Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida

CLCWeb, Oct 2017

In her article "Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida" Shoshannah Ganz shows how the limited focus of research on Roo Borson oversimplifies the poetry and ignores the tradition that Borson is aligning her work with both in form and content: classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and their perspectives on nature. Further, Ganz explores the ways in which Borson's poetry overcomes intuitively the binaries of East/West, human/non-human, and the further binaries within the human/non-human created through representational language. Ganz contextualizes Borson's work within the master/disciple lineage of Chinese and Japanese tradition and explores how Borson incorporates the resonances of Japanese place names and talismanic uses of nature and seasonal words into an Anglophone North American context to show similarly Japanese perspectives on impermanence and the place of humans as product and producer of nature.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2591&context=clcweb

Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida

Volume CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Shoshannah Ganz 0 1 2 0 Memorial University 1 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact 2 Part of the American Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Education Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons , Feminist, Gender , and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, Television Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. Recommended Citation This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field. - UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Volume 16 Issue 4 (December 2014) Article 6 Shoshannah Ganz, "Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss4/6> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.4 (2014) Thematic Issue New Work in Ecocriticism. Ed. Simon C. Estok and Murali Sivaramakrishnan <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss4/> Ōishida" Shoshannah Ganz shows how the limited focus of research on Roo Borson oversimplifies the poetry and ignores the tradition that Borson is aligning her work with both in form and content: classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and their perspectives on nature. Further, Ganz explores the ways in which Borson's poetry overcomes intuitively the binaries of East/West, human/non-human, and the further binaries within the human/non-human created through representational language. Ganz contextualizes Borson's work within the master/disciple lineage of Chinese and Japanese tradition and explores how Borson incorporates the resonances of Japanese place names and talismanic uses of nature and seasonal words into an Anglophone North American context to show similarly Japanese perspectives on impermanence and the place of humans as product and producer of nature. Shoshannah GANZ Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida Roo (Ruth Elizabeth) Borson's tenth poetry collection, Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida published in 2004, won two of the highest honors in Canadian literature—the Governor General's Award in 2005 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006. Mike Quinn discusses Borson's poetry as characterized by the "elegiac" and "nostalgic" and Borson likewise describes herself as living through seven years of mourning with the deaths of her father and mother. Eric Ormsby, in a more dismissive vein, calls her "pre-eminently a poet of the present instant" (123) and Nick Giese takes issue with "Borson find[ing] a possibility of consciousness without human reflection" (293). All of these critiques take a specialized and specific look at aspects of Borson's work, but none of them take any notice of the Asian and, specifically, Japanese ecocritical influence and resonances in her work. The Canadian Encyclopedia concludes its entry on Borson by noting that in 2000 Borson co-published a book of what she called "free variations" on Classical Chinese poetry, Introduction to the Introduction of Wang Wei (Pain Not Bread) and that her Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida "is similarly influenced by her interest in Asian poetry and nature" ("Roo Borson" <http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ruth-elizabethborson/>). However, in spite of (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2591&context=clcweb

Shoshannah Ganz. Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida, CLCWeb, 2018, Volume 16, Issue 4,