Introduction for Sawako Nakayasu at the Bowery Poetry Club

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Yokohama, Japan, on the Den’En Toshi Line, and raised in the USA. For the past three years she has been living in her birthland, translating Japanese poets and making their work known to us.

In an interview on Chicago Postmodern Poetry.com, the insistently interdisciplinary Sawako lists her poetic influences as, “In no particular order: John Cage. Nathalie Sarraute. Musical theater. Frank O’Hara, Tom Raworth, Gertrude Stein, Charles Ives. Jenny Holzer. Keith Haring, John Edgar Wideman, opera. Yoko Ono. Contact Improvisation dance. Hockey. All kinds of movement. Insect movement. Pop music. People who talk in other languages.”

She doesn’t, surprisingly, mention the writer with whom I see her as most aligned, Francis Ponge. Like Ponge, Sawako is a poet of THINGS. Ponge writes, in “The Object is Poetics,”

Man [sic] is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.

Our soul is transitive. It needs an object that affects it, immediately, like a direct complement. It is a matter of the most serious relationship…

The artist, more than any other man [sic] bears the burden, reacts.

The curious body of Sawako Nakayasu chooses greatly unexpected objects to bear as burdens: balconies, hockey pucks, yellow, umbrellas, shortcake. But though they are unexpected, they are common, daily, things, more banal than bizarre.

Ponge, writing on the still-lifes of Chardin observes :

These peaches, these nuts, this wicker basket, these grapes, this cup, this bottle with its cork, this copper fountain, this wooden mortar, these pickled herrings.

There is nothing special, no merit in choosing such objects.

No effort, no invention; no proof here of a superior intellect….

Starting from such a low point, we’ll need all the more attention, prudence, talent, genius, to make them interesting.

…..

Sawako’s special attention, prudence, talent, and genius permit her to create such constructions as

“Needing yellow as an extension of want, or a boing.”

“A large, hollow hockey puck with the top open, about three feet in diameter, two feet high.”

or to imagine, for example,

“a field of fried umbrellas”

That her blog, accessible at nakayasu.blogspot.com, is so aptly named “Texture Notes” is particularly interesting in light of a possible etymology of her name. I don’t know the actual kanji for her name, but, setting aside for a moment the diminutive feminine “ko,” “Sawa” sounds to me like the Japanese verb “sawaru” — to touch. Sawako doesn’t just touch the objects of her attention, though – she massages, palpates, and strokes them — even, if it’s possible, synaesthetically.

Please welcome our foremost hockey poet and a vital ambassador — Sawako Nakayasu.