I have repeated the earlier transliteration for the sake of noting the progression and its “pause.” In the upper section, color is central; in the lower, Komachi presents stark imagery that becomes the speaker’s comparison and realization. The effect is a motion from the quiet, albeit passionate, real world to man’s heart and the flower therein plus the exclamatory zo (translated as an exclamation point). I experience this sharp juxtaposition as a rhetorical whiplash that is absolutely physical.

Of course, Western poetics counts juxtaposition in its treasury of poetic terms: parataxis, or “two starkly dissimilar objects of ideas being place beside each other” (Hogue). Wallace Stevens comes to mind: “ . . . her horny [dead] feet protrude . . . / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” The excitement, in fact an epiphany, is in the odd side-by-side images of a corpse and ice cream. Yes, that sharp cut to comparison is absolutely experiential.

My challenge was to adopt this severe movement. I had assigned myself a kind of jump-cut exercise that produced “Charming Lines” (The Artist’s Daughter). In part because I knew that my editor Jill Bialosky liked this piece, I thought to try more. “The Ashes” was scribbled. Here is the opening stanza:

The puppy snarfles to be let out

and I wake to radiator gurgling

then feet crunching the reticent snow.

Before I was born, Mother sewed her own suits.

What do her ashes know?

My wish is for the reader to shift from a moment of waking consciousness to a random realization and then to a question about human remains. My wish is for the reader to experience the odd shifts to awareness. My hope is that the experience is moving.

But if here or in other sections such juxtapositions just don’t work, I will have failed this undertaking. Over the decades, I may have relied a bit too much on recklessness as a strategy to yield unconscious material and, by end, to offer a mental and emotional closure. To offer a kabuki trapdoor—but that is another story.

Finally, perhaps I should just let those who do not know anything about Japanese poetics just read without distraction. Perhaps I shouldn’t feel the need to essay my mixed sensibility. Please, dear reader, please count this not as a lecture, but as an abiding homage to a culture that is both foreign and embodied.

Essay Influences and Sources

Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. London: The Cresset Press, 1962.

Hahn, Tomie. Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

Hogue, Chelsea. “Parataxis.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 5 May 2017.

Miner, Earl. An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.

Sato, Hiroaki. Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008.

Sato, Hiroaki. String of Beads: Complete Poems of Princess Shikishi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.

Afterword

The Bamboo Grove Where Various Individuals Mostly Think Aloud

The light grew fainter until the cedars and bamboo were lost from sight.