Sawako Nakayasu - a study not of, but through, ants. The exposé of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human "nouveau-ambitious" and "free-thinking" lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled

Sawako Nakayasu, The Ants, Les Figues Press, 2014.

excerpt

THE ANTS is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, THE ANTS is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the exposé of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human "nouveau-ambitious" and "free-thinking" lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled. Found in the soups of dumplings and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nayayasu writes as the "industry of survival," exploring interfaces of love, ambition, and strategy. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non-mechanical pencil, to be isolated in the safety of home, or to "find" "it" "all" at the very very last moment? THE ANTS is the distance, the break, the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton, and Nakayasu puts her finger on it, and it, and it.

“We have plenty to learn from the numerous ants. Sawako Nakayasu—writer, antologist, Baudelaire’s sister—turns daily life inside out and upside down then puts it into perfect little boxes. Here we follow the lines of black legged, syntactical units—the words—as they cross and they tickle the heart of the matter with us.”—John Granger

The lives and times of ants take center stage in vignettes from Nakayasu (Texture Notes) as she highlights the human qualities of these working-class bugs. Nakayasu’s ants lead a detailed and at times volatile life, ranging from feats of athletic strength to political changes for self-governance. Ants are found living in a frozen colony, inside carrot cakes, and posing for Tokyo art students; some are burrowed deeply within dental cavities, while others float “peacefully along in a leaf-boat they believe is bound for eternal glory or sweetness.” Nakayasu is able to evoke moments of both tenderness and morbid curiosity, and she actively participates in these prose poems, inserting herself into the lives and destinies of the ants, especially when her body is involved: “At some point in the day, time will run out, or an ant will fall off, and it could very well possibly be that as close as they ever got to each other was my torso.” Nakayasu’s ants, “clutching one another out of desperation or in search of comfort, slide back down to the wretched earth from which they try to escape once more,” and in doing so illustrate her ability to draw empathy for some of the world’s most fragile creatures: humans. - Publishers Weekly

I’ve waited seven years for this book.
In my second year of grad school at the University of Arizona (or MFA-Land, as I came to call it), Sawako Nakayasu read her poetry in the Modern Languages Auditorium to a hundred or so Creative Writing students. She was last in a lineup that included Deborah Bernhardt and Catherine Wing; all three were loosely grouped together as “language poets,” a label I found confusing and redundant. At the time I was still weaning my poetry from the school of grand, dramatic thesis statements. I was hungry for oddity, craved permission to loosen the grammatical grip on my own work. So language poetry it was.
Nakayasu’s poems fucked with fragmentation and run-ons. She threw parentheses into enjambments like a punk e.e. cummings. Her poetry was highly cerebral and kinda mathy in its breakdown and reconfiguration of linguistic forms. She read a lot of poems about bugs.
The poem that stuck in my mind for the better part of a decade was “Desert Ant,” which begins:
Says ‘and’ with every step, so that it sounds like this: ‘and and and and and and and and and and and and,’ and so on. By the time I make my way to the same desert, I have been collecting and carrying an accumulation of nouns over the past, oh I don’t know how many days, and so I insert them in between the steps of the ant.
And ends:
I thought we were doing okay, but before I know it the ant is out of sight, and then before I know it, the ant has made a decision, and then before I know it, the ant is in my mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth.
You can find “Desert Ant” in Nakayasu’s new book, The Ants, along with ninety or so other poems that explore the mythical lives of formicidae.
This collection from Les Figues Press, Los Angeles’s best publisher of conceptual and experimental poetics, reads like a fantastical encyclopedia,  a journalistic bestiary of sentient insects. Straddling the boundary between prose poetry and flash fiction (is there even a line to blur anymore?) Nakayasu gives us a litany of half-page passages on the strange and ordered mechanisms of her imagined ant world.
Early on, we learn about the ants’ measurement of time in “Apple Speed”:
We have our light years, and they. Their longest unit of time is based on nothing else but. The lifespan of one of their own and. Different colonies use different varieties of apple, but. The time it takes for a single ant to eat an entire. Apple. . . . An so it goes on that an apple speed is the sum of a number of ant lifetimes, the total amount of time required for the consumption of an entire apple by one hypothetical, long-living ant, and so then the question might go, how many apple speeds does it take to dig this hole, from right here under my feet, straight through the underground and popping back up again over there where you.
See what I mean about the mathiness? Nakayasu outlines the parameters of living in the shadow insect world beneath the one her readers know. Even time takes on different properties in ant life. So much so that sentences are stopped before they can end, much like the short lives of ants themselves. What I love about this poem, like many others in the collection, is the line that Nakayasu draws between the lives of humans and the lives of her beloved ants. The speaker who shows up at the end of the poem ponders the distance between her and her missing friend (beloved? Family?), and if that distance can be measured in ant speed.
Elsewhere, in “Ice Event 2,” Nakayasu gives us a three and a half-page epic story about a colony of ants living under ice. The story begins with a division between the Home Ants and the Away Ants, and the subsequent journey through the ice, which leads to a hockey game, the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area, the Great Wall of China, the continental divide, and back to the University of Colorado Ice Arena, all for the purpose of codifying the myth of the Frozen Ant Species and their survival. There are dozens of poems like this, which take quite a turn for the surreal.…
Reading this book, I couldn’t help but think of the song, “The Ants Go Marching,” both the traditional children’s tune and the Dave Matthews Band’s 1990s hit. Neither are as compelling as the images or lines in Nakayasu’s book, but the image of ants marching in a line is a popular metaphor often used to illustrate the conformity, rigidity and ultimate futility of human lives. We lock into our place in the line, we work, we walk, we die, one by one, hurrah, hurrah. But Nakayasu’s poetry does not accept that. Or perhaps it does, but gives weight and attention to all the miraculous and strange things that happen within the line before it ends.
Take “Decay,” for example:
The great desire is to get inside of it – the poem, the painting, the movie, the music.
An ant, perceiving itself to have failed to get in anywhere, takes one brave leap off of a cliff, thereby making its last and final attempt to get into something, anything, anyhow.
The first line’s declaration reminds us why we are drawn towards art, despite or maybe because of our insignificant existences. In Nakayasu’s insect world, the ants, too, want inside creation. They, like us, are prone to the alienation and isolation of living. In the ant’s final leap off the cliff, the speaker in the poem describes the ant as “there, inside that sound, however short-lived, who cares if it is witnessed or not.”
Who cares indeed. Nakayasu probes the big existential questions through the lens of ants, the same insects we compare ourselves to in rueful humility. In the course of the universe’s history, the epic wars, love stories and poems of humanity mean next to nothing. “As important as ants,” you may hear someone say. Or, “We could be crushed like bugs.”
That may be true, Nakayasu seems to respond, but let me show you just how important ants are.
The ants have their battles and byzantine social rules too. Nakayasu asks her readers to crouch down and examine, imagine, the smaller and smallest. Her prose is tender and thoughtful, though it often lands in the tragicomic. For instance, in the poem “No Collective,”
a group of ants gets together and decides to form a collective. They gather all the necessary documentation, fill out all the proper information in the correct little boxes, get photos taken in the right size and dimensions and angle, and step precisely through every single hoop required of them to become an officially recognized collective.
This is the kind of humor Nakayasu exacts from her text. She leads us through an ant bureaucracy whose absurdity mirrors our own. The joke inherent in this setup: Why on earth would ants need a collective? Don’t they realize they are the epitome of all of our allegories for groupthink? Nakayasu then delivers her dry punchline: “Their application is denied, however, on the grounds that ants are an inherently collective species.”…
Nakayasu is not afraid to break her dear ants’ hearts; in fact, she does so fairly often. The ants face apocalyptic fires, menacing human shoes, and turf wars with cockroaches. They are separated from their lovers, their children, and their friends, and indifferently swept into glass jars by curious or sadistic humans. Nakayasu recounts these ant tragedies not with the voice of an omnipotent omniscient narrator, but as a journalist on the ground, recording the stories for ant posterity.
At times, these prose poems take on a more spiritual quality, such as the surreal and psychosexual, “An Ant in the Mouth of Madonna Behind Locked Doors,” an ant that “is, and isn’t, and is.” Or in the poem with the koan of a title, “What Is an Ant Getting Washed with the Rice?” The book may pivot on passages like these, from the latter selection:
 . . . standing in a position, I believe, called still, there beyond, glimpsing unknown glossy yellow objects and a puddle of sauce spilled twelve minutes ago and a crumb, O glorious crumb, and that clear piece of Tupperware on the bottom of which lies another ant, which is in an equally problematic predicament, one that is neither inside nor outside, above or below, but firmly embedded within the plastic of the plastic.
Here, Nakayasu interrogates the relativity of belief and catastrophe. How do we measure the suffering of the ant tempest-tossed with the washed rice, relative to that of the Tupperware-trapped ant? Is rescue even a possibility for either of them? And in “An Ant in the Mouth of Madonna Behind Locked Doors,” we see another ant confined within a human universe, yet still retaining its roster of wishes and desires, both independent of and related to its pop star host’s body.
The central questions in The Ants: What is meaning? How is it constructed and destroyed? What miraculous and bizarre discoveries can be made within the fissures of its imperfect logic? The ants march across the page in their black lines, and the metaphor is clear. What are they marching towards? What will they find when they get there? Is anyone watching them, and does it matter?
In a certain light, The Ants can be taken for an instructional on life in the face of impending disaster. You never know when the shoe will crush down, when the colony will collapse. And yet. And yet. There are still collectives to be organized and Insect Olympics to train for. Foregrounded by the weight of history, our dramas are ridiculous, and aren’t, and are. - Lauren Eggert-Crowe

They populate cities, rural areas and suburbia. Outdoors they assemble in perfect formation between sidewalk cracks or pile on top of what must appear to them a Himalayan mountain of dirt. Their living arrangement is more noticeable and precarious if they take up residence inside a human home. Spiders are artisans; fireflies decorate summer night skies. Ants are just their industrious, ungainly selves.
Or are they? Sawako Nakayasu’s meditation on The Ants goes beyond children tormenting them with sticks, politically correct Pixar storylines, or controlled classroom experiences, placing or imagining the insects on a human level.
The Ants is a series of unconnected short pieces either about ants or about the author’s fascination with them. As a kid, Nakayasu’s parents denied her repeated requests for an ant farm. Indeed, she traces her artistic development to using pencils filled with crushed ants, resulting in lines “coming out funny.” In this particular literary instance, adulthood has its advantages because she never has to search for her inspiration, and the styles she applies are impressive.
The two-paragraph “Harsh Edit” combines the absurd with the metaphorical when her editor demands more of what “looks cute” and the two-way revision process between writer and subject trying to broker “what is truly best for all of us involved.” Nakayasu never takes her editor’s advice to reduce her friends to cartoon level. They do not have cute names; they remain anonymous. The animation is in the writing, not the result. The author applies her impressive observation skills in several creative ways. “Apple Seed” is part field notes, part blank verse:
The time it takes for a single ant to eat an entire. Apple. The fact of the matter is, working along makes the task excruciatingly. Slow. Working alone, a single ant is unable to eat the entire. Thus a new replacement ant must.
The interaction between the author and subjects is more personal in “Carrot Cake,” which the ants “insultingly enough, did not find it good enough to eat,” and choose instead to live inside.
Most of the pieces explore life in the ant world. Nakayasu gives the insects human traits that, perhaps, are universal for all creatures. Some vignettes, such as “Ladybug” when a friendship ends because the ex-ant friend prefers the prettier insects, are humorous. Most are not. “Decay” is one ant’s desperate attempt to do something meaningful before its brief life ends. “Hazing” describes a rite of passage for those seeking indoor living accommodations. “Ant Liberation” follows “freethinking” ants from Yorba Linda, California conducting extensive research on finding the perfect home…only to have the author’s mother find them.
The Ants is a peek into an alternative world that exists a few steps away. Just be careful where you walk. - Patricia Contino

Since the beginning of this century a number of poets of Asian descent have published books that have helped redefine the field of study known as Asian American poetry, while challenging the various received definitions of what constitutes avant-garde or innovative writing.
Predictably, the gatekeepers of the avant-garde have overlooked these poets, partly because they believe that identity and language are separate domains. Based on the assumption that one should aspire to be a post-identity writer, this oversight is further proof of how invested certain authorities are in maintaining a problematic narrative populated almost solely by white writers.
Those who argue for post-identity writing are advancing that English is colorless and even neutral, which may be true if words remain unused. But use and context are another matter. Moreover, the old binary opposition between voice (or what Robert Grenier disparaged as SPEECH) and text (existing printed material, which, at the very least, implies some kind of approval and stability) is no longer viable. It might have been true in the 1970s, when the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, who were calling attention to the materiality of language, were rising into prominence, but globalism and immigration (or migration) has changed the situation. By introducing varieties of pidgin, slippage, sonic confusion, mispronunciations, misspellings, malapropisms, graffiti, and unknowing false signs into English, globalism has upended the rules defining areas of fixed vocabulary, grammar and spelling. We are living in a cauldron of relentless collisions.
This is what the poet and translator Don Mee Choi said in an interview that appeared on the Lantern Review blog (December 5, 2012):
My English was strange for a long time. I’m sure it still is. When my younger brother was growing up in Hong Kong, he spoke Korean, English, Cantonese, and Japanese all mixed up together. He and his Japanese friends communicated perfectly in this mixed-up language. They were too young to censor themselves. The same thing was going on in my head except that I was older and knew how to censor myself. I only freely talked funny with my sister and a Chinese friend who also knew how to talk funny. At school, I wore my uniform and memorized and recited things perfectly that I didn’t understand at all. I always failed because that funny voice inside me always butchered my English. So translating and writing is like this for me. I wear my school uniform and try to memorize and recite poems perfectly, but I always end up butchering them. My primary technique for translation and my own poetry is failure.
In addition to Don Mee Choi, the poets and writers of Asian descent who have altered the literary landscape include: Linh Dinh, Sesshu Fosster, Shirley Lim, Tan Lin, Sawako Nakayasu, Cathy Park Hong, Brandon Shimoda, Brian Kim Stefans, Monica Youn. Many of them write across genres. Beyond being of Asian descent and writing in English, what they share is an engagement with the materiality of language. I see their engagement with language as signaling a paradigm shift away from the lyric poetry of the generation that emerged in the 1970s and ’80s. Such a shift suggests that an anthology of these and other writers should be put together, focusing on their openness to experimentation, while establishing a distance between them and the writers collected in Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), which was edited by Frank Chin, Jeffrey Chan and Lawson Fusao Inada, and The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993), edited by Garret Hongo, which includes some of my poems.
Among the poets I have mentioned, all of who deserve further attention, I want — in this essay — to single out one, Sawako Nakayasu, whose books of poetry and translations constitute an impressive body of work. In the last month, I have gotten her two most recent books: The Ants (Les Figues, 2014), a series of prose poems, and The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books, 2015), which she translated from the Japanese. Ugly Duckling Presse is about to release her translation of Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls by Tatsumi Hijikata. An innovative Japanese choreographer, Hijikata (1928–1986) founded the extreme dance performance art called Butoh.
While I have not read all the books and translations that Nakayasu has published, I have read enough to know that I will be reading be the rest. In addition to these two books, I would recommend you read Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009) and Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), as well as her translation, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions, 2008). In these five books you get a sense of the breadth of her investigation into the possibilities of different forms and language itself, whether writing in English or translating from the Japanese.
This is what Nakayasu has said about poetry:
I work mostly in poetry because it claims to be neither fiction nor non-fiction, because it acknowledges the gap between what really was or is, and what is said about it. Is the woman really in a box? It depends on who you ask, how they see it, or what constitutes a box. I like to claim that all of my poems are “true.”
This is what she has said about translating:
One of the difficulties in translating poetry is balancing multiple demands at once — for example, to make it simultaneously faithful and beautiful. Yet it got me to thinking about faithfulness and its opposite, perhaps also in terms of defining what it means to be ‘true.’ (What good is a faithful partner if he or she is not interesting in the first place?) At some point I started experimenting with unfaithful or less faithful, roguish translations. I wanted to find different ways of being “true” to the work I was translating.
In these two statements I sense a feeling of inexplicable distance. It is apparent to me that Nakasayu recognizes that she lives both inside and outside two languages (English and Japanese) and is never completely grounded in either one. As she states, “it depends on who you ask” or, as I hear it, it depends on which Nakasayu you ask. I don’t mean the one who is conversant in English and the one who is conversant in Japanese. I am not being reductive, and it is not that simple. Nakasayu uses words to construct a space, often an intimate one between the writer and reader, the lover and the beloved, friends. This space is distinguished by its instability, and the slippages that arise.
Nakayasu’s poetics probably share something with this section from the 111 prose poems that make up For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut: 
Entering the room, a pulse is taken right when the heart is crushed upon a color-printed newspaper. And so it is today, too, a line of poetry goes without shooting you, and is nothing more than a soundless watery segment floating up for the first time, finally, enfolded in the gathering dusk of a long detour.
You cannot reduce this to a theme or a story, nor can you decipher it, and yet the language is hardly difficult. There are no obscure words, but persistent questions do arise: whose pulse is being taken when the heart is crushed? Here, heart hardly seems a metaphor. Or is it? In this poetry about poetry the body is central, which locates both Nakayasu and Hiraide’s work in a very different province than the one explored by Stéphane Mallarmé.
According to Nakayasu:
Sagawa Chika is Japan’s first female Modernist poet, whose work resonated deeply with, ad helped shape, the most dynamic shifts and developments in the poetry of that era. She was a singular and remarkably inventive poet who had developed a poetics influenced by French literary movements as they were imported to Japan, English and American Modernist writers whose work she translated, and contrasts between her nature-filled upbringing and cosmopolitan Tokyo. Despite her death in 1936 at the young age of 24, it is impossible to overstate the importance of her remarkable oeuvre, which was created in less than six years of poetic production during one of the greatest social and cultural shifts of her nation’s history.
While reading both the “Introduction” to The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa and the translations, it occurred to me that Nakayasu is changing what Americans know of both the history of Modernism in Japan and contemporary Japanese writers. Sagawa absorbed Dada, Surrealism and Futurism, both the literature and the visual art. Her writing shows the influence of Cubism, the “collapsing of foreground and background.” Her translations include James Joyce’s Chamber Music and poems by Charles Reznikoff.
As Nakayasu astutely points out in her “Introduction”:
[…] Sagawa’ poetics allow us to read her poems not as fixed, stable objects, but something more architecturally complex, inviting us to read (or see) the poem from various angles.
Here is the poem “In White”:
Flickering above the grass like a flame
An amethyst button sparkles
And you descend slowly
The turtle dove lends its ear to a lost voice,
A mesh of sunbeams cuts through the treetops.
Green terrace and dried flower petals.
I remember to wind my clock.
In translating Hiraide, Nakayasu chose a writer who works in various genres and unclassifiable forms, and cannot be conveniently labeled a novelist or a poet. Hiraide’s novel, The Guest Cat, which was translated by Eric Selland, was a surprise bestseller. In the “Preface” to For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, Nakayasu writes:
[…] For the Fighting Spirit Of The Walnut […] once again commanded great attention, as it marked a crucial, albeit early, turn in Hiriade’s career, in which he begins his lifelong explorations of prose as the Idea of poetry, extended syntax, and a poetics of the grammatical line.
Of course, this is also true of Nakayasu. It is not hard to figure out why Nakayasu translated poems and prose by Sagawa and Hiraide into English. In Hiraide, one also reads (sees) him collapsing foreground and background:
The sound of bursting flesh of fruit scatters between your ears. The
forefront of this spray beckons to those outside of sorrow.
The writings of Sagawa and Hiraide are crucial to Nakayasu’s own work, meaning that she has developed her poetics without necessarily locating herself within the Western tradition of avant-garde literature. This doesn’t mean that she hasn’t learned from European and American writers, but that she complicates any essentialist reading of lineage.
The Ants is the third book of Nakasayu’s poetry that I have read. Hurry Home Honey is a book of love poems unlike any other. Caryl Pagel has characterized Texture Notes as “a daybook, a pillow book, a journal, and a map.” Each book is distinguished by its grammar and syntax. The Ants is made of more than seventy prose piece, only a few of which are longer than a page. In prose poems such as “Ants in a Japanese Can,” “Chinese Patriot Ants,” and “Korean Ants Too Erudite for their Own Good,” Nakasayu writes about ethnic food (“soup dumplings”), the movement of language from one culture to another (“one of the 13,500 of the traditional, non-simplified Chinese characters”), game shows (“Jeopardy”), and a “Japanese-Greek chorus.”
Nakasayu’s The Ants is a rich, dense mélange of material derived from a breathtaking range of sources, including local customs, mistranslations and science fiction. You get the feeling that she has read everybody, from Gertrude Stein to Andre Breton to Rosmarie Waldrop, and made them her own. A feeling of dislocation, often inflected by a wise humor, spreads throughout the book, starting with the first sentence of the first piece, “We the Heathens”:
We go to have Chinese for dinner and my friend who is visiting
from another planet is horrified (and perhaps a little excited also),
until I explain to her that we are having Chinese food, not Chinese people.

Ants appear in nearly every one of the prose pieces. They are the Other, the self, performance artists, immigrants and so much more. It is difficult to imagine Nakasayu writing in a way that separates language from identity, which is to say her work is neither colorless nor “avant-garde.” She is a masterful writer and translator whose work I consider indispensable. - John Yau