_Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English_, will be available in coming days from Combo Books. The book will be available through SPD, but advance orders can be made by sending $12 to:
Combo Books
c/o Michael Magee
6 Brookwood Ln.
Cumberland, RI 02864
The book is beautifully designed and set by Christian Palino of Prototype Syndicate. Mike Magee asks me to indicate that he would be happy to send an advance PDF file of the book to anyone who would have a serious interest in reviewing it. You can write to him at [log in to unmask]
Blurb comments can be viewed below.
Kent
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[blurbs on inside pages]
This is essentially a criminal act. --Arthur Vogelsang
'Yasusada's' writing is an entry into a spiritual space . . . It is a
work of art in the largest sense. --Carolyn Forch*
Yasusada is an expression of white male rage. --Charles Bernstein
"The 'scandal' of these poems lies not in the problematics of authorship, identity, persona, race or history. Rather, these are wonderful works of writing that also invoke all of these other issues, never relying on them to prop up a text. In a time and place where book jacket blurbs routinely claim that X or Y poet has written a work that has "found that which is essential" in whatever, this book makes the argument for anti-essentialism. That it has done it so well infuriates folks with a proprietary interest in categories. Thank you, Araki Yasusada!" --Ron Silliman
(The Yasusada author) has done a brilliant job in inventing a world at once ritualized and yet startlingly modern, timeless yet documentary, archaicized yet au courant - a poetic world that satisfies our hunger for the authentic, even though that authentic world is itself a perfect simulacrum. Like Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius", the Yasusada notebooks force us to go back to the 'originals,' so as to see what they really were and how they have been transformed." --Marjorie Perloff
Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada is the most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Using modernist strategies, the author(s), steeped in translations of Japanese literature and feeling uneasy, even - if they are Americans - complicit with the U.S. foreign policy that generated such mass destruction, invented an imaginative, political and poetic act of empathy. To write poems concerning Hiroshima, they felt it necessary to imagine themselves as the other, "the enemy." They relinquished their own identities as authors and became invisible, as the Hiroshima victims themselves disappeared. It is an impossible gesture of solidarity, since one cannot become someone else and since one cannot truly imagine one's way into an actual culture considerably different from one's own. But nevertheless, it is a gesture worth making if its resultant poetry is worthwhile as art, as poetry, as - finally - contemporary Western poetry. In this gambit, Doubled Flowering is an astonishing success. --Forrest Gander
It is possible, I would argue, to see the Yasusada notebooks as a kind of experimental laboratory for identifying and analyzing forms of cross-cultural misprision-the ways that cultures mutually construe, and misconstrue, one another. Far from seeking to con us into believing in a fictitious Japanese poet, the Yasusada experiment compels us to see that this poet, constructed in this particular way, could only be the product of a North American cultural imagination, just as the "America" that this imagined poet in turn imagines reflects a Japanese construction of American culture. Each construction-the American construction of an imagined Japan, the imagined Japanese construction of America-is "wrong," in a sense, but by juxtaposing their respective "wrongnesses about each other we perhaps achieve something like a scale model of cross-cultural assimilation and resistance, cross-pollination and contamination, difference and sameness.
--Brian McHale
In the proliferating discussions, the identity of the author ha(s) become so refracted that it approache(s) the condition of We Are All Yasusada. Perhaps it is best to call him/her/them the Yasusada Author, much as we refer to a Renaissance painter as the Master of the X Altar.
--Eliot Weinberger
No one will buy (this book), read it, or own it-why would we? We know that the poems are not "true" to any genuine emotional experience, and we know that the act of imagination that produced them was motivated by sardonic smugness or misanthropic disdain. Or both.Yasusada hacks at the core of what's sacred in human endeavor. Literature is our record of being, and to defraud it is an act of nihilistic mutiny.
--Michael Atkinson
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[comments for back cover]
These pidgin English fantasies of poetic mastery are awful and incredible. Like Frank O'Hara's "poem in blackface," they give us pause by giving delight. The delight, dear reader, is a ruse. It's the pause that constitutes their gift.
--Ben Friedlander, former editor of Jimmy and Lucy's House of K, author of A Knot Is Not a Tangle, and Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism
Here in America, where even our best experimental writers seem to be constructing gigantic monuments to their own talents and are eager to lie beside Wordsworth in some canonical garden, (the Yasusada) project, whatever it ultimately is or ends up having been, strikes me as either the most moving, unsettling, and important thing going on right now or as the most egregious and dangerous self-delusion in American letters.
--Tony Tost, editor of Octopus Magazine, author of Invisible Bride, winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award
Joyce and Stein gave us an idea of how the ego talked, Mallarme and Proust, the superego. Now, for the first time in our era, an unearthing of Araki Yasusada's shattering letters and sublime poem-fragments, brilliantly edited by Kent Johnson, ALSO, WITH MY THROAT, I SHALL SWALLOW TEN THOUSAND SWORDS, shows us how ego and superego would talk to each other, if only they spoke the same language. It is neither English nor French nor Japanese, neither prose nor poetry, but a post-Ashberian incantation grounded in our primal explosion, at the root of our age, in Hiroshima. The letters from Araki (superego) to Richard (ego) are gifted with annotation by our visionary Dr. Johnson, as he helps us to identify a new realm of memory in unbidden quotation and translation. In memoriam, the twentieth century is presented in a shoebox of lyric quantum equations-between thought and feeling, language and encoding, word and misspelling, reader and misreading. Especially the latter: "I am saying this in a little girl's voice, Richard. Is this the buffoonery of an emotion that I cannot express in art?" No emotion goes missing from this first contemporary instance of the poetic restoration of a lost city-an echo of the great laments of Ur and Mari, Erech and Jerusalem-that is our literary future. It is the landmark of twenty-first century art, as well, that Motokiyu et. al. has created.
--David Rosenberg, former editor of Coach House Press, author of Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah, and (with Harold Bloom), The Book of J.
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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