Hawaiʻi Review Number 12, Special Poetry Issue: 1981

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Review

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PERIODICAL

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HAWAI'I REVIEW SPECIAL POETRY ISSUE

FALL 1981

EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR

donna Bair

POETRY EDITOR

Wini Terada

FICTION EDITOR

Lizabeth Ball

Barbara Fulkerson

POETRY STAFF

• Michael Flynn Elizabeth Foster Zdenek Kluzak Darin Mishina Rosemarie Quintal Robert Sadaoka

ADVISORY EDITORS

Larry Kimura Frank Stewart Phyllis Thompson Rob Wilson

PRODUCTION STAFF

Beau Press

HAWAI'I REVIEW is a student publication of the Board of Publications, University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Subscriptions, manuscripts, and correspondence should be addressed to HAWAI'I REVIEW, University of Hawai'i, Department of English, 1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu, HI 96822. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Single copies, $3.50.

The HAWAI'I REVIEW is a member of The Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines.

C>1981 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai'i at Minoa.

1

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CONTENTS

Y. SHINODA

COVER POETRY PORTFOLIO

7 14

LAURIE KURIBAYASlfl

Two Poems A Supper in Winter Riding with my Father Waking Together Tai-po

22 27 28 29

JUDITH MINTY HOWARD NELSON TRAN THI NGA KENT UClflYAMA ROBERT F. WlflSTLER .

Exhibition of Blue Ladies Cold Sheets ' Patrice A Tea A Noh Play Two Poems Three Poems Mandala

31 32

Two Poems My Mother's Choice Violent Storm A Night Life

46

Six Poems Six Poems

GARY TAClflYAMA

POETRY

.

Somewhere in the Midwest Four Poems

30

34 35

36

42 45

49 50

51 52 53

3

CHARLES EDWARD EATON

JIM DANIELS KAREN CHAMBERLAIN JOSEPH STANTON MICHAEL McPHERSON WENDY WILDER LARSEN STEVEN CURRY PHYLLIS THOMPSON DEAN YOUNG CLARA REID SONYA DORMAN lyn lifshin ROBIN MAGOWAN

SCOTT C. CAIRNS

Reading Their Talk

57 58 59

Poet Explains Love to Doctor

60

CAROLYN LAU-MANNING

Shore Leave Four Poems

61 62

SUSAN DEMAREST

Two Poems

64

ROLAND THARP

Two Poems

66

STEVEN GOLDSBERRY

Lullaby

68

DANIEL KANEMITSU

Two Haiku

D. H. BLEYTHING

Tell

69 70 72 75 78 79

For E. S. H., 1918-1973

80

JOHN HECKATHORN

PuaH1nano

82

KAWEHILANI NEUMANN

Hanohano Nu'uanu

84

KATHERINE ROSE

Ke Kupuna No'eau

86

WALTER M. K. LAYMANCE

INTERVIEW Galway Kinnell

88

HRSTAFF

97 103

HRSTAFF

The Language of Hands Blind Betty

Ferry 'cross the River Two Poems Three Poems Cambridge Reverie

Louis Simpson Judith Minty

4

WANDA COLEMAN WILLIAM STAFFORD

BILL GOTTLIEB

dgbair DENNIS FINNELL GEORGE KALAMARAS JOHN LOGAN MICHAELK. WILSON-SOUTH

KARLA HAMMOND

REVIEW Mortal Acts, Mortal Words

113

by Galway Kinnell

Notes on Contributors

117

5

HOWARD NELSON

Laurie Kuribayashi holds an MA degree in English from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and is currently teaching expository writing there. She was born in El Paso, Texas, but was raised in Kapunahala and Manoa. Her poetry has appeared locally in Bamboo Ridge and in an earlier issue of

Hawai'i Review.

7

LAURIE KURIBAYASHI PORTFOLIO

Lava

Outside, the days end without wind, after afternoons like those they have in Kona when the pores of black a'a' fill with the heat of the sun.

But here, in this small room among the stone markers of Nuuanu, someone has left senko burning: the straight line reaching up out of the grey ash, the red glow marking the moments until this line also disappears into ash and a force in the darkness moves the pale grey smoke like the curve of pahoehoe beneath the vines of the green-flowered pakalana.

8

Upon Your Departure

Close against you this last time I hear the time beat within you and the great silence of your breath but you touch the strands of my hair and here in this crowd of strangers, my body curves into the shelter of your bones.

9

Recollection

It doesn't matter now in the shadows of Mauna Kea that you live below mountains folded out of the land and you only call me on those days we are allowed to remember Lahaina and Los Angeles.

In California, your syllables echo in the halls of hospitals and you read texts on cellular morphology and have watched three people die; while in Hilo, I am still trying to form words that reach across classrooms, to find the secret places of the small-leaved maile, and to stop being afraid in the abrupt shadows of rocks in water, even though I know the silence.

You still want me to forget the boy for whom I burned the senko twenty-seven months after the ocean had flooded the cilia in his lungs.

You still try to take the sadness from my words, forgetting that in Los Angeles I saddened you as my words grew softer and softer until even you could only touch their bones curving on the paper.

10

Dark with the Scent of Senko

The stars form patterned pictures but the words you spoke, lying on the grass in Waimanalo, find no reflection in this room dark with the scent of senko.

You taught me to see through shadows, to touch the light in your hard bones, to hear stories beyond the stars.

But now you can only be remembered.

And I keep forgetting that all that's left of your warm body and your gentle giant hands is kept in this metal box in Nuuanu, a box that I could cradle in my own hands.

11

Shadows in Charcoal

Silhouettes were ash and bone outlined in the dark: you thought of colors at night when, eyes closed, you tangled your fingerbones in prayer and in love.

You must have been so much afraid that day the lava rocks tangled the water, hiding the sun and air.

More than breath, I think you missed the colors then.

12

At Nuuanu Memorial Park

I stroke the dark ridges that spell your name and the dates of your life.

This is the closest I shall ever come to touching you again.

This is why grey elevators in hospitals are always bitter bridges between the living and the dead-to-be.

This is why, in hospitals, white cloth curtains can serve as walls: people are content; what can't be seen cannot exist.

13

Born in Honolulu, Gary Tachiyama grew up near Waikahalulu Stream where he spent long afternoons fishing for crayfish, mullet, and frogs. In 1980, his poetry was awarded first place in an Academy of American Poets Contest. His work has appeared in issues of Bamboo Ridge and Hawai'i Review, and will be included in an upcoming anthology of local literature edited by the Department of Education. He is currently working as a writer and editorial assistant at The Hawaii Herald.

14

GARY TACHIYAMA PORTFOLIO Letter to Grandmother

Grandmother, when I dream of you, you are on the mountain path and it is night.

You leave the village, a man and three kids behind, you break a sandal strap, and tum, look back just once, and then, you sit on a large grey stone.

One hand holds the small straw horse.

The other touches the forehead: thumb on temple, the side of the index finger across the brow.

Then, I enter the dream.

I am waving my hand in a field of tall reeds, but you do not see me, or I think you don't.

You just stand up and begin to walk.

Grandmother, sometimes I hike the _ridge trails, looking for a sandal strap, a sign, some dream of returning.

15

The Catch

Hey Arthur.

You know me, Junior, and Lester went go down the river for catch frogs.

Frogs hard for catch, but we figure can sell 'em, dollar-ninety-eight a pound, Tamashiro Market, so might as well try, yeah.

And we pros now.

I tell you, when daytime, can just watch 'em, where they stay sunning.

You know, eh, by the rocks and holes and stuff.

So you stay there sneaking upbumbye they run away too fastuntil you real close.

Then, the buggas jump and you just watch where they went hide.

Then, just got to stick your hand in and get 'em.

Most times easy, but sometimes no can.

Your arm go all the way in, but still no can.

That kind time, leave 'em alone.

Come back bumbye when get the pole and red cloth.

Ho, the frogs, they like the-red cloth.

16

Sometimes, even one poinsettia leaf work.

But the best is when my mother let me go frogging at night.

You walk through the water real slow, the flashlight checking out the sides where they stay maybe catching mosquitos or something.

Then, the flashlight catch one in the eye, you creep up to 'embut no make noiseand grab 'em.

I figure must be hypnotized or something 'cause always work and we catch plenty.

Make plenty money too.

That's why I say come with us, Arthur.

Why you like stay home read book.

For nothing that. That's for panties.

What, you one panty. I no think so, but hard for tell, yeah, the way you actnab, only joking. Eh, but Arthur, no be shame. Shame suffer.

Only going get us guys by the river, only us guys and the river.

'Cause Arthur, the river, that's where we stay living, right.

No can be more better.

Now tell me where you can go and hemo your shirt and nobody bother.

Where you can go hide when your father like give you lickings.

Where you can go for make your own lunch money.

'Cause us guys still young yet.

We no more nothing 'cept the river and us. That's all.

Everything else come bumbye.

So, Arthur, where you going?

17

Sitting in the Dark

Sitting in the dark the horizon is a crease in a blue blanket with stars and reflections on water that take light from eyes until all blue shades wander off like particles of dust When I look out someone will be drowning the next minute falling I'll hear footsteps running away from this room of night through a window breathing sky a child wanting to fold the universe around herself and hide in blue

18

The Line

When I see you out there on the blue, let me cast my line out and let it be the one straight line between two points.

And when I touch that line, I'll hear the soft rub of your breathing.

It tells me you are there even when the line slacks as you weave from light to light, dividing the plane into intentions like blueprints and rolls of undeveloped film.

I draw the line inward to where it is all one sound, one color, like the soft-white lightbulb or the moon you cradle near your belly.

19

Shadow

Take a shadow. Place him in a world, preferably on land, so a shadow might use his feet and hands the way they were meant to be used.

Let him sit in a chair until he forgets about reflections and thinks only about himself.

Then, walk away before he sees you.

This is the part where the shadow is a madman who stands and speaks: "without the wind there would be no rain without the hill without the rocks we would never fall over the edge."

And this is the part where the chain falls apart in the shadow's hands.

20

The Angel Says Goodbye

Oh mama, the angel is dying tonight.

Oh papa, the dust has settled down, he does not want to fight anymore. he only wants to write to say that he has to go.

I would have called to let you know earlier but you can't understand cannot would not should not understand that the angel is dying tonight.

I have left my last letter in the angel's right hand.

It says all he wanted to say.

The angel says goodbye: goodbye shadow goodbye old man goodbye baby goodbye.

Oh mama, goodbye, the angel gives you his heart.

Oh papa, goodbye, he gives his body to the sea.

21

JUDITH MINTY

Country Road in October

On my left still a ripe field.

To the right, sumac burning.

• Mauve on the hill.

Velvet crimping the edge of clouds, the orchard.

• Water glows in the drainage ditch .

• Against pines, blazing birch and maple. Remember when we praised green?

• This passage makes the chest ache. It's orange that hurts the most .

• Apples dragging down the branches.

In the wagon, pumpkins .

• All the corn stalks point east.

22

* The willow, still green, keeps this white house chaste.

But oh, that yellow cottage.

* In the vegetable garden soil visible again.

* Red-tailed hawk drifting over what runs to hide in the barren field.

* Even the Daily News box orange on its green stem.

* I too am amber driving under the maples .

• Cattails exploded, their dignity in tatters.

* They'll be the last to go, those chrysanthemums bordering the driveway.

* Did that oak know it would be so handsome in its purple coat?

23

• The whole woods vibrating with holy color.

• Surely this land has memory to last it through the white winter.

24

To the Cultivation of Orchids

1.

Service for townsman, old sailor whose face I barely recall, except as it raised to catch telltales on the jib, his scenting of the wind.

I rise with incense and candle flame to alleluias rolling in waves.

A long time, Father, since I faced linen touched to chalice, breaking of wafer.

I can't help a hand-stitch at my breast, this genuflection.

2.

We float like dreams in our funeral clothes, third car behind the hearse, this time the uncle who was mean and crotchetY, surgeon whose fingers finally twisted so crooked he couldn't hold his cigar, who never shut off the television and let conversation fall to his wife.

Past elms, old houses turned into offices, past storefronts blinking OPEN, past the black man on Peck Street, hat over chest, standing with head bowed until we all roll past.

3.

Up North near Cross Village in the divided cemetery, I step over a wire fence to low graves and bend to Chippewa names.

This is the paupers' side.

25

When the earth goes soft, falls under my feet, I think I will sink down to them except for the crow that shrieks, beating wings under my ribs.

4.

They roll the drawer shut on her and I hear a woman crying. The voice is glass shattering on the mausoleum floor.

My chair scrapes. I stand like stone for this suicide. My daughter unfurls inside my belly to take hold of her aunt's name.

5.

My own aunt saw her dead mother once in a moth battering its wings against the kitchen door.

Last year, when her heart stopped in California, she found me sleeping in a hotel room in Michigan.

In the dream, we held hands. Her pulse beat against my thumb.

6.

There is no end to this, reader.

My friend was a warrior, yet even she quit when two swans came, flew over the lake and settled to shore.

I sat with her before she left but we couldn't make the journey together. Her breath was fragile as an orchid's petal, she was already floating in air.

26

HOWARD NELSON

A Supper in Winter

I am sitting in a restaurant alone.

The window is blistered with moisture, but I can see that snow is still falling, covering the parked cars, sifting over trash in wire baskets, blurring the buildings.

The streetlight glows through the powdery darkness; now and then someone walks past quickly, shoulders hunched against the barrage of the snow.

The place is almost empty.

The table is polished wood; dark bread lies sliced in a basket.

Trails of bubbles float up in the gold of a glass of beer.

A spoon and a knife gleam dully; chips of butter lean in a dish.

The waitress comes with the soup. She is too pretty.

Her hair is smooth, the color of the inner circle of a walnut tree, tied back to frame her face and fall halfway down her back.

She is wearing a flannel shirt, and beneath the soft and faded cloth her breasts are bare.

We say a few words, and she goes back to the kitchen where the sound of two or three people talking comes through the swinging door.

Steam flows up from the soup. I spread butter on bread, look out at the snow.

A cinder truck rumbles past, playing the bells of its chains.

27

TRANTHINGA Riding with My Father

I remember the days in the waterfall highlands riding through the jungle in front on my Father's saddle feeling his arms around me.

Together we'd cross mountain passes; wild orchids in the 11.10ming mist, chattering monkeys, pythons sunning on the rocks, transparent streams below where the soldiers, our escorts, would stop to catch tiny fish in their hands.

I'd carry them in the cold pool of a wrapped banana leaf watching the water move from side to side.

When I was scared, I'd cover my eyes or he'd lift me on his shoulders leading his brown horse over the narrow mountain path going to inspect the schools in Yen Bai.

28

KENT UCHIYAMA

Waking Together for Miihealani

Morning again.

The clock hums privately on the dresser and will not ring till 7.

Some days the brains don't come all at once, and we sit for many minutes, stupidly happy in.the light.

The sun is the sound a mower makes swinging a blade in wheat; brown heads leaning over the rustling fall joyfully into the gold arc.

29

ROBERT F. WHISTLER

Tai路po to Li Po, poet

You watch the great white star disappear.

From your mountaintop you watch it disappear like you watched your poems drifting down the streamjust so, you watch the great white star disappear behind the night's dark misty screen.

A drunken dream ferments in a jade jug.

You pull the cork between your teeth.

Once the Emperor himself seasoned your soup.

Now there's only you and the autumn moon.

You think of the wind, water, rain.

Running after gods and goblins you rode a white pony across a thousand years . .Lightning struck but you remain.

30

CHARLES EDWARD EATON Exhibition of Blue Ladies

The tattooed lady had the blues as indelible and deep As the etchings on her flesh. You cannot show the same pictures ad infinitum; A gallery of skin has just so much space. You look and look, and go to sleep.

What does one do when one has been done and done all over?One cannot let the birds fly, the snakes crawl away, the rose wither: You have an immense appetite for art-and this tight cover.

When was the last time you saw the needle flash, felt the thrill of being stuck, Saw a virgin canvas hanging on an arm or thighA brilliant masterpiece this time if nothing happened to your luck.

All those ecstasies-the life, the art, the bleeding!Nothing but dija vu in words and captions once so captivating there: You would have to pay a gigolo to take a look at this light reading.

Well, call the service, negotiate the fee, have him comeIt is far better to have a handsome, pink, paid, young man Than sit at home lamenting no more arabesques on breast and bum.

It is a blue life when we fill it in, tout d fait, complete, and do not try To call in the world, even the bought world, to look the situation over And find in pentimento some glorious stretch of skin that never met the eye.

31

JIM DANIELS Cold Sheets

in third grade after school one day you put slush in my boots but I walked home in them anyway. your mother gave you a ride. you were always fascinated by cold things, kissing them, getting your lips stuck.

I still remember you wearing an ice cube tray on your face, your mother holding you under running water. you loved me because J '"'as underweight and always cold, blue and shivering through those Michigan winters.

• after we were married I thought you would warm up but that first winter you cried when I took the screens off the windows and in the summer sat in misery on the porch eating ice cream, preparing.

I was ~he one who had to carve the icicles off the dog every morning. you said it was good for him to sleep outside though he died in his first January. you said he was weak, wanted to get another, healthier dog. you drank gin and tonics year round and ice cold Pepsi in the morning. our bed was so cold the sheets cracked, fell to pieces.

32

finally, after you locked me out one cold night I got my own place, left you in your igloo. every night I walk down the street kicking the shit out of every snowman I see.

I know you're hiding someplace.

33

KAREN CHAMBERLAIN Patrice ATea:

Three years, I've been away, and where a door opened, I stayed. Not much on this island speaks our language, except sometimes the wind, and even it tonight grows listless, shifts so faintly from the south that I can barely hear its whisper in the palms. Instead, I listen to the surf, the spinning edge of sea-streams as they bend toward you, Tea, holding silence in their arms, as I do. Here, I swim, I fish, I run along the shore. I watch the storms, the stars. I sing whatever song I must. And think of the great distance starlight travels, from Taurus's eyes. Aldebaran's long since gone somewhere else, maybe burning brighter, maybe black. But still, that light is here, dancing in the waves . ..

34

JOSEPH STANTON

A Noh Play

The Lady lies stricken, a folded robe of cold bones.

She tries to pluck a tune on her stretched heart.

But hatred, the killing music, dances through her.

35

MICHAEL McPHERSON Unattended Money

The Fat Jap is back: he doles the chips with fierce resignation. Before dawn he'll tell whore stories: the twenty dollar midget, Asian outcall at the Disneyland Hotel, and the girl in the alley window at sunrise tossed his coins to the winos just to watch them fight.

The Fat Jap is back: the bank is open.

The Source is taking foolish risks.

His ankles are banded in numbered aluminum, his play is as clear as a jewelry store window. He's made his latest killing on a plot of lichen encrusted lava down in South Kona, and the green felt table wants it all.

And it will be a favor when finally, and as politely as the man deserves who just finished paying off your Lincoln, the time comes to cut him loose.

Shanking a corpse, even a greedy one, takes too much heart.

But tonight the Source feels his luck turning, all the little ones coming home.

36

Soon he and Loose draw three, and Loose triples aces, but the Source finds another pair of treys, red to match his black, and grins deep while he stacks Loose's chips.

Now the meat plays like his pants are burning, you can't get him out.

Another night on the generations old first company table, which, among other 1820 relics, shall, in its own time, be enshrined in a haole collection somewhere, another monument to manifest larceny, and soon our Sisyphus of the inside straight, in deep, owes over his average, having hour by hour riped and rotted.

And later still, when the blackness in the branches outside shudders and births the grey dancing, our pigeon, bolstered by his last blast of crystal courage, reminds us again of life's mystery.

The Fat Jap shows three diamonds, the greatest of them a king.

When the queen of diamonds falls, the Source, holding two hooks and harboring another, checks.

37

The novel prudence of his move amuses the Obese Nip; he bets.

And then the axis shifts: far from weighing the hard stones of the call, the fish plants his gaff and raises.

Here the Bulky Samurai sneaks a glance into the glow growing in distant cherry treeshe can't believe itlike being in a home he's never seen, even in dream time.

For this is no blind blunder or function of futility, but a calculated march to oblivion in a cadence of boot heels clanging, this check and raise into the lock.

And the Fat Jap taps him, that's all, just gets it all in.

The Source's eyes get glassy and he sweats.

Get a hunch, bet a bunch.

He can no more help himself than scratch his heart.

He has waited for himself on this comer all along, waited to mug and leave himself busted up and short of sleep in this ruthless light.

38

He calls.

Cash the chips, nothing can follow from this.

On a faraway street the dull drone of motor idles stationary, on alert.

These ceremonies are ended, so tell them where you got it and how easy it was.

39

Roland: In Memoriam

Roland gave me my second acid trip up in L.A. a week after I'd arrived, and after we'd stopped to make a collection at the aircraft plant, he drank half a gallon of wine and slumped over the wheel at four in the morning on the freeway to Dana Point I saw the lane markers, I saw the stripes fading left and I shook him awake and took over, with all the blue lights like a big runway breathing us down into the dark mountains far away somewhere south of Redondo and with the semis whistling down from Seattle I'm keeping to the left in this '59 Hillman staying on 101 so I don't get dumped off in a neighborhood somewhere and have to talk to somebody whose face won't stay still, all the way to Oceanside shifting backwards, the only transmission made that way, and I'd have gone on for the border if he didn't wake up.

40

The sun was bright over the Koolaus the day Roland ate his stash at the airport they had him cold and he didn't want to go back to O.P. The sun was bright over the Koolaus the day they buried him in the valley of the kings.

The last time I saw Roland he was sitting on the stone wall on the beach in front of Hawaiian Village, laughing & talking with some kids.

41

WENDY WILDER LARSEN

ForChiPhuc

You iron my shirts in my livingroom.

Two women alone _in one tiny apartment.

You iron. I read about your country.

We cannot speak one word to each other.

When you almost die after your eighth pregnancy at 27, I find you sitting at home on a rush mat playing with a child.

Your deserter husband hides behind a wardrobe plastered with Playboy fold-outs.

I take you to Than Son Nhut Hospital.

When they lay you on the gurney cart and I see you in my Pucci underpants, you shrug.

42

Star-Crossed

They called me Ba Larsen, stood when I entered the classroom.

I concentrated on appearance and reality, textual analysis of Romeo and Juliet.

Late one afternoon, Miss Hoa came to my apartment on Le Than Ton. I remember her white dress, black hair to her waist.

She had never been in an elevator before.

She said she was in love with her cousin, had been since she was thirteen, explained that many Vietnamese love their cousins, the extended family.

Such love was forbidden by the church.

Should she kill herself like juliet?

She drank the Coke I offered.

From my balcony we watched red flares fall on the city.

43

Calling Home

I called my family from the USO. The room was decorated like a high school gym.

Swags of red white and blue crepe paper taped to the walls.

The garlands sagged in the heat.

The room was thick with the smell of fries, osterizers blending chocolate shakes, the snap of shuffled cards.

I'd wait in line with the G.l.'s, sweating half-circles down to their khaki waists.

Together we'd count the time difference to the states.

"We're all sitting in the blue room on my big bed upstairs."

I heard my mother's voice break over the line like surf over rocks.

"The ducks and geese are flying.

You know how I dread September."

September! pictured my brothers and sisters on the cool evenings rocking on the porch in black wicker chairs under Japanese lanterns.

The lawn curved down to the rocks where the fishermen waited in the fog for the blues to come in.

That morning in my dream, our white frame house stood at the edge of the jungle, its windows lit up like a child's eyes.

44

STEVEN CURRY Mandala

She shows me the way a cat, caught golden in mid-stride or stretch, stares up at a bird singing, liquid silver, in a treeand the way the circle is complete because the bird knows the cat is watching, and this knowing makes the singing silver.

A balanced moment: the beauty of restrained passion and the virtue of passionate restraint, in this four-petalled pose, this wheel.

45

PHYLLIS THOMPSON

Sunset

You didn't choose it.

The light, gathering for a long time in the sky Above the slow riverway, Leaned over, at first growing paler, And sang itself to you Until you had to listen.

Then it compelled you to answer, to speak of it.

"Coral color," gentle on the underside of blue clouds fracturing.

"And rose," brightening as those broken clouds became darker.

"Is there a right name for that redness beginning?"

"Gamet. Carmine. Fire."

"Yes. Yes. Those colors."

Then it took hold of you.

Wide layers of unshaken light crossed the West, Green-gilding the air, till its grave music Undid you, and you fell silent.

For miles behind, it was already night.

Then around us, night, and night ahead of us.

At last we could no longer see each other.

The light had let go.

46

The City Is an Island

The city is ~n island.

It has always been an island.

You cannot walk away from it when it defeats you.

You cannot put out your warding hand, Give in and go home.

This is where you live.

You have wished for a bridge But there are no bridges.

You have wanted strong sunny spans of steel . To rise from concrete out of the streets And ride over the great water away.

But the city lies where it will never be joined.

There is no other near enough for bonding.

It is alone. It can fail of its own folly.

It is warm October.

Out of green bags ripe rubbish unfolds upon the boulevards.

Plague is blackening where the sun is spreading In a flat intense film on the walls of the capitol.

No chips of light glitter from bright blocks.

The glare in neighborhoods, too level and too heavy, Oppresses new automobiles and red hedge flowers.

Refuse blows about the beaches In a dirty wind. Papers slide a little.

The slack sea slaps upward into the trash.

47

And the city is sealed.

A city should shudder and warp With contradictory noises After early traffic subsides.

Instead there is an undifferentiated humming With dead intervals Into which bird cries drop without ringing, And everywhere the silence increases Because the voices sound wrong.

And you live here.

Daily the jets depart in their single gesture, The splendid arc of escape.

But you live here.

You live on an island where what is human has gone wrong.

For this the earth reeks, the ocean is foul, the air corrosive.

The city chokes beneath what kills it.

Only a human change will heal it.

Therefore you will swallow the unconditional promise Of kindness exchanged, which was given you years ago.

It will not hold. Its taste is tears and ashes.

You have to embrace another passionate image As old as forgiveness. Grow strong in labor.

And bid to the mind's eye a cold friend and a savage, Who loved the Law and kept it with wisdom and simpleness.

And begin again, as you should have done all along, To measure by that image how much you honor the city.

You will not even want to leave.

48

DEAN YOUNG

My Mother's Choice

If you could choose when to be pictured it would be now, propping him out of this wrecked bed, feeding him words like soup.

Your promises are hard and gut-earned as pearls.

"The trees are breaking out in fits of blossoms. I know you can smell them. Remember our first date, we drove in the country.

You had a bottle in the glovebox.

My heart ran like a girl from school trailing her red jacket. We had to get married. We will repaper this bedroom, again lie in the wonderful argument our bodies make.

Outside, the bushes are shaping themselves into ducks, kangaroos, roosters, anything you can recognize. You can see the dog's breath."

You were so close to believing yourself.

But now, spilled open like a kaleidoscope you shape and reshape tears.

Even the sparrows see this, one by one leaving the roof.

Leaving behind empty pockets of heat.

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CLARA REID Violent Storm

dear dino trusting you has cost me my reputation as a taupou there is talk in my village of importing chickens from Tahiti and killing them for my wedding sheet

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SONYA DORMAN

A NightLife

Under the window an iron cot covered with the quilt his greataunt made carries him nightly across the sky.

Seventy, he's still Orion: dagger, gembuckled knees. The bull flies over him in the black pasture.

Huddled in stars sewn to village squares he remembers making love to the sisters.

They kept him warm, back and front; they sang, pouring his blood from pitcher to cup. Now all they do is pass him around the sky.

Hour after hour he hears big dippers gear down the long inclines, carrying chains of light over the earth.

Slowly, his cot drifts, the house, the yard, in their wake.

One gleam at a time, the window comes back. Voices from the kitchen break up on the stairs.

"Today, the picnic, just us," they say.

"Tomorrow," they whisper, "the same."

Reaching in, the sun pulls white thorns from his cheeks, places a burning drop of vision in each eye.

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lyn lifshin Somewhere in the Midwest

a man can almost hear the wind cracking frozen cornstalks when he lets the cat in cold glows around the silver fur like those rings around the moon that mean some thing's happening.

He hums a blues tune in a cold room full of paper. This could be Madison or may be Red Granite he could remember a woman he held one night with hair longer and blacker than it was. If he decides she's just a travelling lady he puts down the phone listens to branches and doesn't write what he feels down in a room as cold as hers where she hears the frost etching the moon out too

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ROBIN MAGOWAN Santour Nocturne

In that parlor of the claustral imagination Where "alone," spoken into glass, becomes Mood music of these million shuddering atoms In the country with no smile whose denizen Reptile I am, armed with my thousand kind caresses My magenta-olive American imagination For the more glory of our sunken toilets For the more glory of our shuddering ancestors The devils of these kingdoms and those to come

So I ask you to sit this vigil with me Nightrobe your soul so it most resembles mine Two twinkling near-amphitrites And the sun porch will tender us a robe And the sun, infamy, will expire And morning, which had never been, Shall dawn from your own breast The earth of this my risen sun dial Prism to our night imaginings

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From an Abandoned Railroad Track

ties you were what christ bore and it dripped off of him his back as h.e. struggled to pull it up higher up calvary hill everyone rolled all over themselves giggling at this strange procession this man carrying a slate on his back tacking himself up on it hanging there quite a scarecrow! got to get that for my fields! soon all the villages had them louring from each crossing and a fun religion became established christ is so weird here the children could see horses ropes halters they stayed out and clapped as the men tugged up this stone insanity thinly singing between lichened hands

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Himalayan Pilot on the Eve of Departure

Lying here, drunk beyond the snowcap of a new glacial year, fist abandoning itself to this impending, painful release, this cloud engine I must rotate, this seismic light pulling me crash down into that abysm box where mouth regurgitates, "Release, release!" Handbreak off? Windshield cleared? Wipers circulating unopposed?

Everything ready?

Everything, cosmic sundance into which I invigorate my own night, plunging head down into its black, feet out behind, surfing wave and I'm riding it . .. where moonsalt steps on the earth and everything sinks in blacker than ever before.

Such long times down below cooling out-hearts riding, whispers dancing. Madrid, Tokyo, Yokohama of the great dead, of Fuji and sun all festering together in bloom!i of unmitigated evil, its sleeve-happy citizens saying over their stethoscopes, "Let's wipe it all away," when the electricity of all those sparks might wake us, expanded by that will whose sign is a mountain in my slowly dawning hand.

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Across 18,800 Foot Tesi Lapcha

as eye doctor's firetide flashes startling symphonies of quiet repose echo from cliffside to tent our rivery emergences: from the stocking of moonlight; the dripping red dragon sweater of the dawn. there are no paths. wisdom is its own lake.

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SCOTT C. CAIRNS The Language of Hands

In the communion of hands, a single word carries with it the weight of whole persons.

One hand can speak to another with its touch or a quick flutter of its secret breath.

Hands go to great lengths in their daily stuttering to mention blood often, but to keep it hidden.

Hands are uneasy in the company of high rock; some memory there of loosed blood, or a fall headlong down a mountain, arms outstretched and led to the crush by terrified hands.

So, they grip eagerly where they are able and hope to discover a gentler way to the earth.

Each night, before turning in, hands whisper their love to aU their fellows, and whisper kind encouragement to every foot that hears.

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WANDA COLEMAN

Blind Betty

and i used to pal around a lot. we'd go and do and run. it was fun in a way. i mean, i liked betty. she was a-okay. i called her blind betty cause she always pretended she couldn't see me when i knew that she could. i was fascinated wondering why someone who couldn't stand to look at me always hung out with me, always called me on the phone to talk to me for hours at a time (one time eight hours straight. a listening record for me) perhaps it was cause i looked so much like her after the very first glance she felt i no longer bore examination-it isn't necessary to continually stare at one's mirror image. one begins to think strange thoughts. blind betty and i were both black, almost the same skin tone except that hers ran to yellow and mine ran to red. blind betty wasn't as tall as i, physically, but her ego made up for every inch and she was active aggressive while i was passive aggressive, so it seemed to work out. in that way, blind betty and i were fast friends . it was cool until one day something bad happened to me. i got sick and i did not feel like suffering through blind betty's interminable monologs anymore. when i was forced to travel miles to work so i could pay my doctor bills i tried to tell blind betty. but she pretended she did not hear/ see my mouth shape the syllables. i shaped them very carefully. i even wrote them down in a book and gave them to her to read. but blind betty couldn't see the pages, being blind. so one day, when me and blind betty went to breakfast with her gentleman friend, I took off my blouse and bra. blind betty saw me. she let me know in no uncertain terms that she saw me. she didn't like what she saw. her gentleman friend proffered no opinion. i drove blind betty and her man home i've been free and seen ever since

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WILLIAM STAFFORD

Reading Their Talk

They'll tell you, yes; but what you know comes from elsewhere: pauses, an extra word, a stumble, how they turn, silence.

A hum begins, that surge in the voice when it has to circle honesty: too fast for talk, you hover the air and listen.

The delicious downhill feel of understanding locates you; and a floodlight plays all over the room. You don't speak, for fear of losing the trend, as you follow whatever flickers among their words.

Your tongue smarts with ozone and irony.

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CAROLYN LAU-MANNING Poet Explains Love to Doctor

Arthur, if persimmons were ripening in California this June day , I would open my skirt and arms gathering all I can for your bed.

Instead, I give my desire during those wintery months when I withdrew the pulse & fire from the fruit in a snare of color and words.

Here, the skeleton of fire to eat.

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SUSAN DEMAREST Shore Leave

Oh lord, a sailor, heavens preserve! My house such a pig sty my eyes are all caked-up I hope he has good legs.

In bars, I pick up mariners their eyes are emeralds calling me, so free, just rogues in shore dress pure, but famished revelers.

Tiny eyes, his face like tree-bark peeled, then abandoned he tilts his glass, creme de menthe green teeth smile, eyes glow like foxes, terror sees me plunging into sea life foam breaks where my feet slip under, tears turn into precious stone, at last I take my brother's hand.

We are gliding through amphorae green moss waving-! think for we can't see there is no light, no darkness only colors, some sailors.

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BILL GOTTLIEB

Mark, Chapter 2 Like Santa Claus, I came down through the roof, A finger by my nose's side, a tooth Gnawing on my raw arm nervously, Legs kicking like a chased deer's in high snow, The wild dogs that caught me named palsy.

He smiled and spoke, his words were like a doe, Gentle; the dogs were leaves she ate, the tree Had not a house, but mansions; I play, free.

Matthew, Chapter 23 Tithe spices, anise, cumin, mint and salt Of the earth, where Heaven help an heir caught Calling a man dad. Mine's Dave Abe GottLieb, not top pop on the totem pole, but botTom, mortal. Still, all his trinity of names Christ's chats into the pages of King James Cast. A call? 0 chosen daddy don't exalt; That I believe in God is not my fault.

His Jew nose turns up, down; he verdicts fake.

I hate him for his own and Heavens's sake.

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Matthew, Chapter 8 The pigs, olympic, half-pike off the cliff And snapping pike pig out on deviled ham.

Disciples, wet behind the ears they hath, SOS snoozing saviour; they are lambs Wandering in a wilderness of waves.

"I'll teach that pesty tempest to behave, Teapot the water calm and smooth as china, Still cyclone's whirlpool to a nun's vagina."

Matthew, Chapter 15 Twenty-twenty hearts fall not for ditches But for God. Lame, maimed, dumb, blind, in stitches, Belly laugh, casting out into the draught Glorification like defecation.

Thought Evil and vile? I style my cries On faithful bitches, not false Pharisees, I don't wash my hands, hands of the whole, healed, Dirty as a root; a miracle's my meal.

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ROLAND THARP

A Meditation for Lovers

Miyamoto Musashi, because it could not be otherwise, embarked to meet the master' swordsman Sasaki Kojiro, whose arms and robes were death-black, his victory death-certain.

But Musashi delayed under sail, and past appointed noon Kojiro raged and stamped the sand, hurling curses at the empty bay.

Then Musashi, out of the late going down red gold sun rays rode swiftly in and leapt to the surf, wielding only an oar and Kojiro, dazzled, unable to judge the distance between them, knew he was defeated.

Thus had Miyamoto held death off, and he rested on the moonlight beach.

Likewise, spent from loving, we have held the whole flickering night, asleep, afloat: rocking ocean, rocking boat.

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Ala Moana Beach at Seven

The shower tree shrugs her flowers down like a dark woman slipping from a robe, fragrant, arms raised, dawn.

On the stone wall Filipinos stretch sandals in the sand. They speak of distant women, fish, and mullet break the wakening long sheen.

Samoans wade out, following a man with an open Bible; he puts his hand on the black hair of a woman as surf breaks on the outreef, foaming the ankles of someone bent, in a woven hat; her quick hands pick the crispest seaweed, the sun quickens on her arms and on the bare arms of a child playing in the sand, obedient; a ship rounds the last point, Swedes are in her, idling, oiling to the open sea and baptized, the brown woman slogs from the water shivering, draped with an old shirt, with all her joyful people.

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STEVEN GOLDSBERRY The Sculptor's Night Out Canova would sometimes drink wine all afternoon and then disappear, into the huge bell tower with its dilapidated roof, to weep.

-The journal of Giuseppe Fa/ier (1822)

It is August, dusk, the wind flattens him against the top of the great bell , then rain, sweet and cold as the blue wands of the Maenades.

Nothing seems hard-edged any longer, not his friends, not the patron who once bit him because of a bad statue, not his wife's wild fingernails, his chisels, the stone, the bottles.

Nothing but this highest curve of resonance, the throat of the great bell.

He holds on tight. He has been here so often the metal shines where he lies.

Or perhaps it is not August but another month equally poor, and he decides, peering through the rain at where the moon should be, that he will stay for once.

He will wait until the monks carry their torches into the deep cone of darkness below him, and the ropes, for the curfew knell, tighten.

Or perhaps even this decision is not worth bothering about.

Perhaps, if he thinks hard enough, he can surround himself, like his sculptures,with what is missing. Perhaps he can find everything he chipped away. Perhaps, when the bell rings, he can reach out and hold the terrible sound in his hands.

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The Poem as Potential

My impulse is stronger now, not for any one thing, but for several , like the blind man who gets very drunk and wakes up somewhere.

Start with a fist, which may be solid like stone, or, like a geode, may contain every mathematical possibility for light.

From here I take direction to be what is not yet accomplished: impending distance, or a natural sequence of escapes.

If I am aware of that first dusty smell of a storm, or the hallway deepening suddenly like a lake, or the cold, terrible music of flaming trees, I am enchanted by fear.

I talk to myself constantly.

I try to understand what might happen.

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Lullaby Traditional

Nennen korori yo, okorori yo.

My little boy, my good boy, go to sleep now.

My little boy, where did your nursemaid go?

She went beyond that mountain, she went home.

What presents from her home has she brought you?

A snail drum, a pan-pipe, a red dharma doll, a paper-mache dog.

Nenne shina, okorori yo.

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DENNIS BLEYTHING Two Haiku

On the same vine bud, blossom, rosehip, the dark moon.

This thin sunlighta scented flower opens brightness hurts the eyes.

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dgbair Ferry 'cross the River

1 The small stream that runs from the valley Is forced to course through a concrete trough; It slows to a ripple Acquires an odor And cuts no banks.

2 The water-bearer tipped his urn And the waters froze on their way to the earth Showering the bull that arose in his pasture From the underworld he had just passed through.

Disembodied in darkness He listened with dispassionate interest To the groans that rent the ragged stillness Of a birthing night.

If there was a supernova that winter It was not recorded.

3 Singing Jubilate Deo The New World sufis form concentric circles On the pale grey tiles of the rec room floor.

Led by a former South American farmer With a Middle Eastern name They raise their arms and whirl to the music.

The air slowly turns to red And the bearded face in the rotograve picture Ignores the flowers And bestows an enlightened scowl On his dizzy congregation.

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4 Eyes glazed with a permanent blue From a chill in the amniotic fluid The bear with the naked fingers speaks in tongues.

In a den devoid of anything but the creations of his mind He sings earthly eloquent speeches That reverberate in the dark-hewn hollows Permeate the soil And confuse the hunter who hears the song That seems to be coming from all around him.

5 The girl in the flowered kerchief Wearing flat-heeled Mother Earth shoes Carefully stacks organic grapefruit On the unfinished wooden counter.

Wearing Tulsi beads to protect the bodies They so recently acquired, The river-marked children with matted brown hair Watch the ballast of battered fruit With weary eyes.

Their fingers are naked And the soft fur cradled in their hollow places Remains unseen.

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DENNIS FINNELL Learning to Sleep

At three a.m. her fears wore badges.

Mondays she pulled on gloves for them, washed four blue glasses three times and knocked off cancer and communism.

She ironed our blankets every Tuesday, the blue, the pink, the G.l. drab: we must be warm as uptown snobs.

Each Wednesday she yelled, jesus Christ and the Gas Company, to stop my cries.

Thursday nights she wasn't crazy enough to straightjacket, kiss on the forehead, and cart off to Arsenal Street.

Friday nights she was crazy enough to teach me sleep. Drying her hands, those crippled wings, three times on the apron hugging her like a child, she stomped to my cradle, spooking the night's cockroach into the corner.

I was stubborn and a slow-learner.

Her blue milk, a strong narcotic like that memorable river in Hell, made me coo but did not knock me out.

I flunked every lullaby she sang.

Her voice was my ear's first bird, a pink, nervous warbler warbling deep in the crown of the mother-tree.

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When milk soured and the songbird got hoarse, she touched her forehead, chest, and shoulders, lighting one candle in each eye. Holding me all night, my head in the crook of her ann, she played Mary to my little Jesus, played two Mary's for my big Jesus, played Holy Mary for my sleeping Jesus.

Some nights, when I'm scared shitless and my heart whimpers like a baby, I burrow my head in the feather pillow feeling for a wing. Cradling the heart in the body, we rock for self-pity and self-blessing in a remembered tree until the bough kindly breaks and down comes my heart, my body, and all.

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Double Epitaph

Do not disturb this pair of graves that swelled like fever blisters.

You may not be able to forget his thumbnails useful as bottlecaps or her caterpillar eyebrows.

Under her plot, hectic with ants, four surgical scars lie in knots.

The large one zippered her torso, the wiriest cinched backbone.

The remaining two are angle worms.

Below his rectangle of crabgrass tattooes are draped. He could make a bikini'd woman shimmy on a bicep.

A pink bird named, True Love, broods a black chick. Remember, do not disturb this pair of graves.

You may not be able to forget the set of teeth she hid days in her mouth, nights in a cup.

Or his gold half-tooth past which the skinniest whistle was drawn.

Some parts outlive their bodies.

The side of his heart that quit is gristle. Her plastic artery runs from this to that. I will not disturb this pair of graves.

I do not want to remember cataracts divvying up his stare at her eyelids or her auburn-colored hair growing gray the second time at the roots.

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GEORGE KALAMARAS

Passing Lowell, Indiana

This Indiana road is home, fenced in braided com, sheep-coats thick with grass.

Near Lowell, a hawk flies aimless and I wonder where I'm headed.

Chicago's heavy breath, a stone, a long slab asleep on my tongue.

Six black cows, a brown one behind, on the hill.

I switch the radio too late to listen.

My mirror,.a mooing dream.

I think of Uncle Jerome at harvest, his tassled hands, and remember a book I read about a man who could only live once.

Way off, I can almost hear the husks calling me to sleep in their silk bellies.

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The Long Boats

It is through our minds the sailfish run as we sleep in the quiet ocean.

Our hands clutching our throats the fingers, digging for the tiny eyes that see.

It is the cry of the wild boar, a child gasping at birth, that sings into the grave.

Dirt falls into the hole, the dream into the salt ocean.

And we go on dreaming of long boats circling the island.

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The moon is some beached fish.

A crimson hush scars driftwood pines.

Somewhere, far back in my sleep I remember oceans.

I lean further into the wound, taste this amnesia, its long bone stuck in my throat

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JOHN LOGAN Cambridge Reverie

The rust cat leaps through the gap in the screen: We climb in the Saab and head for Stowe.

October leaves tum from green again And we will haul the pungent apples home.

Tom and Ray and I share these rich skies.

It's not the first time. Once in Amherst In October we swam together Naked with Diane under the sun.

She cooked dinner for us all. We looked Quite naked again at the table!

Guests saw us-played they didn't notice.

Tom's sandals gleamed against his bare feet.

For my part, glowing underneath my heart I felt the deep wine warmth of friendship, And you too might be ripened by this As Fall bugs scurry across the walks And last flowers blue in the dying grass.

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MICHAEL K. WILSON-SOUTH Tell

aunt tellie used to go out in the evening and sit on the porch uncle roy built for her before he died and rock slowly forward and back until she fell asleep she said she liked the sounds the creatures made in the darkness and the wind from the river where it flowed into coos bay she said it smelled to her like rain

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JOHN HECKATHORN For E.S.H., 1918路1973

1.

My father stood six foot four, and weighed maybe 250.

My father wore ties to the office, dark suits With vests and custom-cut shirts, White on white, with oversize cufflinks, Topaz and green jade, onyx and black pearl, And a pair in Delft porcelain.

When he died, the three sons split the jewelry.

I got the Tiffany watch, which I lost, And the Sterling silver key ring And the jade and silver money clip.

He carried only credit cards in his wallet, And bills in his money clip, And a pocket full of change that bulged, And jingled when he walked.

2.

One birthday I gave him a pumpkin-colored Banton shirt.

On it went under his raw silk sportcoat.

"I wonder if they'll let me in the restaurant without a tie," he said. Somewhere once (In Boston? Harvard? 1943?)

Someone made him feel small without a tie.

But that birthday evening he brightened, "If they don't like it, we'll go somewhere else."

3.

My father worried about airplanes, All hundred-ten of his airplanes.

And I loved them best, better than The red trucks with white lettering, Better than the billboard with our name on it, Outside the plant on Cutting Boulevard.

The plant reeked of insecticide.

The planes were clean and white and sparkled.

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Once he lost a pilot and a plane On a routine spray job in the Valley.

"The guy flew under those power lines all day," he said at the dinner table.

"Every time he crossed that field, he flew under. Then on his last pass, glad to be done, he pulled up too fast on the stick, and bam."

He shook his head.

"You've got to watch your emotions," He said. "Even joy can kill you."

4.

When my father died, he weighed less than 250.

The weight came off, doctor's orders in the last years.

He could even buy clothes off the rack.

He quit smoking and slowed down a bit.

But it wasn't enough.

After they took him off the respirator, He was supposed to die right away.

But he fought it for weeks, full of Thorazine and pain killers, not Very lucid, mumbling mostly.

One afternoon in the hospital, the room crowded, His secretary there, and the cute evening Nurse relieving the day shift nurse, The hospital chaplain in for a call, And my mother reading in the comerHe suddenly sat up and said to me, "You all get to live," in a tone Of pained wonder. "You all get to live."

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KAWEHHANINEUMANN PuaHinano

He aloha a'e no wau i ku'u Pua Hrnano Aia i ka nihele e ulu wale ana i laila I uka au i 'ike ai i ka nani o ka pua kea Mohala mau ana me ni lau he boa no ka uluwehi He 'ala onaona kou ho'ohia'ai i ku'u mana'o '0 'oe kahi ho'oheno ke hanu poli iho no

Pi mai ka makani kolotlahe i ka 'ehu o ka hTnano Kau i luna o ni lihi pua ho'omine'one'o i ka 'ili Eia ka puana o ~u路u mele eo e ku'u Pua Hinano Na'u ke aloha pau 'ole no ka pua maoli o ka 'iina.

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PuaHinano

I love my hinano flower there in the forest it grows so easily It was in the uplands that I saw the beauty of the fair flower blossoming among the leaves a companion of the lush growth You have a gentle scent delighting my thoughts you are my cherished one when you are there close to me A soft breeze blows the hinano pollen it lands on the flower petals and tickles the surface Here is my song of my hTnano flower my love will never end for the true flower of the land.

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KATHERINE ROSE Hanohano Nu'uanu

Hanohano Nu'uanu i ka pua lehua, Lehua llhau 'ia i ka pali kunihi.

Pali lei 'ia i ka makani hali noe, Makani kewai, kokoni pu'uwai.

Ke wehe mai nei ke alaula, Hulali ka pali i ka 'ehu kakahiaka.

Ma 'ane'i mai 'oe, e pili kiua, Noho mau no 'oe i ka poli aloha.

'0 'oe ku'u hoa o ka p0 anu, Hoa pili pa'a no ni kau a kau.

Kau nui ka mana'o i ka wai 'olu, 0 Kahuwailana wai lana malie.

Puana i_ka nani o ku'u pua lehua, Lehua lihau 'ia i ka pali kunihi.

Mahalo ike Alcua, nina nei p()maika'i, Noho mau no 'oe i ka poli aloha.

This song was written in honor of my brother John's wedding. He and his bride Clara were married at the Nu'uanu pali at daybreak.

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.,.....---

- - - -- - - - - - -

Majestic Nu'uanu

Nu'uanu is majestic for its lehua blossoms Lehua misted in the steep cliffs Cliffs adorned in the mist-fetching winds Dew-laden winds which tingle the heart.

Dawn is breaking The pali sparkles in the dust of morning Come here, let us be close You will rest forever in the bosom of love.

You are my companion of the cold night A close friend from season to season My thoughts are set on the cool waters of Kahuwailana, calmly floating waters.

Tell of the beauty of my lehua blossom Lehua misted in the steep cliffs Thanks to God, from whom these blessings flow You will rest forever in the bosom of love.

Š1981 Katherine Rose

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WALTER M.K. LAYMANCE

Ke Kupuna No'eau

'Akahi ho'i au a 'ike maka I ka 'olu i ka poli o Maui A me ka nui lokomaika'i 0 ke kupuna no'eau.

Mai uka ka wai e iho nei Mai ka wao akua o na Ko'olau Ka wai kaulana e nihi i ni pali A hiki i ka lae 'o Ke'anae.

'0 ka lei makamae ke kiele Haku 'ia me ka loke o Maui Lei 'ia ka pua kukui Me ka 'ilima o Kikuhihewa.

He aloha mai ka ua Tuahine Aia i ka home ho'ona'auao Mahala mai e na pua poina 'ole I ka lima o ka mahi'ai.

Puana ka inoa 'o ke kiele Ke kumu, ke kupuna no'eau Hea aku makou e omai 'oe E Uncle Harry kou inoa.

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Ke Kupuna No'eau

At last I have seen The comfort in the bosom of Maui And the warm-hearted generosity Of the skilled elder.

From the uplands descend the waters From the gods' lands of the Ko'olau The famous waters that trickle on cliffs Settling at the peninsula of Ke'anae.

The favored lei is the kiele Woven together with Maui's rose A kukui flower lei is worn With Kikuhihewa's 'ilima.

Aloha from the Tuahine rain There in the home of increasing wisdom Bloom forth, unforgettable flowers In the hands of the farmer.

Express the name of the kiele The teacher, the skilled elder We call out to you, please answer Uncle Harry, in your honor.

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Galway Kinnell has been Citizen's Chair Professor at the University of Hawai'i since 1979. During this time, he published his most recent collection of poetry, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, taught classes in writing and translation , and reached out into the community through lectures, readings , and workshops . This interview with the Hawai'i Review staff took place in his office in February 1981.

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An Interview with Galway Kinnell

Hawai'iReview: I'd liketostartoffwithHawai'i in someway. What do you feel about the state of writing here?

Galway Kinnell: I wish you had started me off on an easy one, just to get the brain rolling.

I do know a few of the writers here. Some,like Maxine Kingston, seem to be writing very well. I don't know how productive the other writers are, especially the poets. I see individual poems in the Hawai'i Review and &mboo Ridge, but I don't see the whole body of work. Therefore, I don't think I'm qualified to say much.

B.R.: Well, you've attended readings, and you've given your series of lectures on "Poetry and the Modern Consciousness." What do you think about, say, the turnout here?

G.K.: I think the turnout here is quite good. The numbers are gOOd, and the concentration of the audience is fine - in Honolulu. In other parts of Hawai'i there may be some problems.

H.R.: Where else have you given readings?

G.K.: I've given a few readings at places like Maui Community College, Windward Community College, and Seabury Hall. The reading I gave at Maui was about the third one they have ever had. At Windward Community College my reading might have been the first. So it's no wonder that the people listened with interest, but also with a certain stunned curiosity. And the audience at Seabury Hall was superb.

H.R.: Do you feel like a missionary for modern poetry?

G.K.: I'm breaking ground. Right. For all those poets who will come after me and read to huge audiences!

H.R.: Louis Simpson, who just went back to the mainland after a semester here, says he really enjoys the literary atmosphere, the presence of a literary community, in Pittsburgh. How do you feel about that? Is the literary community important to you? How has it been here in Hawai'i?

G.K.: To have friends who are poets is a great pleasure. It's also very useful. You can get help, criticism. It's easy to find a literary community almost anywhere, these days. When Louis was here, we two had a little literary community , at least during the last month that he was here. There are people who live here with whom I can talk about literature. Rob Wilson

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is one. I haven't really felt deprived in that way. I have an correspondence with writers, and there have also been visiting writers have come for three or four days. I saw William Stafford and josef Krrotidrv' more continuously during their visits here than ever before. Being in outpost has its advantages!

H.R.: When you and Louis Simpson spoke about modern poetry in Campus Center, you said that the poetry workshops were not nAriA.. ,,t;.,,.., much good poetry. Since you are a workshop teacher, what is relationship to this?

G.K.: I was trying to indicate that there is a negative side to MF workshops. Perhaps the negative side is stronger than the positive side, in the end perhaps the proliferation of MFA workshops will have a effect on our poetry. But that was mere speculation. My own workshops is as a teacher of undergraduate workshops. This is a situation. Here, people are exploring, seeing what they can do as urr•t"".. , But the MFA workshop has become a place where people are trained to professionals, to be poets, and then to teach others to be poets. I do misgivings about that short leap from being a student of writing becoming a teacher of writing. Furthermore, the experience of the ,., ...·.til>••• too circumscribed if writers are either students or teachers all their There should be a decent interval between learning to write and Lca1.au~ writing, when one is simply a writer. Well, there must be other ways for young writer to find support. One way could be teaching something than poetry. Or maybe another line of work altogether.

H.R.: What is your role in your workshops?

G.K.: To point out to the people in the workshop the strong points of writing. They are sometimes unaware of what is best. in their own work. also try to point out where their writing is weak and, if I can, to suggest that may be so. Beyond that, I think the basic function of the person runs the workshop is somehow to help create an atmosphere in people will write more and write better.

H.R.: Do you feel that you are a New England writer?

G.K.: That's my home ground. But I don't only write about New ........~~, •.,.._ H.R.: Do you feel that place gets into your writing? Does it matter you are? If you lived here long enough, would it eventually help to your poems?

G.K.: I think it would. Place gets into my writing, it gets into A"''.."'"""'• How much it shapes it, I don't know. I used to feel more quick in a new Maybe it's that Hawai'i is exotic. Iran, where I lived for 12 months, was exotic to me, and while I wrote prose about Iran, I wrote very little with Iran as its setting. There are certain parts of Maui that appeal to great deal, like that coastal road that goes through Kaup(5, where I felt I experiencing a recognition. I think eventually one gets to feel more at on the globe itself. Just as you can write about the street outside

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sitting in your study, so you can write about VermontwhileinHonolulu , or, as may happen with me, Honolulu while in Vermont . Also, the bit of the Hawaiian language that I've heard has interested me. I'm fascinated by the way the sounds are produced by the body and by the way the mouth moves.

I'd like to know more about it, perhaps learn it. There are various avenues that could lead me into a deeper understanding of Hawai 'i.

H.R.: Do you consider yourself a regional writer?

G.K.: I am not a regional writer.

H.R.: What do you think about regionalism?

G.K.: First of all, one naturally writes about where one is, about what surrounds one. Therefore, if you stay in one place all our life, you become what other people call a "regional writer." In that sense, I favor regional writing. I don't like the idea of a program of regional writing. I don't like any program for poetry. By its very nature poetry hates programs. Poetry is an individual art. You write all you know, whether you love theregionorhate the region you're in, or whether you ignore it! Any effort to direct the way people write is bound to be bad for poetry. The problem comes when money is involved: you will become eligible for such and such a grant or fellowship provided you write about Hawai'i or West Virginia or whatever. All efforts to control poetry in our century - and there have been many - have immediately destroyed the poetry of that place. On the other hand, I think some people have the false notion, derived from Pound and Eliot, that poetry has to encompass the Western tradition, that it has to involve the great ideas, the whole Western heritage. So they feel ashamed to write merely about something happening in the back yard or across the street. It is important for people to be given encouragement in writing about the ordinary things. If all the things around you, the look of people's faces, your family, the light that comes in your window, all the particular facets of your ordinary life, if all those things are erased from your consciousness, and you write only about Dionysus or Tiresius, as though reality was out there somewhere and didn't surround you and inhabit you, it leads to a kind of emptiness in poetry. It is good to help people realize, whether they write poetry or not, that in particular things, in the people and things they are closest to, resides reality as much as it resides anywhere.

H.R.: Hawai'i Review is publishing a review of your book, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, in which Howard Nelson, the reviewer, says that the title of your book sums up your thematic preoccupation since your first book or your first poem. Do you go on to perfect that kind of poem, or is there something you would like to, but haven't been able to approach?

G.K.: I go into Immortal Acts, Immortal Words, in the next book. It's not quite true, however, that I've always written about Mortal Acts, though my words may have always been mortal. My earliest poems are often concerned with Eternal Truths. I look at my early work as the attempt to reconcile

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opposite loyalties: the world of ordinary things versus the world of everlastingness.

H.R.: What would you say is the concern now?

G.K.: It's not so easy to describe what you're doing at the moment. It's easier in retrospect. I no longer think of those two realms as opposed and, therefore, requiring choice. I think I write about both simultaneously.

H.R.: Do you write poetry in a trance, or some kind of ecstatic state? Are you interested in expanding consciousness through poetry?

G.K.: When I begin a poem I sometimes feel as though I'm engaged in something like automatic writing. Not exactly automatic writing. I kno111 I'm writing, I do not hear voices speaking through me or anything like that.

It's that I don't know what I'm going to write next, I'm surprised by what comes out, and I have to writ& faster and faster to keep up with what's coming out. I try to keep the words coming, and at the same time I try to understand them as they come. If I stop too long to understand - "What does this mean?" -they may stop coming. If I let them come too fast I may start writing gibberish. There's that little path I try to keep on, between formal intellectual control, or recognition at least, and spontaneous flow. It is not a trance, but it's not a normal state of thinking either.

H.R.: You say you don't write in a trance, but do you try to expand your consciousness through poetry?

G.K.: Poetry is an expansion of consciousness. A poem achieves understandings, new perceptions, and these permanently consciousness.

H.R.: Are there certain poets you go back to for nourishment?

G.K.: Shakespeare. I go back to him. I read King Lear once a year.

H.R.: King Lear? Not something by Whitman?

G.K.: I go back to Whitman often, and I am nourished by him. One reasollj• or another leads me back to Whitman; I have to find out whatever. But nothing leads one to King Lear but the work itself. It necessary for the soul.

H.R.: That's too bad.

G.K.: Why do you feel that way?

H.R.: Oh, I don't know, it's about as bleak a play as we can find.

G.K.: Yet when I read it , it makes me happy. It's one of the truly works, due in part to the disparity between its bleak ground and sublime transcendence. Its language is probably richer than the anywhere.

H.R.: You talk a lot about D.H. Lawrence in your poetry classes; is another writer that you go back to a lot?

G.K.: No, not really. He's a very interesting case to me. I find that I learn a lot from Lawrence directly. I only learn from him if I don't take altogether seriously. He is a kind of curiosity, a man who had a UTnnn~>nll ambition which his own nature subverted. He wandered into

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self-contradictory positions. While there are passages in Lawrence which are very beautiful, on the very next page you find something absolutely grotesque. But he was a very fine poet, a better poet than a novelist. His flaws are more spectacular than most people's, but he has virtues too, and stands well above most English poets of his time. Only Hardy and Owens are his equals.

H.R.: Do you also go to the French symbolists- Baudelaire and Rim baud - or to, say, the Spanish or Latin American poets, to people like Neruda, who tried to deal with surrealism?

G.K.: French surrealism is rather uninteresting to me. It served the purpose of shocking the bourgeoisie. It became liberating, though, to the Spanish poets, even those who had no interest in surrealism as such. They owe a lot to the French surrealists. We in turn owe much to the Spaniards.

If any foreign poetry has affected American poetry in the last 20 years it has been the Spanish. I love to read Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I also like the Spaniards, but I don't know Spanish very well. But then , that has never stopped anybody.

H.R.: When you were writing earlier in your career, one of your teachers, Charles Bell, I think, said that you were one of the few poets working in the great American tradition. I've often sensed in your work that that's one of its strengths, its alignment to, and the risks it takes in the tradition of American romantic ideas. I wonder if you feel that this is true, that you were mining American traditions, or if you feel that there's something that you do in your poetry that comes out of your country's heritage?

G.K.: Though I am the child of immigrants, I've always felt particularly American, as though my true ancestors were not Yeats and Synge and soon, but Melville and Thoreau and Whitman. It's curious to be born and bred in a place and not to have a blood connection to it; perhaps one belongs to it all the more.

H.R.: Wasn't this harder to do at the time when you were first writing, say with Blackmur and the New Critics? Didn't they consider American writers like Whitman to be foolish?

G.K.: I think they took certain American writers very seriously.

Whitman was the one who suffered most at their hands. They never liked him. Some of them felt more affinity for French and English literature than for 19th-century American literature.

H.R.: Do you have any use for theories of poetry, for poetics? Have you ever been affected by critical ideas of what critics said about poetry? Or do you work more directly from your own experience?

G.K.: I've been affected in my ideas about poetry. As I'm interested in ideas about poetry, I've often found criticism interesting. I don't think it has affected my work. I like it that way. The more a criticis able to convince you of what poetry should be doing, the less able you become to do it. You then write according to theory. But when the critic developed that certain theory

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of what poetry should be doing, he was looking at poetry written prior to the theory, poetry written out of a living tradition. If you write according to theory, you produce work extremely different from the work upon which the theory was based.

H.R.: Do you prefer not to write criticism then, just because it becomes difficult to write poetry at the same time?

G.K.: No, I like to write criticism. Poetry as such interests me. I haven't written much criticism- one or two essays. I think about poetry a lot, but I don't write poetry according to my critical theories. Possibly this is schizophrenic, except that critical theories reflect one's own practice.

Poetry produces theory; the trick is to refuse to complete the circle, not letting theory produce poetry.

H.R.: This is a related matter. Do you think that there is a lack of competent critics in the U.S. right now?

G.K.: Yes. H.R.: Was there a time in your life that you felt that a book of yours could be properly reviewed?

G.K.: One felt that there was a group of critics sensitive to poetry, who understood poetry within their limits, and who did not represent a 路 particular point of view.John Crowe Ransom for instance, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, or Delmore Schwartz were such critics. All these people wrote intelligently about poetry. Today most people who write about poetry are "academics." I don't mean they teach, I mean they are caught up in academic jargon and like poetry mainly as grist for their theory. A few young poets write criticism, not too many.

Robert Haas should be writing more. He is a brilliant critic. The younger critics appear in little magazines. The major places of reviewing depend on academicians, not on the younger poets. The younger critics therefore do not feel they have an influence, in general, on readers, on bookstores, and on publishers. They publish mostly in magazines exclusively read by poets.

H.R.: What do you think about Bly's criticism?

G.K.: Bly writes our most interesting criticism. It always deals ..,r.. something that matters and has original content. What I would like Bly is an unified book setting forth an entire theory of poetry, rather the separate essays that often appear to be written out of his own needs as writer at that particular moment. It would be good if he would weave various preoccupations into a unified theory of poetry. It could be a spJ,en<lliCI book. But it would be hard. There is a great difference between setting whatever interests one at any moment and making a coherent standing that will stand up for all moments.

H.R.: In your class "Translating Poetry," you said that there is a lot translation being done in the United States. Why do you think so people are translating now?

G.K.: Maybe it's a sense of being in a rut, and some kind of hope that somewhere we'll dig up a seed we can plant here. But that is the way literature changes. Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson were profoundly affected by translations from the East. Also, we simply know about so many poets from all over the world, so naturally we want to read them. Whitman was fairly ignorant in this sense, and so he couldn't feel much need to read the poets of the rest of the world. I don't know how wide or international Emily Dickinson's reading was. The strengths of Thoreau and Whitman and Dickinson come in part from their insularity. They do not blur into a world style in their writing. They are very provincial writers and consequently very distinctive. They had enormous self-confidence and did not feel they were lacking in anything. Whitman knew exactly what he wanted to do. He took from various sources only what he needed. He used his sources. He wasn't in any way a follower. He felt that he was right at the forefront, that he was the avant-garde. It is possible that Emily Dickinson felt the same way.

H.R.: In scribbling poems on her paper bags?

G.K.: We've lost that provincial spirit that Thoreau and Whitman and Dickinson had. The literature of the whole world is beginning to resemble itself! Translation has helped to produce a universal style. But it was inevitable. It is unlikely that any regional movement can affect the process.

Only individual genius can do that.

H.R.: As a whole then, do you see this trend in American poetry for the better or the worse?

G.K.: I don't know. Thoreau and Emerson profited a lot from seeking models. Dickinson and Whitman profited from being insular. Melville was provincial too. Who knows?

H.R.: Do you think there's any common ground in a lot of poetry that's being written today in the U.S. , or is it all just individual voice, individual perception? Is there a convention of awareness, of language, of grammar, that aligns your poetry with Merwin or Wright?

G.K.: There are groupings when there is kinship. I do feel a certain kinship with the search Merwin and Bly, James Wright and Snyder are, in their different ways, engaged in.

H.R.: How would you describe the common element in this search?

G.K.: It is a search for salvation, to use the Christian term, but it is not Christian. It is a search which uses poetry for basically religious ends.

H.R.: Do you see any direction that American poetry is heading towards?

G.K.: One of the interesting things about our poetry now is that it is in a kind of holding pattern. Nothing very new is developing. A number of poets are turning to formal verse and so on, but mostly there is a sense of expectancy, as though everyone expects someone new and brilliant to appear. The general leveling of voices creates an expectation for that really unusual voice. Poetry is more difficult to write now because the most

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constant voice young people have heard is that of the television commercial.

From age two until age eighteen, for ten or twenty hours a week, that voice has been singing jingles in their ears. Somebody who grew up in the 18th century, say, would have heard the voice of the Bible, ten or twenty hours a week, from age two until age eighteen. It is a question of the imprint language makes. Whatever voice can break through will necessarily be brilliant and powerful.

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Louis Simpson was visiting poet at the University of Hawai'i during the Fall1980 semester. This interview with Hawai'i Review staff members took place in his Waildki apartment in December, just before he left for another position in Philadelphia.

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An Interview with Louis Simpson

Hawai'i Review: Louis, do you feel that you're in the United States~ America when you're in Hawai'i?

Louis Simpson: No, I don't. For one thing, the landscape. No, that's tbe main reason. It is not like my experience in the United States. If I lived Seattle, I wouldn't feel this way quite so much, but it is very unlike tbe United States. I mean, you've got the Pacific Ocean around you; supposed to have Midwest mud, seas of mud around you. And an<)tJM!r, thing, there's the people. I'm not insulting them, mind you, I feelâ&#x20AC;˘h .......... much Americans as I am. I'm a naturalized citizen, so I have even less than these people. I was Jamaican. There's a large Japanese ....,,,u..:auwu. here, there's a Hawaiian population, there are all these people who different from the average person you meet in Indiana. I have a verr different sense here. It's part of the United States politically, and in evert possible way, but in the feeling of it, no.

H.R.: How has the landscape of Hawai'i affected you?

L.S.: Well, when I came here for six months, I resisted Hawai'i'1 landscape very much. I've made a real effort not to become involved because I'm so apt to be involved with the landscape. I think and feel about landscape more than anything else, and I knew I wasn't going to be long enough for it to really mean anything to me. I was not going to be a who wrote about Hawai 'i. So rather than do something trivial and I said, "No, I'm just going. Whatever happens to me there is going to be nice and will be a part of my life, but I'm not going to study it." LaJn05iC8IIeâ&#x20AC;˘ means as much to me as people, and sometimes more. If I knew I was to live here, I would become very, very deeply involved. But since I'm not, I would never write a poem about Hawai'i. Never, because frankly I have too much respect for it.

H.R.: Do you feel attached to a particular landscape or region? What about your own childhood landscape?

L.S.: That's in my writing. I don't write about Jamaica, but what I write has to do with the rhythms and the fact that I love the sea. Not that I'm a great sea man. I'm not out there surfing, but the sea, to me, is just a very great thing, and it's a very dangerous thing and a very beautiful thing. It's changing all the t ime. And that's part of my psyche. I grew up by the sea,

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and when I went to bed every night, and if I woke up during the night, that sound was in my ears. And fishing and all that was part of my childhood.

H.R.: You know what happens - people come here for three days, they write a poem, they send it to the New Yor.,., and it gets published as a Hawai'i poem.

L.S.: I wouldn't even try. The problem with this place is that it's fighting for its life against the kind of wi~ut by technology and by tourists. But you know something, other countries have had this problem. Scotland is a very good example. You know, in the 15th century, Scotland was a great nation. They were as different from the English as the Germans. After England became Protestant, Scotland remained Catholic and their relations were with Europe. The educated Scots spoke Latin, they wrote in Latin, and had their own literature. To this day, there is a big question in Scotland about their own culture and their own language. The man to read on this is Hugh MacDiarmid, the poet, who in the 1920's reinvented Scottish poetry and called it Lallans. The English influence was to him the way that the mainland wi~ut could be to Hawai'i. I mean, there is always the fact that you have lived in a place and you love something, and people come along and they don't wipe it out, but they use it. Obviously, there's a hell of a lot of problems of the local versus the invading tourism and the exploitation, and for a person who writes here, the terrible problem must be to use your brains, not to go off into an emotional deadend. You must use what you can get and not retire and say, "I'm going to go into this deadend and not see the world." I don't believe that's good for poets anyway. I think you have to deal with the world, the big world, because frankly, the Bomb is not coming from your locality. It's going to come from the great world, so you better know it.

You better talk to it. You better talk to the great world as a poet or a novelist, and you must use what you have locally. This is what makes it alive. It's the way you thought as a child and felt as a child and this is what makes you a real poet. The Scots had to do this.

H.R.: And this is what Hugh MacDiarmid did?

L.S.: What happened to MacDiarmid is very interesting. In the 1920's he wrote Lallans. He reached back to the 15th century to Dunbar and Henryson and picked up what they'd done and then he used the local speech and he created this language which sounds a little bit like English. But you really have to have a glossary of the words in the margin to understand MacDiarmid. What happened to MacDiarmid was he became a Marxist and he decided, who the hell is going to understand me in England, in the United States, if I write in Lallans, so he started writing English. It was a peculiar movement he made, but the poems in his Lallans - which was equivalent to a kind of pidgin- are beautiful lyrics. They are stunning lyrics to this day. I don't know why human beings have a belief that they have to say either-or. This is a fallacy. Why can't you have everything? Why can't you write many poems, some of which are more local, some of which are more

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out-directed? Some of the poems would be a mixture of pidgin, a word here and there, which only the local would understand, and which other people would have to study. I don't believe in limitation. I believe you can do everything. You can also write poems in straight English. Oh, you can write poems only in pidgin, but do you really want to be a poet who writes only pidgin? That's very brave, but it could also be fatal and limiting to you. The question is not whether people will read it, but will it do justice to you? And it wouldn't. If you want to write poems in pure pidgin and you become a great poet, then everybody has to go and study pidgin to read ~hose poems.

But this would be my thought: the world is not going to study pidgin, the world is not going to speak pidgin for you. Let's face the facts. Write everything, and write on as many levels as you wish.

H.R.: About writing on many levels. Some writers feel that their pidgin English is being kept outside the body of literature taught and studied in Hawai'i. They become angry and frustrated.

L.S.: You can 't be angry. Anger does no good. You must use your brains, and using your brains means that you can write a pidgin lyric, a beautiful thing, which somebody will have to read someday and which they will have . to learn to read. Like Burns. Bums wrote some poems which you have to learn to read. You really have to learn Scots to understand some of them. He wrote other poems which are not so difficult - they're a mixture of Scots and English. Then there are some poets in Scotland, incidentally, who to this day only write in Gaelic, which is like only writing in pidgin. They are the greatest poets in Scotland. But the only people who can read their poem1 are Gaelic. Why couldn't you have a volume of pidgin poems in which tbe standard is mixed with words used only by somebody who lives in Hawai'il That to me is perfectly feasible. Then if you want to write poems standard English, do it. If you want to talk to the world at all you have make concessions to the world. You know, there are also certain things standard English which are very good. Let's not knock it. Shakespeare not a jerk, you know. Are you going to just read your friends or are you to read everything good that comes around? I always argue this about Pound when I teach Ezra Pound, who was an anti-Semite. I'm half-Jew; Ezra Pound and his friends had their way, I wouldn't be here today, right?

I were an Israeli, which in spirit I am, and I captured a Russian tank was trying to kill me, I'd have two choices: I could say, that's a tank, and burn it, or I could say, that's a Russian tankandl'mgoingto h~w to use it. That's what you do. Poets have got to be more intelligent other people. They are, in fact . They use the weapon of even somebody hates them. You learn how to use what they have.

H.R.: And the weapon is language?

L.S.: Standard English is a big weapon coming at you in any culture; standard English is a tremendous weapon. It has hundreds of behind it . lt has a syntax that can't be beat. It has a voracious

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You learn how to use it, you learn your own language, and put it in your own words, like Patrick Kavanagh. He learned how to use the language and he used his own tone. The tone, the attitude matters more than words. It's not so much a question of whether you call something by its local name, or its standard name, as your attitude and your feeling and your way of shaping something. William Carlos Williams is great on that. He is really right.

There's an abstract world that when you really hand yourself over to it, you're lost. The pressure in Hawai'i is terrible. It's very great. People come along who are terribly developed and terribly knowledgeable, and will wipe you out, but you see, you must realize those people always know less than you do. Williams developed a theory for locality which meant that you work out of your own experience. No one else could do what he did-Pound was off in Italy, Eliot in London. But no one else could do what he could do, no one else could be who William Carlos Williams was. People can come along with all sorts of terrific abstract ideas, but there is one thing you know that nobody else knows, and that is how you have lived. And the question for any writer is how to make poems or novels or plays out of the mixture of how you have lived and of the world outside. But the fact is that they're always coming at you with more things than you know. The whole world is full of people with information. The only thing that we know is how we have lived.

And that no one else can fault. That's always true, always new. And it's always absolute.

H.R.: How do you assert your own identity?

LS.: That's the question, because these things are coming at you from the mainland, from Japan, wherever. How do you assert your own identity?

You assert your own identity by becoming the most intelligent person you can. There's no alternative. You listen to the people who come, and you take what they say and read the books they say, and you make up your own bloody mind and you don't lose touch. However, you must not become a son of a bitch. You must not go to New York City and become the only successful Hawaiian boy in New York. You must hold on to the things of your youth, your childhood. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke talks to a young poet worried about the poems he can't get published. And he says to him: first step, go back into your youth, your own childhood, and write about it. You start your own identity, because there are no winners in this game. The people who are very successful or fashionable now may not be read in a hundred years. In fact, one good argument for reading literature is that you realize how much fashion has come and gone. The only thing you can hold to is what you can do, what you feel. But feeling is no use without skill, so that's why you read literature. If you're an Israeli soldier and you capture a Russian tank, though you don't have the same feelings as the Russians, you can take what they know about tanks and ride it. You just learn it. It would be very good for a poet in Hawai 'ito study a man like Hugh MacDiarmid and see what this man had to do in Scotland. How he worked it out, how he failed, what mistakes he made. This is very educational.

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H.R.: How was he accepted in his time?

L.S.: He was rejected absolutely in England. He was rejected by establishment, but he has the reputation of being a great poet. I went to him,lived and talked with him for many days. I went and sat at his feet a tape recorder. I was not an obscure poet then. I was a fairly ~â&#x20AC;˘,au......,..... , American poet. I went and sat at the feet of this older man, listened to him, humbly, and learned how he lived. How he survived. Asking, "What areyoa trying to do?" You don't get that in poetry workshops. Workshops are because they provide a little society for a little while. But the fact is that real things that go on in poetry are much deeper and more serious. are big things that deal with your own life and your country and .v......n,hi.,.H.R.: Is there anything special you are dealing with, working on L.S.: I'm writing a novel. A year from now, I may be slaughtered, beC:aWII I'm not a novelist. It's as difficult for me to write a novel as it is somebody to learn a new language. I think I can write a novel. That's fantasy . I want to try it. What the hell have I got to lose? I mean, one not hold oneself in a position of protection.

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Judith Minty has lived most of her life in Michigan. Her books of poetry include Lake Songs and Other Fears, Yellow Dog journal, Letters to My Daughters and In the Presence of Mothers. She recently completed a novella/fairy tale for grown-ups and is presently working on a novel under a Creative Artists Grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. She will be teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz, beginning this fall.

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An Interview with Judith Minty

Karla Hammond: Judith, can you explain the significance of Nordic/American-Indian heritage?

JudithMinty: Howit'ssignificanttome?Yes. lgrewupinacity, I played kick-the-can in the alley and scrub-baseball in the street. My was born in Finland and came to this country when he was three. childhood was spent in a small town in the Upper Peninsula ofMic~~.â&#x20AC;˘ area where Finnish is still spoken in the homes, in the churches, in the life of the shops. It's a place where the old ways are kept, where the and streams haven't all been developed for capitalistic purposes, everything has remained pretty much intact.

I didn't discover that my maternal grandfather was Mohawk was in my early teens. In those days, that sort of thing was kept quiet. lucky to have a great-aunt (93 now) who remembers dates and names places. She can recall events of 70 years ago as if they happened last It was she who brought the Indian to me.

Even though my Finnish father introduced me to the North that land was originally Ottawa/Iroquois/Chippewa land. Because I so much time there, I began to learn the Indian history of the seemed natural to combine these two aspects of my heritage since it land that both esteemed and, although I couldn't always be in the Woods, I spent most of my summers there, camping with my family. I clearly remember when I first saw a herd of deer. I felt very in-touch And I'm glad that I live there now in my adult life. It's been coming-home.

K.H.: What relevance does folklore have in your work?

J .M.: Because folklore is from the oral tradition, because, by its renetiti'l ness, it is almost absorbed into the bloodstream, it tends to take on a quality. And, because of its nearness and famess- like the dreambrings us closer to the psyche. Leslie Marmon Sitko suggests that material should only be incorporated into written literature by uu¡.,auu~ Perhaps she's right, but I don't think so. Few of us living in the States are full-blood anything, anymore. I do agree with her in that I believe that a non-Indian, which is what I am after all, should capitalize Indian lore, on that false Hollywood romanticism of "the noble savage,"

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even on the injustices once, and still, perpetrated against the Indian because, simply, we have never experienced what it is to be Indian and all that that entails. There is an immorality in that sort of usage, she's right.

On the other hand, because Michigan's history is, to a great extent, based on Indian legends and because many of those same historical places tug at me and because poets are, by nature, namers, I've - almost by osmosis - incorporated some Indian folklore into my work. I have written about, for instance, the Sleeping Bear, which I've lived near for several months each year. The story is that the bear left Wisconsin to escape a forest fire. She swam acrosa Lake Michigan with her two cubs. When she reached the Michigan shore, she looked around for the cubs, but they disappeared, drowned. She is now The Sleeping Bear Dune, keeping watch over the drowned ones. They are the North and South Manitou Islands.

Surely, if that legend has been with me since childhood, it has a right to enter my poetry. You can't divorce yourself from folklore once it enters the personal mythology.

On another vein, my family was always close. Since childhood, I heard stories about the old ones, the ones on the farm in the Lower Peninsula, the ones in the Upper Peninsula. I heard stories about the hard winters there, the white time. I came to know those family events as if I'd lived them.

They, too, became a part of my work.

I also believe in energy spots. TheYellow Dog River in the U.P. is one for me, also parts of the North Woods, and the Great Lakes themselves. I feel as if I've belonged to those places for longer than my lifetime. I write about them because I feel compelled to do so.

K.H.: Do you regard your poetry as ritualistic?

J .M.: I do in one sense, at least.lf we permit ourselves to go deep enough, we sometimes can enter another place, a place not refined by intellectualism.

There, transformation is still possible. There, bears can change into islands, dunes, other things. We often arrive at that "other place" by believing in the consequence of ritual, magic even. I throw the I Ching a little. I have my own personal method of meditation. I pay attention to all signs and trust my intuition.

A meaningful relationship, even love-making, develops into ritual after two people have known each other for any length of time. Then there's Christmas, Thanksgiving dinner, the gathering of family. It seems important to retain ritual in our lives. Perhaps that's the last vestige of my Roman Catholicism, a need to recreate the mass.

K.H.: Speaking of patterns or habits in writing, when "impulses" and "ideas" come to you, will they remain with you if you're unable to write them down right awny?

J .M.: I always carry 3x5 cards with me. Writing an image, or the sense of something, down when it's perceived helps to write it in the memory. I keep

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a notebook by my bed which I write in sporadically. When something come1 to me in that half-place between waking and sleeping, I make an attempt to turn on the light and write about it for awhile. I also keep a dream notebook and record in that most mornings.

K.H.: A dream notebook? Are you arguing for a poetry that exists outside of time or outside of a conventional dimension?

J.M.: All art, if it's to succeed, must exist outside the "conventional dimension," don't you think? In parts ofthe long poem, Yellow Dog]ou1'111Jl, I deal with the dream in general, but in two sections I record specific dreams.

They refer to the black bear and to other, darker things. Poems that simply retell a dream are boring, but what is important about the dream notebook is that it permits us to make touch with the unconscious. The unconscioua comes knocking at the door to the conscious and says,"I'm here to help you solve your problem. Now pay attention," or "I'm here to repeat this tactile or sensory perception you had last week so that you'll know it instead of just feel it." Perhaps it even says, "I'm here to show you another life."

For example, we may live with our parents for twenty years or so. We may marry, hopefully only once, and live with our spouse for another our lives. We may have children and live with them for a while. But we with only one person all of our lives. And we barely know this person.

He/she doesn't exist in a tangible form, yet we're stuck with this person.

And this person is stuck with our body. We'd better come to know each other. That's my main concern with the dream notebook.

K.H.: In May Sarton's Mn. Stevens Bean the Mermaids Sittging, protagonist, an older woman, who is talking with a young man who uriâ&#x20AC;˘hhe could write poetry, remarks that to write poetry is to confront enemy-the enemy being oneself.

J.M.: At least, the shadow-that is, the Jungian concept of shadow.

That's a wonderful book, isn't it. Her perceptions about the Muse in that book are fascinating-creativity occurs when the Muse visits, and Muse visits as the result of an inter-personal relationship.

K.H.: Can you write fairly continuously or do you need time away from your work?

J .M .: I wish I could write continuously. Each poem is a gift, in a way, I'm not very happy when I'm not receiving those gifts. Sometimes though, we need time away to store up, replenish the cells. These often are when we're preparing to go through a change in our work and aren't aware of that growth.

K .H.: Is writing, for you, contingent on an established schedule?

J.M.: In part, yes, though I hope I'm aware enough to accept the poem whenever it appears. But, yes, it's easy to procrastinate and wait too I'm fairly well-organized in my study, though I walk on poems IAA..o.,,vucua.r.

If I don 'tgo to the study, I generally don't write, and that's dangerous. So go to my desk and do correspondence or pick up work that isn't Pnllift~itna,

partÂŤ

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letting myself move into a space where revision is possible or where new work can emerge.

K.H.: Is revision a necessary factor in writing? Have you revised any of your already published work?

J.M.: I often revise between the period of magazine publication and when the poems appear all together in a book. Once they appear in the book, though, I say, "Well, that's that. Those poems are in the past." And, between the time they are finished and reach book form, they are in the past. They're two years old, or three or four, or longer.

I know that some poets revise poems in books and then reissue them, but I seem to be more interested in getting on to something new. That's why we keep writing, in hopes of finally articulating the vision. Ted Enslin suggests that we're writing one long poem from the moment we begin to write until we lay down the pen. It seems more important to get on to the next part of that long poem.

K.H.: Do you ever find yourself scrapping whole poems or shelving them?

J.M.: Oh, yes. After I did what I thought was the last draft of Yellow Dog journal, I put it aside and decided nono look at it for a year. When I took it out I scrapped whole sections of it and added new. In the Presence ofMothers went through much the same process.

I recently boxed up a novella. I don't know what will happen when I reopen it. Yes, I scrap whole poems, whole series, that don't seem to work finally. Some that I consider scrapping, I don't. I get stubborn about them, perhaps the ego interferes.

K.H.: Would you say that, for you, your favorite poem is the one just written?

J.M.: Yes. We're so close to that most recently written poem-we have the sense of joy at completion, the discovery made. Yes, we love that one best. But there are a few that stand well for a longer period of time. In Lake Songs, the best-crafted poem, and one I'm still comfortable with, is the last poem in the book, "Making Music." As I recall, it seemed to flow easily when it was written too.

K.H.: With respect to craft and discipline, is that distance between kitchen and den difficult to travel?

J.M.: It is hard. I remember something that Tillie Olsen said about motherhood: "It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual."

When I began writing in 1970, my children were younger and went to bed at a decent hour, and I would write when the house was quiet. Now their bedtime hour is indecent; they stay up later than I. When their bodies were smaller and someone decided to wrestle upstairs-my writing room is in the basement next to the laundry room, a place that no one ever wants to visit-then they weren't so loud. Now the house seems full of immense, huge bodies.

A few years ago, I began to teach at universities away from ho?'

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some of that problem was solved. Now I live with my family part of each week and alone in the town where I'm teaching the rest of the week. When teach in another state, I'm sometimes away for an entire semester. It to work fairly well, although not perfectly-there have been '-U'J''P''ILAI'L'u'J~~tt, like the time my son broke his foot. But families change and now children are beginning to go to college themselves, so these eccentric arrangements aren't so difficult to maintain.

But back to your question. We must not let a distance rise between kitchen and study. In fact, I have written poems about the kitchen at typewriter.

K.H.: Whom of your contemporaries do you read for pleasure?

J.M.: Oh, there are so many. I'm sure I'd leave out someone if I listing them. There are some whom I read for more than pleasure, make me feel more alive, who bring me to a heightened awareness of life. mentioned the land a while ago, so I think of Margaret Atwood. I came to late, only a couple of years ago, and was surprised that she was touching many of the same places as I, though she is Canadian. It seems we both ties to the backcountry, the outpost areas.

K.H.: Who else's work do you read for pleasure?

J.M.: Bill Heyen is an incredible voice in American poetry today.

Swastica Poems is one of the most moving volumes of poetry I've ever and his new poem, The Chestnut Rain, is a major work. I like Appleton's poetry very much, the mystic quality of it. She's a student Teilhard deChardin and, although I'm a fallen-away Roman, I can much of what Teilhard offers, and so have particularly enjoyed her work. I like Russell Edson because no one writes like Russell Edson. comes directly out of the "other world" with a lovely combination of and pathos. I can't forget to mention Robert Bly, whose writing has major impact on my life. When I was a beginning poet, I read mostly male poets and didn't know the work of many women writers. Bly, prose and poems I encountered early, showed me how to write as a He'd probably be surprised to hear that now.

I'm presently teaching a course called Contemporary American so I've fallen in love with James Wright's poems again. And Duncan's work-oh, the falconress! I admire Etheridge Knight's work.

Hayden Carruth's-I admire his feeling for Vermont and the life there.

Donald Hall's. I care about Dan Gerber's meditative Chinese Poems.

Adrienne Rich's work, particularly her latest book of poems and her I frequently pick up William Carlos Williams, Rilke, Whitman, Spanish-Americans again. I seem to read Stafford when I'm having impasse in my own writing. And I'm very open to new poets' work. I the quarterlies for that reason.

I carry Jim Harrison's utters to Yesenin with me when I travel. I them helpful. They teach me what good poetry is, how you can expose

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pain with dignity, how to merge with the universe. Harrison is one of the finest poets writing today. Certainly I read and enjoy Diane Wakoski's work, particularly for her understanding of musicality and the function of the line break, and because I believe so strongly that poetry does emerge from the personal mythology. I read Anais Nin for the same reason. And Deena Metzger, who dares to enter the underworld.

K.H.: You've spoken of other women poets who have influenced your consciousness. Do you feel any simpatico with women poets?

J.M.: Of course. I'm especially interested in those women poets whose lives have followed a path similar to my own. I think of Rebecca Newth, for example, and her beautiful book, A journey Whose &nes Are Mine. And I think of a woman painter whom I met recently. Without knowing each other, we had both been working through the same bear myth. She lives in Boston and is a primitive painter. Her name is Franny Hamilton. When I saw her slides and when she attended one of my readings, we both realized then that we were tapping the same source and we each felt a strong kinship through that realization.

It appears also that different audiences may react differently to women's work. After I've read from utters to My Daughter, for instance, women have approached me to tell me they've been emotionally touched by the poems. Sometimes they've been weeping. Yet men, for the most part, seem uncomfortable with them and reject them as "too sentimental." When one experiences moments such as these, one begins to understand the phrase, "woman's consciousness."

K.H.: Are you conscious of writing out of a particular tradition in poetry?

J.M.: I know that I'm constantly striving to find a better way to express what I feel, or "know" intuitively. That's led me recently to a very long line, something that I'd experimented with when I first began writing poetry in 1970. I've also been writing what, for a better description, I'll call prose poems. Some of these are two or three pages in length, but they aren't stories and they aren't essays. Yet I don't think of them as poems exactly, either.

If "tradition" can be construed to mean writing out of the personal, then, yes, I think I'll always hold to that route. If we're going to remain honest, we must look at our work in terms of our own lives, rather than as apart from us. In other words, invention for the sake of the poem seems dishonest to me. I feel that I am an instrument in that I don't will the poem to come, which may be what Linda Pastan means when she speaks of this. It isn't the same, of course, as Tate's "Teaching the Ape to Write Poetry." The pencil or the pen is in my hand and the poem comes and flows through my body and my life and I don't exert any conscious power over it. Only later, in revision, only in the craft.

K.H.: Do you remember the first poet with whom you studied?

J.M.: Indeed I do, because that wasn't very long ago. I might add that I'm

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still learning a great deal about poetry from other poets. Robert VasDiaa came to teach in Michigan from New York and introduced me, in the same year, to the work of both William Carlos Williams and William Butler Yeats. What a wonderful combination. He also organized the first two National Poetry Festivals in Allendale, so I was able to meet some extraordinary poets when I was still a beginner. At the festival, I met Reznikoff, Oppen, and Rakosi, Ed Dom, Ginsberg and Duncan, Diane DiPrima, Robert Creeley, and many others whom I might have spent yean coming to know.

K.H.: Were your early experiences with poetry traditional?

J.M.: As a young child, I read a great deal on my own. I suppose I was a precocious reader. I read Shakespeare when I was about nine, and my father had an unexpurgated edition of Robert Burns' poems which I secretly studied over. He kept it hidden in his closet, as I recall. The first book I remember was A Child's Garden of Verses. I was just learning to read; I must have been four. I remember sitting by my mother's bed when shewaa ill, entertaining her by reading "the," "a," "to," so forth. And her praisina me for doing such a good job of reading to her. I remember the book was red leather, a very soft, red leather.

But when I began to write, I never thought I had to write a sonnet at sestina to be accepted as a "poet." I have written one terrible sestina, one sonnet, unrhymed, almost by accident. I don't want a restrictive form impose itself on the poem. I want each poem to find its own form.

K.H.: Have you experimented with styles other than the longer line prose?

J .M.: Yes, although the longer line seems to give me the most pleasure the moment. It seems to be a freeing thing for me. Recently, I've working on a piece that I'm stuck with for now. It's called "Leland Maybe it's the title which is giving me so much trouble, in that it's i'nnposiJW a form on an unfinished poem. That poem has a very retentive line, an anal line. The images are very tight. I would have preferred a longer and I'm frustrated that this poem seems to demand the other.

Sure, I've tried other things. I've tried indentations, a lot of experiments, most of them not successful.

K.H.: Similar to Kostelanitz?

J .M.: Yes, any number of people. I don't think I'll ever work with though my "spell" poem is very close to a love chant. But who Elements of conversation recently have been entering my poems. I'm letting these things happen.

K.H.: Is it easier for you to work in the mode of prose poems because write a narrative poetry?

J .M.: I think it may be just the opposite. I'm basically a lyric poet and written very few narrative poems. I'm surprised that the prose poem emerged, yet I felt a need to move in that sort of fluidity. It's been like breaking-out for me.

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K.H.: Given the nature of your work in your first volume, do you consider yourself a regional poet?

J.M.: No, I don't. I do, as I said before, write from my "place." Williams wrote five volumes about a falls in Paterson, NJ, yet that poem is much more than a regional poem. The same with Olson's Dogtown!Gioucester.

As I see it, "place" involves the interior geography. I recently returned from teaching a semester at Syracuse University, and I have a couple of new poems that deal with Syracuse. And yet, they don't. They're about other, inner things that were troubling me as much as they're about the exterior landscape.

When things were less expensive and we seemed to have more money, we skiied in Europe. But I never considered writing a poem about that experience because I didn't feel an energy coming out of that region, as a personal place. I felt no sense of attachment to it.

K.H.: There were no roots there?

J.M.: Right. It's interesting that many of the Russians who have come to the States have continued to write about Russia. I think of Akhmatova, who said, "I am not one of those who left the land." And I think of her very strong ties to St. Petersburg. She was not considered a regional poet, yet she nearly always dealt with "place" in her work.

K.H.: How important is reading poetry to other people? Would you write if there were no audience, no market?

J.M.: Yes, even if there were no audience and no market. I can't believe that could happen, though. We don't write in a vacuum. Long before it was written down, poetry was part of an oral tradition. Etheridge Knight, one of the truly great oral poets, says that reading your poems is "publishing" them. What is it Bly says? "On reading a poem, it enters your head; hearing a poem, it enters your soul."

On the other hand, it seems very dangerous to spend too much time in front of audiences. The poem is conceived alone and it's conceived without the ego. As soon as the poet stands in front of an audience, the ego wants to be part of the performance. I remember one of my students saying to me a few months ago after an open-mike reading, "Judith, I stood up there and felt myself start to puff up and I didn't want to sit down once I began to read." 路 That sensation is completely removed from the creative process.

Whenever I read, it upsets my body. I think the ego starts strutting arround.

Then it takes several days to wean it back, get it to lie down, so that I can start writing again. I would be much calmer in my body/my psyche if I arranged a schedule where I only read a couple of times a year.

K.H.: Do you view poetry as a profession? How do you view it?

J.M.: It's very difficult to be a poet when you're mixing it with everything else that must be done. The baby must be changed even though you can't get through the last four lines of the poem. Then too, you can't sell a poem

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$5000 as you can a painting, so the poet must look for other means to supplement a paltry income. Fortunately, I find teaching stimulating. I don't like meetings, however, or being tied to one place, so I prefer to teach at different universities, taking a semester off when I can afford to.

I suppose I view poetry as a profession in that it is "what I do." But I abhor what many poets glibly assume- that poetry is a "business." Many of the journals perpetuate that idea as well. I'm a poet because I can't of anything else that gives me more pleasure or allows me to express intensity of my feelings. The commitment is so total, so much my life, tbatl can't imagine not writing the poem anymore.

Karla Hammond East Hampton, \,;OJDD4~lCUIIl1

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Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. Galway Kinnell.

New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. 72 Pp. $8.95 hardcover. $4.95 paperback.

In a 1971 interview Galway Kinnell commented, " It would be nice if in a single poem one could resolve a given problem forever - come to terms with it once and for all ." But if ever a poet was unable to achieve such a resolution of his given problem, it is Kinnell. He has instead pursued his compelling theme through poem after poem to the border of obsession; then crossed the border and dealt with it again and again. Anyone who has read Kinnell's poetry over the years can be sure of his major theme. The title of his latest collection spells it out: Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.

The awareness of mortality has colored Kinnell's poetry from the beginning, and as one reads through it one finds many explicit attempts to focus this awareness in a single clear statement and attitude. "Spindrift," in Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), ends with these lines: "Nobody likes to die/But an old man/ Can know/ A kind of gratefulness/ Towards time that kills him / Everything he loved was made of it." The final phrase of "Little Sleep's路Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight," in The Book ofNightmares (1971), probably comes as close as anything could to paraphrasing the sense of mortality Kinnell has evolved: "the wages/ of dying is love." And there are many passages in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words one could cite to carry on the illustration, as these lines from "Goodbye": "It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is alL/ That is how we have learned , the embrace is all." As these quotations suggest, Kinnell is an elegist who finds consolation and a measure of glory in the fact of mortality itself. It is because we die, and because we know that this is unavoidably so, that human life is worthy of a unique intensity. Angels and non-human animals on their different levels no doubt experience much that we cannot, but it is the human lot and privilege to live a little while knowing our own end. Kinnell has expressed it well in one of his essays: "That we last only for a time, that everyone and everything around us lasts only for a time , that we know this. radiates a thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our relationships, even on those moments when the world, through its poetry, becomes almost capable of spurning time and death."

It is interesting that often writers of the strongest elegiac senseWhitman, Willa Cather. and Keats would be examples - are also remarkable for the intensity and luminous quality of their sensory

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descriptions. Startling, deeply etched physical description, combining sharp detail and an intuitive apprehension of the presence of a thing, has always been one of Kinnell's strengths, and continues to. be in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, as in the wonderful "Saint Francis and the Sow": ... as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

On the other hand, Kinnell is also drawn to abstractions, discursiveness, the direct expression of ideas, and even didacticism in his poetry. The description which evokes and celebrates the sow, for example, is preceded by a sort of lesson on the often forgotten beauty that even the lowliest things contain. Another poem, "Wait," is precisely a piece of advice-a moving counsel against suicide. The discur&ive teaching mode can be fine, anchored to the physical as it is in "Saint Francis and the Sow," or nourished by a steady, level-voiced eloquence and the music of verbal repetitions, as in "Wait." But there are places in Mortal Acts, Mortal Wordl, mainly in the second half of the book, where even readers who have a for Kinnell's discursive tendencies and his persistent weaving of the theme of mortality may find the going heavy.

Perhaps the discursive, philosophical manner makes a har~ka~round; against which problems in the language stand out more severely. u..,.,,.,..,,_; that may be, the earnestness with which the profound issues and feeliru!l! are discussed sometimes becomes ponderous. The didactic quality can rather thin, as it does in the book's final poem, "Flying Home.".,... · uu:::II way of strin¥ing out long, complex sentences in ragged, enjambed usually creates marvelous cadences that have become one of the :s.'u u•ti1LlJI of his poetry, but those sentences can also seem just too wordy convoluted, as happens in "The Rainbow," for example. He loves elaborate lines and phrasings, which are often magnificent, but sornetlm41!11 are simply overdone-I've yet to meet anyone who can work up enthusiasm for "parabola of bear-transcendence," a sore-thumb from Kinnell's famous poem" The Bear." When such problems occur frequently, the poetry becomes clotted, bogged down. When I read 114

slow-/ given sighs of post-coitum bliss" or " the carcass expels/ defeated desire in one final curve/ of groaning breath , the misery-arc/ farewelling hands have polished/before each face .. .," the poem reminds me of a boat that is taking on water.

But I need to add at once that it is a part of Kinnell's poetic stance and personality to risk melodrama and to push language to extremes in what he knows sometimes seems a "slogging for the absolute" -to use a phrase of his own somewhat out of context. But this is also his effort to write poetry that will reach deeply and honestly, and that will have some true intensity and magnificence to it. He succeeds often enough to make one willing to forgive a good bit of poetry that strains and buckles under the weight of its own language and complusions.

In the respect that Mortal Acts, Mortal Words carries on Kinnell's favorite theme so persistently, the book offers the opposite of surprise; there is a sense of inevitability as he returns to it again and again. But within this thematic unity, a number of poems contain tones and shades of feeling which seem to me to be attractive developments in the evolution of his work. I am thinking of "Fergus Falling," "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," "Angling, A Day," "Lava," "Blackberry Eating," "On the Tennis Court at Night" -poems, all in the first half of the book, which are relaxed, anecdotal, at times song-like. They are warmer and more easygoing and given to humor than we have come to expect from Kinnell. No doubt "developments" is not quite the right word in the sentence above; "returns" or " recurrences" would be more accurate. I notice that James Dickey, reviewing What A Kingdom It Was in 1961, described Kinnell as "a natural poet: humanly likeable, gentle, ruminative" -a combination of qualities that seems new now, twelve years after "The Bear," nine years after The Book of Nightmares.

Kinnell wrote memorably of his children in The Book of Nightmares.

The three poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words about his son Fergus may not have the intensity of what he wrote there, but they compensate for this with a sense of simple human warmth-and by giving pleasure. It is the pleasure of listening to a person talk in an affectionate, unpretentious, concrete way about his life: a poem about his small son's habit of waking at the sound of his parents' love-making and running to their room and hopping into the bed with them; a somewhat wandering meditation centered around Fergus' fall from a tree; an account of a day's fishing which yielded almost nothing in the way of fish but produced a batch of sights, sayings, and moods that will stick oddly in the memory a long time.

Kinnell is enough at ease in these poems to make occasional asides-to make a joke about Fergus' baseball pajamas, or in the middle of narrating the fall from the tree to compare the marks his electric saw would have made in a plank it had been working, to "dark circles under eyes/ when the brain thinks too close to the skin." He shifts gracefully into and out of a lovely long-lined catalogue of people who have lived and died in his valley.

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As always, he keenly senses the physical world, noticing "the slow spondees" of a wood-cutter's ax and a pond "giving off/its little steam in the afternoon," and the physical world where it is most deeply tangled in the world of human emotion: a small boy, as he falls asleep between his parents, "his little, startlingly muscled body," " his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child." The Book of Nightmares went through personal experience and reached for a sense of mythic ritual. These new poems seem satisfied to express a man's life on a more modest level, in more conversational tones, but in the end they touch something timeless just as surely.

Some of the longer, heavier poems in the book, such as "The Sadness of Brothers," "The Last Hiding Places of Snow," and "There Are Things f Tell to No One," are no doubt in some senses more important than the ones I've been praising. They contain much that is strong, but I want to follow my feeling that some of the "lighter" poems offer the finest, freshest moments in the collection, and close with a short poem I particularly like.

BLACKBERRY EATING I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating in late September.

Small pleasures like going out and eating blackberries from wands in the September air may not seem at first to be "mortal acts," course they are. It is a playful, serious poem about the savor that is in physical world and in language, which itself sometimes can become a nearly physical thing, as it does in this poem. Certainly "Blacll:beiTJ Eating" is not representative of the whole Kinnell's work; it leaves many aspects and ambitions that are crucial elements in the total But it does demonstrate his peculiar genius for speaking the language of physical and the physicalness of language. I think it is largely these that give his poetry its distinctive force and beauty.

Moravia, New

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

dgbair is a graduate student at the University of Hawai'i and Managing Editor of the Hawai'i Review. She is a feminist, something of a Taoist, and a student of Aikido.

DENNIS BLEYTmNG's "American haiku" have appeared in most U.S. haiku magazines over the past few years. More recently, his longer poems have run in Mississippi Mud, Milkwud Chronicle, and Portland Reviftl. He recently won an award for his short story, "Harry's Mother."

SCOTT C. CAIRNS lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

KAREN CHAMBERLAIN is a resident of Honolulu.

WANDA COLEMAN, the mother of three, currently works as a medical transcriber.

Her work has appeared in Obsidian, The Black American, Partisan Revkw, Gtwnf~4/d Review, Bachy, and Alcatrru.

STEVEN CURRY currently teaches English at the University of Hawai'i. He is former editor of California Quarlsrly, and has published translations of the French Symbolist poets.

JIM DANIELS was born in Detroit and grew up in a nearby suburb. His second book, On the Line, won the Signpost Press Chapbook Contest in 1980. He has published poems in Paris Review, Poetry Now, Carolina Quarlsrly, and Cimarron Review.

SUSAN DEMAREST sings and writes songs in Long Island, New York. In 19801981, she taught English and Reading at Kalakaua Intermediate School in Kalihi, Hawai'i.

SONYA DORMAN lives in West Mystic, Connecticut.

CHARLES EDWARD EATON's work in poetry and prose has appeared in Harper's

Magazine, The Saturday Review, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarlsrly Revkw, The Kenyon Review, Ben,.ington Review, Salmaguttdi, The Sewanee Reviftl, and The Southem Review, among many others. He has published three volumes of short stories, a book of art criticism, and seven collections of poetry, including Colophon of the Rover, which was recently released by A. S. Barnes and Company. His poem, "Sentimental Education," which was published in the Winter issue of Kenyon Review, won an award in the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1981, organized in association with The London Oburver and London Weekend Television, and judged by Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Charles Causley.

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DENNIS FINNELL received his MFA degree at the University of Ma.ssa1Chltsellft and is now teaching at the University of Tennessee. His poems have appeared Chariton Review, Intro 11, A to 2, and Two Hundred Contemporary Poets.

STEVEN GOLDSBERRY holds an MA degree in English from the University Hawai'i and an MFA and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. His have appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and magazines.

BILL GOTTLIEB is managing editor of Prevention magazine. He lives and works Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

KARLA HAMMOND holds a BA from Goucher College and an MA from College. She was a Breadloaf Scholar in Poetry in 1977, and has work for1thomlinail The Southern Revi~. the American Poetry Review, Pembroke Magaziru, Connecticut Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Northwest Review, and Confrontatiort.

JOHN HECKATHORN teaches English at the University of Hawai'i.

GEORGE KALAMARAS lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

DANIEL KANEMITSU is Director of the Education Center at Schofield Rar't'lll';ldl LAURIE KURIBAYASm is a former poetry editor of the Hawai'i RevinJ. recently received her MAin English from the University of Hawai'i, and is teaching there.

WENDY WILDER LARSEN was born in Boston in 1940, and received her from Harvard. In 1970 she moved to Saigon where she taught English to Vtetnaâ&#x20AC;˘ teachers. Her book, Shallow Graves, was written from her experiences in CAROLYN LAU-MANNING lives in Oakland, California.

WALTER M. K. LAYMANCE is a student at the UniversityofHawai'i. lyn lifshin has published over forty books and chapbooks. A book of prose, Docton, forthcoming from Mudborn Press.

JOHN LOGAN, a teacher at the State University of New York- Buffalo, has as a Visiting Poet at the University of Hawai'i. His most recent books are Can Change the Dream and The Bridge of Change, Poems 1974-1980.

MICHAEL McPHERSON was one of the founders of Hawai'i Review and editor for the first issue. He was a panelist at V Symposium International Joyce in Paris and an organizer of the Thomas Pynchon Festival in Zurich the summer of 1975. He is the editor of Hapa. His poems appear in local journals, his first collection will be published by Petronium Press. He is Scotti ROBIN MAGOWAN lives in London, England.

JUDITH MINTY's work has appeared in numerous magazines. Her books of include lAke Songs and Other Fears, Yellow Dogjournal, utters to my Dauglttm, In the Presence of Mothers. She lives in North Muskegon, Michigan.

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HOWARD NELSON lives in Scipio, New York. He is currently working on a study of Robert Bly's poetry for Columbia Press.

KAWEHILANI NEUMANN is a student at the University of Hawai'i.

TRAN Tm NGA is a resident of New York City.

CLARA REID was born in San Francisco in 1949. She is of Samoan, Irish, English, and Tongan descent. She has resided in American Samoa since leaving California in 1969, and now teaches elementary education there.

KATHERINE ROSE is a student at the University of Hawai'i.

WILLIAM STAFFORD is a teacher at Lewis and Clark College. His collections of poetry include Things That Happen Where There Aren 'I Any Peopk, Sometimes Like a LegnuJ, and Stories that Could be Tnu. JOSEPH STANTON is at work on a doctoral dissertation for New York University and a textbook-anthology for high school students. Recent poems of his have been accepted by Hapa, The Paper, and The SMith.

GARY T ACHIYAMA received his BA in English from the University of Hawai'i. He is a former pOetry editor of the Hawai'i RninJ. ROLAND THARP has won the Hopwood Prize and the Frost Fellowship to the Breadloaf School of English. He is a psychologist who has taught in Michigan, Arizona, and at the University of Hawai'i.

PHYLLIS THOMPSON teaches at the University of Hawai'i. Her books include Arlichâ&#x20AC;˘ and The Crrotiml FraJM. Her most recent book is What the LaPUI Gave.

KENT UCHIYAMA was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1980, he received a BA in English from Grinnel College. He now works in Honolulu as a tutor.

ROBERT F. WffiSTLER is a resident of Glen Burnie, Maryland.

MICHAEL K. WILSON-SOUTH is a student at the University of Hawai'i. His poem, "Tell," won the Academy Of American Poets Prize in 1981.

DEAN YOUNG lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

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..

"I think HAPA is the liveliest, most promising literary journal in Hawaii."

LEON EDEL HAPA, Number 1, features:

• an excerpt from Marjorie Sinclair's Kona; • an essay by Loretta Petrie on the significance of Sinclair's out-of-print novels to Hawaii's literary awakening; • drama by Milton Murayama, author of the acclaimed flfSt novel Alii Asking For Is My Body; • poetry from John Unterecker, Martha Webb, Frank Stewart, Pat Matsueda, Jim Kraus, and several more of Hawaii's fme poets . .. and more.

HAPA , Number 1, is available in Hawaii bookstores and from

the publisher, XENOPHOBIA PRESS, at $3.50 per copy.

Subscriptions arc $6.00 for two issues, checks payable to the publisher.

The deadline for submissions to HAPA , Number 2, is December 31, 1981. xenophobia press 9S Mission Street Wailuku, Hawaii 96793