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First Japanese American Poet

Yone Noguchi

Seen and Unseen, Or, Monologues of a Hom... (by Noguchi, Yone)
The Story of Yone Noguchi; Told by Himse... (by Noguchi, Yone)
Through the Torii (by Noguchi, Yone)
The Spirit Of Japanese Art (by Yone Noguchi)
The summer cloud : prose poems (by Noguchi, Yoné)
The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (by Noguchi, Yone)
The voice of the valley (by Noguchi, Yoné)
The Pilgrimage (by Noguchi, Yone)

The influence of great people often gets misattributed or forgotten in the hubbub of the great persons themselves. This creates the tiresome illusion that some genius dropped whole from the sky and that “normal” folks could never work toward such success, no matter how much time spent.

But no one lives and works in a vacuum.

Born December 8, 1875, in Nagoya, Japan, Yonejirō Noguchi was perhaps the first noteworthy Japanese American Poet. He was always interested in Zen and Haiku poetry, but also found an interest in certain English authors. Before graduating university in Tokyo, he went to live and work in California where he developed his identity as both journalist and poet. In 1900, he moved to New York, where he wrote The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, and The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid.

After about ten years in America, he moved back to Japan where he spent the rest of his days teaching English and continued work as a literary critic and poet. He work found him shoulder to shoulder with pioneering modernists like William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, and Ezra Pound.

Many of his contemporaries seemed to be caught in some sort of ambiguous attraction to Noguchi’s writing. American modernist poet Ezra Pound said of him, “His poems seem to be rather beautiful. I don't quite know what to think about them.” Japanese surrealist poet Junzaburō Nishiwaki said, “Most of his earlier poems have always seemed to me so terrific, so bewildering, as to startle me out of reason or system.” British poet and critic Arthur Symons described him as a “scarcely to be apprehended personality.”

People call him a cosmopolitan writer, claiming his style doesn’t truly belong to neither Japanese nor American writing. Thus, he has in recent years resurfaced as a study in Asian American studies. It’s hard to say how this ambiguous literary identity affected him personally, but it no doubt was part of the foundation of his particular brand of anomaly.

Pound is often credited as being one of the fathers of modernism, but much of his style of brevity, the line by line succession of images, and the tendency for free verse can be traced back to one of Noguchi’s best works, The Pilgrimage. Indeed, Noguchi encouraged his modernist colleagues to explore the haiku form influenced him.

For more of Noguchi’s writing, check out The Voice of the Valley, Selected Poems, and The Spirit of Japanese Poetry.

Yone Noguchi is the father of famous sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

By Thad Higa