3LIGHTS : Autumn Water : M. Kei (Oct

Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. With a stretch of 200 miles, it's little wonder that the Bay's resident tanka poet, M. Kei, has produced much of his poetry with the Bay in both mind and pen. Much of his writing, he says, has been born upon the decks of the historical vessels, the Skipjack Martha Lewis, and the Kalmar Nyckel - both of which he works aboard. His recent collection, 'Heron Sea', is the product of a life on the waters of the 'Great Shellfish Bay'.

We're thrilled to welcome M. Kei to 3LIGHTS this Autumn for a solo exhibition of salty tanka from the shores and waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

Liam Wilkinson, September 2007

the first cold night
of August,
and the shirring of
crickets mourning
summer

Heron Sea, Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay, 2007

getting up early
to go to work,
the reward is three
muddy cormorants
sitting on pilings

pulling the
least wet socks
off the clothesline,
I hurry to work
this autumn day

bottle rockets #16, 8:1, 2007.

choppy waters
as bully breezes
grapple the bay;
the new supervisor
criticizes me again

the captain’s mess . . .
politely
telling his
drunk fiancée
“no”

a rotten spring line
snaps,
neither the first nor last
in a long line
of complications

Modern English Tanka, 2:1, Autumn, 2007.

internal shore
a little haze
lingering
between here
and there

just me
and the ship’s cat
know what
the top of the world
looks like

Gusts : Contemporary Tanka. #5, Spring/Summer 2007.

cargo shorts,
what dreams
will I stuff
into these pockets
today?

“beef to the windlass!”
learning a new definition
for myself,
I put my weight to the lever
and haul the tack

the passengers
ask for pirate tales, but they
look a little nervous
when I tell them the
last shanghai was 1982

Kokako #7, September, 2007.

give me
a wooden skiff,
you can’t fix
fiberglass
with a hammer

LW: In the introduction to your latest collection, 'Heron Sea', you mention the "intense interconnections of land and water" that have been a part of your heritage for generations. When did this intensity enter your writing?

MK: In 2004. I'd been writing tanka for my own amusement and as a way of communicating with my friends for several years at that point. When they started asking me if I'd written any poetry lately, I thought I might be on to something, so I tried submitting it, with not much luck at that time. I started reading more broadly but was often disappointed. I felt that a great deal of haiku and tanka was formulaic and lacked the depth of a real life, fully lived, in difficult circumstances, where appreciation for beauty is not a hobby but a necessity for survival.

In the spring of 2005, I started volunteering with the Skipjack Martha Lewis, the last vessel in North America to fish commercially under sail. I normally crew on Sundays because that is how I worship: no meetinghouse built by human beings can rival the majesty of the Chesapeake Bay. Many of my poems have been written from her deck, but also from her bilge and even her mast top. I've worked that boat in summer and winter, culling oysters, reefing out the deck seams, and sweating under our relentless summer sun. To be a working sailor, as a opposed to a pleasure boater, is to become intimate with sun, wind, and water and all the creatures that inhabit this world with us, without regard to weather or human convenience.

yesterday
I noticed white streaks
in the captain’s beard,
today I find his photo
beardless and young

waterman’s autumn
greasing the mast
before the races;
the clatter of mast hoops
the ringing of halyards

water world —
the tree of heaven
an island
in the middle
of the fog

water weeds and puddles
left after the highest tide
no sailboats
on the autumn bay
this afternoon

Modern English Tanka, 2:1, Autumn, 2007.

cradle-like
the slow rocking
of the boat
on an ebbing tide
at the close of day

LW: It's interesting that you talk of your relationship with the Bay in a religious sense. I remember asking George Swede about the role that his writing plays in his life. Do you see the writing of tanka as a necessity in your life? For instance, has tanka become a necessary way of addressing your relationship with the Bay and its diverse conditions?

MK: You have not asked a simple question. Poetry is the means by which we speak the ineffable. In my case, this was in a physical as well as spiritual sense, and both are critical to my existence as a person. In 2000 I was diagnosed with narcolepsy, a neurological disorder whose most famous symptom is falling asleep at inappropriate times. Mine is very severe and includes attention deficits and aphasia. Normally we associate seeing with reading and reading with comprehension, but in my case, these things came apart. I found myself staring blankly at printed words like "Men" on the restroom door, unable to make sense of it.

In desperation I started trying to write haiku and tanka because they were short and I didn't think I was capable of stringing together anything longer. I used them as way to deliberately retrain myself in expression. I was relieved to discover that the knowledge was still intact; what had been damaged was the ability to translate knowledge into words and vice versa. The brain is a muscle (which I know biologists will dispute), I felt mine straining as it was asked to do something it was very out of condition to do. But little by little, it moved.

A great deal of haiku and tanka contain a layer of artifice that is difficult for my brain to process, yet which is largely invisible to most readers as they are so used to it being part of literature. With this layer removed, I found myself in more direct contact with my surroundings, and my surroundings are, as mentioned extraordinary. The Bay is part of me and I am part of the Bay, but everything I encounter is likewise part of me and I am part of it, no matter how fleeting the partnership. Tanka were originally divine songs sung by a god, thus tanka are ideally suited to expressing the numinous noumenon. While the Chesapeake Bay is a very clear example of manifest creation, it is not by any means the only one. A weed growing through a sidewalk is just as powerful an expression -- and I have written a lot of poems about weeds. Not nearly as many of them get published though.

lowest tide —
the pushboat’s propellor
stirs a coffee cup
in the bottom of
the yacht basin

once again
feeling the arthritic
knuckle,
pretending not to notice
wrinkles in my hands

twenty men
to crack the welds
and hand crank
the railroad bridge open
for a passing skipjack

on the water
you can see
the rain coming:
an immense grey curtain
of falling needles

Modern English Tanka, 2:1, Autumn, 2007.

racing a thunderstorm
back to port,
forty knots in my face
and one chance to
throw the bowline

LW: It's quite extraordinary to discover that your involvement with tanka came as a result of your condition. I think it's safe to say that the sheer quality of your tanka proves that you've overcome that hurdle quite successfully. You're about to launch a new journal, Atlas Poetica. What has led you to this project? Could you explain the idea of 'place' in tanka, perhaps with reference to the tanka used here, in Autumn Water.

MK: 'Place' is the thing that impressed itself upon me as I became serious about poetry. I had read and enjoyed Japanese tanka for years and had written tanka for myself and my friends. But when narcolepsy put a spike in that, I fell silent for about a year and a half. Thus it was natural that I turned to poetry to retrain myself in language skills. But the dissolution of my ability to process abstraction had the virtue of exposing me more directly to reality and what is more real than the place in which you live, work, and move?

I try to record simple, accurate observations of where I am, what I experience, and how I feel about it. I have been astonished to discover that others often read a level of poetry into my poems that I do not see in them; in fact, for a long time wondered if what I wrote qualified as 'poetry' at all. Likewise I value poems by others that make me feel as if I had glimpsed something real, rather than something literary.

All the poems in 'Autumn Water' are poetry of place and all of them are truthful observations of things I have personally experienced. They share a unity of time and place and by their cohesion paint a portrait while leaving some details unclear. That's another element of poetry of place: a tolerance for imperfection. When I first started writing such things people tried to persuade me to shave off the parts a stranger wouldn't understand, to make them universal and more elegant. In short, to become more generic and artificial. I have resisted such advice. I accept that poetry is a plank with knots in it: I can't drive the nail of the reader's attention wherever I please. As for the reader, it means accepting the occasional splinter with the realization that you won't 'get' everything. Some people like camping on a lake, but some people insist upon hotels with indoor pools. It's the difference between immersion and tourism.

Denis Garrison and Michael McClintock have just finished Landfall : Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka, and there was a huge, passionate outpouring of contributions to it -- thousands upon housands of poems. Denis and I had been tossing around ideas for a joint project between us, and so Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka was born. It manifests things we both value, and judging by the response to Landfall, those things are valued by by the rest of the tanka world too.

LW: That ‘shaving off’ of parts others wouldn’t necessarily understand seems to be blighting haiku and tanka today, and it’s very often your use of the technical vocabulary of sailing that attracts me to your writing. I think those ‘occasional splinters’ should be celebrated as an integral part of tanka’s diverse global texture.

Finally, this exhibition and Tankafall, which is running concurrently, are the first all-tanka exhibitions to be shown at 3LIGHTS. What advice would you offer to those writers who have become acquainted with haiku and might be trying out tanka for the first time?

MK: My decision on vocabulary was that if a reader can look up a word in a dictionary, then there's no reason not to use it. Laziness on the part of the reader is never a valid reason to criticize a poem. On the other hand, there is regional vocabulary which will not necessarily be understood. In my book Heron Sea I included a set of notes in the back. The reader who cares can use them, the reader who isn't interested can skip them.

My advice for anyone writing tanka is to be faithful to the experience. While it is not required for tanka to be autobiographical, it's a good starting point. Don't strive to 'be poetic' and don't worry about counting syllables or creating pivots or any of that technical stuff: content trumps technique every time. The hardest part of writing tanka is learning to pay attention to what is around you, sketching this moment, this place, this event, and trust the reader to recognize the similarities with their own experiences.

Be specific. Don't write about 'birds,' write about a blue heron wading. The heron doesn't just stand there; his head slowly swivels to follow the boat as it passes. Don't try to put an interpretation into the poem and be willing to accept interpretations that vary widely from your own. I wrote a tanka about aphasia, but I didn't say the poem was 'about aphasia,' I simply described the tongue-tied staring and moment of panic. An editor who published it thought it was a love poem about a smitten customer staring at the grocery store clerk.

This is what's known as 'controlled ambiguity,' or what Denis Garrison calls 'dreaming room.' By allowing multiple readings the poem acquires depth and resonance, the varied meanings playing off of one another like a pond where raindrops create complex rings of ripples that intersect each other. You can't force that kind of poem; you have to let it happen by itself by removing the layer of abstraction and artifice that is usually considered 'literary' or 'artistic'. You have to let the reader encounter the situation for themselves without telling them what it means. It's the opposite of television with its canned laugh track and ominous theme music.

AUTUMN WATER : Tanka by M. Kei

Curated by Liam Wilkinson
for 3LIGHTS Gallery

Poems
copyright © M. Kei

Photographs
copyright © Amy Kehring
copyright © Dale Johnson
copyright © Danna Cornick

For more information visit:

SkipjackMarthaLewis.org
hdgMaritimeMuseum.org
Kujaku Poetry
Atlas Poetica

Many thanks to the photographers for their kind contributions
and to M. Kei for his unwavering support over the last few months.

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