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Poetic Profile
Bruna Mori
1) Where were you Born and what was your Formation?
I was born (alongside a tumor) in Japan, on the southernmost island of Kyushu, to a Japanese mother, Kuriko Mori, and an Italian American father, Bruno Darini. My parents were in their 40s at the time. My father was a chief electrician on merchantmarine vessels and met my mother while on vacation in Hakata in Fukuoka-shi. He was staying at a hotel where my mother ran the salon (the owners were originally patrons of her sumi-ink paintings). Their relationship commenced, however, in letterwriting, and my father made Kyushu his home for several years. Since they both lived through World War II, the relationship was not without controversy.
As for formation, I believe each year of life is formative. Between the ages of two and five, however, my family moved from Japan to Spain, the Canary Islands, then to Halifax where my parents were married and Vancouver, several small towns in Upstate New York—from the Catskills to the Adirondacks—before settling for a while in Saratoga County. We subsequently moved to New Orleans and San Diego, where my parents retired. Since then, I’ve lived in and around Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
2) What are your Poetic Influences?
Poems on the page? Aside from Japanese fairy tales and children’s songs that utilize a lot of onomatopoeic expressions, and are often bawdy or full of ennui, and the usual introduction to poetry in grade school via the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, in college, the activism in the work of Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, and James Baldwin really moved me. Those with interdisciplinary concerns like Toko Shinoda, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge were most essential.
Others who had an affect were from popular twentieth-century avant-garde groups, like the Futurists, Beats, New York School, OuLiPo, Fluxus, Dada, Surrealists; of each, respectively (though a couple are known more as artists or writers of poetic prose or not entirely associated with a movement): Vladimir Mayakovsky; Isabelle Eberhardt as translated by Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest; Italo Calvino; Yoko Ono; Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, and Gerard del Nerval. As for those who wrote prior to the 1900s, nineteenth-century French symbolists, like Stephan Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire, and the more ancient Sei Shonagon and Dante Alighieri immediately come to mind.
American working class prose poets, and Imagist, Objectivist, Black Mountain, and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets were crucial but not who I ran into initially. My contemporaries remain unmentioned here because there are many I admire, and their own writing is developing and just now starting to influence my own. Regarding poetry in Los Angeles, I think it was Matthew Zapruder who stated, when he read at Beyond Baroque, that L.A. is famous for its derelict poets. I appreciate that quality of exile (which someone like Bukowski possessed, though he had a work ethic, and lived in and around the city for most of his life) and agree with Eberhardt’s statement in The Oblivion Seekers that academics should consider the role of the vagrant.
3) When did you realize you were a poet?
This question could lead me to talk about a basic knack for “understanding things differently”. However, I think the query is more about the decision to make poetry public? I can’t remember when I didn’t write poems, short prose, or essays. The choice to turn toward literature versus journalism was made in San Francisco. I had two commercial jobs—drafting articles on dance and theater performances in the dead of night for a wire news service on Market Street (while the latest murder report rolled in on police radio), and working as an editorial assistant for a tiny publisher in the Mission that specialized in books from China, where I was engaged by the works of authors like Zhang Jie. I decided to focus on the latter.
The first thing I did when I moved to New York to take a publishing job, aside from complain about it to my husband at the time and relatives there, was to get involved with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I studied with Kimiko Hahn and John Yau (who asked the class to write in Oulipian forms). Luckily, individuals and institutions were receptive; otherwise, I’m sure I’d continue to write for myself but maybe, too, keep it to myself (not be a public poet). So really I did not “real-ize the poet” until 10 years ago in New York, when I was already in my twenties.
4) What type of class has proven most useful for your development as a poet/writer?
As an undergraduate at UCSD, that would be modern dance and choreography, and culture and media studies, since I didn’t major in comparative literature. As a graduate, aside from conferences with the writers, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, photographers, and composers at The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, several workshops in Manhattan were helpful—Gerry Gomez Pearlberg’s class on city writing, in particular, and as mentioned, John Yau’s really turned me onto generative processes using preexisting source texts. Letterpress and sculpture courses were helpful in thinking more about the architecture of text and scripting of performance art. As an instructor, talking to other writers who teach in Los Angeles turned me on to the theory of Marc Auge and Rosi Braidotti. Listening to guest lecturers, as well as the students, for my own classes at SCI_Arc and Art Center, and around town continues to be useful to my development as a writer.
5) Favorite Team or Sport?
To participate? Anything done independently and noncompetitively. As a spectator? Anything fast, where I’m in proximity to the movement. Teamwise, I generally support the one nobody is rooting for.
6) Food?
Panang curry with tofu over brown rice and a side of peanut sauce, vegetable korma over jasmine rice, or green-corn cheese tamales with sour cream, black beans, and rice. Comfort food for me is my mother’s homecooking of sweet curries, gomae spinach and tofu, and shitake in a soy sauce and butter combination, with a side of rice or konyaku noodles, or any pasta with a rich sauce that reminds me of my grandmother’s homemade tomato preserves. Also, nocella gelato, and a new favorite: blue cheese paired with a German Riesling.
7) Vacation Spot?
Locally, the high desert. Further out, the town of Railay Beach in Thailand or Amorgos in Greece. Both are several-day treks from Bangkok and Athens but worth the clarity of water and sky. There are portions of Northern Australia, Sinai, Bahia, and Oaxaca that I find stunning. It is unsettling that lands so rife in climactic and political upheaval, or socioeconomic disparity, sometimes possess the most hypnotic terrain or sense of time.
8) Swear Word?
Fuck.
9) Are you working on a book?
I just completed two projects this year: an e-chapbook Tergiversation, inspired by the work of Alejandra Pizarnik, to be released by Ahadada Books, and Dérive, a book of New York cityscape poems with sumi-ink paintings by Matthew Kinney, to be published by Meritage Press. For breaks, I’ve been recopying a lot of conceptual poetics stuff that was originally copied from other preexisting source texts.
I have my heart set on a project called Schooner Rig based on spending time at the old ports and shipyards. This summer, though, I want to continue a series that I have put off a couple times. It is centered on Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, where more Japanese Americans have lived in the United States than in any other area. Oddly enough, no work of fiction has ever been based there. I realized this when I was writing an encyclopedia article about the neighborhood.
Along with an essay for a Semiotext[e] reader called The Security Environment—a piece on sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s internment camp designs created while he was (voluntarily) incarcerated at Poston—a series of poems is emerging. The Nostalgic Gallery of Fame and Beyond is the working title, named after a curios shop that carries antiques from the United States and Japan intermingled in the window. It is never open, but the display keeps mysteriously changing.
10 How does visual art affect your poetic project?
Well, I studied writing at an art school, teach writing to art and design students, collaborate with artists and designers, and have also written about art and design—including stories, as much as essays, for catalogs. An example might be my architecture fairy tales for John O’Brien, Monica Nouwens, and Florencia Pita, based on an artist’s statement, biography, or architectural program as plots. Visual art does directly influence the poems. Aside from including paintings in my first book, often my writing hinges on an image, and I have written ekphrastically, influenced by visual art, sound, movement, and literature. It is additionally difficult to ignore the broader connection between visual art and poetry throughout time. Though artists (and the general public) may know less about poetics than ever, there is a correlation—one example is the shared focus on re/appropriative processes that may be mediated more now through software.
Craft Questions
1) How do you write a poem?
The first poems I shared were rants with names like “Spoiled Milk and Other Conspiracies”, and oddly, it took the use of Oulipian constraints to attune me to process in relation to content and form in poetry and learn literary history. I used to apply the overused convention, n+7, to romance novels, using a medical dictionary, to create porn. Even more recently, for Dérive, I made up rules, such as, in assembling lines, maintaining each as they were originally collected, or riding subway trains to the end stations to generate a story at each. In Tergiversation, I worked with Pizarnik’s poems written in her native Spanish. Since there was very little available in translation, and I do not read much of the language, I applied a partly homophonic, more sensorial, process to create an homage. I do like to cheat, however, not always adhering to the rules set for myself.
More broadly regarding process, sometimes poems are written in one go, but generally, lines are jotted down to be assembled, which feels more like a meditation on the lines generated to better understand the connections between them if that is a desire. And cumulatively, they grow, get edited down quite a lot to their core, becoming individual pieces and collections. I like to establish relationships between the parts but allow room for a certain openness, so hopefully the recipient of the poem may contribute to the whole.
2) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
I wonder sometimes if synthetic is the new organic, or if there is an organic now—what modernists referred to as “authenticity”. I like the idea of synthesis in “synthetic”, but in your question, there seems to be more of a connotation of made-up or machinic, versus inherent, handmade, or woven? In that sense, artifice and experimentation, and experience and investment are equally important. I believe words find you as much as you look for them.
3) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?
Writing may occur anywhere at anytime. Though I may be a recluse, I like the idea of community. Making poems can be an “internal” process for me, so working with source text or being in “the world” helps me connect to it and the potential reader who resides t/here. When you are around strangers, it is possible to be as alone as when you’re alone, and you do choose where to be. Of course, wherever you are, the writing is in some way subjective—but hopefully not overly abstracted or self-absorbed. Generally, when I start a series, I allow time to physically wander and collect, then assemble later. Imagination is t/here, with or without a hermitage or scheduling of muses.
