{"id":8413,"date":"2020-06-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=8413"},"modified":"2020-07-28T23:06:39","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T06:06:39","slug":"10-years-of-lr-process-profile-brynn-saito-on-dinuba-ca-1959","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/17\/10-years-of-lr-process-profile-brynn-saito-on-dinuba-ca-1959\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Years of LR | Process Profile: Brynn Saito on \u201cDinuba, 1959\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In celebration of our magazine’s ten-year anniversary, we\u2019re catching up with past contributors this summer via our process profile series. In today’s profile, Issue 6 contributor Brynn Saito reflects back on her poem “Dinuba, 1959.”<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"LR:
Issue 6 contributor Brynn Saito (Photo by Schoenwald Photography)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

* * * <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by communion with a photograph, this short poem<\/a> inquires into the life and spirit of my mother, Janelle Oh Saito. In the photograph, my mother is about five years old, appearing as the poem describes: bright-eyed before the Dinuba, CA, farmhouse in a white dress. Rereading it now, I see how much my \u201cterrible need to know\u201d has shaped my poetics over the course of the last decade, in the time since the poem manifested itself on the page. In my mother, I\u2019ve forever intuited an unsheltered, untouched wonder\u2014a powerful wonder that tips into joy and laughter so easily. Alongside this energy, I\u2019ve felt a fiery rage, born from what she endured as a child and fueling her current community work. In trying to understand her life, her personhood, I was\u2014I am\u2014subconsciously seeking to know something elemental about myself and something true about the histories shaping our family and making possible the worlds awaiting us. The photograph, then, was a portal to past and future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Saito’s mother circa 1959 in Dinuba, CA (Photo courtesy of the author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve returned, after nearly twenty years away, to my hometown of Fresno, CA, to live. Fresno is the primary city in the middle of the sprawling Central Valley\u2014the valley where my immigrant elders labored; to where my grandparents returned after the Japanese American incarceration of World War II; where my mother\u2019s grandparents settled after fleeing Korea, which, at the turn of the twentieth century, was suffering and surviving under the brutal Japanese occupation. My \u201cterrible need to know,\u201d first articulated in this poem, has, in the short time I\u2019ve been back, unearthed new stories from the memory trove. Closer now to the land that made us and living about a mile from my parents\u2019 house, I\u2019ve become a listener and recorder. (Visit Dear\u2014<\/em><\/a> to see one community-based poetry project that has bloomed into a living archive of letters and portraits.) I\u2019ve also nudged my mother (and father) into writing and telling their own stories, which they\u2019ve performed before large audiences\u2014something I never expected to see. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know who she becomes and why,\u201d goes the poem. \u201cBut the how<\/em> will escape me \/ continues to escape me.\u201d Will, perhaps, always escape me, as our knowledge of the past is forever incomplete. But a desire fills that gap\u2014an imaginative power that drew me to the photograph and draws me still: to the wellspring of memory and feeling, to a place beyond language where I commune with the energies that came before me, where I remember and make whole the body of my future self. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDinuba, CA, 1959\u201d<\/a> was published six years ago in Lantern Review<\/em>, scrawled (most likely) in a workshop setting, and chiseled down to its three sentences for its inclusion in my second book. Today, it continues to undisguise itself, reveal itself\u2014as the most lasting poems (and people and places) do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * * <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brynn Saito <\/strong>is the author of two books of poetry from Red Hen Press:\u00a0<\/em>Power Made Us Swoon<\/a>\u00a0(2016) and\u00a0<\/em>The Palace of Contemplating Departure<\/a>\u00a0(2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She recently authored the chapbook\u00a0<\/em>Dear\u2014, commissioned by Densho, an organization dedicated to sharing the story of the World War II\u2013era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Brynn is assistant professor of creative writing in the English Department at Fresno State and codirector of Yonsei Memory Project.\u00a0More at brynnsaito.com<\/a>\u00a0and yonseimemoryproject.com<\/a>.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"WHITE<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

ALSO RECOMMENDED<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

White Blood <\/em>by Kiki Petrosino<\/a> (Sarabande Books, 2017)<\/strong>
Please consider supporting a Black-owned bookstore<\/a> with your purchase.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an Asian American-focused publication, Lantern Review <\/em>is committed to promoting diverse voices within the literary world. In solidarity with the Black community and in an effort to amplify Black voices in poetry, we\u2019ll be sharing a different book by a Black poet in each of our blog posts this summer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In celebration of our magazine’s ten-year anniversary, we\u2019re catching up with past contributors this summer via our process profile series. In today’s profile, Issue 6 contributor Brynn Saito reflects back on her poem “Dinuba, 1959.” Inspired by communion with a photograph, this short poem inquires into the life and spirit of my mother, Janelle Oh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[318],"tags":[1239,1007,1295,972,321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8413"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8492,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8413\/revisions\/8492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}