PORT ANGELES — Poet Tess Gallagher found a manuscript on her friend Alfredo Arreguin’s dining-room table — he wanted her to take just a quick look — and “two hours later, I was still reading,” she recalls.
“Alfredo said, ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ and I said, ‘Oh, yes, I did,’” Gallagher added.
In her hands was poet Lawrence Matsuda’s A Cold Wind from Idaho, an array of poems Gallagher calls both challenging and inspirational.
Matsuda, who lives in Seattle, will read from the slim volume at 12:35 p.m. Tuesday in the Little Theater at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd. Admission is free to the public, and copies of Wind will be available.
‘Alchemy of the soul’
Gallagher, the renowned poet, teacher and daughter of Port Angeles, will be there, too, to witness something she describes as “an alchemy of the soul.”
Matsuda was born in Minidoka, Idaho, in a World War II “relocation center,” where his family was confined, with thousands of other Japanese-Americans, inside barbed wire and beneath a guard tower.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued executive order 9066, mandating the evacuation and imprisonment of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in February 1942, Matsuda’s parents, Hanae and Ernest, lost their grocery business and were forced to move to the camp at Minidoka. Like other Japanese-Americans, they were widely believed to be potential enemies of the country where they had made their homes.
“They lived dignified lives, often under undignified circumstances,” Matsuda writes in Wind’s dedication.
In his poetry, Matsuda travels back to the era — which outlasted World War II — when Japanese-Americans were treated with suspicion, even loathing, in places like Seattle.
He writes of the ripples he felt as a boy, then a man, long after leaving Minidoka, and of other experiences shared with friends in the Pacific Northwest.
Some of his poems will be hard to hear, Gallagher said, because they confront a period when the United States jailed people, without due process, out of fear.
As she became Matsuda’s mentor — “he’s like a younger brother” — Gallagher helped him turn raw pain into a kind of poetry that reaches out to people.
“The purpose of this book,” she said, “is to help us understand that no country is perfect . . . and we can heal.”
Working with Matsuda, Gallagher learned about gaman, a Japanese practice of bearing the unbearable with dignity. “This is done with a particular kind of silence,” she said, adding that these poems break the silence.
Like a brother
Since Wind’s publication last year, Matsuda has given lots of readings. And “each audience is a little different,” he said.
At a reunion at Minidoka, “a fair percentage were in the camp” during the war. “A fair percentage were crying.
“One woman said, ‘It’s been 60 years, and I had never cried for Minidoka” until that day.
“For some people, it’s a release; it’s permission to speak about things they haven’t spoken about.”
People with no experience with the relocation camps also approach the poet; one man asked Matsuda if anything good had come of his family’s imprisonment.
Each reading different
In a way, yes, Matsuda said: “It gave me a literary voice; it gave me a mission, to turn anger into creative art, to transform it into something that can help others.”
Matsuda believes that man’s question was really about living through a difficult situation and finally emerging on the other side, to realize that something good was born out of it.
Matsuda not only survived the camp and the anti-Japanese feelings that followed the war; he went on to earn a doctorate in education and after 27 years as a teacher and principal in Seattle’s public schools, had second and third careers as a professor at Seattle University and now a consultant on school design.
In the early drafts of his poems, Matsuda said, he held back a bit, not revealing his deeper emotions.
Gallagher taught him, essentially, that if “you’ve taken it this far,” putting your poetry out there for people to read, “you’d better bring it on home . . . so people can understand it, digest it, feel it.”
More than just reading
This Tuesday, Matsuda added, he won’t just read his poems. He’ll deliver them with “vigor and emotion,” to rouse listeners and bring them inside the story.
“People say, ‘Why doesn’t everyone forget about [the confinement of the Japanese-Americans]?’” Gallagher added. But trying to forget can halt the healing process, she believes.
The Japanese-Americans’ story “is so instructive to us,” Gallagher said, when and if “we are made fearful by our government.”
“His reading will be inspirational,” she added.
“He was quite a samurai,” accepting her challenges to rewrite, go deeper and rewrite again.
“It was really a privilege to help him. I’m a Caucasian; I belong to the tribe that did this to him,” Gallagher said. “To have his trust — that was the wonderful part about it.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.