My room is covered with piles of old newspapers. I had not realized how many of them had accumulated; it is now a melee of thousands of newspaper headlines gathered from countries far and near where those newspapers were read and then thrown away. I pick up fragments of text and transform them into new characters. Sometimes these new characters are used to make up the title of a poem. As usual, today I am buried in this dream island of old newspapers and I rummage through them randomly looking for bits I might use. Whenever I see something I like, I just rip it out and paste it along with others to create new characters. There I have another one finished; "Appreciation, Emotion, Rain, Hail."

By Fumio Tachibana