Please start this close reading with some basic instructions. Not from Sawako Nakayasu. Though it would be a delight to interview Nakayasu and ask how she would like readers to prepare themselves for the pieces in her book, Texture Notes. The instructions are my suggestion, because the book is not so much “poetry” as “notes after poetic impulses.” Notes about synthesizing and correlating, materializing the affective. Rather than book-as-constellation-of-poetic-concerns, I would read this book as series of textual objects that could have been hung in an art gallery. And maybe this is me attempting my own “texture note” on Nakayasu’s book. Instructions available as a flyer beside each piece in the gallery. The walls painted a neutral color with a uniform line of frames along the walls.
My instructions for reading “3.21.2004”:
- Be prepared for some “delightful fun.” This is not in quotes, because it’s from Nakayasu’s book. The quotations are intended to put you in mind of the voice you hear saying something like “delightful fun.”
- Stretch. Like physically stretch, as the poem “3.21.2004” will require some physical activity.
- Be serious. Which should feel juxtaposed to, in opposition to, and in collaboration with the “delightful fun” that appears in the #1 instruction.
- Rest assured, I did what this poem told me to. [Says the voice of the gallery’s curator—a person who resembles me, but is not, because the curator worked in collaboration with the Nakayasu who wrote the poem] As in, I took the “you” in the poem to mean me when I was reading it. I was able to press my body onto a friend, who is a conductor (of music). And I admire conductors (on the MBTA), so it wasn’t outside my comfort zone to carry out the tail end of this poem.
- While you read the poem (attached below) think of it as a literal set of instructions. It’s going to be much better if you hear “you” and think YOU reading. That’s what I did. Though I also imagined “you” as other people who I thought had already done it.
Hopefully, instructions like this help establish a spirit for the poem. Or they hint at the book’s ethos, which deals a lot with the incidental. Like “incidentally,” the poet had a dream about having fallen into a hamburger. Or she did a video, like Ginger Ko in these video pieces at FIVES. Ko’s videos have an “incidental” feel to the poem. Explanatory but not explaining. Like I don’t really need Nakayasu to explain why (in a different “texture note”) a character sketch should be done as quickly as you can. But I would like to see what led her to that understanding. Or it would be interesting if Nakayasu had provided a narration while she walked us up to each of these poems. Like some of CA Conrad’s SOMATIC exercises. Which, however narrative, might be better described as imaginative vibe-setters. “If you find yourself like I did,” goes the spirit of Conrad’s prose intro’s, “you would do well to do this.” I’m being more Kent Shaw in my characterization of these. Sorry. Because I’m not really capable of setting the Conrad “vibes,” which I would characterize as a lot more assertive.
Mostly, my impulse to ask Nakayasu for greater context is the delightful fun I have reading the notes. Like many of Nakayasu’s books, the work lodges you in a middle-of-things feeling. Like her book nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she could be a day of someone coming home from work, but with an infinite attention span. The book will always be incomplete, there will always be the feeling of incompleteness to life. Or her book The Ants, which might not need any explanation for its middle-of-things-ness. Because moving forward doesn’t even feel like an impulse in ant world. It’s biological imperative. It’s existential.
Perhaps you’ve noticed I’ve reached an impasse in writing about these Nakayasu “texture notes.” I’ve written nothing about “3.21.2004” except a series of instructions that barely hint at what the poem is about. Or what the poem is doing. I have, however, indicated the poem wants you to do something. I have offered instructions to help put you in the spirit of what the poet wants you to be doing, or what the poem demonstrates as an activity that would give you access to the texture of “conducting,” or if you were to impersonate the poem and find your own inner conductor, what you might see or feel, and your access to personally interpreting an otherwise pedestrian word like “conductor.” Perhaps you see the “inspirational” qualities when you have literally pressed your body against the body of a music conductor, and you’ve felt the “bodyful of music” (an actual quote from Nakayasu’s “3.21.2004”). And the world looks and feels and has an activity for you now that’s different. That’s partly what the poem is about. This imaginative situation where you could access what it’s like living the life of a creative person. But not just in their act of creation. Also in the “memory of every single morning after” a performance, “the joy from being nourished.”
And the poem is about the coincidence of conductor as material that can carry an electrical impulse and conductor as person guiding an orchestra through a piece of music and conductor as the person attending to the order on a train. What a strange collection of words all existing as a single word! How might you describe the “texture” of that?
And that, dear reader, is what I’ve been trying to capture in the lead-up to reading this single poem, “3.21.2004.” Because this “conductor” situation might feel like fertile ground for generating a series of poems highlighting the coincidence of words with these various meanings. The “want” of Mary Jo Bang’s Apology of Want. The “leaving” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Marguerite are you grieving over goldengrove’s unleaving?” Nakayasu’s book, and interest in “texture” is actually much stranger. Much “weirder” to use the parlance of one of my favorite poetry podcasts, Index for Continuance. Texture exists as a between. It is a combination of any material deemed poetic or delightful fun or “inspirational” or weird with any other material. Meaning, it confounds a formulaic method, it keeps reaching for a method that could provide a formula, but then the formula slips from its fingers. And that’s the poetic method.
Which could be used as a lens for almost any of the Nakayasu books I’ve read. Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From and its concept of girlhood or even “English-language” poetry. Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2022) and its understanding of a book. Texture Notes could be considered an absurdist experiment, conducted on oneself or a friend, fabricated from circumstances the poem finds at its disposal (or is assigned to be disposaling of). There’s a frame for this book and this poem that is entirely absurd. But it’s not really absurd. Which is, perhaps, the point of most absurdist pieces. Like when Adorno argues that Surrealists weren’t really refusing a set meaning for their writing, only asking that a reader relieve themselves of how they think a poem might discover “meaning.” Maybe you can have fun with meaning!! And meaning-making! I would argue fun is the main reason for the “texture note” poems. So, please, do not reduce your fun-expectation settings by thinking of these as “just absurdist experiments.”
The poems in Texture Notes endeavor to making significant statements. Is the significance intentional? Incidental? Improvisational? OMG. Do you see what’s happening here? 10x fun!! Phenomenology made fun! Which is what Everything can feel like when a poem is ready to do everything! I think? In “3.21.2004,” lexicality leads to texturicality. Words can mean words, or can visit in on words. There’s so much arbitrary operating in words. Take it easy with the words. They’re fragile beings. Does the conductor in front of the symphony know about electricity? Likely, this poem says. Not that that conductor would necessarily call it electricity. Because he’s very busy leading a passionate life, thinking passionate things the morning after he’s given a (presumably) passionate performance. But, music conductor, the nerves form electric signals. The poet is herself a collection of conducting materials especially attuned to the conducting feeling. A simple touch. Like how definitions for a single word touch one another in the dictionary. Separated only by a number. And often the number is trying to superscript itself, so it’s out of the way. But for the word “conductor,” there must be more conducting that’s going on!