Hawaii poet recognized with national award

As Craig Santos Perez entered the classroom in Sakamaki Hall on the University of Hawaii campus, where 14 undergraduate students in his “eco-poetry” class sat on colorful modular banquettes, it was as if the outdoors had followed him in.

Ceiling lights hung from panels printed with photo murals of bamboo, and the long walls were filled with windows that looked out on trees.

With a calm, friendly demeanor, Perez, an associate professor of English at UH, opened by asking each student to comment on contemporary American poet Robert Hass’ introduction to “The Eco Poetry Anthology,” edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street.

Several students said they liked Hass’ historical approach tracing the development of ecological consciousness in poetry; the book goes back 150 years to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

Maria Garay said she liked that Hass included the science of global warming and extinction of species, but criticized “the way he used a lot of mostly white people’s work and kept calling it American poetry, as if Americans are only white.”

Perez nodded.

“There’s a lot of racial bias in this work,” he agreed in a deep, warm voice, “and in this class we’ll also read different ethnic eco-poetry, because ethnicity shapes how you see the world.”

ETHNICITY has clearly informed Perez’s experiences and his poetry.

A native Chamorro from Guam, he is the first ethnic Pacific islander and Hawaii resident to win the prestigious Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship for Poetry. (Lois-Ann Yamanaka of Honolulu won a Lannan Fellowship for Fiction in 1998, and W.S. Merwin of Maui received the foundation’s lifetime achievement award in 2004.)

Nominations for the awards are made anonymously by a network of writers, editors, publishers and literary scholars, and Perez, 36, said he had no idea he was in the running until, in an October phone call, he learned he’d won.

“I feel amazed and completely grateful,” he said on a recent afternoon before the start of class, sitting on a lanai in the dappled shade of a bamboo grove.

A poet who examines environmental and political themes through the lens of personal and cultural experience, Perez said the recognition felt serendipitous at this stage in his career, when he was about to take an academic sabbatical and work on his fourth book of poetry.

“Knowing people are reading my work kind of gives me the boost of confidence and energy to finish my book,” he said.

In addition to a generous monetary sum, the Lannan fellowship provides a four- to six-week writing residency in Marfa, Texas. Perez hopes to go there, perhaps in the summer, with his wife and fellow poet Brandy Nalani McDougall, an associate professor in the American Studies Department at UH, and their 2 1/2-year-old daughter Kaikainalii.

In 2015, he won an American Book Award for “from unincorporated territory [guma’],” his third book, in which one poem mourns the extinction of the “i sihek,” the Micronesian kingfisher bird, due to predation by brown tree snakes.

A poem to his father, a Vietnam War veteran, juxtaposes the preparation of coconuts to feed a family and make rope with images of quarries, ruins, bodies and bones. Another poem elegizes the first Chamorro soldier to die in the Iraq War.

“Guam has very high enlistment rates,” said Perez, who lived on Guam until age 15, when his family “migrated to California for economic and educational opportunities.”

He spoke of how, as a high school senior, he planned to enlist in the Army so he could attend college on the GI Bill and not burden his family. But his parents refused to let the recruiter into their house. “My father said I couldn’t go to college if I was killed.”

Perez pursued higher education with the help of loans and scholarships, instead. He earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of San Francisco and a doctorate in ethnic studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

His forthcoming book is about Hawaii, where he’s lived for six years, as well as Guam. “It’s about my daughter, being new parents, and creation stories from my own culture and my wife’s Native Hawaiian culture, how they speak to us today.”

In poems written during his wife’s pregnancy, he worries that pesticide drift might harm their child, and the idea of a cesarean section evokes images of plastic waste found in the bellies of dead marine animals:

“Plastic is the ‘perfect’ creation because it never dies/ i wish our daughter was derived from oil so that she will survive our wasteful hands … ”

There is also a seductive ode to a mango.

Asked about the way he treats sometimes grim subjects with fanciful humor, Perez refers to the traditional stories of Pacific islanders.

“For me a lot of humor is subversive,” he said with a sparkle in his big, brown eyes. “In Pacific literature, there is usually a trickster who subverts power.”

Perez has edited anthologies of Pacific literature, most recently a special issue of Poetry Magazine, a 105-year-old publication that has printed verse by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes.

His own poetry often expresses solidarity with other indigenous cultures. A recent poem, “Chanting the Waters,” is about the Dakota Access Pipeline, scene of recent protests by Native Americans and their supporters, and water rights struggles around the world.

STANDING in the middle of the classroom after discussing Hass’ essay, Perez asked the students to choose one of Hass’ poems and write in bullet points on translucent, sliding window panels, “a summary of what’s happening in the poem and an analysis of how you interpret the meaning.”

Of “Exit, Pursued by a Sierra Meadow,” one student interpreted the line “beauty is a little unendurable” as “humans need to do something with nature or get bored of it.”

Next came the creative portion of the hourlong class, which includes learning to write as well as to read and interpret poetry.

Perez asked the students to close their eyes and visualize a natural place from their childhoods, including sounds, smells and emotions. They then wrote a list of words arising out of the memory and gathered in small groups to tell each other stories about their places.

He circulated the room as the students talked. “There’s lots of interesting stories, I can hear from eavesdropping, which I always do,” he said, as the class broke into laughter.

The process ended with each student jotting down the story they’d told. “In the writing itself, some deeper things start to emerge,” Perez said.

After class, Perez, who also teaches in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and the Indigenous Politics Program at UH, mentioned that he is the only Pacific writer in the eco-poetry anthology. He hoped his receiving the Lannan fellowship would bring more attention to other Pacific writers “who maybe don’t have the same opportunities I do.”