Bio-
graphy
Kosuke Miyata was born in Japan in 1980 and lived for 22 years in Kugayama, Tokyo, his hometown from which he often escaped
to regions of different landscapes and dialects since he got a motorcycle license.
He lived in New York as a student at the City College of New York since 2003, visiting Japan once every year.
His poem 'The Fishes' took third place in the English-Speaking Union New York Branch's city-wide poetry competition in 2004,
and 'Dusk Walk' earned him honorable mention in the Lumina National Poetry Contest in spring 2006 (judged by Mark Doty).
He published his first chapbook of poetry in Septebmer 2006. He moved back to Tokyo in September 2007,
after finishing a cross-North America ride.
1st
chapbook
Title: Current
Language: English
Editor: Leah Maines
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
ISBN: 1-59924-085-8
Available online at: amazon.com
Available for local pickup at: St. Mark's Bookshop in NYC
Kosuke Miyata's first poetry chapbook, Current, has been published by Finishing Line Press (Georgetown, KY). The Title poem is made of 18 sections and is based on his first experience going back from the USA to the place he grew up in.
Kosuke Miyata, world citizen born and educated in Japan, is a brilliant convert to the English language and to English prosody in all its richness. With a motorcycle as its Muse, this sequence [Current] takes a lyrically exuberant place in the American tradition of the poem as road movie.
——Marilyn Hacker
Among the paradoxes he realizes in his astonishing chapbook Current, Kosuke Miyata reveals how loss is built into everything we are; that inherent in the solid is the elusive—what we might call the eternal—flux tethered to matter; and what is most fleeting can be most beautifully and intricately made.
Through his attention to the nuances of form, language and meaning, Miyata weaves deep image with deep feeling to evoke deep spirit. He captures the Platonic current of time—an enduring streaming together of past, present and future—within the currency of a solitary moment. By seamlessly melding the urgency of what he says and how he says it, his masterful invention with fixed forms so effortless they seem inevitable, he liberates a world as multifaceted as crystal, as flickering as a guttering candle.
He also unveils that one can be more intensely aware of a language's potential when "foreign within the familiar," when it is not one's mother tongue, though the aura of his native Japanese persists, imbuing European forms, American diction, reinvigorating all. In the serene ecstasy of his voice, he achieves something marvelous: a new lyricism, necessary, radiant, profound.
——Yerra Sugarman
Media
2006/10/14 Yomiuri Shimbun (evening ed.) "Next Generation"
