MiPO 2005

Sawako Nakayasu is known to many readers for the astonishing poetic texts on her blog Texture Notes, which offer almost painterly descriptions of defamiliarized scenes from ordinary (sur)reality—a group of invisible children holding up "a field of fried umbrellas." Coming to Nakayasu's work after reading much contemporary poetry, one feels wholly refreshed: here is a poet who avoids predictable re-combinations of late John Ashbery and Language Poetry. Her texts can be highly accessible—perhaps because of their visuality and humor—yet they never insult the reader's intelligence.

Nakayasu, who was born in Japan but grew up in the United States, is also a translator; her attentiveness to the liminal spaces between languages and cultures, or between seemingly "familiar" and "unfamiliar" realities, is evidence of a strikingly unique sensibility. Some might object that such a sensibility is not radically alien to the aims of numerous other younger poets in the "post-avant-garde" camp. Indeed, an abstract description of what she is attempting might sound quite banal ("negotiating cultural identities"; "blurring genres"). I would argue, though, that her poetry rises above those particular clichés, and that she distinguishes herself from the crowd by her refusal to be dull.

So we have been given time or, which won the 2003 Verse Prize (selected by Ann Lauterbach), is a long poem of 106 pages in the form of a play, or, more accurately, a set of instructions for an unperformable theatrical event. The back cover offers further instruction: "Don't read this book—enact it." At the left-hand side of each page we found capitalized words (CHARACTERS, DIRECTIONS, TIME, REALITY, COLOR, LANGUAGE, etc...), many of them repeated, in an irregular rhythm, throughout the book. On the right are lists (or descriptions or explanations), written entirely in lower-case letters. These lists of instructions are also highly rhythmic, at times in a way reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's tone of tongue-in-cheek naiveté. I don't know whether Sawako took inspiration in Stein's poems or theatrical texts, but in any case the influence, if any, is a relatively subtle one. Stein would not have written:

NEED:             two pairs of recently sharpened scissors.
                                    two recently sharpened minds.
                                    two sonambulists.
                                    two functional minds.
                                    two funky minds.
                                    two best.
                                    two you.
                                    a use.

How, then, can we "enact" this text, perform the unperformable? It might not be difficult to find "recently sharpened scissors" or even "two sonambulists," but to assemble all the ingredients needed to stage this series of fortunate events would be a life's work. The sheer length of the text, moreover, introduces a sort of absurdist simultaneity: new requirements (characters, plots, settings, miscellaneous elements) follow one another, continually replacing (or supplementing?) what has gone before, so that one never can arrive at a clear picture of the theatrical event as an integral whole. At a certain point in the text an astute reader might notice that the capitalized words on the left side of the page have begun to merge with the "main" text on the right, so that the text begins to read more as a continuous "poem" than as a set of stage directions for an impossible-to-produce play. The genres are blurred, in any case: the "theatrical" reading of the text seems excessively literal-minded, in view of the complexity of elements involved, yet I still find it helpful to attempt to envision the entire text as a set of instructions for imagining the unimaginable:

DIRECTIONS:         take heat from one belly to the next.
                                    take train from one person to the next.
                                    stand her head upside the platform.
                                    do it with love.
                                    do everything with.
                                    an illusion of security for whatever fraction of each moment.
                                    spin her eyes to the 47-degree play.
                                    train her ear to this fashionable train
                                    get in

The enactment envisioned by this text, then, is a complex and ultimately uncompletable process. My own approach is read So we have been given time or as a book of recipes for creating works of art in various and overlapping media: dance sequences, films, drawings, or collages. I tend to pause frequently in my reading in order to derive as many implications as I can from each page, rather than reading the text "straight through." This approach might not be the choice of every reader. It is clear, though, that the book resists being read as a conventional "book of poems" or even a typical postmodern "long poem" like Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist.

We are often told that "innovative" poetry is at a stand-still, that younger poets have been reduced to repeating the gestures of a decrepit literary vanguard. Despite this feeling of malaise, there are still poets like Sawako Nakayasu who can awaken our imaginations to new poetic possibilities.