Figure 1.

Yoshimasu Gōzō at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam performing a poetic radio play, in collaboration with sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland. 22 June 2017. (Screenshot by TDR)

The media—especially radio and cassettes—shape the materiality and ephemerality of vocal poetry performances. Contemporary experimental Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gōzō (1939–) is a prolific poet, visual artist, and filmmaker. He is also a pioneer of previously unexplored linguistic landscapes in modern Japanese poetics, and is still a key figure in contemporary Japanese poetry. He debuted his poetry collection Shuppatsu (殫発; Departure) in 1964 and has since written poems that explore the porous boundaries of poetry, language, and written text. He was instrumental in the 1960s “radicalism” movement and inspired ultramodern sensations of “rushing” to “unleash the primitive energy inherent in language” (Nomura Reference Nomura2022). In the 1970s, the rushing impulses in his style were gradually replaced by slower cadences in performance. Yoshimasu’s vocalization of poetry evolved more and more around an impulse of listening to the sound of his voice. Following the publication of Oshirisu, Ishi no kami (Osiris, God of Stone, 1984), he became interested in taking on a shamanistic role to commune with the deceased and spirits of the land, envisioning himself as a receptor of cosmic voices.

Figure 2.

Yoshimasu Gōzō at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam performing a poetic radio play, in collaboration with sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland. 22 June 2017. (Screenshot by TDR)

The “in-betweenness” of Yoshimasu Gōzō’s multilingual manuscripts and his live performances is denoted by the word ma (嵣), which literally means an “interval” between two (or more) things or events—both spatially (kūkan 螑嵣) and temporally (jikan 時嵣). This in-betweenness is exemplified in his poetic performance at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in 2017 (Poetry International 2017b). It was in collaboration with Dutch sound artists Lukas Simonis (1979–), Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland (1983–). In Japanese artworks, Richard Pilgrim argues, this in-betweenness applies to both the “descriptive objective” and “experiential subjective” aspect of the concept of ma. Ma suggests multiple meanings, such as a temporal gap in rakugo (a comic recitation art); a room—the “space between” the walls; in music or sound art, a “pause between” the notes or sounds; and the relational dynamics of “standing in, with, among, or between” (Pilgrim Reference Pilgrim1986:255, 256). Building on Pilgrim’s elaboration on the religio-aesthetic paradigm of the Japanese “intervalness,” I am extending this theological interpretation to SanSan Kwan’s discussion of the spatial experience in dance performance in Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (1997). SanSan Kwan argues that the spatial interval describes “an in-betweenness of space and time, where space and time, rather than conforming to a Euclidean model, are inseparable from each other” (2013:85). The contemporary architect Isozaki Arata (1931–2022) similarly elaborates on this spatiotemporal inseparability in Japanese architecture:

Space is therefore perceived as always in a dynamic interaction with the flow of movements and temporality. It breaks down concrete boundaries and operates experientially around the body that inhabits the space. The Japanese notion of “in-betweenness” distinguishes itself from “liminality,” as used by anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Alfred Gell, but highlights the clash of different media, the rich flow of spatiotemporal intervals, and a multilayered sense of bodily movements. Drawing on the spatiotemporal ontology suggested by ma, I situate Yoshimasu’s live performances at the intersection of space, time-flow, and movement. This “interval-ness,” taken further and considered sonically, reflects the ma among voice, sound, multiple media, and the performance space. In his live vocal poetry performance, the “in-betweenness” of Yoshimasu’s voice—koe no ma, 声の間—is a voice between human breathing and the electric sounds of a radio and instruments, a rest between poetic expression and antinarrative experiments; as well as plural spatiotemporal intervals in-between Yoshimasu’s vocalizations, hand gestures, and bodily movements.

The aesthetic paradigm of ma has been employed and explored in noh performance, linked verse (renga, 孰歌), Japanese architectural design, and even in 1980s Japanese fashion design.Footnote ¹ The contemporary noh actor Kunio Komparu (1926–1984) calls noh performance “the art of ma” (1983:70). Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), the playwright, actor, poet, and aesthetician, inexplicably suggested the relation between ma and moments of senu tokoro (戾抽拔怡枋, time or space of not doing) in noh performance:Footnote ²

Figure 3.

Yoshimasu Gōzō at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam performing a poetic radio play, in collaboration with sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland. 22 June 2017. (Screenshot by TDR)

Spectators find the moments of “no-action” most enjoyable because it is in these moments between doings, between actions, between dancing and singing that the “inner strength” (naishin) of the actor reveals itself and brings enjoyment. This “no-action” relies on an art where actors keep their inner strength “not obvious,” manifesting it as a state of “mindlessness” (mushin), concealing their intent. Echoing Zeami’s idea of the intervals between actions as the most enjoyable, renga affirms this space of in-between. The Buddhist essence of renga is located in the space between linked verse (Ebersole Reference Ebersole1983:55). The master of renga and waka poetry (31-syllable poems), Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–1388), famously describes how renga manifests mujō (葑常)—transience or ephemerality in Tsukuba mondō (The Tsukuba Dialogues, 菟玖波瀖答 [1357–1372]):

The transience of each moment—poetic imagery and affective emotion in renga—thus activates poetic expressions, slipping from one into the other, among the literary intervals. Yoshimasu usually publishes his long poems in installments as renshi (linked poems, 孰委), a modern derivative of the medieval renga (linked verse) and renku (linked haiku). A reader of renshi often does not notice that he or she is reading just a part of a longer, unfinished poem (Morita Reference Morita1988:397). There is usually no discernible connection between sections, except some thread of imagery occurring intermittently (397). Yoshimasu’s renshi carries within itself the slippery motion of poetic imagery and the in-between space of transient experiences infused with sensory data that follows his stream of consciousness.

Figure 4.

Yoshimasu Gōzō at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam performing a poetic radio play, in collaboration with sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland. 22 June 2017. (Screenshot by TDR)

Inspired by Japanese poets like Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953), Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894), and Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912), Yoshimasu’s experimental poetry blends English, French, Chinese, Korean, Okinawan dialect, pictographs, experimental punctuation, and even the ancient Japanese writing system Man’yōgana. In Orikuchi’s writing, Yoshimasu perceived fissures opening in the verse; and as Sasaki Ataru says of Orikuchi:

These Japanese poets have shaped the way Yoshimasu experiments with punctuation, blank space, and visual representations in his written texts. Punctuation becomes a form of breathing, pause, and “no-action.” Formal experiments like dots, lines, and brackets are impossible to read out loud, but they reserve space between words for stillness, interruption, and no-expression, performing the moment of senu tokoro in noh performance. Punctuation thus weaves silence into poetic utterances as nontextual elements that disrupt narrativity with hollow overtones. Yoshimasu’s multilingual experimentation also recalls the Italian Futurists: Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880–1918) Calligrams (1918), Luigi Russolo’s (1885–1947) “The Art of Noises” (1913), and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s (1876–1944) “parole in libertà” (1924) (see Wolfson Reference Wolfson2017:91–94). Marinetti endorsed the use of musical and mathematical symbols to supplant punctuation marks and proposed the abandonment of traditional syntax (Cundy Reference Cundy1981:349). Partly influenced by John Cage’s (1912–1992) drawings, Yoshimasu’s written poems look more like musical scores than literary texts. Words freely flow across the page and maximize the pictorial possibility of writing, producing a fluid stream of consciousness among poetic expressions. The flat plane of the written page is thus enacted as a three-dimensional time-space that allows the swirling and wavering of language. Furthermore, Russolo’s manifesto on the art of noise calls for a new way of listening: “Our multiplied sensitivity, having conquered futurist eyes, will finally be endowed with futurist ears” (in Chessa Reference Chessa2012:120). Interested in Röntgen’s theories on the vibration of waves in the ether, Russolo experimented with the synesthetic interconnection of X-rays, sound waves, and light waves (121). Actively engaging with new technology and media, Yoshimasu has similarly explored the magnetic power of cassette tapes, incorporated double exposure into poetry, experimented with ghostly vibrations, and envisioned electric wave and velocity embedded poetry. Intrigued by the theory of relativity (Hosaka 2016:vi), he may even wonder: Can poetic writing outrun the speed of light? Can poetry carry within itself a negative velocity? Can the human sense perceive the materiality of sound?

Yoshimasu first attended the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in 1981, where he performed his poetry collection Sōshode kakareta, Kawa (River, Written in Cursive, 櫸書拓書忿杭晜暅川, 1977) with actors reading his poems in Dutch translation.Footnote ⁵ In 2017, Yoshimasu joined the festival for a second time with his poem “Ishikari shiitsu” (The Sheet of Ishikari, ⽯摳泓矉泊), a fragment from his longer renshi “Hanabi no ie no iriguchi de” (At the entrance to a house with fireworks,

花⽕拐家拐岝豏拓). Weeks before the performance, he glued fragments of his manuscripts into a long scroll that he could place on the floor or hold in his hands while reading. The poetic concept of ma in renshi is manifested through the materiality of the hand scroll. Both Richard Arno’s English translation and Ivo Smits’s Dutch translation of the poems were projected on screens during the performance. Since Yoshimasu only met the sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland on the performance day or one day earlier, the live performance was mostly his own improvisation. He skipped over several parts, repeated certain parts, and rearranged the order of the text. His vocalization varied from time to time as he improvised with the radio and instruments. Yoshimasu improvised the rhythm of his vocal performance to capture the ephemerality of the poem’s imagery: sea, flower, girl… His voice carried the mood of transience as he sonically varied the tempo, pitch, and repetitions.

In the chapter “Intimate Immensity” of The Poetics of Space ([1958] 1994), Gaston Bachelard comments on Charles Baudelaire’s use of the word vaste. For Baudelaire, “vaste” is an indispensable word to express grandeur. Bachelard suggests a phenomenological nuance when the word vaste is pronounced. The poetic effect of vocalizing the word distinguishes “vaste” from words surrounding it, from the poetic image, and from the thought of the poem. The word vaste performs a “vocable of breath” ([1958] 1994:196). The poetic utterance opens up an immense space that becomes “effective on the very threshold of our vocal powers” (197). Human breathing—“a sixth sense” says Bachelard (197)—thus points to a vocal depth beyond the surface of written pages. Yoshimasu experimented with his vocalizations and treated his speech as a relational extension of his written texts. As suggested by the rich spatiotemporal interval of the ma, the poetic space evoked by a virtuosic vocal performance has a physical dynamism of multiple temporalities. Like a shaman, Yoshimasu’s voice not only activated poetic expression beyond the written page, but also channeled ghostly voices from the distant past and futuristic sounds from the radio and electric instruments used in the performance.

Around 1968, Yoshimasu first vocalized his poem “Ancient Astronomical Observatory” (Kodai tenmondai, 峐蘑天⽂嵴) with jazz musicians and butoh dancers in Shinjuku’s Pit Inn—Tokyo’s jazz mecca at that time. As Yoshimasu moved away from the conventional way of reading a poem, people in the jazz scenes called his vocal poetry “a new type of Japanese vocalization” (atarashii taipu no nihongo no bōkaru ga detekita, 新怛征泱逤狙拐⽇本語拐玟矉注祁怏殫披怔晜) (TKKB [2007] 2016:xxvi). Yoshimasu later reflected on his way of vocalizing and how it was impacted by his encounter with the itako (blind female shamans) in Tōhoku, Japan:

The “attempt to reach out to something” suggests a performative potential inherent in poetic utterances, giving them a quality of active multimedial movement through space. Human breathing thus becomes as material as the air and the objects.

At the end of the 1970s, when he found himself tired of watching performances like the butoh of Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986), Yoshimasu sought new inspiration from the itako on Mount Osore. Though he didn’t understand the itako’s Tōhoku dialect, Yoshimasu was fascinated by these blind mediums who access the spirits of the dead. He studied their unique mantras and scores, their musical instruments and the lamps they carried, and especially the materiality of the sounds they made (TKKB [2007] 2016:xxvi). The way itako interacted with materials and produced sounds reminded Yoshimasu of the cowry shells and sanukite stones he often carried with him. These objects embody writers and musicians who influence Yoshimasu: the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) kept cowry shells his whole life, and the Japanese composer Takemitsu Tōru (1930–1996) created ghostly sounds with sanukite stone for Kobayashi Masaki’s (1916–1996) thriller Kaidan (Ghost Stories, 1965). Takemitsu “recorded the sounds of the stones being struck, cut up the tapes with scissors, played the cut-up tapes, and then recorded the resulting sound,” a musique concrète for the film soundtrack ([2007] 2016:xxvi).

I associate Yoshimasu’s poet/vocalist/performer’s body with the dancer’s body, thinking along the lines of Gabriele Brandstetter’s proposition that “choreography is a form of writing along the boundary between presence and no longer being there: an inscription of the memory of that moving body whose presence cannot otherwise be maintained” (2000:104).Footnote ⁷ The moving bodies of dancers enact a spatial form of writing that preserves the historical memory of ancient astronomical studies. In this regard, Yoshimasu’s moving body is not only a sonic receptor that produces and channels sounds; it also registers his poetic inscription spatially, mapping the notions of historical memory embedded in his writing.

Yoshimasu’s movement further enacts and spatializes what Emily Plumb calls “kinetic memory […] the act of remembering movement in the body. In other words, kinetic memory utilizes a specific kind of memory and temporality—the past acts in future” (2009:77). Yoshimasu’s movements become citational, referring to his poetic imagery, past performances, and memories of the female shamans. The past is channeled through the movement of his sonorous body that encounters the sound of the radio infused with Italian futuristic influences. Plumb elaborates on “phonic memory” by explaining the temporal nature of an echo: “If phonic memory implies the remembering of the sounds of speech in the literal sense, then an echo performs this action in space and reveals the transformative powers of sound in space” (82). The vocal space enacted by Yoshimasu thus prescribes the dynamic reverberation of phonic memory, kinetic memory, and mechanical sound production, reminiscent of the Italian Futurists.

Figure 5.

Yoshimasu Gōzō at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam performing a poetic radio play, in collaboration with sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland. 22 June 2017. (Screenshot by TDR)

Figure 5 Long description

The image contains one photo. The photo shows a stage with four individuals engaged in a performance. On the left, a person is seated at a table with various objects, possibly electronic equipment. In the center, another person is kneeling on the floor, working with a large piece of paper or fabric. To the right, two individuals are seated, one playing a saxophone and the other working with electronic devices. The stage is dimly lit, with red shelving units in the background containing various items. Scattered around the stage are additional artistic materials, including rolls of paper, painted canvases, and electronic equipment.

Also in the 1970s, when portable cassette tapes became popular, Yoshimasu started to listen closely to voices and sounds in recordings. Around 600 of Yoshimasu’s collection of 1,100 cassettes contain recordings of voices other than his. These cassettes include poets reading their own work, such as Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886–1942), Paul Celan (1920–1970); sumo songs and jazz; noh chants and recitations of Buddhist sutras; Yaeyama folk songs; the pop music of Fuji Keiko (1951–2013), Miyako Harumi (1948–), Yamaguchi Momoe (1959–), and Misora Hibari (1937–1989); the Japanese rock band RC Succession (active 1968–1991); Southern All Stars (active 1977–present); the classical music of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Robert Schumann (1810–1856); and goze (“a Japanese tradition in which blind women went door-to-door telling stories and playing music” [Hosaka 2016:viiii]).

As Yoshimasu listened to various voices and sounds, he began to improvise using the repetition of his own voice. Inspired by the techniques and improvisation of jazz vocalists (Yoshimasu 2001:22), Yoshimasu created a “recursive and spiral movement” for the listener, a “negative velocity” driving his poetry (Hosaka 2016:vii). Using each syllable as a unit of repetition, he vocalized in a stuttering manner that simultaneously conveyed speed and spiral movement. Hosaka Kenjiro notes that Yoshimasu’s stuttering recalls the Romanian poet Gherasim Luca’s (1913–1994) “Passionnément” (1973), performed in 1970s France and aired by Radio France’s Atelier de Creation Radiophonique (Hosaka 2016:viiii).Footnote ⁸

Yoshimasu took his sonic experiments further by putting Takemitsu’s sanukite stones in his mouth. Since his encounter with the itako, Yoshimasu began to regularly incorporate objects like a hammer, a chisel, an eye mask, sanukite stones, and the Ainu Ikupasuy (ceremonial sticks) into his vocal poetry performances. For the 2017 Poetry International Festival performance in Rotterdam,Footnote ⁹ Yoshimasu put on a black eye mask, as if blind like the itako. With a string, he tied the sanukite stones across his mouth and let the stones strike each other below his jaw, experiencing pain in his teeth. In his right hand he held a hammer that he struck on the floor while shaking his body. When he vocalized his poem and moved his body around the floor, the sound of the sanukite stones became part of his voice, evoking a haunting, ghostly sound. Watching this more than 40-minute performance, the spectators’ ears got accustomed to the mix of Yoshimasu’s voice and the sound of the stones.

Figure 6.

Yoshimasu Gōzō at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam performing a poetic radio play, in collaboration with sound artists Lukas Simonis, Henk Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland. 22 June 2017. (Screenshot by TDR)

In her “Taxonomy of Distortion: Along the Media Performance Continuum” (2015) Sarah Bay-Cheng proposes a spectrum from material space/time/bodies to mediated space/time/bodies. Bay-Cheng draws on Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), who first called attention to the relationship between a material environment—“nature” is Eisenstein’s term—and a virtual/cinematic one (Bay-Cheng Reference Bay-Cheng, Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck and David2015:46). He regarded a cinema shot as “the minimum ‘distortable’ fragment of nature” (Eisenstein [Reference Eisenstein1949] 1977:5; in Bay-Cheng Reference Bay-Cheng, Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck and David2015:46). Bay-Cheng has observed that, like Eisenstein, Elizabeth LeCompte has “called all descriptions—textual and mediated—of live physical actions, ‘distortions,’ and the effects of recording technologies—film, video, and digital—have been cited frequently as deviations from the original or undistorted event” (46). She further elaborates on the nature of distortion in media performances: “all performances—and indeed all representation—reflect some form of distortion and manipulation of a conceptual ideal—an unmediated materiality, reality, or ‘nature’ as [Eisenstein] claimed” (46). Applying Bay-Cheng’s statement to Yoshimasu’s sonic distortion, if we consider Yoshimasu’s written poetry as an “undistorted” environment, his vocalization of poetry embodies “distortable” effects of cassette tapes, electric waves, and negative velocity in the human voice. On the spectrum of a material voice and a mediated voice, the human voice at some point mingles with digitized sound. Yoshimasu further manipulates his breathing—a sixth sense that spatializes his voice—through repetition, stuttering, pause, changeable tonality, screaming, chanting, and even mimicking archaic pronunciations of Japanese. Yoshimasu’s experiments with punctuation, silence, and pause produce antinarrative elements, different kinds of breathing, and moments of no-action. Yoshimasu’s voice in-between moves toward the far end of Bay-Cheng’s distortion spectrum.

His distorted and mediated voice further intersects with mediated spacetime. The digital projection of the English and Dutch translations on the screen adds a visual representation of Yoshimasu’s poetry to the multimedia performance. Ghostly sounds—produced by the radio, instruments, stones, and the hammer—interrupt the linear temporality of Yoshimasu’s poetry, spatializing the plural temporality of ma.

Yoshimasu’s 2017 vocal poetry performance is a distorted mimesis that relies on the manipulation of sound, voice, and poetic expression. It is in dialog with the Japanese concept of ma, contemporary Japanese poetics, sonics in performance studies, and contemporary media performances. His avantgarde poetry asks how human breathing morphs poetic expression, how objects transmit the materiality of sounds, how media shape the expressive quality of poetry, and how embodied movement spatializes poetic utterances. His poems are located between his breathing and the mediated voice, between the poetic utterance and antinarrative pause, and between the kinetic memory of the past and future.