The Metaphysical Touch of Technology: An Interview with CŌEM

September 5, 2022 | in Interviews | by Xiao Yue Shan

I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday.

The Tokyo-based CŌEM is a multi-talented collective of poets, writers, and coders who explore the ever-evolving and curious intersection between poetry and technology. In creating immersive experiences and rethinking the potential of words, the group work to advance their writerly craft with feats of digital engineering, operating on the idea that poetry is not only a literary form or a vehicle for expression but a way of engaging with the world as it moves and changes. I spoke with two leaders of CŌEM, the award-winning poet Nagae Yūki and co-founder Jordan A. Y. Smith, our conversation touching on the singular life of the poem, how poetry can be enacted in physical and digital landscapes, and what transpires when minds of discreet intelligences converge.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): CŌEM brings together digital language and poetic language to create projects that aim to immerse readers further into the world of the poem. For you two as poets, what about virtuality entices you? What is particularly seductive or engaging about a poem existing outside of the page?

Nagae Yūki (NY): This addresses a fundamental question of how to determine the essence of poetry. The poetry on the page in the form of écriture can easily be understood as poetry itself—but spoken poetry, with the tongue and the throat and gestures, is a more primeval form than written poetry, as seen with the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, I feel that this physicality is key. Over the last ten years, as social media have reached the peak of their prosperity, the digital has largely been criticized as a medium that strips away human physicality; however, today, the latest technology (including the metaverse, which is a sensory technology) allows people to experience leaps in time and space that are possible only in virtual space.

Returning to the first question, what is poetry? Perhaps a metaphysical gaze that overlooks the branching, irreversible movements of time in simultaneity, a miracle of the tongue that freely draws in different places. Isn’t it the poet who makes such connections visible, translating them into something that can be sensed by others? If so, technology as a poetic medium can be considered to have this same power, allowing many people to approach the written word intuitively. Don’t get me wrong—I truly believe in writing, but at the same time, when poets manipulate digital devices and let their bodies and thoughts pass through the metaphysical touch of technology, I am convinced that new poetic expressions that have never existed before will be born—and re-introduced to the page someday. It is my intuition that within these exchanges lies hidden the actual potential for revolutionary changes in the expression of poetry.

Jordan A. Y. Smith (JAYS): Poetry on the page is a great nexus of experiences, but there’s nothing about the medium of paper except its tactility and scent that merits it being the primary locus of poetic form, and the digital “forms” that mimic paper actually sacrifice what’s good about it, remaining faithful to conventions like line shape and length, print-based traditions, and the simulation of book construction that actually deprive the digital of anything that could potentially justify that very sacrifice. There’s a place for poetry in printed forms such as books—I mean, I also edit Tokyo Poetry Journal—so this is not suggesting a replacement of “pages.”

What can be found “in” the poem through the digital is in many ways more akin to the actual poetic experience, which can be synaesthetic, hyperlinked, virtual, disembodied and re-embodied in new ways, spiritually haunting, uncanny, delusional, multilayered, and so on. I’m generally in favor of doing things with poetry—reading it out loud, writing it in my own handwriting, playfully removing parts to highlight, decontextualize, and emphasize them as units.

This sense of play is embodied in Oulipo writers as well, and when I designed and taught a course in digital literature (at UCLA back in 2014), we spent a fair amount of time looking at antecedents of digital literature. Now we have increasingly more versatile tools, so this is just as natural a change as writers switching from quill and ink to ballpoint or mechanical pencil, and from printing press to print-on-demand or e-books.

Free Fleas: Self-Publishing and Storytelling in Japan

March 7, 2022 | in Essays | by Laurel Taylor

The roots of contemporary dōjinshi are firmly planted in the fertile soil of Japan’s post-revolution literary circles.

Goethe had a famously tumultuous relationship with publishing, expressing that to “exchange [my work] for money seemed hateful to me.” The relationship between creation and distribution is always fraught with the masked workings of industry, further complicated in a world expedited and reconstituted by advancing technologies. Today, a text can go from the mind to the press in a matter of hours, via the mechanics of a profligate self-publishing industry; how does this implicate and transform our urge—and instinct—for storytelling? In this following essay, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor looks into the culture of dōjinshi, the creation and dissemination of self-published works in Japan, examining our relationship to our creative endeavors, the promises and pitfalls of profit, and the paths our words take as they make their way into the world.

I think there are very few shared universalities across human histories and societies, but those that exist are tied up, I would argue, in the act of creation. The earliest remnants we have of our ancestors include inventions of the practical variety—tools for hunting, gathering, and protecting—but they also include artistic creations, the purposes of which are far more abstract. The traces of our past include cave paintings and sculptures, bone flutes and drums, but also less tangible things: Ainu yukar, Homeric epics, Indigenous Australian storytelling traditions, tales and chronicles performed orally long before they were written down. The far-ranging history of our urge to communicate, to express, and to entertain seems to ultimately serve the same desire: all of us want to tell stories.

In the modern age, storytelling has, for the layperson, taken on narrower and narrower definitions. Despite the oral legacy of narrative, the stories commanding large audiences are usually associated with the written word; even when such texts are transferred into drama, film, television, or song, it first begins on the page. This, of course, narrows the notion of who gets to tell stories. What once was the work of humanity has become the work of the writer, and the road to claiming “writer” as profession is a daunting one, which few people are ultimately able to take. Though we all still share an impulse toward creation, those impulses are restricted by educational demands, job demands, relationship demands, publisher demands, market demands. We live in a world of exigencies, where storytelling is overwhelmed by societal pressures. As such, the act of writing was, for many centuries, dominated by the wealthy, educated, and idle—and our literary canons demonstrate as much.

However, with the advent of mass production and the internet age, writing has been bolstered by more universalized education, increased access to tools, and growing networks of supportive writing communities. The gap between layperson and writer has been further shortened by bustling self-publishing economies, most evident in Japan through the culture of dōjinshi. Those familiar with Japanese popular culture may already be aware of this term in relation to comics and graphic novels, but it has a much broader definition. Written 同人誌, dōjinshi are broadly defined as “document[s] by like-minded people.” They can be made by anyone for any purpose: cooking, gardening, stamp-collecting, train-watching, and yes, storytelling. The closest kindred term in English might be “zine,” but in the Japanese context, dōjinshi lack that same underground punk aesthetic; it’s not uncommon for students to participate in after-school dōjinshi clubs or for retirees to print dōjinshi about their hobbies. Many of these publications are intended to apprise communities of municipal matters or to attract new members, but narratively inspired dōjinshi reproduce the stories of our day-to-day: those told around the dinner table, fanfiction, original children’s tales. They echo the narrative traditions of long ago, told in amphitheaters or sung around campfires or chanted to the churning of the plow, producing local community-based connections rather than mass market commodities. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Laurel Taylor

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Japanese

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Japan
Tokyo

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Fall 2011: The Pleasure of Literary Engagement

September 4, 2018 | in 30issues30days | by Sim Yee Chiang

Featuring Lydia Davis’ first translation from the Dutch, an excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Dubravka Ugrešić on Croatian novelists

Miraculously, word spreads. Asymptote is selected as The Center for Fiction’s international journal of the month for September 2011. Publishers Weekly features us in a writeup. We are a Paris Review staff pick: apparently, poetry editor Robyn Creswell has been “poking around in Asymptote” and has “especially enjoyed the (very) short story by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky, Adonis’s “Ambiguity,” translated by Elliott Colla, and an essay about riddles by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, translated by Shushan Avagyan(!)” Literary heavyweights Jane Hirshfield and John Kinsella, whom I don’t know personally, write to offer blurbs in support. I discover that Parul Sehgal, an award-winning literary critic I admire, has a Singaporean connection. Had she been based in Singapore, would her talent in literary criticism have been recognized? Would it even have flourished in the first place? This inspires me to move to Taiwan for the lower cost of living. Here to introduce the first issue that I edited out of Taipei (and that also features my translations of Jing Xianghai and Belinda Chang) is contributing editor Sim Yee Chiang.

As I re-read the interview I conducted with Motoyuki Shibata for the Fall 2011 issue of Asymptote, I am catapulted at once to the terror of that late summer afternoon at the University of Tokyo. Why on earth had I insisted that we speak in Japanese? I was armed with notes, even a few jaunty segues, but I knew my adopted tongue could abandon me at any moment, just as it had abandoned me six months before at a disastrous interview for prospective Ph.D. students.

What prevented disaster that day was hearing Professor Shibata talk about the “pleasure” of literary engagement and translation. Translators tend to fall prey to all kinds of pesky anxieties: of influence, of equivalence, of legitimacy etc. Even now, years after that conversation, I still find the principles of pleasure and humour not only useful defences against said anxieties, but also indispensable qualities of a successful translation. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Sim Yee Chiang

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30issues30days
Fall 2011 issue

My 2017: Rachael Pennington

December 26, 2017 | in Essays | by Rachael Pennington

This year has brought me Japanese titles that disarm despite very little happening in their pages.

Today, Assistant Managing Editor Rachael Pennington, who joined us in October this year, tells us about her year of reading Japanese literature—and how it gave her a heightened appreciation for the smaller details of life.

When asked to review my year in reading, my initial reaction was to think back to my most significant moments—travelling to Japan, getting a new job, seeing my best friend getting married—and to recount what I was reading at the time. But on second thought, remembering Ishiguro’s Nobel lecture, which celebrated “the small and private”, I decided to look past 2017’s more momentous occasions in search of the quiet moments of revelation. Asking myself, when nothing seemingly important was happening around me, what books was I reading in what Ishiguro described as “quiet—or not so quiet—rooms”? In the times I was caught up in the monotony of everyday life and lost to my daily routine, which books had tided me over and heightened my appreciation for the minutiae of life?

I read Nastume Sōseki’s The Gate (translated by William F. Sibley) on several Sunday mornings throughout September. Here, cradling a hot cup of coffee and basking in the first rays of the day peeking through the window of my downtown Barcelona flat, I came to understand why Sōseki declared it his favorite amongst his works. The novel captures the intimacy of life through a minimal plot, tracing the magnificently undramatic existence of a middle-aged couple, old before their time. With this relationship as the anchor, people come and go, seasons flourish and wither, yet the patience with which Sōsuke trims his toenails and the grace with which Oyone carries the loss of their children never once falter.

Translation Tuesday: “Blind Spot” from Brief Cartography for Places of No Interest by Marcílio França Castro

September 5, 2017 | in Translations | by Heath Wing

"We banished from cartography all lions, mermaids, pygmies, and dragons. The sterilization of maps only confirms the disdain we have for nature."

When I first met Marcílio França Castro at a coffee shop in Brazil during the winter of 2016, he showed up toting a bag full of presents for me. When he dumped the bag onto the table, out came books, like he was some sort of combination of Jorge Luis Borges and Santa Claus. What most impressed me was his eagerness to promote Brazilian literature in general; several of the books were from his peers and not just ones he had authored. And perhaps Borges is a good comparison for Marcílio; indeed, his writing is in line with the likes of Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar. Yet he does not simply imagine other worlds, he perceives with brilliance unsuspected oddities in places of absolutely no interest. In his short stories, which range from traditional length to flash fiction, and with a prose that is at once economic and yet never lacking in precision, Marcílio França Castro transforms his culture’s most unsuspecting spaces into fantastic reading. The author and I have worked together in producing translations for many of his stories, overcoming differences in idioms, metaphor, sentence structure and other obstacles found in the passage from Portuguese to English. Most importantly, this project kept the translator sane during the subsequent North Dakotan winter of 2017.

—Heath Wing.

The manuals say such devices are made to take anything. Bumps, turbulence, high winds, lightning. Even crashes and hurricanes. It’s said they come out unscathed from the most intemperate of weather. You know the protocols. For every inconvenience there is a plan, an automatic fix. An aircraft like this one, with all its resources, ought to be, according to the manuals, practically uncrashable. That’s why, if it were up to manuals and manufacturers, our role would be merely to maintain course and keep her steady, taking advantage of the dignity of flight and the charm of our profession. And that’s really what we do here, before this gorgeous instrument panel, full of buttons and colorful lights: with the prudence it conveys, we relax and commend our fate and everyone else’s to the invisible wisdom of the display.

Look ahead. The sky’s magnificent, full of stars; someone might say it’s a painting commissioned to decorate the cockpit. A captain, from the moment of departure, always has his beard well-groomed, his uniform impeccable; he pilots the plane with swan-like indifference. That’s how the passengers see you. We fly calmly. The seats are anatomic and dinner well-balanced. An almost anesthetic experience. The Pacific is nothing more than an enormous tapestry of black silk that clips the horizon. We think and act as if the world outside no longer existed, as though the clouds and the ocean below us were but unfailing radar bleeps or a set of geographical coordinates. In truth, as we fly we simply ignore the substance found in Earth’s elements. Try this coffee, it’s wonderful.

Reading Resolutions from the Asymptote Team (Part III)

January 5, 2017 | in Essays | by Anna Aresi