Kiwao Nomura (1951 - ) is a Japanese poet, writer, critic, and lecturer. He is considered one of the driving forces behind contemporary Japanese poetry.[1][2]
Biography
Kiwao Nomura initially focused on an academic career: he studied Japanese and French literature, and taught for a number of years at various schools in Tokyo, including Meiji University and Waseda University. Since around 2000, however, he has concentrated exclusively on creative work – as a poet, performer, critic, publisher, and organizer of poetry festivals.
Literary style
The work of Kiwao Nomura “plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza” [2]. Forrest Gander, co-translator of Kiwao Nomura’s poetry, noted in an interview, “What we find in innovative Japanese poetries like Gozo Yoshimasu’s and Kiwao Nomura’s has, as far as I know, no equivalents in contemporary poetry in English. The mix of the philosophical and the whimsical makes for a tone that is absolutely weird to Westerners.” [3] According to Poetry International Web, “In all such experiments, Nomura shows himself to be very much in search of a center of gravity where the almost ritual repetitions and revisitations of captivating sounds and (often erotic) images dissolve of their own accord into the night, darkness, nothingness, the end of a delirium.”[4] Publisher’s Weekly concludes that Nomura’s poems “succeed through astonishment, shock, and disorder, almost in the manner of Kathy Acker or William S. Burroughs.” [5]
Published works
Books of poetry translated in English
- Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura. Translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2011. ISBN 978-18-9065-053-7.
Books of poetry in Japanese (a selection)
- 川萎え [Dried Rive]（1987）
- 反復彷徨 [Repeated Roams]（1992）
- 特性のない陽のもとに [Under the Sun without Character]（1993）
- 風の配分 [Distribution of the Wind]（水声社、1999）
- ニューインスピレーション [New Inspiration] (2003）
- スペクタクル [Spectacle]（2006）
- plan14（2007）
- Z O L O（2009）
Collaborative books of poetry
- 馬を野に放つ. (co-authored by Jan Lauwereyns, with images by Kris Martin; bilingual edition with a Dutch translation by Jan Lauwereyns) [Loose a Horse in the Field] Ghent, Belgium: Druksel, 2011.
Awards
- Rekitei Prize for Young Poets
- Takami Jun Prize
References
- ^ Lauwereyns, Jan; Van Adrichem, Arnoud (2008). "Slang spreekt, slang bijt". DWB. 153 (5–6). Leuven, Belgium: 739–747.
{{cite journal}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in:|journal=(help) - ^ a b Fleischmann, T. "It's Pigsty I". The Rumpus. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
- ^ Morrison, Rusty. "An Interview with Forrest Gander". Omnidawn. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
- ^ Lauwereyns, Jan. "Kiwao Nomura". Poetry International Web. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
- ^ "Spectacle & Pigsty". Publisher’s Weekly. Retrieved 17 February 2012.