asianamlitfans | Janice Mirikitani's Love Works

Today, as a way of getting back to my dissertation chapter on performing poetry, I re-read this volume of Mirikitani's selected work and her inaugural address as San Francisco Poet Laureate for 2000-2001.

Love Works (City Lights, 2001) is part of the series of books published of SF's poets laureate, fittingly by City Lights Books with its long history in the San Francisco literary and poetic scene. The inaugural address is wonderful for the way it allows Mirikitani to articulate directly her conception of the power of poetry and language. In fairly idealistic terms, she notes, "Poetry gives form to the power of imagination and speaks as the conscience of real life. . . . Poetry, for me, is the act of speaking the truth of the inner self and being connected to or informed by the community" (10). The volume has a nice selection of Mirikitani's work, including perhaps her best known poem "Breaking Silence," which weaves together her mother's voice as she gives testimony during the Congressional Commission on Redress and her own voice as an activist reclaiming the stories and words of Japanese American internment experience:

. . .

We were told that silence was better,
useful like go quietly,
easier like don't make waves,
expedient like horse stalls, and desert camps.

     Mr. Commissioner, the US Army Signal Corps
     confiscated our property. It was subjected to
     vandalism and ravage. I was coerced into
     signing documents, giving you the authority
     to take . . . to take . . .

I particularly like a series of SF locations and sounds that she traces in her inaugural address, a catalog of sorts of the distinctive communities that comprise San Francisco woven through the music and rhythms of various peoples:

City Lights in North Beach, Ferlinghetti's temple of poetry & famous beats. I still hear Ginsberg's "Guru Ommmmm" in an antinuclear drone.

Chinatown: Rhythm from Kearny Street Writers Workshop, the ghost of I Hotel, and manong Freddie's banjo strums, longing for home. But it is the powerful year of the Dragon, Chinese voices warn.

. . .

Samba of the Mission: the beat taps our feet, the heat grabs our hips, our lips can't resist roses - in the teeth of our possibilities.

There's a poem titled "You Bring Out the 'B' in Me," too, that reminded me of Bao Phi's "You Bring Out the Vietnamese in Me", both poems that explore how others' perceptions of the speaker's racialized/gendered body create an intersubjectivity and a kind of social meaning. Mirikitani's poem in particular considers her presence in Hawai'i with her black husband and how a "tanned, blond woman / in bikini" is unable to see her. (Bao Phi notes his poem is after Sandra Cisneros's "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me." It's also definitely worth watching his performances of the poem, available on YouTube.)