Education
Nomura initially focused on an academic career: he studied Japanese and French literature, and taught for a number of years at various schools in Tokyo, including Meiji University and Waseda University.
野村 喜和夫
Nomura initially focused on an academic career: he studied Japanese and French literature, and taught for a number of years at various schools in Tokyo, including Meiji University and Waseda University.
He is considered one of the driving forces behind contemporary Japanese poetry. Since around 2000, however, he has concentrated exclusively on creative work – as a poet, performer, critic, publisher, and organizer of poetry festivals. The work of Nomura “plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza.” Forrest Gander, co-translator of Kiwao Nomura’s poetry, noted in an interview, “What we find in innovative Japanese poetries like Gozo Yoshimasu’s and Kiwao Nomura’s has, as far as I know, no equivalents in contemporary poetry in English.
The mix of the philosophical and the whimsical makes for a tone that is absolutely weird to Westerners.” According to Poetry International Web, “In all such experiments, Nomura shows himself to be very much in search of a center of gravity where the almost ritual repetitions and revisitations of captivating sounds and (often erotic) images dissolve of their own accord into the night, darkness, nothingness, the end of a delirium.” Publisher’s Weekly concludes that Nomura’s poems “succeed through astonishment, shock, and disorder, almost in the manner of Kathy Acker or William South. Burroughs.”.