Aunty Uncle Dog Chicken Bee

Abstract

Aunty Uncle Dog Chicken Bee is a collection of poetry that explores the precarity experienced by many communities in Hawaiʻi as a result of the growing economic gap between the people who live in the state. The poems are inspired by the neighbors who live in a small community and who share the space with the growing numbers of houseless people in Hawaiʻi. The series resists notions of Hawaiʻi as a “paradise” and brings into question the way in which groups are marginalized and ignored both by people who live in Hawaiʻi and people who live elsewhere. The collection explores poetic forms including prose poetry, lyric, sound poetry, and character sketches. Along with English, Hawaiʻi Pidgin weaves in and out of the poetry and reflects the movement of the languages used in neighborhoods and shared spaces. Bees are an ongoing motif throughout the poems. They act as symbols for the way that people meander in and out of each other’s lives and for the way that language and poetry work in tandem. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, ScholarSpace, https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Tiare Picard.