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MY: But as I said, so in the 1970s when I was thinking about publishing my writings, the way that the Camp Notes, my, the writings that I did in camp kind of came out of the shoebox was when I was in these writing groups, and you're working full-time and, "Oh my gosh, tonight is my poetry workshop, I don't have anything that I have prepared," and so you start going through your papers. I'd take out the blue shoebox and was going through the stuff that I wrote long time ago. And I remember kind of dredging that up and taking it to my poetry group and then kind of realizing that, they had no idea what I was talking -- I mean, I didn't explain what it was or anything. But I went to a weekend retreat that was being conducted by a New York poet by the name of Edward Field. And he is a very down-to-earth poet, one of the Beat poets from way back. He's a little bit younger than I am. He still lives in New York, he lives in New York City. And he, and I took my whole manuscript of Camp Notes. And at that time, I think when Alta said, you know, "I'd really like to publish these poems," and I looked at her and I said, "I don't really know if they're poems. I don't even know if they're good" -- you know, how can you tell? I remember asking her, "How could you tell that they were any good? How do you tell? How do you evaluate your own writing?" So when I heard that Edward Field, whose work I had admired for many years, was having a... conducting a workshop down by Ocean -- this little place in Oceanside, I applied and I went down there. And I spent the weekend there with him and many other poets, and he said to submit the manuscript to him beforehand and he would go over them and so forth. And he kind of handed mine back to me and he said, "This is incredible." And I go, "Really?" And that he -- and then he told the rest of the group that, you know, true poetry should come right out of the experience of one's life. And that really gave me a boost, to look at my poems in a kind of a new way.

And then Edward, I still see him off and on, we're both getting on in age so we don't travel as much as we used to, but... and then I showed my manuscript, told Alta that I'm kind of ready to -- and she asked me if I would like to revise it and I said, "No, I don't think so, I think I'll just leave it, them the way they are." There were a couple poems in there where I, when I took it to -- for instance there was one poem in there, in that book, that uses the word "biodegradable," and it had something to do with this old man who got -- I forgot the title of it but it was a story about -- "The Search and Rescue" I think it was called. An old man had gone outside, in Idaho, got outside the fence and I guess he was looking, the men used to look for the sagebrush and they would polish it up and they would become little artifacts on the coffee table. And he apparently went out to look for sagebrush, and he apparently got lost and he was missing, so we were told... so the group of us went out, you know, the way you kind of take, go in a row to look for -- obviously they thought maybe he was dead I guess by that time, but we all helped in searching for him, and of course they found he had died out there. I don't know what he died of, but... so I wrote this poem about search and rescue because it kind of, the irony, you know, of this man who kind of buried himself out there. And then the American Indians used to have their old people, you know, I don't know if you know the ritual of how they used to have old people wander off. And I thought, well, he had kind of wandered off and buried himself, because he was covered up with sand. That's why we had a hard time finding him. And they had to kind of dig him up and bring him back and get cremated or whatever it is they were doing, and they have a funeral service and so forth. I found that image, you know, the whole process kind of ironic. So I decided to write a poem about it. And that was one of the poems that I had taken to the workshop, and I thought well, they're not going to understand what this poem is about, so I put the word in, "biodegradable," you know, is he biodegradable? You know, as he goes into the ground. So that poem is kind of out of -- I forgot the word is when it is out of context of the history of the time -- because I don't think the word "biodegradable" was even a word in the 1940s when I was writing it. [Laughs] It was probably not even, maybe it wasn't even an idea in our mind, in anybody's mind. So anyway, that word is sort of out of context of that period. But most of the writing I think is pretty much intact except for the phraseology, I put the words in breath, breath units, you know, I wrote it down in breath units to make it look more like a poem I suppose, or something like that.

And that was in 1976 when Alta and Angel, her then-husband, decided that they would like to publish it. And they asked me if I had any more and I did have some but they were rather not intact so there were only about twenty poems, I think, in Camp Notes, and the rest of it -- oh yeah, I know, she asked me if there were any more camp poems and I said, "You know, going into camp wasn't the only, by 1975 going to camp was not the only thing I did with my whole life." [Laughs] I did other things with my life and I didn't want to publish a whole book of poems about camp life as if that was the only thing that ever happened to me. And so I said, "I have a whole bunch of poems about my mother," because I'd become -- because of the women's movement I've really come to appreciate who she is. I've come to appreciate the Issei parents and their, and my father's education and his training of all of us. And I wanted to sort of acknowledge their part in my life, and so the first part of Camp Notes has poems that I had written about my father and my mother, and some poems that I wrote in my mother's voice, through the period between camp and 1975. And then of course I wrote a few feminist poems about my relationship with my husband and some poems, other of my poems about awareness of my environment. And so that's what, it's a very small book because Shameless Hussy Press was a garage operation in Alta's house. And up until that time she was only publishing stapled books, they didn't have any spine, and I remember telling her, you know, "I would kind of like to have a spine." Because you know what happens to these books that are folded with the staples in, they kind of disappear on the bookshelf. Whereas a book that kind of sits on the bookshelf and you could see the spine and you have the title, then at least you can recognize the book is there. I was, had the discussion with Alta and she said... and so that was the first book with a spine that was bound that she published, but it was very, very small, so it still disappears anyway on the bookshelf.

And then in the meantime Alta was diagnosed with MS, multiple sclerosis, and so she has had to give up the Shameless Hussy Press. She's doing fine now, which is kind of amazing, but she -- so I needed another publisher for my second book so that took a long time. Twelve years is a long time between books. 1988 I published Desert Run. And then 1987 I got involved with Amnesty International and with the political prisoners movement, with my brother Michael Yasutake. And I have really not written that much poetry. But I have, I have enough of a collection maybe for a memoir, my essays. And you saw some of them, you know, the stuff that I had written about my growing up period and so forth, little bits and pieces. I should probably try to get those together and prose writings, and I have quite a body of poetry that, if I can get my act together and try to put that together, but...

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.