Day of the live Japanese woman who sounds Beat

I'm honored and excited to have been asked again this year to read at Day of the Dead Beats, which goes down (or, maybe, on and on ...) this Saturday, Nov. 1 at The Way Out Club, 2525 S. Jefferson, starting at 8 p.m. with a $3 cover.

Last year I did Kenneth Rexroth, choosing to read from his Chinese translations to make a point. The Beats are remembered (and often imitated) for their sensuous responses to new, intense kinds of experiences (like newly discovered forms of sex and drugs). But they were bookworms too, even scholars, however much they might have thumbed their noses (among other appendages) at the academy.

They broke a lot of rules, but they learned a lot of rules before they started breaking them. And they invented (or adapted) new poetic forms, but they learned (and enjoyed) a lot of existing poetic forms before they tried to do their own thing. Rexroth's translations are a vivid reminder of that.

This year I am doing some of his Japanese translations. I read a New Directions paperback of this stuff on tour as a musician about 15 years ago, but put it back on the bookshelf in the crash pad when I was finished (after copying down some fragments that we turned into a song, "Those Born After Me," with a hook borrowed from Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, by way of Rexroth: "May those who are born after me/ Never travel such roads of love").

Last night, I sifted through the Rexroth archive on The Bureau of Public Secrets and found quite a lot of Japanese stuff. I decided I'll read only women Japanese poets he (co)translated, to compensate for something that aggravates organizer Brett Underwood every year: that there just weren't very many female Beat poets. Almost none.

However, in a confluence that amazes even this guy who goes through life looking for confluences, I managed to find a poem by a Japanese woman (cotranslated by Rexroth) that reads more than a little like a Beat poem. The poem even has a penis, named more bluntly than "penis"!

This poem by Shiraishi Kazuko (and the other poems I will read Saturday) were published in Women Poets of Japan, which Rexroth translated with Ikuko Atsumi. The painting of Shiraishi Kazuko performing on her 77th birthday this past Feb. 10 (above) is by Hisami.

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THE MAN ROOT

For Sumiko’s Birthday

By Shiraishi Kazuko

God if he exists

Or if he doesn’t

Still has a sense of humor

Like a certain type of man

So this time

He brings a gigantic man root

To join the picnic

Above the end of the sky of my dreams

Meanwhile

I’m sorry

I didn’t give Sumiko anything for her birthday

But now I wish I could at least

Set the seeds of that God given penis

In the thin, small, and very charming voice of Sumiko

On the end of the line

Sumiko, I’m so sorry

But the penis shooting up day by day

Flourishes in the heart of the galaxy

As rigid as a wrecked bus

So that if You’d like to see

The beautiful sky with all its stars

Or just another man instead of this God given cock

A man speeding along a highway

With a hot girl

You’ll have to hang

All the way out of the bus window

With your eyes peeled

It’s spectacular when the cock

Starts nuzzling the edge of the cosmos

At this time

Dear Sumiko

The lonely way the stars of night shine

And the curious coldness of noon

Penetrates my gut

Seen whole

Or even if you refused to look

You’d go crazy

Because you can trace

The nameless, impersonal and timeless penis

In the raucous atmosphere

Of the passers-by

That parade it in a portable shrine

In that stir of voices

You can hear an immensity of savage

Rebellion, the curses of

Heathen gism

Sometimes God is in conference or out to lunch

It seems he’s away

Absconding from debts but leaving his penis.

So now

The cock abandoned by God

Trots along Young and gay

And full of callow confidence

Amazingly like the shadow

Of a sophisticated smile
The penis bursting out of bounds

And beyond measure

Arrives here

Truly unique and entirely alone

Seen from whatever perspective

It’s faceless and speechless

I would like to give you, Sumiko

Something like this for your birthday

When it envelops your entire life

And you’ve become invisible even to yourself

Occasionally you’ll turn into the will

Of exactly this penis

And wander

Ceaselessly

I want to catch in my arms

Forever

Someone like you

SHIRAISHI KAZUKO (b. 1931)

Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi.

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Other readers on the gig Saturday with their Dead Beats:

Kenneth Brown - William S. Burroughs

Michael Franklin - Gregory Corso's "Bomb"

Greg Hazleton - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ann Haubrich - Jack Kerouac.

Brock Walker - Gary Snyder

K. Curtis Lyle - Bob Kaufmann

Bob Wilcox - Allen Ginsberg.

Bob Putnam - Herbert Huncke.

Phil Gounis - Jack Micheline

Agnes Wilcox - Diane DiPrima

Brett Underwood - Charles Bukowski

Erin Wiles - Anne Waldman

Joe Wetteroth - Kenneth Patchen

Michael Castro - Philip Lamantia