 Ai
Two
books helped me define myself as a writer, or rather,
helped me decide what kind of writer I would be. The
first was the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky.
I read it when I was a senior in high school. By then,
I had already begun to wrestle with questions of good
and evil which I encountered in the novel and would
later work with again and again in my poems. Perhaps
because I had been raised Catholic, it made the novel
more resonant for me, for I firmly believed in the existence
of evil, as firmly as I believed in the existence of
goodness and its power to transform, although at the
end of the book, I had begun to realize that goodness
alone is not always enough and that indeed, sometimes
we are not transformed by suffering, but are destroyed
by it.
The second book was Body
Rags, poems by Galway Kinnell who made a profound
impression on me when he gave a reading at the University
of Arizona in 1968. For weeks after Galway left, poetry
students (including me) carried Body Rags around
as if it were holy script, as if it were a sacred guide
to the writing life. I remember feeling as if I had
some amulet against the unpoetic mundane world I inhabited
in my everyday undergraduate life. I thought if a book
could make such a difference, perhaps one day, if I
persevered and was lucky enough to write one, I too
could be an inspiration to someone and that feeling
encouraged me to keep writing.
The other book I read around
the same time, was The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima. I was a Japanese major as an undergraduate
and was reading a lot of Japanese fiction at the time.
Native Son by Richard Wright also made a strong
impression on me, as well as The Tale of Genji
by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Hmm...I would say that Native
Son made as powerful an impression on me as any
of the other books, for all the obvious reasons. As
I recall, I read that, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime
and Punishment and Brazilian slave trade chronicles
at the same time, which of course was during the Vietnam
War.
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