Happy New Year, everybody! & Happy Nanao Sakaki Centennial and Global Nanao Day
We’re delighted to announce that Felipe Melhado’s suggestion, a couple of months back, of a day of simultaneous and, to some degree, spontaneous, celebration (you can all join in!) for the late great Japanese “wandering poet, Nanao Sakaki, a dear friend of Allen’s and of Gary Snyder’s, and of many of us here, has been fully realized.
Among the events planned today – Felipe, and Grafatório, the Brazilian collective, will be creating a new Global Nanao website (to be launched 3pm EST, 5pm Brasilia time ) (as well as publishing a new collection of Nanao’s poems in Portuguese translation this coming Spring). Carol Merrill in New Mexico (along with Gary Lawless, Nanao’s US publisher), will be editing, designing and publishing a new book, Hi Nanao (in collaboration with Gary’s Blackberry Books), Anne McNaughton will be leading a community reading of Nanao’s poems in Taos, New Mexico (1-2pm MST), and Donald Guravich will be reading Nanao’s poems to the Bolinas mesa,sky,and bay.
John Stokes‘ short film, “Nanao at 100 – Poems of Land and Life” made in conjunction with cinematographer Bjarni Haraldsson, will be available – here
Emphasizing the international, no, global, reach of today’s (this year’s) events, participants from Italy, France, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and the Czech Republic (see here), have all announced their 2023 plans – and today (Nanao’s actual birthday) is just the beginning!
We here at the Allen Ginsberg Project, present our contribution – a portfolio of photographs of Nanao taken by Allen (an edited selection, it should be noted – he took quite a few)
Previous postings on Nanao on the Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here,
here, here, here and here
Here’s Joanne Kyger reading Nanao’s classic poem “If you have time to chatter..”
David Chadwick’s 2004 interview with Nanao
Lazar Pascanovic – on Nanao Sakaki – The Walking Poet:
“Who was Nanao Sakaki? More than a decade after his death, that question is not easy to answer – mostly because he was a little bit of everything, all the while refusing to be anything. A Zen master, a wandering philosopher, a Beat poet, a counter-cultural leader, an unrelenting environmentalist and a passionate traveler – these are just some of the designations that have been given him throughout his long life..”
Hear Nanao, back in 2007, in Tucson, Arizona, reading at The Drawing Studio
More Nanao links:
https://www.zestletteraturasostenibile.com/la-poesia-di-nanao-sakaki-a-cento-anni-dalla-nascita/
– and, down in Alabama – “Charles Tortorici, Joyce Hudson, and Ned Mudd celebrated Nanao’s 100th over tea and a few of Nanao’s poems and stories. Tortorici belted out a poem in the chanting style of Nanao, which is still reverberating throughout the Cahaba River watershed. Accompanying the celebration was a Great blue heron and a shadowy Bard owl.”