Kenji Takezo

Who is Kenji Takezo to you?

The selection of Rick Noguchi's poems driven by his enigmatic character, Kenji fascinated me. I found myself imagining what he would look like and to visualize his physical attributes with what was given in Noguchi's poems.

Visualizing Kenji:
Black hair
Smells like the sea
Always in shorts
Dark intense eyes
Muscular legs
Awkwardly tall

He struck me as this zen boy (I don't know why I imagined such a pubescent precocious boy who is very observant, well possibly because the accounts of his mother's movements) in the beginning of Noguchi's selection while the last two poems resonated with an older wiser figure within the character development that happens in the poems progressively.

The first three poems (The Shirt His Father Wore That Day Was Wrinkled, Slightly, From Rooftops, Kenji Takezo Throws Himself, The Ocean Inside Him) talk about Kenji specifically but I see Kenji within Ethel Nakano (With Her at All Times Ethel Nakano Carried a Sledgehammer) and Paul Tanaka (A Man Made Himself a Marionette).

One of the other reasons why I string these poems together and see it working so well in the order it's presented and cohesively is the fact that each poem touches base or references about being centered, gravity, space, balance, direction, water and air.

The Shirt His Father Wore That Day Was Wrinkled, Slightly

Wide enough to support
His center of gravity

From Rooftops, Kenji Takezo Throws Himself

The trick, he must remember, is in the landing:
Keep his face and genitals out of it.
Adjusting himself in the air

The Ocean Inside Him

The sense of direction.
He breathed in
When he should have

With Her at All Times Ethel Nakano Carried a Sledgehammer

With centrifugal force behind her.
She could wreck easily

A Man Made Himself a Marionette

So he fashioned strings to his hands,
His feet, his head to gain control.

Centrifugal force kind of encapsulates what the characters strive to be/try to be "centered" in. Not getting into the Newtonian mechanics of the centrifugal force, but rather applying the notion and etymology of the concept, here is how wiki describes it:

Centrifugal force (from Latin centrum, meaning "center", and fugere, meaning "to flee") is the apparent outward force that draws a rotating body away from the center of rotation. It is caused by the inertia of the body as the body's path is continually redirected.

Finding balance, finding your chi, fleeing from balance, falling from balance, crashing into waves, trying to reach. It resonated with me. Noguchi's work is so character driven and the readers get such crisp clean names of the characters that one can't help but to visualize them as well as imagine that they're out there in the world trying to define their centrifugal experience. May be they even have a Facebook.