Blog - Notes of Oak - Literary Resources for a Poetic Lifestyle

Ishigaki Rin’s Poetry Shines in ‘This Overflowing Light’

12/10/202202/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF THIS OVERFLOWING LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS BY RIN ISHIGAKI (ISOBAR PRESS, 2022)

Translation tests a poem’s mettle. In the odyssey between two languages, words can grow strewed and cloudy, drifting far from their intended meaning. But in other cases, the poem may arrive filled with new music and light, and resonant with the essence of the distant poet’s voice. And what a beautiful thing that is: two poems now exist in the world, both the same and different. In the case of This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems by Rin Ishigaki, translated and with an introduction by Janine Beichman (Tokyo and London: Isobar Press, 2022), the poems have not only weathered their journey from Japanese to English, they have arrived in beautiful form. With this text, English readers now have access to fresh renderings of poems plucked from popular Japanese poet Ishigaki Rin’s (1920-2004) oeuvre, in which she confronted the routine and interpreted the uncanny as a single, working woman in post-WWII Japan.

Discover Literature

Prose Poetry: What’s the Point?

10/05/202102/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

LET’S INVESTIGATE PROSE POETRY – THAT OXYMORONIC, SLIGHTLY OBNOXIOUS LITERARY FORM

Prose poetry. It sounds like an oxymoron. Like jumbo shrimp. Or plastic silverware. Or a soothing Lithuanian folk song. But it does indeed exist, having been wrought into existence by the exceptional creativity or pure boredom of writers. But why? Why taint the dainty lines of poetry with the blocky bulk of prose? Let’s find out by looking at the form’s history, major works, essential characteristics, and a literary analysis of Robert Bly’s prose poem “Warning to the Reader.”

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Poets, Allow Me to Reintroduce Metaphor and Simile

02/25/202102/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

USE THESE FIGURES OF SPEECH TO ELEVATE YOUR CREATIVE WRITING

Romeo and Juliet. Coyote and Raven. Lucy and Ethel. There have been many dynamic duos throughout history, but none so inseparable as Metaphor and Simile, those two figures of speech that are always taught together in third grade classrooms and onward. How could any of us forget that a metaphor is when you say something is something else and a simile is when you say it with “like” or “as”?

But alas, it seems that many of our era’s best(selling) poets are content to wallow in the literal, or extend only the tippy-top of their tiniest toe into the rich waters of metaphor and simile. Perhaps it’s because they learned these figures of speech so long ago, they’ve forgotten how they function. Or perhaps it’s because readers seem equally content to shrug off the imaginative leap required to appreciate the metaphorical. Whatever the case, getting reacquainted with metaphors and similes will make us all better readers and writers, so let’s cannonball in.

Book Review

DJ Waldie’s ‘Where Are We Now’ Finds LA’s Pulse

02/21/202002/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF D.J. WALDIE’S 2004 NONFICTION COLLECTION WHERE ARE WE NOW: NOTES FROM LOS ANGELES

If you’re like me, the name D.J. Waldie immediately evokes L.A. suburbs and the unique prose “blocks” writing style that he used in his most famous work, Holy Land (1995), to represent the layout of that tract housing. However, in his 2004 collection of essays composed over a decade, Where Are We Now: Notes from Los Angeles, Waldie wrenches himself from Lakewood, CA and attends to Los Angeles with a bird’s eye historical and geographical view. Is the result as successful as Holy Land, which is considered quintessential wider-L.A. region reading? Read on to find out.

Book Review

‘The Japanese Linguistic Landscape’ is Quintessential Reading

10/15/201910/16/2019
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF NAKANISHI SUSUMU’S NONFICTION TEXT — THE JAPANESE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE: REFLECTIONS ON QUINTESSENTIAL WORDS (AUGUST 2019)

Recently published by Japan Library as an English translation, Nakanishi Susumu’s The Japanese Linguistic Landscape: Reflections on Quintessential Words is many things: essay collection, gathering of reflections, distilled wordstock, linguistic history, and philosophy for living. But above all, the text maps out a poetic landscape punctuated by beautiful word-landmarks. The waypoints on this map are both literal elements in reality, e.g. “folded layers of mountains,” “traditional hair ornament,” and “light blue,” and also the Japanese words that represent these real things. The poetry of these curated “quintessential words” amplifies the significance of the literal elements/phenomena they denote. That is, by considering the nuances of the language we use to describe our world, the author helps us chart powerful new intellectual and emotional connections to that world.

Literary Analysis

Netflix’s “Rust Valley Restorers” is Unexpectedly Poetic

10/02/201902/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A POET’S ANALYSIS OF THE CAR RESTORATION REALITY SHOW SET IN TAPPEN, BC

A Classic Classic Car Show

Recently released on Netflix after originally airing on Canada’s History Channel, Rust Valley Restorers (August 2019) fits right into the ubiquitous car fixer-upper reality genre. It showcases a grungy old guy who owns lots of classic cars that need some serious restoring, but he’s running out of time and money to fix them all. So he opens a restoration shop — Rust Bros Restorations — to catalyze the automotive revivals and bring in money.

Book Review

‘What We See When We Read’: A Tame Thrill

09/06/201902/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A BOOK REVIEW OF PETER MENDELSUND’S NONFICTION TEXT — WHAT WE SEE WHEN WE READ (2014)

Have you ever wondered, “What do I see when I read?” Well, Peter Mendelsund seems to have the answer to your question with the functionally named, What We See When We Read. Published in 2014, this text is a self-described “Phenomenology with Illustrations” and it does indeed teem with images. Such a graphic form behooves Mendelsund, whose author bio explains that he’s “the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf…His designs have been described by The Wall Street Journal as being ‘the most instantly recognizable and iconic in contemporary fiction.'”

Book Review

‘On Color’ and ‘The Music of Color’ Book Reviews

05/15/201902/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

A DOUBLE-DECKER BOOK REVIEW OF ON COLOR BY DAVID SCOTT KASTAN AND STEPHEN FARTHING (2018), AND THE MUSIC OF COLOR BY SHIMURA FUKUMI (2019) – TWO NONFICTION TEXTS EXPLORING COLOR

From the new books at the college library where I work, I plucked The Music of Color by Shimura Fukumi, enchanted by the cover photo of blue, white, and green yarn, the soft and creamy dust-jacket, the poetic title, and the dazzling photographs nestled amid lyrical text within. Then I put it in my desk drawer where it sat like a glowing orb while I did actual work.

Over the next few days, more new books were sent out to the shelves and, being a greedy reader who wants all the freshest volumes, I also harvested On Color by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing, wooed by its squat shape, its indigo cover depicting a chalk stick rainbow, its vivid pictures, and its promise to investigate the intriguing subject of color.

Reader Lifestyle

Literary Submissions Guide – 2019 Edition

04/19/201902/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

SUBMITTING TO CREATIVE WRITING PUBLICATIONS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

What does it take to become a published literary writer in 2019? To start with, impeccable creative writing, along with money and time, followed by a diet of tears and gnawed-off fingernail crescents, and topped-off by a certain morbid fascination with how many literary submissions you have to send out before somebody recognizes your artistic talent.

Hence the three-month hiatus between posts on the Notes of Oak Literary Blog — writing submissions are consumptive, deflating, expensive, and yet, still worth it when even one acceptance letter finally flutters in. But even more than all those things, trying to get published nowadays involves navigating a changing terrain of submission routes and resources. Relying on my knowledge that has resulted in a whopping four publications thus far, let’s tour this rocky realm of getting published in the digital era.

Discover Literature

Ekphrastic Poetry: When Art Kindles Literature

01/25/201902/24/2023
by Hannah Huff

MAGIC HAPPENS WHEN POETS RUMINATE ON MASTERPIECES

Ekphrastic poetry is right up there with the villanelle, the ghazal, the abecedarian, and other specific poetic forms that lead a highly intramural existence: poets know what they are, but rarely write them once they leave the MFA creative writing programs where they’re required to spit out such guided assignments. The problem is that in the real world, most readers don’t know what the hell those words mean, let alone the nuances of each form, and as a poet struggling to make even $5 off a poem — actually, make that even $1 — there’s no point in also struggling to write poems that have ground rules: we poets must have some small joy in our feats of creation.

But what a loss! All of those types of poetry, and the one we’re here to discuss today — ekphrastic poetry — can crack the shell on pithy nuts of insight that will never otherwise be opened through our usual, more organic modes of inspiration and composition. Thus, this blog post will hopefully educate readers on the joys of an unfamiliar type of poetry, and also rouse writers from their creative stupor — including myself.