yellow barges in pushing away sense
. . .
. . .
*
The distinctive features of the music slowly come into focus. For instance, the colour words. The nouns, which usually toll the end of the lines. The big abstract nouns: reason, language, sense, feeling, mind. (Is "mind" an abstract noun? . . .) . The emotional words. The metaphors.
So it's poetry that is quite overt about its constructed nature. Yet it moves and means.
*
dire thrown carelessly : Maybe that's meant to say "dice thrown carelessly". It suggests it anyway.
富士山 = Mount Fuji
[Figuring out how I was going to reproduce this, I discovered that Google Translate has a handwriting option, so I didn't need to learn how to use a Japanese keyboard: with care and patience you can make a drawing of each character, retrieve a copy-and-paste-able Japanese character, and at the same time learn its approximate equivalent in English.
Just for the record, the following characters show up later on in the extract:
川 river
森木林石水火雲霧 forest tree forest stone water fire cloud fog ]
*
A modern landscape. There's hardly any human physical activity but there's plenty of movement. It's a "portable landscape"; sometimes the thing that appears to move is what stands still, and vice versa. So which is the moving target?
Meanwhile, what to make of the recurrent hints of haikuesque tranquillity? The clouds, the canals, the wet trees. . .
A glimpsed tranquillity here in this modern poem, mocked by the ersatz flowers, and paradoxically co-existing with the un-haikuesque abstract nouns and metaphors: yet glimpsed all the same.
But what is the meaning of tranquillity now? Is it merely too late for a human to act?
And other things are here too. The barely contained emotions, they are spilling out. (It's not only the palm trees in that "row of sorrow".) And the exhaustion of "pushing away", "fading", "tired".
*
So my slow dawdle through the poetry anthology women: poetry: migration (2017) has in due course brought me to the poetry of the editor herself, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (born in Harvey, Illinois; she has lived in Japan since 1989). It's an extract from <<terrain grammar>>, a collection published by the same publisher (theenk Books) in 2018. (Her ninth collection, or thereabouts.)
The extract looks like a single flow of carefully considered quatrains (about three times longer than the bit I quoted). Apparently it consists of several poems (and thus my sub-quotation might inadvertently cross a poem boundary). The blurring of poem boundaries is maintained throughout the collection, according to this helpful review by Brianna Vincent:
https://plumwoodmountain.com/brianna-vincent-reviews-terrain-grammar-by-jane-joritz-nakagawa/
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| Jacket of <<terrain grammar>> (theenk Books, 2018) |
[Image source: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Terrain-Grammar-Paperback-9780988389199/351386092 .]
Not all of <<terrain grammar>> has the quatrain format. Here's a taster from another section, which appeared in Cordite Review:
direction). whirling verb (of) personage. not grasped (to). in
search of [nautical roughage like as]. to displace (to). at refuse (of)
historical bending past. expands breadth toward/beyond
urchin of noun objects. forgetting of it now. (a) breach of always.
http://cordite.org.au/poetry/theend/from-terrain-grammar/)
Some extracts from a wide-ranging and lucid interview conversation with Thomas Fink:
I see FLUX in large part as a book of characters trying to navigate difficult things (economic personal and sociopolitical uncertainty and trauma, untrustworthy organizations, natural disasters, etc.). Whereas FLUX is perhaps primarily about “the material world” Distant Landscapes is a more personal book about a character who is similar to me living in a forest versus the larger cityscapes and more numerous types you find in FLUX, both urbanscapes and mental landscapes which emphasize a kind of escape or wish to transcend the world. Both books dispensed with poem titles and are weavings of disparate elements that I try to make harmonize / cooperate with each other; there is a fair amount of formal and stylistic and tonal diversity etc. But Distant Landscapes is I think a quieter or more introspective and more nature-oriented book and is much more me or the me that was writing the book, a character very close to myself (my actual self v. a social self). After FLUX I wrote a chapbook titled wildblacklake and Distant Landscapes continued some of what I was experimenting with in that chapbook, a kind of minimalism that owes much to haikuesque poetics, much moreso than FLUX does.
. . .
Yes, language including my own writing of course is imperfect, as far as trying to capture the world and one’s thoughts and feelings about it in words so that generates the next poem, or thought in language (sometimes gestures seem to work better or music, etc.) where one tries again but only succeeding at best partially:-), an ongoing process that needs to be repeated! As you said the alphabet (or other orthography) can’t help us “merge” with the natural world, a desire some of us including myself often has, or at least it doesn’t work for me that way. Especially for me as far as “thought” (v. “feeling”) poetry is closer to me, more “real” or “truth-full” than “linear” prose which tends to feel much more artificial and divorced from my actual “thinking”. But even so, there is some lack, a kind of grasping/gasping/gaping…gaps! The “music” of poetry is important because it helps make up for some of the lack, but the lack continues….
. . .
It’s not a secret that I have an ecofeminist perspective. Ecofeminism often links together destruction of the environment with patriarchy, masculinities theory, racism, ableism, animal rights etc., as I do. If it matters I am also the survivor of physical assault. This does not make me special, there are many such women in the world. Rape occurs in numerous of my works, both the attempted rapes I experienced as well as the actual rapes of friends and acquaintances or rapes I have heard about in the news. Sex occurs because sex occurs. Environment appears because I care about it. Anything that takes a poet’s attention can be in a poem.
https://dichtungyammer.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/exchange-on-jane-joritz-nakagawas-recent-poetry/
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| Jane Joritz-Nakagawa in 2018 |
[Image source: https://isobarpress.com/authors/jane-joritz-nakagawa/ .]
Some other poems by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa:
http://cordite.org.au/poetry/confession/methane-dress/
Permalink posted by Michael Peverett @ 10:44 am
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