Rick Noguchi’s poems impressed me greatly, both for their clarity of scene and narrative and for their unique subject matter and humor. The poems, particularly, “The Shirt His Father Wore That Day Was Wrinkled, Slightly,” also exhibit a fine attention to word choice that suits the poem’s intent and helps to propel the narrative forward. The poem is written in the present tense which gives us a feeling of immediacy when reading the work. We see Kenji at the very moment of his actions, feel the intensity of his daydreams. We also more effectively experience his mother’s alarm at finding her favorite ironing board destroyed. Noguchi chooses words that have to do with water, the Pacific, the act of surfing. Such words as crest, pitch, purls, diving, surfaces, and others are used to reinforce the oceanic terminology of the piece. But they also serve a larger purpose than just an evocation of the ocean and a reinforcement of the action in the poem. They also draw our attention to the deeper meaning of the poem, which has to do with the imprisonment felt by perceptions and expectations and a breaking of the standard to which one feels himself or herself held.

Japanese culture has historically paid an inordinate amount of time and energy on appearances. In the past, it was not unheard of for Japanese citizens to hire strangers to mourn at their loved ones’ funerals in order to make them appear more important than they actually were. Several years ago, Harper’s Magazine reported that sales of an artificial hymen were experiencing growing popularity in Japan where betrothed women wanted their new husbands to believe they had never been sexually active. And today, a company called Office Agents hires out guests to couples who are worried that their weddings may not be as well-attended as they would like. Those who are unemployed may hire stand-ins for a boss and co-workers for jobs that are, in actuality, non-existent. What does this have to do with Noguchi’s poem? The answer, I believe, comes in the statement, “His father needs/A shirt to impress/The same co-workers/ He sees daily.” Seen in this light, a reader can begin to understand how important appearance is in the underlying meaning of the poem. Mother tries her best to keep up the code she is used to by ironing on the broken ironing board on her hands and knees. We then return to the title where we see how important the shirt is to the poem. In the title, we are not told that Kenji wants to be a surfer, nor are we alerted to the ironing board’s place in the poem. Rather, we see that the two most important elements of the poem, Father and the shirt he wore, are peripheral to the action of the poem, yet central to the meaning. This is mirrored by the first three lines in which Kenji is transported out of his own body, watching himself perform an impetuous action. 

 It is a stunt
 Kenji Takezo finds himself
 Performing unexpectedly

See how the poet pulls the reader into Kenji’s body and then immediately back out again to watch the action? See how Noguchi pulls the shirt and the father out of the poem and inserts them peripherally, only alluding to their importance? We should not be fooled into only looking at the surface actions of this piece. When Kenji himself surfaces after his stunt (When he surfaces, / Her expression is one/ He has never seen) we must also surface. The fact that there is a surface in this poem forces us to look beneath. It is not only the ironing board that breaks, it is also the cracking of a perception that neither mother nor father wants to let go of. The imagery and wording in the third stanza parallel the prison expectations can make for us. Notice how the waves of the ocean “pitch over and enclose” Kenji. Behold how Kenji is in the “chamber” and how “the walls close in.” Other words such as escape, collapsing, and silent also evoke the feeling of claustrophobia and imprisonment. Also, it is not only the ironing board that is breaking, it is the father’s image that is threatened, the breaking of a code, a desire. 

Noguchi also cautions us not to put too much emphasis either on the surface story or other people’s perceptions of us. Just as the ironing board can not hold all of Kenji’s weight, neither can the poem. “Too much weight in front,” is a cautionary line that warns us how frail the perceptions and viewpoints of others can be. The ironing board is the objective correlative for self-image. How mother handles the breaking of her ironing board says something also about her character. One gets the feeling that she will continue trying to live up to the standards to which the outside world holds her. The foreshadowing of Kenji’s incident and the title in which the shirt is still “slightly wrinkled” seems to indicate that she will not be entirely successful. Perhaps she, too, will be overcome by that wave?

Sitting With Family

The word “family” is one of the words that I call HUGE. I mean it can denote so many things for one person and the definition can shift as we learn, grow, and mature. In my opinion, it is a word that must be broken down into pieces and shattered in order for people to understand it. That’s what the poets in this set of readings did, they broke the traditional idea of “family” into specific pieces and gave us images and narratives to connect with.

In Noguchi’s first poem, “The Shirt His Father Wore That Day…” he tells a story through extended metaphor about Kenji and his imaginary stunts as a surfer.

It is a stunt

Kenji Takezo finds himself

Performing unexpectedly.

The poem takes us through this stunt blow-by-blow and ends with Kenji’s mother ironing on her hands and knees – doing the domestic work that she does to insure that her husband’s shirts are pressed for work.

His mother on her knees

Tries to iron on the ruined table

Anyway.

I found this image the most powerful in the poem. I’ve seen mothers who do what must be done to do what must be done. They improvise.

The image we get of the father might be seen as negative – someone who cares what others think or someone who goes out of his way to impress the people he sees everyday, but could also be read as simply a snapshot of the father –a man who wears a pressed shirt to work daily. Either way, Noguchi is pointing to the shattered pieces of his idea of family to give us a closer look:

His father needs

A shirt to impress

The same co-workers

He see daily.

I appreciate how the poet brings us back to the surfing image at the end by including the mother in his metaphor. He says, In this posture, his mother’s movements / Remind Kenji of a surfer / Waxing the board she will ride.

Also, I appreciate the images of water and surfing throughout the piece: The rhythm of the Pacific in his feet (1:4), Counterbalancing the instability / Of water (2:5,6), The crest of a wave / Pitch over and enclose him (3:2,3)

Then in stanza four, the metaphor starts to blend with Kenji’s reality. The ironing table floats / the small boy / only for a moment / Too much weight in front, it purls / Nose-first, into thick / Brown shag. This gives us a small window into the home.

Another poet who touched my sense of family was Sapphire. In the poem, In My Father’s House, she takes us deep inside a family and shows us several shards that, by the end of the poem, create a powerful portrait of a journey from childhood to adult status. Immediately we are introduced to the father who “shot to his feet as The Star-Spangled Banner hailed the network’s last gleaming.”

She uses dialogue and details to guide us on this trip and does not attempt to sugar coat the moments for us. I liked the raw language and imagery. The fifth stanza is so overwhelming in both the images and the sadness I felt reading this scene. The verbs she uses really make this scene stick (cat sprang / claws gouging / I snatched / slammed / beat skin, teeth, skull with my fists / tied its legs / yanked its tail). WHOA!!! The quickness of the lines and the fact that you can’t really pause through it can only offer a sliver of what the speaker must have been feeling, yet I left this stanza with a racing heart and shortened breath.

The obvious abuse being discussed in this piece is gut wrenching, but when she mentions the bombing of the MOVE organization (families, that makes this piece a Personal As Political statement. Sapphire does not spend time on this political commentary, but mentions several other moments in black history where those in power abused their power and the results were traumatic (and in two cases, affected children).

All this and it’s only the first movement of the poem.

The other four movements share qualities with the first and all have the common thread of family through them. I loved seeing the intersections across (and through) each movement. Of the 81 poems we read for this section, this is one I will come back to and spend time with on my own because there are so many layers of family to uncover and discover.

peacelovelight

Kiala

Family Not of Blood

There are poems in these sections that explicitly talk about family relations with parents, children, siblings, etc. but there are also many that do not make any reference to specific family relations. At first I was ready to ignore those and focus on the others but a few of them felt very powerful and still connected to the idea of family and so I started to think about the fluidity and personal nature of the definition of family. The western ideal of family that's shoved down our throats is the whole - 2 parents (one male, one female), 2.5 kids, a dog and a picket fence. But then I thought about the confluences between family and racial identity, placing that in the context of colonialism and the disruption of a traditional family support system. And when I say traditional I'm not referring to the western idea listed above but to whatever family dynamic was the structure for that particular culture and to focus in even more for that particular family. The acts of violence and oppression that accompany colonialism lead to loss of beloved family members through death; separation through slavery and indenture; and criminalizing acts of celebration that reinforce the bonds of the oppressed culture. So what does family start to mean when family can be taken away at a moments notice?

I think it leads to a more flexible definition of family, one which includes many people not at all related by blood. And it's an ideal that still continues today in many forms, personally growing up I had plenty of uncles, aunts, cousins and even a sister that I had absolutely no blood relation to. Sometimes they were people that had grown up with my mother and their children or people I met on my own and formed a connection with. And I know plenty of folks who have "play"cousins so I've always thought of family in terms of emotional connection as opposed to a commonality on the genetic level. This more diffuse idea of family can allow for a larger support system with more diversity for reliance in times of problems, one that can survive the removal of members of that system more easily because there are still plenty of people to rely on still around.

Anyway, one of the poems that triggered all of this was Richard Blanco's "What Is Not Mine". There are levels of separation in the poem itself, a separation from where the narrator was, what is his; a temporary separation from the person who leaves the note; a possibly more permanent one between the two coming; a separation between the narrator and the space he occupies with mounting levels of discomfort. The narrator, the poem, begins to feel adrift, without anchor or tether, without a support system. Something chased him from his home and to this other place where he's found refuge for two days but now he awakes to find the support gone. The language of the note left to him, in fact the first four lines hint at a strong between the narrator and the person at whose place he's staying.

I wake to find you've left, and left a note: Please
wait for me, I'll be right back scribbled over the seal
of an envelope with your key, just in case I want
to leave your home that I've borrowed two days.

The isolation of the Please points to the importance of that word, severed from the rest of the note makes it seem like a plea that trails off into oblivion before to poem returns with the rest of the note that now seems more casual because of that very disconnect. The note calls for a continuation of whatever intimacy/connection the two of them have formed, an invitation for more support if necessary. The fact that the note is scribbled on a envelope that contains the key to the place where they've been holed up speaks to a knowledge of the narrator. The writer of the note is asking (pleading?) for the narrator to stay but with the key to the place the writer admits that they know that the narrator will not stay, will not choose to wait, will instead return to whatever he was running from in the first place. But a key isn't generally required to leave someone's house, most of the time there's a way to secure at least one lock behind yourself without any key. So the key means more than knowledge it's also an invitation to return, an acknowledgment that the support, the consoling, the comfort that was sought in this space is still available. At any time the narrator may choose to return to seek this place again.

For me those four lines form the core of the poem and really connect to a more complex idea of family, one where what is exchanged in the relationship is more important than any connection on a genetic level.

-Naamen

Sapphire to Suhair: Poetry on Family and Home

In the poem “In My Father’s House” Sapphire takes her insides and turns them inside out. The piece is brave and confessional. In describing her shock of violence toward another living being as an adult, she is reminded of what has been done to her by her father as a girl. The four vignettes or stories capture the pain of her childhood growing up in an abusive, patriarchal family. In the first vignette she describes how this cycle of abuse was passed on by her father’s father when she says,

“he told me his father put his foot on his neck

& beat him until his nose bled.

he left home when he was 14,

an Aries full of blind light

trying to wrap barbed wire around the wind.”

On a lighter note, I enjoyed the nostalgic, richly descriptive poems “Chilo’s Daughters Sing for Me in Cuba” and “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” by Richard Blanco in The Wind Shifts. I recently wrote a poem in a similar block style format and felt it allowed me to have a free verse in a new way. I also found it interesting that out of all of Blanco’s poems the ones that resonated the most with me were written in this way. In both these poems he is a master at using food to describe all the senses and bring the reader into his world. What I appreciate the most from “Chilo’s Daughters Sing for Me in Cuba” is Blanco’s repetition of the word “They” which gives precedence to the people he describes in Cuba who after preparing a plentiful meal begin singing in praise and gratitude for the food, history, family, and land.

In “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” Blanco paints a beautiful homage to a woman named Marina in color, scent, texture, temperature and taste. She creates “home” in a foreign place for her son, through cooking and special decorations like papel picado. Blanco writes,

“It is the best she can do in this strange kitchen which

Sele has tried to disguise with papel picado colored tissue

paper displaying our names in pinata pink, maiz yellow, and Guadalupe

green....”

These poems are very personal, nostalgic, sensual and hold cultural significance and perseverance specific to Indian and mestizo culture that I can fully relate to.

From Inclined to Speak Lisa Suhair Majaj’s poem “I remember My Father’s Hands” quietly shows another intimate kinship, but focusing on the relationship of a Palestinian father and daughter as told through the memory of a father’s hands. It was amazing how Majaj shared vivid glimpses of stories in such few words. In these nine couplets as reader we experience spirituality, death, work, childhood, love, and heritage. The rhythm held nicely together through her repetition of the word “because,” beginning each couplet.

What ties all these pieces together here is evident, family. For the good or the bad these relations have strong influence in our lives and in poetry evoke a multitude of experiences and emotions. In telling we can also often further our own personal development.

From the roots

I thought it was great how some of the poets paid homage to their families as helping them become writers. How you grow up is really important to the things you value as you get older and it seemed to me that despite the problems or family issues that were expressed in these poems the poets came out with a love of writing and literature. I really enjoyed how this was presented in Garrett Hongo's Winnings.

Essentially this is just a poem about a day in a cycle of days. As I read this poem, I really got the sense that Hongo spent every Saturday afternoon "near closing time/ at the thrift store". There is a keen awareness of this everyday mundane moment: “ The register rings up its sales—$2.95, /$11.24, 26.48 for the reclaimed Frigidaire-- /and a girl…begging a few nickels for the gumball machine.” (T 132) To me this seems like something you could see essentially anywhere. The only things that distinguish it are the prices and the fact that someone purchased specifically a Frigidaire. It is this lack of description that really allows the reader to see what’s important.

What really makes this a particularly special moment is the feeling of love and happiness that comes in the second to last stanza:

“My father comes in from the Rainbow
across the street, ten hands of Jacks
or Better, five draw, a winner
with a few dollars to peel away
from grocery money and money to fix
the washer, a dollar for me to buy
four pounds of Pocket Wisdoms, Bantams,
a Dell that says Walt Whitman, Poet
of the Open Road, and hands it to me,
saying ‘We won, Boy-san! We won!’
as the final blast of sunset kicks through”

There is such ambivalence to the money won and how it was won and a real emphasis on the books that were going to be purchased. The specific titles are used here when we haven’t had any real detail up until this moment. The store is unnamed, there is no discussion of the other people in it, except the little girl, and generally, our minds are drawn to these details. We can see that the books are the most important to him. So despite the fact that this situation is in no way good for a child, after all his father leaves him to go gamble, there is still hope to be found for him in this literature and he can look past it. And use it as inspiration for the next poem.

It was interesting to me how much I really connected with a lot of the family experiences in what we read. Family is always a moment of connection for people and I always think that's kind of strange. Every family is different and has it’s own level of happiness but somehow we can all connect over family memories. In college my friends and I would always some how end up talking about punishments when we were younger. Some would say, “My mom used to use a wooden spoon…” and then it’s all over because we have to have an hour to go over how we were disciplined and then another hour to go into how we’re going to tramatize our children. Lol.

Sorry my entry is a little shorter than usual….one of those weeks.

Family

The role of food in communicating family traditions was a theme I found interesting in this week’s poems. Phillina Sun in “Untitled” says that “a kitchen is [the women’s] temple.” We see them” as “priestesses...carrying the fragrant rewards of worship.” Through their preparation in the kitchen, they are revered, and they know their responsibility is to pass on their “unwritten recipes generation to generation, from mother to daughter.” Because these recipes are unwritten, they will last in each generation’s memory along with the memory of learning the recipe directly from one’s mother or aunt. The family bond is created and maintained.

In “Last Days of a Slow Cooker” by Mursalata Muhammad, preparation of a meal by the matriarch for a large gathering of family is detailed. “[S]he knows who’s been there by what they’ve left to be cooked,” and we learn about the members of her family this way. The generations of the family “descend...wearing Muslin names like after-thoughts;” we see that by preparing and serving this meal, she is the center of their family and the keeper of their tradition.

In Chezia Thompson Cager’s “Callaloo,” however, the daughters see the passing on of recipes as “instructional tales of horror,” and the “secrets would be lost to the ages with [their mother’s] last breath.” “[T]hey never learned to cook...they didn’t see the point.” They’ve rejected the preparation of these meals. They will not do it on their own. There is a difference in priorities between the generations. What then, is the purpose of food in the family? Why did the mother care so much, but the daughters do not? They are educated women – “three doctors of Medicine, Chemistry and Robotics.” (Ironically, the fields they study relate to the nutrients, health and synthesis of things.) Are the old recipes themselves important, or was the love that went into the act of preparation the “legacy?” Or, does the food represent something else to bequeath to and maintain the family?

I loved the last lines of “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” by Richard Blanco: “home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.” The speaker’s mother, Marina, is doing “the best she can do” in her son’s kitchen far away from her home. He talks about a “kitchen island,” and I picture an “island kitchen.” The fragility of the family traditions is evident; they cannot always be passed on authentically. Future generations may forget how, may not care about, or may make mistakes in recreating the recipes of home and family. For me, it reflects the idea that we wander far from home, where we began, where we were raised, where we learned what the world was like. Nothing will be identical to what it was when we were growing up. Although this poem seems wistful about home and family, sometimes it’s a good thing it can’t be replicated.

Who are these people to whom we are related? If we eat the same food, if we share a meal, if we sit around the table together, does that bring us closer? And, do we want to be closer, or is rebellion and rejection an option? There are poems in the reading this week where the food sends this other message. In “On Eating” by Lara Hamza, the scene begins “[w]e gathered around the dinner table, my three brothers, mother, father, and me.” We picture the ideal, happy family until we learn that the daughter/ the speaker “[isn’t expected] to eat, because for almost a year, [she] had stopped.” Her dad won’t be able to have a piece of steak if she decides to eat at this meal because he hasn’t made enough to include her. She does; she deprives him of his piece but later throws it up. The dynamics of this family are not the nurturing, cooperative, loving ones we expect from the first line.

In Sapphire’s “In My Father’s House,” I knew not to expect a respectful, trusting dinner experience when our speaker “had to have dinner ready at 5:30pm,” but the blatant rejection when the “father had only set a place for himself & my little brother” still comes like a slap across the face or like a beating with “a piece of rubber hose.” When the cat gouges her Bob Marley album, our speaker recalls being raped by her father. The cycle of abuse is exposed; the family “tradition” of pain and cruelty continues. The father left home at 14 – “his father put his foot on his neck/& beat him until his nose bled.” Our speaker is 14 when this dinner occurs. Again, family is where we learn what the world is like.

In Sapphire’s other poem in the collection, “Wild Thing,” the mother “makes corn bread from Jiffy box mix” This small detail, that the family’s meals are not lovingly prepared from recipes passed down through the generations, fits with the rest of this disturbing poem. It shows the absence of opportunity, of education, of better living conditions, of money. The influence of family is felt in a most unsettling way. Food has a complex relationship with families. It can be seen as something that nurtures us both individually and through the generations, but it also can be the source and symbol of something destructive.

Sheila Joseph