Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

mouth, thick
with money and piety
and a sworn
black promise
to shadow
your footsteps
until the hearse
of violence
comes home
to get you.
Now imagine yourselves, if you are white, teaching this poem to a group of
students almost none of whom are white, who’ve grown up in an educational
system that has persuaded them that mainland values are better than "local"
ones, and who are, therefore, many of them–well, the word ornery comes to
mind. This past semester as I taught poetry from Hawaii and the Caribbean, I
found myself repeatedly in situations where the overwhelming emotions of the
moment made ordinary, rational, academic interventions seem fruitless. And
which made my position of authority problematic, at best, since the students
had an emotional investment in the material that was far greater than mine. I
found that the best, or only way, to deal with it was to set the students up to
debate each other, rather than to try to guide them somewhere I wanted them to
go.
As for the poem, if turnabout is fair play, then where on earth do we go from
here? This is what bothers me most; what is violent rhetoric in this case, is
actual violence elsewhere. How can we address the nationalisms that live
among us (including native American nationalisms)? How can we balance
these against a larger American self-definition, whatever that may be? Yes, the
world is Gattifying, becoming more and more international. But it’s also
becoming more and more local. The idea of the Pacific Rim actually only
includes Asia and America–what happens to the islands in-between, with their
self-definitions at stake? And how can university professors (my classroom, at