New Oceania Poetry Interviews
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NEW OCEANIA POETRY INTERVIEWS curated by CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ #34 ESSAY PRESS LISTENING TOUR As the Essay Press website re-launches, we have commissioned some of our favorite conveners of public discussions to curate conversation-based CONTENTS chapbooks. Overhearing such dialogues among poets, prose writers, critics and artists, we hope to re-envision how Essay can emulate and expand upon recent developments in trans-disciplinary small-press culture. Introduction iv by Craig Santos Perez Series Editors Maria Anderson Interview with Lehua Taitano 1 Andy Fitch Interview with Dan Taulapapa McMullin 13 Ellen Fogelman Aimee Harrison Interview with Audrey Brown-Pereira 29 Courtney Mandryk Afterword 43 Victoria A. Sanz by Noʻu Revilla Travis Sharp Ryan Spooner Author Bios 48 Randall Tyrone Series Assistants Cristiana Baik Ryan Ikeda Christopher Liek Cover Image Dancing Queen by Dan Taulapapa McMullin, 2012 oil paint on photograph collage Cover Design Courtney Mandryk Layout Aimee Harrison The major themes of Pacific poetry include culture, identity, kinship, colonialism, tourism, religion, sexuality, gender, migration, militarism, urbanism, nature, environmental justice, politics, language, INTRODUCTION mixed-race heritage and more. Cutting across these themes are a range of diverse poetic styles, from — Craig Santos Perez free verse to sonnets, from the confessional to the documentary, from the postmodern to the lyric. The three poets included in this set of interviews represent an avant-garde edge of Pacific poetry, iterary historians trace the origins of contemporary and they each have recent publications: A Bell LPacific poetry to the 1960s and 1970s, when many Made of Stones, by Chamorro writer Lehua Pacific islands were transformed by movements for Taitano, Coconut Milk, by Samoan writer Dan demilitarization, cultural revitalization and political Taulapapa McMullin, and passages in between sovereignty. Pacific literature was a vital component i(s)lands, by Cook Islands Maori/Samoan writer of these movements because our stories offered Audrey Brown-Pereira. Because the experimental a space to expose the injustices of colonialism, nature of their work often requires multiple readings to celebrate the resilience of our peoples, and to and interpretations, these interviews aim to provide advocate for a decolonized future. readers with background to the development, intentions and personalities of these poets and their During the last 50 years, there has been an eruption work. The afterword is written by another talented of anthologies, chapbooks and single-author poet, Hawaiian writer Noʻu Revilla, who is herself an collections of Pacific poetry published throughout avant-garde written-word and performance poet, as the Pacific and the United States. These works well as a Pacific literature scholar. have circulated in classrooms, bookstores and online; additionally, Pacific poets have themselves After reading these interviews, I hope you will circulated their works via live performances in local purchase these authors’ books, and experience the and international venues. dynamism and vibrancy of Pacific poetry and poetics. iv v interview with LEHUA TAITANO Craig Santos Perez: What is your “origin story” as a poet? When and why did you first start writing poetry? Lehua Taitano: I started writing poetry as soon as I found out what poems were—around seven years old, probably. I have always been drawn to the spaces of poetry: visually, contextually. Poems were something I could tear out of a notebook and keep in my pocket. A small space I would try to fill with the most potent stuff I could think of. So I’m fairly certain that all of the poems I ever wrote as a young person were, expectedly, pretty awful. But that didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t writing poems for other people. I used them more to think about the world in a way that sounded beautiful to me. Because it was gratifying, fun. I think that’s still why I’m drawn to poetry. Mana and Ea, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, 2012 oil paint on photograph collage 1 I didn’t intend to be a Poet, capital “P.” I have only World” never saw publication, due to its enormity really started calling myself a poet recently, after I (12 typed pages). realized my first book was going to be a book of poetry. So far, I like it. I think it’ll stick. Later, in high school, my reading education shifted, probably because I had entered a slightly more CSP: Who were your early writing influences urban school setting, and so I was presented with when you were growing up? In high school? As an African American literature choices in classes and undergraduate? libraries. To say that I was drawn to African American literature is understating what was really more of a LT: Since my family moved off-island right before clinging to. I was devastated as a child by the overtly I began elementary school, I began my education racist, anti-black sentiment that was prevalent in my in the rural, white South. I was the only kid of color community (in fact even in my own home, coming in my class, and was one of about three in the from a racist father), and the reality of slavery and entire school. I didn’t realize for many years that my the black American experience resonated with education was exclusionary—that is, focused entirely something I could not yet articulate. There were on a white, conservative, patriot view of the South simply no stories, no literature I had within my reach, and America, and a pro-militarized view of the world. that spoke to exactly my experience of racism as So my early writing influences were almost entirely a brown island girl in the South, so I clung to the white writers. simulacra (as differently complicated as it was/is) of I knew that I was drawn to writing, to reading, to the black experience as something that approached the world of story. So I read everything I could get my own. my hands on, including every volume of the Lexicon Universal Encyclopedia, which my father bought from I devoured Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James a traveling salesman. I started writing stories and Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, poems early on, and I had a second-grade teacher, Richard Wright and the like. I continually sought out Mrs. Newman, who took an interest in me and stories of black struggle, because the experience helped put some of my stories into typed form. She of reading them ignited something in me that I felt helped me submit some to the children’s magazine I knew. At the same time, I knew it wasn’t my story Highlights, but alas, “Rhonda Rabbit is Out of This and didn’t want to claim it as such. In retrospect, I 2 3 believe it was my first experience of wanting to be strong is the system that keeps even the people it in solidarity with other brown folks. oppresses and denies in doubt of its realness, right? As an undergraduate, and with the advent of being So I took the classes and read more white writers able to access the Internet, I was able to broaden (nearly all the texts assigned were written by white the search for literature that resonated with my men) and, by my own turns, started writing stories experience. The more I searched, the more I was that were not mine. I wrote white characters whose able to hone in on an Islander perspective, but it lives centered upon white situations with white ideals. honestly wasn’t until graduate school, which I started At some point in my first year, it finally occurred to 10 years after undergrad, that I was able to read me that I was unhappy with my stories, but even then I didn’t know why. And then basically, in the middle Chamoru literature. It was at that moment that I felt of reading one of my own stories, I said out loud, the depth and breadth of what I had been missing “What the fuck am I doing?” and it was like a switch all along. Mind that this was only about five years was thrown. My own revealing, a self-reckoning, my ago, when I was 32. own Great Brown Epiphany. CSP: Can you tell us about your experience in So I started changing everything. Questioning graduate school? How did it shape your writing? why I was writing in the first place. What were my What was your thesis about? motives? Who was I writing for? What privileges had I been bringing to the table that I didn’t recognize? : I had pretty naïve expectations when I began LT My interrogation of writing self, in turn, began as graduate school. That is, I had the hopes that the an interrogation of form. I questioned the very highest institutions of American education would literal white space I was typing on, transferred to be different than other institutions. I think it was the white page, 8.5 x 11. Stacks of white pages that the desire to disbelieve what I had long come to had contained white themes and white characters, suspect, which is that the very idea of “American informed by white classmates and white teachers. institution” is fundamentally based on the same That excluded my own identity. ideals as American society, which is to say: primarily white-supremacist, genocidal, racist, homophobic, I began writing stories that ran off the page, whose misogynistic, patriarchal and imperialistic. But text printed beyond the margins. I wrote stories that 4 5 were only typed in the margins. I wrote stories that more respect and solidarity, which is to say—avoid started on page 12, instead of page one.