Will Caron (WC): In 1995, you started Tinfish Press to publish experimental poetry of the Pacific. What made you decide to start a journal and begin publishing that kind of poetry?
Susan Schultz (SS): I moved to Hawaiʻi in 1990 from the East coast—Virginia—and I had just discovered experimental poetry as I got out of graduate school. Then I came to Hawaiʻi and discovered that experimental poetry didn’t really exist here. Instead, at the time, the dominant mode was “local writing,” which tended to be very narrative, quite straightforward, plot-driven and so on.
And so I was trying to think, “How can I create a conversation between these two kinds of literature that I’m really immersed in? And maybe, if I’m really ambitious, how can I bring some experimental poetry to Hawaiʻi?” So I started Tinfish to try to facilitate a conversation between those kind of polar opposites—both of which I really respect, but felt like I didn’t really have a place in.
WC: Was there a shortage of avenues available for Pacific poets in general, or for experimental poets?
SS: Well there wasn’t a shortage of avenues in Hawaiʻi—there was already Bamboo Ridge. Right around that time, ‘Ōiwi started, and there are other outlets here [at UH Mānoa]. I did discover—the first week I announced I was starting Tinfish, I announced it on an email list—I started getting submissions from Australia. So, oddly, I discovered there was a need for such a publication in Australia.
WC: So that’s sort of how it became not just about Hawaiʻi, but about the whole Pacific region?
SS: Right.
WC: How does Pacific poetry relate to the poetry of other colonial regions?
SS: That’s a good question. There are affinities between poetry in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere in the Pacific Islands and Caribbean writing, although in the Caribbean the indigenous peoples were destroyed. But there are affinities between, say, the creole writings in Jamaica, which came from plantations and the creole writings in Hawaiʻi. There are affinities with Irish writing and the resistance against the British, Welsh writing and the resistance against the British.
But I think that this region has its own dynamic, and I am interested in crossing a lot of the categories and boundaries that are often put up, like between Pacific writing and Asian writing in translation, or between white Australian writing and Pacific Islander writing. Crossing those boundaries is really what Tinfish is most about.
WC: What else makes Pacific writing unique?
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