Patti Smith!

Terry Gross interviewed Patti Smith today on Fresh Air--she has a new memoir out, Just Kids. Since listening to the show, I still can't believe that I don't own all of her albums or that I never knew "Because the Night" was Patti Smith. Find it weird that my first job was at Tower Records, yet I never consciously listened to her. I hear her influences in all the women musicians I love-- two that come to mind: Cat Power and from a while back, Susie & the Banshees, et al.

I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese. by Beth Ann Fennelly

I just came across this fantastic poem by Beth Ann Fennelly -- I'm envious.

The translator is ghost

Just finished reading, Michael Emmerich's, "Beyond Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors."

I'm intrigued by this concept that the translator "is not a bridge; she is something like a ghost." The translator, rather than communicating with another culture or person is "existing in two worlds at once but belonging fully to neither."

I'm more than intrigued-- I'm struck by this exploration. Mostly I saw how being a "ghost" is much like being someone with a dual-cultural identity. Breaking down the idea that going between two worlds is notsomuch a linear bridge, but more of a whole experience floating in and out from one or the other and being completely in one at a time, but also with ties to both.

The title of this blog seems so out-dated now-- rather than being "in-between" perhaps its a cultural ghost.

A prose poem

Both Gerard Manley Hopkins & Elizabeth Bishop exhibited a "tension between ecstasy & torment" -- Sandra Alcosser

I like that description. Perhaps it is the poet’s course to write between/despite (or because of) the tension between ecstasy & torment

I have been reading, for Marilyn Chin’s prose poem/flash fiction course, Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem Eds. Stuart Freibert & David Young.

In it, Elizabeth Bishop’s “Giant Snail”

The rain has stopped. The waterfall will roar like that all night. I have

come out to take a walk and feed. My body – foot, that is – is wet and

cold and covered with sharp gravel. It is white, the size of a dinner plate. I

have set myself a goal, a certain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get

there. Although I move ghostlike and my floating edges barely graze the

ground, I am heavy, heavy, heavy. My white muscles are already tired. I give

the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of

my will that I can rise above the smallest stones and sticks. And I must not

let myself be distracted by those rough spears of grass. Don’t touch them.

Draw back. Withdrawal is always best.

The rain has stopped. The waterfall makes such a noise! (And what if I

fall over it?) The mountains of black rock give off such clouds of steam!

Shiny streamers are hanging down their sides. When this occurs, we have a

saying that the Snail Gods have come down in haste. I could never descend

such steep escarpments, much less dream of climbing them.

That toad was too big, too, like me. His eyes beseeched my love. Our

proportions horrify our neighbors.

Rest a minute, relax. Flattened to the ground, my body is like a pallid,

decomposing leaf. What’s that tapping on my shell? Nothing. Let’s go on.

My sides move in rhythmic waves, just off the ground, from front to back,

the wake of a ship, wax-white water, or a slowly melting floe. I am cold,

cold, cold as ice. My blind, white bull’s head was a Cretan scare-head; de-

generate, my four horns that can’t attack. The sides of my mouth are now

my hands. They press the earth and suck it hard. Ah, but I know my shell is

beautiful, and high, and glazed, and shining. I know it well, although I have

not seen it. Its curled white lip is of the finest enamel. Inside, it is as

smooth as silk, and I, I fill it to perfection.

My wide wake shines, now it is growing dark. I leave a lovely opalescent

ribbon: I know this.

But O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me.

If and when I reach the rock, I shall go into a certain crack there for the

night. The waterfall below will vibrate through my shell and body all night

long. In that steady pulsing I can rest. All night I shall be like a sleeping ear.

The giant snail is a persona, a creature we can recognize in ourselves and perhaps Bishop recognized in herself yet the attention to detail is solely in the snail’s movement. We are captured in the snail’s moment of tension between torment and ecstasy and the self-doubt it has. “Ah, but I know my shell is beautiful, and high, and glazed, and shining. I know it well, although I have not seen it.” The snail denies its beauty at the same time she knows it. This juxtaposition and uncertainty yet certainty at once draws this tension. We can argue that “although I have not seen it” simply means what it means – that snails do not have mirrors are not self-conscious beings who see their visage when wanting to. But it is a conscious move by Bishop to assert the snail’s inability to “see” her beauty and in turn, perhaps deny it.

Later, the snail says, “I know this,” of her “lovely opalescent ribbon.” Yet she laments her size, cries “Pity me.” Here, we see the persona’s voice that can back up the claim that the snail is conscious to know her beauty and deny it.

The second to the last line, “In that steady pulsing I can rest” emulates a tension between violence, a steady pulsing, and rest, self acceptance.

Summer Reading

I just finished Amélie Nothomb's novella, Tokyo Fiancée. I found it by happenstance at the San Diego library. I didn't know that she had written a new work. I remember reading Fear and Trembling and The Character of Rain. Of course, she writes in French and these are English translations that I'm reading. Nevertheless, I always find a sort of understanding in her words -- she has a way of describing one's inner thoughts in fresh ways. I find myself surprised sometimes to know that a feeling I once thought was private and unique has been felt by her. 

She writes what I guess would be called autobiographical fiction. She writes in the first person and the main character usually has her name, Amélie, but it's not labeled as memoir-- it is "a novel." I would like to think that this is the way I do/would write - from autobiographical truth comes a bigger truth when it is dramatized  into fiction. 

I wouldn't say that Tokyo Fiancée is the best work-- I found moments where she could have edited down some passages, toward the end, the organization of her ideas seem to be jumbled a little, but I read it in a breezy week just enjoying the moments she captured that reminded me much of my own time in Japan. Her climb and descent of Mt. Fuji brought me back to my climb of Mt. Fuji, which is 3,776 meters. Although her climb was more rigorous and energetic than mine as I did not reach the top, she described the descent much as I experienced it: 

I stood facing the sun, and at five-thirty exactly I flung myself onto the slope. I had removed my brakes. What I experienced was beyond grandiose: in order not to fall, I had to keep my legs in constant motion, running through the lava, moving my brain as quickly as my feet, never allowing for one second my madness to interrupt my vigilance, laughing to keep from falling whenever, inevitably, I began to slide down the slope, thus accelerating my rhythm; I was a hurtling meteor beneath the rising sun, I was my own subject for ballistic studies, I was shouting fit to wake the volcano.

Unfortunately, my edition had several typos which makes me wonder if the last line contains a typo: "I was shouting fit." I'm not quite sure what that means. It is supposed to be "I was a shouting fit ..."?

She also addresses a unique bond that is not so much a love bond, but something else. The jacket cover explains it well, that Nothomb explores "the possibility of love as a form of limitation." In the end she revisits the relationship she had with Rinri, "So that is what it was, Rinri and I: the fraternal embrace of the samurai. Infinitely more beautiful and noble than some silly love story." Here is another passage that struck me:

Between the two words, koi and ai, there is no variation of intensity, but an essential incompatibility. Can one fall in love with a person one has a liking for? Unthinkable. One falls in love with a person one cannot stand, a person who represents an unbearable danger. Schopenhauer saw in love the ruses of our reproductive instincts ... 

I may come back to add more thoughts later. 

Now onto my next library find: Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool: Three Novellas translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, a translator who seems to get it right every time - all works that I've read of his, I like. Kenzaburo Oe says, "Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating."

SUMMER GRASS 

All the dead melt, 

And summer grass stands in clumps. 

(Am I coming and going 

inside a dream?) 

The Chinese bellflower lifts its pale blue flame. 

Hens kick up sand with fierce claws. 

Unable to bear it, 

small insects contract their bodies in. 

In the background, my mother is crushed. 

I become like water. 

The cat with the bulging eyes 

stares fixedly at this.

from Nine Poems 

by Aoyama Miyuki 

translated by Malinda Markham

also from Antioch Review, Winter 2004

"To Translate the Shaking"

I've been inspired by this essay by poet and translator of Japanese poetry, Malinda Markham, "To Translate the Shaking: Contemporary Japanese Women's Poetry (And Coaxing it into English)." It appeared in the Antioch Review, Winter, 2004. I came across it as I started researching contemporary Japanese women's poetry--something that I've never explicitly sought out before. One day last month I had this overwhelming question-- why don't I see a lot of contempo Japanese women's poetry translated into English? After some googling, I found this essay and the book I cited in a previous post. 

It is not easy for me to connect to new poetry (I can flip through anthology after anthology and not be particularly struck by any one poem), but I found kindred spirits (I don't know just yet how to describe it any other way). I don't find poems like these often--ones where I live in them or feel as though I have lived them--but even more so--spoken those same lines but in my own way. 

After reading Markham's narrative of her experience translating Japanese poetry, so many questions that I had about the language (but couldn't articulate because of my own myopic, strange insider/outsider relationship with the language) were answered. I also felt a kinship with these poets, recognizing poems that I have never seen in the English language, but feel very familiar to me. It helps me explain, perhaps why or how I write poetry the way that I do with my own personal experience-- being half-Japanese and not quite fluent in the language yet eerily fluent in the cultural behaviors.

My response is all very general right now, but eventually I want to cite specific poets, poems, and lines. 

Arabic Translations

On my first day of substitute teaching, I noticed a student from Saudi Arabia reading one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems in the computer lab. I was so excited to see that-- turns out he studied poetry and literature (although arabic lit in particular) at university. I asked him to suggest some arabic poets to me-- especially ones that he felt hadn't been translated well. I thought maybe that could be a future collaborative project. He suggested Al-Mutanabbi. Although the repetitive rhymes that come naturally in arabic can not possibly be transliterated into the english language-- most arabic translations lose a lot in this way. 

Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women

I have to return this book to the library tomorrow, but I need to buy or make copies of it -- invaluable book of Japanese poetry translated into English with the original Japanese included. 

Backside by Chika Sagawa

Backside

BY CHIKA SAGAWA

Night eats color,

Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments.

Day falls into the leaves like sparkling fish

And struggles, like the lowly mud,

The shapeless dreams and trees

Nurtured outside this shriveled, deridable despair.

And the space that was chopped down

Tickles the weeds there by its feet.

Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes

Caress the writhing darkness.

And then the people move forward.

TRANSLATED BY SAWAKO NAKAYASU

Source: Poetry (April 2009).

Blog Pedagogy!

In class, we were assigned to read Bridging the Composition Divide: Blog Pedagogy and the Potential for Agnostic Classrooms by Janice Wendi Fernheimer and Thomas J. Nelson- it's timely as I was questioning what a blog does to writing and audience. A blog is a new genre - a space that is semi-private/semi-public. The shifting nature of it is interesting-- I'm using it more as a notebook and marker of things than a journal now. 

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;

all gay transport soon ends.

Chant: who knows—

flight's end or flight's beginning

for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.

Say there is money but it rusted;

say the time of moon is not right for escape.

It's the color in the lower sky

too broadly suffused,

or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how

often one takes his madness

into his own hands

and keeps it.

—Lorine Niedecker  

* published in Poetry 42.6, September 1933 

Durch den sich Vögel werfen

What birds plunge through is not that intimate space

in which you feel all forms intensified.

(There, in the Open, you'd be denied yourself

and vanish on and on without return.)

Space reaches out from us and translates each thing:

to accomplish a tree's essence

cast inner space around it, out of that space

that has its life in you. Surround it with restraint.

In itself it has no bounds. Only in the spell

of your renouncing does it rise as Tree. 

— Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Edward Snow)

Durch den sich Vögel werfen, is nicht der

vertraute Raum, der die Gestalt dir steigert.

(Im Frein, dorten, bist du dir verweigert

und schwindest weiter ohne Wiederkehr.)

Raum greift aus uns und übersetzt die Dinge:

daß dir das Dasein eines Baums gelinge,

wirf Innenraum um ihn, aus jenem Raum,

der in dir west. Umgieb ihn mit Verhaltung.

Er grenzt sich nicht. Erst in der Eingestaltung

in dein Verzichten wird er wirklich Baum.

The Space Between Words: Book Review

My review of John Burgess's second book of poetry, A History of Guns in the Family.

Reintroduction

I've kept this blog around without updating it in nearly four years. It was my space to write in-between my transition from Japan in 2004 to life back in California--I was surprised by the frankness of my posts and how much I've changed since then. Most people didn't know about my blog, so it ended up being a confessional space--something I wouldn't share now. I've left a few posts that remind me of my time back then that aren't as confessional. 

I'm always hesitant to start writing in my blog again--it becomes a journal when it's not a personal journal--some days I'm in a confessional mood and other days I'm very private, which is difficult to monitor in a blog when typing and clicking "publish" is so easy. 

Writers are writing to an audience. Sometimes in a blog an audience is a friendly ear--one can only picture the eager blogger readers enjoying every secret disclosed. Reading my old posts, I noticed that there was an element of confession, but an element of resolution. As I typed, I figured out the whys of my wonders-- and I kept writing in that way because I felt closure--later I'd realized I'd disclosed too much. 

Returning to this blog may be productive for me to do now as I'm close to finishing my first year of the MFA program in poetry. Last semester was a deluge of poetry for me. This semester I'm quiet. Giving myself some space to write out things in other venues and forms than poetry or academic papers may be what I need to gently keep my pulse going.

Meditations and Questions

I've found a secret retreat, hidden away in the woods, with a lotus garden, where I can practice yoga and feel like I'm in Bali again. I didn't even seek it out, either. It was serendipitous how I found the brochure at the coffee shop near work, not even knowing a place like this existed in Carmichael.

I went there this morning and did hatha yoga. It was so relaxing that I still feel calm 2 hours later.

I'm going to quit my gym membership, as I only joined for the classes, I hate the whole gym vibe. I like being outdoors, running, rather than on a treadmill. The yoga classes were just crowded and I didn't get much out of it.

Discovering this place is wonderful, but it also made me question my own life path. I've always been down to earth and my philosophy of life ties close to Buddhism, but I feel that after college it's been more and more difficult to live a life close to that. I fear that I'm turning into a yuppie because now I have a nice car and am working so much.

At the retreat, there was a commune vibe there. I walked into what I thought was the yoga studio, but was actually the live in quarters for the staff. It reminded me of a hostel I'd been to in Japan with the wooden shelves out front filled with shoes. A girl was sitting right inside, prayer beads wrapped around her hand; she showed me to the yoga studio and told me about the meditation circle that happens upstairs.

I guess I felt so connected to a place like this and feel in awe that young people live there. It's the sort of life I've kind of wanted, to live in a retreat among gardens and nature. Yet, I know that I don't want to be them. I'm not as free-spirited as I think I am, at least not to live in a community house.

I've also felt in awe of people who could travel the world with little money and have a carefree way of living giving themselves time to live and explore life without the shackles of a career.

When I dream, I dream like a free-spirit, when I do, I do like a rational person. How do I meld these together? How do I balance these sides of myself so that I don't feel empty or feel that I'm betraying my true spirit?

I guess I'm continually discovering who I am. I want to make the right choices, and I know that I will find complete peace inside of me where my life's work will be in balance with my life's life. It's hard to be able to travel and do the things I want to do without money, and I'm just afraid of taking a risk for fear that I'll just end up from scratch again, with no money, and having to depend on my parents who can't financially support me any longer.

I am, mostly, happy with where I am right now. I guess I am continually searching for my next move and I still don't know what, exactly, it is that I'll do next. I just don't want to lose sight of my creative happiness.

The reidisu biker club

Kaori Shoji writes an  article describing what it's like to be part of a girls' biker gang. It reminds me of the character, Ichigo, in Shimotsuma Monogatari (Kamikaze Girls in US).

The movie was filmed in Shimotsuma and the title is literally, Shimotsuma Story. Shimotsuma is near Tsukuba-san, and my friend Lianne, who taught at Shimotsuma Niko, knows some of the students who were in the movie.

Excuse My Grammar

Despite all my efforts to be as literary as any English major AND writer can be, I am still losing my English. So, now, I am not only losing my Japanese, but I am also losing my English.

But I have excuses! First, I just got back from Japan, and Second, I am reading school kids' essays all day and sometimes using the word "was" instead of "were" sounds completely legit to me. I can't even use idioms correctly. So if you ever hear me say something like this: "... all the Japanese I've learned since now..." just kindly walk me out the door.

I hope there's such a thing as an ex-native English speaker, cuz I am not no native no more.

Nihongo

I went to a Meet Up group for Japanese, and I actually reinforced all the Japanese that I've learned so far. Even though I can speak Japanese with mom, it's just different when you have to express yourself to new people. It felt nice to be around people who like Japanese and I could talk all I wanted about specific Japanese things and their eyes don't wander.

I think I really needed to connect with a group like this. These days, I had been feeling as though my whole Japan experience was slowly melting away. I know that I keep it within me, but at times, when all I see is English, and all I hear is English, I stop caring. It was so much more fun to be able to look at anything in Japan and learn something new. On the train, besides people watching, I'd make out the advertisements hanging from the silver bars, and I'd noticed that as the months went by, I could decode more and more of the kanji around me. Now, on my commute to and from work, I obsessively study car makes and models; something I never had an interest in before. I reckon after learning to consume so much information every minute of the day, I can't stop even now. I miss seeing kanji everywhere!

The best part was when we all took a purikura-like shot at the end of the meet-up with Aaron's sony vaio. It made me all natsukashii!