I Choose to Eat and Sleep

It’s Wednesday night at 11:39pm (change to: 12:38 am on Thursday as I go back to the top of the page to edit), and my month as a Harriet blogger is threatening to end very soon. It’s funny, I’ve known for months and months that I would be the “featured blogger” for Harriet for the month of November, so theoretically I could have been writing many of these posts well in advance. And yet, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t start writing until we were actually in the month of November, and, well, the way it worked out was that I didn’t manage to execute all the grand ideas I had for the month. In an earlier phase in life I could have easily sacrificed time spent sleeping, or making and eating food, in the name of Getting Shit Done. But now that I am charging full steam into middle age, one reality I must face is that I really need to eat and sleep more. So, in light of that, I’m going to sign off with a list of titles and descriptions of the blog entries that never got completed (this, too, is perhaps indicative of my life as mommy poet with never enough time)—

1. A letter to Idra Novey’s translation workshop: in which I attempt to answer questions posed to me by Idra’s students after they read and discussed Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals. The book is a hybrid work, where I try to occupy, as fully and as flexibly as possible, the nebulous spaces between a book of translation and a book of one’s own poetry, a book in which I include the writings and translations of Chika Sagawa, as well as writings by other writers, my own poems, numerous renditions of the same poem, a rewriting of T.S. Eliot’s credo through the language of bees and the language of Sagawa:

So then all this black-and-white means that in order for promise-less order to persist after the supervention of the new queen of sunshine, the carpeted quiet and whole existing ideal order must be just a tiny flower petal little bit altered. And so then the relations, proportions, and values of each sailor bee toward the whole are readjusted. This is rainbow conformity between the old and the new beard. Whoever thinks this embroidered idea of unprotected order is okay will also gently admit that the carpet has bloomed profusely and that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

(You can google the last italicized phrase to point you to the source text.) (Many apologies to Idra’s students, to whom I still owe answers to their wonderful questions.)

2. I am the oppressor. We are the oppressor: in which I tell the story of what happened after I posted the previous blog post (called “Feel Free Not to Read This”), wherein I myself became an example of an oppressor needing to get educated at the cost of the oppressed. I also go back to thinking about education, and Freire, and oppression. This is a complicated subject that I feel compelled to address, especially in the wake of recent events in Ferguson, and yet it is so complicated and tricky that I failed to bring my notes to a satisfying version that is fit for public consumption.

3. The new binary: in which I incorporate thoughts solicited from a few friends who are also poet-translators. It is one thing to move away from the source text/target text binary into new and more interesting conversations, but in beginning to converse—only beginning—again, I wish I had more time (always, the same wish)—I am noticing a new binary, one that I do not yet have a name for. If I were to lump together a pile of what I might call experimental-radical-innovative-what-have-you translations of poetry, this very group of translations will then break down into two kinds: ones that behave, or “pass” as normal, traditional translations, and ones that clearly break the mold and cross the line into the “something else” category of such. I see this very clearly in my own work: here I am talking about this experimental, improvisational, time-constrained and performative translation-design-production project that was Mouth: Eats Color, while I am also trying to complete my “official” translation version of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa. And I have deliberately kept them very separate.

4. Are you going to start writing mommy poems: in which I reflect on how the poet life has shifted for me, pre- and post- having children. The plan was to revisit a conversation I had over e-mail with Carla Harryman on the topic, comparing my thoughts then (pre) and now (post). As I write these words my younger child is crying and I am pausing, holding very still, being careful not to type too loudly, hoping he will go back to sleep without my assistance.

5. Poem titles for November: in which I translate the TOC page from Gendaishitecho, the largest monthly journal of poetry in Japan. This was actually one of the earlier ideas I had, except that the actual contents of the journal led me in different directions and I never even started it, though I am still interested in the idea.

6. Suzuki Shiroyasu: in which I discuss and introduce the Japanese poet-filmmaker Suzuki Shiroyasu.

7. Note for Yoshi Takeda: in which I write a memorial note for Yoshi, who was not a poet but a friend, who cared about social justice enough that he supported his beliefs with real, tangible actions.

…I think there were more but that’s all I can recall for now. Perhaps this is kind of like a note to self—to remind myself to go back and complete these thoughts and impulses. Earlier I had a Grand Plan that during this month, I would convince some Japanese poets to let me shadow them for a day, filming an entire 24 hour period, and presenting those results somehow on this blog. The ambitiousness of my ideas makes me laugh, as I look back and see how hard it was to crank out three little blocks of prose for this purpose. But in any case, I’m signing off now—thanks, it’s been a good experience. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone near and far.