This parable about transformation in our contemporary world builds on Japanese traditional folklore and modern anime. It reads like a fantasy, “a floating world” of dismembered bodies and chaotic landscapes, grounded with vignettes of her own story, a sober rendition of coping with nuclear contamination. From the beginning, “transforming wives,” women who shape-shift from animals, and have to disappear back into their “animal hearts” set a tone of magical uneasiness. Even the sun, along with the animals, disappears in “Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, Withdraws.” In the beautiful haiku “August Sky,” allusions to nuclear catastrophe accentuate death and departure. Although the sun goddess returns toward the end of this book, the speaker indicates her own return is problematic, not entirely possible, except perhaps to “the floating world.” 

 

Poetry Editor, Sandra Wassilie, took time over the Thanksgiving Break to catch up with Jeannine to dialog on this most intriguing work:

 

 

14 H: Your poem published in Fourteen Hills, “Snow White Has an MRI,” and this collection assert your ability to put the traditional fairy tale into modern contexts. In She Returns to the Floating World, one of your threads is relationships between the female and the male, particularly the wife – husband and the older sister – younger brother. I am curious as to why the brother is never given a voice as the husband is; and also why the husband is not imbued with either “dragon,” “moon,” or animal forms as is the brother. Is the husband so unchanging?

 

JHG: My first book, Becoming the Villainess, was a bunch of persona poems in a variety of women’s voices; I decided I wanted to try to do a male voice in this second book, especially because, as you point out, the themes are all about how women and men interact.  

 

I have three brothers, and I consider myself fairly close to them; yet their inner voices remain essentially a mystery to me. I’ve been married for seventeen years to my husband, and his voice was the one that was whispering in my ears during the time I was writing, so I think his attitudes and vocabulary were definitely the model for the voice in the “husband” poems in the book.

 

As far the changing nature of the characters, in the folk tales I was studying, it was usually the woman who changed form, not the man. So the poems followed that pattern, too.

 

 

14H: I am reminded that a shape-shifting wife is a prominent feature in the folklore of several Native American cultures. In your work with Japanese fairy tales, did any fables from Western culture or other ethnicities strike you as having similar themes that you explore here?

 

JHG: Fairy tale scholars keep track of how variations of certain stories move around different countries during different time frames; it’s all in indices, numbered versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc. I’m also partial to the Jungian belief that there is such a thing as a collective unconscious.

 

I do think that the Japanese folk tales I was especially interested in for this book were those that seemed fairly unusual to me; Western European fairy tales are pretty much “man saves girl” over and over. Japan’s folk tales have these “sister-savior” characters that really appealed to me, especially after a lifetime of watching Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, which are full of plucky heroic young women who save the day.

 

The transforming wife is pretty universal; Melusine, one of my favorite French folk tales, is about a fairy-woman who marries a human man and becomes a dragon and leaves him after he sneaks in to see her while she is bathing, breaking her taboo. She would be right at home in She Returns to the Floating World.

 

 

14H: You indicate in your blog the importance of ordering poems in a book, and this work is testament to its power. How did you go about writing and organizing these poems? Did you start with certain intentions of order in mind or did it emerge organically?

 

JHG: I am a lover of organization strategies – I like taking apart my friends’ and my own manuscripts and trying out different layouts for fun. This book was in process for so long that it went through several different organization schemes. Six or seven years ago, it was just in two sections, one section about childhood and family, and the second focusing on the more romantic folk tales-oriented poems. As I kept writing the book, and kept shuffling it around, the political notes in the book – particularly around nuclear issues – started creeping in, and the book kind of expanded beyond what I originally expected it to be. I actually started writing a new book about the nuclear issues and my childhood in Oak Ridge, Tennessee as I was finishing up this manuscript.

 

 

14H: You often juxtapose vulnerability with harsh reality, most evident in the poems or stanzas in haiku form. For instance, in “Wild Strawberries and Anime Fires,” we catch the image of children being used as shields against a fire, a tale that foretells the children maimed by fires set off by the explosions of the atomic bombs, now set in anime. When working with these stories and images, what were your particular tendencies that you had to resist when dealing with such volatile subjects, and how did you do that?

 

JHG: Yes, I was very afraid of overplaying the melodrama card, and was very tentative about writing too much or too directly about Hiroshima; so many good writers have written so sensitively and at-length about those issues that I didn’t want to tread on that legacy. However, because I’ve always had an interest (related to my father’s work consulting on nuclear waste cleanup) I couldn’t leave the legacies of Hiroshima completely out of the book. I hope that I treated the subject respectfully.

 

 

14H: While a couple of your reviewers (Gina Barnard in California Journal of Poetics and Jessie Carty in The Rumpus) focus on the fox-wife, I am more intrigued by the crane-wife whose feathers show up in several poems. Would you comment on her role vis-à-vis the fox-wife and the white bird that the speaker embodies later on?

 

JHG: I think while the fox-wife is the indicator of the more ferocious female feral nature, the crane wife symbolizes the female’s spiritual, self-sacrificing side. The “white bird” representing the spirit often appears in the Japanese folk tales I read, including one where a brother puts out a water bucket and his sister appears as a white bird to give him life-saving advice, like a more angelic fairy godmother. The white bird in general also worked as a symbol for resurrection, a hopeful afterlife.

 

14H: Continuing in this vein, “Postcard from the Suburbs of Seattle to the Suburbs of Tokyo” evokes “some untorn prayer” that seems to me to be a critical thread in this book. It carries through the end where the fox-wife of the beginning poem in the end poem spits out “blankets of white crane feathers.” While a number of interpretations of this image from the ominous to the hopeful are possible, I like to think your work is an attempt to find what is salvageable in the irreparable, a healing of the human heart so that it emerges from its “fire.” I wonder how you originally perceived your purposes. Did you ever sense that this book might be one that promotes a spiritual healing at individual and political levels?      

 

JHG: Yes, that is my hope. I have a cautious spiritual optimism that keeps my more cynical, dystopian visions at bay, at least sometime, in my poetry. I love the beautiful spiritual symbol of folding the origami crane; I nearly cried when I heard about people leaving them on the tsunami-ravaged beaches recently in Japan. I’ve always thought there was a strange merging of Christian-mystic-messiah-esque messages in Hayao Miyazaki’s movies with the echoes of Shinto in his work, though he claims in interviews to be an atheist.