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The Visual Arts Center of Richmond is presenting the inaugural Richmond Poetry Fest April 14-15, with writers-in-residence including the current title holder, Emily Okamoto-Green, and verse makers of prior recognition Tara Burke, Catherine Carson, VisArts Writing Engagement Coordinator Rosa Castellano, Kristina Hammet, Lauren Miner and Laura Chow Reeve.
“Our writer-in-residence is part of our annual residency, which started in 2019,” explains VisArts spokesperson Clarissa Bannor, “where we select four artists for an 11-month residency program at VisArts; three visual artists and one writer.”
The two-day event is free for those who favor adventures with words, due to the support of the Carole Weinstein Endowment for Creative Writing.
The festival involves workshops and inventive ways to bring the art of poetry into people’s lives. The festivities begin with lines spoken aloud on Friday, April 14, from 6 to 8 p.m. with “Of Use: A Poetry Reading + Celebration.”
(From left) Visual Arts Center of Richmond writers-in-residence Emily Okamoto-Green, 2022-23; Rosa Castellano, 2019-20, now writing engagement coordinator at VisArts; and Laura Chow Reeve, 2021-22 (Photo by Alexis Courtney Photography)
The current writer-in-residence, Okamoto-Green is a half-Japanese essayist, poet and animal lover. Originally from Shizuoka prefecture in Japan, her family relocated to Richmond in 1998. She’s a 2018 graduate of George Mason University’s Honors College with honors in English, and she also obtained an MFA in poetry from GMU in 2021.
“I’m a big believer in poetry is everywhere,” Okamoto-Green says. “It’s a tool humanity has used to share thoughts and feelings before we could even write them down. I think some of the best writing in all its forms — screenwriting, advertising, songwriting, novel writing, etc. — keep poetics in mind to some degree.”
Poetry, then, is capable of arriving in unexpected places. Okamoto-Green relates it to how Japanese film director Nobuhiko Obayashi was once asked why he had his 10-year-old daughter help him write a movie script.
“He replied that, ‘Adults can only think about things they understand ... but children come up with things that can’t be explained.’ ”
Okamoto-Green is interested in the magical or inexplicable, and she views children as incredible wellsprings of image and idea. “They have play in their approach, can see beyond the mundane, or even make the mundane incredible again. They’re masters of improv’s old rule of thumb, ‘Yes, and,’ and I think we can always learn a thing or two from their sense of wonder.”
She tries to incorporate the musicality of her first language wherever she can, and she’s fond of a particular inspirational phrase. Japanese fairy tales often begin with, “Mukashi mukashi,” which is often translated into, “Long, long ago.” It’s the Japanese equivalent of “Once upon a time.”
“But it’s the repetition and sound of the word that interests me most,” Okamoto-Green says. “The way my mother and grandmother said it when I was young, it seemed as if they were enchanting something into existence, which is, in a sense, what all poetry is, and what all language does.”
The poet often writes in English while using Japanese verse forms, haiku, haibun and waka, as a means of both challenging herself and connecting to the headwaters of Japanese poetry. And, she says, “At the heart of the Japanese forms that I work in is an instinct to capture a moment, experience, feeling in time.”
Okamoto-Green reflects on how women spearheaded early Japanese poetry in a time when men wrote in Chinese, which they viewed as the language of philosophers.
“It’s quite similar to how Romans often studied Greek poets, or how kings of Europe in the Middle Ages all learned Latin. My writing in English in Japanese form is as close as I can get to my homeland as Japanese diaspora. It connects me to a past that goes back to Sei Shonagon, Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi in the middle Heian period in around 900 to 1000 C.E.”
Okamoto-Green is currently composing a group of poems called “ママ夢 (MAMA YUME),” or “Mother Dreams.”
She wants to hold her poems before the reader like a snow globe for their observation, “while also simultaneously putting them inside the glass itself,” she says.
The Richmond Poetry Fest runs April 14-15 at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Admission is free.
