Kazuko shiraishi biography

Kazuko Shiraishi was.
Kazuko Shiraishi was a Japanese poet and translator who was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Kazuko Shiraishi was a Japanese poet and translator who was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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Kazuko Shiraishi

Biography

Kazuko Shiraishi (Vancouver, 1931) had her breakthrough in the 1950s as a female poet who was unconventional in all respects. After cutting short her studies at the prestigious Waseda University, she published her debut collection The City Where It Rains Eggs (Tamago no furu machi, 1951) at the age of 20. The work which also led to her breakthrough outside Japan in the 1970s shows influences of the American Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), with whom she has also performed, and such jazz musicians as John Coltrane.

Her early childhood was spent in Vancouver, but when she was seven, she moved to Japan. This early period outside Japan has surely acquired a certain symbolic meaning: an enlightened period of freedom and love that always formed a contrast to Japan and that seemed to resonate in the avant-garde status of her poetry in the 1960s and 1970s.

From the outset, Shiraishi has the name of being an outsider, or, as she herself has put it, a “black sheep”. Her reputation as an author of especially erotic poetry, as put together in

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Kazuko Shiraishi

Kazuko Shiraishi was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1931. She lived in Vancouver until 1937 when she moved with her mother and father, a renowned journalist, back to Japan. Shiraishi studied at Waseda University but did not complete her studies.

Shiraishi published her first poetry collection at the age of twenty, shortly after leaving university: Tamago no furu machi, translated as both Falling Egg City and The Town that Rains Eggs (Kyoritsu Shoten, 1951). The book is a Surrealist-influenced work about postwar Tokyo. Shiraishi was deeply influenced by both jazz and Beat poetry throughout her career, particularly the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose work she translated. Shiraishi was also a member of the Vou (pronounced “vow”) Club, a Tokyo-based group of visual poetry artists, led by the poet and visual artist Kitasono Katue. The group was most active during the 1960s and 1970s and was more gender-balanced than the coterie of Beat poets who influenced them.

With the assistance of Kenneth Rexroth, English translations of Shiraishi’s

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Kazuko Shiraishi

Japanese poet (1931–2024)

Kazuko Shiraishi
Born	(1931-02-27)27 February 1931 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Died	14 June 2024(2024-06-14) (aged 93)
Nationality	Japanese
Occupation(s)	Poet, translator

Kazuko Shiraishi (白石かずこ, Shiraishi Kazuko, 27 February 1931^[1] – 14 June 2024) was a Japanese poet and translator who was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She was a modernist, outsider poet who got her start in Katsue Kitazono's "VVOU" poetry group, which led Shiraishi to publish her first book of poems in 1951. She also read her poetry at jazz performances.^[2] She appeared at readings and literary festivals all over the world.^[3]

Kenneth Rexroth called her "the Allen Ginsberg of Japan," and edited a volume of her poetry in English for New Directions Press. ^[4]^[5]

Shiraishi died on 14 June 2024, at the age of 93.^[6]

Translations available in English

Hiroaki Sato translated Shiraishi's poetry for BOMB Magazine,^[7] and several of