
Haunani-Kay Trask’s Night is a Sharkskin Drum (University of Hawaii Press) is a book I picked up along with Lee A. Tonouchi’s Da Word (Bamboo Ridge Press) and the first edition of his Living Pidgin (Tinfish Press) in a Borders Bookstore, of all places, in Lihue, Kauai.
Having found these books, I was trippin’ for two reasons. First, these Hawaii based publishers are some of my favorites for their specializing in Pacific literatures, especially those with a political edge. Second, I never shop at Borders Bookstores because the ones around here (the closest being in Emeryville) just aren’t gangsta enough to carry any interesting indie published titles.
As if on cue, Sunday morning of Calabash arrived with overcast skies. The sofa in the wide living room of the suite I was staying in was getting old already. I was waking up quite early each day because of the firm surface of my bed. On the verandah, the sea is a few yards away, and it makes sense to sit there, and watch the light creep into the sky, and pray and think and make mental notes. On Sunday morning, I could feel the muscles in my legs hurting. At first I wondered what had happened to me the day before—I had not been exercising at all, and yet my legs felt as if I had been doing extreme squats all night. Then I realized how little I sat down on Saturday.
The exercise in silent poetry rages on. I drove in my truck up to The Hispanic Society on 155 St. on Sunday morning to do a walk through with a few of the future silent performers. I wonder if anyone’s read a great book called The Art of Memory by Frances Fitzgerald. Among other things (I’ve never finished it though I have assigned it to students…) it describes the practice of the study of rhetoric in the ancient world and how one would create a memory house to learn long speeches. To practice you would go to some public plaza at night that had lots of columns and lion statues to basically attach your memory tracks to these items and then when you delivered your speech you would move in your memory through the plaza you’d rehearsed in picking up cues from each staircase and statue you touched as you walked in the night.
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