reading noguchi in alaska

So, I’m just gonna front with the fact that Heather already blew everything out of the water with her analysis of Noguchi’s first poem. Bam, woman. You’ve got a knack for that like whoa.


I’ve been looking at these poems while traveling this week & they’ve stuck with me, pulled at me at odd moments. I’ve read them so many times & in so many places that they’ve begun to seem like one extended narrative to me. The first three, obviously yes, but also the last two (on their own, or as a group of five). Since entering grad thesis land recently, I’ve begun thinking a lot about the shape of a book and how one constructs a book to stand on each of its individual poem-legs, but also to be able to move together as one larger animal. I was thinking about this while reading these poems; poems that Noguchi has definitely linked, but perhaps had little organizational control over in the instance of this (or any) anthology. It got me wondering about how flexible our work must be & yet how steadfast. I feel like I could spend a lifetime trying to master that balance on the page.


Back to the poems, themselves. When I read these first three poems, I see continuity physically, like a string to which each poem is clipped. They are pieces of laundry, sheets perhaps, pinned with precision to the line. Flapping in slow motion. Every time Noguchi tosses verbs around, I feel as if we are floating, dream-like, through the action. Kenji flexing his knees, diving deep into the couch cushions. I think a lot of this has to do with the veil that Heather is referencing in her post of this first poem, but also with the fact that Kenji seems to be occupying a very malleable space between young & grown. You can feel the bulge of innocence here, Noguchi makes it so full and rubbery you can practically touch Kenji’s imagination juxtaposed against the flexed nature of his body, bothered by responsibility. The line that this first poem is clipped to contains hyperbolic forces of nature that only a young boy crashing head-first into the discipline of accountability could reveal.


In the second poem, “From Rooftops, Kenji Takezo Throws Himself,” we get a better sense of this imagination, as if the poem titles are the boy’s own third-person narrator introducing his next daring act. There is less figurative curvature here and more subject-related roundness. Noguchi lets us see how Kenji has internalized the rotundity of his mind’s eye & it is his body that bounces, not the entire scene. His heart, his breath, all of these physical exchanges becomes parts of himself that he can own & learns how to own. Obviously, he’s still talking about wanting to be a surfer, but there is a shift between the first poem and the second that indicates more knowing, less hyperbole. Noguchi makes sure, especially in that last stanza, that we notice Kenji hasn’t lost any of his youthful passion, but the language has strengthened in ways that invoke confidence.


In the third poem, “The Ocean Inside Him,” I think we’ve hit transformation. Just as the poems have shortened in length, they have also tightened in control. We get to this poem and suddenly we’re not talking about waves anymore, we’re talking about all kinds of wave-like emotions. Noguchi sets us off early with the word “whitewash” in the second line, then let’s us gloss over lines like “the heavy life of the ocean,” and “it wasn’t funny, but he giggled.” Outside forces have invaded the bubble-like bliss of those earlier moments with the ironing board and I guess what I’m wondering is where is the rest of the laundry?

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