A Re-Inter-View on Hiromi Ito’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank Abby Hagler The only reason a corpse came up was because we were talking about Hiromi Ito’s book-length poem Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Action Books, 2015). Two others responded in kind: the first corpse they saw was their grandfather. Me too. My friend Adam had a different story, having grown up in a funeral home. To the 21 year-old, I said, “Wild Grass is one of those stories of movement— from ignorance-to-knowledge, innocence-to-experience— told from the perspective of an 11 year-old girl who travels a lot with her mother, brother, sister. She has two fathers, both corpses.” To someone’s mother, I said, “Wild Grass is about this mother and her three kids told from the perspective of the daughter. The mother’s husbands keep dying and then coming back as talking corpses, and the children live like that for a while. The plants take over the house and the mother’s body. She never takes care of her kids, so they leave her.” Someone’s mother wanted to know why all the fathers kept turning into corpses – why all the corpses surrounding these children in general. Because I wanted to know too, I asked Adam about the experience of coming up around the dead. He told me:

“There was nothing in the atmosphere of the funeral home to make it a frightening place, just pews and these heavy yellow curtains. My grandmother would send me to the basement to get a gallon of milk from a little auxiliary refrigerator in a pantry next to the embalming room, and in passing I would see a dead, naked old man and it was like passing a couch.”

In Wild Grass, corpse fathers are treated much the same – like a couch or other household objects. Marriage begins to look like this:

“Mother took care of the corpse while taking care of the vines, like the vines that grew tangled up in one another, father’s corpse got tangled

with mother, mother got tangled in father’s corpse, mother grew new shoots and the vines proliferated…”

Bodies are dying. The inanimate feed off them throughout the story. This reminds me: Plants are those inanimate creatures many forget are alive until they’re dead. Corpses, similarly, straddle the worlds of the living and the dead. What Adam said made me think a corpse is also a body incapable of producing or sustaining life, like writing. In the funeral world, a corpse is not a corpse. I asked Adam what I should call the dead in this book: Cadaver? Corpse? Body? “’Cadaver’ is a clinical term,” Adam said.

“You donate a body to science and that act transforms the body into a cadaver. Corpse is too gruesome, has too much horror movie connotation, to use in any professional context. Body is a neutral, human term.”

I liked that he connected a corpse to the terror of death. A body seems to be ambiguous, as if it could still hold life. There is something comforting in that. About corpses, Adam said: “There can be this visceral ‘This is not the person I know; there’s no spark anymore, this is just an empty vessel’ moment when viewing the body that can be incredibly beneficial to someone in mourning.” To live in a funeral home is much different than to live indefinitely with the dead. I want to make that distinction clear. What these perspectives share is how they reveal the way people normalize certain fears—especially the fear of death. Normalization occurs if the bizarre happens first. A corpse is everyday if one never knew to be afraid in the first place, like all of the children in this writing. This gives a corpse possibility beyond death. A corpse can also symbolize or help grief. It serves as the vessel for the passing of emotions. I went on to tell someone’s mother that vessels related to travel are everywhere in this story. A mother is a vessel. To be a mother is a role, too – a space to occupy, to absent, or corrupt. Because Wild Grass is written from the standpoint of a child who must care for her mother, a new role is created: the mother/child.

Someone’s mother disagreed. She said she did not understand why the dead wouldn’t stay dead, nor why a mother would refuse to mother. I told her: The mother/ child is not my idea. Julie Carr wrote about it in her essay “Dear Fred” posted on The Volta. The role of the mother is “the one who holds, carries, bears, and releases without ever really losing the other,” she says. This implies it is the child who is held, carried, born, and released. Meaning roles are vessels. They are plot points. A mother/child is one who performs both roles. Ito’s narrator is a perfect example of this: a child who must care for her parents, her siblings, and herself. In Wild Grass, a mother grows feral, less human, literally sprouting plants. Corpse fathers speak. But they are only patriarchs because “As long as he was the father, it didn’t matter what kind of father he was/ After he became a corpse, he was still head of the household.” Anyone who can be both/and shows that roles are vessels to be occupied, rather than determined by demographics. When multiple roles are occupied (and they always are), it’s possible for a child to stop being a child, or for an adult to become a household object. It makes it possible to be alive and dead, or dead before death. A role unfulfilled may still contain a body, after all. Ito means a parent refusing to parent, or a failed parent still attempting, is the same as a corpse refusing to stay dead. The 21 year-old didn’t want to know any more about the dead. He wanted to know why this fairy tale-sounding story is poetry. I told him old tales in many cultures used to be in poetic form. What I didn’t say was: Like the definition of a poem, the corpse also means something different in every piece of writing. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” a corpse can be a suit to hide pernicious aims. In zombie flicks, the insatiable corpse is part of an army equal to social fears often driving politics. Jeffrey Angles, in his translator’s introduction, lets us know Ito’s story is composed of bits of news, autobiography, the Japanese-English inter-language her own children speak, pre-modern forms, and folklore. It is hard to tell what is real and what is fiction, what is Ito’s and what is borrowed. No reader can try to read this without attempting to parse the two. And, yes. How frightening to read without a solid sense of what is real – a confusion similar to a character coming across a prone figure, unable to tell if it is a body or a corpse. This is the fear of a reader reading a poet’s prose. I never mentioned to any of the interviewees that there isn’t a single word wasted in this poem. I kept to myself the idea Angles brings up regarding Ito’s

fluid shifts between poetry and prose. He says Ito wrote this book attempting to write poetry after a long period of depression resulting in prose. I heard a shadow of this idea mentioned once before on the first day of a writing class. We were given a questionnaire and asked to say whether we were writing mostly in poetry or mostly in prose. The teacher said, “If you write mostly in poetry, you have a sense of control. If you write mostly in prose, you are feeling at sea.” There was no answer for those who are in between, so I thought both must be indicators of growth. No one asked me how the book ends. I haven’t yet read a review that talks about the end – and for good reason. Everyone wants to have the ending to themselves. Even I know this rule, and others, such as: A corpse dropped in any conversation will eventually turn talk to life. Life lurks death that way. However, talk about life does not necessarily bring up death. It may never come to mind. Meaning corpses point toward learning and survival, not stagnation alone.

Abby Hagler lives and works in Chicago. Other work can be found in Black Tongue Review, Alice Blue Review, and Boog City.