 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2022) |
Araki Yasusada was a non-existent Japanese poet, generally thought (though unverified) to be the creation of American literature professor Kent Johnson (born 1955). The publication of Yasusada's poetry by major literary journals including the American Poetry Review , Grand Street and Conjunctions during the early 1990s created an embarrassing scandal for these publications.
Araki Yasusada was supposedly a survivor of the Hiroshima atom bomb. He was born in 1907, attended Hiroshima University (before it was even founded, in 1949), worked in the postal service, and was conscripted into the Japanese army during World War II. He died of cancer in 1972. His son discovered his poems and notebooks and in 1991 they began to appear in print in the United States.
The 'notebooks' included editorial comments, smudged ink and illegible text, and other elaborate attempts to give the appearance of authenticity. They also included hints leading to their own unravelling, however, such as references to poets who probably would not be known to Japanese poets of the period and anachronistic references to such things as scuba divers.
The real writer of the poems is widely believed to be Kent Johnson, professor of Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, though he has never claimed authorship. [1] Beliefs about Johnson's role as author stem in no small part from the fact that Johnson edited the Yasusada texts for the Wesleyan University Press. Johnson also included Yasusada's poetry in his doctoral dissertation.
The texts that had been published in the poetry journals were sent to various academics from a variety of locations, presenting Yasusada as an invented persona that was used by one or more people who intended the keep the origin of the texts secret.
Johnson admitted to some critics that Yasusada was nothing but an invented pseudonym "somebody" used to conceal the writer's origin. Some editors, who asked Johnson who the real writer was, claim to have received different answers. One response was that the real writer was "Tosa Motokiyu", one of the three "Japanese translators"—or at least, 95 percent of the poems were his, the rest being Johnson's older work, which Motokiyu had requested to include in his Yasusada fiction. Johnson continued to lecture on Yasusada and denied the hoax in interviews. At one stage he claimed that Motokiyu asked Johnson to take credit for the poems before Motokiyu's death. Yet elsewhere he said that Motokiyu's name was yet another pseudonym.
There were a number of rumors about other supposed co-authors, including the leading avant-garde Mexican composer, Javier Alvarez, who appears as co-editor of the work with Johnson. Publishers demanded their money back and criticized the hoax. Wesleyan cancelled the publication of the poetry collection. Some critics noticed that Johnson had published similar poetry in 1986 under the name of Ogiwara Miyamori, in Ironwood magazine.
After the 'hoax' was discovered, several journals rejected previously accepted poems. The hoax has allegedly been called "a criminal act" by Arthur Vogelsang, editor of American Poetry Review, which had previously published a special supplement of Yasusada poems, including an alleged portrait of the author, but in letters to the Boston Review he denied having used the phrase. [2] But numerous critics were supportive, praising both the conceptual nature of the fiction and the quality of the writing, including Roof Books that published the entire text in 1997.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound (1885–1972). It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kent Johnson was an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Boston Review is an American quarterly political and literary magazine. It publishes political, social, and historical analysis, literary and cultural criticism, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, both online and in print. Its signature form is a "forum", featuring a lead essay and several responses. Boston Review also publishes an imprint of books with MIT Press.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
— W. H. Auden, from "September 1, 1939"
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. He is primarily known for his literary writings (essays) and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages.
Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist.
Arthur Davison Ficke was an American poet, playwright, and expert of Japanese art. Ficke had a national reputation as "a poet's poet", and "one of America's most expert sonneteers". Under the alias Anne Knish, Ficke co-authored Spectra (1916). Intended as a spoof of the experimental verse which was fashionable at the time, the collection of strange poems unexpectedly caused a sensation among modernist critics which eclipsed Ficke's recognition as a traditional prose stylist. Ficke is also known for his relationship with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Walter K. Lew is a Korean-American poet and scholar. He has taught creative writing, East Asian literatures, and Asian American literature at Brown University, Cornell University, Mills College, the University of Miami, and UCLA. Aside from the award-winning Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts, Lew is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books and several special journal issues and artist's books. Lew's translations and scholarship on Korean literature and Asian American literature have been widely anthologized and he was the first U.S. artist to revive the art of movietelling, beginning in 1982.
Harriet Zinnes was an American poet, fiction writer, translator, art critic, literary scholar and professor. She is associated with poets such as Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg, and the writer Anaïs Nin.
