review in Kyoto Journal #99, December 2020 by Alan Botsford

 

review of mamaist: a different sort of light KYOTO JOURNAL

Kyoto Journal 95 Spring 2020

Reviews

Mamaist Heartbeat Otherwise: A Poetry Roundup


[.....]
       Alan Botsford avoids the two traps that often ensnare poets.The first trap is for a poet to become so smitten with a style that he or she starts to write all his or her poems in that style.The second trap occurs when poets write poems that leave one, after the last line is read, with nothing: nothing to think about, nothing memorable, not a belly laugh, a giggle, or a grimace. Botsford, in his most recent "mamaist" tome, writes in a variety of styles He calls some of his mamaist work "generic poems," by which he means poems that use "generic" language--everyday words and phrases--that he twists in a way that revivifies it. It's the creativity and wit in some of these poems that will stay with readers the longest. In a time when too much of what is offered as poetry is, in fact, chopped prose, it is a delight to find, in a poem called "a mamaist earth of heart":


Yes, you amigo of imago (no scold of clods)--
sing out your amens of names
with booms of bosom borne of boner,
and mania of anima under a cloud of could!
Armed of dream, takes your moods of dooms,
your swords  of words and befriend the devil of lived!


Language is central to what poems are. This is so obvious that one feels silly writing it, especially when one has just been reminded of what a poem can be by language play as lively as Botsford's. One is happy to be so reminded, and also to experience in books such as these the vibrancy and vigor of the English-language poetry scene in Japan.

- David Cozy

A review of mamaist: a different sort of light

http://www.decompmagazine.com/mamaist.htm

A Review of mamaist: a different sort of light
by Alan Botsford

Spencer Dew

“After all, doesn’t milk sound like a miracle?” Not dada, then, but something more nourishing, nudging the unfurl of a seed, “fern-like, out from under / every moment, a tongue, a feather, a flame lifting into the air,” a smell like fresh-baked bread and rich, tilled soil.

While there’s mention here of the notorious nobodaddies—“Uncle-Sam-I-Am” up in the sky—of patriarchal pasts and presents, the gift of this collection is to focus us elsewhere than the phallocentric “I.” Indeed, here, that “I” is surrendered to the wind of words, “a mamaist Daedalus” falling, equipped “with traits of artist and . . . rawness of answers” who nonetheless is confronted in due course with “the coming of gnomic as the cosmic of comics.”

From the hum and crackle of electrotherapy to the notion of light as love, a warm enveloping—from the dark that crows speak of, each to each, to dream horses that may be metaphors for everything but are also just precisely what they are in any given, shifting, moment—such sources are mined via a generous generative. One poem, for instance, is collaged out of titles of City Lights books. Others ask questions such as What if Dante had gotten distracted on his walk? and What if all true writing “is a translation from somewhere” unknown?

The mamaist stance or sensibility, then, is to submit to this, to open oneself, surrendering the self bit, and then

to be taking lessons from the cosmos, in pain and in joy . . . to learn how to walk the dizzying edge between two worlds—how, for instance, to enter a house shoeless like a ghost, how, whenever you read, to read from finish to start; how to eat words—still wriggling and writhing in your mouth—raw, and with a nod of your head to look for the next sentence to be complete...

Official Alan Botsford Web Site

review of WALT WHITMAN OF COSMIC FOLKLORE-- WWQR

WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW

Volume 29, Number 3 (2012)
Special Double Issue: Whitman and the South

Numbers Two/Three Fall 2011/Winter 2012

by Michael Sowder

Alan Botsford.  Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore. (Sage Hill Press, 2010)

As Emerson famously said Leaves of Grass resembled a mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald, so Alan Botsford, one of Whitman’s “poets to come,” combines in Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore poetry, criticism, dialogues, myths and folktales, hip-hop rhymes and postmodern surfaces interwoven with the wit and wisdom of Whitman’s visionary embrace of the reader.  Botsford is an American poet living in Japan, the author of two poetry collections, A Book of Shadows (2003) and mamaist: learning a new language (2002), and an Associate Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, where he co-edits Poetry Kanto, Japan’s leading bilingual poetry journal. 

Books about Whitman written by contemporary poets often make for satisfying reading, and Botsford’s book is no exception, for Walt Whitman as poetic progenitor stands as the great exception to Harold Bloom’s thesis on the “anxiety of influence.”  From the late Eliot, to Langston Hughes, Alan Ginsberg, and C.K. Williams, poets are enabled rather than intimidated by Whitman’s looming presence.  Spencer may have sought to “over-go Oriosto,” and Blake wrestled famously with Milton’s angel, but what would it mean to “overgo” Walt Whitman?  What would such a poetry even look like?  

Befitting its precursor, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore is a unique book.  In many ways it recalls the Whitman imagined by the early disciples, such as Richard Maurice Bucke and Edward Carpenter.  Here, Whitman speaks as a spiritual teacher, poet, and guide, aligned less with the newly-minted spiritual movements of the nineteenth century, than with those popular today in the West, such as Zen Buddhism and Jungian-inflected anthropology and psychology popularized by mythologists like Joseph Campbell and psychologists like James Hillman.  This spiritual focus offers a refreshing read, for, as I have argued elsewhere, Whitman saw himself first and foremost a spiritual and religious poet.    

In “Part One: The Vision of the Dance,” Botsford presents three dialogues between the book’s author-persona and Uncle Walt, inter-leaved with retellings of Japanese folktales.   The dialogues, lively, humorous, and often ecstatic, present a convincing, modern-day Whitman speaking.   In the first dialogue, Whitman invites a hesitant author-persona onto the open road of spiritual journeying and transformation.  Whitman speaks in italicized lines:  “I guess what I’m more concerned about is losing the integrity of my margins, and therefore the organization of my self.  / Everybody, of course, has got to find their own way of getting a grip on themselves and keeping themselves together.  But as anybody can tell you, being both ‘nobody’ and ‘everybody’ at the same time is what being ‘somebody’ is about.” / “Sounds like a lot of suffering is involved” (18).   

Puns, allusions, and wordplay, provide much of the humor of these pieces.  After some extensive coaxing and encouragement, Whitman begins to reveal the nature of the journey: “Yes, there may be nothing in the world more serious than play, but make no mistake—this body is a means the world has of coming into meaning.  And that is your story . . .” (21).  In the last of the dialogues, “Odysseying,” we come to the crux of the matter.  As befits a twenty-first century Walt channeled by an American living in Japan, the dialogue takes on markedly Buddhist tones.  

The struggle to be remade out of this pregnant emptiness will seem endless, for the way’s circuitous.  But be not afraid of your aloneness, your uniqueness, your ‘I am’ ness.  It’s the cost of doing business.

* * *

Go ahead—now peer into the heart of your darkness. . . . Do you see the 10,000 corpses with your likeness? 

* * *

You must give assent and say yes, in utter nakedness.

* * *

Sing, O sing your heart out, Orpheus!  Grieve and mourn your losses.  (46-47).  

A prose narrative, “Thinking Outside the Cave,” retells the myth of the Japanese sun-goddess, Amaterasu as a Whitmanian myth for our times.   Amaterasu retreats to a cave after her brother has violated her and her temple.  Darkness covers the land and the crops are ruined.  Finally, the other gods devise a means of bringing her out.  The bawdy Goddess of Myrth, Uzume, stages a dance before the cave and a mirror is placed before it.   Amaterasu comes out, like a newborn Whitman, or Eve in the morning, enticed by her own naked beauty and retakes her proper place in the heavens.   Botsford envisions her as “Mother Earth,” abused by modern civilization and capable of healing only by a new vision of the body, by our “experienc[ing] Earth once again as lover” (25).   

Part Two: Filled by the Spirit” presents nine essays on Leaves of Grass.  The essays are more impressionistic than argumentative and and like the work of a poet reading Whitman in the open air rather than that of a scholar in the library.  The subject is the spiritual/corporeal terrain that opens up between Whitman and his sympathetic readers.     In "Whitman and Us," my favorite of the essays, Botsford says this: 

Indeed, in its generosity of spirit, its abundance of love, its depth of wisdom, Whitman's Leaves of Grass' offers readers an order of experience different from what we would expect from modern works of art, for Whitman returns the work of art to its original and primary function: a vehicle of awakening, of enlightenment (78).  

Two essays pick up the folkloric theme, reading Whitman within the context of the tale of the “King with Donkey Ears,” as a means to explore the tension between Whitman’s openness and secretiveness.  The king in the tale must acknowledge the (open) secret of his donkey ears, just as Whitman learns to acknowledge the secret of his forbidden desires, which can then become the seed from which his poetry springs.  

The essays maintain that poetry matters, especially Whitman’s, and that poetry makes things happen.  They see Whitman’s work as one of healing, enabling the reader to discover the self “where boundaries dissolve and re-coagulate in constant flux,” to encounter an “otherness” within that paradoxically is the key to a reconstructed and redeemed identity (80). 

After these essays, “Part III: The Cosmic Flow,” offers Botsford's own poetry in sympathetic response to Whitman.  The first section of Part III unfolds in thirty three prose poems or cantos.  Here is XXXIII: 

Diving head first into nature, this hot pursuit of the right to know (colorful world in all its varied hues) starting over again, at the bottom (a vulnerable labor of love) where the tale catches the rock in a hard place come in from the cold but feeling the heat in a hole so deep that no amount of tender loving care can fill its shoes . . .  (209).

A collection of Blake-like aphorisms follows in “Notes Toward a Cosmic Poetics,” which orient us toward the kind of poetry at stake.  It calls for “Poems like a samurai preparing for a beheading at any moment . . . Poems like Emily Dickinson’s honoring the ‘daily crucifixion” (210).   After these preparations, the final work of the book exfoliates into an eighty-three part poem, entitled “Singing With the Dead.”  The poem opens with an invocation of Whitman as forefather and muse:  “There in your sky, Walt, in your celestial garb / Come down, come down to earth for us . . . Be a taker, Walt, take us into you, take us where/ We can give back to you . . . “ (214).  Individual sections appear like holograms or leaves of grass, each with an image of Uncle Walt, bearing titles inviting us in: “Lazarus of Walt,” “Wound of Walt,” “Walt Reading Emily,” “Daedalus of Walt,” “Crazy Blues of Walt,” “PR of Walt’s I(magi)nation.”  This long poem is a pastiche homage, a hip-hop, postmodern celebration, a spiritual canticle courting and cohabiting with a loved cosmic Other.  

Alan Botsford in Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore, steps forward as one of Whitman’s “poets to come,” part of a “new brood, native, athletic, continental”—and intercontinental.  Along this spiritual-corporeal road Whitman invites us to travel, Botsford has come out to pull down fences, repair bridges, and loaf with us and our uncle, observing spears of grass, journey work of the stars. 

-- Michael Sowder

review of EKI MAE, Vol 1 -- by Alan Botsford

EKI MAE, Vol 1
Featured Poet Fumiko Yamanaka (1912-1936)
edited by Yuka Tsukagoshi, Judy Halebsky & Ayumu Akutsu

by Alan Botsford

If Japan’s poetic voices as enunciated by the four (contemporary & modern) poets in the pages of this new poetry journal are to be transformative, then Eki Mae vol. 1 arrives in the form of an annunciation, the miracle which, once spoken, cannot be quieted. What these poets, in both Japanese and English, pour into the individual reader as seminal words may, as with all poetry, take root and blossom, or it may, on the other hand, wither and dry up… Readiness is all: the right poem and the right reader, the right place and the right time. Eki Mae.

Eki Mae Vol. 1

Featured Poet Fumiko Yamanaka (1912-1936)

Yuka Tsukagoshi

Judy Halebsky

Ayumu Akutsu

Contact: ekimae.poems@gmail.com

review of NO/ON Philip Rowland -- by Alan Botsford

NO/ON: journal of the short poem, 7, Spring 2009
edited by Philip Rowland

Philip Rowland, British editor of NO/ON, a journal of English-language short poems published in Tokyo, Japan, has for the seventh issue laid out for readers what one of the poems calls "a fanciful geography." In fact the poem, by Canadian poet/dramatist J.J. Steinfeld (PK 2008), wittily and succinctly brings into focus one of the themes of this issue and is here worth quoting in full:

A FANCIFUL GEOGRAPHY

A location at the intersection

where the world begins and ends

stirs and renounces itself

what a fanciful geography

a writer with a trembling philosophy

devises new routes for escaping

concocts new messages for sending

to geographers of the distracted

devising and concocting

an almost sinister way

of becoming visible

a few words for the beginning of the world

a profusion of images for its end.

NO/ON's 'fanciful geography' is navigated sometimes one-line poem at a time, such as: "peace arrives boots march on without their feet" (Ed Markowski), or "A road crosses a road another road does not." (Mark Terrill). But to call these poems 'short' hardly does justice to the fancifulness and variety the form assumes in the pages of this journal, where can be found a 'shattered sonnet,' an 'anaximandrian,' a meditation, remixes, haiku, neologisms, concrete poems, puzzle poems, and 'mamaist' poems, to name

a few. Endings and beginnings meet and converge and in between "the wars go on & on." NO/ON 7's fanciful aesthetic reminds us, among other things, that fancy does not necessarily end where the real begins: each grows out of the other, forever spawning new geographies, new landscapes, new horizons, underscored by Gloria Frym's contribution 'Please Understand' which begins: "there was no story/ no arc of triumph/ don't be disappointed/ think lyrically"

If NO/ON's 'short-form' poems continue to open horizons for readers, they also refrain from demarcating them. 'CATCH THIS BOY! breathlessly announces the title of Jonathon Greene's poem. Rowland's NO/ON 7, it would seem, calmly offers "new routes for escaping."

-- Alan Botsford

---------

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"NO/ON: journal of the short poem (formerly NOON) usually appears twice a year. However, there will be a hiatus in publication following this issue, and work will not be considered until the next call of submissions is made. To order this issue or check availability of back issues, please contact the editor via email or at the following address: Minami Motomachi 4-49-506, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0012, Japan."

(noonpress@mac.com)

Jane Hirshfield Reading--review by Alan Botsford

visiting poet Jane Hirshfield gives a reading at
Waseda University  Tokyo   March 28, 2009

Poetry readings are unpredictable affairs. The poet-performer sets the tone and mood for the audience to receive, interact with, and reflect on the power of words. If we feel reconnected to the power of language, rather than to the poet's ego, we feel grateful. Jane Hirshfield's reading and talk on translation yesterday at Waseda University gave cause for such gratitude. This Zen-trained poet brings a wealth of Buddhist perspectives to her historical imagination, as well as historical perspectives to her Buddhist-influenced imagination (see her prose work, Nine Gates). But if the measure of a poet lies in her ability to evoke the range and depth of earthly experience via words, Jane Hirshfield transcends both the Buddhist and the historical to touch, as poet, on the transforming effects of language itself. Her poetic voice evokes less Whitmanesque extravagances and vastnesses and more Dickinsonian qualifications and enigmas, which offered this listener much food for thought. She recounted the story of how, as an 8-year-old child, she fell in love with a book of haiku poems. It was a love, she pointed out, which she 'never lost'. 'Forebearance,' 'robustness,' 'resilience,' 'tenacity,' 'persistence'-- one imagines, after hearing the poet casually and repeatedly reference them, that these are not merely verbal abstractions that mark her aesthetic sensibility but in fact offer one-word precepts she lives her life by. Spending time in this poet's company for those two hours or so yesterday brought home the efficacy of the phrases she used to describe her love affair with ancient Japanese poetry: "They touched my heart. They woke me up."

-- Alan Botsford

Reading by Yoko Danno, Takako Arai, Kyong-Mi Park - review by Alan Botsford

reading by Yoko Danno, Takako Arai & Kyong-Mi Park
at Flying Books in Shibuya, Tokyo  (book launch)
December 22, 2008

Flying Books in Shibuya was the venue earlier this week for the book launch reading of A Sleeping Tiger/ Dreams of Manhattan (The Ikuta Press, 2008), the new English verse collaboration between Kobe-based poet & author Yoko Danno and Katmandu/Washington D.C.-based poet James C. Hopkins. At the outset, poets Takako Arai and Kyong-Mi Park, who each read one poem apiece in Japanese, helped draw the audience slowly into the evening's bilingual, bicultural orbit. They were followed by the evening's featured poets whose quieting spirits, melding and harmonizing on stage to give contrapuntal life to a mysterious third voice that enchanted those in attendance, brought new meaning both to the phrase 'a meeting of the minds' and to the experience of 'live' poetry readings. For the contours of their alternately read-aloud-poems seemed to grow before this reviewer's very eyes, and the space in the second floor of Flying Books, already warm and welcoming, seemed to develop and expand into something fuller, as unexpected as it was unassuming.

In addition, Ms. Danno's recently published translation of the Kojiki, entitled Songs and Stories of the Kojiki (Ahadada Books, 2008), is, like her poetry, a boon for anyone who would view and engage the world from the perspective of 'mythic dawn'. This new translation of one of the literary keys to the foundations of Japan's ancient folklore and culture reminds us that, among other things, the myths or archetypes that we 'read' in everyday life, and that 'read' us, are ever-present yet ever-changing, and that just because something is beyond our sight doesn't mean it escapes our notice.

Songs and Stories of the Kojiki

http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Stories-Kojiki-Yoko-Danno/dp/0978141474/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230186232&sr=1-1

The Blue Door (Word Works, 2006)

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Door-Danno-James-Hopkins/dp/0915380625/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230697068&sr=1-2

-- Alan Botsford

brief review of Mari L'Esperance THE DARKENED TEMPLE -- by Alan Botsford

THE DARKENED TEMPLE by Mari L’Esperance  

THE DARKENED TEMPLE by Mari L’Esperance. University of Nebraska Press, 2008, 100 pp. $16.95 (paper).

(Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Born in Kobe, Japan and raised in California, Guam and Japan, Mari L’Esperance (PK 2007) has written a book of poetry entitled The Darkened Temple (Bison Books, 2008). This is a book of poems that does the work, to use L’Esperance’s words, of “shouldering,” “hauling,” “sifting,” ”bracing” and “hunkering down” in the face of loss. In its conception, in its craftsmanship, in its moral bearings, in its production design, in its ambition, and, not least, in its humanity, it is a book that will resonate as only the authentic can.

-- Alan Botsford

review of Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz America & Other Poems by Ayukawa Nobuo -- Alan Botsford

AMERICA & OTHER POEMS, by Ayukawa Nobuo. Selected and translated by Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz. Kaya Press, 2008, 152 pp., $14.95 (paper).

Brief review by Alan Botsford

For anyone needing an accurate set of coordinates for modern post-war Japanese poetry, Shogo Oketani & Leza Lowitz's deftly written preface to their new translation of Ayukawa Nobuo's 'America & Other Poems' would be a good starting point. With their sure grasp of backstory--biographical, political, social--that informs the poems, the translators do the reader a great service by providing fascinating and comprehensive context (see also Additional Materials & the superb Afterword on translation). But the real pleasures of this book are the poems themselves. Ayukawa, a founding member of the famous Arechi, or Waste Land group, is a poet of immense seriousness and resourcefulness whose Melvillian view of the U.S. is bracing. (Amazingly, he never visited America in his lifetime.) Translation-wise, the idiom these English versions achieve shine with hard-earned integrity and multi-faceted, diamond-like clarity. Many of the poems first appeared in journals in the U.S. and Japan, among them Poetry Kanto. The translations have undergone a metamorphosis, with each successive incarnation-- to this editor's ear and eye-- improving upon the previous one. A case in point is the poem entitled 'Ishmael', first published in Poetry Kanto in 2005 featuring a second stanza as follows:

He, who didn't say at all

from where and why he came,

was the chosen one.

Ishmael, who wandered barefoot

strongly believing in the heritage of the human soul,

he was the chosen one.

In the 2008 version, the stanza is divided in two:

There's something decent about this man

who never said a word

about where he came from

or why.

There's something decent about

this Ishmael

who wandered barefoot,

believing only in the transmission

of the human soul.

The changes speak for themselves. A breakthrough has occurred. And these stanzas are only one of a multitude of luminous examples among the poems. This writer finds the multiple renderings that a good translation undergoes sometimes mesmerizing. William I. Elliott and Kawamura Kazuo—‘godfathers’ of poetry translation in Japan--offer proof when comparing, say, one of their many Tanikawa poems translated years ago with the same poem revised years later. Often the difference can be a real study of honing one's craft. Oketani & Lowitz’s 'America & Other Poems' by Ayukawa Nobuo displays a similar dedication to and excellence in craft.

-- Alan Botsford

review of Jane Jortiz-Nakagawa Aquiline -- by Alan Botsford

AQUILINE by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Printed Matter Press, 2007, 65 pp., $12.00 (paper).

Brief review by Alan Botsford

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet who works, or one should say plays, with (and among) multiple literary and non-literary sources. A long-term resident of Japan, she makes hay with the English language any way she can, and for the many experimental impulses she follows, the results--some dodgy, some very moving—throw interesting light on the relation between poet and language, between (non) comprehensibility and (non) context, between word and flesh.

There’s a fallenness embedded in the life and experience of flesh that she will not shy away from, and which indeed she makes--despite deflections and reflections of all kinds-- into her main subject: The body betrays, is forever a wound, wounding:

My eyes sting, my body

Flat and immobile

I want to crush my head against

The dark sparkly pavement

But hers are takes on much more than the fallen world in all its inglorious Faustian bargains (“stepping over the bodies of the dead” etc.). ‘Sparkly,’ in the above-cited poem for example, offers wit, a word choice-- by eschewing ‘sparkling’-- which has ethical ramifications. Joritz-Nakawaga won’t be seduced by anything less than her own resistances to language (“loss of being price of comedy” indeed—this reviewer is not so sure). The distances traversed, and treasured, between “Her stunned immobile/ Body” and “my stunned immobile body” suggest elusive dramas that move in and out of focus, in and out of view. The unsaid, the unread, the as it were undead all converge in cinematic/real-time actions and axioms (i.e. “our natural language is translation & we cannot get it right”). In sum, these are poems swollen with physicality, half-felt presences, and an intelligence that leaves nothing off its radar. “Who is speaking for us, among the/ colonized clouds…” she asks in her long poem ‘Evil Nature (3)’. Perhaps we can ask instead-- who is speaking for us in (as she writes) “our wounded beauty”? The short answer is, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa does.

-- Alan Botsford

review of JAPAN'S OFFICIAL POETRY BOXING COMPETITION

Japan Reading Boxing Association's Annual Poetry Boxing Competition 
Inno Hall near Toranomon Station in Tokyo 

At the sound of the bell, the bow-tie-clad referee in the ring steps forward, shouts 'Fight-o!', then steps back and lets the 'poetry boxer' into the spotlight to recite her or his poem. Japan Reading Boxing Association's Annual Poetry Boxing Competition at Inno Hall near Toranomon station in Tokyo is underway. Sixteen contestants--champions of varying ages--from teens to 40s, and from various prefectures throughout the country--compete for the title of 2006 Poetry Boxing Champion of Japan. For the next three hours, there's barely a lull in the buzz and energy on stage and in the audience. Pairs of NHK cameramen in the hall are busily filming for a TV program of the event (to be aired on NHK sometime in the near future).The crowd, five hundred strong, listens intently, even actively--some children giggle and let out cries of glee in response to certain poets' performances. The performers' costumes are eye-catching: one young man in top hat, tails, and white gloves; a tall woman in nurse whites; a slim marathon runner in shorts and tank top; a Nepalese beauty in a bright red saree; a girl in a classic high school blue uniform; a short-haired woman clad in swirling, multi-colored robes. Altogether quite a spectacle. And the poetry? The contestants recite in Japanese at a brisk pace, the winners advancing from the first round of sixteen, to the quarterfinals, to the semi-finals, through to the finals. As the final round comes to a close, the two finalists--Nepal's Mahatto Laritto Maya, and Japan's Kimura Yumi--are quickly given four envelopes with four different topics from which to choose. They must perform extemporaneously on stage. The audience is enthralled. The winner? Kimura Yumi. The seven judges--among them manga artist and TV personality Ebisu-san, as well as British-born radio deejay Peter Barakan--file dutifully on stage for final comments and the awards ceremony. For excitement and spectacle, it was well worth the price of admission. Next year's competition will be held in October. 

--Alan Botsford