Is it Poetry?

In January 2002, on the verge of quitting poetry, Toshiko Hirata decided, instead, to write a poem on the seventh day of every month. But she didn’t always finish writing the poem in a single day, and the seventh day often “stretched out for me until the poem was finished.” In the afterword to Is it Poetry? Hirata writes that she had trouble sticking to her self-imposed schedule, “as a poet and a living person.” Life, in other words, got in the way. But the phrasing points to a tendency in Hirata’s work to unsettle definitive categories like life and death. Can one be a poet and a nonliving person? 

In Hirata’s poetry, all states of nonbeing are possible, including ambiguous ones. In their translators’ note, Spencer Thurlow and Eric E. Hyett write that they had to consult with a Tokyo-based translator, in order “to clarify whether someone was alive or dead in a given poem—troubling distinctions that were common throughout the book.”

In the poem “Is It June?” the speaker offers refuge to a murderer:

I’d been waiting for the day
when he’d kill someone,
whisper Hide me
I’d protect him with my life.
I chose this in my heart years ago, 
never moved,
never changed my number.

Thurlow and Hyett note that the situation in the poem, in which a murderer comes to stay the night with the speaker, “is so dramatic that it literally could not have been a true story.” This question of truth, which would seem irrelevant in poetry, somehow comes up again and again for the translators. This is because Hirata is something of a poet-trickster—but the book is so enjoyable that it’s easy to forgive her for laughing at the reader’s expense. 

In “Is It December Again,” the speaker leaps out of a bus window with a goldfish that “is also a kind of Journey.” The speaker joins the goldfish, “and so the journey begins.” The poem concludes:

Ladies and gentlemen, the rough stretch is ending, please take care. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we should be experiencing some dying up

ahead, please take care.