Interview with about the John Solt about the Archive
Kitasono Katue, “Portrait of a Poet 1” from Vou 107, 1966
When did you first encounter Kitasono Katue’s work?
In the late 1960s I was a student of the poet Kenneth Rexroth. He had a seminar in his house, a one year course divided into units on American and European avant-garde poetry, Asian poetry, and Indigenous poetry. In that course we read Mary Ellen Solt's and Emmett Williams' anthologies of concrete poetry, which had poems by Kitasono along with Niikuni Seiichi. Later, Rexroth told me about Kitasono, and I remember him saying that "Kitasono Katue was the greatest living Japanese poet," and that stuck in my head.
How and why did you decide to write about Kitasono?
In the 1970s, I was living in Japan, and I met some of the VOU people through my contacts in the Butoh and poetry worlds. Then in 1983, Kitasono’s Collected Poems came out in Japanese, containing his 27 volumes of poems all in one book. Kuroda Iri, one of the ex-VOU poets [VOU dissolved after Kitasono’s death in 1978], sent me the book to Harvard where I was a graduate student, and it was an eye-opener.
I was looking for dissertation topic and I remembered how Kenneth had spoken so warmly about him. And also how Kenneth said he was the greatest Japanese poet. I thought, “Kenneth had read everyone”—he was just unbelievable in his panoramic scope, his depth of knowledge on everything—Rexroth was probably one of the best read people in the country in the humanities, and so when he said Kitasono is the most important poet of his generation, I took it seriously.
What was the discourse like on Kitasono at that time?
He had just died and he wasn't very popular. VOU Magazine was not selling much. People were calling him batta-kusai, "stinking of butter”—too Western, too phony, too this, too that. He was evaluated very poorly.
My advisor at Harvard was Howard Hibbett. I told Howard I'd like to do Kitasono and Howard said, “What does Donald Keene say about him?”—because Donald Keene had just come out with this two-volume history of Japanese Literature. Donald Keene has two lines on Kitasono in the whole book, and Hibbett was kind of like, “Only two lines? Can't you find anyone more famous?” But finally he said, “You’re so stubborn, just do what you want.”
Since then, of course, over the last 30 or 40 years, there’s been a huge turn-around. It's now a time when the chickens are coming home to roost and people are seeing it from a more historical perspective—we're dealing with someone who is great and such a seminal figure.
Kitasono is right there from the beginning of the turn in the Dada and Surrealist period, at the real cusp of it, at the very start. He went through many permutations, and he ends up in the post-war being a fatherly figure to the new generation, and a grandfather or great-grandfather to a lot of what's going on now. He should be understood as someone who has continued to influence from the 1920s up to today.
Can you talk about Kitasono’s early work and his engagement with Dada and Surrealism. What were the differences between the Japanese and European early avant-gardes?
The difference between Kitasono and either the Dadaist or the Surrealist Movement in Europe was that from the beginning he took the essence of what people were trying to do with a movement, and then tried to digest that and come out with his original way of dealing with it through the Japanese language. His intent was not to be a mirror image of what the Westerners were doing.
Very few people in that pre-war generation were interacting with people in the West on this kind of level. Even with Kitasono’s first book, Album of Whiteness, he's already saying, “These are completely original poems.” He's getting the ideas of Surrealism from France, but he's rejecting them, which you can see in the manifesto that he and a couple of his friends wrote in the journal Rose, Magic, Theory.
Imitation didn’t interest him so much; he wanted to absorb and then create in an original way. There's a real sense of wanting to connect, but not do it in a way that is going to be just a reflection of the West, yet rather as a partner in dialogue. It is paradoxical. He's both saying yes and no to these movements at the same time, and it’s that space of creative absorption and resistance together that he makes the launching pad for his own originality.
Do you think his experimentation in style and across disciplines and media is related to his skirting of the orthodoxy of movements in general?
He was always nudging his way out of any pigeonhole. The Pound credo “make it new” was very strong with him. Kitasono used to write against mannerism; he'd say the easiest thing is to just repeat yourself and become a caricature of yourself rather than to push yourself into doing something totally new. I think that each experiment he did is different. He was pushing his own boundaries all the time. He's not just sitting on his laurels. He's completely revamping. He’s reinventing himself at every turn.
He’d been one of the leader of his own generation with the clubs in the pre-war period, and in the post-war he became one of the three leaders, along with Takiguchi Shūzō and Nishiwaki Junzaburō, of the younger generation who wanted to get into the arts and poetry.
Kitasono has several tentacles reaching out: from Pound and Henry Miller to Ginsberg to Rexroth to Ikeda Tatsuo, who told me Kitasono’s essay on Dali changed the whole course of his work, even to the Butoh world. Terayama Shūji was in VOU when he was young as was Shiraishi Kazuko, so a lot of the post-war artists and poets who branched into different fields started out in VOU, influenced by Kitasono.
Basically, he was regarded as the theorist who was going to show us the future in art and poetry. Suzuki Takashi, the VOU member, said that Kitasono, himself, and one other person were the theory division of the Modern Art Association, so he was considered the intellectual leader, both pre- and post-war, along with Takiguchi Shūzō.
Can you talk a little about the collection, and the process of collecting the material?
In my case, I don't like even the idea of being a collector. I did this because I wanted to write about Kitasono. I wanted to gather as much as I could about him because I wanted to think about him.
I interviewed 120 people when I wrote my book. Nobody else cared about him at the time but us. Many people gave things to me, but I never asked for anything. And I became friends with a lot of the interviewees. And I just gathered so many things, like a magnet. Some were given and some I bought. And I kept gathering and gathering stuff, mostly because no one else at the time wanted it.
It was always to aid the research and to aid the thinking, it was never to acquire. But it got to the point that I had so much stuff; things his wife gave me, his son gave me, friends gave me, VOU people gave me, things I bought. It just started growing. And I didn’t want it to dissolve into pieces. I wanted it to stay one collection.
I’m not into objects so much as into people. To me, the relationship with people is always more than the object. I was so lucky to have met and had the love of the people who knew Kitasono—most of them are dead now. Ultimately, meeting them and knowing them was a gift, and these are just things, but they should be taken care of, and it’s my responsibility to find a suitable resting place for them.
I’ve always thought about this collection as being for him. In that sense, I want it to end up somewhere where he would be happy that it is there. I want to think wherever it ends up that he would be happy. That’s why I’m only interested in it going to an institution and not an individual.