About

This is a forum for discussions of Japanese Modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as all other related interests. It features articles and essays on Japanese poetry, translations, book reviews, discussions of translation theory and method, and writing on other contemporary Japanese arts. The title, New Modernism, also refers to the need to go back to the Modernists to find new material for future explorations now that Postmodernism is over. The importance of translation as a means to a poetics in Modernism, as well as the tendency to create cultural hybrids is especially important here.

Eric Selland is a poet and translator based in Tokyo, Japan. His translations of Modernist and contemporary Japanese poets have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He has also published articles on Japanese Modernist poetry and translation theory.  His translation of The Guest Cat, by Takashi Hiraide, was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2014. He is the author of The Condition of Music (Sink Press, 2000), Inventions (Seeing Eye Books, 2007), Still Lifes (Hank’s Original Loose Gravel Press, 2011), Arc Tangent (Isobar Press, 2013), and Beethoven’s Dream (Isobar Press, 2015).