Article
Editorial: 15 October 2011
October 12, 2011
Indeed, Sugiyama’s poems themselves seem to function as reflecting panes of glass, in which the narrator might catch a glimpse of himself, probing and affirming his own identity through close observation of an object or a scene, or through the appropriation of other voices. ‘A Song’, for instance, opens with the lines “a piece of waste paper all crumpled up / that’s me”, while the first-person narration of ‘Billiards’ conflates the voice of a personified ball hurtling towards a pocket with that of the poet. Likewise ‘The Position’, narrated by a baseball centrefielder “all alone” and “far away from infield commotions” also acts as a metaphor representing the poet’s own situation. In ‘A Visit’, again narrated in the first person, the narrator is standing at a gate, waiting to be let in. “‘Who is it?’” he hears. If the reader too is unsure who the narrator is, they are told at the end of the poem – after “a deep breath”, the narrator (with both a touch of wit and a touch of uncertainty) replies: ‘“I am Mr. Sugiyama.”’
PIW offers a warm welcome to this fine poet. We hope you enjoy the work of Heiichi Sugiyama.
Windowpanes and baseball games are perhaps not subjects that spring to mind when thinking about poetry, but in a selection of work by 97-year-old Japanese poet Heiichi Sugiyama, these themes recur, along with images of singing culverts, folded paper and buildings in rubble. Sugiyama’s short poems often focus on and defamiliarise an image or an instant, surprising readers with their unique way of representing the world and open metaphorical resonances.
In ‘Water’, for instance, water tossed out of a bucket momentarily “floats in the air in the shape of a rhombus”, reminiscent of Dali’s Atomicus, or of an instant captured in the frame of a movie. It comes as no surprise that Sugiyama is a film critic as well as a poet; close attention to light and darkness as well as a focus on ways of seeing are evident throughout his work, from the “sooty pane” in the prose poem ‘Attainment’, which becomes “beautifully clear” only when it has been “broken and removed”, to the personified “topmost windowpane” that reflects light throughout the day and catches the poet’s eye in 'The One Lofty and Alone'. In ‘Twilight’, the image of a window features again: the transparent glass turns into a mirror when the sun sets, “to show that the person I thought someone else / is actually my own self”.
Indeed, Sugiyama’s poems themselves seem to function as reflecting panes of glass, in which the narrator might catch a glimpse of himself, probing and affirming his own identity through close observation of an object or a scene, or through the appropriation of other voices. ‘A Song’, for instance, opens with the lines “a piece of waste paper all crumpled up / that’s me”, while the first-person narration of ‘Billiards’ conflates the voice of a personified ball hurtling towards a pocket with that of the poet. Likewise ‘The Position’, narrated by a baseball centrefielder “all alone” and “far away from infield commotions” also acts as a metaphor representing the poet’s own situation. In ‘A Visit’, again narrated in the first person, the narrator is standing at a gate, waiting to be let in. “‘Who is it?’” he hears. If the reader too is unsure who the narrator is, they are told at the end of the poem – after “a deep breath”, the narrator (with both a touch of wit and a touch of uncertainty) replies: ‘“I am Mr. Sugiyama.”’
PIW offers a warm welcome to this fine poet. We hope you enjoy the work of Heiichi Sugiyama.
© Sarah Ream
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère