Started writing a new series of poems tentatively titled "Inspector Inspector."
The Ghost Bus
The bus goes past us, and then stops a full length ahead. An
inspector, blue-uniformed, hops off, and the bus takes off. It is not our bus.
The next bus stops for us, but also stops a full-length before my bus-stop.
There is no reason for it, as the bus lane in front of it is blank, as blank as
the white spaces between words. There is no reason for my bus to stop there. I
walk down the length of my morning bus, and I walk down the length of the ghost
bus, wondering how many ghost people are riding it to a ghost destination that
I know nothing of. The lights change just in time for me to cross the road, and
I look down the full length of the ghost bus, seeing no one, but my morning
driver who is looking, I imagine, back at me. It is the first year of the
pandemic.
*
SNOW AT 5 PM has a French fan! His review on Amazon, translated from French into English, made me laugh in delirium. "“Snow at 5 pm” is probably the most interesting fiction I've read in a very long time. But is it possible to talk about fiction? It's much more than that. Jee Leong Koh's latest book is not really classifiable. It is poetry in the first place, but it is also a book committed in particular to fighting discrimination (racial, societal, gender-based, etc.) and a very incisive look at American society from the 1940s to 2066. Yes, it should be mentioned that this book is also a work of anticipation with dystopian tones. If the haikus are stunning, if the subjects covered are serious, the author does not neglect humor, including self-derision, and some passages are juicy to say the least.
The originality remains in that Jee Leong Koh imagines himself having discovered a wad of 107 lightly burned haikus in the fireplace of the New York apartment, where he moved in 2011. He also imagines having translated them from Japanese into English whereas the original will never be found which will leave doubts about their real author (Jee Leong Koh or an insignificant Japanese poet?). But to add to this construction worthy of Russian dolls, the book consists of a series of commentaries of each haiku published in 2066 by a literary critic, Sam Fujimoto-Mayer, whose personality is as rich as his imagination.
The haikus include allusions to Central Park; its flowers, trees, animals, monuments and water points, and are all marvels of poetry - and Jee Leong Koh confirms in this that he is not the “majorly minor poet” that Sam Fujimoto-Mayer claims to be. But the latter warns the reader in its preface that each verse must be uncovered and explained with reference to social justice.
Each commentary is a success in itself in that it makes us not only learn about the different rules of the haikus but also address topics such as the discrimination that the Japanese and Japanese-American suffered after the attack on Pearl Harbour. The fact that Sam Fujimoto-Mayer is Jewish by his mother, Japanese by his father and endowed with a male organ by one of his lovers (here again, the construction is funny) leads the latter to approach some rather interesting relations between the fate of Jews and that of Japanese (and Asians more generally) as well as that of homosexuals. It is not difficult to imagine that Sam Fujimoto-Mayer resists the drifts of power even if his affiliation to an underground resistance is perhaps another fiction within fiction.
When I first opened the book, I thought I would be able to read it very quickly. But the wealth of information it contains led me to digress a great deal to read other poems, consult history articles, browse biographies or watch videos. But I'm sure that at the end of your reading, you won't be looking at the forsythias, starlings, or other squirrels in Central Park in the same way. I also hope a better ending to Mr. Koh than the one described in the book."
Thank you, Joël, for this review.
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