If the saying is true that "writing about art is like dancing about architecture" — or, as Martin Amis argues, that, when reviewing poems, critics do not respond with sonnet sequences — then, writing about poetry collections is like tap dancing on top of the Tokyo Sky Tree, a dizzying experience that could possibly end in disaster and calumny.
That said, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's latest books warrant attention, regardless of the dangers. Originally from the United States, the poet lives in central Japan, and it is from the poetry of these two countries that her work emerges, converges, and diverges.
"Incidental Music" opens with the marriage and schism of death and birth, a cracking open of the seam of verse, a fractured sonnet probing Nabokov's observation that "the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." The poems that follow — inspired by poets from the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York, and Language schools of poetry — refigure our view of the world. The poet truncates lines and excises words that ground us in experience. At other times, there is a proliferation of nouns, mirroring the materialism of the world, the impossibility of experiencing everything in it. Charles Olson's theory of projective verse and open-field composition informs a number of these poems in that "one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception."
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