To understand the accomplishment of Susan M. Schultz, you have to realize that it is – or always has been, up to now – virtually impossible for a writer to go to Hawai’i & then become widely known & read on the mainland. You can go there if you’re already famous – viz. W.S. Merwin – but the more common result is either for the poet to head back to the continental U.S., usually pretty quickly, or to disappear into the sun glare more or less entirely. One poet who came over just when she was beginning to be known stateside & stayed is Faye Kicknosway, whose poetry – excellent in its own right – isn’t nearly as widely read back in the Contiguous 48 as it should be. As if to underscore the completeness of her disappearing act, Kicknosway changed her name & now teaches at the University of Hawai’i as Morgan Blair, even tho she still publishes as Kicknosway.

 

So Schultz has definitely done it the hard way. Part of Schultz’ secret is that she must have the energy & drive of three or four human beings hidden away inside of her. In addition to teaching, parenting & writing, she has been the force behind Tinfish, both the journal & the ongoing series of exceptionally quirky & eye-catching chapbooks. One of these latter I’m happy to say is Schultz’ own Portraits : Parables, a sequence of 14 prose poems in the manner of Kafka.

 

I think that the parable may be the most difficult of all currently active genre to take on, simply based on the number of bad ones a reader comes across these days – Lydia Davis has a few excellent ones, but she is very close to the only writer over the past two decades to consistently do well in the form.

 

Schultz now is the second instance of somebody who really gets it as to how parables work & what their potential might be for writing. First, her poems here have the precision of the best analytic philosophy. Second, she understands that the dynamics of the parable must play out in the referential world. Typically, poets who focus on the latter forget the importance of the former & a few of those who get the former tend to neglect the gears of causality in the latter. Schultz gets all of it & does so with a wit & tenderness that made me stop just to wonder at it all. Here is “The Untraumatized Man”:

 

The one untraumatized man refused to turn on his television that day. he did not see the people falling, or the towers falling, or the ashes falling, or the falling of light into grief. Perhaps he saw some shadow of it in the faces of those he passed on the street, as if the rays of other people’s televisions permeated their skin, backlighting their silences, their stumbling. How does the untraumatized man define the word “neighbor”? To what nation does he belong if his memory has not failed, but does not in the first place exist?

 

One imagines the untraumatized man playing ball with his son in the park. It is just spring, and the purple and the yellow flowers blossom. If the newspaper is his daily prayer, he has failed to utter it. If there is an ethics of memory, his is incomplete. If we are bonded by our trauma, he stands alone. Guard the untraumatized man, for he precedes and follows us.

 

This poem, I would argue, is built around a single sentence: It is just spring, and the purple and the yellow flowers blossom. It is the detail that does not otherwise belong in this narrative &, as a result, it throws light against every other element here, providing contrast & context. Precisely what the untraumatized man himself lacks.

 

Memory – that linkage (or perhaps spillage) between presence & context, between here & meaning – is a major theme in Schultz’ work – it shows up again & again, both in these poems & elsewhere. Perhaps that is what jumps up for a woman from Virginia who finds herself building a life in the South Pacific, but I think it’s more also – the phrase an ethics of memory strikes me as very close to defining Schultz’ project as such. It’s as political as it is poetic & that double dimension combined with ear & mind that are both razor sharp should ensure that what we are witnessing are the first stages of a major writing.