Yoshimasu Gozo

Born in Tokyo, 1939. Since his debut with Departure in 1964, he has continued to drive forward the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. His major poetry books include Anthology of Golden Age Poetry (1970), Osiris, God of Stone (1984), At the Entrance to the House of Fireworks (1995), the Island of Snow or the Ghost of Emily (1998), Kaibutsukun (2016), and many more. He is a member of the Japan Art Academy, and received the Japan Art Academy Prize and the Imperial Prize in 2015. He has been exhibiting gozo Ciné, a series of film work, since 2006. He is known as a pioneer of live poetry reading, and has performed in every region of Japan as well as France, Italy, the U.S., Brazil, South Korea and other countries. In 2016, his retrospective exhibition The Voice Between: The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo was held at the National Museum of Modern Art.