Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Rob Wilson

Interview of Rob Wilson (RW), conducted by Ken Tokuno (KT) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project via Zoom, on September 7, 2023. Rob speaks of his education, the influences of music and the Western literary canon on his writing, his teaching career and notable students, and Bamboo Ridge’s impact on local literature. Rob also recalls Haunani-Kay Trask, Milton Murayama, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others.

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Rob Wilson (RW) on September 7, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Ken Tokuno (KT) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is one session in length.

Rob Wilson and Ken Tokuno have reviewed the transcript and made their corrections and emendations. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

KT: When and where were you born and what was your early education like?

RW: Okay, I was born in February of 1947 in a place called Waterbury, Connecticut, which is an industrial city in Western Connecticut. I was educated in Catholic schools, parochial schools, St. Thomas at the origin. I had some very good teachers, particularly Sister Alice in 5th grade: she believed in me before I did myself. I transferred to a public school called Sprague and I had, again, a few selectively good teachers. Literature teacher Mrs. Rose Rabizon was a Shakespearian theater director and playwright who made me play the Mayor of London in a comedy on Dick Wittington in 8th grade in 1961. Freshman year I went to Sacred Heart High School. I studied Shakespeare plays deeply like Julius Caesar and Macbeth, but I was mainly interested in basketball and soon transferred to a public school called Wilby High School mainly because I wanted to play on a multicultural team there and I was a pretty good basketball player. At this time, I was always reading the collected poems of Dylan Thomas and carrying around novels by Dostoevsky and Kerouac in my dungaree pockets. I spent a lot of time in the public library downtown, Silas Bronson: it saved and sheltered my life, gave it direction, and I kind of educated myself in Anglo-American poetry. I was drawn to poetry and had an intuitive grasp of it that guided and never left me. I loved it and can talk more about that later, but basically, yeah, that’s it. I could tell you a lot more about my hometown if you want to know.

KT: Okay.

RW: Actually, it’s important to me. I write about it. Actually it’s important to me as a formative soul-making scene and locality or world that never leaves one.

KT: Right.

RW: I write about this in a poetry book called When a Nikita Moon Rose [2021]. It’s a work that’s published in both English and Chinese in Taiwan; it’s about the—Nikita Moon is Khrushchev, it’s the Cold War period, it’s this Sputnik that had had a little dog inside called Nikita. And so it’s kind of a cute title, Nikita Moon, but it’s also ominous like a bad moon rising. As a period of growing up, it was when there was a great superpower rivalry and right now the rivalry is again with Russia, the rivalry again with China, the rivalry with North Korea threatens to return. So in a way we haven’t fully left the Cold War globe.

KT: Okay, what kind of literature were you exposed to in school and going up?

RW: I would say the most important literature for me then was actually listening to song lyrics by Elvis Presley, by Bill Haley & the Comets, by the Doo-wop groups: “Oh, What a Night” by The Dells, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. I mean, my high school basketball team: one time we were at a drunken party, the parents were gone. People were drinking whiskey. I couldn’t drink liquor very well, but I drank beer. Anyway, and the captain of the basketball team Butch Moore—he broke out singing, “Oh, What a Night” in acapella with some of the black guys on the team backing him up. And it was the most beautiful soulful thing I ever heard. It was exalted, I mean we were in a little corner. I didn’t need girls. I didn’t need anything—money. I didn’t need drink. I mean, it was like an exalted poetic plane. I knew what it was. So there was that.

But of course when I read anything by Dylan Thomas, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age” and so on. I was really transported into kind of the bliss of poetry, that complexity of utterance fusing sound and sense, form and meaning. When I heard Bob Dylan come out with “Like a Rolling Stone,” or, of course, earlier than that “My Back Pages.” I mean, it was ’64, ’65. Dylan lifted up my world to another level and then of course that had to do with his influence by the Byrds blissfully going electric in L.A., the Animals in England singing “House of the Rising Sun.” There was a kind of transatlantic feedback between England and the U.S. My friends and I would huddle in a room. Somebody had a record player and we would listen to the Beatles, the first albums when they came out, why was something like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” so good? or why was “Please, please me, oh yeah”? It was kind of a poetic mystery between the simplicity of the language and the repetition of lines, but it was the form, because it had a real power to it and the refrains, the form was moving. And then growing their mop top hair long, they were kind of playing with the idea of beat, the Beatles like the beatitude quest, becoming post-beat. It was not Buddy Holly & The Crickets from Lubbock Texas, but it was the Beatles from Liverpool!.

I was drawn to that sound and I was drawn to Jack Kerouac. I was drawn to Allen Ginsberg when I got a hold of City Lights books Pocket Poets Series, I would carry this around in my back pocket jeans and I felt I had a secret code to the universe: like I had Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Jack Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues” or Dylan’s albums: Bringing it All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. I felt like a little poetic god among people in this little industrial wasteland. I’m not putting it down, but I did feel like I had something extra and I felt intuitively I could grasp poetry as good as anybody, even better than my teachers, so I felt a little bit on the arrogant side of youth. Nobody could talk to me about Dylan Thomas. I just, I had read everything he wrote: every biography, every bit of criticism. So when I got to Boston University—I had started at University of Connecticut branch in Waterbury, but I transferred to Boston University. My advisor in the English major was a guy named John Malcolm Brinnin. When I went in to meet him, I said, oh yeah, you’re John Malcolm Brinnin: I’ve read all your books, you wrote the biography of Dylan Thomas. He was impressed by that, as not many BU students knew who he was.

KT: Okay.

RW: Soon in 1966 I got the crazy West Coast dream, I gotta go to Berkeley, I gotta go to Berkeley. I fully don’t understand it myself. Why somebody from the East Coast; with a perfectly good life going on in Boston; with a beautiful girlfriend working at John Hancock Insurance corporation headquarters as a systems programmer. Why did I uproot our lives and get us to go out [to] the West Coast? But it was some intuitive Western movement towards creative newness. I knew I had to get to the West Coast and from the West Coast my fate later drew me to Hawai‘i, and that drew me by fate or coincidence to South Korea, that led me to Taiwan, that drew me to Hong Kong, across Oceania as such, and then eventually back to California, and eventually I’ll be buried back in Connecticut: it will be a full circle, will be complete.

KT: The ghost of Horace Greeley. Okay, yeah, you’ve touched on some questions we’re gonna ask later, but let me ask you this one.

RW: Okay.

KT: What was the first time you felt connected to something you read? What kind of literature did you first feel connected to?

RW: Yeah, I mean, I would say it actually was the, in that downtown library in Waterbury Connecticut, which actually was quite a good one. The Silas Bronson Library was where in the late 1850s or early 1860s that Henry David Thoreau gave a public talk there called “Autumn Tints.” That library had been around in New England, and it was very well supplied.

KT: Hmm.

RW: They had a really good periodical room full of poetry journals and Nation magazine and Poetry magazine. Anyway I started reading the collected poems of Dylan Thomas and I couldn’t understand them all, but some of them I would read over and over like “Fern Hill” or “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.” You could hear readings of Dylan Thomas on a record player. He was a great oral presenter of his own poems and went on reading tours. He had come to the United States in the early 1950s at places like Vassar and gave drunken readings. These are kind of Welsh, Bardic voice poems: very sonorous. Full voice. And in kind of a mysterious language. I mean, it’s all kind of Shakespearean complexity. Compacted language. I don’t think even now I could totally explain it. I think in a lot of ways it doesn’t need to be explained. Poetry is more like mysterious, sonorous language and beautiful forms, recurring forms. A lot of vowels: like Dylan Thomas said, “God moves in the sound of the long O.”

KT: Okay.

RW: Like “Om,” or the Japanese baseball player’s name, Ohtani. Yeah, that’s a good name, or orifice, ocean, anything with O’s in it creates a circular kind of effect. So, yeah, anyway, so that Dylan Thomas to me, and then later on Bob Dylan amplified that and even though I didn’t think they were connected because they don’t write alike at all. But Dylan, Bob Dylan took his name from Dylan Thomas. His name was Robert Alan Zimmerman. A Jewish name, but he took the name Dylan. Robert Dylan or Bob Dylan and that’s stuck; I thought it was smart because it wasn’t the commonplace I, it was Y, D-Y-L-A-N. It was cryptic and then he always covered it up and said, “Oh no, it was my—I had an uncle named, D-I-L-L-A-N.” He lied about it but I think he was transfiguring himself. He was creating a fiction. He could live inside that mythopoetic persona. Even somebody like the late Haunani-Kay Trask: she’s a brilliant orator poet, and an influential didactic Native Hawaiian activist. She created a kind of persona for herself, an angry polarizing figure. But when you meet her, she was very loving and funny. She had a public figure which was kind of her persona.

And then I remember when Vilsoni Hereniko and I came out with a co-edited book called Inside Out on the interior Pacific and it had a lot of Pacific writers, Native Pacific writers, from Samoa like Albert Wendt, or from Fiji, like Epeli Hau‘ofa, it had Joe Balaz. I don’t know. Haunani Trask required all of her Hawaiian studies students at UH–Mānoa: you have to read this book! So she was open to critique; she married David Stannard, who was a white guy from the Midwest, a really brilliant American Studies scholar. People think of her as just anti-white or whatever; I mean, that’s kinda dumb because she was very open to cultures; and her sister, Mililani. I mean, they were mighty historical figures—labor leaders, activists, lawyers, rhetoricians, and I think her book of essays had a huge impact. Her poetry is deep, you know, so I was fortunate in the sense that I was in Hawai‘i from ‘76 until 2001 where scholars and poets like her had an impact.

I met people like Maxine Hong Kingston from Mid-Pac High School then, and Haunani-Kay Trask from American Studies at UHM and Joe Balaz was from Ramrod journal and from Wahiawā. One of the mysteries of Hawai‘i is why there were so many poets from Wahiawā? The journalist and poet Tino Ramirez is from there, Cathy Song, Joe Balaz. Maybe others. I don’t know. It just was kind of on the outskirts of Fort Shafter [Schofield Barracks/Fort Shafter -Ed.] that Army base, right? Army base town, but on the other hand close to the North Shore, to surfing and to the plantation fields. So they grew up with kind of cultural richness of beauty and complexity. I mean Tino, for example, was Mexican, Japanese, and both. And proud of it and they and lived those contradictions: Tino in my mind was and still is a very good poet. He’s still a surfer. We keep in touch via Facebook. He was a key student editor of the Hawai‘i Review when I was advisory editor from the faculty. He was the main poetry editor. We went to a lot of poetry readings together. We went to Muktananda’s Siddha Yoga Ashram together. What I mean is that Honolulu and environs just an interesting place, you know, like Eric Chock and Darrell Lum. They were in the MA program in English and that’s how I met them there and there; of course, they were kind of disgruntled, understandably, because it was such a white, oblivious kind of department at the time in the mid 1970s.

KT: Okay.

RW: I used to call it, instead of the Department of English, I called it the Department of Anguish. Because it was English anguish for local students and myself too: it was like, Caliban in The Tempest, “You’ve taught me English; and my profit is, I can learn how to curse you.” Eric to my mind had one of the best poetics sensibilities, because I could send Eric five poems. He would pick the best one for Bamboo Ridge journal and I would live by it because if he didn’t want to publish it, I thought, okay, I can touch that up more. He had good radar for what poetry is: he taught poetry in the schools for years, he was a very good teacher. I used to teach Darrell’s short stories in a lot of classes in sophomore literature at UH–Mānoa. Eric would be the one to judge the poetry and I really valued his opinion and I think I ended up publishing twelve or thirteen poems over the years, and maybe three reviews, so Bamboo Ridge kind of kept me alive as a creative writer there.

KT: Hmm.

RW: At some point I pulled out of the national scene and to my better or worse I went local and I stopped submitting to national outlets and contexts. By then, I had poems published in national journals like Poetry and Ploughshares and The New Republic; but at some point, I decided it’s better to go local, you know. But now I need to get my creative writings published more nationally and I will, I’m not, I’m not dead yet as Mark Twain said—

KT: Good. So getting on the next question, I think you already addressed some of this, but how were your interests in literature shaped by seeing Shakespeare plays and reading poetry in general?

RW: Yeah, I mean, in Connecticut there was a place, there’s Shakespeare’s Stratford on the Avon in England, and then there was Stratford, Connecticut, and there’s a Stratford in Canada. They echo Shakespeare’s Stratford and they have, like, a Shakespeare theater. So in Connecticut, there was their own version of a Globe Theatre. And my 8th-grade teacher, Mrs. Rabizon, took the class down to hear one of the plays that, we spent a day there and, my, I was really struck by the language and force of it. It was the Twelfth Night playing and again it was in a lot of disguises: women dressed up as men and vice versa and “love disguised.” But it was more the language, the complexity, the figurative language.

I was really drawn to it and then in the classes we read Macbeth and then in freshman year in high school we read Julius Caesar. I always thought I can read these Shakespeare plays for the rest of my life; I’ll never fully understand them, but I know that that literature is calling to me. It has the grandeur of the sublime that I’ll never fully understand; it’ll always be up ahead of me but that’s why I was drawn to it.

When I heard Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” I mean, that was like the most beautiful poem I had ever heard live, and I was at his Forest Hills concert in New York City. I took a train down there with a friend and I saw the Dylan concert in August of 1965 when I had just graduated from high school and Dylan went electric. So the first part was just his folk guitar and the second time he brought out a band with guitars and electric guitars so some people started booing. But I thought it was like being in Dylan’s poetic heaven because it was the mixture of, like, poetic language with that kind of, electric orchestration. But there was a kind of hostility to it then as non-folk music. There was a kind of a Greenwich Village leftism that was very conservative. It was the village folkies who wanted Dylan to just write protest songs and use the folk guitar forever. So they were booing while I was in poetic heaven.

KT: Yeah.

RW: And then he started writing these very atmospheric, kind of beatnik-like lyrics like “Desolation Row,” like “Don’t send me no more letters/ unless you mail them/ to Desolation Row.” And desolation was echoing like Jack Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels.” It took its title from the Beats: desolation meant Beatific. It was the paradoxical opposite. It’s not about nihilism or despair. It’s about being low but being exalted and high holy, you know, like desolation peak, desolation mountain, desolation row. I think Bamboo Ridge can make that comparable local link; literature made from the little fishing hole site out towards Sandy Beach and between Hanauma Bay yet beyond suburban Hawai‘i Kai, right?

KT: Okay.

RW: And I thought that was a great trope for—they had a distinctive cast slide-bait method of fishing. It had a history, some people wrote about it, but it was a kind of a trope of you know, fishing at a local site to try to catch something you can sustain yourself on. You can’t eat a fancy car, but you can eat the fish. Some of my students like Barry Masuda who published in Bamboo Ridge [Issue #72 -Ed.] he became a little bit of a cyborg post-modernist who took issue with that nostalgic localism.

KT: [Laughs] Okay.

RW: He really was a fisherman, and he still is. I think he made his living and so it wasn’t just a trope, it was a way of life. It had a really deep local value. I don’t know what Bamboo Ridge as a fishing site is now. I assume probably still exists, and there’s probably some people still needing to fish every day to make a living, you know, to get food for their family or something. But for people like, you know, Darrell Lum, Eric Chock or me, it became like fishing for a poem, you know, how do you catch a poem out of local circumstances. So, yeah there was that deep localism.

KT: Okay, I think you’ve already touched on this question. I’m gonna ask you anyway just for the record.

RW: Okay.

KT: You began your college at the Waterbury campus of the University of Connecticut?

RW: Well, it was that the University of Connecticut had a branch system. So there was a hometown Waterbury branch. There was a main campus was upstate in Storrs. There was a Norwalk branch. There were maybe five or six branches and they were all connected to the main college, but they had a kind of autonomy. They were local so you could live at home and go to the college; I had got accepted to NYU, which is really where I wanted to go because of New York and Dylan Thomas and in Greenwich Village the beatnik scene. I was admitted and they gave me some kind of scholarship, but it just wasn’t enough given my parents finances, I didn’t know enough about applying for scholarships at the time. So I started working in an aircraft factory when I graduated to make and save some money.

KT: Hmm.

RW: And then it turned out I got drafted. I didn’t get drafted, but I got called up to go to the draft board in New Haven, because it was a mill town so the army wanted to draft working-class people so they could send them to Vietnam either to kill or be killed. I wasn’t going to Vietnam, but anyway, I was 1A because I was an athlete. So I said, oh my god, I’m not going to Vietnam. I don’t want to go to Canada. So I actually went right up to the University of Connecticut president. Made an appointment and said, “You know, I really want to go to school. I was a good student, I made a mistake. I wanted to earn some money.” He goes, “Well, what do you want to major in, son?” I go, “Oh, English major.” He goes, “Oh, you want to write the great American novel, right?” He says, “Well, anyway, you were a good student. Admitted.” So once I was admitted, I got a 2-S deferment.

KT: Right.

RW: Thank God, because that’s how I started at the UConn branch, but I had aspirations to go to other schools; well first my girlfriend at the time lived in Boston. She had been the college editor of the UConn main campus paper, Judy Becker. Anyway, she was up in Boston and I used to hitchhike on weekends along the Massachusetts up to be with her on the weekend. It was sort of like the so-called Summer of Love. Sergeant Pepper’s album was coming out. It was a crazy time. Big changes were in the air.

KT: 1967.

RW: People were smoking pot. I mean, I did a little acid and had my head turned around for good and bad, but anyway, yeah, it was wild. Then I got into Boston University but only went there one year. I remember one time we were in an English class and it was very kind of preppy. It was sort of like pseudo-Harvard, right? And they had a little cocktail party, invite the students to the home of one of the professors, and we were talking about the poems he had assigned. One of them was “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by William Butler Yeats.

KT: Hmm.

RW: I couldn’t really talk very well then. I was quiet, hard to believe, but I said something like, “What is Yeats’s idea of God?” And he said, “We don’t talk about God in this class, Mr. Wilson.” I go, “What?” I basically said, I’m getting out of here. I’m going out West where they’ll talk about God.

KT: Okay.

RW: I don’t know what it was, but that, that conservatism and the smugness of a pseudo-Harvard place like BU at the time.

KT: Yeah.

RW: Just, I was gonna either drop out, move to Maine, but I wanted to go to Berkeley and thank God I mobilized my brother, Judy, and her brother, and a friend, Jacky Barardis, and we drove a Volkswagen bus across the country not knowing anybody and we ended up in Haight-Ashbury. We lived in San Francisco on Fell Street for half a year. Then I was admitted as an out-of-state student to Cal. It said, “Start in January, 68” and Judy goes, you’re going. And so yeah, I went and I just was driven to do well as a student. then I think I did two years at Cal as an undergraduate, compressing three years. By taking a lot of courses and, you know, finished up so I knew I would succeed. I mean, I don’t know if I knew I would succeed, but I was pretty studious and so I got my AB in a speeded-up time. I also got a MA, master’s degree, and then I got a PhD.

I had started graduate school in ’70 and I finished in ’76 which, at the time, they considered that fast, six years and so I got my three degrees from the California system and I’m really grateful to that public education system. That’s why I’ve been glad to be back inside teaching in the UC system, University of California at Santa Cruz, and also I felt committed to the University of Hawai‘i as a state university too. At the time, if you taught in a public school, a state school, loans were reduced every year. That was a very good program so I could pay off my student debt in like five years or something. I don’t know how we started, what was the question?

KT: Yeah. Okay, why did you decide to go to Berkeley? You answered the question very well.

RW: Oh yeah, yeah, okay, good.

KT: Okay, so when and why did you first start writing poetry?

RW: Well, I would say it was as an undergraduate. I always kept a journal. I have kept writing, like Emerson or Thoreau, a lot of notebooks. I tried to write every day. I think my poetry at the time was not very good, as an undergraduate. I mean, I was a TA to a student named Arthur Sze, who’s one of the well-known Chinese American poets nowadays. He’s living somewhere in the New Mexico area and he drew upon, like, Li Po and traditional Chinese poets, landscape poets. His mentor was Josephine Miles, who was my graduate teacher. Anyway, Arthur was a very good poet and published a little chapbook. My poetry then was nowhere near that good. I mean, I thought it was, lol; but I always was a good judge of poetry and a reader of poetry.

In graduate school. I had a poetry column in the Daily California newspaper called “Inscapes,” the title taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the inscape of poetry, the inner form of poetry. In 1973 or so, I went to Josephine Miles, my mentor and dissertation director, and said I want to start a local journal, and we’ll call it the Berkeley Poetry Review because the famous campus literary journal Occident now wants to be the New York Review of Books. It wants to have published essays on Ezra Pound, it wants to be like a New York journal. I said, I know more poets around me in Berkeley, and they’re better poets than Occident publishes. I was kind of arrogant about it, but anyway Jo Miles got me $500 and she put me on all these high-ranking, like, ASUC committees and I had free tickets to every concert and this and that. Anyway, the point was we had an office building called the Pelican Building. We had a little open space. We could have readings, we could use their typewriters and eventually publish the journal. Then I met very artistic people because it was Berkeley; and Leroy Wilstead and Christine Taylor, they helped me to design Berkeley Poetry Review numbers one and two in 1974, amazingly enough it’s still going. I don’t know how many years is that? Close to—yeah, ’74, it’s almost, Is that fifty years?

KT: Close to it, yeah.

RW: Yeah. So I think actually, yeah, it’ll be, yeah, 2024 will be fifty years. I gotta tell those people about that but, anyway, yeah, it still exists because it served a very local need. So the point being too when I got to Hawai‘i, I was already a kind of committed localist. But it was the localism of Berkeley. The other context was if you knew anything about American poetics, William Carlos Williams was a localist, like “Paterson.” Walt Whitman, New York, ”Song of Myself” was all based in a kind of local urban contextualism: Robert Bly was from Minnesota. I mean, you kind of go around the map of modern American poetics: [Charles] Olson from Gloucester, Jack Spicer at North Beach, Wallace Stevens in Hartford, John Wieners in Boston, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were the New York School. I mean, there was a kind of a localism broadly, but then when I got over to Hawai‘i in ’76, it was a different kind of localism because it had a lot of Asia Pacific input and Native Hawaiian as such. The localism had a lot of Pidgin in it and it also had Native Hawaiian values so I had to shut up and learn, and I did. I was committed to localism, but one time I was teaching a course on sophomore lit I had to teach that every term, I guess. I was teaching Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

KT: Okay.

RW: Most of the students almost had never heard of, they had never heard of Concord, but they almost never heard of Massachusetts or New England. I had to draw a map on the blackboard. This is the U.S., continental U.S. This is New England over here. See this is Massachusetts?

KT: Yeah.

RW: It sounds a little funny, but it really was true that the students from the islands. they almost had no sense of where Massachusetts was, or, why is New England such a big thing in American literature?

KT: No.

RW: Why are we studying Walden Pond? Why did it—somebody like me assign Dharma Bums over and over? But the students kind of loved it, I remember Steve Curry was Chairman in English then. His wife, Donna Shimabukuro, she was Okinawan, anyway, she loved Dharma Bums, the Kerouac Buddhist lingo. Even though you’re a local person, you can learn from the Buddhist quest of Jack Kerouac; it’s not all foreign or imperialist—You don’t just study local everything.

I mean, it’s part of who you are. One of my mentoring byproducts and—he’ll get a kick out of this, I used to call him the pidgin guerilla—was Lee Tonouchi and I had Lee in sophomore lit and Lee was like a really good student in literature classes. But he would write a straightforward essay and, in the footnotes, he’d have a little Pidgin commentary. So I said, “Use that Pidgin more and then he started to write the whole damn essay in Pidgin and he was good at it and he took 313 which was a poetry class and, again, instead of writing Shakespearean, I think what he did was he took a Shakespeare sonnet, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” And then he translated into Pidgin, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like manapua.” Lee became kind of the crazy man of Pidgin, and he’s still going strong. I actually have all of his works somewhere. Lee did some kind of homage to me. He was really a sweet, loving person: he created his final Honors project—was like a homage to Rob Wilson, he had me like some kind of scientist. I mean, I was fortunate to be teaching there and then.

Another student I had was Jennifer Waihee, the governor’s daughter, she was really funny, sharp. She wrote plays. Jason Olive was, like, all-star volleyball player and he actually was a very good poet. He became an all-American in volleyball, but he also became a soap opera star. In one particular undergraduate poetry class of fifteen, this is the truth, I had Lee Tonouchi, Jennifer Waihee, and Jason Olive!

KT: Yeah.

RW: Could you imagine me in a room with fifteen students and three of them are like that. I mean, it was, like, amazing. If you think I’m exaggerating and talk to Lee. He’ll remember it and Lee was like the quiet one. Yeah.

KT: Okay. Hard to believe. I’m gonna skip ahead here because you kind of jumped into this already. How did you, how did you come to first join and then gain tenure at the University of Hawai‘i?

RW: Yeah, well, so I was first a visiting Assistant Professor in ’76. Because Josephine Miles had been a visiting writer there with the poet from Ohio, James Wright; and she came back to Berkeley and said, “I know you’re supposed to go on the job market in the fall, Rob, but would you think about taking a visiting job at Hawai‘i? The department chair there told me it’s most likely turn into tenure track.” So I said yes, and I was glad I did. But I remember going over there. And I had like a blue Oxford shirt and long pants and like it was mid-August and hot. So by the end of that August I have shorts on to teach in, and a polo shirt or something. To get tenure there I at first started spinning wheels a little. I was always doing reviews or this and that and writing some poems. I wanted to turn my dissertation into a book and eventually did that.

My tenure quest at Hawai‘i was interrupted because I went on a Fulbright to South Korea. One of the people I met was the brilliant scholar Peter Lee in East Asian studies at UH and he was a very well-known Korean scholar. He was the main editor of Korean anthologies, main translator, the main Korean literature scholar in the world in English. He was friends with Josephine Miles and then he took me under his wing. I’ll never forget the first Thanksgiving, you’re lonely, my wife and daughter were in Berkeley. Peter invited me to Thanksgiving or Chuseok to his home in Kāhala area. Nobody in the English department did, but Peter, you know, called me up and invited me. I’ll never forget that. He was very kind. He also made me part of a Korean literature conference and made me an outside respondent. And that was how I met learned American and world literature Professor Kim U-Chang and some well-known Korean writers. I had applied to get a Fulbright to go to Mexico because my Spanish was pretty good and I wanted to work on a Spanish poet, a Mexican poet, Jaime Sabines. I didn’t get accepted, but two months later I got a call in Kuykendall Hall from the Washington Fulbright office saying, “You can’t go to Mexico, but would you think about going to Seoul, Korea?” I go, “What?”

KT: [Chuckles]

RW: And I said, but I don’t speak Korean. They said, “Oh, don’t worry. Everybody speaks English over there in Seoul,” which wasn’t true. So I got a Fulbright for two years there and then I thought I might stay there. I put in to become Fulbright director and came in second. Then eventually, went back to UH and got back on the tenure track. It was a little circuitous, but I can remember: I think I told you the story before where one of the high-ranking department members—could have been the chair. I don’t know. We were sitting in the coffee room on the 7th floor in Kuykendall and he said to me, “Rob Wilson, we hired you as an American scholar, a Wallace Stevens scholar, Whitman Scholar. You’re publishing in Bamboo Ridge and that is not going to do your career any good.” He had the tone of, like, we consider that slumming with the locals.

KT: Hmm.

RW: I just said, “Oh, okay,” But I knew in my heart of heart, I’m not going to stop. I knew this is good direction, but I knew that some people in that department are going to think this is not the way to go. I knew I could publish in good journals, like whatever I had to do, plus do Bamboo Ridge. But there was a kind of a scorn for it; on the other hand, the reason I found out about Bamboo Ridge—or not Bamboo Ridge but local literature.

There was a Berkeley scholar named Joe Bacchus, a kind of gay scholar and he was in the English department and he was very kind to me. I went to the UH bookstore once and saw he was teaching a course called Native American Literature. And in that course, amazingly enough, he was assigning “All I Asking for is My Body” by Milton Murayama and it was a little green book, with plantation bamboo on the cover. It was a self-published book. I didn’t know at the time, but anyway, I got it. I was absolutely amazed by the language of this novel, so I wrote a little review of it. Explaining how the Pidgin was wonderful, the point of view of the plot and Bamboo Ridge published it. Milton Murayama, in the same issue, he responded to the review [Issue #5 -Ed.]. And that was how I became close to him. Milton was working in the customs office in San Francisco. And when I got up to see my daughter in Berkeley and visit that area, he made, like, a lobster stew for me. I mean, he’s a wonderful person and his wife was an actress, Dawn, and so I became close to Milton and so every time his new book came out, I would read it and try to write a review. I just think the world of him. I was fortunate to meet Milton Murayama and the other one was Maxine Hong Kingston who was a high-school teacher at Mid-Pac and later a lowly instructor at UHM.

KT: Right.

RW: Yes, she was also a part time instructor at UH–Mānoa. And then Linda Spalding, Frank Stewart and I were organizing a conference called Inter-Arts Hawaii and Maxine was one of the teachers and so was Michael Ondaatje. Those are the two I remember. Maxine was a wonderful teacher, spent so much time putting comments on the writing of older students, other people’s stories and she was just a wonderful, generous person. Earll Kingston, her husband, was so sweet too and we played touch football together on the front lawn of UH–Mānoa on Saturday afternoons. But anyway, Maxine’s book came out, “Woman Warrior,” and, oh my God, she went from being like low-level instructor to being on the Dick Cavett national talk show, which was big like the Johnny Carson show. Within three or four years, she got a job offer to teach writing at UC Berkeley. And that’s how she spent the rest of her years. So I would see her and Earll every time I went up to Berkeley, but I consider it, to meet people like Maxine Kingston, Michael Ondaatje, I mean, Milton Murayama, that was a gift, because Hawai‘i’s location was both local but very international. With lot of living ties to the emergent literatures of Asia and the Pacific.

Another time, I was giving a talk at East-West Center about globalization and localization with Sri Lankan poet and co-editor, Wimal Dissanayake; a distinguished literary scholar, Ping-hui Liao, was there from Taiwan. And he said, “We want to invite you to Taiwan to be a National Science Council professor.” I thought, oh yeah, this is, like, maybe academic bullshit, but sure enough, I got a whole two years in Taiwan with good pay. I’ve stayed connected to Taiwan since then. That would have been ’95. After doing more work on the Pacific I got invited to teach at Hong Kong University one summer, you know, and I’ve got invited to teach a Pacific Literature summer seminar in Kaohsiung, Taiwan at National Sun Yat-sen University. What I mean is Hawai‘i wasn’t exactly Williams College; it wasn’t Boston University. It was out there in the Pacific. And that peripheral site was really a great site to look for post-colonial emergences, you know, the whole invention of local literature. I considered it fateful and fortunate, a karmic decision drew me there. It turned out to be a fortunate conjunction and I learned a lot. I think the main reason I left Hawai‘i was mainly that the UH salary was poor and the cost of living high.

KT: Yeah.

RW: The cost of living was so high that I couldn’t even pay my credit card debts at the end of a month. I saw this job opening at UC Santa Cruz, which is where my daughter Sarah had gone to school as an undergraduate. I applied, it was for transnational post-colonial literature and I had a book coming out with Duke University Press at the time, I got the job and then I think my salary went up by three times.

KT: Sure.

RW: I won’t even tell you what the figure was, but that in California, allowed me to prosper more because Mari and I had a place in the Mauna Luan, we were able to buy a condo and it had a swimming pool. We had some parties there, but the cost of living was too much. My joke was the University of Hawai‘i paid you in nice stationary and good weather, and they had a good pension plan so they said, but shit.

KT: Okay.

RW: I was, like, thirty, I didn’t care about a pension plan. I needed to pay the bills so, yeah, eventually I had to leave. I really felt I was going to burn out mentally and economically if I stayed there, so I had to leave.

KT: Okay, you kind of answered this one question. I’m gonna change it around a little bit if you don’t mind.

RW: Whatever.

KT: I asked a question about how you got involved in local literature, but also Asian American literature. How do you connect local literature with Asian American literature in general?

RW: Yeah. When I was at Cal Berkeley, that was ’74–76, there was a whole struggle to have an Asian American Studies department; it’s in a Third World study context. One of my classes, Ronald Reagan had tear gassed the campus. Literally dropped tear gas and so I was in a Milton class in Dwinelle Hall at Cal. We students all started choking because the tear gas they would drop would make you cough up blood. So we all scurry out. They were trying to squelch Asian- American studies with tear gas, and they brought in the Oakland police to hit the students. It was really a nightmare, but anyway, we moved off campus for the Milton class, but we were all sympathetic to the need for Asian American studies. I was aware of that, and there was all the social movement at San Francisco State and Berkeley, it was exactly where Asian American study had started in the U.S.A.

I knew there was something emergent and different going on, but when I got over to Hawai‘i I soon realized that there was something going on that wasn’t quite what was going on in the U.S. continental version of “Asian American.” What really stood out to me was—again, it was a fortunate disruptive time in 1978—during the summer there was the “Talk Story” conference, right? So there was simultaneously the Inter-Arts International Conference with Maxine and Michael Ondaatje that I had become one of the organizers of, but the “Talk Story” event was also going on that summer. I went to some of the events, but Rob Wilson basically shut up because I didn’t know enough about the movement of social forces and I wanted to hear what people were saying. The mighty literary activist Frank Chin was there and he kind of took me aside to chat. Later, he came back to Honolulu several times and every time he came back, we’d get together informally, and he would ask, “What’s this Bamboo Ridge localism thing?” “Do you think it’s any good?” He was, like, really kind of asking me to explain or justify it, maybe as someone trained from Berkeley and the Bay Area. And he was a provoker but interested in it all. And then of course he got into a real fight with Maxine. He called her a white missionary writer.

Maxine got her revenge on Frank when she put him in Tripmaster Monkey as Wittman Ah Sing. She kind of did a fictional persona version of Frank as Whitman-I-sing and it’s a brilliant book. I think it’s her best fictional book. I teach it a lot as a San Francisco novel, and Wittman is kind of with it spelled differently, but it’s like Walt Whitman and then Frank eventually as he does in real life, he needs to create his own form of community theater. Because Frank’s like a big guy, he’s like six-foot-three and he’s, like, built like a wiry, and he’s fierce, he really gave Maxine a hard time. Oh my god, everywhere she went and she, like, was he was like his super ego, like his scourge. I sympathize with Maxine more, but I knew that Frank Chin had something going on, because he was a real radical. He wasn’t a compromiser, so he had a kind of skeptical view of Bamboo Ridge localism.

KT: Hmm.

RW: But he had a skeptical view of Maxine as kind of writing for The New Yorker or some such. So he was, like, critical of the whole damn scene, but he was sharp and he was a provoker. He was an antagonist, he liked to think and write dialectically, he took the opposite position to shake you up. I haven’t seen him in years, but I always remember we’d be talking and smiling somewhere on the way to get a cup of coffee by ASUH, or something.

KT: Yeah.

RW: Frank Chin was always bright, and fun. So I think it was around that time of Talk Story, the first thing I published in Bamboo Ridge [Issue #5 -Ed.] was the review of Milton Murayama’s first “All I Asking for is My Body” from Supa Press, and then later I submitted some poems of my own. I think the first ones that show up are in 1979, “Walking Down Oahu Avenue,” [Issue #4 -Ed.] “Fear over the Ala Wai.” [Issue #15 -Ed.] There was later a Best of Bamboo Ridge anthology around 1986 or so [Issue #31/32 -Ed.] and they published one of my poems called “Anita Sky”; my daughter Sarah was at UC Santa Cruz where that book was assigned. And so she had to read one of her father’s love poems, “I marinated her heart, oh Italian artichoke,” something like that you know. Poetry is dangerous and never quite goes away.

KT: Yeah, I’ve read something online. You’ve got something called “Seven Tourist Sonnets.” [Jacket #7 -Ed.] It was good.

RW: Oh yeah, yeah, that was another one. That’s more experimental. Here’s what I did. Every 313 class I had, in an introduction to writing poetry, I would assign a sonnet where students got words from somebody else in the class. So like if “You: first word, first line, ‘blue,’ second line,” “’carp.’ Third line, ‘tuna,’” “fourth line ‘Shakespeare.’” The students had to write, using “blue,” “carp,” “Shakespeare” and so on. Sometimes there was an odd number of students in the class so I would have to give a student fourteen words and they would give me the fourteen words. When I got the fourteen words, I would usually turn it into a sonnet of my own. I called it a postmodern sonnet: influenced by Bernadette Mayer, it expressed more of a freeform sonnet. In “Seven Tourists Sonnet,” I played with the idea of being a tourist in the Hawaiian Islands and on Hotel Street. I wrote as an outsider and yeah, they’re more experimental. I thought everything I did by then in the 1990s was kind of a language experiment, but some were more like imagistic, that remain more accessible. Some have more formal complexity. Hopefully I’ll get a collection out next year with Duke University Press that will have a lot of these poems in there.

KT: Okay. So moving on, do you ascribe to a particular literary theory, Post-Colonial, Deconstructionism—?

RW: Well, no, I’m more eclectic and open as a theorist. Houston Wood was one of my former students, a PhD student along with Steve Bradbury and Gary Pak; Houston ended up being the main literature teacher at Hawai‘i Pacific University and he taught local literature, etc. He already had a degree in a PhD in Sociology, so he got a second PhD in English, but anyway, he wrote an article called “Cultural Studies in Oceania” in [The] Contemporary Pacific journal. And he proposed, “Rob Wilson does theory in poetry and poetry in theory.” Makes sense to me! I draw collectively on theory, everything from Frederic Jameson, Masao Miyoshi, and Edward Said to, kind of Marxist critical theory and the Birmingham School of Stuart Hall et al. But I don’t think you should impose a theory as a reader. I think the theory should come from the ground up, like something that fits pragmatically into the world that you’re situated in and decoding. Therefore, I think it would be really vulgar to impose a Freudian approach or even a straightforward Marxist approach because you’d want to see what was going on with the local working class and the voices expressed there. I’m inclined to Marxist theory, and Post-colonial theory, and to Borderlands theory. I think I’m interested in something like Cosmopolitan Political Complexity. So it’s hardly just “Global/local” as such but more than that. The literature, it’s globalized, but it’s localized and it’s indigenized and pluralized as well. I think that’s kind of where my instincts lie.

KT: I see. Okay, you already answered part of this question, but is there anything you want to expand upon in terms of the Talk Story conference?

RW: Well, I mean, I think it was a crucial event. Steve Sumida, in his study of local literature, writes very well about it and we thought it was a turning point. When Maxine picked up on the whole idea of “talk story,” that was a local expression that she uses herself in “Woman Warrior,” characters talking story. The whole idea of a story that’s closer to talk, to oral form, hence poetry that’s closer to Pidgin speech is all to the good. It’s a true story and it sounds crazy, but the most important teacher in Hawai‘i, I mean, I was important, I think to somebody like pidgin guerilla Lee Tonouchi and expert Chinese poetry translator Steve Bradbury and to Korean local author Gary Pak, people like that. Susan Schultz’s Tinfish was also important. But the most important influence of all was Faye Kicknosway or Morgan Blair as she came to rename herself. She came to UH–Mānoa from Wayne State writing in Detroit working-class speech. As a teacher, she basically demanded that students get and use and develop a kind of a local vernacular voice on the page. Faye was brutal as a creative writing teacher. She would take a poem by a student, and she would cut out nine-tenths of it and leave two words and say, “Here, now go write your poem.”

KT: Okay.

RW: Faye was a—the crucial teacher for Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Zack Linmark [publishes as R. Zamora Linmark -Ed.], for others too. I mean, she had the most important impact on getting people to really write Pidgin voices in fiction and poetry. I think Darrell and Eric were already doing this in their own way. She was really influential and, and eventually got a book published with Wesleyan, but I thought the world of her as a teacher. I don’t know if she’s still there anymore, she’s probably retired but then I was part of the creative writing program. So I knew Frank Stewart, I knew Bob Onopa was a dear friend; Ian McMillan and I played basketball on the outdoor courts at Kānewai Park a lot. Pat Matsueda was there and Adele Dumuran, I thought it was a great place to be.

The colleagues in creative writing were very good. We used to have a softball game each spring. Creative writers versus scholars on some Sunday afternoon in Kāne‘ohe. We’d have a picnic, pot lunch, everybody would bring some food, lots of beer; they always made me play on the creative writing team, because there were always more scholars. There were so few creative writers. I got some T-shirts printed up with a Pegasus decal on the front of it. It was fun. Everything over there was just kind of open and, you know, like we’d go to San Souci at the end of the workday and everybody brings some food and beer and, we’d go for a swim and talk. It was just like heaven, I mean, at that level: we were poor, but we had sense to see and enjoy life, right? We had the best beaches in the world, nice people: kind, supportive, funny, unassuming, friendly. Anywhere you went. I used to play basketball, Pākī Park or UH courts. Roy Sakuma, the ukulele player, I was on his team. We played every Sunday at the outdoor courts near the swimming pool. Roy put me on his team, he had his own team, Sakuma out in Pearl City in the over-30 league. We’re going out there and then he treated us, at the end of the year, he took us to a Korean bar. Roy, he has amazing ukulele hands, right? As a basketball player, oh, he was so smooth and good. I would just fit in with the local guys. They’d say, “Hey professor,” they would kid, or “pass it to the haole guy.” It was great.

KT: Okay. Yeah.

RW: I mean, I loved it and I stayed healthy by playing basketball. And Roy was just so smooth and cool in a local way.

KT: I might’ve played against you in Klum Gym sometime. Who knows?

RW: Well, I mean, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, Klum. I remember this black guy, light-skinned black guy with a good left-hand bank shot. That was Barack Obama. He used to play on Saturday afternoons. I remember I used to go to Punahou Tuesday evenings and then Harry who lost tenure at UHM said to me, “oh Rob, sorry, you have to be from Punahou. You can’t play here.” I said, “You know Harry, I made you a part of my basketball team at UHM, my bunch of players in Kāne‘ohe and you’re, like, kicking me out of your stupid pool. Oh, okay.”

KT: Okay.

RW: Goodbye. I mean, Punahou was always, like, its own little world, right?

KT: Yeah.

RW: Barack Obama writes a lot about basketball in one of his autobiographies; basketball was expressing the black side of him; he survived Hawai‘i, I think, by playing basketball and then eventually ended up in Chicago. I think it’s where he kind of identifies more with Chicago than with Hawai‘i, even though he grew up with that mixed race family in O‘ahu. I think he really was more transformed by Chicago and that was where he learned local politics and that kind of thing—

KT: We’re getting too far off the track here. It’s interesting, but still—Yeah. So how did you first learn about Bamboo Ridge?

RW: Well, around the time of Talk Story and then Bamboo Ridge started up and then I must have read it and bought it. Eric and Darrell were MA students at the time in the English department and I got to know Eric more. And when I just submitted that review of “All I Asking for…” they not only published it, they had Milton Murayama respond to it, which I thought was good [Issue #5 -Ed.]. I kind of got drawn in through that, but I think I had submitted a poem earlier than that and got it accepted [Issue #4 -Ed.]. It was kind of open, if you had a good poem drawing on local circumstances or imagery. I always wrote a lot of local poems, you know, about, like, walking through Waikīkī or, or fear over the Ala Wai depending on where I lived and what was going on. I would create new poems out of that. I could publish a poem that might be as good as something that belongs in The New Yorker. But it would be in Bamboo Ridge because The New Yorker was just missing that wavelength of local if it didn’t have, like, East 72nd Street or Central Park, they wouldn’t know what the hell’s the Ala Wai Canal or something.

KT: Okay, could you discuss some of your experiences or relationships with some of the key figures in Bamboo Ridge? I mean, not only Eric and Darrell, but maybe, Gary Pak, Rodney Morales. Anyone else?

RW: Yeah, okay, now Gary. I’m recalling this now that I went to a reading of Gary’s. When an issue [#33 -Ed.] of Bamboo Ridge came out, they had a kind of group reading, a public reading, right? I might have had a poem [“Kogan” -Ed.] in an issue and I read it, and then Gary read one of his stories [“The Valley of the Dead Air” -Ed.] and I thought it was just marvelous. I thought it was a magical-realist local voice, but spiritual, Korean, Hawaiian, everything at once and so I went up to him and I said, wow, this is really great. I mean, you’re good at this, and he started talking about wanting to go to graduate school. He’d gone to ‘Iolani, so he’s a very good student. And then he’s kind of ambitious because he’s Korean, and so he might have been driving a taxi at the time, but he wanted to get ahead more professionally for his family. So he got into the PhD program and then he was a good student and he was driven. He wrote a dissertation about the whole emergence of local literature; and he kept publishing his own fiction as well and then he and I along with Paul Lyons later spent good times in Korea together.

Gary was wonderful: I would go out to lunch with his father a lot. He was just like, like, totally, loving, caring kind of person. I met his, his wife, Merle, and his kids; so I kind of became part of his extended family as an older brother. Gary and I took a Hawaiian class together one summer, Hawaiian 101. I was the worst student in that class! Well, he was the best student, so because he and all of the kids knew some Hawaiian by growing up there. They knew how to pronounce the words and everything. I’ll never forget that was the summer when O. J. Simpson murders and we’d come out and talk about that horrible thing, but yeah, I mean, Gary was good in Hawaiian. My name was Lopaka and his Hawaiian name was Lani and to this day, Gary calls me Lopaka, so he’s endearing in that way.

So I don’t know. I mean, and then Tina [sic Tino -Ed.] Ramirez, I mentioned, kind of yogic surf poet from Wahiawā. Randy [sic Rodney -Ed.] Morales was always very quiet, but definitely committed to the mālama ‘āina activist dimension, and a good story writer. I think, I think I helped Rodney behind the scenes: I wrote an outside review to help him to get from associate professor to full professor and he’s got his book published. But Rodney was to me more quiet. Then there is long-standing Frank Stewart with the journal Mānoa and much more, but he’s not a Bamboo Ridge person.

Who else do you want to know about?

KT: Did you know Marie Hara?

RW: Oh yeah, yeah, she was one of the mainstays. I mean, she was one of the wise elder mentors, statesman people of Bamboo Ridge and then who is the person that taught at Chaminade? Loretta…? Not just Jim Kraus, there was a woman that was always part of Bamboo Ridge too. I’m forgetting. But yeah, I’m trying to think who else. Of course, Lois-Ann Yamanaka. I just loved her. I mean, she was, like, so frank and charming; the funny thing is I once asked her once about where she got all of her characters, “Was it her family?” And she said, “No,” mainly it was from teaching, like, elementary school and then a lot of the stories she would hear about family abuse. Her students would tell her stories about their family abuse and that kind of stuff. She just recomposed it all into the Big Island town of “Pāhala”—eventually I visited Pāhala on the Big Island. I’ll never forget this one Saturday night. Really a forlorn town. One 7-Eleven. There was a phone booth with the phone just dangling off the hook and I thought, man, this is like a forlorn place. How the hell did she come out of here and write such a wonderful book of poetry? But then there were beautiful places like Kea‘au, which was a Hawaiian plantation town but had a strong Hawaiian influence such as where the goddess Hina started hula by the ocean there. So I always liked the Big Island, which I wish I could have lived on it. I love Kamuela, which is where John Dominis Holt came from and wrote about in Waimea Summer. I admired Hilo which is where Lois-Ann Yamanaka is from and then Pāhala, the plantation town. Lahaina was where Milton Murayama’s plantation was located outside of Lahaina and all of that stuff is gone up in flames now.

KT: Oh yeah.

RW: It’s completely sad. Nora Okja Keller was an honors student in English. She had a tutorial with me and Tino. We had like a class of two: we would meet weekly at the Manoa Bar, and it was just fun. Really talented students like Jennifer Waihee was so bright and full of future promise. Eventually she became a lawyer. She could have been anything. She could be the governor like her father, or a playwright. I mean. She was great.

KT: Yeah.

RW: UH was peculiar in that a lot of really good students stayed home. They’re really talented. I mean, Jennifer could go to Yale or whatever, but they’d end up here in Mānoa—Her father was governor, of course, but she’s humble, non-pretentious, Lee and Jennifer, Jason Olive I mean. They were—everybody had a kind of way of just getting along there, I always appreciated that, they were open to learning new things as well.

KT: Did you know Arnold Hiura?

RW: Not really. I think, I mean, I know that name, but I think he’s a little after my time, right? I don’t really know.

KT: Yeah. How about Stephen Sumida?

RW: Oh yes, Steve. Yeah, I mean, Steve was really the main local literature scholar and, yeah, I mean off and on we talked. I forget he moved: Was he up in Washington or something?

KT: The University of Washington.

RW: Yeah, that’s right. I knew him earlier when he was in Hawai‘i. And, we would talk. I think I wrote a review of his book [“Breaking Local Ground: Stephen H. Sumida and the View from the Shore” -Ed.] for either Bamboo Ridge [Issue #57 -Ed.] or Mānoa; yeah, I think it was in Bamboo Ridge or maybe for Hawai‘i Review. I had a lot of respect for Steve and he was from a sort of well-off family in ‘Aiea or something, they had like a watercress farm or whatever they had so he was, he was a little cut above. I’m not saying he was snotty about it, but he definitely was a little more advantaged, his family was well off .

KT: Yeah.

RW: You know, so yeah, I always respected Stephen and he did a first book, he did a really good book with chapters on John Dominis Holt and Milton Murayama, some of the key works but less on poetry. I mean, it was a good, a kind of a foundational kind of work. I haven’t been in touch with him in years, but I always respected him.

KT: Okay, and speaking of respect, you’re very respected by Bamboo Ridge, the people in Bamboo Ridge, for your efforts to bring local literature into your classrooms at the University of Hawai‘i. How were those efforts received on campus and in the community?

RW: Yeah, well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate that. I teach a course on the literatures of Hawai‘i, plural, like every three years as my schedule rotates at UC Santa Cruz on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. There’s a lot of interest in it up here. I can teach anything I want with it, so I rotate works; I often use some Tinfish books. I generally always use Saturday Night at Pahala Theatre and All I Asking for is My Body. I consider those two of the local lit classics. Now I consider Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye a classic. So those three books I would use and then I would use the Best of Bamboo Ridge anthology at times. If there was a Hawai‘i movie showing, I would read it critically. I’ve done everything from, you know, Blue Hawaii by Elvis to the Descendants or something, so I try—I would have a kind of core stuff and then I would update it with something new that was going on. The most peculiar thing was in the Hawai‘i class every now and then I would talk about Stevie Nicks because I know she lived on Maui in a mansion somewhere in Maui like many Hollywood or Silicon Valley people do.

KT: Huh.

RW: I like playing Nick’s lyrics and Fleetwood Mac and so I would refer every now and then, one of her song poems. Student would tell me about her smoking pot in a Mercedes Benz limo on Maui, something like that. Then one of the girls in the Hawai‘i class; she’s from California. She goes, “Oh, you mentioned Stevie Nicks. My father in Hollywood is her manager.” I said, “Whoa, that’s amazing.” So when she turned in her final paper in this Hawai‘i literature class, she turned it in with a signed copy of Stevie Nicks’ photo: “To Rob Wilson: Love Stevie Nicks.” And man, I gave that girl an A.

KT: Okay. Wow.

RW: I kind of have permission to do what I want up in Northern California, so I use or assign a fair amount of Susan Schultz’s Tinfish, what’s that book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Bus? I’ve done different Tinfish works. I haven’t kept up as much with Bamboo Ridge nowadays. I always teach some of Eric Chock’s poems. Like “Tutu on the Curb,” I teach over and over as an urban Hawaiian elegy set in Hotel Street area. The students are new and they’re just coming—Joe Balaz Hawai‘i poem called “Da Mainland to Me.” You gotta kind of go through some of the classics and make them accessible to the students, so it gets a little repetitive, but then I always add some new works too—

I started teaching a course about San Francisco, but I still teach a course about Hawai`i like, every three years or so and they like me to offer it here because it’s—Students in California care about Hawai‘i, they feel connected to it. They maybe have visited as a tourist, but they just care about it, you know, like kava ceremonies, kava pills, you know, whatever is going on in Hawai‘i, of course surfing. The first, surfing outside of Hawai‘i first took place in Santa Cruz, when the Hawaiian princes came up to San Mateo Military School and then one weekend they came down to Santa Cruz. They were nostalgic for the ocean. They had these longboards made out of Santa Cruz Redwood trees—ten-foot boards—and they went down to the San Lorenzo River oceanfront and they started surfing there. That’s the first diasporic spread of surfing outside of Hawai‘i. So when anybody tells you Huntington Beach is Surf City. No, Santa Cruz is where the Hawaiians brought up surfing to the coast of California, and now, of course it’s everywhere.

KT: So, going back, I was actually asking about when you were at the University of Hawai‘i and were teaching local literature in your English classes. I was wondering how that was received by your colleagues in the department.

RW: I mean, I think it got more and more accepted. I think early on it was, like, I don’t know, I would just put it in courses anyway. Because they didn’t really—you’re supposed to have canonical Anglo American works; you have to get an accepted course list and then, I don’t know, you know, say the Great Gatsby and then maybe Best of Bamboo Ridge, you kind of sneak it in there or something. So yeah, I’d have to check this with Lee Tonouchi or Kai Markell, but I think I was always teaching some version of local literature and especially in the poetry classes. Lee was an honor student, so he was in my soph lit course and others. He would probably complain I made him read, Hemingway or something! I should ask him that actually. If you see Lee, ask him or whatever.

KT: I’ve met him a couple of times, but we don’t—

RW: Yeah, Lee is great. Anyway, if you see him ask that when you took Sophomore Literature courses from Rob Wilson, did he have any local literature in there or was it all like Hemingway and Thoreau? He would remember, he’s really good [and funny] at local history memories.

KT: Yeah, I think we’re gonna talk to him, too, down the road.

RW: Oh good. Yeah, yeah. So what are you gonna do with these things? You’re gonna transcribe them and put them on, put them—?

KT: Make them accessible to the public.

RW: Oh yeah, wonderful. That’s great. That’s wonderful.

KT: Yeah. But I’m, I’m hoping that we eventually create some kind of special publication for Bamboo Ridge, The History of Bamboo Ridge.

RW: Yeah, very good. Yeah, and it’s the kind of book actually that UH Press would like, a collection of interviews, or something like that—

KT: Yeah, possibly. Well, cause we’ve already talked to Darrell and Eric and Steve Sumida, Cathy Song, the whole crew so—

RW: Oh yeah, good. Excellent. Is Cathy still over there?

KT: Oh yeah, she’s the acting Editor in Chief.

RW: Oh, she is. Wow, I see. Yeah, well, that’s good.

KT: Yeah, so this is good. I want to ask you one last question.

RW: Okay.

KT: This year, this fall Bamboo Ridge is celebrating its 45th anniversary. Looking back, what impact do you think the press has had both nationally and globally?

RW: Okay. Well, I mean, locally, there’s absolutely no doubt it’s been crucial to the formation, to the support, to the circulation, to the growth, and to the teaching of literature in local schools, everything. I think Darrell and Eric created a great legacy. The fact that more and more people are picking it up; and I like the new way at the journal they’re doing one issue that’s a single author and then another issue that’s collective. I think that’s a really good idea. As a former editor of journals, I think two issues a year is manageable. I think Darrell and Eric were doing like four and that got kind of hard, right or something?

KT: Yeah.

RW: In terms of nationally, I think it’s helped to put Hawai‘i on the map. I think of course, there’s an antagonism or perceived antagonism with Native Hawaiian versus something more like Asia Pacific localism. But I think it’s okay.

I think my sense was, man, if you looked at it, Dana Naone Hall did a special issue of Bamboo Ridge called Mālama, mālama ‘āina [Issue #29 -Ed.]. Rodney Morales did a special issue about the land struggles there, so those are special issues of Bamboo Ridge in the early 1980s. So people that just think it only supported Asian local or Japanese or Chinese works and that’s wrong. I mean, they didn’t do it exclusively, but they did it, they opened up a space to talk about issues like mālama ‘āina, land struggles, political struggles, the lurking or manifest conflicts there.

Rodney Morales did some special issue [Issue #22 -Ed.] about George Helm, the Hawaiian activist that was killed? I have kept all those issues and, you know, someday I’ll donate them to the UH library. I mean, I have a whole lot of, you know, Pacific and Hawai‘i stuff I’ve collected over the years. It’s not so much calling attention to itself, Bamboo Ridge, but nurturing local literature and Hawaiian literature and they were crucial, you know, earlier and more than Mānoa or Tinfish. Tinfish was important later and it did more experimental works, but Bamboo Ridge has the longevity and the vision that Darrell and Eric had. It endured. It was a local ethos or vision. It was also cosmic. I mean, it was really enduring. I think the world of Eric and Darrell both and what they did to create a community, you know, God bless them. I mean it’s just a great work and it will go on as with the kind of work you are doing.

KT: Okay, great. You’ll be glad to hear that they were the editors for the 45th anniversary.

RW: That’s good. I didn’t know that. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, they’re still around. Well, that’s great.

KT: Yeah, so dragged them out of retirement to do that. Yeah.

RW: Dragged them out. Yeah, that’s apt and good.

KT: Well, they reluctantly agreed to do it for one last—

RW: Is their health okay? Are they doing well now?

KT: Yeah, as far as I know, I mean, I’m not in touch with them daily or even weekly, but yeah.

RW: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all good.

KT: I mean, we email.

RW: Well, give them my best when you see them and tell them I think the world of what they did and etc. So—

KT: So what’s gonna happen is Google will, I mean, Zoom will generate a transcription which is very onerous to go through but I will edit it and get it back to you for your—whatever you want to do with it. I’ll give you more instructions at that time.

RW: Yeah, I’ll touch it up a little. I, I think. I think we had a good conversation. I appreciate it. You had good questions and it flows along and I think it works pretty well.

KT: Okay, any last things for the good of the order.

RW: No, I appreciate your care in this, in the questions—so long live Bamboo Ridge! That’s what I say, just keep it going.

KT: Okay. Okay, yeah. Yes. Okay. Goodbye, thank you again.

RW: Okay, yeah, thank you. Thanks, Ken. Bye.