Backlist Bulletin #12: Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi, tr. Sho Sugita
In grade school, I was frequently reprimanded for doodling during class instead of taking notes and paying attention. Though those doodles were often related to the classes, I only recently became aware of my tendency to process thoughts through images prior to reaching any semblance of new understanding. Doodles are a good vehicle for this because they are meditative and lead you to unexpected outcomes, often via repetition: you are simultaneously thinking and not thinking; while doing so, you don’t really know where you are going to end up and make unexpected connections. Hirato Renkichi’s poems in Spiral Staircase (UDP, 2017), translated by Sho Sugita, operate in a similar mode of meditative modulation, albeit on a more intentional level, which is a result of his interest in expansion and experimentalization as well as his impulses toward universalization and progression.
This proclivity is present from the outset of Spiral Staircase in the first section’s titular poem, “New Voice, ” in which Renkichi presents us with a series of images constantly unfolding in a deceptively innocuous and airy fashion:
I say deceptively because this vision is airy only in the sense that it is not stable. This emerges from how Renkichi destabilizes readers with modular repetition: line two is “You and I go back and forth,” (emphasis mine) but by line five it shifts to “You and I sway back and forth.” There is a sense of destination implied by going somewhere, whereas swaying introduces precarity and indeterminacy — either way you are moving “back and forth,” but these are not the same understanding of what it means to do so. The latter is exposed: you are no longer inside anything because the simile, “like a gentle breeze,” provides a means by which this back and forth becomes exposed and mercurial, which stands in opposition to the stationary “great delicate symphony.” However, they are not entirely different: both are moving “from the heart,” which serves as a fulcrum.
The heart serves a fulcrum time and time again in Spiral Staircase, allowing Renkichi to explore both the mechanical and spiritual implications of his work. In many ways, the heart is the human equivalent of a motor; however, because it is part of a human body, the heart ultimately is not a machine (at least not at the start of the 20th century), and this difference is a strength. It is this subtle tenderness and interest in humanity within all of the mechanical movement that I find most surprising and compelling about Spiral Staircase. The heart is a striking and strange anachronism in Futurist verse: I have admittedly thought of it as a word many poets became allergic to around the time traditional meter and form were abandoned. Thus, I find it rather radical that Renkichi does not ignore, bury, or run away from tender cores despite the following proclamation from “The Strange Cloud”:
This illustrates Renkichi’s dedication to poetic expansion and exploration as well as his concern in regard to what the reverberations of these actions convey.
Of the first three sections, “Arabesque” most directly attempts to define Renkichi’s understanding not only of expansion and connection, but also of how one might facilitate the manifestation of these ideas. Assuming Renkichi took this title from the decorative design of intertwined and flowing lines that the word “arabesque” often refers to, it seems quite fitting. Like the heart/motor fulcrum, these arabesque patterns/body parts that are interconnected yet infinite serve as a platform through which Renkichi can imagine the unimaginable by dissolving physical limits:
In “Minimum_Maximum,” from this section, I see Renkichi dissolving what we understand as possible by using the technology of the poem. It is not return that Renkichi dreams of — the dreams of departure and deviation from what has already been defined by dissolving and connecting seemingly disparate spaces. Renkichi makes this goal apparent from the outset through the title by connecting antonyms with an underscore that creates space between the two words while simultaneously linking them. This action is then mirrored in the final stanza of the poem. However, instead of a line, the reader is presented with a series of the word “is” beneath the space between “thus” and “now” that drive downwards toward the poem’s conclusion in an almost mechanical acceleration. The anaphora of “me” and repetition of “is infinite” in these final three lines are also notable: his hand becomes his breath which becomes his heart — all of which are advancing at a rapidity that verges on synchronicity within the “is” that is “infinite.”
In the final section, “Uncollected Poems (1916–1922),” it is Sugita who accomplishes this work of connection, expansion, and progression through his attentive curation of these disparate poems. This augmentation allows Sugita to meaningfully follow in the footsteps of “Hirato’s poet-mentor,” Kawaju Ryoko, who “compiled an additional section” and added it to the first three that were organized by Renkichi for “the posthumous Selected Poems of Hirato Renkichi” in 1931 (Sugita, 7). It should also be noted that Sugita follows Ryoko not only by compiling his own section, but also by keeping the previous sections — “New Voice,” “Arabesque,” “Hard Fight,” and “Development” — in their original order as intended by both Ryoko and Renkichi.
Though organizing sections chronologically is usually not noteworthy, it is quite significant in this context: pairing these two compilations at the end of Spiral Staircase fulfills Renkichi’s desire for connection and expansion within an eternal present, within a ‘spiral staircase’ that is “twirling from dream’s moment to endless dream” (“Deep Nocturne,”118). What we as readers are then left with is a collection that “[pulls our] sleeve[s]” and “leads [us] away” like the little girl from this stanza in “I’m to Get Sucked into Five Flower Pots,” one of the poems in the final section:
Into what or where? I am still not quite sure. But this doesn’t bother me: a space of indeterminacy is exactly where Renkichi intends to lead us since, as Sugita tells us, “he sees Futurist poetics as an ever-expanding collection of new aesthetic practices” — not any fixed set of rules or “-isms” (Sugita, 11–12).
But this is not to say that there is anything indeterminately ambivalent about Renkichi’s poetics. As Sugita explains in the introduction,
Hirato envisioned a new era that purged itself of the sterile conventions and empty lyricism of his contemporaries… A new language of Japanese poetry, Hirato proposed, was a language of directness, or impulse (chokujō). (9)
In “Hard Fight,” Renkichi’s commitment to the directness necessary for bringing about his desired futurity becomes apparent:
Here, Renkichi addresses the reader with a series of imperatives, truly disclosing how he believed his Futurist poetics would manifest in and beyond the known world. Thus, demonstrating how unlike “Sir Romanticist[s],” Renkichi does not need a harp through which he must channel another realm — he already possesses the heart he needs to activate new worlds (Renkichi, 82). Moreover, Renkichi knows that this will neither be an easy nor a solitary endeavor — he calls for us not to become stagnated or demoralized by continuing to believe in what can collectively be accomplished.
I know that these possibilities may seem purely theoretical and thus also impractical, but “Hirato’s Futurism was meant as a life-changing and world-changing project” — not something that exists only conceptually, as Eric Selland writes in the book’s afterword (192). And although nearly a century has passed since Renkichi’s premature death, I think that his resolute vision is currently much needed inspiration as we imagine how and struggle to ensure that our post-quarantine ‘new normal’ surpasses (in a good way) what was previously thought possible. I believe this because my time spent with Renkichi’s work has made me more optimistic about the possibility of actual change and poetry’s role in it despite oppressive systems that have been portrayed as immutable. So, I cannot help but hope that you will find something relevant and encouraging in Spiral Staircase, too — perhaps even doodling a new path for your thoughts along the way.
— Anneysa Gaille
Spiral Staircase is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on Tuesday, December 14 and Wednesday, December 15 are 50% off with discount code DOODLE.
The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices and Interns.
