Preface—For a Book with an Intimidating Title1
Why and how does this thing called “poesy” or poetic mind occur in our mind?
I’m giving a humble introduction to this book that has a somewhat intimidating title, What is Poetry, while clumsily speaking and carefully listening to my own voice. I expect, by doing so, that a subtle hum-like voice would be heard beyond or besides my voice, or from afar.2
There used to be poets like Chuya Nakahara3 or Kenji Miyazawa4 who established their poetry in their youth with their innate genius. However, in my case—and perhaps this is the norm of all my contemporaries—it’s taken more than sixty years to become aware of and be able to talk about my subconscious poetic history and memory . . . about so many things that I’ve unconsciously preserved in a “storage room” in my mind. I never know if it will go well, and I always have these nagging doubts, but still I persist.
The poetic side, or mind, or spirit; poesy, or simply “poetry” . . . we have many names for it, but it must be basal, primordial, and unnamable, and more like an incorporeal body of concepts rather than so-called “thought.” What we must do is seize its workings, as well as the faint inducements for it to work. Now that we’ve experienced several great wars and terrible natural disasters, it’s high time to take it as our duty, although I know “duty” sounds too heavy, that we try and reach for nontrivial fragilities. Poetry is one of the few narrow paths for that. Poetry has drastically changed after World War Ⅱ; it’s parted from art—including poems, waka, haiku, and novels written until around the end of the War—that adheres to a certain purposive style and “shape.”
I only write in Japanese, a language that is plural by nature. It’s a language that has embraced several languages in its making, so you may hear the Chinese of the Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing periods, or the languages of Okinawa, Ainu, or Korea resonating within it. Asia is a region with an extensive history of a totally different sort from the West. Like in Africa, I guess, we inherit a thick layer of profound time in our basal memory that shapes our physical and mental subconscious gestures, and we always have to remember that.
That being said, Japanese is too complicated to discuss, so let me return to the topic of poetry. I know from experience that my mind goes blank if I’m suddenly given a pen or pencil and asked to write poetry. And that’s what matters. While discussing translation, Walter Benjamin advocated a concept of “pure language” as an extreme goal of all languages. Supposing that every language aspires to this “pure language,” we must make efforts to set our sights on it.
There’ll be neither failure nor success in doing so, as it’s just an attitude of mind. Basho5 famously phrased it as “fuga no makoto,”6 the essence of poesy, and claimed that poetry must reach for this invisible “fuga no makoto,” which is slightly different from so-called poesy, poetry, or uta.7 We must ceaselessly reach for it, as though eternally transcending the previous state, just as Nietzsche put it. All living things, including plants and animals, are destined to live out the given that is their ever-changing mortal life in this universe. Language is a particular given, as is the “original sin” in the language of Christianity, to us humans. We must tirelessly reach for our primitive mind, remembering “an unending motion of a primitive hand,”8 an image that I conceived when I was intensely copying Takaaki Yoshimoto.
Sometimes, poetry unexpectedly comes into being, just like an out-of-place smoke or cloud. Let me talk about my recent experience. It was sometime in June 2021. I was proofreading the final draft of my latest book, Voix (2021), which took me three years to complete, in a hotel room in Ishinomaki.9 I was thinking to myself, “This part is weak, I can’t see an image, maybe I should cancel it,” and it might have oozed out. It was a part where I mentioned a woman whose life was taken by a tsunami in Onagawa; I was writing that her spirit was entering my room (206, Hotel New Sakai) through a vent in the wall. The phrase was “a white smoke or a dolomite cloud came into my room,” and then I realized that the white smoke-cloud was also entering my mind as a concrete form of poetry.
The smoke was a sensible variation of poetry. There are those apparently negligible, weak, and ephemeral things that slip through the net of highbrow notions as “pure language” and “primitive hand.” The gateway of poetry is opened by frail things, which also pave the way for music, paintings, and philosophy because of their elusive nature.
A Path to Pure Language
Pure language isn’t the privilege of scholarly discourse, philosophy, or the history of art and poetry. It’s for everyone, just like a humble streetlamp in some impoverished village, or a streak of salvative lightning that strikes after a long struggle. Poetry would come into being if we searched tirelessly for it, for what we used to call a flash of inspiration or an afflatus, by voluntarily undertaking it as our task. (Remember that the character for “task,” 課, is composed of “word,” 言, and “exhaust, limit, result,” 果.)
The question now is how, and in what shape, it comes into being. Sometimes it comes out as a great piece, but that’s a rare and miraculous case. “Poetry” here refers to not only poems but to the hearts of uta and paintings, such as those of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, van Gogh, Gyokudo Uragami, Sesshu Toyo, Franz Kafka, and Buson Yosa, which border on language and faintly signal the whereabouts of a path to “pure language.”
Walter Benjamin owned a work by Paul Klee10—you know those unforgettable lines, I reckon—and he kept it with him until he killed himself on the French-Spanish border after being persecuted by the Nazis. Not long after World War Ⅱ, I saw the lines of informalist and abstract painters such as Wols and Arshile Gorky, along with Klee, for the first time, and they made me realize that the lines, as well as the smudgelike, stainlike shapes—even the very nature of being informal—aspired to “pure language.”
Walking down Heidegger’s Holzwege
I’ve been carefully speaking, keeping in mind that this is for a shinsho pocket paperback for general readers. I’ve been thinking of my own reaction to “what is poetry,” as though . . . being amused by the phrase “as though,” which leads to an odd time and gesture . . . listening to my mind while observing my stance, gesture, and attitude . . . Now it’s early summer of 2021. If it were twenty years ago or ten years later, the gesture, posture, and tone of my voice would be completely different. Despite being somewhat overwhelmed by that presumption, I started anyway.
I’ve tried to answer this ultimate question, “what is poetry,” in writing before. As I tried, however, I heard a voice that went, “That’s not what you can answer in a written form,” as if my thought had obtained its own voice. For sixty-odd years, I’ve ceaselessly moved my hands and devoted myself to make poetry through écriture. Chuya Nakahara likened poetry writing to “wrinkling,” but the metaphor is no longer adequate. There is a narrow path that leads a tiny way away from writing, from écriture, and that seems to be where it’s justifiable to question what poetry truly is. Takaaki Yoshimoto’s hypothetical proposition, “poetry is a wrong expression,” would also hold up there.
I enjoy reading philosophy books and repeatedly return to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein . . . and Heidegger. I know Heidegger is controversial nowadays due to his political stance, but when it comes to the philosophical appreciation of the essence of poetry, I feel the strongest kinship with him.
Among his writings, there is a book titled Holzwege, which was rendered as “woodsman’s paths” in Japanese. “Holzwege” are narrow paths in the forest, often covered in undergrowth, whose destinations are unclear and may or may not lead to a clearing. Heidegger compared the clearing to “truth,” a grandiose word that I’d avoid; and I have a feeling that what I’m trying to do in this book is like tracing a narrow path that leads to “something true.”
Interestingly, the French title of Holzwege means “paths to nowhere”11 . . . But I wouldn’t be able to make a book if the path led nowhere. So, I hope and try—although my effort may not be worth much—to get as close to the imposing question of “what is poetry” as possible.
I just talked about the incident when I was proofreading a final draft in a hotel room in Ishinomaki. I also said that I saw white smoke as a tangible poem—but then, before I knew it, it metamorphosed into the phrase “i no ki no kimi ga tatte kite ita” (a tree of “i” was rising).12 I said to myself, “I’ve waited for this line for three, ten years, or even my whole life.” I was deeply moved. It was one example of how poetry could come into being.
I have a feeling that poetry exists beyond “pure language” as excellently articulated by Benjamin . . . in a space that cannot be confined by the concept of “pure poetry.” What we ought to do is to mine beneath “pure language” to seize not a positive but a negative existence, as impossible and futile as that may be. Maybe it’s unsound to make this claim . . . But I believe that the struggle to reach out for the impossible is poetry; that poetry momentarily reveals itself in our hesitation, in our vacillations, not in the petrified “works” that we produce.
Before I conclude the preface, let me refer to Dogen, a great Buddhist priest and philosopher of the Kamakura period. Dogen went to China during the Song dynasty, acquired the language, and composed his thoughts in Song Chinese. After his return, he established the Soto school of Zen and wrote a massive volume of philosophical essays titled Shobogenzo (正法眼蔵, True Dharma Eye Treasury), in which he said we must think “as though scooping water with a sieve.”13
It should be the other way around, right? The water would just go through if you scooped it with a sieve. It presumably means that all we have to do is listen to the falling water and just concentrate on that very moment. In other words, we must think beyond the “purpose” or “efficiency” of our actions and keep reorienting our mind toward somewhere beyond Benjamin’s “pure language.”
Well, it is a tough journey, indeed. Having turned eighty-two, I’ve tried to expound on where I am, an old poet with a weird name, as a foreword to this book. Arigato gozaimashita.
1. In 2021, Gozo Yoshimasu published a dictated book titled What is Poetry (Shi to ha nanika) at the age of eighty-two, having devoted more than sixty years to writing, performing, and tirelessly thinking about poetry. The book was published by Kodansha, the largest Japanese publisher by sales (as of 2023), as a shinsho pocket paperback designed for the general public. This essay appears as the preface of the book.
Despite the intended audience, What is Poetry is not an easy read. Gozo frequently makes digressions, leaves sentences unfinished, omits the object of a verb or blurs the grammatical subject. Speaking of the subject, he frequently uses “we” in the preface: “we must,” “we have to.” This “we” is ambiguous. It could refer to contemporary poets, literati, or his contemporaries in general, or it could refer to the poet and his alter egos (“the others in me”), which Gozo frequently speaks of in his recent writings. You may remember the first paragraph of the preface, in which he says, “a subtle hum-like voice would be heard” from somewhere afar or just next to his voice. He’d then write the voice down to metamorphose it into a verse. (Shamanic? Yes, a little. As he avows.) ↩
2. “A subtle hum-like voice would be heard”: Gozo often compares the way he receives poetic inspiration to “hearing a voice”. ↩
3. Chuya Nakahara (1907–1937): A poet who was strongly influenced by Dada and other European, mostly French, experimental poetry of the time. He is often called the “Japanese Rimbaud.” Note: All Japanese names in this text are written in the so-called Western order, with the family name coming last. ↩
4. Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933): A poet, novelist, and writer who is widely known for junior novels, such as Night on the Galactic Railroad and Kaze no Matasaburo. ↩
5. Basho (1644–1694): Known as the greatest poet in the Edo period. Initially recognized for his works in the renga form—collaborative linked verse—Basho also made the opening seventeen-syllable verse of renga independent as haiku, and promoted the art of haiku as equivalent to the traditional higher-rank poetic forms, such as kanshi, uta/waka/tanka, and renga (explained in more detail in Footnote 7).↩
6. Fuga no Makoto: Makoto (誠) means “truth” or “essence”. Fuga (風雅) means 1) “poetry” and 2) “elegance,” “refinement,” and “grace,” especially with appreciation of the transient beauty of nature and the seasons. With the particle no (の), the phrase “fuga no makoto” therefore means 1) the essence of poetry and 2) the true refinement (of poetry). ↩
7. Uta (歌) primarily means “song” in contemporary Japanese, but it also means, especially in literary and historical contexts, waka/tanka, a structured thirty-one-syllable poem. In Basho’s time, there was a poetic hierarchy. The most authorized, and therefore most official and sophisticated, were Chinese-style poems (kanshi); next were thirty-one-syllable poems (called waka or tanka); then linked verse (renga); and lastly haiku, the shortest poetic form, which originated as the opening part of renga and was largely promoted by Basho. Gozo’s use of the word “uta” here is intended to mean both the rich tanka/waka tradition as well as “songs” in general. ↩
8. “An unending motion of a primitive hand”: Gozo published a book on Takaaki Yoshimoto’s poetry, Kongen no Te (A primitive hand), in 2016. He spent more than two years hand-copying Yoshimoto’s writings, including 480 poems, as a gesture of mourning, soon after Yoshimoto passed away—which happened to be a year after the East Japan Great Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011 (hereinafter called “3.11”). In the book, Gozo describes Yoshimoto’s manner of relating himself to the world as “a primitive hand that is ceaselessly reaching out for all things in the universe.” ↩
9. Ishinomaki: A city in Miyagi prefecture in the northeast of Japan, which was devastated during 3.11. Gozo was invited to a reconstructive art project, “Reborn Art Festival,” in 2019, and stayed in room 206 in Hotel New Sakai. In the room, he wrote poems that were later published as Voix (2021), kept a video diary, and inscribed quotations from his poems on the window that faced the sacred island mountain Kinkasan. His room was made available for public viewing during the Art Festival in following years. ↩
10. “A work by Paul Klee”: Angelus Novus (New Angels), made by Paul Klee in 1920 as a monoprint. Benjamin purchased the print in 1921 and owned it until his death in 1940. It is currently in the collection of the Israel Museum. https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/199799-0 ↩
11. The French title of Holzwege means “paths to nowhere”: Martin Heidegger, trans. Wolfgang Brokmeier, Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part (Holzwege, 1950), Gallimard, 1962. ↩
12. A tree of “i” was rising: This line says, “A tree, which takes the shape of “i” and pronounces /i/, was rising.” Gozo has particular liking for the letter “i” (lowercase) for its pronunciation (/i/ and /ai/) and shape (a stick with a dot on top), admitting several layers of metaphor to be included in it in both Japanese and English contexts. ↩
13. “As though scooping water with a sieve”: From the chapter “Bussho” (仏性, Buddha nature) in Shobogenzo. A modern literal translation is “one should scoop water with a fishing net again and again; the capability (of catching, of understanding) is in the net,” whereas the modern interpretative translation that Gozo refers to goes, “One must go through (the monk’s words to appreciate) slowly, thoroughly, and repeatedly, as though scooping water by a sieve.” The original text says to “dredge water (for something) with a seine again and again,” but the translation that Gozo refers to says “with a sieve” instead of a seine or fishing net, and Gozo sees the water, not the fish, as the objective. ↩
© Gozo Yoshimasu. Translation © 2024 by Sayuri Okamoto. By arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.
