Honolulu isn’t the most poetic of towns.

If anything, islanders lean more towards magazines, newspapers and the latest offerings at Costco. A handful of literary journals present readings a couple times a year, depending on their printing schedules, at venues such as the University of Hawai‘i’s Campus Center Ballroom, Borders Books and Music and Kumu Kahua Theatre. The events tend to attract Vintage-paperback junkies, open-minded Reyn Spooner types, older transplants from the mainland with fond memories of seeing Ginsberg howl, and the odd college English student hunting down extra credit.

But a core of poets write and publish internationally—people such as Blair Morgan, Cathy Song and…Susan Schultz. An English professor at University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Schultz’s works include Memory Cards & Adoption Papers, a work comprised entirely of poems written on index cards, Aleatory Allegories and And Then Something Happened, her latest collection published by the United Kingdom’s Salt Publishing in March. But Schultz has made her biggest mark locally as the head of Tinfish Press. Launched in 1995, Tinfish is a venue for poets from all over the Pacific, and an enterprise that Schultz does out of love—and her own pocket.

Tinfish chapbooks are striking not just for their experimental poetry. Art director and UH–Manoa professor Gaye Chan oversees the clever designs and visual puns. Normie Salvador’s gothic and sci-fi-flavored Philter was created in the form of a perfumed magazine insert, complete with scent. Vegetarian Steve Carll’s collection on meat consumption, Hamburger, was packaged in a silver foil hamburger package.

The latest Tinfish chapbook, A Drag Queen Named Pipi by Dan Taulapapa McMullin, takes on issues of race, sexuality, and colonialism with sharp renderings of Samoan culture.

Tinfish publications are in a prime, heretofore unrecognized spot on the small but growing local word market occupied by other journals like ‘Oiwi, Hawai‘i Review, Hybolics and Manoa. Its level of experimentation in text, packaging, themes and content place Tinfish smack in between the venerable, “mainstream” Bamboo Ridge and the raw, young slam generation. Not yet as established as the two contrasting poles, Tinfish deserves to be, if only to help further establish Hawai‘i as a San Francisco or New York–like buzz center for ethnic and cultural literary diversity. Tinfish could be the McSweeney’s to Bamboo Ridge’s Paris Review.

The next Tinfish event will take place on Dec. 12 at Revolution Books at 3pm, part of Gary Pak and Carolyn Hadfield’s new Second Sunday reading series (see box). Not long before Schultz and her husband, Bryant, left for Nepal to meet their second adopted child, The Weekly sat with the poet over coffee at a Kane‘ohe Starbucks.

Schultz’s voice has the mature, deliberate cadences and pauses of a seasoned professor used to patiently explaining theorem to students. But her straight blond hair, eyes twinkling behind glasses and paleish pink skin of “tanned” haoles, gives the impression of an artistic, intellectually inclined munchkin — follow the yellow brick interpretation.

How did you begin writing poetry?

I remember writing poems when I was very young. It rhymed a lot. I remember being obsessed with watching people use pens and pencils on paper, but I didn’t know why.

Where did you hone it?

There are some assumptions in that question. Reading a lot. And writing and writing and writing. Now I don’t write that much but when I was younger I would just write all the time. And when you write all the time, you can throw 98 percent of it out without losing a thing.

I was actually a history major in college. Then I went to graduate school in English at the University of Virginia—a very conservative university. I taught briefly at William and Mary and then I came here. And I learned more since I came here than I ever learned in school about literature.

How so?

When I moved here [in 1990], for the first time ever I was in a place where literature was actually happening at the moment and there was an excitement about it that I never experienced before. It was really immediate. There was a kind of freshness to it that also led me away from the poets I knew when I was on the East Coast. My students call them dead white men.

I noticed how fresh and exciting it was because I didn’t understand it. I’d go to a reading and there’d be very local references. There’d be someone reading in pidgin. It was mostly Lois-Ann Yamanaka type of writers and everyone was sitting forward and responding, and I wouldn’t know what they were responding to. That was when I had to go figure things out.

How did you choose Hawai‘i?

I didn’t. I got a job here. The year I went out on the job market, there was a job here in 20th-century poetry in English and that was my field.

What influences you?

In college my influences were poets like Wallace Stevens, Crane…modernists. Then in graduate school I discovered the language poets. Very difficult poetry that’s resistant to interpretation. Since I moved here I’ve gotten a lot more into Pacific poets, Hawai‘i poets—the kinds of poets I never knew about in my old life.

My poetry tends to be really synthetic, like everything goes into it—kitchen sink sort of thing. I don’t just pull out a particular thing I’m interested in and skew to that. Instead I tend to pick everything that’s happening to me as I’m writing the poem and put it all in.

What’s your creative process when you’re writing?

When I first moved here, I did a lot of what you could call automatic writing, a New York school of writing where you just start writing off of a sound or a phrase and you see where it takes you. You kinda do fast writing. Everything that’s flooded into my head, I get it down. And then I throw most of it away.

In recent years I’ve changed to works that are much more focused around particular ideas. [With my memory cards project], I wanted to sit down and write a book that was partly about my mother, partly about me and partly about adopting my son. But I wanted those things all to be related to larger historical and cultural concerns. So I sat down every day, thinking I would write about these sets of experiences. The only rule was that each poem had to fit on an index card. The poems are very coherent in the sense that they’re focused on these several questions. And I also write directly onto the computer now. I used to write everything longhand. That’s part of the reason why I mostly write prose poems. On my computer I find lines a little superfluous.

Why not just do prose work?

A long time ago, when I tried to write short stories, they all turned into prose poems. There’s a big difference between prose poems and short stories, although I find myself using more storylike material. Prose poems are much more interested in the words, the language, how everything is phrased. You’re splitting a hair there because fiction writers are also very interested in that, but I think there really is much more of a focus on language and material in a poem than there is in most prose. At least in the way I tend to write prose poems, it’s more MTV-like instead of a plain linear fashion.

How much does Hawai‘i figure into your work?

I will occasionally write about a moment in Hawai‘i politics or something, but I say the influence is strong but more indirect for me. For example, writing about family and family as a cultural group is something that I do because I live in Hawai‘i. If I still lived on the East Coast, I don’t think I would be interested in how individuals fit into groups of people.

Would you consider yourself a local writer?

Not in the sense that I’ve learned to define local over the years. My husband, who grew up here, says that it has something to do with working the land. Plantation workers spoke pidgin. If you have that kind of working connection to the place, and if you speak pidgin, you’re local. Which is different from Hawaiian of course. I think of myself as someone who lives here, who has a deep interest in Hawai‘i, but is not a local writer.

Do you feel like part of the writing community in Hawai‘i?

I started Tinfish as a way to negotiate the poetry I came to Hawai‘i with and the poetry I learned about in Hawai‘i, and I tried to figure out a way to get these poets to talk to each other. To some extent I do feel a part of it, and to some extent I don’t.

I feel more a part of the community as an editor than as a writer. The way I write is so much like that other kind of writing that I came from that it doesn’t have an immediate resonance here even though a lot of what I do is based upon living here. But I can publish in Hawai‘i. I don’t think anyone has ever excluded me.

I was in a conference in Maine, Poetry in the 1940s. I gave a talk on Japanese-American internment camp poetry from poets in Hawai‘i, It was a very odd paper at this conference. It was either white poets with given names, or African-American poets lumped together. I felt, I belong here, but I don’t belong here. That’s basically my experience: I belong here but I’m from the outside. Usually I find that a good place to be.

Was that the origin of Tinfish?

I wanted to find a way to negotiate that kind of experimental poetry that I knew from the mainland, Australia and New Zealand. There’s so much more Pacific poetry than we had before. The Tinfish community is very porous. Some Tinfish writers are Hybolics people, some are Bamboo Ridge people, some are ‘Oiwi and Hawai‘i Review, and some are from elsewhere. It’s kind of an imagined community.

What does Tinfish look for?

We look for poetry from the Pacific region and I call it experimental poetry, which is a category, for me, that is relatively relaxed. Some people have certain boundaries that they consider experimental, but for me it’s a certain concentration of the language of the poem in addition to the content of the poem. I was very interested in a political resonance.

In Tinfish I don’t change punctuation. So if it’s an Australian writer, they’ve got their own funny punctuation and I don’t change it—a kind of non-standardized writing.

Even your format is non-standardized.

A lot of it has to do with Gaye Chan at the UH art department. She’s obsessed with recycling so we’ve had several covers that were recycled and she finds a lot of young designers to do the work. I have no idea what the cover’s going to look like until I get it from the printers.

How do you fund tinfish?

We just got non-profit standing, but before that, it’s been my funding. I’m hoping I can get grants. It’s amazing what you can do with only a few thousand dollars. But it got to the point where I’m spending way too much money. I needed to find another avenue.

How is the English Department these days?

Better. There were a few years there where it was coming apart at the seams. Creative writing issues—issues of race, gender…a lot of unhappiness. Now, while there are still fissures, there’s a much better sense of where we’re going, especially with the hiring….When I came here, the faculty was almost all white and came from somewhere else with very few exceptions, but now there is a sense that there is more diversity.

From a creative writing standpoint, are you guys producing anybody good?

Our new chapbook is by someone who gradated from UH. And don’t forget Lisa Kanae, Normie Salvador, Lee Tonouchi….They all graduated from UH. But I don’t think we produce writers. There’s an awful lot of talent in this state so we get a lot of talented people. What can be confusing is that there are so many ways of going at creative writing by the faculty. That can be good—to be told one thing in one class, and something else in another. That causes a lot of fertility, but I wouldn’t say we are a one-agenda program. So I tend to publish, obviously, stuff that I feel needed an audience beyond that.

What do you think about spoken word?

It’s a great thing—the most energy I’ve seen in Honolulu in a long time was this slam I went to a couple years ago. It was hopping. But I took books to sell and there wasn’t much interest in the printed word.

While I don’t necessarily think of spoken word as the kind of poetry that appeals to me, it’s a wonderful thing to have happened because it gets people back into language.

Any advice for young writers?

One bit of advice, which I only realized late in the game, about the time I started Tinfish, was that you don’t have to wait for somebody to publish you. Publish your friends, publish yourself. Start a ’zine that’s eight-by-eleven paper with a clip. It doesn’t have to be fancy, you just want things to circulate, people to talk to each other. Get your work out, even if it’s you standing on a street corner handing it out.

Go to a lot of readings by lots of different kinds of poets. I get disappointed when there’s a Tinfish reading and it’s the same five or six people. Read incessantly. Read stuff that you don’t like—realizing what you don’t like helps too. Go to cafés and eavesdrop on people. Keep your eyes open to everything. Don’t shut anything out.  

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The Untraumatized Man

History? We won’t know how it regards us; we’ll all be dead.  —George Bush

The one untraumatized man refused to turn on his television that day. He did not see the people falling, or the towers falling, or the ashes falling, or the falling of light into grief. Perhaps he saw some shadow of it in the faces of those he passed on the street, as if the rays of other people’s televisions permeated their skin, back-lighting their silences, their stumbling. How does the untraumatized man define the word “neighbor”? To what nation does he belong if his memory has not failed, but does not in the first place exist?

One imagines the untraumatized man playing ball with his son in the park. It is just spring, and the purple and the yellow flowers blossom. If the newspaper is his daily prayer, he has failed to utter it. If there is an ethics of memory, his is incomplete. If we are bonded by our trauma, he stands alone.  uard the untraumatized man, for he precedes and follows us.

—Susan Schultz

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Book sale

To purchase books from Tinfish Press, visit www.tinfishpress.com.

Recommendations

Tinfish #14: the latest poetry anthology featuring a cover made from old Bank of Hawaii annual reports.

Living Pidgin: Contemplations of Pidgin Culture by Lee A. Tonouchi.

Sista Tongue by Lisa Linn Kana’e. A perceptive memoir on childhood and speech impediments.