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Chika Sagawa is a digital poet. Yet Sagawa—the spectacular modernist writer who, in her short life, created breathtaking works of free verse poetry that are experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide—is not who might immediately come to mind when talking about the “digital.” The term “digital poet” evokes a certain image: of a contemporary avant-garde media practitioner, using digital technologies to create new types of poems on the screens of various electronic devices. There are certainly plenty of poets in Japan today who match this description—ni_ka’s “Augmented Reality poems,” only viewable through smartphones; Tahi Saihate’s whimsical “Poetry Hacks,” which use as many functionalities of web browsers as possible in their rethinking of poetics; and, of course, the thousands of social media-based poets who compose verse for Twitter, blogs, and Instagram.1 Sagawa is not one of these—how could she be, when she did not live past the 1930s?
It is difficult to capture the vibrancy of literary and artistic production in the context in which Sagawa was active—Japan’s 1920s and 1930s—with an explosion in the number of literary journals (and magazines more generally), art exhibitions, theater troupes, film studios, radio shows, and photographers. An aspiring poet had a vast number of potential venues for publishing their work, and the most successful (or wealthy) might have their work collected and released as sole-authored collections, often with gorgeous cover designs. Over the course of the six years (starting in 1930) that Sagawa was an active poet, her work was published in 38 (!) different journals with names like Variétés, Poetry and Poetics (Shi to shiron), Cockfight (Tōkei), White Paper (Hakushi), Poesie d’aujourd’hui (Kyō no shi), Seashell (Kaigara), Literature (Bungaku), Étoile de Mer, Le Serpent (Serupan), Poesy (Shihō), and Madame Blanche.</em >2 Yet, like so many poets of her time—really, any of those apart from a small handful of “major” figures whose works were repeatedly reprinted, anthologized, and analyzed—Sagawa’s work was largely inaccessible in the many decades after its original publication, a situation which has only changed very recently with the Japanese publication of her complete works in 2022. Previously, there was a posthumous collection of her poetry published in 1936, the year of her death—the few extant copies of which are largely held in museum collections—after which she quickly faded into obscurity. A few of her poems were then included in a 1952 anthology of Japanese poets, published during the American occupation. And, at long last, her poems were reprinted in a complete edition by Shinkaisha in 1983, but in a limited run of only around 600 copies: collectors’ items that often run into the thousands of dollars when they rarely show up at auction. This last edition was reprinted in 2010, though only in similar numbers, and remains rare.
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To begin the process of thinking through Sagawa’s poetry and poetics, it can be helpful to begin with one small line from her essay,
“Walking Between Trees” [Jukan o yuku toki]1:
「眼鏡をかけてゐるといふことは物をはつきり見るためではなかつた。」
[Megane o kaketeiru to iu koto wa, mono o hakkiri miru tame de wa nakatta.]
“It was not in order to see things more clearly that I put on my glasses.” Or, “The fact that I put on glasses was not in order to see
things clearly.”
Sagawa introduces us to a world where the orders of perception are made complex, where seeing and not seeing are overlapping realms of
perception, where neither sight nor things should be taken at face value. She emphasizes the world of things, of objects (“to see things
more clearly”) but also the modalities of seeing. There are glasses, lenses, windows, and mirrors. (Sagawa herself did wear glasses, as
we see in pictures of her). Yet the realm of literal vision is, perhaps, of less interest than some other kinds of fields: the
conceptual image, the imagined thought, the poetic possibility, the multiple modalities of the real. What was it that Sagawa was
searching for in the interstices of the lines of her poetry, in her non-literal modality of perception and thought?