“Reading Not Reading”: Eight Questions for Ryo Yamaguchi
Ryo Yamaguchi lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works as the publisher of Copper Canyon Press, an independent, poetry-focused press established over fifty years ago. He has worked in publishing for more than a decade, including roles at Wave Press and the University of Chicago Press. Ryo is the author of The Refusal of Suitors, a collection of poems published by Naomi Press, and was a reviewer and critic for Harriet Books and Michigan Quarterly Review as well as other outlets. His works have appeared in many publications, including his poem “Reading Not Reading”, which appeared in the 2020 edition of Best American Poetry.
This poem immediately captivated me through its unique form, one that I’d never seen in poetry before. It gave a sense of rigidity and a breaking up of the ideas presented on the pages. The piece itself captures the telling of a story to a loved one. The speaker seems to be unsure about their story, as we can see from its structure, as if the story that they are telling is occurring as they describe it. This reveals the aspect of motion, one of the main ideas of the piece. It’s present in the poem, where the experience being recited is being created as it goes along. “Reading Not Reading” also portrays a sense of stress and tension that can be present in the decisions and choices we make. In addition, it can easily be related to our daily lives in that we all have our own unique experiences that we eagerly want to get out and share with those around us. This can be challenging, however, and our thoughts may not come out as clear as we wish them to, making conveying them more difficult.
I read that you went on a year-long road trip across the U.S. in late 2019. What was the most interesting place that you visited, and did that experience influence or inspire any of your later pieces?
Yes, my wife and I traveled all of 2020, which was right through the start of the pandemic. Of course we didn’t anticipate the pandemic, and it was a hard year for us as it was for everyone, though we had a bit of privileged perspective on it not having to work or maintain a household. We spent a lot of time in wild places (away from people) and I have so many favorites I could tell you about. One is Coyote Gulch in southern Utah, a long section of narrow canyon resplendent with architectures of light and rock, groves of cottonwoods serving as unexpected sanctuarial camps. While I can’t point to specific pieces of writing, my mind itself feels reshaped around it (it’s a space that feels at once private and grand, like a cathedral).
The structure of “Reading Not Reading” is certainly different from others that I’ve read. Does the format have a specific purpose, and if so, how does it affect the meaning of the poem?
Thank you for this attuned question! There is not a traditionally formal structure to this poem, though I’m certain its repetitions come across, and I think I was interested in the way repetition serves in some traditional forms (like the sestina or villanelle) but can be loosened in a free verse format (I’m not alone among poets experimenting with this). In “Reading Not Reading,” I think the repetition and staggered margins create a kind of stuttering effect, and I actually really like that – it’s the mind skipping back and forth, and I hope the poem mimics that kind of attention/distraction cycle that can happen, especially, at times, while reading.
When reading the poem, four ideas stand out to me: thought, being bound, reading, and motion. Each of these things means something to me, but how do you specifically use them to establish the message behind the poem?
This is great, I’d never really isolated these ideas (or maybe, “energies”), and I think this is totally right. I’m not often one to say there is a message, per se, behind the poem, but I do think the general thing the poem is trying to express is this tension in wanting to commit to something, this desire to share an experience (in this case, a memory) with a beloved but being hesitant to do so, maybe because that experience is still unfolding. That’s the motion part. It’s all about being caught in the middle of your life, looking back at a memory, to the side at someone else’s experience (in this case, the book the speaker is reading), and forward at a present moment alongside someone, and wanting to link the three but not knowing how to do it.
Towards the end of the poem, you italicize “here,” and I wasn’t able to pin down the exact purpose of the format change. Can you describe the importance behind this choice?
Oh the dreaded italics in a poem – maybe it’s meant to convey that it will be spoken, maybe it’s conveyed as a kind of hushed whisper. I’m not exactly sure! I’ll say I imagine the speaking of that word with a gesture of the hand, a kind of presentation or even gift.
Who or what do you think has had the most significant influence on your poetry?
Too many influences to account for them all. I often actually go to philosophy a lot when I think about what I’ve hoped my poems achieve – and here I’d cite the profound sense of the adventure of life in Heidegger’s Being and Time and the exuberance of mental clarity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. These are very fancy answers (and these are authors with very fraught legacies), but I stand by them as great reading projections that will be hard but with the potential to be extremely rewarding. If that’s all a bit much, I might cite two very different poets – maybe not influences, per se, but who taught me what poetry can really do – and that’s Chelsey Minnis and Jorie Graham. Again, among so many other possibilities – poetry is wide and vast and its own multiverse.
In your first email, you mentioned how the Best American Poetry series is coming to an end this year. How do you think this reflects the modern state of American poetry?
The poem you are highlighting was in an edition of Best American Poetry, and I am sad that it’s coming to an end. The “Best Of” or “Top Ten” type publications and articles are always a bit forced, and plenty of people have made compelling arguments that we don’t need a “Best” anything. But this anthology was routinely face out in chain bookstores reaching many, many readers who might otherwise feel lost trying to find poetry, especially contemporary poetry, and for that it did a tremendous service.
What is one thing you would tell someone, whether they’re in high school or older, if they told you that they didn’t really have an interest in or haven’t ever read poetry?
The first thing I’d say is “that’s totally OK!”. The second thing I’d say is “I’ll bet you do, you just never thought of it as poetry.” If you’ve ever sung along with a favorite song, or chuckled at a joke in a TV show, or even felt compelled to buy something because you can’t get a message out of your head, you are connecting with, if not poetry, a very close genetic version of it. It’s language clicking, and an adventure into poetry from there offers so much opportunity to enrich our relationship with one of the most important inventions of our species, the one that may very well define who we are. As with anything, I’d say, start small. You don’t need to read an entire book, or an entire play by Shakespeare (though these are great things to do) – just one poem in a day, and give yourself as much time with that one poem as you need. It isn’t to be consumed, or ticked off, or accomplished – just spend some time with it, like watching birds out the window. Nothing needs to happen. But something will be happening. It’s a wonderful antidote to our otherwise often frenetic lives of chopped up attention.
Recently, I’ve been learning about romanticism in school and have also noticed that you include certain aspects of nature in some of your poems, where one could use your writing to create a landscape or scenery. Did you have any of these romantic values in mind when you were writing?
Oh I may well say I’m a diehard Romantic, with a capital “R”, and I encourage a broad and generous view of what that might mean. To me the words “nature” and “wonder” are almost synonymous, and in the past I’ve said that the forest is where I go to encounter the world. That said, I like to think of nature and something like cities as intertwined (and I have written a lot about cities too) – nature burbles up in urban environments, in one way of thinking about it, or it is that we mirror nature in what we build – that might be another. I think it’s very important – especially with our consciousness of the Anthropocene and the devastating toll our activities have had on the earth – to consider not just nature but how we interact with it, whether its preservation, exploitation, or something in between (maybe, by the writing of poems about it). Of course I believe we should be much better stewards of our natural world, and I think that probably begins with a meaningful personal experience within it, as the Romantics sought. Just like reading a poem, go into a forest, park, or to a beach near you (so much beauty where you live) and spend some slow time with no real aim but just to observe (if you bring a notebook, well, so be it!).