The writer in 1936. Nakahara family, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jeffrey Angles’s translation of “Memory of a Three-Year-Old” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255.

This is one of two poems you’ve translated for this issue by Nakahara Chuya. To start, could you tell us a little about Chuya and the poem’s backstory?       

Nakahara Chuya (1907–1937) was a Japanese avant-garde Modernist poet. Although he had a short life and career, today he is one of the best-known twentieth-century poets, remembered for his intensely personal poems and unusual, striking diction. He is routinely included in Japanese-literature textbooks, and his poems have been set to music countless times. “Memory of a Three Year-Old” is a strange little poem that first appeared in the April 1936 issue of Bungei hanron (Literary counterarguments) and was included in Chuya’s second book of poetry, Arishi hi no uta (Songs of days that were, 1938), which was published not long after Chuya’s premature death from tuberculous meningitis.

The memory described in this poem seems to date from Chuya’s early childhood, shortly after he returned to Japan after a couple of months spent in Manchuria, where his father, a high-ranking military doctor, was stationed following the Russo-Japanese War. Whether or not he had a roundworm infection like the one described in this poem is a fact lost to history, but there was a persimmon tree in the courtyard of his home at that time. In a letter to a friend, dated April 12, 1936, Chuya comments that his son had recently turned eighteen months old. He fantasized about withdrawing to the countryside, where he could relax and play with his boy. It seems that thinking about playing with his son prompted Chuya to reflect on his own past. 

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Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Joyelle McSweeney’s “My Fortune” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255.

How did this poem start for you?

For about a year I found the news so bleak that I turned away from the present tense and made myself a connoisseur of Fortune—the grave goods packed into the Pharaoh’s tomb—his mask, his cats, his casket. From the window of my phone, from the cold black cell of my wakefulness, I would watch rival Egyptologists make competing cases, revolving algorithmically, in and out of view. I watched Cocktails with a Curator, a series of hypererudite videos recorded by Frick Gallery staff from their apartments in New York at the height of lockdown, replayed now in sequence like a journal of the plague year—this swain, his lover, this horse, his Polish rider, this hat, this collar, this pearl. This vial. This tipsy lethal cup.

One night, prowling among my treasures in the dark like a crone-ghost or crow, I saw a glittering promotion for some past Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction of a priceless silver service from the eighteenth century. It was laid out on a dark dining table, where you would expect to see such things in use, yet the pieces were crammed on all together, at once, as you never would expect to see them—all the tureens, all the platters, all the chargers, all the salts. And they were thickly lit, from every angle, as you would also never see in life. The light rinding the silver was unnatural, strange, dead. Some lord had lost his fortune. Read More

The English Channel. Photograph by Markus Trienke, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Jana Prikryl’s “Dover Calais” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

In the most basic sense it started with an implicit, unstaged scene from King Lear—Cordelia’s flight from England with her new husband, France, after she’s been banished by her father. I’d been circling Lear for about a year at that point, writing dramatic monologues from approximately Cordelia’s point of view, based on what she experiences in the play. (She experiences quite a lot, even if most of it is only reported by other characters.) I guess more specifically it began with an image of Cordelia falling into the water as her ferry crosses the English Channel. As I wrote these monologues, I wasn’t really interested in making up plot, making up fresh scenes for her to go through—I was trying more to eavesdrop on her language as the play unfolds, but curiously her language often made things happen. That image of her falling in hit me like a memory, which may be why I felt able to write about it, and why the poem opens with that blunt declaration, “I fell in once …” Read More

Tetney Tank Farm: aerial 2025 (2) by Simon Tomson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Millicent Borges Accardi’s “Good Tank Farms” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 254.

How did this poem start?

A teacher, Gay Talese, once advised me to incorporate my day jobs into my writing. At the time, I was working for a dog food manufacturing plant on Malt Avenue in Commerce, California. I’d also worked in oil refineries for ten years or so. I worked at the ARCO Carson refinery as a technical writer from 1992 to 1997, as well as for other refineries and oil-related companies such as BP, ampm, and ARCO Marine (oil tankers). From 1997 to 2016, I was a contractor at Chevron, supporting their refineries from El Segundo, California, to Pascagoula, Mississippi. I had my own safety glasses, hard hat (adorned with worn stickers), and blue fire-retardant Nomex coveralls with my name patch over the pocket. I was familiar with the quirky systems and individuals who make up a ruff-and-ready refinery workplace. I wanted to write about a technical work location in a poetic way—about the serious aspects of blue-collar work, but also its magnificent moments of reflection.

I’ve always admired Fred Voss, and his poetry about being a machinist at an aircraft plant in Long Beach. I wish we had more blue-collar writers these days. Where are the Jack Londons? And the Steinbecks? Where are the writers who work on the dock? Where are stevedores, the longshoremen? The pipe fitters? The electricians?

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