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BN: And I think this kind of segues now right into the next session, kind of discussing your poetry. You mentioned a little bit about the origins of that. I'm kind of curious, were you, even before you started writing poems, did you have an interest in poetry as a younger person, or did you read poetry?

AU: You know, I'm not aware of reading poetry until... you had to read poetry maybe in junior high, in your English class. So no, I wasn't reading poetry on my own. I've sometimes wondered if there's, if certain genes are passed on, you know, like someone whose parent is a painter or sculptor, that type of thing. Because my Uyematsu grandmother wrote tanka, and she was in that very active group of Issei that would contribute their poems to the local ethnic newspaper. I don't know if it was Kashu Mainichi or the Rafu at the time. But prewar, I know, Grandma submitted a lot of her tanka. And the fact that my father could really write well, and I've always had an easy time writing, I've sometimes wondered if it kind of got passed down. [Narr. note: My mother Elsie wrote a column for the Kashu Mainichi.]

Okay, so you were asking about what got me into it. So really, what really started sparking my interest in poetry was a class I took maybe as a sophomore at UCLA. And don't ask me why, for some reason I was drawn to the poems of John Donne, that British poet, and I actually went to the UCLA bookstore and bought a book of poems by him. I don't think I ever read many of them, but I still have that book. I kept it just because it was so strange. But on the other hand, in the next year or two, I would start getting active in the movement and be reading poetry that I'd see in the movement, particularly in Gidra every month, there'd be a poetry page. So that really inspired me. I'll back up a bit, I may have mentioned this earlier, but I did write my first formal poem as a high school junior at Pasadena High, and it was a protest poem called "Simon Says," and I was sort of protesting my peers for being copycats and just conforming to something, because someone said you needed to... so I guess I kept those protest poems up, and I put three at the back of my "Yellow Power" essay when I took Asian American Studies at UCLA in 1969. Poetry seemed to be the (easiest way for) expression. Things I couldn't put down in my essay, feelings, I could put it into a poem. I've been thinking that poetry really has been a vehicle for me to express myself. I'm not that comfortable a speaker in groups, like if you get three to five people together, I'm usually the person that says hardly anything or nothing. I just kind of retreat, I'm not sure where that comes from. But as a young teen, college person, I was on the shy side. So I've sometimes wondered if poetry as well as journal writing, which I started doing in my twenties, has been kind of a release for me to where other people might be talking more, I'm putting things down in my journals and in my poems. So I think that's initially probably why I would find myself writing poems. Even before I started taking poetry classes, if something happened that was, like I know when I turned twenty-five, I wrote a long poem. You know, if there was something stressful that happened, I might want to write a poem. Maybe you could even say it was a form of therapy.

But then the longer I got into writing poetry, I was also just seeing how much it was connecting me to everything. To the outside world, to nature, to other people. It was connecting me to my inner self. And so when I think of poetry, I just think connections. That's how it works for me. And then I think I said something about it's also a way for me to help my memory, because I am forgetful. So if I can get something before I forget it into a journal or a poem, then at least the whole experience isn't lost.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.