Of the several story arcs I have been working on over the last couple of years The Himeyuri (ひめゆり学徒隊) sometimes called The Lily Corps in English, has been kept my attention for a very long time. The Himeyuri were a group of female high school students formed into a nursing unit for the Imperial Japanese […]
Frustration at history. Frustration
at … so little to work with. The defense
of Van, its fall, where this Armenian
story begins with the Turkish offense
against its citizens. Let us start there.
Women hiding in the dark, listening
to the bombs fall. Our stories of warfare
do not interest me; the massacring
at Van left what? One more war metaphor?
I hate war […]
Musicians and bands on Myspace are curious creatures considering all one needs to do is create a profile for free, upload your music and suddenly you have brought into existence something that in previous generations would have required the backing of a major record label. It is true, of course, that there were unsigned bands […]
Yarimo / To My Love comes from Datevik Hovanesian’s 1998 album Listen To My Heart. I have used the phrase before in an earlier poem but I like it so much I am using it again. Please enjoy.
Give up my name. Give up my form; this form
I call my body. Angels do […]
the electric company’s jennifer of the jungle
As a wee Zachary I was fascinated by a children’s television show from the 1970s, The Electric Company; especially a segment staring Judy Graubert as Jennifer of the Jungle with her friend and Paul the Gorilla.
This poem wasn’t based on that sketch, I had written it before […]
How can I explain this to you? I arrived in Gyumri, Armenia, in 1995 to teach English at the Lord Byron English School #20 as a Peace Corps volunteer. It had only been seven years after the Spitak earthquake and the city still lay in rubble; entire block upon city block lay in […]
helen gahagan douglas in she (1935)
This entire episode started with a little research into famed politician and actress Helen Gahagan Douglas; a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s 14th district (1945 – 1951). She was born on November 25, 1900; died June 28, 1980 at the age of 79 and appeared […]
liana papyan
Saxophone players are rare in this world; female sax players doubly so. I had been listening to Ada Rovatti the night before; I love her hard bop sound, her song Airbop. I am sure there must be a female, Armenian sax player somewhere as well, holding court in a jazz club in […]
datevik hovanesian’s yarimo
One of the miracles of being human I find most satisfying is the simple realization that pain cannot last forever. I am not speaking for a particular person or a group or set of people — pain is an identity as much as love — I speak only for myself. However, […]
datevik hovanesian’s ervum em’
Year after year I forget more and more of the Armenian words I use to know. It is a pity, I love the language so but who can I speak it with in Grand Rapids, Michigan? I know no one. The most I can turn up are bizarre little […]
datevik hovanesian’s es gisher, lusniak gisher
I love the moon. No, let me take that back. I do not know the moon — I know the light in the sky; the feeling I get when I am all by myself, walking in a Michigan forest; the happiness moonlight brings me. One of my […]
datevik hovanesian, the breeze, hov arek
The idea that the wind and the breezes will blow us trouble, as Billie Holiday once put it in the song Ill Wind — Blow, ill wind, blow away/ Let me rest today/ You’re blowin’ me no good/ No good — fascinates me. My adopted hometown, Gyumri, sits on […]
datevik hovanesian, partridge, gakavik
To write is to let the world know what we have witnessed, we are told. Often I am cynical of poetry’s positive effect on the world, but that has entirely to do with my own short-comings as a writer, a feeling that everything I do I cast into a void that […]
alfonsina storni, voy a dormir
I have been working on a collaboration with naturalist, illustrator, cartoonist, librarian and the archivist for the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators Diane T. Sands for a while. She creates these fantastic page long, graphic novel-ish drawings I simple adore. The theme is ocean-related and I am very excited […]
charles mingus, flowers for a lady
1974; umbria jazz festival, todi, italy
The connection between leprechauns, the wee people, and jazz great Charles Mingus is obvious. Someone needs to cast Warwick Davis, famous for his roles as The Leprechaun from the movies of the same name, as Mingus in a bi op film. As we […]
mingus big band, moanin’
Sometimes music can directly reflect in a poem and sometimes just take effect all subtle-like. The Mingus Big Band is a NYC ensemble that specializes in the compositions of the late Charles Mingus. I love what Mingus does in this piece and others like E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too, he creates a […]
bobbie humphrey’s harlem river drive
I have never been to New York City, but one day I’d like to. While the jazz flute has never been my craziest of instruments (the Mamas and the Papas killed it for me) this song is from Bobbie Humphrey’s 1973 album Blacks and Blues. It has been sampled by […]
janis joplin’s summertime from
the cheap thrills recording session
To listen to Janis Joplin sing Summertime in any context, any recording, is to stand in the presence of something bigger than you or I. Only then, once, did she ever rival Nina Simone in pain and anger. I never really like her backup band; that […]
soundtrack of rev. jesse jackson’s
i am somebody
classic sesame street, roosevelt
franklin teaches about africa
all of this is for Matthew Thomas “Gordon” Robinson, Jr. (1937 – 2002) who made the magic happen.
Way back when, before black was black, black was
purple and Mister Roosevelt Franklin
scat-rhymed live on TV. Was that because
they could not find a muppet […]
charles mingus better get hit in your soul (1959)
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” — Emily Dickinson.
What was the last thing that took the top of your head off? Besides a falling piece of Skylab, I mean? A […]
Heinrich Hoffmann was a Frankfort physician who had the skill of improvising “humorous little stories,” as he once put it, to help calm his younger patients. His collection, Struwwelpter (which roughly translates into Shock-headed Peter), is, perhaps, still a thing of nightmares and yet in its day it became the most popular children’s book […]
marvin gaye, inner city blues
Make Me Wanna Holler, is, of course, the refrain from Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues. And that, as Walt Whitman would say, is America.
Jazz and poetry took a fascinating step forward when it found 1970s funk, regardless of what straight, sticky people like Wynton Marsalis might say […]
miles davis performing chez le
photograph du motel … damn!
I was working in the music section of a chain bookstore in Las Vegas when I discovered the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) featuring the horn work of Miles Davis. It has been described by jazz critic Phil Johnson as “the loneliest trumpet sound you […]
Monk’s Mood with Thelonious Monk
and John Coltrane
I have been waiting for that scream, the one Federico Garcia Lorca referred to in Blood Wedding, “the dark root of the scream” ripped from the throat. It’s a long time in coming. The record player is on instead. Vinyl dreams and other strange things. […]
Part of an Elvin Jones, Max Roach
and Art Blakey drum battle
My sister-in-law, Mary, plays the drums. She is a rock drummer, not into jazz as far as I can tell (I could be wrong), but if she were and I happened to live in L.A. I would certain go and listen. The line “It’s […]
Billie Holiday and Lester Young, Fine and Mellow
Often we talk about sadness as if they were instruments, “goin’ to croon me some grief, it is my guitar.” And perhaps for some it is, in the same way certain people can hear colors and see sounds. But the more I think about the concept […]
who killed cock robin? freddie redd (piano)
jackie mclean (sax) from “the connection”
This is a scene from the movie The Connection (1961) where a film crew attempts to interview a jazz-jam while they are in mid-session. The song, Who Killed Cock Robin, is taken from an old Mother Goose nursery rhyme, from which I borrowed […]
“Lazy Bird” from Coltrane’s Blue Train album
Today John Coltrane’s Blue Train has been on heavy rotation. It is one of the saddest jazz albums I have ever heard; not because any of its composition are moody or sentimental but because they offered so much and we have delivered so little. It is like […]
So many days gone and so much I still don’t know. I’ve been listening to The Essential Ma Rainey over and over. I listen to a lot over and over, it’s hard to shift gears when you are deep in something good. I love Gertrude Malissa Nix Rainey Pridgitt, Mother of the Blues, […]
Rimi Natsukawa is an marvelous, marvelous folk singer from Okinawan. Here she is performing the American spiritual “Amazing Grace” in her native Okinawan.
hot air slicing through
her words, name, body; splattered
on my startled face.
And so ends the story of the Himeyuri.
I first became interested in making a movie version of the story of the Himeyuri when I stumbled, completely by accident, on a rare film clip that burnt itself into my brain. […]
I still remember some Okinawan phrases I learned at that time. For some reason, all of them have to do with hospitality.
– Ikuo Ogiso, a Japanese soldier. (Feifer, 58)
In Okinawa, we say Nichi do takara: Life is a treasure. Whatever the reasons to fight and kill, however profound the […]
At the heart of the story of the Himeyuri, what turned this from simply being one more example of courage during terrible times into horror (at least for me), was an order given right before Okinawa fell to the Americans; the order commanding the Nurse Corps to […]
A Couple of Notes:
Throughout this movie I have been trying to use only Okinawan phrases and concepts in the dialog. Thus, using the Okinawan term for mother, “Okkaa,” instead of the Japanese,“Okasan,” makes perfect sense to me. However, because 99% of my research comes from books, there are […]
History, they say, has terrible ways of repeating itself. In this part of the film we meet a 10 year-old girl, Chiaki; a neighbor of Kohitsuji’s, someone she tries to take care of even as the Himeyuri begin their fateful march across the island to the battle front.
I chose the name Chiaki on purpose; […]
Uminai-gami’s Weaving
The title for this part of the story comes from the Okinawan Creator goddess Uminai-gami; who, along with her brother Umikii-gami, created all humans and the islands. I have yet to find if Uminai-gami was, in fact, a weaver of souls but it seemed plausible in the realm of story telling. I […]
The Himeyuri, ひめゆり — Blood, Iron & Fog [remix]
I think I made a mistake; picking to sing and record the song “Strange Fruit” and attempting to use it as a metaphor for the atrocities that occurred during WWII might be doing a grave injustice to the song and for all those for racial violence is […]
In a recent fictionalized retelling of the Himeyuri (so far only shown on independent Japanese TV), the producers of the movie chose the American Civil War song “Amazing Grace” as the theme music to draw the story together. It is a good choice; as a reflective message illustrating the terrible suffering of a dark […]
Here is the first installment of my Himeyuri story. I must stress again (and throughout this project) that this is pure fiction. While the story is based on the last months of World War II and the Japanese nurse aides of Okinawa, the characters are not based on anyone living or dead.
The narrator […]