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Rob Wilson

From the Sublime to the Devious:

Writing the Experimental/ Local Pacific

I. ‘Two Postmodernisms’
II. Hawai'i: Becoming Miss Universe?
III. More Panic Poetics, As Such

Thanks are due to Tinfish magazine, who published a shorter version of this piece as a chapbook; details below. This piece is 9,000 words or about twenty printed pages long.

STARTING UP in Honolulu not so long ago in the downsizing weathers of 1995, the literary journal, Tinfish, was formed out of a cultural as well as political movement (ongoing in Hawai'i, as in other dispersed sites of local/transnational re-imagining) to mix, coalesce, and juxtapose what Susan Schultz, the founding editor and writer in poetics herself, called in a brief editorial statement, 'the two postmodernisms."[1]

The experimental and the local, at times in the Pacific, it seemed to some, had come to function like two lurid ships passing in the postmodern night: looking across the Pacific to Buffalo, Perth, and Sydney as much as to the inter-ethnic nation of Bamboo Ridge for its aesthetic moorings, Tinfish sought to intervene in this textual rift, and to shake up the stagnancy of forms and discursive protocols of 'the local' that had set in.[2]

Notes to Section I

Click on the note's number to be taken to the note; likewise to return to the text.

[1] See 'Hawai'i is a place where two postmodernisms meet,' New American Writing 14 (1996): 141.

[2] I always took the name/trope 'Tinfish' to be punning upon, in a diasporic and transnational kind of way, the Pacific-local journal named 'Bamboo Ridge' which, since its founding in 1978 by Eric Chock and Darrell Lum, had nurtured 'local literature' in certain ethnic-friendly ways and visually symbolized its own project via the fishing-hole imagery of slide-bait casting at the coastal site of Bamboo Ridge in East Honolulu, O'ahu. I also read the 'Tinfish' image to be a minor, scaled-down 'Moby-Dick' in the American Pacific. (But I never confirmed these semi-crazed intuitions with the founding editor, Susan Schultz.) Others thought of 'Tinfish' as a kind of linguistically playful yet place-disdainful SPAM, however.

[3] Anthony Mellors and Robert Smith, eds., 'Poets on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,' call for papers for Angelaki, 5 (spring, 2000).

[4] In her polemical essay, 'Towards a Haole Poetics,' Susan Schultz captures this 'avant-garde' or 'postmodern' attitude of uprooted poetics via the person of Charles Bernstein visiting Hawai'i and speaking from a Buffalo/NYC angle of vision: 'when Charles Bernstein came to Hawai'i in January, 1993, he said much the same [as the Heideggerian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo], referring to his home, his locale, not as a place, but as language,' in A Poetics of Criticism, Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm, eds. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994), p. 21.

[5] I would like to make it sufficiently clear, at the outset, that the kind of 'postlocal' and postmodern experimental writing I will be talking about and advocating for in Hawai'i/the Pacific, is by on means limited to the work published in Tinfish journal, and cannot be contained by the mongrelized 'postmodern' theory I offer nor by the authors I will later cite and invoke. Many writers would resist 'postcolonial' and/or 'postmodern' as a container for what they do.

[6] I would also mention here the simultaneous emergence of Pacific Rim journals like Melimelo and Taxi! in Japan and the Pacific Northwest, as well as Salt and Jacket downunder in Australia, which are fusing an interest in Asian/Pacific-based aesthetics with supporting more experimental modes of language-writing in literature and transcultural ethnography. This was something that was happening, in Hawai'i, under the cyborgian editorship of Sean MacBeth, Michelle Viray, and Sam Gonzales et al at Hawai'i Review as well. This journal, sporadically to be sure, was in the process of forging a more 'post-local' view of Hawai'i seen as moving beyond a Bamboo Ridge ethnic-centered aesthetic of 'the local,' that is, before it seemingly became re-absorbed into a de facto MFA program as centered around the journal Manoaat the University of Hawai'i at Manoa).

[7] The dialectical seam of this essay, deformed into split columns, aims to suggest a binding and/or rift of these 'two postmodernisms' written as an (impossible) communal project of building-up and inter-linking. As slogan or aim, 'postmodern' cannot contain the plenitude of place-based writings/selves.

[8] We do need more of this kind of polemical writing in critical genres here in Hawai'i, I would urge, where the 'local' custom is often one of 'not making waves' in the liberal multiculture, or just anti-theoretically retreating into a kind of racially ashamed silence or into a 'rear-guard' and entrenched sense of local ethnicity as 'local nation."

[9] Paul Lyons has shrewdly pointed out to me, in a critique of an earlier draft of this essay, that by juxtaposing poetic works by these 'two postmodernisms' in Tinfish, the 'gap' and incommensurable difference between Pacific-based authors (like, say, Caroline Sinavaiana or Ida Yoshinaga) and more decentered experimental-language authors of post-culture and anti-identity (like Lynn Hejinian, Steve Carl, or Joan Retallack) became all the more painfully clear. (Authors transplanted in Hawai'i like Juliana Spahr, in such a 'local nation' view or position, can be said to be located in the Pacific, whereas their writing [as in the journal Chain], as such, is not of nor distinctly about it. I disagree with this view of Spahr's work: more on this later.)

[10] The most capacious critical understanding of 'postmodern poetic language' in its inventive refiguring of social forms and cultural media and literary genres remains the work of Marjorie Perloff: see among diverse studies of this 'west-coast' quest, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

[11] Again, Anthony Mellors and Robert Smith for Angelakiare describing the co-optation of 'marginal' postmodernity in the UK, but they might just as well be describing the Heath Anthology of American Literature with its packaged tours of the local, marginal, and ethnic as representative voices like Garrett Hongo or Gary Soto. (More on this later.)

[12] Dan Featherston, 26 Islands(Washington, DC: primitive publications, 1999). This chapbook is number seven in a 'primitive chapbook series' edited by Mary Hilton.
[13] It would be misleading for me or anyone to deny to contemporary Hawai'ians the will to technological, political, and cultural innovation. 'Oiwi: A Native Hawai'ian Journal that started up in December of 1998 offers a capacious, multi-genre vision of contemporary Hawai'ian literary-cultural production as tied to past values as well as to such innovative change. As Ku'ualoha Meyer Ho'omanawanui puts the case in an editorial colloquium in the first issue: 'What's so good about this journal and the whole idea of kuleana is that there is no point in Hawai'ian history that I have found where Hawai'ians have denied new technology. At every point-- from finding nails on pieces of wood to the introduction of paper and pen and the printing press-- Hawai'ians took the new [global] technology and 'Hawai'ianized' it,' Oiwi, 1 (1998): 3. Of course, the dictionary, ballad, and newspaper were forms of 'print capitalism' that Hawai'ians used and altered throughout the nineteenth century, and still do to serve Native Hawai'ian purposes.

Ku'ualoha Meyer Ho'omanawanui

Ku'ualoha Meyer Ho'omanawanui,
an editor of O'iwi

[14] The literary apparatus of the white American gaze upon the Pacific subaltern was never quite quieted or lost, but tried to take market dominion in the amplified tourist flow in Hawai'i after statehood , James Michener, and the liberal-US takeover: see Paul Lyons, 'Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day,' boundary 2 24 (1997): 47-78.

[15] I study these debates, rifts, global/ local/ national tensions, and 'lines of flight' and rooting tactics in Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (forthcoming Duke UP, spring 2000). On the 'white mythology' and time-honored colonial discourse of the Euro-American settler Pacific, also see Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); also see Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, eds., Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (Boulder, CO.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) for a tangle of indigenous, local, national, and transnational views by authors from Albert Wendt to Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, and Haunani-Kay Trask.

[16] 4-evaz Anna (Honolulu: Tinfish Network, 1997), p. 11.

[17] Bill Luoma, Works & Days (West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press/The Figures, 1998), pp. 103-109. Also see Bill Luoma, Western Love (Washington DC: Situations, 1996) and Swoon Rocket (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1996).

[18] See James Clifford, Routes(Harvard UP, 1997) , pp. 241-243. Also ponder Gilles Deleuze on American literature as 'lines of flight' and 'Pacific becoming,' even as F. Scott Fitzgerald's manic-depressive Pacific escape/flight in 'On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,' Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 36-38. If 'the line of flight is a deterritorialization,' this leap across borders and codes goes on within and against the struggle for nation-bound forms of territorial sovereignty (as in US/ Hawai'i).

[19] (Honolulu: Hawai'i Dub Music, 199). All selections ASCAP, HDM 0040: contact the label's web site at http://joebalaz.jump.com.

Joe Balaz

Joe Balaz

For a polemical and no less persona-ridden take on the Pacific as site of writing, also see the prophetic and primordial imaginings of Richard Hamasaki in red flea, virtual fleality (Honolulu: 'elepaio press, 1996). HDM rf 20001.

[20] It is true that Joe Balaz is no Charles Bernstein in the range, mixture, or play of voices, but he is closer to this mode of language poetry (it seems to me) than he is, say, to Robert Pinsky or W. S. Merwin in discursive protocols. The latter poet, of course, has lived on Maui for over twenty five years, but his poetry is more directed to New York styles, audience, and modes, even when his work is focused on much-written-about Hawai'ian materials like 'Koolau the leper' in The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative of 19th Century Hawai'i (New York: Knopf, 1998). (It would take another essay to carry this argument, but there is not world enough nor time/interest on my part to discuss what George Oppen once called 'the Merwin' model of the US lyric poem.)

[21] Over his years as poet, editor, and anthologist of the contemporary and indigenous in Hawai'i, Balaz has written poems which are less exercises in subjective point of view and complicated personal voice (which is the dominant tactic in American mainstream poetry), than they are witty experiments in the humorous and impious voice of local characters and marginal perspectives. The surprise and challenge of the Balaz poem is, I think, less one of deep explication and more one of fantasy projection into linguistic and ethnic otherness.

[22] See the concrete icons on Hawai'ian identity issues and cultural-political struggles in the mixed-language poems of Joseph Puna Balaz, Ola (Honolulu: Tinfish, 1996).

[23] It had been Susan Schultz's editorial goal, in Tinfish, to envision a kind of trans-Pacific community across this 'two postmodernisms' gap: 'My hope is that,' she wrote in New American Writing, 'these different postmodernisms will discover themselves in community with each other, not because they speak the same languages, but paradoxically because they do not' (141). Her own writing of poetry aimed to discover 'my depth in the history of a place [Hawai'i] that is not my own.' This humility and openness to place can be opposed to the more US lyric-centered attitude of resident poet, Galway Kinnell, who told me back in 1981 that Hawai'i was a hard place to write in because 'it had no traditions to speak of.' I replied, horrified, 'there are traditions here, Galway, they are just not your own [New England] ones.' The writing around 'Bamboo Ridge' is at least a testament to that 'local' richness of diverse Asian/Pacific/American traditions.

[24] In situating Spahr's poetic as related both to an affiliated break with the New York school of Berrigan et al, as well as to a kind of street-level embodiment of the local, I am drawing here upon her essay/poem, 'Live,' from For More. Also see Juliana Spahr, fuck-you-aloha-I love you (self-publish or perish, 1998): 'Da kine is uneven moments for me' of mongrel mixture, bliss, outrage, displacement in Waikiki (11).

[25] Writings by Masuda, Chin, R. Zamora Linmark et al, are inventively anthologized by Walter K. Lew, ed., in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (New York: Kaya Productions, 1995). Also see Justin Chin, Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes, Pranks (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) for the libidinous embrace of a 'queer diaspora' linking the 'mongrel' Chinese/Malaysian cultures of Hawai'i, Singapore, and San Francisco: an aesthetics of flux and risk.

[26] (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1996), p. 199 and pp. 142-143.

[27] For an informed portrait of Saijo's poetic way of life and writing, see Nadine Kam, ''I take great pains with my writing,'' Honolulu Star Bulletin, June 27, 1997.

[28] Tinfish, No. 6 (March, 1998): p.54.

[29] A very different and much more conventional view of the writing life at Volcano is offered by Garrett Hongo in Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i (New York: Knopf, 1995). Bowing to Yeats and Marquez and Basho even as he puts local ethnic and Hawai'ian indigenous signifiers in italics and wills the ghosts of his immigrant Japanese ancestors to talk story ('kahiko out of my voice' [p. xi]) with this prodigal son becoming native insider, Hongo recounts a 'magical realism' drenched narrative that aims to be a 'sacred book-- a book of origins' (pp. 20-27). Rich in borrowed metaphor and myth and posited as poetic quest, it is surprising to realize that Hongo actually spent only his first three months at Volcano village and grew up in the less charmed urban locales of Honolulu, Los Angeles, and Irvine. Phrases like 'at the car rental agency, we could gaze toward the lower, grove-stubbled slopes of Mauna Kea like van Gogh's French hillsides' (p. 33) reveal Hawai'i less as inhabited place and existence on a small scale of locality (as in Saijo) than as an aestheticized landscape seen via metaphors from a museum and library of world culture, Asian, Euro-American romantic and otherwise (as in Merwin). This is a different genre of cultural work, aimed at another audience and style.

[30] Big Sur (New York: Bantam, 1963), p. 67. Saijo becomes another link to Zen Buddhism and 'the Orient' for Kerouac, who found the west coast USA closer in expansive sentiment and lyric existence to Asia than to Europe (79).

[31] OUTSPEAKS, p. 73. Also see Jack Kerouac, Albert Saijo, Lew Welsh, Trip Trap: Haiku on the Road from SF to NY (Gray Fox Press, 1999).

[32] Ono Ono Girl's Hula (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), pp. 171-176, wherein the indigenous genealogy claims fall apart but she is accepted by diasporic Hawai'ians in California anyway as 'ono ono girl.' Also see Carolyn Lei-Lani Lau, Keonilani (San Antonio, Texas: Chile Verde Press, 1993).

[33] John Tranter, Different Hands (South Fremantle, Western Australia: Folio/Fremantle Arts Center Press, 1998).

[34] John Kinsella, The Hunt & other poems (Newcastle, England: Bloodaxe Books, 1998). Simultaneously published by Fremantle Arts Center Press in Australia. Kinsella now lives and writes in Cambridge, England, but his poetics remains largely tied to the problematics of representing a more multicultural, multilingual vision of Australia and the Asia/Pacific region.

[35] See for example his special issue of Salt 11 (1999) on 'In the Mix: International Regionalism & Hypermodernism,' for an exploration of this double tie to place, nation, region as well as to language experimentation.

[36] Verse Interview with John Kinsella conducted by Brian Henry, Vol. 15 (1998): 65.

[37] See John Kinsella, The Benefaction: vicissitudes of an interior (Cambridge, England: Equipage, 1999), p. 9, where 'interior' is both the landscape and the self, disconnected.

[38] Kinsella has remarked of the Tinfish project, 'Tinfishis a kind of interactive space for a pluralistic English that doesn't appropriate, but doesn't play the [multicultural] game with excessive politeness,' Verse interview, p. 68.

[39] John Kinsella, 'The Sandstone Rim, luxuriant,' in The Benefaction, p. 19.

[40] This would be what I mean by Pacific Experimental writing as a local mode of 'devious' anti-canonical writing.

The opposed meaning of what Susan Schultz had called these 'two postmodernisms' signifies, on the one (more experimental) hand, a concern to activate the play of languages and mixed heritages of representation, as in some intertextual and deconstructive abyss that calls into question any under-theorized, stable, or reified version of 'identity,' 'voice,' or 'sovereignty' of meaning, cultural self, nationhood and so on. The 'deconstruction of nostalgia for transcendental identity is crucial to international poetry working out beyond modernism,' is how the editors of a special issue of Angelaki put this drive to unsettle identity.[3]

kyle koza, former editor of Hawai'i Review; Susan Schultz, editor of Tinfish

Kyle Koza, former editor of Hawai'i Review;
Susan Schultz, editor of Tinfish

This postmodern tactic of language play at times uprooted the writing self from the place/identity of local embodiment, and stressed, instead, the 'depthless' scene of writing as a kind of perpetual displacement and deferral of the self's being housed or contained by any ongoing identity with sign or place.[4]

This avowedly 'avant-garde' sense of language-as-home had come to be considered, at least in the local Pacific, as a mainland US, metropolitan, or 'New-York centric' brand of post-Ashbery poetics playing itself out against other, emerging tactics of voice and identity that, on the other (more 'local') hand, had pushed poetic language towards voicing a more trenchantly situated, affiliated, or localized kind of postmodernism. A kind of 'local"-based poetry that wanted to align itself with forces and forms of imagined identity that were coming to be called, in the late 1980s, 'postcolonial.'[5] This postmodernism, as Susan Schultz saw in Hawai'i and the trans-Pacific regional emergences, 'embodies history and believes in voice.' Such poetry became a means by which local/ethnic/indigenous identity (and these are not the same claims) could protect themselves against homogenizing forces of the global- culture industry and US mainstream.

This stance claiming to express a 'postcolonial' kind of postmodernity would urge, writing in the Pacific, those aggravated concerns to recapture strong claims to cultural, cultural-national, and subaltern ethnic identity; to reclaim some indigenous nation as seen under global/local superpower threat; and to express, more generally, some situated coalition of 'local' writing forces and energies; a kind of place-based imagination of belonging to some specific locality, liminal zone, and counter-nation as entangled in a distinctive, if nervously ambivalent, colonial history.[6]

At times, these 'two postmodernisms' can be said to have split off into extremes of textual word play and ludic prattle, say, letters and words in love with their own materiality and poetic sound play, on the one hand; versus (in another version) a kind of reified, nostalgia-drenched, and reiterative primordiality, on the other hand, wherein indigenous claims to place, myth, symbolic aboriginaity, and nation are invoked to assert a kind of ontological priority against competing versions of cultural mixture, ethnic settlement, or linguistic and biological 'hybridity' discourse as such. Ludic unreadability and white-bread deconstruction, on the one (parodic) hand, versus a kind of grand transparency and sublime genealogy of native metaphor claiming a legacy of balance, blood, earth, and 'truth.'[7]

We could easily round up a few of the more notorious writing suspects here, but 'I prefer not to' at this point, instead choosing, in this exploratory essay/polemic and vision of experimental (cum local) poetics[8] to examine some recent poetic works from in and around the Pacific which have all these strange markings of writerly 'experimentation' and textual play (postmodernism, brand A) as well as the concerns with belonging to and expressing a distinct, particularized, and limited model of identity, affiliated voice, sentiments of nationhood, and (post)colonial heritage (postmodernism B, as it were).[9]

The poetry books, placed in this larger global social framework of the 'postcolonial"/ 'postmodern' Pacific, are Daniel Featherston'sinnovative 26 Islands; Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo's crazed-lyric chapbook from Tinfish Network called 4-evaz, Anna;Bill Luoma's uncanny and playful vision of the global local, in Works and Days; a pidgin-based CD from Hawai'ian local stand-up poet, Joseph Puna Balaz, Electric Laulau; Juliana Spahr's exploratory, bi-textual vision of the contemporary confluence, Spiderwasp Or Literary Criticism; Albert Saijo's OUTSPEAKS: A RHAPSODY, which brings together visionary, local, and experimental trajectories in a singular and uncanny way as a praxis-oriented poetics of Beat life on the Big Island in Hawai'i; Carolyn Lei-LaniLau's troubling poetic autobiography of neo-indigenization, Ono Ono Girl's Hula; John Tranter's computer-generated collaborations of Rim de-centering, Different Hands; and John Kinsella's dusted-down western Australia pastoral, The Hunt & Other Poems and The Benefaction.

A trio of writers

Photo: Alani Apio (Hawai'ian playwright),
Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo (Hawai'ian poet), Sia Figiel

All of these works could never be called 'modern,' in the sense that they unleash a strange and risky mixture of genres, a wilder play of stylistic codes, and everywhere display an ongoing interest in marginal, urban, virtual, and rural languages, trans-lyrical idiolects, and mongrel tongues and counter-subjective tones that would make TS Eliot, Robert Pinsky, Helen Vendler (or perhaps even Doc Williams writing 'the filthy Passaic' locality) turn over in their specific, semi-Wasp graves.[10] Risking experimentation and marginal forms of minor writing, each of these authors realize, and resist the textual fate that 'the marginal is invited into the mainstream or preserved as marginal value by the mainstream only when it gives up its attachment to difference."[11]

hpx/sinavaiana-vicuna.jpg

Caroline Sinavaiana (Samoan writer);
Cecilia Vicuna (Chilean writer)

Featherston's 26 Islands is a handsome and intriguing little chapbook organized around the colonial/indigenous play of some writerly alphabet and missionary nomenclature bringing the natives into the English language, natives, in Ashbery's phrase, 'whose speech is their punishment' of learning how to curse and pray for pidgin mastery, like some Pacific Island Caliban.[12] The book's cover situates these discursively encoded '26 islands' within the Hawai'ian Pacific: Kah'anoku Kina'u is pictured in a woodcut print 'returning from church services' as in genteel procession, with 'The Chief's Children's School, also called the Royal School' like a New England panopticon in the Oahu distance. (At such a school for the royal rulers, the Bishop Estate began to link 'the Kamehameha Legacy of Princess Bernice Pauahi' to the ways of Christian capitalism and leasehold tactics of Charles Bishop et al, which forever altered land forms and social relationships of Native Hawai'ians, for better and for worse.)[13]

Featherston has amplified his explicit pictorial link with Pacific islands locations and Hawai'i by publishing 'L Is For Lexical' in Tinfish7: 'propinquities: Hawai'i/ not far from Le Havre/ are there Hawfinches/ there// Where?' What might appear to be mere word play or the delight in linguistic prattle and lexical wit, on a first reading of this 'primer' or poetic 'prayer book' of metropolitan denomination, becomes caught up in a larger concern with expressing the 'there/here' of first languages as a displacement of place and conquest of the native language and indigenous people and landscape into a Euro-American centered nomenclature: the primacy of the primer and alphabet of colonial induction.

Featherston's alphabet-based 26 entries grow on you, like some devious little deconstructive Pacific haiku, and can accrue a larger vision of place and people as well; the Pacific islands as consumed and placed in language, as in 'M Is For Moloka'i' (perhaps the Hawai'ian island most represented by outsiders and concerned visitors):

At the Moloka'i leper colony,
disease cured by distance reads:
The water will cleanse you
& you will be unto yourself
a no land a no man
standing between sky & sea.

Leprosy and the arrogant ruses of white representation are here absorbed into a kind of Biblical 'cleansing,' suggesting a Prospero-like experiment in evacuation and redemption via re-signification of the local island. Place and the language of prior possession gets emptied out, rewritten, and recorded to fit the prior terms.

There is a lot to like in Featherston's 26 Islands, even if the framing seems to be a bit slight or obvious at times, in part and in the play of the whole, but I wonder as well about the Homi Bhabha-like unsituated ambivalence of Featherston's skeptical, self-canceling, deconstructive claim in his book's final 'Notes": 'But an island alphabet: whose alphabet? whose 'primer"? the colonizer? the colonized? And what are the relationships between the parts & the whole: the letters & the word, the word & its 'thing,' the island & 'mainland,' / 'self"/ 'whole' writ large as world"?"

At least Featherston's book tries to answer such large and small questions of geo-imaginary place with tact and care, with the integrity of an ongoing and committed interest both to amplify experimentation and situation, language and place, mapping these islands of conflicted landings, diverse settlements, and language belongings, whose names and dictionaries we bring on shore and (almost) lose in the trans-Pacific ocean crossing.[14]

While Featherston's poetry book may never enter into the larger 'local literature' debates in Hawai'i, nor be seen as an uncanny revision of the haole settler literature (which it is) of Jack London, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, it does make a devious and linguistically skeptical contribution to this semi-tormented 'white mythology' of the Pacific islands.[15]

A more deviously localist yet experimental work is Kathy Dee Kaleokealoha Kaloloahilani Banggo's 4-evaz, Anna.This is a work fully written in a hard-core pidgin English, incommensurable with the polite syntax and sublimated diction of standard English lyric poesy; it can even be opposed to the ethnic pieties and 'mango days and mango ways' nostalgia of Bamboo Ridge-mode poetry. Creating a street poor underworld of drugs, sex, and brutalized ecstasy in Wahiawa, Oahu, Anna gives voice to the border of the borderland, as it were, revealing racial antagonisms on the verge of madness, murder, and lyric redemption in poems like 'Fly, Da Mo'o and Me' and 'De Wen Sen Me Girl's Home' which ends with this scene of Fanon-like family rage and stabbing of a brother by a sister:

black ass bebe
bruddah tell me
he jealous I surf Ehu Kai
bruddah dahk, too, ah
but he only fake
he light.[16]

In Bill Luoma's estranged yet endearing takes on the Waipahu local and the Ward fish market, in works of wacky cosmopolitical conjunction and global/local fusion like 'KPOI 97.5 The Rock You Live On,' the Pacific local is distanced and estranged as 'identity' or 'place' into some wry calculus of mixture and heteroglossia suggesting co-existence, energy, incongruity, and change.[17] Luoma's manic poem-of-place has all the generic blurring and textual uncanniness of James Clifford's 'Year of the Ram: Honolulu, February 2, 1991,' that tourist-gaze poem/essay from his diasporic study of uprooted belonging, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century: here, global/local Honolulu becomes written over as transnational staging ground for global war, US militarism, island exoticism, on-the-beach trans-gender romance, and the transformation of the paternal agon of the collage-maker poet/ethnographer into something more loving, expressing a 'woman becoming' or 'Pacific becoming into the whale,' as Deleuze might say.[18]

Claiming to speak an embodied relationship between 'the island & 'the mainland,'' there is the Hawai'ian-based yet creolized poetry of Joseph Puna Balaz, for whom as scrappy culture-credo, 'Hawai'i Is Da Mainland to Me":

Wat you mean continent brah?!
Da mainland is da mainland,
dats where you goin, eh?!
Eh, like I told you,
dats da continent--
Hawai'i
is da mainland to me.

This deviously situated and place-bound little poem remains a kind of poetic anthem for local and indigenous settlement and pidgin priority in Hawai'i, and the poem is rightfully included as the eleventh and last poem of Electric Laulau by Joe Balaz.[19]

The poetry of Joe Balaz presents a deft and imaginative reclaiming of the local Pacific with wit and joy, using multiple languages and colorful styles, and the expressive humor of the mixed and impious-- tactics of linguistic imagination much needed in a time of decolonizing struggle in the Pacific when claims to self-righteous purity (of blood, ideology, vision) do abound.

The poems embrace Hawai'ian pidgin English as an uncanny language of local mixture and lively adventure, as embodied in poems ranging from voices of skate boarders, lounge lizards, and raunchy fans at Bows games to the freshly pop-contemporary and localized voice of Maui the demigod.

While in oral performance his poetry can swerve close to stand-up comedy in its local staging of racial antagonisms and un-deconstructed beliefs, Balaz writes with flair, self-consciousness, and ingenuity, creating a whole 'Booga Booga"-like comic carnival of characters and voices distinctly his trans-ego own, yet commenting on, reinventing, and enacting the ever-emerging components of 'local literature' in its postmodern mode of Hawai'ian/pidgin English mixture.[20]

Each poem seems to delight in its own fanciful, offbeat language, and impious emergence: still, his work is unified in overall style, languages, and vision which emerge out of a coherent Pacific-based vision of place, community and self. Craft and cultural politics come together in ways that reflect the vision of a poet who has worked over the course of two decades to earn this ongoing power of imagination, place, and language.

In effect, both the 'local' and 'the indigenous' thematics that dominate the airwaves in Hawai'i (as perhaps in other parts of Asia-Pacific) -- as well as the whole idea of what counts as the literary poetic-- are transformed by Balaz's Electric Laulau. For the postmodern surrealism and wit of his subjective 'fantasy' remain rooted in Hawai'ian history and language and grounded in the struggle for expanded Hawai'ian expression of self, place, and a kind of music-and-art driven cultural nation.

Each poem's impurity and irreverence of voice (for example, ponder the strange etymology of 'Da History of Pigeon,' the singular geography lessons of Hawai'i in 'Da Mainland to Me' and Japan in 'Namoku´Ž Eha,' and the mock authoritative pedagogy of 'Pidlit 101') are of a piece with their passion and conviction. Many of Balaz's stand-up poems (like 'Lounge Lizard' and 'Junior Is Wun Rastah') have come to be considered local classics known from publication in journals like Chaminade Literary Review, Ramrod, Tinfish, and Hawai'i Review and are much used in high school and college courses here. Balaz, in his own singular way, is indeed a postmodern Pacific poet of multi-linguistic wit and situated vision, bringing the 'two postmodernisms' into the weave and mix of his oceanic craft.[21]

'Da History of Pigeon' (the third poem in Electric Laulau, wryly backed up by doowop and calypso voices) links the etymology, change, and survival of the pigeon, as dirty and ugly yet scrappy bird (word), to the survival of a colorful, frowned upon, yet scrappy Pidgin English. The poem opens with a process of amalgamating 'different kind words' from different racial and ethnic sources, 'and den came da pigeon.' A mock history listen in etymology is given in which the Anglo Saxon for dove ('or d-u-f-e, as dey used to spell ´Žum') is blended and replaced with the French word pigeon, which also as cuisine brought to England 'recipes for pigeon pie."

Language, culture, music, and food, the Balaz poem is showing in a humorous way, are produced and enriched through a historical process of creolization, mixture, incorporation of the foreign culture and codes: 'even back den, da word pigeon wen blend wit pigeon, foa get moa pigeon.' Nowadays, pigeons are everywhere, in the zoo, in the city, in cages, as is (by analogy) Pidgin English ('And no mattah wat anybody do, dey kanot get rid of pigeon'). The poem ends with a plea, via pidgin metaphor, for linguistic openness and tolerance of colorful ethnic strands within Anglo-Saxon English, an acceptance of minority sub-languages like HCE Pidgin: 'I guess wit such a wide blue sky, everyting deserves to fly."

Impious, wry, Balaz mocks motrr piously local Hawai'ians in raunchy poems like 'Lapa Poi Boy' and 'Catch Da Bone,' not to mention the visual and semiotic ironies in concrete poems like 'To´Že To´Že Toe' (published in an earlier Tinfish) which suggests (as verbal icon) a kind of uneasy tic-tac-toe game between Hawai'ian sovereignty players and the state (the game ends in a deadlock on state ground).[22]

A deft poem representing contemporary Hawai'ians and the impure mixtures and creolization of local culture is 'Junior Is Wun Rastah.' Junior has gotten so far into cosmic Rastafarian culture from the West Indies (a big influence on contemporary Hawai'ian music) that he not only wears Ethiopian T-shirts, talks Kingston Creole all day, he puts Bob Marley posters on 'his low ridah truck' and even paints the colors of his Hawai'ian canoe club with Rastafarian red and green to go with Hawai'ian yellow to 'give da canoe/cosmic energy/in da watah.' By the end of the poem, Junior is so 'lolo' with Rastafarian vision that he has turned his pubic hairs Rastafarian style: 'brah, wuz all dreds."

In other words, Balaz's poem is showing, via humorous narrative voice, that the local style and Hawai'ian mores of Junior have been taken over, in part, by Rastafarian island tactics in a strangely mixed-localized way that affects his transnational/ Hawai'ian identity, his mongrel style of poetics, his language, even his private body parts. What I would claim is that, in such a poet, the Postmodern Experimental play of language, identity role, and voice, and the Postmodern Local literature's struggle to express multi-constructed identity, situated history, and embodied poetics of place, can somehow come together, mix, and merge into something anti-lyrical, Asian/Pacific based, interesting, open, and new.[23] For Balaz (like Banggo) writes from a place where the two postmodernisms could mingle and meet in the mongrel-magical waters of the Experimental Pacific.

From a differently situated, but place-affiliated angle of vision that is struggling to come to (belated) anti-lyrical terms with the 'New York-centric' vision of Whitmanic Personalism ('I no longer take offense to NY-centric statements, I pay NY rent'), post-confessional charm, and urban street-smart NYC surrealism, as this 'school of poetics' has come to be posed against the free-play of the material signifier in Language-based (A)poetics, Juliana Spahr tries in her Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism to move beyond the (male) agon of categories and (reigning) styles that have marked the postmodern period of the Allen/Hall (Spider/Wasp) anthologies. Spahr thus aims to break into a newer 'Spiderwasp' vision of convergence, flow, linkage, and in-mixture.[24] At least landed belonging as ground of cultural identity, and some vision of an expansive nexus and community of poetic landlessness, become erotically entangled in Spahr's own works and in editing Chain.

In Spahr's mixed-genre work, these 'two postmodernisms' of the Experimental and the Embodied can be written/read as contributions and contradictions to the site of creating trans-ego identity and multiple linkages. Reading works she loves and feels her own work (as poet/critic or spider/wasp) is affiliated to-- as act of spider/wasp devouring of poems by literary criticism and critical theory-- Spahr goes on imagining S/M cultural production and her own more schizo-text brand of poetics as a kind of (Deleuzian) Over-Woman (as in Lisa Jarnot's works which Spahr admires) flowing across the binaries and opposed period-categories, as these can now be measured, posted, and installed against the Silliman/Watten/Perelman Dialectic of US period war. Robert Grenier's performative slogan for the writerly materiality of language writing at Iowa in This (1971)-- 'I HATE SPEECH' (see Spiderwasp, p. 5)-- seems especially inadequate as aesthetic slogan in a place like the Pacific, as region of cultural-political multiplicity and heteroglossia, wherein various forms of pidgin and mongrel cultural mixture are being affirmed as literary possibility, as practiced in writers as diverse as Barry Masuda, Justin Chin, Kathy Dee Banggo, Milton Murayama, Joe Balaz, Wendy Miyake, and Lee Tonouchi (as in his new pidgin-friendly journal, Hybolics).[25]

For Albert Saijo, in his singular memoir of experimental language, OUTSPEAKS: A RHAPSODY, this work of sprawling capital letters, Emersonian rant and discontinuity, and Kerouac-like dashes, language riffs, and sermonizing jeremiads on his Zen monk-poet life as a 'LUDDITE MANQUE,' is dedicated to the poetics of 'LIVING ON THE EDGE."[26] The plover bird, hopping between Volcano forest and Alaska steppes, becomes an admirable Pacific figure of 'ANIMAL CIVILITY,' living on edges and borders, embodying nomadic movement, improvisation and risk, jazzy flights between solitary foraging and communal roosting: anarchic and poetic existence on a small budget.[27]

In Juliana Spahr's laudatory review of Saijo's book for Tinfish, that 'journal of experimental poetry with an emphasis on work from the Pacific region,' Saijo's plover thus figures for her reading, as 'a utopic model for dealing with contradictions' and living on the edges of urban language and wilderness space: an experimental model, as it were, of the Pacific local.[28]

Saijo offers a very globalized view of the local Pacific as place has come to be tied into the larger ecology system of the planet and the political economy of the US war machine, which the author tries his ranting and informed best to critique, if not in a postmodern than in a 'postnuclear' mode of horror, outrage, flight, and outspoken (OUTSPOKEN) contempt.[29]

I mention Saijo here, to make a smaller regional point as well: to show that Bamboo Ridge Press has at times quested to publish a more experimental take upon local writing. Its turn to the risk-taking Saijo-- that exemplary Zen figure of Lew- Welch-like dedication, 'glad freedom.' and boundary-crossing risk figured as George Basho in Jack Kerouac's drunken novel, Big Sur[30]-- has called up an uncanny and venerable figure from the Beat Generation to generate an Experimental, yet organic Local, vision of living a poetic existence in the small-is-beautiful Pacific: 'LIKE THEY SAY IF YER NOT LIVIN ON THE EDGE YER TAKIN UP TOO MUCH SPACE.' As Saijo opines in his pidgin credo, 'EARTH SLANGUAGE WITH ENGLISH ON IT,' he aims as writer to wreck and warp standard English discourse into his own singular and rooted pidgin: 'PULL ENGLISH BACK TOWARD ROOT LANGUAGE OF HOMINID BEFORE CIVILIZATION-- I WANT TO CREOLIZE IT-- VANDALIZE IT-- BEND IT TOWARD CHINESE-- A VITAL COMPACT WAY OF SPEAKING AND WRITING."[31]

Carolyn Lei-Lanilau's Ono Ono Girl's Hula is a work of localist, experimental, and neo-indigenous claims and tactics that raises many doubts about such works and tactics of postmodern localism as the way to go. Here, crafts of self-posturing and semiotic simulation loosen the ties to place and turn phoney, glib, and de-realized. Tracking the morphing of the Chinese American poet, Carolyn Lau into her reincarnation (via the blood of her Hawai'ian grandmother) as Carolyn Lei-Lani Lau (in Keonilani)into the aboriginal voice of a Native Hawai'ian, Ono Ono Girls' Hula is a 'loco moco' brew of mongrel identity politics emanating from the grounds of cultural-political struggle in Hawai'i as much as from the flux of the diasporic Pacific Rim and the ethnic opportunism of California. It is a schizoid text of herstory, and the moments in the texts when she aspires towards primordial ideological bullying are way off the mark. But when she lets the language flow and mix, she becomes a voice of mongrel postcoloniality questing for a blissy, blessed self-mythology as goddess of the California hula.

Ono Ono Girl's Hula falls apart in its self-fashioned claims to establish authorial and authoritative Hawai'ianess, however: (1) the blood claims prove to be murky, as Lau cannot find the genealogical records of her grandmother in the state archives; (2) the language claims are shallow and meandering, bits of Hawai'ian thrown in from a tourist brochure or Hawai'ian 101; (3) the cultural-practice claims are highly impure and inauthentic (like the act of self-naming, or the sexualizing of the 'aumakua place-spirits; (4) the political affiliation claims to nationhood rest on an Office of Hawai'ian Affairs vote that most Hawai'ians protested as a state fraud; and (5) the land-based claims are superficial, as she remains tied to her 'Kaleponi 'Ohana' and only comes back to Hawai'i to visit her family and taste the local by shopping at Long's Drugs and eating in bad Chinese restaurants.[32]

Finally, in this textual analysis section, I want to turn to discuss in more detail some poems by John Tranter and John Kinsella, postmodern poets of post-white Australia who are pulling variously in experimental and place-based directions; and thus helping writers and cultural critics to forge a more postmodern, theoretically informed, and transcultural vision of writing place/ identity/ community in the decolonizing Pacific.



John Tranter, Different Hands - front cover 

John Tranter's Different Hands, as its title of authorial otherness suggests, is the least place-based writing, in that it plays with seven computer-generated collaborations from writings by Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, Edmund Wilson, Henry Miller, Louisa May Alcott, and E. M Forster et al.[33] As in the innovative and colorful new Internet journal that Tranter edits, Jacket [http://jacketmagazine.com/], the influences are eclectic and carnivalesque in tone, range, style, intent. In the reverse of normative lyric procedures, place, voice, and identity start out strange and estranged, uncanny and unfamiliar, then work their way back in as meaning, mother tongue, and frame. Different hands generate different voices, different senses of place and quest; in the mountains of Japan, Henry Miller struggles to understand the meaning of Go, Ginsberg takes twins on druggy trips across the mainland, Little Women undergo perilous mystical experiences in the Mexican deserts.

Tranter's Pacific Rim, in other words, is shaken up and around, swirls as (deformed) place and sign of (displaced) meaning, wobbles as frame and form of narrated selfhood. Having worked over dozens of drafts, Tranter can somehow claim, 'most of the words in these final versions are my own,' even if they seem mangled and generated (he admits) from some 'bad dream about an accident in the Transporter Room of the USS Enterprise' (p. 8). Freedom of the signifier has its pleasures and costs, as the reader slips in and out of meaning, in and out of cybernetic experimentation.

Still, at times, the Pacific does need to be shaken up and re-explored from beyond the domains of the normative and the normal lyric frame: 'The dim room, the little stones clicking into their predetermined places on the board, the Master's wife on the lawn? That's history. I [Henry Miller] don't think about the Mystic East anymore' (p. 37). Intoxicated with such self-as-otherness and literary sites of mixture, Tranter is the semi-drunken captain of his own Pacific language explorations, and opens up tactics of otherness, risk, play, estrangement, invention as poetry could, or should.

Tranter's motto is the all-too-semiotic, language-centered, and postmodern one: 'Scripto ergo sum'(p. 71). Place, self, and identity are conjured into a mongrel haze of writerly adventure and lyric oblivion, which may not be your exact cup of Euro-American tea.

John Kinsella's The Hunt & other poems, while no less anti-tropological in mode and estranged in tactic, is more obligated to ties to place, nation, crafting the under-articulated borders of the Pacific region and community, it seems to me.[34] Also the editor of an important and coalitional Pacific Rim journal produced in Western Australia and linked to international poetics of cross-regional affiliation emerging in the UK as elsewhere, Salt, Kinsella has become an innovative, prolific, and important poet of the experimental Pacific.[35] Theory, and the polyvocal richness of language, are given back to the internal language of poetry as such.

The 'cognitive music' Kinsella puts into deft play suggests a desiccated poetics of Pacific place as read under threat of global displacement, ecological rapacity, and lyric abandonment in poems like 'Reticulating the Avocados' where language and vision fail and fall apart: 'But a dry place with a sun that burns/ Even the toughest plants to the roots// Does not lend itself to altruistic turns/And will ignore even the offerings/ Of the most obsessive Dionysians.' Drought, blight, and depression come with the local territory; the 'eclogue' calls as a classical lie. Vision and landscape disjoin, mostly fall apart into geometry and ruin, longing and empty sublimity: 'Finally/ the hay is wrapped. Christo appears/ in my head and I keep him there' ('Wrapping the Hay').

The land 'has always/been a casual family/archive,' not a profit making scheme alighting upon the place from afar ('Mementos').

For Kinsella's pastoral vision of farming the land remains rooted in a harsh Western Australian landscape of denuding and dispossessing (see poems like 'Emu Hunt,' 'A Lynching Under the Southern Cross,' and 'Death of a Roo Dog'), which is to say that landscape here becomes a politicized category of perception calling out for 'anti-pastoral' and 'anti-sublime' modes of devious writing. The Perth landscape is close to 'the bush,' occupied, written over, edited out for the white gaze of settlement and containment; but Kinsella's verse aims to disrupt easy stability of place and code. Infiltrating verse, critical theory here becomes a way of moving out and across the deadly enclosures of prefabricated, 'decorative' verse, displacing easy or prior meanings.

While Kinsella, more generally, goes on urging the multi-sited formation of 'linguistically innovative' poetry that is affiliated nonetheless with what he calls 'international regionalism"-- whereby his poetic goal of 'preserving the identity of place' is linked to opening cross-cultural avenues of communication between different regions as these are being globalized-- he fully realizes that in the white Australian case, ''place' is problematic because of the occupation of another people's land."[36] Such historical understanding gives the lie to any special claim for 'displacement' of (white-settler) identity or loss of self-belonging: 'they claim to preserve/the species from extinction// per vanitas in the prologue/ or boundary stones."[37] The play of language is geared to generating a more communal and multi-lingual appreciation of place and loss.[38]

Kinsella knows all too well that 'the natives' of a Pacific region like Australia or Oceania have not been allowed to exist in their place, language, and nation: that such peoples, situated as others to the white apparatus of imperial dispossession, have been 'brought down/ within the lyric."[39] It is time for the poetry of place and region, thus, to do something else than bespeak the claims of first, or higher, possession and to disrupt some grand identity of the self and the land. Risking otherness and outsidedness, it is time to disrupt the domineering, liberal-market, and exotic codes of place, in Australia, as in Hawai'i or other parts of the Pacific.[40]


 
 




Notes to Section II

[41] On the plight of writing a North American poetry situated in the global over-determinations of capital and the reign of market-driven ethics, see Sianna Ngal, 'Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust,' in Open Letter, Tenth Series (Toronto, 1999), ed. Jeff Dirksen, pp. 98-122.

[42] On the inclusion and exclusion of Asians from the American national imaginary of racial identity, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 49. For Hollywood's take on Hawai'i as erotic paradise of 'safe savagery,' see Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai'i (Boulder, Co.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), chapter 6.

[43] On the creative-destruction of 'unregulated' capitalist globalization as it dismantles nations, see William Pfaff, 'Gambling with Nihilo-Capitalism,' International Herald Tribune, May 18, 1998.

[44] King David Kalakaua, The Legends and Myths of Hawai'i: The Fables and Folk-Lore of a Strange People (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing 1990 [1888), p. 64. 'Viagra lures Japanese to Isles for special tour,' The Honolulu Advertiser, June 2, 1998: A5. (Viagra and the Pill have now been approved by the Japanese government, so sales in Hawai'i will drop.) On the Pacific as site of Japanese sexual exploration on the beaches and in the neo-colonial bedrooms of Waikiki, see Karen Kelsky, 'Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex in Japan's 'International' Age,' in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 173-192; and Kelsky, 'Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan,' Cultural Anthropology 14 (1999): 229-255.

[45] Greg Wiles, 'Liberty House returning to roots,' The Honolulu Advertiser, May 18, 1998: A1.

[46] Local, in this case, means the self-imagery and a marketing niche situated somewhere between the glamorous cultural capital of Neiman Marcus (oddly, in this time of state budget crisis, coming to Hawai'i in 1999) and the more ordinary wares of JC Penney and Sears: an aloha shirt or running shoes that might appeal to a teacher in Hawai'i Kai, broker on Bishop Street, or a tourist from Iowa.

[47] For a poem on this missing 'sense of the local' even at the shopping mall, where you could at least expect to buy a taste of the local like a piece of semi-sacred jewelry, see the poem by Rob Wilson on Riches, Kahala Mall called 'Five Late Capitalist Haiku,' Hawai'i Review 19 (1995): 10-13.
[48] See Eric Chock, James R. Harstad, Darrell H. Y. Lum and Bill Teter, eds., Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawai'i (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1998), which has already become a text of local affirmation and pidgin-based literatures widely used in high schools and college courses in the state.

[49] This attention can be signalized, in brief, by the enormous coverage the post-Bamboo Ridge work of Lois-Ann Yamanaka has received in national journals like The Atlantic and The Nation, whose reviewers have defended her novellas against more local-driven charges that she recurrently scapegoats and humiliates her Filipino local male characters and all but ignores the deeper call of Hawai'ian culture in her turn to US pop cultural mixtures. For local rumblings, see Nadine Kam, 'Writer's blu's: Yamanaka's award for 'Blu's Hanging' is yanked, igniting a hot debate about literature versus social responsibility,' Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 3, 1991. For a more US national take on this controversy, see Jamie James, 'This Hawai'i Is Nor For Tourists,' The Atlantic Monthly 283 (Feb., 1999) which is a liberal polemic for freedom of literary speech based around a review of Yamanaka's 'trilogy' novel, Heads By Harry (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999).

[50] Although he stops short of reading London's Pacific and Hawai'i short stories as part of the US drive to take literary and imperial possession of 'frontier' outposts (as London did earlier in the Pacific Northwest with his Yukon tales of Darwinian possession via-dog-men), Jonathan Auerbach offers a fine reading of London's literary and cultural politics as coded with US imperial masculinity in Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). For Auerbach, London underwent a kind of self-dispossession of such US macho codes in the Pacific: 'Hawai'i and its people offered London an alterity powerful enough to resist the author's appropriation [of the territory] by way of autobiography [as he did in Alaska, which made him famous as American writer],' fn. p. 282.

[51] See the hard-hitting critique of this infamous London short story by Ku'ualoha Meyer Ho'omanawanui (one of the founding editors of the important new Hawai'ian-based journal started up in 1998, 'Oiwi: A Native Hawai'ian Journal), forthcoming in MELUS, who faults London for his glib misuse of indigenous history, racial abjection, and cultural ignorance of the Hawai'ian codes he claimed to love and understand. This Pacific-based story of aboriginal resistance to their confinement as lepers exiled to Molokai during the Annexation era, in short, is a local and racial mess. It can only be taught as schizoid-text symptom of the US will to take imperial possession of the islands so beloved of tourists (and writers) like London; or, consider the Hawai'i writing, for that matter, of the great Mark Twain laughing at his 'Fellow Savages in the Sandwich Islands' on the lecture circuit in San Francisco and Boston, yet making a small killing on the mainland and becoming a US canonical author doing so.

[52] Matson shipping line, part of the local 'Big Five' corporate oligarchy then as now, tried to revive the Lurline in 1948, even as the base of US tourist influx was changing and fading into the packaged paradise of the mass market.

[53] Mike Markrich, 'What ails tourism: Marketing continued but assets weren't protected,' The Honolulu Advertiser, May 17, 1998: B1-4.

[54] I have tried to provide a larger critical genealogy for this white mythology of 'Bloody Mary' and the appropriation of Asia/Pacific locals and locales in chapters of Reimagining the American Pacific.

[55] Quoted in Esme M. Infante, 'Brook Lee: Home and Happy,' Honolulu Advertiser special report, April 26, 1998: page 2.

[56] Richard R. Kelley, 'Groundwork in place for more industry growth,' The Honolulu Advertiser, May 17, 1998: B1.

[57] Markrich, op. cit., B4.

[58] Markrich, op. cit., B1.

[59] Virginia Postrel, 'Slippery Green Slope to Nativism,' International Herald Tribune, May 14, 1998, Editorial/ Opinion page.

[60] Experimental writing, via tactics of parodic mockery and semiotic excess if not the over-loading of normative codes, would challenge and resist modes of mainstream writing aimed at attracting literary tourists/ordinary tourists to the fixed and phoney sign of 'Hawai'i' as some 'South Pacific' home of 'Bloody Mary"-like and cash-hungry locals and vanished natives.

[61] Barry Masuda, 'Shopping for the Real Local: Dividing and Reconfiguring Local Poetic Identity,' in Hawai'i Literature Conference: Reader's Guide (Honolulu: HLAC, 1994), p. 77, p. 79.

[62] Ibid., pp. 80-81.

[63] James A. Michener, 'What I Learned [in the Pacific],' Return to Paradise (Greenwich, CT.: Fawcett, 1951), p. 416.

[64] Here I draw upon the cautionary mythopoetic speculations about 'Pacific Space' and 'Pacific Destiny' in the US Pacific by Christopher Connery in essays like 'Land, Sea, and Late Capitalism' which will form part of his much-awaited book on the politics and poetics of 'Pacific Rim Discourse' in our global /local age of a cybernetic Pacific.

[65] For some cautionary speculations on the US heritages of racism and subjection in the 'Pacific Frontier' region, see David Palumbo Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, chapter 10, 'Asia Pacific: A Transnational Imaginary."


II. Hawai'i:
    Becoming Miss Universe?


Place is daily up for grabs in postmodern Hawai'i, as represented and claimed as local cultural signifier by various constituencies of place-friendly discourse, not all of them practicing writers, not all of them bound by the same ethical vision or 'poetics of disgust."[41]

Since US statehood if not earlier as outpost along the Pacific frontier of expanding trade, commerce, culture, belief, and arms to and from Asia, Hawai'i has functioned as a 'liminal space' of racial negotiation and cultural mixedness; and was represented in countless fictional works as an in-between, 'East/West' and 'Asian/American' site, where citizens like Honolulu's prodigious detective, Charlie Chan, were (supposedly) working to overcome primordial ties to China and becoming more fully modern and 'Americanized."[42] Less liberally phrased, Hawai'i was a site of cultural mixedness where whiteness never went unmarked and unchallenged as master code of difference and identity; where 'Americanization' never was seamless and smooth as cultural process; where Pacific islander and indigenous ties, above all, complicated US assimilationist models of national identity; where sugar plantation and tourism economies created huge patterns of dependency, hallucinatory unreality, and aggravated de-localization whose patterns were all too often uneven and unjust.

As Hawai'i undergoes its ninth year of economic turmoil in the 1990s, it yet again searches for a (lost) sense of place and (fleeting) vision of the future. This remains a difficult feat of cultural-political imagining, to be sure, because this quest for an affirmative sense of place-bound identity has long been, and still is, deeply tied into the complex global-local dialectics of jet-mass tourism and US exoticism projected in the Pacific.

Where Hawai'i is at heading into the year 2000, in this swirling mix of image, slogan, and dream, we can hear a new localism being voiced (as I have suggested) within the larger economy of Pacific globalization.

Tourists and locals alike can gather items of this new turn towards an entrenchment in place each day in the morning papers, where a tale of doom-and-gloom has continued to emerge in this year of expanding Starbucks, 'nihilo-capitalism,' and the contorted weathers of La Nina and El Nino.[43] Hawai'i. hobbled and ill at ease in its own desperate image-mongering in the Pacific Basin, is entering the so-called Pacific Century of the New Millennium, kicking and screaming, crying out for more cultural air.

Waikiki Beach, once called Honolulu's most 'beautiful and dreamy suburb' by King David Kalakaua, in the empire-crossed days of the Hawai'ian nation as he sought (like the poet-king that he was) to revitalize the legends and mobilize the native traditions of the past, has become the site of Viagra tours for aging Japanese male tourists seeking to find some fountain of youth in a blue virility pill.[44] Amid an array of mounting business closures and lay-offs afflicting the state, Liberty House, the oldest and largest department chain in the state, declared a chapter 11 bankruptcy in March of 1998. This globalizing strategy of appealing to upscale Japanese and resort-minded tourists had failed, many claimed, and, humbled into down-sizing, labor cuts, and debt restructuring, Liberty House was said to be 'returning to its roots' by rekindling its old appeal to 'local customers."

'The focus is going to be on being the local department store' it once was, Liberty House President John Monahan said; we will stock items 'based not on what (New York's) Seventh Avenue tells us, but what Kapiolani Boulevard tells us,' Monahan affirmed.[45] We will stock American brand-name goods interpreted 'for Island lifestyles,' as the Liberty House President said.[46] (There's a local bumper sticker that reads, 'New York, Tokyo, Paris, Waimanalo,' mixing and matching the global/local, but Liberty House's brand of localism would remain linked to Waikiki's boulevard of transnational flows and sex pots and not tied to the rusting Hawai'ian backwaters of Waimanalo.)

Architects of local affiliation now lament that Waikiki (if not Hawai'i more generally) has lost its own 'sense of place,' the distinctive ingredients of place, language, and cultural attitude (the vaunted 'Aloha Spirit' as it is over-marketed and over-called) that once gave it a special feel and aura of distinct belonging. Some architects of postmoernity would now search the cities of Asia-Pacific (like Taipei, Hong Kong, or Auckland) to see what Honolulu might do to discover this 'sense of place' amid transnational development and tourist blight. Even the huge shopping mall of Ala Moana, once the pride of Honolulu, no longer feels local or caters to local clients and customs.

The Japanese mega-investors are pulling back and pulling out, as did Daiei Corporation in the spring of 1999 when it was forced to sell Ala Moana Mall for close to a billion US dollars to liquidate its huge transnational debts. Even the local mall at Pearl Ridge or Kahala Mall has gone upscale, and feels missing in the essential ingredients of that mystery quality, the 'local culture' as such.[47]

Bamboo Ridge, the aforementioned place-based literary journal cum innovative small press on O'ahu that has supported the self-conscious affirmation of 'local literature' and ethnicity as rallying cry and a symbolic terrain worthy of narration and figuration since its founding by coeditors Eric Chock and Darrell Lum in 1978, received National Endowment for the Humanities funding for a 'growing up local' special issue of the journal.[48] This tactic of local specificity and up-building was nothing new, but indeed expressed the main focus this journal has supported and nurtured all along, as the local writing scene has 'grown up' in pidgin ways and mango days to receive mounting US national-popular attention and support.[49]

This 'Bamboo Ridge"-like affiliation towards preserving, affirming, and expressing 'the local,' as this cultural/ethnic drive can be affiliated to US national identity dynamics and, by contrast, opposed to more indigenous Hawai'ian decolonization dynamics, has become problematic in Hawai'i. For now, I would like to set up the 'tourist gaze' a bit more in this essay, to situate Hawai'i within the makings of a long-Americanized Tourist Pacific.

Prior to World War II, Hawai'i was one special destination of choice for a more wealthy upper-class clientele, who typically came by luxury cruise passenger liners like the SS Lurline and stayed at sites like the Hawai'ian, Royal Hawai'ian (which opened in 1927 and had its own 'mele inoa' or name chant suitable for Hawai'ian royalty written in its honor by Mary Keliiauka Robins) and the Moana hotels in Waikiki. The meandering and self-divided short stories of Jack London like 'The Kanaka Surf' and promotional pieces for 'globe-trotters by profession' like 'My Hawai'ian Aloha' reek of this royal and upscale tourism, mingling London's racial and class claims to superiority and comfort in America's own outpost in the Pacific with a more long-wrought Anglo Saxon sense of imperial masculinity.[50]

Jack London's unevenly Americanized, traumatic, and multicultural short stories tried to take enterprising possession of place, at the same time they lobbied for the dying aboriginal Hawai'ians in confused late-imperial stories like 'Koolau the Leper' which Hawai'ians hate to this day.[51] Ever quoted in tourist blurbs and bylines, London helped to evoke this 'aloha spirit' of Waikiki that once reeked of class aura, racial exclusion, and resort status as sporting site for the white corporate yacht set and Hawai'ian royalty. The white American male could laze and gaze at will in the native-pacified Pacific of the Royal Hawai'ian Hotel, and the sovereignty call was (seemingly) dying out as the hula skirts and aloha shirts multiplied and spread across the globe.[52]

With US statehood achieved finally (despite 'oriental' communist labor scares) in 1959, and the arrival of United Airlines and the technologies of space-time reduction, cheaper air fares and packaged tours brought large numbers of Americans and Japanese to Hawai'i. Along with Maui, Honolulu, 'which [for tourists] is basically Waikiki,' became the major destinations of choice, the places of imagery and commodity-aura.[53]

Hawai'i called to the US mainland via music, image, hula skirt, and resort hotel, and the paradise-seekers came in droves like the Brady Bunch looking for some lost aboriginal treasure, some fun and sun in the surf, or just a good tan to boast about back in the suburbs of California or New Jersey. Hawai'i, fetishized into United Airline sign of erotic longing and bodily bliss, 'she was my little deuce coop,' if you know what I mean.

Tourism, for Hawai'i if not for Asia/Pacific sites more generally, depends upon the globalization-of-the-local into a marketable image with lasting appeal, with enduring charm and mysterious claims to uniqueness, what Walter Benjamin termed the 'aura' of the commodity-form.

Some 6.8 million tourists come to Hawai'i each year looking for that special something out there in the remote-yet-near Pacific. In this era of the declining yen and mounting financial crisis in Asia/Pacific, tourism remains the state's largest industry, largest source of jobs, and biggest generator of tax revenues.

Caught up in these pro-tourism, anti-local dilemmas, Hawai'i not only hosted the 1998 Miss Universe Pageant, in effect it became Miss Universe, saying to the global market (reached by telecast to 70 countries around the world), 'Visit me, love me, gaze upon me, I am yours and waiting with open arms in the spectacular Pacific.' Like Bloody Mary in the cold war musical, South Pacific, Hawai'i was singing the seductress song of Bali Hai to the tourist gaze, 'Come to me, I am your own special island."[54]


Postcard - Mid-Pacific Carnival, 1915

Brook Lee, Miss Universe of 1997 and a multicultural, mixed-race product of Hawai'i, gave this appeal personal personification in her own charms; and her efforts (along with 3 million dollars put out by state and the marketing prowess of Al Masini) were instrumental in persuading Donald Trump and NBC to bring the event to Hawai'i for the first time. Brook, who is one-fourth Korean and an ethnic mix of Hawai'ian, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English blood, remains local at heart and in value. 'I've never thought of myself as Asian,' Brook said. 'In Hawai'i you're just local,' she affirmed, and added in pidgin English, I never had Gucci bags before. I was so Arakawa's, it's not even funny."[55] Globally imaged, but paradoxically remaining local at core like a good used aloha shirt, Brook projected an endearing multicultural self-image much like the place of Hawai'i itself as situated in the global marketing of cultures.

As Richard Kelley, chairman of Outrigger Enterprises which controls Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, boasted of the globally circulating Miss Universe images which the state had invested over 3.3 million dollars in to promote, 'We are all counting on the Convention Center to become a significant source of new business, and hoping that the images from the Miss Universe pageant compel viewers to plan a Hawai'i vacation."[56] This goal of compelling the global tourist flow is couched, then (in London's era) as now (in the era of Paul Theroux), in masculinist terms of colonial possession: 'to provide us with the muscle to market Hawai'i [as beautiful woman, one might add] on an international scale,' said Kelley.

This renewed focus on 'island lifestyle,' and the push globally to market Hawai'i's special appeal as a beautiful, multiculturally appealing, and world-class Pacific woman, was happening at a time when many (not just local writers) were beginning to feel a lost sense of place, a disturbance of the cultural codes and place myths.

Indeed, a sense of place-bound consciousness was being lost in the simulacrous circuits of global imagery, where iconic value is repeated and signed until it displaces or replaces the actual with its own semiotic connotations.

But what is the appeal of 'Hawai'i' to the global tourist who would come here after seeing the Miss Universe contest or a Hooters Aloha Bowl football game? Mike Markrich, decrying the 'declining appeal' of Hawai'i in general and the deterioration of the Waikiki core in particular, where hotel development has been restricted since 1977 and its image 'has gone down-market,' went on to argue that the 'real draws' of Hawai'i have never changed: 'the allure and charm of the unique Native Hawai'ian culture, the warmth of Hawai'i's people, and Hawai'i's spectacular beauty,' in that order.[57]

Again, the appeal is to Hawai'i's being somehow 'true to its roots,' meaning not just the natural scenery or a much-vaunted 'aloha spirit,' but to the 'unique' native culture which is seen as under threat and (to be sure) resisting postmodern incorporation into the tourist apparatus. Hawai'ian culture is not just abjected and demonized, as it was by the earlier US missionary generations, but preserved and pampered as source of market appeal and state revenue.

Tourism-- as a vast global apparatus-- encompasses not just the marketing of places and cultures, but the whole infrastructure of transport, accommodation, catering, recreation, and services for tourists; growing in scale, tourism has become one of the largest of the world's transnational industries. If, by now, 'tourism is to Hawai'i what automobiles are to Detroit,"[58] then what we produce and market in this post-Fordist climate is some intangible compound of material reality, exotic desire, and symbolic need: (a) an image of place as well as that (2) cultural-material polity itself in its appeal as a place and culture worth traveling to. A globalized image of locale and local place that hovers over the place itself and re-signifies its meanings and events.

Recuperation of the Pacific local identity is perilous these days of late capitalist weather in the globalizing economy of cash flow and cultural mix. The turn towards 'radical localism' is not necessarily a progressive move within the globalizing economy of so-called 'nihilo-capitalism."

In the state of California, to name an affiliated site on the US Pacific Rim, the Sierra Club came close to approving a resolution calling for restricted legal immigration into the United States. The resolution reflected not so much US economic nationalism but a resource-protective environmentalism (advocated by scholars like Paul Ehrlich, E. F. Schumacher, and Donald Worster), with its 'roots not on the nativist right but on the green left, among population-control advocates."[59] The goal is a kind of static society that will not make excessive demands on the environmental resources. Sierra Club President Adam Werbach (while opposing the anti-immigrant resolution) puts the case for a 'radical localism' this way: 'We should demand that the Safeway in Iowa carry only native potatoes. And we should draw the line when department stores bottom out prices, muscle out local businesses and eradicate local culture."

This kind of eco-friendly 'localism' can be used to oppose the unpredictable dynamism of the capitalist transnational system, with its emphasis on liberalized freedoms of choice, competition and mobility; but, less happily, it can also become a rallying cry to restrict the impacts of technology, trade, and immigration across the borders, installing enclaves and limits upon what is taken to be inside the local community. This kind of place-bound and bounded localism, as Virginia Postrel claims, can promote a 'slippery green slope to nativism' and, in effect, preserve a racialized hierarchy of social and environmental goods for those who already have plenty and want to keep others out. The line of creative flight is broken by state fiat or ideological will to power.

Given the unstable post-plantation and tourist-centered economy that is now emerging, Hawai'i does not need any more white racism, ethnic abjection, or a greater imbalance of cultural capital and goods. Instead, as I have been urging here around the twinned notions of the Postmodern and Experimental Local, Pacific places and sites of cultural production ('global cities') like Honolulu, Taipei, and Sydney, can be connected to diverse and thickened lines of flight, multiplicity of tactics, risk, and cultural innovation. Place is not just bounded or pure in its makeup and its creation.

The vision of a 'post-local"/postmodern Pacific still needs different writing strategies, riskier mixtures, and newer tactics of symbol-making, as many have been urging (as theory/practice) and journals like Tinfish and Mana have been embodying more broadly across the region; needs a more far-reaching, regional, or global vision of the local plight ('plight of the local') as it were.

We don't need the marketing of 'local' (or local-seeming) writers whose metaphors of exotic remoteness and aesthetic charm are all too close, in language codes and protocols, to the packaging patterns of the tourist industry and the marketplace of semiotic and cultural kitsch.[60] We don't need more writers of place and ethnicity who seek to 'add a tinge of cultural authenticity for marketing purposes' and would simulate cultural specificity and the mongrel languages of place for the purposes of historical laundering and self-aggrandizement as lyric hero. In the cautionary analysis of Barry Masuda, himself caustically resisting the cultural kitsch localism of Garret Hongo's 'yellow light' poetry, such 'simulacra neutralize the noise of regional origins, history, and identity; they homogenize, flatten, and dissimulate the asymmetrical power-relations into a kind of ideal liberal pluralism."[61] As in Masuda's own critical-poetic practice in writing 'anti-poems' about Cybercarp at Ala Moana and locals fishing out Maui and blaming tourists, we need to allow for a range of language experimentation, mixed languages, uncanny and outrageous voices, postmodern tropes, and post-local codes.

Mapping this 'place where the two postmodernisms meet,' I have tried to show that Hawai'i is a much-represented Pacific site that remains torn between global-simulation dynamics (Miss Universe tourist syndrome) and the pulls of primordial place (Native Hawai'ian claims), struggling as sign between the more general ethnic pastoralism of mainstream US poetics (a la the Heath Anthology of American Literature) versus more localist pulls towards 'Bamboo Ridge.' It is still a liminal space and 'contact zone' of lively creativity, mutual criticism, and contestation that will not go away any day soon.

Experimental Pacific writing can be further undertaken as a critical process of 'becoming-mutated-local,' as expression of altered states and counter-imaginings of the uneven and queer nexus between place/ identity/ self/ community/ nation(s). In Barry Masuda's words, 'a cannibal local poetics in the zone of division/ devour/ becoming."[62] 'Postmodern' may be a vapid and tired slogan by now, but it can still open up a space and suggest tactics of cultural poetics to be used for (devious) innovation, linguistic risk, queer otherness, and mongrel innovation. ('Post' acted upon as sign of writing after/ against/ within prior liberal-modern formations of selfhood and statehood.)

For the Pacific is not just some 'great highway' of hyper-commercial 'trade routes' and 'sea-lanes,' as Admiral Alfred T. Mahan urged upon frontier-expanding Americans in his militarized vision of the Pacific as geo-imperial 'lake' in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), and James Michener later ratified in his upbeat, born-again vision of the postwar Pacific as 'the highway between Asia and America."[63]

This magical, dirty, swirling, history-laden ocean is also a fluid and multiple space for Deleuzian 'lines of flight' and affirmative place-imaginings; we need more expansive 'Oceania' visions and multiple contestations within the North/South transnational bind (as in exemplary Pacific authors mingling indigenous creativity and cultural critique, like Epeli Hau'ofa's counter-Oceania and counter-conversion to transnational indigeneity in the amazing essay 'Our Sea of Islands' or Teresia Teaiwa's deconstructive troping of Polynesia as 'militourist' body of nuclear terror); sites wherein inflows and outflows can lead to more mongrel innovation and push language beyond tired colonizing dynamics of white/other; sites wherein 'the local' as such is never merely defeated and passively absorbed by the ever-capitalizing world-system.[64]

These 'borderland' spaces and/or 'contact zones' of linguistic innovation, political investment, and cultural risk as enacted in peripheral inside Pacific and 'Rim' sites (as in Hawai'i, Western Australia, or Taiwan) do not just belong to global capital, nor is place or the so-called 'Asia/Pacific imaginary' endlessly beholden to the colonial imaginary of Euro-American Orientalism as it retools, crosses borders, transnationalizes, and goes local.[65]

My own work in writing cultural poetics over the years in Hawai'i, as in Taiwan, Korea, and California, has comprised a small, minor, mongrel, yet affiliated attempt (tied both to Tinfish and Bamboo Ridgeat experimental/local extremes of cultural production) to help provide such a grounded vision of Asian/Pacific place and site, theoretical 'reimagining,' expressing the changing turf of literary culture as situated in the troubled yet promissory waters of Asia/Pacific.


III. More Panic Poetics, as Such

My life had become a confused mess. It no longer had the logic of Leave it to Beaverthat it once did. The suburbs of plasticizing America may radicalize the soul, yet I turn inward (white-souled Dickinson in Amherst). The cities swarm, swain, and radicalize the lyric voice, say, I implode outward (Whitman becoming entrepreneurial son of NYC mass-energies). Lyric poet in any event becomes some kind of advanced sign-consumer, producing further signs of 'the self-as-America.' He/she looks for beggarly signs of 'success' within/beyond prior marketings of American identity as 'sublime.'

If poet gropes towards Las Vegas to be reborn and/or recycled, the task of avant-garde becomes luridly incarnational: to become semiotic waste aglow in the afterlife of shelf-life. Advanced market research into the postmodern sign constitutes an avant-garde trashing of aura-history and turns into an institute for the study of the avant-garde at Harvard. Mood need not be one of lament and eternal negation (Adorno): try animating energies of panic-bliss or Kroker's 'technological activism,' try language-poetry conversions?





Notes to Section III

[66] I allude here to three place-based collections of poetry/poetics which I have been working on, over the past two decades, in Hawai'i, Taiwan, Korea, and California: Rob Wilson, Waking In Seoul (Seoul: Mineumsa, 1988); Ananda Air: American Pacific Lines of Flight (forthcoming) and Automat: Un/American Poetics (forthcoming).

In my own anti-lyric case of US re-imagining , the passage of a post-industrial poetics from the birthplace in the mill valleys of Waterbury, Connecticut towards 'India"; swerves Yankee-like westward across country towards California sign-gold (San Francisco to UC Berkeley, 'Summer of Love'); then to the obsessive local poetics of blue blue Hawai'i; transcultural fusion of displaced Americana in South Korea, 'waking in Seoul"; then on to imaging 'Hiroshima' and the semiotic bliss of Tokyo not to mention the 'postcolonial' swarming city of Taipei-- for me these became representational Asian/Pacific frontiers and border spaces taken out 'along a line of flight' westward to the East. The semiotics of orientalism would be worked over if not undone in the dharma bum quest, the flight to Asia by Ananda Air.[66]

If the post-nuclear future of 2000 still lies before us like an empty beach of 'dead power' (says Baudrillard), then we might as well have fun (says that zany American poet of Fashion Island, Zippy). We are given over to producing and consuming signs of the 'Americas' project in the global village as the makings of a new computer/consumer heaven: 'love endureth all things' (Corinthians 13:7).

As the Berlin Wall fell and the Pacific beckoned as dwelling place and home, I realized driving my Toyota pickup into the Springfield Amtrak Station, late at night, listening to a mix-and-match of AM oldies from the fifties, sixties, and seventies (although being genteel and broke in the eighties) that maybe Adorno (displaced in the city of angels) should have enjoyed Harry Belafonte's creolized take on life as alienated wage-labor: 'tally dee bananas, daylight come and me wanna go home,"

home to the Hollywood dream factory.


Photo credits - thanks to Juliana Spahr of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa for supplying the photographs.

Thanks are due to Tinfish magazine, who published a shorter version of this piece as a chapbook - Rob Wilson, Pacific Postmodern: From the Sublime to the Devious, Writing the Experimental/Local Pacific in Hawai'i. Published in Honolulu in edition of 200 by Susan Schultz, Tinfish, 47-391 Hui Iwa #3, Kaneohe, Hawai'i 96744, USA; designed by K. C. Mah. ISBN: 1-930068-04-2
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