OVERVIEW
The John Solt Kitasono Katue archive is the largest, most comprehensive collection of material in the world by and about Kitasono Katue (1902-1978), who is widely considered to be among the finest artist-poets of his generation in Japan and internationally.
Containing paintings, photography, mixed-media work, manuscript material, journals, correspondence, and a large collection of rare pre- and post-war books, magazines and ephemera, the archive illuminates Kitasono’s key role in Japanese modernism. It explores his many international and cross-cultural connections, from his early engagement with Dada and Surrealism to his later collaborations with artists and poets from the Black Mountain School and international Concrete Poetry movement.
This site presents a small selection of materials from the archive as well as several discrete online exhibitions featuring Kitasono’s artistic and literary work. For a more comprehensive treatment of Kitasono’s role in the Japanese and international avant-gardes, and for more information on the archive, please see the artist and archive, selected items, and additional resources sections of this website.
For more about the origins of the archive and about John Solt see here and at highmoonoon.
PRAISE FOR KITASONO KATUE
“For forty years or more, Kitasono Katue was a most valuable link between the literary cultures of Japan and the United States. The magazine ‘Vou’ was, to my knowledge, the only one which made a systematic effort over the years to present Western avant-garde culture to Japan.” -James Laughlin
“He was certainly the poet who did most to introduce modern poetry—‘the international idiom’—to Japan, in superlative translations . . . Furthermore, he was himself an excellent poet—a true leader and exemplar. Not least, his ‘concrete’ poem [Monotonous Space]…is the best thing of its kind anywhere.” -Kenneth Rexroth
"Katue Kitasono is already marked as one of the few important contemporary poets." -Charles Olson
“I think that the memory for Kitasono Katue will help all of us to never forget what concrete poetry really wanted to be, how pure, simple and rich all in one it can be.” – Eugen Gomringer
“A major, truly experimental poet & artist.” -Jerome Rothenberg
“By common consent the most distinguished experimental Japanese poet of his generation… one of the great radical writers of modern letters.” – Richard Kostelanetz
“For half a century after Papa Flaubert started writing, any man who wanted to write English prose had to start by reading French prose. And it may be that from now on any man who wants to write English poetry will have to start reading Japanese...these poems are better work than any save those of E.E. Cummings at his happiest...I know that nowhere in Europe is there such a vortex of poetic alertness. Tokio Takes over, where Paris stopped.” -Ezra Pound
“...one of the great tragicomic characters of our century.” —Anthony Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement
Images by Kitasono Katue © Hashimoto Sumiko. Used with permission.
website + concept by Ben Swift 2024