First of all, I love your work.
It is strange and phenomenal and amazing.
Thank you.
But I do have a question.
Do you ever write a poem and then you read it out loud,
and you're like, OK?
Because I read your poetry earlier.
And then you read it out loud.
And it was like a completely different meaning
how you read it.
And so I was wondering.
Because it is strange and fantastical
that like your works are.
Do you ever like read it out loud
or have someone read it out to you, and think,
oh, this is something different?
Yes, it does change.
It can change.
Sometimes, I feel more different than not from the me that
wrote that poem in that moment.
And it also changes with all the particles and motions
and fragments that exist in that time and space
every time it happens.
So some of the things I read tonight,
I wrote a long, long time ago.
And some of the things I read are very, very new and recent.
And so all of those have different relationships to me
as a human.
And I tried to imagine this reading
as this particular reading.
So this is a sort of series of poems that I chose to read here
tonight, specifically.
Any other questions?
How long have you been using girl ABC?
How did that come about?
I haven't been asked that before.
Well, it turns out that I started about a year ago,
January, which makes me imagine--
I guess I did actually start it around the inauguration.
Yeah, you want to do that, which is what happened in my head
before I spoke.
But yeah.
Yeah, it did actually start around them.
But I mean, it's I've been thinking
about a lot of those things for a lot of time now.
And they just started rushing forward around that time.
So yeah, it's within the last year or so.
We have time for one more question.
Anyone?
As I understand it, you live both in the United States
and in Japan.
Is that correct?
More or less.
Here's the question.
OK.
What difference do you see in the attitudes about poetry
in the two countries?
That's too big a question.
How about if you're meeting some new people and they say--
OK.
Yes.
You're meeting some new people.
And they ask you what you do, and you happen to be a poet?
Then yes.
In Japan, they go, wow, you're a poet.
And then in America, they say--
I have been asked, is that your hobby?
So yes, there is a different feeling around that.
There was a question over here.
You've raised your hands a couple of times now.
Just going to ask what did it take
for you to get to the point-- or maybe
wasn't a point when you felt like you
had permission to do all those multiple translations
or retranslations?
How did you get there?
I don't have anybody to ask permission,
which is not the case for many other aspects of my life.
So with the poetry, that must not be the framework
that I'm operating from.
And I've heard that sort of language around poetry
and writing and art a lot.
But you already have permission.
And I think that when one is coming from an outside space
anyway, art tends to get position for me.
I find it hard to--
it's much harder to operate as a human
than it is to operate as an artist.
Because when you're making art, I
don't feel the need to ask as much permission.
I recognize that there are many other people
in other circumstances where they actually
do not have the permission to make the kind of art
they want to make.
But for me, my lived life is harder
to survive than the art life.
But the art is what makes the real life survivable,
because you're able to do the thing you
can't do in the real life.
So I don't ask permission.
And I don't know if there's anybody who's upset by my not
having asked for permission.
But why?
I don't know.
I don't feel that.
I've never felt that.
And I don't see why you should need to feel it either.
Sawako, thank you so much for that.
It was such a pleasure.
We have books for sale.
And Sawako will be up there to sign your book.
So thank you.
Thank you, guys.