Shuri Kido is a poet who made a great shift, in the history of Japanese poetry, from the post war poetry (so-called Sengo-shi) to the contemporary. He majored in French literature in Meiji University, and during his course of study, he became interested in, and thoroughly read all those poets East and West, old and new. But among those, Modernist American poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the Japanese poets Junzaburo Nishiwaki and Minoru Yoshioka gave him major influences, and inspirations to write.
At the time he began to write poems, the post war poetry was dominating the Japanese poetry scene. But as a late comer, he came to realize that not only the sentiment, but especially the poetics of the post war poets were something that were not valid to express the contemporary. Since the Japanese post war poets were heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the poetics that were employed - metaphor, he felt the need of renewing the Japanese poetry onto the next stage. As a result, he has realized, and still keeps writing poems that consist not of symbols nor metaphor, but poems of what each line actually means. "The poet who destroyed the post war poetry" is how people call him, but that is not actually true. "The poet who renewed Japanese poetry" should be his title.
Shuri Kido is the author of several books of poems as Shokan (which means "Nekuia"), Non Ferrous, Iteki - Barbarians, A Thousand Names, Genesis of the Earth, and now preparing his prose books consisting of three volumes. (ENDO, tomoyuki)