The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo

by Rick Noguchi

Overview

For the young Kenji Takezo, the innocent surfer who inhabits this collection of poems, balance becomes more than just trying to stand on a wave. It is a way of surviving in a world as precarious as the ocean, a world constantly turning on itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979968
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/31/1996
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	983 KB

About the Author

Rick Noguchi was born in Los Angeles and raised in Culver City. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Arizona State University. His chapbook, The Wave He Caught, won the 1994 Pearl Editions Prize.

Table of Contents

Contents One When for Weeks the Sea is Flat The Turn of Privacy Hunting for Grunion Craving the Taste of Ocean The Breath He Holds The Brother, Joe Takezo, an Amateur Bodybuilder Who Tries to Surf, Sometimes Holes from Somewhere El Toro del Mar After Kenji Takezo Loses His Trunks His Appetite is Met, Almost The Second Oldest Balancing Butsumyo Retired from the Circus, Age Twenty-three I, the Neighbor, Mr. Uskovich, Watch Every Morning Kenji Takezo Hold His Breath The Explosion at the Power Plant Was Not a Supernova The Madonna His the Ocean The Really Long Ride Two His First Big Surf After Kenji Takezo's Worst Wipeout He Takes Home with Him Some Ocean The Sweetest Oranges in Town Two Words That Mean Nothing and Everything The Breath-Holding Contest Kenji Takezo Learns to Keep His Mouth Closed The Shirt His Father Wore That Day Was Wrinkled, Slightly Black with Red Spots Not Surfing Some Days From Rooftops, Kenji Takezo Throws Himself June 22nd The Winter Skin He Wears The Ocean Inside Him The Classmate Who Saw Kenji Takezo Riding a Bus Three The Witch of Miyajima That the First Squad Encountered, Circa 1470 The Widow Who Was Slaughtered Four Lost Under the Ocean After Falling Off a Wave The Room He Cannot Keep His Wave The Kite a Man Made Kenji Takezo Becomes Water Autumn Heat Orchards His Brother Surfing His First Dance October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw Paradise: Resting Off Highway 5 Kenji Takezo the Surfer Who Can Dance, Too The Old-Timer Who Told Himself Away Kenji Takezo Fights Back He Knows Not Every Ride is Perfect Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

With a powerful, quiet grace and a delicate intellectual balance, Noguchi tells a particular, recognizable life in the metaphor of surfing. In everyday language-not a hip, faux-vernacular surferspeak-this California-raised poet offers 46 easygoing takes on the thrills, spills and ironies of the life of a young earnest, dreamy surfer named Kenji Takezo. For teenage Kenji, lost in the deeps of puberty, the waxed surface of the surfboard becomes a constant. Suddenly on a dance floor with a girl, for instance, Kenji "does the only thing/ He can do as the girl/ To whom he is speaking/ Rises in the manner of a wave./ He surfs./ It is an involuntary response/ To stand on his board,/ This dance floor." Noguchi's world is also transhistorical. His sunkissed, aquamarine architectures of sand and saltwater arise from a preternatural Pacific Coast, one not necessarily linked to California or, for that matter, America. Poems in the third of the four sections revolve around Japanese legend, from which Noguchi surfs, dazzlingly, into poems about Kenji's earlier childhood experiences. One of these, "Lost Under the Ocean After Falling Off a Wave," seamlessly blends the underwater experience of not knowing which way is up with the breathless terror of a child's being lost in a supermarket. In these direct, unpretentious poems, Noguchi makes the most of his metaphor without making too much of it. This collection won of the 1995 Associated Writing Program's Award Series in Poetry. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This fine, vigorous collection bears itself out, finding grace in its balance over a very large and unpredictable ocean.”
—Alberto Ríos


“Rick Noguchi’s first book of verse possesses the important characteristics of a plural literature. A traditional ease of storytelling, magic, and an innocence which is the heavy authority for the other two. But there is something extra in these poems. It is an odd spirituality or sensitivity, not of style, but of experience. And as great Bohemian multiculturalist Franz Kafka said, ‘It will have to stay with you.’”
—Norman Dubie

“These spare, demotic lyrics ride with innocence, humility, humor, and doggedness. The Ancient, the Little, the constant Mariner: the human soul, as bare among the cultural wreckage as it always was, surfer of the primordial.”

—Olga Broumas

From the Publisher