Us & Them(s)

Like Shel, I've been sitting with this piece by Perez-Wendt for a few days, wondering how it is we are meant to access the poem. “We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence” is such a pointed title that it took me many reads to even begin absorbing what was going on inside the frame. I think perhaps the title is supposed to have that effect, the proverbial “stick ‘em up” moment of having a gun pointed in your direction. When I read it, I froze. I couldn’t remember anything that happened afterwards. I couldn’t really tell you any specifics about the initial encounter of the title, either, except to say that I sucked in my breath. Perez-Wendt turns the tables here, puts us (the general, the canon, the capital-u Us) on defense for once.

What’s interesting about the beginning of the poem is that without the title, it would be an easy access point. Like Shel mentioned, there is an intuitive understanding of a nursery rhyme here, or at the very least, a sing-song sway between punctuation. “They’ve dusted us / From toe to top / Well nigh / Two hundred years;” and we breathe, then begin again. She accomplishes this by shortening that third line and accenting in a way that drives forward motion. “Well nigh” (as well as “All over us” in the next section) has a forward lean to it, a momentum that helps us through “Two hundred years;” (and through “Uncontroverted, clear;”). Perez-Wendt is a master in these moments, truly schooling the form and working it for her benefit.

What’s happening while she’s linguistically manipulating us? The dusting of a people, specifically Hawaiian I think, over the entire period of the missionary occupation leading up to and through the (unconsensual) annexing by the United States in 1898. The searching for blame, even today, as Hawaiian is still rapidly eaten up and swallowed away by the imperialist language that, while no longer “required” there, has injected its colonial venom and is slowly wiping out history. “They’ve dusted us,” the speaker says, only to find “their fingerprints / All over us / Uncontroverted, clear.”

This is not a new story – the searching for a group or people or person or culture or whatever to blame for “substandard” or “uncivilized” or “urban” or “inner-city” living, only to find that the ones trying to point the finger are, in fact, the ones to blame.

“They’ve kicked the chair / From under us,” the speaker continues, “Acquitted themselves well.” The repetition that follows supports this recycling of history. The powerful and imperialistic repeatedly pull out the chair from under an area or people they have invited to “sit down,” if you will, and then look the other way when the area or people fall on their asses.

Perez-Wendt goes on, using the same imagery, but changing the metaphor of the chair. It goes from representing bailing on some kind of assistance, to stealing the chair (& thereby appropriating, like the US appropriates so many cultures for monetary gain). She doesn’t bother with the rest; there is too much to list. In the last two repetitions of this impacted triplet, we finally get the emotion. “Ignored the tolling bell,” whether that is a warning bell or an alarm bell, it doesn’t matter because both apply to the US, who has both continued to take from a country well past the point of subsistence, and continued to disregard requests (or rulings or laws or peace treaties) to stop its abuse after they’ve been made. They’ve “Consigned themselves to hell,” she writes, before volunteering “Etc. etc.” The poem doesn’t need more examples at this point, but including the “etc” really drives home that she would need more pages than available to really get into the wrongdoings. What’s important here, though, is that she has made her point that “We Are Not the Crime / We Are the Evidence.”

Just as a final note, there’s an interesting juxtaposition here of Us & Them. The “They”s aren’t clear and I’m not sure they have to be. Who is on Hawaii’s side except Hawaii? The United States (post-annexation) is what made Hawaii into a tourist destination, crowding its islands with vacationers and co-opting its culture for profit. The title infuses us with the idea of cause and effect and it would seem that Perez-Wendt is arguing that the only effects are visible in Hawaii, making everything else a cause. I only mention this because the “They” has multiple identities in this poem, showing up in a variety of faces and roles, while the “Us” stays the same. Even within the repetition, the Us never changes, but the lines including They are always different. Great technique, I think, for showing the tally marks building against Us.

The English Canon by Adrienne "BadAss" Su

There are a number of poems in this week’s reading that I find exciting and worthy of further exploration. The one I keep coming back to, however, is Adrienne Su’s “The English Canon” in the AAP book (this anthology is such a goldmine for me this semester). Her work is shockingly fresh. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve read a feminist poem that didn’t make me roll my eyes or turn the page feeling as if it had been done a million times before? Or done better? I think, literarily, feminist poetry or feminist-themed poetry has hit a plateau. Whether that’s because we’re at an impasse politically or because we haven’t found a new angle for the old argument, I’m not sure. Even in the Intro to Poetry class I’m TAing for, most freshwomen believed Joan Larkin’s Vagina Sonnet (ridiculously radical at the time it was written) was old hat. One queer student even said, “If I hear one more poem that uses the word ‘vagina’ like it’s revolutionary or something, I’m gonna gag.” I just about fell out of my chair. We, as women, are living in a totally different climate of gender-politics than has ever existed before.

All that said, I think Adrienne Su bypasses all that is “old hat” and addresses feminism, academia, power structures, and even cultural differences (not just among people, but among women) in a way that is fresh-faced, effective and downright radical. This poem moves me. I love first and foremost that the poem is called “The English Canon,” not just “The Canon,” as we (or rather, I) often refer to it, hierarchically assuming that everyone will understand it to be the English one. I don’t think she does this to suggest that canons in other languages are necessarily more inclusive, but rather to point out these levels of access. Excuse the generalization (or call it out), but I’m not sure folks of the English canon (white, male, educated) really believe there are other canons. Or, if they do, that they could ever imagine which poets might inhabit them. At the same time, this poem is showing up in an anthology of Asian American Poetry, written by an Asian American poet, allowing us to assume that maybe this is a book (or poem) that folks of the English canon might not even read; perhaps the designation of “English” is a signifier to those reading this book (Asian American poets or otherwise) that she is not talking about them, per se, but standing in solidarity against this huge oppressive literary establishment of exclusion.

She begins both the first and second stanzas with the phrase “It’s not that…” letting us assume that she’s narrowing the dimensions of the poem’s focus. She says it’s not that women were portrayed seldom and only in a certain light, it’s not that folks of color were ignored except when their exotification added humor and triumph to the poem – but by bringing these things to the forefront of the poem and negating them, we not only know that they happened, but that they do matter. It is about exotification of varying heritages, it is about sexism and the power dynamics between genders. It is exactly that.

What she really means, she says, is that those portrayals have outlasted their time and, where literature is supposed to be a place of access to knowledge for everyone (who can read), the lessons the English canon teaches have perpetuated this marginalized experience for her (and everyone else, let’s be honest). We recognize the power of the English canon and the implications of being published in something like The Norton Anthology or something equally boring & best used as a doorstop. Doorstop or not, we recognize that power, and in recognizing it, understand it to be true on a level beyond our say. Whether or not it is actually true, doesn’t erase its authority.

The way Su ends the poem is sharp and twists hard. She knows we are, in light of the 2nd and 3rd waves, allowed to and obligated to own our autonomy and demanding it. Still, a woman has to be part of the (capitalist) system and make money, a system that still holds up the English canon as The Canon. “Because what do her teachers know, living in books, / And what does she know, starting from scratch?” I fall out of my chair for real at these lines, know so intimately that inbetween point of being part of the system in order to change the system, as the same time that we must question what has come before while simultaneously building up our own classic history from scratch.

reading noguchi in alaska

So, I’m just gonna front with the fact that Heather already blew everything out of the water with her analysis of Noguchi’s first poem. Bam, woman. You’ve got a knack for that like whoa.


I’ve been looking at these poems while traveling this week & they’ve stuck with me, pulled at me at odd moments. I’ve read them so many times & in so many places that they’ve begun to seem like one extended narrative to me. The first three, obviously yes, but also the last two (on their own, or as a group of five). Since entering grad thesis land recently, I’ve begun thinking a lot about the shape of a book and how one constructs a book to stand on each of its individual poem-legs, but also to be able to move together as one larger animal. I was thinking about this while reading these poems; poems that Noguchi has definitely linked, but perhaps had little organizational control over in the instance of this (or any) anthology. It got me wondering about how flexible our work must be & yet how steadfast. I feel like I could spend a lifetime trying to master that balance on the page.


Back to the poems, themselves. When I read these first three poems, I see continuity physically, like a string to which each poem is clipped. They are pieces of laundry, sheets perhaps, pinned with precision to the line. Flapping in slow motion. Every time Noguchi tosses verbs around, I feel as if we are floating, dream-like, through the action. Kenji flexing his knees, diving deep into the couch cushions. I think a lot of this has to do with the veil that Heather is referencing in her post of this first poem, but also with the fact that Kenji seems to be occupying a very malleable space between young & grown. You can feel the bulge of innocence here, Noguchi makes it so full and rubbery you can practically touch Kenji’s imagination juxtaposed against the flexed nature of his body, bothered by responsibility. The line that this first poem is clipped to contains hyperbolic forces of nature that only a young boy crashing head-first into the discipline of accountability could reveal.


In the second poem, “From Rooftops, Kenji Takezo Throws Himself,” we get a better sense of this imagination, as if the poem titles are the boy’s own third-person narrator introducing his next daring act. There is less figurative curvature here and more subject-related roundness. Noguchi lets us see how Kenji has internalized the rotundity of his mind’s eye & it is his body that bounces, not the entire scene. His heart, his breath, all of these physical exchanges becomes parts of himself that he can own & learns how to own. Obviously, he’s still talking about wanting to be a surfer, but there is a shift between the first poem and the second that indicates more knowing, less hyperbole. Noguchi makes sure, especially in that last stanza, that we notice Kenji hasn’t lost any of his youthful passion, but the language has strengthened in ways that invoke confidence.


In the third poem, “The Ocean Inside Him,” I think we’ve hit transformation. Just as the poems have shortened in length, they have also tightened in control. We get to this poem and suddenly we’re not talking about waves anymore, we’re talking about all kinds of wave-like emotions. Noguchi sets us off early with the word “whitewash” in the second line, then let’s us gloss over lines like “the heavy life of the ocean,” and “it wasn’t funny, but he giggled.” Outside forces have invaded the bubble-like bliss of those earlier moments with the ironing board and I guess what I’m wondering is where is the rest of the laundry?

Inclined and Wind Shifts

So as I read the poets for this week’s reading, it was difficult for me to not see the poems in the context of pre-Columbian, colonial, and post colonial. I started to read each poem looking for these references or the lack of them. Of course, I realize that this is not a required element of amazing poetry, but for the purposes of discussion about poets of color, I am quite intrigued by this concept.

The poets from this week made me realize how, in many respects (whether poets accept this or not), we (poets) are historians. We look at the vast world around us (or the small neighborhood we live in) and we select the things we need/want to share for the purpose of a particular poem. There is so much information available to us and we can, if we want, write about that information in any form we want. Poets typically select poems as their medium. In these poems, we can make war seem like a heroic adventure. We can truthfully display a culture or exaggerate their existence on this planet (then we give it a cute name like hyperbole). My point is that this issue of placement in history and culture is important and can often be the element in the poetry that readers most connect to.

For instance, in the poem titled September 11, 2001 by Samuel Hazo, I am captured by the title alone. I know this date by heart and I remember what it felt like to sit in front of the television for hours not knowing what was really happening and not knowing if people I knew were in the towers or on the plane. When he says, “The natural and scheduled worlds keep happening” I am there. I am reminded that I was getting dressed for work when it happened. That I was still in my robe – that I still had my scarf on my head and that my boyfriend (now husband) didn’t believe me when I yelled to him in the shower, “a plane just crashed into the world trade center” and he responded, “what? did you say near or into?” I don’t remember much conversation after that.

Hazo uses powerful language to describe a horrific event without mocking it or degrading it. In line 19 he writes, “engulfing us like dustfall / from a building in collapse / The day / turns dark as an eclipse.” No matter where you were in the world when this happened, you will surely agree that your life was engulfed by this event and that the world metaphorically turned dark.

In the second movement of this poem, he takes us deeper into the bowels of the moment. He describes a scene where people “downfloated from the hundredth floor” and tells us that “there where others—plunging, / stepping off or diving in tandem / hand in hand, as if the sea / or nets awaited them.

By the end of the poem, we are in day two when we all woke to realize that it did actually happen. It was not a collective nightmare. That last image of “snapping from aerials or poles, / the furious clamor of flags” sticks with me because I wonder whose flags he is referencing. I assume that because he is of Arab descent that he means those flags to be the ones Arabs may have been flying in recognition of their homeland, that they were suddenly afraid to display.

This poem makes me feel that immediate movement towards the edge. I feel an entire nation of people being pushed closer to the edge when I read this and at the same time, I feel a nation that historically has felt dominate, suddenly feeling subordinate. It’s powerful and moving and doesn’t pick sides and doesn’t try to accuse or blame or justify – it just reports with the “poet’s eye” and brings me back to a discussion we had in class about the inseparable nature of poetry and politics.

I’m sure there are many out there in the poetry critique world who found this poem offensive in some way, because the critical eye is guided by our personal politics and our background and our experiences in the world and our age and so many other factors. I’m not discrediting anyone’s opinion of this poem. I feel strongly that this piece touches on many of the elements we have discussed in class regarding poets of color – how history and poetry relate to one another, how we can identify the natural elements from a colonial/post-colonial perspective, the question of what is place, the placement of history and culture, dominance and subordination, and the center and the edge.

***I wanted to talk more about other pieces, but got carried away with this one. Maybe I will post separately about the powerful pieces from Suheir Hammad and one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye or the poem “Pig” by David Dominquez, that made me react out loud in a quiet but crowded café filled with reading customers. There were so many in this section that I want to discuss. Maybe I will.

peacelovelight

Kiala