A Study Guide for Lawson Fusao Inada's "Everything"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Lawson Fusao Inada's "Everything", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535845922

Book preview

18

Everything

Lawson Fusao Inada

1993

Introduction

Lawson Fusao Inada's influence has been deeply felt—Richard Brown of Museletter writes that he is considered the father of Asian American literature—both for the poetry that he has written since the 1960s and for his work coediting the groundbreaking collection Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974). His poetry, written largely in free-flowing free verse, has been likened to that of American original Walt Whitman, whose influence Inada has acknowledged. Inada's verse both draws on his personal experiences—which included time in Japanese American internment camps as a young boy during World War II—and reaches toward universal understanding.

The title alone of Inada's poem Everything hints at interests tending toward the universal, though in this case the context is local. The poem describes a time when the poet and some companions became aware of, or came to develop the idea of, a phenomenal natural relationship between themselves and a nearby river whose waters were rising. This relationship developed in such an extraordinary fashion as to eventually encompass and involve a great deal in the poet's life— indeed, everything. Everything can be found in Inada's Legends from Camp: Poems (1993), which was honored with an American Book Award.

Author Biography

Inada was born on May 26, 1938, in Fresno, California, as a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. He traces his mother's origins to the Saito clan, in Wakayama Prefecture on Honshu (Japan's main island), while his father's clan hails from Kumamoto Prefecture, on Kyushu; the name Inada means rice field. Moving from Japan to California, Inada's grandparents founded the Fresno Fish Market. His mother, who was born in the back of the family store in 1912, would become a teacher, while his father was a dentist. The family's settled life in Fresno was interrupted very early in the young boy's life, when on February 19, 1942—a couple of months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II—Executive Order 9066 was issued, condemning the Japanese American population on the West Coast to internment camps. The Fresno area was evacuated by early May, and Inada's family went first to the Fresno Assembly Center, then all the way to Arkansas and the Jerome Camp, and finally to the