Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Habitat Threshold. He’s the recipient of many prizes, including the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award. An assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, Santos Perez teaches Pacific literature and directs the Creative Writing program there. Also, shout-out to his gorgeous blog. In this episode, we chat with Craig about his most recent poetry collection, published at the very beginning of the pandemic, which has as its core climate activism and anxieties about the future of the planet his daughters are inheriting. Perez gives his readers great insight into the connection between humans and their environments. In this collection, Perez uses what he coined as ‘recycled form’—taking the form of older poems and inserting his own content into it. Perez’s Works: Hacha Saina Guma’ Lukao Undercurrent by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy N?lani McDougall Crosscurrent Honorable Mentions: Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17 Wallace Stevens’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say

Published Date: February 2, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare by writers, for writers.

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is co-founder of Ala Press and the author of three collections of poetry most recently Habitat Threshold. He's the recipient of many prizes, including the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award, and he's an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawaii M?noa where he teaches pacific literature and creative writing, as well as directing the creative writing program. I also wanted to shout out to his gorgeous blog. We, of course, want to talk to you about your latest book Habitat Threshold, and I'm wondering if you plan to have it come out in April 2020, a month after shutdown.

Craig Santos Perez:

Thank you so much, Jessica, and thank you everyone for having me. It was not planned at all. I've been writing it since about 2014, coincided with the birth of my first daughter and the rising awareness of climate change with the Paris Agreements. Those two topics of climate change, environmental justice, and parenthood all coincided. Then the book was published right during the pandemic. My kids' schools were shut down. I moved to teaching remotely, and every book event I had planned was canceled. I know. Even though the book itself does not talk about a pandemic because I never imagined one would happen, as you say, it does speak to other issues that led to this pandemic, which is very unfortunate.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah. I'm so struck by your environmental activism in poetics. I wouldn't say it's unflinching because you're actually flinching, and you're also brave enough to keep looking at things and make these incredible connections between humans and our environment and this abundant tropical beauty of Guam and of Hawaii twinned with its destruction and desecration, which of course mirrors our own. For people who might not be grounded in the environmental aspects of things as you are, where do you think the movement is heading now and how do your poetics intersect with whatever changes have happened in the six years since you started the book?

Craig Santos Perez:

Yeah, it's definitely, so much of the book is about expressing my own anxieties and concerns about both the environment and the planets and future that my daughters are inheriting. At the same time, it was very inspiring and empowering to see both local and global movements for environmental and climate justice mobilize around the world. Here in Hawaii and the larger Pacific, I've been involved in those movements and also made connections to other places that have similar struggles. Thankfully, the movements have been very creative, and so every time I attend either Climate March or an environmental justice event, I often will read my poems at these events and there'll be other artists and musicians singing and contributing their own visions to help us understand what's happening, but also to envision a different, more sustainable future through the arts. For me, that's the activist dimension of my work. It's also very important to my teaching since I teach courses on environmental poetry as well, encouraging my students not only to read and write poetry, but also then to think about how we can contribute to the movement as poets and artists.

Jessica Cole:

It's so cool. I feel like, I mean, sure there are lots of ways to be involved, but for artists, I mean to not have to leave artistic aspirations to check them somewhere else, to bring them with us is just, it's so empowering. I guess this leads me to thinking about your invented form called recycling, used in your poetry a lot. It's very intentional, but I'm really curious to hear you define and describe this recycled form.

Craig Santos Perez:

Definitely. There are several poems ...

Jessica Cole:

Did you name it that or did someone else. You named it that. Right?

Craig Santos Perez:

I did name it that. There are many other writers who will write poems after another poet to signify that they've been inspired by that poet or a particular poem. Of course, I write those kinds of poems as well. I see them as remixes in other context. For this book, it made sense to call them recyclings because I really am taking the form of older poems and then putting inside this form different content just as we might recycle materials. I thought that was a fun way to link it to the environmental issues as well. For one example, I have a poem that recycles Pablo Neruda's famous love poem, Sonnet 17. In that poem, and in all of his love poems really, he uses metaphors of the natural world to describe the body and desire and neuroticism and sex.

I wanted to recycle that in our contemporary context and think about what if I use climate change metaphors to talk about eroticism, and so my poem is titled Love in a Time of Climate Change, and it's a sonnet. It uses his translated syntax. I follow his grammar and stuff. Another fun one is recycling Wallace Stevens' 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. My poem is 13 Ways of Looking at a Glacier. Of course the Stevens poem is all about changing our perspectives to understand more in a more complex way, something like a blackbird. These past couple years though really what so many people are trying to look at and understand are of course glaciers. I thought using that kind of multi perspective idea to think about glaciers would be interesting.

Then the funniest one is a recycling of William Carlos Williams' This is Just to Say, his very famous poem about plums. I replaced his plums with impossible burgers. I tried to have fun with it, but then also make a commentary on how much the world has changed since these other poets were writing, and to think about how their poems can help us understand our world today, even though it is so different.

Jessica Cole:

That's so great. Recycled or not, can we hear some of your poems now?

Craig Santos Perez:

Yes. Okay. I have one pulled up already. It's not one of the recycling, but maybe after this poem I'll find a recycling poem. Okay. This one is called The Last Safe Habitat, and there are a lot of poems, actually a whole section in this book about human and animal relations. This poem is about a native Hawaiian bird called the Kaua?i ???? whose song was last heard here in 1987. It's called The Last Safe Habitat.

I don't want our daughter to know that Hawaii is the bird extinction capital of the world. I don't want her to walk around the island feeling haunted by tree roots buried under concrete. I don't want her to fear the invasive predators who slither, pounce, bite, swallow, disease, and multiply. I don't want her to see paintings and photographs of birds she'll never witness in the wild. I don't want her to imagine their bones in dark museum drawers. I don't want her to hear their voice recordings on the internet. I don't want her to memorize and recite the names of 77 law species and subspecies. I don't want her to draw a timeline with the years each was first collected and last cited. I don't want her to learn about the Kaua?i ???? who was observed atop a flowering ?hi?a tree calling for a mate day after day, season after season because he didn't know he was the last of his kind until one day he disappeared forever into a nest of avian silence.

I don't want our daughter to calculate how many miles of fencing is needed to protect the endangered birds that remain. I don't want her to realize the most serious causes of extinction can't be fenced out. I want to convince her that extinction is not the end. I want to convince her that extinction is just a migration to the last safe habitat on earth. I want to convince her that our winged relatives have arrived safely to their destination, a wondrous island with a climate we can never change, and a rainforest fertile with seeds and song.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's beautiful.

Craig Santos Perez:

Thank you.

Jessica Cole:

I don't know how that one looks on the page. I don't remember, but so many of your poems feel like islands on a page. They're often either shorter lines or little clumps of lines with this ocean of white around them. Sometimes that ocean of white is comforting and opposite of some of the terror in the poem, and sometimes it is the terror encroaching. I really enjoy your poems on the page. They seem very painterly as well as poetic. That also makes me, I need to ask you this question about punctuation. When you put we/our/us it almost always, I feel like it's in brackets. Is that true or am I reading too much into something? Okay.

Craig Santos Perez:

Yes, that's true.

Jessica Cole:

Okay. Can you talk a little bit about that because I have my theories, but since you're here, I'd rather hear yours.

Craig Santos Perez:

In my books, I want to think about who we mean by we and us. Oftentimes, these terms are built on a lot of assumptions and exclusions. For me, I wanted to create a poetic space in which the reader can ask that question. Who is this we? Who is this us? Because I bracket it, I try to use that typography to just draw attention to it, though I never really explain it. In this new book, it's similar in the sense that I want to think about global we's or what is an us if we're thinking about multi-species justice, for example, or who is the we when we think about kinship with other people that are different from us? How can we articulate a we that is more inclusive and diverse in which we always care for each other and take care of each other and imagine each other as relatives.

In the bird poem I just read, I talk about the birds as our winged relatives, and that's how we think about other species and Pacific cultures and of course in other indigenous cultures. I want to try to cultivate that relationship and that kinship throughout my writing.

Jessica Cole:

I really love that. I also felt like it was separating out the human. It reminded me of being in the San Diego Zoo where, and there are probably others you that do this, where I'm the one in the cage bus going around where the animals roam. I feel like it's the way all zoos should be. I'm caged in my brackets, so having the experience of your ...

Craig Santos Perez:

Yeah, I love that interpretation. Yeah. That's awesome.

Jessica Cole:

I'd love to hear about your press and also this poetry album that you co-star on. Undercurrent. It sounds really cool. What's that about?

Craig Santos Perez:

Yeah. About 10 years ago I teamed up with an awesome Hawaiian poet named Brandy N?lani McDougall, and we started a micro press called Ala Press, which is the only press in the US to publish exclusively Pacific Islander literature. We started it because there was no spaces for Pacific writing really in the US. We published maybe just one book a year. At this point, we have a catalog of just about 10 single author collections and anthologies. We've been really blessed to be able to publish a lot of wonderful Pacific writers and to receive a lot of support in our community because there really aren't enough support for our literature and not enough books for the kids in the classrooms or at home. That's that project.

Brandy and I also collaborated on one poetry album. It's called Undercurrent, and you could find it actually on iTunes. It's an album of us reading our poetry, but we also collaborated with these two musicians who experiment with the compositions. It's just more of an avant garde spoken word album. It's really fun. I think it's about $9.99 on iTunes and it's well worth it. There's a lot of tracks. Then I have a second solo album which I recorded myself, which is me reading a selection of poems about Guam and my Chamorro culture. That one is actually on Band Camp, and that one is free, although you can donate, which will go towards me putting together maybe a third album someday.

Jessica Cole:

That's great. I love that. Please read us another poem. Please.

Craig Santos Perez:

All of my books are in my office at the university, and unfortunately, I haven't been there in about a year, and so I'm just working off my computer at this point, so I only have my new book. Let me read the poem I mentioned earlier, Love in the Time of Climate Change, recycling Pablo Neruda's Sonnet 17.

I don't love you as if you were rare earth metals, conflict, diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that caused war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable species urgently between the habitat and its loss. I love you as one loves the last seed saved within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots, and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue. I love you without knowing how or when this world will end. I love you organically without pesticides. I love you like this because we'll only survive in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace, so close that your emissions of carbon are mine, so close that your sea rises with my heat.

Jessica Cole:

Woo, so much. Yes. Woo.

Craig Santos Perez:

That's my Valentine's Day poem.

Jessica Cole:

Woo.

Craig Santos Perez:

Is it getting hot in here or is that just global warming?

Jessica Cole:

We did climate change.

Phuc Luu:

That's frying my impossible burger right there. It's sizzling hot.

Jessica Cole:

Thank you so much, Craig. It was amazing to talk to you and to be introduced to your poetry. I'm a huge fan from now on, so I hope we meet again. I hope we all meet again in the real life in person whenever that is.

Craig Santos Perez:

Well, thanks. Thanks so much for those thoughtful questions and thanks to all of you for setting this up and for supporting writers during these difficult times. It's just so nice to see people and engage with folks, even though I'm so far away it seems.

Jessica Cole:

Well, it's good to have you. We wish you all the best with Habitat Threshold and as you move forward.

Craig Santos Perez:

Ma halo. Thank you so much.

Jessica Cole:

Thank you.

Phuc Luu:

Thank you. This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair. Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, posted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole and produced by me Phuc Luu. Our trustee and hardworking intern is Santi Sadan. Please subscribe, fate, and review wherever podcasts are found.