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When do you remember first being exposed to poetry? When did you
know you wanted to begin writing?
If I go way back, when I was a little girl in Japan there were games
I played with my family, like karuta
—
which uses the Hyakunin Isshu, a thirteenth-century anthology of
poems by 100 different people. There are cards spread out on the
floor with the second half of a poem written on each one. When the
reader reads a poem, you try to be the first to grab the card which
completes the poem. After that, it was a long time before any kind
of awareness of poetry took place...there wasn't much literature
around the house, not even much art, just that my dad loved opera,
would spend the weekends blasting it from the living room.
I
don't remember ever making a clear decision to become a writer, just
that all along the way I always chose to, wanted to, and enjoyed
writing. My senior year in high school I became a big
environmentalist, and thought I would study that in college. I
showed up at UCSD and discovered there was no Environmental Studies
major. The guidance counselor decided I must be interested in
Biology (like everybody else there), and signed me up for Chem 6A. I
never showed up for the first class, but instead made my way to
Music 2A (funny I still remember the course codes...) Given the
choice, I think I might prefer to be writing music, and maybe even
now I still long for it a little bit.
In
college I majored in writing as well as music, but even then I
wasn't sure of what genre. I liked the fiction workshops just fine,
though I eventually ditched it for poetry because I didn't want to
write in some prescribed format, which is similar to why I quit
journalism, which I did, and loved, in high school. In the appendix
to Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred, I found an
excerpt of a Gertrude Stein play - and was immediately drawn in,
without ever having heard of her before. Tucked away in the back of
the book, I thought she was just some kind of little-known footnote!
Maybe I 'knew' I wanted to write when I felt the desire, or need, to
continue it even after graduating from the Writing Program nest.
Do you
have any writing rituals, a place or time you prefer to write?
No rituals, just that some circumstances tend to be more fruitful
than others. I write more in cities than in nature, more during
periods of transition or uncertainty rather than peace and comfort.
I also like to write late at night because there is a sense of
unlimited time, that I don't have to do something or be somewhere in
the next hour or two or three. Or likewise a Sunday morning in bed
with no immediate plans. The moments just before and after waking
are great. Also the moments just before I fall asleep on the train.
How and when did
Texture Notes begin? Will it be a book-length sequence?
What unites or links the pieces? Who or what do you see as
your primary influences in shaping Texture Notes?
I think I wrote the first entry after seeing sumo live for the first
time. I kept thinking about the wrestlers' bodies, and how big and
fat they were. The best seats were ringside, of course, and they
were occupied by wrinkled old men sitting on tatami. Sometimes when
a wrestler fell out of the ring he would land on a pile of old
people, and I was interested in that point of contact - the big
wrestler against these aged bodies. People's bodies have such
different densities and textures, and I find this endlessly
fascinating. Sumo wrestler against sumo wrestler is not as
interesting for me to watch because they have similar densities. On
the other hand the meeting of two similar (but not same) textures is
very intriguing too. Imagine placing a slice of raw cow tongue atop
your own tongue. (Someone I knew claimed that this was the most
sexiest food item to her). The closeness makes the distance more
tangible. Or if you are kissing someone, and they soften their
tongue on you. Shifting, living, textures keep me very interested in
the physical world.
Also, the density of a mass of people, or a mass of anything. This
is something I think about when in Tokyo, just because it's always
so present as an issue. So Texture Notes is a particular kind of
investigation of the physical world. And extending that, trying to
imagine everything - intentions, decisions, conflict, beauty
—
as tangible, as having texture. The texture of something, physical
or not, is one of the hardest things to describe, which is part of
what made it an interesting project for me.
It
is starting to look like it can be a book. There are links of
content that runs throughout, largely concerning human physicality
—
eyeballs and fatness and tongues and boots, as well as the dirtier
elements, like vomit, boogers, 'diarrhea like a motherfucker.' Tokyo
is funny because it is probably the cleanest megalopolis, yet I've
seen more public vomiting here than anywhere else I've ever been.
(But they are vomiting upon very clean streets!) So in some ways
they are a collection my observations on Japan.
Also, I think that the form of my writing has settled into a more or
less consistent prose poetry, which is somewhat new. I used to do
all sorts of formal experiments and gymnastics, but this work seems
to have naturally chosen to be this way...though now I suspect that
it could have been the
blog factor
too, that the format just doesn't allow for much playing with the
page.
Influences...I don't know. But I think I am easily influenced, by
whatever external world is around me at any given moment. I might be
more likely to think in terms of reactions rather than influences -
so for example this work might be read as my reactions against
living in a place where there are piles and piles of people who
don't as a general rule touch each other, who often peer pressure
themselves into drinking to the vomit point, who are surrounded by
fantastic food and paper and fabric and...*stuff,* of many many
curious textures, as well as a few other elements too personal to
disclose here...
In addition to
poetry, you write performance pieces, and your book So We Have Been
Given Time Or has a theatric or performance quality to it. Is
Texture Notes, in some ways, designed to be performed too?
One of the pieces, 'Nightmare about Hamburgers', has been performed,
in Japanese translation. We used real hamburger meat and recorded
the sound of squishing meat, to be used later in the performance. It
would have been nice to cook them up on stage, but it was an old
building and no fires were allowed. Instead we had pizza delivered
on stage, much to the befuddlement (or annoyance?) of the delivery
guy.
I
didn't write Texture Notes intending for it to be performed, but I
think some pieces just naturally lend themselves to it. Bicycle
Texture has been made into a small Flash poem.
Are found texts a
substantive component of Texture Notes?
Not so much found texts, but I find stories, objects, and other
external materials that form the ingredients of the work. But lately
I am starting to suspect that I 'find' much of what I use, without
giving due credit. Which words are mine? Almost everything is
acquired from somewhere, so I don't know how I could possibly be
able to tell. But when I go back and read my own work looking for
found text, I can find a smattering of pop music lines, and also
some borrowed diction, mostly from nonfiction - documents,
instructions, lists, letters. "Imagination is memory"
—
Joyce is famous for saying this, but it's possible he stole it from
somewhere too...but I like the idea that nothing is truly 'made up.'
The tone of your
recent Texture Notes, both here in MiPO and in your
blog,
seems so wonderfully detached and anthropological, especially
compared to your other work. Is Texture in the sequence as
much as anything about language or text?
I don't think it's so much about language itself - I really intend
it to literally be about the texture of things
— nouns
—
the continuous project of naming the things that make up our world,
so it is an anthropological project, you might say. But
incidentally, there is no perfect equivalent in Japanese for the
word 'texture.' So it might function as a catalogue of what this
word might mean. But I don't think I really play with different
textures of language in this piece, although that interests me too.
I think that my book, So We Have Been Given Time Or,
does more in terms of exploring the different textures that writing
can have.
Your chapbook Clutch
and your performance work Tending the Keep, which I’m sorry to say I
haven’t seen, are both about hockey. What’s your attraction to
hockey as a subject?
It's just that I think hockey is absolutely beautiful and exciting -
I play it, not even that well, but I find a very particular pleasure
in being *inside* the game. I can turn it into an analogy for just
about anything
— it is performative in
similar ways that I enjoy dance, or poetry
— much of my poetry I like
to envision as a performance on the page. The challenge, and the
beauty, is to stretch what is possible within a given set of
limitations - be it the two-dimensional page or the
three-dimensional ice rink. And I also love things that are fast.
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