Hirato Renkichi | Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems / 2017

the black shadow-man illuminated by a strong light

by Douglas Messerli

 

             “Get out of my sight! Sun·moon·star·torchlight holding each and every radiance projecting my

                 black shadow-man….”

 

Hirato Renkichi Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems, edited and translated into English by Sho Sugita (Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017)

Given the maturity and audacity of Hirato Renkichi’s writing—a poet who is generally described as the major Japanese Futurist and progenitor of various later Japanese avant-garde poetry groups—it is difficult to assimilate the fact that he died at the early age of 29, after having long suffered pulmonary disease. But in the pages of the English language edition, Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems of Hirato Renkichi, recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse, one recognizes that this is, after all, the work of a young man, even if he seems to have almost come to maturity in his techniques.

     The gatherings written before World War I are filled with poems, as translator Sho Sugita describes them, with issues of “nature, nostalgia, and the sublime.” “Spring! Spring!” for example, begins with a gush of youthful excitement,

 

                       Spring gushes out of there

                       From the body of the stalwart man

                       From the beads of sweat plopping out to scatter

                       Like a burbling fountain gushing out

 

and results in what comes near to a swoon,

 

                       O, confusion     confusion

                       Beautiful confusion

 

                       Spring! Spring!

 

In “Yesterday There” the poet attempts to imagine what it might be like to be young soldier, leaving his family to go off to war:

 

                       Yesterday there—a youngster—a youngster like me

                       threw his pen away and fought. Left the wife, children

                             and house and fought.

 

                        Yesterday there—separation—tears—the tears I’ve

                            never known

                        Became known to the girl’s heart. Soaked into leaves of grass.

 

Bemoaning his own lack of experience, all the poet can do is to call up in ironic sympathy the fact that “on the other end of the world,” “Just once I had seen a wounded Czechoslovakian soldier.”

Other, slightly later works, remind one of the hundreds of poems written by poets early in their careers (Americans as varied as Marsden Hartley, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, and Hart Crane, to name only a few, tried out the same genre). Hirato writes:

 

                   “A Caricature of Early Dawn”

 

                   Train sending off many carts, married lady, giant watch store,

                   the pedestrian walk lasting quite a ways away, a flowery

                   scene. The flowerpot under the willow is a memory of the

                   past, a Fugi dawn violet.

 

                   The streets of Ginza increasingly panting like infected

                   pustules. The stench of gas, a strange lady standing in

                   anxiety.

 

Already in the three short volumes which Hirato had hoped to publish, but for which he was unable to raise money, we see a growing tendency to break up the language and images, abstracting them into a pulse of pure energy that conveys the meaning rather than simply expressing it. In his “Speck, Fishhook, Crest, Antenna, Hoof,” for example, Hirato demands that the reader

 

                   Look, all around

                   The specks shimmering in blaze

                   Passing verse,

                   —Intimidation

                   —Caution

                   —Protection

                   —Induction

                   All the hues clouding.

 

                  SIGNAL!

 

By the end of that same poem, the poet has turned to the F. T. Marinetti-like language of machine, war, and power:

 

                    Listen to the sound of the gun,

                    Gears, belt

                    Roaring steamer

                    Shadows ringing fishhooks while running

                    Women and their ornamental crests.

                    Look,

                    The ferocious beasts

                    In the city fighting and wiggling in packs.

 

There is almost a ring of Eliot in the passage.

     By the time we reach the later poems collected after Hirato’s death, mostly from magazines of the period, we have already encountered a very Japanese blending of Italian and Russian futurisms:

“Ensemble,” for example, is a very potent mix of Marinetti’s “words in motion” with the vocalizations of the Russian zaum poets.

     In Hirato’s “Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement,” which he passed out in printed form in various Tokyo parks, we can hear Marinetti’s voice whipped up in the Japanese poet’s own conceits:

 

                   We rise within powerful light and heat. We are the

                   children of powerful light and heat. Our very existence is

                   powerful light and heat.

                       ●

                   Intuition must preplace knowledge; the enemy of Futurist

                   anti-art is concept. “Time and space have already died, and

                   we already live in the absolute.” We must quickly take risks,

                   advance in defiance of danger, and create…….

                       ●

                   Most graveyards are already useless. Libraries, museums

                   and academies do not even amount to the sound of one

                   automobile skidding on the street. Try sniffing the stench

                   behind the piled books; the superior freshness of gasoline

                   is manifold.

 

Scholar Eric Selland’s afterword summary nicely bookends Sho Sugita’s informative introduction. In all, this book is a compelling portrait of Hirato, Japanese Futurism, and their internationalist connections.

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2017