AMERICAN POETS IN JAPAN: IRVING STETTNER’S POESIE IN ACTION
Regarding Irving Stettner’s poetry, Henry Miller observed to him “you certainly have something most of your colleagues don’t have: Art, Life, Joy, Sun, Love... You’re a bundle of never-ending enthusiasm...” The power of praise of life is Irving Stettner’s gift: through his watercolors, ink drawings of joyous dance energetically conceived, his careful editing of Stroker, his stories vividly drawn with beauty, his Whitmanesque muse shining in poems. In the second stanza of the “Henry Miller You Are God!” Irv praise-gushes

sesquipedalian pornographer poet Pan
From Greenpoint Paris Big Sur
Knavish phallic clown
O joyous sidereal jester
Maneater of the cosmos
King Cannibal of literature
with Capricorn in conjunction with Venus
Lyrical coitus, procreant libido, folly
Ecstasy and laughter

Irv’s work as a book publisher is adding to this diversely expressive artist’s cache. This year he published the poem above in a 2-poem set limited first edition, with ink drawings and signed by the author/artist. This year also through Stroker Press, he published Nippon Bouquet, which contains his “12 Poems for the Road” from Self-Portrait, poems written between 1989-1991. His press this year too released Passionate Pens: Love Poem Exchanges in the Heian Age, translated with an introduction by Howard S. Levy. Among Stettner’s many fine prose works is Beggars in Paradise (Stroker Press, 1995), in which he writes his encounters with Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton and Fernand Leger. In Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Me in 1999, Irv wrote that Henry Miller (whom he met when Miller was 85 years old) “had passed on to me the creative flame.” Irv must also be the godfather of the alternative literary press as his impressive Stroker Anthology (1974-1994) attests. Among the literati he published were Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, Thomas Merton and Paul Bowles.

The 71st issue of Stroker just came out from Saitama, Japan, co-edited and produced by Kato Mihoko. Recent issues of Stroker have reprinted Edward Carpenter’s “Days with Walt Whitman,” translations of Santoka’s haiku by Scott Watson, Saikaku’s haiku and Chinese lyric translations by Howard S. Levy, criticism on Miller by Honda Yasunori and Christopher Nugent, poetry by Alan Catlin and by Irv himself. (I’m grateful Stroker has also included my series of three, “Digging the Avant-garde in Japan,” to boot.)

Stettner’s artwork has recently had exhibits at the Henry Miller Museum of Art in Omachi, Nagano, at Cape Sup Gallery in Lyon, France, and at venues in the Tokyo area. His work is on sale at Umi Gallery in Kanda, Tokyo, among the works of other great modern masters. Stettner consistently shines through his own lyrical praises of beauty in Whitman, free verse style, and through his visual snippets of ecstasy in his art and publishing enterprise. Vive la Irv!

For a catalog of Stroker Press publications, visit the new Stroker Press Web site.

MIGNETTES: EXHIBITIONS

• Early Notice:
  Be on the lookout for an upcoming French & Japanese Visual Poetry exhibit at Gallery Oculus, Tokyo, (03) 3445-5088, next April near Shinagawa St.
  
  
• Takiguchi Shuzo: “Plastic Experiments”
  Over 300 objects, including visual poems and decalcomanie paitings (a Surrealist technique of pressing a piece of paper onto a painted surface and peeling it off, to collaborate with chance). For a profile of this early Surrealist critic and poet, see my upcoming article in Japan Times on December 19, online and in the printed edition. Substantial color catalog with English translation of essays on and by Takiguchi for 2,200 yen. Shoto Museum, Tokyo, (03) 3465-9421. 15 minutes from Shibuya St., 5 mins. from Shinsen St. on Odakyu line. Exhibit runs until January 27, 2002.

MIGNETTES: NEW PUBLICATIONS

• Compare prices  to buy the book • San Francisco Beat

  San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, edited by David Meltzer (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001), includes “Remembering Rexroth,” a discussion by Yokohama resident Morgan Gibson, Ken Knabb, David Meltzer and James Brook, as well as Meltzer’s 30-years-ago interviews with Beat poets.
  
  
• Beautiful Amami Island Folk Songs, edited and translated by Koriyama Naoshi (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 2001). As Leza Lowitz informs us in the foreword, Amami was geographically a part of the Ryukyu Kingdom, though it came to mainland control after invasion by the Satsuma Clan. Yet the cultural features remain outside the Japanese realm, unique to the Ryukyu Islands. Koriyama’s English versions are smooth and accurate. 2,500 yen, The Hokuseido Press, 32-4, Honkomagame 3-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0021.
  
  

• Compare prices  to buy the book • All Worldly Pursuits

  All Worldly Pursuits by Hillel Wright (Canada: New Orphic Publishers, 2001) is a picaresque novel, third-person narrative. The title comes from the sayings of Milarepa (1016-1100 AD), Tibetan Buddhist bodhisattva, and refers to zazen philosophy that all worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow; all acquisitions end in dispersion, buildings in destruction, meetings in separation and births in death. The plot follows the life and loves of Wiley Moon, who drops out of an American university graduate school in the 1960s and embarks on a 35-year journey through psychedelia, the back-to-the-land hippie era on the West Coast of Canada, the commercial fishing industry from Hawaii to Vancouver Island to the Alaska border, marriage, children, divorce, single-parenthood, social activism and finally a 2nd marriage to a modern young Japanese in Yokohama in 2000. Author Hillel Wright was born in Denver, Colorado in 1943, lived in Hawaii, Canada and various states of the USA until moving to Japan in 1997 with his wife Shiori Tsuchiya. His previous books include Single Dad and Welcome to the Below Tide Motel (poetry, Canada) and editorial roles in the anthologies Poesie Yaponesia (Japan) and Evolution Transcended (Canada). He also writes true crime stories for pulp detective magazines.

MIGNETTES: NEW ISSUE OF ONLINE JOURNAL
For poetry by Cid Corman and translations from the Japanese, ask for Bongos of the Lord editor Scott Watson at swbgp@izcc.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp.

MIGNETTES: NEW COLLECTION (IN JAPANESE)
Nazukebito no Fukai Koe (literally and very roughly translated as “the deep voice of the name-attached-people”), poems by Kumagai Yuriya, with a afternote on the poet by Shiraishi Kazuko (Tokyo: Shichosha Press, 2001). See Yuriya’s Web site at www.sapporo-u.ac.jp/~yuriyajk/ for her English (or bilingual) publications.

Taylor Mignon