The words stood with absolute precision, as if slashed by the sharp blade of a sword. I was astonished by my own piece, as I did not know it could emerge with such a presence. Perhaps, I had subconsciously written it in 'such' a way that the poem stands on its own. A single glance at the page is enough to tell: In poetry, winning or losing hinges entirely on this—not on the semantic meaning of the words, but on the sheer presence of an aura.

There are those who can instantly discern it on sight. Take Iijima Koichi, for instance.¹ He used to say quite often: 'Haven’t seen pages like that in ages!', or 'Back in the day, it was right there when you opened the page of the ones like Jean Genet!' This reveals that poetry shares a groundwater vein with other art forms like painting and calligraphy at some deeper level.

At its root, poetry must possess a certain youth. I do not mean ‘being young’ or ‘fresh,’ and I even hesitate to use the word ‘new.’ It is, instead, a matter of the unimaginable. Even a poem by an old poet like myself must manifest the agelessness.

‘Universality,’ ‘eternity,’ and ‘agelessness’—these three are, in essence, one and the same. To put it simply: universality is agelessness. ‘Ever just born’—herein lies one of the secrets of art.

The act of writing poetry collides with a state of emergency. I want to connect this to Franz Kafka.

Kafka abruptly breaks into a sprint at the moment of a sudden crack. This gesture of Kafka—a sudden dash at the cracks at the beginning and the closing of his writing—is akin to an ancient runner's full sprint. Walter Benjamin rightly called him a ‘treasure house of ancient gestures.’²

‘The Wish to Be a Red Indian’ is precisely the epitome of this. If one could become an Indian, the reins would vanish, the horse itself would disappear, and there would be nothing but a pure rush. When people compared my poetry to a sprint, or a gallop, it was perhaps because they saw the exact same quality.

This realization triggers another memory: I have been drawn to Li Bai and Byron since childhood; now I gather that it was for their 'speed.' Let me promptly add, however, that this ‘speed’ encompasses a certain ‘slowness.’ Rather, it is about the modulation of speed—much like shifting gears in an old car, revving the engine to its limit, or slamming on the brakes: The question is whether one is attuned to these shifting movements—which is, ultimately, a question of how attuned one is to Time itself.

With Li Bai in particular, I sensed not only this 'slowness' but even a certain 'smallness.' I was astonished that a spirit so acutely sensitive to cosmic shifts exists in this way. Take his famous verse: 'I raise my head to gaze at the mountain moon; I lower my head and think of home.' It is staggering the that universe is already upended within such a minimalist couplet. Speed is a micro-velocity—a dead slow momentum on the verge of coming to a standstill—simultaneously vanishes in a mere flash. This is the quality found in almost all great poetry.

A poem devoid of speed is a failure—a speed fundamentally distinct from mere tempo. Let us consider Hitomaro’s verse from the Man'yōshū: ‘O mountain, bend low so that I may see the gate of my beloved, who must be longing for me with a heart drooping like summer grass.’ The moment we attune to its voice, the timescape rushes into our mind. Saito Mokichi once characterized this acoustic current as ‘A Grand Continuous Sound-Tone,’³ but I sense in it something far more complex: the poem captures the entire transition of the mindscape, and we can even feel the very dynamism of that working. In our mental vista, we moderns naturally hold jazz and various forms of visual expression—a vast diversity of human creation that our predecessors could never have known. The ‘speed’ is the complexity surging from this profundity—a force of formidable intensity.

I have also realized a hidden drive within me—a motive to distort and warp. But why must things warp? Why do I reject the ‘clean’ form of a poem? Because I hold a deep-rooted conviction that a straight line is merely an abstract concept that does not exist. I say, ‘perhaps even this thing called “vertical” is not a straight line,’ or ‘perhaps it breaks and bends like lightning.’ I once wrote: ‘It is music because the world is warped.’ The world is somehow warped, distorted, skewed—or perhaps sloped, tilted; there is an omnipresence of collapse, warp, misalignment, or curvature, to which I must always stay wide-eyed. My breathing synchronizes with this instinctive conviction and sublimates as ‘a sort of mutism’—an inarticulativeness that cannot be labeled as mere ‘silence’ or a ‘stutter.’

This is a matter of profound significance. Having ingested the expression of the soul of the African continent through jazz, we now possess a fundamentally new sensibility that the generation of Hideo Kobayashi, whose aesthetics were already complete before the Second World War, could not have.⁴ It is through jazz that we have known its African root: a primal turbidity, noise, a voice of darkness penetrating from beneath the surface—the expression that can turn human existence upside down. To touch a 'root' is a terrifying experience in itself—and we have reached down into something even deeper.

For all its ‘warping,' jazz still holds a primal harmony. Noise has broken in, but this is no mere noise; within it, a certain beauty resides.

Schematically, there are two varieties of what we call 'harmony.' One is that of music theory, rooted in classical harmonic systems—a predictable, logical one. But this theoretical alignment is surely not the only form. There is an apparent dissonance that nevertheless perfectly harmonizes on an unimaginably distant horizon—and that is what I call a 'centrifugal harmony.' What free jazz musicians always pursue is precisely this, never the preexisting. And I permanently seek is the exact same thing: the genuine, ‘centrifugal harmony.'

I often perform reading sessions with a musician Otomo Yoshihide—an act that takes place precisely on this horizon, within the vastness of the expanse of noise and free jazz. What made jazz and rock so radically new was that they completely rewrote the grammar of the world. The reason I find those up to Hideo Kobayashi entirely uninspiring is precisely this: there is no jazz, no beat behind them. Even Kobayashi had no means of knowing this radical equivalence—that Jimi Hendrix and Mozart stand equal in terms of this primal 'harmony.'

When listening to classical music, I sense another language resonating from behind the sound—from a deeper level, as if bringing its very heart into the light. This is especially true when I listen to the Russian-born pianist Valery Afanassiev. I feel a palpable layeredness—the very membranes of his fingertips—as they touch the keys. It is as though both his mind and fingers possess multilayered membranes, and I am listening to their music. Yamazaki Hiroshi, the editor of this book, once shared with me a thought attributed to Chopin: that a note is a form of human language before it becomes fixed—a sound that conveys the deepest human emotions before they ever take shape as speech. We moderns, most certainly, have come to listen to it.

Afanassiev, Miles Davis, or Thelonious Monk—these musicians often play with extreme slowness—an inseparable, immediate juxtaposition of notes. In those moments, I feel as though I were hearing a 'pure voice,' modest yet utterly unexpected. Louis Armstrong’s raspy voice is the very archetype of this; here lies the true locus of what we call 'poetry.'

This same 'pure voice' resonates from the poems of Emily Dickinson—as a raspy voice.

A true 'pure voice' is always slightly off and faintly muddy. That is the raspy voice: a voice with frictional roughness.

At various points throughout this book, I have stressed the significance of this 'raspy voice,' beginning with that of Dylan Thomas. This raspy voice is internally richer, more substantive, than a so-called 'clear' voice. I have tried to capture its core—not as a 'stutter' but as 'a variation of mutism.' That is the 'raspy voice'—the raw 'raspiness' itself. Unlike filtered water, a raspy voice tastes rich, filled with microscopic, elementary particles. A so-called clear voice is boring. I am drawn to the voices of Misora Hibari, Louis Armstrong, or naniwa-bushi—voices that sound as though a myriad of tiny folds are quivering.

The same is true even in classical music. Afanassiev told me this regarding the piano: if you tune a piano to be perfectly 'correct' in theory, the true harmony fails to emerge. A great tuner uses their own ear to just slightly shift the sound from that theoretically 'correct' state. This means that a 'good sound' is, after all, slightly misaligned. In other words—and here I am dragging the argument forcefully back to my own side—a 'good sound' is ultimately a raspy voice—which, perhaps, is the only one that feels truly 'real.'

Well, without needing such tedious complexities, Satchmo's deep voice is just so rich, isn’t it?

In this book, I have mentioned several times our disconnect from the older generation's 'poesy.' And to me, the most decisive factor in this break was the encounter with the Beats—with Beat poetry, beginning with Allen Ginsberg.

The Beat—precisely meaning to beat, to strike—seeks to expose the raw voice, the scream, exactly as it is, refusing to dress it up with any kind of aestheticism. Having arrived here at long last, poetry comes to unleash the bare reality of ‘life.’

It was right after the First World War that a movement called Dadaism emerged. It was certainly an impulse to express the shudder, the writhing, of a deeply wounded Europe having undergone such mass murder for the very first time on the scale of a global war. Yet, to my honest regret, it eventually converged into Surrealism—yet another tamed ‘ism’ that flattened out what it had absorbed.

The Beat was on a fundamentally different ground. Not aiming at 'perfecting' a work, it staked itself on the moment—the spark, if any, at the very instant when a work is either born or lost. This is the Beat: throwing their very lives into the act of beating:

Contingency and Harmony

Afanassiev shared with me Mozart’s astonishment as he listened back through his own work: 'Even this music... possesses order, it holds harmony!' Afanassiev drew a parallel here to the classic paradox of Western philosophy: the antagonism between the Heraclitean flux ('everything flows') and the Parmenidean One ('all is one; change is impossible').

To establish a work is to ultimately arrive at the One: it must eventually assume an order, a distinct shape. But we must first incorporate the Heraclitean warp, chaos, and curvature to seize the dynamism that erupts from that charge. This warp—this chaos, this distortion, this bending—is what constitutes the raspy voice. I may lack genius and often fail. Yet, I have never relinquished the primal chaos. Creation begins with Heraclitean chaos, demanding a trajectory toward the Parmenidean—gravitating not necessarily toward conventional order, but toward its own tactile solidity.

The work’s tactile solidity will dissolve, however, if one manipulates it for the sake of mere formative neatness. I write free verse, forging its very structure out of nothing—rejecting all conventional frameworks. I architect an emergent form, labor as a carpenter for and within it—simultaneously playing musical instruments to bring its music into being. It is indeed arduous labor.

I also have a particular habit of ‘shifting.’ I think and answer unstraightforwardly, and it relates to the issue of ‘form.’ Expression is far simpler under structural restrictions—be it haiku, tanka, or novel. As Hagiwara Sakutaro astutely observed, we aspire toward the incomplete—the domain fabled by, and only by, free verse. Having been called into this sphere, I remain bound to struggle within the incomplete—though I cannot completely dismiss the pull of ‘form’—that neatness of a certain shape and harmony.

I strive to draw contents out of chaos: to structure them into a certain formative shape and present them as a tangible work. The outcome may be distorted, yet it possesses a primal harmony—‘centrifugal harmony.' My reach may have hit its limit, but the potential of this harmony is limitless. One may deviate into fragmentation or a counter-narrative to extend the horizon.

I have a hunch that I, too, must and can go even further. My recent series, Dear Monster, is a radical example of this extension through ‘distortion’ and ‘misalignment’: materialized on drafting paper simply by the deed of handwriting, it presents itself as a tangible artifact—an art piece matching none of the definitions of any existing genres—which even transcends the notion of ‘genre’ itself.

Having come this far, poetry finds itself engaged with the entire history of expression and the whole cultural scope. Art and poetry—or the working of the hand and linguistic expression—were severed in the modern era. But there used to be a world where they were inseparable—even indistinguishable—co-sustaining a certain cosmos on their own.⁵

I believe that harmony still exists somewhere—that it must be precisely on the razor’s edge between harmony and distortion. An almost impossible state, perhaps, yet we cannot abandon the pursuit of 'poetry.'

From another perspective, the attempt to capture the very instant when expression begins to stir—an endeavor pursued by the likes of Paul Klee, Kandinsky, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, and even Jonas Mekas—naturally raises the question of whether letters alone suffice. This is a cutting-edge and fundamental artistic inquiry: one that even reaches back to historical figures such as Ogata Kenzan, who treated letters as equivalent to drawings on his decorative earthenware, or to Tawaraya Sōtatsu. The world may only truly know the answer in fifty—or even a hundred years’ time.

It may be a wild leap, but I believe the instinct of that singular giant, Minakata Kumagusu, touches this very frontier with the same primal reaching.

Rikyū, too, was surely searching for something primal. I believe that if one steers one's attitude toward that same fundamental source—rather than blindly following the aesthetics Rikyū has established—one will eventually arrive at the sensation identical to what I seek. This is perhaps what Bashō meant when he spoke of the single essence that penetrates 'Rikyū’s tea, Sesshū’s paintings'—an insight crystallized as the famous concept attributed to him: ‘the eternal and the ephemeral.'⁶ And I must add that even Jimi Hendrix is already included in this aesthetics.

Conventional aesthetics has regarded contingency and harmony just as contradictory, but we must mediate this conflict by installing a certain order at a certain point—so that a new harmony emerges at an even deeper—or perhaps higher—level. This is the very state—imperfect as it may be—that we strive for, where a flash of inspiration may spark. The very process is 'time' itself. We are not ruining harmony; rather, we pursue it on a further horizon—a pure ‘harmony.’

After sixty years of writing poetry—remaining, perhaps, a perpetual novice—I find what plagues me most is the beginning. I desperately wrestle with the opening. There are those who may start smoothly and suffer only at the end. But I am not of that sort. I occasionally drink to the point of total disarray—of indeed suffering—to escape normal thought. It is then that something may germinate, something stands up. Only then do I finally set out to write. And as I do, I find that a certain harmony, an order, is already there.

This echoes what Afanassiev once told me: Mozart, apparently, was the same. Even with a symphony, the entire piece was already complete the moment he set out to write. I do not mean to compare myself to such a genius, but at least, l do not lose sight of the course once I have begun either. In the most extreme cases, when I must write but cannot, I loathe the manuscript paper and the pen—loathe them. To cope, I glue an extra sheet of paper onto the blank manuscript. Then I rub it, wrinkle it, tap it—treating the paper itself like a musical instrument. I keep my hands busy to erase the very existence of paper—and in that precise instant, something emerges.

It is there, even visibly—it has come. And I begin driving rhythm, lineation, phonetics, images, thoughts, and scenes into it to give it form, while thinking how I sustain this for, say, a thousand lines. To have begun is to already reside within the harmony, paradoxically. The desperate wrestling that lasted a week or two with that very first line is, perhaps, nothing other than the labor of discovering this harmony—the absolute prerequisite for its materialization.

'Noise' or 'harmony' belongs to a dimension far beyond mere music. It transcends that, reaching a further stage. Look at Michelangelo. See the Yabure-bukuro (Burst Pouch) of old Iga-ware. These 'incomplete' works embrace contingency—and it is precisely there that we see the Harmony.

What I consider most vital for a poet—or for any artist—is this ability which I hesitate even to call an 'ability.' It is more of a ‘counter-ability’—namely, 'Negative Capability,' first articulated by the English Romantic poet John Keats. It literally means 'capability to be negative,' but I grasp it rather as the capacity to wait—to wait until one catches hold of something soft and fragile. Paul Celan had it; so did Jonas Mekas, and maybe I have it, too. Activeness is generally regarded as essential, but passivity is a root of poetic and artistic creation; this might be akin to the medieval aesthetics of sabi or yatsushi,⁷ and it also nears the 'hesitation' and 'vacillation' I mentioned in the preface.⁸ I also feel an undeniably potent charge in that English prefix, 'nega-': the evocative power of the phrase 'Negative Capability' is simply irreplaceable.

Creative acts may seem inherently positive. In reality, they are rather negative and passive. Jonas Mekas once said that Andy Warhol—much like Mekas himself—was the kind of person who always stayed in a nook, observing everyone and everything from an angle others simply did not see. He existed in the margins, watching the world from where the gaze slightly warps and curves away from the center.

These eyes—these very eyes—are what truly matter. Having autistic traits myself, I understand this instinctively. To go beyond is to enter the terrain of no return. Yet, one must have a gaze that looks at the world obliquely—not quite descending into madness yet nearing its borders: a gaze born of misery, desolation, humbleness, illness, and weakness—the withdrawnness verging on lunatic solitude.

This is no detached spectating, however. Take Pieter Bruegel, for instance. In his paintings, amidst a multitude of figures, one might find a lone girl in a hat sitting in a nook, holding and licking a plate. Bruegel draws such details with profound care. His eyes are directed away from the center, recognizing that the world is sustained by the vital importance of those in the periphery. In poetry and art, the 'I' is never the center. One writes something only to notice it later. Negative Capability lies in such moments and in their endless succession.

I often employ what others have prepared—tracing or imitating their deeds—to make the most of the chemical reaction: happenstance.⁹ I do not actively map out my own path; instead, I yield to these chance encounters, entrusting my very life to them. Once I glimpse the very substance of those forces, I bolt toward it, headlong. At the very root, I begin in a state of passivity.

Negative Capability is of vital importance, inherently harboring a negative charge. When this charge takes on a faint reddish tinge and eventually turns into its opposite—it is then that what Dōgen called tōkan (‘right seeing’) manifests itself.¹⁰

When I started the movie series gozoCiné, I had no active intention of making a movie myself. It was rather my frequent television appearances of that time that prompted me: 'Well then, I might as well make one myself.' Even here, I am wielded by the 'negative.' Ultimately, everything leads back to Negative Capability: Tariki, the 'other-power.'¹¹ The mind resonates with the emerging word, and I move my hands, watching for something to be born.

The writing of poetry is much the same. In 1966, I was requested to contribute to the Chu-dai Shimbun: ‘We will give you two thousand yen for one poem a week.’ Four poems in total, twenty lines each, due on the same day every week. I took the task quite lightheartedly—it was a student newspaper, after all. One morning in a café, while hungover, I dashed off a poem in an instant. That was how I wrote ‘Burning’ and ‘Crazed in the Morning’—the very works now hailed as my ‘early masterpieces.’ I produced these ‘masterpieces’ almost as a matter of course, with absolutely no effort.

There is very little difference between such effortless writing and the most agonizing struggle. It is like a Möbius strip. Sometimes, a work written by seizing a sudden encounter—snapping at it like a bite into a pear—reads much better. Is it because it is written uncounted? I do not know. But when a catalyst arrives from the outside, visions unfold before one’s eyes all at once.

Well, I indeed have no subjectivity (laughter).

[1.] Iijima Koichi (1930–2013), a prominent Japanese surrealist poet and critic. He was among the very first to recognize Yoshimasu’s early avant-garde genius, and his sharp insights deeply influenced the subsequent generation of Japanese avant-garde poets.↩

[2.] Yoshimasu refers to Walter Benjamin’s 1934 essay on Kafka, but deliberately re-casts the original’s concept: while Benjamin analyzes the gestures of Kafka's characters, Yoshimasu extends the subject to Kafka himself, equating the characters' actions with the physical momentum of his writing. (The phrase ‘a treasure house of ancient gestures’ is Yoshimasu’s own poetological creation.) ↩

[3.] ‘A Grand Continuous Sound-Tone’: a concept by modern tanka poet and psychiatrist Saito Mokichi (1882–1953). Mokichi argued that a true verse operates as a singular, uninterrupted acoustic and psychological current, wherein the phonetic texture and the internal emotional state are inextricably fused. ↩

[4.] Hideo Kobayashi (1902–1983), the foundational figure of modern Japanese literary criticism, symbolizes the intellectual establishment of the Shōwa era. ↩

[5.] Here Yoshimasu addresses two separations: One is the modern bifurcation of ‘writing’ and ‘drawing’, two acts that were historically inseparable, sharing the same tools (brush, ink, and paper) and pronunciation (‘kaku’); another is the modernization of the means to ‘write’. By invoking the word and physicality of ‘hand,’ Yoshimasu challenges the modern Western-imposed categorical divide between linguistic and artistic expression, as well as the indirectness between the deed of writing and what is written. This is a subversive reclamation: through the physical act of writing, he seeks to restore the primal, chaotic unity of expressions of the ‘hand’—namely, art and poetry—which was lost during Japan’s rapid modernization. ↩

[6.] ‘The eternal and ephemeral’ represents Bashō's aesthetics, first appearing in Conversations with Kyorai (1775): ‘Without the immutable, one cannot make a foundation. Without the changeable, one lacks sensation.’ He asserts that one must know the eternal and the ephemeral; and that those two apparently contradictory elements are One at their root. The preface to Record of a Travel-Worn Satchel (1707) reads: ‘What penetrates the waka of Saigyō, the renga of Sōgi, the paintings of Sesshū, and the tea of Rikyū is the One.’ ↩

[7.] Sabi: An aesthetic finding hushed beauty in aging itself and in the aged. Yatsushi: The aesthetic of 'refined poverty,' where intentional degradation manifests genuine beauty.↩

[8.] Yoshimasu refers to this in the preface of What is Poetry. ↩

[9.] Yoshimasu maintains a near-obsessive routine of transcribing texts of others—of Jacques Derrida or Yoshimoto Takaaki, for instance—by hand. This radical submission to the 'other' is a central methodology in his series, Dear Monster, where poetic creation is enrooted in the act of copying. ↩

[10.] Dōgen (1200–1253), the Zen master and philosopher, used the phrase tōkan, meaning ‘right seeing’ or ‘must observe.’ It signifies the demand to confront reality exactly as it is—not as a fixed entity, but as a state of constant flux. ↩

[11.] Tariki, or 'Other-Power,' is originally a central concept in Pure Land Buddhism, signifying a total reliance on a power beyond the self—the compassion and vows of Amida Buddha in particular—for salvation and enlightenment. In contemporary daily usage, the term signifies an attitude of total reliance on others and on 'otherness.' ↩