Why I Write About Japan, Part II with Links
My Little Brother Learns Japanese
—For Mike, Watashi wa otouto ga daisuki desu.
In college, he learns to read
right to left,
practicing with Manga,
learns Kanji picture-words:
how the word for heart
can also mean indigo blue.
He learns to conjugate
verbs with no future,
and reads poetry that does not
begin with “I.”
He learns about weather reports
of sakura zensen,
the advance of cherry-blossom fronts
and finds that falling blossoms
can also mean dead soldiers.
He knows the word for bird
by its feet, and knows
a village connects hands to trees.
Little brother is a student,
and older sister
is a woman going to the city.
He learns in Japanese fairy tales
that siblings, not spouses,
are often saviors;
the older sister brings the dead brother
back to life
over and over again.
Continued from my previous post. My little brother minored in Japanese during his study of computer science at a Cincinnati Jesuit university called Xavier University, and it was here he encountered a wonderful, enthusiastic professor named Dr. Ayako Ogawa. My brother would tell stories of how she talked about the time she kept a pet raccoon (maybe a tanuki, or a Japanese variation on the raccoon that in English translates to “raccoon dog”) or how she would spend a class explaining how to do a tea ceremony correctly or the importance of handwriting to the Japanese written language. Like my high school European History teacher who would give us excerpts of books like “Sugar and Power,” photocopy 15th century versions of “Little Red Cap,” and discuss Machiavelli’s The Prince and “Dress for Success” in the same lecture, Dr. Ayako strove to communicate to her students more than just the language; she brought in art, story, traditions like flower arrangement, all aspects of Japanese culture that might help illuminate her world for an American student. She would eventually become a family friend and we would follow her stories of adventure (even now, she is an enthusiastic traveler.) Dr. Ayako graciously read versions of “She Returns to the Floating World” and forwarded them to her husband and children as well, to get their feedback. She’s written her own book too! Here’s a brief profile of her from a Cincinnati paper.
My brother and I have lived in different states since he started college, so we often correspond about things like which anime movies he recommends and his adventures in Xiao Lin Do martial arts and Kendo practice. I started watching all of Hayao Miyzaki’s films and researching his life and work, and discovered his interest in children’s literature. I researched Japanese folk tales, especially interested in the one that helped inspire Miyazaki’s work on Nausicaa, called “The Princess Who Loved Insects.” The most fascinating discovery I made was a recurring instance of older sisters who acted as protectors and heroes to their little brothers; the only times I’ve seen that archetype in Western folk tales were in “Hansel and Gretel” – in which Gretel, not Hansel, kills the witch that holds them captive and “Jorinde and Joringel,” in which the sister struggles to free the brother from enchantment – and, of course, the complex “Snow Queen” mythology, which has a variation in which a young girl travels to free a boy who is a love interest, and ends up overthrowing the evil Snow Queen.
I started to become interested in the scholarly research on Japanese folk tales, and stumbled upon a second-hand copy of Hayao Kawai’s “The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan.” Similar to scholarly works I’d read on Grimms’, but with more focus on Japanese religion and Jungian psychology, it was a fascinating springboard into understanding Japanese folk tales (and had a wonderful appendix containing some folk tales I was not able to locate in English elsewhere.) I’d also begun reading Japanese fiction, such as Haruki Murakami, Osamu Dazai, and researching older books such as the Tales of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogan. I read Roland Kelts’ Japanamerica, about the cross-cultural influence of Japanese pop on America and vice versa, with fascinating insights into anime in particular. My own writing increasingly began to reflect my research and interests, watching anime series like “Fooly Cooly” and “The Fullmetal Alchemist” and trying to learn a little Japanese so I could read some of the work in the original language. Right after “Becoming the Villainess” came out, I wrote the bulk of what became She Returns to the Floating World.
As the scope of the disaster in Japan continues to expand, I am thinking of my friends over in Toyko right now, and of the little things I can do to support them. It is easy to feel helpless an ocean away. The cherry blossoms have started to bloom. Besides Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, I’m looking for good suggestions as to where to direct people for donations. Northwest Medical Teams, one of my favorite local charities that sends medical teams with supplies out to places in need, has a donation page up.
More links:
Where are the Robots? The reasons robots haven’t been used at Japanese nuclear disaster sites
Japan Disaster and Anime Fans
Prairie Schooner Spring 2011
Check out the new Spring issue of Prairie Schooner, including the online version of one of my new poems from the Robot Scientist’s Daughter manuscript, “Knoxville, 1979.” (The other poem, “Foxfire Books: In Case of Emergency, Learn to Make Glass” is more apocalyptic. The whole issue is really wonderful I think.) Lesley Wheeler and Robert Wrigley are also up as featured poets.
A sad note: this was Hilda Raz’s last issue as editor of Prairie Schooner, as she is retiring.
Why I Write About Japan, with links, Part I
When Asked Why I Write Poems About Japanese Mythology
— A letter from the suburbs of Seattle to the suburbs of Tokyo
I will send my voices out over the water
where the same cedars that litter my coast
used to tower over yours. Once green,
your cities have nibbled forests into bonsai.
Our hinoki trees are shipped across the ocean
for your sacred temples now.
Postcards of volcanoes rise from a blue sky
in the background of our homes, we share
zones of tsunami, seasons of weeping cherry.
I read about women’s spirits
haunting peony lanterns in the forest.
Men follow them, fall in love
with women long dead. In shallow graves
rotted with tree roots, they still sing.
And here in pages hammered
from your language into mine,
sometimes with clumsy fists,
I have listened to the bush-warbler
mourn her children, the fox-wife’s eyes
in the darkness have warned me
of the growling of dogs and fire.
And when they disappear in silence,
it is not really silence. Their echoes
burn themselves into stone,
into the living screens of my childhood,
fill my mouth with ghosts.
Ghosts sit in my mouth and sing.
Our grandfathers were at war.
I grew up in the birthplace
of bombs that poisoned children,
burned holes into your sacred earth.
Their poison is part of me.
In the shelter of a shrine, a small girl
holds an umbrella. She becomes a white bird.
She whispers and a thousand cranes,
a thousand burning flowers
pile up inside me, spill out onto these pages.
Forgive me, ghosts, for my hard,
unbeautiful hands, for my tripping tongue,
as you demand a healed future, some untorn prayer.
This poem was written some years ago in response to a question from Marvin Bell about why I decided to write the book, She Returns to the Floating World. It was published in Redactions and will appear in the upcoming book.
The Japanese disaster has weighed on me heavily for the past week or so, and I thought I would write here a little bit about how my life has been tied to Japanese culture since my early childhood. Then I’ll post some links from other sources more useful and possibly more coherent and lovely than my own, including meditations on the quake by Mari L’Esperance and Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
Part I
My father was a robotics expert, and so, as a child living in California and Tennessee in the seventies, we had frequent visitors from Japan, mostly other robotics experts, and family trips to Japan happened on a regular basis – once I had measles so I couldn’t go, another time I had scarlet fever…etc…so although every other member of my family has been to Japan, I never got a chance to go. (This is still true!) My father and brothers would come back with stories, dolls, paintings, new words. I had a collection of Japanese picture books and folk tales, and occasionally, the wives of my father’s business associates would teach me how to make a dessert (I remember something with rice and red bean paste) or teach me how to say a few words in Japanese, or how to sing a Japanese song.
I watched my first Miyazaki movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, when I was ten years old, on an ancient primordial version of the Disney Channel. My brother and I sat transfixed, and watched the movie over and over again, its figure of a girl riding on top of giant caterpillars, a boy and girl trapped underneath a poisonous forest in a crystal cavern, frightening war figures and women warriors with metal limbs. This was my first introduction to Japanese pop culture, before we watched Transformers and Voltron and the other imports that would become popular in the eighties. At this same time, I read a terrifying book about the bombing of Hiroshima told from the perspective of a young girl (don’t remember the name of this novel, it was in our school library so I never owned it.)
I started to make the connection between the work done by my father at the neighboring Oak Ridge National Labs as a consultant for nuclear waste disposal methods and the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. (In case you’re wondering why I’m anti-nuclear bomb, anti-nuclear power, this set of incidents – watching Nausicaa, the book on Hiroshima, and early fourth-grade era research on nuclear pollution impacts – are probably key. And that grad-level class on Ecotoxicology I took during my Pre-Med days. Plus growing up with a Geiger counter in my basement and helping Dad edit papers on nuclear waste cleanup in high school, pretty bleak stuff in case you’re wondering.)
Part II to come.
Some links:
Marie L’Esperance’s meditation on the quake
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s meditation on Japan from the NY Times
The Future on Nuclear Energy Around the World
My second book’s publisher, Kitsune Books, is donating a portion of their sales to the Japanese Red Cross
All About You: Review of Sky Burial, Interview with Rachel Zucker, and Other News
This morning my review of Dana Levin’s Sky Burial went up on The Rumpus. Check it out! Dana Levin is one of my favorite poets, and this fierce new book is definitely worth a read. Then buy her other books, Wedding Day and In the Surgical Theatre.
Victoria Chang interviews another one of my favorite poets, Rachel Zucker, on her blog. Thanks Victoria!
C. Dale Young had two poems up on Poetry Daily. You know, C. Dale’s poems always surprise me with their spirituality. He makes me remember my own spiritual side, which I don’t address very often in writing.
Oliver de la Paz has an interview up on the Ploughshares Blog.
And yet another favorite poet, Matthea Harvey, won a big old award.
Ever wonder what the Vida count would look like for sci fi? Wonder no more.
Kelli’s kicking off another grand poetry giveaway!
Today is a celebration of you guys and all your hard work!
Losing Knut, Reading Reviews, and Supermoons
Amid the news of a Libyan war, the continuing disaster in Japan, I admit a little bit of more trivial news stood out to me: the death of a little four-year-old polar bear named Knut. Knut was rejected by his mother and hand-raised in a German zoo. He became a cover model for global warming and environmentalism. Unfortunately, sometimes mothers reject their cubs because there is something wrong with them; a heart defect, or other genetic problems. Knut’s cause of death was not known, but it is uncommon for polar bears in captivity to drop dead so young. (Note to self: glad my mother did not decide to reject me. A recent x-ray revealed an extra bone in my ankle! Even more mutations surprise me every day!) Anyway, here is a picture of Knut with his handler, Thomas Doerflein, who also died young at 44 of a heart attack.
In other news, instead of just talking about it, actually wrote a review of a poetry book, and now it’s up: Erika Meitner’s Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls reviewed at Barn Owl Review.
Japan, nuclear disaster, donations, and Marie Howe
I’m sorry to say that the situation in Japan has not gotten better in the last few days. I spent the last couple of years researching the effects of radioactive contamination in my childhood hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for my third MS, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” The kinds of things – cesium in the body, radioactivity in the food chain – deer, wasps, swallows, increased risks of thyroid cancer and leukemia – that I found make me even more dismayed when I read about the problems with the nuclear reactors in Japan. Exposed rods = very bad. Cesium leaked into the environment now will probably still be there in thirty years. It accumulates in the human body and builds up over time, like many nuclear contaminants like Strontium-90.
I’m going to donate all proceeds from my first book, Becoming the Villainess, sold in the next week or two, to Doctors Without Borders, so if you’d like to order, click here.
I’m trying to write a new dedication for my second book with Kitsune Books, She Returns to the Floating World, to honor the victims and survivors of the terrible events of the last week. I believe Kitsune Books is going to look for a way to donate a portion of the profits to Japanese earthquake disaster charities as well. All my words seem so pitiful and weak in the face of so much devastation and loss. Nothing seems adequate.
Last night I went to see Marie Howe, one of my favorite poets, read in downtown Seattle. I was happy to see some of my poetry friends, and listen to such a wonderful warm poet read her work, which was spunky and funny and direct. Howe’s What the Living Do, about her life in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS, is a book I’ve read over and over. It embraces the pain, the every-dayness, of surviving. In the end, poetry is something we create as an after-effect of surviving, as a testament to humanity’s ability to observe and survive and create in words some evidence of this.
Here’s a poem about Cesium, one of the nuclear products being released into Japan’s ecosystem as we speak, from Cincinnati Review’s Winter 2010 issue.
Cesium Burns Blue
Copper burns green. Sodium yellow,
strontium red. Watch the flaming lights
that blaze across your skies, America –
there are burning satellites
even now being swallowed by your horizon,
the detritus of space programs long defunct,
the hollowed masterpieces of dead scientists.
Someone is lying on a grassy hill,
counting shooting stars,
wondering what happens
when they hit the ground.
In my back yard, they lit cesium
to measure the glow.
Hold it in your hand:
foxfire, wormwood, glow worm.
Cesium lights the rain,
absorbed in the skin,
unstable, unstable
dancing away, ticking away
in bones, fingernails, brain.
Sick burns through, burns blue.
Japan, anime, apocalypse
All the horrible news coming in from Japan. I still haven’t heard from one family friend from Japan, but most of the people I know in Japan are safe. But still, the images, the terror of the earthquake, the tsunami, and now the nuclear reactor threats, are so terrible, they won’t stop. I’ve been dreaming every night about Japan. Every morning when I wake up, the death tolls have gone up.
I remember someone wrote that anime was characterized by so much apocalyptic imagery because Japan is the only country that has experienced and survived a real apocalypse. The poems in my second book return to these symbols of destruction and pain in the history of the country, symbols we can only partially understand. Haruki Murakami wrote a book of short stories called “After the Quake” after the Kobe earthquake. Many of the stories dealt with the emotional aftermath of that destruction, the estrangement and non-trust of anything, the lack of a feeling of safety, not trusting what literally was going on underfoot. Still, these symbols and stories can only help us understand a little, like watching footage from thousands of miles away is not the same as understanding what it’s like to be there.
There is little I can do from here, the little amount of money I can donate, the prayers, of course, but really, it’s nothing in the face of so much.
A little while ago, I drove from San Diego to Berkeley to see Roland Kelts interview Hayao Miyazaki about his new film, Ponyo on a Cliff. The young girl of the title is an undersea being that falls in love with a human boy, in a sort of variation on The Little Mermaid, and in visiting him and determining to become human, she throws the universe out of balance, bringing storms to a small fishing village where the boy’s father works as a commercial fisherman and his mother works in an elderly care facility. The moon veers closer to earth, and a tsunami swallows the town, including the sweet elderly folks, the mother, and the two main characters. (Of course, this being a Miyazaki film, these characters aren’t in any way harmed, but are somehow protected inside a magic undersea bubble.) Primordial threatening giant fish prowl the streets of the town, now underwater, as Ponyo and the young boy sail around on a toy boat looking for the mother character. It’s very eerie now watching these images, the storm nearly overtaking the cars of villagers, refugees crowded into tiny boats looking for people to rescue, storms tossing boats into each other. Miyazaki, in this interview, said that it time of national disasters, like tsunami, that the Japanese people became very good at taking care of each other, that the feeling of community was increased by the disaster somehow. I only remember this odd comment now because of what has happened.
Two good places to donate (which have good ratings in terms of spending more on actually helping people than administration:)
—Doctors without Borders
—Northwest Medical Teams
Oprah and Poetry, More Girl Poets in a Boy’s Club
My thoughts are with everyone affected by the gigantic quake and tsunami that hit Japan last night. The biggest one that’s ever hit Japan, since the 1800’s when we started keeping measurements. I’m watching local news that showing tsunami surges in Seaside, Oregon.
Go check out these posts on Girls in the Boy’s Club by Kelli and January, definitely worth reading their continuations of the conversation.
Oprah Magazine’s April Issue is poetry focused. Check it out and make your own decisions about how this magazine helps or hurts poetry. Young up-and-coming poets in fashion layouts (weirdly – with no poems from the poets featured, sadly) and interviews with Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, little snippets from poets like Sharon Olds and Terrance Hayes. Wish there was more actual poetry in the magazine, but I guess anything that brings poetry to the masses…? Strangely ambivalent about this.
Girls in a Boy’s Club: Tips for Poets
Elisa had a post about the excellent manifesto, How to Be a Woman in Any Boy’s Club. As someone who has worked in a few boy’s clubs (working as a tech manager for a decade before my foray into writing) I will say that I think poetry has some of the subtlest but also most difficult sexism I have ever run into, which makes it more frustrating. Sure, you’re welcome to the party, but only if you’re this kind of girl – and even then you’re almost statistically guaranteed less in terms of awards, grants, publication, and reviews. As I commented on Elisa’s blog, a lot of the problem is summed up in the headline I saw recently: “Women more educated, still making less than men.” In the end, we can work harder, but we still get…less.
I identified with this essay quite a bit, as I grew up with three brothers and no sisters, and automatically gravitated towards hanging out with guys for most of my life, took up stereotypically “guyish” habits, etc. I’m not a tomboy by any stretch of the imagination, but as you can see with my poetic fascination with robots, comic books, anime, etc, I definitely felt (and feel) comfortable in the quintessential fortresses of male culture. Anyway, this made me think about what I was personally doing to help poetry become less of a boy’s club.
So, since I’m a take-action kind of person, I thought I would post some tips, some action items, for poets to help make the poetry world a little bit less of a boy’s club. (Hint: these tips work equally well for men and women.)
–When you buy a book of poetry, try one by a female! When you review a book of poetry, try a book of poetry by a female.
–When you review said book of poetry by a female, try to eliminate any references to Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or Elizabeth Bishop. I’m so tired of reading comparisons to those three women poets, as if male reviewers haven’t read any other female poets besides those two or three. It just looks lazy, fellas.
–When you have an opportunity to pay readers, have a woman out. Remember, we’re making less money over our whole life span, so cut a sister some slack. Try to remember to invite a woman poet who is not already rolling in dough and awards – that would be extra nice.
–Female poets: start reviewing books. You have something to say about literature and your voice is just as valuable as a male reviewer’s voice. Remember, if you’re not part of the conversation, you’re letting somebody else drive it. Write like your work is something important. Send out like you already know your work is great. Don’t keep everything in an envelope in your desk hoping someone will Emily Dickinson you, because let’s face it, it’s probably not going to happen.
–Don’t automatically laud men who write a lot of sexist poetry. If I have to read one more poem comparing a woman’s body part to something edible…are we allowed to call male writers out when they compare women to animals, lessening women to the sum of their body parts, etc? I was just thinking about Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” and how it started a discussion of race. What about a similar discussion of sexism in poetry?
–Volunteer for literary magazines or book publishers that promote work by women. I’ve volunteered for The Seattle Review, Silk Road, The Raven Chronicles, and Crab Creek Review, and was amazed at what I learned as a board member, editor, reviewer, etc.
In a totally non-related moment: Interested in gluten-free recipes for creme brulee? Interested in gluten-free Northwest restaurant info? See my newish blog! First post has a lactose-free, gluten-free creme brulee recipe. I plan to chronicle my experiments in gluten-free cooking and restaurant-visiting there.
New poems out and about in the world, stylish bloggers, and truth versus lies
A few new poems out there in the world, including a few from my newest in-process collection called “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter:”
—Cerise Press’s Spring issue features two new poems, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [director or dictator]” and “Half-Life”. The issue also features work by Ann Fisher-Wirth, G. C. Waldrep, and Susan Musgrave.
—The journal Eleven Eleven (a beautiful little creation from the California College of the Arts) Issue Ten features three new poems, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Before,” “She Introduces Her Husband to Knoxville,” and one of Kelli’s favorite titles, “On the Night of a Lunar Eclipse, a Missile Shoots Down a Spy Satellite”. This issue also features Megan Snyder-Camp, Hollie Hardy, and Mark Wallace.
–The new American Poetry Journal Number 10 is a hybrid creation, romanced by cover art of two intertwined peacocks, with National Poetry Review. My prose poem, “Seascape,” is featured on the “American Poetry Journal” side, along with work by friend and blogger Keith Montesano, and many of my poet friends are featured on the flip side in National Poetry Review: Mary Biddinger, Tom C. Hunley, and Amanda Auchter. It’s a two-for-one deal!
I feel like now we should have a party with all the poets in these three issues of journals, featuring a wide range of aesthetics and personalities. I think it would be a blast!
I was remiss is not thanking Kelli for nominating me for her Stylish Blogger award a week or so ago, and then I think I was supposed to reveal some truths and a lie. Seventeen truths and four hundred lies. So, I will also use the poems that came out this week as a jumping off point for some truths and lies. Can you guess which is which?
–My childhood home in Tennessee, a two-story brick house on eight acres of farm and woodland, was razed to build an insane asylum. Which then was never built.
—The poem “She Introduces Her Husband to Knoxville” is based on a lie, as my husband has never been to my childhood home in Knoxville.
–I have taken many job aptitude tests that told me I should be a dancer or a director.
–I have owned a Barbie “President” doll.
See if this week’s poems hold any clues!
