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.’