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MY: So I said okay, that's a phase of my life that I should put aside and I started to write. I belonged to, let's see, what was that group? Belonged to... it was not actually a group, a group of Orange County poets decided that they wanted to put together a collection of poems, and Jeni was still, let's see, 1975 she was about twenty-five years old, we asked her to design a cover and we called it Noon. So we just published a few poems, and then subsequently, later on when I belonged to this Orange County Poets that used to have open meetings in Laguna Beach, and during the Vietnam War there was a lot of political stuff, lot of political writing going on. And then the Orange County writers were being charged with being apolitical, that we were just a bunch of conservative writers who weren't doing anything significant. So we got together and said, actually the stuff that we're reading at the readings, you know, some of it is really very good. So we decided to show the world that Orange County was not full of John Birchers and we were, that actually we are very much aware of what's going on in the world. So we decided to counteract the reputation of Orange County poets and publish an anthology. So a fellow by the name of John Branden and I put together an anthology called The Webs We Weave and we published that, we self-published it. It turned out to be, it was quite successful, within the circle of Orange County writers. Some of the people, my friends used the anthology in their creative writing classes because there was quite a variety of writers in that collection.

So, some of that kind of activity I think kept me in touch with some of the poets of that period. And as we talked about my becoming, being introduced to some of the feminist poets, women like Alta who called herself a radical feminist, and she, and of course Nellie Wong came a little bit later in my life, but Nellie called herself the working-class poet. But they were a different brand of poets, you know, who were writing about actual, very elemental experiences right out of their own lives, which, in political poems. It was also a period when the academic world thought of political poems as being something less than aesthetically correct, you know, that poetry should not make a statement. Okay, if you want to make a statement you'd write an essay or write a political pamphlet or something like that, you don't do that with poetry.

But that, and I remember thinking back on my father's senryu period and the kind of comments my mother used to make about the difference between senryu and haiku. That senryu, that's just for men. I mean for men who are, they don't have anything better to do except write senryu, but that women, women should write haiku because it's a much more elegant form of expression. It's not abstract actually, because some of the senryu poems are very -- that the haiku poems are very descriptive of the seasons and so forth, but much more metaphorical in many ways. And so, and I remember thinking, that's right, that's the kind of poetry my father was writing, right out of his experience, you know, and many of the immigrant men and a few women who were writing about the condition of the immigrant lives, and their pain and their difficulties of surviving in a world that doesn't seem to understand them. And during that time in the 1960s, in the 1950s when my dad was meeting with the poets because he, well, he had this compulsion to form groups all the time. He couldn't help himself. [Laughs] So he organized the Senryukai in Chicago after the war and they used to meet again in our house. And by that time I was going to graduate school and I had kind of adopted my mom's rather, what, arrogant class-conscious attitude. And not only that, but then I was also listening to the New Criticism at University of Chicago. So the senryu type of poems that my dad was writing then seemed like second-class poetry, so I didn't really listen to it very much during those -- the way that I was very fascinated with them when I was a child in Seattle. And I thought oh, those guys, you know, they're writing all these little ditties, or something like that. And I really regret that I didn't sit down and take it seriously and talk to my dad a little bit more about this interest, you know, he just had this really consuming interest in expressing himself in poetry. And so towards the end -- well, he died in '53 -- that I had a few years there, like about five or six years that I could have taken advantage of our relationship, and reestablished some kind of a relationship that we had had when I was a child. But so much has happened to me during that time, so much has happened to him, and he was a little bit distant because of his war experience, he was very disapproving of my political activities and so forth, so that kind of kept us, kept a wedge in our relationship.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.