Interview with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa - Wordgathering

Daniel Bratton interviews Jane Joritz-Nakagawa.

DB: Thank you very much for consenting to this interview, Jane. After reviewing three of your books over the past ten years, I feel privileged to have this opportunity to pose some questions about your unique fibropoetics, including your recent ebook Head / lines.

About ten years ago, in an interview, Margaret Stawowy asked “Is there a question that you always wished somebody would ask you?” You responded, “I think many years ago I had hoped somebody would ask me to give an overview of my poetic input, to explain how I see it. But now I don’t think I’d be able to answer that question. As my outcome has become more varied I’d find it hard to attempt to ‘summarize’ it.”¹ You added that attempting to do so had become more complicated rather than clearer, though there were certain themes that had obsessed you for a long time.

Given your output over the past ten years, it’s likely that this question about your poetic input is even more daunting to answer, but would it be possible to provide an overview of where your poetry has headed since the time of that interview? You’ve moved from strings of couplets in diurnal to the long poem form in Plan B Audio and LUNA, with other publications in between, and now you have produced another ebook, so perhaps this is asking way too much as an opening question.

JJN: Thanks for this wonderful opportunity to chat with you, Daniel! And thanks for the kind question. I would say my work encompasses both the abstract and concrete, experimental and lyrical, topical and relatively timeless, narrative and anti-narrative, sociopolitical and personal domains.

In my first five books I think I can say I was really attempting to stretch myself as a writer. By the time I got to FLUX, I started to feel I was more confident of my work and of that book being very solid, then and since. One thing that changed is that I quit my full-time job so I had more time to read, write and rewrite in the last six or so books and chapbooks I’ve written. Reading other poets is super important, I think. Otherwise it is hard to write anything. Leaving my job gave me much more time for reading widely, something I was really itching to do more of. I had purchased lots of books with my research budget but had no time to read them. In my forties I was sick half of the time and to fit in a full-time job and being a poet and a spouse was really difficult for a person with chronic demanding health issues. Then in my fifties I got cancer and it recurred even after extensive treatment. I thought it might be the end of me. An “ultra radical” operation was my only option, I was told, if I wanted to live.

During the editing of women : poetry : migration [an anthology] with theenk Books, cancer was discovered in my body. Although the difficult task of finding women who met my criteria (talented published poet, adventurous writing, living outside birth country) in a variety of locations was mostly finished and work accepted, it was hard to proofread the manuscript when I was so ill. I was sorry my illness delayed the book and I would have done a better job of proofreading had I been well, I think. However, working with Steve Tills at theenk Books was wonderful, of course.

Plan B Audio was mostly written during my cancer treatment. For example, the prose parts were mostly written in the hospital; I created a character to go through radiation treatment instead of me! She is a person who has been driven insane by her cancer treatment. She wants especially to escape from radiation treatment as I did. She tries lots of silly things all doomed to failure from creating escape route maps based on the color of buildings outside to inventing a kind of Morse code only comprehensible to herself if at all. Since nothing works, she tries to imagine herself as an employee of rather than a patient of the hospital; she imagines she is showing her private parts to her doctor not because he is her doctor but because he is her lover, etc. Anyway, that book was a lot of fun to write! I had told a friend I would try to milk the hell out of my cancer treatment and it seems I did. People who heard me read aloud the prose parts realized there is quite a lot of humor there. The same was said of my book FLUX in the sense that there is a nutty narrator who reports absurd but true news stories such as the Lehman shock, Fukushima meltdown and Tohoku tsunami. Even Trayvon Martin is mentioned in the book. I took very sad events and made jokes out of them. Maybe I was imitating my uncles who joked around at funerals. I won an award for that part of (excerpts from) FLUX. It was fun to write. Why do sad events bring out the humor in people? FLUX even includes a poem I wrote on the day of my father-in-law’s funeral, a very sad day for us, but that poem too is punctuated with satiric observations and funny bits.

What is affecting me personally as well as what is going on outside in the world can all go into my work. When I was writing LUNA the wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine were in the news a lot and fell into my book just as happened with FLUX and Tohoku and Lehman, etc.

But I also retain a strong interest in abstract language oriented work. I am not usually interested in conventional narratives. Also, since I know that talking about one’s body in a literary work is something taboo almost, I decided to write a lot about my own body in Plan B Audio and since. Why not mention my colostomy in books? Other people have them. There is no shame in it I think or even if there was even better perhaps!

Even going back to my first or second book you can find an interest in themes that occur within related to violence against women and others. Animal rights comes and goes too in various books.

Maybe my values haven’t changed much but the outer and inner landscape changes often and that impacts what I am working on.

DB: Thanks for that wonderfully detailed response, Jane! I was curious about this timeline in the development of your poetics because, in a later interview with Diane Wiener, you stated that your study and writing of feminist disability poetics predates 2016,² yet events since then have clearly influenced the arc of your poetry. Also, regarding your mention ten years ago that certain themes have obsessed you, are these same themes still central to your poetry, or have they morphed? For example, you more recently spoke to Thomas Fink of certain “larger themes” in your long poems including “life and death, social norms and the limits of human understanding.”³ Are these themes a more recent obsession, or simply a continuation of the obsessions you previously mentioned?

JJN: I suppose a continuation of an always present since childhood obsession and curiosity but I try to represent it in new ways versus repeating myself. Plus there are the works that evolved more from language itself versus a theme or imposed theme. Writing as a form of discovery.

DB: One of your post-cancer themes that really spoke to me as a reader of your recent long poems was expressed in your interview with Thomas Fink, your attitude toward the valorization of those who “battle” against cancer, as though it must be destroyed through fierce combat. You told Fink that you reject phrases such as “she heroically battled cancer” and find nothing heroic in a cancer diagnosis. I’m also thinking here of what Susan Sontag had to say about the War against Cancer. Why all these martial metaphors? (I see this attitude all the time in obituaries here in Canada, where the deceased are frequently described as having heroically battled against their own mortality.)

JJN: My views on cancer or other disease and fighting haven’t changed much. I see nothing heroic in anything I have done. I do make a hero out of my husband at times but he too would certainly reject the label.

I remember a story about a group of doctors working in a war zone being called heroes by a journalist. They laughed at that. They said they were lucky rather to be doing meaningful work that excited them, like it was their dream job!

DB: This social expectation that one must battle disease also relates to Arthur Frank’s contrast between the restitution theme (where one “fights” to be have health restored, which is why this type of narrative doesn’t work for the terminally ill) and the quest theme, though several recent critics have criticized his privileging of this form of illness narrative, arguing that one doesn’t have to have a quest when fighting cancer or other life-threatening illnesses, and shouldn’t feel compelled to embark on one. Personally, I relate more to Frank’s chaos narrative, which he situates between the restitution and quest narratives. He notes that at the height of this chaos it’s not even possible to “tell” the story, which seems highly relevant to your experimental fibropoetics and background in LANGUAGE poetry, where the possibility of language failure is frankly acknowledged and accepted.

JJN: Yes, the restitution narrative is nonsense to people who never recover from their illnesses or merely swap one illness for another, etc. After cancer I ended up with much worse scoliosis and with lymphedema, both of which are conditions that are chronic and progressive, and with two stoma. It’s not ideal but it has kept me alive. Also, I continue to live with fibromyalgia, something I had lived with my whole life. To say to me I hope you feel better soon is ridiculous. It won’t happen unless there are new medical discoveries leading to treatment appropriate for me. There is no finish line to cross, no goal posts in sight even, as if somebody is always invisibly moving them out of my sight. Now that my husband has stage 4B liver cancer it is definitely for me overwhelming and like the chaos narrative.

For me, my life from the age of 16 to 49 was hard especially because of unbelievably painful, disorienting and overwhelming period pain. I waited my whole life for it to end, but that end ended up being cancer, simply another gynecological illness. There is no hero journey in that as far as I am concerned. And now I am in my sixties troubled mostly by my husband’s horrible diagnosis and the daily fear that I will lose him sometime soon without much warning perhaps even. I don’t know, I am not in control of this really. We have been together since 1990 and are still deeply in love with each other.

In Plan B Audio I do briefly mention my love for Junichiro via the character(s) I created.

I wonder how the doctors treating cancer feel, for some of them maybe they feel they are involved in battle? But the patient is submissive in my opinion, we submit to the treatment. On the other hand my husband has forced himself to eat though he has no appetite and to move even though it’s painful, just to stay alive. I think he is a real trooper sometimes but he is just an ordinary person albeit one who wants to live. Humans like to idealize other humans. We all do it probably at times. I’ve always admired him since the day we met!!

DB: You mention having no finish line and no goal posts in sight, yet there’s a poem in LUNA that ends on an affirmative note suggesting not so much a quest as the triumph of a Plathian Lady Lazarus. This is the “essay in verse” you wrote for the issue of Persimmon Tree devoted to heroism, your contribution tellingly titled “my non-heroic, non-inspirational tale.” What interests me is that this poem very much fits into what we’ve been discussing, particularly the lines “you say I am a hero an inspiration / the bravest person you know / I am none of these // just an ordinary person /who poops and pees / like everyone else.” Yet you closed this poem with the lines “but I’m here to tell you / I just turned sixty and I’m /alive alive alive.” What led to your ending what is really an atypical poem in your canon—you have recorded that “it is not like me to write narrative poems that are autobiographical to such a large degree”—on such a tone of defiance?

JJN: Yes, the ending of that essay in verse (I have trouble calling it a poem, but others have been calling it that, and there are some poetic devices: I create a certain rhythm via line and stanza breaks for example and there is some alliteration but it is mostly narrative!) I figured would be judged as triumphant. I like your word “defiant” however and I think that is suitable — I have never read the poem aloud nor have I yet wanted to but I might be ready finally. In my head the speaker is taunting the reader a bit!! Was I feeling triumphant in my own life? No, not at all!!! Defiant, yes that is more like it for me. For me the ending is almost totally artifice. I knew it would likely be judged as triumphant, as winning my battle with myself after cancer treatment. But there was and is no winning. Not really. And at the time I wrote it I felt anything BUT triumphant. I was struggling with severe depression. I thought I was a failure as a disabled person. I thought I was taking too long in my grieving process, that there was something wrong with me. It was like a thwarted hero’s journey. My intention had been to feel sad for a few months and then wow my friends with my speedy recovery and show how resilient I am. That never happened. For me the alive x3 was uttered with a clenched jaw! I was alive but wanted to be unalive so I was angry. I regretted my decision on and off, more on than off, when writing that work. My decision to have the so-called ultra radical so-called destructive and mutilating operation. How do I feel now? Better than when I wrote that poem. But I did have at least a sense of humor at the time, even though it was a hard time for me. There it is again, that humor that empowers the person who otherwise feels powerless, in this case myself again! It’s a powerful weapon. It helped me get through Lehman, through Fukushima, through cancer, through Trayvon Martin, through the first Trump presidency but not this one!, through the death of friends and family, etc. Sorrow, and anger, too.

One reason I wanted to write the work for Persimmon Tree is that I had failed to name all the body parts I said goodbye to in my earlier book Plan B Audio (there is a page in that book where I bid farewell to my uterus et al. but certain body parts I didn’t have the guts to name so I just wrote a blank at the end of the list to be filled in by the reader—incidentally the reason the book is titled Plan B Audio is that I felt this book especially is meant to be read out loud and Plan B was the alternative life plan that I acquired from cancer). So by the time I wrote the work for LUNA I was less cowardly, more gutsy with more chutzpah and yes more defiance and personal confidence.

DB: Let’s talk some more about your poetics. Michael Northen observed that your poems are “deliberately open-ended and non-authoritative,” where the “meanings and rhythms of lines within poems bleed into each other,” blurring distinctions between the outside and inside of a poem by “refusing to set boundaries or draw conclusions.” He makes explicit the connections between your experimental poetics and your personal history of fibromyalgia as well as the trauma brought on by your two major cancer treatments, adding “If this attitude was originally derived from linguistic considerations, it has become more concrete as the poet herself has experienced the messiness of the body and its refusal to conform to our expectations, desires, or control.”⁴ Care to comment on this?

JJN: Michael Northen is correct to put my work and myself into the non or even anti authoritative category. I think people should make what they will of the work. There is no one “correct” interpretation of anything including anything I may have written or write next. I was born with this personality and the poetics I like reflects it. Michael had said that my feminist persona is the stronger versus a disability persona in the Poems New and Selected, published by Isobar Press and selected entirely by the editor, Paul Rossiter. I think in part it may reflect Paul’s interests in terms of what he decided to include, but my disability persona became much stronger in the books I wrote after that one was published since it seemed disability as opposed to just being born female was having the biggest effect now on my daily life, as well as bereavement over the loss of many family members and friends, in the most recent years up till the present.

DB: Your mention of Paul Rossiter’s selecting all the material that went into Poems New and Selected brings into focus the collaborative side of your work. Obviously, you’ve always been a community-oriented person, whether in your teaching or your poetry. I’m thinking here not only of your editing the anthology women : poetry : migration, which you’ve already touched upon, but also your bringing poets together in public spaces, as in your organizing Bill Berkson’s poetry reading in Kyoto, where we first met. How did that come about? You were at a university in Nagoya, outside of which you still live, and yet you somehow brought people together in Kyoto, not the easiest city to pull something like that off.

JJN: Also, Eric Selland, a very gifted poet and Japanese to English literary (especially poetry) translator, wrote the intro to Poems New and Selected. They did all the work unbeknownst to me while I was still in treatment for cancer.

And since you mentioned Thomas Fink earlier, let me mention that all three of these men—Thomas, Eric and Paul—are very talented poets and extraordinary human beings. They have each influenced me in positive ways. Tokyo poet Natsuko Hirata introduced me to Thomas when he was visiting Japan.

Yes, in various ways I have tried to create communities in Japan but now I am more disabled and less physically energetic; also travel is more difficult than before. I live in Hamamatsu now and retired early due to poor health. Recently I gave up even part-time university work due to health problems in my post-cancer life. In Kyoto, with the help of Japanese friends we were able to arrange a variety of readings including Bill Berkson and also Jerome Rothenberg.

DB: Yes, I was at that reading as well: it was wonderful to have Jerome and Diane Rothenberg come to Kyoto, just as it had been with Bill Berkson and Connie Lewallen. These two events were really historic occasions: thank you for your part in making them happen. I loved Bill: he was incredibly witty and urbane, a delightful mixture of NYC sophistication and West Coast hipness—and also such a supportive and kind man. I was blown away by his words on notational, your sixth book of poems, “Each page finds the margin where transition is meaning and each sensational flutter awaits its name.” It’s as though he encapsulated your poetics in one sentence! Amazing.

JJN: Yes, Mr. Berkson was terrific. What a terrible loss.

DB: It really was. He was scheduled to give a reading at our poetry centre in Ontario but had to cancel at the last minute for health reasons. You were fortunate to have had that interesting discussion with him about the world of art at The Conversant not too long before his death.

Getting back to how your post-cancer life has affected your involvement in community, I immediately recall the poem in LUNA that reads “I want to march with BLM / but I live in a tiny hamlet filled with elderly Japanese who / have dementia,” which certainly suggests a sense of isolation (though again, through dark comedy). How have you compensated for the distance from academic and poetry communities in your present life? (I ask this as a person who recently retired from university life and has keenly felt this loss.) Of course, we are now all joined together in cyberspace, but it’s not the same as being part of a physical community.

JJN: I agree with what you say about physical community. We can only do what we can do. I am home more now than before. It’s less a choice than an adjustment to reality.

I am grateful to you for introducing Arthur Frank’s book on the wounded storyteller. I haven’t read the entire book yet actually I want to read his earlier book about his experiences with testicular cancer. But I hope I can develop a quest again of my own. With the help of others I think I can heal. I am still looking for answers. After the total pelvic exenteration I thought I’d try to be a nice old lady. ?

DB: Can we return to collaborations? You’ve had some wonderful book covers over the years, but I’m thinking in particular of the photographs by Susan Laura Sullivan that went into Plan B Audio and, more recently, Mayu Kanamori’s images in your ebook Head / lines. There’s quite a contrast in these photographs, Susan’s relating to the whole presence of institutions in Plan B Audio, while the three photographs that precede and then the three that follow the poems in Head / lines tie in with the theme of arrival and departure. Yet in both cases the collaboration really enhanced your texts. Could you tell us how these projects came about?

JJN: Yes, I am very interested in visual art, actually in pretty much every form of art including music, dance, theater, etc. I curated all of my book covers. I wanted the cover art to suit the writing. During before and after cancer therapy Sue shared a lot of photos with me. Plan B Audio is one of several collaborations with Sue. For Plan B Audio I reviewed photos Sue sent me via email. I chose some that fit the work I was doing and or influenced the final form of work in progress. One of my favorite poets, British poet Frances Presley, wrote a review of Plan B Audio saying the photos seemed to divide the text. That is because each photo for me anyway is the end of a poem or the final page of a poem. The final poem thus has no end as it should be in a book like mine which is anti-closure…

DB: Yes, that review by Frances Presley was really insightful on several scores, as in her mention that some of your “most interesting experiments are with surreal narrative and dialogue in poetry and prose,” and that your narrative in Plan B Audio actually becomes “Kafkaesque.”⁵

JJN: I am lucky that another favorite, in this case Australian poet Pam Brown, also has reviewed a number of my works. Pam introduced me to poet Corey Wakeling: he is unbelievably fabulous, and also the very talented duo Mayu Kanamori and her partner Martin. The procedure was the same: Mayu sent me photos via email and I selected from among many evocative striking photos. I agree with you that Head / lines is much about arrival and departure and how unsettling those things can be. I had trouble writing it because I was in the midst of the chaos the author describes in The Wounded Storyteller. Frank talks about a woman caring for another person placing many demands on her time to the extent she must live only in the present without a past future or time to construct any story. I feel that a lot now not because I am caring for someone else but because my own body demands so much time and constant attention.

DB: Head / lines was your second ebook publication, after Dying Swans, with Argotist. Of course, ebooks obviously reach a considerably larger audience, with the electronic format enhancing the visuals, but are there any disadvantages to this mode of presentation? Do you find yourself writing differently for an ebook, or is the process essentially the same? Do you receive the same sort of feedback for an ebook within the poetry world that you do with print publications?

JJN: Actually I have many publications with the Argotist including a faux haiga collection with Sue, many collaborations with Marcus Grandon, who did the cover of Dying Swans, and others. The advantage of online publications is that they reach a larger audience and you get more feedback. Also, you can do things visually that you can’t do in print for reasons of cost and others. Finally if you live in cramped Japanese housing you don’t need to look for space for yet another book. ?

DB: So what are you doing now that the ebook has been published, and what are your future plans?

JJN: That’s a great question, Daniel! For now I want to be a good friend to my friends (one lost her husband to lung cancer recently so I am thinking especially of her, another lost her brother who was also her best friend very suddenly) and a good partner to my husband. (I feel like I am failing at that a lot of the time because I suffer from anticipatory grief, something I never experienced so deeply as this before). And I want to finish my next poetry book — all I need to do is type and edit some of the many handwritten pages I have accumulated in recent years. Then I want to discover what areas of activism I should focus on outside of poetry (though sometimes inside my poetry as well) including the HPV vaccine, animal rights and women’s rights, minority rights, rights of disabled people—ongoing war, rich poor gap. I guess I will ask Google AI Gemini what to do next! ?

DB: Thank you for spending the time to answer all these questions, Jane. I’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity to interview you at last! Your sense of humor is infectious, even in the face of the anxiety that we all face in these very troubled times, where so many of us seem to be struggling simply to stay afloat.

JJN: Amen to that!

Notes

For Margaret Stawowy’s interview, see www.upthestaircase.org/interview-with-jane-joritz-nakagawa.html.
Diane R. Wiener, “Interview with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa,” https://wordgathering.syr.edu/vol14/issue2/interviews/joritz-nakagawa/
Thomas Fink, “Exchange with Jane Joritiz-Nakagawa on [‘A Poem is a Café]’ in Plan B Audio (Isobar Press, 2020, p. 40,” Dichtung Yammer, 5 Oct. 2024, https://dichtungyammer.wordpress.com/2024/10/05/975/
Michael Northen’s book review of Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Poems: New and Selected appeared in Wordgathering, https://wordgathering.syr.edu/past_issues/issue48/reviews/joritz.html
Frances Presley’s review of Plan B Audio appeared in Long Poem Magazine, https://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/reviews/jane-joritz-nakagawa-plan-b-audio-and-steven-hitchens-the-lager-kilns/

Editor’s Note: Readers are encouraged to visit, “Death, Taxes and Poetry, or, Poetry is My Disability,” a guest blog by Joritz-Nakagawa, in which Jane notes, “When at one of my lowest points, before my third surgery for cancer, I was so frightened of death and further disability that I read Emily Dickinson’s poems aloud to myself every night from my bed. Any poem of hers that mentioned psychic pain would do. And there [are a] great many of such poems by Dickinson, so there was much to choose from! I didn’t even have to repeat myself, as I often do!”

Read an excerpt from Jane Joritz-Nakagama’s Litany in this issue of Wordgathering.

About Daniel Bratton

Daniel Bratton (he/him) is co-founder of The Elora Poetry Centre in Ontario. After teaching for over twenty years at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto, from which he received his Ph.D., he spent seventeen years in the Far East, primarily in Japan, where he was Professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto. He met Jane Joritz-Nakagawa at a poetry reading she had organized for Bill Berkson when he was visiting Kyoto. His biography, Thirty-Two Short Views of Mazo de la Roche, was short-listed for “Best Book (Non-fiction) 1996” by Quill and Quire, and other books and articles have been published in South Korea, Japan, Australia, England, Belgium, Romania, India, Canada, and the USA.

About Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is a former associate professor at a pedagogical university in central Japan known as Aichi University of Education. She is the author of twelve full length collections of poetry as well as chapbooks, fiction, non-fiction, and other works. Her most recent books include Luna (2024) and Plan B Audio (2020), both full length poetry print collections with Isobar Press (Tokyo/London). Born in the USA, Japan has been her home for the latter half of her life. Email is welcome at janejoritznakagawa at gmail dot com.