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Japanese Elements in the Poetry of Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka

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Japanese Elements in the Poetry of Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka Susan Fisher Japanese Elements in the Poetry of Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka For nearly a century, Japanese poetic forms have pro- vided inspiration for poets writing in English. The importance of Japanese poetry for Ezra Pound and its role in the formation of Imagism have been well documented (see, for example, Kawano, Kodama, and Miner). Charles Olson, in his manifesto "Projective Verse" (1950), drew examples from Japanese sources as well as Western ones. Several of the Beat Generation poets, such as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Whalen, studied in Japan and their work reflects a serious interest in Japanese poetry. Writing in 1973, p o e t and translator Kenneth Rexroth declared that "classical Japanese and Chinese poetry are today as influential on American poetry as English or French of any period, and close to determinative for those born since 1940" (157). Rexroth may have been overstating this influence; he, after all, had a role in creating it. Nonetheless, what Gary Snyder calls the "myste- riously plain quality" of East Asian verse has served as a model for the simple diction and directness of much contemporary poetry ("Introduction" 4). Writers belonging to these two generations of Asian-influenced American poets—the Imagists and the Beat poets—had no ethnic connection to Asia. But the demographic changes of the last few decades have produced a third generation whose interest in Asian poetry derives at least in part from their own Asian background. Several Asian Canadian poets have written works that are modelled on Japanese genres or make sustained allusions to Japanese literature. For example, Joy Kogawa's "At Maruyama Park, Kyoto" and Gerry Shikatani's "So What! A Bashoesque: (a rendition for bpNichol)" 93 Canadian Literature 1631 Winter 1999 Wah & Kiyooka and "A Legend, Probably" re-work the famous haiku by Basho (1644-1694): "The old pond/a frog jumps in/ the sound of water." Other examples of this kind of engagement with Japanese literary traditions can be found in Terry Watada's Daruma Days and Kevin Irie's Burning the Dead. These connections between Japanese literature and the work of Asian Canadian writers are usually explained as reflections of ethnicity. Cathy Steblyk, for example, claims that "Japanese Canadian poetry reflects a strong dependence on the Eastern mode of communication of the lyric" (77). The Japanese Canadian writer Sally Ito observes that her own work has certain qualities—melancholy, impersonality, and restraint—often associated with Japanese literature. In her view, these values have been "unconsciously transmitted": "The more I read and studied about Japanese literature, the more I realized how much Japanese aesthetics and ways of thinking informed my writing" (177). In the case of writers who, like Ito, have studied the language and litera- ture of their (or their parents') country of origin, it seems legitimate to assume that ethnicity plays some role in forming their poetics. But attribut- ing everything "Japanese" in Asian Canadian writing to ethnicity neglects the history of Japanese influence—a history which, through the legacy of Imagism and the New American Poetics, prepared the ground so that Japanese-influenced poetry could sound "poetic" in English. The assump- tion that there is a direct link between ethnicity and poetics is only a step or two distant from the attitude Hiromi Goto ridicules in her poem "The Body Politic": People ask me what I do and I say, oh, I do a little writing. Do you write poetry too? someone will ask, and I say, yeah, a little bit. Oh! please make up a haiku for us, we'd love to hear a haiku from you. Uh—I don't— Oh, don't be shy! You Japanese are so clever with haiku! (220) What is the appropriate way to link poetics and ethnicity? What role does ethnicity play in a writer's choice of form and technique? Two of Canada's most prominent Asian Canadian writers, Fred Wah (born in 1939) and Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994), are among those who have made considerable use of Japanese poetic forms. In focusing on their work, I hope to offer some ten- tative answers to these questions, and to suggest some difficulties that arise when ethnicity is used to explain poetic effects. 94 Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 Fred Wah Since the early 1980s, Fred Wah has produced a number of works in Japanese poetic genres. His 1982 book, Grasp the Sparrow's Tail, is a diary-like record of a trip to Japan and China; originally published in Kyoto, it was reprinted in Wah's 1985 collection Waiting for Saskatchewan, where it is described in the prefatory note as "a utaniki, a poetic diary of mixed prose and poetry."1 Waiting for Saskatchewan contains another experiment with Japanese form: "This Dendrite Map: Father/Mother Haibun." In the preface, Wah defines haibun as "short prose written from a haiku sensibility and, in this case, concluded by an informal haiku line."2 Rooftops, published in 1988, is a col- lection of haiku. In 1989, Wah published Limestone Lakes Utaniki, an account of a hiking trip. His 1991 c o l l e c t i o n So Far ( w h e r e "Limestone Lakes Utaniki" also appears) includes two more works in this form: "Uluru Utaniki" and "Dead in My Tracks: Wildcat Creek Utaniki." Diamond Grill, published in 1996, is a prose work, but its form—more than a hundred chapters, all extremely short, with occasional inserted poems (for example, 12, 22) and bursts of lyricism (for example, 31)— suggests that it is not a novel or even a prose poem but rather another experiment in haibun. Although Wah is not Japanese Canadian—his paternal grandfather was Chinese—his interest in Japanese poetic traditions derives at least in part from his self-identification as an Asian Canadian. In his critical writings, Wah has discussed two ideas that I think explain his attraction to Japanese poetics: defamiliarization and "alienethnic poetics" ("A Poetics" 99). Defamiliarization In "Making Strange Poetics," his 1985 essay on the Canadian long poem, Wah discusses the importance for his own poetics of Viktor Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarization or estrangement. Shklovsky saw defamiliariza- tion as the essence of artistic language: "The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged" (qtd in Wah, "Making Strange Poetics" 213).3 In his own poetry, Wah has certainly tried to "increase the difficulty and length of perception." For example, he avoids complete sentences and con- ventional syntax, and refers to people, places, and works of literature that are not easily recognizable. His use of Japanese forms can be seen as another of defamiliarizing strategy. Subtitles that include terms like haibun o r 95 Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 Wah & Kiyooka utanikki t u r n Wah's poems into foreign objects; they signal that something is going on that does not fit the conventions of poetry in English. Wah's use of haibun in "This Dendrite Map: Father/Mother Haibun" demonstrates the workings of defamiliarization. Each of the poem's twenty- one sections consists of a prose-like passage justified right and left, punctu- ated with one or two lines in boldface. In his statement on this poem for The New Long Poem Anthology, Wah describes the relationship between the "prose" sections and ending lines: "the haiku," he says, "settles out at the bottom" (373)· The boldface ending lines are items of denser thought, finding their way to the bottom of the page. A few of these ending lines—for example, sections 6,11,13—actually scan like haiku, with phrases of 5-7-5 syllables. If the word haibun a n d the unusual form of the poem create expectations that it will somehow seem strange and difficult, the poem itself fulfills them. In writing about the long poems of bpNichol, Wah describes how Nichol uses "a labyrinthine network of incomplete thought loops" to keep the reader suspended in an unresolvable, infinitely prolonged process of per- ception ("Making Strange Poetics" 217). Wah employs the same method in "Father/Mother Haibun," as this passage demonstrates: Father/Mother Haibun #10 Working with my back to the window for more natural light, dog chasing cows in the field, the words stubble today, embedded there in the bracken at the edge of the field, Chinese philosophy and numbers, the cloud-filled night, "and they swam and they swam, right over the dam," etc., all this, and sugar too, holding the hook, time, the bag, the book, the shape, you also carried on your back yin and embraced yang with your arms and shoulders, the mind as a polished mirror, there, back into my hand. I can't stop looking at the field of brown grass and weed and feeling the grey sky (Waiting 85) Following the "incomplete thought loops" here requires constant reference to the background sources of Wah's poetry. The field is not only the open land behind the writer's house but also Olson's technique of "composition by field." W h e n linked to the phrase "Chinese philosophy and numbers," the stubble in the field evokes the yarrow stalks used for divining with the I Ching. The lyric from the popular song "The Three Little Fishies"—"and they swam and they swam, right over the dam"—reminds us that Wah played trumpet in a dance band; it connects this passage to the many other 96 Canadian Literature 163 I Winter 1999 icfeiences lo popular music in Wah's poetry.
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