 |
Cold Wind from Idaho
forthcomingNancy Boutin interviews Dr. Lawrence Matsuda
One of the darkest deeds ever perpetrated in the name of homeland security barely registers in the American conscience. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the imprisonment of all Japanese Nationals and tens of thousands of American citizens living along the West Coast. Their only crime was having a Japanese grandparent. After the war, victims did not march on Washington, engage in widespread civil disobedience, or sue the federal government. Bound by the cultural rule of gaman, to bear the unbearable with dignity, they returned to their homes and tried to resume normal lives.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued an official apology. Some former internees began to receive reparations, but nothing could make up for the damage done by years spent in places like Manzanar and Heart Mountain, or the emotional and physiological injury that resulted from subsequent years of silent suffering.
Now, Dr. Lawrence Matsuda, educator, activist, and poet, is giving voice to America's forgotten shame, even as a segment of today's citizens' civil rights are sacrificed to the illusion of safety from international terror. With the support and mentorship of poet Tess Gallagher, Matsuda is publishing the images and emotions that belong a life begun in the Minadoka War Relocation Center and lived amid prejudice and anger in the Pacific Northwest during the post-War decades.
On January 8, 2008, Dr. Matsuda shared his poems, process, and perspective with students at the Whidbey Writers Workshop. He also graciously granted an interview to WWW graduate Nancy Boutin. A portion of that interview follows.
NB: When did you start writing poetry? Why?
LM: As part of my speech education major in college, I took an oral interpretation class in the early 1970s. There I was introduced to poetry as performance, not just as something on paper, and I began to write poems to read out loud. Tess would say that the ear is more forgiving than the eye. In other words, you can get away with things in the oral interpretation that might not fly in print. Because I liked words, I minored in English.
Nevertheless, after graduation from the University of Washington, I became involved in the Civil Rights movement and began writing about injustice. I wrote for the UW Daily, marched against the Elk's Club for discriminatory practices, was the co-leader of a confrontation with the UW that changed minority admissions policies. I was chair of the John Eng state representative campaign--he won in the 1970s as the first Asian in the legislature.
After I earned a PhD in education, I decided I wanted to go to back and do something fun. So in 1978 I enrolled in Prof. Nelson Bentley's poetry workshop and began writing. I still wrote about injustice, but my specialty was the comic villanelle, which later led me to write nonsense poems since I like to play with words.
But also, I have found that my latest manuscript, Cold Wind from Idaho, has helped me make peace with my past and move ahead and not be poisoned by anger. I hope that you could see that in my reading, that there really was no anger. Anger was something that I carried for a long time and I have learned to manage it through self-examination and poetry. Poetry lets me go beyond what Tess calls your "Walking-around-eating-hamburger-self" to the poetic self, which is free of normal conventions. Using this vehicle, I could explore thoughts and scenarios I could not access in the walking-around-eating-hamburger stage.
NB: Were you able to identify the focus of the anger, or was it more diffuse?
LM: My mother was one or two months pregnant when she was sent to the camps. She had a miscarriage there and never really got over it. My parents lost everything. Essentially, the US government betrayed and imprisoned them for three-plus years because of their race. They were not foreigners; my mother was born in Seattle and my father was born in Goldbar, Washington. What could they say when they were taken? My father lost his grocery business because no more customers would patronize his store. When he returned, he could not restart his business and had to become a janitor, got sick, and lost his job. Later Seattle University was the only place to hire him as a part-time janitor.
When I grew up, my best friend's mother committed suicide and another friend found his father hanging dead in the garage. Many other Japanese committed suicide, but we never said much since it was a fairly frequent occurrence. Both of my parents are from Hiroshima. If you were in our family in 1945, you were either in camp or in Japan being bombed. If you looked at the Holmes index, which correlates stress with health, my parents were under great stress.
My mother was hospitalized when I was 3, my father, when I was 7. Then, my mother was institutionalized for depression when I was 13 and my father was given one year to live when I was 16. I was refused service in a restaurant, called names by strangers on the street, given the "Hate Stare" that you will never forget if you are on the receiving end. Once, when I was young, I felt I should commit a crime and go to jail rather than wait for the government to take us again for no reason.
There also was a time that I thought it would be okay to volunteer for the army infantry and either come back--or not—and to take my aggressions out on the enemy. That was unappealing to me because the enemy looked like me during the Viet Nam War.
But I survived—endured the unbearable with dignity.
NB: Given the prohibition on talking about anything shameful, how did you manage your anger?
LM: I used everything I could to deal with the unsaid. In 1969 I started the first Asian American history course in the Seattle Schools and co-taught a course at SCC. I taught it and wrote about it. I talked about it in news articles, short stories and poetry. Most of what I wrote was factual and did not have the emotional weight that I could convey in poetry. For example, there is a huge difference between saying 120,000 were incarcerated without a trial or due process during a time of war and the excerpt below from "War on Terror—Border Crossing," which I read at Whidbey:
I carry my own fence.
Barbed wire encircles me always.
Determined not to follow my parents' path
into clinical depression or a bleeding ulcer—
my shins are raked by the steel teeth
of my unwilled confinements.
Wearing this yellow skin, I am unable
to walk freely in my own country.
But I learn, border by border,
to leap safely in sudden movements
leaving no remnants snagged on the wire.
NB: What did your parents think of your political activism?
LM: They were concerned about me bringing shame on the family. As far as I was concerned, I was just angry. Angry at the US for doing it and angry at the Japanese for going so quietly, angry because after the war so many Japanese wanted to ignore the injustice, and angry that because we were one of the only group treated this way based on race. Again from "War on Terror –Border Crossing":
In camp, many Nisei tried to be 110% Americans--
fought against Hitler, bought war bonds, labored
in munitions factories. After the War,
some changed their last names,
turned white on paper,
"Takahashi" to "Highbridge", the English translation.
NB: How did you start working with Tess Gallagher?
LM: Tess and I were introduced by a mutual friend. He gave Tess my manuscript to review. I thought it was ready to send out, but she had many good suggestions to make it better.
Tess has been to Japan and knows Haruki Murakami the famous writer who, I believe, translated some of Raymond Carver's work into Japanese. Also she did a book, Distant Rain, where she worked with a Japanese artist. My Japanese-American experience was something she was not familiar with. I think she was taken by the social injustice and lack of public knowledge about what happened to the Japanese in America during WWII. She felt that my work had that potential. She felt that America should hear my story and part of her role was to help me tell the story in poetry. So the relationship developed.
I sent her drafts and she sent me corrections. I never tarried and always responded quickly. I knew how lucky I was to have her help that I always got back to her no matter how difficult the revisions. I think she was impressed by my stamina and creative responses to her challenges until the corrections decreased to the level of commas and punctuation issues.
After getting to know her, we say that she must have been Japanese in a past life.
NB: What's that collaboration been like for you?
LM: It has been a great deal of work and fun. She has been a guiding light because she has been down the publishing road before. So her optimism was always helpful moving forward. As we progressed on the project, other people helped or appeared who could help. Roger Shimomura, a famous artist, will let me use his art for my cover. A photographer I met years ago ran into me at an art exhibit and she offered to take my picture for her book.
Also, Tess said that helping me on my manuscript was an education for her as well. So in that sense we both benefited.
NB: Have you had any opportunities to "audition" your work besides the reading at the Whidbey Residency?
LM: Linda, a friend, wanted Tess and I to do a reading at Kobo's Gallery in Seattle. She arranged the venue, etc. and Tess and I presented. It was advertised in the Weekly and other newspapers. We had about 70-80 people attend. Tess did the intro and read a couple of poems. I did about a thirty-minute reading and at the end many in the audience were in tears.
I have read my poems at the UW Castilla Series under Bentley, in Idaho at a civil rights symposium, in Oregon at a day of remembrance (re: the Japanese evacuation), at Seattle University, at the Ethnic Cultural Center, at one workshop in Bellingham, Seattle U. MIT class and other places . I will have a poem coming out some time in Raven's Chronicles.
NB: What are you plans/hopes for getting your poems in front of a wider audience?
Just today I finished the final draft of the manuscript. I am sending it out to publishers Tess recommends. In addition, I am sending the individual poems out while I look for a publisher. I have a possible invitation to do readings and will continue. I may also try to join a group just to be a part of people on the same path I am on.
NB: Do you have any goals beyond seeing your work in print?
LM: My whole point is to "never let it happen again." I am working on a poem that speaks directly. In the poem, I am standing on the stairs of a mosque after 9/11. I am standing for my parents who could not stand for themselves 60 years ago . . . and I stand knowing that to endure the unbearable with dignity solves nothing--it only fuels the nightmare. It is my duty to never let it happen again without protest. That, I see, as what the Japanese must do of all the people in America.
NB: Thank you, Larry. I look forward to seeing Cold Wind from Idaho on the book shelf.
LM: Thank you.
Excerpts From An Interview With David Wagoner
Loren Cooper (Interviewer) / David Wagoner
LC) At the first Whidbey Island Residency, you talked about psychotopes, landscapes of the psyche, as an idea that captured your attention. I was curious about some of the ideas that have caught you in the past.
DW) I think psychotopes may have been one of those kinds of ideas in disguise. I didn’t recognize how important it was to me… I thought it just had to do with my changes of environment geographically.
Up until age 7, I lived in a small town in Ohio. It got implanted in my imagination as a kind of never-never land, a sort of cartoon land full of eccentrics and primitive images of Valentines. There were some grotesques in it, but my first images as a writer came as much from there as from where I lived from age 7 to 18, between Garry and Chicago, which was a ruined landscape.
LC) How did the contrast influence you?
DW) I had this earlier landscape, sort of like a dream in my background, influencing my attitude toward what grew. Very little could grow where I went to school. The earth was resistant to anything bountiful. It was sandy soil, former swamp, former bottom of Lake Michigan that had all been jammed with industry. Not just ordinary industry, but some of it quite destructive or quite inimical to anything fertile. There were no berries, for instance. There were no apple trees. These things I had known as a boy.In my backyard as a very young boy, there were grapes, apples, and not very far away, elderberries and raspberries. So, I moved to a place where nothing came out of the ground except…what did come out of the ground?…water, I guess, when it flooded. We didn’t have any rain. It made a very sharp contrast in my ideas about environment.
Then, of course, I got smeared around the landscape for a while in Southern Indiana, in Pennsylvania, in New York City. The big break was going to the Northwest when I was twenty-five. I had never before been west of the Mississippi. It was a kind of epic journey in my own life, for me to drive from Chicago to Seattle and see what I had only heard about. I came over the Cascades into the ‘promised land.’
Past the Cascades, everything grew. Anything could grow. It was still relatively unspoiled. In those days, you could drive for an hour in any direction from Seattle, except under water, and you could be in a place where there was no trace of man. Unless you count second growth. It didn’t seem like second growth. It didn’t seem as though anybody had cut those things down. It wasn’t long before there were clear-cuts, though, in my life. So, this was a strong contrast. It tempted me to become an animist instead of a Presbyterian. The subject is so complicated and so lengthy and so embedded in my life. You could imagine, then, it would occur to me sooner or later that where you grew up had a lot to do just physically with how you thought about things.
LC) In what way?
DW) I had three kinds of earth to think about -- the forests of the Northwest; old, worked and hard farm land, Midwestern farm land; and the ruin between Gary and Chicago. Even in the small towns the land of the Midwest was still farm land. They had just made some inroads on what my great grandparents had found there when they came over the Allegheny’s and started pushing the Indians out. The contrast was so sharp with the flatland. That was hilly land. There was no flat land there. You either were going uphill or downhill or around a hill in eastern Ohio.
In Whiting, Indiana, between Gary and Chicago, it was dead flat. No one dreamed of being a skier. You could be a skater because it got cold and froze. That was relatively easy. But to hike? Where would you go? You could go to the city dump, which is what I did. Or you could go wade in swamp water. Or you could go swim in polluted water in Lake Michigan. But walking and biking were relatively easy. You didn’t have to worry about hills or slopes. The cars could drive relatively easily in really rotten weather because there were no hills to worry about. It’s hard to get stuck in flat snow. If you skid, you don’t skid very far. Anyway, landscapes entered into my soul.
LC) Do you see any link between psychotopes and Richard Hugo's triggering towns and Thoreau's fascination by the land and by everything in the land and on the land and of the land?
DW) Yes, I do. I think there is a link because we're all tied to the land.
LC) Is this a sort of dialogue between poets?
DW) A dialogue; I have to puzzle over that. Much of it seems like monologue to me, but then it isn’t always my voice I’m recording or wanting to listen to, either. I usually think of it as another voice.
I used to write a lot more lyric poetry than I do now. I miss it in a way, but I no longer feel quite so much of an impulse toward it. I have been a storyteller from time to time, writing novels. I have been called a storyteller as a poet, too. I use a lot of narrative in my poems as a series of connected actions that somebody is doing. And it’s no surprise to me, as I look back, that I was sometimes very nearly simultaneously writing both fiction and poetry. I don’t know why, exactly.
LC) Do you still write fiction and poetry in parallel?
DW) No. I don’t write fiction any more…I quit trying. I published my last novel in 1981. I have written a couple since, but I haven’t satisfied myself. I didn’t really before, either, but I was encouraged by editors and my agent. Naturally, if you get published, you feel that “well, maybe I can do it again and do it better.” But I always wanted to get my novels over with so that I could write poetry, and that’s not the right attitude.
I didn’t let them season. I let them get out of my hands too soon. Sometimes I wrote two novels that should have been one. I realize, having published 10 novels, that I seem really like an odd character these days, when it’s not as easy to get published. But I haven’t unraveled the puzzle in my own head about why I wanted to write long fiction. It has something to do with using up the same impulse in poetry, I think. I wrote what seemed like the equivalents of short stories often in poems. So, if I was going to write fiction at all, it had to be something I couldn’t do in poetry, or I couldn’t to the semblance of.
LC) You never had any impulse in poetry to write– what's the novel-length equivalent -- an epic poem?
DW) When I was a teenager, I did, but I got over that in a hurry. I have never been happy with being categorized. I have tried over and over again to be a playwright, and have been unsuccessful. I have always been attracted to the stage and have a number of friends among actors whose careers I have followed without envy, believe me; they have seemed like warnings to me. I wanted to act, and I did act for a while. And I was literary advisor to the Seattle Repertory Theatre for nine years.
LC) Did you enjoy acting?
DW) No, I didn’t. I learned my lesson. I learned I wasn’t very good, for one thing, which is a genuine kind of discouragement. But I was still very intrigued by the whole idea. And the metaphor keeps showing up in my poems. I have a poem called Backstage. I have a poem called In The Dressing Room. I have a poem called Rehearsing the Death Scene. There are a whole bunch of them. I have one called On Stage. I have one called Stage Fright, one called At the Door, about all the ways you can go out one, what actors have to think about when they are leaving stage. It seemed like everything about it was metaphoric, rich in suggestion. The fact that I’m going to have a play produced next July is sort of stunning to me now at my age.
LC) Theodore Roethke is subject that’s pretty near your heart, too.
DW) Of course, that made it easy, and a one character play isn’t really a test of one’s theatricality as a writer. It’s like doing it with one arm behind your back. You only have one actor to worry about.
LC) But on the other hand, it could be said that holding the audience with one actor on the stage is a challenge.
DW) But I have found in doing that that I have been running into a lot of the problems I recognize as being, what shall I say, what poets and playwrights share. Though in the case of the playwright you don’t depend…well, scarcely at all do you depend on the reader’s mind’s eye or on the spectator’s mind’s eye.
LC) Because you have the stage.
DW) Because it’s there. And I am very conscious of this as a poet. I don’t want to neglect that aspect of writing. The abstract in poetry is rare in me. But the stage is there and concrete. Of course, it’s a group enterprise, and that’s what poets don’t have to worry about mostly. You don’t have to depend on bad actors or overbearing directors or some of the other hazards of the theatre world. Every playwright, every poet, every short story writer, every novelist depends on the memory of the reader or the spectator. You have to depend on their recollection of what has already happened. If they are reading in sequence, down the page, over the words you have written, you have to depend on them or help them as much as you can to remember what has already happened. But especially in writing, you are dependent on a linear imagination.
On stage, it is something else. There is another dimension. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but I suspect that anybody who thinks about it, anybody who tries to tell the difference between reading something and watching something, recognizes this. Some playwrights, some really good playwrights -- I think immediately of Harold Pinter -- I think are marvelous when they write for the stage and awful when they write in any other way. Some playwrights, the best ones, I think are Eugene O’Neal, Dorothy Williams, less so, Arthur Miller, but most certainly Harold Pinter; four playwrights I admire a lot... But Harold Pinter’s not a good poet. He’s terrible. I can’t figure out why. Playwrights have got something prose writers don’t have, that I have always wanted to have, and don’t.
LC) Best of luck in July. Or break a leg; whatever you say to the playwright. And thank you for your time today.
DW) You’re welcome.
.........................................................
Interview with Carolyne Wright
New Works Review, Spring 2006, Vol 8, No. 2Carolyne Wright is this edition's Featured Poet
Carolyne Talks Poetry
NWR: What first moved you to write poetry—did the influence come from your parents, friends, school, community, reading (or as a reaction to all of the above)?
CW: I was inspired to write poetry by a beloved English and writing teacher at Seattle's Roosevelt High School, Mrs. Sally Bryan; and an earlier teacher who taught a unit on Theodore Roethke's work a few years after Roethke, then a Professor at the nearby University of Washington, had died . For Mrs. Bryan, we read selections of work by poets such as e. e. cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot, and also wrote in response to what we read. Sometimes we had whole periods for writing, with classical music playing on the classroom record player! In one class, we read aloud selections from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, each of us taking the part of one of the characters speaking the poems. In another class in the drama department, we did a dramatized reading of Eliot's "The Hollow Men," with a ghostly, Greek choral effect in the repeated lines and at the end: "This is the way the world ends. . . not with a bang, but a whimper."
I found myself fascinated with poetry as a medium that allowed for intense self-discovery and freshly expressed insights into the human condition, in very concise, vivid, language. The exploration and expression of distilled inner states that seemed possible in poetry was what drew me both to read and writ e it—poetry was also brief enough to be the sort of creative effort that I, a girl working by herself with a notebook and pen, could undertake. I served on the editorial board of my high school literary magazine, my first experience of selecting other people's work for publication; and a few years later, as an undergraduate, I was the editor of Fragments, the literary magazine at Seattle University.
In my first year of graduate school, I was in a poetry workshop with Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington, and was impressed by Bishop's work and poetic presence, and the disciplined approach to writing poetry that she conveyed to the workshop members. Inspired by this contact with one of the poets whose work I most admired and continue to read, I went on leave from the graduate studies in Latin American Literature that I was then pursuing, and entered the Creative Writing program at Syracuse. By then, I realized that I needed to write—I had done a lot of drawing and painting as a child and later in graduate school, in high school I had toyed with the idea of theater, after college I experimented with a career in graphic arts, applied and was accepted to an MFA program in painting, and completed much of the graduate degree in the study of literature in Spanish that I just mentioned, but none of these endeavors held my attention or challenged in such a way that I would do the work no matter what. Only writing held my interest and exacted a full commitment—a commitment that I gave, at last, with a sort of relief.
NWR: Were your early influences the classic European and American poets, like Donne, Shelley, Whitman, and Dickinson, or did you turn to 20th-century poets for inspiration?
CW: My mother, a major book-worm in her own younger days, encouraged my reading. She noticed my interest in poetry, and for my 16th birthday, I think it was, gave me a copy of the first contemporary anthology to influence me, Five Poets of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Robin Skelton. This anthology featured work by Kenneth Hanson, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, William Stafford and David Wagoner During the summer between high school graduation and college, I took a poetry course at the Port Townsend Summer School of the Arts, a precursor to Centrum. The instructor was William Stafford, a poet I knew of from the Skelton anthology! We read selections of post-WW II American poets from one of the first anthologies of this work, edited by Donald Hall. I was mystified by some of the cultural references in Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour"—what was an L. L. Bean catalogue? —and I remember Stafford's repeating the line, "a red fox stain covers Blue Hill," savoring its sound and imagery, as he read the poem aloud. He was very kind to me when I showed him a few very early poetic efforts, and he became one of my enduring mentors, mainly through his work, which I have continued to read over the years. Inspired by that course, I began to check out from the library some of the book-length collections by poets featured in the Hall anthology--James Dickey, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, Stafford of course, and James Wright. Their early books—often their first books! I remember going through the poetry shelves and looking for those slim volumes—in new condition since they were recently published and infrequently checked out—and the excitement of discovery I felt.A seminal poetic experience in the fall of my freshman year there was to hear a diminutive nun in a contemporary habit, Sister Mary Gilbert, give a reading of her precise and witty poetry in the Seattle University library auditorium. I thought, "she's a woman and a nun to boot, and if She can write poetry, so can I!" The sister turned out to be Madeline DeFrees, one of my enduring influences and now (in her mid-80s) a friend. At Seattle U, I took literature courses focusing on poetry, and the only Creative Writing workshop (then occasionally offered) of my undergraduate career, from another charismatic and dedicated professor, William Taylor, who encouraged my writing and my sense of myself as an aspiring poet. He helped make the life of a poet more accessible and more realistic—involving craft and revision, discipline and time management. more...
Carolyne Wright Bio and Poems
Carolyne Wright has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection of essays, and three volumes of poetry translated from Bengali and Spanish. Her new collection, A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), was a finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castangola Award from the Poetry Society of America. more...
......................................................................
|
