For me, poetry is of necessity incomplete, fragmentary, and discontinuous. I have often worked with invented forms of various kinds, but ultimately, what happens within the framework of a particular form is governed by accident and contingency. Before the period in which I produced the material appearing here, I spent ten years writing a long poem with seven syllables per line. (There’s an element of insanity in the poetic obsession.)

In the mid-nineties I was reading Adorno’s essays on Hegel and became fascinated with its dense, well-packed paragraphs forming a kind of architecture. This brought me back to another aspect of poetry which concerned me – the poem as object. In my mind’s eye I imagined perfectly square stanzas placed at the center of the white page, so dense as to be almost opaque. I imagined them as being something like those later sculptural works by Isamu Noguchi – blocks of stone, granite and basalt, in which signs of the human hand which shaped the stone are kept to a minimum. Just enough to bring the viewer’s attention to the “stoniness” of the stone. These two obsessions led to the writing in The Condition of Music.

The fragment is essential for me in the construction of a work. I believe that we work with a ruined language, and that by definition, we have only fragments to work with – the fragments of a dying civilization. In a kind of archaeological process, I dig up the broken pieces and attempt to put them back together, but they can never be complete.

And yet, especially in these works, I still had a very musical approach to composition. The sound and rhythm of language were very important in how a work was put together. Whether appropriated or popping up on their own, certain phrases or lines would get stuck in my head, and they insisted on getting into the poem. This was like musical composition, with various phrases taking their place in the sequence regardless of conventional meaning. Often I would hear a rhythm and sound, a kind of distant rumbling gradually approaching, the sound of speech but without words, and this would provide the framework of the poem. Later I would fill it in, often with found text.

The notebook or workbook is central to my process. This is where I collect bits and pieces of found text, sometimes lengthy quotations from my reading and whatever else I happen to collect. In recent years the visual element has also become important. Making a living as a translator, questions of language and meaning have been inescapable. One of the things that I have learned as a translator is that when it comes to meaning, context is everything. This question of context has been an important part of my process. I consider poetry to be a form of translation. The notebook is the site, something like the artist’s studio or the carpenter’s workshop, where I pursue my many obsessions, collecting bits and pieces, found objects, and seeing what fits. When I had an idea for a work (usually with a sense of its general architecture in mind) I would begin extracting material from the notebook and put it together like a collage (though the word “collage” doesn’t quite explain the process or the relationship between the fragments… an artist friend calls it “assemblage”, insisting on its physical nature).

The interest in poem as object, the visual interests and the process of assemblage may seem at first to contradict the elements of musical composition, the aural aspects, the lyric sensibility in the rhythmic flow of narrative sentences, but ultimately I think it’s a kind of tension between all these elements at work in the poem. Both a system of checks and balances and as a means of bringing a variety of materials into the work. It also becomes a question of texture, depth, density, etc. On the same token, fitting together the fragments is not a random process. I also include material from daily life, dreams, and so on.

I’m often asked about Japanese influences in my work being the close relationship with that culture and language which has spanned my entire adult life. I think the influence is there, but it’s rarely visible on the surface. It’s more the way I relate to language, and how, as a translator, I am always in a position outside all languages and all cultures. So in a sense to write poetry is to write in a foreign language. (I feel strongly that the position of the poet/translator/writer/thinker is essentially that of exile.) The works collected here are in a combination of prose paragraphs, shorter poetic lines and fragments, and these do sometimes take the form of haiku or haibun.

It was Arc Tangent in which the possibilities of collage or assemblage came to fruition. First, fragments were extracted from the notebook and input into an electronic file. Then the file was printed out and the fragments cut out into separate pieces of paper, which were placed in a Chinese basket. The pieces could then be physically manipulated to try out various juxtapositions. Work took place on the kitchen table, while alternate combinations and free-standing pieces which were unable to find a place were taped to the kitchen wall of the rickety old apartment building where I was staying temporarily. Unfortunately I didn’t take a photo of the wall.

Selections here move backwards in time, starting with the most recent book (Beethoven’s Dream) and moving back to The Condition of Music. I have found that even though I may use the same methodology, each book is very much influenced by time and place, and the type of work I was doing at the time. Meanwhile, the notebook itself has gradually approached a form of visual art, including images, collage and so on.

I believe that, in approaching poetry, we begin with its very impossibility. There are social and cultural reasons for this, as well as philosophical, linguistic, and technological… and yet we write, and we produce these things called “poems” – but that approach toward poetry, toward writing, toward some final answer to the question of what, exactly, poetry is, is endless. We will never get there. But we will continue writing the poem, searching for that something, for the essential word, for some essential meaning or image.

Eric Selland is a poet and translator living on the outskirts of Tokyo. His translations of Modernist and contemporary Japanese poets have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He has also published articles on Japanese Modernist poetry and translation theory. He is the author of Beethoven’s Dream (Isobar Press, 2015), Arc Tangent (Isobar Press, 2013), Still Lifes (Hank’s Original Loose Gravel Press, 2012), The Condition of Music (Sink Press, 2000), and an essay in The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). His translation of The Guest Cat, a novel by Takashi Hiraide, appeared in January of 2014 from New Directions Books and made it on the New York Times bestseller list.
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The cold sun hanging in the sky descends behind the glass buildings. The hills are near, green-gold as the day approaches solitude. An ending, free of worry. The essential clutter of existence. It is a certain burden – this Americanness. To raise the question more intently, more intimately. To process the image, which is inaccurate. One shape suggested a screaming mouth. He described it as a door, a way to leave. Exile and longing. Writing himself into the text of the times.

*

I wanted to write about the tools and the wood. We establish the horizons of expectation. Finding oneself again in movement. The condition of possibility. How then will it be possible to speak? Within the sphere I perceive bodies, yet appearing in person. My father appeared to me in a dream, angrily insisting that it was he who held the cure to memory loss. On the way to the bus small pieces of paper tumble, mix together and are lost, unrecognizable. Small feet ascend the stairs. What is the function of writing. What is direction, interiority. The heart of language. At the heart of the writing is a dream. The father speaks. That I am exposed.

[from Beethoven’s Dream, ‘Sketches’]

Our procedure has, in a sense, been circular. It is this future word. Impersonal, yet occurring just where we hear it, and where there is music. A little path that goes off into the woods, like an illustration in a children’s book. It is most near to us. How the objects form a set of overly heavy, discolored ensembles. They are set out in the room as if on a great plain in the desert of another country. They are broken or perhaps a bit offset. There is no straight line. I draw a path through the woods along the crest of a hill. I add some color, but abruptly stop. The sounds migrating toward the mouth like sediments. To recompose the image. The imagined self.

[from Beethoven’s Dream, ‘Beethoven’s Dream’]

It bears witness to neither one nor the other. What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived, is the language in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak. But what does it mean to speak in a remaining language? Often it seems as though one were like another. They have always been there. I do not look at them. The passage between the outside and the inside. Now the twentieth century will be emptied. I do not exclude machines. Machines mean complexity. And then there are the advanced processes. Thus the higher terms in the equation diminish more rapidly than if there were no obstacle, but the beginning terms are unaffected. Accordingly, the terms in the summation diminish on both ends. Everything is already broken off

Outside the sentence
Rain is falling
As if a porous film
Set between waking and sleep.

The parched mouth and
Uneasiness of night remain.
It dissolves. The sickness does not dissolve.

Always the expected visit
The order to awaken
And selection

The water mark
Mirror in my sleep
Measuring the presence of light.

So in shame we are consigned to something from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves.