Scott Watson – April 29, 2020 | YouTube
Posts Tagged ‘ Sendai ’
RADIATION DAZE
Radiation is anxiety. Radiation is uncertainty. Radiation is being powerless. Radiation is not having a safe place to live. Radiation is having no where to go. Radiation is having no air to breathe no water to drink no food eat that is not radiation’s. These are radiation days. This is how it weighs though we can’t see or smell it.
This is how it’s ours to be of forever like some wicked fairytale curse.
Radiation eyes where is truth? Radiation love is unlivable lives. Radiation is Pre Traumatic Stress Disorder. Radiation is the way we’ll never be. Radiation dream disintegrates God. Radiation is living without hope. Radiation erases what afterlife you may believe in as it erases you the believer.
The radiation that can be seen is not the true radiation. The radiation that can be said is not the true radiation. Radiation is in our piss and shit. It’s in our sperm and eggs creating offspring to the earth’s end.
Radiation is a prefix for every word we utter. Even though we can’t hear it. Radiation is a never-ending suffix of contamination, the sound of words flapping in an on the beach wind. Radiation is the etymology of our existence.
– Scott Watson
July 2013
Sendai, Japan
Taketeru Kudo,a native of Sendai, Japan, speaks of creating which came out of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown.
TEA CEREMONY
politely
she bows
and with
deeply
felt yet
suppressed
emotions
places
radio-
active
matter
into rivers
so sorry.
Scott Watson
Sendai, Japan
Amazon.com: Quake Notes (9780982019634): Scott Watson,
Quake Notes is a journal of poet Scott Watson’s experience in Sendai. Originally appearing as emails to friends/relatives around the world, these notes helped to sooth and focus Watson while surviving with no electricity and water, scarce food and supplies, and frequent after shocks. He writes: “We sleep, but it is a very light sleep and we are startled throughout by more rumbling and shaking. We have socks on too and are ready to run out of our house should the shaking get too violent. How does one tell? How does one know when to ride it out or when to get out?” And then there is the looming situation in Fukushima, along with Watson’s wife’s radiation treatments. “I’m planning our escape. The roads North are clear. Winter snows are melting. Morie’s radiation sessions: ten days more. Will Fukushima’s nukes hold off until then, or will the danger zone expand?” Not just a survival diary, Quake Notes is a cultural critique and a poetic meditation that culminates into a political song against the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
From the foreword by John Martone: “Watson’s Quake Notes would translate well into Japanese. The diary, from Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, through Basho and Issa to Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes, has been a prized Japanese art form, and readers familiar with those writers will see how clearly Watson’s work stands in their light. Watson is never explicit about this heritage; there is nothing self-consciously literary about this little book, but like its antecedents, Quake Notes is all poetry, the language of survival, life.”
HOW DO YOU DO?
dying is how I live.
living is how I die.
and you?
Scott Watson
Sendai, Japan 2012
travel writing rewriting to leave behind
Taneda Santoka
Walking By My Self Again
Scott Watson’s versions of poems by Japan’s last itinerant monk are steeped in knowledge, understanding, love, and imagination. Just the book title alone bears repeating, like one step after another – Walking By My Self Again – foot step word spaces between each word and between myself. Suddenly that taken for granted preposition “by” takes on yet another sense, and that is how Santoka wrote. ~ DF
I ordered my copy from Mountains and Rivers Press and it arrived in a jiffy.
GOD BLESS LGBT
yes. wonderful. great. congratulations. members at last.
universal human rights. i did not know, but I was already
awarded UN UHR before i was born (in 1954, zodiac year of
the Godzilla). now that i know, how do I feel?
while it might have been, for some of my countrymen or
women, good clean fun — or civic duty — to beat a queer
to death, or for certain governments to sentence them to death,
there is no real money in it. that is why it is understandable
that any true capitalist might want to give it up. bad for biz.
which is why certain politicians try to distance our society from
human sacrifice by including LGBT in club UHR. just to show how
good we really are. how morally upstanding. how civilized.
how righteous. we’ve come a long way. we are better than Uganda.
because there is no big money in persecuting LGBT, but, because
there is still heap big money in nuclear power, there are no rights
protecting us from radioactive fallout, from contaminated food,
from contaminated everything. it is okay for radiation from nukes
to give us thyroid cancer, leukemia, breast cancer, liver cancer,
universal human cancer. no universal rights protect us from
morons with money.
[This scroll-like series of Scott Watson’s Nukeletters, written by the poet, writer, editor and publisher, is presented unedited and in its ongoing entirety here at Word Pond. One Nukeletter will be posted each successive day through the completed set of 14 to date. Beyond that, a Nukeletter will be posted as soon as it becomes available. Scott Watson lives in Sendai, Japan. All rights are © Scott Watson. Word Pond is deeply grateful for the author’s permission to share this remarkable series.]
all the world’s a stage and all the world’s in audience.
A fission brought to us by nuclear reactors.
we as audience do not know why though we are
told they have a role to play.
reactors eat through a stage’s floor, eat through
a theater’s door. we try to flee as if it’s a horror
movie monster roaring after us. “run for your
lives!” but there is nowhere to go
because all the world’s a stage.
[This scroll-like series of Scott Watson’s Nukeletters, written by the poet, writer, editor and publisher, is presented unedited and in its ongoing entirety here at Word Pond. One Nukeletter will be posted each successive day through the completed set of 14 to date. Beyond that, a Nukeletter will be posted as soon as it becomes available. Scott Watson lives in Sendai, Japan. All rights are © Scott Watson. Word Pond is deeply grateful for the author’s permission to share this remarkable series.]