In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, librarian, and memorist, Toyo Suyemoto. During her early years, Suyemoto published under her husband’s surname as Toyo Kawakami, Toyo S. Kawakami, and Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami, though later in life she preferred to be remembered only by her family name. Suyemoto was trained from an early age to be a poet. Her mother taught Japanese literature to her and her eight siblings as children, and also recited Japanese translations of Shakespeare. Suyemoto’s own work in haiku and tanka is the direct result of her mother’s influence, though she was also worked in conventional English lyric forms. Suyemoto herself began publishing poems in Japanese American community papers when she was a teenager, and she continued writing during her years of incarceration as a young woman in Topaz. During her lifetime, Suyemoto published a reference book for librarians, Acronyms in Education and the Behavioral Sciences, as well as poems in Yale Review, Common Ground and the anthology American Bungaku (1938). Interest in her work increased in the 1970s and 80s, however, and Suyemoto’s work soon appeared in the anthologies Speaking for Ourselves: American Ethnic Writing (1969), Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980), and Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry 1892-1970 (1996) as well as in the magazines Many Mountains Moving and Amerasia Journal. Four years after her death in 2003, Rutgers University Press published her memoir I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment (2007). Source

This episode includes a reading of her poem, "Barracks Home".  You can find more poems like this in our Get Lit Anthology at www.getlitanthology.org .

"Barracks Home"

This is our barracks, squatting on the ground,
Tar papered shacks, partitioned into rooms
By sheetrock walls, transmitting every sound
Of neighbor's gossip or the sweep of brooms
The open door welcomes the refugees,
And now at least there is no need to roam
Afar: here space enlarges memories
Beyond the bounds of camp and this new home.
The floor is carpeted with dust, wind-borne
Dry alkalai, patterned with insect feet,
What peace can such a place as this impart?
We can but sense, bewildered and forlorn,
That time, disrupted by the war from neat
Routines, must now adjust within the heart.

Support the show

Support the show