No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home

KAZUMI TANAKA, GIRL, 2007, OOLONG ON PAPER, 10″ X 10″

If there is no returning home, what does “home” mean? If home across the sea in Japan fades away like a childhood memory? Becomes a sea of time impossible to cross?

Poet Jeffrey Yang and artist Kazumi Tanaka collaborated on “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home,” a series of poems and drawings. Yang decided to use the Renga poetic structure. This is a Japanese collaborative linked verse form that traditionally alternates 5-7-5 and 7-7 syllable verses up to fifty times, for a total of a hundred verse units. It is normally composed by two or more poets. In this case, Tanaka became the other poet.

More about their collaboration here

Read “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home.”