One Thing at a Time:  Poems of Japan, 2016
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  April 2017.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
96 pages, with a gatefold color cover reproducing a photograph by the author, 30 original drawings created for the book by Abraham David Christian, a black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece by Joy L. Glass, Basho-an, Kyoto, Japan, March 7, 2016, and an introduction by the author.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN:  1-893207-37-4.
ISBN:  978-1-893207-37-0.
Published by Galerie Albrecht, Berlin, Germany, 2017.

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On the occasion of publishing the book, One Thing at a Time:  Poems of Japan, 2016, by Richard Milazzo, Galerie Albrecht presented the exhibition:  One Thing at a Time:  Drawings and Sculptures by Abraham David Christian, curated by the author.  Besides the sculptures, the exhibition included the suite of 30 drawings (三十 [san jû]) Abraham David Christian made in Japan to “illustrate” the book.

In the Preface, the author writes: “Most of the poems (excepting two) in One Thing at a Time were written during a recent trip to Japan, in February and March of 2016.  In the poems about Hiroshima, I felt sure indirection was the only possible approach.  The hope is that the sincerity of my intentions will carry me and that no part of my life-long-shock will be misconstrued.  As for the rest, we can clearly see at work here, in these poems, history rooted in the most visceral of ontological predications, where it is not simply symptomatic of an erotics of retrospection. When this author gazes up at the burgeoning fruition of the plum or cherry blossom tree, he sees only an overwhelming population, a fleeting consort and delicate conceit, of erotic thresholds.  Clearly, he is dizzy with the pollen of existential spring, even as the thought of everlasting devastation and winter can never leave him, both by nature and circumstance.  The ‘blossom’ here is simultaneously jejune and apocalyptic.

“In its simplicity and sincerity, the title (which I borrowed from the artist), One Thing at a Time, and, by implication, the book, wants to describe experiences that I imagine were not dissimilar to those of the great seventeenth-century Edo period poet, Matsuo Basho, when it is said, perhaps somewhat apocryphally, he lived in a small house or hut in the northeastern hills of Kyoto Prefecture.  Because this title (and the concept behind it) embodied the spirit of his work as an artist, I invited Abraham David Christian, who has, for as long as I can remember, lived part of the year in Japan, as well Dusseldorf and New York City, to do the abstract or analogical drawings, some even exquisitely and daringly illustrative, for this book of poems.  Although I have never visited David’s small cottage in Hayama, pictures of it are evocative of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, and Basho’s modest dwelling (Basho-an) in the northeast hills of Kyoto.

“In the course of preparing the exhibition, the publisher-gallerist, Susanne Albrecht, in Berlin, wrote: ‘There is a vivid relationship between the drawings and the poems.  The drawings could be images that reflect the meaning of the poems and they could be read as characters of an archaic language, thus giving the poetry the atmosphere of an oracle, of words and wisdom from a very old time.  Now you have not only time, but also space in the book’.

“In this world of Pop culture, where the American ethos has unfortunately become a global reality, it was not that I wasn’t tempted to use as the book’s title, Apocalypse and Love or Girls Giggling Beneath the A-Bomb Dome.  The former, because it made an ever so subtle allusion to Alain Resnais’s great film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959); the latter, to distance myself, in a Brechtian manner, from a topic still too painful to address directly – the former (title) obviously being ultimately too facetious and lacking sufficient gravitas, at least for me.  The common idiom, ‘One Thing at a Time’, on the other hand, while facile to an extreme, catches at something that goes against the very grain of our Age of multi-tasking and social media.  In the end, for me, it captures the ‘space between our thoughts’; it is about slowing things down long enough to actually experience them, if only in parts or as a partial reality.”