July 24, 2025 By Greg Pape, poetry faculty On the hottest day of the year, the poetry workshop of the Spalding MFA summer residency program met on the fourth floor of a building near Kyoto Station in a room with no windows. I had prepared a talk on Bashō and read from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa. Bashō came to Kyoto as a young man after the death of his friend Yoshitada. Yuasa tells us not much is known about the next five years of Bashō’s life. “It...
