What a blessing it was December 28, 2022, to interview Shuri Kido, the accomplished Japanese poet and Zen practitioner. As I told he and his translators (Tomoyuki Endo, Forrest Gander) on that occasion, I don’t know of a higher calling at this time than building bridges between different cultures. What a stunning effort Names And Rivers is! Thank you Shuri Kido, Tomoyuki, Forrest and Copper Canyon Press! I especially am taken with the Zen notion of “transparency” as it appears in the poems of this collection.

The audio version of this interview is available below and there is a video version here. Here is my introduction to the interview:

Names and Rivers is a book of poems by Shuri Kido translated from his native Japanese into English by Forrest Gander and Tomoyuki Endo and published by Copper Canyon Press. Shuri Kido is known as “the far north poet” and one of the most influential living poets in Japan. Forrest Gander is a poet and award-winning translator and Tomoyuki Endo is an Assistant Professor at Wako University in Tokyo with interest in modernists and postmodernists such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder among others.