Expanding Verse

Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media

Andrew Campana

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780520399211
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520399228
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: Literature

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Against the Screen: Poets Rewriting Cinema in 1920s and 1930s Japan
• 2. The Voice Recomposed: A Lost Tape-Recorder Poem of Postwar Japan
• 3. You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi’s Disability Poetics
• 4. As a Piece of Flesh: Feminist Poetic Stardom and the Body
• 5. World Webs: Augmented Reality Poetry and Japanese Sign Language Poetry Online
• Coda
• Notes
• Works Cited