Interview with Miho Nonaka
Interview with Miho Nonaka conducted by Jefferson Navicky
I first met poet Miho Nonaka when we both studied at a summer writing institute in Prague in 1999. Since then, I’ve kept up with Miho’s poetic activities mainly through a mutual friend. In 2020, when Miho’s book, The Museum of Small Bones (Ashland Poetry Press) came out, I eagerly bought it, and much to my delight, I found it full of some of the most striking prose poems I’d read in a while. For this interview with Miho, I wanted to focus on the prose poem.
Jefferson Navicky: To start, can you tell me about how prose poetry first entered your life? What is your origin story with prose poems?
Miho Nonaka: The first time I understood how prose and poetry coexist was when I started reading Haruki Murakami’s fiction in middle school. My cousin was one of his editors, and I became a fan. According to Murakami, his debut novel was born of multiple translation processes. He was unhappy with the first draft of his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing, and instead of revising it, he tried translating it into English. His limited vocabulary forced him to focus only on the essentials, and it came out simpler, stripped–down. Then, he re–translated this English version into Japanese. When you read his early works, you notice there are gaps, white spaces, small silences. The prose is imbued with a poetic charge where the writer’s eloquence is suppressed. I loved Murakami’s poetic voice, which felt like a haven to me, a haven from the school I hated, from the long, sterile hours of studying for high school entrance exams.
Much later, in graduate school, I wrote a master’s thesis on a Japanese surrealist, Shuzo Takiguchi. Here is a short passage I translated from his Jikken–shitsu ni okeru taiyo–shi e no kokaijo (A Public Letter to Mr. Sun from the Laboratory), a very long prose poem:
She is the emergence. She is a thunder inside a glass body
A fan–shaped spider web of unblurred sound A cheer of
phenomena An ocean of love She is the emergence. She is
a nature’s favorite — a willow — sulfuric acid — snow drifted by
the wind . . . . an adolescence reached after death
My time in the graduate program was mostly traumatic, but I remember the excitement of reading and translating a passage like this, where Takiguchi tries to extract what he calls “a ray of surreality.” “She” may be Takiguchi’s own muse, who presides over the “temporal and eternal fête,” who keeps transforming herself and becomes, at one point, the impossible season of “adolescence reached after death.” I was mesmerized by the relentless speed and urgency of her transformation, like imagination is pure magma erupting from a volcano. This was probably the first so–called prose poem that transported me.
JN: I love the notion, especially for prose poems, that the imagination is pure magma erupting from a volcano. That makes me think more about Takiguchi’s phrase “a ray of surreality.” What do you think of the link between surreality and prose poetry? Is there some essential aspect of the prose poem that lends itself particularly well to the surreal? I’m thinking about many of Russell Edson’s celebrated prose poems, but also Sabrina Orah Mark’s prose poems in Tsim Tsum. And so many others . . .
MN: As a disciple of André Breton, Takiguchi was a purist, in a way. He couldn’t bring himself to call his work “poems,” so he called them “poetic experiments,” probably because he felt poetry belonged to a higher, purer realm. The kind of surreality I find in American poetry is different from the original movement of French surrealism. Those French writers and Takiguchi were radically committed to producing the sparks of the marvelous and the miraculous through their work and communities; they saw themselves as visionaries. You could call that romantic, possibly elitist. American writers whose work is associated with surrealism tend to be more down–to–earth, even goofy at times. They have no allegiance to the kind of heroism that was part of the original package of surrealism. Personally, I like them both: the purity of Takiguchi’s vision and the impurity of American surrealism (though of course, the idea of purity itself is suspect, in my opinion).
There are various types of prose poems, but the kind I enjoy the most is the one that creates or hints at a different world by describing a surreal situation matter–of–factly. I like Russell Edson’s poems that are cartoonish and fable–like without the resolution of a plot or any moral. Perhaps the link between prose poetry and the surreal is the fact that prose has enough space to construct another world or reality however incompletely. At least, it gives the reader just enough context to believe that it is going to tell a tale, even if it ends up only suggesting a ghost of one.
I am a lover of the absurd and uncanny. I still remember the thrill I felt when I first read Sabrina Orah Mark’s “The Babies.” I was a poetry editor for Gulf Coast at the time, and it was one of the most memorable submissions. I loved it! The world in her poem was definitely uncanny. There were darkly funny moments I enjoyed, but what ultimately captivated me was the memory of trauma, whether of an individual or collective kind, evoked through the language of the surreal. Perhaps, certain realities can only be communicated through artfully arranged half–fables.
JN: I’m so glad you mentioned enjoying prose poems that describe a surreal situation matter–of–factly. Because that leads me to one of my favorite poems of yours — “Rupture” (originally published in The Southern Review). The poem is filled with imagery that toes the line of the fantastical, yet is ultimately very much of this world: cooking marbles, a crystal radio. Both of these are real things, but they seem unreal, or at least to me they do (I wish I had heard about cooking marbles when I was young — I would’ve tried it! And it probably would’ve been the best ((and only)) thing I could cook!) I read in an interview with The Southern Review that you chose the prose poem form for this piece because it is a less stable, more expansive form. Considering it’s such a chunky, almost box–like little form, I wonder how you think about the prose poem as being less stable.
MN: I know it sounds surreal, but I used to fry marbles when I was in middle school — get them extremely hot in the pan and then put them in ice water. The shock would cause shiny fissures to form inside these marbles. And I believed they were as beautiful as gems. My teacher Lucie Brock–Broido used to quote Jorie Graham, “Contained damage makes for beauty,” which would always make me think of the marble that contained a silvery web at its core.
As you read in that interview, my first draft had line breaks and stanzas. It was in quatrains: four lines per stanza. Four is of course an even number, and the symmetrical nature of it gives the impression of stability. Four is pronounced shi in Japanese, and because death is also pronounced shi, it is a sinister number, not just in Japan, but in other Asian countries. I wasn’t thinking about that when composing in quatrains, but I was going for a stable form that provides a sense of completion and emphasizes the ritual aspect of marble cooking. Well, it didn’t work! My description of how to cook marbles in neat quatrains sounded monotonous and dead. Whatever poem I was trying to write had to burst out of that form. Prose felt more open, less controlled, and therefore less stable, but more life–giving to me at the time. Definitely more expansive. I needed space so I could add a few more contextual details since the ritual didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened “on the cusp of two Japanese eras,” when the emperor my father once believed was god was facing death. Adding that bit of history felt important, as well as the fact that I was studying English, still a very new language to me, whose effect would remain suspect — a kind of pharmakon that could bring either health or harm.
JN: That’s such a great story. And I love the Jorie Graham quote. I wanted to ask you about one more of your poems from your marvelous collection, The Museum of Small Bones. I really LOVE “Production of Silk” (originally published in The Kenyon Review Online, 2017). The Kenyon Review describes it as an essay, though in your book, each of the thirty separate sections are given their own page and roman numeral, making them feel like distinct interlinked prose poems. I was hoping you could talk a little about how that poem came together, and also how you think about genre in an expansive piece like that.
MN: Jefferson, the important trigger for that piece was what happened in the summer program in Prague where we first met! The two white American poets came to the workshop I was in, and they basically refused to critique my poem called “The Production of Silk.” One of them said, “This isn’t a poem; I just don’t believe any of it for a second.” In particular, he hated the image of a mother inside a silk cocoon, but he had no advice for revision. The other poet laughed and said he didn’t mind the image of mulberries, because he liked eating them. Their behavior was shocking, and it ended up enraging many people in the program. Later, when I was back in Japan, I happened on a poem by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro from Man’yoshu, Japan’s oldest poetry anthology, compiled in the mid–eighth century. It revolves around the image of the poet’s beloved locked inside a silk cocoon. My encounter with the poem didn’t feel accidental. It felt as if the poem was calling me to see that the image of a silk cocoon as a longed for, lyrical interior goes back to the dawn of Japanese poetics, whether or not it was made believable to certain American poets through translation. Then I started writing short prose pieces about silkworms — my experience of raising them, their appetite for mulberry leaves, how many cocoons it takes to make a single silk tie, my grandfather who came from a family of silk farmers, the process of harvesting silk in which pupae have to die, etc. I translated poems from Man’yoshu, that use the image of silkworms or their cocoons. I translated an excerpt from Snow Country by Japanese novelist Kawabata Yasunari who won the Nobel prize in 1968, a scene where the protagonist’s lover is compared to a translucent silkworm inside a white cocoon. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really thinking about genre when I was composing. For me, they were personal musings, sketches, scientific entries, translated fragments. I shuffled and reshuffled them, getting rid of some sections and adding new ones, trying to create something of a kaleidoscope that shows colorful patterns and possible meanings instead of a fixed thesis. It was an exercise of intuition instead of logic. I feel, broadly speaking, the piece turned out to be a kind of ars poetica: the cost of producing silk was pointing to the sacrifice demanded of the practitioner of poetic art. But that was not all. Because of the sections where I align myself with the Japanese poetic tradition and what has been passed down from my own family, the overall effect of the piece, at least for me, was grounding; it wasn’t just a poetic search after the ineffable.
JN: While I wasn’t in that infamous workshop with you in Prague, I certainly HEARD about this story when it happened. I remember it as a scandal back then, and it has only grown more egregious in memory. However, what I most love about that story is how you took a disappointing workshop experience (and so many of us have had them!) and turned it into such an expansive, astounding poem that flies in the face of those two poets’ ignorance.
To finish up, I was wondering what words of encouragement you might have for people who are curious about, even captivated by prose poetry, but also a bit disquieted or bewildered by it. As one of my students once said in response to reading a prose poem in class, “Is that it?! Wait, that’s a poem?” What might you say to that student?
MN: Did your student make that comment after reading one of Russell Edson’s poems? I ask this, because that was my exact response when I first read Edson’s prose poem. He compares the prose poem to “a cast–iron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or not.” Perhaps we have this tacit expectation that a proper poem must arrive at some form of insight or even transcendence. That is a lot of pressure. You shouldn’t worry whether your poem is going to take off or not when you first start drafting. Poetic ambition can be deadly in the beginning stage of creation. The prose poem is a great entrance into writing, because its down–to–earth, even unpoetic appearance takes some of the pressure off and makes us start playing with words right there and then. We can stay our quotidian selves and still be ecstatic. And who knows, one day, we might find ourselves flying, one way or another.
Or, you may be the writer who likes to approach poetic production with more ambition. In his letter, Baudelaire wrote, “Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness?” Indeed, we all have the right to dream such a miracle! And if you feel frustrated by the prose poems you’ve read so far, you should write one that excites you. I think that’s the beauty of prose poem. There is so much freedom in the format that you can be as ambitious as you want, as low–key as you want, as realistic as you want, or as surreal as you want. It is “supple enough and rugged enough” to house our contradictory impulses and ambivalence of feelings.