Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals

Reconnaissance brings together a decade’s worth of Mark Pawlak’s work exploring the nexus of Japanese poetic journals and American observational poetics. These new and selected poems owe allegiance to the early experimental books of William Carlos Williams (e.g. Spring and All) as much as to the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagan and to Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. They join aspects of poetry with the daily, or near daily, “takes” of journal writing, but differ from traditional diaries or journals by emphasizing the act of writing itself in collaboration with the day’s account.