“The Reality Behind What We See” ~The Poet, Yoshimasu Gozo, in Kyoto~

78-year-old Gozo Yoshimasu is Japan’s most reknowned poet. Yoshimasu began composing in his twenties and has since been on the cutting edge of contemporary poetry for the past sixty years. Yoshimasu, who witnessed the devastation caused by the massive tsunami of the Great Earthquake of 2011, was at a loss for words upon seeing the impact of “water” strip everthing away. After the earthquake, and as if dismantling his own “framework of the mind,” Yoshimasu began to cut out words, ruled lines, and notes of all sizes and shapes he kept in his “diary.” By further adding more color to his work, a new styled diary was born. This was his new “poetry.”