September Book Club: The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa
from Canarium
APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Jane Wong. Jane Wong‘s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the author of the poetry collection Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She teaches at UW and the Hugo House.
I first came across Chika Sagawa’s work through a poet and translator I’ve admired for years: Sawako Nakayasu. The book I found, Mouth: Eats Color (Rogue Factorial, 2011), is presented as a collaboration between Nakayasu and Sagawa. Mouth: Eats Color immediately provokes and expands our parameters of tradition, nationhood, and translation. I loved how translations turned and turned again in French, English, Chinese, and Japanese, confounding language, genre, and time/space. Sagawa, who was one of the first female modernists in Japan, died in 1936 at the early age of 24. Nakayasu invokes Sagawa’s ghost and does not distinguish who writes what (making Nakayasu’s original work, Sagawa’s original work, and Nakayasu’s translations indistinguishable). The collection also calls forth other transnational poets who have passed away, including Frances Chung (a Chinese American poet who also died at a young age in 1990). There’s a ghostly and spiritual connection between writer and translator here, and I’m thankful for Nakayasu’s ability to cross those boundaries.
This year, Canarium published a beautiful collection of Sagawa’s poetry and prose. I’m a firm believer in the importance of reading books in translation (and transnational books); oftentimes, I’m worried that we can’t see beyond this tiny continent and the English language. There are numerous presses that I admire who seek to publish work in translation, including Canarium, Copper Canyon, Action Books (check out Ito Hiromi’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank), Litmus Press (check out Four From Japan), Wave Books, etc.
As Nakayasu writes in her introduction to The Collected Poems, Sagawa was one of the very few female modernist poets writing in Japan: “her work is revolutionary for transcending this massive gender divide.” Sagawa and poets such as Yosano Akiko have influenced following generations of innovative women poets, including Ito Hiromi. Sagawa certainly does not shy away from this gendered position. She writes with transparency: “A lamp dangles from the sky like the neck of a woman” and “Forests and windows go pale, like a woman.”
What particularly excites me about Sagawa’s work is her bold imagery and vigilant inquiry –notably grotesque. As a poet who loves the grotesque and the eerie natural world, Sagawa’s poems thrill me. Mina Loy’s proclamation to “LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it” is definitely here. The speaker is often transformed into an animal self – at times armored, at times vulnerable: “Death strips my shell” and “I become a moth that slams into the window.” This is a world where things aren’t what they seem, testing our imagination and our sense of truth. One of my favorite images from a poem called “Flower”: “a snail crawls through the forest/Above its tentacles is the sky.” We zoom into the interior of the visceral world: “Gradually a chicken bleeds.” Decades into the future, Sagawa’s ferocity is felt through her forceful diction: “Who blindfolds me from behind? Shove me into sleep.” That imperative is both terrifying in its vulnerability and empowering in its command. This teetering back and forth between violence and kindness is striking to me and I aim for that in my own work.
Her ghost is also felt throughout, as she often considers her looming death. She writes with a slow burning vision: “Death deliberately clings to my finger. Peeling off the shell of night, one layer at a time.” I can’t help but think about Keats here, who died when he was 25. In a poem, he addresses that strange limbo world of life and death: “This living hand, now warm and capable/Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold…”
There’s so much to talk about and I can’t wait to discuss Chika Sagawa’s work and Sawako Nakayasu’s beautiful translations on September 13th at 4:00pm. See you there!
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In September, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 9/13 at 4pm in Little Oddfellows, the (newly restyled!) cafe in Elliott Bay Book Company.
