Poets in Japan experiment at the edge of media

During the past century, experimental poets in Japan have been stretching the conventional definition of the genre by creating poems in unexpected places: augmented reality apps, manipulated tape recorders, music videos, protest performances and other hybrid forms.

In "Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media," Andrew Campana, assistant professor of Asian studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, writes about several of these poets and their work.

"What happens when we put our skepticism aside, and even just for a moment, take them at their word?" Campana said. "What I find is that they're using the term 'poem' to push against the boundaries of the medium they're working in - telling the audience that, 'hey, I'm doing something different here,' and you should pay just as close attention to this as you would to reading a more conventional poem."

Campana examines poems composed at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape during the past century that interacted with or even pushed back against new media technologies, from cinema to audio recording to YouTube.

"Over and over, poetic practice has become a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media," he said.

A&S spoke with Campana about the book.

Question: Who are some of the poets presented in this book, and what is notable about them?

Answer: One of the aims of this book is to introduce readers to a huge range of exciting poets who are usually not talked about as literary figures, even in the niche realm of Japanese poetry. The socialite Sachiko Ōi shocked Tokyo in the 1920s with her avant-garde fashion and multiple romantic partners, but she experimented just as much with language in her poetic work.

Starting in the 1950s, the disability rights activist Hiroshi Yokota aimed to write new kinds of poetry that captured the experience of having cerebral palsy. The 1980s alternative pop star Jun Togawa wrote lyrics based on her own poems, which were often dense and grotesque and sounded nothing at all like the other popular music of the time. The contemporary feminist poet ni_ka draws together girl's culture and digital technology - think augmented reality and Hello Kitty - to make us rethink our relationship to both physical and online spaces.

Q: Historically, how has Japanese poetry transcended printed words?

A: If we look at the longer history of poetry in Japan, which dates back well over 1,000 years, it would be pretty much impossible to compose a poem that wasn't in engagement with other media and other artforms. For centuries, most poems were written not to be read in silence, but to be sung aloud, often with musical accompaniment. And there was no such thing as a "neutral" written form - every time someone decided to write down a poem, they had to choose, for example, the brush, the color of ink, the type of paper, accompanying illustrations, and even which characters to use for which words, because that was incredibly unstandardized.

For modern poetry, there's an illusion that there's a such thing as a poetic text as something unconnected or standalone, but that's not and never has been the case.

Q: What makes Japan a place rife for experimentation between poetry and different media?

A: Japan is a distinctive case study for a lot of reasons. The history of modern poetry there is quite short - a bit over 100 years - but in that compressed time span came the introduction of incredible numbers of forms, movements, media and influences. It's a striking example of a non-Western context where a lot of the assumptions we have about poetry don't apply, because what "poetry" could be was being figured out in real time.

The types of works described in this book are not limited to Japan, and most of the poets in the book were in constant dialogue with global movements. Japanese poets drew inspiration from, say, cinematic poets in France, concrete poets in Brazil and disability activists in Canada and the U.S. Japan is often portrayed as closed off or set apart from the rest of the world, especially historically. But one of the positive side effects of looking at literature in the broadest sense possible is that it lets you draw connections between what was going on in Japan and what was happening in the rest of the world.

Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

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