Ralph
Wessman
An Interview with
Susan Schultz
Susan Schultz is Associate Professor of English at
the University of Hawai’i-Manoa and the editor of the new magazine Tinfish.
The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemproary
Poetry, which she edited, was published in 1995 by the University of Alabama Press.
In March 1996 she visited Hobart where she was a
guest at the Salamanca Writers’ Festival.
The question of a distinct and independent
Tasmanian literature is one that receives increasing attention. Interestingly, there are
parallels with the Hawaiian literary experience; as Susan Schultz explains.
‘The strong local writing community in
Hawai’i is careful to separate itself from the "mainstream" writing done on
the mainland. Hawai’i’s culture is very different from that on the continent -
which is not to say that it’s homogenous there, either. There’s a greater Asian
influence for one - and here Asians are the majority, as they are not on the mainland.
There’s also more of a mix of ethnicities and cultural heritages as people intermarry
- I wonder if this happens most on islands - and begin to create hybrid traditions. Thus
there is, generally speaking, a greater emphasis on community here than elsewhere; the
famous American reliance on self-reliance comes under intense scrutiny here. What
interests me at the moment is what the effect of the tremendous success of local writing -
Lois-Ann Yamanaka, for example, just published a novel with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a
New York publishing house - will be on future work; and on the perception of Hawai’i
on the mainland. (The state is seen as a large vacation beach, for the most part). I
especially wonder how this will affect the strong sense of place in local writing;
there’s a very strong attachment to the landscape and to the languages of the place,
including pidgin and Hawaiian. Nowhere is this sense of place stronger than in writing or
in music by Hawaiians themselves. I’d be really interested to hear more about the
Tasmanian take on island literature, and I’ve always loved Gertrude Stein’s
notion that English literature is the way it is because England is an island.’
Schultz says she is ‘woefully ignorant’
of Pacific writing outside of Hawai’i, but hopes her work on the magazine Tinfish
will change that.
‘In what is perhaps on instance of backward
logic, I began the journal to learn about a community of experimental writers in the
Pacific; this is backwards only because I started from a position of ignorance more than
anything. Hawai’i has a very lively literary community, but there hasn’t been
much of an outlet for the kind of writing found in Tinfish; on the one hand there
are members of the creative writing faculty at the university where I teach, and on the
other there are "local" writers. The university writers, for the most part,
participate in what Charles Altieri calls "the scenic mode" of writing; their
poetry is free verse, based on a belief in organic form. Local writers, who in the last 15
or so years have incresingly written in Hawaiian Creole English, tell the necessary
stories of place and family. I don’t mean to criticize either mode, or the many
variations on each, but, interested as I am in Language writing especially, I wanted both
to find and to encourage that kind of writing here - and to discover it elsewhere in the
Pacific "neighborhood". One of the great virtues in living in Hawai’i has
been to discover the many languages that meet here: standard English, pidgin, and Hawaiian
foremost among them. The Hawai’i writing in the first issue of Tinfish
explored the possibilities inherent in experimenting with these languages: Joe
Balax’s concrete poems explored the meanings of Hawaiian words, and Barry Masuda used
pidgin and literary theory jargon to write about his own departure from Hawai’i to
study in California. Kathy Banggo played with the material language - by placing different
letters on different levels on the page - in her lyric poem about her mother. What
delighted me most about putting the first issue together was to see these Hawai’i
poems complemented by work from Australia, New Zealand, and California. The second issue
includes several poems about anthropology, including a satiric mini-epic by Joe Balaz
about being the subject of the anthropologist’s gaze, and Joan Retallack’s
"notes from the specific rim" - of Maryland, USA, in her case - and a poem by
Richard Hamasaki about Hawaiian "artifacts" locked up in museums.’
Im March, Schultz was a guest at the Salamanca
Writers’ Festival. She says her time in Hobart made her realize how little she knew
about Australian poetry, and how much, by way of contrast, her fellow panel members -
Philip Mead, John Kinsella, Joanne Burns and Hazel Smith - had read of American poetry.
‘The name "Frank O’Hara" kept
coming up like a mantra, at Salamanca and elsewhere, and it struck me that his importance
to Australian poets was perhaps very similar to his importance for Americans. Namely,
O’Hara wrote poems marked by spontaneity, and in an informal language that gave him
access to the "ordinary", even as he layered them with references to "high
art"". I’m remembering here his obsession with Rachmaninov. I was also
struck by the presence in the air of the American movement of "Language poetry",
which foregrounds the material with which poems are made and calls into question
traditional poetic forms, including O’Hara’s free verse (though Language poets
link free verse to a more nature-oriented organicism in poetry of the 1960s and 1970s).
John Kinsella linked the Language poetry movement with his own work, while insisting that
Australain poetry must remain grounded in its own place; this interest in place alone
distinguishes him from most American language poets. I believe that Charles Bernstein, for
example, claims that his place is where his language is, something I can’t imagine
John Kinsella saying. Hazel Smith alluded less favorably to Language poetry, but her own
performative style reminded me more of Bernstein’s - though she adds a musical
element - than of any other poet I could think of.’
Like us all, Schultz was unprepared for the tragedy
of Port Arthur.
‘After I left Hobart, I drove - nervously, on
the left side of the road - to Port Arthur, a place obviously much in all our minds of
late. I was struck by the intense strangeness of the place - the awful history, the
stunning beauty of the landscape, the oddity of placing a bakery beside the flogging
field. I could little imagine, however, what would happen a month later.’
Susan’s stay in Oz concluded with a visit to
Melbourne and Sydney before her return to Honolulu.
‘I delivered talks about Hawai’i’s
literature at both the Universities of Tasmania and Melbourne, in which I discussed the
importance of "pidgin" - actually Hawaiian Creole English - to recent writing by
Asian American writers in Hawai’i. The language is used by other writers here, too,
but I limited my papers to a certain few writers whose work I know well. I had a hard time
ascertaining what, if any similarities to this "local literature" there are in
Australia, though I gathered that there is not any literature in a non-standard English;
this is certainly a subject that I’d like to look into further in the future.’
‘In Sydney I met up with other poets including
John and Lyn Tranter, who were kind enough to not only put me up, but who also introduced
me to some of their friends. Once again, I was impressed by the interest in American
poets, including my own favorite, John Ashbery, who was a friend of Frank
O’Hara’s in New York. By this time I had filled a suitcase with books of
Australian poetry, to which I will devote a healthy chunk of my summer.’
Like many an enthusiastic editor, Schultz works
hard to promote her magazine. For the record, Tinfish ...
‘... is a journal of experimental poetry which
emphasizes work from the Pacific region. Thus far we’ve published work by John
Kinsella, John Tranter, and Alison Georgeson, with more to follow in Tinfish # 3
at the end of (our) summer, as well as poetry by Hawai’i, California, and mainland
USA writers. I’m most excited, in editing the journal, by the new combinations of
poets from very different locations, all of those working out of a set of assumptions that
could be termed - loosely - postmodern.’