[ MAUKA MAKAI ]
DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM
KCC instructor Lee Tonouchi proudly holds up "Stick It to Ya," a collection of poetry by some of his writing students. They are, from left, Jamie Shishido, Davin Kubota, Eriko Tsuchida, Daniel Daido, Mika Fellows, Orlando Galindo and Sophia Sek.
Stuck on words
Lee Tonouchi coaxes vibrant
poetry from his students at
Kapiolani Community College
What happens when first-time poets submit their work to literary magazines?" asks Lee Tonouchi in the introduction to his latest literary venture, "Stick It to Ya: Peanut Butter and Poetry Jam."
"Lotta times rejection.
"Henceforth, consequently, as one result kine, many promising young writers get all discourage, cry out their eyeballs and nevah evah write anyting again. Tragic."
Tonouchi should know. The 31-year-old award-winning author and co-editor of local literary rag Hybolics wasn't always such a heralded figure in local literature. In fact, he says, he has felt the sting of rejection many times.
"When I was taking a creative-writing class long time ago, I remember the teacher would say, 'Oh, Lee, your stuff is brilliant. Why don't you send it out?' So then I did. But ho, I got so many rejection letters. I think if I wasn't as strong or hard-core as I was, I would've gave up on writing, probably."
Still, he trudged on because something -- though he's not sure just what -- kept him motivated to write. "It's not money, 'cause of all the negative dollars I end up with, eh? I guess it's just love. Love of literature."
His passion for the written word, he says, flourished while attending the University of Hawaii, where he was introduced to works by local authors, many of whom wrote in pidgin. To read stories and poems by writers who communicated in Tonouchi's preferred idiom was an absolute revelation.
"I wanted (my students) to know that writing is alive and that it's something that can be a part of them. ... I think a lot of them just took the class because it satisfied a writing intensive credit, and I'm not sure how many of them will go on to be writers, but at least they know now that it's a possibility, eh?" --Lee Tonouchi, Writer, editor and Kapiolani Community College instructor
"I never even knew had people here (in Hawaii) writing anything. When I was going school, only had Shakespeare, eh? I never knew had local literature until I went college. I said, 'Wow, get people writing in pidgin, people writing about Hawaii. Where was all this stuff before?' Until that point, I never even dreamed I would be a writer."
Nor could he have envisioned himself a writing instructor a decade down the road. Yet he earns his keep these days as an English and creative writing instructor at Kapiolani Community College, where he dreamed up the concept for "Stick It to Ya," a collection of works by first-time homegrown poets.
"I just wanted to do something nice for my students because I know it's tough being a writer," he explains. "I told them we going put together something, but I going choose and I have very high standards. The poetry was broken down into sections. They had to study rap poetry, they had to study concrete poetry and create various poems about who they are and where they're from and stuff like that."
"On the first day of class, we took a look at some poets from 'Def Poetry Jam,'" he says, speaking of the popular HBO spoken-word showcase. "So I asked my students, 'How do these young contemporary poets define who they are?' So we broke it down: Some defined themselves by place, by race, by gender.
"I asked them to follow these models and try to come up with ways to define themselves. A lot of the students were like me. The only poets they knew was Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dr. Seuss. Nobody studied anything that was modern, yeah? They didn't even know there was such thing as modern poetry."
WITH 13 STUDENTS enrolled in his creative-writing class, Tonouchi took more than 20 pieces per student and pared them down to a manageable number, selecting no more than two of each writer's best contributions for the book.
DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM
Lee Tonouchi, pictured here in his Windward Community College office, exposes his students to self-expression through modern poetry.
"I'm not much of a writer, actually," admits Mika Fellows, a student of Tonouchi's, who nonetheless penned the poem "Caucasian," which made the final cut of "Stick It to Ya." "It was supposed to be a poem on culture," Fellows said.
"We were going through drafts and stuff, and everybody had these cool cultures that you find a lot here in Hawaii. I was like, 'Wow. I don't really have a culture.'"
Then Fellows lets loose a chuckle. "I still don't know if I'm a writer, but it made me realize I can do some things I didn't know I could do. I learned you don't have to do what everybody thinks is poetry as long it means something."
That sense of achievement is precisely what Tonouchi hoped his students would take from his class, regardless of whether they planned to pursue writing further. "I wanted them to know that writing is alive and that it's something that can be a part of them," he said.
"I think a lot of them just took the class because it satisfied a writing intensive credit, and I'm not sure how many of them will go on to be writers, but at least they know now that it's a possibility, eh?"
First-time poets
Here are a couple of poems by Kapiolani Community College students included in "Stick It to Ya":
find voices in verse
Playback Memory
rewind.
The sound of her footsteps on wooden floors.
The jingle of keys unlocking the front door.
The rustle of paper grocery bags.
The clatter of dinner being prepared so comforting.
pause.
"What is this?" she asks for the fifth time.
"Mommmmm ... it's your keys," I reply with no time to spare.
"I just can't remember ...," she sounds half-panicked.
"It's okay ..." I sound barely reassuring.
fast forward
"Is your mom speaking Vietnamese?" teachers ask.
"No, she has Alzheimer's," I reply and ask to be excused from school.
"We're sorry, we didn't know." They sound embarrassed.
"It's alright." I sound less than convincing.
stop ...
She is gone.
Sounds replaced by faint echoes.
Japanese Hair
Urusaiyo! Mom, don't worry, I just colored my hair.
Don't worry, it will grow out. Stop tripping.
It's not like I'm going die.
It's only my hair.
Black hair looks so heavy.
No one thinks black hair is nice now.
I want my hair lighter like Namie Amuro from her "Think of Me" music video.
Nowadays everyone is dying their hair.
If you wanted me to leave my hair natural,
then how come you didn't born me with brown hair?
You never colored your hair before
only because back in those days
they didn't have anything to color it with.
don't be so old fashion.
It's 2003. It's not the 60's.
Get real.
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