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T H E _ D A N D E L I O N _ C L O C K
Daniel Tiffany: "Each poem in The Dandelion Clock opens with a
fragment of Middle English lyric, the syntax and spelling of the
original retained for its textures and overtones--that is, for its
sympathetic powers. Each sampling serves then as a kind of grace note
for the poem it initiates, calling forth and harmonizing with other
idioms and dialects, all combining for an instant to fabricate a voice
with materials retrieved from a verbal underworld. In this sense, the
poems of The Dandelion Clock may be described as pocket rhapsodies.
It is worth noting that the poems from which I have drawn the Middle
English fragments often survived only through citation in treatises
condemning their vernacular origins." Tiffany's book thus joins Lisa
Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue, Lee Tonouchi's Contemplations on Pidgin
Culture, and other Tinfish Press volumes in raising important issues of
language use.
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T H I R T E E N _ W A Y S _ O F _ L O O K I N G _ A T _ T H E _ B U S
In Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus, Gizelle Gajelonia discovers her muse in Honolulu's TheBus mass transit system. She takes seriously (in this seriously funny chapbook) the notion of routes—routes through Hawaiʻi's history and geography, routes through American poetry, routes through languages spoken in Hawaiʻi.. Many of the pieces parody canonical poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Eric Chock. Out of her parodies come marvelous revisions. Among the figures included in Gajelonia's revised canon are Hawaiʻi's last queen, Liliʻuokalani, Filipina nurses, and an honor's thesis writer very like the author who dreams of Columbia University. |
R E M E M B E R _ T O _ W A V E “Do we need our ruins visible?” asks Kaia Sand. “I carry old maps, but sometimes the space seems illegible because reclaimed wetlands and construction changed the shape of the land. I cross-check books and oral histories and photographs. I imagine.” Sand takes the reader on a guided tour of Portland, Oregon's hidden histories—those of the internment of Japanese-Americans, the shunting of African Americans into the part of the city that floods. Her book is composed of essays, a poetry walk, and poems that rise out of documents like histories from a nearly-forgotten past. Sand shows us how a past can be re-visioned through research and the poetic imagination. |
E U L O G I E S
Elizabeth Soto's is a beautiful elegy to an artist who suffered schizophrenia, as well as an examination of mental illness and suicide. It is also a love poem. “What do I remember?” she asks; what she finds are pieces puzzled together in collage form to make, if not a whole, then an evocation of events and emotions associated with schizophrenia. “I remember he was terrified of everything,” she answers. Once a student of archeology, Soto is able to peel back layers of feeling without flinching, offering the reader a poem that works both on the page and in performance. |
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Tinfish Tinfish 19 includes parodies of Wallace Stevens by Jill Yamasawa and Gizelle Gajelonia; a letter to the editor in verse by Ryan Oishi; poems from Daniel Tiffany's forthcoming Tinfish volume, Dandelion Clock; landlord poems by Oscar Bermeo and Deborah Woodard; interventions in Maoist indigestion by Kenny Tanemura and Guantanamo by Rachel Loden; as well as poems by such luminaries as Barbara Jane Reyes, Jody Arthur, Jennifer Reimer, Janna Plant, Brandon Shimoda, Mandy Luo, Dennis Phillips, Emelihter Kihleng, Paul Naylor and others. The covers were handmade, the books handbound. Cover and centerfold by Maya Portner
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L I V I N G _ P I D G I N : A collection of da pidgin guerrilla's talks and poems, over 60
pages, some concrete, on language and culture in Hawai`i. Living Pidgin has been used as required reading at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Hawai'i Pacific University and University of Illinois
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J A M M E D _ T R A N S M I S S I O N
Jammed Transmission is a unique text. It is poetry, but not poetry, philosophy but not philosophy, religion but not religion. It probably refers, wittingly or unwittingly, to ancient writing practices that were considered to be spiritual exercises, shorthand verse-form takes on scripture, composition as devotional exploration. Such forms of writing were commonplace all over the world at a time when religion – conceived as the process of ultimate encounter with the limits of human thought and being – was not, as it is now, divorced from the literary arts. In fact, in ancient times, long before religion learned how to become effectively repressive and oppressive, there was no distinction whatsoever between these two fields of endeavor. All religion required forms of writing, all writing was sacred writing, and all writers were of necessity religious people, because it was only within monasteries and religious enclaves that the esoteric arts of reading, writing and calligraphy were practiced. (Norman Fischer) |
C H A R L O T T E ' S _ W A Y
Norman Fischer’s long poem takes as its place Charlotte’s Way, a house on the California coast, but mostly the poem takes things in. Fischer, a Zen priest, meditates on talk, the passing of time, the brain, catness, bills to be paid, poems, search parties, birds and myriad other subjects as they flicker in and out of thought. Terri Wada’s design emphasizes the fluidity of Fischer’s thinking; rather than turning from one page to the next, the chapbook opens out, filling both space and time.
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T I N F I S H _ 1 8 . 5 _ : _ T H E _ B O O K
TINFISH 18.5: THE BOOK introduces five young poets from Hawai`i in a format modeled after the word puzzles and games books people carry onto airplanes as they go on vacation. Vacations and games are both respites from practical preoccupations; many people come to Hawai`i for their vacation. But there is another Hawai`i, too, one well known to its residents. This Hawai`i is riven by historical and ethnic conflicts, drug adiction, homelessness, economic downturns, environmental problems, and the near extinction of the Hawaiian language in the 20th century. The poets included here all write about these stern facts in beautiful poems, a paradox that befits the place itself. This interactive book is illustrated by five exceptional artists. |
F R O M _ U N I N C O R P O R A T E D _ T E R R I T O R Y
In the preface to his first book, a lyrical epic on the violent convergences of colonialisms on Guam (Japanese and American), history, family, and language (Chamorro and English), Perez writes: “On some maps, Guam doesn't exist; I point to an empty space in the Pacific and say, 'I'm from here.' On some maps, Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, 'I'm from this unnamed place.' On some maps, Guam is named 'Guam, U.S.A.' I say, 'I'm from a territory of the United States.” On some maps, Guam is named, simply, 'Guam'; I say, 'I am from Guam.'” Written in the spirit of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée and Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco, Perez's book promises to add significantly to a growing canon of Pacific poetries. |
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Tinfish 18 airs it out, offering an issue devoted to the Long Poem. Contributors include Mani Rao, Alysha Wood, Lynn Xu, David Perry, Stephen Collis, Endi Bogue Hartigan, and Norman Fischer, engaging issues of translation, form (including collage, the sonnet sequence, and the elegy), contemporary politics, and more. Covers by Alan Konishi, Interior Art by Sara Hertenstein, centerfold by Gaye Chan.
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