A Book of Hours for Anyone, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere
A Review by Mia Hansford
Anonymous Landscape by Yuko Otomo (2019, Lithic Press), is composed of exactly 200 exquisitely spare, numbered poems. Written entirely in Paris and Lille during a 2012 trip Yuko made with her husband, the late jazz poet, Steve Dalachinsky, Anonymous Landscape creates a provocative formalist experiment, and the result is a gorgeous document of the author’s life as an artist and poet.
Spanning more than forty years, Steve and Yuko’s participation in New York’s downtown art and music scene, with improvisors like David Ware, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Daniel Carter and others, became the stuff of jazz legend. In a similar way many vaunted American musicians found their audience in Europe, Steve and Yuko, too, were brought to France by Michel Dorbon, founder of the French Jazz label, Rogue Art. Dorbon encouraged and supported their collaborations with musicians and poets creating in similar idioms in Paris and Bordeaux. Yuko documented each trip extensively. All of it attests to her lifelong collaboration with entire communities spanning much of New York City and Paris France’s jazz and poetry scenes.
For Anonymous Landscape, Otomo wrote one poem each day, capturing the events and energy of the prior day. The poems move between prismatic, fleeting and straight-forward inquiry into how we use language. A few prose poems appear but the overall composition feels like two hundred highly distilled language paintings, at points appearing alongside syllables and symbols of her native Japanese. The book sometimes reads like a zen master's wisdom, sometimes as though Eric Satie returned to earth as a 21st-century poet, and sometimes like the thoughts of an artist questioning and tasting everything. She gives us a quotidian net of travel life and its reverie. Stepping inside her observations and quietly absurd humor, one can become very still. On other pages a jubilant view bursts with high color, as in #134, on a glorious day of the Sun.
Landscape’s dedication is made to “anyone, any thing, anywhere, anytime”. Its first poems repeat the word “anonymous”, setting tone and atmosphere of place, as something to be imagined, something slightly above mortal ground.
#1
hallways/a hallway
no noise
no one
no #s
no names
anonymously unified doors
no floor #s either
Further in, simple thoughts become poems and hold their space easily. The banal is beautiful, not because Yuko adorns, but because she calls toward or questions things simply, leaving them plain, exposed. Certain poems in casual suite form present an exquisite turning of thought. A rose vendor illumines physical hunger and an “unsolved paradise” with the sparest thread of language, a lesson in brevity and the sublime.
#9
roses in many colors with many beautiful names
a rose vendor whose name I don’t know
no money
tonight
#10
hunger
desire
an unsolved blank paradise
#11
two glasses
on the table
on half full
one totally empty
Chardin still life
a name permitted
here
as the only exception
In #11, formed from the same evening as #9 and #10, she calls the painter, Chardin, by name. I wondered why he deserved a mention and when I asked her, she just laughed.
We were sitting there in the restaurant. The rose vendor had come and gone. I looked at the glasses. The light was playing and they were clearly, so perfectly like a Chardin glass. I said it to myself and later wrote it. I let it stay, let myself break the rule. It was so beautiful because we were not at some great feast, but you know..in a no-frills Vietnamese restaurant in a so-so district of Paris.
Her subjects range from un-numbered identical doors, to a lone bird on a roof to open air market crowds in the rain to ways we access language. Half-cut lemons intertwine with adventures at Le Mirroirtoire, a space that in our conversations Yuko likened to Loisaida’s unforgettable squat / performance space, ABC No Rio. She imagines “things rich and poor people buy”. We are with her buying a pair of second-hand shoes as she considers its former wearer. I forget she’s in Paris; she could be anywhere. Breaths of universal motions of living and questioning language find a double pulse. Her douleur and laughter and her textures of place and tone reveal an analytical, humorous soul—a Romantic and a Structuralist who delights in illumining the palpable essences of things and of people.
Her brevity allows these exquisite turns where an awareness of opposites or ironies form a paradigm shift. She said had told me “I enjoyed writing this book so much. Often, I found myself laughing. No pressure, nothing to get right. I had never felt this kind of deep enjoyment in writing before.”
#12
I lay flatly
thinking a horizontal thought
as if I were a writer/composer
exiled in some land, desert or sea.
in his ears
human language sounded
like non-human elements of nature.
Starkly, #13 and #6 make a sum of the book’s initial purpose but then, the whole in its parts and small suites of related poems open up more than lines convey.
#13
I like trees. I might write about them.
Let me open the window
let me forget the noun/name we’ve assigned to it
let me realize it’s me.
In poem #16, her tone approaches the unapologetic nature of structuralism.
#16 (second stanza)
two men & one woman caught my eye, one man with no arms; another with no legs is a woman in fragile fear of losing her mind but not knowing it. What are their names? I want to call their names, instead, I bury them in the nameless crowd as deep as possible into the artificial indifference of my mind.
“I bury them in the nameless crowd”-the poet conveys an instant of perceiving despair and her failure to help, a move straight from her quiet, self-confronting core.
In other places Yuko celebrates her private history simply, directly. Below specific poems Japanese symbols appear with their corresponding words.
#47
the seasons have no proper nouns, but they have general nouns they are called by. I love the way they are called with two syllables in my mother tongue
Haru Natsu Fuyu Aki
#48
on the table
there is a vase
with flowers in it
I try to look at them
without relating
to their names
this way
I erase the boundary
between myself and them
“I am not enough of a verb yet.” In the places where she begins to talk of herself as a verb, Yuko is dancing. The poet’s humor in feeling a bit out of place, a feeling akin to exile, is like vaudeville, and structuralist, but without the hauteur of that school. In becoming language, moving herself from noun to verb, she changes her chemin from being subject to becoming the way of manifesting—subtleties of language are not lost on Yuko.
In a medieval book of hours, desire and materialism are often subverted. Unspoken but undiminished, desire finds its way into the eyes of the narrator in discerning transference. Yuko’s poems are lines of desire as much as any book of hours or days.
#54
I realize I am not quite enough of “a verb” yet
as I observe clouds move pushed
by the residue of last night’s storm.
I see a small patch of “blue” in the sky
another name for another color.
In #65, the absurd merges with homage and longing. “In the ocean of tombstones, we look for a specific stone of a recently deceased friend.” She watches the sky and the narrator is seeing someone in a graveyard. The sky changes; they call out, searching for his stone. It’s one of her few prose poems, poignant and hilarious, both.
In Yuko’s paintings, often only a few marks will create elegant compositions; that sensibility is clearly in the poems. Her dedication to New York’s downtown jazz improvisers who she watched grow from young men into seminal figures, also informs her distillations. In her home and in her mind, Yuko possesses a vault of documentation and experiential knowledge collected over four decades of art-making and music listening. So I was surprised by poem #91. Poet as viewer confronts a contemporary art exhibit in a medieval space. She is appalled and calls out a distinct chasmic disconnect. It’s s a critical poem for its ideas about sensing and working with space. The poem alludes to the act of creation as a behavior, where attention to form matters. It’s as though an important conversation between eras had somehow been missed and we 21st- centurians are the ones missing information, not the medievals.
Yuko’s Japanese childhood was filled with art, history and Buddhism. When she fell in love with Dalachinsky at age twenty-nine, and made her life in New York, she grew into what one might call a deep-space New Yorker. In their Soho apartment’s treasure of poetry and art they fostered over 40 plus years exists another treasure—Otomo’s heritage in vivid threads, which she has woven into this collection.
In Anonymous Landscape, a prodigious use of language and its flourishes are absent. Looking closely prevails. In Yuko’s spare language, a sense of longing feels like undertow. She teases out the essence of various kinds of beauty; she abstracts and distills. Longing and belonging both take root, layering a sense of displacement and a sense of remaining deeply present even as undercurrents of exile, distance and humor texture her voice.
Yuko spoke to me of her mother, grandmother and father who kept daily journals as a way to cherish the mundane—a deeply Buddhist principle. She recalled texts of celebrated courtly women writers; creators of early Japanese Literature whose influence is still felt. She reminded me that even the most high samurai were required to know and internalize portions of “the feminine”: how to arrange flowers and conduct Tea Ceremony; how to carry oneself in different contexts. Her childhood teachings are intuitively bound into her choices in Anonymous Landscape.
I was a stubborn reader. I thought: here we are in Paris, one of the world’s most storied, least anonymous cities—and you’re going to tell me abstractions? But the poet says: You will see. My long beautiful anonymous landscape will hold itself up to the light where you will see your life. Perhaps you will see where I was, but I believe you will really see your own.
Anonymous Landscape
By Yuko Otomo
121 pp.
Lithic Press
$17.00
Mia Hansford is a poet and visual artist. Her painting and mixed media art can be found in the collection at Wheaton College and private collections. She is included in Out Loud: Voices from the Nuyo-Rican Poets Cafe, vol. one and in early issues of A Gathering of Tribes, as well as Sensitive Skin: Selected Writing 2018. Performances include Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Public Theater. Since 2019, she and poet Noah Levin have created The Sun Poem at the New York City Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island. Her writing has appeared as liner notes on recent jazz albums: Matthew Shipp’s Piano Equation, Ivo Perlman’s Garden of Jewels and Shipp’s recent album, Codebreaker. She lives and works in Chattanooga, Tennessee