September Poetry Café: Zuihitsu

Join us for our monthly Poetry Café in the Great Hall. For our September café, we will be sharing zuihitsu.

The Poetry Café was on hiatus for the summer, and attendees spent the time writing zuihitsu. We will share portions from these long-form pieces. Come ready to share your work or be an attentive listener, all are welcome. Please register below.

A Japanese hybrid form that can be traced back to Sei Shōnagon’s 10th-century text The Pillow Book, zuihitsu is often translated from the Japanese as “following the brush.” This capacious genre incorporates nonfiction, musings and confessions, poetry, and miscellany to create a spontaneous, layered text. Zuihitsu writings signify the issues and attitudes that surround the author at the time of composition. The form is hybrid, neither personal essay nor poem, and falls more so within the category of a prose poem. There are no strict formal rules of meter or rhyme to writing a zuihitsu. Instead, the zuihitsu is written in free verse and can shift formally, depending on the preferences of the author.

To learn more, visit these links: Poetry Foundation Zuihitsu; Poets.org Zuihitsu; The Margins Zuihitsu.

There is some debate on the origin of the phrase “Poetry Café.” Some argue it refers to the Modernists (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, TS Eliot, etc.) sharing their work in the cafés in Europe. As spoken word poetry has gained traction and the genre of slam poetry has evolved, some trace the phrase to the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan. The café was founded in 1973 by Rutgers professor Miguel Algarín and gave Puerto Rican New York poets a place to meet and share their work. Although the café was closed for several years in the 1980’s, it continues to serve as an arts center for the Nuyorican community.