Commentaries - December 2015

Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian Edited by Rod Smith & Jen Hofer.

Aerial 10: Lyn Hejinian

Edited by Rod Smith & Jen Hofer.

ISBN: 978-1-890311-32-2

464 pgs, cover art by Tom Raworth

2015

$40.00

$28.00 direct from Aerial/Edge.

A career-spanning multi-genre compendium of work by and about poet Lyn Hejinian, one of today's most celebrated and influential avant-gardists. Through a variety of approaches —philosophical, scholarly, and experimental—Aerial 10 documents and explores her forty-plus years of poetic and theoretical writings. Its 464 pages include poetry, essays, interviews, collaborations, and letters by Hejinian, as well as essays, poetry, and memoir by contemporary poets and critics.

Nakahara Chuya: Six Poems Newly Englished, Plus a Single Transcreation

Translations from Japanese by Jerome Rothenberg & Yasuhiro Yotsumoto

NOTE. Over a short lifetime, Nakahara Chuya (1907-1937) was a major innovator along lines originally shaped by Dada and other, earlier forms of European, largely French, experimental poetry. In 1997, as part of an annual poetry festival in his home prefecture of Yamaguchi, I came to his grave along with a group of Japanese poet-companions, to celebrate the 60th year of his death and the 90th of his birth. The poem marking that time, “At the Grave of Nakahara Chuya,” appeared a few years later in A Paradise of Poets and included a fake “translation” (a “transcreation” perhaps, as Harold de Campos might have had it) in what I took to be his style, or one of them, that brought some of his work into the domain of popular Japanese music.