It is both a moving document and of practically no interest as poetry. The second is the poems of Araki Yasusada, a postal clerk whose family was wiped out by the bomb, but who lived on to 1972. The only problem is that Yasusada is the pseudonym of an anonymous, possibly American poet, who has brilliantly written all the work, complete with slightly awkward bits of translationese. Witness poetry, a sign of the times, reduces, yet again, the political to the personal, and confines the act of writing to a factual narcissism. It should be remembered that legal witnesses are not automatically presumed to be reliable.
Poets are no more or less credible, regardless of the greatness of the work.
Now we'll hate them worse than ever. The preceding was published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement in July 1996, and was the first public declaration of the pseudonymity of Araki Yasusada. A few weeks later, the American Poetry Review published an issue with a special supplement featuring Yasusada. APR , whose trademark is photos of the poets often larger than the poems themselves, represented the witness poet with what appeared to be the blurred xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a mug shot of some low-level yakuza. The first order of speculation was, of course, whodunit.