Those of you who have been following this blog have watched me writing this poem over the last two years. On May 3rd, 2009, I proposed to write a poem a day for a month and started tinkering with the Pushkin sonnet. Things cascaded from there, until I had a full blown 1000 line epic on my hands. Takaaki first appeared in its entirety in 35 pages of the Spring 2011 issue of The Raintown Review. For The Raintown Review's generous bequest of so much valuable real estate, I am eternally indebted.
However, since I first submitted it to The Raintown Review, Takaaki has undergone many subsequent revisions, metrical fine-tunings and other metaphorical refinements. But the essential tragicomical story, the essential moral conundrum the poem presents--Can you actually put a price on love?--has stayed the same.
The story itself revolves around a ridiculous argument over how to spend a quiet holiday evening--playing Scrabble or having sex--that I once had with my Japanese boyfriend, Takaaki. But in Art, as in Life, things are rarely as simple as they seem. The reverberations of that argument and subsequent events continue to shake the world today.
I hope you will give Takaaki a try. Or at least read an excerpt at Lulu.com.
Love and War will never look quite the same.
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