Month: January 2022

Covering and Uncovering Masks: An Interview with Terry Watada

One of our Poetry Editors, Roderick Spence, interviews Terry Watada whose poem “Masks” won third prize in the 2021 Occasional Verse Contest.

Roderick Spence: Your poem “Masks” incorporates the beauty of Japanese vocabulary, cultural imagery and practices. To someone who doesn’t speak Japanese nor hasn’t experienced something like Obon, the Buddhist Festival of the Dead, this effect can be distancing, enticing or both simultaneously. To borrow your wording, it both “covers and uncovers” the worlds, languages, grief, joys and life of the speaker in the poem. It both allows access and defines the boundaries and limits of access. As a reader I feel this tension of access and non-access to the speaker’s interiority, language and memory is important. Can you speak more on how poetry and language generally, as well as Japanese and English specifically, can and can’t allow access for readers to know the occasion for this poem (the festival time in the Japanese Canadian community and the speaker’s grief)?

Terry Watada: Decades ago, I was talking with a group of Asian Canadian wannabe artists about an Asian Canadian Art, specifically a Japanese Canadian Art.  Such hadn’t existed before that time, not even the idea of the artform.

At the centre of the discussion was a paper by Dr. Ron Tanaka, a professor of English Literature at the University of British Columbia.  In it, he proposed that in creating a “Sansei art”, the artist will employ “opacities”; that is, items that Western Culture cannot see or fathom.  Other than Japanese or Asian Canadian readers, no one will understand the reference.  The artists must then decide if this is acceptable.

The participants at the first Asian Canadian Experience Conference, held in 1972 Toronto, were at odds with one another.  Most wanted to be accepted as “just an artist” by the mainstream.  A few of us determined that a true Japanese/Asian Canadian art was necessary and desirable.  The debate continued throughout the conference.

In the end, I decided that I wanted to be true to my own self.

Obon is part of my work, poetry, novels, short stories, and plays, because it is central to the Japanese Canadian community.  I didn’t realize how important it was until the year I drove up and down the west coast, from Vancouver to Los Angeles, and attended as many Obon festivals as I could.  I later discovered it was a major part of the Asian American community in Hawaii.  The folkdances especially, the Tanko Bushi and the Awa Odori were included everywhere.  So Obon had to be central to my work.

Every culture has a “Day of the Dead” festival, Halloween being the anemic one in North America.  I therefore felt the general readership would be intrigued by Obon.  The Japanese terms enhance and emphasize the Japanese Canadian experience.  They signal to the reader that what they are about to read is an entirely new experience.

Many of the terms are truly Japanese Canadian since they have roots in the Meiji culture (1868 – 1912), an Issei, the first generation, influence.  Those terms are not familiar in contemporary Japan.  Therefore, they are truly Canadian.  I will admit, the language can inhibit access to the poetry, but if it takes a little extra effort by the reader to understand then so be it.  I would think the effort will be worthwhile.

As a teenager when I attended a performance of Noh theatre, I was captivated by the imagery.  The masks created a supernatural tone to the theatre.  Since Obon itself deals with ancestral spirits, it seemed appropriate to link the occasion to Noh imagery, folk tales, and the magic of the preternatural.  Even if the reader does not understand the significance of the masks, he/she can feel the otherworldliness of the occasion and link it to the pandemic times.

I hoped the Japanese language, unfamiliar imagery, and the import of what I was saying would allow the reader an insight into what was lost because of the times.

Roderick Spence: In my humble experience of your poem I feel that insight. Each time I read “Masks” I feel invited to connect, almost supernaturally, to the lives, history and communities of Japan and its diaspora of Issei and Nisei. Through your speaker there’s a masking of so many people and lives I can never know directly, yet through your words I can know them representatively. I find this duality has a similar magic as mask theatre or the connection of Obon and “Day of the Dead” festivals gives to our ancestors and deceased loved ones. What was lost, opacities, eschatology and grief at personal and intercultural levels–all these powerful elements in “Masks” are beautifully encapsulated with your use of the bilingual homonyms “no” and Noh. The repetition of English no’s in the first part of the poem compound so many absences, the English is almost “antiseptic”. And yet the compounding absence allows its contrast in the vibrant presence and imagery of Noh, memory and ceremony. To me this quietly culminates in the absence of the word “know” from the whole poem because of what readers, like the “strangers and relatives” in the poem (or even oni and hannya), can and can’t know of the speaker’s world, love and grief. There are many other harmonic and dissonant bilingual poetic devices, I think of the contrasting rhythm and cadences of “no thump/ of/ taiko” or the strange assonance of “no odori choreography”. I ask myself (and you) what is gained or lost in an anglicized or Japanese pronunciation of words like “odori” submerged your English. As much as I want a detailed recommendations and accounts of your trips to various Obon festivals, I’d also love to hear more on how this tension of languages, poetry and meaning informs this poem and your poetry.

Terry: I am so glad you perceived the connection among the homonyms No, Noh, and Know.  Most would simply ignore the words and idea.

For me, the three express the negativity of the situation and the connection between cultures.  There are many absences in Noh theatre: no sets, little action, and no facial expressions save the ones on the masks, but they are rigid and set.  The artistry is in the performers’ skill in conveying emotion.  Add to that, the nothingness of myth and the supernatural.  Both exist in the mind.

Then there is the pandemic which has erased the familiar, especially in a community.  Japanese Canadians lost their community with the internment and have tried to revive it through festivals like Obon.

I am fascinated with the musicality of the Japanese language.  The words transport me to another time, another place.  Take, for example, odori.  Very awkward to use the term “folk dance”, but odori conjures up the scene of a large circle of dancers in costume performing the memory of my community. 

Masks is an attempt to join the absence of festival with the supernatural and myth, perhaps recreated in the Japanese terms and, like the Noh actor, in the rhythms of the lines.

Roderick Spence: In the absences of loved ones, faces, expressions, direct cultural knowledge, words and bodies, negatives nonetheless allow connection and understanding as an opaque yet transcended knowing. In my experience of your work the ability to connect in the absence of a direct means might even suggest a resolution to grief (as impossible as that is). This absence of the speaker’s parents in the poem is compounded by the impact of COVID. In a pandemic no one escapes how medical masks now mediate life and death, be they absent or present. From funerals delayed and masked, to inaccessible hospitals holding the breathless bodies of loved ones, the grief caused and revealed by COVID has been masked in so very many ways. COVID has unjustly fueled so much xenophobia, renewing a long history of the weaponized language of disease towards the Asian Canadian community. And yet as individuals and communities we connect across an impossible knowing through art, empathy and action. We connect to absence and absent faces, we mourn, we have our old and new ceremonies of masks. Masks hold our difference and our sameness, across culture and time. I must admit that I initially read your poem without connecting it to medical masks in a pandemic. But when I reread and made that connection it was almost a whole new poem. In many ways I feel “Masks” is just as impactful without that connection because the speaker equally expressed the metaphorical masks we wear around grief and race. It’s all so intricately expressed and crafted by you in this masterful poem. Do you feel the possibility of reading this poem with and without the context of the pandemic adds to the work or did you intend for that connection?

Terry: When I first visited Japan back in the ancient ‘50s, I was struck by the fact that masks were commonplace in the city streets.  Since I was so young, I laughed but accepted them as a norm.   Much later, I realized the Japanese wore them for several reasons: to protect against pollution, to contain their illness, be it a cold or much worse, and to hide identity in an effort to preserve privacy.  They wore masks as an act of courtesy and compassion.

In this pandemic time, I feel wearing a mask is an act of compassion for others, much more so than personal protection or privacy.  The Noh mask offers distance from the pain brought on by grief.  I therefore do not believe the poem can exist without the pandemic.  The link between the loss of community and the loss of loved ones is too profound to be ignored.  The mask reflects our tragic state of mind.

Roderick Spence: And before we go, can you please tell me and the readers about some of your current and upcoming projects?

Terry: My fourth novel, Hiroshima Bomb Money, is going through the editing process at present.  I was greatly encouraged to write about my wife’s great aunt who survived the atom bomb for about three weeks.  She spent that time looking for her twin babies.  The project was supported by a substantial grant from the Toronto Arts Council.

I was recently commissioned by the Lighthouse Theatre Company in Port Dover, Ontario, to write a play about a favourite son of that town.  Kobi Kobayashi was a beloved citizen and gave so much of himself.  He reminded me of my father: they were born two years apart; they came to Canada with their father and older brother at a very young age.  They left him in Canada while they went home.  There were many other parallels.  Sakura: the Last Cherry Blossom Festival will go through the dramaturge and workshop process sometime in 2022.

I am compiling my sixth poetry collection with Masks as a keystone poem.  I hope the manuscript will be ready for submission sometime in 2022.

Terry Watada’s third novel, “Mysterious Dreams of the Dead”, and fifth poetry collection, “The Four Sufferings”, were released simultaneously in December 2020.

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Nicole Leona Smith’s Writing Space

I rarely write anywhere but at my desk, which is where I write this from now. I have one desk here, in Cambridge, and one desk at my other home, in St. John’s, Newfoundland. 

The history of my Newfoundland desk is almost entirely unknown to me, and that’s because I stole it. The little blue bureau of different shades had been nestled in the corner of my creative partner’s hallway for some time, before I lugged it into my bedroom without really asking and claimed it as my own. I set it up next to my bed, enamoured of the stencil work and mismatched, hand-painted glass knobs on every drawer, and I bought a plant to fill Creative Partner’s deserted corner. She didn’t kick me out, or even object, and that is one reason I am lucky. 

I like to imagine Creative Partner toiling away at the desk in the nineties, writing one of her many award-winning plays at the place I now sit when I’m in St. John’s. I like to picture something of her left behind, lingering, rubbing off on me. Of course, she could just as easily have used the desk as a change table for her son, which would explain what I’ve been churning out of late. 

In any case, I’m not in Newfoundland. I’m in Cambridge, at my Cambridge desk, which is stationed in front of a big window in my “writing room,” inside the home I share with my partner-partner. The writing room is actually just a living room I dubbed “the writing room” somewhat ironically, when I plunked my Cambridge desk down in the centre of it a decade ago, and neglected to move it anywhere else until it grew tendrils and became part of the floor. Boxes of books, and other miscellaneous things from my childhood that I will unpack tomorrow keep my Cambridge desk company.

“I like to imagine Creative Partner toiling away at the desk in the nineties, writing one of her many award-winning plays at the place I now sit when I’m in St. John’s. I like to picture something of her left behind, lingering, rubbing off on me.”

My Cambridge desk was gifted to me by my father, when I was in high school. It’s made of tan-coloured plasticky wood and accented by “wrought iron” black bars. I put wrought-iron in quotations, because I don’t really know what wrought-iron is, but it’s what these are in my head. My dad bought the desk from Walmart. I know this because he told me. He was proud it was on sale, and I would bet anything he still has the receipt.

The desk is very sleek and modern-looking for something manufactured in 2003. It has a little shelf close to the ground on my right, for a computer. A computer tower, I mean, and another small moveable shelf that affixes to the main part of the desk for the monitor, so that it can be raised for extra space. Right now, on the monitor shelf, I have some lip balm, a bag of Goldfish crackers, The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb, a picture of my dog, and a small tube of silver glitter. There’s a keyboard-slider-thing too, about four inches beneath the desktop, upon which I keep the degree I’ve been meaning to frame for the past seven years, and a binder full of notes on the play I’m writing with Creative Partner in Newfoundland, at my Newfoundland desk.

Today, my Cambridge desk is sticky because of the wine I drank at it last night while catching up on the Wild Writer’s Festival’s “Forming First Collections” event, hosted expertly by Carrie Snyder, which I thought was fabulous. No mention from anyone of wine as a catalyst to that first book, though. Later, when I couldn’t sleep, I googled “ways to shut your brain off” and ended up on fluevog.com. Now every time I google something (i.e. “wrought-iron”), I am inundated with photos and slideshows of beautiful boots I covet but will never be able to afford. This is not entirely unwelcome, but it is a cautionary tale.

I shake my head back and forth to make myself concentrate. I stretch my arms, and crack my knuckles, and adjust the brightness of my computer screen. I look at the picture of my dog for a while, and then I look over my shoulder at my real dog, who is the same dog. I make another coffee, and sit back down, and think about how I should go for a walk. I think about how I should clean up. I pull some stapled-together sheets of paper out of the box marked “high school writing” that I use as a hassock. Good choice, but too much telling is scrawled across the cover page in red ink. I rip it off and tape it to the window. I should call Creative Partner, because we still have to figure out the penultimate scene of our play. I open one of the many documents we pass back and forth when I am in Cambridge, at my Cambridge desk. I flip between this and that. I think about what I will make for supper. I get back up to take chicken out of the freezer but Partner-Partner has already done it, which is great, because it’s too late for chicken to defrost before suppertime. Partner-Partner is very good at functioning, which is another reason I am lucky. I make a mental note that we’re out of mustard. I sit back down and stare at the document. I look up the weather forecast for tomorrow. It’s calling for snow. The word accumulation sticks out at me. Tomorrow, there will be a significant amount of accumulation. Yes, I think, but isn’t there always?

Nicole Leona Smith is founding Artistic Producer of Sonderlust, a theatre collective dedicated to the creation of original theatre and the staging of women’s stories, and co-Artistic Director of The Kitchen Party Theatre Festival in Central Newfoundland. A recent graduate of Humber’s Creative Writing program, Nicole’s work has appeared in a handful of literary journals, and her story ‘Something Really Unbelievable’ won the 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Award. 

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Photo by Erica Marsland Huynh on Unsplash

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What’s Marco Melfi Reading?

Imagine an award winning author abandoning their dominant language to learn a new one–not out of necessity but pure desire. This is what Jhumpa Lahiri, fiction writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, does. In her 2016 memoir, In Other Words, Lahiri describes how her obsession to learn Italian required more than courses, tutors and just visits to Italy. It required immersion. She uproots her family and moves to Rome “to keep alive a language that has nothing to do with [her] life.” In preparation, she “renounces” English so she can read, speak and write exclusively in Italian.

In Other Words reads like a series of journal entries in which Lahiri probes her motivations (“studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and Bengali”), navigates the risks (“a writer should never abandon his or her dominant language for one that is known only superficially …. the disadvantages serve neither writer nor reader”) and documents her progress (“Every sentence, like every bridge, carries me from one place to another”). There are setbacks too and she intimates, in the aptly titled chapter “The Wall”, the limitations she faces are not her aptitude or command but people’s willingness to accept her and her Italian. 

“… from the simple joy of gathering and using new words to the recognition of writing’s role to question and investigate oneself.”

In Other Words (written by Lahiri in Italian but translated into English by Ann Goldstein, a deliberate choice Lahiri explains early in the book) is the impressive culmination of her journey: from the simple joy of gathering and using new words to the recognition of writing’s role to question and investigate oneself. This investigation is enriched by the variety and depth of her metaphors. Sometimes refining them: “the metaphor of the small lake that I wanted to cross…is wrong. Because in fact a language isn’t a small lake but an ocean.” Other times redefining them all together. At first she sees her relationship with Italian as “romantic: a falling in love.” Later she wishes to nurture her Italian like a mother might a child because maternity is “a visceral bond, an unconditional love, a devotion that goes beyond attraction and compatibility.” Each new or revisited metaphor illustrates her attempt to better understand her pursuit. 

This is an obvious book for someone fascinated by or interested in learning Italian. But I’d recommend In Other Words to anyone, especially writers, who would appreciate Lahiri’s process and obsessive devotion to engage with language.

Marco Melfi is a recent graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. His poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, The Arc Award of Awesomeness, Funicular, FreeFall and The Prairie Journal. His chapbook, In between trains, was published in 2014. He lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 Territory.

Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Beth Kaplan

For decades, I’d wanted to write an essay about my visit with the famous artist Alice Neel, who painted a portrait of my father in 1949.

I knew my parents had been friendly with Neel and her lefty gang in New York in the late forties, though had no idea to what degree. Going through stacks of old letters left by my mother after her death in 2012, I found one from Sam Brody, Alice Neel’s lover and father of one of her sons; it was full of affection for my parents from both Alice and Sam. It made me proud to realize their bond had been much closer than I’d realized.

When the Metropolitan Museum in New York opened a huge retrospective of Alice Neel’s work in the spring of 2021, bringing her life and portraits much-deserved world attention, I realized this would be the perfect time for the article.

But there was a huge problem: my visit with Alice had been forty-one years before, in the winter of 1980. My memory of most of the specifics of our encounter was dim, though I could remember a few things clearly, especially the moment when she erupted in anger at me. I emailed my ex-husband, who’d been with me on the visit, asking, “What do you remember about our time with Alice?”

He replied, “Just that at one point she was really hard on you.”

I needed more than that.

And then I remembered that right after returning to Vancouver from New York, I’d written a long poem about meeting Alice and submitted it to CBC radio’s Anthology, which bought it and hired me to read it. I dug out the poem and was thrilled that it included details and chunks of dialogue I could use almost verbatim in the essay.

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To fill in other blanks in my memory, I turned to the internet, where I found articles about Alice and a documentary of her being interviewed in her apartment; they helped me bring back the place, her voice, her manner. How had I reached her, I wondered, by letter, by phone? I suspected Dad must have given me contact information. Again luckily, I have kept a stack of old address books, and after flipping through a dozen, located the one from the early eighties. Inside, I found Alice Neel’s phone number and address. I remembered how proud I was to print that name and number in my book.

The essay wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t jotted detailed notes after the visit. I should do so more often now.

→ Beth Kaplan’s memoir, Loose Woman: my odyssey from lost to found, is a finalist for the Whistler Independent Book Award. She’s the author of three previous books and has taught nonfiction writing at Ryerson and U of T. bethkaplan.ca.

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What’s Sandra Kasturi Reading?

I tend to be reading about 10 books at once, which does nothing for my attention span. In December, I am often wallowing in nostalgia and go back to my childhood favourites, the things that still feel Christmassy to me: Agatha Christie’s “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. All of them take place over the holidays, so seem fitting. I also usually reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, probably because I got them as Christmas presents when I was 11, and I like to revisit them every couple of years: a sort of time travel.

I’m also reading the first book in the young adult “Arthur” trilogy, The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland, which I expected to be a tired rehashing of Arthurian themes but is in fact a beautifully written, intelligent and thoughtful examination of the subject matter. It’s always difficult to read something set in the far past (like the 13th century) and not feel enraged over things like the racism and misogyny of the times. However, Crossley-Holland never makes the reader complicit—those incidents are looked at through the lens of a teenage boy who is troubled by what he sees. I’ve been staying up too late to read the book: always a good sign.

“However, Crossley-Holland never makes the reader complicit—those incidents are looked at through the lens of a teenage boy who is troubled by what he sees.”

The mishmash of other books I’m reading right now:

  • Rekindling the Sacred Fire: Métis Ancestry and Anishinaabe Spirituality – Chantal Fiola (I picked this up because it sounded interesting)
  • Aspects of Sinhala Folklore – J.B. Disanayaka (my father’s side of the family is from Sri Lanka, and I’m working on a book that involves folklore from there, so I’m brushing up on my childhood memories)
  • The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories – Ernest Hemingway (whatever else you can say about Hemingway, he still remains an incredible craftsman of the short story form)
  • Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing – Anya von Bremzen (my mother’s side of the family is from the Baltics, and I bought her a copy of this book for her birthday, and she loved it so much, I had to get myself one)
  • 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act – Bob Joseph (I had heard about this book before now and wanted to read it, and it’s also part of a course I’m taking on Reconciliation)
  • Big Sky – Kate Atkinson (I’m a huge fan of her Jackson Brodie novels)

I suspect I should concentrate on one and read in a more linear fashion rather than dipping in and out of books, but old habits are hard to break!

Sandra Kasturi has had work published in CNQ, Amazing Stories, Prairie Fire, CV2, among others. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom and Come Late to the Love of Birds.

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Finding the Form with Callista Markotich

To pay homage to my father, it had to be a poem. He loved poetry. He loved the rhythm, the words, how the substance of poems spilled grandeur into the quantitative world where he worked to keep his family in the black. He was a banker, small B, with a passion for language, literature and music and my mother and us.

After that, the poem wended its way like a navigator who, to the frustration of Ms. GPS, likes a back-road ramble.

I’d been reading The Art of the Poetic Line, by James Longenbach, and with these heady revelations zinging around my head, explored line endings on verbs and verbals, pretending the movement of a car picking its halting way into unknown territory (like the enjambed next line). I tried to capture the zen of nostalgia, at odds with the crisp Ms. and her commands, everything cannonized by happy memory: leggy lilacs, a sideboard from Victorian farmhouse vernacular, laundry on the line.

I’d been recently admiring short sentences after reading Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, so I tucked in two of them after several sentences of mixed length. The turn in the poem is cleaved between them, with a deep dive into personal memory, graciously invited by the mandate of The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

And Dad, of course, sang in choirs his whole life, bass. Basso Profundo as required. And he made those little knotted-corner hankie caps for us and played the pirate, among other dramatic personae, and created laughter as often as he could.

I noticed that the shape of the poem on the page began to bulge when I plunged into the personal memory penultimate to the ending. I decided that that could stand, reflecting the space of an actual turn, a safe U turn. And it kept the poem to one page, too.

I had a friend who’d lost her own father before I did. When Dad died, she foretold that I would find myself weeping at the oddest things, for years. Like white, white squares of cotton fluttering on a clothesline. Hankies. Right she was.

→ Callista Markotich, a retired Superintendent of Education, is grateful for every Safe U-Turn. Other poems appear in Grain, Prairie Fire, Riddlefence, Nashwaak Review among others.

 

 

 

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