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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 119 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 July 17 Saturday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Found a few spare moments to click through some of my poetry pages and review some of the stuff I've put online, always a useful exercise. As I may have mentioned earlier, having my own web site has really made me rediscover myself as a poet. |
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The common perception (the perception which I grew up with) is that poetry has no readership. But what I've found is that if you put a poem on some topic online, then it will be found by readers who are specifically looking for that kind of poem. Whatever kind of poem it is. A rifle poem, for example. Or a poem about snails.
It's very easy to be an online poet and to find a living audience, and it's possible even on a limited time budget. Currently, the poem at the top of my poems list, which coincidentally happens to be my most recent poem, is the aardvark poem called Aardvark Planet. To me, this was a very natural poem to write. As a kid, I didn't have TV, and the Internet had not yet been invented. (As I may have mentioned, I didn't see a personal computer for the first time until I was in my twenties, and then what I saw was a homemade item wired together by a technical wizard). So the dictionary was the number one place to go for quick reference, and a natural place, too, for a certain amount of undirected "maybe I'll learn something" browsing. I've no idea how many hundreds of times I've looked at the "aardvark" page. And so, to me, the aardvark resonates. It was, in my childhood, the starting point for thousands of microexplorations. But, after I'd written the poem, and had placed it online, it occurred to me that, in all probability, the word "aardvark" doesn't have any such emotional resonance for an Internet generation. I guess most people know it's a word that occurs early in the dictionary, but, beyond that, so what? The next poem in the list, a poem about Adam, made me feel a little guilty when I wrote it. At the time, the sex of my awaited-but-not-yet-born child was unknown. The pregnancy was a take-what-comes process: no gender revelations, no in-the-womb genetic testing. Even so, it was believed (on the basis of various omens) that the child would be male, and, had the baby been a boy, its name (or, at least, part of its name) would have been Adam. I can't say, really, why "Adam" came to mind as a choice for a child's name. But that was the name that floated to the surface of my mind when I was tasked with the responsibility of choosing a male Western name for the expected son. Maybe because the prospect of the birth of my first (my only) child made me start thinking of first and last things, of In The Beginning and of In The End. So, anyway, there was a problematical relationship between the imagined teenage son of later years (aged seventeen, withdrawn, brooding, alone by himself for too many hours, always swinging a metal baseball bat) and the Adam poem, which touches on the life of that predicted teenager:- |
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Eden is boring. Nothing explodes. There are no trains to fall off the tracks. And Adam finds himself With something missing. Comic books? Broadband? Balsamic vinegar? Pachinko? Razor blades? Plasma TV? He's aware of an itch And scratching Has yet to be invented. |
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I was conscious of a kind of family treason, of (inexcusably) invading the privacy of my teenage son's inner battles with his own demons, of putting him on display for the whole world to say. But I rationalized the problem, saying to myself, "Oh, well, I can always take the poem down later."
As it happened, I ended up having a daughter, which was something of a relief, sparing me (at the very least) the problem of how to teach my son baseball. (Teaching a son baseball might reasonably be seen as one of the duties of a father in Japan, but I come from New Zealand, and we don't play baseball in New Zealand. While I have played softball, I don't remember ever having had my hands on an actual baseball ball in my entire life.) In the case of my baby daughter, her later life as a woman is quite simply unimaginable, so I don't have the problem of being inspired to write poetry about it. Section 119 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 July 17 Saturday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) I was home along with baby Cornucopia, and was busy doing online research into the mystery of America's 17-year cicadas, when there was an earthquake. At 1510, it seems. Intensity four (on the Japanese intensity scale) in eastern Kanagawa and some other places. No danger of a tsunami. I'm not sure about my area. Do we count as eastern Kanagawa? Maybe it was intensity four right here, maybe intensity three. (This data is up on the TV screen on NHK 1, the main quasi-governmental TV channel, within a couple of minutes of the earthquake. But it's all in Japanese script, with no voice-over, while scheduled broadcasting continues as normal. This is one of the times when it helps to be able to read Japanese, at least at a basic level. Of course, I knew that our house hadn't fallen down, but I wanted to know if this was just the little earthquake that it seemed to be or whether it was the little shake on the edge of a much bigger shake.) Anyway, what prompted my interest in cicadas was passing mention, in a couple of unrelated news articles (one about the George Bush election campaign) which seemed to suggest that, in America, cicadas are not an annual event. On investigation, it seems to be the case that at least some areas of the USA do have annual cicadas, but there are also big broods which surface on a 17-year cycle. Here in Japan, as in New Zealand, cicadas are an annual event, the main differences (as far as I've noticed) being that (a) Japanese cicadas are considerably larger than New Zealand cicadas, and (b) at the end of summer, Japanese cicadas tend to die in public, noisily and conspicuously. I don't recall ever noticing a cicada dying in New Zealand. To me, then, cicadas are normative. Back in my teenage years, I wrote a poem called Cicada Sun. It's a long poem about high school, and about summer, and "cicada" features in the title because (for me) the cicada is a totally normative feature of summer. It signifies the customary rather than the exceptional, the expected rather than the remarkable. But if someone lived in an area where they only saw cicadas (at least to notice and comment on) once in every seventeen years, then the title might quite possibly have a totally different emotional resonance. A cicada summer? An aberrant summer. An exceptional summer. A non-normative season. Before I started putting poetry on line, I never thought about this kind of nuanced cultural difference. But, in the world of the Internet, where you can never be sure who your audience is, this kind of difference starts to become potentially significance for the experience of reading. Section 119 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 July 19 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Yesterday, the perfect family day. Everyone rested from Saturday, and Sunday buffered by the fact that today, Monday, is a public holiday. I looked after baby Cornucopia in the morning, and she was perfectly behaved. After lunch, we all three of us went to sleep on futons in the downstairs master bedroom. Then we watched sumo. Cornucopia watched a bit, but spent a lot of the time delighting in the possibilities of two single futons spread out on the floor, which gave her enormous amounts of space on which to practice her odd method of locomotion, which involves lying on her back and propelling herself forward by kicking with her feet. In the evening, I cooked dinner, looked after Cornucopia while her mother took a shower, and, afterwards, gave Cornucopia her bath. It was really remarkable what a perfectly behaved baby we had, good company all through the day, very easy to be with. No outbreaks of hysterical crying at the end of the day, no collapse into over-tired bad temper. I think it's pretty obvious that the child benefits from having the adults' schedule stress drop to zero. But that's something that quite simply isn't going to happen very often. I wrote a poem called My Baby Daughter which is, really, about that schedule stress. About the difficulty of focusing in on your baby in a world in which there are a billion and one other distractions. Anyway. At the age of three months, Cornucopia is doing well, and I'm confident of our ability to cope with the future. (Actually, looking back, I don't think there's ever been a time at which I felt "I'm not confident about doing this.") The hard thing right now is coping with the summer heat, which depletes energy, adding a fatigue factor to everyday life in Japan. Section 119 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 July 20 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Over the long weekend, spent some time reading picture books to baby Cornucopia, including one Japanese book (for which I supplied an English-language text) called "Akai Ringo," meaning "Red Apple." I really didn't like this book at all, because I didn't like the author's handling of the strong-guys-bully-weak-guys hierarchical setup. (Bullying, as is commonly known, is far from rare in Japanese schools, and extends into other areas of life as well. For example, I have seen reports in the media of cases where young police recruits were bullied by seniors.) While going through "Akai Ringo" with my baby daughter, I didn't read the Japanese-language text, but the storyline is pretty obvious from the pictures. The pictures are like this:- Picture One, a red apple sitting in a forest. This picture misled me, because I expected that the red apple would be the hero of the book. So I was emotionally identifying with the red apple right at the start, which was a mistake. Picture Two, small bird discovers apple. Picture Three, rabbit scares off small bird. (I'm reconstructing this from memory, so "Picture Two" may be a sequence of two pictures, and "Picture Three" likewise.) Picture Four, a yellow wolf comes on the scene. And then, in Picture Five, the yellow wolf grapples with the rabbit in a way which, to my vile imagination, suggests that they might be on the verge of doing something that would breach someone's community standards. But, no, it turns out that they're just fighting over possession of the apple, and of course the yellow wolf wins. By this time, it's clear that this is a story about bullying, and about the hierarchy of power. Then a bigger wolf takes the apple from the yellow wolf, then a bear (the biggest of all) claims the apple. But the bear, on tasting the apple, doesn't like it. The other animals, seeing the bear reject the apple, decide they don't want to have anything to do with it. So the little bird, triumphantly, gets to claim the apple (which has been bitten into by the bear.) The book, then, turns out to be about bullying. And the hero is not the red apple but the little bird. My guess is that the author's expectation is that the juvenile reader, being small and weak, will identify with the smallest and weakest of the creatures, the little bird. And the subtext seems to be, "Hey, kid, welcome to a hierarchical society in which bullying is the norm. But, don't give up. There might still be a (slightly chewed) apple for you, as long as nobody higher up the totem pole wants it." To me, it was a real big surprise that the little bird ended up getting the apple, because I'd seen the little bird as just one more predator in a chain of predators, because I had made the mistake of emotionally identifying with the red apple. As mentioned above, I'd thought that the red apple was the hero of the piece. But it turns out that the red apple is just dead meat. Section 119 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 July 21 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Had to go to four different locations yesterday in the course of my long and busy day, which involved a certain amount of walking. Boy, it was hot! By the end of the day I felt depleted, drained. I found out afterwards that temperatures in Tokyo had spiked to about 40 degrees Celsius, which is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot night. Wife and daughter downstairs in the airconditioned room. Me sleeping upstairs with a fan, aiming to get a quiet night's sleep and make an early start on work. (At home this morning doing curriculum development work.) Put the fan at my head so it played down the length of my body, all the way to my toes. But still very hot. Oppressive. Got the sense I couldn't breathe. Had an idea. Went and smeared some water on my face. Then lay down again so the rush of air from the fan was playing on my face. Thanks to the evaporation effect, the fan cooled my face pretty much instantly. A real ice-rush! A thrill of cold! Wow! I went to sleep not long after, and slept pretty well, really. |
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