Synkroniciti is proud to welcome back writer and visual artist Richard Oyama, who resides in Thailand. He made his debut with us as a photographer in “Haunting” and returns as a poet in “Audacity,” giving us two sparkling and enigmatic poems illuminating iconic African American jazz musicians.
“Elmore James Outfoxes Old Scratch (1955)” illustrates that the blues is not only music, but an audacious rite of survival and tenacity. Elmore James, King of the Slide Guitar, turns it into a weapon against Old Scratch, the devil himself. The imagery is visceral and immediate: salt on the tongue, iron in the mouth, a bottleneck’s broken brown glass edge slid along the strings. Beneath James’ enigmatic lyrics and Oyama’s nuanced poetry lies a deeper mystery, something shadowed and dangerous: the price of performing and the toll that creation exacts from the body.
“Salt seeped into his mouth’s coarse grain./ How does skin contain so much?// Elmore’s fingering a real bottleneck,/ Brownglass lip broken. He slicks the griefs that bedevil him.”
“Propers,” is a tribute to the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Here again, Oyama leads us into the realm of the visceral, capturing her timeless and powerful voice rising like a psalm refracted through radio static and studio light. He traces the tension between the industry’s attempt to shape her into “another Dinah Washington” and the sound that emerged from the Muscle Shoals sessions—a sound rooted in Bethel Baptist and sharpened by the uncompromising clarity of her own self‑possession.
“If you demanded your propers, you insisted we think too./ That love and liberty means no compromise. Wexler coined/ A saint’s name: Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows./ I took habitation in your indestructible voice.”
Read Oyama’s reverent and masterful poetry in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Richard Oyama’s work has appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Breaking Silence, Dissident Song, A Gift of Tongues, About Place, Pirenes’ Fountain and Buddhist Poetry Review. He has a M.A. in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Oyama taught at California College of Arts, UC Berkeley and University of New Mexico.