Becomings E-Book

Joyce Shintani

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Joyce Shintani. Poetry
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 25

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The collection "Becomings" is the second of two collections of Joyce Shintani's poetry. Written between 1983-2021, Shintani's central concerns are on full display: questions concerning identity, spirituality, creativity, and art. The collection reflects a lifetime of self-examination and experimentation. In these poems and fragments, Shintani explores how the self (and our multiple 'selves') creates and shapes itself through art, while also being shaped and created by the world. This is a collection as much about self-exploration and self-expression as it is about the material conditions of Los Angeles, Stuttgart, and Paris, the locations where these poems were written and that influenced Shintani as writer.

Leseprobe

Foreword

I am delighted to have become acquainted with Joyce Shintani’s writing and to have the opportunity to curate this body of her poetry. In Becomings, written from 1985-2021, Shintani’s central concerns are on full display: questions concerning identity, spirituality, creativity, and art. The collection reflects a lifetime of self-examination and experimentation. In these poems and fragments, Shintani explores how the self (and our multiple “selves”) creates and shapes itself through art, while also being shaped and created by the world. This is a collection as much about self-exploration and self-expression as it is about the material conditions of Los Angeles, Stuttgart, and Paris, the locations where these poems were written and that influenced Shintani as a writer.

If Shintani’s first collection, Words I Couldn't Stop, is characterized by an outward opening—emotional, creative, expressive—this collection instead occupies the space left by that opening. This void manifests itself in the poems in Becomings as an underlying awareness of the mortality, of the transience, and the uncertainty of the world. The comfort of religion, and accompanying pastoral tones found in Words I Couldn't Stop give way here to a secular, analytical, corporeal view of the world. In this collection, poetic forms are openly acknowledged as being molded, fused, and sculpted into existence, at times investigated, and rejected; just as in life the self, too, constructs, experiments, and rejects personas. Taking its cue from the collection’s opening poem’s first line—“I live a birth pang / who’s pushing?”, the constellations that structure this collection mark this formation and formulation over the course of a lifetime. I hope that others will find the same honesty and vulnerability and courage I so admire in Shintani’s writing.

James Laval London, May 2021

Preface

The aim of this and the preceding volume is not to present ‘my great poems’, for many are not poems at all. They are documents of ‘becoming’. The writings, most in verse, tell ‘herstory’: the story of a woman trying to become a conductor during a time and in a place where that was almost impossible; the story of a dissociative trying to self-diagnose her disorder—just as impossible; the story of an ethnic woman—a foreigner—trying to find her identity and a place in late 20th century Europe.

Some of the poems may be good, just as some of the concerts I conducted were good. Other concerts and other poems may be of questionable value. Their justification lies not in being fine polished results to be put on display. Rather, they are signposts in a search. They document the sweat behind the performance, the paths not taken, the things left out because ‘they didn’t make the grade’. They are artifacts of becoming.

I am indebted to Christian Bär for encouraging and assisting me in publishing these poems at a moment in my life when nothing