The Sally Ito Interview

In Heart’s hydrography, Sally Ito charts the vital ebb and flow between the personal and the divine while traversing the complex channels of a heart mapped by the ineffable pull of family and faith. In Ito’s careful hands, this same heart becomes ocean and cathedral, a hallowed space in which poetic organ-song crystalizes into poems resonant with hope, love, doubt, and longing.

Born in Taber, Alberta, Sally Ito is the author of four books of poetry, as well as the memoir The Emperor’s Orphans. Ito is also a translator, which includes Are You an Echo?, a collection of poetry by Misuzu Kaneko. Ito teaches creative writing in Winnipeg, where she lives with her husband.

How has your work as a translator of Japanese poetry influenced your own poetry?

Oh, it’s influenced me immensely. Languages have their own structures, and ‘personalities’ as Milosz would say and when you work intensely with a language like Japanese, or German (as I also do some German translation), you expand your vocabulary, for one thing; and your sensibility or awareness expands. I work primarily with Japanese children’s poet Misuzu Kaneko whose poems are deceptively simple but are deeply rooted in a language that animates other living creatures like plants or animals. I recently encountered the word ‘animacy’ which is a different word than the somewhat related English literary term ‘anthropomorphization‘ — and translating Misuzu Kaneko’s poetry has awakened me to the ‘animacy’ of other forms of life expressible in words. So, here for your reference (from my good source, the internet!) is the definition of ‘animacy’: the state of being alive and animate, and ‘anthropomorphism’ is defined this way: the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object.

For me, translating from the Japanese and Misuzu Kaneko’s poetry in particular, ‘animacy’ is a better word to describe her sensibility and approach to poems in Japanese. I have been influenced by her way of looking at the world in my short-form poetry, for sure.

In a previous interview about your memoir, The Emperor’s Children, you said, “I think as an artist, I have always found Japanese aesthetics and sensibility appealing, and felt it a never-ending source of inspiration. To maintain ‘culture,’ one must choose to ‘practice’ it.” As an artist (for some, this word is accompanied by a paintbrush and easel, but I mean in its broadest sense – creative practionishers) what different aspects of Japanese aestheticism, culture, art, film, etc., have you recently drawn from or would like to share with us?

There are a lot of interesting Japanese aesthetic qualities like ‘negative space,’ ‘juxtaposition’, ‘brevity’ (think of haiku and waka) that have existed in its traditional forms and continue to exist in current-day forms as well. One aspect of Japanese culture I have found interesting lately is the idea that it is Nature that teaches the Artist, rather than the Artist trying to control Nature with their technique. (By ‘teaching’ I don’t mean ‘inspiring’, by the way.) When some Japanese artists render the natural world in their art as they see it, they often render the observed thing as it is in all its randomness, or seemingly chaotic and asymmetrical forms, and through rendering it this way, discover the object’s inherent beauty or inner ‘quality’ or ‘soul’ so to speak. I’m fascinated by how this thinking works in traditional crafts like pottery or paper-making. This thinking doesn’t quite work or apply to writing, however, except in the important sense that the diminution of the self is what becomes a key point in the writing, and in poetry, especially in the brief forms like the haiku, there is a kind of discipline in observing nature and recording it so that the seeing becomes all rather than it being all about the seer.

In ‘Only Connect’, a stream of consciousness within a day is held together by the short-term silver thread of a spider. Like a particular moment in time and space – this exact day / memory / poem can never be replicated in the exact way. It’s almost mathematical, the makeup of a poem. Which I’m sure may frighten many poets. It frightens me. The sermon, the news of the baby, its naming and the spider thread all exist in the same exact strand. Can you talk about style and how important it is to your work?

‘Only Connect’, took its title from something I read by T.S. Eliot or so I thought at the time, but on Googling it that does not seem to be the case! And now I see the title is also the same as a British TV show. Oh well. But your question is about ‘style’ and so in this poem, I would have to say, that ‘connecting’ the fragments or disparate parts of this narrative of observations is to create meaning out of the poem.

In the poem ‘Prow’, the speaker asks ‘do I know this place?” – it’s a powerful moment in which, surrounded by a space (unknown water) that is tranquil and unspeaking, says so much and renders the moment enigmatic. Because not only can a place be unrecognizable, but we ourselves are also unrecognizable in certain surroundings – new or familiar. How does age affect our sense of recognition – or does it?

Your question about ‘age’ makes me think this poem might be about a ‘senior’s moment’, but in fact, the question “Do I know this place?” references the words in the poem that connect with church. If you have ever been in an Anglican church, or some anyway, you’ll see that the ceiling rafters and beams resemble the structure of a boat’s bottom — and I think I read somewhere that that is an intentional symbolic architectural evocation — and so if you think of yourself as riding in a boat like being inside a church, then you will get the strange sensation that the place you are entering into (through worship) will be somewhat familiar even though geo-physically it isn’t.

In Vesper Sparrow, did you translate a sparrow’s personal thoughts into the end of the poem?

Good question, I’ll have to check with the sparrow! No, actually, with this poem, I was caught by its name ‘Vesper’ which is a service of evening prayer sung at the end of the day. The ‘Wherefore art thou’ quote is more meant of me, the poet, wondering where this bird’s song is coming from and is a play on the kind of song the sparrow sings — here, here, where, where, hisp. I think I looked up this bird on an app, and on these bird-identifying apps, they will actually give you a worded version of what the bird’s singing is like. And words like ‘here’ ‘here’ have a kind of meaning implicit in them as opposed to straight-out onomatopoeic words like ‘tweet’.

In this, your fourth poetry collection, you blend the personal with the universal, the exterior with the interior and the emotional with the spiritual. With the world now facing the consequences of years of neglect, without sounding too much like a bad Hallmark movie trailer (please don’t watch these films people – no link will be provided, forget I said anything), what is your hope that the casual and obsessive poetry reader may glean from this collection?

I have always been very conscientious as a poet about not sermonizing or preaching through it (poetry) — to me, writing poetry has largely been an act of observation of both interior and exterior life, and translating that observation into words. A lot of the time we project our interior world onto the natural world — hence the naming of insects ‘Jesus bugs’ or ‘Vesper sparrows.’ And it continues to this day — we read the world and the word has read us into our realizations and epiphanies through language.

But what if we had different words? ‘Climate change’ is an observed reality but why then are we made to feel responsible for it? Why must we be prompted to action on earth’s behalf, as if we ourselves, are not of the earth itself? Probably the Christian(?) notion of ‘in this world’ but ‘not of it’ is strangely harmful when it predicates an existence other than where we are in the place we are in the moment. Maybe through my haiku writing, I feel that when I observe the natural world, I observe a world going on without me, a word indifferent to my existence, and world created, wondrous, full of mystery that I participate in momentarily by observing and changing that into words — not words of judgement or fear or anxiety which are all projections of an inner state that is paradoxically trying to be ‘not of this world’. Anyway, I think what I’m writing to realize in the conclusion of this paragraph, is that we humans, fundamentally, are ‘of this world’ and also ‘not of it’ because we have the language to describe a state of being both internal and external to ourselves, and it is this bifurcated state of being that therefore, leads us, to the perpetual anxiety that the words ‘climate change’ wreaks in our soul.

Nathaniel G. Moore

Nathaniel G. Moore is a writer, artist and publishing consultant grateful to be living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Mi'kmaq peoples.