Report from Tokyo #1: Ginema, Haiku Superstar
by Joyelle McSweeney on Sep.16, 2011, under Uncategorized
Tokyo enjoys a high degree of awesomeness, but registering at the apex of the ferociousness scale is Ginema, a haiku artist who brings haiku performance into a whole new plastic exploding inevitable Shinto realm.
Please enjoy these poems from the haiku sequence ‘The Night-Crying Stone’ (translated by Eric Selland) and portraits of her performance at the Tokyo Poetry Festival/World Haiku festival last week. All photos by the superstar poet Takako Arai.
To all those suffering from stomach disorders-- go to the river! Eat rocks!
The huge man, dead as a doornail-- can't brush off the mosquitoes now
I thought my penis was a cartwheel
Infanticide caresses the wildflowers
I have a shell I was born with-- oh God, do you believe me?
September 16th, 2011 on 3:15 pm
I did, I did enjoy.
September 16th, 2011 on 4:49 pm
I think I’m in love
September 16th, 2011 on 7:29 pm
A penis is not a cartwheel? Since when, people?
September 16th, 2011 on 8:25 pm
Wow, she is a force. I found some Youtube videos of her. I posted one just now on my blog, along with some off-the-cuff translations of the poems she is reading.
http://internationaldateline.tumblr.com/post/10285772394/ginema
September 17th, 2011 on 1:19 am
I love this: “A penis is not a cartwheel? Since when, people?”
September 17th, 2011 on 1:58 pm
Holy cow, Jeffrey! Thank you for this amazing footage! I’m totally riveted.
September 17th, 2011 on 4:32 pm
this is wonderful. I didn’t know about her.
Also worth checking out (and I suspect she would see them as forerunners, of sorts) is the Layered Clouds group of early 20th century, led by Ogiwara Seisensui, which revolutionized the haiku by rejecting syllable count, season word, and other conventions of the form. Taneda Santoka, Ozaki Hosai, and the (later Zen) Dada poet Takahashi Shinkichi were also active with the group. A good source for this work, though I think it might be out of print, is Makoto Ueda’s anthology, Modern Japanese haiku. Large selections by some of these poets can also be found in Hiroaki Sato’s anthology From the Country of Eight Islands.