With literary hoaxes back in the news, I hope poetry’s last hoax, Araki Yasusada, the Hiroshima survivor who never lived, gets renewed attention. While the hoax and its many feathers ruffled fascinate, the fictional Yasusada’s poetry is the real attraction. Here’s Yasusada’s elegy for his daughter, killed in the bombing:
Mad Daughter and Big-Bang
December 25, 1945Walking in the vegetable patch
late at night, I was startled to find
the severed head of my
mad daughter lying on the ground.
Her eyes were upturned, gazing at me, ecstatic-like…
(From a distance it had appeared
to be a stone, haloed with light,
as if cast there by the Big-Bang.)What on earth are you doing, I said,
you look ridiculous.Some boys buried me here,
she said sullenly.Her dark hair, comet-like, trailed behind…
Squatting, I pulled the turnip up by the root.
–from Doubled Flowering: From The Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
I stumbled upon an appreciation of bullshit a couple years ago, and have yet to scrape it off my sneaker.
I was teaching English composition and had screened Stan Brakhage’s film Mothlight for my class. In Mothlight, Brakhage affixed actual moths and grass to film, creating a work of abstraction from recognizable concrete elements. I told students to imagine themselves art experts, and write an authoritative explication. I told them I wanted nothing but the finest bullshit. “Bullshit,” I said, “for all you’re worth.”
Afterward, I asked students to share results. One student who rarely spoke raised his hand, and proceeded to read a detailed, confident, inspired piece of art criticism! He may have considered it bullshit, he may not have believed every word, but the contents of his bullshit contained kernels of real insight. Bullshit, it seems, enabled this young man’s critical and creative faculties. He let go of any tendency to censor what might have been inaccurate or dishonest, wrote, and wrote well. The permission to bullshit was generative.