CA. Other Poets and Works

14. Works after 1950.

	A miscellany of Cid Corman, D. J. Enright, James Kirkup, and Gary Snyder. Kenneth Rexroth images are at CA13. The thumbnail of Cid Corman is from a photograph by Lisa Mahony ( ). Images of poets: . Another page of post-1950 images is here.

In the 1950s the cultural and literary interaction between Japan and the United States and Europe changed. This was propelled by the end of the war, the Occupation, and a new generation of intermediaries these events made possible. Those most notable in the context of this study are the translators Donald Keene, Edward Seidensticker, and Ivan Morris. In English-language poetry the most important manifestations of this change are apparent in the work of writers who themselves were among the new intermediaries, poets who lived and worked in Japan and in several cases, unlike poets noted elsewhere in this study, learned the culture and the language, sometimes deeply and well, and incorporated this experience into their work. None of this has been properly described or evaluated in a critical study. Such a study would most profitably begin in the work of five poets: Cid Corman, D. J. Enright, James Kirkup, Kenneth Rexroth (see also 13), and Gary Snyder. See also A38, 42, 43, 49a-b, 59, 60, 71, 72, and BK146, and Iketani Toshitada, ‘Robert Bly to haiku’ (Bly and haiku, Kinjô gakuin daigaku ronshû 70 [1976]: 91-108), Niikura Toshikazu, ‘A Romantic Reassertion: Bly and Haiku’ (in Dentô to handentô—gendai Amerika bungaku ronshû, edited by Kenzaburo Ôhashi [Tokyo: American Literature Society of Japan, 1980]), Naoko Fuwa Thornton, ‘Robert Bly’s Poetry and the Haiku’ (Comparative Literature Studies 20 [1983]: 1-13), and David Ewick, ‘From Zen: The Rocks of Sesshu to Triumph of the Sparrow: The Japanese Sources of Lucien Stryk’s Early Poems’ (in Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk, edited by Susan Porterfield [Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1993]).

a.Cid Corman 1924-2004) and Origin. See especially Descent from Daimonji, Cool Gong, and Cool Melon (Ashland, Mass.: Origin, 1959), and poems and translations from the Japanese by Corman and others in his journal Origin, particularly series 2-4, published in Kyoto, 1961-83. None of dozens of books by Corman published after 1959 are untouched by his understanding and incorporation of Japanese poetics. See also Corman’s essays in Word for Word (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1977) and At Their Word (Black Sparrow, 1978), and A49b. Much of Corman’s post-1960 poetry is collected in Of (2 vols., Venice, Ca.: Lapis, 1990).

b. D. J. Enright (1920-2002). See especially The World of Dew: Aspects of Living in Japan (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955); Bread Rather than Blossoms (Secker & Warburg, 1956); The Year of the Monkey (Kobe: Kônan University, 1956); Some Men are Brothers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960); Instant Chronicles: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985); Philip Gardner, ‘D. J. Enright Under the Cherry Tree’ (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 9 [1968]: 100-111); Russell Greenwood, ‘Enright’s Japan’ (in Life By Other Means: Essays on D. J. Enright, ed. Jacqueline Simms [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990]); David Ewick, ‘A Selected Critical Bibliography of Twentieth-Century British Poetry Influenced by Japan: Edmund Blunden and D. J. Enright, Work from Mainstream British Presses’ (Kônan daigauku kiyô bungakuron 81 [1992]: 181-232); and A28, 73, BD121, 123, 128, and BJ41.

c. James Kirkup (b. 1918). See especially The Prodigal Son (London: Oxford UP, 1959), Refusal to Conform (Oxford UP, 1963), Paper Windows: Poems from Japan (London: Dent, 1968), White Shadows, Black Shadows (Dent, 1970), The Body Servant: Poems of Exile (Dent, 1971), and An Actor’s Revenge (adaptation of kabuki, libretto by Kirkup, music by Minoru Miki [London: Faber, 1979]). Many of Kirkup’s poems from Japan are collected in three 1996 editions from the University of Salzburg, Omens of Disaster: Selected Shorter Poems, vol. 1, Once and For All: Selected Shorter Poems, vol. 2, and An Extended Breath: Collected Longer Poems and Sequences. No detailed study has been made of Kirkup’s considerable debts to Japan, though several works focus on an influence from haiku, the first of which, A. W. Sadler’s ‘James Kirkup as Haiku Poet’ (Literature East and West 9 [1965]: 238-45), is the most perceptive. See also A28, 73, and BJ41.

d. Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). In addition to work noted at 13, see especially The Heart’s Garden / The Garden’s Heart (Cambridge, Mass.: Pym-Randall, 1967), On Flower Wreath Hill (Burnaby, B.C.: Blackfish, 1976, reprinted as Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems [New York: New Directions, 1991]), The Silver Swan: Poems Written in Kyoto (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon, 1976), One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese (New Directions, 1976), The Love Poems of Marichiko (Santa Barbara: Christopher’s, 1978), The Morning Star (New Directions, 1979), Morgan Gibson, Kenneth Rexroth (New York: Twayne, 1972), Emiko Sakurai, ‘Oriental Tradition in the Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth’ (PhD thesis, University of Alabama, 1973), Taguchi Tetsuya, ‘Kenneth Rexroth to Nippon’ (Kenneth Rexroth and Japan, Dôshisha daigaku eigo eibungaku kenkyû 60-61 [1993]: 73-87), Kodama (A59), and Sadria (A72).

e. Gary Snyder (b. 1930). See especially Riprap (Kyoto: Origin, 1959, reprinted in Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems [1965, Berkeley: North Point, 1990]), Myths & Texts (1960, reprint, New York: New Directions, 1978), Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965, enlarged as Mountains and Rivers Without End [Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997]), The Back Country (London: Fulcrum, 1967, enlarged, New Directions, 1968), Regarding Wave (1969, enlarged, New Directions, 1970), Earth House Hold (New Directions, 1969), Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974), The Real Work (ed. William Scott McLean, New Directions, 1980), Axe Handles (San Francisco: North Point, 1983), Left Out in the Rain (North Point, 1986), No Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1992), Katsunori Yamazato, ‘Seeking a Fulcrum: Gary Snyder and Japan (1956-1975)’ (PhD thesis, University of California, Davis, 1988), and A42, 49a-b, 59, 61, 71, and BK146.