By Kimball Bennion

Trail Staff Writer

Jazz was in the air Tuesday night, Oct. 10, during the second installment of Northwest College’s Writer’s Series. Poet Lawson Inada from Oregon spoke and shared his poetry with those in attendance at the Nelson Auditorium.
Cool blue lighting sulked in the background. The stage was set up with the basics: one microphone for reading and a few chairs for sitting. Inada himself dressed in all black. The only set-up that remotely stood out was the vast array of percussion instruments in the background. Clearly, the only thing that was to deserve the audience’s attention was the music and the poetry.
A number of themes ran through Inada’s readings — his childhood in various Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, his love of jazz music and celebrating your own culture and heritage.
Inada, who has been teaching at Southern Oregon University since 1966, looked comfortable and confident, speaking to the audience much like a professor would lecture his students. Long before he started reading his work, he took time to teach. He recounted everyday experiences such as deciding what to eat in an airport’s food court to illustrate the cultural diversity in America.
Inada took much of his time talking about living in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. Although he was never an internee at the nearby Heart Mountain Relocation Center, he encouraged the audience to get to know more about it. “Be proud of that part of your history,” he said, stressing that the camps are not just part of Japanese-American history, but part of everyone’s history. Yet it was his unique childhood in those camps that made his descriptions of that part of history become vivid to everyone.
One of the most powerful poems that he read about the camps was one called “The Legend of Lost Boy.” It told of his experience getting lost one day while playing. After being found by an old man who led him back to his mother’s arms, the lost boy “thought he was found.” “I didn’t know what I was doing there,” he explained after reading the poem. He remembered often feeling lost in those camps, never knowing exactly why he was there.
After inviting Northwest faculty members Renee Dechert and Burt Bradley to share some of their own work, Inada was joined by a jazz ensemble made up of Ronnie Bedford and four Northwest students. Inada and the musicians had little time to rehearse, giving the music an improvisational feel. Far from being mere background music, the jazz combo provided a second voice to Inada’s readings.
Inada says that his favorite way to publish his work is through performance. “When you write something and read it in public, they give you a response,” he said, “that’s something that I enjoy.”

Lawson Inada speaks on diversity in cultures Tuesday Oct. 10. Lawson, a poet interned in Japanese-American relocation campus during World War II, came to Northwest College for the Writers Series.

— Photograph by Brian Schwarz