Remember to Wave

"A poetic imagination can be an insistent one, comfortable enough in uncertainties to demand meaning. We cannot easily see a history of displacement in the parking lots, roller derby bouts, and wet-green terrain of the land that abuts the Columbia River. Such awareness must be deeply felt . . .." So writes Kaia Sand in this quirky, elegant poetic history of the northern mudflats of Portland. Now hipster safe, once these flats were Vanport, a poor flimsy neighborhood built for laborers, and before that they housed the detention of Japanese Americans rounded up for transport to the internment camps, and before that, of course, were the Native Americans. From roller derby to the flooding of immigrant homes to the displacement of the first inhabitants, Remember to Wave re-visions the geography of hip Portlandia thru essay, sketches, photographs and poems, "in terms of displacements and exclusions." As a poet and historian, I admire this little book and recommend it to all who want to see through time.

Is it a guidebook, a rulebook, an epic poem? Is it a work of history, of concrete poetry? If I were a better critic I'd be able to pin back each layer of Kaia Sand's new book, like petals from a flower, or the leaves of an artichoke, and expose its essence, but I'm not perfect so I can't do that, and in any case maybe that's not the way to discuss the book. I do want to suggest something of its multivalence, and that it's not like your ordinary book in any way.Kaia Sand is one of a number of mid-career poets who have worked up a fertile field combining poetry with social and political consciousness slash activism, and as one of a number, she is pragmatic enough about her working process to feel comfortable with listing the contributions of dozens of other poets and other cultural workers all plowing the same field, and in some cases contributing ideas and text for this one. I like this sort of pluralism. In Portland (Oregon) it takes the form of a renewed attention to the area's biopresence, so much of the book is s document or projection of a particular nature walk, as well as a sobering historical analysis of how so beautiful a land managed to summon up the cruelty embodied in the internment camps Japanese-Americans were herded into during World War II after FDR's Executive Order 9066. Portland had a great one, the old Livestock Exhibition Center, which continued to smell like horse dung long after the horses had been freed and Nisei citizens wheeled into their place.Just as a refreshing array of voices fills the book, its design also speaks of reduced authorial function, as though (and perhaps this is a byproduct of zine culture) from now on the designer dictates what and how the work presents. Thus we have patches where you have to stand the book on its side, spine down, and part the pages with both thumbs (do Japanese read this way?)... there are few pages without photos bleeding into and over the text, photos whose function underlines or detournes the pure poetry... In one spread the earth opens and the text tumbles down into the crack as if into a rocky abyss. It's not a book for those used to reading the old-fashioned way, and due to its eccentric typography, parts of it remain a mystery to me--to my eyes that is. I haven't figured out who wrote the blurbs on the back of the book, nor what they say.... Perhaps this is supposed to suggest the sun-bleaching effects of history on the visible? It's like that old song by Neil Young: "All day presidents look out windows/ All night sentries watch the moonglow/ And you know how time fades away." Nevertheless I have returned to Remember to Wave often over the past few weeks, drawn to its strange power and its courage, hoping to look forward to the healing.