Aiko Harman

Poet in Residence at Poets' Letter: March/April 2009

Aiko is one of the 5 Poets in Residence at the 5th London Poetry Festival 2009: August 7-10

Aiko Harman is currently studying for an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh.  She has earned double-degrees in English (Creative Writing) and Mass Communications Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her first name means 'love' in Japanese and here is her love: poetry. She will be posting new works during her residency here. So, please, check back on a regular basis and see how she is doing with the Residency.

Congratulations to Aiko on Winning the Grierson Verse Prize for 2009!

The Grierson Verse Prize, estimated value £650, is awarded to a matriculated student of the University of Aberdeen or the University of Edinburgh. The topic for 2009 was " Deception". Candidates were required to use any recognised verse form but not ‘free verse’. Entries must be not more than 80 lines in typescript.

Aiko's 'Mimicry' is a sestina has won this award for 2009.

Congratulations Aiko. Well done.

Aiko Reading

Aiko is reading on March 11th in The Conference Room, ground floor David Hume Tower, University of Edinburgh, at 6pm at the prize giving event for the University Writing Competitions. Do come along, have a glass of wine and hear the winning entries PLUS readings and visuals from Duo, a collaboration between MSc Creative Students and the Ediburgh College of Art.

Also on March 11th from 8pm-12midnight students from the MSc Creative Writing program will read their poetry at the Meadow Bar in Edinburgh. Seven poets and one fiction writer are lined up so far. To be followed by the sweet sounds of Literary DJ, Matt Werner.

The event will take place in the upstairs room of the Meadow Bar, Wednesday, March 11. The reading will begin at 8:00, so come by around 7:30 to get a drink before hand.

Why I Write Poetry: Aiko Harman

My name is Aiko Harman.  I've just turned 24 and I am a native of Los Angeles, California, in the United States.  However, I'm currently living in Scotland while I pursue an MSc in Creative Writing from Edinburgh University.  I've been quite graciously granted the William Hunter Sharpe memorial scholarship for creative writing, which has allowed me to practise and study my favourite subject -- poetry!

Prior to coming to Edinburgh, I was living in Sendai-city, Japan, where I taught English to Japanese high school students.  My mother is Japanese, and many of our relatives still live in Sendai, so this opportunity was indelible for me.  Not only could I learn and improve my Japanese at a rapid rate, but I had the chance to finally get to know my Japanese family whom I had only met, maybe, once or twice before in my life.  My experiences in Japan - living on my own, getting acquainted with my new family, and being submerged completely in a new culture - have made a huge mark on me, and I am more in tune and interested in representing my mixed Japanese-American heritage in my poetry today. 

For me, poetry is an opportunity to share one's unique worldview.  It is incredible how many different cultures and peoples there are in the world, and it seems so silly that quite often a person can spend his whole life in touch with only one culture.  What a wealth of spirit and history gone to waste on account of a simple lack of exploring. 

So, as I become more and more involved in any community or culture, I hope to share a bit of my perspective via poetry, so that others might have an opportunity to see the world through my eyes.

I am really inspired by Philip Larkin's poem 'The Importance of Elsewhere'.  (If you haven't seen it, I found it online here:  http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-importance-of-elsewhere

I think that, especially, from the viewpoint of 'elsewhere' one can gain a different perspective of one's own 'home', and likewise, the ability to see someone else's home in a new and unique way.  As an American living in Japan, or in the United Kingdom, I can see each country with new eyes, and perhaps, am able to notice more or different things than a local notices.  I only hope I can write this 'elsewhere' vision into my poetry. 
 

Aiko's Post: March 26, 2009 Ravine You, sweet lover of rivers, sleep in the finest bed beside your balcony at Miralrio. I trade my diamond tiara to keep you here. A stream of guests to bide you. A room of your own to muse. A ravine laps at your quiet wisdom, feeds you truths. We babble in tongues that spring from the well of our own lives: I tell you, art has power to grow within us: a living organism, a child in the womb. Remember the armchair— remember the door of the ship torn from its hinges to accommodate my gift. Remember me— my furniture poesy. You fill yourself with my invisible energy, the shakti that only love can give a man in struggle for self-fulfilment. You sit beneath the tipa tree and speak in visions. Your words take root and feed me. Your leaves and branches— my womb, my balcony, my chair. You draw faces in the shelters of furniture. I wait en la barraca for your return.                                 Days are endless                                since you went away. I burn like a slow fuse. Go Up Aiko's Post: March 6, 2009 The Paper-knife   Cradled in the crook of my palm, I measure your weight in breaths. I lower your body on an exhale, slide your single leg between sheets                                                                    and tear. Your production precedes you. The man who sold you to me said you are a relic of your time— nothing is made as well as you are                                                                these days. My need for you has made you real— I am your god. I make the fate that binds you to the envelope or book, that buries you into the heart of a man or leaves you                                                                  to rust. You are an article of construct – an idea forged of metal, locked in wood, engraved by the ornate hands of the artisan who holds your image in his mind, a shared vision,                                                          a formula. Your essence defines you. Your essence defines my essence. My essence is the stream and leaf. My essence is the infant smile. My essence is the black ant who bears his lifeless brother home on his back. My essence is the point                                                     of a paper-knife. The following poems were Posted on March 1 2009 Fireflies Before you loved me, we played Scrabble in Dainohara Park beside a small lake covered in lily pads. I take ages on my turn, calculating, and catch you staring out over the water, hands clasped around the lingering warmth of your vending machine Royal Milk Tea. I lay down the tiles for “SPARKLE.” Seven letters. “Impressive,” you mutter, and grinning I wrestle new letters from the bag. Our hands pass more rapidly over the board. You set M beside E. and I put U beside versatile S until there are no words left and the afternoon has faded into night. It is the first time I beat you. Later, we search for fireflies in the darkness and find them, like shooting stars. We tread off the lit paths and cast our bodies into one another – in a gazebo, against the cold painted steel of a playground slide, tangled in a tire swing dangling from an old pine. I think you love me then. Go Up After Annie’s Box for Darwin, on your birthday bicentenary A swatch of cloth adorned with ribbon, a hand-stitched zig-zag down its side— a doll’s dress. A pressed flower from her patch of garden, its last season. A lock of hair. A child’s trinkets. You called her ‘the joy of the household’, your girl who ‘made custards’ with her fervent body whirling round the room, a human whisk. You mourned her decade-death in your theories: as traits pass down through generations you blamed yourself, your ‘wrecked digestion’. Nature is a scene of relentless struggle and suffering, purposeless like god, you said, only science drives away your daily discomfort. You escaped to evolution, flux. You taught her: we are risen apes, not fallen angels. But as she coughed and sputtered, you dreamed she moved like Bellstone, via glaciers, taking ice ages to floe towards her unspecified unknown— a slow passage, a preservation. Go Up For Your Love of Robots On your 26th birthday, we watched Transformers in Imax, and you spilled the popcorn in all your excitement at seeing Optimus Prime in 3D. In Akihabara, you stock up on figurines. I, like a camel, carry your collector's items like heavy metal straws. A small price to pay to see your eyes glaze over for Doraemon. Gears and sockets, nuts, bolts, and washers, plates of steel and aluminum protect their arms and legs. You affix their light-bulb eyeballs, polish their flesh like a jeweler. There is no rust. There will be no rust. I spy you across the room at your pen tablet, doodling invasions: Cybermen terrorizing citizens, Mechagodzilla crushing buildings, Johnny 5 in a cage fight against Marvin the Paranoid Android. Your license plate reads MEGAMAN. You dubbed your dog K-9. Your gamer name is AstroBoy. You call your laptop HAL. Asleep on the sofa, still cradling a controller between your dexterous thumbs, your eyes flutter as I hum the theme song from Star Wars. Go Up Copyrights @ Aiko Harman

Aiko's Post: March 17, 2009 This week during my residency, Munayem has suggested I read as much as I can about the lives of and relationship between Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and Regine Schlegel née Olsen. I wanted to write something to mark the unique nature of their relationship, but found I kept coming back to the philosophy of Authenticity (a philosophy of Kierkegaard's that greatly affected his relationship - in fact, because of his desire to be 'authentic' to himself, he left the woman he loved, and both of them remained broken-hearted seemingly forever). I didn't want to write a historical poem, but in thinking about the two of them, I began to notice the 'authenticity' in other everyday things. In many ways, I interpreted it as a negative authenticity -- people, in a rush to keep true to 'self', forgetting the world outside themselves. Authenticity For years you were the end-all, be-all for me. My mind a sieve of words meant only for you. But when finally our hands link, you fight a mile-span of feelings between us—                                                       a separation. You say it is always either/or with you. You say you cannot have your passion and your christ. I tell you, you will be the death of me, and you say my decision is mine alone. In art, a masterpiece is authentic                                                 if it is faithful to the artist’s true self. And so in time, I measure my body in canvas and paint, ink and thread, and I wait. I wait for you to become art. Go Up Authenticity is a Bird In St. George’s Square Garden a crow perched on a wooden park bench caws out into the echo of empty space. Hurried passersby do not notice him clocking a change in the weather, like a cuckoo keeping time. Days pass. Snow blankets the paths and grass, and only a blotch of black in the garden blights it. A crow, dead on a mound, mouldering, like a bogman caught between seasons. A lay cairn; a sky burial. Crocuses crop up in purples and whites from the earth, but still, the crow. Hurried passersby now note it, watch it decay in the grass, day after day, and wonder when someone will throw its broken carcass away. Go Up The following poems were Posted on March 1 2009 Kingyou-sukui (Goldfish scooping) Invisible cicadas drone in harmony with the hum of decaying telephone wires under the heavy heat of the zelkova trees. A distant So-re! So-re! echoes against the taiko drum’s deep beat which flows through concrete and feet and hides in the belly. Men in white aprons stained with brown tare sauce, tout their tasty wares: fried octopus, fish on sticks, okonomiyaki. A nasal lady’s voice on the loudspeaker sings ancient enka songs. A grandma hums along, hands clasped behind her back, nostalgic. A huddle of black-haired boys with bowl cuts and boxy shogakko backpacks, hop and hover over a shallow pool, shrieking. They shove one another to make space. Elbows jab and jostle in excitement: summer festival. Their hands rattle with coins. Kingyou-sukui. The ji-san shows them how to use the rice-paper net to scoop fat-bellied fish into a plastic cup. Slowly, he says, or the net with tear. Slowly, he says, for goldfish fear fast actions, moving shadows. And so the boys stand like statues, sliding their stealthy wands against the side of the small pond, in silent concentration. Go Up In the Court of King Neptune In the navy, a man hears many things. A common superstition among sailors is that whenever a star dogs the moon something evil is bound to happen. A common superstition among sailors is that setting sail on a Friday brings bad luck. Something evil is bound to happen when too many young men are sardines in a can. Setting sail on a Friday brings bad luck for the Pollywogs who must ‘cross the line’. When too many young men are sardines in a can something evil is bound to happen. For the Pollywogs who must ‘cross the line’, the Trusty Shellbacks prepare their haze. Something evil is bound to happen. The ‘wogs take their places on the deck. The Trusty Shellbacks prepare their haze: cold buckets of seawater and wood paddles. The ‘wogs take their places on the deck crawling in single file across the equator. Cold buckets of seawater and wood paddles slap the backs of the boys crawling in single file across the equator. A full moon illuminates their shame. Slap the backs of the boys who chose to join this force anyway. A full moon illuminates their shame. It brings a storm. Who chose to join this force anyway? Whenever a star dogs the moon, it brings a storm. In the navy, a man hears many things. Go Up Copyrights @ Aiko Harman