Nanao and I have just got back from the Pinacates
and so it's a little hard to come
from where you could hear absolutely no
sounds the last day of any piece of civilization
and then suddenly land and have all these little things going
on.
And so what I'd like to simply say is,
rather than give you a biography of Nanao,
say that he has become a languages poet rather than
a language poet and believes very
much that you speak in the language of the culture you're
in.
So everything will be in English today.
And when the Nanao was in front of 40,000
people in Czechoslovakia, he read his poems
in Czechoslovakian.
He knows classic Chinese as well as Japanese as well as
a few other languages.
And, so, that really to me tells you
a little bit that while certain poets keep
on going deeper and deeper into the finer and finer
points of some kind of pure English,
there's a whole other way of doing it,
which is to diversify yourself and to go completely
out into the planet as it exists with all of its cultures
and languages.
And that's really what, in part, what you should really
know about Nanao.
He's been very active in saving diversity
if you want to call it that.
Either the Ainu in Hokkaido, Okinawan folk songs--
folk songs from all over Japan--
as well as the land that produced those things,
which is the Suwanose Island-- the small island in Southern
Japan--
a coral reef-- one of the last large remaining coral reefs
that America was going to put a airstrip on--
old forests in Hokkaido.
So it's really a pleasure, since I
work all my life to maintain certain kinds of diversity
on the planet and stop homogenization
of language, culture, themes, and all that,
to be a friend of Nanao.
And I think you'll find, as opposed to some
of the other poets I even saw listed on the University
readings, that this will not be an internalized,
how deep can we get into the mind,
let's work out all of our problems through love and sex
and in the urban bedroom, but try
to move kind of out into the wilds
where those kinds of species, anxieties, and concerns
kind of disappear a little bit and one
can look for a little bit more purity
in a verbal landscape as well as a Earth planet landscape.
And, so, that's really the biography
that I'd like to give, and here's
my good friend, Nanao Sakaki.