ABSTRACT
In 1969, from March 13 to April 3, four poets from Mexico, France, England, and Italy, met in the basement of Hôtel St. Simon, on the left bank of Paris (Paz 1972). Octavio Paz (1914–1998) had invited Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson to join him to put into practice the renga, a Japanese practice of chain poem making that goes back to medieval times. The reader will remember from Chapter 6 that one of Rikyū’s teachers of tea was Takeno Jōō, who also was a renga poet. Paz's and his fellow poets’ decision to attempt renga was prompted by a shared understanding of their place in intellectual history. As Paz summarized in the “Introduction” to the book, publication of the resultant poem:“In contrast with the conception of a literary work as the imitation of antique models, the modern age has exalted the values of originality and novelty.” It tasks “the literary work as ... the reflection of the exceptional ego. ... I believe that, today, this idea has reached its end. ... surrealism, in rediscovering inspiration and making of it the very focal point of writing, put into brackets the notion of authors” (Paz 1972, 17). To the four poets,
The practice of the renga implies the negation of certain cardinal western notions, such as the belief in the soul and in the reality of the I. ... [I]n the West the practice of renga could be salutary. An antidote against the notion of author and intellectual property, a criticism of the I and of the writer and his masks”.
(Paz 1972, 21–5)