| M. Kei : Love Letters Homoerotic Tanka of Love and Friendship |
| It's a pleasure to welcome M. Kei back to 3LIGHTS. When I approached this master of tanka with the proposal of a new solo show, I was surprised and excited to receive a batch of poems that explore love, friendship and very personal emotions that are all-too-often ignored in modern tanka. I asked M. Kei the following question, and his response is a fitting introduction to this extraordinary collection of tanka. LW: These poems are clearly very personal and each of them brim with emotion. How does tanka allow you to plunge the depths of the self? Do you often find that tanka finds a passage into feelings you didn't expect to discover? I'm interested to learn how the poet of the Chesapeake Bay writes something as powerful and emotive as: "I don't want/to move heaven/and earth/just the heart/of a man". MK: Gay love poems were some of the very first tanka I wrote, and so it would be more correct to ask how a writer of erotic tanka became a poet of the Chesapeake Bay. In those days I had no thought of publishing; I didn't even know that the 'tanka world' existed. I thought tanka was nothing but dead Japanese classics. Like the Heian gentlemen of old, I wrote them to friends and lovers, most of whom I knew online. Thus, in 2000, I was writing things like: When I woke from the dream of you I could still taste the tender peach. How could I resist the lure of the newly ripened fruit? 'Tanka Is Now.' My Town, Summer, 2006. This is one of my earliest surviving tanka, and it bears ample evidence that something other than literature was uppermost in my mind at the time I composed it. Still, love affairs end, and since I can't stand jealous pouting, whining, and melodramatic threats, I put that into tanka as well. My life has been a garden of many flowers, but I will still grieve when each blossom falls and leaves me behind. Haiku Harvest, 6:1, Spring & Summer 2006. Yet I always had a melancholy turn of mind, and another one of my old poems is this: Full well do I know that this transient pleasure is like foam on the sea; Yet even so I want it to last a thousand years. Simply Haiku : A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry. 3:2 Summer, 2006. This also was a gay love poem, but it is drenched in aware, the Japanese memento mori, which warns us that pleasure is also a sign of death because it doesn't last. The principle of aware was one that affected me very deeply when I first encountered it. I often suffered from depression when I was younger, and aware provided me with a way to express it while still valuing that which beautiful and positive. In 2004, my mother suffered from a worrisome complication, and so one of my brothers and one of my sisters and I went to her. She was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and one morning in my hotel room, I heard the carillon playing, so I walked out into the snow barefoot and stood there listening to it. I didn't bother to get dressed because I was afraid the song of the bells would be over before I finished dressing. The clangor of bells called me from my seat into the bright frosty air; barefoot in the snow I stood to hear the carol of hope. Haiku Harvest, 6:1, Spring & Summer 2006. During that trip, bad news piled on bad news, and so the hotel television provided me with news about the terrorist bombing in Spain. I wrote the following: Spanish Bombing, March 11, 2004 In Spain eleven million cry a deeper grief; tragedy magnified in a weeping world. Sketchbook : A Journal for Eastern and Western Short Forms, 1:3, December 2006. Thus I can pinpoint the exact moment at which the old poetic excrescences became insupportable. The lushness of my original style seems intimate, but it actually serves to place a distance between the poet and the reader, a distance mediated by literary technique. This also coincided with the beginning of my recovery from aphasia, something I mentioned in my previous interview with you. I was guided in my work by St. Exupéry's maxim that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. It was also during this period that I started deliberately recording the world around me—whatever I found—to report that which was real and authentic and not a literary construct. So it was in 2004 that I began to consciously record the Maryland scenery: I write poetry like the hills of Maryland, slow, easy, green swells, rolling from creek to vale, with all the time in the world. Sketchbook, 1:3, December 2006. In the spring of 2005 I began working on the Skipjack Martha Lewis, and in the fall of 2005 my mother died and my nephew committed suicide. I continued to record life as I lived it. oyster season starts with new yellow slickers for the crew; by the end of the first day they're torn and dirty Heron Sea, Short Poems of the Chesapeake Bay, 2007. I wondered for a long time if the unadorned poems I wrote qualified as 'poetry' at all. Poems like the one above require the reader to have sufficient imagination to envision what sorts of conditions watermen labor in that new gear becomes old on its first day. I'm not sure that all readers can make the leap required; but to write faithfully about my world means accepting that some part of the readership will not follow where I lead. Sadly, I have not had much success in my love life. I have written poems to friends and male companions, but also to imaginary (male) muses. I was involved a very long time in a relationship with an abusive partner, and those echoes continue in my work. rattlesnake love— you gave me warning but I, entranced by your desert heart, wouldn't heed it Fire Pearls : Short Masterpieces of the Human Heart. Perryville, MD: Keibooks, 2006. I am not a naturally social person and I don't like crowds. A friend or two is sufficient. I am on good terms with my children, but the rest of my relatives are dead or far away. I think it fair to say that my greatest love affair is with the Chesapeake Bay, and that all my poems about the Chesapeake Bay are love poems. the wind sings a threnody in the harp-strung rigging; dead mariners rise in answer Kokako #6, Papatoetoe, NZ. April, 2006. Still, I do want a companion who can see the world as I see it. I'd like to go sailing with him, just me and him, wending our way through the autumn marshes in a slim white boat. the October moon a sliver in the blue sky is all I can give to you 'Two and Three Line Tanka.' Modern English Tanka, 2:2. Baltimore, MD: Modern English Tanka Press, Winter, 2007. I'm poor in material things, but I'm happy. I like where I live, I like sailing, I like my children, I like tanka, I like myself. ~K~ Continue to Exhibition >> |