•
You knew and I know differently from parents who realized alloy only from without, whereas the coywolf, say,
realizes coyote and wolf even if the composite isn’t brought to light—
maybe light is the opposite of stone, say, lightning that cracks inside a cloud? or coral that glows below the surface of the sea?
or the full moon that illuminates the shoji of the falling-asleep boy? I love the firefly’s serenading signals, patterned according to kind. Kind—
something our parents did not essentially heed.
In my mind, stone, water, light, etcetera all come down to dust on a moth’s wing that’s evolved
to keep her patterns cued for a mate and to keep her blanketed in the stunning night.
In my mind, an alloy is ultimately practical because, as you commented, to be hybrid anticipates the future.
You also admitted: if you only have clay on hand, then from clay even the centipede is cast.
•••
charms v.
Empathy
If you see a dragonfly caught
In a spider’s barbed-wire
Endeavor to offer asylum
For compassion to fly ever higher
•••
Divine
Song Yang wanted to work the recalcitrant farm,
to pick ginseng with her grandmother;
catch iridescent butterflies by the iridescent river. Five years later,
street-name Sisi, she worked in a realm
of under-the-table massage parlors,
a stone’s throw from where I teach Intro. to Literature
to one hundred undergraduates,
Color — Caste — Denomination — / These — are Time’s Affair —
•
Picking up Heineken, Red Bull and rotisserie chicken
from a bodega on Kissena, Sisi could realize
Death’s large — Democratic fingers
But can I realize the line, merely having pored over Dickinson
where the Hudson River overwhelmed its banks—?
•
Sisi, forced to blow a dirty cop, gun held to her head,
thought of ginseng fields, the chit-chatting river, the factory dormitory
with her butterfly collection pinned to the curtain, while I
lectured to luminous undergraduates on
Death’s diviner Classifying
•
—lectured that oblivion within a chrysalis
embodies the democratic; suggested
that there the Tenets are
put away and put behind;
recited lines to my immigrant students, my homeless students, my
working-graveyard-shift students who likely get
the more obvious instar
doing whatever they do outside our elegiac quadrangle. Certainly—
•
my students living three generations under one roof
know better than I that only Death can
Rub away the Brand —
•
and yes, these students already know poetry, yes,
they recite Meng Haoran,
say, in the lexicon intimated in utero.
Chrysalis of Blonde — or Umber — / Equal Butterfly —
I murmur to a bleeding-heart.
•
Sisi’s rivals deemed her dogged until
fleeing an undercover cop, she stepped to her sooty balcony,
over a mop and rail, to drop into neon air
back to Song Yang, to the line
As in sleep — all Hue forgotten —
then died in the careless ambulance.
•
Diviner also divining and so virgula divina, to locate,
intuit, foretell, foreshadow:
over the Flushing tarmac and concrete, over
the Unisphere and Kosciuszko,
my Grandmother Ghost and Mother Spirit
mingle into the egalitarian air and hover above
me in my lecture hall where I belong
speaking of and to foreign bodies
— Branded and Ablaze —
•••
The Nest in Winter
In the father’s shadowy hoard
pillows belch feathers across
mattress and floors:
what was an oriental rug, now
a carpet of scat, gone-astray socks,
calendars from rescue shelters
angling for checks.
There’s nothing to toss
among the vivid tethers to
Mother. Maybe my mother, maybe Father’s.
There’s no margarine container
any less pathetic than
a netsuke from Kyoto;
no expired sardine tin less urgent
than a dozen aerograms; no
receipt less intimate
than their honeymoon photo
snapped in the local aquarium.
The adult daughter takes in
the spew,
•••
After Words for Ava
Off the Haiku beach,
that shoreline of sugarcane ash
where Grandma gave birth to Mama,
I snorkel and hear an iambic whoosh
I imagine as the sound of death but really
it’s my breath while spying a triggerfish
humuhumunukunukuapua‘a
—later I will hear the sound again
this time the whooshing in utero
of the daughter of my daughter,
the most outlandish and earthly
foreign body
whom we will call Ava—
•••
Nitro
More on Japanese Poetics
Downcast
my body is a reed
torn at the root—
at a current’s notice
I’d acquiesce—I think
—ONO NO KOMACHI (mid-ninth century)
I want arousal. I want to place the craft of poetry back where it belongs: that is, not just party to the mind, but a thing coursing throughout the body. Riotous and iambic. Other times, faint.
PLAYING
For Brain Fever, I wrote “Luminous Vapours,” a short essay on word play. I wanted to speak about paronomasia, that fancy term for puns. Both English and Japanese traditions have influenced my sensibility not just for the jazziness of play, but more, because I love how multiple meanings can give way to a bit of unconscious material. In revision I like to pressure a word to detonate its denotations: alarm, both an anxious awareness of danger and a kind of clock; also, alarm is a noun and a verb. So, to place the image of an alarm clock by the bed is to suggest an emotional alarm. Words can be as unstable as nitroglycerin.
Such changeability can make for productive ambiguity: a simple word becomes a portal out of its dictionary definitions and out of logical sense. Such usage resists easy context and linear thinking. In everyday life, one can pick up on a suggestive remark, as when Mae West says, “I used to be Snow White . . . but I drifted.” English literature has its most famous punster in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Literary allusion, of course, expands meaning. And T. S. Eliot’s character Prufrock is full of such references when he admits, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .”; and when he asks, “Would it have been worth while, / . . . To have squeezed the universe into a ball” (an ironic nod to Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”). Any of these literary moments can suddenly blur one’s vision, then create a leap from point A to points B, C, D. A wayward clarity.
Ambiguity is even more crucial in Japanese poetics. In a haiku, one word can explode the seventeen-syllable economy. Reading the word iro, one moves from the literal meaning color to sexual desire; reading matsu, from pine tree to waiting. In my poem “Constant Objection,” I have the word “object” convey
the verb mind and resist, as well as the nouns body, stuff, organism, meaning, purpose, idea, hope, butt, doodad; and in other poems, I use the idioms object lesson, foreign object, constant objection, direct object, object theory. Also in “Constant Objection,” I hope that the phrase “yawning strippers” presents both bored girls as well as the vagina dentata, an image that would be a terrifying and indelible moment for the little boy viewer. In “Object Lessons,” the closure depends on understanding that the noun stay (i.e., a literal plastic collar stay) includes the verb to stay, the sense of a child’s plea, Mother, stay. And from “A Dusting,” the vacuum in the line “The mother lived in a vacuum” must convey the literal vacuum cleaner and a space devoid of matter.
More associative and less pun-like, I hope that the opening line in “Foreign Body”—“This is a poem on my other’s body, / I mean, my mother’s body”—presents a Freudian slip where the speaker means to say mother but, in inadvertently saying other, reveals something compromising. (Had I been a diligent scholar in graduate school, I’d be able to cite William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.) After all, aren’t word associations the raw material of the psyche, where one rubs up against one’s dreams?
PIVOTING
Ambiguity is rife in the “vocabulary-poor” Japanese language, where there is a wealth of homonyms. At least three poetic conventions depend on such word play. I am most interested in kakekotoba or “pivot-word”: “a scheme of word play in which a series of sounds is used to mean two things at once by different parsings” (Miner, 162). The word “parsing” strikes me as useful for analytical readings, but not necessarily for a reader who is experiencing the poem as opposed to mentally examining it during a first read. Experiencing is a physical event. As such, I think of a pivot-word as the site of an opening, of potential explosion. Further, the moment is more pointed than the shift found in a sonnet’s volta; and the placement of the pivot-word is crucial (and not predetermined). In the following line-by-line transliterations, I have used capitalization to indicate the pivot-word in each of the following poems by Ono no Komachi.
hito ni awamu TSUKI no naki yo wa omoiokite mune hashiri hi ni kokoro yakeori
he will not come moon/chance I think and inside my pounding chest heart is seared
Hiroaki Sato writes in a footnote to his translation: “Tsuki, given here as ‘moon,’ also has the sense of ‘means,’ so the opening part of this poem also says: ‘On this night I have no means of meeting him’ ” (Sato, Japanese Women Poets, 49). The pivot comes early and casts a sense of darkness and dejection on the rest of the poem. It is interesting to note how famous translators have rendered the moon/chance pivot:
On such a night as this When no moon lights your way to me
Earl Miner
This night of no moon There is no way to meet him.
Donald Keene
No way to see him on this moonless night—
Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani
This moonless night I can’t meet him
Hiroaki Sato
The English versions are not as economical and therefore not as intense. There is no pivot moment. In Hirshfield’s choice of “see,” she suggests both literally being able to see someone and the vernacular “seeing,” as in a liaison. Sato implies that there is no chance by using the word “can’t.” Here is my attempt:
no chance of his visit
without the moonlight—
so thinking
within my pounding breast
my heart blazes—
I’ve added the two literal meanings for tsuki, but, sadly, I cannot achieve the compression that the Japanese engenders. Implication may be a satisfying solution, but it does not express the intensity that the double meaning poses. Here is a second attempt:
he will not visit
without the moon casting a light—
so thinking
within my pounding breast
my heart blazes—
I am trying to find words related to the image of the moon that have the same suggestive power. The word “cast” means throwing [off], directing [eyes], causing [light] to appear, discard, the phrase cast a spell; the idioms cast doubt, cast lots, cast adrift. It is not a poor solution, but finally pales, so to speak.
Here is a second Ono no Komachi poem:
IRO miede utsurou mono wa yo no naka no hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru
color [complexion; also refers to sexual flush] seeing a thing that fades middle of the world’s man’s heart [and mind]’s flower is in it !
Brower and Miner (204) paraphrase the poem: A thing which fades without its color visible is the flower of the heart of a man of the middle of the world (i.e., of this world).
Here is my attempt at translation:
that flush—
what changes
in this world of
a man’s heart and
its flower—
What are my reasonings behind this translation exercise? Another way to think of the pivot-word is, in my mind, a portal word. Because the poem erupts at that moment, the reader can enter at the site for other possibilities. Because Komachi started with iro, the poem keeps shifting its tonal color: hana/flower, hito/man, and kokoro/heart-mind. The progression in these thirty-one syllables radiates outward (Brower and Miner, 205). I hope that in my modest translation, flush can carry the ambiguity of the facial glow from illness or embarrassment, a cleansing, and even driving a bird from its cover. Finally, in both of my translation exercises, I have experienced again how to go with words that are marvelously “unstable.”
JUXTAPOSING
Before commenting on how juxtaposition affects progression, I need to cite the translator Hiroaki Sato on the tanka form and its syllabic units (visible when lineated): as a “sense-making unit [the tanka became] a two-part poem of upper and lower hemistiches with a single strong caesura after 5-7-5” (Sato, String of Beads, 26–27). In such a way the Komachi poem would have been rendered vertically as one line. Here is the horizontal romanization:
iro miede utsurou mono wa yo no naka no hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru
understood as:
IRO miede utsurou mono wa yo no naka no [pause] hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru
color [complexion; also refers to sexual flush] seeing a thing that fades middle of the world’s [pause] man’s heart [and mind]’s flower is in it !
I have repeated the earlier transliteration for the sake of noting the progression and its “pause.” In the upper section, color is central; in the lower, Komachi presents stark imagery that becomes the speaker’s comparison and realization. The effect is a motion from the quiet, albeit passionate, real world to man’s heart and the flower therein plus the exclamatory zo (translated as an exclamation point). I experience this sharp juxtaposition as a rhetorical whiplash that is absolutely physical.
Of course, Western poetics counts juxtaposition in its treasury of poetic terms: parataxis, or “two starkly dissimilar objects of ideas being place beside each other” (Hogue). Wallace Stevens comes to mind: “ . . . her horny [dead] feet protrude . . . / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” The excitement, in fact an epiphany, is in the odd side-by-side images of a corpse and ice cream. Yes, that sharp cut to comparison is absolutely experiential.
My challenge was to adopt this severe movement. I had assigned myself a kind of jump-cut exercise that produced “Charming Lines” (The Artist’s Daughter). In part because I knew that my editor Jill Bialosky liked this piece, I thought to try more. “The Ashes” was scribbled. Here is the opening stanza:
The puppy snarfles to be let out
and I wake to radiator gurgling
then feet crunching the reticent snow.
Before I was born, Mother sewed her own suits.
What do her ashes know?
My wish is for the reader to shift from a moment of waking consciousness to a random realization and then to a question about human remains. My wish is for the reader
to experience the odd shifts to awareness. My hope is that the experience is moving.
But if here or in other sections such juxtapositions just don’t work, I will have failed this undertaking. Over the decades, I may have relied a bit too much on recklessness as a strategy to yield unconscious material and, by end, to offer a mental and emotional closure. To offer a kabuki trapdoor—but that is another story.
Finally, perhaps I should just let those who do not know anything about Japanese poetics just read without distraction. Perhaps I shouldn’t feel the need to essay my mixed sensibility. Please, dear reader, please count this not as a lecture, but as an abiding homage to a culture that is both foreign and embodied.
Essay Influences and Sources
Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. London: The Cresset Press, 1962.
Hahn, Tomie. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Hogue, Chelsea. “Parataxis.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 5 May 2017.
Miner, Earl. An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.
Sato, Hiroaki. Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008.
Sato, Hiroaki. String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
Afterword
The Bamboo Grove Where Various Individuals Mostly Think Aloud
The light grew fainter until the cedars and bamboo were lost from sight.
RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA, “In a Grove”