Chika Sagawa is a digital poet. Yet Sagawa—the spectacular modernist writer who, in her short life, created breathtaking works of free verse poetry that are experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide—is not who might immediately come to mind when talking about the “digital.” The term “digital poet” evokes a certain image: of a contemporary avant-garde media practitioner, using digital technologies to create new types of poems on the screens of various electronic devices. There are certainly plenty of poets in Japan today who match this description—ni_ka’s “Augmented Reality poems,” only viewable through smartphones; Tahi Saihate’s whimsical “Poetry Hacks,” which use as many functionalities of web browsers as possible in their rethinking of poetics; and, of course, the thousands of social media-based poets who compose verse for Twitter, blogs, and Instagram1. Sagawa is not one of these—how could she be, when she did not live past the 1930s?

It is difficult to capture the vibrancy of literary and artistic production in the context in which Sagawa was active—Japan’s 1920s and 1930s—with an explosion in the number of literary journals (and magazines more generally), art exhibitions, theater troupes, film studios, radio shows, and photographers. An aspiring poet had a vast number of potential venues for publishing their work, and the most successful (or wealthy) might have their work collected and released as sole-authored collections, often with gorgeous cover designs. Over the course of the six years (starting in 1930) that Sagawa was an active poet, her work was published in 38 (!) different journals with names like Variétés, Poetry and Poetics (Shi to shiron), Cockfight (Tōkei), White Paper (Hakushi), Poesie d’aujourd’hui (Kyō no shi), Seashell (Kaigara), Literature (Bungaku), Étoile de Mer, Le Serpent (Serupan), Poesy (Shihō), and Madame Blanche2. Yet, like so many poets of her time—really, any of those apart from a small handful of “major” figures whose works were repeatedly reprinted, anthologized, and analyzed—Sagawa’s work was largely inaccessible in the many decades after its original publication, a situation which has only changed very recently with the Japanese publication of her complete works in 20223. Previously, there was a posthumous collection of her poetry published in 1936, the year of her death—the few extant copies of which are largely held in museum collections—after which she quickly faded into obscurity. A few of her poems were then included in a 1952 anthology of Japanese poets, published during the American occupation. And, at long last, her poems were reprinted in a complete edition by Shinkaisha in 1983, but in a limited run of only around 600 copies: collectors’ items that often run into the thousands of dollars when they rarely show up at auction. This last edition was reprinted in 2010, though only in similar numbers, and remains rare.

But there is a certain alchemy that may happen to works no longer in copyright, when ink can become pixels and older works of literature can gain new lives by being freely available online even when they are not in print. This isn’t magic, of course—an immense amount of labor (often made invisible) goes into transcribing, scanning, formatting, encoding, hosting, uploading, organizing, and making available public domain works on sites like Project Gutenberg and Aozora Bunko, its Japanese equivalent. In the case of Sagawa, her digital afterlife was made possible by the efforts of a teenage girl who was taken by her poetry and wanted to share it with a new audience. “I found [Sagawa’s] poetry thanks to this sixteen-year-old girl who had typed up all of her poems and posted them on her blog,” said Sawako Nakayasu in an interview, who went on to translate those poems and begin the new wave of interest in Sagawa’s work. “They blew me away—I had to investigate!”4

More than 70 years after her death and the publication of her collected work, Sagawa—whose poetry had never been easy to come by—thus became a digital poet, in the most basic sense of being a poet whose work is particularly accessible through digital means, perhaps gaining more readers through the screens of laptops and cellphones than ever had a chance to encounter her work on the printed page. But in calling Sagawa a “digital poet,” I want to go beyond my admittedly heavy-handed characterization of all writers whose work ends up online as “digital.” Instead, I wish to highlight the powerful resonances her poems have with certain aspects of digitality and the modes of sensation that have intensified in the contemporary media environment. This is along the lines of what Lori Emerson, in her essay “My Digital Dickinson,” calls a “productive misreading,” arguing that “we can foreground the ways in which the digital now permeates our reading/writing habits and the ways in which our current cultural moment may be a productive frame for reading [Emily] Dickinson” (who is, of course, another “pre-digital” poet)5. Even for poets who existed before digital technology, in other words, there is much to be gained through reading them in a way that is self-reflexive about digitality—not just in the act of reading them on a screen, but in reading them from a perspective that acknowledges how the “terminology and theoretical framing of the present moment is so steeped in the digital that, often without our knowing, it saturates our language and habits of thought.”6

Considering the unique aspects of Chika Sagawa’s poetry—its themes, imagery, and preoccupation with various forms of mediation—it is particularly generative to read her work in relation not just to media technologies but to when and how they break down. Focusing on the concepts of the glitch and glitch poetics, as well as the related concept of disability poetics, I will explore how Sagawa’s poetry approaches mediation in a way that centers non-normative embodiment and sensation. I am not arguing, of course, that Sagawa’s work was inspired by digital media (which did not exist in anything resembling its current state until several decades after her death) or even that her work directly anticipates the “digital.” But, at a time when digital technologies have become so entangled with how we read, write, see, and think, whether or not we are actually “on” our devices, there is an urgency to conceptualizing the digital, or a broader kind of “digitality,” beyond the screen. Sagawa’s “glitch poetics”—not despite but because of their “pre-digital” existence—generate new ways of thinking about our relationship to technological mediation.

Chika Sagawa’s poetry is preoccupied with vision and mediation, and particularly how they break down. Nakayasu points to the intense visuality of Sagawa’s poems: how they “operate in a fashion similar to a tableau or montage, placing images one after the other in the reader’s eye.”7 These images are far from conventional: while often describing what at first seem to be landscapes, natural scenes, urban or even domestic environments, there is a prevailing sense of wrongness. Every element is fragmented, or doesn’t behave as it should; colors, textures, and sounds are ascribed to referents that they couldn’t possibly apply to; and most of all, there is a feeling of fragility, of a specific momentary juxtaposition that threatens to fall apart at any time. A passage in Sagawa’s 1931 poem “Green Flames” encapsulates much of what is characteristic of her poetry:

This, I argue, is an extraordinary “pre-digital” example of glitch poetics. First, what is “glitchy” about this? To play a video game and to have it go “wrong”—an extremely frequent occurrence—has powerful resonances with Sagawa’s use of imagery. Interacting with computer-generated 3D worlds is rarely an immersive experience in a virtual reality: rather than seamless, the seams are constantly laid bare. Glitches are a major way in which this happens, where problems in graphical rendering, for example, distort and transform what’s on screen, a spectacle that reveals the (il)logic of the processes that are generating the world we see. What was once a landscape becomes a collection of shards and colors, perspectives become fragmented, the boundaries between previously distinct elements break down, and objects become what they shouldn’t be. This is also, of course, a key part of Sagawa’s poetics, including in this poem: in “Green Flames,” “electric wires” are spun into a “mist,” perspective and color become warped as “everything rotates from a green to a deeper green,” and figures “crumble as they block off shafts of light.” At a turning point in “Green Flames” there is a distinctive Sagawa image: “I hurry to shut the window/danger has come right up to me” (“watashi wa awatete mado o tojiru/kiken wa watashi made kite iru”). This is far from the only appearance of the window as a central image in her work, almost always as a site of instability or threat. In her poem “Morning Bread,” the narrator sees “several friends escaping from the window”; “hazy blue dusk scales the window” in “Rusty Knife”; the city “dive[s] into the display window” in “Departure”; twilight “peer[s] into the window” in “Opal”; a “wrinkled curtain by the window” is “gathered, then torn apart” in “Shapes of Clouds”; butterflies “tear off the flower patterns from windows” in “Days of Snow”; autumn is likened to “Arabian script staggering on the windowpane” in “Seasonal Monocle”; and in “Dream,” the central figure is “unable to explain with her back to the clear window,” her ring “replicat[ing] its reflection many times over,” seemingly giving the impression of “gorgeous stained glass.”

In terms of what is illuminated by thinking of Sagawa’s work as “glitch poetry,” I wish to turn to a wide range of works that touch on this concept. Though “glitch” is a term that refers to some kind of error, malfunction, or breakdown—especially in regards to digital technologies—its potential is not solely a destructive one. Many have explored the generative aspects of the glitch in a variety of fields and disciplines. The glitch artist and musician Ryoji Ikeda, to name one prominent figure, gained global fame in the late ‘90s through to the present, creating installations that place the audience in the midst of vast fields of glitching, static-filled screens and projections, and pieces of music that deliberately use glitches to create texture and shape from sound. More conceptually, the glitch represents a breakdown in a system of any kind—not just computer systems, but systems of language, politics, racialization, gender, sexuality, and ableism, to name just some examples—that has generative or even liberatory potential. In a way that parallels how, say, a glitch in a video game might both show us something about how the game was coded (and the limitations thereof) as well as a potential way to play with the game and complete it in ways unintended by its original creators, the glitch represents both a spectacularization of the underlying logic of systems that were previously concealed to us, and potentially, a way out of them.

Several theorists of the glitch share this viewpoint about its productiveness in regards to materiality, mediation, embodiment, and liberation. For Sean Cubitt, “Glitch is the evidence that control is never complete”; it is “a small revenge, a tactical revolt of the material against its organization, of materiality against intent.”9 Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa speaks of “the moments of the glitch, when the machine stops seemingly extending our actions and asserts itself as itself,” approaching “an active dialogue of intentions where two differing worldviews are stated.10 For Lauren Fournier, there is something intensely feminist about moments like these: “The glitch comes to stand simultaneously for the embodiment of a system’s failure—to understand and properly signify the experiences of intense women—and the aesthetic potentiality for feminist subversion that lies within that failure.”11 Legacy Russell powerfully articulates the feminist and liberatory potential of the glitch, culminating in her “Glitch Feminism” manifesto that draws from a broad range of Black, trans, and queer feminisms, pushing against the lack of intersectionality of the “cyberfeminism” of the 1990s onward. To Russell, the glitch is not just an error, but an erratum: a “correction to the ‘machine’,” broadly conceived, and a way of breaking from “a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification.”12 Through the lens of glitch feminism, “glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance,” with a particular focus not on using the body as a site of resistance (as has been historically characteristic of so much feminist thought, including feminist poetry), but on “resisting the body as a coercive social and cultural architecture.”13 “Glitch poetics” takes this idea and applies it to the realm of poetic practice: in a paper of that name, Nathan Jones argues that “our experience of media is precisely—and perhaps uniquely—the experience of their failure,” and speaks of glitch poetics’ use of the “productive potential of such indeterminacies to hold us in the infinite horizon opened up by language.”14 Glitch poetics points to how poetry—already a type of literary creation with an enormous capacity to remake language otherwise—has the potential to both evoke and be the glitch, especially in connection to conventional ideas about technology, media, and communication.

In “Green Flames,” the glitch occurs when the presence of the outside has made its way too far in, becoming a threat that must be banished from the realm of the narrator’s sight. The “green” in “Green Flames,” says Toshiko Ellis, is a “symbol of life,” but a harmful, overpowering one—it “invades through the window” and the narrator is even “unable to bear seeing it reflected in the milk bottle on the dining table, quickly shut[ting] the window to protect herself.”15 The dramatic shutting of a window to stop further danger unintentionally echoes a classic (and terrifying) error in the Windows operating system, commonly known as the “Blue Screen of Death.” When this dreaded event occurs, everything immediately stops working, a deep azure fills the visual field, and, in white text, a long error message tells you that “a problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” In Sagawa’s poetics, there is something amiss with the world’s “operating system”; her windows, like Windows, are the medium through which her narrators tend to experience the world, but even this aperture can become overwhelmed by the too-muchness of experience, language forced to step in where vision inevitably fails.

A glitch can often be addressed by a “patch,” a modification to a program specifically created to fix certain issues, usually accompanied by a “patch note” detailing what problems were addressed. Some of these were repurposed into a work of poetry in James Ardis’ “Patch Notes” from 2018, with reports of glitches from multiple computer games altered and put side by side in a way that evokes a bizarre, surreal world breaking apart at the seams:

Sagawa’s poetry, including “Green Flames,” also reads like a meticulous error log characteristic of a game tester—though, of course, instead of a game, the narrators in her poems seem to be testing the boundaries of the world itself, the senses and apparatus by which we experience it, and the words through which we describe it. Technologies of vision and sound are often evoked in her work, intensifying the focus on the materialities of sensation and how they can be distorted and reshaped. Far from the conventional idea of media opening up new possibilities of communication, in Sagawa’s poems they are, again, broken down, unpredictable, and glitched. In “Promenade,” for example, cinema is rendered into a “black and white screen” (shiro to kuro no sukurīn) immediately juxtaposed with an image of non-seeing, of eyes “covered by clouds” (hitomi wa kumo ni ōwarete); the titular bugs in “Insects” multiply “with the speed of an electric current” (konchū ga denryū no yō na sokudo de hanshoku shita) linking together technologization with grotesque vitality; far from linking together two disparate areas, a phone ringing makes the villagers in “My Picture” question if “we must relocate” (doko ka e ijū shinakereba naranai no desu ka?); a precarious antenna uncannily “traverses above, running” (antenna was ono ue o yokogitte hashiru) in “Fragment”; and sonic devices are no exception to this kind of failure, with a “torn accordion” (yabureta tefūkin) in “Ocean of Memory,” and a “broken gramophone” (kowareta chikuonki) in “Wind.”

Yet her tone in these poems is not necessarily one of horror—at a world so changed by technology it has become unrecognizable and nightmarish, a hybrid techno-natural ruin—but is often more detached, underlining the sense that she is taking a critical stance. She is seemingly skeptical of the promises of cinema, electricity, photography, and sound recording, yet still treats them in their failure as generative sources for novel kinds of imagery and meaning-making. This resonates with something Sagawa explicitly lays out in her 1934 essay, “Had They Been the Eyes of Fish”: recounting her experience in an art gallery, she noted that she finds completed paintings “just not interesting,” and was “actually more attracted to the works that failed (haten no aru mono).”17 Reading Sagawa through the lens of glitch poetics is not a fetishization of the technological, but instead highlights the critique of mediation (technologized or otherwise) that runs throughout her work. The context in which she was writing, of course, was a time when multiple new media forms and related infrastructures were emerging or in rapid transition—the shift from silent to sound film beginning in the late 1920s, the growth in popularity of radio starting from the first transmission in Japan in 1925, the jostling of multiple electric companies for dominance over Japan’s power grid throughout the ‘20s, and the appearance of home telephones starting in the late 1920s, to name just a few examples. Yet unlike many of the poets of her time—Kambara Tai’s Futurist glorification of machinery of any kind, Kitagawa Fuyuhiko’s seeing, in cinema, a new kind of poetic potential—Sagawa, game tester-like, had a cooler approach, more concerned with how mediation can go wrong—or, more accurately, how its distortions were just as, if not more, important to conveying the experience of the world—than conventional ideas about new media allowing for ever-superior forms of communication and access. And in Sagawa’s poetry, we can find a critique not just of media technologies in their broken-down form, but of the processes of mediation itself—how media purport to give us new kinds of vision and hearing, but in doing so reveal assumptions about how bodies should already be seeing and hearing.

This leads us to how glitch poetics can also be a disability poetics—a poetics that centers the processes that render some bodies “abled” and some “disabled,” and through which disabled poets grapple with the evocation of non-normative embodiment and sensation. In Jim Ferris’ definition, disability poetry is characterized by “a challenge to stereotypes and an insistence on self-definition; foregrounding of the perspective of people with disabilities; an emphasis on embodiment, especially atypical embodiment; and alternative techniques and poetics”—a description which fully applies to Sagawa’s work.18 In “Green Flames,” “the green foliage, symbolizing the life force,” says Ellis, “was not a source of energy but a threat for Sagawa, who suffered from ill health since childhood and also had weak eyesight. Apparently, her health actually deteriorated during the spring season.”19 As Ellis argues, a consistent part of Sagawa’s poetics is that she “place[s] the natural landscape in opposition to the self” and frames nature as a “menacing force,” ready to intrude into both the body and self and destroy it.20 This is no coincidence, but is rather an aspect of Sagawa’s poetics that was grounded in the particularities of her own body—its chronic illnesses from childhood, the way it shaped her vision of the world, and its relationship to the cycles of nature.

Dominant society’s conventional—medicalized and ableist—idea of disability, as Simi Linton has explored, is as a “deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy.”21 Poets and artists like Sagawa—who would be characterized as “low vision” using today’s language, and who certainly had health issues throughout her life—also become tied to an idea of their being “mysterious, mournful, and tragic” and as “emblem[s] of loss,” as blind disability theorist Georgina Kleege puts it.22 Indeed, it is hard to escape this image of Chika Sagawa: of her as a forgotten poetic genius who not only died tragically young, but whose body harmfully shaped her life, keeping her indoors, and made even looking out her window a painful experience.

To think of Sagawa’s work in terms of disability poetics is to resist these characterizations, which can too easily fall into an ableist imaginary which uncritically marks some bodies as normal but any others as wrong, grotesque, or pitiful. Her non-normative vision and embodiment powerfully informed a similarly non-normative approach to poetry, as she grappled with how a body could create poetry otherwise. Though tragedy was certainly a part of her story, it did not constitute its whole. It is true that the narrators of her poems are regularly bounded-off, walled-in, interacting with a distorted world only through the fraught space of the window. But the bounded-ness of these figures does not extend to the immensely exploratory, world-shattering approach she took to her work—the genuinely innovative way she used imagery; how she completely remade the senses (particularly sight) in the space of her poems; and how unflinchingly she centered her own particular embodiment, in ways that anticipate the more explicitly feminist poetry of the 1980s onwards in Japan. As Rosa Menkman says in her groundbreaking “Glitch Studies Manifesto,” “somewhere within the destructed ruins of meaning, hope exists; a triumphal sensation that there is something more than just devastation.”23 Take Sagawa’s 1931 poem, “Blemish on the Grape”:

“Cloud-covered eyes” could easily be read as a poetic take on cataracts, or as a way to evoke Sagawa’s low vision as being “clouded.” But there is also something far more interesting happening here: the “cloud-covered eyes” allow the narrator a new kind of vision, one attentive to the minutiae of the “black specks darting through the air,” that can detect the “teeth marks” left behind by the silhouettes of trees, and that can take the blossoms that once lay before the “darkness of [her] eyelids” and shower them across the landscapes before her. The normative idea of vision is of passive reception through the optical nerve; here, it has become an active force, one linked to eyesight but not fully conflated with it.

“Disability is a glitch in the system,” Elizabeth Ellcessor reminds us, “revealing the system’s failures and offering a leverage point from which to pry it apart and potentially rebuild it.”25 Here, the failure is in the system of conventional poetic language, of literary and media forms whose approach to vision were unfit for Sagawa’s purposes. Taking this “glitch” as a starting point, she rethought poetry in a way that remains fresh and startling almost a century later, the vibrant afterlife of her work taking each window that was closed to her and creating a thousand more anew.