The yoshida-bun was an experimental literary form put forth in the writings of Yoshida Hana, wife of the illustrious minimalist pioneer Yoshida Hayabusa , who found fame with his various forays into exhibiting the raw elements of earth, wood, stone as they were -- visually organic reductions that found force in their statement of this is what I am, and nothing more. Similarly, the yoshida-bun (the name was applied in post by her friends; its inventor never gave it a name) arrests through engaging with the raw material of text itself, unadorned components of noun, verb, adjective, etc. The understanding, among the few that have had access to her personal effects, is that Mrs. Yoshida intended her poetry to be expressed as simply as possible as the arrangement of linguistic units that -- like her husband's works -- demanded force through their absolute existence. Noun-verb, for instance, exemplified the unification of action as mere properties of immanent materiality, extending simply from an ubiquitous object (not subject, as the sequence might be interpreted in English; Mrs. Yoshida never learned to speak the language). Consequently we find in verb-noun an unnatural, even imperative inversion of this idiom where forceful action is imposed upon the material. Similar subtleties can be extended (or really, discovered) towards Mrs. Yoshida's abstracted grammar, resulting in verses of poetry that can only be understood as pointing not towards things (even unreal ones), but towards the spaces between them, uncovering in them the hidden rhythms and variations of pure semantic itself.

A secretary by training, Mrs. Yoshida soon came to substitute the text themselves with her own personal shorthand, and later poems, as they delved the invisible plains of her relational aesthetics, nevertheless came to resemble nigh-unintelligible collections of glyphs, especially as she began plumbing the possibilities of her reductive craft. Her notebooks between 1967 and 1969 were increasingly filled with blossoming sigils where semantic units overlaid upon each other generated patchworks of meaning now entirely abstracted from the linearity of human thought itself, leading to many to frame this phase of her work as a foray into visual art along the lines of Cy Twombly or the early surrealists. Yet there was always an order and pattern to her madness: at times one would see in Mrs. Yoshida's margins detailed flowcharts, attempts to diagonalise her abstracted inspiration into two-dimensional sequential thought. These notes were left entirely for herself, because Mrs. Yoshida, in her work, never once sought the approval of her husband, much less the comprehension of sceptical publishers. They remained, for the rest of her life, as they were written: brief sketches in soft graphite in the pages of her gargantuan notepad, or scribbled on the stray napkins, envelopes, and receipts that littered the drawers of her room.

Mrs. Yoshida died in 1976 of lung cancer, surrounded by a few friends and her husband. She would only be known in the obituaries as Hayabusa's devoted wife, friend, and muse -- a fitting end, it seems, for the woman and her craft.

As usual, we present to you a sample of our featured poet's work as a representation, and seek your participation in emulating the yoshida-bun's unusual style.

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*Untitled #582
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o ^ o / o ^ = o
= o, = o, / o
/ ~!

Yoshida H., 1975