Heiichi Sugiyama Comments

I got chills from this guy as to how great his poetry is and how it speaks to me and actually put me in a good mood when I was at the depths of trauma and post traumatic collapse just earlier today. To find out he was a 'professional poet' is exciting too. And I dig the detail about being a film critic and theorist. His poems have a true painterly succinct ion and beauty to them with a graph of a fictional element.

Heiichi Sugiyama (1914–2012) was a Japanese poet, film critic, and film theorist. Born the son of a wealthy engineer in Fukushima Prefecture, Sugiyama studied art history at the University of Tokyo, and it was at that time that he was discovered by the poet Tatsuji Miyoshi. After graduating, he founded the literary journal Osaka bungaku with Sakunosuke Oda. He won the Nakahara Chuya Prize in 1941 and the Bungei Panron Prize in 1943 for his poetry.

Sugiyama began as a lyric poet and movie critic in the early 1930s, lost the family business in an air raid during the war, struggled to support his family through the cash crunch, labour strikes and bankruptcy in the turbulent post-war years, and finally attained just enough security to fully engage in artistic activities in the 1960s. In fact, he had to wait for 24 years to publish his second book of poetry after the first collection which came out in 1943.

Born in 1914, Heiichi Sugiyama lived through many dramatic changes in the cultural and social landscapes of Japan, from the liberal and lively 1910s and 1920s of the so-called ‘Taisho Democracy’, during which modernism and lyricism blossomed in the art scene, to the militaristic 1930s leading up to the catastrophic defeat in World War II and the post-war decades of ‘miracle recovery’, during which economy dominated the national mindset.