Poet Amy Uyematsu was a good friend and colleague of mine for 30 decades. Her sixth and past guide, “That Blue Trickster Time,” was originally scheduled to be released in the tumble of 2022, but was pushed up to March of that calendar year. “When I figured out I had Stage 4 cancer in May well 2021, I asked the publisher if they could shift up the creation date,” she instructed me. “They were being type plenty of to do that. The title came from a phrase in the closing poem of the guide — ‘that blue trickster time’ — and sadly, this title would acquire on significantly heavier indicating than I at any time predicted.”
Uyematsu died very last Friday at 75, just after a two-year wrestle with breast cancer, in Culver City, in accordance to her spouse, Raul C. Contreras. She is also survived by her son, Chris Tachiki, and her mom, Elsie Uyematsu Osajima.
A short while ago I had been trying, together with poet and Cal Condition Los Angeles professor Michael Willard, to prepare an extended job interview with Amy about her operate and her trajectory as a poet, but Michael and I ran out of time. Fortuitously, Amy had been interviewed elsewhere, and some of these discussions are available on line. Los Angeles has dropped a key poet, 1 whose verse articulated the working experience of Asian Us citizens extended denied presence or illustration.
I had presently been wondering about the electricity of poetry in the lifetime of this city. Past month, Willard and I interviewed Amy’s colleague, Russell Leong, at his Los Feliz dwelling. He informed us about the genesis of a single of his poems. All through the 1992 riots/revolt, when UCLA canceled lessons and shut shop, Russell still left his career as an editor there and headed for residence. Driving Santa Monica Boulevard, he observed gals clustered at just about every bus prevent: the housekeepers, cooks and caretakers of Beverly Hills waiting to acquire the buses east to the other facet of the town. But the buses had stopped functioning. Russell packed as quite a few of the women of all ages as he could in shape in his vehicle and drove them homeward.
I remembered that April 30 properly myself — gazing out the window of my mom’s house in East L.A., watching columns of black smoke increase above a paralyzed town. My poems about these times were revealed alongside Russell’s in a exclusive difficulty of High Overall performance magazine. These details of everyday living you won’t come across in the machismo of movies or in the headlines of news media if there are “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” they are to be identified in poetry. As William Carlos Williams famously put it, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / nevertheless men die miserably each working day / for deficiency / of what is found there.”
In 1989, Michelle T. Clinton, Naomi Quiñonez and I edited an anthology, “Invocation L.A.: City Multicultural Poetry,” the very first of its type about Los Angeles, which gathered poems by writers ranging from machinist-poet Fred Voss to the late Akilah Nayo Oliver and Wanda Coleman, from organizer-poet Deena Metzger to Harry Gamboa Jr. of the famed Asco art group — as nicely as Russell Leong and Amy Uyematsu.
When I published my 2nd and 3rd publications, I invited Amy to study with me at the two publication functions. She’d been performing essential do the job for a long time, publishing in the Asian American movement journal Gidra and co-modifying “Roots: An Asian American Reader” (UCLA, 1971) when I was even now in high college. Amy when remarked to me about her possess do the job, “I know it is far more aged-fashioned or some thing, not as experimental or avant-garde as your operate.” I instructed her she was just one of the main poets in the town. She was like an aunt or older sister, and I invited her to examine at my reserve release readings since I was just some child as opposed to her, with a large amount to study.
Amy experienced been about for the beginnings of the scholar-led Asian American motion at UCLA, and she stayed politically active as she acquired married and had a son, taking element in the activities of the Pacific Asian American Girls Writers West in the 1980s and the collective recognised as Cantaluz in the ’90s. I didn’t know the facts, but I understood her daily life was not quick: divorcing and increasing a son as a one mom embracing Buddhism and locating a time and place for her part as a poet. Amy taught arithmetic in the Los Angeles Unified Faculty District for a lot more than 30 several years.
Finally, I too taught English composition and literature in LAUSD for 34 yrs, so I understood that existence as a poet was a battle. Operating entire time and increasing a family and creating and publishing publications? “That’s like icing on the cake,” Amy mentioned. Probably she did use the aged-time phrases like “icing on the cake” and “Yellow Ability,” but she’d stepped up in the ’60s and she was a veteran, as considerably as I was anxious. I experienced absolutely nothing but regard.
Nor did Amy rest on the get the job done she’d performed a long time before. In 2005, she posted a guide of Zen-inflected poems, “Stone Bow Prayer,” with Copper Canyon Push, just one of the principal poetry publishers in the United States. “The Yellow Door” adopted in 2015, “Basic Vocabulary” a year later on. And finally, “That Blue Trickster Time,” just one of my favorites, which I gave absent to buddies — particularly people avid readers who did not read substantially poetry.
The lifestyle of a town as manifold and colonized as L.A. is normally hidden by garish surfaces, and in some cases the most portentous meanings are found — to use Ralph Ellison’s time period from “Invisible Man” — “on the decrease frequencies,” individuals which our poets attend. I recall this poem, in which Amy drew a parallel concerning the town of 1992 and the L.A. of 1871:
LA Riots, Circa 1871
Invisible heritage for these
all too visible Chinese
17 to 20 immigrants hung
in 3 downtown spots
Wong Chin ran a retailer
Ah Prolonged created cigars
Quite a few cooks, which include
Tong Won, also a musician
A person sufferer found
without the need of his trousers
and his finger missing
for its diamond ring
The mob of five hundred
features females and children
of the ten who stood demo
not one particular sent to jail
A mass lynching overlooked
as well slight to mention
in end-of-12 months recaps
no indication of these brutal info
By 1876 the entrance webpage of the Herald
options the Anti-Coolie Club constitution
a Who’s Who of popular citizens
membership a mere fifty cents
