by Sawako Nakayasu, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts
Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering brings together American and Japanese scholars and artists to reexamine the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets, Sagawa Chika (1911 –1936), largely ignored by critics and known within the Japanese poetry community as “everyone’s favorite unknown poet.” The first extensive study of any female modernist poet in Japan, Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering widens and deepens our understanding of literary developments in Japan in the 1920s. The importance and impact of this project, however, extends beyond a re-presentation of Japanese literature through the lens of global modernism. This cross-disciplinary, multimodal digital publication forges connections between contemporary arts communities (poets, visual artists, and sound artists) that are actively engaged with Sagawa’s poetry.
“ Literature arises from, and exists in, a thick web of human activity that consists of so much more than the literary artifacts themselves. Digital publishing gives us new tools with which to plumb the nuances and effects of poetry, and to examine varying interpretations. It can create an entirely new dimension to how we might discuss poetry in translation, in varying contexts. Especially with regards to the works of writers from distant geographies, languages, and periods of time — here is an opportunity to have access to what used to be highly specialized knowledge, to enliven and deepen a literary engagement, to bridge the distances more mightily and heartily, to read anew.
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Sawako Nakayasu
Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and editor of "Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering"
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Brown Arts Institute
Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering brings together American and Japanese scholars and artists to reexamine the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets, Sagawa Chika (1911 –1936), largely ignored by critics and known within the Japanese poetry community as “everyone’s favorite unknown poet.” The first extensive study of any female modernist poet in Japan, Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering widens and deepens our understanding of literary developments in Japan in the 1920s. The importance and impact of this project, however, extends beyond a re-presentation of Japanese literature through the lens of global modernism. This cross-disciplinary, multimodal digital publication forges connections between contemporary arts communities (poets, visual artists, and sound artists) that are actively engaged with Sagawa’s poetry.
