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Aquiline

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Brief review by Alan Botsford

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet who works, or one should say plays, with (and among) multiple literary and non-literary sources. A long-term resident of Japan, she makes hay with the English language any way she can, and for the many experimental impulses she follows, the results--some dodgy, some very moving--throw interesting light on the relation between poet and language, between (non) comprehensibility and (non) context, between word and flesh.

There's a fallenness embedded in the life and experience of flesh that she will not shy away from, and which indeed she makes--despite deflections and reflections of all kinds-- into her main subject: The body betrays, is forever a wound, wounding:

My eyes sting, my body

Flat and immobile
I want to crush my head against
The dark sparkly pavement

But hers are takes on much more than the fallen world in all its inglorious Faustian bargains ("stepping over the bodies of the dead" etc.). `Sparkly,' in the above-cited poem for example, offers wit, a word choice-- by eschewing `sparkling'-- which has ethical ramifications. Joritz-Nakagawa won't be seduced by anything less than her own resistances to language ("loss of being price of comedy" indeed--this reviewer is not so sure). The distances traversed, and treasured, between "Her stunned immobile/ Body" and "my stunned immobile body" suggest elusive dramas that move in and out of focus, in and out of view. The unsaid, the unread, the as it were undead all converge in cinematic/real-time actions and axioms (i.e. "our natural language is translation & we cannot get it right"). In sum, these are poems swollen with physicality, half-felt presences, and an intelligence that leaves nothing off its radar. "Who is speaking for us, among the/ colonized clouds..." she asks in her long poem `Evil Nature (3)'. Perhaps we can ask instead-- who is speaking for us in (as she writes) "our wounded beauty"? The short answer is, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa does.

In reading the poetry of Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, I am reminded of the sometimes bizarre syntax in writing produced by non-native speakers of English. For many years, Joritz-Nakagawa has taught in Japan where English words often appear in advertising and other forms of writing. This writing is frequently nonsensical, and yet strange juxtapositions and mistranslations may give new meaning to words, or result in inadvertent poetry.

Although the poems in Joritz-Nakagawafs recently released collection, Aquiline (which follows last yearfs Skin Museum) may strike the casual reader as nonsensical or incomprehensible, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that her choice of words is anything but inadvertent. She styles language into poems that force us to reconsider our preconceptions and that address many of our most immediate concerns.

For example, gdead,h which initially appeared in Her Circle Ezine, brings to mind the ravages of war, while gView from the Century Hyatt Hotel Tokyoh addresses the issue of homelessness. gGrey men in blue vinyl/ tentsh are observed from a position of privilege and luxury. In gShe,h the gbruises & large white sunglasses like/Jackie Oh call up a battered woman.

gEvil Nature,h a four-part poem that comprises the core of this book, broods on human violence against nature, which has in turn made nature a menace to humankind. Instead of a nurturing Mother Nature, a haven of beauty and clean air, we now have gmechanic constellationsh and gemotionally unavailable treesh along with gbirds headed in the wrong directionh and gserial killing cloud.h

While her subjects may remain serious, Joritz-Nakagawa obviously takes delight in language, and reveals a sense of playfulness in her various experiments. In S.P. 1 and S.P. 2, she rearranges lines from poems by Sylvia Plath, coming up with ga crocodile of small girls.h gEvil Nature 4 mixes the ideograms for cloud, forest, mountain and rain with suggestive phrases such as gTo banish now the kiss, ancient.h

Experimental poetry is clearly not for everyone, but for those who are interested in expanding the limits of language, Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet worth reading. At turns stunning and shocking, Aquiline is an accomplished collection.