Akira Tatehata

Akira Tatehata


In 2003 Hiroaki Sato, as translator, drew my attention to the poetry of Tatehata Akira, better known as an art historian & curator, but with a genius for the short prose poem that recalled a handful of poets so gifted in our own language & place. For his first book in English, Runners in the Margins (P.S., A Press, 2003), I wrote the following in response: “The power of Japanese poetry since World War Two lies in the creative ferocity & precision of what one of its practitioners called ‘a return to totality in poetry.’ To the ranks of those who have moved Japan into the mainstream of international poetry, we can now add Tatehata Akira & can place him among those poets from Rimbaud to the present, who have broken the spine of verse or chosen prose itself as a medium for poetry. In Hiroaki Sato’s English versions, Tatehata appears as a poet with the ability to move clusters of language & perceptions into larger assemblages – a narrative that escapes from narrative, to create a world that startles & so causes us to see.


Jerome Rothenberg