I've met the poet Kazuko Shiraishi three times, on each of her visits to New York. Shiraishi made her latest trip to this city in the spring of 2002, to mark the publication of "Let Those Who Appear," the second book of her poems to be released by New Directions, the prime American publisher of poetry. New Directions has accorded that honor to no other Japanese poet.
The first time I met Shiraishi was in the early 1970s, when she was taking part in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and came to New York to see me. A few months earlier, I had published "Ten Japanese Poets," a collection of Japanese poems translated into English, which included work by Shiraishi. It doesn't require special candidness to say I chose her because of the titillating title of her book-length poem, which she completed in 1970: "Seinaru Inja no Kisetsu" ("The Season of the Sacred Lecher").
In fact, Shiraishi, then in her early 40s, was at the height of her notoriety as a "sex poet," even a "penis poet," as she ruefully acknowledged. But "The Season of the Sacred Lecher" is not an unrelieved description of sexual acts. Composed under the influence of jazz in general and, in particular, John Coltrane, who once made an observation to the effect that he could discover what he wanted to express only after playing solo for an hour or more, the poem has a number of exploratory passages.