“hearts are scattered everywhere” — Welcome Home by Samuel Wharton
NeO Pepper Press, 2007

reviewed by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Samuel Wharton is the editor of the experimental poetry blogzine SAWBUCK
(http://sawbuckpoetry.blogspot.com/). When I heard that Samuel had
published a chapbook, I wrote and asked him if he would like to exchange
books with me (his for my book Skin Museum that was published in Tokyo in
2006). In this way I managed to receive this wonderful book of poems . . .
.

Welcome Home is a 32 page limited edition chapbook containing 13 poems, two
of which appeared previously in the ezines foam:e (http://foame.org/) and
Otoliths (http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/).

In these poems we find a world falling apart, and a person struggling to
make meaning from the pieces as the pieces and their witness are about to be
carried away, as in the following excerpt from & Then What Happened?:

& Stripes Forever exploded via radio covering our eyes
we waited for our borders to shift again stars exploded

over homes & then someone turned a page & then we forgot
our orders someone said:               
bought & sold

at a bazaar our coins clinking at the ready covering our
eyes
a lullaby through the trees parts were scattered everywhere

In La Pensee Sauvage the reader again encounters a world out of control:

. . . splash of the galaxy spilling out across the sky
I ask for parsley to cool my breath settle

my stomach I need you to hear the screams
of planes heading to the airshow like I do

. . .

that rises & falls rises & falls around a stadium
no: I need to seek meaning more effectively . . .

In a similar vein, the poem Fictions ends:

this is the heart of the story of the story: the machine of history has
no history

has no meaning except as a river rushing away with our things

while Independence Day, Drowning begins:

you do not fool the water though you may dirty it
this is the law of the water the law of the glittering

surface the murky depths the opposition &
the dialogue between how each is necessary

The NeO Pepper Press can be found at http:www.tashogi.com/neopp.htm. An
interview with Samuel Wharton can be read online at the Ploughshares blog:
http://pshares.blogspot.com/2007/06/quickie-interview-19-sam-wharton.html

I’m looking forward to seeing more from this press and from this author.
 

I offered you sanctuary with one condition.
Even this much you could not hold.When you looked into the forbidden chamber
my three daughters became birds
and flew away from me forever.

Memory of our transgressions is a stone. It lies
on the seabed of our deepest forgetting.

—regret and sorrow in the making

Before you came I swept this house daily
with a long broom of rice straw.

Often I would wander from room to room,
touching each treasure as I passed:

a golden screen, three red lacquer bowls—
Now, all is dust suspended in late sunlight.

This forest house, with its paper doors and secrets,
is too large for me now. Let it dissolve in mist
and absence, no trace left for the lost children.

What am I but the flower of your deepest self?

—crushed chrysanthemum petals underfoot

Instead, I am cast out across vast distances,
circling far above the trees, never to be human.

You will say that a grand house once stood
in a forest clearing. Then: nothing but birdcalls.

Longing itself is nothing but the heart’s open spaces.

—regret and sorrow, come calling

If I could make it so, I would be the one left alone
in the meadow, rubbing my eyes and wondering.

Remember this: I, once a woman, took you in,
an exchange for a promise kept.

Three maidens startled, then transformed into birds.

Whatever you abandon returns in your dreams.

Mari L’Esperance is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, where she was a New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. L’Esperance’s poems have appeared in Pequod, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Barnabe Mountain Review, Salamander, and several other periodicals and an anthology. A chapbook manuscript, Begin Here, was awarded first prize in the 1999 Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press national chapbook competition and was published in 2000. In 2002 L’Esperance received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her poem “Pantoum of the Blind Cambodian Women”, which was published in The Worcester Review. L’Esperance has been awarded residency grants from Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and Hedgebrook. She has taught creative writing at NYU, Merritt College in Oakland, California, and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She is currently training to be a psychotherapist and lives in Oakland.

L’Esperance, who is of Japanese and French Canadian-American descent, was born in Kobe, Japan and raised in southern California, Micronesia, and Japan.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 7:00 sharp
Poetry Flash at Cody’s:
TUNG-HUI HU & MARI L’ESPERANCE

Tung-Hui Hu, a San Francisco-based writer on film and new media, has just published his second book of poems, Mine (Ausable Press); his first was The Book of Motion (Contemporary Poetry Series, University of Georgia Press). Mark Doty says of Mine, “This fresh and unexpected poet extends the lyric into social space without losing any of song’s intensity or mystery, so that these casually elegant, arresting poems feel as interior as they are worldly.”
Mari L’Esperance, who was born in Kobe, Japan and raised in Guam and California, won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry for her first full-length book of poems The Darkened Temple, forthcoming in fall 2008 from the University of Nebraska Press. Widely published in literary journals and author of the award-winning chapbook Begin Here, she is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing program where she was a New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.
CODY’S BOOKS, 1730 Fourth Street, Berkeley, (510) 559-9500.
For information: (510) 525-5476, www.poetryflash.org.

POETRY READING AND DISCUSSION

A poetry reading and discussion will take place on the afternoon of Sunday September 2, 2007, on the 4th floor of Daito Bunka Kaikan, a short walk from Tobu Nerima station on the Tobu Tojo line in Tokyo. The event is free of charge and open to the public.

We will meet from 1:00 to 5:00 PM. The readings will take place from 2:00 to 4:00 PM, with one hour of open discussion pre- and post-reading, and short breaks between readers.

Poet JENNIFER FUMIKO CAHILL teaches Poetry Writing at Temple University in Tokyo. She is the recipient of the University of California Poet Laureate Award, the Soho Readers and Writers Festival Emerging Writer Award, and a Greensboro Review Award.

KEIKO MATSUI GIBSON’s work appears in Stir Up The Precipitable World, Other Side River, and other periodicals and books. A professor of English at Kanda University of
International Studies, Keiko previously taught at Indiana University, Knox College, and Pennsylvania State University; her PhD in comparative literature is from Indiana University.

JESSICA GOODFELLOW’s poetry chapbook, A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, won the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in the anthology Best New Poets 2006, Verse Daily, and on Garrison Keillor’s NPR show The Writer’s Almanac.

JANE JORITZ-NAKAGAWA has published poetry in journals such as New American Writing, 580 Split, ACM, Tinfish, One Less, HOW2, and dozens of others. Her books of poetry are
Skin Museum (2006) and Aquiline (forthcoming).

DIRECTIONS: From Ikebukuro Station of the JR Yamanote line, take the Tobu Tojo Line to Tobu Nerima station (use the “local” train). Tobu Nerima station is 15-20 minutes from
JR Yamanote Ikebukuro station.

From Tobu Nerima Station: exit the station at the north exit
(Kitaguchi), and take the road leading off to the right (away from, versus parallel to, the train tracks). Walk a short distance straight ahead. There will be a traffic light, and a Mister Donuts on your right. Turn right at this corner. Walk straight ahead on this road past the buses and taxi stand on the left side of the street. Roughly a half block past the taxi stand, on the left side of the street, is Daito Bunka Kaikan.

The Daito Bunka Kaikan telephone number is 03-5399-7399; address: 2-4-21 Tokumaru, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo.

Note that the Kaikan is a short walk from the train station, rather than located on the Daito Bunka University campus which is a bit further away from the station.

This is the new blog for Yomimono, a literary magazine published in Japan.  The current issue features work by John Lentz, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, V.Q. Wallick, Margaret Stawowy, Ian McBryde, Peter Bakowski, Michele Corkery, Jordie Albiston, Wendy Nakanishi Jones, Virgil Suarez, Catherine Greenwood and jessica Freeman. 

For a copy, send US$10  or 1,000 yen to: Suzanne Kamata, 254-1 Nada, Aza, Tokumei, Aizumi-cho, Itano-gun, Tokushima-ken  771-1210 Japan. 

(Checks should be made payable to Suzanne Kamata.)