishes in the same vein as that underground tradition with a creative circulation of experimental poetry by Pacific-based writers. Their latest endeavor, the Tinfish Retro Series, will usher in a new reading era of “angelheaded hipsters”–a 12-part series of shape-shifting chapbooks published monthly through 2012.
Currently, there are seven issues out, each packed tighter than a can of sardines, the longest running at a satisfying 28 pages: Say Throne by Nou Revilla, Tonto’s Revenge by Adam Aitken, The Primordial Density Perturbation by Stephen Collis, Mao’s Pears by Kenny Tanemura, Yellow by Margaret Rhee, Ligature Strain by Kim Koga and Yours Truly & Other Poems by Xi Chuan.
From kitchen sink approaches to poems with more intentional goals, part of the fun is reveling in those novel gems. Personal favorites include Revilla’s “Pull Without Push,” Aitken’s “The Day Danno Died (In Memory of James MacArthur)” and Chuan’s “Yours Truly.” Though most exciting about the Retro Series, with many of its writers having some Hawaii tie, is feeling a sense that each has a charged responsibility to their words. That they matter. Or maybe that’s just how you feel as reader. Either way, you’ve been hooked.

$3 each, [tinfishpress.com]

Margerat Rhee's Tinfish book is also reviewed in Rob Mclennan's blog.

Bangkok flooded, 1942

2011-10-27T06:35:00.001+11:00

Bangkok Flood 1942 - video

Laurie Duggan and Rosemary

2011-10-22T04:45:00.000+11:00

New book by Laurie Duggan, Australian poet now living in Faversham, Kent. Available from an American outfit, Fewer and Further Press.

Laurie Duggan and Rosemary in the Three Mariners, a gastro-pub in Faversham Kent.

French Postcards

2011-10-20T04:32:00.000+11:00

La Carte de France en pictogrammes, from the Museum of Immigration, Paris.

Thomas Mailaender, Les voitures cathédrales 2004. A picture of the typical vehicles used by Algerian migrants to France.

Liberté

2011-10-20T04:00:00.000+11:00

The Spirit of Freedom on the July Column, Place de la Bastille. A rain squall was fast approaching!

French Poetry

2011-10-17T06:33:00.000+11:00

I posted this image of the cover of Mary Anne Caw's anthology meaning to comment on it later. It is a commendable descendant of Paul Auster's Random House of Twentieth Century French Poetry, but with a whole lot more female poets and poems of Arabic/Moroccan/Algerian descent. There are is a wide range of translators, which is part of the interest. I've been thinking how abstract much of the poems are, in that the French OULIPO and Surrealiste traditions have been so much more influential on French poetry than on our own Australian work. It is interesting to see how L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E based poetry owes so much to the French propensity to accept poems as artefacts and as language games That said I love the realism and specificity of a certain Anglo-American strain, mastered most clearly by our own Laurie Duggan for example.Being here in Paris one feels both the elation of being able to partake of it stimulation but also the oppressive weight of all its CULTURE. But I resist the urge to write ABOUT PARIS. I've also been researching Australian poets who mention "Paris" in their poems. It's fascinating to see what motifs and images are repeated - pigeons for example, Notre Dame of course, beggars, the revolution, chimneys... I have found that swallows are more prevalent in French poems, and in post-war poems Paris is hardly ever the actual subject of a poem, since, I suppose, Paris IS the universe so it isn't singled out specifically in the kind of topographical poem. But what about Baudelaire? For him, Paris is metonymic of an anti-utopia, a post-romantic Hell perhaps. I feel the same bi-polarity - its seductive beauty and its hellishness, cruelty, toughness. Paris IS Western EUROPE condensed. It claims its stewardship of classical and modern culture, so much suffer the consequences of a collapse in the system. And if Europe is to collapse, it somehow seems that Paris will suffer as much as Athens.On the Eurostar from London, I heard two young Americans talking about Paris. "I must go and find Jim Morrison's grave!' In the yellow kitchen in Monet's house in Giverny, an older American gentleman to another: "Did you see that spigot?"

Riots, Paris

2011-08-15T02:36:00.000+10:00

The Guardian today has a good article on the civil unrest in Paris in 2005, which occurred in a run-down suburb called Clichy Sous Bois.

Here's a photo of the areas affected:

The Guardian writes that

"the liberal left agonised as to why. Unemployment, lack of opportunity, police harrassment, and discrimination emerged as the dominant themes. Chirac subsequently acknowledged the "poison" of racial discrimination, saying it "saps the foundations of the republic", and announced a raft of measures aimed at improving the life chances of youths from disadvantaged suburbs, including 5,000 extra teachers and assistants, 10,000 scholarships, individual help with job-seeking and incentives for companies moving near to sink estates.

Not that any of these promises accomplished very much, according to Fize. "A bit of money got thrown at the problem," he said. "But this could happen again in France. The ashes are still smoldering. It just needs the spark. The political and economic systems have both failed these youths – in France, in Britain, but also in Spain, Greece. Even the Arab Spring reflects the same root problems."

It is chilling to remember that the interior minister of the time,Nicholas Sarkozy, like David Cameron now, called for "zero tolerance". Sarkozy also named the rioters "scum", and called for tighter immigration.

Paris, London and Riots

2011-08-13T23:03:00.000+10:00

Paris, London and Riots

I’ve been in Paris for three days, a resident at the Keesing Studio in the old Jewish district of Paris, the Marais. Two days ago Neela and I walked through the Latin Quarter and down past the Sorbonne district which is now chic and gentrified. We passed three up-market camping shops, and as many specialist bookshops. We reflected on the riots in England. Today I noted Facebook comments by my friends, some of whom have celebrated the protests with a deeply Shelleyan tone as the revival of an ‘anarchist’ spirit. As an entry by a Facebook Friend says: ‘Back on the streets a spirit of anarchy and chaos reigns in the hearts of all’.

But what does that really mean, a ‘spirit’ of anarchy? Is it a spirit of unified community at all, and even for the youth running amok, did they ever feel it in the hearts to express a unity of intent? Some joined in to protest another killing of a citizen by trigger happy police, some joined for a laugh, some needed new Nike trainers. But almost everyone hates the police and the authoritarian turn of the state; everyone in those inner city suburbs have felt the cuts to services and the loss of any hope in cheap education or the chance of a meaningful job; everyone who has ever been poor in England (and I have) can understand the resentment of the looters, even if the manner of expression is crude and lacking in strategy.

My own brother-in-law, an architect who works in Clapham Junction, has a different reaction (he was working late the night the high street was set ablaze.) For him it was senseless. What I am saying is that chaos can’t manifest a single unifying spirit, but is what it is – chaos. No wonder the Right in England has erupted in moral panic and indignation. So much for dreams of a Great Society if nothing but teargas and baton charges can hold it together.

Last night I read Paris by Andrew Starkey, and was immediately drawn to his description of Paris’s history of revolts and massacres, the up-wellings of fanaticism and popular discontent over the centuries.

What do the riots in England now have in common with the 1968 student uprising in Paris? According to Andrew Starkey, author of Paris: the Secret History, The French ‘revolt’ was mainly staged by students from the universities of Nanterre and the Sorbonne. It was driven by the middle-class students, sons and daughters of the ‘establishment’ who had suffered appalling conditions in the Nanterre Campus.

A group of anarchists ‘Situationists, or ‘Enragés’ led by the philosopher Guy Debord, occupied the main office, and unfurled banners proclaiming the end of work, Everything is Possible, and Boredom is Counter-revolutionary!

On May 3rd the students had occupied the Sorbonne in protest against an authoritarian crackdown on the Nanterre activists. The battle took to Boulevard Saint-Michel, where the police eagerly beat up protesters in full view of the world’s media.

Authority and anti-authority is the common link here. A police force is determined to show the public it is tough and in control, but as the ‘battle’ never really becomes winnable, the police manifest society’s vulnerability to the psychology of a crowd that is disaffected and alienated.

If the French soixant huitards (68ers) had an ideology and vision, in England none of appeared to have been expressed in the obvious symbolism and mode of the mass demonstration. Where were the leaders, the spokespeople? Twitter has replaced the loudhailer. Blackberrys combine all the work of a telephone, TV, Facebook, and a newspaper.

The rioters in England were rarely seen with sloganistic banners, because the slogans almost only appeared on portable phones as SMS messages and Tweets. I read this morning that not a single bookshop was looted, nor any books burned or stolen. But then muggings and looting were not ever the MO of the 68ers, was it?

I thought this to be an inability to express rage or political discontent. But I was wrong. It’s just that the public space and mode of demonstration and mass agitation no longer takes the 60s as a model.

But here’s Jaya Savige’s take on the English riots:

You don't have to wear a hoodie and throw bricks to cause millions of dollars worth of destruction for personal profit: you can also do it in Armani, with dodgy derivatives and an Oxbridge accent. Until we recognise that the recklessness of (some of) the 'best' capitalists is no different to that of the 'mindless thug' running down the street with a plasma tv, we remain blind to the hypocrisy of our moral outrage.

Singapore 2011

2011-07-03T20:13:00.004+10:00

Singapore 2011

What to write about it as a tourist just passing through? But I am a tourist with some historically deeper connection with Singapore, as my father worked here briefly in 1957, when he was a youthful advertising executive. Singapore was part of his first encounter with “the Orient”. The other places were Hong Kong and Bangkok. I’d also passed through in the mid 80s with my friend the poet and academic, now based in Macau, Christopher (Kit) Kelen. We stayed in a run down doss house near Bugis Street, a place run by an elderly Chinese man in a frayed white cotton t-shirt. It was the kind of high ceilinged room with no air-con and no closeable windows, only shutters. It was clean, had washing facilities, and was comfortable though hot. The light bulbs glowed without shades. It was the kind of place sailors might have stayed in, or very humble salesmen.

Since I can’t remember exactly where we stayed I don’t know now what lies on its foundations. Though Chris probably has the diary he kept on that trip.

The names are the same – Bencoolen Street, Middle Road, Little India. The old Bugis Street with its transvestite culture was officially banned and erased. Now it’s been resurrected in a pasteurized form, sans transvestites I believe (I didn’t have time to check it out).

I think it is too standard to make the usual glib complaints about Singapore’s modernization, but what struck me was how in exterior public places like parks, people were scarce. But enter the shopping malls and it’s all there. So too is there a street life in Little India. Dunlop Street has become a pleasant area for backpackers:

I found the History Museum very impressive if not somewhat propagandistic. The way history is mapped out and displayed as a maze is complex, with a deliberate culmination at the point of Singapore’s successful modernization under the PAP and Li Kuan Yew. I’d experienced this narrative technique before, in museums in East Berlin and Vientiane, the capital of socialist Laos. But here one navigates the Singaporean museum with a brilliant electronic guide, made by Siemens. The effect is non-linear, though the voice over guide encourages you to takes rests, or think of making choices – either the personal or the “official” track through a particular time period.

One is not encouraged to contemplate too deeply the contestation of the grand narrative, though there are hints – the room where you can contemplate your interrogation by the colonial head of the Malayan police force of the time,------ You, the suspect agent provocateur, the nascent revolutionary, suspected of fomenting a demonstration against the colonialists.

The other thing that was nostalgic for me was the smell of Singapore, which reminded me of my Bangkok childhood, and of my time teaching in Indonesia and Bali in the 90s. Somehow that smell, so sensuous, cannot be sterilized completely.

I also love Changi Airport – what used to be a simulated forest environment with taped birdsong has been upgraded with a butterfly enclosure. My favourite Nonya style restaurant is still there, overseen by the very same woman who served me in 2009, when I made a trip to attend a job interview. Unfortunately she looks to have had some kind of stroke and is barely hanging on. This time I felt terribly guilty for not sitting down for a meal, as Neela and I weren’t hungry enough.

It’s better to read comments and poems by Singaporeans like Alvin Pang, or my ex-student Mei Li Siew.

Hi Adam!

…What you say about Singapore is intriguingly resonant with my ambivalence towards life there. So safe and stable (unlike Malaysia) yet so sterile and numbingly material….

Salam aloha.
Mei Li

From: Adam Aitken
To: Mei Li Siaw
Sent: Sat, July 2, 2011 4:59:36 AM
Subject: your part of the world

Dear Mei Li

I was just in Singapore a day ago on the say to France, I thought fondly of Malaysia and all things "straits". What a wonderful world you are living now, despite it's political problems. I am sure things will improve on that front. I hope you are writing lots of poems and maybe something about Hawai'i too. I am sure I'll be getting to Malaysia in the near future. In Singapore Neela and I had dinner in one of the more traditional open air food stall areas and were fascinated to see people glued to the soapie that was on TV at the time. A Chinese made soapie which broaches some interesting topics. It was a wonderful feeling sitting there in a public space that was also quite communal and hardly postmodern. The food of course was great. I do worry Singapore is so overrrun with mega-malls it's become inhumane. But the small ordinary spaces are still there.

Best Wishes
Adam

I kept thinking of Kim Cheng Boey’s memoir of Sigapore, Between Stations, a book I like very much, reviewed here. The Readings Bookshop review is brief but sweet:

Kim Cheng Boey was born in Singapore and became an established poet in his home country before migrating to Australia in 1997. He has had many volumes of poetry published. Between Stations is his first collection of travel writing. He currently lectures on creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Cheng Boey was known in Singapore for his political writings and had become disillusioned with Singapore’s rapid economic growth, which he felt came at a cost to its places of tradition.
The selection of writings here focuses on his experiences travelling and working in China, India, Egypt and Morocco. Here are 11 stories to transport you to a particular place and state of mind. The phrase 'between stations' can mean something different to anyone who has migrated: the feeling of being somewhere which still after many years can feel new. The place of your birth – no matter your feelings – holds a sense of strong nostalgia that can never be lost.

Cyril Wong, a Singporean poet and critic reviews the book in Mascara: he writes

The poet-as-restless-traveller has become more three-dimensional to a reader like me who has followed his work since my junior college days. A sense of urgency grips the eponymous last chapter (“Between Stations”) when the writer tell us that as both emigrant and immigrant, he has become “adept at switching between codes:” “You become Kim Cheng Boey instead of Boey Kim Cheng…Kim Boey is accommodating…while Boey Kim Cheng has begun to try to find a way back to the old world…He is still searching for a language to utter himself into being.” Such urgency emphasises the schizophrenic state that the writer has been struggling to resolve throughout this book, particularly when this collection of essays is aching to a close.

747 Poems And Tonto's Revenge

2011-06-04T00:46:00.000+10:00

Jonathan Shaw has posted a really nice review of Tonto's Revenge here.

He muses on the term '747 poems'. I like the idea it could mean seven hundred and forty seven poems! In Hawai'i I believe 747 is an adjective used to refer to touristic views of Hawai'i. We fly in, fly out, write about the place. Pam Brown has a small pamphlet called 747 poems, which are travel poems, one of which is inspired by her trip to Hawai'i

After living with the term for over a year now. I started to think of it as universal, thus Jonathan's quizzical response to it as an 'obscurity' among a playful set of poems I really welcome his response, as I feel that he's right about what I wanted to do in the book. Finding a new term, word, phrase etc. and playing with it is all part of poetry's potential, as Jonathan finds in the book. And this is precisely what I wanted to do - to let go, play with language, and still make a comment about what a visitor's experience of Hawai'i could mean.

Tonto's Revenge

2011-05-06T22:55:00.001+10:00

Cover by the great designer Mr Eric Butler.

My new chapbook Tonto's Revenge, is out with Tinfish.

What a thrill - a US publication in the most interesting experimental and readable press for poetry with a Pacific focus.I also recommend Say Throne, the Tinfish book by No'u Revilla, a terrific Hawaiian poet I met at the University of Hawai'i, It's reviewed at Harriet Poetry Foundation.

To read about the books, go here.

First week of teaching

2011-03-04T00:24:00.000+11:00

Room assigned doesn't open. Security guard can't open it. Apparently the locks have been changed. The students are all quite tall, some serious, some trying to make light of it be smiling at me when I make eye contact. I go down to security and ask for a guard to unlock it. He can't and he gets on the walkie-talkie and explains things really well. I feel like he knows this is serious. It's humid and stuffy. In the corridor on the 11th floor of the Tower Block 40 students from Europe, Japan, China and Korea wonder why their new university is called the University of Technology, Sydney. Once in another room next door, I get them filling out needs analysises and then five students turn up unexpectedly from the Faculty of Business, sent to me to fix their English, though they are already well ahead of a huge proportion of the student population.

I was getting complacent. Thinking that it all just happens - a space with electronic facilities to project the contents of your web page, or your Powerpoint slides. But no, the room I move to doesn't even have a whiteboard, or a blackboard.

I go back to conversation. A Spanish student ask me if our politics a violent or aggressive. No, the politician just argue about taxes and refugees. They call each other liars in public. The Japanese students find this amusing. Another student ask about our biggest industries. It's minerals I say, then tourism, then education. What are people talking about in your part of the world? Unemployment say the Europeans. Too many old people who can't be looked after, say the Japanese. I feel I am Korean and there is one Korea, not two Koreas, says Youngmin. One of my Chinese students reacts to the discussion about the Australian governmental system, No opposition, so we have harmony she says, somewhat facetiously. I ask her if that's really true. She says it's hard to say. I say we in Australia need to get on with China because we export our minerals there. I wonder if she feels I have trivialised the Australia-China relationship, brought it down to low level of trade and money. I realise that that she has more to tell me. She can communicate irony which I think is very smart. I suggest that Chinese are worried about pollution and that Australians are some of the biggest per capita polluters in the world. We talk about the mafia. and the Italian students re-define the meaning of Mafia. I ask them why don't you just kick out Berlusconi if he's so bad? It's not just guys with moustaches and killing each other says a student from Italy. It's bribery and corruption which is common throughout the world. I agree. I suggest that we should call it "organised crime" as it takes away any racist connotations. I try to log on to an electronic uni website. It's almost frozen so I can't show the 'What is multiculturalism?'Powerpoint. I am relieved by the end of my four hour teaching day as four students stay back for a chat and look like the happiest students I have ever taught.

HEAT 24

2011-02-27T11:45:00.000+11:00

I am quite proud to say I was the first poetry editor for HEAT, and was on the board as a consulting editor throughout its publication, though apart from the editor Ivor Indyk's encouragement and support, I am not sure many of my peers would ever thank me for having done the job. Anyway, why thank editors for being editors? We must be judged by what we published and what we didn't.

Was HEAT too "high-brow" as a few of its detractors would whisper in secret? Was HEAT's subscription base always doomed to stay at around 1000? If so, so what? Were Indyk and the rest of us editors elitist or just too idealistic - too "Europhilic"?

Read on. The Australian has a very positive article by Geordie Williamson about the "Last HEAT" (sounds like The Last Emperor - joke!). I agree with I quote a large piece of it and direct you to the web page HERE:

Almost uniquely among Australian journals, HEAT is international in outlook. From the life of Romanian-born poet Antigone Kefala -- interviewed by Amanda Simons in these pages -- to the work of Melbourne academic and film critic Adrian Martin, who writes here in celebration of French director Maurice Pialat's unflinching art, the magazine's contents reflect an unrepentant Europhilia. The inclusion of poetry by Kim Cheng Boey, a Singaporean Chinese, and Ali Alizadeh, who is Iranian by birth, along with the long essay on Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano by London-based compatriot Andreas Campomar, also suggest a willingness to look beyond the traditional capitals of literary culture.

Of course, lists such as these threaten to raise a chuckle. We all know that the flip-side of philistinism is a fetish for the foreign, the more exotic the better. But if HEAT has taught the Australian reading public anything, it is that the boundaries between nations and cultures are more porous than ever, and that the only homogenous thing about our society is its hybrid character. Boey and Alizadeh are Australian citizens, yet their contributions here, elegiac and scatological respectively -- stylistic chalk and cheese -- betray no obligation to endlessly rehearse their allegiances. Their unselfconscious cosmopolitanism is one of the great gifts HEAT has bequeathed.

For the journal's Anglo-Australian contributors, proximity to writers of diverse backgrounds brings other rewards. Their presence dissolves the tired binaries of post-war Australian politics and culture. It is not that the old conflicts -- between city and country, monarchist and republican, indigenous Australian and Anglo arrival -- have been resolved. But the frame of these debates has widened, and many entrenched arguments have been retired as a result. HEAT has provided a privileged space where exhausted political debates, as well as long-standing literary stoushes regarding experimentation in form and genre, have been put aside: not in a self-congratulatory right-thinking manner, but in a spirit of tolerance and a curiosity about different ways of writing and living.

There's also another positive review of the last HEAT by Jonathan Shore in his blog Me Fail? I fly!

Thanks Jonathan. He writes:

The community of people who are glad of its existence is much larger than the journal’s market – the people who buy it, and so contribute to its viability. As I’ve subscribed for ten years and written blog entries (I don’t really think of them as reviews), I have a twinge of smug virtue mixed with my sorrow: like, ‘It’s not my fault!’ I don’t know that I’ve ever felt part of a Heat community – too middlebrow, too whitebread, too shy – but it hasn’t been a purely economic relationship. I’ll miss this regular dose of austere high culture, and emergent/experimental/cosmopolitan writing.

Jonathan, I don't know why you see yourself as "whitebread". Are HEAT writers "brownbread"? I won't miss the so-called austerity of HEAT, as I feel on the contrary that HEAT would sometimes verge on the too rich, too dense side of things (by virtue of each issue being such a fat book).

It's worth pointing out, as Ivor did in an interview he did with Ramona Koval on ABC Books and Writing, that a new crew of editors are going to keep the HEAT banner flying in online form. Hopefully the experimental space will become even more experimental, especially for poetry. More on that later.

Rabbit cover

2011-02-27T00:56:00.000+11:00

Thanks to Siobhan Toohill and Adrian Wiggins for designing this cover. He used the Rabbit Woman photos I took in Honolulu in December for a chapbook he provides for a series of readings at his home in Sydney.

It seems that in Sydney poetry readings are taking place in people's houses, usually in rather pleasant open air surroundings. This time my own reading involved a Q and A session afterward, which I enjoyed more than my own performance, as the questions led to interesting conversations about Hawai'i, about teaching poetry at UH Hawaii, and the genesis of the poems. It was particularly interesting for me to talk about the challenge for a writer to go someone overseas a be a "visiting writer" and then come up with informed, rich, empathetic work about the place that hosted me. I felt that pressure of being an informant who uses poems to create the image or narrative of the other place. I also felt a responsibility not to mis-inform when it came to conveying my Hawaiian experience.

I was thankfully liberated to read outside of a university environment, to ordinary people who were not all poets or invested in writing as a career. Oddly, it was stressful in a way that reading at UH was not. The stress came from reading completely new and experimental work that has come out of my encounter and struggle with living and working in a US Pacific Island state, a place so complex and difficult. Above all, the encounter with American languages, and variants. I have been conscious of tone, volume, attitude, humour, irony.

Cambodian Stampede

2010-11-25T16:50:00.000+11:00

A very good blogger who lives in Phnom Penh has worked out why the Koh Pich bridge disaster in Cambodia killed over 300 people. Apparently it is due to the way people in crowds behave if the density of bodies reaches six people per square meter. People wills start to push each other away to gain space.

Apparently a stampede was caused by a slight swaying of the bridge that panicked a few people who then pushed on others. It was strange that when first reports came out, the catalyst was attributed to electrification of the bridge by the decorative lighting.

Go to http://about-cambodia.blogspot.com/2010/11/koh-pich-disaster-preventable.html

To kill a Taliban: what it costs

2010-11-20T07:23:00.000+11:00

As reported by Sebastian Abbot in today's Honolulu Star Advertiser (Friday 18 November 2010) in Southern Helmand province in Afghanistan Marines are fighting to destroy the Taliban. The paper reported that while a base was being shot at from some distant compounds, Marines 'called in an AC-130 gunship to launch a Hellfire missile, a 500-pound bomb and a precision-guided artillery round at the compounds, rocking the base with deafening explosions that shook dirt loose from the ceilings of the tents. Tribal Elders later said the munitions killed seven Taliban fighters.'

I wanted to know how much that cost and looked up the prices in Wiki:

1 Hellfire missile = 70,000 dollars

1 500 pound bomb = 700 dollars

1 precision guided artillery round = 80,000 dollars

Total: $150,700 plus costs of flying a AC 130 and paying the crew and the marines ?????

So, to kill one Taliban fighter that day it cost at least $21,000.

According to www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LA29Df04.html the Afghan Ministry of Finance claims that the average yearly income of an Afghan worker is 700 dollars a month.

So money spent on the reported airstrike would have kept at least 30 Afghan workers and their families alive for a year, perhaps many more.

Lookout in Oahu

2010-11-17T20:27:00.000+11:00

I have realised that taking photos of people at lookouts can sometimes be more interesting than the views from the lookout. Or no people at all.

The cat woman of Kaka'ako

2010-11-15T19:50:00.001+11:00

I found this video of a news report on a new proposal to deal with "animal hoarding". It features the 'cat woman of kaka'ako'. The humane society of Hawaii want to limit the length of time a person can keep an animal in a cage in a public place to four hours.

From the Hawaii Independent site (my bolding):

October 28 2010, HONOLULU—In the latest effort to keep Hawaii’s “homeless problem” out of site, Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle today signed into law Bill 39, which establishes “Pedestrian Use Zones” that reserve substantial portions of City sidewalks for pedestrians in high pedestrian traffic areas.
On the surface, the City’s description of the bill makes it sound like Hawaii has a serious foot-traffic problem, with the Pedestrian Use Zones clearing the way for Honolulu’s citizens as they walk to work or do their shopping. Opponents to the bill call it simply another “homeless ban”—not unlike the recent law banning tents and shopping carts in Honolulu’s parks.
Bill 39, introduced by Council member Ann Kobayashi, prohibits the storage of personal property within a Pedestrian Use Zone, defined as the portion of a sidewalk that extends toward the street up to eight feet from the adjacent private or public property line bordering the sidewalk opposite the curb.
The restrictions will not apply to persons unable to comply due to suffering a medical emergency; or engaged in other activities such as waiting at a bus stop or taxi stand; or attending a parade, festival, performance, rally, demonstration, meeting, or similar event conducted on the public sidewalk pursuant to and in compliance with an applicable permit.
Pedestrian Use Zones will be established primarily in Honolulu’s most precious tourist shopping commodities: Ala Moana/Kakaako; Downtown; Kalihi; McCully/Moiliili/Makiki; and Waikiki. The restrictions will apply between the hours of 5:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. except in Waikiki, where they will apply between 6:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. of the succeeding day.
Upon conviction, violators—houseless people targeted by the law—may be fined a maximum of $50 or be sentenced to community service for a time period determined by a judge.
The measure appears to be one that makes more of a moral statement, such as the smoking-near-a-doorway law, than one that will immediately see Honolulu’s houseless swept from City streets. Carlisle cautioned that “resource constraints limit the City’s ability to implement the measure’s requirements immediately in all areas.” The City will conduct an educational and warning program prior to enforcement.
The City Council approved Bill 39 on October 13 by a vote of 5 to 4. The measure will take effect in 60 days, and is available here. [That is December 12 2010]
During a declared statewide “homeless” crisis that is facing a shortage of affordable housing and shelter space, Oahu’s houseless population has been banned from beaches, parks, and now city streets. Where will they end up? The answer will likely come via a testifier’s complaint at the next Neighborhood Board meeting or committee hearing—unless our communities and elected officials enact real solutions to the multitude of problems that lead to houselessness.

The Rabbit Woman of Honolulu

2010-11-14T22:11:00.004+11:00

You a tourist? No, I work here. A college student? Good. Tourists are always photographing my rabbits. Now you've met the Rabbit Woman of Honolulu.

I'd broken my own taboo on photographing people without asking them first. She waved a finger at me. I apologised. I thought she'd tell me to fuck off. She had that right. It was like she had eyes in the back of her head as I was about to press the shutter.

We walked down Kapiolani Boulevard.

Rabbit Woman - or was it Rabbit Lady? My memory is already getting into mythic mode. But that is her own name for herself, the name she gave me after she had told me how the world was going to end when a black hole at the center of the earth would suck everything into it.

Like all media savvy people, she knows how to deal with the media. She's got the Press Release memorised.

Habla Espanole? Where are you from? You look Latino. My mother was an Arab, my father a Spanish aristocrat. I never knew his surname.

Do you have number I can call you?

The world will end. But there is a solution - a massive Noahs ark a thousand feet long and three hundred feet high built out of koah wood, the Hawaiian super timber that resists rot. Read the bible, it was all in there. Make sure to seal the insides with waterproof tar. If I could get the students of the university to build it she would appreciate it a lot. They were smart college students, and they could make it.

The hills of Manoa. She pointed to them. They'd be wiped out by a thousand foot Tsunami. But the ark would float above it all.

The TV guys came and photographed me. I was on TV. She smiled.

I asked her if she lived in Kapiolani Park. (Lived there, like a home I thought? A stupid question.) I move around she said. Why I asked. I get bored she said, and she didn't hang around the library in McCully. Too many crackheads. Then she told me about her rabbits. How a certain guy, a crackhead in McCully Park had actually taken one, stole it out of its kennel and cut its throat. Then he burnt his mouth on a crack pipe. But the police had his number, and so did the Philipino Mafia. The bastard. The police had had it with him. The police photographed the rabbit, the dead one. He was going to die.

Make that ark. I'd appreciate it.

Alexei Melnick's Tweakerville

2010-11-12T23:23:00.000+11:00

Pretty much all my family work tug boat jobs. Or they work for the city and county, work in the sun laying slabs. They work hard.
I wasn’t going to be the first guy or the last guy to take a look at the other ship, tour ship, and figure it never was meant for me. Not if you gotta act that way, bull shit every body and call it people skills. I gon talk like my gramps.
So I wasn’t gon carry luggage for tourists. I wasn’t gon park cars or mow lawns for chump change. And they can jack up the price to live here all they like, I not leaving, so they just gon have to deal with me at the other end of it. Maybe one day I gon live rent free off them in jail.
–Jesse Gomes, narrator and central character in Alexei Melnick’s debut novel, Tweakerville.

Tiki Bar in Honolulu

2010-11-12T18:25:00.004+11:00

One of the last of the original Tiki bars, in the grounds of La Mariana Sailing Club, Honolulu.

According to Wiki:

A tiki bar is an exotic–themed drinking establishment that serves elaborate cocktails, especially rum-based mixed drinks such as the "mai tai" or "Zombie cocktail". Tiki bars are aesthetically defined by their Tiki culture décor which is based upon a romanticized conception of primitive tropical cultures, most commonly Polynesian.

The interiors and exteriors of tiki bars often include "Tiki god" masks and carvings, grasscloth, tapa cloth and tropical fabrics, torches, woven fish traps, and glass floats, bamboo, plants, lava stone, Hula girl, palm tree motifs, tropical murals and other South Pacific-themed decorations. Indoor fountains, waterfalls or even lagoons are popular features. Some tiki bars also incorporate a stage for live entertainment such as Exotica-style bands or Polynesian dance floor shows.

This one was missing a few important features. First, the Minah bird that would greet guests as they came in. Second, the large aquarium was empty. The recession had killed it. Third, poignantly, one of Honolulu's most famous personalities, the owner Annette Nahinu, who passed away in 2008. The present management have set up a small shrine of photos and memorabilia on her favourite table, and like Amnesty International, keeps a chair empty for her. I didn't photograph it out of respect.

According to a blog http://hawaiirama.com/2008/08/passing-of-the-last-tiki-bar-i Annette Nahinu died before she could pass the property on, and so it was taken over by the leaseholders of a boat club, Le Mariana. The blogger describes the bar as 'an appendage of a real live, semi-derelict, Margaritaville boatie club.'

The first Tiki Bar in Hawaii was aptly named the Waikiki Beach, and was founded by Ernest Gantt

Wiki:

When Gantt returned from the War, he moved to Hawaii and opened "Waikiki Beach", one of the two canonical tiki bars. The bar was designed to evoke the South Pacific, with palm trees, tiki masks on the walls, a garden hose that showered a gentle rain on the roof and a myna bird that was trained to shout "Give me a beer, stupid!" The bar was located on the beach, lit by tiki torches outside which enhanced its primitive ambiance.

Humu Kon Tiki is an interesting blog with pictures of Tiki decor here. As the blog states La Mariana was not and has never been "authentically Hawaiian" but an importation from Hollywood that was "Hawaiianized" by the community:

La Mariana, like the many other restaurants, hotels and nightclubs that sprung up in Hawaii during the heavy tourist years of the 1950s and 1960s, wasn’t authentic Hawaiian — it was manufactured to deliver on visitors’ idealized expectations of Hawaii. These expectations were partially set by tourists’ visits to Polynesian restaurants back home — which in turn had their basis in the minds of Hollywood-type decorators and designers, probably more than any actual knowledge of the then-exotic islands. The restaurants and bars of Honolulu did, however, develop their own local character that set them apart from their mainland forebears, thanks especially to the wonderful musical performances there, and the unique social world of the people who lived and worked there. La Mariana likely does deliver a feel of old Hawaii, if your definition of “old Hawaii” is the middle of the last century.

Amazingly, the tiki bar in La Mariana Boat Club is still a secret that locals will probably want to keep to themselves, Haoles and Hawaiians alike.

The Day Danno died

2010-11-11T20:44:00.005+11:00

I posted this a while back, but since it got a mention in the Honolulu Weekly, I will re-post it.

I read this poem at the Mercury Bar in Honolulu tonight, and Susan Schultz asked me if I had 'done a Frank O'Hara'. I was speechless for few seconds, not making the connection. 'I mean The Day Lady Died'. Well, I realised I had unconsciously imitated that famous O'Hara poem. Then Susan said, 'But yours is different.'
Susan is convinced that O'Hara is a major influence on many of the more experimental Australian poets, and I have tried to wriggle out from under that particular carpet. Nobody wants to have such a big dominant influence crowding out the other influences. But Susan's partly right.

Here are the two versions.

The Day Lady Died

by Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

My poem:

The Day Danno Died (i. m. James MacArthur)

The day Danno from Hawaii Five O died

it was 84 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny.

Somebody, not me, had found some shoes

of a fifties vintage

in Uyeda's Shoe Store in Puck's Ally

where boxes are stacked every which way.

The day Danno died someone in Hawaii

had probably entered Masako's Candy & Gifts

which is on the ocean side of Beretania,

between Piikoi and Pensacola.

The day Danno died

a very old Hawaiian lady

came out of The Pill Box,

old Kaimuki drugstore,

in the parking lot

back of Happy Days

and the Big City Diner.

The day Danno died

some old senators

and heroes of Pearl Harbor

last surviving ones

cried. They knew Danno

had done a lot for these islands.

The day Danno died

someone's father entered

Harry's Music Store

and bought his son

a Ukelele.

At Smiley's Nails

someone mentioned in passing

that Danno had died.

Somehow, at Jimmy's

Television Sales & Services

the owner thought

TV will never be the same,

now that Danno's died.

The day Danno died

someone very young

saw and heard the ghost

in the Queen Theater say

My heart's an open book.

The ghost that never left.

Maybe Danno had raided it

and arrested the projectionist

after it went porno

in 1985.

We're all sad now,

now that Danno's died.

Huge thanks to my student Quala Lynn Young for taking me on a walking tour of her neighbourhood, Kaimuki, and telling me about the old shops mentioned in the poem.

Michel Houellebecq and sex tourism in Thailand

2010-11-11T12:09:00.006+11:00

Michel Houellebecq has won the Prix Goncourt. Since reading Platform, his novel on sex tourism in Thailand, I have been following his progress, and have since read Atomized.

Platform describes Thai girls as 'pretty, gentle, good in bed; some of them even speak French.'ⁱ But then this is Valérie speaking, a female tourist marketing manager holidaying in Bangkok. Valérie is giving the narrator (a 'pervy' bachelor who's just hit forty and has a 'serious need to fuck') some practical advice on how he can overcome the death of his father. At the first hotel he stays, the narrator gets to know the pleasures of a local woman with a 'well soaped pussy' that's like a 'small hard brush'. Later, getting to know his companions on the package tour, he discovers Valérie's stand-out mix of maternal kindness and her willingness to have casual sex at the same time. She has a plain face which can never threaten the narrator's own sense of his mediocrity.

My own writing about my Thai mother and her relationship with white men (my father for instance) deals in some way with how difficult it is to imagine Thailand and Thai women without thinking about prostitution. There's a whole genre of thrillers written by male Farang (foreigners) who live a life centred on the Bangkok and Pattaya Bar scene. I have always wondered why I myself feel very little desire for Thai women, or to engage with Thai prostitutes. When I was 23, my uncle a road engineer who was doing a tour of the Thai Highway department regional offices, took me "up-country", to Northeast Thailand, where my first experience of the Thai sex industry was quite local. It is still a Thai male tradition to visit brothels en mass with your work-mates. To me it felt exploitative for a bunch of well paid road engineers to patronise the services of poor girls. I can't remember if we did this, but the process of going into a room and selecting girls who are wearing numbered tags is I think non-traditional, and surely an invention of the Bangkok bar scene that expanded in the early 60s with the arrival of the US military. I remember in Nong Khai or Udon sitting at a banquet table and girls arriving with a kind of random insouciance. At the same time, my upcountry experience seemed rather banal and guilt-free, and in a sense it was safe in every respect for the men and the girls, with condoms given out at the end of late night dinners and drinking sessions, condoms distributed and women allocated to each "punter" in a rather matter-of-fact way".

In the mid 90s I wrote an essay on the Good Woman of Bangkok, a documentary about an Australian filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke and his relationship with a prostitute in Patpong Road. What I hated about that film was the fact that the filmmaker hardly disclosed himself visually, though its narration and voice-over made it a confessional film. On the other hand the Good Woman (Aoi) is given so much of the film to explain her story, and to some extent direct the narrative herself.

from cinemarts.com

Houellebecq's open praise of the Thai sex industry leaves me very uneasy, though I am not horrified by his attitude either. It is the feeling that his writing leaves so much under-analysed, despite its realism And in the end, it's a Frenchman's rather detached and dare I say touristic view of that world.

From a fascinating interview in the Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER
What was your fascination with the tourism industry?
HOUELLEBECQ
I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I’ll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants. I like the vocabulary they use. I like the way they present the world. I love the descriptions of happiness and discovery. And then there are some basic questions I started to ask myself. China in seven days, for instance. How do they choose the different stages? How do they turn the real world into a pleasant, consumable world?
INTERVIEWER
Tell us about Pattaya, Thailand, where the sex tours take place.
HOUELLEBECQ
I was completely fascinated by Pattaya, where the book’s ending takes place. Everyone goes there. The Anglo-Saxons go there. The Chinese go there. The Japanese go there. The Arabs go there, too. That was the strangest part. It was something I read in a guidebook that made me make the trip to Thailand. They said that in one hotel in Bangkok, the Thai prostitutes wore veils to please their Arab clients. I found that fascinating, that adaptability. There are lots of French Algerians from the projects who go to Pattaya for the whores. So the Thai girls speak French but with a ghetto accent. “Ouais, j’tassure! Ouais, ta mère!”
There are karaoke bars for the Japanese, restaurants for Russians with lots of vodka. And there’s a poignant side to it, too, something end-of-the-road about all these people, especially the old Anglo-Saxons. You sense they’ll never be able to leave. And there’s the dust, in the afternoon, when the go-go bars are still closed. There’s something very poignant about that moment when the girls start arriving on their scooters and you see the old Anglo-Saxon tourists start to come out like turtles walking in the dust. There is something very, very strange about that town.

The Paris Review's blog post on the story is interesting too.

Meanwhile there is a poem-sequence by John Tranter in the Fall issue of Paris review. Here is one of them:

Four Poems After Baudelaire

John Tranter

Big Girl's Blouse

In the good old days mutations appeared everywhere,
and every second baby was a monster.
I wish I could have lived then, neighbor
to a gigantic young woman, like her pet hamster.
Her body would grow a foot a day, her legs
swell like tree trunks, and her childish play would
lay waste to housing estates. As adolescence
flushed her limbs, I would look for the first stirrings

of sexual desire. I would explore her body, crawling
around her nipples like an exhausted pilgrim
circumambulating a shrine, and when summer's
heat felled her vast bulk on the beach, I'd doze
inside her blouse between her breasts like a kitten or
James Stewart's invisible rabbit in Harvey.

Thai Poetry: Ungkarn Chantatip

2010-11-09T08:29:00.000+11:00

Marcel Barang, translator of Thai fiction and poetry, posted this poem by Ungkarn Chantatip on his blog "the written wor(l)d en deux langues". The poem has just been published in a Thai government publication called "Truth Globalize". I like the way the point of view of a poor rural farmer confronts postmodern anime (Nemo the orange fish) and the reality of a city market (probably in Bangkok). Somehow the poem steers close to sentimentality but overcomes it's own sadness.

A displaced person’s conversation – Ungkarn Chantatip

The orange fish, he’s been told, is called Nemo
The weird, big-eyed cat, Doraemon
The crocodile, floating-log-like, waiting to be shouldered around
The little monkeys, the tea-leaf-eating worms
All there – chicks, birds, mice, crabs, fish
Clear-eyed Kero frogs – all for sale
Funny some of them creatures
Once sought for food in the fields
The peddler who shouldered paddy sheaves
On a sharp pole along dykes became displaced
A rice farmer turned uneasy seller
Concrete and ground unfamiliar
Hot or cold, seasons feel the same
Exchanging penury for bashfulness
In the fields food there was, but no money
Roaming, confronting, feelings frozen
Same true hardship but different place
What is there that money can’t buy
Lack of it was what prompted leaving
Home at a cost just about worth it
At least the children go to school
Cell phones, school fees ganging up in short order
Wife, children spending left and right
When their voices will break they’ll be asking for ’bikes

The orange fish called Nemo sells well
The weird big-eyed cat – which will you choose
For the car, for the kids, for the house
To give a sweetheart or whoever you wish
Kero the clear-eyed frog doesn’t cost much
But is cute, nice colour too, please support
Whatever little profit will become capital
To renew the stock

On days of cold sky pavements become field dykes
What’s pole-shouldered are sheaves of garish yellow
A gust of cold wind – the farmer’s son
Estranged from home comes to a halt looking at
The orange fish in his hand called Nemo
The weird big-eyed cat with sad glints in his eyes
Glum thoughts while waiting for the haggling
Sadness spreading over both eyes
In that gust – the spread of city buildings in splendorous sunlight
Turns into golden fields all over those very eyes

Poem by Zakaria Amataya

2010-11-07T21:24:00.003+11:00

Recently I blogged on the winner of the last SEA Award for Thai Poetry, Zakaria Amataya. I found a poem of his translated by the French expat writer and translator in Thailand Marcel Barang. Marcel is a great source of commentary (in English) on Modern Thai literature.

A dot on the Malay Peninsula

A river
A mountain
Stars
At night
I’m looking at
A river
A mountain
Stars
That slowly vanish in the dark
I can’t see
Even my own hand
And then everything is darkness
And then everything is darkness

A dot on the Malay Peninsula
A river
A mountain
Stars
I feel blood flowing nonstop
One arm beginning to feel numb
Pain spreading through the whole body
Pulse now slowing down
Breath a murmur
As if in a tussle with the fist of fate
Between mountain and river
Between death and life
With laments and laughs all along

A dot on the Malay Peninsula
A river
A mountain
Stars
In total silence
I hear peace sobbing
And uttering yells that resound
Along sundry roads
Around the city clock tower
On dinner tables, in teashops
In mosques and Buddhist temples
And yet … no one hears
It’s true, no one hears
No one hears
I see the weary face
And battered eyes of peace
Brimming with tears of sadness
Which flow and join a river

A dot on the Malay Peninsula
A river
A mountain
Stars
I try
But blood won’t stop flowing
The other arm beginning to feel numb
Pain storming the heart
While little cuts look like red fountain jets
As if slit by a million krisses

A dot on the Malay Peninsula
A river
A mountain
Stars
I feel the blood has stopped flowing
Heartbeats gone with the last breath
While the eyes begin to blur
Visions in the head shine bright
I see myself in youth
Running up and down ridges
To look at that river
And those sparkling stars

A dot on the Malay Peninsula
A river
A mountain
Stars
I hear birdsong
And the helicopter’s roar over the trees
The rattle of the bullets
And the blasts of the bombs

A dot on the Malay Peninsula
A river
A mountain
Stars – fading off
And then suddenly gone from my memory

Fred Wah Diamond Grill

2010-11-05T19:26:00.001+11:00

I have just finished reading Fred Wah's "biotext" Diamond Grill. I like the way Wah can write about ethnicity and hybridity without letting ethnicity get in the way of amazing writing.

This review from Stephen Hong Sohn probalby overstates the role of the writer as "responsible native informant", though he is aware that Wah is trying to escape that role or category.
From http://community.livejournal.com/asianamlitfans/47795.html
“Quite a soup. Heinz 57 Varieties. There’s a whole bunch of us who’ve grown up as resident aliens, living in the hyphen. Like the Chinese kids who came over after 1949 couldn’t take me into their confidence. I always ended up playing on the other team, against them, because they were foreign and I was white enough to be on the winning team. When I visited China and I told the guide of our tour group that I was Chinese he just laughed at me” (Fred Wah 53). The difficulty in negotiating his biracial identity on the experiential level clashes against the categorizations that appeared earlier. In this case, he cannot claim his Chinese background whereas in the classroom it was a category that he was supposed to mark. What Wah seems to intrinsically understand is that despite the way he looks, his experiences condition a very unique biracial existence, one that is very much connected to the culinary culture presented to him through Chinese cafes and the Chinatowns he visits. What is also so brilliant about this passage is its usage of the metaphor, “Heinz 57 Varieties,” precisely because we recall that so much of the biofiction takes place directly within the Diamond Grill—objects and consumer products are wielded in other creative and unexpected ways. For Wah, passing for white becomes one way to avoid the challenges of the biracial identity: “I become as white as I can, which, considering I’m mostly Scandinavian, is pretty easy for me. Not for my dad and some of my cousins though. They’re stuck, I think, with how they look. I only have the name to contend with. And I not only hear my friends put down the Chinks (and the Japs, and the Wops, and the Spiks, and the Douks) but comic books and movies confirm that the Chinese are yellow (meaning cowardly), not-to-be trusted, heathens, devils, slant-eyed, dirty, and talk incomprehensible gobblydee-gook” (98). Of course, with this sort of immersion into whiteness, Wah faces the added responsibility of knowing how the racist gaze might appear, the ways in which he becomes an insider to knowledge that he might have otherwise been able to obtain. The biofiction’s centeredness within a developmental trajectory is made clear through the inclusion of references such as “comic books and movies,” and we see how growing up for Wah cannot be so easily streamlined.

Fred Wah writes:

I took to the poem as to jazz, as a way to subvert the authority of the

formal, as a way to sluice out “my” own voice for myself.

But the more I wrote the more I discovered that faking it is a continual

theatre of necessity. No other way to be in language, but to

bluff your way through it, stalling for more time. And when I get it,

that little gap of renewal, I see the accent not in my own little voice,

but there in the mouth of the word within the word, there in the

“land of what is,” right there at the tips of our fingers, in the “sniff ”

of the pen as it hunts the page.

Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest Press, 1996) 83.

Byodo-In Buddhist Temple in Hawaii

2010-11-04T18:00:00.002+11:00

This morning I went out to Byodo-In Buddhist temple, situated in a stunning location between Honolulu and the North Shore. It was the first really wet day since I arrived here in mid August, but that just added to the atmosphere. The temple is a replica of the 900-year-old Byodo-In located in Uji, Japan.

According to Japanese Lifestyle,

A Buddhist temple complex in Japan generally follows the pattern of a series of sacred spaces encircling a courtyard, and entered via a set of gates. These gates will typically have a pair of large guardian statues, called Nio.

In addition, many of the more important or powerful temples are built in locations which are favourable according to the precepts of Chinese geomancy. For example, Enryaku-ji, which sits atop Mount Hiei to the north-east of Kyoto, is said to defend the city from evil spirits by being placed in that direction. The arrangements of mountains and other geographic features in particular directions around the temple play important roles as well.

Amida Buddha

3 ton Peace Bell

Entry bridge

Hawaii images

2010-11-03T07:42:00.000+11:00

Mauna Loa Volcano 9000 feet

Holloween at the Ala Moana Shopping mall

Waikiki Condo pool

Older style walk up condo, Waikiki

Big Island

Kaia Sand reads from Remember to Wave

2010-11-01T08:18:00.001+11:00

Kaia Sand. Photo by Ken Hawkins

Kaia Sand reads from her latest book of poems and prose, Remember to Wave, 10 October 2010 (which was also Susan Schultz's birthday). I made the recording in Radhika Schultz's bedroom on an Olympus Linear LS10 digital recorder.

Click here to download her reading. It is 10 Mb as the quality of Kaia's voice seems to deteriorate at lower sampling rates. I also have readings by Jules Boykoff, Tiare Pichard, Lyz Soto, Susan Schultz and others.

Bryant Webster Schultz does Robert Pinsky

2010-10-30T19:55:00.001+11:00

Susan Schultz's husband Bryant does a wicked imitation of the US poet Robert Pinksy.

Download it by clicking here.

Hawaii fish market

2010-10-30T10:30:00.002+11:00

Hawai'i Homeless

2010-10-26T18:58:00.003+11:00

http://www.flickr.com/people/marcmurdock/

http://www.allhawaiinews.com

According to the City & County of Honolulu Department of Community Services there are over 1200 homeless in Honolulu.

According to http://homelessness.change.org/blog/view/tell_honolulu_city_council_stop_criminalizing_the_homeless

Honolulu holds the #8 spot the list of Top 10 Meanest Cities towards the homeless. But it seems this dubious honor has gone unnoticed by city counselors. Yesterday, a bill was introduced that would prevent the homeless from sitting or lying down on Oahu sidewalks. ...
Honolulu City Councilors seem to believe that keeping homeless individuals out of sight is the best anecdote for promoting tourism, a key industry in the state. Unfortunately, this priority has resulted in short-sighted laws and ordinances that make life for Honolulu's homeless extremely difficult, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless' 2009 report, Homes Not Handcuffs.
Since 2006, the City has slowly been removing benches from parks. Thousands of dollars have been spent retrofitting bus stops to discourage sleeping, removing benches and installing concrete stools. In addition to banning camping in several coastal parks, the city council also passed a broad camping ban that makes it easier to remove homeless campers from public parks.
The legislation yesterday was introduced by Councilman Charles K. Djou. His bill comes on the heels of another outrageous piece of legislation, dubbed the "Body Odor Bill" -- a measure that would have prevented those with foul body odor from riding public transportation. This legislation was quickly (and appropriately) withdrawn.
It's time to tell Honolulu leaders: Stop using short-sighted tactics to hide the homeless and get serious about implementing productive, long-term strategies that have been effective in other communities, such as a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness for Honolulu.

Hawaii Tours

2010-10-26T08:34:00.000+11:00

Baby Arabia

2010-10-23T08:04:00.000+11:00

Thai Muslim culture celebrates life with music and a certain amount of partying, and is a long way from the image of Taliban style fundamentalism. The Hawai'i International Film Festival screens this film today:

Zakaria Amataya wins SEA write award

2010-10-22T09:49:00.000+11:00

Photo by Agnes Dherbeys for the International Herald Tribune

Today in the New York Times and story about a Muslim Thai poet, Zakaria Amataya, whose won the SEA Write Award for Thai writers.

My mother comes from South Thailand and in her childhood Buddhists and Muslims often did business together, and even consulted each other for astrological predictions. That's not to say there wasn't tension, just that my mother can remember if there was ever any religious tension. My great grandfather was a Buddhist fortune-teller. It is significant that Amataya's mother tongue is a Malay dialect spoken in Narathiwat, a southernmost state bordering Malaysia.

The full article is here.

Juliana Spahr

2010-10-18T20:35:00.002+11:00

Me and Jade Sunouchi, Tinfish launch, Revolution Books 17 October 2010

A poet and professor of creative writing who once taught at the University of Hawai'i has interested me ever since she published some work of mine in Chain, a journal she co-founded with Jena Osman.

I've been struggling like most visiting writers who come to Hawaii, struggling with finding a position or emotional and political stand-point from which to write about Hawai'i. It is easy to write 747 poems about the islands, as you know you are going to fly out soon and you will never have to be directly responsible to the audience here. But since I am actually employed to teach for a semester, I have felt I have a much more anxiety filled responsibility to get it right somehow. The temptation not to write anything about this place makes me feel mute, as it is clearly no use to anyone to write about Hawaii if one is ignorant of the place. There is a very good argument that I should just READ and there is a huge number of books on Hawaii.

So while I have been beating myself up feeling I can only be a smart-arse, or at best a flaneur, I agree with Juliana Spahr's belief that any writer who comes here has to make a clear stand on the question of colonialism and the on-going sense of occupation that many Native Hawaiians feel. Asian Hawaiians are also part of the mix of those I teach, and are reading poems too. As someone who is forced to confront the fact that people see me as a public body that is "hapa", or mixed race, I am acutely aware of how this body has various strategic advantages in some social contexts, but not much cultural capital in others. One thing I want to reflect on in poems is how this Asian-whiteness fits in here, or doesn't fit, depending on the context.

Spahr was interviewed by Joel Bettridge who asked her how she used LANGUAGE writing to address race, ethnicity, style and form, she replied:

For me, so far, this is a good foundation on which to start thinking about style and form. For once a commitment to a certain political stance is made in this place, when a commitment is made to a certain political and ethical content, writing does become clear in your own head, and more interesting poems about colonialism can emerge.

Here's hoping anyway.

The rest of this article is available as a pdf here.

Laurie Duggan

2010-10-18T09:28:00.001+11:00

Angela Gardner interviews one of my favourite Australian poets Laurie Duggan. Angela is a terrific poet and editor too.

When I was a wee apprentice undergraduate living in Sydney, Laurie was a poet I would often meet at certain pubs. He was usually in the company of other Sydney luminaries like Pam Brown, John Tranter, John Forbes, Gig Ryan, and Rae Desmond Jones. He has been overly classified as a "Generation of '68" poet, though his own work is a long way from the styles of most of the aforementioned poets. He has a huge range of styles and modes.

Laurie Duggan lives Kent, England, but recently lived in Brisbane. His most recent book is Crab and Winkle (Shearsman 2009) reviewed by Tony Baker in Jacket 40. Tony Baker describes him as a 'stenographer of the immediate'. Mangroves (UQP 2003) won the 2003 Age Poetry Book of the Year award. He is also the author of Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture, 1901-1939 (UQP, 2001).

The interview appears in the last edition of the online poetry journal foam:e 6

Amerasia 36.2 – Asian Australia and Asian America: Making Transnational Connections

2010-10-17T14:10:00.000+11:00

I've been waiting to read more about this for a while on the Amerasia blog.

Jason Wing's Amerasia/Asia Australia Cover

2010-10-14T20:46:00.004+11:00

Now that I have got your attention, and Tseen Khoo has provided me with a context - see Tseen's comment on previous posting; and sorry if I stirred inappropriately.

Now for my own contextualisation of my stirring Facebook comment that the cover image is controversial. Now that I know who made the cover, it is no longer very controversial - not to me, though it raises a very interesting issue about how book and magazine covers make meaning.

Jason Wing is the maker of the cover of the new Amerasia cover I posted previously. He is an A.B.C, Aboriginal born Chinese. His website states that

he draws inspiration from his cultural ancestors and spirits. Jason's father's family is Cantonese and his Aboriginal mother's family are Biripi people from Taree, New South Wales. Jason's paintings reference the traditional stencilled cave paintings and the traditional Chinese paper cuts. Jason's thought provoking stencil works explore his cultural identities through themes of rebirth, recycling, and spirituality.

Jason will present an installation of his cut ouf half Aboriginal and half Chinese stick figures.

The website has more striking images of Jason's work, but I think the Amerasia cover image is wonderful in the way it asks you to think about the relationship of race, national identity, being Asian in Australia, being indigenous, and being both Indigenous and Asian in Australia. It invites a serious response that requires one's full attention and commitment to its referencing, and to its original maker.

After reading some very challenging arguments and essays in Hawaii, and thinking about the whole issue of bi-cultural identity and colonization stories here, the image was so powerful and and meaningful to me, especially since I have been out of Australia for a while. And now I have learned that the artist was Aboriginal-Chinese, I read the image is a completely different way.

Sometimes one feels that in Hawaii where I have been teaching in the English Department of UH Manoa, the complexity of identities and representations are reduced to simplistic readings and categorisations. This reduction comes from all quarters of the ethnic spectrum.

Even the Bank Manager on campus interpolated me as "hapa" (mixed race) while I was filling out a bank account application. She seemed to say that as a compliment, and wondered if that was because she herself had multiple ancestral connections. Or perhaps because she does not see herself as mixed race. Anyway, the forms didn't ask for that information, unlike the tax and employment form I had to fill in and tick the boxes White, Thai, Other.

No bank manager in my home town Sydney would ever go there, but after my experience I felt it might be quite normal here to ask about people's racial ancestry, even in a bank.

I feel that one seeing the cover of Amerasia journal I reacted in a way that shows how little context I was using to read the image. As here, in many conversations about immigration, land use, race relations etc, context is neglected. Specifically, as part of my teaching on Susan Schultz's Foundations of Creative Writing course, I had read an article that had attacked Dennis Kawaharada, a scholar and one time publisher of Bamboo Ridge, a journal of native Hawaiian literature of Japanese descent who was attacked by (Hawaiian scholar and publisher of Oiwi journal) Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui for inserting himself "in the position of authority in place of a Kanaka Maoli voice" (see http://www2.hawaii.edu/~dennisk/texts/Hoomanawanui_2008.html). Here the issue is complex and to really understand the genealogy of Ho'omanawanui's argument, show should read her complete essay. The criticism involves questions about who in Hawaii now has the right and responsibility to publish the writings of Native Hawaiians. For some, Kawaharada does not have full right, because he is not racially native enough to qualify for full custodianship rights.

Similarly, in Australia, we have had controversies over who has the right to address Indigenous
stories, especially those of leaders and warriors. I am alluding to the story of Yagan, a warrior whose lands are now occupied by the city of Perth in Western Australia. After dying fighting the colonists, they cut off his head and shipped it off to England.

But after reading Kawaharada's defence of his life's work and reading his deep scholarship, he does have a right and responsibility. I feel he makes a wonderful custodian of native Hawaiian cultural heritage. As an outsider here, I know I might not have the right to say this, but I will.

Clearly, I have revealed my own fragile doubts of what my ancestry gives me a right to talk about in Australia, especially when it comes to Indigenous culture. I feel that here though, it is better to take an "inexpert" approach to Asian Australian experiences, even though I am Asian Australian. It is still such a field of lived experiences and untold stories, I wonder what Asian Australian means now. I mean that my own way of living out my Asian Australianness is such a small example of it. There is so much more to learn about the various ways Asian heritage is experienced and expressed in Australia.

I admire Jason Wing's project and what he wants to do with his ancestry. What Jason Wing's image makes me think about is how American readers will read this most recent cover of Amerasia Journal. I look forward to reading the issue and reflecting on it contents and its reception.

Postscript:
Racist antagonism here is more complex than it first appears to an uninformed visitor. In regards to the issue of Asian "settlers" in Hawaii, there's the very important issue to do with a group of mainly Japanese and other Hawaiians who did not (and still don't) support the sovereignty movement. At the time of annexation, some Democratic union groups fell in line with the US Congress. A leader of that group Senator Daniel Inouye, has long supported military presence in Hawaii and is also a big sponsor of the push to a kind of limited autonomy within a statehood model for Hawaii, but not supportive of full sovereignty. Many Asian-Hawaiians work in the white collar world, whereas many Native Hawaiians have never been to college. Hence the source of a lot of anti Asian antagonism here. Inouye is a war hero of Hawai'i who has been extremely successful in getting funds for Hawaii from the US Government (much of it for military linked infrastructure), but when he retires, it is expected that the "pork" will be severely curtailed, to the detriment of Hawaii's budget.

Still, many Native Hawaiians are working to create an "aloha" kind of reconciliation in areas of land rights and other legal matters.

Amerasia Journal: Asian Australia & Asian America

2010-10-14T13:20:00.000+11:00

New edition of Amerasia journal is out. I don't know what you think of the cover, but it looks like an Asian baby placed in the middle of the Aboriginal Australian flag. CONTROVERSIAL!!!

Australian working class poetry - Linh Dinh and Rodrigo Toscano

2010-10-13T21:00:00.000+11:00

I now see that what we needed in 2001 was a dialogue on how different class interests could find common ground through a poetic practice that was not so tied up with debates about what was the most effective language to express dissent. I recently heard a PoemTalk recording of Linh Dinh criticising the innovative language strategies of a very Left Wing poet Rodrigo Toscano who also happens to do LANGUAGE and sonic experimentation, as his mode of disrupting the norm. I think I regret the way I expressed my indignation at being classed as a right wing exclusionist on the basis that my poetry was not transparent and accessible enough, as I think this debate is still a very useful one to have, if it doesn't close off dialogue between different poets and their political work.

The talk was convened by Al Filreis and it is a wonderfully civilised discussion which really does open up the discussion.

Australian working class poetry - where now?

2010-10-12T19:07:00.001+11:00

A letter I wrote to Overland in 2001:

To OVERLAND

Dear Editors

I am writing in response to Lauren Williams's provocative article on the lack of Australian working class poetry. I welcome the fact that Lauren is arguing for working class poetry and wants to see more representation for it in the Oz Poetry scene. I think she needs to be respected for her views, and given credit for speaking up against the dominance of the poetry world by vested interests.

I do agree that cultural capital is still dominated by poetry that is difficult for most people. I do agree that many poems are 'subtextual letters written to like minded practitioners'.

But so were a lot of Beatles and Bob Dylan songs written in response to their peers. The meaning of such songs is clear on the surface, but if you want to take the time to go deeper you will find more obscure meanings. That's the way it is with popular art, and so with any marginal art. For example, how much do you know about ice skating moves, or the jargon of roller blading, or the arcana of greyhound racing, arguably a working class pastime?

I must also take issue with Williams' crudely and simplistic model of inclusionary and exclusionary camps. For a start, to link 'exclusionary' poetry with middle class values, and 'inclusionary' with working class, is misleading and dangerously divisive. At times Williams sounds very much like Pauline Hanson and the new right denigrating the so called 'elites' of the middle class, those class enemies the chardonnay poets who speak in riddles and give each other hand-outs like a bunch of corrupt politicians on the Arts Council take.

Such stereotyping offends me, and it offends me that Williams patronises her own class by stereotyping its concerns. Let me explain.

What is so transparent about working class poetry anyway? Why does Lauren assume that language and class are products of each other? You still need a 'code' to understand 'working class poetry'. Apparently, you still need to be English, or Scots-Anglo-Irish, and angry. For example, Sarah Attfield's poems uses cockney rhyming slang. I love it but for a Vietnamese factory worker in the western suburbs, this sort of language is as obscure and alien as any Mallarme translated into LANGUAGE poetry. What is so transparently obvious and plain speaking about Geoff Goodfellow's use of blue-collar strine and swearing? How will that go down with our migrant non-English speaking worker? There's nothing universally obvious about 'plain speaking'. Is Lionel Fogarty's 'Creole English' a form of 'plain speaking'? If it is I don't understand many of its messages, but I love it. Why do you assume Fogarty wants to merely 'communicate' to us whitefellas anyway? Perhaps he wants to be authentically difficult and different. And by the way, a very successfully sold poet.

There is no such thing in today's globalising multicultural world of one common language we can all automatically tap into and understand clearly and unambiguously.

Another of my gripes is Williams' attempt to make class enemies out of us 'exclusionary poets'. Apparently, we are middle class. Yes, and I am proud of it, because we are NOT elitists and never wish to be. Lauren, my Mum did three years in a fly spray factory to get me through High School, and my Dad planted trees for Lane Cove Council for a few years, was an anti-Vietnam war activist, and had a lot of friends in the Left of the Labour Party and in the Communist Part. We exclusionists are private school educated: sorry, government in my case. We are reluctant to give the 'inclusionists' a go. Lauren, do your homework. As poetry editor at HEAT, Ivor Indyk and I published plenty of your 'inclusionists': Myron Lysenko, Dorothy Porter, Dorothy Hewett, Jeltje, Geoff Page, and Pi O.

The main criteria for their selection included linguistic energy and that had to come from their ability to unite FORM and CONTENT. Why should content be the prime criteria for selecting poetry? If our prime motivation is to educate people there are quicker and more effective methods than poetry.

As for my own work being obscure and difficult, read my award-winning Australian sports poems (equal first with plain-speaker Myron Lysenko twice!) I have read them to audiences of non-practitioners and they liked them. I was commissioned to write poetry and words for a Centennial Park Federation sculpture. The non-poets who commissioned me insisted I write something that was NOT elitist (it had to communicate to ordinary adults and children) and they 'passed' my work, which will be now be seen by thousands of ordinary people. What about MTC Cronin's poems about domestic violence, poetry that is of the best ever written about working class violence? What about Michael Farrell's disturbing and funny poems about living the hard life in Melbourne?

Congratulations on an issue of Overland that has interesting poetry that we so-called exclusionists might not want to write, but please don't insult us by accusing us of New Rightism.

Adam Aitken

Lauren Williams wrote

'Adam describes my Overland letter as being about "the lack of Australian
working class poetry" and as "arguing for working class poetry", and
claims I am "patronis[ing] my own class"! I'm being conflated here with
Sarah and Brad and the title of the debate. I advise Adam to reread my
letter and redraft his response (to Overland) so that it actually
addresses the issues I raise.'

Dear Lauren, I won't go into this in much detail, but I do think my letter
is a reasoned attempt to deal with the issues in your article. They might
not be the issues you intend us to discuss, but other issues that are not
necessarily on the surface of your text. But hey, that's the way I read your
article. May be you are being conflated by the fact that your article
appears in a special issue that very strongly attempts to do the things you
mention, i.e. argue for working class poetry.

As far as my reading goes, I can't see how you are arguing against working
class poetry as a paradigm. What you are arguing against, however, are those
like Dessaix who attempt to be exclusionary (go on use the term -elitist).
The fact is, I don't buy the exclusionary inclusionary argument, and I
actually DO address the issues you raise! Isn't this one of your key issues?

Any theory of expression based on class will run the risk of glossing over
great complexities. When I said you were patronising your own class I meant
that you were attempting to fit your analysis of the variety of creative
language that somehow 'emerges' from the working class to a set of binaries
: exclusionary and inclusionary; plain and complex. I made a assumption that
you identify with the working class, so correct me if I am wrong. What is
patronising is your implicit claim to be 'speaking' for the working class
AGAINST the exclusionists, who are characterised as basically middle class
but unsympathetic and variously plotting against the emergence of more
diverse working-class based discourse. This is a defensive position, and not
a very useful way of reading Australian poetries in my opinion.

Exclusionary politics, as a way of regulating who gets published and lauded
etc is not the same as what goes on between reader and writer when ACTUAL
texts are being read. You say examples of exclusionary language can be found
in my work. But what is exclusionary language? If it is exclusionary WHO
feels excluded by these poems? The working class reader? Perhaps, as they
are not the audience those poems were written for. On the other hand I make
no attempt to exclude any reader in my general writing practice.

Perhaps you believe that poetry in Australia would be more popular if we
wrote for a more general readership. I don't believe this is an easy thing
to do, as it is the system of distribution, the cost of books and printing,
and the lack of bookshops, and the competition from other forms of art that
exclude the readers. It is not the poetry itself. And even if there was a
better system, would such popular poetry be any good? Do you like John
Laws's stuff because he is favourite of the workers?

If you don't think avant guardism is inclusionary enough, look how
impressionism has become the favourite art of the masses. Just go to a
Renoir exhibition and listen to people saysing 'this is what I like'. Yet
back when the academies ran the show, impressionism was considered terribly
obscure, ugly, meaningless, exclusionary etc. Your arguments echo the very
thinking of those academies.

I thought that this is a the gist of your article. I thought I was taking
your article seriously enough to analyse your theoretical foundations.

Perhaps you need to outline in more detail what 'working class poetries'
are, but of course you have space constraints.

I do think your theory is flawed, and even if you conceive of exclusionary
and inclusionary as two poles on a sliding scale doesn't make those binaries
go away. You still have TWO extremes, two essential positions that are
mutually antagonistic. In what way is such thinking any different from the
aesthetic determinism of Stalinism, Trotskyism, Fascism, ANY-isms and racist
modes of seeing the world? Lauren, I am NOT saying you are any of these
things, (I know you are not!) just that I don't believe binaries are the way
to go.

Hope this clarifies a few things.

Cheers
Adam

Poem, therapy, and death

2010-10-12T18:48:00.002+11:00

An old message I wrote a to a wonderful poetry discussion list Poetry Expresso, moderated by Cassie Lewis. We really did have sensible but passionate discussions.

Here's a message I wrote after 9-11-2001. The Pam is Pam Brown.

Pam, after my own personal trauma at the hands of a knife wielding egomaniac
in Malaysia, I felt like giving up poetry for good -- until I gritted my
teeth and said to myself: 'If I don't redress my trauma through a poem or
two, I will never feel I came to grips with the experience.' But I did think
that the poem I wrote about near death experience would be my last
significant poem. But that was last year. From this week on, I feel no fear
that the bombing will ever stop me writing poetry. I have grown up with war
imagery on the TV - Vietnam entered my head when I was between 10 to 12.

Adam

Here's another

Dear All,

I hope the poetry of mine Pam and I are discussing hasn't been mere therapy.
I was trying to link my own personal trauma to the very issues Pam mentions.
Only because it is one way to deal with the events recently. But obviously
there are real problems with writing poetry that asks to be judged authentic
because it stems from the author's own 'experience', as if experience was
not immediately mediated through poetry. No, I don't want to apply
therapeutic methods to writing about the world today!

This isn't the time to discuss how my particular poem managed to be more
that therapy. But, my response to my own personal crisis was not worth
writing about UNLESS it could have been made meaningful to others. This
meant trying to write about the effect of danger and violence on the human
body, and the ramifications of being in such a state of fear that all sense
of language as a rationalising discourse tends to disappear. It was about
revenge, and all those instincts of self preservation that occur when one's
life is threatened. The urge to kill the person who tried to kill you. The
need to put a face to the invisible threat, the hidden other. If this is
'therapy', then it has a strong link to one issue being discussed in the US
now: how to deal with the 'enemy', how to get justice without becoming a
monster yourself.

It doesn't make 'sense' to try and translate the 'personal' into poetry of
therapy if that is all it remains - a poetry of therapy that can only
alleviate a 'personal' sense of threat and pain and memory. The poetry has
to mean something more, or communicate within other domains of meaning -
political domains, linguistic domains, psychological domains. Whatever. And
I think Pam is write to feel that poets can't quite encompass the range and
scope of this issue.

To be honest, the personal testimonies of survivors relayed to me on CNN
became repetitive, though very moving and upsetting too. As if CNN had
created a new poetics of 'witness TV'. It is therapeutic to air the trauma,
But how much is enough? How much can be mediated to the point that it serves
as propaganda? Who's trauma is worth airing on international TV, whose
isn't? Is an Iraqi mother's grief over a baby dying from UN sanctions too
personal, or not personal enough?

Here's for range and scope in poetry.

Adam Aitken

What I have written I have written

2010-10-11T22:03:00.000+11:00

I have just read this entry in a PhD thesis on Australian emergent poetries of the 1990s by Debbie Comerford. In the context of a review of three books of poetry, none of which addressed multiculturalism, this is what the author wrote of me:

Aitken’s poetry is politically motivated by what is broadly known today as an orthodox politics, “multiculturalism” (Aitken, “Reflecting a Culture of Convergence” 46). And even though this term is hardly adequate to describe a form of politics, it does reflect the political motivations Aitken’s poetry struggles with in connecting his ancestry/cultures: his Thai (mother) and his Australian (father). Multiculturalism is perceived as one of the most important and worthy forms of politics, thus poetry that engages with this form of politics is equally important and has high cultural capital within the contemporary poetry milieu. It is not a coincidence that the established critics on the back cover of Aitken’s third collection (one of the few marketing spaces for poetry) emphasise this aspect in authoritative statements:

I regard Adam Aitken as one of the most accomplished of the younger generation of poets. His technical control, of tone and image and voice is very striking; but what I most value in his poetry is its sense of the possibilities of a hybrid culture. Ivor Indyk

. . . knows language holds cultural riddles and explores his own.
Tom Shapcott, The Age

Since when was multiculturalism "orthodox"? With the Canadian government pushing for a "Canadian Values" re-write of their immigration policy, and our own ex-Prime Minister establishing a citizenship test with the question: who is Australia's most famous cricketer?" I cannot accept Debbie's view. And what has Shapcott's comment have to do with multiculturalism? Everyone has cultural riddles and poetry is a fit medium to explore whatever these are. Indyk's praise for my poetry's sense of a hybrid culture becomes Debbie's authoritative statement of me as a multicultural writer. In the rest of here thesis she can praise poet of hybridity like South African now Perth resident John Mateer, but never critiques his own struggles with making a voice for himself as a migrant writer willing to tackle Indigeneity. Its OK to be hybrid, but "orthodox" to be multicultural. It's even better to be cool and hybrid and write about cross-cultural interactions, but "orthodox" if you are actually Asian-Australian and "struggling" with your ancestry.

Debbie, since where in my poetry can it be shown I have "struggled" with my ancestry? Your crude psychologising cannot begin to represent what I am trying to do with poetry. Since you chose an arbitrary cut off point of 1990 for first book poets, you are unable to explore the genealogy that lead up to these successful publications. It is convenient and easy for you to portray me as an old conservative critc because you don't have to address my poetry. There is not a single close reading of any of my poetry, and an attack on one 800 word review of three poets ( I was forced by the editors to cut 200 words an hour before deadline, and what more the personal issues you allude to were precisely the reason I was unable to enjoy Croggon's book The Blue Gate, with its repetitious metaphors of bodily fluids and blood: I was recovering from a knife attack in Malaysia which nearly killed me. Of course this in not a defence of my review's lack of depth, but it provides another interpretation of my own critical practice at the time. I was comparing three books, and my framework was simplistic in order to fit a 1000 word format for a popular newspaper. If you wanted to use personal information shared on a poetics listserve in a spirit of confidentiality, you should have asked me if I wanted that information made public in your thesis. It would have been a more interesting description of how a critic cannot praise work that is too close to the bone. That I could not reveal my personal misfortune in print should be understandable and nothing to do with my "orthodoxy": if you write for The Australian they won't give a damn what your personal condition is, they want 800 words (at 50 cents an hour).

While I think there is great merit in your critique of the straitjacket of criticism in Australia, and I concede I didn't express well enough the political dimension of Alison Croggon's ecriture feminine, perhaps your own inability or unwillingness to follow my poetry and criticism (see my PhD Thesis on Hybridity in Aust Lit UTS 2006) reveals your lack of understanding on concepts like multiculturalism and hybridity. You quote a snippet from an article culture of convergence, but have no close reading of what it contained. This is your struggle, not mine. I have spent my whole career as a writer trying to critique and understand a cross-cultural poetics and the multicultural cultural capital you claim I exploit for marketing purposes. Multiculturalism is not marketing for me, it is precisely my body and mind, my ancestry and history. I have gained some authority on these subjects because I have published four books, many reviews, and articles, and a number of critics are fruitfully following my ongoing writings. It is my embodied poetics, which you eloquently praise in poets you write about in your thesis, but so glibly brush off when it doesn't suit your argument. The structure of your thesis is crude and simplistic, and not at all in the spirit of academic objectivity, which sits awkwardly with your own subjective passions for certain poetries. But pitting poet/critics like myself who published before 1990 against an arbitrary group of poets who published first book in the 1990s - an easy play on generational stereotypes, and precisely a repetition of most "orthodox" lit crit in Australia. New old new old new. I guess this is the way new literary "experts" build their coteries, by opposing them to perceived old coteries

What your thesis does is other me in a way that's tainted with a kind of chauvinism. I am shocked that this section of your thesis lacks any rigour and depth or will to drill down into the complexities of the concepts you use. It is clear to me that your own way of arguing is now the orthodoxy, which you will hear echoing across the land in new attacks on multiculturalism. It seems poets like myself, who try to write a poetry about all kinds of embodied experiences are further marginalised by your accusations of opportunism and male insensitivity.

If anyone wants a copy of this thesis I can email it to you.

It's full title is
‘A Spirit of Eclecticism’:
Critical Engagements with Australia’s Innovative New Nineties Poetries
by Debbie M. Comerford
BA (JCU), BA Hons. (USQ)

Published in 2008

US Military bases

2010-10-11T09:32:00.002+11:00

Guam (guahan) poet and activist Craig Perez has a great cover for Saina, his second major poetry collection. It's a book that tries to re-territorialize his nation, which is still a territory of the USA, but not a state with any of a state's privileges. The cover compares the traditional sea canoe of Guam (Saina) with a US navy flotilla:

The maps show US military dominance of Guam:

from http://tenthousandthingsfromkyoto.blogspot.com

from google images

and Okinawa, where the US military want to build a new airbase. Okinawans are righted angry at the US, but if they military move 9000 marines out of Okinawa, where will they be moved to? Guam.

from Phillipa Fogarty, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-1139028

Anti-Indian racism in Australia (from ABC news site)

2010-10-10T12:04:00.000+11:00

Racist email scandal disgusts authorities

By Jano Gibson in Delhi

Updated Sat Oct 9, 2010 9:33pm AEDT

Police Commissioner Simon Overland: 'We will deal with these matters in the strongest possible way' (AAP: AAP)

Australia's High Commissioner in India says he is disgusted by reports that a racist email showing the electrocution of an Indian man was circulated among members of the Victoria Police force.

According to a Herald Sun report, the email contains video footage of a man being killed after touching overhead wires while standing on top of a crowded train in India.
The newspaper says one of the alleged comments added to the email as it was circulated was: "This might be a way to fix the Indian student problem".
The comment was a reference to the well-publicised spate of violent attacks against Indians, particularly international students, in Victoria last year.
The attacks sparked claims that the violence was racially motivated and concerns that Australia's multi-billion international education industry could be damaged.
News of the email prompted the Indian government to summon High Commissioner Peter Varghese in New Delhi, saying such "entrenched bias" amongst law enforcers towards the Indian community was a matter of serious concern.
Mr Varghese today joined Victorian Premier John Brumby and Police Commissioner Simon Overland in condemning the emails.
"This is an email which is offensive, it is unacceptable and it is completely contrary to the principles of respect and tolerance that we seek to embed in Australian society," Mr Varghese told Indian media after visiting the country's external affairs ministry in Delhi.
Asked if the emails reflected the general attitudes of police in Victoria, Mr Varghese said only two low-ranking officers were involved.
"I don't think you should tar the entire Victorian police force with the actions of two individuals who are clearly engaged in completely unacceptable behaviour," he said.
Commissioner Overland said one of the officers has already resigned while under investigation and the other is on sick leave pending serious disciplinary charges.
"There are no other members currently facing disciplinary action over this email, however the investigation is continuing," he said.
"As I have expressed previously, I do not condone racism in any form in our organisation and we will deal with these matters in the strongest possible way.
"Victoria Police is incredibly disappointed with the actions of these two individuals, following all the positive work being undertaken with the Indian community, the Indian High Commissioner and the Indian Consular General in support and assisting Indian nationals living in Melbourne."

Conversations on TheBus

2010-10-10T06:32:00.001+11:00

The Honolulu bus is well know for the eccentrics who ride.

Last night I overheard a woman and a man discussing their lives. Here is s list of topics they mentioned:

Satan (who is beautiful)
God
Rehab
"my ex-fiance"
womens refuge
"my Dad's replica AK 47 - "he was one crazy fucka"
"my big Samoan friends who NEVA hit on me"
Navy SEAL
knives
guns
beatings (various)
jail
police
a friend in a wheelchair who goes surfing every Sunday with a group with disabilities
a man with five children who makes more money than Bounty Hunters
"I know my limits I have boundaries."
changing buses and getting home before 9 pm "so I can take my medication. If I don't take it I become really weird."

What is a tourist?

2010-10-08T20:26:00.003+11:00

I realise after reading some of my poems this afternoon, that a lot of my poems have tourists in them. In one poem I mention "sunburnt Europeans 10000 kilometres from the problem of evil" floating on some inner tubes on a lake in Indonesia. Of course what I saw (in Lake Toba in Indonesia in the late '90s) prompted me to describe what I saw: a party of very happy Europeans cavorting in the water, and the hotel staff looking on slightly bemused. But nowadays tourists are from everywhere, and the are going almost everywhere. I feel like my poem unfairly racialises the "tourist". Or am I? Is the term European the same as "white"? I was using European as a snitched of the Enlightenment ideal of a humanity that had risen above slavery and exploitation and found a way of enjoying life unburdened by guilt. European means civilised. The tourists I saw were obviously enjoying a slightly risky activity, as Lake Toba is very deep. Asia provided some relaxation of regulation. they were also unlike other tourists from Asian countries in their exhibitionism, their almost complete lack of inhibition. If they had been permitted I am sure they would have preferred to have been naked. I kind of ship of semi naked fools, inhabitants of a cold place who had found their bodies again. They were "always about to drown / but rescued just in time / by the hotel staff." I feel deeply complicit in a kind of poetic tourism, where I am always unmoored, or detached from a deep sense of belonging to a place. Susan Schultz calls this the "747" poem, a poem of shallow impressions, a sketch. 747 poems are the recordings of flaneurs.

(I get sunburn too.)

But maybe that's OK sometimes, if visual signifiers come to dominate inside knowledge and context. Like a good flaneur, I took a walk through downtown Honolulu today, on my way to the Social Security office. I passed the defunct headquarters of the once greatest exporter of guano in the world - Nauru Towers. I went down a street devoted to car repair, fender shops, place like "Capone's Ultimate Detailing", "Chuck's Corvette Clinic" and "Magnum's Firearms". I saw the "Word of Life Academy, and the prison - a Correctional Facility as it is called here - on a block just behind the manicured lawns and mission house museums of "colonial downtown". The contrast was so striking I thought I had walked out of one city and into another without any forewarning. I walked back alone Ala Moana Boulevard, which connects downtown to western Honolulu and beyond, but cuts off the city from its southern foreshores.

I am always surprised at how few people walk anywhere in Hawaii, unless it is people hiking in the hills. It seems the serious walkers do it out of necessity. The idea of walking through the downtown is unpleasant, as it's hot, but also you feel vulnerable. The street people are more visible. There are so many people on the streets who may be homeless, or may be determined cyclists, or the frugal single people who push their loads bicycles through intersections. People who wait at bus stops so patiently its as if they have no particular reason. Patience is a definite Hawaiian advantage. A car is a bigger advantage.

Shopping Malls are refuges, and like a lot of Asian malls, they make no communication via windows to the outside environment. Here, there must be rules about signage. I can hardly see any from outside a complex. Plenty inside. Here, the car park usually surrounds the mall, it is not underground or disguised. For a tropical island there is little of that sidewalk cafe culture you find in France and now in Britain, certainly in Sydney and Brisbane. Perhaps the weather is too hot. The malls are where Asians and most Europeans go to shops and wander. The Hawaiians prefer the parks and beaches especially on weekends. At least there's the beach, where picnics on the grass are a traditional Pacific habit. Somewhat stereotypical description? I was about to think about this in a sushi train (Genki Sushi USA Inc), but I'd already eaten a tuna sandwich on malt brown bread at Borders, and I would have been a single solitary passenger on the sushi route. It would have felt pathetic.

Syntax and streams

2010-10-07T21:57:00.000+11:00

I've been writing a lot about rivers since I lived in Siem Reap and could not ignore the ecological plight of the Mekong and its tributaries. The economy of a few nations whose poor live on rivers and river produce. Al to be dammed again, in Laos, China.
The source (in French la source) is common trope, and so are the mouths (bouche) of rivers. I live on the bouche of a drowned river valley/estuary whose source is hardly scenic or named as a touristic station.
We have Robert Adamson's poetic life work to guide us through a real and symbolic estuarine real estate (the Hawkesbury). How brilliantly he lingers over his own particular vision of spawning grounds.
I've been reading William Carlos Williams's Paterson, in which the Passaiac flows and connects, and most horribly becomes a site for corpses (at least in Book 1).
Let's write them (the rivers) as reversing gravitational flow or fall, the more familiar way to think of sentences, as going somewhere "forward". This is a kind of language poem in the way it shows English syntax is so flexible.
The following is simply Hawaiian poet Jill Yamasawa's found poem about the gravitational dynamic of water written backwards. The original poem is in her excellent book Aftermath. To read her original, start at the last line (the mouth) and read back, like you would Heart of Darkness.

Equals, Beings, All Things

after Jill Yamasawa's 'All Things, Equals, Beings'

And never anywhere for very long,

not along its entire path

it never quite reaches, at least

striving for an equilibrium state, which

every stream is, always.

Man's intervention

a landslide, or

be it precipitation,

to external factors

ever changing in response,

dynamic systems

streams are complex.

John Kinsella Post-colonial

2010-10-05T11:16:00.000+11:00

A new book of cross-genre criticism by John Kinsella, Post-colonial.

From the publisher's web-site:

Post-colonial is a poetic and wildly experimental account of cultural intrusion and appropriation from one of Australia’s finest and most prolific writers. Questioning what it is that constitutes nation and place, particularly in reference to Australia itself, Kinsella’s narrator travels to the Cocos Islands to collect oral histories. Disaffected and unsure of his own role there, and cast adrift upon an ocean of his own dependencies, the narrator offers not only a fragmented tale of crisis, but also a sophisticated exploration of issues of history and self-determination among the local Cocos Malay of Home Island and the non-Cocos Malay foreigners of West Island. Post-colonial is also a novel about how we read so-called post-colonial texts.

From papertigermedia. I'll be reading this one and keeping track of reviews here in Australia.

UPDATE: My review of the book is in Jacket 40

Tinfish 20

2010-10-05T05:37:00.003+11:00

cover by Tava Tedesco

I read in Hawaii

2010-10-05T05:26:00.000+11:00

Asian Settler Colonialism

2010-10-04T12:08:00.001+11:00

Are Asians in Hawaii colonial settlers? Are they complicit in the continuing economic and social plight of many native Hawaiians? As part Asian myself, it is difficult to accept that being an Asian migrant can make me complicit in an on-going story of colonialism, partly because the issues involve questions of race and genealogical inheritance of kuleana or responsibility for and custodianship over Hawaiian land and community. The anti-essentialist in me baulks at this kind of talk. Why can't a third generation Asian settler become Hawaiian? What does it mean to be Hawaiian? Still, I certainly need to understand much more of discussion of political and legal status of indigenous people and Asian settler/migrants in this place. The debates over land rights, restitution, and the return of native lands have been on-going and bitter, and the more recent anti-terrorism laws passed by the US government make it more difficult than ever for there to be rational debates on the subject.

If you want to know more about these questions, read the introduction to the book available on line here

Burmese Rebels: Aye Saung's Burman in the Back Row

2010-10-04T08:12:00.002+11:00

I met the political activist and intellectual Aye Saung in Bangkok in 1983. At that time he'd long given up the cause of the Shan State Army, the group he joined in the 1960s. I remember him as an extraordinarily cheerful and good humoured man. He became my heroic model of a guerrilla dissident.

Here's a review of his autobiography, Burman in the Back Row: Autobiography of a Burmese Rebel (White Lotus Press, Bangkok, 1990).

Who are the Burmese in Thailand?

2010-10-04T07:21:00.002+11:00

The Guardian, a British newspaper, has published an article on the situation with Myanmar (Burmese) refugees and economic migrants in my "other" home country, Thailand.

Read it here.

I have been teaching a course in the foundations of creative writing at the University of Hawaii, and the status of migrants is complex. In short Native Hawaiians often view the mostly Asian and white Americans as "settler colonists". Hardly anyone uses the term "migrant", except to identify illegal overstayers. One Big Island resident expressed to me her concern and lack of sympathy for poor "beach bums" and others who arrive on the island and sleep on farmland. They can't get jobs or a home and the government funding cuts mean there is almost no one employed to address this situation.

Same in Thailand? Well yes, but the difference is the Burmese are a condoned underclass of underpaid, exploited labourers and servants for wealthy Thais. The history of Myanmar and Thailand has often been antagonistic, so for Thais to denigrate Burmese and discriminate in a racist way is often excused. The arguments sound like this: "Why don't the Burmese get themselves together? Why is the Thais who have to take 2 million refugees? Answer: because Thailand benefits economically from the pool of black market labour.

The other difference is that the Thai state is now mobilised on a semi-militaristic program to evict the Burmese en-mass. Crazy, as the economy will suffer, and many Burmese were born in Thailand and are assimilated.

To compare with Hawaii, the indigenous population of Thailand are the huge majority and apart from economic colonisation by multi-national corporations, Thailand has never been colonized (in a legal, religious, and social sense).

Yet, racism and national identity is a discourse that "others" vulnerable refugees and migrants. so who still speaks of the problem with any generosity of spirit?

Another issue is the way tourism perpetuates the exploitation of Burmese ethnic, and for some who live on the Thai-Burma border their only sources of income are shows for tourists. Similarities can be drawn to Hawaii.
Here's a poem I dedicated to a Burmese dissident writer Aye Saung, who was exiled in Thailand in the mid 1990s.

Mandalay Fort

for Aye Saung

Their fortress walls remind us of the British

their "iron hand", their gentle terror

bathed in holy waters, a river at sunset

wears the setting sun, a saffron sky

inflects a foursquare moat

studded with lotus and colourful police

dozing trishaw drivers folded into their seats.

We speak, and yes, it's the old master's language

dirty as salvage.

Soap it down with poems, and let your gaze

move outwardly

from exile, from a secret lookout in a forest,

from the hamlet of equality

invisible and persistent in its camouflage,

from a Mahayana meditation platform

to a Georgian set-square castle,

misty now in the dusk,

cooking fires along its banks, flooded paddy,

parade grounds raked and footprint free

the blackened fruit of Tamarind trees

and betel-nut expectorant

staining the Irrawaddy sand,

flower gardens strummed by brooms

evicting stray seeds of yesterday's news.

Your picture's in it somewhere,

labelled Wanted Man: mugshot of an artist in fatigues.

Perhaps the Generals foresaw it all:

this gaol a five year plan will make

a college of fine arts perhaps,

or an image bank, staffed

by friendly security guards,

who have eyes for academic landscapes -

river mists, a sunset with a rosy glow

or the petals of a crimson English rose,

Miss Burma 1924.

Rivers of jungle honey, you'd agree

thick enough to sweeten bitter herbs

or thorny mountain trails, where

my mind travels tonight

to a festering hideaway

where even a bookworm's classified subversive

brewing secret jungle medicines

learning the art of crushing roots and leaves that

still the wound

quicker than morphine.

And you can live with that,

the pain, you can even live

without books, without nation.

Antique guns guard windows in the trees.

Behind mere lines of least resistance

art's devised for the hell of it:

sings the dark away like a bush guitar

and a journal trains itself

into testament:

the finest English you can muster

and we don't forget.

For anyone who want to know more about how to help the Burmese people, go to http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk

Bad Woman of Bangkok

2010-10-03T17:50:00.000+11:00

I have to admit trawling Google to find websites that publish my poems without my knowledge, only because it pleases my ego. I recently found a poem The Bad Woman of Bangkok on a site called Cedar Galleries from the Netherlands (http://www.cedargallery.nl/engpoems_abc.htm#A). The really flattering thing is my name is listed in a themed collection of poems with Anna Akhmatova, John Ashbery, Maya Angelou, and William Blake.

Read it here.

Hawaiian Human Sacrifice

2010-10-03T14:27:00.003+11:00

Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son

Dennis Kawaharada is a noted scholar of Hawaiian history, and he writes about how Europeans encouraged the myth that Hawaiians were savage cannibals. 19th century tour operators brought foreigners to alleged sites of slaughter. Herman Melville made a name for himself as the writer "who lived among cannibals". However, there is evidence that humans were sacrificed and ritual acts of cannibalism did occur. According to Kawaharada:

While there is no evidence that cannibalism was ever customarily practiced in Hawai'i, Malo, Kamakau, and Ii ('I'i) give accounts of human sacrifice during the consecration of luakiniheiau for human sacrifice (Malo 159-176, Kamakau Works, 129-145, Ii 33-45). Human sacrifice is a kind of symbolic cannibalism, a feeding of the gods, with whom the ali'i were closely identified. The motive of human sacrifice was to gain a god's favors, particularly the war god Ku, but also the agricultural god Lono: luakini were built when one ruling chief was "about to make war upon another independent monarch or when he heard that some other king was about to make war against him; also when he wished to make the crops flourish." (Malo 160-161), or to bring "peace for the duration of the reign of the king" (Ii 45). According to Malo, there was an element of cannibalism during the luakini rituals: a man impersonating the god Kahoali'i (an underworld deity) "ate an eye plucked from the man whose body had been laid as an offering on the lele [a stand for sacrifices]" (174-5). A similar ritual act of consuming an eye of the man sacrificed is described by Malo as part of the Makahiki celebration in honor of the god Lono (152)....

It is also possible that there were two competing ethics in pre-contact Hawai'i: one associated with the god Kane, to whom life was sacred and human sacrifice and cannibalism, ritualistic or not, was abhorrent; and one worshiping Ku, which required human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism as necessary to obtain the favors of the gods during a war or famine or to prevent war or famine from occurring. But the reality was not that simple: in the rites at the heiau for human sacrifice, prayers were addressed to Kane, Lono, and Kanaloa as well as Ku (Malo, "Notes to Chapter 37" ["Concerning the Luakini"] l76-187; Kamakau Works 143; Ii 37-38). At the time of contact with the West, the kahuna included all four major gods when asking to have his prayers for an ali'i answered.

Kawaharada's full text and references are here.

Afghanistan post script: Jill Yamasawa and Aftermath

2010-10-02T17:12:00.006+10:00

Source: http://www.army.mil

I have been reading Hawaiian poet Jill Hamasawa's book Aftermath (Kahuaomanoa Press), as good a book about Hawaiian memory and forgetting as any I have read so far. but it is also a book that shows the connection between the the US war machine and their recruitment of colonized youth in places like McKinley High School in Honolulu. On of the key metaphors is the human sacrifice and Hamasawa links the place where Hawaiian priests drowned their sacrificed to the greater message of US militarism: that "good men and women" sacrifice themselves for the betterment of others.

Susan Schultz, the publisher of Hamasawa's poems for Tinfish Press writes that Aftermath

is the biography of a place, McKinley High School, in Honolulu. Like so many places in Hawai`i, McKinley High School is only the most recent building, name, ideological construction for what have been other names, other uses, other cultural values. While Lowney notes that “the problem of memory is, of course, fundamental to modernity and constitutive of literary modernism” (4), poets in Hawai`i know this as a problem closer to home. At home. The problem of memory is inscribed in the names used to mark places in Hawai`i. To the winner go the names. What is now called Ford Island (at Pearl Harbor) was Moku `ume `ume, Chinaman's Hat was Mokoli`i, Diamond Head was Leahi, and so on. (In recent years, however, these names are often used in tandem, or as political and cultural choices.) McKinley High School was built in Kewalo. Yamasawa quotes the “Dictionary of Hawaiian Localities” from 1883:

A fishpond and surrounding land
on the plains below King Street,
and beyond Koula.

Kewalo contained a spring called “Drowning waters,” after a spring used by priests for human sacrifice. As we find out some pages later, Kakaako / Kewalo “was a place of recreation” where Kamehameha had a residence, “along with his family, and personal kahuna.” That the militarization of Hawai`i, the thirst of the military for young soldiers from local high schools, is linked to this is clear in Yamasawa's sequence, although the sacrifices have a very different meaning or provenance. And therein lies much of her tale. It is a story of empires (McKinley's and Bush's, by way of the Vietnam War), as much as a story of the young people who participate in it, either as its victims or perpetrators, often as both (children of immigrants from colonized places who become soldiers in the American army). It is a tale of institutions attempting to organize multiple pasts into one, and it is equally the tale of challenges to those institutions.

I am continually struck by the number of soldiers I see in Honolulu, dressed in battle camouflage and ready to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. I also take note of the traumatised and the injured who have returned.

I had originally posted the following link:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6262309924357477439
Tariq Ali a vociferous and convincing anti-war commentator, is interviewed on ABC (Australian) TV.

Now, after reading Jill Hamasawa's book, which puts local names to those teenage men and women who have been to war and will still be going there, Ali's argument seems even more important to listen to.

Literary Offenses of WS Merwin's Folding Cliffs (?)

2010-10-02T12:25:00.004+10:00


from Kapalai‘ula de Silva, Literary Offenses of WS Merwin's Folding Cliffs, Makali'i http://apps.ksbe.edu/kaiwakiloumoku/reviews/book/literary_offences

I refer to Kapalai'ula de Silva's attack on Merwin's epic poem Folding Cliffs, which takes its inspiration and much of its plot from the memoir of Pi'ilani Ko'olau, The True Story of Kaluaikoolau, or Ko-olau the Leper (Hawaiian Journal of History vol 21, 1987).

De Silva's complete text is here. It was set by Susan Schultz as a reading for her 625 Foundations of Literature course at the University of Hawaii. Her discussion of how she used this text in her teaching is here.

To sum up de Silva attacks Merwin for the following:

- not being true to Ko'olau's memoir, since the poet was not motivated to tell truth. (Is this not Plato speaking from the grave, that poets lie and embellish the truth in order to deceive the public?)

- not giving an accurate statement of his primary source and its inherent truthfulness and coherence

- not including a Hawaiian voice on the dustjacket

- too much originality that is 'colonial'

- trivialising received truths and inherited wisdom

- too much fictionalising and messing with the original narrative

- casting doubt on the strength of Pi'ilani's Christian faith

- making her seem like a PTS victim, paranoid and out of touch with her community

- misrepresenting Hawaiian grief ritual; not expressing the original text's, piety, passion, or poetry

- not giving closure to Pi'ilani.

While I am not embarking on a close reading of Merwin's poem, this controversy brings up the issue of what poets can and should and should not do with their primary texts. Another issue is whether Merwin had framed his work clearly as a work of creative re-interpretation. A skilful reader would then have forewarning that his version of Pi'ilani's story was not the "right one", but another one with its own merits.

I find de Silva's critique quite crude in its attempt to paint Merwin as a neo-colonial, and in her complete lack of critical scepticism about a memoir's claims to being a true story. Even if everything described did happen, it's the affective dimension of the text that really matters. I suspect that like Plato, de Silva lauds Pi'ilani as one of the saints of Hawaiian storytelling: her voice is the Truth, and nothing but. And who am I to cast doubt on Pi'ilani's story, since I have no knowledge of a counter-story (and nor did Merwin I believe)?

I wonder if de Silva has an interest in how other savvy readers might read Merwin's poem and take it on its own terms, especially readers interested in following up the Pi'ilani story in a scholarly spirit of research and curiosity. But I also see how Merwin's poem can turn an Hawaiian heroine into a psychologically damaged victim, a celebratory (though tragic) text of survival and spiritual affirmation into an elegy which serve's Merwin's intention to show the fragility of Hawaiian culture and it vulnerability. I have to say that nothing annoys me more than the repetitive trope of the native "victim" of colonialism who's psyche is irretrievably damaged.

If Pi'ilani's memoir is such a powerful and strong work, Merwin's poem won't kill it, and it may even become a bridge for readers to the original. Then they can make up their own mind.

W S Merwin

2010-10-01T05:00:00.001+10:00

From today's Writer's Almanac:
It's the birthday of the poet laureate of the United States: W.S. Merwin, born in New York City on this day in 1927 and raised in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. He won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Carrier of Ladders and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for The Shadow of Sirius (published in 2008). He also won the 2005 National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems.
He started writing poems when he was four or five years old, he said -- at first, they were mostly hymns to give to his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied literature and Romance languages at Princeton, gained the admiring attention of W. H. Auden, and published his first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, the year he turned 25.
He wrote plays for the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, edited poetry for The Nation, and translated a lot of other people's poetry. He has translated verse from French and Spanish and Italian and Portuguese and Latin, and also from Yiddish and Japanese and Sanskrit. He translated Dante's Purgatorio and works by Pablo Neruda.
He lives in Hawaii on the lip of a dormant volcano in Maui, on what used to be a pineapple plantation. He's devoted to cultivating endangered palm trees and reforesting his land with native Hawaiian plants. He's deeply interested in Buddhism.
He once wrote: 'Every year without knowing it I have passed the day/When the last fires will wave to me/And the silence will set out/Tireless traveler. ... Then I will no longer/Find myself in life as in a strange garment ....'
He said: 'I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.'
And he said: 'Writing is something I know little about; less at some times than at others. I think, though, that so far as it is poetry it is a matter of correspondences: one glimpses them, pieces of an order, or thinks one does, and tries to convey the sense of what one has seen to those to whom it may matter, including, if possible, one's self.'

In a poem called 'Separation' Merwin wrote:
'Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.'

Hawai'i Five-O

2010-10-01T04:57:00.001+10:00

I recently wrote to Australian poet John Tranter:

Hi John

Sorry but your Hawaiian Haiku is now out of date. The new series of Hawaii Five-O started last week.

This week's episode featured Serbian terrorists attempting to hack into US Airforce Defense radar so that they could secretly land a nuclear armed plane on the North Shore. As yet, no surfing as the winter swell's not begun. Another interesting event - a new Steve McGarrett lecturing Dano on why he should not torture the suspect.

My re-write of your classic:
Hawaiian Haiku

In Honolulu
they're still watching
‘Hawaii Five-O’.

Best Wishes
Adam

ps. Here's a pic of the cocktail Hawaii Five-0

Here's the recipe

* 1 2/3 fl oz. light rum
* 1 2/3 fl oz. blue Curacao liqueur
* 1/3 fl oz. Cointreau
* 2 1/2 fl oz. pineapple juice
* 1 lime
* 1 lemon
* ice cubes

Cheers
AA

A new library for University of Hawai'i Manoa?

2010-09-16T17:48:00.000+10:00

A traditional wooden ho tai or manuscript repository. Vat Canthasalo, Ban Nong Lam Can, Camphon District, Savannakhet Province, 1994.
PLMP staff
© PLMP, National Library of Laos

This would do nicely, a Lao repository for old manuscripts. I am sure it is more watertight than the present library at UH.

Seriously, there is a fantastic new resource on the net for anyone who wants to study Lao literature. The Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts at http://www.laomanuscripts.net/en/texts/search

Tumbleweed Roundup

2010-09-13T11:44:00.004+10:00

UH Creative Writing students on parade, MELUS Conference, UH 1997

I am very much enjoying the personal meetings and friendships I am making at English Department of University of Hawaii. At the same time, like everywhere in arts faculties in underfunded places, pressure building to justify what we do as creative writing practitioners.

But we have to keep a sense of humour going. My time in the English department at the University of Hawai'i is yielding rather coded messages to colleagues. Susan Schultz has her blog report from the front line (and yes, we are trading in a lot of military metaphors at the moment. There's some influence here of Deadwood, a rather funny TV parody of the Wild West.)

(Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely incidental.)

Tumbleweed Roundup

The posse had gathered

in the emptiest part of town.

Even the dust looked bored.

It was not like there was

enough sentencing to go round

to make a paragraph.

Maybe the Indian Wars

would finally steamroller the pioneers.

All that learnin' foa what?

The Community wanted a lynching

before they knew who did it.

Thankyou for your narrative interest in this position

but we regret to inform you...

Mixed or miffed genres

the Sheriff knew he was up against it -

maybe today he'd name his target, but

no, he wasn't to show his hand

until well after midnight, at which time

the intruder would have left holding nothing

but a kitchen sink -

tho Wild Bill was up on the roof

Bonnie was staking out the front door

and Killjoy Finch had a measure

on Forms. Turnip had planned

a tripartite brochure

to keep the town straighttalking

and Old Quickdraw was gettin' optimised

in a dream of a passive tense.

If the World cometh to our door

if the world were the word? ventured the Preacher.

All eyes turned to him who had once before

and only once proffered sage advice.

Charlie Chan took notes (there was

a suspicious Elsewhere about him - that

he might steal the patents

or spontaneously combust

with song and he wasn't even drunk,

not yet, not ever).

UH English Department soiree to welcome Distinguished Visiting Writer Adam Aitken, (just out of picture)

Joe Balaz in Otoliths

2010-09-13T11:40:00.001+10:00

Here's an excerpt from 'Polynesian Hong Kong' by Hawaiian poet (now mainlander) Joe Balaz

Polynesian Hong Kong
.....

it’s a hootenanny
and a hoedown

if you’re on da top

and you pull da strings
on all da puppet clowns.

If not

just dangle dere in space
wit dat submissive look
on your face

and tink
how wonderful
all of it used to be.

The complete poem is at Otoliths, a ejournal of poetry edited by Mark Young, a New Zealander who lives in Rockhampton Queensland Australia.

Damming the Mekong

2010-09-12T05:59:00.002+10:00

Floating Village, Tonle Sap, Siem Reap

Where water glitters, palm trees dance.
Where egrets and herons flap after fish,
water buffalo charge each other, grunting like giants.

O Sam Ouer

Highlights from the ABC radios' Asia Pacific Report

Mekong dams a threat to Cambodia

Still some of the particular problems are immense. Take the headline issue of land grabs. Ambassador Pou Sothirak is a former humanitarian coordinator on the Thai-Cambodia border and a former MP and minister in the Cambodian government, who's now on leave from an advisory position to prime minister Hun Sen, for a stint at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.

SOTHIRAK: First of all, it's the exploitation by powerful people and rich business men who go out and buy off land from the poorer ones. I just hope that the poor can have their own land title because land is very important. It is known to be a wealth creation asset for the poor and if one wants to see Cambodia move away from poverty, land issues need to be settled for the sake of the poor.

Fisherman in Silk Pantaloons, Tonle Sap

MOTTRAM: But even if Cambodia's largely rural poor get land title and are rescued from land grabs, their fate could lie elsewhere - to be precise in China, whose dam building activities on the upper Mekong River, to quench its great thirst for energy, have an almost permanent alarm ringing in downstream countries, like Cambodia.

Ambassador Sothirak again.

SOTHIRAK: Many of the Cambodian farmers, they also live on fishing and the price of fish lately has gone up two, three times, because of fish species under threat now because of this dam building and some places are now dried up, so no water for irrigation, so the crop cannot survive. So, this effect we have now seen it happening in Cambodia. My view about how to go about it if one country wants to exploit common natural resources, one country has to ensure that this type of development will not have drastic effects on the environment, on the one hand, and on livelihood, on the other hand....

Khon Phapeng, Mekong River, Si Pan Don, Southern Laos

Can China live without the Mekong River? In my opinion, China can live without the Mekong River. But if you ask the same question of Cambodia, I don't think we can live without the Mekong River.

Happy Idul Fitri!

2010-09-10T14:58:00.000+10:00

Some Muslim Chams from Siem Reap Cambodia.

What Next?

2010-09-09T05:57:00.002+10:00

A church in Florida is planning to burn Korans.

See this ABC news report

By the Way I'm in the United States

2010-09-08T20:47:00.001+10:00

But this is Hawai'i, it's not the Mainland, is it?

Speaking to my Korean student Edward Lee I was struck by his comment that after he gets his MA in English, he's heading back to Korea to teach. Born and raised in the US, he went back to Korea for ten years. Now he's suffering some culture shock, as the condition of the US has surprised him - the fall in living standards, the inefficiencies of banks and bureaucracies. East Asia is where's it's all happening as far as he is concerned. All my myths about the US being the most modern country in the world has been buried under twenty or so pages of forms I had to fill out to get this job at the University of Hawaii. And after three weeks, I still don't have a new bank account, and won't get paid for another 6 weeks pending a Social Security card. The problem is that three institutions are responsible for visiting scholars, the university of Hawai'i, the Immigration department, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Apparently these institutions talk to each other (irony lite).

The homeless I see on the streets of Waikiki were hardly visible when I last visited in 1997. (I came to participate in the MELUS conference - Multi Ethnic Literatures of the United States). Then the biggest shopping mall in the Pacific, at Ala Moana, was full, or fullish. A few days ago, on an hour long walk from Manoa campus to Waikiki, I saw more homeless people than I could count on my to hands. I saw one chap sleeping next to the Waikiki Canal. He had ulcerated legs that he'd dressed with absorbent kitchen paper and adhesive tape. There is a law here that homeless people will have their possessions confiscated if they are found to be loitering in certain areas.

Ed Lee is the first American I have met who has expressed a desire to leave, and I suspect that for many Americans with limited exposure the other places, like Australians in a way. It just doesn't occur to them to consider emigrating, and perhaps unlike so many migrants whose imaginations were one factor in lead them out of their condition, there is no imagined greenery across the ocean, and no real means of getting there.

Except perhaps for my friend Dennis Kosanke, who has fond memories of R and R in Sydney in the late sixties. But he would never do that (emigrate), as his grandchildren live in Brooklyn and already, for him and his wife Suzanne, Oregon is the next stop.

My colleague, poet and blogger Susan Schultz posted this link to a story on growing income disparity in the US. It's here.

Little Angkor

2010-09-05T06:18:00.004+10:00

Little Angkor Wat

for Hong Ly

Green moats, all our favourite stupas.
Tiny models of glory we step through,
for a dollar entry.
He was a fine apprentice, strong, fit, fresh
who began in miniature,
upsized later, won a prize,
got married, started a dynasty of kings.
Stone kings and of course Buddhas.
In the old days you learned
by imitation and added 10 %.
That was before the wars.
Now so much depends upon
a pink bike leaning on a frieze
beside an army
jostling to their deaths
with a terrified elephant
hard on their heels.
So much depends on the new Pharoah
who killed the old, who killed the one before.
Among giants you just live here
chipping away at clouds.
Where do you want us
to stand for the photo?
Next to the lions.
Above, in the creeper vine canopy
at 10:1 ratio, a tower hosts a nest of bees,
so big a man could perish within it,
bigger than the copy of
Jayavarman's four faced tower, the man
with a 360 degree angle of view.
Dangrek Mountain stone,
cheap cement, Plaster of Paris
or multi-headed cobras -
compassionate Buddhas
take all forms.
The apprentice became a man
of pride and sinew
who won the King's praise, a bouquet,
a UN restoration grant
and a blue ribbon in 2000.
And now, maybe
the new apprentice might become his father.
If only I owned his chisel,
his blue silk pantaloons and
that pair of good black shoes, we
would not be
diminished.
How we might find him
among his mossy towers
and if he were still alive
we won't ask.

The Green Man

2010-09-04T05:05:00.001+10:00

The Green Man

because I have seen the green man
strut his stuff with the green machine of himself,
on a stage from which the egrets have been evacuated.
The white girl who was really brown
with the native tatts and Iphone savvy
shouts "you dress like shit"
but green man says "The world I make
myself to be myself, a live there
on a four foot square
and 15 K a year,
on beans and barley,
and a copper cup.
Forsake your dream of child or other
human investments
(for they are costs and
more green men
do not make the world more green)
and date me then."

New title for the blog

2010-09-04T04:58:00.004+10:00

I have changed the title of the blog to reflect a change in scene. For my followers it is not necessary to signify where I'm at now, if they read my blog. As Stuart Hall once wrote, it's not where you're from, it's where you are at. Still, Cambodia was the place I really started this blog.

I post Susan Schultz's photo of Cambodian Hong Ly, a leading figure in the Honolulu Cambodian Community. We met up on the University of Hawai'i campus. A truly beautiful man.

Australia and America - what's the difference?

2010-09-02T20:10:00.003+10:00

My colleague Susan Schultz at the university of Hawaii has had me read Kathleen Stewart's wonderful book Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press), a book of ethnographic literature about ordinary places and people in Texas. But also about Deleuzean Affect. It's very much in the vein of Benjamin's Arcades project, but applied to American suburbia.

Susan commented and fed me some bait:

"I'm reading this book and thinking how utterly American a lot of it is. As someone who arrived here two weeks ago from Australia, how ordinary are these affects to you, Adam?

aloha, sms"

I replied on her Foundations of Creative Writing blog:

Yes, it does seem very American if we mean mid-west, Texas. As many readers have noted, film and other media are saturated with Americana from this place. The Walmart/whirlmart antics, and the gun culture is very American, as we in Australia don't have a gun culture like that. We do have obsessions with dieting, youth suicide, self-harming, drunkenness (lots of that), dating by computer, strip malls wastelands dedicated to freeways except we drive on the left: we are your mirrored twin! We have pick-up trucks but we call them "utilities". We have the same innocuous suburbs that hide the despair underneath. We have obesity and bulimia. We have anti-black and anti-brown and anti-white racism - enough for export. We have Danny Webbs. We even have "illegal immigrants", but they are such a small number and they come by boat usually (or by aeroplane and who overstay their visas).

But we have the positive ordinary moments, when strangers recognise each other in checkout queues. A large proportion of people believe we can overcome racism on an ordinary level. We have Radio Shack (but it's called Dick Smith Electronics), Burger King, KFC and... These could be good or bad depending on your chosen diet. We have a Walmart-style corporation called Bunnings, and we have K-Mart. We get lost in car parks too.

We have never had as famous a Civil Rights leader as Martin Luther King, but the struggles of black people in Australia has had many a hero fighting ordinary struggles in ordinary places since like America Indigenous Australians are more or less excluded from mainstream politics.

But as I read Stewart, American culture expresses itself "here", while in Australia American culture has been adopted and adapted for Australians. There's some subtle and not too subtle displacements of the ordinary. Perhaps Stewart can accumulate so much of America in this book because there's so much going on here. USA is has a much bigger population.

Personally, the book made me think about America in a way that the usual channels for consuming American media don't always do. I watch CNN, Ophrah, Bloomberg (why I do not know), and all the Hollywood blockbusters. But in a sense that America is no longer ordinary to me. Stewart's America is banal, but shocking, routine but surprising, it creeps up on you in sometimes unpredictable ways and sometimes the violence in the scenes is more visceral than anything I have seen in a movie.

The book does aspire to a kind of epic scope that W C Williams achieves in Paterson, or that occurs in William Faulkner. But it is comical at times, not high seriousness. I like that too as Australians tend to be suspicious of epic ambitions. We have a lot of irony and self-deprecation and Stewart's later sections deflate some of that rather serious tone you find early the book.

While I've been reading the book, some human remains have been found that are suspected to be those of a victim of one of Australia's worst serial killers. He would prey on European backpackers and hitchikers on lonely stretches of country highway, get them drunk, rape the women, and then kill them. Is that American too. You would have to know about Ivan Milat's Ordinary upbringing in semi rural Australia. There's the fact that such a killer is banal. His own insouciant denials seem Australian to me as I can hear the voice of his denial. An American voice would be different. You have a different, specific ordinariness. The banality of violence is very Australian and ordinary. We started our European history with a lot of random death. Here, to make a sweeping generalisation, so much of American story-telling, films, art tries to come to grips with violence, but often a mythologizing impulse drives it. Or, if it isn't mythologised, it's stylised again and turned into your versions of Manga comic-strips (I'm thinking of Tarantino. Stewart has style, but it's a "Zero-degree" style (borrowing Roland Barthes' phrase). The violence in OA doesn't symbolise or represent anything but itself, and it is repetitious and does not fit into any grand narrative of American Struggle or pioneering. OA does not redeem its banalities by claiming to be epic and important, but I think it has the scope to seem greater than the sum of its individual parts, and as I wrote elsewhere there's no sense of closure or resolution, no vision of a future that better. This does seem like the America I am feeling and experiencing right now. There's not much optimism, people are living for the moment, trying to get through the days, not listening too much to politicians (except Palin has now taken up the preacher's voice of conservative renewal through turning back to some mythic Good Times sans Bad People). Australians are in a similar mood of cynicism, but we don't have anything quite like Palin and the Tea Party. Stewart's book feels like a resistance to that very American reliance on high oratory of hope and redemption and Palin won't like this book one bit for it undermines the idea of American greatness. As such it is anti-mythologising.

Now I'm going to cheer up with a glass of wine!

Alexei's comments

"Adam. Dug the comments! Cool. How can you see the Matrix when you’re in the Matrix? Ask someone from a sister country. Was jamming with fellow proletariats from Newfoundland the other day and I always seem find the most insightful comments about America are from English speakers with cool accents.

I don’t like the burbs either. Stewarts remark about belonging to mainstream American culture reminds me of the burbs themselves. She said, it gives one the sense that: “nothing will happen to us, or will have real consequences.” Like Hesse says of U.S. lifestyle in Steppenwolf: “A life of comfortable and convenient numbness.” Two thoughts that cheer me up. 1) The claim that anyone who gives their forty-hours to American Capitialism should own a house (granted that their ancestors were white and eligible for the G.I. bill), mass-produced or not, descends from one of the better ambitions of U.S. capitalism. 2) The banality of burbians hasn’t prevented America from the stupendous output of style and wealth of artistic energy that America exports. Of course this depends on who get’s to call what art. I think Gertrud Stein is wrong, I’ve been to Oakland. There’s a there there, a bustling community of Underground artists, hip-hop artists, graffiti artists, highly distinct from Urban Cultures in, for example, Atlanta, Brooklyn, Texas. There so many unmistakably American subcultures. Possibly, they tell help the original American story better than Gatsby or Absolome Absolome. Although I think there are numerous better nations than the U.S., given our unique dynamics we ought to be a nation of vast style and originality.

Is America thought of this way abroad, or are we judged merely by Hollywood?"

Comment in reply to student Alexei's comment on my blog post comparing Australia and the States.

(WARNING - this was written without the aid of a Thesis Statement)

Thanks Alexei

Not sure we can keep talking about a clear mainstream/subculture division. It seems that they feed off each other symbiotically.

I've grown up in the Australian version of the 'burbs, lived in a largish house, and went to a highly privileged school (for would be professionals), but my family fell apart and so my mother, brother and I also lived on top of a barber shop on the shopping strip of a main street where the stench of hair-clogged drains and hair products brought out the roaches. I won a scholarship to go to university. I grew up where there were no "artists" and few writers around, but there was a Baptist Church across the street. I've also lived in "bohemian" places. I don't have any automatic dislike of suburbs and Stewart's book helps me to see the 'burbs more accurately, without prejudice. the suburbs come alive when you get to know the inhabitants with some intimacy. Stewart's book facilitates this intimate knowledge. I like safety, security, quiet, a patch of garden for my plants (I'm getting old). I don't have a dog or cat. I have two hoses, one out the front, and one out the back. Australia has the most successful suburban cities in the world if you measure success by real estate values. We haven't had a crash caused by house price deflation.

But I like writing that shows all aspects of suburban life including the tragic and abject. I grew up in a middle class Sydney suburb where heroin culture started out as recreational for teenagers in the 70s. We started out with Thai sticks and bongs and Pink Floyd and graduated to the best the Golden Triangle could export (not me though, I hated needles). Some of the most amazing tragic stories come out these manicured zones of over-achievement. My first sexual encounter was with my friend's 15 year old sister. A few months later she was pregnant to a guy of 16 and they were going to get married and have the child. What's odd is they were not uneducated or desperately poor, but ordinary. I lost contact with these people. Sound familiar? So I am with you in recognising subcultures that mainstream culture comes to after the fact - that is the subcultures often provide the innovations in style for the mainstream.

In Australia we get plenty of the mainstream America and the sub-cultural too. Hollywood is not as dominant as you might think as there are now so many alternative pathways for culture to spread across the Pacific (eg YouTube, blogs, online forums, Ebay...) I am not suggesting that Australia imitates America - far too sweeping and generalised. Though we did take on Rock 'n Roll, drive ins, and cars. We had our own Anti-Vietnam movement, and we have our own version of Veterans Clubs, the RSL (Returned Servicemen's League). Our national brand The Holden, was manufactured by a subsidiary of General Motors. Some of our suburbs are however a patchwork of Asian ethnicities in ways similar to the American urban landscape - Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Chinese. but we also have a large Mediterranean and Middle Eastern group from Lebanon mainly who have transformed what were "white areas". Unlike the States, most Australians live near a beach or ASPIRE to, but there are none too subtle differences between the beach side suburbs and the inland ones. There are huge tracts of our cities I have never seen of course and as a writer I would not presume to be able to write about them with any truth. Ethnography starts by going and experiencing these places with an absolutely open mind free of judgment.

Adam

Hawaiian Aubade

2010-08-30T05:47:00.004+10:00

Subject to change:

Hawaiian Aubade

O'Hara in pyjamas
Stevens in Fedora
one smart feriner shoots up the Common Room

but it was only a dream
the Sheriff rustles up some buddies

Should I head back across the border
never to return, should I just
go back to sleep?

Do I always wake up paranoid
or was the dream
an accurate nightmare
of my feelings?

It's just possible
that without adequate sleep
I will be cut down
by a skateboarder in the Mall.

There are safe ways
and Safeways
a recorded thunder
before the moisturising spray

In the checkout press
the donation button?
The voice coach queu'd, she says
I eat all the right stuff

and the genealogy of my voice
distracts the cashier
in complex play of store card
and refund.

Who got the nerve to see you first?
My hand plenitude!
My mind pure Oregon peanut butter!
We talk about Mel Gibson

doing American – how bad
it must have been way back when.
But it was teachable
all this mutating and changing
despite the Forms.

Perhaps I have escaped
the checkbox. Maybe
there's more of them around the corner
like a charity stand raising money
for the soccer coach.

All depends - depend now on
gracious donations of kindness
or on a good cheap haircut.

Time to hit the Manoa Trail
head up to the mist
before the heat melts the carpark
and bugs come out to play.

I don't want chance wakefulness
without vigilance. So watch it,
the Ordinary revved up,
moment blown by in trade wind.

Visiting Susan Schultz

2010-08-29T19:29:00.009+10:00

Susan and Sangha Schultz
The "Barnett Newman"

Da "Barnett Newman"

Da Tinfish Publisha's Gallery

We Kill Viruses

2010-08-29T19:15:00.005+10:00

Feng Shui master at work?

Using photos for writing

2010-08-29T16:44:00.005+10:00

Chris Bowman has an essay in Text journal about using photos for writing. Looking at photos is part of the process to get you writing. But it's better to go to the places and experience the settings yourself. I have seen many photos of the Khmer Rouge death camp S21, but none of them compared to my experience of going there. When I got there I could not take any photos. The place exceeded the possibilities of my own photography. After all, a camera can't capture smell, or sound (except through video, and even then it doesn't get to the full effect).

This dilemma is more apparent when writing documentary poetry based on old photos. One of my students has written about the famous Capa photo of a Spanish Civil War soldier at the point of being shot: 'Death of a Loyal Soldier', or 'The Falling Soldier'. It's impossible to re-visit the site unless there is a site marked at the point of the soldier's falling. But in the absence of the memorial to evoke presence would any battlefield do to evoke the effect and affect of Capa's image?

Bowman tries to get to the source of the representation if possible, since the world is awash with representation that no longer carries a visceral power to move us. With Capa's image, I've seen it so often, I now react to it mostly in an intellectual way, rather than emotionally.

The full text of Bowman's article can be found here.
Here's an excerpt:

Writers use photography whether they write about it or not. They might go somewhere and take their own pictures, or they might find them through research. Writers take notes and photography is a visceral form of note-taking. A picture is worth a thousand words. Save your writing hand or your typing fingers for more important things.

If I can, as part of my writing practice, I'll go somewhere and take pictures to refer to later, or I'll find pictures if I can't go there myself. Like the concept of the storyboard, visuals to write around, to write to, appeal to me. I have a picture taken circa 1885 of men at a lumber camp. They are lined up to get their hair cut and their beards shaved. The barber chair is a tree-stump and the barber looks like a lumberjack himself. It is obviously a Sunday. The image is immortal, comical and striking, and so I find a way to work a scene like it into the novel. How many novels, poems, movies have sprung from a single photograph?

I knew that with this project, simply collecting archival photographs and reading biographies and histories of the Victorian era wasn't going to be enough. I had to go and physically stand in these spots. The danger in only seeing something as it was, black-and-white or sepia, locked in a posed eternity, is that the writer can re-present that time as something unreachable, precious. Stereotyped.

So, there is a stage of research that submerges in libraries and archives, books, photos, newspapers, journals. The author learns what he needs to about the culture surrounding the story, gathers and retains a way of seeing into the setting. This can take days, weeks, years. There will never be 'enough' research done, and at some point we have to leave the library and face the real world. Preferably with a camera in hand.

When I write I want to create visual sensations; I look at something, walk around it, smell it, hear it, leave it. Taking pictures is not the only way to preserve what any of the senses experience, but it is the most feasible, the most immediate. A sound recording? Perhaps of a train whistle, unusual birds. A smell-jar? Any young boy can tell you stories of failure in that field. Pictures. Sight-vision. Show, don't tell. But before I can show, I have to go look.

On Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects

2010-08-29T13:38:00.006+10:00

Photo by Nic Nicosia Fantastic photographer with a great website.

I'll be teaching this book to graduate students at the University of Hawaii.
I really like this book. It's very much a book of the vernacular, the ordinary, yet very much about getting under the perceptual and affective barriers created by our habitual non-attention to the ordinary. As Susan Schultz writes, you read about people buying something on Ebay and then you can't help but reflect on what you are doing when you next buy something on Ebay. A book that forces intense reflection and vigilance.

The Goodreads site has a nice review:

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events.

I would add question about the deliberate absence of plot and its formal devices. I am interested in how the book keeps the reader engaged on an affective (emotional) level without resorting to the traditional conventions of plot in the realist narrative. It is full of suspenseful moments, but these are contained in the "flash piece" - 'Road Rage' is a perfect example of a suspenseful narrative; the dating scene between the diet freak and the overweight man is another suspenseful moment. Yet the book never promises to continue these micro-narratives in the way that we would expect with most novels. What happens is the repetition of a light/dark opposition, a motif of wild animals being hunted or haunting the suburbs, stories that involve race and racism, domestic violence, and rather moving and rare moments when people recognize the kindness in each other. There's a continual oscillation between 'still life'(what is traditionally called 'descriptive writing') and these moments of crisis and recognition. What is often expected of narrative is 'resolution' of conflict' - the denouement or payoff for the reader at the end of a novel for instance. In this book there is no expectation of that and yet I am compelled to read on.

In Defence of Poetry

2010-08-29T12:18:00.002+10:00

Here's an email I sent to University of Hawaii English Department staff. There's been a debate on whether to hire another poet or another fiction writer. It's desperate times due to the loss of ten staff, many of whom were poets (Robert Sullivan for one).

Hi Uzma and Susan

I know I am newly arrived and learning the ropes but I feel I can add something to the debate. Weighing up demand versus supply and numbers who are fiction graduates versus those who are poets is of course important but I think that poetry needs more expertise at present because the students who do express a desire to study and practice poetry need more opportunities to build up a background of reading poetry before they get to the graduate level. I recently communicated with a graduate student who considered a switch out of fiction to poetry, but concluded she did not have enough knowledge and skill to do so. I was a bit surprised that a grad student would say this. It suggests to me that she had wanted to study more poetry as an undergraduate, but was inhibited in doing so. So having fewer poets around will not help this mindset. In my experience as a teacher of narrative at UTS, I also came across students who seemed embarrassed to admit their interest in poetry, and with so few poets teaching there, there were few opportunities to meet poets and develop that part of their writing. Much needs to be done to de-mystify poetry, and the fewer poets around to do this, the more mysterious poetry becomes.

I also believe we should consider that the skills involved in writing poetry are TRANSFERABLE to writing in fiction. I would go further and argue that novice fiction writers who do not read poetry, or have had little exposure to it, have missed out on important skills and knowledge. Poetry is in a sense a foundation for all writing. Poetic narratives (Chaucer, Icelandic sagas, or the Ramayana for example) offer lessons to fiction (an non-fiction writers on how to structure story, work with myth, allegory, characterisation, rhetoric, dialogue, etc.)

If you were take supply and demand as the main criterium, then consider performance poets who might want to study at UH. Unfortunately the popularity of performance poetry is not reflected at all in the syllabus at present - there is no degree in Creative Writing, Poetry and Performance, though it could be a very popular option. With the increasing interest in poetry and multi-media, you need people who know about that.

We forget that fiction writing is a popular industry and that there are plenty of places to learn about fiction writing outside of universities. Of course a university should stay in the game. But a university with a strong reputation in all genres - fiction, non fiction, poetry and poetics, will distinguish itself from the bulk of institutions and in time attract a great number of students, accumulate more cultural capital, and earn enduring respect, especially in Pacific and Asian countries where poetry has often been regarded as more prestigious than fiction. Take Albert Wendt - a hero of the region for his poetry and his prose fiction. Take Ko Un in Korea, Edwin Thumboo of Singapore, the great poet/playwright of Indonesia WS Rendra, James K. Baxter in New Zealand, or Les Murray in Australia.

Adam Aitken

Home and Away - a Digital Bridge

2010-08-27T19:39:00.001+10:00

Great poetry from New Zealand and Australian poets. Part of the Trans-Tasman poetry Symposium .

All Together Now: A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney - hear and read it at this site.

When bank managers are Hawaiian

2010-08-27T18:48:00.002+10:00

In australia they don't care
where you're born
and offer you new "products"
like online accounts
that glow in the dark
Here
at the campus branch
of First American
they may ask you where you're from
while processing your application
and in my case the answer
is as convoluted as a banking application form.
She says it: I'm hapa
and she's happy with that
'that's what we say, hapa
half and half!'
and we're both happy with that -
I'm
a
happy
hapa!

Thai travel

2010-08-24T08:33:00.004+10:00

Thai travel

Full story at ABC news website

By South East Asia correspondent Zoe Daniel and wires

Philippine security forces stormed a bus packed with Hong Kong tourists overnight to end a dramatic hostage crisis that unfolded live on global television, leaving eight people and the gunman dead.

The day-long ordeal began when a disgruntled ex-policeman armed with an M-16 assault rifle and dressed in combat pants hijacked the bus in Manila's tourist district in a desperate bid to get his job back.

Indigenous Australians abandon major parties

2010-08-23T17:30:00.001+10:00

From the ABC News website

By Iskhandar Razak

Indigenous leaders say Aboriginal people abandoned the major parties on Saturday because neither was offering them anything of substance.

Larrakia woman Donna Jackson, who was at today's opening of the World Indigenous Women and Wellness Conference in Darwin, says the major parties failed to offer anything to Aboriginal people and are paying for it.

"The swing towards the Greens is because they are actually speaking it when they stand up, they are not giving us rhetoric," she said.

Yorta Yorta woman Rachel Atkinson, who was also at the conference, says if one of the major parties did offer more, they may have won outright.

"The Government should never underestimate the political voice of the Indigenous people across this country," she said.

Leaders at the conference are calling on whoever forms Government to take Aboriginal affairs more seriously.

Vietnamese poem: Bamboo

2010-08-21T13:28:00.002+10:00

Dear Mr Adam,

It's long time to hear from you.
We now begin to be busy with the 1st semester but still remember you :)
As promised, I send you a Vietnamese poem. It's about a typical tree in Vietnam - Bamboo. But it is about Vietnamese characteristic: solidarity, hardworking, brave, beloved..

Best regards,
Hang (Moon)

Vietnamese Bamboo

Green bamboo, when it was green
Bamboo hedge has been in legend
Body gaunt, fragile leaves
But why could the bamboo create ramparts?

Wherever they grow, bamboo still green
Even though in exhausted limestone or gravel soil
It’s very simple
Less fat can becomes much after accumulating for a long time

The hard working roots are not afraid of poor land
The more bitter life the more diligence
Bamboo garden swings in the wind
Austere tree still sings lullaby leaves stems

Loving much sunny and blue sky
Bamboo doesn’t hide under their own shade
Standing close to each other in the storm
Bamboo hand hug closer attachment.

Loving each other bamboo doesn’t live separately
That stronghold is created
Unfortunately broken branches falling body
Remains a root for hereditary baby bamboo

Bamboo can’t stand growing curvely
It is an incredible spike since a sprout
Bare back exposed to sun and dew
Bamboo gives the unique their short shirt to baby bamboo

Baby bamboo, baby bamboo
Brought straight and circular body shape of adult bamboo
Years gone by, months go
Bamboo becomes old, the young grow

Tomorrow ... tomorrow ... tomorrow
Green land ... forever green bamboo ... green bamboo!

Nguyen Duy

Vietnamese version

Tre Việt Nam

Tre xanh, xanh tự bao giờ
Chuyện ngày xưa đã có bờ tre xanh
Thân gầy guộc, lá mong manh
Mà sao nên lũy nên thành tre ơi!

Ở đâu tre cũng xanh tươi
Cho dù đá sỏi đất vôi bạc màu
Có gì đâu, có gì đâu
Mỡ màu ít, chắt dồn lâu hoá nhiều

Rễ siêng không quản đất nghèo
Tre bao nhiêu rễ bấy nhiêu cần cù
Vươn mình trong gió tre đu
Cây kham khổ vẫn hát ru lá cành

Yêu nhiều nắng nỏ trời xanh
Tre xanh không đứng khuất mình bóng râm
Bão bùng thân bọc lấy thân
Tay ôm tay níu tre gần nhau hơn.

Thương nhau tre chẳng ở riêng
Lũy thành từ đó mà nên hỡi người
Chẳng may thân gãy cành rơi
Vẫn nguyên cái gốc truyền đời cho măng

Nòi tre đâu chịu mọc cong
Chưa lên đã nhọn như chông lạ thường
Lưng trần phơi nắng phơi sương
Có manh áo cộc tre nhường cho con

Măng non là búp măng non
Đã mang dáng thẳng thân tròn của tre
Năm qua đi, tháng qua đi
Tre già măng mọc có gì lạ đâu

Mai sau... mai sau... mai sau
Đất xanh... tre mãi xanh màu... tre xanh!

Nguyễn Duy

NOTE: Hang wanted me to correct some grammatical mistakes but I have let a few through as they express the paradox of bamboo as a singular organism with its many shoots. To correct subject-verb and pronoun references to make them consistent means that this paradox is lost. For example, does "bamboo stands with itself" or should we say "bamboo shoots stand with each other????" Hang's translation, "Bamboo doesn’t hide under their own shade"is grammatically incorrect but beautifully ambiguous! The English number system is rather inflexible in this regard.

Waikiki

2010-08-21T11:44:00.009+10:00

My first post after arriving in Honolulu last Sunday.

I will be teaching poetry workshops at the University of Hawaii.

I am staying with my gracious and generous hosts Dennis and Suzanne in Waikiki. They are natives of Minnesota and have lived for years in Asian and Pacific locations. As I missed out on a place in Lincoln Hall, a residence for visiting scholars, they were quick to volunteer to "billet" me for a week. They live on the 30th floor and have an amazing view of Honolulu beach central. It happens that the 3rd in line for the presidency of the US lives in this building, and keeps a permanently chauffeured limo in the basement car park. This explains why there were two police cars, engines running parked in front of the building when I arrived. Should the President and the VP be assassinated, he's the top man.

I don't know why I want to mention this observation in my first Hawaii post, but it sticks in the mind. The idea that such an important person shares the same condominium.

Dennis on his balcony

American TV as it is here has been interesting too. Last night we watched a slightly ironic and retro Broadway remake of South Pacific - a hoot and incredibly transparent in terms of message and racial positioning. The New York Times reviewer did like the Hawaiian actor Loretta Ables Sayre's performance. He writes: "When the entrepreneurial islander Bloody Mary (the Hawaiian actress Loretta Ables Sayre in a terrific New York debut), sings the familiar “Bali Ha’i” and “Happy Talk,” they feel new because they’re rendered as systematic acts of seduction."

I don't remember the film version very well, but Dennis and Suzanne grew up with it and can sing along with some of the tunes. The Broadway version is slightly more camp and ironic, but hardly. I don't think most audiences will read it as an allegory of colonial race relations, but some will feel warm and fuzzy by the resolution. It still strikes me that the closing scene is a Utopian emblem of racial harmony framed and constrained within the idea of the modern nuclear family, with a French colonial father, a Southern step-mother who has managed to overcome a visceral horror of racial miscegenation, and two mixed race Polynesian children from the father's first marriage with a local. The NY Times reviewer calls this a dated and tired message. Despite its naive belief that racism can be overcome through love alone, I feel it's better than the perpetuation of racial Darwinism, when "East is East and the twain shall never meet".

touristique image

I also saw a news report about the Australian elections, and the reporter made that point about the confusing name for the Liberal Party. The report showed the clip of Gillard eating a "Pie Minister pie" and Abbott in a long black overcoat (which did look like a priest's cassock) pushing kids on a billy cart through a school yard.

It was also confronting for me to see the roll call of deceased American service men and women, with its absence of sound track. This morning, a classically sunny Honolulu day, I passed a schizophrenic Iraqi war veteran sitting on Duke Kanahamoku lagoon. He seemed to be playing out a firefight and was calling in the C130s.

Other odd impressions seem trivial - the size and shape of the Haagen-Daz icecream trucks - not mini-vans, but trucks. Of course the cliche about America being a place for big and over-sized things does apply to the food you get in the average eatery, though in many other respects Honolulu reminds me of Surfers Paradise, or perhaps Cairns, but not "versions" of them, as they are not versions of anywhere else. Every comparison requires attention to detail if I am to describe location accurately and with a feeling for its less obvious meanings. To see what is essentially local and un-replicable is the challenge, or at least to see how a Vietnamese Asian food store in Honolulu is different from one in Marrickville in Sydney.

Surfing for instance. Waikiki beach fronts a channel that runs between the sand and the reefs a kilometre or so off shore. So you don't experience that close proximity of public bathing and surfing that you feel at Bondi Beach for instance. The colour scheme is different too - the emerald green/aquamarine blue of coral beaches and lagoons cannot be found anywhere on the East coast of Australia I believe. Perhaps Fraser Island? though I have never been there.

Ecopoetics

2010-08-13T15:51:00.003+10:00

If anyone asks me why I write (or can't write) poetry, or how poetry can undertake a role in political activism, I will point them to Jill Magi's website:

Ecopoetry as an Oppositional Mode: Thoughts on Art and Activism

The practice of poetry resists ritualized emptiness in its insistence on individual utterance--even if composite in composition, and its insistence on a non-standardized performance of language--even while enacting traditions. It is language communication on the small scale, with no measurable effect. As a poet, this is my lullaby: "no measurable effect." I believe that whatever difference is or isn't made from a poem can not be measured. This state of not knowing creates an inherently oppositional mode within a post-capitalist "information age" and it is why I write poetry.
Edouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation further articulates this aspect of poetry in the realm of the non-white, non continental, essentially local and relational context of Caribbean literature:

In addition, the Poetics of Relation remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological stability. It is against the comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of a language. A poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible. Theoretician thought, focused on the basic and fundamental, and allying these with what is true, shies away from these uncertain paths.

Attending to silence: this is art-making's requirement. In our political climate, with the record of losses on the left, and the successful public relations work of the right, are artists nervous now about exercising quietude, nervous about being considered bourgeois and out of touch?
I am thinking of Paulo Freire who says there is no action without reflection. Perhaps the very health of our society depends, to some degree, on our role in the symbiotic relationship between those citizens who are not artists and those who are; I think our acts of reflection and small-scale communications as poets are utterly necessary in themselves.
To advocate for the union of art and politics assumes that the two realities are separate. Yet for many artists in this country and all over the world, there has been no separation between art and politics, between experiences of daily life and larger social structures.

Vietnamese poetry - about love?

2010-07-29T01:07:00.002+10:00

After you read it - is it about love, or does it translate as what an English language reading of the love poem defines as love poetry? I am reading it as some thing else which includes love, but is not limited to it - loyalty, nationalism, a critique of regionalism with it's allusion to North and South as perhaps temporary categories to be washed away by greater forces. Transcendent, yes, but very much about a contemporary sentiment. A poem full of ideological echoes, but not arriving at an ideological position of any certainty.