When writers in the west list the major poets of the 20th
Century, they usually do not include Kitasono Katue.
They should. Perhaps they will in the future. Kitasono
produced an incomparable opus in its own right and
exerted a significant influence on the avant-garde arts of
Japan and the Atlantic cultures. At a time when digital
photography, the internet, and examination of
referentiality exert more impact than any artistic
movement, it seems clear that his influence and example
relate as much to the living, active, and dynamic arts of
the present moment as to the literature of the last century.
The European Surrealists whose name he identified
himself with paid little attention to him. Starting with Ezra
Pound, however, Atlantic avant-gardists began to
recognize his genius and borrowed ideas from the few
works of his they saw. This appreciation will probably
increase as more work becomes available in translation
and as 20th Century Japanese poetry becomes better
known throughout the world. Thanks primarily to the
work of Hosea Hirata, Nishiwaki Janzaburo has a small
but dedicated readership in the west. Shiraishi Kazuko has
become well known in the English speaking literary world
through the translations of Kenneth Rexroth and his
associates. John Solt, who was one of those associates,
may play a similar role for Kitasono. Solt's ground-
breaking and exemplary study, Shredding the Tapestry of
Meaning, is available from Harvard University Asia
Center, and a Japanese translation will come forth in late
2007 from Shichosha. We hope our selection of Plastic Poems
and Solt's translations of lexical poetry will help make
way for fuller editions.
Although Kitasono was a devoted avant-gardist and
internationalist, it is important to see him first in the
context of Japanese literature. As an experimentalist, he
avoided repeating forms he had previously explored. Each
new book carried some ideas forward from previous
groups of poems, but in each he tried to completely work
out a new "pattern" or invented form. In middle age,
these patterns drew largely on Japanese traditions rather
than the avant-garde need to reject or destroy convention.
Although Kitasono certainly did not plan it this way or see
it in these terms, his opus as a whole bears resemblance to
Renga and other traditional linked forms. These practices
involve not only links between each unit but also shifts
away from whatever has gone before. Modern
practitioners of Renku say that the purpose of this
technique is to include as wide a range of human
experience as possible. Kitasono, the supreme avant-
gardist, succeeded in exploring the widest range of forms
possible through a life-long habit of shifting with each
new step. However large a move he made in any given
shift, and however much he may have picked up from
Euro-American ideas, he did not fall into imitation of
western art. Instead, he took part in the creation of a
Japanese avant-garde, which may in the long run have its
major impact on the literary and artistic globalism of the
21st Century.
*
Kitasono Katue, a pen name for Hashimoto Kenkichi, was
born on Oct. 29, 1902. His hometown, Asama, lies a few
miles from Ise, the major Shinto pilgrimage site, associated
with the Ise Monogatori, an essential classic of Japanese
poetry. His family was prosperous. Perhaps prophetically,
his father enjoyed tinkering with gadgets, often with the
aim of inventing something new. One of the gadgets was a
camera. Kitasono seems to have been shy, and did not
earn distinguished grades in school. He did, however,
learn some basic English which he would use extensively
later. His elder brother Heihachi became an accomplished
sculptor though his life was painfully short. The creativity
of the two brothers suggests a sympathetic and nurturing
home environment. That Kitasono's parents would
support him with a modest allowance for years after he
left home suggests that they did not object to his artistic
activities.
In 1919, Kitasono moved to Tokyo to attend college.
This was a pivotal moment in Japanese history, and
Kitasono seems to have arrived at just the right time for a
future avant-gardist. Japan enjoyed strong economic
growth in part by picking up Asian markets during World
War I, and also by rapid industrialization, a disciplined
and optimistic work force, and shrewd management. A
recession in 1919, however, created a temporary crisis for
the country. The great earthquake of Sept. 1, 1923
destroyed over half the buildings in Tokyo and killed
more than 100,000. From a friend's reminiscence, we
catch a glimpse of Kitasono printing a small-circulation
magazine as the ground literally began to shake in Tokyo.
The recession and the quake created upheavals in the
country, but the destruction of much of the city gave it the
opportunity to rebuild itself on almost futuristic lines,
making its modernity competitive with the cities of
Europe and America.
The literary and artistic scene of the metropolis at the
time is difficult to summarize. There had been a small but
significant literary avant-garde in the city since the teens.
In the 1920s, news of movements in the arts in Europe
reached Japan quickly though sporadically. Counterparts
to European movements sprang up, and although the
membership of any one may not have been large, the
members could be intensely dedicated and those in
positions of leadership could use their groups in rivalries
with other coteries. European writers and artists at this
time looked to traditional Japanese arts - particularly
wood block prints and short verse forms - as points of
departure for massive reformations in western art. Their
Japanese counterparts, however, were not looking to
European history for new ideas, but to the west's avant-
gardes. Less than a handful of poets and painters in the
North Atlantic cultures made an attempt to learn
Japanese, though some created elaborate hallucinations as
to the nature of Kanji. Some used small verse forms as a
means of exulting epiphanies and eliminating traditional
metrics. Not all Japanese affiliates of western trends fully
understood European avant-gardes, but this is not
surprising since many Europeans simply did bad
imitations of each other themselves. Although some
Japanese were not happy with what seemed the one-way
nature of avant-garde transmission, they nonetheless
actively debated torrents of in-coming ideas while
learning more about the mistakes and successes of the
west than the west was willing to learn from them. In this
environment, Kitasono evolved quickly. The first four
poems in this selection were written in less than two years
and show how much at this early stage Kitasono could
make new techniques his own and how quickly he could
switch between patterns.
Dada morphing into Surrealism seemed to lead the
arts in Europe at the time, and although Japanese artists
were aware of many movements in the west, this is the
one they watched most closely and evoked most often. As
much as Japanese artists could learn from Surrealism, the
association could prove deceptive. Several Japanese
groups associated themselves with Surrealism because
they were interested in the juxtaposition of incongruous
ideas and images. One level of confusion comes from the
way they used the modern European term to validate
explorations of incongruous conjunction which they
might have made anyway. There are plenty of precedents
in Japanese art and culture which could have been
updated. As time goes by, roles plated by indigenous
Japanese ideas may appear more distinctly from those
influenced by the west.
Any modern city is full of incongruities, but those that
included the juxtaposition of east and west added another
layer of strangeness. Construction excavation in any city
cuts through incongruous chronological strata. How
much more so would that be the case in Tokyo than in
Paris? However much Japanese avant-gardists borrowed
from North Atlantic models, we should bear in mind the
interrelation between social and artistic change. If Japan
had been going through a period of industrialization cut
off from its associated artistic ideas, or had done so
without foreign assistance, it would be foolish to assume
that new literary practices would not have accompanied
changes elsewhere in the culture. The speed of
modernization in Japan probably intensified the need
among some artists for radical change, while others
sought solace from the press of events in traditional
forms.
Japanese Surrealism characterized itself as much by
what it left out of the European mode as what it included.
A major factor comes from the Japanese poets disregard
of the basis of Surrealist theory in Freudian
psychoanalysis. Takiguchi Shuzo seems to be the only
Japanese poet of the time to adhere to this line of
European Surrealist thought. Despite claims of
universality, classical psychoanalysis grew out of a
particular phase of European culture which had little to
do with other environments. Although this is an issue to
debate in other venues, suffice it to say that even in the
contemporary west, psychoanalysis is now generally seen
as inadequate in treating people who suffer from mental
illnesses. Japanese poets of the early 20th Century may
have been ahead of their time in ignoring it. As European
Surrealism progressed it took on an increasingly political
cast, with many of its members joining the Communist
Parties. Kitasono and other Japanese Surrealists rejected
poetry becoming subsumed in politics. On perhaps the
most profound level, the European Surrealists were more
prejudiced than they knew. They may have exalted what
they saw as "primitive" in African and other tribal
cultures, but didn't know what to make of east Asia. Its
level of sophistication was difficult to understand, and
conceptions of intelligence and lack thereof were
exaggerated to the point where the people of the east were
seen as either demonically shrewd or hopelessly limited.
Although poets and artists in the west could admire
Japanese work and ideas, the culture as a whole did not fit
into models of primitive or civilized which remained
latent in Euro-American perceptions. Kitasono and some
of his friends went around in androgynous costumes at a
time when Breton was excommunicating anyone who
showed any sign he could associate with effeminacy.
Japan's Surrealists included a few women; France's
virtually prohibited their participation as anything but
erotic toys. European Surrealism, perhaps because of its
theoretical base in psychoanalysis, seemed to include a
profound streak of insecurity and the concomitant need
to go beyond formal extremes to extremes of
destructiveness. Thus Breton could begin with proposals
for blowing up museums and go on to claim that the
supreme act of Surrealist commitment would be to go out
in a crowded street and shoot someone at random. Tzara
could call for "A great negative work of destruction" that
would destroy all but the strongest. Although a few
Japanese poets could rant, they engaged in little of this
kind of folly. The famous Surrealist map of the world does
not include Japan at all. Later writers who did not ignore
Japanese Surrealism altogether tended to dismiss it as
inferior imitation. Surrealists in Latin America moved as
far away from European Surrealism as their Japanese
counterparts, but were not accused of ignorance or inept
copying.
In 1924, the year Kitasono wrote the first poems in this
selection, Nogawa Ryu launched the magazine
Ge.Gjmgjgam.Prrr.Gjmgem. The title appeared on the
front cover in Roman letters and on the back in katakana.
An editorial note says that Nogawa was fascinated by the
shapes of the letters, perhaps intimating that being taken
with the look of alien writing systems went both ways
across the Eurasian landmass. However it looks, the name
suggests an appreciation of abstract sound poetry. Note
the skillful repetition and inversion of similar and
divergent phonemes. Hugo Ball's first abstract sound
poem comes across as clumsy in comparison The late
American master of abstract sound poetry, Jackson Mac
Low, would have delighted in it, and been able to give it
an enthusiastic articulation. By the time the second issue
appeared, Kitasono had become its chief editor. It would
be the first of a number of literary magazines Kitasono
would edit and design, including the essential Madame
Blanche, and finally, VOU¸ one of the longest lived avant-
garde literary journals of the century.
The mid 1920s-early 1930s was a period when the
illusion of one-way, west-to-east, flow of avant-garde
ideas came to one of its most curious and ironic stages.
Japanese poets created all the basic ideas Concrete Poetry
would claim to invent 30 years later. Kitasono contributed
his share to the schematic, mimetic, found, modular,
fractured, conjoined (etc.) modes that would later appear
in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Brazil. As we will
see, Kitasono played a personal and emphatic game with
the Concretists. Would they have worked differently if
they had seen this early body of poetry, or would they
simply have tried to cover it up, as they did when Kenneth
Patchen reinvented similar modes half way between the
Japanese of the 1920s and the Concretists?
One such poem, "Magic," from 1929 appears in this
book. One of several modular blocks within the poem
could have easily appeared in one of the Concrete
anthologies of the 1960s and been hailed as a
breakthrough. The first modular block consists of 70
iterations of the Kanji "umi" and the sign "no". "Umi"
means simply "ocean." "No" (
) is more complex, and
forms one of the links through many of Kitasono's
shifting patterns. We can call it a weak and general
possessive, a particle that could be translated "of" or as
apostrophe s. Thus a translation could read "ocean of
ocean of ocean of ocean ..." or "ocean's ocean's ocean's
ocean's..." Going by sound, the reiterations of "umi no
umi no umi no..." suggest the acoustics of rolling waves.
The "no" sign looks like a cresting wave. This sweeping
and simple round figure contrasts with the tight and
angular Kanji. "No" lends complexity to this poem, and
variations on its usage become the focal point of
seemingly endless variations throughout Kitasono's
opus.. Does the ocean keep on possessing or grabbing
itself? Does it try to be all consuming? Is this a pattern of
infinite regression of ownerships or attributes? Does the
ocean become more complex and more insistent the more
it curls in on itself, from the great breakers you can see
from shore to the molecular level? How many different
ways can you interpret it? Does the process of looking at
the poem, or reciting it, or commenting on it strike you as
relaxing or sinister or hypnotic or annoying? How much
do your reactions change between one reading and
another?
The poem includes a second similar block, divided by
a Gertrude Stein-like lyric. Visually, the page layout
avoids cloying symmetry by dividing the second block
between one side of a leaf of the book and the next.
Sonically, the two blocks and the line dividing them each
has a different rhythm. The sounds of the first block
suggest rolling waves, while the sound patterns of the
second block have a sharp character suggesting the glint
and glare of the sunlight on water the words describe.
Both blocks suggest different forms a accretion or
amplification. The main difference between Kitasono's
poem and those of later Concrete is Kitasono's dislike of
large, clunky looking type. Kitasono's early visual poetry
also includes diagrammatic poems containing few words.
Although he and his friends did not invent the idea of
putting glosses at the bottom of pages so an international
audience could read them, they drew upon the common
currency of industrial and scientific schemata and alluded
to the spread of modern objects and procedures. Plastic
surgery, roses, and airplanes meet gracefully as the
template drawings of blueprints flow in and out of the
standardized shape of ancient Kanji characters rendered
in metal type.
Kitasono's first book, White Album,
published in 1929, included explorations of "no" as part
of the energetic burst of early sketches of the types of
poetry he would concentrate on throughout his life.
Looking back at the book in 1961, he would write:
I have published as many as twenty books
since then, but all the "patterns" of my
poetry are in White Album. In that
sense, White Album is an unfinished
volume of many patterns gathered in a
jumble. . . When I get in a slump, I always
take out White Album, and like a
hunter stalking prey, my eyes wander in the
jungle of words where I discover a forgotten
pattern, sweep away the dust, and extend it
in a new way.
A measure of the personal success and Kitasono's
youthful enthusiasm and inventiveness comes from the
degree to which he used ideas initiated in White
Album. Perhaps as important, the book includes
more basic patterns than he had time to extend in
practice. In the present edition, we have included poems
such as "Tobacco of the Future" and "Doll, Pistol and
Balloon" whose patterns Kitasono did not develop
further. Most of the comments that follow analyze
extensions of patterns found in the book.
After White Album Kitasono kept a complete
coincidence between pattern and book. He did not issue
books of diverse poems at intervals when opportunities
presented themselves, but used each book as a framework
for a new pattern. We could thus see each book as a basic
unit of composition. In the two books following
White Album, we can see Kitasono clearly and
purposefully moving into specific patterns and shifting
away from others between one book and the next.
In Young Colony (1932) the syntax is relatively
straight-forward and the more prickly forms of
experiment are absent. What remains strongest is a
particular type of Surrealist imagery. Instead of using
incongruous or contradictory statements that question
perception or logic or leave the reader feeling
disconcerted, the contrasts have a sweet and celebratory
quality. Young Colony was one of Kitasono's most
popular books. In it we can see him trying to create an
avant-garde pattern that was not hieratic or exclusionist.
The "colony" of the title has nothing to do with those
which Japan was creating throughout Asia, but something
like their opposite. The residents inhabit a dreamy world
where free spirits meet without hindrance from
practicalities or the aggressiveness of the world outside.
The lyricism of Young Colony would reappear in other
books, including a revised edition of the original. Many of
the poems were set to music, and a few achieved
something like the popularity of Kurt Schwitters's "An
Anna Blume." Kitasono, however, initially turned his
back on the book. He may have felt he pushed its
sweetness a bit too far. Yet this may have been part of a
dialectic between his lyric poems and the more stringent
qualities of those poems which placed a heavier emphasis
on formal experiment. Despite the qualities we seem
almost required to call "lyrical," Kitasono strongly
disliked the music to which the poems were set, even
though the settings were quite diverse. Perhaps this
touches most emphatically on Kitasono's dislike for
reading his poems aloud. This was probably not a
rejection of sound for image as a superficial response to
his visual poetry might suggest. The great American
explorer of sound, Lorine Niedecker, didn't like to read
or hear her poems because nothing uttered could match
the texture of sound she could hear with her inner ear.
Kitasono seems to have shared a similar attitude. He gave
two public readings early in his life and never read to an
audience again.
The book's lyricism, however, played an interesting
practical role for Kitasono. His future wife later claimed
that she was "swept off [her] feet" by the book and that it
made a significant contribution to their courtship.
The next book, Conical Poems, (1933) moves back into
an experimentalism more focused and stringent than that
of White Album. Here the poems are written as
prose, emphasizing the play of incongruous ideas and
images against the dry tone of the text. The literary
methodology revamps cues from Cubist technique, and
the tone subsumes that of the relatively cold and
impersonal approach of scientific inquiry. As in many
instances, Kitasono worked contrasts into the fiber of his
poems. In this book, the dull and blunt tone of the prose
contrasts with lavish turns of imagery which swing
between the vocabulasries of science and romanticism.
The excessive repetition of clever phrases in the book
could be seen as a fault, and they do come across as
annoying. Yet it's not out of the question to see these
repetitions as allusions to the interchangeable parts of
industrial production and the anti-mechanical nature of
unusual image combinations. For this book, we have
Kitasono's comments on the poems, and find that
however much he elucidates his work, he has also moved
slyly on to another pattern.
The mid 1930s saw important changes and advantages
for Kitasono. In 1935, Madame Blanche magazine
morphed into VOU, and the group that formed around
him proved stable in number of participants and
supportive of Kitasono and those who stayed with it. The
magazine would go through a change and a period of
suspended publication but ultimately survived the Pacific
War. It would then act as a bridge with other countries,
provide a vehicle for Kitasono and those he mentored (an
increasingly important role for him as he matured), a
place to publish on a regular basis, and prove one of the
most important avant-garde poetry magazines of the 20th
Century. During this period, following the death of his
parents, Kitasono lost his stipend and went through a
number of jobs before finding steady employment as
librarian and publication manager for a dental college, a
job that would keep him designing and editing
publications for a milieu outside the arts.
In 1934, he wrote "Opera Poetica" in English as a
tribute to Paul Eluard. In some respects, this poem
suggests a polite farewell to European Surrealism as he
looks for a new group of patterns. These he finds in a
return to Japanese tradition. His next succession of shifts
move from a reintegrated form of Imagism to a set of
traditional haiku. The first in this set, Kon, takes its name
from a mythological creature, and may draw on
memories of childhood and family spent in more stable
and less hurried circumstances than those of the
economic recession of Japan following the global tidal
waves unleashed by the stock market crash in the United
States. Although the moves toward tradition probably had
many motives and functions, they may have included the
need to move away from European Surrealism - and
they seem to have given him a chance to regroup his
personal resources for a return to avant-garde forms later.
In 1936, Kitasono wrote a letter to Ezra Pound,
primarily seeking a blurb from a distinguished Euro-
American and some advice on Imagism from one of its
founders. The results of this correspondence proved
useful to him in a number of ways he could not have
expected when he committed his letter to the mail.
Perhaps the most surprising and heartening result was
that unlike the Surrealists, Pound was eager to correspond
with him, and the eccentric American actually listened
attentively to what he had to say, despite the fact that the
two often did not understand each other. If Kitasono was
looking for Imagist ideas to help him keep a modernist
edge on his poems in traditional patterns, he was making
one of several feedback loops. The basic ideas (and
misconceptions) which became embodied in Imagism
originated in attempts to understand the traditional
poetry of East Asia. Kitasono and Pound not only gave
each other moral support at difficult times in their lives,
but each arranged for publication of the other's poems
and essays in their respective milieux. The roles they
played in each others' lives and work cannot be stressed
too much. The correspondence could at times be strained
or comic. Amid Pound's rants about currency and
Kitasono's speculation on his theory of "ideoplasty," an
idea which may have been encouraged by Imagism,
Pound sent a school paper written by his 12 year old
daughter. Kitasono translated the paper and arranged for
its publication in Fujin Gaho, a Japanese magazine for
proper teenage girls. This dispelled difficulties brewing
between them and brings some relief into the darkening
world events moving in on the two poets.
In addition to Kitasono's voluntary move to
traditional poetry, as the decade wore on he found
himself under increased surveillance as the government
placed ever greater restrictions on what western
"contaminants" poets could include in their work. On
the eve of war, Kitasono was interrogated by the Thought
Police, and wrote several jingoistic poems in the following
years. He also edited a nationalistic anthology and
converted several issues of VOU into something more
politically acceptable. The nationalist poems, which
Kitasono tried to play down or disclaim after the war,
consist, at best, of camouflage, or, at worse, the results of
being sucked into war fever. There's no reason to see
them as fitting the same criteria for serious consideration
as those of the rest of his opus, including the poems which
rely on Japanese traditions. How does a poet who writes
verse such as Kitasono's cope with mass hysteria and
Thought Police? Although he wrote a poem in homage to
Paul Eluard before the war, he would not have had the
stuff of which resistance fighters are made, even if there
had been a significant resistance for him to join. As
Kobayashi Yoshio, one of Kitasono's friends during the
fire bombing of Tokyo, said of him, "That man truly
understands fear." Some Japanese critics find serious
fault with Kitasono for writing nationalistic poetry, and
discussion of culpability may continue as part of Japan's
internal dialogue and self-analysis. As an American, I am
not qualified to take part in that discussion.
It may be significant to note when looking at
Kitasono's patterns, that he wrote the crisp and untainted
aphorisms of Cactus Island when the Thought Police were
circling around Japanese poets, as well as a few poems
such as "Transparent Object," which do nothing to
support the war, but suggest modest internal resistance.
Kitasono also kept a low-key coterie going among
members of the VOU group, even publishing some work
that would not be completely acceptable to the
authorities. More important, in looking at Kitasono's
approach to art in general, this highlights an essential and
basic characteristic of his work that may contribute to the
inability of some readers to understand him. He was not a
proselytizer or evangelist of any sort. His poems do not
give moral instruction or promote a philosophical or
religious or political position. They do make some
indirect claims for the importance of experimentation
and invention, but they do not apply this to anything
more than the nature of experience. Kitasono is a
singularly non-coercive poet, not even pushing polemics
regarding art for art's sake. Given his refusal to advance
social, political, religious, personal, or ideological points
of view, the reader should not look for "content" that
can be summarized or paraphrased: significance in
Kitasono lies elsewhere.
From the poems in White Album on, the
avant-garde works to a greater or lesser extent explore
shifting or dysfunctional referentiality and a blurring or
complete disassociation of subject and object. The poems
employing the graph "no" stress this most emphatically,
at times suggesting webs that recoil on themselves or run
into dead ends or leave their function in a state of
thorough ambiguity. In one reading, a series of "no"
connections may lead to what seems an infinite
regression. In another, they may seem to rearrange
patterns of force in linear sequences or work through
shifting configurations of association.
At times, Kitasono's disruption of logical progression
can move from classic Surrealism into something more
strange. The first four lines of the following stanza from
"Monotonous Solid" fit the classic model:
death's
burst
inside
hot glass bottle
star's
water's
dahlia's
extraordinarily visible burst
The next four lines, however, introduce extra levels of
difficulty and ambiguity while amplifying the concept of
an explosion illuminating a field of containment. The
water may belong to the star, and both may feed dahlias.
Dahlias are brightly colored and their petals radiate out in
burst patterns. Kitasono may have had other associations
in mind when he wrote the poem. Dahlias were first
cultivated by Europeans (and from them, passed on to
Asia) during the conquest of Mexico - and Kitasono's
poem was written while Japan was under American
occupation. Without looking further into dahlias (and it
seems unlikely that Kitasono had anything more elaborate
in mind), you could see the pattern of relation going in
different directions. The star, for instance, could be
considered a reflection of the dahlia and an entity under
its influence, perhaps using rain as an intercessor.
However you read the stanza, the first half requires a
different type of reading than the second. The second, no
matter how you parse it, requires a constant reversion to
the previous word with every new line you read. The first
four lines continue the standard practice of moving
forward in logical sequence. The second group asks for a
reading which suggests circles rather than straight lines in
its progression. Although Kitasono probably did not have
this in mind, the pattern of reading might be better
charted by the circular shape of the no graph than by a
straight, horizontal line. The basic interpretation of the
first four lines is difficult to argue with. Any reading of the
next four remains forever tentative and inconclusive, even
if patterns of association hold the stanza together and
produce a cohesive poetic effect. No matter how far
Kitasono moved away from logic or certainty in his later
poems, and how adamantly he might write poems which
defy authoritative readings, the sense of satisfaction
produced by poets as rational as Lucretius or as mystical
as Blake, remains in Kitasono's most disconnected
patterns.
Pound and the Imagists had broken away from the
traditional poetic line by sacrificing meter for moments of
perception. Yet Imagism retained the concept of the line
as a unit associated with music. Various forms of collage,
Surrealist and otherwise, had altered linear presentation
by disrupting the connective tissue of grammar, but not
necessarily the didactic and authoritarian nature of linear
thought.. By creating dysfunctions in the no graph and
other grammatical elements, Kitasono had expanded the
possibilities of offering significance without a logical
framework. From White Album on, Kitasono had
written poems whose "lines" consisted of no more than a
graph or two. One of his reasons for doing this
throughout his career was his use of negative page space
and, at times, the tight, staccato rhythms that resulted. In
his mature poems, the pages of isolated characters cease
being poems made of short lines and move closer to
poems made of floating, discontinuos graphs in which the
concept of the poetic line disappears along with linear
authority.
Kitasono died at the time when questioning the
authority of linear referentiality started becoming
important to small groups of Post Modernists in the west.
In a decade, related concerns would themselves become
dogmas and articles of faith in some western literary
groups. Yet even poets of the late 20th Century who
launched crusades against the tyranny of the referent
seldom went so far into rejection of its authority.
*
The traumas of the war worked their way into
Kitasono's poetry during the era of U.S. occupation. Even
his best work of the later 1940s suggests uncertainty as to
where to find the next pattern. His first major book after
the war was Black Fire. Arguably, Kitasono's
most important book was White Album. The
whiteness of the book from the 1920s suggested lightness,
cleanliness, other-worldliness, and, as much as anything,
a fresh sheet on which to write. Kitasono titled one of his
magazines Harkushi, "blank paper." The title of
its next manifestation, Madame Blanche, may
also refer to a white page instead of a woman's name. His
designs stressed open space with discreet fields of type. It
seems that Kitasono venerated surfaces which invited
writing and those which made what had been written
stand out. Black fire implies a text which consumes the
page leaving no room to write further. An album can be
opened or closed; in post-war Tokyo, bombed open and
collapsed shut buildings were norms. The title suggests
smoldering rubble, fires that burn through nights and
days under rains full of ashes. It may include
remembrance of shelters, where people waited below the
fire storms of saturation bombing, desperately hoping
they would be neither burned or suffocated. Although
Kitasono was not about to engage in any kind of polemic,
the book includes an undercurrent of suppressed rage of a
destroyed country under foreign occupation.
From an artistic point of view, Tokyo itself had moved
from the Surrealism of the City of the Future to the
paradigm of dreams of destruction, reminiscent of
various cultures' descriptions of hell. Perhaps as a final
extension of the title, the black fire of smoldering
Japanese cities could turn old albums into fragile ash,
white or black. It seems important to read back from this
point in understanding Surrealism and Kitasono. Even
after the nihilistic strains of Dada had morphed into the
more moderate fields of Surrealism, its advocates still
delighted in images of destruction, and its practitioners
engaged in exhortations to blow things up. The Eurasia of
1945 was one in which the world had outdone the
Surrealist's wildest fantasies of blowing up museums and
other symbols of stability and continuity. "A great
negative work of destruction" had indeed come to pass.
Kitasono had rejected the strains of violence in North
Atlantic Surrealism along with their base in classic
psychoanalysis, yet Japan had endured the worst
destructiveness of Euro-American dreams of catastrophe.
The tone and texture of Black Fire make the
ebullient optimism of White Album all the more
apparent; the mid century book may take some of the
patterns of the book of the 20s, but the book of starting
over used them to chart a dark world in which the poet
tried to retrieve some of what had been lost by reusing
patterns a young man had created in a time of hope. If
Kitasono was a man who understood fear, he may also
have been ideally suited to explore a new type of non-
coercive significance in a shattered world, occupied by an
alien army. The book marked the extreme of Kitasono's
disjunctive imagery and syntax. The sense of violence in
discontinuity and underlying rage find no object or target.
"In a Lost City," written in the immediate aftermath of
war, finds continuity with laments the world over.
Black Fire takes a much more sophisticated
approach and creates a unique post-war poem. Here the
rage is not directed at the conquering enemy, nor the
Empire at home; Kitasono does not blame anyone nor
does he increase his nation's defeat by speaking in the
language of the victim, the penitent, or the conquered.
The violence and rage are simply there. If this book marks
the extreme of Kitasono's lack of coercion, it seems
appropriate tha tit should be a response to war, even
though Kitasono himself was almost certainly not
thinking in such terms when he wrote it. The tone of the
book does not suggest, even by indirection, a plea for
sympathy or pity. It may not be too much to say that the
acknowledgment of the moment and the feeling out of its
jagged edges make a type of catharsis possible. But even
that may move too close to coercive force and external
justification. As the era recedes, however, and historians
reveal no heroes on either side, but only greater villainy,
this book could become the definitive poetic response to
the Pacific War.
The design of Black Fire marks a new move
into the realm of visual poetry. The book is roughly
square, with the type running in a thin strip along the top
of each page. It's general direction of reading is right to
left, with some configurations strung vertically along its
band. Titles in the book are in red; the text in black. The
book's title is a place where Kitasono engages in direct
description. The text presents a state of uncertainty and
frustration without sentimentality or self-pity. Despite the
metaphors of obliteration, Black Fire is a book of
starting over. It uses patterns from White Album,
and it might not be stretching the point too far to catch a
sense of dfefiance or detournement in the optimistic
sources. Picking up and extending the patterns of the era
of optimism, particularly those patterns which seem
impractical and perhaps naive, in terms of Kitasono's lack
of political awareness and his country's failures, could be
read as much in terms of gritty optimism as passive
despair.
*
Black Fire appeared in 1951. By that time,
despite the darkness of life in Japan, the world's relation
to Kitasono had begun to change in positive ways he
could not have expected. Despite his confinement in a
mental hospital and the scrutiny of his mail by the staff,
Ezra Pound continued to encourage his network of
writers and artists in the West to seek Kitasono out.
Ironically, poets in the West had reached a stage of
sophistication that allowed them to at least grasp the
basics of what Kitasono was doing, even from a few
samples in translation. A companion volume to Black
Fire appeared in English three years later under the
title Black Rain. This title moved from the fire
bombing of Tokyo to the use of atomic bombs in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rain in these cities was
something to which everyone was exposed. It fell,
meaninglessly, bearing the soot of burned people and
buildings with it. As fanciful as a white album might have
been, black rain literally fell after the blasts of atomic
bombs. At Pound's suggestion, Robert Creeley issued the
book through his Divers Press, to the adulation of such
poets as Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams,
Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, and James Laughlin.
Creeley would later say in an interview that this book and
Charles Olson's Mayan Letters were "the books I
remember most vividly." In writing the book in English,
with considerable assistance from his wife, it is interesting
to note how much they had their audience in mind. They
seem to have put considerable effort into making the
audience more comfortable with formal difficulties in the
patterns of Kitasono's Japanese poems of the period.
By the time this edition came out, Kitasono had
changed pattern once more - and either changed tone or
recapitulated the sequence of pattern change: Venus's
Seashell, published in 1955, reprises some of the tone
of Young Colony. Some readers may see the lyricism of
this book as a transition from whistling in the dark to
some of the lyricism of an earlier period. It may not be
stretching the point too far to suggest some ironic intent
in the book, as well as a desire to return to a more pleasant
world. After its publication, Kitasono paid no further
attention to Young Colony for many years. As what seems
a preparation for Venus's Seashell, Kitasono
published a reworking of his early book of unabashed
lyricism. Even if this was, as seems likely, a planed
preparation, he inserted some other patterns between the
two volumes.
In White Album Kitasono made extensive use
of color references. His reiteration of color evocations in
the early work began a process of associating colors with
changing images and states of mind. The obsessive and
combinatory forms gave a particularly insistent and
tangible edge to his type of Surrealism, even when the
color was such an anti-color as "transparent" or "black"
or "white." In his books after Black Fire a strong
but limited range of color took on an even greater
significance. In some instances, litanies of color images
acquired an almost hypnotic quality, suggesting that you
could enter a separate reality simply by fixating on colors,
that an alternative world could be reached with color
alone, and without the need to juxtapose unusual nouns
or incongruous verbs or strange images. It seems a bit
uncanny to see this growth of color usage through his
later opus in relation to Rimbaud's fantasy of color
mysticism arising from vowels. It definitely owes a debt to
the work of Joseph Albers, whom Kitasono admired,
though, as usual, it is important to see how much
Kitasono transformed and transposed the root ideas he
picked up. I haven't been able to find out whether
Kitasono was familiar with the work of Ad Reinhardt, but
it is interesting to contemplate what kind of
correspondence they might have had, and to imagine
Kitasono translating Reinhardt's profound and laconic
notes into Japanese. A poem in this pattern,
"Monotonous Space," became Kitasono's best known
piece outside Japan. It was translated into a number of
languages. This poem may initially seem simple, but
check out how many ways it asks questions of the reader.
When a white square is inside a white square, how do you
tell the two apart? By texture, perhaps - or perhaps the
areas dissolve into each other, losing their identity and
individuality. The infinite regression of the "no" graph
may suggest that they are squares appearing in the center
of each other, but since nothing is stated about their size
or placement, they leave almost endless possibilities open
to the reader. Given the nature of questioning the poem
implies as to the shapes and colors, the reader may
question which shapes or colors "own" which, and even
what the words are doing. This last becomes particularly
important. Is this a passive voice suggesting that you
imagine what it describes, or is it in the imperative form,
telling you to construct the image specified? This poem
took a number of the different types of ambiguity and
exploration from Kitasono's older patterns and simplified
them, simultaneously making them more graphic and
more emphatic.
In the mid 1950s, an odd coalition of poets and artists,
often enough starting from different positions, formed
what they called Concrete Poetry. An indication of the
complexity, confusion, and confluence of the basic strains
of the movement can be seen in the fact that the name
"Concrete" was independently and almost
simultaneously coined in Sweden and Brazil. Many
European members were part of the Fluxus movement,
which placed a heavy emphasis on unscripted
performances and intuitive responses to changing
situations. Some Concretists were affiliated with or part of
the Noigandres group in Brazil. This group was interested
in two things: creating an international artistic
environment that included Brazil as an essential
component, and in working out forms of poetry and art
that relied on rigid, crisp geometric expression which
theoretically could be read by anyone with only the gloss
of a word or two. Although Fluxus and Noigandres had
widely divergent mindsets, the minimalist layout and
rigid typography looked similar enough to merge. Both
favored clarity of line and maximum condensation of
word and image. This at times included contests to see
who could compose a poem not just with the fewest
number of words, but the fewest number of marks. The
name for the Noigandres group came from a line in a
poem by Ezra Pound, and once again we find his letters of
reference and ability to make contacts between people
essential to Kitasono. Pound had believed that Kanji were
all little pictures and had built parts of his literary theory
on this notion. The Noigandrens wanted to find a way of
making words written in the Roman alphabet do
something similar. They did not want to make complex
pictures, but to simplify images as much as possible.
Pound's letters, pre-war publications, and his theories
of ideogram and image lead them to Japan and to
Kitasono. When asked for a poem, he gave them
"Monotonous Space," which became a cornerstone of
their movement. With Black Rain and Pound's
connections, Kitasono was becoming less a marginal
figure outside the map of European art, but an essential
and generative, if not broadly recognized, presence. Even
though little of his work had been published outside
Japan, a few key poets and artists had some idea of what
he was doing and were adapting ideas he had originated.
Exactly what Kitasono thought of the Noigandrens is hard
to say. He could easily see that they were reinventing, and
claiming as new, artistic forms he and his colleagues in
Tokyo had thoroughly worked out three decades earlier.
He may not have been interested in what he saw as
repeating patterns he had already exhausted. He may have
noticed that the Noigandrens were profoundly enmeshed
in a strongly nationalistic military dictatorship and
wanted to steer clear of anything that reminded him of
Japanese fascism. He may have wanted to avoid having to
explain to them that their notions of the "ideogram"
were utter nonsense. He may have wanted to create an art
form of his own instead of merely being the incidental
Tokyo bureau chief (who shouldn't quit his day-job) for
someone else's movement. Whatever the case, after his
contribution of "Monotonous space," he sent them no
more poetry that resembled what they were doing.
Although this almost certainly involved some form of
stepping aside, he opened the door for other Japanese
poets who wished to take part in the movement. Niikuni
Seiichi became one of the three or four most highly
respected of the global movement, and the Japanese
Concrete magazines, Shi Shi, and Asa,
became two of its most important publications; Shi
Shi, was also one of the most long-lived.
Although Concrete was the first truly international
movement not dependent on a single language, it had its
down side. Some minimalist work was profoundly
moving and something that could stay with a reader for a
lifetime, but most consisted of trivial and infantile
gimmicks. The movement enjoyed a brief period of
popularity, but readers came to see its exultation of trivia
as no more than a fad and by the early 1970s
overwhelmingly and emphatically rejected it. This took
the work of masters such as Niikuni and Gomringer out
of consideration along with the avalanche of pointless
reiterations of less than a dozen superficial tricks. Most
important, however, was the way it discredited virtually
all writers in the U.S. working in the intermedium
between poetry and visual art. Some of these, such as the
French Lettrists had formed a web of connections of their
own and continued to exert influence in parts of the world
where Concrete had not enjoyed a period of absolute
dominance. For most people working in this intermedia
area - and the number was great, much larger than the
number of Concretists - this meant that every route to
publication became adamantly closed to them. If they
showed their work to anyone outside their own circles,
the response they'd get was "I won't look at that: I've
already seen Concrete Poetry." Even Kenneth Rexroth,
who was in some ways sympathetic to the movement,
wrote of visual poems, "once you've seen one, you've
seen them all," stating precisely the nature of response to
any kind of interaction between word and image on the
part of the overwhelming majority of readers. For
decades, no other movement in art or literature was as
violently and emphatically excluded from consideration
by anyone outside its own ranks. People working in the
area of greater visual poetry - which was usually not rigid,
or minimal, or simple, or trivial - found the only way to
get their work around was via the Mail Art network. Mail
Art began as a coalition between Fluxists looking for ways
to spontaneously and intuitively form large-scale
networks of fellow workers and people who felt the need
to avoid or subvert all types of censorship. Originally, it
simply involved sending art through the mail, but soon
became a means for coordinating public exhibitions of
art, usually accompanied by performance. Japan
remained less affected by the collapse of Concrete than
the U.S. Its Concretists continued their work unfazed.
Some of the major figures of the Mail Art movement were
also Japanese. And, in part through Kitasono, Mail Art
pioneered a new form of visual poetry. A Mail Art map of
the world would give Japan as much attention, detail, and
respect as any other place.
Kitasono may have seen something like the failure of
Concrete coming. Whenever he was asked to contribute
something to a western publication, he sent no Concretes,
only what he called Plastic Poems. (See, for instance, his
contributions to The Chicago Review Anthology of
Concretism, Eugene Wildman, ed, Chicago, 1969.) In
the mid 1960s, when Concrete was nearing its maximum
popularity, he declared the movement dead. Some critics
have seen this as a miscalculation on his part. It was not.
Although it had yet to produce the anthologies that
codified it, it is clear now, as it was to Kitasono then, that
the movement had exhausted the patterns that the
Japanese poets had invented in the 1920s, and backed
itself into a small, dogmatic corner.
Although Kitasono produced several new poems
which had affinities with his Concretes of the 1920s, he
was careful not to publish them outside Japan. In the
essential dynamic of his opus, he had shifted pattern once
again. Kitasono had been designing books and magazines
for years. He presumably had paid close attention to the
poetic possibilities of the photography of his friend
Yamamoto Kansuke. Certainly he was aware of the need
for a poetry that was not confined to a single language -
particularly one like Japanese that the rest of the world
could either ignore or confuse with picture writing.
Instead of imagining systems of pictorial glyphs, he could
write with pictures. The traditional definition of poetry
boiled down to "metered language," with the emphasis
on metered, not language. Once meter had been
dispensed with, words could be too. In fact, abstract
sounds had been part of poetry at least since the days if
Aristophanes. A picture poem was just as far from
convention as a prose poem. In destroying the need for
meter, Imagism had used East Asian forms such as Haiku
to transfer the essence of poetry to an epiphany or
moment of wonder. Surely a photo could do that as well
as a short poem. In the east and west it seems, in
retrospect, a bit silly to expect poets to discuss "the
image" in poetry as something that appeared only in the
reader's mind: it seems inevitable that some poets who
had written about images in the abstract would move into
the making of real images. Perhaps most important,
Kitasono had developed multiple means of breaking out
of the linear nature of traditional poetry and, indeed,
straining at the boundaries of linearity in language itself.
Making poems out of photographs completely broke
away from linear progression into spatial composition, in
which sequence freed itself from a single necessary order
of successions. Plastic poetry may thus have ended the
necessity of the line in poetry altogether.
In his initial statement on Plastic Poetry, Kitasono said
that it was time for poets to put down their pens and
brushes and make the leap to photography as a means of
writing. The Lettrists and other visual poets around the
world had used photographs before, and torn up printed
text and photographs had been integral to such
movements as Cubism, but the photographic practice
Kitasono advocated turned these usages inside out by
making the photograph the dominant technology of
poetry. This resembles the way he turned subject and
object inside out in his "no" poems. Bits of photos were
no longer subsumed by canvas or other frames; the world
became subsumed by photographs. In many of his Plastic
Poems, Kitasono began by crumpling up paper and
making other assemblages, arranging them, and, as his
final step, photographing them. A strong sub-text in his
Plastic Poetry comes from the way the photograph
captures a moment in time. We don't know how long the
crumpled up paper stayed in the position caught by the
photo. It may have been unfolding even as he clicked the
shutter. Whatever the case, the bread and wire and
styrofoam and other objects in his Plastic Poems did not
stay as they were in the photos for more than a few
moments, and they cannot be reassembled precisely as
they were. This combines Japanese conceptions of
transience with the questioning of stability in classic
Surrealism. Some of the magic of photography comes
from its silence. These moments caught on film do not
capture the sounds around them at the moment of
exposure. When the poem becomes a photograph, it takes
this quality into it in a way that does not happen with
words written or printed on paper. If poetry has been
traditionally an art of sound, Kitasono had developed the
perfect means of making a poem out of non-sound or
anti-sound. Perhaps this could be considered as one of
Kitasono's many variations on the negative space in East
Asian painting transposed to speech and other acoustics.
Donald Davie titled a book on Ezra Pound, "The Poet as
Sculptor." Kitasono literally sculpted his poems before
photographing them. Like the work of the Fluxists,
Kitasono's poems relied on "happenings" which had
already taken place and left only a ghostly and
unexplained image behind.
As VOU magazine progressed, it became as
much a forum for the presentation of Plastic poems as it
was for texts, musical scores, and other printed matter.
Coated stock regularly appeared in the middle of issues
for halftone printing with maximum contrast. Each
member of the group developed his or her own style, and
one of the strong points of the group was its diversity.
Yamamoto Kansuke should be considered a co-founder
of plastic poetry, even though some critics see him as a
photographer instead of a poet. The rigidity of this
distinction doesn't seem to have meant much to either
him or Kitasono. His lyrical montages and experiments
with focus and exposure produced some of the most
delicate and polished works of the group. Hibino Fumiko
moved farthest into abstraction, often with a geometric
compositional base, but including components suggesting
interactions between micro-organisms and the building
blocks of inorganic matter. Her work may be the most
important bridge between the esthetics of Plastic and
Concrete on one hand, and visual poetry and multiplt
strains of Modernist painting on the other. It is important
to note that although the organizations Kitasono worked
with since the 1920s had included women, one of the best
of the Plastic Poets, Hibino, was female. Kiyohara Etsushi
started with simple geometric abstraction. Some of his
poems moved far away from this orderly base. These
suggest odd or unpleasant tactile sensations or disordered
fabrics of partially formed signifiers. Okazaki Katsuhiko
took a dry, sarcastic, gritty, and sometimes jaundiced
view of the world, though his sense of texture and volume
gave his intense eroticism immediacy. Shimizu Toshihiko
worked primarily with pop images, stressing the two
dimensions of printed material. Takahashi Shohachiro
worked as often as not in Concrete as Plastic, using Plastic
idioms primarily for installations and pieces that required
considerable depth of field. Tsuji Setsuko (another
woman among the most prominent members) worked
with bas reliefs, focusing on corrugated and otherwise
textured paper, wood grains, and images that made use of
emphatically flat surfaces in other contexts. The
movement of individual members into their own niches
resembled the shifts in patterns in Kitasono's work
throughout his life.
*
Kitasono died on June 6, 1978. He continued commercial
design work, which formed a mutual feedback loop with
his Plastic Poetry, on his death bed. His friends published
a memorial volume, disbanded the group and ceased
publishing VOU.
As with his lexical poetry, Kitasono's Plastic Poems
often lacked closure. Comparing the Plastic Poetry of the
VOU group to Concrete, one of the most striking
features is that Concrete snaps shut almost as soon as it
opens. What's there at first glance, though it may allow
for multiple interpretations, is all that will ever be there.
At it's best, it is highly polished and witty, but lacks depth.
It seems finished, and leaves the reader with a sense of
completion. A Plastic Poem tends to seem to be just
beginning. Often there is something crude about it, and it
may seem unsatisfying to people more familiar with
Concrete. In part this is because Concrete looked back at
a closed world, while Plastic Poetry was ahead of its time
in ways that might not be apparent to anyone until at least
the mid 1990s, and now insists itself ever more
aggressively.
By the mid 1980s, visual poetry was at its nadir in the
U.S. in terms of exclusion from publication. However,
practitioners had never stopped trying to fight their way
out of the ghetto into which they had been pushed. Many
were encouraged by the fact that there were parts of the
world such as France, Yugoslavia, and Japan where the art
still had some print currency, and many of them had
subscriptions to Shi Shi and Le Lettrisme,
as well as Kaldron, the only U.S. magazine that
regularly and consistently published all forms of visual
poetry. By this time, a new generation was coming on the
scene that was blissfully unaware of a world before the
Concrete shattering and assumed, like the Concretists
themselves, that they were starting largely from scratch,
but using material from television and other media, which
the Concretists had ignored. Although they "reinvented
the wheel" over and over again, they did not have the
bitterness of their elders to hold them back. The Mail Art
network, originally formed in large part to subvert any
kind of censorship, particularly that of authoritarian
regimes, had grown to the point where fairly large shows
could be mounted around the world and members could
hold congresses in various cities. The Network's efforts at
freeing dissidents such as Clemente Padin and Jorge
Caraballo from prison suggested that Visual Poets
weren't just sitting in corners moping. With the end of
the Cold War, Mail Artists started putting the energy they
had previously used to subvert censorship into getting
their work printed outside their own distribution systems.
While this was going on slowly, a new and completely
unexpected element entered the picture. At the time of
Kitasono's death, the nascent internet was still the
province of the military and a few scientists. A decade
later, it seemed a good way for a few people to pass plain
text back and forth and to store and retrieve documents
via not particularly user-friendly processes such as ftp and
gopher. By the end of the century, the majority of poets in
the west had internet access and other parts of the world
were quickly catching up to or overtaking them. To make
it possible for a work force to essentially retrain itself
every few years, computers relied ever more on icons
instead of text. The World Wide Web quickly became
heavily dependent on graphics. Some artists and poets
began using the web as the basis of independent art forms
almost as soon as they gained access to it. Now, in 2007,
we find ourselves in a world Kitasono essentially charted
before he could have known anything about it, but
following his life-long practice of being ahead of his time.
Even books without a trace of an image in them depend
on electronic media for distribution and sale, and even if
the books don't include pictures, the sales process
depends on them at virtually every step of the way - even
in such seemingly ungraphic areas as warehousing and
inventory. Aside from the enormous importance of web
publishing, which does more to keep poetry available at
present than any other medium, sales and author pages
depend on graphics.
The advent of digital cameras has brought about a
revolution unparalleled in the history of photography;
and, perhaps, of any image-making process. Given the
fact that digital cameras require virtually no expense after
purchase, and the way this allows people to take as many
pictures as they want without having to restrain
themselves for financial reasons, means that the number
of non-artists who experiment with photography has
spread like no other form of graphic experiment before it.
Cellular phones now have the capacity to send photos
taken with the phones themselves, and even simple cell
phones often include still photos of each person who
rings as a means of identifying in-coming calls. Partly as a
result of digital photography and the internet, visual
poetry has moved from the most denigrated of literary
genres to the fastest growing. How long and under what
terms it may find acceptance by non-practitioners is
difficult to say, but even if it goes through a collapse such
as Concrete, it will be nearly impossible to keep the art
completely hidden as it was twenty years ago. There are
now dozens of magazines which publish visual poetry,
both on paper and on the web. These often contain poetry
reminiscent of Concrete, but virtually none are restricted
to that idiom. Among the many means that contribute to
contemporary visual poetry, photography is one of the
most prominent. Perhaps ironically, works in Concrete
idiom come across better in company of other modes
than they did in the days of Concrete dominance.
Where all this is going, no one can say. Some will
continue to fear it. Some will embrace it without
reservation. Whatever the case, it is clear that at this point
word and image can no longer be kept completely
separate and that their futures will continue to become
more tightly linked. Despite the prophesies of some
technocrats, it seems unlikely that that images will
displace texts. The two will probably benefit from the
association. Although direct descendants of Kitasono's
Plastic Poetry may never become a major global mode, its
basic principles are now part of world culture and will
continue to grow.
An odd and humorous irony comes from the
unfortunate nature of literary terms in the 20th Century.
For many people the word "plastic" has unpleasant
connotations. Yet for better or worse, the computers of
the world Kitasono foresaw are framed in plastic. At the
same time, it's difficult for veteran internet users not to
smile at the similarity between the graph and the @
symbol essential to email addresses.
This is most certainly a time for Kitasono to gain a
larger audience. As one of the pioneers of the union of
photography and poetry, and of international networks,
he would deserve respect even if the quality of his work
was inferior. Early practitioners of arts tend to be some of
the best to use them, and Kitasono's Plastics definitely act
as first levels of major practice. This should reflect back
on his lexical poetry. At the same time, the world is
getting ever smaller and more interconnected. Kitasono's
Plastics may not embody a universal language. But the
more they aid in the process of bringing the world
together through new art forms and new forms of
communication the more we, as citizens of the world,
have to work with in the process of humane globalization.