Doubled Flowering: The Notebooks of Araki Yasusada - Softcover

Yasusada, Araki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0937804711 ISBN 13: 9780937804711

Publisher: Roof Books, 1997

Synopsis

Poetry. Literary Criticism. Asian American Studies. The materials of the Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (1907-1972) were published in Grand Street, CONJUNCTIONS, Abiko Quarterly, FIRST INTENSITY, Stand and The American Poetry Review. Gradually, the rumor began circulating that Araki Yasusada did not exist and that the poems were a hoax perpetrated by the Japanese-American author Tosa Motokiyu or by his literary executor, the American poet Kent Johnson. "The 'scandal' of these poems lies not in the problematics of authorship, identity, persona, race or history. Rather, these are wonderful works of writing that also invoke all of these other issues, never relying on them to prop up a text. This book makes the argument for anti-essentialism"--Ron Silliman. "This is essentially a criminal act"--Arthur Vogelsang.

About this title

Review

...the most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg's Howl ... [T]he pages of Doubled Flowering are stunning as poems and failures as the historical documents they turn out not to be. They are alternately funny, ironic, irreverent, bitter and passionate. I do not think they add up to a kind of joke ... by seducing North American readers with their Orientalist exoticism, by fooling us into liking them for all the wrong reasons or by taking advantage of our desire for Western cliches of Japanese and Chinese writing. -- The Nation, Forrest Gander

Edition details

• Publisher: Roof Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0937804711
• ISBN 13: 9780937804711
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 168