Interviewed by Leonard Chan (LC) and Frances Kakugawa (FK)

Amy Uyematsu is an award winning poet. Her latest book “That Blue Trickster Time”is her sixth published collection. Her other poetry books include, “Basic Vocabulary,”“The Yellow Door,”“Stone Bow Prayer,”“Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain,” and “Thirty Miles from J-Town.”

Amy Uyematsu was the first Publications Coordinator with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center during the formative period of Ethnic Studies at UCLA and other colleges. She later spent 32 years as a high school math teacher.

LC: Welcome Amy Uyematsu. I’ve asked poet Frances Kakugawa to assist me with this interview and I furnished her with a copy of your book.

FK: What a beautiful collection of poetry.

LC: I believe Florence Hongo (head of AACP) has been a fan of your poetry and has made a point to carry your books. This was my first chance to read one of them. Thank you very much for sharing a copy with me.

After I read your bio, I began to wonder if you and Florence crossed paths. You both have common histories that go back to the beginning of the Ethnic Studies Movement in the late Sixties and Seventies. Did you meet back then? What was your connection with AACP (JACP for Japanese American Curriculum Project back then), if any?

Introduction by Leonard Chan

Welcome to our twelfth annual poetry selection article. We’ve actually been doing this since 2004, but we missed 2012-2019 because the newsletter was on a long hiatus.

You can read more about the history of this series in last year’s article and also read all of our previous articles (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2020, 2021, and 2022).

Some of our other articles even show you how to write your own haikus, tankas, and general poems. Note that a lot of the older articles contain broken resources links. So I’ve included some new links at the end of this article. For learning about how to write poetry, I like the tips that poet Frances Kakugawa gave us in the 2020 interview we did with her.

This article features some of Frances’ poems and a few more of Amy Uyematsu’s poems (she’s featured in an interview we did for this month).

I often hear people say that they don’t get poetry or don’t like it. Admittedly, I find some poetry to be unfathomable. However, poetry was probably one of the earliest forms of literature. It was and is deeply ingrained in our music and oral traditions which precede written language.

Here’s a tanka poem I wrote back in 2009.