8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: WEEK 4 :: INTRODUCTION BY CURATOR RYU ANDO, AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING CHAPBOOK [零] A PHANTOM ZERO
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by five incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks, please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here! This week’s curator is Ryu Ando, author of the forthcoming chapbook [零] A Phantom Zero.
Bashō writes:
あらたふと青葉若葉の日の光
ara tōto / aoba wakaba no / hi no hikari
O wondrous / green leaf, young leaf / light of the sun.
It’s so simple. Deceptively so. Although we could languish in the beauty of the surface of things, this poem is not just about those green leaves basking in the sun. This is also about the absence of things, the brightness hiding the darkness that looms after the sun sets, or that comes as a season ends. Another great haiku poet Kobayashi Issa tells us we’re gazing at flowers even as we stand atop the roof of hell. If you pause long enough, maybe you’ll see it. But when has youth ever worried about those things? The face of death, we must constantly be reminded, is just around the corner from these fleeting moments lost, “like tears in rain,” as Roy Batty says in Bladerunner.
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Shift_the future: Apologies for the sudden cultural whiplash. The mix of traditional art and pop culture is deliberate. Just because the newest technologies are here, it doesn’t mean we know what to do with them or how to cope with them. The same concerns dog us. We really haven’t changed that much except for the devices that distract us. Enter the speculative arts: science fiction, fantasy, horror. Sometimes viewed derisively as “genre,” these forms are generally clear-cut in their intents as vehicles for storytelling, especially in novels and filmmaking, where they shine bright and have a pervasive influence over popular culture. I’m sure any one of us could list a favorite fantasy, sci-fi, or horror film from just this year.
But how about speculative poems? What are your favorite speculative poems over the last fifty years? Likely this is a bit of a challenge. And what is speculative poetry anyway? For an art form that’s already a hard sell these days, speculative poetry seems even more obscure. It is often seen, erroneously, as lesser in quality, relegated alongside pulp-fiction romance, hard-boiled detectives, weary cowboys, and embedded like so many chintzy rhinestones in the texts of would-be Tolkiens or neo-Ursula Le Guins. I exaggerate of course.
The problem, as Le Guin herself has pointed out, is that sci-fi overall is too often expected to be merely an extrapolation of current trends, leading us to utopia perhaps, but usually more often to dystopia. Its value seems to be derived only from that click-bait list of how many things 1984 or Brave New World got right. There’s nothing more depressing than that. I can read the headlines, too: maybe Bowie was right after all and we’ve only got five years.
But Le Guin (and Bowie, too, by the way in his Berlin Trilogy) also shows us another way. The value of the speculative arts stems not from accurate forecasting, she argues. Instead, the speculative arts thrive as thought experiment. We derive value by working out and showing to ourselves the human response to different conditions that may or may not yet exist.
And here’s where I think speculative poetry especially shines: not in the prophesies that lead us down the slippery slopes to dystopia or along the spiral stairways leading upward to utopia, but in the experiments wrought in the rarefied, fever-pitched, hyper-aware language of poets. Thought experiments thinking of thought itself, in other words. Five years, indeed.
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And so, it’s my absolute pleasure to introduce the seven writers/poets/artists curated for this final week of poetry month 2019. Each of the authors writing on their own favorite and influential poets bring their unique visions, experimentations, and voices to poetry, art, and writing. I would argue, too that all the writers feature work within this tradition of thought-experiment. Even if these writers do not all self-identify as speculative writers, they each push the boundaries of what poetry means and how it is conveyed, situated entirely in the fertile fields of modernism, post-modernism, technology, and genre.
Marge Simon (Science Fiction Poetry Association Grandmaster and multiple Rhysling and Elgin awards winner) and Romie Stott (Filmmaker, poet, and poetry editor for Hugo-nominated online publication Strange Horizons) situate themselves squarely within speculative literature. Jonathan Basile (creator of the Library of Babel website and author of Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality [punctum books]) and Michael Prihoda (founding editor of After the Pause and a…p press; author of The Festival of Guns, a poetic redaction of “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino) hone in on the philosophical issues of creativity and constructing meaning directly related to our current modern worldviews. Christopher Iacono (author at Cuckoobirds) and Varun Ravindran (author at varunravindran.com) each work with multiple genres and forms — focusing often on music (cf. Chris’s wonderful “Between 6 and 8”; Varun’s astounding ‘La route chante…’) and the impact of technology on everyday life (“Yahoo, I’ve been hacked”), giving us unique insights into the interplay between the poetic, the dramatic, and the mundane. Finally, Mike Good, managing editor for Autumn House Press, focuses on people struggling in a post-industrial America. His poems C.W.P. and Field Guide to Sycamore Island, Blawnox, PA show us the consequences of consumerism, the need for hope, and the necessity of dignity.
The poets they have each chosen to highlight this week range from the older and incredibly famous (e.g. Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp), to the contemporary and rising (Darren C. Demaree, G.C. Waldrep), and to the somewhat overlooked (E.A Robinson, Edward Lear, Yves Bonnefoy). They demonstrate that the roots run deep, too deep for us to limit by label or to discriminate against higher or lower forms, “literature” or “genre”. The same problem continues to dog all of us: the world moves on, with or without us.
Ryu | April 2019 Saitama, Japan / Los Angeles
[零] A Phantom Zero is an 8-part piece inspired by ‘the Drake Equation’.
Ryu Ando’s writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Pidgeonholes, Liquid Imagination, and other venues. His first book of poems, The Lost Gardens of the Hakudo Maru, is available from a…p press. Somewhere between L.A. and Saitama. This is where his characters exist and from where their voices carry. Lost and found. In Japan. In America. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither. Somewhere else entirely. https://ryuando.wordpress.com
