I wish an Alexander Pope were about to make a multiple Rondo in couplets of
all these multiply couched praises! How close can one get to the elusive
substance without burning their fingers, let alone careers? I begin to fear
reading the book in that I might become showered with the ambiguity of my
own presence! Which means I will read it - better adventure than stasis. But
jeezus.
I take it this is Kent Johnson? The trickster lynx happy to haunt our
abodes, who will not disappear amongst us. Ghost with a legacy, it appears.

Stephen V 
Who actually met Sappho way back...
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com



> _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
> 
> ***
> 
> [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
> 
> ***
> [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