Memory 1

In 2006 I moved into a two-story craftsman house with 70’s shag carpet and a flooded basement, owned by an elderly woman named Sylvia. It was a great location, two blocks from the now closed Erotic Bakery in Seattle, Washington’s Wallingford neighborhood. Across the street from the Erotic Bakery’s ancient shadow stands the beloved poetry-only bookstore, Open Books: A Poem Emporium. Although I was in Seattle to attend the University of Washington’s MFA program in Creative Writing, it was there, in that quaint, alphabetized poetry nirvana that I became educated in “experimental poetry.”

Memory 2

The second floor in the English Department at University of Hawai'i is a rectangular home base for teaching assistants, roaches, assistant professors, and Susan M. Schultz’s office, the founder of Tinfish Press. Her office is a wall-to-wall collage of Tinfish Books, Tinfish journals, books with pencil markings from her grad school days, and Cardinals paraphernalia. When I arrived at the university it was common to find Susan at her computer chair, screaming something baseball-related at her 90’s desktop, amongst a pile of open student portfolios. My office was down the hallway and I would often knock on her door, sometimes nervously, sometimes with casual ease, just to say ‘hi’. She was my professor. Later, she would become my friend.

Memory 3

When John Marshall and Christine Deavel still owned Open Books I was there weekly. I passed the bookstore every day on my walk home from class. Each time I popped in I was greeted with earnest smiles and thoughtful recommendations. They were my imagined professorial parents, asking me what I was studying, how the thesis was going, and if I’d read Catherine Wagner’s Miss America yet? I was turned on to Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Anne Carson, and Zhang Er. I went to all the readings I could—free and packed events that could only hold about 20 people—in their galley shop.

Memory 4

My first year at the University of Hawai'i, Susan invited me to a journal “party” of sorts. We were there to assemble and bind Tinfish’s journal, #19. I felt honored to be there. This was the reason I was here, to study experimental poetry with Susan. The covers were handmade, block-printed, from some sort of wood material. The pages were imperfect. The content was confusing and beautiful and the process of binding these journals felt like a democratic act, like I was part of something bigger and more important than whatever poems I was writing for workshop.

Memory 5

It was my last year at the University of Washington. Winter. I wore a plaid puffy jacket that smelled like heirloom tobacco pipes and my grandfather’s breath. I no longer lived next to the Erotic Bakery, but I still made my way to Open Books a few times a month. I was wondering whether or not I should apply for a PhD in creative writing. John and Christine were generous advice-givers. They connected me with students in programs all over the country. They knew which poets taught where. But the process was exhausting.

I was busy at the slim and tidy journal shelves in the bookstore. What’s this? A map? A poem? Many poems? It was issue # 16 of the Tinfish journal. The design was unlike anything I had ever seen. Then, another issue, #17, which looked somewhat like a zine. I was immediately stunned and enamored by the poetry of Sage U‘ilani Takehiro, Tiare Picard, and Ryan Oishi. I want to write like this. I want to make things like this.

Memory 6

I jog almost every morning through the rural neighborhood where I live in Ka'a'awa, on the island of Oahu. It had been only a couple of weeks after Susan told me, via Facebook messenger, that she would likely retire soon and that she was ready to pass Tinfish to someone else. Would I like it? Would I carry it on? I had to think about it.

It was a breezy day, and my legs had to work against each gust. Trump was president. I had a toddler and a baby at home. The pandemic had not yet hit. George Floyd had not yet been murdered, although the weight of systemic and institutionalized racism was heavy on my mind. I was in a murky state, somewhere between rage and hope. As I ran I thought about these two feelings. Are they feelings or reactions? Are they products of the individual or a community? If I hit the concrete so hard with my feet that I fall through the earth in a fit of rage, will I also feel hope?

Memory 7

Yes, I’d be honored. I told Susan I would do my absolute best to carry the 20-year legacy of Tinfish’s mission to publish experimental poetry of the Pacific. The first thing I was going to do was bring back the journal I fell in love with when I held the issues in my hands at Open Books. I wanted to bring back that feeling of confusion and wonder.

Memory 8

It’s the beginning of the pandemic. I have all the work assembled for the journal. We don’t know much about Covid-19, but we do know that hand-sanitizer and toilet paper are scarce. The memes are everywhere. My daughter wakes up every night at 3am. I decide I have to learn how to turn the Tinfish journal into a web journal. This is not something Tinfish has done before. I imagined a room full of people throughout the community, eating potluck and assembling artist books. I imagined us cutting up poems and pasting them back together, hanging titles from the ceiling with musubi in our mouths. None of this was going to happen. And like all of us, Tinfish had to adapt.

Now, Today, and Tomorrow

The work that makes up issue #21 is what I imagine it would feel like to take a journeyed walk through the busiest streets of any big city in the world to the quietest foggy morning on Haleakalā. Of course, that is an imagined reality. An experimental poem in itself that cannot quite commit to form or content. There are no bustling streets. The chartreuse ʻamakihi, Hawaiian honeycreepers, are abuzz without an influx of tourists on Haleakalā. Right now, as I am writing this, a rescue helicopter breaks the hush of coconut palms and ulu trees below the Ko'olau Mountain Range. I hear A.B. Ulep’s poem bagi

ibagam kaniak intono bigat ti bagkaten tayo

come morning, tell me what we shall carry

When I was assembling the journal, I decided upon a menu format that would make it easy to switch between the thematics of “rage” and “hope.” A conceptual delineation appears clear, but in it’s post-production state, I find it difficult, and almost impossible, to make distinctions between the poetics of rage and the poetics of hope when I read the poems together. Where should Steven Deleham’s poem “Surface Tension” live, with its poignant description of the human impact on feeding ducks bread, their hunger satisfied and subsequent flightlessness? Or Yuan Changming’s poem “Heart-Renditions: Lesson 2 in Chinese Characters” with its invocation of life’s precious fragility in the image in “When there’s death on heart / Right above your heart”? Of course, there is a distinction between the way a reading body reaches for light or folds into its own darkness, but it’s not binary.

When I return to what provoked me to think about “rage” and “hope” as topics worthy of building a collection of words around, I think about the wind on that jog. My rage was apparent in the ferocity of something I could control (my legs) and the ferocity of what I could not (the direction of air), which was met equally with the hopeful prospect of determination and belief. I needed both to run away and return home.

Kate LaDew asks, “is it better to have a beating heart to blame?” in her poem “there are forest fires caused by a million things”. There a moments like these throughout this issue where you have to stop and ask, what is my heart for? What is my capacity for love and hate, attack and understanding? These poems and prose have gotten me through sleepless nights and the exhaustion of ordinary days. Like Susan’s gift to me, these offerings are a present and a presence, which I am honored to carry to this space.

Your rage and hope is heard. I wish us all a better year ahead.

Jaimie Gusman

Editor, Tinfish Press