Lee Ann Roripaugh |
Most
states now have poet laureates. It usually
starts off when some local scribe
get some national attention for verse and the state politicos, most of whom would not know
a poem if they tripped over it, decide to lay
claim to him/her with less ceremony than the selection of a
new state bird, mineral, insect, or hat.
Many brilliant poets have been so honored, and so have a few hacks whose sing-song rhymes appeal
to sentimentality and state vanity.
Last
year South Dakota Republican Governor Gov.
Dennis Daugaard had to fill the Laureate chair in that state after the
twelve-year incumbent David Allan Evans
retired. It may have been loyalty to his
own undergraduate alma mater that caused him to turn to a University of South Dakota professor and the editor of the highly regarded South Dakota Review, but Lee
Ann Roripaugh is a gifted and award winning poet with a national
reputation.
South
Dakota is a somewhat schizophrenic state.
Much of the eastern half of the
state is farm land—corn and soy beans giving way to dry
land wheat farming. This half of the
state celebrates hardy pioneer sodbuster
and Homesteaders—think Laura Ingles Wilder, whose itinerant hard luck father brought to
the Territory for part of her
storied childhood. In the west the High Plains dry out and then give way to the Bad Lands and Black Hills. It was the wild wild west of cowboys,
prospectors, gun slingers, card sharps, whores and Indian Wars. The literature of the state, like its politics, reflects that cultural division.
But
Roripaugh does not fit neatly into
either camp and her work reflects that.
She
was born in 1955 in Laramie, Wyoming, the
daughter of Robert Roripaugh, a poet
in his own right who was Wyoming Poet Laureate from 1995-2002. After
graduating from the University of
Wyoming in 1953, Robert was drafted and posted by the Army to Japan where he
met Yoshiko Horikoshi. After his
discharge the couple settled in Laramie where he taught and began a prolific
career as a poet, short story writer,
and novelist.
Young Lee Ann grew up in cultivated academic community. She absorbed as much as she could from her
mother’s culture as well as her father’s background
coming of age on a Wyoming ranch in the Wind River country. Artistic
expression was naturally encouraged. She began writing poetry in high school, but
aimed for a musical career.
Roripaugh attended the University of Indiana where she got her
bachelor’s degree in piano performance and a master’s in music history. But the lure
of writing was too strong. She switched
gears and got a Master of Fine Arts
in Creative Writing.
The desolate Heart Mountain internment camp inspired Roripaugh's first poetry collection. |
Before completing her education,
Roripaugh was establishing a career as a writer. She had already won an AWP Intro Award in Poetry for her work as a student and the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize
in 1995. Then in 1998 Ishmael Reed selected her first poetry collection, Beyond Heart Mountain for
publication in the National Poetry
Series. For that book she drew on
her mother’s Japanese culture and her father’s deep understanding of the West
to touch on the lives on of the internees
at the infamous Hart Mountain
Relocation Center—concentration camp—for Japanese Americans during World War II.
Her subsequent collections include Year
of the Snake in 2004, which explored mixed-race
identity,
myths, Japanese fairy tales, and transition; On
the Cusp of a Dangerous Year in 2009 on the lives of contemporary women with
a nod to mythic archetypes; and Danderins in 2014.
Roripaugh's second poetry collection. |
In
the process Roripaugh won a Bush
Foundation Fellowship in the Arts in 2003 and the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in 2004.
She
is an academic star at the University
of South Dakota in Vermillion where
she is a professor of English, Director of Creative Writing, and
editor of the South Dakota Review. Her work reveals her wide interests from queer identity to science fiction, space travel, and cyborgs.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Spasmed jerk and gutter of Hiroshima newsreels unwinding
inside a movie set in Hiroshima, where the actress in the movie plays an
actress making a movie about Hiroshima and peace. A movie about (re)membering
the (dis)membered. A movie about the horror of forgetfulness.
It is here, inside this movie, where I will walk tonight,
along black and white streets of borrowed time, framed within the movie set of
a movie set; where brazen neon flickers numinous promises, fictional lovers
first illuminated, then dowsed, like a candle pinched between thumb and
forefinger. Can you see me? Will you follow?
(You’re destroying me / You’re good for me.)
Late-night cafe. Crisp pale beer. Shadows of moths small black
hearts charred by the sudden flash and immolation of rice-paper lanterns.
Insatiable koi mouthing the surface of the garden’s pond: like an agitation of
insects against a lit window; like your face, illuminated by the quiet electric
glow of your computer screen as you read; like my face, lit by my words as I
write them to you.
Here, on the other side of your screen, inside the movie
taking place within a movie about Hiroshima, about the illusion of love, about
the illusion of not forgetting, I will fabricate this story rising like wild
iris from a cancerous gourd of ash. I will tell you I love you. I will
promise never to forget. Here, at ground zero, it will all be true.
(She: Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers. There were
cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere, and morning glories and day lilies that
rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for
flowers till then. I didn’t make anything up.
He: You made it all up.)
Here, on the other side of your screen, by the River called
Ota, which runs by the city of my Japanese ancestors, near the American
occupation camp where my Japanese mother met my American father while typing
like the sound of rain dropping, where clouds are slung low and dark like
bruised sulky pansies, and glimpses of the sky behind are a surreal, too-bright
Dali blue I will walk deeper, and deeper still, into the black-and-white interior
of the narrative’s narrative.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh
Happy Hour
I always forget the name,
delphinium,
even though it was the flower
the hummingbirds
loved best. They came in pairs—sleek,
emerald-bright
heads, the clockwork machinery
of their blurred wings
thrumming swift, menacing engines.
They slipped their beaks.
as if they were swizzle sticks, deep
into the blue
throat of delphinium and sucked
dry the nectar-
chilled hearts like goblets full of sweet,
frozen daiquiri.
I liked to sit on the back porch
in the evenings,
watching them and eating Spanish
peanuts, rolling
each nut between thumb and forefinger
to rub away
the red salty skin like brittle
tissue paper,
until the meat emerged gleaming,
yellow like old
ivory, smooth as polished bone.
And late August,
after exclamations of gold
flowers, tiny
and bitter, the caragana
trees let down their
beans to ripen, dry, and rupture—
at first there was
the soft drum of popcorn, slick with oil,
puttering some-
where in between seed, heat, and cloud.
Then sharp cracks like cap
gun or diminutive fireworks,
caragana
peas catapulting skyward like
pellet missiles.
Sometimes a meadowlark would lace
the night air with
its elaborate melody,
rippling and sleek
as a black satin ribbon. Some-
times there would be
a falling star. And because
this happened in
Wyoming, and because this was
my parents’ house,
and because I’m never happy
with anything,
at any time, I always wished
that I was some-
where, anywhere else, but here.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh
Dream Carp
People traveled from miles away to see
my paintings of fish—
the jeweled armor of their scales, the beadlike
set of their eyes in
rubbery socket rings, the glimmering
swish of fin and tail
so real it seemed that you could almost dip
a net deep into
the paper and pull up the arching wet
weight of a golden carp,
a shiny trout, or the dark muscular
heft of a bass with
its mouth stretched into the surprised, wiry
“oh” of a child’s wind
sock. I captured my models from the sea,
lake, and goldfish pond
in the back garden, so careful not to
let their mouths be torn
by the hook, their scales chipped, or the silky
tissue of their tails
ripped by a clumsy hand. I kept them in
large glass bowls, fed them
mosquito wings or dry silkworm pupas
offered from chopsticks,
and when I was finished making sketches,
I quickly took them
back and set them free again. Every
night I dream I swim
with these fish as a golden carp—black spots
on cloisonné scales,
pulled to the surface by the deceptive
creamy luster of
the moon or the sizzle of firefly lights
across the water.
And every night I am tempted once
again by the smell
of the baited hook, by my predictable
hunger for earthly
things, and each time I am surprised again
by the stinging hook
in my lip that pulls me mercilessly
into the bright air,
setting my gills on fire, the sharp, silver
pain of the knife that
slits me open so easily from tail
to throat to reveal
the scarlet elastic of my raw gills,
the translucent film
of my air sac, the milky rise of my
stomach, and the gray
marbled coil of my intestines. I rise
late each day, and work
in brighter light. When I die, I will
have my paintings brought
down to the lake and slipped into the water.
First the edges of
ink will blur, and then there will be a great
flurry as the fins,
tails, and bodies begin blossoming in-
to life again, each
fish detaching from its canvas of silk
or rice paper—a
swirl of color, motion, swimming away.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh
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