Fascinating comment in poet Jerome Rothenberg’s NOTE about Sakutarō Hagiwara: “Unlike Pound’s call for a return of poetry to music, however, Hagiwara’s poetics brought that whole relation into question. Thus he wrote of his own practice: ‘Through the free verse form the poet has been able to freely reveal the perfect rhythm of his ego for the first time.  When it broke every unreasonable restraint and escaped from the bondage of music, poetry for the first time was able to discover its legitimate route and construct the ‘music of words’ in the true sense.’”

The bondage of music?!

The first lines of the poem, read so–dare we say it?–musically by kaseumin, provided the DNA musical figure. Sonic Bloom’s excellent Array Mbira virtual instrument enhanced the sonic landscape.

Find the original in this excellent Multilingual Poetry Collection by LibriVox.

P.S. Linguistic propriety question: is it Hagiwara Sakutaro, or Sakutaro Hagiwara? Seems to depend on the English website. I took kaseumin’s lead and went with HS.