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Winter Residency 2019
by Bogie Bougas (MFA student '19)
Forget drop the mic. At Dominican’s MFA program, you know you’re cool when you drop the page. During this winter residency, we focused on reading our work out loud for an audience. Oh, what a scary prospect. Besides the obvious fear of stage fright, losing one’s place and looking foolish while fumbling to find it again remains every writer’s nightmare. So we inexperienced writers tend to lock our gaze onto the page, looking down like a security camera focused on the Queen’s jewels.
But guest speaker and Japanese eco-poet Ryoichi Wago showed us another way to think about reading: Don’t read your words. Perform them.
Wago gave us two readings: a traditional poetry reading behind the podium, talking into the mic and looking up now and then to make audience contact. The standard fare. However, for his second poem, “Mirai Kagura,”* about the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster, he stepped away from the podium and stood in front of us, raw, vulnerable, yet totally in control. He held a short stack of pages in one hand, leaving the other hand free for expression. Because he had partially memorized his poem, the paper became a participant in his reading instead of a crutch. When he finished reading a page, he dropped it. The page floated down, tilting left then right, sometimes doing a half spin, before sliding onto the floor and resting, looking up at the ceiling like a living snapshot of time. At first, the falling page was funny. When the second page fell, something in our hearts pinged and we knew we were witnessing the sublime.
Wago read his poem in his native Japanese with an English translation projected on the screen behind him. Initially, the translation was a distraction, but as his voice rose and fell, digging in and pulling out each emotional moment, his emotions told the story, not his words. By the end, looking at an exhausted Wago and the pile of pages on the floor, we realized that readers don’t come to hear words. They come to feel them.
Thus, Wago taught us an important lesson: come prepared with a piece you are familiar with and don’t worry about your words, because, in the end, the audience isn’t going to remember your exact words; rather, they are going to walk away with an impression of what you have created. No, we don’t have to be so dramatic as to actually drop the page to express this, but, in our hearts, we should be willing to. And this willingness is the secret to a great reading.
* To drive home the idea of words as impressions, there is no exact translation for Wago’s poem “Mirai Kagura.” Mirai means the future of the world to come. Using the two words in combination you get the impression of Sacred Dance for the Future or Dance for the Next World.
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